Gaming - Page 391

Square Enix plans to support Final Fantasy XIV for 10 more years and confirms a bunch of new content, features, and upgrades coming to the best-selling MMORPG.

Final Fantasy XIV is a big part of Square Enix's games division earnings; MMORPGs accounted for $419 million, or 23% of total 9-month games revenues. It definitely makes sense that the publisher keeps Final Fantasy XIV going for as long as possible, and that's exactly what they plan to do.

In a four-hour content stream, game producer Yoshi-P recently confirmed the 10-year support plan while outlining key features that are both coming soon and in deep development. One of the biggest new updates is a graphical overhaul that will add a new level of fidelity to in-game areas, NPCs, and player characters.

Sony has "vastly overpaid" with its $3 billion buyout of Bungie, analyst Michael Pachter says.

Sony's decision to buy Bungie was a knee-jerk reaction to its competitors making power plays. According to Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter, Microsoft's $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision-Blizzard and Take-Two's $12.7 billion merger with Zynga prompted Sony to make a "me too" purchase of Bungie--and that the buyout was significantly overpriced.

In a recent interview with Yahoo Finance, Pachter outlines his value-oriented rationale. It all comes down to share price and revenues generated by each company. Pachter estimates that Bungie makes $200 million in revenue a year, and Sony essentially paid $4 million per developer (Bungie has over 900 developers).

With a new Fallout game more than 5 years away, Fallout 76 isn't going anywhere. Bethesda has revealed the new content coming to Fallout 76 to carry the game through 2022.

Fallout 76's 2022 roadmap will introduce one of the most ambitious new content drops to date. Later in the year during the Fall season, Bethesda plans to roll out Fallout 76's first-ever expedition to The Pitt, a region previously explored in Fallout 3's original DLC. Expeditions, which are basically bite-sized instances outside of the main Appalachia zone, were originally announced in April 2021 and have been a long time coming to Fallout 76 and original D.C. assets have been in the source files for quite some time.

The main 2022 roadmap cadence looks like this: Every quarter (3 months) gamers will get a new season alongside special themed content, which can include public events, rewards, missions, etc.

Darkstalkers is making a comeback with the new Capcom Fighting Collection arcade re-release.

Capcom is packing in some of their most obscure fighting games into one package. The Capcom Fighting Collection features five Darkstalkers games alongside the first console and PC release of Red Earth. Content-wise, this looks to be a must-have for fighting game enthusiasts. The game "leverages the rich library of content that the company has built up in the fighting game genre over its history," the developer said.

Capcom is going all-out with the Fighting Collection with great bonus features like save states, training modes, and supports rollback netcode for online multiplayer with ranked, casual, and lobby-based matches. All of the games included in the collection have these features and support online play.

Capcom has built Street Fighter 6 specifically for competitive esports gaming.

Street Fighter 6 was announced at the Capcom Cup 2021 with tons of fanfare. The new fighter is built on the higher-end RE Engine, and the in-engine teaser clip shows some serious next-gen effects including higher-end reflections (Ryu's feet are particularly shiny this time around), ultra high-def textures, and superb lighting on two character models, Ryu and Luke.

Capcom has confirmed Street Fighter 6 was made to tap Japan's growing esports market, which remains one of Capcom's core focuses.

The Big Four of crypto gaming pull in less than 500,000 monthly active users, data from New World Notes suggests.

The crypto gaming market may be potentially lucrative, but it seems to be far from the bustling, multi-million user ecosystem that's hinted at in reports. In all actuality the digital NFT-based games landscape is still mostly speculative, with the Big Four--The Sandbox, Decentraland, Cryptovoxels, and Somnium Space--attracting less than 500,000 monthly active users. Strong MAUs and concurrent users are the biggest indicator of a online live game's success. In this case (and all other cases), higher numbers mean more people are active in the space.

According to figures collected by New World Notes' Wagner James Au, the Big Four aren't as popular as you'd expect.

Warzone's anti-cheat team has implemented a hilarious just desserts punishment for cheaters.

