Engadget News, Tips, Tricks, Ideas

Waffle House is one of those uniquely American institutions-turned-meme. The 24/7 chain is not only a place where you can order a breakfast combo at 3AM, but where unruly customers have been known to show up ready to throw hands (and sometimes chairs). Given its notoriety for late-night brawls, it’s exactly the type of setting that would make for a perfect backdrop in a fighting game like Tekken 8 — and apparently, fans have been inquiring. Longtime Tekken director Katsuhiro Harada posted on X this weekend asking what the deal is with all the Waffle House requests.

I had a favorite version of Mulan growing up (Anita Yuen in the 1998 Taiwanese TV series). I obsessed over Chinese period TV series like Legend of the Condor Heroes, My Fair Princess and The Book and the Sword. I consider myself fairly well-versed in Chinese historical figures, especially those represented in ‘90s and 2000s entertainment in Asia. So when I found out that a UK-based studio had made a VR game called The Pirate Queen based on a forgotten female leader who was prolific in the South China Sea, I was shocked. How had I never heard of her? How had the Asian film and TV industry never covered her?

This week, it’s all about cars and Lucy Liu in VR. Devindra chats with Senior Writer Sam Rutherford about his visit to the New York International Auto Show, where he saw the Polestar 4, a unique new EV without a rear window. Also, Cherlynn pops in to chat with Lucy Liu about her new VR game, The Pirate Queen. We also explore the issues around Florida’s bill banning young kids from social media sites, and Sam tells us why he likes Netflix’s Avatar: The Last Airbender adaptation.

Activision is reportedly in the midst of investigating a hacking campaign that's stealing login credentials from people playing its games. According to TechCrunch, bad actors have been successfully installing malware onto victims' computers and using their access to steal logins for their gaming accounts and even their crypto wallets. The video game publisher has apparently been helping victims remove the malware and regain control of their accounts, but it doesn't have enough information at the moment to say how the malware is spreading.

More major changes are afoot on the business side of the video game world, as a notable name is changing hands once again. Take-Two Interactive (the parent company of Grand Theft Auto publisher Rockstar and others) has agreed to buy Gearbox Entertainment from the embattled Embracer Group. The deal is worth $460 million in stock and is expected to close by June 30. It had been rumored for several months that Embracer was planning to sell off Gearbox.

If you're part of the intersection of virtual reality enthusiasts and major league baseball fans, then there's good news for you. MLB has launched Home Run Derby VR on the Meta Quest Store, making it available for Quest 2, Quest 3 and Quest Pro users. The game was previously on Meta's App Lab.

Microsoft may be working on a white version of its current all-digital Xbox Series X console, according to leaked images reported by Exputerand documents seen by The Verge. The design appears to be identical to the current black disc version (sans the disc slot) and has the same «robot white» finish as the white Xbox Series S. If accurate, the news may mean delays to a rumored Xbox Series X refresh that carriesas a different design.

Workers at Sega of America, a division of Sega Sammy Holdings Inc., have officially ratified their union contract, as reported by Bloomberg. This makes it one of the first major North American video-game companies to take this step, which could bode well for future organized labor pushes in the industry.

Marvel Games and NetEase just announced a new Overwatch-like team shooter called Marvel Rivals. As the name suggests, playable characters will be pulled from throughout the Marvel Multiverse, including members of the Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy and the X-Men.

It's taken much longer than expected but Microsoft is finally bringing keyboard and mouse (KBM) support to certain Xbox Cloud Gaming titles. We first heard that the company planned to do so in March 2022 and it was suggested that the option might be available by that June, but evidently that did not happen. It's only now that Microsoft is starting to let testers on the Alpha Skip-Ahead ring check out KBM functions on web browsers (Edge and Chrome) and the Xbox PC app. The feature should be available more broadly soon.

Game Help, which provides developer-created tips and videos to help you progress without leaving the game, has been a staple of players' PlayStation 5 experience since it launched in 2020. Now, Sony has announced Community Game Help, an expansion of the feature allowing you to view hint videos of other users' gameplay across select titles.

