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Purchases made on Steam now inform users that they are buying a license to digital software, and will not actually own the software outright.

Valve's PC gaming marketplace has dominated the competition, but there's one thing that Steam has in common with all other digital stores: No one actually owns the software except for the creators. Consumers are simply buying a license to the software itself, not the actual software. The same is true when you buy a disc-based game or media--you own the disc itself, which is the license, but not the contents of the disc.

Now Steam is letting users know about this clarification every time they purchase a game on the platform. "A purchase of a digital product grants a license for the product on Steam," reads the banner on Steam's checkout page.

The Xbox mobile store will open up soon, allowing gamers to buy Xbox titles directly from a mobile app.

Epic Games made history in its landmark trial against Google. The Epic v Google antitrust case has concluded, with a federal judge officially ordering that Google open up the Play Store and allow competing storefronts on its billion-dollar app marketplace. This means that native Android apps like the Xbox app and the Epic Games Store can not only show up on the Google Play Store, but can also sell games directly to consumers.

Xbox President Sarah Bond has confirmed that the Xbox app will soon turn into an Xbox mobile store starting in November:

Digital rights management software like Denuvo might be pesky for consumers and gamers, but it apparently helps reduce the impact piracy has on game sales by a significant amount.

A new study has some pretty interesting info on how Denuvo DRM can help stabilize piracy as it relates to full game sales. The study is called Revenue effects of Denuvo digital rights management on PC video games, and was published in volume 52 of the Entertainment Computing journal.

The study surmises that piracy and illegal sharing of software can actually have a sizable and noticeable impact on initial PC game sales during a title's critical launch window. The idea is that publishers and developers use Denuvo DRM to shield their games for the first 12 weeks on the market, which is enough time to alleviate most of the revenue losses.

AMD's Ryzen 9800X3D has been popping up in more leaks, and we are now hearing that the next-gen 3D V-Cache CPU could offer a considerable boost in clock speeds compared to its predecessor, and that it might go on sale early in November. Exciting times indeed.

These most recent pieces of spillage on the Ryzen 9800X3D were flagged up by well-known leaker HXL in a couple of posts on X - arm yourself with a healthy dose of skepticism, as ever with the rumor mill.

Let's start with the clock speeds and these come from a Cinebench R23 result HXL uncovered that was posted on Bilibili, which shows the base and boost speeds.

A man who was identified as the creator of the world's most valuable cryptocurrency has denied his involvement in its creation, saying he has been wrongly accused.

HBO released a documentary on October 8 called "Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery," in which the creator identifies Bitcoin developer Peter Todd as the creator of the cryptocurrency. For those that don't know, a mystery surrounds the creation of Bitcoin as the individual behind it, famously named Satoshi Nakamoto, is only a pseudonym. This has led to much speculation as to who the is behind the creation of the Bitcoin algorithm, and to documentaries such as the one recently published by HBO.

Todd has since spoken out about the accusations, saying to The Register the claims made in the documentary, and the evidence to back them up is the "same kind of coincidence-based, circumstantial thinking that fuels conspiracies like QAnon." Adding, "Which is ironic, given that [Hoback's] previous big project was a documentary on QAnon. He clearly didn't try to debunk his theories either."

Nintendo is requesting participants for a mysterious online playtest but is asking all involved not to talk about the contents of the program.

The news comes from X user @OatmealDome, who shared a screenshot of the Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) Nintendo sent out to players, and within it, the company states, "We request that you do not discuss or disclose content from either the Nintendo Switch Online: Playtest Program test software or website with others." Given the nature of the internet, it's very unlikely that absolutely zero leaks will come from this playtest, but perhaps the looming legal nature of Nintendo will be enough to scare participants into not turning on any screen recording software/hardware.

However, I highly doubt that will happen, especially given the secret nature of the play test, which is scheduled to take place between October 23 and November 5. Users interested in participating will need to have an active Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack membership. The secrecy of the playtest has fueled speculation that it has something to do with Nintendo's next-generation console, presumably called the Nintendo Switch 2. However, that is pure speculation at this point, as Nintendo hasn't officially mentioned anything about a next-generation console besides it's coming.

