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Shark robot vacuums are on sale for Prime Day and there are some good deals to be had. For instance, the AI Ultra is on sale for just $280. This is 50 percent off, as the regular price is $550.

This model topped our list of the best robot vacuums, so it’s the real deal. The AI Ultra boasts fantastic suction power and the bagless self-emptying base is incredibly handy. There’s a simple mobile app that lets users control the vacuum when not at home. This app also displays home maps made by the vacuum that can be edited to create “no-go” zones.

The battery life is decent, at 120 minutes per charge. Like most modern robovacs, it’ll head back to the power outlet on its own. During use, we found that the vacuum did a pretty good job at avoiding obstacles and managed to sidestep the many cat toys strewn across the floor.

The only caveat worth mentioning is that this particular model includes a debris canister that needs to be manually emptied every 30 days. There’s a version with a larger canister that’s also on sale. It’s down to $298 from $600, which is also a discount of around 50 percent.

Many other Shark products are also on sale right now. This includes other robovacs, but also standard upright designs.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/deals/shark-robot-vacuums-are-up-to-50-percent-off-for-prime-day-170023667.html?src=rss 

Microsoft was rocked by more than 9,000 job cuts this week. A significant number have come from its gaming division, resulting in the closure of multiple game studios and the cancellation of numerous in-development projects at Xbox and its contracted studios. We’ve already learned that Microsoft has closed the studio that was developing the much-anticipated Perfect Dark reboot, and Rare’s Everwild has also been sunsetted. And now Romero Games — the studio headed up by Doom creator and veteran developer John Romero — is another major casualty of the sweeping cuts.

The news was initially confirmed in a statement signed by Brenda Romero and posted on X. “Last night, we learned that our publisher has canceled funding for our game along with several other unannounced projects at other studios,” it said. “This was a strategic decision made at a high level within the publisher, well above our visibility or control.” It went on to say that the studio was powerless to change the outcome, and that the decision was not reflective of the quality of work its team has produced.

Ireland-based Romero Games is not owned by Microsoft, but it appears the company’s financial support was crucial to keeping the studio alive — a fact that wasn’t publicly known until the shutdown occurred. IGN is now reporting that the entire Romero Games workforce has been let go, and many Romero Games employees confirm on Linkedin that they no longer have jobs.

According to the company website, Romero Games was founded by John and Brenda Romero in 2014, and had more than 100 developers on its staff. Its most recent release was 2023’s Sigil II, the unofficial sixth episode in the Doom series, which John Romero co-created in 1993 with id Software, the studio he also co-founded. The upcoming game was described by Romero Games as an “all-new FPS with an original, new IP working with a major publisher.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/xbox/xbox-was-funding-romero-games-new-game-but-layoffs-have-left-the-project-in-crisis-172234905.html?src=rss 

Sony Interactive’s Helldivers 2, the third-person co-op shooter developed by Arrowhead Game Studios, is finally coming to Xbox on August 26. The sequel to the 2015 top-down shooter was released for PlayStation 5 and Windows in early 2024 and supports cross-platform play.

After launch, Helldivers 2 was a huge success, selling over 15 million copies and reaching 450,000 concurrent players on Steam, the highest number ever among PlayStation games released for the PC. In fact, there were so many players online that Sony briefly attempted to mandate PlayStation Network account linking, which set off a wave of negative reviews from frustrated gamers. The policy was eventually reversed.

In the announcement of the game’s Xbox launch, Game Director Mikael Eriksson said, “we know gamers have been asking for this for some time and we are so excited to bring more Helldivers into our game. We have so much more in store for the future months and years – and the more players we have the more stories we can tell! The fight for Super Earth has only just begun.”

It’s notable that this marks only the second time that Sony will publish one of its first-party titles on Xbox, after MLB: The Show. Time will tell if this is just another rare exception, or the start of a new trend by Sony allowing their games to reach more players. Players can pre-order digital copies of both the standard edition and the Super Citizen Edition for Helldivers 2 now. It’s unclear if a physical copy of the game will be released.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/xbox/helldivers-2-is-coming-to-xbox-on-august-26-172937757.html?src=rss 

I really wanted to love season two of HBO’s The Last of Us. For the most part, I did — but it was also impossible to ignore the online masses saying that showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann had lost the thread in season two. Some of that comes from creative choices the pair made in adapting the first half of the PlayStation game The Last of Us Part II to TV; it’s a story with a sprawling plot that asks a lot of the player and, as it turns out, even more of a passive audience. The season two cliffhanger ending and tease of what’s to come in season three just didn’t land for a lot of people, and (spoiler alert) there are a lot of questions from viewers as to whether the show can survive the loss of Pedro Pascal’s Joel. It feels like fans of the games are mad at the changes the TV show has made, while people who haven’t played the game aren’t vibing with the story as presented in season two.

