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The core of EA's business is now dominated by billion-dollar earners like Apex Legends, EA Sports titles, and Battlefield, but the company still plans to expand into new IPs.

EA has high ambitions for its future. It just bought racing game gurus Codemasters and mobile experts at Glu to expand its sports and free-to-play initiatives. EA has a three-part plan that includes premium releases, new engagement strategies and business models, and mobile games. This plan will see EA's biggest franchises being adapted for the big and small screens complete with monetization and live services.

Most of EA's earnings come from a handful of game series including FIFA, Madden, Battlefield, Star Wars, and Apex Legends, it's still incredibly important to expand into new realms and take chances on projects like BioWare's ill-fated Anthem. It's the only way to move forward and not stagnate with sequels, re-releases, and rehashes.

EA taps Shadow of War studio lead Kevin Stephens to guide a brand new Seattle-based studio on a fresh open-world game.

EA is expanding big-time. The company recently announced its ambitious new three-part plan, which doubles-down on mobile, engagement strategies/new ways to play, and premium releases. EA's immediate focus centers on Apex, Battlefield, and EA Sports, but it still has lots of unannounced projects in the works.

Projects like a new open-world action-adventure game that's being led by Monolith's ex-vice president Kevin Stephens. After 13 years with Warner Bros. Games and 8 years helping Monolith make the excellent Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War games, Stephens has a good understanding of the open-world genre.

Three of gaming's biggest franchises are set to battle it out in Holiday 2021, and the strong competition could affect overall sales revenues and impact yearly earnings.

Holiday 2021 is going to be packed. Things were already pretty heated with a new Call of Duty and Battlefield game set to duel during the period, but Rockstar fanned the flames by confirming a November launch for its Grand Theft Auto V re-release on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. Granted the next-gen console install base is still somewhat small, but given the game's massive momentum with 145 million sales and billions earned over the last 7 years, it's still extra pressure on competitors.

Company executives haven't directly commented on the congested release slate, however both Activision and EA have set conservative expectations for Call of Duty and Battlefield. Activision has said they expect lower sales for Sledgehammer's new WWII-focused Call of Duty Vanguard when compared to Black Ops Cold War, but it's likely that Battlefield's competition also had something to do with those expectations.

GTA V released over seven years ago but is still raking in hundreds of millions of dollars every year for Take-Two Interactive.

After years of big success, Take-Two has expected GTA V to moderate in the long run. That hasn't actually happened yet. In fact, seven years after release the game is still achieving record earnings highs. The game has now sold 145 million copies and GTA V makes up 42% of total franchise sales. Both GTA V and GTA Online helped Take-Two hit a record $3.37 billion in net revenues in FY2021. This trend may continue with the third console release of GTA V on PS5, Xbox Series X/S this November.

How much is the franchise earning every year? In a recent SEC filing, Take-Two confirms that the GTA franchise generated 29.2% of total revenues for the year, or $984.9 million. For comparison's sake, Call of Duty earned over $3 billion in revenues last year.

Rockstar Games parent company Take-Two Interactive has a massive slate of games ready for the next three years, and a ton of them are mobile games.

In 2020, Take-Two Interactive confirmed it was working on 93 games. The company will start delivering on this slate throughout this year. Take-Two recently said it plans to release 62 games by the end of April 2024, leaving roughly 31 games for the post-2024 timeline. Not all of the 93 games will actually release and some will be cancelled, but we don't know which ones are deeper 2024-beyond titles and which aren't.

Take-Two wants to launch 21 games in FY2022 (rom now until April 2022) including annualized sports games, re-releases like the Grand Theft Auto V next-gen version on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, mobile games, and a new IP from Gearbox.

Summer Game Fest returns on June 10, and here's what you should expect.

Summer Game Fest is back and 35 of gaming's biggest players are attending the event. The roster includes Activision, Blizzard, Capcom, 2K Games, EA, Xbox, PlayStation, Square Enix, and a bunch more.

Like E3 2021, the show will be an all-digital stream and showrunner Geoff Keighley will be hosting and conducting a myriad of interviews. The opening kick off event on Thursday, June 10 at 11 am PT / 2 pm ET/ 6 pm GMT will have a live performance by Weezer along with over a dozen premieres and announcements.

Naughty Dog teases big things for its next game on the PlayStation 5.

Nestled in The Last of Us Part II's next-gen PS5 update is mention of Naughty Dog's upcoming plans. It's a slight mention that confirms the studio has been testing the PlayStation 5 out since launch and the team is very excited about the possibilities the Zen 2 CPU, Navi 2X GPU, 16GB of GDDR6 RAM and super-fast 5.5GB/sec PCIe 4.0 SSD have to offer.

