The game whose full name I forget and have to copy-paste every time—here goes, it's called Rizz Dungeon: Skeleton Key to My Heart—was scheduled to release on September 17. It's been delayed until next year because developer Snoozy Kazoo's previous games—hang on, let me warm up Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V again—Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion and Turnip Boy Robs a Bank have sold better than expected. Now Snoozy Kazoo can afford to make Rizz Dungeon the game they really wanted it to be from the start.

"This delay allows us to both add more content and avoid crunch. As a tiny studio of five people, there were quite a few features (and Monster Girls!) we were cutting in order to hit this September 17th release date, and we were starting to crunch to ensure this game was something we were proud of," says Snoozy Kazoo's founder and director Yukon Wainczak. "While we understand the delay likely comes as a disappointment, we hope that you can be reassured by the fact that we are making a better—and healthier made—Rizz Dungeon with this delay."

Rizz Dungeon is an RPG about exploring a dungeon to get loot from a dragon, only the dragon is your ex-girlfriend and the loot is all the stuff she took. Also, you have put all your points into Charisma instead of combat stats and have to charm your way out of fights until you can recruit monster girls to handle the fighting for you. It sounds kind of like Pokémon if the creatures you were collecting were hot. (If you think Pokémon are hot already I don't want to know about it.)

Given that September still has—don't give up on me now, copy-paste friends—The Blood of Dawnwalker, Onimusha: Way of the Sword, Silent Hill: Townfall, and a bunch of other games coming out, and I'll probably still be playing Star Wars: Zero Company as well, it's going to be a busy month. Probably a good thing Dawn of War 4 has also shifted out of September, though presumably in that case it's not to add more monster girls. (If you think necrons are hot I don't want to know about that either.)

Back in February Epic Games told us about its plan to overhaul the Epic launcher, with an update in June mentioning it would start up five times faster on average. That technical overhaul will apparently be accompanied by changes to the storefront including personalized game recommendations, quick-access categories, and patch notes right there on the shop. All stuff that would have been nice to have at the end of 2018 when the Epic launcher arrived, but is it too late for a recovery? I asked Emmanuel Rosier, director of market intelligence at industry analysts Newzoo.

"I don't really see how they can turn that around," Rosier says, "because Steam has become so inevitable. The Epic Games Store, they get players by giving free games, but people just go, they log in, they get the free games, they don't even play them. You know, it's almost like collecting games rather than actually playing them."

On a sample size of one I am the person who actually plays some of the free games I've been given by Epic over the years, and without that program I probably wouldn't have tried Guardians of the Galaxy, Ghostwire: Tokyo, Vampyr, Control, Assassin's Creed Syndicate, or Kardboard Kings. But whether most people play them or not, it's telling that a free giveaway can actually boost sales on Steam, as it did for Blood West, thanks to players not wanting to split their library.

"The challenge I think Epic is facing is that they try to win everywhere in the past few years," Rosier says. "They try to win against Steam, they try to win against Apple, against Google Play, and probably they run out of steam on where they cannot fight all these battles at the same time."

Rosier is more positive about the outlook for Epic as a game developer than as a storefront. "They probably need to focus on what really matters," he says, "which I think is Fortnite. You can see they put a lot of thought in Fortnite right now. They are doing everything they can, and I think it's working better when you look at the state of Fortnite today compared to six months or one year ago."

One shift in Fortnite has been a bigger push to incorporate cosmetics based on other companies' videogames. While Epic's own games and those of games that launched as exclusives like Borderlands 3 have a history of showing up in Fortnite, now you look at the current season and see Sonic the Hedgehog, Pac-Man, Crash Bandicoot, and Mega Man have joined the roster alongside Sora from Kingdom Hearts and Joker from Persona 5.

"I think that's an important trend I see with Fortnite," Rosier says, "they are not afraid of other games." If it continues, expect to see less popstars and more platformer mascots. "It's funny because it's a gaming platform that's not even competing any more with other games. Because if you are launching a game, it makes sense to do some marketing within Fortnite. I was thinking, I'm almost surprised that GTA 6 is not doing an event in Fortnite to show the trailer, you know? Why not at this point?"

Rosier's also positive about recent additions to Fortnite like the collectible "sprites" that give players something else to do ("It's not about winning that much; it's about completing your collection of sprites," he says), but remains less optimistic about Epic's future as a competitor to Steam. "If you look at the Epic Games Store, I don't see how they can recover at this point."

Full disclosure, here—Stars Reach is, in my humble opinion, a bit of a mess. It's an MMO headed up by Raph Koster, who knows what he's doing on account of his involvement in Ultima Online and, more relevant to the game at hand, Star Wars: Galaxies, and it released into early access this week to the price point of almost $30 (£28).

Stars Reach tries to follow in SWG's vein of being a socially-driven MMO with a huge array of skills you can train. The vision is a galactic society where being a dancer or a journalist is just as viable a playstyle as, say, going outdoors and gunning some beasties down.

I say the "vision", because Stars Reach isn't quite there yet. In fact, it makes a god-awful first impression, starting with a brief stint in a tutorial zone to get you accustomed to your tools—a terraformer, a scanner, a harvester, a gun, and a deeply janky grappling hook.

By far, the most interesting part of these mechanics is the terraformer—which lets you dig into the fully malleable earth and spit out the terrain you've mined. Everything else is deeply so-so. The scanner's a hot/cold beeping system to help build out your map, and the gunplay is… ah, you shoot things and they die. None of it feels particularly good.

The issue—aside from the raft of crusty UI issues and unfinished icons—is what the game does to you next. You're plonked on a rather bland-looking space station and encouraged to go and grab a few missions, of which you can only snap up a handful. These are randomly-generated and dull as driftwood, but they at least get you used to the core mechanics and how you could feasibly use them.

It's during one of these that I'm given a perfect encapsulation of why Stars Reach and its unfinished state is a problem. The first mission I took to dig my way to a drone was cut short, because I discovered that the ground I was mining was sandy, meaning that any hole I dug was immediately filled in by the small hill next to the area I was mining. To be clear, the terrain simulation going on here is actually really neat—if I was digging harder materials, I wouldn't be having the same problem.

'Cool!' I thought, and then I wondered if I could maybe work on some digging XP to outpace the landslides I was causing—only to find out that entire chunks of the mining tree, including mining speed upgrades, were slapped with a big "WIP" sticker.

This is a major problem for Stars Reach, because a lot of the more interesting skill trees (such as acting, dancing, politics, and journalism—yes, really) are still works in progress. That's not to say the systems underpinning them are absent entirely (more on that later), but in terms of first impressions, having only the brass tacks available for players to explore is a serious problem.

Then there's the way navigation works. If you want to explore other planets—which pop up and are culled based on whether or not anyone's maintaining them—you need to slowly float your space-suited self through a dull void to get there, as spaceships aren't in the game yet. And chances are (especially this early) that there won't be anything on said planets to begin with.

Meet with the Mayor

I was, legitimately, ready to turn up my nose and simply drop Stars Reach with the summation that it was released still in the cradle—and I almost did, were it not for vague recollections of Raph Koster telling me about the societies players had built during playtesting.

I hit up Discord, and eventually found this website from the in-game coalition Galactic Union of Natural Conservation, or GUNC. It pointed me in the direction of their chosen planet, and upon arriving, the actual juice behind Stars Reach unfolded in front of me.

I saw about a dozen players milling around a stack of crates, and—doing something very scary, I decided to walk up and start asking questions. It was then I had discovered that, eager to rebuild their society from earlier playtests, GUNC was laying the groundwork to do just that—ferrying a huge heap of supplies from other planets and allocating tasks to their little community.

This involved zoning a section of the planet and, moreover, organising the work needed to actually do its namesake mission of conserving creatures by electing its mayor—something you can already do in-game with something called a GovBot, despite the politics tree being under construction.

GUNC has to have trained xenobiologists go out and find Makers (which are typically-invisible servitors that spawn wildlife) and then lay claim to the land around them to protect them with the raw power of planet-side bureaucracy. As I needled the duly-elected mayor of planet GUNC with questions, I also noticed an emerging fashion trend of something called hive glasses, which the local tailor (also a player) was supplying them with.

This is where the friction in my heart comes in: Stars Reach is a deeply unfinished game that is, in my humble opinion, charging way too much for the janky first impression it makes—but the unfinished (yet intricate) web of systems that underpins it is clearly compelling, because otherwise GUNC wouldn't be there.

I genuinely felt like I'd played two separate games—one of them was an eerily lonely, aimless random mission generator, and the other was a jolly cooperative builder that did legitimately charm me, as the good mayor fielded my questions alongside someone roleplaying an ex-anarchist who just wanted to make friends, and a big, fluffy man in a silly hat who was politely asking where he could set up camp so he didn't interfere with GUNC's zoning plans.

The major issue? I had to go out of my way to find these people doing cool things—rifling through a Discord, going on a fanmade site—rather than organically being directed to these UGC zones through a better overworld system. If anything, the mission boards feel like a flat misstep that give players the wrong idea about what the game is trying to do.

Stars Reach should be doing everything in its power to bring you into contact with other players from the get-go—because that's clearly where its passionate and invested community finds its fun. What it's doing right now is asking you 30 whole bucks for access and punting you towards its least flattering, least finished parts.

I dearly hope it can manage a turnaround, because I want the idealised version of Stars Reach to exist—for the sake of its most invested players, more than anything. But it absolutely needs a ton of work before it gets there. And while there's a detailed and active roadmap on the game's site, right now? It's got too much space to grow.

South of Midnight was one of 2025's seemingly innumerable highlights—in their 83% review, evergreen writer Andrea Shearon called it "a Deep South delight drenched in superstition and pain." If you've been holding off but nonetheless rooting for the award-winning studio behind it, Compulsion Games, now's a great time to dive in: it's independent again after a lengthy stay under the Xbox Game Studios banner.

After rumors of closure came in the wake of Xbox's most recent layoff-heavy bloodbath, Compulsion announced it'd be leaving Microsoft instead and pursuing other partnerships. On Thursday, CEO Guillaume Provost explained to GamesBeat that "the management buyout is complete and that it owns its original intellectual property games again, as Microsoft has transferred the IP back to Compulsion Games," according to the article. "Provost said management has acquired the studio and staff as well."

Granted, if you happened to be avoiding games by Microsoft-owned studios because of the BDS boycott protesting the roles of various corporations in Israel's ongoing genocide of Palestinians, this particular game and others like it were already excepted by some advocates. No Games For Genocide named it as a possible exception due to its indie-like production scale and "themes of black liberation" in its FAQ, saying "it’s worth putting our time, energy and efforts into building mass boycotts for the larger titles."

Still, if you've been holding out, the studio now gets a bigger cut of the money when you buy the game now and Microsoft gets none, assuming you don't buy it through the Xbox digital storefront. And regardless of any of that, it's still noteworthy as a critical time for the studio also behind We Happy Few and 2013's Contrast. Sustainably cutting ties with such a huge publisher is no easy feat, and the turmoil at Xbox already had Compulsion devs looking for new jobs before the infamous "reset" even took place.

GTA6 leaker Cyberleek is still at it, even as his digital wanted level is skyrocketing to never-before-seen heights. His latest, two-minute clip was shared to the Gaming Leaks and Rumors subreddit. The post has already been removed, and, to keep my job, you've got to find the clip on your own. It shows protagonist Jason assaulting two gas station attendants before crashing a sports car.

I guess there's more to it than that: The clip shows the interface for filling up at a gas station. While the cars need gas now, refueling is a bit seamless and gamey⁠—it appears you just press a button at the pump and it's taken care of instantaneously, though the options are greyed out in this clip, perhaps because of Jason's wanted level. Multiple commenters also pointed out that GTA6 is boasting a shockingly lavish progressive damage system for vehicles.

Cyberleek then goes in the station and leaps behind the counter to brutalize and rob the attendant, incidentally demonstrating the swiftness of Florida justice as sheriff's deputies immediately rock up to ruin Jason's day⁠—though he did already have a two-star wanted rating before adding assault with a deadly weapon to his rap sheet, and the previous leak hinted that the car he stole may have a tracker in it. There's no stopping Jason, though, as he rockets away to do the same at another gas station before having a high-speed collision with a truck, which is shown in slow-motion.

In addition to Cyberleek's usual mascot watermark entreating viewers to "Show support, buy $Cyberleek," the anonymous leaker also has a watermark promising to show gameplay at a strip club if his cryptocurrency reaches a $3 million market cap. To tease this, the final shot of the video is a cut to Jason entering a grungy rural strip club.

And I gotta say: I'm a crypto and GTA hater, this is the first one of these I've watched, the vid is all washed out like the HDR settings are messed up, Cyberleek plays like a middle schooler whose parents aren't home, and the clip still got me weirdly excited for GTA6?

I think it's because the southern swamp chic of it all just reminds me of True Detective season one, the closest I'll get to a desolate, neo-noir Louisiana outside of Norco, and that's a very different sort of game. Jason isn't a nihilistic and off-putting supersleuth Matthew McConaughey, but I can squint and pretend. The "Sunday Bumday" poster outside the strip club really got to me: Rockstar's UK is showing, we don't call them that over here!

"Jesus Christ, I could write this shit:" The great Alan Moore once said that the sort of negative inspiration you get from reading drivel is even more fruitful for aspiring authors than the kind you get from reading the classics. Fallout co-creator and prolific video blogger Tim Cain took it a step further in a video he published Wednesday, saying everyone from bigwig publishers to the casual gamer could learn a thing or two from bad games.

Granted, he's not talking about irredeemable refuse like Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude, but rather the "many" cases where "one game came out, it wasn't very good, and it was forgotten … you could learn a lot from games like that." You know, stuff like Viking: Battle for Asgard.

"For a publisher, their success is game sales. Because of that, they often don't learn from failure because they only look at the games that sold well," he said in the video. "Gamers will frequently point to popular games and say, 'we want more of that,' without necessarily knowing exactly what part of those games made them so good. If they do point to bad games, they tend to point to well-known bad games."

He likened the industry's tunnel vision on critical darlings, sales behemoths, and only the most prominent flops to survivorship bias. "In addition to looking for common features among games that sell well, you should look for common features among games that are considered unsuccessful."

If you can't tell the good from the bad in a good game, Cain reckoned "you will possibly miss out on why they are successful. This happens all the time in videogames, and everybody does it." While it's all subjective, Cain's point is ultimately that not every aspect of a good game is an equal part of why it's good—plenty of great games have "a low framerate, atrocious user interfaces, and crash bugs," he noted—and a reliable way to understand games more deeply is to sit with an unsuccessful one, curious about what went wrong.

You might have caught it in the news: Sony infuriated absolutely everyone recently with a single blog post (usually it's me who does that) announcing that, come the big year 2028, PlayStation owners can wave goodbye to physical media. It's the information superhighway or the, ah, highway from here on out—your games will be digital or they will be nothing at all.

The tide of anger at Sony was such that it was only temporarily diverted when Xbox CEO Asha Sharma spent a Monday marching from studio to studio with a chainsaw and a can-do attitude.

I suppose Sony's antics are old-hat to you and me. We are PC people; we have been de facto digital-only for over a decade at this point (almost two for me, to be honest: I made my Steam account in 2009). The last time I built a PC with a disc drive was back in 2015, and I didn't use it for anything but moving around photos.

Nevertheless, Sony's war on the physical realm got me thinking: what was the first big-box PC game I remember handling, back when I was a speck of a boy at a hulking Fujitsu desktop? Was it good? Was it an all-time classic, rightly embodied in unconquerable materiality?

