If you’re lucky enough to own a Steam Deck, there’s a fair chance you’ve had someone mistake it for the similarly built Nintendo Switch. They share form factors with the middle screen and side mounted controls, and the Switch is by far the more common portable gaming partner. Plus, it has those iconic Joy Cons, especially if you went with the famous neon red and blue colour scheme.

Whether you’re wanting to lean into the joke or are looking to have a stealthy Switch-themed Steam deck, Dbrand has brought the goods. Spotted by The Verge, you can now grab a fully themed Nintendo Switch skin or protective case for your Steam Deck.

The skin is a fairly complete new wrap for your Steam Deck. It colours the left and right portions of the controls to match the traditional Joy Con design while still working with the Steam Deck’s shapes. The back even has a very blurry logo that looks a lot like the Nintendo Switch on the back. 

It’s one of those things you look at and …

A million here, times a million there. Pretty soon you’re talking about big numbers. So Nvidia claims for its AI accelerating hardware in terms of the performance boost it has delivered over the last decade and will deliver again over the next 10 years.

The result, if Nvidia is correct, will be a new industry of AI factories across the world and gigantic breakthroughs in AI processing power. It also means, ostensibly, AI models one million times more powerful than existing examples, including ChatGPT, in AI processing terms at least.

In Nvidia’s earnings call yesterday, CEO Jensen Huang claimed that Nvidia’s GPUs had boosted AI processing performance by a factor of no less than one million in the last 10 years.

“Moore’s Law, in its best days, would have delivered 100x in a decade,” Huang explained. “By coming up with new processors, new systems, new interconnects, new frameworks and algorithms and working with data scientists, AI researchers on new models, acr…

Friends, the prophets spoke true. Mere hours after rumours began to spread that Rockstar was gearing up for an official Grand Theft Auto 6 announcement ahead of a proper trailer in December, Rockstar has gone and made an official GTA 6 announcement ahead of a proper trailer in December.

In a post on the Rockstar blog marking the studio’s 25th anniversary, company president Sam Houser announced that “in early December, we will release the first trailer for the next Grand Theft Auto,” before letting us know that the studio looks forward to “many more years of sharing these experiences with you.”

And, well, that’s it. No, really. The post announcing the reveal for perhaps one of the most massively hyped games of this decade and the previous one consisted of zero images and 142 words on a black background, almost 12 years to the day after the original 2011 announcement for GTA 5. It’s a level of cocky corporate nonchalance that Rockstar is very good at, even if the stylish m…

RuneScape has announced that it’s ditching its new battle pass system barely a month after it debuted, calling it “not reflective of a direction we’re taking RuneScape in” following widespread player uproar.

The battle pass—called a Hero Pass in RuneScape terminology—arrived on September 4, promising players a gamut of buffs, cosmetics, and special missions. It was immediately despised by the game’s wider community, so much so that RuneScape developer Jagex had to walk huge swathes of it back only four days after launch, announcing that it would patch out some of the system’s most loathed pay-to-win elements in advance of “a longer period of community consultation and re-development”.

That consultation took the form of a survey sent out to players, and the results are in: The Hero Pass isn’t long for this world. On October 6, two days before the survey was due to actually reach its conclusion, Jagex decided it had seen enough. “We will not be releasing anothe…

Sometimes, when I sit down to spend some time with a new game for a quick and simple ‘hey, this thing exists’ news story, I do so with the understanding that I’ll be playing a game—or a demo, as is the case here—and evaluating its strengths, its weaknesses, and its promises. Taking a critical and analytical eye, figuring out whether to recommend the thing I’m trying.

I have not been critical or analytical while trying out Athenian Rhapsody. Instead, I have taken a volume of mental damage that has left me certain I won’t be able to stand the full game—like how you might get motion sickness in VR. You, however, might have an utter blast.

Athenian Rhapsody’s Steam page advertises it as a “a souls-like platonic dating simulator with cooking-mama and WarioWare style battle mechanics”, though clarifies: “and by that I mean it’s a choose-your-own-adventure action RPG with the ability to trade ENTIRE PLAYTHROUGHS between friends!”

