Category: Video Games

Amazon is offering Amazon Prime members an older generation Anker PowerCore 737 25,600mAh USB Power Bank, which also includes a 65W USB PD wall charger for only $79.99 shipped. That’s a nearly 40% price drop from its original $130 MSRP. This is close to the highest capacity power bank you’re allowed to bring on airplane carry-on, and it also boasts 60W of USB power delivery to charge your Nintendo Switch, Steam Deck, or ASUS ROG Ally gaming handheld.

Anker PowerCore 737 25,600mAh Power Bank for $79.99

Includes a 65W USB PD wall charger

The Anker PowerCore 737 can be used like any other power bank; it does a fine job of charging any of your standard mobile electronics. It has two USB Type-A ports and one USB Type-C port. This is one of the largest capacity power banks that can be brought onto an airplane as carry-on. It can charge a Nintendo Switch OLED over 5 times, iPhone 15 Pro Max over 5 times, Steam Deck over 4 times, and an ASUS ROG Ally over 9 times. The power bank is physically larger than smaller capacity ones and weighs in at 1.3 pounds.

The USB Type-C port supports up to 60W Power Delivery. That’s enough to charge the Steam Deck (35W) and Nintendo Switch (18W) at their maximum charging speed. It’s also very close to the maximum charging speed of the ASUS ROG Ally, which caps at 65W. The two USB Type-A ports support up to 18W of total charging, which is enough to fast charge a Nintendo Switch.

What’s unique about this deal compared to some other similar deals we’ve posted is that this one also comes with a USB Type-C wall charger that supports 65W of Power Delivery. There’s no need to buy another wall charger or scavenge one from another power bank you might have sitting around.

The Anker 737 is our pick for best Steam Deck / ASUS ROG Ally charger

We picked the newer Anker 737 as our favorite portable charger for the Steam Deck and ASUS ROG Ally portable gaming handhelds. Both the ROG Ally and Steam Deck suffer from a short battery life when gaming on the go. For instance, when playing most games at 60 FPS, you’re likely looking at four hours of battery life, at most. We even found games like God of War or Spider-Man would tap out in under 2 hours on the Steam Deck. At the end of the day, you’ll never get the full potential out of your Steam Deck or ROG Ally if you’re not equipped with a decent portable charger.

It’s natural that everyone’s been a little antsy about Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth lately. For weeks, analysts and fans have been discussing the game’s potential underperformance compared to its predecessor, Remake, amid worries this might impact the future of the 7 Remake trilogy. Today, we got a little more data on what’s really going on here – though the jury is still out on how publisher Square Enix is looking at the numbers.

Today, Circana published its monthly video game consumer spending report for March, which offers insight on the U.S. market calculated by dollar sales. One of the more notable games in the rankings this month was Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth, which reports have suggested isn’t selling as well as Square Enix would like despite critical acclaim. Without actual sales figures, it’s difficult to tell, and our analysis a few weeks ago indicated that it’s doing….eh, fine, just not gangbusters.

Today’s Circana report paints a similarly perplexing picture. Rebirth is still the fourth best-selling game this year so far, but it’s also the 14th best-selling Final Fantasy game ever – well behind Final Fantasy 15 in first place, Final Fantasy 7: Remake in second, and the original Final Fantasy 7 in third place. Granted, it’s only had two months on the market on a single platform while the others have had multiple years on multiple platforms, so we can give it some grace there.

We asked Circana analyst Mat Piscatella for a bit more context on what’s going on with Rebirth’s U.S. sales. He told us that Rebirth sales in the U.S. are down a double-digit percentage when compared to both Remake and Final Fantasy 16 over the same time in market – so that’s not great. But he also noted, again, that Remake launched “at basically the best time to launch a video game in history, and on a different installed base, with all that built up anticipation.” And he called the game’s performance “not amazing, but also nowhere near terrible.” Which is roughly what other experts have described to us before, and what U.K. sales numbers seem to suggest as well.

Still, it’s impossible to say whether “not terrible” will be enough for Square Enix. The publisher has announced it’s preparing to take a $140 million hit in “content abandonment losses” due to canceled games in the last fiscal year, and it remains unclear how much of this will impact Final Fantasy 7’s remake trilogy, if it will at all. And it’s admittedly a little jarring to see Rebirth in light of Circana’s reported sales for fellow action RPG Dragon’s Dogma 2, which pulled 11x the amount of dollar sales the original Dragon’s Dogma did, and has already surpassed the combined life-to-date sales of both Dragon’s Dogma and Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen combined. It’s only been out for a month, and it’s the second-best-selling game of the year in the US. That’s a pretty stark difference…but again, Dragon’s Dogma 2 released across three platforms: PC, Xbox, and PS5. Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth is PS5 exclusive.

As for the rest of the month in video games, Helldivers 2 is still the best-selling game of the year so far and is the 7th best-selling Sony-published game of all time, after just two months. Dragon’s Dogma 2 was the best-selling game of March, followe dby Helldivers 2, MLB The Show 24, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, and Rise of the Ronin in order. Princess Peach: Showtime! debuted at No.6 (digital sales excluded as usual), Unicorn Overlord debuted at No.8, and WWE 2K24 debuted at No.9 (digital sales excluded). Also notably, Horizon 2: Forbidden West saw a massive jump in March from the No.107 best-selling game in February to No.14, likely thanks to its launch on PC. Stardew Valley on PC and Sifu on PS5 also saw significant player spikes in March.

In total, video game sales were up 4% year-over-year largely thanks to mobile content, while hardware sales dropped 32% year-over-year with all console platform spending down 30% or more. The PS5 remained the best-selling console in both unit and dollar sales.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

Nintendo’s next console, dubbed the Switch 2 by fans, will feature some changes to potentially improve its battery life if new rumors are to be believed.

The latest details regarding how the Mario company might tackle its next console generation comes from a conversation between YouTube channel Moore’s Law Is Dead and content creator The Phawx on the Broken Silicon podcast. When explaining that they anticipate Xbox Series S-level ray-tracing functionality on the new tech, Moore’s Law Is Dead teased that they’ve heard that the Switch 2 will be “clocked faster than we expect” in docked mode but “undocked it’s going to be clocked crazy low.”

Hasbro has already invested over $1 billion in its internal studios as part of an ambitious long-term strategy, according to Wizards of the Coast head of game studios and publishing Dan Ayoub.

“Video games are an integral part of Hasbro’s strategy going into the next 100 years and we have to make sure that everything that comes out is top quality, is authentic, and is something we can build upon,” explained Ayoub in an interview with gamesindustry.biz at the Game Developer’s Conference in March. “Because we’re talking about a couple studios and a couple games right now, but we have much larger ambitions for that.”