News Mash-Up - Week # 45

• • Unity recently released its third quarter financial results. Revenue for the quarter has gone up 13% year-on-year to $322.9 million, but the company additionally reported loses from operations of $239.6 million, up from $126.8 million in Q3 2021.
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  • Roblox also reported its financial results for the last 3 months ended September 30, with its revenue growing 2% to $518 million and net losses growing to $302 million as compared to $74 million one year ago. Its results this quarter were significantly impacted because of changes in the reporting process for the company.
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  • Nintendo reported its financial results for H1 of its financial year. Net sales rose to $4.4 billion, up 5.2% since last year. Switch console unit sales dropped 19.2% due to a continued shortage of components, while software unit sales grew 1.6% to 95.4 million since last year.
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  • Take-Two Interactive has reported its earnings for the quarter ended September 30, reporting a revenue of $1.4 billion, up 62% since last year, and a net loss of $257 million as compared to $10.3 million last year. The losses were greater than the company originally expected, but this is due to the current economic situation, exchange rates, and especially the impact of this on the mobile business.
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  • Nintendo hosted the Indie World Showcase on November 9, showcasing more than 20 indie titles that will be coming to Switch before summer 2023. Among these announcements was a December release date for the long-awaited sequel to Sports Story called Golf Story, Venba from Visai Games, Goodbye World from Yo Fujii, and Oni: Road to be the Mightiest Oni from Kenei Design and Shueisha Games.
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  • Mark Zuckerberg has announced that in a plan to restructure the company, Meta will be cutting 11,000 jobs. This means that the total workforce of Meta will decrease 13%, with some areas of the company more impacted than others. Zuckerberg attributed the cut to a few factors, including “online commerce trends” in the post-Covid lockdown era, increased competition, and the difficult economy.
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  • Sony has announced its pre-order plans for the PSVR2 headset, due for release on February 22, 2023. In the “initial launch phase” Sony plans to make the headset available for pre-order only on the PlayStation online store in the US, UK, France, Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg, meaning that it will be cutting out many retail partners in some huge markets such as Walmart and GameStop, which generally each account for around 30% of retail in the US.
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  • The acquisition of Activision-Blizzard by Microsoft is now undergoing an in-depth phase 2 investigation by the European Commission. This comes as phase 1 investigations showed that the acquisition might “significantly reduce competition on the markets for the distribution of console and PC video games” and that Microsoft has a “potential economic incentive” from sharing access to Activision’s highest profile games such as Call of Duty with competitors.
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  • A second game set in Sony’s Horizon IP is reportedly in the works, in development with NCSoft, a Korean studio most known for Guild Wars and its sequel. The project is most likely in early development, with no date of release announced.
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  • EA has removed a few driving games from sale over the last two months. First off, they removed Project Cars and Project Cars 2. Slightly Mad Studios, the game’s developer, placed the blame on “expiring car and track licenses.” Current owners of the games will still be able to play them. In addition to this, EA removed Dirt Rally and Dirt 4, two games from developer Codemasters.
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  • Following its separation with EA Sports, FIFA has announced licenses for games that will be set around the theme of the World Cup in Qatar which will begin this month. Among these games are Uplandme, a blockchain-based metaverse game which will feature its own “FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 in the Upland Metaverse,” Matchday Challenge: FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 Edition, a game based on football cards, and Altered State Machine – AI League: FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 Edition, which lets you watch and interact with AI-controlled football matches, among others.
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  • Activision has released its plans for a “full premium” Call of Duty game in 2023 which will be a continuation of Modern Warfare 2, contradicting its previous claims that there would be no full COD game released next year.
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  • There is reportedly a Gears of War live-action movie as well as an animated series being worked on at Netflix at this moment. Neither the series nor the movie has a release date for the time being.

Week commencing Monday 7 November 2022