As such, I haven’t put up a full-throated defense of season two when, say, a colleague tells me it’s a bummer that the show is now “mid.” Even though there are plenty of toxic “fans” who trash the cast and seem to hate the show telling stories with gay characters, I can admit there are also legitimate issues with season two. But despite that admission making its way into my Last of Us-loving heart, I was still shocked at the news that Druckmann, co-creator of both the game and the show, was leaving the project for season three. Shortly after Druckmann’s announcement, Co-writer on The Last of Us Part II and season two of the show Halley Gross also said she was leaving, which means that the two most prominent people who worked on the games are now gone.

How this will affect season three obviously will be the big question over the work leading up to season three, which will probably arrive sometime in early 2027. The simultaneous departure of both Druckmann and Gross reeks of HBO deciding that the tepid reception to season two meant a change was needed. In a statement that lacked all of the passion Druckmann has shown for the show thus far, he said he was transitioning his “complete focus” to Naughty Dog and future games, including Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet.

We’ll probably never know if Druckmann left on his own or was forced out, but the part of me that loves Naughty Dog’s games is finding solace in that new focus even as HBO’s The Last of Us is thrown into turmoil. Druckmann will probably be far more useful to Sony as a whole working on new games than dabbling in the TV industry.

That’s in large part because yesterday also reminded us just how chaotic the game industry is. In the biggest news of the day, a series of wide-ranging layoffs at Microsoft impacted numerous Xbox studios, the latest bad news for an industry that has frankly been devastated by instability in recent years.

With that background in mind, Druckmann’s renewed focus on Naughty Dog makes a lot of sense. The TV industry is not hurting in the least for prestige content. Showrunner Craig Mazin already has the plot points he needs to cover in season three of The Last of Us, so Druckmann’s input will probably be missed less than it would have been when the project got started back in 2021. But PlayStation, on the other hand, needs a boost, and having a creative leader like Druckmann helping to make Intergalactic and whatever else Naughty Dog has up its sleeve is something the company could really use.

It’s no secret that the first-party PlayStation studios continue to make exceptional games — but the pace during the PS5 generation has slowed significantly. For the first few years of the PS5’s life, most big exclusives like God of War Ragnarök and Horizon Forbidden West came to both the PS4 and PS5. That slowly changed, with titles like Astro Bot and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 being built exclusively for the PS5. But the cadence of these releases has slowed significantly; this year’s releases include Death Stranding 2: On the Beach (likely a timed exclusive) and Ghost of Yotei but five years into this generation it’s undoubtedly been a slow burn.

That trend is particularly acute for Naughty Dog. After releasing Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End in 2016 and following that quickly with the standalone expansion Uncharted: The Lost Legacy in 2017, Naughty Dog has released one (1) original game since: The Last of Us Part II. Other than that, we’ve gotten… remakes and remasters of both franchises, perhaps not coincidentally to draw in people who found The Last of Us via the HBO show.

Between his duties as Naughty Dog’s studio head and his TV work, it’s fair to wonder how much time Druckmann has spent on actual games in recent years. It’s also entirely possible he’s spread too thin now, even without co-running the TV show — it’s probably past time for some new creative visionaries to take the lead at Naughty Dog given Druckmann’s role as chief executive.

If he’s truly the main director and writer for Intergalactic as he said in his statement, it’s good news for the PlayStation brand that he’s back on that gig full-time. It’s just a bit over six months since Intergalactic was first announced, so we have no real idea where the game is in its development cycle. But it sounds like the game has been in development since 2020, and Naughty Dog has said it learned a lesson from announcing The Last of Us Part II so long before it actually launched. Hopefully we’re looking at a 2026 or 2027 release rather than much beyond that.

