In my past life as a console gamer, I was wary of any controller not bundled in with my first-party hardware. These days though, there are lots of excellent PC gamepad options—particularly in the budget category—but how cheap is too cheap?

Our current pick for the best PC controller that won't hurt your wallet is the GameSir Nova Lite. This costs comfortably under $30 on a good day, but how low can you go in the budget realm? Well, how about a pad you can make yourself in about six hours for €10 (or about $11.22)? The catch is…uh, well, just look at it.

Dubbed the Undercooked V0.4, this thing doesn't have a D-pad or even a full set of face buttons. Instead, this project limits itself to a single analogue stick, 'X' and 'A' inputs, a menu button, and a 'B' button that's been relegated to the pad's right shoulder.

According to the creator, Lazy_Duck, "the idea was to make it simple, affordable and that you could get all components even in the smallest electronics shop quick and cheap." As such, this simplified pad doesn't even feature a full PCB.

Instead, you'll need a protoboard with an RP2040-Zero microcontroller—that is, if you fancy DIY-ing something that looks a bit like the tech you would have seen coming out of East Germany after the wall came down. With only four buttons and a stick, it definitely gets points for novelty at the very least.

The body may also earn itself a few more points for durability. Made from 150 g of 3D printed filament, the shell is then stuck together with heat-set threaded inserts. Basically, this gamepad should be able to take a tumble, or indeed being flung across the room.

All of those 3D printed ridges don't look like they'll be especially comfortable in the hands over extended periods, so you may want to sand the outer parts of the shell before putting it all together. Mind you, sanding may not do much for comfort given the back side of this controller is completely flat.

My fingers are aching just looking at it. Still, if you're looking for a cheap and cheerful electronics project, you can't go too wrong with this, even if you don't end up actually using it.

The GameSir Nova Lite 2 is our new best budget controller for PC. It's extremely well equipped considering the small asking price. Depart with just $30/£30 of your hard-earned cash, and you'll receive a wireless controller with Hall effect sticks, mechanical D-pad, trigger stops, and programmable rear buttons.

There's enough here that even GameSir's own exceedingly popular G7 Pro is at risk of cannibalisation. The Nova Lite 2 doesn't look that out of shape by comparison, with only quality of life and more advanced features between them. Such as a handful of micro switches and a bigger battery. The G7 Pro is a better all-round controller, but for less than half the cash, the Nova Lite 2 is tough to ignore.

There are some drawbacks with a controller at this price. The plastic doesn't feel great and it's not overly grippy. The software could be smarter and the shoulder buttons wider, too. But they all seem savvy sacrifices for the savings that the Nova Lite 2 delivers.

GameSir Nova Lite 2 - Features

The Nova Lite 2 is less than half the price of the G7 Pro, but it's not at a loss for many of the same or similar features. This budget gamepad really packs a lot in.

First off, it offers wireless connectivity at a low cost. It supports 2.4 GHz for PC, via a USB Type-A dongle, and Bluetooth for Android, iOS and Switch. Using the 2.4 GHz dongle, I measured a range exceeding 20 metres, in line of sight, so I wouldn't worry about range at any sensible distances (though Bluetooth and a wall or two will notably trim that down).

Then there are the Hall effect sticks. These sorts of sticks are becoming pretty ubiquitous among gamepads these days—that or TMR, as found in the G7 Pro 8K—but they lower the chance of pesky stick drift making an appearance later in life. This pair lack the premium feel of more expensive controllers but they're otherwise pretty great.

The triggers are also Hall effect, though most are, and offer two modes: full range of movement or stubby li'l clicks. You might get some use out of the shortened trigger stops in fighting games—a more tactile controller may be better suited—though they do come in handy when using the Nova Lite 2 with a Switch 2. I've been using the Lite 2 on Switch and it's very well suited for a mean Mario Kart machine like myself.

The mechanical D-pad is a standout feature. It has a great, lightweight click in each direction. It doesn't take much to actuate but you can be quite deliberate with it. For more casual users, it's great for clicking through menu screens, though it could just as reliably be mashed repeatedly in a fighting game.

The face buttons are standard fare. They're just membrane and aren't anything special. The two rear buttons are also not particularly tactile, being hewn from the same plastic as the housing on the controller. That, too, is just okay. I don't expect much more from a controller at this price tag, but it doesn't feel like it's going to break apart between your hands, either. There's no major flex to any of the plastic housing and only a little creakiness when pressed firmly.

Now, for one thing I don't actually like about this controller, and that's the plastic travel case that comes with it. I get the idea, and hey, if you travel with your controller often, it saves the thumbsticks, but for many people, myself included, it feels a bit like plastic waste I could've done without.

GameSir Nova Lite 2 - Value

The Nova Lite 2 is superb value for money at $30/£30. It lacks some more advanced features, such as a gyro, but makes more than up for it with practical, real-world benefits, such as a mechanical D-pad and Hall effect thumbsticks.

It's a step up over the existing Nova Lite. That's on its way out as our pick as the best budget controller, to be replaced by the Nova Lite 2. That controller is still an option for a slightly reduced fee of $23/£18, but the Nova Lite 2's rear buttons, trigger stops, and mechanical D-pad wholly justify the slight increase in cost for me.

Considering the cost of some wired controllers these days, the wireless Nova Lite 2 feels like a bit of a steal.

GameSir Nova Lite 2 - Ergonomics

The Nova Lite 2 is very, very normal. It's slightly less sculpted than a modern Xbox pad, but has a similar shape. The rear plastic is ever so slightly textured, adding the tiniest amount more grip. Most buttons are easy to reach without moving my hands much, including the extra rear buttons. The only real oddity is how small the bumpers are: they don't extend around the corners of the controller like most pads these days.

It comes in black or white. Both have orange highlights around the thumbsticks, orange switches on the rear triggers, and orange legends on the face buttons. Big Stadia Controller vibes—remember Stadia?

I'm really scraping the bottom of the barrel for things to describe here. This thing is plain, but not offensively so.

GameSir Nova Lite 2 - Software

GameSir Connect is the best way to control the Nova Lite 2 on PC. It's a bit basic as far as modern software goes, though the core functionality one might expect is all in there.

You can control the deadzone for each of the thumbsticks and triggers, vibration intensity, rear button assignments, and lighting within the app. There's just one bonus feature: hair trigger mode. This is loosely equivalent to rapid trigger on some modern gaming keyboards, in that the trigger will click and release based on the relative movement of the trigger, not its absolute position. As GameSir says in the app, it's "useful for scenarios that need fast triggering."

The GameSir Connect app also offers software updates for the controller. Best use it at least once.

There's also a mobile application, simply called GameSir, but it has just two out of five stars on the App Store and a weaker UI than the desktop app. I'd not bother unless you're strictly mobile/Switch only.

Finally, there are ways to configure the controller without any software whatsoever. I appreciate this option for the software-averse among us—even if the actual combos are tough to remember.

So, selecting between PC (X + GameSir) and Bluetooth (B + GameSir) is easy enough, but remapping the back buttons (M + L4/L5, followed by the key to remap), turning on Turbo mode (M + any button), and turning on hair trigger mode (M + LT/RT) might require the manual for a reminder.

GameSir Nova Lite 2 - Gallery

GameSir Nova Lite 2 - Battery life

GameSir doesn't note a specific battery life for the Nova Lite 2. It simply offers a battery capacity, which sits at 600 mAh. That's the same as the Nova Lite, which had a stated 10-hour battery life, so we can more or less assume a similar expected result for the Nova Lite 2.

I've measured how long it takes for the controller to go from 100% to 0% over the course of a couple of gaming sessions. It took roughly eight and a half hours. I suspect with the lighting disabled and a different style of play, it'd be possible to crack the expected 10-hour mark, but either way, it lasts long enough to not cause an issue.

Good news: I know of the existence of two entire pallets worth of RTX 5090 graphics cards—a rare thing in this day and age, as stock appears to have dwindled to virtually zero. Bad news, they've 'gone missing' from a Brazilian airport.

Brazilian electronics distributor Oderço has published an Instagram post drawing attention to the missing Zotac GPUs, which supposedly arrived at Guarulhos International Airport in São Paulo, but then promptly vanished.

"In our more than 38-year history, we have never encountered a situation like this—and we will not remain silent," says CEO Oderço Matos (via Tom's Hardware, machine translation). "Two pallets of Zotac RTX 5090 graphics cards have gone missing at Guarulhos International Airport. The merchandise is worth approximately R$2.5 million (at cost), and to date, we have received no answers."

"We are seeking clarification and want to understand what happened," Matos continues. "How can a shipment of such value disappear from within an international airport without any explanation being provided to us?"

The company has not provided the details of the shipment's arrival date or tracking numbers, but the Oderço Group CEO seems more than a little miffed about the lack of official response towards the missing wares. "We are bringing this matter to the public because we need answers," says Matos. "We expect those responsible for the case to come forward, and we hope that the shipment is located."

R$2,500,000 equates to roughly $495,000, which represents the acquisition cost for the company. I have no idea how many graphics cards that would equate to once they were broken down into individual units, but two pallets worth? Lots, I think I can say that for certain.

I'd also hazard a guess that "gone missing" may be a euphemism for "probably stolen," as I think the wayward GPUs are unlikely to turn up down the back of an airport lounge sofa. I suppose they could always have become mixed up with other freight and shipped off to goodness-knows-where, but one way or the other, the company claims they haven't made it to their final destination.

Has anyone checked in on the whereabouts of Michael De Santa, Franklin Clinton, or Trevor Phillips recently? It seems like their sort of caper. Regardless, the GPUs now appear to be at large—and given retail prices for brand new RTX 5090s are truly jaw-dropping right now, anyone who ends up with a couple of pallets' worth may soon be rolling in cash.

As a console gaming interloper, I've been watching the PlayStation 5 emulation scene from afar with some interest. The latest development to catch my eye is that emulation of the Demon's Souls Remake, which has been exclusive to Sony's console since its 2020 launch, can now run at up to 120 fps on PC.

Leveraging the very much unofficial KytyPS5 translation layer, YouTuber Geralt Benchmarks shared footage of the remake running on their RTX 5070 and AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D rig. The game reaches for more than 100 fps at 1440p resolution thanks to 2x DLSS frame generation, and you can watch it achieve a mostly buttery 120 fps at 1080p at the eight minute mark here.

Otherwise on Sony's hardware, the game is locked to 60 fps and 1440p resolution while in performance mode. Doubling the frames via emulation is impressive to say the least, especially for what is still a current-gen console.

For the sake of comparison, Geralt Benchmarks also shows the game running on their RTX 5070 rig with those PS5 settings left in place, turning in a performance that occasionally crests over the 70 fps mark. This emulated version isn't without its quirks, though.

Even in Geralt Benchmarks' footage, there's noticeable hitching for one thing, though I personally wouldn't say it's to a deal breaking degree. Though the PS5 only offers a maximum of 60 frames per second, it is incredibly consistent (Digital Foundry's Tech Review is still worth the watch).

Sony's hardware remains the only official way to play Bluepoint Games' remake—though now the PS5 costs significantly more than it did at launch, I can't say I'm surprised the emulation scene has kicked into overdrive.

The PS3 emulation scene has also been in the news recently, with the popular RPCS3 having had to clamp down on AI submissions (and don't get me started on AI's contentious role within the game decompilation scene either). As for PS4 exclusives finding their way off of Sony's hardware, what's impressed me most recently is technically not emulation, but instead a native PC port of P.T. Say it with me now: Umbasa!

Outlast has long since established itself as a horror gaming staple with an impressive track record of two mainline games, a DLC, and an online multiplayer game that still scares the bejesus out of me. So it's hard to believe that there was a time when developer Red Barrels was unsure whether or not it'd even be able to get it out of the door.

After trying and failing to convince Ubisoft to let him make a horror game and just generally feeling like it was time to move on, Philippe Morin, co-founder of Red Barrels decided to leave and form a small 10-person team with developers from other big-budget studios. Their first pitch: a horror game.

“We thought at first that we’d come up with the pitch within three or four months and shop it around to a few publishers," Morin says in an interview with GameSpot. "And we’d find out pretty quickly if it works or not." Unfortunately, it turned out to be the latter, at least at first.

Morin explains how many of the publishers they approached would “rather invest $50,000 in 10 mobile games than $500,000 in [Outlast].” This was likely equal parts because of how obsessed everyone was with mobile games back then and thanks to how niche the horror genre was perceived as. 13 years later the horror genre is still perceived as one of the smaller areas of interest in gaming, despite all of the amazing games released and the revival of two staples, Silent Hill and Resident Evil.

“We were experienced game developers,” Morin says. “But we didn’t know much about that side–publishing and marketing and sales and all that. So we had to learn on the fly.”

Red Barrel finally had to turn to a publicly funded investment program, the Canada Media Fund (CMF) to finance Outlast, with a whopping $1 million dollar investment. But even that wasn't enough. The developers had to take money out of savings, credit cards, and leverage home mortgages to get the project over the line; a huge financial risk. “Everything was pretty much on the line,” Morin recalls. “Of course, it meant working very long, long hours. We were in a sprint to release the game before running out of money.”

Luckily this story ended well, very well actually. After just five months Red Barrels managed to hit the goal of 400,000 copies sold and while not all of them were at full price after sales it was still enough for the team to get some "pretty significant bonuses."

Outlast would go on to sell 15 million copies as of 2018 and spawn three other games, the final being the recent multiplayer horror game The Outlast Trials which achieved an all-time concurrent player count peak just 11-days ago of 147,955. Pretty solid for a multiplayer survival horror game.

Rumours have been circulating as of late that Nvidia has halted production of its flagship RTX 5090 graphics card, in favour of moving the GB202 silicon towards RTX Pro data center GPUs instead. However, Jeff Fisher, the senior vice president of Nvidia's GeForce business unit, has denied its demise at an event in Taipei.

"The supply chain (capacity) is indeed somewhat constrained, but Nvidia is doing everything it can to get the product on the market," says Fisher (via 4Gamers). "Although there are other variants of the RTX 5090 (chip), production has not been discontinued, and Nvidia will continue to ship, which is very important."

However, the card has disappeared from Nvidia's official US marketplace, and has reached near-unobtanium levels elsewhere. We've stopped tracking the card on our best GPU deals page in recent months, as the only listings we can find have ludicrous prices from third-party sellers.

It appears we have another Schrödinger's graphics card situation to contend with. On the one hand, a (very) senior Nvidia official reportedly says the card is still a-go. Taiwanese outlet CNA quotes Fisher as saying "it's not true" in regards to the ceased production rumours, although this is via machine translation.

On the other hand, while GB202 silicon for consumer RTX 5090 cards may still be under production in some form or fashion, the finished GPUs themselves seem to have gone AWOL. If even Nvidia itself isn't listing them, it's difficult to imagine where meaningful stock might exist elsewhere—although two pallets have gone missing from a Brazilian airport, so there are at least some of the beasties out there somewhere.

Redditors have even taken to pointing out the odd single example sitting on a retail shelf, which has become worthy of note in its own right. The fact that some are now highlighting individual cards, like bird watchers with binoculars around their necks speculating on the existence of a rare warbler, really does make it seem like the Nvidia card is no more. Or, at the very least, so supply constrained as to be functionally unobtainable.

Rumours surrounding another Schrödinger's GPU, the lesser-spotted RTX 5080 24 GB/Super, continue to pop up now and then. But with the RTX 60-series still believed to be a while away yet, and the memory supply crisis still biting, the GPU market really is looking rather barren in the last half of 2026, RTX 5090 or otherwise.

We are drowning in shit. Steam Next Fest, which kicks off tomorrow, currently has 8,011 matches on its press preview landing page. That's roughly double the amount of demos featured in Steam's June 2026 Next Fest. In June 2022, Next Fest boasted just over a thousand demos.

The vast majority of these demos will be meritless slop. And I daresay many of them—though I have no way to confirm—didn't exist as concepts before October.

