To anyone following gaming with any sort of regularity, it's plain to see that Roblox is by far one of the biggest, if not the biggest game among young audiences. Now, a new report from Hindenburg Research claims that Roblox has not only misrepresented its user count but has also failed to protect minors, who make up as much as 60% of the game platform's users. After Hindenburg released the statement, Roblox responded to the claim denying the allegations, citing that it strictly enforces its community standards, although it admits that bots and inflated user counts are an issue the company actively tries to fight.

Hindenburg's report alleges that Roblox has repeatedly inflated its user figure, intentionally using vague language to mislead its investors about how many users it has. The organization also claims to have discovered several cases of sexual abuse and exploitation of minors on the platform, citing incidents involving kidnapping and sexual assault against minors that stemmed from in-game meetings.

ASUS Republic of Gamers (ROG) and ASUS Metaverse today announced the release of the SL@SH206 Web3 project, which creates a gamified experience and Web3 community where players can explore the virtual world and unleash their creativity. The AI-generated stories are supported by cloud technology from Taiwan Web Service Corporation (TWSC), a subsidiary of ASUS. SL@SH206 is targeting users worldwide and is expected to support both Chinese and English languages.

Innovative Web3 gaming ecosystem
SL@SH206 is the first step in collaboration on virtual experiences between ASUS Metaverse and the ROG brand; it is built using Web3 technology that immerses players in a cyberpunk world. Players take on the role of an amnesiac robot, ZEI-6, in a society where humanity has sought refuge in the virtual world. Through AI-generated content and a gamified experience, they will gradually uncover the secrets of the SL@SH206 world. Along the way, players can discover various virtual objects, trigger game events, and be able to get SL@SH206 digital collectibles by completing missions. Additionally, players can join the official Discord community, where they can interact and participate in mini-games to accumulate points and earn valuable rewards.

Since its inception, Razer Synapse has been designed with the goal of empowering gamers and elevating their experience; with core functions like key remapping and macro creation, Synapse enables users to create personally tailored setups to make Razer peripherals truly their own. For years, Synapse has been constantly innovating to meet evolving user needs. And now, as the Vice President of Software at Razer, it is with great pleasure and excitement that I am able to announce the official full rollout of Razer Synapse 4.

What's new with Synapse 4
In this latest evolution, after nearly a year of intensive beta testing, Synapse 4 has redefined performance and usability, ensuring that all users will be able to enjoy a more reliable and intuitive experience on the platform.

Mojang has revealed that the Minecraft's annual mob vote (a feature that allows players to pick the next creature added to the game) tradition is coming to an end as part of a new game update structure, following TikTok war propaganda-inspired posters by players fed-up with the tradition.

On September 9, via a post on its blog, Mojang announced that its annual news livestream, Minecraft Live, is discarding the mob vote feature and is now being split up into several smaller, more-focused broadcasts, which will occur twice a year. Mojang also revealed that free content updates would be released more often, abandoning the traditional annual larger updates and sticking to smaller updates like this year's Armored Paws update.

Black Myth: Wukong is undoubtedly 2024's best-selling game, so far. Released in August 2024 and gaining 18M sales within two weeks, PC and PS5 users have been enjoying this game since its release, and Xbox gamers have just been sitting at the back seat missing out on all the fun. Now, GameStop has taken advantage of the situation, offering two options to the Series S users.

GameStop posted on X, offering Series S users a trade in price of $272.50 in exchange for their Xbox S, which is not far off from the price of a new Xbox Series S, $289.99. With no release date for the game on Xbox, players on the Series S might be tempted to jump ship. Either the gamers remain patient and wait for the game to come to the console, or they trade in their Series S, and perhaps use credit to purchase a PS5 and enjoy the game that has been making waves in the gaming community recently.

Corcord, Firewalk Studios' hero shooter, released on August 23 for PS5 and Windows, was pulled from sale on Tuesday and will be taken offline later this week, all thanks to its disastrous launch. Sony announced on its Playstation blog Players who purchased Concord would be refunded as it "explores options" for the game, and "determines the best path ahead."

