If you want to be a Twitch streamer, you probably need to be a TikToker too

By Charles Pulliam-Moore, a reporter focusing on film, TV, and pop culture. Before The Verge, he wrote about comic books, labor, race, and more at io9 and Gizmodo for almost five years.

PlayStation's busy season of new hardware and accessory releases is officially underway. The slimmer models of PS5 it revealed earlier this year are now available, and time will tell just how popular they're going to be. Unlikely that they will quickly become as scarce as the original models at launch, but I'm sure the slim versions will be pretty popular. People have a couple of hangups with the new consoles though, top of the list being that you can't stand them upright without paying a little extra.

Apple is a little late to adopt generative AI technology, while the company claims it has been working on its iteration for years. The company is rumored to introduce the technology next year with the launch of iOS 18. The AI features will roll out gradually but could be unveiled at its WWDC 2024 event. It is now being reported that some features with generative AI capabilities will be available exclusively for iPhone 16 models.

I'm pretty excited about Remnant 2's first DLC, The Awakened King. Aside from adding a whole new area to one of my favourite games of 2023—a much-appreciated upgrade, since it's built to be played multiple times—it'll also add a new archetype, build-altering jewellery, and even more guns for me to tinker with. 

Live service games are evolving. The major multiplayer shooters of the 2010s are starting to show their age in the 2020s, leaving their stewards to answer an interesting question: How do you move a service game into the future without disrupting its active player base, or starting completely fresh? In the cases of Overwatch 2 and Counter-Strike 2, Blizzard and Valve decided to make a spectacle of it, packaging revamped maps, reworked balance, and engine upgrades as official sequels that effectively overwrote the old games.

Microsoft has introduced its latest AI efforts which are capable of generating character dialogue, and it's got voice actors fearing for the future of the industry. 

It's not just your imagination; there really is something subtly watching you during certain parts of Alan Wake 2.

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth creative director and veteran developer of the original JRPG Tetsuya Nomura has posed a question that's been bugging him for nearly 27 years: why do you all find Sephiroth so attractive? 

Windows Copilot is here, and if we're honest it's a little underwhelming for the time being. Arriving in the optional KB5031455 «Moment 4» update for those of us not in the Windows Insider programme, Copilot is an AI assistant that aims to help you with all sorts of daily tasks via a Chatbot style sidebar. For those of you that feel a little uneasy about an AI assistant inside your OS, the good news is that it can be disabled. For Pro users this is easy enough to do, but if you're running Windows 11 Home it appears you'll need to install a third party tool to achieve the same result.

One of the funniest interactions in is pretty easy to miss. With a game so expansive, many of the tiny details are bound to fly under the radar of the majority of players. These events are made even rarer when they involve unique combinations of items and quests that few players would have thought to experiment with, but they can sometimes lead to hilarious results.

Twitch updated its rules for when streamers who have violated Community Guidelines can appeal, with a way for even perma-banned streamers to get reinstated on the platform. On Oct. 31, the livestreaming platform published an update and shared it via the official Twitch Support account on X (formerly known as Twitter), saying that the appeals process “shouldn’t be a mystery.”

As if to prove modern PC games are self-obsessed narcissists that can't imagine you might want to play something else, here comes Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III with a ridiculous requirement for up to 213GB of storage space. Oh, and that'll need to be 213GB of SSD storage space according to the game's minimum requirements, not one of those clunky old magnetic jobs with spinning platters.