The question which the Xbox Games Showcase needs to answer on June 9 is what, exactly, that might be. I've been writing summer prediction pieces about Xbox here at GamesRadar+ for coming up on six years now and I always seem to land in🐭 exactly the same place: the time has come for radical transparency. I still believe that this is true – Microsoft Gaming has struggled with messaging since the Xbox One era – but I'm not convinced tha𒅌t such an approach will be possible this time around. Not when you consider how increasingly muddled the wider strategy from Phil Spencer and the rest of the Xbox executive leadership team has become over time. 

Will the price of 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Game Pass subscription tiers rise to accommodate the new crown jewel of the platform? We know that 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 will be the first video game in the franchise to 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:land in the service from day one, we just don't know at what cost. Can the creative teams at innovative studios like Double Fine and inXile survive in an environment where the creators of genre-defining experiences like Prey and 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Hi-Fi Rush can not? 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Xbox Game Studios boss Matt Booty says he wants "smaller games that give us prestige and awards" but that doesn't necessarily seem rooted in all 🐓that much reality. Could big-impact titles like Starfield follow Sea of Thie꧙ves to PS5 in the future? Right now the multiplatform expansion strategy appears written in sand ra✨ther than etched i🍰n stone. 

The time has come for clarity

Embracing a form of radical transparency would answer these questions. It would also work to assuage the uneasy feeling many in the Xbox community are feeling right now, and reaffirm Microsoft Gaming's core strategy and ethos as we transition past the halfway-line of the Xbox Series X generation and into the endgame – a successor could, after all, 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:land as early as 2028, and Spencer has 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:already committed to new hardware. The thing is, transparency could also detract (or otherwise distract) from what I imagine will be Xbox's primary goal during the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Summer Game Fest 2024 schedule: seizing on a rare lull in the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:upcoming PS5 games calendar, with Sony currently lacking any key franchise pillars for the remainder of the financial year (although that could change after the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:May 2024 State of Play). 

When it's all said and done, the one thing I hope the Xbox Games Showcase delivers more so than anything else is clarity. Because the Xbox Game Studios group has the announcements and apparatus in place to once again enact a stranglehold over the biggest genres in the business. Looking at the lineup of 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:upcoming Xbox Series X games, I find myself reconnecting with why I became so drawn to the Xbox platform in its halcyon years: the promise of PC-quality play on console; the framework to take online multiplayer to new, unassailable heights; and a commitment to delivering best-in-class experiences within the 'core' shooter, role-play, and racing niches. Sadly, that message became diluted over time as Xbox waged a war for input one and spent a generation-cycle dealing with the afteꦬrmath. 

But Xbox should be in a position to make the case that it's the best place to play once again. We know that Playground and The Initiative are hard at work on reboots for Fable and 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Perfect Dark, respectively. 343 Industries, The Coalition, and id Software are rumored to be working on new installments to the Halo, Gears of War, and DOOM franchises. inXile, Compulsion, Obsidian, and Rare are investing in new IP through 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Clockwork Revolution, 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:South of Midnight, Avowed, and Everwild. MachineGames is working on 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Arkane Lyon has 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Marvel's Blade, Blizzard continues to tease the possibility of World of Warcraft lining up on console alongside Bethesda's Fallout 76 and The Elder Scrolls Online, and Call of Duty is about to hit shelves slathered in Xbox branding for the first time in a decade. Oh, and don't forget about the promise of 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:The Elder Scrolls 6, 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Fallout 5, 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:The Outer Worlds 2, and 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Project Mara. Am I forgetting anything? Oh yeah! Undead Labs' 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:State of Decay 3. Honestly, there might be others. 

It's an outrageous, exhaustive lineup of confirmed first-party-developed projects that, frankly, is unrivaled – particularly when you factor in second- and third-party platform exclusives that are landing on Game Pass from day one – Hideo Kojima's OD, Avalanche's 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Contraband, or Studio Wildcard's ARK 2 bring prime examples. The problem here is that there's maybe two vague launch windows and no confirmed release dates between every single video game that I just mentioned. It's transparency that led Microsoft Gaming to unveil so many projects so early in their respective development journeys, but it's a lack of clarity that has left so many of them appearing as if they are trapped in limb🌠o. 

Cut through the noise

There's going to be a lot of noise generated by the Xbox Games Showcase and Black Ops 6 Direct, a double-bill event which I'm genuinely excited to sit through. Xbox will likely announce that scores of legendary Activision and Blizzard games are about to land on Game Pass. Perhaps King will be used as a lynchpin to launch a renewed mobile gaming initiative. There may be new details of 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred, perhaps a look at whatever it is that Double Fine has been working on since it shipped 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Psychonauts 2 in 2021, and I wouldn't be shocked to see new hardware – a refined controller, or the long rumored 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Xbox Series X refresh. Ignoring all of ⛄that noise is going to be paramount. 

By the time things are all said and done, I hope that we all have clarity where it really matters: how are each of these announced video games shaping up in development, and what do the people creating them have to say about their projects. Rumors have persisted that Everwild, Perfect Dark, and State of Decay 3 have had tumultuous tu🍌rns in pre-production, and the best way to shake off that perception is to get the teams out in front of a crowd – it's effectively been four years since we last received official updates on any of these titles, and a new trailer, statement of intent, or (whisper it) gameplay demonstration would go a long way to alleviate any perception of enduring problems. 

I hope that we leave the Xbox Games Showcase with a firmer understanding of when Avowed, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and World of Warcraft: The War Within will land this fal🧸l. I hope that titles a little further off get, at the very least, loose release windows and brief flashes on new gameplay too. That's what I hope for, more than anything else. Clarity that these video games are actually coming, and that the studios making them are secure as they look to deliver the world class experiences we know that they are capable of achieving. Xbox needs to prove that it is capable of delivering for the core who have stuck with Xbox so far, and that it has the release schedule capable of adding more players to those ranks. 

No-nonsense gunfights

This was the year of Black Ops 3, which introduced specialists, abilities, and ultimates, along with the thruster pack to enhance movement. While the latter doesn't feature here, 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:XDefiant factions are essentially specialists in disguise, as each comes equipped with a passive, active, and ultimate ability. While it's too early to determine how these will impact the meꦍtagame, early impressions are that they're not too defining. Most XDefiant battles come down to pure gunskill: accuracy, reflexes, and having a weapon suited to the situation you're in.

These straight-up gunfights feel immensely satisfying too, which is largely because the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best XDefiant weapons ensure a fairly high time-to-kill. Call of Duty games often fall into the trap of having player health too low compared to the average damage dealt per shot, which leads to situations where you're being shot in the back and feel like you can't do anything about it when so many players have taken to hiding in corners. On the flip side, you have games such as Halo, where shields make for an incr♍edibly high time-to-kill, and unless you have a power weapon such as the Energy Sword or Grav Hammer, you'll always stand a chance in a fight even if you get caught unaware.

XDefiant strikes the balance perfectly. If your reflexes are sharp, you stand a chance in practically any gunfight. Thanks to the complete omission of killstreaks, this also means🧜 you're suffering from far fewer infuriating deaths because let&apos꧟;s face it, while manning the guns in an AC-130 or hopping inside a Juggernaut suit is a whale of a time in Call of Duty, it's not quite as enjoyable for everyone you're facing off against. Even basic killstreaks such as UAVs can suck the fun out of COD because they're almost essential to use, so everyone runs perks to counter them, and the cycle continues. Killstreaks are hard to balance – we've all been blown up by an RC-XD in Black Ops at some point – and forgoing them is a win for a healthier meta.

Esports adjacent

There's no definitive answer as to why XDefiant has gone down this back-to-basics route, but if I were a betting man, I'd suspect it's thanks to two specific people in the development team. Firstly, Mark Rubin is the Executive Producer on XDefiant, and he previously held the same role at Infinity Ward from 2005-2015. This means he was one of the leads on, at a minimum, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Modern Warfare 2, Modern Warfare 3, and Call of Duty: Ghosts. Excluding the latter, this initial Modern Warfare trilogy is widely considered to be among of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best Call of Duty games ever made, and di🧔d things far simpler than we see ♒in more modern releases.

Patrick "Aches" Price is also one of the developers on XDefiant, and he is an ex-Call of Duty pro player. He competed at the top for around a decade, winning two world championshi𒁃ps between 2010-2020, and likely had some influence on how similar XDefiant feels at launch to a Call of Duty esports ruleset after bans and restrictions have come into effect. Black Ops 2, 3, and 4 are often considered to be the golden games of competitive Call of Duty amongst top players and analysts, and it's a surefire bet Ubisoft will be looking♉ to channel that era and get competitive XDefiant up and running.

Skill-based match making

However, one area of Call of Duty that the highly skilled players love to complain about is skill-based matchmaking (SBMM). It's a never ending debate because when you're in the top percentile of players and you're playing unranked matches, of course it&ಞapos;s a lot of fun to be matched up with opponents worse than you. So there are lots of calls on social media for the SBMM parameters to be changed in Call of Duty, or even removed entirely, but it is very much a vocal minority.

XDefiant has listened and heeded these complaints, meaning 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:there is no SBMM once you leave the introductory playlist beyond rank 25. As always, the response is mixed, with plenty of the better players online lauding this approach, wh🌳ile the more casual players are finding it to be more of a struggle. The problem is that while it's all well having plenty of dedicated players who dream of going pro, they'll only ever make up a small subset of the population, and if all the players who only hop on for an hour or two each evening for fun fall off the game because they're not enjoying themselves in ♈lobbies with players far better than themselves, XDefiant's shelf life will be limited.

This could well be an instance of "git gud" for those complaining, but some players don't want to get good. They want to enjoy the latest FPS without running into skill issues and being demolished by players far better than them, which is exactly what could happen in the longterm when SBMM is disabled. After all, there's a reason it's so widely used in other games: the stats for player retention must far outweigh the players that quit thanks toꦐ it being enabled. If Ubisoft keeps SBMM on across the board – or at least continues experimenting with it as an option – then I'm certain that this fresh, exciting FPS will have a bright fut🐟ure ahead of it. How could it not? XDefiant does a fantastic job of emulating an era of FPS games that we haven't seen for quite some time. 

Looking for more games like XDefiant? Why not check out our list of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best FPS games to play today

Many players picked up one of the lightguns launched for PlayStations one to three, and while a handful of the games will live on as gems, others missed the mark, usually thanks to confused mechanics. We’re going to look at the gameওs that best define this niche genre – usually for better, sometimes for worse, but always shooting from the hip.

Die Hard Trilogy

Platform: PS1
Year: 1996

For many players, the ideal way to control the second part of Die Hard Trilogy – three games in one based on the films – was by guiding a crosshair around the screen with a controller. Admittedly that was a cumbersome and clunky approach that meant John McClane wasᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚ a fair bit more hamfisted than in the movie. 

Players who had access to Konami’s Hyper Blaster (called The Justifier in Japan) were able to step up their game with more accuracy. However, it was more like using a laser pointer than really aiming and shooting. E🎉liminating terrorists was never easier; actually getting your hands on the Hyper Blaster was something of a challenge.

Lethal Enforcers 1 and 2

Platform: PS1
Year: 1997

The Lethal Enforcers series, which first entered arcades in 1992, stands out in this list for one very good reason: all in-game characters were created from digitised photographs. That realistic (for its time) violence made it controversial. With a strong Miami Vice flavour, it saw the player roaming streets as a cop, shooting at petty criminals while avoiding civilians. However, the game h🉐ad its positive side; the console release is what spurred Konami to create the Hyper Blaster lightgun.

Starsky and Hutch 

Platform: PS2 
Year: 2003

Nifty drivers would play this co-op shooter as Starsky; trigger-happy buddies played as Hutch and hung out the window brandishing a weapon. On this side of the TV, that was probably Namco’s G-Con2 (called GunCon2 elsewhere). As Starsky sped through the streets it was Hutch’s job෴ to blast away the baddies who were trying to evade justice. It wasn’t only criminals who needed shooting – players also had to shoot traffic lights to make them shift from red to green. It wasn’t the easiest task. The actors made shooting from a moving car look much easier on the TV show.

Cabela’s Dangerous Hunts 2011

Platform: PS3
Year: 2011

Swerving away from Cabela’s usual ‘stealthy big game hunt’ setup, this title featured a story about hunting a seemingly unstoppable creature. This was more ‘survival’ than ‘hunting’, then, but there were still plenty of guns to shoot, and players could do this using Activision’s Top Shot Elite contro﷽ller, which could be bought bundled with the game. The Top Shot Elite was the last lightgun for PS3 as the PS Move controllers launched and made them redundant. It was a departure from the handcannon style of the G-Con, modelled on a rifle, with a scope on top and an analogue stick on the handle.

Time Crisis

Platform: PS1
Year: 1997

This is perhaps the most famous lightgun game of all – masses of people have played it owing to the arcade version’s popularity, and its propensity to show up in motorway service stations. I𓆉n arcades, Time Crisis bucked the lightgun trend by including a pedal which allowed players to take cover before popping back out to lay down fire. Combined with a constant countdown, it was a perfectly balanced mechanic which would push you through each area and boss fight – if a player took cover for too long they’d run out of time and be unable to finish the level, but if they took a careless all-action approach they would probably be gunned down. With so many fans, it was only a matter of time before Time Crisis jumped from arcades to consoles, but there would be a down side: lightguns were already expensive, and bundling in a pedal would have killed sales. 

Players who didn’t want to fiddle with the oddly placed cover button on the G-Con45 (the Namco-developed de facto Time Crisis home controller) could plug a controller into the second port and put it on the ground. Enter the ingenuity of gamers – cardboard squares Blu-Tacked to the controller to create a makeshift pedal. Or they could yell at a younger sibling to “Press the damn button!” Aside from this awkwardness, the home release of Time Crisis was a superb port and it eliminated the need to pump coins into a machine when you succumbed to death or time ran out. 💖Time Crisis became a blockbuster series spawning many sequels, none of which seem to reach home consoles nowadays, which is a shame given the technology we have. Time Crisis VR anyone?

Resident Evil Survivor

Platform: PS1
Year: 2000

Survivor was a stark departure from Resident Evil’s usual style. Not only did the game use the Namco G-Con45 lightgun, it was the first title in the series to have a first-person perspective – the previous three games had a third-person point of view. Some might say it was also the first entry in the series to miss the mark on quality, owing to poor implementation of the technology plus slow and ponderous action. So why have we included it on our list? Because it’s a landmark title. It not only went on to spawn several (much better) sequels, it was the only real rival to Sega’s popular House 𝓡Of The Dead. The House Of The Dead series didn’t arrive on PlayStation until the third instalment hit PS3 in 2012, and it featured full PS Move support rather than using a lightgun. Before that, if you wanted to emulate the zombie shooting arcade classic, you had to make do with Survivor. This was a time when developers weren’t entirely sure what to do with the lightgun hardware and not everyone wanted to emulate the arcade experience. 

Survivor’s developers definitely struggled to find the right approach, and the game featured a combination of using the controller to guide the protagonist in free-roam with switching to shooting with the lightgun for the act🍸ion s🎀equences. It was a mixed experience, then, and one only possible in Europe and Japan, where players would find the full experience as described. In America the lightgun support was stripped out completely owing to the unfortunate timing of the game’s release, right after the Columbine High School shooting.

Point Blank

Platform: PS1
Year: 1998

Made famous in the arcades of Japan, the Point Blank series’ biggest a🍰ttractions were its minigame features and cartoon visuals. It used the Namco G-Con45 and players would tackle various challenges – among them, memory, which required players to memorise objects and shoot them in a specific order; speed, in which targets and timers combined; and accuracy, which asked players to land shots on increasingly smaller targets. Point Blank appealed to everyone and largely dodged arguments over violence.

Time Crisis: Razing Storm 

Platform: PS3
Year: 2010

If any game is to feature twice on this list, it must surely be Time Crisis. Although this isn’t ‘just another cover shooter’. Razing Storm was actually a small compilation of games, all of which were pretty stellar. There was the titular Razing Storm, which added destructible environments to the usual Time Crisis fare. Time Crisis 4, undoubtedly the better of the series’ entries, was in there too. Lastly, and pr꧟obably most importantly, Deadstorm Pirates was a stonking adventure on the high seas and easily the standout game in the collection owing to its weaponry and departure from the usual cops-and-robbers template of so many other lightgun games. And if you didn’t have a G-Con3, you could use PS Move controllers (which, sadly, didn’t lead to a lightgun game renaissance).

Men in Black: Alien Crisis

Platform: PS3
Year: 2012

Players who’d bought Cabela’s Dangerous Hunts 🌌were stuck with the swish but relatively unsupported Top Shot Elite. Though interest in lightguns was waning due to Sony developing the Move controllers, the Top Shot Elite got another game in 🌌the shape of Men In Black: Alien Crisis. Released alongside the third film, this game follows Agent P (voiced by Troy Baker) who must stop, well, an alien crisis. Sadly this was not the swan song envisioned for the fabulous lightgun; the game was universally panned. We’re not sure how you can get aliens, guns, and humour so badly wrong.

