Category: Uncategorized

Earlier this week, video game venture capitalist firm Konvoy shared its predictions about Grand Theft Auto 6. Perhaps the most eye-catching part of that projection was the notion that GTA 6 will clear will reach $7.6 billion in revenue in only 60 days. Now, a video game analyst has suggested that those sky-high numbers may not be a realistic prediction of the game’s performance.

Daniel Ahmad–the director of research and insights at Niko Partners–shared his assessment of Konvoy’s predictions and noted that, “it’s an aggressive forecast for the first 60 days.” Ahmad added that Konvoy’s numbers suggest that just under 65% of users who have either Xbox Series X|S or PlayStation 5 would need to purchase the game in that timeframe.

Ahmad also pointed out that Grand Theft Auto 5 sold 32.5 million copies in its first three months in 2013 when Xbox 360 and PS3 had an install base of around 166 million users. That’s just under 20% of players who had either console.

Konvoy’s projection may be out of reach, but there could be something to the company’s prediction that GTA 6 will introduce a new UGC platform that allows mod creators to build their own areas of the game. A report earlier this year indicated that Rockstar Games was talking with Fortnite and Roblox creators about making custom experiences in GTA 6. That could potentially allow creators to earn money by selling their creations to other players, with Rockstar sharing a sizable portion of any income.

Grand Theft Auto 6 will hit PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S on May 26, 2026.

In case you’ve been wondering, Ubisoft is indeed working on a new entry in its long-running Ghost Recon series. The news, which had been heavily rumored for a while now, was confirmed by Ubisoft president Yves Guillemot in what sounds like a heated shareholder meeting last week.

First reported by Game File, the confirmation of the the untitled Ghost Recon game came from a question about Ubisoft’s history with live-service titles. Touting the company’s success with Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege, Guillemot added, “In addition to the flagship game that I just mentioned, our objective is to also make strong progress in the growing market, generally speaking, by continuing to enhance our current experiences that we offer–and capitalizing on upcoming launches, such as The Division and Ghost Recon.”

Later on, Ubisoft’s CFO Frederick Duguet specifically called out the upcoming Ghost Recon title as one of the company’s “first-person-shooter-type games,” seemingly also confirming that the next entry will be an FPS. Though multiple titles in the franchise have offered first-person perspectives, the Ghost Recon games have largely been presented as third-person shooters since 2006’s Advanced Warfighter, making this a significant shift for the series.

A new first-person live-service Ghost Recon game is not an entirely unprecedented thing. Ghost Recon Wildlands was a huge success for Ubisoft back in 2017, one which the company built upon by quickly following it up with a worse-received sequel, Breakpoint. Despite the difference in their receptions, both of these titles enjoyed a great deal of post-launch support. Ubisoft, in a controversial move, even added NFTs, a form of digital collectible rooted in cryptocurrency and blockchain technology, to Breakpoint back in 2021.

Despite the confirmation of a new Ghost Recon game, neither Guillemot nor Duguet provided any timeframe, suggesting that the title is still a ways out. In the meantime, Ubisoft is keeping busy, spinning off many of its core franchises into a new division–which is being co-led by Guillemot’s son–as part of its terms with Tencent, and finally greenlighting a Netflix adaptation of its popular Assassin’s Creed games.

One of the most important NPC Sims you’re likely to encounter during your time in Innisgreen in The Sims 4: Enchanted by Nature is Mother Nature. If you want one of your Sims to become a fairy, they’ll have to go through her to do so. Mother Nature is one half of the mythical PlantSim couple that rules over Innisgreen–the other half being Fable questgiver Spruce Almighty, though they’re currently not on speaking terms with each other.

While it may be a little bit sad to see these magical beings experiencing marital difficulties, the good news is that it means that Mother Nature is single. And it will come to absolutely no one’s surprise that Sims 4 players would like to get a little bit closer to Ms. Nature. Which begs an extremely important question:

Can your Sims romance Mother Nature?

