Though Nintendo can technically claim it had the first big gaming news event of the year, at least Xbox’s Developer Direct actually showed off some games and let us know when we can play them. The showcase was anchored by deep dives into the biggest games coming down the green pipe like Doom: The Dark Ages and Compulsion Games’ South of Midnight, with a couple of surprises to fill out the nearly one-hour-long runtime. Here are the highlights from the show.

Xbox kicked off the Direct with the surprise reveal of Ninja Gaiden 4. The game is being codeveloped by Koei Tecmo’s Team Ninja and Bayonetta studio PlatinumGames. Ninja Gaiden 4 revives the series’ bloody, fast-paced combat and high-stakes (but often frustrating) platforming with a new face, the ninja Yakumo. Yakumo will use his unique fighting styles to defeat the Divine Dragon Order that’s turned Tokyo into a dystopian, crumbling mess. Gaiden’s former protagonist, Ryu Hayabusa, will also make an appearance as a playable character and Yakumo’s rival.

Ninja Gaiden 4 will launch in the fall of this year, but if you don’t want to wait for your bloody ninja action, you don’t have to. Xbox stealth dropped Ninja Gaiden 2 Black, a remake of Ninja Gaiden II, and it’s available right now on Xbox and Game Pass.

The developers at Compulsion Games went into detail about South of Midnight’s gameplay and story. You play as Hazel who must use her powers as a Weaver, fighting monsters and traversing the haunted landscape, to rescue her mother who gets swept away in a hurricane. With this, everything I’ve seen about South of Midnight makes it seem like it’ll be one of my games of the year. It’s got a Black protagonist, features characters and tropes that harken to Southern gothic folklore, and its stop-motion art style makes it immediately stand out. I cannot wait to get my hands on this game when it releases on April 8th.

Sandfall Interactive was founded in Montpellier, France, in 2020 with a team led by former Ubisoft developers. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is the studio’s first game — a turn-based RPG with a compelling narrative hook. The world has been ravaged by a being known as the Paintress. Every year, she writes down a number, and everyone older than that number disappears. Expeditions are sent out to stop the Paintress, and the game will follow Expedition 33 in their attempt to save humanity. In addition to an interesting Persona 5-style take on turn-based combat, Expedition 33 features some serious voice acting talent, starring Charlie Cox, Jennifer English, Ben Starr, and Andy Serkis. Can’t wait to hear them perform when Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 launches on April 24th.

To close out the Direct, Xbox gave us another look at Doom: The Dark Ages, the prequel to id Software’s 2016 Doom reboot and Doom Eternal. It will, of course, feature all the ripping and tearing a Doom enjoyer could want, along with an interesting focus on narrative — something the series isn’t really known for. But I suspect folks are far more interested in piloting a 30-story Doomguy-shaped mech suit when the game releases on May 15th.

JetBrains, the company behind coding tools like the IntelliJ IDE for Java and Kotlin (and, indeed, the Kotlin language itself), on Thursday launched Junie, a new AI coding agent. This agent, the company says, will be able to handle routine development tasks for when you want to create new applications — and understand the context of existing projects you may want to extend with new features.

Using the well-regarded SWEBench Verified benchmark of 500 common developer tasks, Junie is able to solve 53.6% of them on a single run. Not too long ago, that would have been the top score, but it’s worth noting that at this point, the top-performing models score more than 60%, with Weights & Biases “Programmer O1 crosscheck5” currently leading the pack with a score of 64.6%. JetBrains itself calls Junie’s score “promising.”

But even with a lower score, JetBrains’ service may have an advantage because of its tight integration with the rest of the JetBrains IDE. The company notes that even as Junie helps developers get their work done, the human is always in control, even when delegating tasks to the agent.

• Phishing campaign mimics CAPTCHA to deliver hidden malware commands
• PowerShell command hidden in verification leads to Lumma Stealer attack
• Educating users on phishing tactics is key to preventing such attacks

CloudSek has uncovered a sophisticated method for distributing the Lumma Stealer malware which poses a serious threat to Windows users.

This technique relies on deceptive human verification pages that trick users into unwittingly executing harmful commands.

Pocketpair, the company behind last year’s viral game Palworld, has a new venture: publishing indie games. Its first project, scheduled for release later this year, will be an as-yet-unnamed horror game from Surgent Studios, the developer behind 2024’s Tales of Kenzera: Zau.

Palworld, jokingly referred to as “Pokémon with guns,” was a breakout success last year, drawing in more than 25 million players in its first few months. The company’s step into publishing comes at a turbulent time for video games, especially smaller studios; last year, Among Us developer Innersloth announced its own move into publishing to help push projects forward. Pocketpair’s Palworld success, it seems, is allowing them to do the same.

