Gaming - Page 9

GTA V shipped with 60 random encounters, 20 Strangers and Freaks mission arcs, and nearly 42 minigames. But according to former lead producer John Riccitiello, that was only after Rockstar cut an enormous amount of content that never made it into the final game.

Speaking on the Kiwi Talkz podcast, Ricchio said, "There was so much stuff in GTA, particularly in GTA 5. Oh my god, there was so much stuff that was done. Like minigames that were completely done and ready to go, except for, like, animation, right?"

Those cuts came down to the animation team becoming a bottleneck. Every part of the game had to reach Rockstar's usual level of polish, and with animators already stretched thin, even finished minigames were left on the cutting room floor because there wasn't enough time to bring them up to that standard.

SpaceX and Foxconn were rumored to have penned a $52 billion order for 13,000 racks of NVIDIA GB300 AI servers from the Elon Musk-led company, with each rack priced at a blistering $4 million.

The deal, set to begin deliveries in Q4 2026, included up to 936,000 GPUs and would have marked a major expansion of SpaceX's AI compute footprint, which we discovered was already quite expansive when the company went public, as its compute prowess is one of the main driving factors behind its staggering $1.75 trillion IPO.

Foxconn, already a key player in the AI server market, expects to capture 40 percent of the global AI server market by year-end, and reports are now stating this new contract adds a material upside to its projections. The deal also breaks the Dell/Supermicro duopoly, signaling a shift in the hyperscaler manufacturing landscape.

Sony announced in July 2026 that it would stop making physical copies of PlayStation games by January 2028, and now Mexican regulators have put PlayStation in their crosshairs over the decision. The move from Sony has drawn sharp criticism, with some arguing the decision could give Sony an unfair amount of control over the market.

Federal Representative Iraís Reyes and Senator Luis Donaldo Colosio are leading the charge against Sony,filing a formal complaint with Mexico's antitrust body against Sony Interactive Entertainment, in which they argue that Sony's decision to phase out physical copies of PlayStation games would mean digital software sales are the only sales channel for PlayStation games, and that would enable Sony to dictate prices and terms for its games without market competition. The complaint describes this as anti-competitive behavior.

Reyes and Colosio claim the removal of physical media could limit consumer choice and make it harder for smaller developers to compete in the market. The broader gaming industry has already seen a steady decline in physical media, but Sony's timeline - ending disc production in under two years - has amplified concerns and has turned many once die-hard PlayStation fans into critics.

Regulators in the European Union are expected to give their nod of approval for EA's proposed $55 billion take-private deal.

EA, one of the biggest games companies in the world, is going private. A consortium of investors pooled $55 billion to buy out all remaining EA stock and take the company private for the first time since EA's inception. The deal is being financed principally by the Saudi PIF, a sovereign wealth fund that has been spending billions to acquire significant portions of the games market, including Scopely, Moonton, and Niantic's gaming assets. It's estimated that the Saudi PIF will fund 93% of the deal, granting major voting rights in the process. Other partners include Affinity Partners and Silver Lake.

The deal has been scrutinized by regulators, but is making headway behind the scenes. Sources tell Reuters that the EU is ready to approve the take-private deal under its Foreign Subsidies Regulation (FSR) division. The decision is expected to be made public on July 30, however, an unconditional approval of the deal under merger guidelines could be announced when the initial investigation ends on July 22.

A user was able to recover their account from Microsoft, but only after going viral--the company previously said there was nothing they could do to help.

Digital entitlements are a valuable currency, but it's only a one-way trade. There's no real way to get redemptive value back from the content that a consumer buys, and worse, this content can be taken back at any time should the rights expire (hello, Studio Canal). As users rack up thousands of dollars in purchases, including games and media, the value of their account skyrockets. But what happens when you lose access?

That's what happened to streamer Joshua Khane, who was recently locked out of his Microsoft account. The company had told Khane that his account, which included access to precious irreplaceable data via OneDrive and a full games library, could not be retrieved and would be deleted. Khane posted the issue on Twitter, gaining mass support and going viral.

Bethesda's Todd Howard comments on the Creations paid mods program, likening it to classic D&D campaigns from back in the day.

