Rich McCormick | The Verge The Verge is about technology and how it makes us feel. Founded in 2011, we offer our audience everything from breaking news to reviews to award-winning features and investigations, on our site, in video, and in podcasts. 2017-06-23T06:04:57+00:00 https://www.theverge.com/authors/rich-mccormick/rss https://platform.theverge.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/verge-rss-large_80b47e.png?w=150&h=150&crop=1 Rich McCormick <![CDATA[Here come the US Space Corps]]> https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/23/15860048/us-space-corps-legislation-proposed 2017-06-23T02:04:57-04:00 2017-06-23T02:04:57-04:00

Star Trek has Starfleet, Star Wars has the Imperial Navy, and Halo has the United Nations Space Command. But for the moment, real-life Earthlings of the United States don’t have a cool sci-fi name for their space military.

That could change soon. Legislation has been drafted by the House Armed Services Committee to form the “Space Corps” — a new branch of the US military that would come under the command of the Air Force, and deal with threats to American national security occurring outside of Earth’s atmosphere.

The branch would report to the Air Force

The draft legislation was worked up by both Republican and Democrat House representatives, who said that there was “bipartisan acknowledgement that the strategic advantages we derive from our national security space systems are eroding,” Representative Jim Cooper (D-TN) and Mike Rogers (R-AL) said in a statement that they were “convinced that the Department of Defense is unable to take the measures necessary to address these challenges effectively and decisively, or even recognize the nature and scale of its problems.”

The Air Force currently has its own Space Command wing, but should the new legislation become law, it would require the creation of the Space Corps “as a separate military service responsible for national security space programs for which the Air Force is today responsible.” Said Space Corps would no doubt carry on some of the secretive projects that Air Force Space Command is currently undertaking in the upper reaches of our atmosphere, but could also (theoretically) be called upon to defend Earth against extraterrestrial threats one day.

That’s if the Space Corps idea isn’t shot down before it can blast off, anyway. The Air Force is currently against the formation of a new branch, arguing that it would cause organizational confusion and delay existing projects. “I don’t support it at this time,” Air Force Chief of Staff General David Goldfein said in May. “I would say that we keep that dialog open, but right now I think it would actually move us backwards.”

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Rich McCormick <![CDATA[Facebook introduces profile picture protections to stop people from misusing images]]> https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/22/15851662/facebook-profile-picture-protection-india 2017-06-22T08:28:16-04:00 2017-06-22T08:28:16-04:00

Facebook is introducing new protections for profile pictures for users in India, in a bid to stop people from copying, sharing, or otherwise misusing their images. Users who elect to guard their profile through the new system will ensure that others can’t send, share, or download their picture, and will keep strangers from tagging themselves in the image.

People who opt in will also get a blue shield border around their image, and — on Android at least — Facebook says it will prevent users from taking screenshots of users’ profile pictures “where possible.”

The social network says that it was motivated to offer the tools after hearing from Indian social and safety organizations that some women in the country elected not to upload pictures of their faces to the internet. The tools were developed in partnership with a range of those organizations, with tests indicating the kinds of things that would cut down on the misuse of profile pictures. For example, Facebook says that something as simple as adding a design overlay to a picture means that others are at least 75 percent less likely to copy it.

Design overlays can reduce picture theft

Users can now add those layers quickly through Facebook’s system, but the tools aren’t likely to cut out the copying of profile pictures overnight. While Facebook says it’s doing what it can to stop people from screenshotting images via Android, users could still take screengrabs on laptop or desktop, and the new blue shielded border is a “visual cue” of protection, rather than any hard barrier.

Still, though, if tests have shown that fairly simple additions can deter opportunists, then the tools are a potentially useful option for Indian users. For now, Facebook has not yet indicated whether similar measures will come to other countries.

