Valve bans developers manipulating reviews “all the time”, and the practice is “really easy to spot”, according to Tom Giardino, who works on the Steam Business team. Developers could illegally buy hundreds of copies of their own game “through shills” and then artificially boost its review score, he said on Twitter. In all products/stores (not just Steam), review scores cannot be taken seriously without some heavy duty verification they are not shills.” In response, Giardino said that not only i

You’ve probably already seen the four minutes of Anthem gameplay that was shown off at E3 this week—but you might not have seen a shorter video that Nvidia released of Bioware’s online shooter running in 4K. It’s only short—less than 30 seconds of footage, all told—but it demonstrates just how good Anthem will look if you’ve got the right rig. We don’t know how beefy a PC you’ll need to max out Anthem’s settings, but the footage above was captured on a GTX 1080 Ti, one of the best GPUs around. C

Devil May Cry 5, which was unveiled at E3 this week, will be released before April 2019, Capcom has announced. The E3 trailer, above, gave a “Spring 2019” release date, but Capcom’s investor relations arm has since narrowed that window to before the end of March. It will be directed be Hideaki Itsuno, who directed Devil May Cry 3, Devil May Cry 4, and Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen. He and producer Matt Walker took to the stage at E3 to reassure fans that the game would be a “true sequel” to Devil

That’s this week’s PCG Q&A: Which of your existing games did E3 2018 make you want to play? Wes Fenlon: Assassin’s Creed: OriginsI installed Assassin’s Creed Origins months ago, excited to play it. I loved Black Flag and haven’t felt the need to play another Assassin’s Creed since. Bethesda’s Fallout games appeal slightly more to me, and I’ve polished off all of those. I’ve also got the urge to play a bunch of the Assassin’s Creed games I skipped after I burned out on Assassin’s Creed III.

Square Enix made it clear they weren’t interested in funding the company any further, so IO bought themselves out and migrated over to Warner Bros. I got a chance to play Sniper Assassin, a mini game that exists outside of the full campaign that’s available to everyone right now if you pre-order Hitman 2. In it, Agent 47 is perched on a mossy hideaway with a sniper rifle, overseeing a royal wedding full of rich idiots. You’re instructed to take out three primary targets with your sniper rifle, w

Shadows: Awakening was announced last summer as an action-RPG with “real-time tactical combat” and a visual style similar to that of the brilliant Divinity: Original Sin games. It also follows on the 2014 ARPG Shadows: Heretic Kingdoms, continuing the story that had been promised (but not delivered) for “Book 2” but also expanding upon it with an all-new storyline, “making Shadows: Awakening not a sequel, but a full and completed experience.” The new game is built on Unity rather than the Ogre E

EA’s reveal of Anthem during its E3 press conference definitely gave us more questions than answers. PC Gamer: People have this expectation for what is a BioWare game and Anthem seems to subvert a lot of that. Out in the world, there’s no branching because you’ll be with other people and we don’t want you to stop and agonize over a decision. So dungeons just caused this odd…They make it feel like you’re going into a cavern. So in freeplay there’s world events, so the titan is a world event.

Above: USA 2020Last year, Valve took action to mitigate the number of trading card farming games on Steam by developing a confidence metric that prevents games from dropping cards until it believes real people are really playing them. Now it’s doing the same thing with achievement farming games. In a brief message posted to the private developer group (which we can read via SteamDB and Reddit), Valve says that these achievement farming games aren’t being used by many people, but that they confus

Blizzard said last year that making World of Warcraft Classic is a “deceptively tough” job. “After careful consideration, we decided on Patch 1.12: Drums of War as our foundation, because it represents the most complete version of the classic experience.” Patch 1.12 was the last major patch of vanilla Warcraft, meaning World of Warcraft Classic will effectively be starting from last major milestone before The Burning Crusade, its first expansion, was launched. For a second prototype, Blizzard ca

Wes Fenlon: Halo Infinite is coming to PC, and so is changeI don’t expect to play Halo Infinite for a long time. Bungie managed to create an incredibly compelling universe with very little direct storytelling, and over the years the Halo game stories have gotten more conventional and more boring. Andy Kelly: Forza comes to the UKSurprisingly, the game that excited me most at this year’s E3 was Forza Horizon 4 . My favorite E3 moments are always the ones where developers tear up, smile uncontroll

