An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge's Sean Hollister If you wrote off the Steam Frame as yet another VR headset few will want to wear, I guarantee you're not alone. But the Steam Frame isn't just a headset; it's a Trojan horse that contains the tech gamers need to play Steam games on the next Samsung Galaxy, the next Google Pixel, perhaps Arm gaming notebooks to come. I know, because I'm already using that tech on my Samsung Galaxy. There is no official Android version of Hollow Knight: Silksong, one of the best games of 2025, but that doesn't have to stop you anymore. Thanks to a stack of open-source technologies, including a compatibility layer called Proton and an emulator called Fex, games that were developed for x86-based Windows PCs can now run on Linux-based phones with the Arm processor architecture. With Proton, the Steam Deck could already do the Windows-to-Linux part; now, Fex is bridging x86 and Arm, too.

This stack is what powers the Steam Frame's own ability to play Windows games, of course, and it was widely reported that Valve is using the open-source Fex emulator to make it happen. What wasn't widely reported: Valve is behind Fex itself. In an interview, Valve's Pierre-Loup Griffais, one of the architects behind SteamOS and the Steam Deck, tells The Verge that Valve has been quietly funding almost all the open-source technologies required to play Windows games on Arm. And because they're open-source, Valve is effectively shepherding a future where Arm phones, laptops, and desktops could freely do the same. He says the company believes game developers shouldn't be wasting time porting games if there's a better way.

Remember when the Steam Deck handheld showed that a decade of investment in Linux could make Windows gaming portable? Valve paid open-source developers to follow their passions to help achieve that result. Valve has been guiding the effort to bring games to Arm in much the same way: In 2016 and 2017, Griffais tells me, the company began recruiting and funding open-source developers to bring Windows games to Arm chips. Fex lead developer Ryan Houdek tells The Verge he chatted with Griffais himself at conferences those years and whipped up the first prototype in 2018. He tells me Valve pays enough that Fex is his full-time job. "I want to thank the people from Valve for being here from the start and allowing me to kickstart this project," he recently wrote.

"There are times when World of Tanks feels less like a videogame and more like a giant ad budget looking for something to be spent on," writes PC Gamer. This year, all those huge sacks with dollar signs on them have been thrown Benedict Cumberbatch's way, making him the game's newest "Holiday Ambassador" and the star of an absolutely bizarre Christmas advert. The story has very little to do with Christmas and, frankly, not much connection to tanks either, featuring Cumberbatch as a sort of chaotic, supernatural therapist trying to bring a meek nerd out of his shell with the help of a chaotic crowd of his other patients. It's a good watch, shedding the usual hard man action star vibe of past celebrity trailers in favour of something that feels more like a mischievous one act play.
Cumberbatch also portrayed Smaug and Sauron in The Hobbit films (2012-2014), Khan in Star Trek Into Darkness (2013), and Dr. Strange in six Marvel movies. And now Amazon has also hired Cumberbatch for what its calls its "Cannes-winning '5-Star Theater' campaign... performing real Amazon customer reviews as theatrical monologues." Cumberbatch performed over 15 reviews, including popular holiday gifts like the Bissell portable carpet cleaner, Toto bidet, and SharkNinja blender — showing that Amazon truly does have something for everyone on your list.
Last year Amazon produced a similar campaign starring Adam Driver ("Kylo Ren" from the final trilogy of Star Wars sequels). "The humor comes from the juxtaposition between Cumberbatch's gravitas and the text itself," reports Adweek, adding that the reviews were curated "using internal AI tools, to find the most oddly specific reviews on the platform."

Amazon will stream Cumberbatch's bizarre ads on major platforms including TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, Lyft, Uber, Disney/Hulu, Paramount, and Roku, and on several NFL football games.

I remember when Amazon just chose the best funny fake reviews from customers, and then posted them on the front page of Amazon...

The CEO of Epic Games, Tim Sweeney, has argued that platforms like Steam should not label games that are made using AI. From a report: Responding to a post on Twitter from a user who suggested that storefronts drop this tag, the industry exec said that it "makes no sense" to flag such content. Sweeney added that soon AI will be a part of the way all games are made. "The AI tag is relevant to art exhibits for authorship disclosure, and to digital content licensing marketplaces where buyers need to understand the rights situation," Sweeney said. "It makes no sense for game stores, where AI will be involved in nearly all future production."

Ubisoft has revealed Teammates, a first-person shooter built around AI-powered squadmates that the company is calling its "first playable generative AI research project" -- not long after the publisher went all-in on NFTs and the metaverse only to largely move on from both. Built in the Snowdrop Engine that powers The Division 2 and Star Wars Outlaws, the game features an AI assistant named Jaspar and two AI squadmates called Pablo and Sofia. Players can issue natural voice commands to direct the squadmates in combat or puzzle-solving, while Jaspar handles mission tracking and guidance. The project comes from the same team behind Ubisoft's Neo NPCs, demonstrated at GDC 2024.

