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Quantic Dream is now fully in control of its destiny and plans to keep making interactive cinematic experiences under its own terms.

Like Bungie and more recently PlantinumGames, David Cage's studio Quantic Dream now has full independence and doesn't have to rely on partners like Sony to get games funded. The company recently announced that they're now in a position to self-publish their own games, which is huge on a business and creative level.

As IP-holder and publisher, Quantic Dream not only gets to fully control the scope of their games, but also keep the revenues from each sale (outside of distributing deals, of course). The studio says the recent success of Detroit: Become Human on PS4 and PC helped make this possible (the game has sold more than 2 million copies).

Principal shooting for The Matrix 4 has begun in San Francisco, and now we have a glimpse at the crazy skyscraper-leaping stunts that'll return for the sequel.

The Matrix wouldn't be the same if people weren't jumping off of buildings and risking their lives for impressive scenes. A bystander recently captured The Matrix 4's stunt shooting in San Fran, showing cable-assisted leaps of faith off of skyscrapers. It looks like Neo and Trinity are doing the stunt, and Trinity may now be able to fly in the movie--unless it's just part of resetting the cable rigging.

We can't tell if its Keanu himself performing the stunts (probably so), but the actor has been recently spotted in San Francisco recording other scenes for the movie.

Activision-Blizzard's latest earnings give lots of clues on what to expect from its future games, especially its spending habits.

Activision-Blizzard is evolving. The company is doubling-down harder on engagement strategies than ever before with a multi-faceted plan that embraces new games, live services, mobile ports, and lots of things behind the scenes that gamers don't actually see. We've taken a close look at the company's latest 2019 financials for clues on what's next for the company, and the results are pretty interesting.

To really understand what the future holds for its upcoming games, we have to take a look at spending, certain vocabulary from executives, and what's being done to make those games--both developmental and business-based decisions.

AMD rocked the CPU world with its Ryzen Threadripper 3990X processor, packing an insane 64 cores and 128 threads of Zen 2 goodness -- but it took ASRock's awesome TRX40 Taichi motherboard to crank that CPU right up to the now world record 5748.66MHz.

It wasn't just the Ryzen Threadripper 3990X frequency world record that ASRock bagged with its TRX40 Taichi motherboard, but instead a total of 5 world records. The wPrime-1024M new record is 11sec 541ms by SPLAVE using the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X processor, while also setting the GPUPI for CPU 1B record with 21 sec 622ms.

SPLAVE also smashed the Cinebench R20 benchmark record using AMD's flagship Ryzen Threadripper 3990X processor and ASRock TRX40 Taichi motherboard with 39,518 marks. Geekbench 3's multi-core benchmark didn't have any relief from SPLAVE's domination with the Ryzen Threadripper 3990X pushing a huge 293,771 points while finishing off his benchmark domination smashing the HWBOT x265 benchmark record at 1080p with 384.389FPS.

At the beginning, BioWare was a fountain of RPG mastery. Then after they got famous they started to focus more on what's popular versus what they actually wanted to make. Ex-BioWare writer Drew Karpyshyn gives a brief but illuminating look at how BioWare has changed over the years.

BioWare isn't what it used to be. The studio used to be known for great RPGs like Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age: Origins, all games that made you feel and had an impact. But something happened after BioWare got big: The studio started chasing money instead of chasing its passions (likely at the behest of its owner, EA).

BioWare shifted its focus to action games and massively watered down its RPG elements, casualizing everything and betraying its key skills. We've seen this with Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem, both of which are heavily action-based and embrace live services. And this erosion of BioWare's RPG talents may not stop here, but only continue with its new projects like Dragon Age 4 and the new Mass Effect--both of which could have live service ecosystems.

Apple and Nuvia are in the headlines over the weekend, with a former Apple chip executive being sued for 'betraying' Apple by launching a new startup and poaching Apple employees... while Apple is also reportedly trying to poach his new staffers. But the story is a lot juicier than that.

Bloomberg is reporting that Gerard Williams III, who left as the lead chip architect at Apple and co-founded Nuvia, says that Apple is stopping his new company from hiring engineers, all while hiring Nuvia staff from under him. Bloomberg reports that Apple's new lawsuit was made to "suffocate the creation of new technologies and solutions by a new business, and to diminish the freedom of entrepreneurs to seek out more fulfilling work".

But where this gets interesting is that Williams said he is maintaining a distant relationship with Apple and his former colleagues, but AnandTech founder Anand Shimpi -- who left his site to work for Apple, has "sent him numerous texts after Williams left the company, including material marked "Apple Confidential" in an April conversation. Williams said he told Shimpi this was "inappropriate and unwelcome," according to the filing. Apple didn't immediately respond to a query about Shimpi", reports Bloomberg.

I have been a part of the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut movement since day one, after WB completely screwed over the best director in the DCEU -- Zack Snyder, after his daughter tragically took her own life when he was working on Justice League.

But ever since the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut movement took more and more momentum, the removed director of Justice League has seen his fan base take things to the next level. Every few weeks Snyder releases a new part of his version of Justice League, leading up to 14/2 or 214 -- a reference to the 214-minute cut of Justice League.

