Partway through Nightdive's video about remastering Thief: The Dark Project, producer Daniel Grayshon casually mentions that in the original you pressed 4 to bring up the water arrows and I realized I still remember a bunch of the keybinds for Thief's arsenal of items. The trusty blackjack was 2, rope arrows were 8, the get-out-of-jail-free flash bomb on F6, and so on.

"As with a lot of Nightdive games in the past we're not looking to change the core experience of the game," Grayshon says, something studio head Stephen Kick reiterates at another point when he explains they take all the comments on the trailer insisting they haven't changed anything as a compliment. If it looks the way you remember it looking, Nightdive considers that a success.

But Thief's controls were definitely in need of improvement. "The first thing that I wanted to do for the game was introduce a weapon wheel," Grayshon says. In the original I cycled through my collection of tools by pressing tab on the occasions when I couldn't remember the shortcut for gas mines or whatever, and a wheel would definitely help there.

"I think that will make a great deal of difference when it comes to playing the game," Grayhson says, "and getting through those tricky situations where you're being approached by someone and you've gotta lockpick through a door really quickly, but you don't have to cycle through your pockets to find your square-toothed lockpick or your triangle-toothed lockpick. You quickly open the weapon wheel, you throw the mouse to the left to get the square lockpick or you throw it to the right to get the triangle lockpick."

Kick jokingly plays the contrarian, miming a desperate search for the right equipment while asking, "Did you think for a moment that that was part of the original design, that as a thief you'd have this bag of just stuff?"

"If you want to do that you can totally do that if you want," Grayshon replies. "Not taking anything away. If you fancy the convenience it's there for you, but we're not forcing you to use it."

Which is exactly what you want to hear. I'm glad the option will be there when I can't remember which key brings up the moss arrows and don't want to accidentally equip a brightly burning fire arrow and give away my position, but I'll still be pressing 4 to whip out the water arrows because apparently that's permanent muscle memory now and I'll still be able to recall it long after I've forgotten the names of all my loved ones.

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In its latest videogame-themed, AI-generated meme, the official White House X account has published a Destiny 2 character sheet featuring an unrealistically ripped Donald Trump wielding a Gjallarhorn.

"Eyes up, Guardians," reads the official tweet. In the image itself, a muscular, Duke Nukem-esque Donald Trump wields the United States flag against a backdrop of fighter jets and a Rolls Royce. In a piece of blunt-edged state propaganda that would have Edward Bernays rolling in his grave, Trump bears a power level of 4700 (the max in actual Destiny 2 is 550, for what it's worth) and is equipped with a B2 Bomber companion, which costs "over $2 billion" per unit and was most recently deployed in America's attack on Iran.

The White House and its departments have been issuing videogame-themed, AI-generated propaganda for years now. Earlier today Homeland Security riffed on the cover art for The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker to celebrate the US Coast Guard. Secretary Brooke Rollins riffed on GTA 6 in a recent video. The Department of Labor and The United States Customs and Border Protection have both taken a swing at GTA 6 as well. And those are just examples from the last seven days.

As Andy Chalk reported in March, the White House issued a spray of videogame-themed AI propaganda to promote its attack on Iran.

While none are subtle, or examples of great statesmanship, the White House's latest is especially poorly timed: today Washington-based Bungie announced sweeping layoffs. Sony executive Hermen Hulst said the layoffs would affect "a significant number of employees, including most of the Destiny team and some Marathon team members." With that context added, it looks very much like the president of the United States is mocking hundreds of now out-of-work developers.

That, or the White House's meme was devised before these layoffs were announced —Destiny 2 is experiencing a bittersweet renaissance at the moment—but that would only make it slightly less deranged. And it's hard to tell who this meme is meant to appeal to, save for the kind of person who pays Elon Musk at least $3 a month for a meaningless blue tick next to their name.

Whichever is true, It's just another example of the United States government's nightmarish slip into malevolent parody. Developers have responded to the disposal of "generational talent" with far more tact.

The other shoe has dropped. Following Destiny 2's last major update and widespread reports that Bungie was preparing for mass layoffs, Sony and the studio announced a "reduction in force" that includes most of the people who were working on Destiny 2, as well as several on the Marathon team and external contractors.

Exact numbers have not been given by Sony, but a required WARN notice issued by the studio says 292 positions were affected in Washington, where Bungie is headquartered (as spotted by GameFile's Stephen Totilo). That number does not include external or remote workers who were affected, so the real total is likely much higher. It's a bloodbath.

Despite Sony conveniently timing these layoffs on the same day GTA 6 pre-orders started, the gutting of one of the most storied and talented studios of the 21st century is all that people are talking about. Reactions across the hobby have included anger, sadness, and whatever you want to make of this official White House tweet. As is the way with this seemingly never-ending cycle of layoffs, we're also hearing from many of the employees affected by the layoffs, with many posts illustrating just how devastating this downsizing actually is.

Sandbox

Cinematics

The entire Cinematic org was included. Let me know if you're looking to pick up a Director and/or other talented cine folks at any level.

— @johnebenger.bsky.social (@johnebenger.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-06-25T22:50:58.907Z

Raid and dungeons

Engineering

VFX

Art

Quality Assurance

Community

On the Marathon team, developer Biru Jones, who contributed to the extraction shooter's powerful sound design, said they were let go.

Among the layoffs are longtime Bungie veterans like test lead Dawn Vu, who was about to celebrate 14 years working on Destiny.

"Generational talent just gone," wrote Bungie alum Ben Platnick. "These people were veterans from the Halo days."

In a statement issued today, CEO of Sony's Studio Business Group Herman Hulst said "most of the Destiny team" and "some Marathon team members" are gone, but noted that Bungie remains committed to supporting Marathon and future projects.

That rationale isn't going down smoothly with longtime fans, nor the folks who've been playing and covering Destiny for as long as it's existed.

I know Bungie is just the latest example of studio layoffs/closures shoveling skilled and hirable people into an industry that is catching them with a teaspoon, but it really is flabbergasting to see perhaps the best sci-fi audio/visual + gunplay artists In The World jettisoned by failed management.

— @woodwould.bsky.social (@woodwould.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-06-25T22:50:58.845Z

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I'm not quite the dedicated coffee drinker I once was, which is why I've become reliant on this excellent self-heating mug from Nextmug. See, I drink my first cup of the day quickly but my second I tend to nurse for the rest of the morning. After lunch, I brew up an afternoon cup and it takes me the rest of the day to get through it.

So a mug that keeps my coffee warm, or even piping hot, is absolutely essential. Nextmug does that perfectly—this is legit the only coffee mug I use these days, and I use it each and every day. It ain't cheap, but this is a nice Prime Day deal for over 25% off on all the different colors it comes in. And the black version is 31% off, if you want to save a few more bucks.

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One of the biggest benefits of Nextmug over a desktop mug warmer is that the heating element is actually inside the mug. I briefly tried a mug warmer that works like a desktop heating element—you put your mug on top of it and it gets scalding hot—but my desk is usually cluttered and I immediately feared that other stuff would get nudged onto the hot surface, like wires, my phone, my earbuds, etc—and melt or become damaged.

You don't have that problem with Nextmug. It sits on a charging base, but that base doesn't get hot: only the inside of the mug does. Off the base, the battery still lasts at least a couple of hours, long enough to keep your beverage hot for a good long while.

There are three temperatures to choose from: warm, hot, and piping (for that just-brewed feeling), all controlled by the single button on the base of the mug. And you can wash it in the sink: just be sure it's dry when you set it back on the base.

If you know a coffee drinker who spends all day sitting at their desk like me, this is a great gift! Feel free to buy me a second one, in fact, so I can have one for the living room, too.

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The long-awaited fifth chapter of Deltarune hit Steam like an asteroid yesterday, sending its concurrent player count skyrocketing to nearly 300,000—more than double its previous peak player count—and putting the game amidst the platform's top 10 best-selling games. Despite its age and somewhat irregular release schedule, interest in the game clearly remains high. And for those many of you who are interested in it, the good news is that more is on the way.

"The story is still continuing, and more chapters will be added for free over time," a brief FAQ on the Deltarune Steam page says. "We are aiming for a 2027 release! Meanwhile, we will be periodically releasing information on the development progress of the game."

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Deltarune has had kind of an odd, shifting structure over the years. The first chapter was released for free in 2018, and then in 2021 the second chapter arrived, and despite expectations it was also free.

Creator Toby Fox, whose previous game Undertale was also a massive hit, warned that subsequent chapters would not be free. The plan at that point was to finish chapters 3, 4, and 5, and then release all five chapters as a paid game—but then that changed in 2025 when Fox put out Deltarune chapters 3 and 4, marking the game's "official" release, while work continued on chapter 5. Chapters 1 and 2 remain free, and anyone who purchases chapters 3 and 4 will get any and all subsequent chapters free.

Deltarune Chapter 5 came out IDK if you saw

— @tobyfox.undertale.com (@tobyfox.undertale.com.bsky.social) 2026-06-25T21:45:42.888Z

Chapter 6 won't be the end of the Deltarune tale either: As noted by IGN, Fox said in a recent newsletter that work on chapter 6 is going so well, "it’s not unrealistic that some staff members may start working on Chapter 7 before the end of the year."

After a year of struggling to pull in players, the PvPvE game Wildgate is calling it quits. Game director Dustin Browder said in a Steam update posted today that despite the best efforts of developer Moonshot Games, "Wildgate hasn’t found a large enough audience to sustain ongoing development," and so it's ending further updates.

"Wildgate is not going away," Browder wrote. "Wildgate will continue to receive occasional updates like bug fixes, balance updates, and small events, activations or rewards that generally repurpose existing content. And new players will still be able to buy the game on all platforms

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(Steam, EGS, Xbox, and PS)—and we plan on participating in as many sales and discounts as we can."

Despite landing with unmistakable finality, Browder appeared to leave the door open for a comeback, writing that the new patch coming in July will be the game's "last big patch for a while." The update also aims to ensure "you can keep playing," with changes including additional information on game modes, additional player-controlled options for custom modes, new sprays and items in the in-game store, and a range of balance changes and bug fixes.

It's not clear how the end of Wildgate development will impact Moonshot Games. Browder said "a small core team will keep an eye on servers," but "community management and player support for the game will be reduced," and the Wildgate Discord will be turned over to members of the community. That doesn't sound good for the future of Moonshot, but a spokesperson told PC Gamer that layoffs are not planned.

"All of us at Moonshot put a lot of love into Wildgate as well as the community that has formed around it," the rep said. "The core Wildgate team will continue to spend some time reviewing issues and supporting the game long-term.

"No layoffs are planned. Members of the Moonshot team are transitioning from Wildgate to work on new projects. We're not ready to talk about them yet, but we're excited to share with players when the time is right."

It's an unfortunate but not really surprising outcome for yet another multiplayer shooter trying and failing to find space in an overcrowded genre. Wildgate showed early promise but couldn't quite stick the landing: "It's one of the most creative shooters I've played in a while, but at times I think the entire concept is better on paper than it is as a game," Tyler Colp wrote in his 60% review.

"At its best, Wildgate can create an entire story arc as your team rises in power, overcomes unforeseen obstacles, and eventually beats the odds. At its worst, Wildgate gives you 30-minute slogs where nobody is quite sure what to do until another more coordinated team dismantles your ship before you can even react."

And while Wildgate was pretty well received by players on Steam, where it holds a "mostly positive" user rating, the audience tailed away quickly after launch, and despite multiple subsequent updates including PvE-focused modes and the launch of a free trial version, it never came back. Hopefully the studio will have better luck with its next endeavour.

If you've been on the fence about Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 for one reason or another, this is the best moment yet to play PC Gamer's 2025 Game of the Year. As part of the Steam Summer Sale, Warhorse is offering the deepest discount yet on its open-world medieval sandbox—you can pick up Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 for $24 or snag the Royal Edition, which includes three DLC story packs, for $32.

We called KCD2 "a new RPG classic" in our 90% review—an expansive Bohemian adventure that carries the torch for weird and varied clockwork worlds. It's not a fantasy game, yet it's the most Oblivion-like RPG you'll find these days. It also has some of my favorite aspects of The Witcher 3, like deep conversations, romance, and varied side quests that often outshine the main story.

As for those DLC packs, I can't yet speak to them. Joshua enjoyed the first one that added shield painting, but thought it felt a bit slight. I've heard better things about the forge expansion and the monastery questline, but I'm saving those for an in-progress hardcore mode replay.

To coincide with the sale, Warhorse also released a patch today that, along with bugfixes, adds a free new quest called "A Jester's Visit."

"A peculiar Jester has started to appear in front of the Hangman's Halter Tavern shouting about a strange new game. A new quest awaits." Considering the accompanying art, I'd say Henry is about to get foolish.

It's also worth noting that the original Kingdom Come: Deliverance from 2018 has an even deeper sale going on—just $6 for the main game and $8 to add on all the DLC. You might be wondering if you need to play it before considering the sequel, and I'm here to tell you: no, not really.

