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ViewSonic is launching a new home theatre projector with the X2-4K, though what makes this different from other similar products is that it has been designed for the Xbox Series X|S consoles and even carries a "Certified for Xbox" tag.

Visually, the black look features a couple of green flourishes to add Xbox flavor to the design, but the underlying specs make it sound great for big-screen console gaming. The X2-4K LED Projector for Xbox supports native 1440p at 120 Hz or a 4K 60 Hz using DMD and TI XPR technology.

The X2-4K is a short-throw LED projector, meaning it can be placed fairly close to where the image will be projected, but perhaps the most exciting aspect is that in addition to the bright 2,900 LED lumens for the lamp, you're also getting a 4.2ms ultra-fast response time. With response times in most 4K projectors being okay or passable for most console gaming, this puts the X2-4K in the same category as LED monitors designed for high refresh-rate gaming.

As games become more complex, consumers can expect to wait half a decade or longer for new entries in their favorite franchises.

Games take a long time to make. Some, like mega-blockbuster hits like Naughty Dog's The Last of Us, Halo Infinite, or Starfield, can take quite a while. The AAA market demands a certain level of near-perfection in order to achieve multi-million sales, and gamers are quick to pick up on any bugs, issues, or monetization strategies. In this age of social media, controversies can spin up and out of control very quickly and doom a game before it even releases.

The advent of new games engines and enhanced technologies are believed to help accelerate game development, but as Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick rightly tells investors (FY23 call transcript), these new tools have only increased game development production cycles. Teams are simply able to do more than they ever have before, and that gives them more freedom to add more complexity to interactive experiences.

2023 is one of the best years in modern gaming. We've gotten and are getting so many high-profile titles this year (Resident Evil 4, Dead Island 2, Zelda Tears of the Kingdom, Diablo IV, Street Fighter 6, Final Fantasy XVI, Alan Wake II, Phantom Liberty, Starfield, Spider-Man 2..the list goes on and on) that gamers may have trouble keeping up.

We're seeing multiple publishers fire off some heavy-hitters, and Ubisoft is among them. Following a few years of declining performance, the French games publisher is set for a big come back with its substantial new AAA game release slate.

The lineup includes three main titles that should help turn the tides in Ubisoft's favor: The return-to-roots Assassin's Creed Mirage in October, the explosively-beautiful action RPG Avatar Frontiers of Pandora in December, and the surprise galactic scoundrel sim Star Wars Outlaws in 2024.

Ubisoft's new Star Wars Outlaws game takes players to the seedy underbelly of the galaxy, and we should be interacting with some of the most notorious criminals in the franchise...possibly even Jabba The Hutt.

Star Wars Outlaws was one of the biggest surprises of last week's big E3-timed events. Ubisoft kept the game under wraps pretty tightly, so most of the reveal was a total surprise. No one expected Outlaws, which looks to be a kind of Han Solo simulator with a brand new face, Kay Vess, taking the helm and forging her path into the realm of scum and villainy. Kay doesn't bring the suave, nerf-herding demeanor like Solo, but she does have a vigilante skill set that makes her one half femme fatale, one half cat burglar. It's an interesting combination, and players will be able to shape her story based on the choices they pick through dynamic dialog sequences and how they tackle missions.

There's a distinct push and pull between the syndicates and the corruption of the Galactic Empire, and players will need to pick who they choose to side with along the way--going full Imperial could close the door on syndicate missions, but the opposite could be true for the Empire, and could cut Kay off of the credits that she needs to clear her name.

Rockstar Games co-founder Dan Houser has launched Absurd Ventures, a new startup specifically aimed at telling stories across all media.

Following his departure from Rockstar back in 2020, Dan Houser is back in the media spotlight with Absurd Ventures, a new company that wants to write scripts and stories for games, TV shows, film, graphic novels--the works. Having penned most of Rockstar Games' biggest hits, Houser has proven his ability to create unique and gritty stories across multiple genres and settings. Now he wants to bring his skills to a wider market and help create new IP across different media sectors.

