Steam has announced the full list of Best of Steam games for this year across several categories. The list does not include a lot of big surprises but it is nice to see that some indie games also made it to the list. Categories include Top Sellers, New Releases, Most Played, Early Access, Steam Deck, Controller, and VR.

The Top Seller list include Baldur's Gate 3 from Larian Studios, which is also the Game of the Year winner, Hogwarts Legacy, which was a big game this year, DOTA 2 and Counter Strike 2, Cyberpunk 2077, Starfield, Lost Ark, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, Apex Legends, PUBG Battlegrounds, Destiny 2, and Sons of the Forest. Some of the Top New Releases category, which is measured by gross revenue, include Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon, Cities: Skylines II, Resident Evil 4, Payday 3, Remnant II, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, FC 24, as well as a few titles that are also top sellers like Starfield, Baldur's Gate 3, Hogwarts Legacy. and Sons of the Forest.

Razer, the leading global lifestyle brand for gamers, in partnership with KRAFTON, Inc., a collective of independent game development studios and the publisher of popular PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS, announced a highly anticipated collection of PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS-themed gaming gear.

"Razer is thrilled to partner with KRAFTON on this exciting collection," said Addie Tan, Associate Director of Business Development at Razer. "When you combine our expertise in gaming peripherals with their innovative approach to immersive gaming, you get a cool new collection that resonates with gamers worldwide and captivates gamers and enthusiasts alike."

Intel's 13th Gen Core "Raptor Lake" is shaping up to be another leadership desktop processor lineup, with an engineering sample clocking significant increases in gaming minimum framerates over the preceding 12th Gen Core i9-12900K "Alder Lake." Extreme Player, a tech-blogger on Chinese video streaming site Bilibili, posted a comprehensive gaming performance review of an i9-13900K engineering sample covering eight games across three resolutions, comparing it with a retail i9-12900KF. The games include CS:GO, Final Fantasy IX: Endwalker, PUBG, Forza Horizon 5, Far Cry 6, Red Dead Redemption 2, Horizon Zero Dawn, and the synthetic benchmark 3DMark. Both processors were tested with a GeForce RTX 3090 Ti graphics card, 32 GB of DDR5-6400 memory, and a 1.5 kW power supply.

The i9-13900K ES is shown posting performance leads ranging wildly between 1% to 2% in the graphics tests of 3DMark, but an incredible 36% to 38% gain in the CPU-intensive tests of the suite. This is explained not just by increased per-core performance of both the P-cores and E-cores, but also the addition of 8 more E-cores. Although the same "Gracemont" E-cores are used in "Raptor Lake," the L2 cache size per E-core cluster has been doubled in size. Horizon Zero Dawn sees -0.7% to 10.98% increase in frame rates. There are some anomalous 70% frame-rate increases in RDR2, discounting which, we still see a 2-9% increase. FC6 posts modest 2.4% increases. Forza Horizon 5, PUBG, Monster Hunter Rise, and FF IX, each report significant increases in minimum framerates, well above 20%.

The popular battle royale PlayersUnknown's BattleGround, called PUBG shortly, has managed to sell over 70 million copies across all platforms it is supported on, like PC and consoles. The huge achievement comes after two and a half years after the game was released, marking a huge achievement for battle royale type of games. The PUBG Corporation, makers of the game, decided to celebrate the new milestone with a release of a remastered Sanhok map. The new Sanhok map is redesigned from the ground up and the developer describes it as "leaner, meaner, and more deadly than ever before!". The new map will go live with the season 8 update, which is going live on July 22nd on Steam, and July 30th on consoles and Google Stadia.

Google Stadia has unveiled several new games and changes coming to the platform in a recent Stadia Connect Event. Google Stadia will be adding 11 new games to the platform, along with updates for Stadia Pro subscribers. The Pioneer Edition of PUBG will be free for Stadia Pro subscribers and $39.99 USD for other users. Stadia also announced that EA would be joining the platform with Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order coming this fall, along with Madden NFL & FIFA coming this winter. Stadia will also be launching some various other new games such as Crayta, Get Packed, Wave Break, Embr, Zombie Army 4: Dead War, The Turing Test, and SteamWorld Heist in the coming weeks.

AMD Thursday released its latest version of Radeon Software Adrenalin 2019 Edition. Version 19.11.2 beta is the second release for the month of November 2019, and comes with optimization for "Star Wars Jedi: The Fallen Order." The driver also addresses a bug with certain map areas or cities in "Player Unknown's Battlegrounds" (PUBG) intermittently experiencing stuttering or performance loss. Grab the drivers from the link below.DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 19.11.2

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 has a significantly watered down multimedia feature-set compared to the other GeForce GTX 16-series GPUs. The card was launched this Tuesday (23 April) without any meaningful technical documentation for reviewers, which caused many, including us, to assume that NVIDIA carried over the "Turing" NVENC encoder, giving you a feature-rich HTPC or streaming card at $150. Apparently that is not the case. According to full specifications put out by NVIDIA on its website product-page that went up hours after product launch, the GTX 1650 (and the TU117 silicon) features a multimedia engine that's been carried over from the older "Volta" architecture.