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Rich McCormick <![CDATA[Now you can build shared Spotify playlists with your friends in Facebook Messenger]]> https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/21/15844838/spotify-shared-playlists-facebook-messenger 2017-06-21T05:00:49-04:00 2017-06-21T05:00:49-04:00

Spotify has launched a new feature for Facebook Messenger that lets you create playlists of songs with your friends. Group Playlists for Messenger uses the existing Spotify Chat extension for Facebook’s app, allowing users to create group playlists, share them with friends, and then let those friends add new songs as they wish.

The two companies first made it easier for users to share Spotify tracks through Messenger early last year, but this new feature builds on that functionality, letting you collaborate on shared playlists rather than sharing ones already built by individuals. Your friends won’t even need to be Spotify subscribers in order to add new tracks to your shared list — they’ll be able to pick out songs through Messenger itself. Spotify says it’s perfect for road trips and parties, but even more fun may be deleting all the achingly cool tracks off your friend’s carefully cultivated mixtape while they’re asleep and replacing them with hundreds of versions of Aqua’s “Barbie Girl.”

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Rich McCormick <![CDATA[HBO is in talks for a Watchmen TV series with Lost co-creator Damon Lindelof]]> https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/21/15844512/hbo-watchmen-damon-lindelof-lost 2017-06-21T00:08:51-04:00 2017-06-21T00:08:51-04:00

Who watches the Watchmen? Maybe you, soon, on HBO. The network is reportedly in talks with Damon Lindelof — co-creator of Lost and The Leftovers — to adapt the seminal graphic novel for the small screen.

It’s not the first time that Watchmen — written by Alan Moore, with art by Dave Gibbons — has been adapted for screen. Director Zack Snyder turned out his take on the story in 2009, giving it lavish slow-mo shots and receiving mixed reviews in the process. HBO, too, tried in 2014 to get a Watchmen TV project off the ground in 2014, apparently speaking to Snyder about a deal in discussions that eventually fell apart.

Lindelof’s version of Watchmen would not involve Snyder, Variety says, but instead start again from scratch. It’s not clear whether it would once again tell the story laid out in the book itself, or whether it would explore further the characters of Silk Spectre, Doctor Manhattan, Rorschach, and the other fallible superheroes featured within. It too may not come to fruition — Deadline says the project is still in the deal-making phase — but HBO and Lindelof could be good fits for the cerebral comic.

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Rich McCormick <![CDATA[The 21 best game trailers of E3 2017]]> https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/16/15814768/e3-2017-games-trailers-xbox-playstation-ea-bethesda-nintendo 2017-06-16T12:00:39-04:00 2017-06-16T12:00:39-04:00

Rejoice, for E3 is over for another year, and we can all take a breath. The world’s biggest video games trade show brings such a flurry of news that it’s hard to stop and take it in before you’re whisked to the next keynote, the next conference, or the next big reveal.

It’s only now, with E3 over, that we can really take time to look back at some of the most impressive, intriguing, or downright bizarre games to get announced or outlined further at the show. Below you’ll find some of the trailers that are worth rewatching — or that you might have missed — from the last week.

Super Mario Odyssey

Nintendo closed its E3 presentation — a presentation not actually presented on any stage at E3 — with the show’s standout trailer. Based on the footage we saw, Super Mario Odyssey is colorful, clever, and endlessly creative, giving Nintendo’s mascot Super Mario 64-esque 3D worlds to run around in.

Previous games have given Mario flying suits, magic mushrooms, and water-squirting backpacks, but Odyssey looks to give him the widest and wildest moveset yet. That includes the eldritch power of possession — he can use his apparently cursed hat to inhabit both living creatures and inanimate objects alike, allowing him to turn into taxis, dinosaurs, statues, and the internet’s favorite new frog.

Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus

While many were hoping for a hint of a new Elder Scrolls game, Bethesda instead closed out its E3 keynote with a bloody and bombastic return to one of gaming’s first classics. Fortunately, it was more than enough to put ideas of orcs and elves out of mind for a good while.

The New Colossus builds on the alternate history Nazi America first presented in 2014’s Wolfenstein: The New Order, but makes it both sillier and more of a biting satire — especially in the modern political climate. It’s a rare series that can mix ruminations on freedom and subjugation with fire-breathing robot dogs and wheelchair-bound shooter segments, but developer Machine Games seems to be having serious fun with the venerable Wolfenstein license.

