Gaming - Page 719

Amid dismal sales and disastrous profit losses, Starbreeze warns investors that it may have to close down and sell off its core assets to repay debts.

Starbreeze has been in trouble for some time now, but it's not out of the race yet. The company's financial woes have improved slightly in Q1, with profit losses reduced by a sizable 85% since last year ($11 million profit losses compared to $135 million). It's still in the red, but the shade has gotten a bit lighter. But make no mistake: things are still pretty dire for the Payday developer, and Starbreeze CEO Mikael Nermark isn't sure Starbreeze will last through the year.

"Starbreeze and some of its subsidiaries have been in reconstruction since 3 December 2018. The company currently lacks sufficient secured funds to guarantee continued operations for the next 12 months and is expected to have a liquidity shortfall before mid-year 2019 if no additional funds are provided," Nermark said in a recent earnings report. "These conditions indicate that there are significant uncertainties that can lead to significant doubts about the company's ability to continue its business."

With original PC shooters like Doom and Quake, id Software is known far and wide for their FPS mastery. But there's one scrappy up-and-comer who's garnered lots of attention with their Wolfenstein reboots...and the two giants could join forces to make a new Quake game.

My friends and I have wanted a new Quake game for a while. Quake 4 was bizarre and awesome all at the same time, but it's been quite a while since gamers got an explosive, singleplayer-driven gothic-medieval gorefest. When Bethesda took over id Software it delivered Quake Champions...a so-so multiplayer fragfest aimed at engagement and live services. But we need something more...and Quake deserves something meaty.

If MachineGames founder Jerk Gustafsson has his way, the Wolfenstein devs will work with id to make a brand new re-imagining of the Quake series. "Quake is the reason I got into gaming. Discovering WorldCraft and Level Design, making maps for Quake, was one of the best experiences of my life - I even still do it today. Developing a Quake game (a re-imagination of Quake 1) is and will always be on my bucket list, but working with Wolfenstein and getting to work closely with my heroes over at id Software is pretty awesome too," Gustafsson said in a recent Reddit AMA.

Square Enix isn't giving up on new IP curation and investment, and plans to bolster big franchises like Final Fantasy with fresh new endeavors.

All too often big publishers shy away from new IPs to focus on big franchises. Activision-Blizzard is pretty much exclusively making sequels in core IPs, but Japanese games-makers are taking a different tact. Today Square Enix revealed its FY2018 financials, and they weren't too good: operating income was down 35%, and total profits dipped by 28%. But the company's earnings slips aren't inspiring Activision-Blizzard's tunnel vision. The publisher promises to put even more emphasis on new series and franchises to help generate more sales.

"We will aggressively invest in new IP on an ongoing basis to enrich our portfolio and enable sustained growth," Square Enix said in its latest earnings brief.

Square Enix's recent performance shows the publisher is ramping up for a big future...but it probably won't happen this year.

Square Enix today announced its earnings for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2019, showing dips in operating income and profits while total expenditures rose by 20%. Key metrics show a sizable jump in game sales thanks to Kingdom Hearts III's massive acclaim, prompting total net sales revenues to rise 8.2% YoY to 271 billion yen ($2.44 billion). Earnings slips offset this favorable performance, however.

Other metrics failed to rise during the year. Operating income for the FY2018 period dropped a big 35% YoY to 24.5 billion yen ($220.91 million), and Square Enix notes this dip is caused by larger investment in the year's under-performing games. Total profits sit at 18.4 billion yen ($165.91 million), dropping almost 30% from last year's.

Although Square Enix plans to show off more Final Fantasy VII: Remake at E3 2019, the first chapter of the trilogy may not release in 2019.

Square Enix's latest earnings report gives visibility into the publisher's upcoming pipeline and may hint at release timings for some of its biggest games. There's usually telltale signs that accompany any big game's launch year, including earnings spikes and sales jumps. Those indicators aren't found in Square Enix's forecasts for this year, but next year.

The publisher expects earnings to moderate in the current fiscal year ending March 31, 2020. Square Enix predicts it'll make 270 billion yen ($2.43 billion) in net sales, with its gaming branch raking in 200 billion yen ($1.8 billion) across the year, slightly down from last year. Overall sales are also expected to drop this fiscal year, which doesn't really align with the launch of a huge game like Final Fantasy VII: Remake. It expects to sell 18.27 million copies this year, down 31% year-over-year. Last year Square Enix sold 26.55 million copies of games thanks to Kingdom Hearts III's strong performance, so admittedly there's a high threshold to break this year...but the FF7 Remake shouldn't have a problem doing so.

Backers of the crowdfunding project Outer Wilds have been shocked as the publisher has decided to convert the title into a timed Epic Games Store exclusive.

In a recent update to the official Fig listing for Outer Wilds, it is addressed to backers that the publishing team behind Outer Wilds have "welcomed helpful partnerships with Annapurna Interactive, Xbox, and Epic" to "keep our small studio running long enough to ship the game at the level of quality that it is today". It should be noted that Outer Wilds has been available to back since 2015 and that the title originally advertised to fans that it would be released onto Mac, Linux and Windows via Steam.

Many fans have turned on the title now, with dislike bombing occuring on the above Outer Wilds crowdfunding video and angry backers taking to Reddit to express their disgust. Reddit user Daear took to the /r/outerwilds sub reddit and said: "As of update #72 from the Outer Wilds team, the game will be a timed exclusive for Xbox One and PC via Epic Games store (source). Other platforms will be "coming later", and the team promises their goal is to "bring the game to your preferred platform as quickly as possible".

Some new sales data has recently been released by Sony on their PlayStation blog. The new sales chart indicate that Days Gone has taken the lead for best-selling game on the PlayStation Store for April.

On the PlayStation blog, it is showcased that for the month of April Bend Studios' Days Gone sits at 1st place, beating the likes of World War Z and Mortal Kombat 11. All three of these games released throughout the month of April and it seems they have all done quite well on Sony's online store front.

Alongside these newly released titles we have Rockstars Grant Theft Auto V going strongly at second place and for PS VR we have Beat Saber at first and Until Dawn: Rush of Blood at second. Moving onto DLC content, Fortnite's Laguna Pack, Lava Legends Pack, Save The World - Standard Founder's Pack and Inferno's Challenge Pack have taken first, second, third and fourth place. For more information visit the official PlayStation blog here.

With every new game release many PC gamers are asking whether or not titles will be heading over to the Epic Games Store as a timed exclusive or not. Wolfenstein: Youngblood will not be one those titles.

In a recent Reddit AMA with Wolfenstein: Youngblood developer MachineGames', many fans posed numerous types of questions to the developer regarding the coming title. Some fans asked questions such as the possibility of crossplay support, how long the title will be in comparison to New Order, the developers relationship with co-developer Arkane Studios and whether or not the title will be an Epic Games Store timed exclusive.

All of the above questions were answered by MachineGames, and even some extra detail was given about Youngblood. Here is what Jerk Gustafsson said about Youngblood; "Youngblood is different than our previous titles in many ways. Player progression is level-based and the game structure is non-linear, which means the experience is player directed in a way that we've never done before where players will be able to perform missions in any order they please. And while the storyline/campaign may be a bit lighter than New Order/New Colossus, the total gameplay time of Youngblood will exceed those titles.?"

Pokemon Detective Pikachu has finally released and has been met with some criticism by fans, but regardless of everyones thoughts of the movie the title has claimed a spot as the highest grossing video game movie in an opening weekend.

According to Box Office Mojo and the above Box Office Report, the Ryan Reynolds starred movie Pokemon Detective Pikachu has reached an estimated "$103.0M internationally since Wednesday". The source of the movies International revenue through Sunday includes; China - $40.8M, Japan - $12.9M, U.K. - $6.6M, Germany - $5.0M, Mexico - $5.0M, France - $4.8M, Australia - $3.5M, S. Korea - $3.2M, Italy - $2.8M and Spain - $2.2M.

Since Pokemon Detective Pikachu is now sitting at the top for biggest opening weekend ever for a video game based movie, who has the movie de-throned? According to MyNintendoNews, the second biggest opening weekend for a video game franchise movie was Angelina Jolie's Tomb Raider. Tomb Raider only manged to pull in $47 million in its opening weekend. In total global standards, Pokemon Detective Pikachu has grossed $170.4M and only seems like its climbing higher.

I still remember late nights every weekend at LANs at my house when I was a teenager in the 90s playing games like Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, Shadow Warrior, C&C: Red Alert and who can forget; Blood.

