Gaming - Page 309

Bethesda has released three epic Starfield shorts that showcase the imagination and spirit of the new spacefaring IP.

In a surprise move, Bethesda today released three animated shorts set in its new Settled Systems Anthology series. The clips are a blend of some of the most colorful and expressive sci-fi influences of our modern era, with strong tones of classic mecha anime, Syd Mead futurism, and John Berkey's blazing vibrancy.

Apart from the visuals, the other thing that stands out is that there is no dialog in any of these videos. There doesn't have to be. The footage and the strong musical tones really tell the story...and that is something special.

The highly anticipated Remnant 2 from developer Gunfire Games is out this week, and it might be the first game without ray-tracing to require the use of NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR, or Intel XeSS to achieve an optimal and playable 60fps experience in 4K. It's a visually impressive title, but many PC gamers are wondering why performance is so bad.

A high-profile PC game launch that has performance issues on day one? Not exactly headline news, but when it comes to Remnant 2, you absolutely need to have one of the upscalers mentioned above turned on - even on a GeForce RTX 4090. Gunfire Games confirmed as much over on Reddit, where it posted, "We designed the game with upscaling in mind (DLSS/FSR/XeSS)" and that for "the smoothest gameplay," you'll need to leave them on.

Over on DSOG, writer John Papadopoulos got to play the game early via the Ultimate Edition. He could not achieve native 4K 60fps performance using the game's Ultra settings with a GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card. "The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 cannot run Remnant 2 with 60fps at native 4K and Ultra Settings," he writes. "The game does not even use any Ray Tracing effects, so we really don't know what the hell is going on here."

Techland, the Polish developer of the popular Dying Light games, has become the next subsidiary of Tencent.

Tencent's gaming empire grows with the addition of Techland. Management for the Polish game dev today announced that Tencent is "in the process of becoming Techland's majority shareholder," effectively making the dev team a subsidiary for the overseas gaming giant.

Techland founder and CEO Paweł Marchewka says that the Tencent partnership will essentially supercharge the developer's capabilities. Tencent's coffers are indeed deep, with the company's video games unit generating roughly $23.7 billion USD from both domestic and international online games. The Chinese firm is known for its ownership buyouts of studios like Riot Games (League of Legends), Leyou Technologies (Warframe), and Funcom (Conan Exiles), and is involved in 45 video games companies in some extent including full ownership, variable stake, majority shares, and minority shares.

NVIDIA recently announced its RTX IO tech is present in Portal: Prelude RTX, and will be in Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart - and the company just underlined that it reckons this fresh innovation will help to fix stuttering in games.

Stuttering is one of the more frustrating experiences to blight a gaming session, as smoothness is everything when it comes to immersion - and indeed aiming in the likes of shooters.

As Wccftech reports, NVIDIA has shared a further statement on RTX IO to make it clear that Team Green is expecting the tech to do a good deal of heavy lifting in terms of minimizing any stuttering.

"Since they started hinting at it in Hearthstone in 1994, it was obvious that they would introduce Glorbo to World of Warcraft sooner or later," writes kaefer_kriegerin over on Reddit. The post references a character that doesn't exist; it's totally made up. The replies were all on board with the fiction, with one reply adding that the addition of Glorbo was exciting, but the character was OP or overpowered and could present a problem for WoW's meta.

The goal of the post was to trick an AI newsbot into posting the announcement as real news, and it succeeded! The outlet The Portal picked up the story, or whatever AI model the site used to publish news, where the text "I just really want some major bot-operated news websites to publish an article about this" was also included in the write-up.

What's concerning is that there's no confirmation or text on the publication's page acknowledging that it uses AI to generate news stories - with The Portal crediting the piece to Lucy Reed. Glorbo isn't real, and this little exercise made headlines at popular Blizard destination Wowhead.com - which even led to the original post being taken down, but not before it was archived.

The Nintendo Switch is the most popular gaming console on the planet, even though its hardware is starting to show its age. Powered by the NVIDIA Tegra X1 processor that features ARM CPU cores alongside an NVIDIA Maxwell-based GPU with 256 CUDA Cores - we've seen impressive results in recent games like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, which presents a massive open-world Hyrule to explore.

But we all know that in terms of visual fidelity, it's a generation or two behind something like the PS5 or Xbox Series X. And on paper, it's nowhere near as powerful as Valve's Steam Deck or the new ROG Ally from ASUS. What if you could mod a Nintendo Switch and use it to play PC games?

That's exactly what the team at Geekerwan has done, with a new video showcasing a hacked Nintendo Switch running Steam via Android and Ubuntu. It gets interesting with the sizable overclock applied to both the Nintendo Switch's CPU and GPU - using the OLED model as a basis. The native CPU clock speed of 1 GHz is pushed all the up to 2.3 GHz, with the GPU boat clock speed of 768 MHz pushed to 1267 MHz.

