GTA 6 is now the most pre-ordered game ever on both the PlayStation Store and the Microsoft Store, according to Sony and Microsoft. Sony announced the record in a PlayStation Blog post that opened PS5 pre-loading nine days before the November 19 launch, pointing to "unprecedented demand" for the early start. Xbox then called it "the most pre-ordered title of all time on the Microsoft Store" while confirming that GTA 6 will stream to Xbox One through Cloud Gaming. Neither company shared actual numbers, however.

Sensor Tower's tracker fills some of that gap. As of November 10, the firm estimates 9.69 million pre-orders worth about $942 million net of returns, up from 7.71 million a week earlier and 6.45 million in late October. PlayStation holds roughly 75% of that with 7.23 million copies and $703 million, while Xbox sits at 2.46 million copies and $239 million. That averages out to around $97 per copy, which fits with most buyers going for the $100 Ultimate Edition. If accurate, GTA 6 has passed the 8 million pre-orders CD Projekt reported for Cyberpunk 2077 in 2020. The comparison isn't quite like-for-like, though, since Cyberpunk also launched on PC and likely counted physical copies, while Sensor Tower seems to track digital console orders only.

Marcus Ash, Microsoft's design and research lead for Windows and Devices, has hinted that more of Windows 11's old dialogs and admin tools could get a modern makeover. Under Jen Gentleman's post about the new option to silence the Sticky Keys prompt, a user asked Microsoft to "winui-fy" the legacy Win32 dialogs and MMC apps, and to fully move Control Panel into Settings. Ash replied with a short "Noted and working on that too." He didn't give a timeline or name any tools, so it's more like a nod than a roadmap.

There's plenty to work with, as Windows 11 still ships more than 20 tools with older interfaces, including Defragment and Optimize Drives, Disk Cleanup, Device Manager, Event Viewer, and the DirectX Diagnostic Tool. Folder Options and the Sticky Keys prompt still have no dark mode, and some links in Settings, such as the extra sound and mouse options, open the old Control Panel windows. Microsoft's recent dark mode update for Hyper-V Manager, another legacy tool, also came out incomplete.

Xbox One owners will be able to play GTA 6 when it launches on November 19, while PC players still have no official way in. In its pre-load announcement, which also confirmed a 30 FPS target on consoles, Rockstar says the game will be available through Xbox Cloud Gaming on Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One consoles, using Xbox Series S graphics settings. Xbox says streaming opens at 1 AM ET on launch day, and the game still has to be bought separately. Rockstar also warns that connection speed and other technical factors may affect performance in ways that local play would not.

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma framed the news as the start of a much bigger deal with Rockstar's parent company. In a post on X, she called the Xbox One cloud launch the first step of a new 10-year strategic partnership with Take-Two, adding that GTA 6 is already the most pre-ordered game ever on the Microsoft Store. Neither company has shared the terms of that partnership so far. Xbox did confirm that GTA 5, Red Dead Redemption 2, and more Rockstar titles will join Xbox Cloud Gaming in the coming months. Back in October, Sharma reportedly told staff at an internal town hall that Xbox had something planned around GTA 6 that "no other platform holder is doing," which led to reports of exclusive streaming rights. Xbox CSO Matthew Ball shot those down shortly after, saying the game "will not be streaming exclusively or to PC."

Anyone wondering what is filling up their GPU's VRAM can now try gputaskman, a free, open-source tool from Microsoft VP Scott Hanselman. It runs in a terminal window with an htop-style layout and lists every process using the GPU with its memory footprint, engine activity, and loaded runtime, such as CUDA or Vulkan. A panel up top tracks utilization, clocks, temperature, and power. Hanselman shared the project on X last week and asked for pull requests.

Task Manager has shown GPU usage since 2017, and it will happily tell you that 15 GB of video memory is in use. It just won't say what is using it. gputaskman goes after that gap with a heavy focus on local AI. Its model inspector can identify the LLM a process has loaded and report its quantization, weights, and estimated KV cache cost, while Ollama and LM Studio users also get context size and proper model names. Hanselman calls it early, experimental software, and the AI breakdowns are estimates for now.

Gaming PCs sitting idle could one day earn their owners credits, or even cash, by training AI models, at least if a newly published Microsoft patent application ever becomes a product. Titled "Opportunistic Micro-training on Edge Devices Using Spare GPU Utilization," the filing US-20260349820-A1 from Microsoft Technology Licensing was submitted in April 2025 and made public on November 5. It describes chopping large training jobs into small micro-tasks sized to what each device can handle, then sending them to phones, laptops, and gaming PCs whenever they have spare capacity. Owners would have to explicitly opt in, after which the system could track the work done and apply credits to their account, redeemable for free software, access to the trained model, or money.

