Month: November 2020

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare continues to break sales records. Activision Blizzard has announced that the game’s first-year sales are the highest in Call of Duty’s history. However, the company did not provide an exact sales number.

That is a notable achievement given that the figure only covers up to September 30, so the game–which released in October 2019–didn’t even need a full year to break the single-year sales record for the franchise. It’s not immediately clear which title was previously the record-setter for first-year sales.

Activision also announced that two-thirds of Modern Warfare’s lifetime sales were digital. That’s good for Activision, as the company makes more money from digital game sales than boxed copies.

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Monster Hunter Rise is coming to Switch on March 26, and fans of the series are wondering how it will differ from past entries–including the huge Monster Hunter World. Now, in a new video, developer Capcom has shown off an example of combat using the game’s Great Sword–and how some of this entry’s new mechanics will work.

This video details your palamute companions, rideable dogs who will fight alongside you. While riding your palamute, you can sharpen weapons, boost stamina, or use potions, meaning that you can move towards your target while also preparing for battle. The video also shows off more of your Wirebug, which is used to gain height and traverse through the environment–but which can also be used in combat.

The video below shows the first two stages of a battle between a hunter and Aknosom, a bird/wyvern hybrid. The fight shows how the Palamute dogs will jump into the battle and fight alongside you, and how the Wirebug can be used in combat to attack from above and escape danger.

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Activision Blizzard has reported new financial numbers for the July-September period, and it was a gigantic quarter for the gaming publisher. One section of the company’s business that did particularly well was microtransactions. For the three-month period, Activision Blizzard made $1.2 billion from microtransactions, which are called “in-game net bookings.”

This is a dramatic 69 percent improvement over the same period last year, when Activision Blizzard made $709 million from in-game net bookings.

Microtransactions are very big business for Activision Blizzard. For the latest reporting period, Activision Blizzard made $1.95 billion in revenue from all of its business combined, so the $1.2 billion figure from microtransactions represents more than half of the company’s total revenue.

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Windbound will expand with a trio of free major updates over the next few months. The first of three major patches is out now, and it contains some new stat-boosting skins, a photo mode, and and new endless mode for the survival game.

The new Witch Skins are made up of three items–the Witch’s Hat, Witch’s Outfit, and Witch’s Staff–which give you a healthy stat boost when equipped. The hat makes potions last longer, the outfit gives you easier, closer respawns, and the staff is an unbreakable weapon that fires out enemy-seeking orbs after each melee attack.

Photo Mode, meanwhile, lets you pause the game and line up a photo, changing how Kara’s posed and adding filters. It lets you change your position, camera orientation, and mess with field of view, exposure, and time, just as in most photo modes. You can also equip Kara with a variety of different hats and accessories, getting some nice shots of your adventures.

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In the midst of another wave of DMCA takedown notices, Twitch recently advised streamers to delete their entire archives of clips or VOD if they couldn’t be sure it didn’t contain copyrighted material. Now, one streamer has shown how difficult that task can be, with increasingly unrealistic copyright claims.

Twitch has had ongoing issues with DMCA this year, with its most recent wave of takedowns seeing the streaming platform sending a one-size-fits-all warning to streamers who had hosted infringing content. Twitch has since returned to sending out regular copyright notices, though they still aren’t helpful for streamers who want a long-term solution.

The issue has been illustrated by streamer Jake’n’Bake, who received a copyright notice over a snippet of a Kanye song appearing in a video from an IRL stream from 2018. As he points out, he never played the song himself, but likely walked past a business or person playing it.

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Far Cry 6 and Rainbow Six Quarantine aren’t the only Ubisoft games that have been delayed. The French publisher confirmed in its latest report that its new Avatar game based on the James Cameron film franchise has been pushed to a new date further in the future.

This new Avatar game, which is in development at The Division studio Massive Entertainment, will now release during Ubisoft’s financial year that begins in April 2022. The first Avatar movie sequel, Avatar 2, is scheduled for release in December 2022 after its own delay. It would make sense that the game will release around that time to capitalize on the hype, but no firm date has been announced yet.

The new delay for the Avatar game was made in response to the delay of the movie, Ubisoft management said on an earnings call.

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