Microsoft's first-party game studios are happy about the decision to break exclusivity and start selling games on PlayStation, Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier says.

Last year, Xbox made the decision to break exclusivity and bring four games to PlayStation. This was a Pandora's Box moment, and soon it was confirmed that any Xbox game could cross-over to rival platforms. This move has proven to be popular for both executives and game developers, as Microsoft is making more money now than it ever has before--sometimes even dominating the PS Store's top charts.

Now in a recent interview with 404 Media, Bloomberg's Jason Schreier says that Xbox's first-party teams are excited about launching their games on PlayStation. After all, this means more revenue for individual studios, all of which balance their own books. Elated teams include Halo Studios, who recently confirmed that all future Halo games would come to PlayStation.

Assassin's Creed Shadows and Mirage both outperformed for Ubisoft in Q2, resulting in strong player engagement across the brand.

Ubisoft's latest Q2 results seem to dispel worries about Assassin's Creed Shadows' performance on the market. According to Ubisoft's CFO Frederick Duguet, Assassin's Creed Mirage doubled its player count throughout the period from 5 million to 10 million players. Duguet attributes this rise in players to Mirage's recent Valley of Memory update.

Combined with Assassin's Creed Shadows, gamers have played 211 million "session days" in the franchise throughout 2025. These metrics are more important for long-term goals, as playtime is a macro measurement that represents potential monetization as long as content can be sustained.

Kingbull's Black Friday 2025 sale is officially underway, offering riders a chance to upgrade their e-bike experience with some of the best prices of the year. From November 5 to December 5, enthusiasts can enjoy incredible savings across Kingbull's lineup of high-performance electric bikes. Whether you're looking for rugged off-road capabilities or practical city commuting, there's a Kingbull model to meet every rider's needs.

At the forefront of the lineup is the Hunter 2.0, now available at $799, with a $900 discount from its original price. This model is engineered for adventurers who value versatility and reliability. Its 750W motor provides strong, consistent power, paired with a 48V battery capable of handling up to 55 miles on a single charge. With 26x4.0" tires, a front suspension fork, and a 7-speed Shimano drivetrain, the Hunter 2.0 ensures comfort and control on varied terrain.

The Hunter 2.0 double set is priced at $1,348 and includes standard bundled gifts, making it an ideal choice for riders looking for a durable, ready-to-go e-bike. This model is also eligible for the additional $250 off when purchasing two bikes.

Ubisoft management says that big things are in the pipeline for future years, including a "significant" amount of content that will roll out through the next two years.

Ubisoft's latest financial report is out, giving a look at where the company currently is and where it's going. The French games-maker has closed its $1.3 billion investment deal with Tencent, and Ubisoft plans to use this funding to pay back debt and transform its games business. The biggest change is that Ubisoft is splitting up its games and divisions into Creative Houses, and the first will lead Ubisoft's three largest franchises--Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, and Rainbow Six.

In the earnings report, executives promise that some pretty substantial high-level games will release in FY27 and FY28, which means we'll see more high-profile AAA games in 2026 and 2027. The slate is potent enough that Ubisoft expects the games to help drive them to positive free cash flow throughout next year.

Sony's Black Friday offers on all its PS5 models are now live, and if you've been thinking about picking up a variant of the console, it might not be wise to pass up these deals.

The deals consist of $100 off all PS5 models, which means that the PS5 Pro is down from $749 to $649, and the PS5 Digital Edition is reduced from $499 to $399, with the PS5 disc model chopped from $549 to $449.

Are we likely to see a PS5 at $399 next year? That's somewhat doubtful, as there are unfortunate component headwinds with price hikes on memory - RAM and storage alike - which are very likely to push up pricing for all devices, consoles included.

Ubisoft is going all-in on generative AI and will use the technology to build new games and experiences in a paradigm shift that hearkens back to the late 90s days of 3D gaming, company CEO Yves Guillemot confirms.

In a recent earnings call, Ubisoft has confirmed that it will be using gen AI in future games and content. CEO Yves Guillemot is particularly evangelistic about gen AI, saying that all of Ubisoft's studios are using AI tools, and that gen AI is as transformational for the modern age of gaming as the monumental shift from console 2D sprites to 3D polygonal graphics in the late 90s.

