Cyberpunk 2077 has been out for less than a week, but developer CD Projekt says it has already recouped its total development cost and marketing and promotional cost.
In a short report to investors, the Management Board of CD Projekt says that the “estimated licensing royalties receivable by the Company in association with pre-order sales of Cyberpunk 2077 across all of its digital distribution channels have exceeded the sum,” of both the game’s development cost and marketing expense.
This means that Cyberpunk 2077 is already profitable thanks to both pre-order sales across PS4, PS5, Xbox One/S/X, Xbox Series X/S, Stadia, and PC. The profits are also bolstered by estimated licensing royalties the company expects to be owed.
Cyberpunk 2077 was announced way back in May 2012 and pre-production began after the development of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Blood and Wine expansion in 2016. So depending on how CD Projekt defines the development time for Cyberpunk, the pre-orders and royalties have already covered anywhere from eight to four years of development.
Similarly, CD Projekt towards the end of its development promoted Cyberpunk 2077 heavily with ads, physical events at conferences like E3, and more, but those costs including the marketing costs for the remainder of the year have also already been eclipsed by the profits.
The news comes just as CD Projekt stock dropped by 29% following the launch and news that the performance of the title is underwhelming on consoles, particularly last-gen systems like the PS4 and Xbox One.
Another Galarian Pokemon is making its debut in Pokemon Go very soon. Galarian Mr. Mime and its evolution, Mr. Rime, will arrive in the mobile game next weekend as part of a Special Research story event–but you’ll need to have a ticket to participate in it.
The event kicks off on December 19 at 10 AM local time and runs until 8 PM local time the following day, while tickets run for $8 USD. Those who do purchase a ticket will get access to an exclusive Special Research questline that will lead to encounters with a handful of Ice and sound-based Pokemon including Alolan Vulpix, Jigglypuff, Jynx, Snorunt, and the aforementioned Galarian Mr. Mime. Niantic also says you’ll be able to earn enough Mr. Mime Candy through the questline to evolve it into Mr. Rime.
Get ready to tap your fingers and feet—Galarian Mr. Mime is making its first appearance in Pokémon GO! 🕺 The Dancing Pokémon and its Evolution, Mr. Rime will soon be coming to the world of Pokémon GO in a ticketed Special Research story event. https://t.co/oVWUJ5xL7Upic.twitter.com/uXjtGdZoZm
Even if you don’t purchase a ticket, you’ll still get more chances to catch certain Pokemon that weekend. From December 18-21, a handful of Ice and “melodious” Pokemon like Jynx, Swinub, Spoink, Woobat, and Cubchoo will be attracted more frequently to Incense, and the Incense itself will last for three hours. You’ll also have your first chance to encounter Shiny Cubchoo that weekend. You can read more about the event on the Pokemon Go website.
In the meantime, Niantic is hosting a two-day Community Day weekend event on December 12 and 13. Throughout the event, all of the featured Pokemon from this year’s previous Community Days will reappear in the wild, and you’ll be able to encounter 2019 featured Pokemon in Raids and hatch them from 2 km eggs.
Niantic has a few other December events lined up beyond that. Shiny Celebi is making its debut in the game starting December 14, while the Legendary Pokemon Kyurem is appearing in five-star Raids again all month long. There’s also a new batch of Field Research tasks this month.
Super Mario-kun by Yukio Sawada is a long-running manga series which began in Japan in 1991. Running for over 50 volumes, with the latest hitting shelves back in October, the zany series has taken the plumber and his pals on a crazy journey throughout the Mushroom Kingdom and beyond. However, getting your hands on localized versions of those stories was near impossible, until now.
Viz Media released Super Mario Mania on December 8, which is a collection of hand-picked stories by Sawada from the Super Mario-kun manga. Take a look below at some of the interior pages for the book.
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Obviously, the manga leans heavily into comedy, absurdism, and zany antics. But what else would you expect? It’s a story about a plumber and his brother in a magical kingdom where turtle-people are trying to kidnap royalty. The last time someone tried to go the serious route with that, we had the Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo Mario Bros. movie.
Super Mario Manga Mania features ten stories, and two bonus short stories, coming in at over 160 pages. While the retail price for the book is $10, it’s currently on sale at Walmart and Amazon for $9 during the holidays.
