Gaming - Page 57

More than half of Capcom's 9-month game sales were made on PC, and the publisher reiterates its annual target of 54 million game sales for the entire fiscal year.

Capcom is one of the most interesting video game companies that has successfully made a digital-first transition. The company now makes 94% of its earnings from digital across PC and console. Digital is a potent gateway because it allows Capcom to make strategic discounts on its back catalog games, with titles dropping below the $20 mark (and sometimes lower). As a result, Capcom has been able to consistently rack up tens of millions of game sales per year.

This trend is continuing into FY25, where Capcom has now made most of its digital game sales on PC. The latest earnings results reveal that over the first 9 months of FY25, PC sales account for 55% of total game purchases throughout the period, and a whopping 58% of digital game sales.

Mobile titan Supercell reveals key details about its agreements with Tencent as the United States probes the Chinese company's dealings in the video game industry.

The US is taking aim at Chinese entertainment giant Tencent, and is seeking specific details on the myriad of minority and majority stakes in the gaming market. The pretext for the scrutiny is national security, as was the case with ByteDance's ownership of TikTok (which has since been spun out as a joint venture).

As we've covered multiple times on TweakTown, Tencent is one of the biggest video game groups in the world, having achieved this feat through a multitude of carefully-curated investments. Tencent has varying stakes and ownerships in some of gaming's largest players, including Epic Games (28%)--whose game is routinely in the top 5 best-earning video games on an annual basis for multiple years running--as well as Clash of Clans creator Supercell (majority ownership), and Riot Games (full ownership).

Ubisoft has a bunch of new Assassin's Creed games in the works, including announced games like Hexe and Invictus, as well as multiple unannounced projects that are deeper in the pipeline.

Now that Ubisoft has restructured its business, the publisher is ready to highlight what's next for its prestige, billion-dollar Assassin's Creed brand. The publisher indicates that 2026 is shaping up to be a strong year for the franchise, with in-development games like the sinister, witch-themed Assassin's Creed Hexe progressing well.

Hexe, which was actually revealed years ago during a big franchise update, will be a "unique, darker, narrative-driven Assassin's Creed experience, set during a pivotal moment in history." It's unclear whether or not this game will launch in 2026, but it's implied that Ubisoft is targeting a release this year for Hexe.

Bungie highlights the post-release seasonal content model for its new extraction shooter Marathon, giving players an idea of what to expect when the game drops tomorrow on March 5.

Marathon will be here soon, and as the first new game since Sony's $3.7 billion acquisition of the developer, the $40 live shooter could be a make-or-break moment for the studio. Gamers are willing to bite, eager for more innovation in the extraction shooter space, and Bungie has outlined some of the ways that Marathon will set itself apart from games like Arc Raiders.

For one, Marathon will have forced seasonal wipes, meaning players can't keep the gear they've unlocked by playing. Paid and earned cosmetics will stay, though, as will player milestones. Contract progression will also remain intact so that gamers won't have to unlock the factions over again with each new season. The seasons in Marathon will be free and will last "about three months," Bungie says, so that's about 4 seasons per year if everything goes according to plan.

The Paramount-Warner Bros merger could interrupt WB Games, leading to project cancellations, studio closures, and other disruptions in the interactive entertainment unit.

Now that Netflix has backed out of the bidding war, Paramount has all but secured its purchase of Warner Bros studios and content business, pending regulatory approval. New reports indicate that Paramount could make substantial multi-billion dollar cuts to Warner Bros in a bid to improve profitability. The cuts could be spread across the entire company, including WB Games, leading to even more layoffs and turbulence for creatives.

In a recent interview with Bloomberg, Netflix's co-CEO Ted Sarandos says that Paramount could make up to $16 billion in cuts in order to navigate the high debt incurred from the merger buyout. While speculative, Sarandos' words do ring with some truth, as companies typically make big reorganizational efforts following a merger.

Sony will stop releasing its new first-party singleplayer games on PC, sources tell Bloomberg's Jason Schreier.

With Microsoft's rumored Xbox PC on the horizon, Sony is moving back towards exclusives. New reports indicate that Sony has changed its mind on releasing key first-party singleplayer games on Steam. Some current and all future singleplayer games will remain exclusive to PlayStation, including the already-released Ghost of Yotei and Housemarque's upcoming gaming Saros. Live service games will remain cross-platform.

