I think it’s fair to say that Mass Effect: Andromeda did not have the impact anyone had hoped. The divisive space opera RPG was not as well received by critics or fans of the series as previous games. It’s put a great big question mark over the future of a once great franchise. It looks like there may be more bad news for fans on the horizon.

I knew Steam would be growing, but I didn't think it would be growing that quickly. By the looks of it, since 2015 they're about 2.4 million away from doubling the concurrent users record. It might sound like a lot, but they've already gone from 8.4 to 14 million.

No One Lives Forever, and its sequel A Spy In HARM’s Way, are infamously unavailable. Through the meticulous horrors of ownership rights across multiple publishers, and an apparent unwillingness by any involved to see it resolved, it’s not possible to buy either classic game anywhere. Well guess what – there’s a way to get them anyway, and we super-encourage you to do so.

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.

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.

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.

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."

No, it's not 'Half Life 3.' Valve just announced 'Artifact,' a new card game version of 'Dota 2.'

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.

Dota 2 is getting review-bombed by angry Half-Life fans who believe Valve’s continued support of the MOBA comes at the expense of a third instalment of the beloved series. The Half-Life games are on our list of the best shooters on PC. Why? Well, yesterday we reported how Valve alumni Marc Laidlaw - a former Valve writer who worked on the Half-Life series before becoming the lead writer for Dota 2 - has written a "fanfic" (his words, not mine) blog that gives us an insight into what Episode 3 might have been.

Last week, former Valve writer Marc Laidlaw posted a synopsis of the Half-Life 2: Episode 3 story he had planned out before the developer distanced itself from its most famous series. Styled as gender-swapped fanfic, it was a fun glimpse into what could have been. But it also reminded some people that they were angry with Valve, and they promptly took to Steam to bomb the user reviews for Dota 2.

A Shadow of War developer who died of cancer has been immortalised as an orc slayer in the game. Monolith executive producer Michael Forgey, who died from a brain tumour last year aged just 43-years-old, appears in Shadow of War as DLC character Forthog Orc-Slayer. If you have the £3.99 DLC, Forthog will on occasion appear to one-hit kill whichever enemy the player character is up against. Think the Mysterious Stranger from the Fallout series.

We all knew that Cliff Bleszinski’s controversial comments would hurt Lawbreakers but it looks like nothing stops this game from a crash landing right now. As we already reported, the game got below 500 concurrent players just a month after launch, largely thanks to Cliff Bleszinski’s negative comments on Twitter where he stated that you should play Overwatch if you love getting one shotted in games. Now, the game that should have been Overwatch’s competition is going down, and it seems that nothing can reverse the situation now.

Lucid Games has announced Switchblade, a free-to-play dynamic vehicle action game developed using Unreal Engine 4, coming to PlayStation 4 and PC in early 2018. Sign-ups for the closed beta are available now at the game’s official website. Here’s an overview of the game, via Lucid Games:

What are lawyers good for? Pouring lemon juice on the open wounds of an MMO community desperately trying to hold on to the remnant of their closed game, apparently. The closure of at least one Asheron’s Call emulator earlier this month was confirmed this week to be what many assumed: a cease-and-desist letter from Warner Bros. One of the main forces behind the emulator projects, a player named Pea, posted an account stating how he initially wrote to WB about the game’s closure and his growing involvement in the emulator scene.

It's over two years since we released SOMA, so it's time for another update on how things have been going. First of all, let's talk about sales. As I've said many times before, sales are not straightforward to count, and the number you come up with is reliant on many different factors. For instance, SOMA was part of the Humble Monthly Bundle, which meant that everybody subscribing to that service was able to download a copy of SOMA. These are not really "sales", so should we count them?

Widely regarding as one of the greatest Star Wars games ever created, Star Wars Battlefront 2, not to be confused with Star Wars Battlefront 2, was released back in 2005 to widespread fan and critical acclaim. However, the game was the one of the causalities of the GameSpy shutdown and multiplayer for most players ended up being lost. You can still use some workarounds such as Game Ranger but if you don’t want to jump through any hoops, multiplayer no longer works.

The weaponisation of Steam reviews continues, with Kerbal Space Program the latest victim. The perpetrators: Chinese gamers who are angry with a revision made to the translation of an Easter Egg. Printed on the side of a space shuttle in the main menu is the phrase “不到mun非好汉.” Back in June, a post was made on Steam which translated this as “without reaching Mun you are not a good male” and complained the language was sexist, since when the developers have replaced it.

Yesterday’s sobering Star Wars news is just the latest nail in the coffin for a beloved but increasingly unsustainable style of video game: big-budget cinematic action games designed as linear single-player experiences. Electronic Arts announced yesterday that it is refocusing the Star Wars project that had been in development at Visceral Games, an unannounced action-adventure title with a linear story campaign. EA Vancouver is taking over with a new direction, assisted by other EA studios, while EA is shuttering Visceral Games entirely and looking to shift the studio’s developers elsewhere inside the company.