Gaming - Page 300

Xbox's management downplays the importance and significance of cloud gaming as regulators use the nascent tech as a lynchpin to their anti-merger arguments.

In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Xbox Game Studios boss Matt Booty shared an interesting perspective on cloud gaming. According to Booty, the tech isn't a big part of Xbox and is more of an experimental and additive part of Microsoft's gaming focus. Despite entering private testing in 2019 as Project xCloud, and moving to public beta in 2020 as Xbox Cloud Gaming included as part of an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription, Microsoft apparently considers its streaming service to be highly experimental.

"For us, to be clear, it is a very, very small market. I'm not even sure you would call it a market yet, in fact. It's very small usage and very small audience," the Xbox Game Studios boss said.

Sony's new mobile gaming segment loses the head executive that oversaw business development.

Sony has big plans to tap the mobile gaming segment using its lucrative and popular PlayStation IPs. The company is investing heavily into new segments including PC expansion, live services, and mobile, with around 20% of its new games lineup aiming to launch on mobile by FY25. To help kickstart its fledgling efforts, Sony conscripted Nicola Sebastiani, an industry vet who helped establish Apple Arcade, to serve as VP and head of mobile for PlayStation Studios.

After 2 years of helping build the PlayStation mobile initiative, Sebastiani's LinkedIn confirms that he's leaving Sony.

The Ryzen Z1 Extreme-based ASUS ROG Ally has had a lot of eyes on it of late, with the impressive Windows PC gaming handheld giving Valve's extremely popular Steam Deck a run for its money in terms of performance and capabilities. Though, if you're one of the early adopters, you might want to hold off on updating the device to the latest 319 firmware - as reports out there point to it lowering in-game performance.

The update, available via the MyASUS app, fixes some bugs concerning the ASUS ROG Ally and its software, causing issues regarding everyday gaming on the handheld. In fact, the 319 update was intended to improve performance when using the 9W low-power preset.

Instead, you're getting overall performance degradation with the latest firmware, with the YouTube channel The Phawx showcasing that even across the various power modes, the benchmark results are noticeably worse, especially when it comes to things like 1% Lows, which are great for gauging the overall stability of a game.

As games become more complex, consumers can expect to wait half a decade or longer for new entries in their favorite franchises.

Games take a long time to make. Some, like mega-blockbuster hits like Naughty Dog's The Last of Us, Halo Infinite, or Starfield, can take quite a while. The AAA market demands a certain level of near-perfection in order to achieve multi-million sales, and gamers are quick to pick up on any bugs, issues, or monetization strategies. In this age of social media, controversies can spin up and out of control very quickly and doom a game before it even releases.

The advent of new games engines and enhanced technologies are believed to help accelerate game development, but as Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick rightly tells investors (FY23 call transcript), these new tools have only increased game development production cycles. Teams are simply able to do more than they ever have before, and that gives them more freedom to add more complexity to interactive experiences.

2023 is one of the best years in modern gaming. We've gotten and are getting so many high-profile titles this year (Resident Evil 4, Dead Island 2, Zelda Tears of the Kingdom, Diablo IV, Street Fighter 6, Final Fantasy XVI, Alan Wake II, Phantom Liberty, Starfield, Spider-Man 2..the list goes on and on) that gamers may have trouble keeping up.

We're seeing multiple publishers fire off some heavy-hitters, and Ubisoft is among them. Following a few years of declining performance, the French games publisher is set for a big come back with its substantial new AAA game release slate.

The lineup includes three main titles that should help turn the tides in Ubisoft's favor: The return-to-roots Assassin's Creed Mirage in October, the explosively-beautiful action RPG Avatar Frontiers of Pandora in December, and the surprise galactic scoundrel sim Star Wars Outlaws in 2024.

Ubisoft's new Star Wars Outlaws game takes players to the seedy underbelly of the galaxy, and we should be interacting with some of the most notorious criminals in the franchise...possibly even Jabba The Hutt.

Star Wars Outlaws was one of the biggest surprises of last week's big E3-timed events. Ubisoft kept the game under wraps pretty tightly, so most of the reveal was a total surprise. No one expected Outlaws, which looks to be a kind of Han Solo simulator with a brand new face, Kay Vess, taking the helm and forging her path into the realm of scum and villainy. Kay doesn't bring the suave, nerf-herding demeanor like Solo, but she does have a vigilante skill set that makes her one half femme fatale, one half cat burglar. It's an interesting combination, and players will be able to shape her story based on the choices they pick through dynamic dialog sequences and how they tackle missions.

There's a distinct push and pull between the syndicates and the corruption of the Galactic Empire, and players will need to pick who they choose to side with along the way--going full Imperial could close the door on syndicate missions, but the opposite could be true for the Empire, and could cut Kay off of the credits that she needs to clear her name.

Rockstar Games co-founder Dan Houser has launched Absurd Ventures, a new startup specifically aimed at telling stories across all media.

Following his departure from Rockstar back in 2020, Dan Houser is back in the media spotlight with Absurd Ventures, a new company that wants to write scripts and stories for games, TV shows, film, graphic novels--the works. Having penned most of Rockstar Games' biggest hits, Houser has proven his ability to create unique and gritty stories across multiple genres and settings. Now he wants to bring his skills to a wider market and help create new IP across different media sectors.

