Microsoft's in-house PowerToys utility may be one of the most useful tools for fixing many of the shortcomings of Windows 11, and its latest update, version 0.102, adds a number of new features to the productivity suite that will be just as useful for everyday users as they will be for those who need accessibility accommodations. The headline features of PowerToys 0.102 are the new CursorHide and Mouse Button Lock. CursorHide is a configurable tool that allows Windows 11 users to hide their mouse cursor automatically while typing, after a user-defined period of inactivity, or both.

Mouse Button Lock is somewhat more involved, being a customizable mouse feature that sort of works like an accessibility tool. It allows users to set mouse buttons to automatically lock in the clicked position after being held down for a certain period. The example provided by Microsoft's PowerToys team is to use Mouse Button Lock to perform click and drag operations—as you might imagine, Mouse Button Lock will be significantly more useful to users of certain hardware setups, like trackballs and trackpads. It can be configured on the left, right, and middle mouse buttons, and users can customize the mouse hold duration and set up a movement threshold that helps cut back on misfires.

Microsoft has rolled out the first firmware update for its RTX Spark-powered Surface Laptop Ultra, less than a week after the laptop started shipping on October 16. Listed in Windows Update as "System Hardware Update 200.0.7.0," the October 22 release fixes three problems spelled out in Microsoft's update history: extended reboot times, screen flickering, and unexpected restarts. It also bundles unspecified bug fixes and general performance improvements. The update is arriving in stages, so not every owner will see it right away, and like other Surface firmware, it can't be rolled back once installed.

These issues had already surfaced in early reviews and owner reports. Windows Central noted reboots long enough to roughly double the time it took to install updates, while some owners saw the Mini-LED panel flicker, in a few cases only when the display sat idle. However, the update doesn't address everything reviewers flagged. Notebookcheck measured a sluggish 57 ms black-to-white response time with visible ghosting, no local dimming, and a grayish 0.61-nit black level, and it seems unlikely that firmware can do much about those. Some owners have also reported the laptop running hot under light workloads, which Microsoft hasn't mentioned.

Microsoft is offering a Voluntary Exit Offer (VEO) to roughly 60,000 employees, about a quarter of its workforce, in its second buyout program this year. The offer, announced in a memo from Chief People Officer Amy Coleman, covers staff at level 70 and below in participating teams across the US, Canada, the UK, and India. That cutoff reaches general managers and some vice presidents, but not corporate vice presidents, and age, tenure, or performance don't factor in. The package is roughly equivalent to standard severance, with base pay tied to tenure and level, continued stock vesting, healthcare for a fixed period, and career transition support. Employees have until the first week of December to decide.

Coleman says the offer gives eligible employees "a new choice to make that transition now with support." Not every team is participating, however. Sales and some engineering and corporate groups are sitting it out, and it's unclear whether Xbox is included, a division whose ongoing cuts Satya Nadella recently called "great to see." Microsoft says the program isn't a sign it needs fewer people, nor a replacement for layoffs, which it hasn't ruled out. The spring Voluntary Retirement Program saw about 30% of roughly 8,750 eligible US employees accept, and Coleman later said it reduced the size of the July layoffs, which hit around 4,800 workers.

Epic Games is finally addressing one of the biggest issues with its game engine: in-game stuttering. Thanks to the latest version of Unreal Engine, version 5.8, this problem is becoming a thing of the past. The engine now incorporates Microsoft's DirectX Advanced Shader Delivery (ASD) for pre-compiled game shaders, moving shader compilation off the player's device. This change reduces the power and CPU time spent on compiling shaders. The company packages shader data into a State Object Database (SODB) and uses cloud-based compilation to convert that data into a Precompiled Shader Database (PSDB). This database can be shipped alongside the game, allowing it to find ready-to-use shaders on the first run. As a result, game developers will be able to provide pre-compiled shaders, speeding up game loading times and reducing any shader-induced stuttering during gameplay.

