Gaming News - Page 90

The Steam Deck has been out for quite some time, and has been undeniably popular - particularly at its launch - but we've now seen the first signs that sales for the handheld gaming PC are starting to fall off.

Valve's Steam Deck was launched early in 2022, and has been around for over a year and a half now, and in that time it has consistently been up there among the company's best-selling products.

As Gaming On Linux reports, the Steam Deck has been in the top 10 of Valve's own weekly top-selling products (globally) for 83 weeks (which is, of course, mostly games - this is all the firm's sales, hardware and software).

UK antitrust regulators at the Competition and Markets Authority have approved Microsoft's new deal, and the companies are now free to combine and merge.

The last hurdle in the Microsoft-Activision transaction has been leapt as the CMA clears the deal, paving the way to the video games industry's largest-ever merger.

Microsoft won CMA approval thanks to a newly submitted deal which separated cloud gaming rights from the Activision merger. Instead, these rights would go to independent third-party publisher Ubisoft. Microsoft gave up the cloud streaming rights to Activision-Blizzard games to Ubisoft for a 15-year period as a concession to address the CMA's concerns over cloud. The maneuver worked and the CMA approved this new deal.

As you may be aware, the Steam accounts of a number of game developers have recently been used to spread malware, and Valve has now implemented measures to help stop this happening.

The game devs in question had their accounts broken into, with the perpetrators then sending out updates to their respective games which included malware. Nasty indeed, particularly when you consider many Steam users have their game library set to update titles automatically, which would have downloaded the malware straight away.

The better news with this security breach is that not many Steam users were affected, fewer than 100 as PC Gamer reported. And as you might expect, Valve has now made a move to tighten its defenses against this sort of attack.

Shadow, the French cloud gaming company that allows subscribers to run games via high-powered PCs over the internet, has emailed customers to warn them that it has suffered a security breach in which customer data was stolen. While Shadow hasn't confirmed how many people were affected, it's thought that around 530,000 users have had their information stolen.

In an email sent to customers and reported on by TechCrunch, Shadow said that it was the victim of a social engineering attack that targeted one of its employees at the end of September 2023. The attack apparently began on Discord and then resulted in the employee downloading a game on Steam at the suggestion of a third party. That third party was also a victim of the attack.

The data itself was collected after the attacker was able to gain access to an as-yet-unnamed software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider.

We might just see a new game in the Guitar Hero franchise, according to a heavy hint dropped by the CEO of Activision, Bobby Kotick.

Windows Central reports that this possibility came to light in a lengthy interview, where Kotick answers a whole load of queries from James Corden (of The Late Late Show and Gavin & Stacey fame).

Apparently the interview, which has been leaked, saw Kotick talking in some depth about how the Microsoft deal will boost what the games publisher can do (assuming it goes through, which it apparently will - and imminently).

Ubisoft has taken to its social media channels to praise its developers behind Assassin's Creed Mirage on achieving the most successful launch on current-gen consoles for Ubisoft in terms of unit sales.

Assassin's Creed Mirage has been available for just six days, and the team has already released a statement congratulating the team behind the title and thanking gamers for their title's reception. Ubisoft thanked fans of the series for coming along for the 15-year legacy of the Assassin's Creed series and, in celebration, shared some statistics sourced from the first week of Assassin's Creed Mirage.

According to Ubisoft, players have already spent 479 collective years parkouring the rooftops of Baghdad; players have done the iconic leap of faith 60 million times; and last but not least, 1.2 million cats have been pet in-game.

The wealthiest Old School RuneScape player BTCs has been banned over allegations of real-world trading, which is the process of exchanging in-game currency for real-world money.

The Old School RuneScape player and stream is known as BTC, and has taken to his YouTube channel to declare himself innocent against Jagex's rollout of a string of bans against multiple of BTC's accounts, along with other accounts associated with his. Notably, BTC took to Twitter at the end of September to share a screenshot of the "first ever 1 trillion bank on OSRS," which equates to approximately $160,000 in real-world money.

BTC claims that he earned the astonishing amount of in-game currency through doing deathmatches, essentially a process where two players both bet a large stack of cash in either liquid in-game currency or gear and then fight to the death - winner takes all.

The next generation in the Counter-Strike series, Counter-Strike 2, was released on September 27, and over time, its reviews on Steam seem to be getting worse and worse.

New reports from Gaming Bible and Insider Gaming explore the current situation of Counter-Strike 2 and why overall, the title is now categorized as "mixed". There are many factors contributing to the poor reviews, one is the deletion of Counter-Strike: Global Offense, which was shut down upon the release of Counter-Strike 2, and all Steam listings for GO redirected to Counter-Strike 2. Other criticisms of the new title include the lack of specific multiplayer modes, maps, and numerous bugs.

Many fans of the series are accusing Valve of simply hijacking CS:GO's Steam listing to get more people to play Counter-Strike 2. Other fans are pointing toward many instances of sloppy hitboxes and hurt boxes. Reports indicate that out of all of Valve's games, Counter-Strike 2 is now the lowest-rated on Steam with its "mixed" review labeling.

Diablo IV had a blockbuster launch earlier this year. Still, with the arrival of its first Season of content and some players growing tired of the endgame grind and variety, the hype surrounding the latest action RPG in the long-running franchise has waned in recent months. The good news? That's all about to change.

Blizzard looks to be in it for the long haul regarding Diablo IV. With the game's second season, dubbed 'Season of Blood' around the corner, the game is not only getting its first major content drop but a massive patch (bringing the game to version 1.2) that features over 40 pages of new features, items, balance changes, overhauls, and more so much so that there's no real way to cover it all in a single news post.

As a fan of the game, the new vampiric theme, bosses, events, and story-driven questlines for Season of Blood sound like a lot of fun - enough to get me to fire the game up. And with that, here are some of the main highlights from Diablo IV's massive 1.2.0 Patch Notes.

Sony has upgraded its new PlayStation "slim" models with a meaningful boost to storage, but gamers shouldn't expect all of the capacity to be usable for games and apps.

Sony's new PlayStation 5 consoles now feature a 1TB SSD, offering a noteworthy increase over the 825GB SSD included in existing PS5s. On paper, that's a 175GB difference.

Gamers won't get to enjoy the full 1TB, though. Advertised storage and actual storage are different things, and there's always some capacity eaten up by formatting (the Series X, for example, is billed as a 1TB device but it only has 802GB of usable storage). Consoles also need extra space for the operating system and other tools/tasks, so oftentimes there is a sizable amount of storage being reserved for these functions.