Night City is looking for new residents — even if they’re only temporary ones who happen to be in the neighborhood for a few hours. CD Projekt Red is offering PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S players the chance to check out Cyberpunk 2077 for free over the Easter weekend.

It's a busy spell for fans of Final Fantasy, and fantasy RPGs in general. Many folks are still working through Baldur's Gate 3 and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, but Dragon's Dogma 2 just dropped and Elden Ring expansion Shadow of the Erdtree arrives in June. The second Final Fantasy XVI DLC, The Rising Tide, will drop on April 18. On top of all that, Square Enix has revealed that Dawntrail, the fifth expansion for Final Fantasy XIV Online, will arrive on July 2. Phew.

Amazon is selling a two-pack of SanDisk microSD cards for $25 as part of the company’s Big Spring Sale. Each card is 128GB, totaling 256GB of sweet, sweet game storage. These are drives that have been designed and pre-formatted for Nintendo Switch systems, though they’ll work with just about any microSD reader. This deal, however, is only for Prime members.

The newly independent game studio Toys for Bob, which announced last month that it was splitting from Microsoft-owned Activision, has entered an agreement with Xbox for a new game, according to a report from Windows Central. Toys for Bob developed 2018’s Spyro Reignited Trilogy and was behind Crash Bandicoot 4, along with the Nintendo Switch port for the N. Sane Trilogy.

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirthdropped only a few weeks ago, but fans of the series won't have to wait long at all to play a new addition to another recent entry. The Rising Tide, the second paid expansion for Final Fantasy XVI, will arrive on April 18.

Qualcomm is said to have new Arm-based laptops of its own in the pipeline, while consumer versions of the new Surface Pro 10 and Surface Laptop 6 that run on the Snapdragon X Elite chipset are believed to be on the way. While that in the past would have meant the makers of x86- and x64-based Windows software needing to port their apps, Qualcomm sought to assure game developers that their titles will run just fine out of the box on any unannounced Snapdragon X Elite systems that just happen to be coming up.

Fans of Dear Esther, Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs and Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, make sure to mark June 18 on your calendar. On that day, you'll be able to buy a copy of Still Wakes the Deep for the PC (via Steam and Epic Games Store), the Xbox Series X|S and the PS5, though you can also play it with Game Pass for Xbox and PC. It's the latest first-person narrative horror game from The Chinese Room, the developer behind the aforementioned titles in the same genre.

It's been almost three years since we found out that former Naughty Dog and Visceral Games writer and creative director Amy Hennig was working on a Marvel game with her team at Skydance New Media. During Epic Games' State of Unreal showcase at the Game Developers Conference, a new story trailer shed some more light on the game, which is called Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra.

To say I loved Alienware's previous flagship gaming monitor, the 34-inch ultrawide QD-OLED, would be an understatement. It was one of the best screens I'd ever seen, with incredible contrast, bold colors and a fast refresh rate. So it came as a surprise that Alienware's follow-up models didn't go bigger (as Samsung did with its massive 55-inch Odyssey Ark). Instead, it went smaller with a 32-inch 4K QD-OLED and a 27-inch 1440p model. The goal this year was to appease more-demanding gamers, which meant avoiding the race towards enormous screens (which also has contenders like LG's recent 49-inch Ultragear) and delivering faster refresh rates for smoother gameplay.

Blizzard is finally making it easier to unlock new heroes in Overwatch 2. This is big news, as players regularly complain about how difficult it is to obtain new characters in the live-service shooter. Currently, people get new heroes by paying for and grinding through a battle pass, buying them outright or waiting until they become available as a reward for winning a certain number of games. That changes with the forthcoming season 10, as the company will make new and old heroes available for free to all players.

NVIDIA has been working on adding generative AI to non-playable characters (NPCs) for a while now. The company is hoping a newly-announced partnership with Ubisoft will accelerate development of this technology and, ultimately, bring these AI-driven NPCs to modern games.

