$1,000,000,000 in 10 Days

Welcome to Lootbox - a weekly newsletter covering the business side of video games.

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What's in this Lootbox?

• 🏍 Fortnite's New Chapter

• 💰 Stealth Mode at Midnight

• 📈 Call of Duty

• 📷 Meme

🏍 Fortnite's New Chapter

In Fortnite's latest chapter, players are being transported to a new realm where they'll encounter The Hulk, Geralt of Rivia, Doom's Doom Slayer, and next-gen graphics and features powered by Unreal Engine 5.1. The season will also introduce dirt bikes, a snowball-rolling mechanic, a Shockwave Hammer, and various other new features. In the Item Shop and Battle Pass, players can unlock

The new Unreal Engine 5.1 promises a significant leap in visual fidelity taking advantage of new technologies such as Lumen for lighting, and Nanite for detailed assets.

Honestly its been pretty interesting to see Fortnite & Unreal Engine evolve together over the last 5 years.

If you want to read more on the tech checkout this blog post here.

If you wanted to checkout the Chapter 4 trailer click here.

💰 Stealth Mode at Midnight

Midnight has emerged from stealth mode, announcing $7.5m in seed funding to build a platform and studio to create web3 games with "never-ending stories".

The firm's CEO, Steve Wade, said the company's goal is to build games for players first, with a web3-based "forging" system creating "true interoperability" and a robust economy. Wade said Midnight's games are designed to be fun without the non-fungible token (NFT) layer, and are aimed at the broadest possible audience. The company was founded in late 2021.

Looks like we're not over the whole web3 thing just yet...

📈 Call of Duty

It's official: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II has shattered all previous sales records for the iconic first-person military shooter franchise.

The game set records when it crossed $800 million in sales just three days after its release, and in just 10 days it raced past the $1 billion mark. This is a truly impressive feat and a testament to the game's popularity and enduring appeal.

I personally played through (most) of the campaign and was shocked at how impressive the game engine was. Like I thought it was better than the Unreal Engine 5.1 demo with Lumen & Nanite. Apparently Infinity Ward has their own proprietary engine known as IW (creative name). You can read about the engine here.

Modern Warfare II + Warzone 2 have been hugely successful launches this quarter for Activision Blizzard, and its worth noting they just soft launched Warzone Mobile in Australia with official launch in 2023.

Would be a shame if... say... the Microsoft acquisition went through and future CoD titles were exclusive to the Xbox ecosystem.

📷 Meme

Thanks for Reading :)

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