Virtua Cop: Elite Edition

Platform: PS2
Year: 2002

At first, players and critics were sceptical of🌊 the Virtua Cop series. With Konami using digitised photos in its leading shooter, some were wary of Sega’s use of 3D polygons. However, in the arcades, the game was a smash. Virtua Cop bridged the𒉰 gap between graphic violence and cartoon-style visuals, and there was even a feature allowing you to disarm criminals instead of killing them. Players felt the use of 3D models made for a more enjoyable experience as a higher level of accuracy was needed. Elite Edition bundled the first two games together in an almost-perfect arcade port.

This feature first appeared in PLAY magazine - 

Hundr꧑eds of quality assurance workers in the Activision Publishing department voted to form t🍨he Activision Quality Assurance United union, assisted by the Communication Workers of America (CWA). A CWA representative tells that 390 tallied votes read "yes," with eight votes opting for a "no."

The Call of Duty, Crash Bandicoot, Diablo, and Warcraft publisher was recently acquired by Microsoft after a series of long, long legal battles. Microsoft previously claimed it wouldꦉn't stand in the way of possible Activision Blizzard unions and announced a labor neutrality agreement back in 2022, which ap🐽parently made the unionization process easier o𓆏n organizers, according to .

"This has been an emergent effort th♐at's arisen in the last few weeks in response to the opportunities we've had to freely organize following the merger," an organizer from the newly-formed union, Tom Shelley, tells The Verge. "As QA workers, we often have the weakest protections and lowest pay of any workers in the industry," he continues, "even though our work is integral to the success of the companies we work for and the titles we make."

Unionization efforts across Activision Blizzard, and the wider gaming industry, have been growing in recent years. Staff from 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Raven Software and 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Blizzard Albany successfully unionized in 2022 despite some potentially union-busting tactics employed by their parent company, And ZeniMax Worker United, Xbox's first-ever unionized subsidiary, 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史🅷查询:began bargaining with corp😼orate stepdad Microsoft just last year. 

Microsoft also recently announced layoffs affecting around 1,900 employees in the gaming division earlier this year. 

Brad's role at 2015 Inc was his first games industry job. In fact, although the studio had secured a modicum of credibility in first-person shooter circles with its SiN expansion, Wages Of Sin, it was mostly populated by you🅰ng and inexperienced developers – nearly all of whom had travelled to Tulsa, Oklahoma from elsewhere in America to seize their breakthrough opportunity. "I had moved out there from California, so it was a bit of a culture shock," Brad says. "But it was really fun." 

Robert Field, a modder who had built the enemy AI for Quake's popular Frogbot, was even further from home. He arrived at Tulsa International Airport on 15 December 2000, when development on Allied Assault was already underway. "I'm from Brisbane in Australia, so walking around in the snow in Tulsa was interesting," he says. "We even had a tornado once." The weather was tolerable because the work was fulfilling. With the N✃ineties over, Medal Of Honor: Allied Assault looked like the future. "To me, up until that point, a lot of games were hyper-coloured and bright and shiny, and this was not," Brad says. "This was subdued and realistic looking, and all the colours were drab. It was much more rich and interesting, the way they were presenting it." 

D-day

The foundations for Call Of Duty were set here, in the shadow of Spielberg. In place of the machismo of Doom and Duke Nukem was a more subtle sense of historic🎶 pride, mingled with sadness and a sense of sacrifice. Your avatar wasn't a superman, but a vulnerable soldier victimised by World War II, attempting to carry out hair-raising orders as best they could. This was an interactive Saving Private Ryan or Band Of Brothers. Or at least, it would be, if 2015 Inc's rabble could all push in the right direction. 

"When I arrived, the animation system and everything was broken because they were replacing everything," Robert says. "I didn't know much about it because I was a mod author, so I thought, 'Oh, this is what you do.' Later on, Jason West brought the discipline where you always have a working game and you're able to show prototypes." Jason West had joined the team as a programmer to work on a console port. "But then I think Vince Zampella convince𝓡d him to take over," Robert says. "He became pretty much the lead of Allied Assault. We were a bunch of mod authors and he came on and got us meeting the schedule." Brad, who was creating the game's characters, would grab photos of members of the team and transform them into German or American soldiers, telling them, "You're gonna be the bad guy." 

"Everybody that I was working with was super talented, and super enthusiastic about what we were making," he says. "Everybody wanted to put the special sauce on it and spend the extra hours. It was really a fun experience, minus a few other things." Some on the Allied Assault team had concluded that they didn't want to stay at 2015 Inc beyond the end of the project. "We weren't going to get a good deal with the owner of 2015," Robert says. "Jason, Vince and Grant [Collier] wanted a better deal where we got royalty sharing." Resolving to set up a new company, a handful of key staff started to make moves. "We were all over the place, with five or six guys sneaking off to lunches and going, 'What are we going to do?,'" Brad says. "We had no idea what the name of the company was going to be. We just started spitballing ideas for games. One of our ex-producers had connections with different publishers, and he was like, 'What if we got this IP or that IP?&a𓄧pos; So it was really exciting. There were a ton of different ideas floating around and options that we could have done." 

Yet the first thing the new Infinity Ward worked on was, in fact, Medal Of Honor. More precisely, an add-on pack for Allied Assault at the behest of EA. "We were still working on the same game, with the same publisher, but as another company," Brad says. Many packed up ♋and vacated the 2015 Inc office overnight. Although, as Brꦅad remembers, Robert didn't get the memo straight away, "Robert was away on vacation or out of the country or something. So we didn't have a way to let him know. He shows up the next day, and everybody's gone. I think Grant contacted him and let him know, 'Hey, we're here, this is what's going on'. He may have been a little bewildered." The change and bewilderment didn't end there. When Infinity Ward was deep into development on its Medal Of Honor expansion, EA stopped paying for the work. "We were about to go under and get absorbed into the EA collective," Brad says. "And Activision swooped in. They were like, 'Hey, we'll fund your next project. If you work for us, you can stay together as a team.' And that was a really big issue for us, because we really liked working with each other." 

"It's a family type of thing," Robert says. "We felt we had a good team, and we had Jason, who was pretty much the team leader, so we all rallied behind him." Activision wanted Infinity Ward to make a competitor to Medal Of Honor – an idea which didn't enthuse the entire team, who had already spent years with their heads in a simulated Second World War. But it was the best offer they had, and so they agreed – initiating a partnership that has now lasted for two decades and counting. "The goal was having a good solid team of people to work with that we liked," Brad says. "We trusted each other's instincts and talents [at Infinity Ward], and it was a great opportunity to continue working with nearly everybody." Twenty-two ℱpeople had worked on Medal Of Honor: Allied Assault. "And when Call Of Duty started, we all moved six miles down the road in Tulsa," Robert says. The team occupied the 37th floor of the 60-story CityPlex tower. The iconic local building was first built by controversial televangelist Oral Roberts at the request of, as he told it, a 900-foot vision of Jesus. "Thirty-seven flights of stairs is not fun for fire alarms," Robert says. "After the first alarm I said, 'I'm not trashing my knees anymore. If it burns down, it burns down.'" 

Infinity Ward was led by West, Zampella and Courier. "To fund Call🌜 Of Duty, Grant was maxing out his credit card originally," Robert says. "He was important from a biz point of view. And he got paid out well in the end." West was the creative force, however – steering the team through a tight 18 months of development. "Starting from Call Of Duty, Jason had a whole system of how we do features," Robert says. "At the beginning, all the level designers would write on cards the things they wanted in the game. Then the programmers would estimate how long that would take and look at ෴our schedule and say, 'OK, this is how many things we think we can do.' We'd prioritise them and go down the list. We were scarred pretty badly from Allied Assault, where it got delayed." 

The team put together a detailed design doc – something they wouldn't bother with on later projects. "I gue🐎ss we were trying to impress Activision," Robert says. "And Jason wanted to make sure we were on track." The addition of multiplayer was a compromise, made✨ to please the publisher – a surprise, given how important the online component would later become to the series. "There was this notion back then of back-of- the-box features, and Activision was focussed on the buzzwords," Robert says. "We said, 'OK, we'll add multiplayer.' By Modern Warfare, half the development was on multiplayer. Earlier on, it was just minimal." 

Infinity Ward's primary focus was the campaign, an ambitious single-pꦑlayer mode that would see the player fight on different fronts of the war as three separate soldiers – one Russian, one Briti🐻sh, one American. "Probably at one point it was more than three," Brad says. "But we had to narrow it down for scope reasons, and have it all be able to fit on a CD." 

Strength in numbers

The decision to back multiple protagonists would have huge implications for COD's future of perspective-swapping stories. "I think we were put off by the idea of having just the one hero character that saves everybody in the war," Brad says. "It didn't feel as realistic. We wanted to represent everybody that contributed to that part of histo🤪ry." Like Medal Of Honor: Allied Assault, Call Of Duty was to be T-rated in the United States – suitable for ages 13 and up, with violence but little blood. Nonetheless, Infinity Ward wanted to ramp up the grittiness and intensity. "We had aiming down the sight and going prone, those sorts of things that were more tactical," Brad says. "A lot of the guys were playing Counter- Strike and they liked all those aspects of the shooting a♍nd the realism." Players of the first Call Of Duty demo were in awe when, during a nighttime assault on the French village of Sainte-Mère- Église, the impact of a nearby mortar shell would flatten their character prone, the impact ringing in their ears. 

"There was a lot of cool attention to detail that was put into that," Brad says. "We wanted it to feel like the player was the person, and the immersion was the thing. And it didn't have to be a name t꧃hat went with a character that you were playing. It was really the i💛dea of getting a feel for what it would be like to be in that situation." Brad was one of five artists on a team that ultimately totalled 26. "And a lot of people wore a lot of different hats," he says. "That was a good aspect of a small company. You're able to play with whatever you can." During one memorable mission, the player crosses the Volga river into Stalingrad with a group of Red Army conscripts – and watches in horror as a boat of friendlies is struck by German artillery. Brad got to animate the ship as it sank into the depths. 

"I had our lead animator holding my hand and going, 'Try this, we're going to make this a little more extreme,'" he says. "It was a learning experience. Everybody was free to contribute." And if an idea didn't work out, nobody got into trouble. "That added to the game being as good as it was, because everybody was heard and everybody got excited about throwing out an idea," Brad says. ෴"Maybe it would stick, or somebody might be able to help make it better." The Stalingrad level was heavily influenced by Enemy At The Gates, the 2001 Jude Law movie that follows two rival snipers over a long winter of battle. In one harrowing moment, the player is handed ammo rather than a gun – and commanded to pick up the rifle of a fellow soldier once he is killed. It's a scene pulled directly from the film. 

"Level designer Steve Fukuda had Sav༺ing Private Ryan running on another screen continually during the whole game, pretty much," Robert says. "Actually, there was talk that Activision wanted to make a Band Of Brothers series. But then they'd have to pay licensing. I don't think it would've been the best decision." The team was hungry for any new piece of cinema that featured the Second World War. "That helped us with setting things apart visually," Brad says. "Luckily there was a nice wealth of really strong cinematography. Having that goal of making things feel cinematic and real and heavy led the way for the look of the three campaigns." Research tools were worth their weight in gold. 

"Whatever books we could find," Brad says. "Whatever things we could find on the internet. For the second COD, we sent a 🌸bunch of guys to different places for photo reference. But for the first one it was all about Google." Infinity Ward bought model kits, and visited tank and aircraft museums on photo safaris. "When you didn't have a whole lot of access, you worked with what was close by, and luckily in Southern California there's a plethora of places that have all these artefacts and equipment from back in the day," Brad says. "Even if it's not in the best condition, all of that wear and tear adds to the flavour. You don't want everythi𒊎ng to look perfect, even though probably at the time it was brand-new. If you throw a little dirt and rust on it in the game, it just looks cool." Legendary military consultant Dale Dye returned, having worked with the team on Medal Of Honor. But the artists most valued their time with re-enactors, who would allow their gear to be photographed, "We were always trying to be as accurate as we could." 

Call Of Duty sold the idea that, rather than a catchphrase-ready commando, you were just one face in a crowd of desperate fighters. Robert worked on the AI, ensuring that each soldier could navigate the rubble and get to their intended destination, "If you've ever seen an AI clip through a wall in Call Of Duty, that's using the fail-safe that Jason said we defini💖tely had to have," he says. "He said, 'No matter what, they have to get from point A to point B.' If the AI doesn't get there, the level's broken, it's not going to continue. Iꦉf they were really getting in trouble, getting caught on something, I would just noclip them wherever they're trying to go." In some of the larger battles, Infinity Ward compromised on the intelligence of its troops, by having the more distant soldiers follow animated paths rather than using their heads. "When you get off the boat in Stalingrad and all the guys are running up, they're actually not AI," Robert says. Among the hundreds of soldiers who passed through Call Of Duty's campaign, one moustachioed individual stood out: Captain Price. 

"It's pretty crazy," Brad says. "He made it all the way to Modern Warfare. He's one of the key guys now, he was the guy that stuck. Everybody was meant to be, not throwaway, but they weren't supposed to be the heroes. Everybody was supposed to be a hero, so nobody was supposed to be the main badass." ജThe "big crazy struggle" of the project came in the summer of 2003, the year Call Of Duty was to ship. That's when all of Infinity Ward upped sticks and moved from Oklahoma to California – into the LA building they would occupy until Modern Warfare 3. "We were more than just coworkers," Robert says. "And the fact that we all came from Tulsa, it's like this journey you're on." 

"We were packing up all our stuff, figuring out where we were gonna live, and had to hit the ground running and make this game," Brad says. "It didn't really seem to affect us as much as we thought it was going to, because everybody was nose to the grindstone. We were all there as many hours as we could be." There were no demands that staff show up on the weekends. "But a lot of ꦦpeople were, because that was the mentality," Brad says. "As a new company trying to prove ourselves, everybody was super focussed on making our first game really good. Or else we wouldn't get to make another game. There were a lot of unspoken stresses." 

Los Angeles was chosen partly because it was near Activision HQ, and would allow studio leaders easy access to the pro൩ducers managing the game. But as far as Robert was concerned, Infinity Ward felt like an independent company, with an independent culture. "You wouldn't get the sense that you were working at Activision," he says. "We were insulated from disputes over what was going to happen on the game. That would be Vince and Jason talking with Activision behind closed doors, and we'd be shielded."

Monster hunter

To the publisher's credit, it often gave the team space to do their best work. "We weren't getting executives going, 'We want you to put this or that in the game,'" Robert says. "We weren't doing corporate dictates, we were just channelling what we thoug🔯ht was best for the player." The team at Infinity Ward was already proven, thanks to its work on Medal Of Honor. But they were intimidated by EA's series, the monster they'd helped create – notജ knowing if fans would stick with the name they knew or recognise the pedigree of the team behind Allied Assault. "EA had crazy awesome marketing at the time for Medal Of Honor," Brad says. "So we would see their commercials coming out, beautiful movie trailer-type things with live action. And we were like, 'Oh, man, that looks so good.'" As Robert remembers it, the team had been in competition with others for as long as it had existed. "On Allied Assault, we were trying to outdo the console Medal Of Honor," he says. "For Call Of Duty, we were going against EA's Allied Assault expansion, Spearhead. It's like a bogeyman." Robert compares the process of pulling Call Of Duty together to being in a Quake clan. 

"Obviously things can go wrong and you start shouting at each other," he says. "And designers are trying to outdo each other with the 💖cool scenes. But you've all got the sense of being on a team working together, pushing each other: 'I'll control that area, you control this.'" The push to the end was frantic and exciting. "And then you're just waiting for the reviews to come out," Robert says. "That was the first shot of drugs in the vein." Call Of Duty was hailed as a masterpiece, with scores over 90%. "We were ju🍬st happy that it was well received," Brad says. 

The day after launch, Activision acquired Infinity Ward. For a few million dollars, the publisher bagged the studio behind the franchise that has since made it unstoppable. In 20𒅌20 alone, Call Of Duty made Activision over $3 billion. "They got us for a song," Brad says. "That was a super good business decision." In 2004, when EA finally did release its answer to Call Of Duty "it really wasn't competitive". "We were worried about them because we saw their trailer and they had really cool rendering stuff," Robert says. "But once Medal Of Honor: Pacific Assault came out it was like, 'OK, these guys aren't our competition.' They didn't have their act ✱together." By then, Infinity Ward was already turning its attention toward Bungie, which inspired West and the team to drop medikits in favour of regenerating health for Call Of Duty 2. "It was obviously based on Halo, because they had their shields," Robert says. "You don't want the game to become this treasure hunt for health packs. You want it to be more about the experience of playing than worrying about your last little bit of health." 

