Framework has confirmed that shipments of its first Laptop 13 Pro units, originally planned for late June, are now delayed by about a month. Deliveries are now expected to begin in late July, with some potentially not arriving until early August. The company notified pre-order customers directly via email, and importantly, this delay has nothing to do with the ongoing DRAM and memory shortage.

Framework says it found two issues before the mass-production ramp. One with the new haptic touchpad and another with the custom display. Framework's email says that the haptic trackpad has undergone a dozen internal firmware releases, but an electrical grounding issue was found in its circuit board design, causing the trackpad to reset after repeated clicks.

The company worked with suppliers Lite-On and Boréas to diagnose the problem and determined that a new board design is needed. Framework is now running validation testing, including a 200,000-click endurance test, and the new modules are expected to reach the final assembly factory by mid-July.

NVIDIA has kicked off a summer sale for GeForce NOW, knocking 35% off 12-month Performance and Ultimate memberships until July 8, 2026. The Performance plan drops from $99.99 to $64.99, saving $35, while the Ultimate plan drops from $199.99 to $129.99, saving $70.

Worth noting that the discount only applies to 12-month plans, with 1-month and Day Pass options remaining at full price. The offer is for new members, free members, existing 1-month Performance or Ultimate users upgrading to annual, and 12-month Performance users upgrading to Ultimate. If you already have a 12-month Ultimate plan, this particular deal will not apply to you.

Alongside the sale, NVIDIA confirmed that Guild Wars 3 will be available on GeForce NOW at launch. ArenaNet and NCSoft announced the game during Summer Game Fest 2026, confirming PC, Steam, and PlayStation 5 releases, with the first beta planned for fall 2027.

Valve has been accused by a Dutch consumer group of using Steam's market power to maintain high PC game prices, higher than the consumer watchdog believes they should be.

The claim is being run by the Stichting Consumenten Competition Claims under the GameClaim banner, alleging that Dutch PC gamers have unfairly paid too much for PC games, downloadable content, and microtransactions due to Valve's restrictions on competition through Steam. The claim states that the group isn't opposed to Steam as a platform, but is seeking fair PC game prices and compensation for Dutch gamers.

The lawsuit claims that Steam is so dominant in the market that developers simply cannot avoid it, and since Valve knows this, it uses its position to maintain high prices and prevent cheaper pricing elsewhere. Additionally, the claim alleges that Valve forces developers to sell their titles at a minimum price and prevents them from offering lower prices or better terms through other online PC game stores. Essentially, the lawsuit claims Valve blocks developers from selling their games outside of Steam for less than they sell them on Steam.

Looming over the next generation of consoles is the ongoing memory and storage crisis, driven by manufacturers diverting supply to high-paying AI companies amid a massive influx of capital into the space. Xbox won't be immune to its impacts, as executives are already discussing the real-world concerns of component prices and how they will affect the next Xbox console.

Xbox recently confirmed that hardware component costs are exploding, with Xbox CEO Asha Sharma detailing in a recent letter that, since this February, the price of storage components was 2x what Xbox had paid the previous fall. Adding, as of June this year, those prices have doubled again. The letter added that Xbox expects prices to continue rising to 5x what the company was paying just two years ago.

In a recent interview with The Game Business, Xbox Chief Strategy Officer, Matthew Ball, has touched on how the shortage will impact the next Xbox codenamed Project Helix.

Xbox has been on a media rampage recently, with new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma expressing in several interviews that Xbox is about to go through big changes, which the executives have described as a "reset".

Xbox has been enduring quite a bit of headwind, as Sharma and Xbox Game Studios CEO Matt Booty described in a recent co-authored letter; the current Xbox business model isn't sustainable, and other factors are at play, such as the ongoing memory and storage crisis caused by the boom in AI. The concerns around the hardware shortage driving up prices have fallen on the next-generation Xbox and PlayStation 6, as Sony isn't immune either.

In a recent interview with The Game Business, Christopher Dring spoke with Xbox CSO Matthew Ball about the condition of the console market amid Xbox's declining revenue despite multi-billion investment.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of the largest cloud companies in the world, and for several years it has been developing and deploying AWS Graviton processors for web applications, analytics, databases, machine learning (ML) inference, gaming, video encoding, and more. The latest in-house AWS processor, designed and built in collaboration with Annapurna Labs on TSMC's 3nm process, the AWS Graviton5, is here.