Beyond Good & Evil 2

Forget what you’re told, kids — swearing is cool. That’s according to Beyond Good & Evil 2, anyway, which peppered its first proper trailer with so many F-bombs that it sounded like a hyperactive sci-fi version of that scene from The Wire.

It was a slightly jarring appearance for the long-awaited game, which has been in supposed development for the better part of a decade, but it’s still got plenty of time to turn its style into substance. Ubisoft has confirmed that BG&E2 is still at “day zero” of development, and that the cuss-heavy trailer will eventually translate into a customizable RPG that sounds like a French take on Mass Effect.

Anthem

Meanwhile, Mass Effect developer BioWare is making its own take on Destiny. Anthem moves away from the single-player RPGs that made the studio famous, promising multiplayer combat across a post-apocalyptic Earth. Players can choose different classes, each with their own sub-abilities that can provide overlapping aid to each other as they take down waves of feral enemies.

So far, Destiny, but Anthem looks slick and snazzy enough to potentially set it apart from Bungie’s shooter. The traversal system — in which players use suit jetpacks to travel beyond what remains of human civilization — gives it an interesting edge on fellow third-person titles like The Division.

Marvel’s Spider-Man

Where DC has followed Marvel in its movie-making in recent years, it seems to be the other way around when it comes to video games. Marvel’s Spider-Man has a combat system that looks a lot like Rocksteady’s Arkham games, relying on timing of button presses to smoothly move Spidey between acrobatic punches and kicks.

The trailer for the PlayStation exclusive looked like great fun, tracking Spider-Man as he chased a helicopter through New York. But some have expressed concern about how much of the game will rely on quick-time events. Hopefully the finished game should offer a little more freedom for the web-slinger — even if he’s not allowed to kill anyone in the process.

Metroid: Samus Returns

The announcement of Metroid Prime 4 was the bigger shock, but with only the teasiest of teaser trailers to go on, it fell to Metroid: Samus Returns to keep fans happy. The newly announced 3DS game might not have the glitz of a new Prime for Switch, but it’s got a pedigree: it’s a remake of the Game Boy’s Metroid II, and it’s being overseen by series co-creator Yoshio Sakamoto. It’s also due out this year, making it the first Metroid release since 2010.

Ooblets

Take Harvest Moon, smoosh it together with Pokémon and Animal Crossing, and then swirl in an extra sugary dollop of cuteness, and you’d get something like Ooblets. The Double Fine game lets you grow and raise adorable mini-monsters — the eponymous Ooblets — and lead them into battle around the pastel-shaded world.

If training your mini-monsters gets too tiring, why not take some time out to get a haircut, rearrange your furniture, or go for a ride in a hot-air balloon? Whatever you do, it’s bound to be extra cute.

Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle

If Mario and friends seemed like strange bedfellows with Ubisoft’s nubby little rabbids, weirder still is the type of game they’re starring in. Kingdom Battle offers tense turn-based strategy, rather than laid-back platforming, and plays like a cutesy version of X-COM. In the same year we saw Mario turn into a T. rex and a taxi, it’s still perhaps more unsettling to see him crouched behind cover, blasting away at enemies with the Mushroom Kingdom’s version of a plasma gun.

Hidden Agenda

Hidden Agenda’s story of cops and serial killers could be straight out of a police procedural, but the way it unfurls looks truly novel. Developer Supermassive Games is encouraging people to play it in groups, where they can affect the narrative by using their phones — not a controller — to vote for different approaches in different situations.

It’s a clever angle by Supermassive, who realized that lots of people played their last game — teen horror homage Until Dawn — as a party game, sitting down to watch the brutal slayings together just as they’d watch a scary movie with friends.

A Way Out

A Way Out — shown during EA’s press conference — also toys with a multiplayer format to move its storytelling forward. Set in a prison, you and a friend (or internet stranger) control two characters as they try to escape, and exact revenge on people who wronged them. The game only works in split screen, always showing you what your partner is doing in specific situations so you can work together to complete your own prison break.

