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A wealth of promising home-grown titles from the Xbox Games Showcase 2024 back in June gave existing users plenty of reasons to stay subscribed.

Xbox Game Pass has had a really solid July for content, and it’ll get even sweeter if the rumors of Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 hitting the service soon pan out.

I wrote recently about how games might not be enough to find those elusive “new” users in an article linked below, revolving around the dilemma that the overall number of “core” console players simply isn’t growing.

While speaking to developers at shows over the past year, a lot of the discourse revolves around “black hole” games like Fortnite and Roblox, which vacuum up users and turn them into mono-gamers with no interest in playing anything else.

Xbox Game Pass is an attempt to cut through that trend in the name of supporting and showcasing the variety of art the industry has to offer — meeting new customer cohorts halfway.

The vastness of its Activision-Blizzard purchase seems to have led to a lost couple of years of momentum for Xbox as a brand, with attention focused solely on its variety of court cases.

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If you need some more interesting games for Steam Deck (and desktop Linux!

), Fanatical launched the Build your own Play on the Go - Elite Collection.

All of the games included are Steam Deck Verified, and so they should work great no matter your Linux device.

Since this is a build your own bundle, the more games you add the higher the discount (up to a point).

Here’s what’s included (Steam links if you need more info on each):

Wave Break (Native Linux)

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Recently, a newsletter by Tom Warren over at The Verge suggested that Microsoft has been exploring giving up on marketing its Xbox brand in Europe and other regions, in favor of the United States and other territories where it is more entrenched.

Flatt described his team’s efforts as “scrappy,” which is not exactly what I would personally want to hear from one of the world’s top three most valuable companies, but Microsoft does find itself in a difficult macroeconomic confluence.

Microsoft’s lack of visible urgency when it comes to Surface, Xbox, and even Windows itself, could be blamed for the struggles of an entire raft of products in recent years, even before we discuss things like software quality and customer service.

I felt like Hellblade 2 marketing was quite visible when I visited London recently, as well as across social media, but sales for the game have reportedly been quite poor.

It would be convenient if we could split into multiple timelines and examine the outcomes of binary decisions, but it’s true that the overall global console user base hasn’t really grown in years, despite the marketing from whoever is involved.

Despite all this, Microsoft has been touting its biggest ever Xbox presence for Europe’s big Gamescom convention later this summer in Cologne, Germany.

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About it: "In 1992, following a series of mysterious deaths caused by wild animals, as well as strange sightings of cryptids in the sparsely populated and underdeveloped Amazon region of Acre, a special operations brigade from the Brazilian Military Police was sent to the area to gather intelligence.

However, the situation took an unexpected turn for the soldiers, who soon found themselves cornered in the midst of a jungle infested with hungry dinosaurs."

Short Length: The story mode can be completed in 1-3 hours, depending on the player’s skill.

Replayability: The game features an Arcade mode where quick survival matches can be played.

Atmospheric: Explore the Amazon jungle with a wide variety of visual and sound effects, weather, and a day-night system that will completely immerse you in the game.

I think younger me would have absolutely jumped at the chance to play something like this, having fond memories of similar games.

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There are reports of IT outages affecting major institutions in Australia and internationally.

The ABC is experiencing a major network outage, along with several other media outlets.

Crowd-sourced website Downdetector is listing outages for Foxtel, National Australia Bank and Bendigo Bank.

Follow our live blog as we bring you the latest updates.

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Microsoft is integrating Nvidia’s GeForce Now service into its store pages for Xbox games.

At the time of publication, the new “play with cloud” button isn’t available just yet, so it’s not clear whether this is simply a link to the main homepage of GeForce Now or whether this deep links and launches the game directly on Nvidia’s cloud gaming service.

Nvidia’s GeForce Now RTX 4080 tier is the most impressive cloud gaming service available right now, with Nvidia even claiming the end-to-end latency beats an Xbox Series X running locally on a 60Hz TV.

Microsoft and Nvidia are no strangers when it comes to cloud gaming partnerships, though.

Both companies signed a 10-year deal to allow Nvidia to license Xbox PC games for GeForce Now, including Activision Blizzard titles.

Nvidia also rolled out an update to GeForce Now earlier this year that allows members to sync their Xbox accounts and Microsoft Store purchases to the cloud gaming service.

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2024 has had plenty of upsets.

Games from small teams — like Palworld, Balatro, and Animal Well — rocketed up the sales charts, outstripping titles with much larger budgets.

Meanwhile, the pace of big releases from major companies like Sony and Nintendo has slowed, as mass layoffs have continued to rattle the increasingly consolidated industry.

As perilous as the year has been for people who make games, it’s offered a diverse bounty for those who play them.

NPR network staffers and contributors have explored this breadth, from cozy puzzlers like Botany Manor to meditative adventures like 1000xResist to updated juggernauts like Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree.

Sortable by platform and genre, we invite you to find your next favorite game on the list below.

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"I’m very aware that I could wake up tomorrow and my job could be gone,” says Jess Hyland.The video game artist says the industry she’s spent almost 15 years working in is on “shaky” ground at the moment.A boom in players and profits during the pandemic sparked a flurry of investments, expansions and acquisitions that, in hindsight, now look short-sighted.Gaming remains profitable, but thousands of workers worldwide have lost their jobs, and successful studios have been shut down over the past two years.More closures and cuts are feared.

There’s lots of worry about the future," says Jess.Some bosses are talking up the potential of generative AI - the tech behind tools such as ChatGPT - as a potential saviour.Tech giant Nvidia has shown off impressive development tool prototypes, and gaming industry heavyweights such as Electronic Arts and Ubisoft are investing in the tech.It’s claimed AI tools can save development time, free workers up to focus on creativity and provide a more personalised user experience.With budgets at the blockbuster end of the industry spiralling as audience expectations rise with them, it sounds like a perfect solution.But not to everyone.

Publicly available AI image generators, for example, can quickly output impressive-looking results from simple text prompts, but are famously poor at rendering hands.

It’s a view echoed by Chris Knowles, a former senior engine developer at UK gaming firm Jagex, known for its Runescape title.

Copyright concerns over generative AI - currently the subject of several ongoing legal cases - are one of the biggest barriers to its wider use in gaming right now.Tools are trained on vast quantities of text and pictures scraped from the internet and, like many artists, Jess believes it amounts to “mass copyright infringement”.Some studios are exploring systems trained on internal data, and third parties advertising ethical tools that claim to work off authorised sources are springing up.Even then, the fear is that AI will be used to turn out assets such as artwork and 3D models at scale, and the expectation on workers will be to produce more output.

The AI industry is currently trying to reassure governments and regulators over concerns about its future use, as shown by a recent law passed by the EUIt will also have to work hard to win over another group - gamers.Online shooter The Finals received a backlash over its use of synthesised voice lines, and developer Square Enix was criticised for the limited use of generated art in its multiplayer game Foamstars.Jess believes growing talk about AI has made gamers “think about what they love about games and what’s special about that - sharing experiences crafted by other humans”.

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For those just joining us, this is for the new Nexus Mods app that will eventually replace things like Vortex with full Linux support so you can mod on desktop Linux and Steam Deck much easier as I reported on earlier in July and initially back in November last year.

Version 0.5.3 of the app includes all these fixes on top of experimental Cyberpunk 2077 support:

Windows: Fixed log file creation failing due to illegal character in path (#1728).

Linux: Upgraded GameFinder to fix an issue with not being able to find Steam installed as a Flatpak or Snap (#1720).

Just to note: it didn’t initially launch for me, I had to remove the configs from the previous version to get this latest to work.

The bug was reported but given it’s in Alpha, such breakages are to be expected and they don’t plan to support migrations yet.

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The team is excited to present the new version of the fheroes2 engine - 1.1.1 for Heroes of Might and Magic II after more than a month of hard work.

The Editor got support for Rumors, Daily Events and special Victory and Loss conditions.

As a start, the team added a missing part of the Sphinx and a new variation of the adventure map Cave object.

A brand new feature now available in the Editor is the ability to restrict the construction of any building in towns and castles.

This aligns with our goals: we want difficulty level affect only AI behaviour without giving it any perks.

As usual, the team updated multiple translations, improved various UI elements and closed over 40 issues since the previous release.

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Energy think tank Ember found that major growth in wind and solar helped push global electricity production past this milestone in 2023.

Its authors say that this rapid growth has brought the world to a crucial turning point where fossil fuel generation starts to decline.

“You also have the invasion of Ukraine which increased the sense of urgency around transitioning to clean power and getting off relying on fossil fuels - not just coal but also gas, and particularly from Russia.

Plans were put in place to help individual member states reach renewable energy targets and deploy technologies at a national scale.

“Certainly you can’t ignore that there was some demand [based] impact on the decrease in use of fossil fuels, but also there was a significant role of wind and solar replacing it.”

Normally this would have meant that the clean energy capacity added around the world last year would have caused fossil fuel generation to drop by 1.1 per cent.

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One of the telltale signs of these stability issues on Raptor Lake is the “out of video memory” error message that pops up in games such as Fortnite.

Cassells claims that his studio has received thousands of crash reports from players using 13th and 14th-gen Core chips and that his development team has personally experienced “frequent instability” on their own Raptor Lake-powered PCs.

But Cassells reckons there’s a more substantial underlying problem here than mere glitches of instability solved by motherboard configurations.

“Over the last 3–4 months, we have observed that CPUs initially working well deteriorate over time, eventually failing,” he claims.

This 13900K went into a gaming PC with a lower-end motherboard that by design can’t max out the chip’s power usage.

Cassells also recommends players, whether they’re hosting their own servers or just playing a game, to avoid Raptor Lake processors.

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One of the telltale signs of these stability issues on Raptor Lake is the “out of video memory” error message that pops up in games such as Fortnite.

Cassells claims that his studio has received thousands of crash reports from players using 13th and 14th-gen Core chips and that his development team has personally experienced “frequent instability” on their own Raptor Lake-powered PCs.

But Cassells reckons there’s a more substantial underlying problem here than mere glitches of instability solved by motherboard configurations.

“Over the last 3–4 months, we have observed that CPUs initially working well deteriorate over time, eventually failing,” he claims.

This 13900K went into a gaming PC with a lower-end motherboard that by design can’t max out the chip’s power usage.

Cassells also recommends players, whether they’re hosting their own servers or just playing a game, to avoid Raptor Lake processors.

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As spotted by SteamDB creator Pavel Djundik, some data in the document was viewable despite the black redaction boxes, including Valve’s headcount and gross pay across various parts of the company over 18 years, and even some data about its gross margins that we weren’t able to uncover fully.

The data breaks Valve employees into four different groups: “Admin,” “Games,” “Steam,” and, starting in 2011, “Hardware.”

If you want to sift through the numbers yourself, I’ve included a full table of the data, sorted by year and category, at the end of this story.

In November 2023, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais told The Verge that he thinks “we’re firmly in the camp of being a full fledged hardware company by now.”

The small number of staff across the board seemingly explains why Valve’s product list is so limited despite its immense business as basically the de facto PC gaming platform.

While we haven’t seen any leaked profit numbers from this new headcount and payroll data, the figures give a more detailed picture of how much Valve is spending on its staff — which, given the massive popularity of Steam, is probably still just a fraction of the money the company is pulling in.

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In what has been a financially difficult year for the industry, which has seen mass layoffs, many of the world’s largest video game companies and influencers have quietly partnered with the oil-rich Saudis.

Some critics have labeled the investments “games washing,” an attempt to polish the country’s reputation and human rights abuses with entertainment and tourism, as it has been accused of doing with its professional golf and soccer leagues.

“Three years ago, I would have had my own prejudices as well, thinking about what Saudi is and what it is not,” said Ralf Reichert, the chief executive officer of the Esports World Cup Foundation.

Once a country that effectively banned movie theaters and strictly restricted tourism, Saudi Arabia has poured wealth into sports and entertainment at a staggering rate.

The fund recruited Brian Ward, a former director at Electronic Arts and vice president at Activision Blizzard, to be the company’s chief executive officer.

“Participating in a region of the world with a pretty egregious track record of human rights is difficult,” said Steve Arhancet, the team’s co-chief executive officer.

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Hamster Playground has today left Early Access as a finished game, ready for you to jump in and get adopting cute little furry friends.

The new 1.0 release brings some fresh mini-games, a whole bunch of new customization items for your hamsters and their home, new quests to run through and new rewards.

Experience laid-back competition with a single button, yet prepare to break a sweat!

Race AI-driven hamsters in mazes and on drag strips, and other challenging mini-games.

Enjoy multiplayer modes, competing with up to 4 players locally or online.

Customize your hamsters with over 100 cosmetic items and enjoy detailed graphics and cute animations throughout the game.

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Another big release of DXVK, the Vulkan-based implementation of Direct3D for Linux with Wine / Proton, has arrived.

Developer Ethan Lee (FNA / Linux ports) also had a nice code merge for this release with the addition of support for multiple window system backends that the application can choose between at runtime.

This is problematic for games that require to be run at 60 FPS but do not limit their frame rate when using a 60 Hz display mode.

In case a game runs at a lower rate than expected and does not provide an in-game option to change refresh rate, this behaviour can be disabled by setting d3d9.maxFrameRate = -1 (or the corresponding dxgi option for D3D10+ games).

There’s more like improved compatibility to third-party mods hooking various DXGI entry points and various other miscellaneous fixes and updates.

Proton and GE-Proton use DXVK directly, and so they both pull in updates in their new releases.

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In its place, Microsoft will “in the coming months” roll out a new $14.99 “Xbox Game Pass Standard” tier.

Quick and dirty chart by me to display the new Xbox Game Pass structure (subject to correction).

But it’s the launch day access to Microsoft’s system-selling first-party titles that really sets the Ultimate tier apart now, and which will likely necessitate a costly upgrade for many Xbox Game Pass subscribers.

Since then, loyal Game Pass subscribers have been able to play dozens of brand-new first-party titles at launch, from major franchises like Halo, Forza, and Gears of War to indie darlings like Hi-Fi Rush, Sea of Thieves, and Ori and the Will of the Wisps and much more.

Including first-party titles with cheaper, console-focused Game Pass subscriptions probably seemed like a good idea when Microsoft was still trying to attract subscribers to the service.

“Let’s put it this way: If 7 million Xbox Game Pass subscribers were planning to buy ‘Call of Duty’ for $70 but now have no reason to (as it’s part of their subscription), that leaves almost half a billion dollars of revenue on the table,” MIDia analyst Rhys Elliott told The Daily Upside by way of illustrating the significant numbers involved.

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On Sunday the Observer magazine published a sensitive piece about video game addiction, speaking to therapists working in the sector and one affected family.

The article asked, “why are so many young people addicted to video games?”, which no doubt struck a chord with many parents who despair at the amount of time their children spend in front of computers and consoles.

Parents will reminisce about how they spent whole days outside, cycling the neighbourhood, but at the same time they’re treating their children’s smartphones like tracking devices, demanding regular check-ins, infiltrating their social media feeds and databasing their activities and friend groups.

No wonder then, that teens withdraw to online video game worlds, the last spaces they have left that remain unmediated by their parents or other authority figures – the last places where they are mostly beyond the reach of adult control.

You can travel freely, and for free, in Elden Ring or Legend of Zelda; no elderly relatives can suddenly vote to restrict your access to the continent in Euro Truck Simulator.

There is massive despair and disillusionment at a world in which home ownership is a fantasy, where steady careers for life are increasingly rare and where young people are accused of being lazy and complacent.

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For a monthly fee, players get access to hundreds of games, as well as day-one titles from Microsoft studios.

According to Microsoft, the vast majority of users today are already on Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, which is their flagship plan for the service.

Microsoft joins a long list of subscription services like Netflix, Spotify, and others increasing their prices over recent years.

Since the service’s inception, people have wondered whether or not giving everyone access to games day one was a sustainable model, and post-pandemic, perhaps it simply isn’t at that previous price tier.

It’s also a positive step that Microsoft grandfathered in existing Xbox Game Pass for Console users into the system, allowing them to keep their entitlements.

Unlike Netflix and Spotify which have access to an almost infinite number of devices to grow on, Xbox Game Pass as a subscription service is arguably limited to a subset of devices in a subset of scenarios, while simultaneously competing with platforms like Steam on PC, and PlayStation on console.

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After being in Early Access since May last year, Tuatara Games are readying up their chaotic brawler Bare Butt Boxing for release on August 1.

Colourful and mischievous aliens land on Earth to host unregulated boxing matches.

Launch your opponents or the giant beach ball in portals to earn points based on which game mode is on.

Face up to 3 friends locally, join 6-player online matches, or fight with bots in single player mode.

Punching is not the only key to victory : collect item boxes to use special powers like the powerful vacuum and super frenzy to turn the tides of battle.

The gusting winds on the Mountain top and disappearing platforms at the neon disco Arcade can mess your score badly if you are not careful.

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Typically, layoff season arrives around Christmas: a flurry of pink slips, empty desks, the anxieties of the newly unemployed, all so companies can cut costs and fatten up bottom lines just before the calendar year ends.

Matanle outlines a historic picture not of innate employment rights but one in which Japanese courts, at key moments, such as 1975’s Nihon Shokuen Seizō case, ruled in favor of workers and unions.

Should a Japanese company be found to break the law by, say, reducing its workforce to cynically juice the numbers of a quarterly report, dismissed employees are liable to be reinstated.

Finally, there are haken, dispatch workers or “hired guns,” says Colin Williamson, lead tech artist at 17-Bit who has worked in Japan for 15 years including a stint at Square Enix in the aughts.

Serkan Toto, a veteran analyst of the Japanese games industry based in Tokyo, points to the country’s long-term shrinking population (down 837,000 in 2024) as an additional factor that could theoretically benefit workers by pushing up demand for their services.

The actions of Embracer’s C-suite and those at video game companies couldn’t stand in sharper relief to the famous words of Nintendo’s Iwata who, just over a decade ago, said, “I sincerely doubt employees who fear that they may be laid off will be able to develop software titles that could impress people around the world.” These are the words Miyazaki was referencing when he spoke about avoiding layoffs at FromSoftware: it is not just the angst, nervousness, and worries of an endemic layoff culture that affects work but also the practicalities of securing alternative employment, drawing focus away from the task at hand.

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Dee had read a newspaper article about a new NHS National Centre for Gaming Disorders that was being set up; she made contact, but the service wasn’t taking on patients yet.

The story of Dee – and Jake, who agreed to be featured in this article, but preferred not to be interviewed – is depressingly familiar to Professor Henrietta Bowden-Jones OBE, the founder and director of the National Centre for Gaming Disorders.

In 2008, she founded the first National Problem Gambling clinic: the NHS now has the capacity to treat up to 3,000 patients a year in 15 centres across the UK based on Bowden-Jones’s methodology.

We sat in a grand, high-ceilinged room in Earl’s Court, which is also the current base for the gambling clinic, and discussed what form an article might take.

The centre, which had been set up with a plan to see all patients face-to-face in London, pivoted swiftly to video calls, which remains the format its therapy sessions still take.

Bowden-Jones has been pushing for urgent extra funding and the clinic has taken the difficult decision to pause family work: this has brought the assessment waiting time down from over a year to three months.

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The Register reports that security researchers at Pen Test Partners recently got access to a British Airways 747, after the airline decided to retire its fleet following a plummet in travel during the coronavirus pandemic.

The team was able to inspect the full avionics bay beneath the passenger deck, with its data center-like racks of modular black boxes that perform different functions for the plane.

Pen Test Partners discovered a 3.5-inch floppy disk drive in the cockpit, which is used to load important navigation databases.

A cybersecurity professor discovered a buffer overflow exploit onboard a British Airways flight last year.

It’s more of a traditional network like you’d find inside an office building, and some of the latest airliners even receive software updates over the air.

Boeing only just resumed production of its troubled 737 Max airplane after software glitches led to two fatal crashes that killed a total of 346 passengers and crew members.

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GamingOnLinux, the website, is another year older today and I’m still blown away by what we’ve achieved together.

This year, amazingly, I don’t have a whole lot to talk about for this article.

Special thanks to our furious Discord moderator and supporter dpanter for sending over a cake:

You can also buy games using GamingOnLinux affiliate / partner links:

You can find all the links to support GamingOnLinux on this dedicated page any time.

Thanks again for being here and I hope you stick around for a very long time to continue this journey.

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Selaco is easily one of the biggest highlights of the year, with its mixture of over-the-top action and chunky retro visuals.

Added “Resume Game” button in the main menu.

They also mentioned a save issue between Steam Deck / Linux and Windows that should be solved now too.

So if you’ve swapped between Proton and the Native Build (Or a Windows PC and a Steam Deck), it shouldn’t lose any saves.

Improvements to the save system are welcome, especially with it being in Early Access and many updates are expected, it’s nice to see they’re working to ensure progress isn’t lost.

Altered Orbit Studios mentioned they’re taking a short vacation now but after that expect work on the Randomizer Mode, more story elements and production for Chapter 2 to continue.

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While there’s been a clear drop, the Linux user share on Steam for June 2024 still remains about 2% showing the clear upwards trend overall.

Interestingly, this is another month where Simplified Chinese as a language on Steam saw a jump, and quite often we see Linux drop when this happens.

According to Valve the latest operating system details are:

For Linux, the Steam Deck with SteamOS continues propping up the numbers with it being the most popular by far.

Freedesktop SDK 23.08 (Flatpak runtime) 64 bit 6.71% +0.66%

Ubuntu Core 22 64 bit (Steam Snap) 2.97% +0.35%

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Bazzite is one of the best options to get Linux on various gaming handhelds, and the 3.5.0 release is out now that has improvements pretty much everywhere with expanded hardware support.

Games that do not support controller disconnection (e.g., Super Meat Boy) will no longer break after suspend!

Games that do not support controller disconnection (e.g., Super Meat Boy) will no longer break after suspend!

Handheld Daemon will now send fake accelerometer values to the emulated controller, ensuring games cant calibrate without moving the gyro incorrectly.

Handheld Daemon will now send fake accelerometer values to the emulated controller, ensuring games cant calibrate without moving the gyro incorrectly.

There’s also a new boot video and suspend animation, Bazzite updates are smaller in size, bluetooth controller fixes, Wallpaper Engine works again,

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Players looking forward to Obsidian Entertainment’s next fantasy role-playing game (RPG) will experience some variety in the world that they explore.

Patel says that the “target” for the overall experience is comparable to Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire, a top-down RPG from Obsidian that was released back in 2018, though Patel adds that there’s a lot of “tonal variety” depending on the exact side quest or section of the main path players are on.

Giatta is a magic-wielding Ocean Human, Kai is a brawling Coastal Aumaua, Marius is a Mountain Dwarf ranger, and Yatzli is a spell-slinging Hearth Orlan.

I’ve been interested in Avowed since it was first announced all the way back in 2020 simply by dint of it being an Obsidian Entertainment RPG.

As the developers have shared more details, such as revealing the third-person mode, that interest has only steadily grown.

On that note, we do really need a release date for this — as well as Bethesda Softworks and MachineGames’ Indiana Jones and the Great Circle — soon.

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Odencat developer of Bear’s Restaurant, Fishing Paradiso and Meg’s Monster recently revealed their next little adventure game with Mousebusters.

The day after moving into your new living space, you wake up to find that you’ve been inexplicably transformed into a mouse.

Luckily, you soon meet a hard-boiled rodent with a crass but loveable manner of speaking who asks you to call him “Chief.” He claims he can help you turn back into a human…if you’re willing to undertake a few missions for him in return.

Together, you’ll form the titular team, and embark on expeditions to bust the ghosts that haunt each unit and break the curse on the apartment building.

It will have full Native Linux support and Steam Deck support.

You can follow it on Steam.

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While every month Valve has been posting a fresh set of the most played Steam Deck games for the previous month, they’ve now added a dedicated Steam Chart for it.

Like the most played for May and again for April.

So you no longer have to wait for Valve to post about what’s currently hot, you can just go and see for yourself.

Like other Steam Charts you can filter it and with the Steam Deck chart it lets you view the most played games over the last week, month and year based on player counts.

For example, this is for the last week, and handily it shows the Deck Verified rating too:

While you’re here, why not hop on over to our Forum to talk about Your favourite game so far of 2024?

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We’re told this “irregularity” was spotted inside TeamViewer’s corporate IT environment on Wednesday, and that the biz immediately called in reinforcements in the form of cyber security investigators, implemented “necessary remediation measures,” and activated its incident response team and processes, according to an announcement on Thursday.

The words “TeamViewer” and “security breach” will make a lot of people’s blood run cold given how pervasively it is used – in homes, organizations, and businesses – so a compromise of the platform could be devastating.

TeamViewer spokesperson Maria Gordienko declined to answer The Register’s specific questions about the incident – including whether it was ransomware or worse – citing the ongoing investigation.

It appears top infosec house NCC Group has already tipped off its customers to the security snafu, and blamed an unnamed advanced persistent threat (APT) team.

H-ISAC noted in its industry bulletin that it had been warned by a friendly intel partner that APT29 – aka Russian intelligence’s Cozy Bear crew – has been “actively exploiting Teamviewer.”

Which could mean the Russians are separately exploiting weaknesses within TeamViewer to get into people’s networks, or taking advantage of poor customer-side security to get in via the remote-desktop software.

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Four years after gamer celebrity and streaming star Dr Disrespect, 42, was banned from Twitch for undisclosed reasons, reports emerged this week that he had allegedly used the Amazon-owned platform’s direct messaging feature to send sexually explicit texts to a minor.

Renowned for playing battle royale shoot-em-up games in character as a kind of alpha jock sporting a thick mustache and mullet wig, he had signed a major multiyear deal with the company that March.

(Full disclosure: the primary author of this article, Rod Breslau, first learned the reason for Beahm’s ban from credible sources in June 2020, but chose not to report on it then due to the extreme sensitivity of the topic.)

“I went through a lengthy arbitration regarding a civil dispute with Twitch and that case was resolved by a settlement…But trust me when I say this…to all my haters that live and breath [sic] social media with zero real life experience, I don’t give a fuck about you.

As some of its streamers faced a flood of sexual misconduct allegations in June 2020, Twitch created an incident response team codenamed “Gold Sparrow” to develop a process to investigate and take action on the reports as one unit, the former employee says.

YouTube’s former global head of gaming partnerships at Google, Ryan Wyatt, confirmed to Rolling Stone that Beahm was not offered a contract due to chatter about the circumstances of his Twitch ban.

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The researchers’ approach involves two main innovations: first, they created a custom LLM and constrained it to use only ternary values (-1, 0, 1) instead of traditional floating-point numbers, which allows for simpler computations.

Second, the researchers redesigned the computationally expensive self-attention mechanism in traditional language models with a simpler, more efficient unit (that they called a MatMul-free Linear Gated Recurrent Unit—or MLGRU) that processes words sequentially using basic arithmetic operations instead of matrix multiplications.

These changes, combined with a custom hardware implementation to accelerate ternary operations through the aforementioned FPGA chip, allowed the researchers to achieve what they claim is performance comparable to state-of-the-art models while reducing energy use.

Researchers claim the MatMul-free LM achieved competitive performance against the Llama 2 baseline on several benchmark tasks, including answering questions, commonsense reasoning, and physical understanding.

The researchers project that their approach could theoretically intersect with and surpass the performance of standard LLMs at scales around 10²³ FLOPS, which is roughly equivalent to the training compute required for models like Meta’s Llama-3 8B or Llama-2 70B.

The article was updated on June 26, 2024 at 9:20 AM to remove an inaccurate power estimate related to running a LLM locally on a RTX 3060 created by the author.

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Another big upgrade for Steam desktop and Steam Deck fans, with Game Recording now in Beta allowing you to easily clip your favourite moments with no external apps needed.

It even makes sharing the clips relatively simple too with you being able to send it to different devices, like from a Steam Deck to desktop PC.

Valve said to expect more “upcoming features, including individualized game settings (coming soon)”.

Here’s a quick clip I recorded directly via Steam on my Kubuntu Linux desktop (game is Rack and Slay):

And a clip recorded from my Steam Deck LCD 512GB, which I then used the built-in feature to send it to my desktop and upload (game is Brotato):

Pictured - me editing the Brotato video clip included above, directly on Steam Deck.

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Chinese chip shop Loongson, which has built modest CPUs based on its own MIPS-like architecture, is on the march towards enterprise workloads.

The silicon slinger yesterday announced that 53 software developers have created 105 products compatible with its instruction set architecture (ISA).

Loongson’s list includes a server virtualization platform, a hyperconverged stack, and a cloud management product from the Chinese hardware maker.

Loongson deliberately eschews compatabiilty with either x86 or Arm in favour tech inspired by the permissively-licensed MIPS and RISC-V ISAs.

It’s been a good couple of weeks for the Chinese chip designer, which has also announced adoption of its silicon by a vendor of network-attached storage devices.

As is the news from last week that “nearly one thousand” desktops running on Loongson CPUs have found a home in one district of the city of Fuzhou.

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Back in 2021, Microsoft announced that it was working on a dedicated streaming device for Xbox Game Pass.

Unfortunately, it appears Microsoft has since scrapped plans to ship Xbox Keystone due to an inability to bring the price down to a level where it made sense for customers.

The closest we ever got was in a photo posted by Phil Spencer, which just so happened to include a front-on view of the Xbox Keystone device on a shelf.

Thanks to a patent discovered by Windows Central, we can finally take a closer look at the box Microsoft had conjured up internally.

Microsoft is known to be working on a mobile gaming store for Android and iOS of its own, but I have absolutely no idea how they’re going to get people to download it.

One day, cloud gaming could be indistinguishable from local playback, and platforms like NVIDIA GeForce Now is proving that the technology is completely and utterly viable.

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HORI, a manufacturer of popular gaming accessories have today revealed the Wireless Horipad for Steam.

The main thing that concerns me here for Linux and Steam Deck support, is their mention of a dedicated app for it.

We’ve seen before from the likes of 8BitDo, that certain buttons on their controllers (like back paddles) require a dedicated app and so cannot be configured directly on Linux / Steam Deck.

Back paddles and 2 extra custom buttons on the bottom.

Rapid fire ability on face buttons (ABXY).

Price according to their page is 9,780 Japanese Yen, so about £50 GBP / $60 USD.

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For starters, SteamIDFinder is using the current sale price of every game in your unplayed library, as confirmed by looking at a half-dozen “Pile of Shame” profiles.

Steam and I disagree on whether I’ve launched and played Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition (I definitely did and was definitely overwhelmed), Mountain, and SteamWorld Dig.

Even if they’re not dedicated tools, Steam libraries sometimes end up with little bits of game that you didn’t ask for and might never play, like Half-Life Deathmatch: Source.

So nobody I could easily poll had fewer than 25 percent of their games unplayed, and those with higher numbers tended to have bought into bundles, sales, add-ons, and other entry generators.

If you’ve looked up your own stats and feel surprised, you can keep your unplayed games as a dedicated collection in Steam, and it might inspire you to check out the most intriguing left-behinds.

Play what interests you when you have the time, and if your unplayed count helps you stave off your worst sale impulse buys or rediscover lost gems, so be it.

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This is the best summary I could come up with:

For starters, SteamIDFinder is using the current sale price of every game in your unplayed library, as confirmed by looking at a half-dozen “Pile of Shame” profiles.

Steam and I disagree on whether I’ve launched and played Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition (I definitely did and was definitely overwhelmed), Mountain, and SteamWorld Dig.

Even if they’re not dedicated tools, Steam libraries sometimes end up with little bits of game that you didn’t ask for and might never play, like Half-Life Deathmatch: Source.

So nobody I could easily poll had fewer than 25 percent of their games unplayed, and those with higher numbers tended to have bought into bundles, sales, add-ons, and other entry generators.

If you’ve looked up your own stats and feel surprised, you can keep your unplayed games as a dedicated collection in Steam, and it might inspire you to check out the most intriguing left-behinds.

Play what interests you when you have the time, and if your unplayed count helps you stave off your worst sale impulse buys or rediscover lost gems, so be it.

The original article contains 761 words, the summary contains 178 words. Saved 77%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!