Steam is introducing a new way for your clan to play games together. The platform has announced Steam Families, a collection of game-sharing (and monitoring) features for parents and children currently available in beta. It takes the place of Steam Family Sharing and Steam Family View, rolling in some of their existing features alongside updates.

GOG, the gaming storefront owned by CD Projekt, is getting into cloud gaming by teaming up with Amazon Luna. Since the Luna cloud service streams games from Amazon's cloud servers, you'll be able to access the titles you've purchased from the store across any compatible device you own, including PCs, Macs, Android and iOS mobile devices, as well as smart TVs and Fire tablets. That is, so long as those devices are installed with the Luna app and you're connected to the internet. You'll also be able to use any Luna-compatible devices and controllers, such as Xbox One's and PS4's, to play your games.

YouTube sensation Dunkey, aka videogamedunkey or Jason Gastrow, has added game publishing to his resume. He started a company called Big Mode last year, which is releasing its first title on May 9. Animal Well is a sidescrolling Metroidvania platformer that will show up on the PS5, the Nintendo Switch and PCs. There’s a trailer that’s absolutely oozing with retro-gaming goodness.

Confession time: I already have a copy of Final Fantasy XVI and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth for the PS5 even though I still don't have a PlayStation 5 console. I never get consoles the moment they come out and usually wait a few years for their next version. In the PlayStation 5's case, I thought it was going to be the PS5 Slim, but it looks like I could have another option by the end of the year: The PlayStation 5 Pro. Tom Henderson of Insider Gaming says the PS5 Pro details leaked by the Moore’s Law is Dead YouTube channel came from documentation Sony itself recently sent to third-party developers.

It's that time of year once again. The Steam spring sale is now live. It's typically not as extensive as the summer and winter editions, and there's no Steam Deck discount this time, unfortunately, but there are still plenty of deals worth paying attention to.

As expected, the Embracer Group has sold much of Saber Interactive, which is known for the Metro series, Gloomhaven and remakes of classic Star Wars titles. The buyer is a group of private investors under the umbrella of Beacon Interactive, which is run by Saber co-founder Matthew Karch.

Paper Trail, the game that lets you fold the world around you, finally has a release date after multiple delays. The top-down puzzler is now scheduled to launch on May 21.

Former professional esports player Dennis Fong founded GGWP in 2022, more than a year before companies like Microsoft and Google debuted their natural-language search engines and the AI revolution officially gripped the globe. GGWP is an AI-powered moderation system that identifies and takes action against in-game harassment and hate speech, and after two years on the scene, it’s now integrated into titles at more than 25 studios.

On Wednesday, Sony unveiled the latest catalog of games for PlayStation Plus Extra and Premium subscribers. The latest batch of titles includes the Resident Evil 3 remake, Marvel’s Midnight Suns and NBA 2K24 (among others). You can play the games for free starting on Tuesday, March 19.

Everyone’s favorite Chrono Trigger-esque RPG, Sea of Stars, is getting a three-player couch co-op mode. Publisher Sabotage Studios dropped a trailer for the upcoming feature, which has been dubbed Single Player+.

The fifth edition of Summer Game Fest takes place this year and now we know when the main showcase will take place. The two-hour stream of trailers, hype, announcements and game updates is set for Friday, June 7 at 5PM ET. So, if you notice any typos in Engadget's coverage of the event, it definitely won't be because we're watching with an end-of-week cocktail in hand.

Google DeepMind has unveiled new research highlighting an AI agent that's able to carry out a swath of tasks in 3D games it hasn't seen before. The team has long been experimenting with AI models that can win in the likes of Go and chess, and even learn games without being told their rules. Now, for the first time, according to DeepMind, an AI agent has shown it's able to understand a wide range of gaming worlds and carry out tasks within them based on natural-language instructions.

The wait is almost over. Nightdive Studios just announced a May 21 release date for the console version of its System Shock remake. It’ll be available on PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S, after arriving for PCs last year.

