Fortnite: How to get V-Bucks without buying them in the shop

V-Bucks are required to purchase the fancy skins in the Fortnite: Battle Royale item shop on PC, PS4 and Xbox One. But you don't have to spend money to get the in-game currency. We show you how to get V-Bucks for the Battle Royale-Mode for free!

V-Buck Gift Card

What are V-Bucks? V-Bucks are the real money currency in Fortnite. In PvE mode, you can use them to buy lamas that contain various items that will help you move forward in the game. In Battle Royale mode, V-Bucks are required to purchase cosmetic items.

As a pure Battle Royale player, it's not easy. V-Bucks can hardly be earned by normal playing. Although the Battle Pass drops some V-Bucks, if you don't pay any Bucks for the pass, the amount is minimal.

Fortnite: Prices to buy V Bucks in the shop for PC, PS4, Xbox One

You can buy the skins, gliders and harvesting tools with real money, but in many cases, this is quite expensive. A legendary skin burns a hole in your wallet for 2,000 V-Bucks or the equivalent of 20 euros when you buy V-Bucks in the shop for real money.

The prices are

  • 1000 V-Bucks (10 Euro)
  • 2800 V-Bucks (25 Euro)
  • 7500 V-Bucks (60 Euro)
  • 13500 V-Bucks (100 Euro)

There are 2 Major ways to get free V-

Bucks. The first one is to win them through giveaways and sweepstakes. Be aware o

f scams on this one. Luckily there is one website out there which combats both problems, the demand for giveaways and teaching a younger audience about the dangers of online scams. 

( Collapse )

Red Dead Redemption 2: Second most successful game of the year in British retail sector

Red Dead Redemption is back!

Last Friday Red Dead Redemption 2 was released for Playstation 4 and Xbox One. According to the latest news, the new Rockstar Games title is already the second most successful title in British retail, which of course only counts physical sales and no digital versions.


It's no surprise to most players that the new Red Dead Redemption 2 from Rockstar Games is also a huge success in retail sales of physical copies. The new title has already achieved the second best sales launch of the previous year in Great Britain - only the football simulation FIFA 19 was even more successful.


RDR2: More successful than Call of Duty: Black Ops 4


Somewhat strange is that there are no exact figures on actual sales, only comparisons with other games. Red Dead Redemption 2 is said to have sold twice as much in retail as its 2010 predecessor. This is remarkable because digital sales play a much bigger role today than they did eight years ago.


In addition, Red Dead Redemption 2 is said to have achieved the best start of a game for Playstation 4 and Xbox One that is not a FIFA or Call of Duty title. But Call of Duty: WW2 and the new Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 are said to have been beaten anyway. Only to the largest success from own house Red Dead Redemption 2 does not come near, because Grand Theft Auto 5 was bought in the first week directly two million times in the retail trade. According to Eurogamer, RDR2 is far away from this.


( Collapse )

Will this graphics chip change the gaming world?

Nvidia presented three new graphics cards at Gamescom: the RTX 2070, RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti. The cards are based on the new Turing architecture and are designed to advance ray tracing technology. I will show you what Ray-Tracing is all about and what the new graphics cards can do.

Nvidia brings professional ray tracing to the consumer market

The biggest innovation in RTX graphics cards is support for ray tracing - a technology that calculates light distribution in real time and makes games look more like movies with more realistic shadows and cinematic effects. 

The technology is often used in computer-generated image (CGI) films and series because it produces very lifelike and lifelike results. 

It has been under discussion in the gaming world for a long time, but has not yet been realized due to the high hardware requirements. With the RTX 2000 graphics cards, it is now available to the general public for the first time.


Ray-Tracing is made possible by Nvidia's new Turing graphics architecture, which uses a new calculation model. Until now, graphics cards have used rasterization to simulate the behavior of light. It calculates 3D environments from back to front in layers, obscuring objects further forward. Rasterization cannot therefore track the light itself and how it is reflected by the objects. 

( Collapse )

"FIFA 19" vs "PES 2019" - which football game is better?

Just in time for the start of the new Bundesliga season, the next big duel in the gaming world will begin- "FIFA 19" against "Pro Evolution Soccer 2019". And as every year, fans passionately discuss which football game is better. 

I have mixed opinions about these 2 games. Over the years, both versions have changed considerably and the annual updates are now in the starting blocks: "PES 2019" will be released on 20 August, "FIFA 19" will follow on 25 September. 

