Today, Microsoft held a long-awaited reveal for many upcoming games that the company hopes will justify bringing players into their ecosystem. Whether via their existing Xbox devices or through the next-generation Xbox Series X and gaming PC, the company put on a show showcasing the future of games as they envision them - but many more games from even Microsoft's first-party studios weren't showcased - yet.

The star of the show and opening opus was Halo Infinite, the much-awaited next installment in the Halo saga. The showcase revealed a part of the campaign, with cinematics and gameplay, and it does seem to be another step in the right direction for the franchise. The 8-minute gameplay video showcased the gorgeous environments, particle and sound effects made possible by the new Splipspace Engine in the new Halo game, with a number of impressive new weapons and game mechanics (that grappling hook does seem sweet, doesn't it?). A look at the map reveals an open-world-esque approach to game design, with 343 industries promising the game to be many times bigger than their two previous games, Halo 4 and Halo 5: Guardians, combined. A smooth 60-frames per second and 4K resolution is promised in what will definitely be the Xbox Series X's crown launch jewel. No multiplayer was shown - yet. We expect 343 Industries to start launching Sprint videos on the development of the game in the coming months, and also new game trailers showcasing the mechanics of the game.

Microsoft in a statement announced they have halted production of the Xbox One S and Xbox One X, the current-generation consoles that are currently being sold under the Xbox brand. The move comes in preparation for the "Holiday 2020" release of the Xbox Series X and its badly-kept secret sister, the (likely?) Xbox Series S. This will allow the retail channel to digest available inventory and open up space for the impending consoles' release.

This move by Microsoft all but confirms that the company will be launching a companion, lower-priced, lower-performing console alongside the Xbox Series X. Microsoft knows that launching the most powerful console also means (most likely) launching the most expensive one, and the company knows they must cater to more budget-conscious consumers as well. Check after the break for the complete Microsoft statement.

When we set out to design the Xbox Series X, we aspired to build our most powerful console ever powered by next generation innovation and delivering consistent, sustained performance never before seen in a console with no compromises. To achieve this goal, we knew we needed to analyze each component of the system, to push beyond the limitations in traditional console performance and design. It was critical in the design of the Xbox Series X to ensure we had a superior balance of power, speed and performance while ensuring no component would constrain the creative ambition of the world's best creators, empowering them to deliver truly transformative next gen gaming experiences not possible in prior console generations.

Worldwide PC shipments totaled 64.8 million units in the second quarter of 2020, a 2.8% increase from the second quarter of 2019, according to preliminary results by Gartner, Inc. After a significant decline in the first quarter of the year due to COVID-19-related supply chain disruptions, the PC market returned to growth as vendors restocked their channels and mobile PC demand increased.

"The second quarter of 2020 represented a short-term recovery for the worldwide PC market, led by exceptionally strong growth in EMEA," said Mikako Kitagawa, research director at Gartner. "After the PC supply chain was severely disrupted in early 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, some of the growth this quarter was due to distributors and retail channels restocking their supplies back to near-normal levels.

NACON the French video game and peripheral company has recently announced a new licensing agreement with Microsoft to create officially licensed accessories for Xbox One, Xbox Series X, and PC. NACON announced the partnership during a recent online event where they also announced their upcoming games and upcoming mobile gaming accessories. NACON already sells a relatively popular range of controllers for PS4, PS3, and PC so this agreement is a logical next step for the company.

NACONHaving already sold over 3 million officially licensed PlayStation 4 controllers, NACON is immensely proud to announce they have entered into a licensing agreement with Microsoft to create and distribute official accessories designed for Xbox One, Xbox Series X and PC.

Microsoft is preparing to launch its xCloud game streaming service in September as part of Xbox Game Pass. The new service is positioned to take on Google Stadia, GeForce NOW, and Amazon's upcoming game streaming service. Accessory makers are busy preparing new products to coincide with the launch, 8Bitdo is adapting it's popular SN30 Pro retro NES controller in a new partnership with Xbox to create the Sn30 Pro controller specifically designed for Microsoft's Project xCloud.

