Despite the entire controversy that has been affecting the digital games distribution market in recent times, life is following its usual course over at the not-so-green, not-so-walled garden of Steam. The platform is having another Sale, this time, themed "Lunar New Year". The whole sale has an eastern flavor to it, which isn't that strange to understand.

There are the usual, multi-developer and publishing deals, but Steam has created a whole category for games by Chinese Developers, thus bringing attention (and keeping flavor, of course) with the sale's team. You can grab some nice discounts on West-developed games such as Vampyr, Bioshock Infinite, and some other classics and not so classics, or some particularly interesting East-developed titles. The sale ends on February 11th, and users buying games at a discount can count on another €5 off from their minimum €30 purchases, provided the conditions are met.

We reported yesterday how Metro Exodus unceremoniously left Steam for a year-long exclusivity deal on the Epic Game store, one of many steps that Epic and Tencent are taking to challenge the Goliath of PC gaming storefronts itself. Valve was quick in putting out a rare statement yesterday, which has been updated since to reflect the status of the game on Steam, and it can be seen below verbatim, with THQ Nordic's take on this matter past the break.

Notice: Sales of Metro Exodus have been discontinued on Steam due to a publisher decision to make the game exclusive to another PC store. The developer and publisher have assured us that all prior sales of the game on Steam will be fulfilled on Steam, and Steam owners will be able to access the game and any future updates or DLC through Steam. We think the decision to remove the game is unfair to Steam customers, especially after a long pre-sale period. We apologize to Steam customers that were expecting it to be available for sale through the February 15th release date, but we were only recently informed of the decision and given limited time to let everyone know.

SteelSeries, the global leader in gaming peripherals, today announced its newest full-size, multi-platform controller, the Stratus Duo. Gamers can swap between the low latency 2.4GHz wireless connection for gaming on Windows, and Bluetooth for mobile gaming on Android, Oculus Go and Samsung VR. Gamers can utilize the Stratus Duo in multiple ways using the 2.4GHz wireless, Bluetooth and wired connections. With its Bluetooth connection, the Stratus Duo supports Android, Samsung Gear VR and Oculus Go. Gamers no longer need to struggle with awkward touchscreen controls while playing mobile games on their Android devices.

The Stratus Duo allows gamers to enjoy playing on their Android device via Bluetooth or on their PC via the 2.4GHz wireless connection with no additional software needed for setup. "The gaming ecosystem is continuing to evolve and grow beyond PC and consoles to include mobile devices and VR systems," said Tino Solberg, SteelSeries CTO. "The Stratus Duo allows gamers to easily navigate across several platforms through wireless and Bluetooth technology to create a truly seamless experience."

CDKOffers is a new online retailer selling genuine license keys to popular software and games, letting you save over 80% on your software costs for new PC builds. Licenses to popular software such as Windows 10 Pro operating systems and Office 2016 Professional Plus productivity suite are so cheap, that you'd rather buy new keys than hassle porting your old OEM key between motherboards. Globally-valid Windows 10 Pro OEM keys go for as less as USD $14.52, while globally-valid lifetime Office 2016 Professional Plus keys go for $36.87, which is less than half what you'd pay for an annual subscription for Office 365. While you'd on the site, you can also check out their jaw-dropping deals on game keys and in-game credit vouchers, which you can redeem on popular DRM platforms such as Steam, UPlay, Xbox Live, etc.

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The Epic Games Store with its aggressive developer earnings program is drilling away at Steam's already-installed hegemony as the PC gaming platform of choice. A mere 12% royalty for the storefront means much more money goes back to the developers, and the more copies are sold of a given game, the bigger the profit will become. This is why some games have already even left Steam's shores to find a home on the Epic Games Store, and now, a AAA title in The Division 2 will be skipping Steam entirely. With launches on Ubisoft's own store and an 88% cut on the Epic store, Ubisoft will be looking to maximize their profits.

That part of the story is done; Ubisoft has also outed the system requirements for the PC version of The Division 2, which, for a minimum of 30 FPS at 1080p, will require either an AMD FX-6350 or Intel Core I5-2500K CPU, 8 GB of RAM, and 2 GB of video RAM on an AMD Radeon R9 270 or Nvidia GeForce GTX 670.

Steam, being the most widely used games platform for the PC ecosystem, has proven weight on current hardware employed by gamers. While not wholly representative, let's just say it caters to enough of the PC gaming population that we can infer some broad strokes of the current state of the market. And for all the hailing for a newcoming of VR in 2018, it would seem that happened, with a doubling of the attachment rate for VR headsets on Steam's hardware surveys. If we're only speaking relatively, that is.