Interestingly enough, this may not be a permanent shift away from PC. Sources say that Sony's plans are in flux and change often. While Sony has had success selling its games on PC, generating over $2.3 billion in sales from games sold on non-PlayStation platforms (including Xbox) since 2019, but this growth may not be fast or substantial enough to offset the potential impact risks to the PlayStation brand.

A renowned Call of Duty leaker "TheGhostOfHope," who had an extremely solid track record for leaking internal information about upcoming Call of Duty-related changes and additions has been legally silenced by Activision, and they said they will be complying with the demands.

Activision has sent a Cease and Desist letter to TheGhostOfHope and legally demanded they stop leaking and disseminating confidential information about Call of Duty and Activision. TheGhostOfHope revealed the news in a recent X post where he said he will still be sticking around to chat Call of Duty on X, and went on to thank everyone for the support over the past several years.

The official Call of Duty X account replied to comment suggesting that because TheGhostOfHope was sent a Cease and Desist letter does it then imply he was correct about the leaks, the official Call of Duty X account responded, "Nah. Even when leaks are wrong, they still hurt the people building the game and mess with player expectations." For those unaware, TheGhostOfHope's latest leaks were the 2026 Call of Duty game being called "Modern Warfare 4", and the campaign will be heavily set in both North and South Korea.

Current rumors point to Sony internally deciding to roll back the number of PC ports for PlayStation games, and now Mike Ybarra, the former President of Blizzard Entertainment, has shed more light on the rumors and provided a perspective on why Sony would make such a decision, if true.

Ybarra pointed to the Steam Machine as a big reason Sony would pull back on PC releases, and to the recent fiasco at Microsoft as the "last nail in the coffin there". Why would these two factors result in fewer PlayStation PC ports? The Steam Machine will run SteamOS, which means it will have direct access to Steam's extensive library of games. Valve's catalogue of games is a significant threat to both Sony and Xbox, with Ybarra writing that Valve is being viewed as a "major new competitor" in the space.

Additionally, the former Blizzard President said Valve is likely to enter the living room and console markets with a Steam Machine, along with 3rd-party variants and different hardware configurations all running SteamOS. Valve currently has the largest gaming platform, with nearly 150 million monthly users, exceeding both Sony and Xbox, and is now entering the console market with a console likely to arrive in variants ranging from $500 to $5000.

A new report reveals that President Trump is currently deciding whether to allow Tencent to maintain its stakes in US-based video game companies ahead of his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

The ban on Tencent in US gaming-related companies, along with Finnish gaming firms, is due to potential national security risks, as Tencent is directly connected to the Chinese government. According to a Reuters report, top officials have held internal meetings to investigate whether Tencent's investments in US-based companies pose a national security risk.

Notably, a meeting with several cabinet officials was scheduled for Tuesday but postponed due to scheduling issues. For those who don't know, Tencent currently holds stakes in several major game companies, including Epic Games, the creator of Fortnite, and Riot, the creator of League of Legends. There is also its $8.6 billion stake in Supercell, the Finnish mobile game maker behind Clash of Clans.

The hope for Fallout New Vegas and Fallout 3 remakes in the same fashion as The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion began when Iron Galaxy Studios shared an image of an internal presentation, and the slide open on a computer screen was the iconic Please Stand By loading image from Fallout.

The image also featured the caption, "Today's our February company meeting. It's time to catch up with what the company's been up to and what's coming up next for IG [Iron Galaxy]." That caption plus the image resulted in the Fallout community taking what seemed to be a big hint at something Fallout related happening at Iron Galaxy, and the leap to that being a remake was relatively easy to make considering Iron Galaxy assisted in the port of Skyrim to the Nintendo Switch, and the development of Fallout 76, and The Elder Scrolls Online.

However, Iron Galaxy isn't working on anything Fallout related, as the company has cleared up the speculation in a recent X post where the studio responded to an article saying Iron Galaxy was teasing something Fallout related being in the works, "Nope! There is nothing to see here. Sorry to disturb the volcanoes, but that was just a BTS look at our company meeting. We use that slide every month and has nothing to do with anything Fallout being worked on. As you can imagine, we love Fallout, too. Now pardon us as we retreat back into our vault."

Following the shutdown of Bluepoint Games, many fans felt the wind had been knocked out of the sails for a Bloodborne remake being in the works, which was then followed by a swift kick while we were down, as it was revealed Bluepoint pitched a Bloodborne remake to FromSoftware, but FromSoftware said no.

