Gaming - Page 213

Sony started selling refurbished PlayStation 5 consoles in late September, giving players an opportunity to buy into the Gen 9 ecosystem at a discounted rate.

Looking to buy a PS5, but don't want to spend $500? Sony's refurbished PS5s might be your best bet. Apart from the Black Friday deals that should be rolling around the holiday season, Sony is currently selling restored units of its original 2020 PS5 lineup duo.

On Sony's digital PlayStation Direct e-commerce storefront, gamers can buy a PS5 disc edition for $399 or a PS5 digital edition for $349, both of which are discounted by $50 based on the current retail rates (it should be noted the disc edition was $499 at launch, though).

Roblox Corp. has responded to claims made by Hindenburg Research that its metrics, including daily active users (DAUs), have been exaggerated.

A new lengthy report from Hindenburg Research alleges, among other things, that Roblox Corp. has drastically inflated a number of key metrics with its mega-hit games-as-a-platform title. Hindenburg, who is a known activist short-seller, has compiled data that alleges a portion of Roblox's reported playtime and daily active users (DAUs) are actually from bots.

Now Roblox has issued their own response, opening with: "The financial claims made by Hindenburg are misleading. The authors are short sellers and have an agenda irrespective of the substance of Roblox's business model and results."

Is Bethesda Game Studios getting too big for its own good, making game development more difficult and complex? That seems to be why one former veteran Bethesda game developer thinks.

ZeniMax Media, and its subsidiary Bethesda Game Studios, have both grown considerably over the years. The billion-dollar success of Skyrim injected tons of cash into the groups, and ongoing live service games like Elder Scrolls Online, Fallout 76, Fallout Shelter, and the new Elder Scrolls Castles sustain the group with consistent multi-million revenues. Starfield, which is hailed as one of Bethesda's biggest passion projects, was funded in part by these money-making endeavors.

This growth has caused issues internally, though. As teams grow, so too does the complexity of the chain of command, leading to conflicts in the sensitive content production pipeline. Games are not made linearly in a factory-like setting, but are often disparate parts mish-mashed together like Play-Doh; it's a messy process filled with lots of revisions. The more people there are working on a creative endeavor, the more difficult it is to have said project actually finished and shipped out.

Nintendo has announced its new hardware, and it's not the Switch 2, but an alarm clock that plays sounds from its games.

Nintendo's new Alarmo tech looks to be one of those innovate, yet small, additions aimed at improving quality of life and bringing some measure of joy in the process. The new alarm clock has a built-in motion sensor that will play various sounds from five Nintendo games based on movements while you're in bed. So if the alarm goes off, and you're still rolling around, Alarmo could play iconic coin sounds from Mario to help get you up.

It seems to be a very friction-free way to add variety and interactivity to the grueling process of waking up. With Alarmo, people can keep things fresh, opting for 7 different sound profiles across five games including Super Mario Odyssey, Pikmin 4, Splatoon 3, Ring Fit Adventures, and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. More alarms will also be added for free, Nintendo says. Alarmo also comes with sounds to help you sleep, but we have to wonder why Donkey Kong Country's legendary Aquatic Ambiance wasn't included.

Google has responded to the recent report that its Pixel smartphone was relaying private user information back to Google servers every 15 minutes, with the company's response refuting the claims from the report and providing additional background on the overall process.

The report came from Cybernews, which looked at the web traffic between Google and its latest flagship smartphone, the Google Pixel 9 Pro XL. The report stated that even before any app is installed, the device is sending private user data back to Google servers, with the researcher stating that every 15 minutes, a packet of data is sent back to Google servers, and within that packet is information such as an email address, phone number, location, network status, and other telemetry data.

Google has since responded to this report with a statement it has provided me, saying the report "lacks crucial context, misinterprets technical details, and doesn't fully explain that data transmissions are needed for legitimate services on all mobile devices regardless of the manufacturer, model or OS, such as software updates, on-demand features and personalized experiences."

Yesterday, United States District Judge James Donato delivered a historic ruling that will change Google's mobile business for the next three years. Now Google is predictably appealing the decision.

The Epic v Google trial is officially over, and Epic won the fight. The district courts sided with Epic, and issued a permanent injunction that forces Google to open up its Google Play Store and allow competing third-party stores right on the marketplace for the next 3 years.

Google also has to allow third-party developers to use their own billing systems. These new orders will undoubtedly affect Google's mobile business to a significant degree as developers can now undercut Google and completely avoid the costly 30% commission fees that Google had been charging for years.

As part of its weekly DLSS update, which sees DLSS, Frame Generation, and ray-tracing technologies arrive in new releases like FragPunk, the Silent Hill 2 remake, and Starship Troopers: Extermination, NVIDIA also took time to highlight a very cool build from modder czuga.

Inspired by Fortnite's LEGO modes, the build includes over 1,000 LEGO bricks to support all components, including the GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER Founders Edition graphics card and customer watercooling. With an entire LEGO Fortnite scene that includes characters, biomes, and the iconic Fortnite bus, it's a stunning one-of-a-kind build.

