Gaming - Page 903

Smash hit PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is coming to the Xbox Preview Program on December 12, but it'll also herald another limited run of cosmetic microtransactions--and a separate roadmap of content updates.

Microsoft announced the news today during its Paris Games Week 2017 showcase, making good on its promise to launch the last-man-standing shooter on the Xbox platform by 2017's end.

"Beginning December 12, Xbox fans will be able to play PUBG while it's still in early access through the Xbox Game Preview program," said Chang Han Kim, CEO of PUBG Corp., the company that was literally made just to handle PUBG.

During his time in Australia for PAX AU 2017, PlayerUnknown himself Brendan Greene, sat down with IGN to talk about all things Battlegrounds. Greene said that PUBG has been a runaway success, all without a gigantic advertising budget.

Greene said that before Battlegrounds was released on Steam Early Access, the team thought they would sell "maybe five million copies, first year". Greene added: "We passed that in a few months and now we're at 15+ [million]. It's basically meant that we've had to do a lot of work internally to restructure how we envision PUBG going forward, because our platform team designed our server system for a million players, 'cause that's what we thought was a reasonable upper limit".

He continued: "We're not gonna pass a million [concurrent players], right? That's more than DOTA; no way will we reach that. And now we're at two, and our platform engineering team are playing catch-up. We're building this as a service... we want this for the next 10, 20 years, you know? We wanna increase the map pool, add new weapons, add new vehicles, and really just refine the feature set we have".

Battlegrounds isn't stopping its momentum at all, with 18.6 million copies now sold - days after we reported PUBG reached 17 million sold. The game is still enjoying around 2 million playing it concurrently per day, which is absolutely mammoth.

PUBG has also reached a new concurrent peak user count of a huge 2.38 million, but it has been holding steady at over 2 million per day for a few weeks now. Battlegrounds started October with around 1.6 million concurrent gamers, but has been slowly increasing throughout the month - also enjoying a minimum of over 200,000 gamers at all times playing for that coveted chicken dinner. Yummy.

We should expect vaulting and climbing to come to Battlegrounds soon, with test servers to get some vaulting and climbing matches under the developers' belt. As for PUBG v1.0, it's coming in the second half of December, just after the release of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds on the Xbox One on December 12, with series creator Brendan Greene saying he wants to see cross platform play between PC and Xbox One gamers in PUBG.

Armed with the might of Microsoft's new $499 Xbox One X console, CD Projekt RED has breathed new visual life into one of the best video games ever made. Here's what the Polish developer had to say about the console, and the incoming enhancements.

With a number of high-profile updates, tweaks, and visual enhancements,The Witcher 3 on the Xbox One X looks to be the definitive way to experience the landmark RPG. Gamers will be able to experience Geralt's adventures in 4K resolution with vibrant HDR imaging, along with other updates that harness the power of the console's 6TFLOP AMD Polaris GPU, the highly customized 2.3GHz 8-core Jaguar CPU, and the 12GB of GDDR5 system memory.

"With the additional power of the Xbox One X, we are able to deliver The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt in 4K, while providing numerous visual tweaks such as higher-quality shadows, ambient occlusion & texture filtering, as well as higher resolution textures, and an all-around performance boost," The Witcher 3's development Jakub Kutrzuba lead told Xbox Wire.

Players who redeem lootboxes in the Call of Duty WII "Headquarters" online social space will essentially broadcast the contents of their loot to nearby users, highlighting a very real marketing tactic to incentivize microtransaction purchases.

Activision recently caught flak with its microtransaction patent that essentially pushes new players towards lootboxes and/or paid in-game items. Now we're seeing an extension of this with the latest Call of Duty: WWII iteration, which, according to Redditors who received advanced copies, will allow players to inspect the contents of another user's opened supply drop.

This is an ingenious tactic for incentivizing organic monetization within the game's social space. Opening supply drops calls lots of attention in the social space as it is--players can trigger an animation that has a supply crate dropping from the sky into the Headquarters zone, and interested players can apparently approach and see the contents of the drop. The trick here is that gamers can essentially spectate lootboxes openings, thus simulating one of the more powerful "hooks" that popular streamers and content creators use to advertise the game (or their own illegal sites, as in the case of CS: GO Lotto).