WB directed The Avengers director Joss Whedon, who replaced Snyder towards the end of Justice League's production, to force the move under two hours -- so Whedon re-shot a bunch of Justice League and chopped the movie down to 119 minutes -- 1 minute under 2 hours. The 214 reference has been huge on February 14 or Valentine's Day, or to us Snyder Cut fans -- 214 day. To celebrate, Snyder released a new photo of The Flash using his Speed Force.

Blizzard recently canceled its Overwatch League matches in China because of the coronavirus outbreak, but now the developer has shifted the games over to Seoul, South Korea.

The company said that all of the canceled matches that were to take place in Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Hangzhou, will now see Overwatch players battling it out in a studio in Seoul. The previously canceled and now relocated matches will take place during week 6 and week 7 of the Overwatch League, on the weekends of March 14 and March 21.

Overwatch League matches in Miami and Atlanta that kick off on those weekends won't be affected, but Blizzard added that it will announce match times for those rounds "soon".

We can expect OnePlus to launch its 2020 flagship smartphone this year, with the new OnePlus 8 teased in a new Geekbench listing packing Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 865 processor.

OnePlus 8 finds itself in the Geekbench listing with just 8GB of RAM which is strange in a now 8/12/16GB of RAM smartphone world with Samsung's just-announced Galaxy S20 range of smartphones. However, the new OnePlus 8 smartphone did pack Qualcomm's flagship Snapdragon 865 processor which packs 5G connectivity and industry-leading performance.

We could see a few different models with the model we're seeing on Geekbench 'IN2023' with 8GB of RAM, while a higher-end OnePlus 8 like a T or Pro model, could pack 12-16GB of RAM. We should see whether this happens in the coming months as OnePlus unleashes their new 2020 smarpthones.

It was a couple of weeks of virtually all companies pulling out of Mobile World Congress before MWC organizers GSMA pulled the plug on the entire event, but now Facebook has just performed a similar move over coronavirus fears.

Facebook had its upcoming global marketing summit which was to take place between March 9-12 in San Francisco, but the social networking giant has canceled the event. Facebook explained: "Out of an abundance of caution, we canceled our global marketing summit due to evolving public health risks related to coronavirus".

The global marketing summit was expecting over 4000 people to attend, but has now been canned. The next event taking place is the Game Developers Conference (GDC) which also takes place in San Francisco between March 16-20, and right after that is NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference (GTC) which is March 22-26 in San Jose, California -- a stones throw from San Francisco. I'll be at GTC 2020 bringing you GPU coverage from the floors of GTC, where NVIDIA is expected to unveil its next-gen Ampere GPU architecture.

Remember the story from a few days ago where NVIDIA's super-fresh game streaming service GeForce NOW lost its library of games from Activision-Blizzard? Well, that was all over a "misunderstanding".

NVIDIA hasn't been super forthcoming about what the "misunderstanding" was exactly, but the company released a statement that makes the situation a little clearer: "Activision Blizzard has been a fantastic partner during the GeForce Now beta, which we took to include the free trial period for our founders' membership. Recognizing the misunderstanding, we removed their games from our service, with hope we can work with them to re-enable these, and more, in the future".

Bloomberg is reporting that Activision-Blizzard wanted to negotiate a new commercial agreement before NVIDIA launched GeForce NOW, but NVIDIA doesn't want commercial agreements with game publishers. NVIDIA wants to let gamers buy their games on the likes of Steam, Epic Games, uPlay, and Battle.net -- and then, play them on GeForce NOW just like they would if they were playing them at home on their gaming PC.

The Division 2 was one of the best-looking games of 2019, but Ubisoft Massive's popular game will most likely not find a new home on the next-gen PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X consoles.

In a recent interview with the Daily Star, Ubisoft Massive Associate Creative Director Yannick Banchereau said: "we are not looking at porting it to new platforms. What I can tell you is that we are not making a specific version for those consoles, we are very much focused on just working on what we have now and making that as good as possible".

We could expect The Division 2 to run on the next-gen PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X consoles, but they might do it through Microsoft and Sony providing backwards compatibility -- and not a newer version of the game tuned specifically for the additional power in the new consoles.

HBO Max is quickly ramping up to its big streaming debut in May 2020, with a new HBO Max teaser trailer released that showcases just a glimpse of what to expect from its gigantic library of content.

We shouldn't be surprised that the HBO Max teaser trailer opens with Friends, given that WarnerMedia paid a huge $425 million for the rights to Friends on HBO Max. But HBO Max will also include every episode of The Big Bang Theory and South Park, as well as every single episode of Friends and Game of Thrones -- oh, as well as every single Batman, Superman, and Joker movie released.

Not only that, but we're looking at The Matrix Trilogy -- a big scoop going into The Matrix 4 in 2021, as well as hit shows like Rick and Morty, The O.C. and The West Wing. On top of that, the company recently announced it had created a new division that was solely made to create streaming movies, so we should expect big things moving forward. The only thing missing?

