Gaming News - Page 80

SEGA has reiterated its plans to create a brand new video game genre by March 2026.

SEGA has an ambitious plan: The Sonic developer wants to adapt its popular franchises into a new type of genre called "Super Games." This is essentially a term that describes online-driven experiences that scale across multiple platforms; a Super Game seems to be a fancy term to describe live service titles. Based on SEGA's own words, there seems to be a lot of overlap between the so-called Super Game and a GaaS (Games-as-a-Service) business model.

Despite the volatility of the current challenging video games market, SEGA isn't giving up on its Super Game plan. The company's latest 2023 annual report reiterates its strategy to create, and potentially release, its first Super Game by March 2026. It's unknown which franchise that SEGA will use for its first Super Game, but reports indicate that new Jet Set Radio and Crazy Taxi games are potentially in development, complete with online play. It's also possible that SEGA will make a Sonic Super Game.

Bungie has scaled back its workforce in an effort to counterbalance missed revenue targets, sources have told Bloomberg's Jason Schreier.

2023 has been hailed as one of the best years for gaming, and more hit games means significant competition. This higher level of competition has stressed developers and publishers across the board, simultaneously leading to record-breaking sales for some and calls for cost-saving measures for others. The gaming sector has stemmed rising costs by enacting mass layoffs of some 6,000+ games workers, including Bungie, a company who had scaled up its workforce for new projects.

According to a new report from Bloomberg, Bungie has laid off around 8% of its staff, or about 100 people. There's multiple reasons for this decision, including the current inflation-driven economic environment, but the chief reason may be related to Destiny 2's performance. The badly-received Destiny 2 Lightfall expansion has had a cascading effect on Bungie's business, especially as more hit games released throughout 2023, and the negative sentiment around Lightfall has led to a drop in Destiny 2's player count. Revenues are also on track to miss Bungie's internal projections by 45%. That's a big problem for Bungie, who relies on Destiny 2's recurring microtransaction revenues to maintain course as it develops new expansions for the live game.

Atari's latest acquisition sees the French company consolidating yet another large portion of the retro/remaster video games market.

Atari has announced that it has made an offer to acquire Digital Eclipse, the developer of a multitude of re-releases, collections, and remasters. Know for its emulation tech, a press release confirms that Digital Eclipse has produced over 250 games. The latest buyout comes shortly after Atari also acquired Nightdive Studios, the team behind enhanced re-release of System Shock, Turok, Quake, and many more.

As per the agreement, Atari's consideration terms offer $6.5 million for Digital Eclipse, which is split up into $4 million in cash and $2.5 million worth of Atari company shares. Digital Eclipse can also earn up to $13.5 million in a payout contingent on the group's performance across a ten-year period.

Baldur's Gate 3's megaton success has spiked Hasbro's video game revenues with two months of sales.

Hasbro's latest Q3 earnings figures have underlined the exceptional performance of Larian's wildly popular Baldur's Gate 3. Hasbro is the parent company of Wizards of the Coast, a subsidiary that owns the rights to the Dungeons & Dragons franchise--remember that BG3 takes place in D&D, so Hasbro's reports show how well all branches of its multifaceted gaming business are doing, whether it's tabletop, card games, or interactive experiences like BG3.

The company's earnings show that Wizards of the Coast's digital and license gaming revenues are up by roughly 133% year-over-year, driven by the release of Baldur's Gate 3 in August. Across a two-month period ending October 1 (Hasbro uses a calendar year for its schedules), WotC's digital and licensed gaming jumped to $133.1 million, up nearly $76 million dollars from last year. These earnings do include digital sales from Magic: The Gathering Online.

Marvel's Spider-Man 2 is off to a great start since it was released on October 20, 2023, and now the game director for the title has commented on what seems to be a pretty big concern about the franchise.

Bryan Intihar, the director of Marvel's Spider-Man 2, has sat down for an interview with IGN's Beyond! Podcast where he discussed what fans could expect out of future sequels of the Spider-Man game. In what seems to be a move to quell fans' fears, Intihar said that Insomniac Games isn't running out of villains to include in new installments into the series. In fact, "I never think we're going to run out of villains, ever," said Intihar.

