Gaming

Microsoft says that Black Ops 6 was the "biggest Call of Duty release ever," but that success apparently has not been replicated for Black Ops 7.

While Microsoft has yet to confirm specifics (it probably won't), multiple reports indicate that Call of Duty is on a downslide. The $35 billion franchise was once a prestige brand that sold tens of millions of games per year and generated billions from microtransactions. That's all changed now that Microsoft is in control. Call of Duty games launch into Game Pass, which could negatively impact sales.

That's apparently what's happening, at least according to former Activision-Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick, who is currently involved in a class action lawsuit surrounding the Microsoft-Activision merger (Sjunde Ap-Fonden v. Activision Blizzard et al. Case No. 2022-1001-KSJM). According to Game File, a new document filed by Kotick and his legal team asserts that Call of Duty sales are down by 60% in 2025.

If the latest PlayStation download results are anything to go by, Electronic Arts could be set to deliver a record-breaking year for game sales.

EA was on a roll in 2025, at least on PlayStation. The publisher delivered multiple hits with both Madden and College Football hitting the sales charts running, as well as DICE's big comeback with Battlefield 6, which managed to sell 7 million copies in just 3 days time (up to an estimated 20 million).

Sony's annual list of top PlayStation Store game downloads adds even more evidence of EA's outperformance. According to the results, EA had 5 games on the top 20 most-downloaded PS5 games of 2025, tying with Microsoft, who also had 5 games on the list. Yet it's not just the quantity, but the positioning that matters here: in the US, EA had 3 out of the top 5 most-downloaded games on the PS Store. Microsoft, however, had no games in the top 5, and only 2 games in the top 10.

Call of Duty has not appeared in the PlayStation Store's top 5 downloads of the year, breaking a long-running franchise streak going back at least 10 years.

More evidence of Black Ops 7 potentially missing the mark has surfaced, this time indirectly from Microsoft's symbiotic rival. Sony recently published the top 20 most-downloaded games on PlayStation platforms, revealing what could be disappointing results for Activision. For the first time in 10 years, Call of Duty has been knocked out of the PlayStation Store's top 5 most-downloaded games.

The list shows that Call of Duty Black Ops 7 was #7 on the top PS Store downloads list both in North America and Europe. Based on the lists that Sony publishes every year on the PS Blog, the Call of Duty franchise has shown up in the top 5 downloads every year since 2015, with the exception of last year. In 2025, Battlefield 6 was #2 on the US download charts, handily beating Black Ops 7, whereas Europe gravitated towards Forza Horizon 5 and EA Sports FC25.

Another high-profile creative has left Ubisoft as the company faces financial and logistical challenges.

Ubisoft isn't in the best place right now. The publisher was just hit with a massive hack on Rainbow Six Siege, its prestige microtransaction revenue driver, and the company is also restructuring its business as part of a big deal with Tencent. Now Ubisoft has taken yet another blow, this time to its creative teams.

Today, Ubisoft revealed that Julian Gerighty is leaving the group after 15 years. "We want to share that Julian Gerighty, executive producer on the Tom Clancy's The Division franchise, is heading off to a new adventure at Battlefield Studios. While we'll miss him, his mark will live on at Massive and we'll continue to bring the world he's been part of creative to our players for years to come," Ubisoft wrote in an announcement.

Although its release is still a few months out, IO Interactive's 007 First Light was showcased at CES 2026 as part of NVIDIA's GeForce RTX announcements, and we got our first look at the game's PC system requirements. Where, in addition to 1080p 60 FPS being listed under the 'Recommended' header, the VRAM and RAM requirements left many confused.

In a follow-up post on social media, the developers have updated and amended the PC system requirements. "We are providing today an update to the PC system requirements for 007 First Light after the community flagged some inconsistencies in an earlier version of the listing," the post reads, "The earlier mistake was due to an internal miscommunication leading to an older version of the specs to be shared."

And with that, the big difference here is that the overall system memory requirement has been lowered from 32GB to 16GB, with the VRAM requirements for the 'Minimum' and 'Recommended' specs also dropping to 6GB and 8GB, respectively.

After deliberating with several companies, Apple has selected Google to provide the new "brain" for Apple's next-generation Siri slated to be released sometime in 2026.

Apple is incredibly far behind its competition when it comes to providing useful AI-powered software features across its range of products, with the company even failing to fulfill its promise to release a next-generation Siri capable of integrating throughout all of Apple's native applications. Apple even quietly removed an advertisement for the upgraded Siri that featured Game of Thrones and The Last of Us star Bella Ramsey.

Why is Apple so far behind in producing a competitive in-house AI model? Several technical difficulties, combined with the product not meeting Apple's exceptionally high standards for uniformity across its range of other products and services, are contributing factors. Apple has recognized that it's significantly behind the competition, such as Google's Gemini, OpenAI's ChatGPT, and Anthropic, and in June 2024 the company announced it was integrating ChatGPT for any prompts that couldn't be completed by Apple's on-device AI model.

Over on social media, an account named XBOX INFINITE posted an alleged screenshot from Forza Horizon 5 that includes pre-order details for Forza Horizon 6, ahead of its big Xbox Developer Direct presentation next week. Apparently, the pop-up appeared in-game, and the pre-order information included the game's release date.

