Gaming

The region-locked Switch 2 might have created a growing unprofitability situation for Nintendo, as one analyst believes Nintendo is losing money each time it produces a Japan-only console.

Nintendo has asserted that the Switch 2 is generally produced and sold at a profit, but that may not be true for all of its console variants. Toyo Securities analyst Hideki Yasuda estimates that the Japanese-exclusive, region-locked Switch 2 is currently unprofitable for Nintendo, and as the company sells more of these systems, the divide between profits and losses will expand. The company introduced the model in a bid to improve its domestic market share, and the losses are incurred strategically to help promote a cheaper, more affordable product.

"As a result, the Japanese market is experiencing a growing negative margin situation, where the manufacturing costs of hardware exceed the selling price, and the more the console sells, the worse its profitability becomes," Yasuda wrote in an analyst piece for Diamond Online.

Epic Games today raised the price of all Fortnite V-Bucks microtransaction bundles, reducing the buying power of the dollar and making each purchase more favorable for Epic.

Today, Epic Games announced a price hike across its V-Bucks digital currency--a move that could foreshadow other live service games in the near future. Although Fortnite has generated well over $20 billion in revenue since 2017, Epic says that the costs of running the world's most popular online game are increasing, and so too are the V-Buck prices.

"The cost of running Fortnite has gone up a lot and we're raising prices to help pay the bills," the company said. "Existing V-Bucks gift cards still redeem at their printed values."

Capcom reveals some of its post-launch plans for Resident Evil 9 Requiem, including additional modes and a new narrative-driven expansion.

The latest Resident Evil game will continue engaging players throughout 2026 with some new updates, including a fully-fledged photo mode to capture the impressive visuals of the RE Engine, as well as a new paid story expansion that will flesh out more of the game's mythos and lore.

"We are planning on adding more content. First, the much-awaited photo mode. On top of that, there's another surprise coming around May. We're planning to add a mini-game. One more thing: We are planning to make extra story content. In this story, we will delve deeper into the world of Requiem," game director Koshi Nakanishi said in today's update.

Bethesda could reveal Fallout 3 remastered sometime soon, with a potential release in 2026, new cross-promotional product listings indicate.

Season 1 of the Fallout TV series delivered some vim and vigor to the franchise's step, and helped sell tons of Fallout games. The Amazon Prime show actually translated into direct sales so efficiently that Xbox essentially took over PlayStation's charts for a period. Bethesda wants to do this again with Fallout season 2, and that means having products at the ready--like the recent Fallout 4 Anniversary Edition, for example.

Now it looks like Fallout 3 remastered could be added to that list as well. The game was directly mentioned in a new McFarlane Toys' product inventory list: "ELITE EDITION 7IN - FALLOUT 3 REMASTERED - #13 T-45B NUKA COLA," the content reads.

At the Game Developers Conference (GDC) currently underway in San Francisco, NVIDIA has announced a new developer-focused feature for its GeForce NOW cloud streaming service. Cloud Playtest gives developers and publishers a way to securely conduct internal, external, and even press-related playtests covering early internal tests, quality assurance, and hands-on media events.

This is something NVIDIA has been developing for a while. During our pre-brief with representatives, Cloud Playtest is already being used by developers and publishers such as 2K, Activision, Bethesda, Frontier, Techland, Ubisoft, Warner Bros. Games, and even Xbox Game Studios.

NVIDIA has confirmed that the service is already being used for playtests for games that are still two or three years out from release, with Cloud Playtest democratizing the idea of testing and even quality assurance by giving testers access to ready-to-go builds playable on a wide range of GeForce RTX hardware, including GeForce NOW pods with up to GeForce RTX 5080 levels of performance.

Quake III Arena is an iconic first-person shooter from 1999 that cranked up the speed and intensity from previous installments, presenting one of the quintessential multiplayer arena shooters of the era. An absolute classic, and a game that is getting the RTX Remix treatment from modder WoodBoy with the Quake III RTX Remix mod.

And, GeForce RTX gamers can jump into a demo of the mod right now, which is available via Moddb. Free for all Quake III owners, like other RTX Remix mods, it presents a classic PC game in a new light with modern path-traced lighting effects and remade assets, and support for DLSS 4 rendering. And, as confirmed by NVIDIA, it's one of the first RTX Remix projects to incorporate new advanced path-traced particle effects, as well as make use of RTX Remix Logic.