Game director at Firewalk Studios, Ryan Ellis, announced Concord's fate in a message to players, saying, "Aspects of the game and our initial launch didn't land the way we intended." He continues, "Concord fans—we've been listening closely to your feedback since the launch of Concord on PlayStation 5 and PC and want to thank everyone who has joined the journey aboard the Northstar." Ellis added,"Your support and the passionate community that has grown around the game has meant the world to us."

Hellsingers! Did you think the music had stopped? Hells, no! We're proud to announce Metal: Hellsinger VR, coming to Meta Quest 2 & 3, Meta Quest Pro, PS VR 2, and Steam in 2024! Get ready to be fully immersed in metal and mayhem. Step into the body of the Unknown in full VR and become a true demon of vengeance. Wield her full wicked arsenal in your very hands and unleash its power straight into the snarling hordes' ugly faces. The original acclaimed rhythm shooter, developed by The Outsiders and rated 96% positive on Steam, has been developed for VR from the ground up in collaboration with Lab42 Games, to take full advantage of the potential of VR.

Metal: Hellsinger VR includes everything you've come to know and love in Metal: Hellsinger. That means the full award-winning soundtrack performed by your favorite metal legends, and the entire campaign to wreak vengeance upon the Red Judge all in glorious VR. The game has been rebuilt to take full advantage of the strengths of VR, creating accurate and meaty gunplay, a world that pulsates to the beat, and doing away with most menus for an immersive hub area. Aim dual pistols independently, cock your shotgun, and make them fear the beat.

First was mobile, then came consoles—and now Sky prepares to take flight on PC! On April 10th, the Sky: Children of the Light experience arrives to PC players on Steam for Early Access, and there's going to be something that all players can celebrate. Sky: Children of the Light is a peaceful, award-winning MMO designed to help players meaningfully connect with one another. You are a Child of the Light with a magical cape, set out into a wide world to find others like yourself. All are welcome in this cozy, open-world adventure above the clouds!

We're very excited about what it's going to bring to Sky. This year Sky turns five, and it's at times hard to believe just how much the game has grown—and how the community has helped it thrive! There are so many more adventures and celebrations ahead, and we're working to bring those to life in 2024 and the years to come. Those won't all fit in one blog post, but we thought we'd share a glimpse of the many things on the horizon—we'll have yet more to share in the months to come.

Paradox Interactive and Channel 3 Entertainment are thrilled to announce that Foundry will be launching in Early Access on Steam on May 2nd. Foundry, the procedurally-generated voxel factory-building and automation sandbox, already garnered 100,000 players during its alpha phase on Itch.io and its demo on Steam Next Fest in October 2023.

Foundry is a first-person, factory-building and automation sandbox set in a beautiful, procedurally-generated voxel world. Starting from humble beginnings of manually mining and processing resources, crafting machinery, and developing technologies, players can advance to automating the entire production line to their precise plans. They will face different logistic challenges such as planning pipe and belt networks and managing complex power systems, working to expand their constantly growing production lines as they create their own gigantic, automated, and self-sustaining factory. Played solo or with friends, Foundry is the perfect mix between grid-based construction games and factory building simulations.

The Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection launched last Thursday (March 14), with day one adoptees experiencing a plethora of issues. Player feedback and press coverage painted an ugly picture—an unreasonable install size of 70+ GB was an immediate point of discussion, considering the lo-fi origins of the Collection's graphical assets. Players were greeted with a low number of servers, and in-game sessions were often interrupted by crashes and other bugs—at the time of writing, overall Steam feedback (from 5315 user submitted reviews) is "Overwhelmingly Negative." The Embracer Group-owned development house is also under fire due to alleged uncredited usage of modder content—iamashaymin's character reskins were present in the PlayStation 5 build, but promptly removed by a post-launch patch update.

Aspyr quickly responded to community feedback—their support department stated: "we'd like to thank the Battlefront community for their overwhelming support and feedback for the Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection release. At launch, we experienced critical errors with our network infrastructure. The result was incredibly high ping, matchmaking errors, crashes, and servers not appearing in the browser. Since launch, we've been working to address these issues and increase network stability, and we will continue our efforts until our network infrastructure is stabilized to prevent further outages. Please continue to report bugs, errors, or unexpected behaviors to our support team via our Request Form." Aspyr's licensing partner, Lucasfilm Games, has not issued a statement on this situation.

