It’s been a rough year for the games industry. An estimated 9,000 people have been laid off in the industry this year, affecting employees at companies like Embracer Group, Epic Games, Amazon Games, Ubisoft, Activision, Bungie, Frontier, Codemasters, BioWare, Paradox, and many more. We’ve also seen the shuttering of numerous studios, including Volition, Free Radical, and Shadow Gambit creators Mimimi Games. Layoffs have also affected companies adjacent to video games, like Hasbro, which laid of 1,100 people two weeks before Christmas.

Hence, it’s nice to have some positive industry news to write about for a change. Rather than joining the seemingly endless layoff brigade, Games Workshop has given its employees an end-of-year cash bonus of £2,500. That’ll buy a few prezzies.<…

When Diablo 4 players aren’t smashing bosses into the ground in one swing or becoming invulnerable with an amulet, most of their time is spent squinting at loot. Now that items pour out of every chest and monster since season 2, your inventory gets stuffed real quick, and the process of sorting through all that gear has become one of the game’s worst activities.

Blizzard is aware of the issue and plans to fix it with a massive rework to item stats in season 4. But in the meantime, when season 3 launches next Tuesday, items will drop at a higher item power more often, which should at least make all that time scanning your inventory more valuable.

In Diablo 4, item power determines how high the stats on gear can roll, whether they’re Legendary or Rare. There are breakpoints at…

Apex Legends is in it for the long haul. The game’s developer, Respawn Entertainment, just opened a new studio in Madison, Wisconsin, with an eye to keeping the Apex series going for another “10 to 15 years,” according to game director Steven Ferreira. As someone who has never been able to answer the question ‘where do you see yourself in five years?’ I guess I admire his foresightedness.

In a chat with GamesIndustry.biz, Respawn bigwigs Daniel Suarez, Ryan Burnett, and Ferreira said that the Wisconsin studio would focus on Apex’s live services development: “Building the live service of Apex is a constant cycle of trying new things and experimenting,” said Ferreira, “and that’s what Wisconsin is going to give us”. 

In particular, Ferreira namechecked stuff “like Legend …

Helldivers 2’s systems aren’t perfect—and while I’ve not had this problem often myself, enough players have complained about receiving unjust boots from their games that there might be room for improvement.

In case you’re unaware, the game’s current system for dealing with problem players is to give the host unilateral control over who stays and who gets sent to their nearest democratic officer for re-education. Which has its ups and downs.

When it comes to positives, this system lets folks quickly and efficiently deal with troublemakers—the slow process of a vote kick can take a while, during which a team-killing menace could set your whole crew on the backfoot, or lock in an extraction before your squad’s ready to depart. 

On the negative side, this …

Building a city in the sky in 2020’s Airborne Kingdom was a mostly chill experience—while you were in a constant war with gravity as you attempted to expand your city while keeping it aloft and balanced, there were no traditional enemies to fight. It was also a relatively short game that could be fully completed in about 10 hours.

That’s all changing in its sequel, Airborne Empire, which is due out in early access later this year and now has a free demo as part of Steam Next Fest. The once-friendly skies are now peppered with enemy planes, cannonballs fired from forts on the ground, and other airborne enemies to contend with while you grow and manage your flying city.

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There’s also a much bigger world to explore, which means the airborne city builder will take …

Generally speaking, when you’re talking about “mechs,” you’re talking about massive machines of war in games like Battletech or Iron Harvest. Lightyear Frontier is an unusual but fun-looking twist on that formula: It’s a farming sim, and your mechs are farm machines—the fusion-powered, bipedal tractors of the future. Autocannons are out, irrigation hoses are in.

The gameplay reveal at the 2022 Future Games Show looked promising, but today developer Frame Break announced that it has decided to delay the early access launch that was planned for this spring. A new release target has not been set.

“With Lightyear Frontier, we want to make sure that you feel powerful and engaged in the mech while starting your own homestead, constructing a variety of structures, farming exo…

One of the best city building games of recent years, Against the Storm, has come out of early access and into proper release. The survival city-builder beautifully blends roguelite and city-building mechanics into a series of well-balanced, bite-size city building experiences. Developers Eremite Games released the 1.0 update on December 8, adding an ironman challenge mode to cap off the game’s launch features.

In Against the Storm each city you build is a settlement that exists on the map for future cities, sending supplies and material back to the sheltered capital because, inevitably, a new storm cycle will scour the outside world clean. Of everything. Including those cities you built—but in obvious roguelite fashion, the resources you return and the queen’s orders you ful…

The Fallout franchise is beloved for a lot of good reasons—it’s got a timeless aesthetic, nukes are cool to look at when they aren’t melting your flesh off, and the blend of post-apocalyptic Americana with radiation that’s borderline indistinguishable from magic is pretty appealing.

It’s also never really moved outside of its country of origin, with its games located almost entirely in the United States. And while some fan projects like Fallout: London are attempting to broaden the scope beyond lore mentions of other world superpowers, Todd Howard says he’s keen to keep things red, white and blue for the foreseeable future.

