Gaming - Page 116

PlayStation profits are up +127% year-over-year to $1 billion, the highest point since 2020.

Sony just released its Q1'25 earnings report, and the results are stellar for the PlayStation brand. In total, PlayStation made $1.024 billion in operating profit during the quarter ending June 30, 2025, up significantly from last quarter's $607 million.

Company CFO Lin Tao explains that this surge in operating income was the result of better earnings from third-party software, as well as high earnings performance from the network services segment, which includes PlayStation Plus. Another major contributor is that Sony is winding down payments for the $3.7 billion Bungie acquisition (side note: Bungie is now slowly being absorbed by PlayStation Studios).

Battlefield 6 has some of the best destruction in a game so far, giving me some serious Battlefield: Bad Company 2 + The Finals vibes, but in this new side-by-side comparison between Battlefield 6 and Battlefield 2042, we get to really see what the team has pulled off with BF6. Check it out:

In a new comparison video from ElAnalistaDeBits on YouTube, a huge highlight was put on the destruction mechanics and physics of Battlefield 6 with some comparisons against Battlefield 2042. You can see the massive improvements in destruction and physics between the two games, where Battlefield 6 feels far, far more realistic and features a massive amount more (realistic) destruction than BF2042.

This is all still in its beta state as well, where I'm sure the developers will tinker around until things are even better for the final release of Battlefield 6. All of this destruction doesn't just pull down your performance either, where the team has said you just need an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti 8GB graphics card to hit 1440p 60FPS+ in Battlefield 6, damn good stuff.

The Battlefield 6 open beta has reached the mainstream with the first weekend attracting more players than the all-time player record for the Call of Duty franchise on Steam. With that intense popularity, EA has revealed how many players have attempted to cheat and have now been banned.

In a recent forums post, EA has shared a message from its SPEAR Anti-Cheat Team where it said that since the launch of the Open Beta its Javelin software has prevented a staggering 330,000 attempts to cheat or tamper with anti-cheat controls. Moreover, the Anti-Cheat team has said Open Beta players have filed 44,000 claims of potential cheaters in their lobbies just on the first day, while another 60,000 reports were lodged on the following day.

330,000 attempts at cheating are a staggering number of attempts, and that number is likely higher as the message from AntiCheatWard was from a few days ago and before the Open Beta reached its new height of 500,000+ concurrent players on Steam. Notably, Battlefield 6's anti-cheat software on PC requires Secure Boot, which provides the anti-cheat team with deep access to a machine and what the team says are the necessary tools to leverage against the various cheating techniques.

Sony's latest Q1'25 financials offer an interesting update on the PlayStation business, showing that the cross-platform initiative is helping a new games segment beat physical game sales.

Inside PlayStation's walls, physical game sales revenues have been outstripped by a relatively new classification: Other Software, which includes first-party game sales/microtransactions made on non-PlayStation hardware. Essentially, what we are seeing is that on the PlayStation platform, physical software is now being more heavily stressed by the combined effect of digital sales made both on PC and PS5. This skew towards digital saw holiday 2024 physical game revenue drop to just $291 million, a low point for this kind of period.

In Q1'25, which included Death Stranding 2's launch, PlayStation made $157 million from physical game sales, compared to $175 million from Other Software. This discrepancy makes sense considering that PC is almost fully digital at this point, but it's worth considering that Other Software technically includes the Lego Horizon Adventures game that PlayStation Studios published on the Nintendo Switch.

Battlefield is back and better than ever, pulling in the interest of hundreds of thousands of gamers worldwide.

The Battlefield 6 open beta is here, and has already broken one of its competitor's major player records. Just 4 hours ago, the Battlefield 6 open beta saw an all-time peak of 521,079 players, beating the Call of Duty launcher's all-time peak by nearly 30,000 users. The Call of Duty launcher hit a peak of 491,000 players quite some time ago in 2022.

Remember that these numbers are only on Steam, and do not include the EA App or those playing on consoles--the actual player base could be significantly higher, especially since the PS5 just hit 80.3 million shipments.

Rod Fergusson, the franchise lead that helped ship the highest-earning Diablo game of all time, has announced that he's leaving Microsoft and Blizzard.

Diablo IV earned $666 million in 5 days, becoming Blizzard's all-time fastest-selling game at launch. Diablo IV went on to break $1 billion in revenue more than a year later, with $150 million made from microtransactions. None of this would have happened without Rod Fergusson, an industry figure known as a "closer" who can step in to lead--in this case, lead Diablo IV's haphazard development.

Now Fergusson has revealed that he's leaving Blizzard and the Diablo franchise.

Fallout 4's Creation Club will soon become more refined and offer higher-quality mods, new reports suggest, potentially as part of a new Fallout 4 Anniversary Edition celebrating 10 years since the game's launch.

Bethesda's Creation Club initiative launched in 2017, adding controversial "paid mods" to Fallout 4 and Skyrim. The idea is simple: Gamers can create custom mods, including armors, weapons, and even entire questlines, and then sell them in a storefront. Creation Club uses its own premium currency, too. Bethesda could finally make money from mods, and users would get the opportunity to try out content that was more guaranteed to work.

