Last week saw Valve reveal three pieces of hardware. The Steam Machine, a console-like mini PC you plug into your TV. A newly updated Steam Controller, which combines the original's trackpad-style thumbpads with the double thumbsticks of a regular gamepad. And also the Steam Frame, a new virtual reality headset that streams games from your PC and opens up your whole game library to be played in the privacy of your own goggles.

While I have a default thrill setting that engages whenever Valve announces new hardware, it's been interesting to see the variety of responses to the hardware reveals. I was surprised, in particular, by the muted response to the Steam Machine in our comments.

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Cities: Skylines developers Colossal Order are moving on from the city building series and parting ways with publishers Paradox Interactive, after 15 years of collaboration. They're handing Skylines over to one of Paradox's in-house teams, Surviving The Aftermath developers Iceflake Studios, who will take over "all existing and future development for Cities: Skylines 2", spanning free updates and paid expansions.

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November digs in. The conveyor belt of crowns, clowns and clones that is Videogaming rattles onward through the midnight forest. The rains swept past over the weekend and now the mud is waist-deep, worryingly responsive, and rank with the stench of neglected deckbuilders. Several sedan chairs carrying former BioWare creative leads are caught in a wave of slop, becoming a disorderly barricade of people crying out for Femshep to come save them from the GAAS. Tencent executives rush over with handfuls of rope, but whether they mean to drag the afflicted free or bind their limbs is unclear.

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It is strange to imagine – I thought as I battled a giant vomit-spewing plant monster in a hallucination induced by a biological weapon – that Call of Duty was once, at least notionally, about the human cost of war. That was a long time ago, admittedly. There are full grown adults who have never experienced CoD's original idea that you played an ordinary soldier snarled up in a terrifying post-industrial war machine. But I don't think the series has ever been further away from that concept than in Call of Duty: Black Ops 7's hideous mess of a campaign.

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Ubisoft's UK publishing arm have filed a strategic report for the year ending March 2025 in which they warn that they expect yearly revenue to fall in the current fiscal year, ending March 2026. They attribute this partly to slumping sales of physical copies of games, and more broadly to the fact that people are fixating on a fistful of mega-popular games at the expense of all others, with subscription and streaming services like Microsoft's Game Pass making us all feel less inclined to buy individual new games. Plus ça change.

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Sundays are for remembering how to write on paper. I used to fill A4 notepads with scribbles as an undergrad but the habit has gradually fallen away, as I've sunk into the endlessly editable quagmire of online journalism. I've got a nice thick biro with Blue Prince press event branding, and a fresh moleskin notepad I got from a magazine subscription. I'm writing a story about spiders. It's heaven, though I do occasionally get the shakes for not being able to open a browser tab and read a random bunch of articles, like these ones.

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I think Horizon Zero Dawn was much more of a turning point for Sony than most people really discuss. The argument for PlayStation used to be its exclusives, those tentpole games like Uncharted, Ratchet and Clank, LittleBigPlanet, the list does go on but you get the point. On the PS5, completely original first-party games feel few and far between, as Sony has joined in on the whole intellectual property above all else train that every other company has hopped aboard. So hearing Guerilla Games' studio director Jan-Bart van Beek say the Horizon series was always thought about as a multiplayer game feels like the last piece of the puzzle has been inserted.

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