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In just 22 hours, the first trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI has racked up 85 million views, breaking a MrBeast video’s record for most YouTube views in 24 hours. That ranking excludes music videos, but the hype around this long-awaited game could smash past those records too — right now, the most viewed YouTube video in 24 hours is the music video for K-Pop sensation BTS’ song “Butter,” which was viewed 108 million times in that timespan.

The first fruit of the partnership between Fornite-maker Epic Games and Lego is due out this week — along with a host of other games within a game that expand Fortnite’s horizons considerably.

Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer says Microsoft is talking to partners about launching an Xbox mobile store, as first reported by Bloomberg. Spencer made the comment during an interview at the CCXP comics and entertainment convention in Brazil on Thursday.

With a Grand Theft Auto 6 trailer on the horizon, Netflix just got its hands on Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy — The Definitive Edition, the company announced today.

YouTube is expanding its games ambition by rolling out access to a set of online games for Premium users after first testing them with select users back in September. The Google-owned company has started notifying Premium users that they can start trying out more than 30 mini-games.

ByteDance’s gaming ambition has been an expensive, short-lived pursuit.

Today’s jigsaw puzzles don’t always look like yesteryears’, and that’s for the best: Not all of us care for scenery, birds and flowers as much as we like Disney and Pixar, for instance. Let’s not be snobs, classic puzzles can be very enjoyable, too. But there’s a whole world that opens up when you realize that puzzle themes can overlap quite a bit with the kind of stuff we care about at TechCrunch.

Powder, AI-powered clipping software that takes highlights from gaming streams and turns them into short-form videos, will soon be able to detect shouting for gamers to create even better montages. The platform is also working on speech-to-text software so creators can get a transcript of their entire stream and search for keywords.

Cozy game, interior decorating app, learn-to-code primer or something in between, the interactive, 3D spaces builder known as Rooms has made its way to the App Store. The startup, which earlier raised $10 million in seed funding led by a16z, offers a way to design 3D spaces — its “rooms” — that are filled with furniture, décor, pets and tiny avatars. You can turn those rooms into mini-games, if you prefer.

Bazooka Tango — a gaming studio founded by former Rockstar and Riot developers — raised $5 million in a funding round led by BITKRAFT Ventures. The proceeds will be put toward Shardbound, the upcoming immersive multiplayer game that combines trading card game (TCG) elements, tactical maneuvers and digital collectibles.

Unity is joining the rest of the gang in providing generative AI tools for its users, but has been careful (unlike some) to ensure those tools are built on a solidly non-theft-based foundation. Muse, the new suite of AI-powered tools, will start with texture and sprite generation, and graduate to animation and coding as it matures.

Amazon announced another cluster of layoffs this week along with plans to discontinue the Crown channel, a flashy Amazon-run Twitch channel that featured television-like programming. Amazon will also shutter its Game Growth group, which helped creators in the gaming world market themselves.

To stream as their ethereal alter ego, Mai, a VTuber known as M41H41, typically had to juggle at least four to seven different programs. Running all of them at once, however, was both mentally exhausting and a burden on their computer, which could overheat mid-stream. If a program crashed, they’d have to break character to fix it. 

When Pico launched its Oculus Quest challenger in China last year, it did so with great optimism. Light (295 grams) and affordable ($420), the virtual reality headset released by the ByteDance-owned manufacturer was expected to drive adoption in a market inaccessible to Meta.

A prominent choreographer’s lawsuit against Fortnite makerEpic Games is back on after the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appealsoverturned a lower court’s decision to throw the case out last year.

Today’s jigsaw puzzles don’t always look like yesteryears’, and that’s for the best: Not all of us care for scenery, birds and flowers as much as we like Disney and Pixar, for instance. Let’s not be snobs, classic puzzles can be very enjoyable, too. But there’s a whole world that opens up when you realize that puzzle themes can overlap quite a bit with the kind of stuff we care about at TechCrunch.

This thing is a beast — in pretty much every sense. It’s a big, heavy, powerful system, with a bright display, massive battery life and impressive power under the hood. After opening the box, I immediately ported all the contents over from the 15-inch Air I’ve been using daily for several months now, but still, the 16-inch MacBook Pro feels like a different species.

There’s a massive appetite for nostalgia in entertainment right now, and one of gaming’s cultural juggernauts wants to cash in.

Roblox China was once full of promise. Since its localized platform, which is a joint effort with Tencent, abruptly halted operation nearly two years ago, the company has been quiet about its standing in the world’s second-biggest gaming market until now.

In the earliest days of foldables, simply participating was enough to get people to take notice. With every new player on the scene, however, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish oneself from the crowd. As we barrel toward the end of 2023, Samsung is far from the only game in town. We’ve got Google, Motorola, Huawei, Honor and, of course, Oppo, among others.

