I dropped everything to play the free viral game that's suddenly matching Palworld and Persona 3 Reload as 2024's highest-rated Steam game, and you should too

Addressing the Helldivers 2 meta while leaning into the game's winking fascist veneer, CEO Johan Pilestedt of developer Arrowhead Game Studios advised veterans to treat new players kindly by showering them in heavy armaments, not fascism.

Gearbox may be the next to escape Embracer Group as the massive company continues to hemorrhage staff and studios as part of a restructuring effort sparked by a $2 billion deal that fell through last year. 

The campaign to defend a single planet, Mort, from Helldivers 2's encroaching Automaton threat saw players die "over 10 million" times in the past two days alone. 

To the dismay of bugs and bots everywhere, it sounds like the weakest weapons in Helldivers 2 are due for a buff in an upcoming balance patch.

Old School RuneScape – and also regular RuneScape – developer Jagex has a new corporate owner, but it's business as usual for the MMO's community, which is still hard at work finishing grinds that nobody, not one soul on this Earth, asked or expected them to actually do. The latest landmark achievement comes from well-liked content creator Limpwurt, who's finally emerged from a self-imposed grind that started some 2,500 hours of game time ago in August 2023, but at least he's got a really cool cape and a baby mole to show for it. 

In amongst the expected Star Troopers chatter, a less obvious comparison for Helldivers 2 has quietly been making the rounds: 2015's Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain. Unexpected overlap in stealth, movement, and gunplay has brought Kojima's open-world action espionage masterwork back into the spotlight, and director Josh Sawyer of RPG powerhouse Obsidian reckons it's all just more evidence that more games shouldn't feel bad about copying stuff that works well and feels good. 

Prolific Nintendo Switch emulator Yuzu is the latest to receive a lawsuit from Nintendo, and it's a big one. The house of Mario alleges that the program fueled a rush that saw The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom illegally downloaded over 1 million times before the game was properly released, and that's just one item on Nintendo's laundry list of alleged damages, which collectively take aim at a major emulator in a way that's rarely seen, even from such a famously litigious company, drawing many comparisons to Sony's lawsuit against Bleem. 

Technology, as storied author Ursula K. Le Guin noted in a prescient 2005 post, is not limited to high-tech hardware but also encompasses the likes of paper, furniture, medicine, and much more. I would go further and argue that some outwardly high-tech hardware should not be classified as technology, and I will now point any naysayers to the GameScent Automated Gaming Scent Atomizer, a $180 AI-powered box that will fart out smells designed to match whatever game you're currently playing.

The line between bugs and features grows ever thinner as Palworld developer Pocketpair apologizes for "inadvertently fixing a bug" that players were having a lot of fun with. 

As it lays off around 900 people across Sony's stable of studios, including cuts at Naughty Dog, Insomniac, and the entirety of now-defunct PlayStation London, PlayStation Studios is also canning multiple unannounced projects. 

Helldivers, we have a problem. Undemocratic bug fodder has infested the ranks of Helldivers 2, and the toxic behavior of these players is putting a damper on what should be a glorious campaign for Super Earth. 

Over a decade later, Skyrim players are still pushing Bethesda's iconic RPG to its limits. Tamriel's latest absurd accomplishment comes from Pawelos4, who claims to have reached level 1,337 on "the ultimate Skyrim character," who has apparently done everything that can feasibly be done. And they uploaded a stonking 11 hours of sped up footage to prove it.