Latest News - Page 1493

Twitch viewers watched over 1 trillion hours for the first time ever, breaking new grounds for the billion-dollar streaming titan.

Twitch's SVP Damian Burns just announced the service's new metrics for 2020, and they're absolutely crazy. Viewers watched an astronomical 1 trillion minutes of streams in 2020, up 78% from the 560 billion minutes streamed in 2019.

The other numbers are equally as impressive, with DAUs hitting over 30 million.

PS5 console scarcity is making people go wild--violence ensued in a U.S. Walmart when a woman brutally stomped on another woman's head to get a console, and now crowds in Japan cluster dangerously during a worldwide pandemic.

PS5 consoles are so rare that Japanese retailers are raffling purchase rights in a random lottery. Hundreds of consumers show up at stores for the chance in buying a console, and sometimes chaos ensues. That's what happened at Yodobashi Camera in Japan's Akihabara shopping area a few days ago.

Tons of Japanese consumers arrived and eventually started to crowd and push each other, eventually pressing hard into the protective barriers that separated the workers from possible COVID-19 contamination. The PS5 lottery was eventually cancelled, and the police were called to break up the massive grouping.

Not all heroes wear capes, but this guy did in a way -- but his cape was a huge banner behind a plane that read: "SUCK MY NUTS ROBINHOOD". See... a true hero.

Kaspar on Twitter said: "It's happening. At 3-4:30pm PST a plane will be flying a banner over San Francisco that says "SUCK MY NUTS ROBINHOOD" and I slid the pilot some extra $$ to circle right above RobinHood's HQ for a while. Go take some photos, I don't even live there".

Absolutely beautiful. Here is the flight path if you missed it:

We might be seeing the entire mainstream media trying to make anyone connected to GameStop shares and WallStreetBets into whatever slur of the day they can use -- but there is some real good happening, too.

I don't think the good gets anywhere near as much headlines as it deserves, so here we go: u/Lunar033 posted in r/WallStreetBets that he went out and purchased 6 x Nintendo Switch consoles as well as a heap of games and is donating them all to the Children's Minnesota Hospital.

In his post, u/Lunar033 said: "I am proud to do my part in paying forward our good fortune with a donation of 6 Nintendo Switches and games to go with them to the Children's Minnesota Hospital. Cant Stop. Won't Stop. GameStop. (Still long 50 shares I WILL NOT SELL)".

NVIDIA was rumored to release a GeForce RTX 3080 with 20GB of GDDR6X memory in December 2020, then the rumors turned into a beefed-up GeForce RTX 3080 Ti with 20GB of GDDR6X -- and now we have more leaks, but this time in benchmark form.

Chinese content creator "big hardware player" reportedly got their hands-on an engineering sample of the GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card with 20GB of GDDR6X -- double the 10GB of GDDR6X that is available on the regular GeForce RTX 3080 -- that no one can buy.

The GeForce RTX 3080 20GB was meant to be released in December 2020 to fight the Big Navi-powered Radeon RX 6000 series which all -- the Radeon RX 6800, Radeon RX 6800 XT, and Radeon RX 6900 XT all shipped with 16GB of VRAM. But then the RTX 3080 with 20GB was nixed, and the purported RTX 3080 Ti with 20GB of VRAM was meant to come, but it didn't... more on that here.

Intel is set to launch its new Rocket Lake-S family of CPUs in March 2021, but it looks like the flagship Core i9-11900KF processor is going to be a hot one -- with temps hitting 98C -- even with a 360mm AIO cooler.

The news is coming from results leaked onto Chiphell, of Intel's new Core i9-11900KF processor -- an 8-core, 16-thread part with no integrated GPU. The TDP on the Core i9-11900KF is 125W, but you can see in the above screenshot that it is chewing through double that at 250W.

Intel's new Core i9-11900KF will have a base clock somewhere around 3.5GHz, with an all-core boost of up to 4.8GHz. We don't know what 360mm AIO cooler that the leaker was using, other than it being described as an "entry 360 AIO cooler". The CPU was being tested in an AVX workload, so we should see these temps lowered during regular/gaming workloads.

Tesla announced its refreshed 2021 Model S electric vehicle teasing that it had 10 TFLOPs of compute performance, but now we know it is a custom AMD RDNA 2-based Navi 23 GPU and its GPU block diagram. Check it out:

The AMD Navi 23 GPU should be used inside of the 2021 Tesla Model S for its entertainment and navigation systems, with GDDR6 memory (Samsung 16Gb chips) with 8GB in total. The Navi 23 GPU has 10 TFLOPs of performance, which is virtually identical to that of the Sony PlayStation 5 console and its semi-custom AMD chip.

