Our next Developer Livestream is now confirmed for Wednesday, February 5 at 10:30am PST (18:30 UTC). Follow our official Twitch channel to receive a notification when our panel of Jorg, Seb, and Martial go live to discuss the future development plans for Microsoft Flight Simulator and answer the most frequently asked questions the community submitted to our web form over the past few weeks. As always, the panel will also answer live questions from Twitch viewers, so be sure to tune in if you didn't have a chance to pre-submit a question!

Thank you to everyone who has downloaded the Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 Sim Update 1 pre-release beta test build! Since its launch in January, our team has been very carefully reading your feedback and bug reports on the forums. A new pre-release build with more fixes and improvements is coming soon for beta testers. If you would like to enroll in the beta to help test the next major release of MSFS 2024, you can find instructions (for PC-MS Store, PC-Steam, and Xbox Series X|S) here.

3M is expanding its commitment to the semiconductor industry by joining the US-JOINT Consortium, a strategic partnership of 12 leading semiconductor suppliers. The consortium drives research and development in next-generation semiconductor advanced packaging and back-end processing technologies anchored by a new cutting-edge facility in Silicon Valley.

"As the demands of AI and other high performance computing technologies increase, suppliers must work together to provide comprehensive solutions to tough challenges on increasingly shorter timelines." said Steven Vander Louw, 3M's president of display and electronics product platforms. "The companies in the US-JOINT Consortium represent US and Japanese innovation leaders in a range of advanced packaging technologies. 3M is pleased to join the consortium in order to bring our decades of materials science expertise, across more than 50 technology platforms, to help address these challenges."

Today, the storied Battlefield franchise known for uncompromising all-out warfare and world-class gameplay for over two decades, announced the most ambitious community testing program in franchise history - Battlefield Labs. The work on the next Battlefield experience is entering a critical phase in development that will benefit from collaboration with the community like never before.

Sign Up for Battlefield Labs Are Now Open
The first phase of Battlefield Labs testing will go live in the coming weeks, and sign up to players is available now at battlefield.com/labs. Initial tests will include an invited group of players and servers located in Europe and North America ahead of plans to expand invitees and server locations in the future.

Hello everyone! The time has finally arrived... Foundation has officially left Early Access, and version 1.0 is available now! After 6 years of new features, bug fixes, and improving the game with the help of your feedback, we are proud to finally wrap up Foundation's incredible journey in Early Access! Since the last major update, we have worked tirelessly to deliver the game we envisioned and the game you want to play.

Foundation is a grid-less, laid-back medieval city-building game with a focus on organic development, monument construction and resource management. Foundation combines free-building tools and procedural generation to create the ultimate organic city-building experience. Assign jobs, create production chains, establish trade. In Foundation, your creations come to life! The full release comes with a large number of changes. So many, in fact, that it may seem like a whole new game! If you want to know what's new, grab a medieval drink and some snacks while the game updates, and we'll take a look through the patch notes.

The recently released DeepSeek-R1 model family has brought a new wave of excitement to the AI community, allowing enthusiasts and developers to run state-of-the-art reasoning models with problem-solving, math and code capabilities, all from the privacy of local PCs. With up to 3,352 trillion operations per second of AI horsepower, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 Series GPUs can run the DeepSeek family of distilled models faster than anything on the PC market.

A New Class of Models That Reason
Reasoning models are a new class of large language models (LLMs) that spend more time on "thinking" and "reflecting" to work through complex problems, while describing the steps required to solve a task. The fundamental principle is that any problem can be solved with deep thought, reasoning and time, just like how humans tackle problems. By spending more time—and thus compute—on a problem, the LLM can yield better results. This phenomenon is known as test-time scaling, where a model dynamically allocates compute resources during inference to reason through problems. Reasoning models can enhance user experiences on PCs by deeply understanding a user's needs, taking actions on their behalf and allowing them to provide feedback on the model's thought process—unlocking agentic workflows for solving complex, multi-step tasks such as analyzing market research, performing complicated math problems, debugging code and more.

Today we are announcing Midnight Society will be closing its doors after three incredible years, with an amazing team of over 55 developers contributing to our new IP DEADROP. We are actively seeking other game studios that would be interested in offering employment opportunities to our talented team members. If you know anyone who's hiring please forward this message to them or DM us for direct intros. We express our sincere gratitude to each and every one of our community members and deeply sorry we were unable to reach our ultimate goal.

Midnight Society was founded on the core principles of transparency and open development. From as early as the creation of the very first weapon, environment, and gameplay systems, we shipped playable builds of our games to our massive community of players. With the leadership of three industry veterans, the studio grew to over fifty AAA developers from the largest franchises in the world (Call of Duty, Halo and Fortnite), alongside hundreds of thousands of community members who signed up to play in-development Snapshots of our first game and provide crucial feedback for the team.

Samsung Electronics today reported financial results for the fourth quarter and the fiscal year 2024. The Company posted KRW 75.8 trillion in consolidated revenue and KRW 6.5 trillion in operating profit in the quarter ended December 31, 2024. For the full year, it reported KRW 300.9 trillion in annual revenue and KRW 32.7 trillion in operating profit.

Although fourth quarter revenue and operating profit decreased on a quarter-on-quarter (QoQ) basis, annual revenue reached the second-highest on record, surpassed only in 2022. Meanwhile, operating profit was down KRW 2.7 trillion QoQ, due to soft market conditions especially for IT products, and an increase in expenditures including R&D. In the first quarter of 2025, while overall earnings improvement may be limited due to weakness in the semiconductors business, the Company aims to pursue growth through increased sales of smartphones with differentiated AI experiences, as well as premium products in the Device eXperience (DX) Division.

New technology from Chalmers University of Technology and the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, is helping the EU establish its own competitive computer manufacturing industry. Researchers have developed components critical for optimising on-chip memory, a key factor in enhancing the performance of next-generation computers.

The research leader, Professor Per Stenström, along with colleagues, has discovered new ways to make cache memory work smarter. A cache is a local memory that temporarily stores frequently accessed data, improving a computer's speed and performance. "Our solution enables computers to retrieve data significantly faster than before, as the cache can manage far more processing elements (PEs) than most existing systems. This makes it possible to meet the demands of tomorrow's powerful computers," says Per Stenström, Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Chalmers University of Technology and the University of Gothenburg.

I've had the privilege of leading the MNC at AMD for the past five years. In this role, I work with Dell, HP, Lenovo, Supermicro, and other leading workstation manufacturers to develop, market, and sell workstations using AMD Ryzen PRO and AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO processors. In this brief time, we've seen over 25 customers develop AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO processor-powered workstations that are transforming the capabilities of premium workstations. Many of you who have followed our journey already know that AMD Threadripper PRO CPU delivers up to an industry-leading 96-cores per processor. However, many of you may not have heard that every AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7000WX-Series processor model offers single-threaded frequencies of over 5 GHz, delivering a no-compromise architecture for lightly threaded and multithreaded applications.

Another secret of AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO processors is that they enable GPU-centric workloads to run faster. When pairing the same professional graphics card with AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO vs. the competition's processor, AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO CPU delivers up to 38% faster graphics performance, up to 29% faster GPU compute performance, and up to 29% faster GPU AI performance. Finally, one unique thing that AMD does is collaborate with leading workstation software manufacturers to optimize their software for the AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO architecture. These include 3ds Max, AutoCAD, Inventor, and Maya covering media and entertainment, design, engineering, and manufacturing.

World's Edge shared plans in February 2024 to launch a DLC for Age of Empires 3: Definitive Edition before the year ended. But come October, they pushed back the expansion's release to a "future date" with no set timeline. The studio has now scrapped the project, as they announced yesterday. The company hadn't shared much about the DLC's contents, production director Earnest Yuen had hinted at one point that it would add two new civilizations that players often asked for.

Age of Empires 3: Definitive Edition last saw an expansion in May 2022 with Knights of the Mediterranean. Now that this new DLC isn't happening, the game looks to be entering a phase of upkeep. World's Edge hasn't ruled out new content, but they'll focus on keeping servers running, rotating free trial civilizations, and helping customers. "Whilst we will not be moving forwards with this DLC content for Age III: DE, we will continue to maintain servers, rotate civs through the free trial version, and provide Customer Support for any issues you may encounter whilst playing."

AMD Radeon engineers are spending newly allocated extra time on optimizing their upcoming FidelityFX Super Resolution 4 (FSR 4) technology—industry watchdogs believe that a finalized version will launch alongside the initial lineup of RDNA 4 graphics card, now scheduled for release in March. Recently, David McAfee—Vice President and General Manager of Ryzen and Radeon products—revealed that his colleagues were working hard on maximizing performance and enabling "more FSR 4 titles." Insiders have started theorizing about how the current landscape of FSR 3.1-compatible games will translate with next-gen "AI-driven" upscaling techniques—several outlets believe that a freshly patched PC version of The Last of Us Part I is paving the way for eventual "easy" updates.

Kepler_L2—an almost endless fountain of Team Red-related insider knowledge—picked up on a past weekend VideoCardz report, and proceeded to add some extra tidbits via social media interaction. They started off by claiming that Team Red's: "RDNA 4 driver replaces FSR 3.1 DLL with FSR 4." When queried about the implication of said development, Kepler believes that all FSR 3.1 game titles will become ready to support FSR 4 on day one. The upgrade process—possibly achieved through a driver-level DLL swap—is reportedly quite easy to implement. According to the insider: "yeah, it should just work."

Hello, Engineers! The day has come—Space Engineers 2 Alpha has officially launched on Steam Early Access! After months of anticipation and hard work, we're excited to take this first step together. The thrilling journey of Space Engineers 2 starts now, and we invite you all to be part of it. The release of the Alpha and Vertical Slice1: Creative Mode is just the beginning—there's so much more ahead!

We're taking a unique approach to developing Space Engineers 2 with our Vertical Slice strategy. A Vertical Slice is a fully playable portion of the game that showcases specific core features and improvements implemented at production quality. It serves as a milestone in the game's development, allowing us to focus on delivering polished gameplay in stages while more features are added in subsequent slices.

People Can Fly is thrilled to be working on Gears of War: E-Day, the next mainline game in the renowned Gears of War series, as a co-development partner with The Coalition. We are honored to return to the world of Gears of War, a franchise deeply embedded in our studio's history. As lead developer of the iconic Gears of War: Judgment and co-development partner on Gears of War 1-3, we have always been passionate about the series and its legacy. "Returning to collaborate on the next chapter of this legendary saga is both a privilege and an exciting opportunity to build upon the intense, visceral action and rich storytelling that fans have come to love. We are deeply grateful for our partners' trust and support on this journey" says PCF's CEO, Sebastian Wojciechowski.

"Gears of War: E-Day is not just our next major game; it's a return to what makes Gears of War games special and authentic. We're pleased to be partnering with the talented folks at People Can Fly who have been a part of our franchise's legacy for so long."—Mike Crump, Studio Head, The Coalition. "Our team at People Can Fly, made up of dedicated Gears of War fans, is pouring everything we have into creating an experience that will exceed expectations. While we can't share more just yet, we're eager for the day when we can show all the exciting things we've been working on" - says Guillaume Barry, Development Director at PCF.

When you ask fans, "What's the quintessential action game?" the NINJA GAIDEN series is one of the legendary names that is guaranteed a mention. With roots as far back as the original 1988 arcade game NINJA GAIDEN (Ninja Ryukenden in Japan), the series has captivated fans in various forms over the years, from 2D to 3D, with its focus on swift traversal, eye-catching swordplay, and ninjutsu techniques, all jam-packed into exhilarating action gameplay.

In particular, the Xbox version of NINJA GAIDEN, released on Xbox consoles in 2004, stood out for its smooth controls and elegant action, earning its place as a revolutionary action game. The series' biggest allure lies in deeply satisfying and challenging battles featuring its iconic lead character, master ninja Ryu Hayabusa. The NINJA GAIDEN series has gained a reputation for being notoriously difficult, but with a near-unmatched sense of accomplishment upon clearing levels and defeating bosses that drives players to persevere. Celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, Team NINJA, the studio behind the majority of these iconic titles, has declared 2025 to be "The Year of the Ninja."

Hey everyone, I've got some sad news today to ring in 2025. Late last month, Noel and I made the difficult decision to cancel Earthblade. Yes, we are opening the year with a huge, heartbreaking, and yet relieving failure. I want to outline in this post what lead to this decision, and what it means for the future of EXOK.

Before I get into it however, I want to acknowledge that this news will likely come as a shock to fans who have been eagerly anticipating the game. We made this decision in December and felt it best to wait until now to announce it. For us on the inside we've had some time to process, grieve, and work toward accepting this, although that process is nonlinear and still ongoing. For those only reading this now who might be emotionally invested in this project, we're sorry to disappoint you.

Element Six (E6), a pioneer in the development of synthetic diamond advanced material solutions, will launch an innovative Cu-diamond product at Photonics West 2025. Cu-Diamond is a copper plated diamond composite material that has a high thermal and electrical conductivity. Designed to address the increasingly critical thermal management challenges in advanced semiconductor devices, this cost-effective solution enables greater performance and reliability for applications such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), high-performance computing (HPC), and GaN RF devices.

As semiconductor devices have grown larger and more powerful, managing heat dissipation has become a significant challenge for the industry. More than 50 percent of all electronic device failures are heat-related, and data centers, which today consume 3.7 percent of total U.S. power demand, are predicted to reach 10 percent by 2029. As a result, thermal management innovation is critical to enabling next-generation performance and energy efficiency.

Global technology powerhouse Lenovo Group Limited (together with its subsidiary, "Lenovo" or the "Group") has announced that its subsidiary has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Infinidat Ltd. ("Infinidat"), a global provider of high-end enterprise storage solutions. The acquisition is part of Lenovo's growth strategy to bring differentiated technology solutions to market. This move will further strengthen Lenovo's enterprise storage offerings globally and underscores a commitment to delivering innovative storage solutions that meet the evolving needs of modern data centers.

With the strong storage solutions and research & development capabilities of Infinidat, the transaction will create strategic synergies with the Group's infrastructure solutions business and enterprise storage capabilities.

Silicon Motion will expand its MonTitan lineup of SSD controllers—for datacenters and enterprise platforms—with the upcoming addition of a truly next-generation model. Wallace C. Kou (the company's founder and CEO) contributes to ChinaFlashMarket.com with a regular written column—his latest feature (posted on January 17) includes a short sentence dedicated to announcing his firm's new SM8466 design. This appears to be their first foray into PCIe 6.0-based interface territories—details are minimal (at this point in time), but the CEO divulged the very basics. Silicon Motion's engineering team is currently in the "development stage" with the SM8466 project—a: "4 nm PCIe Gen 6 SSD master chip."

It is not clear whether this next-gen PCIe 6.0 SSD controller will be heading to market anytime soon, but Kou's column mostly focused on current plans—likely signalling where priorities lie. Silicon Motion's "built-in PCIe Gen 5 SSD enterprise-level master chip" (SM8366) is in mass production—industry experts believe that the company's MonTitan PCIe 5.0 family has had a tough time keeping up with equivalent Phison products—in particular, the market leading PS5026-E26 (PCIe 5.0 x4) controller. The SM8366 could be potent enough to take the crown in higher-end enterprise segments, but the existence of a PCIe 6.0-based successor is bound to attract extra attention.

The video game industry may be preparing for significant pricing transformation, with the prediction that Grand Theft Auto 6 (GTA 6) could set a new precedent for game pricing when it launches in the fall of 2025. According to a recent industry analysis by Epyllion Group CEO Matthew Ball, the current standard price point of $70 for premium games is becoming unsustainable given the escalating development costs of major AAA titles. Ball suggests that GTA 6, one of the most anticipated releases in gaming history, may need to retail for at least $91 to reflect its production value. The potential price increase could have ripple effects throughout the industry, with other developers and publishers likely to follow suit. Anticipated are price points between $80 and $100 for premium titles, with cascading effects on lower-priced games that could see increases of around $10 across different price tiers.

Michael Douse, Publishing Director at Larian Studios, has voiced support for price adjustments, noting that game prices have remained relatively stagnant despite inflation. "A good company raises salaries in line with inflation so that their staff don't die or something, but games prices haven't risen with inflation. This isn't the reason the industry is in the shit for now, but it is an uncomfortable truth. On the other hand, the responsibility for a game developer is to make sure that the game they show lives up to that promise, and that investment from the player," Douse stated on X. While development costs and employee salaries have risen with inflation, game prices have seen only minimal increases. Even multimillion-dollar productions maintain the $70 price point, a model the industry now views as unsustainable.

LG Display, the world's leading innovator of display technologies, continues to lead the way in large-sized OLED technology by unveiling its fourth-generation OLED TV panel. 33% brighter than the previous generation and optimized for the AI TV era, it is the industry's first ever OLED display to achieve a maximum brightness as high as 4,000 nits (1 nit is the brightness produced by a candle).

Panels with both high brightness and energy efficiency are essential for AI TVs, as they use upscaling that analyzes content in real time to deliver ultra-high picture quality of up to 8K. The industry also considers higher brightness to be a key picture quality factor because it enables more vivid images that are akin to natural human vision.

The journey begins now: Assetto Corsa EVO Early Access is live on Steam! Imagine sitting behind the wheel of your dream car, the engine roaring, with the track stretching out before you. Feel the changing light as you accelerate, the road alive beneath your tires. This isn't just a game—it's the start of your driving journey.

For the next two weeks, until January 30th, join Assetto Corsa EVO Early Access at 20% off. By joining now, you'll receive all the content featured in version 1.0 for free. This is your chance to be part of the game's evolution at the lowest price of the entire EA program—immerse yourself in every thrilling lap and turn while shaping the future of the game.

SK hynix has sped up its HBM4 development plans, according to a report from ZDNet. The company wants to start shipping HBM4 samples to NVIDIA this June, which is earlier than the original timeline. SK hynix hopes to start supplying products by the end of Q3 2025, this push likely aims to get a head start in the next-gen HBM market. To meet this sped-up schedule, SK hynix has set up a special HBM4 development team to supply NVIDIA. Industry sources indicated on January 15th that SK Hynix plans to deliver its first customer samples of HBM4 in early June this year. The company hit a big milestone when it wrapped up the HBM4 tapeout in Q4 2024, the last design step.

HBM4 marks the sixth iteration of high-bandwidth memory tech using stacked DRAM architecture. It comes after HBM3E, the current fifth-gen version, with large-scale production likely to kick off in late 2025 at the earliest. HBM4 boasts a big leap forward doubling data transfer ability with 2,048 I/O channels up from its forerunner. NVIDIA planned to use 12-layer stacked HBM4 in its 2026 "Rubin" line of powerful GPUs. However, NVIDIA has moved up its timeline for "Rubin" aiming to launch in late 2025.

The Decima Engine has not been widely utilized outside of Guerrilla Games-developed titles—their Horizon series has mostly showcased this (Sony Interactive Entertainment-owned) proprietary technology. Kojima Productions (Death Stranding 1 & 2) and Supermassive Games (Until Dawn) are notable development houses that have licensed Guerrilla's very capable engine—naturally, both outfits are very invested in the PlayStation eco-sphere. Twisted Voxel has combed through Guerrilla staff profiles on LinkedIn and a certain job description caught their investigative eye. The online publication's reportage focused on a senior producer's role of: "managing communication and relations with other PlayStation Studios interested in or using the Decima engine."

Industry insiders believe that Guerrilla Games is deeply involved in overseeing development at other first-party PlayStation development studios—the Netherlands-based outfit is well-versed in creating epic open world adventures, and this expertise is a hot commodity given current market trends. It is not very surprising to hear about the possible sharing of proprietary engine tech between internal PlayStation teams—Decima would be an ideal candidate for other open world PlayStation projects. Twisted Voxel mentioned Bend Studio—this developer is located in Oregon, USA—best known for producing Days Gone (2019). A former senior game designer's LinkedIn profile lists experience of using the Decima toolset. Bend Studio's unannounced "open world" title is apparently due for launch this year.

Hyper Light Breaker, a new 3D indie platformer we reported on previously has finally launched to early access on Steam, and despite the surprising success of its predecessors, Hyper Light Drifter and Solar Ash, Hyper Light Breaker isn't looking like the break-out indie hit of the month. While the game has garnered a solid 5,230 peak concurrent players just five hours after launch, the Steam reviews are hardly anything to write home about so far.

According to SteamDB, Hyper Light Breaker has a review rating of just 35.5%, with 31.4% of the reviews giving the game a positive rating, while 68.6% of Steam reviewers gave it a negative score. Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, it looks like most of the issues with Hyper Light Breaker stem from the game's early access status. Early reviews on Steam report that the game's core mechanics and gameplay loop are satisfying, but that the game, overall, seems like it needs more time in the oven. Some of the more serious complaints when it comes to Hyper Light Breaker relate to the game's combat being somewhat difficult to grasp, progression feeling unsubstantial, initial difficulty being too high, and a steep learning curve. Others pointed out that there appears to be a lot of missing content. That said, as some reviewers have pointed out, the game is in early access. If we look at the likes of Windblown—or No Man's Sky for an example on a longer timeframe—it's easy to see the value in an early access period and community feedback. If Heart Machine, the developer behind Hyper Light Breaker, uses its community feedback properly and implements fixes to issues as they arise, it seems like it could be a game enjoyed by many indie gamers.

We recently reported on the Good Old Games's Game Preservation Program's success, with the storefront preserving two 30-year-old Warcraft games. Now, however, GOG is partnering with the European Federation of Game Archives, Museums, and Preservation Projects (EFGAMP) for future preservation efforts. EFGAMP is "the largest organization in Europe dedicated to preserving video games as cultural heritage," giving GOG's commitment to game preservation a lot more weight than previously. The partnership could also help GOG work within and with European governmental and non-governmental institutions, like museums and other organizations, in order to further the game preservation cause.

Perhaps more interestingly, as a game distribution platform with some development talent behind it, GOG actually brings something to the table that was previously missing from EFGAMP as a foundation. In the announcement, the foundation and GOG claim that 2024 was something of a tipping point for consumers when it comes to both the erosion of game ownership and game preservation as a whole. The subject of game ownership was a recurring theme in 2024, with games like The Crew joining the aforementioned Warcraft games in being delisted from stores—at least with the GOG delisting, the games are still maintained for existing owners. The goal of both GOG and EFGAMP is to preserve the history of gaming culture, allowing future generations to experience and learn about important moments in gaming history.