Enlarge / Blast away all the guilt you want in PowerWash Simulator, but there's no need to feel dirty in the real world about your backlog. (credit: Getty Images)

Gaming news site PCGamesN has a web tool, SteamIDFinder, that can do a neat trick. If you buy PC games on Steam and have your user profile set to make your gaming details public, you can enter your numeric user ID into it and see a bunch of stats. One set of stats is dedicated to the total value of the games listed as unplayed; you can share this page as an image linking to your "Pile of Shame," which includes the total "Value" of your Steam collection and unplayed games.

Example findings from SteamIDFinder, from someone who likely has hundreds of games from Humble Bundles and other deals in their library. (credit: SteamIDFinder)

Using data from what it claims are the roughly 10 percent of 73 million Steam accounts in its database set to Public, PCGamesN extrapolates $1.9 billion in unplayed games, multiplies it by 10, and casually suggests that there are $19 billion in unplayed games hanging around. That is "more than the gross national product of Nicaragua, Niger, Chad, or Mauritius," the site notes.

That is a very loose “$19 billion”

"Multiply by 10" is already a pretty soft science, but the numbers are worth digging into further. For starters, SteamIDFinder is using the current sale price of every game in your unplayed library, as confirmed by looking at a half-dozen "Pile of Shame" profiles. An informal poll of Ars Technica co-workers and friends with notable Steam libraries suggests that games purchased at full price make up a tiny fraction of the games in our backlogs. Games acquired through package deals, like the Humble Bundle, or during one of Steam's annual or one-time sales, are a big part of most people's Steam catalogs, I'd reckon.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Id | GDC)

John Romero remembers the moment he realized what the future of gaming would look like.

In late 1991, Romero and his colleagues at id Software had just released Catacomb 3-D, a crude-looking, EGA-colored first-person shooter that was nonetheless revolutionary compared to other first-person games of the time. "When we started making our 3D games, the only 3D games out there were nothing like ours," Romero told Ars in a recent interview. "They were lockstep, going through a maze, do a 90-degree turn, that kind of thing."

Despite Catacomb 3-D's technological advances in first-person perspective, though, Romero remembers the team at id followed its release by going to work on the next entry in the long-running Commander Keen series of 2D platform games. But as that process moved forward, Romero told Ars that something didn't feel right.

Enlarge / Features like Image Playground won't arrive in Europe at the same time as other regions. (credit: Apple)

Three major features in iOS 18 and macOS Sequoia will not be available to European users this fall, Apple says. They include iPhone screen mirroring on the Mac, SharePlay screen sharing, and the entire Apple Intelligence suite of generative AI features.

In a statement sent to Financial Times, The Verge, and others, Apple says this decision is related to the European Union's Digital Markets Act (DMA). Here's the full statement, which was attributed to Apple spokesperson Fred Sainz:

Two weeks ago, Apple unveiled hundreds of new features that we are excited to bring to our users around the world. We are highly motivated to make these technologies accessible to all users. However, due to the regulatory uncertainties brought about by the Digital Markets Act (DMA), we do not believe that we will be able to roll out three of these features — iPhone Mirroring, SharePlay Screen Sharing enhancements, and Apple Intelligence — to our EU users this year.

Specifically, we are concerned that the interoperability requirements of the DMA could force us to compromise the integrity of our products in ways that risk user privacy and data security. We are committed to collaborating with the European Commission in an attempt to find a solution that would enable us to deliver these features to our EU customers without compromising their safety.

It is unclear from Apple's statement precisely which aspects of the DMA may have led to this decision. It could be that Apple is concerned that it would be required to give competitors like Microsoft or Google access to user data collected for Apple Intelligence features and beyond, but we're not sure.

Enlarge / What could have been. (credit: No Mutants Allowed)

PC gamers of a certain vintage will remember tales of Project Van Buren, a title that early '00s Interplay intended as the sequel to 1998's hit Fallout 2. Now, original Fallout producer Timothy Cain is sharing some behind-the-scenes details about how he contributed to the project's cancellation during a particularly difficult time for publisher Interplay.

Cain famously left Interplay during Fallout 2's development in the late '90s to help form short-lived RPG house Troika Games. After his departure, though, he was still in touch with some people from his former employer, including an unnamed Interplay vice president looking for some outside opinions on the troubled Van Buren project.

