Last year we released Patch 3.8 which, unlike smaller balance patches released throughout the year, was a larger set of changes aimed at improving multiplayer StarCraft II through various design changes. This year we are embarking on another design patch and are excited to share with you our initial list of changes! This time around our general focus is to address underused units and abilities while also trying to reduce sudden game ending moments.

Debut developer Imaginati has revealed Planet of the Apes: Last Frontier, a standalone cinematic adventure game set between the events of 2014’s Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and this year’s War for the Planet of the Apes. It will be released for PS4, Xbox One and PC this fall. Published by the new games division of The Imaginarium - the performance capture studio run by Planet of the Apes lead actor Andy Serkis, who executive produces here - the game is even being developed on-site at the company’s historic Ealing Studios headquarters.

Mechatronics engineer Julio Vazquez has invented a couple of peripherals that make the Switch's Joy-Con controllers much easier to play for disabled players…

An average indie title these days is priced $8.72 on Steam. During the last Summer Sale the price went down to the mind-boggling $4.63 and yet the average sales are at their lowest at 21,000 copies. Small indie titles usually have a smaller audience save for a few outliers. The problem with our approach is that people seem to normalize extremely successful breakout hits while assuming everything that didn’t sell north of a million copies is a complete failure.

Despite all its challenges, Gigantic released last month to some success. The free-to-play hero shooter lost players after an initial surge, but still pulls in around 2,000 concurrents at its peaks. It's not a phenomenon by any means, but somewhere to start—and now the job of growing begins. Enter Gigantic's first major update, Corruption, which will release tomorrow.

Mechatronics engineer Julio Vazquez has invented a couple of peripherals that make the Switch's Joy-Con controllers much easier to play for disabled players limited to the use of one hand. As pointed out by AbleGamers, a charity specialising in bringing video games to those with physical disabilities, Vazquez's unique controller peripherals can be 3D printed at a local shop and blueprints for both models can be obtained on Vazquez's Thingiverse page.

Along with our partner Blizzard Entertainment, we are excited to announce the release of the Starcraft II Learning Environment (SC2LE), a suite of tools that we hope will accelerate AI research in the real-time strategy game and make it easier for researchers to focus on the frontiers of our field.

A few days ago, I flew to Canada for a friend's bachelor party, prompting me to flip on my Switch for the first time in a few weeks and browse the eShop for a game to play on the flight. I was bummed, though not surprised, to find there wasn't much that interested me, or that I hadn't played elsewhere. But when I look around at the games I haven't spent more time with in 2017— Yakuza 0 and Persona 5, chiefly—all I can do is sigh at my inability to transplant those games to my Switch.

Take-Two is taking its best shot at escaping a multi-million dollar lawsuit for depicting the tattoos of NBA superstars like LeBron James, Eric Bledsoe and Kenyon Martin in its NBA 2K video game franchise. On Wednesday, the publisher submitted a motion for judgment on the pleadings and argued that it has every right to showcase players as they appear in real life. The motion sets up a first-of-its-kind ruling from a New York federal judge, and Take-Two is warning of the stakes.

Racing around the internet like burning helheim fire today has been the knowledge that Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, Ninja Theory’s celt action/thriller, will delete your save file if you die too much. Is it too harsh? Should it be something you can disable? How hard is it anyway? Those are questions for another game because, well, it’s not true.

Last Friday, we ran an article based on an interview with Hinterland founder and creative director Raph van Lierop about the official launch of the studio's Early Access survival game The Long Dark.

You know what everyone forgets about the story of the boy who cried wolf? In the end, there actually was a wolf - a ravenous, man-eating wolf. It's as much a parable about the dangers of ignoring credible threats just because the present situation is rosy, as it is about the social ills of sending bored teenage boys up lonely hillsides in the era before they could stream high-definition porn over LTE.

Computer science researchers at North Carolina State University and Universidade de Lisboa have created a new tool for Skyrim that makes NPCs more autonomous and reactive. The tool, called CIF-CK, is an artificial intelligence program that uses social behavior models to shape NPC behavior based on how they perceive each other and the player.

By many measures, Star Wars Battlefront II is shaping up to be the most ambitious game in EA’s history. It’s a colossal, global development effort that spans multiple game modes, genres, and all three film eras. And it’s being managed by three prestigious studios: Criterion Games, DICE, and the newly-formed Motive Studios.

Path tracing and ray tracing are two renderers that we strongly believe will benefit video-games in one or two decades. Yeah, we are talking about something that some people may never experience, however real-time pathtracing is capable of producing incredible reflections, shadows, and global illumination effects. And gamers can get an idea of what pathtracing is all about as Edd Biddulph has been working on a GPU pathtracer for Quake 2.

In June, Valve shuttered its community vote-driven Greenlight initiative after five years of service. In its place came Direct—a system that allows developers the chance to get their games on Steam for a $100 fee. At the time, Valve said this: "With this transition to Steam Direct, we'll be keeping an eye on new submissions and making adjustments as necessary. We aren't quite sure whether there will be a lot more new submissions, just a bit more, or even fewer."

