Category: IGN

Newly appointed PlayStation CEOs Hideaki Nishino and Hermen Hulst have discussed the company’s perspective on live service games, PC releases, lay offs, and much more in their first presentation as co-leaders.

Nishino and Hulst opened Sony’s Game and Network Services Business Segment presentation by boasting “each PlayStation 5 sold generates over $700 U.S. of additional spend, which is significantly higher than the previous generation.”

Controlling Scope and Scale Without ‘Compromising on Quality’

To keep up a high level of game development Hulst said PlayStation is “increasing [its] use of external development teams, outsourcing partners, and co-development agreements with teams in lower-cost regions”. He then insisted this allows PlayStation to control the “scope and scale” of its games “without compromising on quality”.

AI is seemingly another way PlayStation is looking to achieve this. “We also see opportunities in AI to level up our own productivity and to enhance player experiences enabling us to better serve players and creators, create new experiences, and drive organization-wide efficiencies,” Nishino said.

“Research and experimentation in AI and machine learning is a focus for us,” Hulst added. “With work being done across a wide variety of our development tools and processes, we have a wealth of knowledge and experience forged from decades of gaming industry experience that will enable us to implement AI tools efficiently and impactfully.

“We have been realizing the benefits of AI in several areas, from assets creation to efficiency to accelerating coding to optimizing translation and localization processes, all while ensuring a responsible and ethical approach across the organization. We believe that AI holds great promise for the future of gaming, and we want to lead the industry in the adoption and implementation of this new technology.”

Helldivers 2 Paving the Way Forward for Sony’s Live Service

PlayStation is prioritizing a mix of tentpole single-player games alongside live service games, going forward, but will pull from the success of Helldivers 2 and launch all upcoming live service games on PC and PS5 simultaneously.

“We are bringing our titles to the PC platform and we have a dual approach here on the live service side,” Hulst said. “We are releasing our titles simultaneously, so day-and-date on PlayStation 5 and PC, but with our tentpole titles, our single-player narrative-driven titles that are, as you saw on the presentation, the backbone of what PlayStation Studios has delivered in recent years and in our history, we take a more strategic approach.

“We introduce our great franchises to new audiences, and we’re finding new audiences that are potentially going to be very interested in playing, for example, sequels on the PlayStation platform. We have high hopes that we’re actually able to bring new players into PlayStation at large and into PlayStation platforms specifically. Actually, the same goes for the work that we do with extending our great properties onto other media such as television series and film.”

Speaking of that focus on delivering games outside of just PlayStation consoles, Nishino believes, “rather than cannibalization,” this is an “opportunity for growth.” Hulst chimed in too: “We are looking to extend the reach of our franchises by our focus on multi-platform delivery. That enables us to continue to invest these substantial amounts into creating world-class franchises.”

Helldivers 2 is a prime example of this strategy, and, according to Hulst, it “highlights the strength of our live services efforts as well as the increased returns and reach we can realize by bringing our games to new formats and audiences beyond the PlayStation console.”

This strategy won’t be the same on all different platforms, however, as the team is taking a more “measured approach” when it comes to mobile instead of the more aggressive one on PC.

“PC is obviously more adjacent to the core of our development than mobile is,” Hulst said. “Nevertheless, we’re taking a strategic approach also in the sense of working with some of the leading companies in this space. We’re working with various partners such as NCSoft and we’re learning a lot from these collaborations, and let me conclude by saying that we’re very excited about upcoming title releases that we can communicate in the future.”

Industry Is in a ‘Very Good Place’ Despite Thousands of Job Losses

In response to a question about the layoffs that have impacted the whole video game industry, including PlayStation itself when it let go of 900 people in February 2024, Hulst insisted the industry is actually “in a very good place”.

“We’re always looking to optimize the resource allocation on an ongoing basis, but I think specifically what you’re referring to in recent months and quarters is probably a slight adjustment on the back of the windfall that the industry saw during the pandemic,” Hulst said.

“So, that might be reflective of that rather than impacting the long-term growth of the industry, which I believe in general is in a very good place, but I see this as an adjustment of the pandemic years.”

Alongside PlayStation job losses, Microsoft closed a number of Bethesda studios, including Redfall maker Arkane Austin, Hi-Fi Rush and The Evil Within developer Tango Gameworks, and more in devastating cuts at Bethesda earlier in May 2024.

Bungie

Elsewhere in the discussion, Hulst and Nishino discussed how Halo and Destiny developer Bungie is improving its business, despite several of its employees also being laid off by PlayStation in late 2023.

