AT&T has resolved a widespread outage that had affected over 70,000 customers by 8AM ET, according to tracking site Downdetector. Most of these issues were centered in Houston, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles and Atlanta. This impacted cellular service and data connections, with many customers noting that they couldn’t even contact 911.
It’s still unclear as to what caused the service interruption. In a brief statement to CNBC,AT&T said it is “working urgently to restore service.” The company encouraged customers to make use of Wi-Fi calling until the problem is handled.
Thousands of Verizon and T-Mobile customers also reported outages, but both companies said that those impacted had been trying to contact AT&T numbers. The market has declared this a serious problem, as AT&T shares were down nearly three percent as of this story’s original publish time.
Cellular interruptions are a regular part of life, but the fact that many impacted customers cannot contact 911 and other emergency services is particularly worrisome. The San Francisco Fire Department has urged city residents to try calling 911 from a landline or to “get ahold of a friend or family member” who has signed up for a different carrier.
We are aware of an issue impacting AT&T wireless customers from making and receiving any phone calls (including to 911).
We are actively engaged and monitoring this.
The San Francisco 911 center is still operational.
Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens noted that the city employees could make and receive 911 calls, but that many AT&T customers could not. Dickens has suggested that city residents contact AT&T for service inquiries, and not Atlanta’s emergency services system. The Massachusetts State Police echoed this sentiment, noting that customers had been flooding its 911 center with inquiries about cellular service. “Please do not do this,” the law enforcement agency wrote on X.
This is an ongoing issue and we’ll update this story when the service is restored or when AT&T issues an update on the cause.
Update, February 22 2024, 3:55PM ET: This story has been updated to reflect that AT&T has since restored its cellphone service nationwide.
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The Biden administration is granting $1.5 billion in funding to to bolster semiconductor production under the . The company, which spun out from AMD in 2009 and also has access to $1.6 billion in loans from the CHIPS Program Office, will split the cash between three projects.
First, GlobalFoundries will build a new fabrication facility in Malta, New York, where it aims to produce “high value technologies not currently available in the US,” the Department of Commerce said in a statement. it will use the facility to build chips for a range of industries and applications, including the automotive, aerospace, defense and AI spaces. Construction is expected to start in 2025.
Secondly, GlobalFoundries plans to expand its existing facility in Malta by incorporating tech from its Singapore and Germany plants with the aim of making more semiconductors for use in cars and trucks. This expansion, combined with the new fab, will enable GlobalFoundries to triple the capacity of its Malta campus over the next decade or so. Once all phases of both projects are complete, GlobalFoundries expects to increase wafer production to 1 million per year across the plants.
Last but not least, the remaining funding will go toward modernizing an existing fab in Burlington, Vermont. The aim is to build the first US plant capable of high-volume manufacturing of next-generation gallium nitride on silicon semiconductors for electric vehicles, smartphones, the power grid and other key technologies. The plant will use entirely carbon-free energy, while an on-site solar system will provide up to nine percent of annual power needs.
Through public-private partnerships, GlobalFoundries plans to invest more than $12 billion into the sites over the next 10-plus years. New York is also the Malta projects with $575 million in performance-based Green CHIPS tax credits, while the New York Power Authority is investing at least $30 million.
The Department of Commerce says the three projects are expected to create 1,500 manufacturing positions and around 9,000 construction jobs over the next 10 years. The positions are to pay fair wages and offer benefits including childcare.
Aligned with the broader aims of the CHIPS Act, the investment is designed to improve domestic semiconductor supply chains. GlobalFoundries says that there are only four companies that can deliver “current and mature foundry capabilities” at its scale outside of China, and it’s the only one of those based in the US.
Last year, the company to provide the automaker with US-built processors and help it avoid the kinds of chip shortages that caused a significant slowdown in car manufacturing in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. GlobalFoundries agreed to create an exclusive capacity corridor for GM chips. GlobalFoundries in 2021 as well.
A coalition of 20 tech companies signed an agreement Friday to help prevent AI deepfakes in the critical 2024 elections taking place in more than 40 countries. OpenAI, Google, Meta, Amazon, Adobe and X are among the businesses joining the pact to prevent and combat AI-generated content that could influence voters. However, the agreement’s vague language and lack of binding enforcement call into question whether it goes far enough.
