The return of Call of Duty: Warzone's original map, Verdansk, appears to be doing its job of driving players back to the game, on Steam at least. On Steam, Warzone and Black Ops 6 are packaged together inside the overarching "Call of Duty" launcher--and player numbers are spiking.Call of Duty surged past 114,000 concurrent players on Steam today, April 3, following the re-introduction of Verdansk to Warzone for the first time since December 2021. This is the highest player count for Call of Duty in 2025 so far. It's still well below the all-time peak of 491,670 players from November 2022, however. At 114,000+ concurrent players, Call of Duty is the No. 8 most popular game on Steam at press time.Warzone itself is a free-to-play game, but it's not listed as such on Steam because it's part of the Call of Duty launcher that includes paid titles like Black Ops 6. It's not clear how many of the 110,000+ people playing Call of Duty on Steam are playing Warzone. Also unknown is how Warzone is performing on Xbox and PlayStation since the reintroduction of Verdansk.Continue Reading at GameSpot...
Following the announcement of Mario Kart World this week for the Switch 2, Nintendo showed off even more gameplay footage during a Treehouse Live event, and more information about the game has come to light.Social media user BearUNLV clipped a segment from the broadcast that shows the Mario Kart World character-select screen. There are three rows of four characters on one page for a total of 12, with seven tabs shown at the bottom of the screen. If each tab has 12 characters, this suggests there are a whopping 84 characters in Mario Kart World.A subsequent video from IGN runs through the characters and costumes, featuring 60 in all, including costume variants like Gondolier Luigi and Yakuta Peach. The IGN video features five tabs as opposed to seven tabs in the official Nintendo video.Continue Reading at GameSpot...
Nintendo Switch 2's C button was a late addition, with a new interview stating it was added following a "very last-minute request."The Nintendo Switch 2 Joy-Con 2's mysterious C button sparked debate ahead of the Switch 2 Nintendo Direct, where it was revealed to be a dedicated button for the console's Discord-like GameChat feature. In a series of developer interviews posted on Nintendo's website diving into various aspects of the Switch 2's creation, Sumikazu Ono, a member of Nintendo's entertainment planning and development department, said the C button came as a result of making sure the GameChat feature was easy to use.He said he thought the idea of having to pause the game and go to the home screen, find the right menu, make a chat room, and then return to the game (the way basically every other modern video game console does it) was "bothersome." That resulted in the idea of the C button.Continue Reading at GameSpot...