Lawyers tell Ars the state has a tough road ahead, even as Valve is uniquely vulnerable. For years now, Valve fans have been making jokes about the company’s slow transition from game maker to glorified digital hat and knife paint marketplace. This week, though, a lawsuit brought by the…
The ability to resell Steam items for real value is key to the state’s case. New York state has filed a lawsuit against Valve alleging that randomized loot boxes in games like Counter-Strike 2, Team Fortress 2, and Dota 2 amount to a form of unregulated gambling, letting users…
Stories and lesson learned from an impossibly large community modding project. Despite being regarded as one of the greatest role-playing games of all time, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind disappointed some fans upon its release in 2002 because it didn’t match the colossal scope of its predecessor, The Elder Scrolls…
But Asha Sharma faces scrutiny for lack of gaming experience. Last week’s surprise departure of Phil Spencer from Microsoft led to the promotion of Asha Sharma, who comes to head Microsoft’s gaming division after two years as president of the company’s CoreAI Product group. Despite that recent history, Sharma…
Microsoft CoreAI exec Asha Sharma will take over in surprise executive shake-up. Microsoft Executive Vice President for Gaming Phil Spencer announced he will retire after 38 years at Microsoft and 12 years leading the company’s video game efforts. Asha Sharma, an executive currently in charge of Microsoft’s CoreAI division,…
Director says PC is the “foundation” when targeting “high-end environments first.” For a long time now, PC gamers have been used to the Final Fantasy series treating their platform as somewhat secondary to the game’s core console versions. There are some signs that may be starting to change, though,…
Games appear to be mostly unmodified ports of the well-regarded remakes. For my money, the 2004 Game Boy Advance re-releases of Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen are still the best versions of the original Pokémon games. They fixed most of the bugs and balance issues present in the originals—partly by also including the rosters…
New skill tree paths offer a fun twist on some generally familiar mechanics. Diablo II is one of those storied classic PC games that’s pretty much always fun to come back to—so much so that some players have put thousands of hours into the game over more than two…
GameHub’s existing Windows emulator on Android has its fair share of issues. For a while now, Mac owners have been able to use tools like CrossOver and Game Porting Toolkit to get many Windows games running on their operating system of choice. Now, GameSir plans to add its own…
Alongside new endgame content, Blizzard says the Warlock is coming to other Diablo games soon. It’s not every day that a classic PC game gets a new content expansion 25 years after its last major update. But that’s what happened last night, as Blizzard suddenly released new “Reign of…