The list of companies signing the “Tech Accord to Combat Deceptive Use of AI in 2024 Elections” includes those that create and distribute AI models, as well as social platforms where the deepfakes are most likely to pop up. The signees are Adobe, Amazon, Anthropic, Arm, ElevenLabs, Google, IBM, Inflection AI, LinkedIn, McAfee, Meta, Microsoft, Nota, OpenAI, Snap Inc., Stability AI, TikTok, Trend Micro, Truepic and X (formerly Twitter).
The group describes the agreement as “a set of commitments to deploy technology countering harmful AI-generated content meant to deceive voters.” The signees have agreed to the following eight commitments:
Developing and implementing technology to mitigate risks related to Deceptive AI Election content, including open-source tools where appropriate
Assessing models in scope of this accord to understand the risks they may present regarding Deceptive AI Election Content
Seeking to detect the distribution of this content on their platforms
Seeking to appropriately address this content detected on their platforms
Fostering cross-industry resilience to deceptive AI election content
Providing transparency to the public regarding how the company addresses it
Continuing to engage with a diverse set of global civil society organizations, academics
Supporting efforts to foster public awareness, media literacy, and all-of-society resilience
The accord will apply to AI-generated audio, video and images. It addresses content that “deceptively fake or alter the appearance, voice, or actions of political candidates, election officials, and other key stakeholders in a democratic election, or that provide false information to voters about when, where, and how they can vote.”
The signees say they will work together to create and share tools to detect and address the online distribution of deepfakes. In addition, they plan to drive educational campaigns and “provide transparency” to users.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (FABRICE COFFRINI via Getty Images)
OpenAI, one of the signees, already said last month it plans to suppress election-related misinformation worldwide. Images generated with the company’s DALL-E 3 tool will be encoded with a classifier providing a digital watermark to clarify their origin as AI-generated pictures. The ChatGPT maker said it would also work with journalists, researchers and platforms for feedback on its provenance classifier. It also plans to prevent chatbots from impersonating candidates.
“We’re committed to protecting the integrity of elections by enforcing policies that prevent abuse and improving transparency around AI-generated content,” Anna Makanju, Vice President of Global Affairs at OpenAI, wrote in the group’s joint press release. “We look forward to working with industry partners, civil society leaders and governments around the world to help safeguard elections from deceptive AI use.”
Notably absent from the list is Midjourney, the company with an AI image generator (of the same name) that currently produces some of the most convincing fake photos. However, the company said earlier this month it would consider banning political generations altogether during election season. Last year, Midjourney was used to create a viral fake image of Pope Benedict unexpectedly strutting down the street with a puffy white jacket. One of Midjourney’s closest competitors, Stability AI (makers of the open-source Stable Diffusion), did participate. Engadget contacted Midjourney for comment about its absence, and we’ll update this article if we hear back.
Only Apple is absent among Silicon Valley’s “Big Five.” However, that may be explained by the fact that the iPhone maker hasn’t yet launched any generative AI products, nor does it host a social media platform where deepfakes could be distributed. Regardless, we contacted Apple PR for clarification but hadn’t heard back at the time of publication.
Although the general principles the 20 companies agreed to sound like a promising start, it remains to be seen whether a loose set of agreements without binding enforcement will be enough to combat a nightmare scenario where the world’s bad actors use generative AI to sway public opinion and elect aggressively anti-democratic candidates — in the US and elsewhere.
“The language isn’t quite as strong as one might have expected,” Rachel Orey, senior associate director of the Elections Project at the Bipartisan Policy Center, toldThe Associated Press on Friday. “I think we should give credit where credit is due, and acknowledge that the companies do have a vested interest in their tools not being used to undermine free and fair elections. That said, it is voluntary, and we’ll be keeping an eye on whether they follow through.”
In January, New Hampshire voters were greeted with a robocall of an AI-generated impersonation of President Biden’s voice — urging them not to vote. (Anadolu via Getty Images)
In January, an AI-generated deepfake of President Biden’s voice was used by two Texas-based companies to robocall New Hampshire voters, urging them not to vote in the state’s primary on January 23. The clip, generated using ElevenLabs’ voice cloning tool, reached up to 25,000 NH voters, according to the state’s attorney general. ElevenLabs is among the pact’s signees.
The Federal Communication Commission (FCC) acted quickly to prevent further abuses of voice-cloning tech in fake campaign calls. Earlier this month, it voted unanimously to ban AI-generated robocalls. The (seemingly eternally deadlocked) US Congress hasn’t passed any AI legislation. In December, the European Union (EU) agreed on an expansive AI Act safety development bill that could influence other nations’ regulatory efforts.