Meanwhile, Druckmann’s departure from HBO’s The Last of Us might be a bit of a canary in the coal mine for Sony’s broader PlayStation ambitions and a refocus on just making games. Games industry expert Joost Van Dreunen wrote in 2023 that the success of the show’s first season was “the culmination of Sony’s gradual transition to becoming a media company.” That’s something the company itself has talked up in the years since — the idea of becoming platform-less, with franchises existing on the PlayStation, on the movie screen and on the smaller TV screen in your home. Take its CES 2025 presentation, for example; Sony talked up multiple gaming adaptations besides The Last of Us like the Horizon franchise and Ghost of Tsushima.

“While [Sony] continues to sell hardware at scale, its strategic emphasis is shifting toward high-margin digital services and franchise expansion,” Van Dreunen wrote last month. “Titles like The Last of Us have crossed into television with critical success, and Sony has invested heavily in anime distribution (via Crunchyroll) and film adaptations of its game IP. It positions PlayStation less as a closed hardware ecosystem and more as the foundation for a vertically integrated content engine. Rather than chasing distribution breadth like Microsoft, Sony is doubling down on cultural depth, using its exclusive IP to build multi-format engagement loops.”

I don’t think a less-than-stellar second season of The Last of Us will cause Sony to abandon this strategy. (Sony is also too big of a ship to completely turn away from this plan very quickly.) But the repositioning of Druckmann as the lead of a successful and influential video game studio rather than a multi-medium creative visionary reinforces the fact that if they’re going to have hits on a variety of different platforms, new, ambitious and hopefully good games like Intergalactic are a necessity. At this point, HBO’s The Last of Us is going to keep on rolling, with or without Druckmann — there were a lot of loud complaints, but also still plenty of viewers and positive reviews. But Naughty Dog is past due for another big game that pushes the genre in a new direction. It’s the right time for Druckmann to come home.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/playstation/playstation-needs-neil-druckmann-more-than-hbo-does-154951145.html?src=rss 

The Amazon Fire TV Stick HD is available for just $18 as part of the Prime Day festivities. That’s 49 percent off, as it typically costs $35. This is a record-low price.

The stick made our list of the best streaming devices, and we particularly recommend it for those on a budget. It just gets the job done. The Fire TV Stick HD is easy to set up and provides access to all of the major streaming platforms. It streams content at 1080p and the UI is simple enough to grasp immediately.

It also comes with an updated remote control, which is the same remote that comes with Fire TVs. It allows for voice control, so you can simply ask it to look for something to watch and let Alexa do the rest. It can also control the power and volume on the TV, which is something previous Fire Stick remotes couldn’t do.

The one caveat is right there in the name. This is a stick that supports HD content and cannot stream in 4K. That could be a dealbreaker for some, though the price is most certainly right.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/deals/prime-day-deals-include-the-fire-tv-stick-hd-for-only-18-150502169.html?src=rss 

The developer beta for iOS 26 has been out for a few weeks, and as always,tech sleuths are uncovering features and details that weren’t explained during WWDC. Among the latest discoveries stirring up conversation online is a safety and privacy feature for FaceTime that blurs your feed when it detects you in a state of undress. Should FaceTime detect nudity, it will display a message reading “Audio and video are paused because you may be showing something sensitive. If you feel uncomfortable, you should end the call.”

Originally discovered by X user @iDeviceHelpus, the feature is off by default and can be enabled in FaceTime settings under “Sensitive Content Warning.” The feature reads, “Detect nude photos and videos before they are viewed on your device, and receive guidance to help make a safe choice. Apple does not have access to the photos or videos.”It seems the feature is intended for child accounts, though it can currently be enabled in the beta for adults as well.

The Apple support page for the company’s “Communication Safety” features reads, “Communication Safety uses on-device machine learning to analyze photo and video attachments and determine if a photo or video appears to contain nudity. Because the photos and videos are analyzed on your child’s device, Apple doesn’t receive an indication that nudity was detected and doesn’t get access to the photos or videos as a result.”

Features in beta come and go, as testing and feedback are partly the point of the beta system, so this may or may not see broader adoption. The public beta for iOS 26 is slated for July.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/ios-26-can-freeze-your-facetime-video-if-it-detects-nudity-135329941.html?src=rss 

Everyone’s been hit with a bitingly pass-agg “?” text after waiting just a bit too long to reply. And you might soon get similar (though likely more upbeat) treatment from AI chatbots you’ve previously engaged with on Meta platforms like Instagram or WhatApp. A new report from Business Insider claims that the Mark Zuckerberg-owned company is trialling a proactive feature in customizable chatbots created using its no-code AI Studio software, that will enable them to send unprompted follow-up messages based on previous conversations.

