Gaming - Page 113

Chris Hansen, the journalist and face of the "To Catch a Predator" television series that aired during the mid-2000s, has announced he is now targeting Roblox, following the uproar controversy surrounding the platform being used by many child predators.

To Catch a Predator focused on investigating and exposing adults who attempted to engage in sexual activities with minors, and involved the use of decoys, which were typically young-looking adults who posed as underage teens in online chatrooms. Why that is important is because Roblox recently banned and sent a cease and desist letter to YouTuber Schlep, who was doing exactly the same thing on Roblox.

The banning of Schlep was the catalyst for Roblox to be caught in what is now a global controversy with its platform, as the company said to Schlep that it's against its terms of service to engage in "simulated child endangerment conversations, sharing or soliciting personally identifiable information (PII), [and] directing users to move conversations off-platform."

Roblox Corp. stock drops nearly 9% as it faces a scathing lawsuit from Louisiana's attorney general.

Roblox is being sued by the state of Louisiana for allegedly "permitting and perpetuating an online environment in which child predators thrive." The news has spread rapidly, leading to public outcry and backlash, and the game-maker's stock took a hit from the fiery controversy. Roblox's stock dropped 8.96% after the news of the lawsuit broke.

The gaming platform is among the most popular video games on the market right now with over 82 million daily active users--for comparison, Sony's entire PlayStation platform has 120 million monthly active users--and the company generated $3.6 billion in 2024 from its user base, which is primarily children. The games-as-a-service platform has been closely scrutinized for its business practices and safety policies, especially those involving children.

Grinding Gear Games co-founder and Path of Exile co-creator Chris Wilson has an interesting theory: Minecraft is actually a hardcore action RPG.

Minecraft technically fits the bill as an aRPG, or at least that's what isometrically-obsessed game dev Chris Wilson thinks. In a recent video on his YouTube channel, Wilson makes the case that the child-friendly simulator is actually a brutal role-playing game where knowledge and skill are the keys for voxel mastery.

"There's a surprising amount of RPG in there. When I first dabbled with the game in 2011, it was pretty simple: You build bases out of blocks. But nowadays there's experience, levels, items, enchantments, and end-game bosses. The game even has builds," Wilson said.

LEGO Voyagers launches this September on consoles, PC, and even Apple Arcade.

Back in 2020, during the height of COVID-19, LEGO formed a video game studio called Light Brick Studio to work on digital titles. Their first game was a $20 LEGO brick-building sim with limited capabilities. Now the group's second major release is on the horizon: LEGO Voyagers, a new child-friendly game that wants to tap the success of two-player co-op games like It Takes Two and the more recent Split Fiction.

Light Brick Studio has revealed that LEGO Voyagers will release on September 15, 2025 on a multitude of platforms, including PS4/PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch (also playable on Switch 2), PC (via Steam and Epic Store), and, surprisingly, the Apple Arcade subscription service.

Valve has officially acknowledged that PayPal isn't available at checkout for some Steam users, following the recent controversy with payment providers threatening to withdraw their services that resulted in Valve removing a bunch of adult games from that platform and issuing a policy change.

The problem with PayPal arose in early July, with some users reporting they were unable to use PayPal at checkout, and now Valve has offered an explanation as to why PayPal has seemingly disappeared. According to a statement provided to Rock Paper Shotgun, PayPal has been removed as a payment option for some users due to PayPal's acquiring banks deciding to stop processing any Steam transactions, effectively cutting off PayPal on Steam for a number of currencies.

Currencies still available on Steam for PayPal transactions are as follows: EUR, CAD, GBP, JPY, AUD and USD. For those out of the loop, Valve was recently threatened by big payment providers such as Visa and Mastercard to remove a selection of adult games from Steam following a letter penned by a women advocacy group, Collective Shout. The group called for prevention of Valve and the creators of the adult games from profiteering off the exploitation of women.

Former PlayStation boss Shawn Layden has a word of warning to publishers who greenlight expensive game budgets.

