Palworld continues to discover numbers I was heretofore unaware of. Did you know there could be 8 million of something? I sure didn’t, but then the game went and sold just that many copies in the course of around six days.

But that’s old news, frankly, because on top of its dizzying number of sales, Palworld has just become the second game in history to reach over 2 million concurrent players on Steam, attaining an all-time peak of 2,018,905 players simultaneously seeking the best Pals (according to SteamDB). That puts it ahead of Counter-Strike 2, Lost Ark, Dota, Cyberpunk 2077, and, well, actually, it puts it ahead of literally everything else on Steam that isn’t PUBG: Battlegrounds.

Palworld’s all-time player peak is about 200,000 ahead of Counter-Strike 2’s, but it’s got a long way to go before it could ever nab the top spot. PUBG reached the absurd high of 3,257,248 players back when it made waves and turned two-thirds of videogames into battle royales back in Janua…

Playtron hopes to become the Linux-based operating system for gaming across handhelds, laptops, TVs, and, uh, in cars. According to the company, the PlaytronOS will be an improvement over Valve’s own Linux-based gaming distro, SteamOS, because it won’t be locked to a single storefront: it will be “compatible with every game store and many 3rd party integrations to come.”

Playtron calls itself “a light weight gaming OS optimized for a new generation of powerful handheld gaming PCs.” The company’s website also calls out both Windows and SteamOS as being a poor fit for handheld gaming, and promises to be better.

The Playtron website is not particularly well written, which may go some way to explaining why it’s calling out the SteamOS as locked to the “Valveverse” and solely compatible with Steam. That’s not true—the second bit isn’t, anyways, I’m not really sure what a Valveverse is. But you can launch other stores on the handheld: you have to go around Big Picture mo…

Walmart and Roblox have teamed up to provide a service I didn’t know anyone needed: letting anyone over the age of 13 browse and buy goods from Walmart via Roblox, which amounts to an Inception-style headache. 

There was already a way to walk through a virtual retail shop via Roblox’s Walmart Discovered: a game that lets players discover new Roblox games, buy emotes, customize their very own Walmart cart, and show off their favourite items. It was made by Walmart in a crossover event with Roblox. But now it’s not just limited to immaterial purchases, as players located in the US who are 13 years and older can now actually order real-world items to their door (via Digiday). 

“There is a traditional sort of checkout flow where you put your name, your address, and your credit card information, and that’s all powered by a Walmart API that handles all of the information super securely—it’s very safe,” the director of brand experiences a…

The Sims isn’t the only PC life simulation game in town anymore. Dozens of smaller, more focused life sims have appeared in the years since Stardew Valley took off, and now upcoming Sims competitors like Paralives and Life by You are aiming for the same kind of broad home, relationship, family, and career simulation that EA’s 24-year-old Sims series is synonymous with.

Life by You director Rod Humble, who was the head of The Sims series for several years in the 2000s, thinks the fundamental inclusivity of the life sim genre is responsible for its growth.

“The reason that life simulation is so big, and I think it’s going to get bigger, is that it’s an inclusive game genre that anybody can use to tell stories that are rooted in real life,” said Humble in a recent interview with PC Gamer. 

Humble, whose game credits date back to the early ’90s, says he prefers working on sims to games with authored stories because the latter are “exclusionary” by nature. “Who is …

The latest Warbond for Helldivers 2 includes a lot of ways to dispense electric justice—and ways to survive those zaps when they inevitably blow back in your face. Unfortunately, an entirely different problem’s been slaying Helldivers lately: A frozen game client.

For almost an entire week, weapons like the Arc Thrower, the Arc Shotgun and the Tesla Tower stratagem have been crashing games at random, even if you’re not the unlucky sod firing the things. It’s one thing for a weapon to boot you if you’re using it, it’s another entirely to hope your three other random teammates got the memo and don’t deploy with a game-killing gun.

