Blizzard is incubating lots of new ideas for fresh games and new IP, some of which should see a mainstream release.

We know that Blizzard is working on a bunch of new projects. Some guaranteed titles include Diablo IV and a host of mobile game adaptations, but there's also secret games in early incubation phases. Led by Blizzard co-founder Allen Adham, who returned to the company in 2016, the studio's incubation branch has many teams busily cooking up interesting new experiments that may manifest in new IPs for the service game titan.

In a recent interview with IGN, Blizzard co-founder Allen Adham reiterates the company's strong pipeline, becoming the third major exec to talk up the developer's future slate.

"Today we have five public facing teams. But we have more new games in development at Blizzard today than we've ever had in our history," Adham said, echoing previous words from ex-Blizzard president Mike Morhaime and current president J. Allen Brack. "You can see now, many years later, we can take our many experienced game developers and use them to seed multiple new teams at the same time. I think we're heading into a very bright future."

"I'm pretty proud of how many new teams we've started and how many new ideas we've been able to build those teams around."

Valve's PC gaming marketplace continues its juggernaut reign over the platform with strong datapoints and metrics.

In a rare candid look at internal metrics on the Steamworks blog, Valve revealed some interesting tidbits about its digital marketplace. The storefront-platform attracted 90 million monthly active users in 2018, up more than 34% from a year ago.

Over half of those users logged in every day, too: Steam had 47 million daily active users, up a strong 42% year-over-year, and peak concurrent players (or the total amount of users on at the same time) increased to 18.5 million. These metrics are used to determine proper engagement levels, which is something that every store needs to have in droves. Sales are most important, though, and Steam also shined here with 1.6 million new purchases made every month.

Steam also saw considerable global expansion. The store now sells games to more than 45 countries worldwide and accepts various currencies to boot. Perhaps the most profound growth is Steam's adoption in Asia, and the region is now sits closely behind North American and Western Europe in playerbase numbers.

This afternoon Micron exercised its right to call in Intel's interest in the joint IMFT venture. Micron has more than hinted the company would go in this direction and stated clearly it was on the table in October.

Intel has up to one year to vacate its half of the joint venture that centers mainly on the Lehi, Utah HQ of IMFT. Which is where the two companies have co-developed several generations of memory technology. The two companies will spend the remaining time shipping 96-layer TLC memory and 3D XPoint. Both companies began developing next-generation flash products post IMFT, with each choosing to focus on separate technology paths to better suit focused markets.

Second generation 3D XPoint memory development will continue. The only fab manufacturing first generation 3D XPoint is the Lehi, Utah facility.

Intel is not phased from Micron's actions. The company has fabs already manufacturing NAND flash and is ample more capable of manufacturing 3D XPoint technology.

As a huge PVE-driven live service game with tons riding on it, Anthem needs to hit everything just right. Matchmaking is a big part of this and BioWare says gamers will have access to team-finding systems across every in-game activity.

Matchmaking makes everything easier in grindy online games and fosters a sense of recurring engagement among players. Without these tools, it can be tough to find a competent team for a big raid event, especially when you and your friends' schedules don't always line up (looking at you Destiny). Luckily Anthem will have matchmaking searches for all activities in the game, from the freeform exploration to story missions and the challenging end-level strongholds.

BioWare's Ben Irving recently confirmed the news on Twitter, re-affirming the studio's commitment to Anthem's team-based focus. But this also neatly ties into Anthem's engagement-driven business model that sees playtime and most importantly interactivity as major motivators for the live service revenue cycle.

Nintendo has confirmed its Virtual Console retro gaming storefront will live on as part of the Switch Online service, and now there's evidence that SNES games will join the growing NES game collection.

Direct references to multiple SNES games have been found in code for the Switch Online service, strongly hinting the premium subscription service will soon expand with Super Nintendo titles. Switch hackers like Kapu datamined the service's code to uncover "strings" to 22 SNES games including hits like Super Mario World, Star Fox, Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past, and Super Mario Kart. It's worth mentioning that a lot of these games are found on the SNES Classic Edition.

