Welcome to our latest roundup of what's going on in the indie game space. A bunch of intriguing games arrived this week, including a mobile port of one of the most absorbing things I’ve played in years and two completely different titles with the same name. Let’s get things started with a look at a few projects that were featured in the latest edition of the Future Games Show. Hyperwired (from SidralGames and publisher SelectaPlay) is a 2D roguelike shooter with an interesting resource-management twist. To recharge your weapons and systems, you have to plug a cable that trails behind your spaceship into a socket. While you're plugged in, your movement is restricted by the length of the tether, but you gain more firepower. There are a whole bunch of upgrades and bullet modifiers to play around with here, including a slow-motion system you can activate at almost any time. Hyperwired is slated to hit Steam, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch this summer. In Clean Up Earth, you and other players can work together to restore polluted environments. You can play solo if you like, but on the larger maps you'll need to team up with others to handle large bits of junk. One particularly neat aspect of Clean Up Earth is that in-game actions will automatically trigger micro-donations from developer Magic Pockets and its partners to environmental organizations. Clean Up Earth is coming to Steam, Epic Games Store, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S on April 2. A Nintendo Switch 2 version is on the way in the future. There's a demo available on Steam as well. Mr. Magpie’s Harmless Card Game is a minesweeper-style riff on the likes of Inscryption and Buckshot Roulette. As with some other roguelike deckbuilders, you're trapped in a creepy situation and the only way to escape alive is to gamble and earn enough money in time to meet quotas. To do that, you'll need to twist the odds in your favor by building multipliers and synergies. You can boost your deck with powerful cards you can buy from a shop. However, there are dangerous JERRY cards on the board that could spell doom if you flip them over. You can use hints and strategies to try to figure out where those cards are and avoid them. There's no release date as yet for Mr. Magpie’s Harmless Card Game, which is from Giant Light Studios. However, you can request access to a playtest on Steam. A press release described Herdles as "Spyro meets Breath of the Wild, with a dog." I'm immediately sold. Playing as a magical version of creative director Christian Hübel’s own dog, Snoopy, you'll "restore balance to a fracturing world" in this open-world platformer. On your journey, you'll rescue Herdles, or corrupted creatures. Doing so will unlock new powers, such as being able to glide, bust through walls and swim up waterfalls. There's no combat or death in this game, which seems to be largely about solving puzzles, experimenting with physics-based abilities and exploring. It's said to have "deep accessibility and customization options" too. Fire Sword Studios and One More Journey are behind Herdles, which does not have a release window, though the Steam page is live. I took an earlier-than-usual lunch break on Thursday to check out the mobile version of Ball x Pit (from Kenny Sun and friends and publisher Devolver Digital) as soon as it was released. I adore this game. I'm happy it runs smoothly on my iPhone 16, because that should give me more reason to avoid doomscrolling. It's the same Ball x Pit. It's still fantastic. The touchscreen dual-stick controls work well enough, especially when the auto-fire option is enabled. Still, a mobile controller like OhSnap's MCON or the Backbone Pro works better for me. A bunch more people will be able to enjoy Ball x Pit now that it's on iOS and Android. You can play the first level for free and it costs $10 to unlock the full game. It's a pretty good week for folks who are into brick-breaking roguelites, because here's another one. ITER-8 (from fluckyMachine and publisher Fireshine Games) blends mining and tower defense. It's a bit like Dome Keeper. You're tasked with acquiring resources from an enormous monolith that's above your base. You'll need to drag these items back to your base so you can upgrade your character, ship, shield and weapon. There are relics to find and you can swap these for installations like lasers, barriers and cannons. There are also puzzle-based sections that sees your character leave their ship for some in-person mining and upgrade collecting, temporarily switching from 2D to 3D action. After a while, the monolith starts to thrum with an ominous sound. That means it's time to race back to base (with the help of a fast-travel system) to fend off waves of alien enemies. The two sides of ITER-8 work fairly well together and I've enjoyed my time with it so far. I actually find it pretty relaxing overall, though