Gaming - Page 373

Microsoft Flight Simulator is getting an update later this month, which will be something truly special for Top Gun fans -- the new Top Gun: Maverick movie tie-in expansion -- drops on May 25.

The official Xbox account tweeted: "Attention flight simmers! This is your captain speaking. The Top Gun: Maverick experience is taking off 5/25 in Microsoft Flight Simulator! Don't have your own call sign yet? Create one today!"

We don't know what to expect in the Top Gun: Maverick expansion, but I would dare say that it's going to involve aircraft from the movie... maybe some of the stars of Top Gun like Tom Cruise, and more. Microsoft and developer Asobo Studio said that gamers will be able to "experience first-hand what it's like to be a U.S. Navy Top Gun".

Sony is planning to ship more PlayStation 5 consoles this fiscal year than any other console in PlayStation history.

Sony's plans for a big PS5 sales blitz are still active. The company has announced that it expects to ship 18 million PlayStation 5 consoles through Fiscal Year 2022 (present - March 2023). Sony had originally announced this massive shipment strategy during an investor's meeting in May 2021, where it implied 20 million+ PS5 sales targets.

The PS5 has currently shipped 19.3 million units worldwide. If Sony's plan is successful, total PS5 shipments would skyrocket to 37.3 million by March 2023. This is well below Sony's original implied 45 million PS5 target.

Non-Sony published games dominate sales on the PlayStation Store and retail, with 86% of all games sold in Fiscal Year 2021 being third-party titles.

Sony's recent earnings figures reinforce some key factors of its business, including how the mighty gaming empire relies heavily on games not developed by the platform-holder.

According to the data, Sony sold a total of 303.2 million games on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 across digital and and in-store channels. While Nintendo makes most of its game sales from first-party, Sony is much different; the split is significantly in favor of third-party games. In fact, 86% of games sold in Sony's FY21 period were third-party (259.3 million) and 14% were first-party (43.9 million).

Sony's latest financial report gives an update on PlayStation Plus subscriber counts, revealing a dip as network services revenues increase.

PlayStation Plus subscribers have dropped to 47.4 million as of Q4 FY21, down some 600,000 users from the all-time high of 48 million subscribers set in Q3.

Other key performance indicators from Sony's documents show that most online PlayStation gamers still are not subscribed to PlayStation Plus. Our records show that 55%, or more than half of PlayStation's total monthly active users, aren't subscribed to PS Plus.

Sony's next-gen PlayStation 5 continues being held back by supply constraints.

The PlayStation 5 has shipped a total of 19.3 million units as of March 31, 2022, Sony announced in its latest earnings report. The company shipped 11.5 million PS5s throughout Fiscal Year 2021 as compared to the 14.9 million PS4s shipped in the same launch-aligned period.

The demand for the console has skyrocketed but Sony is unable to meet demand as critical chip supplies remain scarce, however inventory is expected to improve throughout FY22 (now through March 2023).

Sony made nearly $7.6 billion from add-on content throughout its last fiscal year, showing the true might of free-to-play and live service games.

Sony's latest FY2021 financials reinforce key trends about the PlayStation business. The gaming platform is largely propped up by microtransaction revenues generated in mega-hit F2P games like Fortnite, Call of Duty Warzone, and Apex Legends.

In fact, PlayStation made $7.593 billion from add-on content throughout Fiscal Year 2021, a metric that includes microtransactions, in-game purchases, virtual currency purchases, expansions, and DLC.

Sony's latest PlayStation console duo has sold nearly 2 billion games to date.

According to data provided by Sony and compiled by ResetERA's ArmGunar and us, the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 consoles have sold a combined 1.888 billion games worldwide across physical and digital channels. As per Sony's game revenues data, the bulk of these sales were from digital and were made from Sony's PlayStation 4.

Sony sold 303.2 million PS4 and PS5 games throughout FY2021, down 10% from last year's astronomical highs.

Sony has shipped fewer PlayStation 4 consoles in FY2021 than it has in any other period in history.

After seven long years, the PlayStation 4's cycle is starting to wind down. Due in part to market saturation and to make room for the new PlayStation 5, Sony's last-gen console shipments are significantly petering down to the hundred-thousands mark.

Throughout FY2021, Sony shipped a total of 1 million PlayStation 4 consoles worldwide. Last year, the same year the PS5 released, it shipped 5.8 million PS4s.

Gotham Knights has been cancelled on PS4 and Xbox One, is now exclusively releasing for next-gen consoles for $69.99 MSRP.

Today WB Montreal revealed a bunch of new gameplay footage and details for Gotham Knights, its new Batman action RPG that doesn't have Batman in it. One of the updates will actually squeeze out a sizable market and reduce the overall sales of the game.

According to the developers Gotham Knights won't be releasing on last-gen hardware and will only be available on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. Back in 2020, WB Games had released a fact sheet with a promised launch on PS4 and Xbox One.

Artist Lorenzo Drago creates a new Unreal Engine 5 project that redefines the visual standard for UE5 footage.

A new Unreal Engine 5 clip shows the real power of Epic's next-gen engine. The footage is one of the best-looking rendered projects to date, creating ultra-realistic renditions of a train station in Japan. The incredible level of realism sets the bar for other immersive projects including the notorious found footage analog horror sensation The Backrooms.

According to Drago, the footage is based on the Etchu-Daimon Station in Toyama, complete with original work on textures, lighting, animation, and modeling; Drago says he didn't use Nanite and used real-time VR tracking to depict the head movements as accurately as possible.