I've started and stopped on the original KCD on at least four occasions over the years, and what kills my momentum every time is its clumsy combat and bland towns. Many swear by it and I wouldn't dare stop them, but KCD2 is the much better game. You won't miss out by diving straight in—the story has almost nothing to do with the original and its opening hours assume you're new to the series.

There's a lot more on offer in Steam's biggest sale of the year—check out Andy's roundup of the highlights.

Look, let's be frank with one another: If you're browsing this website, you're statistically more likely than the median individual to be involved in a hobby that will—at one time or another—provide you with a use case for small, pretend plants. Maybe you're building scenery for a model train to move through. Maybe you're adding base detail to your tabletop minis and green stuff isn't cutting it. Maybe you just want to construct a diorama to allow your scale figurines to have a nice day at the park.

I don't say this from a place of judgment. I have three unbuilt gunpla kits just outside my field of view; it's only a matter of time before this sickness progresses to the point where I'm tempted to meticulously arrange plastic foliage. Which is why, this Prime Day, I'm presenting you with historic savings on miniature shrubbery.

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Consider the elegantly named Tufts Terrain Model Kit for Miniature Bases & Model Grass Tufts -Diorama Supplies & Diorama Grass for Mini Basing & Gaming Scenery (Withered Winter Ｇrass) set from Spriplant, which offers a grand total of 154 tufts, poufs, and bunches of flavorfully parched winter grass in three distinct sizes. It's an abundance of multi-sized miniature yellow greenery, more than I might—or indeed could—ever use. And they're all available for a mere $12, the lowest price in the listing's history.

That's less than eight cents per miniature plastic grass tuft. Even now, our modern society is capable of wonders.

But don't just take my word for it. One Amazon customer testimonial says Spriplant's tufts "hold together fine when touched/brushed," while another notes that—though they're "more typical of an early autumn tuft where the crops start to slowly fade into yellows"—the Withered Winter Grass has a "really nice texture and durability."

If you'd prefer more variety in your sprite-sized ground cover, allow me to instead suggest Warmtree's Static Grass Bushy Tufts Lowland Shrubs Tuft Terrain Model Kit for Train Landscape Railroad Scenery Sand Military Layout Model Miniature Bases and Dioramas, providing 126 tufts in a selection of different shrubbery styles and color variations. It's a slightly smaller collection, but that's paired with a lower price: $10, which—like the Spriplant tufts—is an unprecedented discount for this SKU of little bushes.

There. I've done all I can to introduce a path towards some semblance of meaning and fulfilment, however shallow that kinship might be—but there's no need to thank me. That's what Prime Day is for.

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This year's Steam Summer Sale has kicked off and if I could convince all my fellow cozy gamers to pick up one thing it would be Fields of Mistria. It's got a nice little 20% discount during the sale, going for just $11.19, which is a dang good price for an already excellent farm sim that's about to launch its completed version.

The magical girl anime-inspired farm sim has been in Early Access for a couple years, and as soon as its 1.0 launch lands in August it's going to officially take the top spot on my favorite games like Stardew Valley list. Mistria's cast of characters is so much more charming and lively than any other farm sim I've played in the past decade. It's been two years and I still can't decide which one to marry, which I'll finally be able to do after the 1.0 version lands.

Even on a normal day, Mistria is one of the cheapest farm sims around. While most of the post-Stardew crop go for around $30, Mistria has always been $14. NPC Studio confirmed to me during its 1.0 date announcement that the price isn't going to increase after the August 5 update, which rocks. Getting it for an extra couple bucks off is even better, especially knowing it'll be in a completed state in about a month.

I will admit that when Prime Day was just starting to roll around I was skeptical about whether, in the current economic climate, there would actually be any Prime Day PC gaming hardware deals that were really that good. I knew there would be discounts, but I was wondering whether we might just get some token offerings from Amazon, Newegg, Best Buy and the like.

But actually, there have been some really stellar gaming deals that are absolutely worth shouting about. Now, obviously, none of the best discounts are to be found on memory or SSDs, you can thank AI for that. Bloody AI. Hoovering up memory chips like they're goddam M&Ms.

Anyways, not everything has been brutalised by the AI bros.' obsession with not having humans do stuff anymore and so there are still some products out there for prices that are almost in the must-buy category. In reality, there can be no such category for everyone—our budgets and needs will always be different—but these are the products where, if you were in the market for something in that area, they ought to be top of the list.

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The almost must-have Prime Day PC gaming deals

The full details

As reports that major layoffs are coming to multiple Microsoft-owned game studios continue to swirl, numerous developers at South of Midnight studio Compulsion Games have indicated that they are leaving the studio and looking for new work.

Posting "open to work" messages on LinkedIn is a very common way for game industry employees to search for new opportunities—and, sadly, it's also often a first sign of layoffs at game studios.

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That was initially thought to be the situation here as well, but according to Bloomberg's Jason Schreier it's not the case: Schreier said on Reddit that with layoffs looming, "studio leadership gave their employees permission to openly look for work because they almost certainly will be losing their jobs."

Still, it's clear that the move caught at least some Compulsion employees by surprise: Principal level designer Mike Sklavounos, for one, described it as "an unexpected turn of events." According to Eurogamer, at least a dozen Compulsion employees have indicated that they are looking for new work in some capacity, a significant number for a relatively small studio of about 90 employees.

More worryingly, the sudden spike in employees looking for work is also pretty close to confirmation that another Xbox bloodbath is in fact coming. Along with Compulsion, reports earlier this month claimed that Double Fine, Ninja Theory, and "several other studios" were at risk of closure as part of an "Xbox Reset" being shepherded by CEO Asha Sharma and CCO Matt Booty; the pair said in an open letter published earlier this month that Microsoft "over extended" itself with a rash of studio acquisitions over the past few years—in other words, yet another management failure that thousands of employees will have to pay for.

The current expectation is that the layoffs will be imposed in early July, following the end of Microsoft's fiscal year, which wraps up on June 30. Microsoft did the same thing in 2025, laying off thousands of employees and cancelling multiple videogame projects on July 2 of that year.

June 25 is a big day: After years of waiting, Grand Theft Auto 6 preorders are finally live! Well, y'know, for some people, anyway.

But it's a joyous day for us too (and, importantly, in a way that excludes them*) because today also marks the start of the 2026 Steam Summer Sale, the annual discount extravaganza that you're just not going to find on consoles.

(*Am I really cheesed about GTA 6 not coming to PC side-by-day with console? No. I find it a little baffling, given that PC gamers clearly are a "core" GTA audience despite what Strauss Zelnick may say, but cynical though it may be I think PC Gamer editor Ted Litchfield is correct in his assessment: Holding it back for a year or two is a very effective way of double-dipping. It's a strategy that's been successful for Rockstar and Take-Two in the past, so it's not terribly surprising that they're carrying on with it now. Anyway, back to the point: Steam sale!)

As always, although I'm pretty sure this is the first time Valve has ever used this specific term for it, the Steam Summer Sale includes "deep-ass discounts"—and hey, don't blame me, I'm just quoting the trailer here—on thousands of games across pretty much every genre you can think of.

Will we be putting together a list of some of our choicest picks? I think we will! To get the ball rolling, here are a few I like:

• Mass Effect Legendary Edition - $4.79/£4/€4.79 (92% off, and that, my friends, is a deep-ass discount indeed)
• Red Dead Redemption 2 - $15/£15/€15 (75% off, while you wait for GTA 6)
• Warhammer 40,000: Darktide - $10/£8.24/£10 (75% off, did you hear about Chuck Tingle's new book?)
• Morels: The Hunt 2 - $5/£4.18/€4.27 (75% off, the original is even cheaper and there's also a new sci-fi sequel)
• Mewgenics - $22.49/£18.74/€21.74 (25% off, not the biggest discount but it's still fairly new and it's great)
• Creature Kitchen - $6.39/£5.25/€6.23 (20% off, another not-huge discount but it's pretty cheap to start with and it's also great)
• Herdling - $12.49/£10/€11.89 - (50% off, I liked Herdling a lot and my list, my rules—also there's a demo if you're curious but uncommitted)
• Ghostwire: Tokyo - $6/£5/€6 (90% off, I was late to the party on this one but it's a genuine low-key banger)

Of course there are also stickers to earn and fresh loot in the Steam Points Shop that you can use to spice up your profile page or chat messages, so don't miss out on that. The 2026 Steam Summer Sale is set to run until July 9.

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This is unarguably the best monitor deal I've seen during this year's Amazon Prime Day… week… thing. MSI's MPG 321URX QD-OLED is an absolute spectacle of a display (seriously, check out Jeremy's review). Uncompromising in practically every element of its design. 4K, 32-inch, perfect pixel density, 240 Hz refresh, and an astonishingly quick response time, backed up with fantastic color accuracy to boot. There's just everything you could want in a 32-inch 4K panel here.

Right now, (although for how long I don't know, because they're selling faster than second-hand SSDs on Facebook Marketplace), you can pick one of MSI's 321URX QD-OLEDs up for an impressively low $745 at Amazon, down from $830.

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Now that's not a huge amount relatively in the grand scheme of things, but it's actually far more than that when you look at how this screen is already positioned in the market. The 321URX uses the same Samsung panel that you can find in Asus's ROG Swift OLED PG32UCDM, Alienware's equivalent, Gigabyte, and all the other gaming brands who've managed to snap a contract up off of the big Korean giants.

The difference is that those screens already cost $500, $300, $200 more than this thing did at launch, for effectively the same quality, the same monitor. That makes the price difference just massive by comparison.

Let's talk about the screen for a second here, and ignore the brand that's packaged it up in that cute little chassis, because it truly is a monster. You might be asking, why is this better? What's so good about QD-OLED compared to your stock standard LG OLED affair? And it mostly comes down to that quantum dot layer that sits on top and how both panel techs optimize for peak brightness in scenes.

Say you have an explosion, or you're casting Giant's Flame in Elden Ring, and the game demands high brightness on a rich and saturated color palette. A traditional OLED screen is actually comprised of four subpixels, RGB, and then an additional W (white) one to boost the brightness up. The issue with that is that the white light tends to almost desaturate a lot of the color on the fringes of that explosion or effect, leading to seemingly pastel colors instead of what they should actually be.

QD-OLED instead uses a global blue backlight that's shifted through the quantum dots into red and green to effectively pump up the brightness without impacting the color.

There's also some magic going on at the sub-pixel layer as well, that improves font and detail clarity at smaller sizes (more critical on a desktop PC than your mom's OLED TV), and there's some smart ambient-light reflection tech in here as well, stopping darker tones from refracting ambient lighting and changing tone.

In essence, QD-OLED is just that traditional OLED tech, but dialled all the way up, and bloody hell is it good. There's a reason this is our top 4K gaming monitor, and how MSI can afford to package all of that into the 321URX, and then discount it on top of that, is a mystery.

Oh, and one last mention, burn-in, because I know you're thinking about it, I'm thinking about it, everybody's thinking about it. MSI still provides a hefty three-year warranty cover, the same as everyone else, and there's plenty of tech in there to keep your UI in-game and not etched into your shiny new $745 screen for all of time.

Now, where exactly did I put my special SSD stash? Papa needs a brand new monitor.

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This Charmast power bank is the most useful thing I own. Well, not this one specifically. I've got the 10,000 mAh version, which is half the battery capacity, and it keeps my phone, vape (yes, I can hear you groaning from here) and various other electronic doohickeys constantly charged while I'm out on the road.

This one has twice the capacity, in what looks to be the same-sized chassis, and it's down to $30 for Prime Day. So I just bought it, because what the hell.

My current model is still trucking along nicely, and seems to keep the exact amount of charge it did when I pulled it from the box two years ago. It's been all around the world with me since then, and other than the odd scuff from being frequently dropped on concrete and tile floors (I can be a klutz), it's practically flawless.

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The best part about this power bank design? Integrated cables. Four of them, to be precise. USB Type-C, Type-A, micro USB, and Lightning cables are tucked into the side, with a tough-yet-flexible rubberised coating that holds them in place within the chassis design. They're always connected, and always ready.

They're not very long, but they're perfect for flipping back on themselves and holding the charger with your phone while it tops itself off. Or most other devices, for that matter.

And because you've always got the four cables with you, you can rescue friends, family, and random passers by with a charge in moments. You become some sort of battery-toting superhero, and that's worth the price alone.

To be honest, I don't need a new one. My old model is a faithful friend. But it's been such a good piece of tech, I feel like buying a second with twice the capacity just makes a whole lot of sense. If you lack a portable power bank entirely (or are just looking for the best), congratulations. I very much doubt you'll regret dropping some cash on this one.

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I'll be honest, my Steam Deck is still trucking along just fine, even with four years of light between today and its 2022 release date. Nevertheless, there are more than a few people who'd quite like a Steam Deck 2 (though, uh, even they are probably prepared to wait for prices to become sane). It's been a while, after all.