Once these pre-compiled shaders are downloaded onto the device, they will be simply invoked when playing the game, leaving Unreal Engine with easy access to shaders for seamless loading. As one of the most demanding game engines, Unreal Engine in its version 5.x is already computationally intensive and requires powerful graphics cards for optimal results. However, even with powerful GPUs, in-game stuttering can occur if a game's shaders aren't properly compiled and loaded. Using ASD will finally resolve this issue for good, provided game developers choose to support it.

Intel's Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) are officially supported on Windows 11 PCs. However, there are currently no consumer PCs capable of utilizing APX. Intel's APX is set to debut with the "Nova Lake" processors in early 2027, but software development has been ongoing to ensure new features are ready before the processors reach retailers. In Windows 11 build 29695 for insiders, there is a toggle that allows you to enable APX for better performance. This indicates that Microsoft has prepared the APX optimizations across Windows, which will enhance everyday tasks and handle workloads with more processing power.

Intel APX is an extension to the x86-64 ISA that adds more registers and introduces new features to boost workloads across various use cases. Intel has designed APX to double the number of general-purpose registers in a CPU from 16 to 32, along with specific optimization paths to ensure compiled code is optimized to take advantage of the additional CPU capacity, resulting in performance improvements. Although this is a minor tweak, the data paths that follow are much more efficient. Intel reports around 10% fewer instructions in compiled code for Intel APX, even though the new instruction lengths are larger. This means the overall efficiency of executed tasks will consume fewer CPU cycles, freeing up resources for more tasks and boosting system performance.

Netflix reportedly offered Microsoft $500 million for seven years of exclusive film and TV adaptation rights to Xbox games, but the two sides never reached a middle ground. According to Matthew Belloni's What I'm Hearing newsletter at Puck, which cites three sources, the offer came from Bela Bajaria, Netflix's chief content officer at the time. Xbox CEO Asha Sharma and her business affairs team apparently countered at $800 million. Bajaria was recently let go and is being replaced by former Disney and Fox executive Peter Rice, and with her gone, the Netflix offer is said to be off the table. Netflix CFO Spence Neumann was reportedly one of the people who thought the price was too high.

Netflix has not commented on the deal, while Xbox told Puck it has seen "record-breaking interest" in its IP and still considers Netflix a valued partner. The two already have Minecraft and Diablo animated series on the way, and Netflix is also working on a Gears of War movie. Instead of one big exclusive package, Xbox is now said to be chasing smaller deals with more partners, which is pretty much what its new XP division was set up to handle earlier this month. That extra licensing money would probably be welcome right now. Xbox has missed Microsoft's executive pay target for the fifth time in six years, just lost its first chief operating officer, and Sharma recently told staff the division won't survive without new IP. Rice is also expected to go after more IP deals at Netflix, so we can expect the two companies to end up talking again.

Microsoft's Xbox division has missed a performance goal tied to executive pay for the fifth time in six years. Microsoft's top named executives, a group that has included CEO Satya Nadella and CFO Amy Hood, have had one Xbox-related metric in their pay packages since 2020. According to Game File, which went through Microsoft's new proxy statement filed on October 21, the fiscal 2026 target was 4.3% growth in Xbox content and services revenue. Instead, that revenue fell 6% by the compensation measure, while the proxy's own business highlights put the drop at 5%. The miss caps a rough year for the division, which saw its revenue slide and later announced plans to lay off 3,200 workers as part of a year-long reset.

The target metric itself has shifted over the years. It started as Game Pass subscriber growth, which Xbox missed in 2021 and 2022, then switched to content and services revenue growth in 2023, which Xbox missed that year and again in 2024. Fiscal 2025 was the lone exception, with Xbox growing that revenue by just under 15% against a target of more than 14%. Of course, the Xbox goal is only a small slice of the pay package. Nadella's total compensation for fiscal 2026 came in at roughly $90.6 million, down from about $96.5 million a year earlier, though the filing doesn't pin that dip on Xbox. CEO Asha Sharma has denied divestment rumors and said Microsoft will take the long-term view, so it's reasonable to expect the turnaround to take more than one fiscal year.

