For the past year and a half, Meta has lost a total of over $30 billion trying to find a way to bring virtual reality and augmented reality to your home.

That total comes from the last set of operating losses for Reality Labs, Meta’s division for researching AR and VR. It lost a total of $10 billion in 2021 and $13.7 billion in 2022. Add in the $4.3 billion it lost in the previous quarter and the $3.99 billion it just lost this year and you get that very, very big number.

The losses are getting smaller, which suggests Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s “year of efficiency” (which included laying off 21,000 employees) might’ve stemmed the bleeding.

Despite the tech world’s waning interest in “the metaverse,” especially as AI continues to flood the public consciousness, Meta con…

I can’t restart Baldur’s Gate 3 again, not for like, six months at least. I’ve got about half of Act 3 to go on my Tactician difficulty Dark Urge Paladin/Rogue, and then I’ve gotta put this thing down for a while. Imagine my surprise and despair, then, when I discovered that I missed the Dark Urge’s first major cutscene, which helps set the stage for the character and has unique interactions for every race and class.

The Dark Urge origin lets you fully customize the race, class, and appearance of your character, an amnesiac with an insatiable bloodlust and mysterious past. A post from user Hysorn on the Baldur’s Gate 3 subreddit helpfully drew my attention to the scene. It’s one of those long rest cutscenes, like most of the Dark Urge’s major story beats, and lets you muse about y…

I gotta respect Baldur’s Gate 3 for so faithfully translating D&D 5e rules into videogame form, but honestly, some of those rules kinda suck.

Take low-level magic for instance: at the beginning of Baldur’s Gate 3, most spellcasters can cast only two level 1 spells before they get tuckered out and need a long rest. I get why that’s the case—spellcasters get way more powerful after reaching level 4 and beyond—but in those crucial beginning hours, when you’re still getting a feel for combat and you have fewer health points than fingers, running out of gas after every combat can be more annoying than tactically interesting. Not to mention the waste of burning 40 camp supplies on long rests when most of your party is still healthy.

If you’re runni…

Diablo 4 players can finally rest easy—that is, unless they’re trying to farm these pieces themselves—as the last of Diablo 4’s six elusive super-rare items has been found. As spotted by AnyComputer on the Diablo 4 subreddit, the final piece of the collection was The Melted Heart of Selig. It dropped for a Chinese necromancer player in the Blind Burrows, a dungeon that can be found in the Hawezar region of the map.

The Heart’s effect isn’t that exciting, unfortunately. It gives a substantial boost to your class’s resource, but turns it into a pseudo-barrier, draining 3-8 of your resource for every 1% of damage you would’ve otherwise taken. 

That 3-8 variable is massive: if your character took 10% of its life in damage, for example, a roll of 3 would drain 30…

The phenomenon known as Skibidi Toilet is a little hard to explain. At a glance, it’s a meme where a man’s head pops out of a toilet and spins around as he sings “skibidi dop dop dop yes yes, skibidi double-u reeh reeh.” 

You can stop reading here if that’s quite enough for you. If I could have stopped there myself, believe me, I would have.

Plunge a bit deeper and you’ll discover that singing toilet man is just the beginning of a (currently) 76-part machinima series on the DaFuq!?Boom! YouTube channel. The series depicts a war between toilets with human heads—the very Skibidi Toilets themselves—and our planet’s defenders, humanoids with cameras and other electronics for heads. Animator Alexey Gerasimov, known as Boom, uses Source Filmmaker to create the ser…

Alan Wake 2 is out today, and despite some trepidation about its daunting system requirements on PC (which fortunately appears to be misplaced), it’s going very well: Early reviews, for the most part, are positively glowing. (We’ll have our own review up soon.) With the new tale of the struggling author now out the door, Remedy has offered the world some insight into what it has in mind for future chapters.

The original Alan Wake had two DLC expansions, The Signal and The Writer, and that will also be the case for Alan Wake 2: As revealed in Remedy’s Alan Wake 2 FAQ, two paid expansions are planned, Night Springs and The Lake House, each of which will “tell new stories and offer exciting gameplay within Alan Wake 2.”

The first expansion, Night Springs is about “visions and d…