To stay out of the way, the system watches GPU and CPU load, memory use, temperature and power draw, and checks less often when the GPU is busy or hot. Apparently, tasks can be paused or stopped when limits are crossed, and results get cross-checked across devices to catch faulty or tampered work. The filing doesn't give a payout rate or list supported hardware, and Microsoft hasn't announced a Windows or Xbox service, so it's impossible to say whether the rewards would cover the extra electricity. Of course, this is only an application for now, and plenty of those never turn into products.

Pressing Shift five times in a row might soon stop summoning the Sticky Keys prompt on Windows 11. Microsoft is updating the dialogs that ask whether you want to turn on Sticky Keys or Filter Keys, adding a way to tell Windows not to ask again directly from the prompt. The change shows up in the release notes for Beta build 26320.9876 and Experimental build 26340.9882, both released to Windows Insiders on November 6. Right now, getting rid of the prompt for good means going into Settings > Accessibility > Keyboard and turning off the keyboard shortcut for each feature. The same Beta build also moves the channel to Windows 11 26H2 and brings Microsoft's rebuilt Windows Search.

This is a small tweak, though it fixes a long-running annoyance for gamers. Plenty of games use Shift to sprint or crouch, which makes it easy to trigger the Sticky Keys shortcut by accident, and the prompt can pull players out of full-screen games. Filter Keys has a similar shortcut that kicks in when the right Shift key is held down for eight seconds. Microsoft's notes don't mention games at all, saying only that it should mean fewer interruptions for people who don't use these features. It looks like another quality-of-life fix from Microsoft's internal push to clean up Windows 11. There's no word on when the updated prompts will reach regular Windows 11 PCs, and Microsoft notes that features in Insider builds may not always ship, so it's reasonable to expect a wait of at least a few weeks.

Microsoft has updated its core component, the Registry Editor, with the latest WinUI framework as a demonstration of what the WinUI 3 framework can offer to existing applications with legacy Win32 components. The Registry Editor, a fundamental Windows application, has remained unchanged across many generations of Windows operating systems, which have relied on it for essential system modifications. According to a report from Windows Latest, Microsoft showcased a modernized version of the Registry Editor built with the WinUI 3 framework as a sample, but it is not intended to replace the current application found in every Windows build.

Initially, Windows Latest did not explicitly state that the application overhaul was just a sample. This led Microsoft's executive Scott Hanselman to clarify on X that the new build is merely a sample application and is not connected to the team maintaining the current Registry Editor. Previously, communities on X criticized the new design for its sparse menus and unfinished look, prompting a response from Microsoft's staff. It is important to note that while a new version might be in development, the current application is only a demonstration and is not related to the team maintaining the existing application. A future update may address this, but for now, we remain with the older version.

Microsoft has filed a patent application for an AI system that can change what someone says in a live video and redraw their lips to match. The filing, US 2026/0341309 A1, was submitted in April 2025, published on October 29, 2026, and first spotted by patent tracker Patentlyze. In short, an AI agent scans the live audio and picks words to swap or remove based on rules and a viewer's profile, such as their age, languages, or location. A generative model then replaces those words in both the audio and video, reworks the frames around each edit and plays the result with a delay of roughly one to ten seconds. It could run locally on AR glasses, phones, tablets or cameras.

A separate claim covers live translation with matching lip movements, which is easily the most practical use. However, the filing also lists filler words, stutters, mispronounced or offensive words, and colloquial terms like "y'all" or "bite the bullet" as things to replace, and the new words can even come from an internet search. It mentions lectures, award shows, game shows, and live sports as examples. The original feed may be stored as "ground truth," but the main claim says nothing about telling viewers what was changed. Of course, Microsoft files plenty of patents that never become products, and the examiner has already rejected the claims as filed, which is routine at this stage. Sony has been busy with AI patents as well, ranging from frame generation to an AI that can play for distracted players.

World of Warcraft: Forever is now the biggest launch in WoW history by peak concurrent players, according to Blizzard. The official Warcraft account also says the game brought back the highest number of returning players the franchise has ever seen. Forever went live on November 4 for Windows and macOS, and it is included with a regular WoW subscription. Blizzard didn't share any actual numbers, so it's hard to say how big the lead is. Going by the claim, Forever beat every expansion launch, including Wrath of the Lich King, as well as WoW Classic in 2019. However, Blizzard never published peak concurrent figures for those launches either, so a direct comparison isn't possible.

