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Saber Interactive, one of the biggest video game companies, says that it is now making games in other countries outside of North America.

Saber Interactive's Tim Willits recently shared a few words that reflect the sobering state of the games industry for interactive entertainment's biggest-spending region, which is that companies are simply moving the bulk of their games development operations out of North America, likely due to unpredictable economics like higher costs of living.

In a recent interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Willits says that Saber Interactive currently has "no real development in North America any more." Saber's HQ is still there, GI.biz reports, but the group is mostly handling development across other regions like Serbia, Armenia, Spain, Sweden, and even Australia.

Diablo V's playable classes include the Monk and Demon Hunter, as well as a brand new game-specific class, the Plague Knight. Blizzard also shares a closer look at what the inventory could look like and confirms that the game will have Diablo II-style runes and runewords.

Blizzard today announced Diablo V will release sometime in Spring 2029. Blizzard has shown off a first look at some of the classes that Diablo V will have, including the Plague Knight, a class that can poison and consume their enemies. One of the most noteworthy confirmations was that Diablo II's runes and itemization are returning, which could get the attention of D2R users.

"We're also going to be bringing new classes to the game. The Plague Knight is the first new class that will be joining Diablo V. This is a heavily armored class, walking death. You're going to be roaming the battlefields spreading disease and then consuming it for power," Diablo V senior game director Joe Shely said during the stream.

Video game subscription services once sold themselves as the smarter way to play. Spend less than the price of a single $70 game and get access to hundreds of titles. That pitch is getting harder to make.

New survey data shows that when people cancel services like Xbox Game Pass, PlayStation Plus, and Nintendo Switch Online, price is increasingly the reason, even when they otherwise like what they're paying for.

The data comes from Circana's Future of Insights for Video Games Consumer Survey, shared by the firm's senior director and video game analyst Mat Piscatella. "Cost is becoming a stronger driver of US cancellations to Xbox Game Pass Essential, PS Plus Essential and Nintendo Switch Online," Piscatella wrote on Bluesky. "Over 40% of those cancelling in the US cite cost as a primary driver, higher than seen in Q1."

Google's fully mapped fruit fly brain is barely a week old, and it's already been put to work doing what any sufficiently advanced piece of neuroscience apparently must: playing Doom.

Last week, Google Research, working alongside HHMI Janelia Research Campus and the wider scientific community, announced it had fully mapped the complete brain and central nervous system of an adult male fruit fly for the first time. The team used AI to stitch together millions of 2D images into a 3D model, reconstructing more than 166,000 neurons in what Google called "a major milestone in neuroscience." The resulting connectome (a detailed map of the brain's neural connections), MaleCNS v1.0, was released publicly for download.

It took only a few days for engineers to start putting it through its paces. Coinbase engineer Alex Wormuth was among the first, announcing that he was training the fly brain to play the original Doom. "Each Doom frame stimulates sensory neurons," Wormuth explained. "Neural activity is mapped to game controls. Damage triggers a stimulus to two PPL101 dopamine cells as reinforcement." Wormuth also published a live feed of the fly's progress, showing both its in-game point of view and a third-person render of its little digital body wandering through Doom's corridors. As of the latest count, the fly was on its 6,385th attempt and still wasn't doing particularly well.

AMD has confirmed pricing for two new Ryzen 5 desktop processors, giving budget PC builders more options across its AM4 and AM5 platforms, according to WCCFTech. The Ryzen 5 7500 will carry a suggested price of $189, while the older-generation Ryzen 5 5500F will be available for just $99.

The two chips target different upgrade paths, with the Ryzen 5 5500F extending the life of the long-running AM4 platform while the Ryzen 5 7500 offers a lower-cost entry into AM5.

Both processors feature 6 CPU cores and 12 threads, but they are based on different architectures. The Ryzen 5 5500F uses AMD's Zen 3 architecture and Vermeer silicon, while the Ryzen 5 7500 is built on Zen 4 and uses Raphael silicon. Both carry a 65W default TDP.

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma spends a few hours each month solving player support tickets to get direct feedback and guidance from dedicated users.

