Gaming - Page 562

The Embracer Group's annual operating income jumps 35% on the backs of strong game segment performance, and the company and expects this year will deliver strong earnings with a 10-game lineup.

The Embracer Group (formerly THQ Nordic) recently announced its FY20 financials, and the results are pretty good. Overall net sales are up slightly to $527 million, but operating income jumped 35% to $104 million due to sturdy games earnings--THQ Nordic saw a big 50% spike on the heels of big catalog earnings, Deep Silver was up thanks to Metro Exodus' latest expansion, and Coffee Stain was up over 100%.

Profit is down 10% year-over-year to $28.59 million due to increase expense spending of $602 million, and the lack of a big AAA release comparable to Metro Exodus (which was the company's record earner). We talk even more about Embracer's expense spending here, including depreciation and amortization of game dev and IP costs.

The Embracer Group (aka THQ Nordic) is ramping up expenses on games development and IP rights as it prepares a massive pipeline of games.

While scouting Embracer Group's latest financials, I noticed some interesting things on its spending habits. Expenses on intangible assets is up quite a bit, namely with game development and IP depreciation values.

Right now Embracer is working on 118 new games and 69 of them haven't been announced. So it makes sense the company is spending more to fund these projects across its 3,000-strong team of worldwide employees.

Microsoft Flight Simulator is shaping up beautifully, with a batch of new screenshots released to prove it. The new screenshots come from the on-going alpha build of the game, and tease the new Boeing 747-8i, too.

The new screenshots of Flight Simulator come from a new post on the official website, with alpha testers submitting their screenshots. These alpha testers include Simtom112, King6EAR, Speedwoblz, Anark1a2004tj, Superdelphinus, OperatorLand468, SulfonicCarp982, R4microds, and BER811.

The Flight Simulator team teased that there will be new invites being sent out in the coming hours, with a new patch arriving to the game on May 28. A bunch of stuff was tweaked with the new Alpha 3 (built 1.3.9.0) that was released on May 14, with a gigantic list of full patch notes here.

There are hundreds of millions of people stuck at home right now over the COVID-19 pandemic, with millions of them working from home -- and NVIDIA knows that, and embraces the fact.

During NVIDIA's recent Q1 2021 earnings call, company CFO Colette Kress said that gaming hours on their GeForce platform saw an uptick of 50% in the recent quarter. This is all thanks to those people forced to stay at home, and now many of them are gaming far more.

NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang said that the work-from-home model that companies are pushing, with the likes of the largest social media company in the world -- Facebook -- wanting to see 50% of its workforce working from home by 2030.

The Embracer Group (formerly THQ Nordic) now has a staggering 118 projects in development across its myriad of studios, up from Q3's 96 projects.

In its recent earnings report, The Embracer Group outlined its new slate of in-development games. Embracer now has 118 games in the works, up 22 games from last quarter's numbers. And 69 of them haven't been revealed.

So what changed? Embracer's buyout of Saber Interactive raised the project count, along with other unannounced titles from other studios.

Atari has teamed up with Litecoin to help kick off their new Atari Token cryptocurrency, and you'll actually be able to use Litecoin to buy the new Atari VCS console.

Atari is kind of a strange company. First, they announced the Atari VCS, a new re-vamped console that merges old-school and modern gaming together for a rather steepish $249 price tag. Then they announced special gaming-themed hotels and resorts (which actually sound pretty awesome). Now they've confirmed more plans to jump into crypto and are partnering with the Litecoin Foundation to make it happen.

This team-up establishes an exchange between Litecoin and Atari Token. Users can trade Litecoin for the Atari Token, and even use Litecoin to buy Atari products like its upcoming VCS console.

2020's big Call of Duty game is called Black Ops: Cold War, sources familiar with Activision's plans tell Eurogamer.

There's been lots of rumors about Call of Duty 2020, and now we have multiple high-level sources corroborating past reports. While Activision has yet to formally announce the game, we actually know a fair amount about Black Ops: Cold War.

Rumor has it the game spans the multi-decade timeline of the Cold War, from the 1950s all the way to the Vietnam era. This year's Black Ops game, sub-titled Cold War, will be a prequel to the best-selling mainline series and should explore and connect the different timeframes.

Doom Eternal's inclusion of Denuvo Anti-Cheat has been massively contested from PC fans, and now id is taking it out. But the developer asserts anti-cheat wasn't causing the performance crashes from Update 1.

