Gaming - Page 338

Nintendo has Mario, Microsoft has Halo, and Sony has...Call of Duty.

Sony has made an interesting claim that all worldwide regulators will want to pay attention to. Call of Duty is the "best-selling franchise on PlayStation," Sony has loudly proclaimed on the back of every retail boxed copy of Modern Warfare 2.

The data is based on full game sales as of April 2022, Sony notes, which coincides with a period where Call of Duty sold 25 million copies in one year.

Dragon Age Dreadwolf, the next Dragon Age game, has entered alpha stages of development and can now be played from start to finish.

It's been many years since the last Dragon Age game--Inquisition was released in 2014, and gaming is due for another major myth-and-magic RPG experience. Luckily for us, BioWare has made significant progress with Dragon Age 4 and the pieces of the game have been put together to create a playable, cohesive game with a narrative story, combat, and character interactions.

"Now, for the first time, we can experience the entire game, from the opening scenes of the first mission to the very end. We can see, hear, feel, and play everything as a cohesive experience," BioWare general manager Gary McKay said in a recent update post.

NVIDIA is reportedly about the slash the price of its "Priority" tier of its GeForce NOW game streaming service, but nothing is official just yet.

The price will be dropping to just $29.99 for the first 6 months for the "Priority" tier of GeForce NOW, which makes it $20 cheaper than it stands right now. NVIDIA's current GeForce NOW "Priotity" tier provides up to 6-hour gaming sessions at 1080p 60FPS, but there are tiers that offer higher resolutions and frame rates than that.

NVIDIA will reportedly also make its "RTX 3080" tier of GeForce NOW cheaper, down to $99.99 for 6 months, or just $19.99 for a single month. The "RTX 3080" tier offers you up to 8-hour gaming sessions, and in the higher-end 1440p 120FPS or 4K 60FPS visual modes.

Microsoft has missed its internal Game Pass subscriber growth projections for the second year in a row.

New SEC filings to shareholders reveal key information about Game Pass' performance over the past few years. This particular document outlines important information for investors, including voting matters, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's pay structure. Nestled in this compensation plan are interesting tidbits about Game Pass.

According to the filing, Game Pass missed its internal growth projections by some 44%, representing the second year in a row that it missed growth projections. Microsoft had originally expected to grow Xbox Game Pass subscribers by 72.8% in Fiscal Year 2022, which was a record year for Xbox gaming revenues with a mighty $16.22 billion earned, but only managed to grow subscribers by 28%.

Activision reveals all the bonus rewards that PlayStation gamers will enjoy in Modern Warfare 2.

Years ago, Sony signed a big multi-year marketing deal with Activision to secure exclusive Call of Duty content and rewards. Sony's deal has lasted all throughout the PlayStation 4 generation and will expire in 2024, but PlayStation gamers will still get access to a bunch of goodies in the new Modern Warfare 2 shooter.

Some of these bonuses are pretty big, like double XP events that are exclusive to the PlayStation platform, giving players a potential heads-up over Xbox gamers. Other bonuses include a significant 25% extra weapon upgrade XP when you're partied up with other players (this is great for engagement in multiplayer, which has proven to prompt in-game spending), 5 tier skips in the battle pass bundle, combat packs every seasons, and two extra loadouts.

Xbox gaming head Phil Spencer admits that Microsoft may eventually have to raise prices on its video game products and services, Xbox Game Pass should be the first in line for a cost bump.

Not everyone is ready to charge $69.99 for new-gen games, but how long can the holdout last against rising inflation costs? Companies like Xbox, Nintendo, SEGA and Capcom have resisted charging more for their games. At yesterday's Wall Street Journal Tech Live event, Phil Spencer says that eventually Xbox may have to increase prices of its games, hardware, services and/or content.

The price hike won't happen this year, though. Microsoft doesn't want high prices to impact their critical holiday period--last year Xbox made a record-breaking $5.44 billion during the holiday and Microsoft is eager for more of that growth. So far FY23 is off to a great start with record Q1 highs of $3.61 billion revenues.

Modern Warfare 2's disc is basically an authentication key for a digital copy of the game.

It's been discovered that Call of Duty Modern Warfare's retail PS5 disc is nothing more than a physical installer with 72.23MB worth of files on it. Modern Warfare 2's Blu-ray disc does not include the actual game, and consumers will have to also download 130GB worth of files to experience the full game in its entirety, effectively making the disc itself redundant other than a gift or collectible.

