Nintendo and The Pokémon Company Officially Suing Palworld Developer Over ‘Multiple’ Patent Infringements

It’s official: Nintendo and The Pokémon Company are taking legal action against Palworld’s developer, Pocketpair.

The companies filed a lawsuit against the developer today, September 18, seeking “an injunction against infringement and compensation for damages on the grounds that Palworld, a game developed and released by the Defendant, infringes multiple patent rights.”

“Nintendo will continue to take necessary actions against any infringement of its intellectual property rights including the Nintendo brand itself, to protect the intellectual properties it has worked hard to establish over the years,” Nintendo’s statement reads.

The filing is absolutely massive news and follows months of speculation that Nintendo would take legal action over the indie survival game that’s been referred to as “Pokémon with guns.” Nintendo previously released a statement about Palworld in January, vowing that intended “to investigate and take appropriate measures” against any potentially infringing content. A modder also claimed that “Nintendo has come for me” after posting a clip with Pokémon’s Ash Ketchum in Palworld.

But six months later, in June, Pocketpair insisted that Nintendo had yet to make a complaint in response to the “Pokémon rip-off” claims. “Nintendo and the Pokémon Company didn’t say anything to us,” Pocketpair boss Takuro Mizobe told Game File at the time. “Of course I love Pokémon and respect it. I grew up with it, in my generation.”

Palworld launched in early access form in January 2024 on PC via Steam and on Xbox as a day-one Game Pass title and catapulted to tremendous overnight success, but also controversy. Pokémon fans were quick to call out the similarities in Palworld, although the indie developer insisted that Palworld is more akin to survival crafting games such as Ark Survival Evolved and Valheim than Pokémon. Pocketpair’s community manager even said the team has received death threats over the backlash.

IGN has reached out to Pocketpair for comment.

In our early access review, we acknowledged that Palworld “may crib quite a bit from Pokémon’s homework, but deep survival mechanics and a hilarious attitude make it hard to put down.”

Alex Stedman is a Senior News Editor with IGN, overseeing entertainment reporting. When she’s not writing or editing, you can find her reading fantasy novels or playing Dungeons & Dragons.

EA Says AI Is ‘the Very Core’ of Its Business: What Does That Mean?

On Tuesday, Electronic Arts (EA) held its annual Investor Day — a three-hour presentation intended for its investors to learn more about the company’s direction and promises to make them money in the coming year. But you’d be forgiven if you thought this was some sort of AI tech conference given how effusively the technology was brought up and touted as a key component of EA’s future.

While we’ve known for a while that EA and a number of other gaming companies are experimenting with and investing heavily in AI, it was nonetheless a bit overwhelming just how often AI came up throughout the entire presentation. It was mentioned it just about every single segment in some capacity, had its own dedicated segment near the end, and was described during CEO Andrew Wilson’s introductory speech as “the very core of our business” — a rather shocking new mission statement for a company that ostensibly makes and publishes video games.

We watched the entirety of the three-hour Investor Day presentation, and did our best to round up all the AI “highlights” in an effort to paint a picture of what, exactly, EA is doing with AI and what we can expect to see in the coming years if its investments and interest in the tech pan out.

Core of the Business

The first mention of AI in the presentation took place right at the top, in Andrew Wilson’s opening speech. In addition to referring to AI as “the very core of our business” and “not merely a buzzword,” he announced that EA apparently has over 100 active “novel AI projects” in the works right now, ranging from the practical to the very experimental. Wilson divvied these up into three categories: efficiency, expansion, and transformation.

Wilson describes the “efficiency” projects as not just cost-saving, but related to doing things faster, cheaper, and at “higher quality.” Specifically, he cites College Football 25, saying the developers could not have made the game’s 150 different stadiums and over 11,000 player likenesses without AI.

Wilson elaborated by saying he believes AI can give developers “richer colors” to paint “more brilliant worlds” and make characters with “more depth and intelligence” while offering “more authenticity and deeper immersion” to the company’s sports games. And for transformation, Wilson describes this as looking into the future and finding entirely new kinds of experiences that don’t currently exist in games, especially around user-generated content.

Chief strategy officer Mihir Vaidya went into more depth about what the “transformation” element will mean for EA in a later section, but Wilson’s opener made it clear that he’s more than bullish on the technology.

