Hogwarts Legacy is currently the best-selling game on Steam, and with Deluxe Edition owners able to play early, it’s already the most popular game on Twitch in advance of its official release. At the same time, many gamers are pledging not to buy the open world Harry Potter game while encouraging others to reject it as well, and a conflict that has been fizzing on social media for years now is flaring into fights and accusations of bullying.

Resurfaced discourse about the wizarding world’s goblins and their resemblance to old antisemetic caricatures aside, the informal boycott has little to do with the contents of Hogwarts Legacy itself, which by many accounts (including our Hogwarts review) is a very good Harry Potter game. It’s all about Harry Potter creator JK Rowling.

Bing’s new chat feature responds to questions with long-form answers in an easy-to-read conversational format. If you’ve used OpenAI’s ChatGPT before, it’s essentially that. Microsoft says this feature is “more powerful than ChatGPT and customized specifically for search.”

Along with the usual search results, the Chat feature lets users refine the information they receive. In one of the demos embedded below, it breaks down the differences between cheap TVs after a couple of follow-up queries with the AI. 

The AI-powered Bing gets its answers the same way AI art is generated: scraping information from the internet. And much like AI art, the creators of the content the system is trained on receive little to no attribution or compensation. There are little numbered boxes in the answers that act as footnotes, so you know where the content came from, but that doesn’t give the user much incentive to click when all the relevant information is already in front of them. Let’s be honest, how often have you clicked on the site in the footnotes when you look up something on Wikipedia?

In this click-based economy, less traffic means less revenue for the site creating the content feeding the machine. In the long term, this affects the sustainability of websites that make money on creating genuinely original walkthroughs, how-tos and buying guides. 

In its current state, Google already has a problem with how it handles link attribution. In 2019, a law was passed in France (opens in new tab) that makes Google only show the headlines and names of press publications in its search results for users in the EU. It’s up to the content publishers themselves to decide if it wants a snippet of an article to appear in Google search results. This all started because news outlets in France were trying to get Google to pay royalties for the clicks it was diverting away from websites. 

We’ve already seen some legal challenges against AI art tools, like Stable Diffusion getting sued by Getty Images (opens in new tab) for copyright violations. How long before big online publishers do the same?

One potential answer would be for AI-powered search engines to pay some form of compensation or royalties for the content they scrape. So far, though, there’s yet to be any sign from either Microsoft or Google that they’re interested in doing so.

And if you’re thinking, “Who cares, no one uses Bing,” well, Google just announced its own ChatGPT-like AI chatbot (opens in new tab) called Bard that will go into public testing in the next few weeks, so this won’t be the last we hear about these AI-powered search tools. 

Part of our culture is the need to go beyond what’s strictly necessary in order to run a game and control it. Since there have been PC games, there’s been an industry adjacent to it that plays on that desire, promises us new and improved ways to interact with our virtual worlds, assures us we’ll look impossibly cool doing it too, then asks us for $300.

Without the innovations of PC gaming’s hardware manufacturers, we wouldn’t have arrived at such a high standard for input devices. Mice that NASA could probably trust to control a rocket launch and calculate a trip to Saturn. Keyboards that will still be registering inputs correctly when we’re just biomass in the ground. And the greatest innovation in PC gaming history: RGB lighting. 

But the R&D that paved the way for our favourite peripherals was funded by sales of gaming snake oil. The dusty doohickeys we bought for full price in 2003 and almost immediately retired to our attics or the bag under the stairs where every modem we’ve ever owned lives. In short, it’s been hit and miss for gaming hardware. We’ve all bought into fads, and maybe it’s time for an amnesty. 

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The story of this writer’s dalliances in dead tech begins in 1999. Microsoft—yes, that Microsoft—released a controller for Windows PCs that was intended for first-person shooters. You saw it all over games mags, held by actors who could scarcely conceive of the blistering action they were apparently a part of. It was as though they were hanging onto this thing for dear life. Its name? The SideWinder Dual Strike.

Yesterday Bobby Kotick gave a pair of interviews to CNBC and The Financial Times, during which Activision Blizzard’s longtime CEO was typically bullish about Microsoft’s proposed $68.7 billion acquisition of the publisher (opens in new tab). Kotick pointed at comments from UK prime minister Rishi Sunak about the UK becoming “the Silicon Valley of Europe,” and warned that “if deals like this can’t get through, [the UK’s] not going to be Silicon Valley, [it’ll] be Death Valley”. Then he said the UK’s regulator “lacked independent thought”.

Well, that’s nice. In a piece of perfect timing, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has today issued its findings (opens in new tab) after a preliminary investigation of the deal, and it looks likely to recommend further scrutiny. Its biggest issues are that it reckons the merger would make Microsoft big enough in cloud gaming that it would stifle competition, harm consumers by weakening the rivalry between PlayStation and Xbox, and potentially “result in higher prices, fewer choices, or less innovation for UK gamers.”