The launch itself went far more smoothly than the beta, which had its population caps raised several times. Forever runs on large megaservers that span multiple regions instead of dozens of smaller realms, and many players reported short login queues or none at all. Blizzard's Holly Longdale summed it up on X as "so far so goodish." Developer Josh Greenfield admitted to a few problems, mainly with the boat and zeppelin service, and Blizzard added temporary portals while it prepares a proper fix. On Twitch, the WoW category reportedly peaked at around 1.12 million viewers during launch, per Streams Charts. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella had already called the Forever beta the largest in franchise history, and it looks like the launch has kept that momentum going.

Epic Games's recent proclamation of significantly faster launch times on its new vibe-coded Epic Games Launcher, followed by a Steam update making similar performance improvements, seems to have inspired Microsoft's Xbox to put in the work to improve its Xbox app for PCs, with a new announcement making several claims about improved performance.

Although the claims for the new Xbox App for PC are more ambiguous, with no startup times claimed and no test data supplied, Microsoft says that the new Xbox App launches up to 60% faster, while Home, Store, and Game Pass pages load up to 50% faster, and in-app windows are claimed to launch 65% faster. Perhaps more important than the performance improvements, however, Xbox has streamlined the app, with "simpler navigation, updated filters, and new ways to organize your games," in addition to a more prominent placement for the Friends tab, wider search that covers installed games, add-ons, and people, as well as a cleaner aesthetic that "make the app easier to scan and navigate."

Members of the French video game union STJV (Syndicat des travailleureuses du jeu vidéo) at Arkane Lyon have accused Microsoft of sabotaging Marvel's Blade. In a statement published on November 4, the union claims a 19-month hiring freeze created the very delays and extra costs that Microsoft now cites as economic grounds for closing the studio. It also says work on Blade is going fine, with expected quality on par with Arkane's earlier games. Xbox hasn't responded publicly yet.

The union goes further, arguing that Arkane is profitable, "just not profitable enough for Microsoft." Apparently, the studio's cash always looks low because leftover money gets sent up to the group through cash pooling, and sales of its older games, which STJV puts in the tens of millions, don't show up in the company results. It adds that closing Arkane would probably cost more than finishing Blade. The union wants workers to have a say in picking a buyer, along with a fund that would protect anyone a new owner lays off within 24 months. If the studio does close, it is asking for a €200,000 redundancy payment and two years of Microsoft-funded redeployment support, among other demands.

Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S consoles are finally getting machine learning-based upscaling technology with the latest FSR Upscaling 4.1.2. Microsoft's Game Development Kit (GDK) now officially includes FSR Upscaling 4.1.2 in two models. One is the full-scale upscaling model based on the INT8 data type, and the other is a new and efficient Lite INT8 model. Both models are compatible with both consoles, but the key point is that game developers have the flexibility to choose which model to implement. Depending on the demands of a game, the appropriate model can be applied to achieve optimal upscaling performance.

For Xbox handheld devices, the AMD FSR SDK 2.4 adds FSR Upscaling support for the Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme and Ryzen Z2 A processors, which power the ROG Xbox Ally, ROG Xbox Ally X, and ROG Xbox Ally X20 handhelds. This is achieved using an efficient INT8 model. Since these devices run Windows, developers can integrate FSR Upscaling 4.1.2 through the standard AMD FSR SDK.

Ubisoft has made an offer to buy Arkane Lyon, the French studio behind Dishonored, Deathloop and the upcoming Marvel's Blade, according to Bloomberg's Jason Schreier. At least two other gaming companies have put in offers of their own, though their names haven't come out yet. Apparently, Xbox is also weighing a sale to the studio's own management, much like how Double Fine and Compulsion Games went independent earlier this year. No deal has been agreed so far, and Xbox reportedly told Bloomberg that it is still exploring options ahead of a December deadline.

That deadline exists because of French labor law. Arkane Lyon's future was put under review in July as part of Xbox CEO Asha Sharma's "reset," and France's Florange Law required Microsoft to look for a buyer before it could close the studio. The consultation was first set to end on November 13, but Microsoft extended it by a month to December 13. Around 217 jobs are on the line. Insider Gaming, which says it confirmed the bid independently, adds that Ubisoft had been interested "for some time," even before Arkane's situation became public over the summer.

