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Sledgehammer Games' new World War II-based Call of Duty is selling gangbusters and Activision is quite happy.

Today Activision confirmed that Call of Duty: WWII has generated over $500 million in sales earnings through its first three days of availability, "toppling popular theatrical box office openings for Thor: Ragnarok and Wonder Woman combined," the company touts. The game also made a new record for day-one sales on PlayStation 4, which is the world's biggest console install base with over 67 million units shipped.

The shooter also sold twice as many copies as last year's Infinite Warfare at release and has set the all-time record for digital full game download sales on day one. Apart from digital sales, the announcement shows another big success for the publisher: engagement. Call of Duty: WWII's new Headquarters social hub, which allows gamers to interact and even watch others open lootboxes, and the new Nazi Zombies multiplayer mode are paying off quite well: these modes pulled in more connected users on consoles and PC than any other Call of Duty game.

Lian Li have announced an all-new series of PC cases, the Alpha series. Lian Li are famous for their traditional, high-quality PC case designs, the Alpha series introduces Lian Li to the mainstream market by combining Lian Li's unique design elements with a traditional mono-space PC case. This is achieved with 4mm thick tempered glass panels all-round, excellent water-cooling potential and three 120mm RGB fans with an RGB strip on the front panel to really enhance the Alpha's appearance.

The Alpha 330 and 550 both feature tempered glass panels on the top, bottom and each side, with one slight exception- The Alpha 330's tempered glass panels is flush with the top of the case, while the Alpha 550 features a metal strip border. The 550 can also house a larger radiator, other than that both models are identical with 1mm SECC steel frame, magnetic dust filters, PSU shroud, ability to vertically mount GPU's, 8 PCI expansion slots, multiple chamber design, three 120mm RGB fans and a 120mm rear mounted fan (rear fan isn't RGB). Water cooling is no problem for either the Alpha 330 or 550, with both supporting up to 420mm radiator at the front of the chassis.

Lian Li offer both models in Black or white, with the Alpha 330 priced at $109 and the 550 at $179.

SteelSeries have added the Arctis 3 Bluetooth gaming headset to their award-winning Arctis line-up, the addition of Bluetooth allows users to hear audio from both a Bluetooth source and wired connection source at the same time. This means gamers can get the performance and quality from a wired connection, while simultaneously using Bluetooth to connect to Discord, VoIP or simply stream music while playing their favorite games. Together with Arctis 3's remarkable sound, comfort, style and compatibility, the Arctis 3 Bluetooth is the perfect choice for online gaming.

"We've noticed gamers hacking away at blending console game audio and Discord voice for quite some time," says Eros Resmini, CMO of Discord. "SteelSeries makes that whole process easy with this product and let's more gamers use Discord with their friends."

The SteelSeries Arctis 3 Bluetooth gaming headset is compatible with PC, Mac, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, VR and mobile. In fact, the Arctis 3 Bluetooth is perfect for Nintendo Switch by allowing users to pair their phones with the Nintendo Switch Online chat mobile app and still enjoy their game via the wired connection. This is the first headset with this type of compatibility for the Nintendo Switch.

Capcom was aiming for 4 million sales of Resident Evil 7 earlier this year, and has now officially reached that point.

The company wanted to reach the target much earlier, with 4 million units shipped, but Capcom has announced close to 4.1 million sales of Resident Evil 7 so far. If we compare the sales of Resident Evil 7 against the sale of Resident Evil 6, Capcom was "disappointed" with the 4.8 million units it sold.

Capcom expected to sell 4 million copies of RE7 at launch, but it took 12 months to make it there instead. It doesn't mean RE7 was a flop at all, but it rode a successful marketing campaign and enjoyed its own spikes in popularity. I played it for a few hours, but didn't finish it, and enjoyed the time I spent in it. Capcom really changed the world of Resident Evil games, so I'm excited for RE8 if it's in development.

It wasn't even a couple of hours ago that news broke that Raja Koduri, the boss of Radeon Technologies Group, left AMD. Now rumors are starting with "sources closed to the related companies" telling WCCFTech that Koduri would be joining Intel.

Raja leaving AMD and joining Intel will surely be interesting, with AMD CEO Lisa Su currently in talks with analysts to try and minimize the impact of Raja's departure to AMD. Raja's future at Intel could truly be bright, since Intel just yesterday announced a collaboration with AMD using their semi-custom division to build a new chip that would use Raja's work from Vega, into Intel's new Kaby Lake-G products.