“Bungie’s network operations expertise has allowed us to optimize the performance of our upcoming live service titles, which is really great,” Hulst said.

“We expect to see the full integration of Bungie’s capabilities into our business operations by the end of this current fiscal year. We can’t disclose financials for individual studios in our portfolio that includes Bungie, but whilst we don’t expect a profit contribution from Bungie in Fiscal Year 24 on a standalone basis, that is obviously to do with the fact that they are working on a new IP that is yet to be released.

“It’s really important to state that we are already seeing returns on our investment in the form of process optimization and capability growth across SIE, particularly in live services. And that was always the goal behind the acquisition, that it has helped us to progress faster. It’s helped us with cost optimization, and then obviously with the upcoming releases of Destiny: The Final Shape and later with Marathon, we are going to see significant revenues coming in to SIE.”

The meeting also revealed the PS5 generation is PlayStation’s most profitable console to date and that Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 sales have swung all the way up to 11 million units since launch.

PlayStation’s big week continues today, May 30, as its gearing up to present its latest State of Play that will feature “14 PS5 and PS VR2 titles, including a look at PlayStation Studios titles arriving later this year.”

Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.

Adam Bankhurst is a writer for IGN. You can follow him on X/Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on TikTok.

The PlayStation 5 generation is officially the most profitable Sony console generation to date, according to new data shared by the company.

This comes from the company’s Game & Network Services Business Segment meeting slides and presentation, which were shared today following the company’s earnings report two weeks ago. In the presentation, Sony revealed that the PS5 generation has brought in $106 billion in sales since launch, outpacing every past console at the same point in its generation.

Stellar Blade, the third-person action game by developer Shift Up, was the best-selling video game in the U.S. in April 2024.

Mat Piscatella, executive director of video games at Circana, noted in the latest report that Stellar Blade was the only new release in April 2024 that ranked “among the month’s top 20 best-selling premium video games,” beating out other new releases in April, such as Sand Land and Another Crab’s Treasure. Additional games that made the top 20 best-selling games for April 2024 include Helldivers 2, Fallout 4, and Tekken 8.

Piscatella further elaborated on the April 2024 report, explaining in a post on X/Twitter that although it was a great achievement for Stellar Blade to rank first in U.S. sales last month, “it did have the lowest sales to lead” since April 2012 when Radical Entertainment’s action-adventure game Prototype 2 secured the number one spot.

More interestingly, Piscatella wrote on X/Twitter that PS5 sales were trending ahead of PS4 but deduced that 2023 might have been the PS5’s “peak year” for sales in the United States. In contrast, the PS5’s competition, the Xbox Series X/S consoles, is trailing Xbox One by 13 percent, and both systems remain “slightly behind” the Xbox 360 in terms of U.S. sales.

Lots of chatter on PS5 sales today… in the US through each platform’s 41st month in market (March 2024 for PS5), PS5 unit sales are trending 7% ahead of PS4, and 66% ahead of PS3.

It is likely that 2023 was PS5’s peak year in the US.

Source: Circana Retail Tracking Service.

— Mat Piscatella (@MatPiscatella) May 14, 2024

The number for the PS5 is interesting. It comes nearly two weeks after Sony’s statistics revealed that half of PlayStation players have yet to upgrade from a PS4 to a PS5 console.

Nevertheless, despite Sony and Microsoft’s respective growing pains in terms of hardware sales, both companies are gearing up for new hardware. In the case of Sony, its rumored PS5 Pro had its hardware specs leaked online in March, with a report last month claiming that Sony told developers to prepare their games for the new hardware.

Microsoft, on the other hand, already revealed it is working on a next-generation gaming console that touts will be the “largest technical leap” in a game console generation. However, before Microsoft released this next-generation Xbox system, a leak from last year revealed that the company plans to launch mid-cycle refreshes of the Xbox Series X and S sometime in 2024.

Taylor is a Reporter at IGN. You can follow her on Twitter @TayNixster.

City 20 is an upcoming survival sandbox adventure game that puts you in a quarantined secret city, one where nuclear work was done, after a radiological disaster of some kind has cut it off from the outside world. Waking up with your own past a mystery, you’re tasked to survive among the factions of people that have formed in this little, localized apocalypse. The developers have tried to create a world inspired by classics like Stalker, The Road, and La Jetée.

So far so good, right? These are all things I like to hear. I recently sat down with a demo build of the in-progress game and got a look at how it’s going so far.

