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Even in an ideal world, Microsoft's Windows Store can't compete with Steam. But Epic Games boss Tim Sweeney predicts that Microsoft will use nefarious tactics to overthrown Valve's reign on the PC games industry.

Epic Games boss Tim Sweeney doesn't trust Microsoft's Windows 10 UWP platform. Sweeney has been a vocal opponent of UWP, accusing Microsoft of "monopolizing PC games development", and now he claims that Redmond will slowly chip away at the foundations of Steam on an OS level and ultimately force gamers to use the Windows Store for their PC gaming needs.

"Slowly, over the next five years, they will force-patch Windows 10 to make Steam progressively worse and more broken. They'll never completely break it, but will continue to break it until, in five years, people are so fed up that Steam is buggy that the Windows Store seems like an ideal alternative," Sweeney said in a recent interview with Edge magazine. "That's exactly what they did to their previous competitors in other areas. Now they're doing it to Steam. It's only just starting to become visible. Microsoft might not be competent enough to succeed with their plan, but they're certainly trying."

Vizio has made a name for itself as budget TV maker in the US, with the company getting acquired by Chinese electronics maker LeEvo in a deal worth $2 billion.

The US-based budget TV maker will continue its day-to-day operations in California, where Vizio will now act as a subsidiary of LeEco. Vizio founder and CEO William Wang will be leaving the company in a way, with Vizio's data business, Inscape, being spun off into a privately held company where LeEco will hold 49% ownership.

Wang will act as chairman and CEO of Inscape where he will hold a controlling 51% stake. During the press event, Wang said he had mixed feelings regarding the deal, and as the owner and CEO of Vizio, he was reluctant to let it go. But, he said the acquisition deal was the best decision for Vizio's hard-working staff and loyal shareholders.

LG invested $905 million in flexible OLED displays last year, and apparently it liked the results, because it's putting $1.75 billion into it this year (the investment was rumored last month, and now the company has confirmed it). The end goal with its investment is to produce bendable screens for use in mobile phones, at least one of which doubles as a tablet.

It's said the company sees flexible phones as part of an "approaching era", and so is putting its gobs of money where its mouth is. Its already released the LG G Flex and G Flex 2 to that end as well. Market research firm IHS DisplaySearch says it anticipates flexible OLED shipments to grow from 59 million shipments this year to 416 million in 2020.

Microsoft is offering a particularly attractive Halo-themed Xbox One S bundle for $299, and Redmond also reveals when the 500GB and 1TB Xbox One S models will launch.

Although I've questioned Microsoft's coercive tactics regarding the Xbox One S' staggered launch, I have to give the company props for its new Halo bundle. The Halo Collection Xbox One S bundle comes with download keys for Halo 5 and Halo Master Chief Collection, and is priced at $299 for the 500GB model and $349 for the 1TB variant. The 500GB and 1TB Xbox One S models will launch August 23. Sadly it looks like the 1TB bundle has "very limited quantities" and can only be purchased at Microsoft's brick-and-mortar stores or the Microsoft Store website.

Microsoft also has a 1TB Xbox One S bundled with Madden NFL 17 for $349 for sports fans out there. The Madden bundle only comes in 1TB options so you won't enjoy the lower admission cost, but you do get some extra goodies like seven Madden Ultimate Team Pro Packs, a free month of EA Access, and a voucher for 20% off your next NFL order.

Burnout was one of the best racing franchises before it was hollowed out in the end, but now ex-Criterion co-founder Alex Ward has confirmed that "work has begun" on a new racing game.

Ward along with Criterion co-founder Fiona Sperry left the company back in 2014 and created Three Fields Entertainment. Three Fields Entertainment has since made Dangerous Golf, but the new racing game looks like it could be a spiritual successor to Burnout 3.

During an interview with Develop Online, Ward said that the new racing game will have support for both the PlayStation VR and Oculus Rift. Ward said to Develop Online: "Our second project will be a racing game. A spiritual successor to one of the Burnout series for PC, PS4 and Xbox One. We aim to support PlayStation VR and Oculus Rift".

Apple has just come out with its quarterly financial report, beating analyst expectations with $42.4 billion in revenue over the quarter.

The bigger news, in my opinion, is Jon Rettinger from TechnoBuffalo being featured on CNBC where he said that Apple "stopped innovating years ago". It's quite shocking, but in a good way, to see someone come out and not be glossing over Apple's new products.

TechnoBuffalo's Rettinger said that right now, Apple is "very reminiscent of BlackBerry, a company resting on their laurels, that seems to have stopped innovating several years ago. Apple's flagship 15-inch MacBook Pro uses a processor that is three generations old", adding that he's "not overly optimistic on Apple's next-gen product offerings".

Developer Raven Software's excellent Marvel: Ultimate Alliance and its less well-received but still respectable sequel are finally available on PC (via Steam) as of this week. Unfortunately, the games have not been done justice: each is priced at $40 (about double what publisher Activision normally charges for games even younger than these), don't include DLC, and they suffer from serious port issues.

