The Finals, Embark Studios’ spectacular yet sweaty multiplayer FPS, is underperforming according to publisher Nexon, as it reports a broader drop in revenue and operating income.

In an earnings letter reporting its financial performance for its first quarter of 2024 (via TechRaptor), Nexon reports that its “stronger-than-expected” revenues, which derived mainly from games like EA Sports FC Online (which it publishes in China), were “partially offset primarily by lower-than-expected performance of the Finals”.

Going further, the report explains that the launch of Season 2 in March resulted in “a short-lived increase in player metrics but delivered lower-than-expected retention and revenue.” Consequently, Embark Studios is now working with Nexon’s Live Operations team in Korea to “understand and address the key issues.”

The Finals enjoyed a strong launch at the end of last year, with Nexon stating that it surpassed internal expectations. And it wasn’t hard to see why…

We originally reported on Nvidia’s RTX Remix modding platform back in September 2022 and, at last, Nvidia says the full creator toolkit is being released on January 22 in open beta form. This raises the prospect of a whole slew of legacy games being updated with ray-traced visuals, AI enhanced textures, and more.

In April last year, Nvidia released the RTX Remix runtime element of the platform which can capture a game scene in real time and replaces assets at playback while injecting RTX technology, such as path tracing, DLSS 3 and Reflex. It was a sort of quick and dirty way of getting a feel for what RTX Remix can do for an old game.

As part of its CES announcements around its new RTX 40-series Super GPUs, Nvidia has put a January 22 launch date on the full toolkit, too, which will give game modders much greater control to assign new assets and lights within a remastered scene, and also use AI tools to rebuild the look of any asset in the game.

Prior to this full…

We’ve had plenty of intriguing news about Path of Exile 2 today, like the combat having been reworked around a new control scheme and the announcement it will be sticking to its “ethical free-to-play” model. However, to pour a little ice water on the fire, here’s one bit of not-so-great news: the beta previously announced for June 7 now won’t be happening until late in the year.

Grinding Gear Games announced the news in a tweet that said, “while we think we would be able to get the game’s content ready in time, we underestimated how long it will take to get gameplay polished to a standard we’re happy with. We’re still going to be doing alpha testing in June, but we are going to be delaying the beta until later in the year.”

PC Gamer contributor Dominic Tarason just got to play a demo of Path of Exile 2 at a press event, where he came away with a lot of positive things to say. Like this: “From playing the first of six acts alone (the later ones seem to be even more fantas…

We’ve gotten another bittersweet taste of Haunted Chocolatier. Sweet because, well, it’s Haunted Chocolatier, and bitter because I still don’t know when this game is coming out. But we do have some new screenshots: in a tweet earlier today, Haunted Chocolatier and Stardew Valley dev Eric ‘ConcernedApe’ Barone shared four tantalising new screenshots of the spooky sweet-making sim. Here they are:

Barone shared the new screens in celebration of hitting a million followers on Twitter, which honestly seems more like a nightmarish burden to me. The shots show off a few new spaces: a cosy house/shop, a woodland inhabited by little slime-looking guys, a fountain at night, and somewhere that looks like a library. It all looks very sumptuous indeed.

You can also see, in that forest screenshot, our hero firing a bow and arrow at a thing that looks a bit like Oddish, which doesn’t sound like it’s in the remit of a chocolatier.

Although given that we got another new screenshot …

Oleksandr Zinchenko is a Ukrainian footballer that currently plays for Arsenal in the English Premier League and the Ukrainian national side. The full-back and midfielder is still only 27 years old but has already had a storied career, winning the Premier League four times with previous club Manchester City alongside the FA cup and another four EFL Cups. And as well as being a world-class footballer with the world at his feet, Zinchenko loves a bit of Counter-Strike.

In 2023 Zinchenko founded esports organisation PassionUA alongside former NA’VI coach Mykhailo Blaghin (who won the 2017 PGL Major with Gambit). The goal is to assemble a Counter-Strike team consisting of young Ukrainian players that can compete at the top, and shortly after its founding the focus switched to Counter-Strike 2.

PassionUA is obviously a long-term project for Zinchenko and one he seems to be deeply involved in, but today things got even more hands-on than anyone was expecting. A member of Passi…

Alien planet colony survival sim Stranded: Alien Dawn has dropped a new update with a new region of the planet to survive: Saltu, a hot, wet tropical region that will provide entirely new challenges to even seasoned survivalists. 

