A decade after the global craze for Pokémon Go peaked, an AI company has been using billions of real-world images captured by millions of players to develop navigation technologies for delivery robots and possibly military drones. That represents an intriguing but potentially discomfiting legacy for an augmented reality mobile game that has incentivized gamers to capture short smartphone videos of physical neighborhoods and landmarks.

The AI company, Niantic Spatial, was spun out of Pokémon Go game developer Niantic in May 2025, after Niantic separately sold its licensed games such as Pokémon Go to the Saudi-backed video game publisher Scopely. But before that deal, Niantic publicly announced plans to use scans from millions of Pokémon Go players along with data captured by users of the company’s Scaniverse app to train and develop a “large geospatial model”—a 3D model of the physical world trained on the geolocated images provided by app users scanning real-world locations.

“Ground scans were one component to help train Niantic Spatial's real-world foundation models —AI systems that learn to recognize and interpret physical spaces,” a Niantic Spatial spokesperson told Ars. “The models are the product of that training, not a copy of or a means of accessing the underlying scans, which were of public points of interest such as statues and fountains.”

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Just 100 days ago, when new Microsoft Gaming CEO Asha Sharma replaced long-serving executive Phil Spencer, she said she'd work to "understand what makes [Xbox] work and protect it." Now, Sharma and Xbox Studios chief Matt Booty have laid out the many things that are not working for the Xbox brand in a brutal self-assessment the they say necessitates a wholesale "Xbox reset."

The message sent to Xbox employees and shared publicly via Xbox Wire last night paints a grim picture for practically every facet of the Xbox division. That portion of Microsoft is currently only seeing a "3 percent accountability margin" (read: profit margin), down year over year and well below both the game industry average and the lofty 30 percent margins that Microsoft is reportedly seeking across the board.

It's an underperformance, they write, born out of being "overextended" by moves like the $69 billion acquisition of Activision. That mega-merger came on top of $20 billion in spending on other acquisitions, platform investments, and hardware subsidies over the last five years, the executives write. But despite the spending spree, Microsoft's overall gaming revenues are down nearly $500 million compared to five years ago.

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For years, Valve's physical Steam gift cards have been the closest you could come to buying a Steam game at a brick-and-mortar store. Now, Valve says it is phasing out the production of new retail gift cards, citing a losing battle against scammers exploiting the hard-to-track payment method.

PC Guide was among the first to note the end of Valve's retail gift card program, which was quietly announced in a recent update to a Steam support page. Since launching the retail cards in 2012, Valve says it has been fighting a constant battle with scammers, who instruct victims to purchase gift cards and share the pertinent details and security PIN. Those scammers can then resell the gift card details at a discount on gray-market sites to effectively launder the funds, creating an anonymous and hard-to-trace form of payment.

Valve says it has made various moves to slow scammers, including placing limits on redemption and availability and adding a prominent warning on the cards themselves: "Never share a pin via email, social media or over the phone."

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At some point during the fog of 2021 or 2022, I noticed that my son's preferred brand of fruit snacks had switched from including 0.9 ounces per pouch to 0.8 ounces per pouch. Most shrinkflation is meant to fly under the radar, but in this case, I just happened to notice it. It felt bad! It's tangible evidence that your money is not going as far as it did in the very recent past.

A little over a year ago, AMD launched the Radeon RX 9070 for a suggested retail price of $549. This month, it's launching the similarly named Radeon RX 9070 GRE for a suggested retail price of $549. This new card (actually the US launch of a GPU that's been available in China for a year or so) has 85 percent as many GPU cores, 75 percent as much memory, and 66 percent as much memory bandwidth as the regular RX 9070.

We'll evaluate the RX 9070 GRE in the context of the current GPU market, where prices have been edging upward due to the same AI-driven RAM shortages and price hikes that have made PC building and buying such a miserable experience for the last few months. But it's hard not to be a little upset about such a clear example of GPU shrinkflation—the same money for a markedly inferior product.

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