Latest News - Page 1533

Bethesda's top brass delves into the ethos that drives the company's success: Exposure, sales, and sustainability.

In a recent interview with Major Nelson, Bethesda's Pete Hines and Todd Howard gave key insight on what makes the company tick. It turns out Bethesda is after the same things as any publisher, including mass-market exposure, increased access, wide availability. These goals are a big reason why ZeniMax sold to Microsoft.

Turns out that Game Pass was a big motivator for the sale. The service checks all the right boxes that ZeniMax and Bethesda were chasing, like live service frameworks, successful monetization, widespread access and availability, huge organic exposure across an online ecosystem, and full game sales across multiple platforms.

Konami finally plans to unleash some of its IP treasure trove onto the PC platform...but hopefully they aren't just basic ports.

A handful of new Konami listings have popped up on the Taiwanese games rating board. There's four games in all for PC, one of which is a Castelvania + Contra retro collection that includes the first three Castlevania games (sadly no Super Castlevania IV or Dracula X) plus Contra and the excellent SNES shooter Super C.

Konami hasn't revealed any info on the games just yet, but expect them to drop on Steam sometime soon. Konami's latest financials saw profits drop by over 40% thanks to coronavirus closing its resorts and pachinko arcades. Digital gaming is still going strong and helped buoy this loss with stronger revenue spikes. Konami should lean into more re-releases and game launches to help offset COVID-19 interruptions, and this strategic PC bundle will help.

The expandable Xbox Series X/S SSD memory cards will cost $220, which is just more than half of an Xbox Series S console.

Best Buy listings confirm pricing for expandable 1TB SSD memory card storage will retail for $219 a piece, which isn't a terrible price for flash memory of this caliber (bear in mind Samsung's blistering-fast 980 Pro SSDs are $229 for 1TB capacities). It's also 73% of the Xbox Series S' $299 price tag, which is something to consider if you go the all-digital Series S route.

The listing confirms Xbox Series X and S consoles use PCie 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSDs on x2 lanes, which makes sense given the 4.8GB/sec compressed transfer speed caps. Remember that this memory is proprietary and specially-designed to run DirectX 12 APIs like DirectStorage, Xbox OS tech, and the new Velocity Architecture. Also remember the cards use a CFExpress cartridge with a smaller M.2 drive packed within. CFExpress is typically reserved for high-end digital photography and enthusiast-grade cameras.

Nuvia is currently in the process of creatring an ARM-based CPU core and server SoC, codenamed Orion and Phoenix -- and now the company has just secured more funds to make that happen.

In a new Series B funding round, Nuvia raised $240 million in the fresh funding round from Mithril Capital in partnership with Sehat Sutardja and Weili Dai (who are the founders of Marvell Technology Group), funds and accounted managed by BlackRock, Fidelity Management & Research Company LLC., and Temasek, with additional participation from Atlantic Bridge, Redline Capital, Capricorn Investment Group, Dell Technologies Capital, Mayfield, Nepenthe LLC and WRVI Capital.

Back in November 2019, Nuvia held its Series A funding round where it raised $53 million. This new injection of funds will help the new company, that was founded in February 2019 by John Bruno, Manu Gulati, and Gerard Williams with the vision of creating the world's leading server processor.

Tom Cruise and director Doug Liman are scheduled to leave Earth next year aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft.

SpaceX is no stranger to the idea of doing private tourist missions for the extremely wealthy, and I suppose that is why this mission has been dubbed a "tourist mission". According to Space Shuttle Almanac, Tom Cruise, director Doug Liman, and most likely one other as one seat has yet to be filled, will be leaving Earth in October 2021 to arrive at the International Space Station.

At the moment, the purpose of the mission is officially unknown, but we can assume that actor Tom Cruise and director Dough Liman are either discussing filming possibilities or are doing some kind of filming for a future movie. One thing is certain; the launch is more than a year away, which means there is plenty of time for plans to change, such as cancellation or the other passenger's announcement.

Oculus founder Palmer Luckey reportedly invested some of his money in SideQuest. This marketplace sells Oculus Quest apps that aren't approved for sale on Facebook's official Oculus Store.

Facebook treats the Oculus Quest as somewhat of a gaming console. It's a self-contained gaming device that's tethered to a platform-specific marketplace, just like an Xbox or PlayStation console. Facebook would prefer that Quest owners buy all their content through the Oculus Store, and the company goes through great lengths to ensure that every title on its store offers a high-quality experience.

Not every app meets Facebook's requirements, and when that happens, developers don't have much recourse. That happened to the founder of SideQuest, Shane Harris, when he submitted his title to the Oculus Store. The rejection inspired Harris to create the SideQuest marketplace as an alternative distribution solution for content that Facebook doesn't want to sell.

