Movie adaptations of video games can be really hit or miss. The Super Mario Bros. Movieset the box office record for the highest-grossing video game movie of all time and was a fun, if safe, movie. On the other end of that spectrum is Borderlands, which was a massive letdown and a box-office failure. With that spotty track record, we were pleasantly surprised when A Minecraft Movie turned out to be…pretty good, actually.
The movie stars Jack Black as Steve, the original player character from the video game, who ends up transported into the voxel world of Minecraft, while Jason Momoa stars as an egomaniacal former gaming superstar. The movie will also debut on the HBO linear cable channel on Saturday, June 21, at 8PM ET.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/tv-movies/a-minecraft-movie-is-coming-exclusively-to-hbo-max-on-june-20-175859982.html?src=rss
A still from A Minecraft Movie showing Jack Black wearing a blue shirt as the iconic character Steve, holding a crafted sword. We see two other characters from the back, both wearing red and looking at Jack Black
Wikipedia is backing off a plan to test AI article summaries. Earlier this month, the platform announced plans to trial the feature for about 10 percent of mobile web visitors. To say they weren't well-received by editors would be an understatement. The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) then changed plans and cancelled the test.
The AI summaries would have appeared at the top of articles for 10 percent of mobile users. Readers would have had to opt in to see them. The AI-generated summaries only appeared "on a set of articles" for the two-week trial period.
Editor comments in the WMF's announcement (via404 Media) ranged from "Yuck" to "Grinning with horror." One editor wrote, "Just because Google has rolled out its AI summaries doesn't mean we need to one-up them. I sincerely beg you not to test this, on mobile or anywhere else. This would do immediate and irreversible harm to our readers and to our reputation as a decently trustworthy and serious source."
"Wikipedia has in some ways become a byword for sober boringness, which is excellent," the editor continued. "Let's not insult our readers' intelligence and join the stampede to roll out flashy AI summaries."
This screenshot from 404 Media shows another version of an AI-generated summary on a Wikipedia page. The planned test would have only showed up on the mobile web version of the site.
Wikimedia Foundation
Editors' gripes weren't limited to the idea. They also criticized the nonprofit for excluding them from the planning phase. "You also say this has been 'discussed,' which is thoroughly laughable as the 'discussion' you link to has exactly one participant, the original poster, who is another WMF employee," an editor wrote.
A Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson shared the following statement with Engadget:
“The Wikimedia Foundation has been exploring ways to make Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects more accessible to readers globally. This two-week, opt-in experiment was focused on making complex Wikipedia articles more accessible to people with different reading levels. For the purposes of this experiment, the summaries were generated by an open-weight Aya model by Cohere. It was meant to gauge interest in a feature like this, and to help us think about the right kind of community moderation systems to ensure humans remain central to deciding what information is shown on Wikipedia.
For these experiments, our usual process includes discussing with volunteers (who create and curate all the information on Wikipedia) to make decisions on whether and how to proceed with building features. The discussion around this feature is an example of this process, where we built out a prototype of an idea and reached out to the Wikipedia volunteer community for their thoughts.
It is common to receive a variety of feedback from volunteers, and we incorporate it in our decisions, and sometimes change course. We welcome such thoughtful feedback — this is what continues to make Wikipedia a truly collaborative platform of human knowledge.
As shared in our latest post on the community discussion page, we do not have any plans to continue the experiment at the moment, as we continue to assess and discuss the feedback we have already received from volunteers.”In the "discussion" page, the organization explained that it wanted to cater to its audience's needs. "Many readers need some simplified text in addition to the main content," a WMF employee wrote. "In previous research, we heard that readers wanted to have an option to get a quick overview of a topic prior to jumping into reading the full article."
The organization didn't rule out future uses of AI. But they said editors won't be left in the dark next time. "Bringing generative AI into the Wikipedia reading experience is a serious set of decisions, with important implications, and we intend to treat it as such," the spokesperson told 404 Media. "We do not have any plans for bringing a summary feature to the wikis without editor involvement."
Update, June 13, 2025, 12:52PM ET: This story has been corrected to note that Wikipedia never actually started its AI summary test. The plan was announced, but cancelled before it took place. A statement from the Wikimedia Foundation has also been added, and the headline has been updated as well.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/wikipedia-cancels-plan-to-test-ai-summaries-after-editors-skewer-the-idea-200029899.html?src=rss
POLAND - 2022/12/07: In this photo illustration a Wikipedia logo seen displayed on a smartphone. (Photo Illustration by Mateusz Slodkowski/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Reddit is making it easier to gauge the impact your comments are having. The company is introducing detailed analytics for comments that measure views and other engagement metrics. Reddit shared the change as part of a larger batch of updates around how it handles comments on its platform.
Comment insights will provide details around upvotes (including the ratio of upvotes to downvotes), replies, views, shares and awards. Additionally, Redditors will now be able to share comments as a standalone post on Reddit.
Reddit
The platform is also adding a drafts feature for comments that will allow people to save up to 20 drafts for 14 days. Drafts will automatically save, according to Reddit, so that you can revisit your thoughts if you navigate away from the page or leave the app mid-comment. In an update to moderators, Reddit said that drafts is "still in its early iteration" and that it may tweak how the feature works in future versions.
The changes are the latest way Reddit has added more flexibility around comments in recent weeks. Earlier this month, the company said it would allow users to hide their commenting history from their profiles.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/reddit-adds-analytics-and-drafts-for-comments-060550128.html?src=rss
Mixtape is the answer to the question, “What if the movie High Fidelity was a video game?” It’s not a perfect analogy, but it’s pretty damn close, and either way it’s a sign that Mixtape is going to be a fabulous slice of late-1990s, early-2000s nostalgia, complete with a banging soundtrack.
