Gaming News - Page 100

Chris Metzen, the original creative director of the mega-popular World of Warcraft MMORPG, has officially returned to Blizzard Entertainment.

Today Blizzard announced some big news: Chris Metzen is back in a leadership role and will now oversee the entire Warcraft franchise. Metzen's current duty is to help shape the future of World of Warcraft as the game moves closer to its 10th anniversary.

"We are excited to share that Chris Metzen has taken on a full-time role as Executive Creative Director of the Warcraft universe. Right now, his main focus is supporting our World of Warcraft leadership in crafting the next generation of adventures," reads the announcement.

Respawn and EA are currently working on a third chapter of the popular Jedi video game franchise, actor Cameron Monaghan has confirmed.

Given the success of the first two games--Fallen Order and Survivor--it seemed inevitable that EA would greenlight a third chapter in the Jedi series. After all, the Jedi games were originally envisioned as a trilogy. Now it look like a third game is indeed happening.

At the Ocala Comic-Con 2023 show in Florida, Cameron Monaghan, who plays the lead hero Cal Kestis in the Jedi games, said that teams are currently "in the process" of making a third game. Neither EA nor Respawn have made announcements on a third game.

Starfield has a new patch out, but despite the patch notes promising a resolution for issues with upscaling, these are still present we're told.

Update 1.7.33 is out on Steam and Xbox for Starfield, and the following important graphics fix was applied according to the release notes:

"Addressed an upscaling issue that could cause textures to become blurry."

However, Wccftech reports that an upscaling fix is still required for Starfield.

Xbox Game Pass will likely see another price increase as time goes by, Microsoft gaming CEO Phil Spencer says.

Microsoft recently raised the prices of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and console--a meager $2 and $1 respective increase as compared to Sony's 35% price jump on PS Plus--but this hike might not be the last.

In an interview with Japanese gaming outlet Game Watch, Xbox chief Phil Spencer candidly says that another increase is "inevitable". As inflation increases, games are becoming much more expensive to make, and companies are spending more to develop titles (Horizon Forbidden West, for example, cost over $200 million to bring to market).

Cyberpunk 2077's big 2.0 update has landed, ahead of the launch of the incoming Phantom Liberty expansion (which arrives tomorrow), and there's good news for Steam Deck owners.

While it's true that Cyberpunk 2077 version 2.0 (with DLSS 3.5 on board) does up the system requirements for the game, it still remains perfectly playable on Valve's handheld.

This is according to testing conducted by German tech site Computerbase as flagged up by Tom's Hardware.

Microsoft expects Xbox Game Pass to deliver nearly $8 billion in revenue by 2030.

New leaks from Microsoft reveal ambitious plans for its $16 billion games division. The tech giant not only wants to make Xbox the top gaming console on the market, but it also wants to radically transform Xbox Game Pass into the leading and revenue-dominant gaming subscription available today.

Microsoft estimates that Xbox could by worth $36 billion by 2030, driven primarily by games sales, microtransactions, and purchases made on console, PC, and the cloud--in fact, Microsoft expects Xbox to make $16.9 billion from transactions by 2030, which is more than the total amount that Xbox makes today.

New details from the Xbox leaks show how much revenue that the top 10 biggest video games companies make from all platforms.

A bit ago, Microsoft accidentally leaked a wealth of valuable info about earnings, upcoming console plans, and games. It's the biggest leak in games history, and while Microsoft says that "a lot has changed" since the documents were new and present day, there's still some extremely interesting details that are worth exploring.

One of these details is a ranking of the top video games companies in terms of revenues. Microsoft's findings highlight some of the more cryptic data points in gaming, including both Google's and Apple's mobile gaming revenues. We've already seen how much money that Apple and Google make in 2022 and now we have figures for 2021.

Sony is doing all it can to persuade consumers to buy a PlayStation 5 console.

Sony wants to ship 25 million PlayStation 5 consoles by April 2024. This is the largest console shipment in the history of gaming, and is one of the most ambitious targets that PlayStation could hope to accomplish. There's just one issue: Consumers are paring back their spending due to economic constraints, and Sony isn't selling as many PS5s as it would like.

Sony has responded by pulling out the big guns. We've seen price promotions with the PS5's MSRP dropping down to $449 across multiple stores like Best Buy, Target, and Walmart. That may have not been enough. Sony wants to maximize its chances in hitting that 25 million shipment target, so now all new PlayStation 5 owners will get a free first-party game to complement their new console.

Embracer Group CEO Lars Wingefors tells investors an interesting factoid: The company spends more on paying platform fees than it does to develop its own games.

Now is a pretty challenging time for the Embracer Group. Like most publishers in 2023, Embracer is trying to stave off increased spending costs to offset what CEO Lars Wingefors calls "weaker consumer buying power". Making games is an expensive endeavor in the best of times, but today's economic situation makes things so dire that studios can almost close down soon after a game bombs on the market.

Platform fees are a big part of these higher costs. Publishers must pay specific amounts in order to have their games made available and sold on platforms like PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo, Steam, and the Epic Games Store, as well as the more standardized 30% royalty fee per every game sold on consoles, PC, and mobile (Steam and Epic are flexible on this, with Epic taking a 15% cut, and Steam reducing its cut based on how much revenue is made).

Microsoft's Phil Spencer has issued a statement that responds to the significant Xbox leaks.

Just days ago, Microsoft uploaded a series of documents to the online public FTC v Microsoft trial exhibit folder. Most of these reports were redacted and omitted key information as per usual, but one particular PDF file housed a series of unredacted files attached to the document. These files revealed a trove of highly confidential Xbox plans, secrets, data--everything from how much money Game Pass makes and Xbox's accountability margin to upcoming Xbox console plans and new controller ideas has been revealed.

The Xbox leak is the largest in gaming history, at least when it comes to the variety and sensitivity of the information revealed (the NVIDIA GeForce Now leak in 2021 did reveal more games, though).