AMD is set to rock our world -- as well as Intel's world -- with its next-gen Rembrandt Ryzen APU family of processors, with the new 2022 APU family of chips being teased with some new specs.

According to @MebiuW on Twitter, we are being told to expect the new Rembrandt Ryzen APU processors to feature next-gen Zen 3 CPU cores and next-gen RDNA 2 GPU cores. Not just that, but the new APUs will be made on the new 6nm process node, and have support for DDR5-5200 memory.

We're being told to expect 20% higher density, with better power consumption numbers compared to 7nm. With AMD utilizing both of its next-gen Zen 3 CPU and RDNA 2 GPU architectures in this new Ryzen APU, we should expect some pretty stellar performance out of the chips when they drop in 2022.

A few weeks ago, we stumbled upon a rumour about a new VR headset from HP that we had never heard of before called Reverb G2 Omnicept. HP has never confirmed the existence of such a device, but it looks like someone at the company temporarily published a page on its website that spills the beans.

HP's Reverb G2 is an upcoming VR headset, which features dual 4K displays and several features from Valve's Index headset, such as the head strap and over-the-ear speakers. The Omincept version of the Reverb G2 is rumoured to include several biometric scanners, such as iris tracking and mouth tracking cameras.

We don't yet know what the Reverb G2 Omnicept really does, nor do we know for a fact that it exists. However, Reddit user u/mFriedelVR posted a screenshot of HP's website that lists the rumoured headset in the VR drop-down menu. We checked HP's website to see for ourselves, but the link has either been removed or it never really existed in the first place.

We are just getting our first look at the purported NVIDIA Quadro RTX A6000 graphics card, with a look at the new card and its blower-style cooler below:

The leak is coming from Moore's Law is Dead, with the next-gen Quadro RTX graphics card pictured here to reportedly be the Quadro RTX A6000. We are to expect 48GB of GDDR6 memory on a 384-bit memory bus with 768GB/sec of memory bandwidth from the card.

NVIDIA seems to be going with a dual-fan design and short PCB, but we don't know if the company is using the same V-shaped PCB that it has on the GeForce RTX 3090 Founders Edition and GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition graphics cards.

Sony's first-party PC cross-overs are off to a good start as Horizon Zero Dawn moves over 700,000 copies on Steam in its first month.

According to latest findings from SuperData, Horizon Zero Dawn sold roughly 716,000 copies on Steam in August. This is up 50% from the estimated combined 477,000 copies Death Stranding sold on EGS and Steam. SuperData also notes Horizon's PC sales approached The Witcher 3's 2015 launch numbers while also handily beating Assassin's Creed Odyssey's PC debut.

The news bodes well for future PlayStation exclusives making the jump to PC. Sony recently confirmed that more PS4 games will jump to PC as it eyes continued back-catalog sales outside of the PlayStation console ecosystem.

Morrowind has absurdly long loading times on the original Xbox, sometimes lasting over a minute or more. Why? Bethesda ran out of memory and literally had to reboot the console as you played.

In a recent interview with Major Nelson, Todd Howard reveals why Morrowind's loading sequences are so ridiculously long on the 2001 Xbox. Howard was discussing the old days and how Bethesda worked with Microsoft to figure out lots of little tricks with the original Xbox. One of these tricks involved literally rebooting the console without the user even knowing.

"There's been great tricks that they taught us. My favorite one on Morrowind is...if you're running low on memory, you can reboot the original Xbox and the user can't tell. You can throw like a screen up. When Morrowind loads sometimes, you get a very long load. That's us rebooting the Xbox,"Howard said.

Now free from Activision's influence, a handful of ex-Blizzard developers join ex-CEO Mike Morhaime to make their own publishing label and game dev studio teams.

Today Blizzard co-founder and ex-CEO Mike Morhaime announced Dreamhaven, an ambitious new publishing label that houses two studios: Moonshot Games and Secret Door. Morhaime and his wife Amy are funding the label themselves, and a number of StarCraft, Warcraft, Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm vets have joined their ranks.

Morhaime says the main goal with Dreamhaven is to create a positive workplace that fosters creativity and frees developers from crushing crunch and financial pressures. You know, the exact opposite of what mainstream AAA game dev studios like Blizzard face under billion-dollar publisher rule. Dreamhaven is a haven and a beacon of hope in one, a place where devs can come and make their passions come to life without worry of over-monetization and constant obsession on metrics, service updates, and the other rigors of current Blizzard development.

Fortnite's removal on Google Play and subsequent one-year ban on the App Store has significantly dropped mobile revenues. Luckily console and PC earnings are skyrocketing to help offset these drops.

Fortnite's mobile microtransaction earnings have plummeted. According to SuperData, mobile earnings are down by over 62%, and daily active users are down by a massive 60% on iOS.

