Author: Trafficblast

As previously detailed, Gears 5 won’t feature random loot boxes or a season pass, and now developer The Coalition has revealed that the upcoming third-person shooter will use “a very player-centric, player-friendly way of doing customisation and monetisation.”

Multiplayer design director Ryan Cleven spoke to GamesIndustry.Biz during Gamescom 2019, where the outlet asked if Gears 5 will include microtransactions. Though confirming the latest Gears entry will have various forms of in-game currencies, Cleven reiterated Gears 5 will have no randomized loot boxes and players will always know what they’re getting whether earning or purchasing content.

Cleven assured that Gears 5 is a player-first game, saying The Coalition can service people looking to expedite their experience while keeping the spirit intact. “We really think we’re ahead of the industry here in getting rid of loot boxes and making sure that we can both service people that are looking to accelerate their progression or earn cosmetics using money but also keeping the integrity of the game experience,” Cleven told GI.Biz.

With governments investigating the psychological nature of loot boxes, Cleven was asked whether the backlash towards games like Apex Legends and Star Wars Battlefront II has forced The Coalition to reconsider how monetization works in Gears 5. Cleven said none of that was a concern. “We had made [the decision to cut loot boxes] before all that happened,” he explained. “We were sort of reading the tea leaves, I guess, and we were one of the earliest to adopt card packs inside our games… We put the challenge to ourselves: can we still provide purchasable things to players that want to purchase and still have the rest of the players really enjoy the system? That was a challenge we set right from the beginning of Gears 5.”

Instead, The Coalition seems more concerned with providing the best experience possible to its players when Gears 5 launches on PC and Xbox One on September 10. “We just felt that [loot boxes] weren’t a good fit for Gears and we wanted to be ahead of the curve looking for possible solutions, even before all the controversy.”

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Season X of Fortnite: Battle Royale rolls on with another set of challenges for Battle Pass holders to complete. In addition to Week 4’s Smash and Grab challenges, there’s a new batch of limited-time missions called Junk Rush. Unlike the standard weekly challenges, these tasks are only around for a brief period of time, so you’ll need to act fast if you’re hoping to snag their rewards.

The first Junk Rush challenge asks you to consume glitched foraged items–a new type of consumable recently introduced to the game as part of the 10.10 content update. The hardest part about this challenge is knowing where to find the glitched items, which is why we’ve put together the map and guide below to help you out.

Where Are The Glitched Foraged Items Located?

Foraged items can be found all around the island, but the glitched variants only appear in one particular area: the rec center, where Fortnite’s indoor soccer field is located. Following the 10.10 content update, the Rift Beacon at the rec center exploded and caused some kind of temporal disruption, resulting in glitched items that randomly change into different foraged consumables.

The rec center is located in the western portion of the map, directly between Snobby Shores and Neo Tilted/Tilted Town. You can see its exact location on the map below.

How To Complete The Challenge

Once you know where to go, completing the challenge is simply a matter of going to the area and consuming enough of the foraged items. You’ll need to collect five of them in total. Given that this is the only area you can find glitched foraged items, it’s sure to be teeming with other players; fortunately, the mission can be completed across different matches, so head to the rec center at the start of the game, pick up a few of the consumables, and repeat the process as many times as necessary to clear the challenge.

The glitched foraged items can be found as floor loot, so keep your eyes peeled while you’re exploring the area. You can also find other tips and guides for this season’s trickier missions in our Fortnite Season X challenges roundup, which we’ll continue to update that list as the season progresses.

Fortnite Season X Coverage

• Fortnite Season 10 Battle Pass: Skins, Price, How It Works, And More
• Fortnite Season 10 Battle Pass Rewards: Skins, Emotes, Back Bling, Pets, And More
• Fortnite Season 10 Update Notes: BRUTE Mech, Rift Zones, And More
• Fortnite Season 10: Big Changes To How Daily & Weekly Challenges Work
• Fortnite Season 10 Map Changes: Rift Zones, Comet, Skeleton, And More
• Fortnite 10.00 Content Update: Titled Town, Automatic Sniper Rifle, And More

Hades will finally make its way to Steam a year after launching exclusively on the Epic Games Store. In fact, Supergiant Games’ roguelike dungeon-crawler arrives on Steam on December 10.

Supergiant announced on Twitter that Hades will see an Early Access Steam launch this winter. The news was bottled in a Twitter thread by the company, which also announced this year marks the studio’s 10 year anniversary.

On Hades’ Steam store page, Supergiant says it expects to pull the game out of Early Access and release it as a full title in the “second half of 2020.” The full version of Hades is said to feature “the complete ending to the story,” as well as additional story content and added polish across its entirety. Those who purchased Hades on or before October 15 will receive a free digital copy of the game’s original soundtrack as a thank you for supporting Supergiant, though it won’t be available until the game’s v1.0 launch next year.

Elsewhere in the Twitter thread, Supergiant revealed a variety of games from its catalog–including Bastion and Transistor–are up to 80 percent off for the company’s 10 year celebration. Both games are incredibly cheap on the Nintendo Eshop right now as well, with Bastion selling for $3 USD and Transistor going for $4 USD.

Some links to supporting retailers are automatically made into affiliate links, and GameSpot may receive a small share of those sales.

Sales tracker Superdata has revealed its monthly sales chart for July 2019, tracking worldwide digital sales across PC, console, and mobile.

Consumers spent $9.02 billion on digital games in July, up from $8.56 billion in the same month last year.

Grand Theft Auto V Online’s Diamond Casino update led to a huge uptick in sales for Rockstar’s immensely popular game. Earlier this month, the developer announced that GTA Online had broken its record for most players in a single day on July 23, and most players in an entire week between July 23 – 29. The company didn’t share specific player numbers, but Superdata estimates the game sold $69 million across console and PC following the Diamond Casino update, so the numbers certainly back Rockstar’s claims up.

The update, which introduced a casino full of games to play, rewards to earn, and new story missions to complete, led to one of the best digital sales months for the game since it launched back in 2013. It also marked the first month of double-digit year-over-year growth since August 2018.

Elsewhere, Fire Emblem: Three Houses had the best digital launch in franchise history, selling 800,000 digital units on Switch in July. This follows NPD Group’s monthly sales chart from July, which showed that Three Houses recorded the highest first-month sales for a Fire Emblem game of all time in the US, good enough to make it the second highest-selling game of the month, behind Madden NFL 20. NPD never shares actual sales numbers, but add on the 800,000 units sold in worldwide digital sales and it’s safe to assume Three Houses had a very successful launch.

Season 2 of Apex Legends kicked off in July, generating $37 million across both console and PC. This is double what Respawn’s shooter made in June, but only roughly half of what Season 1 earned back in March. The Titanfall battle royale game courted controversy this month after its Iron Crown event introduced overly expensive new cosmetics. This led to altercations on Reddit when a thread discussing the event took a turn for the worse once developers began criticizing the community with insulting language and saying most players are “freeloaders.” Respawn CEO Vince Zampella has since issued a statement apologizing for the incident.

Another battle royale title, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, sold a further one million units after a price cut. Superdata estimates PUBG sold 1.1 million units on PC in July, with an average selling price of $18. Sales are still down significantly from last year, however.