The design was a collaboration between Microsoft and the artist GMUNK, and it's not like it was a secret or anything: There's been a post on GMUNK's website and a YouTube video of the thing in motion up online for nearly a decade. But I think we're all so conditioned to disregard or otherwise devalue so much of what we see, why on earth would anyone spare a thought for a corporate branding exercise destined to be replaced with videogame concept art or something anyway? I never consciously said "surely this image is CGI," I simply blanked out the default Windows 10 desktop background the way I might do to an advertisement or garbage post on Reddit.

But the fact that it came from a physical installation is mind-boggling⁠—with that knowledge, I look at the thing and wonder how it was even possible. GMUNK's webpage dedicated to the project explains it best, but basically: The artist shot different colored lasers and other light sources through a glass Windows logo suspended with wires, while the effect was further enhanced with billowing volumetric smoke pumped through the set. GMUNK captured the results with a high-speed camera, and the final image used in the Windows 10 desktop was a composite of several frames from the shoot.

The exercise definitely feels like it came from another era of tech marketing⁠—a slightly melancholic nostalgia piece from the freewheeling days of the go-go 2010s. I find myself pleasantly surprised that, just this once, something I had assumed to be more pointless visual noise from the computer was actually a genuinely interesting physical creation in the real world. You can check out some more shots from the photo shoot below⁠—my favorite is probably the red and pink variation on pitch black.

Of course, there were plenty of conventional fumbles too: Dissembling, dishonesty, and some straight-up bad calls provided plenty of "things that actually happened" for gamers to be unhappy about. From Facebook rejecting ads for board games to a weird cat game accused of being built with AI, here's our roundup of the year's biggest lowlights.

Facebook rejects ads for Votes for Women board game

Our face: 😕

What happened: When board game publisher Fort Circle attempted to purchase Facebook ads for a new edition of Votes for Women, a board game about the women's suffrage movement in the US, it received an unexpected surprise: Facebook said no. The problem, according to an automated response provided by Facebook to the publisher, is that the ad "mentions politicians or is about sensitive social issues that could influence public opinion, how people vote and may impact the outcome of an election or pending legislation."

The outcome: You might think that such patent stupidity is the result of a bad algorithm making bad decisions, as they do, and you'd be correct. But when Fort Circle requested a review of the ruling, that too was rejected. Not being able to run ads had a material impact on the Votes for Women crowdfunding campaign—"Most Kickstarter creators will tell you that Facebook advertising is a crucial piece of the crowdfunding puzzle," Fort Circle founder Kevin Bertram said at the time—but more broadly it points to a pretty serious failure in Facebook's review process.

Sweet Baby Inc sparks anti-woke outrage

Our face: 😡

What happened: In March, a little-known company called Sweet Baby Inc was suddenly thrust into the spotlight by "anti-woke" gamers outraged by, as one put it, the narrative consultants' promulgation of "ideological worldviews that I believe have taken hold of the Western world, media, and gaming as a whole." Which is of course nonsense: The company is contracted by developers who want to improve pre-existing elements of their games, and it has absolutely no power to force anyone to do anything—least of all make wholesale changes to their projects to enforce some sort of imagined "race and identity group quota."

The outcome: As ridiculous as it sounds (and is), the furor was (and is) real. A Steam curator group dedicated to "detecting" the presence of Sweet Baby Inc in games has now swollen to more than 460,000 followers, and the company was forced to lock its social media accounts following a torrent of abuse.

Fallout fans think Bethesda is trying to retcon New Vegas out of existence

Our face: 🤨

What happened: The Fallout TV show on Amazon was a hit, but it made some Fallout die-hards angry because of a perceived lack of faith to the lore. PC Gamer's Chris Livingston broke the whole thing down in detail, but the short version is that aggrieved fans believed Bethesda was using the Amazon show to erase Fallout: New Vegas—a fan-favorite in the series that was notably not developed by Bethesda, but by Obsidian—from the timeline.

The outcome: Reactions to the conspiracy theory varied: Showrunner Graham Wagner said the wasteland isn't static and sometimes things happen, New Vegas lead designer Josh Sawyer understands the annoyance but really doesn't give a shit, and Todd Howard, the man currently atop the Fallout creative mountain, expressed mild exasperation about the whole thing, promising that "New Vegas is a very, very important game" to Bethesda. Bottom line? Everyone needs to simmer down.

Escape from Tarkov infuriates players with a spectacularly botched PvE mode launch

Our face: 🤔

What happened: Battlestate Games shot itself in the foot real good in April with the release of a $250 Unheard Edition of the game that included, among other things, access to co-op PvE—a mode that owners of other editions would have to pay to play. What really stuck in the community's craw, though, was a previously-released $150 Edge of Darkness edition that promised "free access to all subsequent DLCs," but that did not offer access to the new mode. Battlestate argued that the PvE mode was not DLC but a "unique feature of the new game," and thus didn't count.

That went over about as well as you'd expect—extremely not well, to be clear—and Battlestate made the situation worse by dicking around with half-baked sops. It eventually offered six months of co-op play for free, but not until some future date because the servers don't have the capacity to handle everyone; on top of that, people who bought the $250 edition were promised priority matchmaking, meaning everyone else would be stuck in longer queues. They were also given access to in-game items protecting them from scavs and enabling more and better gear to be carried, conferring a distinct advantage over others, including those who bought the previously-prized $150 version.

The outcome: As PC Gamer's Jake Tucker said, Battlestate "wiped out years of goodwill in one catastrophic week," but somehow it wasn't quite finished stepping on the Lego it'd dumped on the floor. After initially offering owners of the Edge of Darkness edition of Escape from Tarkov an option to upgrade to the newer release for $100 (what a deal), Battlestate reduced the upgrade price to $50; players who had already forked over $100 for the upgrade were offered $50 in "compensation," in the form of a single-use Escape from Tarkov voucher.

Fallout 4's next-gen patch breaks everything, improves nothing

Our face: 😣

What happened: Not content to sit quietly on the sidelines and watch Battlestate blow years of goodwill to smithereens with unforced errors, Bethesda said "hold my beer" and rolled out a "next-gen" patch for Fallout 4 that PC Gamer's Ted Litchfield described as nothing short of "calamitous." It wasn't just that the update changed so little, it actually made things worse: The added ultrawide support borked the UI, modded saves wouldn't load, and frame rate was still capped at 60. Adding insult to injury, the update rolled out on the heels of the hit Fallout TV show on Amazon, which had sparked a whole new wave of interest in and excitement for the game series, and the mod team behind Fallout London had to delay the total conversion's release to be sure it'd be compatible with the new version.

The outcome: An update to the update rolled out a few weeks later, correcting a few issues but leaving the biggest problems for modders to fix. Many of them recommended the simplest fix of all: Use the Fallout 4 Downgrader tool to revert the game to a pre-"next gen" state and be happy with a game that works like it's supposed to. For the record, Fallout 4's next-gen patch hasn't been updated since.

Take-Two closes Intercept Games and Roll7, claims it didn't, but yeah, it did (and Kerbal 2 looks DOA)

Our face: 😵

What happened: The Kerbal Space Program 2 controversy actually kicked off in early 2023 with a catastrophic early access launch, but it took a weird, drawn-out twist in 2024. In May, it was reported that KSP2 developer Intercept Games, along with Rollerdrome studio Roll7, were being closed as part of sweeping layoffs at parent company Take-Two Interactive. But shortly after that report, the Kerbal Space Program X account piped up, saying, "We're still hard at work on KSP2. We'll talk more when we can."

Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick threw more confusion on the fire a couple weeks later, saying the closure report wasn't true: "We didn't shutter those studios, to be clear." Zelnick insisted he wasn't trying to be "cute or difficult" about the situation, but yeah, he was being kind of cute and difficult. Not too long after that, Intercept employees confirmed that large numbers of people at the studio, and possibly the entire team, was being laid off.

The outcome: In November, Take-Two sold its Private Division publishing label to an unnamed buyer, and at the same time finally confirmed that Intercept and Roll7 had in fact been closed at some point prior to the sale. Take-Two still hasn't explained what happened between 'we haven't closed the studio' and 'the studio is closed.'

As for Kerbal Space Program 2, it appears to be cooked: The KSP X account hasn't posted since the "still hard at work" promise in May, and the most recent game update—a relatively small bug-fix patch—went live in June. The game currently has a "mostly negative" overall user rating on Steam, and a concurrent player count that hovers around 100.

Sony goes to war over Helldivers 2's PSN requirement

Our face: 😐

What happened: Arrowhead's fascism-is-fun shooter Helldivers 2 was on a monster roll following its launch in February, but ran face-first into a concrete wall in May when Sony, the game's publisher, announced that players on Steam would be required to have a PlayStation Network account if they wanted to keep playing. That was the plan from the start, but the requirement was initially put on hold because of server issues when the game first went live.

That didn't mollify players, who came hard with the time-honored tradition of a review-bombing: More than 220,000 negative reviews flooded into Steam, dragging Helldivers 2's "overwhelmingly positive" rating to "mixed." Sony stood its ground briefly but eventually backed down, leaving Arrowhead to clean up the mess.

The outcome: An influx of positive reviews followed in the wake of Operation Cleanup, but like grassy fields in France that remain pockmarked with shell craters, evidence of the battle remains in the game's "mostly positive" rating on Steam: Good, but nowhere near what it used to be. And despite the debacle, Sony isn't giving up on the PSN account requirement on PC: President Hiroki Totoki said in November that linked accounts are necessary so people can "safely" play its games.

Tekken 8 pro loses World Cup qualifier after his wireless controller goes haywire

Our face: 😬

What happened: Things went sideways in a hurry for Tekken pro Kim "JDCR" Hyun-jin, who was about to claim victory against opponent Alexandra "AK" Laverez at Dreamhack Dallas when his controller crapped out, eventually determined to be the result of someone who was previously connected to the setup turning their controller on. That forced a redo of the match, and that didn't go over well: As PC Gamer's resident fighting game pro Mollie Taylor recounted, "Twitch chat can be seen saying things like 'JDCR won that fair and square,' 'JDCR ALREADY WON,' 'JDCR got screwed,' and 'Jdcr won. This is rigged'."

When the do-over match eventually went ahead, AK—who was undoubtedly going to lose prior to the technical trouble—came out on top, and the reaction was predictable. AK received "a heaping of rather undue hate," Taylor wrote: Some said he should have forfeited the match, others went so far as to claim that he'd intentionally sabotaged JDCR's controller connection in order to avoid a loss.

The outcome: JDCR ultimately finished ninth in the tournament, just missing out on a top-eight finish that would have earned him a qualifying position at the Esports World Cup. DreamHack founder Alex Jebailey said on Twitter that he felt "incredibly sorry for what happened" and that he'd help JDCR attend future qualifiers for another World Cup shot. But, he added, "the amount of death threats and crazy things being said to me are pretty horrendous."

Starfield gives us Horse Armor in space

Our face: 🤠

What happened: Starfield was a perfectly fine Bethesda RPG, but didn't quite live up to the pre-release hype. The mood among players soured further as months went by with minimal support, and the launch of the Starfield Creation Kit in June did not improve things.

The big problem was the release of a single Trackers Alliance mission called The Vulture that cost $7, which thanks to the magic of Starfield Creation Credits bundle pricing was in reality $10. Unhappy players likened the DLC to Oblivion's infamous Horse Armor, the 2006 add-on that heralded the era of cosmetic microtransactions.

The outcome: Horse Armor won in 2006, and despite the widespread early upset it looks like The Vulture did too: In response to the backlash, Todd Howard said "we hear the feedback" (ie., a small review bombing campaign on Steam) but Bethesda hasn't budget on the price, and it remains among the most popular of more than 2,700 Starfield creations.

Ubisoft grapples with Assassin's Creed Shadows blowback

Our face: 🤬

What happened: Assassin's Creed Shadows has been a nexus of anti-woke gamer upset since revealing Yasuke, one of its two protagonists. Yasuke is a real-life historical figure who lived in Japan in the 16th century and eventually became an attendant of Oda Nobunaga. He's an ideal fit for an Assassin's Creed character, but he's also Black, and that caused great distress among certain corners of the gaming world, who very suddenly discovered a new commitment to historical authenticity (it's widely believed Yasuke served as a samurai, but not known for certain) and felt that featuring him instead of a "real" Japanese samurai was disrespectful to Japan. X owner Elon Musk amplified that sentiment in May, replying to a complaint about the game posted on his platform that "DEI kills art." Ubisoft's ham-fisted efforts to address what it apparently imagined were good-faith concerns about the game, meanwhile, only made the whole situation worse. It got to the point where even Reddit was sick of dealing with it.

Other, more self-inflicted problems cropped up over the second half of the year. In July, Ubisoft apologized for using a real-life reenactment group's flag in Assassin's Creed Shadows concept art without permission, and in October the maker of a collectible said it would be redesigned following complaints that it bore a striking resemblance to the one-legged torii standing outside the Sannō Shrine, a remnant of the 1945 nuclear attack on the city of Nagasaki. Frankly, though, I don't think either issue would have attracted nearly as much attention had the anger pump not already been primed by the inclusion of Yasuke.

The outcome: Assassin's Creed Shadows was delayed in September to February 14, 2025, so we're still waiting to see how that works out, but it's been interesting watching Ubisoft grapple with the blowback. There seems to be confusion, or perhaps conflict, on how best to approach it: Executive producer Marc-Alexis Côté said in June that Musk was "feeding hatred," but in September, after announcing the delay, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot took pains to reassure everyone that "our goal is not to push any specific agenda" with games.

But Coté is having none of that, saying more forcefully in November that some of Assassin's Creed Shadows' loudest critics post "lies, half truths and personal attacks online," and that "when we self-censor in the face of threats, we hand over our power, piece by piece, until freedom and creativity both wither away."

Dr Disrespect finally confirms the reason for his lifetime ban from Twitch

Our face: 🤢

What happened: Guy Beahm, better known online as the streamer Dr Disrespect, was banned from Twitch for life in 2020. But the reason for his ouster remained a secret until June 2024, when a former Twitch employee alleged that Beahm was shown the door because he was caught "sexting a minor" through Twitch's Whispers messaging system.

A few days later, Beahm acknowledged exchanging messages with a minor in 2017 "that sometimes leaned too much in the direction of being inappropriate," but insisted that "nothing illegal happened" and that he never faced criminal charges as a result of his actions.

The outcome: The fallout was immediate and severe. Beahm was fired by Midnight Society, the game studio he co-founded in 2021, when the allegations first came to light; shortly after his public admission, 2K Games, Turtle Beach, the NFL, and YouTube also cut ties with the streamer.

Bungie lays off hundreds of employees as its CEO spends millions on cars

Our face: 😧

What happened: Destiny 2 studio Bungie laid off 220 employees in July, less than a year after an October 2023 layoff that saw a number of long-time and high-profile staffers put out of work. What really pissed people off, though, were claims that Bungie CEO Pete Parsons had spent more than $2.4 million on vintage cars over the two years leading up to the layoffs. Parson's money to spend, yes, and not a huge amount of it compared to the cash Destiny 2 has hoovered in over the years, but as PC Gamer's Harvey Randall put it, "Isn't it weird that he has so much of it while his now-former employees face anxiety over their basic living expenses?" Some former Bungie employees sure thought so.

The reaction to Parsons' vehicular habits was no doubt amplified to some extent by his public performance in the wake of those October 2023 layoffs, in which he did his best to present himself as an innocent bystander rather than a well-paid, still-employed studio chief. As one person said in response to Parsons' post about those layoffs on X, "Your senior social lead probably would have recommended against this post, which you would have known had you not let them go."

