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EA says it's committed to the Star Wars brand--and as it should be--but what about a new Battlefront? The next couple of fiscal years should paint a more unique picture for the company's Star Wars focus.

In it's latest fiscal Q3'18 earnings, EA says it isn't sure when the new Battlefront will release. Remember that Respawn--who was just acquired by EA--is working on an action-based Star Wars game. Also there's Visceral Games' Star Wars game Project Ragtag, which was ultimately cannibalized by the publisher when Visceral was shut down, and will be re-shaped into something different.

"We haven't confirmed games for our Fiscal 2020 yet, but remember we have a Star Wars action game that the team at Respawn has been working on for the last few years, and most likely that would drop in our Fiscal '20 versus another Battlefront," EA CFO Blake Jorgensen said during the earnings call.

It Lurks Below is David Brevik's new game, and it's very Terraria-esque.

As a hardcore Diablo nerd who absolutely adores Diablo II (especially the Lord of Destruction expansion) and dies a little inside when thinking about how badly Blizzard botched Diablo III's launch, I'm always fascinated any time I hear about David Brevik, who helped the series come to light. While the veteran game dev isn't working on Diablo IV (or whatever Blizzard will call it), he's chipping away at a neat little indie game called It Lurks Below.

The game itself is a roguelike dungeon crawler that looks a whole lot like Terraria, and even shares a functional in-game world that can be destroyed or customized by players. Apparently Brevik is a huge fan of these types of games: "I wanted more of a point to a lot of those games," Brevik said in a recent interview with Polygon. "I wanted to make an RPG, with classes and leveling up, random items, where you get more and more powerful as you go down into the core of the world and fight baddies."

Electronic Arts' latest fiscal Q3'18 earnings show just how powerful live services are, especially when a big anti-publisher controversy hits.

In the third quarter of EA's Fiscal Year 2018 timeline, the publisher made three times as much from live services than full game downloads. Remember that live services include in-game purchases and microtransactions from PC, console and mobile games, as well as subscriptions like EA/Origin Access, DLC, and other digital non-full game purchases. In the three month period from October to December 2017, EA raked in a huge $787 million from live services, up 39% year-over-year. Full game downloads, however, were down by 27% year-over-year to just $260 million--that's over a half a billion dollar's difference.

Live services made up a whopping 64% of the company's digital segment revenues, whereas full game downloads pulled in just 21% of the quarter's segment earnings. In trailer twelve-month figures, which group the quarter with the last 9 months of earnings, live services have made EA $2.035 billion, up a mighty 30% year-over-year and representing about 60% of total trailing twelve-month digital earnings. Conversely, full game downloads didn't even break a billion dollars in the period, sitting at $682 million, or about 20% of total segment earnings for the period.

The engagement model is incredibly lucrative for companies like EA, who typically make billions a year from live services, so don't expect this trend to change any time soon.

In its recently reported its fiscal Q3'18 earnings, EA once again demonstrates its success with the player engagement strategy. This business model sees a multitude of optional in-game purchases (microtransactions, cosmetics, etc) being riddled into games with key online elements, such as Battlefront II and FIFA, and EA makes quite a bit of cash from this strategy. In fact, in the three month period from October through December 2017 EA made over $700 million from live services, a segment which includes subscriptions, DLC, and microtransactions.

According to EA's CEO Andrew Wilson, this trend isn't going to change: microtransactions are basically here to stay. Despite the big pushback from Battlefront II, in the earnings call Wilson said that the monetization model can basically enhance and expand their games--and he's really not wrong. But what could be construed as wrong is how EA decides to go about implementing their optional purchases.

Samsung have today launched their new 800GB SZ985 Z-SSD, this Z-SSD is designed for advanced enterprise applications that include supercomputing for AI analysis, IoT and other big data applications. Samsung's latest Z-SSD is able to deliver exceptional performance, reliability and ultra-low latency that state-of-the-art AI applications demand.

"With our leading-edge 800GB Z-SSD, we expect to contribute significantly to market introductions of next-generation supercomputing systems in the near future, enabling improved IT investment efficiency and exceptional performance," said Jinman Han, senior vice president, Memory Product Planning & Application Engineering at Samsung Electronics. "We will continue to develop next-generation Z-SSDs with higher density and greater product competitiveness, in order to lead the industry in accelerating growth of the premium SSD* market."

The new single port, four-lane Z-SSD features Z-NAND chips that provide 10 times higher cell read performance than 3-bit V-NAND chips, along with 1.5GB LPDDR4 DRAM and a high-performance controller. This impressive hardware is able to provide random write speeds of up to 170K IOPS, 1.7 times faster random read performance at 750K IOPS and five times less write latency at an incredible 16 microseconds when compared with an NVMe SSD PM963.