Almost ten years ago, the online phenomenon “Twitch Plays Pokémon” convened over a million people to play Pokémon Red at the same time, with each player’s keystrokes registering as commands for the one pixelated avatar. Now, like a Magikarp growing into a Gyarados, the evolution of technology begs a new question: can AI play Pokémon?

Microsoft is always moving forward in the field of accessibility, especially in gaming, where its Xbox Adaptive Controller and other features help gamers with disabilities play however is comfortable for them. A couple new updates and a touching short video on how games fit into the rehabilitation process mark the company’s accessibility highlight month.

Netflix is beginning to test its cloud gaming servicein the U.S. after initially launching limited trials in Canada and the U.K. The service, an expansion on the company’s mobile gaming efforts which began in 2021, has seen the streamer picking up gaming studios and licensing titles from individual developers with the intention to make gaming another major arm of its business. With its cloud gaming service, Netflix now allows members to play its games on smart TV and TV-connected devices, like Fire TV, Chromecast, Roku, and others, by using their mobile phone as the gaming controller.

Microsoft has finally done it — nearly two years after first revealing plans to acquire gaming giant Activision Blizzard in a mammoth $68.7 billion deal, it has managed to secure the final regulatory clearance required to make Activision a fully-fledged subsidiary. But with one notable caveat.

It has been a long time coming, but Microsoft’s near-two year attempt to buy gaming giant Activision is finally happening, after the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) accepted a restructured proposal that addresses the CMA’s concerns about Microsoft dominating the cloud gaming market.

French technology company Shadow has confirmed a data breach involving customers’ personal information.

This is a camera upgrade. Full stop. If photos and video aren’t your primary concerns when it comes to buying a new smartphone, there’s virtually no reason to upgrade from the Pixel 7 Pro to the Pixel 8 Pro (check Darrell’s review to see if the same is true for the Pixel 8). The Pixel 8 Pro isn’t a bad phone; it’s more that Google has found itself in the same spot as the rest of the industry.

Weeks after upsetting developers with a proposed runtime fee, only to quickly backtrack on the idea, Unity announced today that CEO John Riccitiello was stepping down from his multiple roles as president, CEO and board chair, going from having a ton of responsibility to having a lot of time on his hands.

Ohm’s Quest is a steampunk-inspired cubical device that acts as a sort of escape game console. You can scan an NFC-enabled card on a side of the cube, and it starts a new story with interactive challenges that you should solve as a team.

Krafton India has launched a gaming incubator in the South Asian nation as it seeks to expand the local ecosystem and support the domestic talent looking to enter the fast-growing gaming market.

Epic Games is laying off 16% percent of its employees, impacting about 870 people, the Fortnite maker announced on Thursday. The company also announced that it’s divesting Bandcamp, an online audio distribution platform it acquired last year, and spinning off most of SuperAwesome, a kid-safe technology developer that it acquired in 2020. The layoffs news was first reported by Bloomberg.

We haven’t heard the last of Epic’s crusade against Apple over the iPhone maker’s App Store fees.

Meta’s new Quest 3 mixed reality headset will allow users to personalize their physical spaces with “augments” —  a series of objects and widgets that are digitally plastered to their real world environment.

Roblox is launching on Meta Quest VR headsets today, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced at the company’s Connect event. The announcement comes as Roblox, a major player in the metaverse space, was rumored to become available on Meta Quest VR headsets sometime this year.

Meta’s Quest Pro arrived to a mixed reaction when it launched late last year. The consensus – if one can be found – was that the headset presented some impressive technological leaps over its consumer predecessor (the Quest 2), but the $1,500 price tag was ultimately prohibitively expensive. If that sounds at all familiar, it’s because that’s more or less the same feedback we see every time an intriguing new headset his the market.

Update: Meta’s moved the start time by 30 minutes to 10:30AM PT/1:30 PM ET. No explanation why, but the sun’s blazing on the presentation area, and crowds are milling about. If you’re virtual, you have a few options for watching. The most accessible appears to be Meta’s developers page. (Original article continues below.)

Meta’s annual Connect conference kicks off with a keynote tomorrow September 27 at 10AM PT/1PM ET.  Facebook’s parent is expected to make the Meta Quest 3 the centerpiece of the event. The latest version of the headset arrives three years after its predecessor and a little under a year since the company unveiled the Quest Pro — a mixed-reality headset aimed at enterprise users.

Unity has done a 180 on a controversial new pricing scheme that users of its cross-platform game engine almost unanimously disparaged. A new pricing policy is still incoming, but it’s far less fraught for independent developers, many of whom threatened to leave the engine and platform behind rather than pay.

