Gaming - Page 329

Over a decade after release, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is still shattering player records on Steam.

Counter-Strike just broke another peak player record with over 1.8 million gamers jumping in to play the game today. The record was set 7 hours ago and totals out to 1,818,773 million players throughout the day. Right now there are currently around 1.25 million players fragging it out in CS:GO on Steam.

Valve recently turned heads by announcing Counter-Strike 2, the next chapter in the shooter franchise that builds upon the massive success of the original. CS2 is built on Source 2 and features upgraded graphics, visuals, and effects, complete with high-performance servers that eliminate reliance on tick rates for moving, shooting, and throwing.

Microsoft has hired one of the most renowned appeals lawyers to lead its counter-offensive against the CMA's decision to block the Activision merger.

While the CMA has chosen to block the Microsoft-Activision merger, the parties can still file an appeal to the Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) in an effort to get the decision overturned and have the merger case cycle back into the CMA's investigations.

Microsoft has hired Monckton Chamber's Daniel Beard KC, a well-known lawyer with experience in defending competition cases against regulators, to lead the company's appeal against the CMA's Microsoft-Activision merger block. The Telegraph reports that Microsoft counsel is expected to file an appeal in the coming days.

Amazon's Luna game streaming service may very well be the largest cloud gaming subscription in the world by virtue of its connection to Amazon Prime.

British regulators at the CMA recently decided to block the Microsoft-Activision merger on the grounds of the combination having anti-competitive effects on the nascent cloud gaming segment. One of the most controversial aspects of this decision seems to be how the CMA categorized these services; using available market research data and information from key companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Sony, the CMA indicated that certain services had a leading share of the cloud gaming segment, most notably with Microsoft's xCloud game streaming offering.

However, Amazon may actually have the largest share in terms of raw numbers. Amazon Luna, the e-commerce giant's game streaming service, is offered free to Prime subscribers, albeit in an extremely limited fashion. Since Prime has over 200 million subscribers as of 2022, it could be technically correct to say Luna is the largest cloud gaming provider by virtue of its convertible Prime subscriber base.

Xbox is great at using disruption and innovation to compete in the video games market, but it may not be able to outsell PlayStation and Nintendo consoles. Luckily, this is less important to Xbox than it is to its competitors.

Xbox gaming CEO Phil Spencer recently said a lot of interesting things about Xbox, but the one that stands out the most is concerning the relationship between software and hardware. It's all too easy to make an eye-catching headline that reduces what Spencer said--something along the lines of "Xbox admits defeat, says it cannot beat PlayStation or Nintendo."

The truth is that Spencer's words offer more transparency into the Xbox business and games industry as a whole. To really understand what Phil Spencer meant in this interview, we need to look a bit deeper into how Xbox operates and how its fragmented business serves many platforms outside of consoles. Software is now meant to serve Game Pass and is much more diversified than it has ever been before.

Xbox Series X/S expandable storage SSD memory cards are now significantly cheaper than the were at launch thanks to a permanent price drop across all models.

Today Microsoft and Seagate announced a price reduction in the Xbox Series X/S storage expansion modules across the 512GB, 1TB, and 2TB cards. The prices have dropped by as much as 35% off, and the cut likely happened as a pre-emptive response to other competitors entering the Xbox SSD expansion market.

The Xbox Series X/S memory card prices now look like this:

Bungie has announced it will slightly increase the price of individual season passes starting with Destiny 2's new Season of the Deep (S21).

Destiny 2's season passes are getting a price bump from 1,000 silver ($10) to 1,200 silver ($12). The new price will go into effect with Season of the Deep's (S21) release on May 23. It's worth noting that this 20% increase happened shortly after Sony acquired Bungie, and that Sony reported a significant 40% operating profit drop due in part to hundreds of millions of dollars recognized as expenses from the Bungie acquisition.

Sites are reporting that gamers must buy two separate silver bundles in order to get the required 1,200 silver to buy the passes, however this may not be the case. Bungie currently offers a Destiny 2 Season of Defiance Silver Bundle that includes 1,700 silver for $15, which is a bonus of +200 extra silver compared to the a la carte silver bundle purchases. It's unclear if Bungie will continue offering these bundles for more seasons, including the Season of the Deep.

NVIDIA has developed a new compression algorithm for textures that looks very impressive.

VideoCardz spotted the paper from NVIDIA, which is called 'Random-Access Neural Compression of Material Textures,' and was also shared on Twitter by Bart Wronski, a researcher at Team Green who's part of the project.

The Neural Texture Compression (NTC) aims to tackle the spiraling requirements for high-res textures, allowing them to better fit into the available RAM. We're told that it delivers 16x more texels than Block Compression or BC (standard GPU-based texture compression).

