Instead of making a joke, Valve celebrates April Fool’s Day by rolling out a Steam storefront ‘refresh’ that makes it look much nicer

If you’re signed up for Steam client betas, you might have noticed that the storefront looks a little fresher today. That’s because Valve is testing some updates to the Steam store home page that, you guessed it, “aims to make it even easier for you to find new games by displaying more content and information.”…

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Diablo 4’s ‘April Fowl’s Day’ joke is a big chicken boss who drops a cluckton of unique loot, like the ‘Cluckonomicon’ and the ‘Eggcecutioner’

Watch out, Mephisto: A true terror has arrived in Diablo 4 in the form of a giant chicken. It’s April Fool’s Day (or April Fowl’s Day, if you will) and Blizzard has unleashed a new world boss that drops entirely unique, chicken-flavored loot. I barely missed the window to battle the beast, but players in…

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US Patent Office revokes Nintendo’s controversial Pokémon battling patent in nonfinal decision

Amidst its ongoing Japanese patent lawsuit against Palworld developer Pocketpair, Nintendo thoroughly stirred the legal pot on this side of the Pacific when news broke in September 2025 that the United States Patent and Trademark Office had granted the publisher US patent 12,403,397—a patent describing a system for battling summoned characters. Despite concerns about how…

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Gabe Newell stepped back from game design during Portal 2’s development, because ‘he always wanted to be part of the team, but being Gabe and being in his position, that never really worked’

Gabe Newell remains the CEO of Valve, but it’s no secret that he stepped back from actively running the company some time ago: he says himself he’s been “retired for a long time.” Newell now divides his days between various other pursuits, including Starfish Neuroscience, a company he co-founded that focuses on neural interfaces, and…

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Shinji Mikami’s next game was just stealth-announced in a YouTube video and it sure looks like the creator of survival horror is back doing what he does best

On leaving Tango Gameworks in 2023 industry legend Shinji Mikami started up a new development studio called Unbound. This was the third studio Mikami has co-founded or founded, after PlatinumGames (2007) and Tango itself (2010), not to mention his leadership of Capcom’s iconic Production Studio 4 and later Clover Studios. Unbound was recently in the…

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Marathon has made everyone’s favourite loot spot harder to access but even more rewarding, and it’s got solo players raising pitchforks

Marathon’s Outpost map is an extraction masterclass, in large part due to how the central Pinwheel location lulled players in with the promise of loot. However, it wasn’t without its issues: the Destroyed Wing entrance had to be disabled shortly after it launched, and it was overall too easy to break in once players had…

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