After Epic revealed its plan for Unreal Engine 6, CEO Tim Sweeney said in an interview that Valve should stop requiring developers from disclosing if they used AI in making their game. The Epic chief executive made the statement to PC Gamer as he was talking about the use of AI tools in game development. The upcoming version of Unreal Engine 6 will come with AI integrations, which will supposedly make it easier for programmers, developers, and everyone else working in the gaming industry to build games. However, the use of AI tools still carries a stigma among players to the point that titles with this disclosure get significantly fewer reviews and are often viewed less favorably.

He says that AI tools are useful for streamlining boring, repetitive, and menial labor, like reviewing code for over an hour to find an error or doing the rigging work required to make a 3D model move realistically. While it was unfortunate that some AI tech companies trained their models on stolen data, the Epic chief executive said that the AI industry has changed and is now moving towards better practices, especially when it comes to training data. He even pointed at Adobe, which he says is ensuring the provenance of the data it used for training its AI. However, PC Gamer pointed out that Epic uses Nano Banana and GPT Image, which do not claim stringent AI training data controls, and that the Unreal Engine’s AI integrations include models such as Gemini, which have been accused of copyright infringement.

“I think the main usage case that we've seen within Epic, and we're seeing developers actually find gainful, is using AI to reduce the drudge work. The software is still architected by software architects, and they're still writing the important parts of code, and artists are still coming up with a creative vision for characters, deciding between concepts,” Sweeney told the publication. He also added, “If you want to launch a game, and get it as widely publicized as possible, you've got to put it on Steam so people can wish list it, and if you want to play it on Steam, then you have to get this Scarlet Letter of AI attached to your product, and now there is a hater community trying to kill the game. I think it's really irresponsible of Valve. They shouldn't do it, because it makes it much, much, much harder for a game developer to have a chance of success.”

The Epic executive has a point here, as AI can indeed be a useful productivity tool if used correctly and ethically. But even if that was the case, Valve still requires developers to add the AI-generated content disclosure, which could have a negative impact on reviews and ratings. While the Steam platform does not require the disclosure of the use of AI-powered tools in the developers’ workflow, they’re required to note it if AI-generated assets appear in the game or in marketing material. This would presumably include assets that have been partially built using AI tools or were based on AI-generated content.

According to market research platform Game Oracle, titles that had the generative AI disclosure received 53% less reviews than the same type of game that did not have it. Furthermore, it’s more likely to get a negative review. However, it also conceded that several other factors could be at play here, like studios substituting creativity and the proper development process with AI tools, resulting in titles that are obviously AI slop.

Sweeney argues that AI is just a tool for productivity that could help game developers create unique content. The AI disclosure warning on Steam games, in theory, should not influence how games are perceived — after all, what should matter to gamers is the experience of playing the game. Unfortunately, the controversies surrounding AI are negatively affecting the reputation of titles that use these tools. When paired with studios that substitute AI for real creativity, it’s understandable why this AI warning has such a negative impact on game titles.

Earlier this year, Epic Games admitted its launcher sucked and committed to building a newer one that's much more competitive with Steam. Yesterday, at Unreal Fest, the company unveiled a roadmap for the next 12 months, promising significant upgrades in the form of Epic Games Launcher V2. The platform is being rebuilt internally so it's faster and includes a lot more features that will bring it up to parity with Valve's offering.

The biggest change is a redesigned storefront that's truly personalized to the individual user. Games will be recommended based on taste and playstyle, while the game pages will try to do more than just show the price, title, and cover. Epic Games Store already looks more modern than Steam, so the visual efforts are appreciated, but it's the underlying speediness and a sense of curation that will really matter.

The v2 launcher will supposedly open up 5x faster on average upon cold boots, while restoring it from the system tray will be 6.5x faster on average. That's a huge improvement, but keep in mind that Epic got these numbers from a ridiculous test bench comprised of a 32-core AMD Threadripper, an RTX A6000, and 128GB of RAM. Not exactly consumer-grade hardware, especially during these times.

There's a lot more coming apart from the upgraded storefront. For instance, Epic will finally add sprawling player profiles with avatars and your game activity. That will enable everything from DMs to better voice chat and game-independent parties. You'll be able to write manual reviews for games instead of relying on star ratings. Developers will be able to add their own patch notes, directly integrated inside the store, aided by a new notification system that'll inform players of the coinciding update.

The roadmap itself is split into three distinct categories: Up First, Up Next, and On Deck. Chunked installation of Fortnite is among the first new features we'll see, along with cross-region gifting and a private beta for Epic Games Launcher V2. Then, some of the aforementioned improvements are mentioned in the Up Next list, which will also bring the public beta of the new launcher for everyone to try.

Finally, things like universal controller support, akin to Steam's extensive toolset, will debut toward the end of the next 12 months. New APIs meant to help developers better understand the player base will be part of this update. The redesigned storefront is also part of this timeframe, so don't expect it in the following months. Perhaps the most interesting feature mentioned here is third-party communities, which, if implemented right, could be as useful as Steam Forums.

All of these little changes, along with the more prominent ones, will combine to form the Epic Games Launcher V2. If this timeline is to be believed, by this time next year, we'll have a much more competitive and robust EGS than ever before. Steam is a great platform in its own right, but competition is always important to drive innovation. Regardless of what you feel about Epic, the company's efforts to rebuild its launcher are ultimately better for the consumer.

Epic Games' outspoken CEO Tim Sweeney has taken to X to criticize Valve over its recent price hike of the Steam Deck. Valve raised the prices ofits handheld this week, with the 1TB model now costing $949. Even though many consoles have seen their prices jump by $50 to $100 in recent months, this is still nothing compared to the extra $240 to $300 that Valve slapped on the Steam Deck. The increases have been driven by the memory and chip shortages stemming from the AI infrastructure build-out, but Sweeney wasted no time criticizing Valve on X for the much higher price increases it applied.

While his post initially mentioned the significant rise in component costs, which everyone is suffering from, he eventually ended it with “severe disruptions in the component parts supply chain for megayachts” in an apparent potshot at Valve CEO Gabe Newell’s penchant for superyachts. While Newell's Valve is behind some of the most notable game franchises in history, including Half-Life, Portal, Left 4 Dead, and Counter-Strike, he also has a love for massive sea-going vessels. Luxury Launches reports that he owns six vessels, including the 365-foot (111-m) superyacht Leviathan that he took delivery of in 2025, totaling around a billion dollars in value (and not counting the millions he’s spending on maintenance, crews, and other costs). He uses the vessels privately, but also for marine research and ocean exploration.

Valve’s hardware is generally designed to compete against gaming PCs and does not face off with dedicated gaming consoles that have their hardware costs subsidized by sales of gaming titles. So, if we compare the 512GB Steam Deck’s $789 against the Lenovo Legion Go 2 and the Asus ROG Xbox Ally, you’d find that it’s still within the same price range.

As for the rumored Steam Machine, the company hasn’t announced the living room PC console’s price yet, but Valve said that it won’t subsidize it to make its price closer to the PlayStation or Xbox. Instead, it will be priced similarly to other gaming PC builds — and with memory and storage chip prices the way they are right now, it's possible the Steam Machine may be priced at or above $1,000. But, at the very least, you’d own the hardware you buy, and you can freely replace SteamOS with another operating system should you want to do so.

The Trump administration is actively debating whether to allow Chinese tech giant Tencent to keep its ownership stakes in several major gaming companies, including Fortnite creator Epic Games, League of Legends developer Riot Games, and Finnish mobile studio Supercell, the Financial Times reported today.

Senior White House officials are said to have held meetings to assess whether the investments pose a national security risk ahead of President Trump's planned April trip to China to meet President Xi Jinping. A cabinet-level discussion scheduled for Tuesday was postponed due to scheduling conflicts, the report said.

Tencent holds a 28% stake in Epic Games, fully owns Riot Games, and has a controlling stake in Supercell, the studio behind Clash of Clans. Together, those three companies reach more than a billion players worldwide. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), a Treasury-led panel that reviews inbound investments for security risks, has been examining Tencent's gaming holdings since Trump's first term, making it one of the panel's longest-running cases.

It’ll come as no surprise that the Committee’s main concern is user data. Gaming platforms collect financial information, personal details, and chat logs from hundreds of millions of players, but there’s the added kicker that Epic's Unreal Engine is widely used in Western military simulation and training by defense contractors and armed forces. The U.S. Army has worked directly with Epic for years on early versions of the engine, so Tencent's ownership stake in the company that builds that technology has added to the scrutiny.

Attempts were made to resolve the case by the Biden administration, but disagreements between agencies meant that it never happened. Then-Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco pushed for CFIUS to force Tencent to divest its gaming companies, while the Treasury Department preferred allowing the investments to remain under data-protection mitigation measures, the FT reports, citing former officials. "These platforms could serve as a significant intelligence collection source," Chris McGuire, a former Biden administration official now at the Council on Foreign Relations, told the Financial Times.

The Pentagon added Tencent to its list of alleged Chinese military companies in January 2025, a designation Tencent called a mistake and denied. More recently, in mid-February, the Pentagon briefly published an updated list adding Alibaba and BYD before pulling it within an hour, a move that sparked speculation the administration was trying to reduce friction ahead of Trump's China visit.

Sources familiar with the matter cautioned that it remained unclear whether the administration would push for forced divestitures or allow Tencent to keep its investments with conditions. Tom’s Hardware has contacted Epic Games for comment.

It's been more than 7 years since the Epic Games Store debuted alongside its launcher as a unified platform. For many, it's still a glorified Fortnite client: one that's opened to claim free games from time to time, but only out of necessity. The launcher has never posed a real threat to Steam for many reasons, and Epic is finally admitting to those shortcomings, with a promise to build a new version that's much better.

"We’re in the process of rebuilding the underlying architecture of the Epic Games Store Launcher and plan to ship improvements this summer. These changes will make the storefront on the launcher responsive and feel good to use, with fast load times and greater stability."

The news stems from the yearly platform review Epic released yesterday, citing a 4% increase in third party (non-Epic games) players on EGS. Amidst all that data, the company included a little section on what's next for 2026, where it formally announced a revamped Epic Games Store that will feature a "better social experience for players" with new additions like avatars, player profiles and private messaging.

"These social capabilities will be extended to Epic Online Services, opening up text chat for other developers to include in their games later this year. In Q2, we will add voice chat and game-independent parties to our social framework." Afterward, Steve Allison — GM for Epic Games Store — sat down with various outlets to provide insight on the journey the platform's taken and where it's going now.

Becoming competitive with Steam is the number one priority that drives most of these changes. But change starts with first acknowledging what's wrong, and Allison had heaps of self-awareness. "... The launcher sucks. Let's call it what it is. It's really slow," remarked Allison while speaking to Eurogamer. He went on to break down why that is:

"It makes calls to our back-end services to refresh every time you click around, and depending on your connection, you'll have to wait a couple seconds. And that just doesn't feel good, especially when people are comparing and contrasting and dual using one that doesn't do that." Allison is, of course, referring to Steam at the end there, which has always been very responsive — even if it's not the prettiest.

He then explained the branching issues that make Epic's launcher less desirable than even proprietary solutions on console. "We have no social framework in the store, like other stores — even console platforms — which have the ability to communicate with your friends, and we just kind of stripped that out during COVID and never brought it back."

Beyond fanboyism, Epic's storefront is very barebones in terms of actual functionality that players appreciate or have grown accustomed to. Forums are a standout omission here which enable a greater sense of community. The company has focused on developer-facing concerns and bringing EGS to mobile for the past few years, so it's finally time to adjust tracks back to the gamer.

Work on the upgraded Epic Games Store and launcher started back in November 2025, and the company plans to release it this summer. Epic wants to increase its market share in the PC gaming segment to 30-40% in the next five years and topple Steam's monopoly. Valve currently enjoys 90% of the pie, despite Epic offering a more lucrative 88-12 percent revenue distribution offer compared to Steam's 70-30.

Allison was confident in saying the "battle has not been lost at all", mirroring the famous words of Logan Roy on Succession: "This is not the end. I'm going to build something better — something faster, lighter, meaner, wilder." Now, whether Epic's renovation project imitates the titular character's fate on the show or subverts it, well that remains to be seen.

There's also the Tim Sweeney of it all: Epic's rather vocal CEO has presented some very polarizing opinions, especially pertaining to AI, in recent times. These simply serve as ammo to a market that already rejects the EGS as a viable alternative, and there's no saying when the executive will upset the community once again. (If you think what Sweeney says doesn't matter, just take a look at how revered Gabe Newell is amongst gamers.)

It's hard to imagine now, but there was a time before Fortnite's widespread, universal accessibility; a short-lived infancy period where Epic Games was still figuring out what this game truly was, prior to the behemoth that its Battle Royale mode would become. At that point, in 2017, Fortnite had a very limited physical release with discs made for PS4 and Xbox One consoles. This week, one of those has just sold for a whopping $42,500 — possibly the highest amount for a modern, online-only game.

Video game grading site Wata assigned its highest 10 A++ rating to this still-stealed copy of Fortnite for Xbox One, meaning it was essentially in flawless condition. Even though we do see mint copies of retro games from decades ago, preserving this particular disc for over eight years is certainly no easy feat either. Gearbox is the publisher behind the disc, which includes the "Storm Master Weapon Pack" cosmetics, to go along with the Save The World mode, but no Battle Royale since that was added in a later update.

Since this is an early copy of the game, you can earn Fortnite's digital currency V-Bucks for free just by grinding the STW mode and completing daily challenges. Epic Games removed this functionality in 2020, so every Save The World purchase made digitally after that point doesn't let you cash in on V-bucks that you can then spend in the game's popular Item Shop. Redeemable codes from back in the day for this mode alone go for over $1,000 on secondhand marketplaces.

After the grading, Heritage Auctions sold the copy to the highest bidder, who paid $42,500 to own this rare gem, if you could call it that. We're fairly confident that no other game released in the past decade has been valued so highly, partially because Fortnite became a cultural juggernaut, so its stocks are perpetually up. Just yesterday, the game launched its newest update, Chapter 7, which adds Marty McFly and Kill Bill to the mythos, following an Avengers Endgame-esque collab event that saw almost 10 million players attend it.

The current Guinness Book of World Records holder for the most expensive game ever sold is a sealed copy of Super Mario 64 that went for a casual $1.56 million, so this Fortnite disc is not even in the same conversation, and actually feels very reasonable in comparison. Previously, the most anyone paid for Fortnite was $13,750, but rare, unopened copies on eBay still sit around the $10,000 range. Maybe in a few decades, sealed Fortnite discs will be worth in the millions, too.

