It is the third Tuesday of the month and that means its time for anotherUnreal EngineFab marketplace giveaway. Well technically its the last Tuesday of the year, and these giveaways now happen every other Tuesday. You can get three free game development assets, all of the assets work in Unreal, while one is for Unity as well. If you are using a different game engine or tool we have guides below that instruct you on how to export from Unreal Engine to other engines such as Godot, Blender or Unity for example.Also, a major reminder, today is the last day to get the Quixel Megascans library for free!This Months free assets include: Pirate Stilt Village Island Modular Pack Skeleton Guard (Modular) Comic Book CutsceneYou can see all of these assets in action in thevideobelow. Also, a quick reminder tograb all of the Quixel Megascans assetsif you havent already as this offer expires at the end of 2024!If you are interested in getting these assets into other game engines, check out our various guides available here:

Listen to a recap of the top stories of the day from9to5Mac. 9to5Mac Daily is availableon iTunes and Apples Podcasts app,Stitcher,TuneIn,Google Play, or through ourdedicated RSS feedfor Overcast and other podcast players.Last Chance!: Save 20% on all 9to5Mac Daily Plus, 9to5Mac Happy Hour Plus, and 9to5Mac Pro annual subscriptionswith promo code HOLIDAY! Visit9to5mac.com/jointo sign up.New episodes of 9to5Mac Daily are recorded every weekday. Subscribe to our podcast in Apple Podcast or your favorite podcast player to guarantee new episodes are delivered as soon as theyre available.Stories discussed in this episode:Listen & Subscribe:Subscribe to support Chance directly with 9to5Mac Daily Plus and unlock:Ad-free versions of every episodeBonus contentodCatch up on 9to5Mac Daily episodes!Dont miss out on our other daily podcasts:Share your thoughts!Drop us a line at happyhour@9to5mac.com. You can also rate us in Apple Podcasts or recommend us in Overcast to help more people discover the show.Add 9to5Mac to your Google News feed. FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.Youre reading 9to5Mac experts who break news about Apple and its surrounding ecosystem, day after day. Be sure to check out our homepage for all the latest news, and follow 9to5Mac on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to stay in the loop. Dont know where to start? Check out our exclusive stories, reviews, how-tos, and subscribe to our YouTube channel

Apple TV+ had a strong year of original content in 2024, and its starting the new year with some big returning series and more. New seasons of Severance and Mythic Quest are clear highlights, but the conspiracy thriller Prime Target looks intriguing too. Heres everything coming to Apple TV+ in January to kick off 2025.Severance (season 2)When: January 17What:TV ShowGenre: Sci-fi ThrillerIn Severance, Mark Scout (Adam Scott) leads a team at Lumon Industries, whose employees have undergone a severance procedure that surgically divides their memories between their work and personal lives. This daring experiment in work-life balance is called into question as Mark finds himself at the center of an unraveling mystery that will force him to confront the true nature of his work and of himself. In season two, Mark and his friends learn the dire consequences of trifling with the severance barrier, leading them further down a path of woe.Prime TargetWhen: January 22What:TV ShowGenre: Conspiracy ThrillerPrime Target features a brilliant young math postgraduate, Edward Brooks (played by Leo Woodall), who is on the verge of a major breakthrough. If he succeeds in finding a pattern in prime numbers, he will hold the key to every computer in the world. Soon, he begins to realize an unseen enemy is trying to destroy his idea before its even born, which throws him into the orbit of Taylah Sanders, a female NSA agent (played by Quintessa Swindell) whos been tasked with watching and reporting on mathematicians behavior. Together, they start to unravel the troubling conspiracy Edward is at the heart of.Eva the Owlet (season 2)When: January 24What: TV ShowGenre: Kids & FamilyEva the Owlet stars Eva, a creative, cheeky owlet who lives next door to her best friend Lucy in the woodland world of Treetopington. With big ideas and an even bigger personality, Eva goes on high-flying adventures, expressing herself in her diary along the way!Mythic Quest (season 4)When: January 29What:TV ShowGenre: Workplace ComedyBack under the same florescent office lights, the reunited team at Mythic Quest confronts new challenges amongst a changing video game landscape as stars rise, egos clash, relationships bloom and everyone tries to have a little more work work life balance.Which of these Apple TV+ January releases are you most excited about? Let us know in the comments.Best Apple TV and Home accessoriesAdd 9to5Mac to your Google News feed. FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.Youre reading 9to5Mac experts who break news about Apple and its surrounding ecosystem, day after day. Be sure to check out our homepage for all the latest news, and follow 9to5Mac on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to stay in the loop. Dont know where to start? Check out our exclusive stories, reviews, how-tos, and subscribe to our YouTube channel

Aly Lopez/CNETAs members of CNET's sleep team, Dillon and I both test and review mattresses and sleep-related products for a living. As married mattress reviewers, we have a unique advantage in the sleep industry. By testing and reviewing beds as partners, we can offer insight to other couples searching for a bed that suits both people.The irony is that Dillon and I are not particularly good at getting enough shuteye, and it doesn't help that our bedtime preferences are about as opposite as they get. As a side sleeper, Dillon prefers extremely soft mattresses with pressure relief. As a stomach sleeper, I like firmer beds that offer more support for my spine.What happens when two restless individuals with opposite preferences share a bed that one finds uncomfortable? Sleep divorce. Knowing this prompted us to start a quest to find the perfect mattress. In this series, we've been testing different mattresses for 30 nights, hoping to find one that suits both of our sleeping styles.If you'd like to read about previous beds we've tested, check out our 30-night reviews of the Casper Snow Hybrid, Avocado Luxury Organic and Saatva Classic mattresses.Will the Nectar Premier Hybrid save our slumber, or will one of us end up sleeping on the couch? Read on to find out. Initial thoughts on the Nectar Premier HybridThe Nectar Premier Hybrid is part of Nectar's recently launched line of mattresses. These new beds have particularly impressed our sleep team. A few of our experts have been testing beds for over seven years and can personally speak to the improvements made in these mattresses compared to older models -- here's CNET sleep expert and senior video producer JD Christison's full review of the Nectar Premier Hybrid.Nectar now offers four beds at various firmness levels, each with all-foam and hybrid options: Nectar Classic, Nectar Premier, Nectar Luxe and Nectar Ultra. Dillon and I chose to test Nectar's most popular choice, the Nectar Premier Hybrid. Nectar describes this mattress as having a medium-firm feel, or 6.5 out of 10 on the firmness scale. Sleep expert JD Christison examining the Nectar Premier Hybrid in one of CNETs studio bedrooms before Dillon and I took it home for our 30-night test. Dillon Payne/CNETOur team received the Nectar Premier Hybrid at CNET's mattress testing facility in Reno, Nevada. After unboxing and setting it up in our studio bedroom, we waited a few days for the bed to properly inflate to its natural shape, as is recommended for most bed-in-a-box mattresses. Once each of our sleep experts had sufficient time to test and review the Nectar Premier Hybrid, it was time for Dillon and I to transport it to our apartment and officially begin our 30-night trial.FeelPrior to starting this series, Dillon and I had only slept on responsive, bouncy innerspring mattresses. We were both under the impression that we did not like the feeling of dense memory foam -- until we tried the Casper Snow Hybrid. With this bed, we began to realize we both enjoy the sensation of viscous memory foam that slowly molds and conforms around your body. This discovery is one of the reasons we chose to test the Nectar Premier Hybrid next since it offers a similar memory foam feel. Aly Lopez/CNETFirmnessWhen the Nectar Premier Hybrid was initially ready to test at our mattress warehouse, Dillon and I took turns lying on it in various positions to get a feel for its firmness profile. We both felt that it was on the softer side, which is one of the primary reasons we chose to test this bed next in our 30-night testing series -- as a side sleeper who had been waking up with arm and shoulder pain, Dillon wanted to try a softer mattress than we had been sleeping on previously. Although Nectar claims this bed is medium-firm or 6.5 out of 10, our team agrees that it feels softer than this, or around 5 out of 10 on the firmness scale.We conducted another round of testing and formed our true initial thoughts once the mattress was situated in our bedroom at home. We both felt the mattress was right around a flat medium, maybe even slightly softer. In theory, this middle-of-the-road firmness level should accommodate us as a couple with different preferences and sleeping positions since I primarily sleep on my stomach, and Dillon prefers to sleep on his side.Motion isolation Dillon appears to have fallen asleep after testing the beds motion isolation capabilities with a glass of water (which passed with flying colors). Aly Lopez/CNETMotion isolation refers to how well the mattress absorbs movement. A bed with good motion isolation is key if you share it with a partner or pets or are a light sleeper (we check all these boxes).We performed our standardized motion isolation tests. The first method involves setting a glass of water on the bed and rolling around to see whether the glass tips over or the water sloshes out. The second method consists of one of us lying still on the bed while the other person flops and moves around to simulate what it would feel like as your partner switches positions throughout the night.Right away, we thought the Nectar Premier Hybrid performed well in this category, especially as a hybrid mattress with coils, which generally tend to have less motion-isolating capabilities than all-foam beds. Dillon and I were excited to sleep on a bed that would help keep us from waking one another up throughout the night from tossing and turning.Learn more: Why the Materials in Your Mattress MatterTemperature regulationMany mattress brands claim their beds are actively cooling, but often, that's not the case -- and it's hard to tell once you add sheets and bedding. Nectar says the Premier Hybrid mattress features a "Cooling Top Cover" with "over 60% more cooling fibers... than the Nectar Classic Hybrid."We found its breathable cover to be cool to the touch, but not overly cool like other beds we've tested with active cooling technology, such as the Casper Snow Max or Brooklyn Bedding Aurora Luxe. As two hot sleepers, we weren't sure at the start of this trial if the mattress would keep us sufficiently cool at night.Edge supportEdge support is another important characteristic for us, especially for me. Most nights, our cat Jessica sleeps on my head and eventually commandeers my pillow, usually forcing me to lie entirely on the edge of the bed. Thankfully, the Nectar Premier Hybrid features reinforced coils around the perimeter to enhance the edge support, so we expected it to perform well in this category. Dillon tests the edge support by pressing firmly into the perimeter to see how the material responds. Aly Lopez/CNETDesign and constructionOverall, we really like the look of this bed. It has a much sleeker design than its older iterations, and the soft cover has a fun diamond-pattern design. The Nectar Premier Hybrid stands 13 inches tall, which is on the thicker side since mattresses typically range from 8 to 14 inches in height. I prefer thicker beds, which offer advantages such as increased durability and longevity. They also tend to feel more luxurious to me than thinner, flatter mattresses. The sleek and cool-to-the-touch cover has a neat diamond pattern. Dillon Lopez/CNETThis bed has six distinct layers, and a queen-size weighs about 107 pounds, which is lighter than I anticipated. This made the moving process a little easier since most queen-size beds weigh between 120 and 160 pounds. I was excited to learn that the Nectar Premier Hybrid has a 2-inch support layer to help promote proper spinal alignment, which would be crucial for me as a stomach sleeper.Sleep quality goalsWe completely recognize and acknowledge that countless factors other than our mattress affect sleep quality, from pets to diet and exercise to bedtime routines and stress levels. Dillon and I have worked hard to lessen the effects of these other factors on our sleep quality, especially for this 30-night testing series, so we can focus as much as possible on how the beds alone affect our sleep. Our ultimate goal is to find a mattress so comfortable that neither of us feels compelled to get up and move to the couch in the middle of the night.Despite being considered sleep and mattress experts, Dillon and I know we're not the best at sleeping. We understand the science behind sleep and what to look for when choosing a mattress or other sleep products, but we still occasionally struggle to get sufficient shuteye. This 30-night testing series has helped us better understand our sleep preferences and narrow down the type of bedroom setup we need to sleep our best.Recently, Dillon