The Wall Street Journal recently profiled Xbox CEO Asha Sharma, revealing how the executive runs the business. While described as "intense," Sharma has met players with a higher level of transparency and brought home realities like dwindling profit margins and rising costs. Her pragmatic approach has been swift, leading to lots of bad news like mass layoffs--drastic moves that set the stage for future growth.

In the profile, WSJ notes that Sharma spends hours every month responding to and answering/solving player support tickets. Sharma looks through the real problems that players are facing across Xbox, whether it be ecosystem-level or a specific game, or a friction point with hardware.

PS5 emulation just took one of its biggest leaps yet, with the KyTyPS5 emulator now running the Demon's Souls remake at 10 to 18 FPS. That is roughly a tenfold jump from where it stood only a day earlier, when the game was barely limping along at 1 to 2 FPS on high-end hardware like a Ryzen 7 9800X3D paired with an RTX 4080.

The update comes from DSOGaming, which has been tracking KyTyPS5's progress closely. The site puts the improvement at around 800 percent in a single release. That sounds like a stretch until you remember the emulator only recently managed to get past the character creation screen without crashing.

Demon's Souls is not the only title showing gains. Astro Bot is apparently running at around 11 FPS too, and this is reportedly the first time footage of it in motion has surfaced. GTA 5 remains playable to varying degrees as well, so three major PS5 games now technically run on PC, even if none of them are close to a smooth experience.

Diablo V is releasing Spring 2029, Blizzard announced, setting the tone for the darkest ARPG yet.

Blizzard today officially announced Diablo V with a quick cinematic teaser trailer, showing what happens when the demons win The Great War and overtake Sanctuary. The footage highlights the grisly fate of an archangel and shows hopeless humans led by demons.

Developers Joe Shely and Tiffany Wat touched upon the core themes of Diablo V, which seem to be grisly transformation, survival, and eventual triumph through sacrifice. Based on what is said, it's possible that players may also have to give up while playing Diablo V, possibly indicating that players could transform into a demon of sorts.

StarCraft is officially returning in 2030 with a brand new shooter, Blizzard Entertainment announced today.

Blizzard's iconic sci-fi franchise is back in an all-new way. At BlizzCon 2026, the studio revealed a new StarCraft shooter led by former Far Cry lead Dan Hay.

During the reveal, Hay confirmed that StarCraft would be an open-world shooter that's gritty and tough, paying homage to the series but also "pushing beyond." The shooter is due out sometime in 2030, and Blizzard also revealed a cinematic sequence called Dominion, and the visual quality is predictably off the charts.

Blizzard is working on a new Diablo animated series that will premiere on Netflix, the company announced.

A new animated Diablo series is in the works at Netflix, but no exact premiere date, episode run, or other details were confirmed.

"I'm thrilled to announce that we are in development for an animated series for Diablo with Netflix. As a big Diablo player myself, and someone who loves the indulgent darkness of Sanctuary I am very excited to see this project come to life," Blizzard president Joanna Faries said on stage at BlizzCon 2026.

GPU prices are rising once again, but NVIDIA's flagship GeForce RTX 5090 seems to be in a league of its own. Launched with a European MSRP of €2,099, it now sells for more than €5,000 in Europe, with the cheapest listed models in Germany reaching over €5,200.

As the ongoing memory shortage collides with soaring demand for AI hardware, GPU prices have skyrocketed all over the world. As reported by HardwareLuxx, in-stock RTX 5090 models listed on Geizhals are now selling for more than €5,000, a trend that is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore across global markets.

As reported previously, average GPU prices are up 28% over MSRP, while the RTX 5090 is sitting 136% above MSRP across ten markets tracked by TechSpot. U.S. pricing is even worse, with the card reaching roughly 145% above MSRP. Data from PCPartPicker, which tracks pricing in the U.S. market, tells a similar story, suggesting that the escalating prices are far from being limited to Europe.

Qualcomm originally planned to adopt the 2nm process to challenge Apple's A20 chips in 2026, but it appears they may have to wait a bit longer. The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, Qualcomm's latest mobile processor, currently uses a 3nm process, but the semiconductor company wanted to work with Samsung to develop chips with the 2nm process.

The Bell reports that while Qualcomm appears content with the technical side of Samsung's 2nm process, pricing disputes are allegedly delaying the deal to 2027.

