Electronic Arts soars past $8 billion net bookings for the first time ever, supercharged by nearly half a billion dollars in deferred revenue that had been set aside during previous quarters.

Today, Electronic Arts made history by achieving $8 billion in net bookings throughout FY26, a feat that was achieved thanks to how EA's earnings can overlap on a quarterly basis. For EA, the definition of net bookings is simple--you just subtract deferred revenue from net revenue. This classification allows EA to track how it records microtransaction spending from consumers, and every quarter, the company will set aside a portion of live service earnings to defer to another period in accordance with the game and the content.

That's how EA managed to hit $8 billion in net bookings. The company recognized a substantial stockpile of $495 million in deferred net revenue throughout FY26 that had been set aside through prior quarters. This tacked onto the $7.531 billion that EA earned in the yearly period.

The demand for DRAM and NAND from AI has expanded exponentially, and the memory supply crunch we're currently facing is unlikely to ease anytime soon. At least that's what Sanjay Mehrotra, CEO of memory and storage maker Micron, believes, and in his view, the demand isn't going away and will only get stronger.

In an interview with CNBC, Mehrotra described the current phase of AI-driven demand as just the "first innings," suggesting that we are still early in the cycle. As AI companies scale up compute, faster and higher-density memory will become essential to keep up with growing workloads.

He added that as inference and token demand rise, so will the need for both higher-capacity and higher-performance memory. AI GPUs rely heavily on HBM, while AI CPUs use DRAM, and both are currently in short supply. Mehrotra emphasized that the issue goes beyond pricing, as memory production cannot be ramped up quickly enough to meet demand.

Microsoft is officially retiring Gaming Copilot on Xbox consoles and shifting gears to focus on optimization, efficiency, and growth.

Xbox is changing. The division today announced a big corporate shake-up that saw two Xbox veterans leaving the group, and five new hires joining the team, including multiple people from Microsoft's OpenAI teams. Also, a former Instacart exec now leads Xbox's subscription and cloud business. This realignment also sees Microsoft scrapping plans that no longer fit its vision, like Copilot AI integration on Xbox consoles.

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma today confirmed that the program is being shut down: "As part of this shift, you'll see us begin to retire features that don't align with where we're headed. We will begin winding down Copilot on mobile and will stop development of Copilot on console."

Intel and AMD have agreed to standardize the Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) for x86 CPUs, a move that could improve efficiency and reduce long-standing instruction-set fragmentation.

Intel originally announced APX in July 2023. Historically, the x86-64 standard has mandated 16 General Purpose Registers (GPRs). In a CPU, registers are small, fast storage locations within the processor that hold data temporarily during processing. Data is ultimately brought from memory and caches into these registers for execution.

By doubling the General-Purpose Registers (GPRs) from 16 to 32, the CPU keeps more data in flight. Intel claims this leads to 10% fewer loads and 20% fewer stores. APX also introduces three-operand instructions, allowing the CPU to perform calculations without overwriting the original data. Intel says this doubling improves performance without significantly increasing the die size or power consumption.

Microsoft recently launched several new updates for the ROG Xbox Ally X, including the enablement of its Auto SR AI upscaling technology. YouTube ETA Prime tested the upscaler on the handheld and found noticeably improved image quality at the cost of performance. Performance-wise, activating Auto SR at 720p yielded better performance than native 1080p, but was still slower than native 720p by a noticeable amount.

To recap, Auto SR is Microsoft's competitor to DLSS, FSR, and XeSS and uses an AI algorithm to upscale images from a lower resolution to a higher resolution. The tech differs from NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel's implementations in that it can be activated on all games through the game bar or Windows 11 settings app on supported hardware. Auto SR initially launched in laptops using Microsoft's Copilot+ branding in 2024, but has slowly filtered out to other devices. Currently, it is supported on Intel, Qualcomm, and AMD SoCs as long as the SoCs have an NPU.

The ROG Xbox Ally X is the first handheld to gain Auto SR compatibility. Microsoft specifically designed the tech to be used on external monitors or TVs, as the tech can't be turned on when using the built-in screen. That said, ETA Prime noted a workaround where plugging in the handheld into a charger will allow users to turn Auto SR on using the built-in screen.

JEDEC's JC-40 and JC-45 committees have announced a major new step for the DDR5 MRDIMM ecosystem, a memory standard introduced a few years ago to support bandwidth-intensive data workloads. The MRDIMM Gen2 module standard is nearing completion and targets up to 12,800 MT/s. JEDEC has also published a new DDR5 multiplexed-rank data buffer standard and is preparing a matching clock driver standard.

