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A new announcement has come out from Activision who are celebrating the success of the recently released FromSoftware title Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice.

The announcement comes from Michelle Fonseca, Vice President of Product Management and Marketing at Activision. Here is what she had to say on the titles recent success; "Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice has brought something very special and unique to Activision's portfolio of games. It's been an honor to work with FromSoftware to help introduce a brand-new franchise to gamers around the world."

Fonseca continued and said: "The fans have made Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice one of the most incredible game launches of 2019 thus far. The game has performed well on all platforms including PC and we're excited by the continued support from gamers and critics alike. It has been gratifying to see the enjoyment from fans when they overcome each challenge."

It's very rare when a big EA game doesn't have multiplayer, live services, and microtransactions attached to it. Respawn's new Star Wars game will be clean of that monetization curse that's afflicted so many previous games.

From the sound of it, Jedi: Fallen Order aims to be the God of War of Star Wars games. Today EA Star Wars community manager Ben Walke confirmed that Respawn's new action-based adventure is singleplayer-only without any sort of multiplayer, and won't be monetized with optional in-game purchases.

It seems Respawn's game was always built as a more personal game that connects with audiences. Jedi: Fallen Order has strong emphasis on storytelling and character development--Respawn promises to pay respects to the canon--and explores the dark times between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope when the Jedi were being hunted down. The game has six narrative designers crafting the saga-bridging story arc, including industry vets like Fallout: New Vegas writer Chris Avellone.

Ninja Theory has released the launch trailer for Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice debuting over to the Nintendo Switch, check it out below!

Back during the Nintendo Direct that was held mid February, we learned that Ninja Theory's critically acclaimed title Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice would be arriving on the Nintendo Switch this April. The time has finally come, and now Nintendo Switch users can rush into despair and madness whenever and wherever they so choose.

For those that don't know about Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, I will give you a quick run-down. Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice follows the story of Celtic warrior Senua and her quest to save her dead lovers soul by journeying to hell. Along the way Senua encounters demons and manifestations, while also battling psychotic voices that that plague her mind filling it with doubt.

Disney has showcased their upcoming streaming service planned for launch this November. The service will include everything Disney, and when I say everything Disney - I mean everything.

So what will be coming to Disney+ when it launches? Firstly, Disney will be throwing together most of their IP (excluding R rated content) movie and TV show wise. By the end of the year, Disney plans on having 5000 episodes of Disney Channel Shows, over 100 Disney Channel Original Movies as well as all of The Simposon's episodes.

Periodically over the course of the year Disney plans on rolling out 40 more movies that include National Geographic series' and documentaries. At the moment Netflix will retain the Marvel Cinematic Movies, but no doubt after their contracts are up Disney will be pulling them from Netflix's service and placing them on their own platform.

I'm sure you thought that was a click bait headline and I really wish it was, but it is not. It's the reality we live in today, with a British farm trialling 5G-connected cows. Yes, you read that right - 5G-connected cows will be milked in this trial.

Reuters is reporting that the government-funded Agricultural Engineering Precision Innovation Centre (Agri-EPI Centre) in Shepton Mallet, in southwest England. The farm will see 50 or so of the 180 herd fitted with 5G smart collars and health-monitoring ear tags.

Duncan Forbes, the Project Manager at the Agri-Epi Centre explained: "We are testing the ability of 5G to transmit the data from our sensors much quicker, and not via farm's PC and slow broadband internet connection. And the significance of that is it means that this sort of technology could be taken up... not just on farms but on rural communities right across the country".

I've long said that there is a big problem between the super-high-res, super-high-refresh rate displays because right now there's only a 27-inch 4K 144Hz and then the next size up from that sees you plonking down thousands on an NVIDIA-powered Big Format Gaming Display (BFGD).

Well, that all changes today with Acer announcing the next wave of its gaming-focused Predator monitors. The newly-announced Acer Predator CG437KP is a large 43-inch monitor with a native 4K resolution and super-fast 144Hz refresh rate, but it's also compatible with AdaptiveSync technology for the PC.

