Latest News - Page 109

Netflix's recent price hike is starting to make sense now: The company today announced Netflix Playground, a new standalone app that offers games for kids.

Netflix Playground is a new app centered around kid-friendly experiences, bringing eight playable games based on popular kid shows and properties. The wholesome lineup includes games based on Dr. Seuss, Peppa Pig, and Sesame Street.

All of the games hosted on Netflix Playground are completely ad-free and don't require any extra purchases--there are no microtransactions or value-added content. This makes it similar to Netflix's principal video games strategy, which allows subscribers to download select premium mobile games to play for a set period.

Microsoft is rolling out a new version of Copilot for Windows 11, and users are starting to realize the app isn't quite what it claims to be. Those who dug into its files discovered that opening Copilot actually launches Microsoft Edge, making it less of a standalone AI assistant and more of a rebranded browser wrapper.

If you don't have Copilot yet, searching in the Microsoft Store shows a new "Microsoft Copilot" listing with a download button, even if Copilot is already installed. The download completes almost instantly because it only downloads an installer, similar to Microsoft Edge's process.

The Store even flags that you need to take action in another window, making it clear the download is no longer handled directly through the Store. Once installed, the old native Copilot app built on WinUI automatically disappears, and the new version takes over.

Saudi Arabia grows its stake in one of gaming's oldest companies--Japanese entertainment giant Capcom.

As per new filings on Japan's EDINET financial platform, Saudi-owned and -operated group Electronic Gaming Development Company (EGDC) has upped its stake in Capcom, from 5.03% to 6.04%.

The filings show that the EGDC currently has over 32 million shares in Capcom (32,186,900 to be exact). This treasure trove is worth an estimated 107.5 billion yen, or $673 million. At the time of writing, Capcom has over 533 million outstanding shares (533,011,246).

A new update from hardware sleuth Jaykihn on X (formerly Twitter) suggests that Intel's next-generation Nova Lake family will not feature the Xe4 "Druid" architecture after all. While earlier rumors pointed to a hybrid Xe3/Xe4 setup, it appears the platform is sticking entirely to the Xe3 family.

Nova Lake is set to be Intel's next major architecture launching across the desktop and mobile segments of the market next year. The lineup is expected to debut Coyote Cove P-cores and Arctic Wolf E-cores, which should bring about a sizeable boost in IPC (Instructions Per Clock Cycle). Nova Lake reportedly marks a return to a Conroe (Core 2 Duo) style shared L2 cache hierarchy for its P-cores. This, along with the use of a dual Compute Tile layout, allows configurations to reach 52 cores on desktop and 28 on mobile, paired with specialized bLLC (Big Last Level Cache) to tackle AMD's X3D family.

The update suggests Nova Lake's integrated GPU will use the Xe3-LPG architecture, similar to Panther Lake's B390. This is technically classified as a Battlemage GPU, though with some small refinements.

The Super Mario Galaxy movie has beaten opening ticket sales estimates by tens of millions of dollars, signaling yet another big hit for Nintendo and Illumination.

Super Mario Galaxy proves lightning can strike in the same place twice, as Nintendo has captured another marquee busting release with its new film adaptation. New reports indicate that the Super Mario Galaxy film has made $372 million in combined opening ticket sales so far, overshooting the original $350 million estimate.

The phrasing of this data is a bit confusing; initial box office numbers are reported in "opening week" periods, which typically includes two timelines: 3-day opening weekend sales, and 5-day week ticket sales. The new $372 million figure refers to Super Mario Galaxy's 5-day ticket sales in North America combined with the global 3-day opening weekend ticket sales.

Illumination and Nintendo have a novel approach to video game movie adaptations: Actually involving the people who designed and made the games.

Looking closely at the most successful game movies and TV shows, we see a few common elements: Passion, dedication, and continuity. The adaptations that do best are the ones that pay close attention to the details of the source material, often involving original creators, designers, and game developers that have been involved for years to help lead the charge. The Fallout TV show is a prime example of this, but nothing stands higher than the Mario movies.

At the Super Mario Galaxy movie premiere in Kyoto, Tokyo, Illumination boss Chris Meledandri explains that the secret to the Mario movie duo's success lies in Nintendo's unique ability to preserve its teams. It's all because of Illumination's close collaboration with Nintendo's creative minds, Meledandri says, many of which have been working on Mario franchises for decades.

