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Xbox hardware revenues decrease in the Q1'25 period and ultimately make up a small proportion of earnings.

Microsoft recently reported its Q1 Fiscal Year 2025 results that showed significant year-over-year growth for the Xbox brand. The games division raked in a total of $5.621 billion during Q1, with content and services raking in about 91% of earnings during the quarter. This growth was driven by the recognition of Activision Blizzard King earnings which had not been previously included during last year's Q1 period ($3.919 billion revenue).

Hardware, on the other hand, made $532 million, or 9% of the total. That's a large -31% year-over-year decrease from a year ago's $758 million, but a substantial +54% raise in quarter-over-quarter revenues (Q4'24 delivered just $345 million in HW).

Capcom is strongly benefiting from digital as the company makes 94% of its game sales volume from online storefronts.

As it is for most publishers, digital gaming is on the rise at Capcom. The company's Q2 report shows an ever-growing trend towards digital and catalog-oriented games. Consumers are opting to buy Capcom games digitally, with digital representing 94% of total game unit sales volume for the Q2 period.

In fact, the proportion of digital sales has been over 90% across the past five quarters in a row.

If you've been worrying about what you're going to do in a year, when support runs out for Windows 10 - and you really don't want to upgrade to Windows 11 (or hardware requirements mean that you can't) - then Microsoft has thrown you a lifeline.

Albeit a lifeline with a cost attached, but this is the first time that Microsoft has actually made the scheme to pay for extended support available to the average consumer - with a charge of $30.

Previously, Microsoft has enacted ESU (Extended Security Update) programs for enterprise and education users, with subscriptions per user, but this personal individual option is new.

Nintendo's latest bright idea is a music app, featuring a whole gamut of tunes from its game library, for Android and iOS devices.

It's out now and you can download the Nintendo Music app from the Play Store, or Apple App Store, and stream your favorite music from the various Nintendo franchises providing you have a Nintendo Switch Online membership, and you're in the US or Canada.

It's possible to download music for offline listening, as well as streaming, and you can create your own playlists, or pick from a bunch of premade playlists, all as you'd expect from a Spotify-style offering (albeit on the light and fluffy side, admittedly).

Apple sprang a trio of new M4 Macs on us this week, just as rumored, but the firm has also stealthily upgraded the current MacBook Air models in the background - now equipping them with 16GB of RAM as a base loadout.

As you probably haven't missed, all the Macs revealed this week - first we saw the iMac M4, then the Mac mini M4, and finally MacBook Pro M4 models - have 16GB of RAM at the entry-level, and Apple didn't hike the starting price because of this either (thankfully).

So, it makes some sense that Apple would apply the same treatment to the MacBook Air M3 (and M2), and indeed all these laptops now come with 16GB as a minimum, with the price sticking at the same level.

AMD's Ryzen 9800X3D has become a hotbed of speculation recently, and its potential price is one area where we've seen a fair few theories flying around - and here comes another, with a claim that the new X3D CPU will be $30 more expensive.

$30 more expensive than what exactly? As you can see from the post on X by leaker Hoang Anh Phu, the assertion isn't qualified, it's just displayed as an 'up arrow' to indicate a price hike, followed by the figure of $30.

This can only mean that AMD is set to price the Ryzen 9800X3D at $30 more than its predecessor (despite some theories on X that it suggests a 30% price hike, though we don't see how you arrive at that conclusion).

Ubisoft promised three years ago now that it would be making blockchain games, and here we are: introducing Champions Tactics: Grimoria Chronicles, a new PvP blockchain RPG that has playable NFTs that cost as much as $63,000 using in-game currency.

Champions Tactics is dubbed a "PvP tactical RPG game on PC" that was developed and published in-house by Ubisoft, where it features collectible figurines of a bunch of warriors from the in-game fantasy world of Grimoria. Players will build squads of 3, and then take to battle in turn-based combat, alrighty then.

Web3 blockchain uselessness is in the form of collecting figurines to battle with, reports IGN, explaining that "when you first start the game, you're given some temporary figurines to play with, but you'll eventually need to either purchase actual figurines, aka NFTs, from other players using either in-game gold or cryptocurrency, or craft your own using the "Forge" system which also requires either in-game currency or crypto".

OneXPlayer is getting closer to the launch of its new OneXFly F1 Pro gaming handheld, which is powered by up to AMD's new Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 "Strix Point" APU and a delicious 7-inch 144Hz OLED display.

The new OneXFly F1 Pro gaming handheld will be the first to market powered by AMD's new Strix Point APU, with the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 chip featuring 12 cores of Zen 5-based CPU power, and the beefed-up RDNA 3.5-based GPU that will provide an entire new level of portable gaming on the OneXFly F1 Pro handheld.