Adam Marshall spent more than a decade developing Kingdoms of the Dump while working as a custodian at a school in suburban Philadelphia, cleaning floors and hauling trash bags from 3 PM to 11 PM before coming home to work on his turn-based role-playing game until 5 or 6 AM. The game, which Bloomberg has called "one of the year's most charming RPGs," came out on Tuesday after Marshall and his childhood friend Matt Loiseau -- also a janitor -- built it using RPG Maker alongside a small team of hobbyists who mostly worked for free.

The pair launched a Kickstarter campaign in 2019 that raised $76,560, but the pandemic disrupted their plans and forced them to lose contractors and rethink their approach. Marshall maintained this schedule for five years straight before quitting his custodial job last year to finish the game full-time. Kingdoms of the Dump has sold about 7,000 copies since its release. The game stars a walking trashcan named Dustin Binsley who adventures through landfills and sewers in a world made entirely of garbage.

Roblox is rolling out mandatory facial age-verification for chat features to prevent children from communicating with adult strangers. The platform will restrict chat to verified age groups, expand parental controls, and become the first major gaming platform to require facial age checks for messaging. The BBC reports: Mandatory age checks will be introduced for accounts using chat features, starting in December for Australia, New Zealand and the Netherlands, then the rest of the globe from January. [...] Rani Govender, policy manager for child safety online at the NSPCC, said action had been needed because young people had been exposed to "unacceptable risks" on Roblox, "leaving many vulnerable to harm and online abuse."

The charity welcomed the platform's latest announcement but called on Roblox to "ensure they deliver change for children in practice and prevent adult perpetrators from targeting and manipulating young users." The platform averaged more than 80 million daily players in 2024, about 40% of them under the age of 13. [...]

Matt Kaufman, chief safety officer for Roblox, told a press briefing the age estimation technology is "pretty accurate." He claimed the system can make close estimates of "within one to two years" bracket for users aged between five and 25. Currently it can be used voluntarily by anyone in the world.

Microsoft has released the source code for Zork I, II, and III under the MIT License through a collaboration with Team Xbox and Activision that involved submitting pull requests to historical source repositories maintained by digital archivist Jason Scott. Each repository now includes the original source code and accompanying documentation.

The games arrived on early home computers in the 1980s as text-based adventures built on the Z-Machine, a virtual machine that allowed the same story files to run across different platforms. Infocom created the Z-Machine after discovering the original mainframe version was too large for home computers. The team split the game into three titles that all ran on the same underlying system.

The code release covers only the source files and does not include commercial packaging or trademark rights. The games remain available commercially through The Zork Anthology on Good Old Games and can be compiled locally using ZILF, a modern Z-Machine interpreter.

Nvidia and Google announced today a new cloud gaming plan called GeForce Now Fast Pass that is exclusive to Chromebooks. Anyone who purchases a new Chromebook will receive a year of the service included with their device at no additional charge. Fast Pass allows Chromebook owners to stream more than 2,000 games from their existing Steam, Epic or Xbox libraries.

The service removes ads and lets users skip the queue that typically adds two minutes or more of wait time on GeForce Now's free tier. Users get 10 hours of cloud gaming each month. Up to five unused hours can roll over to the following month. Nvidia offers other paid plans starting at $9.99 per month that support higher resolutions, faster frame rates, RTX ray-tracing, and access to a larger game library that includes thousands of additional titles. The companies did not announce pricing for Fast Pass after the first year ends.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The use of AI in the latest Call of Duty has prompted a US lawmaker to call for regulations to prevent artificial intelligence from taking jobs away from human workers. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who represents a large swathe of Silicon Valley, took aim at Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 after buyers noticed the popular shooter contains a significant amount of AI-generated icons, posters, and achievements. Gamers are criticizing it as filled with "AI slop."

On Friday, Khanna tweeted: "We need regulations that prevent companies from using AI to eliminate jobs to extract greater profits." He added, "Artists at these companies need to have a say in how AI is deployed. They should share in the profits. And there should be a tax on mass displacement."

Strauss Zelnick, CEO of Take-Two Interactive, which operates publishing labels including GTA-maker Rockstar Games and 2K, said on Monday that although gaming consoles are not going away, the industry is moving toward PCs in the next decade. From a report: "I think it's moving towards PC and business is moving towards open rather than closed," Zelnick told CNBC's "Squawk Box."

"But if you define console as the property, not the system, then the notion of a very rich game that you engage in for many hours that you play on a big screen -- that's never going away." Zelnick said the current split between console and mobile is about even in the market, but mobile is growing more rapidly than consoles.

An anonymous reader shared this post from the gaming news site Aftermath: Concord, Sony Interactive Entertainment and Firewalk Studios' Overwatch-like shooter, was live for just two weeks before it was pulled offline. Though Concord certainly had some dedicated players, it didn't have many — which is why it may be surprising to hear that a group of players are reverse-engineering the game and its servers to bring it back to life.

Publisher Sony removed Concord from stores and digital marketplaces, automatically refunded some, and, later, shut down Firewalk Studios. Two hundred or so people were laid off, and any hopes of Concord's return were dashed. Poor sales — estimated to be under 25,000 copies sold — and low player numbers marred the release. Firewalk Studios' game director Ryan Ellis said in a blog post that pieces of the game "resonated with players," but "other aspects of the game and [Concord's] initial launch didn't land the way [Firewalk Studios] intended."

