The internet has been buzzing the last couple of weeks with rumors that Microsoft will begin publishing Xbox first-party games on competing consoles. The company promised it would soon share more details about its “vision for the future of Xbox” and that looks to be coming on February 15. Phil Spencer will appear on the Official Xbox Podcast to share “updates on the Xbox business.”

The episode drops at 3PM ET and it’ll also feature Sarah Bond, President of Xbox, and Matt Booty, the head of Xbox Game Studios. Those are three big names, so this could be a real barnburner of a podcast episode.

We don’t know what the team has in store, but there have been all kinds of rumors flooding the web, from Hi-Fi Rush coming to the Nintendo Switch to Starfield and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle showing up on the PS5. It’s somewhat unusual for one of the big three to outsource first-party titles to competing platforms, but it’s not unheard of. Sony puts many of its biggest games on Steam and there are already some former Xbox exclusives on the Switch, like Ori and the Blind Forest and its sequel.

Many fans, however, have used these rumors to fuel wild speculations that Xbox is about to exit the console business entirely. This isn’t likely, even if the Xbox Series X and Series S consoles have underperformed when compared to the Switch and PS5. The company held an internal townhall last week and Spencer reportedly told employees that it has no plans to stop making consoles and that Xbox systems would continue to be a large part of its overall strategy, according to games reporter Shannon Liao.

Also, Game Pass is still a huge selling point for Xbox consoles, with a May 2023 survey indicating that 32 percent of gamers subscribe to the service. There were over 33 million subscribers back in 2022, and that number’s likely to have grown since then.

Microsoft isn’t exactly struggling, even when you factor in the games division. As a matter of fact, the company’s gaming revenue was up an impressive 49 percent for Q2 2024, due primarily to the Activision acquisition deal. A recent earnings report indicated company revenue of $62 billion (up 18 percent from last year) and profits of $21.9 billion.

Even with those numbers, however, Microsoft’s gaming division is still laying people off left and right. The company just slashed 1,900 jobs from its Xbox, Activision Blizzard and ZeniMax (aka Bethesda) teams. If it's looking for the constant growth that modern capitalism requires, dropping some of its more popular titles onto other consoles isn’t exactly the worst idea in the world. In any event, we’ll find out Thursday afternoon.

Dell gaming laptops are up to $560 off right now via a large sale on Amazon. The deals apply to both Dell-branded computers and Alienware models. The laptops here range from budget-friendly releases to more luxe high-end models.

First up, there’s the Dell G16 7630, which is on sale for $1,200 instead of $1,600. That’s a savings of $400 or 25 percent. The G16 is a sibling to our favorite budget laptop, the G15. This computer is plenty powerful, with an Intel Core i9 chip, a GeForce RTX 4070 GPU, 16GB of RAM and 1TB of solid-state storage.

There’s also a 16-inch QHD+ (2560 x 1600) display with a 165Hz refresh rate and 3ms response time. The thermal cooling system takes design cues from Alienware computers, with a large vapor chamber. In just about every way, this is a massive improvement over the G15, which we already loved.

The Alienware m18 is also on sale for $2,240 instead of $2,800, which is a significant savings of $540 and the lowest price ever for this model. The biggest news here is that glorious 18-inch screen. It may not fit in your backpack, but it’ll certainly provide for fantastic visuals. To that end, the laptop ships with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 GPU and the 16:10 FHD display supports Dolby Vision and offers an impressive 480Hz response time.

The AMD Ryzen 9 processor can be overclocked, which is another boon for gamers, and you get 32GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD and a comprehensive cooling system that includes one of the company’s larger vapor chambers, four fans and seven heat pipes. This thing is an absolute beast.

This big Dell sale isn’t just for gaming laptops. You’ll find desktops here, along with displays, headphones, charging docks and just about everything else the company makes. It’s like Black Friday except, you know, it’s Monday and not even close to Thanksgiving.

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Formula E is adding a junior support series that will accompany electric open-wheel championship events throughout Europe, in addition to two events on the DTM schedule. This is Formula E’s first support series since the Jaguar I-Pace eTrophy, which operated from 2018 to 2020.

The NXT Gen Cup actually started last year as a support series for the Scandinavian Touring Car Championship, but will now adventure throughout Europe. Events are open to drivers between the ages of 15 and 25 and will feature at all four European races included in the ABB FIA Formula E World Championship’s Season 10, including Misano, Monaco, Berlin and the finale in London.

The all-electric series will include both male and female drivers, with line-ups to be announced starting next week. Formula E says many of these drivers will be under 17, so this gives them “the opportunity to compete on the same circuits as Formula E’s 22 world-class drivers.” This not only presents race fans with something extra to watch, but helps prepare the next generation of drivers for the big leagues. That’s why it’s called the NXT Gen Cup.

Subject to final FIA approval, this year’s NXT Gen Cup will make its inaugural appearance on April 13 in Misano, Italy. Racers will drive a car based on the Mini Cooper SE, called the LRT NXT1. This front-wheel drive vehicle boasts the equivalent of a 180HP motor, plus an extra 60hp from a push-to-pass system.

These are electric vehicles, of course, so there’s a 30kWh battery with an accompanying 800-volt system. Other features include regen when braking, adjustable Ӧhlins shock absorbers and Hankook semi-slick all-weather tires. The organization built 20 cars for the series, so every driver will have the same exact vehicle. The championship will generally include two 20-minute practice sessions, a 20-minute qualifier and the actual 20-minute race.

Octopath Traveler developer Acquire has been purchased by FromSoftware’s parent company, the Kadokawa Corporation, for an undisclosed sum. The Japanese conglomerate announced the acquisition in a quarterly earnings report published today, as revealed by Gamesindustry.biz.

The purchase makes Acquire a sister company to FromSoftware and Spike Chunsoft, among others. For the uninitiated, FromSoftware is the developer behind little known games like Dark Souls, Elden Ring and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. Spike Chunsoft is also no slouch, as it's behind the Danganronpa and AI: The Somnium Files franchises.

Acquire has made many games beyond Octopath Traveler and its sequel, including No Heroes Allowed VR, Akiba's Beat and Akiba's Trip: Undead and Undressed. Kadokawa said the purchase should help the company “generate synergies” with its “existing game-related subsidiaries.” We don’t know what that means, but hopefully it refers to a bizarre Octopath Traveler and Elden Ring crossover title.

Kadokawa also says the move will enhance its “line-up of console games.” This is true, as the original Octopath Traveler sold over three million copies and the sequel sold a million copies in just three months. Those are big numbers for JRPGs with old-school mechanics. The company hasn’t announced whether it’ll still rely on Square Enix for publishing future entries in the Octopath franchise, but with those sales numbers it’s a fairly safe bet.

Last year’s Octopath Traveler 2 arrived to mostly positive reviews, though we dinged it for the same reason many people took umbrage with the original. The eight storylines don’t intersect enough, making the whole thing seem kind of random and disconnected. Still, the games are gorgeous and manage to capitalize on nostalgia for retro gameplay mechanics. They “feel” like classic Square Enix RPGs, even if they struggle with some of the execution.

A whole bunch of big tech companies, 200 in all, have joined a US-based effort to advance responsible AI practices. The US AI Safety Institute Consortium (AISIC) will count Meta, Google, Microsoft and Apple as members. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo just announced the group's numerous new members and said that they'll be tasked with carrying out actions indicated by President Biden’s sweeping executive order on artificial intelligence.

"The U.S. government has a significant role to play in setting the standards and developing the tools we need to mitigate the risks and harness the immense potential of artificial intelligence," Raimondo said in a statement.

Biden’s October executive order was far-reaching, so this consortium will focus on developing guidelines for “red-teaming, capability evaluations, risk management, safety and security, and watermarking synthetic content.”

Red-teaming is a cybersecurity term that dates back to the Cold War. It refers to simulations in which the enemy was called the “red team.” In this case, the enemy would be an AI hellbent on behaving badly. Those engaged in this practice will try to trick the AI into doing bad things, like exposing credit card numbers, via prompt hacking. Once people know how to break the system, they can build better protections.

Watermarking synthetic content is another important aspect of Biden’s original order. Consortium members will develop guidelines and actions to ensure that users can easily identify AI-generated materials. This will hopefully decrease deepfake trickery and AI-enhanced misinformation. Digital watermarking has yet to be widely adopted, though this program will “facilitate and help standardize” underlying technical specifications behind the practice.

The consortium’s work is just beginning, though the Commerce Department says it represents the largest collection of testing and evaluation teams in the world. Biden’s executive order and this affiliated consortium are pretty much all we’ve got for now. Congress keeps failing to pass meaningful AI legislation of any kind.

Insomniac Games has long-promised a New Game+ mode for its hit superhero sim Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 and it’s arriving on March 7. The mode was supposed to drop at the tail-end of 2023, but was delayed until 2024. The forthcoming update won’t just be about New Game+, as Insomniac promises “new suits and more.”

We don’t exactly know what the mode will look like, as the developer urges players to keep an eye on its social media accounts “for a complete list of features closer to release.” However, we can glean some information from the New Game+ option that’s currently available for the original game. This mode lets players restart the story while holding on to items they found during the previous run. It’s possible the New Game+ for Spider-Man 2 will offer more than that, as the developer has advertised that “many more” features will soon arrive for the open-world web-slinging adventure.

The game also currently lacks audio descriptions, which is an accessibility feature intended for players who are blind or have low vision. This is coming, but we don’t know if it’ll be included with March’s update.

Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 lets you swap between protagonists Peter Parker and Miles Morales with the push of a button. It’s widely regarded as being the rare sequel that’s both bigger and better than the original. We admired the incredibly fun traversal mechanics, engaging open world and the game’s satisfying story. The PS5 exclusive quickly became the fastest-selling first-party title in PlayStation history, with more than 2.5 million copies sold in one day.

The Biden administration recently announced that it would be requiring large cryptocurrency mining operations to report electricity usage, via a press release from The Energy Information Administration. This follows concerns that the industry could pose a threat to the nation’s electricity grids and hasten the impacts of climate change.

To that end, the EIA has targeted 137 “identified commercial cryptocurrency miners” working in the US. These operations account for around 2.3 percent of national energy usage. This breaks down to 90 terawatt-hours per year, which is more than Finland, Belgium and Chile use in that same time period. The world’s crypto miners used as much electricity in 2023 as the entire country of Australia. That's a whole lot of energy for Shiba Inu-branded internet money with no practical application.

The data collection started this week. The survey aims to get a sense of the industry’s growing demands and which parts of the country are the biggest crypto hotbeds, so as to refine policy later on. The EIA has already discovered that nearly 38 percent of all bitcoin is mined in the US, which is up from 3.4 percent in 2020.

“As cryptocurrency mining has increased in the United States, concerns have grown about the energy-intensive nature of the business and its effects on the US electric power industry,” the EIA said in a report that offered further details behind the survey.

The EIA went on to note that large crypto mining operations could strain the electricity grid during peak periods, force higher energy prices for average consumers and negatively impact energy-related carbon dioxide emissions. Most of the electricity generated throughout the world comes from burning fossil fuels, and that process releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

The clean energy advocacy group RMI estimates that US cryptocurrency mines release 25 to 50 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year. That’s around the same amount as the yearly diesel emissions from the US railroad industry. 

The biggest mining operations in the country are scattered throughout 21 states, but largely clustered in Texas, Georgia and New York. This is especially dangerous for Texans, as the state’s energy grid is already notoriously fragile. Ben Hertz-Shargel, who leads energy research consultancy firm Wood Mackenzie, told Ars Technica that crypto mining operations are not only placing a higher burden on the state’s energy grid, but increasing prices for consumers. 

Energy costs in Texas are based on real-time demand, so Hertz-Shargel estimates that state residents see an increase of 4.7 percent in their monthly utility bills due to cryptocurrency mining. He also said that mining operations tend to open up shop next to pre-existing renewable energy facilities, which draws clean power away from nearby homes and businesses.

It’s not all doom and gloom in the crypto world. Back in 2022, Ethereum announced a software update to make mining ether more eco-friendly. The Ethereum Foundation claims this reduces the carbon emissions of its mining operations by more than 99 percent. However, ether accounts for just 17 percent of the global cryptocurrency market share.

If you ask anyone who’s actually tried an Apple Vision Pro what the best feature is, they’ll likely call out the dual micro-OLED displays. These screens produce especially crisp visuals, and iFixit has taken it upon themselves to find out why. The publication conducted a teardown on the Apple Vision Pro with an emphasis on those glorious displays. 

The big takeaway? The screens are incredibly pixel-dense, with 12,078,000 pixels smushed into 0.98 square inches. This means that each individual pixel is just 7.5 μm, which makes them roughly the size of a red blood cell. Yeah. The ones in our bodies right now.

This is much more dense than just about anything else out there. For instance, you can fit 54 Apple Vision Pro pixels inside of a single iPhone 15 Pro pixel. No wonder that dinosaur looks so real. The publication indicates that the micro-OLED displays are likely custom-made by Sony, based on various design decisions.

An important measurement with pixel density is PPI (pixels per inch) and the Vision Pro came in with a “stunning” 3,386 PPI. The iPhone 15 Pro boasts a PPI of 460. As astounding as these metrics are, Apple Vision Pro displays are still not 4K. 4K resolution refers to a horizontal display resolution of around 4,000 pixels, and so the Vision Pro misses the consumer UHD standard of 3,840 pixels wide by just a hair. However, this doesn’t really matter when the displays are like an inch from your retinas. After all, a standard 4K TV features a pixel density of around 140 PPI. 

Another important data point here is PPD (pixels per degree), which takes into account how far you are from the screen and the overall angle. iFixit estimates that the Vision Pro has an average of 34 PPD. This is a very good number for something so close to the eye. As a comparison, the PlayStation VR2 has an average of 19 PPD and the Meta Quest 3 features an average of 25 PPD.

As for the infamous repairability score, iFixit awarded a provisional score of 4 for the Apple Vision Pro. This is brand-new technology, after all, which would make DIY repairs difficult even without Apple at the helm. The publication has yet to test various aspects of the headset for repairability, so the score will likely be updated in the near future.

Ring has announced a refresh of its popular Battery Doorbell Plus outdoor camera. The Battery Doorbell Pro is an upgrade in nearly every way, as is usually the case when companies slap “Pro” at the end of a name.

Ring says this new model is its “most advanced battery powered doorbell” ever and that it’s packed with features that exceed even its wired doorbells. It boasts radar-powered 3D motion detection, which was also included with the company’s Stick Up Cam Pro. Otherwise called “Bird’s Eye View”, this technology tracks an object’s path through the camera’s field of view so you can monitor where visitors are going and the route they took to get there.

This is paired with an algorithm that sets more nuanced and discrete motion alerts, so you won’t get pinged every time a cat or shadow crosses your yard. You also get something called “Bird’s Eye View” that translates this information into a series of dots on an aerial image of your property.

The visuals have received an upgrade. The camera records 1546p HD+ video and there’s some upscaling features to make the image more crisp. Ring says the doorbell’s dynamic image processing and high-efficiency compression delivers “life-like color and sharpness whether you’re watching in Live View or a video recording from the night before.” To the latter point, there’s a new tool called Low-Light Sight that provides “clear color” videos even in the dark.

The Ring Battery Doorbell Pro also includes a noise-canceling algorithm so you can actually hear who’s at the door, and not just a truck passing by. As the name suggests, it’s powered by a rechargeable battery and not by splicing into your home’s electrical system. Ring is owned by Amazon, so you get Alexa functionality and Echo Show integration. The company would also very much like you to sign up to its Ring Alarm Pro subscription plan for cloud storage, package alerts and backup internet for when the power goes out.

If you've been hesitant about Ring products because of where your data might go, the company recently walked back its police-friendly stance regarding video sharing. Amazon says that Ring’s home doorbell unit would stop acquiescing to warrantless police requests for footage from users’ video doorbells and surveillance cameras. 

The doorbell goes on sale on Mach 6 for $230, with pre-orders going live today. A Ring Alarm Pro subscription costs $20 per month or $200 per year. 

Akai just officially announced the MPC Key 37, a standalone workstation and groovebox. This is the latest standalone MPC device, following last year’s larger Key 61. The Key 37 has everything you need to make a beat or song from scratch without having to use an actual computer and DAW, with some limitations. 

There are 37 full-size keys, complete with polyphonic aftertouch. There aren’t that many standalone devices out there with a full keybed, so this should excite musicians who lack experience with Akai-style pads. This device does have 16 velocity-sensitive pads for laying down drum parts and triggering samples, so it’s a “best of both worlds” type situation.

The Key 37 ships with 32GB of on-board storage, though 10GB is used up by the OS and included sound packs. Thankfully, there’s a slot for an SD card to expand the storage — these standalone devices fill up fast.

You get the same color 7-inch multi-touch display and four assignable Q-Link knobs as the company’s Key 61 workstation. This is great for making system adjustments and for controlling effects plugins and the like. As a matter of fact, the entire layout recalls the Key 61, though this new release is slightly less powerful.

Akai

The Key 37 features 2GB of RAM, compared to 4GB with the Key 61. This is going to hamper the number of tracks that will play simultaneously without any hiccups. It also lacks the two microphone inputs and associated preamps. There are, however, stereo 1/4-inch inputs and outputs, USB Midi, 5-pin MIDI In/MIDI Out, 4 TRS CV/Gate output jacks and a USB host port. This keyboard also boasts Bluetooth and WiFi connectivity for wireless streaming with platforms like Ableton Link.

Beyond the iconic 16 pad layout, the highlight of any MPC machine is the software. To that end, the Key 37 ships with Akai’s MPC2 desktop software and its standalone suite. You get eight instrument plugins out of the box and a voucher for a premium plug from the company’s ever-growing collection. You even get that cool stem separation software, though it’s not available on the Key 37 yet.

Akai’s latest and greatest may not be as full-featured as 2022’s Key 61, but it’s around half the price. The Key 37 costs $900 and is available to order right now via parent company inMusic and authorized retailers.