World of Warcraft, or WoW, is like the Red Hot Chili Peppers of the massively multiplayer online roleplaying genre: not only is it still going strong but it’s also somehow even bigger than you thought. World of Warcraft’s current numbers aren’t public, but one recent educated guess came in at 7 million paying subscribers, which, at $15 / month, would make the game a billion-dollar earner by itself. Its developer, Blizzard, merged with Activision in 2008, and Microsoft gobbled up both companies in 2022, but World of Warcraft remains a load-bearing spine of the newly formed corporate turducken. The game that redefined gold mining for the 21st century is still a 19th-century gold mine for its landlords.
It’s also thriving in a subscription ecosystem that it helped to legitimize. World of Warcraft debuted in 2004, during an era when you still had to buy games in boxes from stores. The runaway success of Blizzard’s always-on portal to Azeroth proved that, for the right product, studios could charge a recurring fee beyond the initial cost of the core game’s (at the time) formidable five installation CDs. Here, in the enshittified 2020s, we’ve all grown used to renting our culture by the month, but it was genuinely pathbreaking for World of Warcraft to have 12 million subscribers at its peak in 2010. It didn’t invent the monthly model, which had already gained traction in games like Ultima Online and EverQuest during the dawn of the massively multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPG) genre. But World of Warcraft’s success took that recurring charge mainstream and helped popularize the unassailable business logic that having your customers pay you once was worse than having them pay you until they decided or remembered to stop.
As World of Warcraft turns 20,its enduring financial success arguably pales in comparison to its cultural significance. I asked Angela Washko, a new-media artist who staged several notable performance pieces inside the game world, what she considered World of Warcraft’s biggest contribution, for better or worse. “World of Warcraft expanded the notion of what public space was,” she told me. “I saw the bonds created amongst members of my guilds moving beyond the game space, as players flew across the country to meet each other.” Everyone I talked to about World of Warcraft’s legacy seemed to mention someone or other getting married, either in the game itself or here in reality after meeting in the game. “I think the degree of immersion and dissolving of the boundary between ‘real life’ and ‘fantasy’ within World of Warcraft was really a turning point in computing culture,” Washko said, adding that World of Warcraft “changed the conversation around video games from being something that was ‘an escape from everyday life’ to something that was an extension of one’s social life and happened to take place in a virtual environment.”
Through her own work, Washko also explored the less savory side of a fantasy game populated by real people; her Council on Gender Sensitivity and Behavioral Awareness in World of Warcraft involved traveling from town to town to educate passersby about feminism and discuss how the game’s dominant culture often created a hostile environment for its marginalized players. I recalled my own playing days, when you could be flying into a town on your hippogryph, minding your own business, only to be deluged by a wave of sewer-grade hate speech on a public text channel. We now take it for granted that online spaces reflect the social dynamics of the people who occupy them, including and especially the problematic ones, but in many ways, World of Warcraft was the kobold in this particular coal mine.
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I first encountered the Warcraft universe like many ’90s computer kids: as a series of top-down, real-time strategy games about economic management and cartoon fantasy violence. The world (lowercase) of Warcraft pitted the seemingly noble Alliance (humans, elves, dwarves, your Tolkienesque usual suspects) against the villainized Horde (orcs, trolls, and other stock monster-humanoids from the trope factory) in a vicious-with-a-touch-of-slapstick conflict spanning three main titles and numerous expansions between 1994 and 2003. If no one was using the phone, you could play against your friends over a modem. The series had a rich and goofy aesthetic of exaggerated proportions, saturated colors, and sarcastic jokes. The units that ran your economy were literal simpering peons, which gave everything a barrel-shaped, vaguely comedic flavor that played well against the high-gloss cinematic interludes that would become Blizzard’s calling card.
Flush with revenues from its flagship series, Blizzard began exploring how it might expand Warcraft’s popular lore into other types of games. First, a point-and-click game called Warcraft Adventures — a late-1990s attempt at LucasArts-style vintage puzzle-solving in a cel-shaded take on themythos — was infamously canceled for not meeting Blizzard’s internal release standards. (It also leaked, fully playable, not too long ago. Based on what I’ve seen, Blizzard was right.) Then, starting in 2001, an experimental team of a few dozen people got busy building a whole new engine that would bring Azeroth into 3D for the first time and let players meet, socialize, and slaughter skeletons together. It was a primordial example of the modern phenomenon where a corporation exploits its intellectual property by jumping genres and colonizing a new medium. It was also how they’d get me.
