Latest News - Page 2214

Cloud Imperium Games is getting into the festive season a little early with a tease of Star Citizen's upcoming Alpha 3.0 release, showing off a new Alpha 3.0 trailer. Check it out below.

As you can see, the team is pushing out moon landings, the awesome-looking planetary rover, and the new Nox hover speeder. But there's even bigger news that has happened over the last few days that really overshadows the Alpha 3.0 release, in the fact that Chris Roberts has come out saying that the team plan to launch Star Citizen (whenever that is...) with just 5-10 star systems compared the 100 he teased with the original Kickstarter in 2012.

Image source.

Intel is preparing their new Core i9 range of processors, and while the flagship Core i9-7980XE gets all of the attention, there will be a 16C/32T chip at $1699, the Core i9-7960X.

Now there's some results of the upcoming Core i9-7960X on Geekbench, but the new 16C/32T processor isn't shaping up so well, scoring 5238 in single-core results, while hitting 33,672 in multi-core. Comparing this against Intel's current Core i9-7900X (10C/20T) which has less cores and threads, the single-core performance is superior at 5390, and so is the multi-core score at 33,945.

The upcoming 7960X does beat AMD's upcoming Ryzen ThreadRipper 1950X (16C/32T @ 3.4GHz) with its single-core score of 4074 and multi-core score of 26,768. Both the 7960X engineering sample and early sample of the ThreadRipper 1950X have their CPU clocks much lower than the 3.4GHz on the 7900X (even though it has less cores than the other two processors).

Grand Theft Auto parent company Take-Two Interactive has an independent gaming initiative that is making games "intended to be AAA titles".

Having already crested the AAA gaming market with billion-dollar IPs like Grand Theft Auto, Take-Two Interactive is now setting its sights on the independent games segment with a new indie-centric initiative. The GTA parent company hasn't revealed specifics about this new indie focus, but it got the ball rolling on the program by purchasing the popular Kerbal Space Program IP and adding it to group of developers directed by Take-Two exec Michasel Worosz.

Interestingly enough, it appears that Take-Two's indie-centered group may be making actual AAA games to supplement the company's release slate instead of crafting AA indies. In a recent interview with Games Industry.biz, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said that Worosz's group, which includes indie devs and other games-makers, is working on a "number of titles that are intended to be AAA products."

Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, has announced that he has partnered up with Apple to develop a movie which stars no other than Siri. Because that makes total sense, right? If Steve Jobs got multiple movies, then it's only fair that Siri gets one too!

The movie is named The Rock x Siri: Dominate The Day, and it will be released on YouTube. Very little is known about the movie at this point, and the promotional poster reveals...very little or very much...

We can see The Rock holding an iPhone 7 Plus...then space, a plane, robot, car, and more Dwayne Johnson. Also Chinese lanterns?

Tesla's Gigafactory 1 in Nevada has expanded significantly over the last year. The company worked tirelessly on its first Gigafactory in preparation for the start of the Model 3 production.

Thanks to Planet's constellation of satellites, we can now see how the Gigafactory grew over the last year. And that's not even the finished building. What we see now represents around 30% of the total finished factory.

Tesla plans to finish the factory around 2020, and when they do, the Gigafactory 1 should be the largest building on earth by footprint.

2K Games' new president David Ismailer has laid out a fresh five-year plan for the label that will tap the strengths of its catalog IP including its growing AAA games business and annualized sports titles.

Despite releasing a number of key games in FY17 like Mafia III and Battleborn, 2K Games didn't contributed as strongly to total fiscal year sales earnings as it normally would with such a hefty release slate. Of course it didn't help that Battleborn was quickly swallowed up by Blizzard's Overwatch, and Mafia III was plagued with a rocky start. The current fiscal year, FY18, sees 2K Games' slate much thinner than usual. The label's newly appointed president, David Ismailer, has laid out a new five-year plan that will leverage the label's beefy catalog in strategic ways to help boost earnings.

In a recent interview with Games Industry.biz, Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick and 2K Games President David Ismailer discuss the future of the label. The publisher's "huge" new game is still on for FY19, which is likely to be Borderlands 3, and 2K will continue annually releasing sports games from its WWE and NBA IPs to help bolster profits. Ismailer affirms that his new five-year plan isn't dramatically different from 2K's current strategies, but he is aiming to release a new AAA game every year.

ASUS recently launched the ZenFone 4 Max with a 5,000 mAh battery, but we are still waiting for four new ZenFone series smartphones. It was initially expected that the company would launch the phones during Computex, but that didn't happen due to, according to a source, "design overhaul and efficiency upgrades."

