GTA V shipped 60 million copies, made piles of money for Take Two

Grand Theft Auto is still the king. We’re in the middle of that part of the year where companies do all their financial updates for investors, and now it’s Take Two’s turn. The publisher revealed that Grand Theft Auto V has shipped 60 million copies across all platforms.

Of course, shipped doesn’t mean bought, but I can promise you there aren’t 59 million copies of GTA V sitting in a warehouse somewhere.

While the game shipped originally back in 2013, Take Two has kept it in the spotlight with a 2014 release to the new consoles and a Spring 2015 release on PCs, ensuring that it keeps finding new customers in order to stay atop the charts of sites like YouTube.

Not only does Grand Theft Auto V keep selling well, but Grand Theft Auto Online continues to do well, too, with this holiday season bringing Take Two the highest revenue yet for the game, according to CEO Strauss Zelnick. The period also saw the highest number of players yet for GTA Online.

All of this has helped the publisher beat expectations in this most recent quarter. When Take Two releases a game like Grand Theft Auto V, there are high expectations for sales, and those taper off over time as investors expect seasons without mega-hit releases to be less profitable. The company used to lose money during these periods which, really, wasn’t so bad, because when they were making money, it was by the dump truck.

While analysts had expected revenues of $452.8 million, Take Two managed to pull in $486.8 million. Spending on things like GTA Online currency, downloadable content, and other online content grew by nearly half over last year, and digital revenue overall accounted for 44 percent of total revenue. Helping this along is a strong stable of other, non-GTA titles like NBA2K16, WWE2K16, and the Borderlands games.

For 2016, Take Two currently has XCOM 2 hitting on February 5, as well as Battleborn in May and Mafia III sometime in Fiscal Year 2017. And we’re keeping our fingers crossed that this is the year they announce Red Dead Redemption 2, or Red Dead Revisited, Red Dead Remastered, or something. I want to sit on a horse and shoot at guys in cowboy hats, is what I’m saying.

Regardless, Take Two is doing well, and as usual Grand Theft Auto has played a big role in that.

source:  GAMESBEAT

DayZ hacked, email addresses, usernames and passwords stolen

Heads up, those of you who played DayZ, the game’s forums have been hacked and information was stolen.

Bohemia Interactive writes that the security incident occurred “recently,” though they don’t indicate when. They says that “all usernames, emails and passwords from forums.dayzgame.com were accessed and downloaded by hackers.”

The passwords were supposedly not stored in plain text.They recommend, as do we, that you change your passwords if you tend to use the same one for multiple accounts. Seriously. Do that.

Bohemia Interactive will be making changes following the breach, according to the post. Here’s what they plan to do, following their apology.

We would like to apologize for the inconvenience caused, and share with you one of the major changes planned in order to mitigate similar risks in the future. We will be replacing the IPBoards login system with Bohemia Account within the next two weeks. As Bohemia Account is a separate custom-built service currently used by Bohemia Interactive Forums and Store, it offers much better security and its use should prevent similar incidents going forward.

We ask for your patience over the next few days and weeks as we implement this and other security overhauls, as there are likely to be service interruptions and forum unavailability from time to time. In particular, the forums will be down until migration to the Bohemia Account is complete. We will keep you up to date on vital info and scheduled down-time on the site itself and via our Twitter.

Man, the Internet is like the Wild West. Be careful out there, and be smart about your passwords.

source:  REDDIT

Ramza throws stones in his Dissidia Final Fantasy debut footage

Who am I kidding? Ramza could be a joke character, and I would still choose him as my number one guy. The unsung Final Fantasy Tactics protagonist is finally appearing in a video game beyond the one that made him famous, and fans around the world just can’t hold their excitement.

Following up on the batch of screenshots from last week, Square Enix has released the first gameplay footage of Ramza in battle. Staying true to his Final Fantasy Tactics roots, he sports a wide variety of abilities thanks to the different job classes he mastered over the course of his game. He’s a lot like Final Fantasy V’s Bartz in that way, swinging away with his sword at enemies while still being able to chip away damage from a distance with magic and projectile attacks.

He’s even tucked away the “Throw Stone” ability into his back pocket! How great is that?! Can he use it to gain cheap experience by hurling it at his allies?

Ramza appearing in a fighting game spin-off only puts me in the mood to start demanding a home console release in North America. I get the feeling that Square Enix will be coming around to it, but it’ll take a while.

Dissidia Final Fantasy is currently available in arcades around Japan. A home console port on the PlayStation 4 has been confirmed, but even Japan doesn’t have a release date, let alone North America.

source: SILICONERA