Turing's NVENC is known to have around 15 percent performance uplift over Volta's, which means the GTX 1650 will have worse game livestreaming performance than expected. The GTX 1650 has sufficient muscle for playing e-Sports titles such as PUBG at 1080p, and with an up-to-date accelerated encoder, would have pulled droves of more amateur streamers to the mainstream on Twitch and YouTube Gaming. Alas, the $220 GTX 1660 would be your ticket to that.

Nepal yesterday moved to ban the online game PlayerUnkown's Battlegrounds, citing negative impact of the game on children and their development. Citing violent content and its effect as the primordial reason for the ban, Sandip Adhikari, deputy director at Nepal Telecommunications Authority (NTA), the nation's telecoms regulator, told Reuters that ""We have ordered the ban on PUBG because it is addictive to children and teenagers."

As part of the ban, all internet service providers, mobile operators and network service providers were instructed to block streaming of the game. Gamers might find ways to circumvent this limitation in order to still be able to play the game; or they'll simply migrate to one of the other Battle Royale games on offer, such as Fortnite or Apex Legends, instead. It's interesting to wonder whether the government of Nepal will keep on chasing the next online game fad one by one or if actual studies on the negative impact of these games are fielded by the Nepalese government.

Razer, the world's leading lifestyle brand for gamers, today announces its plan for a long-term lease of a new location for its Southeast Asia headquarters based in the technology and media hub of Singapore. The Company anticipates moving into the new facility in 2020. Razer has been on a strong growth trajectory and delivered a stellar year-on-year growth of 39% in revenues and 46% in gross profit in the first half of 2018. Razer's plans for its new headquarters highlight the Company's growth plans in the esports and gaming industries as the total addressable market (TAM) for gamers is expected to grow from 2.35 billion in 2018 to 2.76 billion in 2021, according to Newzoo Global Games Market Report.

The strategic location of the new Razer headquarters in Singapore also rides on the growing traction of the Services business across Southeast Asia. Razer has proven out to be the preferred monetization platform for gaming and content companies seeking to expand their global presence especially in the fast-growing Southeast Asia market, as evidenced by the recent Razer Gold partnerships with PUBG MOBILE, Nexon America and Webzen. Along with Razer Silver loyalty rewards system, Razer Gold empowers gamers to get the most out of their games and gaming lifestyle.

HyperX, the gaming division of Kingston Technology Company, Inc. today announced it is the No.1 PC gaming headset brand in retail for two years running in 2017 and 2018. The achievement is based on total retail revenue in the United States according to the NPD Group - Retail Tracking Service. HyperX became the e-tail sales leader when it entered the gaming headset business with HyperX Cloud. Starting in 2017, HyperX exceeded revenue sales of all other headset brands sold through retail outlets. In 2018, HyperX continued to grow market share bolstered by the growth of Fortnite, PUBG, Call of Duty and Battle Royale multiplayer games.

Best known for its gaming headsets, HyperX provides a variety of PC, console, and wireless headsets including the Cloud II, Cloud Alpha, Cloud Flight and Cloud Revolver. The recently launched Bluetooth-enabled Cloud MIX gaming headset allows gamers to unplug from their gaming device and take their wireless headset anywhere for on-the-go listening. The Cloud MIX design is subtle, street-ready and popular with people who want to use one headset for both gaming and listening to music.

NZXT and PUBG Corporation today announced that two icons of PC gaming, the NZXT Puck and the Pan from PUBG, are together at last. The perfect addition to any gaming battlestation, the NZXT Pan Puck will bash your cable management woes while securely storing any audio headset. With the NZXT Pan Puck your headset is always ready for when you drop into the heat of battle.

"In a heated game of PUBG, I always know that my pan has my back. Whether I am deep in the jungles of Sanhok or the military base in Erangel, the pan has saved me more times than I can count," says Johnny Hou, NZXT's founder, and CEO. "Working again with PUBG Corp. to bring such a trusty and powerful tool to your battle station is very exciting for us. Now with the NZXT Pan Puck you can count on the same level of support when it comes to cable management."

SteelSeries, the global leader in gaming peripherals, in collaboration with PLAYERUNKNOWN's Battlegrounds, is proud to announce a limited edition line of PUBG-branded peripherals. The new headset, keyboard, mouse and mousepad are designed with exclusive images inspired by the popular battle royale game.

"The opportunity to work with the PUBG team, the players and fans has been a phenomenal experience," said Ehtisham Rabbani, SteelSeries CEO. "We are thrilled to bring the brilliant design of the PUBG world to our premier products. Together we are arming PUBG gamers to win the battle."