More interesting and important than the "doubling" in VR headset attachment rate to Steam's user's is the fact that this only increased said attachment rate to around 0.8% of Steam's user base. Of these 0.8%, 0.37% of Steam users who took part in the December survey carry an Oculus Rift, with HTC Vive close behind at 0.33%. The overall increase in usage for each of these headsets was 85% and 65% throughout 2018, respectively - still definitely a far cry from the kind of market penetration that was expected of this latest generation of VR. As for Windows Mixed Reality products? They make-up 0.07% of the Steam survey's results.

While seeing DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) claims used for the removal of copyrighted content on Youtube and the like is a common occurrence, seeing it used to take a game off digital store shelves is still a relatively new concept. However, that is precisely what happened to Stardock's Star Control: Origins which released back on September 20th, 2018. The DMCA claim itself comes from exclusive copyright holders Paul Reiche III and Fred Ford who were two of the original game designers that worked on the series' first and second installments back in the early 1990s for Accolade. Considering Stardock bought the brand, trademark and publishing rights in 2013, this particular DMCA claim may not be legitimate. Even so, the game has been pulled, oddly enough the DLC remains available for purchase.

While Paul and Fred are claiming exclusive copyright in regards to the original titles as well as any related materials present in said games, they also claim similar copyright in regards to Star Control 3. Even if they do have some form of a legitimate copyright claim, Stardock's title does not use characters or story threads from the previous games and is based in a separate standalone universe. Taking into account Stardock's ownership of the brand, the DMCA claim appears to be nothing more than a form of harassment directed at Stardock. Worse yet, considering the resulting loss of income due to the DMCA claim, the company will be laying off some developers assigned to Star Control: Origins. Considering this legal dispute has been ongoing for some time you can view Stardocks side of the story on a separate webpage. Meanwhile, you can see the original DMCA takedown at the source provided below.

Steam has releases its statistics for the state of gaming in 2018, where the company reveals which games provided the most engagement, either in sales or players, throughout the year. Top Sellers, Top New Releases, Top Selling VR Titles, Top Early Access Grads, and Most Played Games are the categories across which Steam divided 2018's games, and some of these found themselves on the top spot of more than one category.

Warframe, DOTA 2, Monster Hunter: World, PUBG and CS: GO all find themselves on the Platinum tier of both the Top Sellers and Top Played categories, with more than 100,000 concurrent players at some point in time. The Witcher 3 finds itself in the Gold category of the Top sellers, again, and in the Silver category for Top played. No man's Sky, Stellaris, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance all find themselves in the Gold tier of the Top played game as well, with more than 50,000 concurrent players - No man's Sky, for one, surprises here. The game with one of the worst receptions ever has actually managed to keep relevant for much, much longer than other, much more critically-acclaimed games. Check out the top tiers in the images below.

The launch of the new Epic Games store for the PC has created many an aftershock in the gaming industry, including Steam updating their revenue share model, but the games press and media alike were quick to discuss implications more so for the equally new Discord store that understandably is more in line as far as breaking into the market goes, and impact from competition accordingly. In a series of moves that no doubt pleases game developers and publishers alike, Discord announced that they are going to offer a 90/10 revenue distribution with 90% in favor of developers- an increase over the industry leading "up to 88%" from Epic Games until then.

There is a small catch in that Discord is allowing developers to self-publish the games if they so desire, which in turn is how they will get that 90% revenue share, so it remains to be seen how user friendly that process is. Discord in their blog post made a big point about how it does not cost 30% to distribute games in 2018, a move that will no doubt be examined throughout not only the gaming industry but every single online app distribution platform where a 70/30 split is the current industry standard. As long as this move enables the store to break even and churn out a profit, we would like to see more of this happening to where game developers get more money and do not feel compelled to work ridiculously long hours.

Epic Games has been pulling a few major moves in the PC gaming market lately, none bigger than creating their own game store and following up with shifting over some of their games from Steam. The company promises a more lucrative profit distribution share to developers (to which Valve had preemptively countered slightly with their own Steam revenue update), and that did help get some game developers and publishers on board, including Supergiant with their new games Hades.

To appease the cautious PC audience thus far, Epic Games has decided to begin with some free games for account holders. As of the time of this post, the excellent aquatic survival game Subnautica is up for grabs. The game was somewhat of a sleeper hit this year, and well worth the free price of admission for anyone interested. The game is available through December 27, after which Epic Games will offer Super Meat Boy for free the following two weeks.