The Super Mario Manga Mania collection is available at various retailers, and if you’re looking for more from the worlds of manga and anime, check out our Anime Gift Guide. Mario is celebrating its 35th anniversary this year, and Tetris 99 is honoring the plumber with a Mario All Stars event. If you can score enough points during the Maximus Cup, which is happening now, you can unlock a Super Mario All Stars theme for the game.
The products discussed here were independently chosen by our editors. GameSpot may get a share of the revenue if you buy anything featured on our site.
Cyberpunk 2077 is a stunning game… if you’re playing it on the right systems. It’s being hailed as “the new Crysis” on PC, and you’ll need a powerful graphics card to be able to run CD Projekt Red’s latest at its highest settings. But little footage of the game was shown on console pre-release.
Now that Cyberpunk 2077 has been released, we can finally dig deeper into its console versions. In this video, we compare the game running on PlayStation 5 to the base PlayStation 4 model to see just how much difference Sony’s brand new console makes. It should be noted that the version running on PS5 is actually the PS4 version of the game, playable through backwards compatibility. A patch to upgrade the game for PlayStation 5 will be released next year.
Cyberpunk 2077 is available now on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PC, and Stadia.
Fans waited for Cyberpunk 2077 for almost a decade, and that sort of time breeds expectations. Now that the game has been out in some form or another for a few days, fans have had a chance to get to know Night City on their own terms, and their overall opinions run the gamut from ecstatic bliss to total disappointment. This fractious discourse has taken over fan communities like the game’s subreddit, and the debate continues unabated.
Many fans have pointed to Cyberpunk’s dismal performance on the PS4 and Xbox One as a particular sore spot. Some have even gone so far as to accuse CD Projekt Red of misleading advertising, or other unscrupulous behavior. In a highly-upvoted thread, Reddit user “ldillon7777” posted a PS4 trailer for the game that was released back in November, pointing out that the “gameplay trailer” presents a vision of the game with a stable framerate and impressive visual effects, both of which are not representative of the last-gen versions of the game.
“Anyone that has played the PS4 version can clearly see that this trailer is not recorded on the PS4 or on any last-gen console,” the user wrote. “This marketing makes the PS4 version look as good as the PC version. This is completely misleading and not representative of the PS4 version being advertised.”
“You see a huge box and a few seconds later it becomes a car,” wrote another PS4 player in a popular thread. “I’m too disappointed to go through. Don’t even compare to Witcher 3.”
Another top thread purports to document the number of promised features that are missing from the final product, from the inability to adjust certain aspects of your character’s appearance beyond the initial setup to lack of an aim toggle option. While many are common quality-of-life complaints shared by other games, some are uncommonly specific, such as the fact that your character cannot smoke.
It’s not uncommon for fans to complain about mundane aspects of high-profile games, or to accuse developers of “downgrading” the final game compared to its promotional materials, such as pre-release trailers. The most notorious example of this sort of claim is the Spider-Man puddle fiasco, where a fan accused developer Insomniac of “downgrading” the amount of puddles in one of the game’s environments. (Cyberpunk developer CD Projekt Red previously dealt with a similar “controversy” over a Witcher 3: Wild Hunt trailer.)
Such complaints generally ignore the messy reality of game development: that not all features can live up to their initial prototype, and that scaling a game to perform well on consumer-grade hardware like last-gen consoles almost always results in some form of compromise. However, given that sources like Digital Foundry have concluded that Cyberpunk’s performance is “unacceptable” on last-gen consoles–as well as the fact that the game is uncommonly buggy, even by open-world game standards–some of these fan complaints rise above the usual noise that accompanies most big game releases.
This criticism extends beyond the game’s shaky performance and well-documented bugs, with some fans taking aim at minute aspects of the game’s design. In another highly-upvoted thread, a Reddit user lambasted the game’s driving AI, calling it nonexistent. “There’s no AI for driving, at all, period,” the user wrote. “That’s the reason you’ve never been in a car chase in the open world, not in a mission. That’s the reason the AI stops behind you forever when you park in the middle of the road. That’s the reason people don’t peel away in a panic when you pull a gun on them in a car. The only driving ‘AI’ that the game has is predetermined paths for cars to follow along.”
On the other hand, there are several highly-upvoted threads from users who say that they’re really enjoying the game, with one referring to the complainers as a “vocal minority coming on the internet and complaining.” Humorously enough, there were so many threads with the title “am I the only one enjoying the game?” that users started posting satirical threads with similar titles, leading to yet more backlash.
