More enterprises have moved to pay-for-performance salary and promotion models that measure progress toward goals -- but how do you measure goals for a maintenance programmer who barrels through a request backlog but delivers marginal value for the business, or for a business analyst whose success is predicated on forging intangibles like trust and cooperation with users so things can get done? It’s an age-old question facing companies, now that 77% of them use some type of pay-for-performance model. What are some popular pay-for-performance use cases? A factory doing piece work that pays employees based upon the number of items they assemble. A call center that pays agents based on how many calls they complete per day. A bank teller who gets rewarded for how many customers they sign up for credit cards. An IT project team that gets a bonus for completing a major project ahead of schedule. The IT example differs from the others, because it depends on team and not individual execution, but there nevertheless is something tangible to measure. The other use cases are more clearcut -- although they don’t account for pieces in the plant that were poorly assembled in haste to make quota and had to be reworked, or a call center agent who pushes calls off to someone else so they can end their calls in six minutes or less, or the teller who signs up X number of customers for credit cards, although two-thirds of them never use the credit card they signed up for. Related:In short, there are flaws in pay-for-performance models just as there are in other types of compensation models that organizations use. So, what’s the best path for IT for CIOs who want to implement pay for performance? One approach is to measure pay for performance based upon four key elements: hard results, effort, skill, and communications. The mix of these elements will vary, depending on the type of position each IT staff member performs. Here are two examples of pay per performance by position: 1. Computer maintenance programmers and help desk specialists Historically, IT departments have used hard numbers like how many open requests a computer maintenance programmer has closed, or how many calls a help desk employee has solved. There is merit in using hard results, and hard results should be factored into performance reviews for these individuals -- but hard numbers don’t tell the whole story.  For example, how many times has a help desk agent gone the extra mile with a difficult user or software bug, taking the time to see the entire process through until it is thoroughly solved? lf the issue was of a global nature, did the Help Desk agent follow up by letting others who use the application know that a bug was fixed? For the maintenance programmer who has completed the most open requests, which of these requests really solved a major business pain point? For both help desk and maintenance programming employees, were the changes and fixes properly documented and communicated to everyone with a need to know? And did these employees demonstrate the skills needed to solve their issues? Related:It’s difficult to capture hard results on elements like effort, communication and skills, but one way to go about it is to survey user departments on individual levels of service and effectiveness. From there, it’s up to IT managers to determinate the “mix” of hard results, effort, communication and skills on which the employee will be evaluated, and to communicate upfront to the employee what the pay for performance assessment will be based on. 2. Business analysts and trainers Business analysts and trainers are difficult to quantify in pay for performance models because so much of their success depends upon other people. A business analyst can know everything there is to know about a particular business area and its systems, but if the analyst is working with unresponsive users, or lacks the soft skills needed to communicate with users, the pay for performance can’t be based upon the technology skillset alone.  Related:IT trainers face a somewhat different dilemma when it  comes to performance evaluation: they can produce the training that new staff members need before staff is deployed on key projects,  but if a project gets delayed and this causes trainees to lose the knowledge that they learned, there is little the trainer can do aside from offering a refresher course. Can pay for performance be used for positions like these? It’s a mixed answer. Yes, pay per performance can be used for trainers, based upon how many individuals the trainer trains and how many new courses the trainer obtains or develops. These are the hard results. However, since so much of training’s execution depends upon other people downstream, like project managers who must start projects on time so new skills aren’t lost,  managers of training should also consider pay for performance elements such as effort (has the trainer consistently gone the extra mile to make things work?), skills and communication.  In sum, for both business analysts and trainers, there are hard results that can be factored into a pay for performance formula, but there is also a need to survey each position’s “customers” -- those individuals (and their managers) who utilized the business analyst’s or trainer’s skills and products to accomplish their respective objectives in projects and training. Were these user-customers satisfied?  Summary Remarks The value that IT employees contribute to overall IT and to the business at large is a combination of tangible and intangible results. Pay for performance models are well suited to gauge tangible outcomes, but they fall short when it comes to the intangibles that could be just as important. Many years ago, when Pat Riley was coaching the Los Angeles Lakers, an interviewer asked what type of metrics he used when he measured the effectiveness of individual players on the basketball court. Was it the number of points, rebounds, or assists? Riley said he used an “effort" index. For example, how many times did a player go up to get a rebound, even if he didn’t end up with the ball? Riley said the effort individual players exhibited mattered, because even if they didn’t get the rebound, they were creating situations so someone else on the team could. IT is similar. It’s why OKR International, a performance consultancy, stated “Intangibles often create or destroy value quietly -- until their impact is too big to ignore. In the long run, they are the unseen levers that determine whether strategy thrives or withers.”  What CIOs and IT leadership can do when they use pay for performance is to assure that hard results, effort, communications and skills are appropriately blended for each IT staff position, and its responsibilities and realities -- because you can’t attach a numerical measurement to everything -- but you can observe visible changes that begin to manifest when a business analyst turns around what has been a hostile relationship with a user department and you begin to get things done. 

