Xbox

Starting today, you can stream your Discord friend’s gameplay from your Xbox and even call them directly from the console.

The Razer Wolverine V3 Pro has:

🛜2.4GHz wireless
🧲Drift-free Hall effect sticks
🦞Four customizable paddles and two extra shoulder buttons (for claw grip)
🔒Hair-trigger lockouts with mouse-like clicks
⏩1,000Hz wired polling rate on PC
🌈and RGB accent lighting.

I’ve been testing it for over a week and there’s a lot to love. Stay tuned for my full review.

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The Xbox TV app is now available on Amazon’s first-gen Fire TV Stick 4K Max and the third-gen Fire TV Cube. The Xbox app was first available for an initial set of Amazon devices last month.

A day after announcing that Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is coming to the PS5 next year, Xbox boss Phil Spencer spoke a bit more during a Gamescom livestream about the company’s ongoing multiplatform experiment.

I reported earlier this year that Microsoft was considering launching Towerborne into early access. After a promise of a “special surprise” during gamescom opening night live, Microsoft has just confirmed that Towerborne will be available in early access on Steam on September 10th, and on Xbox in early 2025. A full free-to-play launch is planned for 2025.

Xbox fans will soon finally be able to join in the anime-style open-world environment of Genshin Impact. The game is arriving on Xbox Series X / S on November 20th, and preorder bonuses are available right now.

PowerA is launching a pair of wireless gamepads for PC, and they’re some of the company’s first to use drift-free sticks. The OPS v1 ($49.99) and OPS v3 Pro ($99.99) join the recently-announced Fortnite SE controller for Xbox to offer Hall effect sticks and extra programmable buttons.

The new gamepads arrive in September and early October.

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Microsoft is adding Activision’s Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy to Xbox Game Pass on console, cloud, and PC on August 8th. Mafia: Definitive Edition is also being added to the service on August 13th. Crash Bandicoot is the latest Activision game to arrive on Game Pass, after Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III and Diablo IV.

The Verge’s Tom Warren reported yesterday that a delay was imminent, and now it’s official: the Obsidian’s next RPG will miss 2024 and launch on February 18th, 2025, according to the Xbox X account.

We’re still waiting on official 2024 dates for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Starfield’s Shattered Space expansion, and Towerborne. Perhaps Microsoft will announce those during Gamescom later this month.

Xbox president Sarah Bond revealed earlier this year that a new Xbox mobile store would be launching in July. Xbox fan Klobrille discovered an Xbox mobile store webpage recently, which suggests Xbox Insiders will get access first. “Testing has begun for our browser-based mobile store,” says Kari Perez, head of Xbox communications in a statement to The Verge. “Our work is progressing well and we will have more to share in the future.”

Update: Article updated with comment from Microsoft.

I’m hearing that Obsidian is about to announce an Avowed delay. The team had been targeting a November release, but with Xbox exclusive S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 delayed to November, things are getting stacked for Xbox games in the all-important holiday season. More on the Avowed delay and Xbox employees being back under one roof in this week’s issue of Notepad.

The company claims its triple laser PX3-PRO is the world’s first UST projector to be “Designed for Xbox.” What that means isn’t entirely clear given the Xbox can’t take advantage of the projector’s 240Hz maximum refresh rate.

More useful may be the $3,499.99 PX3-PRO’s ability to automatically optimize its settings for gaming when it detects a console powering up.

Starting today, you’ll no longer be able to purchase games, DLC, and other items from the Xbox 360 Store or the Xbox 360 Marketplace — both of which launched almost 19 years ago.

The shutdown doesn’t affect online multiplayer on the Xbox 360, and you’ll still be able to purchase backward-compatible games and DLC from newer Xbox consoles.

The FTC called Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass price hike “exactly the sort of consumer harm” it had predicted ahead of the company’s Activision-Blizzard buy.

Microsoft’s response (PDF) claims that with included multiplayer and the upcoming day-and-date release of Call of Duty, the offering isn’t degraded at all.

It’s a “global outage,” according to an Nvidia status message. “We are working on a fix to bring back the service as soon as possible.”

Nvidia’s other GeForce Now services appear to be operational, so perhaps this issue is tied to everything else going on.