This digest compiles the latest from The Verge.
Today’s The Verge Roundup
Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month
9 Feb 2026, 2:01 pm by Stevie Bonifield
Discord announced on Monday that it’s rolling out age verification on its platform globally starting next month, when it will automatically set all users’ accounts to a “teen-appropriate” experience unless they demonstrate that they’re adults.
Users who aren’t verified as adults will not be able to access age-restricted servers and channels, won’t be able to speak in Discord’s livestream-like “stage” channels, and will see content filters for any content Discord detects as graphic or sensitive. They will also get warning prompts for friend requests from potentially unfamiliar users, and DMs from unfamiliar users will be automatically filte …
PlayStation’s next big games showcase is on February 12th
9 Feb 2026, 1:50 pm by Andrew Webster
Nintendo and Xbox each had their turn, and now PlayStation is up. Sony just announced its next big State of Play showcase, which will stream on February 12th at 5PM ET. There aren’t many details on what to expect, but Sony says that the event will be more than an hour long and include “eye-catching third-party and indie games headed to PS5, along with the latest from teams at PlayStation Studios.”
That said, we can make some guesses for games that are likely to appear. Saros, the sci-fi shooter from Returnal developer Housemarque, is out in April, while Marvel games like Wolverine from Insomniac and Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls from Arc Sys …
Animal Crossing started life as a dungeon crawler
9 Feb 2026, 1:30 pm by Keza MacDonald
Despite the convoluted journey between concept and finished product, despite all the many things that change between initial prototype and whatever ends up in players’ hands, something always remains of the initial feeling that inspired a video game. If you know what to listen for, it’s easy to hear the echo of that original idea. Pokémon was born from a fascination with creatures, Zelda from nostalgia for the freedoms of childhood. Animal Crossing, meanwhile, was born from loneliness.
Katsuya Eguchi left his home prefecture of Chiba, east of Tokyo, to join Nintendo in 1986. He found it hard to adjust to living in Kyoto. “When I moved . . . …
HBO Max is finally launching in the UK next month
9 Feb 2026, 12:33 pm by Dominic Preston
Warner Bros. Discovery has announced that streaming service HBO Max will make its long-awaited debut in the UK and Ireland on March 26th, having previously promised that a launch would happen in early 2026. Until now, most HBO content has been exclusively available in the UK through Sky or the streaming service Now TV.
In the UK, the cheapest tier, Basic with Ads, will cost £4.99 per month, with Standard with Ads for £5.99. The standard plan without ads will cost £9.99, and the Premium plan will be £14.99. There’ll be changes for TNT Sports customers too, who from March 26 will access their sports content through HBO Max, rather than throug …
Live Nation’s monopoly trial is reportedly fracturing Trump’s Justice Department
9 Feb 2026, 12:22 pm by Jess Weatherbed
Live Nation executives have reportedly sidestepped the Justice Department’s antitrust division to negotiate directly with more sympathetic senior officials in the hopes of avoiding a monopoly trial. Citing “people familiar with the matter,” Semafor reports that some talks have excluded antitrust chief Gail Slater, who has pushed for a trial to take place in March after inheriting the case from the Biden administration.
The lawsuit filed by the DOJ and 30 state and district attorneys general in May 2024 seeks to “break up Live Nation-Ticketmaster,” alleging that Live Nation’s dominance provides unfair commercial advantages that enable it to …
This whistle fights fascists
9 Feb 2026, 11:00 am by Sean Hollister
Kit Rocha and Courtney Milan have a knack for drawing attention to a cause. The bestselling romance novelists helped raise half a million dollars for Georgia voting rights in 2020. Now, their cause is whistles, because whistles let neighbors alert each other when they see ICE agents abducting people. They’ve helped create a group that’s shipped a half million free 3D-printed whistles to 49 US states – 200,000 of them in the first week of February alone.
Even I print whistles now. It’s the first thing I do each morning after dropping kids at school, and the very last before bed. Usually, I squeeze in a hundred more after dinner.
I print wh …
OpenAI’s supposedly ‘leaked’ Super Bowl ad with ear buds and a shiny orb was a hoax
9 Feb 2026, 4:54 am by Richard Lawler
As if OpenAI didn’t have enough drama around the Super Bowl and advertising, as the game wound down, word spread of a “leaked” ad that actually wasn’t leaked at all; it was just a fake. Screenshots of a now-deleted Reddit thread told the tale of a frustrated employee who, while posting about how upset they were because the ad they’d worked on didn’t run, accidentally leaked the entire advertisement video, seemingly showing Murderbot star Alexander Skarsgård with what could have been OpenAI’s first hardware device, portrayed as a shiny orb that went with some wraparound earbuds.
OpenAI president Greg Brockman commented on X with a tweet cal …
End of today’s The Verge roundup.