Once again, Sam Altman wants to show you the future. The CEO of OpenAI is standing on a sparse stage in San Francisco, preparing to reveal his next move to an attentive crowd. “We needed some way for identifying, authenticating humans in the age of AGI,” Altman explains, referring to artificial general intelligence. “We wanted a way to make sure that humans stayed special and central.” The solution Altman came up with is looming behind him. It’s a white sphere about the size of a beach ball, with a camera at its center. The company that makes it, known as Tools for Humanity, calls this mysterious device the Orb. Stare into the heart of the plastic-and-silicon globe and it will map the unique furrows and ciliary zones of your iris. Seconds later, you’ll receive inviolable proof of your humanity: a 12,800-digit binary number, known as an iris code, sent to an app on your phone. At the same time, a packet of cryptocurrency called Worldcoin, worth approximately $42, will be transferred to your digital wallet—your reward for becoming a “verified human.” Altman co-founded Tools for Humanity in 2019 as part of a suite of companies he believed would reshape the world. Once the tech he was developing at OpenAI passed a certain level of intelligence, he reasoned, it would mark the end of one era on the Internet and the beginning of another, in which AI became so advanced, so human-like, that you would no longer be able to tell whether what you read, saw, or heard online came from a real person. When that happened, Altman imagined, we would need a new kind of online infrastructure: a human-verification layer for the Internet, to distinguish real people from the proliferating number of bots and AI “agents.”And so Tools for Humanity set out to build a global “proof-of-humanity” network. It aims to verify 50 million people by the end of 2025; ultimately its goal is to sign up every single human being on the planet. The free crypto serves as both an incentive for users to sign up, and also an entry point into what the company hopes will become the world’s largest financial network, through which it believes “double-digit percentages of the global economy” will eventually flow. Even for Altman, these missions are audacious. “If this really works, it’s like a fundamental piece of infrastructure for the world,” Altman tells TIME in a video interview from the passenger seat of a car a few days before his April 30 keynote address.Internal hardware of the Orb in mid-assembly in March. Davide Monteleone for TIMEThe project’s goal is to solve a problem partly of Altman’s own making. In the near future, he and other tech leaders say, advanced AIs will be imbued with agency: the ability to not just respond to human prompting, but to take actions independently in the world. This will enable the creation of AI coworkers that can drop into your company and begin solving problems; AI tutors that can adapt their teaching style to students’ preferences; even AI doctors that can diagnose routine cases and handle scheduling or logistics. The arrival of these virtual agents, their venture capitalist backers predict, will turbocharge our productivity and unleash an age of material abundance.But AI agents will also have cascading consequences for the human experience online. “As AI systems become harder to distinguish from people, websites may face difficult trade-offs,” says a recent paper by researchers from 25 different universities, nonprofits, and tech companies, including OpenAI. “There is a significant risk that digital institutions will be unprepared for a time when AI-powered agents, including those leveraged by malicious actors, overwhelm other activity online.” On social-media platforms like X and Facebook, bot-driven accounts are amassing billions of views on AI-generated content. In April, the foundation that runs Wikipedia disclosed that AI bots scraping their site were making the encyclopedia too costly to sustainably run. Later the same month, researchers from the University of Zurich found that AI-generated comments on the subreddit /r/ChangeMyView were up to six times more successful than human-written ones at persuading unknowing users to change their minds.  Photograph by Davide Monteleone for TIMEBuy a copy of the Orb issue hereThe arrival of agents won’t only threaten our ability to distinguish between authentic and AI content online. It will also challenge the Internet’s core business model, online advertising, which relies on the assumption that ads are being viewed by humans. “The Internet will change very drastically sometime in the next 12 to 24 months,” says Tools for Humanity CEO Alex Blania. “So we have to succeed, or I’m not sure what else would happen.”For four years, Blania’s team has been testing the Orb’s hardware abroad. Now the U.S. rollout has arrived. Over the next 12 months, 7,500 Orbs will be arriving in dozens of American cities, in locations like gas stations, bodegas, and flagship stores in Los Angeles, Austin, and Miami. The project’s founders and fans hope the Orb’s U.S. debut will kickstart a new phase of growth. The San Francisco keynote was titled: “At Last.” It’s not clear the public appetite matches the exultant branding. Tools for Humanity has “verified” just 12 million humans since mid 2023, a pace Blania concedes is well behind schedule. Few online platforms currently support the so-called “World ID” that the Orb bestows upon its visitors, leaving little to entice users to give up their biometrics beyond the lure of free crypto. Even Altman isn’t sure whether the whole thing can work. “I can see [how] this becomes a fairly mainstream thing in a few years,” he says. “Or I can see that it’s still only used by a small subset of people who think about the world in a certain way.” Blania (left) and Altman debut the Orb at World’s U.S. launch in San Francisco on April 30, 2025. Jason Henry—The New York Times/ReduxYet as the Internet becomes overrun with AI, the creators of this strange new piece of hardware are betting that everybody in the world will soon want—or need—to visit an Orb. The biometric code it creates, they predict, will become a new type of digital passport, without which you might be denied passage to the Internet of the future, from dating apps to government services. In a best-case scenario, World ID could be a privacy-preserving way to fortify the Internet against an AI-driven deluge of fake or deceptive content. It could also enable the distribution of universal basic income (UBI)—a policy that Altman has previously touted—as AI automation transforms the global economy. To examine what this new technology might mean, I reported from three continents, interviewed 10 Tools for Humanity executives and investors, reviewed hundreds of pages of company documents, and “verified” my own humanity. The Internet will inevitably need some kind of proof-of-humanity system in the near future, says Divya Siddarth, founder of the nonprofit Collective Intelligence Project. The real question, she argues, is whether such a system will be centralized—“a big security nightmare that enables a lot of surveillance”—or privacy-preserving, as the Orb claims to be. Questions remain about Tools for Humanity’s corporate structure, its yoking to an unstable cryptocurrency, and what power it would concentrate in the hands of its owners if successful. Yet it’s also one of the only attempts to solve what many see as an increasingly urgent problem. “There are some issues with it,” Siddarth says of World ID. “But you can’t preserve the Internet in amber. Something in this direction is necessary.”In March, I met Blania at Tools for Humanity’s San Francisco headquarters, where a large screen displays the number of weekly “Orb verifications” by country. A few days earlier, the CEO had attended a $1 million-per-head dinner at Mar-a-Lago with President Donald Trump, whom he credits with clearing the way for the company’s U.S. launch by relaxing crypto regulations. “Given Sam is a very high profile target,” Blania says, “we just decided that we would let other companies fight that fight, and enter the U.S. once the air is clear.” As a kid growing up in Germany, Blania was a little different than his peers. “Other kids were, like, drinking a lot, or doing a lot of parties, and I was just building a lot of things that could potentially blow up,” he recalls. At the California Institute of Technology, where he was pursuing research for a masters degree, he spent many evenings reading the blogs of startup gurus like Paul Graham and Altman. Then, in 2019, Blania received an email from Max Novendstern, an entrepreneur who had been kicking around a concept with Altman to build a global cryptocurrency network. They were looking for technical minds to help with the project. Over