What's Linux's marketshare on Steam? The Steam Survey numbers tell this story:

11/24: 2.03%
12/24: 2.29%
01/25: 2.06%
02:25: 1.45%

"The February numbers show a staggering 0.61% drop to Linux use..." reports Phoronix. But they attribute this to an sampling error: According to the survey, it shows 50% of Steam users using the Simplified Chinese language pack [a 20% increase from the month before]. In prior months where there has been drops to Linux use, it's been correlated to wild swings in the Chinese use on Steam. This looks to be another such month.

Of the Linux specific data, SteamOS continues to prove most popular for that Valve distribution powering the Steam Deck [at 34.67%, with Arch Linux coming in second at 9.7%].

AMD CPUs power around 70% of the Linux gaming systems thanks to the Steam Deck APU and AMD Ryzen being quite popular with Linux enthusiasts.

Magnus Carlsen "announced this week that he is auctioning off the Italian luxury brand jeans that started a dress code dispute at December's World Rapid and Blitz Chess Championships," reports the Associated Press. ("Condition: Pre-owned," says the listing on eBay, where by Friday night bidding on the charitable auction was up to $14,100.)

But Carlsen drew more attention on The Joe Rogan Experience last week — partly by saying "I have no chance against my phone." (Although he'd also described beating a fan's computer program, according to Firstpost, by playing "some kind of anti-computer chess, where I just closed up the position as much as possible and gave it as few possibilities as possible to out-calculate me.") Carlsen admitted that he rarely plays against chess engines due to their overwhelming strength, but acknowledged their value as training tools. "I rarely play against engines at all because they just make me feel so stupid and useless. So, I think of them more as a tool than anything else."
And this led Carlsen to add "If I started cheating, you would never know," reports Indian Express: It's not just a throwaway line about cheating either. On a two-hour-long podcast, where he touches on mostly everything under the sun, Carlsen fixates on cheating in chess. He also details how a player of his calibre would need very little to cheat in chess. "I would just get a move here and there (from an aide). Or maybe if I am playing in a tournament I just find a system where I get somebody to signal to me when there's a critical moment: a certain moment where a certain move is much better than the others. That's really all I would need to go from being the best to being practically unbeatable. There's so little you need in chess (to cheat). It really is a scary situation," Carlsen said before pointing out how in 2010 the captain of the French chess team was helping a teammate decide his next move at the Olympiad just by standing in specific spots around the table...

"If you're not cheating in a dumb way, there rarely is going to be a smoking gun. And without that smoking gun it is going to be really hard to catch people," Carlsen admits on the podcast... "As long as there are monetary incentives for people to cheat, there will be cheating in chess," says Carlsen on the podcast.
The article adds that Carlsen does not believe Hans Niemann used anal beads to cheat — and that he thinks Niemann has become a much better chess player since the incident. But... "Top level chess has been based on trust a lot. I don't trust Niemann. Other top players still don't trust him and he doesn't trust me," says Carlsen. "There is still something off about him now. We played an over-the-board tournament in Paris last year where there was increased security and he didn't play at nearly the same level there."

EA has released the source code for several classic Command & Conquer games, including Tiberian Dawn, Red Alert, Renegade, and Generals & Zero Hour. "They're being released under the GPL license, meaning folks can mix, match, and redistribute them to their hearts' content without EA lawyers smashing down the door," adds PC Gamer. Additionally, Steam Workshop support has been added for multiple C&C titles, along with updated mission editor tools and a modding support pack. From the report: As for the Steam Workshop? That's getting switched on for C&C Renegade, C&C Generals and Zero Hour, C&C 3 Tiberium Wars and Kane's Wrath, and C&C 4 Tiberium Twilight (they can't all be winners). EA's also gone and "updated all the Mission Editor and World Builder tools so you can publish maps directly to the Steam Workshop." Plus, it's putting out a modding support pack that "contains the source Xml, Schema, Script, Shader and Map files for all the games that use the SAGE engine."

Per C&C producer Jim Vessella, EA commissioned C&C community veteran Luke 'CCHyper' Feenan to officially research improvements to many of the games in the Ultimate Collection," and this is the fruit of his labor.

The boss of The Pokemon Company believes the series can last for at least another 50 years if it continues to innovate. From a report: First launched on Nintendo's Game Boy in 1996, the video game has expanded into films, TV and toys to become one of the world's highest-grossing media franchise. Most recently, the trading card game based on the cute creatures at the centre of its universe has seen a surge in popularity -- but it has also brought scalpers and frauds to the hobby.

