PlayStation's peripheral business is growing alongside record-breaking hardware and software earnings.

Accessories are typically an overlooked part of the games industry. Hardware sales and content revenues are at the forefront, but the peripherals market is surprisingly profitable for gaming's largest platform-holder.

Sony's efforts to expand the PS5's lineup with a range of optional accessories are paying off. The company says that its PlayStation 5 accessories range, which includes the $199 DualSense Edge controller, has become very profitable.

Sony is highly confident that the PS5 ecosystem will become the most profitable console generation in PlayStation history.

Sony Interactive Entertainment executive management has lofty ambitions for the PS5. The console remains the central anchor point to Sony's games business, and the company is accelerating its plans to provide significant worldwide console availability and deeper content expansion across the board. Sony is aggressively bullish on the PS5's success, and based on the system's performance, they have every right to be.

In a recent business strategy meeting, SIE exec Eric Lempel had very strong words to describe the PlayStation brand and the PS5 ecosystem itself.

It's official: Sony's second-gen PlayStation VR2 is drastically outpacing the original PSVR headset.

The PlayStation VR2 is off to a good start, at least when compared to first PlayStation VR headset. In a recent business stream to investors, Sony Interactive Entertainment's Epic Lempel confirmed that PSVR2 launch numbers have not only exceeded that of the PSVR1, but the new PS5-powered headset has sold nearly 600,000 units worldwide.

For reference, it took the PSVR1 headset five months to achieve 915,000 unit sales.

Once again, a Meteor Lake mobile chip has been spotted with a new name that contains 'Ultra,' backing up a previous leak and chatter from the grapevine that Intel is ditching its traditional Core naming format.

The CPU in question is the Intel Core Ultra 7 1003H, so the theoretical switch is to call the processor Core Ultra 7 rather than Core i7. Benchleaks spotted this on Twitter, and it's from a PugetBench result.

Previously, we saw a Core Ultra 5 (rather than i5) in a leaked Ashes of the Singularity benchmark, so this is the second time we've seen this potential 'Ultra' branding as mentioned.

Windows 11 now supports a whole new bunch of archive formats, to the relief of many who for years may have been frustrated by the lack of the operating system's ability to cope with the likes of RAR files.

Expanded archive format support is not on nearly the same scale as Microsoft's Copilot, but it's still good to see (Image Credit: Microsoft)

We've all been there. Probably. Somebody sends you a bunch of files compressed in a different way to the standard ZIP archive, and you groan, heading off to try to find a third-party app to gain access to the contents. WinRAR was an old standby in the case of the mentioned RAR format, as many will doubtless recall.

Those hardships are now at an end, though, as at the Build developer conference, Panos Panay, Chief Product Officer and VP Microsoft Devices, announced that Windows 11 is getting support for RAR, TAR, 7-Zip and GZ formats. This will arrive in a new preview build later this week, we're told.

There's a lot of fuss right now about AMD and NVIDIA's new mid-range RDNA 3 and Lovelace graphics cards, with the RTX 4060 Ti just emerging today, and the RX 7600 set to be hot on its heels tomorrow - but what if you want a much more wallet-friendly GPU than either of those?

Intel's Arc GPUs are continually being improved thanks to a fast pace of work honing the drivers (Image Credit: Intel)

Well, maybe you should take a look at the third horse in the graphics card race, Intel, because the Arc A750 may not be new, but it has dropped to an all-time-low price.

Tom's Hardware spotted that the Arc A750 is on offer at Newegg currently for $199.99, knocked down from $250 where it was already a solid value proposition (the launch price was $290, you may recall).

Sabrent's new Rocket Q 2230 SSD, available in 2TB capacity, not only fits in Valve's Steam Deck but also delivers exceptional PCIe Gen4 performance and offers enough space to install several games. It's also compatible with the new ASUS ROG Ally PC gaming handheld, so it's a great choice for portable gaming fans.

Sabrent's new Rocket Q 2230 SSD is perfect for the Steam Deck, image credit: Sabrent.

Sabrent has put the new Rocket Q to the test inside a Steam Deck at its labs, and the results are impressive, with sequential read speeds of over 3,5000 MB/s and write speeds of over 3,200 MB/s. With Valve allowing for game installs to be copied over a network to a Steam Deck, you'll have enough speed to make a dent in the 2TB capacity in no time. Not to mention the benefit of faster load times to get into the action.

Specs-wise, the Rocket Q 2230 SSD offers speeds of up to 5,000 MB/s and 800K IOPS in a small package with 176-layer Micron TLC NAND flash and a fast 12nm Phison E21T SSD controller. Sabrent notes that the Rocket Q 2230 SSD has been designed with portable gaming devices like the Steam Deck, with an eye toward improving load times, capacity, and long-term reliability.

Microsoft has announced that Bing will be the default search engine for ChatGPT users.

Bing integration in ChatGPT has arrived in beta (Image Credit: Microsoft)

The move isn't a surprise, given the partnership between Microsoft and the maker of ChatGPT - the software giant has a big stake in OpenAI, and ChatGPT powers the Bing chatbot.

Going forward, ChatGPT will integrate Bing search, which Microsoft notes will mean a "world-class search engine built-in to provide timelier and more up-to-date answers with access from the web."

Zotac will be on hand at Computex 2023, showcasing several new products, with one of the highlights being a range of new ZBOX Mini PC products. As per the headline, one of these is set to be tiny - with the ZBOX PI430AJ with AirJet being hailed as the world's first solid state active-cooled Mini PC.

ZBOX PI430AJ with AirJet cooling, the world's smaller Mini PC, image credit: Zotac.

AirJet is a new revolutionary bit of technology from Frore System, with Zotac noting that in the ZBOX PI430AJ, two AirJet Minis can remove a significant amount of heat thanks to their rapid airflow. Small and silent, users can boost performance with increased thermal limits to make the most out of the internal hardware. And all without increasing the unit's overall size - which, per the imagery, looks like a small external USB drive.

Hardware-wise, it features an Intel Core i3 processor, 8GB of LPDDR5 memory, and M.2 SSD storage in a pocket-sized PC.

It sounds like Bungie is helping guide Sony on which live games could make the cut and which games should get the axe.

Sony acquired Bungie for $3.7 billion in 2022 specifically to help lead the new PlayStation live games initiative. Sony has seen other companies make billions of dollars from games like Fortnite, Genshin Impact, Call of Duty Warzone, and Apex Legends for many years and now Sony wants in on the action.

The acquisition has created a symbiotic relationship between the two: Bungie is helping Sony with its live service games, and Sony is helping Bungie market its lucrative IPs, including efforts to expand Bungie IP to Europe and Asia. In a recent investors briefing, Sony gives a better idea of how Bungie is assisting with PlayStation's new online-driven segment.