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Bitmain unveiled its first Ethereum ASIC miner with the Antminer E3, with an April release window that has now been delayed into July after the ASICs "weaker-than-expected performance" reports DigiTimes.

Until now, Bitmain was expected to have full batches of the new Ethereum ASIC miners in late-July, but now the company will ship a small batch in July and the rest of them in Q4 2018 after the company released a refined version of the Antminer E3. The initial Antminer E3 should pump away at 180MH/s, offering the hashing performance of 5 x GTX 1080 Ti graphics cards. The revised one, could be many hundreds of megahashes per second... which would be great.

DigiTimes reports that shipments of the Bitmain Antminer E3 were meant to get close to 2 million units, and even weith the delay Bitman is expected to still reach the same goal according to industry sources. DigiTimes adds: "Bitmain will begin accepting pre-orders for the Antminer E3 in April and will start a small volume of shipments in July. The mass shipments of the ASIC miner are planned for the fourth quarter of 2018 after the release of a revised version of the miner,the sources said, adding the ASIC is manufactured on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company's (TSMC) 28nm process".

TweakTown has been the first with most of the next-gen Navi GPU architecture news, where a few months ago now I wrote that sources of mine had said that Vega was such a "disaster" that the RTG team "don't know where they're going forward" and that Navi will be "just as bad" as Vega.

Well, now Chris Hook has left the company along with Raja Koduri - both from the Radeon team in architecture and marketing, respectively. On top of that, we have fresh rumors from Fudzilla that AMD's next-gen Navi GPU will offer GTX 1080 / Radeon RX Vega 64 performance and that it will replace the RX 580 as a mainstream gaming card in 2019.

None of this is new, as I reported about this months ago but the rumors are fresh again and most tech media is picking it up so I thought I would cover it and give it a bit of an injection of reality.

NVIDIA will propel themselves into a totally new era of enthusiast gaming displays with their new 4K 144Hz G-Sync HDR displays coming out this year, something they've been working closely with ASUS and Acer on.

These new displays will arrive as 27-inch super-powered gaming displays with a native 4K resolution, super-quick 144Hz refresh rate, HDR technology and dashed with G-Sync. We have heard prices of somewhere in the $1500 to $2000 range, but according to some European retail listings for the new 4K 144Hz displays we could be looking at over $3000 for first adopters.

Acer's upcoming Predator X27 seems the cheapest so far with a converted price of between $2500 and $3068 while ASUS has the even more premium side of things covered with their ROG Swift PG27UQ that is priced between $2500 and $3607. Incredible price, but these monitors will be the most premium (lots of) money can buy.

SteamSpy is shutting down following Valve's recent decision to hide every users' games library by default, which cuts off key data used to deliver metrics.

Over the years SteamSpy has been an integral tool for gamers, reporters, and even developers: the site, which delivers updated metrics on game owners and players, allows users to quickly and easily gauge many different answers on a particular game. For example, if, say, Lawbreakers had about 20 people playing it, gamers would likely avoid it like the plague. Developers used it as a tool to eye sales momentum across periods of time, giving them key info on what did and didn't work based on figures alone.

But alas it's all coming to and end: SteamSpy is closing up shop thanks to Valve's new privacy rule.

Big franchises like Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty reign supreme, and that's why the industry needs free-to-play experiences to level the playing field--at least that's what ex Sony Interactive Entertainment President and CEO Andrew House says.

Today's gaming landscape has changed quite dramatically over the years. While titans like GTA V (and its GTA Online component), Call of Duty WWII, and FIFA still top the charts, free-to-play games like Fortnite are making massive splashes in the console space. This is quite interesting given that most big AAA games come with live services baked in that typically follow a similar monetization model as free-to-play games, so publishers are mixing and matching key components of the traditional gaming space with F2P style tactics. But even still, the likes of Fortnite are quickly becoming major competition for publishers--at least when it comes to investment and engagement.

This, according to ex Sony exec Andrew House, could be a good thing. At the very least it would balance things out so that big AAA games don't always have total domination over the console gaming space--a space that's an extremely lucrative arm of the industry's projected $180 billion dollars to be earned in 2018.

In an effort to unify the dwindling and increasingly-frustrated Destiny 2 playerbase, Bungie is making some big restriction changes to the game's PVP crucible mode.

Starting with the May 8 release of Destiny 2's second expansion, Warmind, Bungie will no longer gate off access to new crucible maps behind DLC purchases. As it stands now (and as it stood in the original Destiny game) each $20 expansion unlocks PVP and PVE content such as crucible maps and new strikes/destinations and items. But now Bungie is lifting that paygate for PVP to try and engage its playerbase and pull lapsed players back into the fold with new crucible attractions. The only exception is for private matches: both players will need the appropriate expansions to join the games and play the maps.

"Season Three marks the beginning of a new plan for how we deliver Crucible content. For every player of Destiny 2, we'll be releasing all of the new Crucible Maps being developed for Warmind into matchmaking. The same goes for the maps we released with Curse of Osiris," Bungie wrote on the latest blog post.