"We are building Absurd Ventures to create new universes and to tell great stories, wherever and however we can," Houser said. The company's debut YouTube video is an enigmatic pastiche of pop culture references and iconography with a three-word tagline that feels straight out Natural Born Killers or A Clockwork Orange: "Storytelling, philanthropy, ultraviolence."

Microsoft apparently has no plans to immediately raise the price of its Xbox Game Pass subscription service if the merger with Activision is approved, even with the significant added value of day-and-date Call of Duty games.

In the past, Xbox CEO Phil Spencer has indicated that Microsoft could eventually raise the price of the Xbox Game Pass subscription in an effort to keep up with rising games industry costs. Right now Xbox Game Pass has two tiers: The base tier that costs $10 a month on either console or PC, and then Ultimate for $15 a month, which offers bonuses like EA titles, access to both console and PC, and cloud streaming. So what happens if the Activision merger closes, and a bulk of Activision-Blizzard games arrive on the service?

According to a new court filing, it appears that Microsoft could keep the price of Xbox Game Pass at its current rates on a post-merger basis. This is surprising given the significant added value that big games like Call of Duty and even Diablo IV will add to the service, however the strategy could work in Microsoft's favor and help surge Game Pass signups. This provision is also a means of protection, as regulators and courts may disapprove of an immediate price jump following the merger's closure.

Microsoft has no intention of disruptive Activision Blizzard King's creative operations if the two companies are allowed to merge.

Microsoft's service-first model will disrupt Activision's core business, but to what extent remains unknown. Game Pass subscriptions have been proven to cannibalize and/or reduce sales of premium games. This effect is the exact reason Activision has kept its games off of value-oriented multi-game subscription services like Game Pass--the publisher very strongly relies on full game sales in its annualized Call of Duty franchise, a series that has amassed over 425 million copies and generated over $31 billion in revenues to date. Diablo IV's recent success also underlines this disruption; the game managed to make $666 million in just five days based on game sales alone, a feat that may not have been possible if the game was release on Xbox Game Pass on a day one basis.

While the Microsoft-Activision merger will undoubtedly disrupt Activision's core business model in terms of game sales, Microsoft does not want to shake up the publisher's creative process (unfortunately, this could happen regardless due to the subscription-based business model, which could lead to a change in how games are made, alongside layoffs that are typical after consolidation).

Yoshi-P regrettably announced that Final Fantasy XVI will have a day one patch on PlayStation 5, but the game is still playable fully offline.

Square Enix originally wanted to release Final Fantasy XVI as a complete game that didn't need a day one patch. Now the devs at Creative Business Unit III have announced the game will actually have a day one update that addresses very specific bugs, but this update won't be required to play the base game.

Anyone who owns a disc version can still play Final Fantasy XVI fully offline, as well as gamers who already have FF16 installed onto their PS5. The update is not mandatory in order to start playing the game. The update will be 300MB in size and will release on June 20th, just 2 days before the game's final release.

Quantum computers are extremely powerful, but are famously unreliable in providing a user with the same result. However, that may very well all change, according to scientists at IBM.

So, what is quantum computing, and how is it different from regular computing? The barebones of quantum computing rely on two phenomena or principles of quantum mechanics, superposition and entanglement. Superposition is the principle that a particle, in this case, a qubit, or a bit of quantum information, can be in two separate states at the exact same time. Entanglement is the principle that two particles can share the exact same location at the same time, despite a perceived distance between the two.

The difference between classical computers and quantum computers is that classical computing uses binary, or 1 and 0's. Qubits are able to be both 1 and 0 simultaneously, enabling much faster calculations to be performed as many calculations can be performed at once, compared to a classic computer that performs each calculation individually. Unfortunately, one of the main problems with quantum calculations is the inconsistency with results.

During a conference in Paris, Tesla CEO Elon Musk joked about purchasing Twitter for the staggering figure of $44 billion.

Musk explained on stage during a conference on Friday his mentality behind carrying out the purchase of Twitter, something he has done since the acquisition was finalized and the rollercoaster of a takeover began to settle. Musk said that he was "concerned" that Twitter was going in a direction that would have a "negative" or a "corrosive" impact on society, and that while the social media platform was admittedly "expensive," he wanted to make sure it would be a "positive force for civilization".

