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Xbox consoles don't make a profit and instead rely on software, services, and monetization to make money, Microsoft reiterates in the Epic vs Apple trial.

According to Lori Wright, Vice President, Gaming, Media & Entertainment at Microsoft, the company's 30% revenue commission is "required" for Xbox consoles to be manufactured or sold. All Xbox hardware has been sold at a loss, and not a single generation's hardware sales have been profitable.

"Your justification for the 30% commission is because the hardware doesn't make money," Apple counsel asked in the trial.

Activision kicks off its 2021 year with record earnings across the board due to strong performance of Call of Duty (Warzone, Black Ops Cold War), Candy Crush, and World of Warcraft.

Activision's Q1 2021 has delivered record results across a number of metrics. Q1 2021 was the best first quarter in the last 10 years when measuring net revenues ($2.275 billion), operating profit ($795 million), and profit ($619 million). In fact, Q1 2021 had the best operating profit of any other quarter in the last 10 years. The period had the third-best revenues of any quarter, and the second-best profits when compared to other quarters.

The company notes this substantial growth is due to Call of Duty monetization (up 60% YoY) and full game sales, and Activision also earned $1.343 billion from mictotransactions, representing 65% of its total net bookings.

Xbox's Phil Spencer is still holding out hope that its game streaming service could show up on competing platforms, new emails from the Epic vs Apple trial show.

Xbox's business is built off services, monetization, and widespread access. It's only logical that Microsoft wants Game Pass and its Project xCloud game streaming on every platform imaginable, including competing consoles like the Nintendo Switch and Sony's PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5. Game Pass and xCloud already connect Xbox consoles, Windows 10 PCs, and mobile phones in a billion-dollar ecosystem, and Microsoft wants more.

In a 2020 email conversation with Epic CEO Tim Sweeney spotted by The Verge, Xbox's division head Phil Spencer says he has "hasn't given up" on launching xCloud game streaming on other platforms.

Activision's recent Q1 earnings show a substantial spike in in-game player spending thanks to Warzone, Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War, World of Warcraft, and continued Candy Crush earnings.

Activision's Q1 microtransactions earnings are on fire. The company earned a monumental $1.343 billion in microtransaction and subscription revenue in Q1 2021, a record high for any other Q1 period and the second-best quarter for mTX earnings in Activision history.

The company's Q1 beat out any other holiday period in history, too. This says a lot: Activision releases its mainline Call of Duty games in Q4 every year complete with microtransaction gateways in these games. mTX has markedly increased throughout 2020, hitting an all-time high after Warzone launched in Q2 2020. It's worth noting that CoD microtransaction spending usually bleeds over into Q1 due to the November launches, but microtransactions are never from Call of Duty alone. This year, Activision-Blizzard had strong performance from Candy Crush and World of Warcraft, too.

Future Deep Silver games like Dead Island 2 and Saints Row V may be timed exclusive to the Epic Games Store, internal documents from 2019 reveal.

New documents revealed in publicly available court exhibits reveal more about Epic's future timed exclusivity deals. According to one document which was created in late 2019, Dead Island 2 and Saints Row have been earmarked as Epic Games Store exclusives. Which Saints Row wasn't specified, but it's possible Saints Row V will be EGS exclusive in favor of the 88-12 revenue split.

This aligns with my predictions made in 2019 based on comments from Koch Media's CEO. Based on previous trends, these games should be timed exclusive and not kept off of Steam like Ubisoft's newer titles.

Star Wars fans have been waiting a long time to get their hands-on a real-life lightsaber, and they soon will be able to, but expectations of what it will actually be like may need to be dialed back a bit.

In the above video that has been posted to the official Disney Parks YouTube Channel, we get a very quick 13-second glimpse at the new lightsaber. The Verge states that the lightsaber is "working", and that it's a part of the Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser luxury hotel that will be opening at Walt Disney World Resort in 2022. Engadget reports that patents for the lightsaber indicate that it works by a motor that extends a blade of LED-illuminated plastic.

