Gaming - Page 458

Microsoft confirms that Game Pass subscribers are not only playing more games, but spending more too--a trend that's been established since the service debuted over 4 years ago.

The Game Pass subscription has transformed Microsoft's games business. The service is so powerful that it's sent shockwaves through the entire industry, so much that many major publishers like EA and Ubisoft are mimicking it. Since Game Pass has launched in 2017, Microsoft has seen consistent revenue growth and the service has become one of the must-have subscriptions in the world's most lucrative entertainment industry.

How is Game Pass doing today? Better than ever. In a recent earnings call, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella confirms that Game Pass subscribers are spending more time and money on games versus non-subscribers.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella confirms that demand for the next-gen Xbox Series X and S consoles has been higher than any other generation.

The new Xbox Series X/S consoles are the fastest-selling hardware in the history of Microsoft's games division. "Xbox Series S and X are our fastest-selling consoles ever, with more consoles sold life-to-date than any previous generation," Nadella said during a recent Q4 FY2021 earnings call. The CEO also confirms Microsoft is "all in on gaming."

Xbox gaming just reported a record $15 billion in revenues throughout FY2021, beating its previous record yearly revenues by almost $3.8 billion. Microsoft confirms that hardware sales were up 172% throughout FY21 driven by the Series X/S duo.

PAX West will require all attendees and exhibitors to show proof of COVID-19 vaccination records or a negative COVID test result.

PAX West, held from September 3-6 in Seattle, Washington, will have strict health guidelines for everyone at the event. Today organizing company ReedPop delivered a statement confirming workers, attendees, and exhibitors will have to be vaccinated for COVID-19 or negative for the virus in order to get in.

"We are pleased to announce that, in line with the recommendations of state and local public health authorities, we will be implementing a vaccination or negative COVID-19 test requirement for everyone at PAX West.

Activision shares dropped to the lowest point in the last 6 months amid recent abuse allegations, en masse employee pushback, stalled development, and news of worker strikes.

Activision-Blizzard shares dropped over 8% today as developers prepare to strike in protest against the company's abuse allegations. The games giant, who generated $8.3 billion last year, is facing a scathing lawsuit that alleges multiple instances of harassment, abuse, and discrimination of female employees.

Company executives have since responded internally to the claims, which over 2,000 employees called "insulting and abhorrent" in a recent petition.

Today Microsoft announced its FY2021 figures, showing record growth in its video games business.

Microsoft has enjoyed consistent year-over-year growth since it transformed Xbox from a console into a cross-platform service ecosystem. From the introduction of its industry-defining Xbox Game Pass service in FY2017, Microsoft has seen its Xbox segment take off not unlike its new Flight Simulator game.

This year marks the biggest spike in games revenue earnings. Throughout FY2021, Microsoft generated over $15 billion in earnings from Xbox (+37.2% year-over-year), including game and hardware sales, digital services, microtransactions, and multi-generation hardware.

After tons of requests from fans, Ubisoft is finally adding in one-handed swords to Assassin's Creed Valhalla.

AC Valhalla had a ton of weapons at launch: Two-handed claymores, spears, axes, and you could even equip two shields at once. The arsenal was missing something big, though: One-handed swords. Including new weapons isn't an easy task and takes lots of work from developers, who have to make textures, animations, and other effects for each individual blade. But months after release, single longswords are being added with the new Sigrblot Festival update.

Valhalla's latest v1.3.0 update adds a bunch of new features including one-handed swords and a level-scaling system. The NPC scaling options will hopefully add more challenge and variety to combat, and have four difficulties:

Assassin's Creed Valhalla's massive Siege of Paris expansion is set to launch August 12, where it will chronicle one of the most pivotal and bloody events in French history.

In just a few weeks, Ubisoft will set fire to its home country with the new Siege of Paris expansion in AC Valhalla. The update is the most ambitious to date and features the triumphant return of classic assassination-style missions (dubbed black box missions), but the real meat and potatoes is the historical storyline.

The expansion will highlight the brutal Siege of Paris where tens of thousands of Vikings attacked Charles the Fat's forces and tried to take the city. They were eventually paid to leave, but not until months of destruction took place.