Epic Games just unleashed Unreal Engine 5.6 (UE 5.6), the latest version of its powerful engine designed for game developers and other professionals. According to the company, one of the main targets of this update is to allow current-gen consoles, high-end PCs, and powerful mobile devices to hit 60 fps while using hardware ray tracing. Epic Games achieved this by offloading some tasks from the CPU to the GPU, which allows its Lumen Global Illumination system to achieve higher performance.

Aside from this, it also released an experimental module called Fast Geometry Streaming Plugin. This feature aims to improve open-world loading speeds even as developers add more static objects while still maintaining constant frame rates. There’s also asynchronous physics state creation and destruction, which improves the loading of any asset with any kind of in-game physical interaction without interfering with the main processes necessary to run the game.

The company also said that it has updated the device profiles in UE 5.6, ensuring graphics settings are adjusted automatically for the latest consoles, mobile devices, and PC hardware. All these updates will make it easier for developers to optimize their games and deliver at least 60 fps of gaming performance, even with ray tracing. Epic Games then showed off UE 5.6’s capabilities by previewing The Witcher 4 on PlayStation 5, running out of the box at 60 fps with ray tracing turned on.

Epic Games Store has yet to turn a profit. This was revealed in day one of the long-awaited Epic v. Google trial, when Epic boss Steve Allison took the stand. While this is something of a minor detail in the larger scheme of The Verge's reporting of the Epic v. Google trial, it speaks volumes about how Epic is approaching the PC gaming space.

For the uninitiated, the Epic v. Google trial has been building since Epic filed a lawsuit against Google in 2020 over their revenue share model for in-app purchases. Epic Games and Tim Sweeney in general maintain an outspoken stance against high revenue share, to the point of referring to Steam's model as "Game Developer IRS".

While Epic hasn't taken legal action against Steam in the PC space, Google actually isn't their only lawsuit over revenue share in the mobile gaming space. Epic also sued Apple and lost back in 2021, though they're still appealing that ruling as recently as September 2023.

For a company willing to take its competitors to court over perceived unfairness, this comment from Epic Games is fairly revealing of deeper problems with their business model. Epic claims to be competing against Steam for the sake of gamers and developers, but their model of paying for exclusivity has largely only drawn them ire within the PC gaming space. Epic's licensing deals and free games don't matter if they can't actually provide a service as good as or better than Steam.

While the final results of Epic's ongoing legal battles against digital platform holders remain to be seen, the company itself seems to be a poor example of its own argument. While they did manage to get Steam to budge on the 30 percent revenue share for games that sell more than $10 million, those titles still have a 25 percent revenue share that goes to Steam in exchange for hosting. Steam of course remains massively profitable.

Epic's revenue share is much more generous in comparison, only requiring 12 percent from developers (and even cutting their Unreal Engine fee for EGS sales). As sweet as that sounds, even the most successful EGS timed exclusivity deals reveal just how much faster games sell on Steam. Perhaps Epic should spend more time improving its platform instead of throwing stones in a glass house?

AMD confirmed that Robot Cache, a digital storefront that allows gamers to sell used digital games with crypto or cache, is exiting beta after three years. In celebration, AMD is offering Wasteland 3 for free if you sign up with the platform.

Robot Cache is one of the most unique digital distributors you can find today that allows gamers to sell digital games after playing them. You could do this with physical copies of games twenty years ago, but it isn't as prevalent today as the world transitioned to digital game purchases.

Unlike other platforms such as Steam, GoG, or Epic Games, Robot Cache's success hinges on its ability to buy and sell games simultaneously. As advertised, gamers can buy games on the platform and sell them once they are done playing. According to the Robot Cache website, 70% of the funds go back to the developers and 25% to you when you sell a game on Robot Cache. 

The whole system operates on blockchain technology to track game purchases. When game purchases are made on the platform, ownership is recorded on the platform's blockchain to identify who owns what. This way, the blockchain will record the next person who owns it when that game is sold later.

Buying and selling can be accomplished with cash or the platform's home-brewed cryptocurrency called Iron. Iron is acquired by selling games on the platform, completing challenges, and playing with your friends. But it will also be mineable on PC hardware in the near future. According to one of the platform's videos from four years ago, the primary purpose of Iron is to secure and encrypt game purchases on the platform (alongside buying and selling games with the currency).

The platform has been in beta for the past three years, but we got word from AMD (who is a partner with Robot Cache) that the site is now considered a live release, even though the website still identifies itself as a "beta" release at the time of this writing. In commemoration, the platform is not only giving away Wasteland 3 but also providing up to 90% discounts on many of its games.

The platform has enormous potential, but it's anybody's guess if it will succeed. Nonetheless, it is a unique platform that can give players some extra savings.

CD Projekt RED today confirmed that development has started on the next installment in the popular Witcher franchise. While the announcement was extremely short on details on the game proper, the developer also announced it has entered a new strategic partnership with Epic Games, which will see the replacement of its in-house-developed REDengine by Epic's Unreal Engine 5.

With millions of copies sold, The Witcher 3 remains one of the most lauded RPGs of all time -- it garnered over 250 Game of the Year awards, pleasing both critics and gamers alike. Development on another Witcher game isn't necessarily news. We knew CD Projekt RED had more than a "mere" next-gen upgrade in mind for the franchise. However, the announcement that CD Projekt RED will be forgoing its own development tool comes as a curveball of sorts.

The company originally debuted its in-house engine with The Witcher 2: Assassin's of Kings in 2011, showcasing incredible visual and systems improvements over the licensed Bioware "Aurora" engine employed in the original 2007 The Witcher game. REDengine has since become the backbone to all of the developers' releases - including 2020's Cyberpunk 2077. The company has likely poured millions of dollars into engine development throughout the years, and they've now elected to scrap that work in favor of a new engine with new tools and workflows. Naturally, work on Cyberpunk 2077's future content will still be carried out within REDengine.

CD Projekt RED is well aware of the toll this takes in development. Speaking on the transition to Unreal Engine 5 for this and future games, CTO of CD PROJEKT RED, Paweł Zawodny explained the reasoning somewhat:

“One of the core aspects of our internal RED 2.0 Transformation is a much stronger focus on technology, and our cooperation with Epic Games is based on this principle. From the outset, we did not consider a typical licensing arrangement; both we and Epic see this as a long-term, fulfilling tech partnership. It is vital for CD PROJEKT RED to have the technical direction of our next game decided from the earliest possible phase as; in the past, we spent a lot of resources and energy to evolve and adapt REDengine with every subsequent game release. This cooperation is so exciting, because it will elevate development predictability and efficiency, while simultaneously granting us access to cutting-edge game development tools. I can’t wait for the great games we’re going to create using Unreal Engine 5!”     

It seems that CD Projekt RED took a long look at the opportunity cost of either further developing its in-house engine, or settling for an industry stalwart such as Epic's Unreal Engine. Ultimately, the company concluded that it had more to win by leveraging not only a well-known and well-documented game development engine -- with all the nifty forward-facing features such as Nanite and Lumen that generated that incredible engine showcase demo -- but also Epic Games itself. The joint development collaboration makes sense in more ways than one: CD Projekt RED knows exactly what it needs for smooth development of its open-world sandboxes. The company's engineers are sure to have an impact on Epic's future development of the engine.

Even so, the decision of which engine to use remains one of the most fundamental questions of game design. And as mentioned by Zawodny, it's one that needs to be taken as early as possible in the development. This tells us that the next Witcher installment will still take years to be delivered onto whatever hardware or gaming console that's prominent at the time.

Perhaps we're just witnessing some of the fallout from Cyberpunk 2077. It's at least conceivable that part of the reason for the games' troubled launch (and its much-delayed DLCs and expansions) lay with CD Projekt RED's tools. Here's hoping that the next installment in the Witcher series is less delay-prone and problematic than Cyberpunk 2077.

The Epic Games Store (EGS) appears to have enjoyed a banner year in 2021. For many, the EGS is better known for its giveaways than for being a game buying destination, and the figures show this feeling rings true. To sum up its extraordinary year, Epic Games says that it gave away 765M games (with an average price of $23.82), which means it gave away about $18 billion worth of games. However, its income from game sales in 2021 was just $840 million – which is less than 5% of the total giveaway value it claims.

While we might have nitpicked at the giveaways versus cash generation figures in the intro, the EGS has some great numbers that it can boast about for 2021. To grow and compete with the likes of Steam on PC, the EGS obviously needs to be 'stickier' so those millions of freebie seekers stick around to play the games and add paid titles to their collection.

"There are now over 194 million Epic Games Store PC users, an increase of 34M from 2020," boasts Epic in its year in review blog post. "Daily active users peaked at 31.1M, and peak concurrent users reached 13.2M. December's monthly active users peak reached 62M users, an increase of 11% from last year's peak of 56M." 

As a point of reference, earlier this week, we reported that Steam achieved a record 29.2M+ concurrent users. So, EGS is where Steam was (using this metric) in Q3 2016.

On the topic of free games, Epic Games gave away 89 free games during 2021, which it says were worth $2,120 in total – an average of $23.82 per game, as we mentioned in the intro. With over 765 million free games claimed by players, we calculate an incredible giveaway total value of somewhere around $18 billion. Epic seems to be particularly happy about its most recent sale over Christmas and New Year's, where it saw 31 million people participate in the event. Gamers acquired 159 million items, which was 14% better than the previous year's sale event.

Improvements Delivered in 2021

Epic set aside a portion of its blog to talk up the EGS platform and its development. The immaturity of the EGS client and limited features compared to competitors are frequently highlighted as criticisms. Critical introductions in 2021 include improved navigation, social panel tweaks, improved wishlist support, fuller product previews, and new views to discover new releases, among other highlighted store sections.

Weekly Free Games Will Continue in 2022

In 2022, Epic wants to reassure gamers that "weekly Free Games will continue." Remember, last year we got 89 giveaways, which is more than once a week, due to special events timed with sales and holidays. The better, bigger name giveaways tended to also tie in with these events. We would wager that this promotional giveaway activity will follow a similar pace in 2022. In fact, there is yet another sale now celebrating the Chinese New Year period.

Lastly Epic promises the release of "a number of huge games," through 2022 to get you to visit its store. It name checks the likes of Forspoken, Dying Light 2 Stay Human, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, and Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Extraction. But of course, some of the biggest games of the year are still probably yet to be revealed.

Is Steam Your Biggest Foe – or Xbox Games Pass?

It would be ironic if, as Epic almost grasps Steam's coattails, the industry and gamers pivot to gaming subscription services. Whenever news about Microsoft's Xbox Games Pass (for example) bubbles up, it always seems relatively positive, and Microsoft's investments in it look to have paid off over recent years. If the games industry is going to finally have its Blockbuster Netflix moment with games subscriptions and streaming, Epic better start making some Plan B and Plan C contingencies, and it isn't the only one that needs to do this.

Microsoft is poised to make its first significant update to Windows 11 next month, including a public preview of Android apps in the Microsoft Store. That will come alongside redesigns of the Media Player and Notepad apps and improvements to the taskbar.

The announcement was made in a blog post by Windows and Devices head Panos Panay, highlighting Microsoft and Windows' place in a vibrant PC market.

The changes to the taskbar include the return of the weather widget and a feature to mute and unmute your system, as well as "easier windows sharing," though that isn't specifically defined.

Microsoft has tested the new Notepad and Media Player apps with Windows Insiders. The Windows 11 taskbar was one of the biggest complaints among critics when the operating system launched, as it was missing features like the ability to be resized, showing a clock on multiple screens and dragging and dropping files. At the very least, Microsoft appears to be starting to tackle those concerns.

Notably, the Android apps aren't a final feature. Panay wrote that it's a "public preview," even though it has been in testing with Insiders for a few months using Amazon's app store.

Panay wrote that people are "accepting the upgrade offer to Windows 11 at twice the rate we saw for Windows 10," and that the new version of the OS is pushing three times as much traffic to the Microsoft Store, which has been redesigned and features new apps and entirely different storefronts, like Epic Games. Citing data from Canalys, Microsoft says that Windows 10 and 11 together are running on more than 1.4 billion devices monthly.

Microsoft is also ahead of schedule on pushing Windows 11 out to eligible PCs. Panay wrote that the company is entering the "final phase of availability," pushing it ahead of a planned mid-2022 date.

Fortnite is making a return to the iPhone in the form of a limited-time, closed beta streamed over Nvidia GeForce Now. However, it's not a full return to form for the game, which Apple yanked from the App Store in August 2020 for using alternative payment services other than Apple's own.

This version of the game is designed for smartphones and other mobile devices, including touch controls. Beyond iOS, it will also be available in the GeForce Now Android app. Android owners previously had access to the desktop version of Fortnite over GeForce Now, but the mobile version was also axed from the Play Store in August 2020 for violating Google's policies. Android, however, allows side-loading apps, and some alternative stores allow Fortnite.

You need an Nvidia GeForce Now account to try the beta yourself, but it does not need to be a paid tier. You can go to this page to join the waitlist for entry, though Nvidia is warning that "invitations to join will be limited and admission to the beta is not guaranteed." Nvidia will allow groups of players into the beta over the coming weeks.

Nvidia said in a blog post that the Fortnite beta would be the first of many touch games on the service. "We're working with additional publishers to add more touch-enabled games to GeForce NOW," it reads. "And look forward to more publishers streaming full PC versions of their games to mobile devices with built-in touch support — reaching millions through the Android app and iOS Safari devices."

To stream games on iOS, Nvidia can't put its own app in the App Store. Nvidia, along with Google's Stadia, Amazon's Luna and Microsoft's xCloud, must stream games through the Safari web browser. Otherwise, Apple's guidelines state that to have a streaming game through the App store, each game has to be submitted individually for review. "Of course, there is always the open Internet and web browser apps to reach all users outside of the App Store," the guidelines read.

Epic Games fought with both Apple and Google over sharing its profits to host its game on their stores. There aren't any details on what Epic's deal with Nvidia may look like, but GeForce now is different from, say, Stadia in that it doesn't sell the games: it's simply renting hardware that can play it remotely.

Currently, GeForce Now is the only game streaming service where players can find Fortnite, and only in beta. It's unclear exactly how limited the beta is or when it will be available widely on GeForce Now for iOS and Android. But as someone who still has the last version of the Fortnite app before it was kicked off the App Store on his phone, it's a welcome idea. It's pretty empty in there otherwise.