Known internally to data labeling firm Alignerr as “Project Omni”, the training project will “provide value for users and ultimately help to improve re-engagement and user retention,” according to guidelines in the documents BI claims to have seen. Meta advertises AI studio as a platform where “anyone can create an AI character based on their interests” and encourages creators to view the bots as an AI extension of themselves. You can customize a chatbot’s appearance, choose the content it’s trained on and decide which Meta-owned application you want it to appear in, all without “any technical expertise.”

According to the BI report, Alignerr’s Project Omni guidelines use the example of a film-focused AI bot it calls “The Maestro of Movie Magic” that might send a user message such as: “I hope you’re having a harmonious day! I wanted to check in and see if you’ve discovered any new favorite soundtracks or composers recently. Or perhaps you’d like some recommendations for your next movie night? Let me know, and I’ll be happy to help!”

As BI notes, there is a business incentive for Meta to keep people engaged with its chatbots. Prolonged engagement is vital for increasing revenue, and this year Meta expects to bring in $2 billion to $3 billion from its generative AI products alone. By 2035, the company estimates that figure could be as high as $1.4 trillion. Those kinds of forecasts will only be possible if its AI tools are being used consistently, so a friendly reminder from a chatbot every now and then feels like an obvious move.

The proactive messages are currently still just a test feature. And while it definitely feels like remembering conversations and initiating new ones without invitation is approaching a user consent gray area, a Meta spokesperson told BI that the AI will only send a follow-up message if a user has first initiated the conversation, and it won’t send another message if the first one is ignored. Responses must also be consistent with the AI’s personality and the nature of the previous conversation, maintaining a positive tone while staying away from controversial or sensitive topics unless the user themself has mentioned them.

Last month, Meta started warning its users not to share intimate details in Meta AI’s public feed after it emerged that a large number of users appeared to be doing so unwittingly.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/meta-is-reportedly-training-its-ai-chatbots-to-send-unprompted-messages-143229039.html?src=rss 

EA’s next Battlefield game is supposedly arriving sometime in spring 2026, but its development is reportedly fraught with issues, leading some of its developers to worry that certain parts of the game won’t be well-received. According to a lengthy Ars Technica piece about the game’s development troubles and problems facing AAA titles’ development as a whole, EA had lofty goals for the next Battlefield (codenamed Glacier) to the point that team members working on the project think they’re near unrealistic. 

The publisher’s executives apparently believed that Glacier could match the popularity of Call of Duty and Fortnite and set a 100 million player target over a certain period of time. An employee told Ars that the franchise has never achieved those numbers before, with Battlefield 2042 getting only up to 22 million players within that same period. The first Battlefield, which was the most successful in the franchise so far, only got to “maybe 30 million plus” within that timeframe. 

One of the reasons why Fortnite has over 100 million active users is because it’s free-to-play. In CoD’s case, well, aside from having free-to-play titles, it’s also the biggest gaming franchise and has a lengthy history, so it’s no surprise that it already has a solid fanbase who would play its latest releases. Players had to pay for previous Battlefield games up front, but executives thought that if EA made Glacier free-to-play like its competitors, it could achieve the same numbers. And that is why the publisher promised a free-to-play Battle Royale mode with a six-hour single player campaign for the upcoming game. 

Ridgeline, the external studio working on the single player mode, however, shuttered in 2024 after working on the project for two years. The studio reportedly found EA’s objectives unachievable, since it was expected to reach milestones in the same rate as more established studios when it didn’t have the same resources. Now, three other EA studios (Criterion, DICE and Motive) are working on the single-player mode. But since they had to start from scratch, single player is the only Glacier game mode remaining that has yet to reach alpha status. 

Due to the wider scope of the next title in the franchise and the issues it has faced, it has become the most expensive Battlefield to date. It had a budget of $400 million back in 2023, but the current projections are now apparently “well north” of that. Whether the next Battlefield launches on time remains to be seen. Ars‘ sources said that if it does ship as intended, they expect some features and content to be cut from the final product. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/eas-next-battlefield-game-may-be-in-trouble-and-over-budget-130046636.html?src=rss