Gaming - Page 340

Bayonetta 3 voice actress Jennifer Hale has delivered a response to the ongoing controversy surrounding the game.

A few days ago, original Bayonetta voice actress Hellena Taylor revealed why she wouldn't be portraying the witch heroine in Bayonetta 3. Taylor alleges that PlatinumGames only offered an "immoral" $4,000 to voice the entire game and asked fans to boycott the game. This kicked off an industry-wide discussion around pay gaps in voice work and a big controversy ensued.

Now Jennifer Hale, who was brought on to replace Taylor as the voice of Bayonetta in Bayonetta 3, has issued a statement regarding the issues.

A Plague Tale: Requiem is the latest new-gen game with a hard 30FPS cap, however the visuals are quite dazzling.

Visuals versus frame rates--it's been an age-old battle since the beginning of gaming. Console-makers, engine crafters, and GPU wizards have been able to significantly reduce the trade offs over the years with technical magic like DLSS, Fidelity FX Super Resolution, and methods like Variable Rate Shading (see our Xbox Series X review for more info).

There's been lots of emphasis on frame rates with new-gen consoles like the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S, however some games are pushing for maximum visual quality and are willing to significantly sacrifice FPS in favor of dazzling graphics. That appears to be the case with A Plague Tale: Requiem, which looks to be one of the most beautiful third-party games released on the newer generation.

Hideo Kojima recently shared a photograph of himself sharing beers with PlayStation Worldwide Studios boss Hermen Hulst

Kojima Productions is pretty busy right now and the studio is playing both sides of the console market. Following his meeting with Phil Spencer at the Tokyo Game Show presumably to discuss his new innovative Xbox project, gaming auteur Hideo Kojima recently met up with PlayStation exec Hermen Hulst.

It's possible that Kojima and Hulst were discussing plans for Death Stranding 2, which is believed to be in development. Remember that Kojima Productions is using Guerrilla Games' proprietary Decima engine for both Death Stranding 1 and 2, and that Hulst used to lead Guerrilla Games.

Machinima group Rooster Teeth is currently at the center of an ongoing controversy stemming back multiple years.

Multiple former Rooster Teeth employees have come forward with allegations of mistreatment while working at the company. The news broke out over the weekend and spread rapidly on Twitter, with reports of slurs, poor wages, and over-work.

The most damning allegations come from Kdin Jenzen, a former achievement hunter who had made content for Rooster Teeth for 8 years. Jenzen alleges that while working at the company he was called slurs for years, worked 14-15 hour days, and that HR refused to help.

G4TV has been shut down for the second time, and this time it's gone for good.

A year ago, Comcast resurrected the early 2000's gaming network G4TV in the hopes of riding the billion-dollar wave of the gaming market. The landscape has significantly changed since G4 was popular, with the advent of YouTube and established websites with multi-million monthly views. The idea was to reach the same audience that made G4 popular way back when; this audience is older, and is now the median age for the bustling $198 billion video games market.

Sadly this didn't work. G4 didn't take off and simply didn't gain the traction needed to justify the spending. Comcast has officially shut down G4TV and fired all of its teams.

It's officially happening: Konami has confirmed the next Silent Hill game will be revealed next week on October 19 at 5PM EST.

Konami today announced that it will reveal the "latest updates for the Silent Hill series" next Wednesday, Predictably, the internet went into a meltdown over this news.

Fans have been waiting years for a new Silent Hill game, and rumor has it there are as many as three projects in the works including a Silent Hill 2 Remake from Bloober Team, a new game called The Short Message, and an episode game from Annapurna Interactive.

Overwatch 2 has amassed 25 million players in 10 days' time, Activision-Blizzard has confirmed, which cements the ongoing free-to-play game as a big success for the company.

Overwatch 2 is pretty successful insofar as player counts. The game has managed to attract 25 million users in little over a week, breaking records for the franchise. As Benji-Sales notes, the original Overwatch had 10 million players in 3 weeks' time...but that was a premium game with an actual price tag. Overwatch is of course free to play. It also helps that Overwatch 2 released on new-gen consoles too.

