Following in the footsteps of our friends in Australia, the British government is getting ready to ban under-16s from accessing social media—specifically Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, X and Facebook. The ban is expected to be enforced by spring 2027.

"Social media is making children unhappy, it’s making it easier for bullies to harass and abuse them, and it could even be harming their mental health," Prime Minister Keir Starmer said during the announcement of the ban.

As extremely online former teenagers ourselves, some of whom are now parents, we've got some thoughts on the ban.

Fraser Brown, Online Editor

I stopped using social media several years ago. I kicked Facebook to the curb after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and I got out of Twitter when it refused to take action against Trump's deployment of misinformation and fascist propaganda, before it was purchased by Musk. I will occasionally use Linkedin and YouTube for work, but that's it.

Social media is a curse. Rather than being a tool for sharing information and uniting disparate people across the globe, it's just found new ways to divide us, radicalising children and adults alike. Social media tramples on the truth and makes everyone using it dangerously stupid. I am not a fan.

But the British government's solution is not going to work. Children are among social media's most vulnerable, malleable users, but we keep seeing how it's used to indoctrinate adults just as effectively. During the Brexit campaign, it was adults being targeted by political lies, not children. Kids aren't to blame for the tragic state of affairs the country now finds itself in.

Instead of punishing children, the government needs to target the source. People like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. The rich assholes who think they are untouchable need to start paying for the damage they cause. These companies need to be bled dry. Social media will never improve unless they are forced to dramatically change how they work, and the only way to do that is by fining them into oblivion if they don't.

Harvey Randall, Staff Writer

"Think of the children!" one might cry in response to the idea that the UK's incoming social media ban for under-16s—or indeed the catastrophically boneheaded, hobby forum-snuffing, privacy-violating Online Safety Act—is ill-advised. The issue is, absolutely no-one involved is actually doing that.

Children are smarter than you give them credit for. They're more technologically literate than the adults in the room, too. All legislation like this does is push them to shadier sites where they're out of sight, out of mind, and far more vulnerable than a properly-moderated social media website or an actually-informed parent population would make them.

The issue is enforcement, something the UK government has given me absolutely zero faith it'll be able to do sensibly or with any actual understanding of how this shit works. Mark me: They will mess it up. It'll be easy to get around. They'll do embarrassing news interviews where they try to tether adults verifying their age with the safety of children, and it'll be exactly as condescending now as it was back then.

And look: I don't think social media's good for our brains, it's why I barely use it, but cutting under-16s off from a world they are right to be disenfranchised by doesn't smack me as a great way to make them feel more connected to it. We used to tell kids to be careful online, now we're asking everybody to open their mouth for the camera so Palantir can know what our teeth look like. For the children, of course. For the children.

The reason social media is rotten for kids is because it's rotten for everybody. We've sat idly by while tech giants have made a torment nexus of misinformation and division that's literally built to make you angry and scared and tired—and we could do something about that, sure, but we aren't. And we're shocked that under-16s are a little messed up? We're the example we're setting for them, and we're doing a terrible job of behaving ourselves.

Rory Norris, Guides Writer

You'd be naive to underestimate the potential negative effects of various social media on children and young adults—hell, even full adults, as Fraser rightly points out. Still, a full-on ban and curfews aren't a nuanced solution to a nuanced situation.

I'm not a regular user of most social media. I don't care for Facebook. I use Instagram to chat with friends. I mainly use X for work. But YouTube, which I don't necessarily consider a social media in the same vein, is a substantial part of my day.

I wouldn't be where I am or who I am without it. My interest in media, specifically games, was fuelled by watching let's plays years ago, and now video essays—how else am I supposed to learn how the rivers work in Skyrim? This can lead to careers, as it has for me, or (to name a few) creators like MrRolfWaffles (who has spoken on the topic) and Kane Parsons, who was 16 years old when he created The Backrooms for his YouTube channel, Kane Pixels. Now 20, Parsons has become the youngest director in history to get a number one film at the box office.

This touches on a very important aspect of the platform. YouTube is, in many ways, an educational tool. Sure, there are plenty of bad apples, but I'd argue this is something the platform should be pressured into controlling and providing people with more rigorous controls over their algorithms, rather than a government crackdown.

I grew up watching VSauce's science videos. I remember using YouTube to revise for my GCSE and A-level exams. For one reason or another, I don't think I'd have managed without it growing up. This generation will be forced to.

Dave James, Hardware Dad

Control and regulation has failed, so the UK government is attempting the last desperate thing left to it, an almost impossible-to-enforce ban on social media for the under-16s. And honestly I'm a little conflicted. I disengaged with social media a decade ago, and will be passing my feelings on to my kids as they grow up. Though I will need to prepare for the inevitable desire to rebel against me.

This proposed ban, alongside the Online Safety Act, relies heavily on third-party age verification outfits, and that means you are giving a whole bunch of different people the keys to your personal details. And that means a lot of points of failure and opportunities for bad actors to get in-between and make off with a ton of sensitive, and powerful information, such as your image and passport information.

There are better ways to do this age verification stuff, such as zero knowledge proofs (ZKP). As Jacob spoke about in his piece on age verification's privacy nightmare last year, ZKP is a cryptographic method of providing proof of something without actually handing over specific data in that transaction. The idea is that you hold onto all your data on your device, and then that generates a proof token for the places that need it.

Basically, I feel it needs to be implemented in a more considered way.

OK, but that's actually just how it will impact those trying to navigate the restrictions they will now need to bypass to access their social media accounts, but what about the children? I'm a dad of a couple of young boys, both inevitably very tech literate for their age given what I do, but also both kept very much at arm's length from anything actually online.

Is this ban really going to keep them from finding a place or platform online where their friends are all gathering? No, probably not. But it's my job as their dad to explain the dangers of both and hope I can raise them to be smart and sensitive enough to understand why there is a need to step up and take the social media companies to task. They will find other digital playgrounds, and they will need to be just as prepared for the dangers there, too. As there's no proposed restriction in place for Signal or Whatsapp there will still be easy access to cyberbullying for everyone.

So, I guess my take is that this ban doesn't really change anything at all. In my role as a father of young kids, it is still my responsibility to make sure they're given all the information they need to make sure they can stay safe online and can understand where the dangers lie in the different platforms they may or may not interact with. As it was when they could freely access social media without being asked to hand over valuable private information to potentially unregulated age verification outfits.

Elie Gould, Staff Writer

Bans like this don't work. Take the similar restriction levied in Australia for example: research states that over 60% of teenagers are still using social media. This should surprise no one, not when the workarounds are just so easy.

As someone who grew up in the early days of the internet I know all too well just how easy it is to bypass restrictions. I also know that when kids are backed into a corner, they'll go to any lengths to do whatever they want; this rebellion will often land them on sites which are considerably worse than those they would initially browse.

But again it shouldn't really come as a surprise to anyone that this ban likely won't make kids safer. It's just not what it's meant to do. The onus should be on the platform to regulate and restrict harmful content, and platforms should be heavily penalised for not policing themselves effectively, and the billionaires who profit off it should be forced to cough up some of the money they made from selling this addictive substance. But this ban shifts the responsibility. Now platforms can point their finger at children and parents who simply don't know better and blame them when their child inevitably encounters egregious content.

Let me be clear, I don't think children should be on social media; I don't think anyone should. Sure, those cat videos are funny, but not when it comes at the cost of rewiring the dopamine centre of your brain. But this ban is insincere in its aims, lets platforms off the hook, and will likely only make protecting children harder.

Due to the memory pricing crisis that its own AI ambitions are helping cause, Microsoft does not know how to sell a new Xbox that feels cutting-edge at a price that regular people can afford.

The next Xbox, codenamed Helix, will have "leading-end performance," new Xbox boss Asha Sharma said in a recent interview with Fortune, but I'm left wondering how Microsoft defines that, because everything else she said downplays its likely technical capabilities.

What the console business needs, Sharma said, is "new business models" rather than "just the most premium, high-performance console in the world."

"I think we've reached a point where it will be hard to imagine that mass audiences can afford thousands of dollars to spend on a console generation," she said. "So I think we will see radically different business models that we never expected come into orbit later this year."

It's an astonishing place we're in. Consumer devices always involve compromises for the sake of affordability, but this is the first time I can remember a tech company lowering expectations for its next big gadget so dramatically.

Sharma went on to say that Microsoft will "have to think very differently about storage and memory going forward."

"We will have to apply new techniques so that we can compress [games]," the Xbox CEO said. "We will have to empower customers to have very flexible storage offerings. We will have to empower new types of games so that they can fit on-device."

There are outlines of ideas there, but Xbox has already done "flexible storage options," and what it means to "empower new types of games so that they can fit on-device" is anyone's guess. (Are they going to put "Now with smaller games!" on the box?)

As for "new business models," perhaps Microsoft will offer financing? A rent-to-own plan?

Another guess is that we're talking about cloud streaming. It's not strictly new—RIP Stadia—but it fits in well with big tech's AI obsession. At a GDC session I attended in March, Nvidia DLSS pioneer Bryan Catanzaro said that "AI is fundamentally much more efficient in the cloud." That's a useful premise if you want to move toward a world where games are served like Netflix shows and at-home devices can get by with less RAM and SSD space.

For now, it's clear that Microsoft is still trying to figure out what to do about this self-inflicted problem. The challenge faced by Xbox was reiterated today in an open letter to employees with no specific plan laid out to solve it.

"We are currently unable to make as many consoles as players want to buy, and we need a new business model and partnerships for hardware as we remain committed to Helix," Sharma wrote in the letter.

It'd be funnier that the AI true believers are doing this to themselves if they weren't screwing up everything else, too. I don't really care whether the next Xbox is loaded up with RAM, and I don't need my next PC to render perfect photorealistic graphics—but it'd be nice if it were at least affordable. Valve still hasn't told us what its new Steam Machines will cost, but it doesn't bode well that a 1TB Steam Deck now goes for $950.

I have no doubt that PC gamers will find a way to keep doing what we do, but there may be a long cold winter ahead, so safeguard that DDR5.

After a couple months in beta, an update to the Steam store has rolled out for all users. It adds new sections like a personalized release calendar, tweaks existing features like the "popular upcoming" list, and displays higher-resolution game art, among other things.

In my experience, the default reaction when a piece of software or a website updates its design is to be pissed off, and indeed, some people are pissed off. In the comments on the update post, there's more than one instance of the phrase "hot garbage," and one person declared that the new design is "revolting" and that they don't want to use Steam at all anymore. Geez.

Plenty of others say they're happy with it. I think it's fine! In thinking about it, I was struck by how not-mad I am whenever Steam updates the store or client. I curse Photoshop daily for not working like it did in 2005, and if it were possible to strangle UI elements, I'd squeeze the life out of every AI button that gets in my way. But Steam—it's always been fine!

My colleagues don't entirely agree. Wes Fenlon wrote in 2024 that he was experiencing an existential crisis after Valve moved the 'open screenshot' button, as one example.

I'm sure if I racked my brain I could come up with a long list of things that annoy me about Steam's design, new or old—maybe you'll jog my memory in the comments—but some of the other software I use daily is so bad that Steam glistens by comparison.

How are you feeling about the new Steam store refresh? Sound off in the poll and comments below.

Valve is a relatively small company that punches well above its weight. Perhaps it's the low staff numbers—or maybe just a general libertarian lilt—that makes its approach to content moderation on Steam a hearty "Can't someone else do it?"

Its freewheeling approach has drawn criticism for what it allows to proliferate and, of course, has its hard limits: Valve delisted all manner of adult content from the platform last year following pressure from payment processors.

But it's clearly an approach Valve co-founder and big boss Gabe Newell is personally keen on. In a recent report from Bloomberg, we got an anecdote from an anonymous former Valve employee of a time when Newell downright bit the head off Valve general counsel Karl Quackenbush. The lawyer was advocating for a more hands-on approach to content moderation on Steam as it pondered embracing outright pornographic content.

Newell's response to that proposal was, ah, forthright: "What the fuck do I pay you for if that's your opinion?" the Valve boss reportedly snapped at Quackenbush and—while we don't have further details on the story—we sure know who won the debate in the end: Steam very much did open the floodgates on NSFW content, and its approach to content moderation is as laissez-faire as ever, barring the odd payment processor contretemps.

It's an interesting but brief glimpse into the Valve black box. The studio's public image is A) taciturn and B) democratic, with the memetic image of Valve devs' wheeled desks serving as a bit of a metonym for its willingness to let its employees work on whatever they're interested in. Newell himself barely registers in that picture—the perception is he's a hands-off boss who spends most of his time literally at sea.

Clearly, though, Newell does stick his oar in from time to time, and is willing to throw his weight around on topics he deems important enough. You've gotta feel a bit sorry for Quackenbush—getting yelled at by Gabe Newell ranks high on my personal listings of things that would make me cry.

And hey, Valve owes him: it was Quackenbush who enlisted the aid of a Korean-speaking intern named Andrew to help the studio sift through a ream of Korean-language docs from Vivendi in a legal case where Valve's future hung in the balance: a move that pretty much saved Valve.

Exciting news: Steam Workshop is pretty now. Or, at the very least, it's prettier. Detailed in a Steam news post, Valve has released a Workshop update for all users, bringing an overhauled browsing UI and updated filtering options for finding whatever mod might wildly improve or severely blight your gameplay.

"The next time you visit the Steam Workshop for your favorite game, you'll see an updated interface for browsing, searching, and filtering, making it easier and faster to explore and find great user-created mods to enhance your gaming experience," Valve said.

It's nice that there's some pleasant Steam news today, because the Steam Deck price hike extremely isn't.

The Workshop UI refresh has been available in opt-in beta testing since April, but as of today, everyone on Steam gets to enjoy the facelift. Compared with its previous iteration, which had maintained a distinctly 2011 flavor, the updated Workshop browsing UI looks and feels much more tuned to modern sensibilities—even if it still presents both "Most Popular" and "Most Subscribed" as categories as if the distinction between them should be obvious.

Still, I appreciate seeing the Workshop using screen real estate more efficiently, rather than stacking mods in a titanic, single-column list. Mod listings also now offer a quick view option while hovered over, so you can briefly glance at a mod's description without needing to transition to an entirely new webpage. Nobody has time for that.

In addition to the other new filtering options, the best inclusion in the refresh is the ability to filter mods by required DLC, meaning we no longer have to endure the heartbreak of finding a mod that does exactly what we're looking for—but only for owners of an expansion we don't intend to purchase. Thank god.

The Workshop UI update is live now for all users. If you're not seeing it, try checking in the application for client updates. Otherwise, be sure to mod safely. It can get weird out there.

Valve stuck its oar in the tides of history yesterday, performing a spring clean of Steam's user-tagging system that added 17 new tags and removed 28 old ones. Most importantly, of course, it finally settled the debate as to what the hell we all call the "Vampire Survivors-like" genre, but it also notably excised the "RPGMaker" tag, which players have long stuck on games made using RPG Maker dev tools or that look like they were made using those tools.

And, strangely enough, RPG Maker devs seem pretty happy about it.

Not everyone is psyched, of course—"why would you remove rpgmaker are you fucking insane" lamented one dev on Bluesky in the wake of Steam's update—but visit hubs of RPG Maker development and you'll mostly find devs feeling very sanguine about the whole thing.

"To be honest I think [the RPGMaker tag] was probably doing more harm than good," wrote one RPG Maker MZ dev on Reddit. "Those who avoid RPG Maker games due to some preconception, possibly based on shovelware or RPG Maker 'slop', may then find one that they indeed like if they can't exclude it from tags."

Exclusion is the other side of the coin with Steam's tag system. While you can use tags to narrow games down—to hunt for certain kinds of games that fill whatever niche a particular tag denotes—you can also use them to mark exclusions. Never want to see a sports game? Just nix the tag. Tired of seeing exotic fetish content in Steam's most popular upcoming list? Blacklist the "Sexual content" tag. Though joke's on you in that instance: everything is someone's exotic fetish.

Plenty of players across the years have applied just this kind of exclusion to the RPGMaker tag. It's not unreasonable: a lot of dreadful shovelware gets produced and sold using those tools. But the drawback is that all the genuinely cool and exciting work gets hidden from users too, including a lot of stuff that isn't even made with RPG Maker—these tags are applied based on vibes, not on concrete analysis.

So although users who genuinely used the RPGMaker tag to find cool games made using those tools are rather upset, I get the impression devs making these games consider it a worthwhile tradeoff to resurface the stuff they make. "Happy to see the tag removed," writes another Reddit user, "as I'm sure due to the high amount of low effort crap, it did the good games more harm than good."

Even the official RPG Maker forums seem to lean positive: "I think it's good," writes one user. "I honestly felt that tag helped, at least in some small part, creating the negative perception around RPG Maker during its heyday around the Steam Greenlight era."

But do pour one out for those players who can no longer easily find new RPG Maker games on Steam itself. "Steam really removed the rpgmaker tag because it was 'too broad' and then they add a fucking tag for capybaras," says one. "Fuck you steam."

