With the Xbox Series X on the horizon, Microsoft's head of videogame hardware sees a future where consoles may no longer be front and center. Wired reports: Despite its massive push for the Xbox Series X, Microsoft is hedging its bets that a decade from now more and more gamers will be taking a "no gods, no masters" approach to where and how they play. Phil Spencer, head of Xbox, thinks whether consoles will exist in 10 years is the wrong question to ask. "In the long run, to me, it's a question about the viability of the television," said Spencer last week in an interview with WIRED. "There's this calculus, this chess match we're playing," says Spencer. "It's no longer checkers." Spencer's chess match isn't against Sony or Nintendo; it's against the ever-changing trends in how two billion gamers worldwide consume media. When the Xbox Series X arrives in stores later this year, it will become a part of Xbox's chimera approach -- alongside its cloud gaming service, Project xCloud, and Xbox Play Anywhere -- to capture gamers wherever they are. With xCloud, you'll pay a currently undefined subscription to stream AAA games onto your mobile phone and tablet. With Xbox Play Anywhere, you can buy, say, Forza Horizon 4 and play it on both Xbox One and Windows 10 on PC.
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Spencer paints the Xbox Series X and the "game anywhere on stuff you have" pitches as complementary rather than cannibalistic. "I don't think it's 'hardware agnostic' as much as it's 'where you want to play," he says. Which makes sense: The more ways to play, and the more services Microsoft provides, the more repeatable revenue flowing into Microsoft's coffers. After the hype around the Xbox Series X cools down and the hardware-content singularity approaches, it's possible that many of the people opting to play Xbox games will do so on everything except the Xbox. It seems fair to ask whether this generation of dedicated consoles will be the last. "I like watching TV. I like playing games on TV. It's where I play most of the time," says Spencer. "I think there will be -- for a long time -- a world where people want to play on a television, and we're committed to that and we will deliver great console experiences. I don't think Xbox series X is our last console. I think we will do more consoles to make that great television play experience work and be delightful."

And if not, well, the company still has options. "The nice thing about being in a company the scale of Microsoft is we're able to make bets across a lot of those fronts and we're not really dependent upon any one of those individual kinds of businesses or relationships to succeed," says Spencer.

Microsoft is starting to release the latest twice-annual update to Windows 10, featuring enhancements to the longstanding Notepad app and a way to find your cursor in a sea of text. Some of the other features include: Faster and easier connections: We're making it easier and faster to pair your Bluetooth devices to your compatible Windows 10 PC. Now you can take care of everything in notifications (instead of Settings) with fewer steps.
Go passwordless: Did you know -- for improved security and a simple sign-in experience, you can sign in with your face, fingerprint, or PIN? It's easier than ever to enable passwordless sign-in for your Microsoft accounts: just go to Settings > Accounts > Sign-in options on your Windows 10 PC and select 'On' under 'Make your device passwordless.' Note that this is hardware dependent.
Name your desktops: Now instead of "Desktop 1" or "Desktop 2" you can give your Virtual Desktops more descriptive, clever, or amusing names. Using Virtual Desktop in Windows 10 allows you to expand your desktop beyond the physical limitations of the space, organize groups of related tasks, and easily switch between them. Tackling what you want to -- when you want to -- just got a whole lot easier. Visit this post to learn more on how to access Virtual Desktop in Windows 10.
See gaming in a whole new light: New DirectX 12 Ultimate features provide smoother graphics with increased detail -- all without sacrificing framerate.
Customization and utility at your fingertips: Xbox Game Bar now supports third-party widgets, helping you customize the overlay experience to fit with the way you game.

Last week, Kotaku reported on a new project, called Insignia, "that aims to recreate the original Xbox Live service, potentially restoring online play to many dozens of classic Xbox games that fell offline when the original Xbox Live service closed on April 15, 2010." From the report: The project's announcement on the r/originalxbox subreddit came from SoullessSentinel, a screen name of one Luke Usher. Usher is well known in the vintage Xbox community as the lead developer of Cxbx-Reloaded, arguably the most advanced PC-based emulator of the 2001 Xbox hardware. (Microsoft's classic console has proven notoriously tricky to emulate over the years.)

