Gaming - Page 484

EA and DICE are days away from the reveal teaser trailer for the next-gen Battlefield game, with leaker Tom Henderson not stopping his tweets about the game. Now we're talking about graphics:

Henderson tweeted out that covering his tweets is breaking the NDA on the game for some YouTubers and journalists who have had hands-on time with the game, or been pre-briefed on it -- but I haven't, and I have no NDA and can write whatever the hell I want to.

With that, "CharlesVFX2" asked Henderson if we would be "blown away" by the in-game graphics of Battlefield to which Henderson simply replied: "It looks like a movie" which is good enough for me. If Henderson is right, then Battlefield should well and truly blow us away in the graphical department -- as well as the environmental destruction and physics side of things.

Microsoft takes a play from Epic Games by adjusting its PC games revenue split in favor of developers.

Under Microsoft's new revenue split, developers will get to keep 88% of all earnings from PC games sold on the Microsoft Store. The previous split used to be 70-30, and the new one will be 88-12 in favor of gam devs.

This follows the history-making 88-12 revenue split offered on the Epic Games Store. Microsoft hopes to invigorate developer interest and pull more focus away from Steam, PC gaming's biggest storefront, and onto Microsoft's online shop.

EA is giving out Battlefield V in an attempt to soak up hype revenues and engagement ahead of the big new Battlefield 6 reveal.

DICE and EA are about to reveal Battlefield 6, and we suspect the announcement will happen before EA's yearly earnings report on May 11. There's a big period between reveal and launch, though, and Battlefield fans can't jump into the new game right away. EA hopes to capitalize on the new hype by offering Battlefield V to the 47.6 million PS Plus gamers. EA has long stopped caring about BFV sales; for them it's all about the in-game microtransactions. In short, EA wants to spark new engagement levels in a 2+ year old game with free access.

The new Battlefield reveal will be a big deal for EA. The game has been in development for years and will be an explosive next-gen spectacle that shows what DICE's Frostbite engine can do on new PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC hardware. Expect crazy weather effects, ray-traced visuals, high frame rates, ultra-fast loading times, new AI features, and high-end fidelity using 4K visuals and realistic environment photogrammetry. All of this will create what DICE calls a "jaw-dropping experience."

Sony is ramping up investment into its first-party game studios to help propel PlayStation 5 ecosystem to new heights.

Sony just had an incredible year. The company's games division earned over $25 billion in revenues and over $3 billion in profit, more than any firm in the entire industry. FY2020 shattered software sales records and saw the PS4 crest 116 million shipments worldwide. Sony wants to keep this momentum going throughout FY2021 and the long-term future, and that's why they're investing big into their wholly-owned studios.

The tech giant will invest $184 million more this year into its game studios. "In terms of costs, we plan to increase development, personnel and other costs in our in-house studios by approximately 20 billion yen year-on-year as we further strengthen our in-house produced software," Sony CFO Hiroki Totoki said in a recent FY2020 earnings report.

Sony's PlayStation 4 console has sold over 1.5 billion games across its lifetime, beating any other previous platform in history--including the mighty PlayStation 2.

At 116.1 million units shipped to date, the PS4 won't beat the PS2's titanic 155 million sales. That isn't the case with software. The PS4 has sold an eye-popping 1.562 billion+ games in its lifetime, which is more than the PS2's 1.53 billion, according to figures provided by ResetERA's resident PlayStatician ArmGunar. This data isn't conclusive and only covers FY15 - FY20 so actual PlayStation 4 software sales are even higher.

Q4'20 was a record quarter for game sales with over 338 million software purchases made digitally and physically across PS4 and PS5. 17% of these games were Sony-published titles, underlining the importance of first-party games. 65% of game sales were digital, which is great for Sony who gets to keep 100% of revenues from first-party games sales and 30% of revenues from third-party sales.

GameStop finished its recent share offering and generated a ton of revenue to spend on its new e-commerce transformation.

GameStop's new at-the-market share offering was a big success. The company sold 3.5 million common stock and raised $551 million before fees, commissions, and expenses, which is almost twice as much as the long-term debt that GameStop owes.

The firm will use a portion of the funds to replenish its coffers after wiping out its long-term debt. GameStop announced the senior note redemption earlier this month, and secured a healthy influx of capital with the share offering. GameStop now has no long-term debts.

PlayStation 4 console total cumulative shipments reach 116.1 million, but last year was the system's worst-performing period in history.

Sony is celebrating big news today. The games division made $3.23 billion in profit on $25.04 billion revenues in FY2020, more money than it ever has before, The PS5 has shipped 7.8 million units to date, slightly beating the PS4 by some 200,000 consoles.

