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We all know how cryptocurrency mining is huge again, with reports quickly surfacing that Sony's next-gen PlayStation 5 console has been hacked to support crypto mining and that it can crank out 99MH/s of mining power... well, the reports are totally fake.

The rumors of course began on Chinese forums that claimed the PS5 was hacked to support NBMiner, an Ethereum mining algorithm that was reportedly capable of 99MH/s. This would've been an incredible feat considering a tuned AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics card sits at around 60MH/s mining.

The reports stated the hacked PS5 was pulling 99MH/s with the console drawing around 211W while it mined which would be impressive compared to the RDNA 2-based Radeon RX 6000 series flagship graphics cards. You can tune and overclock the Radeon RX 6800 XT and Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics cards but you'll find it impossible to bump over 60MH/s mining crypto.

Bandai Namco follows SEGA in pulling out of the volatile arcade business, and plans to sell all North American-based facilities to third-parties.

Casinos and arcade centers have been hit particularly hard by COVID-19, forcing renowned quarter-mavens like SEGA to sell off these once-profitable businesses. Today, Bandai Namco announced it will also sell its amusement operations business in North America:

"After careful examination of the Amusement Facilities Business in North America, the Company decided to transfer the business and withdraw from the business, as it expects that the difficult business environment would continue into the future and achieving cooperation between each business is difficult at present. The Group will still continue to engage in the business of selling arcade games in North America," reads a press release announcement.

Recent company documents and reports hint games publisher Deep Silver may be gearing up big games for 2021-2022, possibly including Saints Row V and even Dead Island 2.

While reporting on the recent news of Dead Island 2 possibly becoming next-gen exclusive, I found some interesting tidbits surrounding Deep Silver, its parent company Koch Media, and the Embracer Group. The info strongly suggests that big games are coming from Deep Silver in the 2021-2022 period.

First, let's take a look at what Embracer CEO Lars Wingefors said in a recent Q3 presentation. The company expects FY2022 to be its best yet because of "numerous significant releases towards the second half of the year." This aligns with what Koch Media, the parent company of Deep Silver, said in another presentation:

New job listings hint Dead Island 2 could skip current-gen PS4 and Xbox One consoles, and exclusively launch on PS5, Xbox Series X, and PC.

UK studio Dambuster Studios may have resurrected Dead Island 2 from development hell, but official news is still dead in the ground. The only real info we've gleaned is from presentations and job listings, the latter of which may hint at a next-gen focus for the zombie-survival game.

Multiple listings on Dambuster's career page are recruiting for an "established AAA title for next-gen consoles and PC." Many have assumed this is Dead Island 2, and it's pretty easy to see why considering one listing says the next-gen project is a sandbox game. Other listings confirm Dead Island 2 will have DirectX Raytracing support and that it's built in Unreal Engine 4 (which could be scaled to UE5 later on or even during mid-development).

Battlefield 6 will be EA's most important game of 2021 and the publisher wants to make a big splash in the next-gen market. That's why multiple teams are helping with the larger-than-life shooter.

EA wants to make a statement with Battlefield 6, and on paper, the game looks to be the publisher's biggest game of 2021. It'll have real-time unscripted destruction physics, next-gen enhancements and visuals optimized for higher-end PS5 and Xbox Series X consoles (and PC, of course), and 128-player multiplayer.

The shooter, which EA promises will deliver "all-out military warfare," is due out in holiday 2021 and is expected to help push EA's FY2022 earnings to high points. To make good on these promises, EA has conscripted multiple internal studios to help work on various parts of the game. This is par for the course for EA games--for example, EA Motive helped make Battlefront II's vehicle combat--but Battlefield 6 is a much bigger investment.

Footage of FromSoftware's anticipated new open-world RPG Elden Ring has leaked out, but it's apparently quite old.

Right on the heels of the rumored Elden Ring event for March, some leaked internal footage of the mysterious game has surfaced and gives players an idea of what actual gameplay could be like. The video is off-screen footage and quite blurry, showing what looks like Witcher 3-esque horseback riding in a medieval fantasy world.

According to VentureBeat's Jeff Grubb, who previously hinted Elden Ring news could drop this month, the footage might be a year old and may not represent the current state of the game. The internal reel is also much longer than the brief seconds-long clips being passed around on social media.

It looks like NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 graphics cards with blower-style coolers are very silently being discontinued, with VideoCardz reporting that RTX 3090 blower-style cooled cards are being removed from AIB partners' websites.

NVIDIA partners are now removing pages with blower-style GeForce RTX 3090 graphics cards from their websites, but there are still blower-style custom GeForce RTX 3080 and GeForce RTX 3070 graphics cards. There's no reason behind the discontinuation of the RTX 3090 blower-style cards, but there are a few theories.