As for connectivity we have 3 x HDMI ports, USB Type-C, and DisplayPort. Acer has also used a built-in sensor that automatically adjusts the brightness of the display depending on the light level in the room. Acer has also used a proximity sensor that will wave up the Predator gaming display when you walk away from it, and then wake it up when it detects you back in front of the display.

The day is here: NVIDIA has released its new driver, something it promised at GDC 2019, that ushers in non-RTX series graphics cards to enjoy real-time ray tracing features.

NVIDIA's new GeForce Game Ready 425.31 WHQL drivers (unfortunately skipping over the 420.00 series drivers I was hoping the company would capitalize on) provide support for Microsoft's DXR real-time ray tracing API.

Senior VP of Content and Technology at NVIDIA, Tony Tamasi, explains it all so well in the video above with a great graph that shows that while the GTX 1080 Ti is a powerful card, when it comes to doing RTX abilities the Turing architecture and its powerful RT cores kick some serious ass.

The world of 8K gaming is still many, many years away but that doesn't mean that the R&D into these monitors isn't ramping up already. Dell has an 8K monitor on the market in its UP3218K which I personally own and absolutely adore, but it is limited to just 60Hz.

Sharp teased a similar monitor at a special media event at Sharp HQ in Japan this week with a new 31.5-inch 8K monitor with a whopping 120Hz refresh rate and HDR technology. It is using Sharp's own in-house IGZO panel technology, with the company teasing plans that it will be made available to the market sometime in the future.

A few years ago the company showed off a 27-inch 8K 120Hz IGZO-based monitor but it never made it to market, unlike the promises made over the larger 31.5-inch 8K 120Hz HDR panel shown off this week.

Respawn's new Jedi: Fallen Order game is set to be revealed tomorrow, but a bit of leaked artwork hints at some interesting tidbits in the meantime.

Jedi: Fallen Order has been in development as far back as 2016 and aims to restore the balance of the tumultuous galaxy of Star Wars games. We actually know a healthy amount of info about the game: it's third-person action-adventure, it's built in Unreal Engine 4 instead of Frostbite, and it stars a young padawan who's faced with impossible challenges. Set in a dark age when the Jedi were hunted down, Jedi: Fallen Order promises to explore the brutal timeline between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope. But there's one thing we've been missing: something actual corporeal to lay our eyes on. Until now.

Thanks to a now-deleted Amazon listing, key art for Jedi: Fallen Order was accidentally leaked out. The artwork shows the padawan, who may be named Cal, with a companion droid amidst an epic sci-fantasy backdrop. A decrepit Venator class star destroyer looms in the background, promising galactic setpieces to bring that sense of wonder and exploration. We could spend most of the game alone, or at least a portion of it, and Respawn could bring a kind of Zelda-like discovery theme to the mix.

Today Disney and Lucasfilm dropped the first teaser trailer for Episode IX while also confirming its name: Rise of the Skywalker.

At this year's Star Wars Celebration we got our first glimpse at Episode IX: Rise of the Skywalker, which was a brief 2 minutes that was over before you knew it. There wasn't a whole lot to see in the footage outside of the usual epic vistas, snippets of lightsaber battles, and starship chases...until the end where a very familiar tyrannical laugh echoed in the darkness. As Luke says in the trailer, "no one's ever really gone," and that includes Sith Lords.

Emperor Palpatine, the original Skywalker instigator that inspired Darth Vader's death-sweeping campaign of terror across the galaxy, is making a comeback. We're not sure if Palpatine actually survived the Death Star explosion--or being vaulted into a reactor--or if he'll show up as a Force ghost, but he's definitely in Episode IX.

Epic Games is still actually making games outside of Fortnite, and it recently hired some top talent to help coordinate those projects.

Jason West has been MIA in the games industry since 2013, when he left Respawn Entertainment, the studio he helped co-found alongside Vince Zampella. But now West is back, and he's joined forces with billion-dollar juggernaut Epic Games. The news comes from long-time journalist Geoff Keighley who says West has been working with Epic for a month now on "game development efforts."

