Gaming - Page 41

Polish horror game dev studio Bloober Team is growing its ranks as it becomes a multi-game studio working on a number of projects simultaneously, including the anticipated Silent Hill 1 remake for Konami.

Fans of Bloober Team have a lot to look forward to. The company has announced a sizable roadmap of game releases are in the works, including 7 new titles (2 in-house developed, and 5 co-developed) across multiple platforms. The slate includes Layers of Fear 3, the upcoming Silent Hill 1 remake, and other unannounced titles.

In a press release, the studio said it's "entering a new phase of development, preparing to unveil ambitious projects that could mark the next stage in the company's history."

After demanding Rockstar Games pay $200,000 for the stolen data, hacking group ShinyHunters released a treasure trove of financial data about the developer, revealing key insights about how much money GTA Online generates.

The hack can be traced back to a third party service used by Rockstar's cloud platform provider, and while many would think such a hack would negatively impact the company targeted, the opposite has happened for Rockstar Games' parent company and publisher, Take-Two Interactive. The financial data revealed just how profitable GTA Online is for Take-Two and Rockstar, with the service generating as much as $8.5 million per week across all platforms.

The data, if believed, and it appears it has been by many, showcased the lucrative businesses, and even further increased the anticipation of Grand Theft Auto 6 from an investment perspective. Since the data has been made public, Take-Two's stock price has increased by around 2.6%, which has added approximately $1 billion to the company's market value. It appears investors that have seen the leaked data have felt only more confident that their investment in Take-Two, and by extension, Rockstar, will turn a profit.

Will Xbox game exclusives return? The chances seem slim, but anything seems possible in the games industry today, and Xbox does have a new CEO that's closely scrutinizing the organization and promising change for gamers--and developers.

Microsoft could bring back Xbox exclusivity of some kind, once again offering unique games that are only available on Xbox hardware. With Project Helix on the horizon, console exclusivity doesn't seem actually possible by virtue of the device itself--it's a console that plays PC games, indicating that it's...well...a PC. Plus, Xbox games have crossed over to PC for a while now, with the exception of some games like Halo 5 Guardians.

In any case, sources behind the scenes have told Windows Central journalist and Xbox expert Jez Corden that Microsoft is at least discussing Xbox exclusives, but whether or not new games CEO Asha Sharma will order exclusivity remains to be seen.

School is one of the most universal experiences in everyone's life. From skipping classes to social cliques, one-sided crushes, and the occasional drama, it shapes you in ways you only fully appreciate later. That sentiment is at the heart of what made Rockstar Games' 2006 gem Bully such a massive hit the moment it launched. But since its release, the series has sadly remained dormant, aside from a few re-releases.

This has led to occasional fan recreations and revival projects, but over on Steam, a bona fide spiritual successor to Bully seems to be gaining some traction. It is not from Rockstar, but it draws some heavy parallels.

Meet Agefield High: Rock the School from Refugium Games, where you are put in the shoes of a high school kid looking to make a name for himself. You play as Sam, a senior with his eyes set on shaking things up in the sleepy town of Agefield before graduation. Alongside Kale and Axel, you dive headfirst into story-driven missions, high school drama, and everything that comes with the package.

Rumors of a new God of War spin-off game emerged early last month, when a screenshot from a LinkedIn page of a Senior Writer at Sony Interactive Entertainment confirmed that they assisted in creating a new franchise within the God of War universe. These rumors were further backed up by Bloomberg's Jason Schrier, with the reporter saying that "it's not a new IP, but it might feel like one" on a ResetEra post.

Furthermore, industry insider and leaker NateTheHate wrote in an X post on March 2 that he heard the new game in development at Santa Monica Studios, the developer of the God of War franchise, will feature Kratos' wife, Faye, as the lead character. Additionally, Nate wrote that the game will "differ from the Norse God of War with more focus on action". Nate went on to write that Santa Monica is planning to reveal the secret project sometime this year and aims for a release in the first half of 2027.

More rumors regarding the mysterious spin-off title are now emerging, with MP1st reporting it can confirm that East-Asian mythologies will be included in the new title, and that the publication has heard elements from Chinese and Japanese mythologies will be present.

The Indonesian Game Rating System (IGRS) has confirmed Diablo IV: Lord of Hatred is coming to the Nintendo Switch, or at least that is what the official IGRS website currently states.

