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Capcom's bet on Monster Hunter World is paying off big time: the Japanese publisher just broke a major shipment milestone with the online game, sending a clear signal that service games, when done right, can absolutely rocket a game dev to new heights.

Back when Monster Hunter World was announced I knew right away this game would be the most important and difficult game the company had made in recent memory. An online-based Monster Hunter across mainstream consoles is pretty much everyone's dream, especially since the series had pretty much been secured on Nintendo platforms for a while. I was actually worried that Capcom wasn't ready for such a big investment, and the weight of an online world with millions of players would prove too much to bear, but the publisher understood its task and didn't just meet the requirements: they might've redefined what a service game could, and should, be.

As one of Capcom's most lucrative properties, it shouldn't be a big surprise Monster Hunter World sold extremely well. But what is surprising is how fast it achieved this feat: Capcom confirms that Monster Hunter World has now shipped (or sold-in) 6 million copies worldwide, making it the fastest-shipping game in the company's entire storied history.

Nintendo recently delayed its Switch Online subscription multiplayer service once again, this time to September 2018, but the Japanese games-maker is confident it'll be worth the wait.

Last we heard about the Switch Online service was yet another delay, and no actual new information on what's included. So far we know that it includes online play in a number of Switch games, voice chat through a weird smartphone app, lobbies to join up with friends, and a selection of retro NES games infused with online multiplayer--all for $20 a year. Now the value proposition kind of speaks for itself, despite gamers being disgruntled they actually have to pay for online play in Nintendo games, but it appears Nintendo is trying to find new ways to ensure gamers get more bang for their buck.

In a recent Q&A session following an earnings report, Nintendo executives affirmed that the company is mulling over tons of possibilities for Switch Online, and that they're committed to the service for the long haul. In fact they say it'll be "worth the wait," hinting that we might be getting a stronger Virtual Console presence that's been entirely absent from the Switch since it's launch.

The Final Fantasy XV Pocket Edition was scheduled for release tomorrow but it appears that Square Enix has released the Pocket Edition early, it is available now.

The Pocket Edition has gone live on the App Store for iOS owners, and the Google Play store for Android users, the game has been broken up into chapters which can be purchased individually. Potential users should note that the first chapter of the story is completely free.

Hajime Tabata, Final Fantasy XV director spoke to IGN about the Pocket Edition coming to PC and he replied with "there is certainly a chance."

As the release of Far Cry 5 is just around the corner, the game has had a new gameplay video released by IGN, the video gives examples of how players can diversify their gameplay experience with Guns for Hire.

The 5 minute video by IGN shows how players can approach the game in a number of ways, a sniper method with Grace, sneaking in with Boomer the dog or be that guy who is a guns blazing maniac with the aerial bomber Nick.

What we see in the video is quite interesting as while enjoying the gameplay and the different the variety of approaches that can be done, it appears players can defeat an entire enemy cult camp without even firing a single shot. The video shows that correct placement of Grace the sniper allows for her to take out every enemy without even endangering the player, this could very well just be early game or could require an update before launch.

It has been announced that the upcoming God of War will feature a collaboration with developers Sony Interactive Entertainment, Santa Monica Studio and Loot Crate to bring a limited edition God of War Loot Crate.

Loot Crate will be doing what they do best and that is to fill the crate with a combination of different licensed goods, this would include apparel, accessories, replicas of in-game items and more.

All of which that will be featured in the loot crate will be worth over $90, for gamers it will cost $49.99, plus shipping if they happen to live within the US. For gamers outside the US, Loot Crate only ship to the following countries: Chile, Mexico, Japan, Canada, Colombia, Singapore, Argentina, and South Korea and will also increase the cost to $74.99.

Sony has taken to an NBA court to promote the upcoming God of War game. During a break over the course of the game Sony projected a God of War video onto the surface of the court.

The above video is recording of the trailer unfolding, unfortunately the video is recorded in quite low quality but what should be taken from it is that the video was displayed on the entirety of the court, which provides quite a big screen for the audience.

God of War will feature a Stone Mason edition and has a confirmed release date for April 20th. There is also a small old-school text adventure game called that can be played through Facebook Messenger that can unlock some very cool high-quality art pieces.

Microsoft has been rumored to be working on a Surface Phone for a while now, but the latest rumor should get most people excited no matter if you're using an iPhone or an Android smartphone.

The latest rumors tease that Surface Phone could have the ability to run desktop-grade apps natively, which would see Microsoft turn their Surface Phone into the ultimate power device. The entire enterprise and business industry would flip to Surface Phone in an instant, like most of them have away from the iPad and into the arms of Surface.

Running desktop Windows 10 apps natively on your smartphone would open up the worlds of truly portable gaming, but there will always be limitations on mobile, at least at first. Microsoft is reportedly working on two application layers for the Surface Phone, called RAIL and VAIL. RAIL is Remote Application Interface Layer, while VAIL is the Virtualized Application Interface Layer.