Well, perhaps some good news, then: in our chat with Valve engineers Pierre-Loup Griffais and Yazan Aldehayyat, the pair said that the Steam Machine is a bit of a different beast. "I don't think we're thinking about [the Steam Machine] with quite as long of a timeframe as something like the Steam Deck," said Griffais.

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"The Steam Deck, by its nature, needs a little bit more of a fixed performance target for both developers and users to make sense of, 'What can I play on this?' and not have that picture change once every year, every two years," said Griffais. "Whereas the Steam Machine is very much in line with gaming PCs. There's a big gradient of it: low-end CPUs, high-end CPUs and GPUs—Steam Machine is somewhere on that gradient, right? So I think it's a little bit less important to have a fixed performance target for, like, five years for a product like that."

So, there you have it, right? Steam Machine 2 imminent, perhaps releasing concurrently with Steam Machine 3? Well, not quite. While Valve doesn't think the Steam Machine needs to hew to Steam Deck timeframes, that doesn't mean it's diving right into a second iteration.

"At the same time," continued Griffais, "we don't really have immediate plans to be like, 'In N years we'll have a different performance target,' or something. We're actually really curious to see how things pan out… there's a lot of questions about the new systems generation, how that's gonna roll out, how games are gonna adapt." In other words, Valve is paying attention to how console manufacturers and other tech firms are handling the transition to a new generation in our current, RAM-crisis-afflicted world.

Aldehayyat was quick to point out that the next iteration of Steam Machine hardware isn't right around the corner, either, and that's partially just a reflection of PC gamers' modern habits. "I think we're seeing a natural slowdown of the upgrade cycle for gaming PCs," said Aldehayyat, "so in some ways that probably means that the Steam Machine is a viable product for longer than you would have expected if it was launching 10 years ago." That means the Machine as-is "probably has more longevity… it's gonna basically be in line with typical PC upgrade cycles and what people typically do.

"It's just a matter of when it makes sense to [upgrade], at what price point, at what time, on what games are available. Like if a bunch of new games come out on Steam that require more performance, that would probably make us wanna upgrade the Steam Machine faster." Alright, guess we're waiting for Cyberpunk 2 then.

Bungie has announced a "reduction in force" as it reorganizes following the end of development on Destiny 2, saying that with its premiere game now ended and new projects still in very early stages of development, "we unfortunately could not continue operating at our previous size."

"We know this decision has a profound impact on the people affected, their families, friends, and teammates," Bungie wrote in an unattributed message. "While these changes are necessary to best position the studio now and for the future, that does not lessen the difficulty of this moment or the impact it has on those affected."

Hermen Hulst, the CEO of Sony's Studio Business Group, released his own statement on the layoffs, indicating that the cuts run deep: Layoffs will impact "a significant number of employees, including most of the Destiny team and some Marathon team members."

"Over the past several months, together with Bungie leadership, we reviewed the studio’s long-term direction, development priorities, resource needs, and role within our broader portfolio strategy," Hulst wrote. "We explored multiple alternatives before concluding that a reduction was necessary to align the studio’s resources with its current priorities and long-term goals."

Hulst said "Marathon remains an important part of our portfolio," and said Sony will continue to support Bungie's "team as they build on the strong foundation established in Season 1 and 2, and as they work on incubation efforts for future projects."

Bungie's message actually begins by acknowledging that "Destiny 2 fell short of expectations these past several years," and that's undeniably true. The game has stumbled from one botch to another in recent years, angering and shedding fans, and leading our top Destiny men, Tim Clark and Phil Savage, to each express doubts about the game's future.

The irony is that, with Destiny 2 now concluded, it's putting up fantastic player numbers on Steam. Some of that is no doubt the result of people dropping in for a jolt of nostalgia or perhaps a final farewell, but it's also hard not to see it as evidence that there's a good game underneath all of Bungie's headless flailing, and that people want to play it.

Sony's decision to pull the plug on Destiny 2 instead of properly fixing it is baffling, particularly given its commitment—for now—to Marathon, which is currently pulling a small fraction of the Steam player counts that Destiny 2 is. Marathon is not free, which is no doubt a factor in that, but it's a live service game nonetheless. It's no doubt less expensive to operate than Destiny 2, with considerably less new content in each new season, but it still requires ongoing development resources that could have otherwise been directed elsewhere.

And while Hulst has committed to Bungie's future through Marathon and new projects, I can't help wondering if maybe this is the real beginning of the end. It's a situation that reminds me very much of BioWare, whose future feels very much in doubt even as it's ostensibly working on Mass Effect 4.

Bungie didn't say how many people were let go as a result of the layoffs, but said it will share more about its future plans later.

• We're keeping track of all the Amazon Prime Day PC gaming deals here

We've been blasting your feed with the best deals we can find this Prime Day, or rather Prime week, so here's something a little different. These are the most popular deals according to you lot—and yes, all of these deals are still live last I checked.

You lot have pretty good taste. The top of the pile, and the most clicked on product so far, is this Acer Predator QD-OLED our Jeremy wrote about a couple days ago. It's a cheap, big-brand OLED monitor that no longer has much of a price premium attached to the superior panel tech.

• We're curating all the best Prime Day PC gaming deals here

In the second spot, the GameSir G7 Pro. I wrote about this one earlier in the week, when it was only available at Best Buy for $64, but now it's across both BB and Amazon for the same great price. It really does put the standard Xbox pad to shame with TMR sticks, a charging stand, easy wireless, and mech D-pad.

Third spot, and actually the fifth spot too, sits a Crucial SSD that is going for quite a bit under the usual asking price. Both are sold by Amazon Germany, not Amazon US. If you're willing to take a risk on that delivery and import process, it's a decent discount. Especially in regards to the P510, which would usually cost more for its PCIe 5.0 specification.

So, if you fancy going along with the crowd, or you're just looking for some inspo for your next purchase, here's what everyone has been clicking on so far.

Most popular Prime Day deals

More details

Nobody likes having their ears pinned back by a too-snug gaming headset. Another thing nobody particularly enjoys is just how expensive so much PC gaming hardware has become. Audio is an essential part of any game, but with PC components threatening to break the bank, who could blame you for going the more budget route on peripherals?

Now, to be clear, the best budget gaming headset is still the Corsair HS55 Stereo, but that wired headset is still at its normal $60 in the Prime Day sales. If you're looking for a wireless headset for less than this, you're not out of luck, though. The Logitech G321 Lightspeed is an exceedingly comfortable set of wireless cans, currently going for the cozy price of a little less than $43 at Amazon.

• We're curating all the best Prime Day PC gaming deals here

James really rated this gaming headset for its comfort, writing in his Logitech G321 Lightspeed review, "At one moment, I went to have lunch and forgot it was on. This is perhaps as much an indictment of my hunger-led tunnel vision, but it's still a rarity for me, and not something I've had happen with similarly priced headsets. No, before you ask, I did not get soup on the headset. Stop asking that."

As an additional plus, you can ditch the wires in favour of either a 2.4 GHz or Bluetooth connection. The clamping force of the Logitech is also less than the Corsair, making the G321 Lightspeed an exceedingly comfortable headset to wear all day as you move between devices. If you're looking for a budget device, a versatile device that wouldn't look out of place at either a desk or out and about, it definitely helps.

The main drawback is that you can't listen in via both the 2.4 GHz and Bluetooth connections simultaneously. As James writes, "Dual connectivity would have been better here, to take a quick call or cross off Duolingo for the day, but swapping to Bluetooth isn't a huge hassle, and only really costs a few seconds each time."

If we're still drawing comparisons to the Corsair HS55 Stereo, then the Logitech G321 Lightspeed's microphone can't really compete on audio quality. The more affordable headset also has slightly smaller 40 mm drivers with middling sound quality.

James writes, "I wouldn't say the audio quality is particularly strong for its price point, especially when you can pick the HyperX Cloud Alpha at $60 on sale, but it is clear and easy to make out. I don't feel quite enveloped by sound, but I also never feel like I am missing something."

As you might already suspect, the bass on offer here isn't much to rumble home about either. But even with such middle-of-the-pack audio, the comfort of these cans is not something to be overlooked. Trust me, your ears will thank you.

👉 Check out all of Amazon's gaming headset deals 👈

Here's the official advice from PC Gamer this summer: shut your curtains and stay indoors. But it's not just those new-fangled vidya games you should be playing, as I've found 12 Amazon Prime Day board game deals that are well worth your time.

Many of these I've played myself, and a few more are sitting on my wishlist right now after many, many recommendations from friends. I know a lot of board game nerds, and they won't stop banging on about them. Will I finally drop $85 on Star Wars: Rebellion this summer? Probably, for that sort of cash. It beats melting outside, or, y'know, being sociable anyway.

• We're curating all the best Prime Day PC gaming deals here

I can also highly recommend Talisman: The Magical Quest game for a mere $31 at Amazon. I paid double that for my copy earlier this year, and can confirm it's a whole ton of fantasy adventure fun.

I'm also very intrigued by Dead of Winter, a horror-survival adventure that comes recommended by many of my peers. Yours, for $55. But my heart probably belongs to Mansions of Madness, an astonishingly replayable, re-configurable Lovecraftian horror tabletop adventure that will swallow entire weekends within its slimy tendrils. Ask me how I know. It's down to $92, and my goodness do you get a lot of board game for your cash.

Whichever you pick, you'll be beating the summer heat and enjoying a lovely argument (sorry, rules debate) with your loved ones instead. Two birds with one stone, I reckon.

If I say 'gaming mouse', I'm sure many of you will think of brands like Logitech, Razer, and Corsair. But what if I told you there's a whole other market out there, full of much cheaper but still often very high-quality mice? The 'Chinese clone' market offers just that, and one of the best of the bunch, the lightweight Mchose L7 Ultra+ is at its lowest ever price of $50 at Amazon for Prime Day.

I reviewed the Mchose L7 Pro+ earlier this year and was very impressed by it. The Ultra+ version is essentially the same as the Pro+ I tried, except it's got a slightly better sensor (and possibly a bigger battery—it's hard to tell from Mchose's spec comparisons).

• We're keeping track of all the Amazon Prime Day PC gaming deals here

For most intents and purposes, though, they're essentially the same mouse, as it'll be very difficult to tell the difference between the PAW3395 and PAW3950 sensors.

The long and short of it is the L7 Pro+/Ultra+ gives you a high-spec sensor that stands up against 'custom' big-brand ones in a well-built, lightweight chassis. The lightweight part is key here, too, as the mouse manages to keep under 50 g, which is fantastic and matches the current best (and much more expensive) gaming mouse on the market, the Razer Viper V4 Pro.

The shape might not suit you if you're a full palm gripper, but if you use a more relaxed palm grip, or ideally a claw grip, it's great. The '+' at the end of the name means it's a little bigger, and I found the size to be perfect for my average-sized hands. If you have smaller hands you might prefer the non-Plus 'Pro' version on sale for $46 at Amazon.

I find the clicks to be a little stiffer than some other mice I like, but only by a little, and I got used to it in no time. Apart from that and the mediocre battery life, I have no real complaints.

It doesn't have anything fancy like RGB, it's just a solid mouse for much cheaper than the premium options from big-brand alternatives that it competes with. It performs well, feels great, and is well worth that discounted price tag. If it's a high-quality build and great performance that you're after, I'd give it a look.

👉See all the Amazon gaming mice deals right here👈

Modern CPUs are incredible feats of engineering and capable of doing far more than just running an operating system and a game or two. There's just one minor drawback to them, though, and it's that all processors convert electrical energy into glopping blobs of heat all the time.

• We're curating all the best Prime Day PC gaming deals here

That's not good for the chip, so you need something to shift it away from the silicon and dump it...err...elsewhere (hint: your office or gaming den). But thanks to the Prime Day sales, you can get some of the best AIO liquid CPU coolers with a very healthy discount.

Whichever chip chiller you pick, your CPU is in for a treat.

The best CPU coolers for the best price

The full details

Unless you're using a power-hungry AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition or Intel Core i9 14900K, then any of these AIO coolers will have no problem coping with the heat your processor spits out. And if you do just happen to have either of those chips, then don't worry: the Arctic or Be Quiet! are both capable of taking them on.

I use the Liquid Freezer III Pro 360 mm in my own main rig, with an Intel Core Ultra 270K Plus, and it's honestly pretty quiet and very effective, even when the chip's loaded to the hilt compiling an Unreal Engine build.

Now, if only there were an AIO cooler for my head that can deal with the raging heatwave that's cooking my office at the moment...

We're still some five months from the final release of the oft-delayed Grand Theft Auto 6 and yet there is somehow still a lot of fuss about the fact that GTA 6 pre-orders have gone live today. QUICK! GO GET YOUR TICKET STUB SO YOU CAN HAVE YOUR DIGITAL CODE IN-HAND AND PRE-LOAD A FEW DAYS BEFORE NOVEMBER 19!

