Hastings will not stand for re-election to the company board at its June AGM and will instead ‘focus on his philanthropy and other pursuits’.

Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings is to step aside as chair of the company’s board in June, the streaming giant announced in a first-quarter earnings letter to shareholders yesterday (16 April) that caused stocks to fall with its lower-than-expected forecasts for Q2.

For Q1, the company declared revenue of $12.25bn, year-on-year growth of 16.2pc, operating income of $3.96bn at a margin of 32.3pc and net income of $5.28bn, while diluted earnings per share (EPS) was reported at $1.23. Each of these metrics was higher than the forecast given in the company’s Q4 earning report.

However, the letter’s forecasts for the April, May and June quarter – in terms of, for example, revenue ($12.57bn), year-on-year growth (13.5pc) and diluted EPS ($0.78) – are pessimistic in comparison to stock market predictions, according to Bloomberg, which noted that Netflix shares fell by around 9pc as a result of the Q2 estimates.

In delivering its results and forecasts, the quarterly letter also outlined three “areas of focus” for achieving the company’s “goals”: delivering “more entertainment value” to customers, leveraging technology to improve its service and “improving monetisation”.

Netflix is co-led by dual CEOs Ted Sarandos, who earned $53.9m in 2025, and Greg Peters, who made $53.19m last year; departing chair and co-founder Reed Hasting was the CEO for 25 years after Netflix was created in 1997.

The letter referenced the abandoned deal for Netflix to buy Warner Bros, suggesting the price wasn’t “right” – rival Paramount agreed to buy Warner for $110bn in February in a deal awaiting shareholder and regulatory approval.

Sarandos and Peters paid tribute to the departing Hastings in the letter, calling him “a true history-maker”, the entertainment platform’s “biggest champion” and “part of our DNA”.

Hastings co-founded Netflix in 1997 with Marc Randolph and brought it from an online DVD rental delivery service that went public in 2002 into the realm of streaming. He is a board member of Bloomberg, Anthropic and various educational nonprofit organisations.

The shareholders’ letter said he would not stand for re-election to the company board at its June AGM and would instead “focus on his philanthropy and other pursuits”.

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from the flood-the-zone-with-shit dept

Two trends that I’m very interested in are about to collide and it’s going to be a mess.

By now, some of you will be tired of my calling for a more nuanced discussion about the use of AI and machine learning tools in the video game industry. I get it, but I’m also not going to pretend like I don’t still hold that very same view. AI tools are just that: tools. If the tools are good and used at the behest of the artists in the industry to make better games, that’s a good thing. If they upend artistic intent or simply suck, that’s a bad thing. And on the matter of jobs within the industry, if there is a net reduction in jobs, that’s bad! If AI lowers the barriers of entry for otherwise creative people and the result is even more jobs within the industry spread over more studios and, importantly, more cultural output in the form of games, that’s good!

Except when it’s not. And even if the AI evangelists are right, or those of us who see the possibility that AI use will ultimately result in more people in the industry and more games released to the public are right, that can still present very real problems within the industry. And I think there could be a serious one looming for storefronts like Steam.

This concern calcified in my head somewhat when I came across indie publisher Mike Rose, known for producing Yes, Your Grace, talking about just what all of this output could mean on Steam specifically.

“From a publisher perspective specifically, it’s mega annoying,” Rose tells GamesRadar+ in an interview, echoing other publishers like Hooded Horse. “If we thought the number of games being launched on Steam was crazy before, now it’s just impossible. During the last Next Fest, it seemed like around 1/3 of the demos had either AI generated key art, and/or AI-generated content. So now we have that to compete with too. Hurray!” Publishing lead John Buckley of Palworld developer Pocketpair called out the same AI trend in the latest Steam Next Fest.

Steam, as a focal point for the more open PC gaming market, is the clearest barometer for the rising quantity of games, with over 20,000 releases fighting for space every year. Even with Valve sticking to AI content disclosures for games listed on Steam, the rise of AI tools will only contribute to the torrent of content flooding the platform as games – or at least AI-made things game-shaped enough to be sold – become easier to produce.

Claims that there are too many games being released on Steam certainly isn’t new, nor has it historically been tied to anything to do with artificial intelligence. There have been complaints about this, as well as Valve’s apparent lack of interest in playing any real curation role, going back to 2023. Wait, make that 2020. Oh, wait, it actually goes back to 2015.