The Quake III RTX Remix mod demo is quite a packed release, too, as the 15 remastered and reimagined levels also include an updated RTX Remix version of the NV15Demo map that was created to showcase the power and capabilities of NVIDIA's new-at-the-time GeForce2 back in the year 2000.

NVIDIA showcased its new RTX Mega Geometry technology when it announced the GeForce RTX 50 Series, and without getting too technical, it's all about dramatically increasing the complexity of a ray-traced scene with minimal impact to performance. And by complexity, we mean increasing the number of polygons from, say, 50 million, up to 500 million. And to top it off, improve FPS performance and reduce the VRAM required for ray-tracing.

And with that, at GDC 2026, NVIDIA has announced that it's collaborating with CD Projekt RED to bring the RTX Mega Geometry Foliage System technology to the highly anticipated The Witcher 4. In the brief demonstration we were shown, RTX Mega Geometry will be used in the game to render giant, realistic-looking forests with dense foliage and a level of detail that looks more like real-life or a movie than a video game.

As a follow-up to one of the most critically acclaimed and beloved games of the 2010s, The Witcher 4 promises to deliver an open-world RPG with massive scope and detail. Currently in development using the latest Unreal Engine 5 technology, the game doesn't have a release date or window, but it entered the "full-scale production phase" back in 2024. Employing new tech like RTX Mega Geometry will help the development team at CDPR realize its dream of presenting the "most immersive and ambitious open-world Witcher game to date."

2026 is going to be a big one for single-player games with path tracing or full ray tracing support. Capcom's Resident Evil Requiem has already set the bar pretty high with its incredible path-traced visuals on PC, accelerated by DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation on GeForce RTX 50 Series GPUs. Walking down a rainy city street or through the abandoned hallways of a hospital with full ray tracing adds to the immersion and tension, and RT in Raccoon City is just the beginning.

With GDC underway in San Francisco, NVIDIA has announced a big batch of new game releases that it has worked with game developers to enhance performance with its new DLSS 4.5 with Dynamic Multi Frame Generation technology. 007 First Light, from Hitman-studio IO Interactive, is a new cinematic third-person action-adventure coming to PC and console on May 27, 2026.

And the PC version will feature an immersive path tracing mode on day one, accelerated by DLSS. As detailed in a new gameplay presentation, path tracing in the game is set to enhance shadow accuracy and detail, as well as how reflections and other effects behave. It doesn't stop there, as another big 2026 release, Remedy's Control Resonant, is also set to debut on PC with path tracing support.

Announced earlier this year, NVIDIA's new DLSS 4.5 is all about enhancing and evolving its Super Resolution and Multi Frame Generation technologies. DLSS 4.5 Super Resolution is already out in the world and supported in hundreds of games thanks to the NVIDIA App's DLSS Override feature. With its powerful second-generation Transformer model, it dramatically improves image quality, restoring detail and enhancing 4K gaming performance.

With GDC kicking off this week in San Francisco, NVIDIA has confirmed that the second half of the big DLSS 4.5 update, Dynamic Frame Multi Generation, is on track for release on March 31. And much like the arrival of DLSS 4.5 Super Resolution, it will be available in a wide range of titles via the NVIDIA App, for GeForce RTX 50 Series owners.

Although some of the chatter surrounding the initial DLSS 4.5 Dynamic Frame Multi Generation announcement focused on the fact that the number of potential AI-generated frames was increasing from 4 to 6, the big thing here is the dynamic part of the equation, not the whole Frame Generation 2X versus 3X, 4X, and now 5X and 6X debate. In fact, it's on track to be a potential game-changer for Frame Generation as a whole.

While Xbox's new leader Asha Sharma teases next-gen Project Helix hardware, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella reiterates plans to expand and extend Xbox well beyond consoles.

Xbox has spent the last decade trying to move away from its unprofitable console hardware business, first branching into PC on a unified level with Windows 10, and then bringing Xbox games to mobile devices via Project xCloud. In more recent years, Microsoft broke exclusivity for good and all to ensure its software could be sold everywhere possible--even rival systems like the PlayStation 5. This plan has worked well for Microsoft in the short- to medium-term, leading to boosted revenues via expanded sales.