The report details that Qualcomm is demanding a price reduction, and Samsung is reluctant to meet it. Allegedly, the production volume discussed by both parties also isn't big enough for Samsung to budge on its pricing. With price negotiations delaying production, this could mean that Qualcomm's 2nm chips might not be ready in time for early smartphone launches in 2027. Phone manufacturers like Xiaomi and Vivo might look to Mediatek instead, or it's possible that Qualcomm falls back to TSMC.

Apple's iPhone Duo may start at $1,999, but a significant slice of that cost goes straight to a familiar name. According to leaker Instant Digital, posting on Weibo, Apple has signed a three-year exclusive supply agreement with Samsung Display for the foldable panels inside the iPhone Duo, with Apple reportedly paying $250 per inner display panel. A separate source puts the cover display at an additional $80 per unit.

LG Display does not yet manufacture folding screens, and while BOE produces them for Huawei, Apple reportedly considers those panels inadequate and has had ongoing reliability concerns with the company. Samsung was effectively the only supplier that could meet Apple's requirements, which gave it considerable leverage in negotiations.

The panel Apple is getting for that $250 is Samsung's latest and most advanced. The iPhone Duo uses Samsung's M16 OLED material, a native 10-bit panel that replaces blue fluorescent OLED with blue phosphorescent material and delivers meaningful improvements in efficiency, peak brightness, and colour accuracy. Apple lists the iPhone Duo as capable of 3,000 nits of peak brightness, though the M16 panel itself can reach up to 3,500 nits, with the delta likely attributable to the nano-texture coating or Apple's own settings.

When it comes to melting power connectors, we are used to seeing the latest 12VHPWR or 12V-2x6 power connectors melting on modern NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards that use them. However, a new case has come up where three 8-pin power connectors have melted on a Thermal Grizzly Wireview paired to an RX 7900 XTX. Awareness Hour 9192 on Reddit was the victim of the melting disaster and shared images on the PC Builder subreddit of the power connectors being visibly burned that were connected directly to the GPU.

The victim reports that the melting issues were not immediately apparent. Before the issue was discovered, the Redditor notes that they were having "extreme problems" with their PC, to the point where the system was freezing and displaying a black screen constantly. Later, they took the computer to a repair shop that ran several tests on the system and reinstalled Windows, but supposedly "couldn't find any errors" on the machine. After taking the system home, the PC started crashing again; the Redditor realized they hadn't re-seated the graphics card yet, which finally led to the discovery of the burned power connector.

Luckily for the victim, Thermal Grizzly has already made contact with them and requested they contact their support staff through email to get a better look at the problem and "find a solution". Thermal Grizzly noted in their response that loose connectors could possibly be the issue, but the Redditor verified that all of the connectors were properly inserted and were "quite tight".

The past week brought plenty of discussion around NVIDIA's latest real-time Neural Rendering model, DLSS 5. Of course, the technology itself was enough to hook enthusiasts and gamers alike, but it also sparked a wave of modding efforts to bring it to more games, since only NBA 2K27 currently has official DLSS 5 3D-Guided Neural Rendering support.

NVIDIA now wants that spotlight back on the game meant to showcase DLSS 5's photorealistic lighting magic, and what better way than an NBA 2K27-centered giveaway.

NVIDIA has launched the NBA 2K27 DLSS 5 Poster Challenge, with four custom NBA 2K27-themed GeForce RTX 5090 graphics cards up for grabs. Players can enter by submitting their NBA 2K27 poster, which can be an in-game screenshot or video, but it must be captured with DLSS 5 enabled on a GeForce RTX 50 Series system.

Valve's Steam Controller has already inspired some creative modding since launch, from a custom Steam Machine faceplate that holds and charges the controller on the front of the console to a mod that scoots the controller across a surface toward its own charging puck. Now there is another addition, and this one opens the controller up to an entirely new capability.

Developer FamBoy32 has released LiveHaptics, an open-source tool that captures any system audio playing on a PC and converts it in real time into haptic feedback through the Steam Controller's actuators. Music, game audio, dialogue, sound effects, anything reaching the selected audio output gets translated into vibration. More importantly, it doesn't require individual games to add specific haptic support, meaning it works across everything rather than being limited to titles built for it.