Today, publisher SOEDESCO announced that Weirdbeard games’ physics-based tower building game Tricky Towers gets a boxed release for PlayStation® 4 and PC. The game will hit stores on November 3.

Millions of people play video games, but there's plenty of disagreement on whether they're good or bad for brains. Action games may have a different effect than something like Super Mario.

Rainbow Six Siege has grown. Its original roster of 20 Operators has expanded to 30, and 16 globe-spanning maps currently serve as the battlegrounds for the ongoing fight between attackers and defenders. And now it has another number to celebrate. Rainbow Six Siege recently hit the 20 million registered player mark, with more than 2.3 million players signing on every day. “Our community is growing and so is our ambition to make Siege a shooter that is here to stay,” says Nicolas Lefebvre, Product Director.

Prey launched in May to a mixed reception. Some of the criticism it received was due to a bunch of the PS4 version's performance problems, such as input lag, screen-tearing, and more. Now, two months after the game's most recent update, version 1.05 is live, and it promises to address many of those issues.

As we reported earlier this week, developer Playdek abandoned the Yasumi Matsuno-involved Kickstarter Unsung Story and sold it to publisher Little Orbit. Not being known for games like Unsung Story, or non-licensed games in general, the move was odd and raised a lot of questions about the future of the $600,000 Kickstarted tactical RPG. We reached out to Little Orbit to try and fill in some of the blanks.

The Nintendo booth at gamescom 2017 is set to showcase some of this year’s biggest games for Nintendo Switch and Nintendo 3DS family systems, and we’ll be livestreaming some of those titles on YouTube and our gamescom 2017 website in English. Hungry for more footage of Super Mario Odyssey for Nintendo Switch? On Wednesday 23rd August at 14:00 BST, get a fresh look at gameplay with a special developer talk from producer Yoshiaki Koizumi.

Some of the world’s best Smash Bros. players say they are owed thousands of dollars for their performances in a tournament called BEAST 7 held in Sweden last February. Adam “Armada” Lindgren, the first place winner in the event’s Super Smash Bros. Melee bracket, tweeted yesterday that BEAST 7 had yet to provide “an explanation of exactly where all the money went,” and that the situation had been “handled in a really unprofessional way. Guess I have to talk to the other winners and see what we will do.”

Recently, hit-maker Max Martin referred to Lorde’s track Green Light as ‘incorrect song-writing’. His theory applies to game design – especially Sonic

PC gaming is dead! Oh wait, let me put that tired cliche back in the bin where it belongs. PC gaming is more alive than ever, with Valve revealing there are 33 million players active every day on Steam, and 67 million every month. In fact, new players are coming to Steam at a rate of 1.5 million each and every month.

A hacker says he turned finding and exploiting flaws in popular MMO video games into a lucrative, full-time, job.

In 1996, Bernie Stolar joined Sega America as president and chief operating officer to help release the company’s upcoming console: the Dreamcast. He says he immediately restructured the company, leading to nearly 300 job losses. “I felt that everybody wasn’t strong enough to do their jobs,” he says. “I fired most of them, then I wanted to rebuild the staff.”

Friday the 13th: The Game developer Illfonic has been accused by fans of abandoning the title in favour of its new project Dead Alliance. Illfonic quietly announced in May it was working on the new first-person zombie shooter, due for release 29th August, but the majority of Friday the 13th fans did not realise at the time.

Choosing between Switch and 2DS or 3DS? Here's how Nintendo's consoles stack up.

While BioWare’s Dragon Age franchise features an entirely new protagonist with each installment, the games still take place inside the same fantasy world. As a result, players often encounter characters that were first introduced in earlier installments of the series.

During its latest financial report brief, Capcom revealed Ultra Street Fighter II: The Final Challengers sold above the company's expectations. As a result, the company plans to start preparing more Switch titles. As The Wall Street Journal's Takashi Mochizuki reports, the updated, $40 port of Street Fighter II (which was a decent one) sold over 450,000 copies during the first quarter of the financial year, according to the company. In its official earnings report, the company says the game "made an excellent start and proved to be a smash hit."

Internet Guy Does What Nintendon’t. Thingiverse user sanzliot is to thank for this custom Nintendo Switch drink holder, which is available here to make if you at all have access to a 3D printer.

Over in the good old US of A, September's issue of Game Informer magazine has landed and brought with it a whole host of new details on a social space called Headquarters being introduced to Call of Duty: WW2. Apparently the area will let you not only fight to the death against a friend but also watch loot box openings and win prizes. Tonally dissonant, sure, but rather par for the course in a game where you regularly die to W33dKing_99.

We take a look at how the industry is accommodating gamers with disabilities.

Monolith Soft founder Tetsuya Takahashi is obsessed with insanely grand things. The creator of the acclaimed Xeno series of thoughtful, metaphysics-tinged roleplaying games has an instinctive partiality for Homeric backdrops, Brobdingnagian beings and restive systems of play.