We were so close to finally drifting on the cobblestone streets of Yharnam, but it looks like we’ll have to wait a little longer for Bloodborne Kart. And, it’ll be called something else when it does arrive. Lilith Walther, the developer behind the project, said the team has to “scrub the branding” off of the game and delay its release after Sony intervened. It was supposed to be released on January 31 for PC. The outcome isn’t exactly surprising, but it means the game will take shape a bit differently than planned — in a thread posted on X, Walther said, “This is a fan game no more!”

Cities: Skylines II developer Colossal Order has a uniquely close relationship with its community. The original Cities: Skylines came out in 2015 and gobbled up the audience that was left behind by EA’s SimCity, which came out in 2013 and was a busted mess. Cities: Skylines scratched that urban-planning itch, plus it cost just $30. The game came first to PC, Mac and Linux with modest hardware requirements, and it hit consoles within two years. Critically, Cities: Skylines also supported mods through the Steam Workshop, allowing players to add their own tools to the game and share those features with others.

To the surprise of just about everyone — seemingly including the studio behind it — virtual reality game Ultrawings 2 has hit PlayStation VR2 earlier than expected. Developer Bit Planet Games wrote on X that «shadow dropping Ultrawings 2 on PS VR2 today was not on our 2024 bingo card but, well, here we are.» (A shadow drop refers to a surprise release of a product as soon as it's announced, like Hi-Fi Rush.)

If you weren't able to get the Microsoft Xbox Series S at a discount this past holiday season, you may want to check out Dell's website. The digital media-only console is currently on sale for $230, down $70 from its retail price of $300. While it can't play disc games, your $230 will get you 512GB in SSD storage and a wireless Xbox controller. The console supports variable refresh rates of up to 120 fps, and while it runs games at a max resolution of 1440p, you can use it to stream shows and movies in 4K. You only need to download the streaming apps you have access to, including Disney+, Netflix or Amazon Prime Video.

Following Apple's announcement of enabling third-party app stores for iOS users in the European Union, Epic Games confirms that it'll be bringing Fortnite back to the iPhone and iPad in Europe later this year — by way of a new Epic mobile games store. This will mark the title's official return to Apple's platform since it was yanked back in August 2020, after Epic offered discounts to payments made directly to its own store, instead of Apple's App Store and Google Play which would take a 30-percent cut. iOS users have had to rely on Xbox Cloud Gaming or GeForce Now to play Fortnite, but this will soon be a thing of the past for those based in Europe.

Another former PlayStation 5 exclusive is coming to PC very soon. It's been known for a while that Horizon Forbidden Westwould be Sony's next title to make the leap, and now the company has revealed that the PC version of the game will drop on March 21.

The Last of Us Part II Remastered arrived last week, and if the cutscene commentary from the game's director, writer and key actors wasn't enough for you, Naughty Dog has another behind the scenes piece coming. Grounded II: Making The Last Of Us Part II, a documentary on the game's creation, will arrive on February 2 at 12PM ET on YouTube as well as in the game itself. There's a trailer in the remastered game currently, and the full documentary will be added via a downloadable patch. That patch will also have some new skins for Ellie and Abby in the main game.

Apple's app platform is finally opening up a bit. Today, the company said that it will allow developers to utilize new in-app experiences, including streaming games, accessing mini-apps, and talking with chatbots. That means devs can create a single app that houses an easily accessible catalog of their streaming titles. Perhaps we'll finally see a usable Game Pass app from Microsoft (or even its long-awaited mobile game store).

We're not even one month into 2024 and it's already been another brutal year for workers in the video game industry. Microsoft is the latest company to announce a major round of layoffs in its gaming division as it's cutting around 1,900 workers from its Xbox, Activision Blizzard and ZeniMax (aka Bethesda) teams. That brings the total number of video game layoffs this year to around 6,000 already. There were around 9,000 layoffs in the industry in all of 2023, according to some estimates.