The outcome: Destiny 2 is still grinding along, but the road ahead hasn't gotten any smoother. In October, Sony carved off more of Bungie, making its Creative Studios arm a part of PlayStation Studios, and in December former Destiny 2 and Marathon director Christopher Barrett, who was fired in April over allegations of inappropriate behavior with female employees, sued the company for $200 million, saying Bungie "deliberately destroyed [his] reputation by falsely, and publicly, insinuating they had 'investigated' Barrett and 'found' he had engaged in sexual misconduct."

Russian chess player tries to poison rival with mercury

Our face: 😮

What happened: Amina Abakarova, a 40 year-old chess player from the Russian Republic of Dagestan, was scheduled to play Umayganat Osmanova, a 30 year-old longtime rival who had beaten Abakarova into second place in a tournament the week prior. Not wanting to risk a second consecutive L, Abakarova decided to up her game by smearing liquid mercury all over the chess board and pieces they were meant to use.

Mercury is of course very poisonous, and Osmanova began complaining that she was unwell, nauseous and dizzy around half an hour after the game began. Doctors were called in, and were fortunately able to prevent her from succumbing to the poison.

The outcome: Abakarova might be a really good chess player, but she's not much of a criminal mastermind. She applied the poison in full view of security cameras, and was thus quickly busted by police. She reportedly copped to the whole thing, not because she wanted to win the match but just because she really doesn't like Osmanova, and now she's facing up to three years in prison and a lifetime ban from competitive chess play.

It may not seem like a world-shattering controversy from our videogame-centric perspective, but it was a very big deal in the world of chess: Malcolm Pein of the English Chess Federation said he'd "never seen anything like this before," adding that it was "the first recorded case of somebody using a toxic substance, to my knowledge, in the history of the game of chess."

Black Myth Wukong studio steadfastly refuses to address allegations of sexism

Our face: 😒

What happened: Black Myth: Wukong is a good game and a major success, but it's also become a pivot point in the culture wars thanks to a 2023 IGN report on the long history of sexism at developer Game Science. The issue was put back under the spotlight in August 2024 when the studio sent out streaming guidelines just ahead of Black Myth: Wukong's release forbidding, among other things, "feminist propaganda" during streams.

Naturally, the usual parts of the Twittersphere were thrilled to see a developer being so "based," especially since Black Myth: Wukong was a hit, proof positive that 'real gamers' don't want politics in their videogames, or somesuch. Others viewed the whole thing more as just strange and a little creepy.

The outcome: Game Science has steadfastly refused to even acknowledge the issue: On multiple occasions, both before and after the streamer guidelines came to light, the studio has kept its head down and refused to comment on the controversy. Which may be a comment in itself: As PC Gamer's Wes Fenlon wrote, "It's hard not to read the silence as a sign that Game Science feels it has nothing to apologize for."

Mr Beast lawyers up

Our face: 😶

What happened: Mega-YouTuber Jimmy "MrBeast" Donaldson had a good first-half in 2024, with his main account becoming the most-subscribed channel on the platform in June, but a very bad second half, as his media empire became embroiled in multiple scandals. Longtime collaborator Ava Kris Tyson was accused of grooming a 14-year-old fan after an exchange of inappropriate messages came to light, and while Donaldson quickly cut ties with Tyson, more trouble followed. Contestants in his Beast Games competition, a real-life Squid Games knockoff, complained of poor treatment, and former employees came forward to say some elements of his videos were either faked or rigged—and that they'd been mistreated themselves.

The outcome: Rather than issuing the standard mea culpa that so often comes in the wake of this sort of thing, Donaldson is trying to power through it, keeping his head down, his mouth shut, and the videos rolling. So far it seems to be working: His subscriber numbers continue to climb, and his videos are still attracting hundreds of millions of viewers.

Peter Molyneux says he's "coming home" to PC

Our face: 🙄

What happened: Legendary game designer and bullshitter extraordinaire Peter Molyneux said in August that he's "coming home" to PC, which would've been exciting news in, say, 2006. But in 2024, the bloom is off the rose thanks to a long series of catastrophes including Curiosity, Godus and the follow-up Godus Wars, and Legacy, a blockchain-based business sim that raised a huge pile of money in pre-release land sales (although apparently not quite the $54 million claimed by some reports) and then immediately tanked.

Which isn't to say Molyneux's new thing, the god game Masters of Albion, will necessarily be bad. If anything, it actually shows some real promise: Superficially, it looks a bit like Populous mashed up with Fable, and if Molyneux's 22cans studio can pull it off, that definitely might not suck.

The outcome: Impossible to say at this point because nothing else has happened, but memories of the last decade-plus will not be forgotten, and that puts the whole thing in a deep hole right from the start. I hope he's able to climb out of it and clock us all in the head with one final, great triumph, but the days of granting Molyneux the benefit of the doubt are long over.

Sony pulls the plug on Concord less than two weeks after launch, and a lot of people are strangely happy about it

Our face: 😢

What happened: The online shooter Concord was one of the biggest, most spectacular flameouts in videogame history: After sinking vast amounts of money into the project, including the outright purchase of developer Firewalk Studios in 2023, mixed user reviews and abysmally low player counts sealed its doom immediately. Some hoped Concord might get a second shot at life as a free-to-play game, but Sony shot down that proposition in October: Concord, like the proverbial parrot, is dead.

The outcome: It was an ugly mess by any measure, but what was particularly notable in the wake of Concord's failure was the glee it prompted from some corners of the gaming world: Gloating, memes, and shared screenshots of the game's concurrent player count on Steam dominated the post-closure discourse. PC Gamer's Tyler Wilde said "the eagerness to grave dance on unpopular games has become a bad habit," and he's absolutely right. Concord was at best a perfectly fine shooter trying to break into a crowded genre where "perfectly fine" isn't nearly good enough, and there's plenty of space for analysis and discussion of how it all went so completely wrong. But cheering its loss—and the subsequent closure of Firewalk—does no one any good.

Dr Disrespect begins his comeback tour

Our face: 🤢🤢🤢

What happened: The Dr Disrespect comeback tour began in September with a 20-minute rant on his YouTube channel, in which he said his Twitch suspension was primarily the result of a conspiracy against him. But it didn't really kick into gear until October, when YouTube declined to remonetize his channel. In response, the streamer teased "something much, much bigger" in the works, which in November turned out to be a move to Rumble, the right-wing streaming platform that hosts the likes of Dan Bongino, Steven Crowder, Viva Frei, Russell Brand, The Quartering, and the Tate Brothers.

The outcome: Well, Dr Disrespect is on Rumble now. The numbers aren't nearly the same at this point—he's currently at a little over 76,000 followers on Rumble, a small fraction of the 4.55 million he'd amassed on YouTube—but he's not just streaming there: His deal with the platform includes equity in the company, and he will also lead Rumble Gaming, its videogame-focused livestream category. Lest there be any doubt about his commitment to the cause, the move came a month after he announced a line of "Make Gaming Great Again" merchandise modeled after the campaign slogan of US president-elect Donald Trump.

Twitch bans Arab streamers as it struggles (and fails) to come up with coherent moderation policies

Our face: 😠

What happened: Under pressure from the Anti-Defamation League, a major American non-profit that campaigns against antisemitism and promotes Zionism as a movement for "self-determination and statehood for the Jewish people in their ancestral homeland," Twitch banned several Arab streamers in October over a TwitchCon panel that had occurred a month earlier. Panelists had put together a tier list ranking various streamers from "Arab" to "loves Sabra", an American and Israeli-owned hummus brand; Twitch partner and panel host Frogan said the panel was about "who has a habibi pass" (habibi is Arabic for "my love") but the ADL characterized it as "antisemitic vitriol."

The ban came a week after Twitch suspended Asmongold for his racist tirade against Palestinians, and the discovery that Twitch had stopped signups with email verification from both Israel and Palestine for more than a year, which it said was done "to prevent uploads of graphic material" following the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023—a "temporary" measure it apparently forgot to reverse.

The outcome: Following weeks of back-and-forth complaints of Islamophobia and antisemitism on the platform, Twitch rolled out a policy requiring a warning label for streams about vaguely-defined "politics and sensitive social issues," which included discussions about topics including "reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ rights, or immigration." Twitch modified the guidelines a few days later to remove LGBTQ+ references but the rules remained too vague to be useful in any meaningful way; days after that, again under pressure from the ADL, Twitch forbid the use of the word "Zionist" to "attack or demean" other people or groups, but said it could still be used in its political context.

Elon Musk is going to "make gaming great again"

Our face: 🤡

What happened: X owner and soon-to-be co-president of the United States Elon Musk made the bizarre statement on his platform that "too many game studios that are owned by massive corporations," before promising that "xAI is going to start an AI game studio to make games great again!"

The outcome: Setting aside the fact that making games is really hard and nobody knows what an "AI game studio" is beyond some imagined Star Trek-style fantasy that doesn't actually exist, the statement was especially strange coming from a man with whose net worth is counted in the hundreds of billions—he's literally the wealthiest man on the planet—and who heads up a number of pretty famous "massive corporations" of his own.

The real motivation for Musk's promised move into the industry was revealed by a later tweet to be less about concerns over corporate ownership, and more about wanting games that "skip the woke lecture." The segment of the gaming community up in arms about "wokeness" in videogames was thrilled to see Musk wading into the fray, but there's been no more said about it since.

NZXT comes under fire for its Flex gaming PC rental program

Our face: 😔

What happened: Hardware maker NZXT came under fire in December for its Flex PC rental service, which a Gamers Nexus exposé called a "predatory, evil rental computer scam." Specific complaints included allegations that NZXT would sometimes swap out components in rented PCs with less powerful hardware, use seemingly false or misleading benchmarks, and lock rental customers into unfair contracts.

The outcome: NZXT defended its practices in response, but acknowledged that it "messed up" on some points. It committed to greater clarity on various points of the program and an end to "influencer-led" advertising, and also spent a good chunk of text laying out the "use case" for the Flex rental program, which NZXT said "allows for flexibility and lower commitment than owning or financing a PC." The response did not calm the waters: A video of NZXT CEO Johnny Hou discussing the matter has received 331 likes on YouTube, and more than 6,400 dislikes.

A weird game about cats sparks AI backlash

Our face: 🐱

What happened: Catly, a weird game about cats, dropped a reveal trailer at the 2024 Game Awards. Rather than being greeting with the presumably-expected "awww, they're so cute," though, the trailer sparked immediate speculation (and some straight-up accusations) that it was made with generative AI. The game itself, from the very little that could be seen of it, struck many as little more than an NFT showcase. Those concerns were heightened by reports that Kevin Yeung, the co-founder of developer SuperAuthenti, is also co-founder of TenthPlanet, a studio that definitely is (or at least was) working on blockchain projects.

The outcome: SuperAuthenti has been oddly quiet about the whole thing, although it did eventually state that Catly does not use AI and has "zero blockchain technology." Beyond that, we'll have to wait and see: A post-announcement update to the Steam page provided a closer look at what the game is all about, but more details won't be revealed until sometime in 2025.

Unlike most major players in gaming, Valve is privately owned, so information on the company—headcount, revenues, that sort of thing—is generally not for public consumption. But court documents related to the ongoing antitrust lawsuit filed against Valve by Wolfire Games in 2021 showed that Valve had just 336 employees that year.

That's bigger than a typical tiny startup, yes, but also a very small fraction of companies like Ubisoft, which reported 18,666 employees at the end of September 2024, Electronic Arts, which had approximately 13,700 people as of March 31, 2024, or Activision Blizzard, which counted approximately 13,000 employees at the end of 2022, in its final year-end report prior to its acquisition by Microsoft. In terms of headcount, Valve is significantly smaller than even Baldur's Gate 3 developer Larian Studios, which had 470 employees as of March 2024. (It will always be the quirky little outfit from Ghent to me, though.)

What's also a bit odd is that of those 336 employees, only 79 were directly working on Steam, even though Steam is, by a country mile, Valve's big money maker. 181 people were working in Valve's "Games" department, doing whatever, while 41 were in hardware development and 35 handled administration duties.

Wolfire criticized this breakdown in its lawsuit, saying Valve "devotes a miniscule percentage of its revenue to maintaining and improving the Steam Store." That criticism presumably isn't just about Steam store functionality, but also its moderation policies, which have been under fire for years for allowing hate groups and extremist content to flourish.

By another measure, though, Valve is absolutely monstrous. Documents from that same lawsuit also revealed that in terms of how much money it makes per employee, Valve towers over the giants of the tech industry. A Valve employee with a fondness for numbers and time on their hands broke down the company's internal figures and then compared it with companies including Apple, Facebook, and Netflix. The email chain is redacted so Valve's per-employee revenue generation isn't known, but the second-place finisher, Facebook, pulled in roughly $780,400 in annual net income per employee, so we at least know it's more than that.

Those calculations are based on 2018 numbers and so may be out of date, although Valve hasn't grown significantly since then and it's not as though Steam has suddenly stopped raking in money. Valve obviously isn't earning the revenues of the other companies on the list, but in terms of raw efficiency, that's huge. And, rather like how the low Steam headcount casts an unflattering light on its moderation problems, that kind of cash-crankin' might lead one to wonder whether Valve's 30% cut on Steam sales (with reductions based on sales volume) is in fact behind the times, as Wolfire, Epic Games, and others insist. On the other hand, nothing succeeds like success, and Valve doing so much with so little suggests it has to be doing something right.

2025 could be an interesting year for Valve: After years of slowly grinding through the process, Wolfire's antitrust lawsuit against Valve was certified as a class action in November, meaning it now encompasses "all persons or entities" who have sold games on Steam since 2017. That same month, US Senator Mark Warner sent a letter to Valve boss Gabe Newell warning of "more intense scrutiny from the federal government" if it doesn't crack down on extremist content on the platform.

You can watch a video of the October 23 event via TNT Sports Boxing on YouTube. Fury enters first, dressed normally⁠—for a boxer at a promo event at least, the man's still wearing a patterned blazer and a snapback. We then get Usyk's entrance, and he's in full Silent Assassin mode with a shaved head, black suit, red tie, leather gloves, a tactical-looking brief case, and a rendition of "Ave Maria" playing over the walkup straight out of Hitman: Blood Money. The real chef's kiss comes when Usyk reveals what's in the briefcase: A picture of Fury taking a punch to the face during a bout, which Usyk had his opponent autograph.

It's such an incredible bit, and I'm not just saying that because Usyk is an undefeated heavyweight boxer and I write articles for a living. The whole thing has, dare I say it, a touch of camp, and Usyk revealing the picture after so much build up is such a hilariously catty little gesture. Being able to commit to such a weird bit so fully as part of a multi-million dollar media event requires the paradoxical confidence to not take yourself too seriously. But also? Usyk got his man, just like Agent 47.

It's also such a weird, fun example of games' mainstream pull and recognizability. Hitman in particular is such a strange pull because it's a niche series of stealth games, but it's also internationally recognizable thanks in no small part to Agent 47's iconic design (and maybe also the significantly less iconic Timothy Olyphant movie). I'd love to hear an oral history of how this came about, but until proven otherwise, I'm just going to assume Usyk personally loves Hitman.

The arguments have been around forever, but they've been made concrete by the simple fact that, over the last decade in particular, we've seen more and more games simply disappear. And we're not talking about obscure hobbyist projects, but seriously big budget titles that companies have spent millions developing, and hundreds of devs have spent years of their careers on. 2024 even gave us the perfect poster boy: Concord, Sony's live service shooter that lasted all of 11 days before being taken out behind the sheds and unceremoniously shot in the head.

That seems incredible, doesn't it? Concord was a AAA shooter backed by PlayStation, one of the biggest and most-moneyed brands in gaming, and it didn't last two weeks. For the average punter, Concord may as well have never existed.

