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Hackers were responsible for leaking The Last of Us 2's controversial spoiler cinematic sequences, sources tell games reporter Jason Schreier.

The recent Last of Us 2 leaks have been pretty disastrous for Naughty Dog, and it didn't take long for the internet to make up an urban legend centered around the studio's crunch culture. Legend has it the Last of Us 2 leaks were from a jaded and overworked employee who had their compensation withheld. Sony has since confirmed this isn't true, and now more internal sources close to Naughty Dog say it was hackers, not one of their own, who leaked the content.

Instead of the dramatic rumors, hackers found a weak spot in Naughty Dog's servers, exploited that weak spot, and grabbed a bunch of sensitive copyrighted data to publish online. This is usually the case with all leaks. The infamous Nintendo Switch info dump was caused by a hacker, who was caught and sentenced to hefty prison time.

The Boeing designed X-37B plane is about to take off on a new mission, and as per usual, no one really knows what it's doing and why.

The U.S Air Force is preparing to launch the Boeing designed X-37B, which is a space drone that is highly classified by the United States government. Due to the space plane being so classified, no one really knows what its missions are or what it's doing while it's off the ground, but what we do know is this will mark its sixth mission to date. The last mission the X-37B went on had the plane in the air for a total of 780 days, it was airborne from Sept. 7, 2017, until Oct. 27, 2019.

The missions are called OTV, which stands for Orbital Test Vehicle. This mission, in particular, is called OTV-6, and we can expect that the plane will be breaking the previous record it set. The Air Force hasn't disclosed what kind of payload the plane is carrying, but we do know that it isn't any kind of weaponry, or at least that is what the Air Force has said. The upcoming mission for the X-37B is scheduled to launch on May 16.

It was barely 24 hours ago that I reported on Intel teasing the 'Father of All' GPUs that is the Xe-HP, but now Raja Koduri is teasing the successor to that -- something he calls the 'Superman of All' GPUs.

In a follow-up tweet, Koduri explained "This was called the "baap of all" by our team... The "Baahubali of all" is baking as well. Let's hope the wait will be shorter than what @ssrajamouli put us through for @BaahubaliMovie". Wccftech decoded the post, translating it into the "Superman of All".

Any regular readers of TweakTown will know I'm one of the biggest Superman fans on the planet, as well as a gigantic geek and GPU nerd so this news is righit up my alley. In this tweet, Koduri is referring to the Baahubali movie, which is a superhero movie that Raja was involved with.

Microsoft plans to bundle all of its gaming services together in one neat package. Project xCloud game streaming, Xbox LIVE Gold, and Game Pass will be combined in a new penultimate gaming subscription.

Today Microsoft confirmed something we've long expressed in our coverage: Project xCloud is an extension of Xbox Game Pass. In a move that's quite genius (but also quite logical), the company plans to unionize the two services into a single subscription. "Later this year our cloud game streaming technology, Project xCloud, will come to Game Pass-so you and your friends can stream and play the games you love together on your devices," Microsoft's Phil Spencer said in a recent blot post.

This one-two combo is a knockout punch for Microsoft's billion-dollar service empire. Game Pass is already conquering with over 10 million subscribers to date (the recent $1 promos helped boost those numbers) alongside a huge thriving 90 million Xbox LIVE userbase (not all of those are paying for Gold subs, and PC integration helps too). This is par for the course for Microsoft.

The new Summer Game Fest is set to transform how games are presented to consumers, and more importantly, how they interact with them.

Now that E3 2020 is dead, the biggest names in gaming are teaming up to make something new: A huge four-month event held from May through August that promises tons of reveals, interviews, gameplay demos, and most importantly, interactive slices that gamers anywhere can play. The Summer Game Fest is a new all-digital event that could kill E3 once and for all, favoring smaller digestible Nintendo Direct-style showcases rather than huge explosive on-stage affairs at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

With next-gen consoles on the way, the Summer Game Fest is a perfect opportunity to broadcast new high-end games far and wide. If publishers use the event to show off their new explosive next-gen games, the Summer Game Fest has incredible potential to be the biggest game event of our time.

AMD partnered with Samsung in August 2019 where it would allow its RDNA architecture would power future Samsung devices, after announcing a multi-year strategic partnership in June 2019.

