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CES 2019 - HP has just unveiled its monstrous Omen X Emperium 65, a new out-of-this-world gaming display that measures in at a whopping 65-inch, which makes it a TV - especially considering HP has joined NVIDIA's new Big Format Gaming Display (BFGD) family with this new set.

It's a beast, with HP's new Omen X Emperium 65 rocking native 4K and 120Hz refresh rate it's joined by HDR and G-Sync technology, with a Shield TV built into the BFGD. Inside, the TV rocks a 64.5-inch 8-bit AMVA panel that has a native 3840 x 2160 resolution with 750-1000 nits of brightness (typical/HDR) and 3200:1 to 4000:1 contrast ratio (again, minimum/typical). We have native 120Hz and overclocked 144Hz refresh rates, with gray-to-pray response time of 4ms when overdrive is enabled.

HP is including a custom-designed soundbar that is rated at up to 120W, which will gel beautifully with the built-in NVIDIA Shield TV that is 4K-capable.

COLORFUL is celebrating its 10th anniversary with the release of a new iGame KUDAN series graphics cards, with a new triple-fan design cooling its latest GeForce RTX 2080 Ti iGame KUDAN.

The new COLORFUL GeForce RTX 2080 Ti iGame KUDAN is a huge super-premium, mega-expensive and super-rare graphics card that in the last-gen version with the GTX 1080 Ti iGame KUDAN costing over $1500.

They're super hard to get your hands-on, and when they do ship they arrive in a luxury leather box.

Nintendo seeks to use mobile as a source of recurring earnings to supplement quarterly growth, and this typically means microtransactions will be involved in some form.

Mobile gaming is the industry's most lucrative segment and remains a strong source for consistent revenue for titans like Tencent, NetEase and Nexon. Mobile is expected to earn over $70 billion in 2018, or 51% of total yearly earnings, and Nintendo wants to see its latent smartphone gaming business grow with that number. To do this, we expect Nintendo to continue embracing the free-to-play model with its future games and infuse more gacha-style microtransactions for maximum exposure and accessibility and earnings potential. This strategy is working well and Fire Emblem Heroes made 72% of Nintendo's mobile earnings in 2018.

In a recent interview with Nikkei (as translated by Nintendo Everything), Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa says he'd like to release more mobile games with more guaranteed revenue-generating models.

More and more publishers are looking toward new technologies like game streaming and blockchain infrastructures as potential avenues towards revenue growth.

Like its competitors EA, Microsoft, and Ubisoft, Square Enix is interested in jumping into the game streaming realm. This kind of digital focus is nothing new for the Japanese games-maker, however, and there are signs it may open up its own Steam-like digital storefront and browser combo. The publisher has also significantly embraced the games-as-a-service business model by experimenting with various online engagement strategies in key games like Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. This may only be the beginning and we could see Square Enix push into subscriptions similar to Xbox Game Pass as well as a service similar to Microsoft's upcoming Project xCloud streaming.

In a recent New Year's letter to investors, Square Enix president Yosuke Matsuda discussed the company's interest in latent technologies like blockchain and game streaming.

Aquaman is the success story that WB has been gambling for since it started with Man of Steel in 2013, continued with Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, and hit out of the park with Wonder Woman.

Between now and then it hasn't been so good with the total dumpster fire that was Justice League, but WB allowed James Wan who directed Furious 7 and made an insane $1.5 billion for Universal. Wan had a vision for Aquaman that has paid off in more ways than one, with the energenic and charismatic Jason Momoa riding the wave as anyone would.

Well, the movie quickly shot past a few hundred million dollars in Chinese box office before hitting the US to open just shy of $200 million. It was only a few days ago that Aquaman was edging on $800 million and has now passed that to reach $887 million with no signs of slowing down. In comparison, the full cinema run of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice only pulled in $873 million and that had Superman and Batman in the title, in a fight, in a showdown almost to the death and it didn't hit $1 billion.

BioWare's next game isn't too far away with Anthem set for release on the Xbox One, PS4 and PC on February 22 - but now IGN is ramping up the hype with 15 minutes from the game.

The new Anthem gameplay footage opens with a new mission from the start of the game where you'll need to track down and rescue an Arcanist called Mathias. The world and the mission itself is open-ended, and while the environment looks good the motion blur and lower quality graphics aren't great. This is an alpha build however, so things should hopefully improve in the coming weeks.

