Devolver Digital became a publicly-traded company today, floating across the pond here in the UK on the London Stock Exchange with a valuation of $950m.
Fitting with the culture of the company, employees of Devolver Digital are still the majority owners, though NetEase and Sony now own eight and five per cent stakes, respectively.
Intel's 12th-gen desktop processors promise a dramatic leap forward, courtesy of the long-awaited shift to a modern 10nm process, dubbed Intel 7, and a radical new hybrid design that echoes Apple's powerful M1 chips. It's the most exciting Intel release for years, and it comes at the perfect time: just as AMD's Ryzen 5000 processors prised the gaming crown (and significant market share) from Team Blue.
We've been testing the $589 Core i9 12900K and $289 Core i5 12600K for the past week against their 11th-gen predecessors and AMD's Ryzen 5000 processors, and have come away impressed with what Intel has accomplished here. However, all this horsepower comes with a cost - and we're not sure that 12th-gen makes sense for everyone just yet. In this review, we'll explain the gaming performance you can expect, explore the new features of the Z690 platform and everything else you need to know.
A group of Turkish Twitch streamers have been involved in a money laundering scheme that has reportedly netted $10m.
The scheme was exposed following the Twitch data leak that revealed the top earning streamers on the platform.
In an earnings call this week, EA boss Andrew Wilson called NFTs and so-called "play-to-earn" games were an "important part about the future of our industry", but added, "it's still early to figure out how that's going to work".
The major publishers are slowly dipping their toes into the "play-to-earn" concept, which typically sees players earn cryptocurrency for playing a game.
Another day, another video game delay. This time it's Marvel's Midnight Suns, the upcoming turn-based strategy title coming from XCOM developer Firaxis.
Announced back in August, Marvel's Midnight Suns was originally set for March 2022. It's now set to arrive sometime in the latter half of next year.
Mario Kart 8 Deluxe has officially surpassed Mario Kart Wii in overall sales, making the Switch port obviously the best Mario Kart ever made (sorry, I don't make the rules).
In its latest financial report, Nintendo announced it had shifted 3.34m copies of the game over the past two quarters, meaning it has sold more than 38.74m copies to date. In contrast, Mario Kart Wii had 37.38m sales in its lifetime.
The next major project from Mafia 3 studio Hangar 13 has been canned, despite $53m having been spent on its development since 2017.
The unannounced game, known internally as Volt, was set to be a three-player co-operative live service game to rival Destiny. The game's name was apparently short for Voltron, and one key mechanic would have seen enemies fusing together.
Nintendo has launched its Animal Crossing: New Horizons update a day early - it's available now.
The update, intended for 5th November, was announced at a recent Animal Crossing Direct and brings a number of additions.
One key to the success of the Forza Horizon open-world driving games has been how easy developer Playground Games made that success look. From day one, these games have had a rock-solid certainty of what they were about. They have all been slick and accessible to play, and have all offered an insouciant, easygoing, thumbs-up kind of hedonism: pretty cars, lovely places, pumping tunes, good times guaranteed.
Playground has maintained the games' quality and iterated so carefully that it's hard to pick a favourite or a standout. That said, 2018's Forza Horizon 4 was undoubtedly the series' boldest step, shifting the emphasis toward an online world and regular in-game updates. At the time, I was a little hard on what I felt was a carelessly disorganised campaign and unfocused persistent multiplayer, while I recognised - but still underestimated - how transformative the weekly changes of season and Festival Playlist updates would be for the game's longevity. Between the Playlist, the game's natural affinity with its British setting, and the later addition of a buzzy battle-royale-style Eliminator mode, Forza Horizon 4 cemented the series' popularity in new ways.
Those looking to try before they buy when it comes to Battlefield 2042 will soon have the opportunity to do just that if they're EA Play or Game Pass subscribers, courtesy of a ten-hour early access trial starting next Friday, 12th November.
EA's newly announced offer runs alongside a similar early access event for EA Play Pro subscribers and anyone that's pre-ordered the Gold or Ultimate editions of Battlefield 2042. However, while both those group will have access the game for an entire week ahead of its 19th November launch, early access will be capped at a total of ten hours across the week for those joining in via EA Play and Game Pass.