The program received a lot of flak, especially from PC gamers, who had essentially kept Bethesda's games alive many years post-launch thanks to mod creation and support. Bethesda moved away from Creation Club, morphing the program into "Creations," meaning the content is much more curated and picked with care. That being said, there are still over 4,000 Starfield creations. Both Starfield and Skyrim have Creations pages, but Fallout 4 does not (users can still buy Creation Club mods with the special currency, however).

Sony management doesn't try to sugar-coat the state of PlayStation's live service roadmap, admitting the company has more work to do and lessons to learn.

Sony executives acknowledge the mistakes with PlayStation's live games, briefly mentioning the $400 million blunder Concord and discussing Marathon's delay. Multiple live games have been cancelled, including Naughty Dog's anticipated Last of Us online game; Sony originally wanted to release 12 live games by FY25 and a lot of these titles have been scrapped.

In a recent webcast with investors during Sony's Q1'25 earnings, company CFO Lin Tao says that there are "still issues, many issues" with the games-as-a-service plan. Despite the roadblocks, Sony has indeed seen success with Helldivers 2's gargantuan sales on PS5 and PC, and potentially even more when it drops on Xbox.

Some gamers with an Intel Arc A-Series graphics card - first-generation Alchemist models - are suffering from crashes when trying the Battlefield 6 beta.

Wccftech picked up on the fact that some PC gamers playing the Battlefield 6 open beta (which just kicked off) are reporting that they are being unceremoniously dumped out of gaming sessions, or that it's crashing on loading a map.

Intel has released a statement on its Gaming Forums which acknowledges these crashes and says that a fix is already in the works. Team Blue says:

The Battlefield 6 beta weekend is almost upon us, and with the highly anticipated game now opening up to the public, thousands of Call of Duty players will be flocking to servers to jump into the action. Here's what you need to know if you are a Call of Duty player who is about to experience their first Battlefield game.

Battlefield differs significantly from Call of Duty in its gameplay execution. While Call of Duty leans more toward a solo run-and-gun game, Battlefield is best experienced alongside teammates. It is possible to take on an entire enemy point by yourself in Conquest, cap it, and wait for teammates to spawn on you. However, first-time Call of Duty players are going to find that extremely difficult, considering enemies are also moving alongside their teammates.

Battlefield 6 is split into four classes, with each offering unique abilities and mechanics. While not every map calls for every squad to have one of each class, it's more often than not that a team will have different percentages of the same class.

A modding and repairs workshop based in the US has managed to successfully upgrade a Steam Deck OLED to 32GB of memory.

This is SlickBuys Mods and Repairs, based in California, which offers mail-in repairs or upgrades and specializes in consoles and gaming handhelds.

VideoCardz spotted the above YouTube video which shows how SlickBuys has managed to give the Steam Deck OLED an upgrade to 32GB of RAM - but there are significant caveats here.

Chromebook gamers who used Steam won't be able to do so for much longer, as Google has officially canned support for Valve's platform on ChromeOS.

The Steam for Chromebook Beta kicked off a few years back, in 2022, but it isn't going to make it past the end of this year.

9 to 5 Google reports that if you fire up the installation of Steam under ChromeOS now, you receive the following warning:

The latest freebies from the Epic Games Store for this week are Road Redemption and 112 Operator.

Cast your mind back to 1991 and you may recall Road Rash, a game where you zipped along on a motorbike, swerving between other bikers and then hitting them with miscellaneous weapons to dispatch them from the race.

Road Redemption is the spiritual successor to the chaotic racing which defined that EA classic, and it came out in 2017 (see the 'Road Rash' timeline in the above YouTube clip for the full story).

The beta for Battlefield 6 multiplayer has gone live, and I have already played 14 hours of it since it was made available. Here's what I have learned exclusively from playing Conquest.

There are three maps available in the BF6 beta for the Conquest game mode, two are similar, and one is pretty different, at least in terms of how you want to play it. For example, Siege of Cairo is a close-quarters map where players will mostly be rocking with SMG and AR weapons, possibly even shotguns, depending on how good you are at positioning.

Iberian Offensive is similar in size to the Siege of Cairo, but features more vehicles and a no-man's land located in the center. Liberation Peak is the larger of the two maps, or at least in terms of it being more visibly open. This map is where the Recon class can really cause havoc.

Microsoft's Gaming Copilot is described as the "ultimate gaming sidekick," an AI assistant designed to help you out when you get stuck in a game as it "knows what you're playing and understands your Xbox activity." Gaming Copilot (Beta) is now available as part of the Game Bar for Windows PC for Xbox Insiders, with Microsoft confirming that optimizations are on the way for the upcoming launch of the ROG Xbox Ally and ROG Xbox Ally X handhelds.

