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Nintendo is taking an extremely proactive and consumer-friendly approach to recent JoyCon drift issues, and plans to fix them for free.

Bad press has a way of making companies fix things they might ignore...but dozens of damning news articles usually leads to change. Following thousands of reports of JoyCon drifting and malfunctioning, Nintendo will now repair defective Switch controllers free of charge. Gamers affected by JoyCon drift can send their devices into Nintendo free of charge. They won't have to give proof of purchase or be in the warranty window, nor will they have to pay outright for the repair itself. Old repairs will even be refunded.

"Customers will no longer be requested to provide proof of purchase for Joy-Con repairs. Additionally it is not necessary to confirm warranty status. If a customer requests a refund for a previously paid Joy-Con repair, confirm the prior repair and then issue a refund," reads a support document acquired by Vice Games.

Despite grilling EA and Epic Games at a recent gaming addiction meeting, the UK Gambling Commission says lootboxes aren't gambling.

While undeniably psychological, lootboxes technically aren't gambling, the United Kingdom's Gambling Commission reiterated in a statement to the BBC. For a bit there it looked like the UK would pass regulations on lootboxes in the country. MPs and key government officials put immense pressure on billion-dollar devs like EA and Fortnite during a Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee meeting, strongly criticizing the companies over their addictive online games.

While lootboxes will likely stay under scrutiny in the UK, they won't be classified as gambling. Nor will they be illegalized. It comes down to the official definition of gambling, which states there must be direct winning of money or the items themselves must have monetary value outside of the game itself. The latter part is true thanks to black market skin trading, which swaps real money for digital goods--something that companies like Valve have cracked down on.

It turns out the rumors of Corsair buying custom gaming PC company ORIGIN PC were true, with Corsair officially announcing it has acquired ORIGIN PC in a statement on its website.

The acquisition of ORIGIN PC will see the custom PC maker integrate Corsair's iCUE software ecosystem into their family of PCs, offering up system-wide lighting synchronization and performance monitoring. Better yet, the new Corsair Hydro X Series custom cooling will be making their way into ORIGIN PC systems in the near future.

More details on the cooperation and integration of Corsair and ORIGIN PC products will be "announced in the near future" the company explained in its press release.

Even though Techland is right in the middle of their development for Dying Light 2, the studio isn't going to leave its first Dying Light game in the dust.

According to an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Tymon Smektala, the Lead Designer at Techland spoke about the studio still being in creation for a DLC to come to the original Dying Light.

Smektala gave some reasoning behind the decision to still support Dying Light, here is what he had to say: "We supported the game for two reasons. The first is that we believe in our community, and we really believe they will be the most essential part for us getting the word out about Dying Light 2. The other thing is that supporting a game like Dying Light for such a long time allows us to be slightly more crazy, and slightly more creative with some things, and also test some ideas and gameplay elements that we're not sure about."

The battle royale genre has amassed that much popularity, that games that you would never think of adopting the game mode are considering the thought. Should Gears of War 5 follow the hot-game trend?

According to multiplayer director Ryan Cleven, Gears of War 5 will not have a battle royale mode when it launches, even though The Coalition are 'big' fans of the battle royale genre. "Gears 5 does not include a battle royale mode. We're big fans of the battle royale genre, but we would want to ensure we bring a battle royale mode to Gears in a meaningful way. We're actively listening to our Gears community and will look to further evolve our game modes based on player feedback post-launch."

Even though Gears of War 5 won't have a battle royale at launch, the developers haven't ruled out the possibility of it coming at a later date. According to Cleven who told IGN, "As a fan of the genre I would love to see it, but bringing the intimate combat of Gears to the open kind of organic encounters of a battle royale is difficult. They're two very different modes of combat. It's not that it's impossible. It's just to do it right would require really focusing on it." Gears of War 5 launches in September.

If you played Dying Light you are most likely keen for the sequel that is coming out of Techland. The game looks incredible, and with the new decision system that has been implemented gamers will be running a muck.

According to an interview with Techland's Lead Designer, Tymon Smektala, that the complexity that you see in Dying Light 2 wasn't always planned and that it started "simpler". The inspiration for the decision system came from "analysing Dying Light, we realised we had created this game that was quite sandboxy. It gives you a lot of options on how to solve the gameplay problems. However, the narrative was very linear. Also with the narrative, which was not so cool, the main protagonist [Kyle Crane] was making a lot of decisions that were quite controversial."

He continued and says: "There were a lot of times in Dying Light where you wanted Kyle to choose something but the scriptwriters had decided something different. So the dream with this game is that we could give you the same amount of freedom in the narrative as we have in the gameplay."

A recent study has come out that suggests that scientists current understanding of what is on the moon might not be completely fulfilled.

