Gaming - Page 343

Google Stadia actually mattered a lot and helped define a new inflection point for the games industry.

Stadia didn't even last 3 years on the market. It was a risky bet, but major inflection points for the industry usually are. Some inflection points like the evolution from SD to HD graphics is an obvious benefit (even if it did add tons of work for developers), but the radical transition from singleplayer to multiplayer gaming wasn't ever guaranteed to work (Xbox LIVE was messy in its early days). Neither was the industry-changing paradigm shift from buying games outright to leasing them with subscriptions like Xbox Game Pass.

With cloud game streaming that actually worked, Stadia helped one of these major inflection points mature. Streaming wasn't new--OnLive did it in the 2010s, then Sony pioneered it with PS Now, followed by NVIDIA streaming PC-level performance with GeForce Now in 2015--but Stadia used the same servers that power the entire internet to beam games directly to consumers browsers, laptops, phones, desktops, and even Chromecast dongles. The service also introduced major innovations like save state sharing and merging YouTube streaming with gameplay.

To a Florida native like myself, there are few things scarier than hurricanes (that's saying a lot because with gators, the Everglades, and the eponymous Florida Man, the Sunshine State is legitimately terrifying).

The storms bring untold destruction including floods from ocean and river water that annihilate whole cities, high-speed winds that effortlessly tear roofs off, and torrential rains that only raise the flood levels. The devastation in Fort Myers recently brought on by Hurricane Ian's relentless category 4-force winds are a key example of what these storms can do, and it brought to mind an interesting concept that Rockstar Games could use for GTA 6.

What if the next Grand Theft Auto game had real-time storms in key segments of the game? What if players had to navigate part of the storyline through a category 4 or even cat 5 hurricane that wreaks total havoc on Vice City? That kind of chaos would make an epic set piece that would rival blockbuster movies.

Google's own teams were kept in the dark about Stadia's closure before the announcement was made, and partnered developers found out with the rest of the internet.

Yesterday Google announced its failed game streaming service Stadia would be shut down in January 2023. Google promised to refund all game and hardware purchases, and the store was abruptly pulled offline. No one can purchase games on Stadia, which is pretty bad news for developers like Milestone, who had released Hot Wheels Unleashed on the platform earlier that day.

It turns out that Stadia's closure was a surprise to everyone. Game developers weren't told ahead of time, a few of which had planned to release games on the platform. Even Google's own engineers weren't told before the announcement.

After multiple delays and five years of development, Scorn is finally releasing this October...and now the launch date has been moved up so that Scorn will release sooner.

Scorn's release date has been moved up and the bizarre first-person shooter will now release on October 14, 2022 on Xbox Series X/S, PC via Steam, the Epic Games Store, Gog, and the Windows Store, and also a day one release on Game Pass.

It's been a long five years for developer Ebb Software, who has established deals with Kowloon Nights and Kepler Interactive to help slowly evolve their ultra-weird vision from an interactive Giger painting into a game that's playable from start to finish.

NetEase continues scoring top talent to fill out its international game studios.

Watch Dogs creator Jonathan Morin has joined NetEase Games Montreal, the studio today announced. Morin not only established the concepts behind the Watch Dogs franchise but also served as creative director on both Watch Dogs and Watch Dogs 2 at Ubisoft. Now Morin is serving as a creative director to help form new IPs for NetEase's growing content label.

NetEase's Montreal division is focused on research and development, and published of Naraka Bladepoint's during its global worldwide launch (Naraka remains one of NetEase's most important games).

The developers that helped with God of War's successful PC port are making a new PlayStation live game.

Jetpack Interactive, who spent 2 years working on God of War's highly-optimized PC version, are developing a new live game for Sony. The Vancouver-based studio has been entrusted with a "prized IP" and is currently hiring a number of vital positions like network engineers and system designers for the project.

"We are hiring programmers to join our small & nimble team at JETPACK. We're excited to embark on a new live services title with Sony - and we're ready to launch," the studio wrote on LinkedIn.

The new Skyrim Anniversary Edition is the Nintendo Switch's first $69.99 mainline base game, and the RPG is currently more expensive on the eShop than any other digital storefront on the market.

Today marks the seventh time Bethesda has released Skyrim. The new Skyrim Anniversary Edition is now up on the Nintendo Switch with an eye-opening price tag. For some reason, the game is listed as $70 on the Switch eShop, which cements it as the first base Switch game priced at PS5 and Xbox Series X/S prices. Every other eshop game with a $69.99 price tag includes bonus DLC or an expansion pass.

This price tag means Skyrim Anniversary Edition is currently more expensive on the eShop than any other digital storefront on the market by a significant margin. The game is $20 more on the eShop than other store; it's currently $49.99 on Steam, the PlayStation Store, the Xbox store, the Humble Store, and is even discounted to $24.99 on GOG.com without any DRM.

