Gaming News - Page 84

If there's something I'm actually excited to when it comes to graphics in PC games over the next few months or so, the first would have to be Alan Wake 2 from Remedy, which has a bunch of the very latest NVIDIA RTX features... but then there's Half-Life 2 RTX that has my attention to. Check out the trailer:

If you haven't read into Half-Life 2 RTX, it's a modding project that was announced by NVIDIA and Orbifold Studios with RTX Remix. Orbifold Studios is a team of developers that worked on the likes of Half-Life 2: VR, Half-Life 2: Remade Assets, Project 17, as well as Raising the Bar: Redx.

But as of the last 24 hours or so, there are some great updates on Half-Life 2 RTX and what we can expect in terms of graphical updates over the original (and one of my top 5 games of all time) Half-Life 2. In a new video interview hosted by Lambda Generation on YouTube, who talked with "Kralich" who is working on Half-Life 2 RTX and had previously worked on Raising the Bar: Redux and Portal: Prelude RTX.

Microsoft's new early-access monetization method is apparently paying off, at least in the United States.

Although Starfield skipped Sony's market-leading PlayStation console and stayed exclusive to Xbox and PC, Bethesda's spacefaring RPG has performed exceptionally well. Starfield was the best-earning premium game in the United States for September 2023, analyst firm Circana has revealed, further highlighting the potentiality for Xbox's newly expanded business model.

The data combines sales of all forms of Starfield that were made in the U.S., including the base $69.99 game, the $99.99 deluxe edition, the $299 Constellation edition, and the $34.99 premium edition upgrade which included early access for Xbox Game Pass subscribers. Circana included both digital and physical retail sales of Starfield in their top 20 best-earning games for September 2023.

The Switch just entered its 7th year on the market, but Nintendo says it will continue making and releasing new games for the Switch until March 2025.

With over 1 billion games sold, 129.53 million units shipped worldwide, and $71 billion in sales, Nintendo's Switch handheld-console hybrid has gone down in Nintendo's record books. These kinds of numbers are typically unprecedented, so It's no wonder why Nintendo would want to stretch the Switch's lifecycle and maximize earnings for as long as possible.

Eventually, though, Nintendo has to move to new hardware, and we've been talking about Nintendo's next console for many years. It's believed to be a Switch successor that pushes graphical capabilities and performance to a level far beyond the current-gen Tegra X1-powered Switch family, complete with upscaled 4K resolution gaming thanks to built-in DLSS support. But the age old question remains: When will we get the rumored Switch 2? Or, more precisely, when will the Switch's lifecycle end?

It looks like the new Crysis is right around the corner, with Remedy Entertainment releasing the PC system requirements for Alan Wake 2, now that it's right around the corner.

Alan Wake 2 looks to be one of -- if not the -- most demanding game on the PC this year, requiring a high-end GeForce RTX 4080 16GB graphics card for the ray tracing on high + path tracing enabled preset for Alan Wake 2 to hit 4K at 60FPS. At a bare minimum, Remedy is asking PC gamers to have 16GB of RAM and 90GB of SSD... but another minimum will not make people happy.

Remedy posted the PC system requirements to their official Twitter/X account, with every single preset -- minimum, recommended, ultra, and the low + medium + high ray tracing presets -- having some form of AI upscaling technology required to hit those performance metrics. Yeah... even the minimum setting to get 1080p 30FPS with a GeForce RTX 2060 or Radeon RX 6600 graphics card requires DLSS or FSR to be enabled.

Xbox's first-party revenues will jump quite a bit with the inclusion of Activision Blizzard King revenues, and games expert Joost van Dreunen gives an estimate on what these post-merger earnings could look like.

Xbox currently makes most of its money from third-party game sales and monetization across PC and consoles. But that percentage is expected to skew much more heavily towards first-party now that Microsoft has acquired Activision Blizzard King, and the publisher's 8x separate billion-dollar IPs, in the largest video games acquisition of all time.

