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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Start setting up tripwires and stretch your bow strings, a Horizon MMORPG dubbed Horizon Steel Frontiers has been fully revealed by Sony and developers NCSoft. As ever, it's all about slapping up and taming big metal bears, birds and the like, this time as a custom character in a world filled with other players who're also in the robo-hunting business.

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Hello. My name is Julian Benson and, as you will have gathered from the headline, I am the new Editorial Director of Rock Paper Shotgun.

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Undoubtedly the only thing anyone in the PC world will be talking about for the next week is Valve's trio of hardware announcements, the Steam Machine, the Steam Frame, and their new Steam Controller. But don't forget about the old Steam Deck just yet! While Valve didn't announce anything handheld related today, they have commented on where they're at when it comes to anything like a Steam Deck 2.

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How about that Steam Machine, 'ey? Consoles are now computers and computers are now consoles. What a topsy turvy world we're living in! I'm sure you have lots of questions, a lot of which I hope can be answered by James' hands-on look at the thing, but you may still be wondering how you'll know what games will actually work on it. The Steam Deck has its fancy verified badge that certifies that a game runs on the handheld, and it turns out that same badge is one that'll come in handy for the Steam Machine.

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Deckard lives. Valve have officially announced the long-leaked Steam Frame virtual reality headset, and as rumoured, it is indeed a hybrid VR kit: one that can play both high-fidelity games streamed from a PC, and simpler stuff that’s installed on the headset itself. A departure, then, from the Valve Index’s pure focus on cabled-up PC VR.

Yet neither is it a Meta Quest 3 with a Valve badge on it. Besides its smartphone-spec internals breaking new ground for the kind of hardware that Steam games can run on, the Frame is built with modularity in mind, potentially making it as upgradable and long-lived as an actual PC. As well as their other new gear, the refreshed Steam Machine and Steam Controller, I gave the Steam Frame a test run during a recent Valve visit, and mostly liked what I saw – though it’ll need to make sure its ambitions to do everything >in the VR space are more firmly realised than they are right now.

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Anyone who appreciated the weirdness of the original Steam Controller – and it still has its fans, despite ceasing production in 2019 – might look at this new version and think "Oi, that’s just a Steam Deck with the screen cut out." An accusation to which Valve, one suspects, might respond by slowly leaning forwards, eyes so wide they resemble the old version’s trackpads, staring the increasingly frightened sceptic in the face and whispering: "Yes.">

Except the new Steam Controller has more to it than merely transplanting the Deck inputs to a homebound gamepad. Having squeezed, caressed, and on a couple of occasions nearly dropped it on the floor of Valve HQ last month, I can tell it’s already boding well not just as a controller for mouse-minded PC games, but as a general purpose pad for everything else.

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