Without making too much noise about it, Intel sneaked in a revision of its H310 Express entry-level chipset with support for Windows 7. Microsoft, if you'll recall, restricted support for newer processors (Intel "Kaby Lake" and newer, and AMD "Zen" and newer) on the 9-year old operating system, late-2016. There are ways around this restriction. The revised H310 chipset is pin-compatible with its predecessor, and hence major motherboard manufacturers are putting out revisions of their H310 motherboards with the newer chipset, being referred to as either "H310C" or "H310 R2.0."

To bolster this change, Intel is also releasing Windows 7 drivers for the chipset (INF Update Utility); integrated USB 3.0 controllers, the SATA AHCI controller, and even Management Engine Interface (MEI). What you don't get (yet), however, is Windows 7 versions of Intel UHD 6xx Graphics drivers, so you're restricted to using discrete graphics cards. Windows 7 refuses to die down, not just in enterprises, but also among PUBG gamers from China.

PUBG is still a juggernaut of a game and Battle Royale experience, no matter how much Fortnite has been making increasingly larger waves on PUBG's pond of success. To prove that is the fact that released reports for PUBG sales during the month of June point towards a grand total of 4.7 million copies sold during that month alone. That's the second-highest amount of copies in a single month the game has ever sold - only surpassed by October 2017 - and brings the games' total sales up to some 53 million copies. The reduced, sale-level price point of $19.99 (down from the usual $29.99) helped drive sales maybe even more than the games' popularity.

NZXT, a leading provider of desktop components for PC gamers today announced CRFT, an exclusive line of officially licensed gaming gear. CRFT delivers gamers beautifully designed NZXT products that celebrate gaming's most exciting franchises. More than just a collector's item, every CRFT product provides practical functionality for a gamer's battle station. All CRFT products will only be available in a one-time, limited run, never to be produced again.

"With our roots deep in PC gaming, we love working with the people and brands that make an impact to our community. We are proud to present a line of limited edition, officially licensed products that showcase our user's enthusiasm for the games they love, built on the foundation of NZXT product design," said Johnny Hou, founder and CEO of NZXT. "CRFT products will always be a limited run for a select group of gamers who are looking for a unique way to show off their passion."

Earlier in January of this year, PUBG Corp threw a lawsuit at Epic Games, looking to assert its rights to the "Battle Royale" mode that game was mimicking from the original Player Unknown's Battlegrounds. It now seems that PUBG Corp has decided to throw in the towel over its pursuit of Epic Games' Fortnite as a "straight copy" of its battle royale mode - a move that came only after Fortnite had eclipsed PUBG Corp's game in concurrent players and revenue generation.

Perhaps at least part of this issue was dealt with by Chinese giant Tencent, which owns part of Bluehole Inc (PUBG Corp's parent company) and part of Epic Games - it hurts investors when two of their pots are throwing dirt at each other. Another part of the equation - and the most likely, considering the amount of time the lawsuit survived in court - pertains to how PUBG makes use of EPIC Games' Unreal Engine. I'd say it's at least slightly important to keep a good relationship with such a company.

PUBG Corp. just announced that they have reached the incredible number of 50 million units sold on the platforms PC and Xbox One. When including PUBG Mobile, they have over 400 million registered players world-wide, with over 87 million of them playing PUBG every single day.

To celebrate this epic milestone, they have decided to have the first ever sale of PUBG, at a price of $17.99, until July 5th. Could be that sales are going down, possibly driven by Epic's Fortnite, which has a bigger player base now, and is available for more platforms.

HyperX , the gaming division of Kingston Technology Company, Inc., today announced it has shipped 5 million award-winning gaming headsets. With the popularity of video games Fortnite and PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG), the gaming headset market continues to grow at a rapid pace and HyperX continues to gain new fans. HyperX gaming headsets are worn by gamers globally, including first-time players and professional gamers.

"With the explosive growth of Fortnite, NBA 2K and esports, HyperX is seeing an exciting expansion in the global gaming headset market," said Marcus Hermann, senior business manager, HyperX. "HyperX has been supplying hardcore gamers with gear for over 10 years and we are now seeing our HyperX headsets becoming more popular with casual gamers. Shipping 5 million headsets is a major milestone as we continue to grow."

Epic Games has been dragged to court by PUBG Corporation, developer of "Player Unknown's Battlegrounds" (PUBG) over "copyright infringement" and "plagiarism" in its smash-hit online multiplayer game "Fortnite." PUBG dominated PC gaming in 2017, as its South Korea-based developers raked in hundreds of millions of Dollars in revenues, having sold over 45 million copies of the game. When it released in 2017, "Fotnite" wasn't anywhere near as popular as PUBG, since it only included a tower-defense mode dubbed "Save the World." The game's fortunes turned around when Epic Games introduced the "Battle Royale" mode, which is an open-world free-for-all (FFA). PUBG has a problem with that.

