Although BioWare Montreal's massively panned and hugely criticized action-RPG suffered in the long run, EA confirms Mass Effect: Andromeda strongly contributed to revenues and helped the company pull in record first quarter earnings.

Mass Effect: Andromeda is undoubtedly bombed in the public eye, but according to EA's latest fiscal Q1'18 earnings call, the game bolstered its quarterly revenues with strong sales. With a fully-monetized strategy the game helped in a number of ways including live service earnings, digital downloads, and total net sales.

Net sales for fiscal Q1'18 were $775 million, up 13.63% year-over-year from fiscal Q1'17's $682 million, and $25 million (3.33%) above EA's guidance for the quarter. "Year-on-year growth was driven by the Mass Effect: Andromeda sales captured in the quarter and by FIFA," EA Chief Financial Officer Blake Jorgensen said during the company's fiscal Q1'18 earnings call.

EA's Battlefield empire continues to grow with a strong userbase that's constantly engaged with new content.

Electronic Arts is one of the major gaming titans who not only sees the value of engagement and monetization, but defines it with industry-leading strategies. As a result the company is a titan among its peers, earning billions with its live services initiatives--in its first quarter, EA made more in digital live services than it did in games, pulling in $420 million or a whopping 61.67% of EA's first quarter digital net sales earnings. EA confirms Battlefield 1 was a major driver for its 22% live services growth. But it's not only about making money: EA has to continually engage players with new content.

The company reports that Battlefield 1's community has grown to 21 million unique players across all platforms as a result of EA's content-rich pipeline and macro/micro-monetization paths. The publisher and DICE have belted out a number of new updates and content packs to keep players busy, and even touted a big new announcement for the WWI shooter at Gamescom.

All of Capcom's major games releases last year failed to hit their sales forecast targets set by the company.

Capcom expected to sell 4 million copies of Resident Evil 7 by the end of the fiscal year, and they missed that target. Even with three months to accrue sales after the fiscal year ended, Resident Evil 7 still didn't hit the target 4 million copies sold; as of fiscal Q1'18 the game sits at 3.7 million units sold, just 300,000 copies shy of the target.

The company wants to ship 2 million more units of Resident Evil 7 by the end of the new fiscal year on March 2018, bringing the total lifetime to date sales estimate for RE7 to 6 million copies at the end of this period. Capcom has also said it expects Resident Evil 7 to sell 10 million copies in its lifetime. The game has officially recouped Capcom's development costs, but it still fell short of its projected sales.

To celebrate the upcoming home video release of 'Fate of the Furious, we have fifteen Blu-rays to give away thanks to our friends at Universal Sony Home Entertainment.

The ride isn't over. Now that Dom and Letty are on their honeymoon and Brian and Mia have retired from the game-and the rest of the crew has been exonerated-the globetrotting team has found a semblance of a normal life. But when a mysterious woman (Oscar winner Charlize Theron) seduces Dom into the world of crime he can't seem to escape and a betrayal of those closest to him, they will face trials that will test them as never before. From the shores of Cuba and the streets of New York City to the icy plains off the arctic Barents Sea, our elite force will crisscross the globe to stop an anarchist from unleashing chaos on the world's stage... and to bring home the man who made them a family.

How many 'Fast and Furious' films has Vin Diesel appeared in?

Brendan Greene might not be a household name yet, but you might have heard of his gamer tag 'PlayerUnknown' as he's the creator of smash hit PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, which has now made over $100 million.

During a recent interview with CNET, Greene said that he doesn't think of himself as a gamer. He played games growing up, but he was never super into games or well-known series like The Legend of Zelda. Greene said: "I don't consider myself a gamer, compared to a lot of people I meet at these conventions where their life is dedicated to games. I enjoy games, but I don't consider myself on that level. I've never played Zelda. I've never played these classic games because they don't interest me".

While he didn't play Zelda, he played ultra-realistic military games like Delta Force: Black Hawk Down. Greene added: "I played the absolute s*** out of that game until there were no more servers left. I loved the whole idea of it: the fact there was bullet drop, that it was somewhat realistic, and I could go be a sniper quite easily".

