Gaming - Page 225

GeForce NOW, NVIDIA's cloud gaming service, allows you to stream games running on up to GeForce RTX 4080 hardware with DLSS and G-SYNC support. This week, it expanded its library with 26 new games, including Star Wars Outlaws and the Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 Open Beta.

Star Wars Outlaws is an excellent addition as the game supports several RTX technologies, including full ray-tracing, DLSS 3.5 Ray Reconstruction, Frame Generation, and NVIDIA Reflex. With the graphics settings maxed out, it looks fantastic - presenting a richly detailed Star Wars game with multiple planets to explore.

Another significant addition is Square Enix's Visions of Mana, a new action RPG and the latest installment in a series that dates back to the Super Nintendo era with the iconic Secret of Mana. And for gamers jumping into the Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 Open Beta this weekend, GeForce NOW lets them jump straight into the action without downloading or installing the game.

Final Fantasy XIV is coming to practically all gaming platforms at some point in time.

Square Enix has big plans for their top-earning MMORPG. Since expanding to Xbox platforms for the first time in more than 11 years, the publisher wants to bring the online hit to all platforms--some of which aren't typical places you'd expect to play Final Fantasy XIV.

A bit ago, we reported that Square Enix is working alongside Tencent to create a mobile version of FFXIV for Chinese markets. It's possible we'll also see a North American version of FFXIV mobile roll out as well. This could be a boon for Square Enix's slowing video games segment, which has been mostly buoyed by mobile and MMORPG earnings.

If accurate, the PlayStation 5 Pro's leaked design highlights Sony's focus on tight hardware production efficiencies across its console lineup.

Sony's PlayStation 5 duo has changed a lot since 2020. Specifically, Sony has released a few hardware revisions with one simple goal in mind: To maximize the profit on every PS5 unit sold to consumers and retailers. There's a few ways that Sony has tackled this objective, and based on the rumored design of the new system, the PS5 Pro will continue this trend moving forward.

According to reports from reliable leaker billbil_kun, the PS5 Pro will retain the existing revisionist design of the newer PlayStation 5 slim models. The PS5 Pro's overall shape and design are similar with one exception--the Pro will have extra slits on the side, likely a stylized choice to easily differentiate the base PS5 lineup from the more powerful Pro.

Square Enix producer explains why so few of the publisher's games come to Xbox platforms, and why it took so long for the mega-hit MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV to finally cross-over to Microsoft's game system.

While Microsoft has made great strides in improving overseas relations, Japanese publishers like Square Enix don't always bring their full portfolio of games to Xbox. The reason is pretty simple: Japan's domestic playerbase prefers PlayStation and Nintendo, and Xbox is in a distant third place in the region.

In a recent interview with Eurogamer, FFXIV director Naoki "Yoshi-P" Yoshida offers rare comments about Xbox's presence in Japan. According to Yoshida, Xbox has an "extremely low" amount of users in the region, and this has traditionally stood in the way of expansion onto the platform. Square Enix is changing up its model, though, and plans to bring more of its games to Xbox...and we have to wonder when FF7 Remake, Rebirth, and even Final Fantasy XVI will be offered on the platform (if ever).

A new Batman game is reportedly in the works over at Warner Bros. and its based in the Batman universe created by Matt Reeves that debuted two years ago starring Robert Pattinson as Bruce Wayne (Batman).

The news comes from film industry insider Matthew Belloni from Puck News who reported that AT&T attempted to sell the Warner Bros. Interactive video games assets back in 2020 for $4 billion, but only months later the idea was side-swiped as the properties were deemed "too valuable to unload."

Warner Bros. has apparently now taken a step in the other direction and is looking at games as a strategic play, with Belloni pointing to "the upcoming Penguin HBO show and game" and how they're "both seeded in the 2022 The Batman movie" universe.

The popularity of Black Myth: Wukong has been quite impressive with the new single-player title has already moved more than 10 million copies worldwide, and it hasn't even released on Xbox yet.