Epic Games' worldwide creative director, Donald Mustard has answered a fans tweet about his thoughts on bringing Fortnite to the Nintendo Switch, Mustard replied with a solid "Yes."

It appears that cross-play between platforms might be the next step in the evolution of the gaming industry, as many developers are compromising with each other in hopes of connecting their audiences. Epic Games is one of these developers, as the worldwide creative director wants to see Fortnite go portable on the Nintendo Switch.

When Donald Mustard was asked by a fan if he was interested in bringing the title to the Switch, he replied with "Yes. Yes I am. Hopefully we do that at some point!."

EA has confirmed in their earnings call that Anthem will be postponed for release until Q1 2019, while CFO Blake Jorgensen insists there is no delay on development.

Jorgensen has said that "It's not a delay" but instead EA are more so concentrating on the release of their next Battlefield game which is a fair point considering what happened with Titanfall 2 and Battlefield 1 in 2016.

If EA are carefully planning out accurate release dates, that is more than a fair enough reason to postpone the scheduled date until early next year, as this would provide great benefit for Anthem's initial release.

EA recently had their 2018 earnings call with Andrew Wilson, CEO of EA revealing what kind of impact PUBG had on their company and how they are going to tackle the success of the Battle Royale genre.

Most people are wondering if EA are going to be adding a Battle Royale mode to their already existing games, and while Wilson did not rule out that option, he said that his team is working on "new and innovative ways to play" instead of making carbon copies. Wilson continued by saying that this is the primary goal for EA at the moment, as the company is dissecting the different aspects within games that drive player engagement.

"I think what you discover in this industry is that there's a lot of great vectors that drive player engagement, and one of those is just innovation in the core gameplay mechanic. What the team with PUBG have done is really delivered a new level of innovation that changed the way people were playing first-person shooter games. And we're very respectful and complimentary of what they've been able to do. We've seen that continue with Fortnite. It's clearly a mode of play that the global FPS population is interested in." said Wilson.

Monster Hunter: World is off to a great start selling 5 million copies in just the three days after release, according to an announcement from Capcom.

A press release from Capcom was released yesterday detailing the success of their new title. Capcom announce that across both PS4 and Xbox One, Monster Hunter: World has hit a new series record in sales.

The sales on both PS4 and Xbox One include digital downloads as well, and since the developer has already reached 5 million sales in just the first three days they kindly remind us that the game isn't even out on PC yet.

Bluepoint Games the developer handling the remake of Shadow of Colossus, has explained in a new video the lengths they have gone to remake the classic PS2 title for the PS4.

Bluepoint Games has taken the massive task upon themselves to remake the title for the PS4, the developers in the video say the mission of remaking the game has been an "honor" and more-so the PS4 release is a complete rebuild of the game but still harbours the classic PS2 feel.

Bluepoint talk about when they were remaking the title how important it was for them to respect the older release but still manage to incorporate upgraded textures without taking away from the original feel of the 2005 version of the game.

Rainbow Six Siege has recently tweeted on the games official Twitter page that their current roadmap includes support for both the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X.

Rainbow Six Siege or Ubisoft responded to a fans tweet saying support for the PS4 Pro/Xbox One X "would make the game even better." Ubisoft said that support for both consoles is "definitely on our road map" but sadly the company "do not have an ETA for it though."

It would not be surprising if the developer is working on 4K textures, HDR and lighting improvements before they add support. As this would account for the extra time being taken and also be a very smart move for the developer.

Sea of Thieves has got some of the best water effects we have seen in a game so far, and now to add to that amazement information has surfaced regarding more weapons being added, and also a kraken.

Reddit user m4rx has taken to the Sea of Thieves subreddit to reveal potential weapons, chests, potions, foods, enemies and much more after data mining the Sea of Thieves beta files.

The data mining has shown files regarding a Kraken, a boarding axe weapon, harpoon gun and even some ship customization options. It is not confirmed that all of these files will be made available once the game is fully released, but that doesn't mean it isn't a possibility. A full list of the datamined files can be found here.

Not too long ago we found out that the release date for Age of Empires: Definitive Edition, as players would of guessed, it will be released exclusively to the Windows Store.

In a recent interview with GameStar, Microsoft producer Jorg Neumann has claimed that the reason Age of Empires: Definitive Edition is a Windows Store exclusive is because of Valve's lack of cross-play.

"There are certain things that are important to us, and in multiplayer games, we want to make sure our fans can play together. Therefore it is not okay if someone buys the game in one store and another in the other, and then - for some strange reason - they cannot play together. We're totally against it, and our only way to make sure of that is Xbox Live."