That new RDNA-powered design seems like it's on the right track, with new rumors from South Korean tech forum Clien which says the Radeon-powered chip "crushed" the Qualcomm Adreno 650 GPU in GFXBench. There's quick a smack down from the AMD/Samsung chip versus the Adreno 650, check it out:

If these scores are real, then we're in for a gigantic surprise when Samsung releases its new phones. It could mean that a huge uptick in performance will come from Qualcomm's next-gen chips, with mobile graphics a big deal when it comes to next-gen gaming smartphones.

NVIDIA might have stolen the headlines with a hot new rumor of some pretty crazy GeForce RTX 3080 Ti specs, but now Intel is getting in on the fun and shoving AMD out of the way with some Xe-HP news.

It was barely 24 hours ago that the official Intel Graphics team tweeted out some photos, but the tweet was quickly deleted. Not because it showed anything important where Intel lawyers would tell them to quickly delete the tweet because it showed something it shouldn't -- but rather Intel was slammed for the incorrect use of face masks by major Intel staff like Raja Koduri and Jim Keller.

But don't worry, nothing is forever with the internet because I took a screenshot. Here you can see the original tweet from the official Intel Graphics Twitter account.

Morrowind is now officially 18 years old. Do you feel old yet? Let's take a quick trip back to the past and uncover one of gaming's best RPGs.

Remember when Bethesda made those unique kind of RPGs? I mean real RPGs, not casualized games like Skyrim (which are admittedly amazing, but quite different). Back in the day, Bethesda redefined what RPGs could and should be. They did this with games like Daggerfall, and my favorite Elder Scrolls game of all time, Morrowind.

Morrowind was ahead of its time in many ways. It was unique, exotic, weird. It was actually the first game I saw on the original Xbox back in the day, and seeing the water effects and the lighting blew me away. Yes, I was a console pleb, but I honestly like Morrowind more on console...although I missed out on tons of mods. Even today the graphics aren't so bad (although those screenshots are pulled from my original Xbox 360 BC save of the game).

Motorola is officially talking up the Edge+ smartphone touting the device as supporting the fastest 5G in the world. It supports the Verizon 5G Ultra Wideband network and has Wi-Fi 6 integrated. The smartphone is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 mobile platform. The Snapdragon 865 platform has an AI engine able to process 15 trillion operations per second.

The Snapdragon processor is paired with 12 GB of DDR5 RAM, and 256 GB of UFS 3.0 storage. It has a 6.7-inch display that wraps 90-degrees around each side to produce what Motorola calls the Endless Edge display. The screen does support HDR10+ and has a 90 Hz refresh rate.

The rear the smartphone has a 108MP Quad Pixel primary camera sensor promising "unmatched quality." The triple camera system also has integrated Micro Vision capability for up-close details. The second sensor is an 8MP telephoto lens that has 3x optical zoom. The third sensor is a 16MP ultra-wide-angle lens that fits up to four times more of what's around you into the shot. The rear camera is capable of recording 6K UHD video at 30 fps.

Sony confirms The Last of Us 2 spoilers weren't published by a Naughty Dog employee. Someone from outside Naughty Dog got access to the files and published them online, and Sony knows who did it.

The rumors and reports are all wrong. The urban legend around The Last of Us 2's spoiler motivations goes a little something like this: Naughty Dog withheld a developer's pay, so the dev took revenge by leaking the game's most controversial cinematic sequences online for all to see. This rumor was predicated strongly on Naughty Dog's intense crunch culture, which apparently sees employees being hospitalized from mental breakdowns and overwork.

Sony recently set the record straight and confirmed the allegations are untrue. Sony tells GamesIndustry.biz that it has identified the perpetrator behind the leaks, but hasn't said whether or not it was a hacker, which is the most logical conclusion if the leaks weren't an inside job.

Many people who use Facebook have a huge number of pictures that have been uploaded to the site over many years of using the social network. Some of those users may want to back up their photos to the popular Google Photos service for sharing on other platforms or just keeping their pictures and video safe in the event something happens to their Facebook account. Facebook knows people want to keep their memories safe, and last year it launched a transfer tool for Google Photos in Ireland.