Crossplay has become an interesting point of contention for the industry, with some very popular games and companies advocating for a unified, non-fractured player audience enjoying their games across different media consumption screens, and even gaming platforms. Microsoft has been pushing this kind of capability for some time now, launching their Xbox Play Anywhere initiative which aims to bring PC, Xbox (or both) gamers to parity - acquiring a game on one platform equals having it on both, with all game data being synced.

A new update in the Steam beta update code explicitly refers to Xbox, with an "Xbox_pairwise_id" being present, which could point towards exploration of a future feature. Microsoft adding keyboard and mouse support to their Xbox consoles, news of a new streaming-based console for Microsoft's xCloud efforts, and Steam already offering controller support are some of the little details that could make this a winning bet for both companies.

NieR:Automata on the PC platform is a love-hate affair, the former due to excellent gameplay and replayability via multiple "routes" and the latter no thanks to the game in need of performance enhancements and bug fixes that were promised nearly two years ago but yet to come to fruition. Overall, the game holds an overwhelmingly positive review feedback on Steam, and won many game awards from various video game publications last year. For those who were hoping, or just waiting, for a complete GOTY edition to come out, perhaps this news is for you.

Today, Square Enix officially announced the NieR:Automata Game of the YoRHa Edition that includes the full base game as well as the 3C3C1D119440927 Expansion DLC, four pod designs (Grimoire Weiss pod, Retro Grey pod skin, Retro Red pod skin, Cardboard pod skin), the Machine Mask accessory and two digital wallpapers. This releases February 26, 2019 for $39.99 for PC and the PS4, with the XBOX One having received a "Become As Gods" earlier this year that had brought with it performance improvements. It remains to be seen if the new edition gets a similar patch, which interested users must keep track of before committing to a purchase as many players today have had to resort to a third-party patch to get things smoothly running.

With more and more companies creating their very own digital storefronts in the PC gaming space, it was only a matter of time until Epic Games threw their hat into the ring. With an announcement posted today, by Tim Sweeney the Epic Games store is now officially a reality. The new digital storefront will be made available for PC and Mac to start with, while other platforms will be added throughout 2019. In regards to games available on the platform, Epic will offer Fortnite alongside a set of hand-curated titles at launch. What those games might be is currently unknown.

Delivering a shot across the bow at Steam and their 30% revenue cut, Epic's game store will instead only take 12%, resulting in developers earning 88% of sales revenue. If they are using Unreal Engine the 5% engine royalty will be waived by Epic and instead is factored into their original 12% take. Putting that into perspective, an Unreal Engine based game released on Steam currently gives developers only 65% of the revenue with Steam earning 30% and Epic 5% due to engine royalties. Going from 65% to 88% is a significant increase in earnings, and it doesn't matter what game engine a developer uses, the revenue split will remain the same. This should leave developers quite happy since they are not limited by game engine choice and Epic benefits from a vastly increased selection of titles they can offer in their digital store.

A few weeks ago Valve developers announced a new technology called Motion Smoothing that would enable low-end GPUs to support VR games without problems. The system "looks at the last two delivered frames, estimates motion and animation, and extrapolates a new frame. Synthesizing new frames keeps the current application at full framerate, advances motion forward, and avoids judder".

Motion Smoothing has been available in Beta for some time, but the test phase has come to an end and it seems the technology is ready to enter the final, stable stage. You'll still need an HTC VIVE or HTC VIVE Pro headset -Oculus Rift and Windows Mixed Reality headset have their own display drivers with other tricks to sustain frame rates-, and the lack of AMD GPU support is somewhat disappointing, but hopefully Valve will fix this in future iterations of this technology.

With the release of Fallout 76 a week ago, Bethesda continues the tradition of releasing buggy games that are full of glitches and issues. These problems are always expected to come from Bethesda; typically the game is still fun however unlike previous titles, Fallout 76 is has been universally panned by gamers and critics alike. At this point, some of the bugs, exploits, and problems are just hilariously bad. Tools such as Nukacrypt are already available online, using only a partial code it can decrypt the in-game nuclear launch codes drastically speeding up the overall process. Keeping with nuke theme, players working together were able to crash a Bethesda server by launching three nukes simultaneously. There are more glaring examples but when you add them to the laundry list of problems its begins to look pretty bad even for Bethesda.

