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EA is continuing to move toward a larger live service-based games strategy as full game sales dropped 19% compared to the previous year, according to the company’s latest financial report to investors on Wednesday. EA reported revenue of $1.55 billion for Q1 FY22, up 6.3% from last year. Net income for EA, however, dropped to $204 million, compared to $365 million the previous year.

Despite the drop in-game sales, EA’s live service revenue is offsetting the loss up to 13%.

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EA attributes its growth to various live-service aspects of its most popular games, including FIFA Ultimate Team, Apex Legends, mobile games, and other franchises. EA said that more than 31 million people have played FIFA 21 on console and PC since launch. Meanwhile, FIFA’s Ultimate Team mode matches have grown 48% year-over-year.

Apex Legends also set a new record for concurrent players with the launch of season 9 and averaged 13 million weekly active players.

It’s easy to see why EA is continuing to shift towards more live-service-focused games like FIFA and Apex Legends. The publisher is hoping to expand its sports game offerings to a target audience of more than 500 million players in the next five years. That would effectively double EA Sports’ audience from what the studio says is a current audience of 230 million players.

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While the live-service sector continues to grow, and companies like Ubisoft lean into developing more ongoing titles, EA does have single-player games in the works. BioWare is working on the next Dragon Age, while EA recently announced a full Dead Space remake.

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Insomniac Games has revealed that the last-minute addition of the Performance RT mode in Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart was the result of multiple teams working together to extract as much as possible out of the PlayStation 5.

The Performance RT patch was originally released just six days before the launch of Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart. It was one of three modes available in the game, with the other two being a Fidelity mode and a standard Performance mode. The team didn’t have much to say about the new mode other than the fact that it offered 60FPS gameplay with ray-tracing enabled.

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Thanks to a new newsletter from Axios, we now know why this impressive mode was added to the game so close to launch. The answer is quite simple: it was legitimately a last-minute discovery. According to Axios, Insomniac director of core technology, Mike Fitzgerald, said it was the result of teams across multiple Insomniac departments working together to push the PS5 as far as they could.

“There’s no point, say, in the middle of production where we say, ‘OK, engine’s locked, good luck, game team, finish your thing and we’re going to move on to the next thing,'” Fitzgerald said. “We have the whole core technology team focused on the quality of Ratchet & Clank until a month after it ships.”

Fitzgerald said that it’s toward the end of a game’s development that you learn how much performance can be pushed out of a console. He also said that having multiple performance modes in Spider-Man: Miles Morales and the remastered version of 2018’s Spider-Man put the pressure on the Rift Apart team.

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“We knew, OK, well people are going to expect this [multiple performance modes] out of the next game,” Fitzgerald said. “We do, too, but it’s built for (the PS5), so how are we going to find that extra?”

The developer wizards at Insomniac Games made it happen, though, just in time for the game’s launch exclusively on PS5. Check out our thoughts on the game in IGN’s Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart review and then watch IGN’s Rift Apart PS5 performance review. Read about how Insomniac developers took to Twitter after Rift Apart’s launch to praise the lack of crunch at the studio after that.

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Wesley LeBlanc is a freelance news writer and guide maker for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @LeBlancWes.

Jet Set Radio protagonist Beat, the rambunctious teen “Rudie” who skates around tagging property and pissing off the cops, is joining the notably less anti-establishment — but no less mobile — gang over on the Super Monkey Ball franchise.

Check out the trailer above for a look at Beat as a new playable character in the upcoming Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania. Funny enough, instead of collecting bananas, Beat is rolling down yellow spray paint cans.

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Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania is out on October 5, 2021 for Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and Xbox One. It’s described by SEGA as a “definitive remaster” of Super Monkey Ball 1, 2, and Deluxe.

More than 300 levels have been recreated with new textures, new character models, a photo mode, online challenges, and four-player local co-op, and more. Read here for a full rundown of what pre-ordering either the physical standard or 20th anniversary edition gets you.

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Jet Set Radio, meanwhile, came out all the way back in 2000 for the SEGA Dreamcast, and got a surprise HD re-release in 2016. If you’re hoping for a reboot or proper sequel, there’s a small, small glimmer of hope. It looks like SEGA is considering sequels to Jet Set Radio and Crazy Taxi, according to their last financial report.

But if you can’t wait til SEGA gets in gear, check out Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, a spiritual successor to JSR that’s being developed by the team behind Lethal League Blaze.

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Joseph Knoop is a writer/producer/prime-mate for IGN.

The Rainbow Six Siege developers at Ubisoft released a massive AMA for Y6S2 addressing players’ concerns. The blog post covers mouse and keyboard on consoles, cheaters, playlists, and much more.

Two big topics covered in the AMA were cheaters and people using the mouse and keyboard on consoles. The developers said that while they have team members dedicated to working on mouse and keyboard input for consoles, it is still an “R&D subject.” They said that the goal is to make sure that mouse and keyboard does not provide an unfair advantage on consoles, while still allowing it as an input option.

As for plans to deal with cheaters in the game, Ubisoft was unable to provide details around its anti-cheating security, as anything it shares could be used by cheat makers to bypass the security. The developers did provide some more information around other exploits and if something is a bannable offense or not, like how using a glitch or exploit doesn’t result in a ban, since it brings the issue to their attention.

The Rainbow Six Siege team did say that it si aiming to add more restrictions to the Ranked playlist, limiting access for accounts that are high enough level but haven’t played the game in a while or did not play enough public PvP matches prior to playing ranked. Ubisoft also said that while the team does see the benefit to manually banning cheaters instead of relying on auto-bans, it doesn’t think that can be the main method since it would be too hard to scale.

