But one of the positive things with the 15.3-inch screen is that Lenovo didn’t try to squeeze in a number pad. No, no. Just a standard keyboard layout with a centered touchpad and an adequate amount of room for your wrists. And yet, this also doesn’t feel like an overly large laptop. The width and depth dimensions are nearly identical to the 15-inch MacBook Air, and it’s only about 0.16 inches thicker. It’s definitely a backpackable and travel-worthy device.

And here’s where the remaining compromises are surprisingly few and far in-between. One of the first things I test with budget laptops is the touchpad. Cheap Windows laptops have notoriously awful touchpads, and it’s one of the important parts of a laptop that can’t be spelled out in the specs. I’m happy to report that the IdeaPad Slim 5x has a better tracking surface than most other laptops at this price. Performance is far better than on the HP OmniBook 3 or OmniBook 5. It’s certainly more responsive than the Asus Vivobook 14. I’d say it’s more or less on par with the Dell 14 Plus from last year, though that laptop has received a price increase in recent months. The sound of the click is my only real complaint about the IdeaPad Slim 5x’s touchpad. It’s too loud. I’ll take a responsive surface over a quiet click any day, but if you work in an office with coworkers, they might get annoyed by it.

Photograph: Luke Larsen

I was also surprised by how the speakers sounded. They didn’t blow me away, but compared to the average set of speakers on an average Windows laptop at this price, they’re impressive. Of course, even a 13-inch MacBook Air sounds undoubtedly fuller and bassier, but these are at least serviceable. The webcam doesn’t fare as well. It’s really only adequate in good lighting.

It Only Gets Better

The Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Plus is no M5 killer—that’s for sure. Despite improvements to the GPU this time around, the Apple M5 is still in another league. But Qualcomm is closing the gap with CPU performance, even if the M5 remains the undisputed champion. I’d say that is a bigger deal in laptops designed with performance in mind, but here, that’s not as much an issue. You aren’t buying an $850 to be a full-time video producer, AI junkie, or esports gamer. For the things the IdeaPad Slim 5x is designed for, it excels.

My normal workflow consists of juggling a full load of work apps, dozens of browser tabs, and probably some music and video streaming simultaneously. The X2 Plus didn’t skip a beat. I came away convinced that there’s more performance than what most people will even need. That’s especially impressive since the X2 Plus is a step down from the more powerful X2 Elite (or X2 Elite Enhanced), which is partially how Qualcomm and Lenovo were able to get the price down.

The display is also an aspect of this laptop that surprised me. It’s brighter and more colorful than most laptops at this price, and the addition of a touchscreen is handy. While I don’t typically like matte screens, the IdeaPad Slim 5x’s more subtle anti-glare coating made this display feel premium and clear–just without the heavy reflections.

Meta has revealed that 20,225 Instagram users had their accounts hijacked in a recent incident where attackers used Meta’s AI-powered support system to reset passwords.

As BleepingComputer reported one week ago, the threat actors exploited a flaw in the company’s High Touch Support (HTS) tool, an AI-assisted support system that helps users regain access after being locked out of their Instagram accounts.

By exploiting the fact that HTS didn’t verify whether email addresses were associated with the targeted Instagram accounts, they obtained password reset links that allowed them to log in and hijack accounts without two-factor authentication (2FA) enabled.

“Users can request support from HTS and, as part of that process, can ask that a password reset link be sent to their email address. The tool itself worked properly and functioned as intended; however due to a bug in a separate code path, the system did not properly verify that the email address provided by the individual requesting a password reset matched the email address associated with that user’s Instagram account,” said Amber Hannah, Meta’s associate general counsel for incident response legal, in a data breach letter recently filed with Maine’s Office of the Attorney General.

“As a result, when an individual provided an email address not previously associated with the account, the system incorrectly sent a password reset link to that unassociated email rather than rejecting the request. This allowed unauthorized third parties to receive a password reset link for accounts they did not own. Upon resetting the password, the unauthorized party was able to log in to the account if the account holder had not enabled two-factor authentication (2FA).”