I don't know if it's just me, but holy crap does Anthem look boring. This isn't the type of pre-release hype video the game needs during CES 2019 and all of its hoopla, with Origin/EA Access members open to try the game out with a demo on January 25, I can see this being tested and sales being low and then EA discounting the game a few weeks after release and then BioWare staff jumping ship.

Microsoft has been snapping up key development talent to bolster its flagging game exclusives, and this shouldn't stop any time soon.

Microsoft recently bought AA studios like Obsidian Entertainment, inXile, Ninja Theory, and Playground Games to fold them into the Microsoft Studios banner. This paints an interesting future for the games titan that sees smaller, more frequent AA titles being released between the long development cycles of AAA games like Gears of War 5 and Halo: Infinite. The new games will release on the Xbox Store, across retailers, and more importantly on Xbox Game Pass. These acquisitions are just the beginning, though, and analysts agree.

In a recent interview with GamingBolt, IDC analyst Lewis Ward reinforces the points we've long predicted. The buyouts will be strategically planned to cater to gametypes that Microsoft doesn't typically make any more, including RPGs and the like (hence the Obsidian purchase).

As we see in 15 minutes of new gameplay footage, id Software's RAGE sequel is colorful, chaotic, and filled with post-apocalyptic mayhem.

RAGE 2 looks like a lot of fun and has the hallmark staples of something special. Sure we haven't played it yet, but everything we've seen and heard about the dystopian FPS makes it like a caustic cocktail of Borderlands, Mad Max, and Doom--all supercharged with some nitrous oxide. It's fast-paced and should be a Doom 2016 fan's dream game, complete with lots of loot, vehicles, and powers to keep things engaging and fresh. With the FPS masters id taking the reins of ultra-gory shoot-em-up action and Avalanche bringing their stalwart vehicle and environment crafting to the table, the game takes on a kind of radical Road Warrior vibe with a tenacity that's all its own.

In a new RAGE 2 gameplay stream, Bethesda illustrated many of these bloody points. The footage highlights abilities like Overdrive (kind of like a limit break or supercharge skill from Destiny) and even confirmed that gamers can drive pretty much everything in the game. "If you can see it, you can drive it, including not just vehicles...but let's say flying vehicles," one of the announcers said.

The franchise's official Twitter account may have teased the next big Alien game.

Alien: Isolation is one of the best horror games I've ever played and is absolutely haunting in VR. Sadly the game didn't meet SEGA's planned sales figures, leading many devs at Creative Assembly to rule out a sequel. But something is happening and it could be related to Amanda Ripley's bloody adventure on the Sevastopol.

A new snippet on the Alien Twitter account strongly hints a new game will happen, but it might not be what we're expecting. The message says "read, play, watch" and could be connected to the mysterious Alien: Blackout game that was trademarked by 20th Century Fox. Before we get too excited, remember that this could be a trans-media campaign for comics/books, an interactive "game" app of some sort, and a CGI or animated series based on Ripley--all of which are interconnected in some way.

Take-Two Interactive is mostly known for big AAA releases like Grand Theft Auto and NBA 2K, but the publisher is branching into more AA experiences to help diversify its releases.

Any games-maker needs to have multiple products in development at one time, but more importantly, it must have new titles regularly released to fund those projects. Most publishers (Activision, EA, Ubisoft, Take-Two) use live service games to achieve this. Rather than having to release constant streams of games, they release one big game with microtransactions and rake in continual earnings over years-long periods, and this strategy has worked: GTA Online has made over $1 billion to date. Despite this, though, publishers like Take-Two often have whole quarters with few titles released, and one of the best ways to fix that is to focus on a healthy slate of AAA and AA titles.

The new Private Division label is Take-Two's way of achieving this. But rather than trying to infuse its AAA business model into the new AA-based label, Take-Two is letting developers like Obsidian create the games they want to make how they want to make them. Obsidian's new game The Outer Worlds is an action FPS RPG with the original Fallout devs at the helm, but more importantly, it's singleplayer-only and won't be a live game infused with microtransactions. This clearly illustrates Take-Two understands that AA games are different than AAA titles, and shouldn't be pressured with the same money-making tactics.

Konami might've killed its iconic horror demo P.T. by removing it from the PS Store, but now it's been resurrected for PC.

