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Although this is an issue that has been developing for over a year, the current memory crisis feels like it's accelerating (in the wrong direction) on account of existing stockpiles drying up and the fact that every consumer tech company, big or small, is now paying exponentially more than they were a year ago. This is why we've been seeing a string of recent price increase announcements from companies like Apple and Microsoft, and will probably see several more as the months roll on.

Throw in comments from big players like Lenovo saying that there's basically no end in sight, and we've now got even more bad news to throw into the mix. A new report from Jefferies Equity Research reinforces the bleak outlook, stating that memory prices will increase by another 40-50% in Q3 2026. And that's 40-50% on top of the current inflated prices.

Of course, it doesn't stop there. The research and analyst firm is also predicting that in Q4 2026, pricing will increase by another 30-40%. And with that, it's not hard to see why Apple's MacBook Pro is getting a $300 price increase, and the almost six-year-old Xbox Series X console is getting its price increased by $150. And to make the situation feel that extra bit existential, 2027 will also see price increases of around 40-45%.

Sony's foray into first- and third-party "live service" games for the PlayStation 5 generation has been widely reported on and criticized by fans for its impact on cinematic single-player games. Case in point: the studio behind Uncharted and The Last of Us, Naughty Dog, spent several years working on a Last of Us live-service multiplayer game that was subsequently canceled. The thinking here is that it could have invested that time into a third single-player game or something else.

Throw in recent high-profile failures like Concord, the lukewarm response to Horizon Zero Dawn spin-off Horizon Hunters Gathering, and the 'competitive heist game' Fairgame$ being missing-in-action, and you get the impression that Sony is probably looking to adjust its approach to focusing on massive live-service games. Or, at the very least, realize how difficult it is to create a live service smash hit, as Bungie's Marathon (pictured above) continues to draw a small but passionate fanbase.

In a recent interview with Japanese publication Famitsu (translated), Hideaki Nishino, President and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE), was asked about the company's live-service game strategy with the context of Concord and Marathon failing to make an impact or meet expectations.

According to analysts, Grand Theft Auto 6 is on track to deliver the biggest gaming and entertainment launch of all time in terms of revenue when it launches on November 19, 2026. And without a PC version on day one, gamers and fans have two options: pick up the game on PlayStation 5 or PlayStation 5 Pro, or buy it for Xbox Series X|S.

Starting from $80 US, pre-orders for the game went live last week. And according to a post from IGN's social media account, per data from its affiliate linking program, PlayStation 5 pre-orders for GTA 6 are outperforming Xbox Series X|S pre-orders by a factor of 8X. Which means for every eight PS5 pre-orders, there's one for Xbox.

Now, when you factor in that there are exponentially more PS5 consoles out there than current-gen Xbox hardware, and that Grand Theft Auto 6's marketing deal with Sony has seen this pre-order announcement paired with "plays best on PlayStation 5" style taglines, it's not unsurprising. However, in a follow-up statement provided to Windows Central, an Xbox representative has said that this 8-to-1 figure "doesn't represent pre-order data."

I stopped playing Valorant a while back, but Riot's Vanguard anti-cheat has been running at boot ever since, whether I play or not. That is finally changing. Riot Games has announced Vanguard On-Demand, an update that stops the Vanguard driver from loading at Windows startup. With Vanguard On-Demand, the anti-cheat runs only when you launch a Riot title like Valorant or League of Legends. Once you close the game, Vanguard shuts down automatically. But there is a catch.

The catch is a security checklist Riot calls Vanguard Pre-Check. To switch to on-demand mode, your PC needs to be running at least Windows 11 25H2 with Secure Boot, TPM 2.0, Virtualization-Based Security, Hypervisor-Protected Code Integrity, and IOMMU all enabled.

What makes On-Demand possible is the work Riot did with Microsoft's Xbox OS Security Team on a Windows feature called Runtime Driver Attestation Report, which keeps a record of every driver loaded since startup. From there, Vanguard can check at launch whether anything suspicious was loaded while it was inactive.

Researchers at Cornell University have developed a way to restore old lithium-ion batteries to up to 95% of their original power. The method, called Direct Electrode-to-Electrode Regeneration, or DEER, does so without shredding, without complicated chemical processes, and at much lower cost than conventional recycling.

As lithium-ion batteries get older, a layer called the solid electrolyte interphase, or SEI, slowly forms on the electrodes. A thin SEI layer is actually needed for the battery to work, but after many charge cycles, it thickens, increasing resistance and reducing capacity. This buildup is the main reason electric vehicle batteries and energy storage systems are replaced, even when the rest of the battery is still in good condition.