Blood is a classic 2D first-person shooter from the 90s that has been remastered by the talented hands of Nightdive Studios that has just announced and released Blood: Fresh Supply. The new game has a bunch of new technological features and support like 4K resolution support, Vulkan/DX11/OpenGL APIs, unlocked frame rates, and so much more.

Here's what you can expect from Blood: Fresh Supply:

If there was a game that would benefit from AI upscaled textures it would have to be Diablo 2, with its now low-res graphics being upgraded through AI. Yeah, AI is helping make old classics like Diablo 2 come back to life looking better than ever before.

According to Redditor 'Indoflaven' who has been "playing around with ESRGAN and decided to see how it would handle Diablo 2. This is done using the Manga109 model with a 1024x768 source image". The AI upscaling method 'ESRGAN' stands for Enhanced Super Resolution Generative Adversarial Networks which adds more detail to low-resolution images, making it perfect for low-res games from the 90s.

The team behind ESRGAN explains its tech: "By doing it over several passes with the goal of fooling its adverserial [sic] part, it will usually produce an image with more fidelity and realism than past methods. I have upscaled the textures in Morrowind to four times the vanilla resolution using ESRGAN. Below you can compare various models' results to the original (HR)".

Wolfenstein: Youngblood is the type of game that pulls in steady revenue while MachineGames crafts the next mainline sequel, and as such it's prioritizing long-term online play over strong story-driven singleplayer action.

We've known for a while that the latest Wolfenstein game, a co-op based shooter called Youngblood, is a service game based around two things: monetization and engagement. Youngblood not only has optional skin-based microtransactions, but it features online co-op play with a friend and sports the kind of level design found in Dishonored games. This is apt because Arkane worked heavily on the project. These environments will foster more long-winded play time with emphasis on exploration alongside chaotic, Nazi-blasting combat.

Now MachineGames talks more about Youngblood's design, what it's meant to do, and how it'll expand over time with steady updates, challenges, and content drops, service-game style.

Roadmaps are a big thing right now in gaming, but they're usually reserved for online games that divvy out digestible chunks over time to keep gamers playing. Very seldom do we see them for singleplayer-only games like RAGE 2.

Having failed to capture the live service market with Fallout 76, Bethesda is eager to change things up a bit. The publisher is using RAGE 2 as a means of combining both singleplayer gaming with online content similar to Ubisoft's strategy with recent Assassin's Creed games. As we've said before, RAGE 2 is a live game without multiplayer and keeps gamers static in their own controlled sessions while id evolves the game with updates. This could be a huge drawback as co-op play would spark engagement, which could then be monetized accordingly.

In a recent roadmap update--because every game needs a roadmap these days--id and Bethesda outlined how RAGE 2 will evolve over time. The cadence of free updates is quite slow compared to most service games that must rapidly expand weekly or even monthly, and shouldn't lead to an ever-shifting world.

Red Dead Redemption 2's PC port has been in development as far back as 2016, according to a LinkedIn resume from an ex-Rockstar physics programmer.

Like Old West outlaws after a robbery, evidence of a PC port of Rockstar's latest bit of open-world mastery is mounting up. First a Rockstar Leeds developer listed Red Dead Redemption 2 for PC on his LinkedIn page, and now a previous Rockstar Toronto physics designer did the same. We won't directly divulge their names, but the resumes hint the sequel-prequel's PC version has been in the works since 2016. The Toronto programmer left in 2016 and lists RDR2 as a game they worked on, whereas the Leeds dev left in 2017 and listed the same. Both developers left Rockstar before Red Dead Redemption 2 was shipped in October 2018.

Although Red Dead Redemption 2 was built from the ground up for the current generation of consoles, the game will likely come to PC to ensure maximal exposure, sales, and live service revenues from Red Dead Online.

A new Pokemon mobile game will release sometime before March 2020, DeNA announced in its recent fiscal earnings report.

Not content with Pokemon GO's massive billion-dollar earnings, DeNA and Nintendo plan to release a second Pokemon smartphone game that capitalizes on the franchise's core strengths: RPG aspects, search-and-capture action, and lots of live service earnings opportunities. Whether or not the new game will be an AR-based title like Pokemon GO remains unknown, but the two projects should live alongside one another.