The new Bluetooth controller is compatible with all Android phones and tablets and is officially licensed as Microsoft Project xCloud compatible. The built-in battery provides 18 hours of use and can be juiced up via the USB-C port. The controller comes with an optional mount to attach a phone to the controller. The Sn30 Pro is now available for pre-order via Amazon for 44.99 USD and is expected to ship on September 21st.

After Sony has showcased Unreal Engine 5 capabilities on the new PlayStation 5 console, there was a counterpart event missing from Microsoft. However, Microsoft has announced today that the company will host a live stream event on July 23rd. That is the date when Microsoft will host the event on YouTube and Twitch. Starting at 9 am PT time, the company will showcase the capabilities of the new Xbox Series X console. Possibly, Microsoft will show ray tracing and all the latest technology advancements with AMD's RDNA2 graphics card found inside the new console. What we can expect in terms of games is Halo Infinite and maybe new Forza and Gears of War games. Either way, we have to wait and find out on July 23rd.

Microsoft is giving the Windows 10 OS some finishing touches still, as a lot of UI is slowly changing over time. For example, just a few months back we have received a new icon pack that brought the material design to Windows 10 icons. However, now Microsoft is going even further in its mission to blend UI elements and give users the best possible viewing pleasure. This time, Microsoft is giving the start menu an overhaul. "We are freshening up the Start menu with a more streamlined design that removes the solid color backplates behind the logos in the apps list and applies a uniform, partially transparent background to the tiles. This design creates a beautiful stage for your apps, especially the Fluent Design icons for Office and Microsoft Edge, as well as the redesigned icons for built-in apps like Calculator, Mail, and Calendar that we started rolling out earlier this year."

It is available in Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 20161 and should come to mainstream later on. If you want to splash a bit of color (see images below) you can apply that theme by going to Settings > Personalization > Color, then toggle the "Show accent color on the following surfaces" for "Start, taskbar, and action center". Below, you can check before and after comparison between old and new designs, along with the new color theme.

In a recent report by the Verge, Microsoft is reportedly planning a budget console to go along with the Xbox Series X known as the Xbox Series S. The Xbox Series S will be a successor to the popular Xbox One S, codenamed Lockhart it's set to feature the key next-generation improvements found in the Xbox Series X and provide them at a lower price point.

Sources say that the Xbox Series S will target 1080p 60FPS and 1440p 6̶0̶F̶P̶S̶ 30FPS gaming performance, this will be achieved with roughly 1/3rd of the GPU power at 4 TeraFLOPs, and 10 GB of GDDR6 RAM. The Xbox Series S console is rumored to share the same 7 nm AMD Zen 2 SoC a̶t̶ ̶a̶ ̶l̶o̶w̶e̶r̶ ̶c̶l̶o̶c̶k̶ and the same ultra-fast PCIe 4.0 SSD. The console may not feature a disc drive like the Xbox One S All Digital Edition. Microsoft is yet to publicly say anything about the console, so take these rumors with a grain of salt.

Update Jun 30th: Sources tell Eurogamer that Microsoft is planning to unveil the console at an event in August.

Microsoft seems to be on the verge of introducing a new file recovery tool in a future Windows 10 update. The news, courtesy of The verge, paints a MS-DOS-based tool that would allow users to recover most of the "basic" files they'd be looking for after accidental deletion: MP3 files, MP4 videos, PDFs, JPEG images, and Office, Word as well as PowerPoint documents. The File Recovery Tool is already available as a download from Microsoft's app store (and requires Windows 10 version 19041.0 or higher).

The lack of a GUI could be a put-off for some users; but again, this is a free tool from the company. As a refresher, a file isn't fully deleted if you only use Windows' "delete" function - even if you delete it from the Recycle Bin afterwards. All that does is tell the OS that that those particular storage addresses are available for being written to again - the bits that the file is made of are still there. This is the reason why successful file recovery depends mostly on whether or not new information has been written to those particular cells again. If it has, chances to recover your data are slim.

