Gaming - Page 420

Capcom's latest integrated report shows just how much the company has grown over the last two decades.

Capcom's digital business plan is paying off big. The digital model has led to eight consecutive years of operating profit growth driven by efforts like expansion into emerging worldwide markets, bringing games to the digital-focused PC platform, timed sales, and more engagement-driven experiences in its games.

The company's recent metrics speak volumes and clearly illustrate just how much Capcom has grown over the years, and it's all because of its forward-thinking adaptation to growing markets. Capcom has embraced worldwide expansion in a way that sees its games being carried to non-traditional markets in an effort to maximize sales reach. The plan is working very well.

Capcom wants to sell 100 million games every year, and outlines its plan to make it happen in the near future.

Capcom is on a roll. Over the last decade the Japanese games-maker has made a radical shift towards digital. The results have paid off with eight consecutive years of record operating profit and over 220% in net income growth. Now the company wants more.

In a recent integrated report, Capcom has set an ambitions goal for itself: 100 million games sold every year. For reference, Capcom sold 30 million games last year and expects to sell 32 million games this year with an 82% digital ratio. Capcom makes it clear that digital is the key to achieving its lofty goal.

Ubisoft promises to support its new Avatar game with multiple years of post-launch content, including premium paid DLC, expansions, and more.

The new Avatar Frontiers of Pandora game coming in 2022 will have a long lifespan that stretches across years, Ubisoft has confirmed.

"For Fiscal '23 we have a very exciting lineup, a big lineup on the premium and free-to-play side. On the premium lineup side, as you know Avatar Frontiers of Pandora is a big game next to the highly-awaited movie. The development is progressing well and is a beautiful world delivered by the Snowdrop engine.That will be a very long game in terms of content delivered over many years," Ubisoft CFO Frederick Duguet said in a recent Q2 earnings call.

Ubisoft says it wants to be a key player in blockchain gaming, and sees lots of potential for play-to-earn mechanics.

Ubisoft is just one of the many publishers looking into blockchain (Square Enix and EA are also doing it). The decentralized network affords unique opportunities for gaming including play-to-earn, a nebulous concept that could give out pieces of cryptocurrency in exchange for playing a game.

So how will this work exactly? Ubisoft is vague on details, but says blockchain is "very attractive for the long term" and that they're interested in creating ne digital economies. It's likely blockchain will offer a new form of monetization as we predicted back in 2018.

Ubisoft gives slightly more details about its new never-ending Assassin's Creed Infinity game.

The next Assassin's Creed game is called Infinity, and it's rumored to be a huge live game that's more of a platform versus a standalone release. Now Ubisoft confirms Infinity won't be a free-to-play experience but instead will be a paid, premium game similar to other mainline titles.

"Infinity will not be a free-to-play. This game is going to have a lot of narrative elements in it. It's going to be a very innovative game but it will have what players already love in other Assassin's Creed games right from the start," Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot said in a recent Q2'22 earnings call.

Activision's new texture delivery technology will help shrink monstrous Call of Duty install sizes.

Call of Duty games are absolutely huge. Every annual release commands over 100GB, and Warzone is even beyond that. Considering the PS5 only has 667GB of space and the Series X has 802GB, it behooves publishers to shrink their games or be eliminated from the premium SSD space. That's what's happening over at Activision.

"New on-demand texture streaming tech expected to save up to 30%-50%+ on next-gen console and PC hard drive disk space," the official Call of Duty Twitter account says.

The TACMAP, one of the best new features of Halo Infinite, is being developed by the same studio who made Halo 5's Forge mode.

Halo Infinite's TACMAP transforms the game from a linear FPS into something more like Far Cry. Now gamers have an in-game map with icons, missions, and high-end visual topography they can use to trace out their path through Zeta Halo. It's the single most important new feature of Halo Infinite's campaign and one that's instrumental to the wide open-world scope of the game.

Apparently the feature was also developed by SkyBox Labs, the same team that brought Halo 5's Forge mode to life. SkyBox is also co-developing other portions of the game, too.

