Gaming - Page 207

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently said that Call of Duty: Black Op 6's launch was the biggest in the franchise's history, setting day one and opening weekend sales records on PlayStation. According to Steam data, its PC launch (the game is also available on Battle.net) was at least 60% bigger than last year's Modern Warfare III. As the first Call of Duty to launch day one into Xbox Game Pass, it did so while setting a record for the number of new Game Pass subscribers in a single day.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is a massive success, almost single-handedly justifying Microsoft's unprecedented acquisition of Activision Blizzard. And just in case you needed some more proof that Black Ops 6 and Call of Duty is a juggernaut, one of the biggest internet service providers in the United States, Comcast, has announced that Call of Duty's launch led to the week of October 25 becoming the "biggest week in Internet history."

According to Comcast, the pre-launch downloads accounted for 19% of the ISP's total network traffic, which includes everyone on PC, PlayStation, and Xbox downloading upwards of 100GB to jump into the action on day one.

CD Projekt Red has announced that Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition, which includes the fantastic Phantom Liberty expansion, will be available for Macs in early 2025. The studio notes that it will be compatible with devices "with Apple silicon," which means hardware with one of the M chips - including the new M4 Pro and M4 Max.

Apple only announced these chips earlier in the week, with the company saying that the M4 family has "the world's fastest CPU core" and a faster GPU with a "2x faster ray-tracing engine." This is important to remember in relation to Cyberpunk 2077 because CDPR has confirmed that the Mac version will support path tracing and frame generation.

It will be very interesting to see Cybeprunk's visually stunning RT Overdrive (or path tracing) mode running on Apple hardware. Currently, it's only playable on GeForce RTX 40 Series hardware with DLSS Super Resolution, Frame Generation, Ray Reconstruction, and Reflex. Yeah, that's a lot of RTX tech required for path tracing.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard has achieved strong success on Steam, breaking into the top-selling games on Valve's platform while also setting new concurrent player records for publisher Electronic Arts.

After 10 years of waiting, BioWare's latest RPG is finally here. Dragon Age: The Veilguard picks up right where Inquisition left off, featuring more action-oriented gameplay and adjusted game mechanics. Despite controversy from the game's characters and themes, Veilguard looks to be a big hit on PC.

As IGN notes, early SteamDB numbers show that Dragon Age: The Veilguard is not only pulling in strong player counts, but is actually the most popular singleplayer game under EA's label on the platform. Veilguard peaked at 70,414 concurrent users, behind Need For Speed Heat's 86,000, but beating Mass Effect Legendary Edition (59,817), Jedi Survivor (67,855), and Jedi Fallen Order (46,550).

One analyst expected Microsoft to lose around 6 million Black Ops 6 sales because of Game Pass, but that number might actually be lower.

Microsoft's latest bet may have paid off, but we can't know how well things went without actual figures. The latest gambit sees Microsoft trading short-term sales for long-term ecosystem growth. That's why Microsoft put Call of Duty, a $31 billion franchise that can sell 25 million games in a single year, onto Xbox Game Pass.

The goal is to grow subscribers and player numbers at the potential sacrifice of game sales--a trend that has punctuated Microsoft's games business since the introduction of the Xbox Game Pass subscription service. Microsoft has admitted that Game Pass can "cannibalize" game sales, a concept that sees users simply paying $20 to subscribe to Game Pass rather than paying $70 to buy the full the game.

Xbox hardware revenues decrease in the Q1'25 period and ultimately make up a small proportion of earnings.

Microsoft recently reported its Q1 Fiscal Year 2025 results that showed significant year-over-year growth for the Xbox brand. The games division raked in a total of $5.621 billion during Q1, with content and services raking in about 91% of earnings during the quarter. This growth was driven by the recognition of Activision Blizzard King earnings which had not been previously included during last year's Q1 period ($3.919 billion revenue).

Hardware, on the other hand, made $532 million, or 9% of the total. That's a large -31% year-over-year decrease from a year ago's $758 million, but a substantial +54% raise in quarter-over-quarter revenues (Q4'24 delivered just $345 million in HW).

