Latest News - Page 177

Team Cherry, the developers of the esteemed Hollow Knight franchise, may abandon the third game to create something completely new, according to recent reports.

Team Cherry, a development studio that consists of three individuals from Adelaide, Australia, released Hollow Knight Silksong nearly three months ago, and the title was a massive success, topping the Steam charts and selling millions of copies. Now, Team Cherry co-founder Ari Gibson has sat down with Bloomberg's Jason Schreier to talk about what is on the horizon for Team Cherry. Gibson said the studio has "other games that we plan to make" after completing the DLC content for Hollow Knight Silksong.

Gibson said the big concern is how long it takes to make a game, with Silksong taking seven years to develop, and now the DLC content on top of the full release. "The only time concern really is - and we've talked about this before - death. It's not that far off if you spend seven years per project, and potentially add another two. So it'd be nice to do a few more games," said the Team Cherry co-founder

Intel will reportedly begin fabbing Apple's lowest-end M-series processor on American soil as early as 2027, with Intel looking to become an advanced-node semiconductor supplier to Apple moving forward.

In a new post by insider and analyst Ming-Chi Kuo on X, we're hearing that Apple had previously signed an NDA with Intel and obtained the advanced-node 18AP PDK 0.9.1GA. Kuo says that these key simulation and research projects (such as PPA) are "tracking in line with expectations" and Apple is now waiting for Intel to release PDK 1.0/1.1, which is currently scheduled to arrive in Q1 2026.

Apple plans on having its lowest-end M processor fabbed on the Intel 18AP process node as early as Q2-Q3 2027, but this could change depending on the PDK 1.0/1.1 release, says Kuo.

COLORFUL has just confirmed AMD's next-generation Zen 6-based Ryzen CPUs are supported on its new B850 motherboards, with new CVN, Battle-Ax, and MEOW mobos based on the B850 chipset.

COLORFUL joins motherboard makers like ASUS, MSI, GIGABYTE, and ASRock in supporting next-gen Zen 6 processors on their latest AM5 motherboards, meaning users don't need to upgrade their motherboard to enjoy next-gen Ryzen CPUs based on the new Zen 6 architecture. Unlike Intel, as its new Core Ultra 400 series "Nova Lake" desktop CPUs use a new LGA1954 socket, meaning you'll need to buy a new CPU and a new motherboard when they drop in 2026.

COLORFUL explains: "Colorful Technology Company Limited, a leading brand in gaming PC components, gaming laptops, and HiFi audio products, today announced three new additions to its B850 motherboard family: the CVN B850M ARK FROZEN, BATTLE-AX B850M-PLUS S WIFI7, and COLORFIRE B850M-MEOW WIFI7. These new models bring enhanced power delivery, upgraded connectivity, and signature COLORFUL design identities to meet the performance needs of next-generation AMD Ryzen processors".

Samsung's upcoming Galaxy Z TriFold smartphone is expected to retail for around $2447, which will take the foldable smartphone battle directly to Apple's front door when it finally releases its foldable iPhone in 2026, which is expected to retail for $2399.

In a new post from South Korea rumor aggregating website, Naver, more information about Samsung's new Galaxy Z TriFold has been released in regards to pricing. The new triple-fold smartphone was expected to cost 4 million won (around $2719 USD) but it will reportedly be cheaper, at 3.6 million won ($2447 USD or so) in South Korea.

Apple's first foldable iPhone is expected to retail for $2399, meaning that Samsung is wanting to double-down (or is that triple-down) with the retail pricing on its Galaxy Z TriFold at $2447, meaning Samsung's absolute flagship foldable smartphone only costs $50 more than Apple's not-yet-released and still-ages-away foldable iPhone. In that time, I'm sure we'll find the Galaxy Z TriFold discounted when the foldable iPhone launches, to steal all of Apple's thunder.

Samsung has reportedly reached a technological achievement with its next-gen NAND flash storage, which lowers power consumption by an incredible 96% compared to NAND flash inside of devices today.

NAND flash storage is used inside of a multitude of things and it isn't slowing down, with NAND used in AI data centers, smartphones, and a bunch of other technology devices used today. NAND flash power consumption continues to increase with each iteration, but Samsung's new NAND flash storage is the future with incredible power efficiency.