Other users have taken the serious complaints of their fellow fans as an opportunity for memes and jokes. The most popular post Friday on the forum comes from a user complaining of a “concerning flaw” in the game–that the manhole covers depicted in Cyberpunk only support up to 12.5 metric tons of weight in real life, and are therefore not suited to street use. The apt top reply to that thread: “This is why people are falling through the world.”
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Over the next week, we will be posting featuresforwhat we’ve nominated to be thebest games of 2020. Then, on December 17, we willcrownone of the nominees as GameSpot’s Best Game of 2020, so join us as we celebrate these 10 games on the road to the big announcement.Be sure to check out our other end-of-the-year coverage collected in ourBest Games of 2020 hub.
It’s become cliche at this point to remark on Animal Crossing: New Horizons‘ fortuitous timing, how it arrived at exactly the right moment to ease us through the first few, uncertain months of a world-changing pandemic. And yet, it’s impossible to view the game without also looking at the circumstances surrounding its release. More than any other title that launched this year, Animal Crossing felt like a panacea to 2020. Just as the COVID-19 virus began surging uncontrollably and forced many parts of the world into lockdown, suddenly shattering daily norms and routines that we had all taken for granted, here came this wholesome, candy-colored bit of escapism–this digital playpen where your next-door neighbor is a fitness-minded penguin and your biggest concern is whether the sofa you just purchased matches the rest of the decor in your living room.
Given these circumstances, it’s easy to see why Animal Crossing became such an immediate, inescapable hit, particularly during the first half of the year. As an unprecedented pandemic upended our collective sense of normalcy, the game offered a welcome bit of respite, a chance to socialize with friends virtually and revel in the mundanity of daily life that was now being denied to us. Of course, this in itself is hardly novel; many other games also serve as a virtual social space where you can hang out and pass time with friends. But what made Animal Crossing hit differently is its emphasis on the smaller, unceremonious aspects of daily activities: the joy of checking out what new items are in stock at the store; the small thrill of seeing town hall swap out its fall decorations for Christmas lights; the satisfaction of reeling in a new type of fish not yet on display in the museum.
What gives these little moments their resonance is the same thing that has set Animal Crossing apart from other life sims since the series’ inception: its real-time clock. Animal Crossing unfolds according to the date and time set in your system, so it follows a much more measured rhythm than other games, even within its genre. Days and seasons pass in the game just as they do in real life, while stores open and close at specific hours. Pop into your village at 10 PM, for instance, and you’ll miss your chance to peruse that day’s wares, forcing you to come back the next day (unless you don’t have any scruples about setting your system’s clock back).
New Horizons is a warm hug of a game that has helped many a player find digital refuge from the relentless torrent of this year’s woes.
This deliberate pace extends into how slowly the game metes out its features. When you first arrive on your island, you’ll find no amenities beyond Tom Nook’s makeshift resident services tent. As you return each day, however, your island home will gradually blossom; new villagers will move in and new facilities will slowly open up, which in turn will give you access to a richer array of things to do and see. In a time when many video games are all too eager to indulge in instant gratification, the boldest thing a game can ask you to do is wait–and as Animal Crossing illustrates, there’s value in taking things day by day.
What truly elevates New Horizons are all the smart ways it builds upon the series’ formula. While past games have always offered some degree of customization, New Horizons is the first to give you free rein over every decision. Not only can you now place furniture and other items outdoors, but you can also handpick the exact spot where other villagers move in and even edit the very landscape itself. New Horizons is the first Animal Crossing game to truly embrace customization, presenting players with a veritable canvas that they can color however they please. This makes the experience much more personal and rewarding, and watching your island home gradually develop into a proper village feels immensely gratifying in a way few other games can replicate.
Customization isn’t the only area where New Horizons improves upon its predecessors. Nintendo has made numerous other tweaks and refinements to the gameplay, both large and small. The ability to dig up and replant trees, for instance, is a welcome boon, as is the increased inventory space you have in your pockets and at your house. Tying these disparate elements together are the new crafting and Nook Miles systems. The former lets you fashion furniture, clothing, and other items out of the various materials you can gather around your island, while the latter doles out reward points for all kinds of actions, from chatting up a certain number of villagers each day to even getting stung by wasps. Thanks to these systems, every item in the game–even seemingly useless ones like weeds and trash that you can fish up out of the river–and every action you take has a purpose, feeding back into a satisfying gameplay loop.
More than anything, though, what makes New Horizons a special game is its irresistible charm. Watching a villager plop down in front of a tree to read a book or break out into a spontaneous song in the town plaza–these little moments are endlessly endearing and never cease to put a smile on your face. New Horizons is a warm hug of a game that has helped many a player find digital refuge from the relentless torrent of this year’s woes. There have been many excellent games over the past 12 months, but none of them will be as inextricably associated with 2020 as New Horizons.
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The Expanse Season 5 arrives December 16. Here are some teases direct from the cast and creators.
The Expanse is one of the best sci-fi shows on TV, and it manages to do something that many adaptations can’t: It keeps fans guessing. Even those who have read the books don’t know exactly what’s going to happen in each new season, thanks to the ways the show has blended disparate novels into cohesive stories, expanded certain characters’ storylines because they worked so well on TV, and even pulled from other sources besides the novels.
As a result, even the most diehard Expanse fans don’t know exactly what’s going to happen in the upcoming Season 5. The show is, of course, based on the series Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey, a pseudonym for collaborative authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck. Season 5 will certainly include plot from Nemesis Games, and fans have speculated that it will dip into the following novel, Babylon’s Ashes, as well.
Beyond those guesses, we don’t know for sure what’s coming in Season 5. But we did get a chance to ask the show’s cast and creators during a set visit in Toronto last year, and Amazon has finally lifted the embargo on the tidbits we received. Let’s get into it.
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Spotlight on Marco Inaros
One of the most exciting storylines coming to the forefront in Season 5 is the story of Marco Inaros. Marco is an extremist Belter leader and Naomi’s former lover, as well as the father of their child, who she hasn’t seen in years. This has been hinted at and mentioned throughout the four previous seasons, and it’s in the spotlight in Season 5.
“Obviously Marco is a big deal,” said series co-author Ty Franck. “We laid in the first hints of him in Season 1 when Naomi tells Fred that she has somebody she wants to find. It’s cool that we got far enough into the show, and thanks to Amazon, that we’re able to do the seasons where that’s going to pay off. It’s nice to pay off the things that you foreshadow. We’ve always been playing a long game.”
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Marco and Naomi’s relationship
Marco is one of the main “villains” for Season 5, but we’ll likely meet him through Naomi’s point of view, and they have a complicated history.
“It’s a gargantuan element of Noami’s backstory,” said showrunner and executive producer Naren Shankar. “We have touched on it, we’ve hinted at it, but this is the first time you meet this person.” Shankar continued that Episodes 4 and 5 of Season 5 will explore their past relationship in a unique way. “You get Marco telling it to Drummer, and then you get Naomi telling it to Lucia,” he said. “We don’t show an objective flashback of their life together, because that’s not what’s important. What’s important is people’s memories of the situation. Both of those stories can be true to the person saying it. Whose side of it do you pick?”
Dominique Tipper, who plays Naomi, said she’s excited to explore this element of her character’s backstory. “It’s a full circle thing for my character,” she said. “It’s rare you get to do all this work with backstories and past, and then you meet the thing that all the backstory and past has been about and been based on. I’m not sure where we go after this. I’m sure our brilliant writers have much in store. But, for me it’s like, that’s it. That’s what you kind of want and hope for.”
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Splitting up the crew
Season 5 will split the characters up more than ever before, and the crew of the Rocinante will be scattered to separate corners of the galaxy. Franck said this is a direct result of adapting book 5, Nemesis Games, to the small screen. “Book 5 in the book series, we always called it the axle on which the series spins,” Franck said. “It’s the first book where we take our core crew and split them up and make them all point of view characters and give them their own storylines separate from the Roci and the big story. Getting to do that on the show is very exciting.”
In Season 5, Amos will travel home to Baltimore on Earth, Naomi will reunite with her son and deal with Marco Inaros as she reconnects with her roots as a Belter, Alex and Bobby will return to Mars, and more. However, “obviously, they’re all seeing different pieces of the same larger story,” Franck explained.
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Naomi’s planet problem
In Season 4, Naomi discovered that, having grown up and lived in artificial environments all her life, she can’t actually survive for long on the surface of a real planet. Going forward on the show, more people are going to discover that problem. “What happens to her in Season 4 becomes a tale of what’s going to happen to a lot of people going forward,” Franck said. “We see her land on a planet and be unable to live there; there are now 1,300 worlds on which a lot of people like Naomi will never be able to live. What happens to those people? Are they the forgotten people of that future, and what are they going to do about it? That becomes a major theme going forward in the show.”
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Straight from the source
Like basically any adaptation ever, The Expanse has diverged from the books in various ways. But Franck said that showrunner and executive producer Naren Shankar knows full well where the story is going, and has all along. “Obviously we only have one more book to write, and we outlined it years ago, so [co-author Daniel Abraham and I] have known what that last book is for a long time,” Franck explained. “But we’ve been very open with Naren, our showrunner. Daniel and I work very closely with Naren on the show, and he’s known where all of this is going for quite some time, and we’ve tried to lay a lot of that in. We were laying in hints about [Season 4] and even Season 5 in Season 1, because he knew where we were going and wanted to put those little details in there.”
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Consequences
Shankar said one of the main themes of Season 5 will be consequences. “I think Season 5 is really a reckoning,” he said. “It’s about, I think, thematically, the sins of the past coming back to haunt you…reaping what you sow–that’s what we put on our big board in the room, was that you reap what you sow. And that is about personally, emotionally, and also politically and historically. That is really what’s going to happen in Season 5.”
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The Churn
We got some further hints about Amos’s story, which will be based largely on The Churn, a novella set in the Expanse universe that focused on Amos’s backstory. Wes Chatham, who plays Amos, said he re-reads it every time he needs to get back into character. “That’s kind of like the foundation that I’ve built off of,” Chatham said. “It’s like, if this happened to me, how would this manifest? What would this look like into the future? And so this season is The Churn. It is going back and visiting that.”
Shankar elaborated. “There have been hints about where Amos came from, what his backstory was on Earth–they’ve been dropped very, very carefully and occasionally,” the showrunner said. “I think you’re really going to get a much better sense of who he was and where he came from and how it happened. And that’s really–if you guys have read the novellas, The Churn is a wonderful novella.”
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Seeing the danger
The Expanse is certainly an ensemble show, but if it does have a main character, it’s Holden (Steven Strait), particularly after Thomas Jane’s character Miller’s death in Season 2. Among all the characters, Holden has the most knowledge of the protomolecule, and thus, of the larger dangers that humanity faces. “The only other person who personally experienced the genocide in the beginning of the series is gone, and [Holden] has seen the entire history of this ancient civilization occur and die in a split second in his mind, and he sees the danger out there,” Strait said. “It’s a danger that no one else can see…Holden is the one always within the macro story structure who keeps his eye on the ball of what is the predominant, primary concern.”
Franck agreed: “Holden is always seeing a big picture nobody else seems to see. That’s sort of his story arc, right? He’s always the one banging on the table going, ‘Guys, why are you fighting over the little stuff? The big stuff is right over there.’ We’re going to keep doing that with him.”
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Returning to Mars
Lastly, in Season 5, the series’ two most prominent Martian characters, Alex and Bobby, will team up on their home planet together. Cas Anvar, who plays Alex, spoke to his arc, discussing how the pillars of his character–his identity as a proud Martian, a family man, and a pilot–will largely crumble around him in the upcoming episodes. “Mars is not the Mars–the proud, noble terraforming vision–that he was expecting,” Anvar said. “Everything that holds his identity together unravels. And in order for him to survive, he has to figure out who he is without any of those things. And that’s exciting.”
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Disclosure: ViacomCBS is GameSpot’s parent company
Among Us players can unlock a special Twitch logo pet cosmetic if they link their Twitch account to the game by December 18. Among Us pets usually have to be purchased, but this one is the first that InnerSloth is giving out for free.
You’ll need to open up Among Us, click the settings icon, and then choose the “Data” tab in order to link your Twitch account. Once you click that you’ll need to log into your Twitch profile to officially link the two accounts. Once you’re logged in, click authorize to allow Twitch Among Us drops. You’ll need to then watch 30 minutes of the Among Us Twitch Rivals events in order to unlock the pet.
There are events you can watch on December 11, 14, and 18. The full schedule can be found right here. This is only possible on the PC version of Among Us, but an update for mobile players should let them link their Twitch accounts soon.
InnerSloth revealed a new Among Us map on December 10 at The Game Awards. The map, coming in early 2021, is set aboard a floating airship and will be completely free. It gives you a choice of which room to start in among other new features like ladders, new tasks, and more.
Among Us also took home a couple of trophies at The Game Awards, despite having launched in 2018. The murder mystery game won Best Mobile Game and Best Multiplayer Game, beating out titles like Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Genshin Impact.
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