This week on the TT Show, Jak and Kosta finally discuss their recent trip to MSI's factory in Shenzhen, China. There, they saw MSI's new Z890 boards up close, Intel's latest Core Ultra 200 Series CPUs, and even watched as thousands of MAG Z890 TOMAHAWK WIFI boards were being made.

With new motherboards and chipset technology, a lot of cool new tech will make you want to upgrade - especially when it comes to flagship motherboards like the new MSI MEG Z890 ACE. With Arrow Lake and Intel Core Ultra 200 Series CPU benchmarks starting to show up and full reviews and availability coming later this month, it won't be long before the complete picture is known.

With the new Z890 motherboards also ready for the next generation of graphics cards, this week we learned that NVIDIA could be announcing three GeForce RTX 50 desktop graphics cards at CES 2025: the GeForce RTX 5090, GeForce RTX 5080, and GeForce RTX 5070.

Concord is renowned as one of the biggest video game flops of all time, and is definitely Sony's biggest flop ever, with the title reportedly costing as much as $400 million to develop only to generated a few million upon release.

The failure of Concord is likely underestimated due to how quickly Sony decided to pull the game down after abysmal sales and reception. Moreover, the game was such a failure that Sony decided to refund everyone who purchased it, meaning Sony made exactly $0 from a multi-hundred-million investment. That begs the question: Will Concord and all of the content surrounding it just be thrown in the bin now? Or does Sony shelf it for the time being and re-release it as a free-to-play game?

The second theory is gaining some traction as it was discovered that Concord's developers, Firewalk Studios, are quietly updating the Steam games files, according to the title's Steam db listing. The activity was as recent as October 8, and while we can't decipher the changelog to see what was added/altered, the activity has fueled speculation Sony and Firewalk Studios are preparing for the free-to-play re-release of Concord.

Electronic Arts (EA) is attempting to get back into the good graces of the Apex Legends community by sharing the drop rate for the rarest lootbox item in the game, Heirloom Shards.

So, why is EA suddenly choosing to share the drop rate for Heirloom Shards now? EA was originally forced to share the drop rates for loot boxes by new laws passed in South Korea that require publishers to disclose the drop rates of loot boxes so users can make informed purchasing decisions. As a result of these new laws, EA has taken the opportunity to reveal the drop rate of its rarest lootbox item, Heirloom Shards. According to the new blog post, EA has previously stated that Heirloom Shards have a drop rate of less than 1%, but the specific percentage is 0.045%.

According to EA, the drop rate of 0.045% is based on the inventory of a player who hasn't earned any Apex Legends cosmetics, and an active player will have a higher drop rate than the one listed due to the duplication protection rule. Players are unable to receive the same item twice, which means the more items a player has in their inventory, the more items they have crossed off the list of possible cosmetics. With each new cosmetic earned, a player is increasing their chances of obtaining an Heirloom Shard.

Activision is doing all it can to reduce the toxicity within the Call of Duty community, and with improved features launching in Black Ops 6, a big reduction could be achieved.

Call of Duty is one of the most popular franchises in the history of gaming, and with its popularity, it developed what is renowned in the gaming sector as quite a "toxic community". Activision is aware of this and begun implementing anti-toxic-player features such as its voice and moderation system which is designed to monitor voice and text chats for bad behavior in real-time. As the launch of Black Ops 6 approaches, Activision is planning on rolling out in the latest title a new and improved version of the technology, which is called ToxMod.

ToxMod was developed by Modulate.ai and uses artificial intelligence to monitor voice and text chats. If it detects an infringement on the Call of Duty code of conduct, it will flag the event for a human to deliberate on whether it's a bannable offense. According to Modulate CEO Mike Pappas, who spoke to GaminingIndustry.biz, "We built ToxMod to help sift through the proverbial haystack and identify the worst, most urgent harms. This allows moderators to prioritize where they can have the most impact."

The Internet Archive was hit with a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Attack on Wednesday afternoon, resulting in the service being knocked offline on Thursday.