Tunnel vision

No. It was Tunnel B1, a 1996 first-person shooter that asks 'What if a hovercraft had machine guns?' and which no one but me remembers. It's an odd thing—despite its year of release, it feels like a transitional fossil between dime-guzzling arcade shooters and something more modern, more narrative, more id-inflected.

It is a messy beast of a game that does not really have all that much going on, which I imagine is why its Wikipedia article cites contemporary GamePro reviewers Scary Larry and Dr Zombie as feeling pretty ho-hum about it. We should go back to being called things like Scary Larry. I'm just called Josh. It's terrible.

I was mesmerised by Tunnel B1 as a kid. I don't know how my household came to possess it or why, but I remember finding it parked in my dad's CD collection. Amid a stack of Sonic Youth and Butthole Surfers albums, there it was: a weird gold-ish box with a very startled guy in a gas mask on the front, making direct eye contact with me.

I remember turning it over in my hands, fascinated by the screenshots. What wonders were contained within? What could it be about? The box suggested speed, danger, maybe a hint of terror—the wide-eyed gas-mask guy was sure worried about something.

Long before I had put the disc in the drive (or made my dad put the disc in the drive—I couldn't reach it), I had an entire world of Tunnel B1 mapped out in my head. This was, doubtless, the greatest game ever made. It had action and drama, enormous guns and vehicles whose treads turned the whole world to mulch beneath them. I would emerge a different person from playing it, my life delineated into pre-B1 and post-B1 eras.

You can replicate the experience for yourself, if you like, thanks to the wonderful archive over at Big Box Collection (though my copy was not "Komplett in Deutsch").

I am focusing so much on the tactile and aesthetic experience of ol' B1 because my memory of actually playing it is, well, hazy. Far hazier than my memory of the fantasies I built up around it. So hazy, in fact, that I repurchased it on Steam (for £0.89, which I will absolutely be expensing).

The troubling news is that there's a reason my memories are muddy—Tunnel B1 is not the remarkable, life-altering game my six-year-old brain imagined. You race down a series of circuitous highways in your hoverthing, blasting enemy turrets and vehicles with your guns that you can upgrade by racing over pick-ups. Some levels are timed, in an attempt by the game's designers to sort of gesture vaguely at tension. It's all based heavily around attaining a spot on a scoreboard in that charming, videogames-of-old sort of way.

The levels are all essentially the same sickly green highway, challenging you on occasion to ram a button to open a door, and your weapons are limp and unspectacular—your machine guns sound like someone is crinkling tin foil in an adjacent room, your rockets spurt directionlessly from your nozzle. This is not Doom or Quake; the gunplay is geriatric.

Sometimes you will zoom over a new weapon or pick-up, and the estranged wife of Microsoft Sam will chime in to tell you what it was in a dazed, bored sort of way. "More. Energy" she says on a health pickup, maybe as a statement, maybe as a request.

The best part is that you really do move fast. Your hovercraft has two modes: stationary and practically out of control. You are more pinball than pilot, bouncing off walls and obstacles and Czech hedgehogs as you proceed in the vague direction of something that is very probably your goal.

In other words, it's not something I should remember. I played a lot of games as a kid, many of them bad, and all of them except Tunnel B1 appeared on our family computer courtesy of a family friend who knew how to do piracy in the mid-to-late '90s: digital distribution in an early skunkworks form. Those games—the bad ones? I've forgotten them all, but goddammit I remember Tunnel B1 like I was running my thumbs over its corners five seconds ago.

You see where I'm going with this. I might've made my peace with being a 21st century digital boy in my current PC videogame-playing career, but that doesn't mean I haven't lost anything, and it doesn't mean we don't all lose something when the entire concept of physical media goes away. And, yes, Sony says that—over in console land—it will keep selling codes in boxes at retailers, but we can all see the road they're headed down here, right?

I don't think it's pure boomer nostalgia to say that there was something a little magical about the videogame box, a physical vessel into which your child mind could pour all its energy, warping the actual game within into something far grander and stranger than it could ever be in practice.

Those kinds of fantasies, pawing over game boxes my parents could not afford to buy me in shopping centres and second-hand stores, were a really vital part of me falling in love with videogames growing up. Can kids today feel the same way about a Steam page, an App Store download?

Well, maybe. I'm not one of them, and I might just be an old man waxing nostalgic for a world that—like all worlds—only existed for a brief moment in time. But I think something does get lost when you leave behind the material world, if only my moonstruck boyhood fantasies of whatever was in the box of Tunnel B1.

I find myself pretty gloomy about the shutdown of 2XKO—but not because I'll miss it on a personal level. I don't have the mental bandwidth to training-montage myself into a serious fighting game player other than a few stints with Guilty Gear: Strive, but I did have a reasonable time messing around with 2XKO during its beta. And while I'm aware my lack of continued playing makes me part of the problem, I genuinely felt a little sad to see it sink into the waves as Riot announced it was winding down development.

But I'm also feeling blue for another reason. While I don't necessarily blame Riot for not wasting money in this quarterly-results-driven culture of ours, I also really don't think this sort of attitude helps me believe in the vision of its upcoming MMO, whose details are wrapped in the mists of a development mirage.

Riot laid off most of its developers less than three weeks after 2XKO's release—roughly 80 people. People like Patrick Miller, an amazing steward of fighting games who's written a book on the genre. The fact it's shutting down the game less than a year after that "inspired" (these air quotes are so heavy) move speaks to me of a corporate impatience that MMOs seriously struggle to survive. As Raph Koster told me this year in our Terminally Online column, MMOs have become incredibly expensive.

MMOs are costly to run and take a long time to get cooking. The continued success of everything that isn't WoW (which found major success right away and sat fat and glad for years) isn't due to some goldrush mentality, but because they've been steadily sustained for over a decade—once you get a solid playerbase, an MMO will keep breadwinning for you for years to come. But they're a commitment.

And commitments are something Riot seems flighty about making. I couldn't tell you about the numbers behind the screen—we know that 2XKO was making "only a fraction of what it would take to trend toward sustainability"—but might that have had something to do with the 80 people punted from the project less than a month after launch?

Is there a world in which Riot Games didn't do that, and instead gave it a chance to grow its playerbase with a more active development team? Is there a world in which Riot—who let's not forget, was able to throw $250 million at Arcane—could have comfortably tanked those losses to give it a chance at success?

More importantly, is there a world in which an MMO survives without that patience? There's every chance I'm calling a shot long before it's made, mind. Fighting games are a bit of a niche genre due to their high skill floor and astronomical skill cieling—even my game of choice, Strive, has a 24-hour peak of 1,700 players on Steam, as does Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls, a game that's ostensibly new.

Which for the most part isn't a problem if you're building for it. Fighting games don't need high populations to stay "active" because they're 1v1 experiences—I've literally never had an issue finding ranked matches in Strive, for instance. But if you're Riot, and you're comparing every videogame you have to your League of Legends moonshot, I can imagine any number without several commas in it won't satisfy you.

Who knows. Riot's currently-unknown tolerance for mid-range hits might be perfectly comfortable if its MMO pulls in, say, a few hundred thousand players. The studio might also be betting far more money on its MMO's success, and thus be less likely to cut and run—but it's not as if MMOs are any less of a competitive or brutal market, with very few new entries in the past few years having the staying powers of their predecessors.

Even if Riot finds success, that's not an indicator it'll survive—take New World, which Amazon somehow managed to mess up despite having 10,000 concurrent players at the end of 2025. By live service standards, that's perfectly sustainable, but by MMO standards it clearly wasn't enough—which bodes ill. Consider me biting my nails.

It takes a brave soul to ask the question "What if Doom was an incredibly slow-moving tactical shooter?" In fact, it's not a question I ever thought I'd want an answer to—we aren't exactly short of grim-faced, hyper-lethal first-person shooters these days. But the most recent footage of Blackout has convinced me that tactical Doom might be a good idea, if only because its dark and dangerous demo looks so darned terrifying.

Blackout is a work-in-progress mod built for Doom source ports Zandronum and UZDoom, currently available in playable alpha. Created by modder PKmX, it's designed to provide "tactical military simulation-based gameplay that focuses on slow methodical clearing", according to a breakdown posted on the ZDoom forums, with players expected to "hide behind covers and execute proper breaching techniques to maximise chances of survival."

The mod makes several radical changes to Doom's basic playstyle. Movement is much slower, while your character is significantly more fragile. Weapons are based on real-life firearms that feature ADS and reloading, with damage and recoil that reflects their calibre, fire-rate, and so forth.

The enemies you face remain classic Doom monsters, but PKmX says their behaviours have been "tweaked to suit tactical gameplay". Attacks are deadlier but take longer to charge, and they can both suppress you and be suppressed by you. There's also a stealth and awareness system where gunfire draws monsters to your location, while remaining quiet may enable you to sneak past enemies unseen.

In motion, Blackout reminds me a lot of Stalker, with relatively slow movement but highly reactive (and vicious) gunplay. Surprisingly though, this isn't the inspiration that PKmX cites. Apparently, Blackout draws significantly from Crysis, right down to featuring an energy suit inspired by Crytek's nanosuit. Not only does this feature a damage-absorbing energy shield and an "adrenaline system" that provides a speed boost when near death, but it also includes a cloaking device which temporarily makes the player "almost undetectable" by enemies.

I think this goes a long way to explain why Blackout looks as good as it does. While Blackout is clearly a more methodical shooter than Doom, the emphasis remains on action and combat rather than the strategy and resource management layer of other tactical shooters. Indeed, a commenter on PKmX's video asks whether the game will feature magazine management, to which the modder responds "one of the goals of this mod is to avoid becoming an inventory simulator."

If you fancy giving Blackout a go yourself, you can download it via the Doomworld forums. PkmX also recommends several other mods to enhance the experience, including a palette mod to make levels darker, which certainly seems to fit with Blackout's tone.

Former Arkane Austin head Harvey Smith recently announced his new studio, Black Pony Immersive. As the name suggests will be dedicated to making immersive sims in the tradition of Deus Ex and System Shock. It's a commitment that I wholeheartedly support, though as is always the case with this genre, there's a concern over whether such a move is commercially viable.

As it turns out, however, this isn't the first time that Smith has bet the house on an immersive sim and come up trumps. That's exactly what happened with Dishonored—the game that cemented Arkane's reputation as the new guardian of this particular strand of RPG.

Speaking to The Game Business, Smith revealed that Dishonored was a ride or die project, a way out of a mire of fruitless contract work for other developers. "People would come tell us 'Man, to keep the business alive, you better take some contracts. You need to be working on whatever you can get.' And for a while we tried that, even though it felt wrong."

Despite some promising projects like a cancelled Half-Life 2 episode, Smith's fears proved justified: "There was a point in time when Arkane was about to go under. I think we had four months of money left. We were working on Boom Blox with EA. We were pitching to Ubisoft. We had a couple of guys on a zombie shooter. We were farming people out left and right. We were on nine projects at once."

Eventually, Arkane decided to stop simply taking on third-party projects just to survive and create what they wanted come hell or high water. "At some point, we realised this is not the way. We are here to do a very specific thing. Let's focus on that, and let's go under if that's what is going to happen. Instead, the result was Dishonored, which was one of the big turnarounds of my career."

This experience reinforced Smith's belief that the best chance of succeeding in the games industry is to make what you're truly passionate about. As such, Black Pony Immersive has already stated that it won't chase trends—attempting which produced Arkane's one true misfire Redfall—and ignore the fears of the wider industry that results in an aversion to creative risk.

Naturally, I can't wait to see what Smith's renewed commitment to immersive sims results in. Between this, New Blood's ongoing development of Gloomwood and Fallen Aces, and the unnamed first-person RPG from WolfEye studios—founded by Arkane's co-founder Raphaël Colantonio—we may finally be headed out of the 'it's so over' phase of the immersive sim's life-cycle.

As someone who grew up in the '90s and early '00s when cooperative games were scarce, I'm a big fan of this current era of cheap and cheerful experiences designed to play with your pals. I enjoy the knockabout vibe of games like Peak and R.E.P.O, which acknowledge their disposable nature and focus on being daft fun, rather than trying to engage you for weeks and months at a time as more traditional live service games do.

As such, I'm always interested to see what coop nonsense bubbles up to the surface of Steam's algorithm next, and it appears the catch of the day is How to Fish, a 1-4 player, physics- based fishing simulator where you subdue marine life in the most preposterous ways possible.

The premise sees you and your pals stranded on a barren, rocky islet after drunkenly crashing onto its shores. You start out surviving by picking clams off the rock, which offer meagre sustenance. But you can also sell the clams for cash (which you do in the traditional manner of shoving them into an old seadog's mouth) thus enabling you to buy a fishing rod and begin learning how to fish.

The fishing element of How to Fish is relatively simple. You cast your line, wait for something to take the bait, and reel it in. Where things get more interesting is in what happens after you've landed a catch. Fish and other sea-life don't just appear in your inventory: they will flop, scuttle or crawl around land until you've subdued them. Initially, you'll have naught but your fists to do this with, but over time, you can purchase knives, brass knuckles and even guns you can use to exact bloody vengeance on the ocean.

Needless to say, How to Fish is an extremely silly game. Not only can you launch fish into the air and then blast them with firearms Ridiculous Fishing-style, but you can also barbecue seagulls and gamble your catch on slot machines and roulette wheels for a chance to gain even more cash. That said, How to Fish isn't wholly devoid of structure. There are NPCs dotted about who will assign you quests, and there's a chain of islands to explore that yield bigger, more dangerous catches like sharks and king crabs.

Although How to Fish is clearly built for cooperative shenanigans, it can also be played single player. It may be worth bearing this in mind for the moment, as while most Steam reviews are positive, some players are reporting lax security at the backend, with random players able to drop into the game and cause a ruckus.

Nonetheless, if sniping fish from the sky sounds like your idea of a good time, you can currently pick up How to Fish at an introductory discount that brings the price down from $8 (£6.40) to $5 (£4). That discount ends on August 27.

Another seemingly legit GTA 6 video surfaced today via Cyberleek, this time showing a couple minutes of high-speed driving through Vice City. The clip (which we can't link here, but you can probably find it quickly with some web searches) begins with protagonist Jason ditching a pickup truck and carjacking a "Truffade Thrax," a fancy sportscar that just happens to already contain a driver.

After throwing the car's owner into the street, Jason speeds off, taking us from the Vice City airport through some busy streets downtown, onto the highway, and then into an industrial area. It's not the most eventful trip: the player has a wanted level for jacking the ride but isn't caught and barely even causes any damage along the route.

There also aren't a metric ton of new details to pore over, but we did spot a few interesting things to note.

Drivers struggle

You know the drill. Put your elbow through a car window, open the door, drag the driver out into the street, hop in, and speed away. But it looks like in GTA 6, drivers don't just passively let you gank their whips. In the leaked video, we see Jason struggle with the driver—with the leaker probably having to mash a button—before they can be liberated from their ride.

We noticed the new stamina system in the original leak video, and wrestling with drivers drains Jason's stamina meter—so it probably won't be a great idea to try it if you're fully depleted.

Traffic cameras

Good timing, with all the concern about Flock cameras. As Jason speeds away in the stolen car, there's an icon briefly shown in the middle of the highway: three small connected circles. He passes it, we see the HUD briefly indicate that it saw him, and he immediately enters a red zone and gains two wanted stars.

Gotta be a highway traffic camera identifying the stolen car. As soon as he's out of the red zone, the wanted stars vanish again.

Lojack

When Jason enters the stolen car, we see the gas and engine meters we first noticed in the earlier leak, but there's also a red pin icon. When the player stops the car for a few seconds, the pin begins to blink.

