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Discord secures a big $150 million investment to help bolster its storefront plans.

The PC game storefront wars have begun. Industry titans like Epic Games (Fortnite) and Discord (the massively popular social app) are now opening up their own digital game stores to compete with Steam. While it doesn't have Fortnite's billions, Discord is a strong force and just raised a substantial $150 million in capital, bringing the company's valuation to over $2 billion. Discord has managed to raise $200 million for its various business ventures in 2018.

Multiple companies contributed to the funding round including Chinese juggernaut Tencent, and other equity firms like IVP, Index Ventures, Greenoaks Capital, Firstmark, and Technology Opportunity Partners. Discord aims to use this revenue to bolster its digital store plans, which aims to attract developers with a substantial 90-10 earnings split in devs' favor.

Microsoft is working on multiple new Xbox consoles in its next-gen Scarlett family of systems, including a mid- and enthusiast-grade console. But what kind of performance can we expect? Maybe 4K 240FPS?

Official details about Microsoft's new next-gen Xbox family are scarce. Sources say the higher-end system will be outfitted with AMD's powerful new Navi GPU and Zen 2 CPU architectures to surpass the Xbox One X's 4K 60FPS perf, similar to the tech that should power Sony's PlayStation 5. How much more powerful will the Scarlett Xbox system be than the Xbox One X? No one knows for sure, but one analyst tossed around an interesting figure: 4K 240FPS.

In a recent interview with Gamingbolt, Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter discussed the new Xbox family and attached huge perf to the top-tier model. "So I think there will be a streaming device, like a $100 Xbox console that doesn't run in 4K or 240 frames per second. And then I think there will be a more expensive $400 console that supports 4K, 240 FPS, virtual reality. I don't know if there will be 'models'. I don't think you're going to get completely different devices," Pachter said in the interview.

Anthem's weapons can be outfitted with components that set up and detonate elemental combos.

Combos are an essential part to any BioWare game, whether it be the strategic power combos in Mass Effect or the devastating skill combos in Dragon Age. Anthem might be an online-only shooter that breaks BioWare's tradition of squad-based RPGs, but it'll feature combos in a more dynamic and varied way than other games. Like Mass Effect, gamers can prime and detonate combos with weapons and abilities, albeit in a wider capacity.

In a recent Anthem stream BioWare devs Jon Warner, Mike Gamble, and Ben Irving showed off some gameplay and discussed these combos. Equip-able weapons can apparently be infused with elemental effects to trigger combos. This means players can trade-out weapons and gear to dramatically transform their roles and effectiveness in battle, adding that familiar level of BioWare strategy to the action game.

BioWare's latest Anthem stream shows off a nice chunk of gameplay, showing a sense of fast-paced shooter chaos to the new IP.

EA's big new service game Anthem has been in development at BioWare since 2013. It's an online action-based RPG shooter that blends multiple genres and ultimately aims to take on games like Destiny. The game, which is a PVE-only co-op driven shoot-and-looter, gives players Iron Man-esque mech suits called Javelins to fly in and adds freedom and verticality to each fight. A new 27 minute stream shows off what we can expect from Anthem, and I have to say it looks pretty good.

BioWare's Mike Gamble, Jon Warner, and Ben Irving take control of Anthem's three main Javelin classes--Storm, Interceptor, and Colossus--and blast through a higher-level stronghold area. The footage centers around the Interceptor's ninja-like speed and reflexes, and in many cases I was reminded of NiOh's excellent sword-slashing prowess. The combat looks fun, if not a bit arcade-y in the sense that you're essentially shooting tons of adds and enemies, but the Interceptor has nifty jumps, dashes, and a feline grace to its melee attacks that looks oh-so-satisfying.

Beyond Good and Evil 2 is an online-only game that fits perfectly into Ubisoft's digital-focused engagement strategy.

BG&E2 is Ubisoft's biggest game to date. It's a sprawling, galactic RPG with action-driven combat that brings a sense of interstellar anarchy by blending Grand Theft Auto's anti-authority vehicular chaos with No Man's Sky's massive scope. Everything we've seen about the co-op game indicates it'll be a strong pillar in Ubisoft's growing games-as-a-service business model, so it's no surprise that it'll require a persistent internet connection to play

You'll need to be online whether you play singleplayer or with a friend or friends in co-op, Ubisoft confirms. This is par for the course when it comes to live games as it gives developers real-time access to valuable metrics and arms them with the power to continually tweak, modify, and balance the game world with patches. This also of course means it'll be monetized in some way, and we're curious what the game's microtransactions will be like.