This of course means Modern Warfare 2 can't be played without a day one update...except in this case, the day one update is the actual game. While this seems to be the case for modern Call of Duty games, it certainly isn't a widespread trend in gaming; According to Does it Play?, a tracking site that catalogs whether or not a physical game can be played day one without any sort of patch, 99% of disc-based games still do not require online downloads to play.

Meta's Reality Labs division recorded an all-time high operating loss of $3.67 billion over the last quarter.

Meta's recent Q3 earnings saw a revenue declines and record operating losses for the company's nascent and controversial metaverse. Revenues declined 4.5% to $27.714 billion, and operating losses of Meta's Reality Labs VR division, which is helming its virtual reality hardware and virtual metaverse platform, saw a record-breaking loss of $3.67 billion. These events contributed to Meta's stock diving nearly 20% in after-hours trading.

The metaverse has been under close scrutiny by investors and the media due to its lack of widespread adoption and consumer appeal. Meta shows no signs of slowing down its megaton investment into the fledgling platform, which it hopes to pioneer in order to significantly boost its advertising presence across a new medium. Since Q4 2020, Meta has lost over $21.7 billion on its bet on the metaverse.

Xbox Game Pass makes significantly less revenue than we had previously reported, but the service is still profitable.

Phil Spencer recently confirmed that Xbox Game Pass is not only profitable, but it makes up 10-15% of Xbox content and services revenue. This percentage gives us a baseline range to determine Game Pass revenues, and based on our findings, the earnings are significantly lower than the $2.9 billion figure that Brazilian regulator CADE had included in its report (and that's likely why the figure was removed).

"Game Pass as an overall part of our content and services revenue is probably 15 percent. I don't think it gets bigger than that. I think the overall revenue grows so 15 percent of a bigger number," Phil Spencer said during a Wall Street Journal Tech Live event, as transcribed by The Verge.

Bethesda's Todd Howard absolutely loves making games in the Fallout universe, hints that Fallout 5 will continue the series' penchant for "batshit crazy" ideas.

Fallout is known for its off-the-wall and wacky characters, irreverent storylines, and overall tongue-in-cheek tone that somehow co-exists with a grim world of ghouls and cat-eating hermits. Even back in the early cRPG days Fallout was goofy and outrageously bloody while also capturing that early 90s era mystique of PC gaming.

Bethesda wouldn't have it any other way. The developers love the Fallout world, with Todd Howard even claiming that Fallout is the most fun series to create games around.

Bethesda's Todd Howard reveals that Fallout New Vegas was originally supposed to be an expansion to Fallout 3, but Howard very much wanted it to be its own game.

The Fallout franchise turns 25 this year, and Bethesda is rolling out a series of retrospective videos to celebrate the series. One of these videos discusses Fallout New Vegas and how Obsidian's beloved RPG actually started off as a major game expansion to Fallout 3.

Years after Oblivion's success, Bethesda hit it big with Fallout 3, and the studio was eager to keep that momentum going. That's what led to Fallout New Vegas.

Something may be happening over at WB Games...and it might not be good news.

Rocksteady, the studio known for its Batman Arkham series of games, just lost its co-founders, signalling potential issues within the WB Games unit. Jamie Walker and Sefton Hill, who founded Rocksteady in 2004, are leaving the studio. The news was announced by WB Interactive Entertainment president David Haddad, who confirmed both Hill and Walker will leave at the end of 2022.

The news comes at an interesting time for WB Discovery. Following a mega-merger earlier this year, WB Games became a part of the new Warner Bros. Discovery brand. Fast-forwarding months later and the media giant is culling its spending en masse; WB Discovery plans to cancel and cut $2 billion worth of TV shows and films as well as firing more staff in order to reduce production spending.

The original Witcher game is getting a remake in Unreal Engine 5, but it won't be developed by CD Projekt RED.

The Witcher 1, CD Projekt RED's first game released in 2007, will be completely overhauled in Epic's powerful UE5 tech. The project is actually one of the many Witcher titles that the studio previously announced; the remake is Project Canis Majoris, or "greater dog," in this case referring to a bigger version of the White Wolf's original debut.

The Witcher remake isn't actually being developed by CD Projekt, though the game is definitely in good hands. The game is in early stages of development in a new studio called Fool's Theory, which is made up of many veteran Witcher devs who worked on the series at CDPR. And don't forget that CD Projekt will be overseeing the game's progress as a creative supervisor to make sure everything fits.

With the completion of the first season of Amazon's The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power and the massive divide between those who enjoyed the show and those who didn't due to lore inaccuracies, many Tolkien fans are looking for some new Middle-Earth media to get excited about before the next season comes out two years from now.

