EA just announced FC 27, the latest release of its soccer franchise that it releases annually, and many players were shocked to learn that it came with a $149.99 Ultimate Plus Edition. This led to many complaints, with some comparing it to GTA VI Ultimate, which comes with extra side missions, activities, vehicles, guns, outfits, and other cosmetics, for just $99.99. However, it should be noted that FC 27 is available in three tiers — the Standard Edition for just $69.99, the Ultimate Edition, which costs $99.99, and the Ultimate Plus Edition, with its shocking $149.99 price tag.

Despite the availability of the base game at its usual price, the cost of the top-tier edition has caught the ire of many gamers. One user commented on X that they’re willing to “pay $200 for a game that’ll last 15-20 years,” while another said that EA wants “€150 for a roster update and some blue points you’ll spend on a player you’ll never use.” However, others pointed out that the $150 version is “for people who not only play it but spend money on it; 10,000 FC points is about £70/€82/$93.”

The FC franchise (previously known as FIFA) has been around for over 30 years now, with EA releasing a new title annually since 1994. That means fans have to pay at least $70 every year if they want to stay updated with the latest team rosters. This might be too much for some people, but hardcore fans seem not to mind spending that amount just to be able to have their favorite players on their team. In fact, they might even consider the $149.99 Ultimate Plus Edition good value as the $80 premium comes with 10,000 FC Points spread out over five months, five seasons of Premium Pass, and several other goodies. By comparison, FC 26 lists 12,000 FC Points for $99.99.

Even though gamers get additional value from the most expensive edition of FC 27, it still did not sit well with some people. Aside from that, they’re comparing it to the GTA franchise, with Rockstar continuously dropping updates to GTA Online for more than a decade, even for those who only purchased the game once. But even though EA did not change the price of the base game (and even the mid-tier Ultimate Edition), the fact that they’re asking more than double the price of the cheapest option is what caught the ire of the public, especially as the current FC 26 has mixed reviews on Steam.

The Grand Theft Auto franchise has a rich history when it comes to modding and tinkering, but we're pretty confident the community has never seen anything like this. Created by Dryxio, this new mod combines GTA Vice City, GTA San Andreas, and GTA III into one multiversal entity interconnected through real-time, fully functional portals that let you travel between the three different games as if it were just a regular window.

The video above showcases just how insane this mod really is. It starts with CJ on Grove Street in San Andreas shooting at NPCs in different parts of the game (The Strip). Then, he moves toward the pink portal, shoots at NPCs once again, and just casually goes through it to end up in GTA Vice City as Tommy Vercetti. He wreaks havoc, walks back to the portal, and crosses through to Vice City as CJ, only to go to GTA III and repeat the same thing there.

The craziest part is how these portals genuinely act as windows to another world where you can stand in one game and shoot inside the other one. It's unclear whether there's a limit to the level of interaction, like if you can't drive cars through them, but it's impressive, nonetheless. The video also shows how you can place these portals anywhere in the world in any of the three games yourself.

All of this begs the question: how? The modder explains that all three games are running simultaneously inside one process, sharing one Direct3D device. Each portal is a live GPU texture; there's no video capture to fake the realism, and the transition to each game happens in real-time via an engine swap. When you walk through a portal, it simply switches to that game's engine while the others keep running in the background.

Each game and its world retain full native functionality such as its own AI, traffic, physics, saves, missions, and even settings. There's no loading screen when you use the portals either; you enter the world on the other side instantly, just the way you saw it before going through. This is largely possible because the source code of each game has been reverse-engineered and recompiled using an open-source engine.

Dryxio modified re3 and reVC — community projects that decompile the original source code of GTA III and Vice City into clean, readable C++ code — and used plugin-sdk to interface with San Andreas. Since these games used the proprietary RenderWare engine that can't render multiple spatial scenes together, an open-source reimplementation of it called librw was used to compile all three games into a single unified process.

The mod isn't publicly available at the moment, but you can bet everyone in the community now has their eyes on it. It's by far the most technically complex GTA mod ever, one that doesn't even require any understanding of software to grasp its ambition. There's also the elephant in the room known as Rockstar Games that could see this as copyright infringement and order it to be taken down, but for now, it lives as proof of human ingenuity (and vibe-coding).

Xbox has announced a new Xbox Backward Compatibility for PC program, which will let gamers play a selection of classic Xbox titles on PCs and handhelds, a move the company says marks the beginning of a bigger push into Xbox game preservation. The announcement begins with four titles that can now be played on PCs and handhelds, including the ROG Xbox Ally and Ally X.

"This marks the beginning of a broader effort to preserve XBOX games from the past and bring them to PC over time," the company said in a blog post authored by Xbox "VP next generation" Jason Ronald. Alongside backward compatibility, the company says games will also include new features. The four titles in the announcement are:

• BLiNX: The Time Sweeper 
• Conker: Live and Reloaded 
• Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge 
• Fuzion Frenzy

You can now buy all of these games on PC, and they're also included in all Xbox Game Pass plans. Anyone who already owns these titles digitally on console can also now play them on PC or handheld, with support for Xbox Play Anywhere and Xbox Cloud Gaming. Crucially, this appears to be a digital-only preservation effort, so it won't help anyone who only owns physical copies of these games. Xbox has reportedly been testing a way to digitize physical games as far back as Xbox One, but that hasn't yet materialized yet.

Alongside the preserved original gameplay, Xbox claims these games will let users customize graphics settings, with up to 4x resolution scaling, VSync support, Fullscreen and Windowed modes, anisotropic filtering, and enhanced anti-aliasing, with more features to come in the future. Notably, Xbox will add achievements to select original Xbox games on console and PC.

Users who want to play these titles will need to meet the following system requirements:

Microsoft's emphasis on preserving older games is particularly noteworthy given recent backlash against Sony over its decision to end physical games with its next console generation, and the shuttering of some of its online stores. While Xbox's digital emphasis on game preservation still can't match the solidarity of physical media preservation, the timing of this announcement seems like more than just a coincidence.

The developers of RPCS3 have announced that their PlayStation 3 emulator’s minimum system requirements have been adjusted to include a crop of even older Radeon graphics cards. This well-regarded application already supported ATI Terascale 2 GPUs from the Radeon HD 5000 and 6000 series, but now gamers still cradling Radeon HD 2000, 3000, and 4000 series can join in the fun. Some of these GPUs date back nearly 20 years. Please note that while RPCS3 is available for a range of platforms, this extended ATI architecture support is only for Linux users.

Fine wine on Terascale 2

Back in 2021, the RPCS3 devs lowered the emulator’s system requirements to embrace Radeon HD 5000 and HD 6000 (Terascale 2) series graphics cards. In the subsequent five years, the emulator has been tuned to improve performance on hardware from these generations. An example provided asserts that when using Persona 5 as a benchmark, performance in Kamoshida’s Castle went from 35 to 49 FPS between 2021 and today (on a PC system with an ATI Radeon HD 5850, AMD FX-8350 CPU, and 8GB of RAM).

Inspired Terascale 1 experiments

Success spurred the devs to investigate TeraScale 1 performance and compatibility. Some OpenGL wrangling ensued due to TeraScale 1 GPUs only reporting OpenGL 3.3 and GLSL 3.30 support, but getting these old and unloved ATI cards to work with the RPCS3 OpenGL renderer was surprisingly simple. It was done by overriding the reported OpenGL levels to 4.3 and 4.40.

Initial tests made use of a system packing an ATI Radeon HD 4890 with 1GB of VRAM – the most powerful Terascale 1 GPU ever sold. According to the RPCS3 blog, this card has a more powerful GPU than the PS3, but the emulator’s complex shader code is not optimal for older architectures like this. Nevertheless, “Simpler games work perfectly fine, with playable performance,” notes the blog, “while games that have more complex graphics are GPU bottlenecked with subpar performance.” Screenshots show Metal Gear Solid HD Collection and Outrun Online Arcade with frame rates close to 60 FPS.

Moving down the stack and further back in time, GPUs like the ATI Radeon HD 3870 are “still able to render very simple games with playable performance in RPCS,” assert the devs. To achieve playability, you will want to dial in PSP-like resolutions, though. Specifically, 273p was mentioned.

What about the weakest TeraScale 1 GPUs? The ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT with a measly 256MB of VRAM even performs poorly at 273p. Screenshots from RPCS3 tests show it only managing 8 FPS in Outrun Online Arcade and 13 FPS in Portal.

With RPCS3’s progress over the last half decade, these performance numbers could also improve. In fact, the blog states that “future optimization should improve performance by quite a bit on these old GPUs.”

It looks like a good time to dust off your retro PC and try a few old PS3 classics on your ATI TeraScale 1 GPU-accelerated rig. Remember this extended graphics card support requires a Linux distro with the Mesa driver r600. Then you need to launch RCPS3 with the following environment variables: MESA_GL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=4.3 MESA_GLSL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=440 ./rpcs3.AppImage

Developer PaisleyBoxers has released Backrooms 32X, with the strap line “welcome to the cutting edge of 1994.” Yes, this is a Sega 32X game set in the Backrooms, the dingy, yellowing internet phenomenon given a huge boost with the release of the psychological horror indie film earlier this year. Despite the ancient and relatively resource–starved console platform, the devs appear to have captured the Backrooms' essence of “buzzing fluorescents, damp carpet, walls that go on too long” with a raycasting engine written from scratch in C and SH-2 assembly (with some Claude AI assistance).

Above: a slightly earlier Backrooms 32X release running on real Sega 32X hardware. Since this release, some objects can now be pushed over, and there can be chairs in the rooms.

In keeping with the Backrooms theme, this is a claustrophobic adventure game in the signature endless yellowed beige rooms setting, where you seek the exits, then another exit, and another. The game packs in procedurally generated levels, providing endless ‘fun.’ However, there are also community maps built by your fellow players. As a bonus, there’s a browser-based level editor so you can contribute to map designs, too.

When playing the game, your first-person character can crawl and crouch, squeezing through crawlspaces, maintaining Backrooms aesthetics and mechanics. A six-button (rather than a 3-button) Sega control pad is recommended if you are using original 32X hardware to enjoy full control.

Technical achievements

Probably the most noteworthy element of Backrooms 32X, though, is the technical achievement. Highlights include:

• the endless liminal space with procedurally generated levels,
• dual-CPU rendering utilizing both 32X SH-2s,
• a real raycaster rendering textured DDA walls, dynamic ceiling lighting, distance fog, thin partition walls, and half-height cubicle dividers you can see over,
• crawl and crouch — full eye-height perspective,
• and a live, not pre-rendered,  3D intro to the game.

If you are interested in Backrooms 32X, or even in playing any of the new wave of Backrooms gaming content, feel free to give this a spin. Literally free, as it is open source, available on GitHub, and a trivial 1.5MB ROM-ready download via the itch.io link we shared in the intro (version 164, released a couple of hours ago).

You don’t need an actual Sega 32X and flashcart hardware to play. PaisleyBoxers assures that Backrooms 32X also works on MiSTer FPGA, as well as 32X-capable emulators such as RetroArch, BlastEm, Ares, or Kega Fusion.

The extremely popular Woot deal that scored new customers a Nintendo Switch 2 for just $399 has returned. Right now you can grab a brand new console for just $399 thanks to an extra $50 discount at checkout. If you've used Woot before, the same code (GIFT26) will get you an extra $22 off instead, making this the cheapest Switch 2 on the market right now.

• Check out this deal at Woot

Woot is Amazon's outlet website, so you'll often see refurbished or reconditioned items for sale. However, this is a deal on a brand-new console, making it an extra special (and rare) treat.

The Nintendo Switch 2 needs no introduction. First unveiled on June 5, 2025, the ultra-popular handheld features a 7.9-inch 1080p screen, also supporting gameplay at 4K up to 120 fps when docked with a TV. You also get Joy-Con 2 controllers, which can be used in a variety of modes.

Naturally, the big allure of the Switch 2 is access to Nintendo's delightful world of IP and first-party titles, including games like Mario Kart World, Donkey Kong Bananza, and, of course, games like Legend of Zelda.

More noteworthy than the Nintendo Switch 2's specs or games, however, is the price. Owing to the global AI pricing crunch that is driving up the cost of flash memory, Nintendo recently announced price hikes, bringing the MSRP of the console to $499, a $50 increase. Today's deal means you're not only avoiding that recent hike, but you're actually saving on the original $449 MSRP too. A $399 Nintendo Switch 2 will sell out fast, so don't hang around if you're interested. Even the $427 deal is the best Switch 2 for returning customers

If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, Gaming Chair, Best Wi-Fi Routers, Best Motherboard, or CPU Deals pages.

You can also join the Tom's Hardware deals Discord for up-to-the-minute hardware deals.

A Grand Theft Auto (GTA) modder has developed a mod that lets you run Grand Theft Auto III (GTA 3) and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (GTA VC) as mini games right inside Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (GTA SA). The modder, DryxioGTA, demonstrated the feat in a video posted on YouTube on Thursday, running the game on a Windows virtual machine on macOS.

In the video, GTA SA’s main character, CJ, can be seen stepping up to a TV, apparently inserted into the game by the mod. Once in front of the TV, the option to start either GTA VC or GTA 3 appears. The selected mini-game immediately starts running on the TV.

Gamers can switch between controlling the main GTA SA game or the mini game, using the F10 key. When controlling the mini-game — say, GTA 3, as in the video — players can play it as normal while the rest of the outer SA game continues to run, with characters roaming about. Similarly, switching control back to the outer SA game leaves the mini-game running on the TV.

Just a few hours after uploading a brief gameplay video, the modder released another video demonstrating an even more mind-blowing mod, this time running GTA Vice City inside GTA 3, inside GTA San Andreas!

As shown in the clip, the game starts with GTA SA, where players can walk up to a large screen to activate and start running GTA 3. Within GTA 3 — now running on the large screen inside San Andreas — gamers can drive to another specific screen and launch GTA VC. So you can be playing GTA SA, switch to a fully functional GTA 3 within SA, and then switch again to play Vice City right inside the GTA 3 sandbox, all while the other games are simultaneously running.

The remarkable mods are just one of thousands that developers have created since the game was first released on PC over 20 years ago in 2005. There are also several Mods for other GTA titles. Older GTA games have seen renewed interest as anticipation builds for GTA 6, which is scheduled to be released on consoles on November 19 after several postponements.

In the modern age, password cracking is an activity that generally begets quite powerful hardware, usually high-powered GPUs. Hashing algorithms have gotten trickier, and brute-forcing them has become computationally expensive. It's only natural, then, that a new software project has come up to port the common hashcat cracking utility to the mighty... Gameboy Advance (GBA).

The gba-hashcat software is the brainchild of security engineer solstICE (Ice), to whom the question of "why" is seemingly answered with "why not." Running on an original GBA, the app can power through SHA256 hashes at 727 h/s. At that rate, the author estimates that one year's worth of gba-hashcat would be equivalent to one second of a modern GPU-accelerated rig.

The GBA's main processor is an ARM7TDMI chip, a 32-bit RISC affair clocked at all of 16.8 MHz. It connected to most of its data buses and memory on a 16-bit bus, though, and the machine only carried 288 KB of RAM, plus 98 KB of VRAM. Most password-cracking software makes use of precomputed tables to help speed the repeated attempts along, but given that standard GBA cartridges are limited to 32 MB in size, all that Ice could include was the ignis-1M (one million) word list that rings in at 8 MB.

The software itself is quite small, given that Ice made good use of the Butano engine, a library that allows developers to easily write GBA games using plain C++ code. The gba-hashcat user interface is quite sparse, showing only an intro screen, progress statistics, and the current password attempt. It's not like you need much more for this application, save perhaps for a "please be patient" message.

In the GitHub commit, Ice calls gba-hashcat "[their] dumbest app of all time." That's quite the statement, but X commenters were quick to request networking support so they could make a cluster of password-cracking Gameboys, an idea that may have merit considering the price of graphics cards these days. At any rate, joke all you want, but for the one really important password retrieval I was once tasked with — recovering access to an Excel payroll sheet — even the original Gameboy would have sufficed. The password was "123".

The CEO of GameStop — one of the world's largest video game retailers — has said that Sony’s decision to halt the production of physical game discs in 2028 is “totally irrelevant” to the company's business. Speaking to BloombergTech in an interview on Thursday, July 16, Ryan Cohen made the comments while responding to questions on how console makers’ going disc-less might affect GameStop amid the company's controversial bid to buy eBay.

When asked, “If the hardware makers are reportedly moving to disc-less on the console side, future game launches are digital only, where does that fit in for the business plan?” Cohen responded, “It doesn’t matter at all. Software, it mattered in the past. Software today makes up less than 12% of the business, and collectables makes up over half the business. So, it’s totally, totally irrelevant.”

Cohen's characterization doesn't exactly match GameStop's own filings, but the underlying trend does. In fiscal year 2025, the company reported total net sales of $3.63 billion. At $729.3 million, Software — which includes physical game discs, game cartridges, and digital download codes by GameStop’s classification — accounted for 20.1% of the total, the lowest among the company's product categories. Collectibles brought in $1.06 billion at 29.2 percent, while hardware and accessories — including new and pre-owned hardware, accessories, hardware bundles, interactive figures, strategy guides, and mobile/consumer electronics — remained the largest single line at $1.84 billion, or 50.7 percent.

The year-on-year growth figures also appear to support Cohen's stance, with software revenue dropping 27% in FY24 and hardware revenue dropping 12%. Meanwhile, revenue from collectibles — covering apparel, toys, trading cards, gadgets, other pop-culture products, and submission services for authentication and grading of trading cards — grew by 47%.

Much of the Bloomberg interview was focused on Cohen's somewhat controversial bid for eBay. GameStop began accumulating eBay stock on February 4 and delivered an unsolicited, non-binding proposal on May 3 to acquire all outstanding shares at $125 apiece, split evenly between cash and GameStop stock — an offer valuing eBay at roughly $56 billion, against GameStop's own market capitalization of around $10 billion. eBay's board rejected it on May 12, with chairman Paul Pressler writing that the board had determined the proposal was "neither credible nor attractive." Cohen has said he intends to take the offer directly to eBay shareholders.

The static recompilation craze has just hit a milestone with developer @patchzyy sharing a slick and smooth-looking version of “Mario Kart Wii, rebuilt for PC.” Mario Kart Wiicompiled, created using the help of AI coding, is being teased now, with a video embedded below, but isn’t expected to become available as a beta until next month. That is, if it doesn’t get whack-a-moled somehow by the notoriously litigious Nintendo.

For context, several developers have been busy with static recompilation projects over recent years. Successes in recompiling games from platforms like the Nintendo N64 (and Xbox 360) have clearly inspired a generational jump, with patchzyy’s claimed “first static recompilation of a Wii game.” From the brief video, it looks pretty good.

Static recompilation transforms the binary machine code into equivalent native code for the target platform, like PC. Digital archivists and retrogaming fans like static recompilation as it can offer higher performance and stability, removing emulation quirks and overheads. It can also make use of the best features of the modern platform, so Mario Kart Wiicompiled is going to run at up to 4K, with an unlocked frame rate. Moreover, in this case, Retro Rewind community mod compatibility is confirmed, which means that recompiled players will be able to access 200+ race tracks.

At this time, the static recompilation doesn’t use 4K or HD textures or character models. However, these are options open to the community/modders, going forward, just like we see with N64 and other console recompilations.

It will be interesting to see if the Wii’s big gimmick of motion controls, which could be used for Kart steering, will work on Mario Kart Wiicompiled. Perhaps it could even work with original Wii Remotes you might have lying around.

So, are Wii static recompilation title floodgates about to open? There is certainly a nice selection of games folks with Wii disk collections might enjoy playing on their modern PCs connected to their 4K TVs. So, Nintendo might not like seeing this kind of project getting popular, but the devs studiously separate the static recompilation code from the game ‘ROM’ files, which retro gamers may or may not actually own.

Many social media commenters point out that AI was used in the development of Mario Kart Wiicompiled, but that was already made clear in the project FAQ. That document clearly states that AI was used to assist with code only, not for the generation of art or other assets.

An ex-Sega engineer has created a CRT emulator for macOS so realistic that it even supports screen tapping to fix the notoriously sketchy performance of the technology. On Tuesday, a developer showcased a CRT emulation project which some commenters complained was more like a CRT damage simulator. In other words, the CRT effects like flickering, noise, and aberrations were judged by the masses to be somewhat overdone. Today, @GOROman has followed up by demonstrating that the famicom-rf-hackrf-decoder software’s CRT rendering can be improved via an old-school whack to the top of the monitor. See it with your own eyes, in the video embedded below.

The developer of this CRT emulator, GOROman, is an ex-Sega and ex-Facebook software engineer. They explain that the famicom-rf-hackrf-decoder software receives VHF RF output (NTSC-J) from their Famicom (Nintendo NES) via an open-source SDR (software-defined radio) solution dubbed the HackRF One.

With the software running and the NES plugged into the HackRF One, the console’s RF-modulated video can be displayed on VHF channel 1 or 2. However, here you can see it on a modern LCD, in a window on the desktop. Thus the GOROman project is performing a full NTSC-J color decode in software and displaying the result on the desktop in real time via SDL2.

It is further explained that the Famicom “is not broadcast-compliant (non-interlaced 240p, chroma phase advancing 120° per line, one short line per frame).” Therefore, the decoder has to run several processes in the background to avoid quirks like drifts, wobbles, and color burst instability.

In summary, the Famicom’s RF output isn’t ideal for piping into modern monitors, so the decoder has to effectively simulate an analog TV’s brain, locking in the image stability and color. The initial demo shared by GOROman looked so much like a ‘damaged TV’ because the dev wanted to play around "by shifting the VHF frequency (exaggeratedly)." [machine translation] It was an eye-catching, humorous demo.

So, what’s happening with the new video and demo of percussive maintenance support? On social media, some have guessed that the fun picture stability-fixing mechanic could be using feedback from the Apple MacBook’s lid angle sensor. However, I looked at the GitHub page for GOROman’s famicom-rf-hackrf-decoder software, released under the MIT open-source license, and there appears to be an input variable for "audio tap," so the effect may be based on mic audio input.

Someone in the comments has requested a magnet mode to play with the ‘CRT,’ so guess what might happen tomorrow.

RPCS3, a multi-platform open-source PlayStation 3 emulator and debugger, has revealed that 2,681 of the total 3,559 PS3 titles are now compatible with its software, meaning a huge majority of games can now be played on Windows, Linux, macOS, and FreeBSD. The developers of the app said on X that RPCS3 is continually being worked on and that they’re targeting full preservation of the entire PS3 library. This is an important development for PlayStation 3 owners and enthusiasts, especially as Sony said that it will stop making physical game discs by 2028 and shut down the PlayStation Store for PS3 and PS Vita a year before that.

Ensuring that over 2,600 games are compatible with your emulation is no mean feat, especially for a project that’s mostly supported by Patreon and volunteers. The team has already achieved more than 75% compatibility with the entire PS3 library, with less than a thousand titles needing to be worked on. Of this, 816 are now playable but encounter serious glitches or performance problems, 60 reach the game’s main menu but fail to load past that, while only two titles initialize but are stuck on a black screen. If you want to check if you can now play your favorite PS3 title on your PC, you can go to the RPCS3 compatibility page and type in the name of the game.

This is a huge win for the game preservation community, as this would ensure that you can continue playing your PS3 game library even if your console no longer works. The beautiful thing about RPCS3 is that it works with a lot of different hardware — aside from support for Windows, Linux, macOS, and FreeBSD, it’s also compatible with both x86 and arm64, so you can install it on some of the best handheld gaming PCs to play your PS3 games on the go.

Emulation is quite controversial among game publishers and developers, and many companies have historically taken steps against those who make these apps. However, the courts have said that emulation isn’t necessarily illegal, as long as the people who use them only play games that they’ve already paid for. In fact, the Patreon page of RPCS3 was once hit by a DMCA takedown request from Atlus, the maker of Persona 5, arguing that “no version of the P5 game should be playable on this platform; and [the RPCS3] developers are infringing on our IP by making such games playable.”

While it ultimately failed in its request, it showed how some companies think that their games should only be played on the platform that they designed it for. They argue that emulators might introduce performance issues, meaning players will not get the optimal experience when playing their games. However, RPCS3 has proven that emulators could deliver a similar (or even better) performance than the PS3, with newer versions getting a 5% to 7% boost in FPS numbers compared to previous builds and even hitting more than 1500 FPS on the Minecraft title screen.

A PC gamer has created and demonstrated a handy Steam Game Cartridge system. Over on PCMR, Jibril-sama introduced the system, which blends the old-school console convenience of cartridges with Steam’s awesome and agreeably flexible games library. Ingeniously, it upcycles a bundle of old SATA SSDs into Steam-ready game cartridges using a disk mount detect and execute script on the software side and a SATA dock on the hardware side. Icing on this already tasty cake is provided by Jibril-sama’s colorfully encased and custom-labeled Steam Game Cartridges. Nice.

Steam Game Cartridges from r/pcmasterrace

“Got a couple of used 2.5" SSDs for cheap so I decided to make a Game Cartridge system,” the Redditor casually informs the PCMR masses in the post embedded above. “Games are actually on those SSDs with a script to auto-navigate Steam to the game's page. Auto-starting the game right away is also possible.”

Further comments by the OP explain that all the drives bought for this project were 128GB in capacity, and €7 a piece ($8). That’s not bad in the current RAM and NAND crunch, and keeps these files off your built-in primary storage. As many readers will know, PC game libraries can easily grow to hog a lot of storage.

We reached out to Jibril-sama for some more background info about how the Steam Game Cartridge system is designed to work with as little user friction as possible. They informed us that the system in the video runs Linux and Valve’s Steam URL Protocol is leveraged to navigate to the game's page or launch the game.

“All it needs is a systemd template to check for a script on the SSD and launch it. And a udev rule to trigger the system,” Jibril-sama told Tom’s Hardware. “So basically: Plug in SSD -> udev rule sees the event -> triggers the systemd daemon -> systemd daemon looks into the SSD and finds the script -> execute the script.”

Commenters on PCMR have overwhelmingly welcomed the Steam Game Cartridge future teased by this system. Some want to see the system extended to include GOG game libraries. Others query how the system handles the inevitable hefty multi-gigabyte updates that are pushed (even to older games) from time to time. Jibril-sama told Tom’s Hardware that they didn’t plan to deal with updates often, as they didn’t use cartridges for ‘live service’ titles, and they are mostly used for the “games that I want to replay once in a while.” If and when updates have been flagged, “I just let Steam handle the updates and wait a bit before I can play,” they added.

I’ve had repeated firsthand experience with Steam Games libraries being fussy when moving across different PCs, so stretching the library system this way could reveal cracks and wrinkles as more games are tested. We shall see.

Hopefully, fuller implementation guides, scripts, and resources to help others purchase or 3D print their own Steam Game Cartridge shells will be shared in due course.

Nvidia's RTX Spark platform arrives later this year, and the company is hard at work building the partner ecosystem around the GB10 Superchip to ensure that Windows and applications are ready for its agentic AI PC vision. As part of that groundwork, the two companies announced today that Sega will support the RTX Spark platform with its upcoming Virtua Fighter Crossroads, coming in 2027.

The two companies also committed to RTX Spark support for "future Sega titles,” meaning that we might see official support for other evergreen franchises like the Yakuza series, the Persona games, and the upcoming Alien: Isolation 2 and Total War: Warhammer.

Although the companies didn’t go into detail about exactly what full support for the RTX Spark means for Sega games, one would expect that the developer’s titles will be natively compiled for Windows on Arm instead of relying on the Prism x86 emulator for compatibility.

It also seems safe to expect that future Sega titles will incorporate DLSS technologies like upscaling and Multi Frame Generation in order to deliver the best possible experience on RTX Spark systems. Despite having GPU compute capabilities similar to those of a desktop RTX 5070 on paper, the unified memory architecture and relatively limited memory bandwidth of the GB10 Superchip behind the RTX Spark platform present challenges for gaming performance that are likely to make the incorporation of DLSS tech important for the best experience.

The relationship between Nvidia and Sega spans over 30 years, tracing its roots to the ultimately abandoned development of the GPU for the Dreamcast console. Despite its eventual decision to use an NEC-produced PowerVR GPU for that system, Sega offered Nvidia a $5 million lifeline that gave the company the runway that it needed to develop and deliver the Riva 128, its first DirectX-compatible GPU.

That investment proved to be historic, as Nvidia now has a market cap of over $5 trillion and is in the process of shifting the very foundations of computing through its Grace Blackwell and upcoming Vera Rubin AI platforms for the data center.

Whether the RTX Spark platform reshapes the PC when it arrives in the fall of this year remains to be seen. But if you’re a fan of Sega’s IP, this partnership means that you can at least look forward to a first-class experience with its games on RTX Spark systems.

For years, the PS5 emulation scene has remained dormant, with updates few and far between as most projects become abandonware. However, Sony's recent decision to stop physical disc production and the impending release of GTA VI later this year have created an unprecedented demand in the market. All of a sudden, an influx of PS5 emulators has popped up online, and they're swiftly hitting development milestones, including actually being able to boot recent PS5 titles.

The most prominent name in the news cycle is SharpEmu, which serves as a PS5 emulator for Windows. It's written entirely in C# and works more like a translation layer since modern consoles and PC share the same x86 underlying architecture. SharpEmu allows the PC to execute CPU instructions natively while translating OS-specific API calls and graphics.

Since it's aiming for accuracy, only some 2D titles such as Dreaming Sarah are running on SharpEmu with solid performance and no hiccups. As far as 3D titles go, that's a different story since it's significantly harder to emulate those. At first, the PS5 remake of Demon's Souls successfully booted, but it didn't go past the startup screen. Then, in a major development, Discord user RShantila was able to boot Astro Bot, which is a PlayStation exclusive from 2024, on SharpEmu.

Getting such a recent game to run is extremely promising and shows that PS5 emulation is currently outpacing PS4 emulation at the same point in its life cycle. And SharpEmu is just one project among what's starting to seem like a sea of hopes and dreams.

The other emulator gaining traction is KytyPS5, which started as a cross-platform PS4 and PS5 emulator in 2021 but was abandoned in 2022. Fast forward four years and developer Nmzik has revived the project, creating their own fork that focuses only on PlayStation 5. According to reports online, within just a few weeks, KytyPS5 can boot commercial PS5 games running in Unreal Engine 4/5, Unity, and other custom engines.

KytyPS5 was able to boot and run Silent Hill: The Short Message till the menu screen. Remember, 3D games were previously limited to just their boot screens, so this is yet another major accomplishment. However, earlier today, the project's GitHub page was updated to show two new 3D games actually running with their graphics being properly rendered, shattering all expectations set thus far.

These two games are PowerWash Simulator and Pac-Man World, both of which are playable with functional gameplay, though we don't have any idea about performance or stability. Even more impressively, and perhaps more on-topic, the KytyPS5 version 0.0.3 successfully booted the commercial PS5 version of Grand Theft Auto V far enough to display the loading screens, main splash art, and actually navigate the in-game display settings.

KytyPS5 has also recently received updates to its shader compiler for better graphics, better memory management that leads to faster load times, and better audio support as well. The emulator works on Windows for now, but a Linux version is also planned for the future.

Finally, we need to mention RPCSX, which isn't exactly an emulator but rather just a research project dedicated to better understanding both PS4 and PS5 software. The devs are still working on being able to boot games from the user interface, but in a race like this, you need every hand on deck, and the team behind RPCS3 is one of the most experienced in the field.

The PS5 emulation scene has suddenly exploded, and the pace of these developments is astonishing. At this trajectory, it won't be unreasonable to expect GTA V to actually run on SharpEmu or KytyPS5 by next month. That being said, emulation is a marathon that takes a long time to perfect, so it's almost guaranteed that the official PC version of GTA VI will be out long before the emulated version becomes playable.

A new Nintendo Switch dock shell has been designed to mimic the sleek undulating curves of the classic Nintendo 64 (N64). Dubbed the 64BITDOCK, this Switch accessory kit can be bundled with an 'N64 cart' that will help you keep your Switch Game Cards tidy. The 64BITDOCK is available now direct from the maker on Etsy, priced from $89.

In the assorted images of the 64BITDOCK from Nintendo Switch accessories specialist Krasivoe, you can see that the ‘N64’ cradles the Switch (Nintendo Switch / Switch 2 / LCD / OLED) horizontally, so the upper curves of the ‘N64’ are uninterrupted. Pleasingly, the ‘N64’ cart slot is actually useful here as a Nintendo Switch Game Card silo if you buy the optional magnetically secured storage receptacle (with 6 slots).

● Check out this product on Etsy

This is a cosmetic kit for your original Switch Dock

The 64BITDOCK is basically a snap-on cladding kit for your existing original Switch Dock. What you are buying is a set of “custom plates inspired by the iconic 64-bit console… [which] snap onto your Switch dock in seconds, transforming it into a nostalgic centerpiece while keeping all sides open to prevent overheating.”

The Krasivoe 64BITDOCK is available in light grey and ‘original’ charcoal finishes, with matching Game Card storage receptacles. For the dock plates alone, the Etsy store asks $89. If you want a Game Card cartridge holder, the price rises to $103. Worldwide shipping is $6.99.

This isn’t Krasivoe’s first retro-inspired Switch Dock makeover kit. It also sells the 8BITDOCK, 16BITDOCK, and CUBEDOCK. Fans of retro Nintendo consoles will surely know what those look like.

The market is overflowing with Nintendo Switch docks, so Krasivoe has cannily sought to offer some eye-catching differentiation in the form of this 64BITDOCK. Its $89 starting price is quite a premium offering, though, as it doesn’t even include docking hardware – it’s just a cosmetic 3D-printed shell for your original Nintendo Switch Dock. We see that you can get basic, fully functional Switch docks from $20 or $30 on Amazon, with original ‘toaster’ style replacements priced at about $40.

Barely a day goes by without some retro system developer accomplishing a technical feat that beggars belief. OpenStrike is the latest mad project, creating a proof-of-concept reimplementation of the seminal Counter-Strike for the Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP), a 22-year-old system that arguably has no business running the game.

The port was made by Yifeng Wang (aka doodlestrike), who apparently created his own Rust-based 3D engine called Pocket3D for the affair, along with the PocketJS JavaScript engine for the game rules and UI. Despite the proof-of-concept status, Wang says that elimination matches with bots are already playable, though the game's famous buying stages aren't yet functional. The full set of eight original Counter-Strike maps have already been tested, and interested modders should easily be able to roll their own.

The engine manages to run the game with bots at a steady 60 FPS at the PSP's native 480x272 resolution, thanks to pre-processing graphical assets to directly bake lightmaps into vertex colors (as opposed to real-time or on-startup calculations). Interestingly, Wang kept the old-school BSP (Binary Space Partitioning) rendering method to cull non-visible areas rather than use a fancier modern algorithm, lending credence to the "don't fix what isn't broken" motto.

The game also runs on the PS Vita, a system with 4x the effective resolution of the original at 960x544, with native graphics, without upscaling of either 3D rendering or 2D assets. You should also be able to run the project as a standard desktop game, and naturally, it's playable on the popular PPSSPP emulator. To get the project going, you'll have to provide your own copy of the Counter-Strike asset data, similar to using Doom's original WADs in one of the many ports.

The project's entire technical architecture is impressive, as Wang went way beyond the scope of "make a 3D engine that load maps." Both the Pocket3D and PocketJS 2D engines are generic, and OpenStrike is merely the first "product" that uses them. The code runs on a server/client/event architecture, and the event handling (ex: shooting) is decoupled from the rendering core, preventing nasty FPS dips. The game is testable offline, and most everything is trivially moddable. You should check out the OpenStrike repo if you're interested.

A Brazilian gamer who lost his Microsoft account and all his digital games has won a court order forcing the company to hand it all back, after support staff told him to simply repurchase his library. The user, who posts as Ordo_Liberal on Reddit, shared a screenshot of a small-claims ruling in the Xbox subreddit that gives Microsoft 15 days to restore access or face fines and roughly $400 (R$2,000) in damages. He said the account had two-factor authentication enabled when it was flagged and permanently suspended, and that none of Microsoft's recovery options allowed him to regain access before he filed his lawsuit.

According to the support emails he posted, Microsoft suspended the account after detecting what it described as unauthorized access, and said an investigation found the account's security information had been changed. The company treated the suspension as permanent and directed him to buy his games again rather than reinstating the ones already tied to the account.

Anyone with a large Microsoft account might want to take note here, because the suspension didn’t target a single game or console but the user’s entire account. Microsoft accounts can carry Xbox purchases, Windows licenses, store apps, 365, and OneDrive data, and a permanent suspension blocks all of it, even, as in this case, when you’ve got strong security and two-factor authentication set up.

Brazil's Consumer Defense Code and its small-claims track allow individuals to bring cases without a lawyer and without paying court costs, meaning Ordo_Liberal was able to take Microsoft to court without incurring any costs. If Microsoft misses the payment deadline, an additional 10% penalty will be imposed. While the damages awarded in this case are minor, it's notable that Microsoft has been compelled to restore the account and its contents, which runs counter to the standard platform position that customers license digital games rather than own them.

This, of course, is a first-instance small-claims judgment, not binding precedent, and it covers one account in one jurisdiction. Courts elsewhere have gone the other way. Chinese courts have recognized game accounts as inheritable property, while U.S. rulings generally treat games as revocable licenses. The case comes as both Microsoft and Sony push players away from physical media, with Xbox testing a way to convert discs into digital entitlements and Sony ending new PlayStation disc production in 2028. Microsoft hasn’t publicly commented on the ruling.

According to new research published by Alinea Analytics, Valve has grossed an estimated 11.1 billion dollars throughout the first half of 2026. If correct, the estimates would make it Valve's most profitable half-year on record, as digital storefronts become the norm throughout the games industry. Earlier this month, Sony announced that it would stop making new physical PlayStation discs by 2028, instead turning its efforts digital.

According to a Substack post from research firm Alinea Analytics, games sold on the platform accumulated $11.1 billion in revenue in the first six months of this year, which is a 14.5% jump compared to the first six months of 2025. Even more impressively, though, Steam's H1 2026 has posted 8% higher numbers than H2 2025, which includes the lucrative holiday season where most of the biggest sales happen. The store generated "only" $10.3 billion in revenue during the latter half of 2025.

Steam has been on a consistent incline for 10 years, boasting record revenue numbers almost every successive year. Even if it hits a slump, the data shows Valve has never had two bad years in a row; a recession is always followed by a boom. Alinea says five main factors contribute to the storefront's growth: a surge in Chinese players, higher prices, viral co-op hits, and smarter back-catalogue categories from big publishers.

The last one is rather ironic, as it involves third-party publishers quietly returning to Steam after their own launchers faltered. Some companies like Activision still inject their proprietary launchers between Steam and the game itself for titles like Call of Duty, but the situation has generally improved.

What display resolution do you use on your primary monitor?

Almost 10 years ago, in the first half of 2017, the platform made a little less than $2.5 billion, which means the H1 2026 revenue is 4.7 times higher, almost quintupling in a decade. Moreover, it's remarkable to believe that Steam also made more in the first six months of this year than it did in the entirety of 2020, when most of us were confined to our homes, free from responsibilities, and with a lot of time on our hands.

Alinea lists Forza Horizon 6, Resident Evil Requiem, and Crimson Desert as the top three games for Steam's explosive H1 2026 numbers — all of them made almost $200 million. Games from prior years also played a bigger role this time since 2026 releases only accounted for 21% of the $11.1 billion, while 27% of H1 2025's revenue came from 2025 launches; 29% of H1 2024's revenue was accumulated from 2024 releases.

Amidst all the data, a clear trend is forming. People are looking back in their libraries and appreciating older games more than ever before, while new releases still make an impact if they're universally acclaimed. With the highly anticipated GTA VI coming soon (with no current PC release date), it'll be interesting to see how these numbers change. Now, if only Valve could make more Steam Machines to play all those older games everyone seems to be playing.

Tobias Friedly, also known as Game of Tobi on YouTube, is quite the wizard when it comes to making the seemingly impossible happen on early Nintendo hardware. His latest venture is getting a limited version of Minecraft running on the Game Boy Color (GBC)... but in 3D. As an added bonus, he even got the game working on the original Game Boy in limited fashion, thanks to both machines' interoperability.

Friedly demonstrated his work in a short YouTube video, where it's plainly visible that he managed to coax the GBC's 8x8 sprites into something visually resembling Minecraft in a three-dimensional projection. Although there are no enemies, inventory, or game logic, the feat is exceedingly impressive given that the hardware was never meant to have 3D games.

This is a significant departure from existing Minecraft demakes for old Nintendo gear, seemingly all of which tried implementing the original game's mechanics in a flat two-dimensional space. Friedly's project appears to be an offshoot of his existing Minecraft 3D for the Gameboy Advance.

Even with the limited GBC hardware, he even went as far as adding a map generator that can create flat or bumpy maps. Blocks of various types (including portals) can be placed and removed, and he even added the Nether area of the game. Game saving and loading is included, and there's an option to enable block textures. Predictably the results are a bit iffy given the limited resolution of the display and the inherent difficulty in faking texture mapping with 8x8 tiles.

Despite running at different speeds and color levels, the Game Boy Color and original Game Boy are for the most part compatible, and Friendly even showed that his clone does run on the original black-and-green Game Boy. It's hard to distinguish blocks on that screen — but it works. If you're interested in trying it out yourself, download the cart files that Friedly published.

Nvidia and Sega have scheduled an event next week to celebrate their history and longstanding friendship. The invitation-only shindig takes place at GiGO Akihabara, Tokyo (you can apply via Twitter/X). Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang will star at the July 15 event, officially unveiling the RTX Spark for the first time in Japan. Attendees will also get a chance to win a GeForce RTX 5090 FE in a raffle.

If you will be in Tokyo on July 15, it might be worth pitching for an invite, and if you’re exceptionally lucky, you might visit the event, then go home with one of the best graphics cards available in 2026. The GeForce Japan social media managers are asking for comments that encapsulate 'memories of Nvidia or Sega' with photos, videos, anecdotes,” and so on (machine translation). You have until sometime on July 12 to concoct your invitation pitch. Remember, Japan time is about half a day ahead of the mainland US time zones.

Though it is clearly spelled out what the Nvidia side of the celebration will present on the day (the RTX Spark and a raffle RTX 5090 FE), no such specific teases have come from the Sega camp.

The lack of any teaser might make you think that Sega isn’t going to reveal anything new at the event, or conversely that something big is on the horizon. But if Sega were to pull a hardware surprise out of the bag, it could make quite a splash.

The Japanese gaming icon exited the console race back in 2001, when it ceased production of the Dreamcast. However, it released rehashed mini consoles like the Genesis Mini and Game Gear Micro at the beginning of the 2020s. More recently, some Mini Arcades (like Sonic, OutRun, and Golden Axe) have been released in partnership with MyArcade. It would be great if Sega could do something ambitious again, or even come out with a mini console capable of handling Saturn or Dreamcast titles. With some kind of lightgun support, please.

Nvidia and Sega – an enduring bond

As mentioned in the intro, Nvidia and Sega are old buddies. Nvidia nearly collapsed in 1996, just three years after its founding, and only the belief and generosity of a senior Sega executive at the time saved Nvidia from the graveyard. This is according to Huang’s recollections of a very difficult time for Nvidia, shared in interviews in 2024.

The story goes that Nvidia’s work to design a GPU for a next-gen Sega console fell through largely due to incompatibility with the emerging DirectX API. Sega’s management appreciated the efforts, though, and believed in young Mr. Huang enough to invest $5M in the green team. This investment gave Nvidia the breathing room to pivot from its previous graphics architecture and come out with the DirectX-friendly RIVA line (1997), followed by the unstoppable GeForce series (1999).

Flipping the infamous early 1990s anti-piracy campaign messaging on its head, the Future Nostalgia Project is asking retro hoarders to Copy That Floppy! Backed by the Cambridge University Library and supported by the Digital Preservation Coalition, the project went online late last year. The project includes an extensive, indexed how-to guide to preserving data currently on your dusty old floppy collection. It covers a plethora of removable media from 8- and 5.25-inch floppies to the iconic 3.5-inch ‘save icon’ diskettes. I’ve been archiving my own very poorly labeled collection of diskettes before bit rot gets them, and while the necessary hardware remains affordable.

The published guide focuses mostly on saving the material stored on the old removable media. Rewriting the disks to new media and/or accessing the old data that was squirreled within is beyond the scope of the still extensive guide. However, there are links provided to further guides and documentation that cover those subsequent steps.

My 3.5-inch floppy jumble

I originally acquired a good-condition working USB floppy drive from the iMac era to image my collection of 3.5-inch floppies dating back to the 16-bit era. Buying a USB-attached optical drive has already been great for accessing and imaging old CDs and DVDs. However, due to the mix of (poorly labeled) Atari ST, Amiga (OFS, FFS, PFS), PC, Mac, and even Archimedes floppies, I have the USB floppy, which doesn’t cut it. I had to acquire a Greaseweazle because a PC‑compatible USB floppy drive cannot read or write the raw, low‑level disk formats used by Amiga, classic Macintosh, and many other vintage systems.

It’s a bit of a rabbit hole in a minefield, but some vintage used drives you can get via places like eBay are better than others at reading flux transitions (the raw magnetic pulses on the disk) on non-IBM formats. Then, when you image disks, and it isn’t 100% successful, you wonder if your drive is the problem or if it’s the old media…

My first diskette archiving tests immediately hit a speedbump. After a lot of forum reading and investigating, I determined the used 3.5-inch floppy drive I’d sourced to pair with my Greaseweazle had one malfunctioning head. Having the other USB floppy drive allowed me to verify that using a standard PC disk.

My second used floppy drive appears to be OK. I’ve managed to image some Amiga and Atari ST disks and access them, reading files and running programs within the respective emulators. If you don’t know what format the source floppy is, Greaseweazle can handle it by doing a complete flux copy. Then you can look at raw data in tools like HxCFloppyEmulator to understand the original format and make disk images for common emulators. These can be saved to backup disks, as well as the current PC SSD. That’s what I’ve been doing.

I’m also currently digitally archiving compact cassette audio tapes (Yamaha Natural Sound deck), and scanning 35mm film (Canoscan film scanner), among other things, when I’m not writing here. In all these cases, the media is getting so old now that it could be degrading, if not already useless. Moreover, the devices you can wrangle these old formats with are also often nearing the ends of their service lives.

It’s been over 30 years since the cringeworthy Don’t Copy That Floppy campaign hit the airwaves. You can watch the Software Publishers Association-backed video online anytime now, as it's been digitally archived on YouTube. The messaging was clear: copying software results in a loss of income for artists, writers, designers, and programmers, meaning there will be fewer software products in the future.

Game anti-tamper app Denuvo has been completely bypassed in pre-release versions of Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced, allowing pirates to distribute copies of the game days before its official release. A cracked version of the remake has been circulating since June 7 — more than a month before its July 9, 2026, release date. While the game is a remake of the original Assassin’s Creed Black Flag, which launched way back in 2013, it’s still expected to offer new content and enhanced graphics brought by newer, more capable hardware.

This isn’t the first major title to be hit by a leak before its official release day this year. Forza Horizon 6 leaked four days before early access and more than a week before its general launch date of May 19. LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight and Subnautica 2 also suffered similar leaks, with playable versions of the games circulating online even before early access was opened to players. While Forza Horizon 6 and Subnautica 2 aren’t protected by Denuvo, LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight and Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced use the controversial anti-tamper DRM tool.

Denuvo has been in hot water among gamers, especially as it was blamed for performance issues plaguing games that used it. Aside from that, many consider its mandatory 14-day online checks as intrusive, especially for story-driven single-player games where cheating won’t affect the gaming experience of other players. While a few users might’ve understood the studios’ need to protect their titles and reduce piracy, the fact that Denuvo has been cracked in all single-player games that had it felt like its addition to games is pointless.

This is especially true now that we’re seeing pirated pre-release versions of games that are supposedly protected by Denuvo. While it’s unclear how Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced leaked, the fact that the app that reduces performance and reminds gamers that they don’t own the games they buy has seemingly failed at its one job is making users think that it’s unnecessary.

Game studios need to protect their intellectual property, which is why it’s understandable that they’d want to deploy tools like Denuvo. However, they shouldn't do so at the expense of gaming performance and the user experience, which are some of the primary reasons why gamers are pushing back against Denuvo. If these anti-piracy measures don’t punish legitimate players with reduced FPS and always-online requirements, among other negative side effects, then most gamers will have zero problems with using apps that protect the makers of their favorite titles.

DLSS Swapper is an open-source app that does exactly what it sounds like — it swaps out the appropriate DLSS files for any game, helping downgrade or upgrade its native DLSS version. While the tool itself is safe, along with the verified files it hosts, users can also upload their own DLLs to the app's GitHub repo. Unfortunately, it seems like some of these files can contain malware, disguised as helpful solutions.

To understand how this can even happen, we need to look at the way DLSS Swapper is set up. The app uses a manifest file to dig out DLLs from verified DLSS, FSR, and XeSS libraries. The verification process is thorough, and you won't see any file pop up in-app until its security hashes match official sources. However, it can also detect unknown files from new game releases installed on a user's computer.

These files are automatically uploaded to the repository as "issues," and the app also includes an option to upload your own DLL to help out fellow gamers. As you can probably guess by now, this is where the problem lies. These files are not vetted and remain in a grey area. DLL files are basically executable code, so if any of them were modified to include malware, you wouldn't even be able to detect it before it's too late.

The file would've already executed malicious code and installed a crypto-miner, for instance, in the background that hogs your PC's resources until you finally notice something's off. As such, the creator issues a clear warning to not download random files that show up on the GitHub repo, especially if they include comments that claim some sort of miracle cure. Stick to only the sources you trust if you must go outside of the officially supported libraries.

Previously, the developer already warned against the fake DLSS Swapper website posing as the real thing. Let this serve as your reminder that the app's GitHub page is the only place you should download DLSS Swapper from. Moreover, keep in mind that hardware support is just as important as software support, so if you have an older GPU that doesn't support the latest upscaling tech, a DLL swap cannot magically fix that.

Gamers who find themselves “limited” by SteamOS capabilities can now more confidently install Windows on their Steam hardware. Valve just released the Steam Hardware - Windows Resources page on Steam, which contains Windows drivers for the Steam Deck LCD, Steam Deck OLED, and Steam Machine. This means that those who want to replace the stock SteamOS with Windows 11 on their devices can now do so more easily, and they don’t have to hunt around the internet for drivers just to ensure that all the parts and components on their console will play nicely with Windows.

The drivers on the page include those for the APU, graphics, SD Card reader, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Audio, depending on which Steam hardware you’re driving. However, Valve said, “We are providing these resources as is and are unfortunately unable to offer 'Windows on Steam Hardware' support. If you get stuck and need a way back to the default SteamOS, please follow these recovery instructions.”

This is the main reason why Valve refuses to subsidize the Steam Machine — since owners can essentially do whatever they want to the living room PC console, selling one does not automatically guarantee that the company will make back any discounts it offers through game sales. This is why even though the Steam Machine is highly rated for Steam Deck users who want to upgrade to a more powerful device, its relatively high price puts it at a disadvantage compared to competitors like the PS5 or Xbox.

Many gamers would likely prefer SteamOS over Windows, especially as it offers far less bloat than Microsoft’s operating system. Valve is in fact working on SteamOS to make it more compatible with a general release and allow it to be installed on hardware that features Intel CPUs/GPUs and Nvidia GPUs. But because many anti-cheat apps still aren’t compatible with Linux (hence, SteamOS), installing Windows on Steam hardware is currently the only way that gamers can enjoy titles that require them.

It’s unfortunate that SteamOS doesn’t have any dual-boot capabilities at the moment, as that would give gamers the best of both worlds — use Windows and accept the performance hit if they want to play games that require specialized anti-cheat apps and then switch to SteamOS for all the other titles they enjoy. Valve said that it’s already working on this capability, but hasn’t given a fixed timeline for when it will arrive.

A Change.org petition urging Sony to keep making physical PlayStation games has passed 172,000 signatures, six days after the company announced that it intends to stop producing discs for new games in January 2028. The petition, started by Jade Pearce, CEO of Canadian retailer PNP Games, climbed from around 12,000 signatures on its first day to more than 172,000 by the morning of July 7. Sony hasn’t responded, and the factory that prints its discs has already started moving some staff and equipment onto a different product.

Pearce launched the campaign the same day as Sony's announcement, and it gathered 40,000 names within 48 hours. The petition contends that a boxed download code is a revocable license rather than owned property, references Sony's recent removal of purchased movies from customer accounts, and lists the used-game trade among the jobs at risk. "We are not against digital," Pearce writes. "We are against digital being the only option."

Niko Partners analyst Daniel Ahmad estimated that Sony sold more than 70 million physical discs in 2025, even with digital purchases sitting at roughly 80% of full-game sales. Sony's PlayStation social accounts have stayed dormant since July 1.

Sony DADC's plant in Thalgau, Austria, produces about 600,000 discs a day, roughly half of them PlayStation titles, and has begun shifting some workers onto optical microlens production, DADC CEO Dietmar Tanzer told Austrian broadcaster ORF Salzburg. The company has put €30 million ($34 million) into new equipment, according to Engadget, expects disc output to fall to about 10% of current volume by 2028, and plans to retrain roughly 300 staff rather than lay them off.

Optical microlenses steer and concentrate light across very small distances and appear in camera modules, AR and VR headsets, fiber-optic gear, and automotive lighting. Markus Streibl, head of micro optics at Sony DADC, said mass production could begin as early as 2027.

The PlayStation 6 is reportedly in development without a built-in disc drive, which would leave Sony's hardware team to reintegrate one if the company changed course. Sony's standalone PS5 disc drive has carried a one-per-order purchase cap since at least March last year, predating the disc announcement, and leaked PS6 specifications described in earlier reports frame any drive as an optional backward-compatibility accessory. Grand Theft Auto 6, easily the biggest game of the decade so far, will ship on PlayStation as a boxed download code with no playable disc, ahead of the 2028 cutoff.

Sony has told publishers they can still book disc runs for games released in 2027 or earlier, so existing physical libraries will keep working on supported consoles. Whether the fact that the petition is now pushing 200,000 signatures will compel Sony to move or abandon the January 2028 date is unclear; Sony delayed its 2021 shutdown of the PS3 and PS Vita stores after similar backlash, though that closure is now scheduled again alongside the disc decision.

Microsoft's gaming division, Xbox, will eliminate approximately 3,200 jobs over its 2027 fiscal year in an attempt to turn around its floundering business. The cuts include offloading four studios with plans to spin off another, though no announced first-party games are being canceled.

Around 1,600 of those jobs are being eliminated today, and the rest will occur throughout the rest of the year.

"We are operating at margins that are 3-10x lower than comparable platform and publishing businesses," Xbox CEO Asha Sharma wrote in a note to Xbox employees, pointing out that investments in studios and Game Pass did not add as much value as expected. She wrote that the business typically loses 64 cents for every dollar invested. "As that happened, our core business weakened, and we added more teams, more investment, and more time, hoping for a better outcome. And now the industry is facing the most severe hardware crisis in its history. We must reset XBOX." She wrote that she has a goal for Xbox to reach more than a billion people per day.

Xbox is selling Compulsion Games (South of Midnight) and Double Fine (Psychonauts, Kiln), back to their management as independent studios, along with their catalogs, intellectual property, and funding for their next games.

Meanwhile, Ninja Theory and Undead Labs are being sold to unidentified "new ownership" and will continue to work on Senua and State of Decay 3 with Xbox, respectively.

The fifth studio, Arkane, is entering consultation to review options due to France's strict labor laws. The company is currently working on Marvel's Blade and previously worked on Redfall and Deathloop.

In Sharma's letter, she wrote that changes will come to Activision, Bethesda and ZeniMax, Blizzard, King, Mojang, and Xbox Game Studios. Some will focus more on popular franchise games. Bloomberg reports that ZeniMax will focus specifically on its biggest names, such as Fallout, Doom, The Elder Scrolls, Quake, and Wolfenstein.

Mojang and King will report directly to Sharma, who wrote that those two studios are the largest in terms of monthly active players, and bring "critical geographic, demographic, and differentiation to XBOX." But in other areas, Sharma is greatly reducing the amount of management for a flatter organizational chart.

Xbox has also found its first-ever chief operating officer. Helen Chiang, the corporate vice president of the Minecraft business, was promoted to streamlining changes to how the business operates, including "end-to-end P&L responsibility across content, hardware, platform, and services."

"These changes are about a bigger future for XBOX, not a smaller one," Sharma wrote. "The next decade of gaming will be larger, more global, and more creative than anything we’ve seen before. This year, we’ll invest as much in XBOX as we ever have, but we’ll invest with greater focus, greater discipline, and greater clarity, all in service of making XBOX where the world plays and creates."

Microsoft's other recent moves include bringing more games exclusively to Xbox consoles, such as Gears of War: E-Day, returning to an all-caps "XBOX" brand, and more public discussion of Project Helix, the company's next home console that's also set to play PC games.

Sharma was named CEO of Xbox (then Microsoft Gaming) in February, succeeding Phil Spencer. Spencer built up Xbox with major acquisitions of Game Studios and a push to bring Xbox games everywhere with Game Pass.

Sony makes some of the best headphones on the market, and some of their recent models even include a myriad of sensors for spatial audio. These are standard gyroscopes and accelerometers capable of precise tracking, so why keep them limited to just audio features? That's exactly what developer Nicholas Slattery has done with his new project called "Sony Head Tracker" — it's an app that turns your Sony headphones and earbuds into a real-time head tracker for PC games.

I made Sony headphones work as a free head tracker for 200+ PC games from r/pcmasterrace

The app essentially acts as a bridge between the hardware and the software, which is OpenTrack. Sony baked the Android Head Tracker protocol into its headphones' firmware, which is what enabled spatial audio to expand the soundstage on supported devices. This data is ignored by Windows, but Slattery figured out a way to tap into the protocol and read everything it's capturing.

That includes rotation vectors, gyroscope fields, and Euler Angles (live calculation of yaw, pitch, and roll). The raw data packets are then packaged into a UDP stream that the OpenTrack software can read and understand. OpenTrack supports over 200 PC games and usually works with phones, webcams, and specialized eye or IR trackers, but Slattery's app opens it to an entirely new and ingenious set of devices.

Currently, Sony's WH/WF-1000XM6, WH/WF-1000XM5, and Sony ULT WEAR (WH-ULT900N) are officially compatible. Older models like the WH-1000XM4 or XM3 won't work because they lack the hardware (sensors) required for the head tracking. Apple's AirPods, which popularized Spatial Audio, use the company's proprietary protocol that doesn't open itself up on any device, as you'd expect, so they're also ruled out.

Once everything is set up, you just wear your Sony headphones and the in-camera will respond to your head movements, turning around with you. If you look to the side or glance up, the camera will peep there as well, as if you were wearing a VR headset. But keep in mind that this is not a VR replacement as the screen in front of you is still stationary. Regardless, this unlocks another level of immersion for race and flight sims.

The creator has tested the app to work flawlessly with Microsoft Flight Simulator, Elite Dangerous, and Assetto Corsa already. For those of us not rocking elaborate multi-monitor configs, something like this can serve as a middle ground between a true 6DoF setup and a simple helmet cam in-game, all for free. Sony Head Tracker is also open-source, so we only expect it to improve over time and expand its compatibility.

Ahead of our review of the Steam Machine, we sat down with Valve engineers Pierre-Loup Griffais and Yazan Aldehayyat to talk about the compact SteamOS PC. We discussed the pricing, the design process at Valve, component shortages (how could you not?), and even Windows support. We published excerpts from this interview in a story alongside the review. Here, we're presenting the full transcript of our conversation.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Andrew E. Freedman, Tom's Hardware: I think I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about the elephant in the room, which of course is pricing. The Steam Machine starts at $1,049 in the U.S. for the 512GB option. How do you think that price is going to hit, and how do you think it reflects the vision of the Steam machine when you were building it?

Pierre-Loup Griffais, engineer, Valve: I think we'd be hard-pressed to make predictions on how exactly the market's going to respond to it. I think it's very different than what it looked like last year. And so in terms of what appetite people have to buy a gaming PC at a certain price, everyone's going to have a different opinion on whether it's a good value or whether the product makes sense for them. So I don't know if we're hazarding any predictions there.

But it's definitely the case that our original design, of course, was based on memory and storage prices from two years ago or so, and so we were in a different segment than we were hoping to be, but I think it's more of a reflection of where the market as a whole is than Steam Machine itself, right? So, I think if you're looking at building a PC from parts, either comparable horsepower or more horsepower, you know, you're probably looking at a similar price point here. At least that would be our expectation, right? That if you're, if you're looking at a trade-off of, "I want something that's about as powerful," you're still looking at a price that's roughly what we're offering there. And then you have all the things that you can't really build, like the form factor, the quietness, the CEC integration, the dedicated Bluetooth antenna for controller support. All that stuff is not really something that you can put in your own gaming PC and are still strong reasons that people might want to get the Steam Machine.

Freedman: Some of that definitely tracks. I've been going through our database, and things that were around the price point of the Steam Machine now are not the price of the current Steam machine anymore.

Yazan Aldehayyat, engineer, Valve: Yes, yes.

Valve speaks on Steam Machine compared to traditional consoles

Freedman: You're very much calling the Steam machine a PC. You haven't been calling it a console. Do you see that as a totally different audience, because the PlayStation 5 Pro is $899 right now, which is higher than it used to be? Do you see that as a competitor inside Valve, or are you looking at this like this is specifically a PC for a PC audience for people who already have Steam libraries?

Griffais: Yeah, I think it's a pretty different offering, right? I feel like if you're playing on PC, you're not looking at something like a console system and comparing just the price and the specs, because you have a bunch of games on PC, and you would have to buy those games on the other platform, or you would have to factor in whatever subscription cost there is to play online. There's a lot of factors there where it's not really apples to apples, right? And so I think it's an offering for folks that want to play on PC by definition or have some use for a PC that's around that powerful, it's probably quite a different decision than figuring out if something like a console is for you. There's a lot of trade-offs there.

Aldehayyat: I think the value of the Steam Machine is inherently tied to the value of your Steam library in a lot of ways. The more games you have on Steam, the more valuable the Steam machine is to you, and the Steam Machine makes your existing library even more valuable. So, those two kinds of decisions are very much intertwined, and I think at least early on, for sure, we suspect that it's for people who already have a big Steam library. The Steam Machine is just going to make a lot of sense to them.

Griffais: Yeah, and folks also have a lot of stuff on PC that's not necessarily on Steam, right? Like, there's a lot of different libraries on different stores, there's downloaded games, there's MMOs, all this stuff is also there, right, including productivity apps. There's some desktop use you can do with it. So, I guess the value of it is a little bit harder to express than just, like, you have that price and you have that library.

Freedman: Do you see Steam Machine as a possible entry point for someone who's just getting into Steam, or would you sort of advise those people to be starting elsewhere?

Griffais: For sure. Yeah, I think it could be. Usually, I guess it's hard for us to reason around what someone that's not on PC might or might not do, just because we're not really used to talking to those users. But I think we've seen some people use something like Steam Deck as an entry point for PC, and it seems to have worked for a bunch of people. I would think that Steam Machine is the same between the verification program and the SteamOS experience, that, you know, whose sole aim is to basically get out of the way, so that you can get to your games as easily as possible. I think that it's a good kind of niche for that.

Aldehayyat: I think it's like just to emphasize that point, it's we think it's a good entryway in big part because of how easy it is to set up and play games, right, like if somebody who's curious about PC gaming, and you're interested in getting into it, but you're a little intimidated by all the information that you need to know to build your own PC, or tinker with drivers, or whatever. The Steam Machine could be a really compelling offering for you, because then you can play those games with a lot less work, and maybe after you really get into it, you decide to build your own PC, and that's cool, that's great, that's awesome. But if you're a little bit intimidated, or maybe you're a PC gamer. Your life got a lot busier, you don't have as much time, that could be another way for you to get back into it. So the ease of use is something that we really cared a lot about was really important to us.

Griffais: We've heard that a lot for Steam Deck. People that are like, "I used to play on PC, I might have games on Steam, I might not, but I used to be a PC gamer, and you know, I have a family now, I have kids or something. I've been wanting to get back into it, but it seems complicated, or a time sink, or something." A bunch of people seemed to have found Steam Deck as a good way to address that, and I expect it might be the same.

Freedman: I mean, I can tell you, I have a toddler. I just finished Resident Evil Requiem, and I played the majority of it on a Steam Deck, because I was able to do it after her bedtime in a place in our apartment, far away from her room.

Aldehayyat: Great.

Griffais: First-person or third-person with Grace?

Freedman: For Grace, first-person. So I've got one more price question, and we'll get on to some engineering stuff.

Subsidizing hardware & the VRAM conundrum

Freedman: So you're not subsidizing the Steam Machine, which Valve said would make the PC a more closed platform, I guess maybe more similar to some consoles. but it's been said a lot that Valve subsidized the Steam Deck. I'm not sure I've actually found any definitive sources that say that. Did Valve subsidize the Steam Deck?

Griffais: Not really. If you look at certain SKUs at certain points of time, you know, it might be below or above cost by a small margin. I think there's some comments that we made around it, you know, being painful and all that early on, that was more about being as close as possible to cost than anything. Same thing here, right? If you look at where we thought Steam Machine was going to be in terms of pricing, and where we are now, and where Steam Deck used to be, and what it is now, you know, as we've had to announce some price changes recently, we're actually quite a bit more aggressive now, because we understand that the higher price is less accessible to people.

I guess we're able to be very aggressive with margin, right? And so we're even more aggressive now, trying to be as close as possible to the actual cost of the parts that we're shipping up.

Aldehayyat: But it's important that the Valve hardware is a self-sustained program; it's not subsidized by software sales, so that's kind of the piece to get across.

Freedman: So, on the hardware, one big worry back from the announcement was some of the hardware choices, which aren't, for lack of a better term, current gen, either in terms of AMD's technologies or in some cases compared to other modern graphics cards. The GPU specifically has 8GB of VRAM. How is Valve handling this internally, both your feedback and what you're doing with SteamOS?

Griffais: So there's a few aspects to that. One comes down to the system design when we picked the parts for it, and the GPU, and the amount of memory that was going to be available for the GPU specifically. I think we are very aware that, you know, eight gigs is kind of aggressive and could be kind of in the middle of what you would need there. But we made a lot of calculations on "what are you able to play with things like that?" and our conclusion was that for the stuff that you would want to play, and the level of details, and everything that you would want for that level of performance, you won't be in the spots where you're running out of VRAM.

The cases where you're running out of VRAM are actually cases that you would not want to be playing on a system like that. It'd be too slow. It's possible that there's some games in the future where that calculus is going to be a little bit different, right? Like, they take more VRAM at the same performance or something. But right now I think we're doing pretty good there. The cases where you're exercising the VRAM limits are actually cases that you wouldn't want to play as a real user, in my opinion. But that being said, between the Steam Deck release and now, we have done a ton of work on SteamOS to teach it about discrete VRAM.

We only used to support APUs, where we didn't have that problem — we had a whole other set of different memory management problems instead — and then improve the handling of VRAM under stress, under load conditions, and trying to get to the best outcome. So we're still rolling out updates there, but I think in practice the experiences improved rapidly around those cases. And we're continuing to do a bunch of work there.

Aldehayyat: I also want to just say that everybody sees that upgrade cycle for PCs have been slowing down dramatically. And more importantly, the new games coming out are able to scale generations of CPUs and GPUs a lot more gracefully than they used to. So, again, for us, the metric that we care about is, can you play the games on Steam? Can you play every game on Steam? And we think the Steam Machine absolutely can, right now, and we think the longevity for it is actually quite good, given the current reality of the upgrade cycles. I mean, maybe 10 years ago, a device like this wouldn't last as long, wouldn't have the legs to be competitive for as long. But given where we at now, even as of today, it can play your Steam library pretty well, and given what the market is doing right now, and the upgrade cycles, it still has the longevity to be a good device for people for many years to come.I think that one of the great things about the PC ecosystem is that games are not designed with a fixed performance target, they're able to come up and down, and you can tune them to be a great experience on a variety of hardware,

Griffais: And in a way, things like Steam Deck, and the new-ish, you know, segment of growing PC handhelds has been helping with that too, because people have scalability more in mind, I think. And there's been, there's been games, you know, that have made adjustments to have you know different level details or different presets for lower-end configs that I think you know that same effect will happen in the future and will pay dividends for all of PC as well. You have people that you know are probably playing on old laptops and things like that that maybe don't have to upgrade as much now because the developers, you know, have more scalability in mind, which is, I think, a good development for everyone.

4K capable, 1080p optimized

Freedman: I found that you know you can largely get playable frame rates on this thing. I mean, I'm someone willing to turn down settings.

But there was the 4K with FSR comment that had turned some heads initially in my testing. I found that's largely true, that you know, if you're willing to turn some settings down, you can get somewhere around 4K 60 with FSR. But why call it 4K capable, as opposed to really marketing it as a really solid 1080p or 1440p machine, rather than using FSR in the measurements, which kind of depends on which version of FSR the game is using?

Aldehayyat: A big part of that messaging actually came because we found a lot of people who are not as familiar with tuning their gaming settings want to just make sure that it's compatible with their 4K TV. So, basically, it's just our way of telling people that yes, if you have a 4K TV, you'll be able to use your Steam Machine with it. Not everybody understands the difference between render resolution and your TV resolution, so yes, for a lot of games, rendering a 1080p or 1440p is definitely the sweet spot, but we kind of wanted to make sure people understand that it still can work with your 4K TV, and you have the ability to upscale your content to that resolution, basically.

Griffais: And I think generally it's broadly true for the catalog as a whole, right? For sure, if you're looking at the current segment of games and what's coming out, then that's going to be what's stressing it out the most in terms of performance. Steam has a lot of games that extend decades into the past, as well. There's a ton of games that are playing that are coming out right now that are going to play just fine at 4K native on the Machine. There's there's a wide variety of different performance targets that games have, but in general, I think there's a ton of good experiences that you can have at 4K natively on the Machine. But for sure, for things that are coming out, or more recent games, I would personally probably pick, you know, 1080p render resolution, or 1440p, depending on how scalable it is.

Freedman: Speaking of 1080p, I noticed early on in the testing that 1080p seems to be the default resolution set across SteamOS on the Steam Machine. I was actually kind of surprised by it. I was going through, first on a per-game basis, boosting it up, so I could, you know, test multiple resolutions on my monitor. And I think very much like the sort of like the Steam Controller, there's not a huge on-ramp, not a lot of hand-holding on how to work this type of thing, so is there going to be any sort of messaging or sort of tutorials from Valve elsewhere that explain how to adjust these settings so you can get exactly what you're looking for?

Griffais: Yeah, I think we want to make that more visible and make it pretty obvious to folks that know what it is that this is happening. There's also different work that I think we want to do around that system. Another one is that when we're testing the games, we can also flag them for different default resolutions. So for an indie game or a game that's a little bit lower spec, or an old game, we should have the ability to say that game is actually just fine at 4K, or you know, other resolutions, so that you don't have to go change that setting. A

The thing we're trying to avoid is that some games, the way that they detect settings, you know, is all different. Games do that very differently, right? And it's possible for some games to start at 4K very high ray tracing. And the experience with that is not great. You don't want to start a game and have that sort of experience as a user, especially when you're trying to get to a point where most people can run a game and expect, you know, to be able to play it and not tinker with it. So we're trying to make sure the baseline is on the safe side, where you're going to have a fine experience. But for the folks that want more detail, more definition, they can access those settings, and they know what they're doing, right?

So I think that it could definitely use a little bit more visibility, so that you are very aware of what the OS is doing behind the scenes, and very aware of how you can go change that setting in a way that right now maybe is not as visible as it could be.

The verified program deepens

Freedman: Speaking of all this, there's the verified program. I mean, obviously, the verified program made it very clear if you could play something on Deck. On Steam Machine, assuming you turn off that 1080p flag, you get into more resolutions, more potential settings that are supported, really, just more options and games all around, because you have more powerful hardware. So, when something is verified on the Steam machine, is that specifically verified at 1080p, or is it going to be more like a modular thing where you explain where it's verified?

Griffais: The only thing that we want to make sure that a verified game gets at is that by default it's above 1080p 30, right? So that's really what we're shooting for, and again, it's all about the default experience, because I think all those things that you said are broadly true for the Deck as well. Like you can actually load up a game on deck, uncheck the resolution settings, set it to 4K, and set very high ray tracing. Look into all that stuff, and we're not trying to have the verified system tell you, like, hey, if you do that, then you need to change the settings to X and Y to get to a certain frame rate. We're just saying, oh, you're changing settings — at that point, you're outside of the realm of what the verified system is designed to do, because it's for those users that are not really doing that., and we expect the same to be true for the Machine Similarly as the deck, I think we'll see an effect where more and more games also pick settings that were intended for the Machine as time goes, as developers are putting those presets in, which will further make the default experience match the expectations of those users that are working from the verified system.

Freedman: I very clearly remember, I think one of those was Cyberpunk 2077. That was the first game where I saw that they had a Steam Deck setting. I was like, "Well, I know which one to pick."

Griffais: And, of course, most users never had to pick that, because it was selected by default, right? And if someone can have played the game and never seen that settings menu, that's a win in our book, right? But we also want to make sure that people that want to tinker with that can also do that, and every step of the way, we're messaging to developers, like, hey, even if you know you're running on a Steam Deck, even if you know you're running on a Steam Machine, do not disable settings, do not hide settings, that's not what people want to see. There's a lot of users that you might not be aware of that are all going to have very different opinions on what settings make sense on the device that you're playing, and we're really trying to make sure that you know the SteamOS experience upholds that core principle of PC gaming.

Freedman: I know that quite a handful of places have resources online — all they do is go through Steam Deck settings, tinker, and try to make it the best they can.

Hardware design, repairability and limitations

Freedman: So, I want to move this a bit more towards the hardware design. So every major component is cooled by one big heat sink with the 120 millimeter fan. I'm curious, how did you choose that kind of design? What are the benefits of that?

Aldehayyat: There's actually a couple of reasons. I mean, obviously, the first thing is that it's the most compact design you could come up with, right? Like, if you have one thermal module, then you know you could make the device as small as possible. So that was the number one sort of factor that made us go into that path. But the other thing that is interesting about this is that if you have two separate thermal modules, then each one has to be designed for the absolute worst case for each one, so you end up with a combined volume that is larger than the device is ever going to be. But if you have one, then it can share, basically, right? So, if the CPU is not eating up its entire thermal budget, the GPU can use that, or if the GPU is not eating its entire thermal budget, the CPU can share that. So that's one of the advantages, is that your ability to kind of allocate thermal headroom back and forth between the CPU and the GPU, and all that kind of stuff, independently.

To be clear, it was very, very challenging to make that design work, because when you're trying to touch off of different things, tolerances really eat you up, so you have to come up with, because you know, good thermal module design requires you to have the absolute minimum gap between whatever you're trying to cool and the thermal module itself, and the GPU die to the thermal module, the CPU die to the thermal module, they both have to basically have the smallest gap possible. Nut then in reality, like things vary and the CPU is tall and the GPU is taller and the motherboard bows and the thermal module has tolerances, so actually getting the design to have enough compliance in the right places to accommodate all those tolerances was by far the hardest challenge we had to overcome. But by overcoming it, I think we ended up at the most compact design, cost-effective design.

Griffais: It's also the quietest. Having one big module lets us have a big fan, which then can spin lower and, or, you know, lower RPMs. So we're pretty happy to have been able to make that work, because it turned out really good in terms of the ratio between how quiet it is and its normal performance.

Freedman: I opened it up to take a look, and I was able to take the whole thing out of the case with a single Torx T9 screwdriver. I don't think this was built with the idea that a ton of people were going to open it, but was repairability like a serious consideration of the design?

Aldehayyat: I mean, yeah, absolutely. We care about repairability a lot, and we tried our best to make the device as repairable as possible while still making it compact. I mean, those two things, generally speaking, fight each other. The more compact something is, the harder it is to take apart. So, we think we found a good balance. It's just kind of part of our philosophy, right? We think it's your device, so you get to do whatever you want with it. We definitely did not put any artificial barriers for people to do this, but we actually go a step further and try our best to make it as easy as possible. There's limitations to that, but things like the fact that the SSD is on the FPC that loops around to make the SSD accessible, that was not by accident, nor was it the easiest way to do this. We could have buried it under the thermal module, and that would be actually way easier, but we chose not to do that. It's just kind of a part of our philosophy, even though it's not necessarily the easiest or cheapest way to do things, we still think it's the right way to do things.

Griffais: Yeah, there's a few things that we generally try to have. You know, we can't hit them all the time, but I think we've, we've done, you know, a pretty good job of it ever since Steam Deck OLED, especially, making sure that, all screws use the same type, that they're machine screws, so you can take them apart and put them back without damaging some plastic or some wood receiver there. Also labeling stuff, right? Like, there's a lot of labels on the little connectors on the boards that we could easily have removed in production, but it's actually really useful; We're also taking them apart, right? It's useful for us, but I think you know, we definitely are not intending that most people will open this, like you say, but we want to make sure the people who do are not going to run into barriers.

Freedman: Yeah, I mean, there's an awful lot of Steam Deck mods. I'm sure a lot of those same types of people will be very interested in this. So a lot of the ports — this is probably by the design of making it so compact — they're attached via daughter boards and ribbon cables. Will those components be made available either for tinkerers or repair shops?

Aldehayyat: Yeah, so similar to how we did it with the Steam Deck, we're going to work with iFixit to make the parts available. We're going to basically try and make as many parts available as possible. I don't know for sure the full list of components that will be available, but I believe all the FPCs, daughter boards, and ports will be available through iFixit. I'm not sure which ones they decide to sell, or whatever. But yeah, our goal is to make those parts available as widely as possible.

Freedman: Is it any more difficult to make those parts available because of just the general component shortage, or are you stacked up on those ones?

Griffais: It's actually easier because they're on daughter boards, right? If that stuff wasn't the main board, then you'd be in trouble because there's some soldered-down memory, the VRAM, right, is the only soldered-down; the system RAM isn't, it's SO-DIMMs. If anything, it's a little easier for things like ports, and yes,

Aldehayyat: Believe it or not, right now, even things like the FR4, like the raw PCB material, it has shortages. But it just so happens that the memory shortage is way worse, so yeah, it's not really a major challenge to make those parts available at this point.

Freedman: And I'm assuming if you work with iFixit, that also means I'll be publishing maintenance manuals of some sort, right?

Aldehayyat: Yes, we're going to partner with them too, and they're going to create a lot of the repair manuals, replacement parts instructions, and things like that.

Freedman: Because opening it is super simple, but getting to the RAM, to the SO-DIMMs, that's got a lot of ribbon cables.

Aldehayyat: Yeah, we're aware of that, and I'll be honest, it is something that we really wanted to improve, and we tried to make the RAM more accessible, but there was just no real way to. I don't say it was impossible; it was just given the time and engineering resources we have, we just could not come up with a solution that worked. With the SSD, we were able to put on the flex and just read it around. With memory, you just can't do that because of signal integrity reasons. And trying to make an access hatch through the power supply just wasn't possible for safety reasons. So there's really no way. We couldn't come up with a solution, but maybe in the future we can come up with something,

Reckoning with hardware shortages and pricing

Freedman: I know in the blog post it says that there were some components you were barely able to source at all. Outside of memory, which components have been the most difficult to get for the Steam Machine?

Aldehayyat: Storage, obviously,

Freedman: You mentioned PCB, PCB materials.

Aldehayyat: Yeah. I mean, honestly, it's a little shocking right now. There are some shortages in plastics. There are some shortages in FR4, some capacitors. But all of those kind of pale in comparison to the memory and storage shortage. If this was a normal time, people would be concerned about these things, but given the memory and the supply shortage, this just doesn't really crack the top ten of problems. It's just kind of to show that really everything is constrained, but the memory and shortage overtake all of them. So that's really the primary focus.

Freedman: And the other interesting thing I found in sort of sourcing and building a design is that the blog post suggests you started sourcing parts somewhere in 2022, which suggests you've been at the Steam Machine for a few years. Are you able to talk about the general timeline of product development for the Steam Machine?

Griffais: The process starts very early. I mean, in terms of specific time frames, it's a little hard, you know, just because our memory is fried from working hard on trying to ship this thing. But you know, the design process, I think, probably started like three years ago, or so, when we were building machines from parts, trying to get at the right performance target. And then we started progressively moving to the next step, building it up as, like, a whole all-in-one thing, and then refining the form factor and all that. But from that point on, you're already starting to test the waters and getting in touch with suppliers, making sure that you're going to have multiple suppliers for the things that you're sure you're going to have, so it's definitely a long pipeline. But I would say plans for full-scale production of the object that you're looking at now is probably like a year or so.

Aldehayyat: I also think that the research and development, I guess we take more seriously here at Valve, and potentially some other places. Things don't go from "here's a presentation for a device," and then we start planning to make it. We first start by making some prototypes to convince ourselves that this actually makes sense, and there's an actual research phase that it's like, "OK, here are the technologies that we need to prove out, here are some prototypes we need, we think we need to make to make us believe that this device makes sense." There was never, during that phase, there was never really a plan to make a product. It was just kind of like gathering information, doing prototyping of critical technologies, proving them out, stuff like that, so that takes a while. And then after you do all that, you decide, OK, we want to make this thing happen. Let's start actually doing the development part of that, then that takes a year and a half, or something like that. So, depending on which, how you want to count things, it could have been three, four, five years, it could have been a year and a half, you know. But I would say it's just that we're constantly investigating different things, so it's kind of hard to put a timeline on it.

Griffais: For us, working on these things is very incremental and very gradual. So, in a sense, this all started 15 years ago when we got into hardware, because Steam Machine is actually one of the first things we worked on. The work on SteamOS that we started back then, you can draw a straight line through from that to where we are now: the work on inputs, even you know, the work on Steam Machine with OEMs, they taught us a bunch of stuff that we're leveraging right now. We're always trying to make sure that when we build something, we can reuse it in the future, and we don't have to start from scratch. And so, even back then, everything we were doing with SteamOS is fully represented in the current experience, and we're just building from here.

Windows support incoming

Freedman: Is Windows support still the same on Steam Deck? Will you be issuing new drivers?

Griffais: That's our goal. Right now, we're still working on certain drivers, you know, around Bluetooth and stuff, but that's definitely our goal. And we've been talking to AMD about the best way for users to get the graphics drivers as well, because I think it's pretty important that they can get at the latest fixes.

Aldehayyat: Yeah, but the model will be very similar to the way the Steam Deck Windows drivers work. It's going to take us a little bit of time after launch to get all the drivers lined up, but the general process of us publishing the drivers on our website will probably be the same.

Freedman: Is Valve still working on dual boot with Windows 11? I mean, the Windows resources page I just mentioned, it says the Steam Deck is capable, the OS installer wasn't ready yet.

Griffais: So it's something we're working towards. We don't have dual boot, an easy dual boot wizard plumbed right now. There's a few ways that you go about it, but right now, most of them include some manual steps where you repartition your disks and resize stuff by hand. We want to make that process easier in the future. But the thing that we're doing right now with SteamOS is we want to make sure that if someone builds a PC like a Steam machine, so something that has an AMD discrete GPU, and then whatever other parts they pick, they can choose whatever segment of GPU they want.

We're going to have a SteamOS USB install drive that they can just install SteamOS onto, so that they can have basically the same experience as the Steam Machine. It's pretty similar to how you would re-image a Steam Deck. But we want to make sure that if you're building from parts, that you have that option. So, we'll also be making that available at the same time.

Freedman: Will that mean at the same time as the Windows drivers, or—

Griffais: Just the product launch.

There's already SteamOS images out there that will work there, but we just want to make sure that we have one that has all the latest OS components that we're shipping at launch with Steam Machine, so that everything is ready from the get-go for that sort of experience.

Valve's new reservation system

Freedman: The reservation system you're using, I think it's the most radical one I've ever seen from Valve. I totally get why you're doing it. How'd you come up with that internally?

Griffais: Just lots of discussion. The reservation system that we originally came up with for the Steam Deck was also born of the same sort of discussion. We're talking about, "OK, here's the situation: how many units we have, what the user experience is going to be on purchase. Working back from that, how can we improve the user experience?" We see a lot of users stressed out about trying to secure supply for other products. We just see what's happening in the wild, and how people are frustrated with, like, not knowing where to get something, or having to periodically just recheck online retailers, trying to figure out.

I mean, my experience trying to buy PS5 kind of painted a lot of that stuff, in a sense. But the current iteration on the reservation system here, was just similar. We worked from, OK, we think the broad strokes of the system are good, but there's still an effect where people are rushing at the door, trying to refresh. Our websites might have problems, and then that seems unfair to people that run into that, right? We want to make sure that there's an even playing field initially, and then work from there. So, yeah, it's all I think based on discussions and user feedback.

Freedman: The blog post says that the people who get on the reservation queue, separate from the waitlist, could last through the end of the year. Is that all the first production run?

Griffais: We're constantly producing and trying to secure additional parts and stuff. There's not really discrete, you know, different runs and different segments, so it's a very linear thing. But for sure, depending on how many people sign up, it might extend into time frames that we're not really even sure of, because supply is so interesting.

Aldehayyat: It was just six months, as far as we were willing to make a prediction. As Pierre-Loup said, if there's more demand, we obviously are planning to make more, and so maybe there'll be another waitlist or something. But six months, we felt, is the appropriate amount of time to kind of put a cap on the waitlist, essentially,

Griffais: The interesting and I guess hard thing is that getting supply right now also means getting a wide variety of different prices, right? So it's possible that you would be able to make more, but in a way that the pricing ends up being different. And so we're still trying to figure that out, because if there's ever a bunch of people that want the machine, but the supply is not there on the back end, we'll have to make hard decisions about what are we doing to secure more supply, and does it still result with the product at this price, or would we have to rethink that.

Because we don't really know how the situation is going to continue to evolve. You know, maybe things are going to go back down, and then it's all good, and it can continue to go like that. But maybe not, and so I guess what we're trying to convey with this blog post is that it seems like all bets are off, and we're going to work through it just with the users as well.

[Interview ends]

The Internationale Computerspielesammlung (ICS), a German effort to assemble the world's largest publicly accessible video game archive, is being wound down after roughly €1.5 million in public funding expired at the end of April and the federal government declined to renew it. GamesWirtschaft reported on July 3rd that the project's shareholders voted unanimously to shut it down, leaving the future of its database of more than 60,000 cataloged titles unresolved. This decision comes the same week that Sony confirmed it’s ending physical PlayStation disc production.

The ICS held more than 60,000 games spread across cartridge, floppy disk, CD, DVD, and Blu-ray, alongside manuals, packaging, and hardware, assembled since 2012 from the USK (Germany's game-ratings authority), the Computerspielemuseum Berlin, the industry association Game, and the University of Potsdam. Its public online catalog launched in April 2019 with tens of thousands of entries. The physical holdings remain with the institutions that own them, and whether the shared database and its infrastructure survive is under legal and technical review, according to GamesWirtschaft.

Funding for the ICS came from the Berlin Senate and the federal government's culture commissioner and ran only through late April. Germany's Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR), which took responsibility for games policy in 2025, examined a model for permanent institutional funding and concluded it wasn’t economically viable given the scale of the work involved. Berlin economics senator Franziska Giffey had cautioned earlier in the year that support beyond April wasn't guaranteed.

A 2023 study by the Video Game History Foundation and Software Preservation Network found that 87% of classic games released in the U.S. are out of print and commercially unavailable, a survival rate the researchers put below that of American silent films. In October 2024, the U.S. Copyright Office refused for the fourth time since 2015 to grant a DMCA exemption that would let libraries share preserved games with remote researchers, siding with the Entertainment Software Association.

Meanwhile, fan-run archives face a different set of challenges. Myrient, a repository holding more than 385 TB of preserved games, was set to go offline in early 2026 as AI-driven demand drove up RAM, SSD, and hard-drive prices, before volunteers backed up the collection in full. The ICS shutdown coincides with Sony's confirmation that it will end physical PlayStation disc production in 2028, which will make any future archival attempts all the more difficult.

Sony's one-per-order purchase limit on the PS5 Disc Drive, widely cited this week as a response to panic buying after the company said it will end physical disc production for new PlayStation games in January 2028, has been on PlayStation Direct since at least March 2025. Archived captures of the product page cited by HotHardware carry the same wording, "Due to high demand, there is a limit of 1 per order," more than a year before Sony's announcement. Meanwhile, the largest petition against the disc cutoff sat beyond 74,000 signatures on the morning of July 4th, closing in on its 75,000 goal.

Sony did add something to the product page this week: a bolded notice stating that from January 2028, newly released PlayStation games will be sold on the PlayStation Store and at retailers in digital format only, and that discs for games released before that date will continue to play on supported consoles. We checked the live U.S. listing today and found both the new notice and the long-standing order limit, along with a line warning that household limits may apply.

The detachable drive, $79.99 at retail, is the only way to play physical games or Blu-ray movies on the PS5 Digital Edition and PS5 Pro, neither of which comes with one. eBay listings for the accessory reached $100 to $130 this week, according to HotHardware, which also noted that Best Buy stocks the drive at retail price with no order limit. Sony hasn't said whether it intends to keep manufacturing the drive after the disc cutoff, or how long the PlayStation Direct restriction will remain in place.

A Change.org petition organized by Jade Pearce, CEO of Canadian game retailer PNP Games, gathered more than 74,000 signatures in three days, and Push Square counted at least 15 separate petitions urging Sony to reverse course. The backlash has already spread beyond petitions, with various companies poking fun at Sony's decision, including GitHub, which announced that it'll begin offering CD-ROM copies of public repositories as a jab at the decision.

Regardless, Sony's disc manufacturing plans appear to be set in stone. PlayStation output accounts for roughly half of the volume at Sony DADC's plant in Thalgau, Austria, with new game disc orders making up around 20% of that share, CEO Dietmar Tanzer told Austrian broadcaster ORF in comments reported by Wccftech. The site's roughly 300 workers are being retrained to produce optical microlenses, with mass production of the new line set to begin in early 2027, a year before the disc cutoff takes effect.

Over the years, our internet-surfing machines have evolved to the point that it's now possible to run entire full-length PC games right inside a browser. The latest milestone in this impressive trajectory is a new, unofficial port of Half-Life 2 developed by Slqnt and 98006. It's the complete main campaign of the game, including the two episodic DLCs, accompanied by a host of features that you find on the official release.

The game is, in fact, running natively on your computer; there's no cloud streaming involved. Under the hood, the port is powered by WebGL 2, a JavaScript API that bypasses the browser's typical layout engine and talks directly to your GPU to execute graphics-intensive tasks. Then, WebAssembly helps translate C++ code from the Source Engine into JavaScript that the browser can natively understand.

For storage, the port relies on a virtual file system that calls compressed assets via high-speed web requests. You just need to let the cache build up upon first boot for a few minutes, then you're off to the races. The same method creates .sav files directly in the browser's cache or IndexedDB, which allows you to pick up where you left off, just as if you had actually installed the game on your computer natively.

This port also features the Source console integration, enabling you to pull up a fully functioning developer terminal that can accept classic commands. You can type in cheats to give yourself a gameplay boost or tweak the engine variables as per your liking. While you don't get Steam achievements here (understandably), the game's built-in achievements are still present and accessible through the menus.

We tried the game on three different devices: a Windows PC with a Ryzen 7 7700X and RX 6700 XT, a OnePlus 12 smartphone, and a modded Nintendo Switch running Android. As you'd expect, the computer ran it the best and without any hiccups. Since this is a very old, non-demanding game, we were able to max out all the settings and play in full screen while achieving over 100 FPS. Frankly, it looked beautiful.

The mobile experience didn't work for us, but other users have reported it performing well, so your mileage may vary. Some bugs, however, remain persistent on the ideal desktop experience as well, with many users pointing out a rather hilarious "zombie" glitch where characters' heads render improperly, leaving their eye sockets vacant like a zombie. Certain complex animations also fail to trigger during intense cutscenes.

Overall, this is one impressive project, but it remains unofficial, and that means it's subject to a DMCA takedown from Valve. The port is basically at the company's mercy at this point, but Valve is generally community-friendly when it comes to stuff like this. It took Slqnt and 98006 just three months to develop, and the fact that it has survived roughly two weeks on the internet means it might have precedent to stay.

It's also not the only port of its stature, you can play thousands of old games for free on DOS Zone, including GTA Vice City, and Quake III is also available as a standalone browser project. Copyrighted IP is the only hurdle for retro revivals like these since the talent from the developers, and the grunt from the hardware, is otherwise abundant. If Valve doesn't make Half-Life 3, the fans might as well milk the original games as much as possible

Buying and collecting games on your Steam account can be quite fun, and some people have taken this to the extreme, with the most expensive Steam library worth nearly $750,000 at current prices. Unfortunately, most of us do not have that kind of money to burn on digital games, which is why programmer and web developer Mike Wang built the Steam Summer Sale simulator. This website looks just like the Steam website, and you even have to “log in” with whatever Steam account name you want to make up. Once inside the page, you’ll find $100 in your wallet, and you can just add any game to the cart and check it out.

If you run out of cash, the wallet will automatically refill to $500, meaning you essentially have an unlimited amount of money to splurge on games. You can also click the + Add Funds button as many times as you want to see your wallet grow to millions of dollars. The website makes cute sounds every time you click the Add to Cart button, making it more inviting to keep adding games. And once you’re satisfied (or tired) from all the clicking, head on to the cart and click Continue to payment to see all the games get magically added to your library one by one with matching sound effects that make it feel like you won the jackpot.

Aside from getting the dopamine hit of adding games to your library, there’s also a list of 30 achievements you can hit. You may think these are easy, especially since you’re just essentially adding games to the cart and checking them out, but a couple of them require some dedication. One is the Exact Change achievement, which requires you to zero out your wallet. Since it automatically refills if a game’s “cost” is more than your balance, you have to crunch some numbers to make sure that your cart has the same amount as your wallet. The other one requires you to buy every game on the simulator website, which means a lot of clicking.

While the website might look convincing and have a ton of listed titles, it unfortunately does not have every game available on the Steam store. For example, it’s missing the $999 Steam Game that lasts for just 10 minutes.

The Steam Summer Sale simulator may feel like a nonsensical project, similar to the fake food delivery apps that are growing in popularity in South Korea. However, its creator said that they built it to get the dopamine hit of “buying” games on Steam without actually spending money. It’s also quite entertaining, especially with its sound effects and achievements, and I found myself spending several minutes on the website just trying to hit that Exact Change achievement, which is actually quite hard!

Perhaps the real Steam Machine was the friends we made along the way... is what enthusiast Matthew Brunelle might've said after realizing he already had one at home. Instead of buying Valve's new console for a frictionless experience, Matthew decided to turn his existing PC into the perfect couch-gaming setup, made possible by a really long HDMI cable, a Steam Controller 2, and, of course, Bazzite.

For the expectedly tech-savvy audience reading this, you might already be making fun of this dude for discovering cables, but hold on a second. Matthew's computer sits in his own room, where it serves as a desktop for work, while his TV sits in the living room. The easiest way to bridge that gap is actually wirelessly, streaming the games over Moonlight or Sunshine, or even Steam's native remote play functionality.

There will be a noticeable latency penalty with this setup that may or may not bother you depending on what you're playing. Moreover, you're just mirroring your PC's screen this way; it's not actually a console-like experience where the device wakes up and goes to sleep seamlessly. Not to mention, Matthew is running NixOS, so he has to manually hook up the cable and change the sound and display outputs each time.

In comes Bazzite — Matthew installed the Linux-based OS on a third SSD and plopped it into his computer. Inside, in Steam's "Big Picture" mode, Bazzite automatically handles outputs upon rebooting, switching to the correct display, which is his TV, and remembers to use the HDMI out for sound. This still wasn't enough, however, until two more things came along.

First is the 50-foot-long fiber-optic HDMI 2.1 cable that can carry the signal over long distances without degradation or latency. It costs $75 and sits there, running along the molding of the house. On the other end, it plugs into a TCL Roku TV that's limited to 60 Hz, but Matthew plans to upgrade to an LG C5 OLED really soon, which should help saturate that cable's bandwidth, especially now that HDMI 2.1 officially supports AMD GPUs on Linux.

The last piece of the puzzle is the new Steam Controller, which ticks all the boxes for our resident MacGyver. It features symmetrical sticks, large touchpads, back buttons, and excellent compatibility with Steam and Linux. Matthew even mentioned that the DualSense was already good enough for him in this regard, but the Steam Controller 2 is even more comfortable and more reliable, since it doesn't drop the connection at all.

With everything in place, here's how the setup works. Matthew still has to boot his PC and select Bazzite in the boot menu. From that point, Bazzite automatically outputs to his TV in the living room and uses the living room speakers for sound. When Matthew is done with a session, he puts the system to sleep, and it wakes back up right where he left it. Sleep states on Linux-based gaming distros feel just like a console.

When it's time for work, he restarts his PC and boots back into NixOS, but Matthew finds himself leaving his computer in Bazzite more and more since it's so seamless. He even suggests switching to Bazzite's built-in desktop mode for work if he can't find a convenient solution to the dual-boot dilemma. Speaking of which, the blog post mentions that he is trying to set up hibernate-to-disk on Bazzite.

If he gets that working, Matthew could save his exact game state, reboot into NixOS to do desktop work, and then reboot back into Bazzite later right where he left off. There's still a manual element, but the transition becomes much more seamless as everything within Bazzite no longer needs to be shut down. Matthew still recommends the Steam Machine for an out-of-the-box experience similar to his, but for him, "a 50ft HDMI cable will do."

Brian “Biscuit” Watson, a game developer whose work spans four decades, recently went on YouTube to tell some of his stories. One of the most interesting revelations he shared on The Retro Collective was the existence of the PlayStation 1 controller prototype, called the PlayStation Puga, that housed an entire PlayStation 1 console. Watson said that this “handheld” was specifically built for the Brazilian market, which had tight import regulations, and was also intended to be manufactured within the country. It was also supposed to come with 4GB of memory that could hold 10 games, and four AA-sized batteries apparently power it and connect to your TV via an included cable.

The prototype was working really well, but it encountered issues with game titles that were intended for inclusion. “The unfortunate problem is that Sony licensing couldn’t get their act together about the royalty terms for each of the games. So, it’s like they’re trying to get in touch with Rockstar and a few other places, and they were wanting way too much in the way of royalties,” Watson said. “But what really stuck in my craw with that one was even if it was a Sony game, they had to negotiate with a separate unit of Sony, and they were never happy about how much royalty they were getting.”

Since the gaming controller and console combo was designed to sell at a low price, they expected to make only 10 cents per unit sold and were unhappy with the pricing. Since it seemed Sony would not be able to ship any games with the PS1 controller console, it canceled the entire project.

Watson actually showed the completed controller to the present audience, but it unfortunately doesn’t run. It does boot into the debug stub, but he doesn’t have any of the other required software to make it run. Still, it’s equipped with an Arm-based processor running at 650 MHz and emulated the PlayStation 1 pretty well. It also lasted about 20 hours on a single set of four AA batteries, which is an impressive feat for the time (and still is today). Nevertheless, the project was not wasted at the emulator built for that system eventually found its way into the Sony Xperia Play.

An unlucky gamer has taken to Reddit after their brand-new Steam Machine was hit with a "red line of death" after just 20 minutes of use. u/me_hill posted on the r/steammachine subreddit, saying that they played No Man’s Sky for just five minutes and then updated the machine before it bricked itself. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that the Redditor could do much to troubleshoot the issue. The Steam website says that their particular issue, which is marked by the right half of the LED bar turning into a breathing red light paired with a solid red light on the indicator LED, indicates GPU failure, a possibly fatal issue harkening back to the Xbox 360's Red Ring of Death.

Well, the Steam Machine was pretty cool for the 20 minutes that it worked from r/steammachine

Valve was only able to produce a limited number of Steam Machine units for its initial run, which is why it had to resort to a randomized queue to deter scalpers. While the company did not say how many consoles it had available, it’s likely still in the thousands (if not tens of thousands), meaning there’s some chance that it will ship units that will fail within the first year. For now, it seems that this Redditor’s post is an isolated incident and it’s unclear what caused the failure. u/me_hill said that they already put in a ticket to Steam support, but they haven’t updated yet on whether the company has responded already.

The Steam Machine is one of the most anticipated console releases in the past few years, which has been delayed for several months. It was also released at a relatively high price of $,1049, making it even more expensive than the PlayStation 5 Pro, as Valve cannot afford to subsidize the hardware with video game sales. It was initially thought that the living room PC console would launch at around $750, but as the company announced it amid a memory shortage, its engineers said that the company had to increase the price by around the same level that the Steam Deck experienced in May 2026.

This is certainly a disappointment for u/me_hill, who probably initially felt quite lucky as they were one of the selected few given the privilege of buying the first batch of Steam Machines. In an ironic twist of fate, they were also incredibly unlucky to become one of the first victims of the “red line of death,” an early nickname for the failure and a nod to the “red ring of death” that indicated a critical hardware failure on the Xbox 360 launched around 20 years ago. Nevertheless, other Redditors commented that this is par for the course for customers who buy the first run of a product, with the Redditor themselves saying, “That’s early adoption, I guess.”

We’re hoping that Valve can address this issue for u/me_hill as soon as possible, and that they don’t have to wait months before they can get their hands on a replacement unit, despite its limited stock. In the meantime, they’ll have to settle with their existing equipment (or maybe even get one of the best budget gaming laptops instead) while they’re waiting for their Steam Machine to be fixed.

Yesterday, Sony revealed that the PlayStation Store will be shutting down for PS3 and PS Vita consoles in July 2027. The irony seemed to be lost on the company, pairing up a disc-killing announcement for the future of PlayStation with news that literally serves as proof of why that's a bad idea. Regardless of the rationale, digital archivists are now kicking into gear to preserve PS3 game data with whatever time they have left, and it seems like RPCS3 is leading the awareness campaign.

RPCS3 is a huge name in the emulation scene. These guys are responsible for the most prominent PS3 emulator out there right now, having recently made a breakthrough in performance for all tiers of hardware. RPCS3 is open source, so naturally the project gravitates towards a preservationist culture where everything must be protected for future generations to come.

Emulators are only as good as the software available to run on them, so these efforts are inextricably tied together. The RPCS3 team suggests using no-intro.org, which is a database that tracks everything that needs to be saved. It doesn't directly host any ROMs; rather, it hosts metadata such as cryptographic signatures (hashes like CRC32, MD5, SHA-1), exact file sizes, serial numbers, and revision histories.

It serves as a ledger for the community, so it knows what has already been verified and backed up, and what still needs to be found before it's permanently removed from storefronts. RPCS3 is actually built around no-intro.org since it features automated integrity checks for PSN content. It can check your dumped .pkg file and tell you whether it's corrupt and precisely what's missing if it is.

For instance, to troubleshoot a niche, digital-only PS3 game that doesn't emulate well on RPCS3, the team would need to look at the original, optimized copy of the game first to understand how it should work. Since the game isn't popular, there's a high chance no one ever bothered to dump it — no-intro.org actively tries to prevent this from happening thanks to its contributors knowing exactly what to archive.

Once PSN goes down for PS3 next year, we will be at risk of losing a goldmine of content that was never preserved in its physical form. With the state of the gaming and hardware industry in general, there hasn't been a warning call like this in ages that has reminded people just how illusory an all-digital future could be.

Hardware is so expensive right now that even researchers from Google are suggesting cloud gaming as the way forward, or that leasing silicon would be more viable than buying it. PlayStation stopping disc production in 2028, with Xbox rumored to follow, means that it won't be long before ownership becomes an ephemeral concept cloaked by debates on efficiency and convenience, all while the actual art itself becomes lost media.

Microsoft is reportedly working on a feature that would enable the digitization of disc-based titles, according to the Verge. This would assist players in playing older games on newer consoles, especially if Microsoft follows Sony's PlayStation in abandoning physical game production.

According to the report, employees at Xbox are testing the "Disc2Digital" feature, which will work on Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S discs, but not the original Xbox or Xbox 360. This restriction is likely due to Microsoft's plans to move more games online with the Xbox One.

Discs will continue to work after you've enabled the digital entitlement, but you'll lose your digital rights to the game if you transfer the disc to someone else by loaning it or selling it. The digital games will also reportedly be able to be streamed if they're part of Xbox Play Anywhere.

The Verge also claims that some Xbox One games may not have the feature, quoting a Microsoft warning to testers: "It all depends on how and when the disc was manufactured and it may not have the features we need for this program."

But reporter Tom Warren says Microsoft hasn't made a final call on whether Project Helix, the next-generation Xbox, will come with a disc drive. On the Series X, Microsoft has options with and without the disc drive, though it had one at launch. If Microsoft does opt to go all-digital, this might help soothe some wounds for Xbox players who rely heavily on a physical collection and want to play on the new system.

It would still be a step back from backwards compatibility on the Xbox Series X and Series S, however, which includes most Xbox One games, many Xbox 360 games, and over 50 original Xbox games, many of which you can play with the original disc.

Project Helix is also heavily rumored to play PC games from third-party launchers.

Sony's announcement this morning that it would stop producing first and third-party discs for the PlayStation in 2028 drew vocal opposition from fans who prefer physical media or preserving console games. PlayStation has previously detailed (PDF, see page 10) that approximately 8 out of 10 PlayStation games are bought digitally on the PS4 and PS5 (78% for the fiscal year 2025, but as high as 85% in Q4).

The PlayStation maker's plans have led some analysts to believe the PS6 will launch in 2028.

Some developers and publishers aren't waiting for the change. Take Two Interactive and Rockstar Games is set to launch Grand Theft Auto 6 on November 19, and it will not sell the game on a disc. If you buy a box at retail, it will have a download code.

Well, it's official: Sony has just announced that it will stop production of PlayStation game discs starting in January 2028. After January 2028, no more game discs will be produced, and games will only be available through the PlayStation Store and "at retailers in digital formats only." It's a move that anyone could have guessed was coming but which is nonetheless frustrating to many fans, as it essentially rings the death knell for physical media in cutting-edge gaming.

I say "anyone could have guessed" because you'd have to have your head in the sand to ignore all the factors pointing this way. The biggest of such factors is arguably the reality that Blu-ray drive production has sharply wound down outside of game consoles. But there's also the fact that the vast majority of games purchased today are already purchased digitally; in Q4 2025, 85% of PlayStation games were purchased digitally, and if you zoom out to look at the entire US video game market, the PC and mobile markets are already effectively 100% digital.

That's what Sony is talking about when it says it's making the change "in response to shifting trends in consumer preference." Still, the majority isn't everyone, and there are absolutely die-hard gamers out there who demand physical copies because a digital license isn't ownership. All you need to look at to understand this stark reality is the incident just three days ago where PlayStation announced that it is removing over 500 movies from customers' accounts in the UK and Europe because of an expired licensing agreement.

Defenders of the move will point to the aforementioned 100% digital nature of PC gaming as a counterpoint against the pushback to the death of physical media. But there's a key difference, and that's that PC gaming is done on PCs, opening up tools like backups and private servers for game preservation. This is possible on consoles too, of course, but it's a lot more work.

In January 2028, when the move takes effect, the PlayStation 5 will have just passed its seventh birthday; obviously, the PlayStation 6 will have either just launched or be on the horizon, depending on whose leaks you believe. Those same leaks have claimed that the PlayStation 6 would have the option for a detachable or optional disc drive, and that might still be true, but if so, it would exist exclusively for backward compatibility reasons. If that ends up being the case, we will have to applaud Sony for taking care of its customers that way; it would have been just as easy to leave PS4 and PS5 owners with large physical libraries in the lurch, with no way to play their old games on the new machine. Of course, if those rumors of an optional drive turn out to be false, "leaving players in the lurch" is exactly what Sony will be doing.

It's impossible to deny that there is a certain satisfaction in cracking open a plastic case, pulling out a physical disc, and inserting it into the console to select your game. It's also undeniable that it's really nice to be able to scroll a list of all my games and then click on any of them and be playing in seconds. The cold truth is that digital game downloads are more convenient and easier to manage for everyone at every step of the process, and so this move was coming eventually, no matter what.

However, it is darkly ironic that Sony announced this news in the very same tweet where it announced that it's shutting down the PlayStation Store on the PlayStation 3 and PS Vita systems. After the first attempt at this was walked back in 2021 after community outcry, the company has decided five years later that it simply has to cut off support because the old storefronts supposedly can't be updated to support "modern commerce systems," including contemporary global payment processing security standards. There's no technical reason that's true, of course; the reality is simply that Sony doesn't want to continue supporting these nearly 20-year-old machines anymore.

That's wholly understandable, but at the same time, it really does provide the perfect backdrop for the death of discs, as later PlayStation consoles can't play PS3 games, neither disc nor digital. That means that, when the PlayStation Store for PS3 finally dies in July 2027, there will be no official way to acquire and play those games... besides used discs, of course. As for PlayStation 6, that stands to be one of the first consoles to never have a used game market, a momentous end of an era.

Dagupan City, located in northern Philippines and about 100 miles north of Metro Manila, just banned all “Pisonet” computer rental shops in the town. According to the Mayor’s Facebook Post, the city passed an ordinance banning these establishments and others that offer computer rental services “for the safety of the youth.” She alleged that these shops “distract students from their studies, make them waste their time, and even lead a few to situations of abuse and other dangers.” The move comes a week after a school shooting incident in central Philippines resulted in three student deaths and 15 more receiving injuries, two of which were critical, an event that has been linked to video game violence.

“Pisonet,” a portmanteau of “Piso,” which stands for one Peso, and “net” for internet, are affordable computer rental shops that allow anyone, both young and old, to rent a computer to play games and access the internet. These establishments are crucial for many families who still do not have access to a computer inside their home. Many young people also use these services to play online games with their friends. However, the school shooting incident, which was perpetrated by kids aged 14 and 15, put these shops in the limelight, especially as many adults have started to blame violent computer games for the incident.

Senator Risa Hontiveros is spearheading an investigation looking into the shooting, and it was discovered that one of the perpetrators was allegedly addicted to the violent game Gorebox. While the Senator did not blame the title for causing the violence, she was concerned that extremists are using them as platforms to “brainwash and radicalize children.”

Other experts agree with Hontiveros, with cybersecurity analyst Art Samaniego Jr. telling local newspaper PhilStar that the authorities “should look more closely at the online communities and networks that may have urged the young suspects to commit violence.” Unfortunately, many members of the general public have begun concluding that it was the video game that directly caused the perpetrators to become violent, not the other people who are targeting vulnerable youths playing the game.

Because of this investigation, Gorebox has been temporarily banned from the Philippines, with both Google and Steam taking it down from the Philippine versions of the platforms. Despite that, these remain easily accessible through proxy networks and VPNs. Although the Dagupan City council did not directly link the shutdown of Pisonet shops within their jurisdiction, the decision and the move came so close to the incident that one cannot help but think that they are related.

The Entertainment Software Association has told a California Senate committee that private and community servers are illegal and amount to piracy, which would be news to anyone who has downloaded Minecraft's server files from the official website. The ESA gave its opinion while opposing AB 1921, the state’s “Stop Killing Games”-backed preservation bill, with ESA vice president of state government affairs Jennifer Gibbons making the claim about software that publishers provide themselves, since Mojang offers a Minecraft server for free download on its own site. The bill then failed the committee by four votes to three with four abstentions, though it was granted reconsideration.

AB 1921, the Protect Our Games Act, would require publishers of server-dependent games to give players 60 days’ notice before shutting one down, then provide a playable version, a patch, or a refund. Assemblymember Chris Ward, who authored the bill, raised community servers during the hearing as one way to keep games running after support ends. The California Assembly passed it 43 to 16 in May before it moved to the Senate. Gibbons said the ESA considers such servers “piracy,” and argued that community servers are not affiliated with the publisher and don’t uphold the same trust and safety standards.

Mojang publishes a dedicated Minecraft server as a Java file and documents how to run it, while Valve distributes SteamCMD and dedicated-server tools for hundreds of titles, letting players run their own match servers on their own systems. Running a server for a game you’ve bought obviously sits inside what those publishers permit, and for Minecraft, it’s Mojang’s own recommended setup for free multiplayer.

Minecraft isn't the exception here. Palworld, Valheim, ARK: Survival Ascended, and Counter-Strike 2 all ship official dedicated-server software that runs on a spare PC or a rented VPS. The line the ESA steps over is a technical one, since running a publisher's own server binary is a licensed activity, not the unauthorized copy its piracy comparison implies.

Gibbons cited the U.S. Trade Representative’s Notorious Markets reports as precedent for the piracy claim, which have named private servers as infringement hubs. Those entries, such as Warmane and Firestorm in the 2018 report, were World of Warcraft servers that let players skirt past Blizzard's subscription, which is an entirely different scenario from running a free-to-play multiplayer server on a game that’s already been paid for.

Those WoW servers exist only because Blizzard never released its own, leaving operators to rebuild the backend from scratch through reverse engineering, which is what drew those copyright claims. AB 1921 compels nothing of the sort; its remedies let a publisher comply by releasing official server tools — exactly what Mojang already does with Minecraft — and a company distributing its own server software obviously can't be infringing its own IP.

Responding to comments made by Ward that private servers help to keep games alive, Gibbons said, “They’re illegal. They are not in any way affiliated with Microsoft. Microsoft, for Minecraft, has gotten a lot of criticism because of those community servers not employing the same safety standards that Microsoft does on their Minecraft servers.”

Gibbons also referenced two pending lawsuits against private servers, but didn’t name them, nor did the ESA identify the cases in its written statement, which said private servers infringe publishers’ IP rights and that they reserve the right to act against them.

AB 1921 builds on California's earlier AB 2426, which requires sellers to disclose that digital purchases are licenses rather than owned copies. Back in April, a brief 30-day DRM check-in left some PlayStation buyers facing lost access to games that they had paid for due to this.

The appetite for retro computing grows ever larger, and there are probably hundreds of thousands of homebrew software projects targeting machines from the last century. However, few of those are full-featured, 32-bit, and GUI-driven operating systems that can fit in a single floppy, with some modern conveniences to boot. Enter the upcoming HamsterOS, set for release in November.

HamsterOS is seemingly targeted at using PCs from the 386/486 era, along with DOS software. After loading from the floppy disk, it'll present a user interface with most every commonly used utility: a notepad, image viewer, calculator, file finder, drive icons, and a window manager. The file browser should have up to five windows once, complete with per-type icons.

Crucially, HamsterOS includes an in-kernel VM86 DOS box, and a FreeDOS fallback for programs that might not run well within. Other noteworthy tech aspects include support for FAT 12/16/32 with read-back verification, dedicated format and disk utilities, a partition manager, and even SCSI diagnostic tools. The operating system defaults to 16-color VGA resolution, but the ability to use 256 colors exists as a diagnostic option. There's a neat fallback to VGA as a safe mode after three failed crashes, too.

Mean Hamster, the company developing HamsterOS, didn't publish any sort of mission statement, but judging by the feature set and integration with its HamsterWeazle floppy image management utility (for use with GreaseWeazle drives), it seems to be a more practical means of managing and/or using machines from the era.

The list of hardware support is what you'd expect for 1980 and 1990's era machines, comprising ATA IDE and CD-ROM, ISA floppies, serial and PS/2 mice (with wheel support, too). The only supported soundcard is the Sound Blaster 16, though loadable drivers should let tinkerers expand the list; plus it's possible that the built-in FreeDOS support allows for using most any type of hardware regardless.

The multitasking architecture is cooperative, meaning it's somewhat old-school in its approach, with each program in charge of regularly yielding control back to the OS. This is different and inferior at face value than the now-standard preemptive multitasking, but it ought also to allow for generally increased responsiveness with slow disks, lower RAM usage, and broader compatibility with DOS applications. To keep things running smoothly, HamsterOS includes I/O stall detection if it's frozen for over 8 seconds. HamsterOS isn't just meant to run DOS stuff, though, as it has its own app format.

Mean Hamster flatly says that "HamsterOS is well past the 'can it boot' stage" and that most every listed feature is already implemented. The company says it's focusing on stability and performance improvements as well as bugfixes. It seems to be calling the OS a "product," so it seems likely that it'll be commercial and closed-source, unlike most projects of this type. A good tool is always worth paying for, though.

Enterprising enthusiast Wenting has turned an M5Stack PaperS3 dev kit with an e-ink screen into a more-or-less fully functional Game Boy. If you're not a hardware hacker yourself, there's a fair chance you've never heard of Wenting Zhang or Modos Labs. The engineer's "Wenting Channel" on YouTube has been a favorite of niche tech nerds for a long time, showcasing all kinds of hardware hacking expertise. Zhang spent the last several years turning that expertise into Modos Labs, a company whose high-refresh e-Ink displays we've covered before.

Okay, it won't play real cartridges, the sound is kind of jank, and the performance isn't always full speed. Still, this is quite an achievement for a few reasons. The PaperS3 is an e-Ink dev kit, not really a commercial product. It's intended for prototyping and, well, exactly this sort of hardware hacking. A key detail to understand is that this device isn't powered by some multi-core Rockchip or Allwinner SoC, but rather by an ultra-low-cost ESP32-S3 microcontroller with just two cores running at clock rates measured in hundreds of MHz, not GHz. Moreover, its e-Ink display is not really intended for the kind of smooth refresh normally required for playing video games, yet Zhang pulled it off.

To understand how this Game Boy emulator is even possible, you have to understand Zhang's breakthrough with E-ink hardware, which he originally developed for his open-source monitor project, the Modos Flow. He has a whole video explaining the tech, but the summary is basically that he replaced the display controller of a typical e-Ink display with a powerful FPGA so that he could treat every single pixel as an independent display region and then only update the parts of the screen that are actually changing each frame.

How, then, did he achieve this on the embedded controller in the PaperS3? It's only possible because the Game Boy screen is very low resolution by modern standards at just 160x144 pixels. The screen on the PaperS3 is 960x540, so he was able to multiply the resolution by three to give him enough room for dithering to reproduce the four possible shades of the original Game Boy screen. This process takes up almost the entirety of the second CPU core in the ESP32, leaving just enough room for audio processing while the actual emulation happens on the first CPU core.