If you rewind the clock, one game you would find everyone talking about was Fortnite. While games come and go, Fortnite managed to keep the hype alive, whether through bringing back OG Fortnite or the never-ending stream of item shop collaborations. And it felt like nothing could bring Epic Games down while it had one of the biggest battle royales in gaming in its pocket.

That sense of invincibility is starting to crack. Epic recently cut over 1,000 jobs, citing a downturn in Fortnite engagement, and has raised V-Bucks prices due to tough economic conditions. Reports indicate that Disney is watching for the right moment to acquire Epic Games and Fortnite to gain a significant foothold in gaming. Now, analyst Joost van Dreunen, co-founder of a leading analytics firm, argues the situation is more serious than it appears.

In his latest newsletter, spotted by Wccftech, Van Dreunen writes that the company is in the "middle of collapse." He argues that games like Fortnite, often branded as "forever games," don't last as long as people assume. "Forever games, it turns out, aren't," he wrote, before drawing a comparison to Roblox, which, despite giving users the power to create their own content, remains financially unstable.

Sony takes back control of its PlayStation Store's top downloads with a first-party game in the #1 spot.

Sony recently revealed the top downloaded PlayStation 5 games in March 2026 for North America and Europe, showing some key differences in regional consumer tastes.

MLB The Show 26 took the #1 top spot in the US, but was completely absent from Europe's top downloads. Sony and MLB have seen great success with their annualized sports releases, and these games typically see high rankings even on Xbox. On the US list, Sony had 3 games, beating Microsoft's 2 games, however the top spot goes to Electronic Arts, who had 4 titles on the list. Crimson Desert, Pearl Abyss's breakout hit that has sold 4 million copies in 12 days, is at #2 on the US list.

Intel launched the Core Ultra 200S Arrow Lake CPUs in 2024, but they didn't see the success the Blue Team had hoped for. Then came the newer Core Ultra 200S Plus "Arrow Lake Refresh" lineup, which looked more competitive at launch but has recently seen price hikes. As a result, many users are turning back to Intel's Raptor Lake CPUs, with the 13th and 14th-Gen chips still offering strong multithreading and gaming performance even by today's standards. However, finding a CPU like the Core i5-14600K at a reasonable price is not easy right now, and that is exactly what Intel is looking to fix.

In light of the ongoing memory shortage and rising demand for DDR4-compatible CPUs, Robert Hallock, VP and GM of the Enthusiast Channel at Intel, told Club386 that Raptor Lake is "an extremely fast product and is not going away any time soon." He added that Raptor Lake is a "big part of our strategy, and will continue to be abundantly available."

This is welcome news for those who couldn't make the jump to DDR5 in time, as Intel is not closing the door on its DDR4-compatible LGA1700 platform. Raptor Lake desktop chips on LGA1700 give builders the choice between DDR4-3200 and DDR5-5600, keeping them relevant for anyone who wants to reuse existing memory rather than move to a more expensive DDR5-only platform.

With the recent launch of the Intel Arc Pro B70, the company finally released its 'Big Battlemage' graphics card for consumers, albeit in a form aimed at the AI crown and workstations. Powered by the BMG-G31 graphics processor, the Arc Pro B70 features 32 Xe Cores (with Ray Tracing Units), 256 XMX engines, and 32GB of GDDR6 memory on a 256-bit bus with 608 GB/s of memory bandwidth.

Although it's not a gaming-focused model, we know the DirectX 12 GPU can deliver gaming performance and would make for an impressive Intel Arc B770 if the price is right. That said, with Intel's reference Arc Pro B70 design priced at $949 USD, the card's AI performance and 32GB of VRAM have already made it popular among AI enthusiasts.

Per Newegg's listing for the Intel Arc Pro B70, it's currently the number one best seller in the Workstation Graphics Cards category. It's a card built for AI inference, and with its attractive price point and performance, it looks like its launch has been a success.

All the major players in the PC gaming hardware space, alongside Microsoft with DirectX, are actively investing in neural rendering technologies designed to benefit developers and gamers alike. Intel's Texture Set Neural Compression was demonstrated last year; however, an updated version was shown at the recent GDC event, and Intel noted it plans to make it available later this year.