the tower-defense aspect could have been designed a bit more elegantly. Switching aim from one side of the base to the other doesn’t feel snappy enough. ITER-8 is available on Steam for $13. There's a 25 percent launch discount available until March 23. Piece by Piece is billed as a cozy repair shop game from Gamkat and publisher No More Robots. It looks cute! You can decorate your shop and make it homely by cleaning, keeping the log fire burning and making sure the cookie jar is full. Of course, you'll be fixing up heirlooms and antiques for customers too. It's out now on Steam for $12, with a 20 percent discount until March 25. Piece by Piece is a puzzle platformer in the most literal sense. You manipulate levels by moving puzzle pieces around. It's a great idea from Neon Polygons and I'm keen to check this one out on Steam. It typically costs $13, but there's a 15 percent discount until March 27. Wait a second here... Two games called Piece by Piece that were released in the same week? That's a heck of a coincidence. Thankfully, the teams behind both games saw the funny side. They've even created a bundle of both games so you can buy them both for an extra 10 percent off. Here's another puzzle-forward game, albeit one that's more of an adventure. In Rhell: Warped Worlds & Troubled Times, you'll discover and combine spells in creative ways to solve riddles in similar fashion to games like Baba Is You. There are said to be more than a million ways to combine the magical keywords. Since every spell works on any object in the game, there are more than 102 million possible configurations. Neat! Solo developer Alice Jarratt from SlugGlove spent three years making Rhell: Warped Worlds & Troubled Times and drew more than 10,000 frames of animation for it. The game is available on Steam for $15, with a 20 percent launch discount until March 26. A demo is available too. I've had Hoa on my wishlist for forever, so it's probably time for me to check out that puzzle platformer before the sequel arrives later this year. Hoa 2 (from Skrollcat Studio and publisher PM Studios) sticks with the hand-painted art of the original game but it’s a 3D game this time. It begins a long, long time after the end of Hoa, with the eponymous fairy returning to a world that's been transformed by time. But many of her old friends have passed away, so Hoa seeks a new purpose. Along with platforming and spatial puzzles, Hoa 2 features secrets and mini-games. It's coming to Steam, PS5, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch 2. I dig what I've seen of MotorSlice, which seems to have Mirror's Edge-style parkour action but in a much grittier-looking world. The developers also took inspiration from the Prince of Persia series and Shadow of the Colossus here — perhaps not too surprising in the latter case given that you'll be scaling huge bosses. This action adventure sees you on a mission to destroy every piece of machinery inside a ruined megastructure. MotorSlice is coming to Steam this spring. A demo for this game from Regular Studio and publisher Top Hat Studios is available now. Being a lifelong soccer fan is a curse that's punctuated with infrequent moments of the most intense joy you'll ever feel. Plus, every few years, I lose about a month of my life to the most recent version of Football Manager (I gave up on the last one after winning every possible trophy with Borussia Mönchengladbach for three seasons in a row). So, it's safe to say that a game focused on perhaps the least glamourous job in soccer is up my alley. Kitman — a job you might know of as "equipment manager" — is a sports management game with co-op for up to four people in which you take care of things behind the scenes of a soccer team. You'll clean locker rooms, polish boots, make sure players have the right uniforms and so on, while taking care of details on the fly on match days. There's a fun twist here in that you can secretly take on some of the manager's duties, such as scouting players and adjusting formations. Maybe that explains what's been happening with Tottenham Hotspur lately. Kitman, from Outlier, is coming to Steam later this year. In the meantime, you can sign up to take part in a playtest. If, like me, you adore Astro Bot, here's something to keep an eye on. Astrolander is a 2.5D platformer with lovely-looking 3D environments. As a robot named Feedback, you set out on a journey with a rocket-powered sidekick named Haptic (heh) to save bots known as the Most Valuable Programs, or MVPs. A second player can join in and help take control of Feedback. Astrolander is from 16-year-old Max Trest of Lost Cartridge Creations. The PlayStation team (including its then-head of indie games Shuhei Yoshida) tried Astrolander at an event a few years back and offered Trest the chance to bring his game to PS5. Astrolander is also coming to Steam. It's set to arrive later this year.