"Would you mind coming over and playing one of my game prototypes?" Cain recalls this vice president asking him sometime in mid-2003. "We're making a Fallout game and I'm going to have to cancel it. I don't think they can get it done... but if you could come over and look at it and give me an estimate, there's a chance I wouldn't cancel it."

Enlarge / Zork running on an Amiga at the Computerspielemuseum in Berlin, Germany. (credit: Marcin Wichary (CC by 2.0 Deed))

You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building.

That simple sentence first appeared on a PDP-10 mainframe in the 1970s, and the words marked the beginning of what we now know as interactive fiction.

From the bare-bones text adventures of the 1980s to the heartfelt hypertext works of Twine creators, interactive fiction is an art form that continues to inspire a loyal audience. The community for interactive fiction, or IF, attracts readers and players alongside developers and creators. It champions an open source ethos and a punk-like individuality.

It has now been almost exactly seven years since Nintendo first announced Metroid Prime 4 and over five years since the company said it was restarting work on the game with series mainstay Retro Studios. Now, Nintendo has finally shared the first glimpse of gameplay for the renamed Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, which is now planned for a 2025 release.

"After a very long time, we are finally able to share more information about this title," Nintendo executive Shinya Takahashi said during today's livestreamed Nintendo Direct presentation, showing a remarkable talent for understatement. Takahashi went on to also ask that fans "please wait a little bit longer" for additional information before the game's planned release next year.

That "additional information" should include whether the highly anticipated game will launch for the Switch—as was promised in 2017—or for Nintendo's next console, which the company recently teased via a pre-announcement announcement. Nintendo kept its promise that "there will be no mention of the Nintendo Switch successor" during today's Nintendo Direct presentation, but a major first-party franchise game launching in 2025 definitely seems well-positioned to serve as a showcase for new hardware that Nintendo seems to be planning for around the same time frame.

Enlarge (credit: Bandai)

Elden Ring was my first leap into FromSoftware titles (and Dark-Souls-like games generally), and I fell in deep. Over more than 200 hours, I ate up the cryptic lore, learned lots of timings, and came to appreciate the feeling of achievement through perseverance.

Months ago, in preparation for Elden Ring's expansion, Shadow of the Erdtree (also on PlayStation and Xbox, arriving June 21), I ditched the save file with which I had beaten the game and started over. I wanted to try out big swords and magic casting. I wanted to try a few new side quests. And I wanted to have a fresh experience with the game before Shadow arrived.

I have had a very fresh experience, in that this DLC has made me feel like I'm still in the first hour of my first game. Reader, this expansion is mopping the floor with me. It looked at my resume, which has "Elden Lord" as its most recent job title, and has tossed it into the slush pile. If you're wondering whether Shadow would, like Elden Ring, provide a different kind of challenge and offer, like the base game, easier paths for Souls newcomers: No, not really. At least not until you're already far along. This DLC is for people who beat Elden Ring, or all but beat it, and want capital-M More.

Enlarge / For an unreleased game, Star Citizen still has some really pretty ships... (credit: RSI)

At this point in Star Citizen's drawn-out, 11-plus-year development cycle, we're usually reminded of the game when it hits some crowdfunding microtransaction milestone or updates its increasingly convoluted alpha development roadmap. So last week's announcement that developer Cloud Imperium Games (CIG) has banned over 600 cheaters from its servers is a notable reminder that some people are actually enjoying—and exploiting—the unpolished alpha version of the game.

Shortly after the May release of Star Citizen's Alpha 2.23.1 update, players started noticing that they could easily make extra money by storing a freight ship, selling their cargo, and then returning to the ship to find the cargo ready to be sold a second time. As knowledge of this "money doubling" exploit spread, players reported that the price of basic in-game resources saw significant inflation in a matter of days.

Now, Cloud Imperium Games Senior Director of Player Relations Will Leverett has written that the developer has investigated "multiple exploits within Star Citizen that compromised stability and negatively impacted the in-game economy." In doing so, CIG says it "identified and suspended over 600 accounts involved in exploitative behaviors while also removing the illicitly gained aUEC [in-game currency] from the Star Citizen ecosystem."

