Gaming News - Page 65

It's Thursday, and as usual we've just received our weekly update from NVIDIA about the new games it has introduced to GeForce Now.

There are 11 games for this week, in fact, headed up by Monster Hunter: World, the latest instalment in the popular franchise to hit GeForce Now (following the debut of Monster Hunter Rise, which came out back near the start of 2023).

Monster Hunter: World is well-liked on Steam, and the action RPG is actually on sale right now (but only for the next couple of hours, at the time of writing), with a pretty hefty 67% off. So that's something to consider if you can move quickly on a purchase.

Konami has announced it will be rolling out a new patch for Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 1, adding a bunch of new settings for gamers to tweak their in-game experience.

The new update is version 1.4.0, and it's already live for owners of Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 1 on Steam. The new patch will add a bunch of new settings, such as smoothing options, game screen settings (standard, pixel perfect, 16:9), screen filters, additional audio settings, and controller response speed customization.

The new patch also comes with a bunch of bug fixes, and Konami has demonstrated the changes in detail within the patch notes that can be found here. While Steam players are already enjoying these changes, Konami has announced that PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch players will get the update "early" in January 2024.

Spider-Man 2's budget is more than what Sony paid to acquire Insomniac Games in 2019.

Previous SIE head honcho Shawn Layden tried to warn us: the AAA model is unsustainable. The costs for premium, high-quality games are getting out of control, commanding budgets of hundreds of millions of dollars. And when a game doesn't perform, companies will pull all the levers at their disposal to cut costs. This means mass layoffs, studio closures, product cancellations--all of the unfortunate events that have plagued 2023's games news cycle.

The cracks have been noticeable behind the scenes for some time now, and with the recent Insomniac Games ransomware hack that led to millions of confidential files being disseminated publicly, gamers now have an idea of just how much money their favorite games cost to make.

Besides adding DLSS and Frame Generation support on the PC version of Starfield, Bethesda's post-launch support for its massive sci-fi RPG has been a little quiet for the game's first three months since release.

The game has been extremely popular, with 13 million players, including a remarkable average per-player playtime of 40 hours. In raw numbers, that's close to two billion planets visited, with players spending over 26 million hours building new ships.

That's about to change, with Bethesda Game Studios set to release game updates every six weeks, starting in February 2024, alongside the release of the game's first expansion called Shattered Space, which is also coming next year. These updates will be more than just bug-related; they'll bring quality-of-life updates, improvements to content, and new features.

Sony has achieved a new milestone with worldwide PlayStation 5 sales.

Today, Sony updated sales figures for its PS5 family of hardware. The PlayStation 5 ecosystem has now sold-through over 50 million consoles worldwide (as of December 9) since its original release in 2020 (sell-through refers to hardware sold to consumers, not just shipped to retailers). This year's PS5 holiday sales have also set a new record as the largest November sell-through in PlayStation history, even beating the PS2's mighty numbers.

Looking closer at the sell-through figure yields interesting results. A bit ago, Sony published PS5 sell-through figures in its annual Games & Network Services strategic meeting presentation. As of the end of FY22, the PS5 had sold-through 36 million consoles. A bit of math shows that Sony has managed to sell-through over 14 million PS5 consoles in the last 9-month, 3-quarter period, with the majority of December's PS5 sales not counted in the figure.

Before it became a first-party Xbox studio delivering critically acclaimed titles like The Outer Worlds, Grounded, and Pentiment, Obsidian Entertainment was known as a 'gun for hire' studio entrusted with some of the most beloved RPG franchises in gaming: Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, Neverwinter Nights 2, and most notably, Fallout: New Vegas.

Partnering with Bethesda Game Studios, Fallout: New Vegas would see franchise veterans who worked on the original top-down games return to the series for the first time to develop an original story using the technology and tools established for Fallout 3. To this day, it's widely considered the high-water mark for the franchise.

It turns out that the team behind Fallout: New Vegas also pitched Bethesda many different Elder Scrolls projects and games that would also serve as 'New Vegas' style spin-offs as fans waited for mainline releases like Skyrim. According to industry veteran and ex-Obsidian writer Chris Avellone, Bethesda turned him and the team down continuously.

Another day, another Chinese manufacturer announces a new gaming handheld... today, AOKZOE has announced its new A2 gaming handheld. Check it out:

The new AOKZOE A2 gaming handheld features a 7-inch 1920 x 1200 display at 120Hz, a slightly smaller panel than the 8-inch display used on the A1 PRO gaming handheld. AOKZOE says that the new bezel-less design on the A2 is something to point out, but I don't know about that.

Inside, we have the AMD Ryzen 7 6800U or the Ryzen 7 7840U. The Ryzen 7 6800U has a Zen 3+ CPU and RDNA 2 GPU, while the Ryzen 7 7840U features a Zen 4 CPU and RDNA 3 GPU. We should expect an upgraded Ryzen 8040 series "Hawk Point" APU inside of a future gaming handheld from AOKZOE, and probably soon.

Halo Infinite's new holiday-themed update is now live, brings a new free 20-tier battle pass.

It's Christmas time, and that means snow is falling, millions of people are wrapping presents, and Winter Contingency is back in Halo Infinite.

The new seasonal event features a 20-tier free battle pass with a multitude of rewards, including the Winterknight legendary helmet and the Frost Glaze epic visor effect. Other rewards include 4x XP boosters, 3x color effects, and various Mark VII armor pieces (except for the endcap level 20 unlocks, which are multi-core).

Insomniac Games' 2018 release of Spider-Man is by far the best-earning first-party PlayStation 4 game, new leaked data indicates.

New information unearthed from the recent Insomniac Games data breach reveals key information about Sony's video games business, include sales volume and revenue figures. We won't be directly publishing the tables and data that were leaked as part of this illegal ransomware hack, nor will we be linking to the information. For the purposes of this article, we'll be publishing metrics in a second-hand capacity.

According to the records, Insomniac's Spider-Man game from 2018 stands as the best-earning first-party PlayStation 4 game to date with $827 million net sales revenue generated from 22 million game sales. This information is outdated though. It was accurate as of February-ish 2022, which takes place during Sony's Q4 Fiscal Year 2021 period. It's likely that the values are higher now.

UL has just announced that its new 3DMark Steel Nomad cross-platform benchmark will be a FREE upgrade to 3DMark owners, when it releases in Q1 2024.

The new Steel Nomad benchmark will replace the current Time Spy benchmark, with the new benchmark split into two: Steel Nomad and Steel Nomad Light. Steel Nomad is their recommended benchmark for measuring non-raytraced gaming performance for high-end computers running Windows, macOS, and Linux.

On the other hand, Steel Nomad Light has been built for testing the performance of lightweight devices like Windows laptops with integrated graphics, Windows-on-Arm devices, Apple M-series silicon, iOS, and Android-powered devices across the planet.