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Microsoft's Jason Ronald confirms Hellblade II will use Epic's new Unreal Engine 5 technology for high-end performance.

Although Epic first showcased the Unreal Engine 5 running on Sony's PlayStation 5, the engine will of course support the Xbox Series X and PC as well. Now we have confirmation of the initial first-party Xbox game to use UE5.

"The team will be building the game on Unreal 5 and leveraging the power of Xbox Series X to bring the Hellblade franchise to levels never before seen. The footage shown was captured in-engine and reflects the power of Xbox Series X available to developers to deliver new universes, experiences and games in ways you have never imagined," Xbox Director of Program Management Jason Ronald said in a recent blog post.

Kingston has announced that it is now shipping a new version of its KC2500 2TB NVMe PCIe SSD that packs 2TB of storage in the small form factor SSD. The drive is aimed at desktop, workstation, and high-performance computing systems where performance is critical. Kingston uses a GEN 3.0 x 4 controller and 96-layer 3D TLC NAND.

Read/write speeds are up to 3500/2900 MB/s, and Kingston promises that the drive is durable. The new 2TB capacity slots into the range for the KC2500 NVMe PCIe SSD range that begins at 250GB. Kingston also supports end-to-end data protection using XTS-AES 256-bit hardware-based encryption.

The SSD also allows the use of independent software vendors with TCG Opal 2.0 security management solutions. That includes offerings from Symantec, McAfee, WinMagic, and others. The KC2500 also has integrated Microsoft eDrive support, which is a security storage specification for use with BitLocker. Kingston ships all capacities of the SSD with cloning software.

A recently published Sony patent reinforces our previous coverage that the PlayStation 5 will support save states as well as in-game hints.

The patent was just published, but it isn't really new, and was actually filed in 2017. The topics aren't all that new either. Other patents have pretty much outed the PlayStation 5's own unique answer to Quick Resume via a novel save state feature.

The basic gist of the patent is a new UI system that relays key data to users. On the surface, the UI looks very similar to the PS4. But this patent includes lots of info, metrics, and UI features the PS4 doesn't have. For example, the patent shows panes to quick-launch a game at a specific point in time.

GameStop's Q1'20 earnings show a substantial $177 million comprehensive net loss due to COVID-19 closures, high expenses, and reduction in tax assets.

Retailer GameStop isn't doing well right now. The company was already on a shaky foundation, and the weeks-long COVID-19 closures put a serious dent in net income, and under-performance has diminished one of the company's most valuable assets: Deferred taxes.

GameStop's net sales for the Q1'20 period were $1.021 billion, down 34% year-over-year. But this is just revenue. After expenses, the company reported a total operating loss of $108 million, compared to a positive $17.5 million in Q1'19. The simple reason for this is GameStop spent more than it made.

Gamers have a new mouse to check out from XPG called the XPG Primer. It has a durable double-shot surface with PBT, giving a smooth and grippy surface. Users can weight balance the mouse at 98g plus or minus 5%. It also offers textured side grips for comfort during long gaming sessions.

Primer also has an ultra-light braided cable and selectable RGB lighting effects. The sensor inside is a 12000 DPI PMW3360 optical unit. XPG fits it with Omron mechanical switches with durability for more than 20 million clicks.

The scroll wheel is tactile for comfort. Resolution is adjustable starting at 400 dpi and doubling until it reaches the max 12000 dpi. There are six presets for DPI. The maximum acceleration is 50G, and the report rate is 250/500/1000 Hz. Supported lighting effects include color wave, breathing, static, and off.

Despite a substantial $177 million earnings loss in Q1'20 and an 80% reduction in its deferred tax assets, GameStop isn't down for the count yet. It might owe hundreds of millions, but the company is still alive and kicking for the time being.

Beleaguered retailer GameStop currently owes $417.2 million in total debts. Luckily its cash on hand outweighs its debts. GameStop has $570 million in cash right now, but even a portion of that--$135 million--was financed from credit. So GameStop is still at risk but it's not immediately going under.

To held buy it some time, GameStop issued a new debt note exchange offer. The company will pay exchange a 1:1 promise to all noteholders to pay them the exact value of their notes when the notes are due. But the catch is the notes won't mature until 2023, meaning GameStop won't have to pay everything back until that period.

Apple has always been very big on the design of its products, and as such, it's made some beautiful gear over the years. One of its more attractive products is the new line of iPad Pro tablets that are almost all screen on the front. A new rumor is going around that says when WWDC 2020 kicks off later this month, one of the new products that will be unveiled is a new iMac that has style reminiscent of the current iPad Pro.

A past rumor has suggested that Apple will officially unveil new ARM-powered Macs at WWDC 2020. The rumor of the redesigned iMac comes from leaker Sonny Dickson. The rumor says that the new iMac will have Pro Display-like bezels, a T2 chip, AMD NAVI GPU, and will ditch the Fusion Drive.

