The floating esports suite will allow the ship's company of HMS Prince of Wales to compete against each other in an immersive gaming environment as part of a partnership between the Royal Navy and the British Esports Federation. While the classic Royal Navy game 'Uckers' is still going strong, the suite will allow further opportunities for ship's company to enhance digital skills and an additional space to decompress in their down time.

It's the result of a partnership between the Royal Navy and the British Esports Federation, the national body for esports in the United Kingdom. The facility includes 12 high-end Alienware Aurora R15 gaming desktop PCs, powered by NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 and Intel Core i7 processors. It will join other sports facilities onboard, including gyms, a boxing ring, plus areas for table tennis and running.

Star Citizen's annual Foundation Festival returns from July 2 to 14, celebrating the Star Citizen community and welcoming new pilots to the 'verse. This year's event also features a Free Fly period, giving all players free access to the game and the chance to fly eight distinct ships and vehicles - a perfect introduction to Star Citizen's rich and varied universe. Hot on the heels of the Alpha 4.2: Storm Breaker release, which introduced new missions and the towering irradiated Apex Valakkar, a colossal worm-like creature from the depths below, the Foundation Festival arrives at the perfect time to prepare new players for the adventure ahead.

To get started, newcomers can check the New Player Essentials, packed with helpful tips, guides, and must-know information to take their first confident steps in the 'verse. There are also in-game tutorials, beginner friendly articles and videos on the Welcome Hub, and the Guide System further connects beginners with veteran players eager to lend a hand and share their knowledge.

1047 Games, the developer behind Splitgate and the recently announced follow-up, Splitgate 2, has just announced a round of layoffs to an undisclosed number of "valued 1047 Games team members," according to an announcement on LinkedIn. The studio says that the decision was made at a time when the company is "redirecting resources to build the best game for our players." In addition to the job cuts, 1047 Games's co-founders, Ian Proulx and Nicholas Bagamian, are not receiving salaries at this time. The announcement claims that the studio is working on the next phase of Splitgate 2 and using community feedback to perfect the gameplay experience.

Adding insult to injury, the company's CEO was recently criticized online for wearing a hat that said "Make FPS Great Again" to the Summer Game Fest event shortly after releasing Splitgate 2, which faced a somewhat negative reception because of generic battle royale gameplay mechanics and aggressive monetization tactics. Currently, the game has a "Mixed" review rating on Steam just over a month after its initial launch into Early Access. According to an X post by Proulx, he was unaware of the game's aggressive monetization and $80 launch bundles, which were also part of the reason the game was heavily criticized at launch. The first Splitgate game also had a somewhat mixed response at its initial Beta launch in 2019, so it would not be surprising to see the game and developer bounce back from this hit, however, some of the original Splitgate community seems to have been burned by the rocky launch and CEO's recent statements.

Team Cherry first introduced Hollow Knight: Silksong back in February 2019, as a mainline sequel to the first entry (2017) in the series. Since then, the independent Australian development studio and publisher has produced a minimal amount of preview material. The last significant chunk was delivered during an Xbox 2022 presentation. Fast-forward to June (2025); many Metroidvania genre enthusiasts were hoping for some newer signs of life—potentially amid a flurry of special preview events. Pre-event SteamDB updates seemed to point to an imminent announcement of sorts. Days later, Sony's State of Play and Geoff Keighley's Summer Game Fest did not harbor any fresh Hollow Knight series updates.

Thankfully, yesterday's Xbox Games Showcase provided a hint of things to come. Sarah Bond (President of Xbox) discussed the status of Team Cherry's magnum opus during Microsoft's public unveiling of ASUS ROG's Xbox Ally and Ally X gaming handhelds: "the highly anticipated Hollow Knight: Silksong will be available at launch, and on Game Pass, when the Ally releases later this year." Unsurprisingly, Team Cherry did not launch a parallel promotion/hype campaign. Instead, Matthew Griffin—the team's resident PR and marketing expert—headed over to the official Hollow Knight Discord community channel, and disclosed some pleasing news: "I confirmed BEFORE Holiday—we are not tied to a console release." When pressed about a specific launch window, Griffin envisioned a pre-Christmas arrival.