There are plenty of humbling ways to use Gmail’s internal search function, especially if you’ve had your account for roughly as long as World of Warcraft has existed. For one example, consider my collected personal correspondence surrounding World of Warcraft, from the peak years of its involvement in my life. When I queried “Warcraft before:2007/1/1,” it yielded about two dozen results, and together, they trace a blunt biography of that moment: landing a big new job; getting hella dumped; and “spending two months as an antisocial hermit,” as I told a friend in a Gchat in early 2006. (And how about World of Warcraft outliving Gchat?)
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Reviewing the private record, it’s clear World of Warcraft tore through my life like an experienced raiding party of max-level grinders through the Deadmines. Admittedly, it was the kind of nymph-stage young adult life that was conceptually made of crepe paper and easily shredded by a video game. But something about the predictable rhythm of ordering junk food delivery after an exhausting workday, logging onto World of Warcraft, and hopping through some lush environment searching for herbs to make into sellable virtual potions just drew me in, one night after another.
This aspect of World of Warcraft — its knack for blurring the line between work and fun until the casual observer might not quite recognize it as either — often came up when I spoke to others about their experiences. “One thing WoW proved on a large scale is that people will turn a game into a job at the slightest provocation,” said Cory O’Brien, now a narrative and level designer for games like Redfall and HoloVista. “I remember spending hours and hours and hours grinding for dust so that I could enchant magic items. I remember smelting tin and copper to make bronze.” The elaborate crafting system in World of Warcraft, which often required materials gained through repetitive in-game labor, represented an explosion in the popularity of the now-ubiquitous mechanic where you, as a player, find some stuff and turn it into something else. “I still play all these more recent games like Minecraft,Project Zomboid, and Valheim that are literally just that crafting part,” O’Brien told me. “I spend so much time doing monotonous, repetitive tasks, for free, because somehow we have discovered that that’s fun.” Here, in 2024, it’s hard not to feel a vaguely sinister undertone to all of this as the rising tides of capitalistic overreach gamify the gig economy and hijack the natural human affinity for rewards for their own extractive purposes. But to Washko’s point about an expanded social life, one reason this all worked is that you were often helping out real people, with “legitimate needs” in the scope of the game. You were rarely just doing these things for yourself.
It wasn’t always exactly a waste, either. Andrew Simone, now a project manager in tech, attributes a large swath of his professional tool kit to skills he gained as a guild leader in World of Warcraft. “I actually stopped playing WoW largely because I felt like I was managing my guild more than my actual professional jobs,” he told me, proceeding to outline a frightening slate of workplace-flavored tasks that included interviewing prospective guild candidates, analyzing performance metrics from the game’s multiuser boss fights, dealing with in-guild sexual harassment, managing schedules across the world to hold meetings about all these things, writing guides for new members, and even “cultivating a kind of guild culture so people enjoyed being there,” which is an incredible thing to say about something that is already ostensibly a game. I know there are countless former guild leaders reading this and nodding along because their current workday docket has nothing on mediating a 10-way raiding party dispute over who should get the legendary enchanted pauldrons that just dropped.
On the other hand: plenty of it was a giant waste. I can’t tell you, back in the day, how many hours I was technically playing World of Warcraft butignoring the game itself while I sifted through, rearranged, and tested various custom add-ons for its labyrinthine, fintech-ass user interface. World of Warcraft is a persistent software ecosystem with clients and servers and all kinds of data flying between them at all times — it’s just not necessarily exposed to every player in full. An entire cottage industry of user-created UI mods sprung up to assign repeatable actions to shortcut keys, or process advanced analytics from game logs like Simone would do for his guild, or implement an “automatic goblin therapist” who answers any incoming whispers to your character with an in-game implementation of the classic ELIZA protocol. Letting players scratch their own itches for how the game felt to play was also a clever way to limit complaints about the parts of it that weren’t as polished. I never got much into the game’s advanced content myself, but for those who did, pretty much the only way to follow the expected meta of guild raids was to use externally designed UI add-ons. World of Warcraft had the audacity to make players create their own custom cockpits for the game and ended up creating a kind of recursive procrastination where you could even distract yourself from your intended leisure activity. Anyone who’s ever rearranged the app icons on their phone knows just how ubiquitous this kind of time-consuming “metawork” has become.
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Recently, I engaged in a more contemporary form of networked social entertainment — sitting around a big TV with friends, watching four strangers play a game together on Twitch. Just as things were picking up, the stream cut out, and an algorithmically inserted video ad began to play: it was for World of Warcraft. This was a group of mostly game designers, and before I had a chance to say anything, someone else piped in to mention World of Warcraft was 20 years old now — and formally impactful enough that working game makers still know its birthday.