This development makes a lot of sense. Nintendo's Reggie Fils-Aime confirmed both the NES and SNES Classic Editions would be retired after they're sold out, and that Switch Online would be the only place to play these retro games. Fils-Aime's words of course led us to the logical prediction that the $20 a year service would further evolve into its own "Netflix of games" subscription akin to Xbox Game Pass, using expanded platforms like SNES, N64 and maybe even Game Boy Advance as a means to attract users. Thus Virtual Console would basically be an all-you-can-play "Nintendo Game Pass" model instead of a piecemeal purchase storefront.

Exclusive: AMD surprised the world with the announcement of the Radeon VII during CES 2019 last week, with it being the surprise announcement before its bigger unveiling of Navi towards June/July this year.

The new Radeon VII otherwise known as Radeon 7 is a revamped Vega graphics card, where at the end of the day it's just a Radeon Instinct MI50 accelerator that was released in November last year. We have the same Vega 20 GPU on the fresh new 7nm node, the same 16GB of HBM2 memory, and similar GPU clocks to the new Radeon VII graphics card.

Since the announcement I reached out to some industry contacts who said there will be "less than 5000" made. The same source said AMD is losing money on each card sold as they are, as I said before, just Radeon Instinct MI50 cards that are being re-purposed into 'new' Radeon VII cards.

Antec's new P101 Silent is built specifically for PC enthusiasts who want to match quiet gaming with performance.

The P101 Silent is part of Antec's Performance One series and comes in a mid-tower form factor that features sound dampening panels on the front, side, and top panels to help cut GPU and fan noise in demanding gaming or work sessions. It can fit a full E-ATX motherboard and has enough room for a full-sized GPU up to 450mm in length, while also featuring four built-in fans for cooling (3x 120mm fans in the front and 1x 120mm fan in the back for exhaust).

Antec's latest case also sports ample room for up to 11 drives (8x 3.5" HDDs, 2x 2.5" SSDs, and 1x 5.25" disc drive) and removable front and bottom dust filters ensure easy cleaning and maintenance. The P101's nifty back door allows PSU installation from the rear for easy setup or swap-outs.

G.Skill today announced a new Trident Z RAM kit with boosted frequency speed for AMD's performance-driven X399 platform.

G.Skill's new Trident Z memory clocks in at a speedy DDR4-3466MHz under quad-channel configuration, and sports tight CL18-22-22-42 timings. The 32GB kit comes with 4x8GB modules with 1.35V power consumption, and premium RGB flair adds a nice color splash to any build.

Specifically optimized for AMD's X399 platform, the kit has been validated on an ASUS ROG Zenith Extreme Alpha mobo outfitted with an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2950X CPU. Pricing wasn't revealed, but the Trident Z RGB kit is expected to ship in Q1 2019.

Capcom announced last week the Resident Evil 2 Remake demo and even despite the 30 minute timer on the demo more than 1 million players have already attempted it.

Capcom has announced this player achievement by the Resident Evil.net player counter, a website dedicated to showing the location and the amount of players in each country. At the time of writing this, 1,300,287 million players have downloaded and attempted the 1-shot demo. North America leads the pack with 274,173 attempts, Japan comes in second with 271,305 players and followed by the UK with 204,805.

What is most interesting though, despite there being now over 1.3 million players, the completion rate for the entire globe only sits at 28%. Meaning that a large majority of players did not see the ending of the demo, maybe this is an indicator the difficulty level we will see in Resident Evil 2 Remake? It should be noted that these statistics have only been gathered by "Players who have enabled RE NET Play Data Settings." This could mean that there is many more players out there but don't want their data tracked. Last week the official data size and PC requirements were released by Capcom, if you are interested in that visit this article here.

Celeste will be getting a brand new free DLC very soon as the creator, Matt Thorson has released some details about when to expect it arriving and what it contains.

The Celeste creator took to his personal Twitter account to reveal the DLC details. Unfortunately the first dot point crushes Celeste fans' hope for the DLC to be released on the games anniversary, January 25th. Thorsons Twitter post also details that the DLC is "all one continuous chapter, no B-Side" and that it is based "after the current hardest levels in difficulty."The DLC will also feature "no strawberries" with "new items/mechanics" and will be completely free across all platforms.

Unfortunately no date was issued by Thorson, but we can expect that since it will not be ready for the games anniversary that it isn't that far off. Hopefully on the Celeste anniversary we will hear more news about the DLC as I can't really think of better time to announce something. Celeste is available on the Xbox One, PS4 and PC.