Eliminating the Fusion Drive means that there will be no more hybrid storage inside the iMac. Instead, the new iMac is expected to use flash storage exclusively. iMac fans should be thrilled at this rumor as the machine hasn't been updated in over a year. Other rumors have suggested that an updated iMac was coming.

Amazon UK might've leaked the PS5's higher $599 price tag for a 2TB SKU.

Apparently the PlayStation 5 will have two different models when it releases in 2020: One with an 825GB SSD, and another with a 2TB drive (or roughly 1.65GB, double the capacity of the base PCIe 4.0 SSD). The info comes from a shaky Amazon UK listing that's actually not live yet and only exists in a brief screenshot. Ordinarily this wouldn't mean much, but we've heard rumors of Sony launching both a PS5 Pro and PS5 base console in 2020, alongside rumors of a 2TB model.

It also helps Amazon UK is leaking out placeholder listings for upcoming PlayStation 5 games, including new games from Konami, Take-Two, and Koch Media (Deep Silver).

PUBG Mobile is making some serious money while everyone is under COVID-19 restrictions and lockdowns, correctly socially distancing by winning chicken dinners from a distance on their smartphones.

Well, according to SensorTower's new data PUBG Mobile was the #1 game in overall revenue for May 2020, with its new Top Mobile Games by Worldwide Revenue for May 2020 list having PUBG Mobile at the top by developer Tencent. The developer also has Honor of Kings in at #2 as well while Roblox comes in third.

SensorTower says that PUBG Mobile made $226 million in revenues from user spending in May 2020 alone, which is a gigantic 41% year-over-year increase from May 2019. Chinese gamers are pulling out their credit cards in droves, with 53% of the $226 million coming from gamers in China -- now compare this to just 10.2% from the United States, and 5.5% to Saudi Arabia.

The entire world of live sports was thrown into a black hole the minute COVID-19 restrictions started getting cemented into our reality, and now football's Premier League will be affected.

It returns on June 17 and has Sky Sports teaming with EA FIFA on providing digital channel viewers an option of something that has never been done before: a secondary audio track. This secondary audio track will boast fake crowd cheers, boos, and chants that have been used in FIFA games. Yeah, I'm serious.

Sky Sports MD Robert Webster explains: "With live sport on hold for over two months, we've spent a lot of time thinking about how we (can) broadcast in new ways to bring fans together, even if they can't meet up to watch the match. We want Sky Sports viewers to still feel it all and have the best possible viewing experience, even if they can't be in the stadiums or watch with their family and friends".

By now I'm sure you've seen NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 graphics cards, at least in leaked form -- if not, you can read more about that here. But the story just got a whole lot more interesting.

According to Igor Wallosek from Igor's LAB, the RTX 3080 cooler leak has kicked off an investigation inside of NVIDIA. Two of the subcontractors that handle the manufacturing of the Founders Edition are now involved in an investigation. Both Foxconn and BYD (Build Your Dreams) are under investigation.

Not just that, but NVIDIA product and sales managers have reportedly not seen the design yet -- which as VideoCardz points out, "just proves how fresh the leak was". It came out of nowhere, was radically different -- and kinda shocking in a good way, and now that makes sense. It was so fresh NVIDIA product and sales managers hadn't even seen it.

We've been hearing more and more about this new GeForce RTX 3090 graphics card over the last few days, a card that seems to be slowly forming itself into the next-gen TITAN.

The new rumors are that NVIDIA is working on a GeForce RTX 3090, but with leaks this early in the game the nomenclature can change. We could see this particular part (known as SKU10) being the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti or GeForce RTX 3080 SUPER -- or the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti or even GeForce RTX 3090 SUPER.

Anyway, NVIDIA is reportedly packing in a huge 24GB of GDDR6X memory which is a one-two punch combo. First off we have a gigantic 24GB framebuffer, which is the same amount of VRAM the TITAN RTX has now -- a card that costs $2499. Secondly, current rumors have NVIDIA using GDDR6X memory on all of its RTX 3080 series cards based on the GA102 GPU.

The future of Tesla Motors is near unlimited at this point, with the electric car company rolling out its new feature to Tesla EV owners called "Car Access".

Car Access is a new feature for Tesla owners that lets them grant permission for another driver to access their car, letting the owner of the vehicle add an additional person to the vehicle and all Tesla app features. The only thing they'll be locked out of is being able to request roadside assistance, or (of course) purchase upgrades.

While this might seem like a nifty short-term feature, the long-term implications of Car Access are unlimited. Rewinding the clock back to April 2019, where Tesla CEO and founder Elon Musk, said he saw a future of Tesla where they would be competing against Uber and Lyft, letting people use their car to make money through sending their Tesla vehicles into a robo-fleet.