Microsoft isn't done expanding, though. In a recent internal town hall meeting with employees (per Windows Central), Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella discussed the future of Xbox, saying that the main goal for the division is to ultimately find the most broad, all-encompassing form of gaming. This sure sounds like Nadella is talking about some sort of new evolved medium for gaming (maybe something like Hideo Kojima's new cloud-powered horror game, OD?).

Horror master Shinji Mikami is attached to a new mystery project, and his involvement at the studio was not previously revealed until now, Video Games Chronicle reports.

Original Resident Evil and The Evil Within creator Shinji Mikami is now serving as representative director of Unbound Inc, a new game dev studio that's working on an unannounced AAA project. In 2024, Mikami founded Kamuy Inc, a new game dev studio following Tango Gameworks' closure, and it's unclear how or if the two companies are related.

Details are slim on the new project, yet Unbound's recent job listings give an idea on what to expect. The Japanese game dev studio is currently hiring for 9 positions ranging from art and animation to programming and management, with the listings confirming the game will be a high-end, AAA experience set in a never-before-seen IP.

EA is laying off even more workers as the company prepares to be taken private in a $55 billion deal principally funded by Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund.

EA has already laid off multiple developers across its Battlefield teams, with job eliminations affecting all studios who work on the franchise including DICE, Ripple Effect, Motive Studios, and Criterion.

"We've made select changes within our Battlefield organization to better align our teams around what matters most to our community. Battlefield remains one of our biggest priorities, and we're continuing to invest in the franchise, guided by player feedback and insights from Battlefield Labs," EA said in a statement to IGN.

While Microsoft's next-gen console is undoubtedly new, Project Helix itself is a nearly decade-old plan to unify Xbox and Windows.

Microsoft recently confirmed that its new Xbox hardware will play both PC and console games, punctuating months of reports of a so-called Xbox PC. The reality, though, is that Project Helix isn't actually a new development--the strategy goes way back to the Xbox One era.

Back in 2016, Jason Schreier and Keza MacDonald first reported on Project Helix for Kotaku, describing Project Helix as a kind of convergence of Windows and Xbox. At the time, developers were said to be making two versions of their games--one for Xbox, and one for Windows, which is now the norm as Microsoft has refined its XDK environments so devs can deploy 1 version of their games across two mediums.

Capcom's latest Resident Evil game has performed incredibly well, and is now the fastest-selling game in the entire series.

Resident Evil 9 Requiem launched to major success, achieving 5 million sales in less than a week. This feat technically makes Requiem the fastest-selling game in the franchise's history, with the next runner-up Resident Evil game, RE5, having sold 5 million copies in 2 months' time.

Requiem's numbers help elevate Capcom's Q4 unit sales for the full year, with the company hoping to ship a whopping 54 million games this fiscal year. Capcom is almost there, having achieved nearly 35 million sales in the first 9 months of FY25, and Resident Evil Requiem's numbers have boosted this total to around 40 million or so.

Direct messaging inherently comes with some degree of privacy for the user sending the message and the user receiving the message, but given today's climate of troves of data being stored in various scenarios where you wouldn't expect that to happen, it's becoming more commonplace to find out private messages aren't actually so private.

The latest to join that list is Arc Raiders and Discord, as computer engineer Timothy Meadows discovered that when a player linked their Discord to Arc Raiders, their private messages were being stored on their PC, and they could have been accessed with Discord tokens. This means that Arc Raiders developers, Embark Studios, could have accessed the private messages of players if they so chose.

The problem was quickly identified by Embark Studios, which released a hotfix and explained that "debugging features intended for developers building and testing Social SDK game integrations" resulted in "some players' Discord information from the game being stored locally on their device, and viewing it would require access to the device or the files themselves. Embark has released a hotfix for the issue, and we are providing guidance to developers and updating the Discord Social SDK with additional protections."

Arion Kurtaj, a British cybercriminal who was a central member in the hacking group known as Lapsus$, which performed several high-profile cyberattacks against major technology companies such as NVIDIA, Uber, and Microsoft, along with Rockstar Games, has revealed he has received a smartphone in a hospital where he was ordered to stay indefinitely.