The newly launched content creation platform S&box has 7,693 Steam reviews and they are decidedly "Mixed," though it definitely has its defenders. Facepunch co-founder and creator of Garry's Mod Garry Newman has now directly addressed the situation on the studio's blog, beginning by acknowledging that "our Steam reviews obviously aren't great. They're painful for us. They are showing us where we have made missteps in the release."

Newman goes on to address some of the common themes in the negative reviews. "Around 35% of the reviews compare the game to Garry's Mod," says Newman. "They point out the differences between s&box and Garry's Mod, they wish it was more like Garry's Mod. I understand this, they wanted an iteration of Garry's Mod onto the Source Engine. They didn't want an engine and a platform."

While I think everything Newman's saying here is reasonable, it is also worth pointing out that the first line of S&box's Steam description calls it "our spiritual successor to Garry's Mod," so I'm not enormously surprised that people are buying this with certain expectations. "I don't think we can win in that argument, it's going to be an expectation and preference thing," writes Newman. "My only real hope is that eventually everyone will realise that this is a much better way to work for developers, and we'll end up with much better content because of it."

Newman also addresses the frequent complaints about Steam Workshop integration: Gmod allows players to subscribe to Workshop content outside of the game, which Steam then automatically downloads and installs.

"There is probably something in that [functionality], for certain types of mods, and we'll look into it," writes Newman. "We have a system in our Sandbox Mode where you don't need to subscribe to anything. If you want a weapon or an NPC you click on it, and it downloads and spawns it. I guess this appears like we're shipping all this stuff with the game... but we're not. Anyone can make these entities and publish them for anyone else to use."

Newman goes on to acknowledge that complaints about the game's performance are "a legit grievance, we have the data to back it. We're working on it constantly, and have made some big strides this week."

He does however allow himself a moment of legit grievance about certain negative reviewers, such as the "one French guy [who] played for 280 hours after posting their negative review." Newman also points out that 12% of reviews complain about NFTs: "I have no idea what this shit is about. Of course we don't have NFTs or blockchain stuff, and never will."

Finally Newman moves onto what is perhaps S&box's biggest issue, which is really two linked problems. Since launch there have been consistent complaints about the amount of AI-authored content in S&box, and even before launch Newman told PCG he knew it would be a problem, but believed that "eventually the slop will just fall to the bottom." The other side of the coin is that S&box is a creation platform that has just launched, and is being compared to one that boasts 22 years of user-generated content (UGC). At the moment, and I'm stealing this joke from PCG's Andy Chalk, S&box needs time for Us to G the C.

"It's not our intention to encourage games created using AI," writes Newman. "It's not our intention to encourage people making shit no-effort games. But it's a UGC platform, there is always going to be dog shit. What we need to do is remove obvious trolls, discourage it and make sure it doesn't keep floating to the top. We are developers and this is our platform. Of course we don't want it filled with shit."

It's that magical time of the month when Valve collates all the various drips and drops of updates it's put out as Steam client betas, and packages them into a great, honking, 100% official Steam client update. And a Steam Deck client update. Don't forget that.

As you might expect, there's a good amount of Steam Controller-flavoured stuff in the Steam client update for April 28. Most notably, both desktop Steam and Steam Deck now have a feature that pings you when the wireless controller you're using starts running low on battery, as well as a battery measure indicator at the top of Big Picture Mode.

Which will be handy insofar as it, you know, works. I've had bad luck with accurate wireless gamepad battery measurement on PC in the past, and even when it does work, the new Steam toast will only pop if you're playing a game where the overlay works properly.

Admittedly, this nailbiting on my part might be me-specific. I play a lot of busted old stuff where the Steam overlay doesn't quite function right. If you exist in 2026, videogames-wise, you'll probably be fine.

Valve's also stuck your Steam chat stuff into the Big Picture quick access menu and created a set of quick chat options you can use when talking to pals. Hold the back button in a chat and a quick-select set of options—"Yes", "No", "Can't talk now", that kind of thing—will pop up and send with a quick flick of the right stick. Odds are you're using Discord anyway (though I've found Steam's social stuff to be perfectly adequate whenever I've used it) but, hey, it's the thought that counts.

Another little bonus, for our incoming house-full-of-Steam-devices future, is the addition of multi-device download management in the client. If you've got a game downloading on one machine on your network, you can check in and fiddle with it via the Steam client on another. Neat!

Over on Deck, well, it's a lot of the same stuff, but you can now easily boot to the device's KDE desktop from the Steam login screen now, and your Deck should be better able to handle captive WiFi login screens the next time you take it to a hotel or cafe.

Here are the full patch notes for both the desktop and Deck clients:

Steam Client Update - April 28th

General

• Added a low battery level toast for wireless gamepads. Battery notifications for Xbox controllers on Windows are temporarily disabled.
• Added System Report button to the Help section on Windows.
• Improved client performance when there are many unread account notifications pending.
• Fixed spell check not working in certain browser views.

Big Picture Mode

• Moved Steam chat into the quick access menu, making it easier to access while in-game.
• Introduced new quick chat feature for Steam Deck and Big Picture Mode.
  • When in a chat, press and hold the view button to bring up quick chat options.
  • Move thumbstick and release view button to send a quick chat.
  • Quick chats can be edited in Settings > Keyboard.
• Added a battery indicator to the header for wireless gamepads.
• Updated the Store main menu option to navigate to the Steam Store home page instead of the Great On Deck hub.
• Fixed the Voice chat tab of the quick access menu not being hidden after exiting all active voice chats.
• Fixed an issue with the "use the gamepadui overlay when a controller is connected" mode where desktopUI chat windows could open and block the Big Picture overlay.

Downloads

• Added Remote Downloads Management. This allows you to manage downloads on Remote Steam Clients from the downloads page.
  • The App Details page now has the same options and statuses for remote clients as the local client.
  • Both the local and remote clients must be updated to enable this feature.

Remote Play

• Enabled streaming while Remote Desktop is active on Windows.
• Added more flexible options to the Advanced Host Options for selecting primary display, resolution, refresh rate, etc. while streaming from a Windows computer. This will also allow setting whether HDR is enabled while streaming.
• Added support for the SudoVDA virtual display driver on Windows. If you have the SudoVDA driver installed and select this as your primary display in the Advanced Host Options, Steam will automatically create a virtual display to match the client display settings.
• Added support for streaming 7.1 surround sound.
• Added a workaround for an AMD driver bug causing stream corruption and lockups on Windows. This bug is also fixed in the latest AMD drivers, version 26.3.1.
• Added feedback if capture can't be started on the remote computer.
• Fixed launching with surround sound audio when streaming a game from the library.

Game Recording

• Fixed the instant clip shortcut not working for non-Steam games when using a gamepad.
• Fixed a bug which affected taking a screenshot from a game recording clip.

Cloud

• Fixed an issue which could lead to data loss when uninstalling, reinstalling, and playing a game without restarting the client in between.

Steam Input

• Revised controller settings to reduce clutter and to make them work better with gamepads.
• Fixed a case where radial menus would fail to dismiss after releasing the joystick on Steam Deck.
• Fixed a case where the controller calibration screen could fail to load the correct values the first time it is opened.

Windows

• Updated CPUID SDK used for CPU Temperature in in-game overlay performance monitor when enabled.

macOS

• Fixed soundtrack playback not working on Apple Silicon machines.

Steam Deck Client Update: April 28th

General

• Added a setting to enable 'Switch To Desktop' in the login screen. It can be found in System Settings.
• Added a low battery level toast for wireless gamepads.
• Added a battery indicator to the header for wireless gamepads.
• Updated the Store main menu option to navigate to the Steam Store home page instead of the Great On Deck hub.
• Improved compatibility with WiFi captive portals.
• Improved client performance when there are many unread account notifications pending.
• Fixed a case where opting into the 'Preview' channel could silently fail.
• Fixed subtle sizing issues with the Recently Played carousel.
• Fixed the Voice chat tab of the QAM not being hidden after exiting all active voice chats.
• Fixed spell check not working in certain browser views.

Chat

• Moved Steam chat into the quick access menu, making it easier to access while in-game.
• Introduced new quick chat feature for Steam Deck and Big Picture Mode.
  • When in a chat, press and hold the view button to bring up quick chat options.
  • Move thumbstick and release view button to send a quick chat.
  • Quick chats can be edited in Settings > Keyboard.
• Focus will no longer jump to room effect replay buttons when scrolling through chat history.
• Fixed a bug that would sometimes prevent chat history from loading when scrolling up.

Downloads

• Added Remote Downloads Management. This allows you to manage downloads on Remote Steam Clients from the downloads page. You can select different clients by pressing Y on the downloads page.
  • The App Details page now has the same options and statuses for remote clients as the local client.
  • Both the local and remote clients must be updated to enable this feature.

Game Recording

• Fixed the instant clip shortcut not working for non-Steam games when using a gamepad.
• Fixed a bug which affected taking a screenshot from a game recording clip.

Remote Play

• Added feedback if capture can't be started on the remote computer.

Cloud

• Fixed an issue which could lead to data loss when uninstalling, reinstalling, and playing a game without restarting the client in between.

Steam Input

• Revised controller settings to reduce clutter and to make them work better with gamepads.
• Changed controller settings to use a menu and details structure instead of tabs to list the connected controllers.
• Fixed a case where radial menus would fail to dismiss after releasing the joystick on Steam Deck.
• Fixed a case where the controller calibration screen could fail to load the correct values the first time it is opened.

Proton—Valve's Windows-to-Linux compatibility layer that makes so much of your Steam library work on Steam Deck and Linux desktops—got a new big number today, in the form of the first Proton 11 beta release.

This one incorporates goodies from (the also recently released) Wine 11, on which Proton is based, and you might already have seen that it marks the first glimpse of an Arm64 version of Proton that Valve intends to put to use in the Steam Frame.

But it's also, well, a new Proton version, one that you can put to use right now on your nearest Linux thing, and it brings with it a whole bunch of newly playable games. Games like the recently-Steamified original versions of Resident Evil 1 and 2, Shogun: Total War, and—this is the big one for me—Deadly Premonition.

Deadly Premonition is one of five games that Valve has marked as entirely "Newly playable" on this latest iteration of Proton (I'll include the full list down below), while the others are part of a 13-strong list of games that have previously been playable via Proton's experimental branch but are now safely ensconced in a—relatively, this is still a beta—more stable version.

Aside from the playable games, Proton 11 also includes fixes for yet another busted EA App release that prevented a lot of EA games being playable (and makes the Steam overlay work with them, to boot), fixed Crimson Desert's intro video, repaired a glitch that made Metal Gear Solid 2 hang after the end credits, and plenty more.

I'm always rather impressed by how varied the spread of games are that get fixed, tweaked, or made playable in Proton updates. It's not just the new hotness; if you were desperately hanging around waiting for someone to fix alt-tabbing in the original Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, Proton 11's beta finally grants that wish.

But like I said, for me the big one is Deadly Premonition. It's a kind of Resident-Evil-meets-Twin-Peaks thing, it's Swery's magnum opus, and its PC port has always been utter dogwater—a game I was prevented from 100%ing by the fact that reloading an old save to tick off my last couple of side quests invariably crashed it, and which has long required a mod called DPFix to enter a state of semi-stability. I'm very curious to see if it joins those ranks of Windows games that somehow run better on Linux. Early reports are positive.

Here's the full list of changes.

Proton 11 beta 1 patch notes

• Now playable (previously worked with Proton Experimental):
  • Universe Generator: The Golden Sword
  • DCS World Steam Edition
  • Resident Evil (1996)
  • Resident Evil 2 (1998)
  • Dino Crisis
  • Dino Crisis 2
  • From Dust
  • Blaite
  • Don't Die Dateless, Dummy!
  • METAL GEAR SURVIVE
  • Warhammer: Vermintide 2
  • Metal Fatigue
  • SHOGUN: Total War.
• Newly playable:
  • Unknown Faces
  • Gothic 1 Classic
  • X-Plane 12
  • Breath of Fire IV
  • Deadly Premonition
• Fixed video playback in She Sees Red.
• Fixed rendering of certain symbols with Ukranian language option in Chambers.
• Enabled text-to-speech accessibility feature in Pentiment and Grounded.
• Fixed voice chat in Phasmophobia lobby for desktop players.
• Improved rendering of Rockstar Launcher popups.
• Fixed Sea of Solitude showing black screen on Proton.
• Fixed many EA games being unplayable after a recent EA Desktop update.
• Added support for SteamWorks SDK 1.64.
• Fixed Steam Overlay not working correctly with many EA games.
• Improved emoji support in Idle Trillionaire.
• Fixed intro video playback in Crimson Desert.
• Fixed Rei and the Floating City not being playable with gamescope.
• Fixed mouse movement behavior in Call of Duty 2.
• Fixed rendering issue in launcher of DEATH STRANDING 2: ON THE BEACH.
• Fixed a crash in HELLDIVERS 2 happening in high enemy-count missions.
• Fixed random hangs in Killer Inn.
• Fixed Killer Inn not launching on Steam Decks and other machines with /tmp sizes lower than 10GB.
• Fixed Killer Inn not being able to connect to Square Enix account.
• Fixed graphical gliches in Duck Game that happen with newer Wine Mono versions.
• Fixed REDLauncher (e.g. as seen with Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher 3) taking a long time to exit.
• Fixed Hollow Knight Beta update wrongly registering Steam Deck's Steam button as a left trigger.
• Fixed controller hotplug not working for 8BitDo Ultimate 2C and other controllers that expose multiple HID devices.
• Fixed Xalia intermittently failing to start when game is launched.
• Fixed small memory leak with The King of Fighters XIII Global Match video playback.
• Improved timezone detection.
• Fixed video playback in 我打不过漂亮的她们.
• Fixed lag spikes caused by Steam overlay being opened for prolonged time.
• Fixed VR controller tracking in Microsoft Flight Simulator.
• Improved VR support so that No Man's Sky VR mode is playable again.
• Fixed black blocks in dialog windows created by ARC Raiders and The Finals.
• Fixed glitchy video playback in Satisfactory.
• Fixed Rec Room not being playable after a recent game update.
• Fixed The King of Fighters XIII Global Match freezing when playing videos from the gallery.
• Fixed intro video not looping in Blazblue Centralfiction.
• Made more games using MonoGame playable.
• Improved support for Kodi media player.
• Added System Voice support for multiple languages in Phasmophobia.
• Fixed KDE window maximization support.
• Fixed Brighter Shores window resizing support.
• Improved Space Engineers dual monitor support
• Fixed scaling issue with Arma: Reforger when changing window modes.
• Fixed Dungeon Siege tools showing up at character's feet.
• Improved focus loss behavior with RoBoRumble.
• Fixed rendering issue in Hellsinker. launcher.
• Fixed stutter from keyboard input in Titanfall 2.
• Fixed audio playback when playing intro videos in BIRDCAGE.
• Fixed hang after METAL GEAR SOLID 2: Sons of Liberty end credits.
• Fixed Disintegration getting stuck on the first loading screen.
• Fixed CHRONO TRIGGER flickering in windowed mode with certain resolutions when using Gamescope.
• RAGE no longer has focus issues when Alt-Tabbing on KDE Wayland.
• The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Game of the Year Edition (2009) no longer has problems minimizing after Alt-Tabbing.
• Resident Evil 2 should no longer have issues when changing resolutions on GNOME.
• Call of Duty: WWII should no longer fail to render properly in fullscreen native resolution on setups with dual monitors.
• Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition no longer has issues with keyboard registration after refocusing the game.
• Updated Xalia to 0.4.8:
  • Added controller support for the MC Visual C++ 2010 redistributable installer.
  • Improved gamepad binding support for Graze Counter.
  • Added controller support for launchers of the following games: Red Faction®: Armageddon™, Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster, Sonic the Hedgehog 4 - Episode II, Hellsinker., Disney Bolt, STAR WARS™ Starfighter™.
  • Fixed Xalia wrongly selecting option from unfocused tabs in Rayman: Raving Rabbids.
  • Added controller support for DirectX Runtime Components installer when launching BioShock for the first time.
  • Added controller support for launchers of the following games: Rocket Knight, Puddle, Zero Escape: The Nonary Games, Metal Slug XX, Mortal Kombat Komplete Edition, Disney Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two, Batman: Arkham Asylum GOTY, LocoCycle, Ys SEVEN, Resident Evil (1996), Resident Evil 2 (1998), Resident Evil 3 Nemesis (1999), Dino Crisis, Dino Crisis 2.
• Rebased on top of Wine 11.0.
• Added FEX-2604 for ARM64EC builds.
• Updated vkd3d to vkd3d-1.19-139-g30b93dcea8b0.
• Updated dxvk to v2.7.1-467-g83e503b4ae6d from Proton 11 support branch.
• Updated dxvk-nvapi to v0.9.1.
• Updated Wine Mono to 11.0.0.
• Updated vkd3d-proton to proton-20260410

Roblox's efforts to scrub clean its really-quite-awful reputation for child safety continued yesterday, with an announcement that, come June, it will be introducing new age-based account categories for kids.