That Google Photos transfer tool is now live in the United States. The tool is found within the "Your Facebook Information" section of the settings on the user's Facebook account. Reports indicate that Facebook plans to expand the tool to work with other photo services in the future, but for now, it only works with Google Photos.

Facebook has said that the tool encrypts all data transferred between it and Google Photos and requires the user to enter their password before the transfer starts. The tool was previously available in Africa, Asia Pacific, and Latin America. Facebook plans to enable additional countries to use the tool in the coming months.

The use of video conferencing and chat apps is booming around the world as people are forced to work and learn from home. Some of the software seeing massive increases in user numbers are Microsoft Teams, WhatsApp, and Zoom. Zoom has been under fire during its rapid growth in part because of security issues. Zoom is now under fire again for offering up numbers that were misleading when it came to users.

Microsoft's chief marketing officer Chris Capossela was among the first to call zoom's numbers into question. He stated in a tweet that he believed Zoom's 300 million figure was not daily active users or monthly active users, but a number representing meeting participants. Capossela noted in the tweet that Microsoft Teams had seen more than 200 million meeting participants in a single day this month that generated over 4.1 billion meeting minutes.

Rather than admit someone had quoted an incorrect number, Zoom simply, and quietly, updated the blog post that bragged about the 300 million user figure. The blog post was edited to read that Zoom has over "300 million daily Zoom meeting participants." The difference between "users" and "participants" is massive and can't be understated. Anyone looking at the figures that Microsoft is quoting can see the significant difference between those two numbers with Microsoft seeing over 200 million meeting participants in a single day while boasting 75 million daily active users.

The coronavirus pandemic may have a greater impact on software production instead of hardware, and could lead to some first-party Xbox Series X games being delayed.

Will the Xbox Series X be delayed? The games are more likely to get pushed back instead of the console. In an interview with CNBC, Xbox head Phil Spencer reiterated previous comments on the next-gen system's launch. Spencer says hardware is on track, but he's less confident in games production. Dev teams are working remotely in an industry built on a tight flow and synergy of office-based mutualism, and key things like motion capture and sound recording have been particularly disrupted.

"The teams are doing a really good job on keeping our hardware on track. I'd say the bigger unknown is is probably the game production. Game production is a large-scale entertainment activity now. You have hundreds of people coming together, building assets," Spencer told CNBC.

Coronavirus has put a real beating on just about every industry from automotive manufacturers to smartphone makers and everything in between. Research from IDC looking at the global smartphone market was published recently and shows that the smartphone market around the world suffered the worst annual decline ever in Q1 2020. IDC shows smartphone makers shipped 275.8 million devices during Q1, which was an 11.7% decline from the same quarter of 2019.

That decline marks the most significant annual decline ever, according to the research firm. The reason for the decline has to do with the uncertainty facing many consumers with work and with discretionary income. Many consumers are holding onto their devices and avoiding any discretionary purchases. Analysts say that replacement cycles are likely to become longer in the wake of the coronavirus epidemic.

Data from China offered by research firm Canalys shows that shipments in China, which is one of the biggest smartphone markets in the world, declined by 18 % year-over-year. IDC shows an even sharper decline for China, with its numbers showing a 20.3% year-over-year decline. IDC says that significant decline had an impact on the overall market because China accounts for nearly 25% of the global smartphone market.

One of the most challenging things for a lot of people trying to work or learn from home when the entire family is there is finding a little peace and quiet to concentrate. For many people, one product that can help concentration is a high-quality set of noise-canceling headphones that block external sounds and let you listen to music so you can focus. Amazon has a big sale going right now on a popular set of wireless headphones from Bose.

The Bose Noise Canceling Wireless Bluetooth Headphones 700 in Arctic White are on sale for $299. That is a discount of $100 off the regular $399 price tag. Those who want the silver or black color will have to pay an extra $50 with those on sale for $349.

As of writing, Amazon shows that the white headphones are in stock and can be to you as early as two days. The headphones ship and are sold by Amazon. For those unfamiliar with the Bose 700 headphones, they have up to 11 levels of noise-canceling control to block the outside world or let noise in when it's important. They support Google Assistant and Alexa voice control.