Saltu’s most vicious problem is that it’s always hot. While that might sound nice—no need for heating fuel, nor heavy clothing—it does mean that everything, food included, rots a lot faster, and keeping cool indoors will consume a lot more electricity than heating ever did. Rather than winter, you have a wet season where heavy rainfall will happen continually, and a summer dry season, where unbearable heat can kill your crops. There are also vicious new tropical diseases to confront that can only be stopped by antibiotics, and a spreading blight that kills plants unless infected ones are culled.

Stranded: Alien Dawn is a colony sim that impressed us on release last year, something between RimWorld, The Sims, and a tower defense…

Developer Respawn has released a nine minute clip of the upcoming Stars Wars Jedi: Survivor and, yep, this sure looks like a Star Wars game with a Jedi, surviving. What it does show is returning protagonist Cal Kestis (and his droid BD-1) making their way around a new planet, Koboh, which they’ve apparently crash-landed on.

Koboh is a lush environment that is host to a Separatist hideout, with various battle droids patrolling around alongside plenty of local fauna, and of course some bigger nasties that demonstrate the game’s lightsaber combat. Respawn had already talked about the combat focus of the sequel, with Cal having five “full realised” stances to switch between while fighting

Cal has clearly been in training with new combo moves for his double-bladed lightsaber (this is unlocked near the end of the first game), with the gameplay at various points showing him detaching his weapon into two separate blades, Darth Mauling around groups of enemies and, in one …

Dungeons & Dragons is getting a 2024 rules revamp, and while I’ve had a good old moan today about its baffling pre-order bonus nonsense, I’m overall curious to see what kind of game we’ll be getting out of the whole kerfuffle.

Touted as a backwards-compatible reimagining of the game’s ruleset (but not a new edition), the 2024 rules seek to retool a ton of the game’s spells for the better, as promised by lead rules designer Jeremy Crawford in an interview posted to the Dungeons & Dragons YouTube channel (thanks, Eurogamer).

Watch On

Overall, Crawford’s statements feel accurate, though in the sense that a lot of these issues have been issues for 10 years and relatively unaddressed in rules errata—such as altering Blade Ward and Resistance so they “might actually see use in play”—but hey, better late than never.

Some of these changes, however, have been inspired by Crawford’s personal frustrations while playing Baldur’s Gate 3, Larian’s giga-popula…

Improve every game of Wordle you ever play with our helpful tips and guides, take a quick peek at a clue from the August 29 (801) game if you need a prod in the right direction, or head straight for today’s answer if you need that win. However you want to play the internet’s favourite word game, I’ve got you covered.

Opening with three yellow letters is always a good sign, even if my corrective follow-up only proved that my next guess was way off the mark. Still, knowing where letters don’t go can be as helpful as finding out where they do some days, and thanks to them I found today’s Wordle answer in just three guesses. 

Today’s Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Tuesday, August 29

You’re looking for a bit of fun today. A strange crime carried out in an amusing way—maybe stealing a single donut by distracting the bakery staff with a marching band—would qualify, as would general leaping and dancing about in a happy way. T…

William Murray Hawkins III, better-known as Trip Hawkins, has had a long and incredibly impactful career in games. Hawkins founded Electronic Arts in 1982, and led the company through its trailblazing first decade, establishing certain specialities like sports that the publishing giant was built on. Then Hawkins went on to launch the ill-fated 3DO, a powerful console kneecapped by a high price, before founding Digital Chocolate and spending the 2000s in casual games (like Mafia Wars).

Now, Trip’s back! Don’t get excited. In a move that has strong 69-year-old executive vibes, Hawkins has announced he’s joining a Web3 startup as co-founder and strategy chief. Games for a Living (GFAL) is based in Barcelona and all about that crypto, aiming to create experiences that can compete with famous blockchain games like… err… Axie Infinity (the subject of one of 2022’s biggest crypto hacks).

Naturally the company has its own token, the $GFAL, which will …

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority says that if Microsoft is serious about acquiring Activision Blizzard, there’s one sure way to make it happen: Break up Activision Blizzard.

The bold suggestion came in a new “notice of possible remedies” update, a procedural document that lays out the CMA’s concerns, and the various possible ways that Microsoft and Activision Blizzard might address them.