Navi 23 has 32 Compute Units (2048 Stream Processors) with GPU clocks of at least 2.44GHz, while the 8GB of GDDR6 finds itself on a 128-bit memory bus -- making the memory bus of Tesla's new 2021 infotainment system similar to Microsoft's slower Xbox Series S console.

It was only a few hours before I went to bed last night that Robinhood stopped its Instant Deposit feature to access crypto, pissing off users -- but now it's worse: they're limiting your purchases on "WSB stocks".

These stocks include GameStop ($GME), AMC ($AMC), BlackBerry ($BB) and Nokia ($NOK) which have all been selling some great returns on investment for people. GameStop in particular which has mooned and caused hedge funds to lose billions of dollars, make worldwide headlines, and disrupt the entire market.

Well, now Robinhood is completely limiting the sales of shares of GameStop ($GME), AMC ($AMC), BlackBerry ($BB) and Nokia ($NOK) to just 1 share per customer at purchase. Stock Market News on Twitter shared the new images, which limits the super-popular shares to 1 purchase per customer at the moment.

IO Interactive isn't done with the Hitman franchise, and new games could be in development. But post-launch Hitman 3 DLC comes first.

Right now IO Interactive is on a roll. Years after separating from Square Enix, the company self-developed and self-published Hitman 3. In less than a week on the market, Hitman 3 is already profitable and will help fund IO's massively ambitious new Project 007 James Bond adaptation.

Even with the new James Bond game on the horizon, IO says it's not entirely finished with Hitman. A new mainline game could be in the works at some point--which makes sense considering IO wholly owns the Hitman publishing and development rights.

Sea of Thieves can now break the 120FPS threshold on the Xbox Series X console, Rare confirms in a new game update.

Sea of Thieves adds a new performance target to its repertoire, and can now hit 1080p 120FPS on the Xbox Series X with HDR enabled. This is in addition to the other perf targets that include native 4K 60FPS on the system, as well as the base 1080p 60FPS on HDTVs.

"On the Xbox Series X console, a performance mode is available supporting 120Hz at 1080p. Some TVs do not support 120Hz and HDR simultaneously, so HDR may need to be disabled from the Console Settings," reads the update.

Halo Infinite's new grappling hook is a game-changer that adds unprecedented mobility and verticality to PVP and campaign. It's a new multi-dimensional utility with lots of uses, and offers diverse creativity for chaos creation; pulling enemies towards you, yanking explosive barrels or even weapons to you, and uses it to scale high precipices. Even still, 343i is more excited about another unannounced bit of equipment.

In a recent Halo Waypoint update, Halo Infinite sandbox developers tease a new mysterious equipment that can fling players across the map. From the sound of it, the equipment is probably an updated version of the grav-lift from Halo 3; the equipment is physics-based, it depends on timing, and it can send enemies flying.

"The Grappleshot is definitely a favorite of mine, but I'm equally excited about an equipment item we haven't shown yet. It's highly physics-based, has TONS of interactions across our sandbox, and will leave you laughing or yelling, "Did you see that?!" Proper timing is everything with this equipment, and if you position correctly, you could very well send your enemies flying!" said Sandbox Designer Elan Gleiber.

The Securities Exchange Commission has pushed back Roblox's big public offering so it can clarify its financial reports.

Roblox is set to start public trading with a billion-dollar IPO, but the stock can't debut onto the New York Stock Exchange until the SEC gives its blessing. Right now the SEC wants more clarification on Roblox's income, specifically its digital revenues earned from in-game Robux purchases.

The SEC wants Roblox to separate revenues from in-game consumables and the paid subscriptions, specifically how the revenue is amortized over a period. Roblox originally combined these revenues together. The company says this new adjustment will force a re-write of its financials, which could take a while.

IO Interactive is in a "really good place," CEO Hakan Abrak said after Hitman 3 is already profitable after one week of sales.

With Hitman 3, IO Interactive took a chance and self-published a big AAA game for the first time. The gambit worked. Not only did Hitman 3 generate acclaim from reviewers, but it sold tremendously well. So well, in fact, that IO Interactive is already making a profit from the sequel.

IO CEO Hakan Abrak confirmed the news to GamesIndustry.biz, saying that the company's secret sauce lies in the close relationship between its marketing and development divisions. Instead of keeping the division separate, as most companies do, marketing is closely knit with the developers. The result is a clear and concisely communication that's relayed to consumers and fans.

