While EA, Ubisoft, and Microsoft all tout artificial intelligence, Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser has a more down-to-earth assessment of the new technology.

AI is all the rage right now. We've seen major video game companies invest billions into artificial intelligence in the hopes of streamlining content production and eliminating wasteful spending. Almost every video games company in existence has laid off workers while simultaneously embracing AI, some in the tune of thousands of job eliminations. But one pretty high-ranking games industry creative isn't convinced that AI will be the savior of the games industry that it's hyped up to be.

Rockstar Games co-founder Dan Houser was recently on Channel 4's Sunday Brunch show, and he had some interesting things to say about what AI can and can't do.

Valve wants to deliver a Steam Deck successor that has next-gen performance with current-gen battery life.

The Steam Deck 2 will happen at some point, but for now Valve says the technology to do what they want simply doesn't exist yet. The priorities remain the same for a new Steam Deck handheld with a careful balance between capability and longevity. Valve aims to deliver higher-end performance and power befit of a next-generation machine with a similar power and battery profile to Steam Deck OLED.

In a recent interview with Skill Up, Valve designer Lawrence Yang and software engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais briefly discuss what kinds of hurdles they're navigating while thinking about the Steam Deck 2. Essentially, the chip technology doesn't exist yet, but Valve is carefully watching the market and assessing the needs of the Steam community.

Valve is open to a Steam Machine Pro in the future, but the company has more than enough on its plate with the current hardware spec.

The Steam Machine isn't an enthusiast device. Valve is instead targeting the mid-range user who wants a more complete package that delivers plug-and-play compatibility, kind of like a console. Price will determine whether or not it becomes a mass-market machine, and right now RAM costs are through the roof. Given Valve's focus, and the current market trends, a higher-spec Steam Machine Pro may not happen for a while--if at all. But Valve is still receptive to the idea of beefier Steam Machines, maybe even from third-party OEMs.

"Potentially yeah, I think we're open to anything," Valve software engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais said in a recent interview with Skill Up. "For now we're focusing on this level of spec because we think it's a good trade-off between affordability and the level of power that we get."

The world's largest tech companies are embracing AI in the hope of streamlining workflows and eliminating waste, but the move might be backfiring for the games industry.

Just days ago, Ubisoft confirmed that generative AI is now being used organization-wide, with every office and development team incorporating gen AI. The entire tech sector is betting big on AI, especially in gaming. Microsoft created gen AI tools like MUSE that eliminate the need for game dev coding, and EA is creating a ChatGPT-like chatbotthat can change gameplay in real time.

The widespread use of AI comes with some drawbacks and growing pains, though. Recent reports say AI is causing problems for EA, leading to extra work as developers have to come in and clean up critical mistakes made by the tech. Despite the presentations and assurances, dev teams aren't really showing how AI is used in their games, perhaps to avoid controversy. Or perhaps, as Bloomberg's Jason Schreier suggests, AI is causing more harm than good for game developers.

Valve is making around $50 million per employee based on recent data which sees the company making an incredible $16.2 billion in revenue from its Steam platform alone this year so far, and should easily tip over $17-18 billion by the end of 2025.

This data comes from a recent report from Alinea Analytics, with Valve itself making over $4 billion this year from Steam itself, while each of the 350+ employees of the company creating $50 million each for Valve. We must remember that Valve is a private company, so we don't know exactly how many people work for the company, nor do we know their exact revenues and profits.

If we compare these numbers to the likes of Apple which reportedly makes around $2.4 million per employee, and Facebook parent company, Meta, which makes $1.9 million per year, it's an impressive feat for Valve. Valve knows about this, where back in 2012 the company made its "Handbook for New Employees" available, where it stated: "Our profitability per employee is higher than that of Google or Amazon or Microsoft, and we believe strongly that the right thing to do in that case is to put a maximum amount of money back into each employee's pocket".

In the ever-growing digital age, power is becoming a necessity, especially as portable gaming devices are making their way into millions of people's hands every year.

