Sean Hollister

Discord has shut down the Discord servers for the Nintendo Switch emulators Suyu and Sudachi and has completely disabled their lead developers’ accounts — and the company isn’t answering our questions about why it went that far. Both Suyu and Sudachi began as forks of Yuzu, the emulator that Nintendo sued out of existence on March 4th. “Discord responds to and complies with all legal and valid Digital Millennium Copyright Act requests. In this instance, there was also a court ordered injunction…

Last month, I told you how a new startup is trying to build an Android of PC gaming by picking up where the Steam Deck left off. It’s an intriguing idea from a company with an awful lot to prove. Today, we’re getting the first announcement of the first Playtron-powered handheld, the SuiPlay0X1... but it’s probably not the proof we need? I laughed when I saw GamingOnLinux’s headline: “The first handheld to use PlaytronOS is some Web3 thing.” [Media: https://twitter.com/SuiNetwork/status/1777990…

Console modder Hairo Satoh’s new (emulated) PlayStation is one of the cleanest portables I’ve seen — as Dexterto points out, that’s partly ’cuz it’s built into an actual licensed PlayStation controller that exclusively shipped in Japan. The Takara Roulette Controller originally had a Game of Life wheel on top, which Satoh has now replaced with a screen. Remember the PS One’s optional flip-up LCD screen attachment? This reminds me of that! [Attachment: https://www.instagram.com/p/C5JlgCYSUks/…

This week, Tesla was scheduled to appear in court to defend its Autopilot system against a claim of wrongful death — but it looks like the company will pay the family of Apple engineer Wei “Walter” Huang instead. Court documents show that Tesla is trying to seal the amount of a potential settlement payment to the Huang family. While it’s not clear how much the company might be offering or what other terms the settlement includes, lawyers for Tesla state that both parties have already agreed to…

Before the iPhone, before Android, before webOS, a revolutionary soap bar of a phone made it incredibly easy to get shit done. The Danger Hiptop, better known as the T-Mobile Sidekick, made the internet portable and affordable like no phone before. --- Button of the Month In today’s digital age, it sometimes feels like hardware has taken a back seat to the software that drives our devices. Button of the Month is a monthly column that explores the physical pieces of our phones, tablets, contro…

If you read my scoop last week, I bet you’ve been wondering — how well could a Snapdragon chip actually run Windows games? At the 2024 Game Developers Conference, the company claimed Arm could run those titles at close to x86/64 speed, but how fast is fast? With medium-weight games like Control and Baldur’s Gate 3, it looks like the target might be: 30 frames per second at 1080p screen resolution, medium settings, possibly with AMD’s FSR 1.0 spatial upscaling enabled. That’s what Qualcomm has…

You might think twice before buying a Wyze camera. The company’s security practices are questionable enough that I personally boycotted them in 2022, and since then, they’ve twice briefly let strangers peek into another Wyze owner’s home. In fact, The New York Times and CNET don’t recommend Wyze cameras anymore, and we haven’t done so for a while. But some Verge readers have told us that if you’re pointing them outside of your home and recording to a local SD card, there’s no better bang for yo…

Nintendo might not need to individually sue emulators out of existence to drive them deeper underground. Today, GitLab cut off access to Nintendo Switch emulator Suyu, and disabled the accounts of its developers, after receiving what appears to be a scary email in the form of a DMCA takedown request. “GitLab received a DMCA takedown notice from a representative of the rightsholder and followed our standard process outlined here,” spokesperson Kristen Butler tells The Verge. Suyu was a fork o…

When Asus rescued Intel’s NUC brand of compact computers from the dumpster, I held out hope that the company might also revive Intel’s ambitious miniature gaming PCs. It did, but prepare for a little sticker shock — these systems may cost as much or more than a comparable gaming laptop. The company’s website currently lists two models of the ROG NUC, with what Asus tells us are tentative prices of $1,629 and $2,199. The entry-level model sports an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H, Nvidia RTX 4060 graphi…

Your PS5, PS4, PS3, and Vita might have looked normal — but if you had issues, it’s because Sony’s PlayStation Network was not completely healthy. Sony’s Network Service Status page was red for hours, after a partial outage began at roughly 12PM ET. By 4:30PM ET, service had reportedly been restored, and it’s all green now. At the time, we could still see our friends online, play games that require network authentication, download updates, and access the PlayStation Store, but there were a lot…

