Gaming - Page 294

Halo Infinite's new seasonal update will add an entirely new dimension of PvE multiplayer into the game.

Halo Infinite Season 5 - Reckoning merges two of my favorite things: Campaign and firefight. The season will introduce new enemy AI tools within Forge, allowing gamers to create their own unique Halo campaign missions and/or firefight scenarios.

"Our North Star for the Forge AI Toolkit was wave-based PvE experiences. Firefight, Horde; things like that are what we expect players will lean into first when they create stuff, but it also has the capacity to do more linear experiences," Forge designer Michael Schorr told Xbox Wire.

Reports indicate that Disney CEO Bob Iger is being pressured by upper management to morph the company into a multimedia empire, complete with its own video games division. Current trends show that this is not the best time to acquire a pure-play games publisher for billions of dollars.

While Microsoft just purchased Activision-Blizzard for nearly $69 billion, media giants should still be cautious and tread lightly when it comes to big gaming buyouts. Rising costs and overshot budgets have led to mass layoffs in the games industry, with over 6,100 people being let go in 2023 across a multitude of publishers and developers. Consolidation typically worsens these rates and can trigger dozens and potentially even hundreds of layoffs as companies squeeze out more cost savings.

These realities, combined with other sobering realizations like skewed risk-to-reward ratios, make the current landscape more volatile for buyouts and post-merger operations. Fierce competition has always made gaming a risky business with no guaranteed ROI, but now the stakes are even higher as inflation kicks spending to new heights.

Xbox gaming CEO Phil Spencer gives a loose timeline on when Activision-Blizzard games will come to Xbox Game Pass, and also says that ABK titles are coming to "other platforms" as well.

Following approval from the CMA, the Microsoft-Activision merger saga has come to an end. Xbox has welcomed Activision-Blizzard's 13,000+ employees and treasure trove of games to Team Green. Microsoft has two main goals for this acquisition:

It'll take some time for both of these things to happen. Activision has already confirmed that newer games like Call of Duty Modern Warfare III and Diablo IV won't come to Xbox Game Pass until 2024, however sources have told Windows Central's Jez Corden that certain Activision-Blizzard games could be added to Game Pass immediately.

The new Xbox gaming Mastercard may benefit savvy consumer who is on Microsoft's side of gaming.

If you have decent credit, can pay bills on time every time, and are firmly committed to the Xbox brand, then the new Xbox Mastercard might be a good fit. The credit card comes with reasonable APR rates for well-qualified applicants, ranging from 20.99% APR on the lowest end all the way to 31.99% APR on the highest end (the goal is, of course, to always pay off the full balance and never pay interest). The card has no annual fee. Terms and conditions can be found here.

Apart from building credit and establishing another line of credit, the main reason to get an Xbox Mastercard is to take advantage of the point system. Cardholders can earn points for purchases made on the card, and these points can be redeemed for "eligible digital products" on the Xbox site. Cardholders can also redeem their points for gift cards The idea here is to create a cycle of charges to accrue points and payments to help better improve creditworthiness.

Microsoft has completed its $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard King, and current Activision CEO Bobby Kotick plans to retire next year.

After many months of back and forth, the $68.7 billion Microsoft-Activision merger saga is coming to an end. UK regulators have approved gaming's biggest merger and Microsoft has welcomed Activision and its 13,000 employees and 8x billion-dollar franchises into the Xbox brand. As expected, the acquisition will see a changing of the guard as Activision CEO Bobby Kotick will leave the company in 2024.

Kotick will stay until the end of 2023 to ensure a smooth transition as Activision moves from an independent company to a limited-integration subsidiary of Microsoft's games division.

Ever wanted to play turn-based soccer? No, it's not something we've ever thought of, but EA has turned (pun not intended) this very idea into a mobile game.

EA Sports FC Tactical will be out on Android and iOS, bristling with 5,000 authentic players drawn from over 10 top leagues (with the Premier League being one of them, as you might expect, as well as the Bundesliga and Serie A).

EA tells us the emphasis will be on planning in-game strategies and managing elements such as stamina and power-plays. Simulated matches will offer turn-based decisions on defense and attack, with choices of whether to go for goal, or dribble, and so forth, along with skill moves to employ, all adding up to 'authentic' football action.

The Microsoft-Activision merger is officially a done deal. Xbox now owns the largest independent video games publisher on the planet.

Earlier this morning, UK regulators gave the go-ahead for Microsoft to finalized its megaton $68.7 billion merger with Activision. Microsoft quickly released an announcement that welcomed Activision and its video games empire to the Xbox brand, signalling the closure of gaming's largest-ever acquisition.