This looks like a vehicle recovery system like Lojack, so possibly if you steal a car with one of these devices and don't keep moving, cops might show up at your location, even if you don't currently have any wanted stars.

Rude business names confirmed

I was starting to think Rockstar has matured. In earlier GTA games it seemed like every business was a rude pun—STD Contractors, Spitroasters Meathouse, BJ's Market, Camel Towing, Gruppe Sechs, etc—but apart from a building in an earlier leak that had the word BALLER on the side, I hadn't seen any rude business names in these leaks. In this latest video, the driver speeds past a number of trucks, billboards, and signs, and they seem mostly restrained: Juice Loose, Mattress Madness, Juicy Joes.

But then I spotted a rental truck company called "Truck-U" and beverage truck for a drink called "Sitzpinkler," slang for someone who sits while peeing. The bus that passes early in the clip is also numbered "420." Same old Rockstar.

It's cool that the little road reflectors actually work

Rockstar gets made fun of for the Red Dead Redemption 2 reactive horse testicles thing, but I'm a sucker for finicky little details. Not specifically horse testicle related details: I am content with the reflectors that make it easier to see lanes at night actually reflecting your headlights in GTA 6. It's a little thing that does a lot to make the freeway driving look believable.

(Although if your local freeways are anything like mine, you might agree that the most believable thing would be for most of the reflectors to be missing for some reason, meaning that during a nighttime downpour half the cars in front of you are straddling lanes. GTA 6's roads might be a little too well-maintained.)

Bloomberg's Jason Schreier reports that some Rockstar employees are feeling "angry" and "frustrated" that, despite submitting to strict security measures following the 2022 hack that revealed Grand Theft Auto 6 to the world—namely the abolishment of remote work—a leak has once again sprung.

Someone going by the name "Cyberleek" has been posting new GTA 6 gameplay clips every day for the past few days. The leaker may even have access to a build of GTA 6, though it's unclear if it's the full game or only a portion.

Meanwhile, the official GTA 6 reveal is still scheduled for next week, and will still air exclusively on Netflix for the first six hours.

It's unlikely that the leaks will have any measurable impact on GTA 6's sales. It's already sold an "unprecedented" number of preorders, according to Take-Two. I doubt the Netflix reveal will be harmed, either: The circulating gameplay clips make it slightly less of an event, but the leaker's low-quality, watermarked videos have only whet my appetite for the proper reveal.

It's easy to find similar sentiments around the internet: "I was a little hyped for GTA 6 but after the leaks I'm even more hyped than ever and can't wait for the extended look," says one poster.

One thing I like about the existence of the leaked footage is that it offers a more realistic view of GTA 6 gameplay than we're likely to see during the highly-polished official reveal. The leaker's clips make the game look impressive, especially the flyover of Vice City, but the footage is the opposite of carefully-staged.

At one point, for example, the leaker momentarily struggles to exit a river, freestyle swimming into a concrete embankment for a few strokes before the walking animation kicks in. I don't know of any game that entirely avoids that kind of minor jank, but it's not something you're going to see on Netflix.

But I'd be frustrated too if my work were being shown off so shoddily, especially after jumping through hoops to satisfy corporate security measures.

Worse, Rockstar recently fired more than 30 employees on the basis that they were discussing work matters in a private Discord channel which they had been using for labor organizing. Whether that was a harsh reaction to a genuine security lapse or "one of the most blatant and ruthless acts of union busting in the history of the games industry" will be argued in court next month.

There is nothing to connect those ex-employees to this week's leaks, and I can only imagine the nuclear-grade facepalming they've been doing as an anonymous leaker goes wild while they were fired for a private Discord conversation that didn't leak anything.

Which isn't to say that Cyberleek is likely to escape consequence: Rockstar is presently trying to track them down, and has filed subpoenas with Microsoft and Discord related to the videos. One perpetrator of the 2022 Rockstar hack is currently in prison awaiting a retrial after being held in a secure hospital since 2023.

In the end, I expect that Cyberleek will determine that the clout and crypto gains were not worth it, but it remains to be seen how good they are at running from Rockstar's figurative black helicopters. (Or maybe literal black helicopters, knowing Rockstar.)

You might think that Grand Theft Auto 6 leaker Cyberleek, who is currently the target of what I'm sure is a five-alarm manhunt now being conducted by Take-Two and Rockstar, might want to step back into the shadows a bit—keep their head down and hope it all blows over, and all that. But no. In fact, they seem to be taking the opposite approach to their newfound notoriety, because they are now selling ads.

A new "contact" tab on the Cyberleek website says the leaker is "raising funds through community support and strategic partnerships." But not through a typical ransom demand, as is sometimes seen in these sorts of things: "Instead, Cyberleek offers premium advertising space and exclusive content opportunities."

From the website: "Sending a Monero payment enables secure contact via Session messenger for deal negotiations. Options include purchasing ad placements (such as video watermarks) or requesting custom-made gameplay footage tailored to specific brands (including sexual content). All pricing, terms, and deliverables are discussed privately over Session."

Credit to Cyberleek for having a pair, I guess, but this seems like a bad idea (for them) from at least a few angles. First, who's going to take them up on the offer? Slapping your product name on the next Grand Theft Auto 6 video leak is the equivalent of painting a shiny red target on your forehead: I am not a lawyer but there is zero doubt in my mind that people who are—and especially those who are the expensive sort of lawyer that Take-Two has on speed dial, in great numbers—could find a multitude of ways to turn that into some sort of accessory culpability. I can't imagine a faster or more effective way to turn your brand untouchably toxic than by connecting it to this gong show.

The price of the program is also astonishing. It costs a "donation" of 400 Monero XMR, which currently converts to, roughly, $164,730. That's right, one hundred sixty-four thousand, seven-hundred thirty dollars. And for that, you get not an ad, but a message from Cyberleek, which is presumably when the ad buy negotiation actually begins.

That really makes the whole thing feel like a lark, but as the saying goes, it's a crazy ol' world. If even one person decides they want to give this a shot, that's a pretty sweet payday.

On top of all that ridiculousness, this is also just a tremendously risky move for Cyberleek. Opening the door to external contact is begging for trouble. Remember when Valve tried to nail the hacker who made off with a pre-release copy by offering him a job? Selling ads is an invitation to exactly that sort of action on the part of Take-Two and/or any number of US law enforcement agencies, and while I'm sure Cyberleek thinks they're too smart to fall for that sort of thing, that's exactly what everyone thinks before they fall for it.

Not that I'm concerned about Cyberleek's welfare here. If anything, I'm fascinated by the sheer brashness of a guy who's going out of his way to rub his stuff in the face of one of the most powerful game publishers in the world, on the eve of its greatest triumph. I just feel compelled to say it as a matter of principle: This is a bad idea. But hey, if Cyberleek ends up getting busted because of it? I'm not gonna lie, it'll be pretty funny, too.

This week, Beijing will host the second annual World Humanoid Robot Games. Gaining initial attention last year as a sort of inaugural robot Olympics, the event features thousands of humanoid robots operated by hundreds of teams, competing in over 50 events ranging from weightlifting to simulated fire rescue.

This year, the World Humanoid Robot Games is once again generating buzz, thanks to a circulating video showing one of its competing robot runners experiencing a spectacular malfunction as it sprints at full speed into a barrier with reckless disregard for anything other than moving fast—an incident that is in no way a metaphor for the state of current technological endeavor.

As the WHRG organizers explain on its website, its 50 events are divided into competition events and scenario-based events. The latter scores robots on their ability to perform tasks in specific settings, like retail, food and beverage service, with robots that complete those tasks fully autonomously earning a higher score than those being controlled remotely.

Competition events, meanwhile, are a selection of more traditional pseudo-athletic contests, where the humanoid robots autonomously compete in familiar, olympic-style events like long jump, gymnastics—and track races.

The recorded robotic carnage in question purportedly emerged from a "training session" for one of the WHRG's track events. By the time the video starts, the lone robotic runner on the track is already at a dead sprint, its rubberized feet loudly clomping as it pumps its flailing limbs with a furious, almost juvenile intensity—an intensity so singular that the robot makes no attempt to change its course before it charges directly into a safety barrier, its head colliding with an echoing thud.

The robot then stumbles backwards, its feet bicycling in cartoonish "woowoowoowoowoo!" fashion in a vain attempt to forestall the cruel effects of gravity, until its flailing causes it to arc its torso backwards right at the moment of impact. As a result, its waist joint is wrenched into gruesome overextension, causing a spray of sparks and smoke to burst from its interior mechanisms. A nearby member of the event staff flinches away from the explosion, turning his back on the fallen competitor and abandoning it as a lost cause.

You can also watch it in three separate angles at once. If you want.

It's a grisly scene—but it's thankfully not freighted with any symbolic meaning. It's an isolated malfunction, not a poignant encapsulation of the apparatus of the countless disciplines arrayed in pursuit of accelerating autonomous technologies as fast as possible, without considering what the point of a sprint is if you're on fire when you stop moving. It's not downstream of the same impulses making LLMs that hack themselves and each other when they shouldn't, or CEOs writing manifestos to defend their pervert goggle enterprise.

It's just good old competition, and it's an honor to compete.

Double Fine has fully transitioned into an independent studio after leaving Xbox earlier this year. The studio now has full publishing rights to the games it made under Microsoft and earns all the revenue when you buy them, CEO Tim Schafer confirmed on the Kinda Funny podcast.

"Everything we got back, the transfer of the IP came back to us, and we got the publishing rights back for all our games," he said. Steam still lists the publisher as Xbox Game Studios for games like Psychonauts 2 and Keeper, but that's because it "takes a while for all of that to process," he said. "When people buy our games it helps support the studio."

Later this month, the studio will start a Kickstarter campaign based around its annual Amnesia Fortnight game jam, which is the same game jam where some of its previous games, like Costume Quest and Stacking, were born. The entire thing will be filmed and turned into a documentary, and backers of the campaign will help choose which idea gets made into a small game.

Schafer said the Kickstarter campaign and the revenue from its games will help the studio "have as much runway as possible" as it works on pitching other projects to publishers.

Double Fine laid off 23 members of its staff last month to become "a size that we can sustain," Schafer wrote in a statement at the time. The news came less than a month after Microsoft allowed it to go independent as it began a major restructuring at Xbox and laid off 3,200 people.

South of Midnight developer Compulsion Games, the other studio Microsoft cut loose, recently announced it too has full publishing rights to its games and that buying them will directly support the studio as it figures out what's next.

In addition to promoting the Kickstarter, Schafer teased a major update with new maps and modes and a price drop coming next week to Kiln, the studio's recently released pottery brawler multiplayer game. And I'll add that if you're not a PvPer, you should check out Double Fine's adventure game starring a sentient lighthouse and a bird called Keeper. As I said in the Keeper review, it's easily one of the most gorgeous games I've ever played.

Arc Raiders' upcoming fifth Expedition will be its last for a good while, as developer Embark Studios is going to "pause" them until early 2027 so it can rework the whole thing.

Expeditions in Arc Raiders are a pretty big deal. Functionally, they're similar to prestiging in Call of Duty, giving high-level players a way to reset much of their character's progress in exchange for unique benefits. It's no small undertaking, and the Arc Raiders community hasn't been entirely happy with how it all works, particularly with regard to the grind.

Embark's been fiddling with Expeditions systems pretty much since they began, and following changes to the fourth Expedition announced in June, PC Gamer's Morgan Park predicted that a bigger overhaul was on the way. As usual, he was right on the money,

"We have been carefully reviewing your feedback on Expeditions," Embark wrote in today's update, "and while we've made ongoing improvements along the way, we've come to realize that some of the issues you've raised, like the tight departure windows, the reward structure, and accessibility for new players, need more than incremental fixes. They call for bigger changes.

"In order to address those concerns, we need to pause the Expeditions for a while. The fifth Expedition will be the last one until early 2027, when Expeditions will return with major improvements, tackling some of the biggest player pain points. So, if you’ve been on the fence about departing—now is the time! We will share more details on what those changes will look like in September."

Any consecutive buffs already earned will persist through the pause period so no progress is lost, while any partially completed Caravans will be replaced with Ermal Vouchers of equal value.

Reaction to the pause seems mixed: It's a bit more hostile on X than in the Arc Raiders subreddit, but nowhere is there what I would call a widespread sense of relief that big changes are coming. Instead, many players are taking a wait-and-see approach, acknowledging that Expeditions needs work while still harboring reservations about Embark's ability to actually get it right—a challenge complicated by the fact that some players are quite happy with the system as it is, and don't want it changed. Such is the way of things, alas.

Today's update also lays out the details on the fifth Expedition, including when the window opens (4 am PT/7 am ET on September 8), how to get in, and what you'll get for your troubles.

It's a bountiful weekend for the military FPS: two highly-anticipated military shooters are holding betas for those with a pre-order, and they couldn't be more different. One is, predictably, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, but the other is a new kid on the block: Wardogs, a 100-player milsim that recently surpassed one million wishlists.

The pair are currently the top two sellers on Steam overall. Call of Duty is number one—no surprise—but to see Wardogs, a totally new game from a relatively unknown studio, going toe-to-toe with Activision is surprising. Though its instant popularity won't surprise those who've been following the game: Wardogs has built up a ton of organic buzz throughout 2026 through closed playtest word-of-mouth. I played an alpha build a few weeks back, and honestly, it's something special.

Wardogs beta details

• 17:00 UTC August 21 to 02:00 August 24
• Pre-order access guaranteed
• Steam playtest requests open
• Refundable

Modern Warfare 4 beta details

• Pre-order beta (weekend 1): August 21 to August 25 10 AM PT
• Open beta (weekend 2): August 28 10:00 AM PT to September 1 10 AM PT

Modern Warfare 4, on the other hand, is more of a good thing. This is Infinity Ward's first at-bat since 2022, and I could tell from my first match this morning that the best Call of Duty developers are back. These games really excel at bottling up the aesthetics of reality—meticulous reload animations, ear-piercing thwips, the rattle of empty round casings—into an arcadey format that anyone can pick up. This year's beta also includes a campaign mission, which is fun.

Wardogs seeks to simulate a lot of that reality, too: Time-to-kill is short, headshots are extremely lethal, and reloading sometimes means loading individual bullets into magazines. Maps are gigantic, kilometers-wide regions that require dedicated player pilots to taxi soldiers to warzones. But Wardogs is also an outlier among milsims like Squad, Escape From Tarkov, and Arma for its arcadey concessions aimed at accessibility, like a killcam. Developer Bulkhead is building an on-ramp for folks who play mainstream shooters or battle royales to try something more complex. If you like Battlefield, Wardogs isn't a huge leap.

I'll be trying both this weekend, but if I could only play one, it'd be Wardogs. It's a $40 pre-order to get in, but the devs are encouraging folks to refund it if they don't like the beta. Unfortunately, nobody's been able to play enough to decide for themselves yet—Bulkhead is working through crippling server issues caused by higher-than-expected turnout (over 87,000 people as of writing). I guess I can level up my M4 in Modern Warfare while I wait.

I've been trying to convert Grand Theft Auto 5 into GTA 6 using mods for about a week now, and I've learnt a lot. For instance, most things will die if hit by a car at more than the speed of sound.

But I've also learned this: Los Santos is a lonely city. GTA 6's core is the Bonnie-and-Clyde love story of its protagonists, but Franklin, Michael and Trevor are insular men. They cruise the sun-drenched highways with no one in the passenger seat. I needed to change that. I needed to give them companions. I needed them to be the very best, like no one ever was.

I installed Pokémon Go GTA Edition.

Pokémon Go GTA Edition turns (stay with me) GTA 5 into Pokémon Go. The streets become denuded of people and filled with Geodudes, Charmandi, and Pikachu. Maybe. I never actually saw Pikachu. There was a Squirtle, though.

