Gaming - Page 612

It feels like Death Stranding only just launched, and its legendary creator Hideo Kojima doesn't seem to have stopped and is already hard at work on his new game -- at least in its concept stage.

Kojima took to his personal Twitter teasing the world that he's "working on the next concept while no one is in the office", with a clear shot of a massive sand dune in the background surrounded by a gorgeous blue sky. We also get to scope out his desk, which is littered with stuff.

If we're to take inspiration from his desk, we have a cast of Norman Reedus' face (the star of Death Stranding and The Walking Dead), a Rotten Tomatoes stress ball, a copy of Wired Magzine, a MacBook, a Sony Walkman, and much more. Maybe the sand dune is his background on his personal PC... but we all know the legendary Hideo Kojima works in mysterious ways.

SEGA plans to merge its successful pachinko and dedicated gaming businesses together to solidify its business.

Like Konami, SEGA is in an interesting company that doesn't just make video games. It has multiple branches in various fields like resorts, pachinko machines, and of course its mainstay, gaming. Now the company will merge two of these together to form one unit in an effort to consolidate its cross-synergy focus.

SEGA today announced that it will merge SEGA Interactive Co., the division behind its pachinko and arcade machines, with SEGA Games Co., the division that makes digital games like Yakuza and Sonic. Technically SEGA Games Co. will absorb the interactive branch, and as of April 1, 2020, SEGA Interactive Co. will be no more.

With over 100 all-you-can-play downloadable games including some of the best titles in the industry, Xbox Game Pass is such a good deal that people feel bad about it. Is this model actually sustainable? Yes, and it has been for some time.

Microsoft's wildly popular Game Pass subscription has transformed gaming. Major publishers like Ubisoft are trying to get in on it, and Sony even added offline downloads to PlayStation Now as a result. It's a viable solution that's pushing two forms of valuable earnings: Recurring digital subscriptions and full game purchases.

Game Pass is the ultimate value in gaming right now, giving access to a bunch of classics and every new first-party Xbox game as they release. So how does it make money? Why would anyone want to kind of give their game away for free? The service does something I call the Game Pass Effect: Game Pass subscribers are actually buying more games after having used the service.

Xbox boss Phil Spencer confirms that older-generation Xbox games will harness the power of the Xbox Series X's new Zen 2 CPU and Navi GPU hardware in creative ways, leading to boosted performance on the new console.

Microsoft's Phil Spencer says the Xbox SX will play four generations' worth of Xbox games: OG Xbox games, Xbox 360 titles, current-gen Xbox One games, and new projects designed specifically for the higher-end hardware.

The goal, Spencer says, is to make any game that's playable on Xbox One play better on Xbox Series X than they would on any other console, hinting that the Xbox SX could offer an even greater level of performance enhancement patches and granular hardware fine-tuning than the Xbox One X. We could see a new era of enhancement patches that essentially remaster games by baking in new features like ray tracing and variable rate shading to massively transform the experience.

A new report from Anandtech suggests Macronix's upcoming 3D NAND chips could be used to finally make Nintendo Switch 64GB game cartridges. But this isn't likely simply because the carts don't use flash memory.

Macronix plans to ship its new 3D NAND chips in 2020, but contrary to recent coverage, they won't be used for Switch cartridges. The handheld-console hybrid's GameCards actually use Macronix's XtraROM technology instead of flash, a long-lasting customized read-only memory that doesn't compromise speed. The carts don't use flash storage, which requires a cache, controller, and performs both read/writes with increased degradation, and they certainly don't use the more expensive 3D NAND flash memory.

It's true that Nintendo is buying up tons of Macronix chips--in fact Macronix calls Nintendo's demand for the Taipei-manufactured chips is "highly unusual."

A new hack exposes new outside town of Silent Hills as it appeared (or as it didn't appear) in the terrifying P.T. demo.

Gamers have spent the past five years obsessed with P.T., a macabre demo for Hideo Kojima's cancelled Silent Hills game. It's utterly fascinating thanks to its cryptic secrets that provide various outcomes to how you solve its mysteries. But one thing always remains the same: It only takes place inside a kind of haunted house stuck in a purgatorial hell. You don't actually get to explore the ghost town of Silent Hill.

Until now, that is. YouTuber Lance McDonald created a floating camera hack that let him break outside of the house and take a stroll in the town as it appears in the cinematic ending scene. The result is ultra-creepy and sets the stage for what could've been one of the most cerebral horror games ever made.

Just last week, Netflix released its highly-anticipated Witcher TV show, and with its extreme popularity, viewers of the show have been guided into playing CD Projekt Red's immaculate title.

