Buckle up, because we're about to combine the two most exciting parts of PC gaming news: exponential user growth and graphs! Last Sunday, Steam hit 6.6 million concurrent users. It's an impressive figure, but what's really surprising is how it stacks up against previous totals. Back in January 2012 the service was hitting a high point of 5 million, with them not reaching the 6 million mark until November. That means Steam is currently growing around 300% faster than it was at the start of last year.

So where are those players coming from? To the graph-o-matic!

Source: SteamGraph

Essentially we're seeing massive and steady growth for the (technically) unreleased Dota 2. Less than six months ago the game could beat the then top-dog TF2 in concurrent users, but couldn't surpass the daily peak. Now it's a different story. The latest Steam stats have Dota 2 way ahead with a peak concurrent total of 237,414 players. In second place, still enjoying a post-Christmas boost, is Football Manager 2013 with 78,488 players. Team Fortress 2, meanwhile, has been consistently fluctuating between 45,000 and 75,000 players.

It's a big number, but still one far behind League of Legends, which was pulling a reported 3 million concurrent users as of July last year.

Dota 2 still doesn't account for the majority of Steam's overall user growth, despite the flood of free beta keys it incessantly sends out. And, of course, concurrent users don't give the full picture. We still don't know how many of those are active, or even the collected number of players who log into any particular Steam game over a set period of time.

Even so, it's a great sign of the health of PC gaming. It will be interesting to see how those figures change over the next year, as the console manufacturers creak into life to reveal their upcoming new hardware.

Knytt developer Nicklas 'Nifflas' Nygren has released his latest game, and for free. The Great Work has a lot in common with his recent Knytt Underground, set as it is in a network of shadowy caves, but once you delve in there are a number of subtle differences, which may feel unfamiliar to fans of Nifflas' previous work. Interestingly, the game was developed for a documentary entitled Alkemistens År, which is "about Christer Böke who has taken one year off from his well-paid job as an IT-salesman to become a full-time Alchemist." Blimey.

In the game, you play as the apprentice to the great alchemist Fulcanelli, who as it happens has just created the Philosopher's Stone. He sends you off to alchemise up some gold, which as it turns out involves a lot of platforming and ingredient collection. The major difference from the Knytt games is the new inventory system, which replaces permanent abilities, letting you turn (for example) sticky gloves or high-jumping on or off. You'll also scrounge for and trade various ingredients and items with the strange residents of this subterranean locale.

Nicklas puts the length of The Great Work at around 1-2 hours, although he's stated to IndieGames that "it's however very easy to make additional levels for it and I hope this will take off." He's also released the game's source code, which is sure to be a fascinating document to poke around in, if you're interested in game development (and if you have a copy of Multimedia Fusion 2).

Once again, you can grab The Great Work here. Here's an alchemically correct trailer:

Managing an entire city sounds stressful. Everybody shouting at you to clean up the streets, increase property values, not build nuclear power stations next to a school. Maybe instead of the mayoral responsibilities of SimCity, you'd prefer to kick back in the department of transport. At least in Cities of Motion 2, all you'll do is ruin a person's morning commute.



Paradox's transport management sequel is promising dynamically growing cities, day/night cycles and new multiplayer modes that let you collaboratively (or competitively) spread your network across the game's metropolis. Hopefully the new features will make up for the lack of variation we found in the original.

Cities in Motion 2 is due out in Spring.

Rebellion have released a mysterious teaser for an upcoming project, due to be revealed next month. It shows a soldier running through the war-torn ruins of a city; a city that's bathed in green mist. For those who don't watch terrible horror movies, green mist is the evillest of all mists. So, what are the Sniper Elite devs up to? I may not know, but by golly I can speculate!

Here's the teaser:



And from the video's description:

"One man is utterly alone amidst the chaos of war. But there are worse things to fear than bombs and bullets here..." Tax inspectors? Godzilla? No, this sentence is no help. ONTO THE NEXT!

"Debuting 14th February 2013, PC fans will soon get the chance to discover for themselves just what is in store for those brave enough to venture into the 'Totraum'. Heil Gotterdammerung!"

