Gaming - Page 308

Microsoft has always had a complicated history with screenshots and captures, and now the saga is about to get even messier.

In a big blow to capture aficionados everywhere, Microsoft has announced plans to shut down the Xbox Console Companion App in late August. This app was the primary way to directly import and download screenshots from Xbox consoles to a PC. The way it works is that clips and screenshots captured on an Xbox console would be uploaded to Xbox LIVE, and then users could access those captures through the Companion App and download them to a local machine.

This is useful for a whole manner of reasons, especially for content creators who insert captured clips into their YouTube videos. As a writer and reviewer, I have often used the Companion App to download screenshots that I took on Xbox in order to put them into written reviews. The removal of the Companion App is another hassle

According to internal forecasts published by Microsoft CFO Amy Hood, the Xbox games division is expected to deliver record-breaking revenues in Q1 FY24.

Xbox could start a new year with record-breaking earnings, or at least that's what Microsoft thinks will happen. In its Q1 outlook for Fiscal Year 2024, the company believes total Xbox gaming revenue could rise by "mid-single digits". That's up to a 5% increase over Q1 FY23, which was the best-ever first quarter in Xbox history at $3.610 billion in revenues.

Assuming Xbox is able to achieve this goal, then Microsoft's gaming segment could pull in $3.791 billion in Q1 FY24, driven by content and services growth. Based on the top-end targets of the forecast, the content and services segment could also break $3 billion for the first time ever in a Q1 period.

After years of exclusivity deals with PlayStation, Square Enix makes a commitment to bring more of its games to Xbox.

Like most publishers, Square Enix has a vested interest in making deals that make sense for the company. We've seen the publisher sign lucrative multi-year exclusivity deals with PlayStation in exchange for various benefits, including upfront payments/higher share splits, marketing budgets, and the ability to launch games more quickly by effectively shrinking the work required for the project by isolating it to one platform.

Despite these benefits, exclusivity also lowers potential sales for games, and that's something that all third-party publishers want to maximize. Take Final Fantasy XVI, for example--because of PS5 exclusivity, and the current installed base of the Gen9 market, FFXVI's sales were less than FFXV, which launched in 2016 across PS4 and Xbox One. While Square Enix probably won't stop making exclusivity deals with PlayStation, it sounds like it could be making less of them and bringing more of its heavy-hitting games to Xbox.

It's officially happening: Final Fantasy XIV is coming to Xbox.

In a deal that was six years in the making, Final Fantasy XIV is officially coming to Xbox in 2024. Square Enix's mega-popular MMORPG will jump over to Xbox Series X/S consoles in Spring of next year, complete with cross-play integration and modern gaming upgrades like quicker loading times via the PCIe 4.0 SSD storage.

The news was announced at the big Final Fantasy fan fest in Las Vegas, with Square Enix CEO Takashi Kiryu, Xbox gaming CEO Phil Spencer, and legendary game dev Yoshi-P all taking the stage at the same time to talk about FFXIV's launch on Xbox.

New evidence unearthed by Rockstar sleuth Tez2 strongly indicates the existence of the long-awaited Red Dead Redemption remaster.

It looks like Rockstar Games could be ready to announce the eagerly anticipated Red Dead Redemption remaster. Earlier today, Rockstar Games apparently updated its website to include a new reference to its list of games: "Red Dead Redemption (Rockstar Presents Ver)" was added, as per discoveries from Tez2. There's also indications that the Red Dead Redemption website will receive a big revamp, possibly to coincide with the RDR1 remaster's reveal.

The Korean game ratings board recently turned heads by publishing a final decision for Red Dead Redemption, a 13-year-old game. The new rating for this version of Red Dead Redemption is separate from the Gen7 PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions.

Reports indicate that Sony's new PlayStation 5 model that's set to release in 2023 could use a new 5nm SoC, but the new revised console is more likely to use the chip found in the current lightweight models.

Sony is expected to launch a new PlayStation 5 model in 2023 that ships without a disc drive. Now there are reports that the new model could use a 5nm SoC from TSMC's N5 process technology. Rumors go on to say that the shift to N5 could alleviate the need for the PS5's liquid metal thermal interface material.

This new PS5 model may not actually use a 5nm chip and instead stick with the current 6nm Oberon Plus SoC that is found in the newest PlayStation 5 hardware revisions. Sony has released a number of new PlayStation 5 model with significant weight reductions in an effort to shrink overseas freight shipping costs and streamline console production.

Microsoft's latest 10-K SEC filing gives exact figures on how much revenue its operating segments generated in FY23, including Xbox gaming.

