Nick Statt

Marathon is good, I am having fun, and I think this game will be successful. The obsession with convincing one's self and everyone around them that new multiplayer games are doomed to fail is not healthy for the industry or the community.

Trump orders federal agencies to drop Anthropic’s AI AI vs. the Pentagon

Trump admin just handed Anthropic arguably the most valuable free marketing it could ever ask for. Big questions now are whether the company can hold the line and to what extent the damage the administration tries to do here ends up spilling over. www.theverge.com/policy/88648...

Sony’s Bluepoint Pitched ‘Bloodborne’ Remake Before Closure The inside story of why PlayStation closed its beloved subsidiary

Piece of news that will surely be received well by the broader gaming community www.bloomberg.com/news/newslet...

An illustration of a man laying on a prison floor mattress. Under his pillow is an MP3 player tucked away. From the speaker: "From WBEZ Chicacgo, it's THIS AMERICAN LIFE. I'm Ira Glass... Stay with us..."

Jailed during the 2021 coup in Myanmar, American journalist Danny Fenster passed the time by meditating and listening to podcasts that had been smuggled in.

Read the comic Notes from a Burmese Prison: www.theverge.com/cs/features/...

Big move in the ongoing “should AI companies let the government make autonomous murder bots” saga. Anthropic now calling Pete Hegseth’s bluff here. www.anthropic.com/news/stateme...

The dumbest thing about this is that it's the customer who is most likely to be saying please and thank you in almost all interactions, so mandating the workers say it sounds like it would just contort otherwise completely normal conversations.

Burger King will use AI to check if employees say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ Have it your way?

Nobody wants AI surveillance to improve “friendliness.” This is dehumanizing nonsense. Who asked for this? www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

I've played the Dead Spies demo for almost three hours and all I've done is talk to four different people and dial a number on a pay phone. We are so back.

YouTube video by A24 Backrooms | Official Teaser HD | A24

Oh cool the new A24 'Backrooms' film is actually about generative AI. www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKGh...

I interviewed Roblox's head of parental advocacy for Vulture about safety on the platform 👀

Hank Green lets loose on YouTube, billionaires, and algorithms YouTuber Hank Green on transitioning Complexly into a nonprofit and challenging the AI and algorithm model of the web.

Here's @hankgreen.bsky.social talking about converting Complexly into a nonprofit, why more people should just ask the billionaires for money, and why my platform / AI nihilism isn't inevitable. An all-time Decoder, really www.theverge.com/podcast/8820...

Inside Microsoft’s big Xbox leadership shake-up Microsoft has a new gaming CEO

Really good play by play from the always excellent @tomwarren.co.uk on what went down at Xbox last week and all the inner turmoil that preceded it. www.theverge.com/tech/883015/...

Child’s Play, by Sam Kriss Tech’s new generation and the end of thinking

This is extremely good harpers.org/archive/2026...

How many studios will get eaten and ultimately destroyed by the insatiable hunger for live service revenue? Sony is clearly trying to find out.

After spooking Hollywood, ByteDance will tweak safeguards on new AI model Its easier to apologise than ask permission.

In a statement regarding Seedance 2.0, ByteDance says it "respects intellectual property rights," which you might find confuting because SeeDance 2.0 massively violated intellectually property rights. www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

Announcing open-world action RPG Project Windless for PS5 Discover a fantasy universe inspired by the Korean novel series The Bird That Drinks Tears.

My unsolicited advice to the game industry: strive to make games that, at first glance, make people think "this looks fucking outrageous." I think that's actually precisely what people are looking for. blog.playstation.com/2026/02/12/a...

This Year's Oscar Nominees Have Real Fight In Them, Even If Hollywood Doesn't An introduction to The Work, a column about resistance in fiction

introducing my column about resistance in fiction for @aftermath.site. I’m calling it THE WORK

aftermath.site/oscars-revol...

Palantir CEO Alex Karp Recorded a Video About ICE for His Employees In a video shared with Palantir employees, Alex Karp did not explain how ICE is utilizing the company's products. Instead, workers were told they can sign NDAs if they want detailed information.

SCOOP: Tensions at Palantir have grown in recent weeks over the company's work with ICE.