The chiplet design features an impressive 192 Arm V3 cores, a 5X increase in L3 Cache, a 33% lower inter-core latency, 420 GB/s die-to-die bandwidth, PCIe Gen6 and DDR5-8800 memory support with a bandwidth of 800+ GB/sec. AWS notes that compared to Graviton4-based instances, the new Graviton5 offers up to 35% faster performance for AI inference, making it an ideal chip for the current agentic era. And when it comes to memory, it delivers the "fastest memory of any processor instances in the cloud."

Naturally, this means that Amazon's new M9g instances powered by AWS Graviton5 are outperforming previous-gen AWS instances powered by Intel Xeon "Cascade Lake" and AMD EPYC "Genoa" processors. And with that, AWS confirms that Meta is one of its largest customers, and is deploying Graviton5 "at scale" with tens of millions of CPU cores supporting the company's agentic AI push.

Halo: Combat Evolved is a built-from-the-ground-up remake of the first game's iconic and memorable campaign, and it's out next month for PC, Xbox consoles, and PS5. As the first game in the Halo series to be built on Unreal Engine 5, the latest story-based trailer that focused on the remake's brand-new prequel missions was generally well-received from the community, with many highlighting its impressive visuals.

Earlier this week, we reported on the game's PC requirements and specifications from Halo Studios, which outlined some pretty powerful GPU hardware and even 32 GB of system memory to run the game at High and Ultra settings. Today we've got a new hands-on video from FPS-focused YouTube channel jackfrags, which offers hands-on impressions and even early performance information for the game's PC build.

As the release is still several weeks away and we can expect day-one drivers from NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel, what we see here could improve. For the most part, it's great news, in that Halo: Combat Evolved seems to run smoothly and without stuttering across indoor and outdoor missions, and on and off vehicles. The only downside is that the GeForce RTX 5090 seems to top out at around 120 FPS when playing the game at 1440p with Ultra settings and DLAA.

A new report from Jon Peddie Research, covering the first quarter of 2026's GPU shipments from AIBs (add-in board partners for NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel), paints a relatively strong picture of the current GPU market. With 11.8 million units shipped in the first three months of the year, it's a 0.6% decrease from the previous quarter; however, this figure is much lower than the historical Q1 average drop of 12%.

Q1 is a quieter month for hardware shipments, so the minimal 0.6% decrease is notable. This covers GPUs in the GeForce RTX, Radeon RX, and Intel Arc lineups, and what makes this figure even more interesting is that it arrives when desktop PC shipments dropped 25% year-over-year and 24% quarter-to-quarter for Q1 2026. According to the data, the AIB attach rate, that is, GPU per desktop PC shipped, increased to 76%, which is up an impressive 33.2% from the previous quarter.

And with that, the new report highlights desktop GPU market share by vendor, with NVIDIA holding strong at 90%. This is a 1% drop from the previous quarter; however, most of that went to Intel rather than AMD.

The current memory crisis means that one of the only real ways to ease the burden on the consumer market and meet the insatiable demand from the AI and data center sectors is for key players to ramp up production of existing and next-gen memory chips. As one of the biggest players in the space, SK hynix is looking to do just that and, in the process, triple its wafer production.

Although the construction of four new facilities to, well, facilitate this won't be completed and online until 2034, this is actually a shorter timeline than the previous target set by SK hynix of 2045. In a recent interview with Nikkei Asia (via German outlet ComputerBase), SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won said, "Since we're proceeding with the plan to expand as much as possible, our calculations show that our wafer capacity will double within five years. But honestly, once all these facilities are built, it won't just double, it will triple by around 2034."

According to the chairman, the current 2034 target is the best-case scenario and that there's no way to "move faster than this." Due to the ongoing demand for DRAM and NAND Flash, prices have quadrupled over the past year as supply struggles to meet demand. And with that in mind, this news is welcome for the long-term supply of memory, but it doesn't address the current crisis.

The Rotary Mouse is a new mouse that is attempting to "reinvent" scrolling by replacing the traditional scroll wheel with a built-in rotary wheel. With the rotary wheel in place of the traditional scroll wheel, scrolling up and down is replaced by clockwise and counterclockwise turns.

The Rotary Mouse is an independent creation by a single engineer and entrepreneur, and the product is set to debut via a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign launching on June 17. According to its creator, replacing the traditional scroll wheel with a rotary wheel improves scroll speed when zipping through documents by a factor of 2.5X, with the added benefit of reduced strain from repetitive flicking movements.

The design here also includes tactile feedback and clicks for added precision, enabling much faster, more accurate scrolling stops than a mouse with an infinite scroll wheel. And the design also includes support for standard vertical scrolling for a seamless transition/experience.

Xbox management continues hinting at ads coming to its games and services in some form, and new comments from management emphasize the importance of making things non-invasive.

