Gaming - Page 410

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.

Right now the United States Library of Congress has exemptions made for institutions like archives and universities, however The Electronic Software Association convinced the Library of Congress to remove any remote, off-premises access to video game software (as outlined in the Eighth Triennial Section 1201 Proceeding).

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.

Ubisoft plans to release at least 4 AAA games in the fiscal year ending March 2023, including the long-awaited Skull & Bones.

Ubisoft's next FY2023 period should deliver a handful of unique games across a wide spectrum of genres. The company wants to release four big titles from April 2022 - March 2023, including:

The slate is missing heavy-hitters like Assassin's Creed or a Tom Clancy title, however Ubisoft says this year will be the largest ever for Rainbow Six content and features. There's also more Assassin's Creed content planned throughout 2022, but the major new AC title won't launch in FY23.

Ubisoft's holiday 2021 earnings have dropped due to a smaller number of game releases.

Today Ubisoft announced its Q3'21 figures, and while respectable, the numbers are substantially lower than last year's period. This led to a 30% drop in sales and a 25% reduction in net bookings. Some vital context is needed.

The main reason for the slip is that Ubisoft released more games in 2020 than it did in 2021. Ubisoft had a stacked holiday 2020 period with multiple heavy-hitting games like Assassin's Creed Valhalla and Watch Dogs Legion launching with next-gen consoles. The Q3 2021 period only really had Far Cry 6 and Just Dance 2022 to prop up holiday sales.

Ubisoft shrugs off direct questions about being acquired by a larger company like Sony or Microsoft.

Having fought off one hostile takeover against Vivendi, Ubisoft wants to remain as free as it can for as long as possible. Billion-dollar giants like Microsoft and Sony are flashing pocketbooks to buy up content IP to power their ecosystems of services and hardware.

Ubisoft is one of the last major games companies that hasn't been purchased...and that's how company executives want it to stay. Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot says the publisher is stable and doesn't technically have a reason to sell.

Embracer Group has over 200 games in development, and most of them remain unannounced.

With its sheer volume of developers, labels, and owned IP, Embracer Group is one biggest games companies on the planet. In updated figures, the multimedia giant says it has an incredible 216 game projects that are currently in development. Most of these games are unannounced; there are 149 mystery titles in the pipeline across Embracer's massive array of developers.

The significant increase in game projects reflects some of Embracer's most recent major buyouts, which include Gearbox Entertainment, 3D Realms, Perfect World Entertainment (nestled under Gearbox), and Aspyr.

EA executive Laura Miele reportedly blames Halo Infinite for setting a positive example and poaching Battlefield 2042's playerbase. This line of thought could easily be applied to another mega-hit shooter that EA's responsible for.

According to recent reports sourced from obtained internal documents, EA execs are trying to figure out where Battlefield 2042 went wrong. The usual suspects apply: Live games are difficult to make, the pandemic, and competitors. EA's Laura Miele reportedly mentioned Halo Infinite by name and suggested Halo's polished state set a high water mark for Battlefield 2042...which is a curious statement for two reasons.

One, Halo Infinite had lots of problems at launch. Monetization, bugs, glitches--Big Team Battle was nigh-unplayable for months and it currently has very serious issues with desync and cheating. Gunplay was polished. Many other things were not.

Metro Exodus has sold 6 million copies to date, the Embracer Group has confirmed.

The Metro franchise remains one of Deep Silver's heavy-hitting tentpole franchises and has contributed strongly to overall quarterly earnings. Metro Exodus has sold more than 6 million units since its release on February 2019, making it one of the most popular in the series. While Embracer hasn't given regular updates on total Metro game or franchise sales, these figures are more than respectable and are responsible in part to Koch Media's $78 million revenues generated in Q3'21.

"Back-catalog sales were also driven by the evergreen title Metro Exodus, which has sold 6 million copies since its launch in February 2019," Embracer said in its recent report.