But while Steam hasn’t yet collapsed under the weight of its own volume of releases on the platform to date, the through line to all of that criticism has been Valve’s stoic apathy towards keeping up with the volume when it comes to helping its customers navigate the flood.

And that could be a very real problem for the platform. Steam’s value to the consumer, besides being the most recognizable outlet for PC gaming, is in its curation capabilities. To date, other than providing some search filters and a few tools to personalize the recommendations it makes for new titles to you, Steam has mostly left curation up to the customer themselves, or third-party list-makers. Meanwhile, the process for listing a game on Steam has not changed appreciably in the past several years. It’s still the same $100 entry fee to get your title listed. You still have to jump through all the registration steps with Steamworks, generate an app ID, build the store page, upload your assets. Then you wait for Valve to do its own review before you can publish your game, but that mostly amounts to ensuring that you’re compliant with Steam policies, that the game can launch successfully, and that’s about it.

With a potential flood of PC games coming, that sure doesn’t feel like enough to keep the platform from becoming an unnavigable wasteland where you can’t tell the gems from the slop. And, barring any new rules limiting to what degree AI can be used in game creation, that tidal wave is coming.

On this point, Rose focuses on “the elephant in the room” here: “It’s probably never going away again.”

“People can now make stuff by telling a bot to make it for them, and you know, the thing is that humans are mega lazy,” he reasons. “I don’t even mean that as an insult! We just are. So for a lot of people, if there’s a choice between ‘spend a bunch of time and money making a cool thing,’ vs ‘type some prompts into a program and the thing is made for me very quickly’ – the average person is going to pick the latter.

And that’s the thing really: Our feelings on it don’t matter. It doesn’t matter that a bunch of us don’t like genAI. It’s gonna get used now, and it’ll get used more and more. As the kids say: Video games are cooked.”

I don’t think that video games are cooked, but his point that AI will be in use in the industry is the one I’ve been making for months now. We have to be talking about how it will be used, not if. That ship has sailed.

And if Steam is still going to be of any value at all to the consumer, Valve better be thinking right damned now how it’s going to get more involved in the curation of what shows up on its platform.

Filed Under: ai, curation, filtering, steam, video games

Companies: valve

Strands is the NYT’s latest word game after the likes of Wordle, Spelling Bee and Connections – and it’s great fun. It can be difficult, though, so read on for my Strands hints.

Want more word-based fun? Then check out my NYT Connections today and Quordle today pages for hints and answers for those games, and Marc’s Wordle today page for the original viral word game.

NASA of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Rosalind Franklin rover, which is being sent to Mars. The current plan is to launch via a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center. The timing is still being worked out, but the space agency says this won’t happen until at least 2028.

This is a partnership between NASA and the ESA, with the European agency providing the rover, the spacecraft and the lander. The US will provide braking engines for the lander, heater units for the rover’s internal systems and, of course, assistance with the actual launch.

The rover will be outfitted with scientific instruments to look for signs of ancient life on the red planet. These include a state-of-the-art mass spectrometer and an organic molecule analyzer, which will come in handy as the vehicle collects samples at the Oxia Planum landing site.

This is a mission that has suffered years of delays for all kinds of wild reasons. It was actually first conceived . The rover mission was originally scheduled for 2009, after NASA came on board. Budget constraints forced NASA to drop out in 2012, so Russia signed on as the ESA’s launch partner.

During this period, the mission which . The ESA in 2022 after the country invaded Ukraine. This left the mission in doubt until 2024, when NASA .

However, the setbacks didn’t even end there. The Trump administration has repeatedly tried to end NASA’s involvement with the project, and many others, . The current proposal was made while the around the Moon, . Here’s hoping the launch actually happens in 2028.

Uber has launched a service that sends a gig worker to your door to collect items you want to return to a retailer, for $5 a pickup. The feature, called Return a Package, is available in the Uber Eats app across nearly 5,000 US cities and works with nine retail partners including Target, Best Buy, and Dick’s Sporting Goods. A courier arrives, takes the item, and delivers it back to the store. Uber One members pay $3.

The service is limited in ways that matter. Items must have been purchased through Uber Eats, must be worth more than $20, cannot exceed $100 in value or 30 pounds in weight, and must comply with the individual retailer’s return policy. Customers can send up to five packages per request. These constraints mean Return a Package is not a replacement for driving to a UPS Store or printing a shipping label. It is a convenience layer for a specific subset of purchases made through Uber’s own marketplace.

