Latest News - Page 1346

EA DICE will be kicking off the Battlefield 2042 technical playtest next week, with a "strict NDA" that will stop playtesters from sharing any gameplay videos or details about the game... but we now know the PC system requirements for the technical playtest.

The Battlefield 2042 technical playtest requires at a minimum: 8GB of RAM, Windows 10, and an AMD FX-8350 or Intel Core i5-6600K processor. GPU-wise you need an AMD Radeon RX 560 or GeForce GTX 1050 Ti graphics card with 4GB of VRAM and above.

But those are the minimum PC requirements, the recommended PC requirements are higher: 16GB of RAM, and an AMD Ryzen 5 3600 or Intel Core i7-4790 processor. GPU-wise, EA DICE recommends an AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT or GeForce RTX 2060 graphics card with 8GB of VRAM and above.

Activision's Q2 earnings outperformed expectations on the back of consistent player spending.

Activision just reported its best Q2 in the last ten years, with net revenues ($2.296 billion), operating income ($959 million), and net income ($876 million) all setting new decade highs. Player spending on in-game content was a major driver for earnings and Activision's Q2 continues riding the wave of spending surge driven by last year's pandemic.

In Q2 2021, Activision-Blizzard made $1.319 billion from in-game spending on DLC, add-ons, subscriptions, and microtransactions across key games like Candy Crush, Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, and Overwatch. In-game net bookings accounted for 68% of total net bookings ($1.9 billion). King made the lion's share of mTX revenues with an all-time record high of $635 million segment revenues, and King also had 255 million MAUs as compared to Activision's 127 million MAUs.

Sony confirms that it will ship 12.5 million more PlayStation 5 consoles from now until March 2022.

PS5 stock is about to increase through 2021 and beyond. Today during its Q1 FY21 earnings call, Sony CFO Hiroki Totoki confirms the company has secured enough semiconductor chips to meet its 14.8 million PS5 shipment target for the full year. Sony has shipped 2.3 million PS5s in Q1, leaving 12.5 million PS5 shipments for the rest of the year.

"The shortage of semiconductors have impacts in various areas and through various measures we have been taking some actions. For PS5, the console sales target for this year has been set and we have secured the number of chips necessary to achieve that. Regarding supply of semiconductors, we're not concerned," Totoki said.

EA confirms Battlefield is now a service instead of singular release, and that new games could come biannually.

EA now sees the Battlefield franchise as a service. Publisher CEO Andrew Wilson confirms that Battlefield 2042's online-only framework is the foundation of the future of the series, and that new Battlefield games could release every 2 years.

"That is our orientation," EA CEO Andrew Wilson said when asked about new Battlefield games releasing every 2 years.

Jedi Fallen Order 2 will be among EA's new Star Wars games, the publisher today confirmed.

In its Q1 FY2022 earnings call, EA CEO Andrew Wilson confirmed the publisher will continue making games in the Jedi Fallen Order franchise. In the call, Wilson attributes Q2's high net revenues to strong sales in Mass Effect Legendary Edition and also mentioned Jedi Fallen Order, which has successfully re-engaged users with a next-gen release.

"We will continue to invest in both of these franchises to grow our IP," Wilson said, referring to both Jedi Fallen Order and Mass Effect.

The PS5 only has 667GB of usable space, but owners will soon be able to expand internal storage with the same high-end SSDs used in PCs. But which one should you buy?

New data from The Verge reveals that gamers don't necessarily need to pick the most expensive SSD with crazy read/write speeds. Sony's official recommendations call for a PCIe 4.0 SSD that achieves at least 5.5GB/sec speeds, but testing shows that even slower drives like the XPG GAMMIX S50 Lite 1TB M.2 2280 SSD can work well in the system without many load speed discrepancies.

Meanwhile, OEMs have revealed official PlayStation 5 compatible SSDs like the Seagate FireCuda 530, which commands a 7.3GB/sec read speed matched with a premium $239 price for 1TB models. PS5 architect Mark Cerny also recommends the WD_BLACK SN850 2TB SSD which is as much as a PlayStation 5 console itself.

Activision-Blizzard has upwardly revised its total-year 2021 earnings forecast and now expects to earn a record-breaking $8.5 billion.

While a storm of controversy hangs over Activision, the company's earnings performance is doing better than ever. Activision-Blizzard's Q2 2021 results outperformed across every metric, raking in the best net revenues ($2.296 billion), operating income ($959 million), and net income ($876 million) in a second quarter period in the last 10 years. EPS also beat expectations with $1.12 per share.

Activision has now boosted its original full-year earnings predictions based on these results and now targets a whopping $8.515 billion for CY 2021, up $145 million from the previous forecast.