Yeah, I mean it's not even like if you pre-order the game today that you're going to be getting any physical media. The box-fresh version still only comes with an Xbox or PlayStation download code. Because yes, there is no PC version even announced.

We've been running the quiz for a few days now, but we want to know how you PC Gamer readers are feeling about this: Will you be buying GTA 6 on console or will you be waiting for the PC version whenever that arrives? Hit the quiz below and hit us up in the comments, too.

But if you really feel the need to get your game downloaded a few days early—and can't rely on yourself to remember the biggest game of the past few years is about to release—then you can pre-order either the standard or ultimate editions today, for either $80 or $100 (£70 or £90).

And what do you get with the different editions? The basic, or standard, edition gets you the base game and a little extra FOMO in the shape of some paywalled in-game stores. This is the biggest bone of contention here, because while everyone's used to seeing in-game items reserved for pre-orders or special editions, we've not really seen parts of a game itself being roped off unless you pay the extra $20.

I'm with Mollie on this, I'm kinda pissed about actual stores within the game not being available to someone who has already dropped a whole lot of cash on the game by purchasing the expensive basic version.

I'm sure it'll all get unlocked at some point for console folk, though I'm kinda hoping that when the game finally comes out on PC it will actually be the ultimate edition. There will surely be a host of extra fidelity tweaks, and hopefully those extra perks (the vehicle modding shops, tattoists, boutiques, and the hair salons) will be available as standard, too.

I'm also hopeful we'll get some shiny path tracing mode, extra NPC volume to fill out Vice City, and DLSS 5, of course. I can already feel the hairs on the back of your neck bristling as you read that….

On the plus side, you've probably got another 18 months or so of either saving up for that big GPU upgrade or hoping for memory and storage prices to start to come down.

Do you look upon your everyday ultrawide monitor and scoff at its diminutive wingspan? If so, you'll probably want to check out the whopper that goes by the Samsung Odyssey G93SC, as it's at its lowest ever price of $855 at Amazon for Prime Day.

I say 'whopper' because this thing has a 49-inch panel making for a ridiculous aspect ratio of 32:9—that's 5,120 pixels on the horizontal and 1440 on the vertical. Oh, and did I mention it's a (slightly) curved OLED panel, too? Of course it is, it's got 'go big or go home' written all over it.

• We're keeping track of all the Amazon Prime Day PC gaming deals here

Our Jeremy reviewed it back in 2023 and called it 'outrageous', and that's about the best word for it. It's pretty much the same as the G95SC (with a '5', not a '3'), but it doesn't have all the fancy smart TV gubbins nor the IR remote.

The OLED tech here isn't the newest. It shares the same pixel density and kind of QD-OLED panel as other, less extreme monitors you might be familiar with like the wonderful Alienware 34 AW3423DWF. But it's still plenty punchy. And you just can't overlook the sheer scale factor. Here, I'll let our Jeremy explain:

"This monitor is simply gorgeous. It looks ultra modern and minimalist and feels very nicely put together... In truth, the actual image quality on offer probably isn't any better than the QD-OLED Alienware and Philips panels we've reviewed previously. But the added scale of the 49-inch form factor subjectively ramps up the subjective drama."

In addition to its scale, you're also getting a snappy, 240 Hz experience. And as I've argued elsewhere, jumping up to this refresh rate is substantial, literally improving end-to-end latency and potentially even improving how well you play in games that require quick reactions.

It's not perfect, of course. There's no power delivery for the USB-C-attached hub, for instance. It also has a gigantic power supply, and it can be hard to reach the sockets on the rear of the chassis.

It's also worth noting that in very bright conditions the panel can look a little grey, but that's not the case in normal lighting. And outside of gaming, as with all older OLED panels, text fringing can be an issue, given the subpixel layout and the fact the pixels aren't dense enough to prevent it.

Those caveats don't take away from the sheer outrageousness of this monitor, though, and that's pretty much why you get it: you want to experience ultra-ultrawide gaming on a punchy and snappy OLED. You're still paying a pretty penny for it, but this Prime Day discount makes it as cheap as we've seen it. So if you want something truly outrageous, it's worth a look.

Apple has bitten the bullet. The house that Steve Jobs built took its store offline a little earlier. When it came back, punters were confronted with a bleak new reality: Macs and iPads are now hundreds of dollars dearer. Here's a tasting platter of new starting prices:

• The MacBook Air now starts at $1,299, up from $1,099,
• The MacBook Pro now starts at an eye-watering $1,999, up from $1,699.
• The MacBook Neo will now set you back a minimum of $699, up from its original price of $599.
• The iPad Air now starts at $749, up from $599
• The iPad Pro now starts at $1,199, up from $999
• If you were gonna splurge, get ready to splurge all the more: the M4 Max Mac Studio is up to $2,499 from $1,999

• We're keeping track of all the Amazon Prime Day PC gaming deals here

Until now, Apple had managed to be the one exception to the memory crisis. Even as the waters rose for everyone else, the company's prices generally stayed firm, held steady by one of the most valuable corporations on Earth's relationship with suppliers and, perhaps, the fact it already prices its tech to make a comfy profit for itself at the best of times.

"We have now reached a point where we need to begin raising prices,” Apple said in a statement picked up by the Wall Street Journal. “We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly."

At least for now, Apple is not increasing the price of the iPhone, its number-one moneymaker, but it certainly hasn't said it won't do that. Indeed, just last week outgoing Apple CEO Tim Cook told the WSJ that "Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable… we’ve been trying to shield our customers from the increases, but the situation has become unsustainable."

For as much as I am certain Apple likes making money, it's not happy about this (much like Valve is not happy about the expensive price of its new Steam Machine). In that same interview, Cook said that "We definitely need memory pricing and supply to return to reasonable levels for consumer products. That’s the bottom line." Amen to that, Tim.

It's all very well and good perusing the Amazon Prime Day sales for deals on cold storage SSDs and high-end PC controllers, but it's not always the most exciting kit to cover as a hardware writer. Along similar lines, there's a whole lot of plain black PC cases in the Prime Day sales, so I definitely appreciate when hardware housing rocks up bucking this trend.

The Thermaltake Tower 600 series already gets a big tick from me for its fishtank flourish, but I'm also a big fan of the suite of colours available. Alas, there's only one case enjoying a discount on Amazon right now, and that's the 'Butter Caramel' colourway currently going for $130.

• We're curating all the best Prime Day PC gaming deals here

I've no doubt that's all the inspiration an entomologist who is also a fan of 90's Eurodance bangers will need to fashion the bumblebee-inspired build of their dreams. But you're getting a little more than just a fetching yellow colourway with this case. For a start, the Thermaltake Tower 600 supports hidden connector-style ATX motherboards with extra cutouts—for a case designed to put it all on display, this cable management flourish is definitely welcome.

This case comes with two 140 mm CT fans pre-installed in the top of the chassis. From there, you can then add your own up to a total of either nine 140 mm fans or 13 120 mm fans. You can also install either a 420 mm AIO radiator on the right side of this case, or a 360 mm AIO radiator on the left. As for the all-important GPU, the Thermaltake Tower 600 has room for cards up to 400 mm in length.

That's a fair amount of build flexibility, already. On top of that, the Tower 600 enjoys what Thermaltake bills as a 'Dismantlable Modular Design.' Basically, rather than tying yourself up in knots to get at, say, awkward screws, you can just deconstruct part of the case to better reach it.

Once you put it all back together again though, this isn't the most compact PC case you can pick up, measuring 550 x 420 x 286.4 mm. Mind you, if you're going for a bright yellow PC case, you're hardly going to want to then stuff it under a desk.

While you can display the case on its side, this orientation requires a sold separately mount. If you're feeling extra fancy, there's also a 3.9-inch LCD screen kit too. Should your heart be set on an all-singing, all-buzzing bumblebee build, the add-on costs could really pile up…but who am I to stop you from setting up a little rhythm game-inspired readout right there on your PC case.

👉Take a look at Amazon's PC case line-up this Prime Day👈

It's no secret that the PC market is a little bit of a shambles right now thanks primarily to the global memory shortage—high prices and, often, systems skimping on RAM. Over this Prime Day, however, I've been keeping my eye on different retailers for the best Prime Day gaming PC deals, and have spotted a handful of rigs that have defied the odds and stuck with 32 GB of RAM.

There aren't many 32 GB PCs that are worth considering for price-to-performance this Prime Day, but the six below most certainly are.

• We're keeping track of all the Amazon Prime Day PC gaming deals here

You don't have to go up to high-end territory, either, to get a PC with 32 GB of RAM that's worth its discounted price tag. There's a sub-$1,000 PC I've spotted with a proper 2x 16 GB RAM kit. Now, that one might be DDR4 but it will be enough to have that CPU comfortably keeping up with the RTX 5060 installed alongside it.

The most appealing to my eyes is the RX 9070 XT rig I previously highlighted as one that could be the best we see on sale over Prime Day. So far, that's turned out to be true. But without further ado, the 32 GB gaming PC deals...

Amazon Prime Day 32 GB gaming PC deals

The full details

What-ho and good morrow to you, dear reader. Should one be wishing for a gaming keyboard with some actual class, rather than something clad in gamer-chic vulgarity, may I humbly suggest the Keychron K2 HE—which is currently down to $112 as part of the Amazon Prime Day celebrations.

Wonderful. Anyway, I bloomin' love this keyboard, in all its forms. I recently tested the concrete-framed version and came away incredibly impressed. A large part of that was due to its fantastic Gateron magnetic double rail switches and premium-feeling double-shot PBT keycaps. Concrete or not, this keeb feels absolutely wonderful to type on.

• We're curating all the best Prime Day PC gaming deals here

Our Reece agrees wholeheartedly, as he gave the regular model a score of 88% in his review. While I loved the concrete frame of my review sample, I would happily pick up this version, as it's got all the same internal hardware that makes it a delight to type and game on.

Plus, to keep the unusual material theme going, this one's got two strips of actual wood on the sides. I've typed on this very keeb, and can confirm that it feels awesome, looks great, and is pretty much the classiest keyboard you can currently buy. Unfortunately, the white version is still at full price, but here are some of our own pics for reference:

It's a 75% keeb, so no numpad for you. However, it's got everything most people would need for daily usage, in a form factor that means it's easy to shift around on your desk for a comfortable typing/gaming position.

It's also got a Bluetooth connection alongside its 2.4 GHz, dongle-based affair, which makes it rather flexible. Not literally, though, as Keychron takes build quality very seriously indeed. There's no deck flex in the chassis design, that's for sure, just a couple of strips of rosewood and a very sturdy frame.

Wood I buy one? Sorry. But yes, I wood. As for your own pocketbook, I guess that's up to yew. It's very hot in here, okay?

👉Shop all of Amazon's Prime Day gaming keyboard deals here👈

Ah, good old PC memory: can't live without it, can't avoid the RAMpocalypse price tags, either. Some tech companies would like you to believe that 8 GB is fine, but you try running the latest, graphics-heavy games with that amount of DRAM. Generally speaking, you want 16 GB, and if you like to use lots of apps while you game, then 32 GB is preferable.

With that in mind, I've been scouring through all the Prime Day sales to find the cheapest DDR4 and DDR5 memory kits worth buying.

• We're curating all the best Prime Day PC gaming deals here

I've got 16 and 32 GB options for both, plus a few others if you're happy to pay a bit more for a kit with extras, that get the most from your gaming PC. What you won't find are any 48 GB or larger sets, and that's because they're all so expensive right now that it makes little sense to buy one just for gaming.

Don't believe me? Well, the cheapest 48 GB kit I've found is $580 at Newegg, and when it comes to 64 GB, then you're looking at spending $800 at Newegg, at the very least. So...ah...don't.

DDR4 memory kits

The only reason why any PC gamer would be considering either of these DDR4 memory kits is if you're building a cheap entry-level rig at the moment. In that case, sticking with an AMD Ryzen 5000-series processor and AM4 motherboard is the best way to keep the cost right down.

That said, if you're currently rocking such a CPU in your gaming PC and you want to give it a bit more memory, then swapping a 16 GB kit for a 32 GB one makes sense. You could sell the old set to recoup some of the cost, or keep hold of it just in case the new one ever fails at some point in the near future.

DDR5 memory kits

If your gaming PC houses an AMD Ryzen 7000-, 8000-, or 9000-series processor, or an Intel Core Ultra chip, you have to use DDR5 memory because all of these CPUs lack support for DDR4. Paying almost twice as much money for a 16 GB DDR5-6000 kit as for a 16 GB DDR4-3200 set is painful to see, but there's nothing we can do about it right now.

Fortunately, both of these memory kits are perfectly decent. They're not the flashiest or fastest you can buy, but they are the cheapest. That does mean some elements of them might be a tad wonky, e.g. the heatsinks on the Patriot set are a bit flimsy, but it doesn't affect the cooling.

