Forza Horizon 6 will apparently reach the PlayStation 5 on January 26, 2027, according to billbil-kun, the generally reliable leaker at Dealabs. That would put the port a little over eight months behind the Xbox Series X|S and PC versions, which launched on May 19, and it would miss the 2026 window that Microsoft and Playground Games have been promising since January. The game is also said to be getting a physical disc release on the same day as the digital version. That is a change from Forza Horizon 5, which arrived on PS5 in April 2025 as a digital-only title. Pricing is reportedly set at €69.99 in Europe and £59.99 in the UK, the same as the Xbox version, and billbil-kun expects the US price to land at $69.99.

An official announcement is expected as early as this week, with pre-orders opening shortly after. Of course, neither Microsoft nor Playground Games has confirmed any of this. In early September, the studio's own blog still said the PS5 version would be out "later this year". The Verge's Tom Warren had been saying otherwise since late August, and he later reported that the port was being pushed to early 2027, apparently to coincide with the game's first expansion. It looks like he had it right. PS5 owners should keep an eye out for the official launch date and pre-order details.

HPE (NYSE: HPE) today announced the first four of its HPE ProLiant Gen13 Servers powered by 6th Generation AMD EPYC Server processors. The new systems expand compute, memory, and I/O capabilities to help enterprises accelerate agentic AI and inference, analytics, virtualization, simulation, and modeling while strengthening security, simplifying operations, and providing reliability across distributed IT environments.

As AI systems evolve from generating insights to taking autonomous action, trust becomes a prerequisite for scale. McKinsey's 2026 AI Trust Maturity Survey found that nearly two-thirds of respondents cited security and risk concerns as the top barrier to fully scaling agentic AI. Within this evolving landscape, HPE ProLiant Gen13 helps customers address security and operational barriers with a trusted infrastructure foundation that combines HPE iLO 8 innovations for automatic protection, infrastructure trust, and post-quantum readiness with enhanced visibility and control from HPE Compute Ops Management.

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has reportedly told staff that the next-generation "Project Helix" hardware will lead with a home console, with portable play apparently coming as part of the same lineup. The remarks come from an internal town hall, and Windows Central says it obtained and verified a transcript. Helix was already known to be a "family of devices" instead of a single box, but this is the clearest hint so far about what else is in that family. Here's what she said:

We are moving to a family of devices for Gen-10. There is not one device that fits all. We will certainly have a great console first, but we also know that many players will be on the go. There are some things that we are the best in the world to manufacture, and there are other things that we will partner on. So, we will be sharing more about that as our plans develop. The operating system is starting to look really good. We're very excited about this.

AMD will "substantially" increase its chip supply in 2027, CEO Lisa Su told reporters in Taipei on Tuesday, while admitting that demand is still running ahead of what the company can ship. Su is on her third trip to Taiwan this year, meeting partners such as Foxconn, Quanta, Acer, and ASUS, with TSMC also on the schedule. She is reportedly heading to South Korea later this week to sit down with memory suppliers Samsung and SK Hynix. Here's what she said:

We've been able to increase our supply as we've gone through 2026, and we're going to substantially increase our supply in 2027, but we can definitely use more. There's very, very high demand for the next several years. We can see very high demand, and so we need more advanced wafer capacity.

AMD's upcoming EPYC "Verano" processors will apparently use a new socket called SB1. The name comes from server cooler maker Dynatron, which now states on its website that its cooling solutions support "AMD EPYC Verano on Socket SB1." Dynatron also has a product page up for a 4U active cooler listed as "SB1-4U-ACTIVE (TBD)," so the final product name is still pending. The "B" in SB1 could point to a BGA package soldered to the board, although that is a guess based on the name and nothing official. The listing doesn't help much either. Maximum power is marked as TBD, and the 128.05 x 106.6 x 130.7 mm dimensions are identical to Dynatron's J26 cooler for SP7, so the specs could simply be placeholders for now.

Verano is the codename for the EPYC 9006 LP, a Zen 6 part that AMD announced alongside the rest of its 6th Gen EPYC lineup. It tops out at 72 cores with boost clocks of up to 5 GHz, and it runs on 24 channels of LPDDR5X memory through replaceable SOCAMM2 modules. AMD is aiming it at AI racks as a host processor for GPU clusters, with a launch planned for the second half of 2027. The regular "Venice" chips use different sockets, namely SP7 for up to 256 cores and SP8 for up to 128. For "Verano," AMD itself hasn't revealed the socket name yet.