Yes, your Sims CAN make out with Mother Nature.

Yes! There are a small handful of significant limits to how you can interact with her, but Mother Nature is available for most romantic interactions with other Sims. Specifically, Mother Nature cannot get married, move into your Sim’s household, or get pregnant, unless you use cheats or mods to make them happen. Pretty much anything else is fair game, though you may have to deal with a little bit of UI weirdness along the way. Mother Nature is open to romance with any gender.

To meet Mother Nature for the first time, you’ll have to summon her using a Fairy Seedling, which you can purchase on a computer using Order > Purchase Fairy Seedling. When you plant the Seedling, Mother Nature will appear. Have your Sim introduce themself, and then the wooing can begin.

The limits on romantic interactions with Mother Nature revolve around her, ah, nature as a “homeless” Sim who is intended to be summoned using a Fairy Seedling. Because of this mechanic, Mother Nature doesn’t live on any lot in the world, and The Sims 4 is coded to keep her that way. This is where the few-but-significant restrictions come from.

If you can live with those restrictions, your Sim will be able to socialize with Mother Nature in most of the same ways they would with any other Sim, so there won’t be any need to plant a Fairy Seedling everything single time. They can invite her to hang out, go on dates, and yes, they can WooHoo and even become romantic partners.

The restriction on Mother Nature getting pregnant, by the way, is actually because she isn’t allowed to have a proper household for the child to live in–if you’re dead set on having kids with Mother Nature, you can still have a Science Baby using her genetic material.

Keep in mind that since Mother Nature has these odd restrictions, there may be some UI quirkiness with her. If I attempted to organize a social event from my Sim’s phone, she didn’t seem to always appear as an option for the guest list, which has also been an occasional issue with other, similar immortal homeless Sims like Father Winter and the Flower Bunny. Even with that being the case, you can invite her to a lot or on a date by clicking on her thumbnail image in the social tab in the bottom right of your screen.

Looking for more on Enchanted by Nature, the newest expansion for The Sims 4? We’ve got plenty more guides that will help you navigate the forests of Innisgreen, including our guides for dealing with Ailments, becoming a fairy and leveling up its powers quickly, and completing the new Fable quests. And if you haven’t yet decided whether you should buy Enchanted by Nature, be sure to check out our very positive review.

A lot of Fortnite’s most memorable moments have come from the game’s live events, where everybody playing is experiencing some kind of one-time-only content that you just had to be there for. The very first Fortnite live event, the one that started this whole awesome tradition, was the Blast Off event at the end of Chapter 1 Season 4–and, hey, guess what, it’s coming for the end of Fortnite OG Season 4. The new version of this rocket party will go down on July 26 at 11 AM PT / 2 PM ET during any ongoing rounds of Fortnite OG. Check out the teaser.

The Blast Off event originally took place on June 30, 2018, when the mysterious Visitor launched a rocket that went haywire right in the middle of the battle royale matches that were going on at 10:30 AM PT that morning. The rocket took off, flew way out into space, then turned around and flew in toward toward Tilted Towers. But instead of landing, the rocket hit a rift–and that’s when things got really interesting. You can watch the original version of the event in its entirety below.

It’s not expected that the Fortnite OG version will be very different than it was when it first happened, but it also wouldn’t be surprising if Epic threw in some new wrinkles, like a safe zone where players can watch the event without being threatened by other players.

The arrival of the Visitor on the Battle Royale island back in Chapter 1 Season 4 marked the beginning of Fortnite’s story, though the plotline with the Seven–the Avengers-style group the Visitor belonged to–was largely discarded during Chapter 4. There’s been some hope among folks who care about the story that the new version of the Blast Off event could contain some new detail that might tie it in with the current Fortnite plot.

Whatever the situation ends up being, the event will serve as the beginning of the end of Fortnite OG Season 4, which closes on August 7.