Diablo IV: Lord of Hatred is scheduled to release on April 28, 2026, and so far, it's confirmed for PC, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X|S, and Xbox One. At the moment, Nintendo's handhelds aren't confirmed as platforms, but the IGRS website for Diablo IV: Lord of Hatred lists "Nintendo Switch" as one of the supported platforms. Notably, the listing lists only "Nintendo Switch," not "Nintendo Switch 2," which has led some to believe the upcoming expansion is coming to Nintendo's older hardware as well.

However, that is unlikely to be the case, especially considering Diablo IV isn't even on the original Nintendo Switch. It's more likely Blizzard announces Diablo IV is coming to the Nintendo Switch 2, and the Lord of Hatred expansion is also arriving on the recently released handheld. Unfortunately, nothing is confirmed as of yet, and ratings boards have been wrong in the past. Although the IGRS was responsible for the recent leaks of 007 First Light and Assassin's Creed: Black Flag Resynced, which turned out to be true.

SuperData founder and entertainment industry expert Joost van Dreunen argues that Microsoft could become a pioneer in the dedicated gaming space by relying more heavily on advertising to help grow Game Pass and the Xbox business.

Ads are likely coming to Xbox in some form--after all, Microsoft did buy Xandr back in 2021, and they also acquired King's lucrative adtech platform as part of 2023's ABK acquisition. So...when will Microsoft start employing this technology into its more widespread ecosystem, like, say, its console market? That's a tricky question to answer, and Microsoft doesn't yet have the solution, although there have been rumblings that a free ad-supported version of Xbox Cloud Gaming could be offered this year.

Games analyst and scholar Joost van Dreunen has some ideas on this topic, and in his latest Substack newsletter, van Dreunen waxes intellectual on the traditional media business and how Microsoft will have to try to evolve the formula to eke out more success with Game Pass.

Fans are in for a shocking sequel with Metro 2039 as a newly leaked plot synopsis paints a grisly post-apocalyptic picture.

Metro games are known for their grueling depictions of suffering against the backdrop of slim hope and survival, and it's these themes that give the games their signature, nail-biting tension. The next Metro game is being set up as a truly wrenching experience that could push the series to new heights.

While 4A Games is set to reveal Metro 2039 during the Xbox First Look showcase on April 16, early details about the game have surfaced via a recent Indonesian database leak.

Hackers have inadvertently surged Take-Two's market cap by billions of dollars after revealing how successful Grand Theft Auto Online is for Rockstar Games.

The recent hack on Rockstar Games has led to a major boost for its parent company, Take-Two Interactive. After their ransom wasn't paid, hacker collective ShinyHunters released key info that was purportedly infiltrated via Rockstar's accounts, however this data has proven to be quite positive for the company because it highlights the long-term popularity of GTA Online, a mode that has made billions of dollars from digital spending; it was revealed that the online mode has made at least $5 billion in bookings, and possibly even more when those funds are recognized as net revenue.

The leaks, which generated tons of buzz including in-depth analyses and figures from all over the internet, have propelled Take-Two Interactive's shares. In the span of a day, Take-Two saw a high of $206.5 as of Tuesday, April 14, representing a +4.27% increase in share price over the lowest point of $198.04 from a day prior, Monday, April 13.

Following its release on PS5 earlier this month, Starfield is now gaining more sales velocity on the platform as denoted by updated sales positions.

Bethesda's latest RPG Starfield appears to be ramping up sales on PS5. The game faced steep competition on the PlayStation Store when it launched on April 7, not breaking into the top 10, likely because of all the heavily-discounted sports games offered on the PS Store Spring Sale. Now that the discounts are over, Starfield sales have pushed the game's positioning to much higher spots on the top 25 PS Store best-sellers.

Starfield is currently in the top 5 best-sellers in multiple countries across North America, Europe, and Japan, including the United States, where the game is currently in the #5 spot. According to our tracking, this is the first time that Starfield has broken into the top 5 best-sellers on the US PS Store. This is noteworthy because this particular region represents weighted sales compared to others.

Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the most graphically pleasing games out there, particularly when you crank all of the graphics settings to their max and use the game's ray tracing features with a supported GPU. However, modders have also discovered the game's engine is surprisingly tweakable, to the point where you can run the game on almost any piece of PC hardware. YouTuber Budget-Builds Official accomplished a challenge to get the game to run on an R7 370 with just 1GB of VRAM at a playable frame rate.