Thanks to inflation and complexity, games are more expensive to make now than they've ever been. Competition is fierce, and a miss on a big-budget game can lead to substantial write-offs and studio closures--which is exactly what happened to PlayStation's failed Concord and game developer Firewalk Studios.

In a recent interview with GamesIndustry.biz, former PlayStation studios chairman Shawn Layden cautions devs to reel back high $200 million+ budgets because odds are the devs may not be able to make a profit. The budgets really aren't feasible unless the teams are in the caliber of a dev like Rockstar Games, who can sell 25 million copies easy.

There's substantially more heat on billion-dollar games titan Roblox as Louisiana state Attorney General Liz Murrill sues the company for allegedly creating an online environment where child predators are permitted to thrive.

The state of Louisiana is suing Roblox for allegedly failing to protect the millions of minors on the platform. The scathing 39-page complaint alleges that Roblox "has permitted and perpetuated an online environment in which child predators thrive, directly contributing to the widespread victimization of minor children in Louisiana."

Louisiana AG Murrill outlines three causes for action in the complaint: 1) violation of Louisiana's Unfair Trade Practices Act (LUTPA) by willfully deceiving players about the dangers of child predators on the platform; 2) Negligence and public nuisance, claiming that Roblox has a responsibility to "protect children from predators" on the platform, including preventing registered sex offenders from making accounts; 3) and unjust enrichment, which states that Roblox sold their product to Louisiana citizens in "a manner that was unfair, unconscionable, and oppressive."

Microsoft is beleaguered in the console market, handily beaten by Sony and Nintendo, and the company now has to make a hard decision about the future of Xbox consoles--at least that's what ex-PlayStation boss Shawn Layden thinks.

Xbox is at a very contentious point right now, having broken exclusivity on first-party games in a bid to maximize profits. Players feel this could diminish the Xbox platform long-term as exclusive content traditionally helped propel hardware sales--people would buy Xbox to play games like Halo, Gears of War, and Forza. Ex-PlayStation boss Shawn Layden tells GamesIndustry.biz that Xbox consoles just don't have enough differentiation to claw back console market share, and that Microsoft's current stance in the console market reminded Layden how SEGA stopped making consoles in 2001, just 3 years after the failure of the Dreamcast.

"Watching what Xbox has been doing recently, I do get Dreamcast flashbacks," Layden said, pointing to SEGA's spiraling demise in the console market in the early 2000s.

Roblox has found itself in hot water after it banned a YouTuber called "Schlep," who claims to have been directly involved in the arrest of at least six child predators operating on Roblox. Schlep makes videos on exposing the online predators present on the Roblox platform, and Roblox sent him a cease and desist letter as well as banned all of his Roblox accounts.

The response from the community has been nothing short of an uproar, with Roblox players now calling for the removal of Roblox CEO David Baszucki with a petition that has already attracted more than 65,000 signatures. For more details on the banning of Schlep, check out this article here.

Roblox has since responded to the uproar from the community with a new lengthy post by Roblox chief safety officer Matt Kaufman, who acknowledged the recent situation and gave more details on why Roblox bans vigilante users.

A prominent leaker has revealed there won't be a Nintendo Switch 2 version of Call of Duty Black Ops 7 when it launches later this year. The title will be arriving on current-gen consoles and PC.

The news comes from billbil-kun, a very well-known leaker with a healthy track record within the video games industry. Billbil-kun took to their personal X account to share the news, with the leaker writing "No Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 on Switch 2 at launch!" In addition to revealing the news about a lack of Switch 2 version for the upcoming title, the leaker also unveiled the release date for Black Ops 7, which is November 14, 2025.

Billbil-kun stated the date coincides with information provided by another prominent leaker, TheGhostOfHope, who wrote on X last July that the game would be released on November 14, 2025. As for a Nintendo Switch 2 version of the game, billbil-kun writes they were unable to confirm if Activision is planning a port for Black Ops 7 at a later date.

NVIDIA's GeForce NOW library continues to expand, and this week's additions should please veteran PC gamers who have been gaming since long before cloud gaming was a thing. Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War - Definitive Edition is out this week, and it's a remastered version of Relic's classic RTS game that includes all expansions, campaigns, and other content with enhanced visuals.

