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New reports from Bloomberg say that Minecraft's profits helped fund other games in the Xbox software portfolio, indicating that proceeds from highly-profitable titles like Minecraft helped create other titles for Game Pass. A recent Bloomberg article has caused a bit of a stir for Microsoft; the coverage says that profits from Minecraft were used to fund other games at Xbox. There's a lot to unpack here, especially since Minecraft is a huge driver for the Xbox business.

Ubisoft's latest Assassin's Creed game has $84 worth of DLC available on day one, yet the game is being sold for $59.99 on all major storefronts. Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced is out now, and Ubisoft has launched the title with heavy monetization in tow. Like previous games in the series, Black Flag Resynced features a range of microtransaction options across multiple packs.

Fans of EA's racing franchises are in for some disappointment--the Need for Speed and Burnout series are apparently stuck in the impound lot. Electronic Arts will soon be under new ownership, and that means some changes are happening behind the scenes--or in the case of Need for Speed, the changes were made previously and are now becoming more permanent. It's been revealed that Criterion is now exclusively on Battlefield and will lend its vehicular mastery to the FPS warfighter moving forward.

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced launched this week to some of the best numbers Ubisoft has seen in years. However, it looks like Ubisoft still isn't content with its workforce, as 51 people just lost their jobs. According to Insider Gaming's Tom Henderson, Ubisoft Barcelona has been disbanded, with 51 employees let go days after the studio finished its work on the remake. Many of them had spent years on the project.

AMD has just added 11 new processors to its Ryzen 200 and Ryzen 100 APU lineups, which have further complicated an already confusing product stack. If you're already confused about which chip is which, you're not alone. The bigger addition lands in the Ryzen 200 series, where AMD has added seven new SKUs: Ryzen 3 205, Ryzen 5 216, Ryzen 5 224, Ryzen 5 225, Ryzen 7 217, Ryzen 7 249, and Ryzen 7 253. These use Zen 4 cores, some paired with Zen 4c in hybrid configurations, alongside RDNA 3 graphics.

Open-source Windows alternative ReactOS has finally reached a state where the operating system can play games. Discovered by Phoronix, a ReactOS user uploaded footage on YouTube of Half-Life 2 running on ReactOS at 1440p using a GTX 960 graphics card running on legacy NVIDIA 368.61 graphics drivers. The game reportedly ran "basically perfectly" with 6x MSAA and 16x anisotropic filtering.

NVIDIA, despite being known as the AI juggernaut it is today, will always have its roots in gaming graphics. To celebrate the 30th anniversary of its first partnership with Sega, NVIDIA's CEO Jensen Huang is set to travel to Japan to attend an event with Japanese gamers. He will also (re)launch the RTX Spark. The event is set to take place at GiGO Akihabara, Tokyo on July the 15th.

AMD's unannounced "Ryzen 7 4700LE" has been making the rounds for weeks, but we now have official confirmation of its existence. Yes, indeed, AMD has revived Zen 2, an architecture from 2019, and released a new desktop chip, the Ryzen 7 4700LE. The mysterious Ryzen 7 4700LE has surfaced in a prebuilt gaming desktop on Amazon, sold by system integrator Qehi under the AIGAMEPC brand.

The ongoing memory shortage is filtering through to global PC shipments. According to new analysis from the International Data Corporation (IDC), global PC shipments declined by 4.9% year-on-year. It is the first drop after 9 consecutive quarters of growth. The top three vendors, Lenovo, HP and Dell all saw declines. ASUS saw a small uptick, while Apple recorded a particularly impressive 10.1% increase in sales, likely due to the March introduction of its MacBook Neo.

Apple's iPhone 18 Pro Max is on track to cost significantly more to build than the current iPhone 17 Pro Max, with component costs expected to rise by nearly $300. Counterpoint Research has published a detailed breakdown of the next iPhone's bill of materials, highlighting a sharp increase in key parts, and the cause of the price increase is the demand from AI companies. NAND and DRAM price hikes are the primary cost drivers.