EA should start monetizing Battlefield V in January 2019, giving three months to rack up earnings before its fiscal year ends in March.

Battlefield V's premium microtransaction currency should go live on January 18, 2019, recent Amazon store listings indicate. EA and DICE wisely chose not to monetize Battlefield V at launch and instead organically drive engagement with events and content to gauge the proper way to actually drive the digital business model. Although sales are weaker than Battlefield 1, this tactic could work quite well in the long run, which is what EA's always planning for.

The currency, which is used to buy optional cosmetic items to customize characters in the Company hub, will be priced similar to Battlefront II's crystals.

Bethesda is giving the original Fallout PC games to everyone who played their online-only atomic bomb.

Fallout 76 might be a badly-optimized mess, but Bethesda wants to mop up its nuclear waste with some holiday cheer. That's why it's giving out the original Fallout cRPGs--Fallout, Fallout 2, and Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel--for free to anyone who's played Fallout 76 this year. Anyone who refunded the game will apparently get the gift too, as any players who logged into the game in 2018 will get codes (even PS4 and Xbox One players).

This isn't the first time classic Fallout games were attached to '76. Bethesda gave out these same games to anyone who pre-ordered the game before a certain period. These legacy games are only available on Steam and Gog.com and are coincidentally on sale for $2.50 a piece, so they won't be locked to the Bethesda.net framework.

Although it might be a stretch to think it, Batman's iconic Court of Owls story arc could be adapted into video game form.

Warner Bros. Montreal is currently working on two big DC games, and sources say one of them is Batman related, possibly a title centered around Damien Wayne. The team, who developed Batman: Arkham Origins, pivoted towards a Batman game after cancelling its Suicide Squad project. Not much has been confirmed about the projects, but the studio's production coordinator Valerie Vezina might've teased something interesting: a Batman Court of Owls game.

Vezina's early November Twitter post ignited speculation that the project could revolve around the Batman comics' dark and iconic storyline. The post shows Vezina wearing an owl shirt that resembles the nefarious Court of Owls' insignia in the New 52! graphic novels. It's not an exact match, however, and it may just be a coincidence.

343 Industries is making good on its promise to include split-screen with all future Halo games, and has already implemented it Halo: Infinite.

Halo: Infinite (aka Halo 6) is still in very early stages of development--the game's engine still hasn't been fully fleshed out--but that didn't stop 343i from already adding in split-screen multiplayer. The devs confirmed that 4-player split-screen is indeed playable right now in early internal builds of the game.

"We have [four player] split-screen working. We made a promise to the community that we'd have it in our next game that we make, and it's working. We can play on it, and it's a huge accomplishment for the team this year," 343 Industries FPS head Chris Lee said in a recent Halo social stream.

It's been years since a Halo game came to PC, but Halo 6 will make the jump and 343 Industries affirms it'll be scaled to meet the platform's demanding standards.

Halo has always been a system-selling franchise, but Microsoft's goalposts with Xbox now transcend the console realm and sees a union between PC and console gaming. This evolution means major first-party exclusives will release on PC too, and that includes 343i's next big shooter Halo: Infinite (aka Halo 6). The devs are taking PC development seriously, but it's working on both versions simultaneously and consoles will get first dibs on alpha and beta testing phases.

"We take PC as a full first-class citizen," 343 Industries technical director David Berger said in a recent social stream. "The PC audience expects more things than a curated console experience, and so it definitely goes into our philosophy of making sure we can allow scalability of things on different PC hardware. It's just something we have to think about going forward."

To celebrate the release of Blackkklansman on home video, we have ten Blu-ray copies of the film to give away thanks to our friends at Universal Sony Home Entertainment!

It's the early 1970s, a time of great social upheaval as the struggle for civil rights rages on. Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) becomes the first African-American detective on the Colorado Springs Police Department, but his arrival is greeted with skepticism and open hostility by the department's rank and file. Undaunted, Stallworth resolves to make a name for himself and a difference in his community. He bravely sets out on a dangerous mission: infiltrate and expose the Ku Klux Klan.

