Dave Baszucki went on the Hard Fork podcast to talk about child safety on Roblox after its recent news that age estimation will be required to chat starting next year, and the conversation got pretty adversarial. Worth reading or listening to in full.
[The New York Times]
It’s the first international expansion of Amazon’s upgraded, AI-powered Alexa, which launched first in the US. Amazon plans to invite “tens of thousands of Canadians every week to enjoy the new experience,” according to a blog post.
It’s a roguelike deckbuilder / dungeon crawler game called Vampire Crawlers: The Turbo Wildcard from Vampire Survivors and it’s set to launch next year. It’s “hopefully the first in a series of spin-offs,” Vampire Survivors creator Luca Galante tells Xbox Wire.
“We’re not changing what’s enforced,” Bluesky says, but starting in the coming weeks, when the platform takes an “enforcement action” on a post, a user will be informed of what policy they violated, the severity of the violation, and the end date of any suspension.
According to Circana analyst Matt Piscatella:
Battlefield 6 delivered blockbuster US sales in October. Battlefield 6 debuted as the best-selling game of the year, became the best-selling title in franchise history, and produced the highest single month tracked full game dollar sales total of any video game in three years.
EA is also touting it as the “best selling shooter game of the year.” The game was one of EA’s most important launches in years.
From my colleague Jennifer Pattison Tuohy’s story about Matter 1.5:
The Matter 1.5 spec, announced today, adds support for all types of video cameras — from video doorbells, indoor and outdoor, wired and battery-powered cameras, to baby monitors and pet cams. And, perhaps most importantly, Matter support can be added to existing cameras with an OTA update. The new spec also adds garage door controllers, bi-directional charging for EVs, soil sensors, and more advanced integration with utilities for energy management.
Read her whole piece for more, including an interview with the Connectivity Standards Alliance.
I want to know if Steam’s coming to Team Open or not. Paying 20-30 percent to a giant gatekeeper who intentionally structures their services so that, like, Steamworks users can’t talk to Fortnite users and so on, isn’t a very exciting prospect for the future right now.
As today’s Epic and Unity partnership shows, Epic is willing to work with its biggest competition — but I have my doubts that Valve will make the changes Epic wants anytime soon.