But Concord is just one high-profile example from dozens, and it feels like the combination of prominent games disappearing from storefronts and so many having online elements that will never work again has brought the issue to the fore of many more peoples' minds. Arguments about preservation for future generations may attract the wonks among us but, for the mainstream audience, it is now not uncommon to fork out $60 or whatever for a game that may well not be playable two years down the line, or at the very least compromised beyond the experience promised at launch. I don't envy folk trying to play Suicide Squad in a year's time (albeit in this case Rocksteady has committed to adding an offline mode).

The main way this growing concern found expression, or the most prominent at least, was the Stop Killing Games campaign. This was sparked by Ubisoft pulling the plug on The Crew in April this year, with the 10-year-old racing game now unplayable and no offline mode coming due to "server infrastructure and licensing constraints"—which upset fan and YouTuber Ross Scott enough to begin rallying support around the Stop Killing Games website.

The idea is to create a focal point for opposition to what Scott calls the industry's "assault on both consumer rights and preservation of media," and the site's purpose is to direct consumers towards other gathering points such as major online petitions and advise them on how to submit complaints to regulatory bodies like the DGCCRF, France's consumer protection agency. The legal argument is that videogames should be classed as "goods" rather than "services"—regardless of the terminology publishers use—and goods shouldn't be able to be rendered inoperable by the seller after consumers buy them.

OK: Some of the arguments seem a bit out-there. A proposed class-action lawsuit saying players of The Crew were "duped" by Ubisoft compared the situation to the publisher entering peoples' homes and stealing parts of a pinball machine. But other elements of it have the chance to enact real change by getting the regulators interested. Stop Killing Games is currently running a petition which, if it reaches a million signatures by July 2025, will oblige the EU to consider a ban on making multiplayer games unplayable (it currently has over 400,000 signatures).

This was also happening in a wider context of both publishers and regulators realising that, at the very least, there are some big questions to answer about digital ownership. Even if players might not like the answers. Steam added a new disclaimer about ownership which wasn't exactly new, but seemed forced by the rise in big publishers rendering games inoperable, and in some cases revoking their licenses. The message also followed shortly after a new Californian law that requires retailers to warn consumers that the digital games they buy can be taken away at any time—exactly what this message does.

Point with this example being that Valve appears to be looking at the California law and assuming that other states will follow suit, and dealing with it in the most simple way possible: Applying the new language to everyone, rather than responding on a state-by-state and region-by-region basis.

Never missing an opportunity to weigh in on such matters, GOG (formerly Good Old Games) took a moment to remind players that, hey, anything you buy from us is yours forever and cannot be taken away. But GOG does walk the walk, and this year committed to a new preservation program whereby it'll keep games like New Vegas running on contemporary systems in perpetuity, regardless of what publishers do.

Oh, and the final GOG hit. It'll now let you bequeath your library to someone: As long as you can prove you're actually dead.

GOG shows this is not just a matter of players versus the games industry. In fact, many industry grandees and studios think that actually the industry is doing a terrible job with this stuff, and giving players a raw deal in the process. Larian's director of publishing Michael Douse got all het up about Ubisoft's moves over the year, and flipped the tables on the publisher, saying that if players had to get used to not owning games, "developers must get used to not having jobs."

Not everything is quite so confrontational. Certain publishers are much more alive than others to the value of their back catalogues, and some like Capcom make their heritage a key part of their current strategy with rereleases and remakes. Across the industry there's more of a sense of the value of older games and, quite apart from the preservation angle, that will be what eventually inspires better practices from more publishers.

More and more, publishers are seeing the sense in partnering with companies who devote themselves to the practice of sprucing up and servicing old games. 2024 was another great year for Nightdive, for example, a studio that specialises in polishing up and remastering old classics, from System Shock to Dark Forces to The Thing.

"I was doing remasters even before I joined Nightdive," says Larry Kuperman. "One of the earliest ones was Total Annihilation, that I was involved in when I was at Stardock. We had a lot of resistance from people. I mean, it was taken as an art project, not a commercial project, because the thought was, well, who would ever buy these old games?

"They were great then and they're great now, and companies have begun to realize that and certainly we've had a leadership role in that. But we're not the only company doing that these days. Everybody is."

There are a lot of different issues smooshed together under the idea of ownership and preservation, and 2024 feels like the year that many came to much greater prominence for players and rule-makers alike. The question of whether you own your Steam games, for example, can fairly simply be answered right now: No, you don't. Valve can take them from you at a moment's notice and there's nothing you can do about it.

Many of us have known that for a long time, and traded it for convenience. But it feels like we're reaching a point where these platforms are so core to our lives in videogames, and the personal investment in them is getting so high, that the wider audience is no longer happy with that. More and more of us are realizing that, even if it feels otherwise, we don't own our games. And that there's no good reason to just accept that when there are alternatives.

Project 8 had been in development since 2018, according to a statement released on December 17 (via Insider Gaming), and was intended to be 11 bit's first-ever game "designed specifically for console gamers." But the project ran into trouble, particularly during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the most recent progress review found "unresolved issues and challenges that would require further extensions of the production timeline and corresponding budget increases to address."

Changes in the gaming landscape since 2018 have also dimmed Project 8's prospects for success in the studio's eyes: 11 bit president Przemysław Marszał said the game "was conceived under very different market conditions, when narrative-driven, story-rich games held stronger appeal." That led to revised sales forecasts, presumably in the downward direction, and thus management decided to pull the plug.

The number of employees put out of work wasn't specified but 11 bit said 37 people were working on Project 8 as of September 30, more than half of whom will be given the opportunity to move to other in-development projects, including The Alters, which is slated for 2025. The "phased nature" of the layoffs means the final reduction in headcount and total costs associated with cancelling Project 8 won't be known until the release of 11 bits' full-year report for 2024 early next year. An 11 bit representative told PC Gamer that approximately 15 people are being let go, and confirmed that the cuts are restricted exclusively to the Project 8 team.

The ugly plague of layoffs that made 2023 so awful for so many game industry employees has not abated in 2024, even in its dwindling days. The situation has grown bad enough that even Game Awards host Geoff Keighley, a man not exactly known for his eagerness to embrace controversy, acknowledged the problem at this year's event. December alone has seen layoffs at Warner, People Can Fly, Deck Nine, Illfonic, Ubisoft, Torn Banner, Sweet Bandits, and quite possibly others that went unnoticed in the deluge.

According to the press release, Sony spent 50 billion yen ($317 million) to increase its stake in Kadokawa from 2% to 10%—back of the napkin math thus has the company's overall value at just under $4 billion. The two companies say they "plan to discuss specific initiatives for collaboration, such as initiatives to adapt Kadokawa's IP into live action films and TV dramas globally, co-produce anime works, expand global distribution of Kadokawa's anime works through the Sony group, further expand publishing of Kadokawa's games, and develop human resources to promote and expand virtual production."

What I had feared since rumors of a potential acquisition first appeared was that FromSoftware would become a full-on first party Sony studio through this acquisition. Though Sony has been bringing more of its games to PC, it's always on a one-half to full year delay for blockbuster singleplayer games, like the kind FromSoft makes (the new multiplayer-focused Elden Ring: Nightreign notwithstanding). Further, the continued PlayStation exclusivity of the FromSoft and Sony Japan Studio-developed Demon's Souls and Bloodborne remains something of a defining console exclusivity original sin for PC gamers.

It's unclear how the deal might change the publishing of FromSoft's games moving forward⁠—the studio's go-to partner has been Bandai Namco⁠—but under this framework, PlayStation exclusivity of FromSoft's future games, timed or otherwise, doesn't seem likely to me. This increased stake may position Sony for a full acquisition down the line, but hey: Tomorrow's problems for tomorrow's me.

Maybe by the time that happens, Sony will have reached the point where it's fully simu-launching its games on PC⁠—not a far-fetched proposition, given the continued growth of PC gaming and relative stagnation of consoles.

Amir Satvat, the recipient of the first "Game Changers" award at this year's Game Awards, says he's received "countless hateful messages" as well as "disturbing comments" following his acceptance of the award last week, including antisemitic remarks about his wife.

"I am continuing to do my best to tune this out but it is quite extreme," Satvat said in a LinkedIn post.

During the event, Geoff Keighley admitted that he's "struggled" to know how best to address the unprecedented rash of games industry layoffs we've seen over the past few years. It was the first time the host and producer directly addressed layoffs at the awards, and the solution he came up with was to honor Satvat, a figure well-known in the games business for his efforts to help laid-off developers find new work.

A brief video segment described how Satvat's project has helped "place nearly 3,000 people in jobs," and Satvat accepted the award with a tearful speech in which he challenged the crowd to make the industry better.

Many viewers responded positively to the segment, including viewers in the industry, but some have criticized it as a cynical attempt to keep up the appearance of caring while celebrating the very people responsible for the poor state of the business—the executives in the audience whose companies ultimately fund The Game Awards. Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer, who oversaw Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard and the subsequent layoffs, is on the show's advisory board, for example.

Some critics went well beyond denouncing the awards, however: After the ceremony, Satvat himself came under attack for his job at Tencent, where he's been a business development director for about a year and a half. The suggestion going around social media is that Satvat was presented as a kind of folk hero, but is actually part of the problem—or even a sinister "industry plant" whose heartwarming story was entirely manufactured.

Satvat says that his job wasn't mentioned during the show because it's irrelevant. He began providing games industry job hunting resources before he started work at Tencent last year, and says that he doesn't deal with mergers there, didn't at his previous job at Amazon, and has never laid anyone off.

"I've never signed a contract or personally been part of a deal that led to job losses in my career," wrote Satvat. "In fact, in some instances, like at [Amazon Web Services], I put great effort into making sure hundreds of peoples' jobs were saved during moments of restructuring.

"I've also been accused of creating 'jail-worthy fraud' and mocked for 'just making one spreadsheet people enter info into,' usually by people who spent all of 8 seconds looking at our site with no understanding of the work we do or the impact we've had. We have 15 resources across 5 different resource homes and there is a lot of depth to our community, as any of you who have used it know."

I was aware of Satvat prior to the awards because, in the course of covering the industry's layoffs over the past couple years, his name has repeatedly come up in the aftermath of job cuts as the person out-of-work developers should seek out. I've understood him to be a well-liked figure whose efforts are genuinely appreciated by game developers who've lost their jobs over the past two years.

That impression is reflected in the many positive comments posted about Satvat following his acceptance speech, such as in the replies to this post on BlueSky. "Amir got me a union job in Game Dev in 2024," reads one. "He deserves the world."

The criticism, insults, and accusations Satvat is otherwise receiving don't appear to come from any one perspective—good faith criticism of The Game Awards is mixed in with shouting about China, antisemitism, and other staples of internet discourse most associated today with X.

"This can happen to you too when you sacrifice over 2,000 hours of your time to help the industry—this is the 'reward' for two years of service," Satvat wrote. "...I did not want to say anything but there have been too many comments about my family, about my wife, about her religious background, and other things that are way over the line for me not to say anything."

Satvat says that the post will be his last word on the negative comments, and that he will continue to pursue "positive, public service."

One source told the site that employees were informed there wasn't enough work to justify their continued employment during a videoconference meeting on Monday. Employees impacted by the cuts were then given two options at a second meeting: Accept assistance in finding a new job, or sign up for a recall list for when more work becomes available. The source added, however, that more work isn't expected until 2026.

The report says roughly 240 Keywords employees work as subcontractors at WB Games Montreal. While; Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League was developed by Rocksteady, WB Games Montreal is also credited for additional work on the game.

The actual layoffs are expected to occur in eight weeks, according to the report. Some employees expressed frustration at the short notice of the cuts: There was apparently no talk of layoffs at the company's biannual meeting in late summer, and sources said they were told there would be enough work to keep them on.

Neither Keywords nor WB Games have confirmed the layoffs, but the situation sounds similar to one that occurred at BioWare in September 2023, when 13 Keywords QA employees working on Dragon Age: The Veilguard were laid off. In that case, laid-off Keywords employees picketed BioWare's office in Edmonton to demand their reinstatement; Electronic Arts and BioWare had opposed the plan because the picketers weren't technically BioWare employees, but the Alberta Labour Relations Board sided with the workers, essentially saying that BioWare was their place of employment and thus they had a right to picket there.

This week's layoff notification reportedly came just ahead of the announcement of the official end of Suicide Squad support after four seasons. Multiple other studios have laid off employees in December, including Ubisoft, Torn Banner, Sweet Bandits, Illfonic, Deck Nine, and People Can Fly; the two-years-and-counting bloodbath that's gripped the videogame industry has grown bad enough that even the notoriously controversy-averse Geoff Keighley acknowledged the problem at last night's Game Awards.

I've reached out to WB Games Montreal and Keywords for comment and will update if I receive a reply.

And yes, there were awards, too. The big winner of the night was the PlayStation 5 exclusive Astro Bot, which claimed four wins including Game of the Year, followed by Metaphor: Refantazio, which took home three trophies. The much-loved card game Balatro also scored three times, and it pleases me greatly to say that after dominating the 2023 Game Awards, Baldur's Gate 3 came back to snipe another one, taking home the title for Best Community Support.

The full list of winners, and all the nominees, is below.

Game of the year: Astro Bot

• Balatro
• Black Myth: Wukong
• Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree
• Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth
• Metaphor: Refantazio

Best Fighting Game: Tekken 8

• Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero
• Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising
• Marvel vs Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics
• MultiVersus

Best VR/AR Game: Batman: Arkham Shadow

• Arizona Sunshine Remake
• Asgard's Wrath 2
• Metal: Hellsinger VR
• Metro Awakening

Best Esports Game: League of Legends

• Counter-Strike 2
• Dota 2
• Mobile Legends: Bang Bang
• Valorant

Best Esports Athlete: Faker (Lee Sang-hyeok)

• 33 (Neta Shapira)
• Aleksib (Aleksi Virolainen)
• Chovy (Jeon Ji-hoon)
• Zywoo (Mathieu Herbaut)
• Zmjjkk (Zheng Yongkang)

Best Esports Team: T1 (League of Legends)

• Bilibili Gaming (League of Legends)
• Gen.G (League of Legends)
• Navi (Counter-Strike)
• Team Liquid (Dota 2)

Games for Impact: Neva

• Closer the Distance
• Indika
• Life is Strange: Double Exposure
• Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2
• Tales of Kenzera: Zau

Innovation in Accessibility: Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown

• Call of Duty: Black Ops 6
• Diablo 4
• Dragon Age: The Veilguard
• Star Wars Outlaws

Best Family Game: Astro Bot

• Princess Peach: Showtime!
• Super Mario Party Jamboree
• The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom
• The Plucky Squire

Best performance: Melina Juergens (Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2)

• Briana White (Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth)
• Hannah Telle (Life is Strange: Double Exposure)
• Humberly Gonzalez (Star Wars Outlaws)
• Luke Roberts (Silent Hill 2)

Best Action Game: Black Myth: Wukong

• Call of Duty: Black Ops 6
• Helldivers 2
• Stellar Blade
• Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2

Most Anticipated Game: Grand Theft Auto 6 (duh)

• Death Stranding 2: On the Beach
• Ghost of Yotei
• Metroid Prime 4: Beyond
• Monster Hunter Wilds

Best Multiplayer Game: Helldivers 2

• Call of Duty: Black Ops 6
• Super Mario Party Jamboree
• Tekken 8
• Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2

Best Community Support: Baldur's Gate 3

• Final Fantasy 14
• Fortnite
• Helldivers 2
• No Man's Sky

Best Art Direction: Metaphor: Refantazio

• Astro Bot
• Black Myth: Wukong
• Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree
• Neva

Best Game Direction: Astro Bot

• Balatro
• Black Myth: Wukong
• Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree
• Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth
• Metaphor: Refantazio

Best Action Adventure Game: Astro Bot

• Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown
• Silent Hill 2
• Star Wars Outlaws
• The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom

Best RPG: Metaphor: Refantazio

• Dragon's Dogma 2
• Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree
• Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth
• Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth

Content Creator of the Year: Caseoh

• Illojuan
• Techo Gamerz
• Typicalgamer
• Usada Pekora

Best Sports/Racing Game: EA Sports FC 25

• F1 24
• NBA 2K25
• Top Spin 2K25
• WWE 2K24

Best Sim/Strategy Game: Frostpunk 2

• Age of Mythology: Retold
• Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess
• Manor Lords
• Unicorn Overlord

Best Ongoing Game: Helldivers 2

• Destiny 2
• Diablo 4
• Final Fantasy 14
• Fortnite

Best Adaptation: Fallout

• Arcane
• Knuckles
• Like a Dragon: Yakuza
• Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft

Best Score and Music: Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth

• Astro Bot
• Metaphor: Refantazio
• Silent Hill 2
• Stellar Blade

Best Independent Game: Balatro

• Animal Well
• Lorelei and the Laser Eyes
• Neva
• UFO 50

Best Debut Indie Game: Balatro

• Animal Well
• Manor Lords
• Pacific DRive
• The Plucky Squire

Best Mobile Game: Balatro

• AFK Journey
• Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket
• Wuthering Waves
• Zenless Zone Zero

Best Audio Design: Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2

• Astro Bot
• Call of Duty: Black Ops 6
• Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth
• Silent Hill 2

Best Narrative: Metaphor: Refantazio

• Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth
• Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth
• Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2
• Silent Hill 2

Game Changer: Amir Satvat

Players' voice: Black Myth: Wukong

Vincke started off by saying that not only will he be the first person to know who wins game of the year tonight, he also knows who will win the next year, and the next year, and the year after that. He learned this information, he said, from an oracle, who told him that change is coming.