You can hear it in the trailers — Mixtape absolutely nails the classic Moviefone tone, and it seems that this vibe extends to the full game. I played roughly 30 minutes of Mixtape at Summer Game Fest 2025, and in that time I became enamored with the game’s lead character, a rebellious and insufferably cool teenager named Rockford who’s about to leave suburbia to pursue her dreams of becoming a music supervisor in New York City. She talks directly to the player as she introduces her two also-very-cool best friends and cues up the game’s music, breaking the fourth wall just like John Cusack. Most of the game plays out in a third-person view, following along as Rockford and her friends casually skate down tree-lined streets, flee from the cops in a high-speed shopping-cart sequence, and hang out in her bedroom, looking at Polaroid pictures and CDs while planning the best way to steal liquor from her parents’ stash.
Mixtape comes from The Artful Escapestudio Beethoven & Dinosaur, and it similarly uses music as a core storytelling and scene-setting device. This makes perfect sense, considering the studio’s founder, Johnny Galvatron, is a legit rock star based in Melbourne, Australia. Leaning into musicality also worked out well for The Artful Escape, whichearned Beethoven & Dinosaur a BAFTA award in 2022. Mixtape’s soundtrack is populated by the top teenage-dirtbag bands from the 80s, 90s and slightly beyond, including DEVO, Roxy Music, The Smashing Pumpkins, Iggy Pop, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Joy Division and the Cure (but not Wheatus, as far as I can tell, just to be clear).
Visually, Mixtape has a painterly 3D aesthetic with gorgeous golden light and purple shadows, reminiscent of Life is Strange or Telltale’s The Walking Dead series. In action, the characters move in a windswept, Spider-Verse animation style that doesn’t interrupt the gameplay flow. Even soaring down the snakelike asphalt on a skateboard, Rockford responds immediately to controller input and her ride isn’t interrupted by stray or late animations. Mixtape looks lovely and feels great.
Annapurna Interactive
There are also surprising little moments with alternative mechanics in the game’s first half hour, including a scene straight out of Wayne’s World where you make the trio headbang in a car, and another where you control two tongues making out in a close-up, Ren & Stimpy kind of cartoon realism. When Rockford explains what a music supervisor is, real-world reference images fill the screen in a tongue-in-cheek educational interlude. Throughout all of this, the music continues to roll, each song purposefully placed and given time to shine.
It would be easy for Mixtape to feel like a cheap nostalgia grab, an exploitation of Millennial players’ memories of skipping CDs and pre-cellphone party planning, but that simply isn’t the case so far. Mixtape feels like a love letter to the early aughts, filled with surprising mechanics, beautiful graphics and all the right references executed extremely well.
Mixtape is due to hit Steam, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S in 2025, published by Annapurna Interactive.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/mixtape-turned-me-back-into-a-millennial-teenage-dirtbag-200337301.html?src=rss
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds will only visit around 26 strange new worlds before shuttling into that cancellation sunset. The show will end with a truncated fifth season of six episodes, according to reporting by Deadline.
This news is relatively surprising, given that Strange New Worlds seems like the most popular and successful show of the modern era. However, not a single newer Trek series has made it past five seasons, so maybe that's just the way things go now. It's worth remembering that Captain Kirk's narration in the original 1960s Star Trek spoke of a five-year mission.
“We’re deeply grateful to Paramount+ for the chance to complete our five-season mission, just as we envisioned it, alongside our extraordinary cast and crew. And to the passionate fans who’ve boldly joined us on this journey," executive producers Akiva Goldsman, Henry Alonso Myers, and Alex Kurtzman said in a joint statement provided via press release.
This is a bummer, as Strange New Worlds is a fantastic watch, but it's not the end of the world. The show is about to premiere its third season on July 17. A full fourth season is already in production, and the shortened fifth season will ramp up sometime in the next year. So there are still 26 episodes left to watch. That's a good amount of Trek.
It's also not the end of live-action Star Trek on television screens. The upcoming Starfleet Academy has already been renewed for a second season, though that's the only new show on our radar. There have been rumblings of movies, but we aren't sure what's actually being made. A film chronicling the formation of Starfleet was announced around 18 months ago, but there hasn't been any news since then. Patrick Stewart has been openly campaigning for a Captain Picard movie, but, well, he's 84 as of this writing.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/tv-movies/star-trek-strange-new-worlds-will-end-with-a-truncated-fifth-season-171054923.html?src=rss
A remake of the original Silent Hill is in development, it was revealed during Konami's Press Start stream on Thursday. An image announcing that another Silent Hill game from developer Bloober Team was in the works appeared during the stream. It was accompanied by music from the first game in the series. The official Japanese Silent Hill account on X later clarified that Bloober is modernizing the original 1999 entry.
Back in February, it emerged that Bloober is making a new title based on Konami's intellectual property. The two companies previously worked on a remake of Silent Hill 2, which was released in October and, by January, had sold more than 2 million copies. It was also one of our favorite games of 2024.
So, going back to the game that started it all makes a lot of sense. Konami and Bloober haven't revealed any other details about the remake yet, such as when it's likely to arrive.
There was plenty more on offer during Konami's showcase, including a behind-the-scenes developer diary for Silent Hill f. The first game in the series to be set in Japan will drop on September 25.
Before that, Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater (a remake of MGS 3) will hit PS5, PC and Xbox Series X/S on August 28. Konami revealed on the stream that the Xbox version will include gameplay from the Bomberman series — the PlayStation and Steam variants have an Ape Escape tie-in. It also emerged that Metal Gear Solid Delta will have a brand-new multiplayer mode called Fox Hunt. This is a camouflage-based hide and seek mode that builds on the stealth aspect of the series. You can expect more details on that soon.