First off, VideoCardz is on the money with saying that board partners "might have simply decided to use this type of coolers for their CMP HX models, which will be available through AIBs exclusively starting next month". I even said in my post for the EMTEK GeForce RTX 3090 Blower Edition graphics card: "The daugherboard is a separate PCB that is there solely for the two PCIe power connectors, which is a lot of work for EMTEK to do for a single SKU of the GeForce RTX 3090. Interesting design though, I can see plenty of these being used in crypto mines".

AMD is not very far away from revealing its mid-range Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics card, with the event taking place on March 3 -- but now we have some early pricing rumors that the RX 6700 XT start at $479-$499.

Tom from Moore's Law is Dead is behind the news, where he says that AMD will price the new Radeon RX 6700 XT from $479-$499 on their website. AMD is using its new Navi 22 GPU for the Radeon RX 6700 XT, with previous rumors of two different versions of the Radeon RX 6700 XT reportedly true according to Tom.

The first SKU of the new Radeon RX 6700 XT will be the reference model that AMD will sell on its website for $479-$499, while the higher-binned GPUs will go to AIB partners for custom Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics cards. The reference Radeon RX 6700 XT should compete and beat NVIDIA's mid-range GeForce RTX 3060 Ti while the overclocked AIB partner models and their custom Radeon RX 6700 XT cards getting closer to the higher-end GeForce RTX 3070 Founders Edition.

It looks like Lenovo is preparing a new set of graphics cards, with a custom Radeon RX 6800 XT and Radeon RX 6900 XT revealed inside of the 2021 7000P LEGION pre-built gaming PC.

Lenovo shared a video teasing the new LEGION design on Chinese social media site Weibo, with the clip above being of the Lenovo Radeon RX 6800 XT LEGION graphics card. The design itself is pretty much a tweaked version of AMD's own reference Radeon VII graphics card -- the previous-gen Vega 20-based GPU with 16GB of high-speed HBM2 memory.

AMD's own reference Radeon VII graphics card had a slick triple-fan cooler and backplate design that Lenovo liked so much that it seems to have dipped its Radeon RX 6800 XT LEGION and Radeon RX 6900 XT LEGION graphics cards in Radeon VII design and it looks kinda cool -- very chunky, but I'm sure it will also run cool, too.

AMD will make its new member of the RDNA 2 family of graphics cards official on March 3, with the Radeon RX 6700 XT right around the corner. An early look at a custom RX 6700 XT is in the upcoming ASUS TUF Gaming and DUAL variants.

Starting with the ASUS Radeon RX 6700 XT TUF Gaming OC graphics card, with a bulky (I don't know why, and I don't like it for a mid-range card) near triple-slot design. We have a higher GPU clock on this card, higher TGP, and requires 8+6-pin PCIe power connectors.

Both of the custom ASUS Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics cards feature 12GB of GDDR6 memory on a 192-bit memory bus with 384GB/sec of memory bandwidth.

AMD is really aiming for the stars with its upcoming Zen 4 architecture, with the latest rumor on the next-gen EPYC Genoa CPU family is that it will feature up to an insane 96 cores and 192 threads.

The 96-core, 192-threads of CPU power are done through 12 chiplets and on the SP5 (LGA 6096 socket), with 12-channel DDR5 memory support and PCIe 5.0 support. The new rumors are coming from ExecutableFix, which tweeted out that the new Zen 4 architecture would pack some serious horsepower.

The new Zen 4 EPYC family of processors would pack 12 chiplets each with 8 compute cores, with a separate I/O chipset. Instead of increasing the core count per chiplet, AMD is increasing the number of chiplets in the packaging -- with Zen 4 EPYC packing 12 chiplets that usher in up to 96 cores and 192 threads of CPU domination.

My PC gaming days started in the early 90s but they were super-amplified in the mid-to-late 90s with nostalgic releases from 3dfx in the form of the Voodoo family of graphics cards -- which ushered in the multi-GPU tech as we know it now: SLI. But the last card 3dfx never got the chance to release before it went bankrupt and sold its assets to NVIDIA, was the quad-chip Voodoo 5 6000 video card.

3dfx debuted the Voodoo 1 with 4MB of RAM at the time, and as the releases got crazier -- the competition caught up. 3dfx was in the process of making the insane Voodoo 5 5000, Voodoo 5 5500, and Voodoo 5 6000 video cards before the company went out of business. NVIDIA eventually acquired 3dfx and most of its assets in late 2000.

But now an enthusiast with the best name in the world -- that would be Anthony of course, which I also find a coincidence considering I'm Anthony as well and I'm a huge 3dfx fan and I'm now writing this story -- anyway, Anthony has built himself his own Voodoo 5 6000 with VSA-100 graphics processors he acquired.

I wrote a story in November 2020 about a family photo of 3dfx Voodoo graphics cards, totally nerding out at the time at Al Valentyn and his 3dfx Voodoo collection of video cards.

We began talking over DM and he asked for my address, I agreed and he said he'd send me a prototype box he was working on. The box that Al was working on was a prototype box for the mother of all 3dfx graphics cards: the 3dfx Voodoo 5 6000 quad-chip SLI monster.

