Latest News - Page 2118

Gamers can lament the death of Visceral Games with a free copy of Dead Space on PC.

Dead Space is now available for free as part of EA's On The House promotion within Origin, which typically gives out a free PC copy of a random game every month. To snag your copy all you need to do is download the Origin client and secure your copy--then it's yours to keep without limitations.

The goal behind this is to get more people folded into the Origin PC client and thus potentially make sales, which can then lead to monetized engagement, aka the wheel that churns EA's billion-dollar business. But if you're not up for buying anything you can at least get one of the best horror games for free and give it a whirl. RIP Visceral Games :(.

Rare today confirmed that its upcoming online pirate game Sea of Thieves will indeed be monetized with optional in-game purchases.

When I first saw Sea of Thieves I thought "hey this is a great opportunity for microtransactions!". Nowadays you don't really make an online multiplayer game and not offer some way to make recurring earnings via optional in-game lootboxes/DLC/add-ons, etc., especially if you're a first-party Microsoft studio. Remember Microsoft is all about monetizing engagement right now and has a robust gameplan that bridges gaming software, services, and subscriptions in an effort to rake in tons of cash (and it's working).

Now Sea of Thieves executive producer Joe Neate says microtransactions are coming, but only three months after launch, and lootboxes won't be included--you'll always know what you're getting.

It appears Microsoft is trying to heal its sparse games lineup with a slate of refreshed classics, including a new Perfect Dark game, reports suggest.

We've heard that Playground Games is working on a new Fable game, and Microsoft's Phil Spencer has already confirmed the next Forza and Halo games are indeed in development and will launch directly on the Xbox Game Pass program, but what about the company's other IPs? Like, say, Perfect Dark?

According to OXM Magazine, there's a rumor floating around that The Coalition, who develops the Gears of War games, is helping game dev Storylab Productions make a new third-person Perfect Dark game. That sounds a bit odd especially since The Coalition is working on the next Gears of War game, and that Perfect Dark is a first-person shooter. OXM was careful to say that the project could end up transforming into a different type of game or fizzle out entirely--or the rumor could be entirely untrue.

EA, like other major publishers, have caught wind of the massively popular battle royale trend started by PUBG. But how long until the gaming titan throws their hat into the ring? The longer they wait, the harder it'll be to capture the market, says analyst firm SuperData.

Back in September I wrote an article predicting that Bluehole's PUBG would eventually be squeezed out of the battle royale market that it helped created, especially when big players like EA, Activision, Ubisoft, and Take-Two Interactive jumped in--especially with the competition from EPIC's Fortnite. The latter has happened as Fortnite outstripped PUBG in players, and GTA Online now has a battle royale type of mode, but other big players have yet to step into the space. This should change, and soon, especially with EA's Battlefield series--at least that's what SuperData says.

In its latest analysis report, SuperData highlights the major benefits and reasons why Battlefield should have some sort of battle royale mode. "EA is in an excellent position to capitalize on the battle royale trend," the report states. "The Battlefield games are known among AAA shooters for their large maps and high player numbers per match. Adding a battle royale mode to Battlefield would require fewer changes to the core experience than with games like Call of Duty that have smaller player counts and maps."

As more and more publishers embrace live services, French games-maker Ubisoft explains why it's following this trend.

If you've seen our previous coverage on Ubisoft's quarterly earnings, you already know that they've made a tremendous transformation to a digital-first company. Like most video game publishers (Activision, EA, Take-Two Interactive and even Capcom and Square Enix), Ubisoft is interested in tapping the rich vein that is live services, which allows for a more long-term, lucrative and recurring business model. Instead of selling a game once and taking in the sales revenue, developers and publishers can now keep making money over time by selling in-game items in their online-oriented games. This is the engagement model and it's something that just about every big name in gaming is embracing.

But few publishers go out of their way to explicitly highlight why they're doing this, leaving it up to analysts, journalists, and financial advisers to explain. Ubisoft, however, has exposed its thinking behind the live service model it's planned out and successfully implemented. What it really comes down to is money: by selling its games digitally, Ubisoft retains about 70% of every game sold. Retail sales, however, only net Ubisoft about 55% after distribution costs--digital games don't require manuals, discs, etc, and Ubisoft only has to pay Microsoft and Sony for consoles, while keeping everything from games sold on uPlay.

Just after the release of Dragon Ball FighterZ we are already hearing about another multiplayer Dragon Ball game, this time though it is a fan-made Unreal Engine 4 creation.

A Dragon Ball fan named Emudshit has announced on his YouTube channel that a new Dragon Ball made in Unreal Engine 4 will be debuting in early March 2018. From the above video we can see the work that has already been put into the demo and honestly it seems quite impressive considering it is fan-made demo.