The headline performance number is the 12,800 MT/s target for Gen2 DDR5 MRDIMM raw card designs. First-generation DDR5 MRDIMM platforms currently top out at 8,800 MT/s, which means the new spec is roughly 45% faster. Standard consumer DDR5 tops out at a considerably lower frequency under JEDEC specs, even with CUDIMMs.

The standards progress behind that number is equally important. The newly published JESD82-552 DDR5MDB02 Multiplexed Rank Data Buffer standard defines next-generation data-buffer capabilities and improved scalability for MRDIMM architectures. JEDEC is also preparing specifications for the DDR5 Multiplexed Rank Registering Clock Driver, which will improve signal integrity and timing control in MRDIMM module designs. Together, these two standards are expected to finalize the MRDIMM Gen2 specification.

Xbox's new CEO Asha Sharma has shaken up the gaming leadership team, appointing five new leads that previously worked at Instacart and Microsoft's CoreAI teams.

New developments at team Xbox today, as CNBC reports big changes at the gaming group's upper management. Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has hired five new people to help lead transformational change and deliver better profits and future-oriented growth.

Three of these new hires had positions at Microsoft's OpenAI division, one worked at Instacart--the former head of growth for ChatGPT is now the head of growth for Xbox, and Instacart's synonymous exec is now leading the general Xbox subscription and cloud business. The memo also confirmed that two long-time Xbox veterans, Kevin Gammill and Roanne Sones, will also be leaving after 24 years at Microsoft.

New leaks surrounding the Ryzen AI 400 desktop APUs are starting to surface. The AI 400 is AMD's upcoming APU series for the AM5 socket, built on the Zen 5 CPU architecture. Recently, the AMD Ryzen AI 5 435G APU was spotted on Geekbench, giving us an idea of its core configuration and expected performance. These numbers are not usually 100% accurate, so take these rumors with a grain of salt.

According to the Geekbench entry, the Ryzen AI 5 435G is a 6-core, 12-thread AM5 APU built on the Zen 5 architecture, featuring an RDNA 3.5 GPU. It is important to note that this is the non-PRO version of the chip; AMD also has a Ryzen AI 5 PRO 435G with the same specifications, but the Geekbench entry clearly distinguishes between the two.

The leaked APU has a base clock of 2 GHz and a boost clock of up to 4.5 GHz, along with 14MB of total cache. The GPU is a basic Radeon 840M with 4 CUs, built on the RDNA 3.5 design. The standard TDP for this APU is 65W, and it also has a 50 AI TOPS NPU. The chip was benchmarked on a JGINYUE B850M Snow Dream WiFi motherboard. The entry also confirms a hybrid core setup, with one core cluster having 2 cores while the other hosts 4 cores.

With the current AI and data center boom, which is dramatically increasing demand for storage solutions spanning SSDs and traditional HDDs, the biggest players in the space are now signing long-term supply agreements with customers that span up to five years.

Per Sandisk's latest earnings call with investors (via Tom's Hardware), Luis Visoso, the company's chief financial officer, confirmed that one of its longest-standing customer contracts is for 5 years. Apparently, this includes quarterly commitments and a combination of fixed and variable pricing "tailored to meet the needs" of its customers.

Other storage players in the HDD space, which include Seagate and Western Digital, are also making multi-year deals with customers. According to the latest information, Seagate's long-term supply agreements now include 2028, while Western Digital's have been extended through calendar year 2029.

Intel's long-awaited 'Big Battlemage' GPU finally got released this year, albeit in workstation form, with the new Intel Arc Pro B70 32GB graphics card. It's powered by the BMG-G31 silicon that was on track to power a potential Intel Arc B770 desktop PC gaming graphics card, which is no longer coming. As for what the gaming performance of this GPU might have looked like, we now have a more detailed look thanks to a new deep dive from Expreview.

The outlet tested the Intel Arc Pro B70's gaming performance at 1440p, with and without ray tracing, comparing it to the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB and Intel Arc B580 12GB cards, testing five games in each category. Looking at the overall results, the Intel Arc Pro B70's gaming performance falls short of beating the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB in both categories, with NVIDIA's GPU being around 5% faster on average when it comes to non-ray tracing or rasterized performance, and around 2% faster when it comes to ray-tracing performance.

That said, the two cards do trade blows, with the Intel Arc Pro B70 delivering faster performance in Cyberpunk 2077 in both scenarios, and faster ray-tracing performance on the Intel card in F1 25 and Kingdom Come: Deliverance II. Here's a closer look at the results.

LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, which is out later this month, is a new open-world action-adventure that looks like it's set to deliver an Arkham City-like experience with that LEGO charm. And with the release right around the corner, developer TT Games and publisher Warner Bros. have published the PC specs and hardware requirements for the game. Which, understandably, has now come under fire for listing Frame Generation as a requirement to hit performance targets.

From a hardware perspective alone, the specifications point to a well-optimized experience, with the Minimum GPU requirements being a GeForce GTX 960 4GB or a Radeon RX 6400 4GB. However, this is to play the game with Low settings at 1080p with AMD FSR or Intel XeSS 'Balanced' upscaling and Frame Generation enabled. What makes these specs hard to comprehend is that this will only deliver 30 FPS, which runs counter to how and when Frame Generation technologies should be used.

Frame Generation, whether it's DLSS, FSR, or XeSS, is a motion-smoothing technology, not a performance boost, as it doesn't magically fix latency. And with that in mind, it's a technology that works best when the input frame rate is in the 60 FPS range, ensuring the game still feels responsive and that the generated frames have enough data to minimize issues like artifacts. This means that 1080p 30FPS performance with Frame Generation would feel like you're playing at 15 FPS, with a notable impact on image quality.

The latest Steam Hardware and Software Survey results for April 2026 are in, and we've already gone through the changes in what graphics card models PC gamers are currently using. In addition to this. We've also noticed an interesting change in GPU VRAM capacity, with roughly half of PC gamers now playing on cards that feature more than 8GB of memory.

Now, before the whole memory crisis, which has led to GPU price increases and even some scarcity of cards with more than 8GB of memory, the debate over VRAM capacity has garnered significant attention. The reason is simple: as image fidelity in PC games has steadily increased, the memory requirements for playing with high-quality textures and cutting-edge effects like ray tracing have risen.

This is something that we mentioned in our reviews of the GeForce RTX 5060 8GB and GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 8GB GPUs, where it became clear that performance at higher resolutions and higher in-game graphics settings was becoming bottlenecked by VRAM capacity. According to the latest Steam data from Valve, 49.95% of PC gamers on the platform now use GPUs with more than 8GB of VRAM.

'There is No Secret Cow Level' is an iconic line from Blizzard's Diablo series, as it refers to a hidden dungeon or level infested with weapon-wielding cows and the promise of loot. Diablo 2 and Diablo 3 both featured this bovine bonus, and Diablo 4 players have been trying to locate and find it in the game for years. And now, with the arrival of the Lord of Hatred expansion, the long search is over, as the game's Secret Cow Level has finally been discovered by xGarbett on X. Check it out.

As expected, getting to the Secret Cow Level requires the use of the new Horadric Cube crafting system, where three items (a Stamina Potion, Rusten Bardiche weapon, and Neyrelle's Hand) transform into a mysterious Torn Page. From there, a boat appears on the coastline of the new Skovos region, which takes you to the Secret Cow Level island. This first part of the mystery was solved a couple of days ago, with Diablo fans spending the time since trying to solve the mysteries of the island to actually open the portal to the for-real Secret Cow Level.

Turns out that, like Diablo 2 and Diablo 3, once you do it's a large area or dungeon filled with cow enemies and the return of the Cow King boss. A new boss that drops a special new Mythic Item called 'The Cow King's Helm.' And when it comes to the helm's stats and affixes, it's a fun little nod to Diablo 4's launch from the Blizzard team.

GameStop today announced its full bid for eBay, offering to buy the company for $56 billion.

GameStop has made a public offer to buy eBay in a deal worth $56 billion, made up of 50% stock and 50% cash. In a press release issued today, GameStop says that its $125 per share bid "represents a 46% premium to eBay's unaffected closing price on February 4, 2026," and that the bid is a 27% and 36% premium to eBay's respective 30-day and 90-day stock averages.

The numbers were somewhat quizzical, given GameStop's position; the company currently has a market cap of $11 billion, and around $9.4 billion of cash on hand. With a $20 billion letter that GameStop has secured from TD Securities, the firm would still be over $15 billion shy of full buyout amount.

We recently covered a rumor that NVIDIA might be bringing back the RTX 3060 12GB, and it looks like more changes are afoot in the graphics card business. The ongoing memory shortages have impacted every aspect of the PC hardware industry, and the GPU business is no exception. Now, it looks like ASUS is pivoting away from its RTX 5070 Ti graphics cards toward its bigger brother, the RTX 5080.