In a recent Reddit post, id Software's Marty Stratton outlined some interesting info about Doom Eternal and DAC. After Update 1, which introduced enhanced demons alongside the kernel-level DAC, gamers reported crashes and other stability issues. id says these hitches were caused by VRAM/memory code changes, and a cosmetic skin bug.

"Through our investigation, we discovered and have fixed several crashes in our code related to customizable skins. We were also able to identify and fix a number of other memory-related crashes that should improve overall stability for players. All of these fixes will be in our next PC update. I'd like to note that some of these issues were very difficult to reproduce and we want to thank a number of our community members who worked directly with our engineers to identify and help reproduce these issues.

CD Projekt RED has two franchises, full stop: Cyberpunk 2077, and The Witcher. So what's next after Cyberpunk? A new Witcher game, of course. It's a long ways away, but CDPR teases that it could be a prequel starring Cirilla Fiona Elen Riannon.

In a recent interview with VG247, CDPR's writer Jakub Szamałek says they want to develop Ciri's character more and highlight more of her story. This could happen in a new fully-fledged AAA Witcher game, and if so, it'd be a prequel that maps out the events before the major Geralt-focused Witcher series.

"I regret we didn't get to explore Ciri's past a bit more. She's such an amazingly rich and complex character," Szamalek said.

Can you believe that Solitaire is 30 years old? Microsoft originally launched Solitaire as a part of Windows 3.0 all the way back on May 22, 1990 -- and since then, has become one of the most iconic pieces of software in OS history.

Solitaire was originally created by Wes Cherry, who was a bored intern at Microsoft who started in 1988. Cherry told the Great Big Story back in 2017 that he "was not paid a single cent" for his work in Solitaire, which Microsoft says that 500 million people have played in the last 10 years -- and has 100 million hands played each and every single day.

Microsoft expanded Solitaire into its own beast, with the Microsoft Solitaire Collection which contains Spider, FreeCell, Pyramid, and TriPeaks -- as well as the original Klondike. They have transitioned to mobile over the years, and each pack things like XP and monthly subscription options.

Cloud Imperium Games has made Star Citizen free-to-play for the next 11 days, with teh developer unleashing Star Citizen as a free download until June 1, 2020.

You will have the chance to take some ships out for a flight as well, with in-game ship manufacturers rotating their selections of ships so that each time you log back into Star Citizen, you can try out something new.

Not only that, but Cloud Imperium Games is letting Star Citizen's check out the Hologram Hall, where it will tease a bunch of ships that are in production. The game is still in its alpha stage, and has been for a considerable chunk of time now -- even after raising a record-breaking $300 million and new investments of $17.25 million in the latest rounds of funding.

We all know that Sony's next generation PlayStation 5 console is going to be much faster than the current-gen PlayStation 4, but 100x faster? Yeah, that is kinda bonkers. It's all thanks to the ultra-fast custom SSD the PlayStation 5 has, which you can read more about right here.

Sony president and CEO Kenichiro Yoshida released the hype engines on the PlayStation 5, where he recently said that the PS5 will be "100 times faster" than the PS4. Yoshida hyped the PlayStation 5 up during Sony's recent corporate marketing strategy meeting, where he said that the PS5 is "100 times faster" than the PS4.

Yoshida continued: "In order to further enhance the sense of immersion in games, we expect to improve not just the resolution, but the speed of games. For example, through a custom‐designed high‐speed SSD, we plan to realize game data processing speeds that are approximately 100 times faster than PS4".

The internet blew up last week with Grand Theft Auto 5 being offered for free on the Epic Games Store, but now it is time for Civilization 6 to have some time in the light.

Civilization 6 is free right now on the Epic Games Store, a game that normally retails for up to $60 -- now free to download on the Epic Games Store. All you need in order to get Civilization 6 for free is an Epic Games Store, and once you're signed up just enable two-factor authentication and voila: Civilization 6 is free.

Civilization 6 originally launched on the PC and Mac back in October 2016, but later got ported onto iOS in 2017, the portable Nintendo Switch in 2018, and then both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 in late 2019.

Grand Theft Auto V made more money in April 2020 than it did in the last 7 years on the market, analyst firm SuperData reports.