The company looks to be making its new OneXFly F1 Pro gaming handheld with a few different AMD chips: the Ryzen 7 8840U, Ryzen AI 9 HX 365, and Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 chips. We know it'll weigh in at 596g (1.32lbs) and sport RGB backlit analog sticks, and RGB backlit nameplates in the bottom left and right corners, which can be tweaked to show custom text (a nice touch).

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger made a "big mistake" when he took over as CEO three years ago, with a damning new report from Reuters stating that Gelsinger's comments over the years have strained the relationship wtih TSMC, losing the company a lucrative 40% discount in the process.

In the write up by Reuters, the site points that out that Intel had a "sweet deal" going with TSMC, where it would make the chips that Intel designed, but couldn't produce. TSMC was offering "deep discounts" to Intel, according to "four people with knowledge of the agreement".

Reuters says that instead of Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger nurturing the relationship with TSMC -- with Gelsinger hoping to restore Intel's in-house manufacturing process -- ended up offending TSMC by calling out Taiwan's precarious relations with China. Gelsinger said in 2021: "You don't want all of your eggs in the basket of a Taiwan fab". However, in December 2021 encouraging US investment in US chipmakers, Gelsinger said: "Taiwan is not a stable place".

Sony officially launches its beefed-up PlayStation 5 Pro console next week for $699, with the folks at 4Gamer giving me a good laugh with a review... yes a review of the retail box of Sony's new PS5 Pro console. There's even size comparisons between the PS5, PS4 Pro, and PS4 retail boxes. Check it out:

The review embargo for the PS5 Pro officially lifts on November 7 when the console goes on sale, so 4Gamer is sticking to that by reviewing just the retail box. The first sentence had me going "the box of the PS5 Pro, which is my favorite, is very black. The white hardware and text stand out against the seductive black, and the contrast between black and white really expresses the PS5 Pro".

4Gamer continues, hilariously writing: "I don't think this is a professional review. As for the smell, I have never tried to smell the PlayStation outer box or the equipment in my life, but I felt a very PS-like fragrance. It is probably the smell of the factory. It smells like it is shipped directly from the source. There is no sound from the box, but I can faintly hear a voice saying "Please let me out. Please let me out ." If this is not an auditory hallucination of me in a hurry the day before publication, it must be the PlayStation fairy".

Elon Musk's xAI startup is currently in the process of upgrading its Colossus AI supercomputer cluster from 100,000 NVIDIA Hopper AI GPUs, doubling it to an insane 200,000 NVIDIA Hopper AI GPUs.

Colossus is the world's largest AI supercomputer, and is using used to train xAI's Grok family of LLMs (large language models), with chatbots on offer for X Premium subscribers. Elon's massive xAI Colossus supercomputer cluster facility was recently toured (more on that in the links below) and took just 122 days to complete, something NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang recently called Elon Musk "superhuman" because of it.

NVIDIA recently posted some content explaining its partnership with Elon and xAI, with the company explaining: "The supporting facility and state-of-the-art supercomputer was built by xAI and NVIDIA in just 122 days, instead of the typical timeframe for systems of this size that can take many months to years. It took 19 days from the time the first rack rolled onto the floor until training began".

Rockstar's original Red Dead Redemption, which debuted on the Xbox 360 back in 2010, is finally available on PC. It only took 14 years to make the jump, but the iconic and classic open-world western is finally playable on everything from a Steam Deck to a high-end rig rocking the latest GeForce RTX Series graphics.

As expected, the PC version supports higher frame rates, resolutions, ultrawide aspect ratios, and technologies like DLSS and Frame Generation. The game's detail also increases thanks to expanded draw distances, crisper textures, and more environment detail. However, it's still a game from 2010, and the PC version is similar to the remastered release for the Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4 - in that not a lot has changed.

And with that, if you've got a GeForce RTX 4070 - one of the most popular GPUs among PC gamers - you'll be able to play the game at 8K 60+ FPS with DLSS.

Apple's new flagship M4 Max processor has been detailed, after the reveal of the M4 and M4 Pro chips, with the flagship M4 Max featuring up to 16 cores, up to 40 GPU cores, and support for up to 128GB of unified memory.

The company is claiming that its new M4 Max processor is 400% faster than the "latest AI PC chip" which is probably aiming directly at Qualcomm's flagship Snapdragon X Elite processor. The beefed-up Apple M4 Max processor has up to 16 cores of CPU power (12 performance cores, 4 efficiency cores), with up to 40 cores of GPU power, and support for up to 128GB of unified memory.

Apple's new M4 Max will find its way inside of the new wave of MacBook Pro laptops, with its 128GB of unified RAM offering up to 546GB/sec of memory bandwidth.

BioWare's Dragon Age: The Veilguard is out today. Based on early reviews and deep dives into the game's visuals, the consensus is that the studio "is back" after a couple of misfires - the live-service Anthem and the messy Mass Effect Andromeda.

