Squarespace is taking on Patreon, YouTube and the safe-for-work segment of OnlyFans with the launch of its new video offering. The web host is enabling its users to upload video directly to their Squarespace site and sell access on a one-off or recurring subscription basis. These clips will be hosted natively on the platform itself although users can route in videos from YouTube and Vimeo where necessary. The company added that it has built a new native video player with “slick playback” and “deep integration into the Squarespace platform.”

This is very much an extension of the work Squarespace took to enable its users to earn subscription revenue back in 2020. Much as it did back then, the company said that its new paywall and membership features are targeted toward chefs, instructors, wellness providers and educators. While the company has conceded that it will not be proactively moderating content uploaded on its platform, it does say that the material has to abide by its terms of service, which currently prohibit violent conduct and hate speech.

Creators will get the opportunity to upload 30 minutes of video content for free, with users needing to sign up for a Member Areas plan to get more. On the low end, the basic plan offers five hours of video space, while the Pro tier offers 50, with the promise of lower transaction fees as you grow.

This is part of a broader push that many sites are making into taking a slice of the aforementioned platforms’ pie. Just yesterday, Substack announced that it was expanding into video as a way of keeping creators within the same ecosystem.

Source: Engadget – Squarespace is getting into video subscriptions

Uncharted has been a tentpole franchise for Sony ever since the first game arrived back in 2007, so it’s not surprising that the games have been remastered for newer consoles over the years. Developer Naughty Dog first brought the original PS3 trilogy to the PS4 in 2015 as The Nathan Drake Collection, improving visual fidelity and frame rates. Now, the company is pulling the same trick with the two PS4 games in the series: Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End and Uncharted: The Lost Legacy.

Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection arrives for the PS5 this Friday, almost five years after Naughty Dog last released a new game in the series. The $50 collection features a number of technical and visual enhancements, but the games themselves are identical to the PS4 versions. I’ve spent the last week or so playing both games in the Legacy of Thieves Collection to see how they hold up and determine who this package is for.

There are three visual modes here, all of which improve over the original PS4 game. A “fidelity” setting keeps the frame rate at 30 fps but renders the games in full 4K resolution. Performance mode, on the other hand, runs the games at 60 fps while making no promises about the exact resolution. Finally, there’s a “Performance+” mode for people with 120Hz TVs — the games run at 120 fps with a locked 1080p resolution.

I don’t have a 120Hz TV, so I can’t say how that mode looked, but both the Fidelity and Performance modes looked simply spectacular. Uncharted 4 was beautiful enough when I played it in 1080p back in 2016; the cold snowy vistas of Scotland and the wild landscapes of Madagascar look even better in 4K with HDR. The improved resolution is also appreciated in the dark, shadowy opening of The Lost Legacy, as well.

Despite how great things looked on Fidelity mode, I spent almost all my time playing the game on Performance, as the improved frame rates simply offer a better gaming experience. I don’t have the most discerning eye, it seems, because I couldn’t notice the resolution difference between Fidelity and Performance, so sticking with the 60 fps mode was a no-brainer. Of course, your mileage and TV will vary. If I was playing on a TV larger than my humble 43-inch model, or through a projection system, I might have found Fidelity mode more valuable.

There are a number of other improvements that make these games feel native to the PS5, as well. First off, the games support the adaptive triggers on the PS5 controller, which adds resistance and a different feel when you’re firing your weapons (something you do frequently in both games). Combined with the improved haptics in the PS5 controller, the two games in Legacy of Thieves feel more immersive than they did on the PS4.

Load times are also blissfully short, thanks to the PS5’s SSD and more powerful hardware. If the game wasn’t already running, it still took less than a minute to load my progress and get back into the adventure. I never really thought about the load times when playing on the PS4, but I went back and confirmed the unsurprising fact that the PS5 is much faster.

As for the games themselves, both A Thief’s End and The Lost Legacy hold up well. They look gorgeous, the stories are engaging and more intricate than the earlier games, and the gameplay is more varied than the original trilogy as well. On the other hand, it remains extremely difficult to reconcile the lighthearted tone of Nathan Drake, the protagonist in A Thief’s End, with the massive body count he racks up throughout the game.

The stakes are high, but Drake is a charming and charismatic adventurer — despite the fact that he’s put in a tough situation, needing to pull off a huge heist to save his brother’s skin, he’s not a deadly serious lead hero. But he is deadly, killing dozens throughout his quest. It’s easy enough to just go where the game takes you and not overthink it, but it’s worth mentioning that six years on, the two sides of Drake still don’t sit particularly well next to each other.

The Lost Legacy puts you in control of another antihero, treasure hunter Chloe Frazer who appeared in Uncharted 2 and 3. It’s the first Uncharted game where Nathan Drake isn’t the main character, and it overall has a bit of a darker tone — Frazer and her companion Nadine Ross are just as lethal as Drake, but it fits their personalities and the story a bit better. While we’re discussing The Lost Legacy, it’s worth pointing out that the game originally sold for $40 and wasn’t intended to have the same scope as Uncharted 4; as such, it’s much shorter (a standard playthrough takes about seven or eight hours).

Putting aside any misgivings about the ludonarrative dissonance in these games (something that’s come up a lot with Naughty Dog’s games), they are fun, beautiful, sprawling adventures. If you haven’t played any Uncharted games before, you could pick up the Legacy of Thieves Collection and get a lot of gaming value for your $50. Sure, you won’t know Drake’s entire backstory, but A Thief’s End fills in the blanks well enough even if you don’t know every detail of his past adventures.

I’m a completionist, so I have slight misgivings about telling someone to jump right into it with the fourth game in a four-part series. I might recommend spending $20 on Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection, which is a remaster of the three PS3 games in the series — but Uncharted 4 holds up well enough on its own. As for The Lost Legacy, its protagonists are taking center stage for the first time, so their roles in past games aren’t terribly crucial to the story at hand.

If you enjoyed the original Uncharted trilogy, but somehow missed these games on the PS4, the Legacy of Thieves Collection is a no-brainer. If you’ve played them before, though, it’s a little less clear-cut. Improved frame rates and visual quality are solid updates to bring the games into the PS5 era, but they don’t fundamentally change the experience. That said, Sony is offering the Legacy of Thieves Collection for only $10 if you previously purchased A Thief’s End or The Lost Legacy. For the many people who love the series, that’s $10 well-spent, as these games hold up well — and look and play better than ever on the PS5.

Source: Engadget – The ‘Legacy of Thieves Collection’ is a no-brainer for Uncharted fans

If you’re a streamer, you can’t always reach for your keyboard (or a control deck) to activate a scene or effect. Thankfully, you might not have to. Elgato has released a Stream Deck Pedal that provides three customizable foot pedals to steer your apps and other broadcasting tools hands-free. You can manage Twitch or YouTube, change cameras, start an OBS transition or otherwise control your stream in a stealthy manner.

You can set app-specific profiles if you’re routinely juggling multiple tools, and plugins control everything from Hue lights to Spotify and Twitter. There’s adjustable pedal pressure, too, if you prefer a delicate tap or a firm stomp. And Elgato is keen to point out the use for offline creative work thanks to definable hotkey actions for software like audiovisual editing suites.

Accordingly, Elgato has introduced a Discord plugin for Stream Deck devices. You can use any of the Corsair brand’s peripherals to change channels (including to voice), use push-to-talk, mute your mic or otherwise navigate a server.

The Stream Deck Pedal sells for $115. That’s potentially a steep price if you’re a new or part-time streamer, but it could be justifiable if you’re either building a full-time career or just want to add some polish that brings in extra viewers. This could also be particularly helpful if you’re a musician, VR gamer or other specialty streamer — you don’t have reach for your PC (and interrupt your flow) just to perform a simple task.

Source: Engadget – Elgato’s new pedal gives streamers hands-free control over their apps

The idea of a $250 graphics card seems like a pipe dream today, when unprecedented demand, scalpers and the global chip shortage have driven GPU prices into the stratosphere. Still, that’s not stopping NVIDIA from trying with the new RTX 3050. It’s the company’s cheapest GPU yet with ray tracing, and it’s meant to take on AMD’s even cheaper Radeon RX 6500 XT, which has a suggested retail price of $200. While it’s unclear if the 3050 will actually sell for $250 once it hits stores, it’ll at least come in less than the RTX 3060, which launched at $329 but now goes for around $1,000 (not a typo) at Newegg and other retailers.