Chinese NAND flash maker YMTC apparently expects the global memory shortage to last another three years. The claim comes from a profile of the company published by The Wire China, in which a YMTC employee, speaking anonymously, shared the outlook. The same employee said YMTC has raised prices for its chips and shifted capacity toward higher-margin products. The excerpt was shared on X by @jukan05, who read it as a NAND forecast, although the employee's wording covers memory in general. Three more years would put the end of the shortage somewhere around late 2029. This is one unnamed employee's words, of course, and not public guidance from YMTC.

That 2029 prediction is well past TrendForce's estimate, which has NAND flash supply loosening in the second half of 2027 as new capacity comes online. It sits closer to Micron's view, with CEO Sanjay Mehrotra saying last week that supply will be much tighter in 2027 and 2028. The shift in capacity matters too, especially for regular PC builders. Counterpoint Research ranked YMTC fourth in NAND bit shipments in Q2 with a 14% share, yet only fifth in revenue, since its product mix leans toward consumer applications. Moving capacity to higher-margin chips could leave less for consumer SSDs, even as YMTC works to double its wafer output with new fabs. Nevertheless, readers planning a storage upgrade shouldn't count on prices dropping anytime soon.

Final Fantasy 7 Revelation is getting a physical edition, and it seems director Naoki Hamaguchi had to argue for it. He told Radio Times that he pushed Square Enix for a boxed release, while admitting the product lineup is the publishing team's call. On PS5 and Xbox Series X, the disc reportedly works as a key disc that holds the opening and downloads the rest, and the Switch 2 gets a game-key card. The game launches on April 8, 2027. Here's what Hamaguchi said:

In this day and age, as we've been talking about, there's a lot of pressure for disc-less editions, digital editions, and I used my position to put forth an argument for the physical version as much as possible. I completely understand there are those out there who may not really agree with that direction or approve of that direction. But I would just say that I hope you understand that I completely see where you're coming from, and that I did my best.

Steam reportedly just had its best September on record. Alinea Analytics estimates that the platform generated a hefty $1.7 billion last month, up 13% from September 2025, which held the previous record. The third quarter was also Steam's best to date at $5.5 billion, a 12% increase year over year. That puts the 2026 total at $16.5 billion after nine months, compared to $14.5 billion in the same period last year, and well past the $11.1 billion it made in the first half. Valve doesn't publish these figures, so all of this is Alinea's estimate. Bulkhead's early access shooter Wardogs was the top premium game with $86.9 million after launching on September 10, followed by Onimusha: Way of the Sword at $30.4 million and The Blood of Dawnwalker at $26.9 million.

Free-to-play is still a big part of the picture, however. Counter-Strike 2, Apex Legends, PUBG, and Dota 2 brought in almost $168 million combined, nearly 10% of the month's total. Alinea also noted that The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered, a free upgrade for existing owners, pushed the 11-year-old game to roughly 2.4 million daily active users across Steam, PlayStation, and Xbox on its September 30 launch day, over ten times its 2026 average. All of this spending comes at a time when PC hardware is anything but cheap. Valve's own Steam Machine starts at $1,049, and Micron expects memory supply to be much tighter in 2027 and 2028. The analytics suggest people are buying games regardless, and Alinea expects Steam to cross $20 billion in a year for the first time. With the Q4 release slate still to come, that looks to be a safe bet.

NVIDIA's supply commitments climbed to $279 billion in the quarter ended July 26, up from $119 billion the quarter before. The company says the increase is primarily related to memory procurement. Morgan Stanley estimates that NVIDIA has claimed about 37.3% of global high-bandwidth memory (HBM) supply for 2027, with Alphabet at 36% and AMD at 12.1%. That adds up to roughly 85%, leaving everyone else to split the rest. These are Morgan Stanley's estimates, as reported by The Inference.