The first thing that really strikes me about City 20 is the art style. It’s confident and decisive, to my eyes inspired by comics or paintings, with very stylized characters: Broad hips, bowed legs, narrow shoulders. The colors meanwhile are muted, washed out. They’re something between a set of slightly dirty pastel tones and the darker shades that have become pretty popular in the wake of Disco Elysium. Either way, the aesthetics as a whole are pretty confident and consistent, which I think is important and good to see as this sort of sandbox really lives or dies on how deeply the visuals can pull you into the unfolding story.

City 20 is supposed to be a survival sandbox, one where a realistic social and ecological simulation plays out over seasons of in-game time. Figuring out the politics of the different factions, how they relate, and how to gather the limited resources of the ruined city is supposed to be a major part of the game. The crafting and survival elements are important but relatively simple and basic, with the emphasis there on conserving resources and not overtaxing the environment—one example given by the developers is harvesting too many deer or rabbits, causing local foxes and wolves to become aggressive toward people.

In the demo, however, most of my time was spent figuring out what to eat and drink and where to get it from. Though I woke up in a cabin provided by a friendly man, the two steaks and four apples he gave me barely staved off hunger for a day. While I’m all for a hunger and thirst system, this one was a bit aggressive and will certainly need tweaks before it’s out. How do I engage with the cool social simulation if most of every day has to be spent figuring out the logistics of food?

Anyway, once I figured out I could just murder the nice man and steal all his food, I had enough to get me through my demo time without further concerns. Once I did that I saw some promising glimmers beneath the post-apocalyptic muck and rust.

By talking to people you can learn about them, and by trading with them you can figure out what they need. Every NPC I encountered had a job and a faction, ate and drank, and had a routine that included going to work and sleeping. Trading with them for what they wanted made them more favorable toward me—and presumably making enough of them favorable toward me over time would alter the whole faction’s opinion of me.

The factions themselves are also part of the balance of the in-game economy. They need resources like metal and wood to craft things and sell amongst themselves, and the characters need food and water to live. Giving lots of resources to a favored faction would, eventually, make them more powerful and wealthier than other factions simply because they have more food, better tools, and better weapons. On the other hand, losing access to an entire faction because they hate you would cut you off from a significant portion of the in-game economy—and probably make gathering resources near their territory pretty dangerous, as the pretty simple combat system goes well for you when you’re one-on-one, but the same fights get pretty one-sided pretty fast if several enemies group up on you.

Sandboxes like this one are pretty hard to judge at this stage in development. I’m inclined to look over the frustrating bits toward the more interesting systems, but this is also a pretty tricky genre to develop in the first place. Games can have deeply interesting simulations at their heart but wind up being boring to engage with because of poor pacing, because the core gameplay isn’t fun, or because the simulation itself is too opaque for the player to manipulate. Hopefully City 20 doesn’t fall into any development traps, because I’m interested to see where it’s going from here.

It’s probably the funniest joke in Capes – which has a lot of pretty good superhero jokes – that not one of your eight playable characters actually wears a cape. This clever and challenging turn-based tactical game does wear its heart on its sleeve, though, and a clear love of the comics that inspired it comes across as it makes its underdog vigilante squad feel powerful with creative combo mechanics. It’s a style of battle that gives you almost all the information and lets you execute a surefire plan in a way that reminds me of Into the Breach more than it does XCOM.

Every level is a tactical puzzle that tells you almost everything that’s going to happen next turn up front, and winning is all about countering the enemy’s moves before they can damage you by either taking them down, disarming them, or moving them right where you want them. Only a handful of abilities have randomized effects and there’s no chance to miss, plus you can see any enemy’s abilities and a timeline of who will get to move next. In short, you have all the information you need to succeed. I do wish it went a little further and told us specifically which target an enemy plans to attack and with what to take the last of the guesswork out of figuring out how best to thwart them, but once you understand that they’ll always go after the closest target (unless otherwise specified), it’s rare that you’ll be surprised by how a turn plays out if you’ve taken the time to read the room. Sometimes that can take a minute when there are literally 25 characters in the turn order list and you have to go through each one every turn to make certain your almost-dead character isn’t in the line of fire.

Capes’ tongue-in-cheek story grew on me fairly quickly – and when I heard that Morgan Jaffit, a writer who’d worked on the excellent Freedom Force games was involved, it made perfect sense. Sure, we’ve seen about 300 off-brand versions of the iconic Marvel and DC heroes at this point (everything from The Boys to Invincible to Watchmen has their own set of characters inspired by the classics), but it’s fun to embody the “I understood that reference” Captain America meme as Capes rolls out its parade of eight heroes that pay homage to the likes of Nightcrawler, Colossus, Storm, Quicksilver, Professor X, The Hulk, Human Torch, and… I dunno, someone who punches a lot? I wouldn’t say any of them are terrifically memorable on their own, but they hold their own well enough and only Ignis, the fired-up influencer parody, gets annoying to listen to at times.