The shift reflected a growing concern with approachability. If an Infinity Ward designer was right-handed, they were told to test their level using their left, so that their aim would match that of an unseasoned player. "We were trying to get maximum sales," Robert says. "You're obviously ⛄not trying to do a garbage game, but we really were focussing on getting in as many people as possible. We'd get the receptionist doing playtesting, people who hadn't played games before. Each level designer would have to watch th♊e person play their level without any help, and if they were stuck in some spots, the designer would have to try to fix that." 

Approachability may have prepared Call Of Duty for the big time, but the switch from a historical backdrop to the modern day sealed the deal. "Our designers wanted to push for a new settin♓g, because we were burnt out," Brad says. "As a company, we had made three World War II games, including Medal Of Honor. And so we were like, 'Can we change this up? We've been making World War II longer than World War II lasted.'" There was pushback from Activision, who didn't see many successful shooters on the market with contemporary settings, "They really didn't want us to make Modern Warfare." 

Brad doesn't know what changed the publisher's mind, but the launch of Modern Warfare marked Infinity Ward's ascension to the very peak of pop culture. Call Of Duty became a water-cooler game, its campaign twists discussed on lunch breaks in schools and offices. It secured the future of the series for many more years to come. "We weren't expecting it," Brad says. "We knew that it was fun, especially the multiplayer – we would stick around late at night and play. But the success of that was ridiculous. It was a cool and fortunate experience – not all compani🐎es get to stick together that long."

This feature originally appeared in Retro Gamer magazine. For more fantastic in-depth features, interviews, and more on classic games, or . 

Time, the great teaser 

I've said this umpteen times before, but I'm a firm believer in developers taking their time behind the scenes. I'd much rather wait longer for something than pay for something that's been hauled from the oven too soon, and therefore will never criticize the decision to delay or sit on games until they're absolutely ready. That said, this stance never makes the wait itself any easier, especially when it applies to something like Elden Ring's first official slice of added content. I, like any Elden Ring fan out there, cannot wait to sink my teeth into whatever's next, and the fact that we still don't know, well, anything about Shadow of the Erdtree is equal🌟ly wond🔯erful and mind-bending. 

Looking at FromSoftware's back catalog, there were six months between Dark Souls 3's worldwide release and its first expansion, Ashes of Ariandel. Dark Souls 2 rolled out Crown of the Sunken King just three months after its base game's launch; while Bloodborne's The Old Hunters arrived eight months after its source. The first Dark Souls, released in October 2011 on PS3 and Xbox 360 (🏅September in Japan), waited 10 months for its Artorias of the Abyss DLC, which was rolled into the game's Prepare To Die Edition PC port in August the following year. The Activision-published Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is the only FromSoftware game since Dark Souls not to receive any added content beyond official updates, making the Sengoku-period action RPG the outlier among an otherwise busy bunch. 

Approaching the two-year mark without a sniff of official communication beyond a single image is unprecedented against FromSoftware's previous base game-to-DLC timelines, but Elden Ring itself is likewise unprecedented in terms of its stature and scale. It's a big game, with scores of characters, locations, baddies and bosses, so it makes sense that its first expansion matches that ambition and execution. The thing♔ is: that's a bit of a double-edged Greatsword. Yes, it's good that FromSoftware is taking its time to get Shadow of the Erdtree just right, but the wait has also generated more hype than I've ever seen among the Soulsborne community – even more so than before🐎 the arrival of Elden Ring itself. 

While we still don't know what to expect from Shadow of the Erdtree, the Elden Ring community knows what it wants: more of the same. But Elden Ring was so good, that simply delivering more, clearly, isn't as easy as it sounds. So, what we're left with is the dichotomy of patiently waiting and al🍷lowing our imaginations to run wild. Had FromSoftware fired out a half-baked DLC in the first six months post-launch, expectations would have been lower.🎀 If the quality wasn't there, fans would have spoken up, and the developer would have risked disrupting the base game's unshakable momentum – especially in that first year. Instead, FromSoftware chose to take its time, in turn raising the bar of expectation sky high. 

Of course, if all❀ goes to plan it's a masterful move from FromSoftware. If the developer manages to match the hype with groundbreaking DLC that's as enchanting and entertaining as the Elden Ring base game two-and-a-bit years down the line, then it's job done and everyone's happy. But if it misses the mark, it does so while shouldering the full weight of anticipation among its fans. That can't be easy on the developer's side, but given how accomplished Elden Ring is, not to mention the experience the studios brings from everything from Dark Souls to Demon's Souls, Bloodborne, Sekiro and Armored Core 6, I reckon FromSoftware's up to the tas✨k. Assuming this is the case, I can't foresee a situation where Elden Ring Shadow of the Erdtree is not my personal Game of the Year in 2024. 

Moreover, after months of pushback against Microsoft's high-profile bid to acquire Activisio𒆙n, that deal eventually went through. And while we're yet to see how that will inevitably alter the landscape of the video games industry in the longer term, you'd have to assume Sony will be keen to hit the ground running in the here and now – all of which paves the way for an interesting 2024 as far as PlayStation is concerned.

Games on

The first notable move for PlayStation in 2024 is The Last of Us 2 Remastered, a souped-up re-release of the 2020 original for 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:PS5 that's due on January 19 and includes cut content by way of the "lost levels", and a new roguelike mode named No Return. Given the sheer volume of remakes this horror series has released over the last decade or so, this console-exclusive is hardly a big one, but it is a console-exclusive all the same. 

February is an exciting month for PlayStation fans, with the 4v4 online party shooter Foamstars kicking things off on February 4. It's then closely followed by the console-exclusive squad-shooter Helldivers 2, which brings an old twin-stick affair into shiny third-person in the process. Pacific Drive follows that on February 22, which our own Leon Hurley said already feels like a brilliant mix of the road, the radio, and roguelike after going hands-on earlier this year. And after that again comes what may well be the PS5's biggest game of 2024: Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. Landing on February 29, Rebirth marks the second part of the planned trilogy that reimagines its 1997 JRPG source 🍸material against today's standards, taking us beyond the confines of capital city Midgar for the first time.  

Into March and a game I'm personally pining for comes in the shape of Rise of the Ronin. Due on March 22, this Edo period-set action-RPG is the work of Team Ninja, whose past chops include everything from Dead or Alive to last year's Wo-Long Fallen Dynasty, and the superb Nioh series. After that, PlayStation's console-exclusive calendar dries up, but the likes of Phantom Blade 0, Sword of the Sea, Death Stranding 2 and Hideo Kojima's new pro💎ject OD, Concord, Marathon, and Bloober Team's Silent Hill 2 remake all boast vague TBC due dates, with many of those expected to drop at some point in 2024.  

Hardworn

On the hardware front, 2023 was solid for PlayStation. Between its slimmed-down PS5, the PlayStation Access controller, the arrival of PSVR2, and even the PlayStation Portal – which our own Phil Hayton 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:liked but didn't love, ultimately billing the handheld as a one-tr🅺ick pony in their PlayStation Portal  – last year was busy for Sony in hardware terms. All of which means the 12 months ahead will likely be quieter to this end. Rumors tied to the whys, whens and hows of the PS5 Pro endure, of course, with some pockets of the internet suggesting 2024 is when we should expect an upgrade to the existing models that are out there right now. But that is, of course, all speculation.

What's also hearsay is who might replace outgoing PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan who, after announcing his plans to retire from the role last year, is expected to va✤cate his position in March, 2024. Looking over the fence, it's hard to predict exactly what Xbox has planned this year, but by the time a new face takes the throne at PlayStation that'll likely be more🍬 clear – and at that point, the new PS CEO will be better placed to determine how much they wish to alter the company's course of action. 

In the meantime, what I'd love to see from PlayStation in 2024 is something from the company's first-party studios. You'd have to assume Insomniac will go radio silent for the foreseeable following last year's catastrophic in-development leaks – which is totally fair – but the likes of Naughty Dog, Guerilla Games and Bluepoint could surprise us, either with something from their current ensemble of games, or something new altogether. The best place to do this? A blockbuster PlayStation Showcase event. Following last year's less inspiring showings, I'd love to see PlayStation come back with a bang on this front in 2024, and I'm sure the company itself is keen to do so given how front-loaded its schedule is for the year ahead. We often talk about tone-setting at this time of year, and whereas 2023 was 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:stable but subdued for PlayStation as a whole, laying down 🍰a marker early doo🌊rs seems like the most sensible tact for Sony and its flagship games brand. 

澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Marvel's Spider-Man 2 was the obvious challenger here from a commercial and critical perspective, and while it's difficult to compare the two directly (we'll dig into that further down the page), Insomniac Games' second crack at the red-suited superhero quickly became the fastest-selling PlayStation Studios game over a 24-hour period, selling more than 2.5 million cop🍒iesꦕ in a single day. 

澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Final Fantasy 16 was received well at launch in June, wowing players with its combat, voice acting, and spectacle (I'll leave fans of the series to debate the strength of its story, mind you); while the much-anticipated 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth was pushed back several months into next year. The PS5 had this year's runaway hit 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Baldur's Gate 3 all to itself in the console sp🐽ace for several weeks; whereas timed-PS5-exclusive Forspoken didn't quite live up to expectations. PSVR 2 excelled, not least by way of Horizon Call of 🃏the Mountain; yet the company's marquee PlayStation Showcase and State of Play events too often flattered to deceive. And so went the last 12 months for PlayStation – seemingly matching many of its forward strides with one or two in the opposite direction. 

With the Microsoft-Activision deal bubbling under the surface, a fair amount of Sony's front-facing visibility in 2023 was spent speaking out about why the proposed multi-million dollar acquisition wasn't good for the video games industry as a whole. And while I don't disagree with the sentiment from an anti-monopoly point of view (I will, however, put the glaring inconsistencies in Sony's argument to one side for the sake of debate), I personally felt both sideಞs allowed the tabloid charade of it all to become an increasingly bigger distraction🍒 over the course. 

Alღl of which is to say: 2023 always had scope to be a 🐼strange one for Sony. And, for me, it totally was.

The state of play

Ahead of May's PlayStation-focused event, I ran a headline that read: Sony simply turning up at the PlayStation Showcase will keep Xbox on the ropes. With the virtue of hindsight, I'll be the first to admit that I missed the mark at top-level – Sony ultimately delivered a lukewarm presentation – but I nevertheless stand by the points made within. Xbox console-exclusive Redfall, aka Microsoft's biggest blunder of the year, was barely behind us when this particular PlayStation Showcase rolled around, and we were less than a month on from a Microsoft earnings report that stated Xbox hardware revenue had plummeted 30% in the previous year. At the same time, Sony had announced that the PS5 was selling faster than PS4 in the US despite years of console shortages, and that the PS5 had passed 500 million home consoles sold as a result. 

Roll♈ all of this into the fact that at the time – way back in the heady days of late May earlier this year – the Microsoft-Activision bid was enjoying one of its signature lulls, whereby any deal whatsoever seemed all but unlikely. Fast forward several months, and not only has the Microsoft-Activision deal gone through, but Microsoft has also enjoyed the successful launch of Xbox-exclusive, Starfield. As mentioned above, making side-by-side comparisons between Bethesda's space-faring RPG and Marvel's Spider-Man 2 is impossible, given the fact many Xbox players are playing the former via Game Pass. What we can say about the superhero PS5 exclusive, however, is that it sold more than five million copies in 11 days and was the highest-selling video game of October 2023. That's pretty good going. 

Alongside all of this, the fact that Baldur's Gate 3 launched on PS5 shortly after its arrival on PC made Larian Studios' hit role-player an unlikely boon for Sony – the PS5 becoming the only console alternative for trips to the Sword Coast between September 6 and December 7, when that journey was finally possible on Xbox Series hardware following a handful of delays. I don't think the importance of this inadvertent period of exclusivity can be underestimated, especially given the fact that games of this nature (Larian games in particular) tend to fare better on PC – not to mention the fact BG3 had accrued a solid and pre-existing following via three years in Steam's Early Access initiative. With the promise of Baldur's Gate 3 DLC on the horizon, PlayStation players will inevitably extend their love affair with GamesRadar+'s 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Game of the Year for 2023 when the time comes.

On the hardware front, the PlayStation Portal landed in November with its 8" display and built-in DualSense controller designed to sort of replicate the PSP and PSVita handhelds of bygone eras. The jury's still out💖 on how well it manages that – but another peripheral that was well-received from Sony's 2023 purview was the PlayStation Access controller. Designed in collaboration with the accessibility community, the Access aims to help players with disabilities play more comfortably, with a broad range of customization🀅 options.📖  

Despite the aforementioned mediocre PlayStation Showcase in May, the Sony State of Play event in September did a far better job of stirring hype for what lies ahead – even if much of that extends into next year. This showing's coup de gras was destined to be a closer look at Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, part two of the planned trilogy, and it wasted no time in getting going. With flashes of Junon Harbour, the parade on the central thoroughfare of the same seaside town, the cable car ride to the Gold Saucer, Cait Sith, Vincent, Zack, Red 13's hometown of Cosmo Canyon, Bugenhagen, mention of Emerald and Ruby Weapon, and that big bastard swamp serpent that Sephiroth makes light work of – it all looked stunning. Now with its February 29 launch date in sight, 2024 can&🅠apos;t come soon enough. 

Elsewhere on PlayStation's coming soon radar sits The Last of Us 2 Remastered (January 19) and Pacific Drive (February 22); with a number of TBC labels hanging over everything from Phantom Blade 0, Sword of the Sea, Hideo Kojima's new project OD, Concord, Marathon, the Silent Hill 2 remake, and 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Marvel's Wolverine. To the latter end, the catastrophic Insomniac leaks that unfolded this week at the hands of hackers dealt a devastating blo💯w to all of those on the receiving end. 

The depth, scale, and scope of the leaked material that's now in the public domain is unlike anything I've ever seen before in video games, and is certainly a sore one for Insomniac who'd otherwise be riding high into the New Year buoyed by its latest successful release. This is indeed a notable set-back for a first-party PlayStation studio, but if Rockstar Games' recent trajectory in the face of high-profile leaks is anything to go by – from its own in-development content hack last year through to this month's stellar GTA 6 trailer – then I'm confident Insomniac has what it takes to bounce back once it's duste🌃d itself down anཧd is raring to go again. 

And with the sentiment of looking forward in mind, despite a fairly stop-start year from PlayStation against what we're otherwise used to, its next steps into 2024 and beyon🍨d will be, as ever, well worth watching. 

Here are the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best PS5 games to play right now

That's a lot of movement in one year for Xbox parent company Microsoft. Things are certainly looking brighter for Gaming branch CEO Phil Spencer as we round out 2023, especially when comparing the state of affairs in our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:2022 Xbox Year in Review to how they stand today. Sure, 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Xbox might have "lost the conso🧸le wars", but it's won plenty of other 🐻battles besides – and seemཧs more incentivized than ever to keep that streak going. 

To infinity...

Let's start at the beginning. Teeing off a bumper year for Xbox, January's Hi-Fi Rush made for impressive 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Game Pass fuel. The largely positive 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:responses to its rock n' roll rhythmic action felt promising as we went into 2023, especially 🔥as the first Bethesda game to ship Day One on the Xbox subscription service after Microsoft acquired the studio in 2021. 

That's why Redfall was such a roiling shame. Published by Bethesda and developed by the studio behind Dishonored and Deathloop, how Arkane's vampire-slaying, gun-touting, 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:totally not-a-horde-shooter FPS managed to fall so dramatically short of expectations is something even Phil Spencer could not explain. Like most of us, the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Xbox boss was "disappointed" by Redfall in all its buggy, half-baked glory, and promised back in May that efforts would be made to improve things. Subsequent updates might have cleaned it up considerably for the handful of people still playing, but the damage had already been done. The game was critically panned, our own 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Redfall review deeming it "rushed, unfinished𓄧, and unsatisfying". For that reason, it's fair to say that Redfall is an indelible black spot on Xbox's record꧂ that sticks out as perhaps its lowest point of the year.

On the plus side, Game Pass is ending 2023 on the up when you look at things numbers-wise. Xbox appears to have done a total 180 on its comparatively slower 2022, as both the Game Pass service and Microsoft's "overall gaming revenue" are up by 13% and𒆙 9% respectively (via ) aꦡs of this October. Those percentages might not sound massive, but there was one huge culprit behind the service's late-year uptick in subscription numbers.

...and beyond

Enter: Starfield. The interstellar RPG of epic proportions finally launched in September, alongside a slight price increase for Game Pass subscribers. This did nothing to deter people from signing up to play it on day one, though, with 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:over one million concurrent players loading in on release day. It's the first Bethesda Game Studios-developed title to launch on Game Pass as an Xbox exclusive, and with a host of new Bethesda games still on🎃 the horizon, it's a strong start.

