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I have a couple of very vague memories of playing Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League back when it released a couple of years ago. Mostly, I remember thinking 'meh'. Some of the action was quite fun—although it quickly lost its charm—I didn't mesh with any of the characters and their hit-and-miss humour, but its worst feature was undoubtedly that it was just so desperate to be played.

That may seem like a attribute to pick out, but from the get go it was painfully obvious that the Suicide Squad game had been concocted by a bunch of suits with the sole intention of being replayable and earning stacks of cash. Something that, to no one's surprise, was later confirmed by the devs at Rocksteady after the dust settled on its release, as it was revealed that the botched game cost Warner Bros. $200 million .

(Image credit: Rocksteady Studios) Axel Rydby and Johnny Armstrong, two devs who worked on Suicide Squad retold this same story again in a recent interview with Bloomberg , and boy does that development sound like hell.

"There was definitely a sense when we first moved on to it—arrogance is the wrong word, but a confidence," Armstrong says. "We’re coming back off hit after hit. Of course we’ll be able to do this." But then came the slew of delays, which racked up the cost and the pressure for the game to make its money back.

"That’s when I started feeling like I wasn’t making games anymore," Rydby explains. "I was following a spreadsheet, some elusive marketing-analysis spreadsheet that no one could present clearly. I kind of felt like this isn’t the gaming industry I wanted to work in."

(Image credit: Rocksteady) "It was a big culture shift," Armstrong adds. "We put all these hours in, but it didn’t feel like it was tangibly getting better. Everyone felt like they were having to run to stand still."

To add to the stress the devs were given ridiculous deadlines: "Six months isn’t enough to do any fundamental changes," Rydby says. "That’s just enough to just fix as many bugs as you can and see if you can squeeze in a bit of feature tweaks here and there." But in this time they were expected to fix everything and find the answers to questions like "How many players can we reach with the feature?" and "How can we twist this design into something that can be more replayable?" asked by executives.

(Image credit: Rocksteady) It was all too much, and the unrealistic expectations and pressures of creating an infinite money machine disguised as a live service game was too much. "I felt everything drained from me," Armstrong says. "I said, 'I can’t do this again. I don’t know if I’m done with the industry, but I’m done.' I could feel myself coming apart at the seams."

Armstrong and Rydby ended up leaving Rocksteady and teaming up together to make Secret of Circadia, an RPG deckbuilding game, that has just had its Kickstarter release in hopes of raising $11,404 to help develop the game.

"I think as an industry we are severely losing our way," Rydby adds. "It used to be passion projects that you loved and hoped other people loved too. When they did, it was such an amazing feeling. It became less and less of that. It became: 'Let’s hope it sells. Let’s hope we get money from it.'"

The worst part of all this? I don't think the suits learnt their lesson. It feels like we've been saying this for a while, but games should be made out of love and passion, not because shareholders finally figured out they can make a quick buck from them. The powers that be should just learn to give talented developers the resources and space they need to make cool shit. Swen Vincke once said , the formula for making good games is stupidly simple: "A studio makes a game because they want to make a game they want to play themselves."

2026 games : All the upcoming games

Best PC games : Our all-time favorites

Free PC games : Freebie fest

Best FPS games : Finest gunplay

Best RPGs : Grand adventures

Best co-op games : Better together

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Companies going all-in on AI are also seeing positive impacts on headcount

Entry-level roles saw higher-than-average growth, opposing existing research

Workforce gains aren't immediate – AI needs time to find its place within organizations

A new report has challenged the narrative that AI adoption has been leading to job losses, instead revealing that the companies making the biggest investments in AI are actually growing their workforces.

The study combines corporate AI spending data from Ramp's payment platform and workforce records from Revelio Labs to analyze more than 21,500 US companies, making it one of the biggest of its kind.

It concludes that high-intensity AI adopters increased their headcount by around 10% during the first two years after deploying AI, making AI good news for workers and labor after all.

AI adoption is causing companies to hire more workers

Clearly, only strong AI adoption has a positive impact on workers, because companies making modest investments didn't see any significant growth.

The study also stresses that the impacts are slow-growing – rather than seeing an immediate uptick in employment, it takes time for companies to integrate AI, discover productive use cases and hire more workers.

High adopters are defined as those who invested around $33 per employee per month during the first three months after adoption, compared with around $3 for low adopters.

It also challenges other recent research, asserting that entry-level employment actually rose by a higher-than-average 12% among high-intensity AI adopters. Other reports have implied that entry-level workers have been among the hardest hit.

Even though tech giants dominate the headlines, with Salesforce cutting nearly half of its support staff and Amazon notably cutting tens of thousands of workers, the Ramp/Revelio Labs report actually shows growth across more than just AI engineer roles, spanning sales, marketing, admin, finance, customer service and more.

While the research can't be used to predict long-term labor impacts, it does at least serve as a notice that workers aren't currently at risk of total redundancy, even amid job role shifts.