"The oracle told me that the Game of the Year 2025 is going to be made by a studio who found the formula to make it up here on stage," Vincke said. "It's stupidly simple, but somehow it keeps on getting lost. A studio makes a game because they want to make a game they want to play themselves. They created it because it hadn't been created before. They didn't make it to increase market share. They didn't make it to serve the brand. They didn't have to meet arbitrary sales targets, or fear being laid off if they didn't meet those targets.

"Furthermore, the people in charge forbade them from cramming the game with anything whose only purpose was to increase revenue and didn't serve the game design. They didn't treat their developers like numbers on a spreadsheet. They didn't treat their players as users to exploit. And they didn't make decisions they knew were short-sighted in function of a bonus or politics. They knew that if you put the game and the team first, the revenue will follow. They were driven by idealism, and wanted players to have fun, and they realized that if the developers don't have fun, nobody was going to have any fun. They understood the value of respect, that if they treated their developers and players well, the same developers and players would forgive them when things didn't go as planned. But above all they cared about their games, because they love games. It's really that simple."

This isn't the first time Vincke has spoken out against profit-driven industry practices that have led to a decimation of the videogame industry over the past few years. In March, he blasted the corporate "greed" that's devastated game studios, saying. "I've been fighting with publishers my entire life, and I keep on seeing the same mistakes, over and over and over. It's always the quarterly profits. The only thing that matters is the numbers."

The situation has grown pressing enough that even Game Awards host Geoff Keighley, who faced criticism for avoiding the topic in 2023, addressed it directly during an early portion of the show. The first-ever Game Changer award to be handed out at The Game Awards was in fact given to Amir Satvat, for his work in supporting laid-off game developers as they seek new employment in the industry.

As is his way, Vincke ended his story on an upbeat note. "Winning Game of the Year turned out to be a life-changing event for us. It was an amazing thing. To those who will win game of the year 2024, you have no idea what's waiting for you. It's an incredible honor, and you're in for a heck of a ride. And remember, should you be told to wrap it up for tonight, you can always come back next year and chat for three minutes."

Vincke was famously hit with the "please wrap it up" sign during his Game of Year acceptance speech for Baldur's Gate 3 in 2023. It's nice to see he doesn't hold a grudge. And, believe it or not, Baldur's Gate 3 did win yet another award at The Game Awards tonight—for Best Community Support.

"The sad reality is that over the past few years the gaming industry has suffered significant and unprecedented industry-wide layoffs," Keighley said.

"Those affect the games we get to play and even more importantly, the people who make the games we love. We can debate and certainly disagree with the reasons why, and honesty as a show, we kind of struggle with how to address these topics in a constructive way."

But this year, Keighley said The Game Awards "found greatness" in Amir Satvat, selected as the recipient of the first-ever Game Changer award for his work in helping thousands of laid-off developers find their way back to the industry. Amir's Games Jobs Resources website contains a wealth of information and assistance including support postings, career planning, job listings, and networking.

"To all game makers everywhere, you are seen and treasured, and our community will always be there to help you," Amir said during his acceptance speech. "Over the last three years, we've lost more than 34,000 jobs, a staggering amount of games experience eliminated. This has consequences. You can't make great games without great people."

"This case is about Defendants’ textbook scapegoating of Christopher Barrett, who was, until recently, one of the most respected artists in the videogame industry," the lawsuit states. "Defendants deliberately destroyed Barrett’s reputation by falsely, and publicly, insinuating they had 'investigated' Barrett and 'found' he had engaged in sexual misconduct.

"Defendants did not care that none of it was true; they had blatant motivations for their brazen scheme: (i) to avoid paying Barrett the nearly $50 million he is owed under his employment agreement, and (ii) to shift blame for and deflect attention away from their massive business failures. And to achieve those corporate objectives, they were willing to sacrifice Barrett."

A long-time Bungie employee with credits going back to Myth 2 and Halo: Combat Evolved, Barrett was highly regarded among Destiny fans and seen as one of the key drivers behind the Forsaken expansion that was widely viewed as righting the Destiny 2 ship when it launched in 2018. In 2023, he was selected to direct Bungie's Marathon reboot, but a year later he was unexpectedly replaced in the role by former Valorant game director Joe Ziegler.

Barrett updated his X profile to indicate he'd become "executive creative director" at Bungie, but a Bloomberg report in August said he'd been fired in April, a month after his replacement as Marathon director, following an investigation into multiple complaints about inappropriate workplace behavior. Multiple sources told the site that at least eight women had complained about him, and a subsequent investigation found that he had called lower-ranking female employees attractive, asked them to play Truth or Dare, and talked about his wealth and power within Bungie, apparently suggesting that he could help their careers at the company.

In the immediate wake of the allegations, Barrett denied any intentional wrongdoing. "I feel that I have always conducted myself with integrity and been respectful and supportive of my colleagues, many of whom I consider my closest friends," he said in a statement. "I never understood my communications to be unwanted and I would have never thought they could possibly have made anyone feel uncomfortable. If anyone ever felt that way about their interaction with me, I am truly sorry."

Now he's pushing back more forcefully. The lawsuit claims that after a "remarkable ride" over a 25-year career at Bungie, during which he "drove the artistic development of some of the world's most legendary video games franchises," he was removed from his role by Sony, "acting in concert with Bungie," in a "premeditated scheme to terminate Barrett, avoid paying him the tens of millions of dollars he was owed, and make him a scapegoat for Defendants’ business failures and reputational issues."

Barrett claims he was never shown the alleged inappropriate communications during an investigative interview with a member of Sony's legal team, nor was he asked whether he'd engaged in "inappropriate sexual conduct," or had retaliated or discriminated against other employees for rebuffing his advances. Instead, he was "asked questions about run-of-the-mill communications" involving routine workplace interactions.

"Less than three weeks after this interview, Barrett was notified via Microsoft Teams that he had engaged in unspecified 'gross misconduct' and would be terminated for 'Cause'," the lawsuit states. "Defendants refused to explain further and told him that nothing he could say would make a difference, despite never giving him a chance to engage with the allegations in the first place."

The suit further claims that Sony and Bungie followed this up by providing "wildly misleading statements" to Bloomberg insinuating that he had engaged in sexual misconduct: "Defendants did not care if the public was misled. Indeed, that was the point. Barrett’s high standing within the company and the industry made him the perfect scapegoat to conceal Defendants’ significant cultural problems and business failures."

As a result of Sony and Bungie's actions, the lawsuit says Barrett "has been the subject of harassment and public ridicule, has lost friends and professional opportunities, and has seen relationships with family strained. His lifelong dream of launching his own videogame company (once within reach for a respected designer of multiple legendary games) has been crushed. All in the name of advancing Defendants’ selfish corporate interests."

Barrett is seeking $200 million in his lawsuit, including $45,579,627 (plus interest) owed under his employment agreement, another $45.5 million for violation of Washington state's Wage Rebate Act, and "not less than $100 million" in defamation and punitive damages. He's also asking for reinstatement as Franchise Game Director on Marathon, the position he held prior to his dismissal.

Separate from the lawsuit, it really bears stating that $45.5 million is an extraordinary amount of money to be paid to a single developer, even one as highly placed as Barrett. Sony spent lavishly to keep experienced developers around when it acquired Bungie in 2022—roughly $1.2 billion of the $3.6 billion purchase price, in the form of "deferred payments to employee shareholders, conditional upon their continued employment, and other retention incentives," went toward employee retention—but so much going to one guy is astonishing, and it naturally leads to questions about what other senior staff at Bungie might have earned as part of the deal.

I've reached out to Sony and Bungie for comment on the lawsuit, and will update if I receive a reply.

In regards to game updates generally, Valve says Steam "continues to try to strike a balance between keeping your games ready to play and efficiently using your bandwidth." The automatic settings that most of us will have enabled sees Steam prioritising updates for games you've recently played, and bundling together updates for games you haven't recently played for later download (and you can of course mess around with this queue and tell it to do what you want).

Valve says this is fine for "most cases," but it's adding increased control because "some users might want to delay updating a 200GB game until they are ready to play it again in a few months, especially if they are on metered connections or have monthly bandwidth caps. For others who play the same game every night, they might want updates downloaded as soon as they are available."

This instantly makes a lot of sense. I've had God of War: Ragnarok sitting on my PC for months now (190GB!) being updated, and all I do is keep on playing Counter-Strike 2. I want updates for the latter instantly downloaded, but I don't really need every update for Ragnarok until I decide to sit down and play it.

The new section is added to the "Downloads" tab in the Steam client, and you can set the default to "let Steam decide when to update the game (based on factors like when you last played the game, bandwidth availability, etc.) or wait to update until the game is launched." You can also set specific game overrides by selecting "Game Properties" on titles in your library, and these overrides will be viewable in the "Downloads" section under "Manage Exceptions."

I'm in the fortunate position of having a fairly fast and unmetered connection, but the use case here is undeniable because game file sizes really have got stonkingly big. To take a few recent examples, Stalker 2 will use up about 154GB of storage: But as anyone who's installed it will know, since release it's had multiple enormous patches, some of which involve redownloading the entire game. Others like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Black Myth: Wukong and the Horizon games all gobble up well over 100GB.

There are real outliers beyond that too, like Ark: Survival Evolved, which has a base install size of around 130GB that can balloon into 300GB+ if you start acquiring expansions and DLC. If you're a glutton for the big bois, here are the real mighty storage hogs.

Amusingly enough, Valve signs off with a minor humblebrag about Steam's "robust set of existing download options," which to be fair are as good as it gets, and says it wants to hear from any users about settings they'd like to see that the client doesn't currently have. There's no real rule-of-thumb for when the company rolls out beta features to Steam more generally, but non-beta users should expect to see these new options soon.

People Can Fly CEO Sebastian Wojciechowski said is a message posted to social media that the layoffs are the result of a change in the studio's self-publishing strategy, which includes the suspension of Project Victoria, a reduction of the team working on Project Bifrost, and "restructuring some of our supporting teams."

"The videogame market is still evolving, and we have to adjust with where things are today," People Can Fly CEO Sebastian Wojciechowski wrote. "We are redoubling our efforts with new work for hire engagements and focusing on the development of a single independent game.

"We believe in our teams, games, and their potential, and we remain extremely committed to continuing that journey, but we need to tailor our plans to our financial capacity."

People Can Fly's website says the studio has more than 700 employees, presumably a pre-layoff headcount.

Neither Project Victoria nor Bifrost had been publicly revealed, but People Can Fly have been working on both for at least two years. The studio referenced the games when it announced the end of its publishing deal with Take-Two Interactive in 2022, saying it would self-publish both. But it's had a rough time of things since then: Project Dagger, which it had been developing in partnership with Take-Two since 2020, ran into trouble in 2023 and was eventually axed earlier this year.

Layoffs suck, and the decimation of the videogame industry we've witnessed over the past two years is an ongoing indictment of executive leadership virtually across the board. But as we said last week when Ubisoft, Torn Banner, and Sweet Bandits imposed layoffs of their own—which came just weeks after layoffs at other studios including Thunderful, Humanoid Origin, Reflector Entertainment, and Worlds Untold, and just before layoffs at Illfonic and Deck Nine, in case there was any doubt that there's something very wrong here—the timing of these cuts, which come just 15 days before Christmas, makes them especially ugly.

This will be the second round of layoffs at People Can Fly in 2024—the first happened in January, when more than 30 people working on yet another project, codenamed Gemini, were let go.

As posted to both Bluesky and X, the site was "taken down by Funko of 'Funko Pop' because they use some trash 'AI Powered' Brand Protection Software called Brand Shield that created some bogus Phishing report to our registrar, iwantmyname, who ignored our response and just disabled the domain."

Itch.io later clarified that it "did take the disputed page down as soon as we got the notice because it's not worth fighting stuff like that. Regardless, our registrar's automated system likely kicked [in] to disable the domain since no one read our confirmation of removal."

If you're curious about BrandShield, it's an AI-powered "solution" to things like phishing attempts, fraudulent websites and, with relevance to this specific case, "brand protection". While it's borderline impossible to pierce through the thick fog of business-speak (the world "holistic" is thrown around a bunch) to find a promise that BrandShield actually has people who know what they're doing vetting these takedown requests, the site's page on brand protection describes the specifics of its zealotry.

"You will expose your brand to online attacks if you only protect your registered domain. Make sure to also protect yourself from external digital threats and monitor these important elements," the site states, before listing "visuals of both company logos and product images" and "written and recorded content" as risk factors.

As for the page in question, Itch.io's creator breaks it down in a thread on Hacker News: "From what I can tell, some person made a fan page for an existing Funko Pop video game (Funko Fusion), with links to the official site and screenshots of the game. The BrandShield software is probably instructed to eradicate all 'unauthorized' use of their trademark, so they sent reports independently to our host and registrar claiming there was 'fraud and phishing' going on, likely to cause escalation instead of doing the expected DMCA/cease-and-desist."

Leafo states they'd received reports from their host to take the page down, and had done so days in advance: "I expressed my disappointment in my responses to both of them but told them I had removed the page and disabled the account. Linode confirmed and closed the case. iwantmyname never responded. … I noticed that the domain status had been set to 'serverHold' on iwantmyname's domain panel. We have no other abuse reports from iwantmyname other than this one."

Taking all of this at face value (I have reached out to Funko for comment, and will update this article if I receive a response) this really does seem like a domino-effect snafu powered by AI and, well, incompetence. Automated technology overreacted, as it tends to do, while Itch.io's domain host dragged its feet. As a result, one of the biggest hosts of indie games lost out on hours of potential revenue—which has a knock-on effect to the developers using the website to peddle their virtual wares. It looks like it's mostly been resolved, with Itch.io back online at the time of writing. But phew, at least Funko's brand is protected—that was a close call, everybody.