Bandai Namco has announced a new Little Nightmares game, this time for virtual reality. Little Nightmares VR: Altered Echoes is developed by Iconik and not by Tarsier Studios, but it’s still connected to the beloved titles Little Nightmares I and II. Remember Dark Six, the protagonist Six’s dark doppelganger from the previous games? Well, in this installment, you will control her as she goes on a journey to reunite with the actual Six in order to reunited with her and become whole. The adventure horror puzzle game promises an “eerie, atmospheric universe” with an immersive first-person perspective. It features new locations within Nowhere, a nightmarish world only accessible through dreams filled with dangerous creatures, such as the human-like Residents. The Thin Man, the antagonist of the franchise’s second installment, is also back. Little Nightmares VR: Altered Echoes is optimized for the PSVR2, the Meta Quest 2, 3 and 3s, the Oculus Rift and Rift S, the Pico 4, the Valve Index and the HTC Vive. However, it also works with other PC VR headsets. It will be available on April 24, 2026, and you can add it to your Wishlist right now on the PlayStation, Steam and Meta stores.

European regulators are continuing to crack down on loot boxes and gaming features it classifies as "interactive risk categories." The Pan-European Game Information, better known as PEGI, is rolling out new rules that will apply age ratings based on the presence of loot boxes and other in-game purchases or systems that could be tied to gambling or addictive behavior. The exact policies are as follows: Purchases of in-game content: games with time-limited or quantity-limited offers will be classified with a PEGI 12, games with NFTs or blockchain-related mechanisms will be PEGI 18. Paid random items: the default rating will be PEGI 16 if the game contains paid random items (and in some cases they can be a PEGI 18). Play-by-appointment: mechanisms that reward returning to the game (e.g. daily quests) will get a PEGI 7. If these mechanisms punish players for not returning (e.g. by losing content or reducing progress) they will become PEGI 12. Safe online gameplay: if games contain entirely unrestricted communication features (e.g. no blocking or reporting), they will be PEGI 18. These changes will apply to newly submitted games beginning in June 2026. The messaging from the ratings body is that these rules are aimed at helping parents direct their children's online safety. "With the updated set of age rating criteria, PEGI aims to make parents aware that certain features in games should be carefully assessed, and that parental tools can be a very helpful assistant when doing that," PEGI Council Chair Beate Våje said. Many titles may see an impact from the new policy, some more drastic than others. Online shooters might seen a bump from PEGI 12 to PEGI 16, but a franchise like EA Sports FC would leap to at least PEGI 16 from its current installment’s rating of PEGI 3. Loot boxes have a history of causing strife among regulators. In 2018, Belgium determined that loot boxes were a form of gambling and made them illegal. Other nations have taken similar measures to restrict or prohibit this game mechanic, which has already led some game studios to limit access to their titles. For instance, Blizzard's free-to-play Diablo Immortaldidn't launch in Belgium or the Netherlands due to their laws connecting loot boxes and gambling. Stateside, there has been a renewed push against the concept, with the New York attorney general suing Valve over loot boxes.

Fancy yourself as one of those folks who stands in front of an expensive touchscreen display on a news network on election night, zooming in and out of counties while bleating about polling and voting data? If so, you might get a kick out of BallotGuessr. This is a riff on GeoGuessr that tasks you with guessing how a county voted in the 2024 presidential election. All you have to go on to figure out the identity of each county are contextual clues from Google Street View images. You can move around the environment a bit, but unless you get lucky, you'll need to have a good sense of politics and geography to do well here. Once you think you have an idea of where the county is, you move a slider to guess whether residents voted for the Democrat or Republican ticket and by how many points. In the daily challenge mode, you only have 30 seconds to make your guess in each of five rounds. I'm bad at it, but it's a fun take on GeoGuessr all the same. BallotGuessr features 2,845 curated Google Street View locations from all 50 states, with a maximum of 15 locations for each county. Its creator plans to expand the game with data for the 2022 midterms and 2020 presidential election, as well as recent elections in France, Germany and the United Kingdom.