Then there is Brogadyn on Reddit, who for a week now has been stuck in a semi-god mode. Usually that would be something to rejoice about but in this case, has caused many issues with the game's mechanics as the player is seen to have 0 HP. Worse yet, Bethesda has been dragging their feet when it comes to looking into the problem with Brogadyn speculating that they could reproduce the issue based on the circumstances in which the issue occurred. When you consider all this along with the general bugs, glitches, and problems that are typically a minor annoyance, you end up with a game that likely should have stayed in beta.

As Thanksgiving nears, Steam's Autumn Sale has officially started. Offering multiple deals to be thankful for, such as, Assassin's Creed Odyssey (33% off), NeiR: Automata (50% off), Monster Hunter World (34% off), Shadow of The Tomb Raider (50% off) and Civilization VI Gold Edition (69% off) just to name a few. Even virtual reality titles like Doom VFR, Skyrim VR, and Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality are now on sale for (50% off). That said, PC gamers can breathe a sigh of relief as the latest Steam sale will run from November 21st until November 27th at 10:00 AM Pacific. Meaning you have plenty of time to spend all your hard earned money, so open up your wallets and let the shopping spree begin.

Valve seemed to have the ambition to become a hardware company when he launched peripherals like his Steam Link and its Steam Controller. The scope of these products has been limited, and now the company reports that "the supply of physical Steam Link hardware devices is sold out in Europe and almost sold out in the US". Valve has discontinued the product, although the company will continue to offer support for the Steam Link.

The idea was (and still is) really nice: any decent PC or laptop can be converted into a video game and even video content server, allowing the user to enjoy those experiences on much less powerful devices through an Ethernet or a good wireless connection. They started supporting Linux and Windows desktop and laptops, but Steam Link made it possible to stream video games to Android devices (Apple rejected the application for iOS) and Samsung Smart TVs. The product, announced in 2015, therefore says goodbye, although surely those who already have it will be able to continue enjoying it for a long time.

TechPowerUp today released the latest version, 2.15.0, of GPU-Z, the popular graphics subsystem information and diagnostic utility. This brings along with it support for AMD's Radeon RX 590 GPU, two reviews of which can be seen here and here for those interested. In addition, GPU-Z 2.15.0 adds support for Intel Whiskey Lake, UHD Graphics 617, and NVIDIA Tesla V100-SXM2-32GB along with minor bug fixes including detection of certain Quadro cards as fake, as well as an updated Vega 20 release date.

While this alone is plenty to merit an update, there is a special giveaway added to this version. Indeed, to the left of the "Close" button at the bottom is a temporary button that opens up a giveaway window listing a collaboration with PowerColor enabling users to potentially win the following (one per winner):

• 2x PowerColor Radeon RX 590 Red Devil
• 2x AMD Ryzen 5 2600X
• 15x $30 Steam Wallet Coupon

The terms and conditions can be found in GPU-Z again, but know that the contest runs through Dec 6, 2018 and you will have to enter via the form in the utility itself. The full change log can be found in the download link seen below, and do let us know what you feel about integrating our giveaways with our utilities in the comments section below.

DOWNLOAD: TechPowerUp GPU-Z 2.15.0

Stardock's Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion is currently available for free until November 18th from Humble Bundle. All you need to do is subscribe to the Humble Store Newsletter, at which point you can request a Steam key for what is considered one of the better space-based 4X grand strategy titles available. Although the title was originally released in 2012, Stardock has since further polished the game by optimizing the in-game graphics, removing the 2 GB RAM limit, adding larger worlds, better stability and improved mod support in an update back in April of 2017. All these changes made what I would consider a good game better, having played it quite a bit myself. That said if 4X strategy titles interest you give Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion a shot, after all, it is free so what do you have to lose?

The latest game set in the The Witcher universe has been met with slower initial sales than CD Projekt Red expected. According to the company's CEO Adam Kicinski, who spoke in the last earnings call, the slower uptake was the reason for the game's offering on Steam (it was initially launched as a GOG exclusive, but quickly made its way to the much more ubiquitous Steam store.)

As it is the latest game set in The Witcher universe, community interest and excitement surrounding the title increased the sales forecast, but perhaps the "slightly" different take on a Witcher game has turned some buyers' excitement to other pastures. Thronebreaker: the Witcher Tales is a single-player, story-driven adventure with card mechanics, a far cry from the third-person goodness of the now legendary The Witcher 3. Of course, the game now has a long time to rake in funds through continued sales, and it's unlikely the developer will leave The Witcher world behind even if it flops - which it definitely won't, at least not in the long run.