In a new paper co-authored by 34 researchers titled "Ferroelectric Transistor for Low-Power NAND Flash Memory" which was published in the Nature academic journal, the research started over oxide semiconductors, with Korean outlet SEDaily reporting that these were "unsustainable" for high-performance chips because of their high threshold voltage.

Activision has posted 3 job listings that point to Call of Duty's return to Nintendo platforms, one step in fulfilling an ambitious 10-year contract to bring future COD shooters to the Switch.

Activision's Call of Duty teams are seeking new developers that have experience making games on the Nintendo Switch. The publisher has published 3 job listings that mention Nintendo and/or the Switch platform, strongly indicating that the company is moving forward with its legally-binding agreement to bring the franchise to Nintendo hardware. In 2023, Microsoft signed a 10-year contract to bring future Call of Duty games to the Switch with full feature and content parity. This deal was struck in order to assuage worldwide regulators that Call of Duty would not be made exclusive and was a key development to get the world's largest tech acquisition--Xbox's $68.7 billion buyout of Activision--passed and approved.

Infinity Ward is hiring a principal engineer, which lists "console development experience (Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo)" as a plus. Infinity Ward is also hiring a lead build engineer that lists "(PlayStation/Xbox/Nintendo/Windows)" as the multiple gaming platforms that go through testing and support in the role. Sledgehammer Games is currently hiring a senior technical animator that lists "AAA Mobile or Switch experience" as a bonus.

Xbox cloud game streaming expands to India, a core market that can be served by free ad-supported streaming options, and Xbox CEO Phil Spencer says usage is already up significantly over last year.

Xbox Game Pass is seeing increased engagement across cloud. Microsoft recently rolled out its game streaming program to India--a market that's uncoincidentally dominated by mobile gaming. Reports indicate that Microsoft is currently testing a free, ad-supported version of Xbox Cloud Gaming that could roll out globally, and India seems like a perfect market for the initiative.

Ahead of the expansion, Xbox's Phil Spencer gave some quick metric updates on Xbox Game Pass that confirm increased usage and engagement, both of which are typically precursors for what Microsoft will do next. Spencer says that cloud is ultimately a reflection of Microsoft's push towards choice-driven consumer gaming (a trend that's often synonymous with what Xbox is doing at the time, e.g. breaking exclusivity at the cost of its own personal brand image).

Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 is selling so poorly that Paradox has been forced to make a write-down and reduce the game's value on its accounts.

The latest game in the Vampire: The Masquerade franchise has significantly failed to meet sales expectations, and has triggered a value adjustment from Paradox. The publisher warned investors that it will take a 355 million SEK write-down on the project's capitalized development costs, which amounts to a roughly $37.4 million decrease in overall sales value.

"We've had high expectations for a long time, since we saw that it was a good game with a strong IP. A month after release, we can sadly see that sales do not match our projections, which necessitates the write-down," CEO of Paradox Interactive Fredrik Wester said.

It's becoming more challenging to find something new in the world of experimental gaming - also known as 'playing Doom on an insert-improbable-device-here' - but this is definitely a striking new first: playing Minecraft on a printer.

A receipt printer to be precise, and YouTuber Smill managed to pull this off, as Tom's Hardware flagged up.

The YouTuber beat Minecraft with a speedrun that took up less time than needed for the printer to churn through the five rolls of receipt paper that was all he had to hand. You can see the run in the video above (which has some colorful language and jokes - be warned).

Microsoft went through with the severing process from Windows 10 in October, meaning the company no longer provides security updates to the now out-of-date operating system, leaving PCs running Windows 10 to be at exponentially greater risk of compromise.

With Windows 10 now in the rear-view mirror for Microsoft, the company hoped many users would make the jump to Windows 11. However, Microsoft's latest operating system comes with much stricter requirements than its predecessor, and as always, some people won't upgrade until they absolutely need to. But, it appears the rate at which users upgrade to a new Windows operating system is slowing, as around 1 billion PCs are still running Windows 10.

Those figures come from a recent Dell earnings call where Dell COO Jeffrey Clarke said, "We have about 500 million of them capable of running Windows 11 that haven't been upgraded. And we have another 500 million that are four years old that can't run Windows 11. Those are all rich opportunities to upgrade to Windows 11 and modern technology. Equally important AIPCs."

Australia's Bureau of Meteorology, commonly referred to as BOM by Australians, is a website that receives more than 2.6 billion visits every year and could be joining the list of the most expensive website upgrades in internet history.