Microsoft's redesigned File Explorer context menu is now rolling out to Windows Insiders in the Beta channel with build 26220.9757. The new menu first showed up in the Experimental channel back in August, when the File Explorer team admitted that the Windows 11 right-click menu had grown cluttered and sluggish over time, partly because every app that adds its own entries makes the menu do extra work each time it opens. The redesign trims the top level down to commonly used actions and adds a new Settings page, reachable through a "Customize menu" link at the bottom of the menu, where users can pick what shows up.

Going by Microsoft's August post, the customization goes fairly deep. Built-in commands such as Send to and Create shortcut can be toggled on or off, Print can be added, and app extensions can sit in the main menu or a submenu, or be hidden entirely. Cut, Copy, Paste, Rename, Delete, and Share can also be shown as text instead of a row of icons, and Properties can be moved to the bottom. A first-time teaching tip may also pop up to point people toward those options. Microsoft says it will keep refining the design based on Insider feedback, so some of this could still change.

Earlier in 2026, when Microsoft announced the Xbox Reset that saw 1,600 employees lose their jobs immediately, with 1,600 more on the chopping block for later, and several game studios either cut loose or shut-down entirely, Arkane Lyon was mentioned as one of the studios at risk of closure. Now, according to a report by Le Monde, it seems as though the Dishonored and Deathloop studio has until November 13 to find a buyer before Microsoft will officially shut it down. Arkane has already been forced to cancel the Blade game it was working on, as a result of the recent layoffs, and if no agreement is reached before the projected date, 217 jobs are at risk.

According to a French union delegate representing employees at the studio, the search for a buyer has not gone well. French businesses with more than 1,000 employees are legally mandated to look for a buyer for any business they wish to close for at least three months, and that obligatory search ends on November 13. The union says it has asked for an extension on that deadline and in order to buy more time in the negotiations over the employee redundancy plan, in the hopes that the studio and its workers would be saved, although the negotiations with Microsoft have not gone well.

Recently, analysts estimated that Gears of War: E-Day had earned around $42 million in revenue in its first week on the market, but a recent report from Kotaku claims that that revenue is but a drop in the bucket compared to the game's overall budget.

[Editor's note: Our in-depth review of Gears of War: E-Day is now live]

The report cites an insider "familiar with Xbox's business" and claims that the production budget alone—that is to say, excluding the marketing costs—for Gears of War: E-Day was over $500 million. This puts the game's overall estimated revenue at well under 10% of what Microsoft spent to get it out of the door, and, in a report from early October, employees at The Coalition, the Xbox Game Studios subsidiary responsible for the game's development, said that they were concerned about being laid off shortly after the game launched, especially given the ongoing Xbox Reset and the current climate in the gaming industry overall.

Microsoft is one of the few companies evaluating the dangers of AI while simultaneously implementing the latest features across its product portfolio with cutting-edge designs, advanced models, and top-tier frameworks. However, this doesn't mean the company is halting the rollout of new AI features, despite being aware of the risks of these products on consumer PCs. For example, on PCs running the Windows 11 operating system, the Copilot AI companion includes features that can control some actions on your PC, with your consent. Yet, the company is now arguing in a separate news post that frontier models and the agents running on them are not to be trusted.

Unfortunately, frontier models, regardless of their origin, cannot be trusted. This is not because models are inherently malicious. Models have been trained to attain results, which often leads to reward hacking, and models are not optimized around organizational norms or judgment. Agents are unpredictable. They will adapt as the context changes, may not behave as intended and will collaborate and collude with other agents to reach their objectives, without needing to be compromised.

The rumor mill has long been abuzz with estimations and updates about the supposed price of both the Xbox Helix and the PlayStation 6. The latest update from notable leaker, Kepler_L2 on X, suggests that Sony may have the upper-hand on pricing for the next console generation. According to the leaker, Sony's PS6 bill of materials cost is slated to be as much as $200 lower than that of the Xbox Helix, which will reportedly cost somewhere between $1,200 and $1,800.