cappuccinos, Altman told Blania he was certain about three things. First, smarter-than-human AI was not only possible, but inevitable—and it would soon mean you could no longer assume that anything you read, saw, or heard on the Internet was human-created. Second, cryptocurrency and other decentralized technologies would be a massive force for change in the world. And third, scale was essential to any crypto network’s value. The Orb is tested on a calibration rig, surrounded by checkerboard targets to ensure precision in iris detection. Davide Monteleone for TIMEThe goal of Worldcoin, as the project was initially called, was to combine those three insights. Altman took a lesson from PayPal, the company co-founded by his mentor Peter Thiel. Of its initial funding, PayPal spent less than $10 million actually building its app—but pumped an additional $70 million or so into a referral program, whereby new users and the person who invited them would each receive $10 in credit. The referral program helped make PayPal a leading payment platform. Altman thought a version of that strategy would propel Worldcoin to similar heights. He wanted to create a new cryptocurrency and give it to users as a reward for signing up. The more people who joined the system, the higher the token’s value would theoretically rise. Since 2019, the project has raised $244 million from investors like Coinbase and the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. That money paid for the $50 million cost of designing the Orb, plus maintaining the software it runs on. The total market value of all Worldcoins in existence, however, is far higher—around $12 billion. That number is a bit misleading: most of those coins are not in circulation and Worldcoin’s price has fluctuated wildly. Still, it allows the company to reward users for signing up at no cost to itself. The main lure for investors is the crypto upside. Some 75% of all Worldcoins are set aside for humans to claim when they sign up, or as referral bonuses. The remaining 25% are split between Tools for Humanity’s backers and staff, including Blania and Altman. “I’m really excited to make a lot of money,” ” Blania says.From the beginning, Altman was thinking about the consequences of the AI revolution he intended to unleash. (On May 21, he announced plans to team up with famed former Apple designer Jony Ive on a new AI personal device.) A future in which advanced AI could perform most tasks more effectively than humans would bring a wave of unemployment and economic dislocation, he reasoned. Some kind of wealth redistribution might be necessary. In 2016, he partially funded a study of basic income, which gave $1,000 per-month handouts to low-income individuals in Illinois and Texas. But there was no single financial system that would allow money to be sent to everybody in the world. Nor was there a way to stop an individual human from claiming their share twice—or to identify a sophisticated AI pretending to be human and pocketing some cash of its own. In 2023, Tools for Humanity raised the possibility of using the network to redistribute the profits of AI labs that were able to automate human labor. “As AI advances,” it said, “fairly distributing access and some of the created value through UBI will play an increasingly vital role in counteracting the concentration of economic power.”Blania was taken by the pitch, and agreed to join the project as a co-founder. “Most people told us we were very stupid or crazy or insane, including Silicon Valley investors,” Blania says. At least until ChatGPT came out in 2022, transforming OpenAI into one of the world’s most famous tech companies and kickstarting a market bull-run. “Things suddenly started to make more and more sense to the external world,” Blania says of the vision to develop a global “proof-of-humanity” network. “You have to imagine a world in which you will have very smart and competent systems somehow flying through the Internet with different goals and ideas of what they want to do, and us having no idea anymore what we’re dealing with.”After our interview, Blania’s head of communications ushers me over to a circular wooden structure where eight Orbs face one another. The scene feels like a cross between an Apple Store and a ceremonial altar. “Do you want to get verified?” she asks. Putting aside my reservations for the purposes of research, I download the World App and follow its prompts. I flash a QR code at the Orb, then gaze into it. A minute or so later, my phone buzzes with confirmation: I’ve been issued my own personal World ID and some Worldcoin.The first thing the Orb does is check if you’re human, using a neural network that takes input from various sensors, including an infrared camera and a thermometer. Davide Monteleone for TIMEWhile I stared into the Orb, several complex procedures had taken place at once. A neural network took inputs from multiple sensors—an infrared camera, a thermometer—to confirm I was a living human. Simultaneously, a telephoto lens zoomed in on my iris, capturing the physical traits within that distinguish me from every other human on Earth. It then converted that image into an iris code: a numerical abstraction of my unique biometric data. Then the Orb checked to see if my iris code matched any it had seen before, using a technique allowing encrypted data to be compared without revealing the underlying information. Before the Orb deleted my data, it turned my iris code into several derivative codes—none of which on its own can be linked back to the original—encrypted them, deleted the only copies of the decryption keys, and sent each one to a different secure server, so that future users’ iris codes can be checked for uniqueness against mine. If I were to use my World ID to access a website, that site would learn nothing about me except that I’m human. The Orb is open-source, so outside experts can examine its code and verify the company’s privacy claims. “I did a colonoscopy on this company and these technologies before I agreed to join,” says Trevor Traina, a Trump donor and former U.S. ambassador to Austria who now serves as Tools for Humanity’s chief business officer. “It is the most privacy-preserving technology on the planet.”Only weeks later, when researching what would happen if I wanted to delete my data, do I discover that Tools for Humanity’s privacy claims rest on what feels like a sleight of hand. The company argues that in modifying your iris code, it has “effectively anonymized” your biometric data. If you ask Tools for Humanity to delete your iris codes, they will delete the one stored on your phone, but not the derivatives. Those, they argue, are no longer your personal data at all. But if I were to return to an Orb after deleting my data, it would still recognize those codes as uniquely mine. Once you look into the Orb, a piece of your identity remains in the system forever. If users could truly delete that data, the premise of one ID per human would collapse, Tools for Humanity’s chief privacy officer Damien Kieran tells me when I call seeking an explanation. People could delete and sign up for new World IDs after being suspended from a platform. Or claim their Worldcoin tokens, sell them, delete their data, and cash in again. This argument fell flat with European Union regulators in Germany, who recently declared that the Orb posed “fundamental data protection issues” and ordered the company to allow European users to fully delete even their anonymized data. (Tools for Humanity has appealed; the regulator is now reassessing the decision.) “Just like any other technology service, users cannot delete data that is not personal data,” Kieran said in a statement. “If a person could delete anonymized data that can’t be linked to them by World or any third party, it would allow bad actors to circumvent the security and safety that World ID is working to bring to every human.”On a balmy afternoon this spring, I climb a flight of stairs up to a room above a restaurant in an outer suburb of Seoul. Five elderly South Koreans tap on their phones as they wait to be “verified” by the two Orbs in the center of the room. “We don’t really know how to distinguish between AI and humans anymore,” an attendant in a company t-shirt explains in Korean, gesturing toward the spheres. “We need a way to verify that we’re human and not AI. So how do we do that? Well, humans have irises, but AI doesn’t.”The attendant ushers an elderly woman over to an Orb. It bleeps. “Open your eyes,” a disembodied voice says in English. The woman stares into the camera. Seconds later, she checks her phone and sees that a packet of Worldcoin worth 75,000 Korean won (about $54) has landed in her digital wallet. Congratulations, the app tells her. You are now a verified