The challenge took more than just tweaking all the graphics settings to low; the YouTuber had to go into the game's .ini file and tweak graphics settings below what the low preset allows in-game to achieve a playable frame rate. To get a baseline, the YouTuber ran the game's benchmark out of the box with default graphics settings and found the game ran just shy of 30 FPS.

Tweaking the .ini files enabled the YouTuber to change a variety of settings, including the following: reducing FOV and effect quality to their absolute minimum, turning off global illumination, distant global illumination, and SSAO. Turning down screen space reflections almost entirely, turning off volumetric fog, distant volume fog, and distant fog. Modifying the shadow settings to reduce culling distance and quality, so that the shadows are virtually nonexistent. Turning off post processing, bloom, motion blur, chromatic aberration, film grain, lens flair, AA, and dynamic decals.

As soon as the remake of Assassin's Creed Black Flag titled "Resynced" was announced to be in the works, fans of the series were ecstatic. Black Flag is a fan-favorite in the beloved Assassin's Creed series, and is seen by many as the "good old days" of the franchise before it took a turn towards RPG mechanics. Recent rumors also suggest an official reveal could come as soon as mid-April, and a summer release is expected.

Now, we have some information coming our way that can tell us more about what we can expect from this remake. A game description scraped from the Indonesian Game Ratings System (IGRS) reveals that Black Flag Resynced will also feature "new characters and stories". This is part of the game's description that has been provided to the ratings platform.

Assassin's Creed Black Flag is a cult classic with a massive fanbase, and many of those fans have a strong attachment to the game's characters and narrative. Personalities like Edward Kenway, Captain Blackbeard, and Adewale have a connection with the fans that has hardly been replicated since. It will be interesting to see how Ubisoft adds new characters to the mix without making them feel out of place.

Ben Jordan is the Peter Parker face model for Insomniac Games' Spider-Man series, and recently, the actor shared an image on their personal Instagram account showing Jordan on a set with motion-capture equipment.

The image inherently suggests Jordan is doing some kind of motion-capture work, but Spider-Man fans quickly noticed the caption Jordan tagged, "IYKYK 🕷️," which was quickly taken as a hint toward Spider-Man. The post has since been removed from the account, but not before screenshots could be taken and shared across various social media platforms. So, if Jordan is working on a new Spider-Man-related project, what could it be?

There are a bunch of possibilities here. The first, and perhaps most hopeful for Spider-Man fans, is a new mainline Spider-Man game featuring Peter Parker, which would mark the third in the series. But there is also the possibility that this new filming is for Insomniac's Venom game, which is reportedly in development, or for a cameo in Marvel's upcoming Wolverine game. Perhaps it's filming for the new Miles Morales 2?

The recent Rockstar Games leaks may have revealed key details about the company's earnings performance, namely with Grand Theft Auto and its mega-popular online mode.

Editor's Note: GTA Online's net bookings data was reportedly found in the 2026 Rockstar Games hack and has not been confirmed by Rockstar or Take-Two Interactive. These numbers are not the same as the official documents released by Take-Two. It is possible that the information is not accurate, and therefore must remain speculation at this time.

Yesterday, hacking group ShinyHunters exposed data that was reportedly stolen from a Rockstar Games' third-party Anodot account, revealing potential new information about the company's sensitive financials. It appears that a swath of metrics data was released, including how much money Grand Theft Auto Online books on both a weekly and yearly basis (the mode books about $8.5 million per week, with more than half of sales made on PS5).

Rockstar Games recently suffered a security breach involving one of its third-party services, and the hacking group behind it has now released the stolen data online after Rockstar declined to pay the ransom.

While we cannot independently verify whether the numbers released by the hacking group are 100% legitimate, they do paint a very interesting picture of Rockstar's finances, particularly how much the developer earns from GTA Online. TweakTown's Derek Strickland has done a fantastic job accumulating all of the data into clean charts for viewing, and there we can see just how small a percentage GTA 5 players on PC spend on Shark Cards, which generate Rockstar $8.5 million per week, according to the leaked finances.

The data states GTA Online players on PC only account for 3% of the GTA Online platform breakdown by "weekly bookings", which directly correlates with the number of weekly players. Weekly active users on PC were down to 894,621, accounting for $264,273 in weekly bookings, compared to PlayStation 5 at 3,474,021 players and $4,476,346 in weekly bookings.

Sony Pictures has announced a new animated film at CinemaCon 2026, unveiling a feature-length film currently in development based on FromSoftware's Bloodborne.

