us-technology

Alex Photo Stock/Shutterstock Google is the default search engine on Chrome; that means when you search for any query, your results will be shown in the Google search engine. Chrome allows you to manually change your search engine, but what if you notice it has been changed automatically to Bing? While Bing is definitely a good Google alternative, it’s completely normal to trust Google results over Bing as a matter of personal preference. You can definitely switch to Google again, but what if you notice that Chrome changes the search engine back to Bing again? This indicates that there’s something fishy going on with your Chrome browser. Perhaps your device is affected by malware, or a recently installed extension is interfering with Chrome and forcing it to change the search engine.  Before we get into the advanced fixes, we recommend you update Google Chrome to the latest build and then try switching the search engine to Google again. Doing this will eliminate the possibility of a bug in the current Chrome build causing the problem. However, if the problem remains even in the latest Chrome version, then continue reading to find out its solution. Get rid of malicious agents Aman Kumar/ SlashGear If you notice that the problem has started to occur after installing a particular application on your device, then most likely that application itself is the culprit. The best way to confirm this is to uninstall that application from your device. If you’re facing the issue on your smartphone and have Microsoft SwiftKey or any other Microsoft application installed, consider uninstalling it. If Chrome no longer changes the search engine automatically, then congratulations, as you have resolved the problem. You can report the issue to the app developers as a gesture of goodwill. However, if you still continue to face the issue, then the next thing you should check is the list of installed extensions. It’s possible for a malicious extension to interfere with Chrome and change the search engine to Bing without your knowledge. Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to catch that extension. You’ll have to disable all the installed extensions. Then, enable each extension one by one and check for the problem after activating each extension. You should uninstall the extension that changes the Chrome search engine after being enabled. Malware could also be the reason why Chrome is automatically switching the default search engine. Your best port of call in this case is to launch an antivirus program on your device and run a full system scan. If the antivirus detects any malware, virus, or any other suspicious file that shouldn’t be on your device, you should immediately delete it from your system or follow the steps that your antivirus recommends to remove it. Adjust Chrome settings Aman Kumar/ SlashGear If you are facing the issue on Windows or macOS, then you can access the Chrome settings and remove Bing from the search engine list. To do so, open the Settings menu in Chrome, choose Search Engine from the left sidebar, and then select the Manage search engines and site search option. Click the three dots next to Bing and choose Delete from the menu that appears. Now restart Google Chrome, and you should no longer be facing the problem. However, after a restart, if you notice that Bing is again added to the search engine list and Chrome automatically switches to it, then you will have to reset the Chrome settings to fix the problem. To do this, select Reset settings in the Chrome settings menu, click Restore settings to their original defaults, and then Reset settings. Aman Kumar/ SlashGear In the worst-case scenario, if you still continue to face the problem, then you are left with no option other than to contact the Chrome support team. That being said, once you have successfully resolved the issue, you must enable enhanced protection in Chrome to ensure that the browser doesn’t again face any similar problem in the future. To enable it, choose Privacy and security in the Chrome settings menu, and then select the Security option on the right, then choose the Enhanced Protection option under the Safe Browsing section. In addition to activating the Chrome built-in security feature, you should also regularly update your installed antivirus and use its full system scan feature to constantly check your system for any malware and viruses. Read More

When Parthi Duraisamy was a consultant at McKinsey’s Dubai office, he discovered that the American Express cards his company relied on for corporate expenses were rarely accepted in the Middle East. This forced Duraisamy to cover significant travel expenses out of pocket and file endless expense reports. “It was a constant pain,” Duraisamy explained on the call. “I’d spend my weekends uploading receipts, reconciling every expense manually.” Now, Alaan, the company he launched with fellow McKinsey alumnus Karun Kurien, is the Middle East’s leading spend management platform. It just announced that it raised $48 million in Series A funding led by Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia Capital India & SEA) with participation from others like founders of 885 Capital, Y Combinator, 468 Capital, and Pioneer Fund. Founders of some of Alaan’s unicorn customers, like Hosam Arab (Tabby), Mudassir Sheikha (Careem), and Khalid Al Ameri, a well-known YouTuber in the region, also invested. This is one of the largest Series A rounds for a fintech in the region, compared to Saudi Arabia’s buy now, pay later platform Tamara, which raised $110 million a couple of years ago. “The category has demonstrated strong product-market fit in the MENA region, and Alaan stands out as the category leader,” said GV Ravishankar, Managing Director at Peak XV. “Their customer-centric and product-led mindset has enabled them to build solutions tailored to modern finance teams.” (Peak XV also participated in a large Series B round last month, backing UAE’s proptech Huspy.) Alaan’s path to category leadership wasn’t without challenges, however. Techcrunch event San Francisco | October 27-29, 2025 While the fintech raised a $2.5 million seed round in mid-2021, it couldn’t launch for nearly a year, largely due to regulatory complexities and the need for banking partnerships in the UAE. Its recent expansion into Saudi Arabia posed similar hurdles, taking years to secure approvals from the country’s apex bank before finally launching this January.  “The biggest challenge we faced, both in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, was simply going live,” the CEO shared. Yet, Duraisamy said the fintech was able to move fast in other ways such as in Alaan’s pioneering move to integrate Apple Pay into its B2B offerings, something previously unavailable to finance teams in the region.  In early 2023, the company also claimed to be the first in the Middle East to integrate OpenAI into its services, a move Duraisamy says shaped the company’s current product strategy. Initially, Alaan rolled out a chatbot, anticipating that users would enjoy conversational interactions around their spending. But the feature failed to gain traction. Lesson learned, the fintech shifted focus, realizing customers got more value when AI worked in the background. Alaan began using AI to help streamline processes like receipt matching, reconciliation, and VAT extraction—a particularly valuable use case in the region, where the platform helps businesses navigate complex VAT regulations and reclaimable tax. The company claims its spend management platform has already saved finance teams more than 1.5 million hours of manual work. Its a number Alaan expects to grow as it continues to invest in automation. Since launching in 2022, Alaan has processed over 2.5 million transactions for more than 1,500 finance teams across major regional enterprises, including G42, Careem, Tabby, and Lulu Group. What’s more, the company is profitable, Duraisamy says, noting that it spent $5 million to generate $10 million in revenue. Duraisamy credits YC and his mentors for instilling a disciplined approach in a market where many fintechs are focused on payment volumes. Now, Alaan is looking to replicate its growth in Saudi Arabia, where it launched earlier this year and has been doubling transaction volumes month over month for the past six months, according to the startup. The Series A will accelerate this expansion, allowing the company to scale hiring across sales, customer success, and compliance, while also doubling down on AI-driven finance automation. While the four-year-old fintech, which is equipping MENA finance teams with AI agents, has now raised one of the largest Series A rounds in MENA, I asked Duraisamy if Ramp’s explosive growth—its valuation has doubled this year after raising three rounds—played a role in investors betting big on Alaan. “When you talk to investors, what really matters for a company at our stage is the fundamentals: how capital-efficient we are, how much revenue we generate, how strong our go-to-market motion is,” he said. “We are not in a market where you know size is an advantage, like the US or Europe. So, regardless of whether Ramp was able to raise or not, I think we would have raised this much because our fundamentals were very strong.” Read More

At a time when the world feels increasingly divided between East and West, Uzbekistan has emerged as a rare middle ground, as the Central Asian nation’s homegrown unicorn, Uzum, has raised $65.5 million in a new funding round co-led by China’s Tencent and the New York- and London-based VR Capital, with participation from U.S.-based FinSight Ventures. The all-equity round brings the Tashkent-headquartered startup’s post-money valuation to approximately $1.5 billion — a nearly 30% jump from the $1.16 billion valuation it announced when it first hit unicorn status in March last year. Founded in 2022, Uzum started its journey in Uzbekistan with an e-commerce marketplace called Uzum Market, and shortly after its success, the startup added fintech with a debit card and later expanded into its express food delivery service, Uzum Tezkor. Uzum currently boasts over 17 million monthly active users — nearly half of Uzbekistan’s adult population, or about two-thirds of all smartphone users in the country — and 16,000 merchants. In the first half of 2025 alone, the startup recorded $250 million in gross merchandise value (GMV), up nearly 1.5 times year-over-year. Its digital banking arm, Uzum Bank, launched a co-branded Visa debit card with pre-approved credit limits in August last year. That product has already issued 2 million cards and is on track to surpass 5 million by year-end. Meanwhile, Uzum’s unsecured lending business hit $200 million in financed volume in Q1, growing 3.4 times from the same period last year. The startup also posted $150 million in net income in 2024 — a 50% year-over-year jump. With a portfolio spanning e-commerce, fintech, and digital banking, how has a startup just over three years old managed to scale this quickly — and draw the attention of global investors like Tencent? Uzum founder and CEO Djasur Djumaev attributes the success to a combination of deep local knowledge and disciplined execution. He believes that understanding the country’s culture, consumer behavior, and business environment — and pairing that with the technical and operational expertise that global companies have developed — has been critical to building a business that can scale quickly and sustainably. Techcrunch event San Francisco | October 27-29, 2025 The startup built its digital and physical infrastructure from scratch to kick off its business in Uzbekistan. This includes setting a logistics capacity that has grown to than 112,000 square meters, with a storage capacity of 1.1 million square feet, allowing it to process more than 200,000 orders per day. The startup has also set up more than 1,500 pickup points across 450 cities, towns, settlements, and villages in the country