Back in 2017, Bethesda made one of its most unpopular and controversial announcements: Paid mods were coming to Skyrim and Fallout 4. The idea was to bring both free and paid mods to consoles, and give mod creators a way to make money. The program hasn't exactly taken off--Bethesda recently confirmed Creations have only facilitated $10 million in creator royalty payouts--but even still, the studio has no plans to stop with paid mods.

In a recent interview with Windows Central, Bethesda's Todd Howard briefly waxed poetic on the design philosophies around Creations, saying that the mod microtransactions are kind of like little ways to create that custom Dungeons & Dragons experience from early days.

Xbox's Game Pass has been polarizing among publishers since its launch, but gamers famously love the service. It is one of the most convenient and user-friendly features that currently exists in the gaming industry. However, it looks like not all parties agree. Turns out the people making the games at Xbox and the people running the business side of Xbox have very different feelings about Game Pass.

Bloomberg's Jason Schreier said on his Triple Click podcast that a lot of Xbox studio leadership absolutely detest Game Pass, arguing it destroyed the value of their games and has been a broader detriment to the industry by training players to expect games for free on day one. Schreier's sourcing lines up with what former Xbox studio leads have said elsewhere, describing Game Pass internally as feeling "like a race to zero."

That thought process lines up with what's actually happened at Xbox this year. Microsoft hiked Game Pass Ultimate from $19.99 to $29.99, then walked it back to $22.99 after subscriber counts reportedly dropped from around 35 million to 30 million. The tradeoff for that price cut was pulling new Call of Duty games from day-one Game Pass access, something Bloomberg previously reported was controversial internally long before this price hike ever happened.

Platform exclusives have been a hot topic in the industry lately. Xbox is reconsidering its multi-platform strategy, while PlayStation seems to be tightening its grip on exclusives and scaling back PC ports. However, now we have another player in the mix, and people are understandably curious about what Valve thinks about exclusives.

Valve has recently confirmed to Bloomberg's Jason Schreier that it has no plans to put any exclusive games on the Steam Machine, including a new Half-Life. Valve engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais said the company is much more interested in having the whole PC catalog as their so-called "launch exclusive," adding that restricting where people can play a game isn't a model that makes sense for them.

It's the same stance Valve has held since the original Steam Deck launched, and it fits with how Valve has approached the Steam Machine overall, treating it as a PC first and a console second. The problem is that this argument only really works because Valve's revenue doesn't depend on hardware sales.

Extreme component shortages have driven up costs for games hardware, and this trend isn't expected to stop any time soon.

Months of unnecessary tariffs (that are getting refunded anyway) and worsening RAM/storage shortages have significantly impacted the games market. Hardware adoption has stalled due to higher prices, catching companies like Valve off guard. Unfortunately, this has led to both gamers and manufacturers effectively being squeezed out of the mainstream, as Valve has learned by having to launch its Steam Machine console at an astronomical $1,049 price tag.

Valve has learned a lot in its quest to sell Steam Machines and proliferate its proprietary SteamOS platform. Perhaps the biggest lesson is about production and manufacturing, and Valve learned the sobering realities of the hardware market: memory-makers call the shots, and you can either agree to inflated prices or miss your contract altogether. So Valve signed a deal, knowing it would drive up the price of the Steam Machines, not really being able to do anything else.

Xbox's new CEO Asha Sharma apparently decided very early on that exclusives would be coming back.

After years of multi-million game sales and extracting value from its competitors, Xbox is once again returning to exclusivity. Xbox originally broke game exclusivity in February 2024 when it announced that only 4 Xbox games would cross over, culminating in the confusing "this is an Xbox" marketing campaign. Two years later, Xbox is changing plans as part of a big new company reset and re-embracing exclusives, although Microsoft's CEO hates this world (probably because of Sony's anti-Xbox publishing deals).

Interestingly enough, it's now been revealed that Xbox's shift towards exclusivity was among the earliest business models that new CEO Asha Sharma decided on when she took over for Phil Spencer earlier this year. According to Xbox CSO Matthew Ball, exclusivity is and always was important to Sharma: "This specific decision was made very early. Asha believes that to build a platform, you must have exclusive services and software--in this case, games. And so to return our platform to consistent growth, we need a reliable pipeline of exclusive games," Ball said in a recent interview with GamesRadar.

Xbox's new focus on exclusivity won't be limited to just singleplayer games, bringing to mind interesting questions about future games in the portfolio.