The triumvirate of supervillains who rule over King City are entertaining megalomaniacs, and they come with creative boss fight mechanics. The Joker-ish telepath Wildstar can mess with your heroes’ heads and make them miss their first attack on him, while anti-Tony Stark Primax is completely invulnerable and has to be avoided and worked around as you achieve other objectives, rather than fight her directly. Those boss battles – and a strong variety of enemies and minibosses with tons of different abilities – keep fights interesting and diverse over what turns out to be a pretty lengthy campaign. I extended my time with it by replaying some missions to perfect them and earn more skill points, and there were a couple of very tough ones that took me a lot of tries to squeak through, but it was around 40 hours before I saw the end.

Plenty of amusingly cheesy superhero humor is thrown around – including a lot of references to Primax’s self-driving cars being death traps – but the story is also often dark, with plenty of straight-up murders and blood splashed in the streets as the villains hunt down supers and slaughter anyone in their way. There’s a fair amount of debate over whether heroes should kill, though all the while it sure seems like we’re killing a bunch of dudes by knocking them off of buildings or exploding them with fireballs, and the way it ends seems to hand-wave a lot of that moral ambiguity away. But as excuses to have superheroes beat up bad guys go, this ain’t bad.

That said, it’s very strange that while most of the story is delivered between missions with a 2D animated comic book style where characters’ lips don’t move, sometimes it will randomly switch to conversations between characters using their in-game 3D models. That works well enough, but it’s a confusing inconsistency. There’s also an annoying glitch where the frame rate regularly chugs as the camera zooms out from a cinematic, which is odd for a game that isn’t trying to be terribly ambitious with its graphics.

Even though animations aren’t always its strong suit, they successfully make this group feel like a team and bring energy to the turn-based action. One of Capes’ best ideas is that your squad of four heroes work together to enhance each others’ abilities when they’re close enough. It’s not unlike the team-up system in Marvel’s Midnight Suns, but here it’s much more based on position and they work differently based on which two heroes are collaborating. Among many other team-ups, the speedster Mercurial can leave a trail of fire behind her as she zips from next to Ignis to the other side of the map; Weathervane’s lightning storm is vastly more powerful with Kinetic nearby to supercharge its damage; and Mindfire can telepathically make an enemy turn around so that Rebound can teleport in for a backstab with bonus damage. It makes the choice of which four team members to bring to a fight hugely important – though it doesn’t cost you anything to restart the mission with a different squad if you find yourself in need of, say, damage mitigation from Facet’s crystal armor. You also have to keep your team’s position in mind, because if they stray more than a few tiles apart they won’t be able to take advantage of their team-up abilities.

Capes is very smart about layering on mechanics to think about beyond simply punching or zapping an enemy for as much damage as possible. Some attacks do disarm damage, which doesn’t necessarily reduce their health but can force a thug to drop a gun or bat, or interrupt a more powerful enemy’s super attack that they’re charging up for next turn. On top of that, each hero has an ultimate ability – such as nerdy scientist Hyde transforming into a big stompy swarm of nanobots – but they all charge up differently. Facet charges as he absorbs damage while armored, Mindfire earns his by making an enemy vulnerable and then dealing damage to it, and Ignis slurps up fire around the map like Pac-Man. Because of that, swapping out a single member of your team can pretty radically change your priorities in clever ways.

Once you get the hang of it and are reliably beating down bad guys, you can test your skills by attempting to complete each mission’s list of optional objectives. In addition to completing the main objective without a hero being downed (they can be revived with half their health), you’ll be challenged with pushing some number of enemies off ledges, disarming them, or using specific abilities, among other things. This is the main way you earn skill points to upgrade your heroes’ powers – some of which are minor half-point damage or range increases, but others unlock whole new extremely handy skills – so it’s definitely worth revisiting missions in the Simulator to mop them up, especially if you were that close to pulling off a perfect run.

However, the one type of mission I have no desire to revisit are the stealth ones, which are often obnoxious exercises in trial and error. While you can preview exactly where an enemy will patrol on their next turn and tiles they can currently see are highlighted, their gaze sweeps over the map as they walk and turn, and it can be very tricky to figure out where you’ll be safely hidden. I also had instances where I was detected despite not appearing to be in an enemy’s sight at all, and though there might be a reason for that, it wasn’t clear. That’s no fun, but the saving grace is that the quick-save button makes reloading painless, and several of the stealth missions are optional anyway.