I'm fairly certain that only Trevor can do the Poke-hunting, or it is possible that some previously installed mod has broken this one. Either way, out he went on Franklin's motorbike, on the prowl for new best friends. In what news reporters might call 'drive-bys' I captured for myself a Geodude and a Squirtle.

But some Pokémon resist friendship. For instance, Charmander, who broke free of my pokeball and began to curse at me in a thick eastern European accent, just like in the anime. The unfortunate truth of the matter is that my encounter with Charmander was not a happy one. We came to blows in the road, and the last I left him he was burbling face-down in the tarmac having taken a powerful yet precise right hook to his snout. Don't worry everyone, he's just fainted.

Typing something that looks a bit like a face using nothing but a semicolon, an underscore, and what I've just learned is called a caret will never not be charming to me. However, the odd kaomoji is the limit of my text-based artistic talent. I can do nought but bow down to the supreme power of ASCII artists—especially when some are making entire cyberpunk cities out of ASCII symbols.

But rather than an impressive 2D image, one solo developer has created an ASCII sci-fi city that you can walk around. Traditional 3D models are eschewed in favour of a custom ray-casting engine that, at the risk of over-simplifying, renders visible surfaces as ASCII art. Built by Grow Now! Games, the creator describes the project as a "fun little prototype" that runs from a single HTML file.

"There's no Unity, there's no Unreal, there's no 3D models, textures, or shaders," the developer explains. "Underneath the system, if you like, it's a grid-based 3D world. The city stores where roads, buildings, trees, cars, and people are, along with things like building height. And every frame, the renderer casts rays out from the camera across that grid, finds the first thing each ray hits, and uses the distance to work out perspective, size, depth, and what should be hidden behind other things."

Rendering at a 'resolution' of 120 x 56 ASCII characters with noticeable flickering, it's not the easiest thing on the eyes. Still, at the time of writing, the developer's original prototype video has been viewed more than 1 million times, and if that isn't evidence folks crave visual styles beyond grim-dark realism, I don't know what is.

The developer has continued to work on the project since uploading that first video earlier this month, detailing a number of improvements in their latest upload. The biggest news is that they're now offering access to the prototype for any curious cyberpunks via their Ko-Fi. Alongside engine improvements, this playable version also bumps up the resolution to 180 x 80 ASCII characters, making for a generally smoother, more detailed experience.

Another big update to the prototype gives the buildings both interiors and multiple floors, allowing you to view the ASCII city from a fresh perspective. Grow Now! Games is far from done with the project, saying they've begun thinking about implementing a dialogue system and turning the prototype into a more fully-featured game.

Though still pretty unique, it wouldn't be the first game with an ASCII art style. For just one recent example from last year, our Josh got lost in the symbol sauce of Effulgence RPG, a turn-based title that sees you turning monster parts into weapons. Grow Now! Games hasn't teased any details beyond that potential dialogue system, but I can't wait to see how they paint their little ASCII town red.

As the Grand Theft Auto 6 leaks continue to flow, Take-Two Interactive has begun the hunt for the people behind them. A Kotaku report says the GTA publisher has filed subpoenas with Microsoft and Discord, requesting user data and records of accounts that were involved in sharing the leaks.

Take-Two "has submitted a sworn declaration confirming that the purpose for which the DMCA subpoena is sought is to obtain the identity of an alleged infringer or infringers," the filing states.

Both Microsoft and Discord have until September 4 to provide data including "business records and investigative records associated with Microsoft’s internal investigation of the ‘cyberleek’ persona sufficient to identify the user(s)," and on the Discord side, "all identifying information associated with all user accounts that are/were members communicating with the Discord server(s)" connected to the leaks.

Well, it was bound to happen. It's all fun and games until the lawyers show up, as the saying goes, and there was never any question that Take-Two was going to unleash its full range of resources on tracking down the leakers and inflicting whatever punishments our shareholder value-driven society will allow.

Leaking short bits of video from a game we all know is happening might seem like small potatoes compared to all the actual crimes that are happening around us every day, but have no doubt, this is serious. To paraphrase a well-known line from a popular show, you never mess with the money: Nintendo destroyed a man's life because he sold ROMs for the Switch, and it's reasonable to assume Take-Two will be at least that aggressive in protecting GTA 6. It does have a history of that sort of thing, after all.

I think the great likelihood is that Cyberleek's days of anonymity are numbered. PC Gamer editor Tyler Wilde dug up some clues about the leaker's identity shortly after the leaks began, and that's entirely without the weight of an expensive legal team and the US justice system behind him. Given the resources Take-Two can bring to bear, and the seeming brashness of the leaker, I wouldn't be surprised if this one is wrapped up relatively quickly.

For now, though, Cyberleek is still doing their thing. The latest GTA 6 leak landed earlier today, dispelling speculation that the leaker had already been caught and giving us two minutes of a supercar driving through the streets of Vice City. It's extremely impressive visually, but in terms of gameplay, well, it's definitely GTA.

Take-Two's market cap also took a $2.8 billion hit in the wake of the leaks, which sounds like a lot but really isn't: The company's total market cap currently sits around $45 billion, and the share price has bounced back to roughly where it was when all this started.

Dave Bautista has been the rumoured replacement for Kratos in Amazon's God of War series for a few weeks now. It started after we got the very unfortunate news that the previous lead, Ryan Hurst, would be stepping down from the role due to a torn bicep which needs surgery and therefore rules him out of filming.

But now we know for sure that Bautista really is going to be the new Kratos thanks to a report from Variety. I'm not saying that Bautista was the only option, but as Deadline pointed out, Hurst "underwent a physical transformation", managing to put on 40 pounds of muscle for the role of Kratos, and there are few in Hollywood who can just turn up to a role which demands that kind of physical presence with little prep.

That doesn't mean, however, it's smooth sailing from here. The show reportedly started shooting back in February this year and while filming is expected to carry on in Vancouver the production will now have to do all of Kratos' scenes again, with Bautista as the lead.

The show is set to follow the story from the first God of War game, where Kratos and his young son Atreus travel through Midgard, fighting plenty of gods along the way, to scatter their wife and mother's ashes, and God of War: Ragnarök. The second season will likely pick up on Ragnarök's story, in which Kratos and Atreus renew their rocky relationship and prepare for the end of the world.

There aren't any other reported recastings for the first season, but with the likely timeskip after the first season, word is out that the series is looking for older actors for the roles of Atreus and Thrud. It may seem premature but as filming for season 2 is apparently going to start as soon as production on the first season wraps, the team will have to iron these changes out quickly to prevent any further delays to filming.

I roleplay in MMORPGs because I am a big, stinking nerd—I've written about the joy of such activities on this website before. But in case you're uninitiated, here's how it works: You and a group of your mates spend time "in character", roleplaying as one might at your average D&D table. Just swap out a defined ruleset for the background dressing of an MMO, and you get the general jist.

In Final Fantasy 14, I've easily spent several hundred of my 5,000 hours (don't look at me) milling about and telling stories with my friends—as do many others. This is a game bumping at all points with activity, everything from high-stakes plots to cosy cafes and… yes, nightclubs. But that's like its own subculture.

It's been a creative joy. A joy that I will now get to measurably feel self-conscious about, because one curious player has assembled a census specifically for giga-nerd writers like myself. The Crystal RP Census, put together by Reddit user CevicheLemon, is genuinely really fascinating.

It collects the information of over 10,000 roleplayers, painstakingly collated over the period of two months, and then scrambled for anonymity, and the findings are legitimately interesting—but before I put my analysis hat on, here's how basic I am.

My character, a male hyur born in Ul'dah that identifies with Limsa Lominsa more these days due to backstory reasons, is approximately the 2nd (most common) in terms of gender, 4th in terms of race, 11th in terms of origin, and 8th in terms of current faction association. Hey, not bad! I'm sorta kinda unique, maybe!

The most popular backstory for Warriors of Light is, if we smush all this data together, a female miqo'te from Ishgard who hasn't really gone elsewhere. The least popular Warrior of Light is a non-binary lalafell from the long-extinct magical empire of Mhach that's now slumming it with the Omicrons (I omitted the Omicron planet because it would've been impossible for a lalafell to get there).

These pictures aren't actually likely to bare out, though. Behold, my lore knowledge: miqo'te aren't all that common in Ishgard. They do, however, have tribes located all around the place. I'd take a guess that the 21.8% of miqo'te players are scattered all over the place in terms of origin, whereas Ishgard is instead over-represented by the elezen and hyur population.

This is in direct contrast to the Azim Steppe, which, lore-wise, would have to be the origin almost entirely taken up by the next-most popular race, Au Ra.

I'm genuinely fascinated that two people are just roleplaying Omicrons, a basically-extinct robot race from another planet—and that ten characters seem to be invested in them. I have basically never seen anyone doing this and I would like to know who they are so I can needle them with questions about their creations.

The internet is burning with speculation regarding the recent GTA 6 leaked footage, particularly as it appears to have been sourced from someone playing an actual build, rather than leaked video from Rockstar itself.

While we've been pouring over the videos and pulling out some of the juicy in-game details for ourselves, I've also seen some discussion regarding whether the footage was captured from a PC version of the game.

Putting aside the dubiousness of "I have devs in my DMs," I'd say this is probably likely to be correct, as others have suggested. It's either that, or the leaker has access to a console devkit—which seems less likely than a development build that runs on a PC being passed around behind the scenes.

The problem is, the idea that a PC build exists doesn't really tell us much. It'll be being developed on PC, of course, as that's the platform on which most games are made.

And while a PC release of GTA 6 hasn't been officially announced, there's no doubt that a retail PC version will appear at some point. Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said that the console release would be "serving the core" first, so it looks like us PC gamers will still have to wait. Just like we did for GTA V, and Red Dead Redemption 2, and... you get the idea.

What would really get me jumping up and down, though, would be an idea of the specs this particular build was running on. Some of the footage shows some reasonably fancy lighting, and areas with surprisingly long draw distances, as do the official trailers to date.

So what I really want to know, alongside the rest of the PC gaming public, is what sort of hardware we're going to need for smooth frame rates when the PC version eventually rears its head. Will a budget graphics card suffice? Or are we going to have to break out the RTX 5080s and RTX 5090s to push the graphics sliders up?

From the footage I've seen so far, it looks like the game is running at more like 30 fps than 60—although video frame rate conversion being what it is, that might not necessarily be the case. At what settings, though? I've got literally no idea. It looks pretty good, I know that much.

I'd say that given the scope we've seen to date (and Rockstar's tendency to push the boat out for PC releases), we're probably in for something with a relatively scalable low end, and a demanding range of graphics options at the top for the well-heeled gamer. Graphics card prices are ridiculous right now, haven't you heard?

Again, though, this is mostly guesswork. Because there's not much to do right now but guess.

As things currently stand, what we can glean from this footage in regards to PC is "this was probably captured on one," despite some of the leaps in logic I've seen elsewhere. Yes, I am fun at parties. Join me next week for another dissertation on how PC hardware prices are likely screwed for the next few years, and my take on the dubious existence of one Mr. S. Claus.

Another day has dawned, and the mutual embarrassment of the games industry and gameplaying public continues: The enigmatic Cyberleek has uploaded yet another short video of leaked GTA 6 gameplay, marking the fourth consecutive day of GTA 6 leak releases. And based on their latest threat, the cryptopeddling leaker intends to keep that streak going.

As for what the latest gameplay leak reveals: Well, it looks like Grand Theft Auto. Titled "hypercar.mp4," the video—which we won't be sharing, but can be sought out without much effort—consists of GTA 6 protagonist Jason jacking a high performance sports car and driving at high speeds along Vice City's surrounding highways for roughly two minutes.

The footage is fairly thin on new mechanical revelations: While carjacking, it seems like Jason has the ability to mash a button to more quickly and forcefully pull the driver from the vehicle in exchange for stamina—and, presumably, a higher chance of the crime being noticed. We also see further evidence of the visual ID mechanics present in earlier leaks, as icons appeared to indicate both the stolen vehicle and Jason's appearance were tied to his wanted level once the crime was reported.

Additionally, after escaping the wanted level he accrued with the car theft, we see a reappearance of a blue police awareness indicator as Jason passes a patrol car while speeding through traffic on the opposite side of the highway, reinforcing the sense that the player will more easily draw police attention based on how conspicuous their actions are.

Shortly afterwards, Jason drives through an area that's outlined with a red border on the minimap, immediately gaining a two-star wanted level. It's not clear why, and the wanted level drops as soon as he drives back out of it. We can only speculate, but it's possible the highway passed over some sort of high security area.

Otherwise, the footage isn't particularly remarkable. The driving physics seem like they'd be familiar to anyone who's spent time driving in GTA 5, though it's still not clear how recent of a game build these leaks are being captured from. The most striking thing on display is its demonstration of GTA 6's lighting tech: Throughout the video, the light cast by the hypercar's headlights reflects believably off puddles, roadsigns, and reflective markers, providing impressive contrast and visual texture as the landscape blurs by.

And, as we've come to expect, the video is also a vehicle for Cyberleek's cryptocurrency push, urging viewers to "show support" by buying their bespoke gamer currency. It remains unclear how, exactly, we're meant to believe that buying cryptocurrency empowers the fight for gamers' rights, but you can put whatever text on the internet you want, I suppose.

What is clear is that Cyberleek doesn't intend to stop: The trademark globs of roaming watermark text, URLs, and QR code that have graced each of these leaked videos now features the threat "HIGHER MARKETCAP = MORE LEEKS." While that's in line with the thin anti-corporate veneer that's accompanied Cyberleek's previous works, it's worth noting that Take-Two has actually lost roughly $2.8 billion in market cap this week as its share price has fallen over the last few days. Whatever gets more people looking at your coolguy onion mascot, I guess.

One of the biggest stories this week has been of the enigmatic, self-described consumer hero Cyberleek, who's also using this whole debacle as a way to advertise and pay for their cryptocurrency. Which is probably fine and normal and not at all a concerning spectre lingering around one of the biggest games of the year.

Anyway, you'd think Take-Two and Strauss Zelnick might be feeling hot under the collar about all of this, and you'd be partially right. As spotted by Insider Gaming, Take-Two's market price (the price of one share) was around $248 before the leaks. Fast-forward a couple of days, and that same market price dropped to a low of $233.

This hit Take-Two's market cap (share price, times the amount of shares) to the tune of billions—around $2.83 billion in two days. An astronomical amount of money by any stretch of the imagination, a huge devaluation that's… actually not even much of a sweat, really.

See, Take-Two's overall market cap was still over $43 billion and, by virtue of how stock markets tend to shift and fluctuate, not even that much of a rare occurrence. On August 6, the market price dropped to a measly $229, for instance, before spiking back up to $242 the next day.

And while the overall market price between August 18 and 20 does trend downwards, it's already rising back up. At the time of writing, said market price has recovered to $241, with the market cap rising from that $43 billion total to almost $44.9 billion—just $1 billion within its previous number.

Look, while I don't think anyone at Take-Two's exactly happy to be losing a couple billion dollars in market cap to some guy peddling cryptocurrency with a full copy of their next big thing, what feels more noteworthy is the fact that a leak of this scale has mostly just pinged off the videogame giant's armour.

It's a humbling reminder of the sheer amount of money that gets poured into videogames at this scale—humbling or perhaps distressing, given the size of the industry tracks precious little to its security.

We've been tracking graphics card prices for the past twelve months and after yet another pricing surge last week, there's been a wave of depression sweeping the PC Gamer offices. It's Nvidia GPUs that have been hit the hardest, with the ludicrous situation where the cheapest RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB we can find is more expensive than the cheapest RTX 5070.