has been averaging around 6.5 hours of sleep per night, and I average around 7. We'd like to see these numbers improve and get closer to the recommended 8-hour-per-night mark for Dillon and 8.5 for me, as studies have shown women require more sleep than men.Our thoughts at the end of the trialSpoiler alert: Dillon fell head over heels in love with this mattress while I spent many nights on the couch. Here's why. Dillon Lopez/CNETFirmnessIt didn't take long (about a week into the trial) for me to realize that the Nectar Premier Hybrid was too soft for my liking. It didn't offer the level of support I wanted as a stomach sleeper. My spine seemed to droop down into the mattress too far, causing discomfort.It even felt too soft when I was sleeping on my side, which I certainly did not expect. I felt as if my head was too elevated compared to my torso, which was causing my neck to feel kinked while lying on my side. I even stopped using a pillow because our pillows are on the fluffier side, and it would exacerbate this issue. I frequently moved to the couch in the wee hours of the morning. When I didn't, I found myself waking up with a sore and achy neck and back. The mattress was not quite supportive enough for stomach sleeping, causing my spine to droop uncomfortably. Dillon Lopez/CNETRead more: Best Mattresses for Stomach Sleepers With Back PainOn the other hand, with side sleeping as his preferred position, Dillon felt the firmness of the Nectar Premier Hybrid was perfect. Typically, side sleepers want a softer mattress with plenty of pressure relief for their shoulders and hips, which was the case for him. Dillon said it was the most comfortable bed he'd ever slept on, and he was sleeping better than ever.This experience verified my suspicion that my body still prefers a firmer sleeping surface, which is unfortunate because Dillon prefers a much softer one. We were bummed that the firmness level didn't work for both of us, realizing we'd have to give up a mattress that was perfect for Dillon. Dillon felt totally comfortable on his side as the mattress offered plenty of pressure relief. Aly Lopez/CNETDillon and I enjoyed the Nectar Premier Hybrid's memory foam feel throughout the trial. It comfortably contoured around our bodies but didn't make us feel "stuck" in the foam. It feels slightly airier than you might expect with dense memory foam, which Dillon particularly loved. As you'll see in our scoring breakdown below, Dillon awarded this mattress a 20/20 score for feel because he loved it so much. I tended to roll into Dillon due to the beds softer profile. Dillon Lopez/CNETOne issue I encountered during this trial was constantly feeling like I was rolling into Dillon. Because of the bed's materials and softer profile, and because I'm lighter than Dillon, he would sink further into the mattress layers than I could. This discrepancy caused me to feel like I was rolling into him. I'd have to actively fight this pulling sensation while lying on my side, as my body would naturally be drawn "down" to Dillon -- it was quite literally like a gravitational pull of sorts. It drove me bonkers, and I had a hard time getting comfortable. Thankfully, Dillon did not notice this and was able to sleep comfortably through the night.How we scored our personal preferencesAt CNET, our sleep experts use a standardized rating system to score mattresses objectively. For this series, Dillon and I created a subjective ranking system to rate the features and characteristics we seek in a mattress. Feel and firmness were each given a score out of 20 points, while the other categories were scored out of 10 for a total possible score of 100. We scored these factors on a preferential level, meaning what we liked or didnt like personally. We created a custom point system to give the mattress an overall rating out of 100. Cole Kan/CNETFinal scores of the Nectar Premier HybridAfter finishing the 30-night trial, we scored each characteristic and offered a brief explanation. Here is a breakdown of our final rankings:Dillon's breakdown:Firmness: 19/20It's the perfect firmness for side sleeping, and I like it on my stomach, too. I didn't think I could have both sleeping positions, but they both feel great. I never wake up sore, and it feels comfortable as soon as I get into bed.Feel: 20/20I like the airy memory foam feel a lot. The memory foam bed we had last month was denser, and I liked that, but this feels like the perfect compromise to me. I prefer it now over a more responsive latex feel or a classic pillow-top feel. I haven't found a bed that I like more than this feel.Motion isolation: 9/10This mattress has solid motion isolation. I didn't notice any movement and couldn't really tell when our pets were jumping on and off or if Aly was moving or getting up and out of bed.Edge support: 5/10The edge support is fine. I've seen better out there, but it didn't bother me in my night-to-night experiences.Temperature: 7/10It has a cooling cover but still tends to heat up as you sink into it. It won't keep you actively cool -- I'd say it sleeps more temperature-neutral. It did fine, but Id prefer a bed with more cooling technology.Design/construction: 7/10I like the design of the Nectar Premier, especially the neutral memory foam. I also appreciate the support from the hybrid construction, as opposed to an all-foam mattress, which is better for couples and heavier people.Brand policies: 9/10Great price and generous policies that go above and beyond the mattress standard, like a forever warranty and a whole-year trial period. For just over $1,000 for a queen, it's a solid deal.Sleep quality: 9/10Best sleep I have gotten in this series so far.Dillons overall score: 85/100 "I knew I liked this bed as soon as it came in, but I didnt know how it would feel to sleep on it for 30 nights. I was worried it would be too soft for me, but it felt great in any sleeping position, and I slept longer and better than I have in the last year. It's my favorite bed so far," Dillon explained.Aly's breakdown:Firmness: 5/10I'm a combination sleeper, switching between my side and stomach, and I found the Nectar Premier to be too soft for my liking. Even on my side, I felt like it was much too soft, and I woke up a few times with a sore neck from my spine being out of alignment. I think I sink too far down into the mattress.Feel: 15/20I like this bed's neutral memory foam feel but prefer denser foam. It's somewhat hard to gauge its feel when I sink into the bed like this.Motion isolation: 7/10The motion isolation is pretty good. But because it's softer, I typically noticed when Dillon moved because we both gravitated toward the middle of the bed. I didn't really notice when our cat was jumping on and off on the sides.Edge support: 7/10The edge support was decent, given the memory foam layers on the top. I never felt like I would fall off, but again, that may be because I'd roll toward the middle of the bed because of how soft it is (compared to what I usually prefer).Temperature: 7/10Its not overly cool, but this mattress did a great job of keeping me more temperature-neutral throughout the night. I rarely felt like I was overheating as I had been on our previous mattresses with organic cotton covers.Design/construction: 7/10I was surprised at first to learn that this is a hybrid bed -- you cant feel the coils at all. The foam layers and cool-to-the-touch cover are of high quality.Brand policies: 8/10Nectar has great company policies, including a 365-night trial period, a lifetime warranty and free shipping and returns.Sleep quality: 6/10My sleep quality was not great. It went down from the last mattress we were on. I didnt sleep as long, and I woke up more often. Id like to see improvements in this area.Aly's overall score: 62/100Overall, its a high-quality mattress, especially at this price point. Unfortunately, its not the right firmness level for me, and I think I prefer the classic dense memory foam to the responsive, airy foam in the Nectar Premier Hybrid.Our sleep dataPrior to Nectar Premier, Dillon and I slept on the Casper Snow Hybrid -- which we loved but was ultimately too firm for Dillon's liking.As you can see in the graph below, Dillon's total sleep increased significantly on the Nectar Premier Hybrid, jumping from 6:19 hours to 7:27 hours on average over the 30 nights. This is over an hour more sleep per night than Dillon had been getting, which is a phenomenal improvement for him and his overall sleep quality.On the Casper Snow mattress, I averaged 7:12 hours per night. On the Nectar Premier Hybrid mattress, my total sleep decreased slightly, dropping around 13 minutes to an average of 6:59 hours. Although not a significant decline, it's certainly not the direction I hoped to see my sleep quality go. Dillon slept over an hour longer on average on the Nectar Premier Hybrid compared to Casper Snow. Aly Lopez/CNETRestorative sleepRestorative sleep refers to time spent in the deep and rapid eye movement stages, which are extremely important phases of sleep. Generally, the optimal amount of time for adults to spend in restorative sleep is half the night, or 25% in deep sleep and 25% in REM sleep.Deep sleep (which occurs in the final stage of non-REM sleep) is also known as slow-wave sleep. Our brain waves slow down as we reach a deep state of rest. This is when our bodies recover from the day, repairing tissue and cells, building muscle and strengthening the immune system.REM sleep is when your brain becomes highly active, and your breathing and heart rates increase. This is when most dreaming occurs, and it's considered an essential phase for memory consolidation (when short-term memories are converted into long-term memories) and processing emotions.As the graph below shows, my average time spent in deep sleep decreased by about 30 minutes per night from 1:47 hours on the Casper Snow Hybrid to 1:13 hours on the Nectar Premier. Conversely, my average time spent in REM sleep increased slightly from 1:19 hours per night on Casper to 1:32 on Nectar. Over the 30 days, I spent less time in deep sleep and more time in REM sleep on the Nectar Premier compared to Casper Snow. Aly Lopez/CNETInterestingly, despite sleeping over an hour longer on average, Dillon's restorative sleep phase did not increase as much as we thought -- signifying that he was spending most of this extra time in light sleep. As the graph shows, Dillon's time in deep sleep decreased negligibly from 1:22 hours on Casper to 1:20 on Nectar, while his time in REM sleep increased by 13 minutes on average from 1:36 hours to 1:49 on Nectar. On Nectar Premier, Dillon spent more time in REM sleep and less time in deep sleep (similar to me). Aly Lopez/CNETOur main takeaways and what we learnedPriceAlthough a queen-size Nectar Premier Hybrid retails for $2,196, Nectar frequently offers it at a much lower price tag. Right now, it's on sale for half off, bringing the total down to $1,099. That's a great price point for a high-quality mattress like this.FirmnessCNET's Mattress Smasher 9000, a proprietary device that objectively tests and determines mattress firmness, ranked the Nectar Premier Hybrid 4.9 out of 10 on the firmness scale. The consensus among our sleep team is that this is correct, and it's around a medium or 5 out of 10. Dillon and I say it leans slightly into the medium-soft category or around 4 out of 10. This is especially interesting given that Nectar says it's 6.5 out of 10, or medium-firm. The Mattress Smasher 9000 smashes bed to provide us with an objective firmness score. Aly Lopez/CNETRead more: We Use Tech to Test Beds: Say Hello to Our Mattress Smasher 9000It's another reminder that mattress firmness is still a subjective quality at the end of the day. How firm a mattress feels to one person may differ from the next, depending on body type and weight, and how firm you need your mattress to be is directly influenced by your primary sleeping position, health conditions and personal preference.Our 30-night trial on the Nectar Premier Hybrid underscored the recurring issue of firmness. Dillon is most comfortable on a medium-soft to soft mattress, and I am most comfortable on a medium-firm to firm mattress.Regardless, it's been encouraging to see the quality of our sleep gradually improve throughout this series as we try mattresses of varying feel and firmness levels. Overall, Dillon and I were impressed by the Nectar Premier Hybrid -- Dillon especially so, considering it's now his favorite bed, and I feel terrible for making him give it up.What's next?We have yet to find the "perfect" mattress for us -- and though we're not sure it even exists, we haven't given up yet. That said, stay tuned for the 30-night trial of our next bed: Beautyrest Black Series Three. Dillon preferentially scored the Nectar Premier Hybrid 85/100, and Aly scored it 62/100. Dillon Lopez/CNETWho should get this bed?You should consider the Nectar Premier Hybrid if:You're looking for a premium mattress at a more affordable price pointYou're looking for a bed with an airy memory foam feelYou're a combination sleeper or primarily sleep on your sideYou're seeking a pressure-relieving hybrid mattressThe Nectar Premier Hybrid is probably not for you if:You do not like memory foam. If you're unsure, take advantage of the 365-night trial period and test it out -- you might be pleasantly surprised like we wereYou want a bed with super dense memory foam like Tempur-PedicYou want a super responsive and bouncy mattressYou're a strict back or stomach sleeper who needs a lot of support

