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."

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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."

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.

• 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.

By largely undoing the merger, Zaslav is acknowledging something Wall Street has been saying for a while: WBD's assets are better off apart.

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.

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.

• 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.

No one wants to own cable networks anymore.

Would you like to buy some?

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.

If that sounds familiar, it's for two reasons:

WBD has been contemplating this for a long time.

Last summer, it floated the same idea but didn't go forward with it. In December, it all but said it was going to do this, after all, by splitting itself up internally. Now it's doing it for real.

Comcast is doing the same thing.

Last October, Comcast said it would bundle almost all of its cable channels into a separate company (which it's calling Versant, for some reason) and hang onto its movie and TV studio and its Peacock streaming service.

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.

Because the big picture here is that both WBD and Comcast have concluded what investors — and people who watch things on TV — have concluded long ago: The cable TV business is a shrinking business, as more and more people cut the cord or simply never sign up for one. And the people who continue to watch cable TV are getting older and smaller in number.

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.

• 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.

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.

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.

Sword of the Sea is due to hit PlayStation 5, Steam and the Epic Games Store on August 19.

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.

Asobo Studio announced at the Xbox Games Showcase that its new entry in the Plague Tale series is a prequel set 15 years before its last game. Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy is focused on the smuggler Sophia from A Plague Tale: Requiem, and is scheduled to be released in 2026.

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.

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.

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.

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 Whiteout and 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.

Neverway already looks, sounds and feels like it's going to be something special — in a grim, grotesque and hellishly depressed kind of way. (Side note: That could be a nice tagline, no? It's grim! It's grotesque! It's hellishly depressed! It's... Neverway! OK, I'll stop.)

Neverway is a life-sim RPG starring Fiona, a young woman who quits her dead-end job to live on a remote island farm for a while, where she ends up becoming the immortal herald of a dead god. Fiona has to fight through nightmare realms and battle repulsive horrors, while also tending her land and maintaining relationships with townsfolk. She's able to meet and date more than 10 distinct characters, and forming friendship bonds unlocks combat abilities. The game features farming and fishing mechanics, and there's also a crafting system for secondary tools like the hookshot, which supplements Fiona's primary weapon, a sword.

Neverway comes from Coldblood Inc., an independent Vancouver studio founded by Brazilian-Canadian developers Pedro Medeiros and Isadora Sophia. Medeiros is the pixel artist behind Towerfall and Celeste, two stunning indie games, and Sophia is an ex-senior software engineer at Microsoft and the creator of the open-source Murder Engine, which powers Neverway. The game also features music by Disasterpiece, the composer behind Fez and the top-tier horror film It Follows, with sound design by Martin Kvale of NokNok Audio. OuterSloth, the indie game fund established by Among Us creators InnerSloth, is providing financial backing for Neverway, and Coldblood Inc. is self-publishing it.

Though Neverway was officially announced one month ago during the Triple-i Initiative showcase, it still made a splash as part of the Day of the Devs event tied to Summer Game Fest 2025 this week. Neverway is heading to PC at an undetermined future time, and it's available to wishlist on Steam now.

Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio first teased "Project Century" in 2024, and at Summer Game Fest it debuted a new trailer revealing the game's full name: Stranger Than Heaven. The game clearly draws on the bareknuckle brawling of the Yakuza series, but this time is set in the jazzy Japan of 1943.

It's hard to get a full sense of the story from the trailer alone, but similar to RGG's previous games, it looks like Stranger Than Heaven will feature an open-world full of enemies to whoop and narrative choices that'll be as determined by who you punch as who you help. If the player character Mako Taito isn't a private eye, he does appear to be investigating something.

RGG's released a Like a Dragon spin-off, Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii earlier this year. Before that, it's last major entry in the melodramatic crime saga was Like a Dragon Infinite Wealth in 2024. Besides the gameplay similarities, it's not clear if Stranger Than Heaven is set in the same world as RGG's other open-world action RPGs. At the very least, it does seem incredibly stylish, though.

Stranger Than Heaven is still in-development and doesn't currently have a release date.

Drinkbox Studios is back with a new title called Blighted, a 3D Metroidvania that promises to take the concept of generational memory to some bizarre and compelling new places. It will have a solo or co-op story that sees players fighting their way through a world full of monsters and secrets as they attempt to control the blight that corrupts them. And maybe eat some brains. The game was announced during the Summer Game Fest kickoff stream.

The team describes Blighted as a "psychedelic western nightmare," which is pretty much exactly what I love to see from Drinkbox Studios. This company is probably best known for the excellent 2D platformers Guacamelee! and Guacamelee! 2, but don't sleep on the surreal dungeon-crawler Severed either. Drinkbox games have a powerful sense of place and clever action mechanics, so I'm very curious to see how they'll bring those sensibilities into this genre.