If you're hungering for more news on Elden Ring, From Software's next foray into Soulsian adventure, you're in luck; the developer is showcasing 15 minutes of gameplay footage in a newly announced livestream tomorrow, 4th November.
From hasn't shared details on exactly what it plans to show (although it's entirely possible the developer may choose to focus on some of the Elden Ring action players will be able to experience in next week's closed network test), but proceedings get underway at 2pm GMT/7am PDT tomorrow, on both YouTube and Twitch.
Blizzard's monthly active user count has dropped again, the embattled company admitted last night, during its latest quarterly results.
The developer's monthly active users (MAUs) total was down 13 percent year-on-year, to 26 million players. That's despite the recent launch of Diablo 2: Resurrected in September. Indeed, that figure means Blizzard has overall shed a million active users since May, and three million total since the quarter before that, when it was at 29 million.
The studio behind Nintendo's upcoming Super Mario Bros. movie will next make a solo Donkey Kong film, a new report suggests.
Illumination, which also makes the Minions franchise, will follow up on Seth Rogen's debut as Donkey Kong in Super Mario Bros. with a film all of his own.
Another day, another sign of more bits and pieces on the way to Assassin's Creed Valhalla. This time, its a fresh pair of PlayStation trophies which point to new in-game tombs to explore.
Specifically, the two trophies will be awarded to players for completing either one or three Tombs of the Fallen, an activity which does not exist in Valhalla at present (thanks, AccesstheAnimus).
Sol Cresta, the upcoming vertical shooter from Platinum Games, will no longer launch this December.
Platinum's Hideki Kamiya announced the delay this morning during an hour-long livestream titled "Sol Cresta: Hideki Kamiya's Very Sorry Stream", which also featured new footage of the game.
For ages I have been after a card game that meets very specific requirements. It must be small enough to fit in a pocket - no extra pieces or whatnot, meaning I can bust it out when and where. It must have the option to play single-player. And finally, it must be obscure or stylish enough to ensure that when I play it I feel like I'm in on some great smug secret. I appreciate this last point is not endearing.
Anyway, Bandido! Sweet Bandido! Bandido is a lovely compact card game from Helvetiq, which I discovered over half-term. It fits in a very small box and is playable with elegant cards which are all a little thinner than normal playing cards. Hold them in your hand and it's a bit like holding a small cardboard coffin - perfect, it turns out, for such a claustrophobic treat.
Jen Oneal, who joined Blizzard as new co-leader back in August, has announced she's stepping down from the role and will leave Activision at the end of the year to explore "how I can do more to have games and diversity intersect".
Oneal, formerly the boss of Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy studio Vicarious Visions, was hired as Blizzard co-leader alongside Mike Ybarra following the departure of Blizzard president J. Allen Brack - who left amid the fallout from the State of California's ongoing lawsuit alleging sexual harassment, discrimination, and a "frat boy" work culture at the company.
Square Enix and Crystal Dynamics are removing Marvel's Avengers' controversial progression boosts from sale today as a "first step in rebuilding [players'] confidence in us as a team".
Square faced a furious backlash from Avengers players last month after it began selling XP booster "consumables" in the game's real-money store, despite pre-launch promises it would only ever monetise cosmetics. It was a step the community had feared was coming ever since Crystal Dynamics introduced an unpopular XP nerf back in March, and fan response to the arrival of paid boosters was swift and brutal.
Activision Blizzard has announced Diablo 4 and Overwatch 2 will now arrive later "than originally envisaged", potentially pushing the launch of both titles into 2023 at the earliest.
"As we have worked with new leadership in Blizzard and within the franchises themselves," the publisher explained in its Q3 2021 earning report, "particularly in certain key creative roles, it has become apparent that some of the Blizzard content planned for next year will benefit from more development time to reach its full potential."
Following several months of limited testing in select European territories, Netflix is rolling out its fledging video games service to all subscribers around the world (as long as they have an Android device), starting today, 2nd November.