While the holidays are coming to an end, that's not stemmed the tide of good deals that keep coming. Thanks to a big discount on Amazon, you can currently get your hands on the excellent Echo Show 5 for just $45, which saves you 50% compared to the usual price. You also have the option to bundle it with a WiZ smart bulb for just $2 more. However, there's no telling when this limited-time deal will expire, so we'd recommend getting your order in sooner rather than later. See at AmazonThe 3rd-gen Amazon Echo Show 5 smart display is an improvement over its predecessor and includes better bass and sound clarity. It includes a display of 5.5 inches and lets you make video calls, check the weather and stream your favorite content. Though it's a one-stop shop for making calls and getting info, it doubles as a security system by letting you check in on your home through its 2MP camera, too. You can also use the Echo Show to control and check on other smart home appliances and devices. Hey, did you know? CNET Deals texts are free, easy and save you money.The Echo Show 5 is compatible with Alexa, which means you get voice control options. It also includes security features, such as an on-off button for the built-in microphone, a privacy shutter for the camera and encryption support for Ring videos. But there's even more good news: You can save up to an extra 20% when you trade in an eligible device. Or, if you want something a little flashier, snag the larger Echo Show 8 for just $85, which is 43% off. It offers an upgraded experience with slightly better specs in just about every category. If you're looking for more smart home savings and not sure if this one is for you, check out our list of the best smart home deals so you can find something that fits your needs.Why this deal mattersThough the latest Echo Show 5 didn't quite crack the list, Amazon makes most of our favorite smart displays on the market right now. This compact model is a great option for those who may be a little short on space, and it'll come in handy in just about any home. It's also normally well-priced at $90, so it's a pretty serious bargain now that you can pick it up for half that. CNET is always covering a wide array of deals on tech products and much more. Start with the hottest sales and discounts on theCNET Deals page, and sign up for theCNET Deals Textto get daily deals sent straight to your phone. Add the freeCNET Shopping extensionto your browser for real-time price comparisons and cash-back offers. And peruse ourgift guide, which includes a full range of ideas for birthdays, anniversaries and more. See at CNET

You can trust VideoGamer. Our team of gaming experts spend hours testing and reviewing the latest games, to ensure you're reading the most comprehensive guide possible. Rest assured, all imagery and advice is unique and original. Check out how we test and review games hereSaber Interactive is continuing work on Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2. With a new Operation now in the game, the developer has revealed that it isnt done with new PvE Operations in future updates. However, the studio has also heard complaints from PvP players who feel like theyve been left behind.Space Marine 2 new PvP contentIn a statement to fans in the latest Community Update, Saber confirmed that new PvP content will be coming to the Warhammer game in 2025. The developer explained that Space Marine 2 will continue to get new PvP content alongside the addition of expected PvE missions including new modes, maps and more.PVP Players We have heard you, and we know you feel left out, Saber explained in a statement. We will have your back in 2025 with brand new and exciting content for the PvP.In 2025, PvP players will be able to fight across a new close-quarters map that will encourage players to pay attention when turning corners. Set in a temple filled with narrow passages, shotgun users and melee combat will be encouraged.Alongside the new map, Saber is also adding custom PvP lobbies for players to set up in Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2. Similar to Halo custom games, players will be able to change team setups, allowing for snipers-only modes, as well as other modifiers. (Please have a gravity modifier, please.)Alongside the new PvP modes, Saber also confirmed that Season 3 of Space Marine 2 will include Prestige Rank for players to earn. After hitting Max Rank, players will be able to continue leveling up, just like in CoD.We launched Space Marine 2 on September 9 and it was a success! Saber explained in a heartfelt statement. Weve been working on it for years and it has been a work of passion and dedication. Witnessing the warm welcome the players reserved for the game was the greatest reward and the best achievement to unlock after all these relentless years. The enthusiasm motivated us to keep up the good work and make sure the game would remain up to the players expectations.For more Space Marine coverage, read about the games official sequel animation or find out why the games awesome ending was almost cut. Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2Platform(s):PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S, Xbox Series XGenre(s):ActionSubscribe to our newsletters!By subscribing, you agree to our Privacy Policy and may receive occasional deal communications; you can unsubscribe anytime.Share

Never Forgive ThemEdward ZitronDec 16, 202442 min readIn the last year, Ive spent about 200,000 words on a kind of personal journey where Ive tried again and again to work out why everything digital feels so broken, and why it seems to keep getting worse, despite what techs brightest minds might promise. More regularly than not, Ive found that the answer is fairly simple: the tech industrys incentives no longer align with the user.The people running the majority of internet services have used a combination of monopolies and a cartel-like commitment to growth-at-all-costs thinking to make war with the user, turning the customer into something between a lab rat and an unpaid intern, with the goal to juice as much value from the interaction as possible. To be clear, tech has always had an avaricious streak, and it would be naive to suggest otherwise, but this moment feels different. Im stunned by the extremes tech companies are going to extract value from customers, but also by the insidious way theyve gradually degraded their products.To be clear, I dont believe that this gradual enshittification is part of some grand, Machiavellian long game by the tech companies, but rather the product of multiple consecutive decisions made in response to short-term financial needs. Even if it was, the result would be the same people wouldnt notice how bad things have gotten until its too late, or they might just assume that tech has always sucked, or theyre just personally incapable of using the tools that are increasingly fundamental to living in a modern world.You are the victim of a con one so pernicious that youve likely tuned it out despite the fact its part of almost every part of your life. It hurts everybody you know in different ways, and it hurts people more based on their socioeconomic status. It pokes and prods and twists millions of little parts of your life, and its everywhere, so you have to ignore it, because complaining about it feels futile, like complaining about the weather.It isnt. Youre battered by the Rot Economy, and a tech industry that has become so obsessed with growth that you, the paying customer, are a nuisance to be mitigated far more than a participant in an exchange of value. A death cult has taken over the markets, using software as a mechanism to extract value at scale in the pursuit of growth at the cost of user happiness.These people want everything from you to control every moment you spend working with them so that you may provide them with more ways to make money, even if doing so doesnt involve you getting anything else in return. Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and a majority of tech platforms are at war with the user, and, in the absence of any kind of consistent standards or effective regulations, the entire tech ecosystem has followed suit. A kind of Coalition of the Willing of the worst players in hyper-growth tech capitalism.Things are being made linearly worse in the pursuit of growth in every aspect of our digital lives, and its because everything must grow, at all costs, at all times, unrelentingly, even if it makes the technology we use every day consistently harmful.This year has, on some level, radicalized me, and today Im going to explain why. Its going to be a long one, because I need you to fully grasp the seriousness and widespread nature of the problem.You have, more than likely, said to yourself sometime in the last ten years that you didnt get tech, or that you are getting too old, or that tech has gotten away from you because you found a service, or an app, or a device annoying. You, or someone you love, have convinced yourself that your inability to use something is a sign that youre deficient, that youve failed to keep up with the times, as if the things we use every day should be in a constant state of flux.Sidenote: Im sure there are exceptions. Some people really just dont try and learn how to use a computer or smartphone, and naturally reject technology, or steadfastly refuse to pick it up because its not for them. These people exist, theyre real, we all know them, and I dont think anybody reading this falls into this camp. Basic technological literacy is a requirement to live in society and there is some responsibility on the user. But even if we assume that this is the case, and even if there are a lot of people that simply dont tryshould companies really take advantage of them?The tools we use in our daily lives outside of our devices have mostly stayed the same. While buttons on our cars might have moved around and Im not even getting into Teslas designs right now we generally have a brake, an accelerator, a wheel, and a turn signal. Boarding an airplane has worked mostly the same way since I started flying, other than moving from physical tickets to digital ones. Were not expected to work out the new way to use a toilet every few months because somebody decided we were finishing too quickly.Yet our apps and the platforms we use every day operate by a totally different moral and intellectual compass. While the idea of an update is fairly noble (and not always negative) that something youve bought can be maintained and improved over time is a good thing many tech platforms see it as a means to further extract and exploit, to push users into doing things that either keep them on the app longer or take more-profitable actions.We as a society need to reckon with how this twists us up, makes us more paranoid, more judgmental, more aggressive, more reactionary, because when everything is subtly annoying, we all simmer and suffer in manifold ways. There is no digital world and physical world they are, and have been, the same for quite some time, and reporting on tech as if this isnt the case fails the user. It may seem a little dramatic, but take a second and really think about how many little digital irritations you deal with in a day. Its time to wake up to the fact that our digital lives are rotten.Im not talking about one single product or company, but most digital experiences. The interference is everywhere, and weve all learned to accept conditions that are, when written out plainly, are kind of insane.Back in 2023, Spotify redesigned its app to, and I quote The Verge, be part TikTok, part Instagram, and part YouTube, which in practice meant replacing a relatively clean and straightforward user interface with one made up of full-screen cards (like TikTok) and autoplaying video podcasts (like TikTok), which CEO Daniel Ek claimed would, to quote Sky News, make the platform come alive with different content on a platform built and sold as a place to listen to music.The tech media waved off the redesign without really considering the significance of the fact that at the drop of a hat, hundreds of millions of peoples experience of listening to music would change based on the whims of a multi-billionaire, with the express purpose being to force these people to engage with completely different content as a means of increasing engagement metrics and revenue. By all means try and pretend this is just an app, but peoples relationships with music and entertainment are deeply important to their moods and motivations, and adding layers of frustration in an app they interact with for hours a day is consistently grating.And no matter how you feel, this design was never for the customer. Nobody using Spotify was saying ah man, I wish I could watch videos on this, but that doesnt matter because engagement and revenue must increase. Its clear that Spotify, a company best-known for exploiting the artists on its platform, treats its customers (both paying and otherwise) with a similar level of contempt.Its far from alone. Earlier in the year, smart speaker company Sonos released a redesign of its app that removed accessibility features and the ability to edit song queues or play music from your phone in an attempt to modernize the interface, with WIRED suggesting that the changes could potentially open the door to adding a subscription of some sort to help Sonos ailing growth. Metas continual redesigns of Facebook and Instagram the latest of which happened in October to focus on Gen Z are probably the most egregious example of the constant chaos of our digital lives.Sidenote: Some of Metas random redesigns are subtle and not announced with any particular fanfare. Try this: Using the iPhone app, go to a friends profile, tap photos, and then videos. Naturally, youd expect these to be organized in chronological order. If your friend is a prolific uploader, that wont be the case. Youll find them organized in a scattershot, algorithmically-driven arrangement that doesnt make any sense. What does that mean in practice? Say youre looking for videos from an important life event like a birthday or a wedding. You cant just scroll down until you reach them. Youve got to parse your way through