Hello Drivers. Here we are. Taxi Life was released about two weeks ago. First of all, we'd like to thank you for all your support and feedback to improve the game. Reading your feedback, your kind messages and your encouragement has given us a lot of fuel for this first week. We are glad to read that many of you are enjoying driving in Barcelona! Now, let's get straight to the point. We are aware that you're interested in what is going on next in Taxi Life. And in this post, we want to share with you how our first week was for the team, and what's coming in the future of Taxi Life.

Driving Wheel
The main feedback we've received is that there aren't enough steering wheels compatible with the game. During the development of Taxi Life we worked with the driving wheels that were available for us. There are a lot of models out there, and it takes a lot of time to make every single driving wheel compatible with the game. It's not an excuse, but this was our situation. We really want to expand this list, and improve some actual driving wheels. We have a step-by-step plan that we are polishing right now and should let you know in more detail soon how it will look. In parallel we need to fix other issues you're already experiencing in-game.

V Rising is emerging from the shadows to take its greatest form to date! Join millions of Vampires on the journey to become the supreme predator of Vardoran, carving your name into the history of a world that has forgotten your kind. Journey through the shadows of the lands of man and monster, staking your claim and raising your towering castle. Drink blood, gather knowledge, and prove that you are worthy of the claim of the greatest Vampire to ever live by overcoming one final challenge…

Coming May 8th, 2024 to Steam, take to the skies on leathery wings and face down the Vampire king! Write the future of Vardoran in blood and live your legend this Spring! More information on the upcoming launch is right around the corner, so keep an eye on us to be the first to hear about the latest, greatest chapter of V Rising! V Early Access is available now on Steam!

Helldivers 2 has exploded onto the gaming scene in a massive way. This co-operative third-person shooter packed with danger, action, humor, and surprises has already become one of this year's most talked-about games. What some people may be less familiar with though is its progenitor. The original Helldivers, which debuted in 2015 (and is still active) is a co-op, multiplayer overhead twin-stick shooter packed with action, intensity, and plenty of challenging situations that a player might find themselves in.

We asked Johan Pilestedt, CEO & Creative Director at Arrowhead Studios about the process of adapting the original overhead-view gameplay of Helldivers into the third-person format-after first congratulating him for the rip-roaring success of the game. We asked how the team felt about the positive reception. "Overwhelmed and ecstatic! Over the last 15 years, we've seen a keen interest in the types of games we make and it was great to see our work recognized at this scale."

Lately Tiny Corp. CEO—George Hotz—has used his company's social media account to publicly criticize AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX GPU firmware. The creator of Tinybox, a pre-orderable $15,000 AI compute cluster, has not selected "traditional" hardware for his systems—it is possible that AMD's Instinct MI300X accelerator is quite difficult to acquire, especially for a young startup operation. The decision to utilize gaming-oriented XFX-branded RDNA 3.0 GPUs instead of purpose-built CDNA 3.0 platforms—for local model training and AI inference—is certainly a peculiar one. Hotz and his colleagues have encountered roadblocks in the development of their Tinybox system—recently, public attention was drawn to an "LLVM spilling bug." AMD President/CEO/Chair, Dr. Lisa Su, swiftly stepped in and promised a "good solution." Earlier in the week, Tiny Corp. reported satisfaction with a delivery of fixes—courtesy of Team Red's software engineering department. They also disclosed that they would be discussing matters with AMD directly, regarding the possibility of open-sourcing Radeon GPU MES firmware.

Subsequently, Hotz documented his interactions with Team Red representatives—he expressed 70% confidence in AMD approving open-sourcing certain bits of firmware in a week's time: "Call went pretty well. We are gating the commitment to 6x Radeon RX 7900 XTX on a public release of a roadmap to get the firmware open source. (and obviously the MLPerf training bug being fixed). We aren't open source purists, it doesn't matter to us if the HDCP stuff is open for example. But we need the scheduler and the memory hierarchy management to be open. This is what it takes to push the performance of neural networks. The Groq 500 T/s mixtral demo should be possible on a tinybox, but it requires god tier software and deep integration with the scheduler. We also advised that the build process for amdgpu-dkms should be more open. While the driver itself is open, we haven't found it easy to rebuild and install. Easy REPL cycle is a key driver for community open source. We want the firmware to be easy to rebuild and install also." Prior to this week's co-operations, Tiny Corp. hinted that it could move on from utilizing Radeon RX 7900 XTX, in favor of Intel Alchemist graphics hardware—if AMD's decision making does not favor them, Hotz & Co. could pivot to builds including Acer Predator BiFrost Arc A770 16 GB OC cards.