Microsoft's latest FY23 results saw the company generating $211.915 billion in annual earnings, driven primarily by growth in cloud and server.

Other segments like Xbox gaming were down year-over-year, but others including search and news advertising, dynamics, and LinkedIn saw healthy upticks of $617 million, $750 million, and $1.329 billion, respectively.

Sony has sold 40 million PlayStation 5 consoles to consumers, the company today announced.

Worldwide PS5 sell-through has passed 40 million units as of July 16, 2023. These figures are sell-through and are actual sales to consumers, so the data is more indicative of the PS5's installed base.

Sony Interactive Entertainment typically reports PlayStation 5 console shipments on a quarterly basis, but the games division has started to divulge key info on console sell-through as the system hits specific milestones.

Diablo 4 players using any kind of mod might want to tread very carefully or even rethink that idea, in light of a new post from Blizzard on this practice.

PC Gamer spotted that Adam Fletcher, who is Global Community Development Director for Diablo, posted the following on Blizzard's forums:

It's interesting to see that one mod is actually named as not permissible to be used with the game. What's TurboHUD4? It's a UI overlay customization tool that tracks things like resources, and as PC Gamer notes, seems pretty innocent on the whole - and not unlike many of the kind of mods we used back in the day with WoW all the time.

Earlier this week, we reported on a story about how World of Warcraft players on Reddit managed to trick an AI newsbot into posting an article about the arrival of a fake character called Glorbo. It was a fun story because the name Glorbo is hilarious, and it highlighted how AI cannot differentiate between real news and fake news, even with text in the post stating, "I just really want some major bot-operated news websites to publish an article about this."

So yeah, it brought to light an issue with several shady online publications using AI to generate articles without highlighting what you're reading was generated by AI. Instead, these articles are credited to what we assume are names. And there's another gaming example of some random publication posting Reddit bait as news - this time, it's for Destiny 2, where Glorbo has made another appearance.

In the post from Rasputin_the_Warmind, titled 'I just want to say the new Glorbo secret boss has been the best content I've played in a while,' many replies feed into the prank celebrating Bungie for adding a super secret boss into the game's latest dungeon. "Can you PLEASE tell me how to access Glorbo?!" writes one response, with several more outlining outlandish ways to find Glorbo.

Xbox is currently rolling out a major update to the UI for the OS found across Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One consoles, with Microsoft noting that the new UI design was based on player feedback to make game discovery easier. From custom backgrounds for tiles to subtle changes - let's take a look.

First up, one of the more subtle and welcome additions is the addition of a new shortcut bar at the top of the Home screen that includes quick access to your Library, the Microsoft Store, Xbox Game Pass, Search, and Settings. It's a great addition, as before this update accessing Xbox system settings required a couple of steps.

The biggest overhaul comes with the overall presentation of tiles to access recent apps and games, with more space for custom backgrounds and an option to change the background to match the game highlighted. This is reminiscent of the PlayStation 5's UI, which changes the background and even music depending on what game is currently highlighted. Seeing Starfield in Xbox's demonstration of the new UI is a nice reminder that the highly anticipated game is right around the corner.

Like most of the top video game publishers and platform-holders, Capcom also made most of its gaming revenues from digital.

Digital has been slowly taking over the video games market for many years now. The Gen8 console cycle gave way to a paradigm shift towards live games and subscription services, and now both PlayStation and Xbox make most of their revenues from in-game purchases and digital sales.

Capcom is one of the publishers that has contributed strongly towards this trend, and digital is a big reason why the company is able to deliver strong consistent operating income growth across its games unit. According to Capcom's latest Q1 2023 financial report, the Japanese games-maker once again made most of its game unit sales and total video games revenues from digital delivery.

Microsoft's FY23 results had muted expression of Xbox's full-year performance and missed another valuable opportunity to update investors on the division's current standing on the market.

Xbox's FY23 results are in, showing strong consistent earnings across content and services. Xbox made $15.477 billion in FY23, the second-highest earnings year of all time for the games segment. Interestingly enough, Q4 revenues missed MIcrosoft's expectations due to "weakness in first-party and third-party content."

As per usual, there was no breakdown on Game Pass earnings or subscribers. We've been able to dial-in Game Pass revenue estimates based on previous comments from Microsoft management, and the current Game Pass subscriber count is still "over 25 million." Game Pass did increase in one of the most important metrics in modern gaming, and one of the biggest KPIs that Microsoft looks at: Play time and monthly active users.

CD Projekt Group prepares to lay off 9% of its CD Projekt RED workforce in an effort to stay lean as it continues developing multiple high-profile Unreal Engine 5-powered games.