After a wave of user reports regarding these attacks hit social media platforms, Andy Stone, Meta’s vice president of communications, replied to one of the affected users, stating that the “issue has been resolved, and we are securing impacted accounts.”

BleepingComputer has also contacted Meta last week for comment on this security breach, but we have yet to hear back.

“We are writing to inform you that a vulnerability in an Instagram account recovery support tool was used to potentially compromise the Instagram accounts of 30 users in your jurisdiction. All accounts have been secured to prevent any continued unauthorized access,” Hannah added. “On May 31, 2026, Meta discovered that there was a vulnerability in an AI-assisted account recovery system for Instagram (‘High Touch Support’ or ‘HTS’) that was exploited by unauthorized third parties to perform password resets on Instagram user accounts.”

While Meta didn’t specify when the attacks began in the breach letter, the filing on Maine’s OAG website says the breach occurred on April 17, which is likely the date of the first attack exploiting the HTS flaw.

The company says it has no information on what personal information might have been accessed or stolen from the compromised accounts, but noted that the attackers could’ve gained access to affected Instagram users’ contact information (email address and/or phone number), dates of birth, social media posts and content (photos, videos, stories), direct messages and communications, account activity and interaction history, profile information (biography, profile photo), as well as other connected accounts and linked services.

After discovering the incident, the company disabled the HTS AI-powered support system and all password reset links it had generated to ensure that all future hijack attempts part of the same malicious campaign would be blocked.

It also enrolled all potentially stolen accounts into a mandatory security checkpoint and asked all affected users to reset their passwords again and re-authenticate to secure and regain control of the compromised accounts. 

“Prior to re-launching the tool, Meta will fix the authentication check in the Instagram recovery entry point to ensure proper verification of email addresses against existing account information before any password reset is initiated,” Meta added. “Additionally, Meta is conducting a comprehensive review of similar account recovery flows across Meta’s platforms to identify and remediate any potential issues.”

Prior to this incident, Ireland also fined Meta $264 million over a 2018 data breach that exposed the names, email addresses, phone numbers, and physical locations of over 29 million Facebook accounts.

Meta was also fined €265 million ($275.5 million) in November 2022 for failing to protect Facebook users’ data from scrapers, and another €91 million ($100 million) for storing the passwords of hundreds of millions of users in plaintext.

Security teams log 54% of successful attacks and alert on just 14%. The rest move through your environment unseen.

The Picus whitepaper shows how breach and attack simulation tests your SIEM and EDR rules so threats stop slipping by detection.

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Microsoft has finally put a date on one of its biggest upcoming games. Gears of War: E-Day will launch on October 6, 2026. It’s now set to arrive exclusively on Xbox, PC and Xbox Cloud Gaming.

The announcement came during Xbox’s Summer Game Fest showcase. It appeared alongside a new trailer packed with brutal combat, collapsing cityscapes and plenty of the series’ trademark chainsaw-fuelled action.

More importantly, it offered a closer look at the game’s setting: the infamous Emergence Day. This was when the Locust Horde first erupted onto Earth and changed humanity’s future forever.

The footage opens with a younger Marcus Fenix before he became the battle-hardened soldier fans know today. It also appears to show his first meeting with Dominic Santiago. This is setting up an origin story for one of gaming’s most iconic duos.

UBTECH spent years refining full-size humanoids for factory floors and warehouse aisles. Those machines learned to move with care around people, handle precise assembly steps, and stay safe in busy production lines at places like NIO and FAW-Volkswagen plants. Now the same engineering team has turned that foundation toward regular homes through a new consumer brand called UWORLD and its first offering, the U1 series.