A clue! In German! Thanks to my GCSE-level knowledge of the language, and more relevantly Google, I can conform that Totraum means "dead space". At a guess, it's not referring to either the EA game or the respiratory term. "Gotterdammerung" means Twilight of the Gods, and is the last opera in Wagner's The Ring series.

Deep analysis of these hints leads me to the conclusion that whatever Rebellion are up to has something to do with Germany.

Moving on, the teaser features the villest of marketing tools, the QR Code. Disappointingly, after decoding it in the name of rigorous investigation, it just lead to the same place as the link in the trailer's description: this mailing list. That page is titled NZA (Nazi Zombie Army?), but perhaps more interesting is the URL, which refers to 2000AD.

Now we're getting somewhere: 2000AD has been owned by Rebellion for years, but they haven't made many games based on the comic. Given the war-torn setting, Fiends of the Eastern Front would be the most likely guess. It's about vampires in World War 2. Although the 2000AD connection is far from definitive.

More telling is the logo on the NZA page. It's an occult corruption of the Sniper Elite V2 logo, and given what the trailer shows, an expansion/sequel set in an alternate history WW2 seems like a solid guess.



Best case scenario: A Sniper Elite/Fiends of the Eastern Front spin-off, in which you must upgrade your rifle to fire wooden stakes into unaware vampires milling about in a courtyard below.

That, or it'll be some sodding zombie DLC. The shadows at the 16 second mark of the teaser video had a definite shambling quality to them.

Thanks, RPS.

AARGH! IT'S HIDEOUS! KILL IT, ISAAC! KILL IT WITH FIRE! It's... it's Phil Collins. We're all doomed!

That's right, the latest trailer for Dead Space 3 inexplicably features hairless irritant (and actually quite good Genesis drummer) Phil Collins, marking the scariest thing to come out of the Dead Space franchise to date. You see, we laugh and we mock when trailers go wub-heavy, but when this is the alternative?



In fairness, Collins is about the only remarkable part of this trailer. There's a bit with the limb-slicing nailgun, a bit showing some twisted mutants, and the inevitable bit where a giant boss monster shows up, covered in glowing weak spots. Yup, it's Dead Space all right. There are also some scenes of the series' new features: co-op and snow.

Dead Space 3 is due out February 8th.

The aftermath of the THQ bankruptcy left Darksiders developer Vigil without a buyer. But while the studio has been closed down, many of its former staffers may have found a happy end to the sorry saga. Crytek have founded a new studio in Austin, Texas, with Vigil's co-founder David Adams in place as its CEO. The new development house - Crytek USA Corp. - has been filled with "core" members of the Vigil team.

"I'm thrilled to be a part of the newest Crytek studio," Adams said, "which will boast some of the brightest development talent in the industry. The studio's launch represents Crytek's commitment to delivering diverse and high quality content to players everywhere."

Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli issued a statement, saying, "Crytek has always enjoyed a special relationship with gamers and business partners in North America, so establishing a permanent presence in the US was a natural step."

"We are extremely excited about the work that we will be undertaking from our strategic new location in Austin, with David Adams and his team of 35 experienced developers," Yerli continued, referencing the 35 ex-Vigil staff hired by the studio. "We believe our CryEngine technology will enable the team we assemble to create unparalleled new gaming experiences."

THQ President Jason Rubin offered his congratulations to the team, tweeting: "Great news for Vigil, at least the core team ... Thanks to Crytek for saving as much as they could of a fantastic team."

No word yet on what the USA Corp will be working on. While the Darksiders rights are still due to be auctioned off, Vigil had moved their attentions to a new IP, codenamed Crawler.

Thanks, Polygon.

Crytek, the developer that turned God rays into an FPS staple, is demonstrating no less ambition in Crysis 3. In this lengthy video (via VG247), Crytek Field Applications Engineer Sean Tracy takes you on a tour of the full spectrum of capabilities within CryEngine 3 and the visual and physical effects they support.

