Gaming News - Page 298

In a major win for its contractor teams, Activision-Blizzard today announced that it will make all of its QA testers full-time employees.

Following months of walk-outs, protests, and pressure, Activision-Blizzard plans to enfold 1,110 quality assurance (QA) testers into its ranks. Activision says that all of its QA teams will become full-time employees with benefits and wages starting at $20/hour.

The move comes after employees and developers banded together to form A Better ABK, a coalition aimed at fair wages and better treatment of workers. A Better ABK has organized various walk-outs at the company and a separate group, Game Workers Alliance, has formed in an effort to unionize QA testers at Raven Software. Activision previously announced that it will not formally recognize the Game Workers Alliance union and today's move is a direct response to the demands made by the pro-union group.

Epic Games detailed and unleashed its next-gen Unreal Engine 5 during its State of Unreal 2022 event earlier this week, with game developers also teasing their new UE5-powered projects.

Gears developer The Coalition teased a rather beautiful Unreal Engine 5 demo running on Microsoft's next-gen Xbox Series X console. During the State of Unreal 2022 event the video was teased, but then Coalition Technical Director Kate Rayner provided more details during an interview with Xbox Wire.

Rayner said that Nanite -- Unreal Engine 5's new virtualized geometry system -- allows for over 100x the detail than previously possible. Rayner continued saying that the team can do so many new things with light, saying that fully dynamic real-time global illumination lighting "has been a long sought-after feature, but up until now, it's not been possible on console. Lumen is a total game-changer".

PC gamers are flocking to Windows 11 faster than you'd think, with the new Steam Hardware Survey data for March 2022 showing that 16.84% of users on Steam are now using Microsoft's latest OS.

There are around 16.84% of Steam users running Windows 11, where in March 2022 the new operating system scooped up another 1.25% (up from 15.59% in February 2022) away from Windows 10. Windows 10 lost 1% of users in March 2022, dropping to 74.69% of PC users running Windows 10.

The results aren't too surprising, given the big push by Microsoft for Windows 11 but there's just nothing pulling gamers to it. Sure there's some cool new tricks under the hood, but there's no games where I'm sitting here like "oh man, I've got to install Windows 11 so I can play X". Nothing. Nada. Zip.

Bloober Team is currently developing four new projects, and the dev expects two of them to be ready in the next 3-4 years.

While scanning Bloober Team's recent annual report I noticed an interesting section that revealed how many games the team is working on. The studio currently has four projects in development across a variety of publishers and partners. The biggest is the mysterious game for Konami, which is almost assuredly a Silent Hill project.

The Polish independent developer just posted record earnings in 2021 thanks to the success of The Medium, which has become one of its most lucrative IPs. The company expects to push these earnings even higher throughout 2022 and wants to release two big new games by 2025.

Max Payne 1 & 2 are getting reborn for the modern age.

Originally released in the PS2 and Xbox eras, Remedy's stylish and gritty Max Payne originals are getting the remastered treatment. Remedy today announced they are teaming up with Rockstar Games to remaster Max Payne 1 & 2 in the powerful Northlight engine for next-gen consoles like the PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and on PC.

Grand Theft Auto juggernaut Rockstar Games will publish and finance the remasters, which will be released as a single-game bundle. Remedy could also make royalties from game sales once Rockstar has been paid back. The budget for the project will be typical of Remedy's games (Control was made for $33 million).

Sony has nuked the $59.99 PlayStation Now deal as gamers stack up subscriptions to save on the new $119 PlayStation Plus Premium tier.

With the help of deal maven Wario64, gamers discovered a great loophole that discounted the new PS Plus Premium by 50%. The deal offered 1 year of PlayStation Now for $59.99. Sony previously confirmed that PS Now subs would transfer directly over to its new $119 PlayStation Plus Premium tier that offers access to 740 games across six PlayStation generations. Gamers were buying multiple years' worth of PS Now in the hope that Sony would convert their subscriptions into PS Plus Premium at a 1:1 ratio.

Apparently this was a mistake and Sony has taken the deal offline. Navigating to the web page now delivers an Access Denied message:

Decentralized digital commodities like crypto and NFTs are quite volatile thanks to fluctuating values, shifting regulations, and security issues. Ubisoft has now effectively reminded the games industry as a whole just how unpredictable NFTs can be.

Ubisoft today announced that Ghost Recon Breakpoint is entering maintenance mode. Breakpoint will no longer get DLC or expansions and servers will remain online so the game can be played and monetized. Breakpoint was the first game to use Ubisoft's failed Quartz NFTs which are effectively in-game cosmetics that can be re-sold.

We've talked about how Ubisoft's NFTs are marginally bad for business; NFTs thrive off of scarcity and Ubisoft flooded the market, resulting in less than $3,000 in crypto resale value. That's 0.001% of Ubisoft's microtransaction earnings for Q3 2021.

Epic Games says that nearly half of all upcoming next-gen console games are using Unreal Engine technology.

The games industry typically uses two primary third-party game engines: Unity and Unreal Engine. Today's big Unreal Engine 5 showcase highlighted just how popular Epic's tools are for upcoming games on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S. According to Epic's Tim Sweeney, about 48% of all upcoming announced console games are using Unreal.

"Among game developers, 48% of announced next-generation console titles are powered by Unreal," Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney said.

Epic Games just released Unreal Engine 5 to developers and also shipped out a starter multiplayer game that's quite a bit like Mass Effect without powers.

Alongside UE5, Epic Games is shipping out starter game projects. One of them, a futuristic third-person shooter called Lyra, is pretty interesting. Lyra is basically a shell or framework for a game and isn't necessarily a finished product. Devs are to take Lyra and transform it into something of their own, but at its core the game looks very similar to the third-person multiplayer modes found in Mass Effect 3 and Mass Effect Andromeda (without the awesome abilities, of course).

The recent Unreal Engine showcase highlighted how easy it was for developers to start up Lyra and make direct changes in real-time in UE5, utilizing effects like the direct import feature from other libraries like Artstation and Quixel Megascans as well as a showcase of the new advanced lumen lighting tech.

It's expected that developer Battlestate Games will unleash NVIDIA DLSS technology into its new update for Escape from Tarkov, which could drop this week.

Escape from Tarkov is a super-hard game on your PC as it is, so any performance help is very, very welcomed. NVIDIA's kick-ass DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) technology will offer its multiple upscaling modes in Escape from Tarkov: Quality, Balanced, and Performance.

The news is coming directly from Battlestate Games CEO Nikita Buyanov, who said in a recent podcast that NVIDIA DLSS support would be dropping in Escape from Tarkov sometime this week, and that it has passed the testing phases required for it to go live into the game.