A recent teaser clip shows two models in a dramatic, low-light scene. One of them is dressed sharply in a cut dark suit, with well-combed light hair and glasses that catch even the smallest reflection. The other is seated comfortably in a chair, her long wavy hair framing a well-made-up face with a smooth complexion and expressive eyes. Close-ups show a subtle shine, natural-looking hair, and delicate skin texture, all thanks to a silicone exterior that closely resembles human skin.

Unitree R1 Humanoid Robot (White, R1 Air)

• Three models, one lightweight platform R1 Air (20 DOF, monocular camera), R1 (26 DOF, binocular camera, head+waist joints), and R1 Edu (26 DOF…
• Easy setup – no coding required for basic use Unbox, power on, and start. Manual teaching feature: physically pose the robot, and it replays the…
• More DOF = more expressive movement 26‑DOF models (R1 / R1 Edu) add head and waist articulation for smoother dance and running. For safety reasons…

The male model stands 183 centimeters (6 feet) tall, while the female model is 168 centimeters (5 feet 6 inches) tall. They each have 88 degrees of freedom across their bodies, allowing them to move in a very coordinated manner, including legs, arms, hands, neck, and chest. They stay connected to cloud services via Wi-Fi and last approximately 2-4 hours on a single charge. UBTECH took a deliberate approach to developing these devices, using on lessons learned from real-world industrial applications such as learning balance, gentle movement, and safe navigation in changing environments.

The idea here is to establish an emotional connection, as this is the ultimate goal. Onboard AI moderates the conversation and, in essence, wakes up when you do. It picks up on conversations even when you’re close by and uses tone, facial expressions, and speaking rate to estimate your mood. When things seem dismal, the robot can flip to encouraging banter or try to steer things in a more positive direction. When the mood is right, it enjoys joining in and talking normally. Personal memory is encrypted on the device to keep your conversations secret. Owners can modify cosmetic elements and character qualities at any time, allowing each robot to develop an own personality over time.

JD.com opened pre-orders on June 2, with a 3,000 yuan deposit required to secure a spot in the initial batch, which got over 2,000 reservations in just a day or two. Shipments to clients who ordered early will arrive in mid-September. A full public presentation is expected for June 30, at which UBTECH will discuss final pricing, particular features, and any software updates planned after launch. We’re still waiting for the final retail price, but it appears that this device will be more affordable than a high-end enterprise system.

Their physical abilities are reportedly limited, as in they can get up, sit, and move over flat indoor surfaces using taught gait patterns, but stairs, rough terrain, or tough household tasks are out of the question for now. According to UBTECH, these units will not accept custom programming or behaviors, preventing owners from configuring them to perform new functions on the fly. The emphasis is on communication, with some incremental personalization on the side, as these devices will not be used to retrieve mail or perform chores anytime soon.
[Source]

INTERVIEW Gregory Kurtzer, CentOS’s founder, tells the story of how the Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone was born of a small group of rebuild hackers and Linux fans who were angry that Red Hat Enterprise Linux had replaced Red Hat Linux and convinced they could do better.

Back in 2003, Linux fans were ticked off at Red Hat because they were replacing the end-user-friendly Red Hat Linux with the business-oriented Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). It was a smart move for Red Hat, but users were pissed when then Red Hat CEO, Matthew Szulik, said that for home users, Windows was probably “the right product line.” Yeah. That went over about as well as you’d expect. 

In the meantime, Gregory Kurtzer had no plans to start building a Linux distribution, he says. He came out of biochemistry and genomics, where compute‑hungry (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) (BLAST) jobs were chewing through early SGI systems. One day, his business partner suggested they try Linux.

“He said there was this thing called Linux, he wanted to try, and I thought he was mispronouncing Unix,” Kurtzer tells The Register. They drove to Fry’s, “bought a ton of hardware,” and discovered that a free operating system downloaded off the internet could run serious scientific workloads.

