Gaming - Page 251

MSI has made its Claw gaming handheld official, also confirming that it will feature a 7-inch 1080p display with a 48-120Hz VRR (Variable Refresh Rate), joining the ASUS ROG Ally with its VRR panel.

MSI's new Claw gaming handheld is also one of the first to feature Intel's new Core Ultra CPUs, with the Core Ultra 5 135H processor powering the $649 version of the Claw, while the faster Core Ultra 7 155H processor powers the higher-end $749 version of the Claw handheld, according to The Verge.

The new MSI Claw handheld and its two versions with the Core Ultra 5 135H and Core Ultra 7 155H processors from Intel are similar to the Ryzen Z1 and Ryzen Z1 Extreme APUs used inside of the two versions of the ASUS ROG Ally handheld, both made by Intel's competitor: AMD.

With the help of Activision Blizzard King, the Xbox gaming division generated record-breaking results during goliday 2023.

Q2 FY24 marks the first time that Microsoft recognized Activision's revenues in its Xbox gaming segment. The company today announced the results for the Oct - Dec holiday 2023 period as a historic day for the Xbox brand.

Xbox gaming made $7.11 billion in global holiday revenues, driven primarily by a significant +61% spike in content and services. Xbox was able to deliver an extra $2.353 billion revenues over last year, where it generated $4.758 billion in total Xbox ecosystem revenue.

Following numerous commercial sales misses, Final Fantasy publisher Square Enix will now practice Seneca's wisdom of quality over quantity.

In a recent Q&A with investors, Square Enix's new CEO Takashi Kiryu confirms that the company will produce fewer games with the aim of delivering higher quality titles.

In the report, Kiryu says that Square Enix's multi-faceted approach to content was too fragmented, and that he wants to better centralize and structure games development teams to focus more on quality experiences. Kiryu goes on to say that he feels that Square Enix's games have fallen "somewhere in the middle" between blockbuster AAA games and indies like Palworld, for instance.

NVIDIA has a new graphics driver in beta which seems to provide a substantial boost to frame rates in Cyberpunk 2077, especially in a test build of Windows 11.

We're talking about the game running 23% faster, in fact, although there's a noteworthy caveat here.

Wccftech spotted that Compusemble on YouTube ran some tests with Cyberpunk 2077 and NVIDIA's beta driver, with DLSS 3 on, and also with frame generation turned off, across different Windows 11 builds (stable and Canary).

The newly announced underwater horror game Deep Dark Sea, powered by Unreal Engine 5, takes inspiration from Dead Space and Subnautica to deliver a truly unsettling experience while exploring the ocean floor.

CEO and Founder at Corncrow Games AB, Patrik Hansson, has recently shared a teaser trailer for a new underwater horror experience. Deep Dark Sea is a scarily atmospheric deep sea game that rivals the fear of the ocean players have burnt into them thanks to the likes of games like Subnautica by Unknown Worlds. The teaser puts the player into the shoes of an underwater explorer as/ they walk the ocean floor.

The unnerving atmosphere and darkness surrounding the player build tension and fear, but the darkness is not all that is here to scare players into never swimming again. The trailer shows a giant crustacean rush the player as they fire some kind of weapon to dispatch the monstrous creature as well as stumbling across gigantic skeletons of long-dead deep sea creatures, begging the question, what else is out there in the darkness?

Gamers on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac now have a new console-quality game to try after 505 Games made Death Stranding Director's Cut available for download in the App Store. The game has been available for preorder for a little while but it's now ready for everyone to download and play for the first time.

With this game being such a graphically intensive title there are some limitations on what hardware Death Stranding Director's Cut can be played on. Devices that support the game include the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max with their A17 Pro chips, while M-series iPads and Macs are also supported.

Right now the Death Stranding Director's Cut download will cost just $19.99 for the game across all three platforms, a price that is currently half off the usual $40 asking price. There is no current indication of when that price will change, so keep that in mind if you plan on picking this game up and be sure to order yours as soon as possible to avoid paying more than you have to.

Gameplay footage for a canceled Call of Duty game codenamed NX1 has appeared online, with ex-Neversoft developer confirming that development on this futuristic Call of Duty game began after Infinity Ward's founders Jason West and Vince Zampella left to form Respawn back in 2010. Twitter account @mangafigurines posted the 10 minutes of campaign gameplay footage on the weekend, which shows action from a cinematic mission set on the moon.

Brian Bright, the ex-Neversoft developer who worked on this canceled futuristic Call of Duty, responded to confirm that the 'NX1' footage was real and that the team was experimenting with low-g mechanics while learning the ins and outs of the Call of Duty engine.

