Author: Trafficblast

February 3 is Super Bowl Sunday, where the L.A. Rams will take on the New England Patriots to determine who is the best in the NFL. Will Tom Brady’s Patriots or Jared Goff’s Rams come out on top? Regardless of the outcome, plenty of people watching the game are not football fans, and they’re more interested in things like commercials and what’s happening during halftime. While you could watch Maroon 5’s halftime show, WWE would rather have you tune in to its show, Halftime Heat.

In a video where Maroon 5 gets Roman Reigns-level boos, WWE proclaims it’s bringing back its halftime show, which only happened once before in 1999. It’s called Halftime Heat, and WWE knows how to get the attention of its fanbase, by bashing a pop rock act that wrestling fans probably would have skipped watching anyway, and you can see the promotional video for it below.

WWE has tried this before, in 1999, when Mankind fought The Rock in an empty arena for the WWF World Heavyweight Championship. Personally, I have very fond memories of this and remember it being a big success, but it hasn’t happened since then. 20 years later, WWE looks towards the future by focusing on its NXT brand.

Revealed during the Royal Rumble Kickoff Show, this year’s Halftime Heat will be a six-man tag team match featuring Aleister Black, Velveteen Dream, and Ricochet vs. Tommaso Ciampa, Johnny Gargano, and Adam Cole. The show will air during halftime at the Super Bowl on the WWE Network, WWE.com, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Hopefully, this time around, the area will have an audience. (But the empty arena match was pretty cool)

This is a really smart move for WWE, as these six competitors are some of the best in the company’s developmental brand. Both Aleister Black and Johnny Gargano were surprise entrants into the men’s Royal Rumble match on January 27 and both proved they are ready for the main roster–a roster that’s already a bit too crowded. Regardless, this will be a fantastic match, and it’s nice to see WWE put the focus on the best wrestling in the company, NXT.

You can watch Halftime Heat on February 3 on the WWE Network during the Super Bowl halftime, and for more on Royal Rumble, check out the results and our review of the show.

Despite very mixed reviews, M. Night Shyamalan’s Glass held onto the top slot on this week’s US box office, with an estimated $19 million taken over three days. This brings the movie’s US total to $79 million, off a modest, self-funded production budget of $20 million. While it is unlikely to hit the heights of its 2017 predecessor Split, which made $138 million in the US, it’s still another hugely successful movie for Shyamalan.

The week’s new movies did not fare nearly as well. The family adventure The Kid Who Would be King entered the chart at No.4, making $7.2 million, while the thriller Serenity fared even worse, grossing just $4.8 million to debut at No.8. Serenity, which stars Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway, was hit by particularly bad reviews and currently has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 21%.

Elsewhere, the comedy The Upside and DC’s Aquaman remained at No.2 and No.3 respectively. Aquaman has now grossed $1.09 billion worldwide, which makes it the most successful DC movie ever made, eclipsing Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises, which made $1.085 billion. The season’s other big superhero hit, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, maintained its position at No.5.

In the lower half of the chart, the drama Green Book returned to the Top 10 on the back of its Oscar nominations, rising to No.6. A Dog’s Way Home dropped one place to No.7, while the horror movie Escape Room is at No.9.

You can see the full Top 10 list for the January 25-27 US box office below, as compiled by Box Office Mojo.

January 25-27 US/Canada Box Office:

1. Glass — $19.0 million
2. The Upside — $12.2 million
3. Aquaman — $7.3 million
4. The Kid Who Would be King — $7.2 million
5. Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse — $6.1 million
6. Green Book — $5.4 million
7. A Dog’s Way Home — $5.2 million
8. Serenity — $4.8 million
9. Escape Room — $4.2 million
10. Dragon Ball Super: Broly — $3.6 million

You need a javascript enabled browser to watch videos.

Please use a html5 video capable browser to watch videos.

This video has an invalid file format.

Sorry, but you can’t access this content!

Another one of this year’s biggest releases is skipping Steam in favor of the Epic Games Store. Publisher Deep Silver has announced that the PC version of its upcoming first-person shooter, Metro Exodus, will be available exclusively through Epic’s digital storefront when it launches next month on February 15.

Prior to this announcement, PC players were able to pre-order Metro Exodus through Steam. These pre-orders will still be honored, but the game will be delisted from Valve’s storefront today, January 28, due to the new exclusivity agreement, which Valve blasts as “unfair to Steam customers.” In a statement on the Metro Exodus Steam page, the company wrote:

“Later today, sales of Metro Exodus will be discontinued on Steam due to a publisher decision to make the game exclusive to another PC store. The developer and publisher have assured us that all prior sales of the game on Steam will be fulfilled on Steam, and Steam owners will be able to access the game and any future updates or DLC through Steam. We think the decision to remove the game is unfair to Steam customers, especially after a long pre-sale period. We apologize to Steam customers that were expecting it to be available for sale through the February 15th release date, but we were only recently informed of the decision and given limited time to let everyone know.”

One of the major factors that has enticed developers away from Steam and to the Epic Games Store is its revenue terms; unlike Steam, the storefront gives companies 88% of their revenue while Epic only takes 12%, and it appears that split had a bearing on the decision to bring Metro Exodus exclusively to the platform.

“Epic’s generous revenue terms are a game changer that will allow publishers to invest more into content creation, or pass on savings to the players,” Deep Silver CEO Klemens Kundratitz said. “By teaming up with Epic we will be able to invest more into the future of Metro and our ongoing partnership with series developer 4A Games, to the benefit of our Metro fans.”

As another consequence of Epic’s more developer-friendly revenue terms, Deep Silver is selling the PC version of Metro Exodus in the US for $50–$10 cheaper than the usual $60 price tag most new releases carry. However, the game will still cost €60 in most European countries.

Metro Exodus isn’t the only major PC release that will be bypassing Steam entirely. Earlier this month, Ubisoft announced that its upcoming shooter, The Division 2, will also skip Steam in favor of the Epic Games Store and its own storefront.

Nintendo Switch owners may soon be able to enjoy one of Ubisoft’s biggest franchises on their portable systems. According to retailer listings, a new collection of Assassin’s Creed titles is coming to Switch in just a couple of weeks.

Czech store Herni-Svet has listed a Switch game titled Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation Collection, with a release date of February 15. This follows an earlier product listing from German retailer Media Markt for an Assassin’s Creed collection on Switch.

In response to these latest listings, Ubisoft told GameSpot it does not comment on rumors or speculation, though the publisher’s CEO, Yves Guillemot, told GameSpot last year that no mainline Assassin’s Creed game would launch in 2019. Perhaps this new collection is a way for the company to plug that gap while it works on a brand-new game for next year.

Ubisoft has not yet announced any plans to bring its hit series to Nintendo’s portable console, except for last year’s Odyssey, which came to Switch as a Japan-exclusive cloud-streaming game. Other than that, the last Assassin’s Creed game to launch on a Nintendo console was Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag on Wii U. Assassin’s Creed III, the title apparently part of this new Switch port, also came to Wii U. The other apparent Switch title, Liberation, initially launched as a PlayStation Vita exclusive in 2012, before later coming to PS3, Xbox 360, PC, PS4, and Xbox One.

The maker of a popular Dark Souls mod has opened his own studio. Peter “Durante” Thoman, who created the “DSfix” mod for the PC version of Dark Souls, has founded his own company with two colleagues, specializing in PC ports and providing consulting services.

PC Games N reports that his company is named PH3, after all three founding members holding PhD degrees. The company just finished all the paperwork in its home company of Austria, leaving him free to make the announcement. He plans to tap his expertise and experience as a computer scientist for the new work.

Thoman said he doesn’t plan to license games, which he calls “a whole other can of worms” with its own kind of technical expertise. Instead, he says fans will still have to request ports they may like to see from publishers directly. “But if you gain traction, you can certainly suggest they consider our services,” he said.

Dark Souls was a notoriously buggy PC port, to the point that even director Yui Tanimura called it “half-assed.” DSfix was widely adopted by the community as a must-have add-on to make it run properly. Later Souls ports were less slipshod, as he promised. Similarly, Demon’s Souls creator Hidetaka Miyazaki recently said he was open to another studio handling a remaster of the original genre-defining classic, but expressed disinterest in handling it himself.