About $267 billion of the commitments come due by the end of fiscal 2029, according to the filing. NVIDIA reported record revenue of $96.2 billion for the quarter, but memory costs are weighing on margins. Gross margin was 75% and is guided to 74% this quarter, with a trough of 71% to 72% expected in the January quarter. CFO Colette Kress tied that pressure to memory pricing. Operating cash flow also fell to $24.1 billion from $50.3 billion the quarter before. Jensen Huang said on September 17 that he expects NVIDIA to sell twice as many chips next year, and the company's formal guidance is about 70% revenue growth.

Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra says memory and storage supply will likely be much tighter in 2027 and 2028 than it was in 2026. He made the remarks during Micron's fiscal Q4 2026 earnings call on September 30, where the company reported record quarterly revenue of $54.2 billion. Here's what he said:

Industry demand has strengthened since our last earnings call, and we expect memory and storage supply-demand conditions to be much tighter in fiscal 2027 and 2028 than they were in 2026. AI is becoming super intelligent, and memory enhances this intelligence and the competitiveness of our customers' platforms. Even with additional industry DRAM clean room space plans with robust demand trends, including new upside requests from customers, we do not have line of sight to when supply and demand will return to balance.

Almost a year ago, to the day, Valve revealed a new Steam Store UI, which cleaned up much of the storefront's UI and presented an overall more cohesive design that is better suited to the variety of PCs, handhelds, and consoles that Valve now caters to. It appears as though Valve's next upcoming update to the Steam Store UI is more subtle, but may have a more meaningful impact on game discovery, for both developers and gamers, alike. This update also comes shortly after Valve overhauled the Steam handheld and Big Picture mode with the optional Big Art mode.

According to a new post in Steamworks news—Valve's developer news feed—Steam will soon lose the curated Discounts & Events section that appears at the top of users' Steam Store Home pages, which currently shows deal and event placements scheduled by developers or directly by Steam. In its place, Valve will introduce "something more dynamic and personalized for each customer," which Valve says will give more sale and game events a chance at being featured on the Store homepage and throughout Steam. Valve says that, in previous tests of this new methodology, it has been able to show games to 10 times more Steam users than using the old model.

Sony has confirmed it will not exhibit at CES 2027 in Las Vegas, ending a run that goes back to the very first show in 1967. A company spokesperson told Bloomberg that neither Sony nor any of its affiliates plan to exhibit at the January event. Sony did not have its own booth at CES 2026 either, but its Sony Honda Mobility joint venture still showed off an Afeela EV prototype at that show. That EV project was apparently the last big reason for Sony to keep showing up. Sony Honda Mobility canceled the Afeela 1 and a planned SUV in March, after Honda reassessed its electrification strategy, and the two companies said they would review the future of the joint venture.

Sony has also been pulling back from consumer hardware elsewhere, with TCL taking a 51% stake in a new joint venture that will assume its home entertainment business, including Bravia TVs. Sony's own statement says it "continuously and strategically" evaluates how it approaches events, and that its focus keeps shifting toward entertainment, intellectual property, and technology that supports creators. For gamers, it looks like PlayStation won't be using a CES stage next year either, although that was somewhat predictable. CES had slowly stopped being a Sony show already, but a 60-year streak ending is still strange to see.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered launched today, and it has already set a new all-time Steam concurrent player record for the game. SteamDB showed a peak of around 120,000 players at the time of writing, and the number was still climbing. The previous record was 103,329, set in January 2020 shortly after Netflix's The Witcher premiered. The original's launch peak in 2015 was roughly 92,000. CD Projekt Red announced the remaster at Gamescom with upgrades to visuals, performance, and gameplay, and said it wants the game to feel like a 2026 release.

It is a free update for existing owners on PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and Switch 2. The updated PC requirements now start at a Core i5-8400 or Ryzen 5 2600 with a GTX 1660, and scale all the way up to an RTX 5080 if you want the full path tracing experience. Apparently that didn't scare anyone off from jumping back onto the Path. Steam is the only platform with public player counts, so the total across consoles, GOG, and Battle.net is probably a lot higher. Since the peak was still rising, the upcoming weekend could push it further. The Songs of the Past expansion is due in 2027, so interest may stay healthy for a while, though I wouldn't expect this level to last.

