Gaming - Page 164

A major component supplier of the Nintendo Switch 2 has warned Nintendo to expect a price increase for the Nintendo Switch 2 as Trump's tariffs have impacted the supply chain.

According to Nikkei Asia, which VGC has corroborated, Nintendo has received a report from a major components manufacturer informing them to expect a significant hit in importing goods to the US due to Trump's 145% tariff on China. For those who don't know, Nintendo manufactures the vast majority of its Nintendo Switch 2 units in China, despite trying to relocate its upcoming console manufacturing to Vietnam. Nintendo currently manufactures Switch 2 units in Vietnam, but they only make up a small portion of the total manufacturing of the console.

When Nintendo fully announced the Switch 2, the company stated that the standard console would cost $449, with a limited-edition Mario Kart World bundle costing $499. Those prices have now been thrown into question as Nintendo officially delayed the pre-orders for the new console due to Trump's tariffs, which were first introduced only a day after Nintendo unveiled the Switch 2 price.

Rematch is a soccer game that's been causing quite a stir of late - comparisons drawn to Rocket League certainly haven't hurt - and it now has a launch date, price, plus we've had the announcement of an imminent open beta.

The game looks promising and is made by Sloclap (who developed Sifu, so this is quite a change in direction). It's coming on Xbox, PlayStation 5 and PC platforms on June 19, priced at $29.99, with the open beta starting on April 18 (and registration for that is live now, should you wish to sign up).

PC Gamer recently took Rematch for a hands-on (or feet-on, perhaps) spin and had some high praise for this soccer outing, which can be played 3v3 or 4v4, as well as 5v5.

Rumors continue to swirl about the potential Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion remake, and as well as some leaked screenshots (obviously add your own seasoning there), we've now heard something direct from Bethesda on X - and while it's far from confirmation, it's not a denial either, which has again prompted excitement from gamers.

Check the above post (flagged by The Gamer, via Rock Paper Shotgun) to peruse the exchange between a denizen of X called J Cosmic and the Bethesda Support account.

As you can see, the support rep believes the poster is talking about the existing version of Oblivion, when in fact they mean the remake.

Bethesda's highly anticipated remake of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion has been making headlines of late thanks to rumors that the game is set to get a surprise shadow drop announcement and reveal next week. Well, it looks like that's the case, as screenshots of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered have appeared online, showcasing the massive upgrade to the game's visuals.

The source of the leaks is Virtuos, a game development support studio that has worked on Dark Souls: Remastered, Dune: Awakening, Sea of Thieves, and many more titles. Someone spotted a bunch of screenshots and images for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered uploaded to the studio's website that weren't secured. Whoops.

The screenshots, which look to be from the announcement trailer and a dedicated page that will go up for the remake, showcase some of the stunning visual upgrades the 2006 original is getting. The difference to the Cyrodiil landscape is night and day, with fantastic lighting and detail everywhere.

Valve's Steam has been around since 2003, and my first memory of the app is installing it to play Half-Life 2 and Half-Life 2: Deathmatch. However, it wasn't until around 2008 that it became widely used as a digital storefront for purchasing games and creating a digital library - subsequently exploding in the 2010s as the go-to platform for PC gaming.

Like many PC gamers who have been gaming for over a decade, my Steam library contains hundreds of games, with many acquired during some of the platform's legendary Steam Sales. And with my recent acquisition of the excellent Steam Deck OLED gaming handheld last year, that trend of buying new stuff to play isn't going to stop anytime soon.

As spotted by Reddit user trotski94 (via PC Gamer), there's actually a straightforward way to check how much money you've spent buying PC games on Steam. This isn't one of those tools that gives you the total value of your game library; it's a dollar sign number outlining all the money you've spent on the platform.

Last week, Blizzard released its first roadmap for Diablo 4, giving fans a quick rundown of what's in store for the rest of the year, from seasons to overhauls to cross-franchise "IP collaborations" coming to the game. It also teased a second expansion coming for 2026 alongside a new playable class.

In a recent interview with gaming publication The Game File, Blizzard's Rod Fergusson, the head of the Diablo series and games at the studio, said, "We're here for the long haul." This was in response to a general question about Diablo, its future, and a possible Diablo 5. It turns out that Blizzard's actual Diablo roadmap covers an entire decade.

"We've been doing long-range planning recently," Rod Fergusson adds. "And I've created a roadmap - a 10-year roadmap. It was actually a 12-year roadmap, and I can see this, this, this, and this and all these different things that we can do, which is really inspiring. And it's really exciting."

RSI announces that CitizenCon will be digital-only this year so that the team can focus directly on Squadron 42's development.

Squadron 42's been in development for quite some time, but RSI has pinpointed a 2026 release for the project. The singleplayer game commands star power with actors like Mark Hamill, Henry Cavill, and Gary Oldman bringing Squadron 42 to life.

RSI intends to hit this 2026 release target and is devoting their time and efforts into Squadron 42. The announcement comes shortly after Star Citizen broke a milestone in funding by reaching over $800 million in total development funding to date.

The global economic uncertainty from ongoing trade tariffs have clouded sales forecasts for the Nintendo Switch 2, and some analyst firms are lowering their year-one expectations for the new console.

