Pokemon Go creator Niantic just received a $200 million investment, bringing its total valuation to nearly $4 billion dollars, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Driven by a dynamic engagement cycle that sees millions blending their real life and gaming interactions, AR mobile sensation Pokemon Go has made $2 billion since releasing in 2016 and remains a juggernaut in the gaming space. Investors are keen to continue riding the Pokemon Go wave and are banking strongly on the game's future, and various firms and even companies like Samsung are chipping in.

This swell is likely catalyzed in part by the success of Nintendo's new Pokemon Let's Go Pikachu and Eevee duo of games for the Switch handheld-console hybrid. Both games can connect to Pokemon Go and players can transfer their captured creatures back and forth.

With its huge wealth of shoot-and-loot mechanics and combos, BioWare's new service game Anthem will have plenty of engaging combat to keep players entertained.

As a live game, Anthem is built around a core tenant: keep everyone playing for as long as possible. This means lots of small hooks to extend playtime. Anthem will have a galaxy of items and gear to collect, but more importantly it gives players a lot of flexibility and freedom to actually use said gear in specific situations. We know that along with dishing out serious chaos to enemies, weapons and gear can actually prime and trigger devastating elemental combos in Anthem, which gives your nice new toys a practical and immediate use. But it's actually deeper than that.

Each Javelin mech--Ranger, Interceptor, Colossus and Storm--has their own unique combo effects to add maximum strategic planning and brings a new dimension to how players can plot out their parties. This also means gamers can potentially chain these combos to deal extensive havoc to their foes.

Samsung has some cool new technology inside of its wave of 2019 smart TVs, with reports of the company baking in a new feature called "Remote Access" that will let owners of the new TVs stream their PC output wirelessly to the TV. This will include full mouse and keyboard control, enabling next level living room gaming.

This new feature sounds like the love child of Steam Link and TeamViewer, with full contrrol of your gaming rig in another room, but from the comfort of the lounge. I can imagine this being a huge selling point for Samsung and rightfully so, it would give them a gigantic leg up on the gaming market for selling a new family of 2019 smart TVs that lets you game in the living room without taking your PC and setting it up again, or running a huge cable.

PC gamers won't be the only ones to benefit from the new Samsung 2019 smart TVs with its Remote Access feature, but businesses and shops will be able to use them to easily access a TV. We should learn more about Remote Access and the 2019 range of smart TVs during CES 2019 which kicks off just over a week from now.

Bethesda's judgement isn't without mercy, and cheaters who want to get back into Fallout 76 have to do some homework.

Like any live service keeper, Bethesda guards Fallout 76's shaky online framework from cheating via metrics and detection. The company has swung the banhammer on a few suspected cheaters who allegedly use third-party mods and file edits to give them an unfair advantage. But according to YouTuber JuiceHead, who found multiple instances of the incidents on Twitter, some claim Fallout 76's anti-cheat detection is as faulty as the game itself, and that they were banned for simply using visual enhancement mods that don't affect the economics or mechanics of the game.

Whether or not Bethesda is banning cheaters or earnest modders (or both) remains unclear. The company clearly outlined that unauthorized third-party software violates its terms of service and is a punishable offense. But there's a way out: write a 500-word essay detailing why cheating is bad and submit it to Bethesda, as if it were your high school English teacher.

On the back of Fortnite's megalithic success, Epic Games has made $3 billion in profit in 2018, sources tell TechCrunch.

Fortnite's monetization is making Epic Games billions, but one source claims the company raked in $3 billion in profit this year, which is incredible. There's a lot to unpack from this statement so let's take a closer look. First off, Epic is privately held so it doesn't divulge quarterly or yearly earnings figures, which means we don't know for sure how much they're actually making. Secondly, Epic doesn't just make money from Fortnite (but Fortnite is a big breadwinner). It licenses the Unreal games engine and asset tools out to developers and publishers, and soon it'll make recurring revenues from full game sales on the new Epic Games Store.