The two new account types are Roblox Kids (for five to eight year olds) and Roblox Select (for nine to 15 year olds), and Roblox Corp says the goal for them is to "more closely align content access, communication settings, and parental controls with a user’s age."

Kids will be assigned to their respective categories—or at least, that is the hope—either by Roblox's facial age estimation check or a verified parent. Once there, they'll find themselves limited. The youngest children, in the Roblox Kids category, will only be able to play games with a "a Minimal or Mild content maturity label," and "all communication [will be] disabled by default," though chat can be reenabled via a linked parent account.

Nine to 15 year olds will be able to access content with a Moderate content maturity label, and their default communications setting will be unchanged. Once kids in Roblox Select hit 13, mind you, Roblox's "full suite of parental controls" gets a little less full, though the company promises that "Certain controls and visibility into kids' accounts" will be available until they age out of Roblox Select entirely.

Roblox Corp says it's also using additional evaluation criteria (like developer verification and "real-time evaluation," which sounds like it means checking out user reports to see if games are suitable for kids), to assess games before making them automatically available to kids accounts. Parental controls are also getting beefed up and more granular.

The corporation says its big dream is "to become the world’s healthiest platform for users of all ages," which is going to be quite the schlep from where it is now. We've had numerous stories of child safety failures and controversies at Roblox on our pages, and one particularly memorable instance of its CEO describing its predator problem as "an opportunity". If it wants to clean its image, well, it's got a long row to hoe.

Three months after 14 Disney games were delisted from Steam without warning, the scythe has returned to cut down a few more. As caught by the roving eye of SteamDB, 15 more games under (some form of) the Disney brand were summarily delisted from the Steam store earlier today. Here's the full list:

• Disney High School Musical 3: Senior Year Dance
• Disney•Pixar Brave: The Video Game
• Disney Bolt
• Disney's Treasure Planet: Battle of Procyon
• Disney Alice in Wonderland
• Disney's Chicken Little
• Disney Tangled
• Disney G-Force
• Disney Universe
• Disney Princess: My Fairytale Adventure
• Disney Pirates of the Caribbean: At Worlds End
• Planet of the Apes: Last Frontier (an odd one out, for reasons I'll go into)
• Star Wars: Rebellion
• Star Wars: Dark Forces (Classic, 1995)
• Outlaws + A Handful of Missions (Classic, 1997)

My suspicion is that licensing issues are at play, but I've reached out to Disney to ask why these delistings have happened, and I'll update this piece if I hear back.

The original Dark Forces and Outlaws—both of which have received Nightdive remasters—might be missed by the odd fan who never bothered to replace their CD versions with a Steam copy, but for the most part? I imagine most of the people who will ever want these games already have them.

The odd one out, like I said, is Planet of the Apes. It's the only game in the list not to have "Disney" in its publisher box on the store page, it was released in 2018, and it got an update in June last year. It falls under the 20th Century Games rubric, the publishing arm of the Disney-owned 20th Century Fox. Where most of the games in this list feel like they might simply be lost to time in their Steam form, I'd be surprised if Planet of the Apes, with its oh-so-recent update and relatively recent release, was left to languish.

Anyway, here's the part where I engage in what we in the trade call baseless speculation. Remember Disney's $1.5 billion investment in Epic, and how Epic is reportedly cooking up a bunch of Disney games, including an extraction shooter? Perhaps a fruit of this blossoming partnership will be Disney games becoming Epic Games Store exclusives. Don't shoot the messenger.

On an average day about a dozen new games are released on Steam. And while we think that's a good thing, it can be understandably hard to keep up with. Potentially exciting gems are sure to be lost in the deluge of new things to play unless you sort through every single game that is released on Steam. So that’s exactly what we’ve done. If nothing catches your fancy this week, we've gathered the best PC games you can play right now and a running list of the 2026 games that are launching this year.

Cult Vacui

Steam ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ April 9
Developer:‌ LBRTY games

Set on a remote Scottish island in the 19th century, Cult Vacui follows the travails of a janitor shipped over to work on the estate of a wealthy family. Unfortunately for him, he arrives at an inopportune time: a blood ritual is underway and it cannot be finalised unless everyone on the island is murdered, including him. Cult Vacui is a roughly two hour long point 'n' click adventure about avoiding murder at the hand of lunatics. The medium at the height of its powers, in other words.

Subversive Memories

Steam ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ April 8
Developer:‌ Southward Studio

This Brazilian survival horror game seems to take inspiration from Signalis: its character models are fully 3D, but they navigate fixed perspective areas layered with pixelated scunge. Protagonist Renata has discovered an abandoned military research base where she's privy to secrets "beyond her comprehension" inspired by Brazil's repressive military dictatorship period, which ran from 1964 to 1985. As she explores this labyrinthine base she'll tackle all the usual survival horror obstacles: puzzles, rugged combat, and inventory management. It takes around two to three hours to complete.

KuloNiku: Bowl Up!

Steam page
Release:‌ April 7
Developer:‌ Gambir Studio

Another cosy retail sim with a focus on food prep, but this one stands out due to its "overwhelmingly positive" Steam user reviews. Importantly, it's also a life sim, and when you're not preparing meals in your restaurant, or engaging in cooking battles with enemy shopkeeps, you're engaging with KuloNiku's cast of typically zany characters, or else deliberating over new fittings for your noodle joint. It all comes wrapped in a quintessentially cosy anime art style.

ChainStaff

Steam page
Release:‌ April 8
Developers:‌ Mommy's Best Games

ChainStaff is an action-focused platformer with the most distinctive art style I've seen in this genre since, well, remember Spinch? Its art style balances perilously between distractingly ugly and actually-quite-beautiful-in-its-own-effed-up-way: it's the kind of thing you have to see in action. Beneath the compelling eye candy is what looks to be a fairly conventional sidescrolling shooter, though our hero does have a grappling hook, and there's a weird upgrade system involving the sacrifice or sparing of fellow soldiers.

Agony Increment

Steam page
Release:‌ April 9
Developer:‌ Parish Softworks

Another post-Cruelty Squad FPS draped in a deliberately disorienting and stubbornly garish art style. Not only that, Agony Increment seems to adopt some of the imsim elements, as well as a fully-kitted out combat system that lets you slide, dash and kick. It looks like the kind of thing you might have found on a mysterious demo CD in the late '90s which proves irrevocably traumatizing. The Steam page doesn't let on what the setting or story is here, and that makes me even more interested. The dreamy drum 'n' bass doesn't hurt either.

In the 2026 edition of his yearly games industry report, market analyst Matthew Ball shared a sobering statistic: Since 2021, Roblox has been responsible for over 60% of the games industry's net growth in consumer spending outside of China.

Evidently, Roblox thinks those are rookie numbers. Today, Roblox announced Roblox Plus, a new subscription plan the company says is "designed to deliver more value to its users." Its features, however, include some unsavory monetization tactics.

Replacing Roblox's existing Roblox Premium subscription when it launches on April 30, Roblox Plus will offer subscribers a 10% price discount on purchases using Robux, increasing to a 20% discount after a subscriber's third consecutive month. On its website, Roblox says it will cover the discounts, so "creators will continue to earn the same amount as they do today on any individual purchase."

Plus subscribers will also have "free and unlimited" access to private servers, even for games that would normally charge each player a Robux fee for the privilege. And subscribers can send Robux to other players without transaction fees. If your eyebrow just raised, Roblox says "users must be age-checked and 18+ before they can send or receive without parental approval."

Like the sunsetting Premium subscription, Plus will grant access to item trading and selling on Roblox's marketplace. But what it won't feature is Premium's included monthly stipend of Robux, or its included 10% bonus on purchases of additional Robux.

Existing Roblox Premium subscribers will be able to continue their subscription, but they'll lose their 10% Robux bonus starting May 30. While Roblox says it will offer optional bundles that will add a monthly amount of Robux at additional cost "soon after launch," it means that a player who might just be looking for a monthly Robux dripfeed will be required to pay more than they had previously—an additional cost that the Plus discount on purchases using Robux doesn't immediately soften.

To offset the potential loss of every Plus subscriber gaining access to paid private servers in every game, Roblox says creators "can earn up to 100 Robux for every Roblox Plus subscriber who spends 60 or more cumulative minutes in a game's paid private server over the course of 30 days." Roblox says it will only pay out for the five private servers where each Roblox Plus user spent the most time—a criteria that could incentivize creators to design their games to demand as much attention as possible.

Roblox Plus also allows creators to implement a prompt to their games encouraging players to subscribe to Roblox Plus. As a reward for successfully convincing a player to subscribe, Roblox says the creator will receive a "bonus" of 250 Robux per month for each of that subscriber's first three months.

In its API documentation, Roblox provides a sample script which prompts users to subscribe to Roblox plus when their character interacts with the object the script is attached to. Players that purchase a subscription are then "immediately granted the reward and teleported to an exclusive area."

"Roblox Plus provides a new path for users who want to get more out of the platform and for creators looking for more ways to earn," Roblox said in its announcement. "This launch is only the beginning."

PC Gamer has reached out to Roblox for comment, and we'll update if we receive one.

As part of its 14,000 layoffs in October 2025, Amazon made major cuts to its gaming division, claiming that it was shifting its strategy away from ill-advised attempts at competing with Steam through mismanaged AAA projects and focusing instead on its Luna cloud gaming service.

Despite that supposed refocusing, Luna just got smaller. As of today, Luna will no longer allow users to purchase games from third-party game stores like EA, Ubisoft, and GOG. The service is also discontinuing its sale of Ubisoft+ and Jackbox Games subscriptions. Previously purchased third-party games will be streamable for Luna users until June 10, 2026, at which point they will be removed from the service.

In its customer service page explaining the changes, Amazon said the removal of third-party games from Luna was informed by "clear" feedback from players who "want easy access to great games, more social experiences, and a steady flow of new content from developers you know and love." So it's cutting streaming access for users who've already purchased those developers' games. Makes sense!

Users who've previously purchased games from third-party stores through Luna will still be able to access those games on their respective stores. But the Bring Your Own Library feature, which lets Luna users stream their existing EA, GOG, and Ubisoft store games, is ending on June 3, 2026.

Luna users will be able to download their save data for affected titles for 90 days after they're removed from the service on June 10, but Amazon says it "cannot guarantee that save data downloaded from Luna will work on other gaming services."

While those third-party games will no longer be available for direct purchase, they aren't disappearing from the platform entirely. Many will instead be available to stream for subscribers of Luna Premium, which offers users access to a library of streamable third-party titles like EA FC 26, Madden, Fallout, Death Stranding, and more for an additional monthly fee.

As previously demonstrated by the ever-shifting pricing tiers of Xbox Game Pass, it's apparently impossible to design a game library subscription service that doesn't feel like being hit in the head with a brick when you try and parse what it does and doesn't include.

This feels like a less-than-subtle attempt at squeezing players who've already made a habit of Luna streaming—presumably those players exist—into signing up for Luna Premium's additional monthly fee. But hey, maybe those users will be content with the games included in Luna standard. They might be losing streaming access to whatever EA and Ubisoft favorites they've paid for, but they'll still have AI-generated courtroom Snoop Dogg.

On an average day about a dozen new games are released on Steam. And while we think that's a good thing, it can be understandably hard to keep up with. Potentially exciting gems are sure to be lost in the deluge of new things to play unless you sort through every single game that is released on Steam. So that’s exactly what we’ve done. If nothing catches your fancy this week, we've gathered the best PC games you can play right now and a running list of the 2026 games that are launching this year.

Stiff Neck

Steam ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ April 3
Developer:‌ 伤官制作组 Team Uranian

Stiff Neck is a visual novel with a distinctive art style and an undertow of quiet psychological horror. It follows Noele, a small town cop with a big time neck problem. She's currently dating Nil, a budding writer who lectures in experimental art, but a bunch of other could-be love interests enter the picture, all of whom could or could not be the mysterious "Flayer". This drama takes place in a world that feels weirdly out-of-time, neither futuristic or contemporary: there's a strike at a toy factory that precipitates a cursed doll plague, for example, and you've got an AI dog. This is definitely one for people who don't mind reading a lot.

Which Sausage, Mate?

Steam ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ April 3
Developer:‌ Koksny.com

Here's a life sim about a down-at-heel Polish fellow who's just lost his job at the coal mine and is forced to work retail at "Poland's landmark convenience store". While the cashier life may be, on paper at least, easier than the mining life, it also pays a lot less: so while Kazio scans goods by day, by night he must make hard decisions about where his money will go. What's more important? Food, rent, medicine, school or healing? There are a handful of different endings here, lots of different characters to meet (or fend off) at the checkout, and plenty of random events to mix things up.

Wasteland Bites

Steam page
Release:‌ April 4
Developer:‌ CosmicDev

Keeping to the theme of retail work, Wasteland Bites is about operating a food truck in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Obviously, that would be hard: when you're not cooking up some truly diabolical delicacies, you're shooting aliens and mutants right in the face with your sawn-off. The objective is to get your food truck to a distant, near-mythical non-irradiated beach, but you'll be shedding a lot of toxic blood enroute, and also cooking up some pretty disgusting kebabs.

It Has My Face

Steam page
Release:‌ April 4
Developers:‌ NightByte Games

Previously known as DoubleWe, It Has My Face is a roguelike with whiffs of Among Us about it, but is presented in first-person, and seems a whole lot more blood thirsty. In a procedurally-generated hellscape you're doomed to wander among crowds of fellow citizens in search of your doppelganger, who you must kill before they kill you. Into this mix is a big variety of bizarre modifiers and eldritch monstrosities to avoid. It can be played alone but its online multiplayer mode—which pits eight human doppelgangers against one another—sounds like loads of fun.

Grime 2

Steam page
Release:‌ April 1
Developer:‌ Clover Bite

Here's a sequel to the 2021 Souls-inflected metroidvania. Grimes 2 is definitely one for players who like a more combat-centric platformer, and it has a pretty neat twist in that department: as you defeat enemies you'll be able to shape molds based on them, which can then become special attacks, or projectiles, or other combat aids. Aside from that, expect a parry-centric approach to hand-to-hand combat, lots of apocalyptic moseying around, and some very cinematic boss fights.

On an average day about a dozen new games are released on Steam. And while we think that's a good thing, it can be understandably hard to keep up with. Potentially exciting gems are sure to be lost in the deluge of new things to play unless you sort through every single game that is released on Steam. So that’s exactly what we’ve done. If nothing catches your fancy this week, we've gathered the best PC games you can play right now and a running list of the 2026 games that are launching this year.

The Wide Open Sky is Running out of Catfish

Steam ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ March 28
Developer:‌ Zipit! Games

The wide open sky may be running out of catfish, but luckily the protagonist of this cosy photography sim already has one of their own. It's really big too, and it can fly, which makes it the perfect pet vessel for exploring a bonkers airborne open world taking photos of fun stuff. Once you've taken your photos you can upload them to PhotoPond, and then chat about them in Dolphin Chat, all on the in-game computer. One look at this low-poly pastel offering and you likely understand the note it hits: if you're in the mood, or just love catfish, give it a look.

The Scourge | Tai Ương

Steam ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ March 28
Developer:‌ Rare Reversee, Beaztek

Here's a fascinating first-person horror set in '90s Vietnam. Taking place mostly in a dilapidated apartment in Saigon (or Ho Chi Minh city, as it's officially known nowadays), The Scourge follows the travails of a horribly down-at-heel local who is "overwhelmed by delusions due to past tragedies and life's despair". The protagonist is unable to distinguish dreams from waking life, but hopefully you—the player—can. Expect a mix of puzzle-solving and running away from scary stuff.

Chained Wheels

Steam page
Release:‌ March 28
Developer:‌ Karga Games

Chained Wheels is the latest in a bizarre micro-trend involving chains and two-player coop. Like Chained Together, the two players in Chained Wheels are, well, chained together, with all the mutual reliance that implies. But in Chained Wheels both players are in trucks. I think you can imagine how annoying this would be in practice! Especially given the increasingly gruelling obstacle courses that are never as simple as going straight down a normal road. If you hate a friend, invite them to play this with you: they may never call you again.

Dungeon Bodega Simulator

Steam page
Release:‌ March 24
Developers:‌ Alien Fruit

Not even the most ridiculous "simulator" this week: that distinction goes to Isekai Mage Girl Gacha Pull Simulator. But Dungeon Bodega Simulator is definitely its own beast, with a bigger focus on narrative than most modern retail sims. As Elm Myrkwater, it's your job to gradually convert a dank and cold dungeon into a thriving potion shop. That means growing the right plants, developing the best combinations, and then selling them to the various customers that file in everyday. The story runs for around four hours, apparently, but once you've done there's an infinite mode.

DVD Survivors

Steam page
Release:‌ March 26
Developer:‌ Signal Spike Games

Younger readers may be unfamiliar with the DVD player screensaver, but it was ubiquitous in most homes during the late '90s and early 2000s. Basically, the DVD player logo bounced around a black screen, and it was infuriating how rarely it perfectly hit the corners of the screen. This is a Vampire Survivors-like for everyone who ever hated that screensaver but who, nevertheless, spent hours of their misspent youth with a fixation on it. Things were so much simpler back then.