As a demonstration of Insignia's progress, Usher shared a video depicting the creation of a new Xbox Live account via the Xbox's system UI. It's a cool trick, as this process has not been technically possible since the online service's April 2010 closure. (In a cheeky touch, the video names the newly created account HiroProtagonist, the Gamertag of Xbox co-creator J Allard.) Insignia will work with normal, unmodded consoles, provided the user can perform a one-time process to retrieve their unit's internal encryption keys. Long-existing Xbox soft-mod techniques, which require physical copies of exploitable games like Splinter Cell or MechAssault but do not necessarily alter the console's hardware or operating system, should suffice for accomplishing this key retrieval. Once that initial setup's completed, Usher envisions a more or less vanilla Xbox Live experience, complete with matchmaking, voice chat, messaging, and almost everything else you might remember. (One exception would come in a lack of proprietary game DLC, which Insignia and its developers lack rights to distribute.) Anti-cheating measures are also in the works, as well as reporting and banning mechanisms for truly bad actors. The project works by using a DNS man-in-the-middle maneuver to redirect all of Xbox Live's original server calls to new addresses that point to Insignia's work-in-progress infrastructure.

"The current plan is for Insignia to be a centralized service run by Usher and associates," reports Kotaku. "He believes keeping it centralized will prevent player populations from diluting across multiple third-party servers, and that it will not be much of a resource burden." "The server," he noted, "is used for authentication, matchmaking, storing friends lists, etc. but actual game traffic is usually P2P between Xboxes, so the requirements for our server are pretty low."

Microsoft has explained why it's pursuing 'safe systems programming' through efforts like its experimental Rust-inspired Project Verona language and its exploration of the Rust programming language for Windows code written in C++. From a report: The short answer is that Microsoft is trying to eliminate memory-related bugs in software written in languages like C++, according to Microsoft Rust expert Ryan Levick. These bugs cost a lot to fix and make up a large share of Patch Tuesday hassles. Levick has now offered more insights into Microsoft's efforts behind safe systems programming. Systems programming includes coding for platforms like Windows, Xbox, and Azure, as opposed to programming applications that run on them.

Key systems programming languages include C++, Google-backed Go, and Mozilla-created Rust, but Rust and Go are 'memory-safe' languages while C++ is not. Other languages are memory safe, such as Swift and Kotlin, but they aren't for systems programming. The thing for Microsoft is that it writes a lot of its platform software in C++ and sometimes still in C. While it works hard to address memory issues, the company says it has "reached a wall". "We can't really do much more than we already have. It's becoming harder and harder and more and more costly to address these issues over time," says Levick, who joined Microsoft via its acquisition of Wanderlist, which has become Microsoft To Do. He gave a rundown of Microsoft's safe systems programming efforts in a session at Build 2020 this week.

At Build 2020 today, Microsoft gave developers a slew of new tools to coax them into using Windows over macOS or Linux. From a report: Windows Terminal is now out of preview for enterprises, and Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) 2 is getting support for GPUs, Linux GUI apps, and a simplified install experience. Microsoft even released a Windows Package Manager in preview. Windows 10 runs on 1 billion monthly active devices (PCs, Xbox One consoles, and HoloLens devices), making it a massive platform for developers to target. [...] Microsoft today released Windows Terminal 1.0, which means it is stable for enterprise use. The open source application features multiple tabs, panes, tear-away windows, shortcuts, Unicode and UTF-8 character support, emojis, ligatures, extensions, GPU-accelerated text rendering engine, and custom themes, styles, and configurations. Windows Terminal is for users of PowerShell, Cmd, WSL, and other command-line tools. Microsoft also unveiled WSL improvements today, including support for GPUs, Linux GUI apps, and a simplified install experience. WSL is a compatibility layer for running Linux binary executables natively on Windows. Microsoft first shared it was working on WSL 2 a year ago at Build 2019. WSL 2 is slated to arrive in the next major Windows 10 update coming later this month (brilliantly called the Windows 10 May 2020 Update), but it won't have these new features. In the second half of the year, WSL 2 will get support for GPU compute workflows.

