Early Access impressions: New characters shine, but it feels like we’ve done this before. Do you remember the joyful satisfaction you felt when you really started to understand Slay the Spire? This isn’t a totally rhetorical question. If you’re reading this piece about Slay the Spire 2—published roughly a…
Advanced Shader Delivery uses precompiled shaders for “console-like load times” across PC hardware. Modern gamers are used to loading up a new game for the first time and being forced to wait multiple minutes while a “compiling shaders” step whirs away, optimizing advanced 3D effects for their specific hardware.…
Steam maker says settling the case would be easier but would set a bad precedent. Last month, the New York Attorney General (NYAG) brought a lawsuit against Valve accusing the company of promoting “illegal gambling” through its randomized in-game loot boxes. On Wednesday, Valve issued its first public comment…
Looking back at Dash Rendar, 3DFX cards, and a pivotal moment for Star Wars. I grew up in a Star Trek household, not a Star Wars one. More to the point, I wasn’t even allowed to watch Star Wars when I was a kid, so I didn’t see the…
Google is more focused on desktop gaming than ever before. Google has been tinkering with porting its Play Games platform to Windows for several years, but it started getting serious about it last year. Now, with the 2026 Game Developer Conference underway, Google has announced a new batch of…
What part of “this year,” exactly, is still anyone’s guess. Valve quickly reconfirmed that it plans to ship the Steam Machine and other recently announced hardware products “this year,” after an official blog post late last week set off some worried speculation about possible delays. While Steam’s 2025 Year…
Stories of border issues lead to pervasive travel fears across the worldwide industry. This week, tens of thousands of game developers and producers will once again gather in San Francisco, as they have since 1988, for the weeklong Game Developers Conference. But this year’s show will be missing many…
While semantics count for some, gamers win either way. In New Hampshire, just off the western shore of the vacation destination Lake Winnipesaukee, there’s a town called Laconia. With a population somewhere south of 17,000, it’s barely a blip on a map—except on Bike Week, when around 300,000 motorcyclists…
Project Helix is set to open the closed-console ecosystem, but the details will matter. Last summer, we here at Ars made the argument that the company’s next Xbox console should give up the walled garden approach and just run Windows already. Now, newly named Microsoft Executive Vice President for…
Titles like Ghost of Yotei will remain exclusive to Sony’s hardware. Sony no longer plans to bring current and future single-player games to personal computers, according to Bloomberg. The report specifically names last year’s Ghost of Yotei and the soon-to-be-released Returnal successor, Saros, as games whose PC plans have…