This new Intel/AMD team up was birthed from Raja's vision, and a day after it was announced he's out of the company. I reached out to industry sources to confirm the news earlier today, and then asked about Intel, to which they said nothing is concrete yet. They did confirm that Raja would fit perfectly at Intel, either working in their new Intel/AMD products, or working on a new discrete GPU for Intel, with Intel's near unlimited pockets.

Based on the release of ARMs, a new multiplayer IP, and Splatoon 2, Nintendo has indeed been interested framing the Switch around eSports. That trend will continue as the console's momentum rolls across the industry, Nintendo says. But it's missing one critical component: proper online engagement.

In the company's recent financial Q&A session Nintendo President Tatsumi Kimishima gave an optimistic view on eSports. The seeds of eSports competitions were planted all the way back in the Switch's reveal trailer, and we've seen those seeds slowly blossom with first-party games like ARMs and Splatoon 2, as well as third-party titles like Rocket League.

Mr. Kimishima affirms that eSports have directly influenced how Nintendo makes its games. With the paid Switch Online subscription service on the way, the company faces a near-Herculean trial of fortitude by having to not only make a competent online framework that's consistently stable, but also tie in key social elements and engage players with features such as game streaming, spectating, and a natural rewards program to keep players in the ecosystem.

NVIDIA first unveiled its mysterious TITAN Xp Collector's Edition just a few days ago, but in the meantime we've seen RTG boss Raja Koduri depart the company in full, and now NVIDIA has hit again with a full unveiling of the best looking graphics cards the company has ever made.

The new TITAN Xp Collector's Edition cards will be sold in two Star Wars themed variants: Jedi Order and Galactic Empire editions. They will be available exclusively on the NVIDIA store, with pre-orders opening up tomorrow. The price is $1200, just like the current non-Star Wars themed TITAN Xp graphics card.

This means we have the GP102 GPU with 3840 CUDA cores, 12GB of GDDR5X overclocked to 11.4Gbps.

Based on key data, a few months ago I predicted that Nintendo would have an ample supply of Switch consoles for the holiday season. Now company president Tatsumi Kimishima confirms that supply production has been dramatically amped in an effort to meet the massive holiday demand.

The holiday season is a crucial period for the video games industry, and is typically when most big publishers like EA and Activision make the lion's share of their annual earnings. Nintendo is no different. Following months of scarcity, Nintendo now plans to ship 10 million Switch consoles from October through March 2018 at a rate of about 1.6 million units per month. All of this is an effort to meet that critical point between supply and demand--especially for the holiday season.

"The Nintendo Switch system itself is made from a huge number of components, and weʼve made urgent requests to many of our contract manufacturer to ramp up production, with some of them even installing additional production lines. We released yesterdayʼs upwardly revised full-year hardware shipment target of 14 million units because we now project that we are capable of shipping that many units," Nintendo President Tatsumi Kimishima said in a recent Q&A session with investors.

For the first time ever Ubisoft has earned more from Player Recurring Investment (PRI) than from digital game sales, cementing the company's trajectory towards live service games.

Ubisoft is one of the most fascinating games publishers in the market space; not only has the company dramatically shifted towards a digital-first monetization path that's become repeatedly lucrative, but it's also making waves in player engagement and helping set industry trends. As a result of its multi-tiered slate of live service and singleplayer games like For Honor, Rainbow Six: Siege, Ghost Recon: Wildlands, and more recent Assassin's Creed: Origins, Ubisoft made more money from Player Recurring Investment (microtransactions, in-game purchases, DLC, add-ons, subscriptions, advertising, etc) than it did from digital game sales in the first half of FY2018.

The French games-maker pulled in €174.5 million from PRI in the six-month period from April through September, up 83% year-over-year. PRI beat digital game sales by some €7 million. Digital game sales accounted for €168 million, up 57% year-over-year from 1H'17. The company notes that Assassin's Creed: Origins in-game player spend in optional items is "trending nicely," and that the game has sold 100% more than Assassin's Creed: Syndicate.

Radeon Technologies Group boss Raja Koduri took a leave of absence, or a sabbatical, or something a couple of months ago, but has now officially departed the company.

Before we get into the letter that Koduri wrote to AMD, this news comes just 24 hours after Intel announced its new Kaby Lake G processors will have AMD Radeon Vega GPU technology inside. It's almost as if Koduri waited until that news broke, and then strategically (see: stock prices) left the company.

AMD launched their Radeon RX Vega graphics card family a few weeks ago now, and were instantly put nearly out gamers' minds when NVIDIA launched their offensive against Radeon RX Vega 56 with the new GeForce GTX 1070 Ti last week.

