January 2025

Shit is indeed about to get real, but separate from all that Valve has kicked off the first Steam sale of 2025 in the form of the Real-Time Strategy Fest, a week-long extravaganza of deals, demos, and free stuff in the Steam Points Shop, all of it geared at—you guessed it—real-time strategy games. It’s not…

World of Warcraft’s latest patch brought with it many returning activities and mechanics—and yet another type of currency to throw on top of the mountain of currencies it already contains. Virtually every game has some kind of gold or coins or points that you can exchange for goods or services. But none has quite so…

We got some hands-on time with Exoborne, the new extraction shooter from Sharkmob, in August 2024, and it looked potentially very promising, particularly for more casual players interested in an experience that isn’t built to punish them at every opportunity. In February, curious shooter fans will have an opportunity to try it for themselves in…

Popular gaming-adjacent streamers including Kai Cenat And Mark Phillips have been named in musician Drake’s defamation lawsuit against Universal Music Group (UMG), which accuses the music publisher of spreading the “false and malicious” narrative he is a pedophile via the Kedrick Lamar track Not Like Us. The Lamar song is a diss track, an established…

In case you missed it: this past weekend saw social media platform TikTok banned completely in the US, then restored about 12 hours later thanks to the personal intervention of Donald Trump. Watching the whole series of events unfold on the app itself was chaotic, revelatory, and fascinating—and now it all feels like the morning…

There are a surprising number of RTS romps knocking about these days, but few of them have managed to leave a mark. Pessimism has overtaken me, but there are some exceptions. Tempest Rising—Slipgate Ironwork’s sci-fi throwback—is one of them. If you’ve ever dreamed of a reality where EA didn’t completely wreck Westwood’s Tiberium saga, this…

Grinding Gear Games says it’s sorry for the slow response times to Path of Exile 2 customer support requests, but it’s dealing with an absolute avalanche of them—roughly 545,000 email requests since the game launched in November, far more than it was prepared to deal with. “In the lead up to the launch of Path…