If Discord is getting stuck on the message "awaiting endpoint" when you try to connect to a voice server, it isn't just you. We're seeing the same thing, and Discord has reported a "major outage."

The good news is that the chat app maker thinks it knows what's wrong, and is working on a fix. "We believe we have identified the issue and are taking action to try and restore voice traffic," reads a message on the Discord status page, posted at 1:07 pm PDT.

In the meantime, you could try using Steam's built-in voice chat as an alternative.

I occasionally find myself counting my lucky stars that I'm not a videogame developer, largely because trying to finesse the Steam market sounds like an abstract nightmare. And after listening to indie game advisor Chris Zukowski, who gave a talk at GDC this year (via GamesRadar+) I'm not convinced that sorcery isn't involved.

Some Steam hopefuls, according to Zukowski, are "golden goose" games—the implication being that they are eggs yet to hatch, but have the potential to rake in cash for Steam, thus drawing its attention. The tipping point is around $150,000 sales in six months alongside 500 reviews—humble amounts compared to the big boys, but enough to start gathering moss.

"Your relationship with Valve will change overnight," Zukowski explains. "Gabe cannot buy yachts with wishlists. And you will have so many wishlists after you launch a golden goose game. Gabe will need you. He needs you and your golden goose, and that's a nice thing to have."

He then begins to talk about the process as though the developer in question has been plucked out of the pages of a storybook: "You have power now—all of the sudden you're like a little goblin that has a magical power to turn straw into gold. And Gabe needs you to convert those wishlists into gold. Gabe needs the gold. He will say to you, 'oh god, please spin these wishlists into gold.' And it is up to you to do it. He cannot do it for you."

The process, he argues, is something he calls "the breath of Steam," which is to "inhale wishlists, exhale money." The inhale being Steam's promotion cycle, the exhale being sales—which, fair enough. If I'm on the fence about a game, a sale is the most likely thing to get me to hop on it.

The power of a sale is so strong, in fact, that Zukowski apparently has data to suggest that as many as one to two discounts a month lead to more bulk sales for these golden geese overall.

You might even get a special weekend deal: "I think Valve uses weekend deals to really juice up the games that are going viral," Zukowski explains, before sharing a quote from a dev that states their game's weekend deal raked in more cash, daily, than their launch.

Still, having made it to this status doesn't sound any less stressful—the opposite, actually. Being selected as a golden goose apparently starts a rush to keep the momentum going with, DLCs, bundles, promos, collabs—anything you can throw at them that might stick, really.

"Some people seem to cringe at this," Zukowski admits, and while I'm certainly flinching myself, he's also argued that communities, like the ones behind Spirit City: Lofi Sessions, are happy for more: "They do tons of DLC, and they asked the community, 'are we doing too much DLC?' And the community's like, 'oh please, give us more.'"

On an average day about a dozen new games are released on Steam. And while we think that's a good thing, it can be understandably hard to keep up with. Potentially exciting gems are sure to be lost in the deluge of new things to play unless you sort through every single game that is released on Steam. So that’s exactly what we’ve done. If nothing catches your fancy this week, we've gathered the best PC games you can play right now and a running list of the 2026 games that are launching this year.

Bonnie Bear Saves Frogtime

Steam ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ March 16
Developer:‌ Bonte Avond

Bonnie Bear Saves Frogtime has all the markings of a point 'n' click adventure, and it kinda is that, but it's also a boiled down tactical RPG. As Bonnie Bear—who is dressed in a frog suit, for some reason—your objective is to collect lots of different frogs with different traits and abilities, all the better to win the grid-based frog battles. This task is somehow related to Bonnie Bear's greater purpose, which is to show up the local bully. If you like bright colors, uninhibited whimsy, and frogs, it's probably a no-brainer.

Lost Wiki: Kozlovka

Steam ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ March 20
Developer:‌ yattytheman

In Lost Wiki: Kozlovka you play as a journalist investigating an odd, vaguely supernatural mystery somewhere deep in Eastern Europe. This journalist is not particularly enterprising: their research is conducted entirely on a "Wikipedia-style database", which resembles early GUI operating systems like Apple Lisa and Xerox Star. What ensues is a lot of sifting through information, a lot of connecting of dots, and probably a lot of slightly disturbing "uh huh" moments.

Deadline Delivery

Steam page
Release:‌ March 17
Developer:‌ Good1 Studios

Here's another of those zany physics-comedy outings in the style of Human Fall Flat and Totally Reliable Delivery Service, though Deadline Delivery definitely looks to have a greater focus on going extremely fast rather than uproariously crashing out. As you can see in the trailer, your delivery truck is fast but dangerously unstable. It's also prone to exploding. Parcels must be delivered anyway, and since you're risking your life you might as well do some very dangerous tricks on the way. This can be played solo or with seven others online.

Heroes of Science and Fiction

Steam page
Release:‌ March 18
Developers:‌ Oxymoron Games

As you can probably gather by its name, Heroes of Science and Fiction is very much indebted to Heroes of Might and Magic and the game's Steam page is very quick to draw those parallels. It's a turn-based strategy just released out of early access, and formerly known as Silence of the Siren. There are five factions, four campaigns and more than 30 skirmish maps, and as far as I plays very much like the classic HoMM games of yore, particularly HoMM 3.

The Coin Game

Steam page
Release:‌ March 20
Developer:‌ devotid

This week's oddest game is The Coin Game, which is basically an open world full of more than 50 arcade machines with "realistic physics". I don't mean arcade videogames: there are claw machines, Whac-A-Mole installations, and more in that mould. There are also rollercoasters, go-karts and plenty of other retro-style amusements, all of which sits in a giant '90s style shopping mall. It feels like one of those '90s nostalgia memes come to life. There's a casual sandbox mode where you just wander around sampling the attractions, but there's also—weirdly—a survival mode too.

On an average day about a dozen new games are released on Steam. And while we think that's a good thing, it can be understandably hard to keep up with. Potentially exciting gems are sure to be lost in the deluge of new things to play unless you sort through every single game that is released on Steam. So that’s exactly what we’ve done. If nothing catches your fancy this week, we've gathered the best PC games you can play right now and a running list of the 2026 games that are launching this year.

Mama's Sleeping Angels

Steam ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ March 12
Developer:‌ itamu

Mama's Sleeping Angels is basically Lethal Company by way of Cruelty Squad, though the latter's distinctive low-grade cyber-surrealism is replaced by a seasick Y2K nostalgia. Either alone or with up to three other players, you navigate an unpredictable dream world, killing threats and collecting "cursed objects" that provide "beneficial or bothersome powers" including, for example, the ability to jump very, very high. As you shoot, explore, and bear witness to countless uncanny atrocities across six maps, you'll slowly learn why you're trapped inside a nonsensical dream.

Lucid Blocks

Steam ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ March 13
Developer:‌ Lucy B. Locks

Lucid Blocks dares to ask: what if Minecraft except extremely odd, with an art style mixing "liminal spaces" with dreamlike misty voxel worlds? Like Minecraft, Lucid Blocks has infinite procedural generation, though it supports infinite vertical procedural generation too. In these worlds you'll find "cities made of plastic, serene fields of grass, and massive abandoned warehouses", but you'll also be free to craft your own structures and expanses as well, all while surviving indescribable beasties. It looks surprisingly fleshed out for $10, and has over a thousand "overwhelmingly positive" reviews.

The State of Nowhere

Steam page
Release:‌ March 12
Developer:‌ Anomaly Works

The State of Nowhere is very reminiscent of Papers, Please, but instead of deciding who gets to cross the border into a totalitarian state, you're deciding who gets access to food in a totalitarian state. In other words, you're deciding whether people live or die an agonising, hungry death, while also trying to avoid doling out more food to scammers. There are 46 endings to work towards and four distinct game modes, so there's a fair bit to chew on here aside from debilitating moral uncertainty.

Thysiastery

Steam page
Release:‌ March 10
Developers:‌ DIRGA

The first of two old school dungeon crawlers in this week's column, Thysiastery is a very handsome pixel art blobber in a roguelike package. By dint of being branded, you're fated to life in a huge, mysterious, shapeshifting Labyrinth. The objective is to get out, but naturally there are all manner of puzzles, enemies and obstacles in your path. Combat is turn-based, and there are apparently "a great number of skills" to find, which can be applied to the various party members you'll find spread throughout the maze. If you're loving the recent blobber renaissance, this is another one to stick on the wishlist.

Pluto

Steam page
Release:‌ March 10
Developer:‌ Siege Wizard Interactive

Another dungeon crawler, though this one takes the form of a roguelike deckbuilder, which is very much not a genre that excites me but: just look at this thing. It kinda looks like Eye of the Beholder by way of the Garbage Pail Kids, and I mean that as a massive compliment. You play as an imprisoned wizard who must break their shackles and escape a heinous dungeon, all the better to attend their niece's birthday party. Expect eight playable characters, bizarre elemental synergies, at least one appalling mutant sloth, and lots of cards.

Our six-year stint of feeling very smug about getting pretty much every game on PC (excluding Nintendo, which will forever be Nintendo about it) came to an end last week, when a report from Bloomberg said that Sony has decided to pull back from its strategy of releasing its console exclusives—after a suitable delay—on PC.

Theories flew as to what had prompted Sony to make the move. Do its PC ports not make money anymore? Do they weaken the brand? Was the corporation scared off by Microsoft's Project Helix—its next-gen console that will, it says, play both Xbox and PC games?

Maybe, maybe not, but here's a new theory for the pile, courtesy of Bluepoint Games' (RIP) head of technology Peter Dalton. What if Sony's actually scared of Valve, not Microsoft?

"Some people frame [Sony's PC pullback] as a response to Xbox, but I’m not convinced that’s the real driver," wrote Dalton on X. "A more interesting possibility is the rise of a Steam-based console ecosystem."

After all, why do people buy consoles instead of PCs? They're (usually) cheaper, easier to figure out, and low-maintenance. But now Valve's come along with devices like the Steam Deck and Steam Machine and started blurring those lines. Dalton continues: "If Valve releases a new Steam console that provides a console-like experience while still giving players access to the entire PC game library, that could become a very compelling option.

"If Sony were releasing all of its games day-and-date on PC, the Steam console could effectively offer the best of all worlds: console simplicity with the full breadth of PC gaming." Which is rather tasty, isn't it? In fact, speaking from personal experience, more than a few people close to me—who up to now have been console-only—have reached out to ask me about the Steam Machine, and suggested it might be what they upgrade to next.

"It would be quite ironic if, after decades of traditional console competition, Valve ultimately ended up winning the console war." Of course, to do that, it has to actually, you know, release all that cool hardware it unveiled last year, a prospect which seems to get harder every single day that the RAM crisis continues.

Remember, hang on a second, let me check… three years ago? Back then, our entire executive class was possessed of the same mental malady: a curious fixation on words like "blockchain," "NFT," "Web3," and "Metaverse."

Those dark days are behind us now—the execs got bored and decided to make RAM cost $1,000 a stick instead—but you still sometimes hear a few of the words. Metaverse, for example, is a word I most recently heard from Brendan Greene (aka PlayerUnknown), whose game Prologue: Go Wayback is a sort of blueprint for 'the metaverse, but good.'

When I chatted with Greene for the latest issue of PC Gamer magazine, I asked why he continued using a term which has, for many of us, become deeply associated with companies no one likes. His answer was pretty simple: "We can take it back, right?"

Greene said that "The promise of the metaverse was this multiverse of digital places," where users could turn up and mould the space to their whim. "I think we shouldn't be afraid of using it. It's just been co-opted by certain people."

Greene compared holding onto the term to his continued presence on X—which has become a very different place under the ownership of Elon Musk—"It's like, I still use Twitter, because fuck him. I was there before him."

The vision of the metaverse Greene is working on at PlayerUnknown Productions is not quite Zuckerberg's dread prophecy of everyone working in a virtual office and pulling products from virtual shelves (capitalists have a limited imagination). It's a bit weirder, woolier, more freewheeling and open-source.

"I want to create spaces with the openness and unpredictability of real life," says Greene. "So here our goal is to build that new layer, a foundation on which anyone can create their own virtual world and connect it to a larger whole, where they own what they create."

Bad news for French pirates*: major private torrent tracker YggTorrent was totalled earlier this month. The site, formerly among the biggest—if it wasn't the biggest—torrent tracking websites in France, was "emptied, then destroyed" by a hacker using the alias Gr0lum.

All of the following quotes were originally in French, and have been machine-translated. In a manifesto posted online in the wake of Ygg's seeming destruction, Gr0lum accused Ygg's owners of "DDoS attacks against competing trackers, purging uploaders the moment they opened their mouths, sabotaging your own API to prevent anyone from using third-party tools."

For those of you pretending not to know what a private tracker like Ygg is, the essence is that it's a site that indexes and makes searchable many of the innumerable (and usually illegal) peer-to-peer torrent downloads floating around the internet. They connect seeds (people who have the files) with leeches (people who want the files), but don't host the files in question themselves. A tracker being private means it cannot be used by unregistered users, who will sometimes have to pass some kind of interview to get in.

Ygg was a major one. Originally launched in 2017, it grew to become a major presence in French-language piracy, and became a reliable source for users specifically searching for timely releases of French-language films, movies, magazines, books, games and so on. It stirred up controversy (via TorrentFreak) with the introduction of a €15-per-month "Turbo" subscription in 2025, without which it became harder to download files—another in Gr0lum's list of the site's sins.

Though a lot of French onlookers were glad, in communities like Reddit, to see Ygg get taken down a peg, more than a few expressed regret that the end of the site seemed to mean the end of its centralised repository of timely French torrents. The good(?) news for them is that, while Gr0lum destroyed Ygg, Ygg's torrents have already been scattered to various other trackers, some of whom have struggled to keep up with the influx of Ygg refugees. No, I don't think I'm allowed to link those sites. Je suis très désolé.

Gr0lum went on to make even more serious accusations: "You're storing all 54,776 of your members' credit cards? What exactly do you do with that information? What's the purpose of tracking each visitor's behavior? And the fingerprinting of crypto wallets—are your users aware of that?

"6.6 million users. Years of lies. An empire built on extortion."

Despite seeming down for the count, Ygg has returned—in the form of a countdown website—in the past few days, though it seems likely the damage is done. On that website is a statement: "individuals have been spreading numerous accusations accompanied by fabricated, manipulated, or out-of-context elements, as part of a disinformation campaign aimed at discrediting YGGtorrent.

Among the claims being circulated:

• that our databases and backups were destroyed (false);
• that the site would be permanently offline and impossible to restore (false);
• that we collect users' banking information (false);
• that our security relies on obsolete mechanisms like MD5 (false, this hasn't been the case for a long time);
• as well as other equally unfounded accusations."

So far, the French piracy community doesn't seem won over.

*Bad news for the other kind of French pirates: there's just not the kind of money there used to be in ransacking the English merchant navy these days.

On an average day about a dozen new games are released on Steam. And while we think that's a good thing, it can be understandably hard to keep up with. Potentially exciting gems are sure to be lost in the deluge of new things to play unless you sort through every single game that is released on Steam. So that’s exactly what we’ve done. If nothing catches your fancy this week, we've gathered the best PC games you can play right now and a running list of the 2026 games that are launching this year.

Horuma Hime

Steam ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ February 25
Developer:‌ Crimson Dusk

Homura Hime is a third-person action game the way they used to make them 20 years ago. Protagonist Homura has been tasked with defeating "five extremely powerful demon girls", and the ensuing violence looks like a mash up of Devil May Cry with Nier's bullet hell inclinations. It's a pretty straightforward slash and dodge 'em up wrapped in an anime skin, and if you miss the days when games like this were basically the norm, it's probably $23 well spent.

Planet of Lana 2

Steam ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ March 6
Developer:‌ Wishfully

The first Planet of Lana was a sumptuous, hand painted cinematic platformer in the style of Inside and Another World. I really enjoyed it, and this sequel seems to develop on the original mostly in the direction of tonal variety: this one has "frozen peaks, deep oceans and forgotten ruins", which points to a more varied colour palette than the original's splendid bright blues and greens. Lana is also older and thus moves with more certainty, though overall you can expect something fairly similar to the first: a carefully paced experience blending platforming, puzzles, and some occasional stealth.

iRacing Arcade

Steam page
Release:‌ March 4
Developer:‌ Original Fire Games, iRacing

iRacing is one of the most beloved "serious" racing sims but it's certainly not for everyone. Not everyone wants to pay attention to safety rules and, frankly, not everyone wants to have to brake around corners. iRacing Arcade is an answer to that: it's basically a casual, lightly cartoon-y take on the main game with some management sim aspects as well. It's been put in safe hands: the creators of Circuit Superstars is behind this one, and that's a mightily underrated modern take on the topdown racer.