It was revealed that the make-over for the BOM website cost about $96.5 million AUD, which is about $62.3 million USD. That figure is 20 times the original estimation for the website upgrade, which was $4.1 million AUD ($2.7 million USD). While that is an astronomical figure for a website upgrade, BOM has since gone live, and the response from users has been far from good, with the hashtag "#changeitback" going viral since the new website went public.

Users took to social media to criticize the new website, including the new color scheme for the rain radar and the reduction in functionality, specifically the inability to enter GPS coordinates to obtain forecasts for specific locations. Farmers and fishermen commonly use this feature. According to reports, that feature is now gone.

Ubisoft confirmed that it was bringing Assassin's Creed Shadows to the Nintendo Switch 2 with an announcement trailer published around a month ago, and with the release only a few days away, the publisher has revealed the graphical features and performance Switch 2 owners can expect from Shadows.

The Nintendo Switch 2 has a much smaller performance envelope than competing platforms, such as the Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, and PC, and, due to its limited performance headroom, Ubisoft has had to make dramatic changes to Shadows to get it to run on Nintendo's latest handheld. According to Ubisoft's Project Lead Programmer, in many ways, Shadows has been redesigned for the Nintendo Switch 2, specifically in how the world is rendered, and many of the fundamental in-game systems.

Despite these changes, Ubisoft says it has maintained the core systems, such as clouds and cloth rendering, but they have been heavily optimized, meaning they have been downscaled to free up more hardware resources. Additionally, Shadows on the Nintendo Switch 2 will ditch ray-traced global illumination in favor of a baked solution used by lower-end PCs and the Xbox Series S, significantly reducing RAM usage.

Microsoft recently ended official support for Windows 10, prompting a significant push from the company and its partners to move people to newer devices or upgrade their existing hardware to Windows 11. Well, it's looking increasingly like the Windows 11 transition has been moving at a slower pace than expected, with Dell chiming in on the status of the PC refresh and upgrade cycle as part of the company's recent Q3 2025 earnings call.

As spotted by Windows Latest, the transition from Windows 10 to Windows 11 for Dell's customer base has been slow. Jeffrey Clarke, the Vice Chairman and COO at Dell, says, "If you were to look at it relative to the previous OS end-of-service, we are 10, 12 points behind at that point with Windows 11 than we were the previous generation."

According to Dell, the Windows install base sits at around 1.5 billion. And with that figure, there are still 500 million Windows users with systems that can be upgraded to Windows 11 who haven't been upgraded. This means that these users are sticking with Windows 10 even though official support for things like regular security updates has ended.

AMD's new RDNA 4 generation of desktop graphics cards has been well received, thanks in part to notable improvements to ray-tracing performance and the arrival of the AI-powered FSR 4, which finally delivered a proper DLSS-like alternative with fantastic image quality. Led by the flagship Radeon RX 9070 XT, which launched at $599, this competitive price point made it a more affordable and powerful alternative to the GeForce RTX 5070.

However, with very few models available at launch for $599 and increased demand for modern mid-range and enthusiast graphics cards with 16GB of VRAM, Radeon RX 9070 XT prices have been sitting around $699 or more for months. The good news is that with Black Friday sales, you can actually pick up a Radeon RX 9070 XT for $599 - with the PowerColor Reaper AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT 16GB currently on sale at Amazon for $599.

In addition, PowerColor's more premium Hellhound AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT 16GB model is also on sale at Amazon for $629, down from $699. At these prices, you're looking at 1440p and 4K performance that is notably faster than the GeForce RTX 5070 and closer to the popular (and more expensive) GeForce RTX 5070 Ti.

GeForce NOW, NVIDIA's cloud gaming service, is also having a Black Friday Sale by offering new members 50% off the first three months of a GeForce NOW Ultimate subscription. This is the tier that gives you access to GeForce RTX 5080-class servers, which include full DLSS 4 support and low-latency cloud gaming at up to 5K at 120 frames per second.

With this deal, NVIDIA has also announced that the RTX Blackwell upgrade for GeForce NOW is now "fully live across all servers," with Stockholm being the final region to get the new RTX 5080-class performance. This means that wherever GeForce NOW is available, the brand-new RTX Blackwell technology is also available for Ultimate members.