Nvidia is improving the GeForce Now RTX 3080 experience on Apple's M1 laptops, the MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro. Specifically, a new update to GeForce Now will allow for gaming at 1600p.

Both of those laptops have 2560 x 1600 displays, so Nvidia is supporting native resolutions. Previously, GeForce Now listed only 1080p on Macs at this tier. Nvidia told Tom's Hardware that users will still be able to stream up to 120 frames per second previously as you could at 1080p.

The 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros with M1 Pro and M1 Max, have higher resolution displays than the 13-inch Pro and the Air. Nvidia clarified that those machines, too, will be able to stream at up to 1600p and 120 fps.

In the same blog post, Nvidia announced a limited-time promotion for GeForce Now RTX 3080 memberships or six-month Priority subscriptions to get a free copy of Crysis Remastered on the Epic Games Store. Additionally, Nvidia is adding updates to PC and Mac users to link Nvidia and Ubisoft accounts to launch Ubisoft Connect games more quickly.

The Mac is a big part of Nvidia's push with GeForce Now. After all, those with Windows-based gaming PCs already have access to the most popular gaming titles. But while Apple's latest chips have some powerful GPUs, the biggest mainstream video game developers and publishers haven't paid a ton of attention to the Mac in recent years. (Indie devs have done better in this regard.) Nvidia hopes the Apple faithful will use its service to stream those titles.

Additionally, many of the games that did work on Mac didn't survive the macOS transition away from 32-bit apps. And with M1, programs that aren't reworked to run natively need to be emulated through Rosetta 2. Nvidia's argument here is that Mac users won't need to worry about software compatibility when they stream from the internet because the games run on its servers.

GeForce Now, Nvidia says, will give Mac users that experience without also needing a PC. The same goes for phones, tablets and weaker Windows PCs.

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 subscription is available for pre-order for $99.99 for six months and also promises eight-hour gaming sessions. The Priority membership, with a "premium rig" with RTX graphics (up to 1080p at 60 fps), is $49.99 for six months, or $9.99 per month, and has a six-hour limit. The free tier on a "basic rig" has a one-hour limit. Any of these should work on an M1 Mac, but you will only get native resolution on the most expensive option.

New Games on GeForce Now

Beyond the Mac updates, Nvidia has announced six new games coming to GeForce Now.

A-Train: All Aboard! Tourism and White Shadows will be supported on December 7, the day those games launch on Steam. Monopoly Madness, a new launch on Ubisoft Connect, will be supported on December 9.

Anno 1404 History Edition and Prison Architect, which are both currently part of free promotions on Ubisoft Connect and the Epic Games Store, are also supported, as well as Super Magbot on Steam and the delightful Untitled Goose Game on the Epic Games Store.

Updated December 9, 2:22 p.m. ET with clarification that Macs can stream at up to 120 fps on 1600p displays and that the 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pros can also stream at 1600p on the Liquid Retina XDR displays.

Epic Games has just released an update to its Easy Anti-Cheat software that will add support for the Steam Deck, as well as Linux and macOS operating systems. According to an Epic blog post today, the new update is now available to developers for free and is designed to work with Wine and Steam's Proton compatibility layer to ensure all platforms under Linux get full anti-cheat support.

This is great news for Linux Gamers and for the new Steam Deck, since the anti-cheat services were previously locked to Windows operating systems. Even though the games could be fully functional in a compatibility environment such as Proton or Wine. Now, more platforms have the capability to run all multiplayer games  with Epic's popular anti-cheat software, as long as developers enable Linux and Mac support.

This is especially important for Valve's Steam Deck, which counts on its SteamOS being able to run the entire Steam library. Obviously, lacking anti-cheat support could have been a major problem for the new console.

But it appears Valve knew the anti-cheat SDKs were going to be a problem, and was working on a solution well before now. GamesRadar reported a month ago that Valve was focused on ensuring the Steam Deck would run every single game in the Steam library, so much so that Valve considered any game not compatible to be a bug. Steam developer Lawrence Yang specifically said "Something that we said earlier on is that we really want the entire library to work... If it doesn't work we see that as a bug and we want to fix it."

Thankfully Valve has now resolved this "bug", and the Steam deck will have Easy Anti-Cheat support before the consoles release in December.

Apple’s not going to be able to force app store developers to use its payment system for in-app purchases for the time being, thanks to a new court order coming out from Epic’s antitrust lawsuit against the company.

US Northern California District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers today ruled in the long-running Epic Games v. Apple that Apple has engaged in anti-competitive behavior violating California’s Unfair Competition Law, but stopped short of calling Apple a monopoly. This resulted in an injunction against Apple prohibiting the company from requiring developers to use its own in-app payment system, but also in a fee against Epic for breaching its contract with Apple.

This means that all your favorite mobile games (and even productivity apps) will be able to direct users to outside payment options for microtransactions or subscriptions, avoiding the 30% cut that Apple takes from its own system, which developers have had no choice to use until today. The injunction gives Apple 90 days to set this up, unless it a higher court gets involved.

“Apple has not adequately justified its 30% rate,” Judge Gonzalez Rogers wrote in her opinion on the case. While she acknowledged Apple’s arguments that the use of the app store and the access to Apple’s consumer base does justify a commission, she did not agree that the company adequately argued in favor of its high 30% cut.

While Gonzalez Rogers did not prevent Apple from continuing to charge 30%, she did write that “A remedy to eliminate those provisions [preventing developers from directing users to outside payment methods] is appropriate. This measured remedy will increase competition, increase transparency, increase customer choice and information while preserving Apple’s iOS ecosystem which has precompetitive justifications.”

At the same time, the judge also ordered Epic to pay at least $12 million in damages to Apple for breach of contract, and said “The court cannot ultimately conclude that Apple is a monopolist under either federal or state antitrust laws.”

Both companies are, of course, trying to spin the ruling in their favor. When we reached out to Epic for comment, the company pointed us to a tweet from CEO and founder Tim Sweeney stating that the ruling “isn’t a win for developers or for consumers,” but for “fair competition among in-app payment methods and app stores.”

Meanwhile, while Apple has yet to reply to us directly, the company today released a statement to press arguing that "success is not illegal" and that “Apple faces rigorous competition in every segment in which we do business."

Apple and Epic have been embroiled in a lawsuit since August 2020, when Apple and Google both removed Fortnite from their respective app stores after Epic gave players a 20% discount for buying in-game currency directly through the Epic site as opposed to either the Apple or Google marketplaces.

This, of course, was to get around the 30% commission that both companies charged, and while it remained possible to install Fortnite to an Android device even after it was delisted from Google Play, this wasn’t the case on iPhones.

We can’t say for certain whether this ruling means that Fortnite will be returning to the App Store or even Google Play anytime soon. But like Sweeney’s tweet implies, the ramifications of this decision will probably affect the entire app store ecosystem. Larger games and apps might soon follow Epic’s lead in encouraging users to make payments through an outside system in the near future.

That could have devastating results for Apple’s profitability, with Bloomberg reporting that analysts attribute $20 billion dollars of Apple’s annual revenue to the App Store.

At the same time, apps may continue to use Apple’s system both to reduce user friction and encourage trust. An outside payment system would require users to navigate outside of the app, and smaller developers might also not be able to adequately convince users to give them their personal information.

This isn’t the end of Epic’s fight against Apple, however, as the company still has ongoing complaints registered with the UK, Australia and the EU. Further, Congress is currently debating a bipartisan bill that would rein in both Apple’s and Google’s “gatekeeper control” over their respective app stores. This bill was prompted by an April congressional hearing in which Spotify, Tile and Match Group all similarly complained about the revenue cuts they face on these platforms.

There’s also the question of appeals. NPR tech reporter Bobby Allyn has tweeted that an Epic Spokeswoman confirmed to him that Epic is appealing the decision despite the win for independent payment methods. He also said that Apple is “considering all legal options.”

In a recent blog post by AMD, the company announced that Epic Game's Unreal Engine 5, which is now in early access mode and will power a new generation of games, is now fully optimized for compilation work with Ryzen Threadripper CPUs. Epic Games VP Nick Penwarden notes that using Threadripper CPUs has allowed developers to compile code in Unreal Engine 5 much quicker than ever before. 

"Using Threadripper CPUs, we're able to compile the engine much more quickly than we could previously. That's a huge efficiency boost for all the engineers on the team. The less time they're spending compiling code, the more time they can spend actually developing features, testing functionality, and improving Unreal Engine 5.” - Nick Penwarden, VP of Engineering at Epic Games. 

It's good to remember that Epic refers to compilation performance alone, which is completely different from actual core utilization in real gameplay. For example, Unreal Engine 4 can already utilize far more than 8-12 cores for compilation tasks, but most games running on Unreal Engine 4 can only use eight cores when it comes to actual gameplay performance. 

AMD is a direct partner with Epic Games, so it isn't surprising that the company has helped enable the full Ryzen Threadripper optimizations for Unreal Engine 5 code compilation tasks. These optimizations could include CCX awareness or spanning processor groups with the Threadripper 3990X, the latter of which has caused quite the challenge with existing software that doesn't fully utilize all 64 threads. 

Perhaps we could even see Unreal Engine 5 supporting core counts a full 64 cores for real gameplay. For instance, space sim Star Citizen is already being developed to utilize more than eight CPU cores. The developers of Star Citizen, CIG, have stated that the game will utilize “all available cores” once the game has been updated to a new render engine (codenamed ‘Gen12’) and swapped to the Vulkan API. The game already utilizes eight cores to the max in certain areas (on the rather old DX11 API).

In conjunction with lower-level APIs such as DX12 and Vulkan becoming widely adopted, there is a lot of opportunity for higher core count support in real gameplay. Still, AMD and Epic haven't shared that level of detail about the new engine yet. 

Things are getting a bit recursive around here. Epic Games today announced the addition of several PC apps, including the Itch.io game platform, to the Epic Games Store.

Itch.io is mostly known for indie titles, many of which are free or cost very little, but it also hosts “game jams” that encourage developers to create something based on the parameters set by the event’s organizers.

Bringing the platform to the Epic Games Store essentially means that a marketplace primarily focused on games will feature another marketplace primarily focused on games. Hopefully someone goes further down the rabbit hole at some point.

Itch.io isn’t the only program heading to the Epic Games Store. The marketplace has also expanded to include the iHeartRadio client, the Krita painting app, the Brave browser and the KenShape model generator as part of this push outside gaming.

Epic Games said that social platforms Houseparty (which it owns) and Discord will also be added to the Epic Games Store "in the future." These additions don’t appear to be included with the store’s public roadmap, but that might change.

The company also indicated that games and apps won’t necessarily be confined to their own silos by announcing that "Fortnite Crew Members will receive three free months of Spotify service" if they don’t yet have a Premium membership. Spotify is another Windows app that is already available on Epic.

For anyone who isn’t in the know: Fortnite Crew is a subscription that offers access to each season’s battle pass, additional V-Bucks and other benefits in exchange for $11.99 per month. Now those benefits appear to be expanding beyond Fortnite.

All of these additions make it clear that Epic Games didn’t just want to compete with the likes of Valve and GOG when it released the Epic Games Launcher. It’s actually creating its own app store that just happened to launch with a focus on games.

That might lend some additional context to the company’s dispute with Apple over app distribution on iOS and iPadOS devices.

For now, however, it seems that Epic Games isn’t content with offering an alternative game marketplace for Windows 10 users. It has a long way to go before apps become a core part of the Epic Games Store, but this is a sttart. 

How much information should a legal conflict between Apple and Epic Games reveal about Steam? Apple seems to think the answer is “a lot,” according to a report from PCGamer, but Valve maintains that its platform isn’t directly related to the dispute.

The companies made their positions clear in a joint discovery letter filed with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on Thursday. Lawyers for both companies said they “have been unable to reach an agreement” on the issue.

Let’s back up a bit. This all started in August 2020 when Epic Games claimed Apple and Google’s app distribution policies and monetization were anti-competitive. The developer has since made similar complaints in the UK, Australia, and EU.

Apple subpoenaed Valve in November 2020 to gather information about Steam that might help its case. The letter filed yesterday made it clear that Valve provided some of this information but was unable or unwilling to provide everything Apple wanted.

It’s not hard to guess why. This is how Apple characterized two of its requests:

"Apple’s Request 2 is very narrow. It simply requests documents sufficient to show Valve’s: (a) total yearly sales of apps and in-app products; (b) annual advertising revenues from Steam; (c) annual sales of external products attributable to Steam; (d) annual revenues from Steam; and (e) annual earnings (whether gross or net) from Steam. Apple has gone as far as requesting this information in any readily accessible format, but Valve refuses to produce it.

“Request 32 asks for documents sufficient to show: (a) the name of each App on Steam; (b) the date range when the App was available on Steam; and (c) the price of the App and any in-app product available on Steam. This is basic information relating to the identity and availability of games over time on Steam, is necessary to determine the scope and breadth of the digital distribution marketplace, and is 'relevant to showing competition’ between these platforms.”

See? All the company’s looking for is detailed information about everything sold on Steam and how much money Valve has made from sales via the platform. Apple seems to believe that isn’t a big request; Valve has disagreed. The company said:

”In response to Apple’s 46 documents requests, Valve already produced documents regarding its revenue share, competition with Epic, Steam distribution contracts, and other documents. Apple was not satisfied and demands—without offering to cover Valve’s costs, which would be significant—that Valve (i) recreate six years’ worth of PC game and item sales for hundreds of third party video games, then (ii) produce a massive amount of confidential information about these games and Valve’s revenues. Valve objected.”

Valve also noted that it’s being drawn into a legal conflict that’s primarily about mobile app distribution and monetization, even though its focus is on PC gaming. (With the notable exception of a Steam Link app that’s had its own troubles.)

The letter made it clear that Apple wants the court to force Valve to share more info about Steam. Valve, meanwhile, said that “Apple’s demands for further production should be rejected.” Now it’s up to the court to decide who’ll get their way.

Today, Epic Games announced the expansion of its #FreeFortnite initiative, which alleges that App Store policies are anti-competitive, with an antitrust complaint against Apple to the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Competition.

#FreeFortnite started in August 2020 when Epic Games offered Fortnite players a 20% discount for purchasing V-Bucks, the in-game currency used to buy cosmetic items, directly through its website instead of via the App Store or Google Play.

That discount made sense for Epic Games because Apple and Google both take a 30% cut of transactions made via their marketplaces. Both also prohibit efforts to bypass those cuts, however, and Fortnite was promptly removed from their stores.