Shinehill

Steam page
Release:‌ March 7
Developers:‌ Peach Bite

Another cosy game in the post-Stardew mould, Shinehill has you play as a well-disguised alien spy who has been gifted a house and plot of land. So you'd better farm that land, I guess, all the better to fit in and make a living, and you'd better go ahead and make nice with the townsfolk, because one of them isn't who they seem to be. It's got it all: fishing, dungeon crawling, and cooking.

Angel Engine

Steam page
Release:‌ March 7
Developer:‌ HMS Studios, Black Lantern Collective

Angel Engine is an analog horror series (think Blair Witch, Paranormal Activity) published on vertical video platforms like TikTok and Instagram. I've never heard of it in my life, but it now has a game. It's a "horror surgery simulator that explores a missing chapter of the Angel Engine series", and it's definitely adopted that grimy DreadXP veneer, though it looks more like a '90s PC point 'n' click adventure than a PS1 game.

On an average day about a dozen new games are released on Steam. And while we think that's a good thing, it can be understandably hard to keep up with. Potentially exciting gems are sure to be lost in the deluge of new things to play unless you sort through every single game that is released on Steam. So that’s exactly what we’ve done. If nothing catches your fancy this week, we've gathered the best PC games you can play right now and a running list of the 2026 games that are launching this year.

Water Womb World

Steam ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ February 25
Developer:‌ Yames

This short, reflective and overwhelmingly strange adventure has been available on itch.io since 2020, but now it's hit Steam. In a murky subaquatic world you're tasked with catching fish and seeking out objects, which can then be studied in a lab, all in aid of discovering the womb of God. It's a deliberately cryptic affair with a potent cosmic aura about it, and to be honest, boiling it down to what you do with your hands is kinda underselling its unheimlich energies. If you've got half-an-hour or so, just play it: it's free. And then play Yames' other weirdo artefacts.

New Heights

Steam ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ February 27
Developer:‌ Wikki Works

Released into 1.0 last week, New Heights is a grittier, more sim-centric take on rock climbing compared to Cairn. Here, pathfinding is only a fraction of the problem: New Heights lets you (by default) control each limb manually, and unlike Cairn—which auto-selects limbs—is designed to be played that way. There are 280 routes to tackle here, plus Steam Workshop support if you're keen to try the community's contributions.

Fear Effect 2: Retro Helix

Steam‌ ‌page‌
Release:‌ February 28
Developer:‌ Implicit Conversions

Fear Effect 2 has been a PS1 exclusive since its 2001 debut, but now finally gets an official PC release. It's a fixed perspective, third-person sci-fi horror with a cell-shaded art style that was very distinctive at the time. Nowadays, I'm not sure newcomers will embrace Fear Effect 2, though some quality of life improvements are here including manual saves, the ability to rewind, and a new widescreen mode. It's also extraordinarily cheap at $10, so definitely a better option than emulation.

Tales of Berseria Remastered

Steam page
Release:‌ February 27
Developers:‌ D.A.G Inc.

Another re-release, though it's fair to say Tales of Berseria Remastered is less of a boon. That's because this upgrade of the 2017 original doesn't make hugely meaningful improvements, though it packs in all DLC from the original and includes some QOL additions like destination markers, and the ability to toggle off enemy encounters. It's also, unusually, significantly cheaper than buying the 2017 version, so while there are some annoyances here—like a 60 fps cap—it's probably the best way to play this instalment on PC going forward.

Emberbane

Steam page
Release:‌ February 25
Developer:‌ Hamlet Games

If you're not all metroidvania'ed out, Emberbane is this week's most noteworthy addition to the booming genre. Protagonist Ophelia is an orphan who has to save the world, or something. What matters is that her moveset looks gloriously fluid, and if you love platformers that demand super-precise movement, and if you actually love one-hit kill spikes (that's me) this is well worth a wishlist for when you've burnt through the other 68 metroidvanias already on your pile of shame.

Videogame oracle Jason Schreier has issued a dire portent: Sony might be gearing up to reverse its push onto PC of the past six years. In the latest episode of the Triple Click podcast, Schreier said that "the sense I'm getting is that [Sony is] backing away from putting their exclusive console stuff—like, traditional singleplayer stuff—on PC."

Schreier—whose games industry newshound credentials are hard to argue with—later followed up his podcast comments with a post on Resetera: "It's not speculation, but sometimes topics come up on the show before I'm quite ready to publish a story about them." As an added bonus, Digital Foundry's John Linneman made similar comments on one of that outlet's shows, remarking that "I actually have an inkling that [Sony is] pulling away from PC. Watch this space."

Schreier suggested his understanding is that Sony's "strategy is live-service games are coming to PC," but that we can, perhaps, kiss goodbye to the days when pretty much every Sony first-party console exclusive was all but guaranteed to make its way to our platform of choice. "We're seeing Wolverine coming in September—they just announced it's coming September 15. That's not gonna be on PC. That's gonna be on PlayStation 5 only."

One shouldn't be alarmist about this. Until Schreier's full report hits, all we have to go on concerning any pullback from PC by Sony is a few comments on podcasts. Nevertheless, Schreier and Linneman are reputable, and I'm willing to say there's no smoke without fire. With the next Xbox sounding distinctly PC-like (though, with recent leadership changes at Microsoft's gaming arms, it's anyone's guess as to what the future there looks like now), it would make a degree of sense for Sony to shy away from its hitherto reliable strategy of putting everything on PC eventually. It likely isn't keen on the notion of PlayStation games appearing on an Xbox, even if that Xbox is nothing like the consoles of yore.

Then again, a year ago ex-PlayStation Studios boss Shuhei Yoshida chuckled that putting PlayStation games on PC was "almost like printing money," which has led a few people to raise an eyebrow at the notion of Sony pulling back from PC. I'm not sure I buy that, though. Porting games to PC takes time and resources. If Sony thinks that time and those resources might be better put to use on an alternative strategy—or if it's gotten the notion that committing to PC unavoidably weakens its core console business—I could quite easily see it making a U-turn.

Regardless, I have to admit that I'm not all that broken up by the notion of Sony's first-party singleplayer stuff swerving PC. I've played a fair number of them now, and only ever come away thinking I'd had a nice but unmemorable time.

Yesterday, New York state attorney general Letitia James announced that the state of New York had opened a lawsuit against Valve, accusing the Steam developer of violating gambling laws by "letting children and adults illegally gamble" via "addictive and harmful" loot box mechanics.

Contained within New York's 52-page court filing detailing its investigation into Valve's monetization strategies and the alleged dangers they pose to children and adults alike, the state describes one particularly interesting avenue of its inquiry. Spotted by Aftermath's Riley MacLeod on Bluesky, the state of New York has been dabbling in some Counter-Strike skin trading of its own. For official purposes, of course.

In its allegations, New York explains how Valve hasn't just developed a series of loot box-style monetization methods. It's also developed its own digital exchange with the Steam Marketplace, where users can sell the virtual items and cosmetics they receive from Valve's chance-based microtransactions—demonstrating that those virtual items have value, as do the winnings of traditional forms of gambling.

As New York notes, those sales result in the distribution of Steam Wallet funds, which "have the equivalent purchasing power on the Steam platform as cash." Crucially, however, the ability to use Steam Wallet funds for purchasing Valve's physical hardware, like the Steam Deck, provides users with a method through which they "can readily convert virtual items to cash by purchasing Steam hardware and then reselling it off platform."

And just to be sure, the New York Office of the Attorney General dipped into the Steam Marketplace to do some skin flipping. As written on page 21 of the court filing:

"Indeed, an OAG investigator did so, converting a Counter-Strike skin called a 'Stiletto Knife' to $180 by: (a) selling the skin on the Steam Community Market for Steam Wallet funds, (b) using the Steam Wallet funds received from the sale of the skin to purchase a Steam Deck, and (c) selling the Steam Deck for $180 in cash at a store that buys and sells electronics."

Now, you might be wondering: If the state of New York sold a Counter-Strike knife valuable enough to buy a Steam Deck that costs $549 at minimum, didn't it take a big loss if it only got $180 for reselling the hardware? And the answer is yes, which would be a problem if you'd bought that knife with your own money.

If you used someone else's money, that's another story. If you, let's say, purchased a valuable knife skin using a stolen credit card or the Steam Wallet funds on a stolen account, Valve's provided you with a way to launder stolen money.

While New York's lawsuit is primarily concerned with its gambling allegations, it also demonstrates the hazards generated by digital marketplaces where real currency is exchanged—particularly ones like Valve's, which provides an avenue for converting virtual commodities into real-world goods and cash. By engaging with Valve's loot box mechanics, users enter into the proximity of compounding criminal incentives, as we've seen in previous money-laundering scandals involving Valve cosmetics.

But hey, if you're embedded in the Counter-Strike skin economy, you're at least now also in proximity to New York's OAG investigators. Maybe that's reassuring?

After drawing widespread criticism with the announcement of a new global age assurance policy earlier this month, Discord is now delaying the rollout of its age verification changes until the second half of 2026. In a blog post acknowledging that the company had "missed the mark," Discord co-creator and CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy said it's revising its age verification strategy to address users' privacy concerns by providing greater transparency and offering alternative verification options.

Additionally, Vishnevskiy noted that Discord ended its "limited test" with identity verification vendor Persona in January. While the test ended prior to Discord's announcement of its global age assurance plans, Persona's financial ties to Palantir founder Peter Thiel contributed to the fears circulating throughout the Discord user base about the privacy and surveillance risks of new age verification measures.

"On top of that, many of you are worried that this is just another big tech company finding new ways to collect your personal data. That we're creating a problem to justify invasive solutions," Vishnevskiy. "I get that skepticism. It's earned, not just toward us, but toward the entire tech industry. But that's not what we're doing."

Admitting that "it isn't realistic" to ask users to take Discord at its word, Vishnevskiy said the company is making an effort to provide "more detail about our intentions and how the process works." As a sign of that effort, he said Discord will be publishing a technical blog post about its own automated age determination systems, which he reiterated—as Discord previously had—should mean that "over 90% of users will never need to verify their age to continue using Discord exactly as they do today."

Additionally, Vishnevskiy said Discord is committing to offering "full transparency on vendors" it partners with for age verification processing, "including their data handling practices." Each vendor, he said, undergoes a security and privacy review to prevent a repeat of the 2024 security breach at an ID verification provider that exposed the personal information of up to 70,000 Discord users.

Following its "limited test" with Persona, Vishnevskiy said Discord didn't pursue a further partnership with the vendor as it failed to meet Discord's privacy policies, which requires that age verification vendors ensure that any age estimation takes place entirely on the user's device and doesn't transmit data elsewhere.

Vishnevskiy said that Persona, which researchers recently assessed as being a rat's nest of privacy violations and security vulnerabilities, "did not meet that bar."

While Discord will adhere with age verification requirements where already legally obligated, it's delaying its global age assurance rollout until the second half of 2026 while it pursues the following list of commitments:

• Adding more verification options. We already had alternatives in development, including credit card verification. We'll complete and expand those before scaling globally so you have more options you're comfortable with.
• Vendor transparency. We'll document every verification vendor and their practices on our website, and make it clear in the product who each vendor is. We've also set a new requirement: any partner offering facial age estimation must perform it entirely on-device. If they don't meet that bar, we won't work with them.
• A new spoiler channel option. We know many communities use age-restricted channels not for adult content, but for topics people prefer to engage with on their own terms: spoilers, politics, and heavier conversations. We're building a dedicated spoiler channel option so communities don't have to age-gate their server just to give members that choice.
• A technical blog post before global launch. We'll publish a detailed post explaining how our automatic age determination systems work, including the signal categories and privacy constraints. So you can evaluate our approach for yourselves.
• Age assurance data in our transparency reports. We'll include how many users were asked to verify, what methods they used, and how often our automated systems handled it without any user action.

"We've made mistakes. I won't pretend we haven't. And I know that being a bigger company now means our mistakes have bigger consequences and erode trust faster. I don't expect one blog post to fix that," Vishnevskiy said. "Trust is earned through actions over time: shipping the things we promised, owning it when we miss the mark, and giving you real control over your own experience."

Additional transparency is better than the alternative, and Vishnevskiy's messaging here reads as more conscious of user concerns than his company had been at any earlier point in this particular PR saga. But there's an important fact to keep in mind as age verification continues to rear its head: Discord didn't make these commitments until after the outcry.

Correction: A previous version of this article implied that Discord ended its relationship with Persona following public backlash, but the company says that its test concluded as intended at a scheduled date prior to Discord's age verification announcement and the subsequent public criticism.

The newly-independent classic game slingers at GOG would like you to know something: the whole business of keeping old games going only works if you give a damn about it, so please do so.

GOG was responding to comments made by New Blood CEO Dave Oshry, who told RPG Site that GOG's up against the fact that it's "still 1 to 5% of the sales on Steam… I love their preservation efforts and everything they're trying to do, but they need enough people to give a shit, or how long are they even going to be around?"

While GOG didn't quite strike the same tone—not only is it probably bad PR to suggest your storefront is inches from the woodchipper, but in my own chat with the new bosses, they suggested it had been doing pretty well of late—it did agree with Oshry's overall point. "[Oshry's] right about one thing: game preservation only works if people care," wrote GOG on X.

That does not mean going about your day while sometimes ambiently remembering that Heroes of Might and Magic 3 was really good (though I think you should do that too), it means, well, giving GOG money, for one thing.

It also means showing rights-holders you care about forgotten series and trying, as much as you can, to buy things without DRM. "Buy DRM-free, vote on the Dreamlist, join GOG Patrons. If games matter to you, show it. And let’s prove together that preservation isn’t niche. It’s necessary."

Which I suppose is true. I'll be honest: though I like GOG as a storefront and agree with its quest to keep old games alive, my skin does always crawl a bit when profit-seeking entities adopt the stance of a moral crusade. It rings a little of the classic Stewart Lee "Values of the Carphone Warehouse" bit. But my cynicism aside: there are plenty of people at GOG who truly care about this stuff, and I would like them to keep having the opportunity to act on it.

On an average day about a dozen new games are released on Steam. And while we think that's a good thing, it can be understandably hard to keep up with. Potentially exciting gems are sure to be lost in the deluge of new things to play unless you sort through every single game that is released on Steam. So that’s exactly what we’ve done. If nothing catches your fancy this week, we've gathered the best PC games you can play right now and a running list of the 2026 games that are launching this year.

Horripilant

Steam ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ February 21
Developer:‌ Alexandre Declos, Pas Game Studio

Horripliant is a horror grid-based dungeon crawler, or blobber, that borrows systems from the autobattler and idle game genres. The unnamed knight protagonist must gather resources to bolster their camp and upgrade gear, and as you'd expect, there are increasingly lucrative ways to expedite this process beyond lowly manual clicking. During enemy encounters the combat takes care of itself, essentially pitting the baddie's stats against yours. Don't worry though, Horripliant doesn't play itself: it also features some especially cryptic puzzles. The art style is appealingly rugged, drenching the whole affair in the aura of a long-forgotten shareware nasty.

F-22: Air Dominance Fighter

Steam ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ February 17
Developer:‌ Digital Image Design Ltd.

F-22: Air Dominance Fighter originally released in 1997, and while this thorough revamp is published my Microprose and certainly looks a lot like a ye olde Microprose sim, it was originally published by Ocean Software. F-22 may look like one of those steely flight sims of yore that require a 200+ page manual to figure out, but it actually leans arcade-ward: the Steam page claims it "couples deep modelling of avionics, flight dynamics, and radar with easy controls". The graphics have been marginally improved, but not so much that it F-22 doesn't retain its distinctive '90s charm.

Screaming Head

Steam‌ ‌page‌
Release:‌ February 17
Developer:‌ JZPS Games

Here's a deliberately garish 2D platformer about guiding a disembodied head—and an ugly one, to boot—through increasingly challenging gauntlets. If that's not your idea of a good time, I feel sorry for you, but it gets better: the ugly head's attack is a guttural, quite chilling scream (hence the name, I suppose). There's not much more I can say about this: get a load of the art style, and if it doesn't have you smashing that 'add to cart' button then it's clearly not for you.

Love Eternal

Steam page
Release:‌ February 20
Developers:‌ brlka

Love Eternal is another 2D action platformer, and despite its pared back approach to pixel art it's by all reports a quietly disturbing "psychological horror" with a richly discomforting atmosphere. In terms of the things you do with your hands, it looks like what would happen if you jammed VVVVV's gravity-switching mechanic into Celeste. In the words of one Steam review, Love Eternal is what happens when "VVVVVV woke up after having a rough tummy night and decided to eat Mulholland Drive."

Carmencarmen

Steam page
Release:‌ February 17
Developer:‌ Colectivo Rayente, Juanjo GarBas, Juanma Cabrera

Carmencarmen is a free game about exploring a rundown urban wasteland in a quaint yellow hatchback. It's an hour-long narrative-driven affair about talking with the people (or things) you meet, but there's a simple pleasure in handling the hatchback—it can drift and you really must drift it—and honking its horn. If I'm making this sound carefree and whimsical, do be warned that this outing gets very weird, and the early 3D art style only exacerbates its surreal-verging-horror leanings.