Games that support the new hardware, which includes new releases like Battlefield 6, Borderlands 4, and The Outer Worlds 2, feature a tag on the GeForce NOW interface to confirm you're getting GeForce RTX 50 Series performance. GeForce NOW's Black Friday Sale ends Sunday, November 30. And with that, let's get to the new games added to the GeForce NOW library this week.

The path towards combining both GPUs and HBM memory chips together is here, with NVIDIA and Meta "reviewing plans" to mount GPU cores on HBM.

The general concept is that placing GPU cores into the base die at the bottom of the HBM stack, with Meta and NVIDIA working with HBM leaders SK hynix and Samsung. In a new report from Korean outlet SEDaily and multiple industry insiders "familiar with the matter" that "next-generation 'custom HBM' architectures are being discussed, and among them, a structure that directly integrates GPU cores into the HBM base die is being pursued".

HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) is widely used on AI GPUs from both NVIDIA and AMD, with next-gen HBM4 right around the corner, and HBM4E not far behind it, and it's built perfectly for AI applications and mass amounts of data through its incredibly high memory bandwidth.

The new Witcher trilogy is still planned to release in a six-year period starting with the first game's launch, CD Projekt has reiterated.

CD Projekt's Q3 results give a quick update on the business and what's next for the group. Cyberpunk 2 is accelerating development alongside The Witcher 4, the latter of which is currently in full production phases. In the transcript, company co-CEO Michal Nowakowski says that the plans to launch Ciri's full Witcher trilogy in a six-year span have not changed, and that the switch to Unreal Engine 5 is the key to making this happen.

There's been no confirmation of a release date or release window, however CD Projekt does say that The Witcher 4 won't be out in 2026, so that means the full Witcher trilogy will be complete and released after 2032. Nowakowski also mentions that the teams have been using UE5 for roughly four years and are quite impressed with the engine's capabilities.

CD Projekt executive management makes a quick connection between subscriptions and game sales, saying that introducing titles on services like PS Plus can lead to overall lower sales of the game for a period.

Since CD Projekt only has two franchises, The Witcher and Cyberpunk, the group has to get very creative to continue making money well after its game products are released. The Polish game-makers pull this off with a unique flywheel model that incorporates a strategically-timed series of promos, licensing deals, and transmedia content. Subscription services are a part of this model.

In a recent Q3'26 earnings report, CD Projekt leadership made an interesting concession by acknowledging that subscription services can lead to fewer games sold, but that's a trade-off the company made as part of its planned business strategy. Basically, CD Projekt will rotate older catalog games like Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher 3 into subscription services in exchange for upfront revenue from Sony and/or Microsoft, thereby boosting revenues for the period and also elongating engagement for the franchises. CD Projekt notes that the PS Plus deal contributed to a strong +53% revenue spike in Q3.

CD Projekt is enjoying the success of some particularly interesting trends for Cyberpunk 2077 after introducing the game to Sony's PlayStation Plus subscription service.

CD Projekt's latest Q3 results touch upon a topic that most publishers don't really talk about: Subscription trends, and more importantly, how these services are affecting sales. According to co-CEO Michal Nowakowski, putting Cyberpunk 2077 on PS Plus helped boost license revenues for the period and contributed to a mighty +53% boost in total revenue.

Another eye-catching trend is happening as a result of Cyberpunk 2077 on PS Plus, though. Data shows that users who access Cyberpunk on the PlayStation service are more likely to buy the Phantom Liberty expansion. This actually gives us dual optics on both Sony and CD Projekt; subscribers are willing to buy an expansion for a game that could rotate out of the service, indicating that the users may be subscribed for longer periods, and for CD Projekt, it means a potential additional sale for the Cyberpunk base game if users want to keep playing after the game moves out of PS Plus.

Cyberpunk 2077 has reached a new milestone with 35 million copies sold globally on all platforms, and the game's performance helped CD Projekt boost third quarter revenues by 53%.

CD Projekt's latest Q3'26 results show that the company's flywheel strategy is working quite well. Cyberpunk 2077's continued sales performance helped deliver a strong +53% spike in revenue throughout Q3, with earnings reaching 350 million zloty ($96 million) for the period.

All-told, Cyberpunk has now reached 35 million sales, up 5 million copies from the last update in November 2024. The surge in volume sales and overall revenue could be attributed to Cyberpunk 2077's launch on Switch 2 (although this period only includes roughly one month of sales) as well as well-timed discounts and promotions on all platforms--which are strategic parts of CD Projekt's flywheel business model.