Like NVIDIA’s wildly popular GTX 1050 and its other 50-class GPUs, the 3050 is meant to be an affordable way to reach 1080p/60fps while playing modern games. With newer titles like Control demanding more power from our systems, it makes sense for NVIDIA to finally deliver a budget 30-series entry. The 3050 features 2,560 CUDA cores, a boost speed of 1,777 MHz and 8GB of GDDR6 RAM, putting it well below the 3060’s 3,584 CUDA cores and 8GB of RAM (not to mention its vastly faster memory interface). Still, as a 30-series GPU, it also has ray tracing and tensor cores, allowing it to tap into more realistic lighting, as well as the company’s DLSS technology to boost performance.

NVIDIA is positioning the new card as a major update to the GTX 1650, which had just 896 CUDA cores and no ray tracing or tensor capabilities. (There was no RTX 2050 desktop GPU, though the company surprised us all when it announced a laptop version at CES this year.) The RTX 3050 is also more compelling on paper than the Radeon 6500 XT, which only has 4GB of memory, a much slower memory bus, and only taps into 4 PCIe lanes instead of the typical 16. AMD clearly cut as much as it could to create an inexpensive GPU for entry-level gamers, but that also makes it less future-proof than the slightly more expensive RTX 3050.

During my testing, the EVGA RTX 3050 XC Black GPU (NVIDIA isn’t making any Founder’s Editions this time) was able tackle every game I threw at it in 1080p, even when I cranked up the graphics settings all the way up. It averaged 140fps in Hitman 3’s Dubai benchmark, making it well-suited for 144Hz refresh rate monitors. Bumping the resolution up to 1,440p halved performance to 74fps, which was a significant dip from the 3060’s 110fps average. That higher resolution is definitely playable, but it’s clear the 3050 is best-suited to 1080p gaming, especially if you’re trying to get enough performance to justify a high-refresh rate monitor.

All benchmarks tested on a system powered by a Ryzen 7 5800X, 32GB of RAM and Samsung 970 EVO Plus SSD.

In Destiny 2, the 3050 hit a 90fps average in 1080p and 65fps in 1,440p with the highest graphics settings. Those are decent scores if you want all of the best visual flourishes, but I’d wager many gamers would step some of those settings down for better framerates. I was most impressed with how the GPU handled Control, which is still one of the more demanding games around. It reached 65fps on average in 1080p with maxed out graphics (but no ray tracing). When I flipped on DLSS, which rendered the game at 720p and used AI to upscale it to 1080p, the framerate jumped to a silkier 90fps. And surprisingly enough, it was perfectly playable at 70fps when I turned on medium ray tracing settings along with DLSS. Not bad for a (supposedly) $250 video card!

As for typical benchmarks, like 3DMark’s suite, it’s best you don’t look at those. The 3050 is clearly much slower than the rest of NVIDIA’s lineup, so you’re better off ignoring what you’re missing. What’s important is that it’s an affordable card that can play demanding games well in 1080p, and in some cases it’ll even get you to 1440p. And thanks to its relatively tame performance, it also doesn’t generate much heat or noise. It stayed at a surprisingly cool 60 Celsius under load.

I didn’t have an RTX 6500 XT to compare it to, but judging from the reviews and its specs, you’ll have a hard time reaching any Ultra-level 1080p gaming with that GPU. AMD purposefully hampered its memory to make it less appealing to cryptominers. That plan may have actually succeeded, as its price is now hovering between $250 and $300 on Newegg.

It’ll be interesting to see just how far the RTX 3050’s price jumps after its release. But based on what we know so far, it’s an absolute steal if you can nab it for $250, and for many gamers it’ll be worth paying several hundred more. At the moment, it’s the only way to get an NVIDIA 3000-series card without paying over $1,000.

Source: Engadget – NVIDIA RTX 3050 review: A great 0 GPU (in theory)