People have really flocked to Netflix's Witcher TV show, and now that viewers can peer into the Witcher world, some people didn't want to stop there and decided to pick up the Witcher games. In this sense, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt from CD Projekt Red has been the go-to Witcher game, and according to the Steam Stats page that reflects this, the title has got some new traffic.

At the time of writing this article, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt has peaked out at 50,701 players, and current players are sitting at 32,942. To draw a comparison to a title of the same caliber, Red Dead Redemption 2 peaked out at 46,390, and its current player count is at 21,165. Keep in mind that The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is five years old, compared to Red Dead Redemption 2, that released last year. Personally, after diving into The Witcher TV show, I felt an urge to jump back into the incredible world that CD Projekt Red created, and from these player-count increases, I can tell I wasn't alone in this feeling.

Halo Wars took a serious toll on developer Ensemble Studios, leading to lots of overtime, crunch, and sleepless nights.

Crunch is all-too common in the games industry. The market's biggest games often require crazy 100-hour work weeks and significantly affect the physical and mental health of game devs (BioWare devs, for example, had mental breakdowns while developing Anthem). This problem has existed for time immemorial--as long as people made games, they crunched to get them shipped.

Ensemble Studios was yet another team of developers who crunched hard to get games made, in particular with Halo Wars. The ambitious Halo RTS was demoed in 2007 and shipped in 2009, the same year Ensemble closed. It would be their last project.

Cyberpunk 2077's iconic cast of renegade cyborg mercenaries are getting their own figures, and Johnny Silverhand will be one of them.

McFarlane Toys, who makes some of the best collectibles in the industry, is making action figures based on Cyberpunk 2077. We'll see both 12-inch and 7-inch figures based around the main characters like Keanu Reeves' Johnny Silverhand, male and female versions of the protagonist V., and possibly even Jackie too. We don't know all who the first wave of figures will include...but Cyberpunk 2077 has a huge colorful cast that spans multiple gangs and factions.

Cyberpunk 2077's action figures will release into stores in March 2020, shortly before the game's release in April. Pricing is pretty steep at $24.99 for the 7-inch figures, and $39.99 for the 12-inch Johnny Silverhand figure.

Jedi: Fallen Order sold better than Battlefront II where it counts most, showing gamers are still avid for singleplayer-only experiences.

A bit ago EA announced Jedi: Fallen Order was the fastest-selling Star Wars game ever released on digital platforms. Now analyst firm SuperData adds more color, confirming Respawn's Jedi power fantasy sold 2.14 million copies digitally in November and hit 1/3rd of EA's internal sales target for the game at launch.

SuperData says Jedi: Fallen Order's digital copies on console outsold Battlefront II by more than 2 to 1 at launch. This is EA's most valuable metric; digital is most important because digital games cost less to distribute and typically make more money, and consoles pull in the lion's share of EA's yearly revenues thanks to the PS4's 100 million-strong installed base.

Microsoft's Mixer platform is just a small sliver of 2019's streaming numbers, accounting for just 3% of total hours watched.

Even with the millions-strong streaming might of Ninja, King Gothalion, and Shroud, Mixer is still being utterly dominated by Twitch and YouTube Gaming.

The latest numbers from Stream Elements shows Twitch is still the undisputed king of streaming with 9.3 billion hours watched in 2019, accounting for 77% of total views. Twitch is followed up by YouTube Gaming with 2.68 billion, or 21%. Both Mixer and Facebook Gaming rival at each other 3% of total hourly views.

Final Fantasy XV has sold-in more than 8.9 million copies worldwide on all platforms since its release in 2016, 4Gamer confirms.

After 10 years of development, Square Enix's massive investment into Final Fantasy XV is paying off. The game has managed to push nearly 9 million copies shipped and sold digitally, putting it behind series greats like Final Fantasy VII, the current long-running online MMORPG, and Yuna's colorful PS2 adventure.

Here's how FFXV fits into the mainline series sales charts:

The Nanica Smitch is a real thing, and it's being sold as a knock-off Switch in South America.

Introducing the Nanica Smitch, a hilariously-named Switch rip off handheld that runs on batteries like an old-school Game Boy. The handheld is being sold in Colombia for $50 and comes with 500 retro games pre-loaded onto it across NES and SNES.

And yes, the controllers detach from the sides for arcade-style on-the-go play for two players, or Tabletop Mode for one player. It can even hook up to a TV via RCA cables. The Smitch is kind of like those cheap plug-and-play consoles you see on clearance shelves at Walmart. It seems to work well enough but we can't imagine Nintendo is happy about this one bit.

