Latest News - Page 15

Gaming has once again been taken over by an indie game, and this one has a unique premise: blend yourself into your surroundings like an artistic chameleon while other players try to snoop you out.

Meccha Chameleon brings new viral life to one of the most ancient games in human history: Hide and seek. The $6 indie is a mega-hit on Steam, where it became Steam's #1 top seller (currently #3). Social word-of-mouth has elevated this indie to superstar status; the game recently broke 15 million copies sold in less than a month.

As Niko Partners analyst Daniel Ahmad notes, this milestone makes Meccha Chameleon the fastest-selling and best-selling game of 2026 so far.

The new Halo CE remake will have a LASO playlist that is confirmed to be beatable by players, but it's not true LASO.

Halo Campaign Evolved launches this month, bringing Xbox's seminal FPS to PlayStation for the first time. The Halo 1 remake will have a bunch of extra features including enhanced graphics, the ability to sprint, and even new guns from other Halo games. It also has 42 skulls, more than any other previous title in the series. Enthusiasts have been dying to know if the remake will have the mythical LASO challenge intact--Legendary All Skulls On, which offers a grueling experience for hardcore fans.

The remake will indeed have a LASO mode, but it's not full LASO. Halo Studios calls it LAASO, or Legendary Almost All Skulls On. The mode is so named because only a portion of the 42 skulls will be active. And yes, it can actually be completed. This was a big point that Halo pro player Jervalin brought up (he became famous for beating Moist Cr1tikal's $20K Halo 2 LASO deathless challenge), saying that it would be outrageous for Halo Studios to make a LASO playlist that couldn't be beaten.

One of gaming's most dedicated visionaries laments the loss of physical PlayStation discs at a recent event in Italy.

Hideo Kojima, whose body is made mostly of movies, recently attended the Il Cinema in Piazza Film Festival in Italy, and publicly discussed his thoughts on the loss of physical game discs. It's an end of an era for all gamers and developers alike, yet Kojima in particular has a strong affinity and love for physical media--he's always sharing pictures of some new CD, DVD, or Blu-ray disc he just bought on his Twitter account.

At the film festival, Kojima says that he's woeful for the loss while also warning the audience about the dangers of a digital-only future, especially when it comes to subscriptions. This is interesting because Kojima's next game, OD, is believed to be one of the first cloud-native games that's been made for the nascent delivery method.

We get it, graphics cards are expensive, and they are even more expensive right now due to the ongoing RAM crisis. However, a consumer desktop graphics card that costs over $7,000 is almost unfathomable. That is exactly what the ASUS ROG Astral RTX 5090 Edition 20 is: it has shown up at French retailer LDLC for €6,499.95, which works out to more than $7,400. Somehow, it's still not the most expensive RTX 5090 you can buy.

The listing lines up with earlier reports from a couple of weeks ago, pointing to a DACH region price of €5,799, or around $6,650. So it looks like the final European pricing landed even higher than the first numbers suggested. ASUS reportedly plans to ship the card in late July or early August.

This is part of ASUS's ROG 20th Anniversary lineup, and the Edition 20 branding shows up across several products, not just this GPU. We've also seen a ROG Crosshair X870E Edition 20 motherboard bundle, an ROG Swift OLED monitor, and an ROG Thor power supply, all carrying the same anniversary treatment and priced well above their standard counterparts.

It appears that the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 12GB is back on Newegg, and this time it's real US stock, not just chatter out of China or Europe. Newegg is now listing the MSI GeForce RTX 3060 Ventus 2X 12G OC for $329.99, sold and shipped directly by Newegg with free shipping and a 30-day return window. The listing shows the card was first added on July 2, 2026.

It's worth noting this is an MSI "Ventus" board, not a GIGABYTE or ASUS model like the ones spotted in Europe earlier. The underlying specs look identical to the 2021 original, with 3584 CUDA cores, a 192-bit bus, 12GB of GDDR6 VRAM, and an 1807 MHz boost clock.

We've been following this story on TweakTown for a while now. Back in March, we covered early rumors of a comeback, though at the time, we figured it would probably be the 8GB variant, not the 12GB one everyone actually wanted. By April, leaks suggested NVIDIA was holding off on a rumored RTX 5050 9GB in favor of reviving the 3060 instead.

Someone has figured out a way to get FSR 4.1.1 working on AMD's Vega architecture, despite FSR 4 only being supported on RDNA 3 and RDNA 4 GPUs at the time of writing. YouTube channel yoyosan published a video showing FSR 4.1.1 working on an AMD Instinct MI50 GPU from 2018 with better performance than FSR 4.0.2c.