There are two types of “remedies” available in situations like this, the CMA said: Structural, which changes the conditions of the proposed deal, and behavioral, in which the parties involved effectively promise to be good in exchange for getting permission to do what they want. In merger situations, the CMA prefers structural remedies because they “rarely require monitoring and enforcement”—once they’re done, there’s no going back, so you don’t have to worry about getting screwed three or four years down the road.

In the case of the Activision Blizzard acquisition,…

Remember For Honor, Ubisoft’s vikings-vs-knights-vs-samurai multiplayer melee game? It’s been some time since we last gave it a look, but here are a couple of things about it that you might find useful today: One, yes it is still running (and has actually added a pair of additional factions, the Wu Lin and Outlanders), and two, it’s free to play for a week.

For Honor is a hell of a thing. It was revealed in 2015, seemed reasonably good when it launched in 2017, and very quickly tanked. Six months after it launched, we took an in-depth look at where it all went wrong: It wasn’t quite a eulogy but it was awfully close, noting that even though Ubisoft was making an effort to turn things around, the game had taken such a battering by that point that “it might already be too late” to save it.

And yet that’s exactly what happened. Six years later, For Honor’s average concurrent player count on Steam alone bounces around the 3,000 mark, which isn’t bad for a game this age and o…

Humble Bundle’s dropped another great TTRPG deal—this time for Lovecraft lovers with its Call of Cthulhu book bundle. At the time of writing, the bundle has raised over $22,000 for the World Wildlife Fund. It’s also a pretty damn good deal from a buyer’s standpoint, too.

The bundle includes the game’s Starter Set as well as a host of other supplements: including tips for the Keeper (the game’s equivalent of a DM/GM), a PDF full of horrible monster cards to break your players with, campaigns like Alone Against the Tide, and supplements to help you run stories from occult pulp mysteries to modern horror.

My experience with the system’s limited to a couple of one-shots, though I do recognise “Down Darker Trails”—a booklet that lets you transfer Call of Cthulhu to the weird wild west. While the system’s a little tough to chew through (and perhaps a touch blase about its approach to sanity mechanics, a legacy that other systems like Critical Role’s Candela Obscura…

Microsoft president Brad Smith is not a happy bunny. Yesterday the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority, in a move that took almost everyone by surprise, blocked Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard. It’s a decision that could scupper the entire deal, though no-one’s yet sure of the ramifications. And so Smith is on the warpath about what a boneheaded, plain wrong, backwards-ass move the CMA has made.

“We’re of course very disappointed about the CMA’s decision but more than that, unfortunately, I think it’s bad for Britain,” Smith told BBC World News. “The strong message the CMA has sent is not just to surprise everyone who fully expected this acquisition to be approved, but to send a message that I think will discourage innovation and investment in the United Kingdom, and I think in that sense the impact of this decision is far broader than on Microsoft or on this acquisition alone.”

Ominous enough, but Smith was just getting wa…

Quickly find your feet in today’s Wordle with a clue written just for the October 21 (854) game, brush up on your general guessing, or simply bask in the warm glow of an easy victory with the answer to today’s puzzle. Whatever your Wordle aims today, we can help you out.

It was only good use of all the grey letters I’d stumbled on previously that saved today’s game, helping me home in on the answer. It wasn’t quick but hey, some days any kind of win is better than none at all. As clever as I felt for finding the answer in the letters left behind, I’d definitely appreciate a few more greens next time. 

Today’s Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Saturday, October 21

Today’s answer refers to a particular kind of smile, the sort with a self-satisfied, smug edge to it rather than any warmth. Four of today’s five letters are consonants. 

ViewViewViewView

Is there a double letter in Wordle today? 

No letters ar…

Technically any gaming monitor with an aspect ratio above of 21:9 or above is deserving of the title of ‘ultrawide’. But few have earned it like this Samsung Odyssey G9 DQHD. 

Effectively two 1440p gaming monitors strapped together, this Samsung monitor comes with 49 inches of 240Hz, DisplayHDR 1000 panel to play with. That all sounds expensive, and I guess it still is, but it’s a bit easier on the bank account thanks to a deal that whips $500 off the asking price. It’s down to $800 over on Amazon today.

Just be sure to hit the $100 coupon check box for the full discount. Otherwise you’ll pay an additional $100 tax for being clumsy. 

I fondly remember the first time I gawked at a 49-inch gaming monitor. It also was a Samsung and I was the envy of all the office. I particularly enjoyed having the screen separated as two independent inputs, from one or two PCs, which is a feature that’s carried over to this newer model, too. Back then, however, these mammot…