Gaming - Page 394

Deus Ex and Tomb Raider developer Eidos Montreal is working on multiple new games that utilize Unreal Engine 5 for streamlined and powerful development.

Embracer is buying Eidos Montreal and Crystal Dynamics for $300 million, and the company held a big presentation outlining each studio and their associated IPs. The stream included a look at Deus Ex and a brief discussion on what Eidos Montreal is currently creating.

According to Eidos Montreal studio head David Anfossi, the company has several new projects in dev across its teams in Montreal, Sherbrooke, and Shanghai.

Embracer CEO Lars Wingefors has seen the new games Crystal Dynamics and Eidos Montreal are working on, and says the pipeline is "very interesting" and has multiple "very sizable AAA experiences" in big name franchises.

Today Embracer Group announced it would buy Square Enix's entire Western games development division for $300 million, including Crystal Dynamics, Eidos Montreal, and more than 50 IPs including Deus Ex, Tomb Raider, Legacy of Kain, and Thief (plus a lot more franchises).

The value is not only in the IPs, but also the game studios who have worked on them for decades, and these teams have been working on unique new projects in specific franchises including a new Tomb Raider game in Unreal 5. The developers actually presented their content pipeline to Embracer's board, which was described as "interesting," but no other details were announced.

Embracer will have an incredible 230+ game development projects in the works following its big Square Enix acquisition, but only a portion of them are AAA games.

Embracer Group is buying Square Enix's entire Western division for $300 million, including Crystal Dynamics, Eidos Montreal, and mobile game dev Square Enix Montreal. All of these studios are working on new projects, including a new Tomb Raider game in Unreal Engine 5 and F2P mobile titles, and post-acquisition, Embracer's total number of game dev projects will jump to 230+.

Our records show that Embracer Group had 216 game dev projects in the works as of December 2021. The new numbers show a 14 project increase. This implies that these new studios could be working on multiple projects a piece, and could also include new games being announced by existing teams.

Embracer Group has entered into an agreement to purchase Crystal Dynamics, Eidos, and Square Enix Montreal game development studios from Square Enix, including access to dozens of franchises.

Embracer is about to buy some of the biggest IPs and game studios in the industry. Embracer has offered $300 million for Crystal Dynamics, Eidos, and Square Enix Montreal alongside big IPs like Deus Ex, Thief, Tomb Raider, Legacy of Kain, and "50 back catalog IPs". Square Enix has agreed to sell for this price.

"The acquisition brings a compelling pipeline of new installments from beloved franchises and original IPs, including a new Tomb Raider game," The press release notes. This acquisition will add 1,100 employees to Embracer Group's multi-thousand headcount and supercharge its IP count to over 230 franchises.

Nightdive Studio is hard at work on a remake of one of my favorite games of all time -- System Shock -- with work on the game "largely complete".

The upcoming System Shock remake has been tweaked from the ground up after securing $1,350,700 from their original Kickstarter goal of just $900,000. Nightdive Studios began its work on the System Shock remake on the Unity Engine, shortly after the team switched over to Epic Games' Unreal Engine... as well as adding important members to the development team.

Some of those new members of the development team were veterans of the industry, who worked on games like Fallout: New Vegas, Mass Effect, and BioShock. Nightdive Studios has now said that they've passed the pre-beta point in the development of the System Shock remake, with a release keyed for later this year. But what about the console versions? They're still in development, with the team working on those versions right now.

Microsoft Flight Simulator is one of the best-looking games ever made, with performance in the game getting better and better -- and will soon only get even better -- with upcoming patches to the game.

In a recent developer Q&A with developer Asobo Studio, Executive Producer at the studio, Martial Bossard, explained that Flight Simulator would be getting AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR). Flight Simulator will get FSR 1.0 at first, but will soon get upgraded to FSR 2.0 -- while support for NVIDIA DLSS isn't far away -- dropping with Update 10, scheduled for July.

Asobo Studio Executive Producer Martial Bossard explained: "The good news is that the Microsoft Flight Simulator team is working in a direct relationship with both manufacturers, so NVIDIA and AMD are working with us to help us to have the best implementation of their systems. For DLSS, we are still having some artifacts, some issues with some animated textures and the water surfaces, but we are working with NVIDIA to fix that. For Update 10 we'll have a great DLSS implementation".