In its complaint, PUBG Corp alleges that "Fortnite" Battle Royale mode copies not just PUBG's gameplay, but also its USP of dropping players in arenas empty-handed, and making them scout out weapons and items so they could both survive and hunt down others. The complaint also includes allegations that the user-interface (UI) is heavily borrowed from that of PUBG. Interestingly, PUBG itself has been inspired by Japanese film "Batoru Rowaiaru," the title of which loosely transliterates to "Battle Royale." This is a fact the defense could bludgeon PUBG's lawyers with.

Chinese authorities have apprehended 15 individuals tied to a gang that has been developing and selling cheat programs for the ever so popular PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. The arrested suspects have been fined around 30 million yuan, equivalent to 4.71 million dollars. While this is great progress, the police will continue their efforts to bring the whole gang to justice. According to the local Chinese newspapers, the notorious gang probably profited over 30 million yuans from selling their programs to PUBG players. Some of the programs that were being sold also came with hidden malicious code to steal the victims' login credentials and other personal data. Earlier this year, Chinese police also arrested around 120 people suspected of creating cheats for the popular battle royale. A huge portion of PUBG's player base resides in China which makes selling cheats to the Chinese population an extremely lucrative activity. Heck, even Dell advertised their latest gaming laptops as great for running multiple 'plugins' in PUBG.

NZXT, a leading provider of desktop components for PC gamers, today announced the Limited Edition H700 PUBG mid-tower case, in collaboration with PUBG Corporation and Gamers Outreach, creating the ultimate PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG) airdrop. Sharing the iconic look of one of PUBG's most lucrative and sought after in-game resources, the H700 PUBG chassis is the ultimate set piece for the battle royale fan.

NZXT is limiting production of the H700 PUBG to 2,000 units, with 10% of all sales donated to Gamers Outreach, a charity organization that provides equipment, technology, and software to help kids cope with treatment inside hospitals.

MalwareHunterTeam recently discovered the PUBG ransomware that is currently floating around the internet. When executed, the pesky program would encrypt the files and folders that are located on the victim's desktop and add the ".PUBG" extension to them. While meant to be more of a joke than actual malware, the program demands that the victim play PUBG for an hour. Nevertheless, users can decrypt their files in two ways. They can introduce the "s2acxx56a2sae5fjh5k2gb5s2e" code into the program and proceed to restore their files or launch the PUBG executable for three seconds. MalwareHunterTeam noted that the program runs a background check for a "TslGame" process, and therefore users can rename any executable to TslGame.exe and trick the malware into thinking that the fake executable is the real deal.

Intel held an event in Beijing last week to launch their new 8th Gen Intel Core mobile processors. As usual, PC and laptop manufacturers flocked to the venue to promote their latest gaming products. This time around, Dell single-handedly stole the spotlight. The company claimed that their gaming laptops were perfect for running multiple 'plugins' in PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. Ben Mansill from PC Authority was present during Dell's presentation, and this was what he had to say about Sally Zhang, the Account Director and assigned Dell spokesperson:

"She spoke of how Chinese gamers are the most innovative and dominant in the world by using 'plugins' to, for example, run faster than other players, or blow up ten cars at a time, and that these top gamers can really use 8th-Gen power to 'run more plugins to win more at Chicken Dinner', and that the top players run the most 'plugins' so that's where 8th-gen Dell power gives them the gamer's edge. Behind her a video proudly shows various cheats in PUBG in action (they really like the one with the massively oversized gun and show that a lot), with the new Dell gaming laptops shown every few seconds while Sally told us that gamers should buy a Dell because they're better at running many plugins. Wow."

PUBG Corporation has shared several screenshots of their upcoming 4 km by 4 km map for PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. Due to its small nature, players can expect more intense shootouts and shorter matches. The map will feature a southeastern Asian environment. If all goes according to plans, players should be able to test the new map in early April. The developer hopes to return to their open development model and improve the map based on player feedback.

Today, SteelSeries is proud to announce its official partnership with leading battle royale game, PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS (PUBG). With the announcement of the partnership, SteelSeries is announcing a PUBG QcK+ mousepad, with additional PUBG-branded peripherals and accessories coming later this summer. Today, SteelSeries and PUBG will also kick off the one-year Anniversary Celebration with a global campaign, giving away tons of SteelSeries gear as well as PUBG swag, codes and more.

"This partnership signals the coming of incredible products, meaningful integrations along with creative activities among the PUBG influencer and streamer communities," said SteelSeries CEO, Ehtisham Rabbani. "Together our brands are creating an opportunity for the battle royal community to connect their PUBG obsession with premium gear that is both innovative and designed for competitive esports."