The nominations for the 77th Emmy Awards just dropped and, unsurprisingly, Apple TV+'s Severance led the pack with a whopping 27, including Best Drama. The streamer has another bona-fide hit with the Seth Rogen-led The Studio, which captured 23 nominations.

However, HBO Max received the most kudos by platform, with 142 nominations in total. This is thanks to the second season of The Last of Us, with 16 nominations, and the Batman-adjacent The Penguin. The White Lotus, The Pitt and Hacks also grabbed multiple nominations. This is the highest number of noms the outlet has ever received. Netflix still holds the record, though, with 160 nominations in 2020.

Andor scored 14 nominations, including one for Best Drama. Star Wars shows aren't typically singled out for the high-profile awards, though the first season of Andor was also up for Best Drama, before losing to Succession. No actors from the series were nominated, which is a bummer given the performances by Diego Luna, Denise Gough, Elizabeth Dulau and Stellan Skarsgård, among others.

There was a day when sci-fi programs only received nominations for stuff involving costumes or sets. That sure has changed, with Andor, The Last of Us, Severance, Paradise and Black Mirror receiving so much love this year. Fallout also made an impressive showing last year.

The 77th Emmy Awards will be hosted by comedian Nate Bargatze and is airing live on CBS on September 14 at 8PM ET. Cord cutters will be able to stream it live and on-demand via Paramount+.

Grok, xAi's chatbot most famous for going on an antisemitic spree last week, has now added the ability to perform as a synthetic companion for your enjoyment. Elon Musk announced the new feature, available to paid subscribers, which will take the form of animated characters Ani and Rudy. 

Both are distinctly not safe for work, with the former operating as a digital waifu for you to, uh, romance. Rudy, on the other hand, is a red panda with a smart mouth who likes to get rude with the people he's speaking to. 

The companions have their own X accounts, because of course they do. Ani's bio states, "Smooth, a little unpredictable—I might dance, tease, or just watch you figure me out. Let’s keep it chill… or not." Meanwhile, Rudy's just says, "The Only Pet in Grok Companion." 

There also appears to be more AI companions on their way, including one called Chad. The male anime character is listed as "coming soon," alongside another unnamed woman. 

John Wick Hex, a stylish and well-received game based on the John Wick movies, will soon no longer be available to purchase. In a statement on the title’s Steam page, publisher Big Fan Games says it will be delisted from all platforms on July 17.

After that date, the publisher said, those who have already acquired the tactical action game from a digital storefront will still be able to download it. Physical console copies will still work too.

Big Fan didn’t provide an explanation as to why John Wick Hex is being removed from storefronts, though licensing issues may be at play. Mike Bithell, creative director at developer Bithell Games, said on BlueSky he was "unable to shed any light" on the reason for the delisting.

"This one was a weird journey. [It] initially polarized folks, but now it’s one of the consistent favourites people wanna chat with me about when I’m doing public stuff," wrote Bithell, who came to prominence with Thomas Was Alone and whose most recently released game was Tron Catalyst. "My first disappeared game, a weird feeling."

It's always a shame to see a game vanish from storefronts. It's terrible for game preservation, and it means those who made the game will never be able to find a larger audience for it. You still have a couple of days to pick up John Wick Hex, however. It's on sale at Humble, where Steam keys are available for $4, or 80 percent off.

YouTube has clarified its rules about repetitious content and your favorite reaction video channel won't be impacted. Earlier this month, the platform said it would be changing its rules for monetization in an effort to address AI-generated materials, but didn't include many specifics, which led many to sound the alarm that reaction videos might get swept up in the new rules. The company has now provided a few tweaks and more clear delineations in its guidelines about channel monetization policies.

For starters, the rule is being renamed to the inauthentic content policy. "This type of content has always been ineligible for monetization under our existing policies, where creators are rewarded for original and authentic content," a note appended to the support page states. "There is no change to our reused content policy which reviews content like commentary, clips, compilations and reaction videos."

YouTube provided a few examples of material that it would deem to be mass-produced or overly repetitive, and thus ineligible to be monetized. Inauthentic content includes video "that exclusively features readings of other materials you did not originally create, like text from websites or news feeds" or "image slideshows or scrolling text with minimal or no narrative, commentary, or educational value." The company also shared examples of reused content. YouTube said those beloved reaction channels, as well as videos that contain clips for analysis, review or commentary, are unaffected by the new rules. The no-nos for reused content rules might include "Content uploaded many times by other creators" or "Content downloaded or copied from another online source without any substantive modifications."

Meta is going after creators who rip off other users' content as part of a broader effort to fix Facebook's feed. In its latest update, the company laid out new steps it's taking to penalize accounts that lift work from others.

In a blog post for creators, Meta says that accounts that "repeatedly" and "improperly" reuse other accounts' text posts, photos or videos will have their pages demonetized "for a period of time." Meta willa also throttle all of their posts, not just the ones with the offending content. The company notes that the change is meant to target "repeated reposting of content from other creators without permission or meaningful enhancements" and not content like reaction videos.