Enlarge / Illustration of the Apollo lunar lander Eagle over the Moon. (credit: Getty Images)

On Friday, a retired software engineer named Martin C. Martin announced that he recently discovered a bug in the original Lunar Lander computer game's physics code while tinkering with the software. Created by a 17-year-old high school student named Jim Storer in 1969, this primordial game rendered the action only as text status updates on a teletype, but it set the stage for future versions to come.

The legendary game—which Storer developed on a PDP-8 minicomputer in a programming language called FOCAL just months after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made their historic moonwalks—allows players to control a lunar module's descent onto the Moon's surface. Players must carefully manage their fuel usage to achieve a gentle landing, making critical decisions every ten seconds to burn the right amount of fuel.

In 2009, just short of the 40th anniversary of the first Moon landing, I set out to find the author of the original Lunar Lander game, which was then primarily known as a graphical game, thanks to the graphical version from 1974 and a 1979 Atari arcade title. When I discovered that Storer created the oldest known version as a teletype game, I interviewed him and wrote up a history of the game. Storer later released the source code to the original game, written in FOCAL, on his website.

Enlarge / Do you have a few hundred hours to hear the good news about our lord and savior, Diablo? (credit: Blizzard)

Longtime fans of Diablo II are deeply familiar with the extreme timesink that is the late-game grind for the very best loot. But when the creators of Diablo IV tried to re-create that style of grinding for the latest game in the series, they found that their players' tastes had changed quite a bit in the intervening years.

In a wide-ranging interview with Windows Central, Blizzard's general manager of Diablo, Rod Fergusson, said that they launched Diablo IV under "the assumption that D4 was meant to be more D2-like." That meant, in part, increasing the length of time required to discover the game's most valuable items after post-Auction-House Diablo 3 made rare item drops much more common.

"One of the assumptions was that people were going to be okay with the long grind for the Unique or an Uber Unique in particular, because in Diablo II, it can go years," Fergusson said. "You can go three years before you find the Uber you're looking for... and so we were like, okay, this is what people love about the progression of D2, that idea of that very long chase."

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  Much of the time, the game looks a lot like Civilization, like in this city view. [credit: Microsoft ]

We haven't written much about Ara: History Untold, a new historical turn-based strategy PC game that's been in the works for a few years now. Part of that's because its publisher, Xbox Game Studios, hasn't put much fanfare behind it; it wasn't even mentioned in Microsoft's not-E3 extravaganza last week.

But perhaps both we and Microsoft should be putting more of a spotlight on it, given that it now has a release date: September 24, 2024. The game will be released on Steam and Xbox Game Pass for PC simultaneously.

The date was announced during an Official Xbox Podcast interview (and accompanying blog post) with Marc Meyer, president of Oxide Games, the studio developing Ara. The podcast covered more than just the release date, though, with Meyer offering up some new gameplay details—particularly about how multiplayer will work.

Enlarge / Remember, folks inside those polygons: If your housing feels too expensive, spend less money on resource consumption. It's just math. (credit: Paradox Interactive)

City building simulations are not real life. They can be helpful teaching tools, but they abstract away many of the real issues in changing communities.

And yet, sometimes a game like Cities: Skylines 2 (C:S2) will present an issue that's just too timely and relevant to ignore. Such is the case with "Economy 2.0," a big update to the beleaguered yet continually in-development game, due to arrive within the next week or so. The first and most important thing it tackles is the persistent issue of "High Rent," something that's bothering the in-game citizens ("cims" among fans), C:S2 players, and nearly every human living in the United States and many other places.

C:S2 has solutions to high rent, at least for their virtual citizens. They removed the "virtual landlord" that takes in rent, so now a building's upkeep is evenly split among renters. There's a new formula for calculating rent, one that evokes a kind of elegant mathematical certainty none of us will ever see:

Enlarge / "So slim you can play it anywhere." (credit: VGHF)

Gamers of a certain age may remember Nintendo's Game & Watch line, which predated the cartridge-based Game Boy by offering simple, single-serving LCD games that can fetch a pretty penny at auction today. But even most ancient gamers probably don't remember Mego's "Time Out" line, which took the internal of Nintendo's early Game & Watch titles and rebranded them for an American audience that hadn't yet heard of the Japanese game maker.

