Gaming - Page 7

Grand Theft Auto 6 pre-order speculation has exploded again, with a newly spotted Walmart backend edit recently adding more fuel to the theory that Rockstar is preparing to open the floodgates to pre-orders quite soon.

The latest rumor comes from users on Reddit and GTAForums, who claim Walmart now has a backend listing tied to Grand Theft Auto 6. The key detail is a product ID that reportedly continues to surface as GTA 6 even when the visible URL text is changed, suggesting it may be attached to an actual Walmart database entry rather than a simple search result.

This comes only days after a separate Best Buy affiliate email suggested GTA 6 pre-orders could begin on May 18, with PC Gamer noting that multiple creators claimed to have received the same message. However, there are conflicting reports.

The Resident Evil franchise breaks 200 million cumulative sales as the franchise celebrates its 30th anniversary, highlighting one of gaming's best-selling series of all time.

The iconic Resident Evil franchise is one of the most enduring mainstays of the gaming world, helping define multiple console generations across the last three decades. As the series celebrates 30 years of terror this year, Capcom has announced that Resident Evil has now crossed over 200 million copies sold, with the major sales threshold broken by the highly successful RE9 Requiem.

Capcom's latest earnings report gives an update on its top sellers, including Resident Evil, which is now at 201 million driven by the strong sales performance of the franchise throughout FY25. According to the numbers, the publisher sold 26.76 million Resident Evil games in the period, and a quarter of the franchise's total-year sales alone were from the ninth game, Requiem.

Grand Theft Auto 6 is probably the most anticipated game of the decade, and it's hard to think about a comparable piece of media that has had such a cultural and social impact. We recently covered the rumor that GTA 6 pre-orders might open on Monday, May 18th. However, new information has recently surfaced about the GTA 6 early access process and the game's marketing cycle.

The gaming industry saw three major game leaks this year, with Forza Horizon 6 likely the most impactful. The game leaked online a whole 10 days before release, and something similar happened to Subnautica 2 and PRAGMATA as well. Although the source of the leak has not yet been confirmed, Playground Games suspects an insider, while it is widely speculated that the source of the leak for these games was a third-party reviewer.

With these developments in mind, it looks like Rockstar Games is about to change the review and early access cycle for Grand Theft Auto 6. According to a Brazilian journalist with a solid track record, Rockstar Games will not send any review copies to journalists, media, or content creators ahead of the GTA 6 launch. The early review process will instead take place on-site, with Rockstar sending creators to a specific physical location to play GTA 6.

Final Fantasy XI celebrates its 24th anniversary by making it easier than ever for new players to try it out.

Square Enix's original Final Fantasy XI MMO launched on the PS2 way back in 2002 in Japan, making it the first such game to launch on the PlayStation 2, and the first-ever cross-play MMORPG.

Now the publisher is marking the 24-year anniversary with a major promotion that extends FFXI's free trial in perpetuity. With the free trial, users can play the base game for free up until level 75.

Nexon's latest Q1 earnings report highlights record-breaking revenues and profit, thanks in no small part to Arc Raiders' thunderous success.

Extraction shooter Arc Raiders is one of the most popular new games in recent memory. The shooter has now amassed more than 16 million sales in little over six months on the market. Back in January, Embark had confirmed 12 million sales, and while Nexon expects the game to start slowing down, Arc Raiders managed to sell 4.6 million copies in the Q1 period.

"ARC Raiders, which globally launched in October 2025, has also maintained its momentum, selling 4.6 million units in Q1 2026 and achieving a total of 15.5 million units sold from its release to March 31, 2026. The game has now sold over 16 million units," reads Nexon's latest earnings report.

Capcom's persistent efforts have paid off as the company has successfully leveraged the strength of PC storefronts.

Capcom is one of the most interesting companies in gaming. The Japanese group has successfully grown its operating profits for nine years in a row thanks to its aggressive sales blitz strategy. Capcom aims to sell as many game copies as possible, and its efforts have worked well, with nearly 60 million sales in FY25.

