Gaming - Page 95

Activision has responded to the reports of numerous cheaters in Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 with a statement posted to the @CODUpdates X account.

The post states that "cheaters were expected" and that the Black Ops 7's anti-cheat software, known as "RICOCHET," has "hit the ground running" in the early access beta. Notably, Activision writes that the frequency of cheaters being caught was "faster than ever" due to its "automated systems" and "TPM 2.0" checks. As for those who managed to bypass the automated checks, Activision writes they weren't around for very long as "97% of cheaters were stopped within 30 minutes of their first sign-in."

Additionally, Activision claims that "fewer than 1% of cheating attempts reached a match, and those who did were removed within minutes." Furthermore, Activision writes that major cheat vendors, which are platforms or websites that sell cheats for games, are now labelling many of their most-popular cheats as "unusable" or "detected" thanks to RICOCHET, and many of these vendors are "acknowledging they have no reliable products to offer for Black Ops 7."

If you've been gaming since the 1990s or were a kid during the original PlayStation and Nintendo 64 era of gaming, then Duke Nukem 3D probably needs no introduction. Outside of id Software's iconic Doom, 3D Realms' Duke Nukem 3D is widely regarded as one of the first-person shooter genre's defining releases.

Released in 1996 for MS-DOS and later ported to Sony and Nintendo consoles in 1997, Duke Nukem 3D was built on the company's proprietary Build engine, which rendered detailed 3D worlds (for the time), alongside transporting players to real-world-inspired locations such as a theatre, bookstore, and strip club. It was also chock-full of movie references to classic films like Aliens, Evil Dead II, They Live, Full Metal Jacket, and more.

However, as a first-person shooter (FPS) from the mid-1990s, such as Doom, all in-game characters and effects, including fire, were presented as 2D sprites. That is, until now. Voxel Duke Nukem 3D, from modder Dan Peterson/Cheello, has spent the last three years converting "all monsters, babes, props and more" to 3D voxel models.

A few months ago, in June 2025, Microsoft announced a new multi-year agreement with AMD for the development of AI-powered gaming chips. "I'm thrilled to share we've established a strategic, multi-year partnership with AMD to co-engineer silicon across a portfolio of devices, including our next-generation Xbox consoles," Xbox President Sarah Bond said at the time.

The specific mention of 'next-generation Xbox consoles' can mean only one thing: Microsoft is actively developing a next-generation Xbox console or consoles to replace the existing Xbox Series X|S combo. Or is it? Fast-forward to today, a new rumor from a credible source suggests that Xbox is leaving the hardware business for good to become a third-party publisher.

Now, you'd think that this rumor would be viewed through a skeptical lens. However, based on the past couple of years of Xbox brand realignment and behavior that seemingly points to it becoming a software-first Microsoft division, this rumor has firmly taken root. To the point where Microsoft has had to release a statement confirming that it's still committed to designing, engineering, and building Xbox hardware.

Update: Microsoft has replied to these rumors, with a statement reading: "We are actively investing in our future first-party consoles and devices designed, engineered and built by Xbox". You can also read a new story on the topic right here.

Microsoft has reportedly killed off its Xbox hardware business according to new rumors, with reports that the "hardware production has ceased" on any future Xbox consoles.

In a new post on the NeoGAF forums, leaker "SneakersSO" who had previously leaked the initial plans for porting Xbox games to other consoles, says that there were indeed plans to make a next-gen Xbox console that went from "really concrete" to being "up in the air" because the time to pull the trigger on the manufacturing of a new Xbox wasn't that far.

Alienware is flexing a little more into custom LEGO sets, with the introduction of its new Alienware Brick Kit Desk... a small gaming desk with Alienware's latest hardware including peripherals and a monitor, for the best LEGO full battle station gaming PC in the world.

The company released its super-popular Alienware Area-51 Desktop Brick kit made with Authentic LEGO bricks, but now it's back with the Brick Kit Desk that features a desk with an Alienware Pro Mouse, headset and keyboard, all in a brick build, with the keyboard profiled to mirror Alienware's recently released Aurora FX package.