The Pokémon Company knows about Palworld and is very much aware that the game is drawing a lot of comparisons with its intellectual property, based on a statement it has published. While the company didn't explicitly name Palworld, it said it's going to investigate a game «released in January 2024» and will «take appropriate measures to address any acts that infringe on intellectual property rights related to Pokémon.» It also clearly stated that it has «not granted any permission for the use of Pokémon intellectual property or assets in that game.»

With the news that Blizzard and ESL FACEIT are preparing to launch a new esports circuit for Overwatch 2, mere months after the death of the Overwatch League, it's a good time to take stock of the entire esports scene. Things are looking slightly frantic, at least in North America. League of Legends and Rocket League are particularly messy, entering their 2024 seasons with lean budgets and major shakeups. Meanwhile, an expansion of the open-qualifiers model should provide more opportunities for everyday players to compete in Valorant, Overwatch 2, Rocket League and all manner of fighting games. Get those fingers ready, folks.

Nintendo has revealed exactly when most remaining online services for the 3DS and Wii U will come to an end. After 7AM ET on April 8, it will no longer be possible to jump into a multiplayer match on the original Splatoonor check out other players' levels in Super Mario Maker. Online co-op play, leaderboards and data distribution are among the features that won't be available on either console (unless you find an adequate homebrew solution). The Badge Arcade feature, which allows players to customize their Nintendo 3DS home menu, is going away too.

Netflix said that user engagement with games on the service tripled in 2023. “[Despite] games still being small, and certainly not yet material relative to our film and series business, we’re pleased with this progress,” the company said in its earnings report on Tuesday. As an example, the company pointed to the addition of the Grand Theft Auto trilogy to the service last year, although it isn't clear how much the trilogy, which only arrived on Netflix on December 14, helped drive engagement in the final two weeks of the year.

Blizzard has revealed the next evolution of top-level Overwatch 2 esports after the demise of the Overwatch League. The publisher has teamed up with ESL FACEIT Group (EFG) to run the new Overwatch Champions Series (OWCS) under an exclusive multi-year agreement.

Nintendo is honoring Princess Peach with a set of appropriately colored Joy-Cons. On Tuesday, the company posted on X (Twitter) that a set of pastel pink Joy-Con controllers will launch alongside Princess Peach: Showtime! on March 22.

After a relatively short delay, you'll soon be able to enter the uniquely strange world of Death Stranding on Apple devices. Hideo Kojima's walking simulator will be available on iPhone 15 Pro models and iPads and Macs with M-series chips on January 30. This version of the gloomy open-world adventure will run you $40. However, if you pre-order, you'll save up to 50 percent.

At CES 2023, Roland introduced a streaming mixer called Bridge Cast, which can give creators a way to pipe different audio feeds to different destinations and make it easy for them to create mixes, add vocal effects and remove unwanted audio. Now, the company has unveiled a follow-up to the device called Bridge Cast X that adds video support on top of all its predecessor's audio-focused features. The Bridge Cast X has two HDMI input ports and an HDMI Thru connector that can feed video up to 4K in resolution to an external monitor.

Earlier today, Riot Games announced that it is eliminating 530 roles globally, which make up about 11 percent of its workforce. The company publicly delivered this devastating news in two separate posts — one for players, and another for «Rioters,» with the latter detailing severance package and some other benefits to treat the dismissed employees «with respect and grace.»

The Day Before is no more. The spectacular trainwreck of a game, which saw developer Fntastic announcing its closure only four days after launch, closed its servers for good on Monday, reports IGN. Publisher Mytona has wiped all references to the much-hyped Steam Early Access title from its website.

Awesome Games Done Quick (AGDQ) 2024 has wrapped after a nonstop weeklong speedrunning marathon. This year’s charity raised over $2.5 million for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. Other highlights included four broken world records and a dog named Peanut Butter beating the oddball NES classic Gyromite.

If you love old PC games, but wish they had access to modern graphical flourishes, NVIDIA has you covered. The company just released a beta version of its long-awaited RTX Remix tool. This software is designed especially for modders and can be used to add ray-tracing and AI-upscaled textures to older games.