Cheating is a big problem in online games like Warzone (and even Halo). Activision's newly established anti-cheat team, Team Ricochet, wants to make an example of cheaters by demoralizing ne'er-do-wells by essentially turning cheats on for their opponents.

The punishment enables a "Damage Shield" which effectively a player invulnerable to a cheater's attacks (IDDQD anyone?). If the anti-cheat system detects a cheater, it will automatically turn on the shield for other players for the remainder of the match. The cheater can't kill anyone else--they can only be killed in a hunter-and-prey role reversal.

The Embracer Group has made a whopping 71 acquisitions, mergers, and buyouts from 2016 - 2021...and it has plans for more M&A in the future.

Embracer Group isn't just a name, but an ethos that's represented in the company's massive array of buyouts. It seems like every few months Embracer buys someone new, and major recent acquisitions include Dark Horse Comics, Asmodee, Gearbox Software, 4A Games--the list goes on and on.

In a recent earnings report, Embracer CEO Lars Wingefors says these acquisitions will continue. The company has made 71 acquisitions since 2016 and plans to secure up to 8 billion SEK (roughly $851 million) for more M&A. However, Wingefors says the buyouts will be more selective as the availability of content, gaming's most valuable commodity, starts to shrink due to competing buyouts.

The top 10 Switch games sales list grows exponentially during Nintendo's historical Q3 period.

Nintendo's Q3'22 period (holiday 2021) delivered record software sales, and a good portion of these games were first-party titles. Nintendo sold 85.41 million Switch games during the quarter, a new all-time high, and made $2.72 billion from software in the period. The top 10 most popular Switch games sold 29.77 million units during the quarter, making up 35% of total quarterly software sales.

The largest contributor to this huge first-party sales spike was Pokemon Shining Pearl and Brilliant Diamond. The duo sold 13.97 million copies during a single month across the Q3'22 period (the Pokemon games launched in late November, a month before the December 31 cutoff date).

Nintendo's Q3 FY22 performance nearly matches last year's record-setting holiday period.

Nintendo recently announced its Q3 earnings for the Holiday 2021 timeframe, and the results are stellar. Nintendo set new milestones for profit and software sales, and overall net sales nearly matched 2020 pandemic highs. In this article we'll be using USD conversions based on Nintendo's historical forex rates provided in its documents and investor briefs. All values given are rounded.

First let's take a look at net sales, which were roughly $6.047 billion (695.946 billion yen). Overall net sales delivered strong results and represent the second highest point in Nintendo history, driven by the full conjunction of Nintendo's entire operating business: games hardware, software, digital services and subscriptions, mobile games, and playing cards/accessories.

Gearbox's mighty Borderlands franchise has sold 74 million units to date, making it one of the best-selling shooters on the market.

Embracer's latest financials give updates on key game sales, including Borderlands, which is now one of the 271 IPs the company owns.

Borderlands 3 has sold-in an impressive 15 million copies in two years, taking advantage of various sales, discounts, and re-releases to incentivize purchases. The franchise now sits at 74 million sales total, making it Take-Two Interactive's third best-selling franchise--and by extension one of Embracer's top-sellers.

Gearbox plans to release a whopping 10 AAA games by 2026, its parent company Embracer Group has announced.

Gearbox was once known as the dev behind Borderlands, but now its grown into a multimedia entertainment company with multiple segments. Gearbox now has three divisions: Gearbox Publishing, which has helped publish indie games like Godfall and Risk of Rain 2, Gearbox Software, its internal game studio responsible for Borderlands games, and Gearbox Studios, a branch focused on multimedia like the new Borderlands film.

Gaming is still Gearbox's bread and butter. The company has ambitious plans to release 10 major AAA games by 2026, compromising nearly half of Embracer's total 25 game pipeline for the period.

Hot Wheels Unleashed was one of Embracer's most important games of 2021 and was profitable the second day of release.

Following 1 million sales in the quarter, Hot Wheels Unleashed was a powerful driver for Embracer's holiday 2021 earnings. The game did so well that it broke even after its first day on the market and became profitable on day two.

"Hot wheels has been a success for us, considering the very first day of launch, with our revenue we covered development, marketing and production costs. So in the very second day we were in the profit area," Milestone CEO Luisa Bixio said during Embracer's Q3 presentation.

