Category: Technology

Microsoft Authenticator is sunsetting its ability to store your passwords. This month, the service stopped allowing users to add or import new passwords. Beginning in July 2025, users will no longer be able to use autofill with Authenticator, and in August 2025, passwords will no longer be available at all. Payment information stored in Authenticator will be deleted after July, and after the following month, all unsaved generated passwords will be deleted. Passkeys will still be supported in Authenticator.

People who want to stay within the Microsoft ecosystem do have the option to use access their saved passwords when using the Edge browser. But if you’re not interested in Edge, that means Authenticator users may want to peruse their options for a different password manager. Fortunately, there are several excellent choices for password managers that aren’t tied to a particular hardware provider.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cybersecurity/if-youre-using-microsoft-authenticator-to-store-your-passwords-dont-225842265.html?src=rss 

11 Bit Studios has drawn the ire of players for the undisclosed use of artificial intelligence in its recent release, The Alters. The new project from the team behind Frostpunk and This War of Mine is a narratively and thematically interesting take on a science fiction survival game. The project contains a lot of dialogue and written text, and some players discovered in-game copy that appeared to be generated by a large language model. The Steam storefront requires that games disclose when they contain material that is either pre-generated or live-generated by artificial intelligence, and The Alters had not been tagged as including AI content. The studio has issued a lengthy statement in response to the complaints.

One instance involved AI-generated text in a graphic asset. 11 Bit Studios said this asset was only meant to be used as a placeholder during development. “This was never intended to be part of the final release,” the company said. “Unfortunately, due to an internal oversight, this single placeholder text was mistakenly left in the game. We have since conducted a thorough review and confirmed that this was an isolated case, and the asset in question is being updated.”

The other AI use that players uncovered was in some cases of translations. According to 11 Bit Studios, AI was used for subtitle translations on the licensed movies that can be played in social area of the in-game base, which it said were made by an external source without creative input from its team:

“Due to extreme time constraints, we chose not to involve our translation partners and had these videos localized using AI to have them ready on launch. It was always our intention to involve our trusted translation agencies after release as part of our localization hotfix, to ensure those texts would be handled with the same care and quality as the rest of the game. That process is now underway, and updated translations are being implemented.”

AI is an increasingly delicate subject for creative professionals. Many companies with large language models have either been accused of or admitted to training on copyrighted content, which has made AI an ethical nonstarter for many artists and many players. But when studios are regularly faced with negative working conditions surrounding crunch, it’s also understandable why the gaming industry might be inclined to look for ways to speed up the process of shipping a title. The reactions to AI appearing The Alters is likely just the latest in the ongoing conversations about when and how this tech might be a part of game development.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/11-bit-studios-clarifies-its-ai-use-in-the-alters-after-player-outcry-220014181.html?src=rss 

Nintendo of Canada has announced that the pricing of the Switch, its accessories, its games and even Amiibo figures, will all be changing in Canada come August. The pricing adjustment is being made “based on market conditions,” according to the the announcement.

It’s not clear how much the price of the Switch family of products will be changing — Nintendo said new prices will be posted on its Canadian website on August 1 — but presumably they’ll be going up. The company currently sells the Switch for CA$400, the Switch OLED for CA$450 and the Switch Lite for CA$269 in Canada. Meanwhile, the Switch 2 launched for CA$630 in June.

The market conditions Nintendo is responding to could be the result of the suite of tariffs the US government applied to nearly all of its trade partners in April 2025. When the Switch 2 debuted at $450 in the US, many people assumed the new cost of doing business in North America was being factored in. That the price of the Switch is changing before the Switch 2 could be a confirmation of that fact.

While not an intentional ploy to get customers to spend more, if the Switch inches closer to the Switch 2 in price, there’s plenty of good reasons to buy the newer console over the older one in August. In many ways, the Switch 2 is just a nicer Switch.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/nintendo/nintendo-is-increasing-the-price-of-the-original-switch-in-canada-220145966.html?src=rss 

Apple is considering using AI models from OpenAI or Anthropic to deliver the more capable version of Siri it debuted at WWDC 2024, Bloomberg reports. The company has promised it could deliver a new version of its voice assistant that understands personal context and takes action inside of apps since last year, but officially delayed the updated Siri in March 2025.