Epic Online Services is now available, giving developers free access to the same kinds of tools used to support Epic Games' massive Fortnite player base. From a report: The new suite, which went live on Wednesday, enables a unified gameplay experience across multiple platforms, including Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, PC platforms (Windows, Mac, and Linux), and Xbox. It gives developers and their communities ready access to features like cross-play, cross-progression, unified matchmaking, lobbies, and more. Support for Android and iOS platforms will be added soon. "At Epic, we believe in open, integrated platforms and in the future of gaming being a highly social and connected experience," said Chris Dyl, general manager of online services at Epic Games, in a news release. "Through Epic Online Services, we strive to help build a user-friendly ecosystem for both developers and players, where creators can benefit regardless of how they choose to build and publish their games, and where players can play games with their friends and enjoy the same quality experience regardless of the hardware they own."

Epic Games' Unreal is already one of the most widely used game engines on the planet, utilized by game developers, advertisers and filmmakers alike. And it's ready to take the next step. From a report: Epic Games announced its new Unreal Engine 5 today and we finally have an idea of what graphics will look like on next generation hardware. The first gameplay footage from Microsoft's Xbox Series X was underwhelming, but the first run of games on new hardware typically is. The nine minutes of footage from Epic, which is running a tech demo on PlayStation 5 hardware, offered our first real glimpse of what may be the future of video game visuals. The clip features a video game protagonist exploring a cave system then skysurfing through a mountain pass as ruins crumble around her. Epic designed it to showcase two new features of Unreal Engine 5 -- nanite and lumen. Epic Games says that nanite allows game designers to render an incredible amount of polygons on screen, leading to photo-realistic environments. Lumen is a new lighting engine that renders light and fills space similarly to Nvidia's RTX tech.

In the demo, the two new technologies add up to a beautiful scene with complicated textures, animation, and lighting. Epic Games is selling these new technologies, and Unreal Engine 5 in general, as tools developers can use to save time in the development process. According to Epic Games, Unreal Engine 5 comes with a suite of tools that allow developers to rely less on hand crafting environments and animations. The demo is gorgeous, but it doesn't show off the developer's version of the software and it's hard to know what the software will look like for its target audience -- people making video games.

Jeff Grubb, writing for VentureBeat: One of the tidbits revealed during the first Xbox 20/20 event today is that Dirt 5 supports 120 frames per second on Xbox Series X. Publisher Codemasters' racing game is coming in October, but it supports Smart Delivery. So if you get it for Xbox One, you'll get the Xbox Series X version at no additional cost. And what does the Xbox Series X-optimized version of Dirt 5 get you? In an interview with the Xbox team, Codemasters confirmed that Dirt 5 supports the next-gen console's high-framerate feature. This means you can drive around the rally racer at 4K and 120 frames per second. High framerate is one of a number of key features for the next-gen consoles. And that makes sense. Racing games already have nearly photorealistic visuals. More graphical effects are not going to make much of a difference to the presentation of a Dirt 5. So this enables Codemasters to put that extra horsepower toward running the game faster.

OK, so the Xbox Series X can run Dirt 5 at up to 120fps, but that's not going to matter if you don't have the right display. High-refreshrate content is common on the PC, but consoles have primarily topped out at 60fps. Because of this it hasn't matter that most TVs top out at 60Hz. But it is a problem for the next-gen consoles. To actually see Dirt 5 running at 120fps, you'll need a TV that runs at 120Hz or faster. That means the TV updates its frames 120 times every second. The good news here is that a lot of TVs already have this feature. The bad news is that even if you have an HFR panel, support is a lot more complicated than that. The issue comes down to the audio/video interface running between your TV and the Xbox Series X.

Microsoft, gearing up for its biggest-ever year of launches for Xbox products and services in the middle of a global pandemic and economic recession, will replace its plan for a splashy public game-conference event with a monthly series of online showcases. From a report: The virtual events start on May 7, with a look at third-party games planned for its new console, called Xbox Series X. In June, the company will highlight the Xbox platform and services, and July's session is intended to cover games produced by Microsoft's own 15 game studios, including the next iteration of its biggest franchise, "Halo." The Redmond, Washington-based company had originally planned to unveil many of the details about the new products next month at the E3 conference, which has been canceled. Gaming audiences "love the authenticity of us showing up in our sweatpants here in our home office and talking about what we are doing," Xbox chief Phil Spencer said in an interview. This also seemed like a good time to eschew the typically flashy, celebrity-studded events the video-game industry is known for, he said. "We can all look at the unemployment numbers right now. We can also understand we're in video games, while we have front-line medical workers out there that are keeping people alive."

Microsoft now has 10 million subscribers to its Xbox Game Pass service, the company said during an investor call yesterday. It's the first time Microsoft has publicly disclosed Xbox Game Pass numbers, and it's a sign that the company's ambitious bet on subscription gaming is starting to pay off. From a report: Microsoft has been trying to build a "Netflix for video games" for years, and it looks like it's taking an early lead before a significant expansion to game streaming later this year. 10 million Xbox Game Pass subscribers is a significant milestone. EA's competing subscription services, EA Access and Origin Access, hit more than 5 million subscribers last year, and Sony's PlayStation Now subscriber base reached 1 million in October, five years after its debut. Apple and Google haven't disclosed numbers for Apple Arcade or Google Play Pass, and Nvidia's GeForce Now service reached 1 million users shortly after its launch. Microsoft is also sharing some additional Xbox Game Pass statistics today. "Since March, Xbox Game Pass members have added over 23 million friends on Xbox Live, which is a 70 percent growth in friendship rate," explains Xbox chief Phil Spencer. "Game Pass members are also playing twice as much and engaging in more multiplayer gaming, which has increased by 130 percent."

Nvidia's GeForce Now cloud gaming service is losing access to more titles later this month, the company announced said. From a report: Starting April 24th, GeForce Now will no longer be able to play titles from Microsoft's Xbox Game Studios, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, Codemasters, and Klei Entertainment. Without Xbox Game Studios, GeForce Now can't access popular titles like Halo: The Master Chief Collection or games in the Gears of War or Forza franchises. Warner Bros.' game division is another popular publisher, owning the rights to series like the Batman: Arkham games developed by Rocksteady and Mortal Kombat titles from NetherRealm. Codemasters is well known for developing racing titles with the Formula 1 brand and rally racing games under the Dirt series. And Klei is well known for making indie hits like Don't Starve and Mark of the Ninja The news is another blow for GeForce Now, which differs from Google Stadia by letting subscribers stream games from their existing Steam libraries on a remote PC. .

NPD analyst Mat Piscatella said on Tuesday that hardware spending in March 2020 grew 63% when compared to a year ago, to $461 million. "Nintendo Switch hardware sales more than doubled when compared to a year ago, while PlayStation 4 and Xbox One each grew by more than 25 percent. First quarter hardware spending increased by 2 percent, to $773 million," he added

Xbox co-creator Rob Wyatt has filed a lawsuit against Atari for failing to pay him for the design work he did in creating the Atari VCS console. From a report: Tin Giant, Wyatt's company, filed the lawsuit in federal court in Colorado, alleging breach of contract and defamation. Tin Giant said that Atari owes it in excess of $261,720. Wyatt, a co-creator of the Xbox and cofounder of The Last Gameboard, said in an interview last year that he quit as lead architect for Atari. He alleged that Atari did not pay his company, Tin Giant, for six months of work. Atari CEO Fred Chesnais declined to comment in a statement, saying that he had not received a copy of the lawsuit yet. Atari has not developed a game console for more than 20 years.

What games have you been playing on your Xbox, or PlayStation, or Nintendo Switch -- or any other gaming machine!

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: AMD has been having a particularly rough few months, apparently. The chip designer has revealed that a hacker stole test files for a "subset" of current and upcoming graphics hardware, some of which had been posted online before they were taken down. While AMD was shy on details, the claimed intruder told TorrentFreak that the material included source code for Navi 10 (think Radeon RX 5700 series), the future Navi 21 and the Arden GPU inside the Xbox Series X.

The self-proclaimed hacker added that she wanted $100 million for the source code and threatened to "leak everything" if there was no buyer. She reportedly found the GPU data in a "hacked computer" in November, although AMD said it hadn't been approached until December. AMD doesn't appear to be bowing under pressure. It believed the stolen code was "not core to the competitiveness or security" of its products, and said there was an "ongoing criminal investigation."