The final product from Emudshit will contain characters ranging from the Dragon Ball Z series all the way up to the more recent Dragon Ball Super. The demo will also contain a variety of signature moves from their respective characters aswell as the ability for saiyans to turn super saiyan whenever they like.

Hawaii has been looking into the regulation of sales of games containing loot boxes to the youth, now the senate is pushing bills that would ban the sales of these games to people under 21.

It has been reported by the Hawaii Tribune Herald that there is four different bills in circulation that are being pushed. The first two which are titled House Bill 2686 and Senate Bill 3024 purpose a regulation on the sales of games containg loot boxes to only people above the age of 21.

The second pair of bills called House Bill 2727 and Senate Bill 3025 purposes a requirement for publishers to accurately label games that contain the loot box mechanic as well as the probability rates for each of the rewards.

In a new trailer that was released at D23 Expo in Japan has revealed the new look of Riku in Kingdoms Heart III, in more recent news an action figure of Riku has also been released.

Bring Arts made this announcement not long after Square Enix revealed the new trailer for the game. The new Riku figure will also be accompanied with two new figures of Sora, Halloween Town form and Christmas Town form, both from Kingdom Hearts II.

Following the reveal of the Toy Story world which happened awhile ago, Bring Arts also announced after the reveal a slew of Toy Story figures, so this isn't an unusual thing to happen after an announcement.

Following up from the recent Bayonetta and Bayonetta 2 trailer and also the short video released showing a stable 60FPS on the Switch, a new overview trailer has been released by Nintendo.

Bayonetta and Bayonetta 2 releases this coming friday as Nintendo Switch players gear up for the demon bashing beat'em up joy Nintendo thought it would be a good idea to give a quick overview.

The overview trailer seen above gives a very brief run-down for new and old players going into the Bayonetta 2. The overview discusses just what Bayoneeta does and how so goes about bringing across the carnage seen in the gameplay. Both Bayonetta and Bayonetta 2 will be available for $60 on the Nintendo eShop.

At the D23 Expo in Japan, Square Enix has revealed to us more of what is to be expected in Disney's upcoming Kingdom Hearts III. A new trailer has shown off the Monsters, Inc. world, which is to also be featured in the new game.

In the above trailer confirms the Monsters, Inc. world for Kingdom Hearts III, showing off makeovers of Sora, Goofy and Donald the Duck in monster form.

We also get some quick looks at the Toy Story world and also the Tangled world, as the partnership between Pixar, Disney and Square Enix continues we will more than likely see more of this title in the coming months.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance is finally out but with early PS4 players saying that the game requires a massive 23GB patch when it's first being installed, some gamers are asking why.

The developer has made some significant changes and adjustments to Kingdom Come: Deliverance, with v1.01 also adding new things in as well. Will Powers, the Senior Marketing and PR boss for Deep Silver, who are publishing the game for Warhorse Studios, said the team did "at least" six weeks of work polishing the game before its final on-disc build.

Powers said that this is why the v1.01 patch is 23GB, clarifying: "The way that I've been told that the engine works, is it takes the entire game and separates the PKG or ISO into 2GB archives. If during a patch you so much as alter a 1KB text file within any of these 2GB archives, then you need to reupload the ENTIRE 2GB portion".

This stuff seriously only comes out of Japan, but completely blows my mind every time that it does: in order to market their self-driving car and self-parking technology, Nissan has infused an inn in Hakone, Japan with a bunch of next-level stuff.

We're talking about self-parking slippers, that 'drive' themselves back into position, autonomous flood cushions, and even a self-parking TV remote.

It might be a marketing gimmick but this is totally awesome and makes me #wanttostay there just to see my slippers park themselves. I want to go to Japan (for the first time ever) during the 2020 Olympics, and this is now on my bucket list: I want to see my pillow and slippers park themselves.

It's no surprise that COLORFUL has dived right into the world of Battlegrounds, as it is one of the biggest AIB partners of NVIDIA, and the biggest GeForce GTX 10 seller in China - one of the largest markets for gaming in the world.

COLORFUL has double downed on the entire PUBG frenzy, with the company releasing a performance chart that tallies up all of COLORFUL's custom GeForce GTX 10 series cards, starting from the GTX 1050 Ti right through to the GTX 1080 Ti.

As you can see, starting with the GTX 1060 3GB you can safely play PUBG at 1080p 60FPS on Ultra settings, which is not too damn bad at all. If you're after 120FPS or higher, that is GTX 1080 Ti territory, while the middle of the road GTX 1070 Ti pushes 103FPS average.

Razer lit up the mobile gaming world with their Razer Phone last year, a gaming-focused smartphone the featured a crown jewel: a super-smooth 120Hz display.

The latest rumor is that ASUS will be teasing a new gaming smartphone during MWC 2018, inside ASUS will be using Qualcomm's Snapdragon 845 with a cooling system that will let the Snapdragon 845 hit max clocks and not throttle. We should expect a beautiful Zen-like design, 6GB or more of RAM, and more.