Press Start included looks at some other games, such as Suikoden Star Leap(a new RPG adventure set in the world of Suikoden for PC and mobile). Suikoden I&II HD Remasters are getting upgrades on Nintendo Switch 2 as well. A demo for action RPG Edens Zero (based on a manga and anime of the same name) has dropped, while there was a peek at action-adventure platformer Darwin’s Paradox, in which you play as an octopus.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/konami-and-bloober-team-are-remaking-the-original-silent-hill-160629432.html?src=rss
You don't have to make a huge effort planning Instagram posts anymore so that your profile takes on a certain aesthetic or so that your grid reads or looks a certain way. Instagram will soon (and finally) let you re-order the posts already on your grid. Alessandro Paluzzi, who reverse engineered apps and posted upcoming features online, found an "edit grid" option within Instagram way back in 2022. Instagram didn't say when exactly the feature will be available, but when you do get the edit grid option, tapping it will take you to a screen where you can rearrange your posts in the way you want them to appear on your profile.
In the post announcement from Instagram head Adam Mosseri, he also revealed that Instagram is "exploring a way" that will allow you to post to your account without broadcasting it to your followers' feeds. The idea is to make posting less intimidating and to allow you to keep your account active without the pressure. Mosseri also didn't say when the feature is rolling out, but take note that his post is about Instagram's investments in creativity for this year.
Finally, the Instagram head announced that trial Reels are now available to everyone. Trial Reels will allow you to publish Reels that bypass your followers' feeds. Those Reels are then recommended to non-followers instead, since the feature's original purpose was to give creators a way to experiment with new types of content that could alienate their current audience. Mosseri said that the hope is for trial Reels to "give everyone greater freedom to explore their creativity in a low-pressure way."
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apps/instagram-will-soon-let-you-re-arrange-your-grid-160011925.html?src=rss
You'll have to wait a little longer for The Legend of Zelda movie. Nintendo said on Monday that the film's new release date is May 7, 2027. That's six weeks later than the slot it announced earlier this year. The company attributed the rescheduling to production delays.
"This is Miyamoto," Nintendo's announcement post began. "For production reasons, we are changing the release date of the live-action film of The Legend of Zelda to May 7, 2027. It will be some weeks later than the release timing we originally announced, and we will take the extra time to make the film as good as it can be. Thank you for your patience."
Director Wes Ball in 2024
Reddit
We don't know much about the movie yet. Its director (Wes Ball) and screenwriter (T.S. Nowlin) are both known for The Maze Runner trilogy. Ball also worked on Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, the fourth installment in the modern reboots.
In 2023, Ball suggested that the film could have an anime influence. He described it as "this awesome fantasy-adventure movie that isn’t like Lord of the Rings, it’s its own thing. I've always said, I would love to see a live-action Miyazaki. That wonder and whimsy that he brings to things, I would love to see something like that."
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/nintendo-delays-the-legend-of-zelda-movie-155753324.html?src=rss
YouTube is following in the potentially dangerous steps of Meta and X (formerly Twitter) by relaxing its content moderation policies. New internal training materials viewed by The New York Times instruct moderators to leave videos live if up to half its content violates YouTube's policies, an increase from a quarter of it. The platform introduced the new policy in mid-December, a month after President Trump was re-elected.
The new guidelines reflect what YouTube deems as "public interest." These areas include discussing or debating elections, movements, race, gender, immigration and more. "Recognizing that the definition of 'public interest' is always evolving, we update our guidance for these exceptions to reflect the new types of discussion we see on the platform today," Nicole Bell, a YouTube spokesperson, told The New York Times. "Our goal remains the same: to protect free expression on YouTube while mitigating egregious harm."
The platform has reportedly removed 22 percent more videos due to hateful and abusive content than last year. It's not clear how many videos were reported or would have been removed under the previous guidelines.
YouTube reportedly told moderators to now value keeping content up if it's a debate between freedom of expression and risk. For example, they were shown a video called "RFK Jr. Delivers SLEDGEHAMMER Blows to Gene-Altering JABS" which falsely stated that Covid vaccines can change people's genes. However, YouTube told the moderators that public interest "outweighs the harm risk" and the video should stay up. It has since been removed, though the reason why is unclear.
Other videos allowed to remain online included one with a slur aimed at a transgender person and one in which a commentator discussed a graphic demise for former South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol.
Engadget has reached out to YouTube for comment.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/youtube/youtube-now-allows-more-harmful-misinformation-on-its-platform-133002902.html?src=rss
FILE- This March 20, 2018, file photo shows the YouTube app on an iPad in Baltimore. News that the shooter at YouTube’s headquarters Tuesday, April 3, 2018, felt that the tech company was suppressing her videos puts the spotlight on YouTube’s policies surrounding videos and the ads that support them. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File)
WBD's David Zaslav is partly undoing the merger that brought together Warner Media and Discovery.
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Warner Bros. Discovery — the brainchild of media mogul David Zaslav — is splitting up.
Wall Street had long questioned the wisdom of WBD, and Zaslav now seems to agree.
While this spinoff was predictable, it sparks questions for other media companies.
The ill-fated marriage between Warner Bros. and Discovery is heading for divorce — and Wall Street is cheering.
Warner Bros. Discovery on Monday announced plans to split its declining TV networks from its growing streaming and studios business. This spinoff proposal comes three years after WBD's inception. If all goes well, the spinoff will happen in mid-2026.
WBD CEO David Zaslav will oversee the sexier streaming part, while CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels — known for delivering "synergies" — will be in charge of the shrinking networks. WBD isn't alone, as Comcast is also splitting from most of its cable assets.
WBD shares were up as much as 13% in early trading. (However, Comcast's stock also popped when its spinoff was announced last fall, and has since fallen more than 20%.)
