Sony plans to dole out record bonuses to unionized employees, news site NHK Japan reports.

Sony expects to earn over $10 billion in net profits this year, and the company plans to share its record FY2021 profits with employees. According to recent reports, Sony will pay its unionized workers a bonus that's equivalent to 7-months salary. Unions had previously asked for a bonus worth roughly 6.9 months' of pay in negotiations with Sony.

According to a recent Form 20-F filed with the SEC, 13% of Sony's employees are members of labor unions. As of the end of 2020, Sony had 114,400 employees, so roughly 14,872 workers were unionized in the timeframe. NHK notes that this is the first time in 20 years that Sony has issued such a large bonus payout.

Digital Extremes reveals tons of new content coming to Warframe next month, including PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X optimizations.

Warframe's anticipated Update 30: Call of the Tempestarii will bring new content like the new Warframe Sevagoth and a few quests. Also coming with Update 30 is next-gen upgrades on PS5, Xbox Series X and Series S systems. Thanks to a new memory allocation thread tweak, and Sony's custom 12-channel PCIe 4.0 SSD, PS5 load times have been cut in half. It's all coming in April, the developer says.

"April is also our launch month for the next-generation Xbox build of Warframe. That will include Update 30. So if you play on Xbox Series X or S you will be, in April, receiving Update 30 and the next-gen build,"live ops and community director Rebecca Ford said in a new developer update (full video below).

Hideo Kojima's next game should be revealed soon, Kojima Productions art lead Yoji Shinkawa says. What could it be?

In a recent interview with AI Hub, Yoji Shinkawa says he's working on something new and that it could be announced in the coming months. "Well yeah, I am doing something, for sure, and I could tell you probably that we can announce it quite soon," said Shinkawa.

It's likely Shinkawa is referring to Hideo Kojima's next game. Yoji Shinkawa has worked on over a dozen Metal Gear Solid games in collaboration with Hideo Kojima, and was one of the first to follow Kojima when he left Konami in 2015. That was six years ago, and Shinkawa has been a part of Kojima Productions ever since.

I still remember owning a Nintendo Game Boy but I never thought I'd be writing an article explaining how someone has modded their Game Boy and is now crypto mining Bitcoin from it. Yes, you read that right -- this guy has modded his Game Boy and is mining Bitcoin on it for real -- check it out:

You can't just turn the Nintendo Game Boy on and start mining Bitcoin, as there is no internet connection -- so first, you'll need the Raspberry Pi Pico which acts as a link cable to USB adapter. This is plugged into a PC which gives the Nintendo Game Boy an internet connection which is required for cryptocurrency mining, or else you wouldn't be able to mine Bitcoin from your Game Boy, of course!

There are a few more steps required before you can get Bitcoin mining on your Game Boy, but when it does Nintendo's portable game console is capable of pumping out 0.8 hashes per second, which when compared to a current-gen ASIC miner which pumps out around 100 terahashes per second... the GameBoy is 125 trillion -- or 125,000,000,000,000x slower than the current-gen ASIC miner.

HTC designed the new Vive Facial Tracker accessory exclusively for the company's Vive Pro lineup of headsets. Still, as soon as reviewers and developers got their hands-on the hardware, they mounted the face tracker to all sorts of headsets. HTC quickly moved to support the VR community.

The Vive Facial Tracker is an exciting advancement in immersive gaming. The device tracks the movement of your mouth, cheeks, and tongue and the accompanying software maps those movements to your virtual avatar. When HTC revealed the Vive Facial Tracker, the company said it would only work with the Vive Pro. That, however, is only half true. The tracker will work with any device; it's just designed to attach to the Vive Pro's outer structure.

Several people have created custom mounting solutions to pair the tracker with headsets, such as the Oculus Quest 2 or the Valve Index. After seeing the VR community's ingenuity and their excitement for the facial tracker, HTC decided to release a 3D CAD file to help more enterprising creators design more effective mounting solutions.

We'd prefer HDR 4K and 8K videos for the extremely realistic visual experience. But without exception, many of us are deterred away by the large file size. This is not only a big challenge for our computers and smartphones, but also for online sharing and even for post video editing.

For example, a 5-min 4K 30fps video shot by iPhone takes up 1.75GB (850MB). Obviously, it is impossible to share this video via Facebook Massager or emails like Outlook, Gmail, and Yahoo Mail as it's much larger than the maximum supported size, 25MB. What's worse, with many large videos on your iPhone or laptop, you cannot download one more app and face annoying issues like quit, crash, and freeze.

And that's why we come to solve your problems with VideoProc, an all-in-one desktop program. But in the first place, I think you should know what factors are affecting the video file size.