At the moment, it isn't confirmed if you will be able to purchase the lightsaber, but it certainly would be surprising if Disney doesn't sell it, because I'm sure there are many Star Wars fans out there that would love to own one. If the lightsaber is high-quality, the price of the weapon could be anywhere in the $200 range as the already existing Galaxy Edge is priced at $200. For more information on this story, check out this link here.

Everyone will soon have the opportunity to go for a quick trip up to space, and one of the companies that is providing the service is Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin.

Blue Origin is led by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, and according to a recent announcement on the companies Twitter page, the first tickets aboard the New Shepard rocket will be going live very soon. Blue Origin has said it will be revealing details on how you can purchase a seat on May 5, and if you expected it to very expensive, you assumed correctly.

Going to space is by no way a cheap process. When you factor in every cost, you can find the dollar value of each pound of weight. Blue Origin hasn't officially revealed any prices for a ticket aboard the New Shepard but has said that it will be competitive in the market. Virgin Galactic, another company that is yet to begin space tourism, has priced its tickets at $250,000. So, we can assume that Blue Origin will be anywhere in the $150,000 - $200,000 range, perhaps even lower.

In a recent livestream on YouTube by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, it was discussed how Ingenuity taking flight on Mars multiple times has paved the way for future space exploration.

According to Ingenuity pilot Johnny Lam, successful flights of Ingenuity have unlocked a completely new dimension of space exploration for the human race. Ingenuity's success is such a big deal because now space explorers can guide rovers through a safe and effective path that would have originally have had pilots guessing.

Lam said, "I think with the success of Ingenuity, we basically unlocked an aerial dimension to exploration. We can kind of reach some hard-to-reach areas, we can provide images, reconnaissance... the best path to traverse." Ingenuity will provide the teams back on Earth with vital data, and its next mission will be a one-way trip to a new possible landing site. Eventually, the helicopter will be tasked with flying next to the Perseverance rover to see how Ingenuity does working as a scout.

In an exclusive report from Fox News, former President Trump has officially launched a brand new communications platform that will eventually allow him to communicate directly to his follower-base.

The new communication tool is on the www.donaldjtrump.com/desk website and is touted as a place that as a "place to speak freely and safely". The tool has been named From the Desk of Donald J. Trump, and what we can see on there are many different posts from Trump that go back as far as March 24, 2021. As you probably gathered from the name, this space will be for Trump to directly communicate with his followers via images, text, and video.

The website has been created by Campaign Nucleus, a "digital ecosystem made for efficiently managing political campaigns and organizations". The site also has a sign-up feature that allows users who have signed up to receive notifications whenever Trump posts a new message to the board. Senior advisor Jason Miller told Fox News, "President Trump's website is a great resource to find his latest statements and highlights from his first term in office, but this is not a new social media platform. We'll have additional information coming on that front in the very near future."

A new announcement from an MMA league has revealed that fights will be held in space under the newly announced "Galactic Combat" television show.

Space 11, an entertainment company, has announced through its producer Andrea Iervolino that MMA fights will be going off-world as a new reality television show will take 40 MMA fighters who are participating in an elimination tournament. The participants who win will have an opportunity to fight in zero gravity in a special space capsule that will be floating outside of Earth's atmosphere.

Fighters will train and compete here on Earth, and the eight successful winners will then take off from Earth to go to space to fight the final round in a capsule that is traveling around Earth every 90 minutes. John Lewis, a former UFC fighter, is linked to the project as Vice President and is currently a promoter for Galactic Combat. Pre-production for the TV show is scheduled to begin soon, with the launch date being sometime in 2023.

FOX 35 has been sent a video of what appears to be two mysterious floating orbs of light flying across the sky.