Sony Pictures announced on April 13 that a new animated film based on FromSoftware's 2015 title Bloodborne is currently in the works and will also be produced by YouTuber Sean William McLoughlin, better known as Jacksepticeye. Notably, Jacksepticeye is a massive fan of FromSoftware games, particularly Bloodborne, and has taken to social media to state that he will be doing everything within his power "to make this the best Bloodborne adaptation possible." Adding, Bloodborne is "my favorite game ever made, but I know how truly passionate the fans of this game are and how much hunger they have for more of it."

For those who don't know what Bloodborne is, the title was released in 2015 and was produced by Hideo Miyazaki, the brain behind the Dark Souls series. Bloodborne is a cult classic in the Dark Souls-like universe of games, with many fans loving the ditching of shields for rampant offense that forced players to get good at the game. Furthermore, Bloodborne has a gothic horror atmosphere, making for a particularly interesting backdrop compared to Dark Souls titles.

After not meeting the demands of a ransom, hacking group ShinyHunters has released a treasure trove of data on Rockstar's intensely successful Grand Theft Auto 5, revealing just how much money the title rakes in for Rockstar on a weekly basis.

Assuming the numbers are true, Rockstar is averaging a staggering $8.5 million in net bookings per week from GTA Online, with PlayStation 5 being the platform providing the largest share of that pie at 53%, followed by PS4 with 11%, Xbox Series X at 22%, Xbox One at 11%, and PC at 3%. The newly released data was obtained by hacking group ShinyHunters, which breached a third-party service attached to Rockstar Games' cloud platform. The hacking group demanded $200,000 to not release the data by April 14. Rockstar confirmed the hack, downplayed its severity, and didn't accept the ransom.

One transaction amid the troves of data was an individual who spent $1 million on Shark Cards in a single transaction in GTA Online. Specifically, $1,030,926 tracked in 2020 was followed by $984,000, the second-largest transaction in 2017. The third comes in at $953,000. Funnily enough, almost all of the extremely large transactions were made on Christmas Day. Another interesting fact from the data was that Shark Cards made Rockstar $5 billion in 10 years.

Last week, we reported that Lenovo increased the prices of its new flagship Legion Go 2 gaming handheld, powered by the AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme chip. In addition, it features 32GB of LPDDR5X memory and up to 2TB of internal storage. With the current AI-driven DRAM and flash memory crisis causing havoc in the consumer space, it's putting a big question mark over the immediate future of the PC gaming handheld market.

As noted in our original story, the price of the Lenovo Legion Go 2 with 32GB of memory and 1TB of internal storage rose by a massive $650. This means that its late 2025 launch price of $1,349 is now $1,999 USD - a 48% or so increase. Well, with memory and storage prices seemingly increasing exponentially with capacity, the official price for the Lenovo Legion Go 2 with 32GB of memory and 2TB of internal storage has now reached an eye-watering level.

As noted on Lenovo's official site, the price for this model is now $2,849.99 USD, which is $1,369 above its launch MSRP of $1,480. The new price changes the value proposition so significantly that it's hard to justify the existence of a 2TB model. And when you factor in the recent news that AYANEO has paused and stopped taking orders for its new flagship PC gaming handheld, it's hard not to be concerned about the near future of the growing portable market.

Unfortunately, hacker collective ShinyHunters has apparently released Rockstar Games' leaked data, potentially revealing key details about the mega-popular GTA Online. It must be noted that there is a chance that this information is incorrect.

New info from Rockstar's recent data breach may reveal how much Grand Theft Auto Online makes on a weekly basis, and the numbers are eye-opening to say the least.

According to figures compiled on the GTA Forums, Rockstar makes an average of $8.5 million in net bookings per week from spending in GTA Online, with the PlayStation 5 leading other platforms with over half of those bookings.

Keizaal Online is a newer Skyrim online mod that allows dozens of gamers to jump in and play together in a shared world, complete with PVP, events, and a deep emphasis on roleplaying.

Creators have put together an interesting Skyrim online mod with a growing number of players. It's called Keizaal Online, and it's built on the SkyMP mod framework, the open-source Skyrim mod that enables real-time co-operative gameplay.

The team boasts that hundreds of players have joined Keizaal, and a recent video shows scores of players gathered in towns and even taking on huge multiplayer battles out in the wild. The scenarios have a kind of unique, player-driven charm that brings to mind early online games, with the added bonus that everything takes place in Skyrim's familiar world.