Lapsus$ was responsible for the 2022 leaks of Grand Theft Auto 6, marking one of the most significant leaks in video game history as 90+ videos were released showing early gameplay, debug builds showing the title running on developer tools, footage of the game's Vice City-inspired location, early gameplay systems such as robberies, NPC AI, police responses, and weapon systems, and much more.

The hacker was Arion Kurtaj, who gained access to Rockstar's systems through internal Slack workspaces, as Kurtaj used compromised credentials belonging to a Rockstar employee. From there, Kurtaj accessed links to internal development servers where he then downloaded all of the gameplay videos, etc. Kurtaj claimed he possessed the GTA 5 and GTA 6 source code.

According to a new report from the YouTube channel Moore's Law is Dead, rumors that Sony is planning to delay the launch of the PlayStation 6 to 2028 or even 2029 are unlikely. The reasons we began to hear about a potential PS6 delay comes down to the current memory and storage crisis affecting the entire consumer technology market, where rising costs and capacity constraints could see the price of a next-gen console skyrocket if it's released sooner rather than later.

According to Moore's Law is Dead (MLID)'s latest report, citing insiders, Sony's contracts and agreements with companies like AMD and TSMC are already in place, and PS6 mass production is on track for 2027, as early as the first half of the year. And with that, if Sony were to hold off on 3nm production for the PS6 for a year, it would cost the company much more than going ahead with the current timeline, MLID claims. And with that, even with the memory crunch, the console is still on track for a late 2027 launch, with a potential delay to early 2028.

And with that, the channel also reiterates the performance we can expect to see from the codename 'Orion' chip that will power the PlayStation 6. This monolithic chip built on TSMC's 3nm process will feature a 9 or 10-core Zen 6 CPU paired with 52 to 54 RDNA 5 Compute Units, and up to 40GB of unified GDDR7 system memory.

In a recent Q&A session with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella about the future of the Xbox brand, the Microsoft CEO revealed how he jokes with NVIDIA's Jensen Huang about how neither Microsoft nor NVIDIA would exist without gaming.

The comment from Nadella comes on the heels of widespread concern about the future of the Xbox brand, particularly following the shake-up of high-level executives, which resulted in the departure of 25-year Xbox veteran and CEO Phil Spencer. Nadella sat down with new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma, and both individuals put the concerns of Xbox fans to rest by publicly stating that gaming is a core identity to Microsoft and that Microsoft as a company will "always" be investing in the space.

Nadella emphasized that Microsoft wouldn't be where it is today without its previous investments in gaming, and how those investments haven't just created fantastic games for people to enjoy, but also accelerated the development of other technology sectors, such as cloud, Windows, and GPU-based servers. The last point is why Nadella jokes with Huang about how Microsoft and NVIDIA wouldn't exist without gaming.

The decision for Xbox to bring what were once the biggest reasons to buy an Xbox console, like Halo, Forza, Gears of War, and what will be Fable, to competing platforms such as PlayStation has resulted in a slight branding crisis as fans now question if Microsoft is interested in advancing the Xbox brand or if it makes sense to offload it from their portfolio.

On the heels of Xbox postponing the launch of its upcoming console and the shake-up at the executive level, which saw 25-year Xbox veteran Phil Spencer officially depart from his position, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has conducted a Q&A session to shine some light on the situation at Xbox and how Microsoft is currently viewing its gaming brand. Nadella was joined by Spencer's replacement, Asha Sharma, where they both gave their 20,000-foot view on Xbox's future.

Nadella went on to list Xbox as one of Microsoft's "main identities" and that it wouldn't survive as a company if these identities didn't "continue to thrive". Additionally, Nadella doubled down on "gaming" always being a part of Microsoft, and honored Matt Booty, Phil Spencer, and Sarah Bond for their effort in building that arm of Microsoft over a 25-year period.

The fate of the Knights of the Old Republic remake remains clear, at least for now, and the game is still in active development.

Despite no real updates for quite some time, Saber Interactive asserts that the new KOTOR remake is still happening. "Yes, it is still in development. That's all I can say," Saber Interactive's chief creative officer Tim Willits told IGN.

Progress on the remake was halted in 2022, following a disappointing demo reel shown to investors. Following this development, the game was moved from Aspyr, who was originally handling the KOTOR remake, over to Saber Interactive's subsidiary studio Mad Head Games (who is also making the new Hellraiser: Revival game).