to enable next-day deliveries. These pickup points also allow the issuance and distribution of Uzum Bank cards. “Betting on local expertise and infrastructure in frontier markets gives you an advantage to then perform and scale your business very fast,” Djumaev told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview. Uzum’s pickup pointImage Credits:Uzum Initially, Uzum operated on a fulfilled-by-operator model to enable e-commerce deliveries. It has since expanded to include fulfillment-by-seller and delivery-by-seller options, with a goal of routing 20–30% of deliveries through these new models. These new delivery models will also help Uzum expand its stock-keeping units, which are currently over 1.5 million available for its next-day delivery service, up from over 600,000 SKUs at the time of its last funding announcement in March 2024. When asked what brought Tencent onto its cap-table this time, Uzum’s chief strategy and business development officer, Nikolay Seleznev, told TechCrunch the startup’s strong growth metrics convinced the Chinese investor to come on board after several quarters of ongoing discussions. Uzum plans to grow its fintech business by introducing a deposit product in September and a long-term (more than 12 months in maturity) credit facility for its B2C customers. The startup also plans to expand its merchant base and help its existing and new merchants with its QR code payment processing system, expand its Visa debit card program, and build new products to support small and medium enterprises in the country. Similarly, the startup plans to introduce new products adding value-added services to its e-commerce business, including those helping to generate advertisement revenues. It is also working toward scaling its financial infrastructure further with AI increasingly embedded across credit scoring, fraud protection, and personalized user experiences. Furthermore, Uzum plans to open up its e-commerce marketplace for international merchants, beginning with those in China and Turkey in September. “We are expecting 10 to 15% of cross-border activity coming from these countries,” Seleznev said. The startup has over 12,000 people in its workforce, including blue-collar workers at its pickup points, as well as tech, engineering, and product teams across all its business verticals. Similar to other businesses of its sort, which are profitable and have multiple avenues to generate continuous income over time, Uzum has plans to become public in the medium term. But before that, it aims to raise a Series B round of $250–$300 million in the first half of 2026. That said, the startup has so far raised $137 million in equity, including the latest round. Read More

Indian startup Jeh Aerospace founders Vishal Sanghavi and Venkatesh Mudragalla have had a front row seat to the commercial aircraft sector and its growing production bottleneck. The two former Tata Group executives spent close to two decades in different positions at the company and worked on projects that included participation from global aerospace companies, including Boeing, Sikorsky, and Lockheed Martin. Now, armed with $11 million in Series A funding, the pair are working to ease global supply chain bottlenecks by scaling the production of metallic components for aero engines and aerostructures, which it then sells to U.S.-based Tier 1 suppliers that work with commercial aircraft manufacturers such as Airbus and Boeing. And they plan to help India become a destination for aerospace component manufacturing in the process. “At Tatas, we unlocked India’s potential for these large OEMs, Boeing, Airbus, Sikorsky, and GE [General Electric], but we wanted Jeh Aerospace to unlock India’s potential for the large Tier 1 and Tier 2 manufacturers in the supply chain,” said Sanghavi, who is also CEO at Jeh. Jeh Aerospace co-founders Venkatesh Mudragalla (Left) and Vishal Sanghavi (Right)Image Credits:Jeh Aerospace Jeh Aerospace, which is headquartered in Atlanta to better access its U.S. customer base, has a 60,000-square-foot software-based, precision manufacturing facility is in the Southern Indian city of Hyderabad. The three-year-old startup has combined precision machinery, robotics, and IoT devices to slash product introduction lead times from the industry’s traditional 15-week timeline to 15 days. Jeh Aerospace’s software-defined manufacturing approach helps bring predictability and dynamic scheduling to allow offering a consistent supply to customers with no compromises on quality, Sanghavi said. Techcrunch event San Francisco | October 27-29, 2025 And it seems VCs and strategic investors are interested in Jeh Aerospace’s pitch. The Series A round was led by Elevation Capital, with participation from General Catalyst. With the infusion of the new capital, Jeh Aerospace has raised about $15 million in total from institutional venture capital firms. The VC fresh funding comes less than a month after the startup received an undisclosed strategic investment from IndiGo Ventures, a corporate venture capital arm of Indian carrier IndiGo. Ashray Iyengar, principal at Elevation Capital, said the company “built a truly differentiated approach to aerospace manufacturing.” Aircraft production bottleneck Global air traffic demand rose 10.4% year-over-year in 2024, surpassing 2019 levels by 3.8%, per the International Air Transport Association data released earlier this year. The rebound has spurred airlines to expand fleets, pushing up orders even as the industry grapples with talent and production bottlenecks, as Deloitte notes in a recent report. Tier 1 suppliers are facing extended lead times as the commercial aircraft backlog reaches a record nearly 15,700 units, according to McKinsey. Jeh Aerospace’s founders believe using technology to scale production of metallic components for aero engines and aerostructures will unplug that bottleneck. That premise has shaped how Sanghavi, the former chief operating officer at Tata Boeing Aerospace, and Mudragalla