The Mortal Kombat franchise has now sold 73 million units worldwide, making it gaming's best-selling fighting franchise of all time.

Today WB Games announced some big milestones for Mortal Kombat. Total series sales are now 73 million, beating out the runner up Super Smash Bros. by some 8 million units, and Mortal Kombat 11 will soon beat MKX as the best-selling MK of all time. WB says that Mortal Kombat 11 is now up to 12 million sales thanks in no small part to multiple re-releases, and re-confirms the game is the fastest-selling in franchise history. While MK might be the king of fighters, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate has decimated MK11 with nearly 200% more sales.

The publisher also confirms the Mortal Kombat mobile game has hit a whopping 138 million installs and has millions of DAUs.

Death Stranding is a success with 5 million copies sold combined on both PlayStation 4 and PC, but the game didn't hit those numbers nearly as fast as other popular first-party PlayStation games.

Kojima Productions today announced Death Stranding has sold over 5 million copies on the PlayStation Store, Steam, and on store shelves. The PC version of the game also made 505 Games $27 million in 2020.

"With Death Stranding being the first title developed out of Kojima Productions, from a sales perspective, it has performed quite well. As of March 2021, Death Stranding has sold through over five million units worldwide on PlayStation 4 and PC," Kojima Productions publishing lead Jay Boor tells GamesIndustry.biz.

Square Enix is releasing anew remastered collection of old-school Final Fantasy RPGs, but they're not coming to consoles at launch. That might change sometime in the future.

A new Q&A session reveals a bunch of details about the Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster games. Square Enix confirms some great convenience features like an interactive monster bestiary that marks locations of enemies on your map.

"The monsters you encounter are registered in the list, but there is a mode to arrange them like a habitat map on the world map, and it is very fun to fill the list. In the smartphone version, you can also battle with the monsters registered in the picture book. You can even make the background a photo taken with a camera,"

Ubisoft still thinks a Rainbow Six Siege sequel is entirely unnecessary and plans to continue updating the base game over time.

Rainbow Six Siege will turn six years old this year, but Ubisoft isn't ready to make a sequel just yet. In a recent AmA with developers, R6 creative director Leroy Athanassoff confirms the team has no plans for a second game. Ubisoft said the same thing back in 2018 and even expects the game to last for another 10 years.

"Siege is an evolving game - the Siege of the future will be dramatically different from today's Siege, to the point where we could call it Siege 2. However, as a team, we strongly believe we can bring about these changes in an incremental way, within the current Siege framework," Athanassoff said.

Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais confirms the Steam Deck will have options built right into the OS to help optimize performance and battery life.

Valve's new Steam Deck is a full PC built into a handheld, complete with mod support, multiple OS support and your entire Steam library. Playing PC games on-the-go is pretty demanding on battery life, though, even when targeting 800p 30FPS. That's why Valve is adding options like a frame rate limiter to help keep thermals and battery usage down.

"The 30 FPS target refers to the floor of what we consider playable in our performance testing; games we've tested and shown have consistently met and exceeded that bar so far. There will also be an optional built-in FPS limiter to fine-tune perf vs. battery life," Valve's Griffais says.

Like the rest of the game, Battlefield 2042's hugely ambitious new Portal gametype won't stay static after release.

Battlefield 2042 is an online-only game so it's critical EA and DICE continually release new content over time. DICE says they plan to have four seasons for BF2042 that add in new maps, weapons, and specialists to fundamentally change up the meta--that's on top of regular tweaks and adjustments.

The devs want to make Battlefield 2042's new content available in Portal too. There's no word on simultaneous parity or when exactly Portal will get the new BF2042 DLC content

Back in 2007, game dev studio Factor 5 was working on a Superman game for PlayStation 3. The economic recession killed the game, but a lead designer on the project gives us a look at early prototypes and what could've been.

The cancelled Superman game was codenamed Blue Steel, and was a huge nostalgic throwback to the early days of Superman. It took place in the 1940s with a Metropolis filled with art deco and Packards and Chryslers all over the streets.

Blue Steel was a third-person action game where you ran (or flew) around GTA-style and beat up bad guys. There was also Superman 64-style flying mechanics (though Blue Steel looks infinitely better than that horrible childhood catastrophe) complete with a staggering level of verticality. Kal-el could of course soar, float, and even grab enemies and smash them through destructible buildings. It also looks like General Zod would've been a playable character.

