Xbox

The original version of 8BitDo’s clamp-on smartphone controller featuring Hall effect sticks and a rechargeable battery since it connects to devices over Bluetooth is only compatible with Android.

The tags were made in partnership with big gaming companies like EA, Google, Nintendo of America, and Ubisoft. They add to the tags Xbox already uses, according to an Xbox Wire post.

The dominoes from Microsoft’s layoffs continue to fall. Several games have been cancelled or their development halted with other studios, like The Initiative being permanently shuttered. Now Romero Games has announced that due to the layoffs, Microsoft has cancelled funding for its game. Update July 3rd: According to several employees’ posts on LinkedIn, Romero Games is closing outright due to the layoffs.

Matt Firor is departing “later this month” after more than 18 years of heading up the organization, he says.

News of Microsoft’s major layoffs today keep rolling in, as the company informs around 9,000 employees of the cuts. I’ve heard from sources that the Xbox user research team has been hit hard, with nearly half the team affected. It’s a key team that focuses on ensuring quality across Xbox games, the platform, and developer tools. Even a product lead for Xbox Family and child safety has been laid off.

According to a report from VGC, Rare will be “restructuring” as part of the latest round of layoffs at Microsoft today, and that means development on its mysterious adventure game Everwild — which was announced way back in 2019 — has ended.

The developers at Ninja Theory have been hard at work adding new features to Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II and now they’re ready to show it to even more players than before. Seanua’s Saga: Hellblade II Enhanced launches on Xbox, and, as a part of Xbox’s new multiplatform strategy, it’s coming to PS5 too on August 12th.

“Moving forward, AMD will go beyond building custom chips for Xbox consoles to designing a full roadmap of gaming-optimized chips, combining the power of Ryzen and Radeon for consoles, handhelds, PCs and the cloud.” AMD CEO Lisa Su says in a video posted on Thursday.

Just kidding. Microsoft is continuing to beef up its Game Pass offerings by adding Blizzard titles, this time with the remasters of the first three Warcraft games, which are available on June 26th for subscribers on PC.