Introducing, The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria, developed by Free Range Games and published by North Beach Games. Return to Moria is a survival crafting game that is based in the fourth age of Middle Earth. The game focuses on the race of the dwarves and follows a group that deems it time to reclaim their legendary home of Khazad-dum, later called Moria (black pit), after the Balrog or Durin's Bane is awoken by dwarves delving too deep.

The trailer for the game was released back in June, but the creators behind the game recently appeared on the Nerd of the Rings YouTube channel to dive into its inner workings, what inspired the selected location for the survival crafting game, and how much of what players will see while exploring will be accurate to Tolkien's writings. Corey Olsen, a Tolkien scholar, is consulting on the game, and as explained during Nerd of the Rings' roundtable discussion, the content that players will experience in Return to Moria will be heavily based on Tolkien's writings.

Microsoft kicks off its new Fiscal Year 2023 period with record Xbox revenues.

Xbox gaming just made history for the time this year. On the heels of generated a record-breaking $16.2 billion in total earnings last year, Microsoft's games platform has generated $3.610 billion in its Q1'23 period. This is a new all-time Q1 high that continues the platform's earnings streak.

Xbox content and services revenues were down 4% year-over-year, implying revenues of about $2.797 billion. Hardware was the main driver for these record Q1 results with a strong 13% increase in revenues, driven by higher premium costs of the newer Xbox Series S/X consoles.

Bayonetta voice actress Hellena Taylor claims the franchise has made $450 million in lifetime revenues, but that's not the case...and no one is really sure where she got the figure.

On October 15, Bayonetta actress Hellena Taylor published three videos that alleged she was only offered $4,000 to portray the heroine in Bayonetta 3. To illustrate the game's success and underline the alleged lowball offer, Taylor claimed the entire Bayonetta franchise "made an approximated $450 million dollars not including merchandise."

Most gamers would squint at this and understand the information isn't correct, and Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, who uncovered that Taylor was actually offered $15,000 to play Bayonetta in the third game and not $4,000, says the franchise figure is "fiction and frankly absurd."

It's official: The 2012 release of Dark Souls is now an offline game on PC.

Today Bandai Namco and FromSoftware confirmed that the PC version of the Dark Souls Prepare to Die Edition will be now be permanently offline singleplayer experience. The game's online multiplayer servers have been retired due to the age of the online infrastructure.

Bayonetta voice actress Hellena Taylor admits she was offered $15,000 to portray the heroine witch in the third game, not the $4,000 rate she had originally said.

A bit ago, Bayonetta's Hellena Taylor issued allegations of unfair pay against PlatinumGames and Nintendo. Taylor had released three videos on Twitter that alleged PlatinumGames offered her $4,000 US dollars as a "final offer to do the whole game as a buyout flat rate." Taylor had strongly-worded responses and called on fans to boycott Bayonetta 3.

Shortly after the claims were made, Bloomberg's Jason Schreier uncovered the full story: Taylor was actually offered $15,000 to lend her voice in Bayonetta 3. Now the voice actress has amended her statement, agreeing with the figures provided in the Bloomberg report.

Microsoft reportedly regrets not partnering with Chinese developer miHoYo before Genshin Impact became a billion-dollar sensation.

The old saying is true, hindsight is indeed 20/20. Sources have told Reuters that Microsoft feels that it missed a valuable opportunity by not partnering with miHoYo to bring Genshin Impact to Xbox. On paper, this certainly seems true: Genshin Impact is a mega-hit that has generated $3.7 billion on mobile devices alone, and was one of the five free-to-play games to generate $2 billion on Sony's PlayStation Network.

According to the report, Microsoft was unable to reach a deal with the Chinese game developer, miHoYo, who chose to partner with Sony and bring Genshin Impact to PlayStation instead. This sense of regret and loss is apparently a big motivator driving Microsoft's efforts to recruit Chinese game devs to bolster its Xbox Game Pass subscription network.

Bethesda is updating Fallout 4 once again...and PC players aren't enthused.

Today Bethesda announced that Fallout 4 is getting a free upgrade on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S. Normally this would be a day of celebration, but PC players are expecting big problems from the update.

The big issue is mod compatibility. Any time Bethesda updates or adjusts Fallout 4, the publisher typically breaks mod support in some fashion. This happened with the rollout of Creation Club back in 2017, kicking off a big controversy within the modding community. The main problem is that new versions of Fallout 4 typically break Fallout Script Extender compatibility, which is required for most of the most commonly used mods.