Epic Games responded with a U.S. lawsuit against both companies that, according to a CNN interview with chief executive Tim Sweeney, was months in the making. Similar complaints have been made in Australia, the UK, and now the EU.

The company said in today's announcement that “through a series of carefully designed anti-competitive restrictions, Apple has not just harmed but completely eliminated competition in app distribution and payment processes.”

Epic Games said it's not seeking damages in any of the cases it's brought against Apple; instead, it's "simply seeking fair access and competition that will benefit consumers and developers." It just wants more of those sweet, sweet V-Bucks sales.

CNBC reported that the European Commission said it "has received the complaint and will assess it based on its standard procedures." Don't expect any of these proceedings — in the U.S., UK, Australia, or EU — to be resolved any time soon.

It seems like Huawei isn't the only Chinese tech company the Trump administration is targeting anymore. Earlier today, the White House announced that it would be banning Chinese apps TikTok and WeChat from US app stores starting this Sunday. That means you won't be able to download the apps or any new updates, but if you still have them on your phone, you can continue to use TikTok, at least.

WeChat, unfortunately, won't have the same leniency- you'll be banned from transferring funds or processing payments through the app, and it will be illegal for ISPs to host traffic associated with it. The same restrictions are set to apply to TikTok starting on November 12th, to give the company time to work out a potential sale to Oracle.

These bans follow an August 6th executive order from the Trump administration, where he argued that TikTok and WeChat collect data from American users that could be accessed by the Chinese government. The order warned that the apps would be banned on September 20th if their owners had not sold them to an American company by that time. An American bidding war quickly erupted over TikTok, with companies like Microsoft and Walmart vying for control over the viral short-form video app. Oracle seems like the current front-runner (with Walmart potentially set to hold a partial stake), but the ban will remain in effect until Trump approves the purchase.

Aside from phone users, the bans could have a significant impact on gamers, especially the harsher WeChat ban. While TikTok is currently owned by ByteDance, which largely focuses on Chinese-specific social media platforms, WeChat is owned by Tencent, the parent company of major American video game developers like League of Legends developer Riot Games. It's also a large contributor to other studios like Fortnite developer Epic Games.

Bloomberg reported yesterday that both Epic and Riot had received letters from the US Committee on Foreign Investment (or CFIUS) asking the companies about their security protocols in handling Americans' personal data. We don't know many specifics yet, but former deputy assistant secretary for investment security Aimen Mir told Bloomberg that while CFIUS has traditionally been interested in protecting data surrounding health, financial, and government employee information sectors, it's now broadening the type of data it's focused on.

"When you're talking about massive amounts of data, there's probably something for the committee to look at," said Mir. "The question then becomes: is the risk high enough that it actually warrants forcing deals apart?" Besides losing profits, Mir also warned that a potential risk here is Chinese retaliation against American companies doing business in China.

CFIUS can take this risk in part because of a 2018 Congressional decision that gave it increased jurisdiction to review transactions, even retroactively, from foreign companies for non-controlling investments if those companies collect sensitive personal data of US citizens. This, in turn, means that the current crackdown might have been in the works for a while.

Tencent responded to the WeChat crackdown and potential gaming investigations in a statement sent to publications like The New York Times and CNBC. The statement called the restrictions "unfortunate" and promised that the company would do everything it can to continue to serve customers. "Given our desire to provide ongoing services to our users in the US - for whom WeChat is an important communication tool - we will continue to discuss with the government and other stakeholders in the US ways to achieve a long-term solution."

TikTok spokesman Josh Gartner also replied to the ban by saying, "We will continue to challenge the unjust executive order, which was enacted without due process and threatens to deprive the American people and small businesses across the US of a significant platform for both a voice and livelihoods."

 Bloomberg analysts Vey-Sern Ling and Tiffany Tam aren't positive that this resistance will lead to much, however, speculating that Tencent's US gaming investments, like Epic, Riot, and Activision Blizzard, are at the same risk of forced divestment as TikTok. This might point to a larger trend in the future regarding how the US deals with Chinese investment in its companies.

For instance, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said in his own statement today that "Today's actions prove once again that President Trump will do everything in his power to guarantee our national security and protect Americans from the threats of the Chinese Communist Party."

On a more personal level, Twitter users have started joking about selling their iPhones with TikTok installed on them at a heavy mark-up, reviving the #FlappyBird trend to discuss the similar phenomenon that took place when that game's developer pulled it from the App Store (for more personal reasons than what's happening here).

I, for one, am installing TikTok while I still can. Chinese readers, it might also be worth it to install the similarly data-hungry Facebook before the Chinese government retaliates.

Sony is investing $250 million into Fortnite maker Epic games to purchase a minority stake in the company, according to a joint announcement both companies released today. 

That doesn’t make Epic an official second party developer for Sony (think of the relationship Nintendo has to Pokémon developer Game Freak), but it does pave the way for both Sony and Epic to “broaden their collaboration,” according to the announcement.

$250 million only gives Sony a 1.4% stake in Epic, which a recent Bloomberg report valued at about $17 billion overall, so don’t expect Epic to stop making titles for your best gaming PC, Xbox or even Nintendo Switch anytime soon. Still, the deal is a step forward for the relationship between both companies. After all, it’s not every day that a major console manufacturer buys part of a game dev known for cross-platform support, let alone the developer of the world’s biggest game.

Beyond Fortnite, Epic Games is also known for making the Unreal Engine, a popular game development tool across PC and all three major consoles. In fact, Epic recently unveiled the Unreal Engine 5 demo, the next iteration of the tool, running on a PlayStation 5 (PS5). That might have been a precursor to the company’s “collaboration” with Sony that we’re seeing now.

Whether this deal means that Sony will encourage more PS5 games to use Unreal Engine 5 or that Epic will once again focus more on console than PC, we can’t say. Though Unreal Tournament, Fortnite and the Epic Games Store all point to a storied PC history at Epic, the Gears of War franchise (ironically a Microsoft exclusive) shows that Epic is adept at developing for console as well. Still, Microsoft bought Gears of War outright in 2014, so Epic would have to make a new IP if it plans on making new games for the PS5, exclusive or not.

What we can say is that this isn’t the first time Epic has sought out funding from bigger publishers. In 2012, just a year after buying League of Legends developer Riot Games, Chinese company TenCent bought a 40% stake in the company. That’s still a minority stake (though much larger than Sony’s) but does show that Epic isn’t exactly a walled garden when it comes to working with larger companies.

We ultimately don’t know what immediate benefit this holds for Sony, aside from holding stock in a profitable developer. But we wouldn’t be surprised to see Epic continue to announce future tech and games on the PS5 first in the future.

Just a few days ago Epic Games showed off its new Unreal Engine 5 demo, which blew us away with its impressive graphics. Running on an AMD RDNA-infused PlayStation 5 (PS5) it made console gaming -- or at least its future -- look exciting and promising.  And that just in time for the PS5 vs. Xbox Series X next-gen console war to start raging.

But what about the best gaming PCs? Did Unreal's demo prove that consoles are finally clawing their way to the gaming throne? We wouldn't bank on it yet. In light of the Unreal Engine 5 demo every gamer's now talking about, there's still reason to hang onto your PC. 

In covering the Unreal demo, World Today News quoted Epic Games CTO Kim Libreri as saying the awe-inspiring demo will work "pretty good" on a PC running an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Super graphics card. You'd also need a good NVMe SSD, (the PS5 also has an SSD). 

Of course, Libreri's statement doesn't tell us much by itself. It's unclear whether the RTX 2070 Super is adequate to run the demo at 4K resolution  or at 60 frames per second (fps).

However, given that the PS5 has just over 10 TFlops of GPU performance, and the RTX 2070 Super has 9 TFlops, we reckon the RtX 2070 Super is indeed sufficient for running Nanite at 1440p and 30 fps, just like it did on the PS5. 

The new Unreal Engine 5 demo showcases what happens when a game engine can run billions of triangles, global illumination and presumably ray tracing, along with spatialized audio, proper physics interactions and more. 

It will be quite some time before we see the first games based on Unreal Engine 5. But hopefully by the time that happens there will be more graphics cards out that can run the new game engine, and the minimum required spec is more approachable for the average PC gamer. Why should console gamers have all the fun? 

Grand Theft Auto V came out way back in 2013, but that hasn't stopped it from becoming one of the most popular games ever. When it came out, it wasn't weird to pay $60 for a copy and later shell out more for expansions and in-game content. Now, you can get a copy for free at the Epic Games store -- and it'll be yours to keep forever.

The catch is that you have to claim it within six days from today, but you'll be getting a Premium Edition copy of game that comes with all the DLC and in-game content. You'll even get $1 million dollars of in-game currency for GTA Online. That's a lot of cash flow: Will you invest it wisely for the long haul, or blow it on all the temptations you have to resist in real life? 

It's not exactly clear why Rockstar and Epic Games have decided to offer GTA V for free this week. It's possible that it's just a promotional stunt to draw people to the Epic Games Store, giving Epic Games an opportunity to reel in more customers for paid titles. Either way, we won't complain about a free copy of GTA V.

How to Get GTA 5 for Free

To get the free GTA V download working, you have to enable two-factor authentication on your account. After, the download should be available to you.

It's possible the store will give you an error message stating that you can't download the free game. However, Epic Games is telling customers to then wait 24 hours and try again. 

Understandably, traffic is extremely high with this title available for free, so you might need a little patience to score the bargain.

You can click here to head to the GTA V page on the Epic Games Store.

Epic Games announced the successor to its ubiquitous Unreal Engine 4 game engine today, showing off a playable real-time demo running on a PlayStation 5 developer platform. That gives us insight not only into UE5's capabilities, but also just what the PS5 and RDNA 2 powered hardware can do. Specifically, it sheds even more light on AMD's upcoming Big Navi / RDNA 2 architecture, which will compete with Nvidia Ampere for the battle to be the best graphics card later this year.

Titled Lumen in the Land of Nanite, the new Unreal Engine 5 (UE5) demo primarily focuses on UE5's 'Nanite' feature, which lets it display millions of polys on screen at once, automatically scaling down polygon counts from potentially billions of polygons. The demo also showed off the new 'Lumen' feature, which allows for fully dynamic lighting with no baking required. We take it that means ray tracing, though the demo never explicitly states whether that's the case.

Before we get into specifics, it's worth remembering that tech demos frequently outperform full games released around the same time. For example, Square Enix's 2012 Agni's Philosophy real-time tech demo showed off graphics more similar to 2016's Final Fantasy XV than the PS4's 2013 launch titles. This is because tech demos have the advantage of being tailor-made to show off game engines and the hardware running them in their best light. They don't have to worry about packing in all the assets and other mechanics a full game requires.

Still, it's hard to ignore a new game engine from the studio behind Fortnite, whose Unreal Engine 4 powers graphical standouts like Dragon Ball FighterZ and Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice. Especially when it promises real-time environments running on PS5 that would have been pre-rendered just a generation ago.

Lumen in the Land of Nanite is about 10 minutes long, and takes us through a series of live benchmarks for UE5 and the PS5 contextualized as a Tomb Raider-esque game. This means caves full of craggy rocks to show off high poly counts, dramatically sunlit chambers to show off the lighting, crumbling cliff faces to show off spatialized audio, a room with thousands of cockroaches that all react to player input, and a particularly stunning flight sequence at the end with an "if you see it, you can go there" promise of real-time rendering even on distant objects.

One standout moment at the beginning shows off all the triangles behind a Nanite powered cave system that uses cinematic 8K assets usually reserved for film. Each asset has about a million triangles each, leading to over a billion source triangles per frame overall. This is because cinematic assets expect to be pre-rendered rather than output in real-time.

The video says that "Nanite crunches this down losslessly to around 20 million drawn triangles," with the demo showing off pixel-sized triangles stretching across entire the screen as a result. Keep in mind, even at 4K resolution, there are only 8.3 million pixels on your screen. So "lossless" here means discarding the extra geometric detail that won't actually influence the final image.

All polygons can be fundamentally broken down into triangles, so more triangles means more detail. And that's a lot of triangles, certainly more than assets built with in-game performance in mind traditionally achieve.

Given RDNA 2 will support the DirectX 12 Ultimate API, we assume the technology behind the high polygon counts uses mesh shaders. Nvidia introduced the feature with its Turing architecture back in 2018, but so far it hasn't seen much use out of the Asteroids tech demo. With it becoming part of the DX12 Ultimate official spec, plus AMD's support of the feature on the next-gen console hardware, it looks like polygon counts are about to go way up.

Later on comes a breath of fresh air for game designers, which is the completely dynamic lighting powered by Lumen. Normally, game designers have to make assets for their games called lightmaps, which essentially places pre-rendered lighting throughout a game through a process called baking. Aside from not being as versatile and looking less realistic, it's a lengthy part of designing a level that can extend work for days (speaking from personal experience).

Lumen promises lighting systems that can move and adjust accordingly in real-time, no lightmapping required. In the demo, Epic shows this off through an impressive spotlight that instantly changes the direction light bounces off the environment as the designers move it around in real-time during gameplay. It's a convincing effect, and its ability to work with Nanite to create pixel-accurate shadows is just the icing on the cake.

Interestingly, while the UE5 video says this is "fully dynamic multi-bounce global illumination," it never mentions ray tracing. Ray tracing is one way to get accurate multi-bounce GI, but there are approximations that can be faster if less accurate. Whether UE5 requires ray tracing for the lighting effects isn't clear, but we know UE4 already supports ray tracing and PS5 has ray tracing hardware, so that's not too much of a stretch.

3D Modelers should be just as excited by a section later on in the video that shows off a high-poly asset seamlessly imported directly into the demo from sculpting software ZBrush, which contains "more than 33 million triangles" with no need to bake in normal maps or LODs.

Similar to lightmapping, normal maps allow 3D modelers to pre-render detail into a model without needing the engine to render more polygons in real-time, while LODs control how much detail games subtract from a model as the player moves further away. Both of these are lengthy processes (also speaking from personal experience, here) that are nonetheless required to achieve acceptable performance. Being able to prioritize fidelity over optimization will be a workflow game changer.

What's even more impressive is when the demo then shows off a room with 500 copies of that same 33 million triangle statue in it, with no discernible drop in performance.

The demo also shows off fluid dynamics, enhanced audio reverb, improved physics, and a room full of Nanite-powered bug NPCs that move in response to a player-operated light source. But the show-stopper comes at the end, and doesn't require as much technical knowhow as the rest.