At Computex 2025, ASRock deliberated over the problems that have plagued certain AMD 800-series motherboard models. Fatal combinations—usually affecting popular Ryzen 7 9800X3D gaming CPUs—have been highlighted by sections of the PC hardware community, and (subsequently) press outlets. Months ago, the Taiwanese mainboard manufacturer's Japanese branch took a combative stance (in response to widespread criticism). Following continued failures of Team Red "Granite Ridge" desktop processors on "mid-to-high-end" ASRock mainboards—even in non-3D V-Cache guises—company representatives have interacted with key media conduits, including Tech YES City's Bryan Bilowol. Coinciding with the release of fresh BIOS fixes, long-form video coverage of Q&A sessions have turned up on YouTube.

Company reps have alluded to a warranty replacement scheme, but full details were not disclosed during May-time Computex proceedings. Many critics are still waiting for an official company statement; hopefully addressed to a global audience. In the meantime, one regional office has weighed in with some much-needed outreach: "ASRock Korea takes the recent AMD 800 series motherboard issues experienced by some users very seriously and will follow up with you to protect your trust. ASRock is continuously monitoring the performance and stability of the platform and will provide a firmware update as soon as possible if any issues are identified. In addition, if the system you are using is damaged due to this issue, we will take responsible measures for both the CPU and the motherboard distributed through the official domestic importer, and please submit the case through ASRock Korea's official distributor for diagnosis and processing. ASRock Korea will continue to listen to the voices of our customers and do our best to remain a trusted brand." This message was posted on Quasar Zone; a high-traffic PC hardware forum. A good number of manufacturers have responded to cases raised by members of this South Korean community.

On the dawn of the fifth day, 3.5 million Nightfarers took up arms against the Night in ELDEN RING NIGHTREIGN. We are ever grateful for your passion. But the Night is far from over. In addition to the DLC releasing later this year, new additions will be gradually implemented, including enhanced fights against existing Nightlords starting this month, as well as Duo Expeditions at a later date.Thank you for your support.

Nightfarers, Thank you for playing ELDEN RING NIGHTREIGN. Patch 1.01.1 is out; it includes several bug fixes as well as improvements for solo expeditions. The following improvements for solo expeditions are added to the game:

• The effect "Automatic Revival Upon Defeat", which allows revival once per night boss battle, will be added to solo expeditions.
• The number of runes gained will be increased.

D-DAY! The game is OUT for $4.95! The courtroom is open! Guilty as Sock! is out now, grab your socks and join the chaos. Enter a chaotic courtroom where socks play lawyers, prosecutors, and judges! Use absurd evidence, craft wild arguments, and deliver verdicts in this hilarious online party game. Improvise, strategize, and shout "Objection!"—because in Guilty as Sock!, chaos always wins!

The game is officially out now! If you have any feedback or suggestions, feel free to join our AWESOME Discord server! A huge thank you for all the support over the past few days, it truly means a lot to us, and we're so happy to see how excited you are about the game's concept! Since we're a very small team, we'll now be focusing all our efforts on improving the full game. That means we won't be updating the demo for a little while.

Hello friends! We are absolutely thrilled to share that our game, Spray Paint Simulator, is out now on Steam! It's been a long journey from forming our studio, to the initial idea for Spray Paint Simulator, and now, its release, and we couldn't be more proud. After months of creating a game that we had loads of fun making, we're very excited to be able to share it with the world.

In the past, we've always made games for other people, so creating something ourselves has been both exciting and a little scary. When you launch a title, there's always a mixture of sheer joy and nerves after putting it out there. We're grateful for the support from our publisher and the many players who have helped us shape the game into something we're eager for people to play. We've done our best to listen to player feedback and create a game we hope will be enjoyed by many. We can't wait to see what players come up with during their time with the game. We hope that you enjoy it!

The swarms are back for more in World War Z VR! Coming to Meta Quest and Steam VR on August 12. World War Z VR is a new first-person experience designed from the ground up to capture the series' legendary scale and action for long-time fans and VR enthusiasts alike. The gameplay mechanics of the original World War Z game have been fully reimagined for VR to deliver a gripping sense of realism and excitement with each moment.

Take on hordes of undead across vast environments in three unique locations: New York, Tokyo, and Marseille. Customize your challenge to suit your playstyle with a variety of characters, weapons, perks, and difficulty settings to choose from. A special bundle that includes both the new World War Z VR and the original World War Z is also available to pre-order today!

At Xbox, we want to help you spend more time playing the games you love, to be there when you need some help—and out of the way when you don't. Copilot for Gaming (Beta) is designed to do just that, and starting today, you can begin testing this new feature as it starts rolling out to the beta version of the Xbox app for mobile devices.

Copilot for Gaming is the ultimate gaming sidekick, making gaming with Xbox more seamless and personalized. In this early version of the feature for mobile, you'll be able to access Copilot for Gaming on a second screen, without distracting you from your core gameplay experience. The companion knows what game you're playing and understands your Xbox activity, so it can answer any questions about the games you're interested in, provide links to more information when its response includes web sources, or answer questions based on your account, play history and achievements.

The ACPD officially have a new tool in their arsenal, officers. We're thrilled to announce that The Precinct is now officially Steam Deck Verified, which means you can fight crime on the go! "Whether you're on shift or not, rookie, you take the work with you. You can't just turn it off. You never stop being a cop."—Officer Kelly

But what does being Steam Deck Verified mean?
When a game is submitted for testing on the Steam Deck, it can be assigned one of three different badges depending on how it performs. The Unsupported badge means that the game does not run properly on the Steam Deck and the Playable badge means that the game can be played on the Steam Deck, but the player may need to make some manual adjustments to the game for it to function correctly. The Verified badge is only awarded to games that operate well on the Steam Deck without the need for the player to make manual adjustments and don't present any significant problems when it comes to installation, performance, controls, and display.

Yesterday, Blacksmith Master was released into Early Access with a 25% launch discount—and a brand-new trailer to go with it (see below). Build your workshop from the ground up and manage every step of the smithing trade, from raw resource acquisition to finished goods in the hands of your customers. Design your own products, oversee distant mines and camps, hire and train the right staff, and grow a small-town forge into a kingdom-spanning operation. Whether you're forging footman swords or frying pans, everything has its place in the chain.

Steam Reviews: Your Feedback Matters
The forge is running, the shop doors are open, and players are already setting up production lines. If you've had a chance to play, consider leaving a Steam review. Whether it's a short note or a more detailed take, we're reading everything, and your feedback is essential to helping shape future updates!

Global Accessibility Awareness Day, celebrated annually on the third Thursday of May, is dedicated to recognizing and raising awareness about the importance of accessibility. With billions of people playing video games in the world, including nearly 450 million players with some form of disability, our mission at Xbox is to create welcoming and accessible experiences so as many people as possible can enjoy the community and fun of gaming.

We recognize that every player can have different accessibility needs or preferences to support their play. This is why it's critical we partner with members of the disability community to help inform the hardware, platform experiences, and games we create.

"This just in, over one thousand officers have pledged to assist the ACPD in the BIGGEST city clean-up Averno has ever seen"—Bree Bookman, ACTV. We wanted to take a moment to say a huge thank you to all of the players who have helped support us during what has been, dare we say it, a criminally good launch for us! We've been blown away by all of the positive comments we've received, and all of the useful bug reports and feedback that you have sent our way. We want to assure you that, even though we may not respond to every single review or report, we are looking at all of them and incorporating them into our future strategy. What strategy is that? Read on to find out more about what the future holds for The Precinct.

Together with Kwalee, we've been tracking your most urgent and requested fixes. Our programming team is already hard at work tackling the biggest issues. This is what we're focusing on in the short-term, but in the mid-to-long-term we're also compiling suggestions from your feedback to decide what extra features and content we can add to The Precinct in the future. We are committed to adding more content to the game, but we haven't decided yet exactly what that will be.