Posing as a racist extremist, Stallworth contacts the group and soon finds himself invited into its inner circle. He even cultivates a relationship with the Klan's Grand Wizard, David Duke (Topher Grace), who praises Ron's commitment to the advancement of White America. With the undercover investigation growing ever more complex, Stallworth's colleague, Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver), poses as Ron in face-to-face meetings with members of hate group, gaining insider's knowledge of a deadly plot. Together, Stallworth and Zimmerman team up to take down the organization whose real aim is to sanitize its violent rhetoric to appeal to the mainstream.

HP is getting into the holiday spirit with some big sales on a range of their products, with notebooks, printers and full desktops all on special. It ranges between their touch-capable notebooks through to more powerful desktops, right up to the gaming-focused Omen X by HP machines, all discounted for Christmas.

First up is the HP Envy 17 which is a larger-than-life 17-inch laptop where in a world dominated by smaller 15.6-inch panels, HP includes a 4K display on the 17-inch laptop and normally ships for $1799. HP's special drops the 17-inch Envy to just $1199, a discount of a rather large $600. There aren't many 17-inch notebooks on the market so if you're in the market for one, saving $600 on HP's Envy 17 would be a good start.

If you're after a small laptop then there's the HP Spectre X360 laptop which features a smaller 13-inch panel, but hefty Core i7 processor, up to 16GB RAM, and 512GB SSD storage. This all usually costs $1429, but HP is discounting the laptop to $1179 during the holidays.

In a recent press release from Nintendo Europe, Super Smash Bros. has been deemed Nintendo's fastest-selling home console game ever.

Nintendo Europe has announced on the official Twitter page that the recently released Super Smash Bros. Ultimate has become Nintendo's fastest selling home console ever. Since its release, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate has clocked record number sales within its first three days of being live. The total sales of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate in that same frame were 30% higher than that of Mario Kart Wii, which progressed to sell more than 37 million copies.

The COO of Europes Nintendo commented on the success of the title, saying "Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is the biggest Super Smash Bros. ever, and not only is it the fastest-selling game in the series we've ever seen in Europe, it's become our fastest-selling home console game ever. Nintendo Switch owners have a lot to look forward to in 2019, including new games in the Animal Crossing and Pokémon series, Yoshi's Crafted World, Fire Emblem: Three Houses, and more." Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is currently available exclusively on the Nintendo Switch, for more information visit the official Super Smash Bros. website here.

One of the most anticipated titles for Nintendo's Switch line-up for next year has got to be Yoshi's Crafted World, and with no official confirmed release date set, Amazon may have spilled the beans early.

We first heard about Yoshi's Crafted World when Nintendo accidentally leaked the name for the game back in September of this year. Then the games vague release date window of "spring 2019" was revealed by Nintendo during their Direct, it now seems that date has been further clarified by a mysterious Amazon listing.

It should be noted that Amazon has done with with many game titles and this should hold in no way state or form a confirmed release date for Yoshi's Crafted World. With that in mind, this release date given by Amazon does coincide with the originally planned "Spring 2019" set by Nintendo themselves. So we could actually be looking a legitimate release date, or at least something close to it. For more information regarding Yoshi's Crafted World, check out its official eShop listing here. Yoshi's Crafted World will be arriving on the Nintendo Switch Spring of 2019, I will be sure to update you when an official release date is set.

For Honor players will soon be suiting up as Ezio Auditore as Ubisoft has debuted an Assassin's Creed crossover event to For Honor. Prepare your hidden blades and longswords, Templars and Assassin's are about to battle it out.

The event titled 'For The Creed' will be bringing an Assassin's Creed-themed twist on "dominion mode, new map visuals, and new outfits, gear, executions, and emotes." The event will last for three-weeks and within that time players will be able to jump into a special version of dominion mode that puts Templars and Assassin's in a head-to-head scenario. The principles will still remain the same for dominion, players will fight for capture points but when the point that is closest to your home base is taken the commander for the defending side will come out.

Players will have to deal with Ezio Auditore da Firenze as the Assassin's commander, the Templars will feature Cesare Borgia as their commander. Each commander will have "massive health pools and devastating area area-of-effect swings, these commanders won't be easy to take out, but doing so nets your team 300 points and propels you that much closer to victory." To successfully win a game, a side must reach 1000 points, the first side to do this is deemed victor. To find out more about what Assassin's Creed themed changes are coming in the 'For The Creed' event, check out the official Ubisoft blog post here.

Indie developer Nik Nak Studios is the developer of a GTA 2 inspired title called Geneshift. Geneshift has now recently taken the 10th spot as Steam's 'most played' title.