That last point has been quite the focus as of recent as Xbox gamers are patiently waiting for their version to sink their teeth into but are hearing conflicting rumors from multiple insider sources as to why Black Myth: Wukong has been delayed. The source of the confusion lays between statements from the title's developer, along with statements from Xbox and industry insiders.

Game Science said back in June that it was "currently optimizing the Xbox Series X|S version to meet our quality standards" and that it would "announce the release date as soon as it meets our quality standards". However, shortly after the launch of Black Myth: Wukong an insider claimed they spoke to Xbox insiders at Gamescom that informed them Black Myth: Wukong was affected by a technical issue on Xbox consoles, specifically from a bug known as a "memory leak".

PlayStation 5 Pro hype is reaching what appears to be a boiling point with many rumors now pointing to a reveal slated for the first half of September.

Leading up to the recent leaks and rumors an image was posted to X by Hideo Kojima's assistant Ayako Terashima, which was then re-shared by Kojima, who wrote that he's "building the game these days" and running it through all of the necessary testing methods, covering aspects such as "gameplay, map, enemies, placing things, events, UI, graphics, sound, animation, cut-scenes" and more.

Kojima didn't state what game he was play testing, or what console he was play testing it on. However, fans were quick to notice the cable from Kojima's controller going into a mysteriously covered and presumably, PlayStation console. Notably, Tom Henderson from Insider Gaming stated the PS5 and PS5 Pro developer kits, or the consoles developers receive from Sony to play test their games on to ensure they meet the minimum requirements for a public release, have exactly the same physical design.

After years of exclusivity on the Epic Store, Borderlands 4 is back on Steam...and Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford shares some candid thoughts on the Epic Games Store as a whole.

Back in 2019, Gearbox shocked PC gamers by announcing that Borderlands 3 would be exclusive to the Epic Games Store. The move was a big bet from the Fortnite-maker, who was spending millions to secure exclusive games for its fledgling PC storefront in a bid to attract more users. Years later, Borderlands is back on Steam, with Borderlands 4 planning to launch on both EGS and Valve's store.

So what happened exactly? From a business perspective, it seems a bit straightforward--Steam is much bigger than the Epic Store and can potentially rake in more sales. So it makes sense to release new games onto Steam. But back in 2019, Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford believed in the Epic Store to a greater extent than he does now, so much that he declared Steam may "look like a dying store" in 5-10 years.

If you were about to pull the trigger on the MSI Claw gaming handheld... don't, wait for MSI's beefed-up Claw 8 AI+ gaming handheld which is powered by Intel's next-gen Lunar Lake CPU.

MSI teased its upgraded Claw 8 AI+ at Computex 2024 surprising most people, inside we'll see Intel's upcoming Core Ultra 20V series "Lunar Lake" processor, which has more performance, more gaming performance, and better power efficiency. Great stuff for a gaming handheld, and much better than the Intel Meteor Lake chip inside of the current Claw 7 gaming handheld.

MSI's new Claw 8 AI+ gaming handheld doesn't just have the new Lunar Lake processor, but a bigger 8-inch screen, and a much bigger battery. The original MSI Claw 7 shipped with the Intel Core Ultra 100H series "Meteor Lake" CPUs, LPDDR5-6400 memory, a 7-inch 1080p 120Hz VRR display, a 53WHr battery, and 1 x Thunderbolt 4 port.

Japanese gamers are briefly turning to Xbox as Sony raises the price of its PlayStation 5 consoles and accessories, new sales data from Yodobashi indicates.

Sony is raising the price of the PS5 in Japan for the third time, and it looks like consumers are opting for competitor systems in response to the cost hike--at least temporarily. Sony has announced that the PS5 will now cost 79,980 yen for the disc model, and 72,980 yen for the digital model. Since launch, Sony has raised the cost of both systems by +60% and +83% respectively, driven by fluctuating values of Japan's yen currency.

