Gaming News - Page 278

Nintendo's first-party giants continue to dominate the platforms best-seller charts.

Nintendo's recent full-year performance shows strong consistent earnings across both hardware and software sales. The company sold more games in FY22 than the record-breaking FY21 period, driven by continued momentum in key first-party hits.

Charting Nintendo's top 10 best-selling Switch games shows little deviation in games placement. The overall selection is the same as it was last quarter--Mario Kart 8 still leads the race and now has 45 million+ copies sold, followed up by surprise mega-hit Animal Crossing New Horizons, which is now at 38.6 million sales.

Surprise! Hideo Kojima is making a sequel to his successful, critically-acclaimed new IP Death Stranding.

Death Stranding 2 is apparently happening. Neither Kojima Productions nor Sony Interactive Entertainment have made a formal announcement, but actor Norman Reedus has once again spilled the beans.

In a recent interview with men's style site Leo Edit, Reedus said: "We just started the second one."

HITMAN 3 will receive new ray tracing abilities as well as AMD FSR and NVIDIA DLSS technologies in its upcoming v3.110 patch that drops on May 24.

The developer tweeted: "Ray Tracing and Adaptive Supersampling arrives for our PC players with patch 3.110 on May 24. Ray Tracing brings higher quality reflections and shadows to the World of Assassination through HITMAN 3".

We can expect ray traced reflections and shadows on the PC, as well as AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) 1.0 and NVIDIA Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) that will improve performance when ray tracing is enabled. The developer recommends using FSR or DLSS when enabling RT, too.

Call of Duty: Warzone had a huge update with its recent Operation Monarch event reveal, where King Kong and Godzilla kind of duke it out in Warzone.

It has been a mostly forgettable event, there's something a bit more fun here -- players have discovered you can easily farm some rather baller additional XP by attacking the testicles of King Kong -- yes, that's right: blow up Kong's balls and get XP.

They're not exactly his balls per se, as you can't see his gigantic house-sized balls dangling around in the game as Kong isn't anatomically correct, but if you attack the region where his balls are, you're going to get some additional XP. Call of Duty: Warzone's Operation Monarch event went live on May 11, and wraps up on May 25.

The Grand Theft Auto franchise has generated nearly $7.5 billion in revenues since GTA V's launch in 2013, Take-Two's latest financials have confirmed.

Despite having not released a new mainline game in 9 years, Rockstar's powerhouse GTA series recently hit 375 million copies sold to date. GTA V makes the bulk of single-game sales with 165 million sales, comprising 44% of the entire franchise's sales.

Based on Take-Two Interactive's historical earnings reports, the GTA franchise has made $7.487 billion since GTA V's launch in 2013. Total franchise revenues are even higher because this figure does not include the multitude of other mainline games including GTA 1-4, Vice City, and San Andreas.

Microsoft's proposed $68.7 billion buyout of Activision-Blizzard is proceeding quickly, Microsoft company president says.

In a recent with Belgian business newspaper L'Echo, Microsoft's Brad Smith says the Activision deal is making good progress.

"It's moving fast, at least fast enough for an acquisition of this size," Smith said. "We're coming to the end of the beginning and now we're entering the beginning of the middle," Microsoft's legal counsel told Smith.

The Witcher 3's next-gen version is set to release sometime in the holiday 2022 period, CD Projekt has announced.

Following multiple delays, it looks like development of The Witcher 3's new release is on track. CD Projekt RED says it is now targeting a Q4 2022 release window for The Witcher 3's upcoming PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S re-release.

"Based on recommendations from persons in charge of development, the Management Board plans to release the next-gen version of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt game in Q4 2022," reads a new press release.

Borderlands 3 is free on the Epic Games Store--get it here.

Epic's mystery freebie has been revealed, and it's a doozy. Borderlands 3 was the hyped-up EGS game for May and for good reason: It might be among the top games the storefront has given out gratis. Let's also not forget the game made EGS $14 million in one day.

The main goal of this freebie is long-term monetization. Borderlands 3 will soon be 3 years old so the sales are trailing off, and Tiny Tina's Wonderlands is also out now (this game has done so well it surprised Take-Two. Borderlands 3 has in-game purchases and microtransactions and 2K Games/Rockstar have had big success with EGS freebies in the past, with GTA V's freebie boosting franchise revenues to $263 million.

Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy- The Definitive Edition has sold less than 1 million copies during the Q4 period, Take-Two Interactive's financials suggest.

Following a huge explosive debut, the GTA remastered trilogy has petered out. The game shipped an estimated 10 million copies during launch in Q3'22 during last year's holiday season. Three months later, during Q4'22, the game sold less than 1 million units.

These numbers are suggested by a quick bit of math. GTA V sales rose 5 million units from Q3 to Q4, totaling 165 million. Total GTA franchise sales also rose by 5 million units to 375 million. This implies that the bump in total franchise sales was from GTA V, and the GTA trilogy didn't hit 1 million sales.

The GTA franchise has broken $1 billion in yearly revenues for the first time since GTA V's release in 2013.

According to Take-Two Interactive's latest financial documents, the Grand Theft Auto series made $1.083 billion in FY22, the second-highest point in franchise history. GTA is so powerful that it made up 30.9% of the Take-Two's $3.5 billion in net revenues.

The growth spike was driven by GTA trilogy sales, which hit 10 million shipments in Q3, ongoing monetization in Grand Theft Auto Online, and continued GTA V sales. In fact, GTA V has sold 5 million copies per quarter throughout FY 2022.