As reported by The Verge, Xbox Chief Operating Officer Helen Chiang is leaving the company after three months in the role⁠—though Chiang had previously been a Microsoft employee for 21 years. Xbox had not previously operated with a COO in its hierarchy, and the role was created as part of CEO Asha Sharma's controversial brand "reset."Sharma announced the personnel change in an October 23 internal memo, and did not offer...

Cozy games on GoogleThe past five years of search demand on Google for cozy games, relaxing games, and casual games.Google TrendsInterestingly, the resurgence of "casual games" is even more pronounced at a worldwide view.Google TrendsFirst let's check back in on the same Google Search data I pulled in 2023 to compare how much we, the audience, are actually seeking cozy games. We're looking at the past five years or search...

Weird WeekendWeird Weekend is our regular Saturday column where we celebrate PC gaming oddities: peculiar games, strange bits of trivia, forgotten history. Pop back every weekend to find out what Jeremy, Josh and Rick have become obsessed with this time, whether it's the canon height of Thief's Garrett or that time someone in the Vatican pirated Football Manager.There's a recurring motif in Alan Wake which isn't played for laughs, yet...

Electronic Arts shuttered BioWare earlier this week, and that sucked. A concept trailer for the Mass Effect game the studio had in development subsequently leaked, and that made everyone feel even worse because—keeping in mind that it was an early-development concept piece—it looked really good.YouTuber Dantics has now revealed more about what BioWare was actually working on, which he claims to be aware of because he was part of the...

One of the big topics of conversation around Onimusha: Way of the Sword when it released last month—and even before that, when Capcom first put out a demo of the game—was whether it was too easy. Viral clips of early game enemies standing around doing nothing gave the impression of a woefully easy game for action fans coming from the likes of Sekiro, Nioh or Ninja Gaiden. Once I played...

Arkane Lyon may soon be facing closure, according to a new report by French site Le Monde, which says a deadline to find a buyer for the studio will land on November 13, at which point Microsoft could close the studio outright. Microsoft has since extended that deadline by a month, however, so it can continue to pursue alternative options.Arkane Lyon was caught up in this year's vortex of Xbox...

Excitement over the Total War: Shogun 2 remaster turned to a very different emotion when it launched and turned out to be quite bad—so bad that Sega pulled it from sale just a couple days later. Now, Roger Collum, vice president of Total War at developer Creative Assembly, has posted an update on the situation in the Total War subreddit (via RPS), saying that the studio, like the fans, are...

I have never really thought much about gemstones or minerals, which is weird considering one of my all-time favourite games is Minecraft, in which I spend a bulk of my time strip-mining. But Abyssal Lapidary has made me realise that there is so much more to the dirt than just coal. In the demo for Abyssal Lapidary I got to begin my stint as a lapidarist, someone who cuts, shapes,...

There's nothing I like more in a Fallout game then stumbling across some weird little settlement filled with oddball characters. So when I saw that this mod for Fallout 4 added a whole new town called Detour that's built on top of an overpass near Bedford Station, that was an instant download.Better yet, the mod features new quests and over a dozen new characters voiced by real people—no AI was...

If you care about retro PC gaming hardware, there's a good chance you've heard of the now-defunct 3dfx. And if you know 3dfx, there's an even better chance you've heard of the 3dfx Voodoo graphics card. Well, according to one of its founders, its success is owed at least in part to the legendary shooter Quake. Ross Smith recently spoke to our friends at Club386 in celebration of the first...