Gaming News - Page 332

2021 was the best year ever for Activision-Blizzard with record-breaking net revenues, income, and in-game net bookings.

Activision-Blizzard's games business is remarkably resilient. Despite ongoing controversy from sexual harassment lawsuits, the major delay of big games like Overwatch 2 and Diablo IV, not releasing very may games, and a drop in Call of Duty game sales, Activision just reported its best year ever.

2021 full of milestone, mostly thanks to online-driven live services, digital content, and a hefty $950 million deferral + distribution deal stream. Activision-Blizzard hit new high points in 2021 across pretty much every trackable earnings metric.

Call of Duty Mobile has made a hefty $1.5 billion in total lifetime earnings since it released in October 2019.

Activision's meager Q4 earnings brief confirms two big things: Call of Duty's premium sales are down, but the franchise's F2P earnings have doubled on mobile. The games-maker says Call of Duty Mobile generated $1 billion in revenue through 2021, up more than 200% from the estimated $480 million earned from 2019-2020.

The F2P game is a safe harbor for the publisher (and soon Microsoft too). With its separate revenue stream and progression system, Call of Duty Mobile anchors the franchise and helps Activision weather any sales misses from its mainline games.

Call of Duty Vanguard sold fewer copies than Black Ops Cold War, but we don't know the exact scope of COD 2021's shortcomings.

Activision recently confirmed that Vanguard didn't meet or exceed Black Ops Cold War's sales...but that's what management expected.

Activision's latest Q4 report delivered paltry bits of information on specific topics like Call of Duty earnings and sales. The upcoming buyout from Microsoft has changed how Activision delivers information; it went from a flood to a drip-feed with very little metrics.

Grand Theft Auto V is releasing on consoles for the third time on March 15, complete with high-end optimizations and features.

Rockstar just delivered updates on GTA V E&E and confirmed a few new details for the next-gen version, including:

There's still no word on how much GTA V E&E will cost. We predicted the game could cost $69.99, which is the new MSRP of PS5 games. Take-Two Interactive was one of the first to adopt the new price with NBA 2K21 years ago.

The Steam Deck is a gargantuan among smaller pocket-friendly handhelds.

Valve's new Steam Deck is big. Just how big? It's a heckin' chonker, to borrow a phrase from the parlance of our times. New size comparison pictures from gaming YouTuber Cary Golomb shows the Steam Deck's overall thickness--it's even wider than Nintendo's monstrous Virtua Boy.

The Deck is bigger than any other handheld ever made...and rightly so, because it's basically a PC that you can hold in your hands. Valve's new hybrid system packs a seriously powerful custom AMD SoC with an RDNA 2.0 GPU and Zen 2 CPU that's powerful enough to play most games at decent performance targets, but the core SteamOS fabric ensures smooth compatibility too.

Rockstar Games confirms GTA 6 is in development and says progress has been made for quite some time.

Today Rockstar announced what we already knew for a long time: Grand Theft Auto VI is happening. The studio didn't actually reveal GTA 6, nor did it show a teaser trailer or any kind of artwork. Rockstar did give a brief morsel to feed ravenous GTA fans though.

The studio says GTA 6's development is "well underway," which reiterates previous reports that the game has been in production for years. Our own predictions (which were later backed up by analysts) say GTA 6 will release by 2024 and help Take-Two's earnings surge to a record $9 billion.

Naughty Dog could be working as many as three new games for Sony's PlayStation brand, and one of them is definitely a live service game.

Sony is evolving, and it's now embracing live service games in a way it traditionally hasn't before. The modern PlayStation brand is mostly known for must-have cinematic-style singleplayer games with high production values, but following its $3.6 billion acquisition proposal for Bungie, Sony wants to jump head-first into the live service market. After all, that's where the money is.

That could mean Sony's biggest brands are focusing more on live services. We know that Firesprite is working on a Twisted Metal game for Sony, which could be free-to-play with online elements. There's also Haven Studios who is making an online game, and Deviation Games is also working on a new IP that could have live services.

The Switch broke 100 million shipments in 2021 and helped push handheld sales past 553 million.

While compiling Nintendo's latest hardware numbers I noticed something interesting: The games-maker sells a lot more handhelds than consoles. Actually that's a no-brainer. The DS is the best-selling handheld of all time and remains Nintendo's top system. What is surprising, though, is how many handhelds total that Nintendo has sold.

Based on numbers provided by Nintendo, the company has sold 533.7 million handhelds. That includes the entire 33-year span of games systems from the original Game Boy to the current Switch. Total consoles are lower at 384.41 million, and runs even farther back to the NES days. That's a split of 65% handhelds and 35% consoles.

As we predicted, the Switch family has beaten the Wii's lifetime shipments. It is now the third best-selling Nintendo hardware of all time, and it could beat the Game Boy this year.

Nintendo announced the Switch has amassed 103.54 million shipments since launch. This milestone is a monumental achievement that shows just how powerful and long-winded the Switch generation currently is--and has the potential to be.

Interesting figures from Nintendo's Q3'22:

The Switch is now Nintendo's third best-selling video games system of all time.

The Nintendo Switch family of consoles has now shipped 103.54 million units to date, solidifying it as one of the most successful systems on the market (compare that to the PS4 and PS5's combined 134.4 million).

On a quarter-by-quarter basis, Nintendo shipped 10.67 million consoles in Q3'22 (coincides with holiday 2021 period), down 7.8% from last year's record highs. The Switch has sold-in (shipped) a total of 18.92 million units in FY22, which ends March 2022. This fiscal year is the second best year for Switch shipments but is not expected to beat FY21's monumental performance of 28.84 million consoles shipped.