MassiHancer is back again with some very incredible modding work on Batman: Arkham Knight, using a ray tracing mod at 8K on the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti with some bat-shit insane results. Check it out:

The modder has previously impressed with some super-impressive work on God of War 3 and Star Wars: Battlefront -- both radically improved with his ray tracing mods and more -- showcased beautifully at the monster 8K resolution, offering 7680 x 4320 or 4x the pixels of 4K (and 16x that of 1080p, I might add).

MassiHancer talked with DSO Gaming, where he explained: "For the first time you can see godrays and Dynamic Volumetric Fog integrated into the existing rendering engine extracting object positions from the Depth Buffer (something that was possible only using RT cores or NVIDIA PhysX ). I added Color Grading, Depth of Field and a Camera Mod that reacts to everything happening in Gotham. Finally I used "also" RT shader from Pascal Gilcher for G.I. effects".

Death Stranding 2 is likely in development. Here's what it could look like on next-gen consoles utilizing new Unreal Engine 5 technologies.

Kojima's new Death Stranding game will likely use the Decima engine, but skilled environment and lighting artist Pasquale Scionti gives us an idea of what the game could look like in UE5. Scionti recently created an awe-inspiring environment showcase that looks like something out of a PlayStation 6 reveal trailer starring a next-gen Death Stranding game.

Scionti created the scenes using Quixel Megascans and took advantage of Unreal Engine 5's new powerful and flexible tools, which includes Nanite virtualized geometry allowing for effortless drag-and-drop importing of photorealistic assets. Scionti also used 8K resolution Nanite textures and HDR lighting with volumetric fog.

One of Wall Street's biggest players is betting billions on the Microsoft-Activision deal going through.

Berkshire Hathaway now owns "something like 9.5%" of Activision-Blizzard's total shares, billionaire mogul Warren Buffet said in a company shareholders meeting yesterday.

"We now own something like 9.5% of Activision and if we went over 10% we'd file a report. It is my purchases, not the manager who bought it some months ago, and if the deal goes through we'll make some money and if it doesn't, who knows what happens," Buffet said during the event.

We break down Sony's new PlayStation Plus conversion charts to tell you everything you need to know about the upcoming changes to the PlayStation subscription.

Yesterday, Sony opened up a can of worms by issuing out a very confusing and needlessly complicated PlayStation Plus chart. Sony is attempting to answer everyone's questions about the new three-tiered PlayStation Plus platform.

Like, for instance, what happens to your existing subscription when the new service rolls out.

Activision-Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick has made over $185 million in total compensation from 2019 - 2021, new SEC filings reveal.

Activision's latest SEC filing aims at total transparency for shareholders and gives a tell-all look at the company's financials, upcoming proposals, and executive compensation. Nestled in the latter portion is a stark reminder of just how much money that company CEO Bobby Kotick has made over the last three years.

According to a table in the SEC filing, Activision-Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick has made a total of $185,562,762 in the period between 2019 - 2021. The bulk of this is from substantial $149 million performance-based compensation pursuant to 2016 Kotick Employment Agreement, an expansive contract that rewards the CEO with PSUs (Performance Share Units) based on certain company performances.

Ads may be coming to the dedicated video games industry in more ways than one.

Fearful of subscriber losses, nearly every streaming service is adding lower-cost ad-supported tiers as a catch-all for consumer choice. Microsoft and Sony could follow suit and offer cheaper, value-oriented gaming subscription tiers to ad tolerant users.

Higher-priced gaming services like PlayStation Plus Premium ($17.99/month) and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate ($14.99/month) could see a price reduction in exchange for ad breaks or interstitials before gaming sessions, surveys, or perhaps specific versions of games altered to include in-game advertisements (such as product placement ads on billboards).

Meta's multi-billion dollar advertisement empire is funding the company's ambitious vision for the metaverse.

It's no secret that Meta Technologies Inc (formerly Facebook) makes nearly all of its money from advertisements. The company has made over 97% of its earnings from advertisements for the past 14 quarters in a row, raking in as much as $32 billion from ads.

Meta is using these deep coffers to invest heavily into its metaverse plans. Meta has spent $16 billion on its Reality Labs division over the past six quarters, the department that's currently experimenting with multitudes of technologies for the nebulous metaverse.

Modern Warfare 2 will get revealed soon and it will bring a "new era for Call of Duty."

We're officially in critical hype mode for Modern Warfare 2, which has been confirmed to be this year's Call of Duty game. Yesterday, Activision and developer Infinity Ward revealed the game's official logo with stylish lime-green accenting that symbolizes night-vision goggles, suggesting many night ops missions.