Forbes reports that in a world filled with school closings and social isolation, gaming has surged: - Steam, the most popular digital PC gaming marketplace, reached new heights Sunday, drawing a record 20,313,451 concurrent users to the 16-year-old service, according to third-party database SteamDB

- Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, released by Steam-owner Valve in 2012, seems to be the top beneficiary of the increased engagement, breaking it's all-time peak on Sunday with 1,023,2290 concurrent players, topping its previous peak last month by a million, which itself beat the record set in April 2016...

- Activision Blizzard's new free-to-play battle royale spinoff Call of Duty: Warzone, launched March 10 on PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4, is also likely benefiting, drawing in a staggering 15 million in three days, besting the record 10 million in three days by last year's battle royale sensation Apex Legends.
Polygon adds: Gaming saw a 75% increase, week over week, in data usage this March, Verizon said. Video games are proving to be a popular way to pass the time during lockdown -- though we're also starting to see the strain this is placing on various networks and services... Recently, Nintendo experienced a nine-hour network outage. Over the weekend, Xbox Live also went down, preventing users from online play.

Gaming adjacent tools and services are also seeing a surge. As our sibling site The Verge reports, live streaming platform Twitch had a 10% jump in viewership. The popular communication app Discord, meanwhile, recently saw server outages that coincided days after it expanded its screen sharing limit for users.

The games that people are playing themselves are changing in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, too. Pokemon Go, for instance, has tweaked its mechanics to make it easier for people to play from home, while also changing its events to make it easier for people to play solo. And in an effort to entice its players to stay home, Rockstar vowed to add fun bonuses to the MMO for players who are "spending a little extra time at home." Elsewhere, game developers are starting to give out their games for free in an effort to help people stay indoors. It's no wonder we're seeing changes in usage, playtime, and outages across the board.

In celebration of Windows 10 hitting 1 billion users, Microsoft's chief product officer Panos Panay teased Windows 10's next UI refresh. Gizmodo reports: In the video posted to Instagram, Microsoft starts by showing the evolution of its OS throughout the years going as far back as Windows 1.01 all the way to Windows 10. However, where things start to get interesting is around 12 seconds in when Microsoft shows off a new set of updated icons followed by a redesigned look for Windows 10's Start Menu and Live Tiles. Instead of a bunch of brightly color rectangles, Microsoft is implementing a more unified color scheme that can adjust automatically to match your desktop background and potentially other UI elements.

Additionally, Microsoft also showed off a wide variety of accessibility options including a range of pointers in various sizes and colors, what looks like improved support for the Xbox Adaptive Controller, a tease for a new built-in snipping tool, and more. Then Microsoft capped everything off by showing light and dark themes for Windows 10 along with a bunch of windows resizing and snapping options, all designed to making multi-tasking just a bit faster and easier. Microsoft also made a point to mention support for both x86-based systems powered by chips from Intel and AMD and ARM-based systems like the Surface Pro X.

As if there weren't enough doom in the world right now, this week sees the release of not one but two new Doom games. Doom Eternal is the flashy AAA sequel with incredible graphics and accurately modeled viscera, of course, but you shouldn't sleep on the other: the first rerelease of Doom 64, an underappreciated entry in the series's history. From a report: Doom 64, as the name suggests, was originally designed for the Nintendo 64. It came out in 1997 and, unlike id Software's previous two Doom titles, it was developed by Midway Games. It was the first Doom game to offer any sort of significant graphical upgrade on the original, had all-new levels, and -- depending on your perspective -- could easily have been considered a "Doom 3" had id not released its own game with that name in 2004. Given its original platform, Doom 64 is also a pretty unusual game. Nintendo strongly promoted "real" 3D titles on its 64-bit console, and Doom 64 is only kind of-sort of one of those. The environments are constructed of polygons, and the textures are filtered. But just like the original Doom, you're still limited to movement on a flat plane without the ability to look around you. Next to something like GoldenEye 007, you could have been forgiven for considering Doom 64 a little archaic at the time.