One of the many challenges that smartphone users are facing during the coronavirus pandemic is having to use their device while wearing a mask or gloves. For iPhone users who take advantage of Face ID to unlock their smartphone, having to wear a mask due to coronavirus means that the phone won't unlock. As it stands now, users have the option of waiting until their device times out to be able to swipe up to enter a passcode or remove their mask.

Apple has released updated software that allows users to unlock their iPhones more quickly without using Face ID. With the new software, there is no need to wait for the device to timeout to enter the passcode. All the user needs to do with the software installed is swipe up to enter their passcode without having to wait for a Face ID error and timeout.

While this beta software is ready, Apple hasn't yet said when the final version will launch. The Face ID solution is one of two fixes that are said to be coming aimed at addressing issues that have surfaced during the coronavirus pandemic. In iOS 13.5 beta 3, the software will be introduced that is necessary for applications to develop contact tracing.

Microsoft is currently gearing up to release a new set of noise-canceling headphones as a follow-up to the Surface Headphones that launched about 18 months ago. The headphones were initially launched to battle Sony and Bose in the high-end noise-canceling headphones market. Bose released a new set of noise-canceling headphones not long ago, and Sony has a new model coming.

Microsoft is now gearing up to combat the new offerings with a new offering of its own crossing the FCC. The headphones are expected to land with the name Surface Headphones 2 and are supposed to look identical to the existing model on the outside. FCC documents confirm that no changes have been made to the layout of the antennas.

While the antennas remain the same, several updates are coming to the Surface Headphone 2 product. Microsoft added IMU sensors for better head detection and tracking. The Bluetooth version was updated, and the new headphones will have higher antenna again. Headphones will also have aptX support along with the Bluetooth 5.0.

Respawn Entertainment has revealed who the next Apex Legends character will be and when she will be released into the live game.

As you might've expected, Respawn will be adding the new character into the mayhem-filled battle royale when the next season drops. According to a video released onto the official Apex Legends YouTube Channel, the new character we can expect to see in Season 5 will be Loba, the daughter of Marcos Andrade, who was murdered by Revenant in his reveal trailer.

Loba is out for revenge on Revenant, but as she grew up, she became an adept thief, which will no doubt coincide with her abilities in-game. At the moment, we don't know how Loba will play in-game, but Respawn does plan on giving the character a full reveal, as well as a Season 5 breakdown on May 5th. Courtesy of WCCFtech, we have some dot points below showing off what Season 5 will have. Apex Legends Season 5 will be fully released on May 12th. Prepare your weapons for the mayhem, see you in the arena.

A team of international astronomers has managed to capture 15 rare images of the inner rims of planet-forming disks that are located hundreds of light-years away.

The images were published in the journal of Astronomy & Astrophysics, and shed some new light on how planetary systems are eventually born over. Planet-forming, or protoplanetary disks are formed in unison with their neighboring star. Dust particles are pulled together through gravity and eventually form into small rocks that then pull more dust particles together to eventually become what we know as planets.

According to the lead author on the study, Jacques Kluska from KU Leuven in Belgium, "In these pictures, the regions close to the star, where rocky planets form, are covered by only few pixels. We needed to visualize these details to be able to identify patterns that might betray planet formation and to characterize the properties of the disks." The images were created at the European Southern Observatory in Chile, and astronomers used a technique called infrared interferometry using the ESO's PIONIER instrument.

Battlefield 6 is on the way in 2021, and it could be exclusive to the PS5 and Xbox Series X and push next-gen consoles the same way Battlefield 4 did in 2013.

EA and DICE are planning something big with Battlefield 6. The devs are retiring both Battlefield V and Battlefront II to free up teams for the next-gen Battlefield game, and we should expect DICE to push PS5 and Xbox Series X to their limits with a newly enhanced Frostbite engine. Thanks to this focus on high-level optimization, DICE might actually skip current-gen systems altogether. The underpowered Jaguar SoCs and mechanical HDDs will significantly hinder the explosive next-gen craziness that's made possible by the new Navi GPU and Zen 2 CPU-powered systems.

After the recent BFV and BFII announcements, we dug up some older comments that made us curious whether or not Battlefield 6 is coming to today's consoles. In an October earnings call, EA CEO Andrew Wilson said DICE is "targeting new innovation that will be enabled by next-gen platforms and a growing install base on the new consoles."