have built its 100-person workforce, team of advisers, and business model. Image Credits:McKinsey Aerospace & Defense Practice Instead of working directly with OEMs like Airbus and Boeing, which makes makes 30% of commercial aircraft, Jeh Aerospace deliberately decided to tap Tier 1 and Tier 2 manufacturers, Sanghavi told TechCrunch, adding this group makes 60% to 70% of aircraft. The startup currently has half a dozen paying customers, including Vermont-based GS Precision and Ohio-headquartered RH Aero. Sanghavi said each of these customers is a “high dollar, high ARR customer,” and they have the potential to become large accounts in the next one to two years. “What we believe is that to work with lesser, but better customers, not to have a transactional relationship, but a far deeper and meaningful relationship. So, we are also very, very focused on not having too many customers,” he said. “The business doesn’t need too many customers because you can really scale with few customers very fast and very quickly.” The company has also assembled an advisory team with deep ties to commercial aircraft OEMS. The startup counts former Boeing India President Pratyush (Prat) Kumar and former Airbus India CEO and Managing Director Dwaraka Srinivasan among its early advisors and backers. Jeh Aerospace has made notable manufacturing and financial progress in its short life. Since its $2.75 million seed round in January last year, Jeh Aerospace says it has delivered more than 100,000 flight-critical components and tools on time. The startup has also established a machine capacity exceeding 250,000 hours annually. In the last financial year, the startup reached $6 million in annualized recurring revenue (ARR) and achieved profitability after taxes. Sanghavi told TechCrunch that it projects a 3x to 4x increase in its ARR this year and also boasts an order book worth $100 million. Jeh Aerospace’s facility includes an Center for Aerospace Skill for talent trainingImage Credits:Jeh Aerospace The company plans to use the new $11 million in capital to scale its manufacturing and inspection capabilities by investing in next-generation digital production technologies, Sanghavi said. The Jeh Aerospace co-founders see an opportunity to bring more local manufacturing to India and trengthen the country’s position on the global aerospace map, much like its recent emergence as a hub for iPhone production. India already plays a growing role in aerospace manufacturing, with Airbus sourcing $1.4 billion worth of components annually from the country and targeting $2 billion by 2030. Boeing, for its part, is aiming for a $1.3 billion annual spend and announced its plans to invest $200 million in a new engineering and technology center in Bengaluru in 2023. Still, the South Asian nation has yet to achieve large-scale success in aerospace component manufacturing — a gap companies like Jeh Aerospace are hoping to fill. Although few Indian startups operate in aerospace component manufacturing, the sector includes players like JJG Aero, which appears to be a peer to Jeh Aerospace based on industry positioning. Sanghavi declined to comment specifically on JJG and noted that his startup sees its primary competition among U.S.-based tier-2 suppliers. Read More

Dribbble has permanently banned dozens of designers from its platform following a new effort to pivot to a marketplace and chase monetization. This includes one of the platform’s most well-known designers, Gleb Kuznetsov, founder of the San Francisco-based design studio Milkinside. Dribbble deleted his account with its over 210 million followers because he shared his contact information with prospective clients through the platform in violation of its new rules. Remarked Kuznetsov in a post on X, “I brought 100,000+ monthly users. 15 years of work. 12,000+ shots. All instantly deleted, because a client asked for my email. One warning. No appeal.” Fed up with the changes at the company, which helps product, UX, web, and other digital designers showcase their portfolios and find new clients, Kuznetsov says he’s been talking to investors about launching a competitor. Totally agree with @jondschubert . I loved @dribbble. I brought 100,000+ monthly users. 15 years of work. 12,000+ shots. All instantly deleted, because a client asked for my email. One warning. No appeal. They didn’t care about the community. Just their 3% cut.Dribbble is… pic.twitter.com/ujzvhkLoXO — Gleb Kuznetsov (@glebich) July 29, 2025 Shortly after his social media post, Dribbble users expressed their shock and anger over the decision, crediting Kuznetsov as being one of their biggest inspirations and lamenting that the platform would make such a misguided move. Dribbble, meanwhile, says Kuznetsov was actually warned multiple times that he was violating the new rules and the email was the final notice. Dribbble’s pivot to a marketplace The issue has to do with a more recent policy change first announced on March 17, 2025. Techcrunch event San Francisco | October 27-29, 2025 In an email shared in March with Dribbble’s some 750,000 approved designers — meaning those who are authorized to communicate with others on the platform — the company said it was no longer allowing designers to share their contact information with prospective clients until after their client sent payment through its platform. The company positioned this change as one meant to protect designers from non-payment, as well as one that allows Dribbble to continue to sustain its business. The announcement was also posted to social media and the company blog. Image Credits:Dribbble However, Kuznetsov claims that non-payment isn’t a very common problem, and really, this update is about Dribbble attempting to take a larger cut of designers’ business. Dribbble doesn’t dispute that. Before the policy change, Dribbble made money in one of two ways. Starting in September 2024, Dribbble began pivoting to a marketplace that connected designers and clients. Designers could