Other DDR5 memory kits

If you're okay with spending $350 on a 32 GB DDR5 memory kit (and by that, I just mean you've accepted the horrendous price tag because the alternative is just to give up on having a PC...), then paying up to 14% more perhaps isn't so daunting.

Should that increase be within your means, you can pick up either a super-snappy set for an AMD setup or something that's still plenty fast enough but has bling for days. Corsair's Vengeance kit is arguably the prettiest one out of all the memory kits I've listed here, but you do have to pay more for the spanglies.

A physician called me out on how I sit a couple of months ago, and I've been making adjustments to my desktop ever since. One such adjustment is a new vertical mouse: the Razer Pro Click V2.

Wouldn't ya know, it's down to its lowest price on Amazon for Prime Day. It's $90, down from $120.

This new price puts it in firm contention with other office-minded mice, such as the Logitech MX Master 3S, which I used prior to the Pro Click. That's down to $76 right now and a lovely mouse, though not quite as ergonomically upright as this Razer one.

• We're curating all the best Prime Day PC gaming deals here

What I like about the Pro Click is how it shifts my entire arm into a more natural position. It took some getting used to—the main mouse buttons feel a bit skewiff at an odd angle at first—but over time, it's become normal.

There are a couple of extra buttons above and below where your thumb sits. These are, I'm sorry to say, my least favorite part of the mouse. They're just too easy to press by accident. Though speaking to our reviewer, Nick Evanson, he tells me he didn't struggle with those anywhere near as much as I have.

Here's what Nick had to say in his review: "Having used the Pro Click V2 Vertical Edition for a while now, I can honestly say that it's supremely comfortable and it gives me no aches or pains over long days of clicking."

Though Nick and I will be the first to admit this is a bit of a tough sell as a primary mouse for gaming. You definitely could game with this thing, though it's far from the lightest option at 150 grams (over three times a truly light mouse), and accuracy takes a hit from the vertical angle. Or at least it does for someone who's played games their entire life with a flat mouse.

There's plenty to like about the Pro Click, however. It offers a Type-C charging port, wireless connectivity via a 2.4 GHz dongle, 1000 Hz polling, and a high DPI of up to 30,000. It also has RGB lighting that is surprisingly tasteful.

So, hey, if you're looking for ways to make your desk setup a little easier on the joints, or you have also been accosted by a physician, the Razer Pro Click V2 might be a good shout at this price.

👉View all Razer mouse deals on Amazon👈

These are strange days for hardware, with the memory supply crisis encouraging me to acquaint myself with some Amazon Prime Day SSD deals that I wouldn't have spared a second glance at the end of last year. As someone with many terabytes of personal photos, home videos, and game screen shots, every little scrap of system storage helps.

That brings me to a drive I can only recommend with some fairly large caveats. For a start, the Adata Legend 710 is slooow by PC gamers' standards, enjoying downright leisurely read/write speeds of 2,400MB/s/1,800MB/s. I would not recommend gaming on this PCIe 3.0 drive… but I can't dismiss it outright when it's offering 2 TB of space for only $190 from Newegg.

• We're curating all the best Prime Day PC gaming deals here

That works out to about 9 cents per Gigabyte, and with that maths in mind I can definitely think of another use for this drive. As I said before, I'm holding on to an expansive photographical record of nearly my entire life. That's a lot of files I don't need on the regular, nor at a pace above a leisurely stroll down memory lane. As such, the Adata Legend 710 might make a fine 'cold storage' drive for all of digital memories.

I really must stress this SSD is best suited to files that aren't 'high traffic,' as the Adata Legend 710 only has an endurance rating of up to 520 TBW. That means, if you were to use this as a gaming drive, you'd potentially have to replace it far sooner than you like. Limiting how many times you're writing to this drive really is the way to go.

By a similar logic, if you're currently storing everything—games and precious photos—on one hardworking SSD, shuffling a few files off onto the Legend 710 should give your main internal SSD some much needed room to breathe.

I'd recommend keeping your most important, non-game files in more than one place on external storage media too—just in case the worst does happen. I'm still rocking two external HDDs for all of my photos, but the Adata Legend 710 makes a strong case for upgrading to solid state storage.

To reiterate, if you're on the hunt for a faster drive for gaming specifically, you're better off looking elsewhere. Thankfully, I have a couple of suggestions for nippier PCIe 4.0 SSDs. The Biwin Black Opal NV7400 is the best budget gaming SSD—though the 1 TB version has been enjoying the best discounts during the Amazon Prime Day sales. After the Adata Legend 710, the most affordable 2 TB out there is the Acer Predator GM7 for $246. With a read/write of 7,400 MB/s/6,500 MB/s, it's decently speedy for gaming too.

If you can push the budget boat out just a little bit further, there's also the WD_Black SN7100 which just happens to be the SSD we recommend overall for gaming. The 2 TB version will set you back $284 from Newegg, though with a read/write of 7,250 MB/s/6,900 MB/s, it doesn't completely outclass the aforementioned Acer drive. May the memory supply crisis have mercy on all of our wallets…

Some speedier alternatives...

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It is a singularly bad time to purchase computer parts or release a computer product. The RAM crisis has made memory and storage costs astronomical, and the most recent indignity it's inflicted around our neck of the woods is the price of the Steam Machine—a box whose min-spec edition will still set you back $1,049. Valve itself wishes it was cheaper.

But I guess even an expensive box is better than no box at all, which—to hear Valve tell it—may have been a possibility. When we sat down and chatted with Valve engineers Yazan Aldehayyat and Pierre-Loup Griffais, we got to chatting about how the company's overall stock of Steam Machines is looking as it gears up to ship them. The answer? Less than there would be in a pre-RAM-crisis world, but way better than the beginning of the year, when Valve wasn't certain it would have any Steam Machines at all.

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Griffais said the stock of Steam Machines is "a little bit less" than it would have been pre-crisis, but that Valve's built up "a sizable amount compared to what it initially looked like. Things looked really dire at the beginning of the year. We weren't sure if there was gonna be anything at all."

Compared to that, I suppose any number of boxes seems good, and heck, securing supply even in non-apocalyptic circumstances is hard: "I wanna emphasise that, even under the best of circumstances, getting enough quantity for day one is always hard-slash-impossible, I think," said Aldehayyat. "From our perspective, we still got to a pretty good place," said Griffais.

"Typically what happens with a product like this, is the day one demand is going to be a big, big percentage of the year one demand," Griffais continued. "You just cannot have your factory building for six months… there's always gonna be some gap between supply and demand the first couple of days, couple of weeks." Thus, the Steam Machine reservation system that has been running since last Monday, which lets people enter themselves into a queue which is set to be all shaken up today, ideally achieving a modicum of fairness in distribution.

"I'm really proud of where we're at in terms of, like, our sourcing guys did a great job. I think the quantities we have are really good given the circumstances, and our hope is to kinda catch up to demand as quickly as possible," said Griffais. It's certainly better than nothing.

I've reviewed a lot of PC cases over the last 11 years and built in a lot more as well. There are very few of them that I look back on and genuinely miss. Iconic is the word I'm looking for. The most memorable chassis aren't always the best in terms of the build experience, but for what the build turns into at the end of the process. Phanteks' Evolv X2 is exactly that. It's a case that I constantly think back to. A system I wish I still had because, visually, it is unlike anything I've ever built in previously.

Right now, Newegg actually has it on offer for just $110 after rebate. That's an impressive $70 off its original launch price, and down from its regular running $160 mark on Amazon, too.

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This is very counter-intuitive, by the way, what I'm about to do, but I want to talk about the negatives of this thing before the positives. It's a big part of the build experience. To be blunt, the cable management on this thing is a serious challenge.

Because you've got this wrapped glass effect going around, and that monolithic vertical chimney design, there's not a huge amount of space in the back to route your cables. There are tie-down points, in velcro straps included, and plenty of cut-outs (it's BTF compatible), but realistically, you need to remove the storage caddy in the bottom and use a fairly short and stumpy PSU to get the best out of it. I actually broke one of the velcro straps when I first reviewed the Evolv X2.

The cooling, too, although intelligently designed (Phanteks is leaning heavily into that chimney-style thermal convection strategy), is limiting. You can install your 360mm AIO in the roof, and your three 120mm intakes in the floor, and that's about it. What is impressive, though, is that the AIO cavity is entirely recessed into the roof. Install a standard AIO and a set of fans up there, and they sit cleanly flush against the top of the case, with plenty of ventilation too. It's limited, but incredibly effective.

The positives, though. Boy oh boy, are they a plenty. This thing is beautiful to look at. Phanteks has nailed the aesthetic. Tall proud. Sitting on a plinth, protected intake airflow, glass surrounds. The light bar runs along the back edge and through the roof. It is ludicrously clean. Better yet, you can grab one of their premium PCIe "vertical" bracket (spoiler alert it is $81, although it is PCIe 5.0 compatible). I say vertical, because you actually angle the thing, and pivot your GPU 45 degrees in there too. It just, at every level, is a case that I sincerely miss.

It, as I've already stated, is a bit of a pain in the ass to build in. But what you're left with when you're done is a system that is just stunning (and another build log here for you). It just stays with you, this thing. It performs well. It looks great on your desktop, and arguably, you can build some outstanding rigs in it. Particularly at such a super-low price point. I was so torn on whether to recommend this as a candidate for our best PC case list back when I first looked at it. Visually, it's perfection, but you've just gotta be prepared to fight it a bit to get there.

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The balance of price versus performance is something we're obsessed with here at PC Gamer, which is why we're big fans of MSI's Vector range of laptops. Our Dave reviewed the RTX 5080-equipped version of the MSI Vector 16 HX AI, and found it to deliver great frame rates for the cash.

However, while the RTX 5080 version is still well north of $2,000, I've found this MSI Vector 16 HX AI with an RTX 5070 Ti on board for $1,599 at Walmart. It's stacked full of speedy components, and for this sort of cash I simply can't beat its price/performance combo, even in the middle of the Amazon Prime Day sales.

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The RTX 5070 Ti mobile is a very capable gaming GPU, particularly when it's pushed to a 140 W power limit. Combine that with a 240 Hz, 1600p screen, and this lappy starts to make all the others around the same price look a bit under-specced.

Sure, it'd be nice if it was an OLED. But hey, we're talking value here, and most OLED machines are much more expensive. The rest of the specs sheet is pretty mega, too, with a 20-core Intel chip handling the CPU duties and... hang on a minute, is that 32 GB of DDR5?

Yep, even in the middle of the RAM crisis, this machine comes equipped with a generous amount of memory modules. 32 GB gaming laptop deals have become very rare in recent months, although I've been finding a few during this sales event regardless.

It's also got a 1 TB SSD, which should provide ample room for a few games. Again, I'd love to see a 2 TB here, but SSD prices are still pretty hefty at the moment, so I'll take this one for the money.

There are a few drawbacks to this lappy. For a start, it's very noisy at top whack, but you can set the fan profile to balanced mode and even things out without sacrificing too much performance.

It's also a bit... plastic fantastic, in terms of chassis design. Honestly, I've seen much worse—and it's not a huge deal when you get one in your hands. It's got fair amount of chonk, but it's not a bad-looking machine. In fact, we found it rather charming when it was passed it around the office.

And yes, the battery life is rubbish, so it's not particularly portable. Still, if you're looking for a gaming laptop with high specs for reasonable prices this Prime Day, I can't find anything that beats this. All hail the Vector 16 HX AI. King of the value-based castle once again.

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Whenever I think roguelike exhaustion has set in, another game comes along to drag me back into the endless grind. This time it's Everything is Crab, an action roguelike that plays fast and loose with the theory of evolution—instead of evolving over millions of years, all you need to do is enjoy a big meal and you'll sprout antlers, tentacles or wings.

Since it launched last month, Everything is Crab has become part of my nightly routine. I take the dog out for a walk, brush my teeth, pretend I'm going to bed, and then I spend the next 2 hours on my Steam Deck making delightful new freaks. And it doesn't look like I'll be able to escape its clutches any time soon, as a meaty update has just dropped.

Evolution 1.1 coincides with the news that Everything is Crab hit the 500,000 sales milestone—a very respectable number that really should be higher, because this crabby roguelike is extremely good.

So! The update! There's plenty to sift through, including a new evolution, Tracker, which will allow you to "track specific targets and get varied bonuses against them". It's a level 3 evolution with the predator affinity, and there are other evolutions and specialisations that apply the tracked effect, turning you into the ultimate hunter. Those awful bee-dogs won't know what's hit them.

You'll also be able to play around with a new ultimate, Lick Wounds, so you can self heal instead of frantically running around looking for healing food. Thank god. I have died so many times while trying to find sparkly morsels to munch on.

New specialisations have been added to Stoner, Leech and Spur, and you can skip specialisations instead and get 10 mutagen points in return.

It'll also be easier to unlock new evolutions, and ones that were locked behind challenge progression can be obtained by completing pressure levels for the first time. So, for instance, you'll be able to unlock the new Lick Wounds ultimate by beating pressure 3, and Tracker will unlock after beating pressure 7.