The conceit is one game director Josef Fares has used before, in Starbreeze’s well-received Brothers: a Tale of Two Sons. His new game could be suitably imaginative — at the very least, it should offer novel ways for you to scupper your friends’ plans.

Vampyr

Vampyr looks like it will offer similar amounts of choice, but unlike A Way Out or Hidden Agenda, is a resolutely single-player story. The vampire RPG casts you as a member of the undead, but a more enlightened version of the typical blood-drinker, able to stave off the desire to just chomp on the nearest neck. You’ll need to make a series of decisions throughout the game that will affect not only the immediate objective at hand, but also how you and your vampire kin are seen later in the game.

Star Wars: Battlefront 2

Battlefront 2’s E3 trailer did the impossible — it made The Phantom Menace seem cool. The trailer drew heavily from the movie, showing the battle for Naboo’s capital city of Theed, but making it seem more dangerous and dynamic than it ever seemed on-screen. Even the battle droids, deployed in the movie as hapless comic relief, looked more like unflinching murder machines.

The trailer only got more exciting as it reintroduced whirling Sith menace Darth Maul and Yoda, here in his incarnation as heavily CG-ed backflip frog man. Later stars Rey and Kylo Ren also make an appearance, as do Episode VII’s tweaked X-wings, supported by the Millennium Falcon as they whizz through an asteroid field.

Middle-Earth: Shadow of War

A star was born at this year’s E3. Meet Brûz the Chopper, Shadow of War’s conspicuously Australian orc warlord, and enjoy his jocular assessments on life in Mordor. Shadow of War ups the stakes on 2014’s surprisingly good Shadow of Mordor, allowing you — as the ghostly Bright Lord — to build even bigger armies of orcs, led by warlords you’ve coerced into following you.

That’s how you lull beasts like Brûz over to your side, as the trailer shows. My only concern is that if anything happens to my new Aussie orc friend, I’ll be very sad.

Monster Hunter World

This one gets in on pure potential. The trailer itself, shown during Sony’s keynote conference, revealed off a lush, wild world, packed to the treetops with beasties, but didn’t do a great job of explaining the cult success of Capcom’s series.

Fortunately, the killer loop — of downing bigger monsters to craft better gear so you can down even bigger monsters to craft better gear, and so on — seems to still be in place. The trailer didn’t show how players will team up to off the biggest foes, a vital part of the series so far. Also absent were the Felyne, Monster Hunter’s cat comrades, and any indication of just how long players will spend turning meat on a stick. Expect more before launch next year.

The Evil Within 2

The actual evil within is milk, apparently. Vast swathes of it, transforming itself into screaming human faces and pulling people down into its depths, like creamy sentient goop. Well, it’s either milk or something even weirder, hinted at in the trailer for the follow-up to Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami’s 2014 title. The first game was solid in combat and enjoyably wacky with its plot, meaning that the second could be a confidently spooky experience.

Metro: Exodus

Looking similarly spooky is 4A Games’ Metro: Exodus, set in a ruined version of Russia in which human survivors live in subway tunnels to hide from horribly mutated monsters on the surface. These creatures will happily chew your face off, but in previous Metro games, one of the biggest threats is the world itself: a radioactive and poisonous place that will kill you if you don’t keep your gas mask and suit maintained.

Exodus’ world looks a little brighter — perhaps time has cleared some of the worst of the fallout — but it’s still ruled over by oversized wolves, rats, and giganto-bears that you’ll need to avoid or kill off as you move around.

Far Cry 5

You’ll find far more affable canines in Far Cry 5. As the in-game trailer shows, friendly dog Boomer can be used to seek out and distract members of the game’s violent cult, making them much easier to dispatch with an array of guns. Human buddies can also be deployed, picking selected enemies off from sniper positions, or strafing them with bullets from the sky.