As part of this proposed new plan, Apple has asked Anthropic and OpenAI to train versions of its models that can run on Apple’s Private Cloud Compute, secure servers running on Apple chips. The company already relies on its servers for certain AI features that can’t be run locally.

Apple uses OpenAI’s ChatGPT for some parts of Apple Intelligence, but completely relying on a third-party company for Siri would be a major departure. “The company currently powers most of its AI features with homegrown technology that it calls Apple Foundation Models,” Bloomberg writes,”and had been planning a new version of its voice assistant that runs on that technology for 2026.” One of the few AI announcements Apple made at WWDC 2025 was to make those foundation models available to third-party developers.

Even considering using third-party AI models reflects internal changes at Apple. Leadership of the company’s AI teams has reportedly changed hands from John Giannandrea, Apple’s senior vice president of machine learning and AI strategy, to Craig Federighi, the senior vice president of software engineering. Separately, Bloomberg reports Apple’s Siri team is now being led by Mike Rockwell, who most recently oversaw the development of the Apple Vision Pro.

As Bloomberg notes, an Anthropic or OpenAI-powered Siri would actually mirror Samsung’s current approach to AI. Galaxy AI relies on some custom Samsung software, but primarily uses Google’s Gemini. Using third-party models wouldn’t preclude Apple from switching back to something in-house in the future. The company made a similar transition — albeit, perhaps too early — when it went from a Maps app that relied on Google Maps to its custom Apple Maps service in 2012.

Wherever Apple lands, the updated version of Siri isn’t expected to launch now until 2026. The company will ship a more modest collection of AI-adjacent features this fall with the launch of iOS 26, iPadOS 26 and macOS 26.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/apple-may-power-siri-with-anthropic-or-openai-models-amid-ai-struggles-212028351.html?src=rss 

Welcome to Video Games Weekly on Engadget. Expect a new story every Monday or Tuesday, broken into two parts. The first is a space for short essays and ramblings about video game trends and related topics from me, Jess Conditt, a reporter who’s covered the industry for more than 13 years. The second contains the video game stories from the past week that you need to know about, including some headlines from outside of Engadget.

Please enjoy — and I’ll see you next week.

June has passed me by in a haze of air travel, mild illness, protests and Pride, and it’s now officially time to close the book on Summer Game Fest 2025. We published more than 80 stories around this year’s show and they’re all worth a read, but before moving on for good, I wanted to highlight a final batch of games that I can’t stop thinking about. This week, I present three mini previews straight out of SGF 2025 — and only two of them are horror games, which is a stupendous display of growth on my part.

Crisol: Theater of Idols

Crisol: Theater of Idols wasn’t on my radar until I sat down and played it at the Blumhouse booth, but now it’s pinging loud and clear, as if the booms were emanating directly from the blood-soaked bowels of Hell. It’s a first-person survival-horror action game set in a demented version of Spain that’s filled with monsters of modern folklore. Murderous marionettes and giant, ornately adorned skeletons hunt you through dark streets and towering gothic buildings, lamplight glinting off of every gross 3D detail. The whole demo felt like getting lost in a terrifying, nightmarish carnival, and I enjoyed every bit of it.

In Crisol, blood is your source of ammunition, and you drain the corpses of humans and chickens to refuel your health bar as well as your guns. Crisol is tense and gorgeous, reminiscent of Dishonored or Resident Evil Village, and enemies are both robust and tricky to evade. Crisol is the debut game from independent Spanish team Vermila Studios, which received an Epic MegaGrant for the project in 2020. It’s being published by Blumhouse and is due out this year on Steam, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.

Grave Seasons

There’s something deeply wrong in Ashenridge, the idyllic rural village where Grave Seasons is set. At first glance, Grave Seasons is a cute, narrative-based farming sim with detailed pixel art, juicy romance options and layers of home-maintenance mechanics. You spend time planting, watering, harvesting, crafting items, picking up trash and chatting with villagers — and then you dig up a severed hand. Pilar, your flirty neighbor who runs the tailor shop down the road, says something ominous about the fate of your house’s previous owner. The vibe shifts; the shadows start to look sinister. Night falls and the real horror is unleashed, sudden, violent and all the more shocking in such a peaceful setting. A supernatural serial killer is on the loose in Ashenridge and, in between planting crops, it’s up to you to investigate (and maybe date) the murderer.