"The decision to separate Warner Bros. Discovery reflects our belief that each company can now go further and faster apart than they can together," Zaslav said on a call with investors about the spinoff.
When asked for comment, a WBD spokesperson referred Business Insider to comments made by executives on the investor call.
Better late than never
Many media analysts were initially excited when Zaslav orchestrated the deal to form WBD. But they soon soured on the media conglomerate as cord-cutting accelerated and WBD's streamer — Max/HBO Max — missed lofty expectations and failed to truly challenge the likes of Netflix.
Zaslav and company took note. WBD executives telegraphed this spinoff by reorganizing the business late last year, separating the TV networks from its studios and streaming businesses.
Wall Street was pleased by this potential split, which was the key catalyst for WBD's stock's 16% rally in the past month, UBS media analyst John Hodulik told BI last week.
Others agreed.
"Investor excitement for a Warner Bros. Discovery spin-off of its Global Linear Networks is building by the day," Lightshed analysts led by Rich Greenfield wrote last week.
Bank of America's Jessica Reif Ehrlich wrote in an early-June note that a "spin of studios and streaming could be the best way to unlock the significant unrecognized value of the company."
So far, it seems like she's right.
A sign of the times?
WBD's announcement will likely spark more speculation about future reordering of the media and entertainment landscape.
It's long been the expectation among industry insiders that WBD's spun-off linear networks would combine with others, potentially Versant, the linear assets that Comcast is spinning off. Other ideas that have been floated in media circles are a combination with Paramount — assuming its Skydance deal ever gets approved — or with Fox's linear assets.
Reordering is also afoot across the advertising industry. Two giant holding companies, Omnicom Group and Interpublic Group, are in the process of combining. Their peer WPP is replacing its CEO, Mark Read.
One wild card in the mix with WBD is CNN, with President Donald Trump's general hostility to deals involving media companies.
CNN anchor Jake Tapper and his colleagues face an increasingly uncertain future.
CNN/YouTube
Longtime ad industry analyst Brian Wieser remarked that the news network could be an asset and a liability, given its history and future ability to attract the ire of Trump, who has been aggressive in targeting the mainstream media.
Wieser wrote on Monday that CNN would "probably benefit" from being separated from all of WBD's other assets as it's "the one part of WBD that could tie up other parts of this transaction so long as any government approvals are required to facilitate its completion."
Another question is the fate of WBD's studio business, which has been dragged down. On a call Monday announcing the separation, Zaslav emphasized that the movie business was harder to project than TV. But he said that by leaning into well-known IP, he saw WBD's studios arm becoming a $3 billion business.
The separation also could put WBD's studios business in play, Bernstein's Lauren Yoon said.
The companies that could ingest such a business include Amazon, Disney, Netflix, and Comcast. However, most of the tech companies haven't historically been big acquirers, and the timing isn't ideal.
"No tech companies want to give the government any reason to be in their business," said Jonathan Miller, chief executive of Integrated Media, which specializes in digital media investments.
Also, expect Bob Iger to field new questions about what's ahead for Disney's linear and cable networks. He once floated the idea of selling them, though he then retreated from the idea.
Disney's line at the time was that it wouldn't get the price it wanted if it sold those properties and that it'd be too complex to separate them from the rest of the company. Iger and Trump have also sparred in the past, and Disney could look to avoid deals that need government approval.
Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav owns a lot of cable TV networks — but doesn't want to do that anymore.
Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
Would you like to own CNN, TNT, and the Discovery Channel?
Warner Bros. Discovery owns them now — but wants to get rid of them.
WBD's move follows a similar one Comcast announced a few months ago. Because while cable TV networks still make money, they're a business in permanent decline.
That is the pitch that Warner Bros. Discovery is making to Wall Street now that it has announced it's splitting itself into two companies: One will own Warners' movie and television studio and the HBO Max streaming service; the other — which it's calling its "global networks" unit — will own a bunch of cable TV networks including CNN, TNT, Discovery and the Food Network.
Like Comcast, WBD insists that no, really, it's splitting off its cable TV networks so they can grow and thrive on their own, and you'd be lucky to buy a piece of them.
"The global networks business is a real business," WBD CEO David Zaslav said on the company's investor call Monday morning.
That is definitely true, since those cable networks continue to generate profits. It's also something you don't normally feel compelled to say when you're selling something people want to buy.
The WBD split will generate all kinds of questions to ponder. Some of them are technical: How will WBD's $35 billion in debt be split up between the companies? How will the split companies approach future distribution deals with the likes of Comcast and Charter? How quickly could Comcast and WBD combine their two cable groups into one bigger cable group? Will the split help WBD's stock (it's up Monday — but note that Comcast also spiked when it announced its deal last fall, and has fallen some 20% since)?
Some questions the WBD split can generate may also matter to people who don't care about corporate finance. Such as: What does this mean for the future of CNN — the news channel that's struggling to find a lane in a loud and crowded media environment, but whose brand still has lots of potential value?
But the big takeaway is the obvious takeaway: The people who run the biggest collections of cable TV channels in the country would like someone else to own them. Because every quarter, the number of people who watch those channels and pay for those channels gets smaller.
Like I said late last year: These are garage sales. Maybe someone will want to own shrinking businesses that still throw off lots of cash (paging private equity). But the people who have them now think they'd be better off without them. Buyer beware.
Mark Read will step down as CEO of WPP at the end of this year.
Toby Melville/Reuters
WPP CEO Mark Read plans to step down after seven years leading the advertising giant.
The company faces challenges as the ad industry shifts to AI and tech-driven models.
WPP's restructuring under Read saw brand retirements, office closures, and debt reduction.
Will the last ad exec leaving Madison Avenue please turn out the lights?