Sony has started nudging some PlayStation owners in the US to sell their PS5, with a PlayStation app notification shared on ResetEra offering "up to $400" for a standard console. The trade-in itself runs through Back Market, which inspects the hardware and then sends cash straight to the owner's bank account instead of offering store credit. That $400 figure comes with some fine print, though. It is based on quotes for a standard PS5 in Grade 0 condition, which is basically flawless, with two or more controllers included, collected between August 23 and September 22. PS5 Pro owners aren't part of this one. The timing certainly looks pretty convenient, with GTA 6 launching on November 19 and pre-load starting on November 10.

Coincidentally, Microsoft also started emailing inactive Xbox owners last month, offering up to $375 for a Series X traded in at Best Buy. Sony's offer looks a little better on paper, since Microsoft pays out in Best Buy eGift Cards rather than cash. A couple of users who ran the online trade-in estimate got a little over $400 for a base PS5, so the headline number seems realistic for consoles in good shape. A new PS5 now costs $649.99 after Sony's April price hike, while the $899.99 PS5 Pro is hard to find at list price, and GameStop is reportedly asking $1,399.99 for used units. With retailers already expecting console shortages around the GTA 6 launch, used PS5s will probably sell fast. Owners with an idle console are advised to compare Back Market's quote with local resale prices before shipping it off.

Helen Chiang, Xbox's first-ever chief operating officer, has left Microsoft just three months after taking on the role. The news comes from a short internal memo by Microsoft Gaming CEO Asha Sharma, obtained by The Verge, which simply states that Chiang is leaving the company and thanks her for her years of service. No reason was given, and Xbox's VP of communications, Kari Perez, said the company doesn't discuss individual personnel matters. There's no successor yet either, so Chiang's duties will be split among other Xbox leaders for now, with Sharma promising more details on COO leadership once plans are finalized.

Chiang had been at Microsoft for around 21 years, starting in 2005 and moving to Xbox in 2007, where Sharma credits her with helping build Xbox Live. She later led Mojang and became corporate vice president of the Minecraft franchise in 2020. Sharma created the COO position in July as part of her reset of Xbox, and it came with end-to-end profit and loss responsibility across content, hardware, platform, and services. That same reset includes around 3,200 job cuts by the end of fiscal year 2027, with hundreds of jobs already gone. Losing the executive meant to hold the whole business together this early into the reset probably isn't the kind of stability Xbox was hoping for.

Update Oct 25th: A verified source familiar with the situation has told Eurogamer that Helen Chiang was "terminated for policy violations." This claim has not been independently verified.

Update Nov 3rd: Helen Chiang has since denied being "fired for a policy violation" in a recent LinkedIn post. She goes on to clarify more points about her departure. You can read her full post below.

Microsoft today released a series of optimizations for Windows 11 PCs running on 8 GB of system RAM, promising significant improvements for those with smaller RAM capacities. Especially in the age of RAM shortages, Windows 11 is getting an update that might be most beneficial for those with lower PC specifications. With Windows 11, version 26H2, build 26300.9818 or later, users with systems equipped with 8 GB RAM can expect up to a 20% more responsive Windows operating system experience with day-to-day tasks, as well as up to 40% faster multitasking.

Microsoft's labs tested around 20,000 PCs to find solutions for lower hardware specifications and discovered that keeping more data in RAM significantly enhances the Windows experience. For systems with 8 GB of RAM, the OS will now retain up to 2 GB more of your active application data in memory, rather than moving it to slower SSD or HDD storage. This change directly results in a smoother experience. Additional benefits include reducing committed-memory growth by up to 900 MB in apps like Microsoft Edge and 365 apps, and decreasing the memory usage of Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook by 360 MB. Third-party apps can also take advantage of improved memory management, with Microsoft noting that WhatsApp is already utilizing these enhancements.

Microsoft has introduced Cloud Rebuild, a recovery option that can wipe and reinstall Windows 11 by pulling a fresh image and the PC's drivers from Windows Update, even when the system refuses to boot. It ships with KB5127936, the optional preview update released on October 28 for Windows 11 25H2 and 26H2, and it's rolling out gradually. If Windows still loads, the option sits under Settings > System > Recovery as "Rebuild PC." If it doesn't, the PC falls back to the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE) after a few failed boots, where Cloud rebuild shows up under the Troubleshoot menu.

