Xbox

It’s “coming soon” to LG’s gaming portal, per a slide from LG’s CES keynote. You’ll need an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription to use it.

The long-awaited Competitor gamepad, which brings a PlayStation-like symmetrical stick layout to the Xbox, has been redesigned. Hyperkin announced the new version at CES with a separated D-pad, Hall effect joysticks and triggers, and two programmable back buttons.

The DuchesS, Hyperkin’s recreation of the smaller Xbox Controller S it upgraded with Hall effect joysticks, will soon be available in a new color option.

The “Xbox 360 glitch holiday sweater” includes a power button that illuminates green, and there’s even an interchangeable module that produces the Red Ring of Death. Microsoft loves ugly sweaters, but this one is exclusive to Microsoft employees right now. I’ve heard this one went on sale at Microsoft’s company store today and it has already sold out.

This year Microsoft highlights your preferred gaming platform, total time played, and number of games played for its Xbox year in review. You can see how you stack up against other players, how much gamerscore you earned in 2024, and a list of your favorite games. There’s even a little shout-out from Xbox chief Phil Spencer, too.

The minimum PC specs for Indiana Jones mean you’ll need at least a 10700K CPU, RTX 2060 Super, and 120GB of SSD storage. Interestingly, Bethesda says GPU hardware ray tracing is “required” at minimum, so that rules out Nvidia’s older 10 series of cards. Bethesda also lists the i7-13900K and Ryzen 7 7900X, both of which don’t exist. We’ve asked Bethesda to clarify the typos here.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 has had a pretty rough launch, and now Microsoft has put out a hotfix aimed at addressing some of the performance and stability issues. “We will continue to investigate any issues and keep the community informed,” says game lead Jorg Neumann.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 launches on Xbox and PC today, and in addition to hot air balloons and firefighting planes, Joby Aviation has announced that its electric air taxi will also be available to fly in the game.

Ratatan doesn’t just look and sound like Patapon, it even has Hiroyuki Kotani, the designer of the PSP original, working on it.

As my colleague Tom Warren reported last week, Xbox’s AI-powered search will let you enter things like, “FPS games with zombies” or “cozy farming games with fishing,” which should come in handy if you forget the title of a game, or don’t know what you’re looking for.

Phil Spencer has been dropping hints about a portable Xbox for some time now. But in a new interview with Bloomberg, he cautioned that, while the company is working on prototypes, the release of an actual handheld is still a few years out.

After announcing earlier this year that the feature would be coming back, friend requests are here now, Microsoft says. The company had been using a social media-like “follow” system where you had to both follow each other to become friends.

Kojima Productions and 505 Games are surprise launching Death Stranding Director’s Cut on Xbox Series S / X consoles today.

Activision says Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 set new day one and opening weekend records, making it the biggest Call of Duty three-day opening weekend ever. It also had the highest total PC players during opening weekend in franchise history. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says “unit sales on PlayStation and Steam were also up over 60 percent year-over-year.”

That’s from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on today’s Q1 2025 earnings call. Nadella also says that Xbox Game Pass set a new Q1 record for total revenue and average revenue per subscriber.

The Stealth Pivot has a different approach from other modular controllers — you depress and swivel the front plates to get a mini arcade stick or extra buttons on the fly.

Microsoft has started testing a new home UI for the Xbox app on Windows today. The home UI now includes featured content from Game Pass and the Microsoft Store, alongside collections of deals and discounts. Microsoft is also adding a “jump back in” section to the top of the home UI, allowing you to quickly get back into recent games just like on an Xbox console.

Redherring32 says they spent four months figuring out how to trim the motherboard, build 12 custom PCBs (and custom flex ribbon cables, it seems!), put it all together, and open source it.