Gaming News - Page 382

Capcom wants to sell 100 million games every year, and outlines its plan to make it happen in the near future.

Capcom is on a roll. Over the last decade the Japanese games-maker has made a radical shift towards digital. The results have paid off with eight consecutive years of record operating profit and over 220% in net income growth. Now the company wants more.

In a recent integrated report, Capcom has set an ambitions goal for itself: 100 million games sold every year. For reference, Capcom sold 30 million games last year and expects to sell 32 million games this year with an 82% digital ratio. Capcom makes it clear that digital is the key to achieving its lofty goal.

Ubisoft promises to support its new Avatar game with multiple years of post-launch content, including premium paid DLC, expansions, and more.

The new Avatar Frontiers of Pandora game coming in 2022 will have a long lifespan that stretches across years, Ubisoft has confirmed.

"For Fiscal '23 we have a very exciting lineup, a big lineup on the premium and free-to-play side. On the premium lineup side, as you know Avatar Frontiers of Pandora is a big game next to the highly-awaited movie. The development is progressing well and is a beautiful world delivered by the Snowdrop engine.That will be a very long game in terms of content delivered over many years," Ubisoft CFO Frederick Duguet said in a recent Q2 earnings call.

Ubisoft says it wants to be a key player in blockchain gaming, and sees lots of potential for play-to-earn mechanics.

Ubisoft is just one of the many publishers looking into blockchain (Square Enix and EA are also doing it). The decentralized network affords unique opportunities for gaming including play-to-earn, a nebulous concept that could give out pieces of cryptocurrency in exchange for playing a game.

So how will this work exactly? Ubisoft is vague on details, but says blockchain is "very attractive for the long term" and that they're interested in creating ne digital economies. It's likely blockchain will offer a new form of monetization as we predicted back in 2018.

Ubisoft gives slightly more details about its new never-ending Assassin's Creed Infinity game.

The next Assassin's Creed game is called Infinity, and it's rumored to be a huge live game that's more of a platform versus a standalone release. Now Ubisoft confirms Infinity won't be a free-to-play experience but instead will be a paid, premium game similar to other mainline titles.

"Infinity will not be a free-to-play. This game is going to have a lot of narrative elements in it. It's going to be a very innovative game but it will have what players already love in other Assassin's Creed games right from the start," Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot said in a recent Q2'22 earnings call.

Activision's new texture delivery technology will help shrink monstrous Call of Duty install sizes.

Call of Duty games are absolutely huge. Every annual release commands over 100GB, and Warzone is even beyond that. Considering the PS5 only has 667GB of space and the Series X has 802GB, it behooves publishers to shrink their games or be eliminated from the premium SSD space. That's what's happening over at Activision.

"New on-demand texture streaming tech expected to save up to 30%-50%+ on next-gen console and PC hard drive disk space," the official Call of Duty Twitter account says.

The TACMAP, one of the best new features of Halo Infinite, is being developed by the same studio who made Halo 5's Forge mode.

Halo Infinite's TACMAP transforms the game from a linear FPS into something more like Far Cry. Now gamers have an in-game map with icons, missions, and high-end visual topography they can use to trace out their path through Zeta Halo. It's the single most important new feature of Halo Infinite's campaign and one that's instrumental to the wide open-world scope of the game.

Apparently the feature was also developed by SkyBox Labs, the same team that brought Halo 5's Forge mode to life. SkyBox is also co-developing other portions of the game, too.

Assassin's Creed Valhalla isn't even a year old yet and it's already one of Ubisoft's best-earning games of all time.

Today Ubisoft announced Assassin's Creed Valhalla is the second-most profitable video game in the company's 35-year lifespan. That's a pretty huge milestone for a game that's not even a year old. While Ubisoft predictably didn't give exact sales figures or revenues for Valhalla, it did say the game is responsible for driving strong Q2 earnings.

"In less than 12 months, Assassin's Creed Valhalla is already the second largest profit generating game in Ubisoft's history, reflecting the remarkable strength and value of the franchise."

Call of Duty: Warzone is about to go through its biggest change yet, with the introduction of Warzone Pacific. Warzone Pacific is the new name of the big update for Warzone (which is now Warzone Pacific) with a brand new map that the developer says is "built on the learnings from the community" and is launching with Season One.

The new map for Warzone Pacific is Caldera, and will have the new RICOCHET Anti-Cheat included with its kernel-level driver. Now that the business end of the situation is done, Warzone Pacific will have lush forests and rocky crags, with white sand beaches and mysterious ruins for you to explore -- and annihilate other players. There's even a dormant volcano in Caldera, with Activision promising over 200 other points of interest.

One of the biggest things I love to see from the developer is that they've listened to the community and built Caldera around 2 years of research from that feedback. Warzone Pacific will launch formally as part of Vanguard's first season of content, and is built on the same technology and graphics engine that Call of Duty: Vanguard is built on. Warzone Pacific is fully optimized for cross-play, cross-progression, and has cross-gen console support as well.

Sony has $14 billion left to spend on strategic acquisitions from now until March 2024.

In its recent Q2 earnings report, Sony pledged to "aggressively invest" in games development to help further growth of its $25 billion games empire. In that same presentation, it also confirmed it has $14 billion in funds left to spend on strategic acquisitions from now until FY23 (ends March 31, 2024).

Every three years Sony devises what it calls Mid-Range Plans. At these meetings, shareholders and executives decide specific growth vectors for the company. A budget is made to pay for things like like strategic acquisitions and capital expenditures to grow the business.

Sony has made a new branch to oversee its PC gaming efforts called PlayStation PC LLC.

Sony is going all-in on PC gaming. Before now, Sony's PlayStation Mobile LLC division was responsible for publishing PlayStation games on PC. Now that's being handled by a dedicated PC branch called PlayStation PC LLC. Documents show that the company was incorporated back in April 2021.

All of Sony's games on Steam are now listed as being published by PlayStation PC LLC.