Battlefield 1 launched in 2016 and continues serving as a cash crop for EA. But come next fiscal year it's time for a brand new Battlefield shooter, strongly hinting DICE has been crafting a fresh experience for the last few years.

The new Battlefield game will release during EA's fiscal year 2019 timeline, which runs from April 1, 2018 through March 31, 2019, the publisher today announced in its fiscal Q2'18 financial documents. The company also confirmed that the new Battlefield game will launch in the same fiscal slate as BioWare's big new shared-world shooter Anthem, which is believed to be EA's unique answer to Destiny. Anthem is explicitly referred to as an action game, and EA has previously affirmed the game will have "genre-melding" while strongly hinting microtransactions and other live services will be included.

"The core of our fiscal 2019 is a full slate of sports titles and their associated live services, plus new live services from Star Wars Battlefront II," Electronic Arts CFO Blake Jorgensen said in the report. "We will add the next Battlefield game, and move into the action genre with Anthem. We expect our subscriber base to continue to grow, and for our new mobile titles to benefit from players looking for deeper experiences with higher production values."

The first Major of the Dota 2 season has completed, ESL One Hamburg saw 8 teams from 6 regions battle it out for a share of the $1,000,000 total prize money and the newly introduced Pro Circuit points that are used to determine invites for next year's TI8. ESL One Hamburg saw TI7 grand finalist Team Liquid and Newbee both receive direct invites, with Team Secret, Virtus.Pro, Keen Gaming, Fnatic (HappyFeet had to withdraw due to VISA issues), Evil Geniuses and SG e-sports all representing their regions via winning their associated qualifying tournaments.

The group stage saw strong performances from both Team Secret and Virtus.Pro, both teams took unbeaten series wins into the playoff stage that also saw the end of the tournament for Fnatic, Keen Gaming, SG e-sports and a surprising exit from NA heavyweights EG. All teams failing to qualify for the next stage of the tournament.

The Playoffs saw some impressive Dota, with Team Secret advancing to the grand final after defeating red-hot Team Liquid. Dropping game 1, the TI7 champs looked in control, but Team Secret were able to rally and convincingly defeating the Team Liquid in the final two games of the series. The other spot in the grand final was up for grabs, VP took on Newbee that again saw the series come down to the deciding game 3. In the end, VP were able to book their place against Team Secret in the grand final and a guaranteed $200,000 for 2nd place, or $500,000 for being crowned champions of ESL One Hamburg.

Games titan EA just posted its financial earnings for fiscal Q2'18, which show strong growth in a critical area that ties its games together: live services. In fact, EA executives highlight just how important these services are compared to unit sales.

It should be no surprise that EA, a company that makes billions a year from monetized digital content such as microtransactions, DLC, add-ons, subscriptions, values live services so highly. After all we've seen the publisher's games change considerably over time to align into more digital online-based ecosystems such as FIFA Ultimate Team and Battlefield 1 that keep players coming back months after release--and more importantly, continually spending money in the games they play. With this in mind unit sales have become less and less important to the publisher.

When asked if Battlefront II sales are still forecast to hit 14 million copies, EA CFO Blake Jorgensen said: "We give out unit forecasts at the beginning of the year to help people size things. But we're finding units are becoming less and less meaningful to us because obviously there's a difference between a digital unit and a physical unit--and we've been surprised on the growth of digital units. It's all about the live services at the end of the day as well," Blake Jorgensen, Chief Financial Officer of EA, said in the latest fiscal Q2'18 earnings call.

The highly anticipated update for Dota 2 is here. Dueling Fates patch 7.07 update was first announced at The International 7 and is live! This update is HUGE- two new heroes, numerous gameplay,hero and item reworks, removal and addition of new items, Ancient Apparition remodel and much more.

Dueling Fates update introduces Pangolier and Dark Willow heroes to the Dota 2 universe. Panagolier is a melee-carry that boasts many evasive abilities that are sure to cause havoc, while Dark Willow is a ranged-support that features root and stun abilities to priorities crowd control.

Also included in patch 7.07 is ranked seasons that allows re-calibration of MMR, turbo mode that is aimed at casual players, changes to ability draft, Ancient Apparition remodel, improvements to ping wheel, a massive amount of changes to gameplay and items that includes my personal favorite "Flying Courier upgrade can no longer be purchased. Courier now upgrades automatically at 3 minutes", rework of heroes (Beastmaster, Broodmother, Morphling, Tiny, Viper and Wraith King), removed items (PMS and Iron Talon) and the introduction of 5 new items.