Microsoft has decided to revamp their customer interaction priorities. The company has recently announced they will be closing off all Microsoft physical stores and doubling down on its digital storefronts - the company is looking to start offering new services such as one-on-one videochats, where customers can converse with Microsoft employees when making a purchase - effectively digitizing one of the salient aspects of brick-and-mortar stores. Stores which have been closed since March this year due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The decision rolls back o Microsoft's continued work on deploying physical spaces where its products can be admired, touched, and tested by prospective buyers. It looked like Microsoft was looking to recreate the Apple Store experience - adding a more premium, more personal touch to their products. However, physical stores are both more expensive to upkeep and vulnerable to more liabilities than digital-only storefronts, and it seems Microsoft has decided the stores just weren't cutting, whether financially or in brand image. No mention on layoffs was made by Microsoft in the announcement, so it seems that most of these workers will be moving on to other endeavors inside the company - likely some of them to the aforementioned 1:1 digital shop customer service. Just another step in an increasingly digital world. The closing of Microsoft Store physical locations will result in a pre-tax charge of approximately $450M, or $0.05 per share, to be recorded in the current quarter ending June 30, 2020.

Microsoft has today revealed the complete list of games certified under the 'Optimized for Xbox Series X' program which is the indicator for games that take advantage of the full power of Xbox Series X. Games featured on the list could benefit reduced load times courtesy of the Xbox Velocity Architecture, include heightened visuals and DirectX raytracing, and feature higher framerates up to 120FPS.

Titles featuring the new Optimized for Xbox Series X badge can include brand new games built natively for the Xbox Series X such as Halo Infinite, or previously released games which have been enhanced to take advantage of the power and features Xbox Series X has to offer, like Gears 5. Microsoft has currently certified 22 games but plans to increase that number in the coming weeks and months leading up to Xbox Series X launch. The full list of games can be viewed below.

Phil Spencer, head of Xbox at Microsoft, said in an interview that he is confident in the Xbox Series X's hardware advantages against Sony's PS5. After witnessing PS5's reveal, Phil said that he "felt good after seeing their show. I think the hardware advantages that we have built are going to show up as we're talking more about our games and frame rates and other things." Being a good sport as he usually is, Phil Spencer also said that he felt Sony had done a good job with their PS5 announcement.

Of course, Xbox Series X's hardware advantage over PS5 is a hotly debated topic already, so there is not much to see there. However, some might say that Sony's show was much more impressive than Xbox's when it comes to the - well - platform-defining metric - games. PS5 showed some very interesting exclusives during its show, and Sony knows that this a field where they have an historic advantage against Xbox - generally speaking, Sony's exclusives are usually held in a much higher regard that Microsoft's.

Microsoft has a goal to nurture the Windows on Arm (WoA) ecosystem and give new adopters the best possible experience. Today, Microsoft made an important announcement. The OpenJDK, an open-source implementation of the Java platform, is coming to the WoA project. Why this is so important you might question yourself? Well, the OpenJDK enables plenty of Java applications to run, so with this, Microsoft is giving WoA users a whole set of new supported applications. Take for example Minecraft Java edition. Now you can run that as well thanks to the new port. This shows commitment to the Arm platform by Microsoft and strong will to not abandon it.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is providing breakthrough value to businesses across every vertical, from manufacturing, to energy, to agriculture, to real estate, to healthcare and more. IoT provides real-time insights into assets, enabling businesses to reduce operational expenses, unplanned downtime and unnecessary servicing.

While the benefits of IoT are well established and significant, one of the biggest hurdles for customers is securing IoT devices - both for new digitization initiatives as well as for legacy Operational Technology and industrial control system environments. Two years ago, Microsoft announced a $5 billion investment in IoT to further our commitment to build a trusted, easy-to-use platform for our customers and partners to build connected solutions - no matter where they are starting in their IoT journey.

The genre-defining Tony Hawk's Pro Skater franchise made its mark on videogames in the '90s touting the top names in skateboarding at the time. With the launch of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 and 2 on September 4, 2020, the legacy continues with some of the most preeminent pro skaters in the world today -- Nyjah Huston, Leo Baker, Leticia Bufoni, Aori Nishimura, Lizzie Armanto, Shane O'Neill, Riley Hawk and Tyshawn Jones -- joining the lineup of OGs in the remaster.

