Indie developer Nik Nak Studios is the developer of a GTA 2 inspired title called Geneshift. Geneshift has now recently taken the 10th spot as Steam's 'most played' title.

Ben, the developer behind Nik Nak studios has been working on his title 'Geneshift' for a solid 9 years now, after recent popularity spike of the Battle Royale mode Ben decided to create a version of it for his game and give it away to Reddit to for free. His giveaway platform was Steam, and after some debates with Valve they gave him the go ahead. Ben proceeded to post onto /r/gaming with this gif, eventually the post made it to the front page of Reddit for a few hours and then Ben to his shock saw a 9000% increase in traffic to his game.

It wasn't just redditors that were giving his game a try, but bots and not just a small amount of them either. Since Ben's game was originally $10, it was still possible for the people playing to receive trading cards and sell them on the marketplace for just a couple cents. This motivated a bot farm to hijack Ben's game and become idle within it, Valve eventually caught wind of what was going on and disabled trading cards for Geneshift, not before the title could reach 213,000 concurrent players. After this fiasco, Geneshift now sits on the 10th spot on Steam's 'most played' game, and despite the bot hijacking I hope the publicity gets some well deserve player attention to this developer. Check out Geneshift here. Read the full story from Ben himself here.

Blizzard are getting into the full festive swing with a new stop-motion animated short, this time round Tracer is on 'cookiewatch' duty as a pesky Reaper attempts to steal Santa's cookies.

Back in May, we saw the first stop-motion animated short for Overwatch to celebrate the games second year anniversary. Blizzard must of taken in all the positive feedback and decided to create another for us to enjoy, introducing Tracers 'cookiewatch' and her mission to save Santa's cookies.

The short which would of been hours and hours of frame-by-frame work is about two and half minutes long and we can see Reaper jumping down to rob Santa of his cookies. Tracer see's what Reaper is up to and enforces the Christmas tradition of leaving the cookies for Santa. Dashing around the room and all around the Christmas tree with multiple shots fired from Reaper, Tracer and Reaper end up getting interrupted by Santa himself. Check out the above video for yourself, Overwatch is currently available on the PC, Xbox One and PS4.

Ford has just t eased something that, well I quite frankly didn't think I'd see right now: a prototype noise-canceling dog kennel for dog owners who have pets that are scared of fireworks, and other loud noises.

The new prototype kennel is just one part of a series of "Interventions" the car maker is working on, where it's throwing the knowledge it has from its noise cancellation technology that it uses in its new Edge SUVs, into a dog kennel. Ford's technology in the car uses microphones to record engine and transmissions sounds, and then uses speakers to play the opposite frequencies, canceling out the noise.

Human and dog hearing is vastly different, as dogs can hear up to 400% further away, so Ford had to put some serious work into the prototype kennel in the hopes of helping dogs that are scared of fireworks (that are used far away). Dogs can hear at high frequencies of between 67Hz to 45,000Hz while our puny human ears only hear frequencies between 20Hz and 20,000Hz.

Fortnite now has its own merch store, with developer Epic Games offering a bunch of different shirts, onesies, and other Fortnite-related goods for people to buy. One of those is the new Durr Burger Onesie.

The new onesie should be a big attraction for thousands of Fortnite fans, available for $70 and shipping in late-January 2019. There's also otehr things like the Skull Trooper pullover hoodie for $60, and a bunch of other Skull Trooper tees for $25 a piece.

There might not be much on the Fortnite merch store right now, but Epic will go into 2019 adding more to the store. I'm sure this is a test run to see how successful it is, and just how many of the tens of millions of Fortnite players in the world react to Fortnite merch. The onesie on the other hand, should sell like hotcakes.

There will be plenty of new iPad Pro tablets under the Christmas tree this year, and now Apple has confirmed that the reports of the strange warping issue on some of the iPad Pros is indeed real.

The new iPad Pro has been shipping out bent out of the box, with Mashable reporting that Apple said this is something that happens during the manufacturing process, specifically after the "device's metal and plastic components cool. The tech giant added that it shouldn't affect performance, nor should the bend worsen as time goes by. Still, if you find the bend annoying, you should be able to exchange or return the device to Apple or retailers".