Nintendo just reported its all-time best 1H period for download sales thanks to the Switch handheld-console hybrid.

In 1H'17 Nintendo earned 22.8 billion yen ($205.29 million) from digital download sales, up 55% year-over-year, the company announced in its latest fiscal documents. The Japanese games-maker notes that this titanic growth, which is its best-ever download sales for a six month period, was driven by strong Nintendo Switch digital software purchases through the second quarter (July - September). Other platforms like the 3DS contributed to earnings as well, however a high number of Switch titles are digital-only.

"I would also like to touch on the progress we have made for our download sales. This figure shows the download sales of digital content for dedicated video game platforms compared to past years. Sales through the second quarter were the highest in our history for a six month period. Download sales for Nintendo Switch highly contribute to increase of total download sales," Nintendo President Tatsumi Kimishima said in the company's recent financial results.

Monolith Soft's sprawling open-world JRPG Xenoblade Chronicles 2 will have a $30 expansion pass that includes a bevy of post-release DLC.

Today's Direct showcase unearthed a ton of details about Xenoblade Chronicles 2, and showcased a vibrant world full of exploration, magic, and enchanting mech-fantasy--and of course unique team-based combat. Outside of the grandeur of Monolith's latest Switch-exclusive adventure, the game is another key opportunity for Nintendo to flex the season pass model it's used on past Switch titles like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Xenoblade Chronicles 2 will include a $30 season pass that unlocks content from launch up until Fall 2018, including a new Battle Mode, a new side-story adventure, and a smattering of other packs.

"Fans who want to expand their epic adventure can pre-purchase an Expansion Pass for the game in Nintendo eShop beginning today or pre-order it from select retailers shortly at a suggested retail price of $29.99. With this pass, players can enjoy DLC as it releases between the launch of the game and fall 2018, starting with quests and support items, and eventually including a challenge Battle Mode where they can face powerful enemies. This DLC will even include an additional adventure with a new side story set in the world of Elysium. Details about individual elements of the Expansion Pass will be released in the future," Nintendo wrote in a recent press release.

Telltale Games, the dev behind a slew of narrative-driven games such as The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us, and the Game of Thrones series, is letting go of 25% of its workers--about 90 people across all divisions.

This new restructuring is effective immediately, and the reasoning behind the layoffs is so Telltale Games can become more competitive and launch "fewer, better games with a smaller team." The company said that the shake-up won't affect projects currently in development.

"The decision is designed to make the company, a leader in player-driven narrative games, more competitive as a developer and publisher of groundbreaking story-driven gaming experiences with an emphasis on high quality in the years ahead," the press release notes.

As an online game with co-op multiplayer and "genre melding" elements, BioWare's new game Anthem is perfectly aligned with Electronic Arts' shift towards live services. And this means microtransactions. But how will Anthem be monetized? BioWare is having lots of discussions on the topic, which strongly hints the game will indeed be monetized (not surprising: it's an online multiplayer game made by EA after all).

Months before BioWare officially announced Anthem I predicted the game would be monetized in some form via microtransactions. EA's fiscal year results showed a pattern of action-based games and live services--a pattern that's very evident now--and Anthem, which should be EA's Destiny-killer, is a prime opportunity for monetizing mass engagement. I warned gamers to expect microtransactions and probably loot boxes before Anthem was shown off at E3 2017, and after the reveal that premonition was all the more stronger thanks to the RNG loot mechanics displayed in the trailer (the Jarra's Wrath box opening was a big hint).

Given the current "toxicity" of lootboxes in the gaming sphere, if EA doesn't handle monetization just right it could spell doom for Anthem. Or at the very least a huge swath of bad press. For perspective, Anthem is the biggest thing BioWare has ever done as a company, and should be even bigger than the Star Wars: The Old Republic MMORPG. It's scale is titanic, dynamic, and based on the potent live service platform. EA has put lots of faith, effort, and money into the project over a number of years. These kinds of massive investments into online service games typically embrace microtransactions as a means of mitigating risk. But how exactly should EA and BioWare monetize Anthem? How can they ensure the game continues generating revenue every month to fuel steady content updates and keep the servers online?

With Sony's PlayStation 4 and now Microsoft's new $499 Xbox One X, we've seen console-makers shift towards next-gen resets and more towards an iterative cycle. But how soon until the next major console launches? Ubisoft might have an answer.