F1 25: Everything You Need to Know: Launch times, PC specs, achievements, soundtrack & much more. It's almost time to hit the grid. Here's your one-stop-shop on all of the key information, content and advancements we've made to this year's game. Pre-Load Timings: first-off, let's get F1 25 onto your console/PC. If you've pre-ordered, you can download the game to your system from the dates below.

Launch Timings
The big day is fast approaching, Iconic Edition players can hit the track from as early as May 27. Check out the timings below for both Iconic and Standard Edition. Additionally, EA Play members can trial F1 25 for 5 hours from May 27, and EA Play Pro members will have full access to the Iconic Edition from the same date. Leave your mark on the world of racing in F1 25, the official video game of the 2025 FIA Formula One World Championship, featuring a revamped My Team mode, the thrilling third chapter of Braking Point, and more!

The Cleanest Launch Ever! Hey Cleaners! What a launch! We're incredibly grateful for the support you've shown us—your reviews, your Discord messages, your bug reports, and your amazing vibes. Thanks to your quick feedback, we were able to jump on a few issues right away and already pushed out a hotfix. Welcome to the most satisfying job simulator you never knew you wanted! Grab your gloves, turn up the music, and get ready to clean, sort, and pack stacks of dirty money. It's part oddly satisfying cleaning sim, part fever dream. And yes, every single banknote is physics-simulated, because why not?

But that's not all
We're already working on a new patch coming next week! And once again, it's based entirely on your feedback. So if you spot something weird or have a cool idea, now's a great time to share it. Every message helps! Also…you've already left 300 reviews on Steam. That's HUGE. Early reviews make a big difference in visibility. They help new players find the game through "New & Trending" and other Steam features. If you haven't posted review yet and feel like supporting us, just a few words go a long way. You can always edit it later too. We read everything! That includes the comments under your reviews. Your voice matters and truly helps shape the game's future. Thank you.

Data drawn from a new in-game poll called Play2Act showed evidence that gaming has the potential to incentivize greener habits among gamers. 79 percent of those respondents who had played games with green messages or environmental content reported making at least one positive behavioural change after playing these games. Among these players, 47 percent report reducing their environmental impact through energy use or public transport, while 34 percent report making greener consumption choices.

Launched in September 2024, Play2Act is a poll embedded in popular games, designed to explore the role of games in tackling the climate and nature crises. The initiative was developed by PlanetPlay, a not-for-profit platform that contributes to environmental action through games, in collaboration with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

Unlucky owners of AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D processors have encountered major problems that largely involve ASRock motherboards. Throughout early 2025, user feedback provided insight into numerous cases of "catastrophic CPU failures." Members of the official ASRock subreddit have kept track of these unfortunate incidents; now closing in on 200 documented "murdered" specimens. Industry watchdogs reckon that even more disagreements—involving the Zen 5-based 9000X3D series and ASRock B- and X- (AM5) boards—exist outside of this community-aggregated log. At the end of February, ASRock pushed out an important BIOS update—this fix did not resolve all problems. Over a month later, AMD weighed in with their findings—in response, ASRock released another update.

Evidently, Ryzen 7 9800X3D products continue to perish—Tech YES City's Bryan Bilowol has added Team Red's Ryzen 9 9950X model to the mix. The tech YouTuber was surprised by the death of his example; apparently caused by an ASRock X870 Steel Legend mainboard. Standard "Granite Ridge" processors—that lack 3D V-Cache—have received less attention, but observers believe that these non-X3D options are still vulnerable. Bilowol did not personally experience the moment of catastrophe—instead, a friend was borrowing an affected PC build. As demonstrated in a new Tech YES City video post-mortem, the completely dead CPU sported some worrying gray marks. Tech YES City has a fairly large audience, so ASRock leadership will likely be cursing after noticing another uptick in public scrutiny. Past reports have pointed out the manufacturer's belief that too much "misinformation" is being spread. Bilowol surmised that the company is keeping this issue: "under the radar—they seem to be hoping that the issue will just go away." Despite collaborating with ASRock for over a decade, Tech YES City will not pull any punches—await for more gory details in upcoming follow-up investigations.

