Gaming - Page 321

The current Friday the 13th multiplayer game will officially be removed from all stores at the end of 2023, and will be taken permanently offline in 2024.

Today, Gun Media announced an unfortunate reality to all licensing deals made for big intellectual properties--they expire over time. That's the case with Friday the 13th: The Game. Gun's license rights will be withdrawn on December 31, 2023, and the game will be delisted from digital and physical stores worldwide. The live service game won't be pulled offline until a full year later on December 2024, however.

Much more content had been planned for Friday the 13th: The Game, but rights issues had stalled development of new DLC. In 2018, Illfonic and Gun Media announced that they could no longer provide new cosmetics and updates for the game.

Capcom continues its success streak as Resident Evil Village breaks a new sales milestone.

Just a bit ago we reported on the top 5 best-selling Capcom franchises and how each series grew over the past year. Resident Evil is by far and away Capcom's top franchise with over 142 million copies sold to date, and now it's been revealed that RE Village has surpassed 8 million sales since its release in May 2021.

"Resident Evil Village has just surpassed 8 million units sold! We owe this to all of our amazing fans. Thank you so much!" Capcom Tweeted late last night.

GameStop's board of directors has decided to fire CEO Matthew Furlong and establish Ryan Cohen as the executive chairman of the company.

Following years of operational losses, GameStop has shaken up its leadership team in an effort to further pivot towards transformation. GameStop's board of directors has fired former CEO Matthew Furlong without cause, as allowed in Furlong's employment contract, and has moved Ryan Cohen as the executive chairman. The announcement was made alongside GameStop's Q1 operational performance report which confirmed the company would not be holding a conference call for shareholders.

Following the announcement, GameStop ($GME) stock fell by over 19% from $26.11 to $21.09 in after-hours trading.

Microsoft or Activision may have revoked a confidentiality waiver from the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) which restricted the amount of information the UK agency could share with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the United States.

In an effort to preserve transparency, the Competition and Markets Authority has published an email between agency CEO Sarah Cardell and Business and Trade Select Committee Chair Darren Jones in relation to a recent trade hearing. At the hearing, Cardell was asked to provide more information on how many times the CMA had shared information with the FTC in the United States. The hearing aimed to address concerns of potential influence between the two international merger control agencies, especially after allegations of collusion between the CMA and the FTC to block the Microsoft-Activision merger.

In the email, Cardell confirmed that the CMA had met with the FTC in 26 oral and written meetings, including video calls and emails. Cardell also says that the CMA had secured key confidentiality waivers from Microsoft, Activision, and third parties that allowed the agency to exchange certain information with the European Commission in the EU and the Federal Trade Commission in the United States. These waivers are common practice for worldwide mergers, and both the FTC and CMA have their own waiver templates.

After beating Diablo 4's campaign mission, you may find yourself wondering what adventures await you after bringing an end to Lilith's reign of terror. The good news is the game has only just begun!

The Diablo games have always been known to really start after you beat the campaign, and in this tetralogy version of the franchise, there is more to do than ever!

Once defeating Lilith and beating the game, return to Kyovashad and make your way north to the Cathedral of Light. Here you will find a large set of doors leading you to the Cathedral of Light dungeon. (Be sure to repair your gear and prepare for a challenge if you are under-leveled)

Diablo IV is here, and on PC and console, there are millions of players slaying demons throughout Sanctuary as they hunt for legendary gear in their quest to put a stop to Lilith. The only thing missing is taking Diablo IV with you on the go and playing on a portable device like Valve's Steam Deck. But that's an easy fix.

The Steam Deck has been a game changer for portable PC gaming, but as it runs a Linux-based OS out of the box, you are limited to what's available and compatible with the Steam platform.

For those looking to fire up some portable Diablo IV, which requires Blizzard's Battle.net app, there is good news - getting Diablo up and running on the Steam Deck is relatively easy. The key to getting Diablo IV running on Steam Deck is to run the Battle.net client natively on the handheld, and thankfully that can be achieved with a few simple steps.

Sarah Cardell, the chief executive officer of the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) merger control agency, clarifies how many times it had contacted the Federal Trade Commission in the U.S. to discuss the Microsoft-Activision merger.

Both the FTC in the United States and the CMA in the United Kingdom believe the $68.7 billion Microsoft-Activision merger should be blocked. This has led to significant push-back from executives, past trade commissioners, UK ministers, law experts, and a number of other pundits across the intersecting worlds of industry mergers and interactive entertainment. The FTC's decision also caused former Republican commissioner Christine Wilson to retire from the FTC, leading Wilson to write a scathing op-ed piece that in term led to the U.S. House Oversight Committee to probe the FTC on allegations of "abuses of power."

Some went so far as to allege collusion between the the FTC and CMA, including Activision-Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick, who suggested the CMA had been "co-opted by FTC ideology" and was being "used as a tool by the FTC."

Two galactic forces of nerdery collide in the best way possible as Blizzard announces a collaboration with Spawn creator Todd McFarlane's toy company.

McFarlane Toys and Blizzard Entertainment have signed a deal to produce a series of high-quality action figures based on the Diablo and Warcraft franchises. The action figures will be specifically based on World of Warcraft and the cartoonish Warcraft Arclight Rumble games, but it's possible the Diablo collaboration will include characters from all four games. It's worth noting that NECA had previously made Diablo III figures, and these are typically more expensive than McFarlane figures.

"What I try and do within the walls of McFarlane is to find big brands that look super-cool. It's a fairly simple formula that can be very hard to find, but the talented creators over at Blizzard have been making and designing tons of fun, detailed and visually stunning worlds across their games for decades. And now, my company gets to go play in their sandbox. This should be a hoot!" Spawn creator Todd McFarlane said in the press release announcement.

It's official: Street Fighter 6 is a knockout hit that continues Capcom's powerful combo streak.

Capcom has recently confirmed sales figures for Street Fighter 6, and the numbers show that the legendary franchise has come back swinging. Capcom says that Street Fighter 6 has managed to sell 1 million copies in its first weekend on the market, which pushes franchise sales past 50 million.

"Even today, more than 35 years since Street Fighter first debuted, the series still enjoys immense popularity across the globe with cumulative sales for the series totaling over 50 million units worldwide," Capcom said in a press release.

BioShock creator Ken Levine gives gamers a history lesson on Ghost Story Games and discusses key developments that led to his new game Judas.

Sacred Symbol's latest interview with Ken Levine is a fantastic watch for all BioShock fans, but the podcast is more than that. Not only does it delve into the inner-workings of Irrational Games and the BioShock franchise, but the entire games industry as a whole.

In the interview, Ken Levine shows surprising candor and dispels a fair amount of mystery surrounding his departure from BioShock, the dissolution of Irrational Games, and how he formed his smaller-scale studio. What's most interesting, however, is how Take-Two Interactive and 2K Games actually convinced Levine to do it, and how much faith they had in his small-scale Ghost Story Games studio.

Diablo 4 has finally been released and has introduced a fantastic new feature that many players should want to get their hands-on: Mounts

Many of you may have already seen other players riding their steeds of choice into battle and wondered how you could get one of your own. Thankfully, obtaining a mount in Diablo 4 is quite easy, but it will take you a few hours of glorious demon-slaying first.

To unlock the ability to ride a mount, you will first need to progress through the main campaign enough until you reach the end of Act 3. Once you have progressed enough through the main game, you will be sent back to Kyovashad to speak with Donan at the Cathedral of Light.

Looking through the annals of Microsoft history and lore, during the early days of the Windows operating system, Bill Gates had to uninstall Minesweeper from his PC because he became addicted and realized that the games were eating up most of his time. It got so bad that one story states that engineers had to fabricate an unattainable Minesweeper high score just to get him to stop playing.

Bill Gates has a long and complicated history with video games; he's a fan; he dabbles but doesn't really get into them outside of the occasional sports game. He's played Halo but hasn't devoted countless hours to playing multiplayer on Xbox Live.

Then there's his initial skepticism about releasing a dedicated console, the Xbox, which according to reports, felt like an insult to his and Microsoft's legacy.

With Diablo 4 featuring five unique classes each with multiple different build paths, you may find yourself wondering what your best option is to take on the legions of hell.

There are five main class options for you to choose from at the beginning of your adventure: Necromancer, Druid, Barbarian, Rogue, and Sorcerer. Each of these options provides unique strengths, weaknesses, and playstyles.

While there is no correct answer to this question, each of these options provide a very different gameplay experience as far as things like mechanical difficulty and combat loops go. In this short guide, you will find a brief gameplay overview of what each class has to offer. Please keep in mind the best choice is always what seems the most fun to you as constant balance patches are always changing the meta and what is "powerful" is always subject to change.

Microsoft is set to pay the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) $20 million for violating the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). It collected and retained personal information from children signing up to play games on Xbox without notifying parents or obtaining consent. As part of the settlement, Microsoft must also bolster privacy and protection for children on Xbox consoles.

"Our proposed order makes it easier for parents to protect their children's privacy on Xbox and limits what information Microsoft can collect and retain about kids," said Samuel Levine, Director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection. "This action should also make it abundantly clear that kids' avatars, biometric data, and health information are not exempt from COPPA."