The world of VR might not like hearing what EA boss Andrew Wilson has to say, with the EA CEO stating that VR isn't ready just yet, and that EA sees more potential in AR right now.

EA recently released their Q1 FT18 financial report, where Wilson had some choice words to say afterwards: "So I'll start with VR and AR. Not a lot of new news on VR for us and as you see there's not a lot of new news for VR in the industry. People seem to have come to terms of the fact that VR while an unbelievably wonderful innovation for how you consume interactive entertainment and all forms of entertainment for that matter is going to take a couple of years at least to going to get to a point where it is truly a mass market consumer opportunity. We still are in the same position we were in which we have enabled core VR capability in our Frostbite engine".

He added: "We have delivered a console experience in the course of delivering a mobile experience and we'll continue to push on the boundaries of what's a sports game look like inside of VR? What's first person shooter look like in VR? What's an action adventure game look like in VR? And that's really at a design level and something that will start to manifest in the marketplace in the years to come".

Intel announced its flagship Core i9-7980XE processor during Computex in June, but didn't provide details on its clock speeds. But now there's a leaked slide on the upcoming Core X "Skylake-X" processors, including the 7980XE.

Intel's upcoming Core i9-7980XE processor will reportedly feature a 2.6GHz base clock, with Turbo Clock 2.0 speeds of 4.2GHz, and massive Turbo Clock 3.0 speeds of up to 4.4GHz. Remember, the Core i9-7980XE is an 18C/36T processor, with a large 165W TDP and even bigger $1999 price.

If we compare the 7980XE against AMD's just-launched Ryzen ThreadRipper 1950X, AMD wins in more departments than you think. AMD loses with the amount of CPU cores and threads with 'just' 16C/32T (versus 18C/36T) and a max CPU clock of 4GHz under XFR.

More details have emerged about Samsung's two mid-range processors, the Exynos 9610 and 7885.

The Exynos 9610 is essentially a re-hash of what Samsung released this year, but with 10nm and using all ARM processors. The Exynos 9610 is expected to ship with an ARM Cortex A73 CPU cores paired with A53 little cores. The GPU will also be a G71, meaning that none of the parts of the SoC itself will be anything new. Previous rumors stated that it might have a Mali G72 which is ARM's latest GPU core technology.

Read also: Samsung overtakes Intel as biggest chip maker

For the last 25 or so years, Intel has dominated the world as the biggest chip maker. This is different from manufacturers of chips because many manufacturers are fab-less manufacturers that rely on chip makers like Samsung and Intel to fabricate their chips. There are other companies like TSMC and Globalfoundries that also manufacturer chips, but they don't quite do it at the scale that Intel and Samsung do.

Now, Samsung overtook Intel position and became the biggest chip maker in Q2 2017.

Part of that reason has to do with the fact that Samsung has been expanding their chip manufacturing business and doing so at a rapid pace. Samsung's customers include the likes of Apple, Qualcomm, and Samsung. Between those three companies, it seems logical that Samsung could ship enough chips to overcome Intel's chip shipment numbers. Intel mostly manufactures chips for themselves and does so in PCs and servers, but very rarely for mobile.

Almost a year after its price hike in North America, Sony will raise the cost of its PlayStation Plus online subscription service to £49.99 a year in Europe.

Sony today announced that it will hike PlayStation Plus subscription costs by £9.99 for annual subscriptions, bringing a full year's cost to £49.99. This 25% price hike comes months after Sony raised the cost of PS Plus from $49.99 a year to $59.99 a year in North America.

The Japanese console-maker reports that 26.4 million users have subscribed to PlayStation Plus in 2016, representing 43.7% of the total 60.4 million strong PlayStation 4 install base, and 37% of the total 70 million monthly active PlayStation Network users are subscribed to the premium service. Sony Corp President Kazuo Hirai intends to grow PS Plus subscribers by "further enhancing the content of the service and making it more appealing."