communicate freely on the platform and then either share a 3.5% revenue cut on clients they converted, or they could pay for a Pro subscription to skip the rev share. In March, the company tightened the rules further, saying that anyone finding clients on Dribbble would need to offer the platform a cut of their revenue. “It went from it was optional to use our transactional features to it was required for non-advertisers to use our transactional features, if they were on Dribbble, to find clients,” explains Dribbble CEO Constantine Anastasakis, in an interview with TechCrunch. “If a user is on Dribbble to find inspiration or to get feedback on their work, or to talk shop with their peers, none of this affects them,” he added. Image Credits:Dribbble The exec, who joined the company after working at direct-to-consumer lender Lower, video marketplace Pond5 (exited to Shutterstock), and freelancer marketplace Fiverr, was hired last April to pivot Dribbble into a marketplace. While the company is profitable under parent company Tiny, it’s still a small 20-person team and isn’t reliant on venture backing to serve its 7.5 to 10 million monthly unique visitors. “Dribbble was something that really accelerated our business dramatically back in the day,” Kuznetsov told TechCrunch. Before Dribbble, there was no platform where designers could share their work with others, he says. It helped designers receive feedback that came specifically from their peers and allowed newer designers to learn from those at the top of the industry. Kuznetsov is now part of the latter group. At Milkinside, Kuznetsov has worked with companies like Apple, Google, Amazon, Scandinavian Airlines, United Airlines, Honda, Mitsubishi, Mercedes-Benz, and other large companies in the Bay Area. As a result, he likely didn’t feel that Dribbble would risk banning him for not abiding by the new terms. Anastasakis essentially confirmed this to be true. He told TechCrunch that Kuznetsov received 83 work inquiries since the new terms rolled out in March, and responded to 61. In each message, the site shows a warning that reminds users that contact details should not be shared before project payment. However, Kuznetsov shared his contact information in six messages, which would have displayed a stronger warning at that time. Image Credits:Dribbble Image Credits:Dribbble The company then followed up with a warning email on July 22 about his repeated terms-of-service violations, which informed him he was risking permanent suspension. Kuznetsov told us he didn’t see this email initially, but Dribbble says it tracked that the email was opened three times before his suspension. “I believe that Dribbble — it was their goal to hurt me so I can spread that [news] so they can give a harsh lesson to everyone who tries [to break the rules],” Kuznetsov says. Anastasakis confirmed as much to TechCrunch. “There’s really no conceivable way in which he did not realize that what he was doing risked permanent suspension of his accounts,” Anastasakis told us. “I think that ultimately it was that he believed that we wouldn’t take action against a designer of his caliber,” he continued. “As a side note, I actually think that he’s done us a big favor as far as getting the word out about how seriously we take the terms.” For Kuznetsov, or any designer who was banned for similar reasons, the only option to come back to Dribbble is by joining as an advertiser, which requires a minimum campaign budget of $1,500 per month for at least

Google’s AI-powered bug hunter has just reported its first batch of security vulnerabilities.  Heather Adkins, Google’s vice president of security, announced Monday that its LLM-based vulnerability researcher Big Sleep found and reported 20 flaws in various popular open source software. Adkins said that Big Sleep, which is developed by the company’s AI department DeepMind as well as its elite team of hackers Project Zero, reported its first-ever vulnerabilities, mostly in open source software such as audio and video library FFmpeg and image-editing suite ImageMagick.  Given that the vulnerabilities are not fixed yet, we don’t have details of their impact or severity, as Google does not yet want to provide details, which is a standard policy when waiting for bugs to be fixed. But the simple fact that Big Sleep found these vulnerabilities is significant, as it shows these tools are starting to get real results, even if there was a human involved in this case.  “To ensure high quality and actionable reports, we have a human expert in the loop before reporting, but each vulnerability was found and reproduced by the AI agent without human intervention,” Google’s spokesperson Kimberly Samra told TechCrunch.  Royal Hansen, Google’s vice president of engineering, wrote on X that the findings demonstrate “a new frontier in automated vulnerability discovery.”  LLM-powered tools that can look for and find vulnerabilities are already a reality. Other than Big Sleep, there’s RunSybil and XBOW, among others.  Techcrunch event San Francisco | October 27-29, 2025 XBOW has garnered headlines after it reached the top of one of the U.S. leaderboards at bug bounty platform HackerOne. It’s important to note that in most cases, these reports have a human at some point of the process to verify that the AI-powered bug hunter found a legitimate vulnerability, as is the case with Big Sleep. Vlad Ionescu, co-founder and chief technology officer at RunSybil, a startup that develops AI-powered bug hunters, told TechCrunch that Big Sleep is a “legit” project, given that it has “good design, people behind it know what they’re doing, Project Zero has the bug finding experience and DeepMind has the firepower and tokens to throw at it.” There is obviously a lot of promise with these tools, but also significant downsides. Several people who maintain different software projects have complained of bug reports that are actually hallucinations, with some calling them the bug bounty equivalent of AI slop.  “That’s the problem people are running into, is we’re getting a lot of stuff that looks like gold, but it’s actually just crap,” Ionescu previously told TechCrunch. Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai is a Senior Writer at TechCrunch, where he covers hacking, cybersecurity, surveillance, and privacy. You can contact Lorenzo securely on Signal at +1 917 257 1382, on Keybase/Telegram @lorenzofb, or via email at lorenzo@techcrunch.com. View Bio Read More