Team, we are entertaining, inspiring, and connecting more people with more content and deeper experiences than ever before. Over the last year, we have organized our company to further empower our creative leaders to deliver our strategic priorities of entertaining massive online communities, telling blockbuster stories, and harnessing the power of community in and around our games. These actions have positioned us to build bigger, bolder experiences for hundreds of millions of players and fans around the world. We are also leading through an accelerating industry transformation where player needs and motivations have changed significantly. Fans are increasingly engaging with the largest IP, and looking to us for broader experiences where they can play, watch, create content, and forge deeper connections. Our industry exists at the cutting edge of entertainment, and in today's dynamic environment, we are advancing the way we work and continuing to evolve our business.

As a company full of creators and storytellers, we believe in the value of teams innovating together, and continue to learn and adopt new ways of collaborating to grow and serve our global communities. Given how and where we are working, we are continuing to optimize our global real estate footprint to best support our business. We are also sunsetting games and moving away from development of future licensed IP that we do not believe will be successful in our changing industry. This greater focus allows us to drive creativity, accelerate innovation, and double down on our biggest opportunities—including our owned IP, sports, and massive online communities—to deliver the entertainment players want today and tomorrow. Lastly, we are streamlining our company operations to deliver deeper, more connected experiences for fans everywhere that build community, shape culture, and grow fandom.

Jim Ryan—President & CEO, Sony Interactive Entertainment—revealed a sobering restructuring plan earlier today: "The PlayStation community means everything to us, so I felt it was important to update you on a difficult day at our company. We have made the extremely hard decision to announce our plan to commence a reduction of our overall headcount globally by about 8% or about 900 people, subject to local law and consultation processes. Employees across the globe, including our studios, are impacted." Ryan's full email—addressed to the entire Sony Interactive Entertainment workforce—can be found here. It reveals that company leadership has decided to close its PlayStation London Studio—the South East UK team is/was reportedly working on an announced "PS5 online game." Microsoft revealed a larger scale layoff program late last month—affecting 1900 employees—albeit without shuttering any major development studios. A number of its California-based teams are in the process of ditching "traditional" office locations (including a former aircraft hangar), and are moving to a work from home (WFH) model.

The SIE chief believes that current circumstances are not sustainable: "These are incredibly talented people who have been part of our success, and we are very grateful for their contributions. However, the industry has changed immensely, and we need to future ready ourselves to set the business up for what lies ahead. We need to deliver on expectations from developers and gamers and continue to propel future technology in gaming, so we took a step back to ensure we are set up to continue bringing the best gaming experiences to the community." His email outlines an "impact for employees across all SIE regions—Americas, EMEA, Japan, and APAC," with reductions affecting native development teams and Firesprite, a Liverpool, UK-based studio (founded by former Psygnosis veterans). Hermen Hulst, Head of PlayStation Studios, also posted a blog entry on the subject of SIE global layoffs—he confirmed a number of reductions and project cancellations.

Introducing game hubs. Earlier this month, we started rolling out game hubs to Xbox Insiders on PC and a subset of Xbox App on PC players worldwide. Game hubs were built on your feedback around depth, progression, and more ways to connect with your games. With game hubs, you'll be able to track your progress over time, discover the latest content and add-ons, connect or compete with your friends, get the latest news from developers, and more. This version of game hubs is just the beginning. We have another wave of updates coming soon, including ways to view your local game captures and browse other games from the same publisher.
We can't wait to hear your feedback on what's there now and what you'd like to see in future updates. You can access game hubs from the Xbox App on PC—just click on the game in your library or the left sidebar. Now, let's run through some of the exciting content you will find here:

The essentials. At the top of the page, you'll see the essentials like game info alongside options to play, install, or update the game. You'll also see a quick link back to the details page, where you can purchase the game to own, see reviews, or add it to your wish list. Lastly, you'll find information like when you last played, your total playtime, an achievement summary, and friend overviews. This area will also be used for important notifications like letting you know when a game is leaving Game Pass so that you can use your discount before it's gone.

