Bethesda’s Todd Howard introduces Starfield at the 2018 E3 trade show.
Christian Petersen | Getty Images
The video game industry’s annual trade show went virtual this year, giving publishers a new format to show off upcoming titles.
The E3 gaming expo kicked off on Saturday and runs until Tuesday, when Nintendo is expected to showcase its new releases. Microsoft, Ubisoft and Square Enix were among the big publishers that presented over the weekend.
E3 has lost steam in recent years, with Sony pulling out of the event for the first time in 2019, and long-time host Geoff Keighley skipping the event for the first time in 25 years in 2021.
Still, E3 is often used as a platform for major players to drum up hype for their new blockbusters. And there were several highlights from this year’s event.
Microsoft teases Starfield
The biggest reveal of the weekend was undoubtedly Starfield, an upcoming sci-fi epic from Microsoft’s Bethesda.
Microsoft bought the iconic publisher’s parent company ZeniMax Media for $7.5 billion in an industry-shaking deal announced last year. One of the main outcomes analysts expected from the takeover was Xbox exclusivity for some Bethesda titles.
Microsoft made no delay in bringing out the big guns, and in a joint press conference with Bethesda on Sunday announced that Starfield would launch Nov. 11, 2022, exclusively on the Xbox Series X and S consoles and PC.
Microsoft has long been seen as lagging behind Sony when it comes to exclusives — games that only run on one system. AAA franchises like The Last of Us and God of War were key to the success of Sony’s PlayStation 4, and the company is taking a similar strategy with the PS5.
Here are a few other highlights from Microsoft’s E3 showcase:
We got a first look at online multiplayer for Halo Infinite, the latest instalment in the Halo series; Microsoft also announced the game will release in the 2021 holiday season, after being delayed last year due to criticism of its graphics.
There was an official trailer for the Forza Horizon 5 racing tile, as well as a Nov. 9 release date.
Microsoft unveiled Redfall, a new multiplayer shooter from the developers behind Dishonored and Prey, announcing a summer 2021 release window.
A few popular titles including Hades and Among Us are coming to Xbox Game Pass, Microsoft’s Netflix-style subscription service for games; Starfield will be available to play on Game Pass from the day it launches.
Sea of Thieves: A Pirate’s Life is the successor to the original “Pirates of the Caribbean”-inspired game, and even features the film series’ beloved protagonist Captain Jack Sparrow; the game releases on June 22.
A new zombie survival co-op shooter from the makers of Left 4 Dead, Back 4 Blood, drops Oct. 12 this year.
Age of Empires IV, the fourth entry of the real-time strategy game franchise, comes out on October 28
Ubisoft reveals Avatar game
Ubisoft made a few big announcements at its E3 show on Saturday. The French publisher gave fans a closer look at the story of Far Cry 6, the sixth main instalment of the popular Far Cry series. The game, which features Giancarlo Esposito of Breaking Bad fame, launches on Oct. 7.
But a big surprise from the Ubisoft showcase was a game based on James Cameron’s 2009 sci-fi film “Avatar.” It’s called Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, and features colorful creatures and environments from the Avatar universe.
Ubisoft also showed off Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Extraction, the newest entry in the Rainbow Six tactical shooter series. The game was initially going to be called Rainbow Six: Quarantine, but Ubisoft changed it due to controversy amid the coronavirus pandemic. Extraction debuts on Sept. 16.
Another big reveal was a new mashup of Nintendo’s Mario and Ubisoft’s Raving Rabbids, called Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope. A sequel to 2017’s Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle, the game comes out next year on Nintendo Switch.
Elden Ring and other big reveals
Geoff Keighley may have parted ways with E3, but he’s not done with video game broadcasting just yet.
The presenter hosted his new digital-only Summer Game Fest last week, which ended with a reveal trailer for Elden Ring, the much-anticipated role-playing title made in collaboration with “Game of Thrones” creator George R.R. Martin.
Elden Ring comes out on Jan. 21, 2022. The game’s publisher will be Bandai Namco.
Meanwhile, on Sunday, Square Enix revealed a new game based on Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy.” It will be a single-player title, unlike another game based on the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Marvel’s Avengers, which got a mixed reception when it released in September.
Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) passengers walk off a train at the Richmond station on March 15, 2023 in Richmond, California.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
Commuters in and around San Francisco rode into work for free on Tuesday morning due to an outage in the Clipper card system, which is used to handle payments for train, bus and ferry rides.
“ATTENTION: The Clipper system is experiencing an outage on all operators this morning,” the Bay Area Clipper account wrote in a post on X. “Please be prepared to pay your fare with another form of payment if required by your transit agency.”
Many buses were waving commuters on without asking for payment, and at Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) train stations, the faregates were open, allowing travelers to walk through for free.
Clipper is owned by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, which manages transportation for the nine-county Bay Area. The service is used by hundreds of thousands of tech workers in San Francisco and Silicon Valley.
The MTC website said there were 1.35 million unique Clipper cards — physical and digital — used in May, the highest monthly toll for the year and the most since December 2019, before the pandemic. A fact sheet from the MTC says Clipper is used by 800,000 transit riders a day across the region.
BART fare gates open on July 1, 2025, due to Clipper outage
Kif Leswing
BART, in particular, has undergone dramatic changes in recent years, most notably installing fare gates starting in late 2023, with full deployment expected to be completed by the end of this year.
