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2026-03-15 00:08:13

Meta could be preparing for one of the largest layoffs in its history, according to a Reuters report. The tech giant is planning to cut about 20 percent of its workforce, according to the outlet's sources. According to the report, neither a date nor the exact number of layoffs has been finalized yet.

However, Reuters reported that Meta's top executives have told "other senior leaders" to start "planning how to pare back." In its latest financial report, the company's employee headcount was 78,865 as of December 31, 2025, while revenue reached nearly $60 billion for the fourth quarter and more than $200 billion for the entire year. A Meta spokesperson told Reuters that this was "speculative reporting about theoretical approaches."

Meta is no stranger to major layoffs. Earlier this year, Meta targeted about 1,000 employees in its layoffs with the Reality Labs division that's responsible for the company's virtual reality and metaverse efforts. Early last year, Meta laid off about five percent of its workforce, following a smaller round of firings that same month. Meanwhile, the company has been spending heavily to acquire AI startups, like Moltbook, a social network designed for AI agents, and Manus, a startup focused on AI agents for task automation.

2026-03-14 23:38:48

Digg has shut down, for now, just a few months after its open beta launched. Justin Mezzell, the company’s CEO, has explained on the home page that it noticed hours after the beta launched that it was already being targeted by SEO spammers. “The internet is now populated, in meaningful part, by sophisticated AI agents and automated accounts,” he wrote. Apparently, the Digg team wasn’t ready for the scale and the speed at which bots found and started flooding the website.

Mezzell said Digg banned thousands of accounts and deployed both internal tools and external solutions, but they weren’t enough. He admitted that the votes and the comments on the website couldn’t be trusted due to the amount of bot activity it got. While Digg has decided to significantly downsize its team, a small number of staff members has stayed to rebuild it completely. He said it wasn’t enough to present Digg as an alternative to current social networks and community-based websites. “What comes next needs to be genuinely different,” he added.

The CEO didn’t explain how Digg will reinvent itself, but he did announce that its founder, Kevin Rose, is joining the company full time. Rose bought back Digg last year in partnership with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. Back then, they said they had “a fresh vision to restore the spirit of discovery and genuine community that made the early web a fun and exciting place to be.” Based on what happened to Digg, that’s now harder to achieve with the state of the internet today.

2026-03-14 19:00:00

Welcome to our latest roundup of what's going on in the indie game space. A bunch of intriguing games arrived this week, including a mobile port of one of the most absorbing things I’ve played in years and two completely different titles with the same name. Let’s get things started with a look at a few projects that were featured in the latest edition of the Future Games Show.

Hyperwired (from SidralGames and publisher SelectaPlay) is a 2D roguelike shooter with an interesting resource-management twist. To recharge your weapons and systems, you have to plug a cable that trails behind your spaceship into a socket. While you're plugged in, your movement is restricted by the length of the tether, but you gain more firepower. 

There are a whole bunch of upgrades and bullet modifiers to play around with here, including a slow-motion system you can activate at almost any time. Hyperwired is slated to hit Steam, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch this summer.

In Clean Up Earth, you and other players can work together to restore polluted environments. You can play solo if you like, but on the larger maps you'll need to team up with others to handle large bits of junk. One particularly neat aspect of Clean Up Earth is that in-game actions will automatically trigger micro-donations from developer Magic Pockets and its partners to environmental organizations.

Clean Up Earth is coming to Steam, Epic Games Store, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S on April 2. A Nintendo Switch 2 version is on the way in the future. There's a demo available on Steam as well. 

Mr. Magpie’s Harmless Card Game is a minesweeper-style riff on the likes of Inscryption and Buckshot Roulette. As with some other roguelike deckbuilders, you're trapped in a creepy situation and the only way to escape alive is to gamble and earn enough money in time to meet quotas. To do that, you'll need to twist the odds in your favor by building multipliers and synergies. You can boost your deck with powerful cards you can buy from a shop.

However, there are dangerous JERRY cards on the board that could spell doom if you flip them over. You can use hints and strategies to try to figure out where those cards are and avoid them. 

There's no release date as yet for Mr. Magpie’s Harmless Card Game, which is from Giant Light Studios. However, you can request access to a playtest on Steam.

A press release described Herdles as "Spyro meets Breath of the Wild, with a dog." I'm immediately sold.

Playing as a magical version of creative director Christian Hübel’s own dog, Snoopy, you'll "restore balance to a fracturing world" in this open-world platformer. On your journey, you'll rescue Herdles, or corrupted creatures. Doing so will unlock new powers, such as being able to glide, bust through walls and swim up waterfalls.

There's no combat or death in this game, which seems to be largely about solving puzzles, experimenting with physics-based abilities and exploring. It's said to have "deep accessibility and customization options" too. Fire Sword Studios and One More Journey are behind Herdles, which does not have a release window, though the Steam page is live.

New releases

I took an earlier-than-usual lunch break on Thursday to check out the mobile version of Ball x Pit (from Kenny Sun and friends and publisher Devolver Digital) as soon as it was released. I adore this game. I'm happy it runs smoothly on my iPhone 16, because that should give me more reason to avoid doomscrolling. 