Ubisoft also said that it is currently unhappy with the current way it does battle passes and is aiming to make “a new type of battle pass that won’t be found anywhere else.” It also said that tweaks are coming to the challenges and that season pass owners will receive a battle pass bonus in the future.

The AMA covers many topics about the future of Rainbow Six Siege and you can read the entire thing over on Ubisoft’s website. The Containment event is currently live in Rainbow Six Siege, adding a special PvP mode based on the upcoming game Rainbow Six Extraction, which releases in January 2022.

Battlefield 2042 developer DICE is holding the shooter’s first technical playtest between August 12 and August 15, VideoGamesChronicle reports. DICE also announced Battlefield 2042’s minimum and recommended system requirements for PC players.

The technical playtest will feature six sessions in total. Five sessions will run for three hours, while the remaining test will run for nine hours.

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DICE originally played to host a playtest in July, but the event was pushed back in order to give the studio time to focus on implementing cross-play.

These playtests will host “a few thousand participants.” If you want to try your luck at registering for EA’s playtesting program, click here.

Here’s the minimum and recommended specs for the Battlefield 2042 playtest on PC. If you’re lagging behind on a processor (particularly if you use Intel hardware), you might want to upgrade to an i7 model.

Minimum specs:

OS: 64-bit Windows 10

Processor (AMD): AMD FX-8350

Processor (Intel): Core i5 6600K

Memory: 8GB

Video Memory: 4GB

Graphics card (AMD): AMD Radeon RX 560

Graphics card (NVIDIA): Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti

DirectX: 12

Online Connection Requirements: 512 KBPS or faster Internet connection

Recommended specs:

OS: 64-bit Windows 10

Processor (AMD): AMD Ryzen 5 3600

Processor (Intel): Intel Core i7 4790

Memory: 16GB

Video Memory: 8GB

Graphics card (AMD): Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060

Graphics card (NVIDIA): AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT

DirectX: 12

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If you’re dead set on playing Battlefield 2042, you can check out the upcoming short film that helps explain the sci-fi setting and why nations are warring against one another. You can also check out our extended thoughts on Battlefield 2042’s Portal mode, which lets you create crazy custom matches, mixing soldiers and equipment from different eras of warfare. Knives vs. Panzer tanks, anyone?

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Joseph Knoop is a writer/producer/medic for IGN.

Ryan Reynolds made waves with this recent Deadpool and Korg crossover. But what about Deadpool and Bambi?

In a new interview with IGN, Reynolds revealed that he pitched a rather dark short film to Disney about an interrogation between the hunter from Bambi and Deadpool. You might be thinking that perhaps Deadpool wants to exact revenge on behalf of Bambi and his mother, but… that’s not the case. In a surprising twist, Reynold’s said this short film would reveal that Deadpool is actually a big fan of the hunter.

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“I wanted to do a short film of Deadpool interrogating the hunter who killed Bambi’s mom,” Reynolds told IGN. “But the whole gist of it is that Deadpool is actually just a huge fan. He’s not interrogating — he just wants to know how he could be the most loathed Disney character in the history of Disney… and of course, Disney was like, ‘well, I don’t think that’s ever going to happen.'”

Reynolds actually pitched this short film to Disney before pitching the Deadpool-Korg collaboration that was technically Deadpool’s first MCU crossover. After his short film was rejected, Reynolds returned to Disney’s pitch table to pitch the Deadpool-Korg piece that would serve as marketing for his upcoming film, Free Guy.

“Then we came back to them — we wrote the Deadpool-Korg piece… and we sent it to them, and they said, ‘yes!’,” Reynolds told IGN. “So, my next call was to Taika and Taika was in. He’s also in Free Guy so it wasn’t that hard… Taika’s an actual genius so I was thrilled to collaborate with him as this kind of character.”

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Reynolds said putting Deadpool and Korg in the same room was “amazing.” Perhaps we’ll see the two cross paths again some time in the MCU. It seems almost certain that we’ll see the two team-up again before we see the Deadpool-Bambi Hunter team-up that Reynolds desires.

For more about Deadpool and Free guy, check out the latest Free Guy spoof that features Deadpool and then watch this IGN exclusive Free Guy clip. Read about how Xbox and Reynolds teamed up to host an NPC awards show and then read about how Reynolds lost the Best NPC Award from Xbox.

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Wesley LeBlanc is a freelance news writer and guide maker for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @LeBlancWes.

Monster Hunter Rise players can now add two more special buddies to their hunting party. Capcom is distributing a Palamute and Palico based on ones used by the Monster Hunter community team.

The Palamute is named Thor, while the Palico is named Mimi. To receive them, first speak to Senri the Mailman in Kamura Village and download the buddies from the Add-on Content menu. After that, talk to Iori the Buddy Handler at the Buddy Plaza and select Hire a Special Buddy to add them to your roster.

These aren’t the only special buddies available right now. Capcom is also distributing a Palamute named Wanogre, who is based on one used by a member of the Monster Hunter Rise development team. You can also receive Wanogre by downloading it from Senri and then hiring it at the Buddy Plaza.

The special buddies arrive shortly after the release of Monster Hunter Rise’s 3.2.0 update, which added the game’s second Capcom Collab Event Quest. This one is a crossover with Okami, giving you a chance to craft layered Palamute armor based on Amaterasu. Here’s a full breakdown on how to get the Okami layered armor.

In other Monster Hunter news, the series’ recent RPG spin-off, Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings of Ruin, is receiving its second free update this week on August 5. The update introduces two new Monstie companions–Hellblade Glavenus and Boltreaver Astalos–as well as a new Co-Op Quest featuring Kulve Taroth.