William Fuentes is the man who sent in the video to FOX 35, and from the video, which is best watched at half-speed, we can see two orbs of light fly across the backyard into the night sky. At the moment, there isn't any official word about what these floating orbs are, but speculation from Fuentes suggests that they are UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects).

A more rational suggestion for what the floating orbs are is that it's actually a strand of spider silk. Spider silk is reflective, which makes it appear as an orb of light. As for the flying aspect, it's possible that the wind blew the spiderweb off an object behind the camera towards the outside of the frame. It's also possible that it could just be small aliens piggybacking on each other. For more information on this story, check out this link here.

The animal kingdom is a strange and wonderful place, and sometimes it's really nice just to appreciate the uniqueness the world breeds.

The above caterpillar is the perfect example of the weird and wonderful things we can find in some places of the world. The above caterpillar has a large head and has features that resemble a typical cartoon skull. When startled, the 12 cm caterpillar will begin to arch its back to appear larger and then proceed to lunge at predators in hopes to scare them off with its face.

The internet was struggling to get its head around that this insect is actually real. Some people even compared it to Ridley Scott's science fiction movie "Alien", saying, "The aliens have finally landed... is that the spawn?". Once the caterpillar becomes a moth, it will look camouflage as dead brown leaves, see the below image. For more information on this story, check out this link here.

A new study that has been recently published has revealed that the Amazon rainforest may now be a player in climate change.

The new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change explored how much carbon dioxide the Brazilian Amazon rainforest produced and absorbed from 2010 through to 2019. According to the study, the Amazon has actually "flipped" from absorbing more carbon dioxide than it produces to producing more carbon dioxide than it absorbs.

Between 2010 and 2019, Amazon released 16.6 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide and only absorbed 13.9 billion tonnes. Jean-Pierre Wigneron, a scientist at France's National Institute for Agronomic Research and co-author of the study, said, "We half-expected it, but it is the first time that we have figures showing that the Brazilian Amazon has flipped and is now a net emitter." The same study also found that deforestation increased by fourfold in 2019 compared to the two previous years.

Sony and Nike have teamed again to make a pair of PlayStation-themed sneakers, inspired by the next-gen PlayStation 5 sneakers we have the new PG5 sneakers.

The new PG5 sneakers are inspired by Sony's design aesthetics oozed into the PlayStation 5, with the sneakers made for NBA and Los Angeles Clippers star Paul George. Nike have made 4 other pairs of PlayStation-inspired shoes, with the PG5 being the 5th edition in the line so far.

Nike and Sony had to work around the restrictions put in place because of all of the changes that COVID-19 has forced onto the world, with the teams at both companies not being able to meet in-person and having to do most of the design and collaboration for the PG5 sneakers online through Zoom, and other digital video means.

We aren't far away from the launch of NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 3080 Ti graphics card, with another custom card turning up: the new GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Gaming OC.

GIGABYTE's new GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Gaming OC graphics card was leaked by our friend Tom @ Moore's Law is Dead, who posted the picture he received from someone who had the GIGABYTE RTX 3080 Ti Gaming OC in-hand. The retail box is virtually identical to the non-Ti model, except for where it has 12GB of GDDR6X versus the 10GB of GDDR6X on the GeForce RTX 3080.

It was only just back 4-5 weeks ago now that GIGABYTE had 12 -- yes, 12 new custom GeForce RTX 3080 Ti graphics cards in the pipeline sliding through the EEC (Eurasian Economic Commission). This new GIGABYTE RTX 3080 Ti Gaming OC is just one of them, but now spotted in-person ahead of launch.

AMD is hard at work on its next-gen Zen 4 and Zen 5 architectures, with recent rumors teasing new Zen 5 APUs codenamed "Strix Point" and now we have new rumors for the upcoming Zen 4 architecture.

The new Zen 4 architecture will be powering AMD's next-gen Ryzen 6000 series CPUs that will be released in the second half of 2022, while we could see an announcement of it by the end of the year. The new Zen 4 architecture is codenamed Raphael and will be made on TSMC's new 5nm process node, with the new CPUs reportedly pack a Navi2-based integrated GPU.

