Latest articles by Rich Stanton
Gabe Newell is hooked on Stalker 2 and once he's got the fourth ending (!) will 'figure out what I'm going to play next'
News Taking a break from buying megayachts.
Valve's DRM was inspired by an exec's nephew, who 'used a $500 check I'd sent him for school expenses and bought himself a CD-ROM replicator… he sent me a lovely thank you note'
News "I knew he wasn't a bad kid, but there'd been this generational shift."
Valve CMO threatened the company would walk away from games if it didn't own the rights to Half-Life—'It wasn't an idle threat—we weren't going to take on all of the risk to make other people rich'
News "Gabe had interesting ideas that had nothing to do with games."
Marketing guy invents the concept of 'Real Steam' to explain why 'magic' games, AKA good games, end up selling: 'Don't tell Valve'
News The return of the Ministry of the Bleeding Obvious.
A gorgeous ground-up remake of Counter-Strike 1.6 is on its way to Steam, and one of the game's original creators says 'it really gives me old vibes'
News "Hopefully Valve allows this to get released without any issues…"
Valve tracked 1.7 million Steam users who joined in 2023 to see if they stuck around—they did, and they spent $93 million
News Hot stuff.
Hideo Kojima really just went 'screw it' and made Metal Gear Stranding
News Snaaake?
Nintendo wins major French piracy case with EU-wide consequences: 'Significant not only for Nintendo, but for the entire games industry'
News "Nintendo's message to consumers is not to download pirate copies of Nintendo games."
The Grand Theft Auto series has now sold over 440 million copies, and say g'day to Rockstar Australia
News The studio will be renamed Rockstar Australia.
Bungie's lawyers have to use fan videos of old Destiny 2 content in court because, well, it doesn't exist in-game anymore
News A science-fiction writer’s Destiny 2 lawsuit has forced the lawyers to rely on YouTube.
Ubisoft announces the 'biggest transformation in Rainbow Six Siege's history' for later this year, so big they're adding an 'X' to the name—But don't call it a sequel
News I'm still just going to run around smashing through walls with the sledgehammer.
David Bowie's time on Omikron, and his madcap scheme to buy up a load of old satellites and 'relaunch Ziggy Stardust from space'
News "Something about it didn’t gel enough for people even to try it. I think David was a bit pissed off."
Bobby Kotick reckons the Warcraft film was 'a terrible idea' for Blizzard, and in the end 'was one of the worst movies I've ever seen'
News "It took a lot of resources and distracted them."
Ubisoft's grudging crawlback to Steam continues with achievements for Watch Dogs 2 added a mere 9 years after release
News Yes, it has one for petting dogs.
Truly the dumbest timeline: Mexican president formally requests Google Maps does not re-name the Gulf of Mexico, jokes about renaming North America 'América Mexicana'
News Google Maps says it's just following longstanding policy.
John McAfee is back from the grave as some sort of AI ghoul-slash-memecoin, and his widow's picking a fight with Elon Musk
News Just an average day.
The brass balls on these guys: OpenAI complains that DeepSeek has been using its data, you know, the copyrighted data it's been scraping from everywhere
News "Hypocritical little babies."
Trevor's voice actor says he won't be in GTA 6, though would've liked a cameo where he got 'killed at the beginning'
News "Pass the torch, stomp Trevor's head in, and sort of put an end to that."
Tim Sweeney says Epic is losing billions fighting Apple and Google because it can afford to, jokes that 'we might run into serious financial problems after a couple more decades'
News "So no regrets, though it’s been terribly costly."
'Super Bowl for Excel nerds' crowns the king of the spreadsheets in Vegas, complete with championship belt and adoring crowd: 'You'd never see this with Google Sheets'
News Who's going in the spreadsheet bin?
Elon Musk admits account-boosting on PoE2 and Diablo 4 but says deal with it: 'What would I be apologizing for?'
News Used his IRL loot button.
GTA 5 mod recreating GTA 4's map nuked after 6 years of work because people noticed, and Rockstar insisted on a 'friendly takedown', if you know what I mean
News Busted.
Valve dev says SteamOS isn't about killing Windows: 'If a user has a good experience on Windows, there's no problem'
News "It's not a goal in itself to convert users who already have a good experience."