"This companion makes gaming with Xbox more seamless and personalized, helping you get to gameplay faster, sharpening your skills, and being there when you need it and out of the way when you don't," Xbox's Taylor O'Malley writes. Gaming Copilot appears as one of the widgets on the Xbox Game Bar, and it fully supports voice interaction with a dedicated Voice Mode.

Apparently, this will let you engage and talk to the Gaming Copilot AI assistant while you're playing a game, so you'll be able to get tips and hints "without breaking away from gameplay."

Battlefield 6 is still months away from release, but hundreds of thousands of gamers have jumped into the open beta, which has already broken the concurrent player count of Battlefield 2042, which just... wasn't good at all.

The Battlefield 6 Open Beta has had a huge all-time peak of 334,549 gamers play the game on Steam, beating out Battlefield 2042 and its all-time peak from nearly two years ago with 107,376 players according to SteamDB. This is an amazing achievement for Battlefield 6, showing that just like John Wick... yeah... Battlefield is back.

This weekend is the Battlefield 6 Early Access and Open Beta weekend, where early access was granted to those who pre-ordered, while the open beta was open to anyone who simply streamed more than 30 minutes of the game through Twitch. I did that last night and put some time into Battlefield 6 and my early impressions are very high, I need some more time on it, but it gives me some crazy Bad Company 2 + Battlefield 4 vibes, which were my favorite entries in the franchise.

NVIDIA's GeForce NOW cloud gaming library is expanding this week thanks to the launch of Mafia: The Old Country, the surprise Early Access release of Titan Quest 2, the Assassin's Creed Mirage PC Game Pass debut, and the highly anticipated 1.0 update for RTS game Stormgate.

Even though you're probably reading this while waiting in the Battlefield 6 Open Beta queue, this weekend's big release is the latest installment in 2K's long-running Mafia crime series. With the action taking place in 1900s Sicily, this is also the latest Unreal Engine 5 release that demands some serious hardware to render its cinematic visuals. This is good news for GeForce NOW gamers as you'll be able to play the game on an RTX-powered rig in the cloud with access to DLSS and other features like G-Sync.

This week also saw the surprise release of Titan Quest 2 in Early Access, which is the long-awaited sequel to the iconic Diablo-meets-Greek Myth action-RPG from 2004. Published by THQ Nordic, the Early Access version of the game features the first chapter of the story with the ability to create and customize your character build as you take on mythical beasts and monsters in Ancient Greece.

When id Software released Doom in 1993, it forever changed the PC gaming landscape as it ushered in a new era of fast-paced first-person shooters. The following year, in 1994, id would partner with developer Raven Software (a studio that is still around, working on Call of Duty) to publish Heretic. Instead of wielding guns in the distant future, fending off a demonic invasion from Hell, Heretic presented the FPS action of Doom in a rich fantasy world with magic, spells, monsters, and flaming swords.

Heretic quickly became a cult classic, alongside its follow-up Hexen: Beyond Heretic, which Raven also developed and released with id Software. With QuakeCon 2025 kicking off this week, Bethesda, id Software, and Nightdive Studios have been working behind the scenes to shadow drop Heretic + Hexen, a definitive remastered version of both games, for PC and console.

With native 4K 120 FPS action on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, PC gamers also benefit from the modernized update, which supports multiple resolutions and aspect ratios. It doesn't stop there, as this re-release also includes two brand-new campaigns or episodes in the form of Heretic: Faith Renewed and Hexen: Vestiges of Grandeur, online cross-platform co-op, a remastered soundtrack, and multiplayer Deathmatch for up to 16 players with 120 maps to choose from.

AMD has confirmed that it is working on custom chips for future Microsoft Xbox platforms including the next-gen Xbox consoles, PCs, and gaming handhelds.

During its Q2 2025 earnings call, AMD recorded a huge 71.4% increase in its Client and Gaming business, with this segment including Client (Ryzen CPUs) and Gaming (GPUs, semi-custom SoCs) products. Client revenue leaped by 66% to $2.5 billion, thanks to super-strong Ryzen CPU sales, especially the new Ryzen 9000X3D processors.

In the Gaming segment, revenues increased by an even bigger 83.3% to $1.1 billion, with this segment including graphics products like the RDNA 4-based Radeon RX 9000 series, as well as custom SoCs for gaming consoles and handhelds.

Grand Theft Auto franchise has surpassed $10 billion in revenue generated since GTA V's release, our data analysis indicates.

Grand Theft Auto is one of the most popular video game franchises on the planet. It's one of the only series outside of Call of Duty that can routinely sell millions of copies every quarter, and GTA V itself stands as one of the best-selling video games of all time with over 215 million copies sold. GTA Online churns out tens of millions of dollars per quarter, sometimes breaking $300 million in microtransaction earnings.

We've been tracking Grand Theft Auto data for a while now, and based on our findings, the GTA franchise has surpassed $10 billion in revenue since GTA V's release. Take-Two's latest Q1'26 earnings report reveals that Grand Theft Auto made $221 million in the period, pushing total cumulative GTA revenues to $9.944 billion since the launch of Grand Theft Auto V in 2013.