Gaming News - Page 110

As part of the return of QuakeCon, which is one of the world's largest in-person PC LAN gaming events, Bethesda and id Software announced that Quake II has been remastered and enhanced and is available now on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch, in addition to Xbox Game Pass. So yeah, id Software's classic first-person shooter from 1997 is playable on all platforms.

And it's packed with goodies, with the original campaign and its two expansions (The Reckoning and Ground Zero), plus the addition of a brand-new expansion from MachineGames aptly titled Call of the Machine and a remastered Quake II 64 port for the Nintendo 64 version of the game included as a nice little freebie.

As far as re-releases go, this is up there, as Bethesda and id Software confirm that this enhanced edition includes improvements to gameplay, enhanced AI, plus improved visuals in the form of more dynamic shadows and lighting.

Sony's operating profit for its PlayStation video games business drops again as the company continues paying towards the $3.6 billion acquisition of Bungie, as well as costs of games development.

Sony Corp's latest fiscal year earnings report shows record growth in PlayStation's Q1 net sales, but operating profit has slid -7% in to 3.6 billion yen. Based on foreign exchange conversion rates provided by Sony, this represents a -35% decrease on a USD basis to $263 million and marks the lowest quarterly operating income since Fiscal Year 2017.

PlayStation's operating income has dropped significantly partly because of the Bungie acquisition. In 2022, Sony acquired Bungie for $3.6 billion, but instead of being paid all at once, the purchase price is being expensed over multiple quarters.

Sony expects the PlayStation games division to generate a record-breaking 4.170 trillion yen in net sales for the fiscal year 2023, a new all-time high for the video games industry's top platform-holder.

On the heels of new record earnings of $5.63 billion for its Games & Network Services segment, Sony has upwardly revised its total-year earnings for the PlayStation business. According to its Q1'FY23 earnings report, Sony now expects its gaming branch to generate 4.170 trillion yen in net sales, which equates to about $32 billion in today's yen to USD conversion rates.

While it's worth noting this value will likely fluctuate and change over time as foreign exchange rates ebb and flow on a quarterly basis, Sony does still expect Fiscal Year 2023 to handily beat previous record, which was set in Fiscal Year 2022 with 3.644 trillion yen, by some 526 billion yen. On a USD basis, Sony's PlayStation gaming division made about $26.917 billion in Fiscal Year 2022.

Sony's PlayStation games division kicks off a new fiscal year by breaking a new sales milestone.

Sony just reported its Q1 FY23 earnings results, and PlayStation gaming has grown to new record levels. The company managed to set a new all-time Q1 sales record by delivering $5.634 billion in sales revenues for the period on a converted yen to USD basis. Q1'23 does not make an exceptionally high record, though, and only beats the previous high Q1 periods (Q1'20 and Q1'21) by about $6-10 million.

The Q1 growth was much more pronounced in yen, where Sony recorded a +28% increase in net sales (thanks partly to a +40.6 billion yen impact).

Activision's dev teams have outlined what Modern Warfare 2 content will carry forward to Modern Warfare 3.

MW3 will be an extension of MW2, indicating a potential cross-game future for the Call of Duty franchise. Reports indicate that MW3 was originally envisioned as a kind of expansion lacking a premium experience, but morphed into a fully-fledged $69.99 premium game as Treyarch and Infinity Ward were conscripted to assist Sledgehammer Games with MW3's development.

Although MW3 is technically it's own separate game, there will be a lot of carry-over. Well, carry-forward is more apt. This is a great win for gamers, who won't have to re-buy content or start from scratch in MW3.

Humble Bundle's latest Decades of Horror bundle packs in some must-have Resident Evil games for a low price.

Humble is bringing the savings on legacy catalog titles from Capcom, packing some great action-packed Resident Evil games. The deal offers 12 games total, split into four different pricing tiers. Depending on how much Resident Evil you want, the best deal seems to be the $20 bundle that packs in greats like Resident Evil 2 REmake alongside Resident Evil 7.

There's also a the $35 bundle which includes everything in the $20 bundle with the addition of the excellent and super entertaining Resident Evil Village, a game that stands as one of the best Halloween games you could possibly play.

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.