NVIDIA announced on Sunday that the company's board of directors is launching a full-scale independent investigation into recent reports of founder and CEO Jensen Huang having a relationship with a woman the U.S. intelligence community beleives is an agent of the Chinese state. A few days ago, The New York Times broke a story that Jensen had engaged in a close relationship with an executive at Megaspeed, named Alice Huang. Megaspeed is believed to be helping evade U.S. export controls on NVIDIA chips for Chinese companies, allowing them to use chips that have been banned by the U.S. Government from shipping to Chinese customers. Its network of sister companies is building data centers in Malaysia to satisfy the compute needs of Chinese customers. The original NYT report notes that China's Ministry of State Security, the Chinese equivalent of the CIA, reportedly recruited Alice Huang to extract information from Jensen Huang.

The notorious leaker known as Cyberleek is now threatening to release what is claimed to be a playable build of GTA 6 ahead of the game's November 19 launch. According to a post on the leaker's own website, the build supposedly includes the full story mode, playable through to the end credits. The threat comes with two conditions. The build would apparently go out if a meme coin tied to the leaker reaches a $30 million market cap, and the coin reportedly sits roughly $26 million short of that mark. The post also offers Take-Two a way to avoid the release, stating: "Take-Two gets one way out: physical disks and a public apology."

That is a reference to GTA 6 launching without a disc, as boxed copies are set to ship with a download code. Neither Take-Two nor Rockstar appears to have responded publicly so far, but Rockstar did acknowledge the leaks in late August. Tying the threat to a coin's market cap also gives the post an obvious financial angle, since the attention alone could move the price, so the claim is probably best treated with caution. The claim has not been independently verified, there is no date attached to it, and it may well turn out to be a bluff. Readers are also advised to stay away from the leaker's site and from any files that claim to be the full GTA 6 build, as there is no way to tell what they actually contain.

Traditionally, Microsoft has included AA batteries with its Xbox game controllers as a way to help users get right into the game as soon as possible. However, apparently since at least December, Microsoft has accidentally been packaging and shipping its controllers without batteries. This is according to a post on X by @XboxSupport, which acknowledges the error and advises users how to proceed. This applies both to Xbox Wireless controllers and Xbox Design Lab controllers.

Microsoft says that affected users should reach out to support via a dedicated support page and register a service request, at which time Microsoft will send out a pack of rechargeable batteries and a USB-C cable to correct the issue and perhaps serve as something of an apology. Buyers who were sent controllers without batteries should be able to confirm eligibility with their controller serial numbers, although there have apparently been a few issues with that system, with two users reporting on X that they were unable to view the requisite available service option to be able to take advantage of the corrective action.

Wuchang: Fallen Feathers initially looked like quite a promising Soulslike, with early critic reviews praising it for its solid combat and level design, and peak player counts on SteamDB reaching as high as 131,000 players. However, shortly after the game launched on Steam, it became clear that there were severe issues with optimization and performance. Despite the minimum system requirements only calling for an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6 GB and recommended system requirements bumping that up to an RTX 2070, even players with much more powerful setups, like the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Super, have been having issues with performance. Most of the complaints stem from stuttering, low framerates, and crippling screen tearing at higher framerates, and the issues have resulted in the game's Steam review score dropping to a "Mostly Negative" 32% positive, despite the game's narrative and gameplay successes.

The game's developer, Leenzee, and its publisher, 505 Games have now attempted to address some of these player concerns with a somewhat confusing statement and apology on Steam. The developer-publisher duo starting off strong, acknowledging the performance issues and apologizing for the inconvenience, "We have received reports regarding issues such as the game's optimization not meeting expectations, errors in distributing pre-order rewards, and some abnormal pricing. These problems should never have occurred, and we deeply regret the inconvenience and negative experience some players are currently facing." But then continues to say that "We are confident in the game's performance within our recommended spec, but we're working on optimization. We are looking to issue a patch as soon as we can," and then directs players to a support thread on optimization that directs them to reduce the in-game graphics settings, update drivers, and install the game on an SSD in order to optimize the experience.

Phil Spencer, CEO of Xbox Game Studios, appeared on the popular (Xbox-themed) Kinda Funny Games podcast earlier this week for a video interview (Xcast Episode 137). The almost 45-minute long conversation touched upon several topics relating to gaming matters at Microsoft, with the hosts managing to corner Spencer about the recent (not so good) launch of Bethesda and Arkane's horror FPS Redfall. Gaming community feedback has not exactly been encouraging in the wake of the game's release two days ago, and Spencer admits that he shares similar sentiments: "I'll just say all up, there's nothing that's more difficult for me than disappointing the Xbox community. I've been a part of it for a long time. I obviously work on Xbox, head of the business, have a lot of friends, get a lot of feedback. And just to watch the community lose confidence, be disappointed, I'm disappointed. I'm upset with myself. I revisit our process - I think back to the announcement of 60 FPS and then we weren't shipping 60 FPS, that was our punch in the chin, rightfully, a couple of weeks ago. And then seeing the game come out and the critical response was not what we wanted, and it's disappointing."

He continues his thought about reacting to feedback this early on in the process: "What can we learn? What can we get better? One thing I'll fight is what went wrong. There's clearly quality and execution things we can do, but one thing I won't do is push against creative aspirations of our teams. Then a lot of people will say, hey, you've got teams, teams know how to do one kind of game, just force them to go do the one kind of game they have a proven track record for. I'm just not a believer in that. Maybe that means I'll under deliver for some of our fans out there. But when a team like Rare wants to do Sea of Thieves, when a team like Obsidian wants to do Grounded, when Tango wants to go do Hi-Fi (Rush) when everybody probably thought they were doing The Evil Within 3, I want to give the teams the creative platform to go and push their ability, push their aspirations."

Respawn Entertainment, the Star Wars division at Electronic Arts and Lucasfilm Games have today released their first patch for the PC version of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor - some folks must have been working like mad over the weekend in order to address some of the problems encountered shortly after the game's launch last Friday (April 28). The EA Star Wars Twitter account issued a statement regarding the initial batch of patches for all platforms affected: "Today a patch has become available for the PC version of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, and tomorrow (5/2) we'll also be issuing a patch for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. We are hard at work on patches that will further improve performance and fix bugs across all platforms. There are more updates to come across all platforms, and we will share that timing when it is available."

The patch notes for today's PC update only mention "performance improvements for non-raytraced rendering" so it seems the developers have a lot more work to do over the coming weeks. The situation on current generation PlayStation and Xbox consoles looks to largely the same, and tomorrow's fix list is extensive (the same problems have already been addressed on PC with today's patch). TPU's own resident reviewer extraordinaire went in-depth and explored Star Wars Jedi: Survivor's technical issues this weekend - part of W1zzard's conclusion was very unkind: "We're now paying $70 to beta-test an unpolished turd that they call an AAA game—not the first time this year. I'm starting to wonder if these companies aren't slowly eroding their customer base by delivering broken products over and over again."