If you’re a gamer who owns a 4K television, Microsoft wants you to use it to its full capacity.
The company released the Xbox One X gaming device on Tuesday to complement new technologies that pair with video consoles, according to Mike Nichols, the company's corporate vice president and CMO of gaming, who joined Cheddar for an interview.
Unsurprisingly, the greatest challenge to pull this together was packaging all of the capabilities of the Xbox One X into a smaller console, but gaming is one of the top priorities over at Microsoft, so developers took on the task, Nichols said.
“The hardest challenge was ‘how do you get it in a small package’”, he said, emphasizing that the Xbox One X is “far more powerful than any other console.”
Hardcore gamers are looking forward to purchasing the device, which retails for $499. A Twitter poll by Cheddar’s senior anchor Kristen Scholer, which generated over 2,000 responses, showed that 41 percent of respondents plan to purchase an Xbox One X.
But what exactly does the gaming sector mean for the overall success of the tech giant?
“Microsoft has been in the gaming category for decades,” Nichols said, adding the category is a very important business for the company. The Xbox One X is only an extension of what Microsoft has already been doing in the industry.
According to the market research and statistics firm Statista, the video game market in the United States is big business. In 2015, the market was valued at nearly $17 billion, and it’s expected to generate revenues of $20.3 billion by 2020.
The company reports that the majority of revenues in the U.S. gaming market last year came from digital PC and console games, with the second highest share belonging to mobile games.
Nichols told Cheddar that Microsoft has seen record demands and pre-orders for the Xbox One X, with some avid fans lining up for store openings at midnight.
President Donald Trump says he will allow Nvidia to sell its H200 computer chip used in the development of artificial intelligence to “approved customers” in China. Trump said Monday on his social media site that he had informed China’s leader Xi Jinping and “President Xi responded positively!” There had been concerns about allowing advanced computer chips into China as it could help them to compete against the U.S. in building out AI capabilities. But there has also been a desire to develop the AI ecosystem with American companies such as chipmaker Nvidia.
The end of 2025 is almost upon us. And it’s time to unpack Spotify Wrapped. On Wednesday, the music streaming giant delivered its annual recap — giving its hundreds of millions of users worldwide a look at the top songs, artists, podcasts and other audio they listened to over the past year. Spotify isn’t the only platform to roll out a yearly glimpse of data collected from consumers’ online lives. But since its launch about a decade ago, Wrapped has become one of the most anticipated. And Spotify is billing the 2025 edition to be the biggest yet, with a host of new features it hopes may also address some disappointments users had last year.
Elon Musk’s X unveiled a feature that lets users see where an account is based. Online sleuths and experts quickly found that many popular accounts, often posting in support of the U.S. MAGA movement with thousands or hundreds of thousands of followers, are based outside the U.S. This raises concerns about foreign influence in U.S. politics.
The Enhanced Games is going public in two ways — with a new listing on the Nadsaq stock exchange and also by offering a direct-to-consumer business focused on performance products.
Real estate software company RealPage has agreed to stop sharing nonpublic information between landlords as part of a settlement with the Department of Justice.
2025’s top Black Friday tech deals from smart speakers to wearables. Tom’s Guide editor Kate Kozuch shares expert picks and tips for smart holiday shopping.
Computer chipmaker Nvidia is poised to release a quarterly earnings report that is expected to either deepen a recent downturn in the stock market or prompt an ebullient sigh of relief among investors increasingly worried the world’s most valuable company is perched upon an artificial intelligence bubble about to burst.