If you use social media, especially X, you've probably noticed an explosion of terrible clones and vibe coded mash-ups this month. You can largely thank Anthropic's new 5.5 update to its Claude Opus model for that, which offers massive efficiency gains for vibe coders. It's also been widely used to decompile commercial games and, maybe most famously, jailbreak the PS5.

It definitely feels like we've crossed a threshold this month. On October 10, the creator of Escape the Walls, an incremental punching game which itself uses AI to "increase the speed of creating the game", posted in-progress footage from the game on X.

Prophetically, a user replied: "You have exactly 7 hours before someone makes this on Roblox and gets 20x your revenue".

Right now, on October 19, there are at least seven Roblox clones of Escape the Walls. A competing studio had the audacity to tweet their own clone to the original game's creator. "Our Steam page is live too!" they posted. "Nothing wrong with friendly competition!"

Leaving aside the fact that Escape the Walls is itself pretty crappy looking, the situation highlights the perils of marketing independent games in an age where a clone can be turned around in hours. To wit: as Rick Lane has already reported, the creators of Drunken Goddess Reflux, a "Russian roulette drinking survival" game, has announced it will no longer publish its demo on Steam as planned.

"We are concerned that, based on the content of the demo, works imitating or replicating this game's presentation and gameplay could be quickly produced using AI or other tools and released ahead of the game's launch," a spokesperson for studio Alliance Arts Inc. wrote. The studio will instead hold closed environment play sessions for people who read and agree to a series of "participation requirements".

Elsewhere NoGlyph, the creator of Needle In A Haystack, which is itself a rapid clone of Needle In A Haystack Simulator (see: haystack slop), has accused yet another studio of copying their code in their own clone. "Yesterday, on October 16 a game called A Game About Needle In A Haystack by Little Field Studios came out on Steam," NoGlyph wrote. "It contains code copied from our game. To be clear, this is about our actual code, not a similar idea or similar mechanics."

NoGlyph moves on to offer further proof that the offending studio pulled code directly from their game. "The haystack in our game, meaning how it's drawn, how you dig into it and how gold, lapis and diamond hay work, is something that took a long time to get working properly. When we looked through their game's files, we found 13 of our classes inside it with the exact same names. More than half of the functions in that part match ours exactly. Some of our own error messages are still in there word for word, including one that points to a shader from our project that doesn't exist in their game."

NoGlyph has filed a copyright notice with Valve.

Damn, it sure would be a shame if independent studios stopped releasing demos, or were prevented from marketing their games, because talentless bottom feeders were quickly flipping their ideas into monetizable slop!

Many have made the argument that AI is "good" because it democratises specialised skills and art forms like music, writing, coding, art, and videogame development (which deploys all of the aforementioned). But where videogames are concerned it hasn't democratised anything: it has just emboldened hacks, philistines and scam merchants. Vibe coding a 20 minute blockbuster-looking videogame that resembles the Marvel / Star Wars / Fortnite universes, or vibe coding a Roblox clone of a viral indie, doesn't make you a videogame developer: if anything, it demonstrates why you aren't.

Forgive me, but I don't think someone who hasn't committed time and thought to mastering those pursuits has much hope in producing something valuable with the assistance of AI. You may be able to make something that looks like something else, but you probably don't have ideas. Spending years and years thinking about your craft, being a practitioner, is what generates ideas. Without ideas, you are just playing with the most expensive toy ever built.

Anyone who has made that moronic "democratising" claim has only to look at Roblox and the great piles of worthless slop on Steam to see the actual reality. Steam's discoverability algorithm will probably keep the vast majority of the 8,000+ Next Fest demos out of the public eye, but for those that do go viral, or find an enthusiastic audience, there are hordes of leeches ready to rob you blind, utilising the same technology that's turning PC gaming into a rich person's hobby.

Top Steam games by revenue (October 6 - 13)

You know it's a very boring week on Steam when Dota 2 takes first spot in the revenue chart. So nothing very interesting released, then?

Well, Star Wars: Galactic Racer did, right on October 6, and came in at number four. Given how positive reviews were, and that it's Star Wars, I did kinda expect it to come in at number one.

Gears of War managed to latch onto a top ten position after ranking sixth last week during its first week on sale (it was available as a pre-order before that). Risk of Rain 2 got an actually-decent update and expansion, hence its appearance, and Steam Deck reanimates at number six: there must have been a stock replenishment.

As for Aion 2, people continue to not really like it, based on Steam user reviews, but it's still making bank for NC anyway.

Last week's Steam deep cuts

Volume.art is a nice, free, cool thing on the internet, and I just think that's something worth celebrating these days. The microgame collection sees you manipulating volume sliders through various abstracted, surprising, and very funny ways.

It starts strong with "A man named Bow" by Alice Bottino, which kinda reminds me of the Smash Bros Home Run Contest minigame, at least as far as you're winding up to send something from the left side of the screen to the right. You drag back on the mouse to aim a bow and arrow, attempting to land it a set distance (and corresponding volume level) away.

Some of my favorite entries came from Lunacid developer Akuma Kira, like "What's This About," a riff on the criminally-maligned Elder Scrolls Oblivion persuasion pie minigame. You've got to reach a set likability level with a Gamebryo-perfect lumpy potato man, while also accounting for a game-accurate slow decay in persuasiveness as you rapidly cycle between cruelty, honesty, humor, and sucking up.

If I hadn't known about the Oblivion gag going in, it probably would have been my favorite entry⁠—"What's This About" features fairly prominently in volume.art's promo on social media. Surprise and delight is a big part of this thing, and from here there be, uh, spoilers? I guess?

"Ctrl+Alt+Date" by Iodine really did something for me: It's a loving little parody of dating games and romance sidequests, presenting you with suitably deep and emotionally complex dialogue choices like "Uhhhh" vs. "You're worth so much more than that," all to woo your volume rocker boo and get the music pumping. It's a great gag.

Returning to Kira, "In the Zone" was another favorite of mine. It drops you in a simple 3D environment clearly evoking the STALKER series, and tasks you with following a Geiger counter to the site of highest radiation (and thus, volume) in the tiny, open-ended level.

There are 29 games in total, and it took me a little under an hour to get through them all. Volume.art is brisk and goes down very smooth⁠—I found that this microgame format is a great fit for a themed game jam. For me, it evoked nostalgic memories of getting carsick playing WarioWare in the back of my parents' minivan, but I've seen some commenters compare it to old Flash games. Either way, volume.art is well worth checking out.

At a glance

• The rough prototype looks to have been binned early in development, and it's largely avoided discussion before Doneda's work.
• Some portions appear to have been part of an interconnected area, others are likely different versions of the same concept.
• It may have been related to what became the Undead Crypt in the final game.
• Doneda uses Elden Ring Nightreign to load in and explore what remains of the levels.
• The files contain a coliseum zone, mines, a strange underground tower (potentially a sequence of arenas, like Nightreign's DLC?), and a crypt portion.

Doneda, the dataminer who showed off the unused levels, has been proving a genuine authority on Dark Souls 2 in particular. Previously, they made a Nightreign-compatible version of Dark Souls 2's Eleum Loyce. Doneda has also shown off a tantalizingly ambitious early version of Dark Souls 2's The Gutter.

In hindsight, the entire pre-Sekiro Souls series (perhaps sans-Bloodborne) seems defined by difficult, rushed development cycles. Hidetaka Miyazaki took over Demon's Souls partway through as development foundered, and the final game was missing an entire archstone world. Dark Souls has its rougher, less beloved back half, particularly Lost Izalith. Dark Souls 3, though far more consistent than the prior games, had a striking world state system completely struck from it at some point.

Even among that field, Dark Souls 2 had it rough: Wunderkind Miyazaki was completely focused on Bloodborne, DS2 attempted a divisive new combat feel/hit detection system unlike anything FromSoft made before or since, while early trailers and cut content point to significant story rewrites. That's before you get to the backlash over a significantly downgraded lighting system in the final game versus its early trailers⁠—I never minded that much, but people were big mad about it back in 2014.

All of which is to say: It's not surprising to see so much cut and prototype stuff lingering in the game's files. The sheer majestic scale of the coliseum makes me wistful for the version(s) of Dark Souls 2 we never got, but it increasingly looks like a small miracle that the game came together as well as it did. I wonder where this complex was planned to fit in the game, but the iteration of DS2's story it corresponds to may be all but unrecognizable to me anyway. We'll likely never get a full accounting of this oddity in the game's files.

Politico recently reported on a confidential draft of a proposed AI safety bill from Anthropic, the company behind Claude LLMs (via Tom's Hardware). The bill, which has been pitched to US lawmakers, would let the government crack down on a given AI model "only if it poses a foreseeable, imminent risk of more than $1 billion in damages, or of killing or seriously injuring more than 50 people. The risk must stem from the creation or release of a biological weapon, the model evading its developer’s controls or a cyberattack."

That article pointed out similarities between these proposals and those used in California's AI legislation, and shares a quote from a spokesperson for the company. "This bill represents the proposals outlined in Anthropic’s Advanced AI Framework, which we have been advocating for with federal and state lawmakers since June," they said, calling "sensible policies we believe Congress should act on."

Notably, it has been posited that AI magnates leverage warnings of theoretical, wide-reaching catastrophe to manufacture consent for their self-regulation and expansion while doing little to address the harm AI is already doing (both broadly within industries like the one this website revolves around and directly with regards to human psychology).

Just earlier this year, Anthropic's safety lead quit with a note that "the world is in peril"—and just last week, OpenAI was accused by eight US states' attorney generals of ignoring its own safety warnings for the sake of profit. Regulations like what Anthropic has proposed here arguably give tech companies the appearance of capitulation while only restricting them on their own terms. For more on AI, check out our running tally on the dumbest things tech tycoons have said so far.

Gamedev may as well be conducted in a black box as far as many players are concerned, so it can be easy to think of a good game as one where development went smoothly and a bad game as one where things went terribly awry. But in the case of The Outlast Trials, making something sickeningly good took a lot of struggle.

As Red Barrels co-founder Philippe Morin told Gamespot in a recent interview, it took six years to turn the vague notion of a co-op Outlast game into something ready to launch via early access. It was "a fucking long time," as he recalled it, and the product of "a shit-ton of prototypes."

"[The Red Barrels team] went too far trying to make [The Outlast Trials] systemic, random, and trying to reach our ultimate goal of infinite replayability," he told Gamespot. "We needed to come back to something that maybe added less replayability, but definitely felt more like Outlast." The article notes that a seemingly shippable build was produced within four years, but playtests went poorly enough to send the team back to the drawing board.

I suppose concerns about replayability have been put to rest now that it's mutated into a sizable live service game with around 20,000 people playing as I write this, though the game's ongoing development isn't entirely free from strife—as the article points out, players are mixed on its use of AI-generated imagery, and Outlast 3 was seemingly put on the backburner after Trials proved a huge success.

I have not played Hades 2 since October 4 of 2025. That's not because I "fell out of love" with the game or whatever, I simply plugged 65 hours into it, beat the 'main story', had a jolly old time, and went on to play other things. But one thing about it has persisted: its soundtrack. God, I can't get Hades 2's soundtrack out of my head.

I'm going to outline some of my favorites, but before I do that, I do want to give flowers to the more ambient tunes on Darren Korb's masterwork, here. Edge of Erebus, Spider Silk, and particularly The Song of Sirens—perhaps the most faithful rendition of their mythological namesake before Korb, genius that he is, clubs you over the head with a rock band.

What really cements Hades 2's soundtrack in my mind, however, are its show-stoppers. These boss themes are the real events, so much so that Korb will often bring in a guest musician to set the track on fire.

Scylla and the Sirens' Discography

The entire collection of Scylla and the Sirens' songs are just excellent: Coral Crown, I Am Gonna Claw (Out Your Eyes then Drown You to Death), Rock and a Hard Place (feat. Charybdis), and Bewitching Eyes.

If just one of these tracks existed, I'd call it inspired: But having Scylla become your number one hater after a few defeats, writing a bespoke diss track and then following that up with Charybdis performing death metal screams is both a really funny joke and also a complete and utter earworm. Erin Yvette's got an excellent set of pipes, too, which really ties the whole thing together.

The Titan of Time/The End of Time

The Titan of Time is already a great boss theme on its own. Chronos' signature percussion being a ticking clock is an obvious choice, sure, but sometimes the obvious choices are the best ones, and it still makes clever use of time signatures to great effect (like some of my other favorite videogame music).

But The End of Time, which plays after unlocking the Dissolution of Time incantation to put him down for good? The drums on this thing, good lord. Guest star Louis Cole, who I'm just now finding out is also a bassist and a keyboardist, goes in on those drums like a dog ripping apart a piece of meat. Again, turning drums into the leading instrument for the Titan of Time is a no-brainer—but it's the execution that matters, and holy crap. You owe it to yourself to give this one a listen.

The Sightless Shepherd

And yet, even for minor bosses, Darren Korb busts out the big guns. Which is wild, because while The Sightless Shepherd is a boss fight for an important character in Greek mythology (Polyphemus is the cyclops that Odessyus blinded, pissed off, and revealed his true name to—a mistake, by all accounts, since his papa is Poseidon) he's also just the first boss in the surface area.

But Sam Gendel absolutely tears this theme up with his saxophone solo, a piece of music I literally used during one of our top 100 debates to try and get the PC Gamer team to vote for Hades 2. And while it didn't work, I still had everyone in the voice call's heads bobbing.

Olympus Aflame

Olympus Aflame plays during the Vow of Rivals boss fight where you need to take on both Heracles and Prometheus at the same time, and while it's perhaps the most bog-standard fantasy of all of these soundtracks, it's still earned a permanent spot on some of my TTRPG playlists for that reason. It's sort of the perfect encapsulation of Olympus, orchestral trumpets reaching a feverish, panicked crescendo as their mountain crumbles down around them.

As we've seen with some of these other tracks, Korb's composition can get a little showy, but Olympus Aflame feels to me the proof of mastery over the 'basics' that allows him to go buck wild with other entries on the game's soundtrack.

Hades 2 certainly isn't the first time Korb's cooked this hard—pretty much all of Supergiant Games' music has a special place in my heart. Bastion, Transistor. Heck, even though I've not played a single moment of it, a lot of the music in Pyre has made its way into my regular rotations.

But it definitely feels like the epoch of his work, bar none. In an already-stacked discography, Hades 2 has enough hits to very nearly eclipse the rest of his work under its heft. While I'm done with the game itself, I'm nowhere near done with its soundtrack. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go rock out to Sightless Shepherd again.

I'm standing on top of a flying fortress hundreds of feet in the air, as around me, 15 or so players wage a losing battle against a swarm of flying robots armed with rockets and lasers. It's utter chaos. We fight further and further into the ship, unlocking platforms, defeating waves of enemies and giant turrets which pop out of the deck to gun down unsuspecting looters. But I think we're done.

Time is running short and we've once again stalled at this stage of the puzzle. All that's left now is to try and make it back to ground in one piece and live to attempt another day. This is the Frigate, one of Arc Raiders two new raid-style activities, and it's exactly what the game needed.

Rather than content you can complete the day the update comes out, Frozen Trail's Frigate and Fallen Emperor represent a deeper loot chase, tied into upgrading the new outpost and workbenches to fashion special weapons which fire explosive bullets or incendiary grenades.

More than that: they're properly fun. I've raided a lot in Destiny 2, completed its dungeons more times than I can count (including soloing some) and I'm quite impressed with the variety of these endgame challenges, how they demand cooperation from players, but also really tie into the features and loot chase that Frozen Trail added.

While the Arc Frigate is a pitched battle blasting endless waves of robots as you try to unlock its cargo hold with a bunch of other raiders, the Fallen Emperor is more of an individual challenge. This series of mostly randomised encounters sees you solving puzzles and painstakingly platforming your way through its labyrinth of hazards and Hydra turrets, which love to pick you off when you're dangling in some precarious position.