The YouTuber stated that a few things had to come together for them to get FSR 4.1.1 running at all on the Vega GPU. The version of FSR they used was the Proton version of FSR 4.1.1, which was leaked several days ago. Furthermore, an experimental version of OptiScaler was also required that was not available to the public and was only accessible from the OptiScaler developer's Discord server. The main hurdle the YouTuber had to overcome was a new detection mechanism built into FSR 4.1.1 that disables the latest model if an unsupported GPU is detected. Outgoing iterations of OptiScaler can't turn this off, but the newer experimental one the YouTuber downloaded from the OptiScaler developer's Discord server can with a small tweak to the tool's configuration file.

In games that worked, FSR 4.1.1 was stable on the YouTuber's Vega-based Instinct MI50 graphics card while offering superior performance to FSR 4.0.2c. In Cyberpunk 2077, the GPU achieved 69 FPS with FSR 4.1.1 set to balanced mode and 64 FPS with FSR 4.2.0c at the same settings. Alters with FSR 4.1.1 set to balanced mode achieved 90 FPS and 83 FPS with FSR 4.0.2c. Control and Pragmata were two other games the YouTuber tested but failed to work.

A new RTX 5090 horror story is making the rounds, though this one has nothing to do with the usual 12V-2x6 connector drama. A Reddit user going by RareSiren292 posted photos on r/pcmasterrace showing a PCIe riser cable with its insulation partially melted into goop. The card in question is an ASUS TUF Gaming RTX 5090, mounted vertically using a riser to stand the card upright inside the case.

The damage was apparently discovered during a routine cleaning session, not due to any dramatic failure. The user says the riser cable had to be peeled off the back of the card, with the melted plastic sitting exactly where the cable made direct contact with the GPU backplate.

Importantly, only the insulation looks affected. Users in the thread pointed out that the damaged section did not line up with the main 12V power pins, and it seems the card itself avoided any electrical damage.

Samsung appears to be prepping a new SSD under the plain 990 name, and it does not appear to be another EVO or PRO model. As spotted by VideoCardz, listings for the drive briefly showed up on Samsung Canada's website in 1TB and 2TB capacities before getting pulled. Nothing is official yet, so treat the specs as close to final but not set in stone.

The listing points to a PCIe 4.0 x4 drive, not PCIe 5.0, which puts it a step behind Samsung's own 990 EVO Plus that can run on either interface. Samsung lists the 1TB model at up to 7,150 MB/s read and 6,450 MB/s write, with the 2TB variant reaching 7,250 MB/s read at the same write speed. Random IOPS reportedly top out around 850K read and 1,200K write on the 2TB model. On paper, those numbers look close to what the 990 EVO Plus already offers.

The bigger story here is what is missing rather than what is listed. Samsung does not list a dedicated DRAM cache for this drive, relying instead on Host Memory Buffer (HMB), which borrows a slice of the host system's RAM to handle caching duties. We have seen many good HMB implementations in the past.

Gaming laptops and portability have always been an uneasy pairing. The more powerful the hardware, the heavier and bulkier the machine tends to get. ThundeRobot is looking to challenge that with the ZERO Air 16, a 16-inch gaming laptop it claims is the lightest in the world at its performance tier, weighing just 1.64 kg.

To put the weight in context, 1.64 kg is lighter than many 14-inch gaming laptops with comparable RTX 50-series graphics. The closest 16-inch competitor is the LG gram Pro 16, but that machine uses an RTX 5050, not an RTX 5070. ASUS ROG models can get lighter, but those are 14-inch designs. At 16 inches with a full RTX 5070, ThundeRobot appears to have carved out a category of one, at least for now.

On the hardware side, the ZERO Air 16 pairs an Intel Core Ultra 7 356H, a 16-core Panther Lake chip, with an RTX 5070 Laptop GPU carrying 8GB of GDDR7 memory. The chassis is built from carbon fiber, which explains how ThundeRobot managed to hit that weight figure. The laptop ships with 32GB of LPDDR5 memory and 1TB of storage. Marketing materials mention an HDD, but that is almost certainly a translation error given the form factor.

We have another Steam Machine rival in our midst, and this one is interesting. AOOSTAR quietly expanded global sales of the GODY mini PC this week, and based on the spec sheet alone, it makes Valve's console look a little slow.

