Technology

Microsoft has announced an Xbox Games Showcase for its first-party titles for June, alongside a dedicated Direct event for an unnamed title. The showcase will be livestreamed on June 9, starting at 10am PT (10:30am IST) on Xbox’s YouTube, Twitch and Facebook accounts. The event will feature an upcoming lineup of games from Activision, Blizzard, Bethesda and Xbox Game Studios, along with third-party titles on Xbox.

The Xbox Games Showcase will be followed by a Direct event that promises a “deep-dive into the next installment of a beloved franchise.” While Microsoft did not disclose details about the event, a report from The Verge, citing sources familiar with the company’s plans, claimed that the Direct stream would focus on the next installment of Call of Duty. The best-selling first-person shooter franchise is now part of Microsoft’s portfolio of first-party games after the Xbox parent acquired Call of Duty maker Activision-Blizzard last year.

Additionally, the report also provided details on some of the titles that might be revealed or receive new updates at the Xbox Showcase. Microsoft reportedly intends to announce a new Gears of War game at the event. The last Gears of War title, Gears 5, was released in 2019, and an announcement on Gears of War 6 has been long anticipated.

The showcase will reportedly also reveal release date details for already announced titles like Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, Avowed and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, along with the launch date for Shattered Space expansion for Starfield. According to the report, the expansion is targeting a September launch, while the next Call of Duty is planned for an October release. Avowed and Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, meanwhile, could reportedly debut in November, with Bethesda’s Indiana Jones likely intended for launch during the Holiday period in December.

While Microsoft has not yet revealed any details, the showcase should throw more light on its upcoming first-party titles. The event will likely also reveal more details on Xbox’s slate of games for 2025. According to The Verge, the event will have “a lot of games to show” than last year’s showcase.

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Microsoft is reportedly working on a new artificial intelligence (AI) model dubbed MAI-1, which could be its largest in-house model to date. The company recently created its AI division, which is now headed by Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of Google DeepMind and former CEO of Inflection AI. It is said that Suleyman is heading the development of the large language model and it can be unveiled soon. Notably, Microsoft launched its open-source small language model (SLM) Phi-3-mini last month as a successor to the Phi-2 model.

According to a report by The Information, the MAI-1 AI model is in its advanced stages of development. However, it is said that its purpose has not been determined yet, and it will depend on its final capabilities. Citing unnamed Microsoft employees familiar with the matter, the report also highlighted that the project is being headed by Suleyman. It is believed that the tech giant could preview the AI model during its annual developer-focused event Microsoft Build which will be held starting May 21.

The MAI-1 AI model reportedly contains 500 billion parameters, which makes it the largest LLM created by the company so far. For comparison, the Phi-3-mini model contained 3.8 billion parameters, whereas GPT-4 comes with one trillion parameters. The larger the number of parameters, the wider the knowledge base of an AI model. It also helps in improving the contextual knowledge window of the chatbot. Since MAI-3 has not been released, no benchmark scores are available to judge its performance compared to the top models.

As per the report, Microsoft did not bring this AI model from Inflection AI and instead built it from scratch in-house. However, it might have been trained using data from the startup. It is unclear if the MAI-1 AI model will also be open-sourced like Phi-3-mini, or will require a subscription fee for access. The tech giant could also use it for its own AI products. These details will likely be shared during the company’s Build event later this month.

Separately, OpenAI is reportedly working on its ChatGPT-powered search engine and has already created a domain and SSL certificate for its first-ever search product. Some rumours have suggested that the search engine could be launched on May 9.

Microsoft has shuttered several Bethesda-owned game studios, including Hi-Fi Rush developer Tango Gameworks and Redfall maker Arkane Austin, in order to shift focus on to its “priority games”. The Xbox parent is also closing Alpha Dog Games, makers of the mobile game Mighty Doom, while Roundhouse Studios, which also contributed to Redfall development, will be absorbed by ZeniMax Online Studios. The development, initially reported by IGN, was confirmed by affected studios Tango Gameworks and Arkane in separate posts on X late Tuesday. The shutdowns come months after Microsoft announced layoffs at Xbox and Activision Blizzard earlier this year, which made 1,900 roles redundant.