Brewster Kahle, the founder and digital librarian of the Internet Archive, confirmed the platform experienced a major outage due to DDoS attacks, which resulted in the "defacement of our website" and a major breach that exposed 31 million user accounts. The breach exposed the usernames, emails, and bcrypt password hashes of 31,081,179 archive users, with Kahle confirming the news in a new X post that stated the Internet Archive suffered from "defacement of our website via JS library; breach of usernames/email/salted-encrypted passwords."

As for the defacement Kahle referenced, the hacker/s injected this message into the platform, "Have you ever felt like the Internet Archive runs on sticks and is constantly on the verge of suffering a catastrophic security breach? It just happened. See 31 million of you on HIBP!" HIBP is a reference to the website "Have I Been Pwned," which informs users if their account details have been leaked online due to a data breach. Moreover, HIBP did confirm the Internet Archive data breach, writing that 31 million records from Internet Archive users were stolen.

Spider-Man is one of, if not the most popular superhero on the planet, and anyone who is a fan of Peter Parker has once imagined what it would be like to be able to shoot a web out of their wrist and swing through the concrete jungle of New York City taking down bad guys.

While we are still many years away from that becoming a reality, the foundations of Spider-Man's web fluid have been officially created. According to a team of researchers out of Tufts University Silklab that penned a study published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials, the first web-slinging technology has been created in the form of a fluid material that immediately solidifies after being shot out of a needle. Researchers took silky fibers from moth cocoons, which can then be reduced to its building block fibers called fibroin.

The fibroin is then combined with specific adhesives and shot of a needle tip device to create a stream. Shortly after the web fluid is fibered, it sticks to objects and then solidifies, making it possible to tether to objects. The researchers attribute their inspiration for this device to the incredible strength of spiderwebs, which are 1,000 times stronger than the artificial web created by the researchers in this study, and comic books. While the researchers' web isn't anywhere near as strong as a spiderweb it can still pick up objects over 80 times its own weight under various conditions.

Artificial intelligence tools are expected to change the games industry, but some developers like Fallout creator Tim Cain believe AI offers unique opportunities for smaller teams.

AI, especially generative AI, is accelerating at a rapid clip. Big publishers like Electronic Arts are going all-in on generative AI and plan to use it to revolutionize creator content. Others, like Microsoft's Xbox games division, will use it to help craft stories. But it seems like AI is being used by many parts of the industry right now, whether overtly or behind closed doors.

This level of disruption is common in the tech industry, and innovations in software development are also prevalent through iterations of games engines like Unreal. In a recent video, Fallout creator Tim Cain discussed his thoughts on how technology like AI will change jobs and how games are made.

This year's annual Football Manager game will miss its planned November launch, SEGA has announced.

Football Manager 25 is now coming in March 2025 alongside a 5-month delay, and will not launch during its original November 26 release date. This marks the second time the game has been delayed by the publisher and developer.

"After careful consideration, Sports Interactive have made the tough decision to further delay the release of Football Manager 25. Following discussions with SEGA, our licensors and partners, we have agreed the best course of action is to delay the launch until March 2025. Specific platform release dates will follow once confirmed," the teams announced in a blog post.

While there's still no sight of RDNA 4 graphics cards - more's the pity - AMD is seemingly set to launch another RDNA 3 GPU, with rumors suddenly popping up that there'll be a Radeon RX 7650 GRE.

Yes, this is another GRE or 'Golden Rabbit Edition' to follow in the footsteps of the RX 7900 GRE (even though this name no longer makes sense, as it's now the Year of the Dragon, not Rabbit, so it should be GDE - and indeed we're nearly in Snake territory now, if this 7650 spin arrives after January 2025).

Hoang Anh Phu dropped this leak on X (hat tip to Igor's Lab), simply pointing out the existence of the graphics card, and furthermore, Moore's Law is Dead on YouTube also shared a marketing slide showing the RX 7900 GRE (see below)

Diablo 4's microtransaction prices were out of control, but they weren't always meant to be.

Blizzard has made headlines with Diablo 4's cosmetic prices, usually for the wrong reasons. Earlier in March, the publisher charged charged $20 for town portal reskins. The current store isn't much better in pricing, with $20+ character cosmetics skins being the norm.