"The team has been digging into the PS5 hardware and the possibilities it unlocks since launch last year and we're excited about what the future holds. This patch is just the first step of working on the PS5. We'll let you know when we've got more news to share!" the post reads.

Oculus recently rolled out update 1.8 of the Oculus Developer Hub, introducing a handful of new features that simplify the lives of VR developers building content for the Oculus Quest platform.

Oculus Developer Hub 1.8 includes a new home page with developer updates from Oculus. It also has a new App Distribution page, allowing developers to publish in-development apps for limited distribution for testing purposes. The distribution system includes four release channels: Alpha, Beta, and RC for internal testing and Production for submission to Oculus for store approval.

The new Oculus Developer Hub makes it easy for developers to open run the OVR Metrics Tool, which helps developers optimize the performance of their Quest apps. The latest version allows you to record and save the metrics graphs for analyzing performance issues.

The DecaMove locomotion peripheral is an early success for Deca, a new VR hardware company from Singapore aggressively bringing innovation to the consumer VR space. Deca this week revealed that it pre-sold more than 6000 units of its upcoming DecaMove device.

The DecaMove controller is a new locomotion solution for VR shooter games. It enables you to decouple your head and hand position from your movement direction by adding a hip-orientation tracker to your VR system. Deca sent pre-release DecaMove controllers called the Blogger Edition to a selection of VR influencers, and the response from reviewers was largely positive.

After reviews of the hardware started to come out, Deca opened pre-orders for a limited run of DecaMove controllers at a discounted rate, which would ship later this year. The full launch is planned for early 2022.

Telegram founder Paul Durov is taking a couple of big swings at Apple and the iPhone, where he recently made comments that Apple customers are "digital slaves" and that iPhones are in the "middle ages" up against Android-based flagship smartphones.

Durov made the comments on a public Telegram channel, where he said: "Apple is very efficient at pursuing their business model, which is based on selling overpriced, obsolete hardware to customers locked in their ecosystem. Every time I have to use an iPhone to test our iOS app I feel like I'm thrown back into the Middle Ages. The iPhone's 60Hz displays can't compete with the 120Hz displays of modern Android phones that support much smoother animations".

He continued: "You are only allowed to use apps that Apple lets you install via their App Store, and you can only use Apple's iCloud to natively back up your data".

The creator of the GTA5 R.E.A.L VR mod has done it again. This time he's making Red Dead Redemption 2 playable start to finish in VR. You can try it today if you subscribe to the developer's Patreon account.

Luke Ross, the indie developer who created the R.E.A.L VR mod series, which allows you to step into the worlds of No One Lives Forever 2 and GTA 5 through the lens of a VR headset, today released an early access version of a new mod for Rockstar's other open-world franchise, Red Dead Redemption 2.

The RDR2 R.E.A.L VR mod transforms RDR2 into a fully immersive old west VR experience, allowing you to play the entire game in first-person VR. The mod does not add motion controller support, so you will need a gamepad to play the game this way. If you're susceptible to motion sickness, you probably want to sit this one out, but if you've got a strong stomach, this mod could be the ultimate cowboy experience.

The world's largest iceberg has just broken away from Antarctica over the last few days, with the European Space Agency (ESA) reporting that the iceberg broke off the western side of the Ronne Ice Shelf in Antarctica's Weddell Sea.

The iceberg itself is known as A-76, and it's big... we're looking at 105 miles (170 kilometers) long and 15.5 miles (25 kilometers) wide, which makes it 80x bigger than Manhattan, New York. Keith Makinson, a polar oceanographer with the British Antarctic Survey was the first to notice the iceberg, confirming it with the US National Ice Center using ESA's own Copernicus Sentinel-1 imagery.

This isn't something you need to be worried about and bringing in your tomato plants over, as iceberg calving -- which is what is happening here with A-76 breaking away from Antarctica, is part of a natural cycle. It happens, it's just that this particular iceberg is absolutely mammoth in size... so big in size that it is currently the largest iceberg in the world.

NVIDIA utterly dominates with its DLSS technology, but AMD is coming out with its own DLSS competitor soon in the form of the recently-teased FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) technology.

But now we have some more information, as a new patent has surfaced that teases "Gaming Super Resolution" or GSR. We might still see FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) in the future as a different technology to GSR, but I guess we'll see AMD clear that up over the coming months.

The patent itself has AMD's upcoming Gaming Super Resolution technology using interference to upscale images, as AMD explains the only available approach uses linear upscaling functions which will could see blurry and/or corrupt images because it doesn't use nonlinear information.

Elon Musk is back at it, with the SpaceX and Tesla boss tweeting out "How much is that Doge in the window" and seeing the people's crypto price leap by close to 20% instantly.