Concord wasn't a bad game, but it just didn't generate enough interest with enough players. Now, a group of three hobbyist reverse-engineers, who go by real, Red, and gwog online, are trying to make it playable again... "Sometimes there's enough of the server left in the game, that we can 'activate' that code and make the game believe it's a server," Red said. "We do pretty much always need to fill in the gaps though..." Concord used an anti-tamper software to keep people from cheating, which also creates a problem for people reverse engineering. It's "nearly impossible" to crack, Red said, so the group didn't — they found an exploit to "forcefully decrypt the game's code" to "restore the game and start working on servers...."

It's not open to the public, but people can sign up for future tests. Even former Firewalk Studios employees have joined the server. They're excited to see Concord come back to life, too, the developers said.
"Friday morning, a video of the playtest was posted to the Concord Reddit page," according to the article. (Though ironically by Friday night YouTube had had removed the video "due to a copyright claim by MarkScan Enforcement."

Netflix is launching a new slate of TV-streamed party games that are all playable using your phone as the controller. The Verge reports: To start, Netflix is offering Boggle Party, Party Crasher: Fool Your Friends, Lego Party, Pictionary: Game Night, and Tetris Time Warp. A social deduction game based on the Knives Out series, Dead Man's Party: A Knives Out Game, is also part of this new slate but will launch at a later time. The streaming platform's approach to gaming has been unfocused, with the company bouncing between being a boutique development studio while also being a platform for premium and exclusive mobile gaming experiences. Offering party games on your TV seems like a better fit -- one that could allow Netflix to finally find its gaming footing.

Valve has unveiled a new Steam Machine console, taking a second shot at living room gaming a decade after its 2015 Steam Machine initiative failed. The 6-inch cube runs Linux-based SteamOS but plays Windows games through Proton, a compatibility layer built on Wine that translates Microsoft graphical APIs.

Valve spent over a decade working on SteamOS and ways to run Windows games on Linux after the original Steam Machines failed. The device promises six times the performance of the Steam Deck handheld using AMD's 2022-2023 technology. In an interaction with The Verge, Valve demonstrated Cyberpunk 2077 running at settings comparable to PS5 Pro or beyond on a 4K television. The console updates games in the background and includes automatic HDMI television control that Valve tested against a warehouse of home entertainment equipment. The system navigates entirely through gamepad controls and resumes games instantly from sleep mode.

Valve said pricing will be "comparable to a PC with similar specs" rather than subsidized like traditional consoles. PCs with similar GPUs have cost roughly $1,000 or more. Linux currently plays Windows games better than Windows in side-by-side tests.

Sony reported that PlayStation 5 sales have reached 84.2 million units, officially surpassing every Xbox console ever released. IGN reports: The PlayStation 5 is now up to 84.2 million copies sold after shifting an additional 3.9 million units during the three-month period ending September 30, Sony has announced. That's a slight increase on the 3.8 million PS5 units Sony sold during the same quarter last year, but it's an impressive result given the price of the console has actually gone up over the course of this generation, rather than come down. [...]

As an aside, unlike Sony, Microsoft does not make Xbox Series X and S sales figures public, but analysts have suggested the combined Xbox Series effort is being outsold by the PS5 by at least a factor of 2:1. The more appropriate comparison for the PS5 then, is with its predecessor, the PlayStation 4. Five years into the current console generation, the PS5 is slightly behind the PS4 (the PS4 sold-in to retailers more than 86.1 million units after five years on sale). But Sony has said this console generation is its most financially successful ever, with sales surpassing those made during the reign of all previous Sony consoles.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For years now, Valve has been slowly improving the capabilities of the Proton compatibility layer that lets thousands of Windows games work seamlessly on the Linux-based SteamOS. But Valve's Windows-to-Linux compatibility layer generally only extends back to games written for Direct3D 8, the proprietary Windows graphics API Microsoft released in late 2000. Now, a new open source project is seeking to extend Linux interoperability further back into PC gaming history. The d7vk project describes itself as "a Vulkan-based translation layer for Direct3D 7 [D3D7], which allows running 3D applications on Linux using Wine."

The new project isn't the first attempt to get Direct3D 7 games running on Linux. Wine's own built-in WineD3D compatibility layer has supported D3D7 in some form or another for at least two decades now. But the new d7vk project instead branches off the existing dxvk compatibility layer, which is already used by Valve's Proton for SteamOS and which reportedly offers better performance than WineD3D on many games. D7vk project author WinterSnowfall writes that while they don't expect this new project to be upstreamed into the main dxvk in the future, the new version should have "the same level of per application/targeted configuration profiles and fixes that you're used to seeing in dxvk proper." And though d7vk might not perform universally better than the existing alternatives, WinterSnowfall writes that "having more options on the table is a good thing in my book at least." The report notes that the PC Gaming Wiki lists more than 400 games built on the aging D3D7 APIs, spanning mostly early-2000s releases but with a trickle of new titles still appearing through 2022. Notable classics include Escape from Monkey Island and Hitman: Codename 47.