Like NVIDIA's Neural Texture Compression (NTC), one of the benefits of Intel's Texture Set Neural Compression is its ability to leverage AI and new technologies to significantly reduce the VRAM or memory footprint of traditional textures that use "block compression." AI-powered texture compression offers a fundamentally different approach, which is why Texture Set Neural Compression can compress textures by up to 18X compared to the original format.

Texture Set Neural Compression (TSNC) is planned to be made available as a standalone SDK that takes standard BC1-compressed textures, the industry standard for texture compression in games, and compiles them for modern GPU and even CPU decompression.

Valve has previously expressed its desire to build and release a follow-up to its popular Steam Deck PC gaming handheld, and on more than one occasion has said that it would only release a follow-up if it could deliver a significant increase in performance at the same or similar power as the current Steam Deck's semi-custom AMD SoC.

Earlier this month, industry insider and known leaker of GPU-related information, KeplerL2, said that Valve was targeting a 2028 launch window for the Steam Deck 2 and that it could arrive without a semi-custom SoC. This would mean that, like the ROG Xbox Ally X and Lenovo Legion Go 2, it would arrive with an existing AMD SoC, such as the Ryzen Z2 Extreme. However, if Valve is looking for an SoC with notably more performance than this, there's currently nothing on the market that fits the bill.

Looking ahead, however, the 2028 release window could align with AMD's rumored "Medusa Point" and "Medusa Halo" SoCs, which will feature RDNA 4 (called RDNA 4n) and RDNA 5 architectures. These chips will most likely support AMD's AI-powered FSR 4 Super Resolution and Frame Generation technologies, which could be the secret ingredient in delivering a notably more powerful Steam Deck 2.

Neural Rendering is slowly taking shape in the world of gaming, where new AI technologies will accelerate visual fidelity and push traditional rendering to new heights on modern GPUs and next-gen console hardware. At the recent NVIDIA GTC 2026 event, a lengthy presentation titled 'Introduction to Neural Rendering' was conducted, covering a full range of new neural rendering technologies; however, the stand-out has to be Neural Texture Compression, which could be a game-changer on PC.

As the name suggests, Neural Texture Compression (NTC) offers an alternative to texture streaming and rendering in games. Currently, most games use BCn Texture Compression, or "block compression," which breaks a texture or image into chunks or blocks that are compressed and then decompressed by the GPU. This allows GPUs to decompress parts of images or textures as needed.

Neural Texture Compression (NTC) is very different because it encodes the latent features and data of a texture into a compact format that the neural network on a GPU, i.e., Tensor Cores on a GeForce RTX card, can reconstruct. NVIDIA is clear that this isn't generative AI but deterministic, in which the AI essentially rebuilds and recreates the texture in real time.

Okay, so NVIDIA's big DLSS 5 reveal trailer from its GTC conference last month has been one of the most talked-about PC gaming-related announcements for all of the wrong reasons. The AI rendering tool, which applies an almost post-processing filter to games like Resident Evil Requiem to deliver 'photorealistic' lighting and visuals, has come under fire from seemingly every corner of the gaming community.

And although the effect on in-game environments is impressive, it's the difference it makes to character faces that has stirred the most controversy. The backlash has been so vocal that NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang responded to criticisms multiple times in recent weeks, while reiterating that game developers control how DLSS 5 looks and that it's designed to maintain a game's artistic vision or art direction.

And now, here we are in April, and NVIDIA's DLSS 5 announcement trailer is no longer available to watch on YouTube on the company's official GeForce channel. And no, it's not because NVIDIA is responding to the feedback and retooling the technology for a re-reveal or re-announcement; it's now blocked on "copyright grounds."

We all know how vague official system requirements for games can be. They hardly provide any useful information about what performance level you can expect from a game based on your system specifications. If you're lucky, you may get a hint as to whether you can even run the game on your PC in the first place. Well, it looks like that may be about to change very soon with a new feature that Valve is working on.

Recently, user Dex3108 on the ResetEra forums spotted a line in the Steam Client code that wasn't there before. The line read "Select an App and a PC config to get a chart of estimated frame rates, based on the frame rates of other users." This line suggests that users may be able to use a Steam Store tool to get estimated performance data for each game based on their system specifications.