Assassin's Creed Valhalla isn't even a year old yet and it's already one of Ubisoft's best-earning games of all time.

Today Ubisoft announced Assassin's Creed Valhalla is the second-most profitable video game in the company's 35-year lifespan. That's a pretty huge milestone for a game that's not even a year old. While Ubisoft predictably didn't give exact sales figures or revenues for Valhalla, it did say the game is responsible for driving strong Q2 earnings.

Call of Duty: Warzone is about to go through its biggest change yet, with the introduction of Warzone Pacific. Warzone Pacific is the new name of the big update for Warzone (which is now Warzone Pacific) with a brand new map that the developer says is "built on the learnings from the community" and is launching with Season One.

The new map for Warzone Pacific is Caldera, and will have the new RICOCHET Anti-Cheat included with its kernel-level driver. Now that the business end of the situation is done, Warzone Pacific will have lush forests and rocky crags, with white sand beaches and mysterious ruins for you to explore -- and annihilate other players. There's even a dormant volcano in Caldera, with Activision promising over 200 other points of interest.

One of the biggest things I love to see from the developer is that they've listened to the community and built Caldera around 2 years of research from that feedback. Warzone Pacific will launch formally as part of Vanguard's first season of content, and is built on the same technology and graphics engine that Call of Duty: Vanguard is built on. Warzone Pacific is fully optimized for cross-play, cross-progression, and has cross-gen console support as well.

Sony has $14 billion left to spend on strategic acquisitions from now until March 2024.

In its recent Q2 earnings report, Sony pledged to "aggressively invest" in games development to help further growth of its $25 billion games empire. In that same presentation, it also confirmed it has $14 billion in funds left to spend on strategic acquisitions from now until FY23 (ends March 31, 2024).

Every three years Sony devises what it calls Mid-Range Plans. At these meetings, shareholders and executives decide specific growth vectors for the company. A budget is made to pay for things like like strategic acquisitions and capital expenditures to grow the business.

Sony has made a new branch to oversee its PC gaming efforts called PlayStation PC LLC.

Sony is going all-in on PC gaming. Before now, Sony's PlayStation Mobile LLC division was responsible for publishing PlayStation games on PC. Now that's being handled by a dedicated PC branch called PlayStation PC LLC. Documents show that the company was incorporated back in April 2021.

All of Sony's games on Steam are now listed as being published by PlayStation PC LLC.

Sony's PlayStation division delivers record Q2 sales on the back of strong hardware, software, and FX tailwinds.

Sony's latest Q2 FY2021 earnings report showed a marked increase in segment sales due to strong FX tailwinds. The exchange rate for Q2 was up 3.67% with a rate of $1 USD = 110.1 yen, a boost that benefited Sony tremendously.

The Games and Network Services (G&NS) segment, which includes the PlayStation brand, delivered record Q2 revenues of 645.43 billion yen ($5.862 billion) as compared to 506.63 billion yen ($4.77 billion) in Q2'20, which had a 106.2 yen-to-USD exchange rate. FX boosts represented 27% of the period's 138.8 billion yen year-over-year increase.

Sony Corp's stock is currently at $118.20 per share on the New York Stock Exchange, the highest point in the last five years.

Sony's recent Q2 FY2021 earnings report has caused its stock to jump +4.68% in one day to $118.20, setting a new 52-week and five-year high. The highest Sony Corp. stock has even been is $156.75 on February 29, 2000.

The company reported strong Q2 sales surges of 264 billion yen to 2.369 trillion yen across multiple segments including music, gaming, pictures, image sensors, and electronics partly due to higher FX (foreign exchange) rates, which rose 3.67% with a 1 USD = 110.1 yen rate. Games and Network Services tacked on an extra 20.7 billion yen due to these FX rates.

PlayStation 4 console shipments are plummeting as Sony moves on to shipping and producing PlayStation 5 consoles.

