Notorious UK rights group launches legal action against Valve for distributing music in games on Steam without a license

Valve is facing a new legal headache in the UK, and this one is definitely not like the others. The Performing Right Society, a rights management organization that collects royalties on behalf of musicians when their work is played publicly, has launched legal action against Valve over its use of PRS members’ music on Steam…

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Microsoft teams up with Nvidia, AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm to share ‘our dream of bringing console-level GPU developer tools to Windows’

Microsoft has just shared an update to DirectX, labelling it “the biggest wave of new tooling features in DirectX’s history.” The company, alongside major “GPU hardware partners”, has shared its “dream of bringing console-level GPU developer tools to Windows.” Microsoft reports, “AMD, Intel, Nvidia, and Qualcomm have worked closely with us throughout feature development, each…

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You’ve got a narrow window to nab OpenTTD on Steam for free, because Transport Tycoon Deluxe has just been un-abandonwared by Atari

The figure of the tycoon is tarnished these days. All the people who are killing the planet lay claim to the label—with their billions of dollars and Antarctic ice palaces and greasel armies. But it wasn’t always that way! Time was, the word tycoon brought to mind halcyon memories of afternoons at The Computer, connecting…

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Arc Raiders’ old machine designs sound so diabolical, it’s no wonder they were reworked or removed after poor playtest feedback: ‘At that time, they didn’t fit with the game very well’

I don’t think anyone had it on their bingo cards that Arc Raiders‘ machine design and AI would be so good that people would fervently demand a PvE mode in an extraction shooter. If you did, then good for you, I guess. But it wasn’t always that way, not least because the team was flip-flopping…

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2 years after its announcement, FF14’s monster-taming Beastmaster job finally arrives this year, along with what looks like a Slay the Spire-esque roguelike mode

Final Fantasy 14‘s next big patch, 7.5, will be dropping next month—and in subsequent updates will be adding Beastmaster to the game. Players have been waiting a long time for this’un. Given Square’s propensity to announce almost everything in an expansion before its launch, we’ve known about Beastmaster since (checks notes) two entire years ago….

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It’s been 25 years since my jaw first dropped at 3DMark2001’s Nature test but hoo boy, have 3D graphics changed since then

A quarter of a century ago, Finnish software company MadOnion released its third iteration of a certain benchmark tool called 3DMark, and together with the launch of Nvidia’s GeForce 3 series of graphics cards, 3DMark2001 showcased the potential of shaders in DirectX-powered games. For myself, it was the start of a period in my life…

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‘GeForce 3 was such a transition for us’: Nvidia’s Jensen Huang looks back on 25 years of the classic graphics card

Launching in 2001, Nvidia’s GeForce 3 series marked an important step for Nvidia, according to CEO Jensen Huang. In a YouTube video, Huang celebrates the 25-year anniversary by waxing lyrical about the card and what it means for the company. “GeForce 3 was such a transition for us,” Huang says. “We introduced really the first…

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‘It was supposed to be the greatest time ever’: Jeff Kaplan only got 6 weeks to come up with and pitch Overwatch: ‘We were probably the most demoralised we’d ever been’

Before the rise of Overwatch there was the fall of Titan, a cancelled Blizzard MMO which was stripped for parts and used to craft the foundation of the team-shooter we all know today. Ex-Overwatch boss Jeff Kaplan had been working on Titan and was the driving force behind redirecting the team to something new. It…

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The first thing Arc Raiders’ devs did during its extraction pivot was to reduce the speed of everything by 60%: ‘All the craft that was in the game was kind of background noise’

Arc Raiders looked very different in its early stages of development, and even compared to its initial reveal trailer. While the team was flip-flopping between genres, one thing was clear: your goal was to kill a boss as fast as possible. Naturally, there was a lot of mobility in these early prototypes. You’d move fast…

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