Displaying off a complex series of real-time buildings that stretch into the distance, the demo has the player fly through and interact with them all as they head toward a goal in the horizon, promising a level of interaction with backgrounds that traditional pre-rendered solutions can't achieve, all while maintaining the same level of detail as everything else in the demo.

Throughout all of this, the demo doesn't appear to drop frames, though some social media users are expressing doubt with the UE5's capabilities by calling out the presence of old-school tricks such as the 'loading corridor,' which gates off the player's progress while environments load. Also, the uploaded video only runs at 30 FPS, though it does have 4K support.

For our purposes, what's most interesting here is the showcase of what the PS5's RDNA 2 GPU can support. Aside from what Epic details in the video, we've noticed similarities between this demo and Nvidia's Mesh Shader Asteroids demo from 2018.

The Asteroids demo shows off the Turing GPU architectures's ability to simultaneously render complex scenery and output high framerates. Mesh shaders shift performance bottlenecks off the CPU and onto mesh shading GPU programs, allowing for substantially higher triangle counts by using programmable thread groups, rather than processing each vertex in a scene using a fixed function pipeline. 

That's a lot of words to say "developers will have more control over how GPUs will render their geometry." So, like in the UE5 demo, the Asteroids demo displays a scene with 3.5 trillion source triangles and 50 million drawn triangles. This means RDNA 2 is likely either using mesh shading itself, or a similar technology exposed through the Vulkan API. Either way, it means the technique should see use in future games.

Given the showcase of the PlayStation 5 hardware and UE5, it looks like the Big Navi GPUs and Nvidia GPUs are going to get a workout in the coming years. The new features should drastically improve game development workflows, all while delivering more realistic environments to players. Holding a Master's degree in game design, I've noticed how much detail gets lost in the optimization process, and the thought of just not having to worry about it anymore has me reeling. That is, assuming you can do that and still hit 60 or 120 fps, which the PS5 and Xbox Series X are also promising as key features.

This year's Game Developers Conference (GDC) has been indefinitely postponed because of the Coronavirus outbreak, event organizers announced yesterday, and the Open Compute Project (OCP) Global Summit was canceled for the same reason.

GDC 2020's postponement was expected: Sony, Microsoft, Epic Games, Unity and Electronic Arts pulled out of the conference last week. Other companies may have followed suit, and at that point, we doubt many attendees would've shown up.

Event organizers said in an FAQ that GDC 2020 pass holders will be refunded, and that "individuals who have made hotel reservations inside the GDC room block will not have to pay penalties or fees associated with their reservations," either.

The organizers also said that GDC 2020 presenters will be able to stream their presentations, if they so choose, and that the Independent Games Festival and Game Developers Choice Awards will be streamed on Twitch from March 16-20.

The Open Compute Project Foundation will take a similar approach with the OCP Global Summit. It will still decide the winner for the Future Technologies Symposium, the foundation said, and that person will receive their $10,000 prize as planned.

Other plans seem less clear-cut. The foundation said in its announcement:

"A lot of work has been done in preparation for this event, including important product rollouts, company announcements, and innovations from our member companies. We would like to work with you on following through with those announcements to the Community, and the industry at large, over the next week.

"We will also be creating a plan to convert all the amazing content whereby our sponsors and exhibitors can still share their capabilities and innovations with key constituencies in order to further the innovations among our Community. More details to come, but we will try to create this event to take place as soon as possible."

GDC 2020 and the OCP Global Summit weren't the only events canceled because of the Coronavirus outbreak. Mobile World Congress was canceled, too, and Facebook said its F8 developer conference will be taking place online instead of in San Jose.

GDC 2020 shrank a bit yesterday when Microsoft, Epic Games and Unity announced that they won't attend the conference because of the coronavirus outbreak.

Microsoft said it decided not to attend GDC 2020 "after a close review of guidance by global health authorities and out of an abundance of caution." The company won't have to reschedule any of the announcements it planned to make at the conference, however, because it plans to host "a digital-only event" from March 16-18 instead.

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Epic Games made its announcement via the Unreal Engine account on Twitter. 

"Here at Epic we were excited about participating in GDC 2020," the company said. "Regrettably, uncertainty around health concerns has made it unviable to send our employees, and so we have made the difficult decision to withdraw attendance."

Unity, meanwhile, said in its blog post that it decided not to attend GDC 2020 because "current conditions with COVID-19 ... present too much risk" to its employees. But like Microsoft it plans to "showcase the great GDC content we’ve been working towards online" and said it'd provide more information over the next few weeks.

Microsoft, Epic Games and Unity are merely the latest companies to pull out of GDC 2020. The conference also lost Sony, Oculus, Kojima Productions and Electronic Arts; it wouldn't be surprising if other companies followed suit. Of course, the question of whether GDC will actually go on as scheduled is also on many minds. 

But for now GDC 2020 is scheduled to continue, despite missing some of the biggest names in the industry. The conference is scheduled from March 16-20 in San Francisco.

For some time now, Epic Games has been courting a wide variety of developers to release their games as exclusives on the Epic Games Store. Amid continuing backlash, founder Tim Sweeney has stepped in to explain Epic Games Store's methods. 

The Fornite developer has suffered criticism for this strategy among gamers. While some are only interested in when they can play upcoming titles and not where, there's a vocal group that's vehemently against Epic's push for exclusive games on its platform.  Take the recent controversy surrounding Shenmue III. After developer Ys Net confirmed that the game will be an Epic Games Store exclusive for PC gamers, Kickstarter backers expressed anger and frustration, saying they specifically requested Steam keys when they made their pledges.

In April, Sweeney claimed the Epic Games Store would stop with the exclusives if Steam adopted its revenue model (Epic's split is 88%/12% in favor of developers, Steam's is 70/30). Now, Sweeney is attempting to illuminate the thought process behind this initiative. The exec took to social media with a series of tweets, explaining that exclusivity deals are part of a longer-term solution meant to improve cuts for developers.

According to Sweeney, simply offering a better cut for creators isn't going to change the industry standard rates. Instead, Epic Games believes in purchasing exclusive games at scale in an effort to pressure Steam to reduce their cut.

"After years of great work by independent stores (excluding big publishers like EA-Activision-Ubi), none seem to have reached 5% of Steam’s scale," wrote Sweeney. "Nearly all have more features than Epic; and the ability to discount games is limited by various external pressures." He added that these outside factors lead to the "strategy of exclusives," which indeed may be "unpopular" with Steam gamers, but it does work.

Sweeney also said that the tactic could indeed be seen as aggressive, but it's “proportionate to the problem it addresses." With Epic's long-term goal of lowering the cuts that platforms like Steam take from developers as an industry-wide standard, the strategy does start to make more sense.

"If the Epic strategy either succeeds in building a second major storefront for PC games with an 88/12 revenue split, or even just leads other stores to significantly improve their terms, the result will be a major wave of reinvestment in game development and a lowering of costs," he summarized.

This may not be the most optimal solution for gamers resistant to change, or those who prefer Steam to the Epic Games Store, but it does appear that Sweeney and company believe this is a viable option to better the industry as a whole. And with a goal like that in mind, it's honestly hard to fault them – though we'll grant you the fact that it is a pain to constantly have to swap between launchers. 

At the E3 gaming conference this week, Epic Games announced that it has added 15 new games to its store. The company also revealed that it is extending its free games offering from one every two weeks to one every week until the end of 2019. 

A Free Game Every Week

When Epic Games launched its online store, it said users would receive a free game every two weeks. Last month, the company announced a free game every week for its month-long summer sale. Now, just days before this summer sale would have ended, Epic also announced that it'll be giving away a free PC game every week until the end of the year. 

Game publishers have been rather slow to adopt Epic Games’ store so far. Some games may already have deals with the company’s competitors; however, game publishers may take a second look at Epic’s store before publishing new games, considering the significant discount the company offers to developers using its Unreal Engine gaming engine (just 12% compared to the 20-30% they’d have to pay Steam, plus another 5% commission to Epic if they use its gaming engine).

Epics Games Store's New Games

During E3, Epic also announced 15 titles coming to its store, with five of them being exclusively delivered through the company’s online store.

The new exclusive games are:

• Auto Chess 
• Chivalry 2 
• Shenmue 3 
• Untitled Goose Game
• Zombie Army 4: Dead War 

The other 10 games, which are also available from other retailers, are:

• Atomicrops
• Cyberpunk 2077
• The Griftlands
• The Pathless
• Phantom Brigade
• Rune II
• The Sojourn
• Solar Ash Kingdom
• Twin Mirror
• What the Golf

The Epic Games store launched with a major feature that its main competitor, Steam, hasn’t been willing to offer so far -- an 88/12 revenue split model in favor of developers. Epic's CEO this week said that if Steam would adopt the same model and share 88% of game revenues with all developers, it would drop the exclusivity deals it sometimes makes with certain game developers.

Sweeney Takes A Swing At Steam

"If Steam committed to a permanent 88% revenue share for all developers and publishers without major strings attached, Epic would hastily organize a retreat from exclusives (while honoring our partner commitments) and consider putting our own games on Steam," he said via Twitter, adding. "Such a move would be a glorious moment in the history of PC gaming and would have a sweeping impact on other platforms for generations to come. Then stores could go back to just being nice places to buy stuff, rather than the Game Developer IRS."

That no strings attached would mean Valve wouldn't prevent game developers from using other stores or tax them for targeting more than one platform. An open store should simply allow gamers to find the games they like, with no arbitrary restrictions: Games can use any online systems, like friends and accounts, they choose, games are free to interoperate across platforms and stores, the store doesn’t tax revenue on other stores or platforms (e.g. if you play Fortnite on iOS+PC).

More “no major strings attached”: if you play the game on multiple platforms, stuff you’ve bought can be available everywhere; no onerous certification requirements. Essentially, the spirit of an open platform where the store is just a place to find games and pay for stuff."

Epic vs Steam Store Revenue Split Models

The Epic Games store currently takes only 12% of a game's revenues, with the rest going to the developers. In comparison, Steam takes 30%, or two and a half times more, as commission from games making under $10 million. Those who make more than $10 million in sales from a popular game can have that commission reduced to 25%, while those making over $50 million in revenue from their games have to pay 20%, which is still significantly more than Epic’s 12% fee.

Steam’s current tiered revenue split seems to mostly favor larger developers and hurt indie developers, which could help Epic in the long term.

Epic Games’ store is still very much in its infancy, but if it keeps getting more popular with developers due to the low commission rate, it could become a larger threat to Steam. Epic has also promised to launch its store for macOS and Android in the near future

There's nothing quite like Borderlands. Other games offer some of the same characteristics, from the art style and crass humor to the progression-based systems built on top of a first-person shooter, but none bring them all together in quite the same way. There's some good news for fans of the series, especially if they use AMD products, because Gearbox Software and 2K announced today that Borderlands 3 debuts on September 13 and will be very AMD-friendly. 

We specify those who use AMD products because the companies said Borderlands 3 was "developed from the ground up with AMD" and that it's "optimized for top performance and incredible gaming experiences on AMD Radeon graphics cards and Ryzen CPUs." The game will still work with Nvidia graphics cards and Intel CPUs, of course. But these optimizations could offer even better performance on AMD-based systems. We'll find out when it launches.

Epic Games Store PC Exclusive

Now the news that might be a little bit harder for PC gamers to accept. Borderlands 3 will be exclusive to the Epic Games Store at launch. The game is expected to reach "additional PC digital storefronts," but it won't do so until April 2020, and the companies didn't specify which other retailers. Fans of the series will either have to buy this release from Epic Games or wait more than half-a-year to buy it from an alternative game marketplace.

There are also four different versions of the game: Standard, Deluxe, Super Deluxe and Collector's. They cost a respective $60, $80, $100 and $250. The first three editions are available on PC; the Collector's Edition appears to be limited to consoles and includes some real-life bonuses. More information is available on the game's pre-order page. 

Borderlands Digital Releases Available Now

This announcement kicks off The Year of Borderlands. Gearbox and 2K are celebrating with a bunch of digital releases today. 
Borderlands: Game of the Year Edition
is available today for PC, PS4 and Xbox One with "ultra HD remastered graphics, significant quality-of-life content updates and all add-on content included." There's also a new Ultra HD Texture Pack "that increases the visual fidelity of Borderlands: The Handsome Collection on consoles and provides a visual upgrade for Borderlands 2, Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel and all the game add-ons for both titles on PC."

Most of these announcements should be welcomed by fans of Borderlands. The series hasn't seen a release since 2015, and that was The Handsome Collection, which brought the other titles together for console players. But enthusiasm hasn't seemed to wane: Gearbox and 2K said that Borderlands 2 still has 1 million monthly active players despite launching in 2012, and the overall franchise has sold 41 million copies.

The main question is how people will respond to the timed PC exclusivity to the Epic Games Store. On the plus side, the companies aren't pulling a bait-and-switch by offering pre-orders on other marketplaces and then switching over to the Epic Games Store. Nor are they making Borderlands 3 truly exclusive to this store, as console versions are available elsewhere and the PC version will reportedly hit other stores come 2020. But still, on the negative side, many PC gamers simply don't want to deal with yet another game storefront and launcher (just ask the Corsair Game Launcher Launcher).

Image credit: Gearbox Software and 2K

Epic Games joined Nvidia in promoting ray tracing to developers at Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2019 in San Francisco this week. In addition to Nvidia announcing that Unreal Engine would add support for real-time ray tracing, Epic Games showed off the technology during its March 20 keynote with a demo called "Troll."

"Troll" was made by Goodbye Kansas and Deep Forest Films using the next major version of Unreal Engine, 4.22, and it runs on a single Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti graphics card. In a blog post, Epic Games said the demo's purpose was to "demonstrate how ray tracing can create cinematic-quality lighting with complex soft shadows and reflections"

You can watch the demo below: 

Of course, Nvidia also used the demo in its own blog post to show what its RTX graphics cards are capable of. The company hasn't sold enough of its latest-and-greatest GPUs to meet expectations, so pretty much since GDC 2019 started, the company has appealed to developers with tools and programs meant to bolster interest in RTX cards.

Despite those extra incentives, it could still take gamers a while to adopt Nvidia's latest graphics cards, especially when they remain so expensive. So Epic Games and Nvidia have both worked to convince creative professionals that Unreal Engine 4.22 and RTX graphics cards' ray tracing support has something to offer them.

A preview version of Unreal Engine 4.22 is available now. Epic Games said the full release will debut "within two weeks." The new version of the game engine boasts more than just real-time ray tracing support: it also has "drastically reduced compile times," support for Google's Stadia game streaming platform and more.