every single one. Which takes longer, but is presumably great for Facebooks engagement numbers. Also, there are two separate tabs that show videos (one on the profile page, another under the photo tab). Youd assume both would show the exact same things, and youd be wrong. Theyll often show an entirely different selection of videos, with no obvious criteria as to why. And dont get me started on Facebooks retrospective conversion of certain older videos some of which might be a few seconds long, others lasting several minutes into reels, which also strips the ability to skip certain parts without installing a third-party browser plugin.As every single platform we use is desperate to juice growth from every user, everything we interact with is hyper-monetized through plugins, advertising, microtransactions and other things that constantly gnaw at the user experience. We load websites expecting them to be broken, especially on mobile, because every single website has to have 15+ different ad trackers, video ads that cover large chunks of the screen, all while demanding our email or for us to let them send us notifications.Every experience demands our email address, and giving out our email address adds another email to inboxes already stuffed with two types of spam the actual get the biggest laser spam that hits the junk folder automatically, and the marketing emails we receive from clothing brands we wanted a discount from or newspapers we pay for that still feel its necessary to bother us 3 to 5 times a day. Ive basically given up trying to fight back how about you?Every app we use is intentionally built to growth hack a term that means moving things around in such a way that a user does things that we want them to do so they spend more money or time on the platform which is why dating apps gate your best matches behind $1.99 microtransactions, or why Uber puts suggestions and massive banners throughout their apps to try and convince you to use one of its other apps (or accidentally hit them, which gives Uber a chance to get you to try them), or why Outlook puts advertisements in your email inbox that are near-indistinguishable from new emails (theyre at the top of your inbox too), or why Metas video carousels intentionally only play the first few seconds of a clip as a means of making you click.Our digital lives are actively abusive and hostile, riddled with subtle and overt cons. Our apps are ever-changing, adapting not to our needs or conditions, but to the demands of investors and internal stakeholders that have reduced who we are and what we do to an ever-growing selection of manipulatable metrics.It isnt that you dont get tech, its that the tech you use every day is no longer built for you, and as a result feels a very specific kind of insane.Every app has a different design, almost every design is optimized based on your activity on said app, with each app trying to make you do different things in uniquely annoying ways. Meta has hundreds of people on its growth team perpetuating a culture that manipulates and tortures users to make company metrics improve, like limiting the amount of information in a notification to make a user browse deeper into the site, and deliberately promoting low-quality clickbait that promises one amazing trick because people click those links, even if they suck.Its everywhere.After a coup by head of ads Prabhakar Raghavan in 2019, Google intentionally made search results worse as a means of increasing the amount of times that people would search for something on the site. Ever wonder why your workplace uses Sharepoint and other horrible Microsoft apps? Thats because Microsofts massive software monopoly meant that it was cheaper for your boss to buy all of it in one place, and thus its incentive is to make it good enough to convince your boss to sign up for all of their stuff rather than an app that makes your life easier or better.Why does every website feel different, and why do some crash randomly or make your phone burn your hand? Its because every publisher has pumped their sites full of as much ad tracking software as possible as a means of monetizing every single user in as many ways as possible, helping ads follow you across the entire internet. And why does everybody need your email? Because your inbox is one of the few places that advertisers havent found a consistent way to penetrate.Its digital tinnitus. Its the pop-up from a shopping app that you downloaded to make one purchase, or the deceptive notification from Instagram that you have new views that doesnt actually lead anywhere. It is the autoplaying video advertisement on your film review website. It is the repeated request for you to log back into a newspaper website that you logged into yesterday because everyone must pay and nothing must get through. It is the hundredth Black Friday sale you got from a company that you swear you unsubscribed from eight times, and perhaps even did, but theres no real way to keep track. Its the third time this year youve had to make a new password because another data breach happened and the company didnt bother to encrypt it.Im not writing this to complain, but because I believe as I hinted at a few weeks ago that we are in the midst of the largest-scale ecological disaster of our time, because almost every single interaction with technology, which is required to live in modern society, has become actively adversarial to the user. These issues hit everything we do, all the time, a constant onslaught of interference, and I believe its so much bigger than just social media and algorithms though theyre a big part of it, of course.In plain terms, everybody is being fucked with constantly in tiny little ways by most apps and services, and I believe that billions of people being fucked with at once in all of these ways has profound psychological and social consequences that were not meaningfully discussing.The average persons experience with technology is one so aggressive and violative that I believe it leaves billions of people with a consistent low-grade trauma. We seem, as a society, capable of understanding that social media can hurt us, unsettle us, or make us feel crazed and angry, but I think its time to accept that the rest of the tech ecosystem undermines our wellbeing in an equally-insidious way. And most people dont know its happening, because everybody has accepted deeply shitty conditions for the last ten years.Now, some of you may scoff at this a little after all, youre smart, you know about disinformation, you know about the tricks of these companies, and thus most people do, right?Wrong! Most people dont think about the things theyre doing at all and are just trying to get by in a society that increasingly demands we make more money to buy the same things, with our lives both interfered with and judged by social networks with aggressive algorithms that feed us more things based on what well engage with, which might mean said things piss us off or actively radicalize us. Theyre nagged by constant notifications an average of 46 a day some useful, some advertisements, like Apple telling us theres a nailbiter college football game regardless of whether weve ever interacted with anything football related, or a Slack message saying you havent joined a group you were invited to yet, or Etsy letting you know that you can buy things for an upcoming holiday. Its relentless, and the more time you invest in using a device, the more of these notifications you get, making you less likely to turn them off. After all, how well are you doing keeping your inbox clean? Oh whats that? You get 25 emails a day, many of them from a company owned by William Sonoma?Your work software veers between shit and just okay, and never really seems to get better, nor does any part seem to smoothly connect to another. Your organization juggles anywhere from five to fifteen different pieces of software Slack or Microsoft Teams and/or Zoom for communication, Asana or Monday or Basecamp for project management, or Jira, or Trello, or any number of other different ways that your organization or team wants to plan things. When you connect with another organization, you find theyre using a different product, or perhaps theyre using the same one say, Slack and that one requires you to join their organization, which may or may not work. Im not even talking about the innumerable amount of tech infrastructure products that more-technical workers have to deal with, or how much worse this gets if youve got a slower device. Every organization does things differently, and some dont put a lot of thought into how they do so.Yet beyond the endless digital nags theres the need to be constantly aware of scams and outright misinformation, both on social networks that dont really care to stop it and on the chum box advertisements below major news publications you know, the little weird stories at the bottom promising miracle cures.Its easy to assume that its natural that youd know there are entities out there trying to scam you or trick you, and Id argue most people dont. To most, a video from Rumble.com may as well be the same thing as a video from CNN.com, and most people would believe that every advertisement on every website is somehow verified for its accuracy, versus sold at scale all the time to whoever will pay the money.And when I say that, Im really talking about CNN.com, a website that had 594 million visitors in October 2024. At the bottom is the Paid Partner Content section, including things from publications like FinanceBuzz that tell you about the 9 Dumbest Things Smart People Waste Money On. FinanceBuzz immediately asks for you to turn your notifications on you know, so it can ping you when it has new articles and each bullet point leads to one of its affiliate marketing arms trying to sell you car insurance and credit cards. Youre offered the chance to share your email address to receive vetted side hustles and proven ways to earn extra cash sent to your inbox, which I assume includes things like advertorial content telling you that yes, you could make money playing online bingo (such as Bingo Cash) against other people.Papaya Games, developer of Bingo Cash, was sued in March by rival gaming company Skillz for using bots in allegedly skill-based games that are supposed to be between humans, and the Michigan Gaming Control Board issued a cease-and-desist order against the company for violating multiple gaming laws, including the Lawful Internet Gaming Act. To quote the lawsuit, Papayas games are not skill-based and users are often not playing against live, actual opponents but against Papayas own bots that direct and rig the game so that Papaya itself wins its users money while leading them to believe that they lost to a live human opponent.This is a website and its associated content that has prime placement on the front page of a major news outlet. As a normal person, its reasonable to believe that CNN would not willfully allow advertisements for websites that are, in and of themselves, further advertisements masquerading as trustworthy third party entities. Its reasonable that you would believe that FinanceBuzz was a reputable website, and that its intentions were to share great deals and secret tricks with you. If you think youre not this stupid, you are privileged and need to have more solidarity with your fellow human beings.Why wouldnt you think that the content on one of the most notable media outlets in the entire world is trustworthy? Why wouldnt you trust that CNN, a respected media outlet, had vetted its advertisers and made sure their content wasnt actively tricking its users? I think its fair to say that CNN has likely led to thousands of people being duped by questionable affiliate marketing companies, and likely profited from doing so.Why wouldnt people feel insane? Why wouldnt the internet, where were mostly forced to live, drive most people crazy? How are we not discussing the fact that so much of the internet is riddled with poison? How are we not treating the current state of the tech industry like an industrial chemical accident? Is it because there are too many people at fault? Is it because fixing it would require us to truly interrogate the fabric of a capitalist death cult?Nothing I am writing is polemic or pessimistic or describing anything other than the shit thats happening in front of my eyes and your eyes and the eyes of billions of people. Dismissing these things as just how it is allows powerful people with no real plan and no real goals other than growth to thrive, and sneering at people dumb enough to get tricked by an internet and tech industry built specifically to trick them suggests you have no idea how you are being scammed, because youre smug and arrogant.I need you to stop trying to explain away how fucking offensive using the internet and technology has become. I need you to stop making excuses for the powerful and consider the sheer scale of the societal ratfucking happening on almost every single device in the world, and consider the ramifications of the difficulty that a human being using the internet has trying to live an honest, dignified and reasonable life.To exist in modern society requires you to use these devices, or otherwise sacrifice large parts of how youd interact with other people. You need a laptop or a smartphone for work, for school, for anything really. You need messaging apps otherwise you dont exist. As a result, there is a societal monopoly of sorts or perhaps its more of a cartel, in the sense that, for the most part, every tech company has accepted these extremely aggressive, anti-user positions, all in pursuit of growth.The stakes are so much higher than anyone especially the tech media is willing to discuss. The extent of the damage, the pain, the frustration, the terror is so constant that we are all on some level numb to its