It's the same Ball x Pit. It's still fantastic. The touchscreen dual-stick controls work well enough, especially when the auto-fire option is enabled. Still, a mobile controller like OhSnap's MCON or the Backbone Pro works better for me. 

A bunch more people will be able to enjoy Ball x Pit now that it's on iOS and Android. You can play the first level for free and it costs $10 to unlock the full game.

It's a pretty good week for folks who are into brick-breaking roguelites, because here's another one. ITER-8 (from fluckyMachine and publisher Fireshine Games) blends mining and tower defense. It's a bit like Dome Keeper. 

You're tasked with acquiring resources from an enormous monolith that's above your base. You'll need to drag these items back to your base so you can upgrade your character, ship, shield and weapon. There are relics to find and you can swap these for installations like lasers, barriers and cannons. There are also puzzle-based sections that sees your character leave their ship for some in-person mining and upgrade collecting, temporarily switching from 2D to 3D action.

After a while, the monolith starts to thrum with an ominous sound. That means it's time to race back to base (with the help of a fast-travel system) to fend off waves of alien enemies.

The two sides of ITER-8 work fairly well together and I've enjoyed my time with it so far. I actually find it pretty relaxing overall, though the tower-defense aspect could have been designed a bit more elegantly. Switching aim from one side of the base to the other doesn’t feel snappy enough. ITER-8 is available on Steam for $13. There's a 25 percent launch discount available until March 23.

Piece by Piece is billed as a cozy repair shop game from Gamkat and publisher No More Robots. It looks cute!

You can decorate your shop and make it homely by cleaning, keeping the log fire burning and making sure the cookie jar is full. Of course, you'll be fixing up heirlooms and antiques for customers too. It's out now on Steam for $12, with a 20 percent discount until March 25.

Piece by Piece is a puzzle platformer in the most literal sense. You manipulate levels by moving puzzle pieces around. It's a great idea from Neon Polygons and I'm keen to check this one out on Steam. It typically costs $13, but there's a 15 percent discount until March 27.

Wait a second here... Two games called Piece by Piece that were released in the same week? That's a heck of a coincidence. Thankfully, the teams behind both games saw the funny side. They've even created a bundle of both games so you can buy them both for an extra 10 percent off.

Here's another puzzle-forward game, albeit one that's more of an adventure. In Rhell: Warped Worlds & Troubled Times, you'll discover and combine spells in creative ways to solve riddles in similar fashion to games like Baba Is You. There are said to be more than a million ways to combine the magical keywords. Since every spell works on any object in the game, there are more than 102 million possible configurations. Neat!

Solo developer Alice Jarratt from SlugGlove spent three years making Rhell: Warped Worlds & Troubled Times and drew more than 10,000 frames of animation for it. The game is available on Steam for $15, with a 20 percent launch discount until March 26. A demo is available too. 

Upcoming 

I've had Hoa on my wishlist for forever, so it's probably time for me to check out that puzzle platformer before the sequel arrives later this year. Hoa 2 (from Skrollcat Studio and publisher PM Studios) sticks with the hand-painted art of the original game but it’s a 3D game this time. 

It begins a long, long time after the end of Hoa, with the eponymous fairy returning to a world that's been transformed by time. But many of her old friends have passed away, so Hoa seeks a new purpose. 

Along with platforming and spatial puzzles, Hoa 2 features secrets and mini-games. It's coming to Steam, PS5, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch 2. 

I dig what I've seen of MotorSlice, which seems to have Mirror's Edge-style parkour action but in a much grittier-looking world. The developers also took inspiration from the Prince of Persia series and Shadow of the Colossus here — perhaps not too surprising in the latter case given that you'll be scaling huge bosses. This action adventure sees you on a mission to destroy every piece of machinery inside a ruined megastructure.

MotorSlice is coming to Steam this spring. A demo for this game from Regular Studio and publisher Top Hat Studios is available now. 

Being a lifelong soccer fan is a curse that's punctuated with infrequent moments of the most intense joy you'll ever feel. Plus, every few years, I lose about a month of my life to the most recent version of Football Manager (I gave up on the last one after winning every possible trophy with Borussia Mönchengladbach for three seasons in a row). So, it's safe to say that a game focused on perhaps the least glamourous job in soccer is up my alley.

Kitman — a job you might know of as "equipment manager" — is a sports management game with co-op for up to four people in which you take care of things behind the scenes of a soccer team. You'll clean locker rooms, polish boots, make sure players have the right uniforms and so on, while taking care of details on the fly on match days. 

There's a fun twist here in that you can secretly take on some of the manager's duties, such as scouting players and adjusting formations. Maybe that explains what's been happening with Tottenham Hotspur lately.

Kitman, from Outlier, is coming to Steam later this year. In the meantime, you can sign up to take part in a playtest.

