Gaming - Page 278

Elden Ring is the best-selling FromSoftware game of all time. The bizarre fantasy RPG is billion-dollar success and is even seen as a franchise. There's just one problem: No one at FromSoft knows exactly why it's so popular.

Elden Ring took the world by storm when it launched in February 2022, and is still played by many gamers today. It's the kind of game that only comes around once in a generation, engaging millions of people in an interactive, tough-as-nails scavenger hunt complete with epic bosses and loot.

While YouTubers have written essays that examine Elden Ring as a whole, the game's secret sauce remains a mystery to its creators. At Sony's internal PlayStation partner awards showcase, FromSoftware producer Yasuhiro Kitao said that the studio has 'no idea' why Elden Ring is so big.

The teenager behind last year's disastrous Grand Theft Auto 6 leaks has been sentenced to life in a secure hospital, the BBC reports.

18-year-old hacker Arion Kurtaj has been sentenced to a life term in a mental hospital for his role in Lapsus$ cybertheft activity. In 2022, Kurtaj took part in a major database infiltration on Rockstar Games, successfully acquiring 90 clips of the then-unannounced Grand Theft Auto 6. Kurtaj actually hacked Rockstar and released the GTA 6 videos while he was out on bail for previous hacks on NVIDIA and BT/EE.

As a result of his actions and apparent motivation to keep carrying out cybercrimes, UK Judge Patricia Lees has sentenced Kurtaj to an indefinite stay in a mental hospital. Kurtaj suffers from acute autism and was found by psychiatrists as unable to stand trial, so the courts took a more direct approach and simply asked Kurtaj if he did the acts, Reuters reports.

Xbox gaming CEO Phil Spencer outlines the new pecking order at Microsoft's games business.

Xbox is adjusting its ranks as it integrates its $68.7 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard King into its ecosystem. Activision CEO Bobby Kotick will resign at the end of this month, and the current ABK management will stay in charge.

The biggest update is regarding Matt Booty's recent promotion to president of Game Content and Studios, a new position that was opened up shortly after the ABK merger was closed. In this position, Matt will oversee the existing stable of developers under the Xbox Game Studios label, as well as Activision Blizzard King and ZeniMax, who will sit horizontally in the structure instead of vertically under the Xbox Game Studios banner.

Baldur's Gate 3 has released another hotfix - the fifteenth for the game in fact - and it makes what you might call an interesting tweak.

As PC Gamer reports, those who have run into one particular bug probably haven't forgotten it, because the glitch causes character noses and cheeks to get stretched during cinematics, to the point where they can "lose their eyeballs, turning the sockets into pits of flesh," apparently. Yikes...

Developer Larian tells us: "Have you found some characters' faces turning into stretched eldritch horrors with pits of flesh in place of eyes? That should not be a problem anymore!"

Steam users who are buying games they'd rather not let anyone else know about can now hide such purchases.

Valve has introduced a new capability in beta whereby Steam users can choose a new option at checkout - 'For my account: private.'

As the name suggests, when this choice is made, the game is purchased, but not shown publicly.

It's Thursday, and as usual we've just received our weekly update from NVIDIA about the new games it has introduced to GeForce Now.

There are 11 games for this week, in fact, headed up by Monster Hunter: World, the latest instalment in the popular franchise to hit GeForce Now (following the debut of Monster Hunter Rise, which came out back near the start of 2023).

Monster Hunter: World is well-liked on Steam, and the action RPG is actually on sale right now (but only for the next couple of hours, at the time of writing), with a pretty hefty 67% off. So that's something to consider if you can move quickly on a purchase.

Konami has announced it will be rolling out a new patch for Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 1, adding a bunch of new settings for gamers to tweak their in-game experience.

The new update is version 1.4.0, and it's already live for owners of Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 1 on Steam. The new patch will add a bunch of new settings, such as smoothing options, game screen settings (standard, pixel perfect, 16:9), screen filters, additional audio settings, and controller response speed customization.

The new patch also comes with a bunch of bug fixes, and Konami has demonstrated the changes in detail within the patch notes that can be found here. While Steam players are already enjoying these changes, Konami has announced that PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch players will get the update "early" in January 2024.

Spider-Man 2's budget is more than what Sony paid to acquire Insomniac Games in 2019.