According to the report, Xbox users under the age of 13 were treated like anyone else. "Even when a user indicated that they were under 13, they were also asked, until late 2021, to provide additional personal information, including a phone number, and to agree to Microsoft's service agreement and advertising policy," the FTC writes. "Which, until 2019, included a pre-checked box allowing Microsoft to send promotional messages and to share user data with advertisers."

With Diablo IV now officially out in the wild - breaking Blizzard sales records - if you're rocking a GeForce RTX 40 Series GPU, you've probably checked out its impressive DLSS 3 implementation. Which, even on the new GeForce RTX 4060 Ti, delivers incredible performance with all visual settings maxed out.

Diablo IV scales incredibly well across most PC hardware, it even runs fine on the Steam Deck, but the art and visuals do pop once you dial things up. As per NVIDIA's internal benchmarks playing at 4K with max settings and DLSS 3 enabled everything from the GeForce RTX 4070 to the RTX 4090 hits well over triple-digits.

Firing the game up on the MSI GeForce RTX 4060 Ti Gaming X Trio, I pushed Ultrawide 1440p into the triple-digit region, which was impressive. The good news is that visual fidelity and responsiveness were great, too - thanks partly to NVIDIA Reflex - which makes Diablo IV an excellent example of DLSS 3 gaming.

Western Digital enters the next-gen Xbox storage market with its own affordably-priced SSDs.

Western Digital today launched two new Xbox Series X/S expansion SSDs with straightforward pricing: a 500GB SSD for $79.99, and a 1TB SSD for $149.99.

WD's new SSDs actually helped stabilize the expansion storage market for Microsoft's new console. For over 2 years, Seagate was the only company to offer expansion cards for the Series X/S duo, which led to aggressive pricing. Seagate significantly slashed the price of its Xbox SSDs about a month before Western Digital launched its new models, leading to a hefty reduction in MSRP.

Capcom has just updated unit sales figures for its best-selling video game franchises, including Resident Evil, Monster Hunter, Street Fighter, Mega Man, and Devil May Cry.

Throughout FY22 (April 2022 - March 2023), Capcom sold a total of 47.1 million games across the entire year. The following top franchises made up nearly half of these sales gains. It's worth noting that some games aren't included in these figures, including Street Fighter 6, which launched earlier this month and will instead be included in Capcom's FY23 numbers.

The franchise that saw the largest gains was Resident Evil, which managed to jump by 15 million units, driven by the stellar release performance of Resident Evil 4 in March 2023 as well as catalog game sales. Below we have a better breakdown of how each of these top 5 best-selling franchises performed throughout the fiscal year:

Blizzard's latest demon-slaying medieval aRPG became a huge success even before it launched.

Activision has announced that Diablo IV is now Blizzard's fastest-selling game of all time, setting new records for the live service giant. There's some clarification needed with these claims, though. The press release does not have actual sales figures and the "fastest-selling" claim apparently only applies to early access sales, not launch day sales.

"Fastest selling based on more units sold on all platforms before launch (through June 5, 2023). Sell-through figures based on reporting received from digital partners and Blizzard internal reports," reads the press release.

BioShock creator Ken Levine reveals why he left the franchise and started working on Judas, his new shooter.

In a recent interview with the Sacred Symbols podcast, BioShock visionary Ken Levine gave key insight as to why he decided to leave the series behind. Levine highlights the compounding stress of major success and how developers and creatives are pressured to continually push out big hits that one-up their previous games.

After BioShock Infinite, which Levine says he wanted to be Irrational's own blockbuster version of Call of Duty, the creator essentially felt trapped by his creations. Levine didn't want to feel like he had to compete against himself and up the ante each time, so he chose to work on a different game--one that took many, many years before it was revealed.

Today Apple and Hideo Kojima announced that Death Stranding Director's Cut is coming to the Mac in 2023, and Kojima also plans to bring future games to the platform as well.

Apple is mostly known for productivity and not gaming, but the introduction of its new Metal 3 tech has attracted some developers to release newer titles on Mac, including Capcom with Resident Evil Village. Now Kojima Productions is bringing Death Stranding to Mac.

Apple's latest WWDC 2023 showcase highlighted a new feature called Game Mode that's coming to Macs this year. Game Mode optimizes and prioritizes CPU and GPU to help streamline frame rates, while also reducing controller input latency by doubling Bluetooth sampling rates. Apple also announced a new Metal game porting toolkit that makes it "even easier for developers to port their games from other platforms" through simpler conversion processes.