If, like me, you adore Astro Bot, here's something to keep an eye on. Astrolander is a 2.5D platformer with lovely-looking 3D environments. As a robot named Feedback, you set out on a journey with a rocket-powered sidekick named Haptic (heh) to save bots known as the Most Valuable Programs, or MVPs. A second player can join in and help take control of Feedback.

Astrolander is from 16-year-old Max Trest of Lost Cartridge Creations. The PlayStation team (including its then-head of indie games Shuhei Yoshida) tried Astrolander at an event a few years back and offered Trest the chance to bring his game to PS5. Astrolander is also coming to Steam. It's set to arrive later this year.

2026-03-14 06:26:11

OpenAI plans to add its Sora video generation model directly into ChatGPT, The Information reports . The standalone Sora app was seen as a smash hit when it launched alongside Sora 2 in September 2025, but interest in the video generation app has fallen in the time since as users ran into limits on the amount and kinds of videos they could create.

Adding Sora to the ChatGPT could give the model a second life, and ideally grow the ChatGPT app's weekly active users from the 900 million OpenAI reported in February, to a billion or more. According to The Information, the standalone Sora app will stick around after the model is integrated, even though the app has fallen out of the App Store's top 100 free apps and only a small number of users reportedly share their videos publicly in the app.

It’s hard to pin down an exact number for what generating a video costs OpenAI, but the company charges API customers $0.10 per second for a 720p video, and in 2025, it was willing to give away 30 free video generations per account per a day in the Sora app. When you consider the even larger audience that could use the model in the ChatGPT app, things could get expensive fast. That could be one reason The Information reports OpenAI has projected it could spend over $225 billion on inference — the cost of running the company's models — between 2026 and 2030.

The company has attempted to monetize the Sora app by having users pay for credits to generate new videos, and could deploy something similar once the model comes to ChatGPT. Maybe giving customers the ability to generate videos with Disney characters could even get people to pay for more videos once they run out of free generations. Whether or not adding Sora to ChatGPT moves the needle for OpenAI, though, the company will likely be spending even more money than it was before.

2026-03-14 05:33:23

Meta AI should soon be better at surfacing international news content thanks to a set of new deals with publishers. The company announced new agreements with international outlets and offered additional details on its recent deal with News Corp. 

The latest deals bring French newspaper Le Figaro, Spanish media company Prisa and German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung into the fold. Together, along with News Corp, which runs a number of outlets in the UK, these sources should give Meta AI better access to timely info about world events. Meta didn't disclose terms of the deals — The Wall Street Journal previously reported the News Corp arrangement was worth up to $50 million a year — but it said that it intends to link out to the relevant news sources.

"These integrations will also facilitate easier access to information by linking out to articles, allowing you to visit these partners’ websites for more details while providing value to partners, enabling them to reach new audiences," Meta wrote in an update. The company has a long and sometimes fraught history with publishers as its priorities have shifted over the years. In the past, Meta has struck deals to pay publishers to produce live video and "instant articles" only to change course as news content has become less of a priority for Facebook.

Now, with Meta struggling to compete with its AI rivals, it seems the social media company is once again interested in news content. As the company notes in its blog post, Meta AI isn't always great at surfacing accurate and timely info. I noted this in 2024 when the company's assistant was repeatedly unable to accurately answer seemingly simple questions like " who is the Speaker of the House of Representatives." 

By striking a bunch of deals with publishers, the company should be better equipped to handle these kinds of queries (and hopefully more complex ones). How much benefit publishers will see from these arrangements, however, is an open question. While Meta says it will link out to the relevant news sources, there are lots of outside data points that raise serious questions about the effect AI search tools are having on web traffic.

2026-03-14 05:03:36

Adobe has agreed to pay the US government $75 million to settle its lawsuit over the company's allegedly harmful approach to subscriptions. The suit started in 2024, when the US Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission filed a joint complaint alleging the company deliberately made it difficult to cancel subscriptions and obscured the frequently expensive "early termination fee" customers have to pay to get out of annual subscriptions that are paid monthly.

"While we disagree with the government’s claims and deny any wrongdoing, we are pleased to resolve this matter," Adobe writes. "We have agreed to provide $75 million worth of free services to customers that qualify. We will proactively reach out to the affected customers once the appropriate filings with the Court are made and accepted. Additionally, we have agreed to a $75 million payment to the Department of Justice."

Adobe's statement also notes that it's made the process of both signing up for and canceling subscriptions "more streamlined and transparent." A major sticking point of the original complaint is that canceling an "annual plan, paid monthly" subscription before completing the first year of service required customers to pay an early termination fee to make up for the value Adobe lost initially offering its software at a discount. Adobe currently allows plans to be refunded if they're canceled within 14 days after signing up, but canceling an "annual plan, paid monthly" subscription after those first 14 days requires paying a hefty fee (as outlined in the company's detailed support page).

A court will have to approve Adobe's proposed settlement before the lawsuit can be totally resolved, but the timing is at least a little ironic. Shantanu Narayen, Adobe's CEO for the last 18 years and the executive who oversaw the company's transition from traditional software business to software-as-a-service business, recently announced plans to retire.