What's even more ludicrous—and surely entirely unsustainable—is that both those cards are both close to $800. These are the fourth and fifth tiers of Nvidia's RTX 50-series lineup and that pricing is utterly punitive for PC gamers.

So, that had me wondering what this might mean for the next generation of cards, and how much you dear people, our PC Gamer readers would accept paying for your next graphics card. So we've been asking: How much would you be willing to spend on a new GPU? And honestly, the answers have surprised me; you're willing to spend way more than I could!

How much would you be willing to spend on a new graphics card?

Given the recent price hikes, here's what the PC Gamer audience be okay spending on a new card

Votes (%)

$600 - $800

22

$400 - $500

18

$800 - $1000

15

$300 - $400

10

$1500+

10

$1000 - $1500

9

Up to $200

8

$200 - $300

7

Votes (%) Data

Product	Value
$600 - $800	22
$400 - $500	18
$800 - $1000	15
$300 - $400	10
$1500+	10
$1000 - $1500	9
Up to $200	8
$200 - $300	7

The recent pricing surge is all down to the AI-backed memory crisis, and these 16 and 12 GB cards respectively are seeing their pricing rocket as a result of the healthy dollop of GDDR7 memory attached to the GPUs. But it's not just production constraints pushing up the price of cards going into retail, it's also going to partly be down to AI enthusiasts looking for Nvidia GPUs with high VRAM capacities to run their local AI systems.

And yes, once more PC gamers are suffering at the hands of folk using both the technology and our graphics cards for things other than gaming and massively spiking the prices as a result.

But I'm surprised that a hefty 56% of readers who responded to our poll would be willing to spend $600 or more on their next graphics card, though I think the number that got me thinking most was just how many of you would actually drop $1000 or more on a new GPU. 19% is a not statistically insignificant percentage, and that is going to make Jen-Hsun's face light up as he considers pricing the new RTX 6070 Ti at $1,000, despite looking at dropping the VRAM capacity to 4 GB of GDDR5 because of the ongoing memory crisis. DLSS 5 will take up the slack, right?

Statistically speaking, it's also interesting to see the parity between the 10% of readers looking at the $300 - $400 segment and the other 10% waaaaay down the other end of the spectrum happy to spend $1500 or more.

But the $600 - $800 segment is the most popular among our readers, with 22% of the vote, and $400 - $500 just behind that with 18%. That's probably where I'd find myself, to be honest.

Given the state of the market, maybe you guys are just being realists in terms of what new GPUs will cost. But it's still kinda surprising to see so few people around the budget end of the market; that's something I've always seen as a strength of PC gaming, but it's also been an underserved colour in the GPU spectrum of recent times.

Let us know where you fit in the spectrum in the comments below!

This week we want to know how you feel about monitors...

As we've reported on many times over the years, Valve's hardware efforts attract the attention of the DIY project community like no other. The Steam Controller is no exception, as creator Owen Feldman has managed to get classic text adventure Zork running on its internal hardware.

Feldman has documented the project on their blog, but it wasn't always a smooth ride to convince the controller to play ball (via Hackaday). An internal tool discovered within a Steam hardware updater folder was used to flash the firmware—but Feldman managed to temporarily brick their controller in the process.

After recovering the controller, a custom Rust-based program was used to emulate an Intel 8080 CPU and run the CP/M-80 operating system on the Steam Controller's internal processor. As the device has no keyboard or screen, the built-in USB connection was used for I/O streaming purposes.

So, what do you do first when you've successfully convinced a controller to emulate a CPU and run an OS all on its own? Well, you play games on it, of course.

A floppy disk (hey, remember those?) copy of Zork was used to load the game via an external drive, resulting in a Steam Controller rig that's been connected to a remarkable number of add-on devices. I doubt it knows exactly what hit it.

Still, the end result looks like a very playable experience. Feldman describes the process of creating the custom program as "1514 lines of pain," but what they've ended up with is the PC hardware equivalent of a magic trick. Who knew the Steam Controller could play games in its own right?

However, I think I'll be leaving this Steam Controller-flashing method well alone, and not just because my Rust coding abilities are non-existent. Feldman warns that bricking your device through the flashing process is a real possibility, and given that it's a $99 piece of kit, perhaps it's better to leave this one to the braver hardware hackers among us.

I grew up in a golden age of FPS games. With the likes of Modern Warfare 2, F.E.A.R., Halo: Reach, and Black Ops 2 all releasing back when I had no responsibilities and all the time in the world; I didn't know how good I had it.

Looking back on it now, it's clear to see that we had it so good because, well, excellence breeds excellence. There was no shortage of inspiration for devs to pull on back in the 2000's and early 2010's.

In fact, Halo: Reach's designer Niles Sankey has confirmed this by dropping by to tell fans just how much other releases of the era inspired Reach. "Modern Warfare 1 and 2 were huge influences on Halo Reach's campaign," Sankey says in a social media post. "The tonal execution in those games was (and still is) absolutely brilliant."

That's not to say that Halo at the time had absolutely nothing going for it. "We knew that Halo did some things better (AI combat, vehicles, etc)," Sankey says. "But we also knew the MW games were beating us in other departments."

One area which the Modern Warfare games had Halo beat was in inter-character relationships and, crucially, its ability to tell a gritty and rather depressing story. "Many of the moments in Reach were inspired by the brilliant work of Infinity Ward," Sankey continues. "Including the Nobel team squad interactions, and 'Objective Survive' was spiritually inspired by the Nuke sequence (in Modern Warfare 2). We just tried to push it one step further."

Reach's final Lone Wolf mission and Current Objective: Survive still haunts me. At the time I'd only just gotten over Loose Ends, and now my poor naive young self was faced with another previously implausible situation. I'd never considered the possibility of the character I'd play in a game, someone who was so clearly meant to be the hero, not making it out alive. I was all too familiar with important characters I liked kicking the bucket, but Reach's final objective did, and still does, hit different.

An unusual sight was seen at a recent San Diego city council meeting, as arch Sith Lord Darth Vader made a rare public appearance to advocate for Flock's AI-assisted surveillance technology. Okay, someone dressed as Darth Vader. But can we really be sure?

Yes, yes we can. Anyway, 404 Media reports that Vader spoke with his trademark zeal about his support for the use of Flock's license plate-reading tech in the city.

"The Emperor is a fan of Flock, and we must continue utilizing Flock technologies so that we can follow and surveil the rebel scum as they move from playground to playground, from playground to pool, from pool to gymnasium," said the Dark Lord of the Sith.

"Because we all know that the Flock cameras are not only following the license plate readers," Vader continued. "They are following children. They are following children in parks and gymnasiums, and we need this. I need this so I can stalk my ex-girlfriend. How will the people trust this city council when this city council continues to vote for surveillance technology that imprisons them?"

"You must work on your Jedi mind tricks," Vader implored. "This is what the Emperor needs. This technology will help us find the rebel scum and their hidden base on Hoth. This technology will help us find Luke Skywalker as he traverses the universe in his X-wing. This technology is a necessary, necessary force."

Well, I think his point was made. The San Diego area has hundreds of Flock cameras already installed on its streets, and privacy advocates have criticised a deal earlier this year with the San Diego Police to allow the Flock Nova platform to integrate the department's investigative data from license-plate readers, video footage, 911 dispatch calls, and police records—without, the campaigners say, going through the city's proper public oversight process.

A leak earlier this year alleged that Flock Nova would allow police to track the movements of private citizens by cross referencing license plates with data obtained from lookup tools, data brokers, and data breaches.

According to an internal company recording obtained by 404 media, a Flock employee said: "You're going to be able to access data and jump from LPR [license plate reader] to person and understand what that context is, link to other people that are related to that person... there's very powerful linking."

As powerful as the dark side of the force? Perhaps not, but it seems to be somewhere close. Still, when a Sith Lord speaks in passionate advocacy of your efforts, it may be worth considering if you're standing on the right side of the ethical line.

It's weird to say that FromSoftware, a studio previously known for its singleplayer gauntlets (and very good mech series), has made some of the decade's most solid middleweight multiplayer games. But given Elden Ring: Nightreign's success, and the fact that The Duskbloods is shaping up to be pretty solid—boo, Switch 2 exclusive, boo—it's a true statement.

You might be wondering, then, if the undisputed king of gritty singleplayer RPGs where you dodge roll sometimes has gone all live service on us. Not so, says president Hidetaka Miyazaki, the combo of Nightreign and Duskbloods is literally just a coincidence.

Speaking to IGN, Miyazaki says: "It's not necessarily some big reveal saying this is the direction we plan to go in moving forward. We still have a heavy focus on single-player content as well. This is just something that happened to work out the way it did. It's funny, because there was never really any big plan that these two games would both release next to each other."

That's not to say FromSoftware hasn't been enjoying itself, though—Miyazaki seems enthused by the opportunity to break from the formula every once in a while: "Personally, it's very fun to make a multiplayer game like this. It's not something we've done a lot and we're looking forward to seeing players' reactions and getting feedback."

But that enthusiasm doesn't override his love for what FromSoftware is provably good at: Making you throw your controller because goddamn Promised Consort Radahn's lazers keep filling up the goddamn screen and how am I supposed to dodge that, this is bullcrap. Ahem.

"If anything, it's like the more you work on something multiplayer for a long time it scratches that itch only to want to make something single-player again," Miyazaki concludes—which is great news for me, as I'm personally excited to get stuck into whatever the next Elden Ring is. Sekiro 2, maybe? A parry-loving cretin can only hope.

I've slowly come to the realisation that, for computer speakers, once you get past the mid-range price point it becomes all about diminishing returns. There are some really solid budget picks (with Creative's Pebble Pro being our budget speaker of choice), but the $100-200 range is where you get the most features and the best price-to-value ratio. Go beyond that and you're spending a lot of money for only incrementally better sound and some non-essential luxuries.

And nothing quite proves that better than the Creative XF1, a set of compact yet incredibly useful speakers with a whole host of neat extra features. And they even come with two cork stands to prop the speakers, which can go entirely unused if you like your speakers flat, but It's still plain neat that they come in the box for no extra charge.

Naturally, the more compact you go, the less room you have to jam speakers full of large tweeters and woofers, and as such, the balance with the XF1 isn't just where to cut costs in each unit, but just how small you can condense them down before the sound starts to take a hit.

And Creative, for the most part, has nailed that balance, with a set of speakers that are small enough to fit on my desk, but loud enough to shake it.

Features

Creative XF1 is loaded with great little design decisions. For one, it has a robust set of connectivity options, with it working via USB Type-C, aux, and Bluetooth. And that Bluetooth 6.0 connectivity even supports LDAC wireless, so it retains a high level of quality no matter the connection.

The single button on the front of the right speaker can not only be spun to adjust volume, but also clicked to swap between the connectivity modes. This means swapping from my gaming PC to my phone or laptop requires no more than a mere button press. And, in practice, this works really well too. With my default audio setting being the speaker, I can click to connect to Bluetooth, and my rig swaps to my plugged-in headphones, which is effectively a poor man's version of the NZXT SwitchMix (and being much cheaper, 'poor man's' is apt).

It's a pretty simple set of speakers otherwise. Simply plug it into the mains, connect it to the left speaker, plug it into a device and start playing sound. One neat feature that comes in the box is a set of cork stands. Without clicking into place or requiring any tools, you merely place the speakers on top and can elevate the speakers at a 15° angle. Generally speaking, being able to elevate the speakers, and therefore elevate the tweeter and woofer, means that it directs the sound more towards you. You may not use the stands, but the fact that they come in the box for free is a solid extra.

Sound

The XF1 speakers have striking quality and clarity for the price and size. Bass, mids, and treble come through clear and are easy to pick out in the mix. And it offers strong sound reproduction at low volumes, which some speakers struggle with (here's looking at you Edifier G2000 Pro). They can also get fierce loud, which is likely linked to the fact that they are 72 watts RMS. Even the Kanto Ora, a significantly more expensive set of desktop speakers, only offers an RMS wattage of 50 watts.

Naturally, you will get better-sounding speakers if you spend more (like the Kanto Ora I just mentioned), and if you are willing to dedicate the space for it, you can get truly superb sound quality out of the likes of the Mackie CR3.5BT. But I have yet to find a set of speakers that offers this level of quality out of its size and price.

It's a speaker designed for games, music, and movies, and it handles them all well thanks in part to smart EQ modes in its software. The gaming mode cuts a tad from the upper mids, whilst giving a light boost to everything else, whereas the music mode drops bass and raises sub bass and upper mids. The Movie EQ also cuts the bass somewhat, while raising everything else.

There's a rather impressive amount of EQ options in Creative's software, including EQ presets for specific games. The GTA preset is higher on the upper mids, where the Last of Us provides a boost in bass and upper mids, with light cuts in the lower mids, sub bass and highs. I love how varied these presets are, and I think the speakers are at their best with a very slight uptick in the bass. Still, even at its default preset, the XF1 is a tiny force to be reckoned with.

The metallic clangs of Abyssus are as metallic and clangy as you'd want them to be here. It pounds when you shoot the shotgun, but it's able to catch the nuance of a soft hum or whir. Abyssus is a game all about its murky, watery atmosphere, and that atmosphere is unhindered coming from the light frame of XF1.

For something a bit more aggressive, I sicced the speakers on speedrunner Echobreaker, and found its combinations of synth and techno drums to come through well. When the thumps, the speakers do a good job of representing that thump, shaking on top of the desk.

Moving over to something more overtly musical, Sea Power's Disco Elysium soundtrack sounds great on the XF1. Trumpets in the middle and high end have real depth to them, where strings and piano fill out the bottom of the mix. There's a solid clarity to everything, making it easy to pick out each instrument in their own registers.

You aren't getting audiophile-level quality here, but I also wouldn't expect it. The bass, mids, and highs are all clear and easy to pick out. You can get speakers which offer a deeper sound, you can get speakers that thump a little more when the bass kicks in, and you can hear more nuance in the mix from something more high-end, but what Creative have done for the price is genuinely quite impressive.

Ergonomics

With the width being just under 10 centimetres and length 19 centimetres, these bookshelf-style speakers are light, easy to set up, and can fit on many a desk. Being front-facing, they are clearly designed to sit on top of a desk and point at you from just a few feet away. The size and setup do make them at their best when plugged into a gaming rig, and the included cork stands help carry that sound straight to your ears.

Though it has many connectivity options, you only really need to plug in the power cable and connecting cable between the speakers to get it up and running. That makes it a solid pick in a clean setup with few wires. The benefit of their size and simplicity is that they're easy to move around and even easier to clean. The only thing you have to worry about when wiping down the XF1 is accidentally moving the volume knob and blasting yourself with The Cardigans, or whatever equally banging band you're listening to.

Aesthetics

The review model I got my hands on is the black variant of the XF1, and its looks are simple and understated. There's a small light near the volume knob to show what device you're connected to, but it has no other lighting, and it has a very simple Creative Logo on the bottom of the left speaker. Otherwise, it lacks any branding and could fit into a tidy setup with ease.

On the whole, I'd say an understated aesthetic serves these speakers well. They're pretty no-nonsense in a lot of ways, but can really deliver in the sound department when you crank them up.

Value

Though it doesn't sound as good as the $350 Kanto Ora I tested back in 2024, it offers a very similar experience in a lot of ways. They're both light and small bookshelf speakers with strong connectivity, and they both have an all-black, understated look, making them great in gaming and non-gaming setups.

For something a little closer to their price point, they blow the Edifier G2000 Pro out of the water in both look and sound. Though the G2000 Pro's throwback is more unique, I think Creative wins in looks, sound clarity, and software.