WPP CEO Mark Read said Monday that he plans to step down after seven years leading the advertising giant and more than 30 years at the company. He will continue as CEO until the end of the year to see through the transition to his successor, who hasn't been named.
The announcement comes at a fraught crossroads for WPP and the broader advertising industry. Read's exit follows that of famed ad veteran David Droga, who said last month he plans to leave Accenture Song, the consulting giant's marketing services division, at the end of this year. Several longtime WPP execs have also parted ways with the company in recent months.
Madison Avenue is grappling with upheaval as its profit centers shift from creating TV ads with catchy taglines and big branding ideas to trading media, integrating IT systems, and helping clients make sense of their customer data. The rise of artificial intelligence and its associated productivity gains also rips a hole through the traditional agency business model, where ad companies are generally compensated on the number of full-time equivalent employees devoted to an account. Add to that the threat from Big Tech giants like Meta, who want to cut out the advertising middlemen altogether using the power of their huge audiences and sophisticated ad targeting systems.
Under Read, WPP has attempted to respond to these forces. In recent weeks, WPP rebranded GroupM, the division responsible for managing around $60 billion in clients' media investments, to WPP Media. The company said the streamlined media offering is powered by WPP Open, an AI-powered platform that helps its employees do market research, spin up media plans, and create assets for campaigns using generative AI.
But WPP isn't fighting from a position of strength. The company's annual revenue declined last year, and WPP recently forecast another revenue drop for 2025, which it said reflected a challenging macroeconomic environment.
Once the biggest advertising holding company by most measures, WPP was displaced by Publicis as the largest ad company by revenue last year. Publicis currently trades at a market capitalization of around $27 billion to WPP's $8 billion. The industry is also awaiting the creation of an even bigger ad behemoth later this year once the proposed merger of Omnicom and IPG passes regulatory approval.
"The fundamental challenge is that an enormous amount of what the traditional holding companies do is commodity, and commodity can now be done using technology," said David Jones, the former CEO of the ad agency holding company Havas. Jones now leads the 10-year-old marketing and technology company The Brandtech Group, a WPP competitor.
"AI is going to give the traditional holding companies their Kodak moment," Jones said.
Read laid the groundwork for WPP's next era and its new CEO
While Read is a WPP veteran, the 58-year-old wasn't an ad man in the traditional sense.
He took a graduate job at WPP after getting an economics degree from Cambridge University in the UK. He left and became a cofounder of WebRewards, a digital coupons business he sold to the German publishing giant Bertelsmann in 2001, after the dot-com bubble burst. He rejoined WPP a year later, rising to become CEO of Wunderman, one of its digital agencies.
Read took over the reins of the entire company in 2018, after the acrimonious exit of its longtime CEO Martin Sorrell, who had built the company from a seller of "wire and plastic products" — WPP — into what was the world's largest advertising group.
While a fellow Brit, the similarities between Read and Sorrell largely ended there. Sorrell was famed for building WPP through a series of acquisitions, and still now at his new ad company, S4 Capital, is an archetypal "Davos Man," often seen on stage and TV offering commentary about macroeconomic issues. Read has kept a lower profile and has sought to simplify WPP's many agencies into a more uniform structure.
Sorrell did "empire building," while "Read has been an empire dismantler," the independent media analyst Alex DeGroote said.
Read became WPP CEO in 2018.
WPP
Some industry analysts and insiders say this is to Read's credit. According to DeGroote's calculations, Read retired around 300 different agency brands, closed more than 800 offices, and realized around $5.1 billion for the company from disposals. WPP reduced its net debt to around $2.3 billion as of December 31 last year, down from about $3.4 billion in 2023.
But the Read era of restructuring and layoffs has hit morale within the rank and file — a mood that was further soured among some WPP employees when he instituted a four-day-a-week return to office policy this year. WPP has lost key accounts from clients like Pfizer and the Coca-Cola North America media account, though it has also won business from major advertisers including Amazon and Unilever. Toward the latter part of his tenure, some industry insiders said Read would need to take a bigger swing — anything from taking the company private to making a landmark acquisition — in order to return the company to growth.
Attention now turns to who might succeed Read.
Industry insiders told BI that internal candidates for the role would likely include newly appointed WPP Media CEO Brian Lesser; the CEO of WPP's specialist communications agency division, Johnny Hornby; WPP's chief operating officer, Andrew Scott; WPP's chief marketing and growth officer, Laurent Ezekiel; VML CEO Jon Cook; and Ogilvy CEO Devika Bulchandani. These execs either declined to comment or didn't respond to requests for comment from BI.
The search, led by the former British Telecommunications boss Philip Jansen, who became WPP's chairman in January of this year, is also considering external candidates.
"I don't think it will be internal, but I don't think it will be a radical hire either — WPP does not need more restructuring," media analyst Ian Whittaker said. "I would look for executives at one of the other agency groups who are well regarded."
One WPP insider told BI they expected and hoped the appointment would be made relatively quickly.
"At the end of the day, we've just got to get our mojo and momentum back," this person said.
After a symphony, online multiplayer and a remaster, the well-regarded (and often handheld) puzzler Lumines is getting Enhance’s full synesthetic, Tetris-flowing, treatment. Lumines Arise is almost here.
If you haven’t played the game before, Lumines’ premise centers on rotating and dropping four-square blocks made of one or two colors, building up larger squares of a single color. The game’s timeline sweeps across the playfield – to the beat of the soundtrack – erasing completed squares in its path, while also giving you the brief opportunity to quickly drop more squares, add multiplier combos and score even more points.
