Gaming News - Page 38

Enshrouded is the latest gestalt-style indie game that's taken over the video games market.

While AAA gaming firmly ruled 2023, indie games have since dominated 2024. Palworld has stolen the limelight by selling 8 million copies in less than a week, signalling a large shift in player behavior. Heavy-hitters like Valheim and Fortnite are proof gamers crave survival-crafting experiences, and these new breakout indies fit the bill nicely.

Despite Palworld's success, there's another rising indie star: Enshrouded, a fantasy game with comprehensively combined mechanics, has now sold 1 million copies in 4 days.

Call of Duty General Manager Johanna Faries is officially the next Blizzard president.

Microsoft recently made the decision to lay off 1,900 workers across the Xbox gaming division, with cuts happening across Activision Blizzard King, ZeniMax Media, and Xbox Game Studios. The announcement also came with previous Blizzard Entertainment president Mike Ybarra's departure, and today Microsoft has revealed who will now lead the multi-billion-dollar business.

Blizzard has named Johanna Faries as the new acting president, and she is due to start on February 5. Faries has been with Activision for five years, spearheading initiatives like Call of Duty's esports presence and eventually became the general manager of the $31 billion+ franchise, helping lead Call of Duty through its best-earning period in history. Before that, she spent 11 years as an executive at the NFL.

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League launched in early access with a devastating bug: The game has beaten itself.

Today, Rocksteady released its new Suicide Squad; Kill the Justice League live service game into early access. The launch didn't go smoothly. Just one hour after release, Rocksteady had to pull the game for a very odd reason. It turns out the supervillain co-op action game had completed itself, beating all story missions.

Obviously, the game wasn't really playable at that point. This also happens to be one of the most disastrous things that could happen with an engagement-driven live service game--the entire point of those games is to keep players grinding for as long as possible. If everything is already beaten, there's no reason to even play.

UPDATE: EIdos-Montreal has confirmed the news, and says it will lay off 97 people.

Swedish decentralized entrepreneurs at the Embracer Group have cancelled a new Deus Ex game and laid off workers at Eidos Montreal, sources tell Bloomberg's Jason Schreier.

Max Payne is a DX8 classic of a PC game, and a great candidate for pepping up with RTX Remix - and indeed it looks tons better with a new mod that adds path tracing.

The catch is that the frame rate takes a serious nosedive with the RTX Remix mod - which officially kicked off in open beta last week- as shown off by MxBenchmarkPC on YouTube (the developer of the mod is Slasks Psykbunker on ModDB).

Check out the video above to see the results in the demo, but bear in mind that with the base graphics (the before footage), on an RTX 4080 the YouTuber was achieving up to 1400 fps - something like 900 fps to 1400 fps we're told - but that dropped to around 65 fps with path tracing.

Bandai Namco has revealed 24 characters featured in the new Dragon Ball Budokai Tenkaichi 4 game...and they're all variations of Goku and Vegeta.

As is customary for the franchise, the latest Dragon Ball Budokai game (now renamed to Dragon Ball Sparking! Zero) is set to feature over 150 different characters and customizations. Publisher Bandai Namco illustrates two key points with its latest roster reveal: One is the age of the Dragon Ball series, and the second is just how many different ways the series has to portray two of its main characters.

Case in point: The Japanese game creator's new fighter lineup is just two dozen different versions of Goku and Vegeta, ranging from humble beginnings during The Dead Zone era ranging all the way to SSGSS Vegeta (Super Saiyan God Super Saiyan).

For many months now, we have been hearing rumors surrounding Nintendo's next-generation console, presumably called the Nintendo Switch 2, and those rumors pointed toward the adoption of an OLED panel.

With the rise in OLED panels illustrated by the myriad of new OLED gaming monitors announced at CES 2024, many gave credence to the idea of the Nintendo Switch 2 arriving with a gorgeous OLED display. However, not everyone is convinced as new information from Takashi Mochizuki, a reporter from Bloomberg, and Market research firm Omdia's analyst Hiroshi Hayase indicate the next-generation console will arrive with an 8-inch LCD screen.

According to reports that cite display shipment data, Nintendo is planning on manufacturing 10 million units of the next-gen console in the first fiscal year, and these units won't feature an OLED panel. However, that doesn't rule out OLED altogether, as Omdia says, "not for this year," which seems to allude to a second next-generation console including an OLED panel.

If you're someone who used to play Fortnite on the iPhone or iPad and has been missing the game since it was kicked out of the App Store, you might be in for a good time. That's after Epic Games confirmed that Fortnite is coming back to Apple's portable devices. But that isn't quite the end of the story and it definitely isn't as simple as you might have hoped.

Instead, Fortnite isn't coming to the App Store and it's unlikely that it ever will at this point. Apple kicked it out of the App Store after Epic Games broke the rules over third-party payment methods years ago. But new EU rules have now forced Apple to allow third-party app stores onto the iPhone in a change that will change the way people use those iPhones forever. And Epic Games has already confirmed that it intends to launch its own app store on the iPhone, and that store will host Fortnite to allow iPhone and iPad owners to download it from there.

While Fortnite is currently playable on those devices via cloud gaming services like NVIDIA GeForce Now, the experience isn't the same as playing a local game running on the device itself. There's little doubt that a dedicated app will be a better option for gamers, and now it seems that it's finally going to happen.

Shortly after Starfield was removed from store shelves, Microsoft has reportedly shuttered parts of Xbox's physical retail teams. This decision potentially moves the video games industry closer to an all-digital future.

With the exception of Nintendo, the other members of the Big 3--PlayStation and Xbox--make most of their revenue from digital channels. This trend has been growing in recent years and was supercharged during COVID-19 lockdowns.

Both PlayStation and Xbox have furthered a digital-first future with their respective digital-only PS5 and Xbox consoles, but recent events indicate that Microsoft is aggressively pursuing its all-digital aspirations. After all, Xbox plans to achieve market leadership by 2030 with an implied $32 billion+ in gaming revenues. Digital is a big part of those plans.

Palworld keeps reaching new milestones with an incredible amount of momentum behind the game, and a pair of new achievements have been recorded as the game reaches the ripe old age of a week.

Firstly, as noticed by Tom Warren (of The Verge), today Palworld became the most popular game on Xbox Game Pass (see the above tweet).

The other milestone is exceeding 2 million concurrent players on Steam, as Eurogamer spotted, and indeed right now looking at Steam, Palworld is currently at 1.96 million, so pretty much still at that level. It has almost as many players as the other 4 games in the top 5 put together (CS2, Dota 2, PUBG, Apex Legends).