The Verge’s gaming section brings the latest video game news, reviews of the most exciting releases, and interviews with the industry’s biggest names. We cover everything from PlayStation and Xbox blockbusters, to quirky Nintendo games, to the cool indie gems on PC and Android that you might otherwise miss.
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Steam streamlines its family sharing features
Steam won’t boot you when your kid loads up a different game than you now.
Stardew Valley’s next update, due out on PC tomorrow, has added a very special, very specific feature: the ability to drink mayonnaise. ConcernedApe, the cozy farming sim’s developer, tweeted the news without context or explanation. There is no information on whether this was the fulfillment a long-asked for feature or something else.
Tom Henderson at Insider Gaming reported GPU specifications and performance targets for a “PlayStation 5 Pro” on Friday, and now he says that just like the recently revised PS5, the Pro will also have a detachable disc drive.
Other new details include rumors of faster memory running at 576 GB/s (a 28 percent boost over the PS5), better audio performance, and a new “High CPU Frequency Mode” that boosts performance by 10 percent over the standard PS5.
Starship Home uses mixed reality to make your living room an intergalactic greenhouse
This Quest 3-exclusive spaceship sim will put you in charge of caring for the galaxy’s plants.
Larry Hryb, aka “Major Nelson,” did a little reminiscing on Threads this week, posting videos from his time with Microsoft’s Xbox division, which he departed from back in December.
One video is him running down features of the original incarnation of Xbox Live, but I’m more interested in this parody of defunct electronics store Crazy Eddie’s commercials — something the company did regularly.
When Warner Bros. announced it would be capriciously removing Adult Swim games from Steam, my heart went out to Duck Game developer Landon Podbielski, whose zany quackfest helps keep my circle of friends playing together year after year.
So I’m very pleased to report that Podbielski not only owns the rights to the Duck Game IP, he’s promising to keep it going: “I will never stop updating it as long as my hands and eyes work,” he writes. Full blog:
[Duck Game Unleashed]
We still don’t know much about the Among Us animated series, but the show has its crew, with a voice cast including Randall Park, Ashley Johnson, Yvette Nicole Brown, and Elijah Wood. Sounds like a group that would really love a pizza party.
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Mojang has just posted a warning that says you could lose all your worlds if you download the latest Minecraft update through the Xbox app.
To get around the issue, Microsoft says to run the Gaming Services Repair Tool for PC and then install the update. You can find more information about how to do this here.
Pocketpair CEO Takuro Mizobe says the studio is in talks to bring the game to more platforms beyond PC and Xbox.
The obvious question is whether the game, which has been nicknamed “Pokémon with guns” and has faced accusations of plagiarizing characters from Nintendo’s hit franchise, will ever come to the Nintendo Switch.
Bungie is launching a “big content update” for Destiny 2 players on April 9th, just as they eagerly await the The Final Shape DLC that was delayed until June. Destiny 2: Into the Light will “deliver new game content” free to all players throughout April and May. We don’t yet know exactly what kind of game content it will include, but Bungie is holding a live stream on March 19th to everyone more.
Given how litigious Nintendo is, the company’s reluctance to go after Palworld has raised a lot of questions about what might actually spur The Pokémon Company to claim of IP infringement.
Sales numbers and visual similarities are obviously part of the equation. But according to TPC’s former Chief Legal Officer Don McGowan, one of other big factors that plays into how fanmade projects wind up on Nintendo’s radar entertainment press coverage.
While everyone was getting worked up about the announcement of the next Pokémon game, the Toyota Engineering Society was busy working on a special project to create a life-sized Miraidon, the motorcycle-like legendary dragon mascot from Pokémon Violet.
Even though we’ll probably never get a chance to see the thing actually zooming around, it’s still cool as hell seeing it come together in this video about the collaboration.
Diablo IV is getting a ray tracing upgrade later this month. Armor, water, windows, and other reflective surfaces will all have ray-traced reflections for more detail and lighting accuracy. Shadows throughout the game will also feature ray tracing.
Nvidia is also bringing DLSS 3.5 to Portal with RTX. This should improve the fidelity of full ray tracing in the game, and you can enable Frame Generation on 40-series RTX cards to boost frame rates.
How Nintendo’s destruction of Yuzu is rocking the emulator world
Nintendo sued Yuzu into the ground. What happened next?
If you guessed Epic CEO Tim Sweeney, you’re right — and he said it to Valve’s face, later telling Gabe Newell he was among the “assholes telling the world that the strong and powerful get special terms, while 30% is for the little people.”
It’s from a cache of mostly redacted exhibits in a potential class-action lawsuit against Valve. Simon Carless dug them up, read more:
[newsletter.gamediscover.co]
Geoff Keighley’s Summer Game Fest will once again be the reason for the season with a slate of announcements and trailers beginning on June 7th. Keigh-3 will likely be one of several summer game showcases this year with E3 officially, no joke, for real this time, dead.
After paying £525 (about $670) for a PS3 dev kit, a Redditor has discovered an early prototype of the 2008-era first-person shooter, which was unceremoniously cancelled after developer Free Radical closed its doors. Depressingly, this isn’t the only Timesplitters game to have never seen the light of day. The reformed, Embracer Group-owned, Free Radical studio shut down last year and took its new Timesplitters game with it.
That’s almost a year after its 2023 PC release, but good news for anyone who’d rather try the surprisingly good retro shooter revamp on Xbox One, Xbox Series X and S, PlayStation 4, or PlayStation 5.
404 Media obtained internal emails about how a controversial Call of Duty-themed police recruiting poster was created — and before the backlash, the department was more worried about the publisher’s IP lawyers than comparing law enforcement work to a bloody military shooter. The department pulled and apologized for the ad last month; as far as we know, Activision has not publicly responded.
Stig Asmussen is best-known for directing Fallen Order and Survivor while at Respawn, and before that he worked primarily on the God of War franchise. Now he’s launching a new studio called Giant Skull that will focus on “gameplay-driven, story immersed action-adventure games set in captivating worlds.” No details on any projects yet, but the studio does at least have a logo.
Every desktop GPU should ship with four of these unholy things.
(Backstory: In 2013, Valve disavowed its involvement in the Xi3 Piston, a small gaming PC that was supposedly going to be a Steam Machine but shipped with Windows 7 instead. From the beginning, it had “DP/HDMI” stamped on its I/O shield — how did we miss it?!?)