This Helix price bracket theoretically puts the PlayStation 6 somewhere around the $1,000-1,100 price point, if Sony decides to price the PS6 as competitively as possible. However, it seems as though the pricing strategy for the upcoming console generation is changing, with Sony's Hideaki Nishino commenting in a June financial report that "we do not intend to sell hardware at significant losses," suggesting that the days of low console prices subsidized by subsequent game sales are behind us.

Xbox CTO Scott Van Vliet has shown off the classic Xbox 360 Blades dashboard running inside a web browser on a PC. It's one of the first public experiments from the newly formed Xbox Labs team. The short clip also shows the later New Xbox Experience (NXE) and the Metro-style dashboard, and all three look fully navigable. Xbox CEO Asha Sharma, who announced Xbox Labs last week with Van Vliet in charge, shared the clip with a simple question: "Blades on web. Do we like this experiment?" There's no word on Blades officially coming back to Xbox consoles, and this is very much an experiment for now.

It's not the first time Sharma has floated the idea. Shortly after taking over as CEO earlier this year, she asked fans whether Xbox should bring Blades back. Interestingly, the browser's address bar in the video appears to show FFFE07D1, the Title ID of the Xbox 360 dashboard. That hints Microsoft may be running actual 360 system software through some kind of emulation or translation layer, though Xbox hasn't said how any of this works. Xbox Labs was set up to experiment with how games are built and played, partly in response to the recent wave of AI-assisted ports, so a browser-based approach would fit that brief. Microsoft has already brought original Xbox games to PC, so a proper Xbox 360 push on PC no longer seems far-fetched.

Microsoft might be working on a cheaper 12-inch Surface, and Apple's MacBook Neo looks like the reason. DigiTimes reports, citing supply chain sources, that Microsoft is reviewing the specifications of its entry-level 12-inch Surface to bring costs down, and is also rethinking which processor goes inside. The report's headline, spotted by harukaze5719 on X, goes as far as saying Apple is forcing Microsoft to downgrade the device, and hints at a comeback for AMD with an Arm chip. Reportedly, the processor, memory, camera, battery, and chassis are all being looked at, though nothing seems to be finalized yet.

The pricing gap between the two laptops is quite large. Microsoft only just refreshed the 12-inch Surface Pro with Snapdragon X2 Plus, and it now starts at $1,149, up from $799 last year, partly because the 8 GB base configuration was dropped. Apple launched the MacBook Neo at $599, and even after a $100 increase in June that Apple blamed on memory costs, it still sits at $699. As for the chip, AMD's "Sound Wave" Arm APU was previously linked to Microsoft's 2026 Surface lineup and has even shown up in shipping manifests, so it looks like a candidate. Leaks put it at 2 performance and 4 efficiency Arm cores, RDNA 3.5 graphics with 4 CUs, and a 5 W to 10 W power target. Then again, Microsoft could just as well stick with Qualcomm, and neither Microsoft nor AMD has confirmed anything.

Microsoft has started selling Xbox Cloud Gaming time to people who don't pay for Game Pass. Starting today, Xbox Insiders without an active subscription can buy prepaid playtime and stream games on supported devices, with a broader rollout planned for November. There are three packs at what Microsoft calls introductory launch pricing: 10 hours for $3.99, 25 hours for $7.99, and 50 hours for $11.99. The packs are ad-free and come with shorter wait times, and the purchased hours don't expire until they are used up. Insiders can also keep using the free, ad-supported option Microsoft began testing in July. These pay-as-you-go plans arrive right before the monthly hour limits Microsoft announced in September kick in.

Starting in November, Game Pass Ultimate ($22.99) includes 15 hours of cloud gaming per month, Premium ($14.99) gets 10 hours, and Essential ($9.99) gets just five. Microsoft expects the caps to affect around 4% of subscribers, and said those who run out will be able to buy extra playtime through the Xbox Store. It seems likely these packs will double as top-ups for subscribers, though Microsoft hasn't confirmed that yet. On paper, $11.99 gets you more than three times the streaming hours Ultimate includes each month. Of course, Ultimate also comes with the Game Pass library, while the packs are meant for streaming eligible games you already own. More details on eligible games and market availability should follow in November. Since the current prices are labeled introductory, they could very well change later.