(Image credit: Microsoft / 8BitDo) A limited edition 8BitDo controller celebrating Rare’s 40th anniversary has been spotted at Amazon The blue/yellow gamepad features emblems from the developer’s most iconic titles It’s revealed shortly after the cancellation of Everwild, which would’ve been the studio’s next big game It’s definitely been a trying year for Rare, but there is at least something to shout about for fans of the legendary Twycross-based developer in the form of a limited edition 8BitDo controller. This 8BitDo Ultimate controller for Xbox consoles and PC has been spotted over at Amazon (via Eurogamer), and is intended to celebrate the company’s 40th anniversary. No release date has been revealed yet, and it seems like it’ll only be available to US audiences at present. It’s definitely one of the nicest limited edition 8BitDo controllers to date, featuring a blue and yellow color scheme reminiscent of the developer’s logo. It’s also emblazoned with iconography from some of its most renowned titles, including Sea of Thieves and Banjo-Kazooie. There’s even a banana there as a cheeky nod to the Donkey Kong Country series as well as Donkey Kong 64. If you’re unfamiliar with the 8BitDo controller, it’s a bit of a revelation in the third-party gamepad space. It features Hall effect thumbsticks made to combat drift, two remappable buttons for secondary inputs, and a 2.4GHz dongle for wireless connectivity. The 8BitDo Ultimate also includes a charging dock in the box, for a clever and easy way to keep the pad topped up. I consider it to be one of the best Xbox controllers and best Nintendo Switch controllers on the market today. I can’t help but feel bittersweet about the reveal of this controller, though. While Sea of Thieves is a tremendous game and continues to enjoy a dedicated player base, Rare’s 40th year hasn’t exactly been smooth-sailing. The developer’s next game, Everwild, was recently canceled. This is in spite of comments from Xbox boss Phil Spencer back in February of this year, where he claimed the game’s development was progressing. Rare also created the Perfect Dark series, an immersive sim-esque reboot of which was also shuttered along with its developer The Initiative amidst another round of Xbox Game Studios layoffs. Sign up for breaking news, reviews, opinion, top tech deals, and more. You might also like… Hysilens is here to save DoT in the Honkai: Star Rail 3.5 update – and I couldn’t be happier From edgerunners to evil wrestlers, here’s every big fighting game announcement at EVO 2025 The Turtle Beach Victrix Pro BFG Reloaded could make one of the best PS5 controllers even better Rhys is TRG’s Hardware Editor, and has been part of the TechRadar team for over four years. Particularly passionate about high-quality third-party controllers and headsets, Rhys strives to provide easy-to-read, informative coverage on gaming hardware of all kinds. As for the games themselves, Rhys is especially keen on fighting and racing games, as well as soulslikes and RPGs. Read More

(Image credit: Epic Games) What’s new in Fortnite? (Image credit: Epic Games) Epic Games ran a Fortnite live event over the weekend (August 2), which saw Daigo destroy Demon’s Domain by summoning a huge kraken. Players had to work together to take the creature down, before Superman swooped in to save the day. We’re now just days away from the launch of a new season, so hopefully we’ll be hearing more about what’s next very soon indeed. Fortnite Chapter 6 is finally here, continuing with Fortnite Chapter 6 Season 3 which has switched up the map once again. There’s new weapons to try out, a superhero-themed Battle Pass, as well as updates centered around Superman himself. We don’t yet know exactly what’s to follow in the next season of Fortnite, but given Fortnite Super is just days away from ending, it won’t be long before we get some hints from Epic Games. It’s frequent updates like these that make Fortnite one of the best battle royale games around. Last season concluded June 7 with a climactic Star Wars live event, before Chapter 6 Season 3 went live across the world. Here’s everything you need to know about the process of Fortnite Chapter 6 Season 4 launching, when the next season starts, and what to expect from Fortnite in the future. Also, the latest on what’s been revealed about Superman, and other superhero skins. When does the current season of Fortnite end? (Image credit: Epic Games) Fortnite Super will end on August 7, 2025. So far, no details have been shared on specific timings, though the in-game Battle Pass menu does count down to the update. We’ll be sure to provide details closer to launch, but expect the new season to launch after a period of extended downtime. When is the next season of Fortnite? (Image credit: Epic Games) The next season of Fortnite has yet to be fully revealed, but it’ll launch following downtime on August 7, 2025. Hopefully, downtime is only 2-3 hours (based on the average times of Chapter 6 so far), but it’s worth noting that things have been known to slip slightly in the past. What to expect from the next Fortnite season (Image credit: Epic Games) Epic Games has not fully revealed what’s in store for Fortnite Chapter 6 Season 4, but given that the current one only has a couple of days left, we’ll be hearing updates very soon indeed. Sign up for breaking news, reviews, opinion, top tech deals, and more. Fortnite Chapter 6 Season 3 map changes (Image credit: Epic Games) Here’s the full map for Fortnite Super. As you can see in the image above, there’s still some Star Wars locations like Outpost Enclave, First Order Base, and Resistance Base. The new locations are Supernova Academy, Utopia City, and Demon’s Domain. Sprites have been turned into mascots, but work the same way as before, with different abilities like laser-vision. You Might Also Like… Best crossplay games Fortnite Chapter 4 review Here’s when to expect the new season of Fortnite OG Jake is a freelance writer who currently works regularly with TRG. Hailing from the overcast shores of Brighton in the United Kingdom, Jake can be found covering everything from features to guides content around the latest game releases. As seen on NME.com, Eurogamer.net, and VG247.com, Jake specializes in breaking games down into approachable pieces for guides, and providing SEO advice to websites looking to expand their audiences. Read More

