Embark on a journey into the stars with the Starfield Limited Edition wireless controller and headset, essential navigation pieces in every voyager's collection. The crisp, clean designs are inspired by real world spacecraft, and are custom built to transport you right into the cockpit of a true space explorer. The Xbox Wireless Controller - Starfield Limited Edition features transparent triggers with visible bronze rumble motors underneath, full side and back grips designed to resemble spaceship panels, and a sleek Constellation-inspired color mark around the Xbox button. With up to 40 hours of battery life, you'll have more than enough fuel for your voyage into the deepest reaches of space.

Experience superb audio and chat quality with the Xbox Wireless Headset - Starfield Limited Edition. Secure your space fit with the Constellation red-and-white striped headband, communicate with your crew using the transparent mic boom, and feel fully immersed with audio tones custom made for your adventure. Enjoy ultra-soft large earcups that make for a comfortable experience with convenient on-ear controls for all your exploration needs.

This weekend, at Xbox Games Showcase and Starfield Direct, we showed the exciting future for players and game creators - dozens of new games, a new 1 TB Series S console and new ways for players to get their games anywhere with PC Game Pass coming to NVIDIA GeForce NOW later this year. After our double feature, Head of Xbox, Phil Spencer, Head of Xbox Creator Experience, Sarah Bond, Head of Xbox Game Studios, Matt Booty, and Game Director at Bethesda Game Studios, Todd Howard also addressed the future of gaming at Microsoft in our What's Next for Gaming event.

Players are discovering and playing games like never before - we have reached new records for monthly active users and monthly active devices, and just last quarter we saw a 46% increase year over year in people playing PC games on Game Pass. Game Pass continues to grow - our revenue from subscriptions overall reached nearly $1 billion last quarter. We're excited about the future of Xbox, and we see the opportunity to grow not only our own business, but the entire industry as a whole - through creating groundbreaking new games, inviting creators to build their dream projects on our platform, and opening gaming up to everyone, no matter where they are in the world. These are our key pillars to help continue that growth.

Today we announced Clockwork Revolution at the Xbox Games Showcase, a fantastical, first-person action RPG, with dynamic time-bending combat, deep interconnected roleplaying systems, and the ability to create your own unique character from the ground up. The project is led by Game Director Chad Moore and Principal Designer Jason Anderson, who just happen to have created one of the greatest steampunk RPGs of all time—Arcanum.

Settings and Story
Clockwork Revolution takes place in the vibrant Victorian-era metropolis of Avalon, where steam trains fly overhead, wealthy industrialists replace their limbs with ornate clockwork prosthetics, and mechanical servants fulfill their masters' every whim. But this new age of wonders holds a dark secret—it's been carefully constructed by the ruthless Lady Ironwood. Through use of a time travel device, she's changed key moments in Avalon's history, keeping the working class struggling in the slums and factories, while bringing herself immense wealth and power. That's where you come in…

Microsoft unveiled a variant of its affordable Xbox Series S game console, which now comes in a carbon black trim. The console comes with 1 TB of SSD storage, and Microsoft is pricing it at $349, a $50 premium over the regular Xbox Series S with 512 GB storage. With NAND flash prices on a downward trend, Microsoft is looking to solve the problem of local storage for its Series S console, by doubling the capacity of local storage. The console also includes a matching black controller. The new 1 TB carbon black Xbox Series S is expected to be available from September 1, 2023.A video presentation by Microsoft follows.

At Xbox, we have the fundamental commitment to provide all players with a safe and secure experience on our platform - and this is especially true for our youngest players. We frequently iterate on our safety measures, in collaboration and with feedback from the community, regulators and partners. We recently entered into a settlement with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to update our account creation process and resolve a data retention glitch found in our system. Regrettably, we did not meet customer expectations and are committed to complying with the order to continue improving upon our safety measures. We believe that we can and should do more, and we'll remain steadfast in our commitment to safety, privacy, and security for our community.

Our two decades of safety experience has taught us that all players want, and need, safety and privacy protections. Since 2005, when we launched the first console that could connect players online, we've continued to invest in tools and technologies to protect our community. That work evolved into a multifaceted safety strategy. Our suite of safety, privacy and security measures are designed to respect player privacy and safety, and empower players, as well as parents and caregivers, to have control over their gaming experiences.

Inference software enables shift to NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs, delivering 7x throughput for the search giant. Jiusheng Chen's team just got accelerated. They're delivering personalized ads to users of Microsoft Bing with 7x throughput at reduced cost, thanks to NVIDIA Triton Inference Server running on NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs. It's an amazing achievement for the principal software engineering manager and his crew.