Microsoft is officially cutting back on forced AI adoption that has been troubling Windows 11 users by working to simplify AI use across its operating system. According to a report by Windows Latest, Microsoft is removing Copilot actions related to OneDrive in File Explorer. This means that a simple right-click to open the context menu and then selecting the OneDrive icon will no longer present a long list of tasks that Microsoft's Copilot LLM would perform on the file. These tasks included summarizing, comparing, and asking questions, which provided minimal value on their own. Instead, Copilot features like these can be accessed through "Ask Copilot" or other less intrusive methods. This change is part of a OneDrive update aimed at reducing eight AI actions and keeping them available for those who wish to use them. Image below is a courtesy of Windows Latest, which shows how these actions look like.

MicrosoftAs part of this change, we're retiring the OneDrive Copilot Summarize, Create FAQ, Compare Files, Ask a question, Explain image, Explain images, Compare images, Extract text actions from the File Explorer context menu... Users can still access Copilot features via right-click "Ask Copilot," the File Explorer Home icon, or the OneDrive activity center.

Microsoft's next-gen Xbox console could cost a lot more than anyone hoped. A new Fortune profile of Xbox CEO Asha Sharma says the Project Helix console has internally been projected to cost consumers between $1,200 and $1,800, unless Microsoft decides to subsidize it. For reference, the current Xbox Series X with a disc drive sells for $799.99, and that is after the recent price hikes. The report also says Sharma plans to release a next-gen handheld by the 2027 holiday season, followed by the console in time for the 2028 holidays. Apparently, Helix engineering deadlines have been moved up by at least several months, according to people familiar with the matter, which is putting extra pressure on development teams.

The handheld has also caused some friction inside Microsoft. Windows leaders reportedly wanted it to run a trimmed-down version of Windows Home, while Sharma's team wanted its own software for better gaming performance. It got heated enough that a senior Xbox executive reportedly threatened to scrap the handheld rather than ship the Windows build, though Xbox now seems to be steering the OS. Sharma, for her part, says the teams still work together, noting, "We can't build Helix on our own." Microsoft hasn't confirmed any pricing, and a subsidy could bring the final number down a bit. However, Fortune puts Xbox's profit margin at around 3%, which probably doesn't leave much room for one. Elsewhere, memory makers expect supply to get even tighter in 2027 and 2028, while rival Sony also struggles with rising costs, so a cheap next-gen console looks unlikely from either side.

Microsoft is reportedly emailing Xbox Series X|S owners who haven't touched their consoles in a while, nudging them to trade those consoles in at Best Buy. The email, first shared by Nintendeal on X, opens with "Haven't played on your console in a while?" and tells owners who have moved to other platforms that they can get "up to $375 back." Per Gizmodo, Xbox has confirmed the email is genuine. That $375 applies to a Series X in good condition with its cables and controller, while a Series S apparently tops out at $200. Payment comes as a Best Buy eGift Card, and the campaign seems limited to the US for now.

It looks like this is the trade-in program Microsoft promised in June, when it announced another round of price hikes and said traded-in consoles would be resold at lower prices. Those hikes pushed the 1 TB Series X with a disc drive to $799.99, and the 512 GB Series S to $499.99. Unsurprisingly, Circana data later showed US Xbox hardware sales hit an all-time low through August. Stock is the other problem, as new units are reportedly scarce in mainland Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and South America, while GTA 6's November launch is expected to drain shelves even further. Owners thinking about trading in should note that used Series X consoles have recently sold for over $500 on eBay, so Best Buy's offer is more about convenience than value.

Microsoft's popular wallpaper application, Bing Wallpaper, has now been transformed into adware, according to a new report by Windows Latest. When a user clicks on an empty area of the desktop—not on any icon or menu—the application redirects them to Bing.com, Microsoft's search engine. Normally, this behavior would not be acceptable and would likely trigger a strong reaction from the community. However, Microsoft has limited this issue to occur only once every 24 hours. Repeated clicks after the initial activation do not open another browser window. Testing has confirmed that this behavior persists after the waiting period, even when Google Chrome is set as the default browser.

