Gaming - Page 580

Sony's PS Plus lineup for June gets a nice bump with Call of Duty WWII, but it's a bewildering move from Activision.

Today Sony confirmed Call of Duty WWII will be free on PS Plus in June. It's good news for gamers who can jump in and try it out and run through the campaign, but I'm curious why Activision greenlight this deal. Giving away CoD WWII will take attention away from Activision's real billion-dollar breadwinners: Modern Warfare and Warzone. It's a weird move because Warzone is already free-to-play and serves as an entry point to the franchise.

We've gone over why Warzone is such a big deal in our previous coverage, but ultimately it only works if everyone's playing it.

The worldwide digital games market raked in $10.5 billion in April 2020, a new record for one-month earnings,SuperData reports.

COVID-19 lockdowns have once again pushed digital game revenues to new heights. In April 2020, the digital market pulled in $10.5 billion, breaking March 2020's previous $10 billion record. April's earnings were up 17% YoY, and revenues have grown steadily quarter-over-quarter as key regions practiced shelter-in-place protocols.

Console was up a huge 42% YoY thanks to big monetization and sales across an array of games, including GTA Online, Fortnite, and Warzone. Mobile shot up by 14% YoY, and PC jumped by 12%. SuperData didn't release the per-platform earnings so we can't do a direct comparison. We have quarter-over-quarter numbers but not year-over-year.

The PlayStation 5's and Xbox Series X's customized PCIe 4.0 SSDs have the potential to revolutionize gaming, and developers like Netherrealm's Ed Boon are excited to tap that raw power.

The Zen 2 and Navi 2X GPU upgrades in next-gen consoles are exciting, but that processing power would be hindered without an ultra-fast SSD to feed the system data and assets at blinding-fast speeds. The inclusion of SSDs in next-gen systems is big in itself, but the raw speed will push next-gen to a whole new level beyond current PC tech. The PS5 can transfer uncompressed assets at 5.5GB/sec, or 100x the PS4, and the Xbox Series X can hit 2.4GB/sec, 40x the Xbox One's HDD. This means no loading times, seamless gameplay, and will change how games are made and played.

Mortal Kombat creator Ed Boon is just one of the many devs who see great things in next-gen SSDs. "I think it's funny when these new systems come out, these new consoles, everyone's always like 'okay what do the graphics look like?' I think people underestimate the impact the almost-zero load times will have. That's suddenly going to open up new doors that just weren't considered possible before," Boon said in a recent interview with Geoff Keighley.

The Embracer Group (aka THQ Nordic) already owns 163 IPs across 92 studios, but it's still hungry for more.

The Embracer Group might own more IPs than any other games company on the market today.The company has bought up a ton of IPs and studios, from Deep Silver's entire catalog under Koch Media (Saints Row, Metro, Dead Island) to yesteryear franchises like Kingdoms of Amalur, Timesplitters, and even Gothic.

But that acquisition spreed is far from over. Embracer is looking to grow, and it just got a big $161 million financing surge via a new share issue. Over 100 investors bought into the share issue so Embracer could "continue our buy-to-build M&A journey."

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.