Features ranging from liquid reflections, lighting behavior, and cinematic effects to volume fog and pixel-accurate displacement mapping are all demonstrated by Tracy in real-time using Crysis 3's level-editing software. Seeing the inner workings of a game as gorgeous-looking as Crysis 3 is pretty cool, and it's also a reminder of just how many engine elements are churning together to throw soft rays of sunlight off that soldier's helmet you're about to send an arrow through.

If you ever wondered how Crysis 3 fares when all of CryEngine 3's magic gets slapped together, you're in luck: we wrote about it and wrote about it some more.

Grinding Gear's free-to-play ARPG Path of Exile entered open beta last week, and gamers eager for a top-down dungeon-crawling experience akin to Diablo II flooded the servers. 69,850 players, to be precise. In a forum post yesterday (via PCGamesN), Grinding Gear Lead Designer Chris Wilson stated the deluge crashed Exile's account system and servers over the weekend, but the team quickly brought everything back online today with stability and bug fixes.

"We're getting absolutely crushed under the number of players trying out Path of Exile, and this has manifested as a server crash that has been occurring hourly today," Wilson wrote previously. "For those interested, player concurrency hit 69,850 players before it was high enough to take down the realm."

Grinding Gear also fixed a few pesky login bugs, including a rare and strange issue where players somehow could log into accounts owned by other players as the servers shuddered beneath the load. To keep character info stable, the studio simply switched off Exile's servers until it whipped up a fix.

The high turnout probably has something to do with the satisfying results of clicking a zombie's head into paste for shinies or the web-like skill tree that ought to win some sort of award for its sheer size.

On the cusp of an open multiplayer beta for Crytek's maximally lustrous Crysis 3, Nvidia released an early version of its GeForce 313.95 drivers today. The GPU giant claims the drivers boost SLI performance for Crysis 3 by up to 35 percent in addition to other "sizeable SLI and single-GPU performance gains" in games such as Assassin's Creed III and Far Cry 3.

Nvidia says users should expect a 27 percent gain in graphics performance while playing Assassin's Creed III, 19 percent in Civilization V, and 14 percent for both Call of Duty: Black Ops II and DiRT 3. Just Cause 2 improves by 11 percent, and Deus Ex: Human Revolution, F1 2012, and Far Cry 3 all improve by 10 percent.

Demonstrating its mastery over orderly green bars, Nvidia also supplied benchmark charts for these games using four of its most recent cards: the GTX 650, 660 Ti, 680, and 690. With the 313.95 drivers, the company declares GTX 690 users can max out all settings in Crysis 3 and still achieve 60 FPS.

Grab the new drivers and check out the charts at Nvidia's website. Also try out the GeForce Experience—which we've talked about at length—to automatically optimize and configure your games based on your PC's hardware.

In an interview with Penny Arcade Report (via PCGamesN), Monaco designer Andy Schatz shared his thoughts on Kickstarter campaigns and the inclusion of stretch goals—promises made at tiers above the minimum funding goal—bluntly calling the latter "bulls***" and "the perfect way to make a game that's insufficiently complete or bloated."

"When you’re designing a game, the way I think you should do it is you figure out what the game is, you figure out what the game needs, and you should make that," Schatz said. "There’s a difference between allowing your fans to have an extreme amount of input on the game and letting them design the game in the sense of, ‘If the budget is this, then I’ll do this, and if the budget is that, then I’ll do that.’ That to me sounds like the perfect way to make a game that’s insufficiently complete or bloated."

According to Schatz, designers should follow a simple formula: if stretch goal features are necessary, then simply add them in. "That's sort of my take on Kickstarters," he explained. "That said, there's the possibility that at some point I'll try doing one, but I don't like what it does to design."

Schatz's current project, the top-down heist/stealth combo Monaco, started offering pre-orders in December for a "March-ish" release. Developer Pocketwatch Games drew its budget from the Indie Fund, a financial resource for indie developers run by Braid creator Jonathan Blow and World of Goo designers Ron Carmel and Kyle Gabler, among others.