Gaming News - Page 123

Xbox Game Pass is more than just a subscription--it's the foundation of the entire Xbox gaming business model.

At TweakTown, I've talked a lot about Game Pass and how it has transformed the video games industry. The introduction of Game Pass as the first multi-game content library subscription service (as the FTC refers to it) was a pivotal disruption point in gaming. The history of the world's largest entertainment industry is filled with disruption points.

First there were coin-op arcade machines (aka the original microtransactions), then the advent of the home console which brought the arcade to your living room.

Diablo 4 has seen some odd stuff cropping up from players - the recent fuss around the 'secret cow level' springs to mind - and now there's another outlandish theory about the game revolving around rats.

This one is simple - follow the rats, and they'll lead you to the good loot. We kid you not.

As PC Gamer reports, one player planted this seed of an idea, and there's been a huge flurry of chatter online about it since.

In the recent FTC v Microsoft evidentiary hearing, Activision CEO Bobby Kotick revealed key metrics around the mega-popular Call of Duty franchise.

Over the past 20 years, the $31 billion Call of Duty franchise has amassed significant popularity across all PC and console. But in just 4 years, mobile has become far and away the largest platform for the shooter series. COD Mobile is not only a revenue powerhouse with over $1.5 billion earned in direct free-to-play monetization (as of 2021), but the mobile version has also captured more than half of the total Call of Duty playerbase.

According to testimony from Activision CEO Bobby Kotick in Day 4 of the FTC v Microsoft evidentiary hearing, 51% of total Call of Duty users are playing on mobile devices. It was also revealed that Call of Duty has 70 million daily active users. That's more than Roblox, one of the most highly-engaged games on the planet; at the BIG Festival 2023 event, it was revealed that Roblox had 66 million daily active users.

Tim Cain, who created and served as lead programmer on the Fallout series and co-directed The Outer Worlds, says that Obsidian's newer spacefaring RPG was created with mainstream and casual RPG gamers in mind.

The Outer Worlds is a fantastic first-person shooter/RPG that builds off of Obsidian's strengths from Fallout New Vegas while establishing a new IP. The game has pretty much everything gamers knew and loved about New Vegas and the modern Fallout games, but with the distinct Obsidian look and feel.

This was by design. According to The Outer Worlds co-director Tim Cain, the sci-fi RPG was meant to cater towards a more mainstream audience. In a recent video on his channel, Cain talks about developing good game settings and how this advice pertains to The Outer Worlds...and he also says that the main elevator pitch of The Outer Worlds was "Fallout meets Firefly."

The Witcher 3 might be an old game now - it's coming on for a decade since it came out, in fact - but it can still look stunning with the right mods, as a new video has brought to our attention.

This comes from Digital Dreams (as flagged up by Wccftech), with the game carrying over a hundred mods to make it look this good.

That includes the 'beyond all limits' ray tracing ReShade preset, and the Immersive Lighting Mod version 2.2 - the latter of which does a lot of heavy lifting in ramping up the visuals.

With the FTC case looking to block Microsoft's planned acquisition of Activision Blizzard wrapping up and a decision expected any day now, which will determine if the deal goes ahead or not, a treasure trove of info related to Xbox, PlayStation, and titles like Call of Duty and Minecraft has emerged.

We learned that 200-plus million dollar budgets for exclusive AAA titles like Horizon Forbidden West and The Last of Us Part II for PlayStation consoles rivals big-budget movies. We learned Minecraft makes four times as much money on the Switch as on Xbox. And we learned that Xbox's Phil Spencer decided to make all future Bethesda titles exclusive to PC and Xbox - seemingly starting with Starfield.

But this is all 2023 news related to the current console war between Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony; what about the mid-to-late 1990s when it was all about Nintendo, Sega, and Sony, and consoles like the Nintendo 64, Sega Saturn, and the fresh-on-the-scene Sony PlayStation. Well, a massive 272-page PDF of classified Sega of America documents from the era has made its way online with some cool revelations (via Sega Retro).

A new report from analyst firm Newzoo concludes that console gamers are more likely to go from players to payers.

Console gaming has more payers than mobile and PC gaming, a new report from Newzoo indicates. Based on the report, which measured a size of 59,040 gamers in a global weighted average across 36 markets, roughly 57% of people who played video games in the last 6 months actually spent money on them. This implies that around 43% of gamers, or over 25,000 people, play free-to-play titles and don't actually spend money on games.

The data is part of Newzoo's robust Global Gamer Study analysis, which can be found here.

Microsoft's Xbox games division helped Bethesda unlock the full potential for Starfield.

Following the Microsoft-ZeniMax buyout deal for $7.5 billion, ZeniMax is now a limited-integration company within Xbox, but that doesn't mean that Microsoft's game dev teams and technology specialists haven't helped with Starfield's development. In fact, Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty confirmed that Xbox has been involved with Starfield's development since early 2022, with Xbox's ATG (Advanced Technology Group) assisting Bethesda Game Studios with various console-level optimizations.

In a recent interview with KFG, Bethesda Game Studios' Todd Howard says that Xbox's help has allowed the studio to reach its ambitions with Starfield. Howard responds to the pressures of Starfield essentially being a big proving point for the Xbox first-party games division, and how Microsoft's assistance helped accelerate Starfield's development and allow new improvements like the upgraded Creation Engine 2 optimizations on Xbox platforms. These ambitious new features include things like volumetric fog, the new global illumination lighting systems, physics effects, and more.

ZeniMax head of publishing Pete Hines is not confident Starfield could still release in September 2023 if it was not exclusive to Xbox.

During the FTC v Microsoft federal court case, we heard a lot about about exclusivity. It's a hot topic in the gaming world, particularly in the case of paying studios to skip Xbox--a practice that has earned Sony the designation as a "hostile" competitor against Microsoft.

Conversely, we also heard first-hand about the merits and benefits of exclusivity. These include upfront payments and royalty deals, closer access to console engineers, and, in ZeniMax's case, the ability to launch games more quickly.

The South African Competition Tribunal has approved the Microsoft-Activision merger without conditions.

Earlier this year, South Africa's trade regulator (SAC) recommended full approval of the $68.7 billion Microsoft-Activision on the grounds that it did not pose any significant threat to harm in the region's competition of the video games market. Today, the country's regulation tribunal, the SACT, has formally issued a decision to greenlight and approve the merger.

The regulatory tribunal has yet to publish a formal report on why it unconditionally approved the combination, but it could be similar to those published by other countries, including South Korea.