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Forget BBQs, I'm all about outdoor pizzas this year. If you want to hop on the homemade pizza bandwagon (welcome, there's plenty of space!), then now's a good time to get yourself set up with a pizza oven. Making your own pizzas is fun and satisfying, and the results are so much more delicious than oven pizzas or takeaway. If you're short on time or not especially gifted in the kitchen, it's pretty easy to find premade dough base balls that you can just roll out and add toppings to (this is my preferred method).

When picking a pizza oven, your main decision will be the type of fuel you want it to run on. Most modern pizza ovens — including the one I have at home — run on gas , which is speedy, convenient, and easy to control by just adjusting a dial. Another option is to opt for wood , which gives that delicious smokey smell and taste (although your pizzas won't be cooking for very long, so the impact won't be massive), but requires more effort to control the temperature.

There are a few ' multi-fuel ' pizza ovens that can be used with either wood or gas. Alternatively, you could opt for an electric pizza oven. These are ultra-convenient, easy to control and versatile too. However, they tend not to get as hot as the other options, and you lose that authentic experience and charred flavor.

Below, I've rounded up some of our favorite pizza ovens. If you want to see how these options compare, hop to the bottom of the page for a specs comparison table .

Gas pizza ovens

I tend to think of gas pizza ovens as a 'happy medium' option. They can reach scorching temperatures, so you'll get those authentic charred edges, but are reliable to use and it's easy to adjust the heat up or down.

You won't get the 'smokey' wood-fired flavor — however, given your pizza's only going to be in there for a couple of minutes max, the difference isn't going to be nearly as noticeable as, for instance, using a gas versus charcoal BBQ.

Ooni

Koda 16 Gas Pizza Oven

Ooni

Koda 12 Gas Pizza Oven

ZANUSSI

ZGPO1PC Gas Powered Pizza Oven

Gozney

Arc XL

Read our full review

Pros

Larger pizzas

More stable temperatures

Digital thermometer

Cons

Not portable

No door for fast heat up

No wood-fire option

Jamie Oliver by Tefal

Outdoor Gas Pizza Oven, Rotating Stone

Wood fired pizza ovens

Wood fired pizza ovens run on pellets. Like gas options, they can get super-hot, but controlling the temperatures is trickier — it requires adjusting the vents and adding fuel. You'll also need to deal with the ash leftover afterwards. However, you will get the delicious smokey smell, and a more traditional cooking experience.

GEORGE FOREMAN

Outdoor 12-inch Wood Pellet Pizza Oven

George Foreman

Outdoor 16-inch Wood Pellet Pizza Oven

Zanussi

ZPO1BPC Outdoor 12-inch Wood Pellet Portable Pizza Oven

Electric pizza ovens

An electric pizza oven won't give you that unique cooking experience; instead, it'll be a lot more like using an air fryer or regular oven. They also tend not to have a lower maximum temperature, so it's trickier to achieve those crispy bases and charred edges. However, what you lose in authenticity you gain in convenience — you can control temperatures precisely, and the results are very predictable.

Ninja

Artisan Electric Outdoor Pizza Oven & Air Fryer MO201UK

Ooni

Volt 2 Electric Pizza Oven

Ninja

Woodfire 8-In-1 Electric Outdoor Oven, Pizza Oven & Smoker

Multi-fuel pizza ovens

Ooni

Karu 2 Multi Fuel Portable Outdoor Pizza Oven

Gozney

Dome (gen 2) Multi Fuel Outdoor Pizza Oven

Pizza oven specs compared

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On a dark mountaintop in Chile, the world's largest digital camera has begun filming its masterpiece.

This Tuesday (June 30), scientists with the Vera C. Rubin Observatory announced that the facility's ambitious Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) officially began. Every night for the next 10 years, the observatory's car-size LSST Camera will capture a 3,200-megapixel image of the southern sky — then another, then another, slowly filling in a mosaic of the universe 30 seconds at a time.

"In a sense, we're taking a digital color motion picture of the universe," Tony Tyson , a professor of cosmology at the University of California Davis and LSST's chief scientist and former founding director of the Rubin Observatory, told Live Science.

Strafing across the sky in stop-motion, the survey is expected to spot between 7 million and 8 million changes among the stars each night — from flashing supernovas and streaking comets to colliding galaxies and dim, tumbling asteroids. Within minutes of each exposure, alerts to any peculiar changes will become publicly available for astronomers and space enthusiasts around the world to study.

"Rubin is an automated facility, so scientists don't come here to use it," Tyson said. "But tens of trillions of observations is enough data for everybody in the world."

Tyson is hoping the firehose of data will unmask theinvisible 95% of the universe that is composed of dark matter and dark energy.

While there are still some technical bugs to work out — and the looming threat of ultra-bright corporate satellites to contend with — Tyson and his colleagues are ready to roll out the survey, "gradually increasing our sky area and image quality" over the next few months, he added.

Live Science spoke with Tyson about the LSST and what it may find in the coming years.

Brandon Specktor: You're about to spend 10 years observing the southern sky with the largest digital camera ever. What will a typical night of the survey look like?