It's very likely the mobile game will interact directly with Nintendo's latest mainline Pokemon: Sword and Shield games, which are coming to the Switch in late 2019. We should see cross-platform adventuring with Pokemon migration between mobile and Switch, PVP battles, and maybe even co-op action. Nintendo did something similar with its recent Pokemon Let's Go Eevee and Pikachu games and it did amazingly well as a form of cross-game engagement.

Hackers have had lots of fun with the Nintendo Switch, and the handheld-console hybrid is actually quite flexible. Now one modder gets the original Xbox emulator running on the Linux-powered system.

Ever since its Linux OS kernel was hijacked back in 2017, the Nintendo Switch has been hacked six ways to Sunday. Users have broken the firmware to allow tons of emulators, pirated software, and homebrews to run on the console. They've even broken through the Switch Online's NES emulator and enabled mass storage support. Now a new breakthrough just took place: Microsoft's first console can run on the Switch.

With a lot of tweaks, modder Voxel9 successfully got Xbox emulator XQEMU running on the Nintendo Switch. Of course the emulator didn't run amazing well and had lots of FPS drops, but it did actually start up and even played the original Halo. But playing Xbox games on the Switch is a different story, at least right now. Halo ran quite poorly, but Jet Set Radio fared somewhat better...even if it was a bit choppy.

Recent LinkedIn resumes strongly hint this year's Call of Duty will be Modern Warfare 4.

A number of high-profile devs have joined back up with Infinity Ward to help guide this year's Call of Duty game. The bulk of the devs joined years ago, presumably as development of Call of Duty 2019 was ramping up, and worked on numerous Modern Warfare games. The devs also held previous positions at studios like Respawn. Noted first by Gamespot, the listings suggest this year's big mainline shooter will in fact be Modern Warfare 4.

Activision has yet to announce the new Call of Duty game but a formal reveal should happen before E3 2019 (as is customary for the franchise). The publisher confirmed Call of Duty 2019 will have a singleplayer story-driven campaign with co-op elements to boot, and is described as a "giant step for the franchise" that is "deeply rooted in Call of Duty history."

The creator of Castlevania himself reveals some interesting tidbits about the original NES classic, explaining design decisions around boss fights and more.

Castlevania is one of my favorite series of all time and is a true testament of skill, patience, and grizzled gaming endurance. But there's a few things that I've always wondered about...especially that one hilarious moment when you knock Drac's head off his shoulders and send it to the moon, as the Angry Video Game Nerd so eloquently puts it. Turns out there's a reason for that and it's not actually meant to be that humorous--it's actually foreshadowing.

Japanese gaming translation site Shmuplations recently translated some older Tweets detailing what it was like working on the original Castlevania games. In a span of four years of Tweets, Sonna Yuumi, who worked closely with Castlevania creator Hitoshi Akamatsu on the games, highlighted specific things like the first boss battle, overall mechanics, and how Konami put the series on the back burner.

On the heels of their landmark success with the Friday the 13th game, Illfonic brings its survival PVP multiplayer prowess to the Predator franchise.

A bit ago Sony announced Predator: Hunting Grounds, a new online multiplayer game that aims to recreate the thrill of Schwarzenegger's 1980s action flick. The whole idea is to create that paranoid claustrophobic excitement of being constantly hunted by a monster--only instead of Jason, this time gamers will be picked off by a tribalistic alien from the stars. And instead of a campground, Hunting Grounds takes us to the deep heart of the jungle.

Predator: Hunting Grounds parallels Illfonic's previous slasher adaptation with two different perspectives. Players can roam the jungles as a spec ops force, collecting materials along the way and carefully scrutinizing every rustling bush in frantic paranoia, or take on the role of the predator, complete with high-tech arms and the infamous active camo.

The gaming desk market is about to heat up at Computex 2019 in two weeks time with Thermaltake announcing the ultimate desk for gamers that have no budget.

Thermaltake's new Level 20 RGB Battlestation Gaming Desk costs a huge $1199 and rolls out with a gorgeous RGB lighting strip on the edges of the desk that looks awesome in pictures, and I'm sure even better in person. The Level 20 RGB Battlestation Gaming Desk is fully height adjustable, with memory options to set particular heights.

The big difference here is the RGB lighting which can be tweaked through Alexa and Razer Chroma, with the entire surface built for your gaming mouse. The surface itself is semi-coarse with textured weave measuring 165 x 75cm with smart cable management built into the desk.