The Steam Hardware Survey has become a critical resource for the games industry, allowing curious enthusiasts or practical-minded developers to get a sense of how the average PC gamer enjoys the hobby. To hear Valve senior engineer Jay Stelly tell it in Half-Life 2’s new 20th anniversary developer commentary, the Steam Hardware Survey first came…
A weird new roguelite on Steam blends the genres of tower defense autobattler and factory builder into a cute, if odd, synergy. In ShapeHero Factory you scrawl out little production lines on magical parchment to combine shapes to conjure heroes that then automatically defend a big crystal from hordes of little inkblot demons. The structure…
The YouTube algorithm keeps threatening me with videos about how the new Dragon Age is a crime against Gamers. I haven’t watched any of them, but my recommendations still overflow. Even people with less overheated opinions have been down on its relatively chill vibes and easygoing nature. Just quietly, I’ve enjoyed most of my time…
First reported by Tom’s Hardware, Icelandic strongman Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson—who won the 2019 World’s Strongest Man competition and played Gregor “The Mountain” Clegane in Game of Thrones—has completed a 996 lbs “deadlift of data,” hoisting thousands of next-generation, 128 terabyte SSDs at the SD24 computing conference. With each drive likely to command north of $10,000…
There’s not a lot to love about the aesthetics of Elden Ring’s hub area, the Roundtable Hold: Dull grey stone hallways lit by torches. The best bits of it are all furniture, like the roundtable itself, that you can barely appreciate due to tight camera angles from the claustrophobic walls. Lovers of the least-loved of…
Streamer Crayator‘s first shot at beating Red Dead Redemption 2, live, without a single death, ended nine-and-a-half hours in when Arthur Morgan somehow hit his head at top speed on horseback, chasing after a train in true old west movie fashion. Replays don’t really make clear what happened, but he died. The second attempt came…
First reported by Bleeping Computer, Microsoft is now preventing Windows 11’s 24H2 update from being sent out to machines that have a selection of recent Ubisoft games installed on them. A number of users have reported persistent, unworkable crashing, sometimes on startup, when trying to play the affected games. “After installing Windows 11, version 24H2,…
The Irish Independent (users may encounter a paywall) has reported that Larian has posted a €249 million pre-tax profit for 2023—that’s almost $260 million freedom dollary-doos for those of us without adequate digital privacy protections. The runaway success of Baldur’s Gate 3 saw Larian increase its overall revenue almost twentyfold from 2022. The figures were…
“Cats are amazing animals”. Stray caught everyone a little by surprise when it first leapt onto PlayStation consoles back in 2022. A cyberpunk platformer where you play as a cute kitty sure looked sweet, but it was surprisingly heartfelt? Surprisingly fun to play? And (un)surprisingly drove any real-world cats in its vicinity wild? We weren’t…
PC gamers love tweaking our field of view sliders, the extent of your in-game peripheral vision that gets rendered. Real heads tend to adopt a “the higher, the better,” mentality, with 90 degrees being a commonly-accepted sweet spot. So why did PC gaming grande damme Valve saddle us with a miserly, dare I say console-like…