It was only a few hours ago when I reported that the UK government has been hit with cryptocurrency mining malware, but now a bunch of Australian government websites have been compromised.

Down Under, the cryptojacking affected the "the Victorian parliament, the Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal, the Queensland ombudsman, the Queensland Community Legal Centre homepage, and the Queensland legislation website, which lists all of the state's acts and bills", reports The Guardian.

Hackers used the same browser plug-in that the UK government was exposed with, Browsealoud, with the developers of the extension, Texthelp, confirming hackers infused crypto mining software Coinhive into their extension.

The cryptocurrency mining malware problem is extending into parts of the world that no one expected, with the UK government now directly affected with "thousands of websites" including sites belonging to NHS (National Health Services).

Over the weekend, the website of the Information Commissioner's office that is the UK's data protection watchdog, was taken offline in order to deal with crypto mining malware. The malware was inserted through websites codes to BrowseAloud, which is a plugin that helps the blind and partially-sighted people to use the internet.

CoinHive is back again as the culprit, where the malware is inserted through the compromised BrowseAloud plugin and then mines Monero on users' PCs. Scott Helme, an IT security consultant said he received a message from a friend who said their anti-virus had detected an issue after they had visited a UK government site.

The last we heard about the PlayStation 5 was my world exclusive that the PS5 will feature a discrete GPU, and not an underpowered APU that powers not just the PS4 and PS4 Pro, but even the Xbox One, Xbox One S, and the new Xbox One X consoles.

But the latest on the PS5 is that we have a developer saying that the PS5 and PSVR shouldn't be bundled together, but they should be "considered essential together", instead. During an interview with the Official PlayStation Magazine UK (March 2018, issue 146) Harold Vancol, the Creative Director at Grab Games, said:

Grab Games has some experience with the PS4 and PSVR, with the team working on the John Wick Chronicles, Knockout League, and others. He said that we are getting close to a "sweet spot" with the first-gen VR headsets.

I still remember my cousin being the biggest Star Wars fan I know, and back in the 90s when we were playing games over LAN at my house, he introduced us all to Star Wars: Dark Forces at a time when Quake and Half-Life were filling our first-person shooter fantasies.

Dark Forces was one of the best Star Wars games of its time, and has now been teased under Epic Games' beautiful Unreal Engine 4 a senior environment artist at developer Obsidian Entertainment. The remake only takes a look at the first level of the original Dark Forces game, but with its new graphics, Dark Forces has never looked better. Just check it out.

There are some side-by-side screenshots here, with developer Jason Lewis teasing he has no ETA on whether the level will be released in playable form.

Update: Thanks to your comments, I went and looked at what Gabe Newell had to say about the matter, with Newell saying "Not that I'm aware of".

It's Sunday night here in South Australia and I've decided to get some work done (I seriously never stop) and then I saw an article that I have no idea how I didn't see days ago, with Business Insider writing a piece titled Xbox is in trouble -- and Microsoft is considering a major acquisition to fix it.

Microsoft buying EA is too much as EA has its tenticles across the entire gaming market, PUBG Corp is too obvious and way too late, but acquiring Valve makes sense. Microsoft is a stones throw away from Valve in Washington, and Valve have the tightest grip on the PC gaming world out of all companies involved through Steam. Not only do they have the largest digital distribution system for PC gamers in the world, but they have some of the biggest IP in gaming history.

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds quickly became the most popular PC game of all time through 2017, but now PUBG Corp has its massive Battle Royale game unleashed onto mobile.

Tencent won the exclusive rights to run with PUBG in China, where they are localizing the game for the country to ensure that Battlegrounds on mobile aligns "with socialist core values". There are actually two "PUBG mobile games" made by Tencent, with the first being PUBG: Army Attack, a new game that was developed by Tencent's Timi Studio.

The more traditional PUBG game is called PUBG: Exhilarating Battlefield, with this game being developed by Lightspeed & Quantum Studio. Both of the new PUBG games have a combined 75 million pre-registrations, blowing Western gamers out of the water in sheer numbers.

Jason Colon was at the gym on February 8 when he noticed that smoke was whispering out of his Apple AirPods, where he took them out of ears after which there were signs of "flame damage."

The left AirPod had no damage, but the other one was cooked, with Colon saying "I don't know what would've happened to my ear. But I'm sure that since it hangs down, it could've been [my] ear lobe, you know, my ear lobe could've been burnt". He added that there were also signs of "flame damage."

Apple Insider reports that the burn residue inside of the damaged AirPods looks similar to what would be caused by an overheating battery, so the battery inside of Colon's AirPods could've been damaged and hurt other parts inside of the earpod. Apple has said that teh company is looking into the matter, and that they are going to get in contact with Colon.

NVIDIA is preparing a new GTX 20 series of graphics cards that should debut with the purported GeForce GTX 2080 in April under the new Ampere GPU family, a refresh of the industry-leading Pascal GPU family released in 2016.