The PS4 era is practically over. It's true that Sony expects the PS4 to make up most of FY21's earnings but that's only because of A) the massive install base that continually makes money over time, and B) there's not enough PS5s on the market yet. Sony is already selling the PS5 at a profit and supply is extremely restricted due to the component shortages. Those shortages are also affecting PS4 production and shipments, but the last-gen console market has already been saturated.

Based on Sony's recent financials it looks like the PS4 has hit its peak. Sony shipped a measly 0.2 million shipments in Q2'21, the lowest in the PS4's entire lifecycle. In fact, PS4 six-month shipments fell below 1 million for the first time ever. From June - September 2020, Sony shipped 3.4 million PS4s. That number fell to just 700,000 in 2021, representing a 79% increase.

The PlayStation 5's one year sales have missed Sony's internal sales target, but only slightly.

Sony's PS5 has now shipped 13.4 million units in its first year on the market, the company today announced. While the milestone is impressive on paper, it falls short of Sony's expectations. The Japanese tech giant had hoped the PS5 would match or exceed the PS4's one-year shipments that amounted to 13.8 million.

Read Also: PlayStation 5 Review: The golden era of console gaming

Apple Music integration is now available on the PlayStation 5, Sony today announced.

Apple Music subscribers can now natively listen to content while playing games on the PlayStation 5. Gamers have been able to listen to music USB or Spotify since 2020 and the new Apple Music service functions the exact same way: Install the app and launch it directly or listen to music natively via the PS5's UI. Users can access Apple Music by hitting the PS button and opening the Control Center, selecting Music, and selecting Apple Music from the source list.

"PS5 offers seamless integration with the Apple Music streaming service with background music and music video playback, so players can listen before, during, or after their gameplay session."

Microsoft is spending more into gaming as it ramps up key services like Xbox Game Pass, Project xCloud game streaming, software development, and new console hardware.

Right now Xbox is bigger than its ever been. The brand is now a service that delivers games, content, engagement, and monetization across consoles, mobile phones, tablets, PCs, and soon directly to television sets via native built-in apps.

Microsoft has spent billions to get Xbox where it is today and these investments are paying off. Xbox just achieved a new historic Q1 earnings record of $3.593 billion. This is just the beginning, and Microsoft has continued its aggressive spending and investment into video games.

Announcing the Xbox 2042, the world's most powerful video games console with over 1 million TFLOPs of compute power.

Microsoft just put out a hilarious promo for Battlefield 2042 that details what kind of crazy next-gen games hardware that might exist in 21 years. Sure the world of Battlefield 2042 has literally crumbled under climate change and obliterating world powers, but at least video games are more advanced than ever, right?

The fake advertisement dives into nascent technologies like quantum computing, neural interfaces, special contacts you can pop into your eyes for controller-less interactions, and a full holographic display. This reminds me of the super Wii console used in that episode of South Park where Cartman freezes himself to go to the future.

EA DICE has announced that Battlefield is receiving its first non-binary character, which will launch with Battlefield 2042 as a new Specialist: Emma "Sundance" Rosier.

Battlefield 2042 fans noticed that descriptions for the character had "they/them" pronouns, so one gamer asked EA DICE what was going on. EA DICE community manager Adam Freeman explained: "Yep. Sundance is non-binary and uses the Pronouns They/Them".

"Sundance" has her their own special traits and abilities, with Emma being from France and is an Assault-class Specialist with a wingsuit that allows for faster entry in objectives and tactical situations. Sundance also has Smart Explosives, which can be used to take down enemy aircraft.

Microsoft makes history with a new all-time record for Xbox's Q1 revenues, driven by a massive spike in console sales.

Microsoft kicked off its Fiscal Year 2022 with a bang. Xbox earnings hit $3.593 billion, up 16% year-over-year and a new high for any Q1 period in the history of Microsoft gaming. Microsoft says this uptick in revenues was driven by a huge 166% jump in Xbox console sales primarily due to significant Xbox Series X/S demand. This Q1 performance follows another record year for Xbox with over $15.37 billion earned through FY21.

"Gaming revenue increased $501 million or 16% driven by growth in Xbox hardware," Microsoft writes in an SEC filing.