"We are building Absurd Ventures to create new universes and to tell great stories, wherever and however we can," Houser said. The company's debut YouTube video is an enigmatic pastiche of pop culture references and iconography with a three-word tagline that feels straight out Natural Born Killers or A Clockwork Orange: "Storytelling, philanthropy, ultraviolence."

Microsoft apparently has no plans to immediately raise the price of its Xbox Game Pass subscription service if the merger with Activision is approved, even with the significant added value of day-and-date Call of Duty games.

In the past, Xbox CEO Phil Spencer has indicated that Microsoft could eventually raise the price of the Xbox Game Pass subscription in an effort to keep up with rising games industry costs. Right now Xbox Game Pass has two tiers: The base tier that costs $10 a month on either console or PC, and then Ultimate for $15 a month, which offers bonuses like EA titles, access to both console and PC, and cloud streaming. So what happens if the Activision merger closes, and a bulk of Activision-Blizzard games arrive on the service?

According to a new court filing, it appears that Microsoft could keep the price of Xbox Game Pass at its current rates on a post-merger basis. This is surprising given the significant added value that big games like Call of Duty and even Diablo IV will add to the service, however the strategy could work in Microsoft's favor and help surge Game Pass signups. This provision is also a means of protection, as regulators and courts may disapprove of an immediate price jump following the merger's closure.

Microsoft has no intention of disruptive Activision Blizzard King's creative operations if the two companies are allowed to merge.

Microsoft's service-first model will disrupt Activision's core business, but to what extent remains unknown. Game Pass subscriptions have been proven to cannibalize and/or reduce sales of premium games. This effect is the exact reason Activision has kept its games off of value-oriented multi-game subscription services like Game Pass--the publisher very strongly relies on full game sales in its annualized Call of Duty franchise, a series that has amassed over 425 million copies and generated over $31 billion in revenues to date. Diablo IV's recent success also underlines this disruption; the game managed to make $666 million in just five days based on game sales alone, a feat that may not have been possible if the game was release on Xbox Game Pass on a day one basis.

While the Microsoft-Activision merger will undoubtedly disrupt Activision's core business model in terms of game sales, Microsoft does not want to shake up the publisher's creative process (unfortunately, this could happen regardless due to the subscription-based business model, which could lead to a change in how games are made, alongside layoffs that are typical after consolidation).

Yoshi-P regrettably announced that Final Fantasy XVI will have a day one patch on PlayStation 5, but the game is still playable fully offline.

Square Enix originally wanted to release Final Fantasy XVI as a complete game that didn't need a day one patch. Now the devs at Creative Business Unit III have announced the game will actually have a day one update that addresses very specific bugs, but this update won't be required to play the base game.

Anyone who owns a disc version can still play Final Fantasy XVI fully offline, as well as gamers who already have FF16 installed onto their PS5. The update is not mandatory in order to start playing the game. The update will be 300MB in size and will release on June 20th, just 2 days before the game's final release.

A Diablo IV player has taken to Reddit to share the total amount of XP required to reach max level 100, revealing that half of that total XP would make the player level 85.

Blizzard Entertainment seems to have taken a page out of Jagex's book when it comes to calculating the total amount of XP required to reach a maximum level. RuneScape is notorious for having long grinds of a specific skill or multiple skills, and for a player to commit to reaching the maximum level in a specific skill, the player must be prepared to spend tens or, more typically, hundreds of hours of grinding.

In OldSchool RuneScape, for a player to hit the maximum level in a skill, they must reach level 99, or earn 13,034,431 XP. For a player to hit level 92 in a skill, they must earn 6,517,253 XP, meaning level 92 is technically halfway to level 99. Diablo IV is similar, with Reddit user Aganod44 pointing out that at level 85, a player will have around 243.5 million total XP, and the maximum level requires 487 million XP.

Ubisoft's new Avatar game may deliver one of the most captivating storylines of the year.

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora has an interesting aim. The game wants to meld first-person Far Cry-like action combat and free-roaming exploration while threading an interesting storyline through the experience. The result could be a compelling interactive journey into one of the most colorful worlds of modern entertainment.

Based on what we know about Frontiers of Pandora, the game will take on classic archetypes and motifs like the traditional Hero's Journey adventure that was first posited by Joseph Campbell. The game will have a distinct fantasy mythos undercurrent that carries the entire storyline; in Frontiers of Pandora, you play as a Na'vi that was specifically trained by humans to kill other Na'vi. Eventually you break away from the RDA and have to discover yourself, your culture, and to truly understand what it means to be Na'vi.

Streaming platform Kick wants to make its mark in the billion-dollar ad market, and has poached one of the biggest names in streaming.

xQc has signed an incredibly lucrative two-year agreement with Kick, a new fledgling streaming platform launched in 2022. The non-exclusive deal is worth nearly $70 million, with incentives that could raise the deal's worth to $100 million. xQc's agent Ryan Morrison tells New York Times reporter Kellen Browning that the deal is bigger than those signed by pro athletes.