This reveal would see the new GeForce GTX 2080 revealed, which would have to pack more performance than the GTX 1080 from nearly two years ago. But how much faster can it be before it beats the GTX 1080 Ti? What if the new GTX 2080 could beat the GTX 1080 Ti at a price point of $599 but it is not capable of cryptocurrency mining?

NVIDIA will be shooting themselves in the foot with a refreshed GA104-based GeForce GTX 2080 that even comes close to the performance of the GTX 1080 Ti, because at that point gamers won't want to buy a graphics card from March 2017 when the new GTX 20 series is here. So NVIDIA has to find a way to make its GTX 1080 Ti relevant in a market where the GTX 2080 is out, and that could be from a GPU-level ban of crypto mining on the GTX 20 series cards.

The latest rumor for NVIDIA's refreshed GeForce GTX 20 series is that the company will be unveiling the new Ampere-based series in April, close to two years after the reveal of the GeForce GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 in Austin, Texas.

The new rumors are coming from readers that were posting on German site 3DCenter, teasing that TSMC has stopped production of GP102, the GPU that powers the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. This would mean that current-gen GTX 1080 Ti and TITAN X graphics cards would stop, or at least heavily slow down throughout the rest of 2018 for the unraveling of the GTX 20 series from NVIDIA.

I've been talking about the GeForce GTX 2080 since October 2016... if you can believe it... and it seems we should expect big things from the GTX 20 series. Now that GDDR6 is ready, we'll see NVIDIA use the super-fast new VRAM technology on a smaller bus than the GTX 1080 Ti (and soon GTX 2080 Ti).

Forget traditional bank robberies, that's like the wild west... especially now that we have cryptocurrency exchanges that can be hacked and a huge $170 million can be stolen at today's lowered values.

This is what has happened to Italian cryptocurrency exchange BitGrail, with the company announcing on its website that it has lost $170 million to fraudulent transactions, and that they've approached authorities over the matter. BitGrail has since suspended all withdrawals and deposits "in order to conduct further verifications".

BitGrail has said that it won't be refunding 100% of what users' lost, with BitGrail founder Francesco "The Bomber" Firano saying that there's no 100% way to refund users. Firano took to Twitter, where he tweeted: "Unfortunately there is no way to give it back to you at 100% (we only got 4 MLN XRN right now)".

VLC is one of the most-loved open-source pieces of software that transcends space and time, and has been the most anti-bloat, anti-BS super-lightweight software in Windows' history. Well, the new v3.0 "Vetinari" update has some massive changes in store.

We're looking at HDR10 support, and hardware-accelerated 4K/8K video on everything from smartphones, to PCs. VLC 3.0 works with Blu-ray's Java-based menus, and is even optimized for the notch on the new iPhone X. There's also Chromecast support for all devices and even in formats "not supported natively", while audio passthrough for HD audio codecs is featured in VLC 3.0 as well.

VLC 3.0 even supports 360-degree video and 3D Audio, while the new Vetinari update provides hardware decoding by default in order to hit that 4K and 8K playback, while 10-bit color and HDR are welcomed.

Fortnite has reached a huge milestone of over 3.4 million players, but with teh free-to-play lure of it, it's no surprise that Epic Games' latest shooter is so successful. But console gamers get the short stick with low FPS (in 90% of games anyway) but now Epic are preparing a new update that will provide a silky smooth 60FPS.

Epic has addressed this in their latest post regarding Fortnite, where the developer explained: "We were not able to stay ahead of our continued growth and multiple of our backend services have been struggling under load the last several weeks. And we also shipped v2.3.0 with significant bugs. We don't consider either acceptable". Epic continued, saying that they've "changed [its] release plans [and] processes to help improve quality of client builds".

As for the 60FPS world coming to Fortnite on consoles, Epic said that the optional 60FPS mode will be available for both the PS4 and PS4 Pro, as well as the Xbox One and Xbox One X consoles. Epic explains: "This 60 FPS mode is tuned for each console to maximize frame rate while minimizing loss of visual quality", note that the developer said "minimizing" the loss of visual quality, meaning the graphics settings are even lower than normal, but allow for the leap to 60FPS.

The entire 'can it mine' joke has surpassed the 'can it run Crysis' thing from what feels like 50 years ago now, but then the news broke that scientists working at a Russian nuclear weapons research facility have been arrested, because they were mining cryptocurrency at the site.

Interfax and the BBC are both reporting that scientists that haven't been named have been arrested, and handed to the Federal Security Service (FSB) after it was discovered they were mining crypto. There has been a representative from the Scientific Research Institute for Experimental Physics who has said: "There has been an unsanctioned attempt to use computer facilities for private purposes including so-called mining".

Some of these scientists were using the supercomputer at the nuclear facility to mine cryptocurrency, with the security department at the site receiving an alert that the scientists had connected the machine to the internet, which nuclear-related machines are usually not connected to the internet. But you need to be in order to mine, which is how these people were busted.