Anyone who plays Battlegrounds knows its not perfect yet, but the developer has been pushing out a constant stream of updates on their path towards reaching the land of v1.0.

Microsoft re vealed the release date of PUBG on Xbox One during Paris Games Week, but the PC version reaching 1.0 will take place in "late December". Microsoft said: "In addition to announcing Xbox Game Preview launch date on December 12, we also shared the exciting news that we're on track to launch 1.0 for the PC version in late December. This has been an amazing year for us and launching and this is a huge milestone for the team. We're incredibly proud of how far we've come in such a short time, but I'm even more excited to say that we're just getting started".

I'm hoping for some much needed optimization for PUBG's v1.0 update, but we'll have to wait and see. It's not too far away now, with the game having quite the journey across 2017 with a huge 15 million+ copies sold, constant dominance on the Steam concurrent gamer list, and an upcoming Xbox One release.

In a bid to iterate with player feedback and ensure the game isn't widely panned, EA has tweaked Battlefront II's hotly contested lootboxes into a more palpa(tine)able form.

Months before EA actually confirmed the news, I predicted Battlefront II would be monetized with lootbox microtransactions and ask users to pay money for upgrades and the like. That prediction turned out true, and gamers were exposed to a hugely debated "pay to win" lootbox scheme in the addicting beta test that caused lots of furor. Having spent years making Battlefront II, EA and DICE have heard our cries and have used feedback from the beta to make some big changes by layering the monetization strategies in such a way that there's balance.

First up, epic Star Cards--the most powerful cards that can seriously sway the outcome of battles--aren't in lootboxes any more. That means you can't just spend a bunch of money to get the best upgrades any more. You have to work for them by crafting. But the trick is that crafting these cards is gated behind a ranking system. So now you'll not only need to play the game, but amass a bunch of credits and resources to spend on crafting cards (of course you can still get resources in lootboxes).

343 Industries caught a lot of flak for the Master Chief Collection's bungled launch. But what exactly went wrong? The studio gives a rare glimpse at the inner workings of game development by peeling back the curtain and detailing how The Master Chief Collection fell apart.

Now that 343i plans to fix the Master Chief Collection with solid repairs rather than duct tape, Halo alum Frank O'Connor explains the messy and complicated series of events that triggered the game's fall to infamy. O'Connor first warns gamers that there's no guarantees that MCC can be souped up to what the community expects--but 343i really cares about the project and is very passionate about Halo.

"From a personal perspective, the MCC launch was one of my lowest ebbs, professionally. Every angry mail I received, I took to heart. I felt like I had personally let our fans down. I have not spent a single day since the night the game fell down in matchmaking where I didn't think about it. The hardest messages to deal with were the ones driven by disbelief. "

Now that Sony has hiked the annual membership of its PlayStation Plus subscription service by $10 to $59.99, gamers typically lapse on their payments and drop out of the company's critical online ecosystem. Sony admits that retaining players isn't easy, but promises to make PS Plus more attractive to ensure players stick around.

Sony Corp. just released its latest fiscal Q2'17 financials, revealing key growth among gaming and other major sectors. During the earnings call Sony execs answered a few questions about the operating segments, including PlayStation Plus and what the company is doing to keep gamers subscribed and paying for the service.

"At the end of Fiscal 2016, 26.4 million users subscribed to PS Plus. The participation rate from the worldwide PS4 users is 40% for PlayStation Plus. As the inclusiveness of the PS4 spreads more widely into the base, then the participation rate is going to slow down a bit," said Atsuko Murakami, Senior General Manager of Finance Department at Sony Corp, in the call.

Sony just reported its second quarter earnings for its Fiscal Year 2017 timeframe, showing some interesting growth trends.

Note: The following yen to USD conversions are in accordance to Sony's earnings filing that sees 113 yen = $1 USD.

Sony's PlayStation brand is a titan of the industry: at over 60 million consoles sold and a staggering 67.5 million units shipped worldwide, the PS4 is the king of the console space. What's more is Sony's approach to monetizing the PlayStation brand with key services such as music and video streaming, live TV, and a massively lucrative games-selling platform have all been boons for revenue growth. We've already talked about how the Games and Network Services segment was Sony's most lucrative branch in Q2'17, but now we're shedding the light on specific metrics.

