This week, on a more focused episode of The TT Show, Jak and Kosta break down and go through the crazy Helldivers 2 controversy on PC. If you were offline for a few days (and this all played out throughout a single weekend), the decision to force the Helddivers 2's PC players to link their Steam Account to a PlayStation Network (PSN) account caused a veritable backlash storm.

From the review bombing to developers being grilled to Sony and developer Arrowhead's damage control to the surprisingly swift happy ending, Jak and Kosta discuss the implications and consider what might happen in the aftermath.

This week's other big story comes from the world of Apple, with the company lifting the lid on its new iPad Pro lineup powered by the new AI-powered 3 nanometer M4 chip. The big thing here is that it represents Apple's first dip into the world of OLED displays, with a groundbreaking 1000-nit SDR and HDR screen that has two OLED panels in one!

NVIDIA will play a central role in developing Japan's generative AI infrastructure, as the country seeks to capitalize on the technology's economic potential, and further develop its workforce.

The announcement from NVIDIA comes after Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry on the future of AI with NVIDIA in the country. NVIDIA is collaborating with key digital infrastructure providers, including GMO Internet Group, Highreso, KDDI Corporation, RUTILEA, SAKURA internet Inc. and SoftBank Corp., which the ministry has certified to spearhead the development of cloud infrastructure crucial for AI applications.

The ministry announced plans to provide $740 million in funding to help 6 local firms in this new AI initiative, which means Japan is the latest nation to embrace the concept of sovereign AI by fortifying Japanese startups, enterprises, and research with advanced AI technologies.

Intel teased some more details about its next-generation Falcon Shores CPU at the ISC 24 event, with some rather huge power consumption numbers revealed.

The next-gen Intel Falcon Shores GPU will use up to 1500W of power, with no air-cooling variant planned. Falcon Shores is the true next-generation GPU architecture to Xe, with Falcon Shores originally planned years ago as an XPU th at featured both an x86-based CPU and GPU cores similar to how AMD's new Instinct MI300A APU.

Intel later downgraded Falcon Shores to be a GPU-only design, so it will now take the best parts of Intel's Gaudi AI accelerators, combined with next-gen Xe graphics architecture for HPC and other compute-heavy workloads. Intel's new Falcon Shores GPU will also be backed up by a huge software ecosystem called oneAPI.

Sabrent has a hefty 40% discount ($189.99 down to $114) on its USB-C Universal Docking Station (DC-UICA) which has near-limitless potential with a slew of ports and features that will amplify your computing experience.

If you've got a laptop, ultrabook, Chromebook, Android smartphone or tablet, Apple MacBook, iPhone, or iPad, then the Sabrent USB-C Universal Docking Station would be your new BFF. We've got the entire thing connected through a 10Gbps (USB 3.2 Gen 2x1) USB-C upstream host port that's designed for the latest systems.

Downstream, the Sabrent USB-C Universal Docking Station features 2 x 10Gbps USB-C ports, 2 x 5Gbps USB 3.2 Gen 1x1 USB-A ports, and 2 x 480Mbps USB 2.0 USB-A ports. The first four of those can deliver 5V/1.5A, while the latter will be perfect for keyboards and mice.

Intel's next-generation Lunar Lake CPUs are still in the ovens inside of their labs, but now we're hearing about the new Core Ultra 5 238V processor with 32GB of LPDDR5X on-package memory.

If you don't know about on-package memory, Intel's new Lunar Lake CPUs will have 16GB or 32GB of on-package memory, right next to the CPU, GPU, and NPU on the chip. Lunar Lake is for low-power devices with 8W to 30W TDP designs, using Intel's latest CPU and GPU architectures combined with a brand-new AI accelerator.

NVIDIA's next-generation GeForce RTX 5090 truly can't come soon enough, as TCL is preparing a monster new 4K 1000Hz panel. Yeah... 4K at 1000Hz means 4K at 1000FPS.

The folks from Blur Busters attended the DisplayWeek 2024 conference in California, with TCL CSOT showing off an incredible new 4K 1000Hz panel. There has been no official press release or details released about TCL CSOT's incredible 4K 1000Hz panel, which is unfortunate.

Contrary to what you might've read, Ubisoft's new Assassin's Creed Shadows game can be played entirely offline.

Assassin's Creed fans rejoice: Ubisoft is finally making a game set in feudal Japan. It's called Assassin's Creed Shadows, and it'll take place in 16th century Japan during Oda Nobunaga's bloody quest to unify the country by force. Shadows also features two protagonists--a samurai and a ninja--and you'll be able to switch between them as you play.

Since the reveal, there's been two somewhat new tidbits of info to come out. The first is that AC Shadows won't be on Steam, and will instead be on the Epic Games Store and Ubisoft Store on PC. That's despite the fact that all 3 of the most recent mainline Assassin's Creed games are on Steam, including AC Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla.

Xbox is reportedly under pressure to increase margins, and breaking exclusivity on more first-party games might be the solution.

Like most games companies right now, Xbox has a problem. The industry just isn't growing despite Microsoft's best efforts. Game Pass subscribers have stalled, and Xbox hardware sales are down significantly. Excluding Activision's contribution, Xbox games division revenues are flat year-over-year.

Despite all of these burdens, Xbox is still expected to deliver not only profit, but some measure of growth. The current games industry debacle comes shortly after Microsoft bought Activision for $72 billion. After the buyout, Xbox is on the hook for the merger and Microsoft's executives and board of directors expect returns. This extra pressure, combined with Xbox's general flagging presence in the hardware market and sluggish topline growth, see the games-maker encumbered by the heavy weight of financial pressures.

Grand Theft Auto VI is now expected to launch in Fall 2025, surprising no one.

Today, Take-Two Interactive gave an update on its upcoming release slate, including GTA 6. The billion-dollar games giant is planning to launch GTA VI in the Fall 2025 season, which is typically from September - November. The game is so highly anticipated that it is expected to significantly uplift the entire video games industry through massive game sales, monetization, and engagement across all platforms.

This release would put GTA 6 in Take-Two's FY26 period. The company expects to make up to $5.65 billion in net bookings this year, in the FY25 period, and FY26 is forecasted to sequentially one-up and outperform FY25's numbers.

Activision today announced the formation of Elsewhere, a new studio focused on making a fresh franchise for Microsoft.

A bit ago, Bethesda and Xbox executives made the decision to shut down three studios, including Arkane Austin (Prey), Tango Gameworks (The Evil Within, Hi-Fi Rush), and Alpha Dog (Mighty Doom). Now another one of Microsoft's divisions, Activision, is opening up a new studio.

The new group is called Elsewhere Entertainment, and the studio is made up of "storytelling experts" that worked on some of the highest-profile games on the market including The Last of Us, Uncharted, The Witcher, Cyberpunk, Destiny, The Division, and Far Cry.

Microsoft has made a rather odd move in trying to promote Bing search in Windows 11 with a change to its PC Manager app.

If you're not familiar with PC Manager, well, we wouldn't be surprised, as it's not an app that all that many folks know about - partly because it's only available in certain regions for Windows 11 (and not the US, not officially yet - but that could well change).

At any rate, it's a PC performance boosting utility from Microsoft China, that takes a typical approach with file cleanup features to free up storage, memory, and so forth.