Activision-Blizzard is now facing two separate types of class-action lawsuits: One for sexual harassment and workplace discrimination, and another for securities fraud as a result of the ongoing controversy.

A total of five U.S.-based law firms are investigating Activision-Blizzard for securities fraud, and three of them have already filed lawsuits.

The firms include:

The PlayStation 4 is highly unlikely to ever beat the PS2's mighty hardware sales reign, but it's already beating the legacy titan's software sales.

Sony's latest financial report confirms PS4 sales are drying up quickly. In Q1 FY2021, the PS4 shipped 500,000 units, marking the first quarter that the console sold-in less than 1 million. Right now total PS4 shipments sit at 116.7 million, as compared to the PlayStation 2's mighty 155 million sales. The PS5 is already overlapping the PS4 at a rapid rate as the PS4 enters market saturation. It would take a miracle for the PS4 to beat the PS2's sales.

The PS2 isn't completely dominating, though. The PS4 is actually beating the PS2 quite handily in game sales.

The PlayStation 4 has shipped less than 1 million units for the first time in Sony's Q1 FY21 as the console reaches peak saturation.

Sony today announced Q1 FY2021 earnings and updated sales figures for PlayStation hardware. The results send a clear picture: The PS4 is on its way out, and fast. Sony shipped roughly 500,000 PS4s in Q1 as compared to 2.3 million PS5s.

The PlayStation 4 has now shipped 116.7 million units to date as per Sony's refreshed figures. On the next-gen front, Sony shipped 10.1 million PS5s to date, and recently reached 10 million console sales to make the PS5 the fastest-selling console in Sony's history (note: sell-in is shipments sent to retailers, and sold-through represents actual confirmed sales to consumers).

Activision-Blizzard reports the highest Q2 revenues, operating income, and net profit in the last ten years as it faces down scathing abuse and discrimination allegations.

While Blizzard is embroiled in a heated storm of controversy that's led to worker strikes and walk outs, the company broke records with its recent quarterly performance. Q2 2021 had the highest net revenue, operating income, and net income out of any other second quarter period in the last 10 years.

During calendar Q2'21, Activision-Blizzard made $876 million in profit on $2.296 billion in revenues, Income after operating expenses was $959 million, the best for a Q2 period in a decade. The results were driven by strong Call of Duty earnings from Warzone, Black Ops and CoD mobile, significant spikes in King earnings with a record-breaking $635 million in revenues, and continued purchases and recurring subscriptions from World of Warcraft.

Last week the Russian module Nauka arrived at the International Space Station, but after it docked with the floating laboratory, it knocked it off normal orbit path.

When Nauka arrived at the ISS, it began the docking process, but its thrusters continued to fire after it had docked, which resulted in the entire station being pushed off course. Initially, NASA said that the incident caused the ISS to be pushed "45 degrees out of attitude" and that the crew was completely safe.

However, Zebulon Scoville, the Nasa flight director who was leading mission control during the incident, told The New York Times that the space station actually "spun one-and-a-half revolutions - about 540 degrees - before coming to a stop upside down". Scoville added that the ISS then did a forward flip to get itself back into its original orientation. On top of that, Scoville said that he was forced into declaring his very first "spacecraft emergency" due to the incident.

The United Kingdom's Navy has warned of a "potential hijack" of an oil tanker located off the coast of the United Arab Emirates.

According to the warning from the British navy, an oil tanker boat located off the coast of the United Arab Emirates in the Gulf of Oman was potentially hijacked as the British military's United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations warned on Tuesday that "an incident was currently underway", and that the incident was a "potential hijack".

The oil tanker is located around 60 miles off the coast of Fujairah, and according to a report from Sky News, a group of nine individuals is suspected of boarding the vessel Asphalt Princess. A security source close to the matter said, "It was an unauthorized boarding in the Gulf of Oman". Iran has denied involvement and according to Saeed Khatibzadeh, a Foreign Ministry spokesperson who spoke about the matter to Iran's state-run media, the attacks in the region were "completely suspicious".

A new interactive tool has been published online that allows you to see where your house would be when dinosaurs walked the Earth millions of years ago.

The tool has been created by California paleontologist Ian Webster who spoke to CNN and said that the map shows "that our environment is dynamic and can change". For those that don't know, the seven continents that we know of today weren't always separated as they are now. Around 240 million years ago, all of the continents were together and formed one large landmass called Pangea.

As time went on, Pangea broke apart to form the continents we know today. According to Webster, "The history of Earth is longer than we can conceive, and the current arrangement of plate tectonics and continents is an accident of time. It will be very different in the future, and Earth may outlast us all." The interactive map Webster created allows users to enter their home addresses to see where their location would be up to 750 million years ago. Check out the tool here.

