SteamOS-powered headset sports semi-modular design, wireless “low-latency” PC streaming. Six years ago, Valve made its second big virtual reality push, launching the Valve Index headset alongside VR blockbuster Half-Life Alyx. Since then, the company seems to have lost interest in virtual reality gaming, letting competitors like Meta release regular…
SteamOS-powered cube for your TV targets early 2026 launch, no pricing details. Nearly four years after the Steam Deck changed the world of portable gaming, Valve is getting ready to release SteamOS-powered hardware designed for the living room TV, or even as a desktop PC gaming replacement. The simply…
But author warns that Direct3D 7 “is a land of highly cursed API inter-operability.” For years now, Valve has been slowly improving the capabilities of the Proton compatibility layer that lets thousands of Windows games work seamlessly on the Linux-based SteamOS. But Valve’s Windows-to-Linux compatibility layer generally only extends…
Vampire Survivors-esque battler sets itself apart with great weapons, unique graphics. If you’ve played any number of RPGs, you probably know the skill tree as a break from the game’s core action. It’s a place to pause, take a breather, and scroll through a massive visual menu of upgrade…
Once rare $14K knife now sells for $7K, some common guns jump from $10 to over $100. From the outside, Counter-Strike 2 looks a lot like a game that’s primarily about shooting people. For millions of players, though, the game is more about collecting and/or buying rare in-game loot…
What if point-and-click games weren’t about the puzzles? Even in my youth, I always loved the idea of point-and-click adventure games more than I did the reality. I appreciated how they transported me to other worlds, each with its own rules, histories, and interesting characters. However, like many people,…
UZDoom fork promises to fix other top-down leadership problems with the decades-old mod. If you’ve even idly checked in on the robust world of Doom fan development in recent years, you’ve probably encountered one of the hundreds of gameplay mods, WAD files, or entire commercial games based on GZDoom.…
The first portable “Xbox” fails to unify a messy world of competing PC gaming platforms. Here at Ars, we have been writing about rumors of a portable Xbox for literal decades now. With the ROG Xbox Ally, Microsoft has finally made those rumors a reality in the weirdest, most…
Project Amethyst focuses on efficient machine learning, new compression techniques. It feels like it was just yesterday that Sony hardware architect Mark Cerny was first teasing Sony’s “PS4 successor” and its “enhanced ray-tracing capabilities” powered by new AMD chips. Now that we’re nearly five full years into the PS5…
Arcane hidden options can offer accessibility without confusing the “core” game experience. For gamers of a certain age, gibberish character sequences like idkfa, torg, ABACABB, and UUDDLRLRBA are akin to long-lost magical incantations. They evoke an era where game developers frequently and routinely let players use cheat codes to…
