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Gaming giant Tencent, which you might know as the owner of League of Legends developer Riot Games - or for the numerous other bits of investing and publishing it's done in the gaming space - has been put on a list of businesses the US Government believes have ties to the ******** military. Read more View the full article

I love that Hades keeps inspiring so many new roguelikes. Supergiant Games' version of Greek myth has some of the tightest gameplay, unique storytelling, and challenging progression the genre has ever seen, and more developers keep using it as clear inspiration for their own work. We might be at the point where there are too many Hades-likes to parse on Steam, but this just means we're spoiled for choice. Today I bring you another in the form of Rogue Loops, which twists the genre with a delightful new idea, and you can try a demo right now. Read the rest of the story... View the full article

The development of 2020 FPS Call Of Duty: ****** Ops Cold War cost $700 million, making it the most expensive video game project yet reported. That’s according to a court filing reviewed by Stephen Totilo’s Game File (paywalled) in which Call Of Duty creative head Patrick Kelly divulged the budgets of three games in the series. Read more View the full article

Sony have also had their keynote speech now at CES 2025, and for fans of their games the good news is that there's more of them coming to the big screen. Read the full article here: [Hidden Content] View the full article

A sharp-eyed Magic: The Gathering fan has spotted evidence which seems to suggest that the final, currently unannounced Universes Beyond set of 2025 might be a crossover with Avatar: The Last Airbender. Heads up, when we begin this explanation, it might sound totally tinfoil, but we think there's something solid here. It all comes down to the MTG Arena deals page... No, wait! Come back! Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Top commanders MTG 2025 MTG card sees 460% price spike despite being barred from every format Best MTG Commander precon decks 2025 View the full article For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

Marvel Rivals continues to shine, but despite its popularity, there are still areas for improvement, and players have been calling for an annoying menu feature to be removed. NetEase has developed an incredibly fun game. Most features, including the menu navigation, are well-tuned, but one area, in particular, is causing huge frustration. View the full article

head of the Fantastic Four joining Marvel Rivals in Season 1, we've got a short sneak peek at what Mister Fantastic's kit is going to be like, and from the look of things, he's going to be a powerful duelist and a massive pain in the *****... Read more.View the full article

One of the best things about Fortnite is that it always offers fresh new content and features for players to try. But with new game modes and content come differing opinions and the ever-present accusation that Fortnite is “dead.” Back in 2017, we had the original Fortnite game mode, a PvE multiplayer version eventually named Save The World to help differentiate it from the Battle Royale version released soon after. Although Save The World is still enjoyed by many today, the most popular game mode is Battle Royale. But how long will this Fortnite popularity last? According to many Fortnite players in r/FortNiteBR, we will enjoy it for many more years to come. View the full article

NBA 2K25 has rolled out its first major update of the new year, bringing a host of improvements and preparations for Season 4, which launches on January 10. Alongside general fixes and gameplay enhancements, the update includes player likeness updates, court adjustments, and refinements across various NBA 2K25 modes. View the full article

There's a new trailer for The Last of Us season 2, and while it doesn't show all that much, it does at least have some familiar moments and a release month. Read more View the full article

Until recently, we thought that Titan Walks - massive multiplayer games of Warhammer 40k using two-foot tall Titan models - were the most resource intensive miniature wargame on earth. Enter Ohio-based model maker and experienced firearm handler Daniel, who combined decades of experience with airguns and a massive Gundam collection to create a full-destruction wargame, which plays like a hybrid of XCOM and a firing range. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Here's what to expect in Warhammer 40k's first preview stream of 2025 All the Warhammer 40k primarchs, and where they are now What's the best Warhammer 40k starter set to get in 2025? View the full article

G2 Esports are heading into another expected year of dominance in the LEC, and having won every title in the region, the next step is returning to international glory. Rasmus “Caps” Borregaard Winther has been there through the highs and the lows. From claiming G2’s first international title to crashing out against North America’s NRG, the veteran mid-laner has seen it all with G2. Coming off the back of another disappointing World Championship run in October, the organization brought in fresh faces to get the organization back on track. In comes Rudy “SkewMond” Semaan, a young jungler from Europe’s development scene, and Labros “Labrov” Papoutsakis, a highly touted support player looking to unlock his potential. In an exclusive interview with Dot Esports, Caps detailed how these new players will define the future, how they have been doing in practice, and the overall practice quality of Europe. View the full article

