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Bethesda today announced a commitment to provide free next-gen PS5 and Xbox Series X upgrades for its biggest games, starting first with Doom Eternal and Elder Scrolls Online.

As we predicted, id Software will reveal next-gen optimizations for Doom Eternal at Quakecon 2020. The new id Tech 7 engine that powers Doom Eternal is future-proofed for multiple generations of enthusiast-grade GPU tech, and was built from the ground up for forward-compatibility with new console hardware too.

While no optimization details have been confirmed, we could see Doom Eternal as the first next-gen game locked at 120FPS on PS5 and Xbox Series X.

Spelunky 2 finally got a firm September 15 release date, but only for PlayStation 4. There's no locked launch date for other platforms.

Today Mossmouth confirmed a release date for Spelunky 2 on PS4, but other platforms will have to wait a big longer. Game developer Derek Yu says the maze-runner platformer needs more time in the oven before it's ready to serve on PC. The online multiplayer is adding multiple layers of complexity to the game.

"The Steam version of Spelunky 2 will come out shortly after PS4! We'll need a little extra time to iron out online multiplayer on PC. Release date for that soon! After Steam, we'll look into other platforms. We are excited for as many people to play as possible," Yu said on Twitter.

Godfall, the new PlayStation 5 looter-slasher coming in 2020, won't have microtransactions or monetization.

Godfall looks like prime territory for microtransactions. It's an action-based third-person combat game with heavy emphasis on gear progression and customization, and it also feature online 3-player co-op. There's lots of weapons to collect across five classes, and a number of valor plate armor sets to unlock. These things are typically hallmarks to any service-driven live game, and on the surface, Godfall looks like a great fit for cosmetic mTX. But Counterplay promises the game won't have any form of in-game purchases. Godfall is a complete package, the developer says.

"Godfall is a complete package. All of the gear and items in the game are acquired and unlocked through gameplay. There are no microtransactions. No waiting for content. It's all in the game, day one," Godfall game director Keith Lee said in a recent gameplay video.

UPDATE:As we predicted, Remedy teases this is the beginning of a new expanded connected universe.

"What if there's actually been a plan in place for over a decade on how some of our games are connected - a Remedy Connected Universe, if you will - and payoff for certain things is... down the line?," Remedy's Thomas Puha said in a PlayStation Blog post.

Control's new AWE expansion will feature Remedy favorite Alan Wake, as well as a new cursed arcade machine.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons just sold more copies in a single quarter than most AAA games sell in their lifetime.

Nintendo's Q1 earnings are astronomical; the company's profits are up 541% to $989 million on the back of $3.3 billion in net sales. Switch made up $3.2 billion of net sales, or 92% of total earnings. Nintendo sold 5.67 million Switch consoles in Q1, more than twice any other Q1 in history, and beat all Q2 regions too.

Software is up a tremendously 123% to 50.4 million units, pushing total cumulative Switch software to 406.67 million, which beats the 3DS' lifetime software.

The Nintendo Switch has now sold 406.67 million games digitally and physically, beating the 3DS' current 384 million software sales.

Nintendo is on a roll right now. The company reported massive 541% profit gains in Q1, driven by Switch hardware and software sales surges. Switch hardware shot up by 5.67 million units, up 166% year-over-year, pushing hardware to 61.44 million since launch. Software likewise saw a sharp uptick.

The Switch's current software sales sit at 406.67 million, driven by a huge 50.43 million games sold in Q1'21 (+123% rise in sales year-over-year). These numbers current beat the 3DS' lifetime software sales, which now sit at 384.7 million. The Switch is now #5 in Nintendo's top historical platform software sales.

Nintendo wants to produce 25 million Switch consoles by the end of this fiscal year, sources tell Bloomberg's Takashi Mochizuki.

COVID-19 lockdowns have led to significant console hardware shortage. The Nintendo Switch in particular is scarce in all global markets, and analyst firms like GSD note a 106% Switch sales spike in European markets.. Nintendo wants to alleviate scarcity by adding millions onto its current manufacturing orders.