Now it looks like Japanese consumers are more open to buying Xbox hardware, at least for the time being. According to the best-sellers charts of Japan's popular Yodobashi storefront, the digital-only Xbox Series X took the #13 spot with a 59,970 yen price tag. The Series S, which costs 49,970 yen, was also on the top 50 list, clocking in at a much lower #48 spot on the Yodobashi top-sellers chart.

UPDATE: Sources have told insider Shpeshal Nick that Black Myth: Wukong did not have timed exclusivity on PlayStation.

"I heard there was a misunderstanding around this stuff. I heard Sony only paid to help get the port done. No exclusivity," he said on Twitter.

It's possible that Sony indeed helped accelerate the game's development on PS5 without an exclusivity deal, however these are usually things that come with said deals--Final Fantasy XVI, for example, benefitted from close access to Sony's tech teams as part of the game's exclusivity deal on PS5.

Could Grand Theft Auto 6 push game prices past $70 and introduce a new MSRP to the Gen 9 console market? It seems unlikely, considering a major hike just happened 4 years ago.

The phrase "survive till 25" has become somewhat of a mantra for the games industry right now. The market is wracked with layoffs and fraught with inflation, and publishers are responding to rising costs by cutting jobs, cancelling projects, and closing studios (for example, the Embracer Group has laid off thousands, cancelled dozens of games, and shut down dozens of studios).

There's one thing that hasn't changed, though: Game prices. Publishers already helped push the new $69.99 pricing norm just 4 years ago in 2020, leading to a mega-boom in revenues during intra-COVID-19 periods, but that growth wasn't sustainable. Coupled with rising costs of living and inflation throughout 2023, publishers were hit on both the top and bottom; growth wasn't happening, and they now had to pay their workers more than before.

It appears the first design leak for Sony's upcoming PlayStation 5 Pro have leaked online, with the rumor suggesting this is the final design of the PS5 Pro and what buyers can expect when it finally releases.

The rumors come from DeaLabs and insider Billbil-kun, who is a known industry insider that has previously correctly predicted coming free PS Plus games. The leak states the final design of the PS5 Pro has been locked in and it will be announced in the first half of September 2024, which would put it in line for a possible hands-on experience by attendees of the Tokyo Games Show.

As for the PS5 Pro design, the leak is a sketched image of the final shell of the new console, which is very similar to the PS5 Slim variant. The upcoming console features two USB-C ports on the front along with a power button, with the inclusion of three black stripes in the middle of the system (versus one on the PS5 Slim). Additionally, Billbil-kun believes the PS5 Pro will come with a removable cover that for customization purposes.

Age of Empires and Age of Mythology were a few of the very first games I ever played as a child, and for that reason are part of the foundation that spawned my love for gaming. Now, 20 years later, Age of Mythology is getting a re-release but with a fresh coat of paint, modern real-time-strategy (RTS) features, fresh animations, and new civilizations. Introducing, Age of Mythology: Retold.

Hopping straight into Age of Mythology: Retold we are hit with that incredible nostalgia-triggering soundtrack, but our eyes are blessed with a completely redesigned menu screen. Moving over to play a quick match, the god selection screen has been completely redesigned with a much more cleaner layout that has split each of the gods up into separate pantheons, clearly outlined different game settings and maps, while also showcasing the addition of the new god Freyr.

In this match I played Zeus with the following settings: Standard Game Type, Standard Victory Condition, Standard Starting Resources, Medium Game Speed, Titans on, and Difficulty set to Standard. The match was played on Nile Shallows and was captured with OBS with the following recording settings: 4K at a bitrate of 30 Mbps with the NVIDIA NVENC H.264 encoder through OBS. I pushed all of the graphics to maximum, including Ray Tracing features, and was able to achieve a solid 120 FPS at 4K with my NVIDIA RTX 4090. However, with the inbuilt benchmark tool I scored 1600.

NVIDIA has announced its financial results for Q2 2025, and as expected (or as has become the norm of late), the company saw "record quarterly revenue" of $30 billion - up 15% from Q1 2025 and a whopping 122% from a year ago. Of course, Data Center and AI hardware revenue makes up the bulk of this figure, $26.3 billion, an increase of 154% compared to the previous year.