Meta has previously taken similar steps to reward original content on Instagram, where the company has actively replaced reposted Reels with the original clip. The company now says it's looking into a similar move on Facebook by adding a link to the original video when it detects a duplicate.

Meta

The latest crackdown comes as Meta says it's trying to reduce the amount of spammy and other undesirable posts in Facebook's feed. Earlier this year, the company said it would demonetize creators who share posts with spammy captions and go after creators that manipulate engagement on the platform. In its newest update, Meta shared that since the start of the year it penalized more than 500,000 accounts that engaged in such tactics, "applying measures ranging from demoting their comments and reducing the distribution of their content to preventing these accounts from monetizing." The company has also removed more than 10 million profiles it says impersonated "large content producers."

Additionally, Meta is rolling out new in-app insights it says can help realtors understand issues affecting their reach or monetization status. The new dashboard will highlight potential problems, like unoriginal content or spammy captions, as well as issues affecting monetization.

Google is adding what it calls "featured notebooks" to NotebookLM as a way to demo its AI-powered software and offer interactive, high-quality resources on everything from personal advice to William Shakespeare. The company tried something similar after its developer conference in May, when it created a NotebookLM notebook trained on everything that was announced at Google I/O 2025.

The new featured notebooks have their own dedicated tab on the NotebookLM homepage and were created in partnership with "respected authors, researchers, publications and nonprofits around the world," Google says. Like all NotebookLM projects, you can interact with the raw sources that make up the notebook's knowledge base, ask questions about topics in a chat interface or view an AI-generated summary, audio overview or flow chart for more ways to interact with the content.

The first round of featured notebooks included a notebook on longevity advice trained on the book Super Agers, a notebook on 2025 predictions trained on The Economist's annual "The World Ahead" report and an advice notebook trained on The Atlantic's "How to Build a Life" column, among several other options. Your mileage may vary on how useful each featured notebook is — I found the Shakespeare notebook to be the most fun to play with — but each is a good representation of the quality and volume of material that needs to be uploaded to NotebookLM for it to work well.

Google introduced NotebookLM in 2023 as an experiment in building an AI tool that relies on sources you upload, rather than whatever the company managed to scrape off the internet. The idea is that chats about topics in NotebookLM would be less prone to hallucinations than what an AI Overview in Google Search spits out. Or at the very least, it would be easier to check the AI's answers because the source material is a click away.

NotebookLM became really popular when Google introduced Audio Overviews in September 2024, AI-generated podcasts about the material uploaded to a NotebookLM notebook. Since then, the company has expanded the tool at a rapid clip, introducing mobile apps and the ability to share public notebooks. Clearly, Google is committed to NotebookLM and featured notebooks are a further attempt to model how the AI-powered tool can actually be useful.

Google says featured notebooks are available to people using the desktop version of NotebookLM today and more featured notebooks will be added in the future.

Two years in, Threads is starting to look more and more like the most viable challenger to X. It passed 350 million monthly users earlier this year and Mark Zuckerberg has predicted it could be Meta's next billion-user app.

But Threads still isn't sending much traffic to other websites, which could make the platform less appealing for creators, publishers and others whose businesses depend on non-Meta owned websites. According to Similarweb, a marketing intelligence firm, outbound referral traffic from Threads climbed to 28.4 million visits in June. That's a notable jump from 15.1 million visits a year ago, but still relatively tiny considering Threads is currently averaging more than 115 million users a day on its app, according to Similarweb.

Regular Threads users have long suspected that Meta deprioritizes posts with links. For most of the last two years of Threads' existence the common wisdom was that users shouldn't share links, or should only share them as replies to a primary post. Instagram chief Adam Mosseri, who also oversees Threads, hasn't exactly encouraged linking either. He said last year that Threads doesn't intentionally downrank links but that "we don’t place much value on" them because "people don’t like and comment on links much."

Meta's reluctance wasn't just about users' preferences, though. The company was also concerned about how spammers and other bad actors might abuse links on the text-based platform. More recently though, Meta has changed course, and has been taking steps to surface more "good" links in recommended posts.

"We’ve been working on making sure links are ranked properly," Mosseri said in June. "Links have been working much better for more than a month now." The company has also bolstered links on the platform by allowing users to add more links to their Threads profiles and providing link-specific analytics to its "insights" feature. "We want Threads to be a place that helps you grow your reach – even outside of Threads," Meta said in a May update.

But despite these changes, Threads is still sending very little traffic to websites. Data shared by Similarweb shows that during May and June of last year — when Threads had more than 150 million monthly users — it sent just 24.8 million referrals to outside websites. During May and June of this year, that number more than doubled, rising to 51.8 million.

Those numbers still suggest, though, that the majority of Threads' users are rarely, if ever, clicking on links they see on Threads. Lia Haberman, a social media marketing consultant and author of the ICYMI newsletter, said she's not surprised. "People just got trained not to look for them, not to include them, not to think about them," she tells Engadget. "You can't just flip a switch and all of a sudden expect people to embrace links."

Publishers, a group that likely posts more links on Threads than anyone else, don't seem to be seeing significant traffic from Threads either. Data provided by Chartbeat, a company that provides analytics data to publishers, shows that publisher page views from Threads have nearly doubled since the start of the year, rising from 8.8 million in January to 15.1 million in June.