Expect new cosmetics, too, which can be unlocked by completing challenges. The world itself has also received a wee makeover, "with additional foliage, trees, obstacles and other map elements sprouting up to make the world feel more alive".

On top of all that, there's a whole bunch of balance and quality of life tweaks, along with Twitch integration, changes to the Charm ability and new accessibility options. You can check out all the changes in the patch notes.

More additions are on their way, too, with another big update planned for late summer, featuring a "community-designed" addition and more free cosmetics. Autumn, meanwhile, will see the arrival of some premium DLC, along with more freebies.

While Chuck Tingle may be best known as the author of Pounded in the Butt by My Own Butt and a proliferation of works in a similar style (shout-out to the Space Raptor Butt Trilogy as well as I Have No Butt And I Must Pound), these days he also writes legit and well-received horror novels like Camp Damascus and Bury Your Gays, and is working on a book about an influencer who is also a grave robber called Fabulous Bodies.

That doesn't stop him from releasing the shorter works he calls "Tinglers", the latest of which is particularly relevant to our interests. It's called Pounded In The Butt By The Physical Manifestation Of Spending An Irresponsible Portion Of My Income On Warpounder 40k Miniatures.

What qualified Chuck Tingle to call out everyone who thinks they need another Warhammer army even though we haven't finished painting the last one we bought? As Tingle explained on BlueSky, he used to play both Warhammer 40,000, where he collected eldar, and Warhammer Fantasy Battle, where he had both lizardmen and skaven, which he describes as his "main trot". He's one of us.

The plot of Tingle's latest has "a handsome sentient battleship model" as its centrepiece, and promises to include "4,000 words of sizzling human on gay Warpounder 40K model action." It's available on Amazon, and I look forward to reading it right after I finish painting the Cathayan sky lantern I bought because it looks cool even though I don't have a Cathayan army to use it in.

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Long before Heroes of Might & Magic enjoyed a triumphant return to form with Olden Era, we had King's Bounty: The Legend, a strategy-RPG in the classic HoMM mold only with a single gigantic world map rather than discrete levels, and some quirky ideas about courtly marriage. Infamously, this was the game where you could marry a frog or a zombie.

The most recent sequel toned down the whimsy and ended up being much blander for it. Fortunately, you can skip that and go back to where it began with a newly freshened up King's Bounty: The Legend for modern PCs. Now it fully supports widescreen resolutions without those uggo black bars down the side of the screen. The maximum zoom-out distance has been doubled and the UI's been given a readability pass.

It's also got a bunch of modern Steam features like achievements, trading cards, and a points shop. There's a dedicated Steam Workshop too, though at the moment the only mod is one that undoes one of the aforementioned readability changes and restores the Original Fonts.

Katauri plans to bring these updates to King's Bounty: Armored Princess next. Right now the series is also on sale, so you can get King's Bounty: The Legend for 85% off on Steam, and the fan-favorite follow-up King's Bounty: Crossworlds is also 85% off.

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Riot Games is making a big change to its Vanguard anti-cheat system: After an update set to go live today (and which may already be live by the time you read this) it will not launch when your PC boots up, but will instead will be "on demand," meaning it will only run when playing a game and will shut down once the gameplay is over.

Vanguard was very controversial when it launched in 2020 because it's "kernel mode" software that, in theory at least, grants Riot access to your PC at an alarmingly deep level. On top of that intrusiveness, it's also effectively omnipresent: It launches when your PC does, and it runs quietly in the background, doing whatever, until you shut down.

Other games roll with kernel mode anti-cheat, like Genshin Impact, Doom Eternal, and Call of Duty games, but in those cases the anti-cheat only runs when the game is running, and terminates when the game does. Now, finally, Riot will give League of Legends and Valorant players the same option—with some conditions.

"Starting later today, the universally beloved anti-cheat product, Vanguard, will begin to support on-demand sessions from all sufficiently secured PC devices," Riot's anti-cheat chief Phillip Koskinas wrote in an update announcing the change.

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"'On-demand' here means that Vanguard’s driver component will no longer launch when the system starts, but 'secured' indicates that this will be possible only if that system’s hardware has met a set of modern security requirements. By opting into pre-boot security mechanisms and Windows’ own native protection features, Vanguard can safely end its watch, and your taskbar can have 256 of its pixels back."

Those "pre-boot security mechanisms" are the conditions in question, and for the vast majority of players it's a matter of convenience rather than capability. Koskinas said that roughly 35% of Riot's players already satisfy the conditions required for Vanguard's new "Pre-Check, " so the option to switch Vanguard into on-demand mode will appear automatically after the update goes live.

For just about everyone else, there's more: You'll need to be running Windows 11 25H2 or later, and have UEFI Secure Boot, TPM 2.0, VBS, HVCI, and IOMMU all switched on. If you want to know what all of that means, or what they do, the full update has the details; it gets technical, but you won't need to get into the weeds to get it all set up. You will probably need to do a little dicking around in your BIOS, though, which may or may not sound like your idea of a good time.

I say "just about everyone else" because, according to the update, about 3% of Riot's players are on older hardware that can't meet the Pre-Check requirements—so for them, the on demand option simply won't be available unless and until they upgrade. Vanguard will continue to operate as it is for the foreseeable future, however, so Riot said it's not really an issue: "We’re not making anyone change anything. We’re willing to wait until the ecosystem matures."

That also holds if you're happy with Vanguard as it is (and if you've been playing Valorant or League or the past few years with no complaint, there's a good chance you are) and don't care about any of this: You can just ignore all of this, do nothing, and carry on as usual.

Koskinas said it's taken this long to give Vanguard an on-demand option because it wasn't until fairly recently that Windows and PC hardware had built-in security features sufficient to enable it.

"Microsoft and PC equipment manufacturers have long-recognized the need for cryptographic verification of boot processes and of the kernel, so they’ve been cookin’ up heat for quite some time," he explained.

"The resulting oven-fresh security features require newer hardware components and newer versions of Windows, but through the power of collaboration and the combined might of our wills, we’ve worked directly with the inestimable Xbox OS Security Team at Microsoft to see improvements made natively to the Windows kernel that have finally afforded us the opportunity to offer an on-demand mode within the Vanguard product."

Koskinas also said that as botting becomes increasingly complex and accessible with the advent of AI, Riot will continue to advance its own anti-cheat efforts. "That said, friction is not fun, and we prefer incentives to requirements," he concluded. "For that reason, our trust segmentation will be surgical, and while we might add more checks to Pre-Check in the future, we plan on keeping things optional until you’re in the most competitive segments, on the strangest devices, or amongst the highest ranks."

The 30^th anniversary of Quake recently passed by—June 22, 2026 was the day—and of course there were acknowledgements, salutes, and celebrations a-plenty, as you'd expect for such a groundbreaking, influential, and enduring game. But it also got a couple of the driving forces behind it reflecting on those days rather more deeply, and as sometimes happens when youthful memories come to the surface, they got pretty deep into their feelings.

Quake co-designer Sandy Petersen, who joined id Software in 1993, got the ball rolling, writing bluntly on X that "Quake ruined id Software." He said Quake "is an amazing feat of art, programming, and design," and credited everyone on the development team for doing "a brilliant job, fulfilling tasks just right." But, he added, the workload was intense, "and I think it broke us spiritually."

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Petersen then ran through a list of everyone who left id "within a couple years of finishing Quake," including John Romero, Shawn Green, Dave Taylor, Mike Abrash, American McGee, and of course Petersen himself. All of them went on to have long and fruitful careers in game development, "so plainly we didn't depart because of some kind of talent issue," Petersen wrote. "We were all highly competent, just a little burnt out after the labor of Quake."

"Id Software was never the same after," Petersen wrote. "In my opinion (only an opinion), the only other truly great game that id produced was Quake 3, and it was not at the level of the pre-Quake games."

Despite clearly being a bit melancholy about the whole thing, Petersen said Quake was "absolutely" worth the cost it extracted from id: "Games are more important than game companies, and Quake is an iconic titan of the gaming world." But, he added, "man alive it seems like the company could have had its act together better and kept that dream team."

Sandy Petersen is pretty famous for having his recollections repeatedly (but respectfully) knifed by John Romero, but in this instance his reminiscences were met with agreement, mostly, from the other John of the original id Software squad: Carmack.

In response to Petersen's missive, Carmack said Quake was "overly ambitious technically," and that the studio "could have done all the great multiplayer and modding work inside a Doom++ engine, allowing the designers to work with a more stable base instead of rug-pulling everything out from underneath them a couple times."

"I pushed everyone too hard," Carmack wrote. "I didn’t appreciate how maturing companies need more slack, and that running people at startup intensity constantly will wear them out. Quake was also where I really had to accept my personal limits. I was working pretty much as hard as humanly possible, and I was still slipping past my goal points.

"On all of the founders’ shoulders, our original corporate stock arrangement and buy/sell agreement was a mistake, and resulted in bad incentives. We wanted to ensure that all ownership rested in the hands of people working hard on current projects, but the Silicon Valley standard approach of vesting stock would have worked out better."

Carmack said he doesn't think having elevated expectations for Quake level designers was a mistake (and credited Romero with setting that bar high right from the studio's early days), but acknowledged that "we should have figured out how to pair up artists and designers earlier." But, he continued, "there was infighting among the designers, and the ones that could manage the visuals were happy to disparage the ones that couldn’t."

And then, simply and directly, he apologized: "Sorry, Sandy."

The dissolution of id Software under somewhat acrimonious circumstances has been well documented over the subsequent years: American McGee, for instance, was reportedly fired by Carmack for sub-par performance on Quake, although Petersen later suggested that McGee was actually done dirty by another employee. Petersen also pointed a finger at Carmack's "intensity" in particular in a separate post, writing that Carmack "decided we all needed to be in the same big room together. He’d read about this way of “focusing” the team and it did. But we also had nowhere we could decompress or hide out."

It didn't take long for the other other John—Romero—to enter the convo with his own thoughts on the matter, which aren't too far removed from Carmack's: He echoed the in-hindsight belief that they should have stuck with a Doom++ game while ironing out the fully-3D Quake engine, and that everyone at id was "pushing ourselves past what was reasonable because that was how id had always worked." He also gave particular credit to McGee for being "really good" at building Quake levels, a notably pointed comment given how McGee's time at id ended.

"There are a hundred things we could have done differently, but we did the best we could do at the time with what we knew. Having a media circus around us certainly didn’t help," Romero wrote. "id still goes on, and so does Wolf, Doom, and Quake. Maybe that was what we came together to do. That is more than enough for any game dev, any team, any lifetime really."

Taken altogether, it's a really interesting conversation about one of the most storied game studios in history. But I love a happy ending, and so what really lands for me is how it all wraps up: With an understanding that everyone was younger then, the world was a different place, and as Romero put it, we did the best we could. Following Carmack's apology, Petersen said he didn't blame him for how it all worked out and told Romero he "did an incredible job" on Quake, and Romero thanked Petersen for getting them talking: "It really was a hell of a game."

You're best chance of getting a good Prime Day RTX 5080 deal realistically lies within a full prebuilt gaming PC. And, thankfully there are some good Prime Day gaming PC deals around right now.

I've been casting my eyes around this afternoon and there are four machines that I would recommend taking a look at, and while it would be tempting to suggest that you should just go for the cheapest option—the $2,350 Andromeda Insights machine at Newegg—I would definitely say that it's worth spending the extra $150 on the Stormcraft Phantom system for $2,500 at Newegg, with the more powerful Core Ultra 7 265 and the 2 TB SSD. Upgrading the storage after the fact is mighty expensive these days.

Though I will admit I do have a soft spot for the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D used in the $2,800 Andromeda Insights rig—it is the best CPU for gaming after all—but unless you really want that 3D V-Cache gaming bump the extra $300 is a lot to spend. The Alienware Aurora is the same price, but you have to decide whether the extra multi-threaded performance of the Core Ultra 9 285K is worth the trade off for the smaller 1 TB SSD. I think I'd still side with the AMD rig on this one, as a pure PC gamer at heart.

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The best RTX 5080 gaming PC Prime Day deals

The full details

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Destiny 2 has reached the end of the line: The final update is live, TWIDs are over, and we're all left wondering how the one-time king of live service shooters has come to such ignominious ruin. Even Destiny's competitors are baffled by Sony's decision to pull the plug, although some say Sony's not the real villain here at all. If there is a villain, besides Bungie management—which I think we can all agree has been pretty consistently not great—one thing's for sure: It's not Destiny players.

That bit of reassurance came from Bungie communications lead Dylan Gafner, better known to players as dmg04, in response to a Destiny 2 streamer who wondered whether they'd "done enough to try and help the situation," and if there was somehow more they could do.

"'Could I do more?'" Gafner replied rhetorically (via GamesRadar). "You all have done more for this game and our studio than could ever be imagined, and no words can accurately depict how lucky we are to have shared these worlds with you.

