Gaming - Page 7

Bethesda developers were blindsided with termination letters the same day Xbox and Bethesda announced Fallout 5 is in early development, and now the union is filing a legal complaint against the developer for "continuing to violate labor laws in Canada."

The union alleges Bethesda's layoff and the timing of the announcement were a calculated move to distract from the hundreds of employees who were recently laid off as part of Microsoft's sweeping layoffs that affected approximately 3,200 people, and resulted in the closure of four studios.

The OneBGS union claims that Canadian employees at Bethesda Game Studios received termination notices via email on July 17, the same day the company revealed major Fallout and Elder Scrolls remasters, and hinted at a new Fallout title from Obsidian. The union alleges Bethesda used these announcements as a smokescreen to mitigate the negative public perception of employees being laid off.

Sony has allegedly imposed what insiders are calling its "strictest ever" social media guidelines on first-party developers to prevent them from adding to the ongoing criticism around the company's decision to discontinue physical PlayStation discs in 2028.

The information comes from Alanah Pearce, a former Santa Monica Studio writer who worked on the upcoming God of War: Laufey, who revealed that PlayStation first-party studio employees were handed what is described as "the strictest social media guidelines for this particular thing that they've ever seen issued". "Sony knew this was going to be an enormous PR issue," Pearce said in a recent YouTube video. "They only do this when they're expecting a firestorm."

Sony reportedly issued effectively a social media gag order on first-party developers to curtail any criticism about the issue, and judging by what Pearce said, those guidelines can come as late as the day of the announcement. Pearce recounted one instance where Sony provided guidelines on what she could and could not say regarding the announcement of God of War: Laufey.

Valve has just made significant improvements to the infrastructure surrounding gifting games on Steam, removing the need for Steam friends, accounts, or region locks, and overhauling the wishlisting feature with custom categories.

You can now send a game to someone's email address directly, purchase from shareable wishlists, and all without needing to be logged into a Steam account. The update allows cross-region gifting, though you'll need to know the recipient's Steam account to see the pricing in their specific region.

You can also now organize your wishlist into categories and share only specific lists, such as a dedicated "Xmas" list or a big Steam sale. This is a big win for surprise gifting and better organization of games you want to keep tabs on, and is undoubtedly a welcome addition to the Steam storefront.

Ubisoft has quietly made 80+ of its most popular titles available for purchase through the Xbox Store on PC, but the experience is far from seamless.

The new listings include a mix of classic and newer titles, from Assassin's Creed entries like Valhalla and Shadows to Far Cry 6, Rainbow Six Extraction, and Immortals Fenyx Rising. However, players must still enable the Ubisoft Connect extension to launch the games, and Xbox achievements and cross-save functionality remain absent, raising obvious concerns with many gamers who would like to enjoy Ubisoft's titles but also want to snag the achievements along the way.

This move signals a continued push by Microsoft and Ubisoft to unify storefronts, but it highlights a growing problem with the Xbox PC app, and that frustration is being voiced by many gamers on Reddit and other social media platforms. Here's the issue: none of these titles are natively built for the Xbox PC app, as they all require Ubisoft Connect to launch.

A developer has managed to get an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 desktop GPU to run on Windows 11 Arm by hacking drivers never designed to support that GPU on Windows 11 Arm, marking quite an impressive breakthrough in cross-architecture compatibility.

VoidTech, the developer behind the project, uploaded a video on Bilibili that showcases how they managed to boot the RTX 4060 on a Huawei Qingyun W510 workstation running Windows 11 Arm. The developer demonstrated that by modifying the RTX Spark Arm64 driver package, the system not only recognized the GPU but also enabled DirectX 12, Vulkan, and CUDA support. Additionally, the system featured 32GB of DDR4 RAM, and the GeForce RTX 4060 had 8GB of VRAM.

By modifying NVIDIA's RTX Spark drivers, which, for those who don't know, are the new platform NVIDIA introduced at Computex 2026. NVIDIA described RTX Spark as the culmination of 40 years of computing, as it's a new Arm-based Windows platform that offers exceptional AI performance while simultaneously supporting real-world applications and software, even games.

As part of a global study with a sample size of 1,500 Australians, which asked participants whether or not esports deserve to be in the Olympic Games, there's a definite generational divide when it comes to who said yes or no. For Aussies between the ages of 18 and 24, 59% believe that esports should be a part of the Olympics, which is 10% higher than the global sentiment amongst participants in the same age group.

However, once you look at the data for older Australians, this majority quickly evaporates. For those Australians surveyed between the ages of 45 and 54, this support falls to just 19%, with only 4.6% of Aussies aged 55 or over supporting the idea of esports becoming a part of the Olympic Games.

