For nearly eight years, the Nintendo Switch has found a huge foothold in the gaming world, coming dangerously close to having sold 150 million lifetime units at the time of writing. But eight years is a long time for a video game console to be on the market. Naturally, there will be a new one, and we think we'll find out about it soon. A recent flurry of "insider" leaks and genuine news reporting point to this week as when we will finally learn about the Nintendo Switch 2. After years of speculation, we may actually have some answers about the most talked-about thing in video games these days. Of course, it could also not happen, which would make me look very silly.

For a while in the mid-2000s, a refrigerator-sized box in Abu Dhabi was considered the greatest chess player in the world. Its name was Hydra, and it was a small super-computer--a cabinet full of industrial-grade processors and specially designed chips, strung together with fiber-optic cables and jacked into the internet. At a time when chess was still the main gladiatorial arena for competition between humans and AI, Hydra and its exploits were briefly the stuff of legend. The New Yorker published a contemplative 5,000-word feature about its emergent creativity; WIRED declared Hydra "fearsome"; and chess publications covered its victories with the violence of wrestling commentary. Hydra, they wrote, was a "monster machine" that "slowly strangled" human grand masters.

It is an interesting quirk of video game history that one of the greatest ever horror titles debuted on the Nintendo GameCube, a toylike console better known for the cutest titles in the Zelda series and Animal Crossing. But in 2002, Capcom revealed five exclusives to boost the beleaguered platform – and among them was Resident Evil 4, technically the 13th title in the franchise, which on its release three years later would be considered its zenith. It was an exciting new lease of life for the survival horror genre. Not that you'd guess all this from the game's extraordinarily pedestrian setup. Six years after the fall of the Umbrella Corporation smouldering cop Leon Kennedy has been dispatched on a mission to retrieve the US president's kidnapped daughter, who has been spotted in a tiny village in rural Spain.

Amazon shared the latest list of video game titles that Prime members can snag for free this month. Members can pick up a code for BioShock 2 Remastered right now, and if you're patient, you can also grab a free copy of Deus Ex GOTY Edition or Super Meat Boy Forever later in January. The cloud-based Amazon Luna gaming service has also shared its current lineup of titles that Prime members can play. Airhead, Guacamelee! 2 Complete, The Magical Mixture Mill, Metro Exodus and Super Meat Boy are in the rotation for that service this month alongside Fallout 3: Game of the Year Edition, Fallout New Vegas: Ultimate Edition, Fortnight, LEGO Fortnite, Fortnite Festival, Fortnite Battle Royale, Rocket Racing and Trackmania. Some of Prime Gaming's freebies last for longer than 30 days, so you've also got some time left to pick up a copy of some of the December titles if you haven't already loaded up on those deals.

Assassin's Creed Shadows delayed again UbisoftFemale ninja Naoe is one of Assassin's Creed Shadows' two playable protagonists Video game giant Ubisoft has announced a further delay to its upcoming Assassin's Creed Shadows. The long-running series is one of the French publisher's flagship franchises, with recent instalment, Valhalla, reportedly making more than 1bn. Assassin's Creed Shadows, set in 16th Century Japan, was due to be released on PC, PlayStation and Xbox last November before an initial delay to February 2025. Announcing the new release date of 20 March, executive producer Marc-Alexis Coté said a "few additional weeks are needed" to ensure the game's launch goes smoothly. Players complained that Ubisoft's major 2024 release, Star Wars Outlaws, was launched with bugs and glitches.

As music sales and streaming revenue reaches a high of 2.4bn – the highest since 2001, not accounting for significant inflation – the UK video game market, which has grown almost continually for decades, has shrunk by 4.4%. The most significant decline was in boxed video game sales, down 35%. Data from Digital Entertainment and Retail Association (ERA) puts the total worth of the UK video game market in 2024 at 4.6bn, double the music market and behind TV and movies at 5bn. The numbers show a shift in players' purchasing habits that has been ongoing for years, from physical games to digital downloads and in-game purchases in popular, established games such as Fortnite and Roblox. Boxed games now account for 27.7% of new game sales in the UK, according to ERA data.

Thanks to some distinctly Scottish weather over the holidays, my family and I ended up celebrating Hogmanay at home rather than at the party we'd planned to attend. My smallest son's wee pal and his parents came over for dinner, and when the smaller members of our group started to spiral out of control around 9pm, we threw them a little midnight countdown party in Animal Crossing. The last time I played Animal Crossing was in the depths of lockdown. Tending my island paradise helped me cope while largely imprisoned in a 2.5 bedroom basement flat with a baby, a toddler and a teenager. Our guests had brought their family Switch, and we set up the kids with their little avatars so they could join the animals' New Year party. They spent about 10 minutes gleefully whacking each other with bug nets before gathering with the other inhabitants in the square with a giant countdown clock in the background, the island's racoon magnate Tom Nook offering party poppers and shiny top-hats.

Ex-employees of Annapurna Interactive who quit en masse last year have reportedly found their next project. According to Bloomberg, the team is taking over the games and franchises of Private Division, a former Take-Two label that published indie games. A new enterprise that doesn't have a name as yet is said to have been formed and it appears that some of the remaining 20 or so employees of Private Division will be laid off as part of the transition. Take-Two said in November that it had sold Private Division (which published The Outer Worlds and physical copies of Hades) to an unnamed buyer, reportedly a private equity firm called Haveli Investments. Haveli is said to have brought in the former Annapurna employees in recent weeks and handed them the keys to Private Division's portfolio.

A day after launching the most hotly anticipated product in the PC world, the Nvidia GeForce 50-series family of graphics cards, Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang appeared on stage at CES to answer reporters' questions. A key one: In a world where AI is increasingly used to generate or interpolate frames, is the end result a world in which PC graphics is entirely AI generated? There's a reason we asked Huang the question. Nvidia says that while DLSS 3 could inject AI-generated frames between every GPU-rendered frame, DLSS 4 can infer three full frames off of a single traditional frame, as Brad Chacos noted in our earlier report on the GeForce 50-series reveal. A day earlier, rival AMD was essentially asked the same question.

At its CES 2025 press conference, Samsung just announced that the Ballie home robot it showed off last year will actually be available for sale in the first half of year. This cute yellow rolling device has a built-in projector that allows it to beam images and videos on your walls and floors, so you can interact with it. No further information on pricing and a more specific window of time has been shared, though. When it was first announced, Samsung told The Washington Post that Ballie would actually be available at some point in 2024. Alas, here we are six days into 2025 with no actual date or price yet.