Previous SIE head honcho Shawn Layden tried to warn us: the AAA model is unsustainable. The costs for premium, high-quality games are getting out of control, commanding budgets of hundreds of millions of dollars. And when a game doesn't perform, companies will pull all the levers at their disposal to cut costs. This means mass layoffs, studio closures, product cancellations--all of the unfortunate events that have plagued 2023's games news cycle.

The cracks have been noticeable behind the scenes for some time now, and with the recent Insomniac Games ransomware hack that led to millions of confidential files being disseminated publicly, gamers now have an idea of just how much money their favorite games cost to make.

Besides adding DLSS and Frame Generation support on the PC version of Starfield, Bethesda's post-launch support for its massive sci-fi RPG has been a little quiet for the game's first three months since release.

The game has been extremely popular, with 13 million players, including a remarkable average per-player playtime of 40 hours. In raw numbers, that's close to two billion planets visited, with players spending over 26 million hours building new ships.

That's about to change, with Bethesda Game Studios set to release game updates every six weeks, starting in February 2024, alongside the release of the game's first expansion called Shattered Space, which is also coming next year. These updates will be more than just bug-related; they'll bring quality-of-life updates, improvements to content, and new features.

Sony has achieved a new milestone with worldwide PlayStation 5 sales.

Today, Sony updated sales figures for its PS5 family of hardware. The PlayStation 5 ecosystem has now sold-through over 50 million consoles worldwide (as of December 9) since its original release in 2020 (sell-through refers to hardware sold to consumers, not just shipped to retailers). This year's PS5 holiday sales have also set a new record as the largest November sell-through in PlayStation history, even beating the PS2's mighty numbers.

Looking closer at the sell-through figure yields interesting results. A bit ago, Sony published PS5 sell-through figures in its annual Games & Network Services strategic meeting presentation. As of the end of FY22, the PS5 had sold-through 36 million consoles. A bit of math shows that Sony has managed to sell-through over 14 million PS5 consoles in the last 9-month, 3-quarter period, with the majority of December's PS5 sales not counted in the figure.

Before it became a first-party Xbox studio delivering critically acclaimed titles like The Outer Worlds, Grounded, and Pentiment, Obsidian Entertainment was known as a 'gun for hire' studio entrusted with some of the most beloved RPG franchises in gaming: Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, Neverwinter Nights 2, and most notably, Fallout: New Vegas.

Partnering with Bethesda Game Studios, Fallout: New Vegas would see franchise veterans who worked on the original top-down games return to the series for the first time to develop an original story using the technology and tools established for Fallout 3. To this day, it's widely considered the high-water mark for the franchise.

It turns out that the team behind Fallout: New Vegas also pitched Bethesda many different Elder Scrolls projects and games that would also serve as 'New Vegas' style spin-offs as fans waited for mainline releases like Skyrim. According to industry veteran and ex-Obsidian writer Chris Avellone, Bethesda turned him and the team down continuously.

Another day, another Chinese manufacturer announces a new gaming handheld... today, AOKZOE has announced its new A2 gaming handheld. Check it out:

The new AOKZOE A2 gaming handheld features a 7-inch 1920 x 1200 display at 120Hz, a slightly smaller panel than the 8-inch display used on the A1 PRO gaming handheld. AOKZOE says that the new bezel-less design on the A2 is something to point out, but I don't know about that.

Inside, we have the AMD Ryzen 7 6800U or the Ryzen 7 7840U. The Ryzen 7 6800U has a Zen 3+ CPU and RDNA 2 GPU, while the Ryzen 7 7840U features a Zen 4 CPU and RDNA 3 GPU. We should expect an upgraded Ryzen 8040 series "Hawk Point" APU inside of a future gaming handheld from AOKZOE, and probably soon.

Halo Infinite's new holiday-themed update is now live, brings a new free 20-tier battle pass.

It's Christmas time, and that means snow is falling, millions of people are wrapping presents, and Winter Contingency is back in Halo Infinite.

The new seasonal event features a 20-tier free battle pass with a multitude of rewards, including the Winterknight legendary helmet and the Frost Glaze epic visor effect. Other rewards include 4x XP boosters, 3x color effects, and various Mark VII armor pieces (except for the endcap level 20 unlocks, which are multi-core).

Insomniac Games' 2018 release of Spider-Man is by far the best-earning first-party PlayStation 4 game, new leaked data indicates.

