Google isn’t scanning your Gmail to train Gemini, it’s letting Gemini scan your inbox to provide ‘personalized insights’ but I’m not sure that’s better

For the banishment of all doubt, no, Google isn’t scraping the contents of your email inbox in order to train its AI models. However, that doesn’t mean Gmail is free of Gemini, and sooner or later you’ll need to decide your own personal boundaries with AI. Google announced at the start of the year that…

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Atari just bought the rights to the big daddy of PC RPGs, and a reissue campaign is afoot

Released in 1981, Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord was the first grid-based first-person RPG—what we nowadays call blobbers—and it proved enormously influential. Its art was rudimentary: the monochrome dungeon halls were a series of white lines carefully placed to simulate the feeling of moving through a three-dimensional environment. Leaving the ruggedness of its…

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With a peak player count of 14.2 million, 99 Nights in the Forest has an audience other multiplayer games would kill for: ‘To find these behemoth playerbases you need to be on a platform like Roblox’

When I was a kid I might get a videogame for Christmas and another for my birthday, but in between it was free games that filled my time. First shareware, then Flash games. If you were a kid after 2006 though, the free games that defined your childhood probably involved Roblox. In 2025, players spent…

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Stranger Than Heaven sure looks like a Yakuza series prequel in its first 30-minute deep dive, oh and Snoop Dogg is here

RGG Studios is finally ready to talk about Stranger Than Heaven, the next major action game from the Yakuza studio that appears to be a Yakuza prequel after all. In the 30-minute video, executive director Masayoshi Yokoyama introduces the sprawling brawler from the comfort of a swanky jazz club. Beginning in 1915 and spanning 50…

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Take-Two chief is ‘deeply disappointed’ that we still don’t have a new BioShock game

You’d think it would be fairly easy to make a BioShock game: After all, “there’s always a lighthouse,” as the man once said. Yet it’s proven remarkably challenging: After three acclaimed games in relatively quick succession—BioShock in 2007, BioShock 2 in 2010, and BioShock Infinite in 2013—there’s been nothing. Efforts have been made: Hangar 13…

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