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Microsoft has released its June 2026 Patch Tuesday update, and it is a record-breaker. The company patched 206 vulnerabilities this month, surpassing the previous record of 175 set in October 2025. Of the 206 vulnerabilities patched, 33 are rated Critical, with 28 of those being remote code execution flaws.

The full breakdown covers 65 Elevation of Privilege vulnerabilities, 55 Remote Code Execution vulnerabilities, 30 Information Disclosure vulnerabilities, 27 Spoofing vulnerabilities, 19 Security Feature Bypass vulnerabilities, and 7 Denial of Service vulnerabilities. Five are zero-day vulnerabilities, and one is already being actively exploited in the wild.

CVE-2026-41091 is an Elevation of Privilege flaw in Microsoft Defender that lets attackers gain system privileges. Microsoft has already pushed out a fix through the daily automatic Defender updates, with the patched Malware Protection Engine carrying version 1.1.26040.8 or later. To check your engine version, open Settings > Privacy and Security > Windows Security > About.

It's been over 7 years since Bethesda revealed The Elder Scrolls VI, but it might not be much longer until the game is ready for a full-on reveal.

Xbox management has seen The Elder Scrolls VI in action, and the game is apparently progressing well. In a recent interview with Variety, Microsoft's gaming chief content officer Matt Booty says that Todd Howard is currently playing the hugely anticipated RPG and that it looks simply fantastic.

"So I can tell you, having visited Bethesda and sat with Todd and seen 'Elder Scrolls' playing, it looks amazing, and it's coming along well," the Xbox CCO said.

Despite a rough couple of years for the company, Intel could be set to make a turnaround after its foundry just received what could be its biggest validation yet. According to a report from The Information, Google has placed an order with Intel to manufacture more than three million Tensor Processing Units in 2028. Intel's stock jumped more than 9% on the news, adding to a gain that has already seen the stock climb nearly 169% this year.

Google's TPUs are its in-house AI chips, designed to reduce reliance on NVIDIA's GPUs while powering its own AI services and cloud offerings. Google is reportedly expected to produce more than six million TPUs between 2027 and 2028, with Intel handling roughly half that volume. Previously, TPUs were co-designed by Google and Broadcom with TSMC handling production.

TSMC holds around 73% of the global foundry market and remains the dominant producer of advanced chips for NVIDIA, Apple, and Google. But the AI boom has pushed demand well beyond what TSMC can comfortably handle. TSMC's own chairman recently acknowledged that customer demand is reaching the limits of what the company can manage, and the company is reportedly fully booked out until at least 2028. That capacity crunch has created an opening for Intel that would have been difficult to imagine a few years ago.

Doom usually gets all the glory when it comes to unusual ports, but Argentine developer Dante Leoncini has just made a strong case for Half-Life. He has successfully ported Valve's 1998 shooter to a Nokia N95, a 2007 slider phone running the long-defunct Symbian OS, and it runs at around 30 FPS with full Bluetooth mouse and keyboard support.

The port is built on Xash3D FWGS, an open-source engine designed to make the original Half-Life compatible with modern and not-so-modern platforms beyond the PC. Leoncini handled the Symbian-specific work himself, building a native port rather than relying on emulation. The result runs on a 240x320 screen, which is admittedly tiny, but the single-player campaign is working, including sound, weapons, and dedicated server creation.

The hardware gap between the Nokia N95 and a late-90s gaming PC is smaller than you might expect. The N95 packs a dual ARM11 CPU running at 332 MHz and 128 MB of RAM in its 8GB model. Half-Life's original PC requirements called for a 133MHz Pentium and 24MB of RAM, meaning the phone actually clears those specs comfortably. What it is missing is a dedicated graphics card, but Leoncini has made it work regardless.

Intel's next-generation desktop platform may not have been officially announced, but the very first Intel Z990 motherboard was hiding right under our noses. Publications, including PCWorld and BenchLife, pieced together the discovery after visitors to the GIGABYTE booth were shown a mysterious, unnamed motherboard.

The motherboard shown at Computex Taipei 2026 had its CPU socket covered in tape and stripped of any visible branding. The giveaway was a small "Z99Pro" label printed on the rear of the PCB, which GIGABYTE has since confirmed is the AORUS Z990 PRO, an Intel Z990 board for the upcoming LGA-1954 Nova Lake-S platform.