Interestingly, according to both Similarweb and Chartbeat's data for 2025, referrals from Threads peaked in March. That month, Threads sent 28.8 million outbound referrals to websites, according to Similarweb, while Chartbeat publishers saw 25 million page views from the platform.

But while the latest stats show that traffic from Threads has grown significantly over the last year, it still represents a tiny proportion of the publishers' traffic overall. According to Chartbeat, over the last year and a half Threads has consistently accounted for less than one tenth of a percent of sites' referral traffic. By comparison, Facebook referrals have hovered around 2 - 3 percent over the same period, while Google Discover has accounted for about 13 - 14 percent of referrals. Even among other "small" sources of referrals, like chatGPT, Reddit and Perplexity, Threads is only ahead of Perplexity in terms of the number of referrals it sends.

Threads referrals even pale in comparison to Twitter's, which was never known as a major traffic driver even before Elon Musk's takeover of the company. In January of 2018, Twitter accounted for 3 percent of publishers' page views, according to Chartbeat data reported by the Press Gazette. By April of 2023, after Musk's takeover but before he rebranded the site to X, that number had fallen to 1.2 percent.

Chartbeat's data isn't a complete picture — stats provided to Engadget were based on an analysis of 3,000 sites that have opted in to anonymized data sharing — but the slight increase in referral traffic roughly lines up with another major change Meta made this year. In January, following Mark Zuckerberg's move to end fact checking and walk back content moderation rules, Threads also ended its moratorium on recommending political content to all users.

Following this change, some publishers of political news, including Newsweek, Politico and Forbes saw a spike in referrals from Threads, Digiday reported. But those gains don't seem to be universal, and it's not clear why some publishers may be benefitting more than others. "Threads is trailing significantly in traffic, subscription conversions, and overall conversion rate," compared with Bluesky and X, the Boston Globe's VP of Platforms Mark Karolian recently shared on Threads.

While Threads' growth so far hasn't been hampered by its inability to drive users off-platform, it could become an increasingly important issue for Meta if it really wants to bring more creators onto the platform. The company is also getting ready to flip the switch on ads on the platform. A user base that ignores links could complicate Meta's pitch to advertisers, who are already taking a cautious approach to Threads. Meta declined to comment. 

Haberman says that Threads' ambivalence toward links might be symptomatic of a larger identity crisis the platform is still facing. It has a large user base, but it's not always clear who Threads is really for. It isn't known as a destination to follow breaking news, like Twitter once was, or as a place with highly-engaged subcultures, she notes. "Threads needs to have a purpose," she says. "And right now, it seems very much like a suggestion box at work where people are just filing complaints and trauma dumping."

Whether smaller platforms like Threads can reliably drive traffic to websites is an increasingly urgent question. At a time when online search feels like it's getting worse, AI is rapidly replacing many searches and cannibalizing websites' search traffic. Publishers, as The Wall Street Journal recently reported, are being hit especially hard by these shifts.

Threads is extremely unlikely to fill those gaps on its own, even if referral traffic vastly improves. And publishers in particular have plenty of reasons not to become too reliant on a Meta-owned platform. At the same time, there's clearly an opportunity for Threads to play a bigger role in a post-search world. That would not only benefit the creators, publishers and small business owners Meta has long courted, it could help Threads establish an identity of its own.

Have a tip for Karissa? You can reach her by email, on X, Bluesky, Threads, or send a message to @karissabe.51 to chat confidentially on Signal.

Discord has begun rolling out its in-app Orbs currency to everyone. In conjunction with the platform's Quest system, users can earn Orbs by watching ads on Discord. You can then use the currency to purchase exclusive drip for your profile, including badges, effects and avatars. It's also possible to exchange Orbs for three-day Nitro credits and anything else you can buy on the Discord Shop.

Sometimes developers will also offer the currency in exchange for simply trying out their game, or completing a specific gameplay task. Other rewards include exclusive profile decorations you can only earn by completing an associated Quest. The fastest way to start earning Orbs is by tapping the "Discover" icon in Discord's sidebar and then selecting "Quests." There you will see any promotions Discord is currently running, along with recently completed ones. If you're keen on earning Orbs, be sure to check back often as Discord frequently rotates new Quests in and out.

Discord

The online response to Orbs has been about what you would expect. When Discord first announced the currency, most people on the Discord subreddit were either lukewarm on the idea or outright hostile to it. However, the company says users are broadly in favor of it. Discord points to a survey it conducted before it began rolling out Orbs to beta testers this past May. In September 2024, the company found 82 percent of users it surveyed said they would like to earn a virtual currency on the platform, with nearly half of survey respondents saying a virtual currency would improve their overall experience.

In June, Discord CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy told Engadget the company sees Orbs as a way to give players something in return for their time and attention while aiding game studios with discoverability. In my testing, I've found the system is easy enough to ignore if you don't care about customizing your profile, and they're not necessary to access any of Discord's core functionality. 