Grand Theft Auto V is a money-printing machine that just won't stop. GTA Online its single best month of microtransaction earnings in the game's seven-year history, outpacing 2019's massive surge with the Diamond Casino and Resort update. The news comes on the heels of the best-ever MAU growth as well as huge full game sales--GTA V has now sold-in 130 million copies worldwide, pushing 10 million copies in a quarter alone.

"Grand Theft Auto V saw its highest monthly spending on in-game content ever during April. The title will also see a significant boost to its PC player numbers in May due to a free giveaway that caused the Epic Games Store to crash," SuperData writes in its latest April games report.

We've compiled a handy chart of the 13 best-earning video game companies of the 2019-2020 fiscal and calendar periods. Who conquers the charts?

Earnings season is almost over, and rather than keep all the data separate, I decided to throw everything together for a big square-off. The goal is to weigh the performance of gaming's top-earning publishers and games-makers and get a better idea of who's dominating the charts. The results pretty much speak for themselves, but some context is in order.

Let's go over the data real fast. The numbers compare games net revenue earnings, not total company earnings, and conversions are based on exchange rates provided in company documents or the rates when periods ended (e.g. March 31, 2020).

COVID-19 lockdowns have helped the games industry reach new record $1.46 billion, the highest all-time earnings for April.

Today the NPD Group delivered its April 2020 games report, and the results are mind-boggling. US spending on games reached a historic high of $1.46 billion, up 73% year-over-year and become the best-performing April month in the country's history.

Hardware rose by an astronomical 163% to $420 million and boosted April '20 as the highest-earning HW sales month since April '08. The huge spike was driven primarily by Nintendo Switch sales, but PS4 and Xbox One sales were also up 160% YoY. NPD Group's Mat Piscatella notes that the Switch is now the best-selling console of all time in the U.S. year-to-date, overshadowing Nintendo's legendary Wii console.

Amazon might've tipped its hand with a hugely innovative feature for Project Tempo, its upcoming game streaming service.

The Streaming Wars are upon us. First there was PlayStation Now, then Google's Stadia, and soon Microsoft's Project xCloud. Now Amazon is entering the ring with Project Tempo, a service that taps the full billion-dollar might of Twitch's infrastructure. Amazon has lofty goals and ambitious with Project Tempo that could transform the games industry forever.

Project Tempo's secret sauce might fundamentally change how game and content streaming coalesce. Tempo could let users launch games natively from Twitch. Tempo might not even have an actual launcher and simply use Twitch.tv's billion-dollar ecosystem.

Fortnite is a lot of things: A game, a huge advertising billboard, a melting pot for transmedia promotion. Now it'll soon become the world's biggest drive-in movie theater.

Film companies have a new tactic to help save the movie business during COVID-19: Using Fortnite as a free movie screening platform. Christopher Nolan's new film Tenet will be the first-ever movie that's streamed in a video game--the full feature-length film will be shown on Fortnite's virtual Party Royale stage when it debuts this Summer.

Right now only the Tenet trailer is being shown in Fortnite, but the full film will be shown too.

EA has out of nowhere announced that it will be releasing the source code for both Command & Conquer and its sequel Red Alert, with the source code to be released under a General Public Licence on June 5. June 5 is a big day for the C&C franchise.

Why is June 5 so important? It's because it's the day EA will be launching Command & Conquer Remastered Collection. But EA making good with the modding community before the day the C&C Remaster comes out is glorious news. Jim Vessella, the Producer on the C&C Remaster at EA took to Reddit, where he said:

"This is a key moment for Electronic Arts, the C&C community, and the gaming industry, as we believe this will be one of the first major RTS franchises to open source their source code under the GPL. Along with the inclusion of a new Map Editor, these open-source DLLs should assist users to design maps, create custom units, replace art, alter gameplay logic, and edit data".

Sea of Thieves has been an exclusive to the Windows 10 store until just now, with Rare ready to unleash the Steam version of the game on June 3, 2020 -- for $39.99. Check out the trailer below:

The new Steam version of Sea of Thieves will have cross-play support with the Windows 10 store version of the game, as well as the Xbox version of the game. This means you can jump on the same ship with your friends, no matter the platform, and take to the high seas together.

You will need to sign into your Xbox Live account with the Steam version, linking your Steam game to your Xbox gamer tag, which is a drag. If you purchased the Windows 10 or Xbox version of Sea of Thieves, sorry me hearties -- you'll need to buy the Steam version for $40.