Grave Seasons is a game that will live or die by its tone, and so far, developer Perfect Garbage has absolutely nailed the vibe of nefarious, creeping dread. Ashenridge is a beautiful little town with tons of people to meet and activities to complete, and the character avatars are sexy, sweet and super intriguing. A paranormal murder investigation is simply the cherry on top of a competent farming and dating sim, and I’m eager to take a bite out of the full game. At SGF 2025, developers said the complete Grave Seasons experience should take about 20 hours. Grave Seasons is being published by Blumhouse, and it’s scheduled to hit Steam and consoles in 2026.

Escape Academy 2: Back 2 School

Escape Academy is one of my favorite games of the past five years and I am inordinately stoked for the sequel, which turns the school into an open world of puzzles, riddles and cringey puns. With Escape Academy 2: Back 2 School, developer Coin Crew is going all-in on the student roleplaying vibe, and the entire campus is littered with mysteries. It’s also playable as a split-screen, couch co-op experience, which is one of the series’ greatest strengths. Frantically screaming solutions at your friend just feels better in person than over a Discord call, you know?

I played the original Escape Academy with a local partner, so that’s how I tried out the sequel at SGF 2025. I dragged Engadget EIC Aaron Souppouris to the iam8bit booth and we dove in, starting in a classroom covered in sneaky environmental clues. In Escape Academy 2, the assignment is simple — get out — but the execution is complex, and we were soon throwing out names, dates and math problems, trying to solve a series of tricky, interconnected puzzles and leave the room. After getting just one hint from the developers, we made our way to the hallway, which was lined with locker-based riddles, and eventually reached the headmaster’s office, which was a contained playground of puzzle gaming. We had to use a pen and piece of paper to keep track of a few sections, and overall, our interactions felt fresh. Coin Crew isn’t just rolling out the same problems with different solutions for the sequel, and the new riddles were clever, innovative and super satisfying. (The same can’t be said about all of the puns, but that’s part of the charm.)

Escape Academy 2: Back 2 School features both local and online co-op, so you’ll be free to yell at your friends in whichever format you prefer. Coin Crew is still working on the game and there’s no release date yet, but it’s available now to wishlist on Steam.

The news

11 Bit Studios left AI writing in The Alters

The only thing worse than not disclosing AI use in the creation of a video game is not disclosing it and then deploying it so sloppily that players immediately notice. Indie developer and publisher 11 Bit Studios learned this lesson firsthand with The Alters, a futuristic base-building game starring an astronaut and his alternate-reality clones. Within a week of the game’s release on June 13, posts started popping up on Reddit and Bluesky showing AI-generated text in the game, across multiple languages. On June 30, 11 Bit released a statement confirming its use of AI in developing The Alters, saying it was utilized only in background text and to help with last-minute localization efforts. “No matter what we decided, we should have simply let you know,” the studio wrote.

Xbox layoffs incoming

I’d really love to stop writing headlines like this. Microsoft is preparing to lay off a large number of Xbox employees this week, as part of a planned 3 percent reduction in staff across the company. That’s a loss of roughly 7,000 jobs in total, and according to Bloomberg, Xbox leaders are expecting “substantial cuts across the entire group.” The firings follow a round of 1,900 layoffs at Xbox in January 2024, another 650 layoffs in September, and last year’s closure of Arkane Austin, Alpha Dog Games and Tango Gameworks (the latter of which lives on under Krafton). Meanwhile, Microsoft reported a net revenue of $25.8 billion in the first three months of 2025, with an 8 percent yearly increase in revenue from Xbox content and services. Congrats?

Netflix is culling its games roster

Netflix started beefing up its video games division around 2021, with the acquisition of Oxenfree studio Night School and the rollout of an in-app gaming library offering popular mobile titles at no extra charge to subscribers. Netflix currently supports more than 100 games, including Death’s Door, Hades, The Case of the Golden Idol, The Rise of the Golden Idol, Braid Anniversary Edition, Katana ZERO and the Monument Valley series — but these are disappearing in July. A total of 22 games will be deleted from Netflix at various times in July, and the culling follows similar cutbacks in the company’s interactive division, including the recent closure of an in-house AAA studio.