CD Projekt today announced that has planned to lay off 9% of its employees in the CD Projekt RED division across multiple sectors including game development, publishing, and back office. In its 2022 annual report, the company stated that approximately 1,012 people worked in its CD Projekt S.A. division that includes CD Projekt RED, so this would be about 91 people.

CD Projekt Group president Adam Kicinski later clarified that "around 100 people" would be laid off. The reason for the layoffs is so that CD Projekt RED can conduct "deep transformations" as it pivots not only from its internal RED engine to Unreal Engine 5, but also to the development of new games in three different franchises that should also incorporate multiplayer aspects.

Diablo IV made $666 million revenue in just 5 days, and helped Blizzard achieve record-breaking earnings during the quarter, but apparently the game wasn't enough to significantly impact Blizzard's monthly active users.

By all accounts, Blizzard's latest action RPG is a mega-hit. Diablo IV saw 10 million players embark in an epic quest to slay evil, and the game helped Blizzard make $1 billion in a single quarter for the first time in its 32-year history. But there's one thing Diablo IV apparently didn't do: Considerably drive up the player base.

In its recent Q2 2023 earnings report, Activision Blizzard King outlined its total monthly active players for the April - June period. In that timeframe, Blizzard's monthly active users (MAUs) actually dropped by 1 million players, reducing total MAUs to 26 million. There's a few reasons this may have happened.

Capcom continues its long-running streak of record operating income, hitting a new all-time quarterly high for game sales.

Capcom's latest Q1 2023 earnings results are out, showing consistent strong growth for the Japanese games publisher.

On a converted yen to USD basis, the company set new records for net sales ($439 million), operating income ($240 million), and net income ($182 million), driven by the success of its blockbuster game sales and growth in its arcade business.

Remnant 2 has already been seen on PC giving the mighty RTX 4090 GPU a tough time with keeping smooth frame rates - and there's plenty of feedback on Steam about performance woes - so how does it fare on cutting-edge consoles?

The curious can check out a new Digital Foundry video (see above) which evaluates frame rates on Remnant 2 for both the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, as well as overall graphics quality.

To be fair, Remnant 2 (which uses Unreal Engine 5) does look pretty good for overall visuals - especially in the early stages of the game - and as Digital Foundry makes clear, there are some impressive visuals to be witnessed.

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is out this week, and it's the latest PlayStation 5 title to make its way to PC. And the PC version is shaping up to be something quite special, with improved visuals, enhanced ray-tracing, support for ultrawide resolutions, and NVIDIA DLSS 3 Frame Generation support on day one.

It also marks the arrival of NVIDIA RTX IO in a major AAA release, the DirectStorage-like technology that shifts decompression from the CPU to the GPU to deliver a massive increase in loading times and things like streaming in assets when paired with a fast SSD. Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart joins the impressive path-traced Portal: Prelude RTX as one of the first games to support RTX IO.

At launch, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart was a next-gen showcase of PS5 hardware and made full use of the console's new high-speed internal SSD to seamlessly and instantaneously shift between detailed environments as part of the game's 'Rift' mechanics. To showcase the benefit of RTX IO, NVIDIA has posted a video (above) where the new technology "enables rapid loading of assets, accelerating the seamless portal-jumping gameplay."

Xbox delivered a record-breaking Q4 period, but total-year revenues missed Microsoft's expectations due to weak performance of content offerings.

Microsoft just posted up its Q4 and full-year Fiscal Year 2023 results, and based on the figures provided we were able to key in some performance estimates for the Xbox video games division.

According to the info provided by Microsoft, Xbox gaming generated $15.477 billion in total revenues during Fiscal Year 2023, with the Q4 period delivered a record $3.5 billion in earnings. As per usual, the bulk of the division's revenues game from content and services, with Xbox pulling in a total of $12.198 billion in FY23 from game sales, subscriptions, DLC, microtransactions, and other content sold on the Xbox ecosystem.

In an indie game first, Sea of Stars, the new turn-based RPG from The Messenger developer Sabotage, will come to both PlayStation Plus and Xbox Game Pass on day one.

A bit ago during the FTC v Microsoft trial, a badly-redacted Sony Interactive Entertainment document had some interesting things to say about subscription exclusivity. In the document, SIE said that Microsoft typically requires any game launching day one on Xbox Game Pass to be exclusive to the Game Pass service.

"While SIE does not typically require subscription exclusivity for games included on PS Plus, Microsoft often requires that tiles included on Game Pass--particularly titles offered on Game Pass the same day they are released--not be made available on other subscription services," the passage reads.