It's not like Robinhood wasn't already knee-deep in a pile of DOGE sh*t, the company is piling on -- making changes where it has made Instant Deposits "temporarily unavailable for crypto purchases".

The company emails that this means you "won't be able to buy crypto with funds from a deposit until it settles (which can take up to 5 business days to complete). Your Crypto Buying Power will also not reflect your deposit until it settles". So if you've been trying to use Instant Deposits for the last couple of hours and couldn't figure out why -- now you do.

But never fear! If you are a Gold customer, Robinhood has your back as "you will still be able to use Instant Deposits to crypto purchases". The tweets from 'Doopie' who added that "I hear they're also limiting stocks tomorrow, so like 5 shares max for specific stocks which in guessing will be the big ones. GME, NOK, BB, etc".

It wasn't even 12 hours ago that I was reporting that the Robinhood app had been review bombed on the Google Play Store, but in the last few hours we've seen Google remove 100s of thousands of negative reviews.

Are you surprised? I'm not.

Above, I've got a screenshot of the now-changed Robinhood app listing on the Google Play Store, where the search giant is now meddling in this debacle and is wiping negative reviews... like we weren't going to notice. Below, I've got a screenshot of the Robinhood app page on the Google Play Store reviews which were all negative at the top and from January 29, 2021.

As trust in retail trading implodes over the r/Wallstreetbets $GME saga, people are looking at cryptocurrency, but it's not Bitcoin making the significant gains today. Doge is now the 8th largest cryptocurrency with a market cap of over $8.4 billion.

Usually, what "the internet" says doesn't really work as a collective mouthpiece, but sometimes enough people rally around an idea that it feels like a consensus; like the GameStop stock fiasco that's going on right, which has celebrities,

politicians, and billionaires alike rallying against hedge funds. Well, if you were caught up in the GME excitement today, you might have missed that the meme-based cryptocurrency, Dogecoin, has shot through the roof today.

Facebook is getting a lot more serious about its VR investment. The company just released its quarterly earnings call, and it had some news to share about the VR business. The Quest 2 is selling very well, but there's another headset in development.

Facebook released the Quest 2 in October 2020, and the device has been selling very well. Facebook never talks directly about sales numbers of its VR devices, but Mark Zuckerberg said the Quest 2 "is on track to becoming the first mainstream virtual reality headset."

Oculus falls under the "other" category in Facebook's revenue figures, which grew significantly over the last year. The last quarter of 2019 brought in $346 million, whereas, in 2020, Facebook's "other" revenue topped $885 million. It's unclear what else falls in that category, but it's a safe bet that Quest 2 and its content drive the lion's share of that revenue increase.

Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev is probably one of the most talked about people in the world right now, with the Robinhood CEO talking with CNBC on Thursday night about all-things Robinhood.

The company restricted trading of stocks like GameStop and AMC Entertainment, with Robinhood only allowing sell positions and not letting people open new ones. Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev explained to CNBC: "In order to protect the firm and protect our customers we had to limit buying in these stocks".

Tenev added: "Robinhood is a brokerage firm, we have lots of financial requirements. We have SEC net capital requirements and clearing house deposits. So that's money that we have to deposit at various clearing houses. Some of these requirements fluctuate quite a bit based on volatility in the market and they can be substantial in the current environment where there's a lot of volatility and a lot of concentrated activity in these names that have been going viral on social media".

The Division 2 is getting a big update that will enable juicy smooth 4K 60FPS goodness on the PlayStation 5, and both the Xbox Series X and S consoles.

The news was revealed by Ubisoft Community Manager Johan Lindholm, who was replying to someone asking if there would be a State of the Game tomorrow. Lindholm said there wouldn't be a SOTG tomorrow, but did say that: "TU12.1 releases on Feb 2nd with the Resident Evil Apparel Event, a rebalance of the Optimization Station cost as well as 4K 60 FPS support for next gen consoles".

Apple has shipped an incredible amount of iPhones in Q4 2020 alone, with IDC analyst Francisco Jeronimo showing just how huge this quarter was. Check it out:

The company kicked the year off with the super-popular 2020 iPhone SE which costs $399, ending the year with a huge 90.1 million iPhones sold in Q4 2020 alone. If we look at just Q3 2020, the Apple iPhone 11 and 2020 iPhone SE made up over 50% of all iPhone sales in the US for the quarter.

Apple has reportedly asked its suppliers to boost iPhone production by 30% in the first half of 2021, with Apple taking up 80% of TSMC's new 5nm production capacity for 2021 alone.