It wasn’t the price that blew his mind, says Kurtzer. What hooked him was realizing that “many, many thousands of people [were] collaboratively working all over the world on a common software project… actually creating something of massive amounts of value.” He became “enamored with open source in general, but Linux as a platform,” and started looking for ways to contribute.

When he landed at the Department of Energy’s Berkeley lab, the environment was standardized on Red Hat. He says he missed Debian’s ecosystem and apt so much that he began asking why there was “no community around the Red Hat type ecosystem or the RPM-based ecosystem.” The answer he kept hearing was that Red Hat owned that space. His answer was Caos [Community Assembled Operating System].

The idea was “to be basically a Debian-like alternative for RPM-based distributions of Linux.” Caos used Red Hat as a base. “Glibc came out of Red Hat, for example, right, but we used the upstream kernel and then extended it with a community‑driven package universe.” He formalized the effort as the Caos Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non‑profit. 

Caos might have stayed a small Linux distro like so many others, but when Red Hat ended the classic Red Hat Linux line in favor of RHEL, it picked up steam.  Kurtzer recalls that the community had grown up on free Red Hat Linux CDs, and the move landed badly: “Linux is a community project, it’s freely available, and it should remain freely available, so a lot of people didn’t like that notion at the time.”

By then, there was already a Red Hat “rebuild” mailing list where multiple groups were experimenting with re‑compiling Red Hat’s source packages into community distributions.uKurtzer tell is: “VA Linux was doing this, along with an HPC company called Atipa, which is where early CentOS developer Rocky McGaugh worked… and there were a few others.” 

Rocky, later immortalized in the name Rocky Linux, was part of that loose coalition, maintaining his own rebuilds. The list also included John Morris, who’d create White Box Enterprise Linux, and David Parsley, who would launch Tao Linux.

The first RHEL clone to break out wasn’t CentOS; John Morris’s White Box Enterprise Linux, not CAOS or CentOS, was first. “He released White Box Enterprise Linux, and Slashdot went crazy for it,” Kurtzer remembered.

Sudden success became a burden. Morris “got way more visibility and attention and responsibility than… he was ready to take on” and didn’t want to “take on the weight of the world in terms of infrastructure.” The Caos folks, by contrast, already had build and mirror infrastructure: “we already have our own builders, we already have our own infrastructure… we were already ingesting packages from… Red Hat Linux [and] Red Hat Enterprise Linux.”

“So a couple members of the Caos team said, well, we’re already kind of doing a lot of this… It’s like, well, this actually makes sense, because we can then leverage those same binaries… and let’s start this project, and so CentOS kind of came out of everything that was happening at the time.”

Then the Red Hat clones were more collaborative than competitive: “We were generally all very collaborative… we were all kind of on the same IRC list, so when any of us had a bug on rebuilding a package or issue, we all kind of worked together.”

Where Caos had an edge was scale. “We actually had a number of people already associated with it. We already had a critical mass… so it was not that big of a lift for us to properly support this,” Kurtzer says.

Parsley ultimately “ran Tao Linux… for quite a while before finally retiring the project, and then telling his users basically to go… over to CentOS,” complete with a “nice transition plan.” White Box and Tao quietly funneled users and expectations into the emerging CentOS brand.

Even the version numbers reflect CentOS’s pragmatic roots. “CentOS 3 was developed almost completely by Rocky,” Kurtzer adds. “We started CentOS version 3 before version 2, and there was never a 1, right, because… There was never a version 1 of RHEL either.” CentOS 3 arrived on stage on March 19, 2004.

The community went where the demand was. “We identified that the first and most pressing need was around version 3, so Rocky started with version 3. That focus, combined with Caos’s infrastructure and the consolidation of smaller rebuilds, turned CentOS into the RHEL clone that stuck.”

For its early life, CentOS lived under the Caos Foundation umbrella. By the CentOS 4 timeframe, in 2005, the projects split. Kurtzer says, “At about the release of… CentOS four… the CentOS project left the Caos Foundation, and it moved on… and we kind of ended up going different directions.”