(Image credit: NetEase) Marvel Rivals Season 3.5 will launch next week, adding a brand new Hero into the mix, and refreshing Competitive Mode ranks and rewards. We’ve now had the full reveal on what’s set to change, including details on Blade, the new Team Ups, and all incoming buffs and nerfs. What’s new in Marvel Rivals? (Image credit: NetEase) Marvel Rivals will be launching into Season 3.5 later this week, and NetEase has shared the full roadmap for the new update. Looks like we’ll be getting a new event alongside the launch of Season 3.5, and can look forward to skins for Peni Parker, Scarlet Witch, and Iron Man in the future. For full info on what’s set to be added on August 8, visit our Marvel Rivals patch notes guide. In my Marvel Rivals review, I praised the game’s huge suite of Heroes, and the surprising amount of depth found when trying out each one. With Season 3.5, there’s set to be another Hero added, as well as an overhaul to the roadmap. Since its launch, Marvel Rivals has changed quite a bit, adding smart changes to Competitive Mode while giving players something to work toward. It’s consistent updates like this that make Marvel Rivals a worthy inclusion in our best PC Games of 2025 list. Here’s everything you need to know about the next season of Marvel Rivals, including when the current one ends, and what to expect from the new Heroes that are being added. As release day draws nearer, I’ll update this page with all of the latest news and info. When is the next season of Marvel Rivals? (Image credit: NetEase) Marvel Rivals Season 3.5 will launch following downtime that’s planned for August 8, 2025. This is according to recent info given by NetEase alongside the full reveal of Season 3.5. When does the current season of Marvel Rivals end? (Image credit: NetEase) Marvel Rivals Season 3 will end on August 8 at 5AM EDT / 2AM PDT / 10AM BST, for a few hours of downtime before the launch of the new season. Keep an eye on the official Marvel Rivals website for any changes. Marvel Rivals Season 3.5 new Team Up changes (Image credit: NetEase) Marvel Rivals Season 3.5 brings in a bunch of new Team Ups, while removing existing ones. The first new one adds Luna Snow and Adam Warlock, unlocking powerful synergistic healing. Here’s what changed: Duality Dance: Luna Snow, Adam Warlock (NEW) Vibrant Vitality: Mantis, Groot, Loki (NEW) Ever-Burning Bond: Human Torch, Spider-Man (Balance Changes) Atlas Bond: Luna Snow, Iron Fist (Removed) Guardian Revival: Adam Warlock, Star Lord, Mantis (Removed) Chilling Assault: Luna Snow, Hawkeye, Iron Fist (Iron Fist added) Lunar Force: Cloak & Dagger, Moon Knight, Blade (Blade added) Ragnarok Rebirth: Hela, Loki, Thor (Loki adjusted) Rocket Network: Peni Parker, Rocket Raccoon, Star Lord (Star Lord added) Marvel Rivals latest Hero balancing changes Welcome to Season 3.5 | Dev Vision Vol. 08 | Marvel Rivals – YouTube Watch On In the Developer Vision video you can view above, some general balance updates applied to Marvel Rivals alongside the latest seasonal update are explained in full. We’ve collected the key points in the list below: Sign up for breaking news, reviews, opinion, top tech deals, and more. Hero balancing (buffs): Star Lord, Iron Fist, Spider-Man, Dr Strange, Groot, Thor, Adam Warlock, Hero Balancing (nerfs): Black Panther, Wolverine, Magneto, Mantis, Cloak & Dagger New Hero schedule: One per month from Season 3 onwards New mode: Resource Rumble Maps: Throne of Knull Competitive Mode: New ranked rewards, increased penalties for quitting, point compensation Misc: Voice-Chat monitoring, text chat filtering, shader compilation changes Marvel Rivals Blade Blade: The One and Only | Character Reveal | Marvel Rivals – YouTube Watch On Blade is the main Hero being added for Marvel Rivals Season 3.5. He’s a Duelist that wields a shotgun and a sword. He can use the sword to block incoming damage, and has an arcing leap ability to close the distance. His Ultimate ability deals massive damage over a large area with the sword. Marvel Rivals next season FAQ Who was the last Hero to be added to Marvel Rivals? Phoenix was the last Hero to be added to Marvel Rivals. She’s a ranged Duelist that deals great burst damage with flaming attacks. She has a dash to escape diving enemies, and her Ultimate is great for clearing the battlefield of support items like spider-mines, Loki clones, and Rocket revive hubs. Who are the next characters coming to Marvel Rivals? The next Hero that’ll be added to Marvel Rivals is Blade. Beyond that we don’t know who’s set to arrive in Season 4, though we only have a month to wait now. What season is Marvel Rivals in? Marvel Rivals is currently in Season 3. This started on July 11, and should run through to August 8. We’ll then be in Season 3.5. You Might Also Like… Will Marvel Rivals be on Nintendo Switch 2? Best free games to play in 2025 When to expect the next season of Fortnite Jake is a freelance writer who currently works regularly with TRG. Hailing from the overcast shores of Brighton in the United Kingdom, Jake can be found covering everything from features to guides content around the latest game releases. As seen on NME.com, Eurogamer.net, and VG247.com, Jake specializes in breaking games down into approachable pieces for guides, and providing SEO advice to websites looking to expand their audiences. Read More