"This is more than most professional athletes and megastars. This is one of the highest deals in entertainment, period."

Microsoft legal counsel suggests that the company could abandon the $68.7 billion merger with Activision if federal courts grants the FTC's request for a preliminary injunction.

The fate of the Microsoft-Activision merger may hang in the balance of a decision from Northern California's federal courts. In a recent court filing, Microsoft and Activision lawyers indicate that the acquisition could be terminated if Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley issues a preliminary injunction at the FTC's behest.

The U.S. antitrust Commission wants to stop the merger, and has challenged the deal in its own internal administrative courts instead of in federal court. This is by design: The FTC can effectively kill the merger through years-long process where the Commissioners, not the Administrative Law Judge who oversees the case, have the final say on merger approval. The FTC has been creative in its tactics. In the most recent motion, Microsoft lawyers say that the FTC opted for an 8-month schedule for the admin case rather than a shorter 5-month proceeding, which set the first hearing on August 2, well past the merger's July 18 expiration date.

Sony Interactive Entertainment is still hesitant to disrupt its virtuous cycle business model and follow Microsoft's lead.

Sony has a great thing going right now. The company sells millions of games and makes lots of profit from PlayStation 5 hardware and accessories. While Sony's newer multi-game PlayStation Plus subscription model takes direct inspiration from Xbox Game Pass, the company isn't ready to disrupt its own business and put services and engagement at the forefront of its gaming empire.

Services like PlayStation Plus are additive for Sony. The reverse is true for Xbox, and Game Pass is at the heart of Microsoft's gaming business. This is reflected through the dramatic decision to release first-party Xbox games day-one on Game Pass, a move that lowers the potential full game sales opportunities for these titles. Sony, on the other hand, isn't ready to forgo game sales just yet, and for good reason: Its AAA titles have sold tens of millions of copies.

Three of Twitch's top executives sit down to answer questions about the new Partner Plus program.

Today, Twitch introduced its Partner Plus program. The initiative allows streamers to keep 70% of net revenue generated from subscriptions, provided they meet certain criteria.

These qualifications include:

Gen 8 is finished, and Microsoft is now focusing on the Xbox Series X/S console duo.

Following expanded efforts to preserve backwards compatibility across four generations of consoles, the advent of Smart Delivery, and a 3-year cross-gen transition period, Microsoft is now moving on from the Xbox One generation. The billion-dollar tech giant is now solely focusing its new games for the Gen 9 Xbox Series X and Series S consoles introduced in 2020.

In a recent interview with Axio's Stephen Totilo (via Axios Gaming's newsletter, sign up here), Xbox Game Studios boss Matt Booty confirms that the company's 23 internal studios are no longer making new games for the Xbox One.

Microsoft has revealed new performance measurements that highlight the company's engagement-driven business model.

In some ways, Xbox is a lot different than PlayStation. Microsoft's games division has prioritized services, subscriptions, and digital engagement above all else, and this paradigm shift has helped the Xbox brand stay competitive. Along with cross-platform unification through OS and services, Game Pass is the purest example of this model. The subscription thrives from the breadth of content offered, but also the successful capturing and exploitation of player engagement through key online-driven and replayable experiences.

This model is paying off in terms of players engaged with specific titles, which remains a critical part of today's video games market. The most popular and lucrative games on the planet rely on digital engagement models that monetize players over time directly through in-game purchases, but Xbox Game Pass is another method of indirect monetization through recurring subscriptions. Rather than just relying on full game sales alone, Xbox is diversifying its games to leverage the strongest elements of engagement through steady digital content releases. These ultimately serve both monetization and retention of its Game Pass service.

If you're gaming on a PC, then no doubt most of that time is spent using Valve's Steam client, and today it just got a massive update that overhauls everything from the underlying framework and codebase to the UI elements, in-game overlay, and more.

In fact, if you fire up Steam, you'll notice that even things like font choices and how information and notifications are laid out look different.

This update has been in the works for quite some time, with the big goal being how the client shares code between its various modes - Steam Desktop Client, Big Picture mode, and Steam Deck. This means new features and updates will be easier for Valve to implement going forward. Plus, hardware acceleration has been added to Steam's Mac and Linux versions.

Rather than focusing exclusively on mega-hit AAA blockbusters, Xbox Game Pass helps fuel the development of experimental passion projects like Obsidian's Grounded and Pentiment games, and Xbox management sees the service as a kind of cyclic wheel that helps foster creativity.

Game Pass is one of the most interesting and disruptive parts of the modern video games industry. The service not only packs tremendous value due to sheer volume of content offered, but the real driver is the diversity of the games included in the subscription. Microsoft's day-one first-party releases have created an environment where Xbox Game Studios devs can pitch, fund, and eventually release the games they've always wanted to make, including Minecraft offshoots like the Diablo-like Minecraft Dungeons and Rare's Sea of Thieves.

This has fostered a wide array of unique first-party games that appeal to the full spectrum of gaming, from AA indies to long-lasting service games and heavy-hitting AAA titles like, for instance, the Forza series.