That’s as per an interview with Kinda Funny Games uploaded to YouTube yesterday. In it, Howard was asked whether Bethesda had ever looked into doin…

It’s that time again, folks. The Future Games Show is back, this time with its 2023 Spring Showcase, hosted by none other than Briana White and Cody Christian: Aerith and Cloud from Final Fantasy 7 Remake.

Clocking in at 85 minutes and showing off 45 games, the Future Games Show Spring Showcase will kick off tomorrow, March 23, at 3 pm PDT / 6 pm EDT / 10 pm GMT / 11 pm CET. You can watch it, well, pretty much anywhere that’s capable of displaying video. That means Twitch, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, GamesRadar, and (for the first time) TikTok. Remember to set a reminder on YouTube so you can catch it right from the start.

45 games is a heck of a lot, and many of them are set to be a surprise. But to give you a brief taste of what to expect, you can look for…

The team behind the upcoming Assassin’s Creed Shadows, set in feudal Japan, published a statement on Thursday addressed to its “esteemed Japanese community,” responding to “some criticism including from you, our Japanese players.” Though the message is purportedly directed at Japanese players, it’s only served to embolden criticism from a reactionary contingent of western players shouting about the notion that diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives are ruining games. In this case the target is Yasuke, a Black historical figure who serves as one of Shadows’ two playable characters.

Ubisoft’s message states that the development team is dedicated to “ensuring an immersive and respectful representation of Feudal Japan,” even though the Assassin’s Creed games are not “factual r…

With more than a little braggadocio, Valve has announced that it’s permanently banned over 40,000 Dota 2 accounts for cheating. In a post to the official Dota 2 blog yesterday, the company revealed that it had constructed a cunning trap to catch thousands of players that were using “third-party software” to “access information used internally by the Dota client that wasn’t visible during normal gameplay,” lending them an unfair advantage in-game.

It worked like this: Once it became aware of the exploit, Valve released a patch that created “a section of data inside the game client that would never be read during normal gameplay, but that could be read by these exploits”. Valve says that every single one of the accounts banned yesterday had read from that secret data, giving the com…

First reported by Ars Technica, ResetEra user delete12345 has made an interesting discovery about Steam libraries: we’re not allowed to bequeath them to our loved ones in the event of our untimely passing.

Delete12345 asked Steam Support about the hypothetical scenario, and got a clear, professional, but very disappointing response. “Unfortunately, Steam accounts and games are non-transferable,” the support rep explained. “Steam Support can’t provide someone else with access to the account or merge its access to another account.

“I regret to inform you that your Steam account cannot be transferred via a will.”

Now, I was going to suggest that you can just give your designated heir the Steam login and password without getting lawyers involved⁠—barri…

Best Buy has a deal on an Asus ROG Zephyrus 14 with an RTX 4060 and a 165Hz 1600p display for $1,400, a $200 reduction from its original price. It’s a great choice if you’re looking for a gaming laptop that’s easy to travel with and won’t take up much space.

The Asus ROG Zephyrus 14 is a 14-inch gaming laptop with an AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS processor and an RTX 4060 graphics card offering midrange performance at 1080p and 1600p. It’s a good candidate for using DLSS 3 to get a big framerate boost in games like Cyberpunk 2077.

On the memory side, the 16GB of DDR5 RAM and a 512GB NVMe SSD which is okay, though I would have loved to have seen a larger SSD since 512GB fills up pretty fast these days. However, the specific make or model of these components isn’t mentioned in the listin…

This week, I discovered a TikToker deliberately developing the worst game of all time—complete with impossible platforming, unskippable dialogue, and a rocket launcher that has to be reloaded 150 times between each shot. I ended that post anxious that creator Everywhere Nowhere might one day release their abomination into the world for people to actually play. I’m afraid that happened sooner even than I feared. 

You can now try Monster Sniper Season 3 for yourself on the developer’s itch.io page, and… wow. I knew it was going to be bad, but watching it in TikToks really didn’t do it justice. Actually getting your hands on it is a whole other world of pain.

Thanks to maybe the most ungodly control scheme ever devised—in which you control the hero’s mov…

Thermometers are peaking, birds are chirping, and the air outside is hot and thick. You know what that means, folks, a new season (of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2) is here, and it’s bringing all sorts of changes (to the maps and gameplay of the hit Activision-published FPS) with it. Bad news, though: If you’ve got dreams of completing Modern Warfare 2’s season 4 battle pass, you’ve got about two fewer weeks than you had last season to do it. Chop chop.

MW2’s season 4 patch dropped yesterday, introducing, well, too much to go through bit-by-bit. I’ll link the full notes below, but the stuff that leaps out at me is the new maps, new operators, and the changes to the game’s extraction shooter DMZ mode. Oh, and the fact that this season will only last 48 days, a big drop from the 63…