Tony Tyson: In a sense, we're making a digital color motion picture of the universe. We'll take thousands of 30-second exposures every night. Within two minutes of the shutter closing on an exposure, we will process all the data, [compare] it from the archival sky of that piece of the sky, and — if something explodes, or pops off, or moves in the sky in a way we don't understand — issue an alert. The alerts go to the world.

I made the decision early on to make the data available to everyone. The alerts will also go to eight data brokers, which specialize in things like cosmology, supernovae, etc., and the public can sign up to the feed from their favorite brokers.

BS: Which feed will you be watching most closely?

TT: My most interesting data broker is one which will come up with a classification of "unknown." I'm more interested in the unknown, unclassifiable things that go on in the universe. But there's a sort of a live stream of catalog information that's going to be available to people — and we're excited for writing up a lot of new discoveries.

My hope at this time is that we will discover something unexpected that will revolutionize astronomy. I think it's more than a hope, I think it's a guarantee.

Tony Tyson is an astronomer at the University of California, Davis, and the founding Director of NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory. (Image credit: NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory/NOIRLab/SLAC/AURA/G. Watry) BS: What kind of revolution would that be? Is there one big question you hope Rubin will answer?

TT: I'm a cosmologist, so my hope is that we'll get closer to understanding the physics of dark energy and dark matter.

But to be frank, I think we'll be remembered 100 years from now for something else in addition. And discovering something totally new in the time domain, something that blows our minds, that we did not expect — some kind of new object that's out there. There's examples of this in radio astronomy with the FRBs [fast radio bursts] , for example. And I think that that's going to be how we will be remembered.

My hope at this time is that we will discover something unexpected that will revolutionize astronomy.

Tony Tyson, LSST Chief Scientist

BS: The Rubin Observatory observes in optical light. Are there any strange optical phenomena you have your eye on?

TT: There's already a pretty strong hint, actually, that there is a population of very faint bursting objects that just pop off. The ones we know about are typically pretty bright — supernovae, which last for a long time, and gamma-ray bursts, which are bright but they don't last very long. But there's a big question mark in this unique area that we're going to explore, of faint things that are very short-lived. And there's evidence now from a team in Japan that there is a population of very faint things that explode just once. They don't repeat. And so I'm keeping my eye on that.

A small section of the Virgo Cluster revealed in Rubin's debut images. The first images, released in June 2025, capture more than 10 million galaxies. (Image credit: NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory) BS: What are the Rubin Observatory's main science goals?

TT: There's a lot of areas of science that we can address — and that was really the main selling point for us with the agencies. For one, we'll be looking at cosmology and the history of the expansion of the universe. Just by itself, we will have enough data to measure key parameters in cosmology to eliminate models of dark matter and dark energy, which is exciting.

Another area is looking at new kinds of stars in our galaxy, so we can look at the history of our galaxy and the history of star formation in our galaxy. At even lower redshift, an interesting area is looking at both comets and potentially Earth-threatening asteroids. Every night we detect about a thousand new asteroids.

And we will be able to uniquely look for those, if we can get rid of the interfering low-Earth-orbiting satellites, which really make that impossible. And so I've been unfortunately sidetracked into worrying a lot about that in the recent year.

BS: Are you talking about companies like Reflect Orbital, which essentially want to put giant mirrors in low Earth orbit? We've written about how satellites like that could totally compromise the LSST .

Yes. There's a proposed class of extremely ultra-bright satellites that are going to be launched that are incompatible with the LSST science, totally incompatible. The skies will no longer be dark for anybody, anywhere.

Reflect Orbital is one example. The other example is these orbiting AI [artificial intelligence] computational centers, which will be exceedingly bright. We've met with all these companies. They say that they feel our pain, but their board of directors or their investors say that they're going to go forward.

I've been working with SpaceX, though. They're really trying very hard to eliminate some of these effects, but nothing is perfect. It's going to be tough.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory sits on a mountaintop in Chile under famously dark skies. It's view of the universe will be unmatched, if bright corporate satellites don't ruin the view. (Image credit: Hernan Stockebrand) BS: So if these companies are moving forward, what are you going to do?

What I'm trying to do is work very closely with Congress and the American Astronomical Society and other bodies — the United Nations, the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] — to see what we can do.

I'm inherently an optimist. I think the Reflect Orbital is a failed business model, but they're going to try doing it anyway. So they'll put a lot of junk up there for a while.

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'Revolutionary': Vera C. Rubin Observatory found 800,000 objects of interest in a single night

BS: I truly wish you the best with that. But since you're an optimist, let's end on something positive. You've championed this observatory for more than 20 years — first as its founding director and now its chief scientist. How does it feel now that the LSST is finally operational?

It's quite gratifying, after all this time, to have something that actually works. It's a hugely complicated system, and nothing so complicated as that works perfectly all the time.

I was the original founding director, I am now the chief scientist, and it is my day job to worry about what's going wrong with this or that. And there's a laundry list of things that we're worried about. But it's working, and it's working quite well. And so that's quite gratifying.

Editor's Note: This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity