Steam, the platform responsible for popularizing the first meaning of early access, has had enough. It's now designating the latter scenario, when a developer offers pre-launch access to a completed game, "Advanced Access."

"Unlike Early Access, Advanced Access is not a unique model of development for a game, it's simply an opportunity to play a game before it fully releases on Steam," says the platform.

Is it just the exact same term, but with a synonym for "early" swapped in? Yes. But I don't have a better suggestion, so I'll take it. Please, EA, Ubisoft, and everyone else, do us a favor and play along. (Or, even better, stop it with that annoying preorder incentive altogether!)

I'm sure someone at Valve shares my irritation with the fluctuating meaning of "early access," but the new distinction probably has less to do with that, and more to do with a refund loophole. Apparently, when you got advanced access to a game in the past, your pre-release playtime didn't count toward the two-hour refund window. Now that Steam has formalized advanced access, it does.

Steam's updated refund policy still includes one exception to the two-hour rule, "beta testing," which refers to special beta builds of games that developers can make available for a limited time. So, if you accept an invite to a free playtest on Steam, it won't contribute to your playtime should you later buy the game. But if you pre-purchase a game, and then gain advanced access to it, your playtime will count toward the two-hour limit for automatic refund approval.

The potential for confusion still exists, because sometimes developers call advanced access periods beta periods, even if nobody thinks it's sensible to claim you're "beta testing" a game two days before its wide release. But it's progress.

The new Steam functionality also allows players to write user reviews during the advanced access period. In the past, you'd sometimes see games with thousands of concurrent players but no reviews, because they weren't technically "out" yet. (I still object to the idea that a game isn't "out" if you can pay a deluxe edition fee to play it, but that means rejecting the idea of "advanced access" altogether, and we'd be here all day if I tried to fully work that thought out.)

Recently, the hull has split three ways. Embracer will break off into Asmodee Corp, Coffee Stain & Friends, and Middle-Earth Enterprises & Friends. This is something Embracer CEO Lars Wingefors called "the start of a new chapter". Going forward, he'll be a shareholder in all three companies.

Looking back on the rest of the book, though, Wingefors does seem to admit that he might have messed up. Just a bit. 

In an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Wingefors concedes that "as a leader and an owner, sometimes you need to take the blame and you need to be humble about if you've made mistakes and if you could have done something differently."

While he's "sure I deserve a lot of criticism" and that he "could take a lot of that blame myself", Wingefors sees the aforementioned split as a way to continue the core vision of the company (soon-to-be-formerly) known as Embracer.

"I still feel I have the trust from many or all of my key entrepreneurs and CEOs that have joined the group," Wingefors states. "It's been difficult, but I think they all believed in the mission of Embracer." 

As for the oft-criticised spending spree: "When we were at the peak of 2020, 2021, we made all those decisions to acquire or organically set up or invest … I firmly believed in that. The outcome, because it takes a number of years to make games, is different and it's painful and we need to adapt to it."

Despite forming a large part of the over 16,000 layoffs which rocked the games industry in 2023 and early 2024, Wingefors remains certain that Embracer has "been trying to safeguard as many jobs as possible," adding "We've been trying to find new homes for teams and people." He then says that it's "easy to look back in hindsight on things." As for what those things are, your guess is as good as mine.

Ultimately Embracer's legacy is, as a respondent to a GDC survey in 2024 puts it, "[buying] up large swaths of an industry" and "creating redundancies and placing innovative, more 'exploratory' studios in a position where they’ll never be seen as profitable enough for shareholders." 

An abundance of oops, my bad won't do much to wash that reputation from the public record. Here's hoping that the split is a healthy one, and that we don't see the three houses of the once-great fiefdom Embracer shovelled into the maw of some other conglomerate. Oh, and that the KOTOR remake is still okay. 

"We got time with Helen Chang from Mojang, and we were sharing information, so it's almost as if we have access to what worked for them," Longdale said. "We got to speak to the Elder Scrolls Online team and share what we're up to and what's been working, it's almost like we get a benefit.

"There's no one asking us to do anything. World of Warcraft is doing very well and they're very proud of what it’s been able to accomplish, so it's almost like just let it be, and let it keep being awesome. They've been tremendously supportive and it's like, 'let Blizzard be Blizzard'."

Longdale's statement bears echoes of Microsoft's hands-off approach to Bethesda Softworks, which it acquired in 2021—and which seemingly came to an end a few years later when an Xbox studios reorganization put ZeniMax and its subsidiary studios, including Bethesda, under the direct control of Xbox president of game content and studios Matt Booty. The shift was believed to be driven at least in part by the infamous flop of the co-op shooter Redfall, which Microsoft let slide even though developers at Arkane were reportedly hoping it would either reboot or cancel the project.

A similar scene may be playing out at Destiny studio Bungie, which was acquired by Sony in 2022. Bungie was initially left to operate as "an independent subsidiary," but Destiny 2's recent struggles have put the pressure on: PlayStation chairman Hiroki Totoki said in February that he wants to see more "accountability" for development budgets and schedules from Bungie leadership, and there's a feeling that Bungie could find its operational independence ended if things don't turn around.

While the proverbial Sword of Damocles may or may not be hanging over Blizzard's head at this moment, there's no overlooking the fact that Microsoft has already made some big changes at Blizzard. Activision Blizzard was hammered by layoffs across Microsoft's gaming division, and even more notably the survival game Blizzard announced with much fanfare in 2022—"a journey to a whole new universe," Blizzard said at the time, "a place full of heroes we have yet to meet, stories yet to be told, and adventures yet to be lived"—was unceremoniously cancelled, despite having been in development for six years and by all reports had some exciting potential.

Of course, "let Blizzard be Blizzard" is also a statement that could open to different interpretations. As an old-timer I have fond memories of the scrappy studio that had an amazing mid-'90s run with Warcraft, Diablo, and StarCraft, but the bloom fell off the rose in a big way in more recent years thanks to questionable decisions and allegations of widespread workplace misconduct at the company that led to the departure of several high-profile developers. The ABK Workers Alliance, an organization of employees formed in the wake of a civil rights lawsuit filed against the company, actually thanked Microsoft for not letting Blizzard be Blizzard after it entered into a "labor neutrality agreement" with the Communications Workers of America union in 2022.

Ultimately, Blizzard is Blizzard to the extent that it has a number of big, valuable games to its name, and I have no doubt that Microsoft will be happy to let them keep ticking as long as they're printing money—as Phil Spencer himself said earlier this year, after all, it's his job to ensure Xbox is "a profitable growing business." I don't know if it was a Microsoft decision or Bethesda's call, or if maybe Dinga Bakaba is just a big fan, but as I think about Arkane—the studio responsible for Dark Messiah, Dishonored, Prey, and so much more—working on a licensed Blade game, I strongly suspect that in the end, Blizzard will be whatever Microsoft wants it to be.

Spy.pet ties message logs to the users who sent them, and also collects Discord aliases and linked social media and Steam accounts⁠—it's basically one stop shopping for any surveillance and harassment needs. Spy.pet further purports to offer an "enterprise option" for anyone looking to train an AI model on the site's library of messages. 

The site presents this as a potential option for "federal agents looking for a new source of intel," but I'm not sure what bush league FBI office is looking to outsource that capability here⁠.

Even with all our data already liable to be scrutinized by the government and sold by platform owners, there's a particular sense of violation at seeing it all packaged up and on sale to anyone like this, and Spy.pet's owner seems to take a certain glee in potential objections to the business: A "request removal" link on the site just leads to a .gif of JJ Jameson laughing in the Sam Raimi Spider-Man 2. I don't think J.K. Simmons is actually that flippant about my privacy, thank you very much.

In a statement issued to both the Register and StackDiary, Discord indicated that it is investigating Spy.pet for potential breaches of the company's terms of service: "Discord is committed to protecting the privacy and data of our users. We are currently investigating this matter. If we determine that violations of our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines have occurred, we will take appropriate steps to enforce our policies. We cannot provide further comments as this is an ongoing investigation."

As StackDiary points out, Spy.pet is also likely in violation of several articles from the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation. While we don't get nice consumer protections like that here in the US, the Register argues that Spy.pet's potential sale of children's data could still leave it legally liable in the States as well.

A crypto-fueled private sector surveillance and harassment machine is a lovely new nightmare of the 2020s, and I hope it gets shut down, but it's another valuable reminder not to treat Discord like it's private. What you say in a small, invite-only server with friends will probably stay there unless one of your friends shares it or reports a message to Discord's mod team, but to really be safe, chatting on Discord has to be seen as posting publicly on social media.

So, you know, probably don't leak classified military intel on Discord servers, and just generally don't say anything on there you wouldn't want to see screenshotted and put on Twitter or Reddit. Of course, it would also help if we would just stop making Discord servers for things that shouldn't be Discord servers. 

Hosted by PC Gamer's sister site GamesRadar+, the Future Games Show Summer Showcase will air on June 8 (exact time tbc) and can be watched on YouTube, Twitch, Facebook, X / Twitter, and TikTok.

The Future Games Show aims to help players discover something new, and the Spring Showcase included nine world premieres among the running order. The highlight for me, though it's mainly the name I must admit, was the sequel to Fights in Tight Spaces: Knights in Tight Spaces! 

As for the Summer Showcase, we're promised "the biggest, most varied show yet" as well as "demo drops" and exciting hosts. Last time they had Samantha Béart—aka Karlach, PC Gamer's preferred tiefling barbarian—and Final Fantasy 16 voice actor and verifiable meme Ben Starr, so it'll be some going to top that.

"The Future Games Show Summer Showcase is a fantastic way to see new games," says content director Dan Dawkins. "Every show’s multi-format games line-up is painstakingly hand-curated, with a growing reputation for celebrating innovation, and titles that defy genres. A city builder for worshippers of Cthulhu? We’ve got your back. From fresh updates on AAA blockbusters, to debuts of daring indies, we showcase them all on the Future Games Show."

So get ready to tune in on June 8 and see the Summer in games showcased. If nothing else, it will whet your appetite good and proper for this year's spectacular PC Gaming Show.

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Happy Thursday PC gamers, welcome back to the PC Gamer Chat Log podcast! How are we all this week? If y'all watch the video version of this pod, you'll know that I've discarded the beloved split dye hairdo I've been donning since before my time at PCG (and I've been here for over three years!!) It's quite strange getting rid of something I've spent so long associating as a huge part of my identity, but anyone who's bleached their hair for an extended period of time will know that it does an absolute number on your locks.

Now my hair may change, but you know what doesn't change? War. War never changes. No, I am not sorry for that terrible segue. The Fallout TV series graced our screens last week and you know what? It's actually pretty dang good!

We've brought Chris Livingston on board to chat all things Lucy, Maximus and the Ghoul, as he was fortunate enough to be able to watch the show ahead of its release. Lauren somehow managed to devour the entire thing in a single Sunday, whereas I only got three episodes in by the time we rocked around to recording. I know, I'm slow! The good news is I've finished the whole thing now, which means I'm primed and ready to talk about all the episodes with you lovely folk over on the PC Gamer forums. Go over there to peep our thread about the latest episode and chat with myself and Lauren.

Be warned there are some light spoilers for the show, but Lauren and Chris were lovely enough to not divulge any major story beats for my sake.

You can check out the PC Gamer Chat Log podcast on a whole bunch of podcast platforms:

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And more!

If you prefer some faces to go with your voices, you can also check out the podcast over on YouTube:

Don't forget to check us out over on the PC Gamer forums, too! We'll be checking in every week to see what you lovely lot have to say about each week's episode, and joining in the discussion ourselves.

Update: Since this article went live both Blizzard and Bungie have made changes to the quests and activities that were covered. Here's what Blizzard has to say:

"Our aim with the adjustments was to give all our players goals to play towards, and to reward our most engaged players (who would likely still complete the Weekly Quests without too much difficulty) for their commitment to the game. But we’ve heard your feedback and it's clear that we pushed too far."

The quests, some of which had tripled in terms of their requirements, are now being "'scaled down... to a number between what they were before and what they are now". So, not a complete rollback, but I would expect to see something much more conservatively calibrated.

Meanwhile, over at Bungie, improvements are being made to the Onslaught mode to make sticking around through the later waves more rewarding. 

From the Destiny 2 account on X:

"We've been following feedback that there should be better incentives to stay in Onslaught for the full 50 waves, so teammates don't dip out after wave 10. We're adding two additional weapon rewards to Onslaught and buffing Trophies of Bravery drops to help address this." 

The thread goes into more detail on the changes being made. 

Honestly, I'm not surprised that either company has decided to intervene. Particularly in the case of Blizzard, the reaction to the quest rework was absolutely brutal. What would be really great is if companies could calibrate their reward structures based on what's going to make players happy to log on, rather than trying to trap them into racking up the maximum amount of time in-game. 

It'd also be nice if those who set these targets spent a bit more energy listening to the voices within their own studios who warn them when these decisions are obviously going to land appallingly. We live in hope.

Original: This isn't the article I wanted to write today. I wanted to tell you how much fun the new Duos mode in Hearthstone Battlegrounds is, having jammed a couple of games with my colleague on GamesRadar last night. We won both, partly because we're big-brained CCG professionals, but also because we were in Discord strategizing hard as we threw cards back and forth between our screens. There's a significantly higher skill ceiling to Duos, both in terms of actual APM and planning for two team comps simultaneously, resulting in a mode that demands concentration but also pays off in big laughs. 

