In an earnings call on Thursday, May 3, gaming titan Activision Blizzard hinted at some major changes to some of its largest properties. The biggest announcements came for Destiny 2 and Overwatch, the former of which will be getting a large, previously unannounced expansion coming this fall. Overwatch, on the other hand, will be adding a handful of new, professional teams in the coming months.
Throughout, CEO Bobby Kotick and President Coddy Johnson discussed Activision’s strong financials from the past quarter and assured investors there would be more good news to come and moderately raising the company’s earnings forecasts.
The pair laid out their basic plan for the upcoming year, including renewed investment in mobile and free-to-play games, as well as updates on the company’s tentpole properties. Overwatch, for instance, is continuing to perform extremely well, with tens of millions of monthly players. That’s been bolstered by the Overwatch League, as well as the myriad of additional content — including new characters and seasonal events.
Destiny 2 is also getting some attention. In addition to Warmind, launching on May 8, Johnson mentioned that the game would see a new expansion this fall. While he didn’t get much into details, during a Q and A session Johnson said that will be a “new mode” that will bring with it a totally “new style of play” that will push the envelope in terms of shared space shooters. Activision Blizzard is also treating this as one of its big fall releases and will be focusing on power scaling, player rewards, and plenty of endgame content.
Ahead of the full public showcase of Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 on May 17, Johnson and Kotick were sparse on details for the game, only revealing that Treyarch has put a tremendous amount of work into analyzing what players enjoy most, and basing design choices on that information. What exactly that meant wasn’t clear, but it does lend some credence to rumors that this latest installment will be dropping the single-player campaign in favor of multi-player focused modes.
Finally, the executives on the call largely dodged questions about whether they’d be reconsidering the $60 retail price tag for standard games in the future. The group suggested that the “added value” of DLC and other micro-transactions were performing strong, and such features would continue to be a prominent part of the company’s releases.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.