Tuning a Complex System
Bing's ad service uses hundreds of models that are constantly evolving. Each must respond to a request within as little as 10 milliseconds, about 10x faster than the blink of an eye. The latest speedup got its start with two innovations the team delivered to make AI models run faster: Bang and EL-Attention. Together, they apply sophisticated techniques to do more work in less time with less computer memory. Model training was based on Azure Machine Learning for efficiency.

The season of hot sun and longer days is here, so stay inside this summer with 20 games joining GeForce NOW in June. Or stream across devices by the pool, from grandma's house or in the car - whichever way, GeForce NOW has you covered. Titles from the Age of Empires series are the next Xbox games to roll out to GeForce NOW, giving members plenty to do this summer, especially with over 1,600 games part of the GeForce NOW library.

NVIDIA released the first Xbox games to the cloud last month as part of its ongoing partnership with Microsoft. Now it's the first to bring a smash hit Xbox series to the cloud with Ensemble Studios' Age of Empires titles. Since the first release in 1997, Age of Empires has established itself as one of the longest-running real-time strategy (RTS) series in existence. The critically acclaimed RTS series puts players in control of an entire empire with the goal of expanding and evolving to become a flourishing civilization.

Coming Soon to Xbox Game Pass: Amnesia: The Bunker, Car Mechanic Simulator 2021, Dordogne, and more "available today" notifications! We're excited to bring you some simulators, slayers, stacking, and more. Let's get to the games! Starting off with the "Available Today" category:

Chicory: A Colorful Tale (Cloud, Console, and PC)
Chicory: A Colorful Tale is a top-down adventure game in a coloring book world where you can draw on anything. Use your painting powers to explore new places, solve puzzles, help your friends, and change the world!

Technology is creating amazing opportunities for our industry and the world, and Windows 11 is at the center of innovation with new experiences that transform how we interact with the Windows PC and each other. With Windows 11, we're seeing record engagement, our highest customer satisfaction over any previous version of Windows in the U.S., and accelerated growth in commercial deployments. In fact, we recently shared as part of our latest earnings report that over 90% of Fortune 500 companies are currently trialing or have already deployed Windows 11.

In February, we brought the new AI-powered Bing to the taskbar and other features to improve the way people get things done on their PCs. Today, we are providing a look at new features and enhancements for Windows 11 that will start to become available tomorrow, May 24, that focus on business needs, such as security and IT management, and new benefits that enhance professional and personal usability. For developers building on Windows, this week we are announcing new innovation at Microsoft Build.

According to a blog post by Panos Panay, Chief Product Officer, Windows and Devices, Microsoft is adding native support for RGB lighting control to Windows 11. One of the big frustrations today is that almost each and every manufacturer of RGB equipped devices, or motherboards for that matter, have their own system when it comes to controlling the RGB lighting. This might result in multiple apps having to be installed and they often don't communicate with each other. There's obviously some interoperability, but it's still quite poor, so now it appears that Microsoft has taken things into their own hands.

However, the blog post which covers a lot of other topics as well, doesn't provide any details of a user interface. Microsoft calls its solution to the problem for Dynamic Lighting and it's supposed to be part of the Windows settings. The blog post mentions that Dynamic Lighting will be released in this month's insider build as a preview, so hopefully we should have a better idea of what Microsoft supports and how much user control there will actually be. That said, it seems like Microsoft is expecting the various hardware manufacturers to add support for Dynamic Lighting as well, so it's highly likely that we'll still see plenty of unsupported hardware out there.

Microsoft Surface Pro X owners are reporting that their hybrid detachable tablet computer's in-built (front and rear) camera systems have stopped working - user feedback has been popping up on Reddit and the Microsoft Support forum this week. Unfortunate users of the flagship Arm-driven device have attempted to restore normal operation via driver reinstalls, but to no avail. Windows simply displays an error message that states "0xA00F4271<MediaCaptureFailedEvent> (0x80004005)" when the Surface's camera application is launched. A reddit user (Wapitiii) posits that an expired security certificate is the route cause for this issue, which seems to affect all Pro X units.

A couple of crafty Surface Pro X owners have resorted to rolling back their system clocks to May 22 (2023), which seems to restore the camera app's functionality, but this workaround could have potential downsides with online authentication and security checks. A redditor has been in touch with a "support representative, and they confirmed it is a known issue that Microsoft is currently working on." They have suggested another placeholder measure: "The only way to fix it immediately is if you do a full system reset which deletes all applications and files. He said doing a reset that retains user files does not fix the problem. He advised waiting a few days to see if Microsoft puts out a fix versus doing a full reset unless the cameras are needed immediately." The company is currently engaged in its own Build developers conference, where (ironically) announcements have been made about improvements intended for business devices (such as the Surface Pro X) - hopefully Microsoft's engineers can get onto solving this problem, once festivities are concluded.

