Activision is going big with Modern Warfare's future content, complete with a huge 200-player battle royale multiplayer mode with full cross-play.

A new Reddit leak confirms Modern Warfare will soon get a massive BR free-for-all with up to 200-players. The info was datamined from the game's source code, and contains references to playlists like solo, duos, and squads, and in-game maps.

The BR mode is designed to be a mix of tactical strategy and randomized chaos. It will have plenty of loot across all rarities scattered across the map including all weapons, attachments, and killstreaks from the base MW multiplayer, and it'll also have perks that boost efficacy in battle. There's even missions for teams to tackle during the 200-player warzone havoc.

A new report says Hangar 13 is working on the most ambitious Mafia game to date, and it picks off right where Mafia III left off.

Rumor has it Mafia IV is happening, and it'll take place during the 1970s when the mob ruled the casino-ridden streets of Las Vegas. The entire game centers around your ascension as a gang boss who eventually takes control over Sin City, building an empire of gambling, mayhem, and drug-fueled organized crime along the way. Apparently Hangar 13's fleet of studios is working on the project, and it'll be bigger than Mafia III but filled with more meaningful quests and activities--gone are the annoying repeatable missions from Mafia III.

All of this doesn't come from a reliable source, though. Jason Schreier, one of the most reliable sources in the industry, says the info sounds fake.

Dead Island 2 is still in development, but it could miss the original 2020 release date we had pegged for the sequel.

After years of development hell and trading hands, Dead Island 2 has found a new home at Homefront: The Revolution's Dambuster Studios. As for a release date, that's a bit more complicated. We've had no development updates on the game, and the only assurances it's still happening is from higher-ups at THQ Nordic and Deep Silver's Koch Media. But now it sounds like Dead Island 2 may not launch until 2021 at the earliest.

In a recent interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Koch Media CEO Klemens Kundratitz strongly hints Dead Island 2 may not release in 2020. The CEO says Dead Island 2 won't launch close to Dying Light 2, another competing zombie game that Deep Silver is publishing. "It would be conflict if we were launching on top of each other. But that's not going to be a problem."

AMD is expected to unleash their second-gen Navi GPU at CES 2020 according to the latest reports, with a preview at CES of the second-gen RDNA-based Radeon RX 6700 family -- at least that's what I'll call it for now.

The new second-gen RDNA 2 architecture is expected to use an optimized 7nm+ process node, offer up enthusiast-grade graphics cards (YES!), hardware-level ray tracing support, both GDDR6 and HBM2 options, and even more power efficiency over the first-gen Navi products.

The note about AMD using HBM2 is interesting, which could be useful for the enthusiast-grade RDNA 2 cards that would not just compete with NVIDIA's current flagship GeForce RTX 2080 Ti but also whatever NVIDIA is cooking up for 2020 in their new Ampere-based GeForce RTX 3000 series cards that should see the RTX 3070, RTX 3080, and RTX 3080 Ti released at Computex/E3 2020.

Just a couple of days ago, Golden Joystick Awards were held, and Nintendo representative fighter took home the crown prize.

You might be confused by the fact that Super Smash Bros. Ultimate had won a 2019 award when it was released back in December of 2018. Well, that's because the release of Smash Ultimate fell short of the cut of time for the Golden Joystick Awards of 2018, which is why it was run in 2019 awards.

Even though it might be a year out from its release, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate still managed to scoop a really nice award up. According to Golden Joystick's official Twitter account, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate won the Nintendo Game of the Year award for 2019. This isn't the first time Super Smash Bros. Ultimate has got some decent awards, at the Japan Game Awards it got awarded the 'Grand Award', more on that here.

Back in September, Nintendo finally stepped into the mobile with an extremely strong IP, Mario Kart Tour.

Players started their engines on the 25th of September, and in just one day the app got 20 million downloads. Now some new statistics have been released by Sensor Tower who has revealed that just in September the app was downloaded 86.2 million times. Following the September release, Mario Kart Tour slowed down a bit in October, but still managed to pull in a further 40.3 million unique installs.

In comparison to Mario Kart Tour, Activision's Call of Duty: Mobile pulled in 148 million downloads in October. How much revenue was made off these installs? Mario Kart Tour managed to rake in $32 million in October, while Call of Duty: Mobile pulled ahead with $54 million. Mario Kart Tour currently doesn't have multiplayer support, so these numbers are sure to increase once Nintendo updates the game with that.

Adult Swim has released a new preview of the second episode to come to Rick and Morty Season 4, showing more of why you shouldn't develop an app with Glootie.

This episode, which is titled "The Old Man In The Seat" is a reference to Ernest Hemingway's "The Old Man And The Sea". If you are familiar with "The Old Man And The Sea" story, you would know that it's about an old man and his pursuit of catching a giant fish so he can finally rest.