Seeing that ad, writing this piece, none of it was enough to get me to reinstall World of Warcraft. (It’s a good thing the game never stooped to making you feed your in-game pets.) I didn’t really feel I had to replay the game to measure its influence because its influence is everywhere. Every monthly subscription, in-game economy, or digital “third place” where lives bleed into online connections owes it some spiritual recognition as prior art; those things have all become inescapable. Twenty years later, we are all living in the World of Warcraft.
Independent power producers Vistra , Constellation Energy and Talen Energy are positioned to benefit from a “paradigm shift” in electric demand from artificial intelligence data centers, according JPMorgan. The investment bank initiated coverage of the stocks Thursday with overweight ratings. Shares of the three power companies are poised for more upside even after their tremendous rally this year, according to a team of analysts led by Jeremy Tonet. “We see structural tailwinds, including manufacturing onshoring, broader electrification trends (transportation, heating, and more), as well [as] data center development underpinning a paradigm shift in power demand,” Tonet and his team told clients in research report. Power supply in competitive electricity markets will not keep pace with demand, enabling the three companies “to capture outsized margins for an extend period of time,” the analysts wrote. Demand from tech companies for carbon-free power to drive their data centers will transform nuclear power and enable its owners to “command a substantial premium,” they wrote. Vistra is JPMorgan’s top pick with a price target of $178, suggesting upside of 31% from Wednesday’s close of $135.69 per share. The Texas-based power producer has already more than tripled this year, soaring 252%. Vistra can offer natural gas- and nuclear-fueled power to data center customers. With half of its gas generation in the Texas ERCOT grid, Vistra can also help fill a potential 40 gigawatt supply gap in the Lone Star State by 2030, according to JPMorgan. VST 1Y mountain Vistra shares over the past 12 months. Meanwhile, Constellation’s industry leading nuclear fleet is well positioned to continue capturing long-term power contracts with data center developers at premium prices, according to JPMorgan. Its decision last month to restart Three Mile Island after signing a power purchase agreement with Microsoft was an industry milestone. The investment bank has a price target of $342 on Constellation, implying 22% upside from Wednesday’s close of $279.80 per share. Constellation’s stock has more than doubled this year. CEG 1Y mountain Constellation Energy shares over the past 12 months. Finally, Talen’s multi-decade agreement with Amazon Web Services to power a data center campus with electricity generated at the Susquehanna nuclear plant in Pennsylvania could help send the stock higher if it delivers the full 960 megawatts of power to AWS, according to JPMorgan. Susquehanna also offers additional power that can be contracted. JPMorgan has a price target of $268 on Talen shares, suggesting upside of nearly 57% from Wednesday’s close of $171.05. Talen’s stock, too, has more than doubled this year. TLN 1Y mountain Talen Energy stock over the past year
Unity has announced that Unity 6, the latest version of its cross-platform game engine, is now available worldwide.
Unity 6 can be downloaded here, and is the company’s “most stable and best-performing version of Unity” yet that has been built, tested, and refined in partnership with game developers around the world.
According to Unity, the updated software will allow developers to create games much faster and more efficiently than ever before and comes with new features like end-to-end multiplayer workflows, tools that target the mobile web, alongside new graphics capabilities that move workloads from the CPU to the GPU, improving CPU performance by up to 4X in internal.
Unity has also shared its plans for the engine post-launch, confirming that it will be “dedicating long-term product and engineering resources to Unity 6” to enhance features and add new functionality, while continuing stability.
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“We are relentlessly focused on delivering tools to help game developers build games more quickly and efficiently while also facilitating innovation,” said Matt Bromberg, President and CEO of Unity. “We’re going to do everything we can to ensure that Unity 6 is at the heart of game development for years to come.”
Alongside the launch of Unity 6, the company has also introduced some brand-new learning resources for developers, like Time Ghost, the latest Unity Originals real-time cinematic demo which includes advancements in environment building and character design, as well as Megacity Metro, a demo that showcases how to build a 100+ player cross-platform multiplayer game.
“Unity 6 gives our global multi-functional team the stability and scalability we need. The improved performance combined with features like the new WebGPU graphics API and the seamless live services integration make our workflow much more efficient and our production quality top-tier,” said Josh Loveridge, managing director of Stratton Studios.
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“It’s been a game-changer while developing PGA TOUR Rise. We’ve truly been able to push the boundaries of creativity at every step of the development pipeline.”
Instagram will stop people from being able to screenshot or screen-record images and videos intended to be viewed once, as part of “ongoing efforts” to prevent sextortion on the platform.