Killer Inn is a little bit murder mystery and a little bit third-person action game, and combined, it looks like a lot of fun. Square Enix and developer Tactic Studios revealed Killer Inn during today's Summer Game Fest kickoff stream. A beta for the game is coming to Steam soon and it's available to wishlist now.

Killer Inn is a lot like the movie Clue, or the TV show The Traitors, or the social improv game Werewolf, or the video game Spy Party — it's all about uncovering players' true intentions and concealing your own, with a murderous twist. Each round includes 24 players, some of whom are wolves, while the rest are lambs. As a lamb, the players' goal is sniff out the wolves and survive their attacks, and the wolves are out to blend in with the herd, stealthily killing when they can. Each kill leaves behind a clue for other players to find. The game ends when one team has eliminated all members of the opposing group.

It isn't pure social strategy — there are various weapons, traps, poisons, bits of armor and masks to use, and a range of characters to choose from. Killer Inn is playable solo or with up to four players.

Troy Baker will don the cartoon fedora and play the lead role in Mouse: P.I. For Hire. The game has garnered buzz for its unique blending of genres. Imagine a film noir-infused cross between Cuphead and Doom.

Baker will play Private Investigator Jack Pepper, the game's protagonist. He's a war hero turned detective who begins his journey responding to a cliché damsel in distress. Pepper's investigation then peels back the layers of the city's dark underbelly. It sounds like developer Fumi Games ticked all the items off the noir checklist.

Oh, and don't forget the minor detail that he's a rodent. Expect plenty of cheesy (meaning puns about cheese) one-liners.

Being a first-person shooter, Mouse: P.I. For Hire has plenty of Rambo-style room-clearing. Pepper's weapons range from conventional (shotgun) to comically ludicrous (turpentine cleanser). There's even an ode to Popeye: Down a can of spinach to beat your foes to smithereens.

The game's animation draws inspiration from the same 1930s cartoons as Cuphead. Like that game, Mouse: P.I. For Hire's monochromatic visuals are all hand-drawn. (But whether it's as punishingly difficult as the 2017 classic remains to be seen.) Watching the delightfully wacky trailers, it's easy to see why gamers are keeping an eye on this one.

It sounds like a wild ride. But that doesn't necessarily point to a game in need of an industry titan like Baker. So, perhaps there's more to the game's narrative than you might expect. Or, maybe The Last of Us actor is merely checking "played rodent" off his bucket list. (Couldn't blame him!)

Baker said he's been following the game's development from its first teaser. "Its art style, gameplay and 1930s film-noir aesthetic continue to win me over. I cannot wait to keep working with the team to bring Jack Pepper to life and hope to have some exciting things to share as we get closer to launch!"

You can check out the game's new trailer here. Mouse: P.I. for Hire arrives later this year. It will be available on all major platforms, including Switch 2.

Scams using AI deepfakes of celebrities have become an increasingly prominent issue for Meta over the last couple of years. Now, the Oversight Board has weighed in and has seemingly confirmed what other critics have said: Meta isn't doing enough to enforce its own rules, and makes it far too easy for scammers to get away with these schemes.

"Meta is likely allowing significant amounts of scam content on its platforms to avoid potentially overenforcing a small subset of genuine celebrity endorsements," the board wrote in its latest decision. "At-scale reviewers are not empowered to enforce this prohibition on content that establishes a fake persona or pretends to be a famous person in order to scam or defraud."

That conclusion came as the result of a case involving an ad for an online casino-style game called Plinko that used an AI-manipulated video of Ronaldo Nazário, a retired Brazilian soccer player. The ad, which according to the board showed obvious signs of being fake, was not removed by Meta even after it was reported as a scam more than 50 times. Meta later removed the ad, but not the underlying Facebook post behind it until the Oversight Board agreed to review the case. It was viewed more than 600,000 times.

The board says that the case highlights fundamental flaws in how Meta approaches content moderation for reported scams involving celebrities and public figures. The board says that Meta told its members that "it enforces the policy only on escalation to ensure the person depicted in the content did not actually endorse the product" and that individual reviewers' "interpretation of what constitutes a ‘fake persona’ could vary across regions and introduce inconsistencies in enforcement.” The result, according to the Oversight Board, is that a "significant" amount of scam content is likely slipping through the cracks.

In its sole recommendation to Meta, the board urged the company should update its internal guidelines, empower content reviewers to identify such scams and train them on "indicators" of AI-manipulated content. In a statement, a spokesperson for Meta said that "many of the Board's claims are simply inaccurate" and pointed to a test it began last year that uses facial recognition technology to fight "celeb-bait" scams.

“Scams have grown in scale and complexity in recent years, driven by ruthless cross-border criminal networks," the spokesperson said. "As this activity has become more persistent and sophisticated, so have our efforts to combat it. We’re testing the use of facial recognition technology, enforcing aggressively against scams, and empowering people to protect themselves through many different on platform safety tools and warnings. While we appreciate the Oversight Board’s views in this case, many of the Board's claims are simply inaccurate and we will respond to the full recommendation in 60 days in accordance with the bylaws.”