Capcom is strongly benefiting from digital as the company makes 94% of its game sales volume from online storefronts.

As it is for most publishers, digital gaming is on the rise at Capcom. The company's Q2 report shows an ever-growing trend towards digital and catalog-oriented games. Consumers are opting to buy Capcom games digitally, with digital representing 94% of total game unit sales volume for the Q2 period.

In fact, the proportion of digital sales has been over 90% across the past five quarters in a row.

Nintendo's latest bright idea is a music app, featuring a whole gamut of tunes from its game library, for Android and iOS devices.

It's out now and you can download the Nintendo Music app from the Play Store, or Apple App Store, and stream your favorite music from the various Nintendo franchises providing you have a Nintendo Switch Online membership, and you're in the US or Canada.

It's possible to download music for offline listening, as well as streaming, and you can create your own playlists, or pick from a bunch of premade playlists, all as you'd expect from a Spotify-style offering (albeit on the light and fluffy side, admittedly).

Ubisoft promised three years ago now that it would be making blockchain games, and here we are: introducing Champions Tactics: Grimoria Chronicles, a new PvP blockchain RPG that has playable NFTs that cost as much as $63,000 using in-game currency.

Champions Tactics is dubbed a "PvP tactical RPG game on PC" that was developed and published in-house by Ubisoft, where it features collectible figurines of a bunch of warriors from the in-game fantasy world of Grimoria. Players will build squads of 3, and then take to battle in turn-based combat, alrighty then.

Web3 blockchain uselessness is in the form of collecting figurines to battle with, reports IGN, explaining that "when you first start the game, you're given some temporary figurines to play with, but you'll eventually need to either purchase actual figurines, aka NFTs, from other players using either in-game gold or cryptocurrency, or craft your own using the "Forge" system which also requires either in-game currency or crypto".

OneXPlayer is getting closer to the launch of its new OneXFly F1 Pro gaming handheld, which is powered by up to AMD's new Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 "Strix Point" APU and a delicious 7-inch 144Hz OLED display.

The new OneXFly F1 Pro gaming handheld will be the first to market powered by AMD's new Strix Point APU, with the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 chip featuring 12 cores of Zen 5-based CPU power, and the beefed-up RDNA 3.5-based GPU that will provide an entire new level of portable gaming on the OneXFly F1 Pro handheld.

The company looks to be making its new OneXFly F1 Pro gaming handheld with a few different AMD chips: the Ryzen 7 8840U, Ryzen AI 9 HX 365, and Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 chips. We know it'll weigh in at 596g (1.32lbs) and sport RGB backlit analog sticks, and RGB backlit nameplates in the bottom left and right corners, which can be tweaked to show custom text (a nice touch).

Sony officially launches its beefed-up PlayStation 5 Pro console next week for $699, with the folks at 4Gamer giving me a good laugh with a review... yes a review of the retail box of Sony's new PS5 Pro console. There's even size comparisons between the PS5, PS4 Pro, and PS4 retail boxes. Check it out:

The review embargo for the PS5 Pro officially lifts on November 7 when the console goes on sale, so 4Gamer is sticking to that by reviewing just the retail box. The first sentence had me going "the box of the PS5 Pro, which is my favorite, is very black. The white hardware and text stand out against the seductive black, and the contrast between black and white really expresses the PS5 Pro".

4Gamer continues, hilariously writing: "I don't think this is a professional review. As for the smell, I have never tried to smell the PlayStation outer box or the equipment in my life, but I felt a very PS-like fragrance. It is probably the smell of the factory. It smells like it is shipped directly from the source. There is no sound from the box, but I can faintly hear a voice saying "Please let me out. Please let me out ." If this is not an auditory hallucination of me in a hurry the day before publication, it must be the PlayStation fairy".

Rockstar's original Red Dead Redemption, which debuted on the Xbox 360 back in 2010, is finally available on PC. It only took 14 years to make the jump, but the iconic and classic open-world western is finally playable on everything from a Steam Deck to a high-end rig rocking the latest GeForce RTX Series graphics.