The tool works over USB, Valve's Steam Puck wireless receiver, and Bluetooth, with versions available for Windows and Linux. On Windows, it runs as a static binary with no installation required. Just close Steam, unzip the archive from the GitHub page, connect the controller, and run the executable. Linux installation is a little more involved, but the GitHub repository covers it.

Wardogs is the latest shooter sensation that's sweeping Steam, and if the momentum continues, the game could directly compete with Call of Duty Modern Warfare 4's launch next month.

Wardogs, the new tactical FPS from Bulkhead and Team17, is capturing platinum sales and widespread engagement on PC. The game has already broken 1.25 million sales in its first day on Steam early access, and at the time of writing, the $40 early access shooter is currently the #1 top seller on Steam.

The shooter offers an innovative take on King of the Hill, with three teams of up to 100 players battling each other in random maps spanning roughly 2.5 miles. Bulkhead says that Wardogs is an "all-out warfare FPS that combines tactical gunplay and combined arms combat with building and destruction mechanics in a large-scale militaristic sandbox."

This year has not really been PlayStation's year. The console's exclusive lineup has struggled to make the kind of impact Sony needed, with Wolverine drawing mixed responses and failing to offer what IGN described as "an occasional middle ground." The bigger controversy, though, has been Sony's speedy march toward an all-digital future. While the company has made it clear that no amount of backlash is changing that decision, new data raises a fair question about whether it should.

Figures from Alinea Analytics show the revenue split for first-party Sony games since 2022, and the numbers make a strong case that physical media is still pulling its weight. All but one of the seven titles covered sold between 32% and 47% of copies through physical retail.

Marvel's Spider-Man 2 generated $1.2 billion in total revenue, with 35% coming from physical sales. Ghost of Yotei brought in $400 million, with nearly 40% from discs. A similar split played out across GOTY winner Astro Bot, Stellar Blade, Death Stranding 2, and others in the dataset.

GPU sagging has become a serious problem in recent years thanks to graphics cards ballooning in size and weight. In a worst-case scenario, a heavy enough graphics card without proper anti-sag support can break the card's PCB after months or years of use. Graphics card manufacturer Manli has opted to fix this problem by equipping its RTX 5060 series "Unlimited Firepower" graphics cards with a sensor that can detect when the GPU is being subjected to an abnormal amount of sagging.

The sensor reports GPU alignment in real time and reports any abnormal tilting through instant alerts from the Manli app. Manli neglected to share how aggressive the sensor is, or if the triggering point can be adjusted, but having a sensor integrated into the GPU takes all the guesswork out of checking if your GPU needs an anti-sag bracket.

Hopefully we'll see this type of sensor in graphics cards that really need it, such as triple- and quad-slot RTX 5080s and 5090s. The RTX 5060 and 5060 Ti models Manli has embedded this feature in aren't heavy enough to fully take advantage of it. Both 5060 models sport dual-slot form factors and weigh just under two pounds. Both models also have the same form factor measuring 405 x 240 x 112mm. Manli has equipped its new Unlimited Firepower GPUs with a triple-fan cooler design and a shroud design that mimics the design of a modern handgun.

Desktop graphics card shipments just hit their highest point in four years, right as prices are climbing instead of settling. According to Jon Peddie Research's latest Market Watch report, add-in board (AIB) shipments for desktop PCs reached 12.5 million units in Q2 2026, up 10% quarter over quarter and 6.6% year over year. That's the strongest quarter since Q1 2022, when shipments touched around 13.4 million, and a clear jump from the more modest Q1 2026 numbers we covered earlier this year.

Q2 is normally the slow stretch for desktop GPUs, and JPR's own president, Dr. Jon Peddie, pointed out that shipments usually drop in this window. Instead, they went up while memory prices and component costs kept rising. JPR's read on it is that buyers moved early to grab cards before prices went up even more, with supply pressure tied to broader global tensions adding to the squeeze.

NVIDIA held onto its usual dominance, shipping around 11.25 million of those desktop units for roughly 90% share, leaving AMD and Intel to fight over the rest. Across the first half of 2026, total desktop AIB shipments reached 24.3 million, a solid step up from the same period last year. It's a bit of an odd signal. Gamers are apparently still spending, just maybe not because things feel stable. It looks more like people trying to buy before costs jump again rather than waiting things out.