Xbox is committed to exclusive content moving forward, and has announced plans to release at least one exclusive game a year on consoles and PC. The games will be different each time, and they obviously won't always be singleplayer-oriented, considering Gears of War E-Day is the first major console exclusive under this strategy and that game has a big online 6-player mode.

Even still, this needed to be reiterated by Xbox's chief content officer Matt Booty, who tells GamesRadar that there is no hard mandate that the exclusives have to be singleplayer-focused. While Gears of War E-Day has multiplayer, the exclusive planned for 2027, inXile's Clockwork Revolution, does not. "I wouldn't overly fixate on single-player. I think that's a good rule of thumb, but it certainly isn't something that's carved in stone," the Xbox CCO said.

The much-anticipated Ubisoft remake, Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced, has sold more than 3 million copies in its first week, according to a post from the official Assassin's Creed account on X. The pirate remake launched July 9 with 2 million copies sold on day one, and it has kept climbing since. Ubisoft used the milestone to confirm that New Game+ is now in development, a feature fans have been asking for since launch.

The tweet itself leaned into the pirate theme, thanking players for "sharing tall tales about your Caribbean adventures" and promising to "keep the adventures going with New Game+ later on, mates." No release window was given for the mode, but it is expected to take cues from the New Game+ format Ubisoft shipped with Assassin's Creed Shadows.

This caps off a genuinely strong launch. Black Flag Resynced sold over five times more pre-launch copies on Steam than AC Shadows, landed Steam Deck Verified status right out of the gate, and Ubisoft says Steam user reviews have climbed to Very Positive following a run of post-launch quality-of-life patches and bug fixes. For a studio led by Ubisoft Singapore rebuilding a 2013 game from scratch on the Anvil engine, that is about as good a reception as a remake gets.

We know the GTA modding community to be ingenious and dedicated. For their latest trick, Modder DryxioGTA has pulled off one of the strangest GTA mod demonstrations in recent memory, running a fully playable copy of GTA III on a television texture inside GTA: San Andreas. This isn't a video overlay or a captured window pasted onto a screen prop. GTA III renders directly into the TV's live GPU texture while sharing the same Direct3D device as San Andreas itself.

In the clip, CJ sits facing a television in his yard while GTA III plays out on the screen in front of him, fully controllable. The player can swap between controlling CJ in the San Andreas world and Claude in GTA III, and the San Andreas world keeps running the whole time rather than pausing or handing off to a full-screen interface. It's a genuine case of one game engine instance rendering inside another, live, without any external capture software stitching the footage together.

This is a continuation of an earlier project from Dryxio, released back in February. That mod ported both GTA III (via the re3 project) and GTA Vice City (via reVC) to run as independent engines inside the San Andreas process, each with its own save data, story progress, and settings. Players could technically mod each game separately, since they're not sharing assets so much as sharing a host process. The mod itself is up on LibertyCity.net for anyone who wants to dig into how the trick works.

We previously reported that PlayStation's decision to end production of new physical game discs in 2028 was reportedly kept hidden even from many of Sony's own offices. Now, the company is facing another allegation. Popular YouTuber and industry insider Moore's Law Is Dead claims Sony has deployed social media bots to counter the overwhelmingly negative reaction to the announcement.

MLID says he had a hard time finding anyone truly defending PlayStation's digital-only choice online, and when he did, the accounts seemed suspicious. He looked into three in particular, all showing the same pattern: long periods of inactivity followed by sudden, strangely excited activity using formal, business-like language, interacting with accounts that were later deleted, promoting other likely bots, and profile pictures that looked like they were made by AI.

The first account praised the shutdown of the PS3 and PS Vita digital stores, a widely criticised decision at the time, and liked a post about The Odyssey film days before Insomniac Games confirmed its screenings would include a Marvel's Wolverine trailer. MLID described the timing as a "smoking gun."

GameStop has uniquely insulated its business against disruptions in the retail software sales chain by necessity, and Sony's recent business decision to cut physical PlayStation game disc production has no real effect on GameStop's operations, current CEO Ryan Cohen says.

GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen wants to buy eBay for $56 billion and create an ultra-synergized e-commerce marketplace. The idea is to combine the strengths of eBay and GameStop together to sell games, collectibles, merch, and even establish an in-game digital store.