Scams using AI deepfakes of celebrities has become a major problem for Meta as AI tech gets cheaper and more easily accessible. Earlier this year, I reported that dozens of pages were running ads featuring deepfakes of Elon Musk and Fox News personalities promoting supplements that claimed to cure diabetes. Some of these pages repeatedly ran hundreds of versions of these ads with seemingly few repercussions. Meta disabled some of the pages after my reporting, but similar scam ads persist on Facebook to this day. Actress Jamie Lee Curtis also recently publicly slammed Mark Zuckerberg for not removing a deepfaked Facebook ad that featured her (Meta removed the ad after her public posts).

The Oversight Board similarly highlighted the scale of the problem in this case, noting that it found thousands of video ads promoting the Plinko app in Meta's Ad Library. It said that several of these featured AI deepfakes, including ads featuring another Brazilian soccer star, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Meta's own CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

The Oversight Board isn't the only group that's raised the alarm about scams on Meta's platforms. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Meta "accounted for nearly half of all reported scams on Zelle for JPMorgan Chase between the summers of 2023 and 2024" and that "British and Australian regulators have found similar levels of fraud originating on Meta’s platforms." The paper noted that Meta is "reluctant" to add friction to its ad-buying process and that the company "balks" at banning advertisers, even those with a history of conducting scams.

In space, no one can hear you, uh, stream. We finally have a real trailer for the upcoming Alien: Earth TV series and it looks extremely cool. FX dropped a teaser a few months back, but that was just vibes. This is an actual two-minute trailer that's absolutely packed with footage.

For the uninitiated, Alien: Earth is the first TV series in the franchise's long history and is being helmed by Noah Hawley. That's the guy who made the Fargo TV series and the criminally underrated Marvel show Legion. Franchise creator Ridley Scott is also on board as an executive producer.

This is a prequel that's set just two years before the original film. As the name suggests, it takes place on Earth. The trailer indicates the story will involve a ship crashing into a large corporate-controlled city. This vessel may or may not have a fearsome Xenomorph aboard, among other notable alien species.

A character in the clip says that the ship "collected five different life forms from the darkest corners of the universe," going on to suggest that one is "predatory." That's right. We could be getting a dang Predator in our Alien TV show.

Alien: Earth premieres on August 12 on FX and will be available to stream on Hulu. The show stars Sydney Chandler as a hybrid robot/human lifeform tasked with investigating the crash. The rest of the cast includes Timothy Olyphant, Alex Lawther and Samuel Blenkin, among others.

Discord co-founder and CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy wants you to know he thinks a lot about enshittification. With reports of an upcoming IPO and the news of his co-founder, Jason Citron, recently stepping down to hand leadership of the company over to Humam Sakhnini, a former Activision Blizzard executive, many Discord users are rightfully worried the platform is about to become, well, shit.

"I understand the anxiety and concern," Vishnevskiy told Engadget in a recent call. "I think the things that people are afraid of are what separate a great, long-term focused company from just any other company." According to Vishnevskiy, the concern that Discord could fail to do right by its users or otherwise lose its way is a topic of regular discussion at the company.

"I'm definitely the one who's constantly bringing up enshittification," he said of Discord's internal meetings. "It's not a bad thing to build a strong business and to monetize a product. That's how we can reinvest and continue to make things better. But we have to be extremely thoughtful about how we do that."

The way Vishnevskiy tells it, Discord already had an identity crisis and came out of that moment with a stronger sense of what its product means to people. You may recall the company briefly operated a curated game store. Discord launched the storefront in 2018 only to shut it down less than a year later in 2019. Vishnevskiy describes that as a period of reckoning within Discord.

"We call it embracing the brutal facts internally," he said of the episode. When Vishnevskiy and Citron started Discord, they envisioned a platform that would not just be for chatting with friends, but one that would also serve as a game distribution hub. "We spent a year building that component of our business and then, quite frankly, we quickly knew it wasn't going well."

Out of that failure, Discord decided to focus on its Nitro subscription and embrace everyone who was using the app to organize communities outside of gaming. Since its introduction in 2017, the service has evolved to include a few different perks, but at its heart, Nitro has always been a way for Discord users to get more out of the app and support their favorite servers. For instance, the $3 per month Basic tier allows people to use custom emoji and stickers on any server, and upload files that are up to 50MB. The regular tier, which costs $10 per month, includes 4K streaming, 500MB uploads and more. They're all nice-to-haves, but the core functions remain free.

Marissa Leshnov for Discord

Vishnevskiy describes Nitro as a "phenomenal business," but the decision to look beyond gaming created a different set of problems. "It wasn't clear exactly who we were building for, because now Discord was a community product for everyone, and that drove a lot of distractions," he said.