But it wasn't always going to be this way. Before he left in January 2024, in which Blizzard subsequently laid off over 1,900 people, ex-Blizzard president Mike Ybarra intended to reduce the microtransaction pricing of Diablo 4's controversial storefront. That's according to a report from Jason Schreier's new book Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future Of Blizzard Entertainment, which says that Ybarra wanted Blizzard to move away from the live service model and reduce the reliance the company had on recurring microtransaction-driven revenues.

It was only yesterday that publications began reporting on a Russian YouTube channel that posted a video of what the YouTubers claimed to be, and it certainly appeared to be upon a watch, an unboxing of an unreleased M4 MacBook Pro.

The news was shared by Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, a known and credible Apple insider. Gurman wrote the M4 MacBook Pro, which is scheduled to be announced by Apple at the end of October, appeared to be real, and while it remains unconfirmed, the model, unboxing, and displayed specifications line up with previous information. Gurman also pointed out that this could be Apple's first full retail leak, which is when a full retail device, not a prototype, is leaked from a factory line or Apple internally to the public before an announcement was even made.

To add more credibility to the legitimacy of the M4 MacBook Pro, it now appears it's being sold on a Russian classified ads site. As you can imagine, the price of the M4 MacBook Pro is incredibly inflated, and judging from the listing, it appears the laptop is the base model with a 14-inch display, 16GB of unified memory, a 512GB SSD, three Thunderbolt 4 ports, and the M4 Chip with its 10 CPU cores.

Hurricane Milton has reached landfall in Florida and as resident protect their homes as much as they can one meteorologist was honored for his contributions to the field by having his ashes poured into the eye of the monsterous Milton.

That lucky scientist was Peter Dodge, a radar scientist and hurricane hunter who worked with the National Hurricane Center and Aircraft Operations Center and an avid participant of hurricane aircraft missions where he served as an onboard radar scientist. Dodge passed away on March 3, 2023, and during a hurricane reconnaissance flight of Hurricane Milton, Dodge was dropped into the eye of the historic Category 5 hurricane, as reflected by the Vortex Data Message, which is a log of in-flight observations made by hurricane reconnaissance aircraft.

The Vortex Data Message captures important details about the hurricane, such as its location, wind speed, pressure, storm's center location, intensity, and other meteorological data. The below image shows the Vortex Data Message, and at the bottom reads a tribute to Dodge, "PETER DODGE HX SCI (1950-2023) 387TH PENNY." The tribute message was translated by Ars Technica, who wrote "HX SCI" means "hurricane scientist," and "387TH PENNY" refers to the term "penny," which means "hurricane penetration," or the act of entering a hurricane during a hurricane reconnaissance mission.

AMD could announce the Ryzen 9800X3D processor very soon - maybe even later today - in what might be a bid to run interference with the arrival of Intel's Arrow Lake desktop CPUs.

Moore's Law is Dead (MLID) has the story on this one, with the leaker informing us (get that saltshaker now) that AMD is currently putting out briefings on the Ryzen 9800X3D, which will be the first Zen 5 chip with 3D V-Cache (the others will follow a bit later - perhaps early next year).

MLID says that AMD now has the final marketing material ready, and the release of the Ryzen 9800X3D should happen in the next week or two.

Back in August, MSI detailed how it was planning to boost the performance of AMD Ryzen 9000 series CPUs, and it detailed three new profiles: PBO Enhanced Mode, Set Thermal Point, and High-Efficiency Mode.

We were invited to tour MSI's motherboard factory, where we saw the manufacturing process for MSI's new Z890 motherboard range. During the presentation, MSI gave us an overview of all of its new motherboards, the improvements it made compared to its previous generation, and how it was going to utilize the new offerings from Intel's Arrow Lake CPUs. MSI let us go hands-on with a few PCs equipped with Intel Core Ultra chips and MSI's new overhauled BIOS.

MSI showcased its Set Thermal Point profile and how it compares to Precision Boost Overdrive. The CPU being tested was a Ryzen 9 9950X, and MSI set the thermal point profile to 85, which operates the CPU at a lower voltage and temperature. The magic here is that MSI's specific optimizations can maintain the same performance with the thermal limit being set, which means users will be able to run their CPU with less voltage, resulting in it being cooler but without any loss of performance. We were showcased a performance chart that we are unable to share publicly, but can describe.