This Thursday, Sony will show off the first-ever PlayStation 5 exclusive gameplay footage. But it won't be representative of the high-end enthusiast hardware you'd expect.

In a recent post on the PlayStation Blog, Sony confirmed an interesting tidbit: The upcoming PS5 game reveal stream will be locked at 1080p 30FPS. Sony's next-gen console, conversely, can handle 8K resolution gaming. So why the big drop in fidelity? Sony wanted to make it as easy as possible for developers to capture, edit, and throw together the pre-recorded reveal.

"Now that the event is confirmed for June 11, I wanted to add that this pre-taped program will be broadcast at 1080p and 30 frames per second," said Sony's Sid Shuman. "This eased the show's production process during a time when many of our team and developers are working from home. The games you'll see on Thursday will look even better when you play them on PS5 with a 4K TV, as you'd expect."

Bungie is pulling some time-traveling shenanigans to bring back one of the most iconic end-level battles in gaming history.

Destiny 1's beloved Vault of Glass raid is coming to Destiny 2, but not in 2020. Game director Luke Smith today confirmed the news as part of Bungie's massive block of announcements.

The Vault of Glass raid wasn't ever really gone, though. It was just put into something called the Destiny Content Vault, which is Bungie's big content preservation initiative. The Destiny Content Vault, or DCV, is a new strategy that sees older content and destinations rotating out of the main game and being stored in the vault. Likewise, some old content will rotate back in when it's deemed fitting. In this case, the Vault of Glass' return will happen after Destiny 2's new Beyond Light expansion drops in September.

Naughty Dog director Neil Druckmann ruminates on the studio's next game, but we hope for their sake it won't be The Last of Us 3.

In a recent interview with GQ magazine, Naughty Dog exec Neil Druckmann gave an impromptu answer on what's next after Ellie's sequel of hate and brutality.

"As you start wrapping things up, creatively there are fewer and fewer responsibilities and my mind can't help but think about the next thing. So, yeah, the next thing could be a Part III, the next thing could be some new IP," Druckmann said.

Today Bungie officially confirmed Destiny 3 isn't happening. The future of the franchise will live on in Destiny 2, complete with three major new expansions that will carry the game all the way through 2022.

Bungie is making big moves with Destiny. Instead of following the sequel-ized roadmap Activision originally pushed, Bungie is making Destiny into a single continuous live game. There won't be any more mainline Destiny games going forward, only expansions and updates. Bungie pretty much hints this is how Destiny should've been from the start.

"We're not planning to make Destiny 3. We believe really strongly we want the future of Destiny to be inside of Destiny 2. So, you know, this is the way," Luke Smith said in a live Q&A session with Dr. Lupo.

Today Bungie outlined an ambitious plan for the Destiny franchise. Destiny 3 isn't happening, and Destiny 2 is the sole future of the IP. That means lots of growth, new expansions, and tons of content, but Bungie has a unique gameplan to keep things manageable.

Destiny 2 is getting three big new expansions alongside new seasons that carry throughout 2022. The game is about to get a lot bigger, and Bungie flat-out says the game isn't sustainable in its current state. That's why it plans to rotate specific content in and out of Destiny 2 to reduce the amount of downloads, work, and general upkeep its teams must do, similar to how movies and shows arrive and leave on Netflix.

But unlike Netflix, gamers will still be able to access the content that gets rotated out.

GameStop today announced its Q1 financials, showing a big $165 million net loss, and a portion of this drop was from the company's payouts during COVID-19 lockdowns.

GameStop closed all of its 3,000+ stores in the U.S. for weeks due to the pandemic. A portion of these stores remained open for curbside pickup, but a lot of employees had their hours drastically cut. GameStop promised to pay these employees limited wages during the closure, and now we know how much.

While scanning GameStop's latest financials I noticed something interesting. The company doled out $18.5 million to its employees during the COVID-19 lockdowns, and recorded $3 million in expenses from cleaning materials and other measure to combat the virus.

A new report is going around the claims Apple intends to announce its shift to ARM-based Macs at WWDC 2020. The announcement will give developers several months to prepare for the transition from the Intel-based machines that Apple currently sells. According to the new report, the ARM notebooks will be available starting in 2021.

The new report claims that Apple will eventually transition the entire Mac line of notebooks and desktops to custom-designed ARM processors. They're expected to be multiple advantages of the ARM-powered machines compared to the existing Intel Mac line. Benefits include improved performance and reduced power consumption.

The move to its in-house designed chips also means that Apple is no longer a slave to Intel's development schedule. Intel has fallen behind in its development schedule recently, leaving Apple with little to upgrade in its line of Mac computers. According to the report by Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple is developing at least three Mac processors, the first based on the A14 chip that is coming to the iPhone 12.