Netflix announced it was "in the early stages" of expanding into games back in July, explaining it would initially focus on titles for mobile devices. Two such games - Stranger Things: 1984 and Stranger Things 3 - were added to its entertainment library in August as part of an early Poland-exclusive test, and three more - Shooting Hoops, Teeter (Up), and Card Blast - were introduced during a wider test in September.
Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, developer Niantic's magical spin on the Pokémon Go formula, will permanently shut down on 31st January 2022.
Wizards Unite arrived with much fanfare back June 2019, presenting a more narrative-focused take on the hugely popular location-based AR action of Pokémon Go as Harry Potter seeped into the real-world. And now, nearly two and a half years on, that adventure is almost at an end.
A month after sorting a similar issue for PlayStation 4, it looks like Sony has also deployed a fix for PS5's dead battery issue.
As with PS4, the issue here was a loss of access to digital games when the console's internal CMOS battery failed.
Super Smash Bros. series boss Masahiro Sakurai is unsure if the franchise can continue without him.
The latest issue of Famitsu, the Japanese gaming magazine, includes an interview with Sakurai discussing the future of the fighting series after Super Smash Bros. Ultimate received Sora as the final piece of DLC last month.
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time had portals, before Portal.
British programmer Giles Goddard, who worked on a number of games in the 90s including Starfox 64 and 1080° Snowboarding, has shared footage of portals in an early build of the game.
Fortnite fans think the game's upcoming move to its third Chapter - and third Island map - may come sooner than expected.
The battle royale's original Island was sucked into a black hole after 10 seasons, to be replaced with the rebooted Chapter 2 Island we have now.
Whenever I have a conversation with someone about fantasy fiction, we always seem to end up recommending the same things. Things like The Name of the Wind by Rothfuss (the Kingkiller Chronicles), The Lies of Locke Lamora by Lynch (Gentleman Bastard series), or the Earthsea books - I revisited these recently and books one and two are still absolute bangers - by le Guin. Tolkien is always implied, maybe Philip Pullman and George R.R. Martin too, and Sapkowski's popular now too.
And this - this merry-go-round of the same recommendations - it started to bother me. It's not because the books are rubbish; obviously they're not. But they're known. Fantasy is saturated by them. And their voices, excluding le Guin, are all quite similar. I realised I'd become a bit trapped by their influence, and I realised I wanted something new.
51-year-old Canadian hacker Gary Bowser has pleaded guilty to multiple hacking charges, must now pay $4.5m, and could also face up to 10 years in jail.
Bowser had been a long-term enemy of Nintendo for his role in Team Xecuter, a group which designed and sold console modchips to allow the play of pirated games.
Like a lot of Ubisoft games, Riders Republic is a lot. The work of some seven studios led by Ubisoft Annecy, this is a vast open world compendium of extreme sports that can be as lumpy as the terrain you ride rough over, packed with so much stuff you can see and feel it straining at the seams. It is also, perhaps more crucially, an extreme sports game that will fall over itself in order to serve up some fun, and one that ensures that, for all its excess, you're never more than a few seconds away from the primal thrill of throwing yourself down the side of a mountain. Riders Republic is, more often than not, a brilliant thing.
Some of that brilliance might be familiar from Steep, 2016's equally open-ended extreme sports outing upon which so much of Riders Republic is built. This is neither as focussed - there's a broadening out of disciplines to include bikes as well as terrain types that go beyond mere snow here - nor quite so strange, with no spoken word interjections from the mountains themselves (at least none that I've come across in over a dozen hours or so of play - this is a vast, vast game after all). It is deeply, gloriously silly, though, a playground told with an exuberance that's infectious as you pedal down perilous courses in matching giraffe outfits.
With Black Friday 2021 just around the corner retailers are starting to go live with their deals for this year's sale. Some of the most popular deals to pop up in Black Friday sales are those on gaming monitors, and whether you're buying for a new desktop, replacing a monitor or buying a second one for dual-screen gaming and work, we've listed the best deals you can grab on gaming monitors along with any early Black Friday discounts that are live right now.
Don't forget to bookmark this page as we'll be updating it regularly as soon as new deals get announced.