After spending many years as the public face of Overwatch, Jeff Kaplan stayed well out of the limelight after leaving Blizzard in 2021. Five years later, the former Blizzard vice president and Overwatch lead director is back with his own studio and a new game, which you might be able to play pretty soon. The Legend of California is billed as an open-world, action-survival shooter. It looks like a mix of Red Dead Redemption and Rust (Rust Dead Redemption, if you will). It's set during the gold rush era, but Kaplan says he and his team at Kintsugiyama were not aiming for historical accuracy. For one thing, this version of California is an island. Still, the developers wanted to make the game feel authentic to the time period. There are cowboys and prospectors, and you'll be able to go hunting, build mines and stables, craft tools and weapons, build out your homestead and raid hostile camps. There are "challenging" player vs. environment encounters (Kaplan says there are four difficulty tiers available to start with) and optional player vs. player battles. You'll be able to form a company with up to three other players and share progress, resources, buildings and other things with them. Kaplan says his 34-strong team hand-crafted the world, though there's a degree of randomization at play. A certain biome (say, the game's version of the Mojave Desert) might be the easiest, most beginner-friendly area of the game on one server, and the endgame, tier four section on another. The points of interest might pop up in unexpected spots too — an Alcatraz-inspired structure will appear in a Bay Area-style region in some world seeds, and in snowy mountains in others. The Legend of California is being published by Blizzard co-founder and former CEO Mike Morhaime's company Dreamhaven. It's slated to enter early access on Steam and the Epic Games Store later this year, with closed alpha playtests expected to start soon. Kaplan announced The Legend of California in unusual fashion. Not during a splashy showcase, but in a five-hour appearance on Lex Fridman's podcast. Kaplan discussed his life and career, including his work on World of Warcraft, the ill-fated Titan and, of course, Overwatch. In his first public appearance since stepping down as Overwatch director, Kaplan revealed his reasons for leaving Blizzard, where he spent 19 years and previously had no intention of leaving. Business pressures related to the Overwatch League and Overwatch 2 played a part in his departure, but the final straw came in 2020 during a meeting with Blizzard's then-chief financial officer. Kaplan says he was told that if Overwatch didn't reach certain revenue targets, the publisher would lay off 1,000 people and that would be on Kaplan's shoulders.

Google Play has introduced a new feature called Game Trials, which will let you play a portion of paid games for free before you commit to buying them. It’s now rolling out to select paid games on mobile, and it’s coming soon to Google Play Games on PC. Titles that offer Game Trials will show a button marked “Try” on their profile pages. When you click it, you’ll see how long you can play the game before you have to buy it. In Google’s example, the survival and horror game Dredge will give you 60 minutes of free play time, after which you’ll get the option to either buy the game or delete it from your device. Google has also announced that it’s releasing more paid indie games over the coming months, including Moonlight Peaks, Sledding Game and Low-Budget Repairs. It has launched a new section in the Play store, as well, to feature games optimized for Windows PCs. You can wishlist the games from that section to get a notification when they’re on sale. Finally, the company is rolling out Play Games Sidekick, the Gemini-powered Android overlay it announced last year, to select games downloaded from Play. Sidekick can show you relevant info and tools for whatever game you're playing without having to do a search query. But if you’d rather ask other people for gaming advice instead of an AI, you can also look at a game’s Community Posts, a feature now available in English for select titles on their Play pages.

