Schedule 1 creator had a backup plan if Steam rejected it—pack up the product, don a farmer’s hat, and ‘pivot it to be a farming game’ like Stardew Valley

Schedule 1 was one of 2025’s freshly-cooked batches of surprise hits. Y’know, the kind that comes out of basically nowhere and lands square in the top sellers list—and while it was a year marked with these success stories, it was also the year that saw Steam starting to put the kibosh on adult-themed games. Which,…

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‘Every moment flawed and messy because we are, also’: Indie developer rallies against big studios’ increasingly flippant remarks about generative AI

D-Cell Games—the developer behind the genuinely fantastic rhythm game Unbeatable—has put out a mighty strong statement as it rallies against big studio figureheads becoming increasingly blunt about integrating generative AI into game development: from Krafton’s declaration that it was pivoting to become an “AI-first” company, to Tim Sweeney clowning on Steam’s AI disclosure requirements, to…

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Arc Raiders players want to condemn free loadouters to a life of late spawns, but I don’t think anyone should arrive midway through a match ever

One debate that has been swirling around Arc Raiders for some time now involves Free Loadouts, whether they should exist at all, be nerfed, or sentenced to always join matches late as penance for not putting anything of worth on the line. But I really don’t think any of these solutions are viable options. Issues…

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Escape from Tarkov review

Every time I make a kill in Escape from Tarkov, it’s over in a flash. This is not down to skill. Sometimes in Tarkov you’ll be sitting there minding your own business when two players blithely walk by, no idea you’re there, and even with a pop gun it will be the easiest double kill…

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Obsidian says The Outer Worlds 2 isn’t a deliberate critique of capitalism, which is even more ridiculous than the time Fallout’s co-creator said that isn’t either

The Outer Worlds games take place in an absurd dystopia: a slice of the universe dominated by corporations and the perverse, dehumanising logic that comes with making profit your god. Its people are cogs in a great, blood-greased machine overseen by CEOs, executives, and corpulent moneymen. But it’s not about capitalism. Not intentionally, anyway. So…

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Intel will reportedly take the fight to AMD’s dominant X3D gaming CPUs with monstrous Nova Lake chip packing 288 MB of vertical cache and 52 cores

Intel is planning to sock it to AMD’s dominant X3D CPUs with a 52-core version of its upcoming Nova Lake processor. Incredibly, it’s claimed the chip will pack 288 MB of last-level vertical cache memory. That’s well over double the 128 MB of V-Cache currently offered by AMD’s top X3D CPU, the AMD Ryzen 9…

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The Sims’ biggest sex mod creator says that around 300,000 people use it—that’s more than some of Steam’s top games: ‘It doesn’t make sense to me’

Despite its tame rating, sex has always wormed its way into The Sims series—I fear it’s a canon event to Google “how to make Sims naked” as a teenager. But it arguably didn’t blow up into more mainstream simming until Turbodriver’s WhickedWhims came along in 2016, offering a package of nudity, animated sex, birth control,…

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Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 didn’t sell as well as Paradox expected, and the publisher is taking the blame: ‘The responsibility lies fully with us’

The saga of Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 is coming to a close. After a decade of development, a midpoint studio switch and some last-minute drama surrounding launch DLC, it all culminated in disappointment. “We’ve had high expectations for a long time, since we saw that it was a good game with a strong…

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