With GameStop having moved away from actual game software sales some time ago, instead embracing the highly-profitable world of collectibles like Funko Pops and Magic and Pokemon cards, Sony's recent decision to kill off PlayStation game discs won't cause anything but small chip damage to GameStop's armor rating. The retailer once relied on second-hand game sales to stay afloat, but those days are long gone.

GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen explains why he wants to buy eBay in basic terms, and shares a vision for what could end up being a digital microtransaction depot for in-game items should GameStop and eBay join forces.

In a recent interview with Bloomberg, GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen discussed his unsolicited $56 billion buyout offer for eBay. Cohen believes there are enormous synergies between the two companies in terms of e-commerce, but the CEO also mentioned plans for an in-game digital marketplace if eBay is purchased.

Exact details of what it is Cohen was referring to remain unknown, but it's possible he is referring to GameStop's current store where it sells codes for digital games directly to consumers.

Exclusives are back at Xbox, but will big heavy-hitters like Elder Scrolls and Fallout be among them? Bethesda isn't ready to say just yet.

Xbox is embracing exclusive games to add more value to the core Xbox brand--console and Windows. Microsoft's current exclusive strategy includes two games, and the lineup seems to lack the must-have starpower required to really make a difference...however that could change if high-profile games like The Elder Scrolls VI or even Fallout 5 are made exclusive. Or, perhaps, a Fallout spin-off?

While nothing has been confirmed, Bethesda just released a new studio update that briefly discussed future games. The group says that four new Fallout games are in development, including Fallout 5, remasters of both Fallout 3 and New Vegas, and a joint collaboration project with Obsidian. Then in a recent interview with Windows Central, Bethesda's Todd Howard was asked about TESVI and FO5 going Xbox exclusive, and he replied that it was too early to comment.

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced has obliterated launch expectations, reportedly doubling the Steam sales of Shadows on its first day, marking a tremendous success for the title.

According to the latest Alinea Analytics report, the game sold 701,000 copies on Steam in 24 hours, generating $35 million in gross revenue, which outpaces Shadows' launch day revenue by 2.35 times. Additionally, the report states Black Flag Resynced also pulled in nearly $1 million from its day-one DLC, while hitting a peak concurrent player count of 416,000 on Steam. As for specifics, Steam day-one sales for Black Flag Resynced generated $22.4 million, which is far more than Shadows' $9.5 million day-one Steam revenue.

The success of Black Flag Resynced compared to Shadows highlights a growing fatigue with Ubisoft's latest entries in the Assassin's Creed franchise, with many critics pointing to invasive and unnecessary cosmetics in a single-player game, repetitive gameplay, lackluster campaigns, and a general sense the franchise has strayed far and wide from its roots.

Bethesda has released a large studio update that confirms the status of the group following mass layoffs at Xbox, outlining various new projects in development.

Xbox's latest layoffs have cast doubt on what's next for various studios. Bethesda has issued an update that confirms its slate of games, including mainline games like Fallout 5, The Elder Scrolls VI, as well as remasters. The studio confirms that The Elder Scrolls VI is the top priority, and that Fallout 5 is in pre-production phases, with both games sharing the common Creation Engine 3 technology.

Remasters of Fallout New Vegas and Fallout 3 are also confirmed, as well as official acknowledgement of a new Fallout game with Obsidian: "We're happy to confirm [our longtime friends at Obsidian Entertainment] are working with us on a new Fallout project."

The last time we heard about GameStop, the CEO was attempting to buy eBay by selling items on eBay after the online marketplace asked how the CEO was going to afford the acquisition, and now GameStop has officially partnered with Uber Eats to deliver new video games, consoles, accessories, and collectibles to customers nationwide. So, in theory, you will be able to order Grand Theft Auto 6 and pizza in the same cart when the game releases this November, and get both dropped off for an epic night.

The collaboration brings the world's top physical gaming retailer into the delivery space, allowing consumers to order directly through the Uber Eats app from participating GameStop locations. The move expands GameStop's reach beyond physical stores and into the digital retail ecosystem, a space the company should have adopted many years ago.

According to the press release, customers can now choose between immediate or scheduled delivery, with products ranging from the latest game titles to high-end hardware. The partnership is a clear attempt to digitize GameStop's presence in a market that is moving away from physical media, and, in all honesty, it's an effort to prevent the retailer from being phased out altogether.