Interestingly, the studio was coming off of Guitar Hero to tackle Call of Duty, a major shift in direction. Although it was eventually canceled in favor of Call of Duty: Ghosts led by Infinity Ward - the team had two to three campaign missions playable, including multiplayer with a new for the series Escort mode.

Xbox insider Shpeshal Nick has pre-emptively leaked Sony's new State of Play games lineup, and now Sony has confirmed some of the info was correct.

If recent leaks are anything to go by, then Sony is bringing the heat with its latest State of Play showcase. According to Shpescal Nick, Sony will highlight a bevy of anticipated games including the Silent Hill 2 Remake from Bloober Team, Death Stranding 2 (which is believed to be named "On the Beach"), a new Metro game from 4A Games, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, and the first proper look at BioShock creator Ken Levine's new shooter, Judas.

Since Sony has confirmed a few of Nick's sources to be true, it's likely the rest of the games will also be shown during the State of Play stream.

The Xbox 360's successor, dubbed the Xbox 720, was originally pitched as Microsoft's first profitable console.

Unlike competitors Sony and Nintendo, Microsoft doesn't sell video games hardware at a profit. No Xbox console from any generation has been sold at a profit. In fact, non-profitable hardware was a source of Microsoft's pre-merger pains, and a catalyst for the $68.7 billion buyout. Due to the Xbox One's high $499 MSRP, Gen8 quickly spiraled out of Microsoft's control and became costly for the company. Sony was given a tremendous head start and ran away with Gen8 as a result.

Before Microsoft made the controversial decision to price its always-online, all-in-one entertainment console at $499, the company had more level-headed plans. New leaked Microsoft slides from 2012 show an "Xbox 720" product that would retail for $299 and cost around $225 to produce. This would technically mean the Xbox 720 was the first Microsoft console sold at a profit.

Enshrouded is the latest gestalt-style indie game that's taken over the video games market.

While AAA gaming firmly ruled 2023, indie games have since dominated 2024. Palworld has stolen the limelight by selling 8 million copies in less than a week, signalling a large shift in player behavior. Heavy-hitters like Valheim and Fortnite are proof gamers crave survival-crafting experiences, and these new breakout indies fit the bill nicely.

Despite Palworld's success, there's another rising indie star: Enshrouded, a fantasy game with comprehensively combined mechanics, has now sold 1 million copies in 4 days.

Call of Duty General Manager Johanna Faries is officially the next Blizzard president.

Microsoft recently made the decision to lay off 1,900 workers across the Xbox gaming division, with cuts happening across Activision Blizzard King, ZeniMax Media, and Xbox Game Studios. The announcement also came with previous Blizzard Entertainment president Mike Ybarra's departure, and today Microsoft has revealed who will now lead the multi-billion-dollar business.

Blizzard has named Johanna Faries as the new acting president, and she is due to start on February 5. Faries has been with Activision for five years, spearheading initiatives like Call of Duty's esports presence and eventually became the general manager of the $31 billion+ franchise, helping lead Call of Duty through its best-earning period in history. Before that, she spent 11 years as an executive at the NFL.

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League launched in early access with a devastating bug: The game has beaten itself.

Today, Rocksteady released its new Suicide Squad; Kill the Justice League live service game into early access. The launch didn't go smoothly. Just one hour after release, Rocksteady had to pull the game for a very odd reason. It turns out the supervillain co-op action game had completed itself, beating all story missions.

Obviously, the game wasn't really playable at that point. This also happens to be one of the most disastrous things that could happen with an engagement-driven live service game--the entire point of those games is to keep players grinding for as long as possible. If everything is already beaten, there's no reason to even play.

UPDATE: EIdos-Montreal has confirmed the news, and says it will lay off 97 people.

Swedish decentralized entrepreneurs at the Embracer Group have cancelled a new Deus Ex game and laid off workers at Eidos Montreal, sources tell Bloomberg's Jason Schreier.

In 2022, The Embracer Group made one of the best deals in gaming. The firm paid $300 million to acquire Square Enix's entire Western games division, which included highly-lauded studios Eidos Montreal and Crystal Dynamics. Now as worldwide interest rates climb and affect conversion rates, fear has triggered sizable cost-cutting measures at big decentralized foreign empires like Embracer Group.

Max Payne is a DX8 classic of a PC game, and a great candidate for pepping up with RTX Remix - and indeed it looks tons better with a new mod that adds path tracing.

The catch is that the frame rate takes a serious nosedive with the RTX Remix mod - which officially kicked off in open beta last week- as shown off by MxBenchmarkPC on YouTube (the developer of the mod is Slasks Psykbunker on ModDB).

Check out the video above to see the results in the demo, but bear in mind that with the base graphics (the before footage), on an RTX 4080 the YouTuber was achieving up to 1400 fps - something like 900 fps to 1400 fps we're told - but that dropped to around 65 fps with path tracing.

Bandai Namco has revealed 24 characters featured in the new Dragon Ball Budokai Tenkaichi 4 game...and they're all variations of Goku and Vegeta.

As is customary for the franchise, the latest Dragon Ball Budokai game (now renamed to Dragon Ball Sparking! Zero) is set to feature over 150 different characters and customizations. Publisher Bandai Namco illustrates two key points with its latest roster reveal: One is the age of the Dragon Ball series, and the second is just how many different ways the series has to portray two of its main characters.

Case in point: The Japanese game creator's new fighter lineup is just two dozen different versions of Goku and Vegeta, ranging from humble beginnings during The Dead Zone era ranging all the way to SSGSS Vegeta (Super Saiyan God Super Saiyan).

For many months now, we have been hearing rumors surrounding Nintendo's next-generation console, presumably called the Nintendo Switch 2, and those rumors pointed toward the adoption of an OLED panel.

With the rise in OLED panels illustrated by the myriad of new OLED gaming monitors announced at CES 2024, many gave credence to the idea of the Nintendo Switch 2 arriving with a gorgeous OLED display. However, not everyone is convinced as new information from Takashi Mochizuki, a reporter from Bloomberg, and Market research firm Omdia's analyst Hiroshi Hayase indicate the next-generation console will arrive with an 8-inch LCD screen.

According to reports that cite display shipment data, Nintendo is planning on manufacturing 10 million units of the next-gen console in the first fiscal year, and these units won't feature an OLED panel. However, that doesn't rule out OLED altogether, as Omdia says, "not for this year," which seems to allude to a second next-generation console including an OLED panel.

If you're someone who used to play Fortnite on the iPhone or iPad and has been missing the game since it was kicked out of the App Store, you might be in for a good time. That's after Epic Games confirmed that Fortnite is coming back to Apple's portable devices. But that isn't quite the end of the story and it definitely isn't as simple as you might have hoped.

Instead, Fortnite isn't coming to the App Store and it's unlikely that it ever will at this point. Apple kicked it out of the App Store after Epic Games broke the rules over third-party payment methods years ago. But new EU rules have now forced Apple to allow third-party app stores onto the iPhone in a change that will change the way people use those iPhones forever. And Epic Games has already confirmed that it intends to launch its own app store on the iPhone, and that store will host Fortnite to allow iPhone and iPad owners to download it from there.

While Fortnite is currently playable on those devices via cloud gaming services like NVIDIA GeForce Now, the experience isn't the same as playing a local game running on the device itself. There's little doubt that a dedicated app will be a better option for gamers, and now it seems that it's finally going to happen.

Shortly after Starfield was removed from store shelves, Microsoft has reportedly shuttered parts of Xbox's physical retail teams. This decision potentially moves the video games industry closer to an all-digital future.

With the exception of Nintendo, the other members of the Big 3--PlayStation and Xbox--make most of their revenue from digital channels. This trend has been growing in recent years and was supercharged during COVID-19 lockdowns.

Both PlayStation and Xbox have furthered a digital-first future with their respective digital-only PS5 and Xbox consoles, but recent events indicate that Microsoft is aggressively pursuing its all-digital aspirations. After all, Xbox plans to achieve market leadership by 2030 with an implied $32 billion+ in gaming revenues. Digital is a big part of those plans.

Palworld keeps reaching new milestones with an incredible amount of momentum behind the game, and a pair of new achievements have been recorded as the game reaches the ripe old age of a week.

Firstly, as noticed by Tom Warren (of The Verge), today Palworld became the most popular game on Xbox Game Pass (see the above tweet).

The other milestone is exceeding 2 million concurrent players on Steam, as Eurogamer spotted, and indeed right now looking at Steam, Palworld is currently at 1.96 million, so pretty much still at that level. It has almost as many players as the other 4 games in the top 5 put together (CS2, Dota 2, PUBG, Apex Legends).

Blizzard president Mike Ybarra has announced that he is leaving the company. The news comes shortly after Microsoft told employees that it will cut 1,900 jobs (about 8.6% of workers affected) across its entire Xbox gaming division.

Following the disruptive layoff announcement, Microsoft's gaming division appears to be in chaos right now. Today, Xbox lost some top leadership at Blizzard as both president Mike Ybarra and founder/chief design officer Allen Adham are leaving the billion-dollar company.

According to Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, today's cost-cutting measures also affected projects. Blizzard's upcoming survival game set in a new IP has been cancelled--it was codenamed Odyssey.