The idea of a global, Olympics-style event for esports has been a point of discussion for several years. The Olympic Esports Series, which is run by the same governing body as the Summer and Winter Olympic Games, is still on track to kick off in 2027; however, the choice of non-traditional esports titles (there's no Counter-Strike, Rocket League, or Call of Duty) has drawn criticism. Plus, the inaugural event's location is up in the air as Saudi Arabia pulled out of hosting the event last year.

Palworld's 1.0 launch has been a massive success so far. The game hit 961,867 concurrent players on Steam on July 19, its highest figure since its explosive early access launch in January 2024, when it peaked at more than 2.1 million players, still the third-highest concurrent player count in Steam history. Before version 1.0, daily peaks had fallen to around 58,000 players, which shows just how significant the update has been.

Pocketpair launched version 1.0 on July 10 across Steam, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, and Game Pass. The update introduced 72 new Pals, an Awakening mechanic, reworked main missions, new areas, additional skills, improved riding controls, and patch notes spanning roughly 27 pages. The scale of the update appears to have drawn back a large number of lapsed players while also attracting newcomers.

According to Alinea Analytics market analysis lead Rhys Elliott, Palworld has now sold approximately 30.5 million copies, generating around $700 million in gross revenue. Nearly 1.5 million of those copies were sold in the two weeks following the 1.0 launch, helped along by a 30% Steam discount that ran through launch week. Steam accounts for roughly 65% of the player base, with Xbox at 31% and PS5 at just 4%. The US and China are the two largest markets on Steam, each holding around 27% of the player base.

Rockstar's upcoming Grand Theft Auto 6 might struggle to hit 60 FPS on consoles, according to a former technical director who worked on GTA 5 and Red Dead Redemption, suggesting fans shouldn't get their hopes up for Rockstar releasing the next-gen GTA with 60FPS support on current platforms.

Reece "Kiwi Talkz" Reilly recently posted a podcast with Rockstar producer John Ricchio, who discussed the challenges of maintaining a high frame rate on current-gen hardware given the game's scale and ambition. While rumors of a 60 FPS performance mode have been circulating for quite some time, Ricchio's comments cast doubt on the feasibility of hitting that target without sacrificing visual fidelity, which is something that Rockstar won't want to do. Essentially, Rockstar will need to decide between graphical fidelity + object density versus total in-game framerate, and according to Ricchio, Rockstar is more than likely to lean toward graphical fidelity and object density.

Multiple leaks and retailer listings have suggested GTA 6 could ship with both 30 FPS and 60 FPS modes on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. However, Rockstar has yet to confirm these details, and the developer has a long history of capping major titles at 30 FPS on consoles, and then later releasing a 60FPS mode some years after release. The PS5 Pro, with its extra power, may be the only system that could support a stable 60 FPS at 4K resolution, but given Rockstar's resources and the time it has had developing GTA 6, it's likely we will eventually see 60FPS on both PS5 Pro and Xbox Series X consoles.

NVIDIA has released a new hotfix driver to rectify bugs found in Halo: Campaign Evolved and Path of Exile 2. Driver 610.82 features a fix for stability issues in Halo: Campaign Evolved while running on RTX 50 series hardware that could occur using older 610.xx series drivers. There is also a performance fix for Path of Exile 2 where intermittent long pauses could occur after extended gameplay sessions using the DX12 API.

Halo: Campaign Evolved is an upcoming remake of Halo: Combat Evolved's campaign that updates the game's original story with modern graphics, updated cinematics, and some new missions. The game is designed around solo and 4-player online co-op, and features cross-play and cross-progression support. Path of Exile 2 is an RPG in early access that takes place in the land of Wraeclast, featuring up to six-player co-op. The game features a dedicated campaign with six acts, 100 distinct environments, 600 monsters, 100 bosses, and 12 classes to play.

Ironically, NVIDIA's latest hotfix driver packs more bug fixes than its outgoing WHQL driver 610.74 released on July 7th. 610.74 was launched primarily to support Doom: The Dark Ages | Revelations; however, it had virtually no bug fixes to speak of compared to previous drivers. The only bug fix it had surrounded a minor Smooth Motion bug where flickering might occur in Tencent Meeting if Smooth Motion was enabled globally in the NVIDIA App or NVIDIA Control Panel.

Jagex is using its instantly-recognizable MMO brand to reach players on console, but not with the mainline RuneScape experience.