In the meantime, Intel will be introducing its next-gen Alder Lake platform, with the new 600-series chipset and 12th Gen Core processors supporting next-gen technologies with DDR5 memory and PCIe 5.0 connectivity. AMD won't have a response to Alder Lake until Raphael, with AMD including DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 support with Zen 4... Intel will launch with DDR5 + PCIe 5.0 first, AMD will be a few months behind.

Dogecoin has been mooning for a few days now, with the cryptocurrency that started off as a joke and one of the biggest memes used on the internet, now has a market cap of $70 billion and is worth more than freaking Twitter.

The price of Dogecoin has mooned over 14,000% in the last 12 months -- yes, that's 140x the price in a year -- with the big start of Dogecoin skyrocketing in February 2021. SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk started tweeting out about the cryptocurrency, saying it Dogecoin was the "people's crypto" and that "SpaceX is going to put a literal Dogecoin on the literal moon" on April 1, 2021.

But then more Dogecoin fuel was thrown onto the fire, with Elon Musk announcing that he would be hosting Saturday Night Live on May 8 and that he wanted to "find out just how live Saturday Night Live really is" on April 25 -- and then came the tweet on April 28 with a simple "The Dogefather SNL May 8".

We've already seen crazy pricing on NVIDIA's upcoming GeForce RTX 3080 Ti graphics cards that is landing between $1300 through to a huge $2250 -- but that doesn't hold up against the stupidly high $3500 pricing of the RTX 3080 Ti in the UAE.

MSI's custom GeForce RTX 3080 Ti SUPRIM X graphics card is being sold at a UAE-based retailer for $3500, which I cannot even begin to comprehend. $1300 was bad enough, but $2250 was just insane... and now we're talking about $3500. That should be the entire cost of a kick ass new gaming PC **and** a GeForce RTX 3080 Ti.

Reddit user FaisalKhatib saw the new MSI GeForce RTX 3080 Ti SUPRIM X graphics card at a retailer in the UAE, priced at $3500 and available to buy right now a month out from it being released, and available even before NVIDIA itself has confirmed the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti in the first place.

Dogecoin is flying not just up to the Moon, but beyond and probably to Mars at this point as the people's crypto -- Elon Musk's words -- hits new record high after new record high.

Dogecoin was priced at $0.56 at the time of writing, with a market capitalization of around $70 billion... $27 billion more than the second-largest social networking site in the world: Twitter. Twitter has a market cap of around $43 billion at the time of writing.

To put Dogecoin's new $70 billion+ market cap into perspective, Dell has a market cap of $73.6 billion, COVID-19 vaccine maker Moderna has a $69 billion market cap, Activision-Blizzard has a market cap of $68.9 billion, and even Heineken with its $67 billion market cap. Dogecoin might have started off as a joke, but it's serious business now.

Red Dead Redemption 2 has never looked better than this, with Rockstar Games' phenomenally successful game powered by NVIDIA's flagship GeForce RTX 3090, the new photorealistic raytracing Reshade preset, and the super-beyond-enthusiast 8K resolution. Check it out:

The game is of course running on the PC on ultra max settings with the new photorealistic Reshade preset, which tweaks and improves the colors, shadows, sharpness, and tone mapping of the game. Red Dead Redemption 2 is gorgeous in stock form, but this just adds and very welcomed graphical bells and whistles.

Red Dead Redemption 2 with the raytracing Reshade preset and raytracing looks incredible, and makes me want to re-visit the game in 8K given that I've just come in off benchmarking Call of Duty: Warzone at 8K (7680 x 4320) on the GeForce RTX 3090 thanks to its new update that added support for NVIDIA's magic DLSS 2.0 technology. But man-oh-man does RDR2 look incredible with the raytracing Reshade mod at 8K.