The games-maker is able to sell so many units because it makes steep discounts to its games, often selling titles for $5 or $10. Capcom's strategy is a boon for price-conscious gamers, especially new users who haven't accumulated a library. Now as we've seen, PC is also a big part of Capcom's formulaic approach to success, as PC has surpassed console as Capcom's top sales platform for the past three years in a row.

ASUS is back with what might be its most over-the-top gaming mini PC yet. Three years after taking charge of the Intel NUC division, the company continues to push the format with the ROG NUC 16, available in black or white with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 GPU and Intel's Arrow Lake-HX platform.

The ROG NUC 16 is ASUS's fastest NUC and arguably the most console-like in terms of design. It keeps the same basic shell and 3-liter chassis of the NUC 15 but steps up to an Intel Core Ultra 9 290HX with 24 cores (8 Performance, 16 Efficient), 40 MB L2 cache, 36 MB L3 cache, and an onboard NPU with 13 TOPS.

The ROG NUC 16 offers a modest performance boost over the NUC 15. ASUS's benchmarks show a 2.3% improvement in 3DMark Time Spy over the previous generation, using the same RTX 5080 16GB GPU. Depending on the workload or game you are running, the gains may be more noticeable in practice. GPU options are confirmed to include the RTX 5080, 5070 Ti, 5070, and 5060, all paired with the same CPU, though the product page has not yet listed all variants.

Capcom is on a roll as the company reports its ninth consecutive year of profit growth.

FY25 was a big year for Capcom. The company sold nearly 60 million games, overshooting its sales target by over 7 million. Resident Evil 9 was a big driver of sales and the publisher leaned heavily on its treasure trove of yesteryear games, strategically discounting titles throughout the year to boost unit sales. As a result of these savvy practices, Capcom is reporting its best-ever year for earnings.

For the FY25 period, Capcom made 195.365 billion yen (about $1.2 billion) in net sales, up 15% year-over-year, with operating profit at 75.295 billion yen (about $500 million). This represents a ~38% operating profit margin, which is quite strong for a games company.

Thanks to Valve's APIs and sites like Steam Charts and SteamDB, PC gamers have long had player count data for just about any game on Steam. Console gamers on PlayStation and Xbox have had no such luxury, left with rough estimates, in-game numbers, or waiting for developers to share what their player base looks like. That could be about to change for PS5 users.

Sony is testing a new Community Activity widget in the PS5 Welcome Hub as part of its beta program, spotted by YouTuber Mystic. The widget will list weekly player counts for popular and trending games in your country, bringing SteamDB-style visibility to PlayStation for the first time.

The widget operates in two modes. Top 10 shows the most played games by weekly player count, while Trending Now highlights which games saw the biggest surge in popularity. Beyond these, customization is currently limited, with no way to view historical data for specific games.

Capcom sold a record 59 million games in FY25, making it the most successful year for the company to date.

It's not all dour news in the games industry as Japanese games publisher Capcom has reported strong results for its Fiscal Year 2025 period. The company sold an impressive 59.07 million games throughout the year, up by over 7 million from last year (+14%). The volume was driven mostly by catalog game sales, but Resident Evil 9 Requiem delivered a heavy boost at the tail-end of the year.

Capcom overshot its sales estimate for the year, beating its original 54 million game sales target for FY25. According to the results, Capcom also had its best-ever Q4 of all time with 24.4 million games sold in the quarter alone, and RE9 represents about 1/3rd of these sales, or 8.3 million.

The Steam Controller initially debuted as a Steam-exclusive device that only worked within the confines of Valve's ecosystem. But now, according to Phoronix, the Steam Controller has received SDL support, making the device functional on other storefronts on PC outside of Steam and making the controller functional on iOS and Android (outside of Steam Link).

Testers have confirmed the Steam Controller is almost fully functional with SDL. Control mapping, touchpads, haptic feedback, gyros, and joysticks all work. The only issues that remain are some minor functionality issues with the touchpads and a couple of Steam-specific issues that also exist on the Steam Deck. Adding and playing a non-Steam game with the Steam client will ignore SDL on the controller, and running Steam in the background can result in double inputs occurring due to SDL and Valve's native controller stack running simultaneously.