It's a race to perpetrate a bank heist in the corpse of a colossal robot, and if that doesn't get your juices flowing, I don't know what will. Part of the fun is Frozen Trail's new Grappling Hook item, an easy to craft traversal tool that lets you scale and swing in a much more enjoyable way than the game's existing Snap Hook—I always carry one now, just for ease of exploration.

The Fallen Emperor is also smart in terms of loot, designed like a kids' gameshow (did anyone here watch Jungle Run?). Players who want the guaranteed big score at the end are incentivised to rush there, lest another raider beat them, but since there are loot containers between each encounter and concealed in them, other players can filter in and still have a chance at getting rare items and rewards for encounters without making it to the end.

The same goes for the Arc Frigate—it's not just about who gets there first; these encounters are layered with loot, and often reward exploration as much as pushing for the end goal, especially as the new upgrades require a wide range of materials.

Though Frozen Trail has its bugs—my reward pass still isn't fixed—this is such a positive update for the game's direction. If the PvE-mode test is anything to go by, we'll soon be able to play Arc Raiders' endgame events like the Fallen Emperor, Frigate, Matriarch, or Harvester without fear of getting ratted and having our loot stolen while we're trying to fight big arc, work together, and puzzle stuff out.

I'm not a player who minds PvP or the way it elevates the tension and excitement of the extraction shooter genre, but I think there's a good case to be made for a PvE-only option when running PvE-centric endgame events, which often require cooperation. It's also uniquely frustrating getting ambushed after successfully completing one.

This happened to me after landing a huge loot haul on the Frigate and basically being the only raider to make it out alive—I was riding high, I wasn't cautious, and of course some punk with a Kettle was waiting at extraction. He even said "Hello" before he ratted me. It's a sucky way to end these cool events and it dissuades players from investing in their challenge, so hopefully any eventual PvE mode that does appear will include these.

Still, these new raid-style events have me so excited for the future of Arc Raiders. I can't help but fantasize about how fun and rewarding a Destiny 2 length raid in Arc Raiders would be, or something similar to Building 21 or Koschei Complex in DMZ—a dedicated mode with its own timer, challenges, and bosses. I can't wait to see what endgame content Embark cooks up next.

Joe Ziegler might be best known for his role guiding the design of big competitive shooters, but his formative gaming experiences were with point-and-click adventures like King's Quest. "There was something so clever about trying to use all this knowledge about random things like fairy tales to try to solve puzzles inside of the game," he says. "It was just that 'A-ha!' moment where videogames could be these really engaging ways for you to be clever and creative."

Ziegler started out at Pandemic Studios, where he worked as a mission designer on 2009's The Saboteur. But he is best known as game director on Riot's hugely popular arena shooter Valorant, and his more recent oversight of Bungie's extraction-shooter revival of Marathon, which he assumed leadership of in March 2024 following the dismissal of former director Christopher Barret.

Following Marathon's launch, Ziegler left Bungie and is currently working on a new, unrevealed project: "My goal ultimately when I'm thinking about 'What do I direct and what do I make?' is 'Where can I make the coolest thing with the coolest people?'" he explains. "That's part of the reason I went to Bungie in the first place. And now, as I'm looking at this next thing, I'm also in that headspace."

Ziegler took a break from his secret project to show me around the best loot spots of his Steam library. We talked JRPGs, ARPGs, and the forgotten Bungie game that led him to work on Marathon.

What game are you currently playing?

I'm playing a couple right now. I'm revisiting Elden Ring Nightreign again. I play it socially with some friends. We're doing a lot of the Deep of Night and purple boss stuff. It's a game that's near and dear to me.

It's funny because my initial reaction to it was like, "What is this game?" But over the course of time, it's combined my love of soulslikes—I really like a lot of soulslikes—with this multiplayer roguelike, where every run you're building a build and trying to conquer the challenge that's in front of you. The level of difficulty keeps it constantly a mastery challenge—which is something that definitely motivates me.

A lot of it is playing off of your mastery and understanding of stats that exist in Elden Ring. I played a lot of Elden Ring, so it was easier for me to onboard, and I can imagine for people who have not played a lot of Elden Ring, it's impossible to onboard into. But if you do, you begin theorycrafting a lot of things when you're on your run. You're like, "Oh, should I go for a bleed-based run this time around, am I using the right character with the right arcane stats to do that?" All of your knowledge and all of your capability … come together.

The other game I'm playing is Star Wars: Galactic Racer. Someone called it Race the Spire and I totally agree. It's basically a roguelike racer, and I don't know if it's just the change in pace of playing a racer again, but I think it's been really interesting to see that level of roguelike progression folded into a racer … where all the different components of thinking about your racer become more flexible and interesting from a buildcrafting standpoint.

What was the previous game you played, and is it still installed?

Oddly enough, I was revisiting Destiny 2. A couple of people I know were getting back into Destiny 2 a little bit, so it was fun to jump in with them and experience going through some stuff.

I have about 730 hours, so I'm not as hardcore as a lot of other people. But D2 is definitely comfort food …. I was originally playing a Warlock. I played a Warlock for quite a few years, and then I just recently went back to playing a Titan, and I was levelling up my Titan again. And I was playing mostly a prismatic spec.

Way back when I was 16, I played a lot of Myth 2 [with] a friend of mine from high school. And oddly enough, it came with a box that had a ticket to go to E3 at the time, which was really crazy. So the first E3 I went to was because Bungie shipped these tickets. I talked to Jason Jones about this, and he was like, "That was all Alex Seropian, and Alex Seropian's marketing mentality was that." So that's how I remember Bungie. Of course I played Halo, just like everybody else who lived in America.

It was the legacy of all those games, Halo to Destiny, that really drove me to work at Bungie … it was actually a couple of friends that I used to work with at Pandemic who were at Bungie who approached me, and one of them was Justin Truman, the former CEO … we started working on something. But then they needed help on the Marathon project, so I went over to help advise and then they asked me to come take over direction for it, and I did that.

It's always interesting jumping into a project when it's already been started, because part of it is getting everyone together and being like, "What are we trying to do here?" And sometimes some teams will find a unanimous voice, everybody knows what they're doing, and some other teams will have very disparate ideas of what they're doing …. I found this project was… it had some areas where there were definitely some ideas about where we were going, but there were a lot of disagreements across the place.

So part of where I was advising was trying to bring those all together and be like, "Hey, what is the cohesive place you want to go to? And how do we get there?" And then when we landed on that, I could help them drive that.

I'll say this about Bungie, which I really like, and it's still very true about Bungie: it lives in two worlds. One is this world where there's a lot of legacy to live up to, which is a lot of pressure. But there's also this other side of it, which is that it's a very egoless company. In a lot of cases, they are always looking for some way to improve, and the way they do that is, oftentimes, by bringing in people who are new to help them figure out what they are missing.

What is the oldest game (by release date) currently installed on your PC?

The Secret of Monkey Island—1990 was when it was released. And that's pretty long ago, 36 years now! I feel old.

It's funny, because I've never had the luxury of talking to Ron Gilbert or Tim Schafer, or any of the guys who worked on this whole game. But I will say that The Secret of Monkey Island was formative for me in that adventure game, discovery loop way. Partly because it combined the clever puzzle solving that is iconic for point and click adventure games from that era. But I think that it's that cleverness, that irreverence, that idea of everything being both a pun and world play, and how it plays out, that resonated with me a lot.

What is the highest number of hours you have in any given game, according to Steam?

Ooh, this is going to show my other addiction. I love ARPGs. Path of Exile. I have 3,437.5 hours.

ARPGs to me are [about the] buildcrafting and the cleverness of putting things together. And I think Path of Exile is the most freeform version of that. The level of experimentation you can get in that game is so wide in terms of thinking about how you can make builds.

I play a variety of builds. I have a fondness for playing Totem builds, and then second to that is, when I'm feeling really lazy, I like one-button builds, like Whirlwind builds … that's the fun part of Path of Exile, to be honest, is that it's just such a Rube Goldberg machine of effects and things that you can make, and you're just trying to figure out how to deal the most damage and kill things the fastest.

I think I've changed my expectation around ARPGs because of Path of Exile. It's funny because I've played Path of Exile 2, and it's a little bit more limiting, and it totally makes sense because it's built around more of an action environment. But I definitely feel like Path of Exile one was more meant for me.

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

This is a gimme for anybody who knows me, and it's a hint that exists on every interview that I've done, because I wear a Kingdom Hearts necklace on every single one, and that's the game I'll probably never uninstall.

I have this weird tradition where, every once in a while, I'll go back and play through all those games. Part of it is nostalgia, because you're harking back to a time when you were younger and you had a summer break. And honestly, Kingdom Hearts, for all its confusing and overly complicated narrative, it's still a story about growing up, right?

They're all kind of packaged together now, but I will say my favourite is Kingdom Hearts 2. I think it's the one that's most likely to make anyone tear up. I think it has to do with the identity of Roxas and Sora, and the two different sides of that character. The soul that exists there. There's something about innocence that can be painted in different ways. That's really fascinating in terms of characterisation, how they can live two different lives, but they can be so similar to one another, and how they're so connected that way. It's really cool.

What's a piece of non-gaming software installed on your PC that you simply couldn't live without?

Any online gamer would probably say the same thing, which is Discord. I've been at companies where we've used it for work. I use it almost every night to hang out with my friends and game. We use it to post dumb stuff to each other. It's just the default social hub for my close friends.

Our little group is a few friends I've been really close with since the Riot days, and so we've changed up games a lot … I will say that every time a new World of Warcraft expansion comes out, we probably play it.

WoW is the other thing I've played a lot, but that's not a Steam game. I will say that I have over three-years of in-game time in WoW, so that's way too high. And we counted one time on Valorant, me and the technical director of Valorant had basically had a comparison like "Which of us has spent more time in Wow?" And I think he came in just around two years, and I came in around three years. I was like, "This is insane."

I would say everybody in the industry was playing WoW a lot for a long time …. I think there's a lot to be said that's positive about the gameplay, and I think a lot of people point to that. But my theory, if you want to hear it, is that it was social media before social media. It was basically the common space that a lot of people could get together and socialise while playing. It was before the Discord era, before any social media hub or even Twitch, right? Back in the Justin TV days. It was the place you could default to go into and get things done, but also just hang out with people.

How tidy is your desktop screen?

Not at all. There's two reasons for this. One is because I change up technology at least every couple of years. So trying to keep everything tidy feels like a fool's errand, because this machine I have is probably about a year old … but the other thing is that I rarely am ever on my desktop. Most of the time, it's covered with some [other] screen. It's either my browser or Discord. So I never really see my desktop. I never access anything from my desktop.

Hellraiser: Revival's commitment to being both gnarly and horny has already been thoroughly documented, with PC Gamer's Wes Fenlon describing it as "nasty nasty" in his preview . This uncompromising attitude to both gore and kink went down well with fans, but it has also been celebrated by Hellraiser's creator, Clive Barker.

In an interview with horror site Dread Central (via FRVR), Barker admitted that he had concerns about the project going into it, but was thoroughly impressed by the final product. "I'm proud as f**k at the end result," he said. "I was fearful at one point that the game would be overly censored, but I'm genuinely astonished by how far they've been able to push it."

Barker, who worked closely with developer Saber Interactive to shape Revival's world and to advise on the game's story, reckons that Saber Interactive's work on the game is a prime example of how to approach adapting a license. "I think what was achieved in the game is a wake-up call to anyone who's been involved in the making of a franchise like Hellraiser," the author and director explained.

Barker reclaimed the American franchise rights to Hellraiser several years ago, and Hellraiser: Revival is written as a legacy sequel that ignores the trajectory of the films after Hellraiser 2. "There are many of the Hellraiser movies that were made by the Weinstein brothers that were created simply to hold onto the rights," Barker explained, pointing out that "less and less" money was spent on those films over time. "It's not the fault of the writers and directors, but just the way the system works in some cases."

But it seems the experience of working with Saber on Revival has whetted Barker's appetite to further explore the universe he created. "I have many ideas that I'd like to see realised in the Hellraiser universe, and I'm planning to keep my fingers in that pie," he said. For now, these ideas are being explored in a new series of comic books, but Barker says that he'd "love to go further in the movies."

Barker also strongly implied that Hellraiser: Revival does not represent the end of his collaboration with Saber. "I'm looking forward to working with them again on some other projects." It isn't clear whether this would be a sequel to Revival or an adaptation of a different work by Barker.

The positive reception to Hellraiser: Revival will likely be a relief to Saber Interactive too, following this summer's Rideshare Stimulator controversy. In August, Saber CEO Matt Karch denied accusations that the company had replaced Rideshare Stimulator writer Stella Sacco with ChatGPT, then issued an apology to Sacco for the way he publicly spoke about her following the allegation. Alongside all this, Saber admitted to using generative AI in a general sense, but the company's CCO Tim Willits assured players the tech is not used in Hellraiser: Revival or ongoing projects like Jurassic Park: Survival and Space Marine 3.

Red Barrels' Outlast series has long held a reputation for pushing the envelope further than most horror games, with depictions of violence, gore and nudity that can be shocking even within a medium well versed in delivering scares. But it isn't just audiences who have found the studio's games shocking beyond the virtual horror norm. As co-founder Phillipe Morin recently revealed, there have been numerous instances where people in and around the studio have found working with the material frightening to the point of being traumatic.

In a chat with Gamespot, Morin discussed the studio's unflinching approach to horror, explaining that it wasn't a deliberate attempt to court controversy, and was simply a "personal preference" on Morin and the other co-founders' behalf. "We didn't start like 'Oh, we've got to make the goriest game out there'" Morin explained. "It was just, 'we're making a horror game, so obviously we'll make it gory. I remember even the scriptwriter early on was saying, 'There's never too much blood.'"

Nonetheless, the intense and graphic nature of Outlast' horror has proved triggering within the studio. During the interview, Morin recalls one incident involving an individual associated with Red Barrels—possibly an employee, though Morin doesn't state this explicitly. "We started pushing and pushing, and you know, I remember there was a playtest, and somebody, after a couple of hours, basically ran out of the studio to go cry outside." Apparently, this person never returned to the studio.

Morin says that Red Barrels is not oblivious to the potential effect of its games on people, and that this informs how the studio approaches recruitment. "When we do job interviews, we always make sure that people are fully aware of the kind of content we create and the kind of conversations needed to create that content," he explains, adding that "People have to be comfortable with that because obviously you hear stuff in the studio that [if] you said the same thing in a different studio, you'd end up in a meeting with HR."

Yet these attempts at transparency with potential employees have not always been successful, as Morin explains. "We had one case of somebody who started working with us on Monday, and then on Thursday they resigned because even though they knew about the gore and the violence, they had a blind spot for other things, more so about religion, and they were not comfortable with that." While Morin doesn't specify when this occurred, it's likely that it happened during the development of Outlast 2, the story of which revolves around a violent Christian cult.

Yet while some people may have found Red Barrels' horror to be too much, the broader audience has absolutely lapped it up. The most recent game in the series, The Outlast Trials, sold half a million copies in its first week of early access, while the series as a whole has attracted a whopping 60 million players since 2013. Hence, if Red Barrels ever does make Outlast 3, it's unlikely the studio will soften its approach.

Liquid Swords, the developer behind Samson, has gone bankrupt just six months after its run-based open-city crime sim was released.

As reported by Breakit (via Rock, Paper, Shotgun), a bankruptcy order was issued against the Swedish developer on October 12. According to Breakit, Liquid Swords' staff—around 30 employees—have gone unpaid for at least two months, and it was those employees who petitioned to have the company declared bankrupt.

Liquid Swords was founded in 2020 by Christofer Sundberg, who previously co-founded Just Cause developer Avalanche Studios and co-directed that series' first game. Samson was Liquid Swords' debut title, an open city-crime sim with a distinctive run-based structure, where you play a getaway driver attempting to pay back an enormous mob debt by any means necessary.