Looking from the outside in it may be hard to wholeheartedly determine that Twitter is in a better place than it was, but if you were to ask Musk, he would say that the platform is in a much healthier state post-October 2022. Musk said he thinks that any regular Twitter user would say their "experience has improved" as there has been a mass reduction in the number of bots and scams on the platform. Additionally, Musk points out that Twitter has removed "95% of child exploitation material on Twitter, which was a shock to see ... some of what was going on for 10 years."

A Diablo IV player has taken to Reddit to share the total amount of XP required to reach max level 100, revealing that half of that total XP would make the player level 85.

Blizzard Entertainment seems to have taken a page out of Jagex's book when it comes to calculating the total amount of XP required to reach a maximum level. RuneScape is notorious for having long grinds of a specific skill or multiple skills, and for a player to commit to reaching the maximum level in a specific skill, the player must be prepared to spend tens or, more typically, hundreds of hours of grinding.

In OldSchool RuneScape, for a player to hit the maximum level in a skill, they must reach level 99, or earn 13,034,431 XP. For a player to hit level 92 in a skill, they must earn 6,517,253 XP, meaning level 92 is technically halfway to level 99. Diablo IV is similar, with Reddit user Aganod44 pointing out that at level 85, a player will have around 243.5 million total XP, and the maximum level requires 487 million XP.

Ubisoft's new Avatar game may deliver one of the most captivating storylines of the year.

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora has an interesting aim. The game wants to meld first-person Far Cry-like action combat and free-roaming exploration while threading an interesting storyline through the experience. The result could be a compelling interactive journey into one of the most colorful worlds of modern entertainment.

Based on what we know about Frontiers of Pandora, the game will take on classic archetypes and motifs like the traditional Hero's Journey adventure that was first posited by Joseph Campbell. The game will have a distinct fantasy mythos undercurrent that carries the entire storyline; in Frontiers of Pandora, you play as a Na'vi that was specifically trained by humans to kill other Na'vi. Eventually you break away from the RDA and have to discover yourself, your culture, and to truly understand what it means to be Na'vi.

Streaming platform Kick wants to make its mark in the billion-dollar ad market, and has poached one of the biggest names in streaming.

xQc has signed an incredibly lucrative two-year agreement with Kick, a new fledgling streaming platform launched in 2022. The non-exclusive deal is worth nearly $70 million, with incentives that could raise the deal's worth to $100 million. xQc's agent Ryan Morrison tells New York Times reporter Kellen Browning that the deal is bigger than those signed by pro athletes.

"This is more than most professional athletes and megastars. This is one of the highest deals in entertainment, period."

Microsoft legal counsel suggests that the company could abandon the $68.7 billion merger with Activision if federal courts grants the FTC's request for a preliminary injunction.

The fate of the Microsoft-Activision merger may hang in the balance of a decision from Northern California's federal courts. In a recent court filing, Microsoft and Activision lawyers indicate that the acquisition could be terminated if Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley issues a preliminary injunction at the FTC's behest.

The U.S. antitrust Commission wants to stop the merger, and has challenged the deal in its own internal administrative courts instead of in federal court. This is by design: The FTC can effectively kill the merger through years-long process where the Commissioners, not the Administrative Law Judge who oversees the case, have the final say on merger approval. The FTC has been creative in its tactics. In the most recent motion, Microsoft lawyers say that the FTC opted for an 8-month schedule for the admin case rather than a shorter 5-month proceeding, which set the first hearing on August 2, well past the merger's July 18 expiration date.

Robot police officers are real and the Singapore Police Force have announced that many more are to be rolled out and put on duty.

According to a recent report from The Straits Times, the Singapore Police Force has conducted several small scale roll outs of these robot police patrols, while also working through five years of trials to come to the conclusion that robot officers will be "progressively deployed across Singapore." If this is your first time hearing of patrol robots, the Singapore actually first used them back in 2018 during a parade and abundantly during the COVID-19 pandemic as the patrol robots reminded people to socially distance.