Original story:

YouTube is struggling at the moment. Although I can still play videos and load some pages, attempting to browse the video sharing site returns "something went wrong" errors for me.

DownDetector has recorded a huge spike in reports—340,000 at the peak—so if you're also experiencing problems, we're definitely not alone. YouTube has confirmed that the issue is being looked at.

"We're aware some of you are having issues accessing YouTube right now," reads a YouTube support page. "Our teams are aware, and we'll provide updates as soon as we have them."

YouTube elaborates: "An issue with our recommendations system prevented videos from appearing across surfaces on YouTube (including the homepage, the YouTube app, YouTube Music and YouTube Kids). The homepage is back, but we're still working on a full fix – more coming soon!"

We'll update this article when we learn more, or if the issue is resolved. In the meantime, you can enjoy the comments on that support page, such as "I was going to draw while playing music. I pay for premium btw so I need it like now." Fair!

In recent months, the US Department of Homeland Security has issued hundreds of administrative subpoenas to Google, Reddit, Discord, and Meta to obtain the identifying information of individuals behind accounts that track or criticize Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations, according to New York Times reporting.

According to four federal officials and tech industry workers who spoke on condition of anonymity, the issued subpoenas requested that the companies provide names, email addresses, telephone numbers, and other data that could be used to identify Americans who publicly decry ICE and or identified the locations of its agents.

Of the subpoenaed platforms—which can choose whether or not to supply the requested information—Google, Meta, and Reddit have complied with some of the requests. Some of the accountholders in question were informed that the DHS had requested their information, and were given 10 to 14 days to challenge the subpoena in court.

"When we receive a subpoena, our review process is designed to protect user privacy while meeting our legal obligations," a Google spokesperson told the New York Times. "We inform users when their accounts have been subpoenaed, unless under legal order not to or in an exceptional circumstance. We review every legal demand and push back against those that are overbroad."

The US government's efforts to identify Americans who oppose its actions coincides with rising fears about online surveillance and privacy, as some of the companies being issued subpoenas are the same companies requiring users to provide private information.

Last week, Discord announced the rollout of a new age assurance policy, which will limit some users to a 'teen' experience unless they verify their age by scanning either their faces or government IDs. Some users have been informed that their age verification would be processed as part of "an experiment" with Persona, an age verification provider whose major funders include Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, which likewise invests heavily in ICE surveillance contractor Palantir.

Persona also processes age verification data for Reddit, which the New York Times reports has complied with DHS subpoenas. PC Gamer has contacted Discord and Reddit for comment, and we'll update if we receive a response.

Open-source software development—the open, collaborative contribution of knowledge in the name of problem solving, bug fixing, feature development, and ongoing support—is a borderline utopian idea. But the advent of generative LLMs has forced the maintainers of projects like open-source game engine Godot to face a deluge of AI-generated code from would-be contributors who might not even understand the changes they're submitting.

In a Bluesky thread (via Game Developer), Rémi Verschelde—one of the primary maintainers of the Godot Github repository and co-founder of major Godot backer W4 Games—says the problem of "AI slop" pull requests, or requests to merge code changes with the project, is "becoming increasingly draining and demoralizing for Godot maintainers" as they're now forced to deliberate the trustworthiness and human authorship of an onslaught of LLM-generated contributions.

Honestly, AI slop PRs are becoming increasingly draining and demoralizing for #Godot maintainers.If you want to help, more funding so we can pay more maintainers to deal with the slop (on top of everything we do already) is the only viable solution I can think of:fund.godotengine.org

— @akien.bsky.social (@akien.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-02-17T21:25:12.382Z

"We find ourselves having to second guess every PR from new contributors, multiple times per day," Verschelde said. "The description is verbose LLM output; is the code written at least partially by a human? Does the 'author' understand the code they're sending? Did they test it? Are the test results made up?"

Even if Godot's maintainers are able to identify AI-generated code or description, Verschelde says that's often just the first of compounding complications.

"Is this code wrong because it was written by AI, or is it an honest mistake from an inexperienced human contributor?" Verschelde said. "What do you do when you ask a PR author if they used AI because you're suspicious, and they all reply 'yes I used it to write the PR description because I'm bad with English'?"

Verschelde says Godot "prides itself in being welcoming to new contributors, letting any engine user have the possibility to make an impact on their engine of choice." But navigating the accelerating rate of PRs that could jeopardize the project's health with faulty code or incomplete understanding is overtaxing the maintainers' finite capacity.

"Maintainers spend a lot of time assisting new contributors to help them get PRs in a mergeable state," Verschelde said. "I don't know how long we can keep it up."

Godot's maintainers are discussing and investigating solutions, including potential automated detection options—but Veschelde said it "seems horribly ironic" to have to turn to run AI-based solutions to "detect AI slop," because he's "really not keen on feeding the AI machinery."

Godot is also weighing the possibility of moving the project to another platform where there might be less incentive for users to "farm" legitimacy as a software developer with AI-generated code contributions. But moving to a less popular platform could run the risk of alienating legitimate contributors.

In January, Github acknowledged the "increasing volume of low-quality contributions that is creating significant operational challenges for maintainers," and said it's exploring both short- and long-term options for triaging the plague of AI PRs. The first of those rolled out last week, as Github now allows maintainers to limit pull requests to collaborators or disable them entirely.

But given that Github is owned by Microsoft—one of the world's most shameless AI boosters—one does wonder just how incentivized it truly is to curb the acceleration of AI-generated code flooding onto the platform.

Verschelde said that, ultimately, the best way to support the ability of projects like Godot to weather the flood of AI-generated pull requests is with financial support: "If you want to help, more funding so we can pay more maintainers to deal with the slop (on top of everything we do already) is the only viable solution I can think of."

On an average day about a dozen new games are released on Steam. And while we think that's a good thing, it can be understandably hard to keep up with. Potentially exciting gems are sure to be lost in the deluge of new things to play unless you sort through every single game that is released on Steam. So that’s exactly what we’ve done. If nothing catches your fancy this week, we've gathered the best PC games you can play right now and a running list of the 2026 games that are launching this year.

Roadside Research

Steam ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ February 13
Developer:‌ Cybernetic Walrus

Roadside Research is a four-player cooperative game about running a gas station. You'll stock shelves, fill up tanks and prepare food. But there's a catch: Roadside Research puts you in the role of an alien spy: as you and three friends perform mundane retail tasks you'll also need to gather intel on humankind, all without revealing your true identities. It's a timely blend of those ubiquitous first-person retail sims and zany co-op (the kids are calling it friendslop). Roadside Research is an Early Access affair with a substantial roadmap and , according to the devs, an already bustling community.

Polyarmory: High Calibre Love

Steam ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ February 13
Developer:‌ Scope Creeps

According to its Steam page, Polyarmory is "the world's only fully-loaded conspiracy theorist gun-nut dating simulation". It's not hard to believe, but the dating elements mentioned in that quote undersell the fact that this is also first-person shooter. When you're not interacting with a gaggle of highly-sexualised firearms, you're fending off waves of enemies who want to steal them from you. Also, you're a prepper infatuated with an Infowars-style radio program that airs constantly in-game. All this, free of charge.

The Prisoning: Fletcher's Quest

Steam‌ ‌page‌
Release:‌ February 11
Developer:‌ Elden Pixels

This short 'n' sweet Metroidvania might not have stood out to me if it weren't for the studio responsible: Elden Pixels earlier games, Alwa's Legacy and Alwa's Awakening, are beautiful tributes to fantasy pixel art adventures of yore and I highly recommend them. The Prisoning mixes things up a fair bit: "After a psychologist visit goes terribly wrong, you find yourself trapped in the mind of a game developer on the brink of physical and emotional burnout during the final stages of an intense project". It's a short, two hour Metroidvania with randomly generated maps in the style of Chasm.

BrebeMan

Steam page
Release:‌ February 13
Developers:‌ MetaFormingPro

This rhythm-action game is about a superhero DJ with a huge fondness for breakbeats. "When you finish this game, you will be hooked on breakbeats," the Steam page promises (if you don't already like breakbeats, why not?). Some rail shooter elements have been blended in, tasking you with using records to attack breakbeat-hating enemies while also using them to shield from oncoming assaults. Success fills a bar which, when triggered, changes the beat and destroys all enemies.

Shadows of the Afterland

Steam page
Release:‌ February 10
Developer:‌ Aruma Studios

Shadows of the Afterland is an early '90s style point 'n' click adventure set in 1960s Madrid and also, an afterlife version of that city. "A chilling incident unfolds at the city's old zoo, leading to a mysterious death that propels a soul to the threshold between the world of the living and the afterlife," the Steam page reads. "But when the transition goes awry, the soul arrives with the memories of Carolina, one of the pioneers of the Madrid police force, who has not yet been born." What follows is a pretty straightforward take on a beloved style, leavening puzzles with amusing encounters.

Last week, Discord invited the contempt of its users by announcing it will be rolling out global age verification restrictions in March, which will restrict viewable content and communities for users who don't scan either their faces or government IDs and haven't already been determined to be an adult by unspecified prediction algorithms. Approximately nobody thought this was cool.

Impossibly, despite its attempts to pacify the ensuing outcry by issuing a clarification that merely some users will be required to submit to its child detection matrix, Discord has managed to make the rollout of its global age assurance policy seem even grimier. The company has informed some users in the UK they may be part of "an experiment" with Persona, an age verification vendor whose investors include Peter Thiel, co-founder of ICE's premier surveillance provider, Palantir.

In the days since Discord's age assurance policy announcement, reports began bubbling up on social media from users in the UK—where Discord already requires age verification as a result of its 2025 Online Safety Act—who were presented with prompts to consent to age verification processed by the company Persona.

Sure enough, Discord's support article describing its age verification process now features a disclaimer informing UK users that they "may be part of an experiment where your information will be processed by an age-assurance vendor, Persona." And while Discord had previously insisted that facial age verification recordings would only be stored and processed locally, the notice about Persona says that "the information you submit will be temporarily stored for up to 7 days, then deleted."

While some users have speculated that Discord is testing alternate age verification providers because k-ID—its primary age authentication partner—has proven susceptible to creative workarounds, Discord doesn't specify why some users will be processed by Persona instead.

Regardless of the reasoning, the partnership with Persona has compounded concerns about privacy due to the company's investors. In its two most recent rounds of venture capital funding, its lead investor has been Founders Fund—the venture fund co-founded and directed by Peter Thiel.

A co-founder and former CEO of PayPal, Thiel is nowadays more often discussed—or reviled—for his work in co-founding Palantir, the data harvesting and surveillance technology firm that furnishes ICE's deportation efforts with a digital panopticon and compiles databases from the private information of American citizens.

And listen, I know people harp on this a lot, but it's a company literally named after an orb that lets the most evil force in the world spy on your thoughts.

If that's not enough for you to be unsettled by Thiel's money being involved in Discord's age verification rollout, the billionaire—who infamously wrote "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible" in 2009—appeared more than 2,200 times in the latest release of the Epstein files, where he coordinated years of meetings with the convicted child predator and sex trafficker.

Discord has downplayed the significance of its age verification rules in response to public fears, while critics, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Rindala Alajaji, argue that the outcry is warranted for myriad reasons. A figure like Thiel appearing on the scene within days sure as hell doesn't dispel those fears. IRC's looking more attractive every day.

Discord has announced that, in March 2026, it will begin rolling out what it calls "teen-by-default settings" for everyone worldwide, requiring all users to complete an age verification process to avoid restrictions on content, settings, and communication. That process will require you to either scan your face or submit your government-issued ID.

While Discord says the wide-reaching age verification requirements are intended to "reinforce its long-standing commitment to creating a safer and more inclusive experience," the rollout announcement has been met with privacy and surveillance concerns from users who—understandably—aren't thrilled by the idea of providing the platform with their sensitive, identifying information.

If you'd rather not let the app scan your face or ID, here's what will happen if you don't verify your age on Discord.

What happens if you don't complete Discord age verification?

When Discord implements teen-by-default settings worldwide in March 2026, all new and existing Discord accounts will be reclassified as teen accounts, forcing all users onto a new set of default settings that can only be changed after completing Discord's age verification process.

Those settings will restrict the kinds of content you can see, the channels you can participate in, and the people you can communicate with. It's important to note that these restrictions will apply both in public servers and in private DMs, even if it's just you and four friends in a group chat. Here's what you can expect:

"Teen" Discord account limitations

• Mature and graphic images will be permanently blocked: Images containing graphic or explicit content will be blurred by Discord's sensitive content filter. While users in most countries have previously been able to unblur mature content, it will now be impossible to unblur graphic imagery or adjust the content filter settings for your account until age verification is complete.
• Age-restricted channels and servers will be inaccessible: Any Discord channels, servers, or server commands that have been designated as age-restricted by their operators will be inaccessible to accounts that haven't completed adult age verification. If you attempt to view age-restricted spaces with an account that isn't verified as an adult, you'll be met with a black screen preventing your access—even if you'd previously been a member.
• DMs from unknown users will be rerouted to a separate inbox: Previously, all users could select a setting allowing unknown users to DM them directly without those messages being placed in the "Message Requests" inbox. Now, enabling the "Do not filter" option under Content & Social settings will require age verification.
• Friend requests from unknown users will always produce a warning popup: The setting for disabling warning prompts for friend requests from unknown users will require age verification.
• No speaking on server stages: Speaking on stage channels, which allow specific users to speak uninterrupted to an audience of listeners, will only be possible after completing age verification.

What do you need to complete Discord age verification? Should you be worried about your privacy?

Discord's "age assurance" process can be completed in one of two ways:

• Allow Discord to record a video of your face, which it will use to generate an age estimate
• Provide a picture of a government-issued ID and provide a selfie to match your ID

How willing you should be to provide that information is something we each have to determine for ourselves, but it's always worth exercising caution whenever you're asked to give identifying or private information—especially when it's being associated with your online account and its activity.

Depending which age verification method you use, Discord is either sending the analysis of your face recording or sending your government-issued ID and photo to one of its ID verification partners. Discord says video recordings are analyzed on-device and aren't sent elsewhere and that photos of ID are deleted "quickly," but there's already been at least one case where a data breach at one of Discord's ID verification partners exposed the sensitive information and government IDs of its users.

Ultimately, in providing your private information to Discord, you are taking a large company at its word that it will prioritize your privacy when it might be more profitable to skirt security safeguards, maintain valuable user data, or comply with private or state surveillance efforts. If those risks seem too great, it's worth considering an alternative chat application—or sticking to the new "teen" account privileges.

Discord says that some users may not have to complete the age verification process thanks to a new "age inference model" that will analyze your behavior on the platform to estimate your age. Even if you get to avoid scanning your face or your ID, you should keep in mind that your activity on the platform is nevertheless being analyzed.

If you want to make god laugh, tell him your plans. If you want to make Gabe Newell laugh, tell him your planned 1.0 launch date. Good news: that second one's getting easier, because Steam has implemented a new feature that lets early access devs slap that date right there on the store page. But, says Valve, they probably shouldn't use it.

Devs and publishers tinkering with an early access game's store page on Steam will now be able to select a planned launch window ranging from kinda vague (only the year) to incredibly specific (day and date). "Just as with Coming Soon pages on Steam," says Valve, "developers have the option to share a specific calendar date, or a more vague timeframe if they wish."

Now, it's not like game-makers have been under a geas that forbids them from communicating planned launch dates to fans before this point. Obviously, they were more than able to type a release day into one of the myriad text fields that populate a Steam page, but the date selected here will go right up top, in the blue early access banner, and will be used by Steam to populate users' personal release calendars.

So, roll on the release dates, right? Let a hundred flowers launch? Not, ah, not quite. In fact, after detailing the new features available to early access devs, Valve suggests that they probably shouldn't use them. "Just because this feature exists, does not mean you should or must use it," says the company. "Early Access can be challenging and unpredictable, and it's perfectly normal for a studio to change plans, or simply not know when the time might be right for 1.0."

After all, setting and then missing your 1.0 date is a great way to end up with a lot of angry players on your hands. "When in doubt, wait. Setting a specific calendar date can cause confusion or disappointment if you end up missing that date.

"Building and maintaining trust with your community is an important part of Early Access, and there is no pressure to establish a 1.0 release time far in advance."

Which seems wise, though I also suspect it won't be long before we run into a furore over an early access game missing the date it promised right there on its page.

The thing about Linux is: it's cool, and very interesting and beautiful people use it. I've been running Fedora 43 on my main machine for a few months now and, to be honest? It's easy. Almost boringly easy. I got into all this expecting to have to wrestle the OS' peccadilloes into submission, but aside from minor tinkering to get proprietary Nvidia drivers and codecs installed, it's been smooth sailing.

Imagine my disappointment. And now, as of the most recent Steam beta update, there's even less Linux weirdness to deal with when you slip free of the shackles of Windows. As of yesterday's Steam (and Steam Deck) client beta update, Valve has put paid to a bug that meant the platform would sometimes forget it can run Windows games on Linux. Cut it some slack; it's 23 years old.