Its parent company Meta announced features on Thursday aimed at protecting teens from being tricked into sending intimate images to scammers and blackmailed over them.
Previously tested tools that blur nude images in messages, and hiding the follower and following lists of users from potential sextortion accounts, will also be made permanent.
The NSPCC said the moves were a “step in the right direction”.
But Richard Collard, its associate head of child safety online policy, said that “questions remain as to why Meta are not rolling out similar protections on all their products, including on WhatsApp where grooming and sextortion also take place at scale”.
Law enforcement agencies around the world have reported a rise in the number of sextortion scams taking place across social media platforms, with these often targeting teenage boys.
The UK’s Internet Watch Foundation said in March that 91% of the sextortion reports it received in 2023 related to boys.
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New tools will include preventing the ability to screenshot images and videos sent in Instagram messages with its “view once” or “allow replay” mechanisms – which can be selected by users when sending an image or video in Direct Messages. This will also apply to the web version of Instagram.
Antigone Davis, Meta’s head of global safety, said a new Instagram campaign aims to give children and parents information about how to spot sextortion attempts in case perpetrators evade its tools for detecting them.
“We have put in built-in protections so that parents do not have to do a thing to try and protect their teens,” she told BBC News.
“That said, this is the kind of adversarial crime where whatever protections we put in place, these extortion scammers are going to try and get around them.”
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What is sextortion?
Sextortion, which sees scammers trick people into sending sexually explicit material before blackmailing them, has become a dominant form of intimate image abuse taking place online.
The shame, stress and isolation felt by victims of sextortion crimes, often harassed and told their images will be shared publicly if they do not pay blackmailers, has led some to take their own lives.
Ros Dowey, the mother of 16-year-old Murray Dowey, who took his own life in 2023 after being targeted by a sextortion gang on Instagram, previously told the BBC that Meta was not doing “nearly enough to safeguard and protect our children when they use their platforms”.
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‘Built-in protections’
Meta said its new safety features and campaign are designed to build on tools already available to teens and parents on the platform.
It will also hide people’s follower and following lists from potential sextortion accounts.
Sextortion expert Paul Raffile told the BBC in May that sextorters try to find teen accounts in following and follower lists after searching for high schools and youth sports teams on platforms.
But some parents and experts have said safety controls for teen accounts shift the responsibility of spotting and reporting potential threats onto them.
Dame Melanie Dawes, the chief executive of the regulator Ofcom, told the BBC said it was the responsibility of the firms – not parents or children – to make sure people were safe online ahead of the implementation of the Online Safety Act next year.
October is finally here, which means horror lovers can rejoice in everything that spooky season will bring. Luckily for them, there’s no shortage of content available to stream. The best horror movies on Hulu, Netflix, and pretty much every other major service will offer more than enough chills to satisfy those well-versed in the intricacies of the genre and those who are only looking to experience it because of the season.
However, while watching more mainstream offerings is perfectly OK, October also offers the chance to watch other, more underappreciated efforts. From genuinely terrifying tales of dread to more psychological series that favor atmosphere and gloom, these underrated horror gems will be perfect to watch in the days leading up to Halloween. So grab your popcorn and put on your witch hat because these movies call for it.
Horror legend Vincent Price stars in the 1968 seminal folk horror film Witchfinder General. Based on the eponymous 1966 novel and set during the English Civil War, the film follows the exploits of infamous witch-hunter Matthew Hopkins, who brags about receiving the title of “witchfinder general” despite never receiving an appointment from Parliament. After Hopkins targets the wrong woman, he becomes the subject of a young soldier’s wrath.
Witchfinder General‘s importance to horror is impossible to ignore. Quite possibly the first folk horror film in history, Witchfinder General, which was later retitled to The Conqueror Worm in the U.S., finds terror in the very real danger of fanaticism and weaponized hysteria. The film preys on very real fears to craft a tale of paranoia, power lust, and indoctrination, using the mighty Vincent Price to deliver its message.
Witchfinder General – Vincent Price (1968) – Official Trailer
The actor was seldom better than he’s here as Matthew Hopkins, an utterly despicable and truly chilling figure that ranks among his finest on-screen creations. The ending will surely haunt audiences’ nightmares for days, making Witchfinder General a perfect watch for horror fans.
When one thinks of the fantasy genre, chances are that images of knights, dragons, and wizards come to mind. Hardly anyone would expect one of the best fantasy movies to be a dark and dreadful fairy tale, yet that’s exactly what Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves is. This gothic tale, inspired by the classic Little Red Riding Hood, follows young Rosaleen (Sarah Patterson), who dreams of traversing a wolf-infested forest to reunite with her grandmother. When she meets a mysterious hunter in the woods, her life changes for good.
