It's been over a year since Nvidia released its RTX 30 series line of graphics cards. But if you have been keeping up with the news, you'll probably know it is pretty difficult to buy one of these GPUs right now. With the demand high and supply short, one individual has taken to committing a crime just to obtain these desirable graphics cards.

In a new thread on the EVGA forums, Product Manager Jacob Freeman announced that on October 29, a shipment of EVGA GeForce RTX 30-series GPUs was stolen from a truck on its way to the company's Southern California distribution center.

"These graphics cards are in high demand," Freeman notes in the forum post." "[A]nd each has an estimated retail value starting at $329.99 up to $1959.99 MSRP." EVGA tells IGN that it can't comment on the matter as it is an ongoing investigation.

Although Freeman did not mention exactly how many graphics cards were stolen, the post did warn the perpetrator(s) what Federal and state laws they were violating, noting it will not honor any warranty or upgrade claims on anyone who tries to register one of the stolen GPUs. Presumably, because EVGA expects these cards to enter the black market soon.

As graphics cards become more and more desirable for their power and second utility in crypto-mining, GPU makers have had to work extra hard to combat shortages. Unfortunately, desperate times may have driven one individual to desperate measures.

EVGA is also encouraging anyone that may have any information related to the stolen products to email them at stopRTX30theft@evga.com.

lor is the Associate Tech Editor at IGN. You can follow her on Twitter @TayNixster.

An audition for the 2002 live-action Scooby-Doo movie, which James Gunn wrote, led to a role in a high-profile superhero project 20 years later. That's the story of Lochlyn Munro, who will play a detective in Gunn's upcoming Peacemaker TV series.

Munro auditioned to play Shaggy in the first Scooby-Doo movie, a role that ultimately went to Matthew Lillard. But 20 years later Gunn recognized Munro again when he saw the actor's audition tape for a role in Peacemaker.

"I ended up in [Peacemaker] because when [Gunn] saw my tape, he remembered that I was one of his choices for Shaggy," Munro said on The Dave and Creech Show, according to Slash Film. "So, I went in – Obviously, [Matthew] Lillard was the perfect choice for that character. But that's kind of how he went, 'Oh, yeah, I want Lochlyn in this, because I remember he was one of my choices for Scooby-Doo.' Twenty years later, isn't that weird?"

Munro will play a detective named Larry Fitzgibbon in Peacemaker. As Slash Film points out, this is an original character created by Gunn. The character's last name, Fitzgibbon, is a reference to Gunn's "oldest friend" as explained in this Instagram post from Gunn in 2016.

Peacemaker is a spinoff of James Gunn's The Suicide Squad following the psychopathic, patriotic mercenary of the same name played by John Cena. Peacemaker will debut on January 13, 2022, on HBO Max and the first season will consist of eight episodes starring Cena.

Peacemaker will also include another hero named Vigilante. You can read up on Vigilante's abilities and backstory to see how the DC Comics character fits into the DCEU.

Here is everything new on HBO Max in November 2021 including the season 3 finale of Doom Patrol and the Will Smith movie King Richard.

Petey Oneto is a freelance writer for IGN.

The future of Super Smash Bros. hangs in the balance as Masahiro Sakurai contemplates what's next.

In an interview with Japanese publication Famitsu which IGN has independently translated, Sakurai spoke about the development of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and how it could or couldn't continue without him.

"I’m not thinking about a sequel,” Sakurai told Famitsu following the release of Sora, the final Super Smash Bros. Ultimate DLC character. And while Sakurai says he was never thinking about a sequel during development, he also "can't say this is definitely the last Smash Bros."

But even if a team decides to develop a new Smash Bros. game, Sakurai admits that he "can't see any way right now to produce Smash Bros. without me."

Super Smash Bros. is Nintendo's ambitious fighting game series that pits iconic Nintendo characters against each other. In recent entries, Super Smash Bros. has brought in famous guest characters like Ryu, Cloud, and most recently Sora.

