There's been a lot of chatter recently about Hideo Kojima's PHYSINT and the financial figures tied to its deal with Xbox. Chris Dring of The Game Business said on his podcast that Xbox's budget for Hideo Kojima's PHYSINT sits around $400 million. That number now appears to be disputed. Bloomberg's Jason Schreier says someone at Xbox with firsthand knowledge of the deal told him it was signed for "significantly less." Windows Central's Jez Corden says sources with direct knowledge of the contracts told him Xbox and Kojima Productions are working with a "fraction" of that figure. Dring has since said he has also been told Xbox is paying quite a bit less. Corden adds that $400 million is potentially what Sony and PlayStation were on the hook for before they canceled the deal.

Kojima said Sony dropped PHYSINT during a Zoom call and gave no reason, and Xbox then announced on September 9 that it would publish the game. Bloomberg's earlier report, citing PlayStation insiders, said the game was behind schedule and heading over budget, which Kojima Productions has since denied. Corden also says the Xbox deal includes movie and TV licenses for PHYSINT, plus enhanced terms for OD. There is no official figure from either company, and the game has no release date yet, although Xbox and Kojima Productions did reveal its cast and first poster at Tokyo Game Show. For now, readers should treat the $400 million figure as unlikely, and it may well belong to the earlier Sony deal.

Epic Games has long been attempting to set up the Epic Games Store as an alternative to Steam, which is why it has offered its infamous free weekly games since 2018. More recently, Epic has promised a Game Store overhaul in order to draw in more game publishers and players with new features, a refined UI, better game discovery, and even Linux support. Now, in a recent interview with PC Gamer, Newzoo analyst, Emmanuel Rosier, argues that it may be too little too late for Epic to claw back enough market share with a redesign,

The analyst echoes previous reports that said players were simply going to Epic for the free games and then turning around and going back to Steam when they wanted to buy a game they actually wanted to spend money on. The premise of the argument is that Steam is "inevitable," meaning it is too big for new gamers to avoid and too entrenched for long-time and casual gamers to turn their backs on.

Welcome to the TechPowerUp 2011 PC technology Christmas special. We hope that you will enjoy reading it while tucking into your turkey, Christmas presents and a little too much wine... In this article, we go through the technology of 2011 that has had the most significance, the most impact and was generally the most talked about. It's not necessarily the best tech of 2011 which is the most significant though, since lemons can be just as significant as the ground-breakers in how they fail to deliver - and the backlash that goes with it.

January: Intel Sandy Bridge i5 & i7

Released on January 9th, the new Intel Core i5 & i7 processors were based on Intel's second generation Core architecture built on a 32 nm production process (HEXUS review). They included an IGP (Integrated Graphics Processor) physically on the same piece of silicon along with HyperThreading. These new dual and quad core processors soundly beat all previous generations of Intel processors in terms of processing performance, heat, power use, features and left AMD in the dust. Therefore, Intel badly needed some competition from AMD and unless you have been living under a rock, you will know how that turned out in October with the launch of Bulldozer. Sandy Bridge was a sound win and is generally considered to be the only architecture worth considering at this point. The i5-2500K is currently at the sweet spot of price/performance. It comes at a stock speed of 3.3 GHz, but typically overclocks to an amazing 4.5 - 5 GHz with a decent air cooler and without too much difficulty in getting there. Models in the budget i3 range were released at various times later. See this Wikipedia article for details.

Shattering its own day-one sales records, Activision Publishing, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Activision Blizzard, announced that its highly-anticipated Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 has become the biggest entertainment launch ever with an estimated sell-through of more than $400 million and more than 6.5 million units in North America and the United Kingdom alone in the first 24 hours of its release, according to Charttrack and retail customer sell-through information.

This marks the third consecutive year that the Call of Duty franchise has set day one launch records across all forms of entertainment, something no other entertainment franchise in any medium has ever accomplished. Last year, in North America and the United Kingdom , Activision's Call of Duty: Black Ops had estimated day-one sell-through of $360 million and in 2009, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, set day-one records with estimated sell through of $310 million, according to Charttrack and retail customer sell-through information.

On November 8, 2011, millions of fans attended more than 13,000 midnight openings at retail stores worldwide. According to Microsoft, after just two days, the number of gamers playing simultaneously on Xbox Live set a new peak concurrency record.