Ads are coming to gaming, and apparently soon. But how this will actually happen remains unclear; will companies show ads during loading screens? Will real-life restaurants like Pizza Hut and products like Monster energy drinks show up more often in games? And what about interstitial ads--do those have a place?

Xbox is currently testing a free ad-supported tier of Xbox Cloud Gaming, and it could lead to new monetization avenues. Users watch a few ads and in exchange they get hours of playtime game streaming in return. Now Xbox's new chief strategy officer comments further on how ads could help stabilize the group and fund new games--including Xbox console exclusives.

Valve is finally adding SteamOS support for Intel-based handhelds, enabling Linux gamers to run Valve's official Linux OS on various Intel-based handhelds without resorting to third-party counterparts such as Bazzite. YouTuber ETA Prime tested SteamOS beta 3.8.7 on a Lunar Lake-based MSI Claw 8 AI+, showing SteamOS functioning well on Intel hardware.

SteamOS beta 3.7 introduced a variety of updates for non-Deck-specific hardware, including improved compatibility with "recent Intel and AMD platforms", initial firmware for upcoming Intel handhelds, and controller support for a variety of handheld devices including the MSI Claw 8 AI+. This is a big deal, as Valve has traditionally focused on AMD support for SteamOS on handhelds, thanks to the Steam Deck running on custom AMD silicon.

Despite one quirk where the menu on the handheld failed to come up using controller inputs, ETA Prime notes that the OS ran well on the Intel-based Claw 8 AI+ and achieved playable performance in several games all the way down to 15 watts. The YouTuber tested Cyberpunk 2077, Spider-Man 2, Forza Horizon 6, Left 4 Dead 2, and The Witcher 3 and found that the Lunar Lake handheld was able to achieve performance better than the Steam Deck. That said, the only performance issue the YouTuber noted was in Cyberpunk 2077, where the game ran worse compared to the same game running on Windows.

Microsoft plans to deliver at least one Xbox console exclusive game a year, and the first two have already been revealed--Gears of War E-Day and Clockwork Revolution.

Microsoft is resurrecting exclusivity to help spark interest in Xbox consoles. It's all part of Xbox CEO Asha Sharma's plan to reset the brand, and two exclusive games have showcased. More will follow and Microsoft now says fans can expect at least one new Xbox-only title per year, a rhythm that will be affected by upcoming layoffs.

"Players can continue to expect signature exclusives from us every year," games CEO Asha Sharma told employees in a recent memo.

After a long silence, we've recently seen a spike of activity in terms of rumors for NVIDIA's RTX 5000 Super refresh, and these GPUs have again popped up, this time courtesy of a well-known YouTube leaker.

Moore's Law is Dead's latest video focuses on NVIDIA's GPUs and mainly the rumored Super variants, but also touches on RTX 6000 graphics cards.

And what Moore's Law is Dead (MLID) tells us is pretty much along the lines of the same info he furnished us with last year (in September).

KIOXIA has long been a pioneer in flash memory, so much so that it's already been a couple of years since it partnered with HPE to deliver 130 Terabytes of data as part of the HPE Spaceborne Computer-2 project that essentially put a data center on board the International Space Station. From scientific applications to generative AI in space, the future of data centers and computing is not confined to our planet.

At HPE Discover Las Vegas 2026 next week, KIOXIA will highlight its contributions to HPE's Spaceborne Computer missions and how its SSDs will one day be part of lunar exploration. Yes, it seems like it will only be a matter of time before we see the first data center on the moon. One component of the most recent HPE Spaceborne Computer-2 project was to test and see how high-performance KIOXIA SSDs could support scientific research and edge computing in extreme environments.

Of course, KIOXIA will also showcase how its flash storage is helping transform modern cloud, AI, and hybrid environments at HPE Discover 2026. As a longtime HPE partner, KIOXIA's SSD solutions have long been a part of HPE's platforms, both large and small, so attendees will get to see everything from high-capacity cutting-edge PCIe 5.0 storage in the popular Enterprise and Datacenter Standard Form Factor (EDSFF) and 24G SAS (SAS-4) form factors through to cost-effective solutions.

Microsoft says that its next-gen Xbox console will require partnerships in order to release, hinting at a reference and OEM hardware scheme similar to the PC graphics cards market.

Things are bad for gaming right now, and particularly so at Xbox. Consoles are so expensive to make that Microsoft can't afford to make them--Xbox's new CEO Asha Sharma says that storage costs will be up more than 7x since the time she arrived by holiday 2027. This puts a unique squeeze on Microsoft because it fully subsidizes its Xbox hardware, meaning it makes no actual money on each console sold. So if Microsoft were to start making consoles again, the losses generated by each unit would be up 5x to 7x over previous years.