Well, I suppose we were warned about bugs in the Fallout 76 Beta in advance but no one could have predicted it would be this.. freeing. So much so that a not insignificant fraction of participants in the Fallout 76 beta found their storage drives to be free of all 50 GB of downloaded files without notice. It got to a point where the Bethesda support account on Twitter put out a spectacular tweet saying "PC #Fallout76 B.E.T.A. players: We are aware of an issue with the client and are investigating. Do not click any buttons on the client for the time being." which has since been deleted. There were understandably upset people, including those on a metered or slow internet plan to whom downloading 50 GB again is a lot to ask for- even assuming they could do so and play again before the original beta period ended.

It must be noted that a beta test is for identifying issues such as this to begin with, and this is not the full game that one has paid for either. Although this bug not being caught until a public beta is still worrying, the public outcry to this bug has been a touch overblown and this is coming from the guy who gave Bethesda some unpleasant news and then some over their treatment of the latest addition to the Fallout game IP. To their credit, Bethesda have extended the beta session, as noted in the image below, to allow for a patch to the launcher client and that should hopefully fix this issue as well. Whether or not they did the right thing by not using Steam as a client is a matter for another discussion, relevant as it is now, and you are welcome to carry it out in the comments section.

Halloween is here, and gamers can enjoy these holidays with some new "terrifying" offers on Steam. The dirt-cheap prices affect some new and classic games for Windows, macOS and Linux, but there are also interesting discount on VR titles. The sale will run from October 29th until November 1st, and several games have big discounts of up to 85%. The available horror games include "Plague Inc Evolved" (60% off), "Metro Redux Bundle" (75% off) or "Limbo" (80% off), but there's a special section for top sellers including "Shadow of the Tomb Raider" (34% off), "Rocket League" (40% off) or "We Happy Few" (25% off). Have a great and horrific time with those, my dear readers.

Proton is a new tool released by Valve Software that has been integrated with Steam Play to make playing Windows games on Linux as simple as hitting the Play button within Steam. Underneath the hood, Proton comprises other popular tools like Wine and DXVK among others that a gamer would otherwise have to install and maintain themselves. This greatly eases the burden for users to switch to Linux without having to learn the underlying systems or losing access to a large part of their library of games. Proton is still in its infancy so support is inconsistent, but regularly improving and the list of supported Windows games is growing each day.

In fact, this project has announced that it has now over 2,500 Windows games (2,663 at the time of writing) that work on Linux with Proton and Steam Play. Beyond those supported "whitelisted" games, there are several others that although not-whitelisted are supported and "play just as well as on Windows". Some examples are "No Man's Sky", "The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt", "Wolfenstein: The New Order" or "The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim". Any user can contribute and report about the titles in his game library thanks to ProtonDB.

Well this was a tale that took a roller-coaster ride, and then some. It started with a YouTube trailer for a mod that promised to take back Team Fortress to its 2008-era, which unsurprisingly got many fans of the game excited. The developer/modder who went by the handle XYK initiated a website (now inactive), along with other social media channels that included an active Discord server for the project. Timely updates followed, and good news came in the form of news from Valve that informed the modder of approval of a Steam release, as well as upcoming beta test keys as well. This was followed by Valve wanting some things to be changed, which were also done and things looked smooth at the time.

Then Valve decided they were not sure the mod was more than just a re-purposing of leaked game code, and decided to reverse their decision of approving a Steam release for the mod. This, as expected, did not go well with the vast majority of fans. The killing blow to the project came, however, not from Valve but from the modder himself who decided to go out with a negative bang of sorts instead of working with Valve. As it is, not only is the game community upset at both Valve and the modder but the u-turn taken by Valve has since been negatively criticized by other modders as well.

Microsoft launched Xbox Game Pass in June 2017. This video game subscription service allows users to install and play Xbox games (not just Xbox One ones, there are titles from the Xbox 360 and even the original Xbox) , with over 230 games currently available, a number that is constantly growing. Often called 'The Netflix of video games', the service has been improving its offering, but now the project will go beyond it's initial focus. Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, announced during an investor meeting that Xbox Game Pass will come to PCs soon.

Nadella gave no further details, so we still don't know what games will be included on that service or the subscription price (currently $9.99/month), but the announcement is promising and another sign that the company is moving forward to expand their reach and, of course, their earnings. On the latest earnings release (FY19 Q1) Microsoft pointed out how gaming revenue "increased 44% with Xbox software and services revenue growth of 36% mainly from third-party title strength". This move could make that growth go even higher, and it joins other recent announcements that could improve Microsoft's role in this market.