Late last month, La Quimera did not launch on its promised release date (April 26). At the time, the game's development team—Reburn—sent out an apology (via Discord), but their short statement did not delve into too much explanatory detail. Industry watchdogs proposed revised launch windows; potentially later on in 2025. Apparently, last month's "version 1.0" review code was not well received—content and performance-wise. Additionally, a mid-month closed beta program was reportedly nixed within 24 hours of kicking off—early community feedback suggests participants experiencing a myriad of problems. As promised during non-launch week, Reburn has provided a more comprehensive update about forward progress—in the renewed form of La Quimera; available now in Early Access.

Within the title's rebooted Steam page, Reburn outlines a revised release schedule (subject to change): "La Quimera, our narrative-driven sci-fi FPS, is now live on Steam in Early Access!..We plan to remain in Early Access for up to 18 months. This timeline may adjust based on feedback and the pace of development, but our goal is to deliver a fully polished experience within that timeframe...The Early Access version currently includes the first four levels of the campaign, featuring fully integrated narrative and gameplay elements. It offers approximately five hours of story-driven content, designed to demonstrate the core experience we are building toward. The current build is stable and fully playable, though bugs and balance adjustments are expected as we continue refinement." Interested parties can give this "still in progress" iteration a try; Steam early access pricing is $29.99.

In February, we announced Battlefield Labs as our most ambitious community collaboration in franchise history to validate the future of Battlefield. Today, we'll update you on our initial learnings and how we'll continue to scale testing into the future.

Across our four initial play sessions with a small group of core Battlefield players across Europe and North America, we've completed thousands of hours of gameplay, had hundreds of thousands of player spawns, and seen over a million environmental objects destroyed, including walls, windows, crates, and buildings your squad crashed the helicopter into.

Added Offline Single Player Mode: players can now enjoy Deadzone's single-player mode offline, without an internet connection! This was our top-requested feature, and the #1 priority for our team to deliver this week. We really wanted to address this for the community ASAP, and hope you can enjoy the improved experience this weekend! Note: this is a large change for our back-end systems. We expect performance to be stable after internal testing, but will monitor the patch to make sure it acts as expected. Co-op mode will also still require an online connection, so players can share the same game experience in real time.

Added a new mission—Uniform Chaos II
In this mission, each room randomly spawns a horde of the same type of enemies to defeat. This approach builds on the Uniform Chaos I mission, and offers an even deeper level of enemy variety and challenge for experienced players. This mission can be found in Zone 2, we hope you enjoy it!

Last week, GIGABYTE issued an official response to an initial case of "thermal conductive gel slippage," involving an ultra-expensive AORUS GeForce RTX 5080 MASTER ICE, a vertical-mounted graphics card setup, and very non-intensive MMO gaming sessions. The Taiwanese manufacturer believes that this problem is isolated within a first wave of products: "every graphics card is inspected and verified against our quality standards before leaving the factory. The thermal conductive gel is an insulating, deformable, putty-like compound. It is engineered to remain in place when applied properly, and can endure at least 150 °C before any melting or liquification could happen. In some early production batches for the GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 50 Series, a slightly higher volume of gel was applied to ensure sufficient thermal coverage. The overapplication may cause the excessive gel to appear more prominent, extended, and could potentially be separated from the designated area. While the appearance of extra gel might be concerning, this cosmetic variance does not affect the card's performance, reliability, or lifespan. We had already inspected the issue, and adjusted the gel to the optimal amount in (subsequent) production runs."