Nintendo traditionally has had a Super Smash Bros. entry for every one of its major consoles since the Nintendo 64. However, what direction will the series go after the Nintendo Switch's lifecycle? Will there continue to be new entries and characters, or will Ultimate simply be ported over and over again?

For now, though, Sakurai is taking a much-deserved rest.

Just because Sakurai announced the end of his involvement with Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. doesn't mean he will stop making other games in the future. He was the designer for Kid Icarus: Uprising on Nintendo 3DS, after all.

For more on the end of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate read about how the final DLC fighter, Sora, eventually made his way into the game.

George Yang is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @yinyangfooey

Netflix's live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender series has found its Fire Lord. Daniel Dae Kim, who's known for appearing in Lost and Hawaii Five-O, will play Ozai, the ruler of the Fire Nation and father to Zuko and Azula, in the live-action adaptation.

Kim has previous experience in the world of Avatar, voicing General Fond in one episode of the original show and a video game adaptation.

“I do have the power. I have all the power in the world!”

Netflix’s live action Avatar: The Last Airbender has found its Fire Lord Ozai: Daniel Dae Kim (Lost, Hawaii Five-0) pic.twitter.com/9zYxVuiSLo

— Netflix Geeked (@NetflixGeeked) November 3, 2021

Netflix says Kim is joining the series as a regular, and says his character, "demands everyone live up to his impossible standards, especially his teenaged son, Prince Zuko. Ozai’s drive to conquer and unite the world under firebender rule is a family burden—he believes that it’s his destiny to finish a war started by his ancestors."

We learned the main cast for Netflix's Avatar earlier this year, which includes Gordon Cormier as Aang, Kiawentiio as Katara, Ian Ousley as Sokka, and Dallas Liu as Zuko.

Netflix first announced the live-action adaptation in 2018, when Avatar creators Bryan Konietzko and Michael DiMartino were on board to helm the series. However, the original creators left last year due to creative differences with Netflix. Now, Albert Kim is serving as the project's showrunner, alongside The Lego Movie's Dan Lin, Walker's Lindsey Liberatore, and Swamp Thing's Michael Goi.

This live-action project is far from the only Avatar project in the works. Nickelodeon has revealed plans to create an Avatar Airbender universe with multiple series and shows with the original creators. The first project is set to be an animated theatrical film. We also recently learned that a new Square Enix studio is working on an Avatar mobile game.

Logan Plant is a freelance writer for IGN. You can find him on Twitter @LoganJPlant.

(Photo by Rich Fury/Getty Images)

Marvel's Avengers hasn't had the warmest reputation since it launched last year, but now we've got some words from Square Enix's president about its own internal reception.

In Square Enix's annual report for 2021, president Yosuke Matsuda says that Marvel's Avengers was an ambitious GaaS (Games as a Service) release. However, Avengers was not as successful as the company would have liked.

"We overcame a variety of unexpected difficulties in the final phase of the game’s development, including needing to transition to work-from-home due to the pandemic. We were able to surmount these challenges and release the game, but it has unfortunately not proven as successful as we would have liked," Matsuda says.
Matsuda said Square Enix would learn from its experience with Avengers and work to produce games that "mesh with the unique attributes and tastes of our studios and development teams."

"Nonetheless, taking on the GaaS model highlighted issues that we are likely to face in future game development efforts such as the need to select game designs that mesh with the unique attributes and tastes of our studios and development teams," said Matsuda. "While the new challenge that we tackled with this title produced a disappointing outcome, we are certain that the GaaS approach will grow in importance as gaming becomes more service oriented."

While Matsuda doesn't outright say it, it looks like he thinks that Crystal Dynamics's pedigree and particular skillset just didn't mesh well with the GaaS service model of Marvel's Avengers. After all, the studio is best known for single-player games like its Tomb Raider reboot. The developer is also working with The Initiative on the Perfect Dark reboot, another presumably single-player game.

As if this revelation wasn't bad enough, yesterday Crystal Dynamics removed paid XP boosters from the game's in-game marketplace after fan backlash, apologizing that it didn't listen sooner.

