Friday 19 January 2024

The Morning After: Is Call of Duty losing its grip on gamers?

A Call of Duty game sells. That’s what it does. And it usually tops the sales charts each year. Pretty much every year since 2009. Activision’s warfare simulations (we can just call them first-person shooters, right?) have mostly done just that. Last year’s a bit different: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III landed in second place.

To convey the gravitational pull of CoD, when Microsoft was fighting to buy Activision Blizzard – makers of the game series — the Xbox maker had to make concessions and ensure the games would come to PlayStation and other platforms to make the purchase happen.

This time around, however, Hogwarts Legacy — a game not without its own controversies — beat it to the top spot. It did benefit from being the only Harry Potter game in a decade. In that time, there have been 11 Call of Duty releases. Headlines aside, the series will be fine. Another thing worth noting: 2022’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II still took the number seven spot.

— Mat Smith

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Instagram will start telling night owl teens to close the app and go to sleep

Younger users won’t be able to turn off the Nighttime Nudges.

Instagram’s latest mindfulness feature targets teens. When a younger user scrolls for more than 10 minutes in Reels or their DMs, the app will suggest they close the app and get to bed. Nighttime Nudges will automatically appear on teen accounts, and it won’t be possible to switch them off. Instagram didn’t specify whether the feature will be for all teenagers or just under 18s.

Could we get it for us over 18s too?

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Apple’s Vision Pro won’t have access to YouTube and Spotify apps at launch

Users will have to access them from a browser.

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Engadget

According to Bloomberg, Google’s YouTube and Spotify don’t have any plans to develop an application for Apple’s Vision Pro, at the moment. YouTube won’t make its iPad app available for download on the headset, either. For these apps — including Netflix — users will have to watch things through the web browser. In most cases, this will mean losing the ability to watch or listen to content offline. According to MacStories, Meta’s Instagram and Facebook might also be missing from the Vision Pro’s app store. Companies might be waiting to see whether it’s worth dedicating resources for the $3,500 headset — the Apple Watch took time to generate its own app library.

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The Rabbit R1 will offer up-to-date answers powered by Perplexity’s AI

No, I haven’t heard of Perplexity either.

TMA
Rabbit

The Rabbit R1 launch left many questions unanswered, with some of us wary of it being the vaporware candidate from this year’s CES. Now, Rabbit has revealed which LLM (large language model) will power the device’s interaction: Perplexity. Fortunately, you won’t need to pay for a subscription. The first 100,000 R1 buyers will receive a year of Perplexity Pro, for free. This advanced service adds file upload support, a daily quota of over 300 complex queries. Perplexity is a San Francisco-based startup with investment from NVIDIA and Jeff Bezos.

Continue reading.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://ift.tt/a1SVrAP

from Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics https://ift.tt/a1SVrAP

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