If you gotta go fast, you probably don't want to be a stubby-legged spearman who climbs every ladder like a geriatric walrus. Yet that's the challenge taken up yesterday by speedrunners at Awesome Games Done Quick. The UFO 50 speedrun includes an impressive dart through the retro collection's most bewildering game, the ancient and mysterious Barbuta, in which your character is a frustratingly slow hero with a fearfully short attack range. They managed to complete it in less than five minutes. Not only does the run (and its helpful commentary) serve as a short and sweet explanation of why Barbuta is so glitchily fascinating, it also left plenty of time to marathon another three games from the collection. Read more View the full article

Razer has come out swinging as CES 2025 kicks off in Las Vegas. With Nvidia and AMD showing off all their new hardware options, from graphics cards to processors, Razer is combining their forces into one new Razer gaming laptop, the new Blade 16 2025. The Razer Blade 16 will come with a laptop version of the Nvidia RTX 5090, which Nvidia announced at CES 2025. It packs 24GB of GDDR7 VRAM and tops out at 155W of power for some beastly performance on the go. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Alienware debuts stunning new 27-inch, QD-OLED, 4K gaming monitor Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 release date, price, and specs No, the new AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme gaming CPU won't be in the Steam Deck 2 View the full article

What are the latest Raid Shadow Legends codes? Raid Shadow Legends is a champion collection RPG with turn-based combat elements so, naturally, your main priority is collecting the best champions and increasing their strength. This costs valuable resources, but, luckily, there are a bunch of free redemption codes available to help you out. It is worth noting that redeeming the current codes in Raid Shadow Legends requires some patience since you can only redeem one every 24 hours. If you're new to the free PC game, there are also 13 new player codes to choose from that grant a bonus Champion if you're quick. If you're unsure how to redeem codes in the RPG game, we've got all the details you need at the bottom of this guide. Now, with all that out the way, here are the current Raid codes for January 2025. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Best Android games 2024 The internet's most infamous RPG suddenly launches on Steam Raid Shadow Legends adds WWE SmackDown champion Ronda Rousey View the full article

Whether you’re heroically rescuing a Katamari Damacy Bot or unlocking a Yharnam Hunter costume, Astro Bot’s dense runtime offers a metric ton of referential PlayStation goodies. The main way to unlock new ****** Site activities is to collect puzzle pieces scattered throughout the game’s planets (stages). Each stage contains two to three puzzle pieces located in clever off-the-beaten-path areas. The Final Encore planet is a late-game secret level containing some particularly clever puzzle pieces, and that’s where this guide comes in handy! View the full article

Gentle reader, I have previously written exactly two boob-related articles in my life. One was a cheesy round-up of the best manboobs in video games for Green Man Gaming's long-vanished blog. It was published sometime in 2010, and IIRC, pre-reboot Kratos came out on top. I think/hope it still exists somewhere in the apparatus of Green Man Gaming, hidden beneath the retailer's veneer of respectability like a barrel of radioactive waste. The other boob article was a piece for OXM about Ken Levine saying that he wished people would stop fixating on Elizabeth's cleavage in Bioshock Infinite - a complaint we might consider slightly hypocritical, given the character's visual design. Now it's time for boob article number 3: some modder has given 122 of the 150 Jokers in cardgame Balatro big chests. This extends from visibly human Jokers to Joker concepts that shouldn't, strictly speaking, have the capacity for boobage. The banana card has boobs, for example. The credit card card has boobs. Behold. Read more View the full article

If you've been looking closely at the Invisible Woman's... "dimensions" in Marvel Rivals and thought they seemed familiar, you're not alone. View the full article

Sony clearly has a lot of faith in Ghost of Tsushima as an IP, as on top of that live-action film, an anime has just been announced. Read more View the full article