Diablo IV has helped Blizzard break $1 billion in quarterly revenues for the first time in its 32-year history, but how does the game's launch compare to its predecessor?

With $666 million revenue earned from game sales in just 5 days' time, Diablo IV is a fiery success. The sequel has done so well that it helped propel Blizzard to a new all-time revenue record that saw the segment making up the lion's share of ABK's quarterly earnings, which is something that doesn't happen very often.

The question remains, though: How did Diablo IV's launch compare to Diablo III's? To answer that, we have to look at Blizzard's past quarterly performance, and analysis shows that there is no easy clear-cut answer to this question.

At the behest of Microsoft, the Federal Trade Commission has paused its administrative lawsuit against the Microsoft-Activision merger...but this is temporary, and the agency could still continue its litigation in attempt to block the merger if it so chooses.

Following the FTC"s double loss in federal and appeals courts, Microsoft filed a motion to stay, or pause, the agency's planned administrative lawsuit against the merger. The FTC seeks to block the merger FTC by trying the case in its own internal courts before an administrative law judge. Microsoft is eager to get the merger passed, but it still has some time: Microsoft and Activision have agreed to extend the merger deadline to as late as October.

As a formality, secretary April Tabor, who had discretion to make this particular decision, has granted Microsoft's motion and has paused the Commission's administrative lawsuit against the merger.

Mobile gaming is huge for Activision Blizzard King, and revenues continue to grow across a trio of titles: Candy Crush, Call of Duty Mobile, and Diablo Immortal.

A bit ago, I delved into how mobile gaming has transformed Activision's video games business. In that coverage, I looked at the ways that Activision and Blizzard revenues have changed over time thanks to games like COD Mobile and Diablo Immortal. The data really speaks for itself--mobile gaming has significantly buffered these segments thanks to Activision's successful launches.

The company's latest Q2 2023 filing gives more opportunity to chart the effects that mobile has had on Activision's platform earnings split. The results are just as interesting. According to the filing, Activision Blizzard King has made over $900 million from mobile for four consecutive quarters over the last rolling 12-month period.

Sony is about to drop the price of the PS5 console in the US and Europe, or that's the latest chatter from the grapevine.

If this is true, the reasoning that springs to mind for some folks - and it's an obvious enough line of speculation - is that Sony wants to shift some more stock before the next incarnation of the PS5 turns up. And this long-rumored refreshed model is something a second piece of speculation has just popped up around.

The first rumor comes from billbil_kun on Twitter, and as you can see above, it's a slightly cryptic tweet, translating to 'watch out for a PS5 price drop in the US and UK/Germany [Europe] soon.'

BREAKING: Sony's new PlayStation 5 Pro may release in 2024 with some heavy mid-gen hardware upgrades.

New reports from gaming insider Tom Henderson indicate that Sony's new PlayStation 5 Pro console will be a hefty hardware upgrade over the existing PS5 model. Sources have told Henderson that the PS5 Pro may deliver a new performance mode capable of 8K gaming output, complete with more robust and optimized ray tracing effects.

The console is codenamed Project Trinity, and 4K gaming is likely to be main target for the PS5 Pro. We could see the console enable more consistent 4K 60FPS gaming experiences due to new advanced SoC tech. Reports say that Sony has been developing the PS5 Pro model since 2022 and that most studios will receive devkits by late 2023.

Call of Duty Mobile continues delivering powerhouse earnings with the game passing over $3 billion in spending since its launch in October 2019.

Call of Duty's mobile version has been incredibly successful for Activision's games segment. In its recent Q2 2023 earnings brief, Activision Blizzard King announced that COD Mobile has broken $3 billion in total worldwide consumer spending, doubling the previous $1.5 billion figure that Activision shared in February 2022.

In a previous article, I showed how mobile gaming has transformed Activision-Blizzard's business by charting how much each of its three segments (Activision, Blizzard, and King) make from mobile platforms. COD Mobile has dramatically spiked Activision's total earnings and now remains a key part of its consistent quarter-by-quarter revenues.

Diablo IV's massive success helped Blizzard become the jewel in Activision's crown.

Activision Blizzard King just announced its Q2 2023 earnings, and the results are incredibly strong. Blizzard overperformed during the quarter thanks to the monumental sales revenue generated from Diablo IV. The demon-slaying ARPG helped Blizzard break $1 billion in quarterly earnings for the first time in the publisher's 32-year history.

During the second quarter, Blizzard made $1.049 billion in revenues, most of which was from the release of Diablo IV. The last figures pinpoint Diablo IV sales making $666 million in just 5 days across consoles and PC. This doesn't account for the remaining weeks of sales through the end of the month (Activision's Q2 period ends on June 30).