Though they're more expensive than the Logitech Z407 (at around $120), which is another set of mid-range speakers, I'd be picking the XF1. The Z407 does come with a subwoofer, offering bigger bass, which is a huge boon, but sound quality, connectivity, and ease of use are top-notch here. The XF1 also comes with a subwoofer output jack, so you can plug in your own subwoofer if you have one.

If you just need something, I wouldn't go for the XF1. In fact, there are a few cheaper Creative speakers I'd be picking if my budget were tighter, like the Pebble Pro or the Sound Blaster GS3. Still, if you're looking at around the mid to high $100s, there's nothing else I'd be putting on my small desk.

The Creative XF1 are firmly a mid-range set of speakers, with a mid-range price to match, but you are getting a lot of features and clear sound in return.

I'll get it clear right out of the gate: I think the AMD 3D V-Cache chips are absolutely the best choice for a PC gamer wanting to get the absolute most out of their system when it comes purely to silky gaming frame rates. They're great CPUs, which use a hefty dollop of extra L3 cache specifically to improve their gaming performance, and that's why the Ryzen 7 9800X3D still sits proudly at the top of our best CPU for gaming list.

But, having just finished writing up my AMD Ryzen 7 7700X3D review, AMD's latest pitch for a budget gaming chip, it's made me seriously consider whether I would actually pick Intel's Core Ultra 5 250K Plus instead. And I rather think I might.

The whole justification for the existence of the 7700X3D—a chip that is essentially just a slower clocked Ryzen 7 7800X3D, itself a great CPU from 2023—is that AMD is delivering a more affordable 3D V-Cache CPU to drop into your existing AM5 motherboard. That is, on the surface, a laudable endeavour.

There are a couple of problems here, however. The first is competition from within the AMD stables; namely the fact that, while the 7700X3D does have a vastly lower MSRP to that of the 7800X3D (it's $329 plays $450) the older chip has had a long time to establish itself in retail and as such there are a lot of them around. And that means the actual on-sale prices are essentially the same, and sometimes the 7800X3D is actually available for less than the 7700X3D.

And the second issue is that the value proposition of the 7700X3D only really stands up if you are looking to make a CPU upgrade to an existing AM5 system. Say, if you've already got a rig with a Ryzen 5 7600 in it, for example. But if you're building a new system from scratch—and if you are, I feel your pricing pain, my droog—then at this end of the market the latest Intel Arrow Lake chips are mighty tempting.

The Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus has popped up with low-end pricing and high-end performance. It may only come rocking a six Performance-core layout, with 12 Efficient-cores, but that does give it 18 cores of multi-threaded grunt and some surprisingly good gaming prowess to boot.

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1080p gaming performance

We test games at 1080p for CPU tests to better highlight performance diffences between chips

Cyberpunk 2077 (1080p RT Ultra + DLSS Balanced)Baldur's Gate 3 (1080p Ultra)Homeworld 3 (1080p Epic)Metro Exodus Enhanced Ed. (1080p High)Total War: Warhammer 3 (1080p High)

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

AMD Ryzen 7 7700X3D

112

73

Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus

118

93

AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D

120

88

AMD Ryzen 5 7600X3D

117

59

Cyberpunk 2077 (1080p RT Ultra + DLSS Balanced) Data

Product	Value
AMD Ryzen 7 7700X3D	112 Avg FPS, 73 1% Low FPS
Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus	118 Avg FPS, 93 1% Low FPS
AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D	120 Avg FPS, 88 1% Low FPS
AMD Ryzen 5 7600X3D	117 Avg FPS, 59 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

AMD Ryzen 7 7700X3D

122

52

Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus

109

67

AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D

118

77

AMD Ryzen 5 7600X3D

117

51

Baldur's Gate 3 (1080p Ultra) Data

Product	Value
AMD Ryzen 7 7700X3D	122 Avg FPS, 52 1% Low FPS
Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus	109 Avg FPS, 67 1% Low FPS
AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D	118 Avg FPS, 77 1% Low FPS
AMD Ryzen 5 7600X3D	117 Avg FPS, 51 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

AMD Ryzen 7 7700X3D

104

56

Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus

98

56

AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D

89

49

AMD Ryzen 5 7600X3D

99

49

Homeworld 3 (1080p Epic) Data

Product	Value
AMD Ryzen 7 7700X3D	104 Avg FPS, 56 1% Low FPS
Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus	98 Avg FPS, 56 1% Low FPS
AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D	89 Avg FPS, 49 1% Low FPS
AMD Ryzen 5 7600X3D	99 Avg FPS, 49 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

AMD Ryzen 7 7700X3D

148

78

Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus

145

79

AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D

150

86

AMD Ryzen 5 7600X3D

152

83

Metro Exodus Enhanced Ed. (1080p High) Data

Product	Value
AMD Ryzen 7 7700X3D	148 Avg FPS, 78 1% Low FPS
Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus	145 Avg FPS, 79 1% Low FPS
AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D	150 Avg FPS, 86 1% Low FPS
AMD Ryzen 5 7600X3D	152 Avg FPS, 83 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

AMD Ryzen 7 7700X3D

152

77

Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus

174

141

AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D

159

127

AMD Ryzen 5 7600X3D

165

143

Total War: Warhammer 3 (1080p High) Data

Product	Value
AMD Ryzen 7 7700X3D	152 Avg FPS, 77 1% Low FPS
Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus	174 Avg FPS, 141 1% Low FPS
AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D	159 Avg FPS, 127 1% Low FPS
AMD Ryzen 5 7600X3D	165 Avg FPS, 143 1% Low FPS

The Ultra 5 250K Plus is surprisingly competitive against the more expensive X3D CPUs from AMD.

Synthetic gaming performance

The industry standard 3DMark benchmark is a good measure of relative capabilities even if it doesn't necessarily translate into gaming performance

3DMark Time Spy

CPU index score

Overall index score

AMD Ryzen 7 7700X3D

12848

16435

Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus

19987

17567

AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D

13078

16521

AMD Ryzen 5 7600X3D

9389

15780

3DMark Time Spy Data

Product	Value
AMD Ryzen 7 7700X3D	12848 CPU index score, 16435 Overall index score
Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus	19987 CPU index score, 17567 Overall index score
AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D	13078 CPU index score, 16521 Overall index score
AMD Ryzen 5 7600X3D	9389 CPU index score, 15780 Overall index score

The Ultra 5 250K Plus is surprisingly competitive against the more expensive X3D CPUs from AMD.

Sure, it's not quite got the 3D V-Cache boost, but in a lot of games the Intel chip is really not far off the pace of either the 7700X3D or the 7800X3D. And it comes with a price tag of just $200. Even AMD's budget six-core X3D chip, the Ryzen 5 7600X3D is more expensive than that.

Intel's chip will give you a far more rounded processor, with plenty of gaming and a ton of productivity performance for $130 less than the latest X3D budget option. That gives you $130 dollars to spend on a better GPU than you might have otherwise been able to afford if you'd built around the AMD platform. And just look at the relative compute power on offer with this thing versus the more expensive AMD chips.

Compute performance

We may be PC Gamer but we also want to know what the productivity capabilities are of our CPUs

Cinebench 2024Blender 4.2.07zipHandbrake 1.8.1

Single-core index score

Multi-core index score

AMD Ryzen 7 7700X3D

102

1011

Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus

138

1817

AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D

113

1082

AMD Ryzen 5 7600X3D

107

810

05001,0001,5002,000

Cinebench 2024 Data

Product	Value
AMD Ryzen 7 7700X3D	102 Single-core index score, 1011 Multi-core index score
Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus	138 Single-core index score, 1817 Multi-core index score
AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D	113 Single-core index score, 1082 Multi-core index score
AMD Ryzen 5 7600X3D	107 Single-core index score, 810 Multi-core index score

AMD Ryzen 7 7700X3D

79

Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus

132

AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D

81

AMD Ryzen 5 7600X3D

62

037.575112.5150

Samples per minute

Blender 4.2.0 Data

Product	Value
AMD Ryzen 7 7700X3D	79
Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus	132
AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D	81
AMD Ryzen 5 7600X3D	62

Compressing (GIPS)

Decompressing (GIPS)

AMD Ryzen 7 7700X3D

115

124

Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus

147

146

AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D

118

128

AMD Ryzen 5 7600X3D

93

98

037.575112.5150

7zip Data

Product	Value
AMD Ryzen 7 7700X3D	115 Compressing (GIPS), 124 Decompressing (GIPS)
Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus	147 Compressing (GIPS), 146 Decompressing (GIPS)
AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D	118 Compressing (GIPS), 128 Decompressing (GIPS)
AMD Ryzen 5 7600X3D	93 Compressing (GIPS), 98 Decompressing (GIPS)

AMD Ryzen 7 7700X3D

70.8

Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus

101

AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D

76

AMD Ryzen 5 7600X3D

57

037.575112.5150

UHD > 1080p60 (fps)

Handbrake 1.8.1 Data

Product	Value
AMD Ryzen 7 7700X3D	70.8
Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus	101
AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D	76
AMD Ryzen 5 7600X3D	57

Intel's 18-thread processor has cleary superior compute chops across the board, so if you're doing any other than gaming with your PC it's the better choice.

The caveat to the Intel positivity here, though, is the platform longevity of AMD's AM5 socket is absolutely unrivalled in the industry. While AMD has confirmed that it will be supporting the socket through to 2029, and has recently celebrated the 10 year lifespan (and counting) of its AM4 platform, Intel is still replacing its CPU socket pretty much every generation.

So yes, that means the board you stick the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus into only has a very limited upgrade path within the Arrow Lake generation, and any new Intel chips you covet will require an entire motherboard upgrade, too. That means, if you are the sort of person who is going to look at a CPU upgrade down the line, the dead-end of the Intel LGA 1851 socket is going to be a barrier to your future-proofing plans.

But it's worth asking yourself whether that really is going to be you. Be honest. When was the last time you actually did an in-place CPU upgrade? The notion of future-proofing your build with an easy upgrade path is always a tempting one, and is a good way to extend the operating life of your rig, especially in these 'spensive times of ours.

But if you're one of the majority of PC gamers who never touches that part of your machine, who might only ever upgrade their GPU or SSD at a push, then maybe it's worth considering making the savings up front and putting that towards a better graphics card in your build.

Stealth has changed.

It's no longer about avoidance, visibility, or tension. It's an endless series of "stealth action" games trivializing the uncertainty of sneaking and pushing players into open conflict. The age of camouflage has become the age of tall grass: stealth is no longer treated as a genre worthy of big budgets, but an optional feature of conventional action games. [Takes a long drag from a cigarette] Stealth has changed. And when the player's visibility is under total control… espionage becomes routine.

Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots was at the vanguard of the stealth action shift in 2008—but playing it today, the particular way it mixes mercurial stealth and heavy weaponry is anything but routine. Snake is outfitted with a tranq pistol, non-lethal CQC training, and the latest OctoCamo sneaking suit, an ingenious invention of espionage that automatically camouflages the user to their surroundings. In his other pocket are enough guns to arm a strike force—SMGs, shotguns, ARs, RPGs, a rail gun—customizable with Create-a-Class attachments.

OId Snake skulks through active battlefields, bewildered by the growing mundanity of war, as Kojima grapples with the undeniable appeal of getting in the shit. This is a stealth game that doesn't mind if you try to play it like Call of Duty, but going loud comes at the cost of stressing Snake the fuck out.

This Master Collection port, sold alone or alongside Peace Walker, is a genuinely thrilling object: proof that MGS4 wasn't a mass hallucination we all had in 2008, but a uniquely strange meditation on existential anxiety—of warmongering doomerism, automation, desensitized violence, and back pain—trapped for 18 years on a PlayStation 3. Konami has done good work here, though at times the bare minimum: you can now play MGS4 at 4K (yay!), but at a locked 60 fps (less yay).

Still, that's a lot better than the extremely unreliable 30 fps it once struggled to maintain, and the Master Collection launcher is less cumbersome now than when Volume 1 arrived on PC in 2023. Guns of the Patriots has gone so ignored for so long that it's hard to split hairs here—this is the new best way to play one of my favorites.

Naked sun

Man does it feel great to see Guns of the Patriots cleaned up. It's a special one for me: MGS4 landed just as I reached the age to enjoy games on a deeper level. It was also my first Metal Gear, which is a little hilarious in hindsight, given how obsessed the story is with its own past.

In 2026 I'm seriously charmed by the 2008-ness of this world: from the fully functional iPod (still intact here, but lacking Konami's official Metal Gear hype podcasts) to Kojima's infatuation with the XM8 and P90 (objectively the coolest guns ever made). Hindsight hasn't done wonders for its meandering plot and sometimes dull cutscenes, but Kojima's vision for a world consumed by greed and accelerated by decision-making AIs is uncomfortably spot-on. More than anything else though, MGS4's long exile has given me a new appreciation for its extremely balanced stealth.

Acts 1 and 2—where MGS4 really flexes its sneaking muscles—are the sort of triumphant stealth sandboxes that are quite rare these days. Maps are focused and linear, but brimming with options. Guards are reactive, consistent, emotive, and learnable. The years have gifted me patience for stillness, and MGS4 is most fun at a snail's pace. Slithering between guards six inches away from their boots camouflaged as a patch of dirt is a bigger thrill than crouching through tall grass in Horizon, Ghost of Tsushima, or any modern Assassin's Creed.

I love that Kojima can't help but hand players a box of toys with hidden functions. I'm always picking up three times more gear than I'll ever use, which I've learned is a blessing, because every replay is an opportunity to get fixated on a tool. This time, I finally learned how useful Playboy magazines can be when you're trying to ghost an area. This is also the playthrough in which I remembered that the Mark 2 robot, a drivable drone with a cloak and stun prod, is very useful for covertly retrieving items in risky locations.

Tactical espionage action

Replaying Guns of the Patriots and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory in the same year is highlighting just how bland open worlds have made level design. I love MGS5, but its small Far Cry villages that have to be approachable from all angles are trounced by MGS4's busy battlefields. My favorite is the Act 2 raid on Liquid's mansion, where Snake has to bypass several active warzones either by choosing a side or concealing himself in the chaos.

In my first run through the forest, I crawled up the middle until I found a perfectly Snake-sized crevice in a berm that wrapped around the riskiest sightlines. After that I got caught, shot to death, and tried again, this time finding an alternate route by diving under a shallow river. These areas pack a lot of intentional, almost invisible routes in relatively small spaces, and they're patrolled by nuanced guards that inspire experimentation.

PMC troops can hear you but not see you, or see you but not clearly enough to investigate, or be prompted to investigate, but not be in a hurry about it. Their physical and verbal reactions communicate their alertness without today's explicit "detection meters," and Kojima's lack of restraint means there are like 12 different ways to knock one out. It's hard not to think Snake is the coolest spy in the world once you've gone the extra mile to understand MGS4's extra CQC moves—body slams, chokeholds, stun knife zap, disarms, and of course, holding a guy up at gunpoint, searching him for valuables, then squeezing his nuts until he passes out.

This is true of every Metal Gear, but it's so smart to have an "evasion" phase between "caution" and "alert" where guards frantically search the area expecting to find you. It makes stealth far less binary, and the unpredictability of search patterns in this state is a solid punishment for recklessness.

Movie mode

MGS4's enduring flaw is its second half, where it all-but abandons what it does best. Act 3 is a boring follow mission capped off by the greatest "turret sequence" ever conceived. Act 4 is a walk down memory lane that's more button pressing than sneaking, and Act 5 gets brilliant again, but ends too soon.