[...] Pokemon has continued to bring new fans to the franchise by expanding into anime, card games, movies and toys alongside its video game titles. CEO Tsunekazu Ishihara says fans now "span several generations" and believes "the biggest reason behind their success is the fact that Pokemon became a tool of communication." Last weekend, about 13,000 Pokemon fans headed to the European leg of the International Championships at London's Excel Centre. It demonstrates Mr Ishihara's point that people have found their way into the series through various means.

According to Bloomberg (paywalled), Warner Bros. Discovery announced today that it is shutting down three gaming studios and canceling development of its planned Wonder Woman project. Engadget reports: Monolith Productions, Player First Games and WB Games San Diego will be shuttered due to a "disappointing 2024" for WB's gaming business, according to an internal memo from JB Perrette, the company's CEO and president of global streaming and games. [...]

According to the internal email from Perrette, WB's gaming efforts will be focused on four of its properties: Harry Potter (including Hogwarts Legacy), Mortal Kombat, the DC universe and Game of Thrones. "We need to make some substantial changes to our portfolio/team structure if we are to commit the necessary resources to get back to a "fewer but bigger franchises' strategy," Perette said.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) has sent a letter to Federal Trade Commission (FTC) chair Andrew Ferguson urging the FTC to require that companies admit when you're not really buying an ebook or video game. From a report: Wyden's letter, shared with The Verge, requests guidance to "ensure that consumers who purchase or license digital goods can make informed decisions and understand what ownership rights they are obtaining."

Wyden wants the guidance to include how long a license lasts, what circumstances might expire or revoke the license, and if a consumer can transfer or resell the license. The letter also calls for the information "before and at the point of sale" in a way that's easily understandable. "To put it simply, prior to agreeing to any transaction, consumers should understand what they are paying for and what is guaranteed after the sale," Wyden says.

Microsoft's newly announced Muse AI model for game development has triggered immediate backlash from industry professionals. "Fuck this shit," responded David Goldfarb, founder of The Outsiders, arguing that such AI tools primarily serve to "reduce capital expenditure" while devaluing developers' collective artistic contributions.

Multiple developers told Wired that the tool is aimed at shareholders rather than actual developers. "Nobody will want this. They don't CARE that nobody will want this," one AAA developer said, noting that internal criticism remains muted due to job security concerns amid industry-wide layoffs.

The resistance comes as developers increasingly view AI initiatives as threats to job security rather than helpful tools. One anonymous developer called it "gross" that they needed to remain unnamed while criticizing Muse, as their studio still depends on potential Game Pass deals with Microsoft. Even in prototyping, where Microsoft sees AI potential, Creative Assembly's Marc Burrage warns that automated shortcuts could undermine crucial learning experiences in game development.

Twitch is planning to cull some of the content archived by streamers to save on storage costs. From a report: On Wednesday the streaming platform announced that it will introduce a 100-hour storage cap for Highlights and Uploads starting April 19th, warning that users will have their content automatically deleted until it falls below the limit.

Twitch says it's doing this because "Highlights haven't been very effective in driving discovery or engagement," and it isn't worth the cost of storing thousands of hours of such content. Twitch is owned by Amazon, a market-leading cloud storage provider -- a detail that hasn't gone unnoticed by streamers criticizing the decision.

Valve has made Team Fortress 2's full client and server code public, allowing fans to modify, extend, or rewrite the game as long as their projects remain non-commercial. Game Rant reports: Valve has made Team Fortress 2's server and client code fully public, with the studio encouraging fans to explore the game's files and make it what they want. The game's code is now available thanks to a new update to the Source SDK, which dropped earlier this week. Fans have already been creating TF2 mods for years, but what this essentially means is that fans can make brand-new games. However, there's one catch: any and all TF2 mods must be released for free. "The majority of items in the game now are thanks to the hard work of the TF2 community." Valve wrote. "To respect that, we're asking TF2 mod makers to continue to respect that connection and not to make mods that have the purpose of trying to profit off Workshop contributors' efforts."