Welcome to our latest roundup of indie game news and releases. We've got some nifty stuff lined up for you this time around, including a stylish co-op shooter and a very cool Metroidvania concept. But first I'd like to bring your attention to a newish game I picked up in the Steam Summer Sale. It is absolutely breaking my brain — or perhaps it might actually improve my cognitive function.

It's called Ambidextro and it's from Majorariatto, which self-published the game (the two-person studio's tagline is "Video games that ruin lives"). The gist here is that you play a wizard sent by a queen to rescue her children after a witch kidnaps them and takes them to two different places. Rather than let him try to find the princess and prince one at a time, the queen bisects the wizard and orders him to the dungeons until he learns to control both halves of his body simultaneously. That's where you come in.

There are 100 single-screen levels in Ambidextro and you complete them by controlling each half of the wizard at the same time. One with the left thumbstick and the jump button of your choice, and one with the right. The aim is to bring the two halves of the wizard together. The timer doesn't leave much room for error and when one half dies, it's back to the start. Sure, you could cheat by getting a friend to control one of the wizard halves, but that defeats the purpose.

I am a truly horrible multitasker, so I was curious how well I'd do at playing Ambidextro. As it turns out, I got through the first 19 levels fairly quickly, and then I was absolutely rotten at it. Granting myself more time through the accessibility settings helped a bit, but it's still a tough game. I'm going to stick with it to see if I can get better. There's no way it could be as difficult as simultaneously playing two characters in Overcooked by myself. Now, that's impossible.

New releases

Mycopunk is a co-op shooter from developer Pigeons at Play and publisher Devolver Digital that arrived in early access on Steam this week. With a Moebius-style look that reminds me a bit of Sable, the fantastic Rollerdrome and the Borderlands series, Mycopunk is certainly eye-catching. 

You can team up with three friends and play as robots that have been hired to eradicate a fungus that's infected a valuable world. Each of the robots has their own moveset and class, but (as in the Borderlands games) there's a great deal of variety and customization when it comes to the weaponry.

Inscryption showed what's possible when you inject horror into a card-based game, and perhaps that was an influence for Occlude, which is out now on Steam. This is billed as a "game of occult Solitaire." Sure, you'll arrange cards by numerical rank, but it seems there's more going on here than might first meet the eye. As the title suggests, the rules are somewhat obscured in this narrative puzzle title from Tributary Games and publisher Pantaloon. Can you figure 'em out?

Everdeep Aurora is an interesting-looking game from Ysbryd Games that landed on Steam and Nintendo Switch this week. This NES-inspired 2D adventure reminds me a little of Animal Well in terms of its tone and look. You play as a cat named Shell who drills down to search for her missing mother amid a meteor shower that has wrecked the planet's surface. There's a mix of platforming and exploration here. Everdeep Aurora looks rather pretty and the trailer made me smile. I'm hoping to play it at some point down the line.

Upcoming

I do love a side-scrolling beat-'em-up and Ra Ra Boom is absolutely one of those. This project from Gylee Games features four ninja cheerleaders from outer space who are trying to save Earth from a rogue AI. This is a co-op game for up to four players. Each of the cheerleaders has their own attacks and abilities (including ranged weapons), as well as a skill tree that you can use to unlock new ones.

I've played a chunk of Ra Ra Boom and I'm enjoying it quite a bit so far. It looks and sounds nice, and the combat is just the right level of challenging for me up to this point. If you dig games like the Streets of Rage series and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge, you might be interested in checking this out. A two-level demo is available on Steam now. Ra Ra Boom is coming to Steam, Epic Games Store, Xbox and PS5 on August 12.

Rhythm of Resistance is a Metroidvania that has a very interesting mechanic. It's a rhythm-based game (no points for guessing that after reading its title), but there's a catch — you can pick the music. For instance, you can switch to a track with a lower BPM to make a trap easier to bypass. You can find new songs that can distort reality "in strange and surprising ways" while you're on your journey in this game from NetherMoon Game Studio, which is slated to arrive on Steam next year.

The drama surrounding the significantly delayed release of Subnautica 2 continues with Charlie Cleveland, co-founder and former director of Unknown Worlds Entertainment, announcing via a post on X that he and unnamed others have filed a lawsuit against Krafton, the studio's parent company since 2021.

Cleveland, along with Ted Gill and Max McGuire, were relieved of their leadership roles at Unknown Worlds last week by Krafton. Bloomberg reported that they had been effectively "pushed out." This occurred shortly before Krafton would reportedly owe Unknown Worlds leadership a $250 million bonus for meeting certain goals.

The alleged lawsuit follows Krafton's recent statement accusing Cleveland and other studio leadership of "abandoning their responsibilities." The parent company claims these executives' behavior led to significant delays in Subnautica 2 's early access release, which is now slated for early 2026. Krafton also claimed that approximately 90 percent of the $250 million bonus was already paid out to Cleveland, Gill and McGuire.

In his post, Cleveland strongly refuted Krafton's claims, asserting that Subnautica 2 is in fact "ready for early access" and that any allegations regarding abdication of leadership and financial motivations are false. "Subnautica has been my life’s work and I would never willingly abandon it," Cleveland wrote.

He also firmly denied accusations that he and other executives intended to keep the promised $250 million bonus for themselves, saying, "I’m in this industry because I love it, not for riches. Historically we’ve always shared our profits with the team and did the same when we sold the studio. You can be damned sure we’ll continue with the earnout/bonus as well."

Details about the lawsuit, including the jurisdiction, named parties or specific causes of action remain unclear. Subnautica 2 is still slated for an early access launch sometime in 2026, though it remains to be seen if this new legal drama will cause further delays.

Whether you’re sharing a room with a couple other students or you’ve managed to score a single room by yourself, you’ll appreciate your dorm room more if you add a few personal touches to it. For this guide, Engadget reporters and editors share some of the gear that served us well back in college, or the stuff we wish we had. A lot of it is tech-related (we are who we are) but there are some lo-fi things here as well — and all of it will help you feel more at home in your tiny home away from home.

Disney and the British free-to-air broadcaster ITV have launched a new partnership that will allow them to show each other’s shows in an effort to reach new audiences. ITV viewers will be able to watch shows including Only Murders in the Building, Andor, and The Bear – which lives on Disney+ in the UK – while Disney will take advantage of ITV’s various dramas and reality TV offerings.

Mr Bates vs The Post Office, ITV’s BAFTA award-winning four-part dramatization of the British Post Office scandal, will be available to Disney+ subscribers, as well as selected seasons of the ever-popular Love Island dating show. The thinking seems to be that ITV’s typically older viewing demographic could be drawn to Disney’s more adult-focused shows, with ITV’s output likely to appeal to streaming audiences that skew younger. That said, family-friendly Disney+ shows including Lilo and Stitch: The Series and Phineas and Ferb will also make their way to ITV as part of the deal.

ITV has its own streaming platform, called ITVX, which is free to watch in the UK with ads, or ad-free as part of a monthly subscription. Disney’s content will live on ITVX in the UK, and will be badged as "A Taste of Disney+", with Disney+ offering its "A Taste of ITVX" library to its own subscribers. Kevin Lygo, Managing Director of Media and Entertainment at ITV, said in a press release that the plan is for both libraries to be regularly updated.

Traditional broadcasters striking deals with streaming platforms is nothing new. Netflix has been licensing shows from the BBC and Channel 4 in the UK for a number of years, for example, and back in 2022 Disney and the BBC started co-producing Doctor Who, with Disney+ becoming the home of the long-running sci-fi show outside of the UK. More often than not, though, these relationships tend to be one-way affairs in terms of where the content is distributed, so this even divide between two platforms seems more novel.

The selected shows and movies for the launch window will be available to stream on their respective platforms from July 16. 

Subnautica 2 is one of the most highly anticipated games around. It's the second-most wishlisted game on Steam behind (you guessed it) Hollow Knight: Silksong. However, you'll need to wait longer than anticipated to try Subnautica 2 in four-player co-op, as the survival game's early access release has been delayed until early 2026.

Developer Unknown Worlds said that community members who took part in playtests provided positive feedback about the story, creatures, environment and general direction of the game. However, the studio said, they "also provided some insight that there are a few areas where we needed to improve before launching the first version of Subnautica 2 to the world. Our community is at the heart of how we develop, so we want to give ourselves a little extra time to respond to more of that feedback before releasing the game into early access. With that in mind, we’ve made the decision to delay Subnautica 2’s early access release to 2026."

The delay will afford Unknown Worlds a chance to add more biomes, tools, vehicle upgrades and creatures while expanding the story, the studio said. Players can expect more details in the coming months.

But news of the delay comes amid behind-the-scenes drama at Unknown Worlds. Bloomberg reports that the studio had been in line for a $250 million bonus (which the leadership group planned to share with employees) from Krafton if it hit revenue goals by the end of this year. The delay reportedly means Unknown Worlds is very unlikely to hit those targets. As such, Bloomberg's sources suggest that means the team of around 100 people may not be eligible for the payout.

Last week, Krafton — which bought Unknown Worlds in 2021 — turfed out the studio's leadership team of CEO Ted Gill and co-founders Charlie Cleveland and Max McGuire. The publisher brought in Steve Papoutsis, a former executive at The Callisto Protocol developer Striking Distance, as the new CEO of Unknown Worlds.

"There is nothing more important than the gamer experience. Given the anticipation around Subnautica 2, we owe our players nothing less than the best possible game, as soon as possible," Krafton CEO CH Kim said in a statement, "We are thrilled Steve is joining us in our shared commitment at Krafton and Unknown Worlds to deliver Subnautica 2 as a more complete and satisfying entry in the series — one that truly lives up to player expectations."

Per Bloomberg, Papoutsis told employees this week that Krafton didn't believe Subnautica 2 was ready for an early access release and claimed he didn't know the specifics of the contract regarding the quarter-billion-dollar bonus. "It’s never been told to me that we’re making this change specifically to impact any earnout or anything like that," he reportedly told staff.

According to Cleveland, however, Subnautica 2 is actually "ready for early access release." The studio's co-founder wrote in a lengthy X post on July 5 that "while we thought this was going to be our decision to make, at least for now, that decision is in Krafton’s hands."

