The Steam Machine is the most principled console you probably shouldn't buy
Valve's six-inch cube costs $1,049 because Valve refuses to sell hardware below cost. Here is whether that principle, and the engineering behind it, justifies the money.
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Everything we have published, newest first. 11 articles and counting.
Microsoft priced day-one Call of Duty twice and the answer was no
Game Pass Ultimate went to $29.99 with day-one Call of Duty, then down to $22.99 without it. Microsoft ran the experiment in public and published the result.
Unreal Engine 5 Stutter Isn't One Problem, It's At Least Three
Shader compilation, traversal streaming and expensive rendering features all cause stutter in Unreal Engine 5 games, but they have different causes, fixes and levels of developer blame.
Average FPS Is the Least Useful Number in Any Benchmark Chart
A practical guide to reading frame-time graphs, percentiles and latency so a benchmark chart tells you something true instead of something flattering.
You Don't Own Your Games. Europe Just Confirmed It, Politely.
Nearly 1.3 million people signed a petition asking Europe to guarantee games stay playable after shutdown. Brussels said it legally can't, and offered a voluntary code instead.
Live Service Games Are Built to Die and Nobody Wants to Say It
Highguard lasted 45 days and Destiny 2 lasted a decade, yet both ended the same way. Here's what that says about a business model that can't survive missing.
The case against preordering, from someone who used to do it constantly
Paid early access moved buyers ahead of reviews and publishers noticed. Here is how the modern release cycle got built, and why waiting two weeks costs you nothing.
What Indie Breakouts Actually Cost, and Why the Numbers Don't Add Up
PEAK broke even in hours on a budget under $200,000. But indie sales numbers are a mess of copies, players and estimates dressed up as fact, and that's the story.
The bugs don't sink a broken launch. The apology does.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 shipped broken and became Game of the Year. Borderlands 4 shipped broken and lost its opening week. The difference was never the bug list.
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