Thermal Grizzly has launched the Mycro Pro Stainless Steel CPU water blocks, which list support for Intel's upcoming LGA1954 socket. The AMD version covers AM4 and AM5, while the Intel version covers LGA1700, LGA1851, and LGA1954. Thermal Grizzly sells both at $116.88, and European listings show €99.90. LGA1954 is the socket for Intel's upcoming Nova Lake-S desktop CPUs, which Intel seems to have confirmed through an internal validation tool listing, and recent leaks point to a Q1 2027 launch. Cooler makers have been signaling compatibility for a while, with Thermaltake's leaked installation guide and Noctua's FAQ update both saying LGA1851 coolers should carry over. Since the socket is expected to keep the same mounting as LGA1851, this block looks like it follows suit.

As for the block itself, the main change from the existing Mycro Pro RGB line is the materials. These blocks use an unplated copper coldplate with 0.2 mm microfins (68 on AMD, 70 on Intel), a stainless steel housing, and an anodized aluminium mounting frame. Thermal Grizzly dropped the nickel plating, which it says can give a slight thermal edge and lowers production costs. The tradeoff is that the bare copper will probably discolor over time, and there is no RGB. Neither block is meant for direct-die use, and the Intel inlet is tuned for LGA1851 chips with the stock heat spreader. However, the key point remains that Intel's new LGA1954 socket is now appearing in official product listings.

Qualcomm announced today that it is continuing its licensing agreement with Apple, as the previous agreement has ended. In a brief press statement, John Han, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Qualcomm Technology Licensing (QTL), stated that the company is "pleased to extend the Apple license agreement," which will take effect starting April 1, 2027. The end date of this new licensing agreement is still unknown, as the company did not disclose the exact terms, monetary value, or end date.

As readers may recall, in September 2023, Apple renewed its licensing deal with Qualcomm to obtain 5G modems for its products. This license was valid for three years and is now expiring, requiring a renewal. In its iPhones, Apple has started using a combination of in-house modems, known as C-series SoCs, along with Qualcomm-provided 5G modems. In 2019, Apple purchased Intel's modem business for $1 billion, acquiring the engineers and patents needed to jumpstart its own modem design and production. Early last year, with the launch of the iPhone 16e, Apple unveiled the C1 modem, its first-generation in-house 5G modem, which has since evolved into the upgraded C2 5G cellular modem design, now shipping with the iPhone 18 Pro lineup.

The Moirai have woven a long thread - after roughly a year and a half of hard Early Access labor, that thread is finally nearing its final knot. Hermes, herald of the gods, has descended to the mortal realm to announce the decision of the Pantheon: the Olympians are pleased with the efforts of hundreds of thousands of mortal adventurers, who already faced their Nemesis. In their eternal, divine greatness, they are granting us: a release date! Hermes is pleased to announce that Titan Quest II will leave Early Access and launch into full release on January 19th, 2027, for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S.

The Titan Quest II Odyssey has been long and full of epic adventures, right from ancient Greek mythology. Guided by feedback from a vast number of heroes during Early Access, Titan Quest II has been expanded through numerous updates that added new lands to conquer, new powers to wield, and new treasures to loot along the way. The developers at Grimlore Games have forged an ARPG like no other, with its unique mastery system that offers the players an immense amount of freedom while creating their own unique heroes. Version 1.0 pulls every strand together into the complete tapestry the Moirai had planned all along - plus a fair bit more.

Prominent AMD leaker Kepler_L2 says the chips for both the PlayStation 6 and Microsoft's Xbox Project Helix have taped out. Posting on the NeoGAF forums, he also put the PS6 at 40 TFLOPS and the Xbox Helix at 56 TFLOPS, which works out to roughly 40% more for Microsoft's machine on paper. Kepler was replying to a thread claiming the PS6 would hit 80 TFLOPS, which he dismissed before giving the new figures. Earlier estimates had put the PS6 at 34 to 40 TFLOPS, so 40 sits at the top of that range.

TFLOPS is only peak throughput, though. Kepler himself argued in the thread that TFLOPS is just a measure of FMA throughput and shouldn't be "normalized" across architectures, so these numbers probably can't be compared directly to PS5 or Xbox Series X ratings. Memory bandwidth, ray tracing hardware, and clocks all matter too, so 40% more TFLOPS likely won't translate into 40% more frames. Of course, this is just a leak, and Sony, Microsoft, and AMD have not confirmed any of this.