He ceded control. “I was no longer the project lead of CentOS at that point, so it was taken over by a guy named Lance Davis,” he tells The Reg. Caos continued until around 2007–2008, including a “Node Server Appliance” variant focused on “lightweight high-performance computing systems,” but the market was voting with its feet. “Most people wanted the compatibility… that one-to-one compatibility… was incredibly important,” he says. CentOS became the canonical RHEL clone; Caos faded into history.

How CentOS simply had to exist

From the outside, CentOS often gets cast as Red Hat’s free rival. Kurtzer sees it differently. Red Hat’s subscription model, he contends, practically required something like CentOS to exist. “This choice in the business model has made it very difficult for organizations, and so this is the whole reason why… There was even a need for CentOS,” he says.

Kurtzer explains that enterprises evolved a two‑tier pattern. “Organizations started running a bisected environment where they ran CentOS on the majority of it, and then they ran Red Hat on a sliver of it, where they needed the most support, where they needed validation, where they needed to know that it’s going to work.” 

Without CentOS, he bluntly says: “I believe that most organizations probably would have gone to a Debian and Ubuntu model because nobody’s going to pay for support… across their whole environment for a free product.” Running Debian or Ubuntu everywhere and RHEL on a small slice doesn’t work well, he argues, because “it’s an incompatible operating system, so the tooling would be different depending on what side of the infrastructure that they’re looking at.”

With CentOS, they could “run the free product where they can and then only pay for the support where they need to.” His conclusion: “I actually truly believe CentOS was very helpful to RHEL overall, given the choice of that particular business model.”

Asked when CentOS stopped being a niche rebuild and became a default choice, Kurtzer points to a supercomputing conference in Phoenix in the mid-2000s. “I remember being at a supercomputing conference… and I was talking with a vendor… and I remember somebody came up next to me and interrupted the conversation to ask the vendor: ‘Why don’t they support CentOS?’”

It was a turning point. “This is the first time I actually even heard somebody outside of my circle of people actually now start demanding CentOS… and it was somebody I didn’t know, and I’m just kind of like, ‘wow, that was kind of cool.’” Around the same time, Kurtzer says he and early collaborators met IBM executives there to pitch Caos and CentOS. “Interestingly enough, there was no interest at the time. Another metric of success was seeing technology appear on resumes and in job descriptions. By the mid‑2000s, CentOS was on its way to being more popular than RHEL.”

By the early 2010s, CentOS was everywhere, but still maintained by a small, unpaid team. When Red Hat moved to sponsor the project in 2014, some read it as a hostile capture. Kurtzer didn’t.

“The CentOS team was fairly small at this point… and the developers were basically doing heroic feats for the entire community, and not being paid for it.” Some things never change in open source, do they? 

Kurtzer says he thought the deal was fair. “They’re giving up their home lives and whatnot… and there were companies out there that were doing very well, basing their infrastructure on it, but also making a ton of money on that, so I thought that this was a really fair option for them to now get hired by Red Hat… and now get paid, and now be… not having to give up their home life.” 

Vendors began calling to ask if CentOS was going away and whether he’d recreate it. “I even had two people from fairly large companies at fairly high rankings… basically say, ‘Greg, do you want to recreate CentOS?’ And I said, ‘no… let’s give Red Hat… the benefit of the doubt… and see what happens,’” he recalls. For years, he thinks, Red Hat did “a phenomenal job”: release latency improved, documentation and community interaction got better.

That’s why the CentOS 8/CentOS Stream pivot in  2021 hit so hard. Kurtzer thinks that Red Hat’s messaging “was just a complete cluster… nobody, including the people at Red Hat, really knew what they were saying.” The community’s “general consensus at the time was that CentOS is end of life, and there’s this new thing that’s replacing it, which is some rolling beta.” The blog post announcing the change “got more press… and more comments than any other blog that Red Hat has ever posted… mostly people in the community yelling at Red Hat,” and “it was… nasty.”