AI Examples

In the talks that followed, a number of EA leads highlighted ways in which EA was already working with AI tech in its existing games. Laura Miele, president of EA entertainment, technology, and central development, talked about something called The Sims Hub, the first AI features coming to The Sims universe. EA plans to release a platform with “supercharged discovery tools” that use AI to allow players to find user-generated content more easily. She showed off an AI application that uses a photo search feature, allowing users to drop in photos of real life houses and then find user-generated houses that look similar to them. Miele also highlighted how the AI can be used for character creation, with users able to drop in an image of a celebrity or person in a certain outfit and then generate a Sim that matches up. Miele says The Sims Hub will be released “soon.”

On the internal tech side, Miele talked about EA’s asset library, which she described as “like the Smithsonian of game assets.” Essentially, EA has a massive database of assets from all of its games and work behind the scenes over the years, and it’s using it to train its machine learning capabilities and large language models. Those capabilities are then being used by the company’s “SEED” innovation lab, aka “Search for Extraordinary Experiences Division”, for things like EA’s “Script to Scene” tool.

Script to Scene lets developers “create characters, direct performances, and define worlds all from text.” Miele shows an example on screen, prompting an AI chat assistant to “build me a Parisian-style residential building.” She then asks to make it taller, changes it to a modern high rise, and expands it into a larger neighborhood. With Script to Scene, Miele claims EA developers could eventually make an entire scene in a game using simple text prompts.

After Miele, president of EA Sports Cam Weber took the stage to talk about, well, EA Sports. He showed off the already announced FC IQ, which uses “tactical AI” and real-world data to more accurately simulate how players and teams play together in EA Sports FC 25. And he highlighted Wilson’s prior statements about using AI in College Football 25, noting that the stadium creator AI tools in particular reduced creation time “by about 70%” and allowed developers to focus on building the “pageantry” and unique traditions of each school instead. “The investment in these tools and tech will benefit the rest of our portfolio in the months and years ahead,” he said.

And finally, chief experience officer David Tinson briefly talked about an early prototype of a predictive simulation tool EA is working on. He claims the tool will combine EA game data, AI, and IQ ratings to allow users to run more accurate simulations and answer questions of which team would win in a match, who would have won in a hypothetical match, and which team is the best.

Cardboard boxes and AI soccer stars

If all that somehow wasn’t enough AI chatter for you, chief strategy officer Mihir Vaidya took the stage next to talk about AI and nothing but. He opened by comparing the technology to the advent of makeup tutorial videos and cat videos, which he says people initially dismissed as trivial or niche, but now are ubiquitous and wildly popular. He says EA’s experimental AI efforts should be viewed the same way as “early YouTube videos”, and that while what he shows might feel rudimentary, it will naturally get better as AI improves.

Vaidya was specifically brought onstage to talk about the “transformation” portion of AI that Wilson mentioned earlier. He says the experiences he shows onstage are “not intended to replace AAA games, but instead unlock new and adjacent categories that add as opposed to take away from the existing gaming market.”

Those “new and adjacent categories” Vaidya wanted to show off largely seem to involve apps of some sort that let people use AI to shuffle around EA proprietary assets and spit out minigames of a sort. One example he shows involves two people asking an AI to “make a maze out of cardboard boxes.” They then ask the AI to make it more complex, then multi-level. Then they ask the AI to “make two characters with weapons,” allowing them to select from a gallery of existing EA characters before settling on two that purport to be community-designed, then equip them with guns from a library of weapons. They then select from a handful of game modes and start chasing each other around the cardboard maze. The video ends with one of them asking the AI to “make it more epic,” resulting in a giant cardboard box pyramid seemingly appearing in real-time to the astonishment of the two players.

In a second demonstration, Vaidya wants to demonstrate how AI can be used to create “more believable characters” that players care about even more. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to see much of that in action, as Vaidya encourages investors to check out the demo at the investor event after the presentation is over. But we do see a few seconds of what he’s talking about: an AI version of soccer star Jude Bellingham is apparently available to answer questions posed by investors using AI to simulate his likeness, voice, and likely responses. Vaidya demonstrates by asking him what it was like to play at Bernabéu “in front of millions of screaming fans.” Bellingham briefly explains the indescribable thrill of the experience in a flat monotone, expressionless.

Finally, Vaidya demonstrates how EA wants to use AI for “social ecosystems”, specifically something codenamed Project AIR. Project AIR seems to be a way to use short text prompts to generate characters, have text-based interactions with them, and then share those conversations with friends. In his example, he creates a “legendary investor” character using the prompt, “A high-stakes VC who swims in the deep waters of innovation.”