human.A visitor views the Orbs in Seoul on April 14, 2025. Taemin Ha for TIMETools for Humanity aims to “verify” 1 million Koreans over the next year. Taemin Ha for TIMEA couple dozen Orbs have been available in South Korea since 2023, verifying roughly 55,000 people. Now Tools for Humanity is redoubling its efforts there. At an event in a traditional wooden hanok house in central Seoul, an executive announces that 250 Orbs will soon be dispersed around the country—with the aim of verifying 1 million Koreans in the next 12 months. South Korea has high levels of smartphone usage, crypto and AI adoption, and Internet access, while average wages are modest enough for the free Worldcoin on offer to still be an enticing draw—all of which makes it fertile testing ground for the company’s ambitious global expansion. Yet things seem off to a slow start. In a retail space I visited in central Seoul, Tools for Humanity had constructed a wooden structure with eight Orbs facing each other. Locals and tourists wander past looking bemused; few volunteer themselves up. Most who do tell me they are crypto enthusiasts who came intentionally, driven more by the spirit of early adoption than the free coins. The next day, I visit a coffee shop in central Seoul where a chrome Orb sits unassumingly in one corner. Wu Ruijun, a 20-year-old student from China, strikes up a conversation with the barista, who doubles as the Orb’s operator. Wu was invited here by a friend who said both could claim free cryptocurrency if he signed up. The barista speeds him through the process. Wu accepts the privacy disclosure without reading it, and widens his eyes for the Orb. Soon he’s verified. “I wasn’t told anything about the privacy policy,” he says on his way out. “I just came for the money.”As Altman’s car winds through San Francisco, I ask about the vision he laid out in 2019: that AI would make it harder for us to trust each other online. To my surprise, he rejects the framing. “I’m much more [about] like: what is the good we can create, rather than the bad we can stop?” he says. “It’s not like, ‘Oh, we’ve got to avoid the bot overrun’ or whatever. It’s just that we can do a lot of special things for humans.” It’s an answer that may reflect how his role has changed over the years. Altman is now the chief public cheerleader of a $300 billion company that’s touting the transformative utility of AI agents. The rise of agents, he and others say, will be a boon for our quality of life—like having an assistant on hand who can answer your most pressing questions, carry out mundane tasks, and help you develop new skills. It’s an optimistic vision that may well pan out. But it doesn’t quite fit with the prophecies of AI-enabled infopocalypse that Tools for Humanity was founded upon.Altman waves away a question about the influence he and other investors stand to gain if their vision is realized. Most holders, he assumes, will have already started selling their tokens—too early, he adds. “What I think would be bad is if an early crew had a lot of control over the protocol,” he says, “and that’s where I think the commitment to decentralization is so cool.” Altman is referring to the World Protocol, the underlying technology upon which the Orb, Worldcoin, and World ID all rely. Tools for Humanity is developing it, but has committed to giving control to its users over time—a process they say will prevent power from being concentrated in the hands of a few executives or investors. Tools for Humanity would remain a for-profit company, and could levy fees on platforms that use World ID, but other companies would be able to compete for customers by building alternative apps—or even alternative Orbs. The plan draws on ideas that animated the crypto ecosystem in the late 2010s and early 2020s, when evangelists for emerging blockchain technologies argued that the centralization of power—especially in large so-called “Web 2.0” tech companies—was responsible for many of the problems plaguing the modern Internet. Just as decentralized cryptocurrencies could reform a financial system controlled by economic elites, so too would it be possible to create decentralized organizations, run by their members instead of CEOs. How such a system might work in practice remains unclear. “Building a community-based governance system,” Tools for Humanity says in a 2023 white paper, “represents perhaps the most formidable challenge of the entire project.”Altman has a pattern of making idealistic promises that shift over time. He founded OpenAI as a nonprofit in 2015, with a mission to develop AGI safely and for the benefit of all humanity. To raise money, OpenAI restructured itself as a for-profit company in 2019, but with overall control still in the hands of its nonprofit board. Last year, Altman proposed yet another restructure—one which would dilute the board’s control and allow more profits to flow to shareholders. Why, I ask, should the public trust Tools for Humanity’s commitment to freely surrender influence and power? “I think you will just see the continued decentralization via the protocol,” he says. “The value here is going to live in the network, and the network will be owned and governed by a lot of people.” Altman talks less about universal basic income these days. He recently mused about an alternative, which he called “universal basic compute.” Instead of AI companies redistributing their profits, he seemed to suggest, they could instead give everyone in the world fair access to super-powerful AI. Blania tells me he recently “made the decision to stop talking” about UBI at Tools for Humanity. “UBI is one potential answer,” he says. “Just giving [people] access to the latest [AI] models and having them learn faster and better is another.” Says Altman: “I still don’t know what the right answer is. I believe we should do a better job of distribution of resources than we currently do.” When I probe the question of why people should trust him, Altman gets irritated. “I understand that you hate AI, and that’s fine,” he says. “If you want to frame it as the downside of AI is that there’s going to be a proliferation of very convincing AI systems that are pretending to be human, and we need ways to know what is really human-authorized versus not, then yeah, I think you can call that a downside of AI. It’s not how I would naturally frame it.” The phrase human-authorized hints at a tension between World ID and OpenAI’s plans for AI agents. An Internet where a World ID is required to access most services might impede the usefulness of the agents that OpenAI and others are developing. So Tools for Humanity is building a system that would allow users to delegate their World ID to an agent, allowing the bot to take actions online on their behalf, according to Tiago Sada, the company’s chief product officer. “We’ve built everything in a way that can be very easily delegatable to an agent,” Sada says. It’s a measure that would allow humans to be held accountable for the actions of their AIs. But it suggests that Tools for Humanity’s mission may be shifting beyond simply proving humanity, and toward becoming the infrastructure that enables AI agents to proliferate with human authorization. World ID doesn’t tell you whether a piece of content is AI-generated or human-generated; all it tells you is whether the account that posted it is a human or a bot. Even in a world where everybody had a World ID, our online spaces might still be filled with AI-generated text, images, and videos.As I say goodbye to Altman, I’m left feeling conflicted about his project. If the Internet is going to be transformed by AI agents, then some kind of proof-of-humanity system will almost certainly be necessary. Yet if the Orb becomes a piece of Internet infrastructure, it could give Altman—a beneficiary of the proliferation of AI content—significant influence over a leading defense mechanism against it. People might have no choice but to participate in the network in order to access social media or online services.I thought of an encounter I witnessed in Seoul. In the room above the restaurant, Cho Jeong-yeon, 75, watched her friend get verified by an Orb. Cho had been invited to do the same, but demurred. The reward wasn’t enough for her to surrender a part of her identity. “Your iris is uniquely yours, and we don’t really know how it might be used,” she says. “Seeing the machine made me think: are we becoming machines instead of humans now? Everything is changing, and we don’t know how it’ll all turn out.”—With reporting by Stephen Kim/Seoul. This story was supported by Tarbell Grants.Correction, May 30The original version of this story misstated the market capitalization of Worldcoin if all coins were in circulation. It is $12 billion, not $1.2 billion.

