The internet is really the ‘Google web’ and 10 things Satya Nadella said at Google’s antitrust trial

Google pays as much as $10 billion per year to ensure that users access the internet through its search engine — payments that have blocked startups and fellow tech giants Apple Inc. and Microsoft Corp. from competing, according to the US Justice Department.

The latest episode of VGC: A Video Game Podcast is now available for listening.

Embracer's scythe continues to swing in the wake of a collapsed $2 billion deal, and the latest victim, reportedly, is Zen Studios. According to Videogamelayoffs, one of its sources at the Hungarian studio told it that 32 staffers at the Pinball FX studio were laid off last Friday.

For my money, web-swinging around New York City in Marvel’s Spider-Man is perhaps the singular best game mechanic I’ve come across in the last decade or so. It feels so incredibly right, and almost everything else in that game is built off it. I never really wanted to use fast-travel features, because swinging around was much more fun, and finding hidden missions and helping citizens in trouble as you traverse NYC is almost as rewarding as following the game’s main story. Of course, a great mechanic isn’t enough to make a great game, but Spider-Man is one of the most successful open-world style games I can think of, because it felt packed without being overwhelming.

This review of The Beast comes from the film’s screenings at the 2023 New York Film Festival.

When cinematic legend William Friedkin died in August, most of the mournful obituaries focused on tributes to his eclectic body of work. Affectionately nicknamed “Hurricane Billy” for his force of personality and towering stature among the New Hollywood filmmakers, Friedkin produced a respectable, wide-ranging filmography, from Academy Award-sweepers like The French Connection to reappraised gems like the box-office bomb turned classic Sorcerer. Still, critics elevated one title over all the rest, one film that, even 50 years later, still has a firm grasp on popular culture: The Exorcist, which bears the tagline “the scariest movie of all time.”

An investigative report into the development of commercial and critical failure The Lord of the Rings: Gollum has revealed a number of struggles faced by developer Daedalic Entertainment.

Kazunori Yamauchi is one of the legends of game development and his Gran Turismo games are a flagship title on every PlayStation game console with lifetime sales above 90 million. And while racing is his passion, he stands at one of the most interesting intersections in gaming.

After 146 days, a landmark deal is going to soon be signed by the Writers' Guild of America, after it got several concessions from the producers and moguls running Hollywood. The Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) remains on strike as of this writing.

The government's antitrust trial against Google finished out its second week with testimony from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who argued that Google's search dominance is tied to the amount of data it processes as more and more people use Google, giving it a massive advantage when building better search algorithms, according to The Verge.

One of the biggest releases this month is Alan Wake 2, and it’s a title that fans have been waiting for years since the 2010 game garnered itself a cult following. As its launch draws nearer, Remedy has been cranking up the marketing and slowly revealing more of what we can expect from Wake’s next horror adventure.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said Monday that unfair tactics used by Google led to its dominance as a search engine, tactics that in turn have thwarted his company's rival program, Bing.