But if you open the subreddit today, no one is talking about any of that. Instead you will find thread after thread of white hot fury directed at Blizzard. 

That fury is because, in addition to Duos, Blizzard chose yesterday to revamp the way Weekly Quests work. If whoever is responsible for the redesign hoped that the arrival of Duos meant it would be a good day to bury bad news, then they're either incredibly naive or (worse) arrogant. Because within minutes of the new Quests going live, the uproar began. 

For the last few years players have been given three quests per week that reward a juicy hit of XP that goes towards ranking up on the season pass. These quests have always had fairly generic requirements, like spending mana, winning ladder games, or using your hero power, most of which can be done in a couple of hours of play. However, with no prior warning, Blizzard has decided to triple these targets across the board, in return for which players are being granted a measly 20% more XP. 

The only communication about the change was buried shamefacedly at the bottom of the patch notes: "[Progression] Some Daily and Weekly Quests have been adjusted to be harder to complete but will grant more XP." As the top Reddit thread succinctly puts it: "The math isn't mathing".

Of course, almost everyone reading this will be familiar with games that use predatory design in order to keep players logged in, whether that be to juice those all-important Daily Average User numbers so beloved of shareholders, or just in the hope that you might crack and drop some dollars in the MTX store. But I would say rarely are these things so nakedly egregious. Anyone with a basic command of how numbers work will see immediately that players are being told to grind three times as hard for a fraction of the return. No wonder they're pissed.

What I find really unfortunate is that I cannot believe voices on the team weren't raised against this. But those people either aren't being listened to or are being drowned out by upper management and the bean counters who work on the economy team, whose job it is not to ensure you have fun but to keep you on the hamster wheel. Typing that feels almost preposterously obvious, because I'm a live service game veteran with many thousands of hours logged, so I know that this stuff works and that's why companies do it. But that doesn't mean we have to accept it, and increasingly I don't.

Avaricious design

For another example, let's hop over to my other forever game: Destiny 2. Like Hearthstone, it recently launched a new mode that has been received with near universal acclaim. Released as part of the free Into The Light update, Onslaught is the kind of horde mode players have craved for the entirety of the series' decade-long life. It has great loot, juicy enemy density, and in the Legend version an almost perfectly pitched difficulty level. It's a triumph, and as a result the game has climbed from historically low concurrent numbers back into the top 10 most-played games on Steam and Xbox. 

Here comes the but: In order to unlock any of the dozen new weapons that drop from the mode for 'Attunement' (which means they're much more likely to appear as rewards), first you have to complete a mindless busywork quest. Again, the requirements are pretty generic. For the Mountaintop grenade launcher it reads: "Rapidly defeat combatants using Breech-Loaded Grenade Launchers anywhere in the system. Bonus progress for rapid final blows in Onslaught." Because seasoned players invariably chose the path of least resistance when it comes to loot, the result is that we either load into the entrance to the Grasp of Avarice dungeon, or grab a checkpoint for the Shuro Chi raid encounter, and farm trash tier mobs until the quest is done. 

Is doing that hard? Obviously not. But is it also a completely unnecessary waste of my time? Absolutely, and it's really hard to find any justification for it beyond more hours logged. Instead, imagine if that quest step read: "Kill a lost sector boss on Legend difficulty with a grenade launcher." It would be fun, quick, potentially rewarding, and at least feel like you'd done something. But no, back to the wheel we go.

To be clear: I think the Destiny 2 example is much less offensive than the Hearthstone one. Certainly, the audience has barely blinked. But that's partly because Bungie has plenty of form for busywork, and I think this kind of design—grind, simply for grind's sake—is ultimately cut from the same cloth.

My real frustration here is that Blizzard's embarrassingly obvious manipulation of the XP-to-time numbers is part of a slow drip that ends up poisoning the groundwater for service games in general. Speaking to my non-industry friends, they'll routinely say stuff like: "Well, Bungie doesn't care as long as the engagement number is up." That is a prevailing sentiment among even casual players, and that way of thinking ultimately leads to more cynical accusations like: "These devs don't even play their own game", which I see levelled all the time across service games. 

Having spent over twenty years talking to game developers, I can categorically say that it isn't true. The folks making the games you love want you to keep playing because you're having a great time with their creative work and not just to hit arbitrary engagement numbers. However, where the accusation feels like it does land is with whoever is making decisions related to in-game economy design.

How else to explain the fact that, in Onslaught, it is more rewarding to just play the first 10 waves and dip rather than go all the way to 50 for which you're rewarded with a handful of rare mats and a single extra chest. It beggars belief that people didn't identify that as a problem in testing. Most of us noticed after one run. Also, why are the limited edition 'shiny' versions of these guns going away when The Final Shape launches, other than to jack up numbers now? Yes it works, but that artificially created scarcity breeds FOMO, and leads to real sourness in the long run. I won't be at all surprised when the drop rate is doubled in the last couple of weeks for another injection of playing time.