Each of the kits will feature a sticker pack that features some of Alienware's newly-released wallpapers (which you can download here). The Alienware technology sits on a custom brick desk... that get this... has height-adjustable legs, which the company says "should allow you to fit the kit in places with varying heights" like shelving, etc.

The Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 early access multiplayer beta has gone live, and I have put it to the test across a range of graphics cards to evaluate in-game performance.

We have managed to gain early access to the multiplayer thanks to Activision, and have decided to see what kind of performance players will be getting at 4K and 1440p at native, with DLSS on no Frame Generation (FG), and with FG x 2 enabled. I tested the GeForce RTX 5070, 5070 Ti, and 5080 across 4K and 1440p, each test ran for 3 minutes and was done with the Extreme graphics preset enabled. Notably, all these tests were conducted using an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D.

If you don't want to dive through the charts below, here's what we got in a nutshell. A GeForce RTX 5080 averaged 124FPS at 4K native, with impressively high minimums at 80FPS. By comparison, toggling on DLSS and keeping the same Extreme preset enabled, the RTX 5080 pushed up to 153FPS average, but strangely, minimums dropped down to 74FPS. With Frame Generation x 2 enabled, the RTX 5080 hit an average of 214FPS, but minimums were drastically reduced, down to just 23FPS.

Microsoft's choice to put Call of Duty on Xbox Game Pass has come at a detriment in potential sales.

It was always expected that Call of Duty would sell less copies once it was put on the Xbox Game Pass subscription service, but it was always hard to make an estimate of impact. Now reports indicate that Microsoft could have lost up to $300 million in Call of Duty game sales on console and PC in 2024 by including the franchise in Game Pass, most of which would likely be weighted by Black Ops 6's launch onto the service.

Sources tell Bloomberg's Cecilia D'Anastasio that Call of Duty made $300 million less in 2024 than it did with 2023, potentially indicating that Black Ops 6 was not as successful as the Xbox division hoped it'd be. To be clear, that's a substantial sum for any video game, and the potential lost sales represents 1/3rd of Modern Warfare II's astronomical $1 billion sales that the game made at release.

Microsoft is internally testing an ad-supported version of Xbox Cloud Gaming and a widespread public beta for free streaming is coming soon, sources tell The Verge's Tom Warren.

Xbox Cloud Gaming will soon be free with ads, allowing users to stream a selection of games without being tied to a paid subscription. The move comes as Microsoft officially launches its Xbox cloud product onto the market, and now we're seeing how it will make money on its own: With advertisements.

According to the report, Microsoft's free Xbox Cloud Gaming offering will let gamers stream a selection of titles that they have purchased across PC, console, handhelds, and on the web. To keep content rolling, and to entice people to play and watch ads, users can also stream the current Xbox Free Play Days titles, which includes a rotating lineup of games that can be sampled for free over a weekend, as well as a bunch of retro games. The current test phase has 2 minutes of ads per every 1 hour session, with 5 free sessions, or 5 free hours, per month. Bear in mind this is testing and the official launch hasn't been confirmed or announced, so we don't know these critical specifics just yet.

Unity has issued a patch to fix a high-level vulnerability and is advising all game developers to update their games with the latest solution.

Back in June, a severe-level security vulnerability was found in older versions of Unity. Games that were made in Unity 2017.1 or below are affected by the weak spot and Unity is advising all devs update their applications with the latest patch fix. The vulnerability affected Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS. Unity is one of the most popular video games engines, and a sizable portion of the top mobile games--including Call of Duty Mobile and Pokemon Go--are built on Unity.

"Applications that were built using affected versions of the Unity Editor are susceptible to an unsafe file loading and local file inclusion attack depending on the operating system, which could enable local code execution or information disclosure at the privilege level of the vulnerable application," the company wrote in its advisory post.

It's been a big couple of months for NVIDIA's GeForce NOW cloud gaming service, from expanding the library to allow users to install their own games, to the arrival of new GeForce RTX 5080-class pods, offering premium subscribers the full suite of DLSS 4 technologies. NVIDIA notes that these new RTX 5080 pods have been rolled out in Miami and Warsaw, Poland, in the past week, with Portland and Ashburn the next locations to get them.