RuneScape is one of the older MMORPGs that still has a healthy fanbase--Old School RuneScape is apparently doing so well that it has broken nearly all of Jagex's internal metrics. The studio is now expanding to console with a new RuneScape game, Dragonwilds, but it's a spin-off game and not the original RuneScape experience. Jagex is instead choosing to reach PS5, Xbox, and Switch 2 players with a separate game.

Jagex sees big opportunity for Dragonwilds. Not only is it a survival sim that mirrors popular games like Valheim, but it's also a RuneScape game, and the studio hopes that this will be enough to attract past RS players. In fact, Jagex thinks there are around 18 million console gamers who have played RuneScape in the past, so there's quite a bit of potential for adoption.

A new market analysis is putting a hard number on what Sony's disc decision could cost the used games ecosystem, and it's certainly not small change. Dataintelo pegs the global second-hand game platform market, which covers pre-owned games, consoles, accessories, and peripherals, at $7.2 billion in 2025, with a projected climb to $13.8 billion by 2034 at a 7.5% annual growth rate.

That forecast was published before Sony's July 1 announcement that it will stop producing physical PlayStation game discs starting January 2028, so the real trajectory for used games specifically looks a lot less rosy than the raw numbers suggest. While the used game platform market itself is expected to grow, the pre-owned games segment is expected to shrink significantly.

Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter told CNBC that roughly a third of games have historically sold used, and trade-ins gave gamers actual cash toward buying something new. He didn't mince words on where physical retail is headed, calling brick-and-mortar game stores "doomed."

Old school collectible card game Magic: The Gathering made history by raking in over half a billion dollars in sales in a single quarter.

More than 30 years of Magic hasn't diminished the brand--far from it. Wizards' iconic card game is more active than ever as it becomes a kind of Fortnite of CCGs thanks to its myriad of franchise crossovers. The plan is working exceptionally well, with skyrocketing sales for sets based on Lord of the Rings, Final Fantasy, and more recently, the Marvel superheroes. Having both a digital and material version of the game further propels its consistent sales.

Hasbro today revealed that Magic: The Gathering is now making more money than it ever has before, achieving a record-breaking $545 million in earnings throughout Q2 2026. To put that number into perspective, Magic made up over 71% of Hasbro's total quarterly gaming revenues.

Microsoft brings backwards compatibility to PC, paving the way for its next-gen Project Helix hybrid console.

Xbox's backwards compatibility program has expanded to PC, where Microsoft is bringing original Xbox console games over to the platform. This is an important step that could lay out the framework for Project Helix, the new Xbox console that is expected to also play Windows PC games.

Four original Xbox games will now be playable on PC as a result of this initiative, which occurs during Xbox's 25th anniversary: the iconic party classic Fuzion Frenzy, Conker: Live and Reloaded, Blinx: The Time Scrapper, and Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge. If you already own the games, you'll get a free copy to play on PC, similar to Play Anywhere. This sees Microsoft granting users more cross-generational licensing for specific titles, which is also an important step for Project Helix's gradual rollout.

The Steam Deck has been one of the most popular handheld gaming consoles over the past few years. Although other handhelds do exist and the market is growing rapidly, the Steam Deck is arguably the most crucial proponent of handheld PC gaming going mainstream.

Well, that was until Valve jacked up the prices in late May 2026. Originally, the Steam Deck cost around $549 for the 512GB OLED model, while the 1TB model was sitting at $649. In one fell swoop, Valve implemented a ~45% price increase, pushing the 512GB model to $789, and the 1TB model to an eye-watering $949. The initial Steam Deck price was already a tad high, but these new prices were too difficult to stomach.

It turns out Valve did not get away with its price increase, despite its reasoning being solid. Boiling Steam estimated Steam Deck sales by extrapolating Valve's Top Sellers chart data, and it looks like there has been a monumental decline in Steam Deck sales following the price hikes. The analysis states that the Steam Deck slipped from 5th place in the Top Sellers list all the way down to 14th, a drop that can represent a sales decline of a whopping 82% in weekly figures.

Nintendo seeks tariff refunds from the US government, but has no plans to give any of it to consumers to compensate for price hikes.

Following the US Supreme Court's ruling that Trump's tariffs were illegal, Nintendo wants a refund for the tariffs that it paid earlier in the year. Shortly after Nintendo sued the US government for its tariff refunds, Nintendo was in turn sued in a class action lawsuit (Hoffert et al v. Nintendo of America Inc, Case 2:26-cv-01360-RAJ) that claims consumers should also be refunded.

After all, Nintendo did raise the price of certain products--including the Switch 1--as a potential response to the tariffs, and the lawsuit argues that Nintendo should refund consumers the difference. Nintendo is now calling for the courts to dismiss the case, and its lawyers use stark language in the 27-page filing. In various parts, legal counsel says things like consumers were "never promised" rebates by Nintendo, and that buyers "received exactly what they bargained for." It's technical legalese wording, but it still stands out.