"TF2 mods may be published on the Steam Store, and after publication will appear as new games in the Steam game list," Valve continued. The new SDK update also includes new 64-bit binary support and fixes for multiplayer Source games like Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, Counter-Strike: Source, and Day of Defeat: Source. Time will only tell what fans come up with as they dig deep into the inner workings of the game, but given how passionate and talented the Team Fortress 2 community has proven to be, players can expect to see some incredible creations.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For a while now, many AI researchers have been working to integrate a so-called "world model" into their systems. Ideally, these models could infer a simulated understanding of how in-game objects and characters should behave based on video footage alone, then create fully interactive video that instantly simulates new playable worlds based on that understanding. Microsoft Research's new World and Human Action Model (WHAM), revealed today in a paper published in the journal Nature, shows how quickly those models have advanced in a short time. But it also shows how much further we have to go before the dream of AI crafting complete, playable gameplay footage from just some basic prompts and sample video footage becomes a reality.

Much like Google's Genie model before it, WHAM starts by training on "ground truth" gameplay video and input data provided by actual players. In this case, that data comes from Bleeding Edge, a four-on-four online brawler released in 2020 by Microsoft subsidiary Ninja Theory. By collecting actual player footage since launch (as allowed under the game's user agreement), Microsoft gathered the equivalent of seven player-years' worth of gameplay video paired with real player inputs. Early in that training process, Microsoft Research's Katja Hoffman said the model would get easily confused, generating inconsistent clips that would "deteriorate [into] these blocks of color." After 1 million training updates, though, the WHAM model started showing basic understanding of complex gameplay interactions, such as a power cell item exploding after three hits from the player or the movements of a specific character's flight abilities. The results continued to improve as the researchers threw more computing resources and larger models at the problem, according to the Nature paper.

To see just how well the WHAM model generated new gameplay sequences, Microsoft tested the model by giving it up to one second's worth of real gameplay footage and asking it to generate what subsequent frames would look like based on new simulated inputs. To test the model's consistency, Microsoft used actual human input strings to generate up to two minutes of new AI-generated footage, which was then compared to actual gameplay results using the Frechet Video Distance metric. Microsoft boasts that WHAM's outputs can stay broadly consistent for up to two minutes without falling apart, with simulated footage lining up well with actual footage even as items and environments come in and out of view. That's an improvement over even the "long horizon memory" of Google's Genie 2 model, which topped out at a minute of consistent footage. Microsoft also tested WHAM's ability to respond to a diverse set of randomized inputs not found in its training data. These tests showed broadly appropriate responses to many different input sequences based on human annotations of the resulting footage, even as the best models fell a bit short of the "human-to-human baseline."

The most interesting result of Microsoft's WHAM tests, though, might be in the persistence of in-game objects. Microsoft provided examples of developers inserting images of new in-game objects or characters into pre-existing gameplay footage. The WHAM model could then incorporate that new image into its subsequent generated frames, with appropriate responses to player input or camera movements. With just five edited frames, the new object "persisted" appropriately in subsequent frames anywhere from 85 to 98 percent of the time, according to the Nature paper.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Niantic, the company behind the 2016 hit Pokemon Go, is in talks to sell its video-game business to Saudi Arabia-owned Scopely, according to several people familiar with the discussions. A deal could be announced in coming weeks. The price being discussed is about $3.5 billion, according to one of the people. Any agreement would involve the Pokemon title as well as other mobile games, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the discussions are private. There's no assurance an agreement will be reached.

Valve removed the game PirateFi from Steam after discovering it was laced with the Vidar infostealer malware, designed to steal sensitive user data such as passwords, cookies, cryptocurrency wallets, and more. TechCrunch reports: Marius Genheimer, a researcher who analyzed the malware and works at SECUINFRA Falcon Team, told TechCrunch that judging by the command and control servers associated with the malware and its configuration, "we suspect that PirateFi was just one of multiple tactics used to distribute Vidar payloads en masse." "It is highly likely that it never was a legitimate, running game that was altered after first publication," said Genheimer. In other words, PirateFi was designed to spread malware.

Genheimer and colleagues also found that PirateFi was built by modifying an existing game template called Easy Survival RPG, which bills itself as a game-making app that "gives you everything you need to develop your own singleplayer or multiplayer" game. The game maker costs between $399 and $1,099 to license. This explains how the hackers were able to ship a functioning video game with their malware with little effort.

According to Genheimer, the Vidar infostealing malware is capable of stealing and exfiltrating several types of data from the computers it infects, including: passwords from the web browser autofill feature, session cookies that can be used to log in as someone without needing their password, web browser history, cryptocurrency wallet details, screenshots, and two-factor codes from certain token generators, as well as other files on the person's computer.

