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We lost so much with a mostly virtual CES

The biggest losers at the massive tech industry trade show are the small companies you’ll never hear about.

This story is part of CES, where CNET covers the latest news on the most incredible tech coming soon.

Dave Morgan has been attending CES for 25 years and has seen all sorts of gizmos and gadgets along the way. If you squint at photos from past shows, you might find him gawking at the curved TVs. Or he might be in the background as someone’s controlling a computer through a headband sensing their thoughts.

But Wednesday, at the opening morning of 2022’s show, the longtime ad industry executive and investor saw something quite out of the ordinary while getting some early exercise. The sea of up to 180,000 attendees who typically flood into Las Vegas for one of the world’s largest trade shows was mostly gone.

«Early morning run on pretty empty Vegas strip,» he tweeted out, before adding he’s «actually looking forward to exploring the #ces floor without the crowds.»

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Morgan’s experience of a quieter CES in Vegas is one that many people missed out on. But it wasn’t just that. The sharply reduced crowds — estimated to be less than half of the 150,000 who attended CES two years ago — meant an even bigger obstacle for the small companies that for years have relied on buzz from the show to serendipitously turn them into breakout stars with surprise products that grab the industry’s attention.

«When you’re a smaller company, CES could be your biggest marketing spend,» said Moor Insights and Strategy analyst Patrick Moorhead, who attended this year’s CES in person. «It can be a make or break event for you.»

The CES challenge illustrates another way the COVID-19 pandemic continues to upend the way we work and live. Not only has the pandemic led to 9.5 million confirmed cases and 5.4 million people killed around the globe, it’s also left many people wondering what a post-COVID world will be like, much less how we’ll hold large-scale events like CES.

Read more: The 5 big CES 2022 takeaways everyone’s talking about

The pandemic’s uncertainty has hit everyone, whether they’re working in education, finance or real estate. In the tech world, it means that small companies for which CES could be the ultimate launching pad may struggle a bit more to take off.

In the past, companies like the VR headset startup Oculus offered demos at CES 2014, building buzz mere months before Facebook bought the company for more than $2 billion. There’s also Impossible Foods, the plant-based food company that landed an agreement with fast food giant Burger King after a CES meeting.

«It’s hard to do that in a digital setting,» said Jean Foster, head of marketing at the Consumer Tech Association, which puts on CES.

After last year’s experiment with an all-digital show, she said surveys of attendees and media alike agreed that holding the event in person would be better. And so this year, the CTA decided to press forward with an in-person event, with the caveat that attendees must have proof of COVID vaccination and international travelers must provide a negative COVID test taken within one day prior to taking their flight. The CTA even handed out free COVID testing kits when people arrived.

As health experts have repeatedly noted, none of us has ever lived through a pandemic of this scale. That means companies are learning how to function in this environment without a clear game plan, backed by decades of business school studies and success stories.

«It’s a different model set up for people,» Foster said.

Blending the virtual and real worlds

For more than a decade, CES attendees have debated the show’s relevance. Is it up or is it down? Is it as exciting as it once was or is it just an empty spectacle?

The pandemic gave us some answers. Over the past couple years, tech giants like Samsung, Sony and Facebook have largely figured out how to hold all-virtual events that attract their own buzz. Apple has announced two years worth of iPhones through these events. Microsoft, meanwhile, used online presentations to unveil both its Windows 11 software and its latest Xbox game console.

But CES organizers needed to recalibrate for the more than 2,300 companies coming together over one of the tech industry’s busiest weeks of the year.

One thing the CTA changed was how long presentations ran. The organization noticed that people viewers tended to drop off about 20 minutes into presentations that were given for the all-online CES of 2021. So, this year’s press conference slots were shortened to about a half hour each.

The CTA also reduced the number of live streams offered through its site so visitors wouldn’t feel overwhelmed. And to help attendees communicate with exhibitors and chat and set up meetings, the CTA also leaned more heavily on social features built into its website and app.

«The importance for us is, just be flexible,» Foster added.

Finding the future

Tim Bajarin thought he’d be attending CES this year. But then, around Thanksgiving, COVID-19’s omicron variant began its rapid spread around the world.

A month later, Bajarin and his doctor together decided that his preexisting health conditions presented too much of a risk, despite his being fully vaccinated. Other major companies including Google, Panasonic, Amazon and media organizations scaled back plans to attend the event in person around the same time, citing health concerns.