Bethesda merger aside, acquisitions would go on to be a big deal for Xbox in 2023. The company has bought several developer studios over recent years, but the hot topic was obviously Microsoft's push to purchase Call of Duty publisher Activision. The proposal was unpopular in the eyes of many, most notably with the US Federal Trade Commission, as it pushed back against the acquisition numerous times. Citing exclusivity concerns regarding 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:"financial interests" – in short, that Microsoft might pull 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:games like Call of Duty from rival PS5's game💟 library, drawing players to its own flagship console – emerging headlines sometimes made it sound like Microsoft's bid was going south. 

The two-year long battle ended in success for Xbox when Microsoft succeeded in acquiring Activision in October. Alongside this, Phil Spencer has promised "100 percent parity" for PS5 Call of Duty players going forward. This has been enough to soothe Call of Duty exclusivi🌌ty worries for now, even though new Bethesda games arꦰen't expected to launch anywhere but Xbox and PC platforms. 

It's been a tumultuous yet impressive 2023 for Xbox, and the coming year promises big things for Series X exclusives – even if we're still awaiting a lot of release dates for the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:new games in 2024. I'm already looking forward to Playground Games' upcoming 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Fable remake after witnessing its gloriously crass British humor, as seen in the Xbox Games Showcase trailer this summer. Long-awaited 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Skyrim sequel 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Elder Scrolls 6 is reportedly Bethesda's next port-of-call now that Starfield has launched, though fans of the spacey RPG are wondering where their Starfield updates are. I'm also keeping my eyes glued on BioShock Infinite-tinged 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Clockwork Revolution, Obsidian's 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Avowed, and the moody gothic folklore of 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:South of Midnight as we pivot into 2024. With so many fantastic 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:upcoming Xbox Series X games in the works, all of the above points༒ to another exciting year ahead for Microsoft Gaming – no꧃ pressure or anything, Spencer.

Take a look at our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Nintendo Year in Review to see how the Zelda Tears of the Kingdom publisher and its flagship Switch console has fared in 2023.

Sitting here in (almost) 2024, the age of photorealistic 4K visuals and 1GB broadband connectivity, it's tempting to believe that Doom has long since faded into irrelevance. But that's not the case. In his recent autobiography, Doom Guy, John Romero lists the set of design rules he laid out for the game wh🌜ile the team were working on it. Playing the very latest shooter, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, it's clear that most of the those rules are just as relevant to the FPS genre as they ever were way back in the mists of time (i.e. 1993) – especially in terms of online multiplayer modes. The gh🌠ost of Doom still lurks in the burned-out corridors of Modern Warfare, and I'm going to show you where.

Doom with a view

First of all, let's think about map design. Doom's levels were primarily built for the single-playe🅺r experience, but they had a very compact, non-linear structure. Players often had to double-back and re-explore old areas to open locked doors. Indeed, one of Romero's Doom design rules was: "Reuse areas in the level as much as possible, as it reinforces the understanding of the space every time the player goes through an area again. For example, if players come back to a central hub before going out to a spoke, they will remember the hub the most." 

While modern single-player campaigns tend to be almost entirely linear, this principle still lives on in multiplayer maps. Most are designed around two core archetypes: three-lane maps, which have a trio of parallel channels leading from one end of the map to another, and circular maps, where a central hub is surrounded by concentric orbital routes. Some maps contain 🍌elements of both.

It's really interesting to look at how similar these modern maps are to Doom levels. Let's look at two examples side by side. First, we have the opening level of Doom; and second, we have Highrise from the Mo☂dern Warfare series.

Notice how they&ap𒊎os;re roughly the same size, and how they both have a central hub surrounded by smaller, winding channels. Both adhere to Romero's principle of reuse, of encouraging players to memorise and constantly renegotiate the space, creating their own routes through the alleyways, tunnels and open hub sections. How we behave in MW maps is exactly what Doom speedrunners were doing 30 years ago. 

One of the key principles of multiplayer map design is over-🥂watch – the provision of hidden elevated ꦇpositions with long sightlines from which cunning players can watch (and snipe) unsuspecting enemies. On Activision's , multiplayer design director Geoff Smith explained how and why these areas were reintroduced into 2019's MWII maps: "In our previous games, we would have these power positions, and those got boiled out of the game due to concerns about 'head-glitching' or camping. But that was the kind of special sauce that made Team Deathmatch work so well; that you have a power position and you actually have an advantage by having a line of sight and people would gravitate toward you."

This idea of gaining visibility over players elsewhere on the map was there right in the earliest stages of the Doom design process. "I remember we were barely starting to get multiplayer working," says Romero. "But I was finishing off a lev❀el design and I visualised looking through a window into another room and just thinking about two people out there throwing rockets and plasma rifle shots at each other. I thought, there's nothing that can be better than this. Blowing away a guy who's fighting another guy. We saw that the network gameplay, no matter how it's connected, was the critical must-play part of the game."

Stick 'em up 

Weapons are another area where Doom's blueprints live on. Its standard guns – the pistol, shotgun, chain gun (basically an LMG) and rocket launcher – all remain in the FPS arsenal, but more importantly, the way they were designed to fulfil different and lasting roles in the game had lasting ramifications. "Doom really expanded the vocabulary of FPSs," says Romero."It defined a lot of 🦋the rules, one of which was extremely imp🦄ortant for all modern games, which is in the weapon selection. Every weapon in Doom is always useful.

You do not wipe out the previous gun because you got a better one. In Wolfenstein, that's not true – as soon as you get the chaingun, every other gun is useless. But in Doom, ♐every gun is totally valuable, 𝓀and that was one of the most difficult design and balancing exercises: to get the weapons different enough that you had to choose one depending on what you were doing. None are ever eliminated."

The facets that made Doom work so well are continually being rediscovered by new designers. For the re-imagined Modern War♏fare maps, both Infinity Ward and Sledgehammer have prioritised fluidity of movement through 3D space. Players can climb up scenic objects such as air conditioner units onto previously inaccessible roofs, they can mantle over walls, they can slide across floors and then fire their weapons immediately, t🔥hey can opt for Covert Sneakers and sprint unseen and unheard for long distances. The new games are all about uninterrupted motion. 

This is exactly what John Cormack was going for when building the Doom engine. "You're always moving forward," says Romero. "It was critical that the engine was super🌳 smooth – the speed of the a🅷cceleration, the amount of friction it took to stop moving, the strafing speed, the mouse movement being rock solid. It was just the feel of the movement through that space." It's also there in Romero's first rule of multiplayer map design: "A player should not be able to get stuck in an area without the possibility of respawning."

Doom took the audio as seriously a🌳s the visual elements of the environment, and this is another vital element that still influences FPS titles today. Id Software used sound to enhance the sense of impending battles. You hear monsters before you see them, often from nearby rooms; you hear doors opening and closing. These give vital clues to the player – just꧋ as footsteps and gunshots do in Modern Warfare. Doom was one of the first games to introduce the concept of spatial audio as a strategic element. 

"[It was about] setting up that environment to feel like you're under threat," says Romero. "Hearing sounds off in the distance that something is coming, that kind of thing. We had a little bit of that in Wolfenstein be🧜forehand, but with Doom, we purposely put those wandering sounds in so players could hear them moving around and be scared to hear it. Coming up with that palette๊ of playability and gameplay was really critical."

The chances are a majority of Modern Warfare III players have never seen the original Doom running on a 386 PC in 320 x 200 resolution – the way it looked and felt thirty years ago. But you can buy it on Steam for a couple of quid, or try the homebrew update GZDoom. Graphically, it's hopelessly dated in a lot of ways. But the feel of it – the speed, the guns, the player movement, the design of the maps, the drama of player-vs-player engagements in dark corridors – all those elements still work. The rules Romero shared with Id's designers and programmers hold up. In fact, Romero is still using them - as well as a lot of the original Doom code - in his next project, the spiritual sequel, Sigil 2. Doom is to games what Halloween is to slasher movies – an inescapable blueprint. You can run from it, but even after 30 years, you c꧋an't escape. 

Here are the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best FPS games you can play right now 

Every annual Call of Duty has its own highly sought-after Mastery Camo, which is usually a weapon skin with a snazzy special effect sprinkled on top. Modern Warfare 3’s hard-to-get skin is called the Interstellar camo, which emulates enti✱re galaxies shifting around on your weapon’s surface.

To 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:unlock the Interstellar Camo in M🐓🐎odern Warfare 3, however, is a significant challenge. Or at least a c💛onsiderable time sink. The Interstellar camo only unlocks after you’ve completed every other camo challenge for the 36 weapons currently in the game - pistols, snipers, and grenade launchers included. Those challenges might ask you to kill a certain number of enemies with a longshot or take down enemies without taking damage - and would normally take the average player months to unlock.

But Twitch streamer Reidboyy has seemingly become the first person in the known universe to uౠnlock the universe-spanning skin, just fo൩ur days after Modern Warfare 3’s full release.

“It took him just under 76 hours,” fan account Modern Warzone wrote on social media, “No, he𝕴 has not showered.” Reidboyy also says he killed 14,000 players in-game to achieve the feat, all while fitted with the glorious Nicki🌊 Minaj skin. 

The Interstellar camo is admittedly cool, but most people will never be able to dedicate the time and effort towards the cosmetic. Though Reidb🃏oyy has some potential advice on for fellow grinders who are struggling with the grenade launcher’s difficult challenges: “Correct me if I’m wrong here, but isn’t there supposed to be a new gun being added to ME3 in a few days? And you only need to get 36 guns to unlock Interstellar? You get what I’m saying?”

To gain the competitive edge in your own Interstellar grinds, check out how to use Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3’s new tactical stance. For more convenient cosmetics, here’s 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:what’s in the game’s first Battle Pass.

You feel this as you see Nicki Minaj and Skeletor bunny-hop around dusty 14-year-old maps, firiﷺng year-old weapons, monotonously grinding experience to progress through a raft of messy progression systems that should have died with Modern Warfare 2. The killcams are a confluence of after-effects as leviathans crawl over crumpling, glittering bodies; the lobbie🔥s a circus of discriminatory and sexist rhetoric as children of all ages go to war with one another in absolute defiance of Activision's employment of an AI-powered voice chat moderation system. 

That tension is there in the five-hour single-player campaign too, where a lackluster, nonlinear approach to mission design is, at best, a misguided attempt to recapture the magic of Medal of Honor: Airborne. And in Zombies, the cathartic, compulsive rhythms that once defined its cooperative carnage have been exchanged for an ill-fitting extraction shooter model built atop the still-warm corpse of Activision's abandoned DMZ mode for Warzone. Taken as a whole, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is stuck paying deference to a past🤪 tha෴t it seems to barely understand. 

Out of sync

Traditionally, Activision has given three development studios room to experiment on three-year release cycles. Infinity Ward sought to provide viable alternatives to Counter-Strike; Treyarch a refuge for the competitive class; and Sledgehammer a space to explore advanced-movement mechanics. If you didn't like one style of Call of Duty, you always knew another would follow soon enough – and in the age of Warzone, there are distractions aplenty for the disenfranchised. But Activision's decision to pursue an immediate sequel to 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Modern Warfare 2 (and put it in the hands of a different lead developer), without taking meaningful steps to drive the concept o✱r underlying technology forward, means we'll always be wondering what could have been. 

Infinity Ward should be praised for trying to push Call 🐷of Duty in a different direction with its return to Modern Warfare, slowing the time-to-kill and removing any impulse to remove boots from the ground. A stark shift in pace, and the best the franchise had been in some time. Modern Warfare 3 doesn't just fail to iterate on these 🗹ideals, it does away with them. Sledgehammer has realigned the fundamentals: increasing base health, raising TTK, and widening mobility. You're free to sprint and slide and skip around without penalty, and while play is speedier it doesn't feel that much slicker. 

There are times when Modern Warfare 3 feels like a capable, albeit uninspired and inoffensive, arcade shooter. And there are other moments where it's more of an unwitting return to the series' awkward adolescent 🦋years – where the popularity of Halo 3 and resurgence of arena shooters gradually altered player behavior, subsequently eroding a once-grounded approach to combat. There's a twitchiness to the movement and jerkiness to the firing models, with multiplayer lacking the level of polish and attention to detail that I've come to expect from an Activision-developed shooter.  

There is space for Call of Duty to engage more thoughtfully🍸 with snappier movement and momentum, just as Treyarch has i🐲n the past with Black Ops and Sledgehammer with its Advanced and Infinite Warfare titles. I'd be curious to see the end result, so long as the individual components were designed to support that mission objective. Instead, weapons, attachments, operators, and maps have been dragged forward from two iterations of Modern Warfare 2. It's an interesting concept, particularly as the series moves towards a more connected ecosystem via COD HQ, but the execution is lacking. 

The dearth of creative consistency between Modern Warfare 2 and its successor is stark. The drastic alterations to core play means that many of the returning weapons handle weirdly due to the revised ballistic models and quicker animations, while the vast majority of the 37 new 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Modern Warfare 3 guns are greatly over-torqued to help them stand above the mess of options available from the outset. The amount of attachments is dizzying, with the outlay dissolving any true sense of progression. And the decision to 🉐not immediately carry maps forward is strange, leaving us to trudge a🥂cross exceptionally old arenas that survive on sheer nostalgia alone. There's little new to learn in Modern Warfare 3, which contributes to this pervasive sense that you've done and seen all it has to offer before. 

Reexamining the past

There are some nice ideas scattered throughout Modern Warfare 3, even if the implementa🎃tion is a little heavy-handed. Perk Packages have thankfully been removed, with key modifiers now split between equippable Vests, Gloves, Boots, and Gear. It's a forward-thinking gesture, undermined by how unsatisfying the overall feel and pace of play is. The decision to map weapon, attachment, and equipmeಞnt unlocks across three tracks (player ranks, a premium battle pass, and a new armory system) is greatly misaligned, but would have potential in a less congested ecosystem. 

The rising prominence of daily challenges (the backbone to 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Modern Warfare 3 Armory unlocks, which gates access to key Perks, Killstreaks, and more) has also had positive and negative effects on player behavior.ꦍ When they reward for properly playing objectives, modes like Hardpoint and Domination become more enjoyable; when they encourage a global playerbase to get kills with nothing but Launchers and Lethals, Modern Warfare 3 effectively becomes unplayable for large stretches of time. Sadly, that isn't an uncommon feeling.

Skill-based matchmaking continues to be a divisive part of the Call of Duty multiplayer experience. Admittedly, I'm typically a fan of it, but it feels misaligned this year. I routinely fin𒀰d myself whiplashed between lobbies where I'm notching 60 kills on the leaderboard and then unable to get one on deck in the next, stuck in a cycle of death as a legion of CDL-skinned players wield quickscoping Sniper Rifles with comical precision. It doesn't feel as if I'm gradually raising my skill ceiling and being rewarded with incrementally more challenging encounters, and in an environment where there's already so little to see or do that's genuinely new this quickly creates an attention deficit. 

The lack of consistency in Modern Warfare 3 extends to the c🧜ore 6v6 map selection – 16 from 2009's MW2. I was 19 years-old when I first fell in love with maps like Skidrow, Terminal and Wasteland; and I was 20 by the time I hoped to never set foot on the likes of Highrise, Rust, and Scrapyard again. I'm 33 now, and time has confirmed my teenage suspicions: there are a few classics in the selection, but it&apos🐻;s a real mixed bag. Work has been done to remaster the maps within the new IW9 engine, but the development teams stopped short of making any alterations to better support the style play that's being pursued, or to ease any long-standing friction that exists at a foundational level.

Sniper Rifles are easy to wield and one-shot to a torso, making the uninterrupted sightlines of Afghan, Derail, and Estate a camper's paradise. The messy, interweaving lanes of Invasion, Karachi, and Quarry feel unsuited to a meta built around rapid-fire Assault Rifles. And, you know what, the less said about Underpass and Sub Base the better. The return of map voting means you'll t🤡ypically find yourself cycling t🦂hrough the same few locations anyway, with players either getting their way or quitting out en masse – 2009 all over again. 

Compounding the sense of malaise, ver𝓰y real problems with player visibility and spawn rotation. It isn't uncommon to find yourself cycling onto a battlefield either in the midst of an engagement or miles from the action, often leaving you at the mercy of players sitting prone in a premium skin that is near-imperceptible across environments that were never designed to carry them.

The future is uncertain

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is good for a few hours of fun with friends, but it has very little to offer over time. Performance is solid across campaign, multiplayer,🌳 and zombies, and the entire package is appealing enough from a visual perspective. The problem is that the core play is uninsp🐼ired – MW3 has no big creative concept, outside of pursuing some vague attempt to recapture disparate elements of a past which our collective-nostalgia insists definitely existed. 