It didn't come together quickly either; it took countless hours to design the complete setup and around 14 days to build, test, and decorate. The fact that it uses LEGO for the case and all physical hardware support is awe-inspiring.

Blizzard's original vision for Diablo 4 would have changed the franchise in significant ways, bringing the dungeon crawler to the realm of third-person gaming.

Jason Schreier's new book Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future Of Blizzard Entertainment chronicles some of the most interesting and pivotal moments of the game-maker's history. The book also discusses many of the cancelled projects and games, including Blizzard's own unique take on Minecraft.

One such story touches upon what kind of major departure that Diablo 4 could have been for the series. Blizzard sources tell Schreier that at the tail-end of Diablo 3's popular Reaper of Souls expansion, then-Blizzard president Mike Morhaime had put top leads in charge of pre-planning the next big Diablo game.

Previous reports indicated that Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF) could increase its stake in Nintendo's shares, but the wealth fund has actually decreased its amount of shares.

Two days ago, Japanese publication Kyodo News reported that Saudi Arabia could buy up more gaming stock in Nintendo, as per a small snippet of conversation with crown prince Faisal bin Bandar bin Sultan Al-Saud during Tokyo Game Show 2024. As it turns out, the Saudi sovereign wealth fund has now reduced its stake in the Mario maker.

As per new regulatory documents filed in Japan, Saudi Arabia's PIF has shed an entire percentage point of its shares in Nintendo. The PIF now has 7.54% of shares as opposed to the 8.58% it previously had as of June 2024. This equates to roughly 97.6 million shares (worth about $5.3 billion) currently held by the PIF as versus the 111.45 million shares (about $6 billion) that it formerly held. This represents a decrease of approximately 1.69 million shares, or some $700 million in worth.

Halo moving to a multi-platform games engine could mean the franchise jumps over to PlayStation for the first time ever.

Halo is changing in a big way. 343 Industries has renamed the group to Halo Studios, and the franchise is now being developed in Unreal Engine 5. Now that the studio is no longer saddled with the development and upkeep of a proprietary games engine for its new games, Halo Studios can accelerate its production pipeline--and indeed that's what they plan to do.

There are now multiple new Halo games in development, and the leap to Unreal Engine 5 frees Halo Studios from the shackles of the archaic Slipspace engine. According to studio head Pierre Hintze, it's a shift-change for the team: "What we're doing right now is changing our recipe."

Like Goku collecting energy for an epic genki dama, Dragon ball fans have come together to make the latest Budokai Tenkaichi game the best-selling title across multiple storefronts.

Dragon ball: Sparking! Zero is now the top game across the industry's biggest digital stores. Bandai Namco's new Budokai game has become the #1 chart-topper on both the PlayStation Store and on Steam, and the new ki-blasting fighter is sure to supercharge the publisher's earnings to super saiyan levels and beyond.

Bandai also announced that the new Budokai Tenkaichi game has been released onto early access for users who pre-ordered any version of the game. Otherwise, Dragon ball Sparking Zero is due out on October 11.

After months of speculation, Rockstar finally announces Red Dead Redemption is coming to PC on October 29.

Rockstar's iconic outlaw western is coming to PC in time for Halloween, complete with its Undead Nightmare expansion. The PC version will come with all the bells and whistles befit of the platform, including NVIDIA DLSS 3.7 support and Frame Generation, tons of new settings to tweak, and performance up to 4K 144FPS.

Pre-orders will open up later this week, and Red Dead Redemption will be sold on the Rockstar Store launcher, the Epic Games Store, and Steam.

Nintendo's next-generation Switch 2 handheld will reportedly support all of the features baked into Unreal Engine 5, and possibly even Epic Games' just-teased MegaLights technology.

We're finding out some new information from the folks at Digital Foundry, where during their usual weekly podcast the staffers replied to a fan question asking if the Nintendo Switch 2 would support the latest UE5 features, including tech like Lumen, Nanite, and Virtual Shadow Maps. We could even see Nintendo Switch 2-specific versions of these UE5 technologies, allowing them to run with decent performance on the handheld, with some major power tweaks of course.

There is a huge amount of third-party support behind Nintendo and the Switch, so the new Switch 2 would be a huge focus for Epic Games and getting Unreal Engine -- cough, Fortnite -- ready to rock and roll on Switch 2. There's also the handheld side of thigns, with the Digital Foundry folks talking about handheld mode with the Switch 2 and the performance differences between Nintendo's new console and the Valve Steam Deck.

Nintendo is known for throwing the legal book at any entity that is mispresentating any of its IP, and it's shown through recent actions its more than happy to crack down on any company providing the tools to pirate its games.