Samson was a difficult project for Sundberg and Liquid Swords. The studio initially intended for it to be a much larger action RPG. But the studio struggled to find a publisher for Samson, with one publisher rejecting Liquid Swords on five occasions. Last year, Liquid Swords ran into funding trouble, laying off half its team as a result. It also radically adjusted how Samson plays—which is how the run-based structure emerged.

Upon its release in April this year, Samson received mixed reviews, with unfavourable (and somewhat unfair) comparisons to Grand Theft Auto being compounded by bugs and technical issues. In the months since, Liquid Swords has attempted to buff out Samson's various technical dents, releasing a patch as recently as October 8. Clearly though, that work hasn't produced a surge in interest in Samson, at least not enough to keep the lights on at Liquid Swords.

What happens to Liquid Swords next is somewhat up in the air. The administrator for the studio—Cirio Law—has put the developer and its assets up for sale, including Samson itself, with the bidding window running open until October 21. As for the affected employees, the bankruptcy now means their unpaid salaries will be covered by the Swedish state wage guarantee.

Original Story: This one is thin, man, but it has to do with one of my favorite games of all time, while the circumstances of the rumor are just kind of neat and weird, even if it turns out to be nothing. User Few_Interview8222 on the Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines subreddit reported back from a Genitorturers show in Brooklyn, New York. Partway through the set, the band supposedly told the crowd that a VtMB remake is happening.

Genitorturers played at Brooklyn's The Meadows as part of their "Live + Lewd Tour" on October 15. We've reached out to both rights-holder Activision (one of several, it's complicated) and Genitorturers' representation, and will update this story if we hear back.

Why would an industrial metal band started in Orlando in 1986 have this information?

In addition to a killer score by Rik Schaffer, Bloodlines featured wonderfully era-appropriate licensed tracks from metal bands⁠—they were mostly used as diegetic music in the nightclubs and bars of Los Angeles. The Genitorturers track Lecher Bitch was the pitch-perfect theme of The Last Round, a downtown LA dive bar frequented by the Anarch faction of vampires.

What if they're wrong?

Multiple commenters on the Reddit thread point out that this could have been a confused, untimely, misinterpreted, or all of the above reference to last year's Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2. It's the sort of almost-but-not-quite thing you might expect from an artist with tangential awareness of a secondary fanbase they picked up over the years.

A VtMB remake is also the sort of project you could see getting pingponged around between various actors and stakeholders: started, stopped, shopped around, etc. It'd be a situation ripe for collaborators on the periphery acting on outdated information.

What if they're right?

Rad! I think? It'd depend on who's doing it. More and more, I'm beginning to distrust anyone not named "Nightdive" when it comes to commercial remasters. See also: The recent Shogun 2 debacle and the fate of Deus Ex Remastered.

Bloodlines is such a wild, janky, PC gaming package that Nightdive is the only studio I'd trust to not only do a remaster right, but also to bring on legendary modder Werner "Wesp5" Spahl, the man who's been keeping Bloodlines alive with one of the most impactful unofficial patch projects in gaming. A more ground-up remake would offer equally daunting challenges, like matching the one-of-a-kind mood and look Troika managed to evoke.

Why should you care?

Bloodlines is one of my very favorite games and an incredible RPG that's well worth your time. To the uninitiated, I like to pitch it as an evolutionary missing link between 2D Fallout and New Vegas. Bloodlines boasts the open-ended design and reactivity of Fallout in 3D for the very first time (Bloodlines leads Leonard Boyarsky and Jason Anderson were senior talent on Fallout 1).

Unlike New Vegas' wide open world, however, Bloodlines had a more linear, but still loose sequence of zones on a world map to explore. Bloodlines' Y2K, gothic, noir interpretation of Los Angeles is one of the coolest worlds ever presented in an RPG.

A Nightdive treatment would be my preferred outcome: build on Wesp5's work and compensate him accordingly, then make it more accessible on more platforms at a modest markup over the original game. Bloodlines 1 can be had for $20 on Steam and GOG, but it's practically always on sale.

Even if it turns out to be nothing, this is still just a neat, newsworthy little incident to behold—Genitorturers shouting out an obscure, beloved RPG like this 22 years later, and maybe getting a couple genre nerds like me a little too excited on the way.

At a glance:

• Qualcomm gets $2 from Arm in the Delaware jury's decision, part of a yearslong licensing dispute between the two.
• Yahoo Finance puts their market caps at $210 billion and $243 billion respectively.
• Qualcomm alleges bad faith action by Arm over tech licensed by the former company from the latter.
• Qualcomm won $1 on its allegations of Arm withholding contractually obligated support on the licensed tech, and $1 on allegations Arm interfered with a deal between Qualcomm and Meta.
• Still undecided: Does Qualcomm get a 5-year pause on licensing payments to Arm, which could total in the billions of dollars?

Reuters reported on the mystifying reward, which makes much more sense in the context of a broader legal battle between Qualcomm and Arm. The two companies are each behind some of the most widely-used processors in the world: Qualcomm's Snapdragon CPUs can be found in most non-Apple smartphones. Arm's titular architecture, meanwhile, is the basis of the Snapdragon CPU, and there are rumblings the future of desktop computing belongs to Arm and not the x86 architecture we've defaulted to for so long.

The Delaware jury found that Arm breached a licensing agreement with Qualcomm, failing to provide patches and support for designs Qualcomm had licensed. The jury also ruled in favor of Qualcomm's allegation that Arm strategically leaked information to Bloomberg News that delayed a deal between Qualcomm and Meta in 2024. The jury sided with Arm over Qualcomm on five other counts.

The big prize for Qualcomm would be proving Arm acted in bad faith after licensing its technology out, activating a five-year freeze on royalty payments specified in the companies' original agreement⁠—that could be worth billions of dollars.

Both sides claimed victory following the $2 decision, with Qualcomm pointing to the two claims it won, and Arm highlighting the five that went its way.

Qualcomm: "We are gratified that the jury found Arm breached its long-standing Architectural License Agreement (ALA) with Qualcomm, failed to honor its commitments, and intentionally acted to disrupt Qualcomm's businesses."

Arm: "Despite Qualcomm’s pursuit of this case in an attempt ​to deprive Arm of billions of dollars under our license agreements, the jury’s verdict confirms that Arm operated in ​good faith under its technology license agreement and its award of only two dollars confirms the merit of Arm’s arguments in the ‌case."

Ultimately, the palace intrigues of these two corporations are unlikely to have practical effects on the yeoman PC gamer, though Arm's potential importance to the future of the hobby means it is of some note. But I hope we can all agree it's very funny that a $243 billion company now owes a $210 billion one two dollars.

Every time I check in on Star Wars, there's a new stupid little creature (colloquially known as a Glup Shitto) everyone's into. The latest of these is Biddy Blas, a braggadocious pod racer and mama's boy who stands out for his shrill Huttese quips. "Ding dong pookie, ding dong," he crows. "Scrib doon!" If you love that, here's a video of him doing a little victory dance.

If you hate that, here's a video of him dying in a fireball.

He's become the subject of meme after meme and people generally like the little brat. The voice actor for Biddy Blas, a British wrestler named Richard Summers-Calvert, has responded to all the love—and as you might guess, he basically looks like the opposite of Biddy Blas. All the attention has left him "overwhelmed and overstimulated," as he said in a video he shared on X, and he's hoping to show up for new fans of the Shitto du jour at cons and the like.

In a follow-up video, he said he had some "good news" that he wasn't ready to announce just yet, and thanked all the Biddy-heads for the doors a sudden spotlight like this opens. "I know you're doing it for Biddy. I know you're doing it for him. But I benefit from him as well … I appreciate all the love. And hate, and frustration." It is a racing game, after all.

This all seems like further proof that the true heart of Star Wars has never been the cosmic conflict between good and evil, the ill-fated schemes of devilish bureaucrats, or even the swashbuckling battles between space ascetics with laser swords. No, the true heart of Star Wars is watching a crusty little freak say nonsense words and going on a wiki to check if "jizz music" was a real thing George Lucas signed off on. In the Disney era, it has been amended to the more family friendly "jatz music" (which I don't hate), but a true jizz wailer never dies.

I heard it on the wireless: election fever is sweeping America. The world's loudest democracy is headed to the ballot box to vote in its next slate of soda jerks and Chevrolets and whatever else it is they have over there. It's all very exciting.

Can I help? Yes. I've already solved my own country's politics, now it's time to help the benighted and backward people of places like "Connecticut" and "the Oklahoma Panhandle"—fantasy names from a land beyond knowing. People love it when foreigners tell them how to do their own domestic politics, and especially when they have as robust a methodology as I have: a copy of Crusader Kings 3 and most of the DLC.

Using Paradox's premier 1066 simulator, I will ascertain the best way to remove a burrowed-in leader from power. Which real-life figure is this a videogame analogue for? Don't worry about it, don't email me about it, and don't launch a cruise missile at my house.

Don't email me about how the midterms don't choose the president either. I don't know what those words mean.

King of New York

I first had to create an accurate, 11th-century simulacrum of an American president. None of CK3's historical rulers quite fit the bill, so I decided to create a ruler from scratch.

I created an 80-year-old lecher named Wenzel and put him in charge of the Holy Roman Empire. His defining trait was 'lunatic'.

So that was sorted. Next, I needed a position from which to actually act in the world. I needed to be someone who could effect change in the HRE and test my theories as to the best way to go about removing a leader. This was easier: I simply nosed through Wenzel's myriad direct vassals and picked one who seemed most like some guy, thus to represent the working masses of the American Empire. I've quite genuinely forgotten his name, but he had very few traits and was prone to tuberculosis.

We were off to the races. I immediately cast about to find some means of dislodging the boss. My first solution was simple: plunge the realm in an internecine civil war that scourges the land with blood and fire. Unfortunately, I soon realised I probably wouldn't be allowed to suggest that as an option for the American people in an international videogames publication, so I decided to, like, win an election or something instead. Whatever.

Well, okay, not just win an election. The bloodless paths to power I saw were to either get myself nominated as the old man's heir (HRE elections aren't as regular as modern-day America's—at the time of writing—and so I couldn't replace him directly via one) or to butter him up so nicely that he declares me co-ruler.

I opted for both. My first move was to ply my delicate kaiser with flattery and gifts. He liked flattery and gifts, and as a bonus, by showering him with them I significantly decreased the odds I would wake up to find all my lands redistributed among his wretched children. I increased the odds I would wake up at all, at that.

With my other hand, I penned fawning letters to his most powerful vassals: 'My esteemed lord, my honourable lady, your most munificent worshipfulness…' On and on I went, doling out what little gifts were available to me, and starting schemes to sway and cajole the realm's most powerful. It all seemed, almost boringly, to be coming together. Perhaps the great secret to overcoming your political enemies is… just being plain old nice?

No. Absolutely not. Being nice is just the vague flouncing about you do before you get serious and start organising the guillotines. Though I had successfully gotten a fair few influential figures on-side, none of them seemed inclined to support me for the big chair. As for Wenzel? He was fond of me, but he was also ancient and deranged, and was apparently too busy getting deep into religious superstition (quite literally, he acquired the 'superstition' modifier while I wasn't looking, somehow) to dedicate much thought to power sharing.

Time to get serious.

Not time to get serious

Somehow this goddamn idiot caused a plague. I don't know how, I don't know why, I don't know if what I am describing is even really possible within the mechanics of Crusader Kings 3, but our awful pervert king caused a plague and proceeded to ravage my counties with it. This is what happened regardless as to whether it's possible or not.

It was called "Wenzel's Cough" and it quickly tore through most of my subjects (eh) and my entire family (uh oh). My wife had it, my daughters had it, my sons had it, I had it. The whole castle probably looked like a boss arena from Hunt: Showdown—walls caked in viscous emissions and baking like an orchid hothouse.

The busywork of not dying distracted me from the quest to depose Wenzel. I isolated the capital and secured a personal physician, whom I oriented in the general direction of my family and said "Just go nuts chief." He locked me in a room with a trillion bees (this actually happened), which somehow gave major relief to my consumption. I lost the ominous 'Dying' warning at the top of the screen and was free to return to politics. Most of my family got relief too, save one son who died. Fortunately, it was one I was mostly unaware of up to that point.

With my attempts at diplomacy foiled, I figured it was time to try war. Wenzel had about 7,000 men in his army whereas I had 1,400. Defeating him on the battlefield would need allies. I began a scheme to sway one of his most powerful vassals: a Tuscan duchess named Matilda with a decent army. Perhaps I could marry her? My current wife was an obstacle, true, but an obstacle with a boutique variant of tuberculosis, so it might all work itself out.

At some point while all this was happening, Wenzel developed the traits "Irritable" and "Withering mind."

And then this idiot duchess went and declared a war of independence against Wenzel without me, practically guaranteeing her defeat, imprisonment, and possible execution.

What's the real-life lesson here? You can't rely on the tender feelings of powerful people to hand you your salvation in dark political times. They have their own stupid ends and will pursue them to your detriment.

You also can't rely on your loved ones to die from plague at times that are convenient to you, so my plan might not have worked even if Matilda hadn't gone war-mode. Sometime after our Tuscan duchess declared war, Wenzel's cough abated in my lands. The city gates swung open again, and the cloud of death lifted from over my realm.

Except for me, of course. Despite my physician's daring bee treatment, my condition had worsened to the point that the 'Dying' notification was back. Even more galling: I kept proccing events that showed every individual member of my family recovering fully from the disease, one by one. "The sound of laughter echoes in your halls again," beamed CK3, as a new notification asked if I wanted to have my last rites performed or if I wanted to go to hell.

Idiot Matilda lost her war around the time I choked out my last on my deathbed, surrounded by my family who were all absolutely fine. In the imperial capital, Wenzel tottered along, muttering to himself as he roamed cavernous palatial spaces. He had new traits: high blood pressure and a faulty heart, but refused to die. A new plague was working its way north through the world towards him. He refused to die. An exploding heart, deranged mind, and multiple competing plagues, and he refused to die.

I died, though, having not figured out how to remove a senile moron from power. Well, good luck America.

Per the United Wizards of the Coast Union (UWOTC-CWA) account on X, WoTC is acting in an entirely unsurprising manner: "Yesterday, Wizards informed us that it doesn’t intend to voluntarily recognize the D&D or Studio X units of our union ahead of a vote. We remain committed to creating a workplace focused on wellness, transparency, and collaboration by winning our coming election."

A union composed of employees from the Magic: The Gathering Arena team unionised back in June of this year, giving WoTC until May to formally recognise it. Obviously, it didn't.

Later in the same month, WoTC sent physical letters to members of the company encouraging them not to go through with it on the vote—and while WoTC did technically adhere to the The National Labor Relations Act, it did also not-so-subtly imply that its current benefits would be "on the bargaining table for both parties to negotiate". These letters were also allegedly accompanied by daily emails to employees.

Basically, it should not come as a surprise that Wizards isn't intending to recognize the full United Wizards of the Coast Union—a coalition now formed of members in both the D&D team and Studio X (Magic: The Gathering's creative staff)—either.

In a statement sent to Wargamer, and circulated to employees before that, WoTC stated it was not a fan in the ways it is legally allowed to do so. That being, lots of circular talk about how everyone has the right to unionise:

"We are best able to keep building great games and a great place to work by working directly with employees, not through unions. In this regard, Wizards is not neutral on the question of unionization … in the end, we will respect the results of the election, no matter what our employees choose."

UWOTC-CWA is bargaining for "fair wages, career progression, and job security," as well as remote work protections and "sustainable workloads: We have been asked to do more work with less regard for our personal lives." Other concerns include healthcare, AI protections, and the ability to have legal ownership of creative work made outside of their jobs for WoTC.