The death of Hideo Kojima's ultra-creepy Silent Hills game was a big shock to the gaming world, ditto was the weird treatment the game's playable demo, P.T., got from the publisher. Shortly after cancelling the game Konami yanked P.T. from PS4, so the only way to play it is to have it already installed. It even rolled out an auto-update which stealthily deletes the game from your hard drive if you play P.T. while connected to the internet.

But now gamers don't have to jump through hoops to experience the macabre awe and mystery of P.T. Game dev Radius Gordello has recreate P.T. using the Unreal Engine, and everything from textures and models to animations has been built from scratch. Unreal P.T. took about nine months to develop and is now available to download for PC. Although everything was technically built from scratch, I don't think Konami will be very happy about this so you should download it fast if you want it.

If there was a custom GeForce RTX 2080 Ti that I'm waiting for, it would be the MSI GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Lightning Z which has now been spotted - at least naked, so we get a good look at the PCB.

We are expecting MSI to unveil the new GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Lightning Z at CES 2019 in a few days time, with new HWBOT submissions teasing the card and its existence. There are two HWBOT entries with GPU clocks that exceed 2450MHz, which will be thanks to the monster RTX 2080 Ti Lightning Z and its 19-phase VRM and 3 x 8-pin PCIe power connectors.

There are multiple fan connectors and voltage connectors on the end of the card, with the entire end of the card cover ed in its own awesome heat plate that should keep that side of the card cool. This is a big deal for overclockers and enthusiasts, as there will be a LOT of power going into these cards when they're pushed to beyond their limits with LN2 cooling and the like.

I reported back in April 2018 that NVIDIA's new GPU would be the Turing architecture followed by Ampere, and now we're hearing more about the next-gen GPU architecture from NVIDIA that will arrive in 2020.

NVIDIA will reportedly be using Samsung's new 7nm extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) process that uses a plasma laser to drive silicon material into 7nm transistor structures. The new GeForce RTX and Quadro RTX graphics cards are both made on the 12nm process thanks to TSMC, with NVIDIA no stranger to working with Samsung for GPU production.

AMD will have the world's first GPU on 7nm beating NVIDIA to the punch, with its upcoming Navi GPU launching in July 2019 according to our sources. NVIDIA's new GPU architecture on 7nm should end up being Ampere, which will succeed the current Turing GPU architecture inside of the new RTX-powered cards.

Blizzard is turning a boring Diablo event into an annual tradition, and they didn't even fix the Wirt's Leg bug.

The Darkening of Tristram is back again for another round of lukewarm celebrations. The event, which I originally thought would be Diablo I recreated in Diablo III, instead only adds the original town of Tristam, a pixelated filter over the game, and locks players to a walk-only cycle. It's basically Diablo III re-skinned. Everything else--loot, monsters, etc--is straight from Diablo III. The content is rather drab and isn't a good effort on Blizzard's part as it is, but it actually gets a bit worse: the Wirt's Leg bug is still in.

In Diablo II, Wirt's Leg was used to open a portal to the Secret Cow Level and served as a great stomping grounds for XP and gear for low-level characters. The leg does the same function in Darkening of Tristram by opening said portal to a low-res Cow Level in Diablo III...when it works. Right now there's a bug that doesn't let players transmute the leg into the Map of the Stars, an item required to open the portal.

Slightly Mad, the devs behind Project Cars, are making a next-gen console...and we're still incredibly skeptical about the whole thing.

The gaming world is hyping up a new console called the Mad Box, but there's some big problems: the system is more than 3 years away, the team touts astronomical performance, and it's being made by a games developer who may not know what it's doing. The ambitious plan sees the Mad Box competing against Sony's, Nintendo's, and Microsoft's collective console clout, a battle which we think Slightly Mad could badly lose. Now Ian Bell, studio founder and CEO, has been steadily releasing small drip-feeds of info including some concept renders.

Predictably enough the renders resemble a PC and not a games console. There appears to be liquid cooling, suggesting serious specs and probably an even more serious price tag. We originally said the Mad Box would essentially be a Steam-box system that plays PC games due to necessity, especially since established devs and publishers would likely stick to PlayStation, Xbox, and Switch until the Mad Box proves itself (if it even can). A failed games ecosystem will tank the Mad Box, of course, as any console is only as good as the games it plays. Higher-end specs alone aren't good enough, and Bell says it'll be equivalent to PC perf in 2021 (another claim we're quite dubious of).