Notably, if you haven't played Marvel's Spider-Man 2, there will be some spoilers within this paragraph. According to Intihar, it was always planned that Otto (Doc Ock) was going to appear at the end of the game as the main teaser, and Insomniac Games doesn't feel as if it has already exhausted all of its villain characters.

Twitch is officially dropping support for the Nintendo Switch, with the official word from the company stating that from "November 6th 2023, new users will no longer be able to download the Twitch app in the Nintendo eShop." On top of that, existing users will no longer be able to access the Twitch App on the console from January 31, 2024.

In a statement supplied to IGN, a Twitch representative added that Nintendo remains "a valued partner" and that the decision to remove support was a "difficult" one to make. Interestingly, Twitch did not provide a reason as to why it was being removed.

The reason for this comes down to the Twitch App for the Nintendo Switch being relatively new - it launched in late 2021, a full four years after the console's debut.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III is set to hit Early Access on November 2, and with PC specs already out there and with the recommended specs listing either a GeForce RTX 3060 or Radeon RX 6600 XT GPU, you won't need a monster rig to fire up the latest CoD. To play with competitive or 4K Ultra campaign settings, you will need a GeForce RTX 4070. The good news for GeForce RTX 40 Series owners is that the game will fully support DLSS 3 and its related technologies.

Which includes DLSS Super Resolution to boost performance, DLAA to maximize visual fidelity, NVIDIA Reflex to reduce system latency (which is perfect for Call of Duty multiplayer), and the new AI-powered DLSS 3 Frame Generation. Usually, NVIDIA provides benchmark results for its DLSS 3 announcements. Still, without any for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, we'll just have to assume it'll be the same impressive 2X and higher increase.

It's a big week for PC gaming adopting NVIDIA DLSS 3 technology, with games like Jusant, RIPOUT, The Talos Principle 2, and RoboCop: Rogue City all supporting the tech on day one.

NVIDIA's GeForce Now service has Alan Wake 2 available to stream now, but there are some minor caveats with the experience to be aware of.

As Wccftech spotted, the game is now out on GeForce Now but there are some errors that might pop up for some folks trying to play in the cloud. Fortunately, these aren't critical errors, and the good news is they can be ignored basically.

The errors have been highlighted on online forums such as Reddit, and they all appear when attempting to launch the game. The first bugged message confusingly tells the gamer that their GPU driver is outdated, and to update it.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III is getting closer to release, with the PC lead developer Beenox fine-tuning the PC version of the game in preparation for the launch.

The PC version of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III will launch with NVIDIA DLSS 3 support, with GeForce RTX 40 series GPU owners enjoying NVIDIA DLSS Frame Generation and NVIDIA Reflex technologies. This means that if you've got the right RTX 40 series GPU hardware, you can enable DLSS Super Resolution to boost FPS or turn NVIDIA Reflex on for low-latency COD.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III will be in its best form on the PC, with developer Beenox saying gamers can expect 4K graphics and ultrawide gaming monitor support included, 500+ customization options on PC, NVIDIA DLSS 3, and Reflex technology, gamers are protected by Richochet anti-cheat technology, too.

ASUS released its super-popular ROG Ally gaming handheld to huge fanfare worldwide with gamers. It has just been updated, providing some new features and a new resolution for the handheld to play.

The ASUS ROG Ally gaming handheld comes with a native 1080p (1920x1080) at 120Hz and supports going down to 720p (1280x720), but with the new update, the ROG Ally now supports 900p (1600x900). This is the perfect resolution in between 1080p and 720p, which will make gamers using 900p feel like it's closer to 1080p than it is to 720p, especially because it's a handheld, closer to your face.

The new BIOS 331 is available with a new AMD graphics driver that can be downloaded from the My ASUS application, which is available on the ASUS ROG Ally handheld. The new GPU drivers include support for AMD HYPR-RX technology, the new 1600x900 resolution support, as well as some bug fixes for EA SPORTS FC 24, Resident Evil Village, and fixes a bug with the ROG Ally recognizing 8K 60Hz external monitors.