Releasing a new game launcher might be harder than Epic Games thought. People have complained about the Epic Games Store since its launch, and on March 14, a Reddit post about various privacy concerns got enough attention to warrant a response from Epic.

The post's main complaint involved the Epic Games Store copying Steam's localconfig.vdf file, regularly accessing root certificates, and tracking its users' activity in several ways. Some of those concerns could be explained away by the Epic Games Store being a glorified web browser; others could not.

Epic Games VP of Engineering Daniel Vogel responded to the post. In his response, Vogel said tracking is used to monitor page statistics and enable the Support-A-Creator program. He also said the launcher scans active processes to make sure it doesn't update a running game and that it regularly sends users hardware surveys.

But this part of Vogel's response caught some attention:

"We only import your Steam friends with your explicit permission. The launcher makes an encrypted local copy of your localconfig.vdf Steam file. However information from this file is only sent to Epic if you choose to import your Steam friends, and then only hashed ids of your friends are sent and no other information from the file."

But why copy the file before someone makes it clear that they want to import their Steam friends to the Epic Games Store?

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney eventually chimed in to explain that "the current implementation is the result of a system that was built quickly and then rapidly modified before launch." (This makes it seem like he's talking about the Epic Games Store launch; in another comment, he said he's talking about Fortnite.)

"It's a klunky method that we'll fix," Sweeney said. He also explained that Epic didn't just use the Steam API because "we avoid including third-party code in our engine wherever possible, as it often brings its own privacy, security, and licensing complications (though Valve has a fine reputation)."

In another comment, Sweeney cited a report about iOS apps sending private data to Facebook to explain "the general concern of APIs collecting more data than expected." He also said:

"You guys are right that we ought to only access the localconfig.vdf file after the user chooses to import Steam friends. The current implementation is a remnant left over from our rush to implement social features in the early days of Fortnite. It's actually my fault for pushing the launcher team to support it super quickly and then identifying that we had to change it. Since this issue came to the forefront, we're going to fix it."

A Valve spokesperson told Bleeping Computer that it is "looking into what information the Epic launcher collects from Steam." The localconfig.vdf file doesn't just contain a friends list--it also stores information about the games someone owns, saved login tokens, and other data that's only meant to be used by Steam.

Some of the furor surrounding the Epic Games Store isn't warranted-- as we said above, some of its activity can be explained by it being a Chromium browser wrapped in an app. But it's clear that Epic might not have been as ready as it thought to release a game launcher that could compete with Steam.

Valve announced that it's retiring the Video section of Steam as part of a "refocus" on gaming-specific content in the marketplace.

Steam's Video section previously allowed people to sell documentaries, movies, and other video content that didn't have to be explicitly related to gaming. Yet it seems that Steam users were mostly interested in the platform as a game marketplace--which makes sense given that it's primarily a place where people can buy PC games--rather than a central hub of digital content.

"For the past few years, we have worked on expanding Steam beyond games and software by building a video platform that supports paid and free video content," Valve said. "In reviewing what Steam users actually watch, it became clear we should focus our effort on offering content that is either directly related to gaming or, is accessory content for games or software sold on Steam."

The company said that gaming-related videos will now be discovered "via the associated game or software store page, or through search, user tags, recommendations, etc." Other videos will be "retired" over the coming weeks. Steam users will still be able to view the videos they've already purchased, which is a relief, but it's clear that Valve wants to exit the non-gaming-video business.

This decision arrives during a time of transition for Steam. Over the last few years Valve has rethought many aspects of the store, from how it displays reviews to what screenshots developers can use to promote their latest titles, and overhauled its Steam Chat service. All that's in addition to the company's work on virtual reality, cross-play with other platforms, and other tech.

Steam also faces more competition than ever now that Discord's in the game-selling business, the Epic Games Store has debuted, and services like Twitch have promoted their own storefronts. Other companies, from Microsoft to Electronic Arts, have been planning Netflix-like subscription services that would obviate the need to buy games one at a time from platforms like Steam.

All that competition is bound to lead to changes in Steam. Removing non-gaming content, which apparently wasn't all that popular anyway, is an easy way for Valve to focus on other areas.

Early last month, Ubisoft announced that it would launch its upcoming Tom Clancy's The Division 2 game exclusively on Epic Games’ new store. The move caused a bit of controversy, but Ubisoft told investors in an earnings call yesterday with investors that the the company made the right move ditching Valve’s Steam, as pre-orders have drastically increased compared to the first Division game.

Ubisoft’s Epic Games Success Story

During the call with investors, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot said that the primary reason for stopping the distribution of its games on the Steam store was to increase exposure to its own Uplay store, as reported by VG247. However, at the same time it provided the company with an opportunity to partner with Epic Games for launching Division 2 on Epic’s store.

The partnership seems to have been a success, according to Guillemot, as so far PC pre-orders for Division 2 have already been significantly higher than that of the first game in the series. More importantly for Ubisoft, PC pre-orders from its own store are six times higher compared to the previous game. 

“We believe this deal is a long-term positive for Ubisoft,” the CEO said, according to VG247.

Epic Store Offers Better Terms

It’s no surprise that Ubisoft believes that the Epic Games store offers a better deal than Steam, as a much lower commission rate compared to Steam has been Epic’s main competitive advantage from the store’s launch day.

Epic’s store takes only a 12 percent cut from sales, and on top of that, the developers that use its Unreal Engine are exempt from the engine’s 5 percent revenue commission rate, too. This is compared to Steam’s 30 percent cut for most games.

Steam recently introduced a variable commission rate for developers who sell game copies in the millions, but even those rates are still much higher than the rate Epic charges everyone.

Metro Exodus
developer Deep Silver announced that the upcoming first-person shooter will be available for pre-load, which allows people who pre-ordered the game to download it ahead of its official release date, on Steam but not on the Epic Games Store. But Metro Exodus isn't even available on Steam anymore.

The game's publishers announced in January that Metro Exodus would be moving from Steam to the Epic Games Store. (Deep Silver owner THQ Nordic said that decision was made by Koch Media, which owns the game's intellectual property, without any warning.) Steam pre-orders would still be honored, though.

Now it seems those lucky few who managed to pre-order Metro Exodus before it was pulled from Steam will have something to gloat about to their Epic Games Store counterparts. Being able to pre-load the game might not mean much to most people, but it allows eager players to experience the game that much sooner.

The Epic Games Store doesn't yet offer pre-loading for any titles; apparently that feature didn't make the shortlist of things for Epic Games to prepare ahead of the store's debut in December 2018. It's a young platform, and as this shows, it will have shortcomings.

Competition is healthy. No matter what the Monopoly board game teaches, allowing one group to have too much control over an entire market is often a bad thing, especially if that control is used to stifle competition. In theory, offering a competitor to Steam could be good for PC gamers in the long term. But in this instance, some gamers may be upset that they can't pre-load a very large game prior to its launch.

You can play Fortnite and PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG) on pretty much anything. Both games support a wide variety of hardware, and with their fairly extensive graphics options, it's not hard to get decent performance from most setups. But a pair of players have found out there are hidden benefits to playing these battle royale titles on a system that can push as many frames as possible.

Intrepid players of both games, WackyJacky101 on YouTube and u/0x011A on Reddit have discovered that frame rate directly affects how quickly guns fire. It appears to be a relatively simple relationship: more frames per second, more shots per second. However, things are actually slightly more complicated than that for PUBG, and people are still investigating on social media. The problem appears to result from a flaw in Unreal Engine 4, and because Fortnite and PUBG were both made with that engine, it affects them as well.

How does this affect gameplay?

This flaw probably wasn't the reason you last died to someone in either battle royale. All other things—your skill level or equipped weapon, etc.—would have to be equal for that to be the case. The odds of that happening in a given match are minimal.

But a big part of the battle royale genre's appeal is that games aren't pay-to-win (with the exception of certain emotes offering unintended benefits players can exploit). Nor are they limited to team-based modes where your chances of victory depend on the quality of the matchmaking system. Everyone is supposed to be on a level playing field at the start, with the only real advantages they can get being the equipment they find strewn about the map.

Having a higher fire rate than someone else because your system can push more frames than theirs wdefy that concept. Sure, better hardware can offer certain out-of-game advantages, like a smoother experience. But this is a measurable in-game advantage, not a matter of personal preference. 

A tweet from Fortnite's Twitter account responded to streamer Benjamin “DrLupo” Lupo’s tweet about this issue. Lupo has casted several Fortnite tournaments in addition to streaming the game to thousands of subscribers; his tweet was bound to get the company's attention.

"Thanks for bringing this to our attention. We're aware of this issue and are investigating a fix for it," the Fortnite account's response said.

It's not clear if Epic plans to fix the issue in Fortnite or, if it's Unreal Engine 4's fault, the engine itself.

Code found in a Steam Beta update suggests that Valve and Microsoft are planning to improve cross-play between PCs and Xbox One consoles. The code refers to Xbox-related networking features, which could mean a future version of Steam will make it easier for devs to enable cross-play.

Valve hasn't officially acknowledged the code in question, but it wouldn't be surprising to learn that it's collaborating with Microsoft to help bridge the gap between PC and Xbox players. Microsoft has spent the last few years unifying the platforms by introducing Xbox Play Anywhere, making an Xbox Windows 10 app and revealing initiatives like Project xCloud that will allow people to stream Xbox titles regardless of what device they own.

It would make sense for the unification of these platforms to continue with additional cross-play support. But even though it sells games via the Microsoft Store on Windows 10, it's doubtful Microsoft could accomplish much on its own. Too many people use alternative marketplaces, from mainstays like Steam and GOG to newcomers like Discord and Epic Games, for Microsoft to make a meaningful change without some assistance.

That's where Valve comes in. Competitive game marketplaces have been targeting Steam for years, but most have simply managed to live alongside it, not replace it. Steam also offers features to make it easier for developers to include controller support in their games, offer multiplayer game modes or accomplish many other things besides. Valve's offering is as close as PC gaming comes to having a unified platform.

The game industry is trending towards cross-play. Microsoft and Nintendo have more fully embraced the concept when compared to Sony, which objected to letting PlayStation 4 owners play with people who own other consoles, at least until the backlash from its stance reached a fever pitch. But even Sony had previously committed to letting PS4 owners play with PC and mobile gamers. (No word yet on the Switch doing the same.)

We've reached out to Valve to see if the company might offer more information about the Steam Beta update and will update this story if it responds. And it's worth remembering this is an update to the beta version of Steam--this could be something the company tests but never actually releases to the public. With the way things are trending, however, enabling native cross-play between Steam and Xbox seems more than likely.

Epic Games, the Unreal Engine and Fortnite developer, has revealed the list of games that is now available with the launch of its store today. The company also said that throughout 2019, its store will offer one free game every two weeks.

Epic Games recently announced a games store meant to compete with Valve’s Steam and the DRM-free store GOG Galaxy on the PC, as well as Google's Play Store (in 2019). The store is meant to be more developer-friendly, with a generous 88/12 percent revenue split model in the game developers’ favor.

At the launch of the store today, the company revealed the initial titles that are either currently available for purchase or will be soon. They are:

• Ashen (available)
• Darksiders 3 b (available December 14)
• Hades (available)
• Hello Neighbor: Hide and Seek (available)
• Genesis Alpha One (coming soon)
• Journey (coming soon)
• Maneater (coming soon)
• Outer Wilds (coming soon)
• Pathless (coming soon)
• Rebel Galaxy Outlaw (coming soon)
• Satisfactory (coming soon)
• Subnautica (available for free between December 14-27)
• Super Meat Boy (available for free between December 28-January 10)
• World War Z (coming soon)

Gamers will also find game editors for some of their favorite games available in the store:

• ARK Editor
• Bus Simulator 18
• Conan Exiles Dev Kit
• Dark and Light Editor
• Hello Neighbor Mod Kit
• Mars 2030 Editor
• PixArk
• Robo Recall Mod Kit
• Showmaker Dev Kit
• Squad Editor
• Unreal Tournament Editor
• VR Funhouse Editor

Huge Potential

The launch of Epic Games’ store isn’t particularly large, with only a handful of games available and a handful more being made available “soon.” Add to that the fact that Steam has a 15-year lead that even GOG hasn’t been able to completely erode. However, GOG has also stuck to its commitment on only supporting DRM-free games, something many developers may not find appealing, despite the fact that virtually every PC game’s DRM code seems to be cracked in the first post-launch week. Furthermore, GOG seems to offer similar revenue share to Steam (actually worse now, after Valve published some new changes to its revenue share model).

Epic Games on the other hand has better name recognition with mainstream gamers, due to both its popular Unreal Engine gaming engine, as well as the even more popular Fortnite game. The company can use that name recognition to attract gamers to its store in a way that GOG can not. Moreover, it should be only a matter of time before Epic Games’ bold and aggressive revenue share model, which is unmatched by any app store, PC or mobile, will get developers to rush to the store.

If Epic Games plays its cards right and can attract a significant number of gamers and game developers to adopt its store, that could create an avalanche effect that makes it easier to attract both gamers and game developers to the store in the future.

There's no denying how popular Fortnite has become. It's the world's most popular battle royale title, and because it also serves as a constantly operating meme factory, it's also become a pop culture icon. Epic Games wants to build on that success by letting people make their own Fortnite game modes via Fortnite Creative, a new program that kicks off on December 6 for Battle Pass owners and December 13 for everybody else.

Epic Games described Fortnite Creative as a "brand new way to experience the world of Fortnite" where you can "design games, race around the island, battle your friends in new ways, and build your dream Fortnite." Everything will be saved on a private version of the battle royale mode's island, which should allow players to experiment with pretty much anything they want to without affecting the game's existing play modes.

This seems like an expanded version of the Playground mode that debuted in Fortnite: Battle Royale earlier this year. That mode allows players to wander around the island on their lonesome to experiment with new guns, building techniques, and other mechanics without having to worry about someone else sniping them from across the map. (Unless they're practicing their sniping, in which case those long-range headshots are welcome.)

Fortnite Creative also hearkens back to Minecraft. People have used Mojang's building game to make functioning calculators, recreate other games, and do other things nobody would've expected from a game about harvesting materials to create basic structures. The same could happen for Fortnite--the game's system offers similar flexibility alongside more complex mechanics like advanced movement and third-person shooting.

Epic Games said it plans to support Fortnite Creative with "many new features and improvements over the next few updates" because it's " committed to making this bigger and better over time." It will also be interesting to see if the company borrows from the community's ideas--or perhaps even copies them outright--in more official Fortnite modes. Epic Games essentially just expanded Fortnite's dev team by millions of people.