Keep the NVIDIA and Microsoft party going this GFN Thursday with Grounded, Deathloop and Pentiment now available to stream for GeForce NOW members this week. These three Xbox Game Studio titles are part of the dozen additions to the GeForce NOW library.

Triple Threat
NVIDIA and Microsoft's partnership continues to flourish with this week's game additions.

Microsoft has been hyping up a new implementation of AI assistance into its flagship operating system - Windows 11 - this week, but a keen-eyed journalist has noticed an interesting tidbit placed in plain sight amongst all of the artificial intelligence bluster. Those who have legitimately purchased the WinRAR archiver extractor tool within the past few days should look away now. Within the announcement of a Windows 11 Co-Pilot, under the section named "Reducing toil and unlocking the fun and joy of development on Windows with new features and improvements," Panos Panay (the chief product officer) mentions an unexpected addition: "We have added native support for additional archive formats, including tar, 7-zip, rar, gz and many others using the libarchive open-source project. You now can get improved performance of archive functionality during compression on Windows."

It is slightly amusing that it has taken Microsoft's engineers almost three decades to add native support for RAR files in their OS product environment - it should be noted that Windows 10 is not getting this exclusive treatment, after all the company's product managers are encouraging folks to get onto 11 to enjoy all of the latest fun features. It is perhaps not great news for the developer of this archive file format - RARLAB proclaims on their site: "With over 500 million users worldwide, WinRAR is the world's most popular compression tool! There is no better way to compress files for efficient and secure file transfer. Providing fast email transmission and well-organized data storage options, WinRAR also offers solutions for users working in all industries and sectors." Windows users have often joked about getting the most out of time-limited shareware versions of the WinRAR suite, but not many have actually purchased it - will the small update to Windows 11 impact RARLAB's sales figures in the immediate future?

We wouldn't be where we are today without the developer community. Together, we've been on a journey to reimagine an open app store and provide a better experience for Windows customers. It's because of this partnership that the Microsoft Store on Windows is now used by over one billion customers with more than 50% of new Windows 11 customers engaging with the Microsoft Store in the first 30 days. The momentum of Windows customers is a testament to the growth in quality content from our passionate community of developers, who have more than doubled the number of Win32 and PWA apps since last year.

Engaging PWAs like Snapchat and ESPN, sophisticated native apps like Spark Mail, Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom, Capture One, Bilibili and WhatsApp, along with Android apps like Epic Seven, Best Fiends, and Blink, are truly what makes the Microsoft Store the best place to find the right content, whether for productivity, entertainment or creativity. There are many more apps to recognize, including the winners of the Microsoft Store Awards 2023 which can be found here. We are proud to share the next phase of our journey for the Microsoft Store on Windows and announce new experiences, features and tools. We are focused on building an open store that is ready for the new AI era, and to provide developers with new tools like Microsoft Store Ads to reach even more customers.

From races and stories to road trips and expeditions, since arriving in Mexico you've embarked on the most incredible journeys through beautiful landscapes, vibrant towns and diverse biomes. There is so much rich heritage and culture to discover in this locale, so just how well do you know it? Explore the Horizon will test your Forza Horizon 5 map knowledge and lead you to breathtaking scenery along the way. With 6 new-to-Forza cars, upgraded Photo Mode features, overlanding modifications for select vehicles, and Pathfinder accolades to complete, this will be a Mexican journey like no other. Dust off your camera and charge up your sat-nav, we're going on an adventure!

GAME FIXES & RELEASE NOTES
Explore the Horizon will be available to download on Xbox, Windows and Steam from Tuesday, May 23. Players can immediately try out the new Photo Mode improvements and explore Mexico under a new lens with Pathfinder accolades. Series content will be available on Thursday, May 25 until June 22.

Today, Logitech International introduced a desk booking service that delivers a better hotdesking experience for employees and a greater ability to manage shared desks across multiple locations. The service runs on Logi Dock Flex, a fully-featured managed docking station built for shared desks in flexible work environments. The move to a hybrid work model has given companies the opportunity to reassess and optimize their office space. But the hybrid evolution has also introduced the challenges of motivating employees back to the office, and the need for data and insights to understand space configuration and continued investment.

"Businesses know they have to earn the commute to get hybrid work employees into the office. The answer is not to add more foosball tables, but to instead offer a way for employees to plan their in-office days together," said Scott Wharton, general manager of Logitech B2B. "We took a multidimensional approach to building Logi Dock Flex that not only solves desk booking and management issues, but promotes social collaboration and gives IT and workplace managers data on how the tech and space are being used."

