Latest News - Page 2122

Haven't gotten your hands-on a NES or SNES mini? Nintendo might have some good news for you (and scalpers too, unfortunately).

Following a short stint to gauge demand--which ultimately backfired on consumers the likes of which we haven't seen since the 1980s--Nintendo originally cancelled production of its ultra-rare NES Classic Edition. Then a year later it announced the SNES Classic Edition, which followed in its near-extinct predecessor's footsteps. But there's good news: the House of Mario isn't giving up just yet.

Nintendo President Tatsumi Kimishima has confirmed that the company will continue producing and selling both the NES and SNES Classic Editions throughout 2018. What was once a seasonal product will carry over throughout the entire year...but there's no word on stock or availability.

AMD released their updated GPU roadmap not too long ago, and for the last month or so I've been thinking long and hard about it, as well as talking to sources of mine within the industry to find out WTF is going on over at AMD in regards to their Radeon products.

Back in October I exclusively reported that AMD would be launching Navi during SIGGRAPH 2018, in July/August this year. At the time everyone else called me crazy and that it wasn't going to launch that early, but now I've got other sources that are backing up my claims and saying that I was right. The first Navi reveal will be a professional card and not a consumer-focused Radeon RX Navi at all, that card will launch in 2019.

Then a story on WCCFTech popped up which said that "Navi will be the last GCN-based architecture" and that it will be "succeeded by brand new micro-architecture in 2020/2021 timeframe, execution of GCN successor being led by new RTG leadership". This is interesting, so I reached out to some sources to clarify a few things.

The Nintendo Switch continues its strong upward trajectory, and the Japanese games-maker plans to continue its fledgling DLC plan to extend the life of games and incentivize purchases.

Selling consoles and games is extremely important to companies like Nintendo. But what about those who already own both the console and the game? It's also important to keep existing players engaged in such a way that not only extends the experience over time, which organically bleeds over into other facets of the business--ie the more a person plays a game, the more likely they are to take it on the go, play it with a friend or stranger, and inadvertently advertise the system. One other thing, though: it's also important people pay to extend their games further.

Nintendo's DLC strategy is somewhat new insofar as major season passes, but this model isn't going anywhere any time soon. According to Nintendo President Tatsumi Kimishima, the company will double down on downloadable content for key games.

Nintendo's latest handheld-console hybrid keeps breaking records, and the games-maker highlights these impressive feats with a few visual aids.

In its latest earnings filings Nintendo predictably announced some big trends for the Switch, namely in hardware sales, software attach rates, and that the console has out-stripped the Wii in its first ten months of sales. "Nintendo Switch is establishing itself at a record pace, with the first 10 months of sales in North America exceeding even those for Wii, which had been our previous fastest-selling home console," Nintendo President Tatsumi Kimishima said in the earnings report.

But it's not enough just to say it: sometimes seeing is believing. Despite having supply issues at the chip level, the Switch has managed to closely follow the Wii's initial sales momentum throughout North America, and even rose above the Wii.

Sony delivers another strong holiday quarter thanks in no small part to the PlayStation brand.

Sony Corp's Games and Network Services segment, which includes games and movies sold on the PlayStation Network, PS4 hardware and physical software, as well as subscription services, has pushed the company's quarterly earnings once again. As far as Fiscal Q3'17 numbers the G&NS segment raked in 718 billion yen ($6.35 billion) in sales, up 100 billion yen and 16.3% year-over-year. Operating income sits at 85 billion yen ($752.21 billion), up 35 billion yen and 70% year-over-year.

But what's most impressive is that Sony's Network segment (digital game sales, subscriptions, streaming, etc) broke 300 billion yen in a single quarter for the first time ever.

Hot off the heels of Call of Duty WWII's monumental success, Activision is keen on keeping the staggering earnings going with a new entry in the series' most popular sequels: Black Ops.

Earlier we reported on a rumor from industry insider Marcus Sellars who said that Black Ops 4 is not only happening, but will be this year's annual Call of Duty game. Now sources close to the matter have confirmed to Eurogamer that Black Ops 4 is indeed 2018's CoD title, and that Treyarch will develop the shooter. This underlines the veracity of the original claims.

No exact details were given on the new Black Ops game, but it's worth mentioning that Eurogamer has been spot-on with source reports such as these, whether with last year's Call of Duty WWII or the Nintendo Switch's specs and feature set. Given the tremendous sales momentum of CoD: WWII due to the game's triumphant return to boots on the ground action, it's very likely that Activision will push Treyarch away from sci-fi and more towards visceral, old-school Call of Duty action.

Synology have launched the RackStation RS2818RP+, a 16-bay NAS that is able to provide up to 192TB of capacity that can be expanded to 336TB with a RX1217(RP). Basically, the RS2818RP+ is designed for large storage applications for expanding businesses that want to future-proof their technology.