Mere hours after it was leaked that Xbox would be continuing its recent slew of layoffs, Xbox Wire published an internal email, officially confirming those layoffs and providing a glimpse into the future of the Xbox game development landscape. As a result of the layoffs, which will see 268 employees out of work, there also will be changes to several studios at Xbox, including Activision, Bethesda, King, Playground, and Turn 10.

It seems as though all of the layoffs this time around came out of the Halo Studios team, and Microsoft has left Activision in charge of the next Halo game as a result. Xbox says that a small team at Halo Studios will remain in order to support Activision in the franchise's development. Meanwhile, Ninja Theory, which was previously in negotiations on deals to exit Xbox's ownership, will officially close down instead of being bought. The Hellblade/Senua franchise will seemingly be developed by another studio at Xbox, following the closure of Ninja Theory. Xbox claims that two separate buyout deals had fallen through. For the time being, it seems as though Blizzard has escaped its anticipated layoffs.

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 currently ships with 2 GB GDDR7 modules, but even 3 GB modules have seen limited adoption due to their high cost. However, that could change soon. According to Weibo leaker Golden Pig Upgrade, memory manufacturers are reportedly planning 4 GB and 6 GB GDDR7 chips for a 2027 to 2028 window, a jump that could reshape how much VRAM budget and mid-range GPUs can carry without needing a wider memory bus. A 128-bit card using four memory packages currently tops out at 8 GB with today's 2 GB chips. Move to 4 GB chips and that same card could hit 16 GB, or 24 GB with 6 GB modules. Scale that up to a 256-bit interface with eight packages, and you're looking at 32 GB or 48 GB respectively, without touching the PCB layout or bus width. Of course, going the other way is possible too, a narrower memory bus combined with higher density, faster memory chips, can lead to similar bandwidth, with lower relative cost.

This would matter most at the low end, where narrow 128-bit buses have made generous VRAM capacities either awkward or expensive to pull off. Videocardz, citing supply chain sources, notes that today's 3 GB GDDR7 chips are already unusually expensive due to extreme demand, and that cost has reportedly contributed to delays around the rumored RTX 5050 9 GB and the RTX 50 Super refresh. If 4 GB chips end up cheaper to produce at scale, they could become the more practical choice for mainstream cards, while 6 GB modules might make more sense for workstation and other high-memory GPUs first. It's worth noting that the leaker's timeline only points to sometime in 2027 or 2028, so there's no confirmation this lines up with NVIDIA's RTX 60 series or AMD's next Radeon generation specifically.

Xbox is reportedly gearing up for a second major round of layoffs this week, and this time Blizzard and Halo Studios appear to be in the crosshairs. According to The Information, which cited a source briefed on the plans, Xbox is set to cut hundreds of jobs and consolidate several of its game studios. The report doesn't name specific studios or a final headcount, but insiders believe the consolidation could touch Xbox's publishing arms, including Xbox Game Studios, Bethesda, Activision, and Blizzard.

Blizzard's situation looks especially notable here. The studio was reportedly spared during Xbox's first wave of cuts in July, when CEO Asha Sharma eliminated 1,600 roles as part of a planned 3,200 reductions through fiscal 2027. That first round instead hit studios like ZeniMax Online and id Software. Bloomberg's Jason Schreier has since said Blizzard layoffs are coming and imminent, despite the studio reportedly being Xbox's most profitable branch right now, and just weeks after a strong BlizzCon that revealed Diablo V and World of Warcraft Forever.

Samsung is reportedly increasing its orders for materials to boost high-bandwidth memory (HBM) production, with plans to double the production capacity of its current HBM4 and HBM4E manufacturing by 2027. According to SE Daily, the manufacturing capacity for HBM4 and HBM4E is expected to grow from around 20,000 wafers per month in 2026 to 50,000 wafers per month in 2027. This data is derived from the use of glass carriers, which are temporary glass panels placed over thin DRAM wafers to prevent warping or breaking as they are prepared for packaging. Since HBM involves stacking many thin DRAM modules, glass carriers stabilize these wafers until the packaging process begins and the glass is removed. As the unit is one glass carrier per wafer, this provides an estimate of how many HBM4 and HBM4E wafers are produced each month.