Microsoft and Intel are working together to drive the development of artificial intelligence (AI) on personal computing (PC). And at Microsoft's Build 2023 conference, Intel and Microsoft are previewing the AI-enabled capabilities of Intel's upcoming Meteor Lake client PC processors. Utilizing Meteor Lake processors' unique disaggregated architecture, Intel and Microsoft are enabling new AI-powered features for PC users - including new multimedia features like auto reframe and scene edit detection in Adobe Premiere Pro and more effective machine learning.

Meteor Lake marks a significant milestone in the evolution not just in personal computing, but also in how we interact with technology. It starts with the "chiplet" system-on-chip (SoC) design that allows Intel to deliver advanced intellectual properties (IPs) and leading-edge processes to optimize segment-relevant performance and lower power. This has enabled Meteor Lake to be the first PC platform from Intel featuring a built-in neural VPU, a dedicated AI engine integrated directly on the SoC to power efficiently run AI models. With the new neural VPU combined with powerful AI accelerators on the CPU and GPU, which Intel has been supporting for several generations, Meteor Lake will play a crucial role in shaping the future of innovation and PC experiences for consumers and businesses across industries.

NVIDIA today announced that it is integrating its NVIDIA AI Enterprise software into Microsoft's Azure Machine Learning to help enterprises accelerate their AI initiatives. The integration will create a secure, enterprise-ready platform that enables Azure customers worldwide to quickly build, deploy and manage customized applications using the more than 100 NVIDIA AI frameworks and tools that come fully supported in NVIDIA AI Enterprise, the software layer of NVIDIA's AI platform.

"With the coming wave of generative AI applications, enterprises are seeking secure accelerated tools and services that drive innovation," said Manuvir Das, vice president of enterprise computing at NVIDIA. "The combination of NVIDIA AI Enterprise software and Azure Machine Learning will help enterprises speed up their AI initiatives with a straight, efficient path from development to production."

AI is one of the most transformative technologies to debut in the past 40 years, but taking full advantage of its capabilities requires more than just the latest processor or graphics card. Previous major shifts in computing, like the adoption of 64-bit software and the introduction of 3D-accelerated graphics in the late 1990s, required significant software support as well as sophisticated new hardware capabilities. Today, AMD and Microsoft are stepping up to this challenge, working together to create the building blocks developers and consumers will need to take full advantage of AI both today and in the future.

While many AI tasks can run on a conventional CPU or GPU, these often aren't the ideal locations for executing a machine learning inference workload. As more AI models and workloads evolve, it will be vital to use specialized AI engines on the silicon designed specifically for AI tasks to deliver the right performance and experience to end users. The select new AMD Ryzen 7040 Series processors with Ryzen AI deliver cutting-edge AI features via a dedicated on-die processing block that's purpose-built to handle AI workloads - the first of its kind for x86 Windows 11 laptops. Integrating this functionality in ultrathin laptops will give these systems the outstanding AI performance they might not enjoy if relying on more conventional processors.

Panos Panay, Chief Product Officer, Windows and Devices: "The team and I are pumped to be back at Build with the developer community this year. Over the last year, Windows has continued to see incredible growth fueled by Windows 11 adoption. In fact, one of the most exciting areas driving that growth for Windows has been developers themselves, with a 24% YoY increase in monthly devices used for development."

"AI is the defining technology of our time and developers are at the forefront of this transformation. With the right tools we can empower developers and our shared customers to shape the future and leave their mark on the world. We are just starting to see the incredible impact AI is having across industries and in our own daily lives. Today, the team and I are excited to share the next steps we are taking on our journey with Windows 11, to meet this new age of AI."

There were rumblings late last week about China's competition regulatory bodies giving Microsoft the go ahead for its proposed takeover of the Activision, Blizzard & King games publishing group. The crowd-sourced content site Seeking Alpha was the first online outlet to break the news last Friday - the author had learned from capital market firm - Dealreporter - that China's State Administration for Market Regulation had granted unconditional approval for the $68.7 billion bid, following the conclusion of a "Phase 3" investigation. The latest judgement arrived only a few days after the EU Commission's approval of the deal.

Microsoft has chosen to make an official announcement about this verdict - and has today released statements to several gaming news outlets, including GamesIndustry.biz and Eurogamer: "China's unconditional clearance of our acquisition of Activision Blizzard follows clearance decisions from jurisdictions such as the European Union and Japan, bringing the total to 37 countries representing more than two billion people. The acquisition combined with our recent commitments to the European Commission will empower consumers worldwide to play more games on more devices." Microsoft's next challenge sits with the US government's Federal Trade Commission (FTC) - a final deliberation is due this August.