In 2024, Microsoft caused a lot of head-scratching and general bemusement with the launch of its "This is an Xbox" marketing campaign. Now, though, it appears the quandary over what is and isn't an Xbox has been resolved. Game Developer noticed that the original blog post on Xbox Wire that kicked off the whole affair has been removed. It seems Xbox will be going a new direction with its future promotions. Maybe since the new Project Helix hardware it has in the works is more definite attempt to blur console and PC gaming, "This is an Xbox" might have been truly confusing as a tagline. Maybe with the recent changing of the guard at the company, the top brass decided that it was the right time to start fresh with a less meme-able marketing plan. Whatever the reason, we have enjoyed this opportunity to learn about the existential philosophy behind being an Xbox. And fortunately, although the blog post may be gone, the video trailer still exists whenever we need to remind ourselves of the many things that can be Xbox-ified.

The Steam Machine is back from the dead. Not as a Valve-supported program for manufacturers to create living room PCs, but instead as a home console sibling to the Steam Deck. Valve introduced its second attempt at ruling the living room in a surprise hardware announcement in November 2025, and paired the new Steam Machine with a new Steam Controller and a wireless VR headset it calls the Steam Frame. Since the announcement, as is often the case with Valve, some details remain elusive, however. While we wait for the release of the company's new hardware lineup in 2026, and more information straight from the horse's mouth, here's everything we know about the hardware, software and price of the Steam Machine, so far. Like the Steam Deck, the Steam Machine is utilitarian and bespoke. The PC is a black, 5.98 x 6.39 x 6.14 inch (152 x 162.4 x 156mm) box, with ports and a grille for a fan in the back and a removable faceplate and customizable LED light strip in the front. Inside, Valve says the Steam Machine features a "semi-custom" AMD Zen 4 CPU with six cores and up to 4.8GHz clock speeds, and a "semi-custom" RDNA3 AMD GPU, along with 16GB DDR RAM, 8GB GDDR6 VRAM and either 512GB or 2TB of storage. While these specs make the Steam Machine more powerful than the aging Steam Deck (which shipped in 2022 with its own custom AMD chip) Valve has been careful not to oversell the capabilities of the box. In a blog post, the company said that "the majority of Steam titles play great at 4K 60FPS" using AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) frame generation and upscaling technology, but some titles require more upscaling than others, and it "may be preferable to play at a lower framerate with [variable refresh rate] to maintain a 1080p internal resolution." In a hands-on preview of the Steam Machine, Digital Foundry expressed concern with what Valve's claims and the device's stated specs could mean for future performance. "The decision to opt for 8GB of GDDR6 memory has been proven to be a limiting factor on many modern mainstream triple-A games and falls short of the maximum VRAM pools and memory bandwidth available on both Xbox Series X and base PS5," Digital Foundry writes. The Steam Machine supports Bluetooth 5.3, Wi-Fi 6E and includes an integrated 2.4GHz adapter for the new Steam Controller. In terms of port selection, there's DisplayPort 1.4 and HDMI 2.0 inputs for connecting the box to external monitors and TVs, four USB-A ports (divided between two USB 2.0 ports and two USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports) and one USB-C port on the back. Any game that runs on SteamOS, Valve's Linux-based operating system, will run on the Steam Machine, provided the device's technical specs will support it. For games running natively on Linux, the Steam Machine will download the Linux version. For Windows games and everything else, it'll be able to use Steam's built-in Proton compatibility layer to translate games to Linux, just like the Steam Deck does. Proton is developed by both Valve and CodeWeavers, the team behind the macOS compatibility app CrossOver. Valve's compatibility layer translates a game's API calls and other software features into something Linux understands, essentially tricking the game into thinking it's running on Windows when it isn't. Proton has worked remarkably well so far, in some cases helping some PC games run more efficiently on Linux than they do on Windows, but it does have some limitations. Because some anti-cheat software doesn't support Linux, many competitive multiplayer games aren't playable on SteamOS. Valve hopes the Steam Machine will help change that. "While [the] Steam Machine also requires dev participation to enable anti-cheat, we think the incentives for enabling anti-cheat on Machine to be higher than on Deck as we expect more people to play multiplayer games on it," Valve told Eurogamer. "Ultimately we hope that the launch of Machine will change the