This reveal confirms the upcoming motherboards, and also gives us a look at what the Z990 platform will bring. Most notably, there are at least three PCIe 5.0 x4 M.2 slots alongside three additional PCIe 4.0 slots, giving the board a total of six NVMe drive bays. Earlier chipset leaks suggest PCIe 5.0 lanes from the chipset will be exclusive to Z990, Q970, and W980, which would make this level of high-speed storage support a differentiating feature of the flagship tier.

UPDATE: Microsoft has confirmed the layoffs, publishing the memo on the Xbox Wire. Xbox's CEO Asha Sharma confirms that the division will have a 3% accountability margin (similar to profit) for the entire Fiscal Year 2026 period.

Xbox will conduct significant layoffs as part of a major business reset, sources tell Bloomberg's Jason Schreier.

Not so long ago, new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma said that Microsoft will reset the gaming business. The CEO has gone to say that Xbox has to look at ways to make the next console more affordable, stressing how much hardware production costs have increased--over 7.5x, Sharma says. Now it's been revealed that Microsoft is planning to hold heavy layoffs at Xbox as part of this reset.

Microsoft is making big changes to Xbox and is now specifying what's going to happen moving forward.

Exclusives are back at Xbox and Microsoft has now re-committed to shipping two Xbox console exclusives by 2027. But what does that actually mean? The term is somewhat misleading, and really just means "not on PlayStation or Switch." It means that the content is being excluded from other consoles, but not entirely from other platforms.

In a recent interview with Game Informer, Xbox's chief content officer Matt Booty defines the terms for gamers: "When we say 'console exclusives,' it means Xbox console. It'll still show up on all the normal places where we sell the PC version, and our cloud. Wherever you can get Xbox Cloud streaming."

Anthropic recently announced its latest state-of-the-art AI model, Claude Fable 5, and with the release of this extremely powerful model, we are beginning to see the creations people are coming up with due to its increased capabilities.

In a new Reddit post on the r/ClaudeAI subreddit, user FiLo420blazeit shared a short video showcasing how Fable recreated Microsoft's Minecraft in HTML. The video shows the user navigating terrain, placing blocks with the appropriate sound effects, pulling up their inventory, detonating TNT, and much more. The original poster described the result as "really, really good," adding, "it even added background music."

Additionally, the poster wrote that they aren't sure of the exact cost, which is a reference to how many tokens Fable had to use to generate the Minecraft test, but they believe it was somewhere around $30.

Anthropic released Claude Fable 5, the company's first publicly released Mythos-level AI model, and while it is state-of-the-art, Microsoft is reportedly running it through its legal department before authorizing its use in its products.

The news comes from The Verge's Tom Warren, who writes that he has heard from unnamed sources that Fable isn't available in the model picker for Microsoft employees using GitHub Copilot. Notably, every other Anthropic model is available in the model picker, as each complies with Microsoft's Zero Data Retention (ZDR) rules. However, Fable is different: the model's sophistication levels require data retention to operate, which violates Microsoft's internal policies.

Since Fable requires some data retention, Anthropic stores data such as prompts and the AI's responses. Anthropic deletes this data after 30 days, but some prompts and outputs can be stored by Anthropic for up to two years depending on how badly either has violated Anthropic's usage policies. So, to remedy this, Microsoft has handed over Fable to its legal department to evaluate the model, and see how it can use it safely.

Xbox recently announced that it has selected Asha Sharma, the company's new CEO, and under her leadership, along with a bunch of other executive-level departures and entries, Xbox will be entering a genuine strategic reset. But what does that mean exactly? And how long will this newfound directional change last?

Windows Central's Jez Corden has reported from the ground floor at Summer Game Fest, speaking with several Xbox executives and developers. Corden admits he was somewhat pessimistic about Xbox's new direction, given the company's history of empty promises and various strategies that have hurt Xbox fans. However, Corden reports that after speaking with Xbox executives and developers, he believes there is a genuine desire to rebuild the Xbox brand to its former glory, and one way to do that will be through exclusives.

The report states that Microsoft's push to make everything an Xbox significantly hurt its brand and weakened the Xbox ecosystem as a whole, but now, with the shift toward exclusivity, having two titles already announced and on the way, new Xbox leadership is viewing exclusivity as not a financial burden, but as a means of rebuilding the Xbox culture, community, and fan trust.

Xbox's new CEO Asha Sharma has sat down for an interview with Fortune Conversations, where she was asked a series of questions about Xbox as a brand, it's future, and where it stands versus the competition.