He then decides the “game” will be to pitch business ideas to him. In an interface that looks suspiciously like Tik-Tok, the user pitches “self-tying shoes” only to be slapped down. He then invites a friend to help him pitch, but lost for any ideas on how to make self-tying shoes more interesting, he uses an AI co-pilot to write the pitch for him, which ultimately succeeds.

What does it all mean?

That’s a lot of noise about AI, almost an astonishing amount even from a company we knew was pushing the tech hard. And it’s a lot of noise specifically about generative AI. Artificial intelligence, broadly, has been used in games for decades. But generative AI, which is involved in most of the things EA shared yesterday, is different. Generative AI effectively spits out brand new images, text, sound, or other content based on data it’s fed, which has led to numerous ethical questions regarding its use. Some of those EA has managed to answer effectively. For instance, EA is training its AI on its own proprietary material, so there’s seemingly no concern about it stealing copyrighted work (we’ve reached out to EA for comment).

But other concerns remain. There’s the environmental impact, for one, which we’ve also asked EA about. And then there’s issues of using personal likenesses. EA says Jude Bellingham agreed to let EA train an AI on his likeness and voice for the model we saw yesterday, but will EA ensure it has permission from every single individual it uses in the future? What about voice actors for beloved characters, who are still at this moment on strike from companies including AI over these exact protections? We’ve asked EA for comment on all this, too.

On the game development side, how does this implementation of AI impact individual creatives at the company? It’s easy to say that tools such as Script to Scene are intended to free up developers to work on other things. But it’s a practical reality that the games industry has seen two years of unprecedented layoffs just as AI is beginning to creep into the mainstream, and EA has been a part of that. There are no guarantees that this tech might not eventually be used to replace developers eventually. Developers have said over and over that they are rightfully nervous about this possibility, but neither EA nor its investors seem to be especially interested in addressing that. Nor does it seem apparent to them the difference between the intentional, creative work of designers assembling a thoughtful map for a shoorter, and anyone at all prompting an AI to spit out a random array of cardboard boxes. It’s all content to be sold in the end.

As some have pointed out online, EA is no stranger to pushing hard on new tech before immediately backing off the second the wind changed. But this feels different. EA leadership made it abundantly clear at the Investor Day that the company is already very, very deep in on AI even if the experiments themselves are still in their infancy. Investors might be kept happy by these experiments, but perhaps fans of EA’s 40-year history as a video game company ought to be asking why AI, not games, has suddenly become the “core” of its business.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

This $10 Baseus 10,000mAh Power Bank Can Fully Charge Your Nintendo Switch

Amazon is currently offering a Baseus 10,000mAh USB Type-C power bank with 20W USB Power Delivery for a mere $10.44 after you clip a 20% off coupon and apply 25% off code “HM8WNMGD“. That’s a great price for a 10K power bank that’s equipped with a USB Type-C output with up to 20W of Power Delivery. It’s an excellent battery backup for your Nintendo Switch since it can charge the console at its maximum rate of 18W.

Baseus 10,000mAh 20W Power Bank for Just Over $10

The 10,000mAH power bank is the perfect compromise between battery capacity and size, especially if you’re looking for a battery backup for something as small as the Nintendo Switch. This Baseus model measures 6″ long and 2.7″ wide, about the same size as an iPhone 14 Pro, and only 0.7″ thin. It weighs in at about 9 ounces. The 10,000mAh capacity is no slouch either. Factoring in charging inefficiencies, you should still expect this power bank to charge a Switch about 1.5 times. If we go by Nintendo’s official claim of 4.5-9 hours from the battery, you’re essentially extending that to 11-22 hours.

There are three ports for versatility: a USB Type-C port, USB Type-A port, and Micro USB port. The USB Type-C port is both output and input, which means you can charge the power bank OR charge your devices from that same port. This is the port you want to use to get the 20W charging rate. Since the Nintendo Switch can charge at a cap of 18W, the Type-C port will max out the Switch’s charging speed.

The Baseus power bank is UL certified and comes with built-in safety protections you’d expect from a decent quality power bank. It also has an LED battery indicator that you can check with a press of a button. Although not as well known as Anker, Baseus is still a popular brand on Amazon and has plenty of positive reviews. I have a Baseus power bank myself and it hasn’t given me any problems.