effects, because discussing it requires accepting that the vast majority of people live poisoned digital lives.We all live in the ruins created by the Rot Economy, where the only thing that matters is growth. Growth of revenue, growth of the business, growth of metrics related to the business, growth of engagement, of clicks, of time on app, of purchases of micro-transactions, of impressions of ads, of things done that make executives feel happy.Ill give you a more direct example.On November 21, I purchased the bestselling laptop from Amazon a $238 Acer Aspire 1 with a four-year-old Celeron N4500 Processor, 4GB of DDR4 RAM, and 128GB of slow eMMC storage (which is, and Im simplifying here, though not by much, basically an SD card soldered to the computers motherboard). Affordable and under-powered, Id consider this a fairly representative sample of how millions of people interact with the internet.I believe its also a powerful illustration of the damage caused by the Rot Economy, and the abusive, exploitative way in which the tech industry treats people at scale.It took 1 minute and 50 seconds from hitting the power button for the laptop to get to the setup screen. It took another minute and a half to connect and begin downloading updates, which took several more minutes. After that, I was faced with a licensing agreement where I agreed to binding arbitration to use Windows, a 24 second pause, and then got shown a screen of different ways I could unlock my Microsoft experience, with animations that shuddered and jerked violently.Aside: These cheap laptops use a version of Windows called WIndows Home in S Mode, which is a paired-down version of Windows where you can only use apps installed from the Microsoft Store. Microsoft claims that its a streamlined version of Windows, but the reality is its a cheap version of Windows for Microsoft to compete with Googles Chromebook laptops.Now, why do I know that? Because youll never guess whos a big fan of Windows S? Thats right, Prabhakar Raghavan, The Man Who Killed Google Search, who said that Microsofts Windows S validated Googles approach to cheap laptops back when he was Vice President of Googles G Suite (and three years before he became Head of Search). To be clear, Windows Home in S Mode is one of the worst operating systems of all time. It is ugly, slow, and actively painful to use, and (unless you deactivate S Mode) locks you into Microsofts ecosystem. This man went on to ruin Google Search by the way. How does this man keep turning up? Is it because I say his name so much?Throughout, the laptops cheap trackpad would miss every few clicks. At this point, I was forced to create a Microsoft account and to hand over my cellphone number or another email address to receive a code, or I wouldnt be able to use the laptop. Each menu screen takes 3-5 seconds to load, and Im asked to customize my experience with things like personalized ads, tips and recommendations, with every option turned on by default, then to sign up for another account, this time with Acer. At one point I am simply shown an ad for Microsofts OneDrive cloud storage product with a QR code to download it on my phone, and then Im told that Windows has to download a few updates, which I assume are different to the last time it did that.Aside: With a normal version of Windows, its possible although not easy to set up and use the computer without a Microsoft account. On S Mode, however, youre restricted to downloading apps through the Microsoft Store (which, as youve guessed, requires a Microsoft account).In essence, its virtually impossible to use this machine without handing over your personal data to Microsoft.It has taken, at this point, around 20 minutes to get to this screen. It takes another 33 minutes for the updates to finish, and then another minute and 57 seconds to log in, at which point it pops up with a screen telling me to set up my browser and discover the best of Windows, including finding the apps I love from the Microsoft Store and the option to create an AI-generated theme for your browser. The laptop constantly struggles as I scroll through pages, the screen juddering, apps taking several seconds to load.When I opened the start bar ostensibly a place where you have apps youd use I saw some things that felt familiar, like Outlook, an email client that is not actually installed and requires you to download it, and an option for travel website Booking.com, along with a link to LinkedIn. One app, ClipChamp, was installed but immediately needed to be updated, which did not work when I hit update, forcing me to go to find the updates page, which showed me at least 40 different apps called things like SweetLabs Inc. I have no idea what any of this stuff is.I type sweetlabs into the search bar, and it jankily interrupts into a menu that takes up a third of the screen, with half of that dedicated to Mark Twains birthday, two Mark Twain-related links, a quiz of the day, and four different games available for download.The computer pauses slightly every time I type a letter. Every animation shudders. Even moving windows around feels painful. It is clunky, slow, it feels cheap, and the operating system previously something Id considered to be the thing that operates the computer system is actively rotten, strewn with ads, sponsored content, suggested apps, and intrusive design choices that make the system slower and actively upset the user.Another note: Windows in S Mode requires you to use Edge as your default browser and Bing as your default search engine. While you can download alternatives like Firefox and Brave, though not Google Chrome, which was removed from the Microsoft Store in 2017 for unspecified terms of service violations its clear that Microsoft wants you to spend as much time in its ecosystem as possible, where it can monetize you.The reason Im explaining this in such agonizing detail is that this experience is more indicative of the average persons experience using a computer than anybody realizes. Though its tough to gauge how many of these things sold to make it a bestseller on Amazon, laptops in this pricepoint, with this specific version of Windows (Windows 11 Home in S Mode as discussed above), happen to dominate Amazons bestsellers along with Apples significantly-more-expensive MacBook Air and Pro series. It is reasonable to believe that a large amount of the laptops sold in America match this price point and spec there are two similar ones on Best Buys bestsellers, and as of writing this sentence, multiple different laptops of this spec are on the front of Targets laptop page.And if I havent made it completely clear, this means that millions of people are likely using a laptop thats burdensomely slow, and full of targeted advertisements and content baked into the operating system in a way thats either impossible or difficult to remove. For millions of people and it really could be tens of millions considering the ubiquity of these laptops in eCommerce stores alone the experience of using the computer is both actively exploitative and incredibly slow. Even loading up MSN.com the very first page you see when you open a web browser immediately hits you with ads for eBay, QVC and QuickBooks, with icons that sometimes simply dont load.Every part of the operating system seems to be hounding you to use some sort of Microsoft product or some sort of product that Microsoft or the laptop manufacturer has been paid to make you see. While one can hope that the people buying these laptops have any awareness of anything, the reality is that theyre being dumped into a kind of TJ Maxx version of computing, except TJ Maxx clothes dont sometimes scream at you to download TJ Maxx Plus or stop functioning because you used them too fast.Again, this is how most people are experiencing modern computing, and it isnt because this is big business its because laptop sales have been falling for over a decade, and manufacturers (and Microsoft) need as many ways to grow revenue as possible, even if the choices they make are actively harmful to consumers.Aside: I swear to god, if your answer here is get a MacBook Air, theyre only $600, I beg you I plead with you to speak with people outside of your income bracket at a time when an entire election was decided in part because everythings more expensive.At that point, said person using this laptop can now log onto the internet, and begin using websites like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, all of which have algorithms we dont really understand, but that have been regularly proven to be actively and deliberately manipulative and harmful.Now, I know reading about algorithms and manipulation makes some peoples eyes glaze over, but I want you to take a simpler approach for a second. I hypothesize that most people do not really think about how they interact with stuff they load up YouTube, they type something in, they watch it, and maybe they click whatever is recommended next. They may know theres an algorithm of sorts, but theyre not really sitting there thinking okay so they want me to see this, or they may even be grateful that the algorithm gave them something they like, and reinforce the algorithm with their own biases, some of which they might have gotten from the algorithm.To be clear, none of this is mind control or hypnosis or voodoo. These algorithms and their associated entities are not sitting there with some vast agenda to execute the algorithms are built to keep you on the website, even if it upsets you, pisses you off, or misinforms you. Their incentive isnt really to make you make any one choice, other than one that involves you staying on their platform or interacting with an advertisement for somebody elses, and the heavy flow of political and particularly conservative content is a result of platforms knowing thats what keeps people doing stuff on the platform. The algorithms are constantly adapting in real time to try and find something that you might spend time on, with little regard for whether that content is good, let alone good for you.Putting aside any moral responsibility, the experiences on these apps are discordant. Facebook, as Ive written about in detail, is a complete nightmare thousands of people being actively conned in supposed help groups, millions of people being scammed every day (with one man killing himself as a result of organized crimes presence on Facebook), and bizarre AI slop is dominating feeds with Mark Zuckerberg promising that theres more to come. Thats without mentioning a product experience that continually interrupts you with sponsored and suggested content, as these platforms always do, all algorithmically curated to keep you scrolling, while also hiding content from the people you care about, because Facebook thinks it wont keep you on the platform for as long.The picture I am trying to paint is one of terror and abuse. The average persons experience of using a computer starts with aggressive interference delivered in a shoddy, sludge-like frame, and as the wider internet opens up to said user, already battered by a horrible user experience, theyre immediately thrown into heavily-algorithmic feeds each built to con them, feeding whatever holds their attention and chucking ads in as best they can. As they browse the web, websites like NBCnews.com feature stories from companies like WorldTrending.com with advertisements for bizarre toys written in the style of a blog, so intentional in their deceit that the page in question has a huge disclaimer at the bottom saying its an ad.As their clunky, shuddering laptop hitches between every scroll, they go to ESPN.com, and the laptop slows to a crawl. Everything slows to a crawl. God damnit, why is everything so fucking slow? Ill just stay on Facebook or Instagram or YouTube. At least that place doesnt crash half the time or trick me.Using the computer in the modern age is so inherently hostile that it pushes us towards corporate authoritarians like Apple, Microsoft, Google and Meta and now that every single website is so desperate for our email and to show us as many ads as possible, its either harmful or difficult for the average person to exist online.The biggest trick that these platforms played wasnt any one algorithm, but the convenience of a clean digital experience or, at least as clean as they feel it needs to be. In an internet so horribly poisoned by growth capitalism, these platforms show a degree of peace and consistency, even if theyre engineered to manipulate you, even if the experience gets worse seemingly every year, because at least it isnt as bad as the rest of the internet. We use Gmail because, well, at least its not Outlook. We use YouTube to view videos from other websites because other websites are far more prone to crash, have quality issues, or simply dont work on mobile. We use Google Search, despite the fact that it barely works anymore, to find things because actually browsing the web fucking sucks.When every single website needs to make as much money as possible because their private equity or hedge fund or massive corporate owners need to make more money every year without fail, the incentives of building the internet veer away from providing a service and toward putting you, the reader, in silent service of a corporation.ESPNs app is a fucking mess autoplaying videos, discordantly-placed scores, menus that appear to have been designed by M.C. Escher and nothing changes because Disney needs you to use the app and find what you need, versus provide information in anything approaching a sensible way. It needs your effort. The paid subscription model for dating apps is so aggressive that theres a lawsuit filed against Match Group which owns Tinder and Hinge, and thus a great deal of the market for gamifying the platforms to transform users into gamblers locked in a search for psychological rewards, likely as a means of