Stardew Valley continues its long-running success streak with a massive 20 million copies sold to date.

After six years on the market, Stardew Valley is still incredibly popular. The indie farming sim has now broken 20 million copies sold worldwide on all platforms as of March 2022, which is up 5 million units from September 2021. Of course it helps the game was released on practically every gaming medium to date, including PC, Mac, Linux, Nintendo Switch, iOS, Android, and of course the PS4 and Xbox One.

"As of March 2022, Stardew Valley has sold over 20 million copies across all platforms, with 13 million copies sold on PC alone," reads the official website.

EA today announced Heroes of Middle-earth, a new smartphone game that will help boost its mobile business.

EA's next mobile game will be based on J.R.R. Tolkien's beloved fantasy series. Heroes of Middle-earth is described as a next-generation fee-to-play collectible mobile RPG that "brings the fantasy and adventure of The Lord of the Rings to existing fans and new audiences alike in a strategic, social-competitive experience".

Outriders developer People Can Fly has updated its multi-game pipeline with a bunch of new details.

People Can Fly is currently working on a bunch of new games. The studio is developing five titles, including Project Gemini with Square Enix, Project Dagger with Take-Two Interactive, one project that will be self-published, and two games in early concept phases.

The developer has outlined its slate of games with tons of fine-tuned information on what's to come, including its upcoming Gemini and Dagger titles.

Sony may have accidentally revealed expanded co-op for WB Montreal's new Gotham Knights game.

According to the PlayStation Store listing, Gotham Knights will feature four-player network co-op in one session. The developers at WB Montreal had previously confirmed that only two players could join in the same group. In fact, the entire in-game crime city world of Gotham was built specifically for solo or paired play.

"Focusing more on the idea of the immediate team-up of two allowed us to say, 'OK, we can build a world that works perfectly well for either solo play or pairing off,'" creative director Patrick Redding told IGN in 2021.

Square Enix's primary motivation for selling its Western games division was not NFTs or blockchain.

Square Enix plans to sell Crystal Dynamics, Eidos Montreal, and its Canadian mobile division to Embracer Group for $300 million. The deal includes a ton of IPs like Tomb Raider, Deus Ex, Legacy of Kain, and Thief--among many more. We've gone over why the deal was made, but the condensed reason is that they want to avoid risks.

Making AAA games takes hundreds of millions of dollars. Case in point: Square Enix spent a record $700 million+ on game dev in FY21. Sometimes those games don't break even and you lose a lot; Square Enix, for instance, lost an estimated $200 million on Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy.

Take-Two Interactive's definition of Recurrent Consumer Spending now includes NFTs, but it doesn't necessarily mean NFTs are coming to games like GTA Online and NBA 2K.

Take-Two recently posted a new 425 business combination disclosure SEC filing that updates shareholders and investors about the incoming merger with Zynga. The report contains vital information on shares, performance metrics, executive compensation, and an interesting new definition of Recurrent Consumer Spending, a blanket term that is used for microtransactions, subscriptions, virtual content, and DLC.

The new definition has been updated to include NFTs: "For the avoidance of doubt, Recurrent Consumer Spending may generally include, without limitation, the sale of virtual currency, add-on content, microtransactions, NFTs, game related subscriptions offered directly by the Company and/or its subsidiaries and similar items, but would not include full-game digital downloads."

Performance-based compensation is one part of how Take-Two rewards its executives, and most of those awards are based around stock prices, not microtransactions.

A bit ago Axios published a report outlining specific terms of Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick's pay structure. One interesting tidbit was how Zelnick and other executives like president Karl Slatoff are rewarded specifically if Recurrent Consumer Spending (RCS) grows.

Here's the company's official definition of RCS: "Recurrent Consumer Spending may generally include, without limitation, the sale of virtual currency, add-on content, microtransactions, NFTs, game related subscriptions offered directly by the Company and/or its subsidiaries and similar items but would not include full-game digital downloads."

The new Halo TV show is hailed as a huge success that helped spark subscriber counts for Paramount+.

While the Halo TV show dropped in the tail-end of the quarter in late March, Paramount says the series has been a "global hit". Subscribers are up 6.8 million, breaking a pushing total subscribers to a new all-time high of 39.6 million.

According to Paramount Global CEO Bob Bakish, the series has delivered great results for the company:

Based on Activision-Blizzard's recent financials, Microsoft may lose out on over $1 billion in sales revenue if it keeps Call of Duty off of PlayStation hardware.

Recent financials show that making Call of Duty exclusive to Xbox platforms will have a significant material impact on earnings and revenues generated by Activision. Microsoft could lose out on over $1 billion in revenues, and Sony in turn could lose out on some $500 million every year. That's not a whole lot of loss for Sony, who has made $10.2 billion in FY21 so far, but it's not nothing either.

This could lead to the FTC making a provision in the Activision-Blizzard buyout mandating Microsoft to keep Call of Duty cross-platform in perpetuity.

A new WWE-based RPG is currently in development and will be announced soon, the wrestling company has announced.

Hot on the heels of WWE 2K22's big success, World Wrestling Entertainment has greenlight a new role-playing game based on its brand. Details are slim but the WWE confirmed the RPG is in the works.

"We continue to see strength in the performance of our mobile games with 2K and Scopely, SuperCard and Champions. And recently signed a new deal in the role-playing game space that will be announced soon," WWE chief brand officer Stephanie McMahon said in a recent Q1 earnings call.