Consumers spent $10.6B on digital games in October 2020, up 14% year-over-year. Consistent with ongoing trends, console spending grew the fastest, with earnings up 18% over 2019. This was especially impressive growth given that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare launched in October 2019 and many of the biggest titles of the 2020 holiday season were not released until November. Earnings on other platforms rose as well, with mobile up 15% and PC up 10%. The title, which was released on September 28 on mobile, PlayStation 4 and PC, is an unprecedented international success for a game made by a Chinese developer.

Ubisoft's AI experiments have resulted in more realistic enemy behaviour in Far Cry 5 AI has a new task: helping to keep the bugs out of video games. At the recent Ubisoft Developer Conference in Montreal, the French gaming company unveiled a new AI assistant for its developers. Dubbed Commit Assistant, the goal of the AI system is to catch bugs before they're ever committed into code, saving developers time and reducing the number of flaws that make it into a game before release. "I think like many good ideas, it's like'how come we didn't think about that before?'," says Yves Jacquier, who heads up La Forge, Ubisoft's R&D division in Montreal. His department partners with local universities including McGill and Concordia to collaborate on research intended to advance the field of artificial intelligence as a whole, not just within the industry.

For Xbox Live Gold subscribers, June's free roster of games is anchored around a mix of major flagship franchise titles and indie options. Microsoft confirmed that June's Xbox Live Games With Gold program will be headlined with Watch Dogs, Dragon Age: Origins and Assassin's Creed III . Subscribers to Xbox Live Gold can get free games through Microsoft with the Games With Gold program every month. Originally released in 2014, Watch Dogs comes from developer Ubisoft. The open-world third-person shooter puts you into the role of hacker Aiden Pearce.

We will have a compiled Forbes Games "Best of 2016" list online soon, but a lot of people have been asking me what my own favorite games of the year have been. I don't normally do this, but 2016 was an interesting year in many ways, and this is a list I actually wanted to write this year, so here we are. I will admit I have pretty mainstream tastes, so I certainly have missed a number of indies that will crop up on more hip game critics' lists. But I think I may surprise you with a few of my picks as well. Without further ado, to start the new year, here are my ten best video games of 2016.

Tobii's latest eye-tracking peripheral, the Eye Tracker 4C, refocuses itself on gaming while cutting out some of the cruft that limited its predecessor. Its basic constraints, however, haven't measurably changed. Eye tracking sounds magical: The small, USB-powered 4C "eye mouse" sensor mounts to your monitor, watches your eyes, and "teleports" your cursor to where you're looking. Available for $149 via the Tobii Web site (with a mandatory $25 shipping fee) the 4C is priced at $10 more than its predecessor, the EyeX. The 4C began shipping on December 2. It's a hefty price for a peripheral that essentially supplements your mouse for work and play, though Tobii continues to add features to justify the price tag.

What did you most enjoy doing this year: shooting demons? Or perhaps you spent many aeons creating a civilisation worthy of song? Yes, they're all sequels or remakes, but here are five of the games our readers felt were cruelly overlooked from our roundup of 2016's best efforts. 'Doom was our number 11', said Guardian games editor Keith Stuart, responding to howls of indignation from those calling for the inclusion of the satisfyingly rebooted demon killing shooter. Sigh...Very well then, DOOM ought to be on the list since it successfully updates a beloved shooter from yesteryear with modern elements like upgrades and character improvements whilst simultaneously reinvigorating the FPS genre with old school past-paced action.

I'm going to get around to Watch Dogs 2, but it's going to be by way of a semi-lengthy tangent into Assassin's Creed--particularly, what Assassin's Creed II meant to that now-juggernaut of a series. It's easy to forget, with almost a decade of sequels under our belt, that there was a time when Assassin's Creed could've conceivably died off. After garnering quite a bit of hype, the original Assassin's Creed released in 2007 to middling reviews. "Disappointing," said many, or "Repetitive." It had some great ideas, but was a boring mess of a game.

As we're finally beginning to see video games take diverse representation seriously, it's almost poetic that Americans just elected a race-baiting misogynist as their next leader. It's as if the resentment built up over calls for more diversity in media (which also reared its ugly head with the Gamergate crowd) reached a point where a significant portion of the country was ready to be charmed by a demagogue who promised to stop those pesky Social Justice Warriors. Pop culture, be it games, film or novels, can't help but reflect the society in which it was created. And that couldn't be more true for Watch Dogs 2, a sprawling open world game that's notable for placing you in the sneakers of Marcus Holloway, a black activist hacker. Instead of centering on a generic angsty white dude, like the first Watch Dogs, the new game fully commits to exploring the role of race and identity in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley today -- ostensibly progressive environments that still have trouble finding a place for people of color.

It would be fair to say that a sequel to Watch Dogs wasn't topping many people's wish lists. Sales for the first game may have been high, but it failed to ignite much passion in players. Plagued by accusations of a graphical downgrade on release, and a terrible cardboard cutout of a main character, the game came and went with little fanfare. The good news is that Ubisoft has clearly been listening to players, and have produced a title that is a huge improvement on that first game. One of the problems with the original Watch Dogs was its po-faced protagonist, Aiden Pearce.

The games developer gets into hacker education. People tend to think the world of data capture--as it pertains to their online activity--is limited to web clicks. It is not at all, and Ubisoft wants you to understand that as the gaming company promotes its new hacker-themed video game called Watch Dogs 2, which is due out Nov. 15. The Montreal-based player today is launching a microsite called Selfie Reveal, which allows viewers to upload pictures they've shared on social media to understand what data--such as their location--can be gleaned from their pics. The initiative, which is being led by agency AKQA, is being pushed by digital ads on Facebook, Twitter and other channels.