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War dates back to 2004, a time when the RTS genre was still a big thing in the PC gaming space. Dawn of War introduced a new spin on the genre by adding strategic points to capture and hold, a mechanic that would be expanded upon in Relic's other RTS classic, Company of Heroes. Dawn of War's Definitive Edition includes new 4K visuals, improvements to the user interface, and is available on GeForce NOW.

Also joining the library is the recent Heretic + Hexen re-release from Bethesda, id Software, and Nightdive Studios, which received a surprise announcement and release as part of QuakeCon 2025. With over 110 campaign maps, including brand-new missions, and remastered 4K 120 FPS widescreen visuals, Heretic + Hexen is the return of the cult classic Doom meets high-fantasy first-person shooter series from the early 1990s.

GPD has just announced its new Win 5 gaming handheld, with the company claiming it's the world's fastest gaming handheld, powered by AMD's new Ryzen AI Max+ 395 "Strix Halo" APU. Check it out:

The new GPD Win 5 gaming handheld is powered by the AMD Strix Halo APU with 16 cores and 32 threads of Zen 5 processing power, and a powerful 40 GPU cores of RDNA 3.5 integrated GPU goodness with the Radeon 8060S, capable of driving 120FPS+ gaming on the go.

GPD has no physical keyboard on the Win 5 gaming handheld, but it does have a built-in (and replaceable) battery. GPD offers battery backpacks with 80 Wh of capacity, as there is no internal battery on the Win 5 gaming handheld. The company has released videos showing that it takes a few seconds to replace the battery, but there's no confirmation on how much these battery packs will cost from GPD.

Diablo 4's new update mentions paladins, fueling speculation that the class will show up in season 11.

Blizzard just changed the name of Diablo 4's build designation, possibly indicating something is on the horizon. According to Blizzard-focused publication WoW Head, Diablo 4's vendor build recently changed names from Fenris to "Paladin," which could mean that the classic character is coming over to modern Diablo. The vendor build is basically the full software package that Blizzard sends to Battle.net, Steam, PlayStation Store, Xbox, etc.

It's believed that the aura-infused Diablo 2 class could show up as part of Diablo 4's season 11, which was hinted at by the patch 2.5 moniker.

If your custom Battlefield 6 Portal content is good enough, you might land a job at DICE to work on the franchise.

DICE could use its Portal custom content creator to recruit new game devs. On paper, this sounds similar to how Bethesda will often hire top-tier Elder Scrolls and Fallout modders to help work on new projects; Elianora, for example, became part of Starfield's dedicated object-placement "clutter team" because of her work on previous mods.

"Remember, I come from a world of Quake mods, and how we'd hire people off of these amazing mods that they did on the internet. I have a secret desire to find the best of the best and target them for maybe working with us," Battlefield lead Vince Zampella said in a recent interview with Gamer Update's Jake Lucky.

Former PlayStation Worldwide Studios boss Shawn Layden indicates that Game Pass may not actually be healthy for game developers, saying that the service turns them into "wage slaves."

Despite its high value proposition, Xbox Game Pass is one of the most contentious subscription services on the market. Critics say that Game Pass could devalue games over time, and the FTC trial in 2023 did confirm that Game Pass "cannibalizes" game sales, that is to say users choose to subscribe rather than to buy.

We've talked about Game Pass a whole lot here at TweakTown, and we were the first to report on the $1.9 billion revenue figure in 2022. Since then, Game Pass has more than doubled its earnings; Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says Game Pass made nearly $5 billion last year.

Battlefield 6 runs amazingly smooth on decent hardware, but in new testing we see the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D processor being around 30% faster than the Intel Core i9-14900K in new testing. Check it out:

Testing Games spent some time comparing both of the CPUs against each other at 1080p, 1440p, and the glorious 4K resolution using NVIDIA's flagship GeForce RTX 5090 graphics card running Battlefield 6 in open beta form. The game is quite CPU-bound at lower resolutions, where the 9800X3D chews it up and delivers around 29% more performance than the 14900K.