Slimbook Spain has presented its "KDE Slimbook V" model to the public—the company has collaborated with KDE, an international free software community. The latter's Plasma 6 open-source desktop environment is due to launch next week (according to Phoronix), so it is encouraging to see partner hardware appear beforehand. The Spanish tech company specializes in Linux-loaded laptops and notebooks—their "KDE V" collaborative variant seems to be an offshoot of an already released Slimbook Excalibur model, bearing a full "refined" aluminium chassis. The KDE Slimbook V is hyped as offering: "outstanding Performance—slender laptop that packs a punch. At the heart of the svelte KDE Slimbook beats the AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS processor, one of the most powerful CPUs for portable computers in the range. With its 8 cores and 16 threads, it can run your whole office from home and on the go, render 3D animations, compile your code and serve up the entertainment for your downtime." The KDE Slimbook V's full specification page can be found here.

A Slimbook Manjaro gaming-oriented laptop was revealed last week—again, this seems to be another rejigged model. An earlier "Hero" version shares the same spec sheet; notable parts include an Intel Core i7-13620H CPU and NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4060 Mobile GPU. The Slimbook and Manjaro partnership provides an almost Valve Steam Deck-esque user experience, albeit in non-handheld form—with support for Steam, Heroic Games Launcher, ProtonUp-QT, OBS, and Lutris platforms. Returning to the Slimbook V—its upcoming deployment of KDE's Plasma 6 desktop simply replaces the Excalibur model's standard installation of Linux or Windows OS options (dual boot is also available). Slimbook has set a starting price of €999 for a basic configuration—customers can select various upgrade options (RAM, storage, USB-C adaptors, power bricks etc.).

At Xbox, we strive to create games that inspire, entertain, and connect players from around the world. As a publisher and platform we are committed to meeting players where they are, by bringing more games, to more people, and on more devices. And at the heart of all we do are our players, and the vibrant communities that they build around the games they love.

Today we are announcing that four fan-favorite Xbox games will be coming to Nintendo Switch and Sony platforms this spring. The studios that built these celebrated games have drawn on their multi-platform experience to open the worlds they created to even more players and communities.

Last Epoch is releasing Wednesday, February 21st, 2024, at 11:00am CT! Welcome everyone to the patch notes for Last Epoch's Release! It's been an amazing road to this point, and it's unreal to be writing patch notes without using the term "Beta Patch". With this patch Last Epoch will officially be leaving Early Access. We couldn't have made it to this point without all of you, our amazing community driving the world of Eterra alongside us. We can not say it enough, Thank you.

We also want to mention again here that to prepare the servers for our release on February 21st, we will be shutting down our servers 24 hours before the patch, starting: Tuesday, February 20st, 2024, at 11:00am CT. While the servers are down, authentication will not be possible. If you are already playing in offline mode before we take down the servers, you should be able to continue your play session, however offline will not be able to authenticate to log in once the servers are down. This is also a good point to note that one of the features being added with 1.0 is a true offline mode, which will prevent this kind of interference with offline mode in the future.

Building on our previously announced support of the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT, XTX and Radeon PRO W7900 GPUs with AMD ROCm 5.7 and PyTorch, we are now expanding our client-based ML Development offering, both from the hardware and software side with AMD ROCm 6.0. Firstly, AI researchers and ML engineers can now also develop on Radeon PRO W7800 and on Radeon RX 7900 GRE GPUs. With support for such a broad product portfolio, AMD is helping the AI community to get access to desktop graphics cards at even more price points and at different performance levels.

Furthermore, we are complementing our solution stack with support for ONNX Runtime. ONNX, short for Open Neural Network Exchange, is an intermediary Machine Learning framework used to convert AI models between different ML frameworks. As a result, users can now perform inference on a wider range of source data on local AMD hardware. This also adds INT8 via MIGraphX—AMD's own graph inference engine—to the available data types (including FP32 and FP16). With AMD ROCm 6.0, we are continuing our support for the PyTorch framework bringing mixed precision with FP32/FP16 to Machine Learning training workflows.