Microsoft and Nike have teamed up for a new Jordan-themed Xbox One X console and controllers, with the iconic red elephant print dopped all over the Xbox One X and two controllers -- it looks slick. Check out an unboxing of one of them below:

Nike is unleashing its new Air Jordan III Retro U sneakers during the upcoming All-Star Weekend in Chicago, with the custom Jordan-themed Xbox One X console and controllers to be given away in a competition during the Microsoft sweepstakes on Twitter. If you want to enter that, follow the official Twitter account for Xbox, retweet the announcement and use the hashtag #Xboxsweepstakes.

The giveaway of the Jordan-themed Xbox One X ends on February 27, with a single winner to be announced. I wouldn't want to touch it if I won it, and would love to keep it in the box forever.

Back to the Future is one of my favorite movies of all time and I highly cherish it, it's something I don't want to ever be rebooted or remade -- but a deepfake inserting some new actors into it for fun? I'm up for that. Check this out:

In the movie, Michael J. Fox plays Marty McFly and Christopher Lloyd plays Doc Brown -- but in a deepfake of Back to the Future, YouTuber EZRyderX47 has inserted Avengers: Endgame stars Tom Holland and Robert Downey Jr. The two play Peter Parker / Spider-Man and Tony Stark / Iron Man respectively, but thanks to deepfake tech they take over the roles of Marty and Doc.

It's an absolutely incredible (and somewhat horrifying) look at what deepfake technology is capable of, and as someone who has watched countless hours and researched heavily into deepfake tech, it's one of the best I've seen yet.

We've been learning a little bit more about Sony's next-gen PlayStation 5 thanks to a new report by Bloomberg, where the site reported that the manufacturing costs of the PlayStation 5 is sitting at around $450.

But in the report we also learn that Sony is putting some serious work into the cooling system for the PlayStation 5, with Bloomberg reporting Sony opted to "lavish more" on the cooling system to make sure "heat dissipation from the powerful chips housed inside the console isn't an issue".

Bloomberg wrote: "Most of the components for the console have been locked down, the people said, including the cooling system, which is unusually expensive at a few dollars per unit", adding that "typically, companies would spend less than a dollar" on the cooling system -- but Sony opted to "lavish more" on the PlayStation 5 cooling system.

Sony is aiming for a December 2020 release for its next-gen PlayStation 5 console according to my industry sources, but now Bloomberg is reporting about the manufacturing costs -- something that gives us a hint towards the final retail pricing of the PS5.

Bloomberg reports from "people with knowledge of the matter" that the PlayStation 5 manufacturing cost is "around $450 per unit" which is forcing Sony into a "difficult price-setting decision" with Microsoft and the next-gen Xbox Series X console. Bloomberg continues in its article saying that the "biggest headache" is making sure they have a reliable supply of DRAM and NAND flash memory.

The issues here is that other companies like AMD, NVIDIA, and Samsung are eating all that up for graphics cards and the just-launched Galaxy S20 family of smartphones which packs 8/12/16GB of RAM and a heap of super-fast flash storage. Sony's Chief Financial Officer Hiroki Totoki recently said at an earnings briefing earlier this month: "We must keep PlayStation 5's bill of materials under our control and we need to make the correct number of units in the initial production".

Disney now sits on the world's biggest treasure trove of franchises and IPs, from Marvel to 20th Century Fox properties and Star Wars. Now it wants developers to make new games based on all of them.

At DICE 2020, Disney sent a clear message to game developers: Its wealth of IPs are now open for new game adaptations. The billion-dollar titan wants to leverage its massive franchise catalog to create interactive entertainment experiences with innovative and re-imagined characters and scenarios. Essentially Disney wants game devs to breathe new life into IPs like Aliens, Predator, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and a lot more.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, who was in attendance at the 2020 DICE Summit, Disney's interactive VP Sean Shoptaw extended a warm welcome to game developers.

Today Square Enix revealed Final Fantasy 7 Remake's opening cinematic sequence, and it's absolutely enchanting.

There's nothing quite like a Final Fantasy cinematic. Square Enix has set the bar to such a high pedigree with its cinematics that few developers hold up, and that's especially true today with the new FF7 Remake footage. The opener brings back all the chills of the 1997 RPG classic, transporting gamers back in time to those days when demo discs still came with magazines and you had to buy guidebooks to unlock all the secrets.

The graphics in the cinematic are just absolutely mesmerizing...and when that logo pops up over the steampunk city of Midgar, complete with the musical score, it hits you right in the feels. The lighting effects, the visuals, the atmospheric wizardry, the colors...everything comes together to blow your mind just as the original game did back in '97.

Today Remedy confirmed its next game is now in the critical pre-production phases, which comes before principal development.

Remedy, like all independent developers, works on many games at once. Even as Control was being made, a small internal team of Remedy devs was working on a new project that may or may not be set in the Control IP. We knew about this additional game as early as 2018 and then Remedy reinforced the news in 2019.

Now in its recent earnings report, the studio says the unannounced game is currently entering pre-production. This means the project isn't quite in full development, but it's gearing up to that point, and should be developed with Remedy's Northlight games engine.