More enterprises have moved to pay-for-performance salary and promotion models that measure progress toward goals -- but how do you measure goals for a maintenance programmer who barrels through a request backlog but delivers marginal value for the business, or for a business analyst whose success is predicated on forging intangibles like trust and cooperation with users so things can get done? It’s an age-old question facing companies, now that 77% of them use some type of pay-for-performance model. What are some popular pay-for-performance use cases? A factory doing piece work that pays employees based upon the number of items they assemble. A call center that pays agents based on how many calls they complete per day. A bank teller who gets rewarded for how many customers they sign up for credit cards. An IT project team that gets a bonus for completing a major project ahead of schedule. The IT example differs from the others, because it depends on team and not individual execution, but there nevertheless is something tangible to measure. The other use cases are more clearcut -- although they don’t account for pieces in the plant that were poorly assembled in haste to make quota and had to be reworked, or a call center agent who pushes calls off to someone else so they can end their calls in six minutes or less, or the teller who signs up X number of customers for credit cards, although two-thirds of them never use the credit card they signed up for. Related:In short, there are flaws in pay-for-performance models just as there are in other types of compensation models that organizations use. So, what’s the best path for IT for CIOs who want to implement pay for performance? One approach is to measure pay for performance based upon four key elements: hard results, effort, skill, and communications. The mix of these elements will vary, depending on the type of position each IT staff member performs. Here are two examples of pay per performance by position: 1. Computer maintenance programmers and help desk specialists Historically, IT departments have used hard numbers like how many open requests a computer maintenance programmer has closed, or how many calls a help desk employee has solved. There is merit in using hard results, and hard results should be factored into performance reviews for these individuals -- but hard numbers don’t tell the whole story.  For example, how many times has a help desk agent gone the extra mile with a difficult user or software bug, taking the time to see the entire process through until it is thoroughly solved? lf the issue was of a global nature, did the Help Desk agent follow up by letting others who use the application know that a bug was fixed? For the maintenance programmer who has completed the most open requests, which of these requests really solved a major business pain point? For both help desk and maintenance programming employees, were the changes and fixes properly documented and communicated to everyone with a need to know? And did these employees demonstrate the skills needed to solve their issues? Related:It’s difficult to capture hard results on elements like effort, communication and skills, but one way to go about it is to survey user departments on individual levels of service and effectiveness. From there, it’s up to IT managers to determinate the “mix” of hard results, effort, communication and skills on which the employee will be evaluated, and to communicate upfront to the employee what the pay for performance assessment will be based on. 2. Business analysts and trainers Business analysts and trainers are difficult to quantify in pay for performance models because so much of their success depends upon other people. A business analyst can know everything there is to know about a particular business area and its systems, but if the analyst is working with unresponsive users, or lacks the soft skills needed to communicate with users, the pay for performance can’t be based upon the technology skillset alone.  Related:IT trainers face a somewhat different dilemma when it  comes to performance evaluation: they can produce the training that new staff members need before staff is deployed on key projects,  but if a project gets delayed and this causes trainees to lose the knowledge that they learned, there is little the trainer can do aside from offering a refresher course. Can pay for performance be used for positions like these? It’s a mixed answer. Yes, pay per performance can be used for trainers, based upon how many individuals the trainer trains and how many new courses the trainer obtains or develops. These are the hard results. However, since so much of training’s execution depends upon other people downstream, like project managers who must start projects on time so new skills aren’t lost,  managers of training should also consider pay for performance elements such as effort (has the trainer consistently gone the extra mile to make things work?), skills and communication.  In sum, for both business analysts and trainers, there are hard results that can be factored into a pay for performance formula, but there is also a need to survey each position’s “customers” -- those individuals (and their managers) who utilized the business analyst’s or trainer’s skills and products to accomplish their respective objectives in projects and training. Were these user-customers satisfied?  Summary Remarks The value that IT employees contribute to overall IT and to the business at large is a combination of tangible and intangible results. Pay for performance models are well suited to gauge tangible outcomes, but they fall short when it comes to the intangibles that could be just as important. Many years ago, when Pat Riley was coaching the Los Angeles Lakers, an interviewer asked what type of metrics he used when he measured the effectiveness of individual players on the basketball court. Was it the number of points, rebounds, or assists? Riley said he used an “effort" index. For example, how many times did a player go up to get a rebound, even if he didn’t end up with the ball? Riley said the effort individual players exhibited mattered, because even if they didn’t get the rebound, they were creating situations so someone else on the team could. IT is similar. It’s why OKR International, a performance consultancy, stated “Intangibles often create or destroy value quietly -- until their impact is too big to ignore. In the long run, they are the unseen levers that determine whether strategy thrives or withers.”  What CIOs and IT leadership can do when they use pay for performance is to assure that hard results, effort, communications and skills are appropriately blended for each IT staff position, and its responsibilities and realities -- because you can’t attach a numerical measurement to everything -- but you can observe visible changes that begin to manifest when a business analyst turns around what has been a hostile relationship with a user department and you begin to get things done. 

Mauricio Rocha | TaAU | Alejandro Castro | OMA | Michel Desvigne | Robert Moses | El Equipo Mazzanti | ContraFuerte |  Batlleiroig | Christian Kerez Earlier this year, news broke that levels of fine particulate matter in Paris had dropped by an astounding 55 per cent since 2005. Through a combination of regulation and public policy, the city has vastly reduced the number of cars on its streets, introducing bike lanes and public green spaces in the place of around 50,000 parking spaces. This issue is dedicated to roads and the architectures that support them. Cities around the world are reckoning with 20th-century car-oriented urban planning, as epitomised by Robert Moses’s New York (p36). Existing roads are increasingly repurposed for broader uses, prioritising pedestrians, cyclists and other forms of movement. São Paulo’s Minhocão has been gradually reclaimed by residents, and the restoration of a historical promenade in Reus is inclusive for all. Meanwhile, OMA’s new bridge in Bordeaux is designed to host public events – as well as six lanes of motorised traffic. Elsewhere, automobile infrastructure continues to expand; in Bahrain, four new car parks stand largely empty, and a roadside service station in Colombia is yet to be occupied. Roads promise prosperity and progress, often with expansionist ambitions; as Nadi Abusaada writes, ‘The road is both the myth and mechanism of the colonial frontier’.  Electric vehicles are now heralded as the future of transport, but as Nelo Magalhães writes in this issue’s keynote, ‘EVs do nothing to change the mass of roads or the issue of their maintenance’. The shift needed is more radical and wide‑reaching.  1522: Roads cover (above)Highway #5, Los Angeles, California, USA (2009) is part of Edward Burtynsky: The Great Acceleration, an exhibition on view at the International Center of Photography in New York City until 28 September. In it, a motorway bulldozes its way through suburbia, sending out smaller branches that further subdivide it. Credit: © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Flowers Gallery, London folio (lead image)Home follows a family living in a house next to an uncompleted motorway, who reclaim it, temporarily, as an extension of their home. Credit: Album / Alamy keynote How much does your road weigh? Nelo Magalhãesbuilding Malecón de Villahermosa by Taller de Arquitectura Mauricio Rocha, TaAU and Alejandro Castro in Villahermosa, Mexico Laure Nashed building Simon Veil bridge by OMA and Michel Desvigne Paysagiste in Bordeaux, France John Bingham-Hall reputations Robert Moses Andy Battlebuilding Control and operations centre by El Equipo Mazzanti and ContraFuerte in Bolombolo, Colombia Felipe Walter essay Cape to Cairo Sara Salem essay A short history of the roadblock Jan-Werner Müller outrage The Amazonian road to COP30 Martha Dillonrevisit Schlangenbader Straße estate in Berlin, Germany Sophie Lovell essay Living with the Big Worm Richard J Williamsbuilding Passeig de Boca de la Mina by Batlleiroig in Reus, Spain Blanca Pujals essay Taking Norway’s scenic routes Tomà Berlanda building Pearling Path car parks by Christian Kerez in Muharraq, Bahrain Oliver Wainwright typology Petrol station Tom Wilkinson essay The road is the frontier Nadi Abusaada