"Today, we are sad to share the news that we must say goodbye to some of our talented team members," the message, attributed to Deck Nine CEO Mark Lyons, begins. "This was an extremely difficult decision and reflects the challenging times many companies in our industry are currently facing. We are extremely grateful to every individual who has dedicated their hard work, passion, and commitment to making transformative entertainment with us.

"To those of you leaving the studio due to these changes, thank you for sharing your talents with us. We are proud of what we were able to accomplish together and we are committed to supporting you in this transition in any way we can. To the community, we ask for your support and understanding during this difficult time."

Deck Nine's first round of layoffs this year came in February, well before the release of Double Exposure, and were attributed to "worsening market conditions." This year's cuts also came after Deck Nine let go of an estimated 30 people back in May 2023. Deck Nine took over stewardship of the Life is Strange series from Don't Nod, producing the Before the Storm prequel game, 2022's remastered collection, and the follow-ups True Colors and Double Exposure.

Deck Nine's layoffs are part of the much-discussed wider contraction in the industry, and while that general crisis remains ongoing, the timing of this latest round of layoffs strikes me as a likely indicator of poor sales performance by Double Exposure, which came out in October. In our review, PC Gamer features producer Mollie Taylor found it to be an entertaining, but largely unnecessary sequel, writing that "Double Exposure does a lot of retreading old narrative ground of its predecessor: dead besties, sus teachers, secret societies, a third girl whose mystery permeates the overarching story… you get it."

The possibility of a buyout was first reported in October, although at that point it seemed more of a kick-around idea than anything else: Ubisoft is in trouble, and something—just about anything—needs to be done. This new report, citing two people "familiar with the matter," sounds like more of a concrete step forward, in the sense that there is an active push toward making it happen.

The sticking point, according to the report, appears to be over who's left in charge if a deal is done. Sources cited by Reuters say the Guillemot family, which founded Ubisoft in 1986, want to retain control of the company. Tencent, Ubisoft's second-largest shareholder and the Guillemot's presumptive partner in this boardroom boogie, wants more say in board-related matters, and is reportedly waiting for an agreement on that front—which, as I take it, essentially means capitulation—before committing to financing the deal.

It's an interesting spot for the Guillemots. Ubisoft fought a protracted war several years ago to maintain its independence from Vivendi, the French media conglomerate that launched a hostile takeover bid in 2016, and CEO Yves Guillemot has been clear in subsequent years that he has no interest in being acquired by anyone.

But Ubisoft is also struggling badly right now: Sales of Star Wars Outlaws, which should have been a sure-fire hit, were "softer than expected," and Assassin's Creed Shadows, the next addition to Ubisoft's biggest and most popular series, was delayed for three months at the last minute, from November 15 to February 14, 2025.

More recent news has not been better. Earlier this week, Ubisoft pulled the plug on XDefiant, its planned Call of Duty competitor—an especially ugly move because it happened less than three months after executive producer Mark Rubin insisted XDefiant "is absolutely not dying." The end of XDefiant also resulted in the layoff of up to 277 employees, and the closure of two production studios.

All of that is bad news for gamers, but the real issue is Ubisoft's financial position. The company's share price has slid from a high of more than $85 in early 2021 to just over $13 today. Whether anything ultimately comes from these negotiations is an open question for now, but pressure from shareholders is growing, and that puts a timer on things: If the Guillemots don't do something, they may soon find that something is done for (or to) them.

A PC Game Pass membership grants access to a big library of games that includes '90s classics like Sim City 2000, more recent classics like the Mass Effect trilogy, and really recent classics like Stalker 2 and Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, which we just awarded a glowing 90% in our review. Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is also available on Game Pass, and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle will be there when it releases on December 9.

For a chance to receive a free month of Game Pass, enter your email address in the form below. This Friday, December 6, 2024 at 12 pm PT, codes will be emailed to 1,000 randomly selected entrants. (If you don't see the form, you can also enter here.)

We won't use your email address for marketing purposes; it'll only be used to send you a code if randomly selected.

The codes are redeemable at https://microsoft.com/redeem, and must be used by December 31, 2024. New Game Pass members who sign up with a code will get one free month of the service. Heads up that you'll have to include a payment method when you sign up, and your account will renew at the standard price unless you cancel it before the end of the free month. For existing Game Pass members, a conversion rate applies.

Here are the official terms from Microsoft:

Redeem at microsoft.com/redeem by 12/31/2024. Valid payment method required. Unless you cancel, you will be charged the then-current regular membership rate when the promotional period ends. Limit: 1 per person/account. Subject to the Microsoft Services Agreement, Game Pass terms and system requirements at: xbox.com/subscriptionterms . For existing Game Pass Ultimate members, a conversion ratio applies; conversions are final.

Good luck!

There's more info about the prize below, but first things first, here's the link to the survey:

Click here to take the PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted survey

The survey can be filled out until December 12, and the optional prize draw is entered by submitting your email address at the end of the survey. You must be a resident of the US or UK and be at least 18 years old to be eligible to win (with some exceptions listed on the survey page). More terms and conditions here.

If you're not eligible for the prize draw, we still want to know what you think, and you're welcome to fill out the survey.

Miss this year's PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted? Catch up on all the announcements and reveals here. (And then come back and tell us what you thought!)

Be sure to check out the four special collector's edition covers this issue, too (see below), which feature four of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33's lead characters.

This issue also features our prestigious Game of the Year Awards. This is a process that PC Gamer takes incredibly seriously, with games and winners decided after weeks of voting and deliberation. Emotions run high, passionate pleas are made to fellow team members, but in the end only a small selection of games can go on to win one of PC Gamer's coveted awards. And this year the competition has been fiercer than ever before. This is your definitive celebration of the last year in PC gaming.

Then, in terms of previews, this issue is stuffed to bursting. From the action-filled multiplayer extraction shooter Arc Raiders, to the shiny remaster of classic action-adventure game The Thing, and through to Mirthwood, Wizordum, EVE: Frontier, Beyond Astra, Beyond.Frontiers, Spirit of the North 2, Pip My Dice and Citizen Sleeper 2, we've gone hands-on and eyes-on with a bunch of exciting new games.

Meanwhile, over in reviews land, the PC Gamer scoring machine has rated a host of big-name games this issue, including Dragon Age: The Veilguard, MechWarrior 5: Clans, Starship Troopers: Extermination, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and Planet Coaster 2. If you're looking for advice on what game to pick up for some holiday fun, this issue definitely doesn't disappoint.

All that plus a group test of six of the best gaming mice on the market, a reinstall of cult classic action RPG Path of Exile, a dramatic new installment in our hijinx-filled Alpha Protocol diary following the misadventures of intern Mickey T, a look at an incredible new parkour mod for Assassin's Creed 2, a love letter to the best combatants in versus fighters, grapplers, a detailed guide to mastering Diablo IV: Vessel of Hatred, a special report on making Ossian Studios' Pathfinder: The Dragon's Demand, the latest dispatch from The Spy, a new case to be cracked for the PCG Investigator, Dick Ray-Tracing, and much more too. Enjoy the issue!

Issue 404 is on shelves now and available on all your digital devices from the App Store and Zinio. You can also order directly from Magazines Direct or purchase a subscription to save yourself some cash, receive monthly deliveries, and get incredibly stylish subscriber-only covers.

Enjoy the issue!

"Today we had to accept the harsh reality that the state of the industry has impacted us here at Illfonic," co-founder and CEO Charles Brunghardt wrote in a message posted to LinkedIn. "It is with the heaviest of hearts that cuts to our teams had to be made today as we re-aligned to a refined strategy."

Brunghardt didn't say how many employees were put out of work, but former community and social media manager Michael Robles said on LinkedIn that "a lot of very talented people were laid off."

Illfonic was founded in 2007 and found success, despite some high-profile troubles, with Friday the 13^th: The Game. We quite liked it, and it was a success, selling almost two million copies over its first few months of release. But work was brought up short in 2018 by a dispute over ownership of the Friday the 13^th property. Illfonic's follow-up games did not fare as well. Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed was not great and failed to attract much of an audience, while the multiplayer horror game Killer Klowns From Outer Space, released earlier this year, was better received but also garnered little attention.

Like yesterday's layoffs at Ubisoft, Torn Banner, and Sweet Bandits (and the late November shutdowns of Humanoid Origin and Worlds Untold), these cuts seem especially brutal because of their proximity to the holidays. In the bigger picture, though, they represent an industry in a state of freefall, put there by Covid-19 mismanagement and the relentless pursuit of profit. As I said earlier today, because this keeps happening so often and so quickly, 2023 was awful and 2024 is set to be even worse: This kind of attrition is simply not sustainable, and yet at this point I don't have much hope that things are going to be meaningfully better in 2025.

In terms of raw numbers, the Ubisoft layoffs are the deepest cuts. The decision to end development of the free-to-play shooter XDefiant, coming less than three months after executive producer Mark Rubin insisted "the game is absolutely not dying," means the closure of Ubisoft's San Francisco and Osaka studios (although Ubisoft's San Francisco business office remains open), and a "ramp down" of the company's studio in Sydney. A total of 277 people are expected to lose their jobs: 143 from the San Francisco studio, and another 134 "likely to depart" from Osaka and Sydney.

Sweet Bandits, the developer of vintage spycraft extraction shooter Deceive Inc, has closed outright. "There is no easy way to say this: The Sweet Bandits team is no more," the studio announced in a message on the Deceive Inc forums. "After a long and difficult road of trying to get Deceive inc. in a state where it could thrive, we have reached the breaking point for the studio, unable to continue this adventure with you."

Sweet Bandits said it is "considering options" for the future of the game, which will be handled by publisher Tripwire Interactive, and for now the servers will continue uninterrupted. The number of people now heading into the holiday season without jobs wasn't revealed, but the studio's website says it had 18 employees.

Torn Banner Studios, best known as the developer of the Chivalry games, also made "the very difficult decision to undergo a restructure and reduce some of our talented workforce," CEO Steve Piggot said in a message posted to LinkedIn. Piggot didn't say how many people were let go, but senior 3D artist Andrew Waddingham said "many" employees were put out of work, while character artist Matheus Paiva described it as a "mass layoff." Torn Banner's website says it had more than 150 employees prior to the layoffs.

While Chivalry 2 was a success, it never put up massive player numbers, and received its final update in May 2024. No More Room in Hell 2, Torn Banner's current project, has struggled: Its early access launch in October was plagued with bugs and server problems, and the average concurrent player count sagged to just a few hundred almost immediately. Piggot said the studio remains "fully committed" to a 1.0 launch in 2025.

These layoffs are the latest in a decimation of the videogame industry that's been ongoing for the past two years: 2023 was a brutal year for layoffs and 2024 has been even worse, according to the public Game Industry Layoffs tracker hosted by Obsidian Publishing, which estimates that 14,000 people have been put out of work so far. The timing of these latest cuts is especially ugly, coming just weeks before the holiday season, but it's far from a sudden uptick: November saw layoffs at studios including Thunderful, Humanoid Origin, Reflector Entertainment, and Worlds Untold.

Tomorrow, the PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted returns. To guide us all through the insurmountable onslaught of new and upcoming PC games (14,000 new games have released on Steam in 2024, yow), our end-of-year PC Gaming Show counts down the 25 Most Wanted games as determined by The Council, our very own panel—or secret society, depending on which rumors you believe—of games industry luminaries.

The Council unites renowned developers like Brenda and John Romero, New Blood Interactive's Dave Oshry, and Tanya X. Short of Kitfox Games with trusted streamers and content creators like CohhCarnage, Missmikkaa, DansGaming. From our list of 100 nominees featuring games of every genre, scope, and level of weirdness, The Council votes to select which games on the horizon are most worthy of your attention.

Counting down the Most Wanted will be regular host and esports presenter extraordinaire Frankie Ward, who'll be joined by the narration talents of Baldur's Gate 3's Amelia Tyler, who together will present the show from a stylized subterranean lab—a fitting venue to reveal the Most Wanted. Alongside the rundown, the show will also feature new trailers, exclusive announcements of new games, and developer interviews for upcoming games like Avowed, Cairn, Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector, Killing Floor 3, and many more.

Some of these interviews will take the form of behind-the-scenes visits to locations like Iceland and Baltimore that PC Gamer traveled to, where we met with the developers of some of the hottest upcoming PC games.

Here's how to watch the PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted live as it airs:

How to watch the PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted

The PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted 2024 airs tomorrow: Thursday, December 5 at 12pm PST / 3pm EST / 8pm GMT / 9pm CEST.

The show will be streaming on Twitch, YouTube, Ginx, Steam and China's Bilibili platform. Dedicated streams with localized subtitles in English, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, Japanese, French, Korean, German, ASL, and BSL will be broadcast, all of which can be found at PC Gamer's YouTube channel.

Co-streamers including Esfand, MissMikkaa, CohhCarnage, DieHardDiva, Elajjaz, GRONKH, XopO and SodaPoppin will also be broadcasting their live reactions to the Most Wanted countdown and reveals.

If you can't bear the wait until the stream goes live, check out PC Gamer's Bluesky and X accounts, where we've been posting cheeky teasers about the games and developers we'll be featuring throughout the show.

In a statement about the lawsuit, News Media Canada president Paul Deegan argued that "these artificial intelligence companies cannibalize proprietary content and are free-riding on the backs of news publishers who invest real money to employ real journalists who produce real stories for real people.

"They are strip-mining journalism while substantially, unjustly, and unlawfully enriching themselves to the detriment of publishers."

The suit was filed on Friday, and calls for a share of any profits OpenAI made from the use of articles from these companies, an injunction on OpenAI's continued use of any content from them, and damages of up to $20,000 per article used by OpenAI to train its LLMs. Given the dragnet nature of AI model training and the sheer number of individual articles likely in question, OpenAI could be liable for catastrophic damages if the court rules in the media companies' favor. The companies behind the lawsuit include:

• The Globe and Mail
• The Canadian Press
• The CBC
• The Toronto Star
• Metroland Media and Postmeda

I'm not usually one to lose any sleep over the protection of corporate copyright, but it's starting to become clear that copyright law may prove an effective defense against AI companies swallowing up the internet whole and spitting it back out to us in diminished form. OpenAI is currently also fending off copyright lawsuits from the New York Times and a class action of authors including George R.R. Martin, while Elon Musk has also sued OpenAI in a bit of palace intrigue between him and other co-founders of the supposed non-profit.

None of the competing PC game stores can hold a candle to Steam for volume or name recognition, so most of them have to find other ways to stand out. Bundles, flash sales, a focus on classic games, maybe more competitive regional pricing; whatever the technique, you can save a good bit by shopping around.

Or just by reading this article, since we've already done the shopping around for you. Here are the best Black Friday game Steam key deals we've found at legitimate stores (don't worry, there's no sketchy too-good-to-be-true aftermarket stuff here). Keep in mind a few of the deals won't actually be for games you can activate on Steam; GOG, for instance, has its own launcher, but also offers games that are completely DRM-free, so you don't even need a launcher to play them. And while the prices are listed in USD, most or all of these deals should be available in other regions, too, at comparable discounts.

👉 We're curating the best Black Friday PC gaming deals right here 👈

Quick links

Here are the Steam sale alternatives to check over the Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend:

• Fanatical - Flash sales change every 24 hours, while franchise bundles offer deeeeep discounts
• Humble Store - In addition to its great bundles, Humble breaks deals down into nice $5 / $10 / $20 categories
• Green Man Gaming - Get mystery freebies and extra discounts when you buy from the Black Friday sale
• GOG - Likely the best prices on CD Projekt games, and nicely curated classics for dirt cheap

The best Black Friday Steam sale alternative game deals

👉Check out all the Amazon Black Friday PC gaming deals right here👈

Overgrowth developer Wolfire originally filed suit against Valve in April 2021, contending that Valve uses Steam's dominance in the PC gaming marketplace to suppress competition and extract an unfairly high cut of sales made through the store. The case was dismissed in November of the same year, but Wolfire was given 30 days to amend and refile its complaint, and so it did, bringing the case back to life in 2022. In July of that year, Wolfire's suit was combined with a similar antitrust lawsuit filed by Dark Catt.

The suit has ground on through various bits of legal wrangling since, but this latest decision is interesting because it broadens the action to include, well, just about everyone. The ruling (via GamesIndustry) certifies the class as "all persons or entities who, directly or through an agent, paid a commission to Valve in connection with the sale or use of a game on the Steam platform on or after January 28, 2017, and continuing through the present until the effects of its scheme are eliminated (the 'Class Period'), and where either (1) the person or entity was based in the United States and its territories or (2) the game was purchased or acquired by a United States-based consumer during the Class Period."

The "commission" would be Valve's cut on sales made through Steam, which starts at 30% and drops to 20% as sales increase. Valve defended the percentage as "industry standard" when Wolfire's lawsuit was first filed, but that's no longer the case: The Epic Games Store and Microsoft both take just 12% of sales made through their stores.

There's still a long way to go before this is all settled, but the class action certification means that if Wolfire and Dark Catt eventually prevail, Valve could be on the hook for a lot of money in compensation payments. Speculatively, that might be enough to inspire some fresh thinking about Steam's revenue share policies.

"It is an honor to represent the interests of all PC game developers as we fight to ensure that competition is not being unlawfully restrained," Wolfire founder and CEO David Rosen told PC Gamer. "We’re committed to letting the facts speak for themselves and trust the legal process to thoroughly and fairly evaluate our claims."

Valve took another bump in the ruling as the judge denied its request to exclude the testimony of Dr. Steven Schwartz, called by the plaintiffs as an expert witness. "Dr. Schwartz’s methods are reliable and within the norms for admission," the ruling states, while Valve's arguments against his inclusion "go to the weight of the evidence, rather than admissibility."

I've reached out to Valve and Wolfire for comment on the ruling, and will update if I receive a reply.

Musk's latest outburst came in response to Dogecoin co-creator Billy Markus, who said he doesn't understand how game developers and journalists have become "so ideologically captured," particularly given that gamers—real gamers, one must assume—"have always rejected dumb manipulative BS, and can tell when someone is an outsider poser."

"Too many game studios that are owned by massive corporations," said Musk, the owner of X, SpaceX, and Tesla, whose personal net worth is somewhere north of $322 billion. "xAI is going to start an AI game studio to make games great again!"

Lest there be any doubt about his motivations, Musk wrote in another post, "Can't they just make good games and skip the woke lecture?"

This is all deeply, despairingly stupid, starting from the very premise that a giant corporation is going to save videogames from, uh, giant corporations. xAI is a "startup" but currently has at least 100,000 Nvidia GPUs at its disposal, meaning it's already a multi-billion-dollar operation. Musk's concept of an "AI game studio" goes entirely unexplored, but is presumably some sort of holodeck-inspired nonsense that, much like the promise of near-future offworld colonization, lives entirely in the realm of fantasy.

Despite the obvious ridiculousness of the whole thing, Musk's tweet is getting traction from predictable corners of the platform, who are thrilled with the prospect of game ownership being returned to the people (which is to say the wealthiest man in the world). At least one actual game designer doesn't appear to be buying it, though.

Say what you will about Battlecruiser 3000 AD, but he's not wrong.

The likelihood of this going anywhere beyond a stupid idea expressed in a stupid tweet is very slim, but I do harbor some small hope that Musk will talk himself into it, much like he talked himself into having to buy Twitter. If that happens, I would also expect similar results. Amazon and Google, both virtual bottomless money buckets themselves, discovered the hard way that making and releasing videogames is actually really difficult.

I've reached out to X for comment on Musk's latest idea, and will update if I receive a reply.

But Yoshida's real legacy for PlayStation is the senior roles he's held since the early 2000s, first as vice president of Sony Computer Entertainment America, then senior vice president of SCE Worldwide Studios USA—and from 2008, president of SCE Worldwide Studios. Over this time Sony enjoyed the colossal success of the PlayStation 2 and dominated the console market for a spell, before the leaner times of PlayStation 3. But it was with PlayStation 4 that Yoshida became a more public-facing figure for the brand.

The highlight? It has to be PlayStation's response to the disastrous reveal of Xbox One in 2013. Microsoft had made a mess of the console's announcement, and people especially hated that Xbox One would stop you sharing your physical games with friends. Sony's savage response to this was 21 seconds long, and arguably the greatest gaming roast of all time.

Yoshida stepped down as president of SIE Worldwide Studios in 2019, and has since then focused on nurturing smaller titles for the platform as the head of Indies Initiative. To mark his departure he's been interviewed on the PlayStation podcast, and is charming as ever. "It’s like announcing the launch date of a new game," chuckles Yoshida, "[something] I haven’t done for a long time."

Yoshida says "I’ve been with PlayStation from the beginning, and this is my 31st year with PlayStation. And when I hit 30 years, I was thinking, hmm, it may be about time for me to move on. You know, the company’s been doing great. I love PS5, I love the games that are coming out on this platform. And we have new generations of management who I respect and admire. And I’m so excited for the future of PlayStation.

"So you know, PlayStation is in really good hands. I thought, okay, this is my time."

Elsewhere Yoshida reflects on joining Ken Kutaragi's team in February 1993, when they were still building the first PlayStation console. "Ken’s team had only engineers," says Yoshida. "Everyone was engineers. And I was the first non-technical person to join the team at the company." Sony Computer Entertainment would be founded in November that year, and Yoshida remembers the thrill of bringing a genuinely disruptive product into the console marketplace. "We were so excited about the innovation that Ken’s team was bringing in, like 3D graphics, real-time technology, and CD-ROM with lots of data that we can put in with a low cost of manufacturing. And so we had really high hopes, high ambitions.

"However, we were not known in the videogame industry. And there were other electronics companies, big companies that tried to enter the videogame industry and, you know, didn’t do well. So at the beginning before the launch of PlayStation, I think we were not taken very seriously from the industry, to be honest."

Consumers, on the other hand, couldn't wait to get their hands on PlayStation, and one of the major factors in its success was the third party licensing: Its success is unimaginable without launch titles like Ridge Racer and Tekken, nevermind later classics like Resident Evil, Final Fantasy 7, and Metal Gear Solid.

Yoshida is at one stage asked about his best memories at PlayStation. "One time [that] stood out for me in my memory as something really, really special was when Journey got the Game of the Year Award," says Yoshida. "Journey was distributed through PlayStation Network. It was a digital-only, small game. You can finish playing the game within like three hours.

"But that game … [won] Game of the Year against all these AAA titles, I think for the first time in the industry … the creator Jenova Chen did a talk at the summit, and he talked about a letter he received from a girl who lost her father and she thought about her father and she was able to move on in her life.

"The whole audience stood up and the whole room was filled with happiness and an amazing feeling that this small game could have such a big impact on people’s lives."

You can tell he's loved the job: "When I was managing, working with big studios, making AAA games was great." Yoshida says he stumbled into his most recent role because he was always finding indie titles at events and would "take a photo with the developer, trying to help promote these games … that’s what I was doing almost as a hobby. So when I got this job where I could spend 100% of my time helping indies, it was like a dream job."

It is obviously a form of madness trying to guess the personality of corporate executives, but Yoshida has always struck me as an extremely nice man, and in every picture or presentation seems to have a mischievous glint in his eye. He'll officially retire from Sony in January 2025. And then, finally, all those Microsoft executives can stop having nightmares about one smiling Japanese man, and his retail copy of Killzone.

Hudson announced Humanoid Studios, as it was originally known, in June 2021, just six months after his surprise departure from BioWare. In 2022, he revealed the studio was working on a "multi platform AAA game, focusing on character-driven narrative in an all-new science-fiction universe," which sounded like a natural fit: During his long tenure at BioWare, broken up by a three-year split from 2014 to 2017, Hudson led the development of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and the original Mass Effect trilogy.

But while Hudson said the studio had a "playable prototype" in July 2022, nothing beyond a few pieces of vague concept art was ever shown publicly. Hudson said the studio is "heartbroken that we will not be able to bring our new science-fiction universe to completion," adding that the focus now is on supporting employees "in their transition to new employment."

"In our time together, the team achieved incredible progress, and demonstrated that it's possible to do amazing work while fostering a culture of fun and creativity," Hudson wrote. "We thank them for their talent, courage, and friendship."

While Hudson's project is now defunct, other efforts to recreate Mass Effect-style magic headed up by former big names at BioWare continue: Mac Walters is heading up a new NetEase studio developing "a near future action adventure game in a breathtaking world filled with mystery and exploration," while James Ohlen and Drew Karpyshyn are working together on Exodus, "a new AAA science fiction action-adventure role-playing game."

See, the thing is, alt-tabbing or checking your phone is "taking you out of your game" and Microsoft just won't let that stand: "We believe there’s a better way." It's announced Edge Game Assist, a bespoke in-game version of Microsoft's browser that integrates with the existing Game Bar on Windows 11 (press WinKey + G).

Game Assist will recognise certain compatible titles and automatically suggest guides and information about them, though players can also use it to manually search. At launch, it has what Microsoft calls "game aware" support for nine titles, including Baldur's Gate 3, League of Legends, and Minecraft.

The big selling point, so to speak, is that Game Assist can be pinned on top of the game you're playing, the idea being that you can follow a guide without having to alt-tab out and check where you are. This window can be re-sized and moved to your preference, and the feature also works with YouTube videos, so you can have one playing away while you go through the game. I mean, if that's your thing.

Game Assist can also be used to bring up the likes of Discord, Spotify and Twitch, and boasts that it integrates all your browser data from Edge: So it shouldn't be asking you to login to things again. There is a short and rather bizarre YouTube video showcasing the feature which is unlisted on the official Microsoft Edge YouTube channel: Subscriber count, 18.3K. Ouch!

Game Assist is available in preview now via Microsoft Edge Beta 132, and the corporation says more compatible games will be added over time (though it can be used with any game as-is, it just won't have custom recommendations). Microsoft says it'll be gathering feedback and improving this before a wider release, and has a community portal where users can vote on the features they'd most like to see.

So I'm not sure who was asking for this, but here it is. Among the odder use cases Microsoft suggests is watching a TV show while you play, while it also ominously promises an optimised sidebar that "makes it easy to find the services that matter most" while gaming. That's me in the Lands Between, always looking for services.

On a more serious note, I'm not sure what niche this is filling: The difference between pressing WinKey+G or Alt-Tabbing seems much of a muchness. There are definitely use cases I can see, like having a video chat with your mates overlaid on the game you're playing, but this can already be done easily with Discord Game Overlay, and I'm not sure I ever use guides enough to want them pinned on top of the actual game. On top of that the browser lacks functionality like right-clicking on links and images (unlike for example the Steam browser), which you just know is going to be annoying at some point.

One thing did make me smile: You have to set Edge as your default browser to check this out. Microsoft never misses a chance to try and pull that one. Some might feel I'm being mean, because there isn't much about Game Assist to dislike. But it does feel a tiny bit like an overwrought solution in search of a problem.

"This version of the Steam client will no longer run on Windows 7 or Windows 8," reads the accompanying documentation of the November 5 Steam client update. "Users on these OS versions will not automatically update to this new version of the Steam client."

Really, the news is less that you can no longer download the latest version of Steam on Windows 7 and 8, but that it took this long to happen after Valve announced the end of support for them back in January. "We expect the Steam client and games on these older operating systems to continue running for some time without updates after January 1st, 2024," Valve wrote on the Steam support website at the time, "but we are unable to guarantee continued functionality after that date." According to Valve, the embedded version of Google Chrome required for core functions of the Steam client was the impetus for the move⁠—it just doesn't support older versions of Windows anymore.

As of October's Steam hardware survey, only .28% of users were still on Windows 7, while there were no reported users at all on Windows 8. Not only is that one final damning indictment of the awkward, touchscreen-centric Windows 8 before it's gone for good, that Windows 7 figure is actually kind of confounding⁠—that's higher than the percentage of Windows 7 and 8 users combined in the December 2023 Steam Hardware survey PCG senior editor Wes Fenlon cited at the beginning of the year!

If you're still gaming on Windows 7 in 2024, especially if you installed Steam in just the past year, please drop me a line. You are fascinating. If you're still gaming on Windows 8 and just skipped the survey, it's about time you upgraded that college laptop⁠—you've more than gotten your money's worth.

Steam launched in 2003, initially as a way for Valve to automatically ship updates to players of its existing games. "Gabe [Newell] in particular, he had a pencil sketch of an idea in his head of what would become Steam," says Erik Johnson. "But it was clear with Team Fortress Classic and then Counter-Strike that fundamentally the thing we were really attracted to was the ability to ship content directly to our customers.

"I mean, there was a set of business goals that ended up being part of Steam. But fundamentally it was a bunch of game development goals that it was servicing that was so attractive to us."

Newell may have had some idea of where he eventually wanted this thing to go, but Steam wasn't initially being built to distribute games: Until someone had a lightbulb moment.

"We ended up going out and finding this company called Applied Micrososystems," says engineer Yahn Bernier. "So we ended up hiring most of the original Steam team from that other company to build initially this sort of in-game advertising streaming model but then there was this epiphany that, 'Hey, it's just bits. Why don't we just download whole games this way? You guys go off and do it.'"

Steam would eventually begin selling third-party games in 2005. But well before that point Valve had made the major decision that Half-Life 2, which would release in November 2004 and was easily the most-anticipated PC game of its era, would require Steam to play. Readers of a certain vintage may even remember that, at the time, this got a lot of angry pushback from elements of the PC gaming community, aghast at being forced to install an additional client in order to run a game they'd paid for.

"The decision not just to ship Half-Life 2 with Steam but to actually require Steam, even with the versions that were purchased at retail in a box, was the most interesting decision of all those," says Greg Coomer, who worked with Gabe Newell at Microsoft before becoming one of Valve's first employees. "Because it turned out to be an incredibly important decision for the future of the company, and a lot of us were nervous, and a lot of the people who'd been at Valve for a long time, since the very beginning, were the most nervous about that decision.

"So it was one of the rare exceptions to our [usual] decision-making process, and Gabe had to really step in and say, 'No, actually we're doing it this way.'"

The consequence of this decision was that Half-Life 2 became not only a best-selling smash hit for the company, but one whose very success made it a phenomenal Trojan Horse for Steam as a platform. Steam was a digital storefront that was already installed on your PC when most of us hadn't heard the words "digital storefront" before. Put like that, it almost seems like a fait accompli: But no one at the time, outside of Valve, thought Steam would work.

"It was a very weird time," says Gabe Newell. "I don't think people understand how many times we would go to people and say, 'No, you will be able to distribute software over the internet' and have people say, 'No, it will never happen.' I'm not talking about one or two people. I mean like 99% of the companies we talked to said 'It will never happen. Your retail sales force will never let it happen.'

"But also people would say, 'Users aren't gonna want this... people want physical copies.' There were so many bad faith arguments that were being made. Retail sales is not the goal, right. It's actually an impediment, it's somebody who sits between you and the customer."

This is one of the consistent things about Newell and Valve people generally: Most answers end up back at the user.

Valve's hegemony over PC gaming is one of those facts that elicits strong reactions. Some folk, and they're not wrong, bristle at its sheer dominance, its ability to set the terms for developers, and the control wielded over the PC gaming landscape by one company. Another perspective might be that Steam does have competition, albeit no equals, and if one company is going to be in that position, well, Valve certainly ain't the worst: And does seem acutely conscious of its responsibilities to developers as well as players.

Whether what exists now resembles that "pencil sketch" Gabe Newell had in mind… well, only he knows. But its success can arguably be put down to two facts above others. Valve saw which way the wind was blowing before most everyone else: And it had one hell of a delivery vector ready to go.

Ybarra says that FromSoftware is "incredible," creating games that are "AAA and epic," whatever that means. "The only thing bigger would be buying Valve or Nintendo," Ybarra concludes. "And I don't see either of those happening in any scenario. Exciting times."

Now listen, I agree that Sony snagging a juggernaut like Kadokawa is a pretty big deal. The conglomerate has its fingers in all sorts of pies—videogames, film, anime and manga, the latter of which Sony has undeniably been trying to increase its ownership of in recent years—but I'm not sure I'd exactly liken it to a Valve or Nintendo-level acquisition. Hey, maybe I'm wrong, and I'm greatly underestimating Kadokawa's power.

I do find it interesting that Ybarra is only focusing on the FromSoftware part of the potential acquisition here, too. Like I said, Kadokawa encompasses far more than that, and I'd bet that Sony has its eyes on far more than just the videogame developers it could get its hands on. After all, Sony already owns Crunchyroll, which it merged with its earlier acquisition of Funimation back in 2022. Anime and manga feels like one of those corners of the industry that's not slowing down anytime soon, and I wouldn't be surprised if Kadokawa's giant publishing operations are the bigger prize to come out of all this. Though say it with me, folks: Consolidation of the industry is bad for everyone!

Reflector said the layoffs weren't driven by "commercial success or external pressures," but simply the fact that there's currently not enough work to support the studio at its current size.

"With the recent release of Unknown 9: Awakening and our two key production lines entering the early stages of development, we must make sure that our staff is laser-focused on contributing to the projects that wholly benefit from their skillsets," general manager Marc-André Séguin wrote (via Game Developer). "As such, we are reducing our team by approximately 18% of Reflector’s total workforce, a decision that impacts people who aren’t assigned to roles that our active projects require."

Unknown 9: Awakening did not make an especially good impression when it launched in October. We liked what we saw of it in a pre-release preview well enough, but it currently holds a "mixed" rating on Steam, and more notably the all-time peak concurrent player count on the platform was just 285, a number that quickly tanked to double digits. We don't have access to console player numbers but it hasn't fared any better on other platforms critically, holding a not-great 59% aggregate score on Metacritic.

The actual number of people put out of work hasn't been specified, but Reflector's LinkedIn page indicates it has 51-200 employees, with 145 "associated members"—that is, LinkedIn users who list Reflector as their current workplace.

Attempts to reach Reddit are currently being met with a bit of alarming text: "upstream connect error or disconnect/reset before headers. reset reason: connection failure."

The problem is also clearly visible through DownDetector:

The Reddit Status account on Twitter also confirmed the outage.

We'll keep an eye on things and update when more information is available.

The proposed acquisition was first reported yesterday by Reuters and Nikkei, each citing their own separate sources saying a deal was in the works. In a statement released today acknowledging those reports, Kadokawa said that while no formal announcement about a possible buyout has been made, "the company has received an initial letter of intent to acquire the company's shares."

Kadokawa added that "no decision has been made at this time," but given how these things generally work, the receipt of a letter of intent indicates that the process is fairly far along: The initial chit-chat and wheeling-dealing is over, and everyone is more or less prepared to move forward. A regulatory body could halt the acquisition (although given how that worked out with Microsoft and Activision-Blizzard, I can't say my confidence in the ability of government agencies to keep big companies in line is at an all-time high) but aside from that, it's very likely that this deal will be done.

Snapping up Kadokawa would be a big get for Sony. FromSoft is obviously a crown jewel, but Kadokawa has its fingers in many pies, particularly anime and manga development and publication; it also owns, through its Dwango subsidiary, Danganronpa studio Spike Chunsoft. In its latest earnings report, Kadokawa reported significantly more income from its "publication/IP creation" operations (books, manga, and so on) and animation/film than gaming. Sony has shown a clear interest in owning more of that space in recent years, after acquiring Funimation in 2017 and Crunchyroll in 2021. Earlier this year Sony looked into buying Infocom, one of Japan's largest online comic platforms, though a private equity company came out with the winning bid.

The downsides are obvious—media consolidation is a scourge upon the land and all that—but I think at this point the best we can realistically hope for is that Kadokawa's employees come out the other side in better shape than those left behind by Microsoft and Embracer. I can't say my confidence in that is especially high right now either.

Antitrust officials, alongside several US states that have joined the case, will ask federal judge Amit Mehta to order Alphabet Inc., Google's parent company, to sell off Chrome, with markets already scrambling to work out what the browser may be worth. In addition to this, the DOJ is said to be seeking further measures relating to Google's Android OS, AI technologies, and data licensing (ie, allowing third parties and advertisers to access Google's own search engine data).

It is up to the court to make a ruling but, should the judge accept the DOJ's recommendations, this would be the biggest crackdown on a technology company in history. It is also possible that the judge may decide a sale is not necessary if certain other conditions are met. Finally, there's the question of who could even buy it: The companies that have the money to do so, such as Amazon or even Microsoft, might find a Chrome acquisition brings more scrutiny on their own fiefdoms than it's worth.

Chrome is the most popular internet browser in the world (web tracker Similarweb puts its current global market share at 64.61%), and integrated fully with Google's lucrative ads business. It tracks users, personalises recommendations, and directs users towards other Google products such as GSuite and Gemini. It is impossible to overstate how important it is to Google's business, and unsurprisingly Google is going to fight this tooth-and-nail.

The DOJ "continues to push a radical agenda that goes far beyond the legal issues in this case," said Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s vice president of regulatory affairs. "The government putting its thumb on the scale in these ways would harm consumers, developers and American technological leadership at precisely the moment it is most needed."

Perhaps Google should give thanks this is the battle it may be fighting: The same report claims that the DOJ decided not to go for the most severe remedy, which would have been forcing it to spin off Android. But the DOJ will apparently recommend that Google separate-out Android from its other products such as the Google Play store.

Needless to say there are some twisty paths to follow. Judge Mehta’s August ruling that Google broke antitrust laws is still subject to appeal by Google, which it is near-certain to do. At the same time, the judge has scheduled a hearing for April 2025 to hear proposed remedies to Google's behaviour, and a final ruling is pencilled in for August 2025. But something tells me the timeline won't be that cut-and-dried.

The DOJ has not commented on the report.

One of the themes of the documentary is that, as Half-Life 2 was being developed, Valve was embroiled in what would become a huge and potentially existential legal fight with publisher Vivendi. Valve COO Scott Lynch explains that they'd filed a "narrow" suit over a dispute in their existing licensing terms, and won a few minor victories, before Vivendi decided to "go World War 3" in response.

Yes, we'll get to the shark soon, but the necessary context for this tale is that Vivendi was allegedly out for blood, soon targeting Lynch and Newell (and their wives!) personally in addition to suing Valve.

"It's not a legal strategy," says Newell. "It's basically trying to intimidate you, they're saying 'not only are we going to take all this money from the company but we're going to bankrupt you as well.'

"Publishers in the industry at that time were used to being able to bully developers, right? And so this was as much about an assertion of power as much as it was optimizing for a financial outcome."

Lynch says there came a point where "if we want to keep going" Newell had to put his house on the market, and Newell himself says "I was pretty close to going personally bankrupt: ⁠We went all in, there was no money left."

Now, it strikes me that trying to bully someone like Gabe Newell might be a bad idea. The man himself, telling the story from what looks like his $500 million superyacht, has another way of putting it.

Asked whether this was an anxious time for him, Newell demurs. "I don't know, uh, there are certain things that I just… I'm kind of a weird person in a number of dimensions. I don't really think 'oh this is super scary', like I don't have an emotional response to it. I just say 'well this is what we're doing and we'll see how it plays out.'

"So I don't think it was super stressful to me, right, I mean it didn't really bother me. I was diving in South Africa recently and a shark tried to bite me a couple of times, and the people around me were way more freaked out than I was. I was like 'oh, a shark's trying to bite me, I should get away from the shark' whereas other people were having like [high-pitched voice] 'oh, a shark! It's trying to bite somebody!'"

Newell is at pains to point out that he doesn't consider this to be anything to do with bravery, or indeed foolhardiness.

"I just think that's how I'm wired," says Newell. "I don't think it's anything that speaks to my character or anything, it's like I just seem to not get particularly agitated around risk, which probably means I take on more risk at times than most sane people would. Which can be a positive or you can wreck a bunch of other peoples' lives being in the neighborhood of your risk indifference."

In other words: Vivendi could go swivel. And I'm not sure there's a better comparison for standing up to bullyboy lawyer tactics than being unbothered by an actual honest-to-god shark trying to bite you.

One final touch is that Newell tells this story on a yacht, with a big model of a shark behind him. Was the shark in question zapped for its impertinence and stuffed as a trophy for the big man? Well if this was Saxton Hale, there would be no doubt.

Valve would eventually emerge triumphant from the Sierra lawsuit, much as I imagine Newell emerged triumphant from the sea, ending the ordeal in 2005 with a settlement that saw the publisher stop distributing Valve's games, and all the licenses return. It's a wild story though and, next to the shark, perhaps the most stunning cameo comes from an intern who could speak Korean and, arguably, changed the course of videogame history with what they found.

It's that time of year again. The Golden Joystick Awards have rolled around to highlight the best bits of gaming from the past 365 days. Over 12 million votes (a new record) have been cast across 21 categories, and with Final Fantasy XVI's Ben Starr taking the stage to share the winners, there's a lot to get excited about. Potential new Ben Starr memes, most of all.

The Golden Joystick Awards will air on November 21 at 8am PST / 11am EST / 4pm GMT / 5pm CEST on any livestream hosting platform you can think of. The show will go out across YouTube, Twitch, Steam, Facebook, and X, alongside Future Games Show, GamesRadar, and right here on PC Gamer, so there's no excuse to not tune in really.

It's been an interesting year for games, which makes an award show like this all the more exciting. Knowing who's going to take home the title of Ultimate Game of the Year is anyone's guess, especially given the tough competition across all the nominations. Over 125 games have been nominated across 21 categories, so there's been plenty to vote for.

Throughout the show, Ben Starr will be joined by multiple guests such as Alex McKenna, Alix Wilton Regan, Derek Siow, Neil Newbon, Patricia Summersett, and Samantha Béart. So, an abundance of beloved characters to spend the evening with. That's not even the full list of special guests, either. The awards show will also feature a live musical performance of both classic video game scores and music from the nominated games from video game composers Mark Choi and Lucia La Rezza.

A number of new categories have been added to the Golden Joystick Awards this year too. The debut of Best Indie Game - Self Published, Still Playing - PC & Console and Still Playing - Mobile will take place during the showcase, alongside the more traditional categories like Best Storytelling, Best Multiplayer Game, and Best Visual Design. In addition, a category for Best Game Adaptation will present its first award, and we've definitely seen some great contenders this year with Fallout and Halo's second season.

So if you do want to spend a while celebrating the last year of gaming then tune in on November 21 at 8am PST / 11am EST / 4pm GMT / 5pm CEST to see if your top pick brings home any prizes. We'll see you there!

Kadokawa Corporation is home to some pretty major developers, including Danganronpa's Spike Chunsoft and Octopath Traveler's Acquire, and has almost a 70% stake in too-many-bangers-to-list studio FromSoftware. It's not just games, either, as the media conglomerate also owns Niconico, which is essentially Japan's alternative to YouTube.

Sony actually already has a very small stake in Kadokawa—2% to be exact—along with shares in FromSoftware which the publisher secured in a deal back in 2022. Now, according to a source for Reuters, Sony is looking to take home the whole pie. It's allegedly in talks with Kadokawa right now, and a deal could be signed off within weeks if discussions are all fine and dandy.

It doesn't mean much at all right now, but I do wonder what impact it'll have if it goes through. For one thing, FromSoftware has a pretty tight working relationship with Bandai Namco, which has published a fairly big chunk of FromSoft’s library and has IP rights to those games. Kadokawa also heads up a sizable amount of anime and manga distribution, which isn't gaming-related but might still be of interest to Sony: it bought out Funimation in 2017 before acquiring Crunchyroll in 2021, merging the two services together a year later. It wouldn't surprise me if there was at least some interest in that on Sony's part.

I'm not exactly one for the alarming increase in industry consolidation—Microsoft's acquisition carnage has raised multiple eyebrows, and Embracer proved to be ruthless in scooping up multiple companies, only to dump many of them when it landed itself in financial hot water. If the deal does go through, FromSoftware will likely come out of it unscathed, but I wonder what will become of the numerous other operations under Kadokawa's belt.

Teixeira's first few years passed without notable incident before, in early 2022, he began to access top secret documents and photographs. Some of these he would later post on the private Discord server in February 2022, from where they found their way onto public social media channels.

The secret documents included details of America's involvement in the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, information about negotiations between South Korea and the USA over ammunition, and China's development of a supersonic spy drone.

A US Air Force report made public last year concluded Teixeira was the only airman behind the leak, though determined that his chain of command bears some responsibility for letting the classified data dump happen on its watch. It said Teixeira "was observed viewing intelligence content on TS-SCI [Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information] websites" in August 2022, an incident that his supervisor did not document as they should have, and that shortly afterwards Teixeira was caught viewing secret documents while making notes on a Post-It.

Teixeira would later admit he had begun posting classified information as a way of boasting to his friends. He was a keen gamer and the Discord server concerned had around 25 members, all of whom seemed to share similar interests in cheery topics like assassination, conspiracy theories and mass murder, as well as poor old Minecraft. Teixeira would initially write down details from documents he was viewing at work, take the notes home, and transcribe them: Later, as he grew bolder, he began printing out secret files on a rarely used printer on the base.

Teixeira initially pleaded not guilty to six counts of willful retention and transmission of national defense information, before changing his plea in March this year to avoid additional charges under the Espionage Act (which could have risked the death penalty).

"The documents and information Teixeira posted to social media are highly classified and contain vital national defense information," said prosecutors in a sentencing memorandum to the court. "By posting intelligence products on the social media platform Discord to feed his own ego and impress his anonymous friends, Teixeira caused exceptionally grave damage to the national security of the United States. The scope of his betrayal is breathtaking. The amount of damage he caused is immeasurable."

Among the eyebrow-raising details are Teixeira clearly admitting on the server that he was aware of the illegality of his actions. In March 2022 one of the server members asked Teixeira to post information about military casualties in Ukraine: "If I want to go to jail for the rest of my life, yeah", replied Teixeira. He also dismissed his military oath, calling it "not an oath, an NDA… The oath is just the defense of America against all threats and the following of orders."

The documents subsequently spread from the private Discord server to other online haunts, and in one case had been doctored before being re-posted to overstate Ukrainian casualties and downplay those of Russian forces. At this point Teixeira realised he was in trouble, told members of the server to delete any material they had saved ("[i]f anyone comes looking, don’t tell them shit"), shut down the server, deleted his account, and went on to physically destroy his PC and iPad before, brilliantly, leaving the smashed-up remnants of the latter in a dumpster behind his house where they were found by the authorities. Teixeira was arrested in April 2023 after Discord gave up his address.

Teixeira was sentenced by a federal court in Boston to 15 years in prison, plus a further three on probation. "This sentencing is a stark warning to all those entrusted with protecting national defense information: betray that trust, and you will be held accountable," said FBI director Christopher Wray. "Jack Teixeira's criminal conduct placed our nation, our troops, and our allies at great risk."

Even that vague statement seems to no longer apply. In an interview with Famitsu (machine-translated by VGC), Nagoshi walked back that boast, saying, "the current version is so large that it's almost too large. This time, while researching existing games, we started by making a fairly large map with roads and highways. Now we are gradually shrinking it down and exploring the best balance for the game."

In response to the interviewer pointing out that some people like a game with a big map, Nagoshi replied, "You could fill it in with some element to create a sense of density, but it's not modern to have similar experiences repeated over and over again."

The developers of every live-service game in existence, and a fair few singleplayer open worlds, would probably disagree. But it's not controversial to point out that even well-received games like Ghost of Tsushima get dinged for having repetitive activities dotted across their maps, making them eventually feel like thin butter spread over too much toast.

"I feel that the era of games where the volume is the selling point is coming to an end", Nagoshi said.

Nagoshi left Sega after 32 years at the company. As he said at the time, he felt distant from the act of actually making games after reaching "the top management level", and had no desire to climb further and become the CEO of Sega.

In the colorful words of the filing, via 404 Media, "Defendant is a recidivist pirate who has obtained and streamed Nintendo's leaked games on multiple occasions."

Nintendo previously used copyright takedown notices on EveryGameGuru's footage, which the filing notes "often consist merely of him playing Nintendo's leaked games without commentary for extended periods of time." According to Nintendo's claims, he streamed Mario & Luigi: Brothership 16 days before it was released, Super Mario Party Jamboree six days before it was released, and The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom five days before it was released, among others.

EveryGameGuru responded to the takedowns by sending Nintendo an email with the heading "I have a thousand burner channels" in which he wrote "We can do this all day". After that, the filing continues, "Defendant began adding a CashApp handle to his streams, continuing to seek to profit off of his unauthorized streaming of Nintendo's games. On top of his own flagrant piracy, he has also posted links to repositories of pirated game files ('ROMs') encouraging and inducing his followers and viewers to unlawfully reproduce Nintendo's games."

It wasn't just piracy Nintendo objected to, but the promotion of emulators. The filing named the Yuzu and Ryujinx emulators in particular, claiming that linking to them counted as "trafficking in that unlawful software". Nintendo's campaign against these emulators resulted in them both being shut down last year, with Yuzu settling a lawsuit for $2.4 million followed by Ryujinx being taken offline at Nintendo's demand, presumably to avoid a similar situation. Since then, the company has been playing DMCA whack-a-mole with copies of Yuzu posted on Github.

Nintendo has demanded $150,000 from EveryGameGuru for each unauthorized public performance and reproduction of protected works, which at 404 Media's estimation of at least 50 streams means $7.5 million, with another $2,500 for each alleged circumvention of technological measures, though it reserves the right to "elect to receive actual damages as well as Defendant's profits" to the value of "amounts to be proven at trial."

In the words of to a statement given to Polygon by a Nintendo of America spokesperson, "Nintendo is passionate about protecting the creative works of game developers and publishers who expend significant time and effort to create experiences that bring smiles to all."

Thunderful said the shift to publishing over development will reduce costs and "allow for greater flexibility, enabling faster, diverse game releases. Alas, it also means that a "large portion" of Thunderful's development team are no longer needed, and so 80-100 employees are expected to be put out of work.

"It is regrettable to announce a second restructuring of Thunderful in less than a year, but we unfortunately see no other alternatives in order to ensure the Group’s long-term sustainability and resilience," Thunderful Group CEO Martin Walfisz said in the restructuring announcement. "The strategic move towards publishing games from external partners allows us to reduce fixed costs, increase flexibility, and better control our cash flow. We have many talented and dedicated employees, and it is with great regret that we are forced to part ways."

As noted by RPS, the first round of layoffs referenced by Walfisz occurred in January of this year, which saw 20% of the company's workforce let go because of "over-investments made in the last few years."

That's been a running theme throughout the games industry over the past couple years: Big spending and hiring during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, and then deep cuts when concerns about the disease subsided and people very predictably (unless you're a videogame company executive, I guess) started going back outside again.

Spencer's focus at the moment is talking up the strength of Xbox's lineup while flogging Game Pass, and moving towards a "Play Anywhere" marketing line that will see Xbox games work across a variety of devices. It's Game Pass that feels like the real driver right now, however, with the recent launch of Black Ops 6 the first time a Call of Duty title has been available day one on the subscription service. But that's part of a wider slew of offerings that, for the moment at least, tend to exclude most DLC and expansions across the slate.

In a new interview with newsletter GameFile, reporter Stephen Totilo pointed out to Spencer that three of Microsoft's nine fall releases are expansions: Diablo 4's Vessel of Hatred, World of Warcraft's The War Within, and Starfield's Shattered Space. Given that the Game Pass model is the blindingly simple subs, subs and then more subs on top, Totilo suggested that expansions are becoming more important revenue-wise, with Microsoft able to hive off paid expansions for popular titles and then offer them to a captive audience. This isn't small beans: Shattered Space was a $30 release while Vessel of Hatred was $40.

Spencer says there's no "top down mandate" on expansions, but then that's exactly what he would say from the top. "It's really left to the creators what plan they have for their stories. I think it's a great way for us to re-engage players who may be lapsed."

Big Phil points out that Vessel of Hatred offered a new class in Diablo 4, while Shattered Space added a new world to Starfield, both being of obvious interest to existing players.

"I don't like expansions that are manipulative," said Spencer. "I want it to have a unique point of view. I don't want it to be, like, the third level that you cut before you launched.

"But we're always learning. Todd [Howard] and I were talking about Shattered Space. Starfield is a game I put a ton of hours into and really love, but they've had this thing where they've added features throughout the year and then they had an expansion. I think some of the feedback on the expansion is: 'We wanted more features.' And he's like, 'Well, should we have waited to put buggies out?'"

The buggies arrived shortly before the paid expansion, and were free for existing players, though I'm not sure they're the slam-dunk response to player issues that Howard and Spencer think. Not least because the buggies were, essentially, solving a traversal problem where the game's treks between locations can be extremely boring.

Anyway, Spencer goes on to talk about balancing "both development effort and the impact of the expansion" when managing Microsoft's portfolio in this respect, ending on the note that "not every game will do expansions."

The odd element is that idea of expansions being exploitative. Players are rarely happy about the pricing of any expansion (unless it's free) but the better examples quickly win over the crowd: For many people, this year's GOTY may well be Elden Ring's $40 Shadow of the Erdtree expansion. When I think "exploitative" I don't think of expansions for games like Diablo 4 or Starfield so much as the pattern followed by the likes of the Sims, with constant minor DLCs and a nickel-and-diming approach generally.

Shattered Space didn't seem to go down tremendously well or offer a huge amount of new content but, even then, I wouldn't call it "exploitative" or muse too much about the balance between the free buggies and the paid stuff. The truth is more banal: People will smile and fork over for great expansions without complaint. Maybe Starfield's expansion just wasn't a very good one.

If you missed it last year, this end-of-year edition of the PC Gaming Show has a slightly different format: it presents a countdown of the 25 Most Wanted games as selected by a special panel of voters called The Council. This special group includes high-profile game developers like Brenda Romero, John Romero, David Gaider, Tanya X. Short, Soren Johnson, and Brian Fargo, as well as some of our favorite content creators—CohhCarnage, Esfand, Missmikkaa, AnnieFuchsia, DansGaming, and others—who lend their opinions to the process. Likewise, the entire PC Gamer team adds its votes to the pile.

If you've seen those "most anticipated" lists, Most Wanted is like if one of those turned into a big-budget, goofy TV show hosted by the delightful Frankie Ward, who's been one of the faces of the PC Gaming Show since 2018. As we prepare to turn the calendar into 2025, we hope this broadcast helps you filter through the constant avalanche of games coming to PC and pick out what's truly wishlist worthy.

To watch the countdown as it airs, tune into the broadcast on the PC Gamer Twitch channel, YouTube, Twitch Gaming, Steam, or Bilibili at 12 pm PST / 8 pm GMT on December 5.

How we selected the nominees

The long list of more than 100 unreleased games below are selected by the PC Gamer team based on our collective interest in these projects. We take into consideration everything from that game's profile, premise, initial reception, the number of wishlists it's garnered, and its creative direction, among other factors. It's important to us that the Most Wanted list is not simply a popularity contest, however—we make a point of putting a wide range of projects that haven't been widely noticed in front of our voting panel, to make sure a spectrum of games that represent the breadth, weirdness, and experimental nature of PC gaming are represented.

Games releasing before January 1, 2025 or that are already released in Early Access are not eligible for voting (though there is an exception or two, like Arma Reforger, which is a precursor to what will become Arma 4).

The long list is limited to around 100 games; as capable as The Council is, we can't ask this group of people to vote on every game in existence (especially in a year when an average of 39 new games per day release on Steam). Although the list necessarily excludes many of the hundreds of unreleased games coming to PC, all voters also have the opportunity to nominate any game that they feel should be voted on by the wider group.

How the final Most Wanted list is selected

Voters vote on a 1-5 scale, using the following criteria:

5 • Maximum hype. Intense, obsessive interest in this game.

4 • This game looks excellent to me.

3 • I think this game looks really good.

2 • This game looks promising and captures your interest.

1 • Mildly optimistic. You're curious about this game, but not more than that.

0 • (Abstain / no vote)

• We use a consideration called Release Certainty to weight the score of each game relative to how certain we are of that game hitting its announced release date. If a game has a nebulous release date or none at all, its score is weighted lower—it's difficult to fully anticipate a game when it's unclear when it'll actually be available.
• The number of votes a game received is an additional weighting factor

The PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted 2024 nominees

Path of Exile 2

Deltarune

Vampire: the Masquerade - Bloodlines 2

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2

DOOM: The Dark Ages

Metal Gear Solid Δ: Snake Eater

Project 007 (working title)

ARK 2

The Thing: Remastered

Citizen Sleeper 2

Big Walk

PVKK

Control 2

Wolverine

Blade

Wonder Woman

Tenjutsu

Kingmakers

Crescent County

Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra

Menace

s&box

Nivalis

Monaco 2

Killing Floor 3

Little Nightmares 3

Arma 4

D.O.R.F. Real-Time Strategic Conflict

Judas

Avowed

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Titan Quest 2

Mariachi Legends

Atomfall

Witchbrook

Den of Wolves

Light No Fire

Streets of Fortuna

Beautiful Light

Borderlands 4

Dying Light: The Beast

Mafia: The Old Country

Haunted Chocolatier

Grand Theft Auto 6

Slay the Spire 2

Death Stranding 2: On The Beach

Monster Hunter Wilds

Skate

Hollow Knight: Silksong

Perfect Dark

Dune: Awakening

Sid Meier's Civilization VII

Masters of Albion

Goat Simulator Remastered

darkwebSTREAMER

Marathon

Wrekless

State of Decay 3

Blight: Survival

2XKO

Among the Wild

Generation Exile

Gears of War: E-Day

ARC Raiders

Sand

Fable

Battle Aces

Exodus

Eclipsium

Gothic 1 Remake

Eternal Strands

Quartermaster

Fairgame$

Exoborne

Dread Dawn

Marvel Rivals

Project C

Cairn

Wanderstop

Project DOSA

Hyper Light Breaker

Usual June

Nightmare Operator

Twisted Tower

Kiborg

Miegakure

Canyons

The Sinking City 2

The Looter

Skin Deep

Mixtape

Cruel

Paperhead

Subnautica 2

Wreckfest 2

Splitgate 2

Aquametsis

Descenders Next

All Systems Dance

The Outer Worlds 2

South of Midnight

FUMES

Truckful

Super Fantasy Kingdom

Heart of the Machine

God Save Birmingham

And guess what? We know exactly which videogames would top that pyramid. The PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted returns this December 5 at 12pm PST, 3pm EST, 8pm GMT and 9pm CEST, hosted by the inimitable Frankie Ward and narrated by BG3's Amelia Tyler, to present the 25 most-anticipated games coming to PC, as assembled by our shadowy council of games industry experts, superstars, panjandrums, and luminaries.

What's on the list? That would be telling. But I can reveal that the show will feature over 75 games (we got carried away) with all kinds of new trailers, announcements, behind the scenes visits, and more. Expect word from Citizen Sleeper 2, Killing Floor 3, The Thing: Remastered and, most tantalising of all, something special from Strange Scaffold, the folks behind El Paso, Elsewhere; I Am Your Beast; and, uh, Clickolding.

Who's on our council of illumined ones? There are some things it's best not to ask, reader. This isn't one of them, though. Our experts consist of big names like Abubakar Salim (AC: Origins' Bayek and Alyn on House of the Dragon), David Gaider (Dragon Age co-creator), Devora Wilde (Lae'Zel from BG3), and Sid Meier (Sid Meier). Plus countless others who, for mixed reasons of national security and paragraph length, remain anonymous until I write another news post about the PC Gaming Show.

The show is set to be a banger, and if you want to know where you can watch it, you can pretty much just pull up a livestreaming service and go. We'll be broadcasting on all frequencies over at the PC Gamer Twitch channel, the PC Gamer YouTube channel, Twitch Gaming, Steam, and Bilibili.

To find out more about the show, check out the PC Gaming Show's spiffy website or hit us up on X.

"Today, we are on strike," the union posted on X. "We are not afraid to do what's necessary to make sure that Microsoft meets us at the bargaining table over key issues like remote work options and outsourcing.

"We deserve job security and improved working conditions. Hundreds of our members are striking from 10-6PM in Maryland and Texas today to tell Microsoft to stop dragging their feet."

ZeniMax Workers United was formed as part of the Communications Workers of America in January 2023, becoming the first game studio union at Microsoft and, at the time, the largest union of videogame workers in the US. Microsoft said when the union vote passed that "we look forward to engaging in good faith negotiations as we work towards a collective bargaining agreement," prompting CWA president Chris Shelton to compliment the company's approach to worker unionization, saying it "should serve as a model for the industry and as a blueprint for regulators."

The honeymoon would now seem to be over, however. The CWA said in a statement that the strike is taking place "to call out [Microsoft] for the lack of progress at the bargaining table over remote work and for unilaterally outsourcing quality assurance work without bargaining with the union."

"ZeniMax Workers United-CWA members have raised concerns that ZeniMax’s recent unilateral decision to outsource quality assurance work threatens job security amid record layoffs across the videogame industry," the union said. The CWA also noted that it filed an unfair labor practice charge against ZeniMax in October "for contracting out work without notification."

A representative added that contact between the union and Microsoft "has been ongoing throughout the entirety of negotiations," saying, "Our hope is that this strike will create urgency at the bargaining table."

Images from the strike at ZeniMax's office in Rockville, Maryland, courtesy of ZeniMax Workers United-CWA member Jordan Duenas (via Communications Workers of America).

Microsoft, which acquired Bethesda parent company ZeniMax Media in 2021, has indeed played a large role in those industry-wide layoffs. The company cut 1,900 people from its gaming division in January 2024, and followed that up with 650 more in September, which Xbox head Phil Spencer said at the time was necessary to ensure "sustainable future growth."

Sustainability has apparently been achieved: Spencer recently said the Xbox business "has never been more healthy," and indicated Microsoft is open to making more acquisitions in the future.

Regarding today's strike, "We respect our employees’ rights to express their point of view as they have done today," a Microsoft spokesperson told PC Gamer. "We will continue to listen and address their concerns at the bargaining table."