Additionally, Samsung's overall HBM production, which includes older generations like HBM3 and HBM3E, currently averages around 180,000 wafers this year and is expected to grow to about 250,000 HBM wafers next year, with 80% dedicated to HBM4 and HBM4E. Samsung began mass production of HBM4 on its sixth-generation 10 nm-class 1c node in February, with HBM4E customer samples available by mid-2026. Future production increases will focus on HBM4 and HBM4E, as customers seek higher densities and bandwidth for their AI accelerators.

Acer Chairman and CEO Jason Chen says PC prices could rise by another 5% to 20% in the fourth quarter of 2026, according to Taiwan's Economic Daily News. Chen reportedly said that DDR4 and DDR5 memory are no longer in short supply and that CPU supply is mostly fine, with only some low-end and mid-range chips still tight. Prices haven't followed this change, though. Memory and SSD costs are still high, so systems with more RAM or storage will probably see bigger increases. Chen expects the average selling price of PCs to peak around mid-2027, with a possible drop in the second half of that year.

Even if component costs fall earlier, it takes several months for cheaper parts to reach finished PCs. Chen also reportedly said suppliers keep pushing through price increases, some of which he considers hard to justify. He also pointed to expanding Chinese memory production, and by the sound of it, he doesn't think the shortage can run until 2030, as many in the industry have claimed. That capacity is still ramping up, though. Chinese giant CXMT is reportedly preparing to enter the NAND flash market with an R&D line, and YMTC is expanding with new fabs.

SK hynix subsidiary Solidigm is reportedly planning to open its first NAND Flash manufacturing facility in the United States. To address global supply chain challenges, SK hynix is exploring ways to expand its production capabilities worldwide and create a more resilient operation against geopolitical events. Currently, Solidigm operates in the United States with its headquarters and R&D center, while all its manufacturing is based outside the country. When SK hynix acquired Intel's NAND Flash manufacturing business in 2021 and established the Solidigm brand, the company continued manufacturing in China without expanding overseas.

At present, Solidigm operates Fab 1 in Dalian, China, and has accelerated the construction of Fab 2 nearby. This expansion aims to increase production by 50% by 2027 to meet the rising demand for NAND Flash. Solidigm owns and operates this facility, marking a resumption of expansion in mainland China after a four-year project freeze.

Intel is reportedly preparing to retire the Core i5-14600K in favor of a new "Raptor Lake Next" chip with eight P-cores and eight E-cores. According to leaker Jaykihn on X (spotted by VideoCardz), the successor will have two more Performance cores than the current 14600K, putting it on par with the Core i7-14700K in P-core count, though not necessarily in cache or clocks. Raptor Lake Next is the codename for Intel's plan to extend the LGA 1700 platform with fresh silicon based on the original Raptor Lake design rather than the newer Raptor Lake Refresh. The chips are expected to launch alongside new LGA 1700 motherboards from Intel's partners in early 2027.

Intel seems to be using the lineup to fill gaps in the 14th Gen stack instead of replacing it outright, and it's reportedly also working on more 125W and 65W desktop SKUs alongside mobile variants. DDR4 support is apparently part of the pitch, which would help buyers sidestep today's DDR5 pricing crisis. More P-cores should help in games that lean on core count, and it looks like this could put the chip ahead of the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus, since the current 14600K already trades blows with Arrow Lake Refresh in several titles. That said, this is a single-source claim for now, so treat the exact configuration and timing as rumor until Intel or its partners confirm anything.

It's long been known that Grand Theft Auto VI would initially launch as a single-player game when it arrives in November 2026, and there has been no indication of when an actual GTA VI Online would launch. However, recently, Dan Clancy, CEO of Twitch, revealed in an interview with Bloomberg that he expects a "big bump with GTA 6, but then an even bigger one next year when they launch multiplayer," suggesting that GTA VI Online will launch in 2027.

The executive explains that he had spent time "talking with Rockstar about their plans," which doesn't necessarily mean that the information is 100% accurate—and even if it were, we've seen GTA VI's launch date move several times, by now—but it is a reasonably credible source for the information. In a previous interview with IGN, Take-Two's Strauss Zelnick suggested that the original GTA Online would receive support long into the future, even if GTA Online 2, as it were, was already released.