Can Qualcomm replicate Apple’s feat and finally create Arm-based laptops worth buying, 15 years after its first attempts? Here’s one incredibly promising sign it might: Qualcomm is telling game developers their titles should already work on a wave of upcoming Snapdragon-powered Windows laptops — no porting required. In a 2024 Game Developers Conference session titled “Windows on Snapdragon, a Platform Ready for your PC Games,” Qualcomm engineer Issam Khalil drove home that the unannounced lapt…

Did you know Valve’s Steam Deck OLED product introduction video was entirely lit by Steam Deck OLEDs? Now you do, and Valve has just published a blog post that goes behind the scenes. The thing’s legit, and I’m kicking myself for not publishing my own pics of it sooner. (Court happens!) Here I am inside the thing, and I like this intentionally goofy one of Valve’s Lawrence Yang. [Attachment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpExNYMxALE]

For the past three months, ever since I spoke to the AI NPCs in Nvidia’s cyberpunk ramen shop, I’ve been wondering: Which game developer will take a flying leap on this controversial and intriguing tech? If you said “Ubisoft,” the company that’s always raising its hand to play with VR, NFTs, interactive TV shows, secondary screens and more, you’d be half right. Last night, I played three prototype segments of an experimental Ubisoft demo featuring the company’s just-announced “Neo NPCs” — one o…

This should give you a way better idea than the partial transcript I originally included in my story! The delay before each answer is annoying, but InWorld CEO Kylan Gibbs tells me that’s because text-to-speech and other microservices are running in the cloud — future chips with onboard AI coprocessing might run them locally instead. [Attachment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTi2l_hjVRs]

Handhelds are the future of gaming — but there are reasons the category hasn’t exploded yet. The Nintendo Switch is locked down, Windows can be cumbersome, and Valve’s pick-up-and-play SteamOS hasn’t yet escaped the Steam Deck. What if there were an Android of gaming, an OS you could install on any capable hardware to get a controller-friendly PC experience? Imagine an “Epic Deck” that could actually play Fortnite, a “5G Deck” for cellular carriers, or maybe a “PlayStation Deck” for Sony’s grow…

Nvidia’s must-have H100 AI chip made it a multitrillion-dollar company, one that may be worth more than Alphabet and Amazon, and competitors have been fighting to catch up. But perhaps Nvidia is about to extend its lead — with the new Blackwell B200 GPU and GB200 “superchip.” [Image: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang holds up his new GPU on the left, next to an H100 on the right, from the GTC livestream. https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/3jcxwihK1NA3o4F8ecpTNgGnUgY=/0x0:2294x1362/2294x1362/filters:focal(1…

I’m sorry, there’s simply no escape. The addictive magic roguelike poker game Balatro, which grossed $1M in eight hours, sold 500,000 copies in 10 days, and has now been played for 1,742 years, is now coming to iPhone and Android too. That’s the word directly from the game’s anonymous solo developer LocalThunk and their publisher Playstack Games, who participated in a verified Reddit AMA earlier this week. [Media: https://www.reddit.com/r/balatro/comments/1bebf1g/comment/kutxwa3/?utm_source=…

When Nintendo sued the developers of Yuzu out of existence on March 4th, it wasn’t just an attack on the leading way to play Nintendo Switch games without a Switch. It was a warning to anyone building a video game emulator. Seven developers have now stepped away from projects, are shutting them down, or have left the emulation scene entirely. Of those that remain, many are circling the wagons, getting quieter and more careful, trying not to paint targets on their backs. Five developers declined…

Would you pay $180 for a USB-C water blaster that blasts an entire shot glass full of liquid every time you pull the trigger? That’s been Spyra’s pitch for the past six years, but today it’s revealing a new toy that costs (and weighs) less than a third of its previous flagship products. The new SpyraGo will cost just $54 when it arrives on March 26th, a price finally low enough to tempt me! It’s five inches shorter, between one and two inches slimmer, and importantly weighs just three pounds fu…

Every desktop GPU should ship with four of these unholy things. (Backstory: In 2013, Valve disavowed its involvement in the Xi3 Piston, a small gaming PC that was supposedly going to be a Steam Machine but shipped with Windows 7 instead. From the beginning, it had “DP/HDMI” stamped on its I/O shield — how did we miss it?!?) [Attachment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZpHizpZSPQ]