Technology

Rare’s open-world pirate game, Sea of Thieves, is sailing to Steam on June 3rd, Microsoft announced today. For the past two years, Sea of Thieves was available on Xbox One and the Windows Store. The Steam version will cost $39.99 with cross-play support included between all versions of the game. If you own a copy on either Windows 10 or Xbox One, you will still need to purchase a Steam version to play it on Valve’s digital storefront. At launch, the Steam version will include all of the content previously released on the other platforms. This includes the Ships of Fortune update released last April that introduced a new emissary system, allowing players to become an emissary in the game. Sea of Thieves was a slow burn that has greatly improved over the last two years. As my colleague Tom W...

Avatar: The Last Airbender is back on Netflix after a seven-year absence, and if you never caught the show, now is a perfect time. Avatar isn’t just one of the best animated series around; it’s full-stop excellent television regardless of format. This might not be clear from episode 1, though. As premieres go, it’s charming but geared toward hooking children. Skepticism is okay! Just don’t pass it by without diving into one of its best episodes, “Zuko Alone” (season 2, episode 7). It’s a standalone tale that explains everything you need to know — a terrific martial arts Western with surprisingly rich characterization and a gut-punch ending — all in 20 minutes. In Avatar, there are four nations, each based on the mastery of a different element: Water, Earth, Fire, and Air. The Fire Nation d...

A group of Thomson Reuters shareholders says the company’s technology databases are being used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to “track and arrest immigrants on a massive scale,” potentially causing reputational damage to the company. “Companies are facing scrutiny for contracting with government agencies carrying out the Trump administration’s inhumane family separation and indefinite family detention policies at the US-Mexico border,” states the resolution from the BC Government and Service Employees’ Union (BCGEU) General Fund and its Defence Fund, both of which are in British Columbia, Canada (Thomson Reuters is based in Toronto). “The UN considers such separation and detention illegal under international law and has stated the practice constitutes ‘arbitrary and unlawful inter...

Facebook has long believed in the promise of virtual and augmented reality extending well beyond entertainment, and we’re now getting a clearer glimpse at what that future might look like now that the current pandemic is reshaping how companies everywhere think about remote work. According to Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, Facebook’s head of of AR and VR, the company is already investing in “supercharging remote work and productivity” using those technologies. He even shared a video of what that might look like, featuring real footage of an experimental test using prototype Facebook hardware and software. This is real footage using prototype headsets. We’re always experimenting with future concepts using different hardware configurations as part of our proof-of-experience process — Boz (@boz...

Some Apple AirPods Pro cases now say the headphones are assembled in Vietnam, according to a Twitter user, multiple reports on the MacRumors forums, and one Verge staffer who recently purchased a pair, indicating the company may be reducing its reliance on Chinese manufacturing (via MacRumors). Typically, AirPods Pro units contain a message on the back of the case that says the device was assembled in China. Here’s a photo of what the new message looks like: Photo by Kara Verlaney / The Verge Apple famously assembles a large majority of its products in China. But the company has shown interest in, and even made sizable foreign investments toward, diversifying its manufacturing. That’s partly due to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the ongoing trade war between the US and Chi...

Microsoft is making some improvements to its Windows 10 accessibility features, specifically centered around making the text cursor easier to see and follow using the built-in Magnifier feature. There’s also new text-to-speech functionality being integrated into the Magnifier tool, as well as improvements to Narrator (the built-in Windows screen reader), all set to roll out in the May 2020 Update. Microsoft had previously offered tools to adjust the size and color of the standard mouse cursor. Now it’s bringing similar options to the text cursor, allowing users with impaired vision to adjust the size, thickness, and color of the text cursor, along with adding a new, larger indication to easily find it on-screen. Similarly, the Magnifier feature will follow the text cursor in the middle of ...

ViacomCBS is licensing John Krasinski’s heartwarming weekly YouTube series Some Good News, making a once totally free and accessible show now locked behind a streaming paywall. New episodes of Some Good News will stream exclusively on ViacomCBS’s streaming service, CBS All Access, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Krasinski, however, will no longer host the show. Instead, he’ll step into a producing role, with a new host to be announced at a later date. After the episodes stream on All Access, they’ll “move to a number of the company’s linear networks,” according to the Reporter. It’s unclear which networks will get the show (ViacomCBS owns MTV, Nickelodeon, CBS, Comedy Central, and more), or how long new episodes will stream exclusively in All Access. Calls reportedly started coming in...

The outdoor theater on Fortnite’s new party royale island is finally being put to use. Tonight, at 8PM ET, the virtual space will be home to the latest trailer for Christopher Nolan’s time-traveling film Tenet. The trailer will air on an hourly basis, though it’s not clear how long it’ll be available. This isn’t the first time the world of film and TV has come to Fortnite. The battle royale game has been home to a clip from Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker as well as Quibi’s reboot of Punk’d. However, both of those events took place before developer Epic launched a brand-new, nonviolent space in the game called party royale, which is housed on a different island. A separate area of the island has already hosted two live music events featuring Diplo and Deadmau5. Related Party royale could ...

In a move that illustrates how swiftly the COVID-19 pandemic is reshaping the global economy, Facebook said today that it would eventually begin allowing most of its employees to request a permanent change in their jobs to let them work remotely. The company will begin today by making most of its US job openings eligible for remote hires and begin taking applications for permanent remote work among its workforce later this year. “We’re going to be the most forward-leaning company on remote work at our scale,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an interview with The Verge. “We need to do this in a way that’s thoughtful and responsible, so we’re going to do this in a measured way. But I think that it’s possible that over the next five to 10 years — maybe closer to 10 than five, but somewhere in tha...

The hyperlink reaches my inbox a few minutes before 10PM on Saturday night. I click the link and enter a password. And at precisely 10PM, a video pops up on the page, welcoming me to Eschaton: part performance art, part nightclub, and all conducted over video chat. During the next hour, I stumble across some dozen passphrases that allow me into Eschaton’s many rooms, each one launched as a Zoom meeting with a different host. There’s the room where a man in a rat costume reads quietly in a corner, stopping occasionally to stare at the audience. The one where a violinist alternates playing songs and delivering a wry standup routine. The one with a woman performing a Cabaret number in what looks like a cramped New York apartment. The man in the rat costume sits quietly Midway through, I stumb...

Facebook’s Workplace, its Slack-like collaboration and chat tool targeted at businesses, now has more than 5 million paid users, up from 3 million in October, Facebook announced today. That growth in users is due in large part to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has required many people to rely more on software tools while working from home. Many collaboration apps have also seen growth since the pandemic. In March, Slack said that it had surpassed more than 12.5 million concurrent users, for example, and Microsoft Teams hit 75 million daily active users in April, a jump of 70 percent since the month before. However, those metrics indicate both Slack and Teams have more users than Facebook’s Workplace, even if they aren’t comparing apples to apples, as Teams is bundled into Microsoft’s broader...

When Nate Fox was working on Sly Cooper, a series of stealth games about a master thief who also happens to be a raccoon, he looked around for inspiration on how to make anthropomorphized animals feel more real. This led him to the comic Usagi Yojimbo by Stan Sakai, which followed a wandering samurai who also happened to be a rabbit. “I loved it,” Fox, now a creative director at Sucker Punch Productions, tells The Verge. “It really struck me as this beautiful, very reserved adventure series that would translate very well into a video game.” It also rekindled Fox’s interest in classic samurai movies from the likes of Akira Kurosawa. So when the studio began brainstorming new ideas after launching the superhero game Infamous Second Son, he knew exactly the direction they should go. “For me, ...