As Wargamer itself is right to point out, UWOTC-CWA does have a strong lever to pull. Namely, that D&D and Magic: The Gathering are incredibly profitable. This earnings report shows that "Wizards of the Coast and Digital Gaming" raked in $568 million in operating profit over the past six months (before adjustments), while consumer products lost $62 million, and entertainment dragged just $23 million through the door.

In other words, if you're making most of your company's profit, you're in a prime position to negotiate with them. Unless your corporation decides to lay off 1,000 people, including those responsible for your biggest commercial success, again.

Ah, zone chats in MMOs—trade and general chats, /shouts and /yells. Intended as a way to render the social glue that binds these videogames together, they are often instead a tableau for (and I say this somewhat affectionately) absolute lunacy, pock-marked with some of the most vile verbiage you'll see online.

Take, for instance, the time-honoured tradition of "Barrens Chat" in World of Warcraft. Combine a big zone that spans around 10-15 levels along with proximity to a major city, and you get a certain kind of verbal hooliganry that, in my journeys through WoW: Forever, I was actually pretty nostalgic for.

I mean, sure, the Chuck Norris jokes have gotten a smidge old. But while collecting Zhevra Hoofs, I would find myself possessed to ask Barrens Chat philosophical questions, and while I never received much in the way of wisdom, responses were always entertaining.

I'm not so fond of trade chat, though, which—at least on the horde side of things—has mostly been dominated by a bot by the name of Margrave Tyrael. Who, I kid you not, was literally sitting there for days spitting out the same automated messages, questioning why Blizzard was deleting beta characters.

I fell for it, at first. Then I started trying to warn people not to fall for it. It didn't work.

Things are no less cursed in my other MMO of choice, Final Fantasy 14. I shan't repeat some of the obscenity I've seen in Ul'dah here, but it does always stagger me that the same kind of infectious absurdity can persist, particularly in a videogame whose moderators are altogether far more heavy-handed with banning folks for ill behaviour.

Which leads me to my question, dear reader: Zone chats. Are they a force for good, or ill?

Personally, I'm weirdly fond of them. I don't think these chats are particularly healthy to engage with, and they're certainly not worth arguing with some rando over. But the belligerent nonsense of the masses feels somehow pure. Unsullied by the algorithmic mechanisms that drive us, purposefully, towards enragement and bickering. Instead, we piss people off all by ourselves. And that's kind of beautiful.

I am a stakhanovite, a hero-worker. My productivity is not measured in grams but kilos. My working hours have been divided and subdivided into ultimate efficiency: not a nanosecond is wasted.

That is, in Flesh Grinding, whose demo I've been mucking about with. Not in real life, where my working hours consist mostly of staring at a blank Google Doc and wondering if I'm a moron who could never actually write at all.

Anyway, Flesh Grinding, which releases in Q4 2026—not to be confused with Fleshgrinder, which releases in Q1 2027; good luck—is a labour simulator. It's also one of those PS1-style horror games that are so fashionable right now. But mostly it is a game about working.

Working, specifically, with flesh—great, distended chunks of the stuff that plop down from the ceiling and amass in shiny piles. You must pick them up, walk them to your grinder, then turn them to mince. You must do this until your IV drip runs out of fluid, at which point it is time to return to your home and upgrade yourself, spending the millilitres of blood you scrounged from your grinding on upgrades.

Hit your goal (a kilo of meat at first, then five kilos, and so on) and new areas open up with new machines—feed a lump of flesh to this thing and it will spit out IV-replenishing potions, that kind of thing, which add entirely new aspects of the fundamental flesh-grinding loop to think about and strategise for.

You're no longer just trying to run as quickly as possible between your flesh pile and your grinders. Now you have to figure out when in the process to stop at the new machines, how to run a perfect loop that wastes the absolute minimum amount of time you get each day on the factory floor.

In this way, it is exactly like real life.

No, really. Or, well, sort of really. I've definitely worked jobs that felt as grey and arduous as standing at Flesh Grinding's, uh, flesh grinder and attempting to maximise the return of each stifling second—to cram as much compensable work into every fragment of time I had before the inevitable burnout set in. It wasn't quite an IV drip of unknowable motivating fluid or an endless parade of shapeless flesh: it was writing freelance marketing copy, which was worse.

I'm rather impressed by Flesh Grinding for condensing this experience down into its sickly gameplay loop. It's a laborious work sim that nonetheless feels quite moreish, that tempts you to return day after day to make some new tweak to your routine or to test out a new machine.

That's what's really horrifying, I say. I mean, sure, the blood and strange ethereal figures and creepy grandmother and ever-multiplying religious icons are also, probably, scary to someone, but surely far less than the constant reminder that the trade you make for being alive is selling eight hours (at least) of your day, every day, to distant and unknowable forces, and all the wear on your body and mind that entails. And then you spend your off hours trying to compute how to come in the next day and do it all even more efficiently. What a horrible scam we've played on ourselves. What a, um, grind.

Ghostwire: Tokyo, Tango Gameworks' spooky, neon-drenched action-adventure game, is now officially a good old game. Granted, it's not that old, but 'good' seems about right given that contributing writer Imogen Mellor scored it a 72 in her review. But what I mean is that it's joined GOG's Preservation Program.

If you're wondering why a game from 2022 would need to be preserved already, well, it kind of doesn't. You may be thinking the game is finally free from its seemingly arbitrary implementation of Denuvo, but that was actually removed shortly after it was added. What this release does is remove Bethesda.NET integration (providing any extra goodies on your first launch of the game) and come with a promise from GOG that any stability issues that arise as decades pass and operating systems change will be addressed in future patches.

That may just come into play given that Tango Gameworks would be closed right now if Xbox's sudden closure of the studio hadn't been canceled out with an acquisition by PUBG owner Krafton. It's worth noting that the game still appears to be published by Bethesda Softworks, so if you're trying to avoid Microsoft products for any genocide-related reasons, you'll have to weigh that as a consideration.

As for Ghostwire itself, it proved surprisingly popular with over 6 million players. We called it a great game that Elden Ring overshadowed around release alongside the quietly adored Teardown and Sifu. Like its left-field follow-up Hi-Fi Rush, Ghostwire seemed to hit pretty hard for the cult it attracted. Hopefully Tango can capture some of that juice in the games it's currently developing under Krafton.

I've nothing against games that feature simulated animal petting, but it's never been something I've considered buying a game specifically for. Sure, it's nice when your character can stroke a virtual dog or fuss with a clump of polygons shaped like a cat, but it rarely amounts to more than a canned animation. That said, I am suddenly more tempted to shell out on The Blood of Dawnwalker, as Rebel Wolves has announced that the next update to its vampire RPG will introduce "directional animal petting".

The Blood of Dawnwalker already features a directional combat system in the vein of Kingdom Come: Deliverance. And this system lies at the heart of the animal petting being added to version 1.1 of the vampire RPG—according to an update the developer posted on X: "What happens when you merge a directional combat system with an ability to pet dogs and cats?" Rebel Wolves asked. "Directional. Animal. Petting."

Sadly, Rebel Wolves didn't provide any further detail about this system. But it did offer plenty of insight into what else is coming with update 1.1. Aside from being able to stroke cats at different angles, perhaps the most significant addition is a new Story mode. This will feature an "additional combat assist" for players who aren't interested in mastering the game's swordplay, letting them focus mainly on enjoying the narrative and making decisions. It's worth noting this will not replace the existing Story mode outright. That difficulty setting will still exist, but under the new name of "Forgiving."

Elsewhere, The Blood of Dawnwalker will now allow players to rework their abilities through the Draught of Mind Rebirth, which gives you back the points you've allocated into the RPG's various skill trees and lets you spend them elsewhere. That's it for major new features, but smaller changes coming in 1.1 include improved combat targeting, better traversal, in-game camera tweaks, and updates to the RPG's FrameGen tech.

In total, Rebel Wolves promise 1100 changes coming to The Blood of Dawnwalker. It's unlikely any of these will relate to the game's controversial time mechanic, even though the studio has said this system might not feature in the sequel. And a sequel to The Blood of Dawnwalker is coming. Rebel Wolves is already working on it after the first game sold 1 million copies in its first three days on sale.

The developer of an upcoming horror drinking game has cancelled plans for a public Steam demo in favour of private preview sessions, citing concerns that AI vibe coders might use the demo's content to clone the game.

Drunken Goddess Reflux is a "shot glass Russian roulette" drinking game where players square off against an anime demon girl who loves you but also kind of wants to murder you (which sounds like a standard relationship to me), with the goal of getting your girl-frenemy so blotto that she barfs up her soul. Frankly, it doesn't sound like my cup of tequila, although there is a mechanic where the rules of the game grow weirder and wilder the more alcohol you imbibe—which sounds neat.

Regardless, developer Alliance Arts planned to release a Steam demo on October 19, but in a post on X (via Rock, Paper, Shotgun), the studio explained this is no longer the case. Instead, the studio will host "closed online play sessions for a limited number of participants."

"We sincerely apologize for the short notice," Alliance Arts added, before explaining its reasoning behind the demo's cancellation. Apparently, the demo would have come with "some restrictions on posting and streaming gameplay videos", which Alliance Arts decided it wouldn't be able to properly manage.

On top of this, however, the devs are also worried the demo will be exploited to create AI-coded clones. "We're concerned that the demo's content could be used to quickly imitate or replicate the game's presentation and gameplay with AI or other tools, and that such works could be released before launch."

It isn't clear which of these was Alliance Arts' bigger worry, but game developers having their projects vibe-cloned is becoming a more frequent issue. Back in March, a developer shared her game prototype online only to have it cloned within five hours. This isn't the only example either, over on Bluesky, McPixel developer Sos Sosowski shared numerous examples of indie game developers having their works almost instantly copied by AI cloners and released on Steam.

Games being flagrantly copied is not a new problem—the mobile space has struggled with it for years. But the way AI tools have sped up the process is clearly a cause for concern among developers—especially since one of the best ways to improve a game's chance of success in today's crowded market is to share the idea early and build a community around it. As such, unless Valve and other game stores take a firmer stance against outright copycats, we may well see more developers adopt Alliance Arts' approach.

Funcom, the developer behind Dune: Awakening and Conan Exiles, has announced a restructuring process that will result in layoffs at the company, and that current CEO Rui Casais will leave Funcom once the reorganisation is complete.

The decision comes after a shift in direction at Funcom, whereby the studio will focus wholly on supporting its existing survival RPGs. In a statement (via GamesIndustry.biz) Casais said that Dune: Awakening was "the biggest project we have ever undertaken, requiring many years of significant development resources across our studios". He continued that "moving from full production into long-term post-launch development and operations requires a different organisation.

"While we would have wanted everyone who helped build Dune: Awakening to continue with us, we cannot sustain the size and structure required during peak development as we move into this next phase. My focus now is ensuring the process is as supportive as possible for everyone affected, and to treat our colleagues with the respect and transparency they deserve."

Dune: Awakening was a big hit for Funcom when it was released in June last year, with the survival MMO shifting a million copies in two weeks to become the fastest-selling game in the Norwegian developer's history. Despite this initial success, however, the longer-term performance of the game is harder to gauge.

In the months following release, Awakening's player counts dropped substantially, with the game's PvP elements and faction-based endgame receiving a mixed response from the community. Funcom enacted a round of layoffs in October last year, while last month the studio overhauled Dune: Awakening to pivot away from its MMO elements, adding both solo play and PvE exclusive modes (though the game does still support more competitive multiplayer).

Alongside the changes to Awakening, Funcom's other survival game Conan Exiles also received a substantial upgrade this year, getting a new engine, a major paid expansion, and an "enhanced endowment slider" for fancier player-character genitals.

Now that both those reworks are complete, Funcom's plan seems to be to rest on its games for the foreseeable future. In a chat with GamesIndustry last month, Funcom's Chief Creative Officer Joel Bylos said the studio is "not ready to start a new game" and that any plans for future projects amounted to "wispy thoughts in the back of our heads."

Funcom did not share the number of employees affected by the layoffs. But in a press release, the company stated that restructuring "begins now" and that it will not share additional details until after the process has concluded "out of respect for the employees involved." Once the reorganisation is complete, Rui Casais will be succeeded by Scott Junior, Funcom's Chief Product Officer and Executive Producer on Dune Awakening.

Pierre-Louis Biojout, founder of Y Combinator-backed AI startup NanoCorp, took heat from San Francisco residents and city leaders this week after publishing a weekend vibe coding project: a web-based shooter set in SF's Tenderloin district, which is known for homelessness and open drug use.

"San Francisco couldn't fix the Tenderloin," Biojout said in a now-deleted X post on October 13. "So I monetized it [as a] Call of Duty style zombie shooter on the real SF streets." He noted that he'd already made $300 from in-game ads.

The game, called Tenderloin Night Shift, had players shoot "zombies" that, according to reports from the SF Chronicle and KRON4 news, included a "folded" fentanyl addict and a Black security guard.

Speaking to the Chronicle, Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the SF Coalition on Homelessness, said that Biojout was "monetizing the dehumanization and pretend killing for fun of mostly Black and Brown residents of the poorest neighborhood in San Francisco."

In a correspondence with the paper, Biojout said that he had not intended to "provoke or to depict shooting real people" and that the game also included tech workers as characters.

Tenderloin Night Shift appears to have been removed from NanoCorp's website. Although Biojout deleted his X post, the discourse that ensued remains.

"You made a game about shooting people in active addiction," said another tech founder. "These are human beings, not zombies. show me the positive side of this - i'm probably blind."

"Why are you talking about addiction? It's a zombie shooter," Biojout said in response.

Some commenters, however, expressed approval for the message Biojout has disavowed. "They are currently NOT human beings," said one user, while another said they'd "train in bro's game" to prepare to visit San Francisco.

We learned last week that a Cyberpunk 2077 movie is in the works, an announcement I used mainly to talk about a completely different cyberpunk movie starring Keanu Reeves as a guy named Johnny who's having a bad week. Now we've got a bit more insight into what CD Projekt Red has in mind for the film, and it's possible that a guy named Johnny may not be involved at all.

"Our contract with Anonymous Content expired, and in the meantime, an opportunity arose to establish cooperation with Paramount Pictures," co-CEO Michał Nowakowski told Polish PAP Biznes (Google translated), referring to the Cyberpunk 2077 "live action project" that was announced in 2023 and ultimately went nowhere. "We decided that we would conduct a live-action Cyberpunk project in a new formula.

"At this point, we can only say that we definitely don't want to make a film adaptation of the game. We want to tell a story in the world of Cyberpunk, but it won't be a one-to-one translation of the game's story."

I loved Cyberpunk 2077, and the fact that it featured two Hollywood stars in central roles might make it seem like a natural fit for a direct translation. But I think avoiding that approach is the wiser move: V's story has been told, and trying to replicate it on film only invites unflattering comparisons and criticism. And it's not as though the world of Night City is short of other stories to tell, after all, nor would it be difficult to indirectly tie it to the game through references or cameos, if the urge to do so is really that strong.

Remember as well that two of the most successful game-to-screen adaptations, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners and Resident Evil, took their respective underlying settings and made them their own. That's basically what Cyberpunk 2077 is, as far as that goes: A vision of Mike Pondsmith's Cyberpunk tabletop setting, interpreted through the lens of a new timeline. They're all stronger for it, because they allow creators to work within a particular framework without tying them to specifics.

It's way too early in the process to say when all of this big-screen fun will actually happen, but Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 is set to debut on Netflix on October 20.

What's it take for a game to snare me? Over the Hill is a co-op (or singleplayer!) offroading adventure that launched on Steam this week, and even just playing a bit of it has made me determined not to just play more but to 100% it. That's a feeling I haven't had about a game in a while.