"Today, we officially welcome Activision Blizzard and their teams to Xbox," Microsoft gaming CEO Phil Spencer said.

NVIDIA has revealed the games that'll be going live on its GeForce Now streaming service this week, and it includes some big-name releases.

We're talking about Forza Motorsport, the latest instalment in the racing franchise which is supported right now.

Then there's Lords of the Fallen, the Souls-like action RPG outing which has been generating a lot of interest, will be live on GeForce Now later today.

The Steam Deck has been out for quite some time, and has been undeniably popular - particularly at its launch - but we've now seen the first signs that sales for the handheld gaming PC are starting to fall off.

Valve's Steam Deck was launched early in 2022, and has been around for over a year and a half now, and in that time it has consistently been up there among the company's best-selling products.

As Gaming On Linux reports, the Steam Deck has been in the top 10 of Valve's own weekly top-selling products (globally) for 83 weeks (which is, of course, mostly games - this is all the firm's sales, hardware and software).

UK antitrust regulators at the Competition and Markets Authority have approved Microsoft's new deal, and the companies are now free to combine and merge.

The last hurdle in the Microsoft-Activision transaction has been leapt as the CMA clears the deal, paving the way to the video games industry's largest-ever merger.

Microsoft won CMA approval thanks to a newly submitted deal which separated cloud gaming rights from the Activision merger. Instead, these rights would go to independent third-party publisher Ubisoft. Microsoft gave up the cloud streaming rights to Activision-Blizzard games to Ubisoft for a 15-year period as a concession to address the CMA's concerns over cloud. The maneuver worked and the CMA approved this new deal.

As you may be aware, the Steam accounts of a number of game developers have recently been used to spread malware, and Valve has now implemented measures to help stop this happening.

The game devs in question had their accounts broken into, with the perpetrators then sending out updates to their respective games which included malware. Nasty indeed, particularly when you consider many Steam users have their game library set to update titles automatically, which would have downloaded the malware straight away.

The better news with this security breach is that not many Steam users were affected, fewer than 100 as PC Gamer reported. And as you might expect, Valve has now made a move to tighten its defenses against this sort of attack.

Shadow, the French cloud gaming company that allows subscribers to run games via high-powered PCs over the internet, has emailed customers to warn them that it has suffered a security breach in which customer data was stolen. While Shadow hasn't confirmed how many people were affected, it's thought that around 530,000 users have had their information stolen.

In an email sent to customers and reported on by TechCrunch, Shadow said that it was the victim of a social engineering attack that targeted one of its employees at the end of September 2023. The attack apparently began on Discord and then resulted in the employee downloading a game on Steam at the suggestion of a third party. That third party was also a victim of the attack.

The data itself was collected after the attacker was able to gain access to an as-yet-unnamed software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider.

We might just see a new game in the Guitar Hero franchise, according to a heavy hint dropped by the CEO of Activision, Bobby Kotick.

Windows Central reports that this possibility came to light in a lengthy interview, where Kotick answers a whole load of queries from James Corden (of The Late Late Show and Gavin & Stacey fame).

Apparently the interview, which has been leaked, saw Kotick talking in some depth about how the Microsoft deal will boost what the games publisher can do (assuming it goes through, which it apparently will - and imminently).

Ubisoft has taken to its social media channels to praise its developers behind Assassin's Creed Mirage on achieving the most successful launch on current-gen consoles for Ubisoft in terms of unit sales.

Assassin's Creed Mirage has been available for just six days, and the team has already released a statement congratulating the team behind the title and thanking gamers for their title's reception. Ubisoft thanked fans of the series for coming along for the 15-year legacy of the Assassin's Creed series and, in celebration, shared some statistics sourced from the first week of Assassin's Creed Mirage.

According to Ubisoft, players have already spent 479 collective years parkouring the rooftops of Baghdad; players have done the iconic leap of faith 60 million times; and last but not least, 1.2 million cats have been pet in-game.

The wealthiest Old School RuneScape player BTCs has been banned over allegations of real-world trading, which is the process of exchanging in-game currency for real-world money.

The Old School RuneScape player and stream is known as BTC, and has taken to his YouTube channel to declare himself innocent against Jagex's rollout of a string of bans against multiple of BTC's accounts, along with other accounts associated with his. Notably, BTC took to Twitter at the end of September to share a screenshot of the "first ever 1 trillion bank on OSRS," which equates to approximately $160,000 in real-world money.