CD PROJEKT RED has pushed out a rather large patch for Cyberpunk 2077, with the v1.5 patch including a plethora of tweaks, new features, and so much more -- for all platforms -- not just the PC.

Inside of Cyberpunk 2077's new v1.5 update is a built-in benchmark for the PC, but also AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) 1.0 which joins the ranks against NVIDIA and its DLSS technology inside of CDPR's flagship game. Previously, Cyberpunk 2077 had an option for Contrast Adaptive Sharpening (CAS) but now FSR 1.0 has replaced it.

Cyberpunk 2077's new addition of AMD FSR support can be enabled in the "Graphics" menu of the Settings, and then down the bottom under Ray Tracing you'll see "Resolution Scaling" and have the options for NVIDIA DLSS and AMD FSR technologies.

CD PROJEKT RED has pushed out a rather large patch for Cyberpunk 2077, with the v1.5 patch including a plethora of tweaks, new features, and so much more -- for all platforms -- not just the PC.

One of the biggest and surprise additions in the new Cyberpunk 2077 update was the inclusion of a built-in benchmark, which will run a benchmark within a pre-determined path of the game and give you the results you need. You can benchmark with the vanilla version of the game, with DLSS -- or the newly-added AMD FSR upscaling tech option -- as well as ray tracing.

There are a bunch of PC-specific things that CD PROJEKT RED have added into the v1.5 update for Cyberpunk 2077, including a "Toggle walking" button when you're playing with your keyboard. When you're exploring, simply press "G" on your keyboard although this can be rebinded in your settings.

Cyberpunk 2077 doesn't exactly hit next-gen performance on Xbox Series S consoles, but CD Projekt may change that.

Yesterday Cyberpunk 2077 got a huge upgrade on PS5 and Xbox Series X consoles with 4K 60FPS and raytracing modes, improved loading times, and haptic feedback support. The Xbox Series S, however, is locked to 30FPS with dynamically scaled 1440p resolution. That's not great news to anyone with a Series S.

Luckily it looks like CDPR wants to at least try and boost the FPS on Series S systems. "We are also looking into the possibility of [raising FPS cap on Xbox Series S], but at the moment we don't have any details to share," CDPR's Marcin Momot said.

Nintendo plans to permanently remove NES, SNES, Nintendo 64, and other retro classic games from sale starting in 2023.

From 2023 onward, Switch Online service will be the only place gamers can experience retro Nintendo games. Earlier today Nintendo announced it would close the Wii U and 3DS eShops in 2023. Starting next year, gamers will not be able to buy content from either the Wii U or 3DS storefronts, including a wealth of Virtual Console games across legacy systems. This effectively removes these old-school retro hits from the market.

In a now-deleted section of its announcement FAQ, Nintendo said it "currently has no plans to offer classic content in other ways" outside of Switch Online. Just a bit ago we discussed how Nintendo was evolving the Switch Online subscription service with additive value. This particular move sees the company is boosting value with the omission of choice rather than additional content.

Sony receives criticism for using marketing materials to allegedly push gamers into buying a more expensive $69.99 Horizon Forbidden West bundle. But why is that?

Sony is selling two cross-gen bundles for Horizon Forbidden West. One is $69.99 and comes with a PS4 and PS5 copy. The other is $59.99 and comes with a PS4 copy and a digital upgrade to the PS5 version. Functionally, both options are identical. Sony splits cross-gen games into two SKUs, so any bundle that you buy will unlock both a PS4 and a separate PS5 version of the game.

So why does the $69.99 version exist at all? There's a few reasons. One is that the $59.99 version cannot be purchased on the PS5's storefront. Two is that the SKU existed before Sony made the announcement to honor their prior commitment and offer a free next-gen upgrade. Three, it's possible the $69.99 PS4 and PS5 bundle offers a permanent license to both versions of the game, and the $59.99 PS4 version offers a limited-time upgrade to PS5 that could expire.