Microsoft is expanding the Xbox brand in expected ways but a new announcement shows that the company is willing to step off the beaten path a bit, as well. Partnering up with Lynx, the company behind Axe body spray, GameSpot reports that Microsoft revealed an Xbox line of personal care products including shower gel, body spray, and deodorant.
The Lynx Xbox scent is described as a “fresh scent of pulsing green citrus, featuring top notes of kaffir lime and winter lemon, aromatic herbal middle notes of mint and sage, and woody bottom notes of patchouli and clearwood.”
“We see Xbox fans achieve incredible things every day, and we wanted to celebrate that elevated skill, passion, and determination by creating something truly special,” Tania Chee, Xbox Australia’s business group lead, told The Verge. “Now, powering up can be as simple as a quick spray before you head out the door.”
In gaming, Microsoft is strengthening the move to support PC by creating a dedicated Xbox Game Pass for PC gamers and is expanding Xbox Live to Android, iOS, and Nintendo Switch. The company even wants to find a way to get Xbox Game Pass on other platforms if they welcome it and it did recently engage in a gaming driven partnership with Sony.
As for non-gaming branding, this isn’t the first attempt to expanding Xbox into strange spaces and it’s far from the last. Microsoft has maintained a relationship with Taco Bell over the years but that has been limited to Xbox offers with Taco Bell purchases, not a branded food item. In Japan, however, fast food chain Triple-O created a limited burger but it merely came wrapped in Xbox One-themed paper with no special items added.
As it stands, if you’re in the U.S., you’re going to have to make some plans to fly out of the country if you want a chance to grab any of the Lynx Xbox products. When they launch in July, they’ll only be available in Australia and New Zealand. If it performs well, it wouldn’t be surprising to see the Lynx Xbox lineup leave the region and take the official scent of Xbox around the world.
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”
It’s turning into a pretty good time to be a Monster Hunter fan who plays on a phone. Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Outlanders will launch on Android and iOS on October 29, giving the series a new mobile-first game just as Monster Hunter Rise is also preparing to make the jump to smartphones through Netflix.
Outlanders is being developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group under license and supervision from Capcom. Unlike Rise, which appears to be the full console and PC game adapted for mobile, Outlanders is a free-to-play survival hunting game made specifically for phones.