Although Destiny 2's populace is bristling with frustration at Bungie's lack of updates and effort to morph the game into an enjoyable grindfest, the dev has posted up an update on the slow-moving future of the game.

Destiny 2's second expansion will drop next month and will feature new content like weapons, destinations, and missions. The next expansion is called Warmind and is very likely centered around Rasputin. Like the first expansion, Warmind will be a premium paid DLC versus the free live content updates that Bungie rolls out and will likely follow the same weird rotating weekly content schedule that locks non-DLC payers out of weeklies.

"On May 8, with the beginning of Season Three, we're also launching the second expansion to Destiny 2," Bungie wrote on its blog. Of course the dev is secretive as always: "It's called Warmind, and it will send you to new places to meet new heroes and battle new enemies. You'll earn new loot and master new activities."

EOS has gone on a massive bull run in the past 24 hours, running up a massive 42%! It has now overtaken Litecoin in Market capitalisation by $539,000,000 and has taken 5th place in the top ten cryptos. Many are speculating it is because of the eosDAC airdrop that is due to start on April 15.

According to the EOS White Paper:

To put it simply, it is a platform for the development of decentralised applications (Dapps), just like ethereum. eosDAC, on the other hand, will be the EOS block producer and DAC enabler. DAC stands for 'decentralised autonomous community' which is owned by its members with all of its business logic controlled via code which anyone can inspect. The easiest way that they could decentralise eosDAC was to airdrop the tokens to the EOS community.

November 2017 through to February of this year saw many people scramble into the crypto space. Recording breaking amounts of people, not just record-breaking, exchange breaking amounts!

Many exchanges having to shut their doors to new investors so they could handle the sheer amounts of orders being placed on their books. This is when the trouble began for banks. Bank accounts and credit cards were bled dry all over the world as people believed they could 'get rich quick' by investing what they had into bitcoin or altcoins.

Some banks closed people's accounts, others stopped people from being able to use their credit cards and others issued sky-high fees. JPMorgan Chase & Co did the latter and are now being sued for it. JPMorgan decided to charge their credit card users up to 30% in interest and additional fees. Brady Tucker, a Chase credit-card customer from Idaho, seeking a class-action suit against Chase claimed the bank began treating his cryptocurrency buys through CoinBase like cash advances instead of purchase.

Even with Cboe powering forward and looking at offering futures on other tokens, they may be up for some serious competition sooner than we thought.

Bloomberg asked Jeffrey Sprecher, CEO of Intercontinental Exchange Inc, the owner of the New York Stock Exchange when cryptocurrency futures contracts will be offered on one of his exchanges he replied:

Nasdaq Inc also says they are looking at whether listing futures on cryptocurrency is the right thing to do. It seems that while the rest of the world sleeps, cryptocurrency is sneaking up, on everyone. Not only is there constant innovation in the space that barely anyone is aware of, big financial institutions are paying WAY more attention to cryptocurrency than they originally let on.

In just over a month we will be receiving the re-master of Dark Souls for the Xbox One, PS4, PC and Switch, fans in the UK and Ireland can already begin pre-orders.

Dark Souls: Remastered will be coming with more features, unfortunately it won't feature cross-play but it will feature 6-player co-op and a smooth 60FPS at 1080p for PS4, Xbox One and PC. The Nintendo Switch will be running the title in 30FPS at 720p, the docked mode will be featuring an up-scaling to 1080p.

Dark Souls: Remastered will be arriving on May 25th for all platforms, if you are interested in other news for the title check out the Dark Souls: Remastered PC and Nintendo Switch comparison here.

Yacht Club Games took to Twitter yesterday to announce that their title Shovel Knight has reached a milestone of 2 million copies sold. Digging into the data that the developer supplied us with on the post it is revealed that 370,000 of those units were on the Nintendo Switch.

From the below pie graph we can see that Shovel Knight sold the most on Windows, then the Nintendo 3DS and finally the Nintendo Switch. Yacht Club Games says "What stands out at first is that Switch has emerged as Shovel Knight's 3rd best selling platform- with only a single year of sales under its belt. We've sold about 370k units on Switch! Windows has our highest unit sales, but keep in mind we also have the most discounts on that platform."

Yacht Club Games continues to give a great breakdown of their sales data, they compile together some dot point facts for those that don't have enough time to read through their entire post. Some of these facts include: Perhaps the best indicator of how our sales are progressing from year to year - our rough Windows units sold each year: 170k (2014)->140k (2015) -> 100k (2016) -> 75k (2017)." As well as "We passed 1 million units sold on Nintendo platforms alone in September 2017!", this also ties into "Outside of Nintendo platforms, our sales dipped by about 30% in 2017."

Blizzard has just released a game-changing update to Warcraft 3, with Patch 1.29 making the game feel more like a game released much more recently, with a bunch of upgrades and new 24-player support.

Warcraft 3 now supports aspect-correct, horizontally expanded widescreen that will provide gamers with an expanded field of view and cleaner UI. There are 12 new player colors and lobby support for 24 players, which is freaking awesome for 24-player FFAs.

