Gaming - Page 270

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.

Microsoft is cutting 1,900 jobs from its Xbox gaming division just months after it closed the $68.7 billion merger with Activision-Blizzard.

Today, Xbox gaming CEO Phil Spencer informed employees that approximately 8.6% of them, or 1,900 workers, would be laid off.

Layoffs were expected as a result of the Xbox - Activision Blizzard King merger, but the current economic landscape has made companies extremely cost averse. Layoffs are happening everywhere in the tech sector, with the games industry having lost several thousands of jobs in 2024 alone.

Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition has been confirmed to be launching on PC in just a couple of months.

The port of the sequel to Horizon Zero Dawn lands on March 21 as announced by Sony on the PlayStation blog.

Naturally, the PC version is embellished with a bunch of goodies, and that includes NVIDIA DLSS 3 and DLAA (plus AMD FSR and Intel XeSS). Speedy loading on your SSD will also be facilitated thanks to DirectStorage support, which is good to hear.

Until Dawn came out in 2015 for the PlayStation 4, and nearly a decade later, the horror game is apparently inbound for the PC (and PS5 console).

That's according to leaker billbil-kun of Dealabs, as Neowin flagged up, who asserts that an announcement regarding the PC port will be made soon. This comes hot on the heels of news that Until Dawn is also being made into a film, which makes sense, as the game has a highly cinematic feel to it already.

We've played the PS4 version and thought it was excellent in terms of the atmosphere, story, twists, and of course the scares and deaths.

Palworld has become a storming hit very quickly - it was released less than a week ago and has sold 8 million copies - but that explosion in popularity has come with its own problems.

The developer has freely admitted being taken by surprise by the success story of the 'Pokemon with guns' game and the sheer number of players flocking to servers has caused trouble, as well as the bugs that need to be ironed out.

In the latter case, we've just had a patch delivered on PC which fixes some issues, and that includes dealing with cheaters.

Palworld is going great guns, hitting yet another huge sales milestone, although this has been accompanied by what could be looked at as a tentative legal 'shot across the bows' from The Pokemon Company.

The latest sales news is that Palworld has now sold over 8 million copies, a pretty staggering feat considering it was released less than a week ago.

At the time of writing, Palworld is the most played Steam game, hitting 1.77 million concurrent players, which is nearly double the current tally of Counter-Strike 2 in second place (with 915,000).

Last week, the smash hit that is Palworld added DLSS support for its Early Access PC launch to boost performance for GeForce RTX owners, and considering the insane popularity of that game in the span of a few short days - it's worth reiterating this before diving into this week's list of game adding DLSS 2 or DLSS 3 support.

The headline title is Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, the latest mainline release in SEGA's Yakuza series and the follow-up to the brilliant Like a Dragon that mixed turn-based RPG combat with a sprawling epic story set in modern-day Japan. The follow-up is even bigger, with a big chunk taking place in Hawaii while ramping up the enjoyable and fantastic mechanics that made the original a hit. It launches on January 26, with DLSS 3 support.

Next up is Enshrouded, which is available now on PC with DLSS 2 Super Resolution. Described as a "co-op survival action RPG for up to 16 players," it's launching into Early Access, and with DLSS 3, performance frame rates are increased by "93% on average at 4K" with max settings. Check out the DLSS video for Enshrouded below.

NIVIDA RTX Remix has entered Open Beta, allowing modders to easel remaster classic PC games with full ray tracing, AI-enhanced textures, DLSS and Reflex support, and modern physically-based rendering (PBR). To say it's a game-changer is an understatement, as it gives the tools to talented modders to essentially remaster and remake games into cutting-edge 2024 releases.

Look at the RTX Remix trailer above and this recent look at Half-Life 2 RTX: An RTX Remix Project from Orbifold Studios. The results are incredible when developers are given an easy way to replace in-game assets and add modern lighting effects, including real-time ray tracing.

RTX Remix is built on NVIDIA Omniverse and allows modders to inject any DirectX 8 or 9 title (a list that includes classics like Call of Duty 2, Hitman 2, and Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines) and begin the modding and remaster/remix process.

AMD launched FSR 3 alongside the debut of the Radeon RX 7700 XT and Radeon RX 7800 XT last year, with support for the company's Frame Generation update available in two games at the time: Forspoken and Immortals of Aveum. That was back in September 2023, and with the next games to get FSR 3 support arriving in December 2023, it's no secret that FSR 3 adoption heading into 2024 was non-existent.

Now, it's worth noting that December 2023 saw FSR 3 arrive in Ubisoft's Avatar Frontiers of Pandora, a visually stunning title that also debuted an updated and improved version of FSR 3 technology, showcasing noticeably better results than what was seen in Forpsoken and Immortals of Aveum. So much so that its platform-agnostic approach to Frame Generation, much like its approach to Super Resolution upscaling, was embraced by Avatar players using Radeon RX and GeForce RTX cards alike.

And now, as 2024 kicks off (with AMD launching a brand-new GPU in the form of the Radeon RX 7600 XT), FSR 3 support in games is heating up.

Hideo Kojima is assembling a dream team of horror icons to collaborate on his new game OD, and Junji Ito could be one of them.

Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima has an ambitious idea: What if games and films were combined in one experimental package? Throw in cloud streaming technology and some sort of mysterious gimmick, and Kojima could have a breakout success that defines a brand new medium.

Kojima's first game-film hybrid is OD, a horror game that's built off the bones of PT and features a star-studded cast. It's not just Kojima working on OD, though; he's conscripted macabre mavens like Jordan Peele (Get Out, Us, NOPE) to help make it happen. At The Game Awards 2023, Kojima said he was assembling a kind of Avengers team of horror:

Pocketpair reveals a big content roadmap for mega-hit Palworld, confirms various new features and modes that in development.

No live service game would be complete without a plotted list of updates, features, and content. Palworld is no different, and Japanese studio Pocketpair has outlined a timeline of fixes, adjustments, and new updates for their popular survival-crafting game.

Palworld is still in early access, but Pocketpair still wants to considerably update the game over time. That being said, there's some immediate fixes that the studio is targeting. The biggest problem is server congestion--the game has been purchased by 7 million people, but some gamers are still having a hard time actually playing.

Whether or not Square Enix achieves its full-year profit targets depends largely on Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth's sales.

Following Final Fantasy XVI's successful release and subsequent 3 million+ sales, Square Enix has one more big tentpole release up its sleeves to maximize sales revenues and profits. The Japanese games company will launch Final Fantasy VII Rebirth next month, sending off its FY25 timeline with a potential sales surge.

As far as profits, Square Enix has set a 55 billion yen operating income target for FY24, which amounts to roughly $372 million. The company booked 17 billion yen in net income (roughly $117 million) for the first two quarters of the year, leaving the lucrative holiday period and the Q4 period in which FF7 Rebirth will release.

Is MachineGames working on a new Quake? No one knows for sure, but the studio has dropped a teaser for the next Quake game.

MachineGames, the team behind the successful and action-packed Wolfenstein revival duology, just announced its new Indiana Jones adventure game. It's called Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and the reveal trailer actually hosted a surprise tease for the Quake franchise.

The recent Developer Direct '24 showcase took players behind the scenes of Indiana Jones' production and gave us a direct look at MachineGames' offices. Around the 11:35 mark of the dev direct, the words "Quake 6" can be seen written in huge letters on a dry erase board. It's possible that MachineGames is involved in Quake 6's development, and that the studio may be co-developing the project alongside id Software.

Netflix's video games strategy is taking off, but the business isn't yet strongly impacting the core subscription model.

Did you know that Netflix offers free games to all members? The streamer has a variety of mobile games that can be accessed for free. The content selection is growing, and Netflix has plans to eventually bring games to other platforms with the main goal of offered extra value to promote retention (and eventually justify another price increase).

While Netflix's games ambitions have typically seen muted responses from subscribers, everything changed with the free release of the Grand Theft Auto trilogy on mobiles. Suddenly, Netflix was the #1 mobile games company on the App Store and Google Play--and Netflix didn't even make the game, they're only distributing the game's free license.

Pocketpair could have made over $130 million profit on Palworld.

Palworld, the smash-hit indie sensation that's taking over gaming, has become wildly successful with 6 million sales in 4 days. It's not just sales volume and revenue that's envied by billion-dollar publishers, though. Palworld also enjoys an incredibly high profit margin.

According to our calculations, Pocketpair could have made $130 million of profit on Palworld's game sales. Reports indicate that Palworld had a production budget of 1 billion yen. That's roughly $6.7 million in current yen-> USD exchange rates. For context, big-budget AAA games often have budgets in excess of $100 million, and these projects can go on to sell around 4-5 million copies and be considered a success.

Dragon's Dogma 2 game director wants to see more devs commit to engaging travel mechanics in RPGs.

Fast travel is one of the most convenient features in gaming, but what if you didn't have it? The game would have to be pretty compelling to keep your attention as you traveled through its world in real-time. The lack of fast travel something that Capcom's fantasy RPG series Dragon's Dogma is known for, and the game provides a unique experience as a result.

As Dragon's Dogma 2 director Hideaki Itsuno notes, RPGs could do a better job with how they approach traversal across the world. Just look at the robust discovery and engagement enjoyed in the modern Zelda duology and in Elden Ring as prime examples. If the worlds were more interesting, perhaps players may not even want to use fast travel.

Death Stranding Directors Cut is coming to the iPhone, iPad, and Mac on January 30, 505 Games has confirmed. The title, from Kojima Productions, was announced in 2023 but is only now getting an official release date and will lad before the month comes to an end.

Gamers will be able to play the new game on the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max as well as any iPad or Mac that has an Apple M-series chip inside. That means that all modern machines will be good to go.

In the case of the iPhone, only devices with Apple's latest A17 Pro will be able to run Death Stranding which is why the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max will be the only models capable of playing the title.