(Image credit: 2K) Despite having been announced over five years ago, we barely know anything about BioShock 4, and have next to nothing that’s been officially confirmed. This is a shame given it’s one of the most interesting and highly acclaimed gaming series of all time – and it’s been more than a decade since the last game was released. We do know that 2K Games are publishing it and it’s being developed by a studio called Cloud Chamber. Apart from that, we’re clutching at straws in terms of where the game might be set, how it might play, what platforms it is going to release on, and so on. It would be easy to say that we ‘expect’ to hear something soon, but given the nearly five-year gap since the announcement and now, and the fact that it really is one of the most highly-anticipated upcoming games that’s known to be in development, we really do hope that we get something concrete soon. However, while we wait for more info on BioShock 4, here’s everything that’s been revealed about the game so far, including some rumors about its development so far. Once new details come to light, this page will be updated. BioShock 4: cut to the chase What is it? The fourth entry in 2K Games’ retrofuturistic game series When can I play it? TBC What can I play it on? TBC (PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC are likely) Who is making it? Cloud Chamber Studios (a 2K Games studio) BioShock 4 – what we know so far (Image credit: 2K) While we’re certainly excited for the next BioShock game, we don’t actually know when we’ll get our hands on it. In a tweet officially announcing a new BioShock game back in 2019, publisher 2K Games stated that work had begun on the next iteration of the BioShock franchise. Here, it confirmed that the game would be in development “for the next several years”. That may not have been the most welcome news, but it did give us an idea about what platforms BioShock 4 would eventually release on. Now that we’re deep into the generation of the PS5 and Xbox Series X|S – and, by extension, further away from the Xbox One and PS4, we would strongly predict that, given the ongoing wait for the game as well, BioShock 4 will be a current-gen exclusive and not cross-generational. As spotted by GamesRadar (July 4, 2024), the studio’s senior cinematic designer Jeff Spoonhower shared a bunch of open roles on LinkedIn, while also teasing what’s to come. Sign up for breaking news, reviews, opinion, top tech deals, and more. “The BioShock team at 2K Cloud Chamber is ramping up!” the post reads. “We have many positions open across a variety of disciplines including art, animation, engineering, design, narrative, and production.” In a report published by Bloomberg (August 2, 2025), it’s revealed that BioShock 4 allegedly failed an internal review by publisher 2K recently. As a result, the creative director Kelley Gilmore has been moved off of the project, and there’s a change in the top layers of leadership involved with making BioShock 4. This is unfortunately the latest update with have on BioShock 4, so it would appear that the game is still a while off from being released. BioShock 4 gameplay predictions (Image credit: 2K Games) Now, when looking at or thinking about BioShock 4 gameplay and setting details we are diving head first into a lot of speculation and clutching at straws. However, there have been some clues that we could investigate (read: ‘cling to’) to try and inform ourselves a little on both factors. First, to potential BioShock 4 gameplay. The original official 2K press release from 2019 (no longer live or available) did seem to indicate that it would be first-person again. 2K President David Ismailer said alongside that ”We can’t wait to see where its [BioShock’s] powerful narrative and iconic, first-person shooter gameplay head in the future with our new studio team at Cloud Chamber leading the charge.” This rather implies that the first-person nature is likely to continue. BioShock 4 setting prediction (Image credit: 2K Games) The settings of BioShock games are always incredibly important aspects. Ever since players first locked eyes on the underground city of Rapture, BioShock games’ settings have mesmerized, while also became a core part of each game’s story and narrative. In terms of possible BioShock 4 setting details, there was a lot of rumor floating around at the end of 2021 stating that the fourth game would take us back to a familiar time period. The crux of the rumors was that BioShock 4 would be set in the 1960s and in an Antarctic city called ‘Borealis’ – and that its story would connect the previous games in the series. While these claims did align with several publications’ own sources at the time, there has been no official confirmation or word on them. Going back a bit further in 2021, there was a strong belief that BioShock 4 would be going open-world due to details stated in some job ads at the time that all pointed toward the design of a bust, crowd-filled, expansive open-world setting. Again, there was and has been no official comment on that. BioShock 4 developer (Image credit: 2K Games) As we know, the studio making BioShock 4 is Cloud Chamber – but who exactly is leading development and has their hands on the tiller? Well, we know a few people involved – and we’ve addressed the Ken Levin-shaped question below too. Leading the studio is Kelley Gilmore, a veteran developer, formerly of Firaxis Games. However, with other folks involved who have experience with the BioShock series working on the game too, there is genuine “BioShock DNA” within the development team as Gilmore confirmed in an interview with our sister site GamesRadar+. When was BioShock 4 announced? Today, 2K announced the founding of Cloud Chamber, its newest development studio. This team