User reviews (currently at 'Mostly Negative' based on 51 reviews) consistently cite control issues (no key rebinding, unresponsive controls, and bad controller support, to name a few), and poor audio. As well, it's been pointed out that 1080p resolutions are not supported, at least for 1440p monitors: resolutions above and below 1080p are, but not 1080p itself. Whether 1080p is supported on 1080p monitors or not is unclear, but either way, this is a concerning matter.

We've asked Activision for comment on this story and will update it should we hear back.

According to insider sources, Nintendo's new NX console is a dedicated mobile handheld that features an interesting transforming hybrid design.

Eurogamer has recently corroborated a lot of my past speculation on the NX, with an added twist: the NX may apparently be a mobile tablet-like gaming handheld like we thought, but it could have detachable controllers and no dedicated "console" nexus. The outlet reports that the NX is transformable: the side "controllers" detach from the tablet screen into halves that can combine into a full controller. The screen can then be placed in a stationary position allowing gamers a mini console-like experience.

Per the reports, it looks like the NX won't have a dedicated "hub" base like the Wii U. This suggests that the NX hardware is entirely mobile-based, and that all of the internal components are housed within the portable tablet-like handheld. If you want to play the NX on your HDTV, you'll have to slot the tablet-like handheld into a docking station, not unlike a 2-in-1's keyboard/charging station. So when its docked the NX is theoretically a "console," but it's also not.

After a disappointing theatrical release which was only saved by China's massive appetite for the long-running Blizzard franchise, Universal Pictures have announced the home video release for this summer's 'Warcraft'.

Coming as a fully fledged special edition Blu-ray release featuring deleted and extended scenes, making of featurettes, a gag reel, the Bonds of Brotherhood motion comic and trailers, 'Warcraft' hits Blu-ray, 4K and digital from September 27, while it comes a week earlier in Australia, in addition to a 3D release.

Despite becoming the highest grossing video game adaptation of all time with a $432 million haul worldwide, 'Warcraft's huge $160 million budget means the film needs to generate additional revenue from home video releases to turn a slim profit.

Fox has signed a deal that will see American Crime Story stream exclusively on Netflix as of 2017. Available everywhere but Canada (where Rogers' holds rights to FX content), each season will launch on the service after their broadcast windows are up.

The first season of the show -- which earned 22 Emmy nominations -- centers on the fevered trial of O.J. Simpson that began in the mid-90s and gained worldwide attention and earning the title "Trial of the Century." It stars John Travolta, Cuba Gooding Jr., Sarah Paulson (who funnily enough also has a role in American Horror Story), and David Schwimmer.

The second season focuses on Hurrican Katrina and will debut on FX next year.

The free August Games With Gold titles have been revealed ahead of schedule, and they're not actually pretty good this time around.

Thankfully it looks like the days of Pool Nation HD repeats are gone forever: August's GwG lineup includes some rather decent titles on Xbox 360 and Xbox One. On the "all-in-one console" we have Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate, one of the best Musou games on the market, and WWE 2K16, a semi-competent wrestler that seems to be a big improvement over the broken WWE 2K15.

On Xbox 360 the offerings are lighter fare for GwG August. Sadly we won't be seeing any AAA titles this time around, with the free games limited to XBLA games like Spelunky and Beyond Good & Evil HD. Don't get me wrong, both of these games are pretty good on their own right, but it's not necessarily what Xbox 360 users are used to. Then again a good portion of the Xbox 360's library has already been given away for free.

Siggraph 2016 - AMD has announced its new Radeon Pro SSG graphics card, with it being one of the first under the new Radeon Pro branding, with AMD rebranding its FirePro graphics card range.

AMD's new Radeon Pro SSG is a super unique new way of professional graphics, as it has flash memory attached to the graphics card, which can see professional graphics solutions scale far beyond the 32GB limit we're at now. Instead of having a 32GB frame buffer, which might sound like a lot to gamers, it gets used very quickly with massive professional workloads.

Radeon Pro SSG uses flash memory that can scale into the terabytes, which means we'll see professional graphics cards with 1TB or 2TB of memory available. The flash memory has direct communication with the GPU but doesn't work in the way of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) which is physically on the Interposer, with the GPU. Performance wise, the flash memory on Radeon Pro SSG can handle 8K video at 96FPS compared to the previous high-end FirePro graphics card that was only capable of 8K at 17FPS - a huge 5.6x increase in performance.

Siggraph 2016 - AMD has changed its entire professional graphics branding at Siggraph 2016, with Radeon Pro replacing the FirePro branding, bringing all of AMD's graphics cards under the Radeon umbrella under Radeon Technologies Group.

AMD has three new Radeon Pro WX professional graphics cards, with all of them powered by their new Polaris architecture. We have the Radeon Pro WX 4100, WX 5100 and the higher-end WX 7100 with AMD telling us that they will all be priced at under $1000, with the WX4100 and WX5100 being priced "well below" $1000. What does WX stand for? Workstation experience, which makes sense, and makes things easier to discern between Radeon RX (consumer graphics) and Radeon Pro WX (workstation graphics).