Here's what my brief excursion into Over the Hill has already shown me:

• A beautiful open world
• Weather conditions and a day/night cycle
• Sweet-looking vehicles
• Challenging driving physics
• Secrets to find
• Cosmetics to collect
• Vehicle upgrades to unlock
• Wildlife to photograph

I'll be honest, it's the last one that really got me to commit to hundred-percenting it. I was driving slowly along up a bumpy trail, stopping occasionally to pull my little Jeep up a hill with my winch, when I suddenly heard the familiar croak of a raven. I zoomed out my view and eventually spotted the bird flapping over the trees nearby. I switched to camera mode and took a picture of it. Nice.

But a moment later I saw the flash of something slinking through the tall grass near my Jeep, and after following it with my camera for about a minute, it finally stepped out into full view.

A coyote! I photographed it as well, and decided right then I was going to find and document every single animal in the game.

And I'm enjoying driving around in Over the Hill so much, I think I'm gonna do it all: find every point of interest, unlock every vehicle and cosmetic, acquire every upgrade, and track down every meteorite.

(Yep, you can locate meteorites hidden around the world using a special piece of installed gear, then figure out an offroad route to reach them, then attach your winch and pull them free. I've found one already. And I'm gonna find the rest.)

And here's a bonus I didn't have on my list up top: Over the Hill is verified on Steam Deck. As soon as I'm done typing this I'm gonna kick back on the couch for the weekend and do some more driving. Over the Hill is also 20% off on Steam until October 28.

One day into Wardogs Season 2, Bulkhead Interactive has decided to scrap the bribery plan it announced last week as a way to help convince players to join the Blue team. The problem isn't that the plan didn't work—it actually worked far too well.

THE PLAN:

• "Lonestar cash and XP bonus. Season 2 only. New Bakurani spawn."
• "We're looking at how we can help the win rate of a certain team." -Bulkhead CEO Joe Brammer (via "Road to Season 2" devlog)

THE REALITY:

• "We were wrong. We fucked up," Brammer admitted in a new video (via RPS).
• Blue team is now winning "by far, the most," Brammer said, even though the actual boosts are not terribly substantial: 5% Lonestar cash and 2.5% XP.
• "Median" players didn't get much from those percentages, but Bulkhead found that "top tier" players were seeing significant boosts
• Bottom line: it's gone.

"We're removing the Blue XP bonus, the cash bonus. We were wrong," Brammer said. Bulkhead co-founder Howard Philpott added that the studio thought Blue team bonus might work out this way, but said "I don't think we expected it to be this much of a swing."

I can't say I'm terribly surprised by the outcome. I'm not a Wardogs player, but I have been around long enough to know how these things go: If you dangle a competitive edge in front of gamers, they're going to jump for it. Percentage boosts are especially risky because they're performance-based and so much more likely to go spinning out of control, especially in the hands of, as Brammer put it, "tryhards."

And it's not just the extra XP and cash being earned that's a problem: Philpott said the bonus is also "impacting people joining games and starting games," presumably because if they can't be a Blue, they'll leave and try their luck with another game.

(Quick side note: I'm not a fan of the term 'tryhard.' Of course I'm trying hard! Why wouldn't I be? My nephew called me a tryhard once and I told him that maybe if he tried harder he wouldn't get his ass kicked so hard. He was 12 and I got some disapproving looks from other people at the Christmas party, but I stand by it.)

PC Gamer's Morgan Park, who is a Wardogs guy, also made the call when this plan was unveiled last week: "XP and cash bribes are a drastic move, but should have a real impact. It's unclear how big these boosts will be, but I expect Blue will instantly become the most popular team by a wide margin in Season 2."

Predictable as this outcome was, I don't see it as a particularly egregious misstep. Brammer called it an "experiment," and sometimes that's what you have to do—and the early stages of a massively popular videogame with teething issues can definitely be one of those times. Brammer also noted that other changes aimed at rebalancing things, including new spawns on the Bakurani map, have proven effective and will remain.

Alongside the removal of the Blue team bribery, Bulkhead is also fixing issues with driver progression, and is fixing a driver exploit that's letting players access tanks too quickly: Players who are "very clearly" taking advantage of the exploit (less than 1,000 in total, according to Brammer) will be given a 24-hour ban from the game and have their cash and XP wiped.

I'll be honest, I wasn't sure if today's mod counted. A peek behind the curtain: sometimes I select a mod to try for this feature and it doesn't work. Just plumb does not function. In those cases, I discard it and find another one. It's hard to write something about nothing.

Today's mod did not work. Mostly. I installed WeedFarm (based on PlantationV), which should, in theory, let you "Grow, harvest, and sell weed in GTA 5 with a full-featured farming system."

It does not do this. The farms? Present. The dealer you sell to? Also there. The various individual particulars of the mod, in general, are all correct. And yet try as I might, I cannot harvest a single paltry bud.

I believe this is due to golf and also a jetpack. You see, the controls from WeedFarm (based on PlantationV) are apparently unalterable. Although it comes with an .ini file—which with other mods will often let you rebind keys—it has no obvious means of changing its controls. Bringing up its uber-menu is bound to F3. Also bound to F3: my street golfing mod and jetpack.

This is an issue, as every time I attempt to bring up WeedFarm (based on PlantationV)'s master menu, I start golfing and the game asks if I want to equip a jetpack. I don't! I want to farm weed! I want to farm weed but I am compelled to golf!

It's an awkward situation. I did try visiting the dealer—perhaps he'd let me sidle into the mod somehow—but no luck there either. At one point, I punched his front door in frustration, at which point I learnt all my melee attacks detonate on impact now, and I don't know why.

As I watched the credits roll on Modern Warfare 4's campaign, a sobering thought infiltrated: I've been playing Call of Duty for over 20 years—two-thirds of my life. While I consider it primarily a multiplayer game these days, what I loved about Call of Duty all that time ago was its campaigns. In 2006, as a shy fourth grader at a new school, I made my first friend because we both played Call of Duty 3 on the Wii and spent a week recounting cool moments from the campaign over lunch. By 2007 (the year of Modern Warfare, of course), our lunch table was losing its collective shit over the part where Captain Price slides you the pistol right as he (as we thought at the time) dies.

As memorable as that sequence was, it marked the moment Call of Duty became globe-trotting romps about superhuman, super serious operatives who prevent WW3 before breakfast. It was pretty badass at the time, but what they gained in the sort of spectacle that makes great Sunday Night Football ads, they lost in relatability.

Sure, those early WW2 campaigns were shlocky riffs on movies, but they starred normal people who primarily wanted to go home—grizzled sergeants and green privates who fended off helplessness with humor. They depicted large-scale offensives won by smaller contributions. That's the energy that Infinity Ward tries to harness again in Modern Warfare 4. At times, it totally works.

This is the most fun I've had with a Call of Duty campaign in years, lending mostly to its new, non-elite faces. Over half of the 6-hour campaign revolves around a crew of young South Korean marines (plus a few Americans) running out the clock on their compulsory military service when North Korea suddenly invades. The guys themselves are familiar archetypes—a serious guy, an audience insert who doesn't talk much, an American who fills every silence with a joke—but they're basically charming enough that I cared to remember their names.

I like the idea, even if this latest "ripped from the headlines" premise of a North Korean offensive continues Infinity Ward's streak of flattening complex foreign conflicts through a conventionally American lens (while conveniently making the CIA's dogs the good guys). You'll never guess which global superpower is really pulling the strings this time, ya'll.

Going dark

Playing a "cog in a machine" again unlocks Modern Warfare 4's most standout missions, many of which remind me of the series' best days. "Mayhem" and "Losing Ground" follow a futile attempt to hold the fictional Hajin City against the overwhelming invasion. They're loud, chaotic fights where your characters are noticeably terrified of what's happening (a rarity in a post-Price world) and your side is constantly outnumbered. Later on, "Counter Attack" ramps up the scale and intensity with a massive beachfront assault that can only really be achieved by throwing a silly amount of money at it. It's certainly a better use of resources than the overly gimmicky, Warzone-y campaigns of recent Black Ops sequels.

Even when the action gets smaller, Private Park (no relation) and friends are simply fun to follow. "Stranded" picks up with the squad crash landing behind enemy lines in North Korea, and its Infinity Ward's best swing at a sandbox level to date. The multi-hour mission establishes three non-linear objectives, side quests, and a hideout where you can craft better armor, guns, and camouflage. It's a comparatively quiet, isolating mission than the ones that precede it—almost like playing a micro Far Cry in the middle of a CoD campaign. It was a bit jarring at first, but ended up a major highlight.

I was worried this would prove to be another instance of sneaking Warzone into singleplayer, as the mission uses the DMZ looting system, but I was told the map was made just for the campaign, which is nice.

Infinity Ward could've crafted a whole campaign around Park's squad, and I'm still not sure why they didn't. Instead, their story runs parallel to the disconnected adventures of Captain Price, now a wanted fugitive because of some Modern Warfare 3 business that most people didn't see (the game acknowledges this by playing a lengthy recap video).

Modern Warfare 4 tries to explore a darker Price while replaying the hits—a car chase with shooting, a foot chase with jumping, a cinematic knife fight—but these sequences left my head as quickly as they ended. It's bizarre how different and less interesting this part of the game is, especially considering Price basically exits the story for the back half and never intersects with the real heroes.

It comes off as Infinity Ward checking boxes for the folks who are expecting Price stuff while also wanting, desperately, to do something else. This was billed as the conclusion of the Modern Warfare story that started in 2019, but in practice, it's more like a sprint to be done with it all. It's a shame they dragged Mads Mikkelsen into the bad parts of this one—he could've been a menacing presence in a campaign that actually had time to use him.

It speaks to the quality of this series lately that producing a regular campaign with extravagant setpieces, lavish cinematics, and basically great gunplay is a big win. Uncompromised by the influence of Warzone or Zombies, this is the first time in too long that Call of Duty's campaign does not feel like the afterthought.

The phrase 'RMA' is likely to send shivers down many a spine, especially when it concerns something like a graphics card. Returning a faulty component can often be a 'cross your fingers and hope for the best' kind of deal, so naturally I am pleasantly—very pleasantly—surprised to hear Asus has enough of a heart to not only give one lucky Redditor an upgrade but also get the colour right.

According to the Redditor's original post about the issue, they sent their white Asus ROG Strix RTX 4080 Super OC in for RMA and were sent back a black Asus TUF Gaming RTX 5080 when they discovered the former couldn't be repaired. That's a win, right? Well, not fully, because the Redditor wanted a white one, like their original RTX 4080 Super, to match their all-white build.

So, what's to be done about that? Naturally, asking for them to swap it: "After about 6 weeks of emails and escalating the case to higher-level management, Asus finally approved the exact card I asked for: the ROG Astral RTX 5080 White OC. I sent the TUF back, and they even upgraded the shipping to FedEx Standard Overnight at no extra cost. The card finally arrived!"

This is an RMA result, if ever I've seen one. It might seem a bit much, but to be honest if you have an all-white build and an expensive GPU that fails, I can see why it makes sense to at least attempt to get a replacement just right.

Funnily enough, I can speak to this very kind of issue with a much cheaper product. A few years ago, I sent my cream-coloured Sennheiser HD 599 headphones for RMA, and they sent back a new pair... except they were black, not the lovely cream colour I sent off. But being the non-confrontational and lazy weasel I am, I just accepted my fate, and those are the headphones I use to this day.

RTX 4080 vs RTX 5080 Super

Comparing the real-world gaming performance of the RTX 4080 and RTX 5080 Super at 1440p resolution, using upscaling and frame gen when possible.

Black Myth Wukong (1440p High + Upscaling (quality))Cyberpunk 2077 (1440p RT Ultra + upscaling (quality))F1 24 (1440p Ultra high +upscsaling (Quality), 2x FG)Homeworld 3 (1440p Epic + upscaling (quality))The Talos Principle 2 (1440p Ultra +upscaling (quality), 2x FG)

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

RTX 4080 Super

121

94

RTX 5080

132

116

037.575112.5150

Black Myth Wukong (1440p High + Upscaling (quality)) Data

Product	Value
RTX 4080 Super	121 Avg FPS, 94 1% Low FPS
RTX 5080	132 Avg FPS, 116 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

RTX 4080 Super

155

118

RTX 5080

189

123

050100150200

Cyberpunk 2077 (1440p RT Ultra + upscaling (quality)) Data

Product	Value
RTX 4080 Super	155 Avg FPS, 118 1% Low FPS
RTX 5080	189 Avg FPS, 123 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

RTX 4080 Super

223

161

RTX 5080

259

129

075150225300

F1 24 (1440p Ultra high +upscsaling (Quality), 2x FG) Data

Product	Value
RTX 4080 Super	223 Avg FPS, 161 1% Low FPS
RTX 5080	259 Avg FPS, 129 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

RTX 4080 Super

137

66

RTX 5080

136

62

037.575112.5150

Homeworld 3 (1440p Epic + upscaling (quality)) Data

Product	Value
RTX 4080 Super	137 Avg FPS, 66 1% Low FPS
RTX 5080	136 Avg FPS, 62 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

RTX 4080 Super

172

99

RTX 5080

203

94

075150225300

The Talos Principle 2 (1440p Ultra +upscaling (quality), 2x FG) Data

Product	Value
RTX 4080 Super	172 Avg FPS, 99 1% Low FPS
RTX 5080	203 Avg FPS, 94 1% Low FPS

The RTX 5080 performs at least as well as the RTX 4080 Super, and often noticeably better at 1440p.

To give just a glimpse of how difficult and frustrating RMAs can be, consider the fact that we recently discovered that a faded serial number could scupper your chances of being able to RMA your Founders Edition card. So yes, Asus swapping an RTX 5080 out just to get the colour right is pretty sweet. I can only assume the Redditor must have been very persistent. And fair enough, because it worked.

This is all on top of the performance improvement they received, too, of course. As you can see from the chart above, the RTX 5080 performs better than the RTX 4080 Super, and it has access to more of the latest and greatest DLSS tech. Just don't go breaking your 40-series cards and trying the same. Who knows what the RMA gods will have in store for future requesters.

The Linux kernel has dropped a rule, implemented in January this year, that required contributors submitting code to the project to explicitly declare any usage of AI tools in that code's creation.

At the start of this year, the Linux project added lines to its documentation noting that "When AI tools contribute to kernel development, proper attribution helps track the evolving role of AI in the development process… If you used any sort of advanced coding tool in the creation of your patch, you need to acknowledge that use by adding an Assisted-by tag." Now, as reported by The Register, the project's maintainers have decided the tag is no longer necessary, and it's been removed from the relevant docs.

Why? Well, to hear Linux creator and lead maintainer Linus Torvalds put it in response to concerns raised about the tag's removal by contributor Laurent Pinchart, because it doesn't really communicate anything of value about the code it's appended to.

"I don't understand this whole idiotic concept of 'don't use AI for X,'" Torvalds wrote in a post to the kernel mailing list. "The kind of expectations *I* have is that people do their best and I expect people to understand what they are doing. But that understanding has very little to do with what tools they use."

In other words, there's good code—which a creator knows well and understands—and bad code—which a creator has more or less barfed out—and both can be made with the help of AI tools. So in Torvalds' view, there's not really much value to forcing the disclosure of particular tools; it doesn't help Linux kernel maintainers sift the bad code from the good. At least, that's how I interpret Torvalds' statement.

Torvalds compared rules restricting or banning AI use in coding (which, to be clear, is not what the rule under discussion did) to hypothetical rules that restrict other, more venerable tools. "Here's a new rule just for you: don't use compilers for any of your kernel submissions," he suggested. "Because if you can't show that you really understand what the machine is actually doing by writing your code in assembler, then I don't want to see your code contribution. You clearly aren't competent if you can't write it that way.

"Do you not see how UTTERLY STUPID those kinds of rules would be? So no. We're not going to make stupid rules that say 'you can't use tools for X'".

It's not a surprising statement from Torvalds, who has generally been pretty positive about the uses of AI when it comes to coding (while lamenting the number of slop reports the kernel team now has to wade through). I doubt arguments like this will end any time soon, though, even with the input of Linux's benevolent dictator for life. Computing, and open-source especially, is still figuring out how to live in the world AI has brought us.