Console and PC earnings are on the rise to help equalize this loss. SuperData's report for August 2020 shows a sharp uptick in Fortnite's mTX earnings on these platforms driven by the new Marvel promotion. Fortnite's revenues for August are up 76% month-over-month which SuperData says "more than offsets falling mobile revenues."

Microsoft's new Xbox beta app for Android has an innovative new pre-loading feature that'll save you time and get you right into the game.

Game downloads are a pain and can interrupt your gameplay sessions. Fire up your console, pop in a game, and bam, a multi-GB update--or worse, you find out most of the game isn't even included on the disc. Luckily Microsoft has you covered with a nifty new convenience feature on the Xbox Android app.

The app now lets you download any digital game offered on the Xbox store. With a tap, you can tell your Xbox One or Xbox Series S/X console to download a specific game even if you're away from home. Of course, you have to actually own the game before you can play it. The store will verify ownership in two ways: Digital rights allowance that's tied to your account, and using the disc as DRM.

Space is a strange and beautiful place, and we are yet to discover many of the hidden beauties that are floating around out there in its vastness.

But, every now again, we come across something that we have never seen before. In this instance, we have come across a comet that has its own "Northern Lights". As described by NASA in a recent blog post, data from the Rosetta mission conducted by the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA have revealed a new comet titled 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko that has its own far-ultraviolet aurora.

For those that don't know what the Northern or Southern Lights are, NASA explains that these phenomena happen when charged particles from the Sun hit the upper atmosphere. This interaction between the charged particles and the upper atmosphere creates the beautiful shimmers of color we see. These auroras are known to happen in other locations in space such as Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and even Mars.

HoloLens 2 is getting a significant feature upgrade. Microsoft released a new feature called Azure Object Anchors, which allow the HoloLens 2 to use physical objects to anchor 3D content. Say goodbye to QR code markers.

Azure Object Anchors is Microsoft's third cloud-backed service for Windows Mixed Reality. HoloLens 2 already supported Remote Rendering for streaming high-quality 3D content, and Spatial Anchors, which associates content with spaces.

Object Anchors adds another layer of granularity and allows developers to align content with physical objects. Microsoft said the new service uses the depth and geometry of physical objects to align 3D content, eliminates the need for manual alignment procedures that marker systems require.

First we had GIGABYTE outing the new GeForce RTX 3080 with 20GB, a new RTX 3070 with 16GB, and then the RTX 3060 with 8GB.

Now it's time for GALAX to get onto the "leak" game that NVIDIA doesn't seem to be stopping (free hype and marketing), with a new "internal leaked roadmap". You can see at the top of GALAX's roadmap is the GeForce RTX 3090 -- but right under that is the RTX 3080 20GB, and then RTX 3080 10GB.

We also have a new 'PG142 SKU 0' which should manifest into the GeForce RTX 3070 SUPER or GeForce RTX 3070 Ti. Under that we have the RTX 3070 which is coming in October, and then the RTX 3060 which should roll out with the TU106 GPU.

Facebook last week announced Quest 2 and opened pre-orders for the new device. The company said it was prepared for high demand, but it seems to have underestimated how much people want a Quest 2.

The new Oculus Quest 2 is a spectacular device, and people really want to get their hands-on one. Facebook is selling the XR2-powered standalone headset for an astoundingly low $299, and that entry price seems to have sparked some attention. Quest 2 is supposed to ship on October 13, but if you don't have your order in yet, you're in for a bit of a wait.

Quest 2 is now backordered but just shy of a month in both the United States and Canada. Canadians can expect new orders of either Quest 2 model to arrive on November 10. Americans can get the 256GB model on November 3, but the 64GB version is backordered to November 9. If you live in the UK, you can get your hands-on a 64GB Quest 2 as early as October 20, but the 256GB version won't arrive until November 3.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Warzone Season 6 is right around the corner, with Activision releasing a new cinematic trailer to tease it. Check it out:

Warzone's exciting Verdansk map will be getting a big change, with an underground network of subway tunnels being inserted into the map which will change Warzone up in a big way. There's also some new operators, with the introduction of Nikolai and Farah.

As for the new operators entering the fray in Season 6, we can expect:

GALAX has just unveiled its new custom GeForce RTX 3090 GAMER graphics card, which seems to have been inspired by LEGO. Check it out:

You can see that GALAX GeForce RTX 3090 GAMER edition graphics card is rocking out with a triple-fan cooler, just like most of the custom GeForce RTX 30 series graphics cards. But where GALAX is doing it differently with this model, is being heavily inspired by LEGO -- yeah, LEGO bricks.

As VideoCardz points out, with the color and shroud design it also looks like it is some LEGO bricks infused with a Nintendo Switch console. It actually looks great, and I kinda really dig it.