The IGN report, citing an internal email to employees sent by Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty, said the closures would lead to “significant layoffs,” but Microsoft has not yet confirmed the number of roles affected.

Bethesda-owned Arkane Studios, which comprised of Arkane Lyon and Arkane Austin teams, confirmed on X that the latter would close and cease all development on their last game, Redfall. The vampire shooter will get no further updates, but its servers will remain online for active players, the studio said.

Redfall was released in May 2023 to largely negative reviews, leading to Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer taking “full responsibility” for the game’s disastrous launch. Spencer, however, had defended developer Arkane Austin at the time and promised that Xbox would continue to work on improving the game.

While Redfall fell short of expectations, Hi-Fi Rush, in Microsoft’s own words, was a “break out hit” across “all key measurements and expectations.” Aaron Greenberg, Vice President of Xbox Games Marketing, had said last year that Microsoft “couldn’t be happier” with Tango Gameworks’ rhythm-based action title. Yet, the studio did not survive the latest round of cuts. Tango Gameworks confirmed on X Tuesday that the studio would close, thanking players and announcing that its previous games, which include The Evil Within series and Ghostwire: Tokyo, would remain available and playable across all supported platforms.

The internal email from Booty cited in the report said that the shutdowns would help prioritise “high-impact titles” and continued investment in “blockbuster games” from Bethesda. Without putting a number on the resulting layoffs, the email said, “This reprioritization of titles and resources means a few teams will be realigned to others and that some of our colleagues will be leaving us.

“We are making these tough decisions to create capacity to increase investment in other parts of our portfolio and focus on our priority games,” the email added.

Microsoft is yet to make an official announcement on the cuts, but the company will hold an Xbox Games Showcase event on June 9, where it will reveal its upcoming lineup of exclusive and third-party titles.

The latest round of shutdowns follows a spate of layoffs this year across major studios like Riot Games, Eidos-Montréal, Sony, Electronic Arts, Embracer Group, Take-Two Interactive and more. Back in January, Microsoft laid off 1,900 employees at newly acquired Activision Blizzard and Xbox — an eight percent reduction of its overall gaming division.

The sudden closure of several video-game studios at Microsoft’s Xbox division was the result of a widespread cost-cutting initiative that still isn’t finished.

This week, Xbox began offering voluntary severance agreements to producers, quality assurance testers and other staff at ZeniMax, which it purchased in 2020 for $7.5 billion (roughly Rs. 6,26,28 crore), according to people familiar with the company’s plans. Others across the Xbox organization have been told that more cuts are on the way.

A spokesperson for Xbox declined to comment.

Employees were shocked by the unexpected shuttering Tuesday of three Xbox subsidiaries and the absorption of a fourth. The closures included Tokyo-based Tango Gameworks, which last year released the critically acclaimed action game Hi-Fi Rush. Tango was in the process of pitching a sequel, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing nonpublic information.

During a town hall with ZeniMax staff on Wednesday morning, Xbox president Matt Booty praised Hi-Fi Rush but did not specify why the company had shut down the development studio behind it, according to three people who were in attendance.

Speaking about the closures more broadly, Booty said that the company’s studios had been spread too thin — like “peanut butter on bread” — and that leaders across the division had felt understaffed. They decided to close these studios to free up resources elsewhere, he said.

Booty added that the shutdown of subsidiary Arkane Austin, the longtime developer of games such as Prey, was not connected to the performance of its new multiplayer game, Redfall, a critical and commercial flop.

Before its closure, Arkane had been looking to return to its roots by pitching a new single-player “immersive sim” game, such as a new entry in the Dishonored series, according to the people familiar.

Jill Braff, head of ZeniMax studios, said in the town hall that she hoped the reorganization would allow the division, which also develops Fallout and Doom, to put more focus on fewer projects. “It’s hard to support nine studios all across the world with a lean central team with an ever-growing plate of things to do,” she said, according to audio of the meeting reviewed by Bloomberg.

“I think we were about to topple over,” she added.

Both Tango and Arkane released games last year and were looking to hire additional staff as they pitched new projects, which Booty and Braff suggested was the main factor behind their closures. Shinji Mikami, Tango’s founder and studio head, departed last year.

