Disney now sits on the world's biggest treasure trove of franchises and IPs, from Marvel to 20th Century Fox properties and Star Wars. Now it wants developers to make new games based on all of them.

At DICE 2020, Disney sent a clear message to game developers: Its wealth of IPs are now open for new game adaptations. The billion-dollar titan wants to leverage its massive franchise catalog to create interactive entertainment experiences with innovative and re-imagined characters and scenarios. Essentially Disney wants game devs to breathe new life into IPs like Aliens, Predator, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and a lot more.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, who was in attendance at the 2020 DICE Summit, Disney's interactive VP Sean Shoptaw extended a warm welcome to game developers.

Today Square Enix revealed Final Fantasy 7 Remake's opening cinematic sequence, and it's absolutely enchanting.

There's nothing quite like a Final Fantasy cinematic. Square Enix has set the bar to such a high pedigree with its cinematics that few developers hold up, and that's especially true today with the new FF7 Remake footage. The opener brings back all the chills of the 1997 RPG classic, transporting gamers back in time to those days when demo discs still came with magazines and you had to buy guidebooks to unlock all the secrets.

The graphics in the cinematic are just absolutely mesmerizing...and when that logo pops up over the steampunk city of Midgar, complete with the musical score, it hits you right in the feels. The lighting effects, the visuals, the atmospheric wizardry, the colors...everything comes together to blow your mind just as the original game did back in '97.

Today Remedy confirmed its next game is now in the critical pre-production phases, which comes before principal development.

Remedy, like all independent developers, works on many games at once. Even as Control was being made, a small internal team of Remedy devs was working on a new project that may or may not be set in the Control IP. We knew about this additional game as early as 2018 and then Remedy reinforced the news in 2019.

Now in its recent earnings report, the studio says the unannounced game is currently entering pre-production. This means the project isn't quite in full development, but it's gearing up to that point, and should be developed with Remedy's Northlight games engine.

Eric Barone aka ConcernedApe has one of the top-selling indie games of all time, but he's not done yet.

Stardew Valley creator Eric Barone is currently working on two new projects, and one of them is set in the franchise's beloved pixelated universe. But it won't be a farming simulator (exciting news!). The other is still quite a mystery.

"Yes, I'm actually working on a couple of new projects. One takes place in the world of Stardew Valley, but is not a farming game. The other, I'm not 100% sure about the world yet, but it will tie into Stardew Valley in some way," Barone said on Twitter.

Remedy Entertainment may be exploring other platforms for its inventive new game Control (check our our review here), possibly including next-gen systems.

Control could be coming to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X with a dedicated port or update, Remedy teased in its latest earnings filing. The developer says Control is ripe for expansion to new platforms, which doesn't explicitly confirm next-gen systems, but doesn't rule them out either. It's also possible Control will come to service platforms like Stadia or even Nintendo's fast-growing Switch with its 52 million install base.

Remedy makes it clear the team is currently optimizing and gearing up for next-gen systems. The studio has already tremendously evolved its potent Northlight games engine to support new features like ray tracing, a new transformative environment effect that both the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X's GPUs will support.

Remedy reveals an interesting revenue split for every copy of Control sold, further illustrating what it's like to be an independent developer.

As an indie dev, Remedy has to rely on costly deals with publishers to get their games made. The team's new game Control is a big example of this. To get Control made, Remedy signed a substantial multi-year deal with publisher 505 Games. In exchange for 20 years publishing exclusivity on Control, 505 Games would distribute, market, and inject millions into Control's development. There were other stipulations though, like revenue sharing, and now we know more info.

According to Remedy's latest financial report, the developers keep less than half of the money generated from every purchase of Control. Remedy receives royalties from every game sale, and in 2019, the company earned 17.84 million Euros in revenue, up 63%, driven by these sales royalties.

Square Enix recently showed off a ton of new screenshots for Final Fantasy 7 Remake, but not all of them were awesome. Some were pretty terrifying.

Amid the new wave of awesome high-def FF7 Remake screenshots of Aerith's spellcasting skills, Tifa's boxing prowess, and Cloud's hack-and-slash chaos were two glimpses into what nightmares are made of. The new carbuncle and chocobo chick summon redesigns are just bizarre and should be remedied ASAP.

These new summons are pre-order incentives--you get the chocobo chick from any pre-order, and carbuncle from the digital deluxe on PS Store--that have immensely bizarre foreheads. For some reason, Square Enix has stretched their heads out to freakish proportions that'd make Beldar Conehead proud. Nearly every fan is uncomfortable with the redesigns (myself included).

If you are a Rick and Morty fan, then you are no doubt upset with how long you have had to wait for the second half of the awesome season four. But what if I told you it was just around the corner?

Right now, Rick and Morty are halfway through their fourth season, and before the year ticked over to 2020, Adult Swim announced that they would be going on a break only to return with the second half of season four. Fans have waited quite some time for that second half, and during that waiting period, Adult Swim posted to their Twitter page requesting "patience".

While patience is running thin for fans, Adult Swim did say that the second half would return sometime in 2020 and gave no specific date - so it's like they have lied. It's assumed that there have been some production issues with the second half of the season, which can be understandable if fans are informed. So when will the second half release? According to "sources" close to TheBuzzPaper, the second half of the season is expected to release in "April".

We have been hearing about how Robert Pattinson was geared up to take on the role of the Caped Crusader, and now we have video proof.

According to a report by Deadline, Robert Pattinson is seen wearing the bat suit in red-saturated camera test released by The Batman director, Matt Reeves. The music that is heard throughout the video is a score done by Michael Giacchino, which adds a certain dark tone to Bruce Wayne's alter ego.

The camera test was shared on Reeve's Twitter account, and fans were quick to judge what they saw. Not-so-surprisingly reactions were very divided with many fans comparing Ben Affleck's Batman in Batman V Superman and Justice League, to what they are now seeing in Reeve's design with Robert Pattinson. If you didn't know, The Batman by Reeves will concentrate on batman's known trait as the world's greatest detective.

Phishing scams are currently one of the most common ways to scam someone, and while you'd probably think that it would never happen to you, it just happened to the Puerto Rico government.

In a new report by the Associated Press, the Puerto Rico government transferred funds equating to over $2.6 million dollars to a phony bank account through a phishing scam. The incident was discovered just this past week, and at the moment, government officials are working with the FBI to recover the stolen funds.

So how did this happen? According to Ruben Rivera, who is the finance director of Puerto Rico's Industrial Development Company, the department received an email that said that a bank account that was tied to government payments needed changing. In response to the email, officials transferred the funds into the changed bank account, which they later discovered was fraudulent.