Fortnite Creative will be free, too, even if it's initially restricted to Battle Pass owners. The Battle Pass typically costs around $10 worth of the in-game V-Bucks per season, but it's possible to amass that many V-Bucks without spending a dime. (Possible, but not exactly convenient.) That should help keep people invested in Fortnite even after the battle royale craze all-but-inevitably dies down as people latch on to the next trend.

Epic Games, the maker of the Unreal Engine gaming engine, has just announced its own multi-platform games store. The company will support Windows and macOS at launch, but it will also support “other open platforms,” including Android and presumably Linux, next year.

Epic Games Launches Own Game Store

Through the extremely successful Fortnite game, Epic Games gained both significant amounts of revenues as well as experience to run its own digital store. This experience allowed the company to learn just how much it costs to run a digital store, which ultimately enabled it to offer third-party developers 88% of the games' revenues.

That means Epic Games takes only a 12% cut, which is almost three times smaller than what Steam and Google Play Store charge most developers. Epic said there are no tiers or thresholds that developers have to meet either, unlike with other platforms.

Moreover, developers that use the Unreal Engine and who normally have to pay a 5% royalty will be exempted from paying that royalty, as Epic will take its 5% cut from the 12% store commission. Epic Games noted that games using other game engines are welcome on its store, too:

“We’ve built this store and its economic model so that Epic’s interests are aligned with your interests. Because of the high volume of Fortnite transactions, we can process store payments, serve bandwidth, and support customers very efficiently. From Epic’s 12% store fee, we’ll have a profitable business we’ll grow and reinvest in for years to come!”

The Store Wars Have Begun

Earlier this year, Epic Games accused Google of taking too high of a commission just for hosting developers’ apps on its store. As a result of this, the company ended-up recommending users to install its game from outside the Play Store, including from third-party Android app stores.

Google normally takes a 30% cut from the third-party developers’ app revenues. Apple and Valve’s Steam service take the same 30% cut. However, Steam recently announced a reduction in its commissions for large developers, presumably to preempt the launch of Epic Games’ store.

Steam now charges large developers that have earnings of over $10 million a 25% commission, and those that have earnings over $50 million a 20% commission. The latter is still almost twice as large as Epic Games’ commission. Additionally, some of those developers may still have to pay the 5% Unreal Engine royalty on top of the Steam commission.

Epic Games can’t launch its games from outside of the iOS App Store yet, because unlike with Android devices, iOS users can’t sideload applications on iOS devices. However, Apple is currently involved in a lawsuit that reached the Supreme Court, and depending on the ruling, Apple may be forced to allow other app stores on the iOS app store. Furthermore, if the justices rule this way, their ruling may also impact other app stores, such as the Microsoft Store or the Xbox and Playstation stores. That would give Epic Games even more room to grow on other platforms, but the same would be true for Steam and other app stores, too.

Epic Games finally launched Fortnite on Android in early August. People had been waiting for the game to reach Google's platform since it debuted on iOS devices in September 2017, and with the release of Samsung's latest Galaxy devices, that patience was rewarded. But nobody should have brought out the champagne yet, as Google quickly discovered and, over the weekend, publicly disclosed a vulnerability in the tool used to install the game.

The problem starts with the fact that Fortniteisn't available through Google's official Play Store. Epic didn't want to split 30 percent of the revenues earned from the Android version of its almost-bafflingly popular game, and because Android doesn't have the same restrictions as iOS, Epic was able to cut Google out.

But the Play Store and App Store don't exist only because their parent companies want to make some extra money. They're also supposed to make sure people are only installing software from a trusted source that (ostensibly) verifies that an app is secure and non-malicious. When people install apps from alternative sources, they run a greater risk of being compromised.

Enter the vulnerability Google discovered on August 15 and publicly disclosed on August 25. An engineer at Google named Edward discovered that Epic's installer enabled "man-in-the-disk attacks" that could let hackers quietly install malware alongside Fortnite (you can learn more about man-in-the-disk attacks via an August 12 blog post from security software vendor Check Point). The malware could also be given permission to access data without requiring any user input.

Epic released a fix on August 16. The company requested that Google maintain its standard of waiting 90 days before publicly disclosing the vulnerability, however, so people would have a chance to update their devices.

Google decided not to wait. "As mentioned via email," Edward said, "now the patched version of Fortnite Installer has been available for seven days we will proceed to unrestrict this issue in line with Google's standard disclosure practices."

This led Epic founder Tim Sweeney to criticize Google in a tweet saying the company was "creating an unnecessary risk for Android users in order to score cheap PR points."

Publicly disclosing this vulnerability could make it seem like Epic should have simply distributed Fortnite via the Play Store. Several comments on the initial disclosure made since it was public confirm this; some people have criticized Epic for using its own installer. Even if that wasn't Google's intention, that's how a number of people are taking the news, and people who haven't updated remaining vulnerable just makes things worse.

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG) kickstarted the nascent battle royale genre. Some titles incorporated similar elements before PUBG launched, but after the game's success, a new genre was born. The battle royale has come to life with indie games like Totally Accurate Battlegrounds, the addition of battle royale game modes to long-running series like Call of Duty and Battlefield and, of course, Epic Games' quick pivoting of Fortnite from a modern take on Minecraft to having a battle royale mode that has become a pop culture sensation less than a year after it first debuted.

This flood of titles has forced PUBG to compete in a genre it effectively started. Over time, however, the game's players have grown increasingly frustrated by long-running technical issues and the relatively sluggish update schedule when compared to how often Epic refreshes Fortnite. PUBG Corp. has been hearing those complaints, and now it's started a new Fix PUBG campaign to convince the wunderkind's players their complaints aren't falling on deaf ears. Now the question is whether or not the initiative comes too late to help PUBG regain its former glory.

Here's what PUBG Corp. said in a Steam update about the Fix PUBG campaign:

"For the duration of the campaign, we’ll be entirely focused on addressing problems with the game, including bugs, long-needed quality-of-life improvements and fundamental performance improvements. Throughout this campaign we’ll share specifics about what we’re working on and the expected time it’ll take to address the issues. Then we’ll deliver on our promises."

The company also included a list of changes it already plans to make based on player feedback. That includes allowing shots to deal full damage if they would've hit a vital area were a limb not in the way, various quality-of-life improvements and changes to how the FPS cap works, among other things. PUBG Corp. said "many of the improvements we’ll be making to the PC version will naturally be carried over to the Xbox version of the game as well" and that it's "committed to fixing problems for all our players," so presumably PlayStation 4 players will also benefit.

PUBG Corp. established a new website specifically for the Fix PUBG campaign where interested players can find the company's roadmap, a progress tracker for individual fixes and some FAQs that mostly boil down to "read the site." The website discusses the campaign's general purpose--"fix the game" by making PUBG a "better, more stable and fairer game"--as well as offer more details about specific changes. It's refreshing to see a company be so transparent about its game's problems and exactly how it plans to fix them, as well as when.

Yet, it remains to be seen if any changes will help PUBG earn back some of the goodwill it's lost. Cheaters have run amok (and technical issues have persisted) long enough to leave a bad taste in people's mouths. Redemption is possible, as Hello Games showed with the popular NEXT update to No Man's Sky, but there's no guarantee. That's especially true now that people can look forward to ostensibly similar experiences from the more established and much larger developers behind Call of Duty and Battlefield. And, well, Fortnite has already become gamer's new pastime.

Saying that Fortnite Battle Royale is a gaming phenomenon would be an understatement. Epic Games announced during E3 2018 that more than 125 million people are playing the game. And less than 24 hours after it was released for the Nintendo Switch, another 2 million people downloaded it. Yet many of those players soon faced a sad realization: Not only was there no cross-play with PlayStation 4 owners, but if they had used their Epic account for any game on Sony's console, there was no way for them to sign into it on the Switch. Xbox One players have the same problem.

Not being able to play with PS4 owners is a bit of a bummer. Fortnite offers cross-play between the Switch and Xbox One, yet Sony has prevented the PS4 from joining the game's console ecosystem, which means console players might not be able to play with all their friends. But this doesn't come as much of a surprise: Other games that bridge the gap between consoles, like Paladins, Minecraft, etc., also support Nintendo and Microsoft's consoles but not Sony's. Even if games do support cross-play, like Rocket League, the PS4 is kept apart from the Switch and Xbox.

At this point it seems like Sony is content to offer cross-platform support between PS4 and PC, but not to let its customers fraternize with its console competitors. There could be any number of reasons why: Sony could be worried that PS4 owners will jump ship if they can play with their friends on other consoles. The company could have decided it doesn't want to build the infrastructure/code required to support cross-console play, or it could simply want to keep as many people in the PlayStation Plus ecosystem as possible. Those monthly subscriptions aren't going to sign up for themselves.

Of course, there are other, more reasonable explanations for not supporting cross-platform play on certain devices. Many games don't bridge the gap between the PC and consoles, for example, because of their different input methods. PC gamers could have an edge over console players because they use a mouse instead of having to use a joystick. Or console gamers' aim assist could overcompensate and put the PC players at a disadvantage. That isn't the case here, though, because you can play Fortnite with people on PS4, PC, iOS, and Android devices.

Whatever the reason, it's clear that Sony wants the PS4 to be an island. That's unfortunate for anyone who wanted to play Fortnite with their friends regardless of what console they own. But it's understandable, or at least not unusual for Sony. The bigger problem comes from the fact that once you visit and log in Sony's island you can't leave. (Insert obligatory-yet-dated "Lost" reference here.) Previously using an Epic account for any of the company's games, like the now-defunct Paragon, will apparently prevent you from signing in to the same account on a different platform.

Here's the message shown in Fortnite for Switch:

"This Fortnite account is associated with a platform which does not allow it to operate on Switch. Neither the Fortnite website nor Epic Customer Service are able to change this. To play Fortnite on Switch, please create a new account."

That means people who purchased in-game cosmetic items and linked their Epic accounts to their PS4 can't access those items on their Switch or Xbox. You can link your account to every other platform--and Xbox Live director of programming Larry "Major Nelson" Hryb tweeted instructions for how to connect your Xbox Live account to Epic so you can access your items on Switch--but not to the PS4. The same is also true in reverse; a Fortnite account created on or connected to the Switch can't be accessed on the PS4 version of the game. You simply can't access both platforms from the same account.

This leaves us with two major takeaways. The first is that true cross-play remains a dream--and that it only takes one company, like Sony, to exclude its platform from the list of available options to kill that dream. (Unless keeping its console separate from the others becomes a deal-breaker with consumers, in which case even Sony might be persuaded to stop creating artificial boundaries along console lines between players.) Games will remain fragmented. Sure, at least some of the fragments can be put together, but true "play anywhere" capability still doesn't exist.

The other major takeaway is that Sony might have too much power regarding accounts for outside services. Imagine if the company had tried to pull the same with something other than a game. Would you buy a PS4 if watching Netflix on it meant you couldn't watch it on another platform? Or, to leave the realm of game consoles: would you buy an iPhone if it was able to hold your Facebook, Google, or Twitter accounts hostage? Sony's policy is so ludicrously anti-consumer that even long-standing PlayStation fans might be tempted to move to another platform.

It doesn't help that Sony issued a non-response when the BBC asked about backlash surrounding the Fortnite scandal:

”We’re always open to hearing what the PlayStation community is interested in to enhance their gaming experience. Fortnite is already a huge hit with PS4 fans, offering a true free-to-play experience so gamers can jump in and play online. With 79 million PS4s sold around the world and more than 80 million monthly active users on PlayStation Network, we’ve built a huge community of gamers who can play together on Fortnite and all online titles. We also offer Fortnite cross-play support with PC, Mac, iOS, and Android devices, expanding the opportunity for Fortnite fans on PS4 to play with even more gamers on other platforms.”

That's a great response to a question nobody asked. Perhaps the Sony rep who crafted the above statement should consider a second career in politics.

PUBG Corp. filed a lawsuit in South Korea accusing Epic Games of infringing on its copyright with the ultra-popular Fortnite Battle Royale.

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG) may have set the stage for battle royale games, but Fortnite Battle Royale stole the spotlight. Epic Games' take on the genre has more players, a bigger audience on Twitch, and potentially a larger esports scene thanks to Epic Games' pledge to contribute $100 million to the professional scene. With this new lawsuit, it seems PUBG's creators won't leave Fortnite Battle Royale uncontested.

The games do boast many similarities. Up to 100 players are transported via airplane or "battle bus" to a location featuring a few medical supplies, plenty of weapons, and an ever-shrinking safe zone surrounded by lethal gases or storm clouds. Each player strives to be the last one standing, but how they achieve that goal is up to the player. They can engage in firefights, skulk around the action, or simply hide in a bush.

That's where the similarities end. PUBG is based off military shooters that feature semi-realistic gun mechanics. It takes place in believable not-quite-real-world settings, and lets people choose between a third-person view or first-person perspective. Fortnite Battle Royale is defined by cartoony graphics, a building mechanic that lets adept players build the equivalent to the Sistine Chapel in mere seconds, and casual gun play.

Many gamers were captivated by PUBG when it debuted. It spent weeks atop the Steam charts, shattered records for concurrent players, and dominated Twitch streams. But then Fortnite Battle Royale came around with its free-to-play spin on the genre and usurped its predecessor in all major categories. In other words, it's fair to say that PUBG's backers popularized the battle royale category only to have Epic Games steal the thunder.

So now the fight will leave the digital realm and head to the courts. Though less violent, this battle could be even messier than anything that's happened in either game. PUBG is built on Unreal Engine 4, which means Epic Games could probably find a terms of service violation that would leave PUBG Corp. open to counter-suit--and while they're competitors, both companies are partly owned by Tencent. This is basically a family dispute involving the world's biggest games.

Because PUBG and Fortnite Battle Royale are involved, however, this is a lawsuit to watch. Both are rushing to establish dominance over the battle royale genre before it, like the first-person shooter and MMORPG genres, becomes crowded with new games. The court's decision could make the difference between battle royale being a viable genre, or every title too similar to PUBG risking a lawsuit or having to pay some kind of licensing fee.

We reached out to PUBG Corp.'s parent company Bluehole Studio and Epic Games for comment on the lawsuit and will update if either responds.

How We Tested

How big a sensation is Fortnite at the moment? It's addicting the NBA. It's setting records for concurrent numbers of players. It's making our colleagues lose more sleep than they'd likely care to admit. (Wake up, buddy.)