For the uninitiated, SDL stands for Simple DirectMedia Layer and is a cross-platform development library designed to provide low-level access to a variety of hardware and devices, including graphics cards, audio devices, mice, joysticks, and controllers. SDL is the reason for the wide variety of game controller support that works effortlessly across multiple operating systems, featuring Windows, Linux, Mac, iOS, and Android. If you've ever plugged a controller into your PC and it "just works," there's a good chance SDL is responsible for making that possible.

Xbox revs up the RPMs with its latest release, showing that consumers are willing to spend $120 to play specific games in early access.

Forza Horizon 6 looks to be a success on PC even before its official release. Microsoft's strategy of 5-day early access is apparently paying off in the new Forza game, at least on Steam.

According to SteamDB's tracked figures, Forza Horizon 6 has amassed over 172,000 players. Since those users have to pay a hefty $120 to even play FH6 right now, a quick bit of math shows that the game has made at least $20 million in gross sales revenue on Steam alone.

New reports suggest Microsoft is working on a new disc-to-digital conversion program for its next-gen Project Helix console PC hybrid.

It's believed that the next-gen Project Helix will be digital-only be default, meaning users won't actually be able to hook up a disc drive and play old Xbox games. This seems to go against the very core promise of the device itself--that it can play Xbox console games--however it also makes sense given Microsoft's aggressive digital-first business strategy.

If Project Helix is indeed digital-only, and it lacks the open-ended flexibility of Windows and doesn't allow users to hook up their own third-party disc drives, then it stands to reason Microsoft needs to find a way to preserve physical disc game libraries. That's where codename Positron comes in.

Sony's PlayStation division just reported record-breaking operating income...and the company now expects similar results for this fiscal year, even as it invests in its next-gen PS6.

PlayStation's latest FY25 results were a cause for celebration at Sony, with the games division pulling in a new all-time gross revenue record of $31 billion and a new operating profit high of $3 billion throughout the period. While that's a ~10% operating profit margin, Sony has increased its revenues and its operating income through FY25. Sony's Game & Network Services division had a double-digit 23.3% return on invested capital through FY25, up 4.8 pp from last year.

These records were in spite of the unpopular hardware price hikes and the lowest-ever console shipments in the PS5 generation set during the Q4'25 period, and would have been higher if PlayStation didn't make a $700 million+ impairment charge due to Bungie's shortfalls.

Following multiple years of heavy investment and lower returns, PlayStation is expected to deliver a strong 32.2% return on investment this year.

Sony's latest earnings results were triumphant for PlayStation, with record-breaking $31 billion revenue and $3.1 billion operating profit and a new all-time high of 125 million MAUs. Amidst the overperformance was a hefty $700 million+ impairment charge to Bungie's assets--two charges were made, one in Q2, likely due to Destiny 2's Edge of Fate missing expectations, and another in Q4, tied to Marathon's missed expectations.

It's not all doom and gloom for PlayStation, though. Far from it. Sony expects PlayStation to make even more operating profit in FY26, about $3.7 billion compared to last year's $3.1 billion. Another big overlooked metric is the division's return on invested capital (ROIC), which is exactly what it sounds like: Sony puts money in, the returns come out, and that's tracked as a %, denoting a certain level of business operating efficiency.

Two new Xbox controllers have leaked--a small, portable cloud controller and the next-gen premium Elite 3, which looks to be a descendant of Microsoft's Sebile prototype controller accidentally revealed during the FTC trial.

Microsoft is continuing its cloud gaming efforts at Xbox with two new accessories that will enable direct-to-cloud game streaming. Similar to Amazon's Luna and Google's Stadia controllers, Xbox's new peripheral duo have two modes: local mode and cloud mode. Both of these require pairing and cloud mode will essentially optimize the controller to ensure smoother latency.

According to Technoblog's findings, the smaller, cheaper device is more of a paddle and is more designed for on-the-go play. It's about 5-inches in length and looks like it fits into a pocket.