The Steam Summer Sale is here to take your money

Because we know you’re going to get something — what are you picking up at the Steam Summer Sale this year? Share your spoils in the comments! If you’re overwhelmed, allow me to humbly suggest Blue Prince, Home Safety Hotline, Look Outside or Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. 

On a related note, don’t forget to check out (the nearly complete) Playdate Season 2.

Once upon a time, Resident Evil: Requiem was an open-world game

… but it’s definitely not any more. Resident Evil: Requiem producer Masachika Kawata and director Koshi Nakanishi clarified in a video that their new game is an offline single-player experience, but they said that early in development, the team seriously considered making it online and open-world. This experimentation fueled rumors about Requiem introducing a new direction for the Resident Evil franchise, but it turns out the final product will be a familiar, self-contained horror romp with the ability to swap between first- and third-person views. Spooooky.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/video-games-weekly-summer-game-fest-ends-when-i-say-so-213556598.html?src=rss 

Sinners was already a huge hit in theaters, and for the film’s debut on streaming, Warner Bros. Discovery is trying to make it as accessible as possible. The studio announced today that when the vampire film gets added to Max on July 4, it’ll be available to stream alongside a new version of the film interpreted in Black American Sign Language (BASL).

The film follows a pair of twin brothers played by Michael B. Jordan, and their aspiring musician cousin played by newcomer Miles Caton, as they stand up a nightclub in Mississippi. Of course, humans aren’t the only ones interested in a night of music and dancing, which naturally leads to some decidedly supernatural problems. Besides confidently straddling a line between genre B-movie and thoughtful meditation on race in America, Sinners shines because of its commitment to cultural specificity. Adapting the film in BASL — a distinct dialect of American Sign Language developed by the Black deaf community and with its own methods of signing — feels right in line with the spirit of the film.

While most people could make do with closed captions and subtitles, interpreting a film or TV show captures the nuances of performance that aren’t normally communicated in text. For the premium most people pay for streaming, offering an ASL version seems like the least streaming services could do.

The BASL-version of Sinners is interpreted by Nakia Smith and directed by Rosa Lee Timm, according to Warner Bros. Discovery. Timm also directed the ASL-versions of A Minecraft Movie and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. Warner Bros. Discovery has been slowly building a library of ASL-versions of its films and TV shows: Both Barbie and the two available seasons of The Last of Us can be viewed with an ASL interpretation.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/streaming/sinners-will-hit-max-with-a-version-translated-into-black-american-sign-language-200216402.html?src=rss 

The US Department of Justice’s antitrust lawsuit against Apple will progress. US District Judge Julien Neals of New Jersey denied the tech company’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit brought over its “walled garden” approach to smartphone software.

The DOJ and several states filed the lawsuit against Apple in March 2024. Their argument was that Apple had created a monopoly over app software. The suit claimed that Apple’s restrictions and fees placed on developers, as well as its limits on third-party devices and services, were in violation of antitrust laws. Apple quickly responded with a rebuttal of all the claims made in the lawsuit. The company filed for a dismissal of the case in August.

Judge Neals’ ruling in the US comes as Apple has also been facing down charges of anti-competitive behavior in the EU. It recently introduced a new App Store fee structure for its operations in the bloc in response to a ruling by the European Commission that it fell afoul of the Digital Markets Act.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/judge-rules-apple-must-face-antitrust-lawsuit-brought-by-the-us-doj-202519089.html?src=rss 

NASA is bringing live NASA+ programming to Netflix. For the uninitiated, NASA+ is the space agency’s very own streaming platform. Content will begin showing up later this summer.

This will be reserved for live events, with NASA saying it’ll be used to stream “rocket launches, astronaut spacewalks, mission coverage and breathtaking live views of Earth from the International Space Station.” NASA+ also streams original documentaries, but it doesn’t look like that’s part of this deal.