"On the innovation side now, we are making great strides in applying gen AI to high-value use cases that bring tangible benefits to our players and teams. It's as big as a revolution on our industry as the shift to 3D, and we have everything to lead on this front," Guillemot said in the call.

Ubisoft is about to make some big organizational changes as it nears the completion of a substantial $1.3 billion deal with Tencent.

Armed with a mighty billion-dollar investment from Tencent, Ubisoft is ready to restructure its business. Tencent invested $1.3 billion into Ubisoft, acquiring a 25% stake in a new subsidiary called Vantage Studios. This deal is about to close, and a recent earnings report gives an update on what's next for its major brands.

Ubisoft will split its creative game-making organizational structure into what it calls Creative Houses. Each of these units will oversee various franchises. It's been confirmed that Vantage Studios is the first of these Creative Houses, which indicates that each house unit will not be limited to a single franchise. Vantage will be in creative control over all of Ubisoft's most valuable franchises--Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, and Rainbow Six Siege will be managed by the Vantage-led Creative House.

Ubisoft explains that an accounting error led to its 1HFY26 earnings being delayed by a few days.

A bit ago, Ubisoft made a confusing announcement to delay its half-year earnings report. Speculation ran rampant, with many believing that Ubisoft could have been acquired, perhaps by overseas giants like Saudi Arabia's Savvy Games Group or China's Tencent. Now it's been revealed that the first-half earnings report was pushed back because Ubisoft made a mistake in its books.

In its now-published first-half FY26 results, Ubisoft expands on exactly what happened. Basically, the company made an accounting error on their report, which was spotted by an auditor (an outside accounting firm) and then reported it. As per regulation, Ubisoft had to delay its 1H report and de-list its stock because it was found in non-compliance.

Samsung Display has reportedly abandoned development of its new glass-based micro-display for VR headsets "G-VR", which was intended to be used inside of Apple's purported Vision Air headset.

Samsung partnered with Apple to develop the glass-based micro-display (G-VR) for its Vision Air headset, with the technology based on a micro-OLED on a glass substrate, allowing for a cheaper Vision Air headset, versus its mega-expensive Vision Pro. However, in a new report from Dealsite, Apple has reportedly "scrapped its plans" and that it was Apple that reportedly told Samsung to stop development of its G-VR technology.

Apple's plans for its headsets has changed considerably over the year, after its not-so-great launch of the Vision Pro and its hefty $3499 price tag. Samsung has entered the chat with its new Galaxy XR headset, coming in at close to half the price of Apple's Vision Pro, with the Galaxy XR priced at just $1800 in comparison.

AMD's powerful Ryzen 7 9800X3D processor is now available at under MSRP pricing in the United States, dropping to $449 on Amazon in early Black Friday sales.

The AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D is an 8-core, 16-thread chip based on the Zen 5 architecture, with 96MB of L3 cache and second-generation 3D V-Cache, which when paired with any AM5 motherboard -- and some of them you can get for $100-$150 -- will give you some truly amazing CPU performance that doesn't require a 360mm AIO liquid cooler to keep thermals down.

The official price of the 9800X3D sits at $479, but with $30 off on Amazon right now it drops to $449 -- below its $479 MSRP. The $30 off deal won't last forever, so if you've been holding off on the 9800X3D... now might be your time. Pair this bad boy with a budget B850 chipset and 16/32GB of RAM and you've got a monster CPU + mobo + RAM upgrade on the (relatively) cheap.

Intel has secured TSMC's former Senior Vice President of Corporate Strategy Development, Wei-Jen Lo, in a shock move in the semiconductor industry, with the latest reports that Intel is now gunning for big US tech companies like NVIDIA, Tesla, Microsoft, and Qualcomm as new advanced packaging customers.

In a fresh report from DigiTimes, we're hearing that Intel will be relying on Wei-Jen Lo who has experience in both Intel and TSMC wafer manufacturing R&D and management, to handle orders from US clients at TSMC's new Arizona semiconductor fab and related advanced packaging work for Intel.