The first season of Diablo 4 is now live, and Blizzard has already removed one of the less well-received changes made in its unpopular preseason patch (v1.1.0).

Sadly, this doesn't involve letting up on the nerfs made to the sorcerer class, which have been the most complained about element of patch 1.1.

However, as Wccftech spotted, with the release of Season of the Malignant, Blizzard has performed a U-turn on a change whereby level requirements were implemented for tackling Capstone Dungeons to level up to World Tier III or IV.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for the Nintendo 64 is legendary; it took one of the all-time great top-down action RPGs from the 16-bit Super Nintendo era (The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past) and successfully translated that into an interactive full 3D experience. An open-world game before that was even a term.

With the recent release of the critically acclaimed The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (check out our in-depth review here), the Zelda franchise is as relevant as ever, delivering some of the most immersive gaming experiences in 2023 - and on aging hardware like the Nintendo Switch.

But what if The Legend of Zelda was given the ultra high-end visual fidelity treatment with something like Unreal Engine 5? That's exactly what The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Unreal Engine 5.2 from CryZENx presents. Albeit currently in limited form with the Deku Tree dungeon from the game's introduction fully playable.

Activision-Blizzard's mobile performance was one of the main reasons why Microsoft seeks to buy the publisher for $68.7 billion, and our analysis really underlines just how important on-the-go gaming has become for the publisher.

It's well known that ABK makes a lot of money from mobile. After all, the three-headed giant includes King, who is responsible for the ultra-lucrative Candy Crush. But what about the other segments? Traditionally, the company's segments each have their own strengths. King reigns on mobile, Activision dominates on consoles, and Blizzard leads the charge on PC. That's what makes the publisher such a powerhouse--it's able to effectively generate billions of dollars everywhere games are played and sold.

Throughout recent years, we've seen ABK break these traditions. In 2018, the publisher enacted its new four-part plan, an ambitious strategy that led to more mobile games as well as new cross-game innovations like Call of Duty Warzone. The company sought to expand the presence of its mighty billion-dollar IPs (ABK has eight of them) across all available platforms.

Square Enix has officially responded to the recent Final Fantasy 16 sales debacle.

There's been lots of talk about Final Fantasy 16 somehow being regarded as a financial flop. The game has sold less than Final Fantasy 7 Remake and Final Fantasy 15 at launch, but as I've explained before, these are bad comparisons to make because the games launched in radically different console environments. Apparently Square Enix agrees with this assessment.

The publisher has given official comment to IGN about Final Fantasy 16's sales. Given the current landscape of the PlayStation 5 sales base, Square Enix considers Final Fantasy 16's launch sales to be "extremely strong." Data clearly supports this assertion.

In what will come as no real surprise to anyone, Blizzard has confirmed that Diablo 4 has set a new record for sales of its games.

As part of the firm's latest fiscal results, Blizzard told us that the action RPG is its 'fastest-selling title to date,' having sold through more units than any other game at the same stage of its life.

Diablo 4 drove Blizzard to achieve its first $1 billion net sales in a quarter, with net sales increasing 50% for Q2 compared to the same quarter last year. Yes, Diablo 4 is proving to be quite the cash cow (even if there isn't a secret cash cow level).

Xbox Game Pass subscribers might have a pleasant surprise incoming in the hopefully near future, or so a hint delivered on Twitter suggests - namely the arrival of Elden Ring.

A cryptic clue in a tweet from Sarah Bond, who is Xbox VP for Game Creator Experience and Ecosystem at Microsoft, was made slightly less cryptic in a follow-up message.

Initially, Bond tweeted an icon for an older person and a ring - 'Elder' or rather 'Elden' and 'Ring' - then decided that was maybe a bit too obscure, so just dropped an image of Elden Ring into the mix (not so obscure).

Diablo 4's latest patch is causing gamers to swear off the dungeon crawler en masse, and the controversial update could jeopardize player counts, engagement, and potentially even spending.

Running a live game is hard. In fact, I think it's one of the hardest things any publisher or developer can do. Online games can deliver the most revenues, but they're also incredibly risky and there's no guarantee of a payout. What makes live games so difficult to handle is developers not only have to maintain stability but also iterate and try to keep things new. Developers have to live in all three timelines at once--the past, to figure out what worked and what didn't work; the present, to apply these lessons to the now; and the future, to carry these lessons forward while also trying new updates and new content. Perhaps what is most important, though, is that a team is able to pivot to a backup plan if something goes wrong.

Blizzard, whose bread and butter is live games, knows these lessons quite well. That doesn't ease their burden. Diablo 4's recent update is proof of this, and the developer isn't in an enviable position right.