In the first five months of the year, average BART station exits totaled between 170,000 and 182,000 a month, according to its website. Those numbers are way down from the pre-pandemic days of 2019, when averages were generally above 400,000 a month.
The MTC has plans to roll out an updated system called Clipper 2.0, which it says will be a “customer-focused, cost-effective fare collection system” with a “flexible platform for future fare structures.” Features include use across the various mobile operating systems, updated communication and “expanded retail, online and mobile sales.”
The update, however, has been routinely delayed, leading to tense confrontations at recent Clipper executive board meetings.
Corporate treasuries have surpassed ETFs in bitcoin buying for a third consecutive quarter as more companies try to benefit from the MicroStrategy playbook in a more crypto-friendly regulatory environment.
Public companies acquired about 131,000 coins in the second quarter, growing their bitcoin balance 18%, according to data provider Bitcoin Treasuries. ETFs showed an 8% increase or about 111,000 BTC in the same period.
“The institutional buyer who is getting exposure to bitcoin through the ETFs are not buying for the same reason as those public companies who are basically trying to accumulate bitcoin to increase shareholder value at the end of the day,” said Nick Marie, head of research at Ecoinometrics.
Public company bitcoin holdings increased 4% in April, a tumultuous month after the market was rocked by President Donald Trump’s initial tariffs announcement, versus 2% for ETFs, he pointed out.
“They don’t really care if the price is high or low, they care about growing their bitcoin treasury so they look more attractive to the proxy buyers,” Marie added. “It’s not so much driven by the macro trend or the sentiment, it’s for different reasons. So it becomes a different kind of mechanism that can push bitcoin forward.”
Bitcoin ETFs, whose collective U.S. launch in January 2024 was one of the most successful ETF debuts in history, still represent the largest holders of bitcoin by entity with more than 1.4 million coins held today, representing about 6.8% of the fixed supply cap of 21 million. Public companies hold about 855,000 coins, or about 4%.
Regulatory relief
The trend reflects the significant regulatory relief the crypto industry broadly is benefiting from under the Trump administration. In March, Trump signed an executive order for a U.S. bitcoin reserve, sending a strong message that the flagship cryptocurrency, which has long been a source of reputation risk among many investors, is here to stay. The last time ETFs outpaced public companies in bitcoin buying was in the third quarter of 2024, before Trump was re-elected.
In the second quarter, GameStop began buying bitcoin, after its board approved it as a treasury reserve asset in March; health-care company KindlyMD merged with Nakamoto, a bitcoin investment company founded by crypto entrepreneur David Bailey; and investor Anthony Pompliano’s ProCap, kicked off its own bitcoin purchasing program and is going public through a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC.
Strategy, recently rebranded from MicroStrategy, is still the main behemoth in the bitcoin treasury game. The company pioneered the strategy that more than 140 public companies globally are now emulating. It holds about 597,000 BTC, and is followed by the bitcoin miner Mara Holdings, which has almost 50,000 coins.
“It’s going to be very hard to catch Strategy’s scale,” said Ben Werkman, chief investment officer at Swan Bitcoin. “They’re going to be the preferred landing spot for institutional capital because of the deep liquidity around their equity, while these smaller equities are going to be really good risk returns for retail investors and smaller institutions that want more of that upside – that initial growth that comes in kicking off the strategy – because a lot of people missed it with MicroStrategy.”
A long-term case?
Marie suggested that 10 years from now, there probably won’t be so many companies committed to the bitcoin treasury strategy. Firstly, he said, the more that enter the category, the more diluted the activity at each firm becomes. Plus, bitcoin may be so normalized by then that proxy buyers are no longer constrained by rules and mandates around direct exposure to bitcoin.
“You can think about this wave as a bunch of companies that are trying to benefit from this arbitrage,” Marie said.
Werkman pointed out that most investors that are attracted to bitcoin treasury companies today already have a thesis around bitcoin. For them, leveraged bitcoin equities are likely how they try to outperform bitcoin itself, the foundational component of their investments.
“What people really like about these companies, and why they like to get into these smaller companies, is because they can do something that the investors holding spot bitcoin can’t do: go and accumulate more bitcoin on your behalf because they have access to the capital markets and can issue securities,” Werkman said.
There’s also likely to be a fair number of companies that convert their existing treasury holdings to bitcoin without pursuing leverage the way Strategy does, Werkman noted.
“They’ve got that ability to generate more and more value behind their shares, backed by bitcoin, plus whatever the operations of the company are generating. It’s a unique value proposition,” he said.
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An image of a Quantix drone made by AeroVironment.
David Mcnew | Getty Images News | Getty Images
AeroVironment shares fell 7% Tuesday after the defense contractor said it plans to offer $750 million in common stock and $600 million in convertible senior notes due in 2030 to repay debt.
The drone maker said it would use leftover funding for general purposes such as boosting manufacturing capacity.
AeroVironment shares have soared 85% this year, ballooning its market value to about $13 billion.
Last week, shares of the Arlington, Virginia-based company rallied on strong fourth-quarter results, lifting higher as CNBC’s Jim Cramer called it the “next Palantir of hardware.”
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Last month, the company also closed its $4.1 billion acquisition of space-related defense tech company Blue Halo.
Earlier this month, President Donald Trump signed an executive order intended to boost drone production in the U.S. and crack down on unauthorized uses.
The company also has a high short interest level, which may have contributed to some of the recent gains, creating a short squeeze. This phenomenon occurs when a stock price surges, forcing those shorting the stock to purchase shares to cover their positions and prevent losses.