Analyst firm DFC Intelligence has downwardly revised its sales forecast for Nintendo's upcoming Switch 2 system. The stat-tracker dropped its target by 2 million units as it weighs the implications of the current worldwide trade market.

DFC Intelligence originally had a top-line estimate of 17 million units for the Switch 2, but the firm now expects Nintendo to ship 15 million successor consoles in the first year.

The Switch 2's new upgraded chipset has excited developers who seek squeeze more performance out of their games.

With its Tegra X1 and 4GB of RAM, the Switch 1 was pretty outdated at launch, and delivered lower-end performance in modern games. Developers often had to make considerable trade-offs to get their games running on the Switch, often dropping both resolution and frame rates to get stable mobile performance.

The Switch 2 changes all of that. It's capable of delivering 4K 60FPS gaming when hooked up to a TV, and 1080p 120FPS gaming while on-the-go. The Switch 2's new custom onboard NVIDIA Tegra chip can deliver 10x the graphics performance of the original Switch, and the simulation masters over at Firaxis have some stellar praise for the next-gen machine.

The Switch 2 will support Auto Low Latency Mode to enable streamlined and smoother gameplay on specific TVs.

Nintendo's new Switch 2 console has a bunch of new upgrades, and the biggest one is performance. Thanks to a new custom chip from NVIDIA, the Switch 2 can deliver 10x the graphics performance than the Switch 1. That means 4K gaming and other modern NVIDIA gaming chipset features, including raytracing, DLSS upscaling, and what appears to a Nintendo-specific version of NVIDIA's broadcast technology.

We know the Switch 2 can support gaming up to 4K resolution and 60FPS (Tears of the Kingdom runs at this rate), and now we have a small bit of new info about another convenience feature that will help with performance: Auto Low Latency Mode. With ALLM, the Switch 2 communicates directly with the TV or display and tells it to turn on Game Mode for better gameplay.

The latest season of The Last of Us TV series debuts with an exceptional start, and this time around Sony has a product ready to sell to viewers.

The Last of Us season 2 premiered last night to over 5 million people, beating out season 1's original launch viewership.

"The season 2 premiere of The Last Of Us delivered approximately 5.3M U.S. cross-platform viewers, outpacing the season 1 premiere by more than 10%. Season 1 went on to amass an audience of nearly 32M per episode, the largest viewership of an HBO and HBO Max debut season ever," WB Discovery wrote on Twitter.

Microsoft is releasing another Xbox Game Studios game on Battle.net, this time it's Rare's popular live pirate fantasy Sea of Thieves.

Xbox's games everywhere approach has led to first-party exclusives showing up on PlayStation and Switch, and now more first-party games are crossing over to Blizzard's storefront. First we saw Activision's Call of Duty make the jump, now games from satellite studios are coming over, including Avowed, Doom: The Dark Ages, The Outer Worlds 2, and more recently Sea of Thieves.

Sea of Thieves will release on Battle.net on May 22, 2025 with three editions: The standard $40 edition, a $50 deluxe edition, and a $60 premium edition that gets you 6 days early access, access to the closed beta, and comes with extra cosmetics and in-game currency. Sea of Thieves also supports Play Anywhere on Battle.net, so if you buy Sea of Thieves on a Windows PC or Xbox console, you can download it and launch it through Battle.net for free.

Mafia: The Old Country is the latest game in the cinematic crime series from publisher 2K and developer Hangar 13. Set in 1900s Sicily, the story is a love letter to classic gritty mafia stories. This is the first game in the series since 2016's Mafia 3, and it made its trailer debut late last year at The Game Awards.

Until today, Mafia: The Old Country had a vague 2025 release window; however, thanks to an update/post to Steam that has since been edited, we now know that the game is set to make its PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC debut on August 8, 2025. For 2K, it's set to kick off a massive second half of 2025 as Borderlands 4 from Gearbox Studios is on track for a September 24, 2025 launch.

2K is a subsidiary of Take-Two Interactive, which is also publishing Grand Theft Auto VI, undoubtedly the most anticipated game of all time. With Mafia coming in August and Borderlands in September, this paves the way for GTA 6 to arrive in either October or November.

Last year, id Software released a free update to the origins of Doom and Doom 2 that brought cross-platform multiplayer across deathmatch and co-op, an updated soundtrack, modding tools, a slew of new maps, including John Romero's Sigil, and more.

This definitive edition of two classic games from the 1990s that helped create a new genre is also getting a physical release from Limited Run that includes a Standard edition, a Big Box Edition that mimics PC game releases from the era, and a special Will It Run Edition that is set to cost $666.66 and be limited to 666 copies.

It's so expensive because it plays into the whole "it can run Doom" meme in the most fun way possible - it ships in a box that can play Doom. Yeah, and not only that, but it also includes a handheld cacodemon that can play Doom, like one of those retro pre-Game Boy handhelds.

