We’ve just passed the half-way point of 2018, so Ian Gatekeeper and all his fabulously wealthy chums over at Valve have revealed which hundred games have sold best on Steam over the past six months. It’s a list dominated by pre-2018 names, to be frank, a great many of which you’ll be expected, but there are a few surprises in there.

2018 releases Jurassic World Evolution, Far Cry 5 Kingdom Come: Deliverance and Warhammer: Vermintide II are wearing some spectacular money-hats, for example, while the relatively lesser-known likes of Raft, Eco and Deep Rock Galactic have made themselves heard above the din of triple-A marketing budgets. (more…)

The crappiest common cards in Shadowverse look better than the best legendary cards in most of the collectible card games I’ve played, so you can imagine what Shadowverse’s legendaries look like. They are stupidly, irresponsibly beautiful. Dragons with uncountable glistening scales, angels clad in impossibly pearlescent metal, musclebound demons flanked by swirling tongues of raven-black flame, to say nothing of all the hunky anime boys and cute anime girls. The legendaries are also stupidly, irresponsibly powerful, which pretty much sums the whole game up. Shadowverse is a game of extremes – sometimes great, sometimes not-so-great, but always a spectacle. (more…)

Collectible card games have been around for decades, but they’ve really been running hot ever since Blizzard unleashed Hearthstone four years ago. Since then, we’ve seen Shadowverse, Gwent, The Elder Scrolls: Legends, Duelyst, Faeria – there are a lot of these things, if you haven’t heard. They all put their own spin on rectangles with numbers on ’em, but they also universally take cues from Hearthstone and, just as often, each other, and as a result they regularly run into similar problems, the biggest two being how to balance a competitive system and how to price card packs fairly.

Artifact, Valve’s upcoming Dota-inspired card game, is definitely using some pages from the same books, but it’s also doing enough things differently that it has the potential to solve a lot of those problems. (more…)

Welcome to Spawn Point, where we take something wonderful from the world of gaming and explain what it is, why it s worth your time and how to get involved. This time: collectible card games (or at least, the videogame kind).>

Hello, I would like to collect some cards please. Of course, friend. We have a wide variety of fantasy themed cards, ranging from hostile dragon to raving ghoul to

Hang on, what are these numbers? Oh, ignore those, they re nothing to worry about. Look at this wizard! (more…)

Another year over, a new one just begun, which means, impossibly, even more games.> But what about last year? Which were the games that most people were buying and, more importantly, playing? As is now something of a tradition, Valve have let slip a big ol’ breakdown of the most successful titles released on Steam over the past twelve months.

Below is the full, hundred-strong roster, complete with links to our coverage if you want to find out more about any of the games, or simply to marvel at how much seemed to happen in the space of 52 short weeks.

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