Amazon announced Monday that the company negotiated a deal to purchase Twitch.tv for the small sum of $970 million. Google (YouTube) had been in negotiations since May to acquire Twitch, but were unable to close the deal. This gives Amazon the most popular avenue for game streaming. Although Google owns YouTube, Twitch reaches a very different market, and this can't be seen by Google as anything other than a slap in the face. It will be interesting to see if Google rises to the challenge and duels it out with Amazon – hopefully bringing their YouTube streaming service to a more complete status (corporate blood sport, how wonderful).

RAM prices are on the rise again. If you've watched the market prices on RAM -- either through our weekend sales round ups or just through shopping in general -- you'd have noticed the price of an 8GB 1600MHz kit has nearly tripled. Around the end of 2012 through the first few months of 2013, the price of our example kit was in the mid $30-40 range; since that golden period, the price has raised pretty steadily toward the current resting spot. Prices had a major peak around the end of last year after supplier Hynix's factor fire, but February saw prices settle at what appeared to be a fairly steady $70-80 range.

It seems that this is no longer the case.

Starting around June of this year, prices began climbing once again. The current price appears to be in the mid $80-90 range and is poised to climb even higher. DDR3 hasn't changed much -- why is the price so volatile? To adequately answer this, let's recap RAM's position in the PC world and talk about how it's made.

With the beginning of the third fiscal quarter for 2014, we see analysts filing revenue reports and public companies announcing performance. We recently posted about the boon to desktop PC sales for 2014 -- recovering nearly 6% of a projected 7% decline -- and now it looks like Intel has similarly good news for the PC industry.

The semiconductor giant has reported 2Q14 revenue as $13.8B -- an 8% hike over 2Q13's $12.8B -- netting a $2.8B profit. Intel's quarterly profits have risen 40% over its 2Q13 reports of $2B. Promisingly for the world of PCs, Intel showed an $8.7B revenue in its PC Client Group (including desktops), a 6% increase over last year.

ASUS recently predicted a boon in desktop PC and AIO shipments in the face of a slowdown in tablet sales, further amplified by the discontinuation of Windows XP support. With the second quarter of the year effectively behind us, the International Data Corporation (IDC) has reported that the desktop PC business has declined at a “markedly better” pace than previously forecasted.

In the most recent update to the DFC Intelligence Forecast for the games industry, the metrics group notes that a $36 billion industry growth to $100 billion is expected by 2018. This is right in line with what we've been told previously, but new statistics suggest that thirty percent of the entire games industry will be owned by the mobile gaming space.

2013 saw the explosion of mobile gaming, bringing in $10 billion in total revenue from the industry's 1.17 billion gamers. The intelligence firm projects a $19 billion mobile growth -- a total of $29 billion -- by 2018, comprising 30% of total game software revenue. This expansion doesn't come without its growing pains, though: