How a nephew’s CD burner inspired early Valve to embrace DRM

Back in 2004, the launch of Half-Life 2 would help launch Steam on the path to eventually becoming the de facto digital rights management (DRM) system for the vast majority of PC games. But years before that, with the 1998 launch of the original Half-Life, Valve cofounder and then-CMO Monica Harrington said she...

Continue Reading…

Why Anthropic’s Claude still hasn’t beaten Pokémon

In recent months, the AI industry's biggest boosters have started converging on a public expectation that we're on the verge of “artificial general intelligence” (AGI)—virtual agents that can match or surpass "human-level" understanding and performance on most cognitive tasks. OpenAI is quietly seeding expectations...

Continue Reading…

Hands-on with Frosthaven’s ambitious port from gigantic box to inviting PC game

Frosthaven, a board game that was somehow even bigger and more ambitious than its considerably weighty forebear Gloomhaven, asks a lot of its players. Each turn means picking two from maybe a dozen different...

Continue Reading…

Developer’s GDC billboard pokes at despised former Google Stadia exec

It's been nearly two years now since game industry veteran Phil Harrison left Google following the implosion of the company's Stadia cloud gaming service. But the passage of time hasn't stopped one company...

Continue Reading…

New Portal pinball table may be the closest we’re gonna get to Portal 3

Fans of Portal 2 have been waiting nearly 14 years now for another official entry in the beloved action-puzzle series. In the meantime, those fans have had to settle for DLC, fan mods, and odd, Aperture-Science-themed spinoffs that capture the look and feel of the Portal universe in a number of decidedly non-Portal...

Continue Reading…

Why SNES hardware is running faster than expected—and why it’s a problem

Ideally, you'd expect any Super NES console—if properly maintained—to operate identically to any other Super NES unit ever made. Given the same base ROM file and the same set of precisely timed inputs, all those consoles should hopefully give the same gameplay output across individual hardware and across time. The...

Continue Reading…

Microsoft’s new AI “Copilot for Gaming” struggles to justify its existence

Last year, Microsoft showed off a pair of concept videos highlighting how "real-time conversations with your AI companion copilot" might one day provide personalized guidance and companionship while playing a solo game of Minecraft. Now, Microsoft is announcing that it will roll out "Copilot for Gaming" as an...

Continue Reading…

Epic Games is addressing one of Windows-on-Arm’s last big app compatibility gaps

Using a Windows PC with an Arm-based Snapdragon processor in it feels a lot like using a regular-old Intel or AMD PC these days, thanks to the work developers have put in to get their apps running natively on Arm chips and the work Microsoft has done on Windows' Prism technology for translating x86 apps to run...

Continue Reading…

Civilization VII, one month later: The community and developers chime in

A month ago, Civilization VII launched to generally positive critical reviews, but user reviews on Steam and Metacritic weren’t nearly so positive, at least at first. Take a look at the Civilization subreddit, and you’ll see a general consensus: The bones of this game are great, and even most of the radical changes...

Continue Reading…

Leaked GeForce RTX 5060 and 5050 specs suggest Nvidia will keep playing it safe

Nvidia has launched all of the GeForce RTX 50-series GPUs that it announced at CES, at least technically—whether you're buying from Nvidia, AMD, or Intel, it's nearly impossible to find any of these new cards at their advertised prices right now. But hope springs eternal, and newly leaked specs for GeForce RTX...

Continue Reading…

Six ways Microsoft’s portable Xbox could be a Steam Deck killer

The long-running rumors and hints that Microsoft is planning to enter the portable gaming market accelerated forward this week. That's thanks to a Windows Central report that Microsoft is planning to...

Continue Reading…

Blood Typers is a terrifically tense, terror-filled typing tutor

When you think about it, the keyboard is the most complex video game controller in common use today, with over 100 distinct inputs arranged in a vast grid. Yet even the most complex keyboard-controlled...

Continue Reading…

AMD says top-tier Ryzen 9900X3D and 9950X3D CPUs arrive March 12 for $599 and $699

AMD's Ryzen 7 9800X3D is probably the best CPU you can buy if you're trying to put together a fast gaming PC, thanks to its eight Zen 5 CPU cores and extra helping of 3D V-Cache. You don't really need more CPU cores than this to play games, and most games benefit from the extra cache more than they do from a...

Continue Reading…

“Literally just a copy”—hit iOS game accused of unauthorized HTML5 code theft

Here at Ars, we've written frequently about the video game industry's ongoing problem with blatant game cloning, and the shifting legal and ethical landscape around the issue. But we've rarely seen a case of alleged game theft as blatant as the one surrounding recent iOS App Store hit My Baby or Not!, which appears...

Continue Reading…

AMD Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT review: RDNA 4 fixes a lot of AMD’s problems

AMD is a company that knows a thing or two about capitalizing on a competitor's weaknesses. The company got through its early-2010s nadir partially because its Ryzen CPUs struck just as Intel's current manufacturing woes began to set in, first with somewhat-worse CPUs that were great value for the money and...

Continue Reading…