New information unearthed from the recent Insomniac Games data breach reveals key information about Sony's video games business, include sales volume and revenue figures. We won't be directly publishing the tables and data that were leaked as part of this illegal ransomware hack, nor will we be linking to the information. For the purposes of this article, we'll be publishing metrics in a second-hand capacity.

According to the records, Insomniac's Spider-Man game from 2018 stands as the best-earning first-party PlayStation 4 game to date with $827 million net sales revenue generated from 22 million game sales. This information is outdated though. It was accurate as of February-ish 2022, which takes place during Sony's Q4 Fiscal Year 2021 period. It's likely that the values are higher now.

UL has just announced that its new 3DMark Steel Nomad cross-platform benchmark will be a FREE upgrade to 3DMark owners, when it releases in Q1 2024.

The new Steel Nomad benchmark will replace the current Time Spy benchmark, with the new benchmark split into two: Steel Nomad and Steel Nomad Light. Steel Nomad is their recommended benchmark for measuring non-raytraced gaming performance for high-end computers running Windows, macOS, and Linux.

On the other hand, Steel Nomad Light has been built for testing the performance of lightweight devices like Windows laptops with integrated graphics, Windows-on-Arm devices, Apple M-series silicon, iOS, and Android-powered devices across the planet.

2023 was a banger year for gaming, no matter if you spent most of that time playing on a PC or a console like the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, or Nintendo Switch. With heavy hitter releases like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Baldur's Gate 3, Diablo IV, Starfield, and Marvel's Spider-Man 2, it has been a great year for new releases.

If new games aren't your thing, perhaps you spent most of 2023 firing up Counter-Strike: GO and then Counter-Strike 2, or maybe, like me, you played an alarming amount of a co-op rogue-like cooking game called Plate Up! on PC.

And if you want to see where you've spent your 2023 gaming time, there's a bunch of annual summaries from the major platforms presenting your annual gaming habits in fun holiday-themed presentations. So check out your Year in Review on Steam, Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo.

New first-party PlayStation games sales data has leaked as part of the Insomniac Games data breach.

Sony's Insomniac Games development studio recently suffered a ransomware attack that has exposed over 1TB of confidential information, including employee records, the terms and license deals of upcoming games, budgets, costs, and ROI info, and a goldmine of sales data.

The sales data provides an interesting snapshot of how well certain games have sold, including Days Gone, which moved 7.3 million copies as of early-ish 2022. Bloodborne is one of the older games on the list, and Sony is famous for not providing updated sales figures for the game. The leak finally reveals that Bloodborne has sold nearly 7.5 million copies as of early 2022.

It appears that Sony has secured multi-year exclusivity for X-Men games as part of its contract with Marvel.

It's no secret that Sony Interactive Entertainment has exclusive rights to make Spider-Man games and films, but the Japanese entertainment giant has also negotiated game exclusivity on the X-Men franchise as well.

New details exposed in the recent Insomniac Games leak reveals sensitive and confidential details of the studio's deal with Marvel, specifically for the X-Men license. According to Powerpoint slide, which we cannot show, Sony will acquire and retain exclusivity for X-Men games for the next 12 years, until 2035. Other studios can release games with X-Men characters in them, but it appears that no one can make games principally set around the X-Men besides Insomniac Games.

One of Sony's premiere video game studios has suffered a big data breach, and lots of info has been leaked out into the wild.

A bit ago, Insomniac Games was hacked by Rhysida ransomware and the studio's stolen data was put up for auction. Now Insomniac's data has been released, revealing practically everything about the studio past or present via 1.3 million stolen files.

The data includes information about new games like Wolverine, as well as extremely sensitive financial information that offers dollar value on budgets, returns on investment, profit margins, and the general cost of operations. Insomniac's full game slate has also been leaked, confirming some interesting titles that had been (and are) in development. The leaks highlight the games that Insomniac is currently working on, and plans to work on, from now until 2030 or thereabouts.

Microsoft could push out its next-generation console considerably earlier than expected, with another rumor emerging with the claim that the next Xbox could be released in 2026 - something we heard at the end of last week.

That's a lot sooner than the previously rumored launch timeframe of around 2028, as you may recall, and this latest theorizing comes from RedGamingTech (RGT) on YouTube.

RGT tells us that this much sooner launch would mean that theoretically the next-gen Xbox will run with Zen 5 silicon, rather than Zen 6, which Microsoft was supposed to be considering as the engine for the console.