If that feature becomes publicly available, it will be a huge benefit to PC gamers and even users of the Steam Deck and the upcoming Steam Machine. It will most likely put an end to the "recommended system specifications" that are posted by game developers. Instead, users will be able to get a good idea of the performance level that they can expect in the game that they're looking to buy.

Intel's Wildcat Lake CPU lineup has been a hot subject in the news lately. They were first spotted on Crossmark and Geekbench, giving us a rough idea of their performance levels. Then, another leak outlined the total number of SKUs and their specifications. Now, even more information has surfaced from OEM Advantech, which has posted a technical datasheet that mentions the specs of various Wildcat Lake CPUs.

According to the datasheet for the MIO-5356, three yet unreleased processors are supported on the platform: the Core 7 350, the Core 5 320, and the Core 3 305. Interestingly, the datasheet also lists detailed specs of the CPUs. The documentation clearly states that the model supports "Next Gen" Intel Core processors.

The Core 7 350 apparently has a maximum frequency of 4.8 GHz and a base clock of 1.5 GHz. It uses the same 2P+0E+4LPE core configuration that was previously leaked, and has a TDP of 15W. As a reminder, Wildcat Lake CPUs omit traditional "Darkmont" E-cores in favor of LPE cores.

Samsung has finally decided to kill its messaging app and push Google Messages as the default across its devices. The manufacturer has been slowly nudging users toward Google Messages as the default SMS and RCS app on its newer devices, and the Galaxy S26 series already ships with Google Messages as the default while skipping Samsung Messages entirely.

Now there is an official timeline for Samsung Messages' death.

In an end-of-service announcement on the Samsung Messages US page, the company confirmed the app will be discontinued in July. This applies to Galaxy users on Android 12 or newer. Devices running Android 11 or earlier will continue to support Samsung Messages, likely due to compatibility reasons.

Despite the Star Fox cameo in Super Mario Galaxy, Nintendo says there are no plans to make a kind of inter-connected Nintendo cinematic universe, so-to-speak, with intricate crossover events that evolve over time. It's more about fun and what feels right to Miyamoto.

Super Mario Galaxy is rocketing towards a record-breaking opening, and is expected to make $350 million in global five-day ticket sales. A big draw of the new film is how it uses more of Nintendo's iconic characters, including Star Fox's dashing pilot Fox McCloud.

But fans shouldn't expect a vast webwork of strategically-plotted storylines any time soon--in other words, Nintendo has no plans to make its own take on the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

The new Mass Effect TV show hasn't actually been greenlit just yet, and its fate could hinge on multiple script rewrites.

Hot off two back-to-back successful seasons of the hit new Fallout show, Amazon wants more gaming adaptations. Back in 2025, it was revealed that a live action Mass Effect show had been pitched to Amazon. Now it's been reported that Amazon MGM Studios has yet to actually order the Mass Effect show, and whether or not this actually happens will depend on script approvals from higher management.

Hollywood newsletter The Ankler reports that Amazon MGM Studios head of global TV Peter Friedlander will go through every project script to help weed out undesirable shows and help re-align the content slate. With Amazon having launched its new streaming subscription, the $5/month Prime Video Ultra, the company is now shoring up what kinds of shows it will produce and host on the platform.

Netflix recently announced a price hike for its US customers across all its plans, as part of improvements to its "wide range of entertainment" and service quality. Since it launched at $7.99 in November 2010, this is the eighth price increase Netflix has introduced for its Standard plan. That means the price has increased by 150% in just over 15 years. While US customers have largely accepted their fate, Italian consumers seem to have had enough.

A court in Rome recently ruled that Netflix owed its Italian users a refund for price hikes between 2017 and January 2024. Each subscriber would be entitled to a reduction in their current subscription price, and Netflix Italia would notify customers within 90 days of their right to a refund and publish the ruling on its website, or face daily fines of € 700.

According to the court, the clauses allowing the increases violated Italy's Consumer Code by failing to set out valid grounds for the hikes. The lawsuit was originally filed by Movimento Consumatori, a consumer rights organization based in Rome, whose president, Alessandro Mostaccio, said over 25,000 Netflix users had complained about the price increases.