Last year, Infinity Ward was charged with laying the foundation for the future of Call of Duty with MW2. A platform which would allow for better cohesion between mainline installments, the expansion of Warzone, and an advanced technology framework to empower the series' shepherds to innovat💃e and iterate with greater consistency. 12 months later, in the midst of a 20th anniversary celebration, Modern Warfare 3 is more of a death rattle than a sign of what's to come. 

Modern ⛦Warfare 3 was reviewed on Xbox Series X, with code provided by the publisher.

It can work, leaving you feeling under-gunned and outnumbered as you creep around trying to get an edge; unsure where the threats are and what to expect. When it does click it can capture the TaskForce 141 fa🅠ntasy well - just you and your wits trying to survive second to second. But for the most part, these small free-roaming beats often feel like the game is trying to do ⛦something it was never really made for. 

For example, most of these open missions are presented as stealthy infiltrations. Largely because if when you blow your cover everyone attacks - there's no sense of depth to the AI here as you creep about. You might get a few stealthy kills here with the silenced weapons you nearly always start with, but it feels more like luck than anything else. More often than not you'll alert eꩵvery enemy in the vicinity and then hav⭕e a slug-out gunfight, hoofing it from cover to cover until you kill them all, or somehow (if you have the space and cover to pull it off) manage to lose their attention, resetting the alert. 

It all feels like it's been built out of gameplay elements that weren't meant to do what they're doing, with simple objectives placed around fragments of recognizable multiplayer maps. The constant chatter of allies incessantly directing you to goals, or the fact reinforcements are constantly sh💫ipped in to prevent you ever clearing a map of enemies, all feel like a game doing its best at something it wasn't meant to do. That's quite evident from the fact that, in many cases, if you die you just restart the entire mission, just with whatever gear you've collected along the way. One level just straight-up parachutes you back into the action when you die like you've respawned in Warzone. It doesn't feel like a true single-player experience, but more like a passable impression of one cobbled together from multiplayer components.

Effective fire

There's a germ of an idea here but more a proof of concept that, with more time, could create a really interesting open-world Call of Duty. A few free-roaming levels do work, mainly the ones set in more enclosed environments. One 𓆉in a tower block can be exciting, as you fight freely from room to corridor, while another set in Warzone's Verdansk dam area has a good mix of space and cover to battle th♛rough. There's even a quite simple level set in the Verdansk stadium that works surprisingly well for what it does. Many of the other missions, however, are just boxy maps with some things to tick off scattered around. 

The open, unscripted levels and plentiful reuse of Warzone areas, gear, and mechanics (right down to loadouts where you can change your gear) smacks of a game that had to be made fast and lean. There are only r🀅eally three or four of what I would call 'scripted levels' with a sense of flow or design to them. The final level is the biggest and most polished of these but doesn't entirely feel like it was ever meant to be the big climax. Tellingly it's the only level set in a recognizable, real-world place, with almost all the other locations consisting of various forests and mountain ranges of Call of Duty's usual fictional Middle Eastern countries. 

The story, like much of the game design, feels unformed but also just about works. Julian Kostov turns in a great performance as Makarov but his brooding sinister intent feels lost in a plot that doesn't have any more teeth to it than 'bad man does bad things'. There&aposꦜ;s clearly a history between him, Captain Price, and the rest of the team but it feels like something was lost. 

I'm fairly sure the entire plot motive hangs on a single, almost throwaway line about Makarov wanting to start a war between East and West, which doesn't quite feel like an ample enough fra🅘me to support a globe-trotting array of international incidents. Between the loose mission design and the sparse, non-committal plot there's no real sense of urgency oꦆr drama too much of it - despite the best efforts of the cast. For all the fuss about this being the first direct sequel in Call of Duty, the rushed implementation suggests it may not have been by choice.

There are hints of a more traditional Call of Duty campaign in the roughly six hours it took me to compete Modern Warfare 3 - one mission on plane, for example, is a trademark bit of playable COD exposition. But the majority of the missions feel assembled instead of crafted, and there's very little texture variation to either them, or the game overall. When I think of the Call of Duty franchise I think of big action set pieces, and occasionally surprising missions with unexpected mechanics or ideas breaking up the overall move forward and shoot everything thrust. This lacks any🉐 of that and feels more like it's being made to do as much as it can with as little as possible anꦗd is underwhelming in a way that feels like it knows it can do better. 

As spotted by @PowerPyx on Twitter, if you access Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3's trophy menu on 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:PS5, you'll find that it doesn't have a platinum trophy for players to obtain. Not only this but it actually gets grouped into Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2's trophy menu, as if it was the aforementioned game's DLC. S꧒urprisingly, this isn't the case on PS4, which gives the Activision shooter its own trophy menu and platinum trophy to collect. 

Fans have been questioning whether Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 is just "glorified DLC" for Modern Warfare 2 since i♓ts announcement a few months ago - with many wondering if it's even worth the $70+ price tag at launch. Now that this trophy discovery has been shared, it seems these theories are back and stronger than ever. "So it was DLC all along," one Twitter user has to the tweet below. "If this isn't a mistake then they need to immediately lower the price 🌜of the game," another has .

To be fair, as that user has pointed out, there's always a chance that this is a mistake and will be fixed before the game launches next week. This might not be💎 enough to convince everyone to part with their cash though: "If this doesn't have a Platinum I'm just not buying it lmao," another Twitter user has . 

It's understandable why Call of Duty fans might be suspicious of the new title. Early this year reports suggested that we wouldn't be getting an annual Call of Duty release in 2023, that is until Activision apparently had a change of heart. As well as this, a diffe🍷rent report revealed that this year's upcoming release (which turned out to be Modern Warfare 3) was originally supposed to be a "premium expansion" but evolved into its own thing that acts as an "extension of the 2022 Modern Warfare 2 reboot."

It's also since been revealed by Activision that Modern Warfare 3 will carry forward most of Modern Warfare 2 - everything including guns, cosmetics, and progression. I guess we'll find out if it's worth the cost when Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 launches for PS5, PS4, 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, and PC on November 10, 2023. 

Find out what the rest of this year has to offer with our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:new games 2023 list. 

Speaking during the , Spencer discussed the recently closed 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Microsoft Activision deal and reflecte🐻d on the company's other IPs. "When I think about Activision Blizzard King, you add in Bethesda, you add in Xbox's history, Rare - like the amount of franchises that we now have in our portfolio is kind of inspiring, it's daunting. I feel that we have to be a great custodian for the content that we touch," Spencer explains.

"When you look across all of the franchises that are part of our teams, there's an opportunity for us to go back - even if it's just to recognize the moment and what t✃hose things meant in gaming's history and do something right with it," Spencer continues, "If teams want to go back and revisit some of the things that we have and do a full focus on it, I'm going to be all in on that. I🦂 think there's just an amazing trove of things that we can go and touch again."

Using Id Software's Quake 2 remaster as an example, Spencer explains that the team behind the 2023 title "did a real good job revisiting a game, making it current, but also not leaving the history behind," n🍬oting that he'd "love to see more things like that." The Xbox exec also mentioned games like Raven Software's Hexen as well as Activision's Guitar Hero and Tony Hawk series' but didn't reveal any future plans for any of these franchises. 

Elsewhere in the same interview, Phil Spencer pledged "100% parity" across Call of Duty in an attempt to reassure PS5 players. Addressing not just PlayStation players but also Nintendo fans (Microsoft did sign a deal to put Call of Duty on Nintendo consoles for 10 years, after꧋ all), Spencer said: "I want you to feel 100% part of the community. I don't want you to feel like there's content you're missing out [on]." 

Find out what's definitely in the pipeline with our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:upcoming Xbox Series X games list. 

Phil Spencer, Xbox boss and CEO of Microsoft's gaming arm, confirmed as much in t🌳he latest of the official Xbox podcast. 

"When we finished Bethesda, there was this great moment and we were able to put a bunch of the back catalog games and celebrate their history," Spencer says. "The truth of the matter is, with Activision Blizzard King the regulatory process took so long, and frankly there was a lot of uncertainty in that process until really a week before we closed, when the CMA finally came down to their decision, that we weren't able to get in and work with, mostly Activision Blizzard in this case, on that back catalog. So now that the deal is closed, we're starting that𓆏 work. But there is work, and I think the Activision Twitter 😼handle did put out something that talked about 2024. I think that's accurate."

The statement Spencer's seemingly referring to 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:co✱nfirmed that Activision does "not have plans to put [Call of Duty] Modern Warfare III or Diablo 4🎀 into Game Pass this year." How𓂃ever, this statement preceded the actual closure of the deal, and that was all Activision said at the time, only adding that "once the deal closes, we expect to start working with Xbox to bring our titles to more players around the world." Spencer's comments have now ruled out any Activision Blizzard games from hitting Game Pass this year.  

"I would love it if there was some kind of secret celebration drop that'sಌ coming in the next couple of weeks," Spencer continues. "There's not. When we think about the new games that are there, I would be straight with people if we were gonna put them in the subscription this year. I know there'll be some disappointment about that. This acquisition is definitely long-term. The fact we're not hitting day one with a bunch of games dropping into Game Pass is a little bit of a downer, but I'm very excited about the future." 

Following Xbox deal, embattled Activision CEO Bobby Kotick will stay "through the end of 2023" at Phil Spencer's request.

Original story: The 'Gamer's Lawsuit' is ine⛄xplicably petitioning the Supreme Court to block Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard.

As Axios reporter 🍸 first noted earlier this week, the Ninth Circuit of Appeals Court denied the Gamer&ap꧋os;s Lawsuit an injunction last week to block Microsoft's ongoing purchase of Activision Blizzard. Dissatisfied with yet another setback, the gamers are now headed right to the very top of the legal chain: The United States Supreme Court.

Well, they're trying 𒁏to, at least. A new from the gamers, addresse💖d to Associate Justice Elena Kagan of the Supreme Court, petitions the judge to intervene and grant the group an injunction against Microsoft, so as to stop the company from acquiring Activision Blizzard and holding off the two corporations from merging.

The 10 gamers are going big, because they definitely are not going home, even with their latest setback last week. The Gamer's Lawsuit against Microsoft's purchase was 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:first dismissed by a US Court earlier this year in March, but it would rear its head again 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:with ꦍsome backing from none other than Sony, who obviously have a tiny interest in Microsoft not acquirin𒊎g Activision ꦚBlizzard.

And yes, just so we're clear about one thing, this is still a lawsuit from 10 random gamers against Microsoft. Weirdly enough, the Gamer's Lawsuit is the only legal opposition to Microsoft's buyout outside of the 澳洲幸运5💃开奖号码历史查询:UK's Competition and Ma𝓰rkets Authority, which is still yet to be persജuaded to rule in favor of the proposed merger.

The fate of one of the biggest corporate mergers in the history of the games industry might well come down to a ❀lawsuit from 10 gamers. Well, that's assuming the US Supreme Court even agrees to hear the case, because if they🎃 don't, it's straight back to the curb for the Gamer's Lawsuit, and it's hard to see where the case goes from being blocked by the highest legal authority in the US.

The Federal Trade Commission lost its last-ditch attempt to stop the merger, and now Microsoft is officially cleared to acquire Activision Blizzard in the US.

Yesterday on July 16, Microsoft and Sony announced a binding 10-year deไal to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation consoles until 2033. You'd be forgiven for thinking this deal included other Activision-pub🐈lished gaming franchises like Overwatch and Tony Hawk, but was able to clarify that the deal is exclusively limited to Call of Duty, and Call of Duty only. 

This immediately raises the wild prospect of Activi𒊎sion's other games being excluded from PlayStation laun♒ches. The likes of future Crash Bandicoot, Spyro, Tony Hawk, and new Overwatch games could well be Xbox exclusive after Xbox acquires Activision Blizzard because the 10-year deal with PlayStation leaves out all these other franchises.

The possibility really isn't sitting well w🌠ith fans of each of the series's. Crash Bandicoot, Spyro, and Tony Hawk have always been franchises associated with PlayStation for decades at this point, so it's only natural that fans around the world are scratching their heads at the franchises heading awa꧒y from PlayStation for good, never to return.

There's also a lot of people decrying a perceived Xbox monopoly on gaming in general. Crash Bandicoot, Spyro, and Tony Hawk being brought under control of a company that already owns a vast slew of its own major gaming franchises, not to mention Bethesda's blockbuster games like 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Starfield and 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:The Elder Scrolls 6, isn&apos𒁏;t going🍌 down well with plenty of people.

There's even World of Warcraft players bemoaning the fact that its console release could be limited to Xbox platforms. Not that Blizzard or 🍌Activision 🐈have ever confirmed that World of Warcraft will be available on any platform outside PC, mind you, but there's still people getting themselves into a twist over the mere possibility. 

The signing of this new deal at least shows the two companies have found some common ground in the days since the Feder🍎al Trade Commission lostꦯ its bid to block the merger. With the FTC losing out, Microsoft is now officially cleared to acquire Activision Blizzard in the US at least, although the UK remains as a major roadblock to the deal be�🦋�ing approved around the world. 

We're still set to receive a 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:new Call of Duty game in 2023, which a Federal judge accidentally revealed earlier this month. 

Th💝e length of the deal matches those that Microsoft made public earlier this year. As Sony attempted to hinder progress on the merger, Xbox made clear that it had offered a decade-long agreement to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation. That was an extension of an initial five-year offer, but several Xbox leads suggested that even the tওen-year offer could be adjusted upwards in future.

Original story follows...

Sony and Microsoft have signed a "binding agreement" to keep Call of Duty on the PlayStation ecosystem following the completion of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Xbox Activision deal.

, Microꦇsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer confirmed that a deal has been agreed by the two🎉 rival platform holders to keep Call of Duty cross-platform – should Xbox's acquisition of Activision Blizzard close. 

The ten year deal is 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:similar to the one Micros🥀oft signed with Ni♉ntendo, or something else entirely – Sony ♔reportedly rejected such an agreement𝓡 last year. This information will surel🅷y be provided in t🎀he days ahead.

Still, this is the conclusion of a bitter, months-long battle between the two companies. Call of Duty has been at the centre of Sony's concerns surrounding the merger, with the publisher arguing that the behemoth franchise being controlled by Microsoft would lessen competition within the industry. The signing of this agreement signals that the two parties have found some common ground in the days following the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码🏅历史查询:FTC's loss in court to bl🤪ock the merger. 

Microsoft president Brad Smith also commented on the agreement, : "From Day One of this acquisition, we’ve been committed to address💧ing the concerns of regulators, platform and game developers, and consumers. Even after we cross the finish line for this deal’s approval, we will remain focused on ensuring that Ca🀅ll of Duty remains available on more platforms and for more consumers than ever before."

We're still waiting on the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Call of Duty 2023 release date.

Yesterday, July 13, a US court released from the case of the Federal Trade Commission against Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard. The court documents reveal Microsoft Gaming's CFO Tim Stuart believed the company could see over 10 million Starfield sales on PS5 al🌳one if it had kept Bethes♋da's RPG on Sony's platform.

Obviously, we know Starfield isn't coming to PS5 anymore. What persuaded Microsoft to ditch these 10 million potential Starfield sales was the belief the company could recuperate these profits by launching Starfield via the Xbox Game Pass subscription service on both 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Xbox Series X/S and PC, not t♍o mention increased console sales.

It's a bit of a gamble from Microsoft, which clearly believes Starꦬfield will be enough to get people to buy into Xbox and Game Pass purely for Bethesda's new game. 10 million sales is a hell of a lot to sacrifice for a game, especially one that's been in development for so long at a development studio as big as Bethesda Games.

It's not just Starfield that's mentioned here by Stuart, either. The CFO also  believed the Indiana Jones game from MachineGames, part of the Zenimax umbrella Xbox acquired when it also took o🌜ver Bethesda, could also see 10 million sales on PlayStation consoles. But just like with Starfield, Microsoft chose to forgo these possible sales in favor of launching exclusively on Xbox Game Pass on day one.

These court documents were published alongside 澳洲🌠幸运5开奖号码历史查询:the FTC losing their court case against Microsoft. A judge decreed the FTC hadn't provided sufficient evidence to grant an injunction halting Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard, and so the planned🉐 purchase is now officially cleared to proceed in the US.

Check out our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:upcoming Xbox Series X games guide for a look ahead at all the new-gen games coming to the console.

The rumor mill, not to mention years of histor𒊎ical precedent, have suggested Call of Duty 2023 will launch in November, but this leak from a federal judge (via ) is definitely our most concrete confi🧸rmation of a specific date yet. Moreover, the official Call of Duty Twitter account seemed to chime in with its own corroboration of the leak, sharing with the eyes emoji right after news spread of the judge's leak.