"Hopper demand remains strong, and the anticipation for Blackwell is incredible," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. "NVIDIA achieved record revenues as global data centers are in full throttle to modernize the entire computing stack with accelerated computing and generative AI."

Jensen Huang confirmed that "Blackwell samples are shipping to our partners and customers" and that the anticipation for its next-gen AI hardware is "incredible." However, as someone who reviews gaming GPUs and primarily covers news surrounding the PC gaming industry, I found it interesting that NVIDIA's Gaming revenue was also up.

Sony's new live service shooter Concord has bombed on Steam, with sales estimates lower than 20,000 copies sold on the PC storefront.

We've known for a while that Firewalk's new hero shooter Concord is a dud on PC. The game had fewer than 700 concurrent players in its launch weekend, and at the time of writing, Concord only has 170 players in-game on Steam.

The numbers haven't grown, either. Headlines of the game's apparent demise on PC have not driven up interest, sales, or active players of the game, as sometimes happens with titles that get this kind of exposure. In fact, sales estimates for Concord's PC version are between 8.4K - 17.7K, with the high end being estimated by analyst firm VG Insights (as per info on SteamDB).

When will Polaris, aka The Witcher 4, release onto the market? There's no launch date just yet, but CD Projekt has delivered some clues on when we can expect to jump back into the monster-ridden fantasy world.

No one knows exactly when the next Witcher game will launch--not even CD Projekt RED. The studio certainly has some sort of internal target, but AAA game development is not a linear and perfect process, and delays are always possible. Even still, CDPR is starting to ramp up work on Polaris with 410 developers attached to the new Witcher RPG, and company management has given a bit of a clue on when we could see the game release.

In a recent Q&A with investors, CD Projekt executives revealed an interesting tidbit about pre-order policies for the PlayStation and Xbox digital storefronts that also gives somewhat of a clue or a hint on The Witcher 4's release.

CD Projekt Group management confirms that the dev team for Polaris, aka the new Witcher game, is pretty much as big as it will get.

The Witcher 4 is about to go into full production with 410 developers attached to the project. The game, codenamed Polaris, will be the first chapter in a new Witcher trilogy built in Unreal Engine 5, but CDPR is not expected to expand its dev team past its current size.

"So in general terms, the biggest part of the team is working on Polaris right now and in this respect we feel the team is kind of complete. Probably it will grow a bit, but we believe we have the force, we have all or absolutely most of the people that are required for the project in this part of our activity," CD Projekt joint CEO Michal Nowakowski said in a recent Q&A with investors.

CD Projekt is about to start principal development of the new Witcher trilogy...but fan feedback won't be a direct guide for the new saga.

If it's anyone that gamers trust with Witcher games, it's the devs at CD Projekt RED. Despite the past hiccups with Cyberpunk 2077, players have always had great respect for CDPR's excellent handling of Geralt's adventures in the Witcher trilogy. The Witcher 3 is hailed as one of the best games ever made, and has captured an entire generation of fans.

That's the kind of expertise and goodwill that CD Projekt RED will be leaning on with Polaris, aka The Witcher 4, and the future games in the new Witcher trilogy. In a recent Q&A with investors, CD Projekt Group joint CEO Michal Nowakowski affirms that the team will be mostly trusting its gut with The Witcher 4's themes, story arc, and gameplay instead of relying on direct survey info from fans and gamers.

CD Projekt executives confirm that Cyberpunk 2077's incoming sequel, Project Orion, will enter development phases soon.

Project Orion, aka the new Cyberpunk sequel, is moving from the R&D research and development phase into pre-production development. The game had previously entered R&D earlier this year.

"Moreover, as I mentioned with Orion, we are close to moving from the research phase to the development phase in IFRS terms, so this part of the expenditures that was so far booked in our P&L will soon become treated as development expenses and presented as capitalized in our balance sheet," CD Projekt CFO Piotr Nielubowicz said in a recent Q&A with investors.