Interestingly, Microsoft tested a similar feature in 2025, which included a clearly labeled setting in Bing Wallpaper that allowed a desktop click to open Bing. At that time, the feature could be turned off, but this option is not available in the latest version of the application. Microsoft has removed the ability to disable this feature, meaning that every 24 hours, a desktop click will redirect to Bing.com. This change leaves users with less control over an action that is unrelated to managing wallpaper. The application has also reportedly displayed prompts encouraging users to make Bing their default search engine across installed browsers, even when the default browser is Google Chrome or another non-Microsoft browser.

Microsoft has posted a job listing for an "Xbox Games Supply Strategist," and the role revolves entirely around physical games. The full-time, Redmond-based position went live on October 14 and was spotted by users on X a few days later. The new hire will join the Xbox Supply Chain team to coordinate the launch of physical Xbox games "across all platforms," along with global supply planning, inventory, and retail sales. Oddly enough, the listing never mentions discs. The timing is interesting regardless. Sony confirmed in July that it will stop producing discs for new PlayStation games from January 2028, and its lawyers have since argued that digital game ownership "is not plausible." On the other hand, Microsoft's signals have been more mixed.

Team Green's Disc-to-Digital program lets owners of supported Xbox One and Series X discs claim a digital license, which many read as groundwork for a discless Project Helix, yet Microsoft later asked Insiders whether its next-gen console should install games from physical discs. Xbox CEO Asha Sharma also told the BBC in August that she wants players to have a choice between physical and digital, without committing to anything for Helix. Still, a job listing isn't a confirmed hardware roadmap. "Across all platforms" could simply cover Xbox-published games that ship physically on PlayStation and Nintendo consoles, and it says nothing about a disc drive on Helix. It looks like boxed Xbox games will stick around a while longer in some form, but anyone hoping for a disc drive on Helix should wait for Microsoft to confirm it.

Microsoft is making its long-promised Windows 11 changes official! Today, the company confirmed that Windows 11 is finally getting a responsiveness improvement, up to 20% more noticeable than the older Windows experience. In footnotes, Microsoft states that the company compared response times across Search, Start, Settings, Snipping Tool, File Explorer, Microsoft 365, and right-clicking on applications and functions across the operating system. Compared to the older Windows 11 build 26200.7628, the newest Windows 11 build 26300.9550 offers up to a 20% faster, noticeable improvement in response time. Microsoft has spent months of engineering work optimizing this behavior, and we are finally seeing a concrete figure that will help get Windows 11 to where Microsoft promised months ago.

Additionally, Microsoft has stated in the past that 8 GB systems will receive a significant set of optimizations to ensure that millions of users across the Windows ecosystem continue to have a smooth experience, even with 8 GB of RAM in their systems. With the latest Windows 11 build 26300.9550, the operating system will keep up to 2 GB more data in memory instead of storage, enhancing responsiveness. Keeping more data in RAM doesn't mean that resources are inefficient; rather, it means that services will start faster, and overall usage will feel smoother. To combat unnecessary background memory-hogging processes, Microsoft has confirmed that when your PC runs on 8 GB of memory or less, Widgets will load only when you open them, freeing up more than 200 MB of memory for your apps and other tasks. Hence, only what is needed will be loaded into the memory.

Barring the upcoming launch of GTA VI, it's safe to say that the majority of the big game launches for 2026 have already taken place, and it seems as though Microsoft's Forza Horizon 6 will come out of 2026 as one of the year's big winners, per recent data from Alinea Analytics. According to the analytics firm, Forza Horizon 6 has handily taken the top spot as the most successful first-party game launch from Xbox and Sony for 2026 so far—and with quite a margin, to boot.

