One year on, with the teething problems a major new release inevitably brings firmly behind us, Plasma's developers have worked on fine-tuning, squashing bugs and adding features to Plasma 6—turning it into the best desktop environment for everyone! Read on to discover all the exciting new changes landing in this release…

Digital Art
We want to make Plasma the best platform for creativity, and Plasma 6.3 takes the next step in that direction by providing features that help artists optimize and customize their graphics tablets to their liking.

Steam is highly valued by many gamers, not only for being a fairly inexpensive, easy way to buy and manage games, but also because it provides statistics on player count and play times, via tools like SteamDB, which are a neat way for gamers to see how the community is participating in games before buying them. According to a post on the FandomPulse Substack, however, Ubisoft has taken issue with Valve's player statistics.

The Substack post quotes Ubisoft insiders who claim that the game developer and "other companies" want Valve to disable or restrict the APIs used by tools like SteamDB and Steam Charts as a direct response to the disappointing performance of Star Wars Outlaws. This news also comes ahead of the early 2025 launch of Assassin's Creed Shadows, which has already caused significant apprehension as a result of game previews. The claims also mention that Ubisoft seeks to control the narrative of its games and potentially present a rosier image to its investors. If Ubisoft has its way, the gaming industry would lose even more transparency, since tools like SteamDB are often used by game journalists to evaluate the popularity and commercial success of games.

Worldwide silicon wafer shipments increased 5.9% quarter-over-quarter to 3,214 million square inches (MSI) in the third quarter of 2024 and registered 6.8% growth from the 3,010 million square inches recorded during the same quarter last year, the SEMI Silicon Manufacturers Group (SMG) reported in its quarterly analysis of the silicon wafer industry.

"The third quarter wafer shipment results continued the upward trend which started in the second quarter of this year," said Lee Chungwei (李崇偉), Chairman of SEMI SMG and Vice President and Chief Auditor at GlobalWafers. "Inventory levels have declined throughout the supply chain but generally remain high. Demand for advanced wafers used for AI continues to be strong. However, the silicon wafer demand for automotive and industrial uses continues to be muted, while the demand for silicon used for handset and other consumer products has seen some areas of improvement. As a result, 2025 is likely to continue upward trends, but total shipments are not yet expected to return to the peak levels of 2022."

The Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket is billed as a "casual," accessible way for people to enjoy the fun of the Pokémon Trading Card Game, regardless of where they are in the world. That said, it looks like players will also have to endure the added fun of the financial burden of the real-world Pokémon TCG if they want to be able to play the game in any serious fashion. According to one gamer's analysis posted on Reddit, however, the amount of time you'd need to invest into Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket is anything but casual, clocking in at over two years of daily gameplay to unlock your first whole set.

The method used in the analysis was based on the likelihood of obtaining a new card needed to complete a card set in one of the two daily card draws available to non-premium players. Without optimizing gameplay using features, like the Points Shop or the Wonder Pick, both of which greatly increase the odds of drawing specific cards, players would need to play consecutively for 1843 days, opening a total of 3,687. Paying for a premium pass enables opening three packs a day, however, reducing that number to 1,229 days and resulting in a total bill of $404 for that period. It's only by making full use of the Wonder Pick and Points Shop that the total play time comes down to a little under two years, at a total of 655 days (around 1,310 packs). Upgrading to the premium pass reduces this, but will run up a total of $180 but reduce the amount of time significantly.

We previously covered a damning report that levelled some pretty severe allegations at Roblox concerning a mix of child safety and false platform metrics. While nothing seems to have been done about the latter, Roblox looks to be addressing the former, and far more serious, of the allegations. According to a Bloomberg report, Roblox will add child safety measures in November that will give parents more control over what their children can see and interact with in Roblox's various games and communities.