In light of Geoff Keꦕighley rather unceremoniously revealing that a new Call of Duty game is launching in the Fall, GamesRadar's managing editor in the UK 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:recently pondered the implications of Activision remaining so conspicuously quiet on the matter of its next premium release in by far its bigge🌊st franchise. 

However, with a release date now out in the wild, albeit one still technically unconfirmed, it does seem a little more likely that we'll get an official announcement soon. Hopefully then we'll finally learn what exactly the next mainline Call of Duty will be, whether that's Modern Warfare 3 or something else entirely, as well as which studio is leading development - two key details that remain unknown in a break from the series' usual revea✃l cycle.

An even bigger unknown is whether the next entry in the series can rival the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best Call of Duty games out there right now.

A significant part 🍌of the FTC's strategy has been to highlight Microsoft's strength in the games industry. If it can do that successfully, it would make its j﷽ob - of proving that this historically large acquisition is anti-competitive - significantly easier. To do that, it's focused on the three main console providers, attempting to argue that the Nintendo Switch shouldn't be considered alongside the Xbox Series X and the PS5.

If the FTC can successfully disavow the Switch, then the console war becomes a two-horse race between Xbox and PlayStation, in which Microsoft's relative strength theoretically becomes much greater.  If it can't, then Microsoft remains in third place behind Sony and Nintendo, and its apparent position in the industry is weaker. It's not a perfect argument - Microsoft is still well behind Sony, and both Microsoft and the FTC acknowledge that Xbox has lost the console war.

Nevertheless, the attempt to diminish the strength of the Switch remains, with the FTC arguing that it's technically an 8th Generation console that has no place competing with the processing power of Sony and Microsoft's 9th Generation offerings. It's being labeled as almost irrelevant in the modern console landscape - something that pundits have already decried as flawed given the strength of both the Switch's sales and the importance of 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:one of 2023's best-selling games.

Microsoft hasn't been leaping entirely to the Switch's defense - the company has been attempting to focus on Sony's strength - although Activision-Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick did acknowledge that he should have been more open to the console's potential.  Nintendo's deposition was sealed, so🎃 we don't know what it has to say on the matter, but at the last moment, it seems the Switch found an unlikely defender. During yesterday's closing arguments, IGN report🐎er Rebekah Valentine tweeted a comment from the judge presiding over the case, suggesting that the Switch is "not the same [as Xbox and PlayStation]. In many ways, it's better."

Technical law analyst Florian Mueller offered some more context around those comments. While the FTC that witnesses had said the Switch is not the same as high perfor🐬mance consoles, Judge Corley said that they connected to TVs to allow players to play "many of the same games," with Microsoft pointing out that many of the world's most popular games - Fortnite, Minecraft, and EA's Sports games - are available on the platform.

Those comments reflect a common line of analysis during this trial: that it doesn't really matter what generation the Nintendo Switch is part of. What matters is that it's still a popular, profitable console with games that still have the power to sell in the tens of millions. The Switch was never marketed as a direct competitor to PlayStation and Xbox consoles, just as the Wii and Wii U were alternatives to the likes of the Xbox 360, Xbox One, and PS3 and PS4. It's long been discussed that Nintendo has somewhat deliberately thrown off the shackles of the traditional console generations in order to appeal to a different audience, something both the Wii and the Switch have done extremely successfully. It seems that the FTC hasn't been wholly s🅘uccessful in it🃏s argument if this is the judge's takeaway, and even though we're still waiting for the Switch's successor, it seems that the original console is still creating new fans. 

Keep up with our list of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best Switch games.

The , dated January 19 and 20, 2022 - immediately after Microsoft announced its plans to acquire Activision Blizzard - was made public as part of this week's hearings over the deal. The first email came after an app🌃earance by Xbox boss Phil Spencer on CNBC, where he said the deal would cement Mic♕rosoft's role in mobile gaming. That refers to King, the Candy Crush publisher which is the third pillar of Activision Blizzard.

"Strikes me as more of a King play than COD," former Sony Computer Entertainment Europe president Christopher Deering told current Sony Interactive Entertainment president Jim Ryan in the email. Deering notes that King sold to Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick for "$5 billion and has now grown to be worth £50 billion." Deering seems to be suggesting that the acquisition - which is on track to cost $68.7 billion - would be a good dealౠ to pick up King.

Not so for Call of Duty, however. "If it was an Xbox exclusivity play, Spencer could have locked up MS console exclusivity for the next 3 COD releases for maybe £5 billion," Deering said, adding that "if this was a play to end run PS5, et cetera, I think it was massively overvalued and will not meaningfully succeed. I guess MS can piss away that kind of valuation without being m♏ore harmed than helped, but I am not losing a wink of sleep over the future for our baby."

Deering addeဣd in a PS note that Microsoft "would have been better off announcing a new elec🍒tric car."

Jim Ryan's response to this email had been revealed earlier in the hearings, and he agreed at the time that the deal was "not an Xbox exclusivity play at all" and that he was confident Call of Duty would remain on PlayStatiꦗon for "many years to come." He added that "I'm not complacent and I'd rather t꧟his hadn't happened, but we'll be OK, more than OK."

That's a notably different tone than the one Ryan would take in public soon afterward, repeatedly skewering Xbꦯox's offers to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation and taking a central role in opposing t💎he buyout as a threat to PlayStation's longevity. 

This week's hearings have also revealed Jim Ryan's claims that publishers "unanimously do not like Game Pass."

As part of the ongoing hearings over Microsoft's deal to purchase Activision Blizzard, several internal documents have been made public for various reasons. Some reveal interesting titbits – Phil Spencer's fear of 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Sony buying Starfield or 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Xbox's "final watchlist" for acquisit🍌ion, includiܫng Sega, Bungie, and seven other studios. 

Others are fairly understandable and yet still amusing, like Bethesda Softworks SVP of global marketing & communications Pete Hines asking Spencer what the deal is with being vocal over keeping Call of Duty on PlayStation when 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Starfield is locked down to Xbox.

As shared online by Bloomberg's Jason Schreier on , Hines expressed his "surprise" t🔜o Spencer regarding the messaging of an Xbox blog post about ensuring "Sony fans can continue to enjoy the games they love", going on to say it was being r𓄧ead as the opposite of what happened when Microsoft acquired Bethesda.

Also shared during the trial was Hines' email to other Bethesda buds like Todd Howard, getting across a similar sentiment more can💮didly. Hine🐟s expresses "confusion" as Microsoft's messaging over Call of Duty is the "opposite of what we were just asked (told) to do with our own titles?" Hines also mentions that it would have been good to get a heads-up as Howard was due to attend DICE, and would have likely been confronted with the topic in several interviews.

Again, the difference in tone is fairly par for the course when༺ it comes to corporate settings - it's just amusing to see the curtain on games development pulled back ✅to reveal a group chat vs the side chat moment.

澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Starfield will have physical discs, after all, Bethesda confirms – just not PlayStation availability.

澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Dev kits enable developers to create games for new or burgeonin❀g hardware ahead of its release and are particularly important when testing early and/or unstable games 🎃in development. 

But whilst Sony was seem🌼ingly "sending [PS5 dev kits] to other developers", Spencer revealed that Sony was "reluctant" to share the tech with its competitor, even though Minecraft has long been available on Sony systems.

"Sony was reluctant to send us development kits for the PlayStation 5 at the same time they were sending them to other developers, which put us at a disadvantage relative to other d🧸evelopers," Spencer said (thanks, ). 

"I think Sony could have sent the development kits to Micros🧸oft just as easy as they sent them to any other publisher."

ICYMI, Microsoft says that if the US Federal Trade Commission gets its way and delays its 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Activision Blizzard purchase, it may just abandon the deal altogether.

As concisely summarized by Jordan, Microsoft began defending its Activision deal against the FTC in court earlier this week with the goal of convincing a federal judge not to grant the FTC a preliꦐminary injunction that would delay the buyout's closing.

Like the UK's own antitrust authority – 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:which shock-blocked the deal in April – the FTC is concerned that Microsoft's $70b purchase of Activision Blizzard would harm competition if it were to p༒roceed. If the judge decides to agree with the FTC and Microsoft's Activision purchase is slapped with an injunction and unable to proceed, however, it wouldn't necessarily mean the deal's over - it would just mean it can't go through until the FTC has a chance to fully review the details against US antitrust law. 

However, Microsoft's lawyer Beth Wilkinson argued in court that a loss for Microsoft after this week-long hearing could resul🌺t in a "three-year administrative nightmare", and that could cause Microsoft to abandon the deal.

Here are our picks of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best Xbox Game Pass games.

Today marks th🥃e beginning of the US's Federal Trade Commission versus Microsoft case, as the latter battled the regulator to approve its attempted acquisition of Activision Blizzard King. In the process, Microsoft is keen to show Xbox is in third place, thus making it look less dominant in acquiring the company.

As part of this strategy though, Microsoft admits that Xbox "lost the console wars." As reported by , Xbox states that in 2021 it had just 16% of total console sales, and that🍷 same year, it had just 21% of the total console install base. We don't know whether this is just in the US, or around the worldܫ.

Unfortunately, Xbox redacts the parts where they reveal what shares Nintendo and PlayStation controlled of the overall console market. You've got to imagine the Nintendo Switch was beating the PS5 in 2021, considering the latter's supply short🔴ages at the time, but it'd still b🔥e interesting to know by how much.

It's very curious for Xbox to admit these figures out in public. The company obviously isn't afraid to make themselves look bad - and two years ago, a🔴t that - if it means 🌠securing their attempted acquisition of Activision Blizzard King.

It's also really, r🐓eally funny. You can expect the console warriors will be out in full force over this comment, whether it's PlayStation fans going in on Xbox fans, or the latter trying to somehow refute Microsoft's new comments and somehow bend those stats into reading better than they actually are.

This i♎s clearly what Microsoft thinks☂ it's going to take to land them Activision Blizzard King, and the cost couldn't be higher.

Check out our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:upcoming Xbox Series X games guide for a look ahead at all the exclusives coming to Xbox's new-gen console over the coming year.

In a new deposition to the US Federal Trade Commission on the matter of Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard, PlayStation's Jim Ryan made the comments seen below. In short, Ryan ♛says that if Activision was to become a Microsoft-owned company, it would force PlayStation to keep PS6 information away from the publisher.

According to Ryan, PlayStation working with Mojang, the 🐭Microsoft-owned developer who makes Minecraft, actually supports this concern. Because of the redacted nature of the comment, however, there's no real way to work out how PlayStation's work with Mojang supports Ryan's new concerns over Microsoft buying Activision. 

As Axios reporter Stephen Totilo recalls in another , Ryan previously stated in December 2022 that Sony had collaborated with Activision on technical features for Call of Duty. The redactions from Ryan's deposition means we don't know what features these a🧔re, but it's easy to imagine it being something revolving around the DualSense's adaptive triggers, for example.

This could mean, if Microsoft acquires Activision, that Activision-published games would have less features designed specifically around PlayStation hardware. That's essentially what Ryan's getting at here, although whether that's actually true, or whether Ryan&♔apos;s presenting this as a hypothetical purely to get the merger cancelled is another matter entirely.

This all comes after the FTC r🐽ecommended blocking Microsoft's acquisition of Activisi✱on Blizzard King earlier this month. Both Microsoft and Activision Blizzard King said at the time that they plan on appealing the ruling, but for now at least, the potential acquisition looks incredibly unlikely to be allowed to proceed by the US regulator.

Check out our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:new games 2023 guide for a look ahead at all the games we've got to look forward to throughout the rest of the year.

"In Fiscal 2025, we expect to enter this new era by launching several groundbreaking titles that we believe will set new standards in our industry and enable us to achieve over $8 billion in Net Bookings and over $1 billion in Adjusted Unrestricted Operating Cash Flow," says Rockstar's parent company in its latest . "We expect to sustain this momentum by delivering additional growth in our operating results in Fi𝄹scal 2026 and beyond." 

That's all a little finance-speak, but the most important parts of this specific statement are mention of "several groundbreaking titles", and, of course, $8 billion in net bookings. From what I understand, the fiscal year 2025 generally kicks off in April 2024 for UK firms, and October 2024 for US outfits, although there appears to be wiggle room on either side of the pond. Either way, it now seems we could see GTA 6 as early as next year.

High roller

Which, to be fair, was pretty much what my totally reliable psychic told me last month. Perhaps more relevant, though, is the fact that rumors of a 2024 GTA 6 release date have been circulating for some time. As noted in our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:GTA 6 guide, a back in 2022 said "current and former Rockstar staff reckon GTA 6 is still at least two years away from release, suggesting a 2024 launch." This then who, in one its replies to the UK Competition and Markets Authority's investigation into its 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:o🌠ngoing acquis🦄ition of Activision Blizzard, said: "The highly anticipated Grand Theft Auto 6 is expected to be ꦉreleased in 2024."

Speaking to the latest earning's report, Take-Two's $8 billion in annual net bookings is a pretty big jump from the company's reported $5.35 billion in fiscal year 2023, and its rough prediction of $5.42 for fiscal year 2024. I couldn't be further from a financial analyst – seriously, any talk of money at this level sounds like Monopoly to me – but that jump of ~$3 billion makes more sense in the context of Take-Two and Rockstar's previous earnings reports. Sure, mention of "several" new games here sounds interesting at face-value, but it's worth noting Take-Two also owns the likes of 2K, and the recently-acquired Farmville dev Zynga. "Several" new games could apply to any of those, and the $3 billion jump could refl🌸ect furꦇther buyouts akin to the latter takeover. 

To me, what's more interesting is how Take-Two's earnings projections changed in the w🅺ake of Red Dead Redemption 2's delay a few years back. Originally scheduled to launch in the second half of 2017, RDR2 was pushed to October 2018 – a move that saw the company's share and stock prices drop, and also, more importantly, its projected earnings fall. , Take-Two's forecasted revenue for the financial year ending March 31, 2018 was initially $2.23 billion, but, post-delay, changed to $1.42 billion. 

Again, not to get bogged down in the money side of it all, but that example, at this moment in time at least, double-underscores the idea that GTA 6 could be with us next year, or some point in 2025 at the latest. GTA 5 is still clearly raking it in for Take-⛄Two and Rockstar – it was only 2018 when it passed 100 million un✅it sales; it's now edged its nose over 180 – but it really feels like the stage is now set for its successor proper, even if we're yet to get a trailer or proper reveal. October 2024, was what my psychic said. And, the way things are unfolding, she just might be right!

Here are 10 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:games like GTA you need to play while waiting for GTA 6

Known only as "SM2," the massive mod promised to overhaul the original Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 with well oܫver 100 weapons, and revamped gameplay systems like the ping ability. 24 Perks, dedicated melee weapon slots, party chat voice features, and unique progression systems were all promised in the SM2 mod, as a dream game for Call of Duty players.

Now though, that's all shutting down. Earlier this week, a developer on SM2 was sent a cease and desist letter from Activision, demanding they stop all work on SM2 im🐈mediately. The entire development team on the mod is complying with the cease and desist letter from the publisher, and all work on SM2 is ceasing with immediate effect.

SM2 hopefuls are gathering together on Twitter to mourn the loss of the prestigious mod. "This has made me incredibly sad," one user wrote, with another adding "All my homies hate Activision." O🌃ne popular post even uses that much-memed 'Press F to pay respects' prompt from Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare to mourn the passing o🌌f the SM2 mod. 

You can get a glimpse of what SM2 would've been via the gameplay video belℱow. The mod truly would've been a gigantic overhaul for the classic Infinity Ward sequel, seamlessly integrating brand new weapons and Killstreaks into the shooter, and effectively breathing new life into what many believe to be the best Call of Duty game ever made.

It's a sad day for Call of Duty f⛎ans, then, and particularly classic Mo♓dern Warfare enjoyers. For what it's worth, dubbed this project a "dream game" for any Call of Duty fan, so there are probably legions of fans out there really feeling this cancellation as a kick in the gut.

A recent report claimed Call of Duty 2023 is an extens𝔉ion of Modern Warfare 2, so there's at least good news for those who enjoy the more recent off𝔍erings of the Modern Warfare series.

Check out our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:new games 2023 guide for a look at everything else slated to launch over the remainder of the year. 

In EA's latest earnings call, Wilson admitted he doesn't know wh𒊎ether Microsoft will end up owning Activision Blizzard, but assured investors that the end result of the buyout isn't "material" to his company.

"We think we have the scale - again, back to our network, our IP, and our talent - to continue to navigate the future 𒉰and lead the future 📖of entertainment, and compete in the marketplace regardless of whether that deal goes through or not," he said.

Wilson added that further industry consolidation is a 🧜near certainty and said he hopes EA "will have the scale to be a meaningful consolidator in that space."