The research firm estimates that Forza Horizon 6 has earned a whopping $579.2 million in revenue from 8.8 million copies sold on PC and Xbox so far, even without a PS5 port, which is slated to launch in early 2027. This still puts it behind Forza Horizon 5, which earned over $1 billion in revenue across all platforms, but Horizon 6 only launched in May 2026, meaning it has only been on the market for around five months. The data suggests that Forza Horizon 6 generated 56.7% of its revenue on Xbox, with the rest coming from Steam, and estimated over 10 million gamers played Horizon 6 on Xbox Game Pass, with 1.3 million players opting for the Game Pass upgrade, generating $82 million in revenue for the platform.

Since Asha Sharma took over as Xbox CEO earlier in 2026, she has been gunning hard to grow the Xbox audience, and part of that strategy has been a return to Xbox-exclusive games, although it was assumed that these Xbox exclusive games would be relatively limited, but it seems as though that may not be the case, according to a new report by Windows Central. Per the report, a new Xbox Research user survey asked gamers how their gaming habits would change if it was announced that all future games from Xbox-owned studios, excluding Call of Duty, suddenly became console-exclusive to Xbox.

Imagine it was announced that all future title releases from every XBOX-developed gaming franchise except Call of Duty will be console-exclusive to XBOX. For Minecraft only, existing titles would no longer be available for purchase on PlayStation or Nintendo consoles, and would not receive any new content updates. However, there is no impact to any of the existing titles or content you already own. Nothing changes on PC in this announcement.

Microsoft has announced the Xbox Nano Controller, a pocket-sized gamepad priced at $49.99 (£44.99) that it calls its smallest controller yet. It measures just over five inches long and weighs a tiny 3.5 ounces, yet still packs all 18 standard gameplay inputs, plus a programmable Action Button for screenshots and gameplay capture. It connects over Xbox Wireless and Bluetooth, runs on a built-in rechargeable battery, and works with Xbox consoles, Windows PCs, iOS and Android devices, and select smart TVs. Microsoft hasn't shared battery life or color options yet, and there's no word on rumble or impulse triggers either. Pre-orders are open now, with the controller launching on November 4 across 36 markets, including the US, UK, Japan, and much of Europe.

Xbox is also lining up US holiday bundles, with select Samsung TVs and Meta Quest headsets coming with a Nano Controller and two months of Game Pass Ultimate for new members. A compact controller for TVs and VR headsets makes the most sense for cloud gaming, though the timing isn't great. Starting in November, Xbox Cloud Gaming gets monthly time limits, with Ultimate subscribers capped at 15 hours, Premium at 10, and Essential at 5, and extra hours costing more. At $49.99, the Nano also costs noticeably more than other compact controllers, such as CRKD's Atom+ at $29.99 and 8BitDo's Lite 2 at $34.99. Native Xbox Wireless support might justify some of that premium, but battery life will probably decide whether it's worth it.

New sales data shared by The Game Business suggests physical PS5 games still have plenty of buyers. According to Ampere Analysis, 35% of worldwide sales of Marvel's Wolverine in September came from boxed copies. Ampere estimates the game sold around 2.16 million copies in its launch month, which would put physical sales at roughly 756,000. Interestingly, Europe leaned even harder towards discs, with GSD data showing 51% of sales there coming from the boxed version. The split varies a lot by country, though. Two thirds of Wolverine's UK sales were digital, while in France more than two thirds were physical. Wolverine wasn't alone either, as over 45% of Silent Hill: Townfall sales were boxed, while The Blood of Dawnwalker on PS5 and Onimusha came in at 36% and 30%, respectively.

These numbers are interesting because Sony plans to stop producing discs for new PlayStation games from January 2028, and earlier data from Alinea Analytics pointed in a similar direction for Sony's biggest exclusives. Of course, these are estimates, and actual data available to Sony may be different. Moreover, these patterns can be affected heavily by factors such as pricing and availability. There have also been rumors that Sony could push its digital-only plans back, while Microsoft is asking Xbox Insiders whether its next console should support discs. For now, though, Sony's own messaging still points to a January 2028 cutoff.