“As society embraces the benefits of AI, we have a responsibility to help ensure these tools don’t become weaponized in elections,” Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith wrote in a press release. “AI didn’t create election deception, but we must ensure it doesn’t help deception flourish.”
Sarah Silverman’s lawsuit against OpenAI will advance with some of her legal team’s claims dismissed. The comedian sued OpenAI and Meta in July 2023, claiming they trained their AI models on her books and other work without consent. Bloombergreported on Tuesday that the unfair competition portion of the lawsuit will proceed. Judge Martínez-Olguín gave the plaintiffs until March 13 to amend the suit.
US District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín threw out portions of the complaint from Silverman’s legal team Monday, including negligence, unjust enrichment, DMCA violations and accusations of vicarious infringement. The case’s principal claim remains intact. It alleges OpenAI directly infringed on copyrighted material by training LLMs on millions of books without permission.
OpenAI’s motion to dismiss, filed in August, didn’t tackle the case’s core copyright claims. Although the suit will proceed, the judge suggested the federal Copyright Act may preempt the suit’s remaining claims. “As OpenAI does not raise preemption, the Court does not consider it,” Martínez-Olguín wrote.
The result of Silverman’s OpenAI hearing is similar to one in San Francisco in November when Silverman’s claims against Meta were also slashed down to the core copyright infringement claims. In that session, US District Judge Vince Chhabria described some of the plaintiffs’ dismissed claims as “nonsensical.”
Welcome to the weekend. First, read our Vision Pro review, but also try not to look directly at Devindra’s Vision Pro avatar. I think it may be cursed. Yes, Apple’s vision of the future of computing is here to bleed early adopters of thousands of dollars. I half-joke: Apple has brought its intelligence to AR, gesture interfaces and high-technology (those screens!) to drop jaws around the world. But you might not need one just yet. We also touch on the biggest podcast in the world getting bigger and those perennial folding iPhone rumors. It might happen, but you’ll probably get a foldable iPad first.
Do you need all the AI tricks under the sun to make a competitive smartphone in 2024? Well, OnePlus is here to disprove that. The OnePlus 12 has the same speedy performance and better battery life than the Galaxy S24+, along with solid cameras and a great screen for $200 less. There are few, if any, AI tricks, but that doesn’t detract much from great battery life, high-res cameras, and an $800 price. Full review right here.
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Threads is beginning a bookmarking feature to allow users to save posts, according to Instagram head Adam Mosseri. The update is beginning as a “limited test,” but the “heavily requested” feature will eventually have a permanent place on the service, the company .
According to screenshots shared by Meta, the “save” button on Threads will look very similar to Instagram’s version of the feature. Users will be able to access their bookmarked posts from the “save” section of the app’s settings.
While the ability to save posts may not seem like the most exciting update, it will help bring a little more organization to the app. threads currently lacks direct messaging, search filtering, lists and a number of other features often requested by power users looking to replace the functionality of Twitter (now known as X).
Threads recently introduced , but Meta has so far resisted adding chronological search or trending features. Mosseri has said chronological search could be easily gamed by spammers, though an of the feature was recently spotted in the wild. Meta employees have also sharing images of a feature that looks a lot like trending topics, though it’s unclear what the company’s plans for it may be.
In a statement, a Meta spokesperson said the company “will continue listening to community feedback for ways to improve the Threads experience.” The app has climbed to 130 million monthly users, Mark Zuckerberg last week. He has said that the app has the to be the company’s next billion-user service.
Apple’s new plan to give a higher cut of royalties to artists who offer spatial audio has pissed off some indie labels, who argue it will take potential earnings away from them in favor of companies with more resources at their disposal, according to a report from the . Apple last month started offering to artists who release spatial audio tracks on Apple Music. But, this comes out of the same fixed pool of money also used to pay artists who do not offer the format.
Spatial audio is produced using Dolby Atmos technology and, according to executives who spoke with FT, costs roughly $1,000 more per song. A whole album would cost about 10 times as much — now multiply that to account for the hundreds or thousands of albums a label may have in its back catalog. The Financial Times spoke with executives from Beggars Group, Secretly and Partisan Records, which house labels representing artists including Vampire Weekend, Phoebe Bridgers and others.
One executive told FT, “If [this policy] takes between 5 and 10 percent off of your global revenues, and not even because the songs aren’t performing but because you lose that money and it goes to Universal, the biggest player in the market, we’re definitely concerned. It’s hard enough to make money off of streaming.” They plan to take it up with Apple in hopes of working out a better deal.
