It's not altogether surprising that a company earning billions of dollars a year making the chips that power today's hyperrealistic video games has a business plan inspired by a science-fiction novel. Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, the nation's most valuable semiconductor company, with a stock price of $645 a share and a market cap of $400 billion, is out to create the metaverse, what Huang describes "a virtual world that is a digital twin of ours." Huang credits author Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, filled with collectives of shared 3-D spaces and virtually enhanced physical spaces that are extensions of the Internet, for conjuring the metaverse. This is already playing out with the massively popular online games like Fortnite and Minecraft, where users create richly imagined virtual worlds. Now the concept is being put to work by Nvidia and others.

TL;DR: The 2021 Complete Learn to Code by Making Games in Unity Bundle is on sale for £29.01 as of April 18, saving you 97% on list price. Want to start learning how to code your own video games? Consider the Complete Learn to Code By Making Games in Unity Bundle. This collection of classes includes eight courses and over 900 lessons on coding, machine learning, Construct 3, and more. You'll start by learning how to use Construct 3 to create your own computer games by building simple pixel art animations.

Maybe it's time for Amazon to take the'L' on trying to build a thriving video game business before more jobs are affected? The latest misstep for Amazon's stumbling efforts to build and release its own video games is also a story about The Lord of the Rings. In 2019, the company announced plans "to develop and publish a free-to-play massively multiplayer online (MMO) game" -- think World of Warcraft -- based on author J.R.R. Tolkien's beloved fantasy series. Now, almost two years later and with nary a trailer, screenshot, or fact sheet released about the game, that project is canceled. Amazon confirmed as much in a report from Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, who first heard the news from anonymous sources.

This "critically-acclaimed" and "insanely successful" Unreal Engine course was created in collaboration with Epic Games. The course has been fully updated and remastered to Unreal Engine 4.22 . Existing students get all the new material for free. Get plugged into our communities of amazing developers on Facebook (nearly 20k), in our own TA-curated Community (17k views/day), and our student chat group (10k live at any one time). This course started as a runaway success on Kickstarter.

Video game sales are still smashing records roughly a year after the COVID-19 pandemic led many people to stay indoors. The NPD Group has determined that video game spending in the US surged 18 percent in March 2021 compared to a year earlier, hitting a new record of $5.6 billion. Hardware sales in particular jumped 47 percent to $680 million, breaking a March record that hasn't been touched since 2008 -- yes, the heyday of the Wii, PS3 and Xbox 360. It won't surprise you to hear that new consoles helped fuel the hardware surge, but it wasn't all up to the new models. The PlayStation 5 is the fastest-selling console in US history both in dollars and units, NPD said. However, it wasn't the strongest seller in March -- that honor went to the four-year-old Nintendo Switch, which outperformed the PS5 in sheer volume.

ShelbyRenae – @shelbyrenaeyt A Fortnite Twitch streamer and YouTuber, ShelbyRenae makes hilarious (and often very telling) TikToks focusing on her conversations with the strangers she plays with, mostly teenage boys who chuck out endless bizarre insults and gigantically inappropriate comments. Alisha – @alishakins_ Mainly a Twitch streamer, Alisha makes brilliant little TikToks of her experiences playing Call of Duty: Warzone, providing a turbo-charged voiceover, complete with her own sound effects – mostly, "Pew, pew, pew! The latest video shows the amazing full-size cabinet for Sega's Let's Go Jungle, designed to resemble an offroad truck. DKOldies – @dkoldies Similar to the above, DKOldies is an online retro gaming store and its TikTok shows off interesting items from its vast stock including rare games, ancient consoles and weird controllers. Komazawa Isolation – @kmzwisolation A Japanese YouTuber who makes astonishingly accurate real-life reenactments of games such as Grand Theft Auto and Yakuza.

Like Grenier, other developers speaking to The Washington Post shared that working in the pandemic was challenging from a mental health, personal workload and collaboration standpoint. As offices closed worldwide, developers shifted to working from their living rooms and kitchen tables. Meanwhile, gaming took off as people stayed home, increasing the demand for content and the appetite for multiplayer games and hardware. In 2020, 79% of United States consumers, or about 261 million people, played a video game, up from 73% of consumers, or 241 million, in 2019, according to market research firm NPD Group.

Assassin's Creed Valhalla's first major expansion, Wrath of the Druids, will come out a couple of weeks later than expected. It was supposed to be available on April 29th, but now Ubisoft has announced on Twitter that it will be released on May 13th instead. The video game developer said it pushed back the release date "to deliver a more refined experience" and promised to publish an article that provides transparency and insights into its dev process. To deliver a more refined experience, we're sharing that: Wrath of the Druids will now release on May 13 We're working on an article to provide transparency and share insights on our dev process Thanks for your patience. Keep an eye on our social channels for future news!

The "one more thing" Nintendo had to show off at the end of its latest Indie World Showcase was a sequel to the supernatural hit Oxenfree. Set five years after the original game, Oxenfree II: Lost Signals sees a character named Riley returning to her hometown to investigate strange radio signals that are causing mysterious disturbances. It seems that, as in Oxenfree, you'll need to find the right frequencies on a handheld radio to solve puzzles. Night School Studio's sequel is coming to Switch and Steam later this year. OXENFREE II: Lost Signals from @nightschoolers and @mwminteractive is coming to #NintendoSwitch in 2021! Set 5 years after OXENFREE, guide Riley through a supernatural coming of age story, as you communicate with other-worldly entities.

A blue Switch Lite wasn't the only news Nintendo had up its sleeve this week. The company will host its latest Indie World Showcase at noon ET today. The stream will run for around 20 minutes and highlight some new indie games that are coming to Switch. You shouldn't expect updates on the likes of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild 2 or any other big first-party games, of course. Still, there could be some big surprises in store.