Al sent the package over to me in Australia and I received it a few days ago, opening it up and being more excited than opening up the box after box of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 series and AMD Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards. Totally nerding out at what was inside, as it wasn't just the prototype 3dfx Voodoo 5 6000 box that was sent.

Halo Infinite is shaping up to be the ultimate, never-ending Halo, complete with tons of adventures, exploration, and discoveries. 343i gives more clues on what lays in wait for gamers in 2021.

Halo Infinite is basically an RPG that's more similar to Ubisoft games than linear campaigns. It has an online live campaign with co-op and a strong emphasis on replayability, complete with enemy skirmishes, missions, and tons of stuff to explore and unlock. Halo has always had little discoveries and secrets peppered throughout the campaigns, but Infinite will take things to a new level.

In a recent Halo Waypoint update, 343i teases Infinite's new playground and promises unique opportunities for discovery. Not everything will be on the ground; some things you'll have to fly to using vehicles like the Banshee.

Amazon reveals its Twitch Prime freebies for March 2021, and the offering includes one of the most visceral indie games ever made.

Prepare yourself for penitence! Blasphemous, the brutal platformer from The Game Kitchen, will be available free for all Amazon Prime subscribers on March 1. Just link your account to Twitch Prime to unlock this stylish, blood-soaked indie.

While you're at it, be sure to grab the huge SNK game pack while it's still free. The collection includes a ton of classic games from franchises like Metal Slug, Fatal Fury, King of Fighters, and Samurai Shodown. The SNK pack will be available free until March 31.

Sony plans to unlock the PlayStation 5's expandable SSD storage slot this summer, sources tell Bloomberg's Takashi Mochizuki.

The PlayStation 5's limited storage is a pain point that's caused headaches since the system launched. The PS5 console ships with a 825GB PCIe 4.0 SSD, but only 667GB of it is usable. That's not much considering games like Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War and Cyberpunk 2077 take up over 100GB a piece.

Luckily, the console has an expansion slot that supports high-end PC-grade NVMe PC SSDs, but the M.2 port is currently inactive because only specialized premium drives will work with the console. The PS5 requires expansion SSDs that match or exceed the base 5.5GB/sec I/O speeds, which are made possible by the console's custom 10-channel memory controller. Sony cautions gamers not to buy NVMe SSDs for PS5 expansion until they formally announce compatibility lists.

Destiny 2 will get cross-play this fall, allowing Xbox, PlayStation, and PC gamers to play together in PVE and Crucible.

Bungie just outlined a bunch of content and changes coming to Destiny 2 in Season 14 and Season 15. The major changes for Season 14, which kicks off in May, includes tweaks across subclasses, the return of the classic Vault of Glass raid, and a new lowered power cap raise by 10.

Season 15 is where things really start to heat up. Cross-play is finally coming to Destiny 2 to complement cross-saves, and this feature will usher in a new level of consistent engagement across the live game. Bungie didn't give an exact date when cross-play will be implemented, but Season 15 should start sometime around mid-August of this year.

A new report from Bloomberg outlines what exactly went wrong with Stadia, painting a grim picture of overreaching, overspending, and mismanagement.

Just a year after release, Google has pulled the plug on Stadia and closed all first-party studios. The service is now a storefront platform rather than the innovative new ecosystem that Google promised would go up against PlayStation, Xbox, and the Nintendo Switch. That plan failed for many reasons.

Sources tell Bloomberg's Jason Schreier that Stadia was rife with mismanagement. Google shelled out millions acquiring studios and setting up first-party games (which were later cancelled, with the studios defunded and closed) in a whirlwind of spending. Rather than starting small, Google rushed the market with a pocket full of cash, overpromises, content, and innovative features.

Eager to break farther into mobile gaming, Square Enix is making a Final Fantasy 7 battle royale game for iOS and Android. Yes, really.

With Final Fantasy 7 The First Soldier, Square Enix hopes to tap the billion-dollar market that PUBG Mobile (and soon, Apex Legends) has been enjoying. The game is a mix of first-person and third-person shooter, complete with action-based combat straight out of games like Final Fantasy XV and FF7 Remake.

Classic magical spells like firaga, thundaga, blizzaga, and barrier also show in combat, offering a unique mix of unorthodox gunplay and wizadry. There looks to be both PVP chaos and PVE boss battles lifted straight out of the most recent Final Fantasy releases.

Final Fantasy 7 Remake is coming to the PlayStation 5 as a next-gen re-release, but it won't be cheap.

Square Enix is bringing Final Fantasy 7 Remake over to the PS5 with high-end features like a 4K graphics mode, a 60FPS mode, overhauled texture, lighting, and weather effects, and ultra-fast loading via the system's 5.5GB/sec PCIe 4.0 SSD. Sadly, the publisher is also embracing the new $69.99 standard for next-gen games.

The company's storefront confirms the new $69.99 price tag, and we should expect new mainline Square Enix titles to adopt this pricing on next-gen hardware (although Outriders, the new game from People Can Fly, is $59.99 on PS5).