BTC claims that he earned the astonishing amount of in-game currency through doing deathmatches, essentially a process where two players both bet a large stack of cash in either liquid in-game currency or gear and then fight to the death - winner takes all.

The next generation in the Counter-Strike series, Counter-Strike 2, was released on September 27, and over time, its reviews on Steam seem to be getting worse and worse.

New reports from Gaming Bible and Insider Gaming explore the current situation of Counter-Strike 2 and why overall, the title is now categorized as "mixed". There are many factors contributing to the poor reviews, one is the deletion of Counter-Strike: Global Offense, which was shut down upon the release of Counter-Strike 2, and all Steam listings for GO redirected to Counter-Strike 2. Other criticisms of the new title include the lack of specific multiplayer modes, maps, and numerous bugs.

Many fans of the series are accusing Valve of simply hijacking CS:GO's Steam listing to get more people to play Counter-Strike 2. Other fans are pointing toward many instances of sloppy hitboxes and hurt boxes. Reports indicate that out of all of Valve's games, Counter-Strike 2 is now the lowest-rated on Steam with its "mixed" review labeling.

Diablo IV had a blockbuster launch earlier this year. Still, with the arrival of its first Season of content and some players growing tired of the endgame grind and variety, the hype surrounding the latest action RPG in the long-running franchise has waned in recent months. The good news? That's all about to change.

Blizzard looks to be in it for the long haul regarding Diablo IV. With the game's second season, dubbed 'Season of Blood' around the corner, the game is not only getting its first major content drop but a massive patch (bringing the game to version 1.2) that features over 40 pages of new features, items, balance changes, overhauls, and more so much so that there's no real way to cover it all in a single news post.

As a fan of the game, the new vampiric theme, bosses, events, and story-driven questlines for Season of Blood sound like a lot of fun - enough to get me to fire the game up. And with that, here are some of the main highlights from Diablo IV's massive 1.2.0 Patch Notes.

Sony has upgraded its new PlayStation "slim" models with a meaningful boost to storage, but gamers shouldn't expect all of the capacity to be usable for games and apps.

Sony's new PlayStation 5 consoles now feature a 1TB SSD, offering a noteworthy increase over the 825GB SSD included in existing PS5s. On paper, that's a 175GB difference.

Gamers won't get to enjoy the full 1TB, though. Advertised storage and actual storage are different things, and there's always some capacity eaten up by formatting (the Series X, for example, is billed as a 1TB device but it only has 802GB of usable storage). Consoles also need extra space for the operating system and other tools/tasks, so oftentimes there is a sizable amount of storage being reserved for these functions.

Lords of the Fallen is a highly anticipated Souls-like that is set to launch this weekend - with the game garnering plenty of attention due to its incredible Unreal Engine 5 visuals. It's a title set to push high-end PC hardware to its limit, with the god-tier GeForce RTX 4090 delivering an average frame rate of 69.2 FPS at 4K with max settings.

That performance figure comes via NVIDIA, with the company announcing a few days ago that Lords of the Fallen will ship with DLSS 3 support - pushing that 62.9 FPS figure up to an impressive 159.4 FPS. This figure includes DLSS Super Resolution using the 'Performance' mode with Frame Generation.

Until recently, NVIDIA DLSS 3's Frame Generation was the only, err, frame generation in town. That has changed in recent weeks thanks to AMD finally delivering the long-awaited FSR 3, including its brand-new frame-gen tech called AMD Fluid Motion Frame. Based on an early look at Lords of the Fallen, it will be the next game (after Immortals of Aveum) where DLSS 3 and FSR 3 will go head-to-head.

Microsoft has funded two digital-only mid-gen Xbox console refreshes, but Sony moves in the opposite direction to improve profitability and significantly reduce costs.

Xbox and PlayStation compete in two different timelines. Microsoft is trying to plan for an all-digital future where consumers are funneled into subscriptions, whereas Sony is capitalizing on the here and now. Since the PS5s launch in 2020, Sony has released multiple console revisions aimed at boosting profitability while simultaneously reducing costs.

Microsoft's Xbox Series X/S consoles aren't profitable--in fact, no Xbox console has been made and sold at a profit. The PlayStation 5, on the other hand, was profitable soon after launch. This profitability isn't constant, though, and the PS5 has ebbed in and out of certain levels of profitability due to higher manufacturing and shipment costs. Sony responded by raising PS5 prices worldwide except for North America and releasing multiple hardware revisions that reduce weight and make the system more efficient.