Latest News - Page 1423

Yaw VR launched a Kickstarter campaign earlier this week for its Yaw2 home motion simulation seat, and it already secured nearly ten times its backing goal. Yaw VR expects to ship the first unit to backers in September.

Three years ago, Yaw VR ran a successful Kickstarter campaign for its first motion cockpit, the Yaw VR, which was pretty much a bowl with a seat it in that rotates along with the input of your VR game. The Yaw 2 accomplishes the same motion with a much more impressive-looking setup.

The Yaw2 features a racing-seat-style gaming chair on a motorized platform that mimics the motion of the games you play. The Yaw2 supports 70-degrees of pitch motion and 40-degrees of roll motion. Yaw VR also offers an optional attachment called the Yaw Platform, which adds 360-degree rotation to the package.

GameStop finished its recent share offering and generated a ton of revenue to spend on its new e-commerce transformation.

GameStop's new at-the-market share offering was a big success. The company sold 3.5 million common stock and raised $551 million before fees, commissions, and expenses, which is almost twice as much as the long-term debt that GameStop owes.

The firm will use a portion of the funds to replenish its coffers after wiping out its long-term debt. GameStop announced the senior note redemption earlier this month, and secured a healthy influx of capital with the share offering. GameStop now has no long-term debts.

PlayStation 4 console total cumulative shipments reach 116.1 million, but last year was the system's worst-performing period in history.

Sony is celebrating big news today. The games division made $3.23 billion in profit on $25.04 billion revenues in FY2020, more money than it ever has before, The PS5 has shipped 7.8 million units to date, slightly beating the PS4 by some 200,000 consoles.

Despite the celebrations, the PS4 was the low point in Sony's books. PS4 console shipments are down 56% as the install base hits a 116.1 million peak. In FY2020, Sony shipped only 5.8 million PS4 consoles compared to the 13.4 million it shipped in FY2019. Every quarter in FY20 was a new all-time shipment low for the PS4.

Sony's next-gen PlayStation 5 has slightly outsold the PS4 at launch as console demand soars.

The PS5 has sold-in (shipped) 7.8 million units in Q3-Q4, Sony reveals, which is about 200,000 more units than its predecessor. Comparatively, Sony had shipped 7.6 million PS4s through Q3-Q4 FY2013. Sony expects to sell over 14.8 million PlayStation 5 consoles in FY2021, company CFO Hiroki Totoki reveals.

The company made 517.1 billion yen (roughly $4.9 billion) from PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 hardware sales in FY2020, roughly 12% of total gaming earnings.

Sales for Monster Hunter Rise keep rising, and Capcom reports the game has now hit over 6 million sales.

Despite only releasing on the Nintendo Switch, Capcom's latest Monster Hunter game is selling incredibly well. At 6 million sales, MonHun Rise game has already surpassed other modern Capcom games like Street Fighter V (5.2 million) and is eyeing Street Fighter II (6.3 million).

Monster Hunter Rise managed to jump by 2 million copies--as of Q3'20 the game had sold 4 million copies, and now it's breaking 6 million. The sales milestone marks yet another achievement for Capcom's string of record-breaking earnings and its FY2021 period should be no different. The company is already making major strides into the new fiscal year with heavy-hitters like Resident Evil Village, which is slated to release in early May.

Xbox has made record revenues for three quarters in a row, and FY2021 will set a new high watermark for the gaming division.

Microsoft today announced its results for Q3'21 (Jan - March 2021) and confirmed another quarter of consistent Xbox growth. The games segment generated a whopping $3.533 billion in Q3'21, up a substantial $1.2 billion (+50%) over Q3'20. The growth driven by hardware, which was up +232% thanks to Xbox Series X/S sales, and Game Pass services/game sales which increased by $739 million (+34%) year-over-year.

Between Q1-Q3 FY2021, Xbox gaming has made more money than any other full year of earnings. With one quarter to spare, Xbox pulled in $11.657 billion in total Q1-Q3 revenues. The second-highest point was FY2020 with $11.575 billion.

Samsung has said that the global chip shortage is most likely going to affect TV production, holding meetings with Taiwanese chip manufacturers "reciprocal conclusion for this year and next year".

Han Jong-hee, head of visual display business at Samsung Electronics told reporters recently: "the industry in general is facing a severe supply shortage" and that if the shortage continues, Samsung "may not be able to produce TVs" adding that the company is "doing all we can to prevent problems".

The latest reports suggest Han has flown into Taiwan and met with local chipmakers including MediaTek and Novatek, both of which make chip components including driver integrated circuits that are used in Samsung TVs. Even amongst the chip shortage, Han is still confident in Samsung's new Micro LED TVs that were released last month.

Apple's next-gen M2 chip has reportedly entered production, with the new M2 processor set to power the next-gen Apple MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops planned for later this year.

