On the heels of recent Silent Hill news, an old rumor from January that Sony wants to buy some of Konami's biggest franchises has resurfaced. But Konami is very unlikely to sell.

Sources tell Rely On Horror that Sony is funding two new Silent Hill games: A Silent Hill reboot with original series devs at the helm, and a remake of Silent Hills with Hideo Kojima as director.

Now gamers are connecting an old 4Chan rumor (now deleted) that Sony wants to buy Castlevania, Silent Hill, and Metal Gear Solid from Konami. After all, the original post did predict two new Silent Hill games, leading to others like Dusk Golem to report the same.

As studios like Naughty Dog impose merciless crunch that's hospitalizing its developers, id Software didn't crunch while making Doom Eternal.

Doom Eternal's core development team--at least the higher-ups--didn't crunch long hours readying the game for release. At least that's what creative director Hugo Martin said in a recent podcast with Joe Rogan.

"It's not really crunch. It's like a lifestyle. I live and breathe this. No one makes me stay at the office, and even when I come home I see my kids, I do my thing, and then I just do research. It sounds ridiculous but my research is that of a 13 year old. I play video games and read comic books and engross myself in pop culture because essentially what we do is make pop culture content," Martin said.

Sony Interactive Entertainment is reportedly producing and funding two new Silent Hill exclusives for PlayStation: A Silent Hills remake with Kojima Productions at the helm, and a reboot of the classic original game.

Rather than spend big on new Silent Hill games, Konami will license the IP out to Sony, sources familiar with Konami's plans tell tell Rely On Horror. Sony has two projects in the works including a Silent Hill reboot and very tentative plans for resurrecting Silent Hills with original director Hideo Kojima at the helm. Silent Hills was originally cancelled in 2015 and Konami hasn't released a big-budget game in its original IPs since then.

The sources say original Silent Hill creator Keiichiro Toyama will lead the reboot, alongside other series vets like creative designer Masahiro Ito, and Akira Yamaoka, who composed Silent Hill's soundtracks. Back in January, Ito confirmed he's currently working on a new project.

Rockstar Games is the latest AAA games dev to mandate employees work from home due to the worldwide coronavirus pandemic.

The offices of all of Rockstar's eight international game dev studios from Rockstar North to Rockstar Bangalore are now on lockdown. The billion-dollar games-maker has enacted remote work policies to safeguard against COVID-19. The studio has actually created robust tools and hardware to ensure game devs can continue their work without disruption--which is critical considering Grand Theft Auto VI is on the horizon. Rockstar titles get delayed enough as it is.

"In the interest of reducing the possible impact of COVID-19, Rockstar Games has implemented work from home policies across our international offices and studios. After significant research and consultation with our teams around the work, we began rolling out remote work solutions worldwide across the past week, and we are confident we have a robust system in place for our teams to continue their work with a minimum disruption," Rockstar said in a statement on Twitter.

When CD Projekt Red released The Witcher 3 back in 2015, gamers were stunned at just how gorgeous the game was, and you'd probably think that after five years it wouldn't give that same 'wow' reaction. Well, take a look at this...

Above is a video released onto the Halk Hogan YouTube Channel that reveals a gorgeous new mod for The Witcher 3. It completely overhauls all of the current textures The Witcher 3 has and adds in some gorgeous new ones. The mod is called 'The Witcher 3 HD Reworked Project,' and the mod offers high-quality 4K resolution textures that unlock more sharpness and overall increase object detail.

So what does the mod actually rework? Basically, everything. Terrain, rocks, water, vegetation, NPC's, animals, and much more. In the above video, you can see a side-by-side comparison of The Witcher 3's stock graphics versus the mod. If you are interested in trying this mod out for yourself, head on over to the official website and download it here. In other Witcher news, CD Projekt Red will be working on a new Witcher title after they complete Cyberpunk 2077, more on that here.

The world is being shutdown over COVID-19 coronavirus, and even the greatest detective ever isn't unaffected -- production on The Batman has been halted.

Warner Bros. announced the news that production on The Batman will go on 'hiatus' effective immediately, with the studio telling Deadline: "Warner Bros. Pictures feature production of The Batman will be on a two-week hiatus starting today. The studio will continue to monitor the situation closely".

Matt Reeves along with Batman himself in this new outing in the franchise in Robert Pattinson had been shooting in London, but was expected to see production shift locations to Liverpool. No one from the cast or crew of The Batman has been diagnosed with COVID-19.

It was recently confirmed that Sony would be bringing one of its best PlayStation-exclusive titles over to PC -- Guerrilla Games' Horizon Zero Dawn.

While PC fans rejoiced at the news of a one PlayStation exclusive title coming over to PC, some PC gamers were wondering what kind of support the port would be arriving with. On the Horizon Zero Dawn Steam Community Forums, a representative for the development team confirmed that the game would be arriving with ultrawide support.

At the same time, as confirming that Horizon Zero Dawn will be coming to PC with ultrawide support, the representative also confirmed that there would be Steam Achievements. The representative also teased that more details about more features will be coming soon. At the moment, the PC port of Horizon Zero Dawn is planned for release sometime in the Summer of 2020. If you want to check out the Steam listing, a link can be found here.

The Xbox Series X's new proprietary SSD was custom-built by Microsoft for fast loading times, intuitive functionality like expanded Quick Resume, and a virtual RAM memory cache for developers.

Microsoft has confirmed our suspicions: The Xbox Series X will use a customized solid state drive tailor-made for the console. The next-gen Xbox's SSD is specifically designed to massively boost in-game load times and asset fetching speeds first and foremost, but it has some unique memory capabilities that enable new expansive features. Thanks to the new SSD, Quick Resume on the Xbox Series X will let you keep save states for multiple games at once. These save states also survive a hard system reboot.

In a recent Major Nelson podcast, Xbox director of program management Jason Ronald confirmed the next-gen Xbox will indeed use specially-made storage.

As the coronavirus rampantly spreads across the globe, whole countries are hitting the pause button on everyday life. People are staying indoors, working from home, and distancing themselves from others. And they're playing video games. Lots and lots of video games.

According to Steam DB's metrics, Counter-Strike: GO just broke over 1 million concurrent users in the last 24 hours. CS:GO is now the third Steam game to break 1 million players online at once, topped by DOTA 2's 1.2 million and PUBG's titanic 3.2 million. At the time of writing, CS:GO has over 930,000 active players. To put this number into perspective, roughly 1/9th or 11% of Steam's 90 million MAUs are playing Counter-Strike right now.

Valve might owe a lot of those numbers to the coronavirus outbreak as gamers and consumers stick indoors, especially in overseas regions like China and Italy, both of which have instituted mass shutdowns of businesses, gatherings, and social events.

Activision may release a remastered Tony Hawk Pro Skater game later this year on all platforms.

According to a fresh leak, a new Tony Hawk games is coming in 2020. Art punk band The Death Set, who's providing songs for the new Tony Hawk Pro Skater's soundtrack, accidentally outed the game in a now-deleted Facebook post. But not before someone captured a screenshot.

It's very likely the new game will be a remaster or even a reboot for the franchise. Activision recently teased a bunch of new remasters and re-releases for 2020, and after the disastrous performance of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5, the publisher may not jump right into another sequel.