equation around anti-cheat support and increase its support." To help users find what games work well on the Steam Machine, Valve plans to expand its program for verifying games on the Steam Deck to include the Steam Machine and Steam Frame. Valve looks at things like controller support, the default resolution of the game, whether or not it requires a separate launcher and whether the game and its middleware work with Proton to determine a game's rating. Then the company sorts games into four categories: Verified (where the game works with Steam hardware at launch), Playable (where a user might have to make modifications to run smoothly), Unplayable (where some or all of the game doesn't function) and Unknown. According to an announcement Valve sent to developers in November 2025, games that were Verified for the Steam Deck will automatically be verified for the Steam Machine. In a presentation at GDC 2026, the company also shared that Steam Machine Verified games will be expected to support the same input methods as the Steam Deck and run at 1080p at 30fps at a minimum. Unlike the company’s handheld, Valve won’t require developers to support specific display resolutions or meet legibility requirements to be Steam Machine Verified, though, because the Steam Machine is more likely to be connected to larger displays. That means a game could be marked as Playable on the Steam Deck due to its small text, but Verified on the Steam Machine. Valve’s system is helpful, but far from definitive — some Unplayable games are in fact playable on the Steam Deck — which is why online, community-run databases like ProtonDB fill in the gaps with more granular information. Valve hasn't announced a price or a release date for the Steam Machine or any of its new hardware, beyond affirming its new hardware will ship in 2026. In terms of price, however, the company has suggested it might not be a deal in quite the same way the $399 Steam Deck LCD was. Valve designer Pierre-Loup Griffais told The Verge that the "Steam Machine’s pricing is comparable to a PC with similar specs" and that its price would be "positioned closer to the entry level of the PC space" but be "very competitive with what you a PC you could build yourself from parts." That means the Steam Machine will likely cost more than the $499 PS5, and that the rising costs of memory could make it even more expensive. Valve has already publicly admitted that memory and storage shortages are affecting its plans. In February, the company said that it was delaying the launch of its hardware (though it still hopes to ship in the first half of 2026) and rethinking pricing, particularly around the Steam Machine and Steam Frame, because of the "limited availability and growing prices" of critical components like RAM. The changes Framework had to make to the pricing of the Framework Desktop are an illustrative example of the position Valve is in. Framework pitched its compact desktop PC as being great for gaming, with an AMD Ryzen AI Max chip (originally meant for gaming laptops) and a minimum of 32GB of RAM that lets it run games at 1440p. The company originally sold the base configuration of the Framework Desktop for $1,099, but announced in January 2026 that it would now cost $1,139 due to the rising cost of RAM. The price situation got even worse for configurations with more RAM. A Framework Desktop with 128GB of RAM now costs $2,459. The blame for rising costs lies squarely with the AI industry, whose demand for RAM has led to the collapse of consumer RAM brands and a dearth of true deals on the in-demand component. At this point, PC makers have no solution to the problem other than riding the shortage out and raising prices. Valve clearly isn't immune to those same issues. That doesn't rule out the company offering its Linux PC at multiple different price points, or in some kind of bundle deal with multiple pieces of new Steam hardware. But it does mean that the Steam Machine will likely be priced like a premium device. Same for the Steam Controller and Steam Frame. In the case of the Frame, UploadVR reports that Valve wants to sell the headset for less than the $1,000 Valve Index, but that doesn't mean it won't be significantly more expensive than the $300 Meta Quest 3S. The Steam Machine is designed to work with a variety of different Bluetooth controllers and other wireless accessories, and also whatever you can plug into its multiple USB-A ports and single USB-C port. With a built-in 2.4GHz Steam Controller dongle inside the Steam Machine, Valve's controller should be an ideal option for controlling games, particularly because of its multiple input options, like touchpads and gyroscopes. Support for Steam Link, Valve's tech for streaming PC games over local wireless, means you can also send games from a Steam Machine to the Steam Deck, Steam Frame or the Steam Link app and play them there. Update, March 11, 4:40PM ET: Updated headline and added details on Valve’s Steam Machine Verified program.