You'll need to be playing custom maps to enjoy the madness of 24 players, with everything being expanded in this new patch including maps to support up to 30,000 objects, 2000 neural units, and 4300 player-owned units.

Not to long ago we saw Drake jump onto Fortnite with the highly popular streamer Ninja, yesterday the same thing happened and throughout the stream Drake revealed we could see some Fortnite lingo in his new album.

Drake and Ninja took to the Fortnite stage to cause some chaos, and throughout the stream Tyler "Ninja" Blevins said to Drake "Dude, you gotta put some Fortnite lingo on the album." Drake replys with "It has to happen, it's just gotta be the right way, someone's gonna do it. Someone's gonna pull it off. I say when Epic gives me the emote, when Epic gives me the Hotline Bling emote, I'll do it. Until then, I'm on strike. "

For those that don't know the reference to a 'Hotline Bling emote' is from Drakes immensely popular song 'Hotline Bling.' The song features some quite unique dances moves from the rapper which would definitely be a great addition to the Fortnite emotes. Check out the below videos to see Drake put on some good moves and also Ninja and Drake chat about his upcoming album.

Farmers all around will be pleased to know that they will be able to have a helping hand from a friend online next month, as Stardew Valley will be receiving multiplayer next month.

Eric Barone, Stardew Valley creator has taken to Twitter to announce that there has been "good progress" with implementing the multiplayer mode to the current game. Barone details that him and his team are "fixing bugs" and if everything goes well the multiplayer should debut "in about a month."

For those farmers out there that are worried that the multiplayer will cost money, fear not as the update will be arriving on all platforms completely free. Sickhead Games will be rolling out the update in a certain order, starting with the PC version of the title first, then the Nintendo Switch and finally Xbox and PS4.

Not to long ago we saw a developer diary for OVERKILL's The Walking Dead, now a new trailer has been released by Starbreeze Studios showcasing an awesome cinematic trailer for Maya.

OVERKILL's The Walking Dead will feature 4 playable characters, in this trailer we can see that we are getting an introduction to Maya, the doctor. The trailer was released through Microsoft's Inside Xbox series episode, I have linked the whole episode below if you are interested in viewing what else was presented.

Robert Kirkman, the creator of The Walking Dead has seen the project that OVERKILL is working on and has said that this is the "co-op action game fans have been waiting for." Maya will be the healer in-game and as the weeks progress we will no doubt have some more cinematic trailers released from OVERKILL detailing the other characters.

We have all experienced those pesky 'warranty void if removed' stickers on our devices, but it looks like those stickers don't really matter... with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) saying they're worthless.

Motherboard reports from an FTC press release, that the Commission has sent letters to six companies that said that their stickers are in violation of a long standing law. The press release said: "The letters warn that FTC staff has concerns about the companies' statements that consumers must use specified parts or service providers to keep their warranties intact".

It continued: "Unless warrantors provide the parts or services for free or receive a waiver from the FTC, such statements generally are prohibited by the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, a law that governs consumer product warranties. Similarly, such statements may be deceptive under the FTC Act".

Quantic Dream is one of my favorite game developers, as they try to push the boundaries of what the cinematic gaming experience should be, and bit by bit they've been unveiling their next game... Detroit: Become Human.

IGN has one of their IGN First videos that is between Quantic Dream, talking about Detroit and its push into being in a world of its own when it comes to cinematic gaming experiences. There are near unlimited choices in the game, with Detroit moving past the usual "left path or right path" that traditional games give you.

Quantic Dream boss and Heavy Rain and Detroit mastermind David Cage explains: "Depending on how you play, there are entire scenes you can see or miss. There are characters that can be with you for just one scene or until the very end of the game. In Detroit, all the three player characters can die at different points in the story, so you really have to be careful and think about your choices, and really care for them, because you might lose them. It's always surprising to see the permutations [when people play Detroit] - how did you get this? How did you do that? It's a real nightmare for the QA teams to be honest with you".

It was only yesterday I wrote news about Dell promoting cheats and hacks for Battlegrounds, but now there's new ransomware that holds your files hostage until... you play Battlegrounds. Yeah, you read that right.

A team of people on Twitter that call themselves the MalwareHunterTeam posted about the new ransomware, saying that instead of forcing you to pay to unlock your now-locked data, the new "PUBG Ransomware" wants you to play Battlegrounds for an hour, then your data is unlocked.

You could also do something else ot get your files back, where after the ransomware is finished encrypting all of your files with the .PUBG extension, all you need is the restore code. This is provided in the window of the program itself, where you need to simply type in "s2acxx56a2sae5fjh5k2gb5s2e", click Restore, and you're back to normal... without having to play PUBG.

AMD is losing key staff left, right and center, but one of the best guys in the industry is now gone from Team Red: Chris Hook. Hook joins major talent like Raja Koduri that have abandoned the what seems to be sinking ship that is Radeon.

Hook took to his Facebook page to announce the news, but had briefed some of the press before hand. I have been in contact with Chris for years now, he is a good friend of mine and it is sad to see him depart AMD, but I believe he will be landing on his feet very soon with some exciting news to share.

On his FB post, Hook said: