Blockbuster News, Tips, Tricks & Ideas

Possibility Space has become the second studio owned by Prytania Media to close in recent weeks following Crop Circle Games' closure in March. Both studios were founded by Jeff Strain, the co-founder of Guild Wars creators ArenaNet and the founder of State Of Decay developers Undead Labs.

BlizzCon, Blizzard's annual get-together for fans of their games, was halted by the pandemic in 2020 and only returned as a physical event last year. One year later, it is cancelled again, Blizzard have announced.

Players that put more than two hours into pre-purchased or advanced access games will now be exempt from Steam's refund policy, says Steam, the maker of said policy and thus the final word on how it is implemented. As spotted by the Verge, this change is intended to combat a loophole where filthy time criminals could fill their stolen boots with ill-gotten fun pre-release, then get their money back.

Ugh, I do not have the energy to feed the Maw this week. Sometimes the creature manifests as a proper monstrosity, with B-movie prosthetics and sound effects, and sometimes, it's more of an... unfathomable annoyance, like a nose that won't stop running, or a single player game that requires an internet connection. In either case, the Maw must be sated, and fortunately, there are quite a few appetising video-or-computer games out in the next seven days, with at least one behemoth landing on Friday.

We hired Katharine back in 2017 as our first full-time hardware writer, having been impressed by her rare talent for writing about tech in an approachable way. It quickly became obvious that Katharine's skills stretched beyond just hardware and in 2021 she became editor-in-chief, responsible for running the entire site.

I have spent most of my working life looking at efforts to breach the FPS event horizon, and going 'OMG who cares, they literally all look the same?'. People like our hardware editor James then point and laugh at me, as an objectively wrong person. But according to a small study highlighted by the Guardian, I might have been right too! Turns out there's evidence that we might all see life at different FPS. That player might not be cheating, he might just experience Fortnite at a speed you don't.

Microsoft have announced April's new arrivals for the Game Pass subscription service, and it includes a cute game about being an alligator, a cute game about gardening, a cute game about fleeing a doomed planet in search of a new home among the stars, and also EA Sports PGA Tour, I guess.

Former Dragon Age director Mike Laidlaw is making a new fantasy game. Eternal Strands is third-person adventure pitched as a mixture of Shadow Of The Colossus and Monster Hunter with Tears Of The Kingdom's physics powers. The trailer, which you'll find below, certainly has giants you can clamber across and spray with goop.

Hello, dear RPS reader. Do you have a somewhat complicated relationship with online adverts and would like to see them banished into clean, white and uninterrupted space? Then why not sign up for a free month of our RPS Standard subscription? Starting from today, Tuesday April 2nd, until the end of Tuesday April 30th, you can use the following discount code below to get ad-free browsing across the whole of RPS, all for absolutely nothing. It's ad-free, and literally free, so why not give it a try to see if you like it?

The Oculus Quest launched back in 2019, just five years ago, but come May new apps released in the Quest Store won't be playable on the Quest 1. This isn't because the Quest 1 isn't powerful enough to play them anymore, but because developers will no longer be able to upload them and players won't be able to see them.

Earlier today, megacorp Embracer announced they were selling Borderlands developer Gearbox to Take-Two. During an investor call about the divestment, CEO Lars Wingefors confirmed that this brought an end to the restructuring process Embracer announced last year. He was also asked whether this meant Embracer had plans to start acquiring other studios again.

Sega Of America employees have become the first a major US video games studio to ratify a union contract. The contract covers guarantees minimum yearly pay increases for around 150 staff through 2026.

Marvel Rivals is an upcoming free-to-play, team-based PVP shooter for PC with the backing of Chinese publishing giant NetEase.

In case Amy Hennig's Captain America and Black Panther game 1943: Rise Of Hydra wasn't going to be quite enough to satisfy your Marvel hunger, Netease have just announced they've got another comic book bun in the oven for you. Marvel Rivals is a free-to-play, third-person team shooter where two teams of six heroes and villains go head to head with each other in destructible arenas. I can't say its reveal trailer has me particularly pumped - the game looks and feels a bit like it's ten years too late. Still, why not come and have a gander at it below.

It's Monday and I'm tired, so do I really have to write out hundreds of words telling you who Nic Reuben is? You already know Nic! He's been writing here as a freelancer loads. He threw a rock through the treehouse window and were preparing to sacrifice him to appease Horace's great coils, but the endless bear spake and instead commanded us to hire him, after a rigorous interview process. Say hello to Nic in his new and official capacity here on the site! My enthusiasm has woken me up again!

It's GDC week, and conversations are being had about AI. Ubisoft have blundered into this, in classic Ubi style, by revealing that they've had an R&D team beavering away on a project called NEO NPC. It's the usual pitch. "Have you ever dreamed of having a real conversation with an NPC in a video game?", asks Ubi's official post about it. And what all people who make this fail to understand that the answer most normal people give if they think about it is "Erm, probably no, actually?"

Valve have launched Steam Families on the Steam Beta Client, a suite of new and refreshed family sharing options that replace Steam's existing Family Sharing and Family View features. The idea is that you'll now have a single location where you can manage your family's games from, as well as have more control over what and when other family members can play.

Developer Mojang has warned anyone playing Minecraft through the Xbox app on PC not to download its latest update as it could cause their worlds to disappear.

It's hard for me to get a read on Steam sales, because my relationship and access to games is defined by my work. So I ask you, as the Steam spring sale starts: are Steam sales as big a deal as they used to be?

Saber Interactive have parted ways with Embracer Group, buying back the rights to both themselves and numerous other studios in a deal initially valued at $247 million. The deal includes 38 ongoing game development projects plus the rights to 3D Realms, Slipgate Ironworks, New World Interactive, Nimble Giant, Mad Head, Digic, Fractured Byte and PR agency Sandbox Strategies, as well as Metro developers 4A Games and Pinball FX maker Zen Studios via options.

The upside of things being bad is that you don't have to pay attention to them. Think of the time you've saved, in life, by movies, TV shows and video games being rubbish, and therefore culturally irrelevant and safely ignored.

When we first saw Capcom's upcoming action strategy game Kunitsu-Gami: Path Of The Goddess at last year's Xbox Games Showcase, there wasn't much to say other than that the game looks gorgeous. Thanks to last night's Xbox Partner showcase, we now know that it's a blend of Japanese mythology, sword-fights, Pikmin and tower defense.

Meta keep emailing me to tell me my Oculus account is going to be deleted on March 29th. It's only today, seeing other people talking about it, that it occurs to me: this is not personal. Meta is perhaps going to delete your Oculus account on March 29th as well, if you have one.

After several months on the Steam beta build, Valve last night officially launched an update which revamps the shopping experience and lets you hide your shame. Two universal conveniences: your shopping basket is now shared across devices, so no losing track of things you meant to buy later; and buying gift copies is now less faffy. More conditional: you can now choose to make individual games private, meaning no one will ever see if you own them or are playing them. I won't ask why you might want to hide any particular games.

In Shakespeare's Anthony And Cleopatra, said famous woman says "Give to a gracious message an host of tongues, but let ill tidings tell themselves when they be felt." I.e., when you have good news you can go round the houses, but if you have bad news - like sending an all-hands email to the staff at EA to let them know that, less than a year after the last round of layoffs, a further 5% of them are getting booted - then you should just come out and say it as quickly and simply as possible.

In 2023, more than 500 games earned more than $3 million (around £2.3 million) in gross revenue via Steam, according to Valve. The stat was shared as part of their annual summary, a breakdown of the platform's past year in terms of new features and performance.

Epic have outlined their 2024 plans for the Epic Games Store, which includes a new download manager, a proper offline mode, pre-loading of games, and a focus on game discovery in general.

People who read my articles have exceptionally good taste, which is why I will assume you are already intimately familiar with Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. For those who are not and somehow got here by mistake, it will save me a lot of time if you go away and read them all. Oh fine, I will explain Hex. And also, if I have time, a real life man with ants in his computer.

Hideo Kojima dropped a bombshell at the end of January, announcing that — alongside development of Death Stranding 2 — he would also be returning to the action-espionage genre that put him on the map with the Metal Gear series, in the form of Physint for PlayStation 5. And now, in a new episode of his HideoTube web series, the designer has explained how a period of sickness and surgery — and thoughts of his own mortality — convinced him to 'change his priorities' and do something fans had been asking him to do for years.

The best games are co-op games, and one of the best features of Steam is Remote Play, which turns local co-op games into online co-op games through the power of internet magic.

Given that Microsoft have spent considerable time and effort becoming the biggest cock-of-the-walk possible, it does, I suppose, make sense that their layoffs are correspondingly massive. In an internal memo obtained by The Verge, Phil Spencer is very sad to reveal to the staff that, in order to grow, the combined powers of Microsoft's 22k-strong Gaming Division have to be denuded to the tune of 1,900 human beings. That amounts to about 8% of the division.

The Nvidia tools used to create that raytraced Portal mod and other fanciness are now in open beta, inviting all and sundry to jazz up everything from Deus Ex to Garry's Mod. Nvidia's RTX Remix tech lets people fancify old games by injecting fancy modern lighting, new models, textures 'remastered' by AI, new environmental decoration, and other such fanciness, even if the game doesn't have mod support. I'll be curious to see what people make with this, though I am wary of artlessly pumping new tech into old games.

I enjoy Games Done Quick, an organisation that raises money for charity (this year is the Prevent Cancer Foundation) by playing games at peak efficiency. If you've never watched it before, I recommend loading up the Twitch stream at about 1am and sort of gently dissociating while someone plays an 80s NES game you've never heard of. Speaking of, one of the headline acts for this year's stream - which is running through to this Sunday 21st - was Peanut Butter, a shiba inu trained to press buttons on command, "playing" a NES game that came out in 1985. Although Peanut Butter obeyed his training, some technical issues colluded to snatch a world best time from him - but he raised many thousands of dollars, so good for him.

Alright, alright, they're in a disupte over the letter R as used for a logo for a video game company. As spotted by Respawn First, Remedy (they of the Alan Wake) revealed their new logo last year, a big letter R, and Take-Two (they of the owning Rockstar Games) contest it. Rockstar's logo is also a big letter R, although I think they're pretty different Rs.

We're just a week away from the launch of Naughty Dog's The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered for PlayStation 5, and the studio has now announced it'll be marking its arrival with Grounded 2 — an official making-of documentary that'll be free to watch on YouTube.

Remember last year, when The Last of Us composer Gustavo Santaolalla first suggested a new version of Part 2 was on the horizon? He said players would be able to make his in-game character «play certain themes» during the then-unannounced remastered's release.

Seemingly not content with swallowing up Animal Crossing and spitting out its own farm-and-craft minigame, Final Fantasy 14 has apparently now guzzled down Starfield and is readying to unleash its own way to sink dozens of hours into galactic wandering.

Final Fantasy 14 has revealed the second new job arriving in its upcoming Dawntrail expansion. The Pictomancer is a new-oldie, bringing back the magical artist class from Final Fantasy 6 - albeit with some colourful new powers for magical ranged DPS players to enjoy. Meanwhile, we now know that the MMO's second limited job will be the Beastmaster.

The new Job coming to Final Fantasy 14 in next expansion Dawntrail has now been revealed: the Pictomancer.

Over 14,000 games were released on Steam in 2023, according to according to data tracked by SteamDB. The number is nearly 2000 games more than in 2022, and continues a steady trend of growth on the digital storefront.

The player-voted Steam Awards have reached their conclusion, and the results are about as weird as the nominees. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that the weirdest game possible won in several categories, such as Red Dead Redemption 2 for the Labor Of Love award and Starfield for "Most Innovative Gameplay".

Valve have put together their "Best Of 2023" lists on Steam. This is different from the Steam Awards, voting for which is ongoing, and instead is built from Steam data like revenue, peak concurrent players, and so on. It's interesting every year as older games or indie obscurities do better than you expect.

We're now firmly in the liminal space between Christmas and New Year. Sick of your family, sick of leftovers, wondering if the day after Boxing Day is still excuse enough to eat two dozen After Eights for dinner, your mind might start to slip towards the future. 2024! What all could you achieve with a whole twelve months stretched out before you?

Versus Evil, the publisher behind The Banner Saga and Pillars Of Eternity 2, among others, has been closed down and its entire staff laid off. Versus Evil were bought by tinyBuild in November 2021.

Seriously. I have had new emails today from PRs. What are you doing? Genuine question. But yes, Rock Paper Shotgun is closing up the treehouse for our Christmas break. It's far too cold to sit in a treehouse at this time of year! But owing to a miscalculaton, our bosses think it's plenty warm enough in January, so we'll be back on Tuesday the 2nd of Jan, 2024, at which time I will continually write the wrong year on things for at least three months. I hope that, whatever you're celebrating this season, you have a lovely few days off, as I imagine most of you will. In the meantime, we will not leave you completely bereft! Because we love you, we've got some hashtag content scheduled for you while we're gone.

The Steam winter sale is now underway, with discounts across the digital storefront's catalogue of games from now until January 4th. This also means that voting is now open in the 2023 Steam Awards, with the slightly earlier closing date of January 2nd.

If you've opted in to the Steam client beta, you can now mark games in your Steam library as private so that they're invisible to other users. That means that if you're - as a hypothetical - a games journalist who once had to buy and install some games with questionable names and subject matter for an article you were writing, you can now hide that so it's no longer visible to your friends or - hypothetically - your child.

Sony has filed a patent which could see difficulty levels adapt and adjust as users play.

The nominees for the public-voted Steam Awards have been announced and they are, perhaps more than ever before, baffling to me. If I was being uncharitable, I'd say that's because the list is overrun by games with large multiplayer communities that can be encouraged to vote for them - but who would want to be uncharitable? Let's instead say that the list is certainly not boring, even if Starfield gets a nod for "most innovative gameplay".

Following reports that development on Naughty Dog's long-awaited The Last of Us multiplayer game had been «slowed down» earlier this year, the studio has announced it's officially pulling the plug on the project, saying it didn't want to become a «solely live service games studio».

"After more than two decades of E3, each one bigger than the last, the time has come to say goodbye. Thanks for the memories." So says the official E3 website this afternoon, as the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) confirm that E3 is officially dead.

Once again, we have reached that point in the year where we come to you with a warm grin and outstretched hands, saying: "Please, dear reader, will you fill out the RPS readership survey? It's very quick, and will only take 5-10 minutes of your time, so please consider filling it out if you find yourself at a loose end. It will be a big help for us in the year ahead.

Connecting Worlds will be released across the globe in the spring of next year, via Disney+.

I don't want to encourage more publishers to create irrelevant, self-indulgent trailers for Geoff Keighley's Advertganza, but I'll cut Sega a break for their one. Sure, the first 52 seconds are some live-action skit, but the following 41 seconds announce no less than five games. Sega are returning to their glory days once again, with new games coming based on Jet Set Radio, Crazy Taxi, Streets Of Rage, Golden Axe, Shinobi, "and more." You can get a few tiny glimpses at those in the trailer below.

Hitman 3 at 60% off. No Man's Sky at 50% off. Tetris Effect: Connected at 50% off. These are great games whether you play them in VR or not, so even if you don't own a headset you might want to check out Steam's VR Fest, which is live now until December 11th.

This week on the Eurogamer Newscast, we discuss the first ever trailer for GTA 6 which was finally released following a tease from Rockstar, after the trailer leaked online ahead of schedule.