The new Apple M2 system-on-a-chip will be made by TSMC and should be on its new 5nm+ process, which is a performance-enhanced version of the 5nm process that the M1 was made on. Apple's new M2 chip will have improved performance and power efficiency over its predecessor.

Apple is expected to use the next-gen M2 chip inside of its future MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops that will be unveiled later this year, a move that will see it pushing away from relying on Intel for its CPUs inside of its popular and high-end MacBook and MacBook Pro lines.

AMD has some rather impressive power consumption improvements in its new Radeon Software Adrenalin 21.4.1 drivers, with the Radeon RX 6800, Radeon RX 6800 XT and Radeon RX 6900 XT all seeing great reductions with idle and media playback power consumption.

The new Radeon Software Adrenalin 21.4.1 drivers include a bunch of new tricks, including a new version of AMD Link software that can be installed onto your PC and lets you stream up to 4K 144Hz content from your RDNA 2-powered Radeon RX 6000 series GPU to an ultra-low-power notebook, tablet, or smartphone.

But then TechPowerUp noticed some impressive power consumption improvements on the higher-end RDNA 2-based Radeon RX 6000 series graphic cards -- where with idle power and media playback the power consumption has been improved greatly over the March 21.3.2 drivers. We're looking at ~50W of power consumption with media playback on the Radeon RX 6800, Radeon RX 6800 XT and just over 50W power usage on the Radeon RX 6900 XT -- reduced to around ~35W.

Tesla has announced a record quarterly profit for Q1 2021 even in the middle of the on-going pandemic, with $10.39 billion in revenue and $438 million in profit for the three-month period.

The electric car giant has been hit with supply issues, safety investigations after a fatal crash in Texas, the COVID-19 pandemic, Elon Musk and his manic tweets and soon -- and appearance on Saturday Night Live where Musk seems to be ready to see "just how live Saturday Night Live really is".

Technoking of Tesla, Elon Musk, said during the investors call on Monday: "We've seen a real shift in customer perception of electric vehicles, and our demand is the best we've ever seen". Musk added that Tesla has sold 184,800 Model 3 and Model Y electric vehicles, both beating expectations and setting new records for the company. Tesla didn't make any higher-end Model S or Model X vehicles for Q1 2021 -- instead, delivering 2020 Model S and Model X cars from its existing inventory.

AMD currently has its Zen 3 architecture powering its Ryzen 5000 series CPUs and while the Zen 4 architecture is in the oven, the Zen 5 architecture is right behind it and now we have some juicy new rumors about AMD's next-next-gen Zen 5 APUs.

The next-next-gen AMD Zen 5 APUs are reportedly codenamed "Strix Point" -- with no affiliation to ASUS that I'm aware of -- which will be made on TSMC's new 5nm process and rock next-gen DDR5 memory support. The new codenamed Strix Point APUs would use the AMD Zen 5 architecture and will fill out the Ryzen 8000 series of CPUs in 2024.

Moepc has the scoop here, explaining: "Zen 5 APU "Strix Point" belongs to Ryzen 8000 series (at the time of writing), and it will adopt big.LITTLE like Intel's Alder Lake and Raptor Lake, with 8 big Zen 5 cores and 4 little cores. It's scheduled to be launched in 2024".

Asgard is teasing some gigantic, super-fast next-gen DDR5 memory kits for 2022 -- with some plans for its new DDR5 memory kits teased all the way through to 128GB DDR5 kits.

Jiahe Jinwei's own gaming brand is Asgard, which has received their first Micron DDR5 memory chips for trial mass production. The Chinese memory manufacturer has confirmed it has successfully completed those tests, and is ready to begin planning next-gen DDR5 kits of memory.

The company is already pumping out 16GB and 32GB kits of DDR5 memory at speeds of up to 4800MHz, the standard speed for DDR5 -- but we're seeing 8400MHz speeds, 10,000MHz+ speeds, and now gigantic 128GB kits of DDR5 memory at 5600MHz and 6400MHz which is insane.

We thought NVIDIA would be revealing its new GeForce RTX 3080 Ti graphics card on May 25, but it could happen a week earlier on May 18 according to the very latest rumors.

According to sources of ITHome we are to expect NVIDIA to announce the new GeForce RTX 3080 Ti graphics card on May 18, the review embargo drops on May 25, and then the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti will be officially released on May 26 -- which is all within the next month.

I know that my sources have said "sometime in May" but now we're hearing a solid May 18 reveal from ITHome while the card will be "available" in stores on May 26. NVIDIA's tweaked GA102-225 GPU that will pack 10240 CUDA cores, while NVIDIA will use 12GB of GDDR6X memory -- versus the RTX 3080 and its 10GB GDDR6X and the flagship RTX 3090 with 24GB of GDDR6X memory.

After this final update releases in May, Friday the 13th The Game will enter maintenance mode and dedicated servers will be taken offline.

