Beat Saber has climbed to the #7 spot among best rated games on Steam—VR or otherwise—and continues to hold the #1 spot among VR titles. For a few days following its Early Access launch back in May, Beat Saber basked in the #1 spot of top rated titles on Steam as the only game on Steam with a 99% positive rating. A few weeks into release, a handful of negative reviews dropped the game down to 98%. With just 19 other games on Steam holding a 98% positive rating...

Download it in that time and it's yours to keep.

Ever since the fall of the Maxis empire, Colossal Order’s Cities: Skylines has captured the heart and minds of wannabe mayors all over the world. The developers have maintained a steady stream of DLC and add-ons for the game. This has helped keep Skylines feeling fresh even three years after its initial launch date.

The world’s first 2D MMO isometric shooter once abandoned but now playable again. The gaming industry has changed massively since the 90’s with digital distribution platforms such as Steam, GOG and itch.io providing developers with the tools and community needed to launch a game with the potential to instantly reach thousands of gamers without millions in funding.

November 7th is a hallowed date for Mass Effect fans, the series’ dedicated collective of fans taking the occasion to show love to their favorite galaxy-exploring franchise. While players share their most beloved memories as Shepard and Ryder, developer BioWare also express their dedication in the form of a heartwarming video, this year’s celebration offering a retrospective of the N7 insignia.

Somewhere deep inside Valve’s labyrinthine compound of Steam-sustaining tubes, wires, and pipes, somebody is thanking their lucky stars for Artem Moskowsky. The self-described “bug hunter” came across a glitch that allowed him to generate thousands of free keys for any game on Steam. A lesser person might have kept that knowledge to themselves. He reported it.

The maker of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds has declared its high-profile, major bug-fixing campaign over and announced a change in direction for development. In an open letter to players published on Steam, executive producer Taeseok Jang admitted the developer, PUBG Corp. had "overlooked issues that matter to you" as it focused on providing new content quickly "while supplementing battle royale gameplay". PUBG Corp. has "reflected a lot on our mistakes," Taeseok Jang added.

Epic hasn't announced this just yet, but it already has a page live on the Epic Store website: One of the games that will be released on its new store is Journey, which is "coming soon." The PS3 exclusive (well, not any more) from thatgamecompany was a big deal when it released. We've seen lots of experimentation in adventure and multiplayer games in the six years since, but back in 2012, it felt like an anomaly. It still did, when it was re-released on PS4.

Everyone’s building their own Steam competitor, and Bethesda is no exception. Rage 2 pre-orders went up last night, but only on the Bethesda.net Store, and the game still doesn’t have a Steam page. You might’ve expected this given that Fallout 76 launched exclusively on the publisher’s client, but now it seems certain Bethesda games going forward won’t be coming to other stores.

Indie devs like myself have always likened to be the scrappy underdogs underneath the machine. While AAA game companies make their dollar to dollar decisions on using nylon for their $200 Collectors Edition bag to save a few bucks or revamp their loot box structure to better their game (in the face of outright hostile feedback), we, the Indie Devs, make games from the heart. That’s not to say there aren’t some cold, calculating moves done in the background...

During the 300 years of European witch hunts that started in the 15th century, tens of thousands of women, men and children lost their lives due to superstition, politics and profit. But that’s our history and our world. In the world of Witchfire, witches are real. And you are the punishing hand of the Church. That’s the core idea behind the game, even if things are not as black-and-white as one might think.

Valve has revealed that the Steam Winter Sale 2018 begins later today. Players will be able to purchase great titles that will be on sale for a limited time. In a post on its site, Valve has revealed that the Steam Winter sale 2018 will start on 20 December. In addition, Valve also revealed their annual Steam Awards, the 2018 nominees have been announced and voting begins today and lasts till 3 January 2019. The winners will be announced in February 2019.

Grapeshot Games have finally managed to launch Atlas, but now it's on a good track to be more of a disappointment than Fallout 76 was. Many are calling it a reskin of ARK: Survival Evolved, while others claim it was originally DLC. How does one produce a mess that overshadows Fallout 76 as the biggest disappointment in 2018 when they have only eight days left until 2019 kicks off? Ask Grapeshot Games, who not only pushed the release of Atlas back several times, but when they finally launched the game, people couldn't get past the login screen.

Atlas has become one of the biggest disappointments of 2018, and it hasn't gone unnoticed. It has an abysmal rating on Steam and Valve are now refunding the game even if someone played it for more than two hours, which doesn't occur often. Atlas has been called a cheap reskin of ARK: Survival Evolved and it pretty much is just an asset flip by Grapeshot Games. The start is identical, UI looks just about the same and gameplay seems to be pasted from ARK.

It became clear that Valve was going to have a hard time selling Artifact when fans were left disgruntled (to say the least) by the Dota card game’s reveal at The International 2017. Similar to Blizzard’s Diablo Immortal blunder at Blizzcon a couple months ago, Valve’s decision to try and monetize a $19.99 card game and ignore the demand to create sequels to their best-selling franchises Half-Life, Left 4 Dead, and Portal isn’t paying off for the popular publisher.

According to a new report, EA's open-world Star Wars game, in development following the closure of Visceral Games, has also been canceled. Kotaku has reported this game's alleged cancellation. According to Kotaku, this Star Wars game was the one announced following Visceral Games' closure in 2017, which came alongside the cancellation of Amy Hennig's game in production at the studio. Development resources at the time shifted from Visceral's title, reportedly codenamed Ragtag, to this new, now reportedly canceled title.

Steam, unquestionably, needs a sizeable competitor. With a significant monopoly on the PC games market, such that present rivals like GOG and Humble barely take a dent out of its audience, Valve is able to take an infuriatingly lackadaisical approach to many aspects of Steam. Something to scare them into action would be marvellous. And while not optimistic, I’d hoped that maybe Epic, with their lorries full of money, might be able to try. Except, with yet another exclusivity announcement today regarding Metro: Exodus, they’re going about it entirely the wrong way.

A newly-discovered bit of developer documentation suggests Valve has big plans in mind for third-party developers of multiplayer games. Most notably, it looks like Valve is working toward letting developers host their games through the company’s own dedicated servers. Exactly how this will work in practice remains to be seen, but the feature is currently in beta among some some number of developers.

Rainway, the web-based gaming service that enables users to play their PC games anywhere, across different devices, without compromise, launched out of beta today. The company’s all-in-one game launcher for all digital PC game stores is fully compatible with AMD, Intel and NVIDIA hardware, and capable of encoding Full HD at 60 Frames Per Second in under three milliseconds.

In September 2013, Valve founder Gabe Newell gave a rare, 20-minute presentation at LinuxCon. He called Linux "the future of gaming," predicting that as the industry became more user-driven and connected across both distances and devices, an open-source foundation would be the only way to keep pace with coming innovations. With the standard, proprietary operating systems powering Windows, Mac and consoles, Newell argued, all control over content, pricing and change rested in the hands of billion-dollar corporations. Linux offered a chance for all players and developers to shape the marketplace.