The "Reset this PC" menu has had a Cloud download mode for a while. According to Microsoft, Cloud rebuild goes a step further by grabbing drivers as well and by not depending on the installed copy of Windows being intact. It is a clean slate, though. The system drive gets reformatted, wiping apps, settings, user accounts, and local files, and only data synced to services like OneDrive survives. Anyone handing the PC off can pick a sanitize mode that has the drive securely erase itself first, and IT admins can kick off a rebuild remotely through the Recovery CSP.

Microsoft recently restored the ability for Windows users to move the Taskbar to any screen edge, nearly five years after Windows 11 launched. The Windows 11 implementation, however, is not the same as it was in Windows 10, where users could click and drag to move the Taskbar and lock it in place when they were happy with its position. Instead, Windows 11 makes users go into the settings app to change the Taskbar position, and now, in response to a news story about a third-party utility that allows Taskbar dragging, Windows Vice President of Design, Diego Baca, explains that this is indeed a feature, not a bug, and that the drag-and-drop repositioning often caused accidental movements.

Diego Baca, Windows Vice President of Design at MicrosoftFrom our research, dragging the Taskbar to reposition it can lead to accidental movements, which is one of the reasons "Lock the Taskbar" existed in previous versions of Windows. We also found that changing the Taskbar position isn't something people do frequently.

We felt that providing a discoverable setting, just one right-click away, was a more intentional and predictable experience. It's a deliberate design decision, not a missing capability.

It seems as though nobody's future at Xbox is particularly certain after this year's intense layoff spree at the Microsoft-owned gaming giant, but some game studios have been hit harder by Asha Sharma's Xbox Reset plans. In the late-September restructuring that saw Activision take over the Halo franchise, Microsoft also merged Turn 10 and Playground Games into a single studio, in what many saw as the last nail in the coffin for the Forza Motorsport franchise.

Following the merger, an internal email reported on by The Verge announced that Dan Greenwalt, the head of Turn 10 games with a 27-year tenure, has "decided that this is the right time for him to retire from Microsoft." In the memo, Trevor Williams, head of Playground Games, announced that Dan Greenwalt would remain on in some capacity to serve as an advisor for Williams and Playground Games COO, Michel Bastien. Forza Motorsport was already on the ropes when it was announced that the current version of the game, which launched in 2023, would no longer be getting support. It's unclear whether Forza Motorsport will continue as a franchise or if the absorption of Turn 10 into Playground Games means that its developers will be permanently reassigned to games like Fable, which Microsoft appears to be betting the farm on, or Forza Horizon 6, which has shown itself to be a cash-cow in a struggling gaming industry.

Microsoft's gaming business shrank again in the first quarter of its 2027 fiscal year, which ended on September 30. Xbox revenue came in at $5.38 billion, down 2% from $5.51 billion a year ago, while Microsoft as a whole grew revenue by 19% to $92.3 billion. Content and services revenue fell 2%, and hardware dropped a bigger 14% on a lower volume of consoles sold. CFO Amy Hood said the overall Xbox decline was driven by third-party content and Xbox Game Pass, partly offset by growth in first-party games.

Microsoft Gaming CEO Asha Sharma, however, put a positive spin on the numbers in a post on X. She pointed out that the 2% decline is much smaller than the 10% drop a quarter earlier, and that margins improved. She also listed record results for Minecraft and World of Warcraft Forever, called Modern Warfare 4 Call of Duty's most acclaimed release in over a decade, and said PC platform revenue grew by double digits. As for hardware, Sharma claims console sales are being held back by supply, with demand currently outpacing the number of consoles available. She added that Xbox is working to get more units out to players, partly through an expanded refurbishment program.

Fake GitHub repositories posing as two PS5 projects, the KytyPS5 emulator and the AnyPS5 porting tool, are being used to spread password-stealing malware, according to NordVPN's Threat Intelligence team. As reported by Tom's Hardware, visitors get pointed to a ZIP file whose Windows executable unpacks a hidden multi-stage loader. The loader first checks whether it's on a real gaming PC, and exits if the system has less than 2 GB of RAM or no physical GPU, or looks like a virtual machine or cloud server. It seems built to dodge sandboxes and security researchers. Here's how NordVPN CTO Marijus Briedis put it:

Emulation fans are a perfect target. They are used to downloading experimental software from GitHub and running unsigned files, so nothing about this feels suspicious. But this is not an emulator. It steals your data, hides from your antivirus and erases its own tracks before you notice anything is wrong.