The Gayming Awards 2024 date has been set for June 25, where it will once again showcase the best in LGBTQ gaming on the occasion of Pride Month.

This year’s show will highlight the best games with LGBTQ themes from 2023. It will also award the Gayming Icon 2024 award to designer Jeremy Crawford, who is best-known for his work as lead designer on Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition, while inducting five LGBTQ streamers into the LGBTQ Streamer Rising Star Class.

Cyberpunk 2077 will get the long promised FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 (FSR3) support at some point, developer CD Projekt Red has confirmed.

Speaking to IGN, the developer confirmed FSR3 — the latest iteration of AMD’s supersampling technology which increases the frame rate of a game — would still be released despite announcing it no longer had a dedicated Cyberpunk 2077 team.

“We are still working on the FSR3 support for Cyberpunk 2077, but I do not have an update on its availability just yet,” a CD Projekt Red spokesperson told IGN.

Fans were left questioning whether the promised update would ever arrive after the developer told investors its Cyberpunk 2077 team had been migrated elsewhere following the release of what was assumed to be the final update in version 2.12.

“AMD’s FSR3 was supposed to be coming to Cyberpunk 2077, but it seems like that was cancelled given that no developers are working on Cyberpunk 2077,” one Reddit user commented in a post discussing the development shift.

Some internet sleuths spotted a change to the game’s backend on PC platform Steam, however, which indicates that another update might be on the way. “Not sure if they decided to scrap the FSR3 update or not but I feel like there will be one (small) final patch, considering the internal QA branch was updated six hours ago for the first time since the last update released,” wrote Apoqsi on X/Twitter.

This certainly seems to be the case, even if the update only arrives for the PC version of Cyberpunk 2077. FSR3 was similarly added to the likes of Immortals of Aveum and Starfield, letting PC players get the most of their high-end rigs.

CD Projekt Red wound down the development of Cyberpunk 2077 after the release of its first and only expansion, Phantom Liberty, in September 2023. It came after the game-changing Update 2.0, which completely revamped Cyberpunk 2077 with features such as a new perk system and improved AI, and was followed by another big update in 2.1 but only minor changes afterwards.

Patch 2.11 addressed myriad bugs and balance issues in the open-world role-playing game, while 2.12 applied what was thought to be a final layer of polish. CD Projekt Red is now looking firmly forward towards Cyberpunk 2077’s sequel, codenamed Orion, and its myriad incoming Witcher games, though not without releasing this FSR 3 update eventually.

In our 9/10 review, IGN said: “Cyberpunk 2077 throws you into a beautiful, dense cityscape and offers a staggering amount of flexibility in how you choose to take it from there.”

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.

Sony has deleted a controversial interview with Naughty Dog chief Neil Druckmann after The Last of Us director called it out in a social media post.

The interview included quotes attributed to Druckmann that discussed views on everything from AI to Naughty Dog’s next game, which was said could “redefine mainstream perceptions of gaming”.

Druckmann then tweeted to say some of what made it into his interview with Sony was “not quite” what he said. “In editing my rambling answers in my recent interview with Sony, some of my words, context, and intent were unfortunately lost,” Druckmann added, before posting the “full long rambling answer for the final question about our future game”.

Forza Horizon may soon have some competition. Amazon Games announced today that it has struck a deal with Maverick Games for a “narrative-led open-world driving game,” which is set to release on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S.

Maverick Games, a studio spearheaded by numerous Playground Games veterans, is leading development on the new project. The studio’s leadership includes Forza Horizon 5 creative director Mike Brown.

In the aftermath of the release of Call of Duty Black Ops 6’s live-action reveal trailer, fans have unearthed a number of secrets, Easter eggs, and hidden details — and perhaps even a pointer to the game’s first Zombies map.

Activision’s marketing so far has revolved around teasing fans with cryptic nods to the Gulf War of the early ‘90s, and the trailer, below, continues the conspiracy theories with a few words of wisdom from world leaders central to the military action that took place in Iraq during the decade. Former U.S. presidents Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush, as well as ex-UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Iraq leader Saddam Hussein, combine to utter words from the shadows that allude to some grand conspiracy the player will presumably unravel over the course of Black Ops 6’s campaign.

To accompany the release of the trailer, Activision released a single piece of key art for Black Ops 6. On the face of it, this image, below, rekindles memories of Black Ops 1’s iconic box art, with a soldier in a familiar pose while holding handguns. But fans have spotted various clues and Easter eggs in the image that have certainly set the cat among the pigeons within the community.