Month: September 2024

There was a time when E3 was the big videogame event of the summer, but that time is long past. These days the Summer Game Fest is the can’t-miss show of June, and today organizer Geoff Keighley revealed exactly when this year’s festivities will begin, and which companies will be taking part.

The 2023 Summer Game Fest will begin at 12 pm PT/3 pm ET on June 8, and for the first time will take place with a live audience at the YouTube Theater in Inglewood, California. 

If you’re able and eager to attend the live event, tickets are on sale now at Ticketmaster—and if not, the whole thing will also be streamed globally on pretty much every major streaming platform, including YouTube, Twitch, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram and Steam.

“Summer Game Fest started as a way…

The world got worse yesterday as the ever-spiralling Embracer Group laid off 97 people at Eidos Montreal and apparently cancelled an upcoming Deus Ex game the studio had been working on for two years. The layoffs were, in a year that has already seen thousands of job losses before the end of January, bitterly unsurprising, but the fact that a new Deus Ex had been in development only to be cast aside took many of us unawares.

Many, but not all. One person who wasn’t shocked by the news of Deus Ex’s aborted resurrection was Elias Toufexis, voice actor for Human Revolution and Mankind Divided’s Adam Jensen. In the wake of the news, Toufexis tweeted that “I told you guys it wasn’t happening,” and told PC Gamer that “I gotta be honest, I gave up on it a long time ago.”

I…

Is that time of the month again, when Valve releases the results from its Steam hardware and software survey, and to no surprise whatsoever, Nvidia still rules the graphics card chart. The November figures show that Nvidia accounts for 72.5% of all the entries, with its Ampere-based GPUs (i.e. GeForce RTX 30-series) accounting for 27.3% of all the different architectures.

Every month, Valve collates the results it gleans from carrying out its random requests of Steam accounts to supply it with PC system and software configurations, such as operating system type, CPU, GPU, RAM amount, and so on. It’s not done without the account holder’s consent, of course, as you have to actively choose to participate. Valve never indicates the number of accounts it’s sampled, so there’s always an…

Palworld is already obscenely popular—knocking out 4 million sales in about three days. It’s also a far better experience on Steam, thanks to some certification process nonsense.

The game’s developer Pocketpair has been wrangling with some thorny systems architecture that’s been impacting the game on both Xbox, Microsoft Store and—by extension—Game Pass. That’s according to several statements made on the Palworld Discord server (thanks, Windows Central). The game’s community manager Bucky writes:

“The versions of the game are not the same between Steam and Xbox. That is to say, Steam v1.2 and Xbox v1.2 are not the same thing. There seems to be some confusion that Steam and Xbox are ‘missing features’. That isn’t entirely true.”

According to Bucky, the…

It may have escaped your notice, but word on the street is that Nvidia is doing rather well of late. Fourth quarter earnings released earlier this year revealed gigantic revenue and net income figures thanks to surging AI demand, and now a recent report from Trendforce shows that the company has overtaken Qualcomm to become the biggest chip designer by revenue, too.

The figures show that Nvidia raked in $55.268 billion in revenue in 2023, in contrast to the second biggest chip designer, Qualcomm, which managed $30.913 billion over the same period. That puts Nvidia firmly at the top of the table, beating out Broadcom, AMD, Mediatek and others by a substantial margin and leaving the company at an estimated market share of 33%, up 15% over the previous year.

Notable by their ab…

So farewell then, Google Stadia: We barely knew ye. Around ten hours ago Google’s streaming service finally closed after three years. There were props for the way the company handled the shutdown (with all customers receiving refunds and the controller getting a firmware update to enable bluetooth functionality), some unseemly celebrations, but mostly sadness about what developers and players alike would miss.

You never know what you got till it’s gone, I suppose. Stadia’s last week brought one small gaming surprise in the form of the service’s very final released game being its first: a multiplayer version of Snake called Worm Game. That dude who put 6,000 hours into Red Dead Online on Stadia streamed his final journey into the wild west on the service, with Rockstar’s save trans…

Warner Bros. Discovery says sales of the superhero looter-shooter Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League did not meet the company’s expectations, a shortfall that’s put the company’s game division on track for a “tough” first quarter in its 2024 fiscal year.

“We are lapping the release of Hogwarts Legacy in February last year, which saw the largest portion of its very positive financial impact in the first quarter,” Warner Bros. Discover chief financial officer Gunnar Wiedenfels said during the company’s earnings call (via Seeking Alpha). 

“This year, Suicide Squad, one of our key videogame releases in 2024, has fallen short of our expectations since its release earlier in the quarter, setting our games business up for a tough year-over-year comp in Q1.”

Warner ha…

Final Fantasy 14 has a stellar cast of voice actors for its English version—backed up by some genuinely great translation from its localisation team. One such actor is Jonathan Bailey, who plays beloved catboy and friend to the Warrior of Light G’raha Tia, though he’s also famous for his role in Netflix’s Bridgerton as Anthony. Fair warning: I’m going to get into some story spoilers for Shadowbringers and Endwalker in a moment.

In case you’re completely unfamiliar—FF14 has a central cast of characters called the Scions of the Seventh Dawn, and G’raha Tia (formerly known as the Crystal Exarch) is one of them. Bailey has a staggering amount of dialogue to perform for the game’s cutscenes, and the character, a heartfelt confidant to your own self-insert, …

If the recent rash of survival games failing to make good on their ambitious promises has left you disillusioned, then I’ve good news: Road to Vostok is getting a substantial demo in fall 2023. You’ll be able to see for yourself exactly how the genre’s hardcore entry is coming along.

In Road to Vostok, you travel toward the titular region, crossing borders into areas populated with hostile NPCs. The more dangerous the location, the more valuable the loot you’ll find. Make it across the next border crossing, and you can trade your haul with shopkeepers for better gear or medical treatment.

The super realistic survival game involves an impressively deep weapon behavior modeling layer that simulates recoil, arm stamina, breath control, low and high ready positions, …

Back in 2020, YouTuber and Portal speedrunner nicl83 uploaded a video detailing a curious discovery: the version of Steam included on retail DVDs of Half-Life 2 can still be recognized by Valve’s servers and updated to the modern client we use today.

Now, there are naturally some caveats here. There’s really no practical reason to do this⁠—updating the client will effectively wipe the archival, time capsule version of Steam you just installed, and it is so much quicker and easier to get Steam off the official website.

The process is also, naturally, a huge pain. Nicl83 starts in Windows XP, which they describe as providing the “best results” with initially installing Steam from the Half-Life 2 DVD. From there, a halting, almost arcane series of restarts and faile…

Watch On

It’s the last week of August, another summer is slipping away, the kids will soon be back to school, and for some reason that means Tropico 4, the banana republic management sim, is free for the next three days on GOG.

Tropico 4 is not the latest and great addition to the long-running city-and-politics simulator: That honor goes to Tropico 6, which came out in 2019. But you know what Tropico 4 has that Tropico 6 (and, for that matter, Tropico 5) doesn’t? It’s free. Come on, we’ve already covered this.

It’s also a pretty good game: “It’s not a great leap forward, but growing bananas and rigging elections remains remarkably entertaining,” we said in our 72% review. And if you dig the Tropico 4 experience and want even more, GOG also has the T…