What can Microsoft do? In a recent memo published on the Xbox Wire, current games division CEO Asha Sharma lays out the sobering reality of Project Helix: Microsoft needs help to make the console. The costs are just too high, and signs show that they will continue rising into next year.

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma and head of Xbox Game Studios Matt Booty have co-authored a new blog post detailing the next 100 days at Xbox, which outlines the company's hurdles in the coming future. Some will be much easier to navigate than others.

The post on Xbox Wire put some harsh realities into the public eye, such as Xbox ending the year at about a 3% accountability margin, and that being down year-over-year. Additionally, the post states that over the past five years Xbox has spent $20 billion on ongoing investments, which includes content development (games), platform improvements, and a hardware subsidy, yet its annual revenue has declined "nearly half a billion during that time. Going forward, this cannot continue". Notably, that $20 billion total doesn't include the acquisition of Activision Blizzard King.

Another struggle is the ongoing hardware component crisis, spurred by AI companies' endless lust for more compute. AI is consuming the world's hardware for dedicated data centers, etc., straining other electronic markets, particularly gaming hardware, as components within those devices become scarcer as manufacturers shift to making components for AI-specific hardware.

Ubisoft is being hit with another round of layoffs as the publisher is reportedly closing two more development studios, resulting in hundreds of employees being laid off.

The news comes from Insider Gaming's Tom Henderson, a well-known and credible source on Ubisoft's internal workings. Henderson took to X and wrote that Insider Gaming has received email confirmation from Ubisoft employees that upper management decided to close two development studios. The reporting from Insider Gaming prompted Ubisoft to contact the publication and confirm that the layoffs were planned, saying the information about them was under embargo.

Now, reports are surfacing that Ubisoft has closed Ubisoft Winnipeg and Ubisoft Belgrade. The closure of Winnipeg resulted in approximately 65 staff members being laid off. Ubisoft Belgrade is the next studio to be hit, which has resulted in around 100 employees being let go and the total closure of the studio. So, why the layoffs and closures? Ubisoft shutting the doors to two more development studios comes after what seems to be a years-long restructuring plan to bring the company back to its former glory after catastrophic performance following the COVID-19 pandemic.

At Computex 2026, NVIDIA unveiled Vera, its new CPU purpose-built for large-scale AI deployments and agentic systems. With its 88-core Arm-based design, it's a general-purpose data center-focused CPU powered by Arm v9.2-A 'Olympus' cores. Compared to the previous generation's Grace processor, NVIDIA claims a 1.5X increase in IPC and around 50% faster performance than existing x86 solutions.

Although a lot of the focus in the past has been placed on GPU performance, with the rise of AI factories and agents, the CPU is quickly becoming a critical component - and it's an area or market that's still relatively new for NVIDIA. Not so for AMD, which has been delivering its data center-focused EPYC processors for years now. When it comes to AI, AMD has released new performance benchmarks showing that its EPYC lineup, including the next-gen 256-core EPYC 'Venice' processor, outperforms NVIDIA Vera and Intel Xeon.

However, it's worth noting that these benchmarks are based on a single data-center rack with a 100 kW power budget, and Vera's performance is an estimate based on currently available data. "Data centers are provisioned in racks, and racks are bounded by a fixed power and thermal budget, finite floor space, software-compatibility requirements, and operational readiness," AMD explains. Adding that its numbers are based on a full workload set rather than a "single favorable benchmark."

Although its delay into early 2027 was probably the direct result of trying to avoid Grand Theft Auto 6, Playground Games' Fable reboot is still one of the most highly anticipated game releases on the horizon. And this week, in addition to the cinematic story-focused trailer that debuted at the recent Xbox Showcase event, we've now got one of our best looks at the game to date, with an uninterrupted 30-minute deep dive that showcases a wide range of gameplay and moments.

This includes traversal, engaging with NPCs in a small village, and how the questing works. For fans of the original Fable games, the blend of high-fantasy, fairy tales, and a distinctly British sense of humor is the standout. Early on in the video, we see an amusing side quest or story involving a talking pig, with branching dialogue and choices to make. Playground Games notes that this is one of hundreds of smaller side stories with choice and consequence to discover in the game, separate from the two-plus hours of motion-captured dynamic cinematic sequences in the main quest.

The new gameplay deep dive does a great job of showcasing the game's new morality system and how it's much more complex than a binary good-or-evil label for your actions. One of the more interesting aspects of this is how it's based on your actions and surroundings, so whatever you do in one particular town will shape your reputation in that area and how the town's citizens react and interact with you.