While smartphone batteries have reached a point where a general user can typically get a full day on their smartphone without it going flat, some users are experiencing battery degradation, resulting in their device going flat or, at the very least, running extremely low sometime during the day. When that happens, it's good to have a portable power bank on hand, especially one with fast-charge capabilities.

Genki sent out their Energy Pack, designed to be the solution for both smartphones and gaming handheld devices. It features 30W fast charging and a 10,000 mAh battery. The Energy Pack is compatible with any Qi2 wireless charging device and comes with a digital dashboard for real-time energy transfer monitoring. The screen displays the power bank's current capacity and the charging or discharging rate.

Intel's next-generation Xeon "Diamond Rapids" CPUs will be supported on its next-gen "Johnson City" reference platform, spotted inside of a new NBD shipping manifest.

The shipment log teases the "JNC" server board hardware with a label of "Validation Material", with JNC standing for Johnson City, a reference platform being used by Intel and its partners to test performance, capabilities, and features of the next-gen Xeon "Diamond Rapids" processors on next-gen platforms.

We don't know much from these new details other than two listings referring to "1SPC 500 DMR" which could be a 500W TDP range for Diamond Rapids CPUs, while the other lists a higher 650W TDP. In a separate listing, the JNC Multi-S platform is teased, numbered "2+1+1S" with 1S referring to a single-socket setup, but it could easily be a label for a multi-socket, or even multi-chiplet Diamond Rapids configuration.

Intel's new W890 platform details have leaked, created to design the company's Xeon "Granite Rapids" workstation CPUs, offering up to 86 cores and 172 threads of processing power.

The new Intel Xeon "Granite Rapids" CPUs will use the E2 Socket (LGA 4710) that will come in both Expert and Mainstream segments, supporting Granite Rapids CPUs with up to 350W TDPs and up to 16 P-Cores. On the memory side, it supports both standard DDR5 DIMMs and RDIMMs, with RDIMM support with up to 5200 MT/s speeds and up to 2TB RAM capacity.

On the PCIe lanes side of things, the Expert CPUs feature up to 112 PCIe lanes (96 x Gen5 lanes and 16 x Gen4 lanes), while the Mainstream platform supports up to 80 PCIe Gen5 lanes but lacks Gen4 lanes completely. The CPUs are connected to the W890 chipset using a Gen4 x 8 lane DMI interface, while the PCB is also packed with features.

SK hynix is one of the largest DRAM manufacturers on the planet, and while it has invested tens of billions of dollars on its semiconductor prowess, the South Korean memory giant is set to increase DRAM production by a factor of 8x in the near future due to DRAM shortages and skyrocketing prices on every product with DRAM inside of it.

In a new report published by Korean media outlet Hankyung, SK hynix has plans to increase its DRAM production capacity by more than 8x by 2026, in order to meet the demand of CSPs and companies like NVIDIA and AMD, which both make graphics cards and AI GPUs, both using more and more of the most advanced DRAM on the planet with HBM4 onwards, and GDDR7 onwards.

This falls in line with rumors that we wrote about back in June 2024, that there was a coming DRAM memory shortage, as manufacturers were pushing all-in on HBM production for HBM memory. Then just this September 2025, NVIDIA reportedly asked Samsung to double its GDDR7 production, ready for its new B40 AI GPU for China.

We know most of what we need to know about Valve's upcoming Steam Machine, but we're missing one key detail: its price, especially with suggestions that it'll cost $499... and there is NO subsidizing its price and Valve selling its new Steam Machine at a loss, says Valve.

Valve has now confirmed that it will not be subsidizing the Steam Machine, unlike many generations ago where Microsoft and Sony heavily subsidized -- sold at a loss -- for their consoles, even if the real money for Valve is in games on Steam being sold.

There have been rumors from LinusTechTips commenting to Valve that the Steam Machine could be priced at $499, but said that the "energy wasn't great" when he said that. In earlier interviews with Wccftech, Valve Hardware Engineer, Yazan Aldehayyat, said that the Steam Machine pricing would be "really competitive" to the price of building your own PC at home.