«One of the reasons I’d originally been planning to go was we were going to have face-to-face meetings with a lot of companies that we had not been able to meet with over the last two years,» said Bajarin, a longtime industry analyst now with Creative Strategies. This would have been his 47th winter CES show. «Literally, it’s about trying to discover what’s next.»

Though CES began a half century ago as a way for product makers to speak with buyers like TV and radio stores, it’s evolved into a broad consumer electronics showcase. It’s also been the place Bajarin has caught on to new trends, like when companies began coming up with concepts for noise-canceling earbuds a little less than a decade ago, when over-ear Bose headphones were the must-have at the time.

«Now you have noise canceling everywhere,» he noted.

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Morgan, who tweeted out the photo of the mostly empty Vegas strip, said he traveled to the show from New York because he values meeting people in person. After his morning run, he shared stories of technologies he saw over the years while running his own startups or working as an EVP at AOL.

Now the founder and head of TV ad tech company Simulmedia, he wants to see tech that could change his job up close, particularly the constantly evolving smart TV software. And with him and his family back home vaccinated and boosted, it’s worth the risks.

«I’ve been coming here for most of the last 20 years,» he said. «I love wandering into those areas with the tiny booths on one side with these different companies making stuff like connected forks and wondering how that’s going to work.»

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WWE 2K25 Jumps From the Top Rope Onto PlayStation Plus in September

Subscribers will also be able to play a turn-based strategy Persona game.

«The American Nightmare» Cody Rhodes, son of one of the greatest pro wrestlers of all time, «The American Dream» Dusty Rhodes, is the current undisputed WWE champion. And PlayStation Plus subscribers can bring Rhodes down a peg or help establish a new wrestling dynasty with the champion beginning on Sept. 16 in WWE 2K25.

PlayStation Plus is Sony’s version of Xbox Game Pass, and it offers subscribers a large and constantly expanding library of games. There are three PlayStation Plus tiers — Essential ($10 a month), Extra ($15 a month) and Premium ($18 a month) — and each gives subscribers access to games. However, only Extra and Premium tier subscribers can access the PlayStation Plus Game Catalog. 

Here are all the games PS Plus Extra and Premium subscribers can access starting on Sept. 16. You can also check out the games all PS Plus subscribers can play in September, including Psychonauts 2.


Don’t miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source.


WWE 2K25

Take control of your favorite superstar from the men’s and women’s divisions in this knockdown, dragout wrestling game. Become one of over 300 wrestlers from today and years past, like Rhea Ripley and Andre the Giant. This entry in the series also introduces intergender wrestling matches, barricade diving and new brawl environments where you can get over or turn heel.

Persona 5 Tactica

Join the Phantom Thieves in this real-time strategy game set in the Persona universe. You and the group wander into a bizarre realm where people are living under tyrannical oppression, and you cross paths with a revolutionary named Erina. Now you’re in cahoots with the rebels as you try to free an oppressed people and find your way back home.

Other games on PS Plus

Those are a few of the games Sony is bringing to PlayStation Plus, and subscribers can play these games as well starting on Sept. 16.

*Premium subscribers only.

For more on PlayStation Plus, here’s what to know about the service and a rundown of PS Plus Extra and Premium games added in August. You can also check out the latest and upcoming games on Xbox Game Pass and Apple Arcade.

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Little Nightmares 3 Hands-On: a Creepy Co-Op Game Arriving Just in Time for Halloween

The sequel adds cooperative play with all the haunting hallmarks of the earlier games.

After about an hour playing Little Nightmares 3, I’d used a person’s bisected halves to solve a puzzle, gotten a high score in a carnival shooting game and escaped the murderous claws of a deranged baby. As a 2-foot-tall youth trying to survive the morbid dangers of one demented area after another with my co-player, I was terrified and delighted.

I’ve only sampled the first two Little Nightmares games, but in my brief preview of Little Nightmares 3, it felt like a refined version of the series’ premise: small protagonists endangered by a large, grim world filled with traps to evade, puzzles to solve and horrid, lethal enemies to outwit. Take the scale of the animated horror movie 9, mix it with the darkest of stop-motion director Henry Selick’s maudlin settings and let players enjoy the haunting ride, room by perilous room.