It must be 2017 because loot boxes are back in the news again. Two weeks after New York's attorney general sued Valve over its use of the gimmick, the company has responded. In short, the Steam maker essentially said, "See you in court." New York's lawsuit accuses Valve of promoting illegal gambling through its games. AG Letitia James called the loot boxes found in titles like Counter-Strike 2, Team Fortress 2 and Dota 2 "addictive, harmful and illegal." The state seeks to "permanently stop Valve from continuing to promote illegal gambling in its games" and pay relevant fines. In its defense posted on Thursday, Valve likened its mystery boxes to kids buying packs of physical trading cards. "Players don't have to open mystery boxes to play Valve games," the company wrote. "In fact, most of you don't open any boxes at all and just play the games — because the items in the boxes are purely cosmetic, there is no disadvantage to a player not spending money." That last point, while applicable within the game itself, isn't quite that cut and dry once you zoom out beyond that. As James pointed out, players can trade the cosmetic items they win from loot boxes on Steam's marketplace or sell them on third-party marketplaces. Rarer ones can sometimes fetch lucrative sums. Here, too, Valve defended the profitable practice by rolling out the trading card comparison. "We think the transferability of a digital game item is good for consumers — it gives a user the ability to sell or trade an old or unwanted item for something else, in the same way an owner can sell or trade a tangible item like a Pokémon or baseball card," the company wrote. "NYAG proposes to take away users' ability to transfer their digital items from Valve games. Transferability is a right we believe should not be taken away, and we refuse to do that." Valve is also facing a new class-action lawsuit over its loot boxes. Some of Valve's points land a bit more than its righteous defense of a gaming gimmick that, well, isn’t exactly beloved. The company accused the NYAG of proposing that Valve collect additional user information to prevent VPN use. In addition, the state allegedly "demanded that Valve collect more personal data about our users to do additional age verification." Privacy experts have been sounding the alarm about the recent push for online age verification. Valve also addressed James's erroneous and outdated statement that video games encourage real-world violence. "Those extraneous comments are a distraction and a mischaracterization we've all heard before," the company wrote. "Numerous studies throughout the years have concluded there is no link between media (movies, TV, books, comics, music and games) and real world violence. Indeed, many studies highlight the beneficial impact of games to users." The company says that, while it may have been cheaper to settle the suit, it deemed the NYAG's demands user-hostile. "Ultimately, a court will decide whose position — ours or NYAG's — is correct. In the meantime, we wanted to make sure you were aware of the potential impact to users in New York and elsewhere."