This move is expected to include orders from Microsoft and Tesla in the short term, and then NVIDIA and Qualcomm in the future, ensuring a "smooth transition between the front-end and back-end". Wei-Jen Lo's expertise in managing the wafer fab and equipment supply chain will be used to "rapidly" improve yields and efficiency for Intel Foundry.

Apple launched its new M5 iPad Pro last month, with a Russian YouTuber uploading an unboxing video ahead of the release, and now Apple has bricked the new iPad Pro, turning it into an expensive paperweight.

The new M5-powered iPad Pro was released in October, with the 13-inch iPad Pro spotted being used by YouTuber "Wylsacom" who ran benchmarks of the new M5-powered tablet to see the performance improvements over the M4 iPad Pro. The YouTuber noted around a 30% improvement overall, but we all know Apple doesn't like leaks... so they bricked the M5 iPad Pro once they found out who leaked the unboxing.

The new Apple M5 iPad Pro was sold in Russia ahead of its October release, but a post on Reddit from two days ago says that Apple bricked the unit, and it is pretty much an expensive cutting board now.

GMKtec has teased its new EVO-T2 Mini-PC at Intel's recent conference 2025 event in China, powered by the new Intel Panther Lake CPU with 12 Xe3 GPU cores.

The new GMKtec EVO-T2 Mini-PC had its spec sheet on display with some basic specs teased, listed with a Panther Lake-H processor (actually, it's spelled on the spec sheet "PatherLake" but whatever) with the chip fabbed on Intel's new in-house 18A process node, featuring 12 Xe3 GPU cores, and 128GB of LPDDR5X-10677 memory.

On the storage side the new EVO-T2 Mini-PC system has dual M.2 SSD slots with one of them wired to PCIe 5.0 and the other one wired for PCIe 4.0, with support for up to 16TB of SSD storage (hot damn). There are 3 x USB-A ports, 1 x USB-C port, and a 3.5mm combo audio jack which are all on the front, but we don't know the I/O for the rear of the PC.

NVIDIA has confirmed that one of the most recent Windows 11 security updates (KB5066835) for Windows 11 version 25H2 and 24H2 has caused performance to tank in some games when using a GeForce RTX graphics card. As one of those mandatory Windows updates, it's the latest in a long line of Microsoft releases that have caused unwanted issues.

The good news is that NVIDIA has released a Hotfix Driver that resolves the issue, so if you're one of those people who keep their Windows updated and have a GeForce RTX graphics card, be sure to download and install GeForce Hotfix Display Driver Version 581.94.

NVIDIA doesn't specify which games are affected, other than the information that this new Hotfix or Beta driver fixes the "Lower performance may be observed in some games after updating to Windows 11 October 2025 KB5066835" issue. However, per this X post by Sebastian Castellanos, it looks like Assassin's Creed Shadows is one of the games that saw performance take a hit.

This year, AMD released its mainstream RDNA 4 GPU in two flavors: 8GB and 16GB of VRAM. Naturally, the latter proved to be the model to get with 1080p gaming performance that's 53% faster than the previous-gen Radeon RX 7600 and 1440p performance that is around 61% faster. These impressive results are thanks to AMD's massive improvement to ray-tracing performance, which finally sees the company present a competitive alternative to GeForce RTX.

And on that front, the Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB is around 10% faster than the GeForce RTX 5060 while featuring double the VRAM. These results come from our review of the ASUS PRIME model from earlier this year, which is why this new Black Friday GPU Deal on the compact ASUS Dual Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB is worth checking out.

Available for $339.98 at Amazon, which represents 15% or $60 off its original $399.99 price tag, you're looking at a powerful mainstream gaming GPU with enough VRAM to give you peace of mind that it'll have no problem running all of the latest games on the horizon with decent settings, FSR 4, and even ray-tracing enabled.

We're in the process of reviewing ASRock's custom Radeon RX 9070 XT Monster Hunter Wilds Edition 16GB graphics card, created in collaboration with Capcom to celebrate the release of the latest open-world entry in the series. As a new model that represents AMD's flagship RDNA 4 gaming GPU, there's no doubt it's an impressive 1440p and 4K performer - as we've covered extensively in our GPU reviews this year.