How Many 0s? 007 First Light officially revealed as the title for Hitman dev's James Bond game, and we'll see it in action later this week This week is IO Interactive's big 007 coming out party, as the studio's next James Bond game has been officially unveiled - or at least its title has been. Image credit: IO Interactive News by Sherif Saed Contributing Editor Published on June 3, 2025 IO Interactive has officially dropped the first real news on its in-development James Bond game since it was initially announced back in 2020. The game is called 007 First Light, and IO revealed it with nothing but a single piece of art on Twitter. The good news is that we won’t have to wait too long to actually see more, because IO is planning some big events this week. To see this content please enable targeting cookies. Alongside this teaser, the developer also announced its first-ever showcase. Dubbed IOI Showcase, the event is being held in person in Los Angeles this Friday, June 6. It’s also going ot be livestreamed, of course, kicking off at 6pm PT, 9pm ET, 2am UK. As you may have already realised, that’s a few hours after Summer Game Fest’s kick-off show, which will be going live 2pm PT on the same day. It’s very likely that Geoff Keighley’s show will bring a first-look teaser that directs viewers towards the showcase taking place a couple of hours afterwards. The IOI Showcase will deliver our first look at gameplay, but it’s also going to offer some updates on IOI Partners games such as the upcoming MindsEye, as well as some Hitman news for good measure. 007 First Light does not have a release target, and though it was initially announced as a multi-platform title (and the start of a trilogy), the only officially confirmed one of those is the upcoming Switch 2. The game will very likely also be released day-and-date on PC, PlayStation, and Xbox. Friday’s event will no doubt clear all that up for us, and maybe even provide a proper release date for one of the most mysterious games currently in development. 007 First Light is an origin story with an original character that’s not based on any existing Bond portrayal in the films. It stars a young James Bond with his own stories in a separate canon.

Nichols Canyon cuts through the south side of the Hollywood Hills, stretching from Hollywood Boulevard in the south up to Mulholland Drive in the north. Made famous by David Hockney, whose 1980 painting of the canyon sold for just over $41M in 2020, the area remains a thriving artist's community. What better place for Elle Decor A-List designer Oliver Furth to build a "creative cottage" for his partner, The Culture Creative founder Sean Yashar?Furth and Yashar, who've been together 14 years, met in the industry and purchased their home 7 years ago. When the lot next door—a pines-filled acre with a tiny house on it—came up for sale, the couple jumped at the chance to buy. "Anyone else would've torn it down and built something bigger," says Furth. "We replaced the windows and redid the kitchen and bathrooms, but we leaned into its size." Now drenched in Yashar's signature "eau de nil" pastel tones, the cottage embraces the character of its original 1940s structure while serving as a cutting-edge space for creativity.Kort HavensIn the sitting room, a Philippe Starck chrome side table from the original Royalton Hotel, from 1988, holds a place of pride with a group of Peter Shire and Ron Arad vintage chairs and a Rachel Shillander pyramidal lamp. Art includes greats of LA’s past and present: a Laddie John Dill mixed media, a Sam Falls tapestry, a Tom Holland metal relief, and a Strauss Bourque-LaFrance painting."All of my work is really portraiture." —Oliver Furth"My clients are all muses to me," says Yashar, who provides consulting services for designers. "I have to be a good listener and understand who the client is and how they connect to decorative arts history, so I spend a lot of time researching. How else can I be an authority?"To that end, the space is designed to provide a moment to reflect and the fodder to rev into high gear in equal measures; to facilitate rest as much as the chance to recharge. Following in the footsteps of Albert Hadley and Tony Duquette (who once declared malachite a neutral), Furth color-drenched the space in a mint green. "That color is the envelope—that's what I call it," says Furth. "We kept it very tight by lacquering the floors, the walls, and the ceiling in that color. Even the cabinetry and the appliances are in that mint. It allows us to have this object-driven interior space by unifying everything with color."Kort HavensA vintage Joe D’Urso for Knoll desk, Sam Maloof desk chair, Christopher Prinz stool and felt-clad speaker by Studio AHEAD create a sleek composition under an Ingo Mauer chandelier in the office. Art includes a triptych of photographs by David Benjamin Sherry, and framed magazine ads from Yashar’s parents’ furniture store, Moda Italia, from 1990.The seafoam hue unites not only the interior, but also decades of decorative history: Yashar found that the architect Paul Williams, who worked in LA in the 1940's and 50's, used a similar shade in many projects. "There's a lot of history and narrative within this color that maybe not everyone will be able to know, but hopefully everyone can feel," says Yashar. Clocking in at roughly 1,000-square-feet, the interior is now a mixture of millennial aesthetics, showcasing Yashar's love for design culture icons like Mario Buatta and Saul Bass. The entry sets the tone with its metal-and-glass Dutch door. A mixed-use meeting room offers a blend of contrasts, from Buatta-inspired shades in a Dickies-esque khaki twill to antique Chippendale chairs juxtaposed with 1990s Marc Newson tables. "All of my work is really portraiture," says Furth, "so this was an opportunity to help create this sort of portrait of Sean and his business." "Sometimes things just resonate...you just know when it's right." —Sean YasharThe sitting room features iconic design pieces, including a worn black leather sofa from the 1980s and a Philippe Starck table from the Royalton Hotel. Peter Shire and Ron Arad chairs are paired with conceptual furniture inspired by Dan Friedman. The kitchen celebrates postwar and ’80s influences with Smeg appliances and works by Soft Baroque and Patrick Nagel, grounded by a custom table from Studio MUKA. "A lot of people know me for my interest in eighties and nineties design culture," says Yashar. "But when I think eighties or nineties, I don't think of one thing. I don't want to choose. So I want to have Joe D'Urso high-tech track lighting, and I want it against these Mario Buatta-style balloon shades. I like that duality."Outside, a Persian-inspired courtyard nods to Yashar's heritage while offering dining and lounging areas that showcase rare 1980s furniture, including a Peter Lane ceramic table and one-off mint-colored Richard Schultz seating. The courtyard’s natural and faux vine murals create a satirical trompe-l’oeil effect, celebrating real-versus-virtual artistry. "I think we're both big believers in feeling," says Yashar. "Sometimes things just resonate. You can't really put your finger on it, but you just know that it's right."Sean SantiagoDeputy EditorSean Santiago is ELLE Decor's Deputy Editor, covering news, trends and talents in interior design, hospitality and travel, culture, and luxury shopping. Since starting his career at an interior design firm in 2011, he has gone on to cover the industry for Vogue, Architectural Digest, Sight Unseen, PIN-UP and Domino. He is the author of The Lonny Home (Weldon Owens, 2018), has produced scripted social content for brands including West Elm and Streeteasy, and is sometimes recognized on the street for his Instagram Reels series, #DanceToDecor

Take a look at our latest curated selection of architecture and design firms currently hiring on Archinect Jobs: This week's featured employer highlight includes job openings in New York City/Brooklyn and Los Angeles/El Segundo. For even more opportunities, visit the Archinect job board and explore our active community of job seekers, firms, and schools. New York City-based architecture, construction, and development firm GLUCK+ has openings for a Project Architect and an Entry Level Designer. The Project Architect should have three to five years of experience, proficiency with Revit, AutoCAD, and Adobe Creative Suite, and experience working on institutional/educational and multi-family residential projects. The Designer should have up to three years of experience, experience with Revit and AutoCAD, construction documentation experience on single family, mixed use, and/or institutional projects. House (s) in the Mountains by GLUCK+.In Los Angeles, Nwankpa Design is hiring for an Int...