Despite sending out a public assurance to a worried audience—"(we) take your concerns seriously and want to provide clear information"—GIGABYTE will not be recalling problematic products. VideoCardz reckons that the company is "downplaying" current conditions. Based on further evidence—shared by several members of the TechPowerUp forum (commenting on news coverage)—unfortunately, the first reported case (emerging from South Korea) was not an isolated incident. Given the contents of GIGABYTE's public bulletin, they seem to be aware that this special thermal material (reserved for fancier SKUs) is troubling owners of early batch "GeForce RTX 50 Series and Radeon RX 9000 Series graphics cards." TPU forumite, remekra, shared two images and the following bit of feedback (plus a warning): "I have mine mounted in Lian Li SUP01 case, so GPU is basically standing that's why it drips into the direction of ports. So far it does not overheat on memory modules. I will hold off sending it to GIGABYTE customer service, as I don't have good memories of them; so until it overheats or stops working I will use it. But if you have a vertical case or stand then be aware."

We're excited to present IBM Granite 4.0 Tiny Preview, a preliminary version of the smallest model in the upcoming Granite 4.0 family of language models, to the open source community. Granite 4.0 Tiny Preview is extremely compact and compute efficient: at FP8 precision, several concurrent sessions performing long context (128K) tasks can be run on consumer grade hardware, including GPUs commonly available for under $350 USD. Though the model is only partially trained—it has only seen 2.5T of a planned 15T or more training tokens—it already offers performance rivaling that of IBM Granite 3.3 2B Instruct despite fewer active parameters and a roughly 72% reduction in memory requirements. We anticipate Granite 4.0 Tiny's performance to be on par with that of Granite 3.3 8B Instruct by the time it has completed training and post-training.

As its name suggests, Granite 4.0 Tiny will be among the smallest offerings in the Granite 4.0 model family. It will be officially released this summer as part of a model lineup that also includes Granite 4.0 Small and Granite 4.0 Medium. Granite 4.0 continues IBM's firm commitment to making efficiency and practicality the cornerstone of its enterprise LLM development. This preliminary version of Granite 4.0 Tiny is now available on Hugging Face—though we do not yet recommend the preview version for enterprise use—under a standard Apache 2.0 license. Our intent is to allow even GPU-poor developers to experiment and tinker with the model on consumer-grade GPUs. The model's novel architecture is pending support in Hugging Face transformers and vLLM, which we anticipate will be completed shortly for both projects. Official support to run this model locally through platform partners including Ollama and LMStudio is expected in time for the full model release later this summer.

The momentum around Deadzone's Early Access release has been amazing! Since this week's launch, over 30,000 players have jumped in, and the feedback has been super helpful. Thanks everybody! The most-requested feature so far is offline single-player mode, so we're making it a top priority. You'll be able to play Deadzone Rogue offline in single-player mode ASAP—we're aiming to have a patch out and live as quickly as possible.

We're also sorry if it wasn't clear that an online connection was required. We've updated our Steam page "System Requirements" with this info for now. Note: co-op mode will still require online play, so everyone can share the same game experience in real time. Thanks again for your support, it's been so exciting to see so many players enjoying Deadzone! In the meantime, keep the bug reports and feedback coming through Steam reviews, or Discord—in our #feedback channel. Let's make this the best game possible!

Dear Rally Community, every great journey eventually finds its finish line, and today, we announce that we've reached the end of the road working on WRC. After releasing EA SPORTS WRC in 2023, the 2024 season, including the recently released Hard Chargers Content pack, will be our last expansion. For now, we are pausing development plans on future rally titles. Rest assured, EA SPORTS WRC will continue to be available for existing and new players. We hope it remains a source of joy, excitement, and the thrill of rally racing. We've poured our hearts into making it for fans, and we know you'll keep the passion alive.

Our WRC partnership was a culmination of sorts for our Codemasters journey with off-road racing, spanning decades through titles like Colin McRae Rally, and DiRT. We've provided a home for every rally enthusiast, striving tirelessly to push the boundaries and deliver the exhilarating thrill of driving on the ragged edge. We've brought together incredibly talented racing developers, worked with some of the sport's icons, and had the opportunity to share our love of rallying. Thank you to all the fans who have and continue to be part of our rally journey.

• The Codemasters WRC Team