Earlier this week, the team behind the Arc browser for Mac (and recently Windows) released a brand-new iPhone app called Arc Search. As you might expect, it’s infused with AI to power an experience where the app “browses for you”—pulling together a variety of sources of info across the internet to make a custom webpage to answer whatever questions you throw at it. That’s just one part of what The Browser Company is calling Act 2 of Arc, and the company gave details on three other major new features its bringing to the browser over the coming weeks and months.
The connective tissue of all these updates is that Arc is trying to blur the lines between a browser, search engine and website — the company wants to combine them all to make the internet a bit more useful to end users. In a promo video released today, various people from The Browser Company excitedly discuss a browser that can browse for you (an admittedly handy idea).
The Arc Search app showed off one implementation of that idea, and the next is a feature that arrives today called Instant Links. When you search for something, pressing shift and enter will tell Arc to search and automatically open the top result. This won’t have a 100 percent success rate, but there are definitely times when it comes in handy. One example Arc showed off was searching for “True Detective season 4 trailer” — pressing shift + enter automatically opened the trailer from YouTube in a new tab and started playing it.
You can easily get multiple results with this tool, too. I told it to “show me a folder of five different soup recipes” and Arc created a folder with five different tabs in for me to review. I also asked for the forecasts in Rome, Paris and Athens and got three pages with the details for each city. It’s handy, but I’m looking forward to Arc infusing it with more smarts than just simply pulling the “top” search result. (Side note: after testing this feature, my browser sidebar is awash with all kinds of nonsense. I’m glad Arc auto-closes things every day so I don’t have to sort it out.)
In a similar vein, the upcoming Live Folders feature will collect updates from sites you want to follow, like a sort of RSS feed. The idea is anticipating what sites someone is going to browse to and bring updated results into that folder. One example involved getting tagged in things on GitHub — each time that happened, a tab would be added to the folder with the new item. The demo on this feature was brief, but it should be available in beta on February 15th for further testing.
I got the sense from the video that developers would need to enable their sites to be updated via Live Folders, so it doesn’t seem like you can just add anything you want and expect it to work. In that way, it reminds me of some other Arc features like the one that lets you hover over a Gmail or Google Calendar tab to get a preview of your most recent messages or next appointment. Hopefully it’ll have the smarts to do things like drop new posts from your favorite site into the folder or open a new video from a YouTube channel you subscribe to, but we’ll have to wait to find out. (I also reached out to Arc for more details on how this might work and will update this story if I hear back.)
Finally, the last new feature here is also the most ambitious, and the one that most embodies that “browser that browses for you” vibe. Arc Explore, which the company says should be ready for testing in the next couple of months, uses LLMs to try and collapse the browser, search engine and site into a singular experience. In practice, this feels similar to what Arc is already doing with its new browser, but more advanced. One example the company gave involved making a restaurant reservation — starting with a query of wanting to make a reservation at one of a couple different restaurants, the Arc Explore interface brought back a bunch of details on each location alongside direct links to the Resy pages to book a table for two at exactly the time specified.
Another demo showed off how using Arc Explore can be better than just searching and clicking on results. It centered around soup, as all good demos do. Having Arc Explore bring up details on a certain kind of soup immediately provided details like ingredient lists, direct recipe steps and of course related videos. Compared to the pain of browsing a lot of sites that get loaded down with autoplaying ads, videos, unrelated text and more distractions, the Arc Explore experience does feel pretty serene. Of course, that’s only when it brings back the results relevant to you. But using a LLM, you can converse with Arc to get closer to what you’re looking for.
After using Arc Search on my iPhone, I can appreciate what The Browser Company is going for here — at the same time, though, breaking my old habits on how I browse the internet is no small thing. That means these tools are going to need to work pretty well when they launch if they’re going to supplant the years I’ve spent putting things into a Google box and finding the results I want. But that sums up the whole philosophy and the point behind Arc: to shake up these habits in an effort to make a better browsing experience. Not all these experiments will stick, and others will probably mutate a lot from these initial ideas, but I’m definitely interested in seeing how things evolve from here.
is an innovative country that leads the way on many technological fronts. But the wheels of bureaucracy often turn incredibly slowly there. So much so, that the government still requires businesses to provide information on floppy disks and CD-ROMs when they submit certain official documents.