The Baseus Power Bank is TSA-Approved

Spare lithium ion and lithium metal batteries, including power banks and cell phone battery charging cases, must be carried in carry-on baggage only. Power banks must be under either 27,000mAh or 100Whr in capacity. This Baseus power bank’s 10,000mAh battery capacity is well below TSA’s 27,000mAh limit, so it can be brought onto airplanes without worry. This power bank is small and discreet enough that it’s hard to imagine TSA even noticing the power bank in the first place.

Looking for more alternatives? Check out the best power banks of 2024.

The Best Xbox Game Pass Ultimate Deal Is Back: Get 3 Months for $33.49

Woot! (which is owned by Amazon) is offering the best deal on Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. Right now you can get a 3 month code for only $36.49. Earlier this year, Microsoft raised the price of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate to $19.99 per month, so now you’re saving 40% off a 3 month membership. Note that you can purchase multiple codes and apply them to your account, up to a maximum of 36 months. If you’re an Xbox gamer, this is a great way to save a lot of money in the long run since you won’t have to buy new release games individually to play them.

Note: There is a new coupon “ULTIMATE” that takes $3 off one order, dropping the 3 month code price down to $33.49. If you purchase multiple codes, this coupon will only work on one code. The rest of the 3 month codes will be $36.49 each.

3 Months of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate for $33.49

Use code: ULTIMATE

Xbox Game Pass Ultimate gives you access to a library of hundreds of Xbox games, including day one releases. You can play them for the entirety of your membership without any restrictions. You do lose access to them once your membership is over, but if you ever decide to renew, all your past achievements and progress will be saved. You’ll also have access to Xbox Game Pass for PC. Although there aren’t nearly as many games as there are on Xbox, there are still plenty of AAA titles to keep you sated. Other perks include exclusive membership discounts, the ability to play your games across multiple devices with cloud gaming, free access to EA Play membership, as well as bonus in-game content and rewards. It is an exceptionally good – almost essential – membership for Xbox gamers. New release games are not cheap, and being able to play them without buying them will save you a lot of money and easily recoup the cost of the membership.

Looking for more deals? Check out all of the best Xbox deals today.

How Dragon Age: The Veilguard Used Lessons From The Sims to Craft Its Character Creator and More

Corinne Busche wasn’t looking for a job when she sat down for lunch with BioWare’s leadership team in 2019. She had been a fan of BioWare’s games since the days of Dragon Age: Origins, and she wanted to, in her words, “meet my heroes.”

“So I went to lunch with a couple of folks in the leadership team at BioWare, and we started riffing about progression systems and skill trees and economies, and we just really resonated with one another,” Busche remembers. “And much to my surprise, they expressed an interest in me joining, and it was kind of the question you don’t have to ask me twice. That was such a dream opportunity, and to be able to step in this space, visit the studio, see my favorite characters on display throughout the walls, I was immediately sold. Immediately.”

Busche was coming off a stint at Maxis, where she helped design the systems on various The Sims projects. In taking the helm of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, she became part of a wider talent pipeline flowing from Maxis to other parts of the games industry. It’s a pipeline that includes the likes of Eric Holmberg-Weidler, who was credited with fine-tuning many of the systems that comprised The Sims 4 before spearheading the Professions revamp in World of Warcraft’s Dragonflight expansion. Justin Camden, who also worked on The Sims, is one of Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s technical designers.

Systematic discovery

At first blush, it might not seem like The Sims has much in common with an RPG like Dragon Age outside the fact that they both feature romance in some way. Going back to its release in 2000, The Sims has garnered a reputation as a casual, frequently silly lifestyle simulator; the game where you remove a ladder from a swimming pool and watch your poor little Sims drown. Under the hood, though, The Sims is a complex web of systems, progression and relationships. Sims have jobs. They gain skills. They fall in love.

“Maxis is a great place for designers to hone their skills,” Busche says. “There are many projects across differing platforms and service models happening simultaneously which give a rare opportunity for a breadth of experience. What people may not realize about the Sims, given its playful outward nature, is the underlying systems and mechanics are deceptively deep – especially as a dev. One of the more interesting parts of coming up through Maxis as a designer is the experience you get with simulation, emergent gameplay, and emotionally relatable player experiences. It’s just a really unique opportunity being a part of these teams, and those are skillsets that can benefit a number of different games and genres.”

…we find that RPG players are hungry for that same sense of autonomy, making decisions, influencing characters

Busche’s systems design background is evident throughout The Veilguard. It includes extensive skill trees, with sub-classes that are geared around different weapon types and styles of play, and the choices you make also resonate deeply throughout the story. It’s also possible to level up your relationship with individual factions and shopkeepers, which in turn opens up new possibilities for acquiring unique gear, and characters bear long-lasting scars depending on the choices you make. Systems are layered throughout Dragon Age, deepening the player’s intertwined connection with the world and the characters that inhabit it.

“What’s so wonderful about [The Sims] is there’s so much autonomy in that game, and we find that RPG players are hungry for that same sense of autonomy, making decisions, influencing characters. And what you might not realize in the Sims is behind the scenes, there are some really robust progression systems, game economies, character behaviors for their own AI and autonomy… a lot of really fascinating parallels,” Busche says. “So in that regard, I’m very grateful to my time there, being able to take some of those learnings, whether it’s about how to convey romantic progression to the player, or design skill progression, game pacing, a lot of really interesting transferable ideas that you might not think about on the surface.”

In The Sims, characters go through their daily lives in an idealized world filled with strange but charming characters like Bonehilda (Dragon Age, it should be mentioned, has its own living skeleton in Manfred). While Dragon Age’s characters are still bound by the demands of the story, BioWare goes out of its way to make them seem more alive. As we talk about in our hands-on preview that went up last week, Dragon Age is filled with little messages noting how, for instance, you “traded verbal jabs” with Solas. As we’ll go into in a future article, both platonic and romantic relationships are a big part of how characters grow in Dragon Age.

And of course, as anyone who has played a BioWare or Sims game knows, both games have their share of woohooing.

How Dragon Age learned from The Sims’ character creator

Ultimately, though, it’s the character creator where the resemblance between the two is the most apparent. Dragon Age’s character creator is extensive, allowing players to adjust physical characteristics including chest size, the crookedness of a character’s nose, and whether or not their eyes are bloodshot, among other features. While custom characters are a time-honored BioWare tradition going back to the days of Baldur’s Gate, The Veilguard draws from the lessons of The Sims in everything from body customization to the flow of the user interface.

Cross-pollination like this is common within EA, and Dragon Age: The Veilguard borrows from plenty of other sources as well. That incredible hair technology, for example, got its start within EA’s sports games, meaning your Rook can have a luscious mane like Lionel Messi. But the character creator is perhaps the greatest inflection point between Dragon Age and The Sims.

“Character creators are extremely complex, and in many ways even more personal. It’s so important that players feel they can be represented and feel pride in that representation as they go through the creation process,” Busche says. “In particular, I remember we were struggling with some of our iconography, and we turned to each other and said ‘how did The Sims 4 handle this?’ While the technology and UI is quite a bit different, the underlying goals and lessons were quite similar.”

She adds that Maxis has a “tremendous wealth of knowledge when it comes to representing gender, identity, and the surprising number of localization issues that come along with that when you’re releasing in different regions and languages.”

“It’s always nice when you can draw from that prior experience. See what worked, what didn’t, and how expectations have evolved. The fun part is now we get to pay that forward and have been sharing our knowledge with other teams,” Busche says.

Character creators are extremely complex, and in many ways even more personal

On a moment-to-moment basis, of course, The Sims and Dragon Age are two very different games with very different goals. One is a single-player action RPG, the other a lifestyle sim. As studios, too, BioWare and Maxis are in very different places right now. The Sims has been a powerhouse franchise for more than two decades, and EA is seeking to expand its reach with a new movie. BioWare, meanwhile, is seeking to rebuild after stumbling badly with Anthem and Mass Effect Andromeda.

But when creator Will Wright first decided to focus on the people inhabiting his games, the world he crafted wasn’t too dissimilar from the one found in Dragon Age. Both use unique systems to create reactive, imaginative worlds full of interesting choices, filled with characters with their own inner lives. It’s a philosophy that’s always been part of BioWare’s legacy; now, in The Veilguard, it finally gets to be on full display once again.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard will be on PC, PlayStation, and Xbox on October 31. Make sure to keep an eye on IGN all this month as our IGN First coverage continues.

Kat Bailey is IGN’s News Director as well as co-host of Nintendo Voice Chat. Have a tip? Send her a DM at @the_katbot.

You Can Already Save on Final Fantasy 16 for PC at GMG

Final Fantasy 16 released on PC yesterday and there’s already a nice little discount available. At Green Man Gaming, you can get 15% off Final Fantasy 16 by using the code ‘SEP15’ at checkout (see the game here at GMG). This drops its price from $49.99 to $42.49. Additionally, if you’ve bought from GMG before and achieved a certain XP status, you can skip the code, because the price is even lower, at $40.99. That’s a nice little deal for a game that just came out on PC, so take advantage of it while it’s still available!

Final Fantasy XVI Is 15% Off With Code ‘SEP15’ at Checkout

By purchasing this game right now at Green Man Gaming, you’ll get a few bonuses as well:

  • Accessory: “Cait Sith’s Charm”
  • Valuable item: “Sixteen Bells Orchestrion Roll”
  • Weapon “Brave Blade”

For those curious about the XP program, this is Green Man Gaming’s loyalty program. As you gain more XP from purchases, you’ll move up to different tiers that offer a variety of exclusive benefits. To learn more about the XP program, visit Green Man Gaming’s XP page here.

In our review of Final Fantasy 16, writer Mitchell Saltzman stated that, “Final Fantasy 16 will very likely be looked back upon as a turning point for mainline Final Fantasy games, taking its combat fully in the direction of an action game, but I hope that conversation doesn’t overshadow its dark and captivating tale, memorable characters, and the innovative ways in which it helps you keep track of it all.”

If you’re looking for even more gaming discounts, we’ve got plenty of roundups for you to check out, including the best PlayStation deals, the best Xbox deals, and the best Nintendo Switch deals. We also have a roundup of the overall best video game deals that covers everything from those platforms to what other deals are happening in the world of PC gaming. Another great place to look for gaming discounts is our Daily Deals roundup, which showcases the best deals of the day.

Hannah Hoolihan is a freelance writer who works with the Guides and Commerce teams here at IGN.

Square Enix Admits Final Fantasy 16 and 7 Rebirth Profits ‘Did Not Meet Our Expectations’

Square Enix has finally made public its dissatisfaction with Final Fantasy 16 and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth’s commercial performance, admitting neither game met profit expectations.

In a financial results briefing held May 13 but only released today, September 18, Takashi Kiryu, president and representative director of Square Enix said: “In the HD Games sub-segment, we released multiple new titles, including major titles such as Final Fantasy 16 and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, but profits unfortunately did not meet our expectations.”

Kiryu went on to suggest Square Enix cannibalized sales of its Final Fantasy games released during the financial year ending March 2024.

“We recognize that issues remain in the Digital Entertainment segment,” Kiryu admitted. “The HD Games sub-segment failed to better its profitability, posting operating losses in every year of our previous medium-term plan. In addition to this, we did not manage our title portfolio across the company as well as we could have, which I believe resulted in opportunity losses due to cannibalization between our own titles.”

Square Enix released Final Fantasy 16 in June 2023, then Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth just over half a year later in February 2024. Final Fantasy 16 and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth both launched as PlayStation 5 exclusives, and while Square Enix has announced a sales figure for Final Fantasy 16, it has yet to do so for Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, the second game in the company’s trilogy of Final Fantasy 7 remakes.

The company has already announced a significant rework of its business as it fights for profitability. It has a new multi-platform plan that encompasses PC and potentially Xbox and the next Nintendo console (Final Fantasy 16 launched on PC this week). But it has also canceled a number of games, and, Kiryu revealed, taken steps to better curate its pipeline of games.

“In the case of the HD Game sub-segment, sales of individual games will remain the key variable, but we believe that we will be able to exercise some degree of control over that volatility by carefully curating our pipeline over the next three years,” Kiryu said. “By also working steadily to improve our profitability, we intend to offset the weakness in SD games to achieve overall profitability.”

We did not manage our title portfolio across the company as well as we could have.

Square Enix has now extended the timelines for a portion of its pipeline, “in part because of the massive amount of time required to develop HD games, and in part because we determined that we should rethink how best to deliver some of the titles we had under development to our customers,” Kiryu revealed.

Final Fantasy isn’t the only Square Enix series struggling. Its Splatoon-style game Foamstars also flopped and has since gone free-to-play.

So, what’s next for Square Enix? Square Enix has Kingdom Hearts 4, the third game in the Final Fantasy remake trilogy, and Dragon Quest 12 in the works. In January, Final Fantasy 16 producer Naoki Yoshida said it might be time for a younger generation to lead the franchise and helm Final Fantasy 17.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

HTC Vive’s $999 Focus Vision Lets PC Gamers ‘Bring the Same High-End Headsets Used in VR Arcades Into Their Homes’

HTC Vive has upgraded its lineup of Extended Reality headsets with the new HTC Vive Focus Vision, promising gamers built-in eye-tracking, improved cameras, and better hand-tracking. If actual reality is just too much and you’ve recently received an unexpected inheritance from a wealthy benefactor, the new headset is available to pre-order today.

HTC Vive Focus Vision price:

  • USD $999
  • UK £999
  • €1229
  • AUD 1,899 inc GST

Not to be confused with the currently available Vive XR Elite, Focus 3, Focus Plus, Pro 2, or Viveflow VR models, the HTC Vive Focus Vision will also offer a DisplayPort mode that will connect directly with a PC’s graphics card to let VR gamers work their way through their Steam VR back catalog without a drop in visual quality. The only catch with that feature is that it won’t be available until “late 2024.”

HTC Vive Focus Vision features:

  • Built-in eye-tracking and motorized auto-IPD adjustment
  • DisplayPort mode for stunning, visually lossless PCVR experiences
  • Dual 16MP color cameras for stereoscopic full-color passthrough
  • Up to 120-degree FOV and 90Hz refresh rate. Support for 120Hz refresh rate via
  • DisplayPort mode coming late 2024
  • Combined 5k resolution across both eyes
  • Depth sensor for scene recognition
  • Infra-red sensor for enhanced tracking in low-light conditions

“VIVE Focus Vision gives you the best of both worlds, with outstanding standalone capabilities, and DisplayPort mode support for visually lossless PCVR experiences,” said Shen Ye, Global Head of Product at HTC VIVE.

“Now, PC gamers can bring the same high-end headsets used in VR arcades into their homes. We’re taking everything to the next level with built-in eye-tracking, stereo color passthrough cameras for depth-correct Mixed Reality, and even an infra-red sensor for enhanced hand tracking in low-light conditions.”

Extended Reality – or XR – is the umbrella term for virtual, augmented, and mixed reality technologies. HTC Vive is one of the biggest players in the space, and its new toy will compete with the Meta Quest 3 and of course the Apple Vision Pro. We’ll let you know how it stacks up against them when its released later this year.

Rachel Weber is IGN’s Managing Editor.

Nintendo Announces 4 SNES Games for Switch Online Library

Nintendo has announced four Super NES games from the early ‘90s are now live via the Nintendo Switch Online library.

First up, we have Battletoads Double Dragon, a crossover beat-’em-up developed by legendary studio Rare and released in 1993. Here’s the official blurb, from Nintendo:

The warriors from Double Dragon join forces with the toad-acious Battletoads trio to form the ultimate team in this 1993 beat-’em-up! Tussle with terrific twins Billy and Jimmy Lee as they team up with Zitz, Rash and Pimple to defend the Earth against the combined might of the Dark Queen and the Shadow Boss! Leap from the Battlecopter onto the tail of the Colossus spaceship and fight your way through beastly baddies and lethal objects using the Battletoads’ arsenal of Smash Hits or the Dragons’ array of Dragon Force Techniques – each provides incredible attacking combos, including kicks, punches, throws and more! You’ll also put your driving skills to the test with the Speeder Bike and high-speed Space Pod. How will this struggle for Earth’s future end?

Next, we have Jaleco’s Big Run, a racing game originally released for the Super Famicom in 1991. Check out what the game is about, per Nintendo:

Race across the vast landscape of Africa – from Tripoli to Dakar – over the course of nine stages in this racing game originally released for the Super Famicom system in 1991. This monumental task isn’t only about putting pedal to the metal, though! First, you’ll need to select a sponsor and then use those funds to hire staff. Next, you’ll need some spare parts to replace tires and engines when they get damaged or worn out. The glory of victory awaits if you can combine precise tactics and bold driving to weather the brutal driving conditions that stand between you and your goal.

Cosmo Gang the Puzzle is a 1993 action puzzle game developed by Namco and originally released for the Super Famicom.

The Cosmo Gang take on falling-block-style puzzles across three modes in this 1993 action-puzzle game that was originally for Super Famicom. Focus on clearing blocks to get the high score in 1P Mode, play competitive battles in VS Mode and put yourself to the test in 100 Stage Mode, where you can solve stage after stage of strategic challenges. In each of the modes, progress is made by removing containers and Cosmos that fall from the top of the screen. You can remove the containers by lining six up in a horizontal row — and Cosmos are removed when they touch the blue orbs that occasionally make their way down. Though the two types of blocks are cleared in different ways, try to see if you can perform a combo by clearing both types at once!

And finally, Technōs Japan’s sports game Kunio-kun no Dodgeball da yo Zen’in Shūgō!, which came out on the Super Famicom in 1993, is available. The Kunio-kun series, known as River City outside Japan, is now in the hands of Guilty Gear developer Arc System Works, with recent revivals from WayForward.

This sports game, released for the Super Famicom system in 1993, features Kunio-kun (who you may recognize from the River City series!) and his striking dodgeball moves. Take the field and square off against teams from various countries and employ a variety of jumps, passes and dynamic knockout shots as you aim to become the greatest dodgeball team in the world. Plus, each stage has hidden gimmicks to discover, so your matches may even take some unexpected turns! Build your ideal team, power up with in-game items and train your teammates to be the best they can be. Can you take the dodgeball championship by storm?

Super NES – Nintendo Switch Online library additions for September 2024:

All four games are now part of the Super NES – Nintendo Switch Online library, and are available for all Nintendo Switch Online members to play today.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Freedom Wars Remastered Bringing Vita Favorite to Modern Platforms as Potential First Step Toward Sequel

Freedom Wars, the fan-favorite multiplayer action game frequently hailed as one of the PlayStation Vita’s best games, is officially coming back. Bandai Namco announced today that Freedom Wars will be getting a remastered version on modern platforms, bringing with it 4K resolution, 60fps support, and other enhancements.

First released on Vita back in 2014, Freedom Wars is a dystopian third-person multiplayer action game similar to Monster Hunter that supports up to eight players. It was originally developed by the now-defunct Japan Studio, which was merged into Team Asobi in 2021. Freedom Wars’ servers were turned off that same year. The remastered version is being developed by Dimps Corporation, which was able to gain permission from Sony to use the license.

Despite Freedom Wars’ status as a niche favorite, it was able to develop a cult following and earn a spot on our list of the 25 best Vita games.

“Freedom Wars’ emphasis on fighting, looting, and upgrading creates an addictive gameplay loop for Vita owners. It certainly isn’t the only Monster Hunter clone available on Vita, but it’s perhaps its most successful one,” we wrote at the time. “The staying power of its addictive fight-loot-upgrade cycle is enhanced by deep gameplay, customization options, and a really interesting online component made it one of our favorite portable releases of 2014.”

In addition to graphical enhancements, Freedom Wars Remastered will feature an overhauled weapon crafting system and additional difficulty settings, among other additions. Nevertheless, we wrote in our hands-on preview that it feels similar to how it was 10 years ago.

“Part of me sees Freedom Wars Remastered more as a novelty – a Vita classic that is now at least playable on modern platforms with its most important parts unsullied, for better or worse. It’s fundamentally the 2014 game with some quality-of-life necessities,” our previewer Michael Higham wrote. “It was a perfect fit for Sony’s last handheld, and a blast to sink hours into, competing with other Panopticons across your region and reducing your prison sentence in futility. I’m not sure if it’s going to take the same way it did 10 years ago, but I do believe this is a big win for preservation and making a cult classic much more accessible in a faithful form.

In the same preview, director Takashi Tsukamoto calls the remaster a neccessary first step on the path toward eventually make a sequel.

“We’ve been wanting to create something like this for a long time, but we really didn’t have the opportunity. As Dimps [the development team], we’ve been looking for opportunities to release something, maybe a sequel – something related to Freedom Wars. However, it was very difficult to set up a team and nothing was really lining up. At some point, we said maybe a remastered version of the original would be good.”

[W]e don’t know if there’s going to be a sequel yet of course, but if there is a sequel, we have tons of ideas we’d want to implement into said sequel

As for why it’s taken this long to revisit Freedom Wars, Tsukamoto said, “The opportunity never really presented itself until now. We were able to come to an agreement with Sony regarding the license and they were able to partner up with Bandai Namco, and it just so happens that it’s about 10 years later that all of it started coming to fruition.”

Tsukamoto says he hopes the new remaster will be successful enough to “take the next step into potentially releasing a sequel,” adding, “As much as we’d like to share it with you, we don’t know if there’s going to be a sequel yet of course, but if there is a sequel, we have tons of ideas we’d want to implement into said sequel.”

Freedom Wars Remastered is set to release on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Steam, and Nintendo Switch on January 10, 2025. In the meantime, check out our list of the best 2024 games so far.

Kat Bailey is IGN’s News Director as well as co-host of Nintendo Voice Chat. Have a tip? Send her a DM at @the_katbot.