George Yang is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @yinyangfooey

Update: According to a Bloomberg report, the unannounced game in question was being developed by Mafia 3 studio Hangar 13 and was code-named Volt.

The report goes on to say that the game had been in development since 2017, and had troubles with reboots, technological hiccups, and COVID-19. The studio's employees will meet to discuss next steps on Thursday.

Update 4:03pm PT: A Kotaku report has provided a few more details about the canceled title, saying it was a third-person action title similar to Destiny, and was canceled because Take-Two determined the costs of development were too high compared to the game's commercial viability.

“We are confident that there are many opportunities for H13 employees to work on other games in development, both at H13 and across the label," wrote studio head Haden Blackman in an email to staff today. “2K has also assured me that the company believes H13 can deliver a critical and commercial success, and we will begin developing future projects soon.”

Approximately 200 people are impacted by the game's cancellation, Kotaku reports.

Original story:

Games get canceled all the time, and while we occasionally hear about them via official announcements or reporting, more often they are canceled before they ever reach the news. We got a rare glimpse into the process during Take-Two's earnings today, which revealed that an unannounced game cancellation cost the company $53 million.

The company cites the cancellation in its earnings as part of an "impairment charge," which in releases like these means that the company had assets that it now finds are unexpectedly worth a whole lot less than they previously valued them at. For example, say GameStop buys a lot of amiibo, expecting to sell them for a certain amount of money. Then, sudddenly, Nintendo cancels amiibo support for its games and no one wants to buy those amiibo anymore. GameStop might report an impairment charge on its amiibo for the amount of money it expects to lose by putting them on heavy discount just to get them out of its warehouse.

In Take-Two's case, this effectively means that it spent about $53 million on a game it was making, but no longer expects to be able to do anything sellable with the things it spent that money on.

When reached for comment, Take-Two declined to give further detail as to what the canceled game was. Though the earnings indicated the title was unannounced, one possibility is that it could have been the long-hoped-for Bully 2, though there's no evidence to confirm this. Another possibility is Agent, a Cold War espionage thriller that did get originally announced at E3 2009. Its website was shut down just last month without any explanation. It also appears to have been deleted from Rockstar's games section on its website, and its trademark was abandoned in 2018.

Whatever the case, $53 million is a hefty amount to lose on a game, even if it is just a fraction of what the company makes in a quarter (in this case, $985 million in net bookings). It's also a not-insignificant chunk of what it takes to make some of Take-Two's biggest titles. Borderlands 3, for instance, is said to have cost around $95 million to make, plus $140 million for its DLC — though it was reportedly massively over budget.

Whatever it was, Take-Two still has plenty more games on deck for the next few years, and has repeatedly given guidance that it's ramping up game production, including on "immersive core" releases similar to 2K sports titles and GTA 5. So even if we've lost one game we never knew we had, there are many, many more games queued up to take its place.

Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.

Take-Two, the parent company behind Rockstar, 2K, and Private Division, appears to be cooking up something big.

For the last year and change, they've been telling shareholders to expect a significant, hefty release slate down the pipeline, promising last fiscal year a total of 93 games in the coming five years, and more recently outlining its plans for a slate of "immersive core releases" over the next three years.

During today's earnings call, Take-Two continued to lay out expectations in a similar manner. Between April of 2022 and March of 2024, it's preparing over 60 new releases: 23 "immersive core" titles, similar to its 2K sports games, GTA, and Red Dead Redemption; six games from its independent game publishing label, Private Division; 20 mobile games, four "mid-core" games that are either arcade titles like WWE Battlegrounds or just generally smaller in scope than, say, GTA; and nine games that are either ports or remasters.

That's a significant uptick from what Take-Two has produced in the past, specifically in the immersive core department. In recent years, Take-Two has largely produced a few big games per year, mostly annual 2K releases and then, sporadically, a GTA or Red Dead. On average, to get to 23 in that time frame, it would need to produce seven to eight big blockbuster games each year of that period. That's a lot of GTAs.

