When I checked early last week, Steam Charts showed the 24-hour peak concurrent player count at seven. To get players into their game—in part to give those who bought it someone to play with—developer Torn Banner took a drastic step. For 24-hours last week, they made Mirage: Arcane Warfare completely free. The concurrents have settled down now, with Steam Charts currently reporting just under a thousand for the 24-hour peak. In an update posted today, Torn Banner called the experiment a “huge su

To reflect on the rise of the trendiest microtransaction scheme before it overwhelms and consumes all videogames, we’ve gathered some of the best and worst loot boxes out there. The bestOverwatch – Loot boxesSourceNo surprise here, Blizzard set the standard with Overwatch’s loot box. –Fortnite – PinatasSourceThe pinatas in Fortnite are excellent loot boxes, but not necessarily for what they deliver. Just know that it might be the best loot box ever. –On the next page, we take a look at the wor

“It has come to our attention that a gauntlet in Destiny 2 shares elements with a hate symbol,” developer Bungie tweeted earlier today. There’s just one problem: Virtually nobody in the Destiny community had any idea what Bungie was talking about. This does NOT represent our values, and we are working quickly to correct this. We renounce hate in all forms.September 12, 2017Once the notification went out, Reddit went to work and quickly sussed out that the Road Complex AA1 gauntlets are (probably

H1Z1: King of the Kill is a major hit. It takes an even bigger hit like PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds to completely overshadow a game like King of the Kill, selling 10 million copies in just a few months. But PUBG’s arrival didn’t signal the death of King of the Kill. GTA Online’s battle royale modeEveryone should be paying attention to this genre Anthony CastoroI also asked the team their thoughts about other developers and publishers jumping in to the battle royale genre. We’ve already seen a

Third-person shooter and multiplayer loot ladder The Division will be free to play in its entirety this weekend. Running from September 14-17, the base game, including the campaign and Dark Zone, will open up to anyone curious enough to give Massive’s post-disaster romp in New York a late tour. When it launched, there wasn’t much to sustain The Division after the campaign ran out, and the loot grind was a bit too time consuming. I’d still recommend it if you want something to play with friends o

If you are not feeling the double-wide 1080p monitors that have made headlines lately, never fear, there are ultra-wide 1440p models available. One of them is from Samsung—the CF791, and it is on sale from BuyDig through its Ebay account for $680. Best Buy has the same panel marked down to $850 (from $950), while Amazon has it on sale for $799. And as an authorized online retailer, BuyDig says it is backed by Samsung’s one-year parts and labor warranty. This 34-inch monitor uses a VA panel with

That prompted Firewatch developer Campo Santo to disassociate itself with the streamer by filing a DMCA takedown notice against all of his Firewatch content. And as day follows night, that in turn has resulted in a thorough and ongoing review-bombing campaign against the game on Steam. Firewatch was released in early 2016 and its overall rating, across well over 25,000 Steam user reviews, is “very positive.” But recent reviews are “mixed”—industry parlance for “bad”—and it’s not hard to figure o

The dust hasn’t settled, but reports indicate that The Judge personally stole over a trillion ISK (EVE’s in-game currency) worth of alliance ships, modules, and more. But the real kicker is that he’s left CO2’s players with nowhere to call home, handing their space stations over to CO2’s rivals, TEST and Goonswarm. Right now, thousands of CO2 pilots are stranded in space and attempting to evacuate with whatever they can. And if that wasn’t bad enough, CO2’s leader, a legendary player by the name

We have seen some funky looking motherboards before, but never one quite like Colorful’s new C.B250A-BTC Plus V20, an elongated slab for cryptocurrency miners. Forget about the E-ATX form factor, or any existing form factor, for that matter. Colorful eschewed every standard that is out there for motherboards and focused solely on having enough room for eight graphics cards. The end result is a motherboard that measures 485 mm in length and is 195mm wide. The company did not say how much this boa

PewDiePie’s casual use of the n-word during a PUBG stream over the weekend prompted Firewatch creator Campo Santo to issue a DMCA takedown notice on PewDiePie’s Firewatch videos. Campo Santo had not publicly taken issue with PewDiePie’s Firewatch video prior to his behavior over the weekend. For PewDiePie, if he really wanted to get that Firewatch video back up, his only defense would be fair use. If a strategy guide full of screenshots isn’t transformative enough to count as fair use, are Let’s