Lumines Arise adds a new mechanic to the addictive yet simple puzzle. 'Burst' is a refillable bar that you can trigger with L2/R2, which locks a square on the playing field, allowing you to pile on subsequent blocks. You can initiate Burst once the counter has rolled above 50, although it maxes out at 100. As you might expect for a synesthesia-tickling game like Arise, Burst mode has its own low-key musical accompaniment.
Lumines has never looked better. But that’s not just due to 2025 hardware power, but also design choices for Lumines’ skins – the unhinged wallpaper design and block themes that bubble up as you advance through puzzle stages. They’re delightfully mad and, at times, distracting. (As you play, the view of your Lumines blocks will occasionally ‘zoom’ closer – this is intentional. Game Director Takashi Ishihara said this was to both add some dynamism to what are typically static blocks, but also to pull the players’ attention back to the game at hand. Lumines Arise wants you to focus on the now, not the score, your Burst meter, or your customizable avatar.)
My favorite part of the demo was the final stage, which featured two chameleons simply raving along to the dance music. The soundtrack is, naturally, a banger, too. Lumines Arise features new music from Hydelic, also responsible for the award-winning soundtrack of Tetris Effect: Connected. (The band has already launched one track, "Only Human," on Bandcamp – it’s coming to other streaming services, too.)
On another stage, two skeletal hands, seemingly strung up like puppets, twitch and wriggle as you shift and rotate your blocks. If anything, I think Enhance missed a trick not mapping the finger movements to a DualSense controller. I said that in front of Ishihara because I have zero sense of decorum — apparently, he'd had the same idea. I now consider myself a game designer.
I got to briefly see Lumines Arise running on a Steam Deck, too. The time of the handheld console and PC is now, so it's nice to see a typically made-for-consoles game ready for this new gaming PC form factor.
Ishihara teased that there’s more to reveal ahead of Arise’s launch. The game will launch on both PS5 and Steam, and it will also feature VR compatibility on both platforms. While Enhance wasn’t yet willing to reveal the details, there will also be some form of multiplayer, but it seems like it’ll be in a different form compared to the more adversarial nature of Tetris Effect’s multiplayer modes.
Additionally, Ishihara wanted to highlight that the avatars, which dance and emote in sync with your in-game actions, now feature legs. That is important, apparently. Enhance is promising more answers in due time. Lumines Arise is set to launch in fall 2025.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/lumines-arise-hands-on-interview-takashi-ishihara-000038767.html?src=rss
Sword of the Sea is a game about letting go. Its main mechanic involves surfing across vast desert dunes on a thin blade, slicing through glittering sands and scaling ancient towers on a quest to unearth the secrets of civilizations past. It plays best when you forget about the controls entirely, and just surrender to the slick physics and let your little character flow. With enough exploration, you’ll naturally discover glowing orbs and shining gold gems, and the sands will transform into deep, crystal clear seas with fish swimming through the air, carving wet paths through the dirt. Your character, dressed in flowing robes and a gold mask, rides the orange hills and the blue waves with the same easy athleticism, reacting instantly to every input on the controller.
Charge up a jump and then complete sick tricks with a few quick inputs, or unleash a bubble of sonic energy to smash nearby vases, uncovering bits of currency in the shattered pieces. The protagonist moves in whatever direction you push, stopping immediately when you let go of the analog stick. There are giant chains to grind, a hover ability in some areas, and half pipes generously positioned around the environments. Control prompts pop up when you’re first introduced to an ability, but the text fades quickly and you’re left alone in the desert. There are no waypoints in Sword of the Sea, but the environment tells a clear story, inviting you to solve puzzles in the mysterious temples dotting the landscape. Find glowing orbs on the rooftops and hidden down secret passageways to unlock the buildings’ secrets, opening up new areas.
I played about 20 minutes of Sword of the Sea at Summer Game Fest, but I wanted to surf its dunes for a lot longer. It’s the kind of game that makes the real world fade away, no matter how chaotic or intrusive your immediate surroundings are. It’s built on rhythm and vibes, and it encourages a meditative flow state from its first frames. Learn the controls and then forget them; play with pure intuition and it’ll most likely be the right move.
“The game is about surfing, and it's really about the process of learning to surf and getting comfortable with surfing, and then trying things that are a little bit beyond your abilities, failing, and then figuring it out and actually accomplishing them,” Sword of the Sea creator Matt Nava told Engadget on the SGF show floor. “And in the process, you kind of realize that surfing is all about harnessing the power of something greater than yourself. You’re not paddling — the waves carry you. The zoomed out camera, the little character; in a lot of games, they're right on the character, because the character is the focus. But in this game, it's about how the character is a part of the environment, that is the focus. And I think that's a constant in a lot of the games that we've made.”
Nava is the creative director and co-founder of Giant Squid, the studio behind Abzû and The Pathless. Even with these two successful games under his belt, Nava is still best known as the art director of Journey, thatgamecompany’s pivotal multiplayer experience that hit PlayStation 3 in 2012. Nava has spent the past decade attempting to build explicitly non-Journey-like games with Giant Squid, and while Abzû and The Pathless both have his distinctive visual stamp, they’re the opposite of Journey in many ways. Where Journey was set in a dry, desert landscape, Nava’s follow-up, Abzû, took place in an underwater world. After that, The Pathless was mostly green, rather than dusty orange.
Giant Squid
With Sword of the Sea, Nava let go. He dropped all preconceptions of what he should be making and mentally said fuck it. He finally allowed himself to manifest the game that came naturally to him.
“In this game, it's very much taking on, accepting and proclaiming that this is me,” Nava said. “I did Journey. I'm doing orange again. And I'm going back to the desert because I have way more ideas that we couldn't do in that game … It’s like I’ve been living in my own shadow for a long time in a weird way. It's like, why am I doing that? I should just be who I am and continue to explore the art that is my art.”