Subnautica 2 is off to an incredible start as the hotly anticipated game goes platinum in its first hour of availability.

Unknown Worlds is seeing massive success with the release of Subnautica 2, and the developer today announced the game has surpassed over 2 million copies in its first 12 hours on the market. That's double the sales of the game's previous milestone listed above, making Subnautica 2 among the fastest-selling games of 2026.

The sequel, which was at the center of a contentious legal battle, is seeing strong engagement on Steam where it is currently the #1 top selling game with over 467K concurrent peak players. The game's success also pushes total Subnautica franchise sales past the 20 million mark--before the announcement was made, the series was at 18.5 million copies. The game is currently being sold on Steam, the Epic Store, and Xbox, all via early access.

Earlier today, AMD Computing and Graphics SVP Jack Huynh announced what longtime Radeon gamers have been waiting a year for: AMD's new AI-powered FSR 4.1 is coming to RDNA 3 and RDNA 2-generation graphics cards. RDNA 3, which covers the Radeon RX 7000 Series, is set to get official support in July, with RDNA 2 cards in the Radeon RX 6000 Series set to get official support sometime in 2027.

This is huge because FSR 4 delivers a massive boost to image quality compared to FSR 3.1, especially when gaming at resolutions like 1080p and 1440p. FSR 4 was previously exclusive to RDNA 4 and desktop GPUs like the Radeon RX 9070 XT because it uses the lineup's second-generation AI Accelerators, which support FP8. With FSR 4.1 coming to RDNA 2 and RDNA 3 GPUs, AMD is implementing an INT8 version to ensure that it works on first-gen Radeon AI hardware.

Right off the bat, this is a big win for gaming handhelds like the ROG Xbox Ally X, Lenovo Legion Go, and MSI Claw A8, and the upcoming Steam Machine from Valve. However, there's another potential big win on the horizon, and that's for Xbox Series X gamers. Unlike the PlayStation 5, the Xbox Series X features the full RDNA 2 suite of hardware and technologies, and FSR 4.1 on Microsoft's current flagship gaming console could deliver a PlayStation 5 Pro-level upgrade.

We are slowly but surely approaching the launch date of the most anticipated game of the decade. Grand Theft Auto 6 might still be a few months away (barring ANOTHER delay), but it looks like the pieces are starting to fall into place for the eventual launch. The latest piece of information is quite interesting and concerns pre-orders for GTA 6.

According to several creators online, particularly Frogboyx1Gaming on YouTube and @videogamedeals on X, GTA 6 pre-orders are set to start from Monday, May 18th, 2026. The information was disclosed to these creators through a Best Buy affiliate email, as part of the Best Buy U.S. Creator Campaign. The email references a "GTA 6 Pre-order (Physical Game)" promotional window running from May 18th to May 21st, 2026.

These creators are receiving these emails from Best Buy as part of a promotional offer that provides a 5% affiliate commission, so it is a marketing scheme rather than a direct pre-order announcement. It must be noted that the emails were sent by Best Buy, not by Rockstar Games or Take-Two Interactive. The May 18th - May 21st window is the promotional window for the commission, but the actual GTA 6 pre-orders will likely run through to the launch date.

Fans of BioWare RPGs, like the original Mass Effect trilogy and the iconic Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, will probably know the name, Casey Hudson. The veteran game designer and director led development of these classic titles and is currently leading a new studio, Arcanaut Studios, to create a Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR) spiritual successor, Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic.

With the new studio partnered with Lucasfilm Games, with an additional $100 million in funding from NetEase veteran Simon Zhu, the studio co-founder and Fate of the Old Republic game director recently sat down with Bloomberg to discuss the project. And during the discussion, he conveyed his feelings on the role of generative AI in game development. As the headline says, yeah, he's not a fan.

"I just find AI to be creatively soulless," Casey Hudson tells Bloomberg. "It's hard to imagine where it's actually helpful in the process. I'm just really unimpressed with it." Although this doesn't call out a specific use case for generative AI in game development, the discussion naturally went in that direction, as Arcanaut Studios is a relatively small studio developing a massive AAA-style Star Wars RPG.