Nintendo filed a lawsuit in US courts in June 2024 against Ryan Daly, the alleged operator of Modded Hardware, a company that Nintendo claims provides firmware and hardware to create and play pirated Nintendo games. Additionally, Nintendo claims Modded Hardware also provided customers with "copies of pirated Nintendo games." The lawsuit states Daly was offered a chance to walk away from Modded Hardware in March 2024, and both parties agreed that Modded Hardware's business would stop completely.

However, that didn't happen, and in May 2024, Nintendo issued a final warning. The US court filing occurred in the following month. Now, Daly has appeared in court without a lawyer to represent himself against Nintendo's allegations, and according to reports, Daly has denied any wrongdoing. Daly responded to the lawsuit claims by citing a lack of sufficient information to either admit or deny the allegations, fair use, an arbitration clause, failure to state a claim, invalid copyrights, a lack of standing, and more.

Bethesda has just released its big expansion to Starfield called "Shattered Space," and judging by the review scores from both critics and players, the reception hasn't been promising and is certainly an indicator of underwhelming sales figures.

While there aren't any official unit sales out for Shattered Space, we can devise an idea of how the title is performing by looking at a few public metrics. Firstly, when Shattered Space was released on October 1, the concurrent Steam players peaked at 21,792, which is only an increase of approximately 6,000 players from the title's previous concurrent player high back in August. What paints a bleaker picture is Starfield's concurrent players peaked at 330,723 when it launched in September 2023.

Another indicator of Shattered Space's sales performance is Starfield's position on the Most Played Xbox Games list, where it is ranked number twenty-six. Moreover, Starfield is currently the seventh most-played game on Console Game Pass and fifth on PC Game Pass, which puts it just behind the Microsoft Solitaire Collection. Moving back to Steam, Starfield is directly competing with Fallout 4 on Steam, a Bethesda title from nearly nine years ago.

Leo Torres is a creator who uses the power of Unreal Engine 5 to present the various cities and locations in The Elder Scrolls with a "realistic and lore-accurate scale." Their laster creation, Riften, is widely remembered as the home of the Thieves Guild in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, where autumnal colors meet stone buildings, housing, and a waterway that gives the city character.

This isn't a mod or one of those videos that demonstrates what Skyrim might look like running on Unreal Engine 5; we have some incredible gameplay from versions of the game running with thousands of mods. Instead, this is a tech demo or interactive work of art meant to showcase what it might look like and feel like to walk around Riften at scale.

The results are undoubtedly impressive, capturing the tone and feel of exploring the location within Skyrim. Riften was always one of the most remarkable locations in the game due to how built-up and modern it felt compared to towns like Whiterun.

Epic has ambitious plans to also give out free smartphone games on the mobile version of the Epic Games Store.

The Epic Store's freebie program has done wonders to boost the storefront's user numbers, with MAUs jumping from 160 million in 2020 to a whopping 230 million in 2022. A good portion of that uptick is from users signing up to nab the free games that Epic routinely doles out on the service.

As it turns out, the freebies are also coming to Epic Games Store mobile, too. And with federal judge ruling that Google must now allow competing third-party storefronts right in the Google Play Store, Android gamers will be able to access these free mobile games once they are made available without having to do any extra steps.

Most game developers have switched to Unreal Engine 5, which is powering some of the biggest games available now or currently in development at studios worldwide. In a new interview with Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney at The Verge, we learn that the studio is already working on Unreal Engine 6, which will be much more than a game engine.

Sweeney says that the current plan for the next version of Unreal Engine is to combine the developer tools and platform that game studios and teams are using today with Fortnite's easy-to-use Unreal Editor. The reason can be summed up using a single word, which you probably haven't heard in a while - the 'metaverse.'

"The real power will come when we bring these two worlds together so we have the entire power of our high-end game engine merged with the ease of use that we put together in [Unreal Editor for Fortnite]," Sweeney says. "That's going to take several years. And when that process is complete, that will be Unreal Engine 6."

Epic Games wins big in its antitrust case against Google, with Judge Donato ruling that Google must allow competing third-party app storefronts within the Google Play Store for the next 3 years.

Google has officially been ordered by United States District Judge James Donato to break open Android's ultra-lucrative Google Play Store and allow competing storefronts on the service.

Today, Judge Donato issued his final ruling in the Epic v Google antitrust case with a permanent injunction. Documents retrieved from PACER reveal that the terms of the injunction are to start on November 1, 2024.

This Pokeball-related patent possibly the reason why Nintendo is suing Palworld developer Pocketpair for patent infringement.

Nintendo is officially suing Japanese games developer Pocketpair, but it's not for copyright. Instead, the lawsuit alleges that the Palworld developer has infringed on one of Nintendo's game patents. While we can't be 100% certain, it looks like this is the patent in question.

The patent (publication number 20230191255 in the United States) was filed in September 2022 in the U.S., and published in June 2023 in the region. However, the Japanese version of the patent (identification number JP2023-92953 (P2023-92953A)) was published in July. The patent also appears to be closely related to patents filed in 2021 specifically for Pokemon Legends, and a YouTube clip of the patent in action was also attached to the Japanese patent filing.