Microsoft has released one of the most significant updates to its DirectX Raytracing (DXR) since its debut in 2018. This update officially introduces clustered geometry and partitioned top-level acceleration structure (PTLAS). With clustered geometry, Microsoft envisions scenes where all animated and generated geometry is broken down into simple, reusable clusters of triangles. Typically, scenes repeatedly build large bottom-level acceleration structures, which incur additional compute costs. By using clustered geometry, ray tracing can utilize full detailed geometry used for standard rasterization instead of proxies, ensuring that ray-traced shadows and reflections match the currently visible scene.

In open-world games, using a top-level acceleration structure (TLAS) can lead to massive VRAM and compute demands. To address this, DXR now introduces partitioned TLAS (PTLAS), allowing ray tracing to focus on changes in a specific region while retaining acceleration-structure data elsewhere. Clustered geometry and PTLAS can be used together or separately, with no limitations. Below image is NVIDIA's sample of clustered geometry in action, visualized in three stages: default, clusters, and triangles applied.Benchmarks follow.

Microsoft is bringing some of its Xbox console technology to Windows PCs with the introduction of DirectX Dump Files. When a GPU crashes on your PC, you can investigate what happened in the same way Xbox developers do with their GPU crashes, gaining insight into the underlying issues. With the latest Agility SDK 1.620 and PIX 2610.28, DirectX Dump Files provide data from Windows, Direct3D, and GPU drivers to help investigate a crash, understand its cause, and improve the graphics rendering pipeline to prevent future crashes. Joining Microsoft in this effort are AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, and Qualcomm.

The process begins with a GPU crash. Once the GPU stops its graphics processing, DirectX creates a new dump file containing traces of what occurred before Windows resets the GPU. This includes the last Direct3D runtime state, hardware and driver data, and up to 2 MB of data from the game developer that might be traced. These files can be saved on developers' machines, but on players' PCs in production, they aren't saved by default. However, game developers can set up a crash pipeline to send crash data back to them for analysis. Once the data is available, Microsoft's PIX tool, used for performance-tuning and debugging DirectX 12 games, helps analyze the situation. PIX decodes data, analyzes dump files, identifies hang points, and traces shaders and resources that caused the crash. This allows developers to quickly isolate and fix the problem.

Microsoft reported strong Q3 2026 results with $92.3 billion in revenue. However, the company's earnings report also revealed that, despite overall revenue growing 19% year-over-year, the Windows OEM licensing business is struggling, with a 22% decline on a yearly basis. This quarter, revenue from Windows 11 OEM licensing and Surface PCs amounted to $3.6 billion, a significant drop from the $4.6 billion this segment generated last year. Several factors contribute to this decline, making it the only business unit, alongside Xbox, to experience a downturn. The first factor is the drop in consumer PC demand. As Microsoft sells Windows 11 licenses to PC OEMs, weakening demand in this space, caused by rising prices, has directly resulted in fewer licenses sold to major PC OEMs like ASUS, HP, Dell, and Lenovo.

Additionally, Microsoft Surface PCs are included in this mix. The generally weak PC demand means consumers are less willing to spend on other brand PCs, and they are behaving similarly toward Microsoft. Surface PC shipments have seemingly declined, as these products are historically priced for mid-tier to high-end buyers. When recent increases in memory and storage supply chain costs affected Microsoft's procurement, general price increases followed. Consequently, consumers are opting to wait for another opportunity to purchase a PC.

Call of Duty has crossed $40 billion in lifetime franchise revenue, according to Microsoft Gaming CEO Asha Sharma. She shared the milestone on X on October 26, a few days after Modern Warfare 4's full launch on October 23, calling it one of the most celebrated games in the series' history and thanking both the Activision team and the players. The series debuted in 2003 and has seen a new entry almost every year since, along with Warzone and mobile spin-offs, so that figure covers a lot of ground. PC Gamer's math puts it at a staggering $4,762,472 a day, which is hard to wrap your head around. It's also worth remembering that this is revenue, not profit, and Activision doesn't disclose development or marketing budgets for its games.

Sharma, however, didn't say how Modern Warfare 4 is selling, or whether it was the game that pushed the franchise over the line. Early signs have been good, at least on PC. The game picked up a 90% positive Steam rating during campaign early access, a far cry from the reception Black Ops 7 got, and even climbed the Steam Top's Sellers list rapidly. Activision has also called it the conclusion of the current Modern Warfare series, with a new sub-franchise set to follow. For some context, Microsoft paid $68.7 billion to acquire Activision Blizzard back in 2023, though only some of that $40 billion would have come in under Microsoft's ownership.