Game Pass subscribers will have to wait a bit more before they're able to play Diablo IV and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III on the service. Activision Blizzard has announced on X, formerly Twitter, that it doesn't have plans to add those games — among other upcoming and recent releases — to the service anytime this year. Based on its explanation, it's waiting for Microsoft's acquisition of the company to be finalized, which is expected to happen within this month. 

"As we continue to work toward regulatory approval of the Microsoft deal, we've been getting some questions whether our upcoming and recently launched games will be available via Game Pass," the gaming giant wrote. It added that it expects to start working with Xbox and add its titles to the Game Pass service once the deal closes, and that the process would begin "sometime in the course of next year."

Microsoft first announced that it was buying Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion in early 2022 and that it was hoping to close the deal by June 2023. However, several regulators moved to block the purchase over concerns that it would harm competition and stifle innovation. The European Commission rubberstamped the acquisition in May with the condition that Microsoft offers its games on other cloud gaming services. Meanwhile, the UK's Competition and Markets Authority blocked the deal until the companies promised to sell "cloud streaming rights for all current and new Activision Blizzard PC and console games released over the next 15 years to Ubisoft Entertainment... in perpetuity." In the US, courts denied the Federal Trade Commission's (FTC) request to issue an injunction on the purchase. However, the FTC announced in September that it plans to restart its in-house trial against the acquisition. 

Unity game developer said that John Riccitiello will step down as president and CEO of the company after nine years in leadership, effective immediately. James Whitehurst, who previously served as senior advisor and president at IBM, will fill in as interim CEO. The leadership transition comes during a turbulent time for the company.

Just a month ago, Unity rolled out some significant concessions to its developer pricing model after widespread backlash over its plan to charge developers for game installations. The move will directly impact developers, publishers and distributors. The upheaval of Unity’s business model came at the same time as a series of massive layoffs. In 2023, the company reduced its headcount three times in an attempt to cut costs.

Despite the recent controversy, Unity said it expects third-quarter revenue to fall somewhere between $540 million to $550 million, which is up 67 to 70 percent from last year.

At dawn on Wednesday, French antitrust authorities conducted a surprise raid on a company in the country that specializes in graphics cards — and according to The Wall Street Journal and Challenges business magazine, that company was NVIDIA. We reached out to NVIDIA for clarification and a spokesperson declined to comment. Here's what we know for sure:

The French Competition Authority conducted a surprise raid early Wednesday morning on "a company suspected of having implemented anticompetitive practices in the graphics cards sector," according to a brief press release from the regulator. The raid was tied to a larger investigation into the health of the cloud computing market, with a focus on identifying whether new companies were being unfairly squeezed out by larger, existing ones. The results of that investigation were published in June and they centered on three "hyperscalers," Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. 

The results read, in part, "The likelihood of a new operator being able to gain market share rapidly appears limited, excluding companies who are already powerful in other digital markets." NVIDIA is not mentioned in the original cloud investigation.

NVIDIA has seen significant financial success this year amid the AI boom. NVIDIA's AI chips and data centers are in high demand, and the company crushed its most recent earnings expectations, pulling in $13.51 billion in the second quarter of 2023, compared with $6.7 billion in 2022.

As the French Competition Authority noted, a raid does not mean the targeted company is guilty of anticompetitive practices — but it's a confident step from the regulatory body.

Jim Ryan, Sony Interactive Entertainment's (SIE) President and CEO, is stepping down in March 2024. In a post announcing his retirement, the executive said he's been finding it "increasingly difficult" to juggle his home life in the UK and his job that's located in the US. Ryan has been with SIE since 1994, before the first PlayStation was launched worldwide. He helped establish the company's presence in Europe and held several positions before he was eventually named as the CEO of SIE in 2019. 

SIE launched the PlayStation 5 under Ryan's leadership. While the company struggled to produce enough consoles in the height of the pandemic due to component shortages, it was eventually able to increase production and meet demands. In the first quarter of 2023, Sony shipped 3.3 million PS5 units, bringing the total number of consoles sold to 41.7 million. Sony CEO Kenichiro Yoshida praised Ryan for "overseeing the launch of PlayStation 5 in the midst of the global COVID pandemic," saying that the device is now "on track to become SIE’s most successful console yet."

On April 1, 2024, Hiroki Totoki will step in as interim CEO of SIE, taking on the responsibility on top of his roles as the president, COO and CFO of Sony Group Corporation. The company said that he will work with management to "help define the next chapter of PlayStation's future" and to find the next boss for Sony Interactive Entertainment.

Microsoft Gaming chief Phil Spencer wanted to acquire Nintendo so bad, he considered it a "career moment." One of the leaked documents from the FTC v. Microsoft case was an email Spencer sent to the company's Chief Marketing Officers Chris Capossela and Takeshi Numoto in 2020. The executive talked about how Nintendo was the prime asset for the tech giant in gaming, which is Microsoft's best bet for consumer relevance. He was confident that if there was an American company capable of acquiring Nintendo, it was Microsoft. However, Nintendo was apparently sitting on a "big pile of cash" that made it unlikely to go looking for buyers. 

Spencer added that Nintendo had a board of directors that had not pushed for increases in market growth in ages. He explained that it might change in the future, though, as one of Microsoft's board of directors — investment company ValueAct Capital — had been "heavily acquiring" Nintendo shares and had been "fully supportive" of an acquisition if the opportunity arose. 

Microsoft has a long history of trying to acquire the Japanese gaming giant. When Bloomberg published an in-depth oral account of how the Xbox came to be for its 20th anniversary in 2021, it was revealed that the company asked Nintendo if it was willing to be acquired — and got laughed out of the room. "They just laughed their asses off," Xbox co-creator Kevin Bachus said. "Like, imagine an hour of somebody just laughing at you. That was kind of how that meeting went." Microsoft also reportedly asked Nintendo to let it take care of hardware so it could focus on games, but it ultimately failed to convince the company to do a merger. 

In Spencer's letter, he said it was "taking a long time for Nintendo to see that their future exists off of their own hardware." And then he ended it with a smiley face that seemed to indicate that he was willing to play the long game, though it's unclear if he still has plans to make another attempt at a merger. Microsoft's legal battle against the Federal Trade Commission will decide the outcome of the company's $69 billion Activision Blizzard acquisition. The company announced the massive purchase in early 2022, but the FTC filed a lawsuit to block the merger, which the agency says can harm competition in the gaming market. 

Panos Panay is leaving Microsoft after 19 years with the company, as confirmed via an official tweet. He’s been operating as the chief product officer with Microsoft, heading up Windows 11 development and the company’s Surface line. Rajesh Jha, Microsoft’s vice president of experience and devices, broke the news in an email to employees, as reported by The Verge.

Panay was hired on by Microsoft back in 2004 as a group program manager, overseeing a number of premium products. After heading the development of the initial Surface line of tablets and hybrid laptops, he was named the company’s chief product officer in 2018. His rise continued in 2021 when he was promoted to executive vice president after a successful Windows 11 launch, eventually becoming involved in a leadership team that directly advised CEO Satya Nadella.

There’s been no actual reason given by either party, but Panay says he has “decided to turn the page and write the next chapter.” The timing here is a bit suspicious, as Microsoft’s conducting a livestream event on Thursday that will almost certainly be dedicated to new Surface products. We reached out to the company for clarification as to why Panay left his position and what that means moving forward. We’ll update this post when we hear more.

As for what’s next, Microsoft has already said that Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s current corporate vice president of modern life, search and devices, will take Panay’s place as the head of the Windows and Surface divisions. The company also still seems committed to two areas of the business that Panay consistently championed: integrating AI into Windows 11 and mixed-reality. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a statement released to TechCrunch that the company remains “steadfast and convicted in our strategy.” We’ll have to see how this unfolds Thursday during Microsoft’s Surface-centric event.

Embracer's days of buying nearly every game developer and publisher it possibly can seem to be over, with the company now looking to reduce expenses. It recently closed Saints Row studio Volition as part of a restructuring plan that includes layoffs and game cancellations. Embracer may now be set to sell one of its more valuable assets.

The company is considering several options for what to do with Borderlands creator Gearbox, according to Reuters. Some third parties are said to have shown interest in snapping up the developer and publisher, which Embracer bought in February 2021 in a deal that was worth up to $1.4 billion. Embracer is reportedly exploring a sale with the help of Goldman Sachs and Aream, while marketing materials are being made available to potential suitors.

Embracer said in June that it was making sweeping changes in order to reduce its debt by around $605 million to less than approximately $903 million by the end of its financial year. The Swedish company said at the time that a proposed investment worth over $2 billion over six years ultimately fell apart. It was later reported that the Saudi government-funded Savvy Games Group was the partner Embracer tentatively had a deal with.

Intel is one of the latest companies to invest in Arm, joining the ranks of Samsung, Alphabet, Nvidia and more, Tom's Hardware reports. The move comes as Softbank preps Arm for its IPO, with plans to offer 95.5 million shares at $47 to $51 each. The company is valued at $52 billion — more than the almost deal selling Arm to Nvidia for $40 billion that fell off in 2022 (barriers included the Federal Trade Commission suing to block it).

Investing in what is, essentially, its competitor allows Intel to expand beyond its x86 chips — which are not nearly as efficient as those Arm is currently manufacturing. Stuart Pann, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Intel Foundry Services, confirmed the investment during the Goldman Sachs Communacopia & Technology Conference Call. "80 percent of TSMC's wafers have an ARM processor in them," Pann said. "The fact that our organization, the IFS organization, is embracing ARM at this level, investing in ARM, doing partnerships with ARM, should give you a signpost that we're absolutely serious about playing in this business because if you're not working with ARM, you can't be a foundries provider." As an “anchor investor,” Intel should have better access to Arm’s future chip design IP which it can then produce via its burgeoning contract factory plans.

As part of this expansion, Pann added that the company would be focusing more on other low-power chipsets, including RISC-V, which he said is where the “volumes” are at in the new world of mobile-first computing. After all, the point of Intel opening up its factories to third parties in the first place was to admit that its own efforts in this space hadn’t been as successful as its much-smaller rival.

Intel's decision to invest in Arm comes at a time of tremendous growth in (and incentives to grow) the chip manufacturing industry. Earlier this year, the Biden administration released funding applications for companies to get a piece of $39 billion devoted to semiconductor manufacturing. More recently, Apple extended its licensing deal with Arm until 2040. The iPhone maker was a founding backer of the company, first using its technology in its (ultimately doomed) Newton and now, more recently, as the backbone of its entire lineup.

Just over a month after it declared bankruptcy, e-bike maker VanMoof has found a new home. Lavoie, the electric scooter division of McLaren Applied, has agreed to buy VanMoof and make investments in it to grow the business. According to a press release, Lavoie and its parent plan to "inject stability into the VanMoof operations" before bringing together their "capabilities to create a next-generation e-mobility business and establish a world-leading premium e-mobility offering."

Terms of the acquisition haven't been disclosed, but Lavoie and McLaren Applied appear to have a reasonable understanding of the challenge that lies ahead to get VanMoof back on track. McLaren Applied Chairman Nick Fry told Reuters that VanMoof is "a company with a brilliant product" that offers his team an opportunity in a new market, "but this is not going to be a walk in the park. This also is a company that got itself into a difficult financial situation." Fry noted that McLaren Applied would need to invest "tens of millions" of pounds "in the short term" to stabilize VanMoof.

Lavoie CEO Eliott Wertheimer pointed out that VanMoof has more than 190,000 e-bike customers, some of whom have been struggling to obtain parts for repairs after production was suspended. Lavoie's goal is to "continue to keep those riders on the road whilst we stabilize and efficiently grow the VanMoof business and continue to develop its world-class products.” However, there will be layoffs as part of the acquisition. VanMoof will also shift away from an in-house retail store model to instead sell and service bikes via third-party partners. Peloton has made a similar shift in its business model over the last year or so.

If you've been wondering who's making the most money from the AI boom, NVIDIA may have the answer in it's latest earnings report. The company announced revenue of $13.51 billion in the second quarter, more than doubling the $6.7 billion it made last year and crushing market expectations. On top of that, it earned $6.18 billion in GAAP net income, nine times the $656 million it made in Q2 2022. 

NVIDIA's gaming segment did pretty well too, thanks to $2.49 billion in Q2 revenue, up 22 percent from last year. During the quarter, it started shipping the budget-oriented GeForce RTX 4060 GPU, announced the Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) for games and saw the addition of 35 DLSS games including Diablo IV. (Earlier this week, it unveiled DLSS 3.5 designed to use AI to make ray-traced games look better.)

But it was very much the AI and data center segments that pushed NVIDIA to new heights. It saw a record $10.32 billion in revenue in that sector alone, up 141 percent from Q1 2023 and 171 percent from a year ago. 

Earlier this year, CEO Jensen Huang said that back in 2018, NVIDIA had a "bet the company" moment when it started using AI to power DLSS, "and while we were reinventing CG with AI, we were reinventing the GPU for AI." He later added that "the future is a large language model (LLM) at the front of just about everything," from VFX to heavy industry. 

NVIDIA's prescience is now paying off with the company's flagship H100 Tensor Core GPU. It's also been building more complex systems like the HGX box, which puts eight H100 GPUs into a single computer. All of that helped it create immense cashflows with top customers spending heavily on NVIDIA GPU tech to build complex AI models — like Microsoft with its Azure segment. 

In addition, the company's use of custom software and apps makes it difficult for customers to switch rivals like AMD. "Our Data Center products include a significant amount of software and complexity which is also helping for gross margins," said NVIDIA finance chief Colette Kress in an analyst call.

All that led to a perfect storm of profit. "During the quarter, major cloud service providers announced massive NVIDIA H100 AI infrastructures. Leading enterprise IT system and software providers announced partnerships to bring NVIDIA AI to every industry. The race is on to adopt generative AI," Huang said in a statement. "Companies worldwide are transitioning from general-purpose to accelerated computing and generative AI." The company expects more to come, forecasting around $16 billion in revenue for Q3.