What appears to be a tease from the official Bayonetta Steam page has pointed fingers towards a possible future Catherine release.

The post is from the SEGA Dev team and simply features a photo of a sheep with the caption "baa". As simple as this image might be, many Catherine players would know that sheep are integral part of the adventure within Catherine. Not only is the a direct reference to Catherine itself, but it also could be in reference to the metaphor of counting down sheep to go to sleep, meaning there isn't a lot of time before the release of either the game or some information.

As always this is just pure speculation at this point, what is 100% true though is that there is a listing for "Catherine Classic" on the Australian Classification website. This listing and the image posted by the Bayonetta Steam page could suggest we are going to hear about a PC Catherine game sometime soon.

Pokemon GO has seen quite the slew of content rolled out onto the mobile hit game, and this content has resulted in developer Niantic to pull in a massive $795 million in worldwide revenue.

The mobile tracking website Sensor Tower has estimated that Pokemon GO has generated a staggering $795 million in worldwide revenue throughout 2018. Looking towards where large portions of the money is coming from, Americans spent the most with $262 million. Followed by the Japan spending which approximates to $239 million.

Not only was this $795 million a 35% increase in total revenue when compared to the previous year, but the daily spending average was also above average. Throughout 2018, Pokemon GO generated around $2.2 million per day up from $1.6 million in 2017. Most impressively, just throughout the month of December the app managed to bring in $75 million, up from $57.2 million during 2017. Now that we have passed into 2019 and the 2018 business books have closed, Pokemon GO, since its release in July 2016 has totaled $2.2 billion in revenue.

The moderately popular online indie game, Town of Salem has been subjected to a hacking over the Christmas and holiday break. The developer has now announced that 7.8 million user account details have been exposed.

According to the announcement which is featured on the BlankMediaGames' official forums details what information has been compromised and what players should do to keep their accounts safe. The post details that BlankMediaGames "don't store any credit card or payment info. At all" and that "all passwords were hashed and not plain text".

BlankMediaGames further clarifies that they "do not handle money. At all. The third party payment processors are the ones that handle all of that. We never see your credit card, payment information, anything like that. We don't have access to that information." Aspects of the hack that are compromised are the following; "username/hashed password, IP and email." Players that are worried about their password are advised to immediately change it, as whoever has hacked the Town of Salem servers could use programs to guess the hacked passwords.

Dataminers have dived into the files of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, surfacing what appears to be some name tags for the future DLC characters.

Above we can see that Jam1Garner has managed to datamine his Super Smash Bros. Ultimate to discover three labels for what appears to be characters. The labels that were found are the following; "fighter_kind_jack", "fighter_kind_packu (piranha plant)" and "fighter_kind_brave." While there is no official confirmation of this, we can assume that "jack" is in reference to Persona 5's recently revealed Joker and that "packu" is piranha plant.

What we don't know is who "Brave" is. While looking on the ResetEra forums, it would brought to my attention that Brave may be in reference to Dragon Quest. In Japan, the Dragon Quest hero class is called "Yuusha" which directly translates into "Brave" or person of bravery. As always with these types of speculative posts, please take the information with a grain of salt until we hear official confirmation from the Big N. Speaking of officiall confirmation, we should see a reveal of a DLC character at the next Nintendo Direct, recent rumors have suggested it will be held sometime in January.

We all know Mario Kart 64 is used for a million and one uses that aren't just player-vs-player battles but for drinking games, settling disputes, and in this Reddit posters family: a battle around the track of Mario Kart 64 decides who makes the tea for the day.

An interesting post turned up on /r/gaming by 'bork1138' who posted an image of his parents, explaining: "Every day my parents play Mario Kart 64 to see who will make a cuppa tea. They've done this religiously since 2001". The post has 123K+ upvotes, which for non-Redditors that's pretty damn big. As for the post, it's awesome to see parents play Mario Kart 64 daily for the last 17 years in order to decide who makes the tea for the day.

The poster says that his mom always races with either Wario for battle and Yoshi for Grand Prix, while his dad rolls out with Toad, always. His parents battle for who makes the tea for the day playing a round of Grand Prix, followed by a "best of 3" on Battle. Bork1138 talked about his mom and her love for Toad, where he explained: "Just a collision can lose a balloon". Yep, I know that pain, I think we all do.