"I think that we have tremendous assets with respect to the future of entertainment," Wilson said. "But as it stands today, I think we're indifferent as to whether [the Microsoft Activision sale] goes through or not. We feel like we have an incredible strategy. We feel like we have an incredible opportunity, and w🧜hether it goes through a not, we'll continue to be the number one publisher on the Microsoft platform."

EA is indeed the biggest publisher for monthly active users on both Xbox and PlayStation, according to recent data provided by Ampere Analysis (via ). The publisher is known for some of the most popular IPs in the industry, including The Sims, Battlefield, Dragon Age, Apex Legends, Star Wars, and the EA Sports games FIFA, Madꦏden NFL, NBA Live, NHL, PGA, and UFC.

Wilson's comments come as Microsoft and Activision face their most significant legal hurdle yet. Two weeks back, the UK's Competition and Markets Autho🉐rity (CMꦕA) blocked the merger over concerns that it would leave UK gamers with less "innovation and choice." Microsoft responded by saying the move was "bad for Britain" and pledged to appeal the decision in court, and 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:the CMA followed up b💛y saying the Xboಞx maker's argument was "not borne out by the facts."

The Microsoft Activision deal tops the list of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:biggest video game acquisitions of all time.

Earlier today (via the ), it was revealed that Baron David Pannick, KC had been hired by the company after 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:its merger was⭕ blocked by the CMA lastꦿ month. Pannick is known for his handling of extremely high-profile cases. In a career spanning more than 40 years, he has represented Manchester🐬 City FC, the UK government, and Queen Elizabeth II. Recently, he assisted former Prime Minister Boris Johnson over the controversial 'partygate' probe that rocked UK politics.

While Activision has secured Baron Pannick's services, Microsoft has armed itself similarly, hiring another King's Counsel (KC) lawyer, Daniel Beard. In the wake of the CMA's decision, both companies made clear their inten🦂tion to appea🌼l, slamming the UK as a bad place to do business.

While Call of Duty was the focus of much of the investigation to determine whether the deal would be approved, the CMA eventually blocked the merger on grounds of Microsoft's strength in cloud gaming. However, Xbox head Phil Spencer has made it clear that Microsoft 🃏doesn't believe that the Authori🐻ty's idea of cloud gaming even exists yet, so it's likely that tho🦋se definiti🌸ons could be an important part of the appeal process. 

Multiple territories have already approved the deal, but major players including the European Union and the US' Federal Trade Commission are yet to deliver their verdicts. In recent weeks, Microsoft has been attempting to secure multipl✃e cloud gaming deals to bolster🍎 its position, but it's possible that plan backfired, at least in the eyes o𓆉f the CMA.

Still need a catch-up? Here's the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Activision-Xbox deal explained.

Last week the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) blocked the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Microsoft Activision Blizzard acquisition claiming that it could damage competi𝓰tion in the gaming market. The regulator's on the deal revealed several interesting insights into Microsoft and Activision Blizzard, as well as the gaming industry as a whole. One of these interesting tidbits from the report reveals that Activision requires "almost 1.5" lead studios for each Call of Duty game it releases. 

The report reads: "A report by IDG submitted by a third party quoted Activision Blizzard as saying that it has so much content for CoD that it needs almost 1.5 lead studios for each annual CoD." The report continues, "Further, Activision is claimed in the report to have said that it typically uses about 15 outsourcing/co-development partners for a $100 million game, and 20- 30 diffeඣrent partners for a larger game."

As any Call of Duty player will tell you, Activision typically uses three main development studios so that there can be a new installment in the FPS series each year - the studios in question being Infinity Ward (most recently behind 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2), Sledgehammer Games (Call of🐼 Duty: Vanguard), or Treyarch (Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War) with several support studios - such as Raven Software - assisting with the development of each game. 

Another interesting bit of information found in the report reveals that the total cost of the biggest games now reportedly tops $1 billion, which is a sharp increase from as recently as five years ago. Elsewhere in the report, the CMA shares its view on the Microsoft deal which allows Call of Duty games to release on Nintendo consoles for the next 10 years - to which the CMA concluded that the Nintendo Switch isn't "technically capable" of running Call of Duty well.

Want to experience more of Activison's back catalog? Take a look at our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best Call of Duty games list.  

Last week, the UK regulator moved to formally prevent Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard from going through, citing anti-competition concerns, particularly in the Cloud gamin▨g space. The 400-page report has now been thoroughly combed over a🌌nd as such, new details continue to surface almost a week after its publication. 

As spotted by , the CMA ultimately concluded that concerns by Sony that Microsoft would make Call of Duty exclusive to Xbox platforms were unfounded on the grounds that 🌳Microsoft would lose "substantial" money by doing so, adding, "it would not be financially profitable for [Microsoft] to engage in a total foreclosure strategy."

To make this statement, the CMA used what it called the "critical diversion ratio," that is, the rate at wh💫ich Call of Duty players on PlayStation would have to switch to Xbox - as well as how much those converted players would have to spend - to make the deal profitable for Microsoft. Regulators also considered factors including the potential hit to Microsoft's reputation if it were to renege on commitments to keep Call of Duty multiplatform. All things considered, it estimated that Microsoft would end up with a net loss if it took Call of Duty from PlayStation and other platforms.

While this specific part of the report would seem to appease concerns that Microsoft's Activision buyout would be anti-competitive, ultimately the agency blocked the transaction from going forward, pending 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:a likely appeal from Microsoft. 

Call of Duty isn't one of them, but here are the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best Xbox exclusives to play today.

Reacting to the news over on the , one user wrote, "Amazing news. Glad some agency has the sense to stop monopolistic expansion." Another speculated that "MS is probably in full meltdown mode internally right now," while a third said, "I'm still salty about Bethesda becoming Xbox exclusive so I'm thankful for anything and everything that stands in Microsoft's way of ruining my gaming exp🌱eriences further."

Many who aren't even huge fans of Sony are also relieved the divis🌞ive $69 billion deal has hit a major stumbling block. One said: "I'm a PC gamer and still have my concerns: This merger is clearly a massive market consolidation, bad for competition, bad for the free market, and bad for consumers." Another user replied: "I'm shocked but somewhat relieved about this development. Sony would have had a very difficult time up against an opponent that can casua🌳lly spend their market value on acquisitions alone." 

That being said, it's important to remember that this deal isn't technically dead, nor will its outcome necessarily prevent Microsoft from trying to buy other, smaller studios in the future, and smaller could still mean Bethesda-sized. Following the CMA's ruling, Microsoft president Bra🃏d Smith said in a statement that the company remains♚ "fully committed to this acquisition and will appeal."

Some hope that Microsoft will now instead focus on expanding its internal studios and develo👍ping new IPs rather than trying to purchase established ones – broadening the market rather than consolidating it. "They need to actually work with their devs and build up a talented team from the inside to make good games vs waiting at the finish line to buy entire companies," argues xD_Alch3my. "It bit them in the a**. Microsoft needs to quit trying to stunt on the gaming industry with their pockets and focus on the devs." 

Similarly, averageuhbear commented: "Maybe Microsoft can use a fraction of that money to invest in new studios with creative visions to increase t🥂he output of good games in the world instead? Crazy thought." 

We've already seen direct proof of how Xbox's support can empower game developers to try new things. In November 2022, Obsidian's Josh Sawyer said its offbeat RPG Pentiment wouldn't have b🃏een possible without Ga♈me Pass. Obsidian is, of cou൲rse, a sizable and established studio, but it's still nice to see it experimenting after Microsoft bought the company. 

For more on the biggest deal in gaming history, here's the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Microsoft Xbox Activision deal explained. 

Earlier this week, a UK government agency ruled against Microsoft's attemptedꦓ acquisition, arguing it would ultimately hurt competition, particularly among cloud gaming spaces. Now, Micros🐟oft president Brad Smith has announced the sign𒁏ing of another 10-year deal with cloud gaming platform Nware.

Specifically, the deal is meant to help stream both Microsඣoft's PC games, as well as Activision Blizzard games on cloud devices, should the deal actually close. This is just the latest in a comical꧟ly long line of 10-year deals Microsoft has signed with various partners, all of which hinge on the acquisition actually going ahead.

Microsoft has signed a deal to put 澳洲幸运5开奖号𒆙码历史查询:Call of Duty on Nin﷽tendo platforms for a decade, for example, should the deal close. In actual fact, when the CMA delivered its ruling on the acquisition earlier this week, it decreed that the Nintendo Switch wasn't cap🤪able of running Call of Duty.

It's get🅷tinꦺg a little difficult to keep track of the number of decade-long deals Microsoft has signed with other gaming companies in recent weeks. Nware marks at least the fifth effort in a strategy that has definitely drawn the attention of the internet in the past few months, as it's become increasingly clear Microsoft would sign a deal with just about anyone to get this acquisition over the line.

As for the future of the acquisition though, this isn't the end for Microsoft's attempted purchase, as Microsoft and Activision have said they'll appeal the merger obstructi✤on. 

To catch up with everything that's happened so far, here's the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Microsoft Xbox Activision deal explained. 

On April 26, the CMA blocked Microsoft's purchase of Activision Blizzard and published its final report on the acquisition. In its findings, the CMA discussed Microsoft's deal to put Call of Duty on Nintendo consoles for 10 years - once again reiterating everyꦿone's concerns about how well the FPS game would actually run on the Nintendo Switch. 

In the , the CMA writes: "CoD is currently available on two gaming consoles – Xbox and PlayStation. We found that these c💖onsoles compete closely with each other in terms of content, target audience,ღ and console technology." 

The report continues: "We found that Nintendo's🐻 consoles compete less closely with either of Xbox or PlayStation, generally offering consoles with different technical specifications, and with its most popular titles tending to be more family- and child-f💫riendly."

"Nintendo does not currently offer CoD, and we have seen no evidence to suggest that its consoles would be technically capable of running a version of CoD that is similar to those in Xbox and PlayꦫStation in terms of quality of gameplay and content," the CMA concludes. 

This isn't the first time the UK regulator has made this kind of statement about Microsoft's Nintendo deal. Last month, in its provisional findings, the CMA expressed its doubts that Call of Duty can run on the Nintendo Switch without "financial investment and compromises on graphical quality or the use of cloud-gaming solutions." And as we've seen before, 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Nintendo Switch Cloud version games certainly don't guarantee stellar ๊performance. 

In case you were wondering, Microsoft has said Call of Duty wꦑill run "like y🐎ou would expect" it to on Switch, and given the struggl﷽es of other AAA ports on the console, that isn't super encouraging. 

To catch up with everything that's happened so far, here's the Microsoft Xbox Activision deal explained. 

Earlier today on April 26, the UK's Competition and Markets Authority announced that it had prevented Micros💝oft from purchasing Activision Blizzard. You can see the full announcement just below, in which the government agency reasons that the deal would potentially damage competition in the gaming market.

Not only that, but there&apo💖s;s also concerns that the deal would damage competition in the cloud gaming market specially. This would ultimately lead to less "innovation and choice" for UK gamers, the CMA writes above, leading to them preventing the acquisition fꦛrom going ahead.

"We remain fully committed to this acquisition and will appeal," Microsoft president Brad Smith s🍨aid in a statement after the ruling. "The CMA’s decision rejects a pragmatic path to address competition concerns and discourages technology innovation and investment in the United Kingdom."

"We𓂃 have already signed contracts to make Activision Blizzard’s popular games available on 150 million more devices, and we remain committed to reinforcing these agreements through regulatory remedies," the Microsoft head continued. "We’re especially disappointed that after lengthy deliberations, this decision appears to reflect a flawed understanding of this market and the way the relevant cloud technology actually works."

"The CMA’s report contradicts the ambitions of the UK to become an attractive country to build technology businesses," Activision said in a state🐭ment. "We will work aggressively with Microsoft to reverse this on appeal. The report’s conclusions are a disservice to UK citizens, who face increasingly dire economic prospects. We will reassess our growth plans for the UK. Global innovators large and small will take note that - despite all its rhetoric - the UK is clearly cl🐬osed for business."

Head over to our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:upcoming Xbox Series X games guide for a full look at all the games coming to Microsoft's new-gen console in the near future.

"Being loud about it because I've lost yet another person this🐟 week," WoW producer Adam 'Glaxigrav' says on . "Blizzard is losing amazing talent because someone in power doesn't listen to the game directors who make his products. DE&I also means diversity of thought, especially when it's backed by data and financia🐭ls."

Earlier this year, Activision Blizzard announced that employees would soon be required to return to the office for at least three days a week, a move that met with a quick, vocal backlash from employees on social me𝔍dia. The company partially backtracked on 🃏its plans to relax COVID-19 vaccine mandates in response to employee backlash earlier this month, but𝓰 Blizzard employees are to be forced back to the office in July.

By many accounts, 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Dragonflight was the best WoW expansion inꦿ years, and Glaxigrav says that the prospects for future expansions are diminishing with these departures. "I just want to make video games. I want to make amazing best sellers that are critically acclaimed. I want to make better Dragonflights. I want to make better experiences. Can&ap☂os;t do that if we get rid of everyone who made it."

Glaxigrav says the talent bleed has gotten to the point where the studio is "creati🉐ng crisis maps of what we can or cannot ship. THAT is the loss of capacity we’re facing. I literally have a schedule I strike out as people hand in notice."

A Blizzard representative tells that the aforementioned 'crisis maps' are "not﷽ a team practice for WoW. However, making decisions around priorities, iterating, and ensuring quality are everyday parts of game development."

Another WoW developer, senior game designer Allison Steele, "forced [return to off🦄ice] has cost us some amazing 🌞people and will continue to cost us more in the coming months," calling it a "terrible, shortsighted, self-destructive policy that is only weakening our ability to deliver the kind of game we want to make and our players deserve."

As Activision Blizzard's return-to-office policy courted controversy earlier this year, Bungie was happy to note how it delivered Destiny 2's best season ever "entirely remotely."

Earlier today on April 17, South Africa's Competition Commission announced in a 🌄 that it had approved the proposed acquisition. Specifically, the government agency has recommended the country's Competition Tribunal to approve Microsoft's move to acquire Activision Blizzard.

"The primary competition concern in this transaction arose from the (vertical) concern that Microsoft may, post-merger, restrict the distribution of Call of Duty to the Microsoft console, Xbox, or make Call of Duty available on terms th♛at exclude or undermine the ability of other console manufacturers to compete," the Competition Commission writes.

"The Commission found that the proposed transaction is unlikely to result in significant foreclosure concerns as the parties do not have th🐟e ability and incentive to foreclose competing game distributors, particul💫arly Sony (Playstation) and Nintendo (Switch)," the statement concludes in its reasoning for the positive ruling towards the acquisition.

This ruling is likely a result of Microsoft signing a deal to put 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Call of Duty on Nintendo consoles 🎉for a decade, as well as expressing an intent to 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:sign a similar deal wi🦩th PlayStation (which the latter company allegedly declined). Microsoft has effectiv❀ely done enough through these deals to dissuade concerns from South Africa's Competition Commission that it would keep Call of Duty off other platforms.

South Africa is the latest country to rule in favor of the deal, after Japan's Fair Trade C🅘ommission gave the deal the green light last month in March. This was after 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Saudi Arabia approved the deal, and a UK watchdog 🌱walked back previous competition concerns over the proposed acquisit♔ion. These are all increasingly ﷽positive signs for Microsoft's proposed deal.

Check out our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:new games 2023 guide for a look over all the titles we can expect to launch throughout the rest of the year. 

First picked up on by , there's been some harsh language of late from Sony towards Microsoft in patent filing𒈔s. Just earlier this month, a Sony patent acknowledged users could be playing a "home entertainment system of a different albeit inferior manufacturer," stopping just short of explicitly naming Microsoft and Nintendo as these "inferior" manufacturers.

You'd be forgiven for thinking this is Sony just lashing out at its competition thanks to Microsoft's attempted acquisition of Activision Blizzard (which Sony has been having meltdowns over fo𝔉r months now). However, this language actually extends🎃 much further than just the last few years, even as f🔯ar back as 2013.

Foss Patents notes that Sony has used the phrase "different albeit inferior manufacturer" for home consoles in 12 total patents over the last decade. That's 11 times Sony has called its compe🗹tition "inferior" in US patent filings, and once in European filings, for anyone keeping track.

This is hardly the first time ♋Sony, or any other console maꦉnufacturer for that matter, has used disparaging language to describe its competition. What's just downright weird here is that Sony repeatedly brings this up in innocuous patent filings, a battleground where you'd think disparaging your competition wouldn't really help you succeed in patenting technology.

Sony can stamp its feet all it wants, but Microsoft scored a major win 𒉰for its Activision acquisition last month in🐷 the UK after the CMA walked back concerns over decreased competition resulting from the acquisition. T🦹hat said, there's still a ways to go before the government regulator delivers its final verdict in August. 

Last month also saw Microsoft sign its fourth 10-year deal in as many weeks in an attempt to push the acquisition through, this time partnering with a cloud technology provider. 