Sources say Nintendo has adjusted its internal production forecast by 3 million units, and now plans to create and make available 25 million Switch consoles in the fiscal year ending March 2021. Sources say Nintendo previously only planned to make 22 million units this year.

Epic Games just successfully closed a $1.78 billion funding round pushing its total equity valuation to over $17.3 billion.

Fortnite creator and Unreal Engine platform-holder Epic Games tacked on nearly $2 billion to its total equity, the company today announced. New investors include a number of accounts from a myriad of firms, including BlackRock Financial, Fidelity Management, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and even the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan Board invested into Epic.

The news comes weeks after Bloomberg reported on the funding round back in June 2020. The company has managed to add over $2 billion in valuation in less than two years. In 2018, Epic's valuation sat at $15 billion, and the same year it managed to rake in over $3 billion in operating profits.

Nintendo sold more Switch consoles in Q1'21 than in any other first quarter period in the console's history.

Today Nintendo announced record-breaking Fiscal Year Q1'21 earnings on the back of strong hardware adoption. Nintendo managed to sell 5.67 million Switch consoles in the quarter ended June 30, up triple digits (+166%) from last year.

Nintendo's recent quarterly Switch sales are more than twice that of any other Q1 since the system's launch. These numbers also beat any Q2 period since the system's release in March 2017. Nintendo doesn't traditionally break 5 million hardware sales until the critical Q3 holiday period.

Nintendo Switch sales surged by triple digits in Europe during COVID-19 lockdowns, and helped raise overall hardware adoption by 84% in the region.

COVID-19 is surging sales revenues for the games industry. Sony and Microsoft just reported record quarters for games earnings, and Nintnedo is poised to do the same. But not all regions are the same, and analyst firm GSD shows some interesting metrics.

According to GSD, all three major consoles saw a sharp uptick in sales during COVID-19. The Switch in particular grew triple digits by 106%, reflecting the console's scarcity across the globe right now.

We have right now some truly incredible news if it begins to turn into reality, with our very good friend Igor over at Igor's Lab exclusively reporting details on Vermeer -- or what you will eventually know as the AMD Ryzen 9 4950X processor.

Vermeer is the codename for AMD's upcoming Zen 3-based Ryzen 4000 desktop CPUs, which should see emerge the flagship Ryzen 9 4950X that Igor has some details on. Igor reports from his sources that AMD's next-gen Ryzen 9 4950X will be a 16-core, 32-thread CPU which could roll out with a 3.5GHz base clock and huge 4.8GHz boost clock.

Igor has noticed something interesting with Vermeer, with per core voltage adjustments that would be a huge sandbox for overclockers to play around with. We should expect AMD to build these features into their Ryzen Master Tool software.

Samsung has made its Galaxy Z Fold 2 foldable smartphone official, the successor to the Galaxy Fold which has been rebranded to fall under its Galaxy Z family of foldable phones.

The new Galaxy Z Fold 2 improves upon virtually every area of the already technically impressive Galaxy Fold, where it is faster, thinner, packs a better display, better hinge, faster charging, better cameras, better 5G, better everything really. Samsung really went the whole hog, again.

Samsung plans an event on September 1 for the full unveiling, or should we say, unfolding of the Galaxy Z Fold 2 -- so until then, let's walk you through what we do know about the new foldable.

Call of Duty: Warzone is now enjoying its Season 5 update, with Activision taking the time to announce that Warzone has now passed 75 million players.

Season 5 of the game just launched, changing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and the free-to-play battle royale mode Warzone. Warzone had racked up 60 million players in May 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic has surely been fueling Warzone's continuous growth.

The game itself is wicked fun and I'm personally addicted, so I can see why 75 million other players are loving Warzone and how Season 5 has completely changed the game. After a huge Warzone session last night, it's interesting how the meta changes so quickly and the newly-tweaked Stadium is now a huge hot spot of action and I love it.

It seems we're a few steps away from full disclosure at this point, between The New York Times and its report from The Pentagon on UFOs being 'off-world vehicles not made on this Earth' -- blowing up because Joe Rogan shared it on social media.