Lines of communication briefly became crossed, leading to rumblings that Naughty Dog's new game could launch sometime in 2026. But that's not the case, and Sony has no plans to release the game next year, Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier says.

Despite recent social media buzz, Naughty Dog's new third-person action game Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet won't release in 2026, and it won't be shown off at The Game Awards. The confusion stems from a recent episode of the Dan Allen Gaming podcast, where PlayStation-centric reporter and personality Colin Moriarty speculated about Intergalactic's release date. Despite his saying "I think" multiple times, fans mistook Moriarty's speculation for actual info, and the rumor mill starting belting out erroneous reports.

Now it's been clarified by Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier that these manufactured reports are false. "I can assure you that Intergalactic isn't coming out in 2026 because people familiar with the game's development timeline have told me that it is not coming out in 2026," Schreier said on Reddit, then adding: "The game is not scheduled to come out in 2026."

Dell is now offering AMD Ryzen 9000X3D processors inside of new configurations of its Alienware Area-51 desktop gaming PC, which launched with Intel Core Ultra 200 series CPUs earlier this year at CES 2025.

AMD versions of the Alienware Area-51 system weren't offered until today, with new Area-51 systems using an Alienware X870E motherboard and either the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D (8C/16T) or Ryzen 9 9950X3D (16C/32T) processors, providing even more gaming and multi-threaded performance over the flagship Area-51 system and its Intel Core Ultra 9 285K processor.

The overall design of the new AMD-powered Alienware Area-51 gaming PCs isn't changed, with a positive pressure cooling system consisting of dual 140mm fans, dual 180mm fans, and up to three 120mm intake fans. The cool air inside of the system is pushed towards the CPU and GPU, with warm air blowing out of the passive rear exhaust.

Valve says it is working closely with developers to get anti-cheat solutions on the Steam Machine, but ultimately it will be up to the individual third-party teams to make it happen.

The lack of anti-cheat support is one of the biggest disadvantages of the Steam Machine. Not being able to play big online games like Call of Duty or Battlefield 6 on the Steam Machine will inhibit its mass-market appeal and impact sales potential. Valve is hopeful that developers and publishers will opt to build their anti-cheat systems on SteamOS, but there's no guarantee. That's not stopping Valve from trying to accelerate the process from the backend, though.

In a recent interview with SkillUp, Valve engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais gives an update on the current status of how anti-cheat will work on Steam Machine.

The Steam Machine was mostly inspired by gamers who hooked up their Steam Decks to TV sets, showing an interesting hardware innovation crossover.

While Nintendo created consoles first, handhelds, second, and then finally a unified handheld-console, Valve's own hardware journey has been a bit different. Valve tried Steam Machines in 2015, which failed due to lack of content. Then Valve pushed the Steam Deck, leading to major learnings, and now 10 years later after their first introduction, the Steam Machine is back in the limelight.

This time around, Valve has taken everything it's learned from the Steam Deck, most notably the significant SteamOS advancements and Deck Verified software spec. The current Steam Machine was ultimately informed by a specific part of the Steam Deck userbase--those that ended up using their Decks as makeshift PC consoles.

Intel will officially launch its new Core Ultra 3 series "Panther Lake" CPUs at CES 2026 on January 5, but before that we've got a new leak and some early testing of a 10-core Panther Lake "ES" processor with 16GB LPDDR5X memory, and tested with up to 65W PL2 rating.

A new post with a bunch of juicy pictures and early tests from leaker @YuuKi_AnS on X shows an early engineering sample of Intel's new Panther Lake CPU, with some early silicon on the PTL 16C/4Xe3 die configuration. We have four tiles and a filler tile on the SoC, with the package base around a BGA 2540 socket configuration, with this specific CPU featuring a "000C06C0" device ID.

The test platform used was the Intel RVP (Reference Evaluation Platform) that supports both LPCAMM2 and standard LPDDR5X memory configurations, with this particular ES processor featuring 16GB of LPDDR5X memory that is assembled using an ADL-P "Alder Lake" frame. There are four SK hynix "H58G56BK8BX068-418A" DRAM modules with a rated speed of 7467MHz.