This is all running the Ultra graphics preset, where the 9800X3D also consumes around 40% less power, with 1% and 0.1% lows being impressive for smoother gameplay. The GPU usage was hitting 80-90% using the 9800X3D, while sitting at just over 70% using the 14900K. There are parts where the performance gap between the 9800X3D and 14900K was sitting at around 25%, but it's still a huge gap between the two processors, showing AMD come out on top in Battlefield 6.

Star Wars Genesis is an ambitious list of mods that transforms Starfield into a fully-fledged Star Wars RPG, complete with force powers, iconic Imperial and Rebel outfits, weapons, ships, and entire areas like Mos Eisley and Coruscant.

Thanks to Kotaku, I've recently stumbled upon what could be the best Starfield mods that I've ever seen. To be more specific, it's a list of mods and not a singular one. The project is called Star Wars Genesis, and it's a series of total-conversion mods that transforms nearly all aspects of Starfield into Lucasfilm's legendary franchise, complete with new items, UI overhauls, Jedi and Sith force abilities, and even a ton of new vehicles and bosses like AT-STs and Star Destroyers (I even spotted a Sandcrawler, too).

Unfortunately, Genesis doesn't include lightsabers. Why? The melee combat just isn't up to snuff. "I will add lightsabers when they are ready with proper animations, deflection, and dismemberment," mod author DeityVengy says.

Releasing Tekken 8 on Switch 2 is a good business tactic, series creator Katsuhiro Harada says, but it would be costly...and the payoff may not entirely be worth it (at least right now).

At EVO 2025, Eurogamer asked Tekken director Katsuhiro Harada if a game like Tekken 8 could ever come over to the Switch 2. Nintendo's new console is selling like gangbusters right now, becoming the fastest-selling video games console with the best-ever initial launch in the history of the games industry. So...why not attach a mega-popular IP to the platform?

The reality is that something like this could be pretty tough to pull off. Tekken 8 was built from the ground up for Gen 9 consoles and PC, featuring crunchy, fast-paced gameplay where split-second timing is crucial. The Tekken team would have to do lots of scaling on the Switch 2, and while it's not impossible, it just might not be worth it for Bandai Namco right now.

A petition for the removal of Roblox CEO David Baszucki has reached 50,000 signatures after the platform targeted a 22-year-old predator hunting YouTuber with a cease and desist letter.

Roblox has been caught up in a recent controversy after the platform sent a cease and desist letter to YouTuber "Schlep" who is known for his investigations into child predators lurking on the Roblox platform. Schlep's investigations have resulted in multiple arrests in real-life of child predators attempting to groom Roblox players, with Schlep saying in a recent video that he has directly influenced the arrest of six people using the Roblox ecosystem for nefarious grooming activity.

Schlep said in his recent video that he experienced grooming by an individual on Roblox when he was younger and that one of his main motivations behind his vigilante activities on Roblox is to prevent what happened to him from happening to other children using the platform. Despite Schlep's efforts, Roblox claims the YouTuber is "engaging in simulated child endangerment conversations, sharing or soliciting personally identifiable information (PII), [and] directing users to move conversations off-platform."

Apple won't be releasing an iPhone 17 Plus this year, but instead will be dropping the iPhone 17 Air, a super cut-down iPhone that is incredibly thin and only has the bare minimum features.

A dummy unit of the iPhone 17 Air has made it out into the wild, and in a new video posted by Majin Bu, a known leaker, the upcoming iPhone has been compared to an iPhone 16 Pro. The video showcases the new incredibly thin design of the iPhone 17 Air, with previous reports pegging the width of the device at just 5.5mm. To keep to the minimalist feature set, Apple is dropping the multiple cameras on the iPhone 17 Air and only placing a single-lens camera module on the back inside a pill-shaped camera bar.

For comparison, the iPhone 16 Pro measures at 8.25mm thick, making the iPhone 17 Air nearly half the width of the previous generation Pro device. Additionally, the video shows an Action button on the left-hand side of the device above the two volume buttons, and on the right-hand side, the power button and below it what appears to be a Camera Control button.