Despite the celebrations, the PS4 was the low point in Sony's books. PS4 console shipments are down 56% as the install base hits a 116.1 million peak. In FY2020, Sony shipped only 5.8 million PS4 consoles compared to the 13.4 million it shipped in FY2019. Every quarter in FY20 was a new all-time shipment low for the PS4.

Sony's next-gen PlayStation 5 has slightly outsold the PS4 at launch as console demand soars.

The PS5 has sold-in (shipped) 7.8 million units in Q3-Q4, Sony reveals, which is about 200,000 more units than its predecessor. Comparatively, Sony had shipped 7.6 million PS4s through Q3-Q4 FY2013. Sony expects to sell over 14.8 million PlayStation 5 consoles in FY2021, company CFO Hiroki Totoki reveals.

The company made 517.1 billion yen (roughly $4.9 billion) from PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 hardware sales in FY2020, roughly 12% of total gaming earnings.

Sales for Monster Hunter Rise keep rising, and Capcom reports the game has now hit over 6 million sales.

Despite only releasing on the Nintendo Switch, Capcom's latest Monster Hunter game is selling incredibly well. At 6 million sales, MonHun Rise game has already surpassed other modern Capcom games like Street Fighter V (5.2 million) and is eyeing Street Fighter II (6.3 million).

Monster Hunter Rise managed to jump by 2 million copies--as of Q3'20 the game had sold 4 million copies, and now it's breaking 6 million. The sales milestone marks yet another achievement for Capcom's string of record-breaking earnings and its FY2021 period should be no different. The company is already making major strides into the new fiscal year with heavy-hitters like Resident Evil Village, which is slated to release in early May.

Xbox has made record revenues for three quarters in a row, and FY2021 will set a new high watermark for the gaming division.

Microsoft today announced its results for Q3'21 (Jan - March 2021) and confirmed another quarter of consistent Xbox growth. The games segment generated a whopping $3.533 billion in Q3'21, up a substantial $1.2 billion (+50%) over Q3'20. The growth driven by hardware, which was up +232% thanks to Xbox Series X/S sales, and Game Pass services/game sales which increased by $739 million (+34%) year-over-year.

Between Q1-Q3 FY2021, Xbox gaming has made more money than any other full year of earnings. With one quarter to spare, Xbox pulled in $11.657 billion in total Q1-Q3 revenues. The second-highest point was FY2020 with $11.575 billion.

After this final update releases in May, Friday the 13th The Game will enter maintenance mode and dedicated servers will be taken offline.

Friday the 13th The Game is winding down into sunset mode. On May 4, the game's final update will roll out addressing tons of bugs across all platforms. Like Jason Voorhees, F13 won't exactly die; although dedicated servers will be switched off the game will stay alive via peer-to-peer matchmaking. The forums will also become read-only archives in May.

The reality is Gun Media is moving on from the game due to a legal snafu tying up the rights to the Friday the 13th franchise. In 2018, Gun announced it could no longer provide new content for the game. Illfonic and Gun had an ambitious plan for post-release content that was never fully realized.

CD Projekt just released new stats on GOG.com's 2020 earnings, showing strong revenue and user spikes throughout the year.

Cyberpunk 2077 has supercharged CD Projekt's earnings, spiking yearly revenues to record highs. The game sold a whopping 13.7 million copies, most of which were on PC--in fact the game sold more copies on PC than PS4 and Xbox combined. Most of the copies were sold on Steam and the Epic Store, but CD Projekt did generate impressive sales on its wholly-owned GOG.com storefront.

According to new metrics, GOG generated roughly $91.8 million in revenues (343.74 million PLN), up a strong 114% over last year. CD Projekt says 9.6% of Cyberpunk 2077's sales on PC were from GOG (about 739,200 copies), and Witcher 3 also had strong adoption on the platform as well.

After more than 20 years of Street Fighter, Capcom's legendary Yoshinori Ono is leaving the company for something new.

Today Yoshinori Ono announced he is leaving Capcom to serve as COO, President and CEO of Delight Works, the team behind the successful Fate Grand/Order mobile game. Ono plans to depart in May and will join Delight Works to "manage the company from a more multifaceted perspective," a press release states.

"On May 1st, I will be moving from Capcom to another company. I'm going to be working at a studio that is a little different from the one I'm used to. I'm also going to be looking at development from a different perspective than in the past," Ono said on Twitter.

Hot off the heels of Wasteland 3, inXile is developing a new project that has studio head Brian Fargo quite excited.

inXile just shipped Wasteland 3 last year, but the studio is already hard at work on their next big game. Earlier reports said the project could be a VR-based experience with multiplayer, and now inXile's boss Brian Fargo (of Interplay and Fallout fame) teases next-gen visuals/design for the next game. There's just one issue: inXile won't have anything ready for a while.