"Modern-day skateboarding originated from a generation of skaters who grew up playing the original Tony Hawk's Pro Skater games," said Michelle Bresaw, Vice President of Product Management and Marketing at Activision. "The world-class pro skaters we're adding to this remaster took the tricks and combos from the videogame and made them possible in real life. We're proud that the remaster will represent the skate culture landscape today with a diverse roster of skaters that will appeal to any gamer."

It is known that Microsoft has been working on bringing its Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) on non-Windows platforms, and it finally has happened. Today, Microsoft is enabling users of popular Linux distributions to use its Defender ATP locally. This is an important announcement as Microsoft is bringing even more software to the Linux ecosystem. With this, Microsoft is making Defender ATP the software tool to manage and monitor security on all enterprise platforms available - Windows, Windows Server, macOS, and now even Linux. Supported distributions include RHEL 7.2 or higher, CentOS Linux 7.2 or higher, Ubuntu 16 LTS or higher LTS, SLES 12 or higher, Debian 9 or higher, and Oracle Linux 7.2.

Microsoft introduced the Windows segment heap memory improvements for modern and system apps such as Microsoft Edge to reduce memory requirements. In a recent blog post, Principal PM Manager of Microsoft Edge Kim Denny announced that with the latest Windows 10 May 2020 Update Microsoft Edge saw a memory usage reduction of up to 27%. The New Microsoft Edge referenced here has adopted the chromium source engine which shows the possible memory reduction effects on google chrome.

In a recent chromium commit discovered by WindowsLatest shows a chromium developer stating that users "could save hundreds of MB in the browser and Network Service utility processes, among others, on some machines,". Considering Google Chrome has the largest market share of any browser by a healthy margin and given its memory-hogging tendencies this development will be a very welcome addition. The feature is currently being implemented and should hopefully be available soon.

CD Projekt Red has announced that their upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 will be upgraded, free of charge, to a revised version in the wake of both next-gen console systems from Sony and Microsoft being released. This means that users who ordered (or will order) the game for current-gen systems will see their version be automatically upgraded to a next-gen one when they boot up their next-generation games console. This next-generation re-release of Cyberpunk 2077 will take advantage of the new consoles' much increased horsepower in both graphics and storage system terms.

The update, much like the game, will be ready "when it's ready". Only CD Projekt Red knows when it is hoping to release this update. We would think that a release next-year, after the entire planned DLC packages for the game are released, would be a great time to launch the updated version and re-release the game for next-gen systems as a "Game of the Year" version or a next--gen remaster. Of course, PC users don't have to fiddle with any of these upgrades - we'll be getting the games definitive version, including ray tracing support, on day one.

Microsoft is preparing to launch a competitive product to Google's Stadia and Amazon's Project Tempo, which are both game streaming services. To Microsoft's advantage, the company has experience in building gaming systems and using cloud technology to integrate them. While both Google and Amazon are cloud providers and have the infrastructure to implement game streaming services, Microsoft has its Xbox division, which has been in the gaming industry for a long time. Despite already owning the infrastructure, Microsoft wants to use the hardware from its Xbox consoles as a base of the upcoming game streaming service called Project xCloud.

According to sources of Tom Warren, senior editor at Verge, Microsoft will be re-using the Xbox SoCs found in their consoles. According to the source, in the beginning, Microsoft is going to use Xbox One S blades to power its game streaming service. After that, the company will upgrade its servers with more powerful Xbox Series X SoC. As a reminder, the Xbox Series X SoC has 8 Ryzen CPU cores based on "Zen 2" µarch, RDNA 2 GPU capable of delivering 12 TFLOPs, 16 GB of GDDR6 memory and a mighty fast SSD. This will be enough to satisfy game streaming service demands and power all of the AAA titles users will be playing once it is available.

