Gaming News - Page 321

A Cryptopunk NFT has sold for nearly $24 million, proving the speculative market is extremely lucrative.

Chain.com CEO Deepak Thapliyal just purchased CryptoPunk#5822 for $23.6 million, or 8,000 ETH, making it the most expensive NFT in the CryptoPunk collection. This is also the fourth largest NFT purchase of all time, and dwarfs the previous CryptoPunk sales record, CryptoPunk#7523's sale for $11.8 million in 2021.

Data from DappRadar notes that the CryptoPunk line generated over $31 million in NFT sales in the week from February 7 - February 13.

Cyberpunk 2077's PS5 and Xbox Series X/S release date could finally be announced tomorrow.

Gamers who have been waiting for the definitive, fixed version of Cyberpunk 2077 on consoles may get some good news soon. CD Projekt today announced a special Cyberpunk stream will go live tomorrow, February 15 at 4PM CET (10AM EST) on the official CDPR Twitch channel.

The developer previously said Cyberpunk 2077's next-gen release would launch in Q1 2022. It's already February, so the game could still release across the rest of the month and the full month of March. CDPR also confirmed CP2077's PS5 and Xbox Series X/S launch would be free for existing PS4 and Xbox One owners, and rightly so given the game's near-unplayable launch condition.

Nintendo may delay its next-gen Switch Pro or Switch 4K due to the ongoing chip shortage.

Now is not a good time to release games hardware. 2023 may not be much better, either. Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, and a multitude of hardware makers are facing a worldwide chip shortage. Supply lines are constrained and production costs have risen as a result, and hardware is more expensive to make. This typically leads to two things: lower production volume and lower profits.

Meanwhile the gaming market is booming. The pandemic has kicked off a new level of hardware and software spending, and consumer hardware demand has been voracious throughout the shortage. It's not an issue of gamers wanting to buy hardware. It's an issue of companies being able to produce hardware, ship it, and then make enough of a profit on the hardware to make it necessarily worth it--or at least maintain according values.

Nintendo Switch is currently sold at a profit, but that margin is being lowered by the worldwide chip shortage.

Nintendo CEO Shuntaro Furukawa tells investors that ongoing semiconductor supply issues are slowly eating into Switch hardware profits. Supply and demand economics have raised prices of critical components, and the Switch in particular is becoming more expensive to manufacture, produce, and distribute.

In a recent Q3'22 Q&A session, Furukawa says profits made from Switch console unit production have been dipping gradually throughout the chip shortage. The CEO confirms Nintendo is prepared for the profit hit and will maintain its 23 million unit production forecast through FY22, but he also notes that next year's FY23 period could be impacted to an even greater degree.

Nintendo has no plans to support the metaverse, gaming's nascent and often-confusing new trend.

Despite properly being able to explain it, Ubisoft, EA, Bandai Namco and even Square Enix are gung-ho for the metaverse. Nintendo, who is typically shrewd, conservative, and studiously careful in its adoption of video game trends, isn't ready to help trailblaze the new NFT-laden digital frontier. Instead, Nintendo will bide its time as it has done so often in the past.

In a recent Q3'22 earnings call, Nintendo CEO Shuntaro Furukawa was asked outright by an investor if Nintendo will support NFTs and the metaverse. There was no comment about NFTs (Nintendo stands to make a killing from its treasure trove of instantly-recognizable IPs at the cost of its wholesome brand image) but Furukawa did discuss the metaverse.

Nintendo is embracing more value-oriented subscription models in an effort to sell recurring services and cement players in digital ecosystems.

With its selection of retro classics and online play for $19.99/year, the base Nintendo Switch Online is already one of the most valuable subscriptions on the market. It's a cost-effective sub that allows Nintendo to lease its valuable legacy library to gamers who must perpetually buy-to-play over time. Now the games-maker is adding more value to its more expensive Switch Online expansion pass tier.

The $49.99 a year Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack tier was somewhat of a tough sell at launch. For a 150% price increase, the subscription included N64 games, Genesis games (yes, really), and the base Switch Online games and content. Nintendo is now adding value to the more expensive tier by leasing in-game content, too.

Take-Two expects this year to deliver its third consecutive year of earnings in excess of $3 billion.

FY23 will be another year of impressive for Take-Two Interactive. While exact forecasts haven't been outlined yet, the publisher is confident it will make $3 billion+ in net bookings driven by a number of new games including Grand Theft Auto V Expanded & Enhanced, NBA 2K23, Tiny Tina's Wonderlands, and Midnight Suns (although these games won't release in the FY23 timeline, which is from April 2022 - March 2023, a portion of these games' revenues will be deferred and carried over to the next fiscal year).

Thanks to these games and the ongoing earnings from services like GTA Online and Red Dead Online, Fiscal Year 2023 would mark Take-Two's third consecutive year of earning over $3 billion in net bookings, an operating metric that includes microtransactions, full game sales (digital and physical), and earnings from live service games sold during a specific period.

Take-Two Interactive made record earnings from microtransactions and DLC during Holiday 2021.

GTA parent company Take-Two Interactive recently reported a new five-year Q3 high for in-game spending. According to data provided by the publisher, Take-Two generated roughly $551 million in recurrent consumer spending, a metric that includes microtransactions as well as DLC and expansions.

These earnings represent a new five-year high for recurrent consumer spending in both net revenues ($551 million) and net bookings ($494 million). The numbers punctuate previous holiday records set in 2021 and show the long-lasting growth value in Take-Two's live service offerings.

Take-Two Interactive plans to release up to 62 games by March 2024, but some of these games could be delayed or even cancelled.

GTA publisher Take-Two has an absolutely massive release slate on the horizon. The company wants to release 62 games from now until FY2024, which ends on March 31, 2022. The slate, alongside the accretive Zynga purchase, is expected to supercharge annual earnings to the effect of $9 billion in combined revenues (14% CAGR). This fueled our prediction that GTA 6 could release by March 2024, and analysts seem to agree with our assessment.

Even still, Take-Two's slate isn't set in stone. In fact one of the games included in the release has already been cancelled--Volt, a game from Mafia dev Hangar 13, was cancelled with a $53 million write-off.

Horizon Forbidden West is now pre-loading PlayStation 5 or PlayStation 4 right now, and now we know how much SSD storage space you'll need on the PS5 to install it.

According to PlayStation Game Size, the PS5 version of Horizon Forbidden West weighs in at close to 100GB for gamers in Europe, coming in at 97GB. US gamers will have a download size of 86.5GB, while gamers in Japan will be enjoying the smallest download for Horizon Forbidden West clocking in at 82.7GB.

Why is the EU version of Horizon Forbidden West so big? Language packs. There are many languages throughout the EU, hence the download size is between 15GB bigger (from the JP version) or 10.5GB bigger (than the US version) of the game.