That said, the response to Dragon Age: The Veilguard has not been uniformly positive. When the first gameplay footage debuted, many fans were shocked by the dramatic shift in the series' visual tone. Gone was the realism and over-the-top Game of Thrones-style violence of the first Dragon Age game, and in its place, a more 'cartoony,' vibrant, stylized, and almost Pixar-like world. It is a deliberate design choice and one that many have also praised.

Outside of future updates and any potential expansion, BioWare's next major release will be a new game in the beloved Mass Effect franchise. It will pick up the story after the climactic conclusion of Mass Effect 3 and continue the story of Commander Shepard and the N7 crew. To quash any rumors that the next Mass Effect will change the look and feel of the franchise for a more stylized approach, the game's director, Michael Gamble, posted the following statement to social media.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is scheduled to release on December 9, and ahead of the title's highly anticipated launch we have some details about how it will run performance-wise on Xbox consoles.

In an interview with WindowsCentral, creative director of MachineGames, Axel Torvenius explained that closer to launch, the team will release more technical details about the performance of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, but what they can say for now is the team is targeting 60fps for both the Xbox Series X and Series S. Torvenius said there won't be compromised visuals or the experience of the product between the consoles, and the idea of targeting 60fps was to make the game feel "cohesive" for players.

Torvenius has previously revealed details about Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, with the creative director teasing back in September that players will be encouraged to overcome enemies in ways that don't involve guns, and that guns won't be the "primary way forward". Torvenius explained that players will need to be just like Indy, and "use your wits and your whip". The decision to steer players away from gunplay was made to compliment the character of Indiana Jones, who doesn't have superpowers and typically overcomes his opponents by outsmarting them.

NVIDIA's DLSS 3.5 Ray Reconstruction, which debuted in 2023, has been a game changer for PC games with multiple ray-tracing effects - particularly those with ray-traced reflections. It's an AI-powered denoiser, a part of the rendering process that cleans up an image.

NVIDIA's Ray Reconstruction AI model was trained on over 6X the data used for DLSS Super Resolution and Frame Generation. It's a game-changer that 'fills in the gaps' in a way that dramatically improves the image quality of ray-traced effects. Reflections become sharper and more detailed, and the lighting looks more realistic and cinematic.

The difference is so big that games with ray tracing look better on GeForce RTX rigs - plain and simple. The good news is that AMD is working on a similar-sounding AI denoiser that could be part of RDNA 4's new "AI capabilities." Also, its FSR super-sampling or upscaling is going AI.

Yesterday, we reported on AMD's Q3 2024 financial results, which showed revenue and growth once again driven by its Data Center segment. Regarding AMD's Gaming business, which covers Radeon products for PC and console production for Sony and Microsoft, revenue was down 69% - with extremely thin profit margins.

As part of the earnings call, AMD CEO Lisa Su addressed the slump in the company's gaming business by teasing its next-generation RDNA 4 products. She confirms that RDNA 4 GPUs are on track to launch "in early 2025" and has teased what to expect.

In addition to a "strong increase in gaming performance," Lisa Su has confirmed two RDNA 4 features for next-gen Radeon RX 8000 Series GPUs that should bring its capabilities closer to the NVIDIA and GeForce RTX juggernaut.

EA's chief executive, Andrew Wilson, is pretty stoked about the prospects of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, and who could blame the CEO following some of the reviews we've seen.

The game launches tomorrow and Wilson believes it has 'breakout potential' and we wouldn't bet against that right now.

Wccftech reports that the CEO made the comment in a Q2 2025 earnings call (as transcribed by The Motley Fool).

Apple just took off the wraps from new MacBook Pro 14-inch and 16-inch models with the M4 chip, which can pack an even faster SoC than we've already seen - namely the M4 Max - plus a move has been made to a minimum of 16GB of RAM with the 14-inch flavor of the laptop (finally).

All of this was rumored - indeed Apple itself accidentally leaked the M4 Max yesterday, via its own website - and the 16GB of Unified Memory for the entry-level MacBook Pro 14-inch with M4 is, of course, very welcome.

The good news is that there's no price hike with the move to 16GB on that base MacBook Pro 14-inch, with Apple maintaining the MSRP at $1,599.

Activision has announced via its blog when the first season of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 will begin and what will be within the "colossal amount of free content" on the horizon.

The blog post explains that Season 1 will begin on November 14 and will add new multiplayer maps and modes, along with the next Zombie map, a slew of updates to Warzone, a new Warzone map, Area 99, the original Nuketown map, and more. More specifically, the new game mode is Infected and is currently available right now. Infected will spawn one player as a zombie, and they will infect other players until there are no players left in the game or the time runs out.

Area 99 is the new Warzone map, and it is set in the Nevada desert. The location will let players scourer over a top-secret government site, while also taking players through peculiar locations such as a mannequin assembly plant, factory warehouse, and other locations that will feature references to the iconic multiplayer map, Nuketown. The original Black Ops Nuketown from 2010 will also be returning to Call of Duty on November 1, and it will arrive with fresh new graphics.