The supremely shooty trailer also highlights vehicles you’ll be able to drive and pilot, including pickup trucks, aircraft, and farm threshers. Boomer’s the real star, though: the mutt chews on enemy arms, tears out their throats, and then brings you their rifles like a macabre game of fetch.

Uncharted: The Lost Legacy

There’s no Nathan Drake in this new Uncharted, but newly minted headliners Chloe Frazer and Nadine Ross look like they’ll be keeping that character’s legacy alive. The PS4 exclusive’s trailer shows them leaping chasms, pulling guns, and double, triple, and quadruple-crossing their friends to get their hands on treasure.

The Lost Legacy gives us a good chance to better get to know characters we’ve met before. Chloe starred in Uncharted 2, while Nadine stepped into a starring role in Uncharted 4, but that doesn’t mean they’re fast friends — their alliance in The Lost Legacy seems mighty uneasy.

God of War

Or, Dad of War, as it should now be called. The new game in the Sony series sees ultimately angry man Kratos trade his Greek mythology in for Norse legend, his shaven face in for a big, bushy beard, and his single life in for a son. With his American accent and normal child body, that son seems a little incongruous in a world of fantastical beasts and vengeful gods, but then anyone would look a little weedy set against a hulking man-brute covered in red body paint.

The dad life hasn’t affected Kratos’ training regimen, however. He can still lay into snarling monsters and spitting demons with wild abandon, slicing them up with his axe, bashing them to pieces with his shield, or just ripping them apart with his bare hands.

Skull & Bones

It’s good to see that Ubisoft didn’t just shelve the excellent pirate ship technology it developed for Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag. Instead, it seems to have become the basis for Skull & Bones, a seaborne combat game that pits pirates against pirates and players against players in multi-boat battles.

A variety of ships are on offer, from big brigs all the way down to little sloops, each specialized for a different purpose on the high seas. Most importantly, the trailer seems to confirm you can still get your crew to sing sea shanties as they set sail.

Ni No Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom

With Hayao Miyazaki seemingly in a quantum state of retirement, Ni No Kuni II might be the closest you get to a new Studio Ghibli film for a while. The Japanese RPG sequel has lush animation and wildly imaginative characters, with a new and extra-lovable companion to replace the last game’s delightful Drippy.

Days Gone

There was no sign of The Last of Us 2 at this year’s E3, but Days Gone made up some of the slack, showing a zombie apocalypse that looked a lot like Naughty Dog’s end-of-the-world adventure. Main character Deacon showed how players could use zombies as a weapon, sneaking past groups of scavengers before unleashing the horde on them, letting him sneak to his goal unharmed.

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Rich McCormick <![CDATA[Amazon’s new Alexa-enabled Dash Wand is basically free for Prime subscribers]]> https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/15/15806840/amazon-alexa-dash-wand-updated 2017-06-15T01:12:36-04:00 2017-06-15T01:12:36-04:00

Amazon has released the Dash Wand, a new Alexa-enabled device that can help you scan grocery barcodes, convert measurements, and order household essentials from Amazon just by using your voice. The Wi-Fi-enabled Dash Wand is magnetic, so you can stick it on your fridge, and also offers some of the features of its bigger Echo sibling, allowing you to find recipes and restaurants without using your hands.

At a few inches long, and made out of white and black plastic, the Dash Wand looks like a refreshed version of the company’s original Dash devices. First released in 2014, those Dash also let you scan item barcodes or use voice controls to add products to your shopping cart, but forced you to check out via Amazon’s site. They also had no Alexa access — Amazon’s assistant wasn’t available to the public then — and were only available to a limited number of existing AmazonFresh users. A second-generation version cost $49.99 and could add anything on Amazon to a shopping cart, but users still had to check out manually.

The Dash Wand, on the other hand, lets you buy items directly, and is now available to all Amazon Prime subscribers in the United States. It’s priced at $20, but Amazon Prime subscribers who do pick one up will receive $20 back in their Amazon accounts, making the Dash Wand essentially a free purchase. Customers will theoretically then use that returned cash to buy things using their new Dash Wand, picking up paper towels, soap, and other household essentials by asking the device to order each one, rather than needing a more expensive Echo or an individual Dash button for each product. Buyers will also get a free 90-day trial of the AmazonFresh home grocery service.