ASUS could call it the ROG Phone, keeping its first gaming-focused smartphone under the Republic of Gamers branding would be a nice nod to PC gamers that love ROG products. We'll hear more at MWC 2018, and report back with the latest as it happens.

NVIDIA is poised to release its new GeForce GTX 20 series in the next couple of months, with sources telling me it'll happen in March and then other sources saying April. Whatever the release is, it's comign in the next couple of months and it's going to be big. I recently wrote one of our biggest stories of the last 12 months with 'Could NVIDIA block GeForce 20 series cards from mining' and have been thinking about it ever since.

We should see the revised Ampere GPU architecture with it being a refreshed Pascal GPU, but made by Samsung on their 14nm FinFET node, versus Pascal's entire GP10x lineup that is on 16nm by TSMC. On top of the refreshed Ampere GPU we'll see the introduction of GDDR6 which is really going to change things at the high-end side of memory bandwidth.

The perfect card for NVIDIA's new Big Format Gaming Displays (BFGDs), as driving the 65-inch 4K 120FPS with G-Sync and HDR isn't going to be easy, even with the current flock of GTX 10 series cards. But with all of this purported brute speed and bandwidth, the GTX 20 series cards will be even better in miners' eyes as they'll have what should be some amazing hashing rate for cryptocurrency miners.

It seems like a few of the big Steam Early Access games are leaving their not-v1.0 confines with Battlegrounds recently hitting v1.0 and now we have Rust leaving Steam Early Access and reaching the v1.0 milestone, too.

The prise of Rust has increased now that it's out of Steam Early Access, with v1.0 of the game costing $35, up from the $20 entry cost. The team has also changed the update frequency, moving from weekly to monthly updates.

Rust in its v1.0 state has some improvements made to the graphics, after gamers were noticing visual loss with the constant changes being made to the game. The final release sports improved lighting and post-processing, as well as new flora and fauna in the game world.

Ubisoft has once again made the lion's share of its net sales from digital, showing how the company has not only changed but laying out a clear path for the publisher's future.

Over the past few years Ubisoft has made a significant transition to embrace digital in its lineup of games, and its slate typically taps the live service model to some extent (look at The Division, Rainbow Six: Siege, and even the upcoming Far Cry 5, for instance). Now in its latest Fiscal Q3'18 earnings report, Ubisoft illustrates just how important digital is by earning 80% of its total net sales for the quarter from digital purchases, DLC, subscriptions and microtransactions.

Ubisoft made €725 million in net sales in the three-month period from October thru December 2017, of which 80.4%, or €670 million, was from digital. That represents an increase of 75% year-over-year.

Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto strongly hints the Switch will extend beyond the company's typical console lifecycle.

When the Nintendo Switch was revealed in in 2017 I thought two things: the device's transforming nature was brilliant, and that it'd be a system that lasts for quite a long time. The console-handheld hybrid is positioned to be Nintendo's merged future for possibly as long as a decade simply because it combines both handheld and console gaming together--and it's built on NVIDIA's Tegra chip, which can leverage a host of combined graphics and/or network architecture to boost performance. There's so many options Nintendo has at this stage insofar as hardware and software capability that the Switch looks to be the apex of the company's hardware evolution (Wii to Wii U to Switch).

Now at a company financial briefing, Nintendo exec and Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto pretty much says gamers should expect the Switch to disrupt the games-maker's traditional console release cadence.

Ubisoft is apparently working on a mysterious unannounced AAA franchise to release in next fiscal year's timeline.

While scouting Ubisoft's latest Fiscal Q3'18 earnings I noticed something quite interesting: the company says a new unannounced franchise should roll out in the fiscal year ending March 2020 (FY2019). In fact, this game was supposed to release during this year's timeline but was delayed for unexplained reasons.

The report sees Ubisoft downgrading its sales target by 5 million units due to the delay, as it now will ship 4 AAA games from April 1, 2018 through March 31, 2019 versus 5 AAA titles. Here's what the company said in the filing:

Now that the Nintendo Switch has gained tremendous sales worldwide, it's imperative that the games-maker is able to continue this momentum going forward with a slate of innovative products and games--which is something Nintendo plans to do.

Every quarter it seems Nintendo keeps beating its Switch sales targets. The company is selling the hybrid-handheld console faster than they can make them, but even amid shortages, it's managed to completely smash its forecasts--a trend that should continue for the foreseeable future. What makes the Switch so appealing is not only that it allows gamers to take their games on-the-go and also play them at home, but the software library itself, which is grown to tremendous proportions. And this is only just the beginning.

In a recent financial meeting, Nintendo President Tatsumi Kimishima affirmed that the Switch's second year on the market is extremely important for its continued success, and the Japanese titan has a solid plan in place for the console's future.