But the most important bit of context around the $3 billion in profit comment surrounds what type of profit it actually is. Is it operating profit or gross profit? Gross profit is total revenues minus costs of goods sold, whereas operating profit is total earnings left over after a company subtracts expenses like wages, marketing, live service upkeep, etc. from gross profit. So operating profit is always smaller than gross profit.

It looks like things are rather glim for Blizzard where according to a new report from Kotaku, the developer of massive fan favorites like Diablo, World Warcraft and Overwatch, is offering its developers money to leave the company as part of a company-wide cost-cutting program called "Career Crossroads".

Kotaku staff member Jason Schreier spoke with an anonymous Blizzard source that confirmed Career Crossroads, a program that allowed certain developers to leave the company with a chunk of cash in their pocket. This is a way for the developer to provide its staff with a way out of the company instead of being fired, or having to quit when they look around and see the place crumbling.

The insider said: "We have had a completely voluntary and long-standing program in various locations around the world that gives eligible staff the option to make the most of incentives while proactively pursuing other career opportunities. No one is required or encouraged to participate in the program, but for those who do, we work hard to make it generous".

Jack Black is a freaking legend, involved in so many industries that has spanned Hollywood in both TV and movies, as well as the music industry witeh the greatest band of all time: Tenacious D.

Black has announced a new YouTube channel called "Jablinski" where he will be talking about all things games, food, and life. What I love is that Black's pinned comment from a couple of days ago is in reference to my favorite game of all time: Overwatch. Black said: "I just want to clarify that there is no production behind this. this is all my son. He's holding me hostage and I can't be tracer. help...".

It will be Black's son that is handling the production, directing and editing his Dad behind the scenes (which as a father of two, I think is super awesome). Black will upload a video every single week, and with his sense of humor and no shame, I think he'll go far - hell, he's already giving a dig to YouTube mega star PewDiePie. It has barely been a week and Jablinski has 576,000 subscribers already.

NVIDIA was in the headlines over the Christmas break with a new GeForce RTX 2060 that will include not one, not two, but six different models. If this leak is correct, we're looking at an absolute landslide of RTX 2060 graphics cards to choose from, and it's going to get messy.

The latest leak on the GeForce RTX 2060 is from a new entry at the EEC (Eurasian Economic Commission) where three different SKUs are listed with two different memory technologies. There will reportedly be a 6GB, 4GB, and 3GB model of the GeForce RTX 2060 in both GDDR6 and GDDR5 models, making for six cards launching under the GeForce RTX 2060.

If this is true it's going to be very confusing for consumers to choose between the cards as there are six in the price range that the GeFOrce RTX 2060 will launch in. Testing performance between each exact card is going to be harder, as one card should be faster than another in a particular game and resolution, but lose against it in something else.

Sony's PlayStation Classic apparently isn't selling too well, and has been discounted quite a bit over the holidays.

The PlayStation Classic hasn't even been out a month yet and it's already dropped down to $59.99, about 40% below its original costly $99.99 MSRP. Retailers like BestBuy, Walmart, and Amazon are all selling the retro mini-console at a steep discount.

The system was widely panned by critics for its lackluster library of 20 pre-loaded games, almost half of which are PAL region based, and poor performance caused by frame-rate drops.

Free-to-play mobile games are fraught with ways to spend money, but like millions of parents out there, SuperData analyst Joost van Dreunen is concerned how this is affecting kids.

In a recent email newsblast, of which typically have wise insight on the games industry, SuperData's Joost van Dreunen had a few choice words about over-monetized mobile games. These titles, which typically target kids and younger gamers, help churn mobile gaming's billion-dollar wheel of microtransaction revenues with invasive, often manipulative tactics. Progress is often interrupted or even held ransom unless users spend a dollar here or two dollars here, creating a self-sustaining loop of instant gratification vs. having to wait (hence the "freemium isn't free" argument.).

"The current offering of kids games has a glaring problem in terms of how they connect kids with suitable content. The issue, as I see it, is two-fold: first, there's a sobering amount of overly aggressive in-app monetization going on," van Dreunen wrote in the newsletter.