A recent report suggested that the company should unveil the devices on August 17th and while we still can't confirm this date, we can say that the launch date is definitely close because ASUS has just posted the first teaser photos of the ZenFone 4.

The company posted four photos on its official Facebook, and all four photos indicate that the ZenFone 4 will have a dual camera setup.

While we are waiting for Samsung to unveil the highly-anticipated Galaxy Note8 on August 23rd, it seems that the company is naturally already preparing for next year's flagships, presumably named the Galaxy S9 and S9+.

According to industry sources, the Korean giant has already placed display orders for the upcoming devices. The same sources state that the Galaxy S9 and S9+ will have the same screen sizes as this year's S-series phones, meaning 5.8-inch and 6.2-inch displays.

The phones should have rounded corners, making them identical to this year's Infinity Displays found on the Galaxy S8 duo.

AMD is about to launch its next-gen Ryzen ThreadRipper CPUs that will drive 16C/32T processors into the masses, while ASUS is preparing a new high-end motherboard.

The new ASUS X399 ROG Zenith Extreme has been teased, with a full unboxing revealing that the new board rocks the beefy TR4 socket, Wi-Fi antennas, and much more. ASUS includes a PCIe ethernet card, VGA holder, ASUS DIMM2 extension card, LCD screen, and four reinforced PCIe slots.

ASUS' new X399 ROG Zenith Extreme is the first X399 motherboard to arrive in E-ATX, which is a fair bit larger than a traditional ATX motherboard.

Intel has lost one of its best, with 20-year veteran François Piednoël leaving the company. Piednoël was involved in the development of some of Intel's biggest CPU architecture development, including Katmai, Conroe, Penryn, and Nehalem as well as SoCs in Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, Haswell, Broadwell, Skylake, and Kaby Lake.

Piednoël leaving Intel at this time is very strange, especially as AMD is back into the game in a very big way after nearly a decade out of the high-end enthusiast CPU market. AMD is preparing the launch of its new Ryzen ThreadRipper processors that will bring 16C/32T CPUs to the masses, and Intel loses one of its chief CPU engineers. He won't be joining AMD, that's for sure - as he tweeted out a reply to someone saying "going to AMD", he said: "NEVER!" with a follow up tweet asking "why "NEVER!" to which Piednoël replied: "Because my knowledge about Intel is too deep, I would get lawyers knocking on my door next day".

Intel seems to be finding more and more holes in its ship, is there something bigger going on that we can't see yet?

Ubisoft reports stellar first quarter revenues and sales driven by strong digital growth across all segments and platforms, including PS4, Xbox One and PC.

French games-maker Ubisoft is transforming more and more of its business into digital revenue streams, and this initiative is paying off big. The company recently announced total sales earnings of 202.1 million euros ($232.78 million) in the three-month period ending June 30, all without even releasing a new game.

What's even more impressive is that 80.4% of these earnings, or 164.2 million euros ($189.07 million) were from digital purchases such as full game sales as well as recurrent consumer spending via microtransactions, DLC and add-ons. Ubisoft categorizes the latter digital monetization revenues as PRI, or "Player Recurring Investment," which also saw tremendous growth in the quarter: the company earned 83.1 million euros ($95.69 million) in PRI, up a mighty 73.4% year-over-year. PRI actually made up 41.1% of the quarter's total sales, meaning almost half of Ubisoft's digital revenues consisted of paid add-ons and other content.

As the games industry shifts towards a digital-powered games-as-a-service model with recurring revenue streams at the whims of consumers, analyst firm SuperData reports that console gamers will purchase and consume more digital content in the form of microtransactions, DLC, and add-ons than games in 2017.

In today's market, digital-driven games like Overwatch, GTA Online, Rocket League and FIFA dominate consoles across the world, earning billions in combined revenue. We've just reported on how Ubisoft's digital-first strategy is paying off big, and other publishers are just as keen on slicing off their share of the lucrative market as gamers are to spend on their creations. Analyst firm SuperData predicts that add-on content--which includes microtransactions, DLC, season passes and other post-release content like map packs--will make up over 50% of the console gaming sector's total revenues for 2017.

This effectively means console gamers are willing to spend more money on add-ons than they are on full game downloads.

Take-Two Interactive's massively lucrative online-based Grand Theft Auto game has pulled in considerable lifetime-to-date earnings, according to research firm SuperData.