Sources close to gaming publication VGC and tech outlet The Verge have apparently confirmed the release date or release window for the game as seen here as accurate, even though this appears to be the only recorded instance of a Forza Horizon 5 player being shown this Forza Horizon 6 pre-order pop-up. The release date is May 19, 2026, with Early Access available on May 15 for Premium Edition buyers.

This date applies to the Xbox Series X|S and PC versions of the game, as Microsoft has previously confirmed that the PS5 version will arrive at a later date. Forza Horizon 6 is the highly anticipated new open-world racing game from Xbox and Playground Games, with this latest installment shifting the racing action to Japan.

The current DRAM crisis is affecting all aspects of the PC industry, and right now, the rising cost of components like DDR5 memory is making the prospect of building a new rig or upgrading out of the question for many. And with GPU prices expected to rise in the coming months, there's a sense that PC gamers are going to have to make do with what they've got or can pick up for a reasonable price.

Yesterday, we reported on a rumor that NVIDIA would focus on delivering more 8GB GPUs, such as the GeForce RTX 5060 and RTX 5060 Ti, to the market this year. The big concern here is that 8GB will remain a bottleneck for gaming with higher graphics settings; however, the arrival of RTX Neural Texture Compression could be the relief the VRAM-constrained PC gaming market needs.

Part of NVIDIA's RTX Neural Shaders SDK for developers, the RTX Neural Texture Compression SDK leverages AI to "significantly" compress textures while maintaining image quality. And the latest 0.9 update from NVIDIA has sped up encoding by a factor of 6X, while reducing latency and saving up to 7X the memory footprint allocated for high-resolution textures.

Announced at CES 2026 and immediately made available as part of a Beta branch of the NVIDIA App, DLSS 4.5 has quickly exited its preview phase and is now available for all GeForce RTX gamers with the latest NVIDIA App update. DLSS 4.5 Super Resolution includes a second-generation Transformer model, five times as powerful as DLSS 4, that delivers notable improvements to lighting, motion clarity, and image detail.

NVIDIA notes that the app's DLSS Override mode has been updated with a new 'Recommended' setting that overrides Preset M with DLSS 4.5 Performance mode, and Preset L changes to DLSS Ultra Performance mode for 4K gaming. Due to the performance hit from using the newer, more complex model, NVIDIA notes that both the older and newer Transformer models are supported in both Quality and Balanced modes.

Although available for GeForce RTX 20 and RTX 30 Series graphics cards, DLSS 4.5 Super Resolution has "a heavier performance impact for these GPUs" due to the lack of native FP8 support. Although it's great to see this level of detail and control over which DLSS models to use for Super Resolution, there is a sense that the complexity will mean users will need to experiment to find the right balance between image quality and performance.

PS5 Pro owners, set your phasers to stun - as in a renewed and hopefully stunning level of image quality - because the next-gen version of PSSR is set to land in the next couple of months according to a new rumor.

As Wccftech spotted, the latest chatter on the subject of PSSR2 comes from Gust_FAN on X, who posted to say that the "update will be available between January and March".

In other words, Q1 2026, and this marries with what we've previously heard from another source, YouTuber Moore's Law is Dead. Gust_FAN is a Japanese insider and a generally reliable source with something of a track record, as Wccftech points out, and the same holds true for Moore's Law is Dead (at least in my book, although not everyone agrees on Reddit, ahem).

Rockstar Games may be testing a 32-player mode for GTA 6's online component, new court documents reveal.

The first details of GTA 6's online mode may have been inadvertently revealed as part of an ongoing court case. Rockstar North recently fired multiple employees for allegedly divulging information in a Discord chat room. The employees brought the matter before the courts, and it appears some of what was said by the fired employees has been revealed.

According to the court documents, which were viewed by People Make Games, one fired Rockstar employee had mentioned doing a playtest session of 32 players in the Discord. channel. The developer said: "Absolutely no idea, they mentioned the large session we did today 'being difficult to do' but that was 32 players, not sure how that was difficult."

The president of Nintendo, Shuntaro Furukawa, has been questioned on the RAM pricing crisis and how that might affect the Switch 2 - and the swift answer is it won't, at least for the time being.

Furukawa was interviewed by Kyoto Shimbun, a daily newspaper in Japan (Kyoto, as you might guess) on a range of topics related to Nintendo, in a paywalled article translated by VGC (as flagged by TechRadar).

The Nintendo president was asked about the challenges posed by the lower profit margin on the Switch 2 compared to its predecessor, and noted that these things depend on "component procurement conditions" as well as the impact of global currency fluctuations and tariffs.

Call of Duty could be available on the Nintendo Switch 2 sooner than gamers had hoped, and it might debut on the handheld imminently based on a fresh rumor.

We know that Call of Duty is inbound for the portable, the main question is the timeframe, and apparently it's closer to hand than expected based on some fresh revelations courtesy of data mining.

As Eurogamer reports, Reality posted on X (see above) to say that the game is imminent for the Switch 2, and should be part of the next round of Nintendo announcements.