That’s starting to change. Back in 2022, Minister of Digital Affairs Taro Kono urged various branches of the government to The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) is one of the first to make the switch. “Under the current law, there are many provisions stipulating the use of specific recording media such as floppy disks regarding application and notification methods,” METI said last week, according to .
After this calendar year, METI will no longer require businesses to submit data on floppy disks under 34 ordinances. The same goes for CD-ROMs when it comes to an unspecified number of procedures. There’s still quite some way to go before businesses can stop using either format entirely, however.
Kono’s staff identified some 1,900 protocols across several government departments that still require the likes of floppy disks, CD-ROMs and even MiniDiscs. The physical media requirements even applied to key industries such as utility suppliers, mining operations and aircraft and weapons manufacturers.
There are a couple of main reasons why there’s a push to stop using floppy disks, as points out. One major factor is that floppy disks can be hard to come by. Sony, the last major manufacturer, . Another is that some data types just won’t fit on a floppy disk. A single photo can easily be larger than the format’s 1.4MB storage capacity.
There are some other industries that still rely on floppy disks. Some older planes need them for avionics, as do and some aging medical devices. It also took the US government to stop using floppy disks to coordinate nuclear weapon launches.
Cities: Skylines II developer Colossal Order has a uniquely close relationship with its community. The original Cities: Skylines came out in 2015 and gobbled up the audience that was left behind by EA’s SimCity, which came out in 2013 and was a busted mess. Cities: Skylines scratched that urban-planning itch, plus it cost just $30. The game came first to PC, Mac and Linux with modest hardware requirements, and it hit consoles within two years. Critically, Cities: Skylines also supported mods through the Steam Workshop, allowing players to add their own tools to the game and share those features with others.
“With Cities: Skylines, the audience grew in size and the modding took even a bigger role, allowing for a huge amount of creativity and inspiration for us devs,” Colossal Order CEO Mariina Hallikainen told Engadget. “Anything from quality-of-life improvements to ideas for DLC content, we have gathered a huge amount of information to help us create the game that Cities: Skylines is today.”
Colossal Order and its publisher, Paradox Interactive, continued to support Cities: Skylines with consistent game updates and DLC drops, and its mod community continued to grow. The game picked up a ton of new players during the pandemic in 2020, and around that time, a number of now-prominent content creators leaned into Cities: Skylines for streams and videos.
In the months before the launch of Cities: Skylines II in October 2023, Colossal Order partnered with a handful of content creators and gave them access to bits of the game early, so they could create YouTube videos showing off specific features each week. These partners included Biffa, two dollars twenty, YUMBL, Infrastructurist and City Planner Plays. City Planner Plays has a clever edge in this space — Philip, the man behind the builds, worked as an urban planner for more than a decade, and his videos often include insights about how real-life cities are designed. He started his channel in mid-2020, and today he’s a dedicatedCities: Skylines streamer and video editor with nearly 650,000 subscribers on YouTube. Like many other community members, he has a history with Colossal Order that spans years.
“Prior to the Cities: Skylines II release, I think that most everyone in the community viewed them incredibly positively, looking at them as ‘one of us’ and the type of developer that you want making a game that you love,” Philip said. “They were viewed as responsive and generous. …I can’t recall a bad thing being said about them.”
That’s exactly what made on January 15th so surprising.
“We have seen a growing tendency of toxicity in our community, something we have not experienced to this extent before,” Hallikainen wrote, clarifying that the negativity was being directed at developers and players alike. She continued, “We have always treasured having the devs present on the different social platforms and having direct communication with the community, but our biggest responsibility will always be protecting the team.”
Tensions have been high in the Cities: Skylines community since the launch of the sequel in October. Though the game was originally pitched as a simultaneous PC and console release, it’s only available on PC and there’s for when the other versions will come out. On top of that, Colossal Order raised the game’s minimum and recommended specs just a month before release, and the new requirements placed it out of reach for a large chunk of players.
Colossal Order
Even with a capable rig, the game is riddled with visual and mechanical bugs. Philip said Cities: Skylines II strained his RTX 4090 graphics card, making it run at 100 percent on the main menu, and he couldn’t play in 4K at launch because the game was so GPU-bound.
Simply put, it feels like the game needed more time in development.
“Since the launch of Cities: Skylines II, things have without a doubt gotten more prickly,” Philip said. “While many people have been appreciative of Colossal Order’s transparency with the weekly updates as well as the frequent bug fixes, many appear to view Colossal Order as being all-too-willing to release a game that wasn’t ready to be released.”
