The Fridge

Blizzard wants Diablo 4’s outrageous damage numbers to mean something again in Lord of Hatred, so it’s letting you crank the difficulty up to near-impossible levels: ‘It’s going to be really f*cking hard’

The fun of a loot-based action RPG disappears when monsters pop in a single hit and the only thing that goes up are the damage numbers. Right now, you can upgrade your gear all you want in Diablo 4, but the majority of the game doesn’t really require it.This is a problem in a genre…

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Steam game listing achieves knockoff singularity by aping Pokémon, Zelda, and even Overwatch designs with a shamelessness Palworld could only dream of

Back in our January 2024 launch impressions of Palworld, I wasn’t kind about its shameless design counterfeiting, calling its creatures “a surreal gallery of familiar eyes, limbs, and silhouettes” built from “the reassembled pieces of existing Pokémon, adding a color swap and a couple tweaked details to hide the Frankenstein stitching.”I understand now that I…

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Valve says Steam users downloaded 100 exabytes of games in 2025, and are averaging 274 petabytes of installs and updates every day

Valve recently published its Steam Year in Review for 2025, which is a big old list of things it has improved on the platform over the year for developers and publishers. Much of it won’t be of particular interest to players, unless you’re gagging to find out how Valve is messing with calendars and recommendations…

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Microsoft’s CEO insists that Xbox, ‘at its best, lifts the entire company’ and that it will ‘always’ invest in gaming

To recap for those who’ve been recently resting under a cool, mossy rock, Phil Spencer has now retired from his role as CEO of Microsoft Gaming. His replacement is Asha Sharma, who joined Microsoft in 2024—as president of its CoreAI product. This has resulted in a wave of doomsaying for Xbox that leadership has since…

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