WB Games shares some impressive figures for their breakout new hit Hogwarts Legacy, confirming eye-opening revenues and sales performance.

Hogwarts Legacy has now sold 15 million copies and generated over $1 billion in revenue, WB Games today announced. That number is set to go even higher as the publisher also launched Hogwarts on PS4 and Xbox One, with the upcoming Switch version coming next month.

WB Discovery management had commented on the success of the video games unit in an earnings call today, with CEO David Zaslav seemingly hinting at a possible new Superman game to help capitalize on the new Superman: Legacy film from James Gunn. Also in the call, WB Games CEO Jean-Briac Perrette says that the company expects Hogwarts Legacy on Switch to deliver a meaningful uptick in performance thanks to the system's more age appropriate audience.

Warner Bros. Discovery boss David Zaslav teases new games that could release alongside DC feature films, including a new Superman interactive experience.

In a recent Q1'23 earnings call, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav spoke about the power and flexibility of the company's video games profile. More specifically, Zaslav discussed how its wealth of wholly-owned intellectual property franchises could encompass all forms of interactive entertainment, from feature-length films to games. Zaslav points to Hogwarts Legacy's significant billion-dollar overperformance as a key example on how the company's IP could blend across movies and games moving forward, while directly mentioning the new Superman: Legacy film from James Gunn.

Below we have a full transcription of what Zaslav said during the earnings call, and while he did not specifically say that a new Superman game was coming, it's easy to infer that the CEO was trying to express that it could happen.

Microsoft's gaming CEO Phil Spencer reiterates that the core ethos of Xbox is platform agnostic and doesn't adhere to any one console or device.

We've known for a while now that Xbox isn't just a console, but an ecosystem of services and content that bridges multiple platforms. To date, Xbox serves four separate platforms including consoles, PCs, mobile devices, and even smart TVs via xCloud game streaming. This multi-pronged approach is part of Microsoft's core gaming vision that doesn't focus primarily on any one device, unlike Nintendo and Sony who have put their respective Switch and PlayStation systems as the core destination.

"We have a different vision," Xbox Gaming CEO Phil Spencer said during the Kinda Funny Xcast episode 137 stream.

Starfield could indeed be a highly-optimized game on Xbox platforms, including Xbox Series X/S consoles and Windows PCs.

According to Xbox gaming CEO Phil Spencer, the Xbox Advanced Technology Group (ATG) joined up early in Starfield's development to help Bethesda optimize the new space RPG for Xbox platforms. This could point to much better in-game performance than Redfall, which launched at 30FPS, and the ATG could have been instrumental in helping Starfield's new next-gen Creation Engine 2 tap into the power of the Xbox Series X's higher-end GPU hardware.

In a recent interview with Kinda Funny Games, Spencer talked about how internal resources like Xbox ATG can affect development and the overall performance of launched products. Spencer indicates that it's better for developers to utilize these resources as early as possible to maximize in-game optimization benefits, and in the case of Redfall, Arkane had already been in mid-production when Microsoft had closed the ZeniMax merger.

Microsoft is currently working with 14 international competition regulators to seek approval of its proposed $68.7 billion merger with gaming powerhouse Activision Blizzard King.

Just like in the console market, there's a distinct Big Three for mergers and acquisitions approvals: The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the United States, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) in the United Kingdom, and the European Commission (EC) in Europe. Microsoft is working with these three key regulators in an attempt to close its mega-merger deal with Activision, however both the FTC and CMA seek to block the combination.

That's not where the process ends, though. Microsoft plans to appeal the CMA's decision, and the FTC is currently holding an adjudicative proceeding in its administrative court to weigh the deal before a judge. That being said, the merger has already been approved in seven territories that we know of.

Ukraine has officially approved the Microsoft-Activision merger, becoming the seventh worldwide jurisdiction to greenlight the $68.7 billion deal.

Last week, Ukraine announced a decision to lend its approval to Microsoft's proposed buyout of North America's biggest independent video games publisher Activision Blizzard King. Unlike the Competition and Markets Authority in the UK and the European Commission in the UK, Ukraine notes that the merger does not have any anti-competitive effects on its domestic market for two reasons.

The first is that neither company offers cloud gaming in Ukraine, which is the main reason that the CMA chose to block the merger; and the second is that neither Activision nor Microsoft have a significant aggregate share of specific markets due to widespread segmentation effects.

The latest update for Minecraft has resolved a bug that has been blighting the game since, well, forever - albeit this was a relatively minor glitch.

Given that, it's not surprising that there wasn't a big rush to fix the problem, but the length of time it took the devs to correct this is pretty staggering - an entire decade.