Grand Theft Auto V's massively popular persistent online open-world component, GTA Online, has generated an estimated $1.092 billion in total revenues, analyst firm SuperData reports. GTA V is the highest-earning digital console game of all time thanks to its hugely profitable add-on content, the firm said in a recent market report, with total revenues of $1.4 billion since its release in 2013--78% of which was earned by add-on content through GTA Online.

Rockstar Games parent company Take-Two Interactive reported strong earnings in its last fiscal year thanks to the years-old GTA V and GTA Online powerhouse. The company earned $927.1 million in digital net revenues, with recurrent consumer spending on DLC/add-ons/microtransactions making up 50% of revenues, or $460.85 million. GTA Online had a tremendous effect on digital sales revenue, too: bookings from recurrent monetization streams grew a substantial 52% over last year to an impressive $562.7 million, or 57% of total digitally-delivered bookings.

Tech titan Microsoft has reported its total yearly and fourth quarter earnings for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2017, showing substantial earnings spikes in all segments.

Microsoft pulled in a total of $90 billion in revenues for Fiscal Year 2017, handily beating Wall Street's predictions thanks to a big tax write-off from its mobile phone business (Microsoft recorded an effective tax rate of 8% of reported GAAP revenues versus the 15% tax rate in FY16) and impressive growth in the giant's four major segments.

The Redmond-based company reported operating income $22.3 billion for the fiscal year, and net income of $21.2 billion. As Business Insider notes, these figures caused Microsoft stock to climb.

Xiaomi is all set to announce its latest smartphone, the Mi 5X, on July 26th. The company will also introduce the MIUI 9 user interface on the same day.

The Mi 5X will feature a 5.5-inch Full HD display and run Android Nougat with the latest MIUI 9 on top. The device is expected to be powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 625 processor and come with 4GB of RAM.

The recently leaked images show that the phone will come with a dual rear camera setup.

To celebrate the upcoming home video release of 'Ghost in the Shell', we have ten Blu-rays to give away thanks to our friends at Universal Sony Home Entertainment.

They did not save your life, they stole it.

In the near future, Major (Scarlett Johansson) is the first of her kind: A human saved from a terrible crash, who is cyber-enhanced to be a perfect soldier devoted to stopping the world's most dangerous criminals. When terrorism reaches a new level that includes the ability to hack into people's minds and control them, Major is uniquely qualified to stop it.

Remember when Snap's Spectacles came out and the only way to buy them was to wait in lines for hours in front of one of the randomly placed vending machines? Well, those days are over.

After making them available for purchase on its website, Snap has now made Spectacles available on Amazon as well.

If you want a pair of sunglasses with a built-in camera, you can get it a price of $129.99. There are three color options available which are Black, Coral, and Teal.

Microsoft today reported strong Q4 and full year fiscal earnings across all of its segments, and its gaming branch pulled in over $9 billion in revenues despite lower Xbox console sales.

Despite Sony's dominant lead in console sales, Microsoft's gaming segment is extremely healthy and prosperous as the company's digital cross-platform transformation continues paying off. The Redmond-based titan has unified Windows 10 PCs, mobile phones, and Xbox consoles with its unique Xbox-as-a-service initiative, which sees Xbox LIVE connecting a manner of popular devices together.

In its fiscal year 2017 financials, Microsoft reports that there are now 53 million Xbox LIVE users and counting, and that its gaming segment raked in $9.076 billion in total revenues during the 12-month period ending June 30, 2017.

Although it was supposed to arrive by the end on June, Essential's first smartphone, the PH-1, is still nowhere to be found.

The phone was announced by Andy Rubin, the co-founder of Android, back in May and up until now, we didn't have any updates or reasons of the delay.

Today, twenty days after the expected launch date, Andy Rubin has sent out emails to users who pre-ordered the phone. In the email, Rubin says that they are now "going through certification and testing with multiple US and international carriers." Rubin also states that the device would be in user's hand in "a few weeks."

Intel has thrown their hat into the ring in the fight between Qualcomm and Apple. The reality is that they are kind of the source of this fight, to begin with, and if you look at Apple's complaints, they sound written from Intel's perspective.

The irony, of course, is that Intel is the chip company in question that is supposed to be the only competitor to Qualcomm. Intel accusing anyone of monopolistic behavior after what they did to AMD in the past is laughable.

Apple and Qualcomm accuse Qualcomm of being monopolistic, but Qualcomm has many competitors including Huawei, Samsung, Spreadtrum, and MediaTek.