LPDDR6 prices are set to be much higher than anticipated, with rumors swirling that Qualcomm and MediaTek will be the only ones with flagship chipsets in the future that feature the next-gen LPDDR6 memory standard.

In a new post by leaker Digital Chat Station on the Weibo forums, we'll only see "Pro-level" chipsets with next-gen LPDDR6 RAM in 2026, and that Chinese memory manufacturers are preparing for mass production of LPDDR6 memory next year, which should give Qualcomm and MediaTek some leverage when it comes to pricing for their next-gen Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and Dimensity 9600 processors, respectively.

Digital Chat Station wrote: "industry forecasts suggest that memory price increases may ease in 2027, with the latest LPDDR6 standard expected to see significant price hikes next year, likely only appearing in Pro-level flagship processors like the Dimensity 9600 and Snapdragon 8E6".

ASML has just opened up its first training facility on US soil, with the new facility in Phoenix, Arizona, set to train thousands of engineers on how to use their industry-leading EUV machines.

Right now, US semiconductor investments are growing by the week with the likes of TSMC opening up semiconductor facilities in Phoenix, Arizona, as well as Intel and Samsung with their foundry operations on US soil. However, there aren't enough US-based workers in the R&D divisions of these companies to get them trained up on how to use ASML's leading High-NA EUV lithography machines.

In a new report from Reuters, the outlet reports that the Netherlands-based company is opening a technical training center in Arizona, which will be training over 1000 engineers each year, and will become one of the core tenets of the US semiconductor industry.

Intel's next-gen Panther Lake CPUs will be launching at CES 2026 in January, rocking new Xe3-based Arc B390 integrated GPUs, and now we've got some very early performance metrics leaks.

In a new post on X by leaker @OneRaichu, we're hearing that the Xe3-based Arc B390 is scoring over 7000 points in graphics run of 3DMark TimeSpy, meaning it doubles the Xe2-based Intel Arc 140T on Lunar Lake, and easily doubles the RDNA 3.5-based Radeon 890M on the AMD Strix Point APU.

This is just a synthetic benchmark and not indicative of gaming performance, but we should expect some good gaming performance out of Panther Lake CPUs. Intel has promised that its new Arc GPUs with 12 Xe3 GPU cores will deliver "more than 50% faster graphics performance vs. the previous generation", so these leaked 3DMark scores are on the right track.

Estimates from analyst firm GSD indicate that launch sales of Black Ops 7 have been halved in Europe.

European consumers are buying far fewer copies of Activision's latest Call of Duty game. According to GSD data that was shared with The Games Business, sales of Call of Duty Black Ops 7 are down roughly 50% compared to last year's Black Ops 6. It's worth mentioning that at one point, a Microsoft employee described Black Ops 6 as the highest-grossing Call of Duty game from Activision. This was later removed, however Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella had said that Black Ops 6 was "the biggest Call of Duty release ever."

Black Ops 7 is a different story, at least in Europe. According to the data, Black Ops 7's full game sales are down when compared to both previous Call of Duty games as well as major competitors like Battlefield 6. Estimates indicate Black Ops 7 sold 63% fewer copies than Battlefield 6 in Europe (side note: EA has confirmed that Battlefield 6 sold 7 million copies globally in 3 days).

ASUS has a custom 800W XOS BIOS that it made for its flagship ROG Matrix GeForce RTX 5090, but now it has been flashed onto other non-ASUS RTX 5090 cards with some huge GPU boost clocks.

This has been achieved previously through shunt-modding, but that is a much more serious process as it requires physical hardware changes to the PCB. ASUS unveiled its new ROG Matrix GeForce RTX 5090 in August, with a high-end custom PCB design, but one of the biggest selling points was its huge 800W XOC BIOS, paving the way for 323MHz+ boost clocks over stock.

ASUS charges over $4000+ for its ROG Matrix RTX 5090, but now if you have a non-ROG Matrix RTX 5090, you can flash the monster 800W XOC BIOS (you can download it here) and enjoy the higher power limit it allows, and the higher GPU boost clock speeds.