Halo Wars took a serious toll on developer Ensemble Studios, leading to lots of overtime, crunch, and sleepless nights.

Crunch is all-too common in the games industry. The market's biggest games often require crazy 100-hour work weeks and significantly affect the physical and mental health of game devs (BioWare devs, for example, had mental breakdowns while developing Anthem). This problem has existed for time immemorial--as long as people made games, they crunched to get them shipped.

Ensemble Studios was yet another team of developers who crunched hard to get games made, in particular with Halo Wars. The ambitious Halo RTS was demoed in 2007 and shipped in 2009, the same year Ensemble closed. It would be their last project.

Cyberpunk 2077's iconic cast of renegade cyborg mercenaries are getting their own figures, and Johnny Silverhand will be one of them.

McFarlane Toys, who makes some of the best collectibles in the industry, is making action figures based on Cyberpunk 2077. We'll see both 12-inch and 7-inch figures based around the main characters like Keanu Reeves' Johnny Silverhand, male and female versions of the protagonist V., and possibly even Jackie too. We don't know all who the first wave of figures will include...but Cyberpunk 2077 has a huge colorful cast that spans multiple gangs and factions.

Cyberpunk 2077's action figures will release into stores in March 2020, shortly before the game's release in April. Pricing is pretty steep at $24.99 for the 7-inch figures, and $39.99 for the 12-inch Johnny Silverhand figure.

Jedi: Fallen Order sold better than Battlefront II where it counts most, showing gamers are still avid for singleplayer-only experiences.

A bit ago EA announced Jedi: Fallen Order was the fastest-selling Star Wars game ever released on digital platforms. Now analyst firm SuperData adds more color, confirming Respawn's Jedi power fantasy sold 2.14 million copies digitally in November and hit 1/3rd of EA's internal sales target for the game at launch.

SuperData says Jedi: Fallen Order's digital copies on console outsold Battlefront II by more than 2 to 1 at launch. This is EA's most valuable metric; digital is most important because digital games cost less to distribute and typically make more money, and consoles pull in the lion's share of EA's yearly revenues thanks to the PS4's 100 million-strong installed base.

Microsoft's Mixer platform is just a small sliver of 2019's streaming numbers, accounting for just 3% of total hours watched.

Even with the millions-strong streaming might of Ninja, King Gothalion, and Shroud, Mixer is still being utterly dominated by Twitch and YouTube Gaming.

The latest numbers from Stream Elements shows Twitch is still the undisputed king of streaming with 9.3 billion hours watched in 2019, accounting for 77% of total views. Twitch is followed up by YouTube Gaming with 2.68 billion, or 21%. Both Mixer and Facebook Gaming rival at each other 3% of total hourly views.

Final Fantasy XV has sold-in more than 8.9 million copies worldwide on all platforms since its release in 2016, 4Gamer confirms.

After 10 years of development, Square Enix's massive investment into Final Fantasy XV is paying off. The game has managed to push nearly 9 million copies shipped and sold digitally, putting it behind series greats like Final Fantasy VII, the current long-running online MMORPG, and Yuna's colorful PS2 adventure.

Here's how FFXV fits into the mainline series sales charts:

The Nanica Smitch is a real thing, and it's being sold as a knock-off Switch in South America.

Introducing the Nanica Smitch, a hilariously-named Switch rip off handheld that runs on batteries like an old-school Game Boy. The handheld is being sold in Colombia for $50 and comes with 500 retro games pre-loaded onto it across NES and SNES.

And yes, the controllers detach from the sides for arcade-style on-the-go play for two players, or Tabletop Mode for one player. It can even hook up to a TV via RCA cables. The Smitch is kind of like those cheap plug-and-play consoles you see on clearance shelves at Walmart. It seems to work well enough but we can't imagine Nintendo is happy about this one bit.

Blizzard is getting right into the holiday season by bringing some awesome discounts to basically their entire library of games. Merry Blizzmas everyone?

Blizzard is here to celebrate the holiday season with its player base, bringing discounts to a range of different Blizzard products. These deals include heavy discounts on some of their best titles, such as Overwatch, World of Warcraft: Battle For Azeroth, the Call of Duty franchise, and more.

In the entirety of this article, I have listed out the best deals the store has on offer, and how much the current products are versus their original prices. Jump into the Blizzard action while these deals last, and make sure you have a happy holidays! A link to the Blizzard Store can be found here.

This comes as no surprise. China has released a new set of internet laws that will dictate what content companies are allowed to publish online.

According to these new laws, internet companies will have to manage whatever content is published online within a strict set of guidelines. These guidelines include a big push for algorithms to be manipulated to show "positive" ideas and not "bad" material. The new rules also prohibit any form of content that "endangers national security, leaks state secrets, subverts state power [and] undermines national unity."

The Chinese government will be implementing these rules as of March 1st, while at the same time begin cracking down on the management of accounts and online "rumors". Essentially, these new algorithm changes are targeted as removing as much freedom of information from the public's grasp. With algorithms in place that stop the public from finding any information contrary to government opinion, the people will be living within an echo chamber of moderated government information.

Epic paid for a nice head start for Red Dead Redemption 2, but the game didn't even break 500,000 copies sold in its first month.

Apparently Red Dead Redemption 2 didn't sell all that great on the Epic Store. Rockstar's heavily-lauded outlaw adventure only sold 408,000 copies on the Epic Games Store in its first month, analyst firm SuperData reports. The numbers are far lower than Borderlands 3's massive 1.78 million sales at launch.

Of course some context is needed here: Borderlands 3 is a six-month EGS exclusive and Rockstar was clear from the start RDR2 was coming to Steam a month after its EGS release. Also remember Rockstar released the game on their own first-party Rockstar Games Launcher, meaning RDR2 effectively saw three different digital releases.

Both the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 use mysterious custom SSD tech that allows developers unprecedented access to storage data. This kind of freedom might be possible thanks to a derivative of new software-defined flash (SDF) technology.

One thing we need to make clear: Software-defined flash was made specifically for enterprise-level cloud services with huge server farms. We're talking about gigantic scale-out applications like datacenters, telecommunication infrastructures, and financial institutions that require thousands of petabytes of data. It was not made for consumer storage. It's a new datacenter standard aimed at boosting efficiency with thousands of storage drives.

But a lot of the things that both Microsoft and Sony are saying (the crazy I/O speeds that're faster than anything available in PCs today, the granular access to data) somewhat matches up with the tenants of software-defined flash.