The end result is a very convincing facsimile of the Game Boy's display, except instead of being a tiny and dim LCD, it's a razor-sharp, crystal-clear e-Ink display. Zhang even implemented some quality-of-life features, such as partial Bluetooth LE controller support as well as dedicated quick-save and quick-load touchscreen 'buttons' to save the emulator's state. You can even load a state directly from the front-end, allowing you to instantly resume where you left off when you have to stop.

That's not to say the project is flawless, though. For one thing, it relies on touchscreen controls with no haptic feedback because the device simply doesn't have the requisite hardware for it. Perhaps more pressingly, the PaperS3 only has a simple piezo buzzer for sound, and while Zhang pulled off some real hackery to get recognizable Game Boy audio out of the mono buzzer (by using pseudo-polyphony like a ZX Spectrum hacker), it doesn't quite sound like a real Game Boy. The hacker also doesn't discuss the battery life of the device while running his emulator; given that he's pushing both CPU cores of the microcontroller to their limits, and also that e-Ink displays are actually quite power-thirsty when driven at 60 Hz, we can't imagine it's great.

If you're keen to try out "Paper Boy S3", Zhang says he's uploaded it to the M5Burner tool that serves as both a firmware flasher and app store for the M5Stack devices. However, as he notes himself in his video on the project, PaperS3 is actually already discontinued by the manufacturer, so you might have a hard time getting hold of one if you don't already. Still, the project serves as a fascinating demo for what can be done with ultra-low-end hardware and a direct counterpoint to at least one of the weaknesses of e-Ink displays.

Sony has unceremoniously informed its PlayStation customers in the United Kingdom that 551 movies from StudioCanal will be removed from their accounts on September 1, 2026. If you bought any of the films included in this list, you'll no longer be able to access them. There is no workaround, no method to offload them to another device; just absolute, emotionless deletion that doesn't even offer refunds.

The lineup includes some truly legendary movies such as Terminator 2, Apocalypse Now, Mulholland Drive, Moonlight, and Dawn Till Dusk — essentially every film that StudioCanal distributed in the UK. Sony cites licensing agreements between it and the French company as the reason behind the sudden removal. The announcement doesn't include any other details beyond the list of the affected films.

Sony began selling movies and shows on the PlayStation Store in 2008. During the PS3 era, you could actually transfer the content to view on other devices, but that feature was removed on the PS4. In 2021, after the PS5 had launched, Sony stopped selling films and TV series entirely on PSN, which meant that it likely wouldn't renew contractual agreements with studios and distributors going forward.

The only exception to this rule was in 2023, when Sony began a similar deletion spree of Discovery Network shows but signed a new licensing deal to keep them on the platform. It remains to be seen whether public backlash can usher in a similar response for StudioCanal movies this time. You might not have heard its name before, but the studio is responsible for bringing countless popular movies to the UK.

For now, this is yet another distressing reminder of the digital precedent corporations have set for us. You no longer truly own any digital content you purchase; rather, it's just being licensed to you indefinitely. And you agree to this precedent "willingly" when you accept all those terms and conditions that veil ownership rights under fine print.

The moment the provider decides it's not viable to maintain said content, you're at risk of losing access to something you already paid for. It's like a subscription service with extra steps — as if people aren't growing wary enough of those already — except it was never advertised like that.

Despite Valve’s efforts to prevent scalpers from taking advantage of the Steam Machine’s limited supply, there are still a few opportunists out there who are taking the risk of selling the pre-order slot that they have won. A quick search for “Steam Machine” on eBay would pull up results for pre-order slots sold at a significant premium above Valve’s own $1,049 retail price.

We see various listings for the 512GB version selling between $1,363.70 to $2,800 — a 30% to 167% premium. Scalper prices for the 2TB version are far more egregious, with listings priced between $2,399 and $2,899, making it 93% to 140% more expensive than buying it directly from the Steam Store.

Valve has already anticipated this event, especially given the massive interest in the Steam Machine and limited supply. This has happened multiple times before, especially with the arrival of the PlayStation 5 and every Nvidia GPU launch since the 30 series. To avoid frustration among legitimate gamers who couldn’t score a console during the first run of pre-orders but see several listings from third-party sellers with excruciatingly tall markups, Valve set up a randomized reservation system to make buying the Steam Machine as fair as possible.

“A launch that starts at a specific day and time tends to reward bots, people with fast internet connections, talented gaming fingers for quick F5/refresh reactions, and those who can schedule their life around that moment. By accepting reservation signups over the course of a few days, without any incentive to be first, we're hoping to take away some of that friction,” the company said on the Steam Machine FAQ section. “The longer timeframe also allows us to do some extra validation on the signups to make sure they're real accounts, with only one per household.”

There are some stringent requirements before a Steam account can be considered for the privilege of buying a Steam Machine. This includes: a Steam account in good standing, a Steam purchase on or before April 27, 2026, and only one Steam Machine per household. These criteria will make it quite difficult for professional scalpers to scoop up multiple Steam Machine units and sell them at a premium on the used market. Despite that, it seems a few people are willing to trade their slot for cash and have put their reservations up for sale on eBay.

If you weren’t lucky enough to secure a Steam Machine reservation, you might get tempted to pick one up from these scalpers. However, we strongly advise against that, as you’re taking several risks. For one, there is no guarantee that the seller you’re talking to is legitimate. Even though they may have 100% rating, it’s quite easy to game the system to achieve this. You might end up getting scammed out of your hard-earned cash, especially if they ask for payment first before shipping the item.

While being among the first to get a Steam Machine might bring a good feeling, you shouldn’t let FOMO dictate your spending decisions. In fact, it might even be better to wait a little longer because the first batch of Steam Machines will only have one 16GB stick of RAM, meaning it won’t have the advantages of dual-channel memory. While there’s no guarantee that future releases will use two 8GB sticks instead, Valve said this may change.

Last fall, a family member asked me for help with an older PC, which was trying to run Windows 10 and several programs on a cramped 110 GB SSD. At first, I figured I could clone the boot drive onto a more spacious drive so the OS and programs had more space to stretch out.

But the thought of juggling USB enclosures or shuffling drives in and out of my desktop filled me with dread as I pictured sitting there for hours, getting the system back up and running. So I looked into getting an M.2 SSD cloner, and was surprised to see they can be found for less than $50. And Rosewill’s upgraded Rosewill M.2 NVMe Cloner + Eraser, which just dropped down to its lowest-ever price of $47, is even more handy than a basic cloner, also offering four one-touch offline erase modes, or all your data deletion needs.

• Check out this deal at Amazon

I don't love the plastic shell of Rosewill's cloner and eraser, but it's one of the more affordable options with these capabilities. I own the stepped-down model that doesn’t have the erase function (also on sale for $39, and using it is pretty straightforward. You plug in the included USB-C power adapter, put your source drive in the left slot, the destination drive in the right slot, press the power button on the back, and a few logos light up, letting you know you're ready to go. Press the clone button on the top, and drive cloning will commence (provided your destination is the same size or larger than your source).

That's assuming you want to do an offline clone. But because I needed resize the partition between the old 110 GB and the newer Team Group 512 GB SSD, I used the second included USB-C cable and connected my Rosewill cloner to my laptop and powered up the device. Both drives were recognized in Windows within seconds, so I fired up the excellent free DiskGenius software, cloned the old partition to a new drive with a few clicks, and then used the software to drag the boot partition to the full size of the new drive. The whole process took just a few minutes, since the Rosewill cloner supports 20 Gbps USB, and I wasn't exactly copying a huge partition.

The Rosewill cloner is also handy for just checking the contents of old M.2 drives you may have lying around. But if that's all you need, you can buy an NVMe enclosure or a single-drive dock. I also own a version of this model from Suitok, which costs $21.

More Prime Day Tech Deals

Join the Tom's Hardware deals Discord for up-to-the-minute hardware deals.

Best Tech and PC deals | Best gaming PC deals | Best RAM combo deals | Best 3D printer deals | Best RAM deals | Best gaming laptop deals | Best monitor deals | Best Wi-Fi Router deals | Best GPU deals | Best SSD deals | Best hard drive HDD deals | Best CPU deals | Best gaming chair deals | Best PC building tool deals | Best PC peripherals deals | Best filament and resin deals | Best motherboard deals | Best CPU cooler deals | Best PC case deals | Best Dell and Alienware deals | Best USB charger deals | Best gaming and productivity laptop deals under $1,000 | Best laptop PC deals

SOLD OUT: As expected, this deal was extremely popular and has now sold out. Keep an eye on our live blog to stay informed when hot deals like this one arise.

The Nintendo Switch 2 has seen several price increases in recent months. Right now, however, you can score a brand new console for just $399 if you're a new customer at the Amazon outlet website Woot with code CHEAPSWITCH2.

If you're a returning Woot customer, you can still save $30 off MSRP with the same code, bringing the price to just $419.

• Check out this deal at Woot

As noted, Woot is Amazon's outlet website, so you'll sometimes see used, open box, or factory reconditioned items. However, this item is brand new and sealed. As you can imagine, there's a limit of one per customer, and we expect this deal to sell out extremely quickly.

The Nintendo Switch 2 is Nintendo's ultra-popular handheld gaming system. The console comes with a 7.9-inch 1080p screen, and it can be docked with a TV for 4K gaming at up to 120 fps. The Joy-Con 2 controllers (included in the purchase) can be used attached or detached for flexibility.

The console comes with 256GB of internal storage and supports expansion through microSD Express cards. Obviously, if you stack up a few titles, you might want to think about buying some extra microSD Express storage.

The best deal right now is this Samsung P9, which is down to just $40 right now. Again, act fast, as there's no guarantee how long this deal will last.

As noted, this is an amazingly good deal on the Switch 2, even if you just use the code for returning customers to score one for $419. If you're new to Woot or Amazon and get one for $399, however, it's an absolute bargain.

More Prime Day Tech Deals

Join the Tom's Hardware deals Discord for up-to-the-minute hardware deals.

Best Tech and PC deals | Best gaming PC deals | Best RAM combo deals | Best 3D printer deals | Best RAM deals | Best gaming laptop deals | Best monitor deals | Best Wi-Fi Router deals | Best GPU deals | Best SSD deals | Best hard drive HDD deals | Best CPU deals | Best gaming chair deals | Best PC building tool deals | Best PC peripherals deals | Best filament and resin deals | Best motherboard deals | Best CPU cooler deals | Best PC case deals | Best Dell and Alienware deals | Best USB charger deals | Best gaming and productivity laptop deals under $1,000 | Best laptop PC deals

Price hikes! Get your price hikes here! Hot on the heels of Apple's upward push of dollar figures, ganging up with Framework, and harnessing the disillusion caused by the price of Valve's Steam Machine... It's now Microsoft's turn. The ailing division is enacting yet another increase to the price of the Xbox Series consoles, at $100 more for the 512 GB versions and $150 more for the 1 TB model. The pricing will come into effect in roughly a month and change, on August 1st.

The firm is also killing the 2 TB version of the Xbox Series X, in an echo of Apple slicing away the higher-RAM variants of its Mac Studio computers. If you were on the fence about buying one of those, it would be wise to rush, as at the current price of "only" around $799.99, stocks are unlikely to last. Here's the new pricing, in all its glory:

• Xbox Series S, 512 GB, Digital Edition: $499.99
• Xbox Series S, 1 TB, Digital Edition: $599.99
• Xbox Series X, 1 TB, Digital Edition: $749.99
• Xbox Series X, 1 TB: $799.99

Microsoft is also adding a few options for payment and alternative purchases. Buy Now, Pay Later for splitting purchases across short-term installments for consoles bought at the Microsoft store, confirming rumors of a partnership with well-known payment processor Klarna. If that's not quite your jam, there's also interest-free 12-month financing available at Amazon for Xbox hardware.

The company is expanding Xbox trade-ins, stating that it's "working with retail partners" to enable players to sell their consoles to stores for cash or store credit. This isn't a new thing in the gaming world, as GameStop and Amazon have historically had this feature, but Microsoft's wording makes it sound like the program will be expanded to more retailers. As always, you can buy a certified refurbished console from the Microsoft Store and a number of retailers.

The highly anticipated Steam Machine is being shot down by flak due to its high release price, but all of a sudden, the $1,349 on ask for the 2 TB version doesn't sound so absurd, considering the superior hardware, gigantic game library, and low prices for games. Following Microsoft's logic, the upswing for the now-dead 2 TB version of the Xbox Series X would be $300, putting it at a nice round $1,099.99. Are you not entertained, if not excited, to be living in such interesting times?

Riot Games has announced that it plans to let players stop its Vanguard anti-cheat from loading at Windows start-up, the company has announced, ending the boot-time behavior the kernel driver has had since 2020. The new mode, Vanguard On-Demand, loads the driver only when a Riot game launches and unloads it on exit, made possible by a Windows 11 25H2 feature that records driver activity even while Vanguard is dormant. It works only on PCs that also have UEFI Secure Boot, TPM 2.0, Virtualization-Based Security (VBS), Hypervisor-Protected Code Integrity (HVCI), and IOMMU switched on. Riot anti-cheat lead Phillip Koskinas said roughly 35% of players already clear that bar, while about 3% are running incompatible hardware.

Riot calls the qualifying checklist Vanguard Pre-Check, and many prebuilt PCs and laptops sold in the past couple of years ship with the features on by default, and Koskinas estimates the share of fully secured machines at 34.33% and rising one to two percentage points a month. Everyone else will need to enable the settings manually, and most are UEFI options that Vanguard can’t change, meaning a trip into BIOS for those who want to do so.

The feature leans on Microsoft's Runtime Driver Attestation Report, built with the company's Xbox OS Security team and new to Windows 11 25H2. It records every driver loaded since boot as a running, append-only hash kept in the TPM, which is the same measured-boot method the Windows Boot Manager already uses for boot-start drivers. Vanguard can then confirm at launch that no vulnerable driver slipped in while it sat idle, closing the gap that forced the always-on design before. Older Windows releases lack that reporting hook, however, so 25H2 is a baseline requirement.

Riot Games has spent years pushing the same security stack as a barrier to play, having begun enforcing TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot on Windows 11 in 2020. The company drew backlash when it brought it to League of Legends in 2024, and in December, flagged a pre-boot motherboard flaw across Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, and ASRock boards. Last month, a Vanguard update bricked DMA cheat hardware in a move that was likely tied to stricter IOMMU enforcement.

VBS and HVCI are likely to become sticking points for users who are most likely to want the option to toggle Vanguard’s anti-cheat. Both run parts of the kernel inside a hardware-isolated enclave, and benchmarks have long since shown a small but noticeable degradation to frame rate, which is why many gamers leave them off. Turning VBS on also activates Microsoft's vulnerable driver blocklist, which can disable older peripheral drivers.

Alternatively, payers can leave Vanguard as-is, with Riot saying it’s not “making anyone change anything” and is willing to wait until the ecosystem matures.

Valve has confirmed that the first batch of Steam Machines will only come with a single stick of 16GB RAM, limiting the device to single-channel memory. The company confirmed this in a correction to Gamers Nexus (GN), after its engineers initially said that Steam Machines could either come with a single 16GB stick or two 8GB sticks. “We misspoke here,” Valve wrote in its email to the media channel. “All units will actually have one 16GB stick of RAM.”

Tests have shown that using single-channel memory can reduce performance by about 9% to 13% compared to dual-channel memory, meaning gamers will feel the difference, especially in 1% lows. This is especially hard on the Steam Machine, which uses already aging hardware — a semi-custom AMD Zen 4 CPU and RDNA3 graphics with only 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM. Note that AMD launched Zen 5 in 2024, while the RDNA4 GPUs dropped in early 2025. We also already have details for Zen 6 CPUs and have heard rumors that RDNA5 GPUs will arrive next year.

However, the company probably made this decision to keep the costs for the Steam Machine as low as possible. The device’s $1,049 base price is already steeper than what many are willing to pay for — an estimated $300+ price increase from the $700 to $750 target price that Valve presumably targeted. While its engineers did not confirm these numbers, they also said that the Steam Machine would have gotten a “probably similar” price hike to the one the Steam Deck experienced recently. Nevertheless, there is hope that later batches will have dual-channel memory, with Valve telling GN that there is a chance of this happening in the future.

This is another blow to the much-awaited living room PC console that is supposed to finally give PC gamers a chance to enjoy their Steam library with a console-like experience. Valve originally announced the Steam Machine and the Steam Controller in November last year, which was also around the same time that memory chips have started to be in short supply due to the massive demand from AI hyperscalers. The device was originally slated to launch in the first quarter of 2026, but the ongoing memory crisis forced Valve to hold off until it finally released the console this summer.

Although having only a single stick of RAM is a disadvantage to any system, more optimistic gamers can consider this a boon as they could easily upgrade the console to 32GB if they have an extra matching 16GB DDR5-5600 SODIMM stick lying around at home (or are willing to spend extra to buy one). Upgrading the console’s RAM is a rather involved affair, though, requiring you to remove a lot of components and sub-boards just to reach the RAM slots. But if you’re the adventurous kind and could score a good deal on laptop RAM, this might be a viable solution to getting more performance out of your Steam Machine.