It seems that Jerry is the 'old man' and developing an app with Glootie is his 'giant fish' to financial gain and notoriety. Little does Jerry know, and to Rick's full knowledge, developing an app with Glootie is how his species takes over planets. The app, which seems to be some form of alien-Tinder rip off called "Lovefinderrz" launches, and Jerry and Morty end up on the mother-ship to turn the server off.

When you are traveling, whether it is throughout and the airport, to a hotel room or everything else in-between, battery becomes a problem you have to overcome. The convenience public USB charging should be all good, right? Wrong.

According to a new warning issued out by LA County District Attorney's Office, travelers should avoid using public USB charging stations in airports, hotels and other locations as devices connected to these chargers could result in the device being hacked. The scam is called "juice jacking" and its when criminals place malware onto the charging station and its cables and the leave the cable there for an unsuspecting traveler to come by and juice up their phone.

While the charging is occurring for the traveler, the malware might "lock the device or export data and passwords directly to the scammer." With the risk of having personal information scammed away from your device, the battery % you would have gained charging doesn't seem worth the cost. How do you overcome this new issue? Easy. Invest in reasonable portable chargers with a considerable amount of milliamp hours. Anker is a great brand, as well as Cygnet. A link to a great one can be found here.

Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass service is getting so good that I'm starting to feel bad for subscribing.

Game Pass is the best value in gaming right now: For $10 a month, you get access to over 100+ games across the entire Xbox spectrum, from the original Xbox all the way to Xbox One. Microsoft has invested tremendously with partners to bring some of the biggest games over to the all-you-can-play service, and now Square Enix is jumping into the fray with their beloved Final Fantasy series.

At the XO19 event in London, England, Square Enix confirmed that multiple big Final Fantasy games will be on Game Pass in 2020. The following games are coming to Game Pass on both consoles and PC:

The Switch has now sold over 41 million systems worldwide on the backs of a big quarterly surge.

Nintendo sold 6.93 million Switch consoles in the six-month period ended September 30, 2019, with 2.13 million systems sold in Q1'19 and 4.8 million sold in Q2'19. This brings total lifetime Switch sales to 41.67 to date, including the 2017 base model, the new Switch Lite handheld-only system, and the new Switch revision with improved battery life.

Total hardware sales made up 53.2% of Nintendo's total gaming platform sales, or roughly 214.961 billion yen ($1.99 billion).

343i has two weeks to fix some pretty big issues with Halo: Reach on PC, and if they can't, the game might not hit promised high-end performance targets.

Right now Halo: Reach on PC is locked at 60FPS for its beta testing flights. But it could stay that way when Reach launches in December, possibly even for an undetermined time after release. In a recent forum update, 343i's Tyler Davis says the team's work will carry over long after Reach's release with "more improvements beyond launch."

He also said the team still isn't happy about Reach's frame rates:

Nintendo platform holders are mostly buying first-party games like Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, Super Mario Maker 2, and Link's Awakening over third party games.

Surprising absolutely no one, consumers buy Nintendo hardware specifically to play Nintendo games. The company's recent 2H'19 financials highlighted the continuing trend, showing that Nintendo's first-party games made up 75% of total software sales during the six-month period. Nintendo managed to sell roughly 58.54 million Switch software units in 2H'19, of which 43.90 million were first-party titles.

Nearly all of Nintendo's major first-party games have made it big on the Switch, especially newer titles. Super Mario Maker 2 has sold 3.39 million units so far, and others like Link's Awakening moved 3.13 million and Fire Emblem: Three Houses moved 2.29 million copies.

Nintendo is making big strides towards digital-based revenues, propelled by game sales, services, and add-on content.

Nintendo's recent financials show a huge surge in digital earnings. The company made 71.6 billion yen ($663.45 million) from digital in the first six months of Fiscal Year 2019, up a tremendous 83% year-over-year. Nintendo attributes this big jump in digital revenue to strong Switch Online subscriptions, massive add-on sales like Super Smash Bros. Ultimate's fighter pass, and more direct consumer spending on digitally-delivered games.

Interestingly enough, the digital still isn't the preferred method consumers actually use to buy games. Retail box sales still hold the lion's share of Switch game sales. Only 36.2% of Nintendo's total 58.54 million software sales in 2H'19 were from digital--the rest were from physical sales.

Microsoft's Project xCloud might've just killed Stadia before it even released.

Google's new Stadia game streaming service is kind of a confusing mess right now. Google doesn't really know what it's doing. Stadia requires a $10 monthly sub at launch, forces users to buy their own games separately, is missing lots of key features like save state sharing at launch, and needs a mobile app to change basic settings. You'll also have to buy a Chromecast Ultra to play on your TV, and PC gaming is limited to 1080p 60FPS. It has a lot of hooks and gamers are dubious.