Using Bluetooth is a convenient way to exchange data between devices and to connect wireless peripherals. What makes BlueBorne so dangerous is that it does not require any interaction with a device’s user. “BlueBorne is an attack vector by which hackers can leverage Bluetooth connections to penetrate and take complete control over targeted devices. Of the estimated 8.2 billion devices that use Bluetooth, BlueBorne affects nearly 5.3 million of them across Windows, Linux, Android, and iOS. As he

I enjoyed my brief hands-on time with The Evil Within 2 at Gamescom. It felt familiar but improved enough to merit praise—paying deference to its staunch survival horror roots, while exploring new avenues so far as systems, level design and character progression are concerned. I also felt Sebastian Castellanos’ latest outing echoed Silent Hill. Its latest trailer appears to follow suit, with its multitude of otherworldly beasts, strange dimensional shifts, and mysteriously crumbling road network

The folks at Epic Games are “huge fans of the Battle Royale genre,” according to creative director Donald Mustard, and so—surprise!—the studio is adding a Battle Royale mode to its base-building FPS Fortnite. “We love Battle Royale games like PUBG and thought Fortnite would make a great foundation for our own version. The new Battle Royale mode was so much fun we decided to share it with everyone to get feedback.” Fortnite Battle Royale will be rolled out to early access players on September 26,

You can find bundles of indie games on sale all the time, but they’re not usually discounted this much. Today you can get the Best of Indie Legends Bundle 2 on Bundle Stars. It has eight games, the majority of which are definitely worth a look, and you can get a massive 96 percent off the regular price of buying all of them individually. The games in the pack are:Party HardSpeedRunnersDoor KickersNever Alone Arctic CollectionThe FallCook, Serve, Delicious! Sir, You Are Being HuntedCastlestormDoo

Image credit: YouTubeEarlier this year, popular YouTube person Felix Kjellberg lost a lucrative sponsorship deal with Disney following an anti-Semitic video. This week, the streamer better known as PewDiePie faced criticism for using a racial slur during a livestream—which latterly saw Firewatch developer Campo Santo issuing Kjellberg with DMCA takedown notice. After two days of silence, Kjellberg has responded via a video posted to his social media channels. Being in the position that I am, I s

After revising its schedule last month, PUBG declared its updates would become less regular so as to maintain a “high standard of quality” moving forward. The first patch post-shift is live on the game’s test servers today and, as you might expect, it’s a biggie. As in reality, the foggy weather effect “will hinder player sight on the map”—however the fact that this weather effect “has a low probability to occur” might console those less sold on the idea. Elsewhere, the September update adds the

But for now I’ll dock in New Winchester and see what the city has to offer an adventurer. I leave and visit Company House, an old factory now housing the offices of the Windward Company. Perhaps you’ll stop cutting your own hair.” Content with my visit to New Winchester, I decide to head back out into the stars. Between ports and the stories they tell, Sunless Skies is about survival. Choices like these will dictate whether you make it back to New Winchester or die hopelessly lost among the unca

Ahead of its September 29 launch, FIFA 18 has so far given us a “Ronaldo-fueled” reveal trailer and a star-studded teaser for The Journey’s second season (see above). Today, EA Sports’ annually updated footie sim drops a 12-team sporting demo two weeks ahead of kick off. The developer hasn’t revealed exactly when the demo will arrive—”The launch of the FIFA 19 Demo varies depending on platform and location”, so reads this update post—however it is due at some point today. Anyway, back to the FIF

It’s a weird and wonderful little world to step into for a few hours, though. It’s a short, sweet hit of no-frills puzzle platforming in a verdant world full of forests and old ruins. Put it in your Steam wishlist and surprise yourself with it one day in a sale.—Tom SeniorOikospiel Book One: The “Dog” OperaThis is a tough one to explain. But stick with it and you slowly find yourself settling into the strange, freeform rhythm of this very peculiar, and very pretty, open world game. It’s funny, a

And yet one of the show’s most anticipated features was vaulting mechanics in PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. Via this Steam post, Bluehole has now outlined how the mechanics are coming along, and when we might expect to see them in-game. “Our vaulting system is not built on predefined objects or locations in the map. “If needed, we may roll it out on test servers for a certain amount of time even before November. Whenever vaulting does arrive in PUBG, though, will it look as majestic as this?