We can see the very beginnings of this in Take-Two's current upcoming slate, which had NBA 2K22 out in September, WWE 2K22 set for March, and Tiny Tina's Wonderlands also in March. Looking into next year, we know about Midnight Suns (which just got delayed into the second half of 2022) and Kerbal Space Program 2 planned for fiscal 2023 (which Take-Two is counting as immersive core despite being under the Private Division label). It's also a fairly safe bet to expect the company to keep bringing out NBA 2K and WWE 2K games on a fairly regular basis, and there's an NFL game in the works that's been delayed past March of 2022 (though that may fall under the "arcade" banner).

A look at Take-Two's investor slide presentation shows how they're preparing for this cascade. On a slide showing new hire numbers by fiscal year, Take-Two shows that from 2012 to 2017, it was only hiring a few hundred people per year. But in 2017, it jumped to hiring around 700 folks, and in 2019 and 2020 it hired a similar amount. Today's earnings report included the detail that Take-Two brought in 350 new developers in this quarter alone, not including more senior hires, and in a conversation with IGN, CEO Strauss Zelnick said Take-Two was now somewhere around 7,200 employees strong worldwide. As of it's 2020 annual report, the company was at about 5,800 — that's a 1,400 person jump since March of last year, and during a global pandemic too.

Take-Two certainly has the resources for this surge. It's experienced consistent growth in its net bookings year after year, and expects to do so again in the current fiscal year. Just this last quarter, it brought in $985 million in net bookings. That's only up 3% year-over-year. But when you consider that it's been able to sustain net bookings growth since the release of Red Dead Redemption 2, that's fairly significant.

Meanwhile, GTA V continues to sell absurd quantities — another five million in the last quarter, bringing it to 155 million units sold total over its lifetime — alongside Red Dead Redemption 2 (39 million total) and NBA 2K22 (five million total). Even smaller titles like The Outer Worlds (four million total) are doing very well for it. It's enough that the company raised its earnings projections for the full year today, despite delaying a massive Marvel game into next fiscal year — a move that would normally see projections take a hit.

All this put together makes it apparent that we're about to see a big ramp-up of game announcements from Take-Two, most likely beginning sometime next year if everything is to be marketed in time to make these projections come true. While plenty of those big releases are likely to be 2K Sports titles and possibly more adventurous new ideas like Midnight Suns and Tiny Tina's Wonderlands, rumors continue to swirl about GTA 6 — a game that would certainly fit in with the "immersive core" description.

Fortunately for fans, the GTA Trilogy Definitive Edition is coming up later this month, keeping the hope alive for now.

Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.

The official Twitter account for EA Sports PGA Tour announced today that the game has been delayed, promising an update will follow in the coming months.

"Hey golf fans, we wanted to let you know that we are shifting the launch date of EA Sports PGA Tour," the Tweet reads. "We're excited to bring championship golf to you and will be providing more information on our launch plans in the coming months."

pic.twitter.com/RjIEpQZBSL

— EA SPORTS PGA TOUR (@EASPORTSPGATOUR) November 3, 2021

EA first announced the title in March and it was slated for release in spring 2022. Described as a "next-gen" golf game, the title would allow players to compete in the Masters, the PGA Championship, the U.S. Open Championship, and the Open Championship. It will be the first title released as part of a new deal between EA and the PGA Tour and the first new game using that license since 2015's Rory McIlroy PGA Tour.

While the game will allow players to challenge many professional golfers, they won't be able to play Tiger Woods since he has an exclusive deal with 2K that placed him in PGA Tour 2K21, which released in August. His contract with EA ended in 2013, which also resulted in the end of the Tiger Woods’ PGA Tour series.

Save for a few shots of the courses it will support, EA has revealed little of its new PGA Tour game since its original announcement. It's being touted as a "next-gen golf game," with a firm release date yet to be announced.

Samantha Nelson is an IGN freelance writer. Find her on Twitter @samanthanelson1.