Now, the Video Game History Foundation (VGHF) has helped preserve the original film of an early Mego Time Out commercial, marking the recovered, digitized video as "what we believe is the first commercial for a Nintendo product in the United States." The 30-second TV spot—which is now available in a high-quality digital transfer for the first time—provides a fascinating glimpse into how marketers positioned some of Nintendo's earliest games to a public that still needed to be sold on the very idea of portable gaming.

Imagine an “electronic sport”

A 1980 Mego catalog sells Nintendo's Game & Watch games under the toy company's "Time Out" branding. (credit: Mego Museum)

Founded in the 1950s, Mego made a name for itself in the 1970s with licensed movie action figures and early robotic toys like the 2-XL (a childhood favorite of your humble author). In 1980, though, Mego branched out to partner with a brand-new, pre-Donkey Kong Nintendo of America to release rebranded versions of four early Game & Watch titles: Ball (which became Mego's "Toss-Up"), Vermin ("Exterminator"), Fire ("Fireman Fireman"), and Flagman ("Flag Man").

Enlarge / The "Xbox Series V" was a social media hoax, but the idea of a portable Xbox seems to still have legs inside Microsoft. (credit: Reddit)

The extremely long-standing rumors regarding Microsoft making a portable game console got a strong shot in the arm over the weekend from none other than Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer. Speaking on stage as part of an IGN Live interview, Spencer said directly that "I think we should have a handheld, too."

The comment stops just short of an official announcement that Microsoft is actively working on portable gaming hardware for the first time. But if anyone is in a position to make an "I think we should..." into an operational reality, it's Spencer.

"The future for us in hardware is pretty awesome," Spencer continued during the IGN presentation. "And the work that the team is doing around different form factors, different ways to play, I'm incredibly excited about it."

Enlarge / Looking more like a refrigerator than ever before. (credit: Microsoft)

A new version of Microsoft's top-end Xbox Series X will launch without a disc drive for the first time this holiday season.

The new "Digital Edition" console option—which sports 1TB of storage and an Xbox Series S-like "Robot White" color scheme—will be available "in select markets" for an estimated retail price of $449 (or 500 euros). That price is just $50 less than the MSRP for the current, disc-drive-equipped Xbox Series X, which is currently on sale for $449 from the Microsoft Store.

Word of Microsoft's plans for a disc-drive-free Xbox Series X first leaked last September as part of the Federal Trade Commission's case against the Microsoft/Activision merger. But the new disc-free Series X bears little resemblance to the cylindrical "Brooklin" refresh shown in those leaked promo materials, which also touted redesigned internals and improved power usage. Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer said at the time that "so much has changed" from the "old emails and documents" in those leaks.

Enlarge / A slide-up screen is just one of the novel features for Adata's Steam Deck clone. (credit: RetroHandhelds)

For PC gamers used to the modular design of a desktop rig, there are pros and cons to the all-in-one, pre-fab design of the Steam Deck (and its many subsequent imitators in the growing handheld gaming PC market). On the one hand, you don't have to worry about pricing out individual parts and making sure they all work together. On the other hand, the only way to upgrade one of these devices is to essentially throw out the old unit and replace the entire thing, console-style.

Korean computer storage-maker Adata is looking to straddle these two extremes. Lilliputing reports on Adata's XPG Nia prototype, which was shown off at the Computex trade show. The unit is the first gaming handheld so far to embrace the CAMM (Compression Attached Memory Module) standard that allows for easily replaceable and upgradeable memory modules, as well as a number of other mod-friendly features.

CAMM on down

Samsung shared this rendering of a CAMM ahead of the publishing of the CAMM2 standard in September. (credit: Samsung)

If you've read our previous coverage of the emerging CAMM standard, you know how excited we are about the ultra-thin modules that can simply be screwed into place on a laptop or portable motherboard. That offers a viable replacement for the now-standard soldered LPDDR RAM, which saves space but is incredibly difficult to repair or replace.