Who is ahead this year? Here is my first impressions of the Gamescom games fair, where I played a few multiplayer matches of each game.


Pro Evolution Soccer 2019


As with "FIFA", the same applies to the annual "PES" update: the changes are in the details. In 2014, Konami completely changed the graphics engine to make stadiums and player faces look more realistic. The whole game system was radically redesigned, it took some version numbers until the game feeling was round again.


Even though some fans suffered from the rebuilding and switched to "FIFA": The 2019 version of "PES" shows that the switch to Konami's Fox Engine has paid off: The ball physics are great, the animations are as soft as butter and the stadiums with their light effects and shadows are a feast for the eyes. 

( Collapse )

No new apps for Windows 8

Microsoft has announced that it will not release new apps for Windows 8.x and Windows Phone 8.x from November 2018. Submissions from developers will also no longer be accepted.

Microsoft is slowly but surely saying goodbye to Windows 8.x, a rather unpopular child of the Windows family. In a blog post, the company announced that app support for Windows 8.x and Windows Phone 8.x will be discontinued from November.

Specifically, Microsoft does not plan to accept any more submissions for new apps from external developers as of October 31, 2018. However, the latter still have the option of publishing updates for existing applications.

The Beginning of the end?

Starting July 1, 2019, Microsoft will not ship any further app updates for Windows Phone 8.x or below. App updates will then only be made accessible to users of Windows 10 devices. Finally, Microsoft will also stop distributing app updates for Windows 8.1 from July 1, 2023, which will then only be available for Windows 10 users.

With this announcement, Microsoft is taking a further step away from Windows 8 and towards Windows 10, and as the official update times show, since January 9, 2018 there have only been updates for Windows 8 for critical vulnerabilities as part of extended support.

The deadline for this extended support ends on January 10, 2023 in the case of Windows 8; users of Windows 7 will be confronted with this earlier: With this operating system, extended support will only run until January 14, 2020.

What happened to the duel Xbox One vs. PlayStation 4?

Analysis of the success of the PlayStation 4 and Microsoft's (non-)success with Xbox One.

We are in the eighth generation of consoles and somehow everything is different from the generation before. The Xbox 360 was many years more successful than the PlayStation 3.

Sony did everything right with the PlayStation 4, but the Xbox One is far behind. Nintendo's success with the switch gives the Xbox One the rest.

The success of the PlayStation 4

The PlayStation 4 is about to beat every seventh-generation console in sales. After all, more than 70 million consoles have been sold to gamers on the planet so far. Of course, the success of PlayStation 2 (155 million units sold) is not in sight, because this generation of consoles will not last that long. But the PlayStation one with 103 million copies sold is within reach. To refer to the seventh generation: The PlayStation 3 sold "only" 87 million times in its lifetime, the Xbox 360 an estimated 85 million times.

"Cover-up" on the Xbox One sales figures

On the other hand, the Xbox One - which we would now like to discuss in more detail. For the Microsoft console, there are no more official sales figures on the part of the Redmond company for a long time. 

They don't talk about it anymore. According to NDP Group figures, Xbox One has sold an estimated 35 million units worldwide. Japan is certainly not the hot spot, but the Xbox One and its "upgrade console", the Xbox One X, is also struggling in Europe. 

( Collapse )

Why old games are better than new games

Today's games are huge, detailed, expensive, becoming more and more realistic graphically, seem endless through hundreds of quests and hours of play, and have a huge community behind them that meet in the multiplayer game.

You can spend hours riding across the prairie, driving across an entire state or chasing criminals through Bolivia without even fulfilling a mission. But why can't games today capture the flair of games from 10 or 20 years ago to stay in our memories?

The past vs. today - a striking difference

There is a small but subtle difference between new and old games that can make game worlds fall into oblivion or burn them into your memory: The minimap or the navigation device!

In Gothic from 2001, the place where you had to solve a quest was described in detail. You had to remember exactly who the client was, where the described place was and where the client was again. 

That is, games were a cognitive challenge for gamers, which even trained the brain. Unlike today's agents. 

One is led bluntly from A to B to nameless conversation partners with an arrow over the head, so that one does not overlook them. You don't know where the person you are looking for, the cave or any other place is. Instead, a short sentence in the sense of "do something" with no less information and the player immediately knows where to go and what to do. 

( Collapse )