Sony has kicked off controversy by using its new PlayStation Rewards loyalty program to prioritize access to its PlayStation support help section.

Sony's new PlayStation Stars loyalty program has a lot of perks. The idea is simple: Play games, earn points, and trade them in for free games, PSN cash, or little digital collectibles. PS Stars also has a ranking system. The more games you buy, trophies you unlock, and challenges you complete, the higher you rank up. There's four ranks and the highest tier has the best rewards.

This rewards program has one hidden perk: priority on PlayStation Support. In Japan, users with higher PS Stars ranks will be able to skip the general line and have more direct access to PS support (spotted by Automaton). Earlier this year, Sony made it even harder to contact PlayStation Support by stopping all Twitter responses and direct message responses on the Ask PlayStation Twitter account.

It'll be a while longer before gamers can set sail in Ubisoft's new pirate simulator.

Ubisoft has announced Skull and Bones has been delayed to March 9, 2023, right before the company's fiscal year ends (although the game's release won't make much of an impact on FY23 revenues, it will however help buffer the Q1 period of the following year...assuming the game does well).

As IGN notes, this is the fifth time Skull and Bones has been delayed. The game has been in development for some 10 years after being announced in 2013, and has been rebooted multiple times. Skull and Bones had originally started off as an Assassin's Creed expansion, and then morphed into an MMO at one point. The pirate sim's current iteration puts emphasis on online multiplayer, ship decoration and naval combat (which should offer monetization potential), as well as crafting and gathering and exploration of the High Seas.

Saudi Arabia is prepared to invest nearly $40 billion into gaming to make the country the "ultimate global hub for the games and esports sector" by the year 2030.

As announced by the Saudi Press Agency, Saudi Arabia is funding its new game-centric plan through its sovereign Public Investment Fund, and is prepared to invest a total of 142 billion riyals ($37.8 billion based on today's conversion rates) into multiple key points. The Saudi-owned Savvy Gaming Group will execute the strategy which includes strategic minority stakes in various game developers and publishers similar to Tencent's approach, as well as a buyout of a major games publisher.

The kingdom is prepared to spend up to 50 billion riyals ($13.3 billion) for the "acquisition and development of a leading game publisher to become a strategic development partner."

Google is officially shutting down Stadia, its failed game streaming service.

Today Google confirmed that it will shut down its Stadia game streaming platform and storefront in 2023. Google is refunding all purchases of games, subscriptions, and hardware, and users have until January 18, 2023 to access their games. After that, the service will be pulled offline and access will be revoked.

"A few years ago, we also launched a consumer gaming service, Stadia. And while Stadia's approach to streaming games for consumers was built on a strong technology foundation, it hasn't gained the traction with users that we expected so we've made the difficult decision to begin winding down our Stadia streaming service," Google's Phil Harrison said in the announcement.

Sony has plans to bring four more PlayStation 5 games to PC, and three of them are coming very soon.

First-party PlayStation games are no longer locked to consoles, and Sony is expanding onto PC in a big way. In a bid to help stabilize recurring game sales and buffer revenue streams, Sony has brought a number of high-profile PlayStation console exclusives to PC so far including Horizon Zero Dawn, Days Gone, God of War, and Spider-Man. This is just the beginning.

Sony is releasing four new PlayStation 5 games onto Steam and the Epic Games Store, including Uncharted Legacy of Thieves Collection (October 19), Sackboy A Big Adventure (October 27), Spider-Man Miles Morales (Fall 2022), and Returnal, which has been outed on PC.

Intel has launched its XeSS technology which has found its way into Death Stranding Director's Cut, as well as Shadow of the Tomb Raider... now updated on the PC with support for XeSS.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider received its new patch over Steam, and then was confirmed with the new Steam notes for the game where the developer explains it "added XeSS graphics support for DX12-compatible systems". CapFrameX has already used an AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics card in Shadow of the Tomb Raider with XeSS enabled -- remember, XeSS works on Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA graphics cards -- with some surprising results.

In the benchmarks, Shadow of the Tomb Raider was running at 3840 x 1600 (not quite 4K) on Ultra settings with RT enabled on the Radeon RX 6800 XT with XeSS enabled. With XeSS disabled, the RX 6800 XT is capable of 46FPS average, while with XeSS on Performance mode the RX 6800 XT drives far higher frames up to 75FPS average.

Death Stranding Director's Cut has just been updated on the PC, adding support for Intel XeSS technology... before Intel Arc GPUs are even on the market, ironically.

Hideo Kojima's last game is now upgraded with Intel's AI-enhanced upscaling technology, delivering 4K visuals at performance levels of lower resolution rendering to create a "more immersive experience" in Death Stranding Director's Cut, explained in a post detailing the update on Death Stranding's Steam page.