The returns problem

US retail returns totalled $850 billion in 2025, according to the National Retail Federation, with online purchases returned at roughly twice the rate of items bought in physical stores. Processing a single return costs retailers between $10 and $65 when accounting for shipping, labour, inspection, and restocking. Return fraud added another $103 billion in losses. For retailers, reverse logistics is an operational burden that scales with e-commerce growth and shows no sign of shrinking.

Uber’s pitch is that its existing courier network, the same fleet that delivers takeaway food and groceries, can handle returns as a natural extension of its logistics infrastructure. The marginal cost of adding a return pickup to a courier’s route is low if the courier is already in the area. The $5 fee covers Uber’s cut and the driver’s compensation for what is typically a short trip. For the customer, it eliminates the friction of packaging an item, finding a label, and visiting a drop-off point during business hours.

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The competitive landscape is crowded. UPS acquired Happy Returns from PayPal and is transitioning the service from FedEx Office locations to The UPS Store network, offering box-free, label-free returns at thousands of physical locations. Amazon handles its own returns through Whole Foods, Kohl’s partnerships, and its own locker network. FedEx and USPS maintain their own drop-off infrastructure. What Uber adds is the on-demand pickup element: no driving, no queuing, no leaving the house.

Uber’s logistics expansion

Return a Package builds on Uber Connect, a peer-to-peer package delivery service launched in 2023 that already lets customers send items to USPS, UPS, or FedEx locations via a courier. The new service adds the reverse direction: instead of dropping off a pre-labelled parcel, the courier collects an item and returns it directly to the retailer on the customer’s behalf.

This sits within a broader strategic push. Uber has been systematically expanding beyond ride-hailing and food delivery into logistics, autonomous vehicles, and fleet services. In the past year alone, the company has signed a $1.25 billion robotaxi deal with Rivian, begun robotaxi pilots with Wayve and Nissan in Tokyo, started testing autonomous ID. Buzz minibuses with Volkswagen’s MOIA in Los Angeles, and relaunched Motional robotaxis in Las Vegas. The returns service is less dramatic than any of those initiatives, but it serves the same strategic logic: every package that moves through Uber’s network strengthens the case for its courier infrastructure as a general-purpose logistics platform.

The financial case for expansion is strong. Uber’s delivery revenue hit $4.9 billion in Q4 2025, a 30% year-over-year increase, within total annual revenue of $52 billion and gross bookings of $193 billion. The company generated $10 billion in free cash flow for the full year. Uber does not need returns to be a major revenue line; it needs them to increase the frequency with which customers open the app and the number of tasks its courier fleet can fulfil per hour. Both metrics drive the unit economics that make its delivery business profitable.

The limits of convenience

The restriction to Uber Eats purchases is the most significant constraint. It means Return a Package does not help with the vast majority of online returns, those from Amazon, direct-to-consumer brands, or any retailer outside Uber’s marketplace. A customer who buys a blender from Target through Uber Eats can have it picked up; the same customer who buys the same blender from Target.com cannot. This limits the service’s utility and reinforces its role as a retention tool for Uber Eats rather than a standalone logistics product.

The $100 value cap and 30-pound weight limit further narrow the use case. High-value electronics, furniture, and appliances, categories with significant return rates, are excluded. The nine launch retailers cover a reasonable range of categories, from home goods to sporting equipment to pet supplies, but the absence of clothing retailers is notable given that apparel has the highest return rate of any e-commerce category.

Uber could expand both the retailer list and the eligibility criteria over time. The company’s track record with Uber Eats suggests it will. The grocery delivery service started with a handful of partners and now operates with tens of thousands of merchants. But for now, Return a Package is a feature, not a platform. It solves a real irritation for a narrow set of transactions and signals where Uber wants to go without yet delivering the broad platform capability that would make it a genuine threat to established reverse logistics providers.

The $5 price point is the most interesting element. It is low enough to be an impulse decision for most consumers, cheaper than the fuel and parking costs of driving to a store, and comparable to the cost of printing a label and scheduling a carrier pickup. If Uber can expand the service beyond its own marketplace and remove the value cap, it would have a legitimate consumer proposition in a market worth hundreds of billions of dollars that no one has made convenient yet. The infrastructure is already there. The question is whether the restrictions come off before a competitor, most likely Amazon, gets there first.