Microsoft is eager to buy PC chat platform Discord and is currently in advanced acquisition discussions, sources tell The Wall Street Journal.

Microsoft could finalize a deal to purchase Discord as early as next month, sources tell WSJ. The deal could cost Microsoft over $10 billion, a substantial sum that re-affirms the company's commitment to gaming during a time of record-breaking industry earnings.

The Discord buyout follows Microsoft's recent acquisition of ZeniMax media and all of its studios and IPs for $7.5 billion, the second-largest games industry purchase in history. Microsoft will likely use Discord to power its Xbox party chat infrastructure and help better unify its cross-platform PC-and-console ecosystem.

aOver the past decade, Darby McDevitt has helped shape the stories of Assassin's Creed. Now he's moving on to a "new adventure."

As narrative lead at Ubisoft Montreal, Darby McDevitt has spent 10 years weaving historical fact with engaging fiction. McDevitt helped pen some of the most memorable games in the Assassin's Creed franchise; he was narrative director on Valhalla, and lead scriptwriter on Black Flag, and Revelations, helping create unique characters like Edward Kenway and Eivor Wolf-Kissed.

Now McDevitt is moving on. The dev recently announced his departure from Ubisoft Montreal on Twitter and said a new adventure awaits...but we don't know exactly what he's referring to. Given the pedigree of his past works, it's likely that McDevitt won't leave the games industry entirely.

This year's Call of Duty is called Vanguard and returns to the franchise's World War II roots, sources tell Eurogamer.

Activision has conscripted Sledgehammer Games to develop 2021's Call of Duty game, which will be set in World War II. Contrary to recent reports, the game won't follow an alternate history set in a 1950s timeline where WWII never ended. Instead, the game will be more traditional, sources tell Eurogamer's Wesley Yin-Poole.

Sledgehammer is being re-entrusted with the franchise after supporting Black Ops Cold War's development, and the news follows a substantial 100-worker expansion across its Australia- and California-based studios.

Back 4 Blood brings back Left 4 Dead's original Director game mode with a unique twist.

Turtle Rock's new zombie FPS gore-fest Back 4 Blood will make use of an evolved form of L4D's classic Director gametype. The mode is basically like a randomized Firefight map with weapons and enemies strewn throughout by an AI bot. Turtle Rock is making one big change by adding in some Magic The Gathering-style card mechanics.

There's two sides to Back 4 Blood's new Corruption Cards: Ones the director selects, and ones players use while fighting. Director cards are detrimental things like enemy spawn types and in-game challenge activities. Players, on the other hand, get to buff their team with handy bonuses like extra health, ammo, and other things.

Thomas Happ reveals more details on Axiom Verge 2 in the recent Future Games Show event.

The mystery of Axiom Verge 2 is slowly peeling away, and now we know the game is actually a prequel set before the original game. It's also a standalone experience that doesn't require players to beat (or even play) Axiom Verge 1.

"I eventually decided to break down the story of Axiom Verge into multiple parts, with multiple perspectives, each intended to be its own game," Happ said in the presentation.

Since Apex Legends' release, gamers have been wondering if titans from the Titanfall franchise will ever make it into EA's battle royale. Well, it might just happen.

Dataminer Biast12, who is known for finding Season 7's new legend Horizon before the release, has found something quite interesting in the game files. Biast12 posted what was found to Twitter, and as you can see from the above video, the new character Blisk has an ultimate called "Standby for Titanfall". Upon using the ultimate, the player can summon a titan from the Titanfall series to provide covering fire to an area.

Additionally, we also have gotten a look at Blisk's abilities, and from the provided screenshot that can be found below, we can learn that Blisk's passive is a Pilot Kit. This passive has been taken straight out of Titanfall and provides Blisk with the ability to hack Survey Beacons and also wall run. Blisk's tactical ability allows him to create a damaging zone that is powered by the arena's ring. It should be noted that none of these leaks have been confirmed by Respawn, so take them with a grain of salt.

Samsung has just announced it has made the world's first 512GB DDR5 memory module, using High-K Metal Gate (HKMG) process technology.

We have 7200Mbps speed here with the DDR5 module, double the performance of DDR4 -- all while using 13% less power. Samsung says its DDR5 has lower leakage, more performance, and it's not even the first time the company has worked with HKMG material. Samsung used HKMG process technology in its GDDR6 memory back in 2018.

Samsung's new 512GB DDR5 memory module is using through-silicon via (TSV) technology in order to stack 8 x 16Gb DRAM chips. Don't expect DDR5 in your gaming PC anytime soon, as the first destinations for this next generation technology for cloud-based datacenters, big networking systems, AI, supercomputers, machine learning, and more.

GameStop is about to step up and into the world of the PC hardware business, with the company announcing it would be expanding its reach and will begin selling graphics cards, gaming monitors and gaming TVs as well as the usual CPUs, motherboards, RAM, SSDs and everything else you need for a gaming PC.

The news comes directly from GameStop CEO George Sherman who said during their Tuesday earnings call that the company would be expanding its product offerings in a big way through PC hardware, saying: "This includes growing our product offerings across PC gaming, computers, monitors, game tables, mobile gaming, and gaming TVs to name only a few".

GameStop will be selling PC hardware and desktop PCs on its own dedicated page, but at the time of writing most of the products aren't available but I'm sure this will change as GameStop gets this all up and running. I don't think they'll have much graphics cards, well, I guess at all -- ever -- but we'll see how that goes over the next 6-12 months.

Sorry folks, MSI graphics cards are about to get more expensive -- and it'll be like that for most of 2021 and even into 2022 unfortunately -- and eventually (probably very soon) it'll be all of the other AIB partners making similar comments.

DigiTimes is reporting that MSI chairman Joseph Hsu said during an investors conference on March 23 that the demand for motherboards, graphics cards and gaming notebooks are "likely to stay robust for the rest of 2021 and each product line's shipments in 2021, after registering on-year increase between 30-50% in 2020, are expected to see double-digit growths again".

This isn't too much of a surprise given that we all know there are major GPU shortages worldwide, with even second hand prices getting out of control. It was only yesterday that I wrote that the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti was launching in May and not April, and that GPU yields were very low. NVIDIA and AMD are shipping very low amounts of GPUs to AIB partners like MSI, that are now feeling that pinch -- and so will consumers with MSI and other AIBs increasing their baseline prices.

GameStop is shrinking its board of directors from 13 members down to 9, and expects high-profile industry vets like Reggie Fils-Aime to retire.

In a recent Form 10-K SEC filing, GameStop outlined future plans to reduce its board of directors. It expects that eight current board members will retire during its 2021 annual meeting, including ex-Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime, who joined in 2020, as well as Board Chairperson Kathy Vrabeck.

Returnal, Housemarqe's new ultra-frenetic sci-fi shooter, is now 100% finalized and ready to ship.

Sony's latest PlayStation 5 console exclusive Returnal has gone gold and won't be delayed any further. Housemarque's latest AAA game uniquely blends the die-and-respawn mechanics of a rogue-lite with an arcade-style third-person shooter.

In fact, Housemarque says they're drawing on their substantial experience making arcade games for Returnal. Combat-wise, the game is flashy and chaotic like a typical Housemarque arcade shoot-em-up, and has a sense of Mass Effect Andromeda movement mixed with Dark Souls bossfights and bullet-hell evasion tactics.

Ghost of Tsushima is being made into a feature-length film, and John Wick director Chad Stahelski will direct it.

Sony Pictures and its newly-formed PlayStation Productions label will produce a live-action film based on Ghost of Tsushima, sources tell Deadline.

Chad Stahelski of John Wick fame will direct the adaptation, which will be centered around the bloody Mongolian invasions of 13th century China and subsequent clashes with samurai clans. 87Eleven Entertainment is set to produce the film, and Sucker Punch will be directly involved as executive producers on the film.

Want to cheat in Outriders? The devs will find out, and they'll mark you as a cheater so you never forget.

Outriders developer People Can Fly has a unique punishment for cheaters. They won't ban you, but they will potentially shame you among your peers. On Reddit, the developer said it will have a permanent watermark reminding you (and anyone else that sees your screen) that you've cheated.

"Any account logs found to have evidence of cheating on them on or after launch day will be permanently branded."

aAs a Castlevania fan, I get excited about anything that: scrolls sideways, has gothic architecture and a pixellated style, and incorporates the term "Metroidvania" in its description. Last night I came across The Last Faith, a new indie from Kumi Souls Games that checks all those boxes.

The Last Faith blends Symphony of the Night with the more intricate hack-and-slash timed combat from Dark Souls. Combat is slicey-and-dicey, there's a huge non-linear environment to explore complete with puzzles, hidden items, and lots of loot, and there's also tons of enemies to stab, shoot, or ignite with magical spells.

What sets The Last Faith apart is its "reactive combat system," which incorporates three separate types of dodges (a dodge that moves back, a roll-dodge, and even a dodge that slides underneath enemies and lets you sneak in an attack) alongside an expansive weapon list complete with unique movesets.