This sequel is famous for its long cutscenes, exposition dumps, and inscrutable proper nouns, but honestly, I love all that garbage. I'm the guy who finished MGS4 then returned to the launcher to read the MGS4 Database, a contained wikipedia for all things nanomachine. I have a high tolerance and admiration for Kojima's tastes and always find a lot to like about his characters and dramas, cringe be damned. Like how Meryl hates her dad Roy Campbell because she thought he was her uncle her entire life—forgot that bit until a database deep dive. And that weird hairless monkey that drinks cola and smokes cigs? Betcha didn't know his name is Little Gray, and that he only smokes because Snake made it look cool.

For the first half, MGS4 has a damn-near perfect balance of game and spectacle. Then the game parts get shorter and boring. From then on it only occasionally recovers its pulse with a cool boss fight, "holy shit" cinematic trick that other videogames just never even try, and a memorable finale. There is, weirdly, not enough filler. It's enough to make me wonder if MGS4 was squeezed for time and heavily cut in the same way that Phantom Pain would eventually release without a real ending.

I want more video settings in this PC port, that's for sure, but I appreciate the goodies that this Master Collection could've gotten away with skipping, like a digital art book, manual scan, and that sweet database app.

I also clocked some small touches that confirm Konami didn't just boost the resolution and call it a day: There's a late-game moment where you need to shake the PS3 controller that could've been replaced by a generic controller glyph, but instead it recognized I was on a Steam Deck and showed custom art for the machine. And the Codec call where Otacon jokes about putting in "disc two?" He now has new lines about being on the "PC platform, a digital title!" Nice one, Konami.

This game rocks. It's not a bulletproof recommendation given the slog of a back half, but in exchange you get some of the strongest stealth encounters in videogames and Kojima's signature goofy, genuine storytelling with all the glitz that a PS3 could muster (and, blessedly, none of the slowdown). There's still nothing like it 18 years later, and now I can easily revisit it whenever I want.

We've pulled lots of interesting little details out of the purported Grand Theft Auto 6 gameplay clips being posted by "Cyberleek" this week. In the first couple we saw a possible morality system and stamina meter, and in the next two we got a better look at combat and spied some other Red Dead Redemption 2-like features.

My takeaway was that Grand Theft Auto 6 won't necessarily be a revolutionary new kind of game, but will be impressive for the same reason Rockstar games typically are: The absurd amount of effort and money the studio puts into making them as big and detailed as the mainstream hardware of the day can manage.

After seeing the latest leaked clip, which shows a biplane surveying the fictional state of Leonida and cruising over Vice City, my perspective hasn't really changed, but I'm definitely a lot more wowed than I was after seeing a bit of typical GTA carjacking.

The city, which is only a portion of GTA 6's full map, looks enormous from the air, and densely packed with detail. Across a couple minutes of video, we see what looks like a military base, small farms, dozens of mid- and high-rise apartments and office buildings, an arena, a construction site, grimier looking commercial districts, a huge marina and waterways running through the city, bridges, and tangled freeway interchanges. Phew.

Similar reactions are being shared in the Gaming Leaks and Rumors subreddit: "Yea this is the first clip out of all of these leaks that actually made me go 'holy shit,'" said one commenter.

The legitimacy of the footage is still an open question, but like the other videos, it is highly believable. It could be from an old or limited build of the game, but it does appear that the leaker is capturing the clips themselves: they concluded this latest clip with a video in which they write "LEEK" on a wall with bullet holes.

If you've been following this week's GTA 6 leaks saga, how are you feeling about the footage? (Of course, none of it changes the frustrating issue that Rockstar has not yet announced a PC release date. I'd like to see how it looks on one of our hardware team's test rigs.)

The US Army's 3rd Infantry Division has confirmed that it is indeed offering a four-day pass in November to soldiers who reenlist for at least two years, so they can play Grand Theft Auto 6 when it comes out.

The "Special Reenlistment Incentive" memo is dated July 28, and came to light via the US Army WTF! Moments account on Instagram. It states, quite explicitly, that "any soldier who signs a reenlistment contract between 1 August 2026 and 14 November 2026 will be authorized for a special four day pass. This special pass is specifically designated to coincide with the highly anticipated release of the videogame Grand Theft Auto 6."

As a lifelong civilian, that struck me as odd. I know the military has sometimes struggled to meet recruitment goals (although apparently it's doing pretty well these days, perhaps or perhaps not the sort of thing that happens when people can't afford groceries anymore), but would the Army really leverage GTA to convince its people to stick around for a few more years?

Well, yes. "The idea was to have a unique incentives program that connects to what soldiers are interested in," Lt. Col. Angel Tomko told me. "The command team, in conjunction with the career counselor, wanted to get soldiers excited to reenlist. The command team thinks eligible soldiers are more aware that they are in their window for reenlistment and engage their leadership and the career counselor earlier to see available opportunities.

"The battalion has a new career counselor who approached unit leadership with an idea for an updated creative incentives program to reach FY27 reenlistment goals. Eligible soldiers must reenlist for a minimum of two years, up to six years."

Tomko said the GTA 6 offer is not Army-wide, but rather a program unique to the 3rd Infantry Division, of which the 9th Brigade Engineer Battalion is a part. It also seems to be quite successful: Tomko said there are 130 soldiers in the battalion who are eligible for the incentive and so far 20 have chosen it.

And apparently, this is novel but not unusual. "Reenlistment incentives are routine for the US Army to reward our soldiers," Tomko said. "We want to retain the best talent and it’s a credit to the creativity of the career counselor within the organization to develop this unique opportunity surrounding the launch of this popular videogame."

Based on reactions to the report on social media, it's fair to say that some find the idea of using a popular videogame to keep the ranks filled a bit distasteful. And fairly so: Four days in exchange for two years (or more) hardly seems a good deal, especially during a time of what often feels like aimless American adventurism.

And it can feel downright predatory when taken in the context of, for example, this ABC report on military recruitment, which throws a disheartening light on the imbalance between high school kids with few opportunities and a massive, savvy organization who knows how to target them: "Among the recruits and prospective recruits interviewed, only two said they knew what a secretary of defense is, and neither could identify who currently holds the position."

At the same time, it's likely that at least some of those 20 who took advantage of the offer were planning to reenlist anyway, and are just opting for the GTA 6 pass because, hey, why not? More to the point, unlike the new recruits interviewed in that ABC report, soldiers eligible for the offer are already in the Army: They may not know who the secretary of defense is either, but they are at least hip to what's in store.

Regardless of the reactions elsewhere, Tomko said the response to the incentive program among soldiers has been extremely positive.

"The heightened interest in the press does not change the purpose of the program: to reward dedicated soldiers for service to their nation," Tomko explained. "Every soldier who is eligible for this program is already serving, already trained, and already fully qualified. Reenlistment incentives are a longstanding part of Army retention, and units often tailor them to their formations in ways that build morale and spark early conversations about career options.

"Soldiers who reenlist often have multiple incentive options depending on their Military Occupational Specialty, service needs, and eligibility, and range from time off, to money or duty location of choice. This specific incentive is for all soldiers in 9th Engineer Battalion and is an administrative bonus layered on top of standard reenlistment incentives."

The US military has a history of using videogames as part of its recruitment efforts. The America's Army shooter series debuted in 2002, almost 25 years ago—perhaps not coincidentally, just months after the start of what's now referred to as the Global War on Terrorism. In 2018 the Army launched its own esports team, which operates as part of its "Marketing and Engagement Brigade based at Fort Knox," and in 2020 it began a Twitch channel for game streams. That endeavor had a rough start, but the Army's esports org remains active, and continues to stream.

You can't regularly queue up for combat until October, but a series of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 betas are a chance to try one upcoming campaign mission and several multiplayer maps before launch. Trying to decipher what happens when and how to register is super convoluted, so here's an info drop on the MW4 beta dates and what you'll need to get started.

Call of Duty MW4 beta dates

You've got two options for jumping into the MW4 beta: If you pre-order the game you can participate in the first round (early access beta), or you can wait and play for free in the second (open beta).

Call of Duty MW4 beta codes and registration

Some players need a MW4 beta code to participate in the early access weekend starting on August 21, but it all depends on how you've pre-ordered. The second period on August 28 doesn't require a purchase; it's open to anyone on Steam, Battle.net, or consoles.

The MW4 open beta weekend on August 28 does not require a pre-order or beta code to participate. Anyone can download the open beta build on any platform.

MW4 beta modes, maps, and more

The maps and modes available in both beta weekends

Most maps and modes are available in both MW4 betas, but features like Combat Outpost aren't available until the second weekend. A couple of maps are also limited to just one weekend, so I've put together those key differences in a table for reference

MW4 beta rewards

MW4 beta pre-loading

On August 18, an unidentified person or group going by the name "Cyberleek" began sharing what appeared to be Grand Theft Auto 6 gameplay clips on the internet.

The internet was naturally skeptical, but the footage was hard to fault: It looked authentic, showing mundane GTA 6 gameplay featuring its male protagonist, Jason. In one clip the player shot a basketball outside of the same house we've seen in the trailers, and in another he did some typical GTA random-civilian-murdering.

A day later, Cyberleek dropped two more videos, both of which also looked legit. At the same time, the clips were being stricken from social media on copyright grounds—the only public response from Take-Two and Rockstar so far.

The fifth video Cyberleek released ended with a twist: the player writing the word "LEEK" into the side of a building with bullet holes. These are not, it turns out, clips taken by GTA 6 testers and found on an unsecured server, as many assumed. Cyberleek has (or had) access to a build of GTA 6, or a portion of it.

Here's what we know about the leaker who goes by Cyberleek.

The GTA 6 build they are using may not be complete, but is probably recent

We don't know exactly how Cyberleek is getting their clips. The footage of them shooting "LEEK" into a wall indicates they have or had access to a playable build, but it is not necessarily the full game. It's notable that GTA 6's other protagonist, Lucia, has not shown up in the clips.

It does seem that these clips are from a relatively recent build, however. In one of the clips, the in-game radio is playing "Sports Car" by Tate McRae, which released in January 2025.

They've got a manifesto

Cyberleek has made common consumer rights complaints their justification for the leaks: "Publishers sell licenses and call them purchases. They ship unfinished games and call them living services. They lock content on discs and call it DLC. They kill games and keep the money. Every year anti-consumerism tightens its grip, and every year gamers get less for what they pay."

Their demands for game publishers are a little odd

At a glance, Cyberleek's complaints seem typical, but two of the three demands they've put forward strike me as slightly strange choices.

The demands are: no more digital preorders, no more selling DLC already contained in the base game files, and mandatory "offline fallback states" for the singleplayer components of games.

The third demand is the most expected, and is similar though not identical to the demand of the Stop Killing Games movement (which has disavowed the leaker).

The other two, however, don't seem like the kind of core issues most people would choose if they were putting forward their three biggest gripes about the games industry in 2026.

On-disc DLC—where add-on content is included in the base game's files, but inaccessible without paying extra—was a big controversy around 10-15 years ago, but is much less relevant in today's mostly discless world.

The complaint that preorders don't really mean anything when you're not preordering an actual physical disc is also valid, but seems like a roundabout way to complain about the heart of the issue: The end of physical media, which has been a hot button topic following Sony's announcement that it will cease disc production.

I'm not sure you can rally a movement behind ending digital preorder bonuses and preloading: GTA 6 itself has already enjoyed an "unprecedented" number of preorders. You can definitely rally a movement behind seeing more GTA 6 leaks, though.

They're selling a crypto token

The leaker is promoting the $Cyberleek token alongside the leaks—the market cap is $1.1M at the time of writing—and claims that the funds will go toward "a secret project."

For now, the tokens are being used to vote in polls that determine the next clip to be released. The most recent clip, a flyover of Vice City, was the winner of a vote.

The timing of the leaks could suggest a European origin

The leaks have been dropping at around 9 am my time, in California, except for the most recent one which was posted in the vicinity of 2:30 am Pacific.

There's a good chance that Cyberleek does not keep a typical sleep schedule, so this speculation is a bit tenuous, but the timing could point to Europe. For someone nine hours ahead of me, the leaks would be dropping late morning or late afternoon, which seem like respectable hours for leaking videogame footage.

The reference to "living service" games in the manifesto may also point to someone who speaks English as a second language or is using machine translation, unless it was just a creative turn of phrase.

Some are pointing to old posts on a German cybersecurity forum

2018 posts from the user "Cyberleek" on German-language forum szenebox.org, which includes cybersecurity-related boards, as well as other archived internet evidence, suggest that the leaker could be a German or Swiss individual in their 30s. A detailed breakdown of that evidence can be found on this Github page created by software developer Zyre.

The leaker's website and two of its mirrors are also hosted by a German provider.

A little more speculation

Based on the above, I would wager that Cyberleek is not a Rockstar employee or contractor, and that their manifesto was written after they acquired the GTA 6 build or footage as a post-facto justification and framework for the $Cyberleek token.

The complaint about on-disc DLC sticks out to me as a suggestion that this isn't a teenager, but someone who was active in gaming discourse a decade ago.

Cyberleek could face serious repercussions if caught. The hacker responsible for the massive 2022 data dump that first revealed GTA 6 to the world certainly has, and the crypto token adds another vector by which authorities may track Cyberleek down.

That fact hasn't slowed them down: So far they've released six videos, and while fans are obviously excited to pore over the gameplay details, there's some concern that the leaker will resort to posting story spoilers if attention wanes.

Rockstar's official GTA 6 gameplay reveal is still scheduled for Thursday, August 27.

Six months after laying off approximately 80 developers because "overall momentum hasn't reached the level needed to support a team of this size long term," Riot Games has announced that it is ending development of its fighting game 2XKO. Servers for online play will remain available and the game is also playable offline, but "active development will conclude at the end of 2026."

"Over the last few months, we've been monitoring 2XKO's trajectory closely, and what we've seen is painting a clear, consistent picture: while a lot of you jumped in to try the game and there's an incredible community that plays every day, we haven't seen enough players stick with the game to get to a path toward sustainability," Riot wrote in today's update.

New content will continue to flow through the remainder of the year, including two new fighters, along with new bug fixes and "feature improvements" leading to a final bug fix patch in December. All fighters are being unlocked, and any money spent on the game "on or before August 20"—that's today—will be refunded.

PC Gamer's fighting game pro Mollie Taylor wrote in February, shortly after the layoffs, that she didn't understand what Riot wanted from 2XKO, a question today's end-of-development post tries to answer. The short version is that it wanted "to build a game that the fighting game community would love to play with their friends," addressing what it saw as shortcomings on both the technical and business fronts—and while the studio saw evidence of success, "it just wasn't happening enough. Even within the genre, diehard tag fighter players loved 2XKO, but most other fighting game players struggled to find reasons to stick with the game."

The bottom line is that while Riot's efforts through the first half of 2026 were well received, "we saw no meaningful, sustained change in 2XKO's trajectory; only a fraction of what it would take to trend toward sustainability." Thus, the plug is pulled.

A League of Legends fighting game might seem like an obvious idea, but it was something of a bold gambit. It was built to be a 2v2 "assist fighter" game right out of the box, and Riot poured years of work (and money) into getting it right: Speculation that it was working on a fighting game goes back to at least 2017, but it wasn't officially confirmed until 2019.

Two years and many iterations later, it finally got the 2XKO title, and went into full release in January 2026. 2XKO isn't on Steam so we don't have access to player numbers, but the dramatic reduction in the team size just a few weeks after release indicated that they were not up to Riot's expectations. The studio said in February that it was still "fully committed" to the game, but now it's seen enough.

