The Fridge

The New York Attorney General’s Office has flipped at least one Counter-Strike knife skin on the Steam Marketplace for purposes of state

Yesterday, New York state attorney general Letitia James announced that the state of New York had opened a lawsuit against Valve, accusing the Steam developer of violating gambling laws by “letting children and adults illegally gamble” via “addictive and harmful” loot box mechanics. Contained within New York’s 52-page court filing detailing its investigation into Valve’s…

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Just Cause dev co-founder says the studio got too big and ‘numbers focused,’ so he quit and made a $25 open world crime brawler

It’s a story we’ve seen a lot this decade: An experienced videogame developer becomes fatigued by ballooning team sizes and meetings about monetization strategy, and then strikes out on their own to start a smaller studio with funding from private investors and companies like NetEase. In this case, it’s Christofer Sundberg, co-founder of Just Cause…

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Marathon briefly censors ‘Arc Raiders’ in chat, just like Activision and EA did, and it was probably another accident because it was quickly and quietly fixed

Marathon looks pretty groovy, but it’s got one big problem and it goes by the name of Arc Raiders. Embark’s narrative-driven sci-fi extraction shooter is really good, and really popular, and it stole Marathon’s thunder in a big way—to the point that it influenced some of the design changes Bungie made to the game in…

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Capcom’s latest Resident Evil promotional stunt is a bizarre fictional lawsuit from the Umbrella Corporation aimed at the makers of Cup Noodles

Resident Evil’s Umbrella Corporation has filed a fictional copyright infringement lawsuit against Nissin Foods, the Japanese giant best-known for its ramen noodles and the Cup Noodles brand (thanks, Automaton). As per the Japanese Resident Evil social media accounts, the Umbrella Corporation claims that Cup Noodles bear striking similarities to Umbrella Noodles, an in-game Easter egg…

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An early version of Stardew Valley’s mines featured an ‘underground goblin village’ before ConcernedApe scrapped it

While I’m sure acknowledging this will inflict some amount of psychic pain, today is the 10th anniversary of the launch of Stardew Valley. To commemorate the occasion and the steady degradation of our joints and bones, Stardew creator Eric “ConcernedApe” Barone aired a celebratory 10-year anniversary stream, covering his gigahit life sim’s history—some of which…

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Alan Wake Remastered drops an out-of-the-blue patch that glams up the whole thing and lets you skip the intro—which you shouldn’t, because it’s now in dazzling HDR

Congratulations, Wakeheads: you can now witness Alan at such a brilliantly vivid colour intensity that it becomes, frankly, disturbing. Alan Wake Remastered has HDR now, is what I’m saying, as of its recent 1.33 patch that dropped, rather out of the blue, earlier today. It does a fair bit, which I’ll get into, but I…

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Highguard developers were surprised by layoff notices, new report says: They thought they’d have at least a few months to work on it but when Tencent ended funding, there was nothing left

As the free-to-play multiplayer shooter Highguard continues to sink, a new Bloomberg report based on interviews with 10 former employees of developer Wildlight Entertainment provides a closer look at where it all went so badly wrong. The skeleton of the story is well known: A surprise reveal at the 2025 Game Awards that didn’t make…

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