Following a report by Game Developer on the ESA’s refusal to budge during a hearing on easing copyright restrictions around academia’s remote access to legacy games, Deus Ex creator Warren Spector has written for the website on his own frustrations with, and efforts to aid, game preservation. Channeling some of the classic immersive sim resourcefulness he helped pioneer, he writes that he’s “literally dumpster dived to retrieve information other developers have simply thrown away, believing it to be worthless.”

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Yesterday, coinciding with the release of the Thrones of Decay DLC, Total War: Warhammer 3 jumped 90 places in the Steam charts, trailed closely by the three lord packs that make up the strategy game's latest expansion. Those lord packs are now the three top rated expansions in the series’ history, and the base game itself saw a huge uptick in positive reviews. The last day also saw a peak player count of around 66,000, putting it ahead of giants like Palworld, Rimworld, and Fallout 76. None of this would be especially notable, however, if this wasn’t a complete turnaround from how things have been for the best part of a year now.

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A player-run troupe of actors will be performing an adaptation of Richard III in Fallout 76, featuring a "ghoul" in the lead role. They're partly inspired by the recent Fallout TV show, which puts a jaded cowboy ghoul in a pivotal role and has led to an increase in players of the online multiplayer RPG. This production will likely be more faithful to the bard than to Amazon Prime. It will open with the line: "Now is the nuclear winter of our discontent."

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We learned a bit about Deep Rock Galactic's upcoming Season 5 update a few weeks ago, and now we know a bit more thanks to a Ghost Ship dev stream. Not only has it gifted us details on the new mission type and the new season event, it's also given us an idea of when we might see Season 6 emerge. I suppose you could liken the stream to a bushy Dwarven beard, from which the devs pluck out announcements like it's show and tell. And the show and tell is set in a dingy mine. And there are multiple pints involved.

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The high-fidelity rustic hurly-burly of Manor Lords is all very well, but some of us yearn for a simpler and perhaps, more elegant age, when city builders looked like a bunch of copulating squares, and could run on PCs with approximately the computing power of a slice of bread (toasted, but not buttered). Step forward Mini Settlers, which has a free prologue version you might try if you're weary of Manor Lording, or you've already exhausted the play possibilities of early access Franconia.

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Microsoft's Xbox summer showcase in June will reportedly include a hefty post-show segment on the next and currently untitled Call Of Duty, alongside release dates for such first-party headliners as Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, Avowed and Indiana Jones And The Great Circle. As rumoured in April, they're also apparently going to show off a new Gears Of War game. Nice to see the COG and Locust still getting work.

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I'm not sure how I, a committed Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy fan, managed to miss A Difficult Game About Climbing. It is, like its obvious inspiration, a difficult game about climbing, but here you're using your arms independently to grip and hoist yourself rather than hooking and swinging a pickaxe. It is, also like its obvious inspiration, frustrating and moreish, like a scab you keep picking at.

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Square Enix have announced 22.1 billion yen (around £112m) in "content abandonment losses" for the fiscal year ending March 2024. The loss is the result of the publisher being "more selective and focused in the allocation of development resources," suggesting they have cut funding to or cancelled undisclosed projects.

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The developers of sci-fi action-adventure Deliver Us Mars have laid off all their staff. The news was announced by KeokeN Interactive's leadership in a statement in which they state they have "exhausted all our possible options" of finding funding for a new project. They also say they plan to rebuild the company.

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A new batch of games have been announced for Game Pass in May, including five that are playable on PC. There are siblings, felines, reapers, and a Croft. I'm struggling to identify a theme.

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