The free-to-play reach has been extremely beneficial when it comes to regional numbers, and cross-play integration has helped bring in new players and keep them playing across the world. "The game has proven to be a global phenomenon, already achieving a daily player base spread near-even across EMEA, Asia, and the Americas that's nearly triple the previous daily player peak from the original Overwatch."

Obsidian Entertainment wants to return to the post-apocalyptic world of Fallout. Will Bethesda let them?

The devs behind Fallout New Vegas, one of the most acclaimed games in the franchise, wants to make another Fallout project. There's just two things getting in the way: Time and getting Bethesda to agree.

In a recent interview with DuelShockers, Obsidian studio head Feargus Urquhart said that he would instantly agree to make a new Fallout game. "Of course, if we ever got the opportunity to make another Fallout game, we'd make it. There's not even a question of whether or not we would do it, it's just...will the opportunity arise?"

Rocksteady technical artist Lee Devonald has spoken out on the reports of Gotham Knights only hitting 30FPS on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S/X, a controversial perf target that has triggered backlash against WB Montreal.

A bit ago, WB Montreal confirmed that Gotham Knights, the big new open-city Batman beat-em-up, would be locked to just 30FPS on the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. This kicked the hornet's nest and gamers wanted to know exactly why the game was running at such a low frame rate. WB Montreal offered a cursory explanation, saying that its environmental effects coupled with "untethered co-op" hindered higher FPS.

Now a dev from another one of WB's studios is jumping in. Rocksteady artist Lee Devonald has shared some insight on Twitter, saying that Xbox Series S is a "potato" and that it's "not much better than a last-gen" console. Apart from hardware limitations, Devonald gives valuable insight from a developer's standpoint on what it's like to make a game run at 60FPS, and how consumers and gamers should see these kinds of decisions.

The confusing market of cloud streaming handhelds expands with the most expensive

Today Razer has introduced the world's most powerful Android gaming handheld. It's called the Razer Edge, and it's the latest in an emerging market for enthusiast mobile gaming, a kind of strange hybridized market that sits between consoles and on-the-go mobiles.

The Razer Edge features decent specs, powered by the Snapdragon G3x Gen 1 SoC for "high-end Android gaming" with a 6.8-inch 144Hz OLED display to match. It's built specifically to play Xbox cloud games and Android mobile games. Everything sounds pretty good except for the price.

Bayonetta voice actor Hellena Taylor alleges that PlatinumGames and/or Nintendo only offered to pay her $4,000 to voice the witch heroine in the third game, and is now standing up against big business.

Following the significant failure of Babylon's Fall, PlatinumGames is embroiled in another big gaming controversy. Nintendo too is also involved, fresh off the heels of a controversy surrounding a fired game tester.

Hellena Taylor says that Nintendo and PlatinumGames offered an "insulting" $4,000 to do the entirety of voice acting in Bayonetta 3. Taylor has issued two videos on Twitter claiming that she suffered from depression and anxiety because the offer was so low that she worried about becoming homeless, and at one point became suicidal from the depression.

Gotham Knights is locked to just 30FPS on both the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X consoles...two systems that are technically capable of 120FPS gaming.

Warner Bros. Montreal is facing a big controversy ahead of its new game launch. The studio has confirmed that Gotham Knights, its new open-city Batman brawler game, will not perform above 30 frames-per-second even when leveraging the upgraded power of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S consoles.

So why is Gotham Knights locked to just 30FPS on systems that can output at 120FPS? It appears the two-player co-op is to blame, but exact technical reasons were not touched upon.

Data suggests that the addition of Call of Duty into Xbox Game Pass could indeed be a so-called "tipping point" that pushes Microsoft into the market leader position for multi-game subscriptions by revenues.

Microsoft recently published a response to the concerns raised by the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) regarding its merger with Activision. The trillion-dollar corporation makes an interesting claim as part of the response, saying that acquiring Call of Duty won't "'tip subscription services in Xbox's favor." Data suggests otherwise, however.

We'll be focusing just on Call of Duty, however other series like Diablo and Overwatch (both of which are billion-dollar franchises) will add further compounded value to the Game Pass subscription.

How much are gaming's big 3 platform holders making from subscriptions? Quite a bit.

Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony are all making considerable revenue streams from their respective subscription services. Thanks to figures made public by Brazil's CADE competition authority, we're now able to compare the Big 3's subscription revenues for calendar year 2021.