Palworld has sold a million copies in just over eight hours, according to developer Pocketpair. The game has been on our radar for a while, thanks to its unique ‘Pokémon with guns’ premise, and it looks like launch day has been an absolute success.

As promised, Xbox offered the first details on MachineGames' Indiana Jones project during its Developer Direct stream on Thursday. It also confirmed the game's title —Indiana Jones and the Great Circle — and revealed that it's coming to Xbox Series X/S, PC and Xbox Cloud Gaming later this year.

Ask and you shall receive. On January 16, Massive Monster and Devolver Digital releasedCult of the Lamb’s much hyped “Sins of the Flesh” update for consoles and PC, bringing, among other things, a form of in-game sex to its cute-but-brutal world of anatomically incorrect animals and false prophets. It’s exactly what some fans have been asking for, and since its announcement, everyone, including Massive Monster, has been leaning into the fun of “the sex update” actually happening. But it turns out calling it the sex update was a major undersell.

We finally have a release date for Ninja Theory's Hellblade sequel: May 21, 2024. It's been over four years since Senua's Saga was announced at the 2019 Game Awards alongside Microsoft's (then next-gen) Xbox Series X console.

Avowed, the fantasy roleplaying game from Outer Worlds studio Obsidian Entertainment, is due to hit Xbox and PC in the fall. This is a slight update from the game's original release window, which was just "2024." Specifically, Avowed will hit Xbox Series X/S, PC via Xbox and Steam, and it'll be available through Game Pass on day one.

Behaviour Interactive is the latest notable game developer to lay off workers. The Dead by Daylight studio confirmed to Game Developer that the cuts affected less than three percent of the total workforce. Kotaku first reported on the layoffs, stating that they took place earlier this month and affected around 45 people across several departments. It initially appeared that the layoffs were limited to Behaviour's Montreal headquarters, but the publisher hasn't confirmed whether that's the case.

Activision has taken aim at Call of Duty cheaters in a swathe of novel and often hilarious ways over the last few years, from cutting their parachutes so they splat onto the ground in Warzone to straight up taking their guns away. The latest tactic targets those who use illicit tools to activate aim assist while playing with a mouse and keyboard.

Rock Band 4’s weekly DLC drops are coming to an end. Harmonix said Wednesday the upcoming batch of new songs on January 25 will be the game’s last. Although all other live services will remain active, the developer plans to give full attention to the Rock Band-like Fortnite Festival, a rhythm game inside Epic’s digital world.

Back in November, Ayaneo officially unveiled the AM01 mini PC. This thing was built to look like a retro Macintosh computer, but the inclusion of older AMD APUs wasn’t exactly going to win any power awards. Now, the AM02 is here, with a revamped NES-inspired design and a much more impressive chipset. It’s also three times the price.

Just like death and taxes, you can usually rely on a Call of Duty game to top the sales charts each year. The various entries in Activision’s warfare simulation franchise have mostly done just that, going all the way back to 2009. This year’s a bit different. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III has fallen to second place, as reported by media research firm Circana.

It's almost time to take a peek at some of what Xbox has in store for gamers this year. The Xbox Developer Direct, Microsoft's first game showcase of 2024, takes place today. It starts at 3PM ET and you can watch it below.

Sony is continuing to mine its back catalog of games for movie adaptations while persistently forgetting that Bloodborneis right there. Its next game that's bound for the big screen is Until Dawn, a 2015 interactive horror title that Supermassive Games developed and Sony published.

I own a jacket that’s eerily similar to Tess’ in Open Roads. It’s a blue bomber with yellow and burnt orange accents, and it’s not the only thing that Tess and I have in common. As she leisurely explores her childhood bedroom in the first few minutes of the game, Tess comes across set pieces that ground her environment in the early 2000s. There’s a chunky black television set and scattered DVD cases, little bottles of bright nail polish, a black-and-white strip from a photo booth, newspapers remembering 9/11 and hunting for bigfoot, and a bright pink tube of sickly sweet lip balm. These are the leftovers of her adolescence — the room is disheveled and largely empty, with most of her possessions packed away, ready to move. Tess picks through the room’s remaining photos and yearbooks, her hand-drawn fingers reaching out to interact with 3D objects, revealing more of her backstory with each touch. The cuff of her jacket is jarringly familiar every time it enters the frame.