Microsoft's competing service is totally different. Project xCloud basically does everything Stadia does, but it'll include a pool of games for a set monthly fee, complete with total Xbox account integration. But it's the newly announced features that've basically just snuffed Stadia out before Google's service had a chance to compete.

Microsoft's powerful next-gen Project Scarlett console will focus more on frame rates and speed than resolution, delivering up to 120FPS in specific games.

Project Scarlett is shaping up to be quite beastly. Reports say the next-gen Xbox will beat PlayStation 5's onboard specs, but on paper the systems seem quite similar: They both have a high-end AMD SoC with a Zen 2 CPU and Navi GPU, a super-fast PCIe 4.0 SSD, raytracing support, 8K resolution support, and high FPS gaming. But Microsoft promises it's going all out with Scarlett's power.

So what kind of in-game performance can we expect from Project Scarlett? No exact resolution and FPS matchups have been explicitly confirmed (there's no 4K 60FPS selling point yet like with the Xbox One X, for example), but Microsoft says Scarlett can hit 120FPS, which is likely for 1080p resolution. We should also expect native 4K gaming without upscaling like with the Xbox One X.

Following the gameplay reveal of Age of Empires IV, Microsoft and Relic Entertainment have released a behind the scenes video detailing the development of the title. Let's dive in.

The above video shows Game Director Quinn Duffy, Art Director Zach Schlappi, Creative Director Adam Isgreen, Community Manager Eliot Hong and General Manager Shannon Loftis describing all of the new aspects that will be arriving in Age of Empires IV. Its mentioned that Age of Empires IV's game resolution is "designed for 4K", meaning the game is going to come with a next-gen graphical upgrade when compared to its predecessors.

The developers also claim that they are "doing things that no other RTS has done before" in terms of how AI responds to players. They go into further detail, saying that the AI "are actually people with voices, character, and personality". This same upgrade in AI goes for combat as well; sometimes the AI will go offensive, and sometimes it will go defensive forcing players to come to it. These multiple strategies are designed to keep players on their toes.

BioWare is working on a new Mass Effect game, and lucky for us, it's a long ways away. That gives gamers plenty of time to tell BioWare exactly what they want from the next sci-fi chapter.

Now that BioWare is in very, very early stages of dev on the next Mass Effect, we thought it prudent to share our wishlist for Mass Effect 5 (or whatever the new game is called).

Mass Effect has lost its way over the years. The original trilogy is excellent, but Andromeda fell short in many ways--while also reinvigorating the franchise in others. Andromeda was jarring and awkward in execution, but also pushed some new barriers and evolved the series. Our wishlist is predicated on the best elements from both the trilogy and Andromeda, and assumes the next chapter will be based heavily around Andromeda's basic framework. We also toss in a few ideas of our own, mainly centered around the potential live service features.

BioWare's Mike Gamble is leading development of a new Mass Effect game, sources tell Kotaku.

It's not exactly a secret that BioWare is working on a new Mass Effect project. The studio has teased it repeatedly over the last few months:first on N7 Day in 2018, then in February 2019, then again in September, and only a week or so ago BioWare said it has "many more Mass Effect ideas and stories yet to tell."

But now we have a bit of concrete information. The new Mass Effect game is currently in extremely early planning phases of development at BioWare's main Edmonton branch, and we shouldn't expect it for a very long time. BioWare's next project in line is Dragon Age 4, and even that game is pre-production and EA doesn't expect it to ship until 2022 or thereabouts.

BioWare isn't giving up on Anthem, and plans to roll out big updates to turn the game around.

Anthem is far from dead--at least at BioWare. The game has been lambasted by its playerbase for months after release, and seems to barely have a pulse when it comes to active players. As a live service game, Anthem failed. But BioWare wants to right the ship with a huge expansion that systematically overhauls loot, skills, and most importantly, the online elements.

The ambitious shooter-looter will get a huge The Taken King-style update to revamp Anthem's soft spots, sources close to BioWare tell Kotaku's Jason Schreier. The idea is to radically change and streamline gameplay (not unlike No Man's Sky's huge NEXT update) to make Anthem less jarring and awkward. In many ways, BioWare wants to finish Anthem and reach its full potential.

During Microsoft's XO19 event, the publisher officially revealed when Minecraft Dungeons would be released on all platforms.

The above release date announcement trailer has been uploaded to the official Xbox YouTube Channel. The trailer doesn't really show that much at all, besides the official release month for Minecraft Dungeons. Microsoft will be debuting developer Mojang's next game sometime in April 2020. It will be arriving on the PS4, Xbox One, Switch, and PC all at the same time.

For those that don't know what Minecraft Dungeons is, the game will introduce players to a new range of nasty mobs, some sweet multiplayer dungeon-crawling action, new items, personalizations for characters, quests and more. This will mark the first game Mojang has developed since the original Minecraft. If you are after more information about Minecraft Dungeons be sure to check out the other trailer here.