Corsair has just revealed its new Call of Duty: Warzone Collection, celebrating the 5th anniversary of Call of Duty: Warzone with a slew of new high-end gaming products. Check them out:

We have an exclusive collection of new Corsair x Call of Duty: Warzone goodies, from gaming PCs and gaming laptops, through to new controllers, Elgato devices, and more. We've got new Call of Duty-themed DDR5 memory in Corsair's growing Vengeance family of RAM, as well as a new Vengeance a7500 Call of Duty: Warzone Edition Gaming PC, powered by the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D processor and RDNA 4-based Radeon RX 9070 XT graphics card.

Thi La, President and COO at Corsair, said: "We are thrilled to team up with Activision again as our world-class brands come together for the return of Verdansk. This powerful collaboration extends across multiple product categories at Corsair including Drop, Elgato, ORIGIN PC and SCUF Gaming, bringing true high-performance to true Call of Duty: Warzone fans as they squad up and drop in".

MSI's next-generation Claw gaming handheld is reportedly going to be powered by AMD's upcoming Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme APU, marking a move away from Intel and its Meteor Lake chip used in the current Claw handheld.

Intel has launched its new Core Ultra 200V series "Lunar Lake" processors, but the uptake on gaming handhelds isn't that great -- because AMD's range of APUs are continuing to get better and better -- especially with its new Strix Point and Strix Halo APUs crushing anything Intel has on the market.

In a new post on X by leaker @Haze2K1, it looks like MSI's new Claw gaming handheld will be powered by AMD's unannounced, but upcoming Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme APU, the best of its upcoming Ryzen Z2 family of chips based on Zen 5 + RDNA 3.5 and an XDNA 2-based NPU for AI workloads (if you thought handhelds were safe from AI, you were wrong).

Ahead of its release next week, PlayStation has revealed the set of enhancements Indiana Jones and the Great Circle will be getting on the PS5 and PS5 Pro.

Writing in a new update on the official PlayStation blog, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle will be releasing onto both PlayStation 5 consoles with DualSense controller features such as haptic feedback and adaptive triggers, with the addition of the lightbar on the controller being linked to Indy's current status.

For example, if Indy enters combat, the LED light around the touchpad will turn yellow or pulse red if Indy's health gets low. As for performance, PlayStation writes that the title benefits from SSD optimization for "frictionless loading" that's paired with a stable 60FPS and a "high-quality resolution."

One of the biggest games on the original Nintendo Switch was The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and while fans of the newly announced Switch 2 gritted their teeth at the price for the Switch 2 version of the game, those teeth are now undoubted brandished at the realization the DLC for the game isn't included within that initial purchase.

Nintendo will be selling the DLC for Breath of the Wild for an additional $20, which is on top of the game's higher $70 listing price. Speaking to IGN Nintendo has confirmed players after the DLC Expansion Pass will need to pay an additional $20 as a separate purchase, bringing the total to $90 for a game that originally released on the Wii U and specifically in 2017.

For those who already own a copy of Breath of the Wild, those users will still be able to play Breath of the Wild and its DLC with no additional costs. Moreover, players who already own a copy of Breath of the Wild and want the upgraded Switch 2 version will only need to pay $10, which will get them better framerates, higher resolutions, and HDR support. So, to summarize. If you don't own a copy of Breath of the Wild and intend to play it on the Switch 2 be prepared to fork out $70, and if you also want the DLC, add another $20 on top of that.

One of Apple's biggest blunders in years is the advertisement of an advanced Siri upgrade under the guise of "Apple Intelligence," which has now been officially delayed by the company. But, Apple used this feature to sell the iPhone 16 generation, and still to this day, the biggest and most sought-after feature within Apple's umbrella of Apple Intelligence features is yet to be released.

We are now getting some behind-the-scenes details about why a fully integrated and upgraded Siri hasn't come to fruition and the position Apple was in with the technology before an announcement was made at WWDC 2024. According to a report from The Information, former Apple employees speaking to Wayne Ma, the journalist behind the recent piece, high-profile Apple leadership styles are partly to blame. John Giannandrea joined Apple in 2018 and began overseeing the development of Siri, with his official title being the Senior Vice President of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence Strategy.

According to the report, Siri engineers already felt like "second-class citizens" at Apple, and this problem was exacerbated by struggling to keep up with constant iOS updates and features being released by the iOS software team led by Craig Federighi, Apple's Senior Vice President of Software Engineering.

Ubisoft has made an argument in a court case that people who buy games don't actually have ownership rights over them.

The comments from the Assassin's Creed developer came about during a dismissal of a case filed against them by two The Crew players who have taken the company to court over its decision to shut down game servers last year. Ubisoft announced that 2014's The Crew will no longer be playable as it is switching off the servers of the game at the end of March 2024. Despite having ownership of the game, whether that be digitally or physically, owners will no longer have access to the title after the aforementioned date.

The two players suing Ubisoft over this decision state they were "under the impression" they were "paying to own and possess the video game The Crew instead of paying for a limited license to use The Crew." The lawsuit alleges that Ubisoft violated California's False Advertising Law, Unfair Competition Law, and Consumer Legal Remedies Act, along with "common law fraud and breach of warranty claims." Moreover, the lawsuit also claims Ubisoft broke California's state law surrounding gift cards, which are prohibited from expiring.