Gaming News - Page 120

Rockstar's best-selling Grand Theft Auto franchise has now generated over $8.4 billion in revenues since GTA V's release.

Take-Two Interactive's latest Q1'24 financials give key updates on the company's performance, including refreshed figures for the Grand Theft Auto series. According to the data, the GTA franchise has made over $8.4 billion in total revenues since Grand Theft Auto V's launch in September 2013, driven primarily by GTA V game sales and in-game spending on GTA Online microtransactions.

In Q1 Fiscal Year 2024, the GTA series made $175 million, primarily driven by GTA V and GTA Online. While this is on the lower side of earnings and represents the lowest GTA revenues for a Q1 period in the last 4 years, Take-Two executives still believe the earnings beat their expectations.

Microsoft has halved its Xbox Game Pass promotion to just 14 days, the newly updated subscription website has confirmed.

Shortly before the FTC lost its federal case against the Microsoft-Activision merger, Microsoft increased the price of its Game Pass subscription; Game Pass Ultimate was raised $2 to $16.99/month, whereas Game Pass on console was raised to $10.99. The price hike skewed the Xbox LIVE Gold conversion ratios, and also brought back the popular $1 trial of Game Pass Ultimate.

Now a few weeks after the introduction of the promo, Microsoft has quietly changed the promotional period for the $1 trial. Users can now only get 14 days of Xbox Game Pass for $1 instead of the full 30 days that was previously offered.

Fancy an Assassin's Creed marathon later this week? There'll be more than enough to keep you busy this coming weekend as Ubisoft is offering free access to five games from the franchise.

They are as follows: Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, Assassin's Creed II, Assassin's Creed Brotherhood, and Assassin's Creed Revelations (available in The Ezio Collection on consoles).

Those games will be free to play from August 10 to August 14, on PC, Xbox, and PlayStation, although the exact availability will vary depending on what platform you're using.

The latest NVIDIA GeForce Game Ready Driver 536.99 release is here, adding DLSS 2 support to Baldur's Gate 3 to deliver impressive performance gains on GeForce GPUs. The worldwide RPG phenomenon from developer Larian Studios is one of the biggest PC releases 2023, hitting an all-time peak concurrent player count on Steam of over 800,000.

NVIDIA notes that GeForce driver support for the game has been there since the game first hit Early Access three years ago, with the latest GeForce Game Ready Driver featuring "additional optimizations and enhancements" to improve performance. Baldur's Gate supports NVIDIA DLAA and DLSS 2, with the latter delivering some impressive 4K results - up to a 93% boost on average for the GeForce RTX 40 Series.

To showcase Baldur's Gate 3 with DLSS 2 enabled, NVIDIA provided a 4K benchmark graph of the game running with max settings using the DLSS 'Performance' mode. And we see every GPU from the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti and up getting a sizable boost, with the mid-range and lower-tier GeForce RTX 40 Series cards seeing the biggest benefit.

Rockstar Games parent company Take-Two Interactive reiterates that Fiscal Year 2025 will deliver a major upward curve with significantly high earnings results.

A bit ago, Take-Two Interactive gave us clues on when GTA 6 could release. The company potentially telegraphed Grand Theft AUto VI's launch in its earnings forecast for the upcoming fiscal year. Take-Two expects to make an incredible $8 billion in net bookings in Fiscal Year 2025, which is from April 1, 2024 through March 31, 2025.

This represents a massive $2.5 billion+ increase in net bookings over the current-year projections. Analysts speculate that Grand Theft Auto 6 will be the main driver for this spike in revenues, however it's worth noting that Take-Two currently has a 52-game pipeline of titles that it expects to release by the end of Fiscal Year 2026.

Take-Two Interactive management comments on the pros of adding catalog games to subscriptions like PlayStation Plus, saying that these services offer an economic advantage.

While Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick doesn't agree with the Xbox Game Pass day-and-date model, that doesn't mean that the publisher is anti-subscription. Quite the opposite is true: We've seen NBA 2K games regularly show up on PlayStation Plus, and Grand Theft Auto V was just included on Xbox Game Pass for the third time.

Now a recent Q1'24 earnings call, Take-Two Interactive President Karl Slatoff comments on the advantages of adding catalog games into subscription services, saying that the company wouldn't do this unless it offered a "significant economic advantage."

Despite big successes from Nintendo and Sony, Take-Two Interactive will continue to be very selective on adaptations of its hit franchises.

It may be a long time before we ever see a Grand Theft Auto movie. In a recent earnings call, Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick expressed his thoughts on TV shows and films based on video games.

Zelnick is mostly wary about expanding games into new mediums because of the incredibly high risks involved, but that being said, Take-Two has still licensed two franchises to film, including Borderlands and BioShock.

Grand Theft Auto V has now sold-in, or shipped, 185 million copies worldwide, Take-Two Interactive has announced.

Today, Take-Two Interactive announced strong Q1'24 earnings and gave key updates on game sales figures. According to the latest report, Rockstar Games' landmark Grand Theft Auto V has now sold-in over 185 million copies across three console generations--Gen7, Gen8, and more recently on Gen9 with the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S versions.

This milestone has also pushed total Grand Theft Auto franchise sales past 405 million lifetime-to-date.

The new Super Mario Bros. movie caused sales of Nintendo's Mario games to jump.

Following the huge success of the star-studded film, Nintendo has enjoyed a strong rise in Super Mario game sales on its Switch handheld-console hybrid. Not only has the film helped rise Nintendo's IP royalty revenue to an incredibly high $131 million, but the movie is also sparking more game and hardware sales for Nintendo's Switch ecosystem.

According to sales data released by Nintendo, the Switch saw a strong 3.91 million shipments worldwide, with the bulk of consumers opting for the more expensive OLED model. This helped Nintendo reach a new all-time Q1 high in yen earnings. It's especially noteworthy that all of the models in the Nintendo Switch family are sold at a profit.

Valve's Steam Deck comes with 16GB of RAM, and you can't upgrade that - at least not in theory, but where there's a will...

Balázs Triszka achieved this feat just as you'd expect, using a BGA rework station, desoldering and removing the existing RAM modules inside the Steam Deck, and replacing them with beefier ones.

While this is clearly a trickier prospect than simply upgrading the storage on the Steam Deck, the modder notes on Twitter (as spotted by OC3D) that the task isn't that difficult "if you have the skills needed for bga rework" (naturally), adding that "there is no glue under the chips."