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Rich McCormick <![CDATA[Facebook celebrates the GIF’s 30th birthday by making the format usable in comments]]> https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/15/15806630/facebook-gif-comments-30th-birthday 2017-06-15T00:13:21-04:00 2017-06-15T00:13:21-04:00

Happy birthday to the GIF! The venerable file format turns 30 today, and Facebook is taking the opportunity to add a few GIF-related features to its service. Users could already post GIFs in status updates, but from June 15th, you’ll now be able to add GIFs in Facebook comments, allowing you to search through and select from a list of relevant files right there in the social network’s interface.

Facebook is also using the day to salute the surprisingly resilient format, throwing what it calls a “GIF party,” and offering statistics on its existing GIF usage. More than 13 billion GIFs were sent last year via Facebook Messenger, it says, after the company made the format usable on the chat service. The busiest day for GIFs was apparently January 1st this year, with more than 400 million sent, as hungover people across the globe let a short moving image do the legwork of expressing their friendship and love for them.

More worryingly, Facebook is also using the day to re-open the fractious debate about GIF pronunciation — hard or soft G — with a poll for US-based users. It’s a decision that may turn friend against friend and tarnish what should otherwise be a happy day, but we may finally work out what the people want, no matter what the format’s creator says.

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Rich McCormick <![CDATA[Instagram tries to beat secret celebrity #sponcon with new label]]> https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/14/15799024/instagram-sponsored-posts-label 2017-06-14T09:00:08-04:00 2017-06-14T09:00:08-04:00

Instagram is adding a new label to better differentiate paid-for posts from regular content. The label — which features the words “Paid partnership with…” — will appear above sponsored posts and stories created by celebrities and other users promoting brands or products over the coming weeks.

The addition comes in the same week that a report claimed that 93 percent of paid-for posts made by Instagram’s most popular users were not labeled according to FTC guidelines. The report, put together by marketing firm Mediakix, looked at Instagram’s 50 most-followed accounts and found that 61 percent of sponsored posts were related to the fashion industry. BuzzFeed’s Katie Notopoulos broke this data down further, splitting the posts into four categories: posts that failed to disclose a long-term sponsorship (49 percent of posts), the receipt of an expensive one-off gift (16 percent), a cheaper gift (12 percent), or single pay-to-post ads (12 percent).

FTC guidelines state that sponsored posts must have clear reference to the fact they serve as paid advertising, either with words like “sponsored by” in the accompanying text, or by using hashtags like #ad. Prolific Instagram users have previously found ways around this system, however, using vaguer hashtags like #sp or #partner.

The FTC sent notices to 90 Instagram users in April this year, to remind them to clearly disclose any “material connection” they may have with a brand or company. Some of the letters referenced these vague hashtags, saying that consumers aren’t likely to understand inclusions like “#sp” as indication of a paid sponsorship. They also noted that consumers are likely to skip over sponsorship hashtags when they were included in a group of more standard tags.

By putting the notification above the image or story, rather than in the description below, Instagram’s new system should make it clearer for followers to pick out paid-for posts. Of course, users will still have to choose to include the label when making their posts — potentially leaving the door open for more surreptitious advertising — but the service has a solid reason for businesses to want to clearly state their connections.

Metrics for posts with the “Paid partnership with…” label will be available to both user and advertiser, allowing them to see just how wide a reach they get for their marketing money. The creator of a post will be able to see metrics inside of Instagram itself, while business partners will be able to view it through the Facebook Page Insights apps.

Update June 14th, 10:31AM ET: Instagram has clarified where users and businesses will be able to view metrics on sponsored posts.

