Over 200 staff at GTA 6 developers Rockstar North have signed a letter to management calling for the "immediate reinstatement" of 31 workers fired recently by the company. Rockstar claimed they fired these staffers for "gross misconduct", subsequently accusing them of sharing confidential info publicly. UK union the IWGB, of which the fired staff were members, have accused Rockstar of union busting and filed legal claims against the company.

The union have also held protests outside Rockstar North and Take-Two's UK offices.

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People who savour the sweet reek of Saturn V exhaust, rejoice. People who love cats, tremble. Felipe Falanghe, original developer of gurning spaceflight simulator Kerbal Space Program, has teamed up with Dean Hall, original creator of zombie MMO DayZ, to make a spiritual Kerbal successor - Kitten Space Agency.

As the name may suggest, it trades the little green men of KSP for a bunch of feline astronauts - a meme-ish setup that apparently has nothing to do with real-life space experiments on animals, and which goes hand-in-paw with a new in-house software engine. Also, Hall and Falanghe have hired a former SpaceX staffer to work on the physics.

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If you sit and look at one of Assetto Corsa Rally’s gorgeously-rendered Alfa Romeos, Lancias, or Fiats in the car preview screens, there’s a palpable elegance and beauty to their forms.

Sadly, anyone watching me attempt to wrestle them through the Welsh woods or along tight stretches of French tarmac over the course of six hours so far would have rarely seen any elegant or beautiful driving. There are times, especially in long sweeping turns, when things start to feel as satisfying as they should. Most of the time though, Assetto Corsa Rally with a wheel feels a lot like you’re skating on ice, rather than the gravel and tarmac it currently offers.

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Among the trio of new hardware devices Valve just announced for 2026 – which also include the Steam Frame VR headset and a redesigned Steam Controller – the new Steam Machine is probably the most surprising. Mainly because the original Steam Machines, a series of partner-built SteamOS mini-PCs, sank like rectangular stones upon launching in 2015.

Designed and built entirely in-house, the new model is a very different proposition, though it’s not so much the updated hardware that has Valve believing it’s time to give the Steam Machine another chance. According to engineers Yazan Aldehayyat and Pierre-Loup Griffais, the biggest problem faced by those doomed Machines was one that the Steam Deck’s Proton software has solved: a lack of SteamOS-compatible games.

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Wall World 2 isn't as easy to explain as its predecessor. Yes, it is still a roguelike in which you split your time between piloting a robotic spider up and down a giant wall in search of weak spots from which you can mine deep into the cliff face, digging up minerals to spend upgrading your mecha-arachnid's weapons, enhancing its ability to fight off periodic waves of pustule-covered aliens, until you either kill the biggest pustule-covered alien or die in the attempt. But now it's become a much more complex game, embellishing both its mining and combat halves and thinning the divide between them.

This is going to take a little explaining, with a lot of changes falling into the plus and minus columns, so here's an easy improvement to tide you over. You can now name your robospider; mine is called Nigel.

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The final episode of swish and salacious Telltale-style caped tellydrama Dispatch released yesterday. It's been a surprise hit - according to the gabbling labcoats at GameDiscoverCo, AdHoc's superhero workplace comedy is approaching two million sales. Reasons given for this range from the appealing but uninvestigated - there's a Galactus-sized untapped audience for narrative single player games, and all the publishers are absolute spanners for doubling down on live service projects instead - to the boring - people are still keen on superheroes, especially sociopathic and disgusting superheroes that cut against archetypes from the more pompous Marvel films, and Dispatch is simply a very well-made game.

Good games sell? What a gauche>, back-of-napkin excuse for industry analysis. There must be a more arcane and clever-sounding explanation for Dispatch's meteoric fortunes. Ah yes, here we go: speaking to GameDiscoverCo, AdHoc's CEO and exec producer Michael Choung has suggested that it's partly down to the weekly episodic release schedule.

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