A huge thank you to all of our Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition players for your record-setting support and to everyone who has played Return of Rome so far! This is the biggest DLC launch in Age of Empires II history! We've been listening to your feedback and would like to share our plan to address the concerns regarding your in-game experience and your desire to see Age of Empires campaigns in Return of Rome.

We are actively monitoring the issues you're reporting and will address them as soon as possible. This includes disruptions to your hotkey settings, issues preventing UI mods from loading in correctly, and games failing to load. The hotkey disruption was a one-time adjustment. You can visit our support page if you need help getting them reconfigured. Our teams are paying close attention to the reports you make and are thankful for your continued trust.

Microsoft is determined to get the entirety of its Windows 10 userbase onto the final version - 22H2 - by early summer. Older iterations including 21H2 (issued in November of 2021), will not receive official support beyond the date: June 13 2023. The announcement crept out quietly last week, via the company's Learn Documentation center: "Home, Pro, Pro Education, and Pro for Workstations editions of Windows 10, version 21H2 will reach end of servicing. The upcoming June 2023 security update, to be released on June 13, 2023, will be the last update available for these versions. After this date, devices running these version will no longer receive monthly security and preview updates containing protections from the latest security threats."

The reminder does not give specific details about rollout timings, but news outlets reckon that OS-focused enforcements will begin in early June: "To help keep you protected and productive, Windows Update will automatically initiate a feature update for Windows 10 consumer devices and non-managed business devices that are at, or within several months of, reaching end of servicing. This keeps your device supported and receiving monthly updates that are critical to security and ecosystem health. For these devices, you will be able to choose a convenient time for your device to restart and complete the update." Microsoft provides further advice and recommends that users update (manually) to version 2H22 at the earliest opportunity, or take the larger step of transferring to Windows 11. Last month TPU reported on a similar official advisory blog entry, where the author/product manager (in effect) proposed "that current Windows 10 users move to 11 as soon as possible, in order to enjoy a continued stream of feature updates."

Global Accessibility Awareness Day is an exciting moment for Xbox to recognize the importance of accessibility, celebrate the players and developers with disabilities that are part of our vibrant, global gaming community, and highlight recent accessibility work at Xbox. To meet the needs of over 427 million players with disabilities, and create a platform where everyone feels welcome, safe, and represented, we know that accessibility awareness and support is something that has to happen every day and has to be part of the community culture. What this support resembles will vary based on the player, but ultimately, accessibility at Xbox is all about creating gaming experiences that everyone can enjoy.

Gaming is all about the power of connection and play. And it has been incredible these last several months watching the energy our community has put into learning about game accessibility, especially as we continue our own accessibility journey and push for a more inclusive games industry. On Global Accessibility Awareness Day 2023, we're excited to share with you some of the work we've been doing in support of our Gaming & Disability communities, including updated accessibility support pages, new accessibility features on PC, and recognizing the achievements of thousands of Xbox Ambassadors who are showing how easy and fun it can be to learn about game accessibility by completing over one million Accessibility Explorer Path missions!

A 64-bit Dec Alpha C compiler was found by Virtually Fun's neozeed earlier this year - the software archeologist has been searching for various test builds of Microsoft Windows NT, including an "AXP64/ALPHA64 port," deemed extra special due to it being the first 64-bit version of Windows 2000 Professional. The small discovery of this obscure compiler was celebrated, but its functionality is ultimately not all that useful - neozeed notes that the items have been sitting within 1999 vintage Windows Platform SDKs: "It turns out that the AXP64 compiler set has been hiding in plain sight for DECADES. I know that it's so unlikely that we'd ever see any public release of a 64-bit version of Windows for the Alpha, but oddly enough the compiler, headers and libraries are all there. YES. You can make full executes for AXP64/Alpha64. Of course with no OS, so it's not like you can run them."

He continues: "Sadly as of today, there is no way to test. There is one surviving machine with Windows 2003 AXP64, outlined in an article by Raymond Chen. It's a great read about how Alpha64 NT port came to be. The machine is still sitting in Microsoft Archives. Hopefully one day someone can dig it out." The story could have ended there, but a follow up post appeared on Virtually Fun earlier this week - courtesy of guest contributor Antoni Sawicki (aka tenox) who has also experimented with the cross-compiler. He provided a little bit more historical context before making an interesting announcement: "The Win64 project for AXP64 and IA64 was code named "Sundown." Sadly, 64-bit Alpha AXP Windows was never released outside of Redmond."