Gaming News - Page 105

Microsoft reveals more details about how much money Xbox Game Pass actually makes.

Over the last few years, we've pieced together a lot of information and data about Microsoft and its video games division. In October 2022, we uncovered that Xbox Game Pass on console made $2.9 billion in revenue in 2021, as per a regulatory document. Shortly after, Xbox gaming CEO Phil Spencer said Game Pass made around 10-15% of content and services revenues, leading to our own adjusted calculations.

Now Microsoft has delivered concrete data on Game Pass revenues. According to a newly published Xbox slide deck from the FTC v Microsoft federal case, Xbox Game Pass generated an average of $9.26 per subscription. We know that there were around ~25 million Xbox Game Pass subscribers as of January 2022, so Xbox Game Pass may have generated around $231.5 million in revenue for the month of April 2022.

New court documents in the FTC v Microsoft case reveal in-depth figures from Xbox's secretive data vault.

Days ago, the Northern California District Court uploaded a series of new exhibits to the recent Microsoft-Activision merger federal trial. One of these documents has an eye-opening view of revenue metrics that the games division typically keeps under wraps.

Exhibit PX1240 is a slide deck of an internal gaming review from April 2022. While nearly all of the slides in the deck have been redacted and blacked out, two particular slides (pages 49 and 50) have been left untouched. In these slides, Microsoft reveals useful KPIs (key performance indicators) like MAUs (monthly active users), monetized users, and gaming hours. These numbers are much more important to Microsoft now that it has shifted towards a service-oriented and subscription-first business model.

A newly-published email chain reveals that Microsoft consulted with Matthew Ball, a leading force behind the emerging metaverse trend, to help with its growing Game Pass subscription.

California district courts recently uploaded a new batch of exhibits, documents, and files from the FTC v Microsoft federal case. These documents have shown that The Elder Scrolls 6 will be exclusive to Xbox and PC, highlighted Microsoft's initial plans to propose an acquisition of SEGA, and some interesting tidbits about Game Pass.

According to exhibit PX1087, Microsoft hired metaverse pioneer and ex-Prime Video strategist Matthew Ball to help solidify plans and ideas around Xbox Game Pass. The email chain reveals that Ball wrote an expansive 13,000-word white paper for Microsoft that discusses subscription models in length.

Bethesda's next Elder Scrolls RPG will skip PlayStation, new court documents from Microsoft indicate.

Microsoft apparently has no plans to release The Elder Scrolls VI on PlayStation consoles and may keep the massively-anticipated RPG exclusive to Xbox and PC. The latest evidence of TESVI's exclusivity is found in a recently uploaded court document in the FTC v Microsoft case (23-cv-02880).

In the document, Microsoft's legal counsel submits a table (PX0027-004) with upcoming first-party Xbox games. The table is meant to illustrate how Microsoft handled games on a post-acquisition basis and that the company did not instantly make specific titles exclusive to Xbox after buyouts. To prove a point, Microsoft's lawyers focus on ZeniMax games, and The Elder Scrolls VI is listed on the table with a "expected 2026 or later" release timing and an apparent confirmation that the upcoming RPG will not be on PlayStation.

The past couple of weeks we are starting to see rumors swirl about the Nintendo Switch 2, with many of these rumors pointing toward a massive performance upgrade.

The rumors came from select developers that were reportedly pulled into a private room by Nintendo employees and showcased the hardware that will be running the Nintendo Switch 2. The developers suggested that Nintendo's highly anticipated console will come with massive performance upgrades, which will put it much closer to the performance of Microsoft and Sony's consoles.

The jump in performance can be attributed to the rumored adoption of a NVIDIA Ampere GPU, which pushed select titles such as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild to 4K at 60FPS. This wild purported leap in performance has now been backed up by internal Activision emails that have been made public by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

Starfield is already getting attention from the modding community despite the game not having the official mod tools released.

Starfield has been out for a little over two weeks now, and despite the lack of official modding tools, modders are rolling out mods in various forms, with one being the implementation of Stormtroopers. Now, we are starting to see mods surface that fix some of the most annoying aspects in Starfield. For instance, players have always wanted to be able to create a ship without size limitations. Vanilla Starfield ship construction is limited to 40 meters long and wide, which isn't enough if a player wants to build any large ship from Star Wars.

Thanks to NexusMods user AccursedPrism, players can now enjoy Starfield ship creation without a size limit, as the new mod overrides the default limitation of 40 meters and adds the following options - 60 meters, 80 meters, and 4/5 kilometers. The sizes below 100 meters are considered to be "safe", which indicates minimal or hardly any performance issues or in-game bugs. However, 4/5 kilometers will likely have a massive impact on performance/cause bugs. Check out this mod here.

As with many large-scale AAA game releases, there's a very vocal contingent that looks at all aspects of a release to see if there's anything "woke" going on - elements that promote or otherwise cater to a diversity of players. With the release of Starfield earlier in the month, the Steam forums for the game were briefly overtaken by conversation and toxic commentary about the game including an option to select a pronoun for your character.

In what amounts to maybe 15 seconds of screen time (text) for a game with well over 200 hours of content, the decision to let players choose from He/Him, She/Her, or They/Them was too much to handle - or a bridge too far. This is for a game set hundreds of years in the future, where They/Them makes a lot of sense to include, simply from a setting perspective.

As the discourse on the wokeness of Starfield has died down, and that YouTuber rant on the subject has become a meme, one of the most popular modding sites on the planet - NexusMods - has decided to remove a mod that removed the option to select pronouns in the game.

The Unity controversy continues as the games company issues a new statement on its controversial new runtime fees.

Outside of the back-to-back hit game releases, 2023 has been a strange year for gaming. We've seen the United States government take on Microsoft's $68.7 billion Activision merger, the closure of Saints Row developer Volition, and we've also seen thousands of game developers being laid off despite companies reporting billion-dollar earnings. Now Unity has made one of the most controversial business decisions in the entire history of the industry and alienated practically its entire customer base.

In a quest to finally become profitable, Unity made a radical new policy: Game devs and distributors would be charged money on a per-install basis for specific popular games. The move was universally hated, and led to Unity issued several PR responses. The firm even evacuated its offices due to a death threat. While the heat is still very much on Unity, the company has now released another statement on the runtime fees.

NVIDIA's GeForce NOW is widely considered one of the best cloud gaming platforms in terms of latency, visual fidelity, and overall experience - it takes the games you own across platforms like Steam. It gives you the ability to stream them without the need for high-end PC hardware.

And it's the latter that has made the GeForce NOW Ultimate for USD 19.99 a month tier impressive because it gives you access to GeForce RTX 4080 hardware to stream and run games with DLSS 3 technology, NVIDIA Reflex, real-time ray-tracing, and all in 4K. The visual fidelity for cloud gaming doesn't get any better.

And with that, NVIDIA has confirmed that Starfield is available to play - as part of the service move to include Xbox Game Pass and first-party Xbox titles as part of its line-up of supported games. Starfield on GeForce NOW running on a GeForce RTX 4080 can push higher than 60fps performance using the Ultra spec with AMD's FSR 2 upscaling. And with free trials for both GeForce NOW and PC Game Pass available, you can jump in to try it out for yourself.

It might be hard to believe, but Grand Theft Auto V turns 10 years old today.

There's really nothing quite like Grand Theft Auto V. It really is a best-selling titan. Despite the fact that it was released at the tail-end of the Xbox 360 generation, the game still managed to sell over 11 million copies in 24 hours and make over $1 billion in sales within three days after launch. The game has gone on to make over 8x that in the last decade.

While Rockstar is celebrating GTA V's 10-year anniversary with new Grand Theft Auto Online content, we decided to take a look at the various milestones that Rockstar Games and Take-Two Interactive have achieved through GTA V's continued support.