A Krafton spokesperson told Eurogamer that the decision to delay Subnautica 2 was "based solely on our commitment to quality and to delivering the best possible experience for players" and it was not "influenced by any contractual or financial considerations." They added that "the decision had already been under discussion prior to recent leadership changes at the studio."

• Cindy Rose, a Microsoft executive, will become WPP's new chief executive in September.
• Insiders see Rose's tech background and board experience at WPP as assets for the role.
• WPP issued a profit warning this week, and the ad industry is beset with problems.

As advertising giants try to shed their analog roots, WPP has raided one of the world's biggest tech giants to find its next leader.

The UK-based ad giant on Thursday announced that Microsoft executive Cindy Rose, 59, will succeed Mark Read as chief executive on September 1.

Insiders and shareholders told Business Insider they were hopeful Rose would steady the ship after a rocky period.

The appointment was announced the day after WPP had issued a surprise profit warning on Wednesday, saying cautious clients were spending less and less keen on pitches.

Three company insiders expressed relief to BI that the CEO search was over just a month after Read announced in June he would exit the company after 30 years. WPP said it considered both internal and external candidates. Rose was a surprise appointment to most observers BI spoke to and wasn't on their lists of probable candidates.

One WPP insider said they were "very optimistic" about the hire, adding Rose was both a fresh face and knowledgeable about WPP, having sat on its board since 2019.

American-born Rose is a former lawyer who switched to corporate roles, worked a long stint at Disney before joining Microsoft, where she is chief operating officer for global enterprise. She is a dual UK-US citizen and will split her time between both countries, which the insider said was another plus for a company listed on both US and UK stock markets.

Her tech background would put her in good standing to lead WPP to capitalize on the newer and more profitable parts of its offering to clients, the insider added.

"She doesn't come from a 'media' or 'creative' background, so won't see the company through that lens either," the WPP insider said.

WPP chair Philip Jansen praised Rose's experience building "enduring client relationships," having led multi-billion-dollar operations. At Microsoft, she's helped large enterprises harness AI.

Jansen said in a statement her expertise would be "hugely valuable to WPP as the industry navigates fundamental changes and macroeconomic uncertainty."

A US to UK import

Rose studied at Columbia University and New York Law School before relocating to the UK.

She worked at the Allen & Overy law firm in London and later joined Disney as legal counsel for Europe.

Ian Twinn, former director of public affairs for UK advertising trade body ISBA, told BI that Rose's legal background would help her navigate the PR highs and lows of running a large public company.

"In terms of being a public affairs guy, you do rely on people with a good legal background — it makes a big difference," said Twinn, who briefly interacted with Rose while she was at Disney. "She was very receptive and very focused."

Just after the turn of the millennium, Rose became Disney's UK managing director, leading thousands of employees across film, TV, and retail, and launching huge movies like "Finding Nemo" in the market.

Andy Bird, former chairman of Walt Disney International, told BI that Rose's experience as a custodian of several different brands in her time at Disney positions her well for understanding the needs of WPP's marketer clients.

"How you stay relevant to consumers is going to be very important to WPP moving forward," Bird said.

Rose was senior vice president of Disney's Europe, Middle East, and Africa interactive media group when she left after nine years to take senior leadership roles at UK telecommunications companies Virgin Media and Vodafone.

In 2016, Rose became chief executive of Microsoft UK. Joshua Graff recalls first meeting Rose at this time, when he was UK country manager at LinkedIn, which Microsoft acquired in December of that year. They worked together at Microsoft for almost 10 years.

Graff described Rose as "direct, empathetic" and "super funny," with an ability to create energy in the teams around her.

"No doubt she will be a talent magnet for WPP," Graff told BI.

Read previously credited Rose with putting Microsoft on the map among UK business leaders and politicians. She also championed diversity, both within Microsoft and in encouraging people from different backgrounds to take up careers in tech. She will be the first woman to be chief executive of a global advertising holding company.

Bringing a touch of Microsoft to WPP

The American-accented Rose was made an Officer of the British Empire, an honor conferred by the UK government, and received it from Queen Elizabeth in 2019. Rose was promoted to become president of Microsoft in Western Europe during the pandemic and rose to her most recent position in 2023. In this role, she was responsible for helping huge blue-chip businesses understand and use technologies like AI to transform their businesses.

WPP, too, is attempting to retool its business as it looks to pick up more lucrative work than simply creating and placing ads. It's investing hundreds of millions annually in AI and other technologies as it hopes to win lucrative contracts in areas like customer-relationship management and digital transformation, areas where Rose has firsthand experience.

Matt Atkinson, former chief customer officer of The Co-Op, worked closely with Rose as the grocer transformed its tech stack, from data infrastructure to the in-store customer experience. It was a big, competitive process, and Microsoft won the pitch, beating out Snowflake, among others.

"She had created an environment where we were able to creatively and technologically collaborate for mutual benefit," Atkinson told BI.

He added she had the "technology chops, emotional intelligence, and a way of being," which made her a good choice to run WPP.