The bug in question afflicted users with especially large libraries—though Valve doesn't say how large—and would "result in Proton games showing up as 'Not valid on current platform'". Which rather defeats the whole point of Proton—Valve's fancy, WINE-based compatibility layer that lets Windows-only games run on your Linux distro of choice.

Which is rather good news. Also bundled into the beta are fixes for the client's downloads view "when moving game entries between scheduled and queued sections," gyro fixes, repairs for "an issue with Switch Pro Controller Home LEDs turning on when disabled," and those rascally ABXY button options should no longer go missing from your configs.

The gradual tilt toward Linux is probably the most interesting thing happening in tech right now, if you're me (which I assume you are). As Windows gets more and more insufferable, increasing numbers of people are saying to hell with it and sticking some flavour of Linux on their machines, often Bazzite, Nobara or some other gaming-specific distro in our neck of the woods.

Is it the end for Windows and the beginning of the era of total open-source dominance? Well, no. But even folks that have previously paid no mind to Linux are starting to have to pay attention. That's healthy and, as a beautiful, neophyte Linux-er, pretty dang cool.

Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has handily summarised the latter's Q4 results in a blog post this week, and right near the top is an interesting figure: YouTube's annual revenues surpassed $60 billion across ads and subscriptions.

Looking deeper into the fiscal results themselves, YouTube ads brought in $11.38 billion in the last quarter, compared to $10.47 billion in last year's report. Anecdotally, I can well believe this figure, as YouTube's ad frequency ramped up at such a rate towards the end of 2025 that I finally caved and bought a YouTube Premium subscription myself.

Speaking of which, while Alphabet doesn't report YouTube Premium's revenue individually, it has declared that the company now has "over 325 million paid subscriptions across consumer services, led by strong adoption for Google One and YouTube Premium."

On the surface, YouTube's revenue figure seems impressive—but its viewing figures are even more so. According to CEO Neal Mohan in his 2026 YouTube community letter, YouTube Shorts alone average out to 200 billion daily views. The YouTube head honcho also reports that YouTube has been "#1 in streaming watchtime in the U.S. for nearly three years", according to Nielsen's The Gauge report.

It's difficult to get reliable data on YouTube's usage figures overall, but it's said to have between 2.5 and 2.7 billion monthly active users worldwide as of 2025, with well over 1 billion hours of video content consumed daily, and over 20 million videos uploaded on average per day. If those figures are even close to accurate, that's an astonishing amount of data to handle—even for a cloud behemoth like Google with its own vast server infrastructure to lean on.

Likewise, it's very difficult to get a bead on exactly how much YouTube costs to run. But once creator monetisation payments, employee costs, and server maintenance are brought into the equation, it must be a pretty penny. Alphabet's Q4 financial report says that the revenue of Google Services in total was $95.86 billion, with its operating income reported as $40.132 billion, so that's $55.73 billion spent on servicing costs in the last quarter alone.

Of course, that's including Google's vast services infrastructure overall, not just YouTube. Still, it does make me wonder whether YouTube in and of itself is as profitable as its parent company hopes it would be, despite the impressive revenue figure. It's certainly more than Netflix, though, which reported $45.18 billion of total annual revenue earlier this year—along with operating expenses of $31.85 billion.

The ad strategy I (and many others) have observed in recent months certainly seems to suggest that YouTube is doubling down on its income potential, whether that's advertising or pushing people towards its paid premium services, or a combination of the two. It's remarkably good at noticing adblockers these days, too, which feels like an escalation of its previous, adblock-hating ways.

It's all about money at the end of the day. Still, with so many eyeballs on its videos, and so many excellent (and many dubious) creators using its platform, I will admit that YouTube Premium has finally got me to open my moth-ridden wallet and cough up. What can I say, I like a bit of ad-free YouTube before bedtime. Don't we all?

If you're anything like me, your Epic Games Store account is a kind of Library of Alexandria of free-but-unplayed games. Every so often you open the site, add whatever the current free game is to your collection, then never, ever, ever play them. Perhaps some day a long winter will come, and we'll all sit down and chew through our collections like they're so many acorns in our cheeks.

For now, though: the Epic launcher is bad. It's just not a good launcher—it's slow, bloated, and continually forgets who you are. That's not just me saying that, it's Epic. Last year, Epic head honcho Tim Sweeney straight-up said the launcher was "clunky," and now EGS vice president and general manager Steven Allison has told Eurogamer that "the launcher sucks. Let's call it what it is. It's really slow."

Allison says there are "a lot of things we need to fix. We have needed to fix them for years. We've been really focused on developer tooling and all the things we do there. But last year, we finally started to point more of our resources towards player experience stuff."

Which is pretty similar to what he told PCG when we sat down with him for a chat about the storefront's future (sans the "sucks"). Up to now, the EGS has been making "calls to our back-end services to refresh every time you click around," explained Allison, which is why you might experience lag on slower connections. Apparently, that's all set to change.

In essence, Allison says Epic's devs are hard at work stripping out the EGS' innards and putting in new, faster innards. "We're basically pulling the guts out, putting new guts in… It should start to feel good, be faster and people be like, 'Holy shit. It doesn't suck so much.' And that will be a win for us." The EGS team is also working on adding community spaces to the storefront. To be frank, the absence of anything resembling the notoriously toxic Steam forums has been one of the things in EGS' favour so far as I'm concerned, but I guess others disagree. Anyway, small, achievable goals.

Which, okay, sure. It's nice when corporations acknowledge reality—it's harder for them than it perhaps should be—but let's bear in mind that Sweeney was copping to the EGS' clunkiness almost a full year ago and the store itself has been available since 2018. At no point in that long tenure has it been good. Rather than shuffling out once a year to have the bosses shamefacedly take their lumps for how bad it is, it'd be preferable for it to just stop being bad.

Hey, that's what Allison promises, and that sounds great, but I also won't be paralysed with shock if you and I meet here again next year when some other exec performs the shame ritual.

The Epic Games Store development team is now squarely focused on "the things that players need," says store GM Steve Allison.

After launching the store in 2018, Epic prioritized building features aimed at game publishers, because "there's no store without content," Allison said on a call with PC Gamer this week. Attention was then turned to building the mobile versions of the store, but the time has now come for a major effort to improve the user experience.

That includes a technical overhaul coming mid-year—"We're ripping out the guts of the Epic Games Launcher on PC," Allison said—as well as new social features. There are plans to test "community and forums around some of the top games on the store" and add player profiles, avatars, private messaging, voice chat, and game-independent parties.

Epic remains more cautious than Steam about social features

The addition of forums represents a shift in approach. Back in 2019, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney said that the Epic Games Store would not have its own message boards, and encouraged developers to link to external forums.

At the time, Epic also opted not to emulate Steam features like user reviews, presenting its launcher as a light-touch intermediary between developers and players more than a destination in itself. Epic's account system is a good example of that philosophy: Unlike the Steamworks API, which only lets games interface with Steam's social features, Epic's Online Services can connect players across platforms and stores.

That interest in interoperability hasn't been abandoned, but Epic is now open to building a more active community within its launcher, with limits that keep its approach distinct from Valve's.

In the case of user reviews, Epic introduced a system in 2022 that asks random users who've played a game for more than two hours to assign it a star rating. Allison says the system has been "fairly bulletproof" as a way to include player ratings without allowing review bombing.

"The brigading that happens on the Steam platform against games, when they do things like cap a frame rate at 30 frames or whatever, that can turn a game's commercial outcomes upside down, that's something we want to not be able to facilitate," he said.

Steam has introduced features to mitigate review bombing, such as identifying surges in "off-topic" reviews, though the ability to collectively express anger via a mass thumbs-downing is no doubt something some Steam users would say they like about the platform. The moderation of Steam's forums and user groups is also notoriously lax.

Epic may never cater to users who want a free-for-all, but Allison says they know that more social features are desired, and they're going to build them.

"Right now, the first thing we're going to explore is adding a forum and using our trust and safety team to moderate the forums," said Allison. "But we're open to all that stuff now. We still have issues with and believe that those things [such as review bombing] need to be mitigated, but it's on us to figure it out."

Speeding up the launcher

The other big announcement, a technical overhaul of the Epic Launcher, has been in the works since October, and is expected to roll out this summer.

"The goal there is to eliminate the experience that players have where [the Epic Games Store] feels a little slow," said Allison, "Like you go to your library and it takes two seconds to load in, the system resourcing for when it's in tray, the time to load."

Allison said that the improvement is "pretty profound."

In its year in review dispatch, Epic also shared some of the store's statistical achievements from 2025, most notably record spending on third-party games.

Although Epic's user experience doesn't currently match Steam's, it has attracted game developers by offering them a better deal—a lower revenue cut which as of last June doesn't kick in until after a game reaches $1 million in annual sales—and has had success attracting users with its free games program, which Allison plans to continue for the foreseeable future.

On an average day about a dozen new games are released on Steam. And while we think that's a good thing, it can be understandably hard to keep up with. Potentially exciting gems are sure to be lost in the deluge of new things to play unless you sort through every single game that is released on Steam. So that’s exactly what we’ve done. If nothing catches your fancy this week, we've gathered the best PC games you can play right now and a running list of the 2026 games that are launching this year.

Don't Stop, Girlypop!

Steam ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ January 30
Developer:‌ Funny Fintan Softworks

The name of this one probably won't prepare you for what it actually is. Don't Stop, Girlypop! is a blisteringly fast movement-oriented arena shooter, except instead of the usual horror / sci-fi / dystopian / fantasy setting, we get a blissfully garish love letter to turn of the century chart pop. And in case you're tempted to write this off as a novelty—why would you?—there are some fascinating modern touches applied to this dayglo boomer shooter: moving faster means killing harder, and killing harder means healing more. "Tigris Nix wants to drain your world of The Love, a natural force keeping your planet alive," so reads the Steam description. "Lay waste to its robot drones to heal the Oasis!" OK! I'm in.

Space Warlord Baby Trading Simulator

Steam‌ ‌page‌
Release:‌ January 30
Developer:‌ Strange Scaffold

Strange Scaffold adds to its growing catalogue of delightfully macabre games (Clickolding, Life Eater, I Am Your Beast) with a sim about buying stocks "based on the simulated lives of babies", where you'll profit "from their misery" and cash out "the moment they win the Galactic Lottery". That means betting on procedurally generated alien babies from seven planets, and then sitting back to bear witness to their wretched lives, all the better to track the progress (or lack thereof) of your investment. It's extremely morbid stuff, obviously. But that's capitalism, baby.

Bogos Binted?

Steam page
Release:‌ January 29
Developers:‌ underbadger

I'm sorry, but what the hell does Bogos Binted mean? That's the question that compelled me to investigate this game about gambling against three fellow aliens, either solo or online. The central card game seems pretty simple at heart, until the complication of special cards comes into play. Oh, and the fact that you can simply blow the head off your opponents is also likely to complicate things too. I'm neither a card or boardgame fan, but this looks like a ridiculously fun online party game for people who are.

Millennium Dream

Steam page
Release:‌ January 28
Developer:‌ LucidDreamLab

Here's a fascinating walking sim about exploring environments loosely belonging to the 'Chinese Dreamcore' visual aesthetic which, to my untrained eyes (for I am not Chinese nor have I ever been to China) looks like a blend of vaporwave with "liminal space" trappings. It's a slightly askew, quietly dark form of nostalgia, in other words, and given the Steam tags that hint towards darker things, I wouldn't be surprised if this game about photographing popular retro settings is actually more than that.

Valkyrie Saga

Steam‌ ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ January 27
Developer:‌ Public Void

Valkyrie Saga looks like the most shit hot PlayStation 3D platformer that never existed. The textures are unmistakably belonging to the fifth generation, but the sprawl and scale of the maps is unlike anything we saw during that era, lending it a—perhaps deliberate—sickly dreaminess that I'm drawn to. Protagonist Roll can jump and glide balletically through these oddly barren landscapes, on her mission to stop a floating island from falling onto her home.

A few weeks ago, I sat down with GOG managing director Maciej Gołębiewski and new owner (and original co-founder) Michał Kiciński to chat about the venerable storefront's future without CD Projekt. One of the ideas it was batting about? Checking out this whole Linux thing, since quite a few people seem to be jumping ship from Windows recently.

But beyond expressing a general interest, the pair weren't willing to make any concrete commitments to Linux as a platform. Well, I guess the intervening few weeks made some difference: in a recent job posting for a senior software engineer for GOG Galaxy (GOG's optional Steam-like game interface), it straightforwardly says "Linux is the next major frontier" for the client.

"We’re looking for a Senior Engineer who will help shape GOG Galaxy's architecture, tooling, and development standards with Linux in mind from day one," reads the posting. "At the same time, GOG Galaxy is a long-lived product with a large and complex C++ codebase." In other words: you have to be able to get everything hunky-dory on Linux without breaking the entire thing for GOG Galaxy's pre-existing macOS and Windows user base.

Which is pretty great news. Although you'd think GOG's whole vibe—keeping old tech going, giving you digital goods you can plausibly say you truly own—would jibe quite well with the Linux community, the storefront's had a chequered past with it up to now. It originally said that a Linux version of GOG Galaxy 1.0—the first iteration of its client—was low-priority but on its roadmap. That went out of the window when GOG Galaxy 2.0 launched, and all mention of a Linux version was scrubbed from GOG's docs.

But better late than never, right? I'm always glad to see Linux get love from devs, especially as a recent Fedora convert. But there is a jumpscare lurking in that listing, too: GOG says whoever it hires will be tasked to "Actively use and promote AI-assisted development tools to increase team efficiency and code quality."

What does that mean? Your guess is as good as mine, and GOG declined to comment when I asked. But it sure leaves a sour taste in my mouth. I suppose we'll see what GOG's future is with Linux, and AI, as time goes by.

When Valve bizarrely vetoed the launch of horror adventure game Horses on Steam last year, its plucky competitor GOG was quick to swoop in. "We’re proud to give HORSES a home on GOG," announced the storefront, "giving players another way to enjoy the game. We’ve always believed that players should be able to choose the experiences that speak to them." In an interview this month, managing director Maciej Gołębiewski referred to Horses when he declared that "We as a company are always ready to take a stand on the right values".

That rankled some onlookers who remembered that, well, that wasn't always GOG's stance. In 2020, it came under fire for unceremoniously dumping Devotion, which had become subject of repression in China for memes seemingly mocking president Xi Jinping. In a new interview with Eurogamer, Gołębiewski chatted a bit about how GOG looks back on that episode.

"That situation remains difficult to reflect on," said Gołębiewski. "At the time, we made that decision in the context of very real business constraints, a limited understanding of the complex geopolitical factors at play, and a lack of good options that would both protect GOG and partners and allow the game to be released responsibly.

"In hindsight, we acknowledge that this decision—and the way we communicated it—understandably damaged the trust our users have in us."

When GOG announced it wouldn't be hosting Devotion, all the way back in 2020, it came in the form of a tweet: "Earlier today, it was announced that the game Devotion is coming to GOG. After receiving many messages from gamers, we have decided not to list the game in our store." That went down about as well as you'd expect at the time: GOG drew no end of criticism and mockery and at least one dev pulled their own release on GOG in solidarity with Devotion's studio, Red Candle.

"Keeping a global digital storefront operating means navigating legal, operational, and commercial realities that don't always allow for ideal outcomes," Gołębiewski told Eurogamer. "In 2020, we chose a path we believed was best for GOG, even though it came at a cost to our credibility." Letting Horses on GOG was much easier: it came without "legal, political, or operational risk to our business or partners."

Nevertheless, it seems like Gołębiewski remembers the whole thing with a wince. "When I say that we're ready to take a stand on the right values, I don't mean that we won't make mistakes, or that every decision will be easy, or that we'll never face trade-offs." Rather, he says that "with every given opportunity, we're striving to be clearer, more consistent, and more willing to stand behind our choices (including explaining them openly when they're being questioned)."

Perhaps it will be easier for GOG to make tough decisions now it only really answers to its new owner (and original co-founder) Michał Kiciński, or maybe it doesn't matter who owns you, and annoying a vast number of potential buyers in China might never be worth taking a stand.

Reacting to claims made by New Blood's CEO that Epic Games Store's free giveaways supposedly cause a boost in Steam sales, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney is once again unhappy with his store's lot in life.

"On some transactions, Epic wins. On more, Steam wins. But one thing is constant on every transaction: gamers and developers win by having more options and better deals", says Sweeney.

This time, Sweeney's comments were challenged in a long thread by Michael Douse, the publishing director at Larian Studios, makers of Baldur's Gate 3 and the upcoming Divinity. Douse chimes in with added context about Remedy's critically-acclaimed Alan Wake 2, which took over a year and two million sales before it became profitable, arguably partly due to its Epic Games Store exclusivity.

"I understand Epic entirely funded Alan Wake 2 but this altruistic pro-developer talk doesn't sit well when Remedy seemingly went into financial crisis because they couldn't tap Steam for AW2 sales suffering potentially hundreds of millions in lost revenue," says Douse.

