Gaming News - Page 91

When you think about playing a Blizzard title on PC, whether that's World of Warcraft or even something like the original StarCraft - you think of Battle.net, the developer's PC launcher and online service that it has been running ever since gamers first went online to matchmake in Diablo II.

And with the long-awaited release of Diablo IV this year, its PC release was naturally on Battle.net. However, in a surprising (and very cool) move, the game is officially coming to Steam on October 17, coinciding with the release of the game's second season, the 'Season of Blood.' And yes, this means Steam Achievements for the game are coming, and the option to invite Steam friends to play.

Blizzard notes that it's all about opening up the game to a wider audience, and with seamless cross-play and cross-progression, Diablo IV is playable on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S. As with the game's console versions, those who purchase the game on Steam will need to link their account to an existing or new Battle.net account to enable the cross-play features.

Publishers and developers are using Xbox Game Pass subscriptions to help catalyze growth of newer monetization methods, signalling another disruptive shift across gaming.

Xbox Game Pass is kind of like a river of revenue, and like a major river, there's all sorts of smaller tributaries and streams that feed into the flow. The main draw of Game Pass is being able to access hundreds of games for a flat fee, but it's the myriad of smaller synergistic monetization paths that help turn the river's flow from a meandering waterway into white water rapids.

The temporary-access, all-you-can-play model behind Game Pass gives way to other avenues, two of which are being leveraged to what appears to be great success. These include early access and incredibly attractive pricing discounts.

A new hotfix has been applied to Baldur's Gate 3, the eighth one to be issued for the RPG (with some major patches in-between, too), and it has some important fixes - as well as a rather more off-the-wall tweak.

There are some cures for crashing here, including the resolution of a multiplayer crash that happens after listening to a dialogue following an active roll. The game could also fall over when re-assigning characters in split-screen play, and that issue has been cured.

Another important one is that Larian has fixed a problem which was causing saved games to be invalid - nasty indeed.

September marked the tenth anniversary of Grand Theft Auto V, and even though the game (specifically Grand Theft Auto Online) continues to be extremely popular, selling over 185 million copies - fans are clamoring for that official Grand Theft Auto VI reveal.

Developer Rockstar Games has acknowledged that it is working on the highly anticipated sequel. However, release windows, setting, and how it will look and feel - are all a mystery outside of leaks, suggesting a return to Vice City.

Rockstar is known for placing cryptic hints and teasers in games and other places, and some fans are convinced that Grand Theft Auto Online's Moon Festival event holds the key to when we'll officially get that big GTA 6 unveiling. Per the event's naming, the clues are about the moon and its connection to the Waning Gibbous phase.

Microsoft sees the path to achieve 100 million+ Xbox Game Pass subscribers by 2030.

The recent FTC v Microsoft trial leaks were some of the biggest in the history of interactive entertainment. The erroneously-uploaded files offer a candid look at upcoming plans for Xbox, including new mid-gen refreshes and a potential hybrid compute console that could change the future of gaming.

The leaked documents show that Xbox Game Pass is a big part of this plan. Microsoft eventually wants to lead the Big 3 hierarchy and help usher the industry into a new age of disruption, and it wants to use Game Pass to help make it happen.

A throwback post from one of PlayStation's former bosses gives a quick reminder of Sony's handheld production numbers.

There was a time when Sony challenged Nintendo in the handheld market. We all know how that went (while Sony has exited the dedicated handheld business, the spirit of the PSP and Vita live on with the new $99 PlayStation Portal remote play tablet), but gaming was way different nearly 20 years ago.

Sony's first handheld, the PlayStation Portable, was a big success. Official Sony shipment records show that the PlayStation Portable sold-in/shipped "over 76.4 million units." Now thanks to Shawn Layden, who was president of Sony Computer Entertainment America from 2014-2018, we know how many PSP units that Sony actually produced.

SEGA has officially cancelled its first Super Game, and it's possible that the new business model is now under question.

SEGA has an ambitious vision. The Japanese publisher wants to create an entirely new genre to provide long-term sustainability--not exactly an original idea, but SEGA did come up with a term to describe this new genre: Super Games. So what is a Super Game? It's kind of a spin on the live service/games-as-a-service model, but there's some criteria.

To qualify as a Super Game, a title will target $1 billion in lifetime revenues. That's a pretty lofty target that takes publishers years to achieve--however, some like Activision can achieve it in a single year--and the closest thing that SEGA has right now is Phantasy Star Online 2.

Meta's metaverse avatars have come a long, long way, showing that the company's billion-dollar loser is starting to look like a winner.

At the behest of Mark Zuckerberg, Meta has spent tens of billions of dollars on mixed reality. The company is trying to create the metaverse, a nascent concept that combines digital avatars with mixed reality peripherals to deliver realism in a digital space. For Meta, the goal is to create a new digital world that can be monetized over time through advertising while also linking up to entertainment services, content delivery, and social experiences.

Meta has lost over $33 billion on the metaverse so far, burning through Facebook revenue in an attempt to grow the new digital realm. In the past, Meta has faced ridicule for its cartoony metaverse avatars--the digital representations of people in that metaphysical space. Now Mark Zuckerberg shows off just how far Meta has come with its new hyper-realistic code avatars...and things are looking pretty impressive.

Xbox has had a capture problem for two console generations, and Microsoft's solution isn't a great fix.

Capturing screenshots and video on Xbox is fairly straightforward. You press the button, and the console will record what happened in video or picture form. Unfortunately for gamers, the Xbox Series consoles will automatically overwrite and/or delete captured content that is stored natively on the SSD if storage runs low. The console does not notify users that this is happening; screenshots and video will just disappear.

Users had some choices to help mitigate this. The most convenient solution was to just have the console upload screenshots and content to the Xbox network. These files were safe once they were uploaded. You could even fire up the Xbox Console Companion App and download any screenshots or videos that were stored on the Xbox network.

Fortnite makes billions of dollars a year and is one of the most popular video games ever made. So why is Epic Games firing hundreds of workers due to overspending? The answer lies in Epic's multi-faceted ambitions.

Epic Games is one of the most interesting companies in the video games industry. While Epic is the maker of Unreal Engine, one of the most widely-used multimedia graphics engines on the planet, this engine doesn't define Epic's ambitions. The reality is that Epic wears many hats. It's not just an engine-maker that licenses its tools out to a sizable portion of games, films, TV shows, and even cars; Epic is also a major disruptor for video game economics and pledges to shake up the status quo.

Epic appears to follow the whims of CEO Tim Sweeney, a legendary programmer who created the Unreal Engine. Sweeney is staunchly opposed to certain games industry trends, including the business practices of Valve, Google, and Apple, the last two of which constitute a "mobile duopoly" on gaming's most lucrative billion-dollar platform. Sweeney has been vocal and consistent in his opposition of these companies, and Epic's specific business decisions have followed Sweeney's beliefs.