As expected, the PC version supports higher frame rates, resolutions, ultrawide aspect ratios, and technologies like DLSS and Frame Generation. The game's detail also increases thanks to expanded draw distances, crisper textures, and more environment detail. However, it's still a game from 2010, and the PC version is similar to the remastered release for the Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4 - in that not a lot has changed.

And with that, if you've got a GeForce RTX 4070 - one of the most popular GPUs among PC gamers - you'll be able to play the game at 8K 60+ FPS with DLSS.

BioWare's Dragon Age: The Veilguard is out today. Based on early reviews and deep dives into the game's visuals, the consensus is that the studio "is back" after a couple of misfires - the live-service Anthem and the messy Mass Effect Andromeda.

That said, the response to Dragon Age: The Veilguard has not been uniformly positive. When the first gameplay footage debuted, many fans were shocked by the dramatic shift in the series' visual tone. Gone was the realism and over-the-top Game of Thrones-style violence of the first Dragon Age game, and in its place, a more 'cartoony,' vibrant, stylized, and almost Pixar-like world. It is a deliberate design choice and one that many have also praised.

Outside of future updates and any potential expansion, BioWare's next major release will be a new game in the beloved Mass Effect franchise. It will pick up the story after the climactic conclusion of Mass Effect 3 and continue the story of Commander Shepard and the N7 crew. To quash any rumors that the next Mass Effect will change the look and feel of the franchise for a more stylized approach, the game's director, Michael Gamble, posted the following statement to social media.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is scheduled to release on December 9, and ahead of the title's highly anticipated launch we have some details about how it will run performance-wise on Xbox consoles.

In an interview with WindowsCentral, creative director of MachineGames, Axel Torvenius explained that closer to launch, the team will release more technical details about the performance of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, but what they can say for now is the team is targeting 60fps for both the Xbox Series X and Series S. Torvenius said there won't be compromised visuals or the experience of the product between the consoles, and the idea of targeting 60fps was to make the game feel "cohesive" for players.

Torvenius has previously revealed details about Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, with the creative director teasing back in September that players will be encouraged to overcome enemies in ways that don't involve guns, and that guns won't be the "primary way forward". Torvenius explained that players will need to be just like Indy, and "use your wits and your whip". The decision to steer players away from gunplay was made to compliment the character of Indiana Jones, who doesn't have superpowers and typically overcomes his opponents by outsmarting them.

EA's chief executive, Andrew Wilson, is pretty stoked about the prospects of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, and who could blame the CEO following some of the reviews we've seen.

The game launches tomorrow and Wilson believes it has 'breakout potential' and we wouldn't bet against that right now.

Wccftech reports that the CEO made the comment in a Q2 2025 earnings call (as transcribed by The Motley Fool).

Activision has announced via its blog when the first season of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 will begin and what will be within the "colossal amount of free content" on the horizon.

The blog post explains that Season 1 will begin on November 14 and will add new multiplayer maps and modes, along with the next Zombie map, a slew of updates to Warzone, a new Warzone map, Area 99, the original Nuketown map, and more. More specifically, the new game mode is Infected and is currently available right now. Infected will spawn one player as a zombie, and they will infect other players until there are no players left in the game or the time runs out.

Area 99 is the new Warzone map, and it is set in the Nevada desert. The location will let players scourer over a top-secret government site, while also taking players through peculiar locations such as a mannequin assembly plant, factory warehouse, and other locations that will feature references to the iconic multiplayer map, Nuketown. The original Black Ops Nuketown from 2010 will also be returning to Call of Duty on November 1, and it will arrive with fresh new graphics.

Homeworld 3 is the latest PC game to drop the controversial Denuvo DRM protection.

Neowin noticed the move and reports it was made in a stealthy manner, with no formal announcement of the ditching of Denuvo by developer Blackbird (or publisher Gearbox).

Homeworld 3 arrived back in May 2024 to a very lukewarm reception from fans, who particularly rubbished the game's storyline. Also, as you might imagine, the inclusion of Denuvo was not popular in some quarters - well, many quarters, let's face it - as the DRM system is often blamed for dragging down the performance of the games that incorporate it. (And substantially, at least if some theories are correct - and we should note they are just theories).