Hi everyone, we have received feedback from players about the quest progression of Enshrouded. Many of you are frustrated with the fact that it is currently mainly server-side instead of player-side. We have some good news to share. Put your reading hats on, this one's long...When designing this system, we believed that the best way to enjoy Enshrouded was with a group of friends who are all working cooperatively together. However, we know that having quests completed while one player is offline might feel bad for those who feel they are missing parts of the gameplay experience. We designed Enshrouded as a co-op game. While working on it, we envisioned one group of friends experiencing the world together—sharing bases, resources, crafting recipes, and loot.

Furthermore, we wanted players to be able to play together meaningfully with different groups of friends and on different servers. We developed a game environment where a new player could join a long-running server and jump into the same action as their friends. Skipping the "tutorial" server quests to instead learn through conversation and cooperation, uniting the group. Our reasoning was that players shouldn't feel forced to participate in quests. Our player base is diverse, after all. Not everyone is bound to enjoy our combat or puzzles as much as building a base or exploring. If some players in a group want to focus on building or farming, while others are going on adventures, both making meaningful progress for the group, that should be fine.

Hello, Commanders—we hope you all have been enjoying your first-time going hands-on with Homeworld 3 during our public demo of War Games. Watching you share your experiences, exchange and debate strategies, and give us constant feedback has been incredible. This was our first time seeing the game played at scale, which is always an equally thrilling and nerve-wracking moment. We also recently gathered a dedicated group of players from outside our organizations to play through the full game. This resulted in additional insights and perspectives that will be incorporated to make Homeworld 3 the best experience possible.

After careful analysis of feedback, we made the decision to delay the global launch of Homeworld 3 until May 13, with advanced access set for May 10, to ensure that we're making the final tweaks needed to deliver at the level of quality that we strive for and you deserve. To say that you as a community of players have been waiting patiently for this next installment would be an understatement, and we are deeply appreciative of that. We will continue to keep you updated on our progress. As always, you're welcome to send your feedback via social channels, the Homeworld Universe Discord, and through our support page.

War Games mode fuses Homeworld's RTS gameplay with roguelike inspiration, charging commanders to take on a randomized series of fleet combat challenges. Claim powerful Artifacts that augment your ships with more power, speed, and, of course, weapons. Based on your results, you'll unlock new fleets to shake up your strategy. This demo, available to all Steam players starting February 5 at 10am PT until February 12 at 10am PT, supports up to three players as they engage waves of hostiles in a series of increasingly challenging encounters. Players can find teammates through Quick Match or create a lobby to team up with friends online.

It's important to note that any Fleets or Artifacts you unlock in the War Games demo will carry over when Homeworld 3 launches. For players not using Steam Cloud Saves, make sure you don't delete your demo files as we'll be sharing info on the exact transfer process later. Each level presents a greater challenge and new modifiers to your next War Games run. This demo will feature four different maps and a slew of things to unlock as you continue to play, including different starting fleets (maybe even an extra special one!) plus new Artifacts and more.

Paradox Interactive and Triumph Studios have announced the release date for Age of Wonders 4: Primal Fury, a new content pack coming on February 27, 2024 to the award-winning fantasy strategy game for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. The studios also revealed the full list of features that will be included with Primal Fury, including a new Primal Culture themed around mastery of beasts and nature, new Tomes of Magic to wield the forces of mists and storms, new physical forms, mounts, and much more. Primal Fury will be available on all platforms for a suggested retail price of $9.99/£8.49/€9.99; players who purchased the Premium Edition of Age of Wonders 4 or the Expansion Pass will receive Primal Fury at launch for no additional cost.

In the Age of Wonders 4: Primal Fury content pack, players will discover new ways to conquer the realms, and bring the land itself under their control. The new Primal Culture will enable rulers to channel an animal spirit that shapes their empire, both physically and spiritually. The Tome of Fey Mists and the Tome of the Stormborne, both added in Primal Fury, include new spells to conceal troops in magical fog, gain advantages over seas and shorelines, and even transform armies into fearsome nagas. The pack will also launch alongside the free Wolf Update, which will add new features and improvements requested by the Age of Wonders community, including a rework of necromancy, new randomly generated items, and War Bounties to better direct allies in conflicts.