The Embracer Group now has access to a whopping 271 video game IPs and franchises.

Nordic-based games company the Embracer Group is one the biggest players in the video games industry. The multimedia giant owns and licenses an incredible 271 IPs, franchises, and series that range from heavy-hitting AAA titles like Borderlands to smaller, licensed multiplayer game like Saber's World War Z and the new Evil Dead game.

Now that big-name giants like Microsoft are buying up studios in multi-billion deals, Embracer's pool of intellectual property remains extremely valuable--content IP is the most valuable commodity on the market today. Some of Embracer's most profitable franchises hail from the Deep Silver branch, including Dead Island, Metro, and Saints Row, but Gearbox's Borderlands is very lucrative, too.

Diablo 2's max life threshold has been broken to an absolutely excessive degree.

Diablo 2 streamer MrLlamaSC is mostly known for its impressive speed runs and encyclopedic knowledge of the old-school 2000's era ARPG. Now he's pushing that know-how even farther with one of the craziest min-max builds in the game.

In a recent video, MrLlamaSC showed how to push a barbarian's max health to nearly 34,000. The feat takes a serious amount of specialized gear and sequencing of skills, and it's entirely realistic--it's not necessarily a usable build insofar as damage but more so a spectacle of what's possible.

Battlefield 2042 may need to go free-to-play to succeed on Steam, but only after the game is stable and fixed.

Battlefield 2042's player count has tanked on Steam. Significant controversy has dropped Battlefield 2042's player counts by 97% since launch to present day. There's one potential way EA can turn things around.

Data from Steam DB suggests that EA's best bet right now may be to release BF2042 as a free-to-play game. The shooter's concurrent players shot up from 18,907 to 47,883 during Battlefield 2042's free weekend on Steam, but dropped sharply to 19.516 after the freebie ended. This is the kind delivery mechanism that EA needs to leverage, possibly even breaking up Battlefield 2042 into segmented, separately-monetized pieces.

Dead Island 2 could release sometime in 2023...but our predictions have been here before.

Dead Island 2 is still alive although Embracer barely talks about the game. The project has been in development for nearly 10 years and has been handed off to multiple studios before finding a home at Dambuster Studios, the team behind Homefront: The Revolution.

So...when is it coming out? Neither Embracer Group nor publisher Deep Silver will say for sure, but CEO Lars Wingefors might've delivered a hint.

Assassin's Creed Valhalla has made over $1 billion in revenues in little over a year, breaking a new record for the franchise.

In less than a year, Assassin's Creed Valhalla became the second most-profitable game in Ubisoft history. Now Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot confirms the game has made over $1 billion in total consumer revenues, which includes sales and microtransactions.

"For the first time in the Assassin's Creed brand, the game passed $1 billion dollar consumer revenue and it did that during the December month. It's something new for a franchise like Assassin's [Creed] to reach that kind of revenue," Guillemot said in a recent Q3 2021 earnings call.

Nintendo isn't just shutting down the 3DS and Wii U storefronts, but it's also removing all forms of digital retro game purchases from the market.

Nintendo's unpopular business decisions are catching the ire of gamers and preservationists alike. The Video Game History Foundation, which wants to create the Library of Alexandria for video games, has gone so far to call Nintendo's current tactics "actively destructive" to the slowly-ebbing retro market.

Nintendo has made nearly $60 billion in dedicated video games revenues since the Switch's release, and a good portion of that is from hardware.

Nintendo's video games business has been rock solid since the Switch's arrival in early 2017. The Mario-maker has generated billions in revenue every year since it unionized handhelds and consoles into one cohesive multi-device ecosystem. Things have certainly turned around since the Wii U days.

According to data provided by Nintendo, the company has made roughly $59.8 billion in total cumulative sales revenues across its video games business unit since the Nintendo Switch released in Q4'17. What's interesting is Nintendo has made more from hardware than it has from software because every Switch is sold at a profit. Hardware made up $33.16 billion or 55% of total dedicated video games revenues, and software made $26.63 billion, or 45% of the total.