Ben, the developer behind Nik Nak studios has been working on his title 'Geneshift' for a solid 9 years now, after recent popularity spike of the Battle Royale mode Ben decided to create a version of it for his game and give it away to Reddit to for free. His giveaway platform was Steam, and after some debates with Valve they gave him the go ahead. Ben proceeded to post onto /r/gaming with this gif, eventually the post made it to the front page of Reddit for a few hours and then Ben to his shock saw a 9000% increase in traffic to his game.

It wasn't just redditors that were giving his game a try, but bots and not just a small amount of them either. Since Ben's game was originally $10, it was still possible for the people playing to receive trading cards and sell them on the marketplace for just a couple cents. This motivated a bot farm to hijack Ben's game and become idle within it, Valve eventually caught wind of what was going on and disabled trading cards for Geneshift, not before the title could reach 213,000 concurrent players. After this fiasco, Geneshift now sits on the 10th spot on Steam's 'most played' game, and despite the bot hijacking I hope the publicity gets some well deserve player attention to this developer. Check out Geneshift here. Read the full story from Ben himself here.

Blizzard are getting into the full festive swing with a new stop-motion animated short, this time round Tracer is on 'cookiewatch' duty as a pesky Reaper attempts to steal Santa's cookies.

Back in May, we saw the first stop-motion animated short for Overwatch to celebrate the games second year anniversary. Blizzard must of taken in all the positive feedback and decided to create another for us to enjoy, introducing Tracers 'cookiewatch' and her mission to save Santa's cookies.

The short which would of been hours and hours of frame-by-frame work is about two and half minutes long and we can see Reaper jumping down to rob Santa of his cookies. Tracer see's what Reaper is up to and enforces the Christmas tradition of leaving the cookies for Santa. Dashing around the room and all around the Christmas tree with multiple shots fired from Reaper, Tracer and Reaper end up getting interrupted by Santa himself. Check out the above video for yourself, Overwatch is currently available on the PC, Xbox One and PS4.

Ford has just t eased something that, well I quite frankly didn't think I'd see right now: a prototype noise-canceling dog kennel for dog owners who have pets that are scared of fireworks, and other loud noises.

The new prototype kennel is just one part of a series of "Interventions" the car maker is working on, where it's throwing the knowledge it has from its noise cancellation technology that it uses in its new Edge SUVs, into a dog kennel. Ford's technology in the car uses microphones to record engine and transmissions sounds, and then uses speakers to play the opposite frequencies, canceling out the noise.

Human and dog hearing is vastly different, as dogs can hear up to 400% further away, so Ford had to put some serious work into the prototype kennel in the hopes of helping dogs that are scared of fireworks (that are used far away). Dogs can hear at high frequencies of between 67Hz to 45,000Hz while our puny human ears only hear frequencies between 20Hz and 20,000Hz.

Fortnite now has its own merch store, with developer Epic Games offering a bunch of different shirts, onesies, and other Fortnite-related goods for people to buy. One of those is the new Durr Burger Onesie.

The new onesie should be a big attraction for thousands of Fortnite fans, available for $70 and shipping in late-January 2019. There's also otehr things like the Skull Trooper pullover hoodie for $60, and a bunch of other Skull Trooper tees for $25 a piece.

There might not be much on the Fortnite merch store right now, but Epic will go into 2019 adding more to the store. I'm sure this is a test run to see how successful it is, and just how many of the tens of millions of Fortnite players in the world react to Fortnite merch. The onesie on the other hand, should sell like hotcakes.

There will be plenty of new iPad Pro tablets under the Christmas tree this year, and now Apple has confirmed that the reports of the strange warping issue on some of the iPad Pros is indeed real.

The new iPad Pro has been shipping out bent out of the box, with Mashable reporting that Apple said this is something that happens during the manufacturing process, specifically after the "device's metal and plastic components cool. The tech giant added that it shouldn't affect performance, nor should the bend worsen as time goes by. Still, if you find the bend annoying, you should be able to exchange or return the device to Apple or retailers".

When consumers are paying up to $1899 for the high-end 12.9-inch iPad Pro with 1TB of storage and LTE connectivity... you'd kinda not want a bend in your new tablet, right? Plenty of reports state that even brand new shrink wrapped iPad Pros have a slight bend in the aluminum, without being touched at all. This means they're rolling off the production line like this, and Apple are happy putting them on shelves and then into consumers' hands.