recouping revenue after user numbers have begun to fall. And if youre curious why these companies arent just making their products less horrible to use, Im afraid that would reduce revenue, which is what they do care about.If youre wondering who else is okay with that, its Apple. Both Bumble and Tinder are regularly featured on the Must-Have Apps section of the App Store, most of which require a monthly fee to work. Each of these apps is run by a company with a growth team, and that team exists, on some level, to manipulate you to move icons around so that youll interact with the things they want you to, see ads, or buy things. This is why HBO Max rebranded to Max and created an entirely new app experience because the growth people said if we do this in this way the people using it will do what we want.Now, whats important to accept here is that absolutely none of this is done with any real consideration of the wider effects on the customer, as long as the customer continues doing the things that the company needs them to. We, as people, have been trained to accept a kind of digital transience an inherent knowledge that things will change at random, that the changes may suck, and that we will just have to accept them because thats how the computer works, and these companies work hard to suppress competition as a means of making sure they can do what they want.In other words, internet users are perpetually thrown into a tornado of different corporate incentives, and the less economically stable or technologically savvy you are, the more likely you are to be at the mercy of them. Every experience is different, wants something, wants you to do something, and the less people know about why the more likely they are to with good intentions follow the paths laid out in front of them with little regard for what might be happening, in the same way people happily watch the same TV shows or listen to the same radio stations.Even if youre technologically savvy, youre still dealing with these problems fresh installs of Windows on new laptops, avoiding certain websites because youve learned what the dodgy ones look like, not interacting with random people in your DMs because you know what a spam bot looks like, and so on. Its not that youre immune. Its that youre instinctually ducking and weaving around an internet and digital ecosystem that continually tries to interrupt you, batting away pop-ups and silencing notifications knowing that they want something from you and I need you to realize that most people are not like you and are actively victimized by the tech ecosystem.As I said a few weeks ago, I believe that most people are continually harmed by their daily lives, as most peoples daily lives are on the computer or their smartphones, and those lives have been stripped of dignity. When they look to the media for clarity or validation, the best theyll get is a degree of hmm, maybe algorithm bad? rather than a wholehearted acceptance that the state of our digital lives is obscene.Yet its not just the algorithms Its the entirety of the digital ecosystem, from websites to apps to the devices we use every day. The fact that so many people likely use a laptop that is equal parts unfit for the task and stuffed full of growth hacked poison is utterly disgraceful, because it means that the only way to escape said poison is to simply have more money. Those who cant afford $300 (at least) phones or $600 laptops are left to use offensively bad technology, and we have, at a societal scale, simply accepted that this is how things go.Yet even on expensive devices youre still the victim of algorithmic and growth-hacked manipulation, even if were aware of it. Knowing allows you to fight back, even if its just to stop yourself being overwhelmed by the mess, and means you can read things that can tell you what new horror we need to avoid next but you are still the target, you are still receiving hundreds of marketing emails a week, you are still receiving spam calls, you are still unable to use Facebook or Instagram without being bombarded by ads and algorithmically-charged content.Ive written a lot about how the growth-at-all-costs mindset of The Rot Economy is what directly leads big tech companies to make their products worse, but what Ive never really quantified is the scale of its damage.Everything Ive discussed around the chaos and pain of the web is a result of corporations and private equity firms buying media properties and immediately trying to make them grow, each in wildly different ways, all clamouring to be the next New York Times or Variety or other legacy media brand, despite those brands already existing, and the ideas for competing with them usually being built on unsustainably-large staffs and expensive consultants. Almost every single store you visit on the internet has a massive data layer on the background that feeds them data about whats popular, or where theyre spending the most time on the site, and will in turn change things about their design to subtly encourage you to buy more stuff, all so that more money comes out, no matter the cost. Even if this data isnt personalized, its still powerful, and turns so many experiences into subtle manipulations.Every single weird thing that youve experienced with an app or service online is the dread hand of the Rot Economy the gravitational pull of growth, the demands upon you, the user, to do something. And when everybody is trying to chase growth, nobody is thinking stability, and because everybody is trying to grow, everybody sort of copies everybody elses ideas, which is why we see microtransactions and invasive ads and annoying tricks that all kind of feel the same in everything, though theyre all subtly different and customized just for that one app. Its exhausting.For a while, Ive had the Rot Economy compared to Cory Doctorows (excellent) enshittification theory, and I think its a great time to compare (and separate) the two. To quote Cory in The Financial Times, Enshittification is [his] theory explaining how the internet was colonised by platforms, why all those platforms are degrading so quickly and thoroughly, why it matters and what we can do about it. He describes the three stages of decline:First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.I agree with Cory on some levels, but I believe he gives far more credit to the platforms in question than they deserve, and sees far more intention or strategy than really exists. I fundamentally disagree about the business customers even being some elevated class in the equation as weve seen with the Google Ads trial, Google didnt really give a shit about its business customers to begin with, has always sought a monopoly, and made things worse for whoever it needed to as a means of increasing growth.Perhaps thats semantics. However, Corys theory lacks a real perpetrator beyond corporations that naturally say alright were gonna do Enshittification now, watch this. Where The Rot Economy separates is that growth is, in and of itself, the force that drives companies to enshittify. While enshittification neatly fits across companies like Spotify and Meta (and their ad-focused business models), it doesnt really make sense when it comes to things where there isnt a clear split between business customers and consumers, like Microsoft or Salesforce because enshittification is ultimately one part of the larger Rot Economy, where everything must grow forever.And I believe the phenomenon that captures both is a direct result of the work of men like Jack Welch and Milton Friedman. The Rot Economy is selfish and potently neoliberal corporations are bowed down to like gods, and the powerful only seek more, at all times, at all costs, even if said cost is the company might eventually die because weve burned out any value it actually has or people are harmed every time they pick up their phone. The Rot Economy is neoliberalisms true innovation: a kind of economic cancer that with few reasons to exist beyond more and few justifications beyond if we dont let it keep growing then everybodys pensions blow up.To be clear, Cory is for the most part right. Enshittification successfully encapsulates how the modern web was destroyed in a way that nobody really has. I think it applies in a wide-ranging way to a wide range of tech companies and effects.I, however, believe the wider problem is bigger, and the costs are far greater. It isnt that everything is enshittified. Its that everybodys pursuit of growth has changed the incentive behind how we generate value in the world, and software enables a specific kind of growth-lust by creating virtual nation states with their own digital despots. While laws may stop Meta from tearing up peoples houses surrounding its offices on 1 Hacker Way, it can happily reroute traffic and engagement on Facebook and Instagram to make things an iota more profitable.The Rot Economy isnt simply growth-at-all-costs thinking its a kind-of secular religion, something to believe in, that everything and anything can be more, should be more, must be more, that we are defined only by our pursuit of more growth, and that something that isnt growing isnt alive, and is in turn inferior.No, perhaps not a religion. Religions are, for the most part, concerned with the hereafter, and contain an ethical dimension that says your present actions will affect your future or your eternity. The Rot Economy is, by every metric, defined by its short-termism. Im not just talking about undermining the long-term success of a business to juice immediate revenue numbers. Im thinking in broad ecosystem terms.The onslaught of AI-generated content facilitated, in no small part, by Google and Microsoft has polluted our information ecosystems. AI-generated images and machine-generated text is everywhere, and its impossible to avoid, as there is no reliable way to determine the provenance of a piece of content with one exception, namely the considered scrutiny of a human. This has irreparably damaged the internet in ways I believe few fully understand. This stuff websites that state falsehoods because an AI hallucinated, or fake pictures of mushrooms and dogs that now dominate Google Images is not going away. Like microplastics or PFAS chemicals, theyre with us forever, constantly chipping away at our understanding of reality.These companies unleashed generative AI on the world or, in the case of Microsoft, facilitated its ascendency without any consideration of what that would mean for the Internet as an ecosystem. Their concerns were purely short-term. Fiscal. The result? Over-leverage in an industry that has no real path to profitability, burning billions of dollars and the environment - both digital and otherwise - along with it.Im not saying that this is how everybody thinks, but I am convinced that everybody is burdened by The Rot Economy, and that digital ecosystems allow the poison of growth to find new and more destructive ways to dilute a human being to a series of numbers that can be made to grow or contract in the pursuit of capital.Almost every corner of our lives has been turned into some sort of number, and increasing that number is important to us bank account balances, sure, but also engagement numbers, followers, number of emails sent and received, open rates on newsletters, how many times something weve seen has been viewed, all numbers set by other people that we live our lives by while barely understanding what they mean. Human beings thrive on ways to define themselves, but metrics often rob us of our individuality. Products that boil us down to metrics are likely to fail to account for the true depth of anything they're capturing.Sidenote: Heres a good example: in an internal document I reviewed from 2017, a Facebook engineer revealed that engagement on the platform had started to dive, but because the company had focused so much energy on time spent on the app as a metric, nobody had noticed (and yes, thats a quote). Years of changes the consequences of which were felt by billions of people were made not based on using the product or talking to users, but a series of numbers that nobody had bothered to check mattered.The change in incentives toward driving more growth actively pushes out those with long-term thinking. It encourages hiring people who see growth as the driver of a company's success, and in turn investment, research and development into mechanisms for growth, which may sometimes be things that help you, but that isn't necessarily the reason they're doing it. Organisational culture and hiring stops prioritising people that fix customer problems, because that is neither the priority nor, sadly, how one makes a business continue to grow.We are all pushed toward growth personal growth, professional growth, growth in our network and our societal status and the terms of this growth are often set by platforms and media outlets that are, in turn, pursuing growth. And as I've discussed, the way the terms of our growth is framed is almost entirely through a digital ecosystem of warring intents and different ways of pursuing growth some ethical, many not.Societal and cultural pressure is nothing new, but the ways we experience it are now elaborate and chaotic. Our relationships professional, personal, and romantic are processed through the funhouse mirror of the platforms, changing in ways both subtle and overt based on the signals we receive from the people we care about, each one twisted and processed through the lens of product managers and growth hackers. Changes to these platforms even subtle ones actively change the lives of billions of people, and it feels like we talk about it like being online is some hobbyist pursuit rather than something that many people do more than seeing real people in the real world.I believe that we exist in a continual tension with the Rot Economy and the growth-at-all-costs