When consumers are paying up to $1899 for the high-end 12.9-inch iPad Pro with 1TB of storage and LTE connectivity... you'd kinda not want a bend in your new tablet, right? Plenty of reports state that even brand new shrink wrapped iPad Pros have a slight bend in the aluminum, without being touched at all. This means they're rolling off the production line like this, and Apple are happy putting them on shelves and then into consumers' hands.

Atari today announced its total earnings for the first six-month period of its financial year, and reiterates a 2019 launch for its new Atari VCS console.

Atari is a curious business. It once reigned supreme in the early days of console gaming, but now its massive brand awareness is spent on licensing IPs and releasing games like Rollercoaster Tycoon. The company's earnings don't reflect a titanic industry force, but more so a company that's found its comfortable niche in the market. In the six-month period ending September 30, 2018, Atari made just 10.8 million Euros or about $12.7 million in total earnings, up 27% year-over-year. Operating income is up a mighty 87% YoY to 2.2 million Euros, and shareholder's equity spiked by an astronomical 194% to 23.1 million Euros.

For perspective on these numbers, the company's new crowdfunded Atari VCS generated $3 million on Indiegogo, or about a fourth of its half-year revenues.

Bethesda's gamble with Fallout 76 didn't exactly pay off in terms of digital launch sales, but EA's Battlefield V was also soft in November.

According to findings from SuperData, both Fallout 76 and Battlefield V saw weaker sales throughout November when compared to previous series entries. The analyst firm estimates that Battlefield V sold 1.9 million units digitally on consoles and PC, whereas the only-only Fallout 76 sold 1.4 million copies. For clarification, EA's shooter released on November 9 and Fallout 76 launched on November 14. Both games are down from Battlefield 1 and Fallout 4, but SuperData didn't say by how much.

"Consumers spent $9.05 billion on digital games across all platforms in November, down 1% year-over-year. Mobile and Premium PC revenue declined roughly 5%, offsetting a 13% rise on Console, where Fortnite and Red Dead Redemption 2 made up for the weak performance of Battlefield and Fallout 76."

Star Citizen's singleplayer campaign is still a long ways off and a beta won't be released until 2020 at the earliest.

As Roberts Space Industries adds more muscle to its online-driven space titan, the game's development time grows at the same time. Today the company released an updated roadmap for its upcoming Squadron 42 singleplayer campaign, confirming a targeted Q2 2020 release for a beta test.

Although its been in development for some time, the campaign is quite monumental and features a 28 chapter story with a star-studded cast including Mark Hamill and Gillian Anderson. The chapters are also being worked on at the same time. That 2020 timeline is just for the beta and not the final game, but RSI notes that it's the "final stage of polishing and bug fixing before release."

To celebrate the release of 'Searching' on home video, we have ten Blu-ray copies of the film to give away thanks to our friends at Universal Sony Home Entertainment!

After David Kim (John Cho)'s 16-year-old daughter goes missing, a local investigation is opened and a detective is assigned to the case. But 37 hours later and without a single lead, David decides to search the one place no one has looked yet, where all secrets are kept today: his daughter's laptop. In a hyper-modern thriller told via the technology devices we use every day to communicate, David must trace his daughter's digital footprints before she disappears forever.

To go into the running to win a prize, post this article to your social media profiles and send your postal address to ben at TweakTown dot com before the competition closes on December 26th.

DICE and EA offer a rare glimpse at Battlefront II's concept art to give an idea how imagination is translated to dynamic video game worlds.

I absolutely love concept art, especially video game concept art. There's something magical about these early windows into fabulous worlds: they speak of limitless possibility and potential, fanning the flames of creativity and hope. Quite often I've looked at concept art and been able to capture the overall tone and feel of a game--other times it's been a surprise. But there's always something special about these slices of captured imagination, and Battlefront II is no exception.

With Battlefront II's concept art, the talented artists at DICE have recreated the early works of Ralph McQuarrie to a tee. McQuarrie's original concept art is directly responsible for the iconic aesthetic of Star Wars' favorite characters and locales, from the Cloud City of Bespin to Darth Vader's imposing samurai-esque helmet, and even X-Wing fighters, the Death Star, Star Destroyers and so much more. McQuarrie's talent envisioned what Star Wars is today.