On Friday, CEO Alex Karp tried to calm concerns in an hourlong video that offered few specifics—instead offering NDAs to workers who want to understand how it's empowering ICE.
www.wired.com/story/palant...

Hold on reorienting my entire personality around becoming a Baby Waluigi fan

Tl;dr: The vast majority of adults will never have to interact with our age assurance systems and their experience won't change, because we know Discord and how people use it, so we're designing to respect privacy and deliver a safer experience while minimizing friction for adults. Hey folks – I’ve been on Discord since very early 2016 and actually joined the company in 2017. Safety is one of my areas, so today’s announcement on our blog is something I’ve been pretty involved with. I’ve always cared about Discord's approach to privacy (E2EE for A/V was another of my projects here), so I figured I’d add some more context to today's news. I can say confidently that the vast majority of people will never see age verification. I say this because we launched age assurance in the UK and Australia in 2025, and we have some pretty good data on this now. The idea here is that we can pre-identify most adults based on what we already know (not including your messages!), and that looks to get us pretty far here. No face scans, no IDs, for the vast majority of adults.

And if you are one of the smaller subset of folks that we can't definitively pre-identify, then still, you only have to do it if you're accessing age-restricted servers or channels, or changing certain settings. That's really not most users. (Altho... might be more Redditors, tbh.) Last, I know that there is concern about privacy and data leaks. That's a real concern. The selfie system is built purely client-side, it never leaves your device, and we did that intentionally. That'll work for a bunch of users who aren't pre-identified as adults. But if you do end up in the ID bucket, then yeah, you're right that has some risk. We're doing what we can to minimize this by working with our range of partners (who are different partners than the data leak you read about), and if it's any help, we learned a lot internally from the last issue. But I get if that doesn't necessarily inspire more confidence. Anyway, we’ll be sharing more next month as we get closer to the global roll out about the system, including the technology behind it in March. I honestly wouldn't be happy if we didn't build something good and I am excited about what we’re launching, but please let us know what you think when we share more details. And I really appreciate everybody's feedback here today. We’re definitely reading it!

Discord is already starting to walk things back a little, so people should keep doing what they're doing (cancel Nitro, leave feedback/criticism, direct contact through support tickets/phone/email/etc)

Someone nailed their halftime show bets on Polymarket. An anonymous Polymarket account, created a day before the Super Bowl, bet exclusively on celebrity appearances during Bad Bunny’s performance, and got every single one right. It’s a little less alarmi...

Polymarket and Kalshi, which ran massive markets for the super bowl yday and had at least one person with inside knowledge use that knowledge to win many thousands of dollars www.theverge.com/entertainmen...

The tech industry really said let’s show mainstream America what we’re all about at the Super Bowl and it was just automating b2b SaaS, cryptocurrency, surveillance, and online gambling but insider trading is allowed and encouraged.

Big Tech to Spend $650 Billion This Year as AI Race Intensifies Four of the biggest US technology companies together have forecast capital expenditures that will reach about $650 billion in 2026 — a mind-boggling tide of cash earmarked for new data centers and all...

Getting some distinct "capitalism endgame" vibes from this, and not the utopian future kind. Very much the cyberpunk kind (without any of the fun stuff). www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

*Nods solemnly*

I love sci fi bullshit as much as the next person. But AI hype combined with the grifter / techbro / e/acc cultures is extremely insufferable.

Oh hey. It's me. I'm back. I wanted to talk to all the devs who took the war chest from their popular games (and YouTube careers!) and turned it into a publishing studio to find out what they're doing differently and if its working out for them.
Turns out...yeah seems like its going good!

Not a new issue, I know, but I find it frustrating that I've found myself using old and sometimes literally broken / falling apart tech because companies like Apple refuse to communicate when, or if, they ever plan to release new versions of stuff.

"rich dipshit owner doesn't understand the industry he's bought into and clumsily destroys what made it good" feels less like a narrative unique to the washington post and more like the music that's been playing in the background of all our lives for at least 40 years

"This is a case study in near-instant, self-inflicted brand destruction."

Anthropic says ‘Claude will remain ad-free,’ unlike ChatGPT ‘Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.’

I do appreciate Anthropic’s marketing strategy of just pointing at OpenAI and saying “we’re not those guys.” www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

I would commit crimes for a kitchen with an island that large.