This leads us to a compelling question: How much revenue will Xbox make now that it owns Activision Blizzard King and recognizes the publisher's $7-8 billion yearly revenues as its own? We've outlined some predictions based on past numbers and you can find that data here. This particular estimate is based on the entire Xbox ecosystem, though, and doesn't narrow things down to Xbox first-party revenues.

Reports indicate that Nintendo could be preparing two versions of its next-gen Switch system: One model would support GameCards, and the other would be a digital-only system. But the dual-SKU approach doesn't align with Nintendo's historical financials.

There's been lots of new Switch 2 rumors floating around, including discussions of potential DLSS-enabled performance capabilities of the next-gen Switch that enables 4K visuals to plans for a simultaneous launch of two model variants. Reports indicate that Nintendo could be readying a digital-only Switch 2 model that does not feature a cartridge slot for existing Switch GameCards, not unlike Sony's PlayStation 5 Digital Edition or Microsoft's Xbox Series S. There's just one issue with this report: Nintendo's own financials don't entirely support the hypothesis.

While PlayStation and Xbox make most of their software revenues from digital sources (the bulk of digital revenues for PlayStation and Xbox are typically from free-to-play microtransaction-driven games), Nintendo is different. While Nintendo has a commanding presence in the Big 3, with the Switch selling more units than its competitors, it doesn't exactly play by the same rules.

Diablo 4 is part of Microsoft's latest 'Free Play Days' scheme which offers Xbox gamers the chance to enjoy a small selection of games over the weekend.

You don't need a Game Pass subscription, and this offer is free to any Xbox owner, with Microsoft making Diablo 4 free from now through until October 22 (across this weekend, basically, today included).

There is a limit on how much of the action RPG you can forge through, mind, so don't go thinking you'll run a marathon session and complete it over the course of the next two days.

Rockstar Games is expanding its GTA+ subscription to include mobile games.

GTA+ is essentially Rockstar Games' own personal publisher-specific Game Pass subscription. The service was originally created to supplement GTA Online content by offering a slew of bonuses and extras, but recently expanded to include classic games.

Users who pay $5.99 per month will now get access to a handful of Rockstar titles across consoles and mobile, complete with a cyclic catalog that rotates games in and out on a specific timed basis.

Xbox gaming CEO Phil Spencer confirms that Activision-Blizzard games won't start showing up on Xbox Game Pass until 2024.

Microsoft has closed its $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision-Blizzard, so why hasn't a bunch of classic Call of Duty games been added to the Xbox Game Pass subscription? The answer is pretty simple: Migrating and incorporating that much content into Xbox Game Pass takes time and work, and Microsoft simply wasn't prepared.

In a recent Xbox podcast interview, Xbox gaming CEO Phil Spencer says that the 11th hour regulatory approval process didn't give neither Microsoft nor Activision enough time to ready a high-level multi-game integration onto Game Pass. That means there's no surprise launch of Activision games planned for Game Pass, and Activision's previous 2024 schedule was accurate.

Blizzard's Diablo IV, one of the biggest games of 2023, is now available on Steam - the second Blizzard Entertainment game to make up the jump from Battle.net. The first is the free-to-play Overwatch, which also recently jumped to Steam. And just like Blizzard's popular hero shooter, Diablo IV's arrival on Valve's platform is being review-bombed.

Naturally, these "reviews" are based on very little play time on Steam. However, there are fans of the game who have put in hundreds of hours on Battle.net coming to Valve's platform to praise the game - and the new Season of Blood, which introduces a lot of new content and features close to 40 pages of Patch Notes covering balance updates and quality of life fixes based on community feedback.

Diablo IV's community review rating is sitting on "Mixed," much of the negativity seems to be pointed towards Blizzard as a development studio, the Activision side of Activision Blizzard, and the company's love of microtransactions. Plus, many take aim at Diablo IV's 'live service game' aspects.