Epic hasn't announced any news--the company is quite busy managing the rather ramshackle Epic Store and its battle royale sensation Fortnite--but we shouldn't be surprised at game dev ramp-ups. It's uncertain what West is working on but it's likely shooter-related given his repertoire.

According to actress Janina Gavankar, Horizon: Zero Dawn's upcoming sequel will one-up the original in lots of ways.

Horizon: Zero Dawn is one of the best PS4 games in existence. With amazing quality, an expansive story set in a new IP, and 10 million copies sold, it's not surprising that Guerrilla Games is making a sequel. The bar has been set pretty high with the original but Guerrilla aims to redefine that high water mark, and they certainly have the tech and know-how to do it.

Janina Gavankar, who voiced a character in a HZD expansion, says the sequel is so good it's going to absolutely slay us: "Just wait until you see the sequel. It's good. You're gonna die. I know some secrets...and you're gonna die," she told a fan at the Star Wars Celebration in Chicago.

Gamers are more likely to try out new storefronts like the Epic Games Store if the product offering is right...and if it's exclusive.

Exclusives are and always have been a part of the laws of attraction for gamers. Exclusives like Spider-Man, Horizon: Zero Dawn, and God of War are proven PS4 sellers, just like Halo was for the original Xbox. Now exclusives are fragmenting the PC gaming market in a bid to tap this formula. Epic Games' penchant for buying up timed-exclusivity rights for its new PC storefront brings a new dimension to the competitive landscape.

According to a new survey from analyst firm SuperData, this approach actually works quite well to pull gamers over. The survey notes that 70% of active gamer respondents are very likely to try out a new storefront if it's the only place to play and buy specific games. This bodes well for the Epic Store, which has a growing library of timed-exclusives ranging from big AAA games like Borderlands 3 down to AA titles like Obsidian's new The Outer Worlds RPG, which is skipping Steam but available on the Windows Store.

Games are never just one-off releases, and publishers are intent on offering lots of SKUs with middling bonuses and frills. Remedy's new IP Control won't be exempt from this, and comes with two platform-specific pre-order charts.

Buying games isn't always simple. These days we need to break out star charts and compasses to plot out our pre-release game paths. Every big AAA release seems to have so many SKUs that developers make FAQ pages around pre-order bonuses (Ubisoft is particularly guilty of this, offering sometimes as many as 7 different options). Remedy's new game Control isn't as egregious as, say, Anthem or Ubisoft's games, but it still needs multiple charts to clear things up.

Control has not one, but two pre-order charts that detail what goodies consumers can get (or miss out on) if they buy early. Control favors PS4 with extra goods, offering bonuses not found in the Xbox or PC version. Not only are platforms segmented, but there's an extra layer of stuff offered to various SKUs and some are even digital exclusive (the retail PS4 version has physical extras not available in the digital one, for instance).

Game streaming promises to bring a new advent to the games market and disrupt the current console reign, and Qualcomm is betting big on the new revolution.

Google waged war on the games industry with its new Stadia game streaming service. Google wants to use powerful servers to wirelessly beam a Netflix-like selection of games to any device, bringing PC-level gaming to mobile phones, laptops, and even TVs. Stadia would theoretically make consoles and even high-end PCs irrelevant and unnecessary--in a very real sense, Stadia could be a console-killer that breaks the mold.

Chip-maker Qualcomm is onboard with the streaming revolution. Company president Cristiano Amon thinks cloud gaming is the future, and rightly so as Qualcomm's nascent 5G tech will help usher in this new streaming age. "There's no question, in our view, that the cloud is the new console," Amon said at a recent 5G summit, as reported by The Sun.

Like it's one-armed protagonist, Sekiro is quite agile and is selling at a faster rate than the original Dark Souls games.