Valve's Steam just set a new concurrent player record with over 42 million users (42,042,778 to be exact) logging into the platform on January 11, 2026. Breaking the previous record of 41.6 million set in October 2025, this new milestone isn't tied to any specific game release, so, outside of it occurring during the tail-end of the holiday season, it's indicative of Steam's continued growth as the premier PC gaming platform.

Naturally, the record was set over the weekend, when most gamers jump in to play. The latest figures and records come from SteamDB, which also showcased Steam's growing user base mapped over the past decade. The chart shows that Steam's popularity has effectively doubled since 2020, rising from around 20 million concurrent users to over 40 million.

According to the report, out of the over 42 million users logged into Steam, over 13 million were playing games at the time.

Intel launched its new Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" CPUs at CES 2026 last week, and it looks like the new Panther Lake-powered gaming handhelds should offer performance close to what we'll see out of Sony's next-gen PlayStation 6 handheld.

In a new post on X by leaker @Kepler_L2 who posted: "PTL handhelds might be a great ballpark estimate for how PS6 Handheld will perform/how PS5 games can be scaled down to very low TDP. Z2E is too slow and Strix Halo is too fast, but PTL @ 30W should be very similar to Canis @ 15W".

Panther Lake has a fantastic integrated GPU in the form of the Arc B390 with 12 Xe3 GPU cores that provides some great performance, a good chunk of CPU cores, and the NPU. In its handheld SKU form, we should expect Intel to cut the fat (NPU) and keep the gold (CPU + GPU) and then it can be fully unleashed for next-gen gaming handhelds.

Baldur's Gate 3 would have come to the Nintendo Switch 2 if it was up to Larian Studios, but that much-wanted port will not be happening, the developer has confirmed.

You may recall that rumors were swirling late last year about such a port for the Switch 2, and the topic came up in a Reddit 'Ask Me Anything' (AMA) session, as Gamespot noticed.

As you can see in the thread above, Larian's founder and CEO Swen Vincke chimed in to say:

GameStop is officially closing as many as 400 retail locations across the United States, as part of the company's stringent cost-saving method.

A GameStop may be closing around you, with a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing revealing the company is anticipating the closure of a significant number of stores in fiscal 2025. The same filing revealed that GameStop would pay out GameStop's CEO, Ryan Cohen, up to $35 billion in stock options if he is able to increase the company's market cap to $100 billion.

The US isn't the only place GameStop intends to make physical store closures, with plans also in place to reduce physical stores in both Canada and European countries. Since the stock spike in 2021, GameStop has really struggled to adapt to the exponentially growing digital landscape for video game purchasing, with many gamers now turning to services such as Steam, Xbox Store, and the PlayStation Store over making a trip to a local GameStop.

Valve revealed the Steam Machine in November last year, with the announcement stating the new device was to arrive sometime in 2026.

One of the biggest points of the Steam Machine's unveiling video and following interviews Valve conducted with the press was affordability and ease of use. Valve hasn't officially said how much the Steam Machine will be, and since the unveiling speculation has been all over the place with some hoping for approximately $500, and others warning that it will be a $1,000+ PC/console.

The latest leaks come from Czech retailer Smarty.cz, which lists the 512GB Steam Machine model for about $950 and the 2TB model for $1,070. It should be noted these prices are estimations, and were conversions, which means US buyers from local retailers may not have to incur some taxes or trade tariffs.

Microsoft recently officially confirmed it will be hosting the Xbox Developer Direct 2026 on January 22 at 10 AM PT, where the company will showcase three titles.

However, Shinobi602, a prominent leaker with a healthy track record for predicting reveals, said in a post on the ResetEra board that Microsoft has a surprise reveal, a "secret fourth game". Shinobi602 was asked what the game is and the leaker said they aren't too excited about the title as it doesn't match their personal taste. Other than that, no information was given on the secret fourth game.

So far three games have been confirmed for the Xbox Developer Direct 2026, Forza Horizon 6 from Playground Games, which is certainly one to keep your eyes on after the developers said the open-world experience within Japan will "blow fans" away. Next is Fable, which Playground Games has been working on for seven years. Fable was originally meant to release in 2025, but was delayed to a 2026 release window, and some insiders have even said it could possibly slip into a 2027 release window.

Rockstar Games has confirmed in court proceedings that Grand Theft Auto 6 has leaked to the public three times, resulting in three separate instances of employees being let go from the developer.

Rockstar cited its zero tolerance policy it has in place against leaks, and pointed to three instances where suspected individuals were let go from the company over leaks. Notably, Rockstar wrote that it "dismissed a Rockstar employee in Lincoln, UK in April 2025, who it alleged disclosed confidential information about GTA 6 to a third party who published the information to social media."

Additionally, Rockstar pointed to one dismissed employee in the US in November 2023, and another in India in November 2025. The last instance was dismissed for two separate acts of information leaking. The confirmation from Rockstar about a UK employee being fired in April 2025 lines up with a leak from X user GameRoll, which listed a bunch of information in a lengthy X post about the game's use of weight mechanics, "relationship bar," different gameplay options between male and female characters, dual protagonist option, details about characters, and more.