While at E3, I got a notification on my phone that the Steam Link app on iOS had received an update. I still have a beta of the app on my iPhone from when I tested it prior to its release—a release that ultimately didn’t happen because Apple rejected the Steam Link app for reasons that were a shade unclear. At the time, Valve stated that the Steam Link app, after initial approval by Apple, had been rejected due to ‘business conflicts with app guidelines’. The recent update to the Steam Link app

People in my Twitter feed were joking about the new trailer for Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown today, saying it had the funniest opening line ever. Then I found out that I was watching the wrong trailer. The trailer on Bandai’s Japanese YouTube channel (and embedded above) is narrated slightly differently: “How penal is this penal unit, you ask? Ace Combat 7 is an arcade flight sim that combines real (visually, at least) modern-day fighters with a fantasy world of nations at war. Ace Combat 7: Skie

Here are some of the other trends we noticed at E3 2018:Battle royale, obviouslyBattlefield 5 will get a ‘Royale’ mode after launch. Even where battle royale wasn’t present, it had to be mentioned that it wasn’t present, with nearly every developer being sure to clarify that they are not doing battle royale. But really, they all might be doing battle royale. Samurai are inWe saw three big samurai games at E3. Three samurai games may not sound like a lot, but consider this: that’s three more samu

Instead of meeting its contractual obligations, according to a Marin Independent Journal report, the company instead cut off communications and then voted him off the board. Telltale lawyers described the suit as “meritless” and “an apparent means of extracting revenge” on the company, but the judge in the case rejected Telltale’s request to dismiss it outright. Bruner, who also co-founded Telltale, took over as CEO in early 2015. Eight months after his departure, Telltale laid off roughly one-q

Look at its shopping carts, unassuming and unlikely vehicles that players have used to do the impossible. In the process of bashing some birch trees, she accidentally clipped a shopping cart with his pickaxe. She probably didn’t even notice she’d hit the shopping cart, but shopping carts never forget, and as MarleyLo would soon find out, they never forgive. Like an ancient evil woken from a thousand-year slumber, the shopping cart began gathering its strength. Never cross a shopping cart.

More often than not, it seems Dell has a coupon code available for its desktops and other gear. That is the case right now, and by using promo code XPS10 at checkout, you can bring home an XPS Tower with a Core i5-8400 processor and GeForce GTX 1070 Ti graphics card inside for $1,034.99. As configured, the price before coupon works out to $1,149.99. The promo code knocks 10 percent off, which in this case works out to a tidy $115 discount. Likewise, you can spend $100 more upgrading to a Core i5

There have been five big upgrades since Windows 10 launched, the most recent of which is the April 2018 Update, which many people thought would be called the Spring Creator’s Update. In a blog post, Microsoft said the April 2018 Update is now sitting on 250 million devices, taking just over six weeks to hit that mark. “Our AI approach intelligently selects devices that our feedback data indicate would have a great update experience and offers the April 2018 Update to these devices first. Those t

I’m always disappointed when a PC game doesn’t control well with a mouse and keyboard. When I saw Madden 19 on PC at E3 this week—if you hadn’t heard, Madden is back on PC after a decade away—I was fully expecting to have to play it with a controller. There was a single station where Madden was set up with a mouse and keyboard. On keyboard using A and D to turn, you only have the option of turning all the way. Controlling a player in Madden 19 isn’t mapped to the WASD on the keyboard, but is tie

Rage 2’s announcement was a little unexpected, given that the original open world FPS didn’t get near the top of our list of preferred id shooters. Even though Avalanche is best known for third-person open world games, this one’s in first-person, no doubt benefitting from id’s expertise. Rage 2’s release date is Spring 2019 right now, and we expect a final date at either Gamescom 2018 or QuakeCon, both of which are happening in August. Here’s Rage 2’s gameplay trailerLooking a little bit Bullets

Everything about it feels good. Phil: Yeah, the flying was what made me think Anthem could be a thing I regularly play. But it really does feel good. Destiny’s supers and abilities basically feel like magic with no logic informing them, but Anthem’s arsenal feels strictly science fiction. I get wanting to avoid PvP—honestly, Bungie has had no end of problems trying to balance Crucible without making PvE players feel underpowered.