A peacemaker

Rose will join as the ad industry faces a reckoning. Economic and geopolitical uncertainty is making marketers cautious about taking on big projects and launching new brands. Meanwhile, Big Tech players are increasingly touting AI-powered tools that can create entire ad campaigns and lure eyeballs away from the sites that host the ads agencies make.

With WPP's share price hovering at lows not seen since 2009, investors will look for signs Rose is ready to make big swings to attract new business. Insiders are hoping she will boost morale after a series of restructures, layoffs, and the institution of a strict return-to-office policy that has rattled many in the internal ranks.

Claire Enders, founder of media and telecommunications research company Enders Analysis, said Rose "epitomizes the reasons women have increasingly succeeded to these roles."

"She's a peacemaker, she's very non-confrontational, very thoughtful, and she works very well in very large organizations," Enders added.

• Hollywood companies continue to integrate AI, even as they challenge its applications in court.
• AI startups like Toonstar and Chronicle Studios are innovating in animation.
• Studios are using the tech to promote content discovery and reduce production costs.

Hollywood giants are pushing back on AI's encroachment. Disney and Universal recently sued Midjourney, accusing it of using tech to rip off their famous characters.

But inside entertainment companies, it's a whole different story. The biggest studios and filmmakers are using AI technology in various ways — and people in Hollywood are taking note. The AI on the Lot conference in May has doubled its attendance to 1,200 over three years, while AI editing company Runway attracted some 1,000 people to its third film festival.

The tantalizing promise of AI is that it could solve big problems in the entertainment business, like content discovery and high production costs.

"No matter how you feel about AI tools in the media and entertainment business, they're here to stay," said Peter Csathy, who advises media companies.

Investors are climbing on board companies like Ecco, an AI startup that helps people find titles across multiple streamers using queries like "find me all the shows about F1." It has raised $7 million from Ben Silverman, Shaquille O'Neal, and others.

One such investor is Ishan Sinha, a consumer partner at Point72 Ventures. He said the hype around AI-generated video hasn't translated into consumer interest. He sees the most potential in companies that use AI to promote distribution through personalization, translation, and IP ownership.

"We believe the winning consumer businesses aggregate eyeballs — they have some type of a hook, whether it's content aggregation, playlists, proprietary IP, etc., that acquires and retains users," he said.

Point72 Ventures' investments include GlobalComix, which uses AI to bring recommendations and language translation to comic book and manga readers that they couldn't otherwise find, and Cheehoo, which is working with studios to simplify animation.

The firm also invested in Chronicle Studios, which aims to help animators grow their audiences and monetize their projects beyond YouTube.

Here are some AI companies transforming different areas of Hollywood, and the pitch decks some of them used to raise funding.

Faster, cheaper animation

AI may still be a long way from making full-length movies, but it's quickly making inroads in animation. Toonstar, a startup behind "StEvEn & Parker," uses AI for tasks ranging from developing storylines to creating images and says it can make episodes at a fraction of the cost of conventional methods.

Chronicle Studios is a startup cofounded by Chris deFaria, a former animation president at Warner Bros. and Comcast's DreamWorks, that's using AI to help creators level up, with a focus on animators. Others chasing the animation or independent creator opportunity are Further Adventures, a new studio that's investing in digital creators and independent filmmakers; Invisible Universe, an animation studio backed by Seven Seven Six; and Promise, an AI studio backed by Peter Chernin's North Road, Andreessen Horowitz, and Google.

"AI can't really make stories that are enduring," deFaria told BI. "The biggest pain point is getting an audience."

Read more:

• A former DreamWorks president just raised $11.6 million to build franchises using AI
• Read the pitch deck for a Toonstar NFT animated series backed by Mila Kunis

AI is transforming special effects

Other companies, such as Runway, which has raised $545 million from General Atlantic and others, and Connect Ventures-backed Deep Voodoo, are using AI to provide tools for de-aging and other special effects work.

Some have entered the rollup stage. Metaphysic, which was known for de-aging Tom Hanks and Robin Wright for the Robert Zemeckis film "Here," was acquired in February by DNEG Group's AI company Brahma. Papercup's voice-cloning IP was acquired in June by RWS, a content solutions company, while its team was acquired by Scale AI.

AI is also being applied to speed the dubbing process, recreate the voices of bygone actors, and restore old films and TV series. With streamers going global, there's a big demand to translate titles for new markets, and new approaches to AI promise to eliminate awkward dubbing of the past.

Runway made news this past year for deals with Lionsgate to train an AI model on its library and with AMC Networks, which will use its tools to generate promotional material for its shows.

One player, Deepdub, which uses AI to dub movies and shows, just extended its tech to real-time dubbing of live sports commentary, esports shoutcasting, and breaking news coverage.

"For the first time, broadcasters can deliver real-time, multilingual dubbing that captures not just words, but the energy, urgency, and authenticity of live content," said Ofir Krakowski, the company's CEO.

Read more:

• Read the pitch deck from Metaphysic, an AI startup behind a viral Tom Cruise deepfake
• How AI Startup Runway aims to simplify video editing and filmmaking
• Here's the pitch deck AI startup Papercup used to raise $20 million to help media go global

Startups are tackling different phases of production

A third area where AI startups have been active in Hollywood is in the content creation process more broadly.