By then, Kurtzer was running CIQ, a young high-performance computing (HPC) company building a computing platform on CentOS. They had already asked themselves what would happen if “something happens to CentOS.” Their answer was to be ready to help rebuild a RHEL‑compatible distro if needed.

Within two hours of the CentOS blog going live, as comments piled up, Kurtzer says, he replied publicly: “Hi everybody, I’m… original founder of CentOS. I’m going to go… recreate CentOS, and I’m hanging out over in this Slack over here… and if anybody wants to join me, I’ll be hanging over there, kind of thinking about how to do this.”

The response was immediate. “Within four to six weeks, we had over 10,000 people join… it took off,” he says. The free tier of Slack couldn’t cope, “that 10,000 message limit goes in a matter of hours,” but it was enough to bootstrap a new community. Teams coalesced around release engineering, testing, development, branding, web work, and even merchandise. “We had T‑shirts, swags, and memorabilia that you can get before we had any code,” he laughs. Early shirts read “Rocky Linux” with “early supporter” in brackets underneath.

Rocky Linux wasn’t the only successor; AlmaLinux and others joined the field, and the usual distro tribalism followed. Kurtzer compares it to sports rivalries: “We just do it around our Linux distribution choices,” he says. But he insists the diversity is healthy. “If something happens to Alma, Rocky’s here; if something happens to Rocky, Alma is there; if something happens to both of us, Oracle is there; and we have all of these other options to guarantee the stability in the ecosystem.”

That may be CentOS’s real legacy. It proved that a community could rebuild an enterprise OS from source and sustain it long enough for enterprises to standardize on it, and that doing so could actually reinforce, not undermine, the commercial platform it tracked.

The clones that followed, from Scientific Linux to Rocky and Alma, are part of the same lineage that began when a few people on a rebuild mailing list decided that Red Hat’s sources shouldn’t just sit on a server; they should become a truly community Linux again. ®

Sound significantly influences your sleep quality — positively or negatively — depending on the scenario. Here are examples of each:

Negative impact: Recent studies have shown that environmental noise (especially cars, city or transportation sounds) can decrease your deep and REM sleep while increasing your awake time. Those annoying extraneous noises keeping you up at night provoke a biological stress response in your body, which is detrimental to your sleep quality. As a result, those who sleep in noisy environments are at greater risk of feeling groggy the next day, often experiencing mood changes, annoyance and decreased brain functioning.

A lack of sleep from sound disturbances at night has long-term health consequences, which is why using a pair of sleep headphones can be beneficial in this scenario. Canceling or blocking out those unwanted sounds can help you fall and stay asleep longer.

Positive impact: Listening to audio for sleep — particularly relaxing music or soundscapes — affects our brain and body. Soothing music can shift the focus in your brain from stress-inducing thoughts to a more relaxed state, which helps to lower your heart rate and blood pressure. This makes it easier to fall asleep.

When listening to music at around 60 beats per minute (the same as the average relaxed human heart), “entrainment” can occur when your body synchronizes with its environment (in this case, the beat of the song), which promotes relaxation.

It doesn’t have to be slow-tempo songs; listening to any music you enjoy can release dopamine in the brain, promoting pleasure and reducing stress and anxiety. Adding music or soothing soundscapes to your bedtime routine can be a great way to mask unwanted extraneous noises and train your body and brain that it’s time for sleep. 

Expansion in Japan will enable Midnight to operate in a country that is ‘uniquely vulnerable to AI-generated copyright infringement’ due to ‘sophisticated digital piracy syndicates’ operating at ‘unprecedented scale’.

Dublin-based AI-powered copyright protection platform Midnight Labs is to benefit from investment by Sony Innovation Fund.