A new DirectX badge is going to start showing up on graphics hardware: It's called DirectX 12 Ultimate, and it denotes support for "ALL next generation graphics hardware features," Microsoft announced today. From a report: DirectX is a collection of application programming languages (APIs) that developers use to communicate with your hardware. You can think of it like a conduit between software (especially games) and hardware. Up until now, DX12 was the latest version, supported in Windows 10 (and also in Windows 7 for some games). Now that distinction belongs to DX12 Ultimate. It's not an overhaul of the API, but a culmination of the latest technologies bundled into one. This notably includes DirectX Raytracing (DXR), variable rate shading (VRS), mesh shaders, and sampler feedback.

One of the reasons Microsoft is doing this is to unify experiences across the PC and its upcoming Xbox Series X, which will launch November 26, 2020 (Thanksgiving Day). "These features represent many years of innovation from Microsoft and our partners in the hardware industry. DX12 Ultimate brings them all together in one common bundle, providing developers with a single key to unlock next generation graphics on PC and Xbox Series X," Microsoft explains. The main benefit for gamers is knowing, at a glance, if the graphics card they are about to buy supports all the latest features. Spotting the DX12 Ultimate badge is the key, and I suspect hardware makers will be quick to promote it. Related to that, Microsoft is pitching this as a way of ensuring "future-proof" feature support. There's no such thing as future proofing, of course, but DX12 Ultimate should remain relevant for at least the next couple of years.

Now that Microsoft and Sony have published the technical specifications of their respective next-gen gaming consoles, we can compare them head-to-head to see which one has the edge. While Sony appears to lag behind Microsoft when it comes to specs, the PS5's speedy custom SSD may be its secret weapon. Engadget reports: Sony's lead PlayStation architect, Mark Cerny, finally gave us an in-depth look at the PS5 in a livestream event, in lieu of a major GDC keynote. [...] Cerny confirms that the PlayStation 5's graphics processor will feature 36 compute units and up to 10.28 teraflops worth of compute performance. That's a bit less than the Xbox Series X's 12-teraflop GPU, but realistically you might not see many differences in performance. There are plenty of other system optimizations, like the company's focus on a custom 825GB SSD, that'll be a huge leap over the PlayStation 4. That SSD will push 5.5 gigabytes per second compared to a mere 50 to 100 MB/s, meaning it can fill the system's 16GB of GDDR6 RAM in two seconds. And on the plus side, Sony will let you plug in a standard NVMe SSD to expand storage while Microsoft will rely on specialized 1TB SSD expansion cards.

Cerny was quick to point out that teraflop numbers are a "dangerous" way to measure absolute levels of performance. A teraflop from the PlayStation 5 translates to much more gaming performance than a teraflop from the PlayStation 4, thanks to the new console's more-efficient architecture. Still, it's not exactly unfair to compare the PS5 to the Xbox Series X, since both systems will be based on AMD's CPUs and GPUs. It's interesting to see how Sony and Microsoft devices take advantage of AMD's hardware. The PS5's eight-core Zen 2 CPU will run up to 3.5GHz with variable frequencies, so it can slow down when necessary. The Xbox Series X, meanwhile, will lock its Zen 2 processor at 3.8GHz, and devs can also choose to run their games at 3.6GHz with hyper threading. Sony also chose to use 36 RDNA 2 compute units running at up to 2.23GHz with a variable frequency while Microsoft stuffed its system with 52 compute units running at 1.825GHz. Cerny argues that running fewer cores at a higher frequency rate is more beneficial than running more cores at a lower rate, since it will lead to a speed bump across many GPU tasks.

Sony definitely has the lead with its custom SSD with 5GB/s of raw bandwidth and 8 to 9GB/s of compressed throughput. The Xbox Series X's SSD will be limited to 2.4GB/s of raw data and 4.8GB/s compressed. Again, while the numbers are significantly different, it's unclear how the performance will vary in real-world use. Microsoft also has a slightly higher GDDR6 memory bandwidth -- 10GB at 560GB/s and 6GB at 336GB/s -- than Sony's 448GB/s, which could make up for the slower storage. As for backwards compatibility, Sony announced that the PlayStation 5 will support PS4 and PS4 Pro games, but the company made no mention of retro PS1, PS2, and PS3 titles. Microsoft, on the other hand, stated that the Xbox Series X will support all games playable on the Xbox One, including those Xbox 360 and original Xbox console titles currently supported through backwards compatibility on the Xbox One.