Hallikainen acknowledged that the game is missing some promised and highly publicized features, like mod support.
“Naturally we’re disappointed we weren’t able to achieve everything we aimed for, but it’s fantastic to have the game finally out and continue working on it with more openness,” she said.
The issue, as far as Colossal Order sees it, lies in the community’s response to Cities: Skylines II. Players have been venting on social media and in the Steam and Paradox forums, and the feedback has risen to toxic levels, according to Hallikainen. She cites a surge in personal attacks on developers and other players.
Colossal Order
“Cities: Skylines II attracted a lot of attention and very high expectations were set,” she said. “When the game did not fulfill all the promises, it was natural to cause frustration in the audience. However, the shortcomings should spark a conversation on ideas for improvement, constructive feedback and respectful discussions in the community.”
For City Planner Plays and other community members, the issue is the game itself. Where Colossal Order sees toxicity, Philip sees justified frustration.
“I will admit that I was taken aback by this description of what’s happening in the Cities: Skylines community regarding Cities: Skylines II,” he said. “I have noticed increased negativity. However, I wouldn’t say that I have noticed increased toxicity. And bluntly, I think the negativity is completely understandable and predictable.”
Philip identified four factors driving the negative sentiment: The game is only on PC, it’s buggy and unplayable on many common hardware configurations, there’s no official support for mods, and Colossal Order hasn’t held itself accountable for the game’s blunders.
“Colossal Order has been transparent, talking with the community, but has not taken accountability for the release of the game,” Philip said. “I hear this over and over again. Many players appear to want them to admit that the release state of the game was poor, say that they are sorry, and make some gesture to make amends. To date, they have delayed the DLC release — which actually was a huge negative for people that purchased the Ultimate Edition of the game — but not made amends. [They haven’t] provided the information that people are looking for.”
Colossal Order
The biggest misstep on Philip's list is the lack of mods. Colossal Order is planning to add an official pipeline for mods directly through Paradox, rather than Steam Workshop, which was the home for mods in Cities: Skylines. Shifting to an in-house modding platform will ensure parity across all platforms, bringing mods to consoles and players outside of Steam. However, the Cities: Skylines mod community was built on Steam Workshop, a popular and easy-to-use platform, and with the delay of the console release, the current player base is simply being inconvenienced.
“The maps that come with the game aren’t great — incredibly high difficulty level, unforgiving weather — and many basic features need refinement,” Philip said. “Mods offered that opportunity and they aren’t available just yet. Worst of all, early messaging made it seem like modding was around the corner, weeks after launch, [but it’s been delayed] to some undetermined time in Q2 of 2024.”
Collaboration with the community is what made the original game so successful, and the sequel could certainly benefit from crowdsourced improvements. For now, some players are using a third-party tool to make mods work in Cities: Skylines II.
“The tech is new, the simulation has been entirely rewritten and the game has all the potential to become the city-builder of this decade,” Hallikainen said. “What we failed in was to get the modding support available for the release, and we’re doing our best to catch up. We have been delighted to see the modding community has not waited for us, but are already creating amazing mods for the game.”
Paradox Interactive
This is only the beginning for Cities: Skylines II. Colossal Order has plans to support and expand the game over the next 10 years. The original Cities: Skylines didn’t have all of the bells, whistles and mods when it first came out in 2015, and the sequel is starting in a similar position. Colossal Order sees Cities: Skylines II as a fresh foundation, but its core community expected a more complete experience.
“The feedback we’ve gotten from the content creators and modders has immensely helped us in heading in the right direction, and we love working in cooperation with different parties,” Hallikainen said. “There’s a lot of work to be done and we plan to keep going for the next decade.”
Cities: Skylines II has improved significantly in the months since launch, thanks to a slew of updates from Colossal Order. It’s on the right track. Colossal Order updates on the game’s progress each week, but it’ll take time — and maybe an apology, a plan and free in-game perks — to rewrite the narrative around Cities: Skylines II.
“I think the most ‘toxic’ people right now are the game’s biggest fans,” Philip said. “And bluntly, they are just disappointed that the game doesn’t run well for them or that they can’t play it at all. They’re disappointed and lashing out, which isn’t right. But to me, that means that there is a path to repair the issues if the game is fully fixed and accountability is taken.”
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/whats-up-with-the-toxicity-around-cities-skylines-ii-213034938.html?src=rss