However, in a sea of existing designs that have been around for a couple of generations, it's always great to see a custom design built for fans of one specific thing. The ASRock Radeon RX 9070 XT Monster Hunter Wilds Edition features a design inspired by one of the game's large, menacing monsters, Arkveld, also known as the 'White Wraith'. A large wyvern with greyish, almost ice-like scales, fur, and armor plating, Arkveld is the key big bad of Monster Hunter Wilds.

This means ASRock's custom design sports a unique icy grey and blue metallic look with the reinforced metal backplate sporting a large (and menacing) depiction of Arkveld. It's a premium design that also includes a reinforced metal frame, the company's latest Striped Ring Fans, a nickel-plated Copper Base, heatpipes with a high-density fin stack, and phase-change thermal pads.

Valve's new Steam Machine might be Microsoft's "worst nightmare" because it could lock the Xbox-maker into a very risky position.

To combat PlayStation's mighty lead over Xbox, Microsoft has reportedly put together a plan that leverages its strengths. The idea, as reports have it, is to combine Xbox and Windows in a seamless way and make the next gaming console into a PC. That way Microsoft could utilize the power and versatility of Windows 11, and its new AI toolsets, to generate engagement, revenue, and continued profit.

There's just one roadblock: Valve's new Steam Machine could end up eating Microsoft's lunch in this new PC frontier. The Steam Machine is a major contender to Microsoft's plans, and Valve already pretty much dominates the PC market with Steam. As a result, one analyst believes that Valve's small form factor PC could end up being Microsoft's so-called "nightmare."

Intel will officially introduce its next-generation Core Ultra 3 series "Panther Lake" CPUs at CES 2026 on January 5, after its initial tease in October 2025.

The new Intel Panther Lake CPUs are the first out of the fabs on its new in-house Intel 18A process node, with new P-Core and E-Core architectures, fresh next-gen Xe3 "Celestial" integrated graphics, a new 5th-generation NPU for AI workloads, and more.

Intel is also introducing a new naming scheme for its higher-end Panther Lake processors with the introduction of the "Core Ultra X" branding, with new chips ranging from the Core Ultra X9 388H down to the Core Ultra 5 322 processor. The higher-end Core Ultra X9 388H, Core Ultra 7 X368H, and Core Ultra 7 X358H processors will feature 12 Xe3 GPU cores, offering higher gaming performance than other Panther Lake CPUs that feature 10 Xe3 GPU cores, while most of the stack features just 4 Xe3 GPU cores.

NVIDIA has just posted its Q3 FY26 financial results, with the company pulling in a record $57 billion in revenue, and projecting to hit an even bigger $65 billion in Q4 FY2026.

During the earnings call, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said that the company is seeing "record-level" demand for Blackwell AI systems, adding: "Blackwell sales are off the charts, and cloud GPUs are sold out. Compute demand keeps accelerating and compounding across training and inference -- each growing exponentially. We've entered the virtuous cycle of AI. The AI ecosystem is scaling fast -- with more new foundation model makers, more AI startups, across more industries, and in more countries. AI is going everywhere, doing everything, all at once".

One of the big questions that NVIDIA was asked was for its upcoming quarters, and whether the company would meet the $500 billion projection that Jensen said recently at GTC Washington 2025.

The unfortunate user with an expensive, dead NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 card worth $10,000 has just had his card replaced by the company, as used PCIe boards enter the Chinese market.

Just a few days ago we reported that a user had sent NorthridgeFix a damaged NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 card, which had been damaged during transport as the user kept the $10,000 card installed into the PCIe slot in his motherboard, and the PCIe board snapped. The board isn't replaceable by NVIDIA and the company doesn't sell any spare boards, so $10K was flushed down the drain... until now.

That was just a few days ago, with NVIDIA reaching out to Northridge Fix saying: "we recently saw your video featuring the NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 GPU that a customer sent to you. We would like to provide a replacement unit to the customer. Also, if the original RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPU can be returned to us, we'd like our technical team to help inspect and troubleshoot".