Gaming

Although accessing the cooling fan requires quite a bit of disassembly and swapping out the battery involves a brief battle with glue, iFixit says Valve has applied the same “repair-friendly thinking” to the Steam Frame’s design as it did with the Steam Deck helping to potentially prolong the headset’s lifespan.

First announced last March with shipping in late June, the tiny Atom Plus is finally available from retailers like Amazon for $29.99. It’s slightly wider than the 8BitDo Micro but CRKD’s palmable gamepad adds a symmetrical pair of tunneling magnetoresistance (TMR) thumbsticks and two pairs of full-size shoulder buttons.

While Undead Labs is avoiding closing as Xbox’s assortment of developers continues to shrink, the studio announced on LinkedIn that “Unfortunately, today we are also saying goodbye to a significant number of our colleagues. It’s difficult to reach this moment knowing that not everyone who helped get us here gets to make the rest of the journey with us.”

It may not benefit every setup, the company warns, but Pyrowave is a new Steam Remote Play high bandwidth, low latency video codec now available in Steam beta on macOS, Windows, and Linux. It uses “5-10 times the amount of bandwidth of other streaming codecs,” but leverages your PC’s GPU to “encode and decode frames to achieve extremely low end to end latency with a good network.”

After first teasing their designs last November, the $99.99 E Ink and $89.99 Pixel Matrix magnetic faceplates are now available for preorder from Jsaux’s online store. The Verge’s Sean Hollister got some hands-on time with both displays and while the colorful pixelated faceplate needs a constant USB-C connection to the console, the E Ink is wireless with Bluetooth and a battery.

State of Decay 3 developer Undead Labs is now an independent employee-owned studio. It’s the third studio to successfully separate from Xbox, after Double Fine and Compulsion Games did the same recently. “Development of State of Decay 3 remains actively underway at Undead Labs,” says the team. The game is still planned to release in 2027 on Xbox (and Game Pass), PC, and PlayStation.

Nvidia is releasing a new Game Ready driver today, in preparation for the release of AION 2, Control Resonant, Gears of War: E-Day, and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Remastered. The driver includes optimizations for all four games, as well as enabling DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction in Control Resonant.

Microsoft is due to announce another round of Xbox layoffs today, according to sources familiar with the company’s plans. The cuts will reportedly be part of a larger restructuring, with The Information reporting that Microsoft plans to “consolidate several of its game studios.” Today’s layoffs will reportedly affect hundreds of employees, and are part of the 3,200 Xbox layoffs that Microsoft is planning by the end of June 2027.

A system for “contextually aware” ads described in the patent application could pause gameplay “at the operating system level” to show an ad when certain in-game events or triggers happen. For instance, players might get an ad break after a boss fight or when their avatar “is determined to be in a safe location, such as the user’s team base.”

I didn’t just review Valve’s Steam Frame last week — I spent a whole lot of time talking about the headset with fellow reviewers. I interviewed CNET’s Scott Stein about his review on The Vergecast, then Aftermath’s Chris Person turned the tables on me for Aftermath Hours, too!

Microsoft’s DLSS competitor isn’t just for Qualcomm laptops and Xbox Ally X anymore — the MSI Claw EX handheld and anything else Intel Core Ultra Series 3 should now qualify. Microsoft claims it’s enough to play at ultra instead of high, among other examples, and I see the hard-to-find Claw EX is now back in stock at B&H, MSI, and ExcaliberPC.

It says mods aren’t allowed to “expand or modify” official storylines, plots, missions, or characters. The updated policy also bans crossover mods that combine content from one Rockstar game into another, like maps or characters from previous GTA games, and limits multiplayer mods to Rockstar’s official Creator Platform.

Valve’s 0.3.0 update for Steam Frame claims “Substantially faster charging while unit is off / sleeping.” It’s true. I used to see 8-watt charging when plugging in a dead unit, and 27-watt charging at peak. Now I’m getting 19-21W charging right away and up to 42W in game.

The Steam Frame and Meta Quest headsets can natively beam your Windows monitors into a headset — but some still prefer Virtual Desktop, the app that pioneered the idea in 2016 before getting “sherlocked” by Meta. Developer Guy Godin says Valve didn’t send him a Frame, but he’ll try to port it anyhow.

“Lepton is intended to help game developers bring their VR Android games to the Steam Frame,” Valve writes. “Lepton is not designed for general Android use, instead opting to keep the bare minimum functionality required to launch into games.”

If you’re looking for a GPU upgrade, but don’t want to shell out $800 or more for an RTX 5070, Newegg has the Gigabyte RX 9070 GRE, a capable card for 1440p gaming, discounted to $500 when you click “Extra discount available. Unlock it here” on the product page and then enter your email. The deal also includes Onimusha: Way of the Sword, although you’ll have to redeem the code by October 24th, 2026.

Bloomberg interviewed Twitch CEO Dan Clancy:

Sure, the Xbox One’s disc strategy blew up in the company’s face, giving Sony the perfect ammo. But as Tom reveals, Microsoft decided to secretly start printing unique serial numbers on its discs way back then — a decision that’s paying off now!

Physint just switched publishers from PlayStation to Xbox, and Hideo Kojima appeared at Xbox’s Tokyo game show stream today to reveal the lead role for the game. Swedish actor and producer Bill Skarsgård, best known for playing Pennywise the Clown in the It horror films, will portray the lead role alongside Charlee Fraser in Kojima’s upcoming action-espionage game. Kojima says Physint “continues to make steady progress,” months after Sony gave the studio an unexpected cancellation notice in June.

The new guides cover everything from replacing the motherboard to cleaning the heatsink, and offer a neat look at the Steam Machine’s internals.

Capcom’s getting rid of its character edit vouchers with the upcoming Ascendance expansion, so you can change your character’s appearance for free without needing workarounds. Capcom is giving players 10 free character and Palico edit vouchers to tide them over in the meantime.

That’s according to Gal Silver, a technician at GameTraderZero who’s modded and repaired more than 1,000 Switch 2 Joy-Cons over the past year. You can read their findings on NintendoLife but despite using older thumbstick tech, the new Joy-Cons have much improved durability with fewer issues and no instances of “drift issue straight out of the box.”

The EU Kids Act will be formally unveiled tomorrow where it will eventually be put to a vote by the 27-nation bloc. Parent-chaperoned “mini accounts” are proposed for children 13 to 15.

Sony has two new wireless headsets for PS5 players: the PlayStation Pulse and Pulse Edge. Visually it’s hard to tell the difference between these headsets, apart from the fact the Pulse Edge has a hidden and detachable boom mic (instead of integrated on the Pulse). The Pulse Edge also has eight magnets per planar driver instead of six on the Pulse, active noise cancellation, a carry case, and built-in audio controls on a PS5. They’re both designed to compliment the existing Pulse Elite, and the Pulse will arrive this holiday, followed by the Pulse Edge in early 2027. No exact release dates or pricing yet.