On the Fortnite Battle Royale subreddit a disabled fan going by the nickname of RAOBJSheff posted a new thread describing how he goes about playing Fortnite, and how Epic Games can improve his experience.

RAOBJSheff explains that he is unfortunately one-handed but this doesn't stop him and his friends from jumping into a game of Fortnite. The problem is the auto-run feature that Epic Games has added, RAOBJSheff requested to reddit for this to a toggle option as this causes him to die more than he would like to.

Here is what he had to say on the reddit post: "I lack the subtle movements a thumb can provide on the left stick so have to press it hard against my cheek bone to play. The new autorun feature means I constantly run and now fall out of buildings, off walls and die way more than normal."

Fast-paced gory top-down shooter Feral Fury has hit digital stores for PS4 and Xbox One.

A new trailer has been released a day before the games launch. It certainly shows some fury with players performing combat rolls, fighting bosses, dodging lasers and being immersed within a whole lot of action.

Not only do players get the classic top-down feel of dominating a level but Feral Fury also combines good game mechanics with a decent storyline.

Grand Theft Auto V continues making money hand over fist thanks to Rockstar's massively successful engagement strategy.

Leviathan. Juggernaut. Cash cow. All of these terms (and more) can be used to aptly describe Grand Theft Auto V: despite releasing in 2013, the game's GTA Online multiplayer component has carried it higher and higher on the money scale. Rockstar's parent company Take-Two has seen stellar success quarter after quarter thanks to GTA Online's new content, and now GTA V sits at the top-earning digital game of 2017--beating out competitors like the massively successful Call of Duty: WWII that made over $500 million in its opening weekend alone in total game sales.

According to analyst firm SuperData's latest 2017 year in review report, GTA V is the top-earning digital game in revenue throughout last year. The game earned over half a billion dollars or $521 million, the firm reports. As of July 2017, GTA Online has earned Take-Two over $1 billion dollars in revenue.

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The Gaming Video Content segment of the games industry, which includes streams, let's plays, and other gaming content published on platforms like YouTube and Twitch, is a maturing sector that earns billions every year. But YouTube had a big problem in 2017...

Last year saw we saw big advertisers like Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Procter and Gamble, and AT&T yank advertisements from YouTube following a big content controversy: ads were playing over videos deemed racist and massively inappropriate. It didn't help that major YouTube stars like Pewdiepie were also part of the controversy. Predictably enough this exodus took a toll on YouTube's advertising revenue, which it relies on to keep the platform afloat and support content creators. SuperData notes that YouTube earned 69% of its GVC revenues from advertisements in 2017. But how badly was its Gaming Video Content hit by the move? Pretty bad.

According to analyst firm SuperData, YouTube's GVC revenue dropped by a massive 50% year-over-year in 2017, effectively meaning it earned Google half of 2016's pre-controversy revenues.

Free-to-play gaming is king, and the smartphone platform reigns throughout 2017.

Analyst firm SuperData just published their latest year in review report to highlight how key sectors of the games industry fared in 2017. According to the data, mobile gaming topped the free-to-play market in Asia, North America and Europe with some $51 billion in collective earnings, representing 72% of the combined revenues across mobile, free-to-play PC, and social gaming for the year. Free-to-play gaming, specifically mobile, typically top the yearly earnings charts above console gaming.

One of the more surprising metrics shows just how many people actually play F2P games around the world: SuperData notes that one in three people on the planet play on PC or mobile, and actually pull in $82 billion of the global games market, or about 89%. In fact players spent $14 billion more on mobile games in 2017 than in 2016, showing a clear rise in the popularity and the appeal of buying in-game purchases.

Microsoft acquires PlayFab, a "complete backend platform provider of services to build, launch and grow cloud-connected games" that ties in with the company's plans to accelerate games with Azure.

Remember Microsoft's Xbox LIVE Compute platform? Remember when the company said it would accelerate the power of gaming via the cloud? Clear results didn't really materialize like Redmond had promised, but now it's doubling down on cloud-based tools in a bid to power its new gaming push. The company recently snapped up PlayFab in a bid to bolster its games-as-a-service business strategy, which Microsoft has embraced over time (most of it's third party games have GaaS elements and are monetized, not to mention Xbox LIVE which thrives on engagement).

But the acquisition isn't just to power games themselves, but also give developers a wider toolset to open new avenues for their creations. For example, Microsoft has confirmed that both Crackdown 3 and PUBG on Xbox One use/will use Azure, and we're betting both games will also use PlayFab's backend tech too.