Microsoft has been maintaining two separate Windows options menus for generations now, but a new test project spotted and investigated by Windows Latest might pave the way for a single, discrete bit of software that can do it all. What looks like a new Windows Settings app has stealth dropped in on the Microsoft Store, and that alone might make it easier to update with new features and hopefully finally consolidate everything Control Panel does in one place.

Windows Latest discovered 'Project Odeon' in the Store, which shares the same icon as Windows Settings and resembles the usual Settings interface. Finding and installing the app apparently requires Windows 11 build 26100 or newer. I tried enabling developer mode and finding the app but I still couldn't see it, so perhaps it also requires you to be using an Insider build, or be based in a certain region.

It seems like there's a little bit of jank to the app at this point, as it shows different settings, unfinished pages, and some greyed out options, but that's to be expected for an early test application. Other areas, however, seem more extensive than the regular Settings app. For instance, towards the bottom of the Display settings page, you can see things such as your monitor's display path, HDR support, and SDR white levels.

WindowsLatest looked into the executables the app uses and calls on, and discovered the base executable can call on helper ones which require extra permissions to run. They seem to be modular add-ons related to tasks such as changing time zone or renaming the PC.

It's possible that Windows is simply using the Store for its testing of different functions for some specific reason and that none of this will translate to a discrete store-based Settings app. But it could also be that Settings eventually becomes an app store app, which would mean quicker and easier updates to it than having to wait for bona fide Windows Update.

Those who are still keen on using the Control Panel instead of the Settings app should also take heed, because the fact that more features and so on are being tested in something almost identical to the regular Settings app is just more sign that Microsoft is pulling away from Control Panel. To be clear, saying goodbye to Control Panel has been on the cards for at least a couple of years, now, and it doesn't look like Microsoft has changed its stance on migrating things over to the Settings app.

I'm personally okay with Microsoft moving everything from the Control Panel to Settings, provided the latter lets you do everything you could in the Control Panel, and that everything is easily accessible and suitably customisable. And to be fair to Microsoft, many of the changes to Windows 11 we've seen over the past few months have been pretty great.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 is releasing soon, but also features early access for many of its modes, including its campaign and the hotly anticipated revival of the DMZ extraction shooter.

To get early access to both the campaign and DMZ, you need to preorder the game digitally, otherwise, you'll be able to play on October 23. Activision hasn't revealed an exact time for the campaign early access unlock on the 16th, but the PC preload is already live.

There also hasn't been any official info about the DMZ early access release time on October 20. However, some sources predict it will be 10 am PT (1 pm ET/6 pm BST). What we do know is that:

• Modern Warfare 4 will release on October 23 at midnight local time, wherever you are.

You'll need 115GB for the game's storage and you can find the official system requirements to run it on the Steam page.

As we draw closer to the DMZ unlock and the full release, I'll update this article with any official time announcements that Activision drops.

In contrast, Epic's store "always feels sterile to me—you can complain about the Steam comments all you want … but, what they also do is they give the player a place in that world. They give the player actual agency and import and power inside of that ecosystem." Yeah, that tracks. The Steam forum is basically a replication of the horrors (and hilarity) of Barrens Chat, just with a few less Chuck Norris jokes.

Appealing to vibe coders, then, is a bizarre move, since "they have nothing" for people who just want a platform where they can play videogames. "It's nothing about community … And this is your store that you're complaining that Valve is unfairly competing against!

"When you fumble your announcement this badly, and you fumble what this is this badly, and you're gonna blame it on Gabe, like this is Gabe's fault? That you decided to make a jab at him and talk about vibe-coding and say that 'making a store is hard!'

"It's just bizarre to me, man. And I know a bunch of people I used to know there that were really smart about how to communicate and talk about this kind of thing, [they're] gone. And I think they're gone 'cause of little Timmy [whispering]: 'Make sure you make a jab at Gabe. Where should we put it, first paragraph? No. Second. Second, we'll be subtle. We'll be subtle. No-one will catch it."

To be honest, given how tumultuous the topic of AI has been in video gaming, it does smack as strange that Sweeney has gone so heavily in on it. Sentiment's not the same everywhere in the world, mind, but a good portion of gamers and developers both are a little exhausted by having an otherwise interesting bit of technology crammed into every single nook that'll fit it.

We are now in the second half of the most brutal war to play out on the pages of this venerable website—a war that will determine, through democracy and science, which RTS unit is the greatest of them all.

Two weeks ago, the conflict started with 16 units. Last week, eight survivors duked it out in the quarterfinals. Blood was shed and four more units were tossed into the void. It was tight—with two battles ending with the victor claiming only 10% more of the votes. My two faves, the noble Dolphin and humble Peon were killed off. I weep for these fallen heroes.

But there's no more time for sentimentality. Another battle is about to begin. Clean off the blood and get ready for the semifinals. It's time to choose which two units will be going head-to-head in the glorious final battle.

The semifinals bracket

During the quarterfinals, I made a prediction. One I was pretty confident about. But was I right?

I was pretty close, actually! The only one I got wrong was Peon, which has honestly shocked the hell out of me. In the first round, my sweet green boy utterly dominated the Glass Dragon, and it's been getting plenty of love in the comments. I did not expect to see it get knocked out by a tank. Just a tank! OK, it's probably unfair to call the indomitable Mammoth Tank "just a tank", but the Peon was robbed.

Clearly we've got some tank fans, but even more Star Destroyer fans. The sneaky Mirage Tank, another of my favourites, was blown to smithereens by Darth Vader's Executor Super Star Destroyer. When you've got that many turbolasers blasting at you, pretending to be a tree ain't gonna do you any good.

Spaceships are clearly doing well. The Pride of Hiigara was up against a bunch of horseboys, and unsurprisingly one of the most iconic videogame ships around triumphed over a bunch of lads who love a gymkhana.

I knew it was coming, but it still hurts to see the brave, noble Dolphin getting taken out by the Priest—a thief and a trickster who can't fight his own battles. In the war between nature (because what is more natural than a weaponised aquatic mammal who can destroy ships with sonic blasts?) and organised religion, organised religion won. A tragedy.

Anyway! That's all in the past now. We're down to four combatants, and your votes will determine who goes into the final. You'll have until the end of Tuesday (BST) to make your picks, but otherwise there are no rules. This is not a case of "Who would win in a fight?" unless you want it to be. Maybe you just think the Priest looks sexy in those robes, or you're broadly pro-Sith and must show the Star Destroyer some love. Right, let's get fighting!

Mammoth Tank vs Pride of Hiigara

Mammoth Tank (Command and Conquer: Red Alert)

God bless these great, trundling beasts—implacable Soviet strength wrought in steel and pig iron.

Mammoth Tanks are unfathomably costly and painfully slow, but whatever. I'm convinced just one of them could probably win the entire RA1 Soviet campaign by itself. Akh-knowledged. —Joshua Wolens, News Writer

Pride of Hiigara (Homeworld 2)

While other ships are spitting out missiles and other little projectiles, the Homeworld Mothership is spitting out capital ships. It is both a unit and your base—an impossibly huge mobile factory that can carry your whole fleet inside of it. Its direct offensive capabilities are extremely limited, but like I said: It can spit out capital ships.

I've picked the Kushan/Hiigaran version specifically because of its iconic design, which for me is right up there with the Enterprise D and Star Destroyers. While it's largely stationary in the original Homeworld (at least in the campaign), it's fully mobile in Homeworld 2, giving it an extra dose of utility. —Fraser Brown, Online Editor

Super Star Destroyer vs Priest

Executor Super Star Destroyer (Star Wars: Empire at War)

My colleagues have, for some reason, chosen to prioritize things like "funny voice lines" and "subtext" while proposing their favorite RTS units. Sorry, gang: you're about to get crushed by 19 kilometers of steel and turbolasers.

This enormous Death Triangle is the ultimate wish fulfilment vessel in Empire at War, one of my favorite Star Wars games. It's not a top-tier RTS, but it is top-tier Star Wars fantasy in game form, letting you move around a bunch of little toy ships and play out the "what if" of throwing Rogue Squadron's ace pilots up against a Star Destroyer. They've got a real chance in that fight, but not against the Executor, Darth Vader's personal ride.

The damn thing is practically the size of Manhattan, and you can really feel that scale in the game. It makes regular Star Destroys look like Doritos by comparison. It's swimming with so many turbolaser batteries it can bully an entire Rebel fleet by itself. Don't even try that A-Wing trick against it—that sort of nonsense only works in the movies. —Wes Fenlon, Senior Editor

Priest (Age of Empires)

"Wololo." I win. —Jody Macgregor, Weekend Editor

As part of an interview that I conducted with Peter Molyneux in Guildford recently, a wide-reaching chat that covered everything from Molyneux's final game, Masters of Albion, and its new game-changing update, through to the origin of Black & White's famous titan creatures, I also asked the veteran designer why a third Black & White game has never been made.

Fans of the Black & White series like myself and countless other PC gamers (Black & White is currently top of GOG's most-wanted remaster list) have been desperate for a new release, be that a remaster of one of the original games or a brand-new third game, so the fact that it has now been 20 years since the Black & White 2: Battle of the Gods expansion was released is pretty dispiriting. But is there hope for fans of the series?

My reading of these comments is that they ring true and are entirely unsurprising—especially that god games are seen as a small piece of pie by publishers. Any gamer who has followed the gaming industry for the last 10-20 years will have seen how the major publishers have coalesced around, and increasingly bet the farm on, just a few genres and business models, the most infamous being live-service. Those bets, for most, have now proven to be massive follies, with countless epic failures (Skull & Bones, Concord, Suicide Squad, Anthem, Marvel's Avengers, Redfall, MultiVersus, and APB: All Points Bulletin, to name but a few) leading to, literally, billions of dollars being flushed down the pan.

Why spend money on making a new god game, one that will require a dev team to really get to grips with a variety of bespoke, complex, interconnected systems, in order to make a profit, when instead you can just try to make your own version of Fortnite and make a mega profit? Or, as real gaming industry history has shown, actually make a mega loss. Getting a god game project greenlit, even a sequel to one of the most beloved god game series ever made, was likely next to impossible. In this light, it feels remarkable that Masters of Albion is now a reality, even in Early Access, and it is likely only due to Molyneux's pedigree as the father of the genre.

A tantalising teaser for Black & White fans

Just when I thought this part of the interview was petering out into disappointment, with any new Black & White release still stuck in gaming limbo, Molyneux dropped a potentially bombshell piece of news for god game fans.

Now, obviously, Molyneux's studio doesn't own Black & White anymore, and he's not connected with EA or Microsoft now, either. He's clearly not involved in the project. And he also only says he thinks a remaster is in the works, not that it definitely is, so I think it is important to take this comment with a pinch of salt. However, this would be huge news if true. As noted above, Black & White is the number one game on GOG's wishlist, and one of the greatest (if not the greatest) god games of all time. So a well-done remaster would be superb.

If the remaster sells well, which I'm sure it would, it could also potentially open the door for a new game in the series. Right now, that feels quite far-fetched, but a remaster would at least inch us closer to it becoming a reality. I'll keep my fingers crossed, as a return of Black & White's famous creatures (potentially powered by new powerful AI?!) would be awesome.

In the meantime, though, I'll be digging further into Masters of Albion's New Beginnings update, which has really taken Molyneux's last god game to a whole new level. It's also teased its own possible titans, too, so there's plenty to be getting stuck into while I wait for more Black & White news.

I've never been stung by Amazon, but I've heard enough stories for it to be a worry. Amazon can take returns and list them again as new products if they pass inspection, which can open the door for scammers if something slips through inspection. And it's tales of this happening with expensive components that really give me the heebie jeebies, such as what seems to have happened to one Redditor with the incredibly expensive AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2.

The picture they share shows what are supposed to be two Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 chips, but they look different. The pin layout on the underside is different, and on the top there is a distinct lack of caps jutting out from under the integrated heat spreader (IHS).

Those familiar with AMD chips will know that that lack of capacitors on top is a giveaway that it's not, in fact, a new Ryzen chip under the IHS—those caps, or surface-mount device (SMD) components, are never bundled in the middle and never on the underside. Another giveaway, therefore, is that the underside of the fake chip features all that SMD gubbins bundled in the centre, which is a feature of Intel chips, not AMD ones.

What has most likely happened here, just as the top Reddit comment says, is someone has probably delidded a Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 and stuck an old Intel CPU under the Ryzen IHS. The smudging/wearing of the text on top of the fake chip probably occurred during the delidding process.

For someone who doesn't know a lot about CPUs and components, this might have been difficult to spot in part because for quite some time now Intel chips have been rectangular rather than square. Someone giving a chip a quick glance without knowledge of the pin and cap situation might just see the naming, the eight IHS jut-outs, and the square shape, and assume it's good to go.

One would hope that inspections would usually catch something like this, though, given the differences are far from subtle if you know anything about AMD and Intel chips.

We've seen likely Amazon return scams like this before, such as for memory. This particular one with the fake Ryzen chip is no small deal given how expensive the 9950X3D2 is. It's currently retailing for $889 at Amazon. I'd be unhappy with having this happen to any processor I bought, but especially one that's pushing $1,000. Hopefully Amazon sorts it out for the Redditor.

US Representative Ritchie Torres, a Democrat from New York City, announced today that he will introduce the "Power To The Players Act."

If it becomes law, the bill will see the US Federal Trade Commission create regulations that protect our "ability to own and play" purchased games, according to Torres' office.

"When you pay for a game, you should own it," says Torres. "Consumers must have the right to own, the right to play, and the right to transfer the games they buy. A game that can be taken away the moment a company pulls the plug is not a purchase. It is a rental disguised as a sale."

The game ownership issue is longstanding on PC, which moved to digital distribution a couple decades ago, but has recently come to the foreground of public consciousness as the consoles also transition away from discs. Earlier this year, Sony announced that it will end physical disc production in 2028.

The related problem of online games being decommissioned before players are done with them has also received more attention in recent years. The Stop Killing Games campaign in particular has raised the issue's profile, arguing that basic offline functionality should be expected when online games are retired. Founder Ross Scott and organizer Moritz Katzner gained an audience with the European Parliament earlier this year.

As one of its prime examples of the problem, Stop Killing Games has pointed to The Crew, a Ubisoft racing game which went offline in 2024, preventing those who purchased it from continuing to play even the singleplayer campaign.

The aim of the Power To The Players Act is to establish and enforce a more genuine ownership of purchased games, as opposed to the revocable licenses we currently buy, and to require that offline modes be made available before online games are shut down.

For DRM-free games, such as those purchased from GOG, ownership is a non-issue: Once you have the game files, you can back them up and use them for as long as you can find a PC that'll run them. Realistically, the FTC is not going to mandate the eradication of software copy protection, so if passed the bill would presumably arrive at a softer definition of ownership.

I've reached out to Rep Torres' office for more information on what enforcement of the bill is expected to look like, should it pass.

Valve has pushed a new update to its Steam client beta introducing big changes to how achievements work and how they're displayed. Developers can now create sets of achievements customized to their game, like mastering a specific character class or finishing a singleplayer campaign. Sets also distinguish base game achievements from separate DLC and seasonal sets.

Previously if you unlocked all achievements for a game you'd see a nice 'n' tidy 100% in your achievements list. But if that game got DLC with new achievements, that 100% would drop accordingly. I can understand why achievement heads would be annoyed by this: what if you have no intention of playing the DLC, but want to retain 100% completion bragging rights? This update fixes that, assuming devs use it.

It's a similar situation for seasonal achievements, which I can see working well with battle passes. The example Valve uses is a set called "Halloween Event Achievements" which are valid for a certain period and don't affect the achievement count of the base game. In other words: if you have the completionist itch but skip a season, it won't affect your base game stats.

All these changes have prompted a refresh of the achievements page. Most achievements info is now displayed on a single page: your progress towards overall completion, and your progress towards unlocking individual achievements.