“As the games industry continues to grow, more and more games find themselves struggling to get funded or greenlit,” John Buckley, head of Pocketpair Publishing, said in a press release announcing the new division. “We think this is a real shame, because there are so many incredible creators and ideas out there that just need a little help to become incredible games.”

It’s no surprise, then, that Pocketpair would work with Surgent Studios, which has struggled to find funding following the release of Zau. The developer put its team on hiatus last year as it sought a partner for its next Kenzera game, currently known as Project Uso.

Surgent’s deal with Pocketpair is separate from Uso, founder Abubakar Salim tells WIRED. Unlike the Afrofuturism of Zau, it’ll be a horror title meant to introduce players to something new. “We’re taking a little detour from the Tales of Kenzera universe,” Salim says.

Salim adds that the horror genre “is a fascinating space that taps into primal emotions, immersing audiences in a reality that’s removed from their own yet strikes something deep and dark within us all.” Pocketpair and Surgent gave few details about the game in Thursday’s announcement, other than to describe it as “short and weird.”

“The world is so raw right now, and it feels natural to craft an experience that reflects and feeds off that intensity,” Salim says.

Pocketpair Publishing has not announced any other future projects. The company has been embroiled in legal drama since last year, when Nintendo filed a lawsuit in Tokyo claiming Palworld infringed on its copyright. Nintendo did not respond to a request for comment. When asked if the lawsuit was of any concern to Surgent, Salim says the studio isn’t worried. “We’re really excited to be working with their new publishing wing to bring this game to life,” he says.

Meta and YouTube aren’t the only platforms looking to benefit from TikTok potentially disappearing — Substack wants in on the action, too.

The company announced Thursday it’s launching a $20 million “creator accelerator fund,” promising content creators they won’t lose revenue by jumping ship to Substack. Creators in the program also get “strategic and business support” from Substack, and early access to new features.

“We established this fund because we’ve seen creators who specialize in video, audio, and text expand their audience, revenue, and influence on Substack, where the platform’s network effects amplify the quality and impact of the work they’re doing,” the company said in a blog post.

This pivot on Substack’s part has been in the works for a while — for months, the company has been marketing itself not as a newsletter delivery service but as a creator platform similar to Patreon.

“On Substack, [creators] can build their own home on the internet: one where creators, not platform executives or advertisers, own their work and their audience,” the blog post reads. The post also cites “bans, backlash, and policies that change with the political winds” as a reason creators can’t depend on traditional social media services.

That’s all fine (we at The Verge have been saying this for a while). But creators focusing on Substack are also subject to ebbs and flows depending on what the company is prioritizing: first, it was newsletters, then it was tweet-like micro blogs, followed by full-on websites and livestreaming. For some, Substack’s initial stated mission of giving more freedom to independent writers is fading. And TikTok creators looking to move to Substack will need to rebuild their following all over again — you obviously can’t export your TikTok followers.

The $20 million fund isn’t the first time Substack has offered a pool of money meant to entice creators. Under a program called Substack Pro, the company poached top media talent from traditional newsrooms with higher pay, health insurance, and other perks. That program ended in 2022, with Substack cofounder Hamish McKenzie saying the deals weren’t employment arrangements but “seed funding deals to remove the financial risk for a writer in starting their own business.” In other words, welcome to Substack. Now that you’re here, you’re on your own — which is more or less the deal other platforms offer.

In an announcement perhaps timed to divert attention away from OpenAI’s Operator, Anthropic Thursday unveiled a new feature for its developer API called Citations, which lets devs “ground” answers from its Claude family of AI in source documents such as emails.

Anthropic says Citations allows its AI models to provide detailed references to “the exact sentences and passages” from docs they use to generate responses. As of Thursday afternoon, Citations is available in both Anthropic’s API and Google’s Vertex AI platform.

As Anthropic explains in a blog post with Citations, devs can add source files to have models automatically cite claims that they inferred from those files. Citations is particularly useful in document summarization, Q&A, and customer support applications, Anthropic says, where the feature can nudge models to insert source citations.

Citations isn’t available for all of Anthropic’s models — only Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Claude 3.5 Haiku. Also, the feature isn’t free. Anthropic notes that Citations may incur charges depending on the length and number of the source documents.

Based on Anthropic’s standard API pricing, which Citations uses, a roughly-100-page source doc would cost around $0.30 with Claude 3.5 Sonnet, or $0.08 with Claude 3.5 Haiku. That may well be worth it for devs looking to cut down on hallucinations and other AI-induced errors.

