Latest News - Page 1279

Take-Two Interactive expects to release 62 games in the next 3 years. Hangar 13's new game, Volt, won't be one of them.

Hangar 13's new game Volt has been cancelled after four years of troubled development, sources tell Bloomberg's Jason Schreier. The game started development in 2017 and would've been an online-driven superhero game with sci-fi elements, but was canned due to numerous reboot failures, issues with game engine tech, and communication problems due to COVID-19 disruptions. Volt was part of 2K Games' pre-E3 2021 leak.

Interestingly enough it appears Volt's cancellation isn't being reflected in Take-Two's latest roadmap, however the game represents the $53 million write-off the company took in its financial report.

Red Dead Redemption 2 reaches a new sales milestone of nearly 40 million copies sold to date.

Today Take-Two Interactive confirmed that Red Dead Redemption 2 has sold 39 million units worldwide across digital and physical channels on consoles and PC.

The sequel now makes up 63% of total Red Dead franchise revenues with the original Red Dead Redemption making up 37% (23 million copies). This mix could skew as reports say a RDR1 remaster is currently in development at Rockstar.

Battlefield will remain a premium experience on consoles and PC for multiple years, EA today confirmed.

EA says that free-to-play makes sense for Battlefield, but the company currently has no plans to roll out a F2P Warzone-like experience for the franchise any time soon. The Battlefield mobile game will come first, and then possibly F2P later on.

During EA's Q2'22 earnings call, company CEO Andrew Wilson confirmed that a F2P Battlefield component isn't a core focus right now. The new $69.99 Battlefield 2042 premium release is the core framework for the entire future of the franchise with its massive 128-player multiplayer chaos. In short, Battlefield 2042 is the reboot for the IPs premium presence, and the new free-to-play mobile game will address the smartphone market. After that, a F2P Warzone-like competitor could happen...but not for a while.

Grand Theft Auto V is still a sales monster seven years after its release.

GTA V has now sold-in (shipped) a combined 155 million units physically and digitally, Take-Two Interactive today announced. The numbers span two generations of consoles and will expand even more once the GTA V E&E remaster launches on Gen 9 systems. This represents a +5 million increase over the figures reported in Q1'22, and this quarter is the fourth quarter in a row the game has tacked on 5 million units sales.

To date, Grand Theft Auto V has helped generate over $6.4 billion in franchise earnings. The full game and the heavily-monetized GTA Online have significantly contributed to Take-Two's quarterly earnings since launch and continually drive up recurrent consumer spending (in-game microtransaction purchases), digital revenues and sales, and overall net revenue impact through game sales.

Amid four separate lawsuits and investigations, heavy media scrutiny, accusations of sexual misconduct and harassment, and multiple high-profile executives and team leaders leaving, Activision has reported a record Q3 that breaks 10-year highs.

Activision-Blizzard just enjoyed an explosive Q3 (they aren't, however, enjoying the explosive controversy stemming from workplace misconduct). The company's net revenues, operating profit, and net income all set record highs for a Q3 period. In short, this recent quarter was Activision's best Q3 in the last 10 years.

The billion-dollar games-maker has generated a whopping $2.070 billion in net revenues driven by Warzone, Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, and huge sales from Diablo II Resurrected, which turned out to deliver the best first-week sales of any remaster in Activision-Blizzard's history. Q3 2021 also was the 5th highest quarterly period for net revenues in the last 10 years. Predictably, Activision-Blizzard made 90% of its revenues from digital.

NASA is inching closer and closer to the launch of its highly anticipated James Webb Space Telescope, which has been quite literally decades in the making.

NASA and many contractors have been building the James Webb Space Telescope for many years now, and unfortunately, the project has been plagued with delays that caused its budget to skyrocket into the multiple billions. But now the construction road is nearing its end, as the telescope has been transported to the last place, it will be on Earth, French Guiana, South America, where it will be launched into space close to the end of next month.

The launch and setup of the telescope will be the most challenging part of getting the telescope out observing the universe, as the entire process has to go according to plan, or the telescope will be completely useless. In the above video, the NASA team working on the telescope says that Webb has "300 single-point failure items, and they all have to work right. When you're a million miles from the Earth, you can't send someone to fix it". The European Space Agency and NASA have locked in December 18 for the launch.

Officials have confirmed that several coronal mass ejections (CME) are on the way from the Sun, some of which are directly in line to impact Earth.

NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center confirmed with an update that several CMEs erupted on the Sun on the 1st and 2nd of November. With the data, the researchers applied it to their current models and found that there are "likely Earth-directed components to a few of them."