I especially like that you can now directly compare achievements with up to three friends at once, which is what's being displayed at the bottom of the above image. This has been a feature on PlayStation consoles for a while, and so has separate sets for DLC achievements. It's nice that Valve has caught up.

Naturally, not every game on Steam will have implemented this new system yet, but the following games have:

• Against the Storm
• Age of Wonders 4
• American Truck Simulator
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4
• Crusader Kings III
• DREDGE
• Euro Truck Simulator 2
• Forza Horizon 5
• Flock Around
• He is Coming
• LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight
• Left 4 Dead 2
• Portal 2
• PowerWash Simulator
• PowerWash Simulator 2
• Team Fortress 2
• Victoria 3

This system is still in beta, but you can sign up for the Client Beta or just wait: as we saw with Steam's new screensaver feature, betas normally only last around a month.

Life comes at you fast, as the saying goes, and the folks at RuneScape developer Jagex can sure attest to that. Less than two weeks after announcing RuneScape Reignited—essentially a way for new and lapsed players to restart their adventures from fresh on separate, unique servers—the studio has decided to cancel it.

There was trouble with RuneScape Reignited almost right from the start, with complaints ranging from a potential community split to restrictions on character interactions and the need to pay for a separate subscription. Just a few days after the initial announcement, Jagex apologized for making veteran players feel like they were being shunted aside, and said it was "exploring a heavy set of revisions to Reignited based on your feedback."

A few days after that, it laid out a more specific list of intended alterations, and invited more feedback from players, "so we can follow up next week with more of our thoughts." With that feedback now received, it seems that Jagex has heard enough.

"It is clear that we missed the mark on this, and so we are not moving forward with it," Mod Ryan—associate creative director Ryan Philpott—said in a blog post announcing the cancellation. "Our goal is to see Runescape grow again, with returning players coming back and new players joining, but never at the expense of our existing community."

It's a very sudden about-face, but not unprecedented. In 2023, for instance, Jagex dropped a new RuneScape battle pass in the wake of massive player backlash; in 2025, the studio scrapped "Treasure Hunter" microtransactions, in what Jagex CEO Jon Bellamy said was "part of a wider transformation across Jagex, which is seeing a renewed commitment to delivering deeper value, greater fairness and long-term improvements for players."

It hasn't been entirely smooth sailing: Recent price hikes have not gone over well (no surprise there, though), and Jagex's cowardly decision to scrap in-game Pride Month events was allowed to stand despite players absolutely mauling the studio for it. But in terms of gameplay, at least, Jagex has demonstrated a willingness to react with relative haste when it's blown things sufficiently badly—and this definitely qualifies.

Despite the cancellation, Philpott invited new and returning players to jump into the game with a 10 day free trial beginning on December 2, which will offer full access to all worlds and content. The 2027 roadmap for RuneScape also remains in place:

"The future of RuneScape is still extremely bright," Philpott concluded. "RuneScape will always be built for and defined by its community. So please keep letting us know when you feel we're getting it wrong and shout with that same energy when you think we're getting it right too."

Attention fellow base-building ghouls and survival masochists, I've got good news and bad news. Starting with the good: Some of the best survival crafting games are no longer in early access, and have hit their 1.0 milestones. The bad news? Three of them piled into the same one-month window.

I've seen a million posts all asking the same advice: "Should I get Valheim, RuneScape Dragonwilds, or Enshrouded first?" And as someone who can't stop sinking hundreds of hours into mining the same three types of rock, I'm qualified enough to help you decide. I've also recruited my colleague, Chris Livingston, who is always up to in-game riffraff resulting in funny animal encounters or injuries like some sort of bizarre, survival-crafting Jeff Corwin.

Comparing Valheim, Dragonwilds, and Enshrouded

We've got our own opinions on who's who among the recent survival crafting 1.0 launches, but maybe you just need something to compare features before getting into recommendations. It's by no means everything included across all three games, but here's a quick comparison of the differences and similarities between features and default settings in Valheim, RuneScape: Dragonwilds, and Enshrouded.

Valheim vs Enshrouded vs RuneScape: Dragonwilds

Valheim vs Enshrouded vs Dragonwilds: Our picks

I had such high hopes for the Street Fighter movie: The trailers were so promising, the cast so charismatic, and it seemed to get the inherent ridiculousness of the franchise, playing it seriously without ever really taking it too seriously. I mean, you don't put a guy like David Dastmalchian in the role of M. Bison unless you expect him to do something with it, right?

Alas, it seems that this may be a real Tuesday, at least for my Street Fighter movie aspirations. The reviews are in, and they are not especially kind. Street Fighter isn't a complete catastrophe, according to the critical consensus, but I don't think JCVD has to worry about having to turn in his "Best Street Fighter Movie" trophy anytime soon, either.

Here's what they're saying:

"Dumber than a box of rocks, but have you ever thrown rocks at things? It can be pretty fun"

IGN: 6/10

The story is too thin to support its bloated roster, but IGN reckons the Street Fighter film is "all about landing as many punches as it can before the round timer hits zero. Even though there are plenty of misses, the ones it does manage to land hit hard."

"A garish and incoherent mess that amuses in fits and starts but barely improves on the Mortal Kombat movies before it"

The Guardian: 2/5

Fans might enjoy the new SF flick, and the performances are "likeable," but its repeated self-knowing acknowledgment of how silly it all is "would land better if the movie ever rose above the stuff it’s making fun of. Instead, Street Fighter is satisfied punching down on itself, and everything that’s cringe about the '90s, while happily being stuck there, in the past, so it could pretend that this is as good as it gets for videogame adaptations."

"Not a great adaptation of what is one of the most recognizable brands in all of gaming"

Collider: 6/10

"The movie is at its most fun when it truly locks in for those high-octane fights and the surprisingly beautiful and not-much-publicized animated sequences," Collider reviewer Aidan Kelley wrote. "Unfortunately, to get to those, you have to deal with a lot of exposition and unengaging character drama."

"One of the most overtly mixed bags of any movie this year"

ScreenRant: 7/10

Despite calling Street Fighter "a fundamentally flawed movie on an underlying storytelling level," ScreenRant's review is one of the more positive takes floating around out there: The film is "buoyed by the overall 'go for broke' tone" and director Kitao Sakurai's "great work helming the film, working with the cast and crew to deliver consistently entertaining fight scenes that are flush with personality and style."

"Like a trip to a ’90s mall arcade, Street Fighter’s pretty fun — for about 30 minutes"

ScreenCrush: 5/10

"The sheer absurdity and fevered intensity of the pacing, not to mention some very athletic fight choreography, is good enough to carry things along through the jittery first act," reviewer Matt Singer wrote for ScreenCrush. "But you can only mainline caffeine for so long before it starts to give you a headache."

"A campy '90s nostalgia ride and a complete mess"

Associated Press: 1/4

Street Fighter is a "very enthusiastic, weirdly convoluted and jumbled mess of a movie," Jake Coyle wrote for AP. As much as you might think a Street Fighter movie, good or bad, would at least offer up some bluntly entertaining hand-to-hand combat, it’s so messily plotted and chaotically conceived that it makes a game with six buttons seem comparatively artful."

"Dull fight scenes and tonal whiplash make this mostly forgettable videogame adaptation work only for superfans"

The Film Verdict

Street Fighter "is a little bit of everything that amounts to a lot of not-much," The Film Verdict declared, comparing it unfavorably to this year's Mortal Kombat and Resident Evil flicks: Street Fighter has all the elements that made those films successful, "but never lands on a formula than functions."

"I’m not sure Street Fighter meets any conventional standard of quality, but it’s undeniably its own thing"

The Wrap

This review takes a more holistic approach to Street Fighter, calling it "an action-packed, hyper-stylized, borderline-nonsensical fever dream with a central storyline that begs to be taken seriously" despite being goofy, horny, largely incoherent, and somehow "even weirder" than the 1990s movie. But hey, maybe that's your thing: As reviewer William Bibbiani wrote, "What even is a 'good movie' anyway?"

"A jumbled tonal mess that feels deadly serious one moment and like parody the next"

The Hollywood Reporter

"Featuring so many characters and elements from the games that non-aficionados are left desperately attempting to keep up, Street Fighter tries to thread the needle between fan service and welcoming the uninitiated," THR says. "The result is that neither camp is likely to be fully satisfied."

"Not even close to coherent, but it does have some good fight scenes"

Gizmodo

Gizmodo's review says the Street Fighter film is a bit like its portrayal of Ken Masters, an oafish clown who can actually fight: "The editing choices, scene transitions, and even the basic plot are frequently baffling. And yet, it can throw a punch when it wants to."

"The closest any filmmaker has come to bringing the franchise’s signature verve and bombast to the big screen"

Inverse

In another relatively positive review, Inverse declares that "Street Fighter might not be a film that sticks in your brain for days afterwards, but while you’re in your seat it feels like a shot of adrenaline to the arm, the kind that you might get from hearing the coveted 'You Win' announcement after the end of a hard-fought match."

"Something goes terribly awry in its back half, hinting at either a troubled production, or one that was doomed from the start"

Variety

Variety was impressed by Street Fighter's strong start, but says the wheels come off in the second half: "It’s a film at war with itself, in which a straightforward narrative about strained brotherhood is spread far too thin across unconnected snippets of action and comedy that grow increasingly disparate."

So there you have it: Not a disaster, but definitely a mess. We'll hopefully have our own critical take on the Street Fighter film up eventually, if we can ever talk Mollie Taylor into going to see it; in the meantime, if you've seen it, let us know what you think.

The developers of World of Warcraft: Forever, the venerable MMO's newest 'Classic+' flavor, say that even though the level cap is staying at 60, there will always be new gear to chase, and lower level gear has never been more powerful.

Blizzard Entertainment developers are wary of the drastic increases in power in WoW's modern version, including the recent Midnight expansion, which render previous seasons of gear irrelevant, require massive resets between expansions and lead to periodic stat "squishes" to avoid players becoming omnipotent gods.

"Classic wasn't far off from this," vice president and senior game director Ion Hazzikostas said of Forever's approach in a recent PC Gamer interview. "It's gradual. Going from [Classic raids] Blackwing Lair to Ahn'Qiraj that's actually only a couple of item levels higher. Those two largely coexist. C'thun drops are probably better than anything in Blackwing Lair, but that's like one or two items per player. This is a system that can last for a long, long time."

Associate production director Clay Stone says that's part of what makes gear in Forever—and Classic—meaningful.

"Your best-in-slot that you pick up from a previous raid tier may continue to be your best in slot for a long time. It's very much our intention to try wherever we can to not invalidate old content."

Then again, a long time isn't expected to be literally forever, Hazzikostas says.

"At some point, if you're running the Barrow Deeps raid that's coming out in December, you're going to have all the items that you want. That's fine. You're done with it."

Forever players will see gear progress at level 60: those modest item level increases, gear that's good in specific niche situations, and rare "chase" pieces should keep people hunting, Forever developers say.

An item might be especially powerful when fighting in a desert, or against a dragon, for example, making it particularly good in one especially tough fight.

(And yes, players, developers are aware that this means bag space will be at a premium. "We're already thinking about that," principal designer Kris Zierhut says, mentioning the ideas of more bank space, trinket bags or even garment bags to hold the excess.)

Un-solving the game

Forever launches on November 4, and so far players have seen few of the pieces that will entice them at the end game. The current level cap in the beta is 30, and future items have been hidden from view and datamining to keep them guessing.

"We resurrected some old tech that keeps item stats and properties and tooltips secret, unknown to the client, until the item has actually been obtained by someone on the server," Hazzikostas says. "That's something we can use in modern WoW if we want."

Essentially a flag on items determines whether they are known, making them visible in the game's data. It trips when someone discovers an item for the first time, making sure that if the player links the item to others, it doesn't cause bugs

But until that moment, players can't get a sneak peek at what the piece of gear does. It's one reason why Forever doesn't have an Adventure Guide for dungeons; developers want the game to keep its secrets.

"Every single boss in our raids has some items that are very low percentage drop chase items, kind of like the Dragonspine Trophy was in Gruul's Lair—but for every boss," says Zierhut. "It might be three weeks, four weeks before somebody sees that item drop, and the whole meta is torn up again."

The goal is to keep the magic of exploration alive, he says.

"The goal is to un-solve the game, so players have to figure out again what's the best path," Zierhut says. "They don't know what the best items are. They don't know what to get. It's back to 2004 and nobody knows anything and figuring it out all over again."

Hand-crafted power

To add a layer of complexity—and, again, keep players from gaining power too quickly—items deliberately aren't optimized for players' preferred classes and stats. "Our items are much more idiosyncratic, and you don't get exactly what you want," he says, noting that knowing your class and choosing between gear sets will be one way players express skill in Forever. "None of the gear is perfect."

That's an old strategy—there are oft-discussed items from WoW's original launch that put strength on cloth gear, for example—but what is new is how much power items can have at a relatively low level.

Both low-level drops and crafted gear are powerful early, and that's on purpose, developers say.

"A lot of times tradeskills felt like an afterthought in Classic. Like, 'Oh, I could craft this item, but it's too much work and I'm about to out-level it anyway. Skip it. I'll level up my tailor when I get to level 60,' " Zierhut says. "I made a deliberate effort to make more crafting recipes worthwhile to craft while you are leveling up, including lowering the skill requirement to craft them.

"The typical item from tailoring, leatherworking, blacksmithing requires 25 fewer skill points than it used to. So you'll be able to craft that item right around the time it's your best-in-slot at that level and get the real value out of doing it."

Much of the tuning done so far to gear in Forever's beta has been to keep that idea of modest but steady progression across the whole leveling process.

"It's just a slightly different gradient in terms of power level," lead game designer Tim Jones says.

Remedy announced today that Control Resonant has surpassed one million copies sold, moving past Alan Wake 2 to become "the fastest-selling game in Remedy Entertainment's 31-year history."

Thank you for the support ❤️ For playing, sharing, and being a part of the community.#CONTROLResonant

— @remedygames.com (@remedygames.com.bsky.social) 2026-10-15T18:14:33.049Z

Three weeks to a million copies isn't exactly a blistering pace by conventional videogame standards: The Blood of Dawnwalker hit the mark in three days, Wardogs did it in one, and Subnautica 2 put out twice that number in just 12 hours.

But despite producing a string of unique, memorable, and critically acclaimed games, Remedy has never really smashed a massive home run in the sales department. Even Alan Wake 2, which won numerous awards for narrative and art direction in 2023 (and would have claimed so many more if not for the Baldur's Gate 3 behemoth) took two months to sell a million copies, significantly outpacing the original Control and making it the studio's fastest-selling game at that time.

Remedy's more pressing problem, though, is profit: It took more than a year, and two million copies sold, before Alan Wake 2 actually started making money for Remedy. Addressing that shortcoming was the top priority for Jean-Charles Gaudechon, who took over as the company's new CEO in February: Remedy chairman Henri Österlund said at the time that Gaudechon's appointment was intended "to lead Remedy into a phase of profitable growth."

So far, Gaudechon seems to like what he sees from Control Resonant, calling the million-sold mark "a very strong start."

"Control Resonant is Remedy's first self-published release of this scale, launched into one of the most competitive windows in years alongside the industry's biggest names. The game is unmistakably Remedy, with the bold ideas and distinctive style our players have come to expect from us," Gaudechon said. "A huge thank you goes to our players and to the team, who have made Control Resonant the incredible game that it is.

"We have always believed Control deserved an even bigger audience, and this launch shows what's possible: we see the game connecting with long-time fans while bringing a significant number of new players into the world of Control, which strengthens its long-term potential. With Control and Alan Wake, we now have two established franchises. Our focus is to build on what makes them special, support them, and grow them even further. There is a lot more to come from these worlds."

We'll get a closer look on how Control Resonant's success has impacted Remedy's bottom line in Remedy's Q3 business review, which takes place on November 3.