According to Bloomberg, Roblox sent parents of the platform's minor audience an email detailing the new changes coming in November. Seemingly in response to the recent criticism, Roblox is putting more control in the hands of parents. Specifically, children under 13 will need parental approval in order to access certain chat features, although the company declined to clarify on exactly what it means by this. Additionally, children under nine years of age will require parental approval in order to play games known to contain moderate violence or crude humor. For more involved parents, Roblox is also introducing a new account type that will allow parents to supervise their online activities. These new safety measures come after Roblox effectively dismissed the October 9 Hindenburg report's accusations that it wasn't doing enough to protect its minor audience.

Global shipments of silicon wafers are projected to decline 2% in 2024 to 12,174 million square inches (MSI) with a strong rebound of 10% delayed until 2025 to reach 13,328 MSI as wafer demand continues to recover from the downcycle, SEMI reported today in its annual silicon shipment forecast.

Strong silicon wafer shipment growth is expected to continue through 2027 to meet increasing demand related to AI and advanced processing, driving improved fab utilization rate for global semiconductor production capacity. Moreover, new applications in advanced packaging and high-bandwidth memory (HBM) production, which require additional wafers, are contributing to the rising need for silicon wafers. Such applications include temporary or permanent carrier wafers, interposers, device separation into chiplets, and memory/logic array separation.

Have you ever dreamed of having a real conversation with an NPC in a video game? Not just one gated within a dialogue tree of pre-determined answers, but an actual conversation, conducted through spontaneous action and reaction? Lately, a small R&D team at Ubisoft's Paris studio, in collaboration with Nvidia's Audio2Face application and Inworld's Large Language Model (LLM), have been experimenting with generative AI in an attempt to turn this dream into a reality. Their project, NEO NPC, uses GenAI to prod at the limits of how a player can interact with an NPC without breaking the authenticity of the situation they are in, or the character of the NPC itself.

Considering that word—authenticity—the project has had to be a hugely collaborative effort across artistic and scientific disciplines. Generative AI is a hot topic of conversation in the videogame industry, and Senior Vice President of Production Technology Guillemette Picard is keen to stress that the goal behind all genAI projects at Ubisoft is to bring value to the player; and that means continuing to focus on human creativity behind the scenes. "The way we worked on this project, is always with our players and our developers in mind," says Picard. "With the player in mind, we know that developers and their creativity must still drive our projects. Generative AI is only of value if it has value for them."

Valve has released the tabulated results and statistics of its April Steam Hardware and Software Survey - the key take away from last month's user generated data is that NVIDIA's trusty GeForce GTX 1650 GPU is once again the most popular graphics card. It dethrones last month's winner - the NVIDIA RTX 3060 graphics card which falls to third place where it sits below the second place GTX 1060 GPU. The RTX 3060 experienced an almost 6% decline in usership from the previous month, and the GTX 1650's userbase grew by 2% in the same period of time. It is interesting to note that the entry for the GTX 1650 encompasses both desktop and laptop variants, while the RTX 3060 gets divided into two separate entries on Valve's survey - the desktop version sits at third place and its laptop-oriented sibling trails slightly behind with a placement at position number four. NVIDIA absolutely dominates the field with lots of its budget and midrange cards (across several older generations) - AMD and Intel barely make it into the top 25 with a small sprinkling of iGPUs and one discrete model (Radeon RX 580) placed at position 24.

April's survey shows that Intel processors remain a favorite for many Steam users with a 67.14% share, and AMD follows in second place with a 32.84% share. AMD CPU popularity is on the rise (when compared to previous months) so a more even share of the market could be on the cards, if an upward trend continues. System RAM enthusiasts were upgrading to a smaller degree last month: 52.19% are on 16 GB, and 16.1 percent are on 32 GB - indicating slight declines (from March) of 4.73% and 6.61% respectively. The majority of users prefer to stick with Windows 10 64-bit - that OS has a 61.21% share, but its popularity has dropped by 12.74% within the survey period. Windows 11 64-bit is gaining ground with a 10.98% increase from March to April, and it sits at second place with a 33.39% share of the OS userbase. As always, the results indicated by the monthly Steam Hardware and Software survey are not considered to be pinpoint accurate due to the random nature of user responses, but overall and general trends can be discerned from the data on hand.