Microsoft first debuted its full screen Xbox experience for Windows in the ROG Ally Xbox handheld, in a bid to compete with Steam's nearly 15-year-old Big Picture Mode. That Xbox interface eventually made its way to other Windows 11 gaming portables last year. Today at GDC, Microsoft revealed that its big screen Xbox UI is headed to all Windows 11 devices (including laptops and desktops) in April. Oh yah, and it's now simply called "Xbox Mode." Xbox Mode will only be available in select markets at first, and Microsoft describes it as bringing "a controller-optimized experience to your Windows 11 device, letting players browse their library, launch games, use Game Bar and switch between apps." You know, just like Steam Big Picture mode. Microsoft didn't have much else to share about optimizations in Xbox Mode, but when it debuted the feature for Windows 11 Insiders last fall, the company noted that its task switcher will let people quickly move between games, as well as their apps. Microsoft plans to reveal more information about the future of Xbox today at GDC. Last week, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma confirmed the company's next hardware is codenamed "Project Helix," and it will play both PC and console games. That likely means it'll just be a Windows gaming PC with Xbox branding, something the company has been hinting at for a while. Microsoft also has some geekier developer-focused news for the Games Developer Conference. Advanced Shader Delivery (ASD), which first appeared on the Xbox ROG Ally, will be made available to all developers on the Xbox store. ASD allows delivers to pre-compile shaders, so you're not stuck waiting for them to get processed on your system. That should also help to avoid the shader stuttering so common when playing a new title, since shader processing often occurs in the background too. DirectStorage, Microsoft's technology for speeding up game loading on NVMe SSDs, is also getting support for Zstandard compression, as well as a tool called the "Game Asset Conditional Library." According to Microsoft, that tool enables "improving compression efficiency while simplifying asset conditioning across production pipelines." Microsoft also plans to give developers a glimpse at how next-generation Machine Learning will be implemented in its DirectX gaming API.

Microsoft plans to begin shipping early units of its next generation console, codenamed Project Helix, to game studios starting sometime next year. “We're sending alpha versions of Project Helix to developers starting in 2027,“ said Jason Ronald, vice-president of next generation for Xbox, according to IGN, which was present at the company’s GDC 2026 presentation where it shared early details about the new device. Ronald did not clarify what he meant by “alpha version,” but given the keynote’s developer focus, presumably he meant devkits, which studios could use to start creating games for the new console. Additionally, Ronald reiterated that the new system would be capable of playing both Xbox console games and PC games, and said it would incorporate a custom AMD-made system-on-a-chip capable of rendering graphics with path tracing. Judging from a slide the company shared, Microsoft and AMD are working on many of the same technologies and capabilities AMD is co-designing with Sony for next PlayStation console. For instance, Ronald said Helix would be capable of ray regeneration, a technique designed to produce better-looking ray-traced effects. The new console will also offer multi-frame frame generation and machine learning-based upscaling. “It delivers an order of magnitude leap in ray tracing performance and capability, integrates intelligence directly into the graphics and compute pipeline, and drives meaningful gains in efficiency, scale, and visual ambition. The result is more realistic, immersive, and dynamic worlds for players,” Ronald wrote in a blog post published after his presentation. Ronald didn’t speak to any specific compute numbers, likely due to the fact Microsoft has yet to finalize the Helix hardware. We’ll likely learn more of those details the closer we get to 2027.

Sony has announced its latest additions to the PlayStation Plus Game Catalog. While they might not top last month's introduction of Marvel's Spider-Man 2, Extra and Premium subscribers are still getting access to some notable games. Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 is a third-person action game reminiscent of Gears of War, but set in Games Workshop's elaborate Warhammer 40,000 universe. If you're a fan of the larger franchise, Space Marine 2 is well worth a look, especially with a third entry on the way, but the game is also a solid option if you're just looking for a new co-op game to try with friends. Persona 5 Royal is a known-quantity among fans of Atlus' social simulation/RPG series, and the way it both expands on and streamlines the original Persona 5 also makes it a suitable entry point to the series as a whole. If seeing Japanese teenagers deal with their personal problems while embarking on Inception-style missions into the hearts of the corrupt adults of Tokyo sounds interesting, you'll love Persona 5 Royal. Alongside those standouts, PS Plus Game Catalog is also getting: EA Sports Madden NFL 26 (PS5) Blasphemous 2 (PS5 and PS4) Metal Eden (PS5) Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria (PS5) Astroneer (PS5 and PS4) And as promised last month, the PS Plus Classics Catalog is expanding to include Tekken: Dark Resurrection, a revamped and rebalanced version of Tekken 5 that includes expanded character customization options and new stages that weren't in the original 2004 fighting game. This one’s only for PS Plus Premium subscribers on PS4 and PS5. All of these will be available on the PS Plus Game Catalog on March 17.