There are news reports going around today about how physical sales of Bioware's Anthem is much worse than their previous title, Mass Effect Andromeda. Nearly all these reports are using the two UK sales metrics, as of February 23, to make this claim, stating that Anthem sold less than 50% the physical copies relative of ME Andromeda. This is a story no doubt, but not big enough to where people are claiming this to be the end of the studio by itself. For one, ME Andromeda had the luxury of being the new entry into the massively popular Mass Effect franchise, which many were desperate for more. Secondly, Anthem is a predominantly online game released in 2019 wherein such games tend to get more digital sales- especially on Origin for PC.

The good news for Anthem (and also EA as well as Bioware) is the game still topped both charts, as seen in the images below courtesy Metro UK. It sold more physical copies compared the other new entries last week- Far Cry: New Dawn and Metro Exodus- in the UK, which tends to be representative of the entire physical sales world too. Indeed, Anthem on the two major consoles were individually also the best sellers too, so there remains hope for the game. Despite mediocre reviews and interest online, perhaps this will be enough for continued support of the game post-release, and for Bioware to get enough momentum to push out more games in the future, and ideally more, better single-player games too.

New game releases with newly-revamped Denuvo protection, and new cracked versions of those games - all in less than five days after release. For now, only Metro Exodus is cracked, though the fact that Far Cry New Dawn makes use of the same version does little to inspire confidence in its continued resistance. The tale is becoming older and older, and the question in most anyone's mind is whether there is actually any financial incentive for developers/publishers to go after Denuvo's protections against cheaper option, because it seems that Denuvo is failing to guarantee even that brief time-window that is always brought about when it comes to new game releases.

Most Denuvo-protected games have been cracked in less than a week after release, and things haven't been improving for some time now. Whether or not it makes sense to keep a team of software engineers working on such a product is also a question that would be well-posed to Denuvo. But not only Denuvo and its DRM solutions are falling short, since it seems that Microsoft's own UWP-protected Crackdown 3, which finally released after a very early 2015 reveal, has also been cracked.

The PC requirements for the upcoming Far Cry: New Dawn, a re-invented, re-visited post-apocalyptic interpretation of Far Cry 5's Montana, have been outed by the developer. Ubisoft has taken a Far Cry: Primal approach to development, it seems, and these are usually some of the more experimental Far Cry games (Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon also comes to mind). Read on after the break for the system requirements, but note that Ubisoft hasn't mentioned NVIDIA's new generation of RTX-enabled 2000-series graphics cards.

Ubisoft has announced the latest installment in the Far Cry series. Titled "New Dawn", the new entry will retain the New Montana setting, with a twist: we are now 17 years into the future (with the baseline being the end of Far Cry 5). An apocalyptic event (a global nuclear catastrophe, naturally) has warped humanity's capabilities and way of living, and we'll get to see an all-new, re-skinned New Montana - it seems tons of pink and purple will make a major splash in this post-apocalyptic setting. Think of how Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon swapped over to a red color scheme, and you get the idea.

Overall, the game makes some changes to the overall Far Cry aesthetic. I'm curious to see how much Hope County has changed with the events that happened in-between games, but I'm slightly suspicious of a game within the same setting and with such a short development time - it's sort of a revisit on the Far Cry Primal formula. The new game drops February 15th, 2019.