These cuts at Xbox come amid a wider contraction in the video-game industry due to economic shifts following a period of rapid growth during the pandemic. Recently, Microsoft’s gaming division has expanded more than any of its competitors via the acquisitions of ZeniMax and Activision Blizzard for more than $76 billion combined. In February, Microsoft cut 1,900 jobs, mostly at Activision Blizzard.

The massive Activision Blizzard acquisition has ramped up scrutiny on the Xbox division from leaders at Microsoft, according to people familiar.

In recent years, Xbox became deeply invested in Xbox Game Pass, a subscription service that offers unlimited access to hundreds of downloadable games for a monthly fee. To fill the service with new enticements, Xbox acquired dozens of studios, including outfits known for making smaller games, such as San Francisco-based Double Fine.

While most game publishers are looking to take big swings with games that cost hundreds of millions of dollars, Xbox promised to support less sprawling creative titles such as Hi-Fi Rush with smaller budgets and lower sales expectations. It didn’t matter if a game sold tens of millions of copies as long as it helped bolster the Game Pass library.

But Game Pass has not seen the massive growth that Xbox boss Phil Spencer may have been hoping for.

Mat Piscatella, executive director of analysis firm Circana, said that monthly, non-mobile, video-game subscription spending in the US “has been flat to low single-digit growth” since the middle of 2021.

“In our data, Game Pass spending really had its big growth period in late 2019 through early 2021 and has since settled,” Piscatella said. “Purchasing games and add-on content as well as free-to-play models are still the vastly preferred method of getting to video games by US consumers, at least for now.”

While there’s no indication that Xbox plans to ditch the Game Pass model, there are hints that its big bets have not paid off. During the most recent quarter, sales of Xbox content and services were up 62 percent, but as Niko Partners analyst Daniel Ahmad pointed out last month, the growth was entirely due to the acquisition of Activision Blizzard. On social media, he noted that without sales from that deal, Xbox gaming revenue would have been down approximately 5 percent year over year, “with no software and services growth and sharp hardware revenue decline.”

With console revenue down, the company recently began releasing some of its games on competing platforms. In a March interview with the gaming site Polygon, Spencer said that “the thing that has me most concerned for the industry is the lack of growth.”

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Microsoft will soon introduce new artificial intelligence (AI) features that will help users who struggle with writing prompts or getting the desired result from its Copilot chatbot in one go. On Wednesday, the tech giant announced that it is working on several new features all designed to assist in improving Copilot results. These features include auto-complete, rewrite, and catch-up. Additionally, it is also working on a Copilot Lab feature that will help organisations get tailor-made prompts for their specific work needs.

In a blog post made by Microsoft and its subsidiary LinkedIn, the companies highlighted how AI has impacted the workspace. The post shared various reports and statistics highlighting how AI is creating new jobs, and pushing professionals towards upskilling and switching jobs to enter the AI space. It also mentioned several new features the tech giant was working on which targeted at those who struggle with writing prompts.

Elaborating on the problem, Microsoft said, “For many, staring down that empty prompt box feels like facing a blank page: Where should I even start? Today, we’re announcing Copilot for Microsoft 365 innovations to help our customers answer that question.”

The first feature is auto-complete. This feature will allow Copilot to show suggestions to complete a prompt. For example, if a user types “summarise”, the chatbot will show “last ten emails” and several other suggestions. The user can then pick one of them and quickly get to the result. Another such feature is called rewrite. This is aimed at those who struggle to get the desired result in the first iteration and write multiple follow-up prompts to fine-tune Copilot’s response.

Copilot will get a new button for rewriting prompts and once the user has written a basic description of what they want, it will modify it to add more details, specific instructions, and elaboration to help the AI get the right context. Finally, there is a catch-up feature. It is a new chat interface that will show users personal insights based on their recent activity. It will also show recommendations. For instance, if there is a meeting coming up, the chatbot will suggest the user go through the notes. These features will be available to the paid users of Microsoft 365 in the coming months.