According to the data, PlayStation's subscription lead over Xbox is not as substantial as many had thought. PlayStation's subscription duo--PS Plus and PS Now--only beat Xbox subscriptions by some $700 million throughout 2021. Those numbers do not include the full extent of Xbox Game Pass revenues and are only limited to consoles, not including PC earnings.

Brazilian's economic competition regulators note that Sony would be materially impacted from the loss of Call of Duty, but at a catastrophic level for the company.

A bit ago, Brazil's CADE regulatory body had approved the Microsoft-Activision merger without restrictions. The branch had published a 76-page document (now 75 pages after a very important redaction) outlining their reasoning behind the decision.

Included in the document is discussion on Call of Duty exclusivity and what would happen to Sony if the franchise were made exclusive to Xbox. Microsoft has doubled-down on assertions that Call of Duty will remain on PlayStation, but for the sake of argument let's take a look at what CADE has to say about this situation.

Brazil's economic regulators just approved the Microsoft-Activision merger without restrictions, but its determination document is decided myopic on one of Microsoft's strongest points: Video game subscriptions.

Following its approval of Activision-Blizzard's merger with Microsoft, Brazil's Administrative Council for Economic Defense (CADE) regulatory body put out a massive 76-page document that outlines how it came to its decision. The missive is incredibly thorough and has turned out to be a treasure trove of data while providing an in-depth look at how the market is read and interpreted by anti-competitive watchdogs.

The document in itself goes through painstaking detail on key points of $196 billion video games industry, discussing market share, downstream and upstream markets, and delivers illuminating data on just how big Sony's position really is. There's just one aspect that CADE was short-sighted on, and it happens to be the core of the Xbox business: Subscriptions.

New Vegas-era dialog skill checks are back, and Starfield will have a unique persuasion system befit of a "classic" Bethesda game.

Starfield is shaping up for its impending 2023 launch, and no epic Bethesda RPG would be complete without an innovative dialog system. We've already reported that Starfield wouldn't recreate one of Fallout 4's biggest mistakes, but now Bethesda's Todd Howard discusses more info on the game's dialog mechanics.

"We've a lot of different dialog systems, we've gone back to a kind of classic Bethesda style dialog system. You're looking at the character and how they emote and there's a series of choices there," Howard said in a new Starfield video.

Bethesda has done everything from consulting with Elon Musk to studying quantum physics research papers to inject more reality into Starfield.

In a new Starfield promo video, Todd Howard talks about developments the team is making in the massive epic space RPG. Bethesda originally wanted a fair amount of realism in the game, but Howard says that some of these mechanics just didn't fly.

"We were really into fuel and how the gravity drive works...I'm reading papers on quantum physics, you know, bending space in front of you, you don't actually work, you bend the space forward, you bring the space toward you," Howard said in the video.

UPDATE: CADE has released a new revised document that removes the revenue values from the tables listed below.

Nintendo Switch Online (launched in 2018) has generated nearly $1 billion in revenues throughout 2021, new documents from Brazilian regulator CADE have revealed.

Brazil's government competition watchdog CADE recently approved the Microsoft-Activision merger. The regulator published a sizable 76-page document detailing how it made its determination, revealing valuable data points in the process. CADE's report revealed how much Xbox Game Pass made in 2021, for instance, showing that the service is a meaningful contributor to Xbox revenues.

Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick makes interesting comments about entertainment streaming subscriptions that could in theory be applied to the current multi-game subscription market.

Strauss Zelnick, the CEO of Grand Theft Auto publisher Take-Two Interactive, has always been skeptical of new technologies and business models. Zelnick typically delivers level-headed responses to emerging entertainment industry trends and has made some interesting comments about streaming subscriptions that could be applied to other media subscriptions on a macro level.

In a recent interview with The Wrap, Zelnick outlines why overspending on production can lead to mediocre content. These comments are in regards to entertainment streaming services like Netflix, Disney+, Peacock, and Paramount+, however they could be applied to game subscriptions--to a degree at least. Zelnick further pontificates that the current exclusionary media streaming market will eventually fold back into itself out of necessity and that big networks will once again start cross-streaming content on competing services as a back-end solution--which is something the games industry actually has a head start on.