A landmass that once connected Britain to the continent of Europe has been pieced together by a team of archaeologists.

The landmass that was swallowed by a tsunami more than 8,200 years ago is called Doggerland, and now a team of archaeologists inspecting the area along the Dutch coastline has gathered enough data to piece together what Doggerland looked it.

According to a report from The Guardian, more than 200 objects from Doggerland were discovered by archaeologists, and those objects included things such as a deer bone that had an arrowhead embedded in it, fossils, mammoth molars, and a skull fragment from a young Neanderthal.

The Pentagon is using an experimental artificial intelligence program that allows it to see "days in advance" and look into the future.

The new experimental program is called the Global Information Dominance Experiments (GIDE), and it combines artificial intelligence with cloud computing and large data pools. The newest version of GIDE is GIDE 3, and according to General Glen VanHerck, the commander of the US Northern Command, the idea behind the new program is to "achieve information dominance" and "decision making superiority".

VanHerck stated to the press conference that the Pentagon is currently living in a "reactive environment" where it will respond to rival nations' actions. Now, VanHerck says, "What we've seen is the ability to get way further what I call left of being reactive to actually being proactive. And I'm talking not minutes and hours, I'm talking days."

Astronomers find peculiar-looking things in the cosmos all the time, even to the point where a collection of the most strange wonders of the cosmos is compiled into a book for viewing pleasure.

The Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies is a catalog by Halton Arp, and it's comprised of a collection of all of the strangest galaxies found. The Atlas was assembled in the early 1960s, and since then, astronomers have been finding more and more of these weird and wonderful galaxies. Our window to the universe, or more commonly named the Hubble Space Telescope, has been snapping images of these galaxies for the past 31 years.

Above is an image that was taken by Hubble, and it's of the galaxy Arp 195. As you can see, the galaxy is all warped and distorted, but why? Arp 195 is caught, literally, in a cosmic game of gravitational tug-of-war. Arp 195 isn't a single galaxy - it's actually a trio of galaxies all slowly colliding with each other. This slow collision and the gravity from each of the galaxies is causing what would be normal-looking spiral galaxies to become distorted.

A national park in Alaska has posted a very cool video of a "flying saucer" hovering above the water in a picturesque landscape.

The video was posted to the Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve Facebook page, and if you are already jumping to conclusions about it beings aliens or extraterrestrial origin, you would be wrong as this "sighting" can be easily explained. The Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve Facebook page post explains that what is caught on video here is called Fata Morgana, an optical illusion that is seen within a narrow band on Earth's horizon.

The Facebook page explains, "Islands in glacier bay turn to UFOs or the flying Dutchman with a little imagination and a pinch of cool science! When air of different densities meet, the air in Earth's atmosphere acts as a refracting lens, creating the mirage effect we see. Cool, calm air often forms at the water's surface- then, if warm dense air pushes down on the cool air at the surface, a lens is created. This phenomenon occurred on a warm day (70F+) in Glacier Bay, but is not exclusive to summer months."

A massive meteor is slated to pass dangerously close to Earth this month, and according to researchers, you will be able to spot it if you have the right equipment.

The asteroid is named 2016 AJ193, and according to reports, it's estimated to be just under a mile in diameter and is traveling at a ridiculous 58,538 miles per hour. NASA has dubbed the asteroid "possibly dangerous". However, EarthSky has said that the asteroid won't impact Earth. 2016 AJ193 was identified back in 2016 by astronomers using the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System at the Haleakala Observatory in Hawaii.

2016 AJ193 barely completes one orbit of the sun every six years, and according to NatureWorldNews, the asteroid won't pass by Earth for another 65 years. If you are interested in checking out the asteroid for yourself, you will need an amateur-level telescope and be stationed outside on August 23 around 11:10 a.m. If you are interested in reading more about this asteroid, check out this link here.

You'll need a bucket of salt for this one, but Intel's next-gen series of CPUs has been leaked out on Reddit... and quickly deleted... but the internet being the internet means nothing is ever deleted.

Anyway, we're now hearing about Intel's next-gen Arrow Lake, Lunar Lake, and Nova Lake CPU architectures that will drop in 2023, 2024, and 2025, respectively. Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake will reportedly use Lion Cove high-performance "big" cores and Skymont high-efficiency "small" cores.

Arrow Lake CPUs should have 8 big cores and 32 small cores, for a total of 40 cores... doubling the core count over Raptor Lake, which will have double the core count of Alder Lake (8+8 with Alder Lake, 8+16 with Raptor Lake, and 8+32 with Arrow Lake).