Microsoft has shut down three studios from ZeniMax as the games industry shrinks and retracts.

In a bid to cut spending and stabilize margins, Microsoft has made multiple rounds of layoffs across its Xbox games division. In January, Microsoft laid off 1,900 employees across its Xbox and Activision branches, and today it was revealed that three entire studios will also be closing down.

Arkane Austin, the developer of Prey and the ill-fated Redfall, Tango Gameworks, the devs of Hi-Fi Rush and the excellent Evil Within games, and Alpha Dog, who made mobile games like Mighty Doom for ZeniMax, have all been shut down.

Microsoft has announced the closure of at least four developer studios under its Bethesda branch, including Arkane Austin, the studio behind Redfall, and Tango Gameworks, the creators of Hi-Fi Rush and The Evil Within.

According to an internal email sent to studios by Matt Booty, the head of Xbox Game Studios, Microsoft has decided to blame the inevitable job cuts on its initiative of "reprioritization of titles and resources". The email states the team at Arkane Austin will be closing, and some members of the team will be going to other teams at Bethesda.

Alpha Dog Studios, the developers of the mobile game Alpha Dog, will also be closing, along with the internal development studio Roadhouse Games, which will be merged into ZeniMax Online Studios, which is working on titles such as The Elder Scrolls Online. As for Tango Gameworks, the developer behind Hi-Fi Rush, Booty, thanked the team for their work and said the game will remain available to players, the same as Redfall.

The president of Nintendo has confirmed when the company will make an announcement regarding a successor to the Nintendo Switch - something fans have been dying to know for many months now.

If you have been following along with the Nintendo Switch 2 news, you will know there have been plenty of rumors and leaks of information regarding Nintendo's next console, with some pointing to support for higher than 60FPS gameplay, and others saying the console will come with "electromagnetic suction" Joy-Cons, along with an 8-inch display. While all of the rumors haven't been confirmed, Nintendo has finally confirmed when it will be announcing its next-generation console.

Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa took to X and stated Nintendo will make an announcement regarding the successor to the Nintendo Switch "within the fiscal year". The president of Nintendo made a point to mention the Nintendo Switch was announced in March 2015, making its existence 9 years old, an incredible age for the console. For context, the Switch became available in March 2017.

It looks like we could be in for a huge naming scheme change for AMD's upcoming "Strix Point" APUs, with the new ASUS VivoBook S16 laptops featuring an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 170 processor.

We've never heard of the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 170 processor, but ASUS lists it as a 12-core, 24-thread CPU that clocks at up to 5.1GHz with 36MB of cache and Ryzen AI performance of up to 77 TOPS. Until now, no "AI" wording has made it into any processor from AMD like this, so it looks like we could see the Ryzen AI 5, Ryzen AI 7, and Ryzen AI 9 series CPUs in the near future.

ASUS will unveil the new VivoBook S16 laptops at Computex 2024 next month, and I'm sure we're going to get the official naming from AMD at their Computex 2024 press conference. The new Strix Point CPUs aka Ryzen AI 9 HX 170 processor will deliver up to 77 TOPS of AI performance from its beefed-up XDNA2-based Ryzen AI NPU and newer RDNA 3.5 GPU. The NPU on its own will provide 45 TOPS of AI workload performance.

In a new interview with MIT Technology Review, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed what the future will look like with artificial intelligence-powered systems becoming more engrained in our lives.

The CEO of one of the companies leading the charge in AI development began the interview by saying AI tools will replace the smartphone as the most dependent piece of technology in our daily lives, and the capabilities of AI will be so great that it will feel like "this thing that is off helping you." Altman went on to describe the perfect app for AI would be a "super-competent colleague that knows absolutely everything about my whole life, every email, every conversation I've ever had, but doesn't feel like an extension."