"I know that teasing is cruel but I am so excited about the visuals, design and writing for our next big game. Unfortunately you won't see what I see for quite a long time," Fargo said on Twitter.

SEGA plans to mine its rich vein of characters and IP to sell NFT (non-fungible tokens) artwork in 2021, the company today announced.

After the first bit of digital art sold for tens of millions, everyone is jumping into NFTs; concept artists, digital mavericks, and of course, games publishers. First Square Enix jumped into the NFT craze, and now SEGA is following suit.

The company's motivations for NFT adoption are clear and SEGA is simply chasing new earnings avenues. SEGA's 9-month earnings slid in 2020 due to coronavirus interruption of segments like amusement and pachinko; Net sales were down 25%, operating income was down 51%, and total profits were negative throughout the period as the company weathered COVID-19 shocks as well as new internal restructuring plans.

Sony today announced it will hold a special State of Play event for its next big PlayStation 5 exclusive Ratchet & Clank Rift Apart.

Insomniac just showed new gameplay footage for Rift Apart that flexes the PlayStation 5's processing and SSD power. This is just the tip of the iceberg--Sony plans to show off a huge 15-minute chunk of footage at a new State of Play on Thursday, April 29 at 5PM EST.

Insomniac devs should be at the show to discuss details including DualSense integration, Rift Apart's ultra-fast loading times thanks to the PS5's high-end PCIe 4.0 SSD tech (seriously, this game handles world transitions so incredibly smoothly), and possibly some info on the game's ray-traced illumination effects. We could also get more info on the game's display/performance modes that should include a 4K 30FPS option and a 60FPS option with dynamic resolution scaling.

Third-person PvPvE shooter Scavengers aims to push multiplayer gaming to new heights with game sessions that host thousands of players at once.

Scavengers is among the first major games to implement Improbable's SpatialOS technology, which offers a flexible infrastructure for online-based games. Armed with SpatialOS, Midwinter is experimenting with some truly mind-boggling player numbers in Scavengers.

According to PC Gamer, who played an experimental internal dev test, Scavengers is capable of hosting thousands of players at once in a new open-ended sandbox mode. The session wasn't bound by the typical PvPvE rules found in other Scavengers gametypes; instead it was more freeform, a kind of world where developers could play god, flinging players across the map, spawning hordes of enemies, and various other physicality effects like growing to monumental proportions.

In a scramble for profitability as its CEO steps down, GameStop will start "aggressively" pursuing new consumer product sales and expanding its inventory.

GameStop's CEO George Sherman will step down soon, leaving the board leader-less in a critical transition point. Chewy billionaire Ryan Cohen has laid out an internal plan to supercharge company earnings, and sources tell Bloomberg this strategy involves two major things: transforming its customer service teams and "aggressively expanding" the company's product selection.

Cohen currently leads the newly-formed Strategic Planning and Capital Allocation Committee, which has orchestrated key plans to turn GameStop into a digital e-commerce titan. The idea is to offer products through omni-channel distribution (in-store and online) that range from entertainment, collectibles, and gaming hardware.

Sony releases a new gameplay trailer for Ratchet & Clank Rift Apart that shows just how far Insomniac can push the PlayStation 5.

Following Spider Man Miles Morales and Demon's Souls, the next PS5 exclusive might be the best one yet. Insomniac is doing some impressive things with the PS5's power (they're using AI machine learning for Miles Morales, for example) and Ratchet & Clank Rift Apart is no exception. The new Ratchet & Clank game can hit ray-traced visuals, a smooth 60FPS frame rate, and virtually no loading times thanks to the PS5's supercharged 5.5GB/sec PCIe 4.0 SSD tech.

The studio dropped a new trailer showcasing the real-time raytraced visuals, loading time breakthroughs, and story beats. Apart from the high-end graphics, one of the main innovations with Rift Apart is the instant loading sequences between worlds. Players can break through reality barriers and hop into other parallel dimensions with seamless transitions and zero loading times. Everything looks buttery smooth.

Ubisoft is tacking an extra week onto Assassin's Creed Valhalla update times in an effort to add more polish and quality to post-launch content.

Ubisoft is taking criticism to heart and now plans to slow down Assassin's Creed Valhalla content updates to give more time on each seasonal event. The most recent Ostara Festival event was met with frustration from gamers, and Ubisoft is listening. Instead of rolling out a new title update every 4 weeks, Ubisoft will release new content every 5 weeks. The idea is to give developers extra time to craft seasonal events and rewards to keep players engaged with the product well after release.

"We recognize that some of our recent title updates may not have met your expectations or been up to our standards,"Ubisoft said in a recent blog post.