If you own a copy of Minecraft: Bedrock Edition or Minecraft: Education Edition, you can now grab a free expansion pack based on the BBC's Planet Earth III. Much like the previous Frozen Planet II experience, this new wildlife documentary DLC lets players explore five scenarios through the lens of animals — arctic wolves, ocelots, musk oxen, leopards, Cape fur seals, great white sharks, impalas and more.

We're just a couple of weeks into 2024, but the layoffs that plagued the gaming industry last year are back. An undisclosed number of employees at Lost Boys Interactive have been laid off across seemingly «all disciplines at all levels,» terminated producer Jared Pace told Aftermath. Lost Boys Interactive is responsible for games like Tiny Tina's Wonderlands — which is launching on PlayStation Plus.

Just as we expected, AI was the running theme throughout CES 2024. In this episode, Devindra and Producer Ben Ellman chat with co-host Cherlynn Low, who’s on the ground in Las Vegas with the Engadget team. We dive into AI coming to almost every product category, new standalone AI hardware, and a surprising amount of “shush” tech. In geekier news, we dive into Micron’s new RAM format for laptops, which has the potential to reshape the notebook industry, and discuss why we all may want a rolling house robot like Samsung’s Ballie. And on a sad note, we chat about the wave of tech layoffs from Google, Amazon and others.

Valve may have had a change of heart about fan-made tribute projects “borrowing” its intellectual property. GamesRadar+ reported on the Steam maker’s DMCA takedown notice sent to the creators of Team Fortress: Source 2, a passion project porting TF2 to the more modern Source 2 game engine. In addition, the Steam maker squashed a Portal demake for the Nintendo 64, hinting at a possible shift toward a more protective corporate strategy from the typically lenient Valve.

There may be a lot more real-money gaming (RMG) apps available in the Google Play Store before the year ends — at least in certain locations. Google initially started allowing apps that deal with real money in its store back in 2021, but only if they fall under a game type that's regulated by the government. Now, the company has announced that it's tweaking its rules to allow more «game types and operators not covered by an existing licensing framework.» That will open the Play Store to games that aren't that popular or aren't played widely enough for local governments to create laws around them.

Even though Apple didn't have an official presence at CES 2024 in Las Vegas, the trade show still had a whole area dominated by mixed reality tech. One of the most popular booths there was none other than Xreal (formerly Nreal), which decided to ride on the Apple Vision Pro hype train and unveil its latest AR glasses, the Xreal Air 2 Ultra, in Las Vegas. The Chinese firm claims that its latest headset makes «an affordable alternative to» the likes of the $3,499 Vision Pro, though it's currently priced at $699 — a tad more than the $499 Meta Quest 3 — as Xreal attempts to lure developers into its ecosystem.

Ubisoft’s Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown launches next week, but players are likely to encounter an amusing bug as they make their way through the game, as reported by IGN. One of the game’s NPCs is voiced by a text-to-speech program, complete with the slightly robotic tones we’ve come to associate with these services.

The cult hit Prison Architect is getting a sequel and it's actually releasing pretty soon. The franchise follow-up launches on March 26 for PC via Steam, Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5. There’s even a trailer, posted below. Of note, Prison Architect 2 brings the series to 3D, as the original was a strictly top-down affair. The sequel has a cartoonish look that’s slightly reminiscent of newer Dragon Quest games, but the gameplay is anything but a JRPG.

Take-Two Interactive has filed an opposition to Remedy Entertainment’s newest logo, claiming the symbol infringes on Rockstar Games’ logo despite the two having little in common besides the letter “R” representing a video game publisher. First reported by RemedyFirst, the trademark dispute was filed against two versions of the Remedy logo (one with the company’s name, one without) in September with the UK’s Intellectual Property Office.