Additionally, this level of AI could attempt things outside its known capabilities, fail, and then come back to the user with follow-up questions. The answers the user provides to those questions are then integrated into its second attempt at the task. So, what will power this crazy new AI? Altman believes there's a chance that we won't even need a specific piece of hardware to use this AI on the go, as the new app could simply access the cloud.

The U.S. government is on a quest to reduce the strain on the microchip fabrication industry, which has progressively become more important with the rise of artificial intelligence-powered systems.

The Biden Administration is committed to bringing chip manufacturing back to the United States, and under the multi-billion CHIPS Act, applications have been opened for $285 million in funding to develop "digital twins". Digital twins are advanced software models of hardware that can be used by engineers to identify key problems in the design of a piece of hardware. In this case, to receive funding an institute would have to create a digital twin of microchips.

The result of having a digital twin for hardware means engineers can make changes to the design of a chip before its even manufactured, speeding up the overall time it takes to design new silicone-based hardware. These virtual clones of pieces of hardware have been used in the past by the auto industry and the Space Force for satellite simulations.

Helldivers 2 has had a somewhat tumultuous week following Sony Interactive Entertainment's announcement that PC gamers will soon be required to connect to a PSN account to access the game.

Sony has since backpedalled on that announcement, saying via the PlayStation X account that none of the the previously announced changes were going to go ahead and that it's still learning how to engage with the PC gaming community. The initial news of forced PSN and Steam connection resulted in massive backlash in the form of negative review bombing the game's Steam listing and an uproar in the Helldivers 2 Discord.

Spitz, the Helldivers 2 community manager stopped posting in the game's dedicated Discord server on Saturday, one day after the changes were announced. PCGamer reports the community manager left then server and has only returned today, telling the community he was almost fired for his last public comments about the controversial situation.

Supergiant Games' Hades is not only one of the most critically acclaimed and celebrated games of all time, serving as the high watermark for narrative-driven rogue-like action games, but it was a game that went from great to genius through its Early Access period.

With a recent technical test for the highly anticipated Hade II proving to be a success, developer and publisher Supergiant Games has decided to launch Hades II into Early Access on Steam and the Epic Games Store.

Yes, you can play the game right now. Which, according to the team, "has more environments, foes, and fully-voiced characters than the full version of the original Hades game." However, it isn't complete with key areas, foes, and narrative events set to be added in the months ahead.

NASA Goddard has taken to its YouTube channel to share an incredible visualization of what it would look like to fall into a supermassive black hole.

The space agency explains via the description of the video that a NASA supercomputer was used to create a scenario where a camera, or as NASA put it, "a stand-in for a daring astronaut," was placed within the orbit of a supermassive black hole. The camera orbits the supermassive black hole, pulled in by its intense gravity, and then passes the black hole's event horizon.

The space agency explained that the supermassive black hole within the visualization is approximately 4.3 million times the mass of our Sun, and the entire video was created using the Discover supercomputer at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation. The event horizon is the boundary around a black hole that light can no longer escape due to the gravity intense gravity of the astronomical object.

Quad-slot, triple-fan graphics cards are not unheard of, but they're massive units that push the limits of what you can fit inside a standard PC chassis and still have some room left for airflow. XFX, one of AMD's closest partners for creating Radeon graphics cards, has unveiled its latest flagship, the Radeon RX 7900 XTX Phoenix Nirvana - with dimensions (346 x 130 x 66mm) that make it one of the biggest gaming cards on the market.

Currently available for pre-order in China, with a price that translates to around $1100 USD, the Phoenix Nirvana should make its way to global markets as the Radeon RX 7900 XTX is set to be the most powerful ADM gaming GPU for at least another year or so. So, even though the Radeon RX 7900 XTX first launched in December 2022, there's enough room to launch a new flagship variant.

With next-gen RDNA 4 targeting a more mid-range market, the Radeon RX 8800 XT is set to fall behind the Radeon RX 7900 XTX in performance. With its 24GB of VRAM, the 7900 XTX is also a capable AI GPU in addition to being a 4K gaming card.