• Sextortion scams evolve with personalized tactics and heightened intimidation.
• Threat actors exploit invoicing platforms to bypass email security filters.
• Robust email filters and training help counter sextortion threats effectively.

Sextortion scams are becoming more complex and personal as the scams now frequently target individuals across different sectors with greater precision creating a sense of immediate threat.

Cofense Phish Defense Center (PDC) recently observed a notable evolution in sextortion scams, which unlike earlier versions, which relied primarily on generic scare tactics, now use more sophisticated strategies, often bypassing traditional security measures.

TerraPower, a nuclear energy startup founded by Bill Gates, struck a deal this week with one of the largest data center developers in the US to deploy advanced nuclear reactors. TerraPower and Sabey Data Centers (SDC) are working together on a plan to run existing and future facilities on nuclear energy from small reactors.

Tech companies are scrambling to determine where to get all the electricity they’ll need for energy-hungry AI data centers that are putting growing pressure on power grids. They’re increasingly turning to nuclear energy, including next-generation reactors that startups like TerraPower are developing.

“The energy sector is transforming at an unprecedented pace after decades of business as usual, and meaningful progress will require strategic collaboration across industries,” TerraPower President and CEO Chris Levesque said in a press release.

A memorandum of understanding signed by the two companies establishes a “strategic collaboration” that’ll initially look into the potential for new nuclear power plants in Texas and the Rocky Mountain region that would power SDC’s data centers.

There’s still a long road ahead before that can become a reality. The technology TerraPower and similar nuclear energy startups are developing still have to make it through regulatory hurdles and prove that they can be commercially viable.

Compared to older, larger nuclear power plants, the next generation of reactors are supposed to be smaller and easier to site. Nuclear energy is seen as an alternative to fossil fuels that are causing climate change. But it still faces opposition from some advocates concerned about the impact of uranium mining and storing radioactive waste near communities.

“I’m a big believer that nuclear energy can help us solve the climate problem, which is very, very important. There are designs that, in terms of their safety or fuel use or how they handle waste, I think, minimize those problems,” Gates told The Verge last year.

TerraPower’s reactor design for this collaboration, Natrium, is the only advanced technology of its kind with a construction permit application for a commercial reactor pending with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, according to the company. The company just broke ground on a demonstration project in Wyoming last year, and expects it to come online in 2030.

Microsoft made a deal in September to help restart a retired reactor at Three Mile Island. Both Google and Amazon, meanwhile, announced plans last year to support the development of advanced reactors to power their data centers.

While Meta lures TikTok creators to Instagram and Facebook with cash bonuses, its X competitor Instagram Threads is now making things easier for creators, brands, and others who need more professional tools to manage their presence on the app. On Thursday, Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced a small handful of new features coming to Threads, including a way to schedule posts and view more metrics within Insights.

In a post on the social network, Mosseri shared that users would now be able to schedule posts on Threads and view the metrics for individual posts within the Insights dashboard which offers a way for Threads users to track trends including their views, number of followers and geographic demographics, number and type of interactions, and more, for a given time period.

In addition, he said that Threads is adding a new feature that allows users to “markup” a post they’re resharing so they include their own creative take. While Mosseri didn’t elaborate on what that means or share an example, earlier findings from tech enthusiast Chris Messina indicate that Threads will add a new icon next to the buttons for adding photos, GIFs, voice, hashtags, and more that provide access to this feature.

The squiggle icon, when clicked, takes users to a screen where they can choose between tools like a highlighter pen or arrow tool, that would allow them to draw directly on a Thread post. This feature was also spotted last week by Lindsey Gamble, who posted on Threads to show the feature in action.

It’s an odd sort of addition for Threads, given that users are more often sharing something clipped from the web, like a news article, where they’ve added a highlight or underline in a screenshot. There hasn’t been much consumer demand for a tool to mark up Threads’ posts directly.

However, the feature does offer Threads users something unique, when compared with social networking rivals like X, Bluesky, and Mastodon — and that could be the point.

• Cloudflare AI Audit offers analytics to track and monetize content usage
• Creators regain control with automated tools and fair compensation
• Cloudflare bridges creators and AI firms for balanced content use

As artificial intelligence use cases continue to evolve, there is a growing concern from website owners and content creators over the unauthorized use of their content by AI bots.

Many websites, ranging from large media corporations to small personal blogs, are being scanned by AI models without the creators’ knowledge or compensation, not only affecting businesses but also diminishing the value of online content.