The investment for an undisclosed amount would be used to expand Midnight Labs’ agentic ‘Enforcement Engine’ to protect high-value entertainment intellectual property (IP) from mass piracy, deepfakes and AI-generated infringement in the US and Japanese markets, the company said.

Midnight’s technology uses “automated enforcement workflows” to fast-track the scanning, detection, analysis, verification and removal of IP-infringing content in minutes, rather than weeks, according to the company, which forecasts that “video piracy alone will drive an estimated $125bn in annual revenue leakage by 2028”.

“Generative AI has industrialised piracy, exposing IP holders to both financial loss and real-time reputational damage,” said Dan Purcell, CEO and co-founder of Midnight Labs. “Traditional digital rights management built on manual processes simply cannot keep pace with AI-generated infringement, leaving legal and content protection teams overwhelmed.

“We make enforcement autonomous by scanning, detecting, proving and removing stolen content faster than it can spread, returning control to IP holders over their content, reputation and revenue. The backing of Sony Innovation Fund accelerates that mission.”

Midnight, founded in 2025, said it has removed more than 2.8bn pieces of infringing content across gaming, anime, manga, film, sports, music and live streaming, and works with “the world’s largest streaming platforms, entertainment studios, podcast networks, talent agencies and Fortune 100 executives”.

According to the company, its platform integrates legal-grade evidence collection directly into an automated pipeline, with “every takedown” supported by a “forensic evidence bundle, including time-stamped screenshots, cryptographic hashes, HTML source archives and full network records”, enabling the next steps towards litigation and court proceedings following content removal.

The company claims that its internal AI platform continuously scans more than 75m sources – including on the dark web and non-compliant platforms –  and identifies threats in real time to automate takedowns, filings and compliance workflows.

Expansion in Japan through Sony’s funding will enable Midnight to operate in a country that it said is “uniquely vulnerable to AI-generated copyright infringement” due to “sophisticated digital piracy syndicates” operating at “unprecedented scale” there.

“Midnight Labs is tackling an important and increasingly complex problem for the creative industries,” said Antonio Avitabile, managing director at Sony Ventures EMEA. The company is also backed by Airbridge Equity Partners, Earlybird VC and Upside VC.

Midnight also offers a “creator-focused” product named Ceartas, which the company said is aimed at “protecting the world’s biggest content creators and creator-economy brands from impersonation, piracy and deepfakes”, and was “founded to fight exploitation and protect victims of non-consensual content”.

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It’s already been five years since BGMI came to the Indian market. And if you’ve been playing for long, chances are you remember a very different gaming landscape. Gaming creators were rare, eSports was still finding its footing, and convincing someone that gaming could be a career was almost impossible. Fast forward to 2026, and things look very different. BGMI has moved from just being a fun pastime to leading the Indian gaming sector, with thriving eSports and collaborations with real-world brands that were once impossible.

Speaking to Fossbytes, Srinjoy Das, Director – Marketing & BGMI Product Management at KRAFTON India, explained how both BGMI and the Indian gaming audience have evolved over the years, and why the company increasingly sees BGMI as more than just a battle royale game.

Indian Gamers Have Grown Up

I’d be the first to admit that I downloaded PUBG Mobile on the very first day. It was a quiet afternoon, and I was bored, scrolling through my phone, when I saw it launch in India. I got my friends to download it, too. We used to play together, sitting in the same room for hours before our parents called us back. It’s been many years since that, and we’ve all grown up, pursuing careers in different parts of the world. Still, there’s one way we all keep in touch, and that’s BGMI. It’s the place we hang out virtually, turning the experience from simply grinding through a game into a way to stay in touch with friends while having fun.

When asked what had changed more over the years, the game or the audience, Das had a simple answer: both. Gaming is one of the fastest-moving forms of entertainment today. Unlike movies or TV shows, which evolve gradually, games and the communities around them can change dramatically in just a few years.