And with that, October is set to be a big month for GeForce NOW cloud gaming, with 17 titles coming to the platform, including some of the most anticipated releases of the year. The big one, naturally, is Battlefield 6, which could be one of the first major titles to support the service's new 360 FPS streaming at 1080p with NVIDIA Reflex technology delivering cloud-gaming response times as low as 30 milliseconds.

Other big releases for the month include ARC Raiders, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2, Jurassic World Evolution 3, Painkiller, and The Outer Worlds 2. Here's the list of games coming to GeForce NOW in October 2025, alongside some recent additions to the library added in the last week.

Much to the dismay of physical media aficionados, the new Oblivion remastered deluxe edition apparently won't be shipped complete on disc.

The box art for Bethesda's anticipated Oblivion remaster deluxe physical edition has been updated, confirming that the game will indeed require internet downloads, but it's unclear whether or not this refers to the bonus content, which also requires users to download a separate app in order to fully access. Gamers had initially hoped that the physical copies would ship complete on disc, with the full game and all associated bonuses packed onto the Blu-ray.

Each of the game boxes say different things. The PS5 box says "internet required" while also confirming that the deluxe DLC content has to be downloaded from the PlayStation Network. The Xbox Series X version says "requires content download," which is vague, but erring on the side of caution never hurts. It's expected that even if the disc contains most of the game itself, that players will have to download a portion of Oblivion's juggernaut file size from the internet. And for no particular reason at all, the physical deluxe edition is $40, whereas the base game (not deluxe) is currently $50 on both the PS Store and Xbox Store.

Battlefield 6 is just over a week away from release if you can believe it, and according to new reports, the game has already seen 1.7 million pre-orders fly out the door (well, onto gamers' systems) on Steam alone.

In a new report from The Game Business and some new statistics from data firm Ampere Analysis, Battlefield Studios has already had 1.7 million copies of Battlefield 6 pre-ordered on Steam, with the firm predicting that we'll see another 5 million copies of BF6 sold in the first week alone.

The report also has some Newzoo estimates that the Battlefield 6 beta was played by around 25 million people, while Ampere's numbers have the BF6 beta being played by 22 million people. Newzoo reports that the peak concurrent player count for the Battlefield 6 beta across all platforms -- PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S -- sat at around 10.4 million, double the peak of 5.1 million for the Battlefield 2042 beta.

The new Halo Combat Evolved Remake is being co-developed by Abstraction Games, sources tell insider Rebs Gaming.

Halo Studios is poised to unveil the next Halo game on October 24, but until then it appears new reports and rumors have surfaced about the project. According to the latest info from Rebs Gaming, the new Halo game, which is expected to be a Combat Evolved remake in Unreal Engine 5, is being co-developed by a Virtuos-owned studio in the Netherlands.

"Two of my sources say Abstraction, a Virtuos studio located in the Netherlands, is developing the Halo: Combat Evolved Remake," the YouTuber, who has an accurate track record of reporting Halo leaks, said in the video.

Microsoft's third Game Pass price increase has affected PC Game Pass, but the extra cost offers day and date access to new first-party games.

Game Pass is getting overhauled with a rebrand and price hikes. Ultimate is now $30 a month, and includes Ubisoft+ with the promise of 75 day one games per year. Game Pass PC has also gone up from its original $11.99 price to $16.49 per month, an increase of +37%.

Interestingly enough, this price increase was not mentioned anywhere in the official Xbox Wire announcement post, nor did Microsoft make a new promotional trailer video for PC Game Pass like it did for the other tiers. The new PC pricing is only available via a clickable drop-down section on the Game Pass join page. Perhaps the imminent launch of the Xbox Ally PC handheld duo has something to do with this obfuscation, as Microsoft may want new users to initially buy games at full price.

A consortium of investors is taking Electronic Arts private in a $55 billion leveraged buyout, but experts are saying that the deal's timing doesn't make a ton of financial sense.