The traditional workstation industry is who AMD are targeting with the Radeon Pro WX series graphics cards, as the WX series will have companies like Dell or HP that will have specific requirements in the way of power use, or clock speeds so that their workstations will last for years and years.

The latest mod for Grand Theft Auto V is here from modder 'Razed', with his latest NaturalVision mod that has some really impressive photo-realistic graphics for the game.

Razed says that the mod was made from utilizing ReShade and ENB, while mixing in the VisualV mod that makes Grand Theft Auto V better than it's ever looked before. You'll need VisualV to use NaturalVision, which you can download right here, while NaturalVision is available here.

An French auction of vintage 'Star Wars' merchandise has sold for an eye-watering $654,000 USD, which includes a sealed, carded action figure featuring fan favourite character Boba Fett which sold for $34,000 alone.

According to the Daily Mail, the auction saw "terrific interest, emails and constant condition reports from all corners of the globe" and which smashed estimates. The sale also included an ultra-rare prototype of the bounty hunter which never went into production due to concerns that children could injure themselves with a removable projectile weapon.

While the French collector behind the lot no longer has his precious 'Star Wars' toys, at least he can retire quite comfortably.

It looks like Nintendo is not far away from revealing its NX console, with reports from major gaming sites to release their articles on NX "soon", according to Nintendo insider Emily Rogers.

Rogers took to Twitter, saying: "Also, I don't know what the price of this thing will be. It sounds expensive, but I hope it's not". Rogers added: "You will see some more NX reports coming out from other sites soon. Major sites. Not Nintendo fan sites".

According to my industry sources, NVIDIA will be powering the Nintendo NX with a Pascal-based Tegra processor. NVIDIA hasn't announced or even teased a Pascal-based Tegra processor yet, but we should find out exactly what NVIDIA has in store for Nintendo's next-gen console very soon.

In a bid to counter Nintendo's NES Mini, Sega is planning to release its own official Mega Drive/Genesis Mini console that one ups its rival.

Sega knows the NES Mini is quite restricted, so its decided to release its own fully-functioning miniaturized Megadrive/Gensis system that not only rocks 80 built-in games from Sega's best-of library (30 more than the NES Mini) but also plays original NTSC and PAL game cartridges. That's a pretty huge advantage--as we know the NES Mini doesn't play NES cartridges and isn't a fully-functioning console. Plus it's listed at $49.99 which is a full $10 cheaper than the NES Mini. But it does have its shortcomings and we'll come to those later.

A listing for the Megadrive Mini was spotted on a UK retailer Smyths for £49.99 and a release in October. Remember that the Megadrive is the UK/Europe version of the Genesis. The weird thing is the Genesis Mini is already being sold in the UK and in the US so perhaps the console listed at Smyths is a re-release?

According to the official No Man's Sky website, the eagerly anticipated procedurally-generated space sim will release three days late on PC. Is it a simple mix up, or has No Man's Sky been pushed back a little bit farther for PC players?

No Man's Sky's about page clearly tells us that the PC version will launch "worldwide on August 12," which is a full three days after the PS4 flavor which launches on August 9. Interestingly enough Steam's marketplace still lists the PC version for August 9, and anyone who's pre-ordered the No Man's Sky Collector's Edition received confirmation of a August 9 PC launch.

"No Man's Sky Explorer's Edition Update on the Explorer's Edition Coming Soon! (PC codes will be sent at least 24 hours before launch of Aug 9)," reads an email blast sent to collector's edition orders. Honestly it looks like Hello Games might've mixed up the release date on the about page, especially when we have two clear instances telling us the PC version indeed releases on August 9.

SAPPHIRE has just officially unveiled its new NITRO+ Radeon RX 480, which is positioned perfectly for 1080p and 1440p gaming.

The new NITRO+ Radeon RX 480 has the same 2304 stream processors as the AMD Radeon RX 480 reference card, with the Polaris 10 GPU overclocked to 1342MHz on boost. It has 8GB of GDDR5 clocked at 8GHz on a 256-bit memory bus, while the 4GB model has a boost clock of 1306MHz and has its 4GB of GDDR5 clocked at 1750MHz.

SAPPHIRE includes the usual VR support thanks to AMD, with two HDMI ports which makes it much easier to get your VR headset connected into the graphics card. Normally most graphics cards only have a single HDMI port, so if you have a monitor or TV connected, you need to disconnect it in order to get your VR headset connected.

The current largest flyable ship in Star Citizen is the Starfarer, a standard fuel transporter vessel, and is the feature of the video below by level lead Matthew Trevelyan Johns. Presented in glorious 4K, it represents yet another way to appreciate the superb technical achievement Star Citizen is, as well as the game's ship design.

If the Starfarer looks big to you, it's nothing compared to the Bengal Carrier, a monster of a ship that appears to be roughly 100 times bigger in this chart. Of course, due it's massive size, it'll likely be awhile before the Bengal is playable.