Naughty Dog has revealed the characters we will be able to play as in The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered's No Return mode.

Some of the material which will feature in The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered's Lost Levels is also planned to appear in the second season of HBO's show, Naughty Dog's Neil Druckmann has teased.

It's hard to know where to begin with this, but let's just rip the plaster off and get it over with. Reedpop have today announced that they're "investigating the potential sale" of RPS owners Gamer Network. This also includes our friends at Eurogamer, VG247, Dicebreaker, and GamesIndustry.biz. Not included in the sale are UK events EGX or MCM, or the website Popverse. There's not a lot more I can say at this stage - we ourselves still have lots of questions that need answering first - but I'll endeavour to share more with you, our readers, as soon as I can. For now, here's the broad strokes of what's happening.

There is a Creature that resides in the farthest corners of the cosmos and the deepest fathoms of the human psyche. It is a dreadful god of gossip and reportage, a hideous, paradiscursive entity of boundless appetite, whose Number is Infinity+1 and whose Sign is the Serrated Spiral. It's one of many abyssal denizens of a dungeon dimension outside of Time, where nothing changes and there is accordingly an apocalyptic hunger for News. My ancestors, the Brigante Celts who once ruled the misty valleys of Yorkshire, called it keno-augā-brājat, or “the cave that will never be filled”. But nowadays, we call it the Maw.

Black Friday may have been and gone, dear readers, but the deals still continue with the dawn of Cyber Monday. This will be the last day of the Black Friday extravaganza, so make sure you get those purchases in before midnight if you still want to take advantage of any offers. And to help you navigate the trauma of endlessly navigating several different price-checking sites to bring you the best Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals, I'm back for one last day of liveblog duties. Hardware editor James will also be updating our dedicated Cyber Monday deals pages with lots more of the best deals if you're looking for something more specific.

This week on the Eurogamer Newscast, we discuss this year's various video game remakes and remasters, including the recently-announced The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered, which is headed to PlayStation 5 in January.

Black Friday is upon us, dear readers, and by all accounts, this year's sale is meant to be a pretty good one for PC gaming hardware, so let us help you navigate the trauma of endlessly navigating several different price-checking sites to bring you the best Black Friday deals from across the internet. Together with our hardware editor James, I'll be manning our Black Friday liveblog this week, bringing you rolling coverage of the stuff we think is worth highlighting as it happens, from great deals on new microSD cards for your Steam Deck to the best discounts on graphics cards, SSDs and more. James will also be regularly updating our dedicated Black Friday hub pages (linked below) with all the best deals if you're looking for something more specific.

Black Friday season is once again upon us, folks, but before you sigh with a deep-seated sense of dread, there's good news afoot. From now until November 30th, we've shaved 20% off the price of our annual RPS supporter memberships, which means you can pick up 12 months of ad-free browsing (and exclusive articles and game keys if you pick our Premium tier) on the cheap. All you need to do is head on over to our sign-up page and pick the subscription that suits you best.

Netflix is planning to open brick-and-mortar locations – and both Blockbuster and Redbox have (hilariously) responded.

Fall Prime Day 2023 is going in full force, offering some amazing discounts across different product lineups. For UK consumers, it seems the deals are getting even better, with ECOVACS offering a direct 36% discount on its DEEBOT T20 OMNI.

Gareth Edwards' new sci-fi blockbuster The Creator has been impressing early viewers as the first reactions have begun trickling in. 

Stranger Things season 5 will be bigger and bolder than ever before, according to series producer Shawn Levy. The director, who is also helming Deadpool 3, shared the insight in the latest issue of Total Film magazine, which hits shelves on September 14. 

It’s hardly a controversial take, but it sometimes feels as if many of us are being wealth-gated from gaming due to perpetually increasing prices. So, when we see a sale that helps us add a handful or two of new games we won’t get around to playing until 2036, we feel an obligation to pass the news along.

Demand for generative AI has translated into skyrocketing financial growth for Nvidia, even as sales for PC graphics cards has slowed.