Previous reporting claimed that Sony even approved a remake of Bloodborne, but out of respect to the creator of the game, Hidetaka Miyazaki, and his wishes, they didn't approve of its creation. It was revealed that Miyazaki didn't want anyone else to touch Bloodborne as that game holds a special place in his heart, and that if a remake were to happen, it would be handled by him.

Despite Sony owning the rights to Bloodborne, and could have technically gone ahead with a remake without Miyazaki's involvement, Sony decided to shelve the idea until FromSoftware is ready. Now, Brandon Sheffield has posted on BlueSky with insider details, such as FromSoftware receiving more than 10 pitches for a Bloodborne remake, sequel, or spinoff, which were all rejected.

Death Stranding 2: On the Beach from Kojima Productions and legendary game designer Hideo Kojima is finally making its way to PC on March 19. With support for uncapped frame rates, customizable graphics settings, 21:9 and 32:9 ultrawide resolutions, and more, GeForce RTX gamers will also benefit from DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation support to enhance performance and smoothness.

And when it comes to DLSS, NVIDIA has confirmed that on day one, GeForce RTX owners will be able to enable DLSS 4.5 Super Resolution via the override feature in the NVIDIA App. Announced and launched earlier this year, DLSS 4.5 Super Resolution introduces a second-generation advanced transformer model for AI-powered upscaling, delivering a notable, dramatic improvement in image quality.

DLSS 4.5 is a game-changer in its own right, as using the DLSS 4.5 'Performance' or 'Balanced' mode in 4K, which upscales from around 1080p, can often deliver a sharper and more detailed image than native rendering. This will be a part of the Death Stranding 2: On the Beach GeForce Game Ready Driver that is set to arrive ahead of the game's March 19 debut.

Cicana analyst Mat Piscatella reveals a quick snippet of info about the video games industry that speaks volumes on what's to come.

Gaming has become increasingly more and more digital-centric throughout the last decade. It's to the point where console-makers are starting not to even put in optical disc drives in their systems by default any more; all new PlayStation 5 consoles are discless by default, and Microsoft was the first to introduce the digital-only console with the Xbox Series S. Predictably, this hardware lockout has helped accelerate digital adoption, leading to consumers buying fewer and fewer physical games throughout the years.

Now we have an interesting tidbit from Circana executive director Mat Piscatella, who routinely delivers updates on games industry numbers in the United States. According to Piscatella, 2025 was an all-time low for physical game spending in the United States; buyers in the region spent less money on physical games last year than any other period in Circana's 30-year tracked history.

Highguard is being pulled offline and will officially shut down on March 12, Wildlight Entertainment today announced.

The games industry will soon lay to rest another games-as-a-service title, and this time it's Highguard that will be interred to the live service graveyard. The developers at Wildlight today confirmed that Highguard will go dark on March 12 (which happens to be the same day that Black Ops Royale launches in Warzone).

Highguard will have been on the market for less than 2 months before its shut down, handily beating Concord's short lifespan of two weeks. The developers released a statement thanking players for their time and patience, and also confirming one last update will be released before the game goes offline permanently next week.

Call of Duty Warzone is getting a new 100-player battle royale mode inspired by Black Ops 4, and it's coming next week.

Activision has announced Black Ops Royale for Warzone, a new 100-player, team-based BR mode that takes cues from Black Ops 4's original Blackout multiplayer game type.

Warzone's new Black Ops Royale takes place in the new Avalon map introduced in Black Ops 7, and pits 25 teams of 4 players against one another in a chaotic quest for dominance. This time around, though, players won't get to select loadouts and will have to scavenge and collect gear across the map, and Activision has also removed the Gulag, as well as the ability to buy items.

A week ago, several reports began to emerge, hinting at AMD potentially ending support of the Ryzen Z1 Extreme processor found in PC gaming handhelds like the original Lenovo Legion Go and ASUS ROG Ally X. The main source for this report was Lenovo's Korean community team, which said that there were no more plans to release new drivers for the original Legion Go handheld.

Throw in the fact that these Ryzen Z1 Extreme handhelds hadn't received an official graphics driver update for months, and you can see why it looked like AMD was pulling back support for the chip even though it's only a couple of years old. As driver packages for very specific devices like the Legion Go come from vendors who work with AMD, and not the generic or standard AMD Software Adrenalin Edition updates that serve as a catch-all for all modern Radeon GPUs, it puts these handhelds in the position of potentially becoming obsolete, or not optimized to run the latest releases.

