Tweet
A few things happened at the tail end of the week ending March 15, 2024 and then a couple of things popped up over the ensuing weekend. I have a severe case of the Mondays right now, so that means we're doing a NewsBits and so help me you better enjoy it.
• New rumors about the PlayStation 5 Pro popped up over the weekend. Inside Gaming claims that the PlayStation 5 Pro retains the same Zen 2-based AMD APU, but it'll be able to draw 10% more power for some higher clocks. RAM speeds will get a bump from 448 GB/s to 576 GB/s. Audio will see a bump of 35% more performance. The GPU will allegedly render at 45% faster than base PS5 hardware. It will also have 2-3x ray-tracing power, and may hit x4 in some cases. "PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution Upscaling" will be a new upscaling and anti-aliasing solution. 8K support is planned. The Pro will also allegedly include an AI Accelerator supporting 300 Trillions of Operations Per Second (TOPS) of 8-bit computation and 67 TFLOPS of 16-bit floating point.
• Dark and Darker returns to a PC storefront after being pulled from Steam about a year ago due to copyright claims and a lawsuit from Nexon. Sadly, the game hasn't (yet) returned to Steam. Instead, it is going to the Epic Games Store. Developer Irongate says that this is the "first step" of offering Dark and Darker to a wider audience, which could suggest a return to Steam may still happen in the future.
• Helldivers 2 may have sold over 8 million copies between PC and PlayStation 5. This is according to TD Cowen analyst Doug Creutz.
• Valve just launched a beta for Steam Families. This feature will replace both Steam Family Sharing and Steam Family View. It offers a single place to manage which games your family can access and when they can play. Steam Families will support Family Sharing, extensive parental controls, and child purchase requests approvals.
• The deckbuilding game that has become a rather surprise hit, Balatro, has sold over 1 million copies. Balatro was released on February 20, 2024 for PC, PlayStation, Xbox, and Switch.
• Bloomberg reports that Sony put a pause on the production of more PlayStation VR2 headsets. The report says that the pause comes because Sony just has too many unsold PSVR2 headsets sitting around and they want to clear those out before resuming production. Analysts have suggested the $550 price and lack of game support are big reasons why the hardware isn't selling. Sony hopes to make the PSVR2 more enticing later in 2024 by adding official PC support.
• Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection had an incredibly rough launch this past week. There was a major lack of servers, players unable to spawn if they did get in, broken aiming, broken hitboxes, repeatable crashes, bugged textures, and more. People also took issue with the fact the games ballooned from a combined 7.3 GB install size of the original games to needing 72 GB of free space for this new Collection. Now, a modder has further evidence that Aspyr used his mod for the original games in the release version of the Classic Collection. This is despite a claim made months ago that it was "mistakenly" included and was "not in the product." The modded content was removed as part of a day one patch for the Collection, but can still be seen in unpatched versions.
• Anti-piracy software Denuvo will soon be able to help developers track down who leaked information. The new technology is called TraceMark will use an "invisible game watermarks unique to each build or user." The method being used here is supposedly very similar to what Hollywood and professional sports leagues use to detect leaks. It can possibly be used to secure playtest environments, closed beta tests, and even press review copies of games.
• Star Citizen might actually be released within our lifetimes. Chris Roberts of Cloud Imperium Games said that the 1.0 launch is "on the horizon." First, Star Citizen Alpha 4.0 will be released later in 2024. I would keep the optimism in check though, because Star Citizen was initially supposed to be out a decade ago in 2014. Star Citizen was announced in late 2012 and has since raised over $672,139,000 in funding over the past 12 years.
• A Twitch streamer by the name of Elajjaz lost over 11 hours of progress during an all-bosses randomizer permadeath run of Elden Ring. While on his 14th attempt, a tragic incident involving pee happened. The "Pissident" as it were, happened when Elajjaz warped back to the Roundtable Hold and ran to use the bathroom. Unfortunately, the usually peaceful location was invaded by one of Elden Ring's NPCs. Elajjaz's character was relentlessly attacked and ultimately killed while the streamer took care of business. Elajjaz learned of his character's fate upon returning, at which point he started up yet another attempt from the very beginning. Elajjaz later lost another run when he died in a fight against Gideon. According to his chat, this absolute destruction at the hands of the All-Knowing was far, far more embarrassing than losing an 11-hour run to a pee break.