A new research paper that has been published in Nature Geoscience by Lior Rubanenko, Jaahnavee Venkatraman and David Paige suggests that there might actually be more water on the moons surface than once expected. Using data from the Arecibo Observatory and also NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft, we found that Mercury has much more water in its cratered areas on its surface. These craters revealed ice vapor and ice deposits.

Since it was unexpected that Mercury contained thick ice sheets, we looked for the same craters on the moon to see if the trend followed. The research states that due to material buildup inside of these divots or craters, ice was eventually formed. Researchers have now located 2,000 craters across Mercury's surface and have cross-referenced these craters with the moons surface and have found 12,000 similar looking craters.

Imagine watching a galaxy level battle between two galaxies fighting it out to see who is going to win on the consumption level. The Milky Way is an undefeated champion in this regard as 10 billion years ago it swallowed up a fellow galaxy.

About 10 billion years ago, the Milky Way had a "violent collision" with another galaxy. Researchers from the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC) used the Gaia space telescope to observe the position, brightness and distance of over 1 million stars in the Milky Way. The observation was within 6,500 light years of the Sun and indentified two clusters of stars - one set being "blue" and containing less metal and the other "red" containing more.

From this observation the researchers were able to determine that each of the sets of stars were equally as old, except that the blue set had been set into a "chaotic" motion. This is the evidence of The Milky Way swallowing up another galaxy around 10 billion years ago. "The novelty of our work is that we have been able to assign precise ages to the stars that belong to the galaxies that merged and, by knowing these ages, when the merger took place," Carme Gallart, lead author of the study published in Nature Astronomy.

The PC version of Wolfenstein: Youngblood is coming 24 hours early, dropping on July 25 for the PC versus July 26 on the consoles. Bethesda confirmed the news over Twitter.

QuakeCon 2019 begins on July 25 so it makes sense to hype gamers up with an early PC release of Wolfenstein: Youngblood, with QuakeCon itself concentrating around DOOM and the impending release of DOOM Eternal, with DOOM-inspired custom gaming PCs, a panel dedicated to 25 years of DOOM and its influence on the world, and world exclusive Battlemode gameplay from DOOM Eternal.

We'll be grabbing Wolfenstein: Youngblood and testing it in all sorts of manner when it drops, which now isn't far away for us PC gamers.

We will be finding much more about DOOM Eternal at QuakeCon 2019, with its new multiplayer mode 'Battlemode' to be detailed on July 26.

DOOM Eternal's new Battlemode will see one player as the DOOM Slayer, while two other players deploy into the round as demons. The DOOM Slayer gets his full arsenal of weapons -- including the jetpacking Revenant, in a best-of-five fight. Each of the demons have their own "unique movement options, attacks and abilities" that will allow them to battle the DOOM Slayer, making the games nice and quick.

The DOOM Slayer might have weapons but the demons will be able to access the literal armies of Hell, as demon players can spawn hellish AI-controlled reinforcements to battle the DOOM Slayer. The DOOM Slayer can use this to his advantage as he has more enemies to kill, with Glory Kills gaining the DOOM Slayer health, so you don't want to spawn demons at the wrong time.

Samsung will unveil its new Galaxy Note 10 and Galaxy Note 10+ smartphones in around two weeks time, with new rumors suggesting Samsung's new handset will have the best specs on the market.

The latest news on the Note 10 is that it will pack Qualcomm's just-announced Snapdragon 855+ processor which powers the new insane ASUS ROG Phone II gaming smartphone. Notorious mobile leaker Evan Blass has detailed the specs of the Galaxy Note 10 as well as the Galaxy Note 10+ variant.

CPU: Qualcomm Snapdragon 855+

All of Remedy's projects affect one another in a unique way--even the ones that never got made like Alan Wake 2.

Games development is an intensely iterative industry. Developers constantly build on what they know and what they've made to make new games, and new projects are almost always tied to previous games, whether directly via physics engines and UI or indirectly via early concept ideas. In a recent interview with IGN, Remedy writer Sam Lake gave some interesting insight into Alan Wake 2 and how the unreleased sequel led to new IPs like Quantum Break and Control.

According to Lake, the studio made various concepts for Alan Wake 2 in between projects. Think of this as an incubation phase when games are on the drawing board, pulling from existing designs while simultaneously iterating on them. Remedy's an indie studio so it must constantly churn out new ideas for games on a regular basis and then sell them to stay afloat. Some, like Quantum Break, get funded, and others like Alan Wake 2 don't. Even though Alan Wake 2 never happened, many of these early concepts inspired future games like Quantum Break, American Nightmare, and even its big new supernatural IP Control.

As is the case with most non-official Rockstar Games info, those Red Dead Redemption remaster rumors are 100% fake.

Red Dead Redemption isn't getting remastered. The anonymous Redditor behind the claims now admits the rumors are entirely fabricated; Red Dead Redemption 2 isn't getting aliens DLC (kind of preposterous) nor is John Marston's iconic gunslinging adventure coming to current-gen systems. The Redditor says the rumors were a social experiment.