Conventional recycling addresses this by shredding strong electrodes into a black, powdery material called black mass, then using energy-intensive chemical processes to extract important minerals to make new electrodes. DEER uses a completely different method. The electrodes are removed intact, soaked in an electrochemical bath that cleanly removes the SEI layer, and then returned to a new battery. This process also leaves a thin layer of lithium fluoride that helps keep the electrode stable and slows down future wear.

Power-related issues have been a running theme with NVIDIA's RTX 4090 and RTX 5090 cards. Despite newer 16-pin standards that were meant to be safer, repair shops and media outlets have become familiar with these cards ending up on their benches. The latest case out of Vietnam shows some of the worst power-related damage we have seen yet, severe enough to completely destroy a GPU and its VRAM.

The report comes from Vietnamese GPU repair outlet quyle.gpufix, which received two RTX 5090 cards for repair. The first had already been tampered with before arrival, arriving with no power, no GPU detection, and a missing A1 VRAM package. That card was repaired and returned the same day. The second was a different story entirely.

The second RTX 5090 had its 16-pin connector blown out completely, leaving no physical trace. The burn damage was severe enough to expose the copper layers of the PCB, and the destruction extended to both the GPU die and the VRAM, rendering them dead. Out of two cards, only one made it out.

A post in r/steammachine this week flagged what appears to be a white mini PC styled after Valve's Steam Machine, apparently available in China for around 4,680 RMB, or roughly $688. That appears to be an unbelievable value by comparison, since Valve's Gabe-cube starts at $1,049, and that's without a Steam Controller.

The listing claims that the higher-end configuration comes with an AMD Ryzen 5 5500 processor, an RX 6750 GRE 10GB GPU, 16GB of DDR5 memory, a JGINYUE B350I-PLUS motherboard, and a whopping 2TB of M.2 NVMe storage. We inspected the listing further and immediately spotted problems.

First, the Ryzen 5 5500 is an AM4 desktop processor, and AM4 does not support DDR5 memory. That's a basic compatibility error, and it's one of the first things anyone who knows the platform would catch. The B350I-PLUS is also an AM4 board, which only supports DDR4. So the DDR5 claim in the listing is simply wrong.

Windows 11 has some pretty strict hardware requirements that have made it difficult for many to upgrade from Windows 10. TPM 2.0, Secure Boot, and a relatively modern CPU are among them, and Microsoft has been firm about them. But a modder going by "Omores" has now decided to call that bluff, getting Windows 11 running on a platform from the early 2000s powered by DDR1 memory.

The system is built around an ASRock ConRoe865PE motherboard with an Intel i865PE chipset, a board regarded as something of a legend among hardware collectors for bridging generations. It allowed users to run Intel Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad processors while keeping DDR1 memory and AGP graphics. Omores took advantage of exactly that flexibility, pairing the board with an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600, a 65nm quad-core CPU that gives the platform enough grunt to be genuinely usable.

The GPU situation required the most work. The system uses an ATI Radeon HD 4650 AGP graphics card, and getting AGP acceleration working on Windows 11 meant hunting down Windows 7 64-bit ATI drivers from 2012 and forcing them onto the system with a custom INF file. The effort paid off, with AGP 8X fully functional and H.264 hardware decoding active. The system also boots from a Toshiba SATA SSD.

Hardware insider Kepler_L2, who has a solid track record of leaking GPU architecture details, has posted an updated PlayStation 6 bill-of-materials estimate on NeoGAF. According to the update, the BOM now sits at around $960. In March, he had the figure at $760, with a $699 retail price still on the table, with a reasonable subsidy. That window is looking a lot narrower now.

The BOM (or bill of materials) is simply the cost of components needed to build a single unit. It doesn't include labor, R&D, marketing, or logistics. It is basically the sum total of the hardware cost, and that's not all it takes to build a console. That means $760, or now $960, would just be the starting point for Sony's costs, not the final number.

Sony has almost always sold consoles below cost at launch, making back the margin through game sales and PlayStation Network. That math gets harder as the BOM climbs. Consoles have traditionally been subsidized by only around $100 to $200, which means a $999 launch price is still plausible, but a higher one isn't impossible if costs keep rising before 2027.

With Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced just under two weeks from launch, someone posted the game's full opening half-hour on Chinese video platform Bilibili. The footage surfaced barely 24 hours after Ubisoft sent the game out to creators and media. Video quality is rough, apparently captured off a review build, but it's enough to confirm quite a bit about what Ubisoft has built.