Reports indicate that since 2019 Singapore has been using patrol robots at the Changi airport as means of maintaining traffic regulations. Since April 2023 two types of new robots have been spotted, and according to reports they are based on the Multi-purpose All Terrain Autonomous Robot 2.0 and 3.0.

As a large number of subreddits continue to say offline in protest to Reddit's new API changes, Reddit's CEO has conducted an interview that has no doubt thrown more fuel on the already enraged Reddit community fire.

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman sat down with The Verge for a quick 30-minute interview where he gave more context on the reasoning behind Reddit's API changes. For those that don't know, Reddit recently announced that it will be starting to charge third-party developers to use the platform's API. This change came after Reddit discovered that its API was being used to train potentially extremely lucrative AI tools.

However, the API pricing change will also wipe out the most popular third-party Reddit app Apollo, along with some popular third-party tools used by subreddit moderators. The Reddit community has decided to protest these changes by conducting an almost platform-wide blackout, with some of the largest subreddits going offline. Huffman doubled down on the decision to change Reddit's API pricing, saying in the interview:

Skin conditions can be major health problems that, unfortunately, often go undiagnosed. In an effort to help people identify possible skin conditions, Google is rolling out a new update to Google Lens.

While Google's new update won't be anywhere near as accurate as an official diagnosis from a qualified medical practitioner, Google is hoping its new update to Lens will be able to give users enough information to get them on their way.

So, what is the new update? Google has explained via its blog that describing an odd mole or rash can be difficult with words and that the new update to Lens will allow users to take a picture of the concerned region of skin and upload it to Lens.

Some weirdness in the world of AMD drivers for Radeon graphics cards, with two AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition releases adding F1 23 support. AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 22.40.57.06 for F1 23 covers all Radeon GPUs from the Radeon RX 7900 to the RX 6000 Series and even cards from the Radeon RX 500 Series.

That is all GPUs apart from one, the new AMD Radeon RX 7600. And so it looks like AMD has released an F1 23 optimized driver, AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 23.10.01.37, specifically for the Radeon RX 7600. And separately from the mainline driver update.

This isn't the first time we've seen a split in driver support for AMD drivers for the new RDNA 3-based Radeon RX 7000 Series, with the company taking a few months to unify its driver updates to support the new cards and previous generation cards after the launch of the Radeon RX 7900 and Radeon RX 7900 XTX in December.

Dell and Alienware have launched four new gaming monitors. Two new Alienware 27-inch displays called AW2724HF and AW2724DM.

Dell is aiming its new Alienware gaming monitors at gamers that looking to gain the competitive edge in first-person shooter titles as the AW2724HF is capable of a ridiculously fast 360Hz refresh rate, with a 0.5 ms GTG response time.

According to Dell the AW2724HF will also come with a Fast IPS display, FHD resolution (1920x1080), 400 nits of brightness, 1000:1 static contrast ratio, VESA AdaptiveSync Display Certification, and AMD FreeSync Premium. Notably, the 0.5 ms response time is only possible when running the monitor in Extreme Mode. The AW2724HF is selling for $459.99.

With NVIDIA dominating the GPU space, it's always good to see new players enter the game, Intel with its Arc Graphics line-up or Moore Threads, a Chinese-based tech company looking to create new GPUs for the PC gaming market.

But we already know that the Moore Threads MTT S80, even with its MUSA architecture with 14.4 TFLOPs of performance, 16GB of GDDR6, and a 256-bit memory bus, is something of a dud. Earlier this year, we reported on benchmarks for the new GPU appearing online, where South Korean outlet BullsLab showed it lagging the GeForce GT 1030. A passively cooled 30W GPU with only 2GB of VRAM and a 64-bit memory bus. Yikes.

The story isn't much better with the latest benchmarks, this time from Japanese outlet PC Watch, which shows the Moore Threads MTT S80 being absolutely destroyed by the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 150 Ti. Not only that, but PC Watch came across several titles that didn't even run on the card, and the most prominent issues look to be around DirectX 12 and Vulkan-based games.