"There is no DLC for Red Dead Redemption 2 or remake of the first game as far as I know," they said. "This was an experiment I have always wanted to do regarding the spreading of rumors in video game culture."

MachineGames' next big Wolfenstein game could follow Youngblood's example, complete with some sort of online play.

Wolfenstein: Youngblood is a big departure for MachineGames. Typically the newly revamped Wolfenstein series is singleplayer-only chaos, but Youngblood is a live game with microtransactions, online co-op, and a winding story-based campaign. Youngblood, which clocks in at 25-30 hours, is the latest example of Bethesda's newfound focus on engagement-driven live games (ESO, Blades, Fallout 76, and now Youngblood).

Now MachineGames studio head Jerk Gustafsson says Wolfenstein 3 could also have online modes...but not at the expense of singleplayer. Wolfenstein will always be a singleplayer game first and foremost.

Team Liquid is on top of the Counter-Strike: GO world right now, conquering every challenger and reigning victorious at this year's Intel Extreme Masters tournament.

Copyright: ESL | Helena Kristiansson

To a roaring audience, Team Liquid raised their sixth trophy in a row last weekend after vanquishing Finnish challengers ENCE 3-0 in the IEM 2019 grand finals. Liquid managed to steal the entire show with only a single map loss, but ENCE put up a good fight in the finals and won out two pistol matches in a row. At the end they lost 14-16 to Team Liquid in a thrilling 1v1 battle between Stewie2k and xseveN.

NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER is now here (my review here) and with it comes with a new GeForce 431.60 driver release which supports the new RTX 2080 SUPER and includes optimizations for the latest games and some upcoming games.

Included in the optimizations with the GeForce 431.60 drivers is Wolfenstein: Youngblood, as well as Madden NFL 20, the first DLC for Metro Exodus and Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot. It also supports 3 new G-SYNC compatible monitors, which are the HP 24x, AOC AG272FCX6, and AOC AG272FG3R.

You can grab the new GeForce 431.60 drivers here.

We've already heard a fair amount of rumors and base specs of Sony's next-gen PlayStation 5, and it seems now is the time to learn about the new SoC inside of the next-gen Xbox console codenamed Project Scarlett.

A new SoC has turned up in a UserBenchmark sample as the AMD 'Flute' which is based on the Zen 2 architecture with 8C/16T and a low base clock of 1.6GHz and maximum boost of 3.2GHz. It was always expected to see next-gen consoles see their CPU clocks lower than what the PC versions of the Zen 2 processors pack, to keep that all-important TDP down inside of a small console.

AMD will be providing a custom Navi GPU on the Flute SoC, something that is listed as 'NAVI 10LITE' and has turned up previously in AMD's Linux display driver release. We should expect a cut down Navi GPU to once again keep the TDP low, while it should see 16GB of GDDR6 shared memory, as per previous rumors on Scarlett.

QuakeCon is famous for its stylish modding PCs, and this year's show will focus on Doom Eternal.

(Photo: IGN)

Every year thousands of dedicated fans come together to celebrate the demon-slayer that ignited the FPS revolution, complete with insane customized builds. The show is a chance to highlight some of the craziest modded cases in gaming with a set theme (usually hell-on-Earth Doom action or the medieval brutality of Quake). QuakeCon 2019 will be no different.

Corsair has been making big inroads into the hearts and souls of PC gamers across the world for years now, extending into new markets every year and acquiring companies along the way.

Elgato was a recent one, and now rumors are swirling that Corsair is going to acquire custom system builder Origin PC. The rumor is coming from our friends at eTeknix, who said "Corsair is acquiring system builder Origin PC in the US, according to several sources that have informed us earlier today".

Once Corsair has acquired Origin PC it could see its hardware and product stack, including game streaming and product lines from Elgato, rolled into systems across the US. Origin PC also recently showed off its Big O PC which combined an Xbox One, PS4, Nintendo Switch and gaming PC all into one. The PC packed a bunch of Corsair goods, but imagine a future where Corsair actually owns Origin PC.

Nintendo was recently called out en masse for its cheap JoyCon controllers, and now it's delivered a very Nintendo-y response.

The Switch's JoyCons have a few issues. They're wonky analog sticks that're just a step above nubs and they seem to wear out fast. And when they wear out they don't just get funky, but they can make games nigh unplayable thanks to controller drifting. Despite thousands of gamers reporting drift issues on Reddit, Nintendo isn't really ready to acknowledge the problem with a definitive blanket statement promising to do better. Instead they've done the predictable Nintendo thing and dropped a business-like PR response.

"At Nintendo, we take great pride in creating quality products and we are continuously making improvements to them. We are aware of recent reports that some Joy-Con controllers are not responding correctly. We want our consumers to have fun with Nintendo Switch, and if anything falls short of this goal we always encourage them to visit https://support.nintendo.com so we can help," a Nintendo rep told Kotaku.