It's good to see that a big title like Death Stranding has Intel XeSS technology support, but as big as the game is, it doesn't have a gigantic player base. Secondly, Intel (like AMD and NVIDIA do) throw money at developers like Kojima Productions, but it doesn't matter: XeSS needs to be in as many games as possible, as soon as possible.

It looks like Sony is about to deliver another PlayStation 5 game to the PC with Returnal teased, packing NVIDIA DLSS and AMD FSR upscaling technology support.

In the leak, we can see the PC graphics settings of Returnal which details DLSS without knowing which version (we should expect DLSS 2.x) while FSR is the same (we should expect FSR 1.x unfortunately, and not FSR 2.x) as FSR is listed as "spatial upscaler" in Returnal.

Returnal is a third-person shooter developed by Housemarque and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment, released over a year ago in April 2021. It seems we have to wait over a year before Sony pushes its PS5 exclusives to the PC, but that's alright with me... it means we have some exciting PS5 games to look forward to on the PC in the future. Returnal seems to be another one of those, after the fantastic PC port of Marvel's Spider-man Remastered.

Sony's new PlayStation Stars rewards program launches next month on October 5 in North America.

PlayStation Stars is kind of like a side quest for, you know, PlayStation gaming: Get a quest from an NPC (in this case, the PlayStation App), complete the objective, and get a reward. It's a lot like the Xbox quests system that Microsoft put out many years ago.

The new program will reward players for completing various challenges and tasks in specific games, creating a perpetual cycle of fulfillment through playing games. There's even daily log-in bonuses, similar to those used in live service games.

Verizon has announced the Razer Edge 5G, a new powerful gaming handheld optimized for high-performance cloud gaming and remote console game streaming.

While the Steam Deck and the Nintendo Switch deliver dedicated games to the handheld market, a new frontier is emerging: cloud gaming handhelds. Following Logitech's muted jump into new market with its lower-powered mobile G Cloud handheld, Razer, Verizon, and Qualcomm are defining the upper end of the nascent market with the new Razer Edge 5G.

Razer's new Edge 5G is an Android-powered mobile handheld with controllers on the sides, a la Switch, and is based on Qualcomm's potent G3x Gen 1 gaming platform that was revealed back in November 2021. Qualcomm says the G3x supports TV or monitor output at up to 4K 144FPS for enthusiast cloud gaming.

After decades of making Dynasty Warriors games, Japanese developer Omega Force is about to try something very different.

Today Koei Tecmo announced Wild Hearts, a new Monster Hunter-like game that's coming from its famed Dynasty Warriors studio. The game is being published by Electronic Arts under its EA Originals label (the same one that brought best-seller It Takes Two) and takes place in feudal Japan with towering mythical beasts to hunt called kemono.

Combat looks fluid and slick, and what's most interesting about Wild Hearts is the new "karakuri" tech, which basically let's you create traps, fortifications, siege weapons, and other fabrications Fortnite-builder style to tackle enemies. There will also be three-player online multiplayer co-op so gamers can team up with friends to take down huge hulking behemoths.

Cyberpunk 2077 is back in the limelight after a huge comeback story as CD Projekt RED shares new sales figures.

CD Projekt RED today announced that Cyberpunk 2077 has sold 20 million copies worldwide since its launch in December 2020. To put the number in perspective, that is half of The Witcher 3's lifetime sales of 40 million.

For even more perspective we can chart the game's overall sales rates from release to present. Cyberpunk 2077 sold an astronomical 13.7 million copies at launch, making it one of the best-selling games of the year, but sales dropped significantly thereafter when the game was pulled off of the PlayStation Store due to big performance issues.

NVIDIA has just published its new GeForce Game Ready 517.48 WHQL drivers which have the best day-0 gaming experience for Overwatch 2, which launches on October 4.

The new GeForce Game Ready 517.48 WHQL drivers will not only be ready for Blizzard's controversial Overwatch 2 launch, but they also include NVIDIA DLSS support for Microsoft Flight Simulator. We've recently seen NVIDIA show off its next-gen GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card with Overwatch 2, running the game at 1440p at 360FPS+ with parts of the game that were pushing over 500FPS+ which is more than impressive.

NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card is so powerful it can run Overwatch 2 at 400FPS, with NVIDIA requesting Blizzard boost the frame cap of Overwatch 2 from 400FPS to 600FPS... and now there's some day-0 support for the game. NVIDIA DLSS performance in Microsoft Flight Simulator on the new GeForce RTX 4090 is 2x faster than the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti, so DLSS being added to the new GeForce Game Ready 517.48 WHQL drivers makes sense.