The opening plays out largely as you'd expect, with the remake looking like a faithful reimagining of the 2013 original. That said, a few things have changed. New scenes have been added before the Duncan Walpole boss fight, and viewers who watched the footage noted the extended intro makes Duncan look considerably more incompetent than he did in the original. Whether that's an improvement is going to be subjective, but it's a clear creative choice to flesh out his backstory before Edward deals with him.

The other notable change is a fix Ubisoft apparently made after fan feedback. In the original reveal trailer, Edward's leap of faith was performed awkwardly, drawing comparisons to how Eivor handled it in Valhalla before the tutorial. In the final game, it's been corrected. That one quietly slipped through, but players caught it immediately during the showcase months ago, and it seems like Ubisoft has listened.

The console sales numbers for May are in, and they're bad. Market research firm Circana has published its US video game hardware data for May 2026, and the console market just had one of its worst months in living memory. Xbox hardware unit sales in May 2026 were the lowest ever recorded for any May month. PlayStation didn't do much better, posting its worst May unit sales since 2000. That's not a typo; we're talking pre-PS2 territory for Sony.

The culprit, to no one's surprise, is the usual suspect: memory shortage. The average price paid for new video game hardware hit $502 in May, up 14% from $440 a year ago. The average PS5 was selling for $672, a 33% jump year-on-year, while the average Xbox Series unit sat at $524, up 22%. Those aren't small jumps either.

Sony took by far the worst of it. PlayStation spending dropped 43% year-on-year, with unit sales collapsing 58%. That's a freefall if I've ever seen one. When a PS5 disc edition costs $650, and the PS5 Pro has ballooned to $900, people start holding on to their wallets.

At the ISC 2026 conference in Hamburg, Lenovo executive director Martin Hiegl delivered what was intended as a joke but landed like a gut punch. When asked about the memory price outlook, he told the room that prices will "never" come back down to where they were before the crisis. The laughter that followed from the audience was probably nervous.

To be fair, Lenovo and ComputerBase (who first reported the comments) were clear that "never" is relative. Hiegl was really talking about the next five or more years, with prices expected to remain structurally higher through 2030 and beyond. Still, the underlying analysis is dead serious, and that leaves us worried.

According to Lenovo's presentation, DRAM and NAND began their rapid climb in late Q3 2025, and have since hit levels the industry itself did not see coming. Even with continued capacity expansion by major manufacturers, prices are highly unlikely to return to early-2025 levels.

Rockstar Games has no plans to print or release physical disc copies of GTA 6, sources tell The Hollywood Reporter.

Yesterday, we reported on rumors that GTA 6 could have a disc version ready by Christmas. It was believed that Rockstar would have a physical version of GTA 6 complete on disc to sell in December, a month after the game's initial digital-only launch in November. This apparently is not the case.

New reports from The Hollywood Reporter say that Rockstar will not release a physical disc version of GTA 6 this year, and that the publisher currently does not have any strategies that include producing and selling physical disc copies.

Intel's upcoming Nova Lake desktop platform is shaping up to be a serious power draw. According to leaker LC Tech Leaks, backed by well-known Intel leaker Jaykihn, Intel has revised its Z990 power design guidance, with a PL2 target of 474W reserved for nominal performance on dual-compute-tile Nova Lake-S CPUs. Anything exceeding 474W would apply specifically to overclocking scenarios on dual-die configurations.

For context, PL2 refers to the maximum power a CPU can draw during short burst workloads before throttling back to its sustained PL1 limit. A 474W PL2 figure is unprecedented for a consumer Intel desktop platform, territory typically associated with high-end desktop workstation designs. Given that the flagship Nova Lake-S dual compute tile configuration packs up to 52 cores, the number is aggressive but not entirely surprising.

The revised power guidance has also prompted discussion around a third 8-pin EPS CPU power connector appearing on some Z990 motherboards. Most current enthusiast boards ship with two EPS connectors, so adding a third raised questions about whether it was required for full performance with the 52-core chip.

The memory crisis, dubbed by many as the RAMpocalypse, has touched nearly every corner of the tech world. Console launches have been delayed, laptop prices have climbed, and PC builders are holding off on new rigs with no clear end in sight. Now, Micron has revealed a new business model that makes it clear that relief is not coming anytime soon.

During its Q3 earnings call, CEO Sanjay Mehrotra disclosed that the company has signed 16 Strategic Customer Agreements, or SCAs, with major customers, including hyperscalers. Most of these agreements run from 2026 to 2030 and cannot be canceled. Each SCA commits a customer to purchase a set volume of memory annually over five years, within a defined price band that has both a floor and a ceiling. The floor price is set to deliver what Micron describes as "a very robust gross margin, well above our peak quarterly margins in any past cycle."