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, From Software's new hard-as-nails samurai-souls, has sold more than 2 million copies globally on all platforms in its first 10 days, Activision today announced. As is usually the case for FromSoft games, players are all-too-eager to check out streams and videos to learn tricks, and once again the devs have created a wild storm of singleplayer engagement; Sekiro garnered over 631 million minutes of viewership on Twitch over its launch weekend, and jumped to an insane 1.1 billion minutes within a week.

What's even more interesting is how Sekiro's debut sales compare to Dark Souls. Sekiro amassed 2 million sales in less than two weeks, and it took Dark Souls games months--sometimes even years--to hit similar figures.

If you are a fan of the MMORPG genre then you most likely would of heard of Pearl Abyss's Black Desert. A recent announcement from the developer has revealed how many players are registered to the game and how much revenue it has managed to pull in.

Firstly before jumping into the statistics, if you don't know what Black Desert is, it's a MMORPG game that combines skill-based combat with in-depth character customization and smooth controls. This has resulted in quite the popular MMO experience for players and just to add icing to the top of the cake, the worlds that players are immersed in can be viewed as truly impressive graphical wise. Especially on MMO standards for games.

Since its release back in 2014, the game has reached over 150 countries and is available on PC, mobile and the Xbox One. Since its available on so many platforms, the game has amassed 18 million registered players and has also managed to rake in a gross amount of over $1 billion. Pearl Abyss CEO, Robin Jung commented on the success saying "We're proud of what this achievement represents - the hard work and dedication from our teams over the past four years and the support from a community of fans around the world."

The CEO of Fortnite creator Epic Games has taken a step forward to clear up some confusion about user data leaks and also addressing what the future will look like for the Epic Games Store.

The Epic Games Store has copped an awful amount of flack since its release. This was mostly due to its lack of features and what appeared to be quite a lot of users having their accounts hijacked through their personal information being leaked online. The Epic Games Store is quite bare-bones features wise when compared to the likes of Steam, or even Uplay or Origin. Epic Games' CEO, Tim Sweeney has stepped in to clear these concerns up.

Sweeney decided he would answer some Epic Games Store concerns on his personal Twitter account, some of which linked parent company of Epic Games, Tencent into the picture. A Twitter user claimed that Epic Games reserved to the right to distribute account user information back to Tencent, which was then shared to the Chinesse government. Sweeney denied these claims and said "Tencent has no access to customer data. The Terms of Service references data shared between Epic's wholly owned international subsidiaries (which exist to process purchases and pay tax around the world). Tencent is an investor only and is not covered by that language."

The very first image of a supermassive black hole has been taken by Earth's Event Horizon Telescope, bask in its extremely dense but gorgeous gravitational pull.

Firstly, the image has been captured with the Event Horizon Telescope which instead of using a singular telescope to take the image, uses a global network array of radio telescopes. The energy of these radio telescopes are honed in to create one big telescope that gave us enough power to be able to capture the above image.

The supermassive black hole is located somewhat 55 million light years away and is at the very centre of the elliptical galaxy M87. Astrophysicist Luciano Rezzolla of Goethe Universitat in Germany spoke out about the recent achievement, saying "The confrontation of theory with observations is always a dramatic moment for a theorist. It was a relief and a source of pride to realise that the observations matched our predictions so well."

Ever wondered what it would be like to enjoy Capcom's Devil May Cry 5 in board game form? That possibility will soon be available as Steamforged Games has announced a new partnership with Capcom.

Steamforged Games will be partnering up with Capcom to bring the recently released Devil May Cry 5 board game to table top mode. Steamforged Games is known for their success in transitioning games such as Dark Souls, Resident Evil 2 and Horizon Zero Dawn to board game form. Each of these table top games mentioned was more than a success for the studio.

The newest project coming out of Steamforged Games is Devil May Cry 5: The Bloody Palace. When reading the blog announcement on the Steamforged website, we learn that "Players will be trying to outscore each other by building the most impressive attack combos and achieving the highest style rank". Players will be able to take control of "Dante, Nero, Trish, or even the newest addition to the series, the mysterious V". For more information, visit the official blog post announcement here.