Sword of the Sea is a specific and special game, and even though it’s set in an orange desert, it doesn't feel like Journey. The game also includes music by Austin Wintory, the Grammy-nominated composer behind Journey, Abzû and The Pathless. Together, Nava and Wintory form a formidable foundation.
“A lot of video game scores, they just make a music track for the area,” Nava said. “If you're in the town, you hear town music, and then it just repeats. But that's not how it works here. The music advances as your story advances, it reflects where you are on your surfing adventure, what you're learning how, how far your character has gone on this character arc. And so that's where the music of a video game like ours should be.”
As Nava and I chatted, someone sat down to play Sword of the Sea on a nearby screen, and when I glanced up, I saw that they were gliding through an area I didn't find in my runthrough. A giant animal skeleton was half-buried in the sand, bright white vertebrae dotted with gold gems for the player to collect. There are a lot of secrets in Sword of the Sea, Nava assured me. The best way to find them is to just let go and play.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/sword-of-the-sea-is-what-happens-when-matt-nava-strides-back-into-journeys-shadow-233148894.html?src=rss
Originally announced as "Project Bloom," Game Freak's upcoming action-adventure game made a formal appearance at the Xbox Games Showcase as Beast of Reincarnation. The studio describes the game as a "one-person, one-dog" RPG and it's supposed to be coming out in 2026.
Based on the trailer, the game is set in a post-apocalyptic Japan that's returned to nature due to some kind of beast-born blight. As the main character "Emma the Sealer," you'll travel through the wilderness, engaging in "demanding, technical combat" alongside your dog Koo, all in the hopes of "saving humanity" from the sickness that's plaguing the land.
Game Freak is best known for its work on the Pokémon games, but the developer has made an eclectic collection of other projects between mainline entries, including Pocket Card Jockey: Ride On! and more recently, Pandoland. "Project Bloom" was originally supposed to be published by Take-Two's Private Division label, but when the label was sold in 2024, Game Freak's game was taken up by a new publisher called Fictions.
Beast of Reincarnation is coming to PS5, Xbox Series X/S and PC in 2026. It'll also be available through Xbox Game Pass at launch.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/beast-of-reincarnation-is-a-one-person-one-dog-rpg-launching-in-2026-192305237.html?src=rss
Based on the brief description from the game's trailer, Resonance follows a young Sophia as she "seeks her independence as a fierce plunderer in the unforgiving world of the 14th century." The trailer shows Sophia on the run, escaping conflict, exploring mysterious ruins, and generally being pursued by danger, alongside more ominous vignettes showcasing Asobo's typically lush visuals.
If surviving a plague made the first two games seem grim, escaping a flaming ship or battling in a gladiatorial arena doesn't make Sophia's past adventures seem all that more for fun. Still, there's very little to go on, and quite a bit more to learn before Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy comes out in 2026.
Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy is currently set to be released on Xbox Series X / S, PS5, PC and Xbox Cloud Streaming. It'll also be available from day one through Xbox Game Pass.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/xbox/asobo-studios-next-plague-tale-game-is-a-prequel-arriving-in-2026-183305421.html?src=rss
The Hitman trilogy, also known as Hitman World of Assassination, will be available on iPhones, iPads, as well as Mac computers, this summer. IO Interactive has announced that it was expanding Hitman's availability during the developer's showcase at Summer Game Fest 2025, where it celebrated the franchise's 25th anniversary. IO Interactive's Chief Development Officer, Veronique Lallier, said the launch on iOS means you can travel the world with Hitman in your pocket. Event attendees were given the chance to experience the game running natively on iOS.
Lallier also announced that Hitman is coming to table top. IO Interactive has teamed up with board game creator Mood Publishing to make Hitman the board game, which will be available for backing on Kickstarter later this year. The board game will feature the franchise's characters, iconic weapons and backdrops. Up to four players can play as assassins going after a single target, and the one who takes the target out will get the payout in the end.
In addition, the developer has revealed that Le Chiffre, the villain from the Bond film Casino Royale, will be the World of Assassination's new Elusive Target. Mads Mikkelsen, the actor who played Le Chiffre in the movie, provided the likeness and the voice for the new game character. You'll only have a limited time to go after Mikkelsen's character, as Hitman's Elusive Target missions only appear once, and you cannot attempt them again after they end. To note, IO Interactive recently revealed its James Bond game, 007 First Light, which will be coming out in 2026. If you play the Elusive Target mission with Le Chiffre, you can redeem an exclusive suit in 007 First Light when it becomes available.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/hitman-world-of-assassination-is-coming-to-ios-and-table-tops-160036401.html?src=rss
Wu-Tang Clan has a new game. At Summer Game Fest 2025, Brass Lion Entertainment has introduced its debut game, Wu-Tang: Rise of the Deceiver. In it, you'll have to fight alongside the group's members to defeat the invading forces of the Deceiver and to save your home of Shaolin. The game is an action RPG with "anime-style fighting and afro-surrealist aesthetic." While you can play the game alone, you can also team up with up to two more friends online, and all of you can customize your fighting styles and your fashion.
According to The Washington Post, the group looked for a studio that can develop a game that can tie in with Ghostface Killah and RZA’s upcoming film, the supernatural thriller Angel of Dust. That's when the members found out that Brass Lion's director of music and culture was American record producer Just Blaze.
Bryna Dabby Smith, Brass Lion's co-founder and CEO, said Wu-Tang loved the concepts their company presented for the game. "The script is in the horror genre, but it really worked from an interactive perspective," the executive told The Post. Brass Lion was co-founded by Manveer Heir (Wolfenstein and Mass Effect 3), Rashad Redic (Fallout 3, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim) and Smith (The Bourne Conspiracy, Sleeping Dogs). Heir previously said that the studio will focus on telling authentic underrepresented stories not just relating to race, but also to age, religion and sexuality.