What did the bug, labeled MC-1133, actually cause? In certain situations, the player's footsteps would become inaudible. When the avatar was too close to the edge of a block, the game would read the position wrongly as in mid-air, and therefore produce no footsteps.

In spite of Redfall's disastrous launch, Xbox business lead Phil Spencer says he will not stifle creative freedom and wants to allow teams to fully realize their visions, even if that means taking big risks.

By now you've probably heard about Arkane's new game Redfall, the vampire survivor FPS that's driven a metaphorical stake through Xbox's heart. In a recent interview with Kinda Funny Games, Xbox's Phil Spencer showed candor and transparency on his leadership tactics, saying that despite Redfall's controversial launch, he won't order his teams to just make numbered sequels and to stick to what they're good at. Spencer encourages studios to be creative and try new things--even if that means sometimes underdelivering on content.

"One thing I won't do is push against creative aspirations of our teams," Spencer said.

Recently we reported that modder PureDark had successfully modded DLSS 3 into The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, with the mod being in the early stages of testing before it can be made widely available.

But, PureDark has also been working on adding DLSS 3 and Frame Generation into Elden Ring on PC, with mod now available to Patreon backers. Frame Generation and DLSS 3, which leverages AI to generate new frames and improve game performance, is exclusive to the new GeForce RTX 40 Series of graphics cards. It leverages Super Resolution (DLSS 2), Frame Generation, and NVIDIA Reflex to reduce latency.

The results have already been impressive, with several titles like Cyberpunk 2077, Forza Horizon 5, Marvel's Spider-Man, and more supporting the tech. For DLSS 3 in Elden Ring, Wccftech got their hands-on the mod via PureDark and tested it to see how it performed with a GeForce RTX 4090 and an Intel Core i7 12700KF processor.

Gaming's top publishers reveal how much money they spend to develop and market AAA games, and the results are eye-opening to say the least.

As part of their investigations on the Microsoft-Activision merger, and the video games market at large, regulators like the UK's Competition and Markets Authority are publishing an incredible amount of interesting information regarding the world's largest entertainment industry. The latest finding reveals the astronomically high budgets of AAA games while underlining the rationale behind the unpopular decision to hike game price MSRP to $69.99 across new-gen titles.

According to Pages 309 and 310 in the CMA's final report decision on the Activision merger, some publishers are paying as much as $1.2 billion in combined development and marketing costs for an entire franchise.

Microsoft's Xbox Game Studios was not directly involved with Redfall's development, sources have told Windows Central's Jez Corden.

Redfall, Microsoft's debut $70 first-party Xbox game, just released and has caused lots of bad press for the games division, with Microsoft receiving a large portion of the blame for Redfall's myriad of issues. The reality is that ZeniMax, not Xbox or Microsoft, led Redfall's decision-making process.

A new investigation from Windows Central indicates that ZeniMax still essentially operates as its own unit and that Redfall was in development long before Microsoft purchased ZeniMax--which includes Bethesda, id Softworks, Arkane, and others--for $7.5 billion back in 2020. This hands-off approach is common within mega-corporations in the games industry; Tencent, the largest video games company in the world, typically lets its studios continue day-to-day operations without interfering with specific titles, roadmaps, etc, as is the case with Riot Games and Grinding Gear Games. Sony is also taking a similar approach with Bungie, who it acquired in 2022 for $3.7 billion.

Capcom expects big things from Street Fighter 6, and hopes the game will become the best-selling title in its beloved franchise.

Street Fighter is synonymous with Capcom, and remains the company's third best-selling IP of all time behind Resident Evil (135 million) and Monster Hunter (90 million). Street Fighter 6 looks to be one of the most explosive games in the franchise yet and fan reception to the promos and recent playable game trial have been very strong. All signs are pointing to the next Street Fighter being a smash hit.

Capcom management certainly hopes this to be the case. In a recent interview with Famitsu, Capcom President Haruhiro Tsujimoto says that internal SF6 sales projections are as high as 10 million units, which would outpace all previous games in the series. Right now, Street Fighter V is the top-seller with 7 million unit sales.

Sony's PC gaming initiative is paying off big time, with its appropriate PlayStation games segment generating a record-breaking $2.5 billion in FY22 on the backs of five major PlayStation 5 titles.

PlayStation generated nearly $27 billion revenue in FY22, a new all-time high for console gaming's top platform-holder. This success was driven by multiple PlayStation segments delivering record-breaking revenues, including hardware ($8.3 billion), full game software sales ($6.4 billion), and the segment that includes Sony's PC gaming revenues.

According to Sony's latest earnings report, PlayStation made a considerable $2.51 billion from its Other segment, representing an increase of $842 million from last year. Sony had previously said that it expects to make $300 million from PC games in FY22, and its unknown how much of these total revenues are from PC games.