This time, players aren’t alone. In Little Nightmares 3, developed by Supermassive Games, two players (or one and an AI companion) choose between characters Low (a bird-masked boy with a bow) and Alone (a girl with a jumpsuit and a wrench), who rely on each other and get out of rooms using their unique tools or just good ol’ fashioned teamwork. Sometimes this means pushing a box for the other to jump on, but other obstacles require rather complex puzzle-solving. 

In the game, Low and Alone seek to escape the bleak Nowhere and its roulette of dystopian lands. My preview was limited to one of these areas — Carnevale, a demented circus where our small characters had to sneak under the feet of grotesque, ambling workers (or their corpses, tied up or swinging for the sport of their fellows). When we thought we were safe, possessed puppets sprinted after us until we could team up to knock their wooden heads off and crush them. Being noticed by anyone meant our demise, requiring frantic cooperation amid the anxious stakes of rather gruesome deaths. 

It’s this tension and the dour setting that sets Little Nightmares 3 apart from other co-op games like the more excitable and dynamic Split Fiction released earlier this year, a rollercoaster flipbook of game genres that made for a breathless if not terribly coherent experience. In contrast, the section of Little Nightmares 3 I played unfolded like a series of grim vignettes that rely on its pleasingly goth trappings as much as working together with your friend (or computer teammate) to progress. 

Surviving your little nightmares

While I got only an hour with the game, Little Nightmares 3 seems to iterate on rather than innovate away from its predecessors: Expect more of the same in new, grotesque settings, just with the welcome addition of tightly designed teamwork dynamics. For fans of the series, this is likely a good thing. There’s not much else like Little Nightmares.

The Carnevale stage I played through opened up with rain pelting red-and-white circus tent tops, which I as the masked Low (and someone from Bandai Namco who kindly played as the jumpsuit-wearing Alone) skittered between. Lumbering above us were brutish factory workers seeking escape at the funfair, which very quickly turned sinister as we very shortly saw some hanging tied-up as others took turns beating them like a piñata. We entered one room to find one worker in connected boxes as the subject of a magician’s saw-in-half trick…which was no trick, as we had to separate the halves to climb out of a window. I tried, and failed, to ignore the viscera slopping out of the boxes.

While we hid from the human-size enemies, we had to fight the wooden puppets. Like Geppeto’s most horrid creations, they ambushed us in several rooms, requiring me to knock their heads off with Low’s bow and run away from their decapitated bodies while my teammate rushed forward to crush their heads with Alone’s wrench. 

But most of the rooms are about solving puzzles, which could be as simple as moving a box for my teammate to jump up and pull a switch or figure out how a radio plays into a complex solution. While these quiet moments are a nice break from the tense combat or pursuit, they also give time to appreciate the macabre backgrounds: I ran past one room with a circle of empty tall chairs only to come back a few seconds later to find them filled with puppets, unmoving but watching.

And then there are the really, really tense moments. We moved from the carnival to the adjoining candy factory (apparently where all those brutes work) and up to the offices where the boss works, to find him asleep with the TV droning on in the darkness…and his frankly hideous baby nestled next to him. Naturally, we had to make noise, cranking open a grate, awakening the terrifying spawn who ran after us. After many, many failed escapes, my teammate and I discovered we had to scramble for a hiding place after making it past the grate. 

This was perhaps the most frustrating part of the preview as we panicked looking for a solution to our deadly woes (as opposed to the slow, methodical gameplay earlier) — but that’s part of the tension, especially when adding a teammate to the mix. Ultimately, it was a hard-won lesson in patience. In the next room, a kitchen, the nightmarish baby banged a bowl on the table until the father walked over to a corpse (presumably his worker) and cut out some meat for his ghoulish child to eat.

In my short time with it, Little Nightmares 3 seems like a cooperative spooky storybook for players and their friends (but not couch buddies, sadly — it’s online co-op only) to experience. How much it lives up to previous games in the series, especially as developer Supermassive Games takes more of the reins from the franchise’s original creators Tarsier Games, is anyone’s guess. (Tarsier’s similar spiritual sequel to Little Nightmares, Reanimal, is coming in 2026.) 

But as the air turns crisp and Halloween beckons, it’s the best time of the year for a creepy co-op game like Little Nightmares 3 to land.

Little Nightmares 3 comes out Oct.10, 2025, for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2.

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