Wu-Tang: Rise of the Deceiver will feature classic Wu-Tang tunes alongside new material, as overseen by Just Blaze. It doesn't have a release date yet, but you can watch a teaser below and look at some screenshots on its official Steam page.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/wu-tang-clans-new-game-blends-anime-with-afro-surrealism-140048792.html?src=rss
Panic is not messing around with Playdate's second season. After starting off Season Two on the right foot with Dig! Dig! Dino!, Fulcrum Defender and the surprise rollout of Blippo+, the team has followed through with another strong pair of games for week two. The Whiteoutand Wheelsprung are, like the week one games, polar opposites of each other: a somber, narrative-heavy post-apocalyptic adventure and a nutty dirtbike game with realistic(ish) physics.
If you're looking for any throughline between them, I've got you. It's squirrels. You'll see. (Alright I may be reaching, but as both a journalist and a wildlife rehabilitator who is currently raising orphaned squirrels, just let me have this one).
This week also brought an update for the "intergalactic TV service," Blippo+, and it looks like we'll be getting new content for some time to come. The Season Two team wrote in an email accompanying the latest drop that "Blippo+ itself is going to update every week for eleven (!) weeks, every Thursday at 10AM PT [1PM ET]." Once it's all over, there will be reruns. We'll get a countdown for that on week 12, the team says. Now, let's get into the new games.
The Whiteout
Scenic Route Software
Minutes into playing Scenic Route Software's The Whiteout, I became certain that this was going to be another game that would make me cry. The narrative tone is heavy, the atmosphere is bleak and absolutely nothing about it suggests that anything is going to get better… ever. It feels hopeless from the start, but you have to keep trudging along anyway. (If you've ever read The Road, the feeling should be familiar). When I finally reached the end, though, I wasn't in tears — I was totally speechless, in a "mouth hanging open, empty inside" kind of way. It's stunning.
The Whiteout is narrative driven, picking up in a barren post-apocalyptic version of the US in which a snowstorm began one spring and never stopped. The events are set in current times — the onset of the snow occurred in spring 2025 — giving it an eerie, close to home kind of quality. Everything about it feels like something that could happen. As you play through its five chapters, the story is told through the playable character's musings about the past and present. It's all beautifully written, with numerous sentimental moments that felt genuinely heartbreaking.
It did manage to get a few smiles out of me though; the character makes cynical quips here and there, and a nefarious bunch called The Woodpeckers comes to be known simply as "the 'peckers," which got me every time. And the appearance of a squirrel just kind of hanging out in the background served as a refreshing sign of life amid the desolation. (I wondered while playing if the squirrel was a checkpoint, but I'd have to go through it all again to figure that out for sure.)
The gameplay entails mostly linear exploration, searching for resources, solving puzzles and making choices about your next moves. There's not much in the way of action, and you spend most of the game just walking with a slowness that is at times maddening. But, while I definitely would have appreciated the option to speed up even a little (a gentle jog, maybe?), the lethargy helps to illustrate how hard it would be to carry on in such conditions. Backtracking several times to get all the resources you need to progress in some areas is painfully tedious, so the relief when you do complete the action is real. Patience is key in this game.
I fear some people will give up on this title early because of the pace, and I implore you not to do that. It's worth every minute. It's also worth it to play with headphones, as recommended, to really let yourself be immersed in the setting. I stayed up half the night playing and got up early the next morning to finish it, and I'm still thinking about the ending I came to. There are multiple endings according to the creators, so I'll likely dive back in for another go once I've had more time to digest. The Whiteout is without a doubt the most memorable game of both Playdate seasons to date.
Wheelsprung
Nino van Hooff & Julie Bjørnskov
So, you played The Whiteout and now you're depressed. The Playdate team seems to have prepared for this, because the other game that dropped this week with the second release of Season Two may as well be the antidote. Wheelsprung is cute, charming and silly as hell. It's also a pretty challenging (and frustrating) physics game, but I do love a game that pisses me off a little.
The art of Wheelsprung is instantly recognizable as that of Julie Bjørnskov, one of the creators of Escape the Boardgame and Escape the Arcade, which is to say it's oozing whimsy. Bjørnskov made this one with programmer Nino van Hooff. The story is pretty simple: a family with a child who loves nuts — like, enough to scatter them all over the place in joy — has briefly left their home unattended, and you're a squirrel equipped with an absurdly flexible dirtbike who is on a mission to collect as many nuts as possible in their absence. There are nearly three dozen levels to complete, each of them an obstacle course you must figure out how to navigate on the two-wheeler. There's also a level editor to create your own tracks.
The squirrel's dirtbike is basically a Dr. Seuss contraption, and it's capable of some pretty impressive maneuvers. Lean in either direction using the D-pad and it can do a wheelie. Hit the down arrow and it'll instantly turn you to face the other way. But you must always be conscious of your balance. Allowing the squirrel's helmet to so much as tap an obstacle will result in a run-ending wipeout, as of course will all-out crashing. This game forces you to get extremely creative to traverse complicated tracks. There's a leaderboard and ideally you want to finish with the fastest time possible, but for a handful of levels my main goal at first was just figuring out how to make it to the end at all.
I don't want to give away too many hints about how to excel in this game, but I sure have spent a surprising amount of time driving my bike upside down dangling from one wheel, or rocking the bike back and forth to creep forward like an inchworm. It is absolutely ridiculous, and lots of (somewhat rage-inducing) fun.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/playdate-season-2-review-the-whiteout-and-wheelsprung-130014285.html?src=rss
A yellow Playdate handheld console is pictured on a wooden surface displaying the title card for the Season 2 game, The Whiteout, which features a snowman with X'ed out eyes
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