As a part of its second-quarter earnings announcement today, Take-Two Interactive announced that Firaxis' upcoming Marvel strategy game, Marvel's Midnight Suns, is being delayed into the second half of next year.

This isn't a massive bump as the Midnight Suns was previously planned for March 2022. Now, it's looking at somewhere between July and December of that year. In a press release, the company implied that the delay was connected at least in part to increases in the difficulty of making games as technology has improved.

As it becomes possible to make bigger and more technologically interesting games, those games are also tougher and take longer to make.

"While we don’t take delays lightly, we know that our proven success has been rooted firmly in our 'player-first' approach and unwavering commitment to delivering the highest quality entertainment experiences," reads the press release. "We believe it is far better to provide the extra time needed for a product – especially a new IP – to reach its full potential and drive long-term success as a permanent franchise in our industry-leading portfolio."

Firaxis' Twitter account provided a similar statement moments prior:

We have an important development update to share with our fans pic.twitter.com/ycNDCVtbwD

— Marvel's Midnight Suns (@midnightsuns) November 3, 2021

In a conversation with IGN, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick added a bit more detail about why Take-Two, 2K, and Firaxis opted for the delay:

"We think it needs more development time to be everything it can be," he said. "What we're known for doing is supplying the time and the resources so that the creative talent that's taken a big chance by coming to work at our company always has not only the ability to pursue their passions but every possible asset in service of allowing them to pursue their passions, and that's what generates the highest-quality titles in the business, for which we're known.

"We couldn't be more excited about the title. We don't love when we have to slip a title. It's not that common for us; it's been very uncommon in past years. This is a situation where we thought it made sense, and therefore we stand behind it."

Notably, despite Midnight Suns moving out of Take-Two's current fiscal year and into the next one, the company actually raised its projections for this year from between $3.2 billion and $3.3 billion in net bookings to between $3.3 billion and $3.4 billion, in part thanks to its second-quarter net bookings of $985 million – well above its expectations.

Marvel's Midnight Suns was revealed back in August, playing into Firaxis' strategy game strengths as a tactical XCOM-like with a customizable protagonist fighting alongside superpowered heroes like Iron Man, Captain Marvel, and Wolverine against large numbers of enemies. It will include destructible environments, but no permadeath like in the XCOM series.

Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.

Insomniac Games' spectacular 2018 game Spider-Man was originally meant to end with the hero and Doctor Octopus fighting all across New York City.

Insomniac CEO Ted Price revealed the original boss fight plans at last week's Develop: Brighton conference per GamesIndustry.biz. But the scope of the finale the studio envisioned couldn't be realized without resorting to crunch, which would clash with the company's goals of increasing employee wellbeing and reducing burnout.

"The temptation is to just brute force it, put our heads down and run through the brick wall," Price said. "But the team took a step back and thought about what was important to the players, and that was the breakdown of the relationship between Peter and his former mentor, Doctor Octavius."

The fight was ultimately a one vs. one battle between Spider-Man and Doc Ock atop a Manhattan building. The team scaled back its ambitions and Price said the decision didn't just help the developers but improved the game itself.

"They rethought the fight and realized they didn't need to destroy half of New York to pay off the relationship," Price said. "In fact, it would have worked against what we were going for. As a result, the final battle is much more up close and personal, and has a far bigger emotional impact than planned — and it fit within the time we had."

Price urged other developers to seriously consider what players want and how they can deliver the best experience with the resources they have rather than pushing employees to their limits.

"In the stress of hectic production, we often feel we can't take our foot off the gas pedal — but that's often what it takes," he said. "The team needs to have permission to pause and come up with a better way, instead of bulldozing through the problems and causing potential health problems."

Insomniac is currently working on Marvel's Spider-Man 2, which the team says will be "darker" than the last two Spider-Man games, including Spider-Man: Miles Morales. Furthermore, Insomniac is also working on a Wolverine game to add to its Marvel bonafide.

Samantha Nelson is a freelance writer for IGN. Follow her on Twitter @samanthanelson1.