QNAP Systems Inc. today officially released Boxafe, a comprehensive Google G Suite and Microsoft 365 backup solution for enterprises. Boxafe can centrally back up cloud data to a local NAS, which easily safeguards enterprise data.

Many enterprises have adopted Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), and with constant data growth they not only face challenges with insufficient storage space but also the chance of data loss and data recovery limitations. QNAP Boxafe backs up files, emails, calendars and contacts from Google G Suite and Microsoft 365 to a QNAP NAS. IT staff can centrally backup and manage multiple G Suite and Microsoft 365 data and schedule multi-version backup to reduce the risk of data loss. Boxafe also allows users to preview all backup data before restoring.

Microsoft has announced an extension to the Windows Defender System Guard which will allow it to also verify and guarantee integryity of systems at a UEFI BIOS level. Citing an increase in hardware and firmware-level attacks over the years, the extended protection functionality aims to guarantee protection across the entire hierarchy of a device, from firmware up through to cloud processing.

The UEFI scanner is a new component of the built-in antivirus solution on Windows 10 and gives Microsoft Defender ATP the unique ability to scan inside of the firmware filesystem and perform security assessment. Working in conjunction with your systems' chipset, the UEFI scanner features a three-pronged solution to firmware security: UEFI anti-rootkit, which reaches the firmware through Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI); Full filesystem scanner, which analyzes content inside the firmware; and a Detection engine, which identifies exploits and malicious behaviors.

Microsoft has released its Chromium-based Edge browser some time ago and it is already capturing the market. Just in April of this year, it became the world's second most popular web-browser, just behind Google Chrome. Surpassing even Mozilla's Firefox web-browser, the new Edge is rising in popularity very quickly. So far, Microsoft gave an option for Windows 10 users to just download the new browser if they want to, or the only Edge browser you had would be the old version based on the EdgeHTML engine. Even though Microsoft has recently decided to start rolling out the new Chromium-based browser via OS updates, the old version could still find its way in the OS and there wouldn't be a new one present. Starting with update 20H2, Microsoft is bundling the new browser with OS update, making it a default option in the OS.

While the new browser is going to replace old Edge for default opening of links or some files like PDF, the old Edge will still be present. A lot of legacy applications are relying on opening some of their stuff in the old browser, and there sure would be problems if it would be gone. Additionally, gone are the year plus month names for Windows 10 updates, like 1803, 1903, and 1909. Now you get a year plus the first or second half of the year. For example, the next update is 20H2 (second half of 2020), and the one after it is 21H1 (first half of 2021). This is done to avoid confusion and with this Microsoft announced that updates will be faster in general.

A 3D mark entry uncovered by database spelunker Tum_Apisak, since shared on Twitter, points towards Microsoft incorporating AMD's latest and greatest mobility-geared CPU in one of their upcoming product refreshes. The database entry register an unknown Microsoft device carrying ÃMD's Ryzen 7 4800U CPU. All specs are correct for this CPU - GPU cores, GPU clock, as well as CPU base and boost clocks.

While we can't know for sure this is Microsoft's next iteration of the Surface Laptop, assuming it is just an educated guess. Microsoft's current-gen Surface Laptop 3 shipped in a special, AMD-inside edition in the form of the "Microsoft Surface Edition" Ryzen 5 3580U - and if Microsoft included an AMD Zen+ CPU manufactured in a 12 nm fabrication process inside their Surface Laptop, we would find it very hard to justify not including the much-improved Ryzen 7 4800U - the chip is better in any conceivable way compared to its last-gen counterpart. This is a sure way of improving overall performance and battery life of their Surface Laptops compared to what the competition has currently available.

We are transitioning and converting our current ring model, based on the frequency of builds, to a new channel model that pivots on the quality of builds and better supports parallel coding efforts. In addition to this change, Insiders will also find similar offering names and expectations across Windows and Office programs and soon Microsoft Edge and Microsoft Teams. Our goal is to not only make it clearer for existing Insiders to choose the experience that's right for them, but also for new Insiders to pick the right channel as they join. The Insider community is very important to us all and we're working to align how all our Insider programs work better together across Microsoft.