You'd be forgiven if you've lost track of which lawsuit is which in the myriad efforts to block Microsoft's planned acquisition of Activision Blizzard. The 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Gamer's Lawsuit w෴as filed in December 2022 on behalf of 10 seemingly random game fans arguing that the acquisition would be bad for the public, not just Microsoft's industry competitors. A judge 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:dismissed the suit in March, s🎐aying that it failed to "plausibly allege" that the merger would have anticompetitive effects.

With that in mind, the suit has now been amended and refiled. The plaintiffs were unable to conv🌳ince Nintendo and Sony's CEOs t🦂o testify here, but Sony was willing to produce a number of documents related to the case. In an April 7 filing (via ), Microsoft noted that it was "surprised" that the plaintiffs "received document productions fr🌃om Sony weeks ago.🔯"

The amended lawsuit w🧔as filed on April 10, with the new information provided by Sony included. Sadly, we haven't gotten to see that info for ourselves. As Florian Mueller notes on his , the charts provi🦩ded by Sony have been redacted in the public version of the amended suit.

Even with the amendment, it's certainly possible that this lawsuit will be dismissed again, as the court will still have to decide whether or not there's merit to these arguments even with some additional detail. Beyond that, there's not much of interest in the new suit for casual observers - except for one thing. Sizable stretches of the amended Gamer's Lawsuit appear to have been directly copied 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:from the FTC's complaint – a complaint which obviously carries mu💛ch greater weight than the꧃ gripes of 10 random gamers. 

Sony's unhappy about Microsoft's reported cancelation of Redfall on PS5.

Microsoft's ongoing bid toꦓ buy Activision Blizzard has faced setbacks from a number of regulators from around the world as well as complaints lodged by its main competitor in the gaming space. Sony's latest argument is that, if the merger closes, Microsoft could make Call of Duty♉ a "defacto" Xbox exclusive by adding it to Game Pass or "providing Call of Duty on Pla🎃yStation Plus at a commercially unviable price."

Activision Blizzard itself is now defending its deal with Microsoft by targeting specific complaints from Sony, including a recent suggestion that Xbox might giv♐e PlaꩲyStation a deliberately buggy version of Call of Duty to sabotage sales.

"You may have seen statements from Sony, including an argument that if this deal goes through, Microsoft could release deliberately 'buggy' versions of our games on PlayStation," Kotick said in a publicly available to staff. "We all know our p🔯assionate playe🧸rs would be the first to hold Microsoft accountable for keeping its promises of content and quality parity. And, all of us who work so hard to deliver the best games in our industry care too deeply about our players to ever launch sub-par versions of our games."

Kotick, apparently stung by Sony&𓆉apos;s suggestion that his company's games will somehow be compro﷽mised on PlayStation hardware, said he won't let a little mutual mudslinging get in the way of Activision and Sony's long-running business relationship.

"Sony has even admitted that they aren't actually concerned about a Call of Duty agreement—they would just like to prevent our꧒ merger from happening. This is obviously disappointing behavior from a partner for almost thirty years, but we will not allow Sony’s behavior to affect our long term relationship. PlayStation players know we will continue to deliver the best games possible on Sony platforms as we have since the launch of PlayStation."

澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查ꦐ询:Microsoft rec⛎ently scored a major win when UK regulators walked back their concerns over its Activision deal. Kotick also noted in his email that the Japan Fair Trade Commission 🔯ruled in favor of the de𒊎al just this week, clearing another p🐠otential roa🍸dblock.

"We will continue to have discussions with European❀ and UK regulators until the decꦍision dates, which we expect in the coming months," Kotick said.

Here are the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best Xbox Series X games and the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best PS5 games to play right now.

In January last year, Microsoft announced it plans to buy Activision ꦗBlizzard to the tune of $68.7 billion. If the deal goes ahead, it will be the largest acquisition the industry has ever seen. Given its magnitude, there are a lot of hurdles that Microsoft must overcome before it can bring Activision Blizzard under its umbrella. Currently, it's being investigated by the regulatory authorities in various countries to determine whether or not it would hinder competition. Japan is the latest country to give its verdict on the proposed merger, and it's good news for Mi🦄crosoft.

As spotted by The Verge's senior editor Tom Warren, Japan's Fair Trade Commission has ruled in favour of Microsoft's Activision Blizzard deal. According to a report released by the JFTC (translated on ), it has concluded that the deal "would not substantially restrain competition in a certain field of trade." The commission has informed the companies that it will not issue a cease and desist order and has now brought the matter to a close. In addition to Japan, the countries that have appro🃏ved the deal are Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Chile, and Serbia.

This is the second major victory Microsoft has had regarding the Activision Blizzard deal recently, as last week, the UK's Competition Markets Authority walked back concern💙s over the Activision Blizzard deal. In new provisional findings published on March 24, it claims that "the transaction will not result in a substantial lessening of competition in relation to console gaming in the UK." This is all before the final ruling from the CMA is due to arrive next mon𒊎th on April 26.

Get the most out of Microsoft's latest console with our pick of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best Xbox Series X games.

That comes fr🃏om , which reports that Congress members from both sides are telling the Biden administration that Sony's business practices in Japan are blocking US companies from competing in the gaming space, which could fall foul of trade deals between the two. 

"Today, we write to bring to your attention th🍸e imbalanced Japanese video game market, which we are concerned may be a result of a discriminatory trade practice that could violate the spirit of the US-Japan Digital Trade Agreement," one letter from four Republicans reads. 

The letter mentions that Sony's PlayStation has "98% of the 'high-end console market in Japan'"🤡 and that the console maker signs deals designed to keep Japanese games from Xbox, which "may violate Japan's antitrust laws". 

"The Japanese government's effective policy of non-prosecution when it comes to Sony appears to be a serious barrier to US exports, with real impacts for Microsoft and the many US game developers and publishers that se𒁏ll globally but see their earnings in Japan depressed by these practices," the letter continues.

Now, that's not the first time we've seen the phrase "high-end console market" thrown around. Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell recently raised 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:something similar during a heari𝓀ng, referring to that same statis🦄tic to come away with a similar conclusion. 

The short of it is that America's Federal Trade Commission coined the market defi🦄nition last year, which removes the Nintendo Switch from conversations around Sony and Microsoft's consoles. It's ܫinspired a fair bit of debate as Nintendo is a major player in Japan, and removing the company from the conversation doesn't paint what many believe to be a complete picture.

The news also comes at a time when Japan's Federal Trade Commission has , one which Sony has plenty of qualms over. Indeed, with a UK wat🐷chdog changing its tune over the deal recently, it now looks more likely than ever to pass. 

It remains to be seen whether Microsoft scrapes more favourable trading conditions in Japan alongsi♑de the deal, though the noise US side is only getting louder.

Recently, 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Sony pointed to Starfield exclusivity as why Microsoft can't be trusted with Call of Duty.

Earlier today, on March 24, the CMA published a new provisional finding into Microsoft's attempted acquisition of Activision, updating its previous results. Whereas the CMA wasn't too keen on the acquisition previously 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:due to p🍒ossible lessened competition, it's now seemingly changed its tune.

"Overall, the transaction will not result in a substantial lessening of competition in relation to console gaming in the UK," the CMA says in a statement emailed to GamesRadar+. The CMA goes on to state that Microsoft wouldn't have anything to gain financially by 澳洲幸运5开💙奖号码历史查询:restricting Call🙈 of Duty to one console, in other words, taking the franchise off PlayStation platfℱorms entirely.

"The updated analysis now shows that it would not be commercially b✨eneficial to Microsoft to make CoD exclusive to Xbox following the deal, but that Microsoft will instead still have thꩵe incentive to continue to make the game available on PlayStation," the CMA further continues. 

In short, this is a serious win for Microsoft and Activision. You might recall the CMA previously floated the idea of Microsoft selling off C🃏all of 💟Duty in order to acquire Ac𝕴tivision, but it now seems like the CMA has reversed course on this comment entirely, and actually doesn't see a huge problem with Microsoft maintaining control over Call ๊of Duty should the acquisition close.

This is all before the final ruling from the CMA, which is due to arrive next month on April 26. For the time being, though, things are looking good for the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Xbox Activision deal in the UK.

Check out our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:new games 2023 guide for a look over all the games set to launch in the coming months.

As shared by intellectual property analyst and Twitter user Florian Mueller, on March 20, Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley ordered a motion to dismiss the "so-called gamers' lawsuit" due to the compl❀aint made by the plaintiff "not plausibly" alleging the Activision Blizzard merger "creates a reasonable probabili𝐆ty of anticompetitive effects in any relevant market."

The 'Gamers' Lawsuit', which was first brought to court in December 2022, was filed by a group of 10 gamers from California, New Mexico, and New Jersey who all sought to stop Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard du🤪e to concerns about it reducing competition in🍨 the games industry.

"Why would Microsoft💎 make Call of Duty exclusive to its platforms, thus resulting in fewer games sold?", Judge Corley reportedly asked during the proceedings (according to Mueller), "what is it about the console market or PC games market and Microsoft's position in those markets that makes it plausible there is a reasonable probability Microsoft would take such steps."

In other Activision Blizzard acquisition news, Microsoft signed its fourth 10-year deal in four weeks last week, all to push the acquisition through. The latest deal sees cloud gaming company Ubitus (who is responsible for several Nintendo Switch ports) partner with Xbox which, according t🌺o Xbox boss Phil Spencer, will allow the company to "stream Xbox PC Games as well as Activision Blizzard titles after the acquisition closes."

Right now, Microsoft's Activision Blizzard deal is still uncertain - find out which 10 Activision Blizzard franchises we'd love to see reborn at Xbox if it does go through though.

Sony argues that, "as well as a total foreclosure," Microsoft could pursue partial foreclosure – that is, 𒐪neutering competition more indirectly – through several means. The most important point here is the prospect of Microsoft "making Call of Duty available on multi-game subscription services (MGS) only on Game Pass or providing Call of Duty on PlayStation Plus at a commercially unviable price, thereby making it de facto exclusive."

The notion of a "de facto exclusive" 🐻essentially counters Microsoft's repeated claims that it wouldn't outright withhold Call of Duty from PlayStation; it asserts that it wouldn't have to in order to hurt PlayStation&🃏apos;s ability to compete. Parity between Game Pass and PlayStation Plus has been a sticking point throughout this process, and Sony's bringing that to a head here by arguing that secondary differences in access, or perhaps licensing terms for subscription services, could still make Xbox the go-to console for Call of Duty. 

Sony also reiterates and doubles down on other anti-competitive strategies including Microsoft making Call of Duty cost more and/or run worse on PlayStation, as well as "restricting, degrading, or not prioritizing investment in the multiplayer experience on PlayStation." This doubles down on the company's stated fears that Microsoft might give it a deliberately sabotaged version of Call of Duty. Apropos of nothing, I'd like to point out that 🦩from𒊎 an unnamed third party "found the arguments against this acquisition to be slightly exaggerated and out of proportion," and I simply cannot imagine why.  

Sony's concluding argument minces no words: "Microsoft's previous acquisitions and strategic rationale indicate its incentives to foreclose. Foreclosure will cause irreparable harm to the console and cloud gaming industry, to the detriment of gamers and competition. The way to prevent that harm is for the transaction to be blocked." This certainly lines up with reported comments from PlayStation boss Jim Ryan, who apparently tol🐟d Activision that "I just want to block your merger." 

In its own , Microsoft again insists that it "stands ready, as it has since day one, to enter an agreement with Sony to ensure that [Call of Duty] remains on PlayStation," and has proposed remedies that would "guarantee parity between the PlaySta𒊎tion 🅷and Xbox platforms in respect of [Call of Duty]." 

Curiously, Microsoft also argues that the CMA must show more evidence that, even if it were to withhold Call of Duty from PlayStation or give it a price hike, this would lead not just to "'some diversion' of would-be PlayStation buyers," with some switching to Xbox instead, but rather true foreclosure in the market. To that point, Microsoft maintains that "some 'shift in share' is not enough," as PlayStation a♉lready "holds a significant incumbency advantage over Xbox."

To sum up the several dozen pages of legal squabbling I've had to pick through, this battle is still at a relative standstill with both armies leaning into their own tried-and-true tactics, though the fighting is picking up on the front of literal versus implicit exclusivity for Call of Duty. Microsoft is making broad assurances and Sony is drilling into more specific scenarios and conditions. Expect to see more responses in the future🍬, because this ain't over for anyone. 

After announcing 10-year deals with everyone and their dog in a transparent bid to make this deal appear pro-competitive, Microsoft is getting absolutely clowned on. 

Earlier today, on March 16, the UK's Competition and Markets Authority published Microsoft's response to the agency's provisional findings. On page 11 of the , there's a refꦆerence to a "Superman" game as a PlayStation exclusive, which would appear at first glance to be a brand new, unannounced title.

But let's pump the brakes on that quickly. This new "Superman" game is mentioned alongside Sony Santa Monica's God of War as a "big title" for PlayStation, implying that the game is already out and in the hands of PlayStation userಌs worldwide, just l🧸ike 2018's God of War.

What's far more likely to have happened here is that Microsoft actually means Insomniac's Spider-Man games, which have been published under PlayStation and developed by Insomniac, with 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Marvel's Spider-Man 2 on track to release later this year. The implication that an unannounced game could potentially dri😼ve console sales is ludicrous at best.

Superman and Spider-Man are admittedly tw🦄o pretty tricky characters to get mixed up, but never underestimate the capabilities of corporations in that department. This probably won&apos𒈔;t be the only mistake in the staggering 84-page document.

This is just the latest in a very long line of silly development around Microsoft's attempted acquisition of Activision Blizzard. The arguments are simply too long to catalogue at this point, as both Microsoft and Sony have gone back and forth over why the acquisition should and shouldn't happen, respectively. It has been amusing to watch 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:certain executives tweet through it, though.

Head over to our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Xbox Activision deal explained guide if you want a recap of all the circus antics so far. 

Yesterday, Xbox boss Phil Spencer announced Xbox's fourth 10-year deal in as many weeks. This time it was Ubitus, a company best known for its work on the Nintendo Switch's cloud-based ports, that got 10 years of access to "Xbox PC games as well as Activision Blizzard titles after the acquisition closes." That news came just a day after a very similar deal with 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Ukrainian cloud service Boosteroid, and only weeks after 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:partnerships with Nintendo and ⭕Nvidia.

Some of those names are significantly bigger than others, and Microsoft is now getting c﷽lowned on as social media users invent all manner of fake partnerships with obscure and outdated tech. A couple of posts (one boasting Spencer's seal of approval) describe a deal with Texas Instruments, promising to "bring Call of Duty to a calculator near you."

One post confirms a deal with Tamagotchi, while others are bringing Call of Duty to the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:infamous chicken-warming KFC console and 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:SouljaBoy's bizarre consoles. 

Others are taking an even more mocking st🐠ance, coming up ꧙with partnerships for fledgling platforms that don't really exist, but are simultaneously "definitely real and used by actual people." 

While Microsoft's taking a bit of a beating, this is unlikely to be the last we hear of its 10-year deals. A core aspect of its negotiations with Sony is using increased access to Call of Duty for playe🉐rs around the world as a counter to complaints that it'll keep the franchise away from PlayStation users as soon as it gets the chance, or that the acquisition would otherwise give🧸 it an unfair advantage, especially in cloud gaming. 

While Microsoft's scattershot tactic is making it the butt of a few jokes, I think it's better than Sony's recent approach of 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:accusations of potential sabotage, reportedly as part of a 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:strategy to block the merger at any cost.  

Ever-opposed to Microsoft's Activision acquisition, Sony claims 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Starfield's exclusivity shows why Microsoft can't be trusted with Call of Duty.

That comes from the United States Federal Trade Commission, which announced the penalty sum has been finalised following the complaint's 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:initial announcement last December. 

The FTC accused Epic of using design tricks to lull players of all ages into making unintende🌜d in-game purchases. 

"Fortnite's counterintuitive, inconsistent, and confusing button configuration led players to incur unwanted charges ba♈sed on the press of a single button," an FTC press release reads. "The company also made it easy for children to make purchases while playing Fortnite without requiring any parental consent."

The FTC also alleged that Epic lockedဣ the accounts of people who disputed the unauthorised charges with their credit card companies.

Now, the FTC has revealed Epic must pay $245 million to p🔴ut that all right, which will be used to refund players affected.

"The order also prohibits Epic from charging consumers through the use of dark patt💮erns or from otherwise charging consumers without obtaining their affirmative consent," ✤the press release continues. "Additionally, the order bars Epic from blocking consumers from accessing their accounts for disputing unauthorised charges."

Elsewhere, Google and Nvidia have reportedly 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:expressed "concern" to FTC over Microsoft's Activision Blizzard acquisition, which continues to rumble on.