mindset. I believe that the friction we feel on platforms and apps between what we want to do and what the app wants us to do is one of the most underdiscussed and significant cultural phenomena, where we, despite being customers, are continually berated and conned and swindled.I believe billions of people are in active combat with their devices every day, swiping away notifications, dodging around intrusive apps, agreeing to privacy policies that they dont understand, desperately trying to find where an option they used to use has been moved to because a product manager has decided that it needed to be somewhere else. I realize its tough to conceptualize because its so ubiquitous, but how much do you fight with your computer or smartphone every day? How many times does something break? How many times have you downloaded an app and found it didnt really do the thing you wanted it to? How many times have you wanted to do something simple and found that its actually really annoying?How much of your life is dodging digital debris, avoiding scams, ads, apps that demand permissions, and endless menu options that bury the simple things that youre actually trying to do?You are the victim of a con. You have spent years of your life explaining to yourself and others that this is just how things are, accepting conditions that are inherently exploitative and abusive. You are more than likely not deficient, stupid, or behind the times, and even if you are, there shouldnt be multi-billion dollar enterprises that monetize your ignorance.And its time to start holding those responsible accountable.Im fairly regularly asked why this all matters to me so much, so as I wrap up the year, Im going to try and answer that question, and explain why it is I do what I do.I spent a lot of time alone as a kid. I didn't have friends. I was insular, scared of the world, I felt ostracised and unnoticed, like I was out of place in humanity. The only place I found any kind of community any kind of real identity was being online. My life was (and is) defined by technology.Had social networking not come along, I am not confident Id have made many (if any) lasting friendships. For the first 25 or so years of my life, I struggled to make friends in the real world for a number of reasons, but made so many more online. I kept and nurtured friendships with people thousands of miles away, my physical shyness less of an issue when I could avoid the troublesome hey Im Ed part that tripped me up so much.Without the internet, Id likely be a resentful hermit, disconnected from humanity, layers of scar tissue over whatever neurodivergence or unfortunate habits I'd gained from a childhood mostly spent alone.Don't feel sorry for me. Technology has allowed me to thrive. I have a business, an upcoming book, this newsletter, and my podcast. I have so many wonderful, beautiful friends who I love that have come exclusively through technology of some sort, likely a social network or the result of a digital connection of some kind.I am immensely grateful for everything I have, and grateful that technology allowed me to live a full and happy life. I imagine many of you feel the same way. Technology has found so many ways to make our lives better, perhaps more in some cases than others. I will never lie and say I don't love it.However, the process of writing this newsletter and recording my podcast has made me intimately aware of the gratuitous, avaricious and intentional harm that the tech industry has caused to its customers, the horrifying and selfish decisions theyve made, and the ruinous consequences that followed.The things I have watched happen this year alone which have been at times an enumeration of over a decade of rot have turned my stomach, as has the outright cowardice of some people that claim to inform the public but choose instead to reinforce the structures of the powerful.I am a user. I am a guy with a podcast and a newsletter, but I am behind the mic and the keyboard a person that uses the same services as you do, and I see the shit done to us, and I feel poison in my veins. I am not holding back, and neither should you. What is being done to us isn't just unfair it's larcenous, cruel, exploitative and morally wrong.Some may try to dismiss what I'm saying as "just social media" or "just how apps work" and if that's what you truly think, you're either a beaten dog or a willing (or unwilling) operative for the people running the con.I will never forgive these people for what theyve done to the computer, and the more I learn about both their intentions and actions the more certain I am that they are unrepentant and that their greed will never be sated. I have watched them take the things that made me human social networking, digital communities, apps, and the other connecting fabric of our digital lives and turned them into devices of torture, profitable mechanisms of abuse, and find it disgusting how many reporters seem to believe it's their responsibility to thank them and explain why it's good this is happening to their readers.Sam Altman is a con artist, a liar, and a sleazy carnival barker who would burn our planet to the ground, steal from millions of people and burn billions of dollars in pursuit of power, and I believe the same can be said of people like Dario Amodei of Anthropic and Mustafa Suleyman of Microsoft.Tim Cook is a wolf in sheeps clothing, slowly allowing the rot to seep into Apples products, slowly adding bothersome subscription products and useless AI features to chip away at the user experience. Apples app store and its repeated support of exploitative microtransaction-laden mobile games built to create gambling-like addiction in adults and children alike, making it billions of dollars a year. Because Apples products are less shitty, it gets a much easier time.Sundar Pichai is the Henry Kissinger of technology a glossy executive that escapes blame despite having caused harm on a global scale. The destruction of Google Search at the hands of Sundar Pichai and Prabhakar Raghavan should be written about like a war crime, and those responsible treated as such.Satya Nadella has aggressively expanded Microsofts various monopolies, the most egregious of which is the Microsoft 365 suite a monopoly over business software that everybody kind of hates that Microsoft prices to undercut the competition, effectively setting the conditions of most business software as either cheaper than Microsoft or slightly better than Microsoft. Nadella has overseen layoffs of tens of thousands of people in the last three years alone, and despite his bullshit growth mindset culture treats his employees and customers as equally disposable.Mark Zuckerberg is a putrid ghoul that has overseen the growth and proliferation of some of the single-most abusive and manipulative software in the world. Meta has grown to a market cap of $1.5 trillion dollars by intentionally making the experience on Instagram and Facebook worse, intentionally frustrating and harming billions of people.These are the people in charge. These are the people running the tech industry. These are the people who make decisions that affect billions of people every minute of every day, and their decisionmaking is so flagrantly selfish and abusive that I am regularly astonished by how little criticism they receive.These men lace our digital lives with asbestos and get told theyre geniuses for doing so because money comes out.I dont know or care whether these men know who I am or read my work, because I only care that you do.I don't give a shit if Sam Altman or Mark Zuckerberg knows my name. I don't care about any of their riches or their supposed achievements, I care that when given so many resources and opportunities to change the world they chose to make it worse. These men are tantamount to war criminals, except in 30 years Mark Zuckerberg may still be seen as a success though I will spend the rest of my life telling you the damage he's caused.I care about you. The user. The person reading this. The person that may have felt stupid, or deficient, or ignorant, all because the services you pay for or that monetize you have been intentionally rigged against you.You aren't the failure. The services, the devices, and the executives are.If you cannot see the significance of the problems I discuss every week, the sheer scale of the rot, the sheer damage caused by unregulated and unrepentant managerial parasites, you are living in a fantasy world and I both envy and worry for you. You're the frog in the pot, and trust me, the stove is on.2025 will be a year of chaos, fear and a deficit of hope, but I will spend every breath I have telling you what I believe and telling you that I care, and you are not alone.For years, Ive watched the destruction of the services and the mechanisms that were responsible for allowing me to have a normal life, to thrive, to be able to speak with a voice that was truly mine. Ive watched them burn, or worse, turned into abominable growth vehicles for men disconnected from society and humanity. I owe my life to an internet I've watched turned into multiple abuse factories worth multiple trillions of dollars and the people responsible get gladhandled and applauded.I will scream at them until my dying fucking breath. I have had a blessed life, and I am lucky that I wasn't born even a year earlier or later, but the way I have grown up and seen things change has allowed me to fully comprehend how much damage is being done today, and how much worse is to come if we don't hold these people accountable. The least they deserve is a spoken or written record of their sins, and the least you deserve is to be reminded that you are the victim.I don't think you realise how powerful it is being armed with knowledge the clarity of what's being done to and why, and the names of the people responsible. This is an invisible war and a series of invisible war crimes perpetuated against billions of people in a trillion different ways every minute of every day, and it's everywhere, a constant in our lives, which makes enumerating and conceptualising it difficult.But you can help.You talking about the truth behind generative AI, or the harms of Facebook, or the gratuitous destruction of Google Search will change things, because these people are unprepared for a public that knows both what theyve done and their sickening, loathsome, selfish and greedy intentions.I realize this isnt particularly satisfying to some, because you want big ideas, big changes that can be made. I dont know what to tell you. I dont know how to fix things. To quote Howard Beale in the movie Network, I dont want you to write your Congressman because I dont know what to tell you to write.But what I can tell you is that you can live your life with a greater understanding of the incentives of those who control the internet and have made your digital lives worse as a means of making themselves rich. I can tell you to live with more empathy, understanding and clarity into the reasons that people around you might be angry at their circumstances, as even those unrelated to technology are made worse by exploitative, abusive and pernicious digital manipulation.This is a moment of solidarity, as we are all harmed by the Rot Economy. We are all victims. It takes true opulence to escape it, and I'm guessing you don't have it. I certainly don't. But talking about it refusing to go quietly, refusing to slurp down the slop willingly or pleasantly is enough. The conversations are getting louder. The anger is getting too hard to ignore. These companies will be forced to change through public pressure and the knowledge of their deeds.Holding these people to a higher standard at scale is what brings about change. Be the wrench in the machine. Be the person that explains to a friend why Facebook sucks now, and who chose to make it suck. Be the person to explain who Prabhakar Raghavan is and what his role was in making Google Search worse. Be the person who tells people that Sam Altman burns $5 billion a year on unsustainable software that destroys the environment and is built upon the large-scale larceny of creative works because he's desperate for power.Every time you do this, you destabilise them. They have succeeded in a decades-long marketing campaign where they get called geniuses for making the things that are necessary to function in society worse. You can change that.I don't even care if you cite me. Just tell them. Tell everybody. Spread the word. Say what they've done and say their names, say their names again and again and again so that it becomes a contagion. They have twisted and broken and hyper-monetised everything how you make friends, fall in love, how you bank, how you listen to music, how you find information. Never let their names be spoken without disgust. Be the sandpaper in their veins and the graffiti on their legacies.The forces I criticize see no beauty in human beings. They do not see us as remarkable things that generate ideas both stupid and incredible, they do not see talent or creativity as something that is innately human, but a commodity to be condensed and monetized and replicated so that they ultimately own whatever value we have, which is the kind of thing youd only believe was possible (or want) if you were fully removed from the human race.You deserve better than theyve given you. You deserve better than Ive given you, which is why Im going to work even harder in 2025. Thank you, as ever, for your time.ShareAbout the authorCommentsWelcome to Where's Your Ed At!Subscribe today. It's free. Please. Great! Youve successfully signed up.Welcome back! You've successfully signed in.You've successfully subscribed to Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At.Your link has expired.Success! Check your email for magic link to sign-in.Success! Your billing info has been updated.Your billing was not updated.