"Don't blame yourselves or think you could have / should have done more. This is just the way it goes sometimes."

It's fair to say that Bungie has sometimes had a bit of a rocky relationship with some of the more rabid Destiny 2 player base. Bungie whiffed on Destiny 2 in many and various ways over the years—here's us explaining "why Destiny 2 players got so angry," in 2017—but the backlash from some in the community could be beyond the pale.

In 2022, Gafner wrote on Reddit that persistent abuse and threats against Bungie employees had resulted in "reduced communications as the team plans future protections/strategies to help avoid these sorts of things," which eventually led to the creation of the anonymized Destiny 2 Team social media account. In 2023, after winning a $500,000 legal action against a particularly abusive player, Bungie warned that Destiny 2 developers were still being harassed by members of the community simply because they worked at the studio.

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But, as with so many things in life, the worst of the noise came from a small number of players—the vast majority, while sometimes unhappy with one aspect of Destiny 2 or another, focused their frustrations through a lens of respect, appreciation, and love. Despite the rough patches, that's clearly what's settled in with Gafner.

"No matter the future, we will always have these memories," Gafner concluded. "Thank you. For everything."

You remember Elden Ring, right? Pretty good game, pretty successful, won a few awards? Well, forget about all that: A Reuters report says a substantial number of shareholders in Kadokawa Corporation, the parent company of Elden Ring developer FromSoftware, want to give CEO Takeshi Natsuno the boot because, simply put, he's blowing it with Elden Ring.

Natsuno appeared to be in a strong position atop the company, earning the support of 90% of the company's shareholders at Kadokawa's 2025 annual general meeting. But Oasis Management, described in the report as "one of the most active activist investors in Japan," is now Kadokawa's largest single shareholder, with nearly 14% of the company, and it wants Natsuno gone.

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The problem, ironically, is Elden Ring's success. I may have (also ironically) undersold it just a bit up above: Elden Ring had sold more than 30 million copies as of April 2025, three years after its release, and the Shadow of the Erdtree punched out 10 million more. Add another five million copies of the multiplayer Elden Ring Nightreign on top of that, and you've got yourself some enviable numbers by any measure. But as Janet Jackson once famously asked, what have you done for me lately?

The problem is "profit leakage," essentially meaning that Kadokawa under Natsuno's leadership has failed to capitalize on Elden Ring's success to make more money—in particular, it's let money slip through its fingers by partnering with external publishers for game releases. Elden Ring, for instance, is published by Kadokawa (via FromSoftware) in Japan, but Bandai Namco is the global publisher.

In a press release calling for Natsuno's ouster earlier this month, Oasis described FromSoftware as a "crown jewel asset," but said Kadokawa "continues to leave a meaningful share of the economics from [its] titles with third-party publishing partners, creating a significant and ongoing loss of value for all of Kadokawa stakeholders."

"Oasis has long advocated with Kadokawa privately and directly for a more ambitious approach to capturing the full value of FromSoftware’s success," Oasis wrote. "Management itself previously committed to self-publishing under its prior mid-term plan, and raised money in 2022, diluting shareholders, to self-publish. But CEO Natsuno has since retreated from that commitment without providing shareholders with a clear explanation, economic framework, or decision criteria for how and when Kadokawa will improve gaming economics.

"Oasis is not saying that every title must be self-published immediately. Rather, Oasis is asking for transparency, discipline, and a credible plan for how Kadokawa will capture more value from one of the most important assets in the global gaming industry."

Beyond Natsuno, Oasis believes "Kadokawa also requires broader improvements in governance, capital allocation, cost discipline, and Board oversight." But he's the top dog, and that's where you start with these things.

Elden Ring isn't Natsuno's only problem: A 2024 data leak cost the company millions, which apparently didn't go over super-well with anyone, and shareholders are also reportedly unhappy that a hoped-for (by investors) acquisition by Sony turned into a relatively small-potatoes "strategic alliance" in which Sony took 10% of the company. It came to light in a new Reuters report that Natsuno did in fact survive the AGM and will maintain his position, but the actual results of the vote won't be known for several days; if his support has dropped off sharply, Natsuno may be forced to implement many of the changes desired by Oasis and other activist investors anyway.

It doesn't hurt to be just a little sceptical when you stumble across decent-looking hardware at an absurdly low price. Well, I know first-hand that you can dispense with such wariness as far as our best budget gaming keyboard is concerned, though.

Even before the Amazon Prime Day sale, the GK Gamakay x NaughShark NS68 was already a ridiculously affordable 65% keyboard. Now that the deals are here, this Hall effect keyboard is going for even less thanks to a delectable discount making it only $32.

• We're curating all the best Prime Day PC gaming deals here

Now, I know what you may be thinking: 'A $33 gaming keyboard? There ain't no way that doesn't just immediately crumble into microplastic dust in my hands.' To be clear, there's definitely some flex to the board, but overall this affordable hero doesn't feel anywhere near as cheap as it is.

Don't misunderstand, weighing only 762 g, this is a light-feeling keyboard. However, its Outemu Peach Magnetic key switches and double-shot PBT keycaps go some way to making this an affordable keyb that actually feels nice to type on. In terms of looks, it's almost tasteful—though the strap and RGB lighting leaves little doubt this is one for The Gamers.

On the subject of gamer-geared flourishes, this board also enjoys an 8K Hz polling rate (yes, really), and Rapid Trigger. As is to be expected of a magnetic keyboard, you can noodle with customisable key actuation points ranging from as light a touch as 0.1 mm all the way up to a smashing 3.7 mm depth. This may be a budget board, but it's not skimping on responsiveness—and the software isn't awful either!

As our Reece surmised in his review, this is "a powerful gaming keyboard that makes a bit of a mockery of more expensive rivals, with beefy Hall effect switches, pleasant physical touches, and decent software."

The white colourway with the shine-through keycaps and wireless connectivity happens to be the cheapest version going. Personally, I'm quite partial to the classy topographic-inspired design in black with the side-mounted legends. Thankfully, all of the discounted options are understated enough that the GK Gamakay x NaughShark NS68 can take pride of place on your desk at home or at work.

👉Check out all of Amazon's gaming keyboard deals👈

To paraphrase a well-known line from a certain film, it's an older model, but it checks out. By older, I do just mean 'last generation', though Razer released the DeathAdder V3 Pro back in 2022. Four years is hardly a lifetime ago, but things have progressed very rapidly in recent times when it comes to gaming mice.

But for all your super lightweight, ultra-fast, gazillion Hz polling rate rodents, the mighty V3 Pro still stands above the crowd. Only its successor, the DeathAdder V4 Pro, is mightier. And best of all, you can now pick up a black or white V3 Pro for under $67 at Amazon.

• We're curating all the best Prime Day PC gaming deals here

This particular model doesn't come with the 8,000 Hz HyperPolling dongle, but you honestly won't have any quibbles about the mouse's standard 1,000 Hz polling rate. Paired with Razer's Focus Pro 30K optical sensor, you'll have no problems keeping up in games, unless you happen to be a caffeine-injected esports twitch shooter specialist.

For the rest of us mere mortals, the lower polling rate means you can enjoy up to 90 hours of gaming before the mouse needs charging.

Due to the DeathAdder's distinct shape, this mouse is very much for right-handed people, and to be blunt, it's a very gaming-focused rodent, too. You can use it for day-to-day PC activities, of course, but the side buttons and clunky mouse wheel aren't so great for whizzing through spreadsheets or hopping back and forth in application menus.

But hey, this is PC Gamer, not PC Imma-Excel-nurd, so just buy this mouse and enjoy peerless clicking and tracking in all your favorite games. Just like Mr Bezos clearly does, because why else would he offer this great mouse at such an awesome price?

👉Check out all of Amazon's gaming mice deals here👈

What probably springs to mind when I say 'upgrade for competitive gaming' is a new lightweight gaming mouse. Maybe a high-refresh monitor. Or, at a push, maybe even a slick new mouse pad. But just as important is audio, and honestly one of the best improvements I've made to my Counter-Strike gaming setup over the past few months has been a humble set of in-ear monitors (IEMs, ie, earphones) that are now just $24 at Amazon for Prime Day (Prime members only).

Audio isn't massively relevant for all games, but for a bunch of competitive FPS games it's crucial. Placing your enemies using audio can sometimes separate a win from a loss. Anyone else remember the Xbox 360 era where being accused of using Turtle Beaches (peculiarly specific) was considered an insult? If you can't beat 'em—or rather if you want to beat 'em—join 'em.

• We're keeping track of all the Amazon Prime Day PC gaming deals here

The mistake a lot of people make, and which I made until recently, is to assume that if you want to be able to place your enemies with good audio imaging, you need to spend a fortune. That's true if you want headphones that are great in a bunch of other respects, too, but if competitive shooters are your goal then something like these Linsoul Tripowin x 0DiBi IEMs should take you far.

IEMs in general tend to be good for helping you place enemies ('sound localisation') and these ones in particular are great for the price.

I swap from the very pleasant Razer BlackShark V3 Pro to these Vivace earbuds whenever I'm booting up CS2 for that very reason. Since I've made the switch and spent some time getting used to its sound profile, I've been able to place enemies easier and am often hearing things that my teammates aren't. I can even almost tell the difference between A and B plants on Nuke, now, which is a nigh-on miracle.

The IEMs come with a few different tips, and the cable which you have to attach. I'd like the cable to be a little longer as it doesn't reach the back of my PC to plug into my motherboard, and the power from the case's connector on the front doesn't seem to be enough. This meant I had to buy a separate DAC, but a cheap UGreen one has done the trick just fine—this way I can use it with other USB-C devices, too, so it's a win-win.

Outside of the sound localisation, these earphones sound pretty reasonable across the spectrum, without much of a boost in any particular frequency range, to my ears. They're not the bassiest, and mids are perhaps a little far back, but overall they're very balanced and compare well against some much more expensive wireless earbuds with fancier tech (ANC, etc) I've tried.

And for the discounted price here, I'd say that's a damn good proposition.

👉 Check out all of Amazon's gaming earbud deals 👈

There's a lot going on this week, folks. Monday saw a thick glut of Steam Machine news, and today Rockstar switched on the Grand Theft Auto 6 info-hose. I am here to tell you not to care about any of it. Here's the real story: Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 have got new patches.

Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition, Baldur's Gate 2: Enhanced Edition, and Icewind Dale—Edition? You better believe it's Enhanced—all just got a new 2.7 patch courtesy of Beamdog. This is the patch that entered beta last February, now available for all and sundry. Well, I suppose the beta was also available to all and sundry, but now all and sundry are getting it whether they click a button or not.

It's a doozy of a patch, too. Beamdog says that it's focused on quality-of-life updates for the Infinity Engine games this far out (14 years) from their Enhanced Edition releases, and the two big ones in 2.7 are: Steam cloud saves that work how they ought to (GOG cloud saves work "properly", too) and Apple Silicon support on Mac.

Cloud saves on Steam are now controlled, uh, by Steam. That is to say, if you toggle them off in your Steam client settings for BG:EE, they will be off. Turn them on? They'll be on. You might think, "Surely it always worked like this?" but you'd be wrong. Previously, cloud saves were configured in the gameplay menu for the games themselves—the Steam client settings were a kind of vestigial organ. Which is very counterintuitive and not how pretty much every other game on Steam works, so this is a welcome change.

Apple Silicon support, meanwhile, means the games will now run natively on Apple's ARM-based Mac hardware. This was almost certainly done because Apple is set to phase out its Rosetta 2 translation software that lets x86-based applications run on the company's M-series chips (though it does promise to keep it for some older and unmaintained bits of software). Anyway, it's good news—I can't pretend these games didn't already run like a dream on my M1-series MacBook Air, but now they'll be even dreamier, and potentially a little lighter on the ol' battery.