The astronomical development budgets of the Call of Duty games were revealed for the first time after a court document confirmed Activision pumped $700 million into ****** Ops Cold War alone. First reported by Game File, a court filing submitted by publisher Activision as part of a lawsuit regarding the 2022 school shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas, included official word on the development budgets of 2015’s ****** Ops 3, 2019’s Modern Warfare, and 2020’s ****** Ops Cold War. The court filing also includes updated sales figures for each game, showing the huge revenue Call of Duty brings in through sales alone and before its post-launch monetization. First, some caveats. The figures detailed below include pre and post-launch development. That is, the cost to develop each game for launch, then the subsequent post-launch development costs associated with feeding the ongoing live service, meaning the development lifecycle of the game. Call of Duty games offer a range of free content following release, including new maps, new weapons, and new cosmetics for use across Multiplayer and Zombies. Activision monetizes Call of Duty post-launch by selling battle passes, store bundles, and, most recently with ****** Ops 6, premium event passes, released in the traditional live service seasonal model in the year each game has to itself before the next Call of Duty comes around. The development of this relentless conveyor belt of content, which often includes high-profile crossovers with popular intellectual property such as Warhammer 40,000 and Squid Game, does not come cheap. Now, onto the figures themselves: ****** Ops 3 (2015): $450 million in development costs across the game’s lifecycle, 43 million copies soldModern Warfare (2019): $640 million in development costs across the game’s lifecycle, 41 million copies sold****** Ops Cold War (2020): $700 million in development costs over the game’s life cycle, 30 million copies sold To provide context, Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us 2 cost around $220 million, Guerrilla’s Horizon Forbidden West cost $212 million, and Insomniac’s Spider-Man 2 cost $300 million to develop. However, these games are not live services, and so post-launch development costs are not necessarily related to the figures as they are with Call of Duty. As Game File noted, these development costs do not include marketing spend, which for Call of Duty will be significant. So the true cost of bringing Call of Duty to market and operating it as a live service will be even higher. While ever increasing triple-A development budgets are a hot topic within the industry, and have caused some experts to question the viability of these sorts of games, Call of Duty operates on a different level to most of its peers. ****** Ops Cold War’s 30 million copies sold will in of itself have generated well over $1 billion in revenue for Activision, then there’s the live service revenue generated by the game during the 12 months before 2021’s Call of Duty: Vanguard launched. Even with $700 million spent on development and more on marketing, ****** Ops Cold War will have been hugely profitable for Activision. You can see why Microsoft forked out $69 billion to buy the company. Speaking of Microsoft, the math is now muddled by Call of Duty’s day-one launch on Game Pass, which some analysts had predicted would impact sales of ****** Ops 6 but boost subscription numbers. Microsoft itself sounds delighted with the performance of last year’s game, saying sales of ****** Ops 6 on PlayStation and PC were 60% higher compared to the 2023 release of Modern Warfare 3. Microsoft has yet to say exactly how many new subscribers ****** Ops 6 brought through the door, although CEO Satya Nadella has confirmed that Game Pass set a record for new subs on launch day. However, Microsoft’s gaming business has suffered devastating layoffs, and Activision has taken a significant hit as part of that. Microsoft has cut an eye-watering 2,550 staff from its gaming business since acquiring Activision Blizzard for $69 billion in 2023. Xbox boss Phil Spencer has indicated the cuts were related to the acquisition of the Call of Duty maker. Wesley is the *** News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at *****@*****.tld. View the full article

It's almost 30 years since the first Dynasty Warriors game was released, and the sometimes fighting game, sometimes hack 'n' slash, and sometimes RPG has come a long, long way. Back in 1997, Dynasty Warriors was a straightforward beat 'em up, and would-be rival to Tekken. Over three decades, however, Koei Tecmo's series has gotten ******* and *******, incorporating sandbox and free roam elements to become something closer to an open-world, crowd combat game. With Dynasty Warriors Origins about to land on Steam, one obscure and overlooked spin-off is also about to close down for good, and if you own it, you had better spend your in-game currency fast, because there won't be any refunds. Read the rest of the story... View the full article

Marvel Rivals is all about balance. The competitive hero shooter needs every character to be viable in several scenarios, and while that's mostly been true of Season 0, the wall has some cracks. Some ranged DPS characters are dominating matches, and other heroes don't have enough versatility to make them practical picks over the rest. This is bound to happen as a meta emerges, which is why it's now up to NetEase Games to make changes to bring other heroes back into the forefront. Luckily with Season 1, this is exactly what's going to happen. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: All Marvel Rivals codes and how to redeem - January 2025 Marvel Rivals events - all current and upcoming events Marvel Rivals Season 1 release date, start time, and news View the full article

The United States government has added ******** gaming giant Tencent to a ‘blacklist’ of companies it believes are linked to the ******** military. While the Pentagon’s designation carries no specific sanctions, it discourages American companies from dealing with its members. The ‘blacklist’ originates from an executive order in 2020, which prevented US companies from investing in companies with ties to the ******** military. Read More... View the full article For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

A new season dawns in Marvel Rivals, with Season One bringing new environments to compete on, additional characters to the roster, and balance changes to fine-tune the meta that has emerged since launch. Marvel Rivals‘ first full season is due to kick off on Jan. 10, introducing two new characters immediately alongside new maps, game modes, a fresh Battle Pass, and more. Later down the line, a mid-season update will expand things further. View the full article

It's that time of year again. Voting for EA Sports FC 25's Team of the Year is now open, giving you your yearly chance to nominate the players from the men's and women's games that you think have been setting the world alight for a card that streamers will blow thousands on being able to scream at. Read more View the full article