We have been hearing quite a bit about PS5 emulation on PC recently, with it only being a few days ago that an open-source project called KytyPS5 made it all the way to the Grand Theft Auto 5 menus. Now, another PS5 emulator for PC called SharpEmu has made progress.

SharpEmu, a new PlayStation 5 emulator for PC, has now advanced to the point where it can run Demon's Souls Remake all the way to the character creation screen. This marks a major leap for the project, as just one week earlier it was only able to boot the game, crashing shortly after.

The new emulator is still in its very early development stages, meaning it isn't capable of running any new PS5 games, or any PS5 games for that matter. SharpEmu can technically boot a handful of PS5 games, execute native CPU instructions, and partially manage kernel operations, but cannot play a single PS5 game. Demon's Souls Remake is the only substantial PS5 title it can load and advance into menus. While the emulator remains experimental, the progress shows it's on a strong trajectory.

A controller disguised as a console helped Nintendo legally enter China's once-banned gaming market, and now the unique console didn't have a very high total number of units produced.

The console is called the iQue Player, and it was Nintendo's first official console sold in China. Its existence is unique compared to traditional consoles, as its design was a clever engineering solution to what was, at the time, a widespread ban on gaming consoles by the Chinese government.

Instead of selling a traditional console, Nintendo and partner iQue developed a plug-and-play controller that housed a full Nintendo 64 system inside. The controller-console functioned similarly to a traditional console, as it could be plugged into TVs and used flash memory cards for games. These design decisions, among others, including its shape, sidestepped China's legal restrictions.

As far as military-themed shooters and action games go, Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon series of games from Ubisoft used to be a mainstay. From the very first Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon game in 2001 through to the open-world Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Breakpoint in 2019, the release cadence meant we got a new Ghost Recon game every year or so. However, since 2019, the series has been dormant. Until now.

And that's because, like a sleeper agent waiting for their next mission, it's finally looking like Ubisoft is ready to dust off Ghost Recon for another military-themed set of missions. "It's been a while Ghosts!," a new announcement on the official Ghost Recon account on social media platform X begins.

Adding, "We know some of you saw some updates, we'll have more to say on the 6th of August when we celebrate the 25th Anniversary of Ghost Recon. Intel coming soon." Setting aside the ongoing troubles at Ubisoft when it comes to releasing games and achieving sales targets, it's definitely a promising sign of a potential game reveal or some form of announcement that Ubisoft is planning to bring back the series with a remaster or collection of remasters for some of the more classic entries.

After showcasing the sheer power of modding through running a fully playable copy of GTA III on a television texture inside GTA: San Andreas, the modder Dryxio has demonstrated another feat in GTA modding: portals between GTA III, Vice City, and San Andreas.

If you thought the playable versions of GTA inside GTA were impressive, this will certainly raise your eyebrows, as Dryxio shared the above clip to his personal X account and showed three portals, each leading to different GTA games.

Dryxio demonstrates he is able to run directly through the portal and pick up playing as their character in that nested GTA game, and then move back through the portal. Additionally, Dryxio showcases he is able to shoot through a portal at NPCs, and the bullets hit the target in real-time, meaning Dryxio is able to shoot across a GTA game at a target. Could this be a world first?

With performance gains chiefly driven by AMD's advanced Ryzen Z2 and Z2 Extreme APUs with onboard Radeon graphics, portable PC gaming handhelds have become increasingly popular in recent years. This year, the debut of Intel's Panther Lake architecture with next-gen Arc graphics has seen performance increase even further, with new Intel Arc G3 Extreme delivering impressive 1080p 60 FPS gameplay with High in-game graphics settings when running on the integrated Arc B390 GPU.

However, with the current component crisis affecting memory, storage, and even processor pricing, these powerful PC gaming handhelds are arriving with price tags that make them feel more like luxury items than something everyday PC gamers can pick up. At Computex 2026, we got the chance to go hands-on with the impressive Predator Atlas 8 handheld from Acer, which pairs the Intel Arc G3 and G3 Extreme processors with an 8-inch 120Hz touchscreen display and premium controls.

With the official release of the Atlas 8 on track for later this year, sometime between September and December, Acer's UK site is now letting potential buyers register their interest with pricing for the various models. And with the entry-level Predator Atlas 8 with an Intel Arc G3 non-Extreme processor, 16GB of LPDDR5X memory, and 512GB of storage priced at £999.99 (around $1,300 USD), it's definitely a sign of the times we're currently in.