Sharma is stepping into the CEO role at Xbox during a time where the company's lost most of its identity through extensive marketing campaign that was pushed by former Xbox leadership that "everything is an Xbox". With that messaging, along with the end of exclusivity for titles, many Xbox fans felt there was very little reason to own an Xbox.

Sharma has recognized this, and many other problems with Xbox, saying in the interview that it's been difficult to balance Xbox as a publisher, and Xbox as a platform. In an effort to reignite the Xbox brand, the publisher recently unveiled Gears of War: E-Day and inXile's Clockwork Revolution will be "signature exclusives" to Xbox, and that if the Xbox brand becomes healthy more exclusives will be considered.

Microsoft has released a new update for Windows 11 that makes the entire operating system feel much faster, or snappier, when it comes to opening applications.

The new update (KB5094126), which is currently being rolled out regionally, introduces a neat trick for Windows 11 users that are feeling like their experience navigating Windows is more on the slower side of things. The update introduces Low Latency Profile (LLP), which is essentially a profile that yells at your CPU to increase to high clock speeds whenever the user clicks on applications. According to Microsoft, the new profile "accelerates app launch and core shell experiences such as Start menu, Search, and Action Center."

So, what does this mean for users? Opening apps should feel slightly snappier, especially apps that are heavily supported Microsoft tools. However, it won't make every app feel snappier, applications such as Steam, or even Xbox games won't open quicker given the nature of how games launch. But for smaller games, such as solitaire, users should notice an increase in speed. This feature will be particularly useful for people who own older PCs that are likely just making it past the cut off point for Windows 11's hardware requirements.

Vibe coding is becoming ever-more prevalent, as you may have noticed, and now AI has crept into graphics driver maintenance in Linux.

Phoronix.com reports (via Tom's Hardware) that a fresh effort to tidy up code for the AMD R600 Linux GPU drivers witnessed a bunch of commits (from Gert Wollny) assisted by GitHub Copilot.

This fact was clearly highlighted, with Wollny stating: "This series does a lot of refactoring to make the sfn shader compiler code a bit cleaner. The refactoring was done with the help of Copilot (auto mode)."

Nintendo shares have dropped nearly 7% after the most recent Direct show as investors express their disappointment with the event.

Following the outperformance of the original Switch, shareholders are expecting big things from Nintendo. But the company has carefully informed investors about the Switch 2 generation's myriad of problems, including rising costs eating into profits. One thing that hasn't changed, though, is Nintendo's conservativism around software, which sees the group carefully scheduling and spacing out its games across multiple years.

Right now, investors believe the Switch 2's pipeline is missing something big for this fiscal year--a new 3D Mario game. The latest Nintendo Direct apparently disappointed shareholders because it didn't include more new Switch 2 games, leading to a reduction in share demand and causing stock prices to drop more than 7.4% in next-day trading (currently at 7,215JPY, -6.76%). Nintendo only revealed two new first-party Switch 2 game at the show, and neither was a Mario game.

Neural Dawn is an impressive new mobile game co-developed by Arm and Sumo Digital, created in part to showcase the capabilities of Arm Neural Technology in next-gen Arm Mali GPUs that are set to hit the mobile space later this year. Launching exclusively on Android, Neural Dawn is also the first game to make use of Unreal Engine MegaLights, the impressive ray-traced lighting tech that delivers high-end desktop-class visuals.

As seen in Neural Dawn, Arm Neural Technology leverages AI-powered solutions to improve image fidelity and performance, much like DLSS, FSR, and XeSS in the PC space. Here, it includes Neural Super Sampling (upscaling), Denoising (NSSD), and Neural Frame Rate Upscaling (NFRU). The latter is Arm's take on Frame Generation, while the AI denoiser should hopefully deliver results close to NVIDIA's DLSS Ray Reconstruction or AMD's FSR Ray Regeneration.

Part game, part tech demo created to showcase what's possible with mobile games, Neural Dawn will ship with around two hours of gameplay across four levels as players follow a research scientist exploring a cave network to uncover the "truth behind a collapsing civilization." Lighting plays a major role in how the game plays out, which makes it all the more impressive that this will be the first mobile game to use Unreal Engine 5.6.1 and Unreal Engine MegaLights in real time.

Kingdom Hearts IV is the next mainline game in Square Enix and Disney's long-running action RPG, which is pegged to follow Sora after the events of Kingdom Hearts III.