Epic paid for a nice head start for Red Dead Redemption 2, but the game didn't even break 500,000 copies sold in its first month.

Apparently Red Dead Redemption 2 didn't sell all that great on the Epic Store. Rockstar's heavily-lauded outlaw adventure only sold 408,000 copies on the Epic Games Store in its first month, analyst firm SuperData reports. The numbers are far lower than Borderlands 3's massive 1.78 million sales at launch.

Of course some context is needed here: Borderlands 3 is a six-month EGS exclusive and Rockstar was clear from the start RDR2 was coming to Steam a month after its EGS release. Also remember Rockstar released the game on their own first-party Rockstar Games Launcher, meaning RDR2 effectively saw three different digital releases.

Both the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 use mysterious custom SSD tech that allows developers unprecedented access to storage data. This kind of freedom might be possible thanks to a derivative of new software-defined flash (SDF) technology.

One thing we need to make clear: Software-defined flash was made specifically for enterprise-level cloud services with huge server farms. We're talking about gigantic scale-out applications like datacenters, telecommunication infrastructures, and financial institutions that require thousands of petabytes of data. It was not made for consumer storage. It's a new datacenter standard aimed at boosting efficiency with thousands of storage drives.

But a lot of the things that both Microsoft and Sony are saying (the crazy I/O speeds that're faster than anything available in PCs today, the granular access to data) somewhat matches up with the tenants of software-defined flash.

Ori and the Blind Forest developer Moon Studios has already outlined its next project, and it's an action RPG.

On the heels of injecting serious beauty into the Metroidvania sidescroller genre, Moon Studios says it wants to "revolutionize the action RPG genre." A new Senior Designer job listing outed the indie studio's next game:

The devs behind the first revealed PlayStation 5 game hype up the console's SSD, teasing an ultra-powerful solution that allows for massive freedom for developers.

With the new NMVe SSD tech found in next-gen consoles, developers can absolutely obliterate loading screens and push a new level of detail, immersion, and performance in their game worlds. Both the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5's Navi-and-Zen 2 SoC are tailor-made to synergize with the SSD (much the same way their new desktop CPUs harness the might of PCIe 4.0 SSDs), leading to a new era of gaming. Games will load faster, gameplay itself will be much more repsonsive, and the experience will be dramatically changed as the game renders more seamlessly as you move through it. The idea is the SSD will massively accelerate the data transfer rate from storage to the CPU, GPU, and RAM, while also allowing for nifty tricks like VRAM buffering.

Both Sony and Microsoft have touted their respective SSD solutions, but developers are chiming in too. The devs behind Godfall, the first revealed PlayStation 5 exclusive, say they're impressed by the console's "exceptionally powerful SSD".

Valve has kicked off its annual Steam Winter Sale 2019, with thousands of games on discount and there's even some gaming required in the form of "Festivity Tokens" by completing Holiday Quests.

The Festivity Tokens can be used in the Holiday Market, where gamers can purchase Chat Stickers, Chat Room Effects, and the Steam Winter Sale Coupon. The quests will continue to grow in number throughout the Steam Winter Sale 2019, in which there are some great bargains to be had.

The likes of Mortal Kombat 11, Max Payne 3, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, and Dark Souls 3 are all on sale -- as too is Stardew Valley, and Monster Hunter: World... just to name a few.

The new Oculus Link cable will turn your all-in-one Quest headset into a PC-powered HMD that can play all Rift games. There's just one catch: It's pretty expensive.

Oculus is now selling the Oculus Link cable and it comes in at a steep $80. That's pretty rough for a single cord, and is 20% of a Oculus Quest's MSRP. Luckily there's alternatives and you don't have to use the official Link cable. The Link software will "work with most high-quality USB 3 cables," the company says.

According to the specs, the Oculus Link cable is USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-C with 5Gbps bandwidth, which is pretty standard for USB 3.0. You can simply use a basic USB Type-C cable that meets these specs even if it's not Type-C to Type-C and ends in a Type-A head.

343 Industries lays out the future of Halo on PC with new fixes, details, and updates.

343i is working on a number of fixes and improvements for Master Chief Collection on PC, namely with Reach. But everything's not coming all at once. Some things, like the audio issues, the big aim-assist vs KB&M controversy, online campaign co-op latency, and input lag issues are more immediate. 343i is even working on crouching fixes. Other things like cross-play are put on the back burner and aren't even in active development yet.

In a recent update, the studio details the current state of Reach on PC and gives a tentative roadmap of their upcoming plans. They're aware of the more important issues plaguing Reach on PC and are introducing some basic QoL improvements, along with more ways to earn XP to rank up.