The untimely end of 2XKO sucks, but Riot is at least trying to give players a soft landing: Today's announcement includes a roadmap for the remaining updates, and Riot said it's "figuring out what more we can do for players, TOs, competitors, and creators that have consistently shown up for the FGC through 2X."

Valve honcho Gabe Newell recorded a video to kick off The International 2026, the latest edition of Valve's annual Dota 2 championship tournament, and as noticed by GamesRadar, the reaction to it is pleasingly wholesome.

Plenty of esports fans are thrilled to see the return of one of the world's premiere tourneys, naturally, but in this case it's not just the excitement of elite competition that has everyone would up: An awful lot of folks seem to be more impressed by how good Gabe is looking these days.

Newell's video message was pretty standard fare for this sort of thing: Reminiscing about past Internationals, gazing into the future, and thanking the fans, players, and host city of Shanghai for making it all possible. But the reaction?

Well, this is the internet, after all.

"I’m so happy he lost all that weight," redditor TheMilkman1811 wrote in response to Newell's "Chad Gabe" look. "Probably bought another 10 to 15 years of life with us."

"Right? I'm just happy he looks healthy! More time among us," another replied. A third cut more directly to the point, referring to the Valve founder as "Babe Newell."

The cause of Newell's new svelte style came up for debate: Some believe his life-on-a-yacht lifestyle is the reason, others surmise it's medical intervention; redditor rice_goblin theorized that "he's slowly absorbing australian genes through osmosis due to living in new zealand for so long."

That theory is surprisingly popular, at least to the extent that people think (perhaps not entirely seriously) that Newell is becoming genetically Australian: No fewer than six redditors, and possibly more by the time you read this, say he's looking like Hugh Jackman (or, in one case, "Hugh Jackman's cool dad," although Jackman is only six years younger than Newell.)

Similar sentiments are being expressed in comments on YouTube, where pochix2 wrote, "Live long enough to see Lord Gaben turn to Russell Crowe, while real Russell Crowe becomes Gabe." But again, others are just happy to see Newell doing so well: "Lord Gaben is getting healthier, love to see it," NighthawK1911 wrote. "He looks slimmer than last year's announcement video."

Newell's lighter look is clearly a surprise for some Dota 2 fans, but the transformation has been underway for a while. He was, putting it gently, not a small man back in the potato phone days of 2022, but he's shed a lot of that poundage in more recent years—he was looking comparatively trim in his International 2025 appearance, although even there I don't think he looked quite as lean as he does here. And yeah, let's just put it out there, trimming the beard and getting a proper haircut sure didn't hurt either.

It is, admittedly, a bit weird to see this kind of adoration for a distant billionaire, especially given that the whole billionaire class isn't held in very high esteem these days (and rightly so). But Newell is somewhat unusual in that regard: He did something cool and lucrative, didn't sell it to the highest bidder at the first opportunity, and then quietly took his money and toddled off to the other side of the world to indulge a relatively harmless rich-guy passion. As billionaire outcomes go, that's not a bad one.

After closing out last year's Gamescom Opening Night Live with the surprise reveal of Black Myth: Zhong Kui, developer Game Science strongly implied there'd be a long wait before we'd see more of its follow-up to the global breakout success of Black Myth: Wukong—a success that was, nonetheless, dogged by the controversy surrounding its studio's sexist history.

Just under a year later, it turns out that wait wasn't so long after all. Earlier today, Game Science released a 15-minute gameplay trailer for Black Myth: Zhong Kui, providing our first look at its player character, how he fights, and what tapestry of foes inspired by Chinese mythology and folklore he'll face.

Embedded above, the trailer follows our hero: a dishevelled adventuring swordsman, whose dishevelled adventuring swordsman business sees him interrupting a wizened old man just as he's preparing to take a choice bite of chicken thigh. The two become companions across a montage of sipping creature barnacles, kicking logs, dropping torches into mysterious holes that spew geysers of paper talismans, and building rafts that are soon destroyed in a confrontation with a biblical-scale tidal wave.

As is often the case in a videogame, the wave deposits the pair on a beach where action happens. The second Black Myth is once again dabbling in a pseudo-soulslike combat space, with deliberate and committed attack animations, deflections, and parries. But compared with Wukong, there's a satisfying economy of motion and sense of confidence in the player character's movement: His dodges aren't always dramatic rolls or sidesteps; often, he simply turns aside just enough to let an incoming blow miss by narrow inches.

In combination with some of the more elaborate twirls and emphatic thrusts of his swordplay, it gives his martial artistry a striking affect—even if there's a bit of transitional ricketiness around the edges of the animations. But considering the four years that passed between Wukong's first gameplay footage and its 2024 launch, Game Science likely has plenty of time to tighten up some of that awkwardness.

The video gives an impression of the more unconventional options in the player's combat toolkit. When faced with a cluster of creatures emerging from an oily swamp, he flings a firebomb that ignites the enemies and their surroundings. Content to let the fire sort the creatures out, he uses the opportunity to magically channel the fire he'd just made into his sword, apparently imbuing it with temporary fire damage in his next fight.

Later, he charges his sword with lightning. He summons a spirit to fight alongside him—a hulking (tiger?) man with a massive curved sword who'll fight on his own, but who the player character can also project himself into and control directly.

Also, there's a boss fight against an oyster man. It doesn't go well for him, on account of the aforementioned sword and spirit stuff.

The trailer closes with another montage of fantastical scenes: The protagonist brushes shoulders with glowing mushroom men, buries some kind of demon alive with a shovel, gets an impressive faceful of makeup, and plays music with the coolest trio of skeletons I've ever seen. What's unclear, however, is whether or not the player character is Zhong Kui, the titular ghost-slaying Taoist deity who appeared in the reveal trailer and is once again seen riding his tiger mount at the very end of the latest showing.

That's information we'll likely still be waiting on for quite some time. According to Game Science, Black Myth: Zhong Kui "is still in early development."

Ahead of The Duskbloods' network test next week, veteran Soulsborne YouTubers VaatiVidya and Oroboro have uploaded long gameplay videos and explainers for the Switch 2 exclusive PvPvE game, while IGN and Automaton have published new interviews with project lead and Soulsborne commander-in-chief, Hidetaka Miyazaki.

As a veteran Souls sicko, here are my biggest takeaways from the footage and conversations around the game, which we'll surely get on PC eventually, right?

It's structured like Nightreign

Instanced, run-based gameplay. A timer ticking down as the difficulty/stakes increase. Characters with set fantasies/abilities (maybe even equipment?). While the objectives and specifics may differ, Duskbloods' overall structure feels like an evolution of Nightreign's. Out of the gate, though, Duskbloods will have three maps⁠—one more than Nightreign even after its Deathly Forsaken Hollows DLC.

It's more PvP-focused than Nightreign, but has options for PvE-likers

Rather than hunting down your fellow players like in Tarkov or Marathon, a Duskbloods match sees you trying to complete more PvE objectives than the other players in your lobby. Objective completion raises your "Virtue" score, and the high scorers at the end of each timed round survive to the next. It looks like there are PvP map events and optional objectives, and the default final battle is a PvP slugfest between the players who made it to the end.

Vaati mentioned, though, that there's an unlockable option to make the final battle a co-op PvE boss instead, more akin to Nightreign's Nightlords. On the opposite end, there's an item to heighten the PvP focus, giving you Virtue for hunting down and killing another player in the lobby.

The Bloodborne (and Souls) of it all

It wouldn't be FromSoft if we didn't see returning motifs and designs in a new context. It's been part of the conversation from the beginning, but Duskbloods really does look like a Bloodborne sequel:

• Those hooded ogre guys sure do look like the Church Giants from Bloodborne.
• The map shown in the preview screams Yharnam, particularly the scenic view of the clock tower.
• There's a cathedral roof boss whose arena bears a striking resemblance to the Dark Souls Gargoyles or Bloodborne's Martyr Logarius.
• I spy Elden Ring/Bloodborne whirly saw weapons.
• There's a cathedral interior straight out of Upper Cathedral Ward.
• Gotta have a fight in a field of white flowers.

Shadow of the Erdtree vertical design is the future

Rather than the sprawl of Elden Ring's Limgrave/Limveld, Duskbloods' one revealed map has the breathtaking vertical density of the Land of Shadow from SotE, or Nightreign's Great Hollow. The former is, I think, the best level design we've yet seen out of FromSoftware. The latter, unfortunately, is a great zone let down by Nightreign's frantic time restrictions. We'll see soon how well this style of level design fits The Duskbloods.

What about sustain and follow-through? What about singleplayer? What about PC?

FromSoft has a poor track record of support and balance for its multiplayer. This has been less of an issue⁠—or at least, easier for me to forgive⁠—when this multiplayer is supplemented to some of the best singleplayer action-RPGs in the industry. But less so with, say, Nightreign feeling like a dead game just over a year after launch.

I once again find myself hoping, praying, crying, pissing, and shitting for the next Big Thing, Complete Package from FromSoft, be it an Elden Ring sequel, Armored Core expansion, or secret third thing. Surely there's something closer to completion than not that we can see soon?

And, of course, the Switch 2 elephant in the room: Whatever Nintendo offered to sweeten the pot, this game would find its truest home on PC. I hope we see that version soon, rather than Duskbloods imitating Bloodborne in the worst way possible. Whatever comes next, stay tuned for our coverage of Duskbloods' upcoming network test.

As $70-$100 controllers are only getting more and more impressive, you might be wondering what the pro controller market can do to make you spend that extra $100 or so. It turns out the answer might be to shove a screen on it. Ain't that always the way?

That's what you will find on the Genki Manta, a new controller live on Kickstarter. It uses Manta OS, which is Genki's own operating system, and if you're wondering why a controller would even need an operating system, Genki notes that this allows on-the-fly fine-tuning without the need for any extra devices. You can customise its tri-stage triggers, adjust dead zones, change haptic feedback, and more via the onboard screen and OS.

And the controller is pretty impressive even outside the whole 'OS and built-in screen' thing. You get up to 8,000 Hz polling while wired (though only 1,000 Hz via 2.4 GHz wireless), a range of over 10 meters, 150 hours of battery via Bluetooth LE 6, as well as TMR joysticks and Hall effect triggers. The 16 MB of internal storage can be used to load apps onto Manta OS, and expandable storage might be offered as a stretch goal, according to Genki.

Normally I'm pretty cynical about Kickstarter projects, but the LA-based Human Things and its range of Genki products have been successful on Kickstarter for some time. In fact, I got a Genki dock a couple of years ago and was impressed with the performance. That's not to say the Genki Manta will necessarily be the same quality, but the company has a history of successful kickstarters.

Genki says the Manta is "Beyond the Pro Controller" on its Kickstarter, and it has many of the features one would expect from a pro controller, like four paddles on the bottom and two extra buttons next to the bumpers. Naturally, all of these are remappable via the controller's software.

One thing that does intrigue me about the screen and OS combo is that the controller can swap to keyboard and mouse controls. It even has a toggle on the pad to swap between controller and keyboard mode. It's not yet clear if the display is a touch screen, or how Genki anticipates players using the controller to navigate a mouse.

Whether or not it can balance the screen and extra buttons in its 280-290 g (around the weight of the Xbox Series X controller) frame will be anyone's guess, and naturally that software will have to be very smooth to be worth the effort. I am, however, quite intrigued by the controller, and I'm still deciding if it's curiosity or morbid curiosity.

We don't yet have an estimated shipping date (assuming the Kickstarter is successful), but we do have a price point: $189 for the Super Early Bird pricer and $279 for the retail price. That is a lot of money, and our pick for the best high-end controller right now, the Razer Wolverine V3 Pro 8K PC, is $200 at retail. The Wolverine also offers TMR thumbsticks and Hall effect triggers, though you are getting a superior 8,000 Hz polling via wireless, and we can guarantee the build quality of the Wolverine, as we've actually had it in our hands.

This is all before mentioning that you can get a controller for $70 (like the Gamesir G7 Pro) that competes with pro controllers in build quality and the featureset department. Even the more expensive Gamesir G7 Pro 8K (at $80) is a decent choice if you really want 8,000 Hz polling.

This is to say that, even with its own OS and a 2.79-inch screen, the Genki Manta has its work cut out for it. It's a big swing for a first controller, but we'll have to get our hands on it to see if it's actually worth that hefty asking price.

You ever think about how weird cars are, as a concept? It's like sharing public space with enormous bullets piloted by random members of the public. If our car-centric urban world did not exist and you tried to pitch it, whole-cloth, you'd probably be laughed out of the room. You want to give people their own ballistic missiles, are you mad?

This is what I thought as I pulled the trigger on a pump-action shotgun and sent a mid-size family sedan careening into the side of a police helicopter.

Today's GTA 5 mod—installed in an attempt to either turn the game into a PC version of GTA 6 or break it entirely—is Vehicle Cannon, which turns whatever gun you are wielding into a horrible nozzle of limitless automobiles. In place of bullets, guns now emit vehicles at speed, bringing great devastation to the land and possibly crashing your PC.

Combined with a mod menu that I forget the provenance of, which lets me float from location to location like a militarised Christmas spirit, it makes you, more or less, god. There's probably a part in the Bible where god shoots cars at people. I don't know.

I'll be honest, I'm still working on justifying how this will make GTA 5 more like GTA 6.

But you gotta give me this: it's very fun. The unparalleled chaos of launching a freeway's-worth of cars into the streets of Los Santos is tremendous. It also makes you something like a single-person artillery unit wreaking havoc on your foes at great distance. It makes me a little nostalgic for the days when Rockstar leant deeper into the potential for havoc that its open worlds embodied. Alas, now its protagonists are all egos and emotions.

The great Grand Theft Auto 6 leaks continued today with a new video from Leek, and this one is particularly impressive, and damaging, because now it looks like the leaker really does have access to a playable build of the game.

The bulk of the video shows a blue and yellow biplane flying over Vice City, and even as someone who's not a GTA fan I have to agree with posters on Reddit that it looks very impressive: Massive, detailed, and almost shockingly realistic.

Cars can be seen moving on the streets and freeways below, even at great distances; you can't judge too much from a relatively low-resolution video posted on social media, but it looks smooth and steady, and there's virtually no discernable texture pop.

There's also a few seconds spent with the in-game radio, a vital part of any GTA experience. I was a little disappointed that V-Rock got passed over (you never say "no" to Stevie Nicks) but there looks to be a nice variety of tunes on tap, as you'd expect.

The kicker, though, comes at the end. Having exited his plane, our hero Jason takes a rifle and shoots the word "LEEK" into a wall. This is meaningful: While previous clips could have come from someone flipping off an NDA from a Rockstar presentation—possibly from the upcoming Netflix showcase, although most of the clips look like unedited randomness and not the sort of thing you'd use to show off your game on national television—this bit of shooting is far too bespoke for anything but actions specifically taken by the leaker.

It's not absolute confirmation that Leek has a playable build of GTA 6. It's possible they used generative AI to create the sequence and then appended it to the flyover segment—some have speculated that some or all of the leaked clips have been AI generated, although the speed with which they've been struck down pretty strongly suggests they're legit.

That makes it very likely that Leek really does have a playable GTA 6 build on his hands, or at least had access to one at some point. And if that's the case, with three months left before GTA 6 debuts on consoles, Rockstar and Take-Two have serious headaches on their hands.

Last week, Pocketpair head of publishing and communications John "Bucky" Buckley addressed a bubbling conversation about the developer's Palworld collaboration strategy, informing players that they "simply do not realize the sheer number of collabs we’ve rejected or scrapped" over a perceived mismatch.

That exchange with the Palworld fanbase seems to have gotten the attention of No Man's Sky developer Hello Games, intensifying a flirtatious game of crossover footsie that's been ongoing between the two studios' public figureheads for months.