Gaming News - Page 77

Xbox gaming CEO Phil Spencer reveals some very interesting stats on the growth of the Japanese video games market.

While North America and Europe are the predominant regions for gaming, Japan represents an untapped market for Xbox in particular. Domestic giants like Nintendo and PlayStation have traditionally dominated the Japanese console gaming sector with Xbox on the outer fringes. Xbox gaming CEO Phil Spencer is eager to change things and have Microsoft capture more of the Japanese region, and Xbox Game Pass may represent the gateway to capturing more of Japanese players.

In a recent interview with Famitsu, Phil Spencer listed some interesting metrics for Japan. Spencer believes that Game Pass PC will be a key asset in improving Xbox's presence in Japan. According to the gaming boss, Japan's PC market has doubled and the amount of Japanese users subscribed to Game Pass' PC plan are up by 4x.

Fortnite OG is more popular than even Epic Games could have anticipated.

Fortnite's latest season takes players back to the past--to the halcyon days of 2018, before the pandemic, and back when the battle royale sensation was on top of the world. Similar to WoW Classic, Epic's new Fortnite OG Chapter 1 season essentially resurrects the BR as it was six years ago, almost like players are opening up a time capsule and jumping into Fortnite's best-ever year (during 2018, Fortnite generated over $5 billion in revenues, more money than it ever has before).

Now Epic has announced some incredible stats for their mega-hit sensation. According to the latest metrics, Fortnite OG Chapter 1 has helped the game absolutely smash engagement records. Over 44.7 million players played Fortnite yesterday, which is the "biggest day in Fortnite's history." Gamers also played 102 million hours worth of BR action.

Sony's latest acquisition should influence and propel its game streaming capabilities, and potentially help solidify PS Plus game streaming delivery to mobile devices.

Sony Interactive Entertainment will soon purchase iSIZE, a UK-based company that has developed technologies centered around making video delivery more efficient. iSIZE's proprietary tech leverages AI deep learning across three solutions: Bitsave, Bitclear, and Bitgen. The company's tech slide deck reveals more info about what's involved. Sony plans to leverage iSIZE's three-pronged advancements to better optimize its video and streaming services.

While SIE's official announcement is more basic and generalized, we can analyze this in a more broader scope to see how this could affect different facets of Sony's interactive division. This acquisition isn't just for video streaming services like the Sony Pictures Core subscription (now included with PS Plus Premium), but it also has implications for video game streaming via PS Plus (formerly PS Now) as well.

Bungie management is said to have explored all other options before choosing to lay off 100 workers, including pay reductions for executives.

Destiny is often mired in controversy, but this time things are different. After it laid off 8% of its employees, including Destiny and Halo composer Michael Salvatori, Halo vet Lorraine McClees, and even Destiny's own community manager Liana Ruppert (yes, Destiny currently has no CM), Bungie is now facing near-universal pushback from all sides ranging from its faithful players to workers in the video games industry. It's rough situation for Bungie and everyone involved.

A new report from Forbes' Paul Tassi reveals more info on what went on behind the scenes, including the measures that Bungie management took before the decision was made to lay off about a hundred people from its staff. Based on what Bungie told Forbes, it sounds like layoffs were the last resort. Bungie executives including CEO Pete Parsons are said to have given up and relinquished their annual bonuses in an effort to help stave off the controversial decision to reduce its workforce.

Sony's new PlayStation 5 "slim" revision is a lot smaller than previous models, but the system hasn't received a node shrink.

A bit ago, there were rumors that the new PS5 slim duo could feature a new 5nm SoC refresh to accompany the system's various form factor changes--smaller case, modular hot-swap disc drive, etc. This trend isn't abnormal, and most console hardware revisions also benefit from a die shrink. That isn't the case with the latest PS5 models.

Having looked into TSMC's node processes and family structure while working on TweakTown's PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X reviews, I didn't think the jump from 6nm (N6) to 5nm (N5) was very likely. A new teardown from Linus Tech Tips confirms our suspicions: The PS5 slim uses the same 260mm² die as the most recent PS5 revisions, which indicates a 6nm chip. This means the PS5 slim is effectively the same as the PS5 CFI-1202 models introduced in 2022.

Microsoft Gaming CEO and the head of Xbox, Phil Spencer, took the stage at BlizzCon 2023 this weekend, weeks after the company acquired Activision Blizzard in a record deal worth $69 billion. Blizzard and its franchises, including Warcraft, Diablo, Overwatch, and StarCraft, are some of the biggest in the industry, and Phil Spencer praised the studio's history while addressing the crowd.

"Now that Blizzard is part of Xbox, we will nurture the essence of what makes Blizzard unique," Spencer said, name-dropping StarCraft in a move that brought some hope to the idea that we might get another game in the iconic RTS series at some point. "The future of Blizzard is brighter than ever," Phil added.

Seeing Phil Spencer at the event was fun, though he wasn't the only Xbox presence at the show.

World of Warcraft is set to celebrate its 20th anniversary next year, which is an incredible milestone for a game that is still being played by millions and receiving new expansion content and regular updates, with WoW and Blizzard veteran Chris Metzen returning to shepherd "the next 20 years of adventure," World of Warcraft is set to kick off a major storyline called the Worldsoul Saga. And there was a heartfelt cinematic trailer with heroes Anduin and Thrall to set the scene.

"The Worldsoul saga is so epic it cannot be contained within any single expansion," Chris Metzen said, introducing three new World of Warcraft expansions. "It is built to play out over multiple expansions over the next few years. We are working on multiple ways to deliver this adventure to you a little faster than you're used to."

"We are moving with purpose," Chris Metzen added with Blizzard, confirming that World of Warcraft: The War Within, World of Warcraft: Midnight, and World of Warcraft: The Last Titan are the next three major expansions coming to the popular online role-playing game with The War Within launching in 2024.

At BlizzCon 2023, the Diablo IV team took the stage to celebrate this year's launch of the highly anticipated game, dropping stats like players spending over 1.5 billion hours in Sanctuary and how the current (and positively received) Season of Blood produced 14,000 words of Patch Notes driven by community feedback.

Expansions and Diablo go hand-in-hand, but it seems that Diablo IV will be taking a more WoW-like approach in that multiple expansions will be released - and the very first got announced alongside a teaser trailer confirming that it's on track for a late 2024 launch.

Diablo IV: Vessel of Hatred, as previous leaks have suggested, continues the story laid out by Diablo IV's main campaign, with the main villain looking to be Mephisto, the Lord of Hatred. The teaser trailer was light on details, but it has confirmed the expansion's setting - the lush jungles of Torajan. A location last seen in Diablo II.

The direction of Destiny 2's future may rely on the success of The Final Shape expansion.

Bungie recently laid off 8% of its staff, or about 100 people, in an effort to lower costs as it navigates an incredibly challenging period where revenue is missing projections by nearly half, and the player base is falling. In a new eye-opening report, sources close to Bungie have told Forbes' Paul Tassi a lot of new info about the going-ons of the studio, the current state of Destiny, and why the layoffs were made

According to the report, The Final Shape's performance could determine the fate of Destiny as a whole. Bungie is doubling-down on the expansion and wants it to go far and beyond any previous Destiny content, even The Taken King.

Baldur's Gate 3 just received another big patch (Bethesda, are you paying attention?) and this fourth effort brings in a whole load of nifty changes, most notably the addition of FSR 2.2.

With FSR 2.2 now on-board for AMD graphics cards - and that means the Steam Deck, of course - the RPG will get nicely boosted frame rates courtesy of the upscaling tech, but with much better graphics.

Using FSR 1.0, which was previously in place, Baldur's Gate 3 looked pretty awful, with all manner of odd graphical artifacts and glitches as PC Gamer, which spotted the release of this patch, points out.