The way I would describe…

Battlefield: Bad Company 1 and 2 and Battlefield 1943 are going away forever: Electronic Arts has announced that their online services are being shut down in December, and as a result they will be removed from sale from all digital storefronts on April 28.

Those of you with good memories may recall way back about, oh, 42 minutes ago, when we reported that Mirror’s Edge was also being delisted. That, it turns out, was a mistake: Not ours, but EA’s. Mirror’s Edge, at least for now, is not being taken off sale.

All the games being delisted are elderly as these things go: Battlefield: Bad Company came out in 2008, Battlefield 1943 followed in 2009, and Bad Company 2 was released in 2010. But they were standout games in their day. Bad Company 2 was PC Gamer UK’s shooter of the year in 2010 (back in the days when the UK and US teams did things separately), and the Vietnam DLC was brilliant. (The original Bad Company and Battlefield 1943 were console exclusives.) 

Bu…

There have been a few small hints that people like poker roguelike Balatro. Our Balatro review score of 91, for instance, the 40,000 Steam reviews that average out to “Overwhelmingly Positive,” and the fact that I put 30 hours into it in a single week—and that was when I was playing the pre-launch demo, not even the full game.

Another tiny clue that Balatro is, y’know, pretty good surfaced this week: it’s now sold over 2 million copies on all platforms. That’s outstanding for a game that’s been for the most part the work of a single developer, LocalThunk. 

“I would never have thought that Balatro would be played by over 2 million people when I started working on it almost 3 years ago,” LocalThunk said in an email sent to PC Gamer. “I’m so grateful to all the players for giving it a chance and I’m excited to show everyone the next chapter for my game.”

Wait, there’s the next chapter? Yes, there is. LocalThunk is gonna put …

If you need help with your daily Wordle, I’ve got everything you need right here. Whether you’re after a tailor-made clue for the July 8 (749) game or today’s answer served up on a plate. Once you’ve won, why not spend some time reading our tips and guides too, so you can make the most of every guess.

Locking in a pair of greens usually feels good—except when they leave the board so wide open I know there’s no guarantee I’ll whittle today’s Wordle down to the answer in time. The good news is one of my guesses today ended up almost revealing the correct word, so in the end I only had to switch out a single letter to win. 

Today’s Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Saturday, July 8

Today’s answer is a physical response to a frightening situation, a sort of crouching or shrinking action where someone makes themselves small. You’ll need to find two vowels to win. 

ViewViewViewView

Is there a double letter in today’s Word…

Earlier this month, Polish game devs, including several from CD Projekt Red, formed the Polish Gamedev Workers Union (PGWU). This came in the wake of further layoffs at the company in July, to the tune of 9% of its workforce. At the time, CEO Adam Kiciński explained the move as something to help make the teams more “agile and effective”, but agile and effective doesn’t pay the rent.

“This event created a tremendous amount of stress and insecurity,” explains the union’s website, “affecting our mental health and leading to the creation of this union in response. Having a union means having more security, transparency, better protection, and a stronger voice in times of crisis.”

The devs at CD Projekt Red have shed more light on the situation during an interview with IGN, saying that the aftershocks of the game’s crunch culture problems—both with the Witcher 3 in 2017 and Cyberpunk 2077 in 2019—led to that unnerving climate.

Linguistic QA Assurance Co…

Fancied some hot neural-machine interfacing action but not totally sold on a chip buried in your head by Neuralink’s slightly (completely) terrifying robosurgeon and its nightmarish needle? Then good old Zuck’ and Meta have something for you.

It’s a wristband that tracks hand and finger movements by detecting the neural electrical signals passing through the nerves in your arm using an entirely non-invasive technique called electromyography. Sounds much more friendly? Yes. And yet no.

Meta showed off the device as an experimental prototype back in 2021. Now Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says the company is working on bringing it to market. “We’ve been working on this for a while, it’s not a one year project. But we’re quite a few years into it and we’re close to having something, to having a product in the next few years,” Zuckerberg revealed in an interview on the Morning Brew Daily (via UploadVR).

Now, if you’re thinking, so what, this is just a fancy way to move a mo…