NOAA notes that the CMEs came from the southwest area of the Sun, with one CME being linked to a C4 flare from NOAA/SWPC Region 2887 at 01/2133 UTC (02/1:33 am EDT) and another CME being related to an M1 flare (R1-Minor Radio Blackout) from Region 2891 at 02/0301 UTC (02/7:01 am EDT) near the center disk. Additionally, NOAA states that its confidence in the measures of the Earth-directed components remains at "moderate" levels, "while there is less confidence in timing and intensity." At the time of writing this, current predictions state that there are G1 (minor) Geomagnetic warnings for November 3 and 4 that coincide with the arrival of the blasts.

A new video has been published on the NASA Goddard YouTube channel that details a NASA study that found global crop yields could decrease because of climate change.

NASA states in its video that civilization is already experiencing the effects of climate change, and with global temperatures continuing to rise, we are going to experience even more changes to our planet. The study found that average global crop yields for maize or corn may decrease by 24% before 2100.

Additionally, NASA states that the decline in global crop yield for foods such as corn, soybean, wheat, and rice will be determined by factors such as shifting rainfall patterns, higher temperatures, and an increase in greenhouse gas emissions. While corn yields are expected to decrease, NASA predicts that wheat may see a slight uptick of about 17% until about 2050 where the uptick will level off. Lastly, NASA says that the effects of climate change on our global crop yields will become apparent as early as 2030.

A new image snapped by the Hubble Space Telescope has been published by NASA, and it showcases a mysterious nebula.

The nebula is called N44, and it's located about 170,000 light-years away from Earth. The nebula is known for its dark, distinctive region that NASA describes as a "superbubble" - this region can be seen in the upper center of the image. The "superbubble" spans a distance of about 250 light-years, and the reasoning for how it came to be what it is today is still being figured out by researchers.

Researchers suspect that the stellar wind from massive stars within the bubble has pushed out the gas from the interior, however, this hypothesis is "inconsistent with measured wind velocities in the bubble." Another theory is that massive stars within the gap exploded in violent supernovae that "sculpted the cosmic cavern." Another distinctive feature is the deep blue area located at the 5 o'clock mark of the mysterious gap. This deep blue area is one of the hottest regions of N44 and one of the most intense for star formation.

A newly published study has revealed that NASA's Curiosity rover has just discovered never-before-seen organic molecules on Mars for the first time.

The new study has been published in the journal Nature Astronomy and details the discovery that occurred in March 2017 when NASA's Curiosity rover collected a dirt sample from the Bagnold Dune on Mars. Curiosity is equipped with 74 cups that can be used to store dirt samples, and nine of these cups are pre-filled with a chemical mixture. Due to Curiosity's drill being out-of-service at the time, the team behind the collection decided to place the dirt into one of the nine cups containing chemicals.

Initially, the team's motivation was to create a reference for future chemistry experiments that will be conducted on Mars with samples, but what the researchers didn't expect is their first sample to be rich with organic molecules. The team identified two significant organic molecules after performing analysis on the sample; benzoic acid and ammonia. Maeva Millan, a postdoctoral fellow at NASA's Goddard Spaceflight Center and lead author of the new study, said, "This experiment was definitely successful. While we haven't found what we were looking for, biosignatures, we showed that this technique is really promising."

MSI is preparing the Big Boi of its Z690 motherboards with the MEG Z690 GODLIKE motherboard, flexing out its teaser muscles in its gigantic E-ATX form factor.

MSI's gigantic new flagship MEG Z690 GODLIKE motherboard is bigger, wider than the flagship ASUS ROG Maximus Z690 Extreme -- which is already huge, at 305 x 277mm -- MSI's new MEG Z690 GODLIKE is 305 x 310mm which is why it looks pretty much like a square.

MSI isn't messing around with the MEG Z690 GODLIKE motherboard, packing in 22 phase CPU VRM design and support for up to 128GB of super-fast next-gen DDR5-6666+ memory. You've got 1 x PCIe 5.0 x16 and x16 slot, while another offers PCIe 4.0 x8. The board will have plenty of power flowing into it with the 24-pin power connector joined by dual 8-pin EPS power connectors that are placed above the DDR5 DIMMs.

Just as Intel is launching its new 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" CPUs and next-gen Z690 chipset which delivers DDR5 memory and PCIe 5.0 connectivity for the first time, Micron has announced new GDDR6 16Gbps memory for AMD Radeon RX 6000 series GPUs.

In a new press release, Micron announced that its high-performance 16Gb/16Gbps GDDR6 memory is now available to RDNA 2-based Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards. Micron uses its advanced 1z process technology for its 16Gbps GDDR6 memory, offering up to 512GB/sec of memory bandwidth.

But there's something definitely worth pointing out here: this is nothing new. There's nothing new, or upgraded coming from AMD with new 16Gbps GDDR6-based memory from Micron on a new Radeon RX 6000 series graphics card. Micron is just announcing that its 16Gbps GDDR6 memory is now available to AMD for its Radeon RX 6000 series cards.

AMD is sitting on its hands right now riding out the wave of Intel's about-to-launch 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" CPUs and the new Z690 chipset, with its own next-gen CPUs dropping in 2022.

According to Yuri "1usmus" Bubliy, the creator of the DRAM Calculator and Clock Tuner for Ryzen says that AMD might be releasing new Ryzen CPUs in late January 2022. Bubliy says he's working on Project Hydra, a new tool that will support the current Ryzen 5000 series, and next-gen Ryzen 6000 series CPUs.

The second he said that there were instantly tweets asking what the hell is going on with Hydra and the new Ryzen 6000 series CPUs that no one else knows about. What we do know about the new CPUs is that they should be Zen 3-powered CPUs with new 3D V-Cache technology.

Update: Uh, so this isn't the new 12-pin PCIe 5.0 power connector...

I've just had an industry contact reach out to me, saying that the "5.0 connector is not a 12-pin. Your article is wrong. What is in your article is just the 12-pin FE connector". They followed up with "This is the new 5.0 connector", which I've got pictured below:

This is the GPU side of the 5.0 connector.

Activision today confirmed that its core mobile development teams are all collaborating on a new Call of Duty project.

Following the massive success of Call of Duty Mobile, Activision is further expanding the franchise into the huge market. Company president and chief operating officer Daniel Alegre confirmed that all of the Activision-branded mobile teams are coming together to work on an unannounced project in the Call of Duty universe.

"We recently acquired Digital Legends in Barcelona. They join our mobile development roster which now includes our new internal team, Solid State, as well as the mobile teams at Beenox and Shanghai, who are all coming together on an unannounced project in the Call of Duty universe that's very exciting," Alegre said.

Former Xbox executive Mike Ybarra now the captain of Blizzard Entertainment as it weathers a storm of lawsuits and accusations.

Today Jen Oneal, former boss of Vicarious Visions, announced she is leaving the company at the end of 2021. Mike Ybarra will now take over and lead Blizzard: "Mike Ybarra will take on Jen's leadership responsibility,"Activision said in its earnings call.

Ybarra and Oneal took the reins of Blizzard when ex-president J. Allen Brack left the company just a few months ago in August 2021.

Diablo IV, which never had a release date to begin with, and Overwatch 2 have both been delayed past their original internal launch periods.

Today Activision-Blizzard announced thunderous Q3 results amid a zero-tolerance policy to fire employees who harass others. Nestled in the earnings presentation was a few game delays, namely from Blizzard, a segment that's being affected most from a "frat-boy culture" that has kicked off multiple sexual harassment lawsuits.

The team announces that Overwatch and Diablo IV have been delayed...despite either one of them actually having release dates. "While we are still planning to deliver a substantial amount of content from Blizzard next year, we are now planning for a later launch for Overwatch 2 and Diablo IV than originally envisaged."

Dedicated modders are bringing the immortal Blood Gulch into Halo 3.

Halo modders are having a field day with the Master Chief Collection's new modding tools. We've seen awesome AI wars, sequences that break the enemy limit, and now Blood Gulch is making a triumphant combat in Halo 3.

Arguably the best CTF ever made, Blood Gulch has provided countless hours of chaos in the early LAN days of Halo CE. Now thanks to a community of modders including ex-Installation 01 lead TheChunkierBean, wwm0nkey, and Amit Bisember, Blood Gulch is being ported into Halo 3.

Xbox gaming will soon be integrated in the metaverse in some way, but not for a long time.

The metaverse is happening. First Facebook changed itself to Meta and is using Oculus VR as a portal to the new platform. Now Microsoft is jumping in and it's bringing Xbox into the new frontier. Today Microsoft announced plans to integrate its productivity software with Mesh, a platform that allows users to meet up with one another virtually with avatar representations. Mesh is now available for Teams, which allows users to show an avatar of themselves in video chats. Users can also project holographic images of themselves to others for a more realistic presence.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says the company's metaverse plans will bring 2D games like Halo, Minecraft, and Flight Sim into the 3D world.

Valve and AMD will reveal tons of more info about the Steam Deck's APU and capabilities during a special November 12 stream.

Today Valve announced a Steamworks Virtual Conference dedicated entirely to the Steam Deck handheld-PC hybrid. The event starts on November 12 at 10am PST / 1pm EST and covers a myriad of topics like deep dives on the Steam Deck's custom AMD processor, game support, and much more.

The Steam Deck utilizes a custom SoC built on AMD's new Van Gogh line of low-power Ryzen APUs, which is the first APU that uses the RDNA 2 architecture. The Steam Deck's SoC features a 4-core, 8-thread Van Gogh APU with Zen 2 CPU and an RDNA 2.0 GPU that's more powerful than the AYA Neo Vega handheld.