Friday the 13th The Game is winding down into sunset mode. On May 4, the game's final update will roll out addressing tons of bugs across all platforms. Like Jason Voorhees, F13 won't exactly die; although dedicated servers will be switched off the game will stay alive via peer-to-peer matchmaking. The forums will also become read-only archives in May.

The reality is Gun Media is moving on from the game due to a legal snafu tying up the rights to the Friday the 13th franchise. In 2018, Gun announced it could no longer provide new content for the game. Illfonic and Gun had an ambitious plan for post-release content that was never fully realized.

CD Projekt just released new stats on GOG.com's 2020 earnings, showing strong revenue and user spikes throughout the year.

Cyberpunk 2077 has supercharged CD Projekt's earnings, spiking yearly revenues to record highs. The game sold a whopping 13.7 million copies, most of which were on PC--in fact the game sold more copies on PC than PS4 and Xbox combined. Most of the copies were sold on Steam and the Epic Store, but CD Projekt did generate impressive sales on its wholly-owned GOG.com storefront.

According to new metrics, GOG generated roughly $91.8 million in revenues (343.74 million PLN), up a strong 114% over last year. CD Projekt says 9.6% of Cyberpunk 2077's sales on PC were from GOG (about 739,200 copies), and Witcher 3 also had strong adoption on the platform as well.

After more than 20 years of Street Fighter, Capcom's legendary Yoshinori Ono is leaving the company for something new.

Today Yoshinori Ono announced he is leaving Capcom to serve as COO, President and CEO of Delight Works, the team behind the successful Fate Grand/Order mobile game. Ono plans to depart in May and will join Delight Works to "manage the company from a more multifaceted perspective," a press release states.

"On May 1st, I will be moving from Capcom to another company. I'm going to be working at a studio that is a little different from the one I'm used to. I'm also going to be looking at development from a different perspective than in the past," Ono said on Twitter.

Hot off the heels of Wasteland 3, inXile is developing a new project that has studio head Brian Fargo quite excited.

inXile just shipped Wasteland 3 last year, but the studio is already hard at work on their next big game. Earlier reports said the project could be a VR-based experience with multiplayer, and now inXile's boss Brian Fargo (of Interplay and Fallout fame) teases next-gen visuals/design for the next game. There's just one issue: inXile won't have anything ready for a while.

"I know that teasing is cruel but I am so excited about the visuals, design and writing for our next big game. Unfortunately you won't see what I see for quite a long time," Fargo said on Twitter.

SEGA plans to mine its rich vein of characters and IP to sell NFT (non-fungible tokens) artwork in 2021, the company today announced.

After the first bit of digital art sold for tens of millions, everyone is jumping into NFTs; concept artists, digital mavericks, and of course, games publishers. First Square Enix jumped into the NFT craze, and now SEGA is following suit.

The company's motivations for NFT adoption are clear and SEGA is simply chasing new earnings avenues. SEGA's 9-month earnings slid in 2020 due to coronavirus interruption of segments like amusement and pachinko; Net sales were down 25%, operating income was down 51%, and total profits were negative throughout the period as the company weathered COVID-19 shocks as well as new internal restructuring plans.

So far, NASA's Mars helicopter has achieved three successful flight attempts, and during the second attempt, the small helicopter snapped some images.

The images taken mark the very first time a powered aircraft that's taken flight on an off-world planet and has taken pictures of what it sees below. The images were shared on NASA's website, and from what we can see, the view from Ingenuity is very awesome. From the above image, we can immediately notice tracks on the surface of the Red Planet, as well as a shadow, casted from Ingenuity.

You can notice around the shadow of the helicopter a circular indent in the sand. NASA states, "Wright Brothers Field" is in the vicinity of the helicopter's shadow, bottom center, with the actual point of takeoff of the helicopter just below the image." If you were wondering what the purpose of Ingenuity is, the answer is shockingly simple. Ingenuity's purpose is simply to prove that aircrafts can fly on Mars. It's not equipped with any scientific instruments but does sport a sensor that can capture images up to 4208px by 3120px in resolution.

The expansion of the federal tax credit that was ushered in with the passing of the $1.9 stimulus bill that Biden signed into law could give select Americans an $8,000 tax credit for 2021.

The Child and Dependent Care Credit expansion has been explained by the finance website Nerdwallet; "The Child and Dependent Care Credit can get you up to 50% of up to $8,000 of child care and similar costs for a child under 13, a spouse or parent who cannot care for themselves, or another dependent so that you can work (and up to $16,000 of expenses for two or more dependents)."

Essentially, the credit will be given to individuals that have two or more dependents, and are already eligible for stimulus by meeting the income requirements. It should be noted that the specifics of this credit are somewhat complicated, but what can be simply understood is that the tax credit will only be available to qualifying people; $75,000 for single filers, $150,000 for married filing jointly and $112,500 for head of household filers. For more information on this story, check out this link here.