According to Das, one of the biggest shifts has been the seriousness with which people now take gaming. He pointed to KRAFTON’s BGMI Career Mode campaign as an example, saying the response showed that many players now see gaming as more than just a hobby. “People are seriously thinking about a career in gaming now,” Das said. “They think gaming gives them real-world skills, and it’s not just about becoming a streamer or an esports player anymore.”

That broader acceptance is something he believes has transformed the industry. Gaming is no longer something people do only in their spare time. Instead, it has become a mainstream form of entertainment that competes directly with movies, OTT platforms, and social media for people’s attention.

BGMI Is Bigger Than Gaming Creators Now

One of the more interesting changes over the last few years has been the creator ecosystem surrounding BGMI. When the game first exploded in India, gaming YouTubers were the primary way new players discovered the game. Today, however, KRAFTON’s strategy has expanded far beyond traditional gaming creators. According to Das, India boasts one of the largest gaming creator ecosystems in the world for a single title. But he believes the industry has now reached an inflection point where relying solely on gaming creators is no longer enough.

Over the last few months, BGMI has worked with creators like Bhuvan Bam and other mainstream internet personalities. The company is also preparing collaborations with CarryMinati, showing how the game’s reach now extends well beyond the gaming audience. “We’re going beyond gaming-focused influencers,” Das explained. “We’re seeing what else lies beyond that world.”

How KRAFTON Decides What Goes Into New BGMI Updates

One of the more interesting aspects of BGMI today is its updates. Every few months, a new mode introduces a new map to discover, along with special abilities that take time to master. It’s one of the biggest reasons my friends and I still log in to the game, as it’s more fun than just running around a field trying to find an enemy.

I asked Das how the team comes up with these, and he said player feedback remains at the center of the update process. The recently released BGMI 4.4 update introduced a Greek and Roman mythology-inspired theme, complete with floating islands, special powers, and new gameplay mechanics. While these large thematic updates have become a regular part of BGMI, KRAFTON says the goal is always to create new ways for players to prove themselves.

One example is the new Glory Battle system. Instead of allowing everyone access to the same rewards, only top-performing teams can participate in certain encounters and unlock some of the most valuable rewards. According to Das, this creates a stronger sense of achievement and rewards skilled gameplay. “Players repeatedly tell us they like it when we make these changes because it gives them a chance to prove themselves,” he said.

Along with these updates, another trend that’s become more common in BGMI is brand collaborations, such as those with Mahindra, Royal Enfield, Harley-Davidson, and Ford. While many players may view these collaborations as simple cosmetic additions, Das says the reality is far more detailed. According to him, partner brands are involved in nearly every stage of development. Everything from a vehicle’s appearance to how it sounds and handles is carefully reviewed. Using Royal Enfield as an example, Das told us that both teams spent considerable time perfecting the exact sound the motorcycle makes when players start it up in-game.

A More Social Gaming Experience

More than ever, BGMI feels like a social platform rather than just a game. According to Das, KRAFTON is actively designing for that behavior. Over the years, BGMI has evolved from a simple lobby into a much broader social experience. Features like the Hub, Collection Hall, Home Ground, and the newly introduced Flash Crew system are all designed to encourage players to spend time together outside of matches.

The Hub allows players to interact while waiting for games. Collection Hall lets users showcase their collections to friends. Home Ground gives players the ability to build their own spaces and host gatherings. Flash Crew takes that idea even further by allowing players to create multiple friend groups around different interests and activities. “It’s not just your closest friends anymore,” Das explained. “You can have different types of friends for different circumstances.”

The company is also focusing more on player-generated content. Das said that players have already created nearly 30,000 custom maps using BGMI’s creation tools. That’s a massive leap from the handful of official maps that existed during the game’s early years.

The company now wants to invest even more heavily in that ecosystem. Future tools could allow players to create everything from zombie survival experiences and fighter jet battles to parkour challenges and uniquely Indian environments. “We’re seeing players who don’t just want to play content anymore. They want to create it,” Das said.