Understatement of the year: Fortnite has enjoyed a whole lot of success since Epic Games added a free-to-play Battle Royale mode last September, building on the already available Save the World mode (PvE). (For more on Fortnite: Battle Royale, see this primer on sister site Tom's Guide.)

The game is available on the Sony PlayStation 4, Microsoft Xbox One, Windows, and macOS platforms. It leverages the Unreal Engine 4, and it is DirectX 11-compatible (Metal, if you're on macOS). And indeed, on the PC side of things, it's designed to run even on low-end hardware. Sister site Laptop did a keen analysis of how to play Fortnite on the integrated graphics chips that are common fare in most non-gaming-minded laptops and low-end desktop PCs.

Check out that story, if your intention is to play Fortnite on hardware like that. Under those circumstances, it becomes a balancing act of tweaking settings and resolutions. Our intention here, instead, is to see how Fortnite plays on a mainstream PC with a variety of dedicated graphics solutions, and what it takes to run the game at maximum settings, which in the case of Fortnite is known as "Epic."

The Benchmark Sequence

The trick to testing Fortnite on any kind of hardware is settling on a test sequence that will generate meaningful, repeatable results. It is always tough to choose a sequence for games that don't include an integrated benchmarking routine. For the purposes of our performance analysis, this time around we created an easily reproducible walk-through within the mission “Before and After Science,” found in Save the World mode. A recording of the exact sequence is shown below...

Minimum & Recommended System Requirements

Fortnite's minimum and recommended system configurations are available directly from Epic's webpage. Whether you're talking about host processing, system memory, or graphics horsepower, Fortnite doesn't seem particularly demanding. Of course, it remains to be seen if our mainstream gaming PC is enough to enable the Epic quality preset at 1920x1080...

Test Configuration

We recently updated our test configuration to better reflect the state of mid-range PC gaming on a desktop in 2018. This time around, we picked an AMD Ryzen-based platform, focusing specifically on the Ryzen 5 1600X as a great CPU compromise option for enthusiasts looking to save some money.

Steam's survey of hardware and software configurations offers us a view of the most prevalent components and settings (the data comes from February 2018):

• 8GB of RAM is the memory level in 45% of gaming PCs. Our system has 16GB, similar to almost 40% of surveyed gamers.
• Full HD resolution is used by 76% of gamers, while 8% are still running at 1366x768. QHD is the resolution of choice of only 3.4% of respondents, while 4K remains a small enough percentage of adoption to remain anecdotal. We will test at 1440p in addition to the classic Full HD.
• Quad-core CPUs are installed in more than two-thirds of surveyed systems (72% to be exact). In anticipation of CPU trends in coming months, we're using a mid-range six-core processor.

Graphics Card Selection

We chose 10 representative graphics cards for this test, mainly entry-level and mainstream options. Here are the competing boards:

Test Procedure

All performance data is collected using the PresentMon tool and our own custom front end.

To represent performance accurately, each graphics card is warmed up to a stable temperature before measurements are collected. Most newer GPUs employ mechanisms to optimize clock rates based on variables such as power consumption and temperature. As a result, tests run during the warm-up period would convey better performance than you'd see in the real world. We therefore execute the benchmark sequence one time to warm up the card, prior to gathering official data. For graphics settings, we tested the game at Full HD and QHD resolutions, with the maximum settings (Epic preset) and with the Show Grass setting turned on.

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Graphics and Rendering Settings

Fortnite doesn't give you a ton of graphics options. However, the most important knobs and dials are easy enough to manipulate. Beyond the universal image-quality presets (Low, Medium, High, and Epic), you can individually adjust view distance, shadow quality (the most demanding graphics parameter), anti-aliasing, and texture quality. Show Grass, a resource-hungry option on lower-end graphics cards, has its own toggle.

High vs. Epic

Differences between the High and Epic presets are not obvious. Looking closely, however, the shading and lighting are slightly dissimilar. Overall, we suspect that you'll find the High setting perfectly suitable if it means enjoying a smoother frame rate on your hardware.

Medium vs. Epic

Shadow quality takes a hit under the Medium preset, while Show Grass is disabled by default. (You can turn this setting back on independently.) There is also a noticeable decrease in texture quality, as well as in view distance.

Low vs. Epic

The Low setting is clearly designed for entry-level GPUs, as far down as integrated graphics engines. Basic image quality and the complete absence of shadows wrecks the game's visual appeal. Skip this option unless you have no other choice, in which case consider upgrading your PC.

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Benchmarks at 1080p and 1440p

Given that the minimum and recommended configurations suggested by Epic are quite reasonable, we're running our tests under the Epic preset with Show Grass enabled. We're also generating data at 1920x1080, as usual, but also 2560x1440.

Benchmarks at 1080p

Surprisingly, the Epic preset gives our mid-range field some trouble. None of the cards successfully maintains a minimum frame rate of 60 FPS. Only the Radeon RX 570, RX 580, GeForce GTX 1060 3GB/6GB, and GTX 970 rise above a minimum of 30 FPS. According to our results, those are also the only cards (along with AMD's Radeon R9 390) to deliver sufficient smoothness.

If you own a Radeon RX 460/560 or GeForce GTX 1050/1050 Ti, dial down the graphics quality if you want to play at 1920x1080.

Benchmarks at 1440p

Of course, the frame rates fall further at 1440p. Only Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1060 3GB and 6GB minimize hitching by staying above 30 FPS. To play at 1440p on anything below the level of those cards, you'll have to drop the Epic preset and switch to High.

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The Best Quality Settings for 60 FPS Performance

Because the graphics presets have a greater impact on performance than we expected, we revisited the slowest card in our lineup, MSI's Radeon RX 460 OC 2GB, and reran all of our tests using the game's Auto preset. For each configuration, we also measured performance with and without Show Grass enabled.

We did a bit of research on the best settings for this card, aiming for a minimum frame rate of 60 FPS. Those turned out to be the High preset with Show Grass enabled, but Shadows set to Off. Shadows seem to affect frame rates most, so dial that option back (or deactivate it altogether) if you're trying to improve otherwise marginal performance.

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How Fortnite Uses CPU, RAM & Video Memory

CPU Utilization

Now, let's see how Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) manages available host processing resources. Given modest minimum and recommended settings, we expect that our Ryzen CPU won't be overloaded.

Overall, the utilization that we measure appears acceptable, regardless of whether you have a GeForce GTX 1060 6GB or Radeon RX 580 installed. But we do see two cores more active than the rest. Epic's Unreal Engine 4 does not seem to exploit our Ryzen CPU's resources in a balanced way, though we've definitely seen worse when it comes to threaded games.

For what it's worth, we've been told by Epic's Tim Sweeney in the past that UE4 scales well to four cores, with worthwhile scaling to eight to 10 cores in more complex UE4-based game scenes.

System & Video Memory Utilization

There is not much to say about memory use. Gaming PCs with 8GB of RAM should be fine. As for graphics memory, our two comparison boards have some headroom left, though you'll see greater utilization on Radeon cards than GeForce ones.

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How Fortnite Uses Multiple Cores

We now know that Fortnite does not distribute CPU loads uniformly over available resources. Two of our Ryzen processor's cores are more heavily utilized than the rest, so let's see what happens when we start dialing back the number of active threads. For this experiment, we dust off the GeForce GTX 1060 6GB and test several core/thread combinations with our Ryzen 5 1600X.

Reducing the number of available logical cores leads to a slight drop in average and minimum frame rates. However, the difference between six-core/12-thread and two-core/two-thread is so small that it is barely above the margin of error. In other words, a CPU with just two cores should be sufficient to play Fortnite at 1920x1080 under the Epic quality preset with a mainstream graphics card.

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Our Conclusions (and Bonus Testing With GeForce GTX 1080 vs. Radeon RX Vega 64)

The GeForce GTX 1060 6GB and Radeon RX 580 struggled to run at 1920x1080 under the Epic quality preset. But our host processor appears to have plenty of headroom left. So let's take a look at what a couple of high-end graphics cards can do to push our platform harder.

In this round of tests, we drop a GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition and a Radeon RX Vega 64 into the Ryzen-based PC, maintaining a 1920x1080 resolution and the Epic preset with Show Grass enabled.

While AMD's Radeon RX Vega 64 falls below our 60 FPS floor once, the GeForce remained above that threshold through our test sequence. Unsurprisingly, both cards offer smooth game play, even if the Radeon demonstrates some significant frame-time spikes.

Processor Utilization

When it comes to CPU utilization, Unreal Engine 4 still operates mostly across two cores, leaving the others far less occupied. Overall usage is definitely higher with these two high-end graphics cards installed, though, which is definitely understandable, since higher frame rates force the CPU to do more work.

Processor Utilization at 144 FPS and 240 FPS

Now, let's focus on specific frame rates. We want to know if host processing comes into play as a limiting factor when you try to run at 144 or 240 FPS. Of course, hitting those performance levels means dialing down the graphics quality, even on our high-end cards. Medium and High quality settings with Shadows disabled are what we need to get there.

Although we still see two cores most heavily utilized (sometimes fully), the game engine takes advantage of other cores this time, too. Tim Sweeney's words prove accurate: Unreal Engine 4 does seem capable of exploiting the Ryzen CPU's resources, just not in a perfectly homogeneous fashion.

Our Conclusions

Based on the Unreal Engine 4 game engine, Fortnite is playable on a wide range of system configurations, from entry-level to high-end, thanks to a panoply of graphics settings. How you toggle those settings on and off has a large (and variable) impact on performance. For example, the Shadows option has the biggest effect on frame rates, in our experience, particularly on lower-end GPUs.

We definitely recommend a card based on the GeForce GTX 1060 3GB/6GB or the Radeon RX 580 to push the detail settings as high as possible at 1920x1080. With a less powerful graphics card, you'll have to sacrifice either quality or resolution.

Don't worry as much about your CPU. While Unreal Engine 4 is certainly capable of making use of multiple cores, it does so in an unbalanced fashion (in Fortnite, at least). Our findings show that two cores are really all you need. At least this makes it possible for the game to run smoothly at Full HD on a fairly low-end platform, so long as you have enough graphics horsepower to burn and a high enough clock rate.

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Nvidia didn’t announce a new gaming graphics card at GDC, but it did give gamers a glimpse of the future with a new ray-tracing technology that runs on Microsoft’s new DirectX Raytracing (DXR) API.

What Is RTX?

Nvidia's RTX ray-tracing technology is a combination of software and hardware that allows applications (primarily games) to have real-time ray tracing effects, something long considered the holy grail of graphics processing.

Nvidia explained in a press release:

“Real-time ray tracing has been a dream of the graphics industry and game developers for decades, and Nvidia RTX is bringing it to life,” said Tony Tamasi, Senior Vice President of Content and Technology at Nvidia. “GPUs are only now becoming powerful enough to deliver real-time ray tracing for gaming applications, and will usher in a new era of next-generation visuals.”

RTX supports Microsoft’s new DirectX Raytracing API, so it can be utilized by the Windows OS. Industry leaders including 4A Games, Epic Games, Remedy Entertainment, and Unity each have an RTX technology demonstration on display at GDC, showcasing how real-time ray tracing can look in future games. The new DXR API is said to support the latest game engines, including Unreal Engine 4, Unity 5, and DICE’s Frostbite, and Nvidia claimed we would see games with the new technology hit shelves this year.

Nvidia said that the new RTX technology runs on “Volta architecture GPUs,” and further explained that RTX can function on GPUs that support the new Microsoft DirectX Raytracing API, indicating that Volta GPUs are currently the only ones in Nvidia’s catalog that run DXR.  This leaves developers who are interested in using RTX technology a few expensive options: the Tesla V100 accelerator and Titan V. The new technology is clearly currently aimed at developers--Nvidia also announced a new GameWorks SDK for Ray Tracing that provides a suite of resources for game devs to integrate ray-traced area shadows, glossy reflections, and ambient occlusion into their titles.

Volta For Gaming?

Some have taken this as a sign that Nvidia has not abandoned plans for Volta-based GeForce (gaming) graphics cards, and when asked what the Volta architecture utilizes for RTX that previous architectures don’t have on a hardware level, the company declined to get into specifics at this time. However, if Nvidia is indeed readying completely new and segregated GPU architectures for consumer and client as the rumors suggest, it could be that Volta just clears some kind of hardware support cutoff that future architectures will also have.

We’ve privately theorized that if Volta were to make it into a GeForce gaming graphics card lineup, Nvidia would have to eliminate or find a use for Volta’s tensor cores. Although they are optimized for deep learning workloads, tensor cores have also been adapted for use with AI-based denoising, and they could be ideal for ray tracing with its dedicated mixed-precision FP16/32 cores. RTX support may not have anything to do with Volta’s tensor cores, but with only the current snippet of Nvidia’s GeForce hardware future made clear, it’s certainly a possibility, and the announcement of Nvidia RTX just intensifies enthusiasts’ thirst for new graphics hardware.

Epic Games' Paragon will be shutting down in April. The company made the announcement on its official website in a heartfelt apology to the community and fans of multiplayer online battle arena players everywhere.

"It's with heavy hearts we've decided to close down Paragon," the statement begins. "After careful consideration, and many difficult internal debates, we feel there isn’t a clear path for us to grow Paragon into a MOBA that retains enough players to be sustainable."

The MOBA market was already crowded whenParagon entered the ring, but now that the craze has somewhat shifted to the insanely popular Battle Royale genre, it doesn't come as a surprise that Paragon is making way for Fortnite at Epic.

Paragon originally launched March 2016 on PlayStation 4 and PC as an Early Access title before heading into open beta later that August. The open beta originally cost players if they wanted to participate but was later altered to become a free-to-play game and doffed the premium charges. If you did decide to sink some cash into the game, you got a slew of upgrades and optional cosmetic items for your trouble.

Unfortunately, Paragon never came to fruition as a full-fledged retail release, nor was there ever a planned date for the game's debut. Epic Games is doing just fine, however, with the success of Fortnite and its Battle Royale spinoff, which is enjoying a massive, growing playerbase just since it hit the market in 2017, and it's still in Early Access. Without having to divert resources to Paragon, it's no doubt Epic will be able to spend time and money on Fortnite instead, and that game will continue to blossom.

If you invested in Paragon and spent money on any items or upgrades within the game, Epic has stated that it will be refunding all purchases across every platform. So no matter what you spent and no matter what you spent it on, you'll be able to request a refund directly through Epic Games via this request form.

If you enjoyed Paragon, it's time to pour one out for the MOBA. It had some interesting concepts, but it just wasn't meant to be. You can still play up to March 26, so if you want one last hurrah, you've still got some time.