As if early June wasn't already going to be a wild enough time in the gaming world with the arrival of the Nintendo Switch 2, that's also when a whole host of showcases takes place as part of Summer Game Fest. Along with the two blockbuster events — Summer Game Fest Live and the Xbox Games Showcase — there are a bunch of other ones in store, including the always-delightful Day of the Devs. There could be even more on the docket. There's always a chance that Nintendo and Sony will run a Direct or State of Play, respectively, over the next few weeks. Ubisoft hasn't yet announced a Forward event for this year — perhaps because it has delayed a bunch of big games and isn't ready to talk about them.  As things stand, SGF is slated to run from June 6 until June 8. With E3 officially dead (organizer Entertainment Software Association is planning an industry-focused event for next April instead), SGF is now the de facto replacement and the biggest event for announcements and updates this side of Gamescom in August. We'll update this preview as more details about the showcases emerge, including additional events in the SGF nebula. We'll embed videos for each stream as they become available as well. Engadget will be on the ground in Los Angeles for the in-person side of SGF, which is for media and creators. We'll be bringing you hands-on impressions of many of the games that are featured during SGF Live. Most folks will be keeping up with everything from home, though. To that end, here's a breakdown of how to watch Summer Game Fest 2025 and what to expect from the extravaganza (we're bound to get a Hollow Knight: Silksong release date this time, right?!?!). Summer Game Fest 2024 schedule Summer Game Fest Live — June 6, 5PM ET Day of the Devs — June 6, 7PM ET Devolver Direct — June 6, 8PM ET Wholesome Direct — June 7, 12PM ET Women-led Games Showcase — June 7, 1PM ET Latin American Games Showcase — June 7, 2PM ET Green Games Showcase — June 7, 4PM ET Xbox Games Showcase — June 8, 1PM ET Death Stranding 2: On The Beach Live Game Premiere — June 8, 10PM ET How to watch Summer Game Fest Live — June 6, 5PM ET Watch on YouTube or Twitch Putting aside our annoyance at the timing of this showcase — late on a Friday evening in the UK and right when many folks on the East Coast are clocking out for the weekend — Summer Game Fest Live is one of the bigger events in early June. It starts at 5PM ET and will run for two hours. Organizers are promising "spectacular new video game announcements, surprises and reveals." That's pretty compelling, especially since host Geoff Keighley (rightfully) downplayed expectations ahead of last year's show.  We do know about a few games that will appear. SGF Live will include a fresh look at Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, a Soulslike action RPG from Leenzee, a studio based in China. That game will arrive in July. Open-world MMORPG Chrono Odyssey will make an appearance as well. Oh, and Hideo Kojima will be there, of course. SGF Live takes place just a couple of weeks before Kojima's Death Stranding 2: On the Beach arrives, so we'll likely get another peek at that game before a more in-depth event on June 8 (more on that momentarily). Perhaps some of the other projects Kojima's working on will get some time in the limelight too. We’re proud to welcome a record-setting 60+ partners for #SummerGameFest 2025, a global celebration of video games in Los Angeles this June. pic.twitter.com/1TZkEbKlHt— Geoff Keighley (@geoffkeighley) May 28, 2025 Keighley has also released an initial list of partners for SGF. It includes big names such as PlayStation, Nintendo Switch 2, Xbox, Steam, 2K, Epic Games and Square Enix. On the list is IO Interactive, so perhaps we'll get more information about the James Bond game that the Hitman studio has been working on for several years.  Embark Studios is there as well, and given that there's a lot of hype around its upcoming extraction shooter, Arc Raiders, there'll be high hopes for a release date for that one. On top of that, CD Projekt Red will be at SGF, but it's more likely to be promoting Cyberpunk 2077's arrival on the Nintendo Switch 2 than shining a spotlight on The Witcher 4 (it feels a little too early for the latter after the reveal trailer at The Game Awards in December). You can watch SGF Live on more than 20 platforms, including YouTube (that stream will be available in 4K at 60 fps), Twitch, X, TikTok, Steam and international services. The event will stream live from the YouTube Theater, and you can attend in person, if you like. In any case, we'll be bringing you all the major news from Summer Game Fest Live. We just can't promise we won't have an adult beverage with an umbrella next to us while we're covering the event. How to watch Day of the Devs — June 6, 7PM ET Watch on YouTube (the same stream as SGF Live above) or Twitch  Immediately after SGF Live ends, the YouTube and Twitch streams will segue into the summer 2025 edition of Day of the Devs. This indie-focused showcase invariably has a fantastic lineup of games worth keeping an eye on. Among the games making appearances are Possessor(s) from Heart Machine and "nightmarish RPG" Neverway from Coldblood and co-publisher Outersloth. We'll also see something from House House (Untitled Goose Game) — presumably the co-op "walker-talker" Big Walk that was revealed in 2023. In all, Day of the Devs will feature 20 games.  Last year's show included 2024 game(s) of the year contender UFO 50, the very intriguing platformer Screenbound, survival climbing game Cairn, the delightfully kooky-looking Building Relationships and sci-fi mystery Phoenix Springs. My Steam wishlist somehow expands quite significantly after each Day of the Devs showcase. Weird how that always happens. How to watch Devolver Direct — June 6, 8PM ET Watch on YouTube (the same stream as SGF Live and Day of The Devs above) or Twitch  Sorry to everyone who was hoping for Baby Steps and Skate Story release dates from the SGF edition of Devolver Direct. This installment will be entirely focused on one game, and it's neither of those. Devolver Digital will be showing off a previously unannounced title called Ball x Pit: The Kenny Sun Story. The publisher hasn't revealed any more details about this game yet, but apparently it's one that the Devolver "team themselves can't even put down — hundreds of hours later." Devolver's got a strong track record, so this will probably be worth your attention. How to watch Wholesome Direct — June 7, 12PM ET Watch on YouTube or Twitch Definitely don't overlook the smaller events that take place during