"One of the common challenges for modern small and medium-sized businesses is finding a storage solution that can store large amounts of data while having the flexibility to scale when business grows," said Jason Fan, Product Manager at Synology Inc. "RS2818RP+ offers large storage capacity with affordable TCO. It is ideal to serve as a centralized backup target, a file server or a hub-and-spoke backup target for distributed businesses."

Synology's RS2818RP+ is the first 3U RackStation NAS to appear in the Plus Series range and features an Intel Atom C3538 quad-core CPU with 4GB DDR4 non-ECC UDIMM RAM, which can also be expanded up to 64GB with four 16GB ECC UDIMMs for heavy applications. The RS2818RP+ also is equipped with four 1GbE ports Ethernet LAN ports with the option to upgrade to four 10GbE NICs, providing an impressive 1,400 MBps sequential read throughput and 26,000 random write IOPS.

Qualcomm is close to the full push of its next-gen 5G mobile connectivity, and the launch of their next-gen Snapdragon 845 processor, a new SoC the company detailed during their Snapdragon Technology Summit in Hawaii in December.

PCMag is now pondering what Qualcomm's successor to the Snapdragon 845 will be, with a purported Snapdragon 850 "probably coming this year, not next year, and that it'll probably appear first in Qualcomm's Windows always-connected PCs". PCMag's Sascha Segan is making a "bold guess" that the '50' in Snapdragon 850 will be something to do with Qualcomm's super-fast X50 modem, the first consumer 5G modem in the world.

Qualcomm recently teamed with Sprint to prepare US smartphone customers for 5G in the first half of 2019, which means we'll need to see X50-powered smartphones in the second half of 2018 or very early 2019 at the latest. Qualcomm is utterly leading the 5G race here, and I don't see this slowing down into the new year.

Samsung hasn't even confirmed their new Galaxy S9 smartphone and the rumors on the next-gen Galaxy S10 are already appearing, with something that should really steal the show: 5G connectivity.

Inside, we should expect Samsung's new-new-flagship will rock a high-performance SoC with a built-in Neural Processing Unit, or NPU. Samsung will also reportedly use LPDDR5, 5G connectivity, UFS 3.0 storage, 3D + AI tech, and over 93% of the front of the Galaxy S10 will be display goodness.

Samsung would also use a next generation OLED display, something that should ensure the Galaxy S10 has the best smartphone display, ever. We should expect to hear and see more on the Galaxy S10 later this year, with a launch in Q1 2019 at this rate.

Red Dead Redemption 2 could be one of the biggest games of all time, and now the latest rumor on RDR2 teases what could be an amazing feature: first-person view mode.

Not only would a first-person perspective be on offer, but Rockstar Games would be throwing in a big change to the multiplayer of RDR2 offering a Battle Royale mode. The rumors are coming directly from Trusted Reviews who received some "development documents" that tease that the Battle Royale game mode would be joined by 'Revive and Survive' and 'Money Grab' modes.

Red Dead Redemption 2 is said to drive the immersion factor much higher, with Trusted Reviews saying that "NPCs will decorate storefronts with amenities and pack things away once night comes". They continued that the towns in RDR2 are "populated with various NPCs including general store owners, gunsmiths and undertakers. You can also partake in gambling if you're hoping to risk it all for financial gain".

Shadow of Colossus will release tomorrow, we recently saw the trailer but now in celebration Sony has announced that there will be a livestream showcasing some of the gameplay.

In about 30 minutes or so Sony will be taking Shadow of Colossus live, showing off some gameplay of the new game and also a discussion reflecting on the first title.

The Shadow of Colossus livestream can be found here and while also what Sony said on Twitter "We're only a few hours away from the launch of Shadow of the Colossus on PS4! Watch live starting at 7 PM PT/10 PM ET for gameplay, reflections on the original, and much more"

It's not just the cryptocurrency market that is suffering with a huge $500 billion wiped away from the cryptocurrency market cap, but it's the entire stock market, including the largest technology companies in the world losing billions in the last few days.

We're talking about industry giants like NVIDIA, AMD, Qualcomm, Google, Intel, Samsung, Netflix, Amazon, Apple, and everyone in between.

Google is down to $1062, after skimming close to $1200 per share last week.

Starbreeze Studios has posted on their blog, announcing that they have picked up the new Soren Johnson strategy game title 10 Crowns.

Johnson is best known for his work on the classic turn-based strategy title Civilization 3 and Civilization 4 which was developed by Firaxis Studios.

On Starbreeze's blog post they describe 10 Crowns to be "an epic-scale turn-based strategy game that lets players create the greatest dynasty in world history." The upcoming title has also had its development described by Johnson, saying that his team are "going back to our game development roots to make a classic historical 4X strategy game with some important and radical innovations to the genre."

