Gaming - Page 392

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".

Following its expensive acquisitions of Glu Mobile ($2.4 billion) and Playdemic ($1.4 billion), EA is doubling-down on mobile gaming to supercharge its recurring revenues. EA's current mobile games include Apex Legends, Madden and FIFA mobile, Galaxy of Heroes, and a multitude of casual games.

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.

The bulk of Final Fantasy 16's development is finished, however the game's critical debugging, polish, and adjustment phases still are not finished.

FF16 game director Yoshi-P recently gave some quick updates on the states of the RPG. In a recent NeiR Re[in]carnation stream, as translated by Twitter's @aitaikimochi, Yoshi-P says a new trailer for Final Fantasy XVI is coming "soon," and that a substantial amount of progress has been made on the game.

Yoshi-P and his team is "working their hardest" on Final Fantasy 16, and has spent lots of time squashing bugs and issues with the game's code. The project isn't entirely finished just yet and the team wants to spend more time polishing the experience before it's ready to ship.

The Federal Trade Commission has issued a Second Request into the Sony-Bungie deal.

The FTC is currently reviewing Sony's proposed $3.6 billion buyout of Bungie. Reports indicate that this review has advanced into the third phases of standard M&A procedures with the FTC issuing a Second Request.

This essentially means the FTC requires more information and data from both Sony and Bungie before it agrees not to oppose the deal.

NVIDIA is celebrating in a big way today with some rather big upgrades for GeForce NOW in May, with 27 new games hitting the game streaming service, 4K streaming on the PC and Mac, and more.

If you are gaming away on the RTX 3080 membership of GeForce NOW, then you're going to enjoy up to 4K 60FPS gaming from the PC or Mac with native GFN apps. Not just that, but NVIDIA DLSS helps out with 4K streaming performance since it'll tap the dedicated Tensor Core AI processors on RTX GPUs.

NVIDIA says that its RTX 3080 members can "enjoy the benefits of ultra-low latency that rivals native console gaming. They can also enable customized in-game graphics settings like RTX ON, taking games to a cinematic level, and experience the maximized eight-hour play sessions".

New metrics from Microsoft underline just how powerful xCloud is for discovery, access, and game sampling.

Game streaming offers two distinct advantages: Instant access to gameplay and being able to play anytime, anywhere. Microsoft has shared some interesting figures that show how its xCloud game streaming network is organically synergizing with its billion-dollar subscriptions and content empire.

The data is pretty clear. xCloud is being used as a very powerful tool that promotes more games being played for longer periods.

Take-Two Interactive's big investment on WWE 2K22 has apparently paid off big time.

WWE 2K22 sales have helped boost the WWE's consumer product revenues by over 50% year-over-year, the company today announced in its Q1 earnings report.

"Revenue increased 53%, or $11.2 million, to $32.2 million, primarily due to higher sales of the Company's licensed video games, including our franchise game WWE 2K22, as well as higher venue merchandise sales driven by the return to ticketed live events. These items were partially offset by a decrease in eCommerce merchandise sales due, in part, to a difficult comparison to elevated COVID-related sales in the prior year period," the report reads.