Likewise, who on Diablo 4's economy team decided that four Resplendent Sparks (already nerfed from five!) was the correct number required to craft an Uber Unique, the game's most rare tier of item? Almost the only source of Sparks comes from dismantling Uber Uniques, meaning you already need to have played for a wild amount of time each season to guarantee getting the one you want. And look, this isn't about wanting loot handed out for free. Trust me, I'll put the hours in. It's about not wanting to feel like the economy designers are laughing as they turn the screw. 

As things stand, I can't help but feel like these sorts of woeful decisions are damaging the great work done by their colleagues. If I were one of the mad geniuses on Destiny 2's weapon sandbox team, or one of the brilliant artists creating cards for Hearthstone, I would stop letting the economy designers sit at our table for lunch. The fightback has to start somewhere.

Word of the layoffs came from an SEC filing saying Take-Two is "rationalizing its pipeline" and "streamlining its organizational structure." Among the charges it will take in connection to the cuts are $15 to $25 million related to office space reductions, suggesting that some Take-Two offices will be closed as part of the cuts. 

The actual number of employees being put out of work was not revealed, but in a 2023 annual report Take-Two said it had nearly 11,580 employees worldwide as of March 31, 2023, which would put the number being laid off at a little under 600. This will be the second round of layoffs in just over a year at Take-Two: In March 2023, following "exponential growth in recent years," Take-Two laid off an unknown number of employees from its Private Division publishing label and other divisions.

Take-Two reported $1.3 billion in net bookings in its most recent financial quarter and expects total net bookings of $5.25 to $5.3 billion for its 2024 fiscal year. That's a lot of money, although apparently not enough to prevent laying off hundreds of people. And while there will be even more money—a lot more money—when Grand Theft Auto 6 comes out in 2025 or '26 or whenever, that won't be enough either.

As of early February there had been more than 16,000 layoffs in the games industry since the start of 2023, and 2024 has shown no signs of slowing down. Since then we've seen hundreds more layoffs from studios including Relic, Certain Affinity, Sega, EA, and more.

Take-Two declined to comment on the layoffs and cancellations. The company's next financial report will take place in May, and may shed more light on the extent of the cuts.

The opportunity to share news about some of the most exciting upcoming PC games is always special for us, but this year's PC Gaming Show is a little extra special, because it's also the show's 10-year anniversary. 

Back when you could still tell people "merry E3," PC Gamer's editors noticed a big gap in the June press conference lineup: no show dedicated to PC gaming, which unlike the consoles isn't cared for by a single company. So we decided to make one ourselves, and a decade later, the PC Gaming Show is still going strong.

This year, you can expect some reflection on the positively transformative changes PC gaming has seen in that time, but don't worry, we won't let the navel gazing get in the way of the world premieres, exclusive announcements, and developer interviews. You can expect over 50 games at this year's PC Gaming Show.

We'll be streaming the show on Twitch, YouTube, Twitter, Steam, and Bilibili, but you can also catch it via one of our official co-streaming partners⁠. That's right, you can watch it with your favorite Twitch streamer instead of us, and we won't even be too hurt. Interested in teaming up with us as one of those co-streamers? Fill out our form for partner content creators.

You can keep abreast of PC Gaming Show updates via its official website.

Last November, we introduced a second show to our yearly lineup with PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted, which revealed dozens of new trailers and a list of the 25 upcoming games we and our panel of experts are most excited for.

Shadow the Hedgehog is famous for several things, most of them hilariously bad lines of dialogue being delivered badly in Sonic Adventure 2 and his own starring game, 2005's Shadow the Hedgehog. We'll see if Reeves can dig deep to deliver the anti-hero's most famous expression "This is like taking candy from a baby, which is fine by me." It's a tougher sell than Keanu's trademark "whoa," but hey, he did Shakespeare too back in the '90s. Surely he can swing it. 

Shadow's solo outing remains an infamous example of '00s "edginess" pervading once cartoony games, as exhibited by Shadow holding a gun on its cover. I can only hope that the upcoming Sonic threequel gives this moment a nod with a John Wick-style gun-fu action scene. Go for the hard R, Sega & Paramount. The fanbase is ready for it. 

While I don't have my finger directly on the pulse of fan casting for Shadow, I have a feeling this is going to go over very well based on this video alone.

Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is out in theaters this December.