SGF, as you can always find plenty of treats among them. One such event is the Wholesome Direct, which will feature around 60 cozy games. It will include world premieres, demo announcements and updates from publishers and developers including Playstack, btf Games, ustwo games and Wētā Workshop (whose Tales of the Shire: A The Lord of The Rings Game arrives in July). How to watch Women-led Games Showcase — June 7, 1PM ET Watch on YouTube This one does what it says on the tin. It's a showcase featuring games from women-led and majority-women studios. Women-led Games will feature 39 titles, including world premieres and release dates. How to watch Latin American Games Showcase — June 7, 2PM ET Watch on YouTube The Latin American Games Showcase will feature more than 50 games, all of which are from Latin American developers, oddly enough. Expect world premieres, game update news and more from this one. How to watch Green Games Showcase — June 7, 4PM ET Watch on YouTube The Green Games Showcase is a new addition to the lineup for 2025. This will focus on the game's industry's "growing commitment to the environment." It will feature games that make direct contributions to green initiatives. Other titles in the showcase center around sustainability, and some are designed to raise awareness or drive action regarding environmental causes. Amazon Games, Skybound Games and Team17 are among those taking part. The stream will include a Q&A about how games can inspire meaningful action on climate change. There will also be a fundraising drive to help plant 50,000 trees. How to watch Xbox Games Showcase — June 8, 1PM ET Watch on YouTube or Twitch (there's a separate ASL stream on Twitch too) What's the over/under on the number of times the phrase "day one with Game Pass" will appear on this stream? That's one phrase you can definitely expect to hear, but Microsoft will have plenty to share here. It's the biggest Xbox showcase of the year. There will be reveals and updates from across Xbox Game Studios, Bethesda and Activision Blizzard. Games that the company has in the pipeline include Fable (2026), Perfect Dark, Gears of War: E-Day, Everwild, State of Decay 3, Clockwork Revolution, Hideo Kojima's OD and Contraband. It feels a little early for an update on The Elder Scrolls 6 since that game is still years away. But we may find out more about those other games and some we don't yet know about, such as whatever Double Fine and Toys for Bob are working on.  I have my fingers crossed for more info on the Blade game that Arkane Studios is working on. It's a reasonably safe bet that we'll see something about the next Call of Duty here as well. There's always going to be space for offerings from Microsoft's partner studios and publishers too. Plus, you never know, we might get a peek at what Halo Studios has been cooking up. One game we'll definitely hear more about on June 8 is The Outer Worlds 2. That's getting its own time in the spotlight, with a dedicated event that will start as soon as the main Xbox Games Showcase ends. How to watch Death Stranding 2 Live Game Premiere — June 8, 10PM ET Watch on YouTube Kojima will join Keighley at the Orpheum Theatre in LA to kick off a world tour of events to celebrate the arrival of Death Stranding 2: On The Beach. There will be a panel discussion with some special guests, as well as a live demo of the highly anticipated game. In case you can't make it in person (ticket registration is open now), you can watch the hour-long event live at home.  Meanwhile, several publishers and other organizations are hosting their own shows around SGF. Here's when those will take place:  Access-Ability Summer Showcase — June 6, 11AM ET, on YouTube, YouTube with British Sign Language and Twitch (featuring games made by disabled developers and the accessibility options in each title) IGN Live — throughout June 7 and 8, on YouTube and Twitch Southeast Asian Games Showcase — June 7, 3PM ET, on YouTube Future Games Show — June 7, 4PM ET, on YouTube (featuring more than 40 games)  Frosty Games Fest — June 7, 7PM ET, on YouTube (showcasing "the coolest upcoming and recently released games made in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand") PC Gamer's PC Gaming Show — June 8, 3PM ET, on YouTube (with 50-plus games) Phew. Get ready, gamers. Details on many, many new games are coming your way very soon.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/summer-game-fest-2025-what-new-game-announcements-to-expect-and-how-to-watch-162140617.html?src=rss

Death Stranding 2: On the Beach technically launches on June 26, but you'll be able to get an early look at the game and hear from a panel of people who worked on it thanks to a newly announced event that will close out Summer Game Fest on June 8. The "Death Stranding 2: On the Beach Game Premiere" will be hosted by Geoff Keighley and feature live gameplay of the upcoming game, alongside a panel discussion with Hideo Kojima and other talent who worked on it. Death Stranding 2: On the Beach picks up after the events of the first Death Stranding, following Sam Porter Bridges (Norman Reedus) as he's drawn back into the world of schlepping things by Fragile (Léa Seydoux). Based on recent trailers, the sequel appears to build on the traversal challenges of the original, with new types of terrain and weather to navigate and new tools at Sam's disposal to make it easier. You can attend in-person at the Orpheum Theatre on June 8 at 10PM ET / 7PM PT by registering for tickets online. The event will also stream live on YouTube for anyone who's not able to make the trek to Los Angeles to attend. This premiere event kicks-off a world tour — appropriately titled the "Death Stranding World Strand Tour 2" — promoting Death Stranding 2: On the Beach leading up to the game's launch and extending well beyond it. A24 and Kojima Productions also recently announced that the film adaptation of Death Stranding will be written and directed by Michael Sarnoski, the director behind A Quiet Place: Day One and Pig. Considering the bromance / business partnership Kojima and Keighley have maintained over the last few years, it's not at all surprising they're teaming up to promote the new Death Stranding. Of course, the event is just one of several livestreams that will pad out Summer Game Fest 2025, which includes the Keighley-hosted Summer Game Fest Live, and more intriguing games showcases like Day of the Devs and the Devolver Direct.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/playstation/how-to-watch-the-death-stranding-2-premiere-event-at-summer-game-fest-184514009.html?src=rss