The UK’s competition watchdog has signalled it’s preparing to greenlight a restructured proposal for Microsoft to acquire Activision. In an update on its ongoing assessment today it said the deal “makes important changes that substantially address the concerns it set out in relation to the original transaction earlier this year”.

As Microsoft marches toward a new deadline for its planned acquisition of Activision, the company stumbled into an unexpected setback of its own making.

Roblox, the community-focused gaming platform popular amongst kids, has downsized a substantial portion of its talent acquisition team, signaling a shift in the company’s focus from expansion to the bottom line.

Two years after announcing voice chat was coming to Roblox, the gaming company has acquired a voice tech startup, Speechly, offering voice chat moderation, real-time transcription and Voice API that lets companies add AI voice technology and voice interfaces to their products and experiences.

The web3 gaming world has been a work in progress for a handful of years now. Studios in the space have found it difficult to gain Web 2 gamers’ trust and get over the image issues resulting from the “play-to-earn” era, and traction has been slower than predicted. So, what will it take to spur more mainstream gamers to pick up and play web3 games?

Unity, the popular cross-platform game and media development engine, is on the defensive after receiving intense backlash over a controversial new fee structure, which developers using the platform decried as destructive and unfair. Now the company is reportedly looking to walk back the announcement, at least in part.

Apple is making iPadOS 17 available to users today, and one of the most notable features for creators is the support for attaching USB-based cameras and mics. To take advantage of the feature, Reincubate, the company behind Camo, is releasing Camo Studio for iPad as a free app.

Former WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar has joined the board of directors at the online gaming platform company Roblox. The appointment, which was effective as of September 13, will see Kilar joining board chairman and Roblox CEO David Baszucki, as well as lead independent director Anthony P. Lee, and board members Gregory Baszucki, Christopher Carvalho, Gina Mastantuono and Andrea Wong.

When Trombone Champ came out on Steam last September, it was met with immediate internet hooplah. It’s a rhythm game like Guitar Hero, only you’re playing an unforgiving, brassy trombone. If you can’t get the hang of the game, you will be met with a comically awful trombone rendition of classic songs like “Auld Lang Syne” or a Beethoven symphony.

Apple spent some time focusing on games during Tuesday’s iPhone 15 launch event, and while we got the usual mobile devs talking about the improved hardware and software capabilities, we also found out that some very recent top-tier console games are coming to the iPhone, including the Resident Evil 4 remake, Resident Evil Village, and Death Stranding. The iPhone’s distinction from dedicated handheld gaming devices like the Steam Deck introduced more recently has been largely academic – and with the 15 Pro, it’s eroding further still.

Jess Murrey isn’t your typical founder. After ten years working in nonprofits to train young activists, Murrey and behavioral change researcher Alicia Clifton decided that mobile gaming could be an unexpected way to broaden their reach. And so, Wicked Saints was born.

YouTube is letting a select number of users play online games as part of a new experiment. The games will live in a new “Playables” section on YouTube’s home feed, and can be accessed on both desktop and mobile.

IFA technically kicks off today in Berlin, but it seems like Lenovo may have won the thing outright. I’ve given the company plenty of credit in the past for its willingness to try new things in this oft-staid world of consumer electronics, and it’s really come out of the gates swinging.

Garena is relaunching Free Fire in India, a year and a half after the popular mobile title was banned in the South Asian market over national security concerns.

The long-awaited “Skyrim in space,” Starfield, is out today after many years in development over at Bethesda. It’s ambitious and lavishly produced, but despite its size it lacks the sense of wonder and vastness that its pastoral predecessor epitomized.

Earlier this summer, Twitch offered some good news to streamers frustrated with the platform’s default revenue share, which splits earnings between the company and the creator 50/50. With the launch of Twitch’s new Partner Plus program, streamers could soon qualify to take home 70% of their earnings instead — but that better deal came with a few pretty major caveats.

The Iconfactory, home to a number of popular apps like wallpaper app Wallaroo, puzzle game Frenzic, and the unfortunately shuttered Twitterific, among others, is out today with its latest creation:Ollie’s Arcade. The new app aims to bring a retro gaming experience to iOS users with a collection of mini-games reminiscent of classic arcade-style or electric handheld titles.

The gamers behind the Gray Lady have a new game to add into our morning rotations: Connections, which invites the player to categorize 16 words or phrases into four distinct groups of four.

With a big budget space exploration game debuting in days, indie spacefaring mainstay No Man’s Sky continues to deepen its own world with no signs of slowing down.

LG is teaming up with Amazon to bring the Amazon Luna cloud-based game streaming service on its smart TVs.

Epic’s ongoing quest to dethrone Steam as the PC gaming storefront of note has taken a new turn with First Run, an option for developers to get 100% of their game’s sales revenue in exchange for being an exclusive on the platform for six months. But is this really a good choice?