Enlarge / All these goons are targeting Captain America, as shown in icons above their heads. Good. That's just how he likes it. (No, really, he's a tank, that's his thing.) (credit: 2K/Firaxis)

I fully understand why people don't want multiple game launchers on their PC. Steam is the default and good enough for (seemingly) most people. It's not your job to compel competition in the market. You want to launch and play games you enjoy, as do most of us.

So when I tell you that Marvel's Midnight Suns is a game worth the hassle of registering, installing, and using the Epic Games Launcher, I am carefully picking my shot. For the price of giving Epic your email (or a proxy/relay version, like Duck), or just logging in again, you can play a fun, novel, engaging turn-based strategy game, with deckbuilding and positioning tactics, for zero dollars. Even if you feel entirely sapped by Marvel at this point, like most of us, I assure you that this slice of Marvel feels more like the comic books and less like the overexposed current films. Just ask the guy who made it.

Tactical deckbuilding is fun

The game was very well-regarded by most critics but was not a financial success upon release in December 2022, or was at least "underwhelming." Why any game hits or doesn't is a combination of many factors, but one of them was likely that the game was trying something new. It wasn't just X-COM with Doctor Strange. It had some Fire Emblem relationship-building and base exploration, but it also had cards. The cards blend into the turn-based, positional, chain-building strategy, but some people apparently saw cards and turned away.

Enlarge / COMING SOON (credit: 2K / Imgur)

2K Games is expected to show the first trailer footage of the upcoming Civilization VII as part of this weekend's Summer Games Fest marketing extravaganza after a logo for the game leaked on 2K's website this morning.

Eagle-eyed gamers at ResetEra and Reddit both noticed the Civ VII banner atop the publisher's official site early this morning, alongside a "Coming Soon" label and inactive links to a trailer and wishlist page. The appearance comes just ahead of the trailer-filled Summer Games Fest livestream, which will premiere at 5 pm Eastern Friday afternoon.

In May, the Summer Games Fest Twitter account teased that 2K would be using the event "to reveal the next iteration in one of [its] biggest and most beloved franchises." Civilization VII now seems primed to fill that pre-announced slot, which may be unwelcome news for fans of 2K-owned franchises like Borderlands, Bioshock, and NFL2K (which was first publicly mulled for a revival in 2020).

Enlarge / At least my son will be able to use my copy of Fallout: New Vegas to distract him from mourning... (credit: Getty Images)

A few weeks ago, we called some attention to the legal difficulty of passing on your digital Steam game library after you die. While Valve hasn't responded to a request for comment on the matter, PC gaming platform GOG tells Ars that it is ready and willing to help users transfer their accounts in the event of their death.

As long as they bring a court order, that is.

"In general, your GOG account and GOG content is not transferable," GOG spokesperson Zuzanna Rybacka tells Ars. "However, if you can obtain a copy of a court order that specifically entitles someone to your GOG personal account, the digital content attached to it, taking into account the EULAs of specific games within it, and that specifically refers to your GOG username or at least email address used to create such an account, we’d do our best to make it happen."

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  The new PS5 packaging, as seen on the PlayStation Direct online store, is missing the "8K" label in the corner. [credit: PlayStation Direct ]

When we first received our PlayStation 5 review unit from Sony in 2020, we reacted with some bemusement to the "8K" logo on the box and its implied promise of full 7630×4320 resolution output. We then promptly forgot all about it since native 8K content and 8K compatible TVs have remained a relative curiosity thus far in the PS5's lifespan.

But on Wednesday, Digital Foundry's John Linneman discovered that Sony has quietly removed that longstanding 8K label from the PS5 box. The ultra-high-resolution promise no longer appears on the packaging shown on Sony's official PlayStation Direct store, a change that appears to have happened between late January and mid-February, according to Internet Archive captures of the store page (the old "8K" box can still be seen at other online retailers, though).

A promise deferred

This packaging change has been a long time coming since the PS5 hasn't technically been living up to its 8K promise for years now. While Sony's Mark Cerny mentioned the then-upcoming hardware's 8K support in a 2019 interview, the system eventually launched with a pretty big "coming soon" caveat for that feature. "PS5 is compatible with 8K displays at launch, and after a future system software update will be able to output resolutions up to 8K when content is available, with supported software," the company said in an FAQ surrounding the console's 2020 launch.