And now? President Trump has said that we should have "full transparency" on UFOs in a recent chat with Lou Dobbs on Fox Business.

Dobbs questioned President Trump, asking: "Your administration, you promised would be transparent and you have done your level best to do that despite the Deep State's efforts to bury everything about as deeply as they could. But I have one question as we conclude here".

ASUS has just announced an unnamed ROG gaming monitor, the world's first HDMI 2.1-certified gaming monitor that has HDMI 2.1 bandwidth pushing 48Gbps. This makes it support 4K at up to 120Hz, previously exclusive to DisplayPort.

This is the perfect gaming monitor for next-gen consoles in the Sony PlayStation 5 and Microsoft Xbox Series X, or upcoming next-gen NVIDIA Ampere GeForce RTX 3000 series and AMD RDNA 2 aka Big Navi graphics cards with HDMI 2.1 when they launch over the coming months and into 2021.

ASUS has baked in Auto Low Latency that allows consoles to control the processing mode of the display, where it will be able to prioritize either low latency or processing quality depending on what you're doing at the time.

We are another step closer to Ampere, with NVIDIA reportedlyt discontinuing the GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER graphics card. This isn't the first time we heard about the GeForce RTX 20 series being discontinued, with the first rumors popping up back in July 2020.

The news is coming from Chinese site MyDrivers, which reports that NVIDIA has "completely discontinued" the Turing-based GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER graphics card.

The last batch of Turing-based GPUs has been dispatched, with no further orders on the GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER to be accepted. GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER is now EOL = end of life. This list will eventually, where I'm sure the wheels are already rolling, to discontinue the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER, GeForce RTX 2080 and GeForce RTX 2070.

AMD just continues to swing winning hits against Intel, with news breaking that AMD has reached the highest x86 CPU market share its had since Q4 2013.

The news is coming from Mercury Research, which reports that during Q2 2020 the company reached an x86 CPU market share of 18.3% which is the highest AMD has been since Q4 2013. Not only that, but AMD also reached a new all-time high for the mobility CPU market, too.

AMD's newly-launched Ryzen 4000 series "Renoir" chips have been kicking some serious ass, and that will only continue in 2021 when we will see many more laptops released powered by Renoir.

Intel has just announced two new virtual events: the first is an "update" from Raja Koduri -- so expect something on the Intel Xe GPU architecture, while the second is the Tiger Lake launch event.

Raja Koduri, Chief Architect at Intel and also the point man on the GPU business, will provide an update via a webcast on August 13 at 9AM ET, where we will hopefully be provided with some juicy updates on Intel's upcoming Xe GPU architecture.

After that, Intel will be hosting the Tiger Lake virtual launch event on September 2, which is the event we heard about a few weeks ago when Intel said it had "something big" to share on September 2 -- this is it, the Tiger Lake launch.

A fresh batch of hype is coming out of the oven, with reports that NVIDIA is gearing up for a September 17 launch of its next-gen Ampere-based GeForce RTX 3000 series graphics cards.

We now have a new report from MyDrivers, which is reporting that NVIDIA will launch Ampere GeForce RTX 3000 series cards on September 17. It will begin with the flagship GeForce RTX 3080 Ti (or is that the GeForce RTX 3090) and then stage out the GeForce RTX 3080 release for October, while the GeForce RTX 3060 would drop in November.

All the way back in March 2020, I first wrote that we would see an August 2020 reveal for the next-gen GeForce RTX 3000 series cards, while the launch would take place in September 2020. These new rumors seem to be lining up with what I predicted earlier in the year.

Sony will be hosting its State of Play event on August 6, where we could be introduced to more details on the PlayStation 5 -- even though Sony has promised "no big PS5 announcements".

But now French retailer Carrefour has teased pricing on the next-gen PlayStation 5, which will reportedly cost $599 at launch. The all-digital PlayStation 5 will cost $499 at launch, but won't come with a 4K UHD Blu-ray player.

The pricing is higher than the previous pricing of $499 for the standard PS5 and $399 for the all-digital PS5 from a few weeks ago, but I think we'll still see a firm November 20, 2020 launch.