The Company of Wolves is an exquisite and lush Gothic story that shows a new side to horror. Blending disturbing scenes with straight-up body horror and fantasy sensibilities, the film offers a thoughtful and oneiric tale of sexual awakening, self-discovery, and the treacherous, ever-changing human nature that drives our actions.
The Company of Wolves (1984) – Official Trailer
Equal parts traditional fairy tale and off-putting and occasionally revolting horror story, The Company of Wolves is packed with meaning in every shot, brought to life by an absorbing production design that brings a dark yet alluring forest to unbelievable life.
Stories about witches are at the very foundation of the horror genre; luckily, modern cinema keeps delivering new and incredible versions of a well-known tale — for example, 2022’s You Won’t Be Alone. Starring an ensemble cast, including Noomi Rapace and Alice Englert, the film follows Nevena, a mute girl in 19th-century Macedonia who is captured by a witch and transformed into a shapeshifting witch herself. Alone in the world, Nevena adopts new identities on her way to discovering everything life has to offer.
You Won’t Be Alone is light on jump scares, preferring instead to build an atmosphere of mystery, anxiousness, and fear that dominates every scene. Like the best horror movies, it uses traditional horror and supernatural settings to tell a deeply humane story about self-discovery and the complicated, winding, and painful road to maturity, both physical and emotional.
YOU WON’T BE ALONE – Official Trailer [HD] – Only in Theaters April 1
Nevena’s tale is universal yet still profoundly intimate, brought to life by an excellent collection of actors who act as observers of the human condition. Silent but packed with meaning, You Won’t Be Alone is a thoughtful and thought-provoking entry into the so-called elevated horror movement.
The main difference between them comes to thermal imaging tech. The ‘T’ version has thermal imaging tech, while the other phone does not. It tries to compensate for that with an infrared camera, though.
The Ulefone Armor Mini 20 Pro & Mini 20T Pro go through several performance tests
Ulefone ran AnTuTu, Geekbench 6, 3D Mark, and Speedtest tests on the devices. The two phones have the same performance-related specs and software, so the results should be identical, which is why only one is shown in the video below.
The Ulefone Armor Mini 20 Pro series managed to reach 434,964 points on the AnTuTu benchmark. Speaking of which, the phone is fueled by the MediaTek Dimensity 6300 SoCo. It also comes with 8GB of RAM; which can be expanded to 16GB via virtual RAM.
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In regards to the Geekbench 6 score, the device managed to reach 791 points in the single-core test, and 2,102 in the multi-core test. That’s per course for the MediaTek Dimensity 6300 processor.
In the 3DMark Wild Life test, the phone score 1,379 points. The only test that remained is the 5G Speed Test, that one will depend on the 5G speeds in your area, and with your carrier, of course. Ulefone managed to reach 192Mbps download, and 25.7Mbps upload speeds, though.
These phones use a tiny display, and a large battery
It’s also worth noting that both of these smartphones are IP68/IP69K and MIL-STD-810H certified. They’re rugged phones with a large battery (considering their size). They include a 4.7-inch display and a 6,200mAh battery pack.
Many of DJI’s drones including its latest consumer products are being held up at the US border, the manufacturer said in a blog post today. It appears to be a customs matter and not related to proposed US legislation to ban DJI products (the Countering CCP Drones Act) currently in US Congress. However, the holdup means that sales of DJI’s latest Air 3S drone will be delayed, the company told The Verge.
“The U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has cited the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA), as the reason for the current holdups,” the DJI ViewPoints team wrote. “This assertion made against DJI, however, is entirely unfounded and categorically false.”
Calling the situation a “misunderstanding,” DJI said it’s sending documentation proving it complies with the UFLPA. It added that it has no manufacturing facilities in and doesn’t source materials from Xinjiang, the region that’s a red flag for the US in terms of Uyghur forced labor violations. It also noted that it’s not a listed entity under UFLPA and that its supply “undergoes rigorous due diligence by respected US retailers.” US Customs and Border Protection has yet to comment on the matter.
While the US House of Representatives did pass the a bill to block DJI’s drones, the Senate removed that clause from the 2025 National Defense Authorization Act. It was later re-introduced as an amendment, though, and could still make it into the final bill. If so, imports of new DJI drones could be blocked, but a ban wouldn’t likely prohibit current owners from using them. DJI has a massive share of the worldwide drone market upwards of 70 percent as of 2021, according to Statista. including as much as 90 percent by public safety officials.
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