The GODY Mini-PC packs a Ryzen 9 7940HX, a 16-core, 32-thread Zen 4 chip, alongside a dedicated Radeon RX 7600 XT with 16GB of GDDR6 memory. That's double the amount of VRAM found in Valve's box, plus Wi-Fi 7 and dual 2.5 GbE LAN ports for good measure. All of that lands at $849, a full $200 under the Steam Machine's $1,049 starting price. Looking at the listing, it looks too good to be true, and then you scroll down a bit.

Here's the catch. The $849 price is for a barebone unit only. AOOSTAR hands you the CPU, GPU, chassis, and cooling, then leaves you to buy and install your own DDR5 memory and M.2 SSD. Normally, that would just be a minor inconvenience for anyone who has spare parts lying around. However, right now it is a much bigger problem, because DRAM prices have gone completely sideways.

Ubisoft's highly anticipated Black Flag Remake, which the company has been clear is a full remake and not just a remaster, is now days away from launch on July 9. Steam Deck gamers who have been waiting to find out whether they will be able to sail the Caribbean on the go finally have their answer, and it is a good one.

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced is Steam Deck Verified at launch. Ubisoft confirmed the news in a post on Steam, saying its teams worked hard to make the game playable in as many places as possible. A Steam Deck Verified rating means the game runs well out of the box with default settings, controller configuration, correct controller icons, and legible text on the handheld's screen.

Ubisoft has not confirmed specific frame rates for the Steam Deck version, which likely means the game targets 30 FPS on the handheld. That said, Steam Deck Verified status is also a decent indicator of broader PC performance. If the game runs stably on Valve's modest RDNA 3-based hardware, most modern gaming PCs should have no trouble with it. It is also worth noting that Steam Deck Verified games carry over to the Steam Machine, which runs the same underlying SteamOS software and features stronger AMD hardware.

Reading between the lines, Sony's decision to move to an all-digital future for PlayStation was always in plain sight.

Last month on June 5, Sony published a Q&A centered on its PlayStation business. Looking through that document in hindsight after Sony announced it would be cutting game discs for new titles after 2028 adds new context to what was said.

PlayStation CEO Hideaki Nishino mentioned something particularly interesting given the new developments: "At the same time, most of the value of our ecosystem is driven by third-party publishers, who benefit from our large install base, strong community engagement, and monetization tools. This supports a shift toward a true digital platform business.".

Ubisoft has hired 2K Games co-founder Christoph Hartmann to lead the future of big Tom Clancy franchises like The Division.

Some of Ubisoft's biggest franchises will now be overseen by a proven games industry veteran. The company recently restructured into five different segments called Creative Houses, with each overseeing a domain of franchises. Now Ubisoft has found leadership for Creative House 2, which handles Ghost Recon, Splinter Cell, The Division, and the recently-acquired March of Giants MOBA.

2K Games co-founder and former president Christoph Hartmann will lead Creative House 2, Ubisoft has announced. Hartmann helped bring to market multiple games in his tenure at 2K including Borderlands, BioShock, XCOM and NBA 2K. Hartmann will now lend that expertise to Ubisoft and its titles.

Sony PlayStation has officially declared AI as one of the core ingredients of its future strategy, with leadership emphasizing its role in improving game development and player experiences, at no cost to the end product or user.

In a recently translated Q&A from a PlayStation internal meeting, CEO Hideaki Nishino described AI as an "important foundational piece" of the company's long-term vision. He noted that AI is already being used to enhance development efficiency by removing repetitive tasks that developers would otherwise have had to complete. Nishino also highlighted PlayStation's global IP library and how an integrated ecosystem leveraging AI will benefit the company.

Sony says its approach to AI is less about cost-cutting and more about accelerating development, while maintaining the exponentially growing standards of game development. A joint response from Nishino and PlayStation studio leadership emphasized that AI is being used to reduce repetitive tasks and enable developers to iterate faster than before, with examples including the development of synthetic assets and placeholder voices. They also mentioned that AI is being used to create more immersive in-game worlds and characters.

Security researchers at LayerX have discovered a new prompt injection technique that tricks AI browsers into revealing saved passwords and login credentials by leading them to believe they are playing a game.

The attack is called BioShocking, named after the 2007 video game BioShock. The game follows a brainwashed character who follows commands after hearing the phrase "Would you kindly?" That is pretty much what's going on here. Essentially, the AI agent believes whatever information it is given, and changing the information changes what it will do.

The attack starts on a malicious webpage designed as a puzzle called Rapture Games, themed after BioShock's underwater world. The puzzle rewards wrong answers, training the agent to accept that 2+2=5 and that incorrect actions are the winning move. Once the agent learns this, its safety protections stop working. The last step of the puzzle tells the agent to navigate to a GitHub repository and copy the login details stored there.

CD Projekt Red has officially confirmed that Cyberpunk 2077 has crossed 40 million copies sold, and perhaps surprisingly, it beat The Witcher 3's pace to get there. The studio confirmed the milestone on X, with joint CEO Michał Nowakowski calling it proof of the game's "lasting strength" and teasing that Cyberpunk: Edgerunners season 2 is coming this fall.

The number covers the base game plus the Ultimate Edition bundle, and it comes just seven months after CD Projekt announced 35 million, a jump TweakTown covered back in November when the game was also driving a 53% revenue increase for the company. It looks like Cyberpunk 2077 has been on a real redemption arc over the past couple of years.

For comparison, CDPR's older RPG, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, sold around 30 million copies in its first six years on the market. Cyberpunk 2077 has now hit 40 million in that same six-year window, a full 10 million ahead of its own predecessor's pace. That's a really impressive turnaround for a game that launched in December 2020 in decidedly rough shape, got pulled from the PlayStation Store, and became a punchline for months.

A new internal document from Sony outlines how its controversial disc phase-out will affect third-party publishers and partners.

Sony plans to stop physical disc production of new games by January 2028. This means that any game that comes out after that timeframe will be digital-only on PlayStation. But games that had already been released on the market before this cutoff date can still get physical disc releases.

Sony's official messaging to publishers was obtained by Game File's Stephen Totilo, offering more clarification on what to expect. The report states that publishers "will still be able to place re-orders for existing PlayStation disc games," confirming that these specific games can still get printed onto discs even after the January 2028 cutoff. There will be some adjustments to how discs are ordered, Sony says.

Nintendo's latest Q&A with investors shows the company is operating under the assumption that the current component crisis does not abate.

The ongoing chip squeeze has triggered price hikes across nearly all consumer electronics, including consoles from Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft. Gamers have had to adapt to multiple increases on both PlayStation (two price hikes) and Xbox (three hikes). Nintendo plans to raise the price of its Switch 2 console on September 1, pushing the system from its original tariff-insulated $459 price to a more profit-friendly $499.

In the latest annual shareholders meeting, Nintendo management was specifically asked how skyrocketing chip prices will affect the group's future plans. Company president Shuntaro Furukawa responded by saying that Nintendo is currently outlining its plans and predictions for Fiscal Year 2028 (April 2027 - March 2028) based on the belief that memory and storage could continue increasing in price. This falls in line with Microsoft's own expectations, as Xbox CEO Asha Sharma says chip prices will continue to jump through the end of 2027: "As we plan for the 2027 holiday season, we expect another significant increase, taking us over 5x the prices we paid only two years earlier," Sharma said at the time.

UPDATE: It's been revealed that this messaging is not new, and has been on the PlayStation Direct storefront for over a year.

Sony is limiting orders of the PS5's $80 disc drive to 1 order per person following its controversial decision to kill game discs in 2028.

Sony recently shocked the gaming world by announcing it would stop producing PlayStation game discs for new games by January 2028. The PlayStation community is vexed and incensed like never before--and that's saying a lot after the PS3 woes and the infamous 2011 PSN blackout. This has led to one of the most significant consumer backlashes in the history of the video games industry.

Intel has officially confirmed a price hike on its Core Ultra 200S Plus desktop CPUs, just days after the new pricing quietly showed up on its own product pages. The change was first spotted by X leaker harukaze5719, who noticed that Intel's ARK listings for the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus and Core Ultra 5 250K Plus had jumped without any accompanying announcement.

According to the statement given to Hardwareluxx, Intel says the new pricing reflects current market dynamics, including rising supply chain costs and strong demand for the Core Ultra 200S Plus lineup, and adds that the move is in line with recent price increases across other Intel product families.

The Core Ultra 7 270K Plus launched in March at $299 and now carries a recommended customer price of $339 to $349, depending on the tray or boxed version. The Core Ultra 5 250K Plus moves from its original $199 up to a $219 to $229 range, while the Core Ultra 5 250KF Plus reportedly climbs from $184 to $214. That works out to increases of roughly $30 to $50 per chip.