“The National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 calls on us to share our story of space exploration with the broadest possible audience,” said Rebecca Sirmons, general manager of NASA+. She went on to say that the agency is committed to inspiring new generations “right from the comfort of their couch or in the palm of their hand from their phone.”

This won’t be reserved for US residents, as NASA says it’ll be available throughout the globe. This should expand the agency’s reach significantly because Netflix has over 300 million subscribers all over the planet.

NASA+ isn’t going anywhere. It’s still available through the NASA app and on the official website. The free service replaced a pre-existing cable channel. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/nasa-will-start-livestreaming-content-on-netflix-later-this-summer-184314711.html?src=rss 

Super Mario Maker 2 was released six years ago this past Saturday. While Nintendo didn’t do a whole lot to mark the occasion, one of the game’s most dedicated players sure did. DSteves hit a remarkable milestone by becoming the first to clear 1 million SMM2 levels.

The Twitch and YouTube streamer had hoped to reach that point by the game’s sixth anniversary and got there toward the end of a 18-hour marathon. In fact, DSteves cleared 1,000 levels during that single stream.

After the 999,999th level clear, an emotional DSteves punched in the code for a custom level a player named raysfire created just for this occasion — you can try it yourself by entering the level ID QKQ-4TD-0DG. Since this is SMM2, of course there was some cheap (or should that be Cheep Cheep?) trolling from raysfire, such as a Question Block that dispensed an enemy instead of a power-up. DSteves died a couple of times while playing this level, including to Bowser fireballs that were disguised by a bunch of coins.

DSteves said on the stream it took six years and eight hours to beat 1 million SMM2 levels, and then toasted the achievement with some champagne. The vast majority of the level clears, nearly 800,000 of them, occurred in one Endless Challenge streak on Easy difficulty (just slightly more than my current streak of 581). So, DSteves didn’t exactly grind through several hundred thousand ultra-hard kaizo-style stages, but it’s still an impressive achievement.

To reach the goal, DSteves cleared an average of 456.4 levels per day. The streamer skipped more than 80,000 levels, died more than 772,000 times and hit the million mark with about 165,000 more stage clears than the player in second place (I love that SMM2 shows these stats publicly).

Despite hitting an astounding number of cleared levels, DSteves isn’t done with SMM2. The streamer was back to playing the game the following night and, at the time of writing, has now beaten 1,000,050 Super Mario Maker 2 stages.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/nintendo/a-super-mario-maker-2-player-has-cleared-an-astonishing-1-million-levels-192445569.html?src=rss 

It’s been getting easier and easier to purchase a Nintendo Switch 2 since launch, but the console is still notably unavailable from Amazon. According to a new report from Bloomberg, Nintendo’s frustration with third-party game sales on the platform could be the reason why.

“Third-party merchants were offering games for sale in the US at prices that undercut Nintendo’s advertised rates,” Bloomberg writes. That proved to be a major problem for Nintendo, especially because Amazon used to sell some of the company’s products directly in the US, at Nintendo’s prices.

Amazon reportedly tried to smooth things over by offering to label games and consoles as authentic (implying third-party listings were suspect), but the video game company declined and pulled its products. Certain Nintendo games are once again available to pre-order in the US on Amazon, like Donkey Kong Bananza, but Nintendo hardware is still conspicuously missing.

Of course, both companies deny there’s anything unusual going on. “There is no such fact. We do not disclose details of negotiations or contracts with retailers,” Nintendo shared in a statement to Bloomberg. Amazon similarly downplayed any conflict. “The claims made by Bloomberg regarding our relationship with Nintendo are inaccurate,” Amazon said. The company provided the same statement when Engadget asked about Bloomberg‘s report.

You can find the kind of erratic price gouging behavior Nintendo was reportedly responding to all over Amazon, so it would make sense that the company is trying to protect the Switch 2 from the worst of it. It’s still pretty unusual, though, especially when it’s so easy to get a PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X / S from the same marketplace. When the Switch 2 launched on June 5, it was only available to order from Walmart, GameStop, Target, Best Buy and Nintendo itself. Those are still the only places you can purchase one online.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/nintendo/you-cant-buy-a-switch-2-on-amazon-and-third-party-sellers-may-be-to-blame-183825949.html?src=rss