Reports indicate the new game will launch a new saga called the Lost Master Arc, marking a transition away from the Xehanort/Dark Seeker storyline. While still retaining the most iconic Kingdom Hearts characters, Kingdom Hearts IV is reportedly set in Quadratum, a realistic Tokyo-like city with more grounded visuals than the whimsical, fantastical world seen in typical Disney content. Additionally, Sora's design has changed, appearing more realistic to fit this world.

Kingdom Hearts IV was recently announced for the Nintendo Switch 2, which means it's coming to all platforms, including the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC via the Epic Games Store and Steam. However, the release date has yet to be revealed by Square Enix or Disney, but according to one Australian retailer, it may be sometime next year.

Anthropic has officially launched Claude Fable 5, a Mythos-class AI model that now available to the public, and to celebrate the launch Anthropic has also reset current and weekly session limits.

The release marks a major milestone for the company, offering users unprecedented access to a powerful system that balances performance with safety. Anthropic explains in its blog and a series of videos that after it conducted its preview of the Mythos model and discovered thousands of cybersecurity vulnerabilities, which meant the Mythos model could be used for nefarious practices if used by the wrong hands. So, Anthropic created a new model based on the Mythos model, but implemented safeguards.

Fable 5's capabilities surpass those of previous models, excelling in complex reasoning, natural language understanding, and multi-step problem solving. According to Anthropic, the model has been made safe for general use while retaining the advanced features of its Mythos sibling. The company also writes that if users begin asking questions in the following areas Fable will detect the line of questioning and prevent any misuse of its capabilities. Those areas are: cybersecurity, biology, chemistry, and distillation.

FromSoftware's The Duskbloods will be playable on the Nintendo Switch 2 this summer, as Nintendo has confirmed during a recent Direct.

FromSoftware has developed The Duskbloods with a focus on multiplayer, with the setting being inspired by the studio's iconic title Bloodborne. From the above trailer, we can see Duskbloods is shaping up to be a gothic, action-packed experience, as players will be taking on not only other players but also the environment.

The title is expected to leverage the Switch 2's enhanced hardware to deliver a smooth experience in a portable package, and while we don't have any performance metrics yet, The Duskbloods is a Nintendo Switch 2 exclusive, meaning it has been specifically developed for the Nintendo Switch 2 hardware, as opposed to being a port.

Razer's latest microphone supports USB-C, so it's versatile, but it's also built to deliver a professional-grade sound thanks to its built-in audio DSP. The new Razer Seiren V3 Pro is built for creators, streamers, and gamers of all sizes, delivering broadcast-quality audio with the simplicity of a plug-and-play setup.

And it's packed with impressive features, like support for 32-bit float recording via Razer Synapse on Windows, expanding on the standard 24-bit recording to offer a wider dynamic range and more detailed sound. 32-bit recording (with a 50 Hz to 16 kHz range) is also useful when capturing from a louder or more dynamic source, such as an instrument. Part of the premium design of the Razer Seiren V3 Pro is the built-in audio DSP, which means all sound processing is handled on the device rather than on the PC it's connected to.

This includes onboard effects and audio tools such as an AI noise remover, compressor, limiter, and expander. In addition to dual USB-C inputs, the Seiren V3 Pro supports XLR connectivity for pro setups with audio interfaces, mixers, and other hardware. As for the microphone itself, you've got a 30mm dynamic capsule with a cardioid polar pattern.

Xbox's new strategy boss, Matthew Ball, recently sat down with The Game Business to discuss how he and his team, led by new CEO Asha Sharma, are looking to turn the business around. In addition to talking about the return of Xbox exclusives, with the new Gears of War: E-Day and Clockwork Revolution set to be 'Xbox console exclusives,' he also touched upon the future of the brand and Xbox hardware.

Namely, Project Helix, the upcoming console-PC hybrid device from Microsoft and Xbox, has been officially announced. Although details such as hardware specs and the architecture of the internal AMD CPU and GPU are still to be confirmed, the company has stated that Project Helix is being positioned as a premium, powerful gaming device. And in the meantime, it's focused on restoring Xbox's status as a premium console brand in gamers' eyes.

The only problem is that skyrocketing prices for memory and storage are making things difficult for Xbox (and others) to deliver both affordable and readily available console hardware. And with demand for Xbox Series X|S consoles exceeding supply, the company is rethinking its approach to Project Helix as "the crisis is not yet getting better."