Anyway, I am as ever very pleased to see these classics continue to get care and attention. Here are the full patch notes for 2.7:

Beamdog Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale 2.7 patch notes

• Steam Cloud saves can now be controlled via the Steam client — Previously, the only way to enable or disable Steam Cloud Saves for BG1:EE, BG2:EE, and IWD:EE was within the Gameplay Options of the games. Now, Steam Cloud Saves are controlled by the Steam client and the individual game properties settings
• GOG Galaxy Cloud saves — now functioning properly
• Added Apple Silicon support — With native support for Apple Silicon, on Mac devices you can expect faster app launch times, overall improved performance, and faster rendering. In addition, laptops will benefit from lower power consumption while playing, leading to longer battery life
• New localizations — We added the following community-translated languages: BG:SoD - Chinese (Simplified), Korean, Russian; BGII - Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Ukrainian; IWD - Hungarian, Japanese
• SoD language switch — Switching to the SoD campaign will now only display languages where SOD was translated. Previously, the game always displayed the full list of languages that BG1’s base game supported. If you are playing BG1 or The Black Pits in a language that SoD doesn’t support when you switch to the SoD campaign, the game will change the language to English automatically
• Dynamic language support — We made changes to allow easier language updates and additions in the future
• Chinese font change — At the request of the Chinese localization volunteers, we have changed the font for Chinese
• Font Size saved per font language — The Font Size zoom setting is now saved per font language
• Indexing Fix — Resolved an off‑by‑one error in rebuilt BIF files that affected some community tools
• iOS Restore Purchases — The “Restore Purchases” button has returned, allowing the game to sync with Apple’s purchase history
• Mobile Keyboard Improvements — The UI now shifts so the text cursor remains visible above the virtual keyboard, preventing cursor loss and mis‑registered taps on iOS & Android
• Android Foldable Support — Fixed UI scaling and touch‑input issues on foldable and tall‑aspect devices. The game now properly resizes when the device’s screen configuration changes
• Android Character Export — Exporting a character now also places the file into the user‑accessible directory
• iOS Modding now supported — The game now stores and reads data from a location visible to standard file browsers. You can manage saves and other files directly on your device or by connecting it to a computer.
• Android Override Folder Optimization — Fixed long boot delays caused by large /override/ folders. Importing is manual via an in‑game UI
• Android DLC Display Fix — The Fists of the Fallen DLC for BG2 now correctly shows as installed
• Android Modding now supported — This update resolves a bug that caused incorrect permissions, preventing access via PC or file browsers. Existing installations with incorrect permissions cannot be repaired. You must uninstall and reinstall the game. Because uninstalling removes saves, export them first and copy anything important to a PC:

It's Amazon Prime Day, and it's hot. Combine that with a lack of air conditioning, and it's easy to feel sweaty and miserable. Still, one thing always cheers me up: Lego. Particularly Prime Day Lego deals, where the prices fall to seriously tempting levels.

Not only do I love building Lego, but my friends and family do, too. Which means now's the perfect time to shop for birthday gifts, or holiday presents. Or, y'know, for yourself—just to bring a bit of brightness to your day.

• We're curating all the best Prime Day PC gaming deals here

I'm particularly fond of this Lego Star Wars Millenium Falcon kit for $68 at Amazon, as my model sits pride of place on the shelves above me as I type. And I'm already getting my wallet ready for this Imperial Star Destroyer for $112, which will soon join it. Or perhaps I'll save some cash and pick up a neon green Dodge Charger SRT Hellcat kit for $22 instead. Or will I go for the big red Ferrari FXX K for a mere $52?

Decisions, decisions. Still, Lego rocks. Bring a little joy to your life in these testing times, that's what I say. We're all big kids really, after all.

Amazon Prime Day Lego deals

I wish I'd set up a NAS sooner. I only recently took the plunge on a system and it took a couple weeks to understand what a NAS really is. It's not really just accessible network attached storage (NAS) across a home connection: it's a personal server.

It starts with an enclosure, though I think that term slightly undersells the hardware. I'm using one from Ugreen, the NAS DXP4800 Pro, which is currently on sale over at Amazon for $640. That's 20% off.

A NAS enclosure is not just a handful of hard drive bays glued together. It's a proper little PC. The DXP4800 Pro is a 4-bay enclosure and uses low-power components not often found in gaming hardware, including an Intel Core i3 1315U and SODIMM memory. It has 8 GB of DDR5, which can be upgraded via a panel on the underside of the unit, though you'll have to pay through the teeth for more right now.

• We're curating all the best Prime Day PC gaming deals here

You will likely have to pay over the odds for a hard drive at the moment, too. While not ruled by the same companies making memory chips, HDDs are still in high demand for datacenters. That means prices have gone up and availability has gone down in recent months. Most of all, for drives capable of running 24/7 in a NAS.

You're looking at around $300 for an 8 TB Seagate IronWolf. Or $390 for 10 TB. Smaller drives aren't that much cheaper as to make it worthwhile and bigger drives are astronomical. Personally, I'd rather not take the risk on a refurbished model, so I'm afraid this is just a cost you have to swallow. You need a proper NAS drive, either way, as a cheaper SMR drive just won't cut it for long.

A NAS is pretty spectacular once it's set up. I run tons of things on mine: from photo storage and video streaming to my very own self-hosted RSS reader. It's let me kill most of my monthly subscriptions, as I no longer need to rely on Google for storage space, and if kicking Google out of your life isn't reason enough to do something, I don't know what is.

It's just freeing to take control of your photos, videos and documents on your own personal cloud, located in your own house. I'd take that over some datacentre in some other part of the world anyday.

If that sounds like the sorta project you're into, the Ugreen NAS DXP4800 Pro is down to a low price right now. It's not the lowest we've seen it—that happened at the end of March, when it was $624—but it's not far off. If you prefer something cheaper, the Plus model is more or less the same bar a weaker Intel Pentium Gold CPU for $584.

👉Check out all of Amazon's NAS deals👈

Alas, as I sat baking in this insufferable Bri'ish heatwave, with caffeine-induced mirages and rippling hallucinations rife around me, I'd all but given up on finding any decent chassis deals—the kind of deal that drives us PC building enthusiasts into a lucid frenzy of clamor every Prime Day and beyond. Just as I'd lost all hope, that's when I saw it…

Slithering through the deal page mists, a sprite effervescently made its way into my periphery. 'The Hyte Y70 for $170,' it whispered, 'Fish tank design, vertical GPU, Amazon, any color you'd like, and $50 off to boot.'

• We're curating all the best Prime Day PC gaming deals here

Oh, what a blessing! Nothing sings to me more than a case that defies expectations, and makes a name for itself by doing something uniquely different, something bold, something not wholly standard. Hyte's Y70 line is exactly that.

A relative newcomer in the world of big metal boxes we like to put our expensive NAND into, it's a brand that's quite rapidly become a household icon in the world of PC gaming enthusiasts. With the Y70's three-glass-panel design, extensive cooling support, dual-compartment build out, and quirky vertical GPU support, it's not hard to understand its popularity.

I've built inside it myself. In fact, more than that, it acted as my personal test-bench and work machine for well over a year before I bid farewell to its bright red form in favor of something new. And I must say, outside of possibly Havn and the ridiculously over-engineered HS 420, there are few chassis out there that I've tested that have filled me with quite as much joy.

It's the small details that matter. The generous amount of cable management routes, the floating storage sleds in the rear, and the masses of cooling support the Y70 offers is genuinely impressive. It's not perfect, mind you—For instance, you're limited to a vertical GPU only, and the riser is capped as a PCIe 4.0 connector, and alright, yes, you can technically mount three bottom fans in the Y70, but I found it particularly bothersome to secure them in place. For what its worth though, these are minor inconveniences compared to this PC case's boons.

I actually prefer the standard Y70 over the Touch Infinite. The original design (the Y60, which our Dave reviewed) had thicker bezels top and bottom. The Y70 Touch Infinite shook that up with a slimmer design to better fit its integrated angled screen. Fortunately, a few months on we were graced with the display-less version at a far more affordable price. That's just as well as that 2.5K touch display is overkill, complete with a pixel density that would put most of our best Prime Day monitor deals to shame (it also constantly steals your mouse cursor when you're not looking).

No, this screen-less version is the best of the bunch. Not just because it's affordable, but because it makes sense. Oh, and well, you can get it in so many colors (my personal favorite is that vigorous matcha green above). If you're looking for a big ol' beastie to house all your hardware, and you aren't already considering one of our best PC cases, the Y70 is a seriously good shout at this price. Now, forgive me, for I must return to the fields of PC-lysium in search of yet better deals.

👉Take a look at Amazon's entire PC case line-up this Prime Day👈

This week during Amazon's Prime Day sales, I've spotted plenty of cracking deals on plain black hardware. Just for a start, the Razer gaming mouse I use everyday is currently enjoying a tasty discount, and a similarly no-frills squeaker from Turtle Beach is going for even less. You can also scoop a comfortable set of Asus ROG cans at a cozy price point, and get the best high-end PC controller for less…even so, I'm about to McFlippin' lose it.

I am so bored of plain black hardware that looks like all of my other plain black hardware. As for white hardware, let's just say I've ruled out picking up anything that would so easily betray how dusty my home office gets. My point is, I'm on the hunt for a deal on something that looks decidedly different—and I think I may have found it now that the glass version of the Hyte X50 PC case is only $100.

• We're curating all the best Prime Day PC gaming deals here

The rounded, bubbly silhouette of this ATX mid-tower is a resuscitating breath of fresh air to a brain slowly turning to mush while gazing at otherwise samey looking hardware. Better yet, this deal applies across the colour wheel, meaning you can pick up a brand new PC case in either red, purple, pink, or green (Before you ask, yes, this deal also applies to the white and black colourways too).

Now, the X50's rounded corners aren't its only quirky design choice, as this case will require you to mount your PSU up top. I hope you've got power cables both long enough to reach and that would avoid being anchored at a weird angle. Our Jacob spent some quality time building within the confines of the pink version, and had some thoughts to share in his Hyte X50 PC case review on this example of its old school flair.

"I can see why Hyte has chosen the top-mounted PSU here, as the case would have to be made wider to make room for one in the rear chamber or risk cutting off height to the CPU cooler, of which mine only just fits already. Though I'm not a huge fan of the end result," he writes.

"It feels pretty retro, which isn't out of character for the case, but it also blocks a good part of the windowed side panel and feels a little out of place above the motherboard. Maybe if the lower edge was more rounded to give a floating appearance I'd be more into it?"

Add to this weirdness the fact the X50 doesn't feature dedicated cable management channels within its chassis, and parts of this build sound like they were a little annoying. Thankfully, Hyte includes plenty of velcro straps to batten down the hatches, and the case itself balances things out by offering pretty broad compatibility for cooling and components. That's just as well as Hyte have decided not to include any fans with this case, much less cutesy colour co-ordinated blowers.

That missed trick and the X50's other quirks aside, I have to hand it to Hyte for continuing to offer such head-turning cases (I'd also be remiss if I didn't at least mention the one of a kind skyscraper PC the company commissioned for Computex 2026). I must admit, a top-mounted PSU build does give me The Fear, but if it means I'm left looking at something other than a boring black box by the end of it, I'm willing to brave it.

👉Take a look at Amazon's entire PC case line-up this Prime Day👈

Gaming laptops used to be massive. I don't mean in terms of popularity (although they still are), but more in terms of physical chassis size. That was a real problem when you wanted to put one in your backpack to take to work, or on your next flight.

However, there are now plenty of slim and light, game-ready machines to choose from, most of which won't look out of place in your next meeting. Take these little Asus ROG Zephyrus beauties, for example.

• We're curating all the best Prime Day PC gaming deals here

I've found an RTX 5060-equipped Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 for $1,450 at Best Buy. That's the perfect size for travel, and while the fans are a little noisy, I don't think that's too much to bear when the price is this reasonable.

Or, you could pick up the Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 with an RTX 5070 mobile crammed inside for $1,575. It's more backpack-friendly than shoulder-bag ready, but it's a very tempting, very premium gaming laptop for mid-range money.

So, why don't either of these machines top our best gaming laptop guide? Well, that's because the Razer Blade 14 and Razer Blade 16 are slightly better overall in their respective classes, so they take the crown. However, both are very expensive at the moment, while these second-place contenders are down to much, much more affordable prices for the Prime Day sales.

Quick links

• Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 | 14-inch | RTX 5060 | $1,450 at Best Buy (save $850)
• Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 | 16-inch | RTX 5070 | $1,575 at Best Buy (save $575)

Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 | RTX 5060

If an ultra-portable 14-inch gaming laptop is your goal, you'd usually have to pay through the nose for it. However, this ROG Zephyrus G14 is priced very attractively at the moment, coming in at $1,450.

As our Dave found in his review of the RTX 5070 Ti version, it's got a chassis design that's nothing short of delightful. The 120 Hz OLED display is a real highlight, too, which means it should make games, movies, and everything else you use your laptop for look downright lush.

The saw-toothed fan profile, though, can be a touch irritating. And the 90 W RTX 5060 will need plenty of DLSS help to make the most of its 1800p display. But otherwise, this is a 14-inch machine with very few peers—all for a very reasonable price.

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 | RTX 5070

If you want a larger screen size and chonkier hardware than the 14-inch tiddler above, how about this RTX 5070-toting G16 for $1,575? It's got a full-fat 240 Hz OLED display, all in a screen size that makes the most of its fairly grunty graphics hardware.

Yes, a 105 W RTX 5070 in a slim, milled-aluminium chassis will still need a healthy dose of upscaling thanks to its 1800p panel. And the CPU performance is a little off the boil. But honestly, it's the combo of potent graphics hardware and a backpack-friendly design that really sells me on this particular machine for this sort of money.

The Razer Blade 16 is slimmer still, and has an even better display—with quieter fans, to boot. But have you seen the price of those recently? Nah, I'd absolutely save the cash and pick up one of these instead.

👉Shop all the Best Buy gaming laptop deals here👈