The bit of reporting I'm about to relay to you probably isn't surprising, but it's worth making sure you've got a pillow on standby to scream into once you've digested it. Microsoft, they of more money than a company could ever need or know what to do with, have reportedly spent the last two years pushing Xbox to deliver profit margins which are well above the industry average. Cue all of the layoffs, cancellations, and shutterings.

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I am a baby, floating through space. A decade or so passes while I’m frozen in a pod, dead to the world. Clearly, though, all is not as it seems. Upon finally being rescued and thawed out, I’m given grave news.

I’ve been diagnosed with consumerism.

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Ah Valve, you awful, giggling vultures. You terrible purveyors of mischief and misfortune. Weeks go past without you making any significant game-related announcements, and then you suddenly dropkick the entire Counter-Strike cosmetics economy into the sun.

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Two Ubisoft studios have announced plans to cut back staff, though one of them is trying to encourage people to lay themselves off in the form of "a voluntary career transition program". The studios in question are Ubisoft Massive - creators of Tom Clancy's The Division, Star Wars Outlaws, and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora - and Ubisoft Redlynx, creators of the multiplayer gadabout Trials biking games.

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Big Helldivers 2 patch alert. Seriously, it's massive. Dubbed the Unjust: 4.1.0 update, this behemoth boasts of having attempted to murder more than 200 bugs, alongside delivering some performance optimisation and gun balancing tweaks.

A healthy suite of changes indeed, and one that looks worth the bit of extra wait, assuming it does what it says on the tin.

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Paradox have outlined some workarounds for a number of "high priority" issues which have been draining folks' ability to get sucked into Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 now the gates to Seattle are open. Proper fixes for these and other known issues are also in the works, as is planning for post-release additions.

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It's really quite interesting how, in a time where big budget live service games are doing anything they can to get you to continue playing (and importantly spend money on) them, the sort of spiritual opposite of this to rise out of this are games where you just hang out with a few buds doing silly nonsense that don't cost very much. Lethal Company, Peak, you know the kinds of games I mean, and yesterday a new one I quite like the look of arrived: RV There Yet?

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It's been so long since I played a Telltale-style game that all the Telltale quirks feel novel again. Timed dialogue choices and action QTEs. X will remember that. Hashtag 4 Clementine. Created by a team co-founded by former Walking Dead and Wolf Among Us developers, Dispatch brings all of that charming, movie-night energy to bear on a superhero comedy premise you might broadly recognise from The Boys and Invincible, except that it's more laidback and banter-driven than either of those. So far, anyway - the game's first couple of episodes are out now on Steam.

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