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After laying off thousands of employees over the past couple years, games industry executives appear to be adopting a more efficient method of what they euphemistically call “reprioritization”: closing entire studios. Take-Two axed two studios just last week, and now Microsoft has bulldozed four more, including Arkane Austin and Tango Gameworks, which it acquired when […]

After laying off thousands of employees over the past couple years, games industry executives appear to be adopting a more efficient method of what they euphemistically call “reprioritization”: closing entire studios. Take-Two axed two studios just last week, and now Microsoft has bulldozed four more, including Arkane Austin and Tango Gameworks, which it acquired when […]

Microsoft’s Xbox division has announced a rash of studio closures as part of an effort to prioritise “high-impact titles” according to multiple sources, including IGN and Bloomberg. Included in the four announced studio closures are Arkane Austin, Tango Gameworks, Alpha Dog Games, and Roundhouse Games.  Arkane as a whole has been responsible for several excellent […]

The year has started with an impressive string of boneheaded moves from game publishers. The particulars are different, but they’re connected by how predictable, and therefore avoidable, they were. Here are the biggest recent hits on the 2024 wall of shame: Helldivers 2 suddenly insisted that its millions of PC players make and connect PSN […]

The year has started with an impressive string of boneheaded moves from game publishers. The particulars are different, but they’re connected by how predictable, and therefore avoidable, they were. Here are the biggest recent hits on the 2024 wall of shame: Helldivers 2 suddenly insisted that its millions of PC players make and connect PSN […]

A recent paper by cybersecurity-focused firm Akamai has found that queries to suspicious domains impersonating the US Postal Service accounted for nearly as much internet traffic as those to the actual USPS in a four month span between 2023 and ’24. The firm’s conservative criteria for avoiding false positives, meanwhile, might mean that traffic to […]

In a continuation of Square Enix’s promise to review its development processes “from scratch”, the gaming giant best known for Final Fantasy announced it was expecting massive losses in a warning to investors yesterday.  “… in light of the myriad changes underway in the environment surrounding its Group,” the statement reads, Square Enix plans to […]

Deliver Us Mars developer KeokeN Interactive has laid off its entire team after being unable to secure funding for future projects. The studio said in today’s announcement that it has “exhausted all our possible options for publishing, work for hire, and co-development.” The sci-fi thriller Deliver Us Mars, and its predecessor Deliver Us the Moon, […]

First reported by Android Authority, a recent Google earnings call included praise for a pilot program to show users ads when they pause videos on YouTube‘s TV app. The company has so far only experimented with pause ads on the TV app, but its apparent success is a cause for concern with future inclusion on […]

Like many at PC Gamer, I’ve been enjoying a healthy amount of Helldiving the last two months. Whether I’m shoulders-deep in pulped bug biomass or cowering beneath a storm of automaton energy bolts, Helldivers 2 has been a refreshing surprise. I expected Helldivers 2 to be good, but not “unforeseeable appeal that knocks out back-end […]

We couldn’t hold a roundtable interview on the State of PC Gaming without asking developers about the most ubiquitous name in PC gaming: Steam. After 20 years the store is still a fixture, and despite increased competition from Epic, Ubisoft and other storefronts, it continues to thrive. The perspective of the developers we invited to […]

Reversing a Trump-era ruling from 2018, the Federal Communications Commission voted today to restore net neutrality rules, so as to “bring back a national standard for broadband reliability, security, and consumer protection.” The vote has been several years in the making, as President Biden signed an executive order in 2021 directing the FCC to restore […]

Casey Yano, co-founder of Slay the Spire developer Mega Crit, quit his job several years ago to work on the deckbuilder that would eventually earn a 92% from PC Gamer and a 97% overwhelmingly positive rating on Steam. It wasn’t a smash hit at first, when it launched in early access, but as Slay the […]

During Baldur’s Gate 3’s trip around the award circuit winning every major GOTY trophy there is, the developers at Larian have taken some of their stage time to criticize corporate greed and mass layoffs. In the wake of its massively successful self-published game, Larian hasn’t been shy about pointing the finger at what it sees […]

During Baldur’s Gate 3’s trip around the award circuit winning every major GOTY trophy there is, the developers at Larian have taken some of their stage time to criticize corporate greed and mass layoffs. In the wake of its massively successful self-published game, Larian hasn’t been shy about pointing the finger at what it sees […]

Workers from just about every industry in the US are celebrating a landmark announcement by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) that, unless stopped, will ban non-compete clauses in around four months. A non-compete is, in essence, a clause that dictates whether a worker can find employment (or create a product) that directly competes with their […]

This month PC Gamer delivers world-exclusive access to Frostpunk 2, the gripping new city-survival game from 11 bit studios. Flying to Warsaw, Poland, to visit 11 bit’s studio, experience the game in action, and interview its developers, we have the authoritative inside scoop on a game that’s already looking like one of the best new […]

Few videogame marketing terms are more aggravatingly ambiguous than “early access.” Most painfully, it can refer to two very different scenarios: Sometimes it means putting an in-development game on sale before it’s done, and other times it means offering access to a finished game early, typically as a deluxe edition preorder bonus. Starfield offered several […]

Few videogame marketing terms are more aggravatingly ambiguous than “early access.” Most painfully, it can refer to two very different scenarios: Sometimes it means putting an in-development game on sale before it’s done, and other times it means offering access to a finished game early, typically as a deluxe edition preorder bonus. Starfield offered several […]

Few videogame marketing terms are more aggravatingly ambiguous than “early access.” Most painfully, it can refer to two very different scenarios: Sometimes it means putting an in-development game on sale before it’s done, and other times it means offering access to a finished game early, typically as a deluxe edition preorder bonus. Starfield offered several […]

If you’ve not been following the journey of Embracer, let me speedrun an explanation real quick: Over the course of seven years, Embracer snapped up a bunch of companies, hit an iceberg of a sunken $2 billion dollar deal, subsequently laid off 1,400 people in six months, and scrapped a bunch of projects while selling […]

Six months after its 2023 acquisition by Microsoft, it sounds like its business as usual at Blizzard. In an interview with VGC, World of Warcraft executive producer and vice president Holly Longdale said being a part of Microsoft has “just been helpful,” and that so far the new owners are taking a light touch. “We […]

First reported by StackDiary and The Register, a website called Spy.pet claims to have scraped billions of public Discord messages made by almost 620 million users, selling the individual messages and profiles for crypto. Spy.pet ties message logs to the users who sent them, and also collects Discord aliases and linked social media and Steam […]