As one of the biggest video game platforms in the world, and with a particularly high proportion of minors among its player base, Roblox has had to invest heavily in trust and safety technology over the past decade. As part of its ongoing effort to disrupt abuse, misuse, and harm, the company is rolling out a new system to verify players’ age: “age estimation” through analysis of video selfies.

In a press release, Roblox announced that it is reconfiguring how its social features work to better protect minors from untrusted or potentially exploitative interactions. First, it is introducing a two-tiered “Connections” system to govern how players are linked to one another: normal and “Trusted Connections.”

Two players who are Trusted Connections will be able to communicate with each other without restriction, including via party and text chat with no filters. However, becoming Trusted Connections will require clearing several hurdles designed to reduce the potential of child exploitation or other types of harm.

Most fundamentally, the Trusted Connections feature will only unlock if players verify their ages, which requires uploading an ID or using Roblox’s new Age Estimation mechanism. This new system asks players to upload a video selfie, which is then processed by the company and compared against “a large and diverse dataset,” according to the press release. Roblox promises that this data will be handled “securely,” although the specific details of its privacy and security mechanisms related to video selfies were not shared.

Upon verifying age, players between 13-17 years old can create Trusted Connections with one another. If a minor wants to establish a Trusted Connection with a player over 18 years old, the minor will have to confirm a real-life relationship with the other person through a QR code or the uploading of a contact list. Under-13s will not be able to create these connections.

This effort to better protect under-18 players comes during a roller-coaster year for the company. The Roblox platform is host to Grow a Garden, an experience which broke Fortnite’s record for most concurrent players online at one time back in June. However, researchers of online communities have continued to sound the alarm on Roblox’s vulnerabilities, especially related to child safety.

What does a day in the life of billionaire gaming boss Gabe Newell look like? Speaking to Zalkar Saliev from one of his yachts, the Valve co-founder said he enjoys the benefit of living on a boat while maintaining a fairly regular work schedule.

“I get up, I work, I go scuba-diving, work some more, [then] either go on a second scuba dive or I go to the gym and work out. I live on a boat so I just hang out with everybody on the boat. Then I work,” he said, and PC Gamer confirmed with Valve that this interview is real. “I work seven days a week: I’m working from my bedroom as you can tell. I like working, it’s fun, to me it doesn’t feel like work. The kinds of things that I get to do every day are super-awesome.”

Newell said the traditional idea of retirement is that you “stop doing your horrible job and go do what is most fun and entertaining,” and in that sense, he said he feels like he’s been retired for a while.

“I’ve said it before but, when you retire, you want to like stop doing your horrible job and go do what is sort of most fun and entertaining,” says Newell. “In that sense I’ve been retired for a long time.

In addition to his responsibilities at Valve, Newell started the neural interface company Starfish Neuroscience, a competitor to Elon Musk’s Neuralink. He’s also working with a company that is creating an “aerosol pathogen detection device” that reveals what pathogens may be in the air.

“I just work all the time,” he said. “But it’s not like, ‘Oh my god I’m up late at night slaving away on stuff.’ It’s more like, ‘I can’t go to sleep because I’m having fun,’ you know?”

Newell dropped out of Harvard in the early ’80s to join Microsoft, leaving the company as a millionaire with Mike Harrington to form Valve. He’s now a billionaire, with Forbes estimating his net worth at $9.5 billion. Despite his immense riches, he still gets out there and talks to fans, as he personally delivered Steam Decks back in 2022.

The current gaming industry is filled with remakes and remasters; some of them are faithful to their source material, while others are more open to changing things around when needed. It’s not too often that the original creator of a remade work speaks about a modern reimagining, but recently the co-creator of Crash Bandicoot took to LinkedIn to give his thoughts on 2017’s N. Sane Trilogy–and the “most important 30 milliseconds” worth of change that made a world of difference.

As spotted by GamesRadar, Naughty Dog co-founder Andrew Gavin posted a wide range of thoughts about the modern remasters of Crash Bandicoot 1-3, While he says the games “nailed the visuals” and said they “looked great [and] faithful to the original,” in his mind, things went south when it came to jumping–or, as he put it, the team “completely botched how jumping works.”

That polar bear is just happy to see Crash, right?

The original game, Gavin explains, read how long the player held the jump button down and measured Crash’s jump accordingly–the longer a player held the button, the higher Crash jumped. This mechanic was lost in the N. Sane Trilogy, according to Gavin, and replaced with a system when every jump is always the maximum height possible.

“The remake developers either didn’t notice this system or thought it wasn’t important,” Gavin’s post said. “They reverted to simple fixed jumps, [and] then realized Crash couldn’t make half the jumps in the game. Their solution was to make all jumps maximum height.”

This solution, according to Gavin, fundamentally changed how jumping in the remaster worked, to the game’s detriment. “Now every jump on the remake is huge and floaty. Those precise little hops between platforms are awkward,” Gavin wrote. “The game’s fundamental jumping mechanic feels worse than the 1996 original despite running on hardware that’s 1000x more powerful.”

If you want to try the altered jumping for yourself, Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy is available now for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and PC.

Steam has partnered with the Make-A-Wish charity to launch the “Wish 200 Week Charity Sale” that sees numerous games go on sale to help support the organization. This charity drive benefits Make-A-Wish UK, but anyone can participate.

“Gaming is a lifeline for critically ill children–it’s not just entertainment. From when they’re undergoing treatment and unable to attend school or clubs with their friends to urgently needed respite and distraction from the challenges they face every day. Gaming offers a welcoming and inclusive community where critically ill children can be who they want to be again,” reads a line from the sale’s page.

A portion of sales from the Wish 200 Week Charity Sale now through July 20 will be given to Make-A-Wish UK to help critically ill children. Some of the games on sale include Vampire Survivors ($4), Let’s Build a Zoo ($7), Bassmaster Fishing ($7.50), and Haven’s Vault ($10). You can visit the sale site to see them all.

Wish 200 Week is an annual event that aims to raise enough money to support 200 “life-changing wishes” for sick children in the UK. In addition to the Steam sale, there is an auction containing gaming items like Spider-Man: Miles Morales-themed Adidas shoes signed by PlayStation Boss Hermen Hulst.

You can also donate directly to Make-A-Wish UK. The charity says one child every hour in the UK is diagnosed with a critical illness that the organization aims to support.

Make-A-Wish UK is also running a real-life version of Overcooked with streamers Dan and Phil, Theo, Yammy, Geeky Cassie, Ebonix, and AlicesPixels on Sunday, July 20.

The MCU’s version of the Fantastic Four is finally making its debut on July 25, and it will come as absolutely no surprise whatsoever that it looks like Marvel’s First Family will receive Fortnite skins to mark the occasion. But it also appears they’re bringing with them something a little more unusual skins for this sort of collaboration: a set of four pairs of Nike kicks, with each pair themed after a member of the Fantastic Four.

The shoes were added to the files with Tuesday’s patch and decrypted when the shop updated on Tuesday evening. The set includes a pair of Harbor Blue Air Max 90s for Reed Richards/Mr. Fantastic, clear Air Force 1s with a blue swoosh to represent Sue Storm/the Invisible Woman, red and orange Air Max 95s for Johnny Storm/the Human Torch, and orange Dunks for Ben Grimm/The Thing. The set will apparently have a bundle, which would make this the first Kicks bundle to come with more than three pairs. We don’t know when these shoes will land in the item shop, but it will likely be during the week before Fantastic Four: First Steps hits theaters on July 25.

What’s particularly interesting about these shoes is that, like all Nike kicks in Fortnite, all four of these pairs are real shoes that were available to purchase. These Fantastic Four Nikes were originally released in 2006 as a tie-in with Fox’s Fantastic Four movies, which hit theaters in 2005 and 2007, and you can read more about them over at Sneaker News.

The best part of this set is that the clear Air Force 1s are a major new novelty for Fortnite kicks, as you can see the color of the sock that a skin is wearing with the shoes. That marks the third pair of novelty Air Force 1s, after the solid white and solid black pairs released in May that give off unique trails as you run.

This isn’t the first time Fortnite has imported some tie-in kicks to the item shop. During Star Wars season in May, the shop offered three pairs of Crocs and three pairs of Nikes that were themed after Star Wars characters.

If you haven’t preordered a copy of Donkey Kong Bananza, the new Nintendo Switch 2 exclusive is in stock at multiple major retailers ahead of its launch tomorrow, July 17. Depending on your location, you might still be eligible for release-day delivery at Amazon or Walmart. And if you’re interested in the new Amiibo figure featuring DK and Pauline, Walmart has restocked its $98 bundle (saves you two bucks overall).

Developed by the team behind Super Mario Odyssey, Donkey Kong Bananza is earning fantastic reviews, including a 9/10 from GameSpot. It currently holds a 90 Metascore on review aggregator Metacritic (a GameSpot sister site).

Bananza is only available on Nintendo Switch 2. If you don’t have Nintendo’s new console yet, select Best Buy stores will have units available for Bananza’s launch. Additionally, Amazon has the Switch 2 and Mario Kart Bundle in stock right now, but you need to request an invitation to buy one.

If you haven’t picked up the Nintendo Switch 2 Pro Controller, Amazon recently started carrying Nintendo’s great new traditional gamepad for TV mode. It has a pair of remappable back buttons, which come in handy for games like Donkey Kong Bananza, Switch 2 Editions of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, and many other games. We’d also recommend checking out the 8BitDo Ultimate 2 Bluetooth Controller, a $70 alternative with four extra remappable buttons, trigger locks, premium TMR thumbsticks, and a slew of customization features that can be saved to three custom profiles.

Donkey Kong Game Deals for Nintendo Switch

Donkey Kong Country games for Nintendo Switch and Switch 2

If you’re looking forward to Bananza and haven’t played the enhanced editions of Tropical Freeze and DKC Returns on Switch, you can save big on both of the stellar side-scrollers for a limited time. Donkey Kong Country Returns HD, which released earlier this year, is on sale for $43 at Woot. You can also get Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze for $43 at Woot. This deal has already sold out a couple times, so snag it while you can.

• Donkey Kong Country Returns HD — $43 ($60)
• Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze — $43 ($60)
• Mario vs. Donkey Kong — $40 ($50)

Grab Donkey Kong Lego Sets at Amazon while you can

Donkey Kong’s Tree House | Donkey Kong & DK Jumbo

• Mario Kart: Donkey Kong & DK Jumbo (387 pieces) — $29.49 ($35)
• Donkey Kong’s Tree House (555 pieces) — $60
• Diddy Kong’s Mine Cart Ride (1,157 pieces) — $88 ($110) | Also at Walmart
• Dixie Kong’s Jungle Jam (174 pieces) — $18.89 ($27)
• Rambi the Rhino Expansion Set (106 pieces) — $11
• Save on Lego Super Mario Starter Sets – Mario, Luigi, and Peach
• Save on more Lego Mario Kart Sets

All five Lego Super Mario sets featuring Donkey Kong characters are in stock at Amazon, which is notable considering several of them were retired late last year. Most notably, Donkey Kong’s Tree House is in stock for retail price ($60). The 555-piece set had been sold out for most of the year. Donkey Kong’s Tree House is one of two Lego sets that comes with a buildable DK figure.

The other Lego Mario set that includes a Donkey Kong figure is the 387-piece DK Jumbo set. Part of the Lego Mario Kart launch lineup from earlier this year, DK Jumbo is up for grabs for $29.49 (was $35).

All of the Donkey Kong Lego sets interact with the Lego Super Mario Adventures starter sets.