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Dell XPS 13 9345 and Dell Inspiron 14 7441 Plus could be launched soon as the company’s first laptops to be powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Series processors. Images of the next-generation laptops from Dell have now leaked online. They are said to feature a dedicated key to launch Microsoft’s Copilot chatbot along with support AI capabilities. Dell’s purported laptops are also tipped to arrive with support for Microsoft’s upcoming Windows AI Explorer and will reportedly be launched in the second half of 2024.

Images of two new laptops — the Dell XPS 13 9345 and Inspiron 14 7441 Plus — were published by Windows Report on Friday. These laptops are similar to the company’s previous XPS and Inspiron laptop lineups, and are equipped with a Snapdragon X Elite chip instead of AMD or Intel processors, according to the report.

Dell XPS 13 9345
Photo Credit: Windows Report

The leaked images of the Dell XPS 13 9345 show the laptop from various angles, revealing an OLED display with slim bezels and a dedicated Copilot key. The laptop is also shown to feature a touch bar with escape, delete, and function keys, while the right and left sides of the keyboard extend to the edges of the chassis, just like the Dell XPS 13 Plus with a 12th Gen Intel Core Alder Lake CPU that was introduced at CES 2022.

Meanwhile, the Dell Inspiron 14 7441 Plus is shown with a design that will be similar to the company’s recent Inspiron series of laptops, along with rounded edges. It will also be equipped with a dedicated Copilot key, according to the leaked images, while the keyboard will also feature a fingerprint scanner that is built into the power button. The Inspiron 14 7441 Plus is also shown with a fairly large trackpad.

Dell Inspiron 14 7441 Plus
Photo Credit: Windows Report

On the connectivity front, the Dell XPS 13 9345 is said to be equipped with two USB Type-C ports. Meanwhile, the Dell Inspiron 14 7441 Plus is shown to feature two USB Type-C ports, a USB Type-A port, and a microSD card slot. The leaked images show the XPS 13 9345 with a borderless trackpad, while the pictures of the Inspiron 14 7441 Plus suggest the laptop will have a Windows Hello compatible webcam alongside other unspecified sensors.

While Dell is yet to announce plans to launch new XPS and Inspiron laptops that are powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite chips, the publication states that the XPS 9345 and Inspiron 14 7441 Plus could be launched in August or September. There’s also no word on pricing for both laptops, but we can expect these details, along with other product specifications to surface online in the coming months leading to their debut. 

Asus ROG Ally X is confirmed to launch on June 2. The upcoming handheld gaming console will reportedly come with significant upgrades over its preceding model, the Asus ROG Ally, which was introduced last year. The new handheld is said to get a significantly larger battery. Now, key features of the Asus ROG Ally X including display, processor, and storage details, have surfaced online. The price of the purported gaming console has also been tipped.

X user Arsène Lupin (@MysteryLupin) shared several details of the upcoming Asus ROG Ally X in a post. The gaming console is tipped to be available in a black colourway and is likely to be priced at $799 (roughly Rs. 66,700). It is said to feature a 7-inch full-HD 1080p screen with a 120 Hz refresh rate. The console could be powered by an AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme chipset paired with 1TB of SSD storage. 

A recent report suggested that the Asus ROG Ally X is expected to get more than the 16GB of RAM. The upcoming console is also expected to be backed by a considerably larger battery that is claimed to offer up to three hours of battery life. The Asus ROG Ally carries a 40Wh battery with support for 65W charging. We are likely to learn more about the upcoming console closer to the launch.

The first generation Asus ROG Ally is equipped with an AMD Z1 Extreme chipset and debuted in India in July 2023 with a price tag of Rs. 69,990. It is offered in a white colour option. The console comes with a 7-inch full-HD IPS LCD screen with a 120Hz refresh rate, up to 500 nits of peak brightness alongside Corning Gorilla Glass Victus and Gorilla Glass DX protection. 

It is equipped with 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM and 512GB of NVMe storage. The handheld ships with Windows 11 and supports Wi-Fi 6E, USB Type-C, and Bluetooth 5.2 connectivity. The Asus ROG Ally also has an AI-backed mic and Dolby Atmos-backed stereo speakers. It weighs 680g and measures 280 x 111 x 21.2mm in size.