We've all heard about swatting over the years, where someone online swats someone -- the process of faking an emergency call to the police, who descend on the victim's house thinking they're about to, or have just killed someone.

It's happened again, where this time a 60-year-old grandfather was killed in Bethpage, Tennesse -- all for his @tennessee Twitter handle. A bunch of minors in the US and UK used Discord to mobilize, swatting Mark Herring who died in April 2020, collapsing to the ground having a heart attack when the police showed up at his door.

The minors simply wanted his @tennessee handle on Twitter, a "rare username worth thousands of dollars". Herring's granddaughter Corinna Fitch, explained that then-minor Shane Sonderman was part of a criminal campaign to force Herring to provide his username, and then Sonderman posted his full address and personal details onto Discord.

Respawn's next game will apparently be another singleplayer adventure title, and it may be separate from Jedi: Fallen Order 2.

Respawn put up a few new job listings for its incubation team that confirms a new singleplayer adventure game is in the works. So what exactly is Respawn working on? We don't know for sure, but it could be a new IP. Here's what we know.

Studio creative director Mohammed Alavi shared a few incubation job pages on Twitter that confirmed the game is in early pre-production phases. Respawn describes its incubation team as a small and compact group of specialists that have a lot more freedom to shape a new game--in other words this project isn't coming out any time soon.

2K Games releases screenshots of NBA 2K22's next-gen visuals on PlayStation 5, showing high-end realism and effects.

Take-Two and 2K Games have promised big things from this year's NBA 2K game, including a bunch of new modes and impressive in-game performance. NBA 2K22 will be best on next-gen consoles thanks to new optimizations like ultra-fast loading, 4K visuals and textures and lighting systems, and exclusive game modes.

In a recent update post 2K Games outlines what to expect from NBA 2K22 while also showing what all-stars like Candace Parker, Luka Doncic, Dirk Nowitzki and the Washington Wizards' Rui Hachimura look like in-game.

Eight years after launch, GTA Online continues breaking records and shows no signs of slowing down.

GTA Online's new Los Santos Tuners is the latest record-breaking update. Rockstar confirms Los Santos Tuners has added more players than any other update, even the recent Cayo Perico Heist. This shows the massive power of GTA Online's player onboarding, retention, and return rate, all thanks to the massive 140 million game sales install base. Rockstar has proven time and time again that gamers will show up for all GTA Online content updates.

Los Santos Tuners added "more players joined GTA Online for the launch of Los Santos Tuners than any update ever!"Rockstar said on Twitter. The devs are adding 250,000 GTA cash to everyone's accounts as a thank you.

After nearly three years on the market, Fallout 76 is finally getting some semblance of mod support.

Fallout just isn't Fallout without mods. In fact, Bethesda Game Studios RPGs simply aren't the same without mods. In tandem with the creation kit and console commands, you can do anything in Fallout. That's really why I think Fallout 76 failed; it restricted player freedom by removing all mod support and tried to monetize the things that were previously free, like new skins, custom base designs, etc. Now Bethesda is injecting some of the basic principles that mods offered into Fallout 76--freedom, customization, and fun.

Fallout 76's new Fallout Worlds feature is basically Fallout 76 custom games. It's sort of like mods without the total control previous BGS games offer. Essentially Bethesda lets you create or access game instances with custom parameters--infinite ammo, infinite AP, extra loot, etc.

DICE is only getting a one-month headstart on Battlefield 2042's open beta playtesting.

At the recent EA Play Live showcase, DICE and EA confirm that Battlefield 2042's open beta testing will start sometime in September. Anyone who pre-orders any edition of the game will get early access alongside EA Play subscribers, but an official date hasn't been revealed. The beta will be held on PC, next-gen consoles, and PS4 and Xbox One systems.

DICE hasn't discussed its beta plans in detail just yet. The devs will hold a closed technical preview throughout the end of July to help pave the way for the beta. Expect a plethora of modes and features from the final game to be missing and we expect this to be a significant undertaking given the game's huge 128-player warfare. It's unknown if Conquest or even the new Battlefield Portal custom games mode will be available during the beta.