Technology

TiMi Studios, the Tencent-owned developer of huge mobile hits Call of Duty: Mobile and the MOBA Honor of Kings, earned a staggering $10 billion in revenue in 2020, according to an April 1st Reuters report. Reuters’ article says those earnings make TiMi the “world’s largest developer,” according to its sources. While it’s unclear exactly what metric that is defining, it’s a undoubtably a huge number. For comparison, Activision Blizzard (which publishes the Call of Duty franchise) posted 2020 revenues of $8.09 billion, nearly $2 billion less than TiMi’s reported $10 billion. TiMi’s games are some of the biggest in the world While TiMi might not be a household name, its games are some of the biggest in the world. Call of Duty: Mobile reportedly had the biggest mobile game launch ever when it ...

Hyundai’s luxury vehicle brand Genesis used 3,281 drones to create its logo over Shanghai’s skyline on March 29th in celebration of the brand’s arrival in China. That number of drones sets a new Guinness World Record for “The Most Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) airborne simultaneously,” according to a Genesis press release. You can see a picture of the Genesis logo formation at the top of this post. Genesis also made a video that showed off some additional drone formations, including a hand, two of the company’s cars, and… a double helix? [embedded content] Genesis’ record edges out the previous one held by Shenzhen Damoda Intelligent Control Technology, which used 3,051 drones in a display on September 20th. Here’s a video of that display, which I personally think is even more impr...

Personal data from 533 million Facebook accounts has reportedly leaked online for free, according to security researcher Alon Gal. Insider said it verified several of the leaked records. “The exposed data includes personal information of over 533 million Facebook users from 106 countries, including over 32 million records on users in the US, 11 million on users in the UK, and 6 million on users in India,” according to Insider. “It includes their phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birthdates, bios, and — in some cases — email addresses.” If that 533 million number might sound familiar to you, that’s because this information is apparently from the same dataset that people could pay for portions of using a Telegram bot, which Motherboard reported on in January. Now, though, i...

NASA’s Perseverance rover, which is currently roaming around Mars, has dropped off the mini helicopter Ingenuity ahead of the four-pound aircraft’s historic first flight. Ingenuity dropped four inches from the belly of Perseverance to the surface of Mars. While four inches might not seem like a very big drop, getting Ingenuity to successfully stick the landing is still a significant milestone, as the helicopter had to go through a multi-day process of flipping from a horizontal position on the rover to a vertical position before it was set down. (It also had to survive a seven-month trip through space to get to Mars. NBD.) Now that Ingenuity is separated from Perseverance, it will need to power and heat itself. Ingenuity will draw power from the sun using its onboard solar panels, but its ...

I’ve read plenty about what it’s like to use, hold, and type on an LG Gram before, but that didn’t take away from the impressive first impression it made when I used the new Gram 17 for the first time — especially this larger model. The Gram 17 has a grandiose 17-inch display, yet it’s only three pounds, which is light enough for me to carry around one-handed. Its keyboard is a joy to type on with a surprising amount of tactility and travel in the keys, and the battery life outlasts a whole day of work, even much of a second one, too. It’s a quiet laptop, and even under pressure, its fans weren’t loud enough for me to hear once. The Gram communicates its biggest selling points — lightness and longevity — so effectively that it outshines some persisting minor problems. Those include a keybo...

Genesis Noir is set at the start of existence, reimagining the Big Bang and the natural expansion of the universe as the violent end result of a love triangle gone wrong. It’s a marriage of jazz and film noir in a point-and-click adventure game that sometimes works better as an audiovisual plaything than it does a series of puzzles. But the game’s visual style is a clear standout. The monochromatic, abstract, line-drawn look that makes Genesis Noir so unique comes from a host of influences: classic film, Italian literature, other indie games. The real mystery to solve was combining those ideas in a way that makes sense — and it actually ended in a playable game. Genesis Noir creative lead Evan Anthony’s jumping-off point was Cosmicomics, a collection of science-inspired short stories by It...

Now that the street price of an Nvidia RTX 3070 is over $1,200, it’s temping to think scalpers, bots and cryptocurrency miners got them all — but the latest Steam Hardware Survey suggests at least some of them are making their way into gaming PCs, too. As TechSpot reports, the 3070 in particular appears to have become Steam’s fastest growing GPU, and the 17th-most popular graphics accelerator on Steam with a 1.29 percent share overall. The top 20 GPUs on Steam, as of March 2021. The RTX 3080 also commands 0.87 percent, the RTX 3060 Ti has 0.39 percent, and the pricey RTX 3090 claims 0.34 percent of the market — for a total of 2.89 percent Ampere cards. That not bad, especially considering AMD’s rival RX 6000 series doesn’t have a single spot on the entire 95-GPU leaderboard. Apparently, mo...

Hummer has unveiled the SUV version of its electric pickup truck, which comes with up to 300 miles of range and will sell for a suggested retail price of up to $110,595 for its first edition. Reservations for that model are already full, according to GM’s website. GM, which is producing the electric Hummers under its GMC brand, said the SUV will go into production starting early 2023, with less pricey variants starting at $90,000 in the spring of 2023 and a low-end $80,000 variant with a 250-mile range in the spring of 2024. Previously, the company said that its electric pickup truck will start assembly at the end of 2021, starting with the most expensive trim level. Like the pickup, the SUV’s $90K-and-up trim levels come with Crab Walk, which can let the Hummer rotate all four wheels to d...

Internet data caps are not like pizza — where taking a slice could mean fewer slices for everyone else. I don’t think Verge readers have trouble understanding this concept? It’s been well-established that ISPs have no trouble delivering unlimited data, even during — say — a global pandemic when vast throngs of the population have suddenly found themselves working from home. This, however, did not stop WideOpenWest (aka WOW!) from using pizza to justify brand-new, possibly-never-before-seen data caps for its cable internet subscribers, starting June 1st, 2021, as Ars Technica reports. Here’s a portion of the email subscribers are receiving: What’s a monthly data usage plan? Let us illustrate … Imagine that the WOW! network is a pizza. Piping hot. Toppings galore. Every WOW! customer gets th...

Uber was sued in 2014 for discriminating against blind people and their guide dogs, and agreed to change that as part of a $2.6 million settlement two years later. But apparently, that didn’t entirely happen. Uber will now pay an additional $1.1 million to a blind woman who says said she missed work, missed her birthday celebration, missed Christmas Eve church services, and was left out in the dark, in the rain, and other such humiliations because Uber drivers refused to carry her and her dog on 14 different occasions — a number of which happened after Uber finalized its 2016 settlement. “Uber allowed drivers who discriminated against disabled riders to continue driving without discipline,” an arbitrator concluded this week (via The San Francisco Chronicle). This line from the arbitrator’s...

When Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, he didn’t stop asking his supporters for money. The emails kept coming in. But by the end of his four years in office, according to a new report in The New York Times, they had begun to look an awful lot like a scam. By June 2020, the Trump campaign had begun using dark patterns, computer interfaces designed to trick users, to automatically sign up campaign contributors to donate far more money than they had intended — recurring monthly donations, recurring weekly donations, even a one-time surprise “money bomb” — by pre-checking the checkboxes for each option, burying the fine print under paragraphs of bold text, and forcing his supporters to wade through it all and opt out if they wanted to make a simple donation. Here’s how bad it go...