Well, there's some good news for Ryzen Z1 Extreme gamers and original Lenovo Legion Go owners, as the company has released a statement to PCWorld confirming that it will support its first-generation PC gaming handheld with driver updates through to 2029.

Software engineers have been on a quest to get DOOM to run on any piece of hardware physically possible, but now the quest has made new ground in the category of wetware, or human brain cells.

In a new video posted by Melbourne, Australia-based company Cortical Labs, it's demonstrated how a cluster of 200,000 lab-grown human neurons was taught how to control DOOM, with the video showcasing that within the CL1 device, there are cultured neurons on top of a multi-electrode array, enabling researchers to input various levels of electrical signals. This electrode array also enabled the researchers to interpret any response from the neurons.

The video explains that when Cortical Labs demonstrated in 2022 that human neurons were able to play the game Pong, it marked a milestone as it demonstrated real-time goal-oriented learning. However, Pong and DOOM are two very different games, with DOOM being much more sophisticated due to its 3D environment, enemies, weapons, etc. Due to DOOM being more demanding, Cortical Labs constructed the Cortical Cloud, a neural computing system that enables anyone to access the cells within the cloud via simple Python commands through Cortical's API.

Last week, ahead of Resident Evil Requiem's launch, NVIDIA released GeForce Game Ready Driver 595.59 WHQL to support the release, but hours later, the company removed the download and urged gamers to roll back to a previous release. As detailed in NVIDIA's response and today's GeForce Game Ready Driver release, the reason for the recall came down to a bug that caused issues with fan monitoring and even "one or more fans not spinning on GPUs after driver update."

It was a serious bug, hence the quick removal of the driver release. Today, NVIDIA has released the fix, with GeForce Game Ready Driver 595.71 WHQL also adding belated "day one" support for Capcom's Resident Evil Requiem. The game, which is proving to be a massive hit for the publisher, features DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation support, including DLSS Ray Reconstruction for the game's visually stunning path tracing mode.

GeForce Game Ready Driver 595.71 also adds support for Bungie's Marathon, which is out this week, alongside a few games-specific fixes for titles like Total War: THREE KINGDOMS, Call of Duty Modern Warfare (2019), and FINAL FANTASY XII The Zodiac Age.

A report from January stated that remasters for Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas were currently in development, and these claims were substantiated by Bethesda's Todd Howard when the CEO said, "multiple Fallout projects" are in the works. What wasn't revealed was the studio behind the projects.

Well, it seems we now know which studio will be at the helm of the remasters, as a post on LinkedIn has revealed Iron Galaxy Studios heavily alluding to working on the Fallout franchise. The LinkedIn account for Iron Galaxy Studios shared an image of the classic Fallout loading screen with the caption, "Today's our February company meeting. It's time to catch up with what the company's been up to and what's coming up next for IG."

Looking closely at the image, we can see it's actually an image of a deck containing 72 slides. Additionally, Iron Galaxy Studios has previously worked with Bethesda Studios in the past, such as contributing to the development of Fallout 76, The Elder Scrolls Online, and even Skyrim. Furthermore, Iron Galaxy also assisted with the Nintendo Switch port of Skyrim. This experience indicates Iron Galaxy is more than capable of handling remasters of two of the most renowned RPG games ever made, Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas.

Wildlight Entertainment, the devs behind the ill-fated Highguard, has reportedly diminished down to a team of less than 20 people, sources tell Bloomberg's Jason Schreier.

New information has surfaced on Highguard's disastrous release and the fallout that has ensued. New reports from Bloomberg indicate that Highguard's fall from grace, so to speak, was swift--the game amassed a high number of players shortly after launching, but the general feedback lambasted the F2P shooter, essentially casting the game off into the dreaded live service graveyard shortly after launch. It didn't help that the game actually released into controversy surrounding its marketing--or lack thereof.

That controversy heated up even further when it was revealed that Tencent had funded Highguard, leading gamers to feel duped by the assertions from Wildlight that they were fully independent. A quick double-check also shows that Tencent has a seat on The Game Awards' advisory board--in December 2025, The Game Awards showrunner Geoff Keighley gave Highguard the coveted last premiere slot of the showcase. It was previously believed that Keighley had chosen Highguard because he liked the game, which may well be true, however the absent disclosures of where the funding actually came from has made gamers suspicious.