Month: January 2021

Developer Jagex’s long-running MMO RuneScape has hit a milestone that contemporaries such as World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy XIV have yet to achieve. Having launched on January 4 all the way back in 2001, RuneScape is officially 20 years old today and continues to still draw a sizeable crowd to its servers.

With the game having been played for 7306 days across 300 million player accounts, RuneScape saw impressive growth in 2020 with a record 1.2 million users subscribing and millions of other players trying the game out in its free-to-play form.

To celebrate its 20th anniversary, players will be able to participate in the Grand Party, a birthday event that has its own series of associated questlines and includes the return of iconic RuneScape characters such as the Wise Old Man and the Sandwich Lady. Players can also unlock a fancy new cape and armor.

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ZeniMax, the parent company of Bethesda which is in the process of being acquired by Microsoft, has filed a trademark application for what could be a new game.

On December 21, 2020, ZeniMax filed a trademark for something called “Hi-Fi Rush.” The description states that it could be “mobile application software” with online capabilities. The trademark filing also mentions PC and consoles. However, there are no further details on what the game might be, if it even is a game.

ZeniMax/Bethesda has yet to officially announce a project called Hi-Fi Rush, and its existence in a trademark filing does not guarantee it will ever become a product. That being said, sometimes trademark filings can point to future releases. As an example, ZeniMax filed the trademark for Starfield back in 2013 before the game was eventually announced at E3 in 2018.

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With destinations stretching across the globe, IO Interactive’s Hitman series has become a massive collection of scenic locales to explore. Hitman 3 will add even more locations to the experience, ranging from a massive skyscraper in Dubai through to a stately manor in England.

If you’re planning to install the entire world of assassination onto your PC or console, the good news is that the entire trilogy will take up less space than Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War or Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond‘s mind-boggling 177GB installation size. This will make the entire trilogy smaller than Hitman 2 on Steam, with the 2016 Hitman content included.

“All three games with all content will take up around 100GB,” an IO Interactive developer explained on ResetEra. “Biggest wins are because of data management and file structures and how we deliver the game so we could remove duplicate data. We also use newer and better compression for textures – that helps too.”

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Warner Bros. has announced the second-weekend box office results for Wonder Woman 1984. The Gal Gadot-starring superhero movie made a further $5.5 million in North America over the weekend, which is down 67 percent compared to its first-weekend numbers.

With the $5.5 million, Wonder Woman 1984 has now made $28.5 million in the US and Canada. Deadline, which supplied the numbers, suggested that the big drop-off in ticket sales for the second weekend is partially attributed to people realizing they can stream the movie at home on HBO Max, and spend less to do so compared to buying tickets for a whole family. Deadline also noted that Wonder Woman 1984’s B+ CinemaScore rating might have contributed to a bigger downturn in ticket sales than expected.

Box office results are always front-loaded, so a drop-off in ticket sales across the US and Canada was expected to some degree. Many theatres remain closed or scaled down–60% of US theatres are closed, Deadline said–and people may be generally less inclined to visit a cinema even if it is open due to the health crisis. All of this is contributing to some of the lowest box office results ever for major movies in the past year.

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Microsoft has requested a class-action lawsuit over malfunctioning Xbox controller go to arbitration. In fact, the filing issued to a Washington court claims that Xbox users have already agreed to use arbitration through the Microsoft Services Agreement.

VGC reports that in the motion, Microsoft says users consent to its services agreement simply by using Xbox controllers and Xbox Live, and according to that agreement, such a class-action suit is not permitted.

“Plaintiffs repeatedly agreed not to bring a lawsuit like this in court,” the company’s filing states. “Instead, they assented to the Microsoft Services Agreement and to warranty agreements in which they promised they would arbitrate disputes on an individual basis using a consumer-friendly process before the American Arbitration Association. The Federal Arbitration Act requires enforcing these agreements.”

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As part of Steam’s “Best of 2020” extravaganza, Valve has announced the highest-grossing games on the platform by revenue, and there are few surprises.

Valve did not provide any specific revenue numbers, nor did it rank any of the games in order of how much they sold, but the company did categorize the games into Platinum, Gold, Silver, and Bronze tiers, presumably based on the gross revenues.

Games in the Platinum category include Valve’s own free-to-play games CS: GO and Dota 2, which make money from microtransactions. Other games that made the cut for Platinum include Red Dead Redemption 2, Destiny 2, Fall Guys, PUBG, Doom Eternal, Monster Hunter World, Among Us, Cyberpunk 2077, and Rainbow Six Siege.

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