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Rich McCormick <![CDATA[Uber board member resigns after making sexist remark in meeting about pervasive sexism]]> https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/13/15797646/uber-board-member-resigns-sexism-david-bonderman 2017-06-13T21:55:07-04:00 2017-06-13T21:55:07-04:00

The Uber board member who made a sexist remark during today’s meeting about the prevalence of sexism within the company has resigned from his position. David Bonderman’s resignation from Uber’s board was first announced by The New York Times, and confirmed in a statement by Bonderman himself, in which he said his comment was “careless, inappropriate, and inexcusable.”

Bonderman was recorded making the remark in reply to to fellow board member Arianna Huffington, who was speaking about the need for more female representation on Uber’s board. When “there’s one woman on the board, it’s much more likely that there will be a second woman on the board,” Huffington said, to which Bonderman shot back “what it shows is that it’s much more likely to be more talking.”

Bonderman — who helped found TPG, a private equity firm — said that the comment “came across in a way that was the opposite of what I intended,” but that he understood “the destructive effect it had,” and that he took full responsibility for it.

Uber is currently considering the findings of the so-called Holder Report: an internal investigation into claims of sexual harassment and a toxic sexist attitude within the company. Bonderman noted the report in his statement, saying that he had been working with the company for six months on the report, and recognized “the importance of implementing [its] requirements” for the future of the company.

His resignation will come into effect from tomorrow morning, and comes as Uber continues to hemorrhage executives and major figures. Earlier in the day, CEO Travis Kalanick confirmed that he was also taking a leave of absence from the company.

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Rich McCormick <![CDATA[Bethesda’s new DLC marketplace won’t sell existing Skyrim and Fallout mods]]> https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/12/15780924/bethesda-creation-club-skyrim-fallout 2017-06-12T05:16:33-04:00 2017-06-12T05:16:33-04:00

Bethesda has clarified its new Creation Club system — the program that will sell additional content to both The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim and Fallout 4 — specifying that the service will not be used to sell existing mods. Creation Club, which was announced during the publisher’s E3 keynote last night, will instead allow players to buy officially sanctioned characters, weapons, and other add-ons created by Bethesda’s own studios and selected third-party developers.

Also available via Creation Club will be new clothes, areas, and even game modes. All of the above sound like the kinds of things mods have been bringing to the two games since their release, but Bethesda notes the difference, stating in its FAQ that most of the items for sale will be made internally, by the games’ own development teams, or by other studios under its umbrella.

Some other developers will also be involved, the company says, mentioning partners that have already worked on Bethesda games, as well as “external creators,” but each will have to go through an internal review process. “All the content is approved, curated, and taken through the full internal dev cycle; including localisation, polishing, and testing,” the company says. “This also guarantees that all content works together.”

That’s a marked difference from regular mods, which are usually created by amateur coders in their spare time, and distributed online for free. That approach may mean that regular mods lack the polish of the add-ons you can expect to get under the Creation Club program — save games are often incompatible with some mods, for example — but it also gives mod makers freedom that official add-ons might not get. Don’t expect to see a Bethesda-sanctioned Thomas the Tank Engine mod for Skyrim any time soon.

All Creation Club add-ons will go through Bethesda’s development process

That said, the idea of paying for third-party mods is not unheard of. Bethesda was one of the first companies to get involved in a paid mod program Steam creator Valve launched — and then quickly shelved — back in 2015. The program faced widespread criticism from PC gamers as soon as it launched, and lasted only a week before the publisher canceled it. Speaking at the time, Valve’s Alden Kroll said that Valve “didn’t understand exactly what we were doing” by introducing real money into established modmaking communities.

Speaking in 2015 about the controversy, Bethesda’s Pete Hines said that his company would re-evaluate the idea of paid mods in the future, saying that “there is a case to be made that people who spend a lot of time working on mods ought to be able to have a way of monetizing what they’re doing.” But two years doesn’t seem to have reversed Bethesda’s decision. In its Creation Club FAQ, the company says a definitive “no” to the question of whether mods will be available for real cash. “Mods will remain a free and open system where anyone can create and share what they’d like,” the page reads. “Also, we won’t allow any existing mods to be retrofitted into Creation Club, it must all be original content.”

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