The release of the PlayStation 5 Pro is right around the corner, and ahead of the highly anticipated release, Dying Light director Tymon Smektala has revealed what has excited developers about Sony's new console.

The director of Techland, the studio behind the Dying Light franchise, spoke to GamingBolt and explained the studio is beginning to understand the capabilities of the new console, and with the increase in hardware, developers now have much more "flexibility with graphics and performance". Smektala specifically pointed out the increase in GPU power in the PS5 Pro compared to the standard PS5 as being what has enabled Techland to increase the visual fidelity of its upcoming titles. Moreover, Smektala pointed out that "complex environmental details" benefit immensely from the GPU power.

However, an increase in GPU power isn't the star player Sony has on its PS5 Pro team, as Smektala highlights the future potential of PSSR, or PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution, which is Sony's new upscaling technology that's essentially the company's version of NVIDIA's DLSS, or AMD's FSR. Smektala explains that PSSR enables developers to focus less on performance, enabling more creative liberty.

The CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment has officially given an update on what's happening at PlayStation Studios, and within it is the confirmation of Concord's fate.

Concord is one of the biggest video game flops of all time and has been identified as Sony's biggest flop ever. Reports indicated that the title cost as much as $400 million to develop, but upon release, it only generated a few million. Concord didn't even reach a critical mass to sustain players, resulting in Sony pulling the game down from public access and refunding any buyers of the title. Since then Concord has remained in somewhat Limbo, as Sony considers what to do with its multi-million investment.

Firewalk Studios, the developer behind Concord, also went quiet while Sony deliberated on its decision: spend more money implementing free-to-play infrastructure into Concord or cut its losses and abandon the tile completely. It appears Sony has selected the latter, as Hermen Hulst, the CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment, explained in a new blog post the decision has been made to "permanently sunset the game."

BioWare's Dragon Age: The Veilguard is out this weekend, and based on reviews (the game is currently sitting on an 84 rating on Metacritic), many critics are hailing it as a return to form for the studio that made a name for itself for creating engaging single-player RPGs. Outside of the actual content, the good news for PC gamers is that it's one of those rare releases that is well-optimized and pushes the visuals much further than what's possible on consoles.

The gaming tech gurus at Digital Foundry have posted a new video praising the PC version's visuals, performance, and stability. In addition, NVIDIA's latest DLSS round-up for the week shows that the game runs incredibly well on GeForce RTX 40 Series GPUs with full ray-tracing without DLSS - a rare feat for a modern AAA cinematic release.

At 1080p, everything from the GeForce RTX 4070 and up can run the game with Ultra Settings and Ultra Ray Tracing at 70+ FPS without DLSS. Bump this up to 1440p, and the GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER hits an average of 61.4 FPS without any DLSS action. Bump things up one step further to 4K, and one GPU delivers 4K 60+ FPS Ultra Ray Tracing without DLSS.

In accordance with rumors sourced from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple is preparing to announce its a refreshed line of Mac Mini's that will be powered by Apple's M4 chip and feature a slight redesign.

Gurman has previously stated that Apple's upcoming Mac Mini will be slightly smaller than previous generations and that it will come with M4 and M4 Pro chip options. It now appears that was completely accurate as Amazon has posted a listing for M4 Mac Mini's that Apple hasn't even announced yet. Previous estimations have now been verified by what appears to be an official image of the general specs of the systems, which state M4 and M4 Pro chip variants will come with up to a 14-core CPU, and 20-core GPU.

Additionally, the leaked chart reveals the new Mac Mini can come with up to 64GB of RAM, which is double the current 32GB limitation on already-announced models. As for storage, that appears to have the same limit as previous models with 8TB. The leaked image does confirm the previous rumor the new Mac Mini will get a redesign, as the M4-powered variants have two front-facing USB-C ports, and what could be a headphone jack located on its front. Moreover, the M4 Mac Mini appears much smaller than the Mac Studio, backing up claims from Gurman the new generation would be approximately the size of an Apple TV.