The ceiling protects customers if prices climb even higher. Customers also pay an upfront cash deposit as a fail-safe, with $18 billion in cash and $22 billion in total financial commitments already deposited across all 16 agreements. These deposits are returned quarterly but are decremented if a customer fails to purchase the committed volume.

Over the past few months, Microsoft has been hard at work improving the Windows 11 experience, and for obvious reasons. It wants to win back the nearly billion users it left behind after ending security updates for Windows 10. But despite those efforts, Windows 10 fans are not budging, which has now forced the company to give them more breathing room.

Microsoft has quietly extended Windows 10's Extended Security Updates program by another year. The company updated its support page without any formal announcement and has since confirmed that it was not a mistake.

GTA 6's new $80 price tag may introduce a new mainline pricing model for AAA games moving forward, and some of the largest franchises are expected to embrace the higher-cost MSRP.

Games are getting more expensive to make, and developers are now charging more for the biggest titles. Nintendo was the first to raise game prices to $80 with Mario Kart, and now the biggest entertainment release of all time--GTA 6--will also cost $80. Pandora's box has been opened, so to speak, and S&P Global Market Intelligence analyst Neil Barbour believes other big games will be next.

In a recent interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Barbour says that gaming's other annual hits could get hiked to $80 too. This includes games like Call of Duty, NBA 2K, and EA's yearly sports games. These are the same exact titles that collectively raised game prices to $70 at the beginning of the console generation back in 2020.

The Steam Machine has not even launched yet and Valve employees are already talking about future iterations of the console. PC Gamer conducted an interview with Valve engineers Pierre-Loup Griffais and Yazan Aldehayyat, who divulged ideas on the potential release cadence of future Steam Machine iterations.

Griffais reportedly told PC Gamer that the lifecycle of the Steam Machine does not need to be nearly as long as the Steam Deck. (For reference, it has been four years since the Steam Deck's release.) Griffais elaborated that this logic comes from the way Valve views its performance targets for the two devices. Valve reportedly treats the Steam Deck as a console, but treats the Steam Machine more as a gaming PC. Griffais explained that the extreme range of various CPU and GPU hardware configurations in the PC space makes it more appropriate for the Steam Machine to have less stringent performance targets compared to the Deck.

Sadly, the Valve engineers clarified that they are not building a Steam Machine 2 right now, nor is the console's announcement right around the corner. The duo revealed that the RAM crisis and the "natural slowdown" of the gaming PC upgrade cycle will affect the launch window of a future Steam Machine model. Aldehayyat pointed out that the longer upgrade cycle of the modern gaming PC industry will likely extend the longevity of the outgoing Steam Machine, compared to what the console might have achieved if it had launched a decade ago. Aldehayyat also pointed out that the performance demands of PC games in the Steam library are also a contributing factor. "...Like if a bunch of new games come out on Steam that require more performance, that would probably make us wanna upgrade the Steam Machine faster."

When Valve announced the Steam Machine at $1,049 with semi-custom RDNA 3 graphics, the obvious question was: can't you just build something better in the same footprint? AMD engineer Jacob Terkelsen decided to find out, and the answer is a resounding yes.

Terkelsen shared his creation, the Terk Box v1.1, on X on June 24. The build uses a 3D-printed Mini-ITX case designed by 3DCatt, whose print files are now publicly available on Printables for anyone who wants to replicate the project. The chassis is built around a standard Mini-ITX motherboard and a 400W FlexATX PSU, making it a legitimate compact living-room candidate in the same vein as the Steam Machine.

The hardware inside is rather interesting. Terkelsen fitted a low-profile GIGABYTE NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060, an AMD Ryzen 5 5500, 16GB of DDR4-3200 RAM, and a 512GB NVMe SSD. The RTX 5060 alone represents a substantial leap over what Valve ships in the Steam Machine, which packs an RDNA 3 GPU roughly equivalent to a Radeon RX 7600M.

Sony's PlayStation Store listing for GTA 6 indicates that GTA Online will remain separate from the premium-priced story mode.

Rockstar has already confirmed that GTA 6 is a singleplayer experience, and it's clear that the game will launch without GTA Online packed in. The language that Sony is using around the game could mean GTA 6 and GTA Online could stay separated and sold as two different products. Technically, Rockstar already did this in 2022 when it opted to sell GTA V and GTA Online separately for reduced prices, and it looks like this model will be used for this cycle too.

While checking over the PlayStation Store, I noticed that GTA 6 is listed as "offline play only" when viewing the game on the PS5's version of the PS Store. That terminology is not used anywhere else in Sony's product materials for GTA 6. Elsewhere, including the browser PS Store and the PlayStation.com splash page, the game is listed as "offline play enabled."