Sony Corp just announced its earnings for the three-month period from July to September, and the results show strong growth in key segments.

Note: The following yen to USD conversions are in accordance to Sony's earnings filing that sees 113 yen = $1 USD.

Sony's latest financial report fro fiscal Q2'17 see the Japanese company enjoying a staggering 739% spike in YoY net income, or bottom-line income after taxes and expenditures, to $1.263 billion (142.8 billion yen). The company managed to deliver a meteoric 2600% jump in net income attributable to stockholders in the period to $1.158 billion (130.9 billion yen), which ensures holders of Sony stock look favorably on the company.

As per the company's latest second quarter earnings, PlayStation gaming continues driving significant growth for Sony.

In recent decades, gaming has been an asset for Sony's multi-segment corporation, especially now. Sony's PlayStation 4 sits at the core of its layered subscription and digital gaming and network services strategy, and as a result of the titanic sales growth across the globe, the company has pulled in big revenues quarter after quarter. The Japanese conglomerate just released its fiscal Q2'17 earnings and the results are quite good--especially for the Games and Network Services segment.

Sony's lucrative Games and Network Services segment, which includes PS4 hardware, software, subscriptions and digital PSN sales, made the most out of any other segment in fiscal Q2'17 revenues and operating income. This performance is due to strong hardware and software sales and currency fluctuations.

It seems the world of VR is deflating, with CCP Games announcing it is closing two of its studios down and shifting away from virtual reality, one of its major focuses for the last few years.

CCP Games is reportedly closing down its Atlanta branch, while it will sell the Newcastle-based studio, which is part of a round of layoffs. There will still be the London, Reykjavik, and Shanghai offices, but there will be 100 jobs lost, while CCP Games is providing relocation opportunities or severance packages to those affected.

CCP Games CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson said that the changes are "tough, but important", and while the developer will continue working on its flagship EVE Online without changes, it is making major changes to two announced projects: their multiplayer PC shooter 'Project Nova', and the free-to-play mobile game 'Project Aurora'. The developer will continue supporting existing VR games.

Sony has debuted a new trailer for Far Cry 5, with a new gameplay video that highlights that Ubisoft is making the game with co-op in mind, with the full Far Cry 5 single-player campaign playable in co-op mode.

This means that you and a friend can get into a plane in Far Cry 5 and have a gunner shooting around you, or have tractor races, or shoot from the same car and defend your friend. The entire game will be available in co-op once the first mission is finished, which both players will need to do before teaming up.

You can give each other ammo and health packs, with both players getting to keep the XP, loot, and player progression during the season. The host will have individual world progression, something that will include quests, outposts liberated, and other open-world activities.

One of the hottest games right now is Bethesda's latest Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, which I want to add is incredibly polished, looks awesome, and runs beautifully even on a Core i3 machine with a GTX 1080 Ti.

Finnish speedrunner DraQu has completed the first world record on speedrunning through Wolfenstein II, something he did in a super-fast 80 minutes. There's not much killing in the speedrun, as he's had to run so quickly through the game so most of the gore is missing. Still, the speedrun itself was great to watch.

This also isn't DraQu's first speedrun in a Wolfenstein game, with his 1:31:16 run of The New Order still being the first-place record. DraQu adds that one of the key parts of his speedruns is using the armored stilts, so that you can get the insane navigation required to skip the gunfights and other obstacles. But the big question is, will we see less than 60 minute speedruns in Wolfenstein II? I think so.

Heavy Rain was one of my favorite games on the PS3, with developer Quantic Dream working on their next-gen game ever since, and it is forming quite well indeed. Detroit: Become Human is a PS4 exclusive, and was just confirmed for a Spring 2018 release during Sony's Paris Games Week 2017 Media Showcase.

The latest trailer for Detroit: Become Human shows off the main character from the original tech demo that inspired the game, something I loved from the E3 2016 trailer. The announcement trailer was released two years ago in October 2015 and has been in most PS4 gamers' eyes since, as it should be one of the best PS4 exclusives of this generation of games.

Detroit's new trailer shows just how much work Quantic Dream has put into not just the graphics engine and improved performance over the sluggish Heavy Rain on PS3, but the team has written a very emotionally powerful script for the game. I'll buy a PS4 Pro soon for this game, just like I purchased the PS3 for Heavy Rain.