The comments about a new era aren't just for the game itself, but also refer to the upgraded Warzone that will ship alongside Modern Warfare 2. Activision has said the new Warzone experience will deliver "groundbreaking innovations."

Sony has officially announced that PS Plus and PS Now subscription stacking has been turned off ahead of the big new PlayStation Plus service revamp.

PlayStation Plus and PlayStation Now subscription stacking have been disabled, Sony today confirmed in a FAQ. Sony has announced that PS Plus and PS Now vouchers can no longer be redeemed until the new PlayStation Plus service goes live on June 13 (in the U.S.). Once the new three-tier PS Plus service is live, gamers can then redeem their codes and choose between the three tiers at pro-rated rates.

This effectively removes the option for users to stack individual subscriptions and get grandfathered into PS Plus Premium. Sony has said that all existing PlayStation Now subscribers will convert over to the $119/year PlayStation Plus Premium tier that offers 740 games across six PlayStation generations. Users who are subscribed to both PS Now and PS Plus will also be converted.

Microsoft has plans to widen ads in its video games ecosystem, a move that could tack on billions of dollars to its already-bustling ad business.

Microsoft is creating a new ad tech infrastructure that will delivery more advertisements in its gaming space. This initiative will be powered by Xandr, aka App Nexus, a leading ad tech company that Microsoft purchased from AT&T in 2021.

"As the digital landscape evolves in a post-cookie world, Microsoft and Xandr together will help shape the digital ad marketplace of the future," Microsoft said at the time. "Xandr provides a data-enabled technology platform with tools that help power a diverse ecosystem connecting marketers and media owners through first-party, data-led advertising solutions across its network."

Ex-Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime supports NFTs, and he has a compelling and unique vision in favor of blockchain gaming.

Reggie "The Regginator" Fils-Aime has an interesting idea about NFTs. As president of Nintendo's America branch through some of the most transformative eras in gaming, Fils-Aime witnessed tectonic shifts in the industry. First with the Wii, and then the 3DS handheld hybrid, and finally the Switch. Along the way, Fils-Aime also saw Nintendo's push towards services, namely with Switch Online.

Now Fils-Aime sees big opportunity with NFTs and blockchain, and has laid out an ambitious vision that could actually appeal to gamers. The idea is simple: Spend your entertainment time to make money. What if you could sell the content, characters, and equipment you unlocked in a game to someone else? You could, in theory, monetize your time investment. Spend hundreds of hours in a game to progress, and then sell your progress to someone else who doesn't have the time.

The single largest acquisition in the history of video games has been accepted by shareholders...and now it's up to the FTC.

The Microsoft-Activision deal is one step closer to going through. Today, the overwhelming majority of Activision-Blizzard stakeholders have voted yes to Microsoft's share buyout offer. As per an SEC filing, 98% of company shareholders (539.332 million) voted in favor of the buyout.

Microsoft has bid $95 a share to acquire all of Activision-Blizzard's stock, representing a massive deal worth $68.7 billion. The deal is expected to close by June 2023 if it can clear the FTC, which has been emboldened to crack down on industry-shaking mega-mergers.

Meta's Reality Labs division has reported billion-dollar operating losses for six consecutive quarters, showing that Meta's new ambitious plans for the metaverse may not pay off any time soon.

The metaverse is an expensive new frontier. Meta Technologies Inc. wants to pioneer the nebulous metaverse, and is spending billions to lay down foundational technologies for the new inter-connected, commercialized and consumer-friendly social infrastructure. This will be a long-term strategy will many more years of expenses, as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg doesn't expect the metaverse to mature until the 2030s.

Meta's Reality Labs division is doing much of the heavy lifting for its metaverse ambitions. Reality Labs, which includes VR headsets, AR technologies, and new software platforms like Horizon Worlds, is a big part of Meta's R&D investments due to its experimental focus on XR.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg thinks the metaverse will usher in a "very exciting 2030s".

One of the richest men in the world has a purely ambitious plan for the future of work and play: A new, inter-connected social computing platform for commercial enterprise, consumer leisure, and interactivity that beams directly to proprietary hardware. It's called the "metaverse," and Meta is investing heavily into what it believes will be the primary platform throughout the next decade.

When asked about investments into the metaverse, Zuckerberg said that Meta's high expenses are a result of foundational spending for the metaverse, and that the company is in for the long haul: "Maybe primarily, this is laying the groundwork for what I expect to be a very exciting 2030s when this is sort of more established as the primary computing platform at that point. I think that there will be results along the way for that, too. But I do think that this is going to be a longer cycle."