Battlefield RescueMy most anticipated game of 2025 is a game with no title and no date, but its one I hope will make me fall in love with my favourite shooter series all over againThe next Battlefield, whatever it ends up being called, will define the future of the series, for good or ill. None of us know much about it, but I cant wait to see and play it.Image credit: DICE/Electronic Arts Article by Sherif Saed Contributing Editor Published on Dec. 31, 2024 Will the next Battlefield save the series and bring it back as a major player in the shooter space? Is that something that it could even do? EA would certainly like the answer to both of those questions to be yes, and the publisher has been working to secure every possible advantage to help get it there.Those ambitions could easily crash at the shore of a terrible launch, leaving it to only be appreciated by the few whove stuck with Battlefield all those years. As a longtime fan, I really want this next Battlefield to not only deliver, I also want a new staple shooter to go back to regularly.To see this content please enable targeting cookies. We know very little - almost nothing - about the next Battlefield game. EA hasnt even officially said whether itll be coming out in 2025, but the timeline and all recent developments at the publishers various studios make me think that 2025 is the year that makes the most sense.EA wants to recreate the Call of Duty: Warzone setup with the next Battlefield, so it could be that the core, premium game comes out in late-2025, only for the free-to-play battle royale mode to follow early in 2026.We know that some form of testing will begin early in 2025, but its likely to be limited and heavily NDAd, so it may not end up informing us about the nature of the game in a satisfying way. All indications tell us that the next Battlefield will have a modern day setting, and that it will be a return to the series longstanding classes format. How exactly will the Warzone formula influence how this next Battlefield looks? We'll have to wait and see. | Image credit: Activision, Treyarch, Raven.None of that guarantees that were going to get a good game, of course - it just shows that EAs head, at least when it comes to identifying what players want, is in the right place. This is what has me excited to actually see and play it.The thing about Battlefield is that many of its core elements can be found elsewhere. Combined arms combat, asymmetrical classes, slower gameplay, large maps - and even destruction in some cases - they all exist in other games. But no single shooter combines them in quite the same way. Even the recently released Delta Force only serves as a reminder of why that formula is not easy to recreate, as perplexing as that might be.The more failures Battlefield produces, however, the more that perception fades. We all know many former Battlefield players that now spend their time in other games, and Im willing to bet that none of them would tell you that any of those games can scratch the same itch - they only offer enough to keep you hooked, but not so much that you can truly call them of them the next Battlefield.

Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Undocked)Editor's note: This article was originally published in December 2023 as a review in progress. We had hoped to return to Palia once it hit version 1.0, but it's still not there at the time of writing. Therefore we're revisiting one year on to see how things have changed with some new text up top and a score below.A full year on from its initial beta launch, now feels like as good a time as any to revisit Palia to see whats changed. The good and bad news is well, not that much.On the good side, a steady drip of performance improvements and quality-of-life updates have made for an overall better play experience, while relatively minor content drops have brought things like two-story houses and the conclusion of the main storylines Prologue. Theres never been more to do in Palia and all the content is that extra bit more enjoyable due to various nips and tucks that have streamlined things.Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Undocked)However, version 1.0 still feels like its quite a while off. Though the next major explorable area (called the Elderwood) is supposedly due to shake things up when it releases sometime in early 2025, most of the content updates thus far have amounted to baby steps beyond the version we reviewed a year ago. Loading times and performance hiccups are still a pervasive issuePalia runs on the Switch, but wed hardly suggest this as the ideal platform to play it on. The underlying gameplay is still essentially the same as it was; the lack of significant expansions or additions makes this current version feel more like what wed expect out of a months progress, rather than a full year.Now, Palia hasnt had the titanic resources of a behemoth like Genshin Impact dev Hoyoverse powering developmentSingularity 6 was hit by multiple rounds of layoffs in the last year, reducing its staff to just a few dozen before it got acquired by Daybreak Game Company. This in mind, it's apples and oranges to compare its progress to that of other live service games, especially considering that there aren't a whole lot of competitors in the cosy farm-sim MMO space at the moment.Even if its progress this year has felt lacking, Palia is still an all-around decent social farm sim. Its definitely got its jank and it still very much feels like a game that has yet to reach the vaunted 1.0 status, but people are playing (even if it's not exactly bustling) and theres some real magic and charm here that makes it an enjoyable experience in its current form. Who knows, maybe another year or two of progress will see this little sprout finally blossom into something fully formed and beautiful. At the very least, its still worth a download to see what you think.Original text [Wed 20th Dec, 2023 18:00 GMT]: Two years ago, a new developer called Singularity 6comprised of various ex-Riot, Sony, and Blizzard staffannounced Palia, a Massively Multiplayer Community Sim that would aim to bring together the best parts of Stardew Valley and World of Warcraft. Since then, the title has been in early access on PC, and even though its still yet to arrive at its 1.0 release, a Switch version has arrived as part of the continued development. After spending some time with it, Palia shows a lot of promise, though it also notably still feels like an unfinished game.The gameplay loop in Palia feels like it falls neatly between the grindiness of an MMO and the sedate pace of a farm sim. You engage in all the expected homesteading tasks, such as fishing, cooking, and tilling your field, to not just acquire gold to spend on some better furniture for your house, but also to progress an ongoing series of chained questlines from various NPCs that gradually lead you deeper into the world of Palia. Youre encouraged to take things at your own pace and engage in the activities that interest you, though fulfilling quests is usually the quickest way to secure yourself some renown currency that can later be spent at a shrine to increase your focus meter. Focus is what you get when you eat food you cook for yourself, and this consumable resource will ensure that your labor will be rewarded with additional experience for as long as it lasts.Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Undocked)Borrowing a bit from the Rune Factory games, Palia also sells itself as an RPG-lite experience, wherein completing various tasks will fill up an experience bar that will further your effectiveness in that skill. Theres no combat to speak of herethough the bug-catching minigame calls to mind the catching mechanics of Pokmon Legends: Arceusbut it still feels satisfying to build your character according to the tasks that interest you. Most tasks also involve some sort of minigame to change up the gameplay, such as having to keep fish within a narrow zone as you reel them in or having to manually till away the soil on a plot of land.The nearby village of Kilima is home to several NPC residents you can get to know and eventually romance, and we particularly appreciated the use of branched dialogue trees here. You can pick responses according to air, fire, water, and earth, which will not only shape that NPCs perception of your personality, but leads to your character generally taking on more traits that align with the element for which youve selected the most responses. Its not the kind of system that pigeonholes you into a specific personality type over time, but we enjoyed how this spruces up conversations by adding a light gameplay element to responses.Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Undocked)All of this is well and good for a single-player game, but it bears mentioning that the multiplayer elements feel quite downplayed, to the point that we cant help but wonder why Palia was pitched as an MMO at all. Sure, you can see a few other players roaming around the map and theres a shared chat where you can talk with each other. However, you cant even do something as basic as directly trading materials with other players, though you can make use of a roundabout requests system to exchange goods across the server. Meanwhile, shared activities feel a bit like public events in Destiny, wherein anyone who participates in something like mining a specific node for ore will benefit from the drops it gives out.It would maybe feel odd to have some outlandish farming equivalent to raids to participate in as group content, but it feels like this is a multiplayer game that really struggles to implement its multiplayer features. Why can players visit your home, but only help you with watering crops? Why is there a server item request feature, but no way to directly trade with other players? Perhaps these things are on the roadmap, but Palia is full of weird decisions like this where one cant help but wonder if development resources wouldve been better spent on making this a more fully featured single-player title.Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Undocked)As you might expect from a pre-1.0 release, Palia feels very much like a work in progress. At launch, there are only two explorable zones beyond your instanced housing plot, and neither is particularly sprawling. And though theres a fair bit to do between the various tasks and quests available to you, it really begins to run out of steam about a dozen or so hours in as you start to get more into the grind of acquiring resources and waiting for various maker machines to finish converting materials after a fixed amount of real-world time has passed. Make no mistake, there are some good farm sim mechanics here and the potential for a great game is certainly there, but the current build feels like an anemic proof-of-concept of some grand experience that may or may not ever materialize.As for its visuals and performance, Palia is kind of dicey on Switch. The Fortnite-esque art style certainly looks nice, but the resolution gives everything an overly fuzzy appearance in both docked or handheld modes, while muddy textures abound and take an extra few seconds to load no matter where you go. Meanwhile, the frame rate is all over the place, and while this isnt as much of a bother in a game as slow-paced as this, it can be annoying watching things turn into a slideshow for a few seconds when you try to turn the camera as youre running across a field. We didnt note any crashing issuesthough returning to the Switchs home screen for more than a few seconds will boot you and force you to log back inbut Palia overall still feels like a game thats only just barely holding it together on Switch.Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Undocked)As a free-to-play live-service game, microtransactions naturally have got to show up somewhere, and here they manifest in a basic cosmetic shop. You can buy things like outfits and gliders either individually or as part of themed bundles, but it bears mentioning that the prices seem kind of high for whats being offered. Buying the bundle will knock off a few bucks, but youre still looking at paying anywhere from $8 to $17 for clothes in a game that isnt very multiplayer-centric. Fortunately, gameplay-related progress isnt gated behind paying real money, but we still wish the cosmetics economy were a little better balanced.

Image: Square EnixJapanese publication Famitsu has held its traditional end-of-year interview round-up with game creators, speaking to 158 different people about their hopes and aspirations for 2025.The replies weren't totally focused on games some of the interviewees spoke about what they were looking forward to seeing in the worlds of movies, music and tech in 2025 but it was interesting to note that two of the Square Enix staffers included in the round-up mentioned Switch 2.When asked what he was looking forward to the most in 2025, Akitoshi Kawazu, creator and general director of the SaGa series, said:It's not a work, but the successor to the Nintendo Switch that Nintendo will announce in 2025 and the corresponding market strategy that Nintendo will develop. I'm looking forward to it as both a user and a creator.Square Enix co-worker Takaya Ishiyama, director of PARANORMASIGHT: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo, added:The successor to the Nintendo Switch is coming out, right? Before the announcement of a new hardware, there are many moments of suspense and excitement from the perspective of both creators and players.Switch 2 hasn't been officially shown off yet, but we've seen plenty of hints at what it might look like recently. "It's feast or famine, really"Set your AlarmosEverything about the "Switch successor"[source famitsu.com, via x.com]See AlsoShare:01 Damien has been writing professionally about tech and video games since 2007 and oversees all of Hookshot Media's sites from an editorial perspective. He's also the editor of Time Extension, the network's newest site, which paradoxically is all about gaming's past glories. Hold on there, you need to login to post a comment...Related ArticlesPSA: Switch 2 Is Getting Revealed In The Next 100 DaysSet your AlarmosFinal Fantasy Team Wants To Hear Your Thoughts About The SeriesFill out the Final Fantasy questionnaireNieR:Automata Surpasses Another Sales Milestone, Plans For 2025 TeasedThe 15th anniversary takes place next yearThe HD-2D Series 'Octopath Traveler' Hits Another Sales MilestoneHere's some new artwork to celebrate