The post was out of nowhere after hundreds of billions of dollars was bled out from the entire cryptocurrency market and hundreds of billions of dollars of cryptocurrency market capitalization was wiped off the market in hours. The price of Dogecoin was at $0.36 before Musk's tweet and it flew up to $0.420 (of course) with his tweet.

At the time of writing the price of Dogecoin was sitting at $0.405 and was on the uptick, we could expect Dogecoin to fly past $0.50 and back up towards its trajectory of $0.69 and beyond up to $1 -- but that might need many more random tweets from Elon Musk at this point.

PS5 and Xbox Series X/S consoles are expected to be hard to find throughout 2022, but Take-Two Interactive expects console supply to even out with time.

Since next-gen consoles are hard to find, publishers are hesitant to move to full next-gen exclusives. EA, for example, is going full cross-gen with new games like Battlefield 6 and its annualized sports games. The install base simply isn't big enough yet. Other publishers like Take-Two Interactive aren't incredibly worried about the situation.

"There is a chip shortage and console supply is disrupted. It's a good news bad news thing. The bad news is you can't get a next-gen console for love or money. The good news is people really want these consoles. We had a limited selection of next-gen releases. We have many more titles coming in the future, we think supply shortages will be resolved," Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said in a recent FY2021 earnings call.

Bethesda's new singleplayer space epic Starfield won't release in early 2022.

Sources tell Bloomberg's Jason Schreier that Starfield, Bethesda's biggest new RPG, is "nowhere near done" and gamers shouldn't expect a release any time soon.

Although Bethesda's Todd Howard first teased Starfield when he described three "big and crazy projects" in 2016, Schreier asserts that Starfield's team was quite small until 2019. The reality is that Bethesda's main Maryland branch was helping its Austin studio work on Fallout 76's development. Those three projects that Howard spoke of ended up being Fallout 76, Starfield, and The Elder Scrolls VI.

The metaverse is huge in gaming right now, and billion-dollar games like Roblox, Fortnite, and even Call of Duty Warzone are doing their part. What about games like GTA Online? Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick comments on the metaverse idea showing up in certain games.

Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick says he's allergic to buzzwords like AR, VR, and 3D...and he's somewhat skeptical on the nebulous idea of the metaverse, which sees millions of gamers coming together in a virtualized, social environment complete with fourth wall-breaking crossovers.

Zelnick has already commented on a Roblox-style community creation tool showing up in GTA Online, but he was also asked about the metaverse. The CEO says it's something they already do in highly engaging, social-driven online games like NBA 2K, GTA Online, and Red Dead Online (and he's right, GTA Online and RDRO both have a very active roleplaying community, for instance).

We are in the middle of a gigantic wave in the cryptocurrency market, with nearly $1 trillion in crypto market cap wiped in hours just a couple of days ago -- and now the U.S. Treasury Department is stepping in.

The Treasury Department has announced major crackdowns on cryptocurrencies, the crypto markets and exchanges, and every single crypto transaction. The Treasury Department has new rules that require Americans to report any transfer of cryptocurrency over $10,000 to the IRS (Internal Revenue Service).

The U.S. Treasury Department explained in a press release: "Cryptocurrency already poses a significant detection problem by facilitating illegal activity broadly including tax evasion. This is why the President's proposal includes additional resources for the IRS to address the growth of cryptoassets".

Embracer Group (Deep Silver, Gearbox Software, Saber Interactive, 4A Games, etc) spent more to storefront owners like Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, and Valve than it did on games development.

Embracer owns 225 game IPs and currently has 160 projects in development, but without its own digital distribution platform or games store, the company must give a cut of its revenues to third-party companies. In a recent earnings report, the company expressed frustration with the current 70-30 revenue split on platforms like the PlayStation Store, the Xbox marketplace, the eShop, and Steam. The company says it will challenge the revenue policies and do its best to invest intelligently.

In the fiscal year ended March 31, 2021, the games titan actually spent over 200% more on commissions than internal games development. This says a lot considering Embracer owns 225 game IPs and currently has 160 projects in development.

Aspyr Media's Knights of the Old Republic remake may release throughout Embracer Group's Fiscal Year 2021 timeline.

Nestled in Embracer Group's (formerly THQ Nordic) incredibly positive earnings report is mention of the company's release slate. Embracer says its FY2021 timeline will include 90 completed games and directly mentions new projects from Gearbox and Aspyr Media.

"In the current financial year ending March 2022, we are committed to fulfilling our ambition to complete more than 90 game development projects with a total completion value in the range of SEK 2,800 to 3,300 million. This includes projects from Gearbox and Aspyr," the company said.