Former PlayStation executive Shuhei Yoshida has attributed the current wave of video game industry layoffs and slowdown to companies overextending during the COVID-19 pandemic. "I think it's an overreaction to the COVID situation. Companies invested too much, including ourselves. Then we had to face reality and make adjustments," Yoshida told VentureBeat in an interview.

Yoshida, who left Sony in January after 31 years at PlayStation, suggested the industry's growth would have been more stable without the pandemic-driven surge. "If you take out the COVID years you'd have smoother growth over the years," he said. Yoshida's comments come amid widespread job cuts across the gaming sector, including at Sony, Microsoft, Epic Games, and other major publishers following a post-pandemic decline in gaming engagement.

"Magnus Carlsen, the world's top chess player, is bored of chess," the Washington Post wrote Friday: Carlsen has spent much of the past year appearing to dismiss the game he has mastered: It was no longer exciting to play, he told a podcast in March. In December, he withdrew from defending a world championship because he was penalized for wearing jeans to the tournament.

How would the world's best player spice up the game? Change the rules, and add a touch of reality TV.

Ten of the world's top players gathered in a German villa on the Baltic coast this week to play in the first tournament of a new chess circuit, the Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour, that Carlsen co-founded. The twist: The tour randomizes the starting positions of the chess board's most important pieces, so each game begins with the queen, rooks and knights in a jumble. [It's sometimes called "Chess960" or Fischer random chess — with both players starting with the same arrangement of pieces.] Players have to adapt on the fly. Carlsen is backed by a cadre of investors who see a chance to dramatize chess with the theatrics of a television show. Players wear heart-rate monitors and give confession-booth interviews mid-match where they strategize and fret to the audience. Some purists are skeptical. So is the International Chess Federation, which sent a barrage of legal threats to Freestyle Chess before it launched this week's event.

At stake is a lucrative global market of hundreds of millions of chess players that has only continued to grow since the coronavirus pandemic launched a startling chess renaissance — and, perhaps, the authority to decide if and how a centuries-old game should evolve... The format is an antidote to the classical game, where patterns and strategies have been so rigorously studied that it's hard to innovate, Carlsen said. "It's still possible to get a [competitive] game, but you have to sort of dig deeper and deeper," Carlsen said. "I just find that there's too little scope for creativity."
The article also includes this quote from American grand master Hikaru Nakamura who runs a chess YouTube channel with 2.7 million subscribers). "An integral part of regular chess is that when you play, you spend hours preparing your opening strategy before the game. But with Fischer Random ... it's a little bit looser and more enjoyable." And German entrepreneur Jan Henric Buettner (one of the investors) says they hope to bring the drama of Formula One racecars. ("Cameras mounted at table level peer up at each player during games," the article notes at one point.)

The first Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour (with a $750,000 prize pool) concluded Friday, according to the article, but "Carlsen did not play in it," the Post points out. "He was upset in the semifinals by German grand master Vincent Keymer." Carlsen's reaction? "I definitely find Freestyle harder."

But Chess.com reports that Carlsen will be back to playing regular chess very soon: Global esports powerhouse Team Liquid has announced the signings of not just one, but two superstars of chess. Five-time World Champion and world number-one Magnus Carlsen and the 2018 challenger, world number-two Fabiano Caruana will represent the club ahead of the 2025 Esports World Cup (EWC)... Carlsen and Caruana, fresh from competing in the Weissenhaus Freestyle Chess Grand Slam, will first represent Team Liquid in the $150,000 Chessable Masters, which begins on February 16 and serves as the first of two qualifying events in the 2025 Champions Chess Tour. The top-12 players from the tour qualify for the EWC.
In an announcement video Carlsen reportedly trolls the FIDE, according to Indian Express. "The announcement video sees Carlsen wear a Team Liquid jersey along with a jacket and jeans. He then asks: 'Do I have to change?' To this, someone responds: 'Don't worry, we're pretty chill in esports. Welcome to Team Liquid.'"

Nintendo is facing an uphill battle in its U.S. patent fight against Palworld creator Pocketpair, with the United States Patent and Trademark Office rejecting 22 out of 23 patent claims, according to gaming news site GamesFray.

While Nintendo has successfully obtained one patent covering character capture mechanics, the company is seeking additional protections related to gameplay features like "smooth switching of riding objects." An attorney representing Nintendo has requested a meeting with patent examiners to discuss the rejected claims. The patent dispute, which began in Japan where Nintendo is seeking $66,000 in damages, could have broader implications for the gaming industry if successful