According to industry sources quoted by Channel Gate, ASUS is planning to reallocate its GPU supply, prioritizing the RTX 5080 over the RTX 5070 Ti, thereby limiting the supply of the latter. The move is apparently a consequence of the current market conditions, with the global DRAM shortage in full swing. While NVIDIA remains firm that the supply of all RTX 50-series GPUs is stable, it seems ASUS has its own plans.

The current timeline for implementing this strategy is Q2 2026, but that is, of course, subject to change. The report claims that ASUS will focus on selling only a few mainstream RTX 5070 Ti models, but that the focus will eventually shift to the RTX 5080. The mainstream models in question might refer to low-end or mid-range variants such as the Dual and PRIME, while the high-end ROG Strix models are likely to be limited in production.

In a recent interview with Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick gives a brief explanation on why GTA is coming to consoles first and PC second.

For Rockstar, console has always come first...and for good reason. Recent financial leaks showed that GTA Online makes most of its money on consoles, with PC making only 3% of weekly bookings, as well as 11% of weekly active players (a lot of PC players also play FiveM, a separate modded version of GTA Online). The numbers speak volumes, but now Take-Two Interactive CEO shares a quick take on Rockstar's console-oriented focus:

"Rockstar always starts on console because I think with regard to a release like that you're judged by serving the core. Like really serving the core consumer. If your core consumer isn't there, if they're not served first and best, you kind of don't hit your other consumers," Zelnick said in the interview with Bloomberg.

Activision gets ahead of a recent rumor, squashing reports that this year's Call of Duty game is coming to PS4.

The rumors were false: Call of Duty 2026, which is believed to be Modern Warfare IV, won't be launching on Gen 8 consoles like the PS4 or Xbox One.

"Not sure where this one started, but it's not true. The next Call of Duty is not being developed for PS4," Activision said on Twitter.

Well-known financial institution Bank of America believes that Grand Theft Auto 6 will cost $80, and that the game could herald a new baseline price hike for AAA game software in preparation of the new console generation.

According to a new report from Seeking Alpha, Bank of America Securities analyst Omar Dessouky openly predicts that Grand Theft Auto 6 could be priced at $79.99, a $9.99 surcharge (+14.3%) over the current $69.99 base price for new AAA games.

The analyst also thinks that other publishers and developers could support the new price hike, effectively meaning that consumers would now be paying $79.99 for all new AAA games. This would be similar to the jump from $59.99 to $69.99 that was introduced at the start of the 9th console generation back in 2020 (side note: Take-Two was among the first publishers to push this new price with NBA 2K).

Information about AMD's APU refresh is starting to surface. As earlier reports suggest, the upcoming Ryzen AI APU lineup will be split into "Gorgon Point" and "Gorgon Halo" models, with the latter being the more premium option. Recently, performance benchmarks of the flagship Gorgon Halo model, the Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 495, have appeared on PassMark.

According to the database, the Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 495 is the Halo flagship based on the Zen 5 architecture, featuring 16 cores and 32 threads. The boost clock is reported to be up to 5.2 GHz, which is a 100 MHz bump over the current "Strix Halo" APUs. Another change is in the memory configuration, with the new AI Max+ PRO 495 reportedly supporting 192GB of LPDDR5X memory, compared to the 128GB supported on the Strix Halo flagship.

Performance is also a point of conversation, but these numbers should be taken with a grain of salt since there is only one sample of the AI Max+ PRO 495 on the site right now. Per PassMark, the Gorgon Halo flagship is 3% faster than the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 in single-threaded performance and 4% faster in multi-core performance. If we compare the Max+ PRO 495 to the Max+ PRO 395, the difference is 4.8% in single-threaded tasks and 10% in multi-threaded tasks.

Grand Theft Auto 6 might still be on track for November, but new reports suggest Rockstar is pushing hard behind the scenes, with crunch conditions intensifying as the November deadline slowly looms.

According to recent reports, QA staff working on GTA 6 have been dealing with heavy workloads, with some employees reportedly working as late as 3 AM to meet internal milestones. The claims come from employee reviews, which describe "hectic days," unpaid overtime, and expectations to complete months of work in significantly shorter timeframes.

Take-Two has repeatedly expressed confidence in the November 19 release window, even joking that players will call in sick on launch day. At the same time, Rockstar has maintained its usual silence, sticking to a short, high-impact marketing strategy following the record-breaking Trailer 1 reveal. That combination of public confidence and limited communication often signals an intense internal final push, especially for a project of this scale.