That sense of mission drift was further exacerbated by the explosive growth Disord saw during the pandemic, as even more new users turned to the platform to stay in touch with friends during lockdown. "It covered up all the things that we didn't fully clarify about how we want to approach things," said Vishnevskiy. "We came out stronger. A lot of people were introduced to Discord, and it's their home now, but it's probably part of what made it take longer to realize some of the decisions we made at the time weren't right."

One of those was a brief flirtation with the Web3 craze of 2021. That November, Citron tweeted a screenshot of an unreleased Discord build with integrations for two crypto wallet apps. The post sparked an intense backlash, with users threatening to cancel their Nitro subscriptions if the company went forward with the release. Two days later, Citron issued a statement saying Discord would not ship the integration.

"We weren't trying to chase a technology. It was about allowing people to use Discord in a certain way, and that came with a lot of downsides. We were trying to do some integrations to limit some scams, and actually do right by users and make people safer," said Vishnevskiy. "But we really underestimated the sensitivity the general user base had to the topic of NFTs, and we did not do a really good job at explaining what we were trying to do."

According to reporting from that period, Discord's employees were partly responsible for the reversal. An internal server made up of workers and game studio representatives reportedly erupted over the proposed implementation.

Looking back, Vishnevskiy credits the company's employees, some of whom have been with Discord for a decade, for steering leadership in the right direction over the years. He says there have been situations where the company's employees have come to him and Citron to ask "why are we doing this?" He adds, "sometimes, they've pushed us to do things [Jason and I] didn't think we should be doing. I think that's an amazing asset to have. This product is built by people who love it and use it."

Coming out of the pandemic, Discord announced last year it would refocus on gaming. In the immediate future, that shift of strategy will see the company emphasize "simple things" like app performance and useability over "building new features." In March, users got a taste of that new approach, with the company releasing a redesign of its PC overlay that made it less likely to trigger anti-cheat systems like BattleEye. In turn, that made the overlay compatible with a greater number of the most-played games on Discord. In that same release, Discord added three new UI density options to give users more control over the look and feel of the app.

Moving forward, one area where the company wants to be particularly thoughtful is around AI. Discord has deployed the tech in a few areas – for example, it partnered with Krisp AI in 2019 to add noise cancellation to calls – but it also has wound down experiments that didn't work. "What we've found is that a lot of these things did not work well enough to be in the product," said Vishnevskiy, pointing to features like AutoMod.

The tool exists in Discord right now. Moderators can use it to filter for specific words and phrases. But when the company first pitched the feature, it envisioned an AI component that would help admins manage large, unruly servers, and even built a version of it that ran on a large language model. The company has yet to ship the feature because "it was making too many mistakes." Discord also experimented briefly with a built-in chatbot called Clyde that leveraged tech from OpenAI, but canned it less than a year later. At the time, the company didn't give a reason for the shutdown, but the occasional screenshots posted to the Discord subreddit showed Clyde could, often unprompted, say some questionable things.

"We're constantly retrying some of those ideas with modern models. No timeline on any of this because we will not ship until we think it's a good fit for the product," said Vishnevskiy, adding the last thing the company wants to do is "slap [AI] in because everyone else is doing it."

Looking to the future, Vishnevskiy says Discord is focused on helping game developers, especially as it relates to discovery. The majority of the most popular games on Discord are the same ones that were popular on the platform 10 years ago. That's where Vishnevskiy says the app's new Orbs currency comes in, which people can earn by watching interactive ads, playing a game, or streaming their gameplay to friends on Discord. Yes, it's a way for Discord to grow its revenue, but Vishnevskiy believes the system aligns player interests with developer interests by giving Discord users something in return for their time and attention.

At least that's the idea. I got to try the system after my interview with Vishnevskiy, and while it does feel friendly to users, I'd like to see how Discord plans to make it into something smaller game studios can leverage. Right now, many of the publishers the company has partnerships with are advertising releases that already have a lot of word of mouth going for them. I'm sure fans of Marvel Rivals will love the chance to earn an Ultron avatar decoration for their Discord, but a game with 147,000 concurrent players on Steam isn't exactly struggling.

Vishnevskiy wouldn't discuss the specifics of when and if the company plans to IPO, but did offer one last assurance for users. "Discord is something that is meant to be a durable company that has a meaningful impact on people's lives, not just now but in 10 years as well," he said. "That's the journey that Humam joined and signed up for too. We are long-term focused. Our investors are long-term focused." 

While it may be true that the Vishnevskiy and Discord's veteran employees have learned a lot over the company's sometimes turbulent history, it's not clear how a culture of experimentation and dissent might change with more shareholders to appease. The test will be whether Discord can stay true to itself and its many fans.