In the next two years we might see Sony debut its next-gen PlayStation 5, which may be a whole new generation powered by discrete graphics, or another iterative design that joins the PS4 family. That's what Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot thinks. When asked about how Ubisoft will support PS4 Pro and the Xbox One X during the Q&A session of its earnings brief, Mr. Guillemot said: "We think we have about 2 years before something else is coming." In this case something else is a new console.

Ubisoft let slip crucial details of the Nintendo Switch--something I covered way back in the NX days--but here the company isn't privy to insider knowledge. Guillemot goes on to say that Ubisoft has no actual information on when a new system will come out--this is just the company's educated guess.

As Nintendo's new Switch handheld-console hybrid continues strong sales momentum, analyst firms and holding companies are adjusting their predictions. One such firm, Nomura Securities, predicts the Switch will surpass the Wii's sales by 15% by the year 2023.

In light of Nintendo's latest Q2 financials, Japanese securities group Nomura Securities has updated its long-term sales forecast for the Nintendo Switch console to 115.8 million units by the fiscal year ending March 2023, reports The Wall Street Journal's Takashi Mochizuki. This estimate would firmly set the Switch between two of Nintendo's all-time bestselling hardware: 14.95 million unit sales above 2006's breakout Wii system and 38.22 million unit sales below 2004's superstar DS handheld.

This isn't the only huge prediction made by analysts. Swiss brokerage firm Credit Suisse made an outperform forecast of 130 million Switch sales by March 2022. On its forecast the group says it "expects the Switch to sell like a handheld," and the firm's peak-year sales have been upgraded from 25 million to 31 million units.

Disney is thirsty for another massive acquisition, with CNBC reporting that the company is in discussions to buy 20th Century Fox, which is Fox's film and TV divisions. This purported deal would leave Fox to double down on its news and sports programs.

Fox would sell its entertainment divisions and make a tidy sum of money, as they're not interested in selling their Fox broadcast network that includes Fox Sports, and the Fox News and Fox Business brands. That doesn't matter however, as Disney is legally bound from buying the Fox network because it already owns ABC, leading into antitrust issues with ESPN.

Disney through an acquisition of Fox's film and TV divisions would secure the company massive international assets like Star and Sky, as well as FX and National Geographic. This deal could do some major things for Disney which has acquired some large players in the last few years making them one of the biggest entertainment companies in the world with Pixar, Lucasfilm, and Marvel.

Xbox One X is now on the market for $499 in the US, with Phil Spencer doing the rounds with the media and teasing during an interview with Bloomberg that the company is working on a new streaming service.

Spencer told Bloomberg: "Microsoft will probably debut a streaming service that doesn't require a console for some types of content in the next three years". According to the report, Microsoft has been working on the streaming service for the last five years, but deemed it "too costly" and was never pushed into the market.

It's no surprise that Microsoft is working on a streaming service again, now that the Xbox family of consoles has grown by another three units since the original game streaming prototypes the company was working on over the last few years. We could expect a $20 a month or so per month cost for an Xbox streaming service, as Microsoft would have to price it against Sony's PlayStation Now streaming service, which lets gamers stream PS3 and PS4 games starting at $20 per month.

Intel has officially unveiled its new Kaby Lake G processor family, infused with AMD's next-gen Radeon Vega GPU with 4GB of HBM2 on-board. This new Intel/AMD processor has now had some benchmark numbers leak, and I don't really know what to expect from here on out.

We now know that there are prototypes in the wild, which should arrive as the Core i7-8809G and the Core i7-8705G. The flagship Core i7-8809G has a board name of 694E:C0, while the Core i7-8705G is the 694C:C0.

AMD's custom multi-chip modules (MCMs) will feature the Vega GPU and offering up 24 compute units, with 1536 stream processors in total. GPU clocks should be at 1000MHz for the 694E variant, while the 649C variant is 20% faster at 1190MHz. The faster version should rock 3.3 TFLOPs of compute performance, which is around half that of the APU inside of the new Xbox One X console, a semi-custom design that AMD also worked on.

Microsoft has officially released its new Xbox One X console, with Xbox boss Phil Spencer talking with the media and had some pretty big words about the power of the Xbox One X.

Spencer said: "This is for the discerning connoisseur of gaming has a 4K television, [who] wants to see the absolute best visuals. This box is definitely targeted toward the customer that buys the most and plays the most".

Microsoft built the Xbox One X as a beefy upgrade and flagship console in the Xbox family, topping the 4K Blu-ray infused Xbox One S, and the original Xbox One console. Spencer said having multiple consoles on the market is all about giving gamers the choice, whether they want to spend $200 or $350 or $650 on a console.