Fortunately, that should all be fixed now. Arc weapons and stratagems should no longer crash your game. Community Manager Baskinator also shared a list of known issues the team at Arrowhead’s still working on, as per the game’s official Discord:

• Various issues involving friend invites and cross-play:
  Cross-platform friend …
  

Bethesda has added one of the best unofficial Doom addons to its re-release version of the 1993 classic. Titled Base Ganymede, this megawad adds a new 27-map campaign to Doom set on Jupiter’s largest moon.

Unlike many Doom mods, Base Ganymede adheres largely to the style and conventions of the original game, using the base weapons and enemies, but providing different levels to expand upon the challenge originally conceived by Carmack, Romero et al. Its levels also follow the trajectory of the original game, starting out with familiar sci-fi bases, before becoming more surreal and hellish (in a literal sense) as the story progresses.

Base Ganymede was originally created by Adam ‘Khorus’ Woodmansey back in 2009. Well regarded since its release, it was honored in doomworld’s 2012 Cacoawards. “Base Ganymede is a megawad beaming with personality and charm”, said Doomworld’s Alfonzo back in 2012 “The maps showcase the Khorus design perfectly in being moderately sized with inte…

June 11, 2024: This story was originally written in May, but Tiny Glade’s demo is now publicly available in the Steam Next Fest and seems to be attracting tons of players.

There has been a lot of anticipation for Tiny Glade in the cozy gaming circles I follow. Its an adorable little building toy inspired by the success of Townscaper but has you build idyllic little castles instead of seaside cities. After getting to spend some time with its upcoming demo, I am hurting to play with the rest of it.

As in Townscaper, Tiny Glade’s premise is that your builds are all reactive. If you draw a little dirt footpath up to your cozy curtain wall it will sprout an archway. Widen that path and your single archway will split into two. Windows placed together may spawn shutters while dragging a circular tower close to your other buildings will have them mesh together as if they’d always been there.

In the demo I can doodle a…

You’ll find plenty of tips for your daily Wordle just below, sitting alongside a helpful clue for today’s game as well as the answer to the September 1 (804) puzzle. If you need help with today’s Wordle, you’re in the right place.

What looked like an easy win from the outset soon turned into a tense game of “almost, but not quite”, every guess dancing around today’s answer but never quite getting there. And then I realised that in my panicked rush to fill the gaps in my greens, I may have left a spare yellow behind. A spare yellow that soon sorted this mess out. Oops.

Today’s Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Friday, September 1

The part of the universe that’s beyond Earth’s atmosphere. Star Trek’s final frontier. A physical void or even an emotional gap between two people. Today’s answer can mean a lot of things, but they all refer to some form of significant emptiness. There are two different vowels to find in this one. 

ViewViewViewVie…

Damn son, does SCS Software love a truck. The venerable Czech studio is best-known for its various Truck Simulator games, the incredible success of which has led to the studio expanding and becoming almost a Truck Simulator studio. But that’s OK because, if there’s one thing that SCS and its players love, it’s a good old reliable truck.

How much do the players of this game like trucks? Enough that actual truck companies now pay SCS money to try and recruit in-game truckers into real-world operations. They can’t get enough of trucks; they’d take one to bed if they could. And SCS has decided to lean right into this with its latest project, a newly launched series called SCS On The Road, in which its developers visit truck makers and their facilities, both learning information that will be used in the games and sharing the behind-the-scenes experience with an audience that has probably dreamed of this moment.

The first episode visits the “legendary” Scania demo centr…

Stardew Valley players have theorized for years that harvesting crops from left to right is faster than harvesting them from right to left. Not hugely faster, hardly even noticeable, but just ever so slightly quicker. For non-Stardewers it’s the sort of thing that sounds a little weird and even ridiculous—not quite up there with fake moon landings and “Elvis is alive” conspiracy theories, but of a similar nature. Left-to-right, right-to-left—come on, be serious here!

Except in this case, well, it turns out that the temporally-sensitive farmers were correct: Stardew Valley creator Eric Barone confirmed today that there is in fact a bug that caused left-to-right harvesting to be faster than right-to-left harvesting, and it’s going to be fixed in the big 1.6 update coming out next week.

Now, this isn’t entirely new or unknown, at least among some deeply committed members of the Stardew Valley community. Three years ago, for instance, redditor Snow-Infer…