He goes on to add, "Competition is good, and important, but it is difficult to buy the message when there are demonstrable cases of games underperforming as a result of the tactic."

Bringing things back to Epic's strategy of tempting players to its platform with free games, Douse says, "the viability of the store sits on their ability to convert hundreds of millions of Fortnite players into mid-hardcore premium gamers, and I don't see the Fortnite brand attempting to do that."

"Giving everyone everything for free might bump numbers but doesn't create a viable storefront from which to sell premium experiences."

I'll add that, if the Epic Games Store aspires to be a true competitor to Steam, then it should start by offering a comparable, robust platform before splashing the cash, handing out free games like a bribe, and nabbing seemingly permanent exclusives on PC (though in Alan Wake 2's case, Epic did fund it). Maybe then I'd be more tempted to even play the free games I own over there before considering buying them on Steam instead, like I've done on a few occasions now.

These days, the only time I recapture the sheer rush of Steam sales of olde ("I can buy every Quake game for £5? I'd be a fool not to!") is when I find one of those 'complete your collection' sets some games have.

You know the ones: they combine a bunch of games in a series, subtract the prices of the ones you already own, then slap a little discount on the remainder to tempt you into splashing out to complete the set. When you find one of those in the midst of an already-ongoing sale, making it all even cheaper? Baby, that's the good stuff.

Well, joyous news: you can now share that glee with your Steam pals. As spotted by SteamDB, Valve has recently pushed a change through that means you can now purchase these kinds of bundles as gifts.

The discounting feature works as it should: if you buy a bundle for someone who already has some of the games featured in it, it'll cost you less overall. I've tested this myself with some Steam friends and this Ghost Recon bundle—for those who don't have any of the games, it would cost me £43 to gift it. For those who already have some of them, it's cheaper.

This is bigger news for some folk than you might think, and there are plenty of people issuing a rapturous "finally!" in various social media corners. "Heck yeah," writes Redditor RoboKun, "Totally gifting friends the Valve Complete Pack cuz they never got it." Which is a worthy use of the feature, certainly.

"Oh fuck this is huge," concurs redmagicspider on Bluesky, and people on X are probably pretty chuffed about it too, but I resolutely refuse to care about X.

It's a good move, is the point. My only question is why it took quite so long to implement. It's a feature that seems obvious when you think about it, which is in no small part why so many are excited to see it arrive.

On an average day about a dozen new games are released on Steam. And while we think that's a good thing, it can be understandably hard to keep up with. Potentially exciting gems are sure to be lost in the deluge of new things to play unless you sort through every single game that is released on Steam. So that’s exactly what we’ve done. If nothing catches your fancy this week, we've gathered the best PC games you can play right now and a running list of the 2026 games that are launching this year.

Confidential Killings

Steam ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ January 13
Developer:‌ Brane, Lorenzo Boni

Detective games had a resurgence in 2025 and they're still coming. Detective Killings is a point 'n' click solve 'em up set during the seedy heyday of Hollywood: someone is systematically murdering actors, writers and producers, and it's your job to find out who. After thoroughly investigating the gritty comic book-style crime scenes, you'll need to reconstruct events in order to discover connections between the deaths, and how the people you meet factor into them. You do detective work, in other words. If you're into L.A. Noire or James Ellroy's Los Angeles novels, this looks like a nice fit.

Craftlings

Steam‌ ‌page‌
Release:‌ January 16
Developer:‌ Ariano Games GmbH

Craftlings mixes automation and Lemmings-style horde management, but instead of the short 'n' snappy levels of the latter, this outing takes place across 12 sprawling maps. As you'd expect, your craftlings can be assigned a bunch of different tasks including lumberjack, stone mason, warrior and more, and as those roles imply, there's a big focus on resource management and base building. Unusually for games like this, you can also expect to face off against foes on occasion.

Streetdog BMX

Steam page
Release:‌ January 15
Developers:‌ Yeah Us! Games

Goddamn do I love a good push bike game. Most of my recent faves have been about going really fast down hills on mountain bikes (see Descenders, Lonely Mountains Downhill) but Streetdog BMX, as the name implies, is all about their more compact trick-oriented stablemates. Set across six maps, Streetdog takes the form of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater: it's all about pulling off gnarly tricks, in particular wallrides, fakies and icepicks. Don't ask me what an icepick is, but if you must know there's a free demo.

EmuDevz

Steam page
Release:‌ January 17
Developer:‌ [r]labs

It's worth stating upfront that EmuDevz requires a working knowledge of programming: "if you can't write code yet, turn back while you still can", reads the Steam page, but if you do have that skill this looks fascinating. Set in the year 32767 in the aftermath of an internet apocalypse, it's your job to build an emulator for the fictional 1983 console NEES (one guess what that name is referencing). It's a thoroughly unique premise, and I admire how uncompromisingly niche it is.

Big Hops

Steam‌ ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ January 13
Developer:‌ Luckshot Games

If programming a working emulator sounds is too complicated a task, this cheerful 3D platformer might be more your speed. Like most modern 3D platformers it adopts the '90s mascot approach, quite effectively I would say, because I can easily imagine that cutesy frog in the above trailer on a cereal box. As you should expect from modern 3D platformers, Big Hops is designed to feel much more fluid than its predecessors: the frog can tongue swing and free climb, the latter with a Breath of the Wild style stamina bar. If you miss the 3D console games of yore, this one's for you.

Steam has announced a big change to its community awards system that means they no longer confer Steam points to awardees and, thank god, has freed us all from that one jester icon that people would unthinkingly hand out to any content they found offensive or idiotic.

If you've ever dipped into a game's Steam forums, or its guides, or its reviews, you've probably noticed something: a whole lot of the stuff posted there absolutely blows. On the one hand, hey, it's the internet, right? But even among the slurry you can find anywhere online, Steam's community hubs have long stood out for being especially tedious and filled with rage-baiting content.

A not-insignificant reason for this is the Steam community awards system. Introduced in 2020, community awards let Steam users give tips of their hat to other Steam users in the form of small animated emojis that appeared on awarded content. You've seen these before: things like the fistbump, little glowing heart, or the dreaded jester icon.

In theory, a fine idea—a way for the community to interact with each other and to give little shows of recognition to stuff they like. In practice? A nightmare. Each community award also came with a small number of Steam points that awarded users could spend in, well, the Steam Points Shop, and users would often award a particular icon—the jester, which looked like a clown—to content they thought was offensive or stupid. You see where this is going: a vicious cycle where trolls were directly incentivised to post trash-tier content to soak up the jester awards and resulting Steam points.

The new change to the system feels tailored specifically to avoid this problem in future. First up, there are now only 12 awards you can hand out: a gold badge, a flower, a heart, a spicy pepper, a laughing reaction, a 100 symbol, a lifering (for some reason), a bullseye, a +1, a lightbulb, a treasure chest, and a cup of tea (or other hot beverage; I guess it's not made clear). Crucially: no clown. The clown is gone, along with many other Steam awards that have been present since 2020.

But even more meaningful is that community awards no longer award points. "We found that [awarding points] encouraged and rewarded a narrow set of attention-grabbing content and didn't allow the focus to be as much on a broader pool of thoughtful, well-considered creative content," says Valve. So even if one of the new awards does become a byword for 'get a load of this idiot,' trolls won't be incentivised with Steam points to post useless content. Also, Steam no longer hands out profile badges for giving or receiving these new awards.

The new awards all cost the same amount—500 Steam points—and any you accrue can be displayed in a new showcase you can stick in your Steam profile. "The Second Edition set of Community Awards is intentionally a smaller set of awards, each one meaning something distinct from the others. This set is designed to make it quicker and easier to choose and keep the vibes positive. The First Edition awards cannot be granted anymore."

Thank goodness for that. I don't think this will suddenly turn Steam's community into a hub of erudite discourse, but at least it means there's no longer a direct incentive to post garbage.

In an industry whose most recent high-profile buyouts cost tens of billions of dollars, the December sale of GOG—for the relatively humble sum of around $25 million—might seem like barely a ripple in the pond. But the impact of the buyout was incommensurate with its cost. For years, GOG has marketed itself as the videogame storefront with values: preserving games, keeping them DRM-free, and letting you actually own them. But values have a tendency to fall by the wayside in the tumult of a corporate sale. Players were concerned.

But perhaps there's comfort to be taken from the fact that GOG's new boss is, quite literally, the same as the old boss. The store was acquired by Michał Kiciński, its original co-founder, under the explicit banner of preserving its integrity and mission statement.

"I think it has a very solid foundation as a company," Kiciński tells PC Gamer. "Good results, a very good brand—known, respected—with very clear values, and customers love it and stand behind it."

Plus, Kiciński has a sentimental attachment: "The less business[-y] reasons [for buying GOG] were: I'm kind of a parent of the company. I invented it back in 2005 together with Marcin Iwiński, and, for a moment, I was the first boss of the company… So I know the business. I know the company, and I didn't want it to be sold to, I don't know how to say it, to some random company." You know, the kind that might see all that chatter about DRM and game preservation as an obstacle to maximising profit.

Gold rush

The sale itself occurred in a remarkably compressed timeframe. "It was rather faster than it usually happens," says Kiciński. "Around September [2025], I found out that CD Projekt planned to sell GOG," recalls Kiciński, "so I joined the process around September." The next few months were a flurry: "It was quite an intensive few months: September, October, November, and especially December—the process was quite competitive."

Kiciński doesn't actually know who he was competing with for ownership of GOG—"We know only that there was one, probably big company competing with me," he says, and "some science shows" it was likely a US one—but he says he was concerned nevertheless. "I've seen some M&A [mergers and acquisitions] processes in the past, and I saw smaller companies being purchased by bigger companies, and then within a year or two disappear from the market.

"The database of customers was taken, the database of products was taken, teams were fired, things like that. I didn't want it to happen to GOG."

Why was CD Projekt looking to sell GOG, a company it owned for 17 years? Part of the reason isn't too hard to guess—GOG's simply not that profitable a part of the company compared to the megabucks the rest of it pumps out. Its net profit of, say, $1.2 million in 2022 might sound very nice to mere mortals like you and me, but CDP as a whole reported profits of over $120 million in 2024. Those are two quite different economic realities.

But there are broader, strategic reasons too. "I think it's become pretty clear for CDPR and GOG that we are pursuing two different strategies," said Maciej Gołębiewski, GOG's managing director. "CDPR has their strategy of developing triple-A games [with] story-rich, immersive worlds and creating franchises around them.

"GOG has its own strategy of bringing the finest visions of modern classics to gamers and creating a community around it… it does not make a lot of sense to keep them together for the long-term."

For Kiciński, "it was a very natural decision to split the company." The sheer difference in scale between GOG and CDP's other operations meant the storefront ended up overshadowed. "When you have two entities in one family, and one is much bigger and more profitable, it's very hard for the smaller entity to get enough attention, and it's very natural that the focus and attention goes into the bigger part of the company."

"I always felt that there was good faith and kindness coming from CDPR," says Gołębiewski, but "it was also visible that they have really ambitious projects, they have a lot on their plates, so… it could be felt that their eyes were on their challenges and on their strategy."

"This [sale] gives the opportunity for GOG to be fully focused on itself, let's say," concludes Kiciński, "and it's not like you are a smaller part of a bigger group, where there's something more important [happening], because a new game is coming out, or something like that."

For its part, CDPR has come out of the deal quite well. The "spirit of the agreement," as Kiciński puts it, is that arrangements between GOG and CDPR remain unchanged, at least for now. That includes the generous royalties CDPR gets from its games sold on GOG: "They have an exceptionally good royalty rate from GOG," says Kiciński, "And that's still the case, because there is no other place in the world where CD Projekt Red has such a big royalties from every game. So they kind of, you know, eat the cake and have the cake."

Future perfect

Loosed from the embrace of a studio giant with $120 million-worth of irons in the fire, what does the next move for GOG look like?

If you've got a plan, Kiciński and co might like to hear it. The rush to secure GOG's purchase over the last few months has left precious little room for grandiose visions of the years ahead. "We've just finished something that was both a marathon and a sprint," says Gołębiewski, "so we'll need to take some time to discuss our strategic options."

Still, that doesn't mean there aren't ideas floating around. No longer under someone else's control, GOG is freer than ever to take risks. "It's natural that in much bigger companies, the risk appetite—especially being a public company—tends to be smaller," says Gołębiewski, "and that removes some of the nimbleness of the company."

Reduced nimbleness does you no favours when your chief competitor is a behemoth like Steam: "Attacking a Goliath in wrestling is not a good idea," says Gołębiewski. "One needs to have good agility."

"One good example of risk-taking," adds Kiciński, "is publishing activity, because publishing activity has a tremendous amount of risk." He's not sure, but Kiciński reckons that risk is what held GOG back from publishing games when it was part of CDPR.

But Kiciński is fairly deep in game publishing—"I'm already in the publishing business through Retrovibe—I have 50% in that company"—and he thinks GOG could make a splash there too. "I'm absolutely open to taking risks in publishing, because I believe that if you have good people—knowing the games, knowing the industry, you can really minimise the risk to an acceptable level."

There are other obvious avenues the store could go down. When I ask if it might be tempted to get more heavily into preservation—not just uploading old games to its storefront and making sure they work, but actively working on them à la Nightdive—Gołębiewski plays his cards close to his chest. "I think that there are not that many companies that do it well," he says (though adds that "Obviously, Nightdive is one of the ones that are doing it well").

In his view, that means "there is space for another good company on that scene. I'm not saying definitely that it will be GOG in 2026, but certainly there is a space there. We are fans of Nightdive's work, but also we believe that competition is always good."

So, doubling down on the things GOG already does and knows, is how that sounds to me, continuing on with the tack that has seen the store, over the past year, lean much harder into its old Good Old Games brand with a focus on preservation and untangling classic rights. Looking forward, that means leveraging connections with developers and rights-holders to explore game publishing and, maybe, turning initiatives like the GOG Game Preservation program into something more dramatic, more remaster-esque.

Will that be enough to topple that old "Goliath," Steam? Well, no, probably not, but neither Gołębiewski or Kiciński are (currently) pitching themselves as out to conquer Gabe Newell's empire. "I think hooking people off of Steam is a byproduct of us trying to provide superior editions—something we call the finest editions of classic games," says Gołębiewski, "If there's a version of the game that's clearly better on GOG, and it has the promise that it will run forever… people will come."

"We are not really putting direct competition to Steam [in the sense] that we have to unhook somebody from Steam," says Kiciński. "Rather, we would like to persuade people, 'Okay, if you have an option to purchase a game—more purchase than rent—and you value having your classic, beloved game to own, then check out GOG. If it's not important, or you have different priorities, go for Steam."

GOG willing

Will GOG make it on its own? It seems up for the challenge, at the very least, and whether it succeeds—if you ask me—is down to just how salient the issues of game ownership and preservation become over the next several years. The issue "comes and goes," says Gołębiewski, "but as long as GOG exists, we are a point of reference on that scale. And if GOG doesn't exist, then, okay, we can actually say that people have given up.

"I think it is a challenge to operate in this industry in this day and age, and still stay true to the values, right? And to the mission. I think, judging by the reception we got last year, it holds up, and we'll see whether it holds up in 2026 and beyond."

Chalk up a win for small business! The Seattle offices of Valve Corporation—a plucky upstart company co-founded by Washington businessman Gabe "Gaben" Newell—must have been abuzz recently, when its videogame storefront Steam pipped a steamy milestone in its concurrent user metrics.

Sorry, I've written so many articles about Steam's concurrent user records that I decided to try talking about it like a local news channel covering a bake sale, just to see how it feels. Anyway, over the weekend (Sunday, to be exact), Steam broached the 42 million concurrent user limit, hitting a new record of 42,042,778 users online at the same time (per SteamDB). Not a bad way to kick off the year, if you're a titanic videogame storefront.

Which, yes, on the one hand, is hardly a surprise. Steam's growth has been relentless and undaunted for ages. It hit 41 million in October, 40 million in March, and 39 million in December 2024. I suspect I will see you back here in a few months when it hits 43 million. On and on it goes.

But! Credit where it's due: these are fairly bleak times for this whole PC gaming thing. Also, the entire rest of society, but let's stay focused. As you're no doubt excruciatingly aware, building a PC in 2026, well, sucks.

RAM is absurdly expensive because a cabal of billionaires has bought up, like, all of it to plug into the data centres powering their brain-melting lie engines. SSDs are more expensive too, as NAND production for AI server drives subtracts from production of NAND production for mere mortals like you and me. Oh, and GPUs are ridiculously pricey when their makers deign to remember videogames exist at all. Because of, yeah, AI.

So it's perhaps some small encouragement that, for all that it truly blows to try to assemble a gaming PC in the year 2026, the dominant PC game storefront continues to hoover up users like some kind of, ah, hoover. You hear that, Altman? Buy up all the memory you want*, we'll just keep playing on our 6-year-old CPUs and 16GB of RAM and keep on trucking.

*Please stop doing this, actually, if you happen to be reading.