E3 is dead. Forever
‘End of an era’ is one way to describe E3’s official exit from this world. “I cri evrytiem,” is… another way to put it. Oh, right. We haven’t told you the bad news yet. E3 is dead. Forever. We’ve become so accustomed to banging out those annual ‘E3 is cancelled’ articles (no, really, look), it was a bit of a shock to see the official E3 account on X.com confirming its demise.
“After more than two decades of E3, each one bigger than the last, the time has come to say goodbye. Thanks for the memories.”
E3 last managed an in-person went back in 2019, just months before the world decided to collapse in on itself. E3 was already struggling — with Sony and Microsoft pulling out beforehand — but it was the pandemic that finished it off. E3 did have a conference lined up for 2024, with the ESA partnering up with Reedpop to pull a miracle off before the two parted ways due to “creative differences.”
The conference that was once the be-all of gaming conferences brought us some of the most iconic game reveals in history. From the absurd Grand Theft Auto IV reveal through a tattoo on Peter Moore’s body in 2006 to Twilight Princess’ reveal on the 2004 stage (which only vaguely resembled the actual game), it’s been a packed and eventful ride that’ll never be forgotten.
Fly high, E3.
Netflix is jumping on the end-of-year recap bandwagon
Remember when companies shoving their year-end data down audience’s throats was a niche practice? Pepperidge Farm remembers. Nowadays, you can’t walk down the street without someone showing off the music they listened to for the year. Netflix is the latest corporation trying to play nice with Gen Z and jump on the end-of-year bandwagon, announcing “What We Watched” – a culmination of the year’s most-watched titles split up into two six-month-long reports in the form of an Excel spreadsheet.
At the time of writing, Netflix has only released data covering the first half of 2023, but we can expect a brand-new Excel spreadsheet every six months or so. The report covers the hours viewed for every title that racked up more than 50,000 hours (sorry, Death Note) coming to a total of 18,214 eligible titles. This is the first time a streamer has delved quite so deeply into its metrics, usually keeping these sorts of reports under lock and key.
The results are about as boring as you’d expect. Sat atop the most-watched movies list was The Mother (we had to Google what that is), pulling in more than 249,900,000 viewing hours overall. It still fell 20 ranks short of the platform’s best-performing TV shows, such as The Night Agent: Season 1, Ginny and Georgia, The Glory, and Wednesday.
In its announcement, Netflix stressed that hours viewed are not the only indicator of a show’s success. “We have enormously successful movies and TV shows with lower and higher hours viewed. It’s all about whether a movie or TV show thrilled its audience — and the size of that audience relative to the economics of the title.” Yeah, right. We’re guessing this will be Netflix’s go-to statement the next time it cancels something popular. 1899, anyone?
Google Play Movies & TV is dead, long live YouTube
Two years later, and Google Play Movies & TV is still on its deathbed, its death rattle echoing around the Google graveyard. The time has finally come to pull the plug on the service for good. It’s not like we (or many others) are that upset about the change, with most already believing the service to be dead and buried.
But it raises some concerns for the four or five people who own content on the service. Don’t worry. Google isn’t making like PlayStation or Discovery and shovelling that content into the recycler. It’ll all be relocated safely when the time comes — that time is 17 January 2024 (though this is subject to change depending on your location).
The Android TV Help website announced the changes to the service last week, noting that it would no longer be available on Android TV devices or the Google Play website. Instead, people who are looking for their content can find it in a few ways. One — for TVs and/or set-top boxes powered by Android TV, you’ll need to head over to the ‘Shop’ tab to find any active content. For those countries that allow for purchasing movies and TV series on YouTube (there’s a list here), they’ll have their content moved here, too. South Africa is still awaiting its turn on that front, unfortunately.
Tesla’s Optimus is in its Prime
Optimuspic.twitter.com/nbRohLQ7RH
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 13, 2023
When we last saw Tesla’s line-up of humanoid Optimus robots in action, they had learned how to walk menacingly toward the camera and couldn’t do much else. At the time, they were still being taught a range of tasks by humans, such as being able to sort items into boxes, though there was no proof in that pudding yet. Now, Elon Musk has taken to X.com to show off the Optimus bots in their current form, and… they can dance now?
Apparently, yes. Optimus Gen-2, as the current iteration is called, can groove to a beat. It’s also got a far slimmer, more human-like look to it, and can walk around 30% faster than the last generation. That’s thanks to a 10kg weight reduction on the robot’s body, newly improved toes, and feetier feet (?) alongside a few more technical improvements that lead to a more pleasing gait overall.
Perhaps the most impressive shot of the sub-2-minute video was the robot demonstrating its new hands and its ability to handle an egg without much fear of being dropped.
The point, if you missed Musk’s announcement of the “bipedal autonomous humanoid” back in 2021, was to swap out humans in place of robots when completing those tasks considered too boring or plain unsafe. Musk believes that the Optimus program could be worth more than the car business and full self-driving at Tesla headquarters.