Nintendo's Deputy General Manager of Nintendo EPD, Yoshiaki Koizumi, has taken to the Nintendo YouTube channel to answer some fan questions regarding Super Mario Odyssey.

Koizumi began by addressing the confusion surrounding if Toad is wearing a hat or if what is on his head is just his head, "So that, as it turns out, is actually Toad's head I'm going to have to leave it to all of you to figure out exactly how that works out. Maybe there's something inside..." answered Koizumi.

While Super Mario Odyssey was arguably an incredible game, fans were still confused at why Mario seemed to have nipples but didn't feature a belly button of any sort, Koizumi slightly touches on the subject, "I didn't really expect that to be a topic among fans. Once I heard that people were talking so much about Mario's belly button, it made me start to think about whether we should revisit the topic on the design side."

Activision's Crash Bandicoot N.Sane Trilogy is a remastered collection of the original Crash Bandicoot games, but now news has surfaced from a European supplier of licensed merchandise that the remastered Crash Bandicoot game is coming to the Nintendo Switch and PC.

According to the License Source Book Europe, a supplier of licensed merchandise named GB eye discussed the success of the N.Sane trilogy and explained that it triggered a long-term plan for the Crash Bandicoot games.

"The new game [the N. Sane trilogy] was a huge success at retail..." said Max Arguile, licensing manager of GB Eye. "Next year it will be going broader (Switch and PC) and there will be a new game in 2019. Activision have a five-year plan for this and GB eye is delighted to be fully on board for all products." said Max Arguile, licensing manager of GB eye.

One of Twitch's most popular streamers took a 7-week gap between streams and now those streamers are back in full force, with Dr. Disrespect returning to Twitch and PUBG and crashing Twitch in the process.

Dr. Disrespect went to launch his stream at 11AM PST, but the huge wave of Twitch viewers wanting to jump onto his stream smashed Twitch's servers. The Doc tweeted that he broke Twitch, where he most likely had anywhere between 100,000 and 300,000 people jumping onto his stream... all at once.

This situation is similar to League of Legends player Tyler1 who returned earlier this year and crashed Twitch, where he broke Twitch's concurrent viewer record with more than 400,000 people watching at once.

There are new rumors circling of the next Call of Duty game being a sequel to Black Ops 3, with COD: Black Ops 4 being teased to launch not only on the Xbox, PlayStation and PC but the Nintendo Switch as well.

KitGuru reports that industry insider and editor Marcus Sellars, says that the 2018 release of Call of Duty will be Black Ops 4. COD: Black Ops 4 will reportedly be set in modern times, with boots-on-the-ground gameplay - meaning wall running and jet packs are out of the picture.

Activision appears to be keen to get Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 onto the incredibly successful Nintendo Switch, where the Switch version of Black Ops 4 to reportedly pack new DLC map packs, HD Rumble, and support for the Joy-Con motion controls.

SK Hynix has just taken the wraps off of its new enterprise SSD, packing their in-house 72-layer 64GB 3D NAND flash, and arriving at up to 4TB capacities.

This isn't the first enterprise SSD from SK Hynix using their in-house NAND flash, as the consumer side of the market were first. SK Hynix is releasing the new enterprise SSDs in both 2.5-inch SATA and so-far unspecified NVMe form, but we should expect M.2 as usual.

As for the performance of these new SSDs, we can expect the 1TB SATA SSD to pack sequential reads of up to 560MB/sec while writes will hit 515MB/sec or so, with random reads of up to 98K IOPs, and random writes of up to 32K IOPs.

NVIDIA is partnering with German automotive components maker Continental, where together the two companies will produce a full-scale self-driving car platform.

NVIDIA's own Xavier chips will be used on the hardware side, with the company using their operating system and software from their DRIVE suite, while Continental takes care of its security certification experience with its LiDar radar technology, as well as their camera products.

Continental and NVIDIA are aioming for their self-driving car platform to hit level 2 autonomy, which will include smart cruise control similar to Tesla's Autopilot technology, right through to level 5 which would be a full self-driving car without steering implements. Wow.

Samsung is gearing up for the massive reveal of its next-gen Galaxy S9 flagship smartphone, where we should see a slightly tweaked design with a huge upgrade to the camera.

The latest peek at the Galaxy S9 is courtesy of notorious leaker Evan Blass (@evleaks on Twitter) where he teased some new renders of both the Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9+ and what we should expect from Samsung's new flagship.

Samsung will continue the overall styling of the Galaxy S8 with the new Galaxy S9, where we can see what will be a beautiful edge-to-edge Super AMOLED display. The slightly larger Galaxy S9+ will rock a new vertical dual camera on the back, which I really like the look of.