Sony has twice tested the waters in portable gaming, with the unsuccessful but fondly remembered PSP and Vita. Third time lucky is the hope with PlayStation Portal, a handheld gaming device that — there’s no getting around it — is more or less a supercharged version of Nintendo’s endearingly confusing Wii U.

A new Pokémon just dropped, and it’s literally a chipped teapot of matcha. It is called Poltchageist, and yes, that’s a portmanteau of poltergeist and matcha. It’s ghost tea.

Netflix just announced a new mobile game that many “Love is Blind” fans will want to know about.

The UK’s antitrust regulator has confirmed its April decision to block the $68.7BN Microsoft-Activision gaming mega-merger — rejecting arguments by Microsoft that it should overturn its original prohibition because of developments since the original decision. However in a simultaneous announcement today the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has opened a new investigation into a restructured proposal Microsoft has submitted for review.

Charles Martinet, the voice actor who has portrayed Mario since 1991, is stepping down, Nintendo announced Monday morning. Besides voicing the world’s most famous plumber, the 67-year-old Martinet also portrayed Luigi, Wario, Waluigi and the baby versions of these characters in more than one hundred titles across the Mario video game franchise.

Skich, a Tinder-like game recommendation app where users swipe and discover mobile games based on their interests, rolled out a new feature that allows users to launch, collect, sort and delete games on their devices without leaving the app.

After an exhaustive review by regulators in the United States and across the globe, Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard is on track to close later this year. The European Commission approved the transaction in May, the Federal Trade Commission has suspended its administrative challenge, and negotiations are underway with the United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority.

Netflix announced today it will begin testing its games across more devices, including TVs and computers, in addition to mobile phones, where its games already run today. The tests will begin today in Canada and the U.K. with a “limited number” of Netflix subscribers who will be given the chance to test games on their TVs. In the coming weeks, those tests will expand to include PCs and Mac computers through Netflix.com via supported browsers.

Culture is often inseparable from entertainment. Your affinity for the kind of books, music, film or art you consume has more to do with the language you speak, the values your family and friends espouse, and the economics of where you live than anything else.

First, the basics. Baldur’s Gate 3 is a Dungeons & Dragons game through and through, but you don’t need to be familiar with that world or those systems to enjoy it. It’s a dense roleplaying adventure that alternates between an old-school isometric view and close-up, voice-acted cut scenes, offering players a world of choice through complex, cascading chains of cause and effect.

The next big thing in VR might not be higher resolution or more immersive sound, but an experience augmented by physical sensations or moving parts that fool your senses into mistaking virtual for reality. Researchers at SIGGRAPH, from Meta to international student groups, flaunted their latest attempts to make VR and AR more convincing.

South Korean gaming firm Krafton plans to invest another $150 million in India over the next 2-3 years, it said in a boon to the local gaming ecosystem, after securing permission to trial its popular battle royale game in the South Asian market following two bans.

After last fall signaling its intentions to expand into cloud gaming, Netflix today launched a new app that will soon allow subscribers to play games on their TV. The app, dubbed “Netflix Game Controller,” lets you use your phone as a controller after pairing it with your TV in order to play the games available through Netflix’s service.

India’s popular online gaming and fantasy sports startup Mobile Premier League is reducing its staff by approximately 50%, two people familiar with the matter said, weeks after New Delhi implemented a 28% tax on online real-money games.

The Pokémon Presents livestream on Tuesday morning was pretty mid. We knew that the Pokémon Scarlet & Violet DLC was coming, and I still refuse to learn what Pokémon Café Remix is, why they’re turning Tatsugiri into sushi, and how to reconcile the ethics of eating Pokémon in-universe. N64’s Pokémon Stadium 2 coming to Switch is nice, but the biggest surprise among today’s load of announcements? Cramorant is back, baby.

Chat app Discord has let go of nearly 40 employees (4% of its workforce) as part of company’s restructuring efforts, according to multiple reports.

Streaming to Twitch is one thing, but sometimes you just want to share a new game (ahem Baldur’s Gate 3) or a big gameplay moment with your inner circle.

For a recovering gamer like me, one of the most exciting applications of generative AI is dynamic dialogue. I’m not suggesting AI replace writers — goodness forbid. But as anyone who’s sunk hundreds of hours into an RPG can tell you, scripted NPC interactions get old fast.

In February 2020, Samsung planted its flag in the sand. Screen issues aside, the original Galaxy Fold was met with a mixed response. “Innovation for innovation’s sake” was a common refrain. The wildly expensive device arrived at just a hair under $2,000. People questioned whether anyone really needed to carry a tablet in their pocket. The device was big and bulky. And then there was the crease.