This can involve everything from AI in the script reading phase to scouring video libraries to generate new ideas for titles based on what's performed well in the past.

One, Paris-based Moments Lab, recently raised a $24 million round from backers including Oxx and Orange Ventures to expand its AI tools that are used by Warner Bros. Discovery, Hearst, and others.

Moments can make clips for social media seven times faster than the conventional approach, cofounder Phil Petitpont recently told BI, citing internal research. He said media companies would be able to use AI to help make full-length documentaries based on their video libraries in several months, while predictive modeling tools that can suggest audience-boosting changes are a year away.

"We're not very far from that because audience data is very easily available on YouTube," he said.

Read more:

• This startup raised $24 million to help Hollywood use AI to save time and money. Read its pitch deck.
• A new AI product being tested by top YouTubers like MrBeast scans a creator's catalog to give them fresh video ideas
• The pitch deck Strada, an AI startup to streamline content creation, used to raise $2 million
• Here's the pitch deck Filmustage, an AI startup focused on streamlining pre-production, used to raise $1.5 million

• Perplexity AI is cautiously growing its ad business.
• Its main ad product is 'sponsored follow-up questions,' and it recently introduced a perks program.
• Perplexity has a revenue share program with publishers, but its ads business is still nascent.

Perplexity AI is taking a softly, softly approach to building its ad business.

The AI company had a low-key presence at last month's Cannes Lions ad festival in France. Amid the huge multimillion-dollar beach structures erected by tech giants like Meta, Amazon, and Google, Perplexity sent just a handful of executives to meet with current and potential business partners.

Perplexity, a conversational AI-powered search engine, began testing ads last year. Brands such as Whole Foods and Indeed have bought "sponsored follow-up questions," which appear alongside an answer to a user's prompt, encouraging them to dig deeper into the topic. Advertisers themselves don't write or edit the sponsored questions, which are generated by Perplexity's AI.

It's a contrast to traditional search engine marketing, where ads typically appear before the organic results.

Speaking to Business Insider at Cannes Lions in June, Ryan Foutty, Perplexity's VP of business development, said the company is still figuring out which advertising model will work best.

He described sponsored follow-up questions as "a really incredible brand advertorial."

"It's additive because you're helping users figure out the next question they need to ask to make a better decision or figure out what they're trying to do versus just trying to put something in your face," Foutty said, adding that 40% of its users click on related questions.

Perplexity advertisers pay on a CPM, or cost to reach a thousand impressions, model. A Perplexity spokesperson said advertising currently comprises less than a tenth of a percent of the company's total revenue, and declined to comment on the company's current ad prices.

In recent weeks, Perplexity has also introduced a perks program, where it provides subscribers to its Perplexity Pro service with offers and discounts from brands including Turbotax, the smart ring company Oura, and hotel booking service Selfbook.

Both Perplexity ads and perks are only active in the US. Foutty said the company was also considering more ways to monetize Perplexity's shopping and travel booking features, which could theoretically include further ad formats.

"It's very manual today," Foutty said, "But when we find something that works for everyone, then it's very easy, naturally, for us to scale it."

Perplexity hasn't released its user numbers, but its CEO, Aravind Srinivas, said the company received 780 million queries in May, up 20% from April. But compare that to Google's AI Overviews, which the search giant said reached 1.5 billion monthly users in May. Google recently brought advertising to more areas of its AI Overviews product, and it's testing ads within its AI Mode, a newer feature where users can conduct deeper research.

With its relatively small scale and only one specific ad format available, Perplexity's advertising offering is only getting tepid interest from marketers for now, said Eric Hoover, director of search engine optimization at the digital marketing agency Jellyfish.

"I don't see strong adoption by users," Hoover told BI. "People rarely click out of 'regular' AI results; I don't see them being eager to click on sponsored ones."

Perplexity wants to build 'long-term incentive' deals with publishers

Perplexity shares a portion of its ad revenue with the publisher partners it uses to help source its answers, which include Time, Fortune, and Der Spiegel.

The company doesn't cut up-front licensing deals with these publishers because it isn't building foundational large language models that require content for training, Foutty said. It does offer these partners access to its enterprise product and APIs that can help publishers embed Perplexity's tech, like conversational search, into their own sites. (Disclosure: Business Insider's parent company, Axel Springer, has a multi-year content licensing deal with Perplexity rival OpenAI.)

"The model that we're creating on the revenue share side is a long-term incentive," Foutty said. "It's not a one-and-done."

When asked whether any publishers were making serious money from the program, Foutty said it was still early days. The publisher program launched in June of last year.

"We're focused on building the right product before we scale it to everyone," he added.

The relationship between AI companies and publishers can often be fraught, and many are locked in legal battles. Rupert Murdoch's Dow Jones and the New York Post filed a lawsuit last year alleging that Perplexity engaged in copyright infringement by scraping and using their content. Perplexity said last year that the facts alleged in the complaint were "misleading at best" and that it planned to defend itself.

This week, the content delivery network and security provider Cloudflare announced it has begun automatically blocking AI crawlers from scraping the websites it powers unless site owners explicitly opt-in or the AI companies pay.