EA will soon become a private company. A consortium of three investor groups has pooled $55 billion together to buy out all existing EA shares: Saudi Arabia's PIF sovereign wealth fund, investment firm Silver Lake, and Jared Kushner's investment group Affinity Partners. The deal, which is expected to close in April 2027, is a bit of a head-scratcher for institutions like Citigroup.

In a recent interview with Yahoo Finance, Citi managing director Jason Bazinet says the timing of this move is unusual, mainly because EA will likely divulge metrics of Battlefield 6 during its upcoming quarterly reports and that info can potentially be used to secure a higher price.

Polish game dev Bloober Team has confirmed Silent Hill 1 is in production at the studio, and also mentions some interesting new game world technology for future projects.

Work on the Silent Hill 1 remake is in full swing. On the heels of the successful Silent Hill 2 remake, Bloober is applying their horror mastery to the first game in the series, and it could use new "open cities" technology created by the game devs.

In a recent Q&A with investors, management for the publicly-traded Bloober Team discussed plans for new games, including Silent Hill and beyond. The studio, who just released Cronos: The New Dawn, aims to streamline game development so that fans aren't waiting too long in between major title releases. This could mean that the Silent Hill 1 remake will release sooner than expected.

New Call of Duty games are exclusive to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate for at least a year, Microsoft has announced, and some existing Call of Duty games can still be played by Premium subscribers.

Microsoft has announced key changes with Xbox Game Pass, with new Essential and Premium tiers and Game Pass Ultimate increasing to $30 a month. Due to the timing, the hike was designed in part for Call of Duty; Microsoft is locking access to new Call of Duty games like Black Ops 7 behind the more expensive Ultimate tier.

This sets the trend for new Call of Duty game releases on Xbox Game Pass, however older Call of Duty games will remain in the Game Pass catalog to be played by mid-tier subscribers. Doing a quick search, I found that there are three mainline Call of Duty games offered on the $15 per month Xbox Game Pass Premium: WWII, and the newer Modern Warfare II and Modern Warfare III reboots. This feels like an important distinction to make, and is indicative of Microsoft's willingness to break apart premium franchises for potential long-term gain (Call of Duty is so popular that even the older games would still sell millions of copies per year, and in one year, the franchise sold 25 million games).

Xbox president Sarah Bond reiterates that the Game Pass model is profitable, sustainable, and beneficial for game developers.

About a week before Microsoft chose to increase Xbox Game Pass Ultimate to $30 per month, executive management was reminding Japanese games publication Game Watch about the service's recent milestones. Xbox's president, Sarah Bond, says that Game Pass continues to be profitable.

When asked by Game Watch if Xbox was a viable business, Bond answered: "Last fiscal year, Xbox Game Pass sales reached a record high of $5 billion. It's a profitable business, and as more creators join Xbox Game Pass, payments to creators increase, so we think it's a good business for creators."

In the by now long and established tradition of weird stuff happening in the world of gaming, somebody has built an actual AI within Minecraft.

As TechSpot reports, this is the work of YouTuber Sammyuri, who is no stranger to pulling off novel stuff in Minecraft, and this latest installment is called 'CraftGPT' - dropping a hint as to the inspiration here.

This is a small language model (SLM) AI running using Minecraft's Redstone mechanics (which is akin to the electricity of the blocky world).

Microsoft is experiencing backlash after announcing a price hike for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate by 50%, and now the director of gaming and platform communications for Microsoft has come out to defend the decision to increase the price of the subscription.

Dustin Blackwell spoke to The Verge regarding the 50% price increase on the Ultimate subscription plan, and said that Microsoft understands that a price increase is "never fun for anybody," but Microsoft is attempting to make swallowing the hike easier by adding more value to Game Pass Ultimate. Blackwell admits the backlash from the community is "something we don't take lightly" and that "we're listening to the feedback of players and the community".

What value is Microsoft bringing to the new, now-overhauled Game Pass tiers? Blackwell explained that Microsoft has decided to give subscribers access to more than 75 day one releases each year, which is a "50 percent increase over the day one titles we provided last year." In addition to day-one access to titles, Blackwell pointed to additions to Game Pass such as Ubisoft+ Classics and Fortnite Crew.