When Valve announced its upcoming Steam Machine hardware last month, some eagle-eyed gamers may have been surprised to see that the official spec sheet lists support for HDMI 2.0 output, rather than the updated, higher-bandwidth HDMI 2.1 standard introduced in 2017. Now, Valve tells Ars that, while the hardware itself actually supports HDMI 2.1, the company is struggling to offer full support for that standard due to Linux drivers that are “still a work-in-progress on the software side.”

As we noted last year, the HDMI Forum (which manages the official specifications for HDMI standards) has officially blocked any open source implementation of HDMI 2.1. That means the open source AMD drivers used by SteamOS can’t fully implement certain features that are specific to the updated output standard.

“At this time an open source HDMI 2.1 implementation is not possible without running afoul of the HDMI Forum requirements,” AMD engineer Alex Deucher said at the time.

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It’s been over 10 years since the launch of the excellent The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and nearly four years since the announcement of “the next installment in The Witcher series of video games.” Despite those long waits, developer CD Projekt Red is still insisting it will deliver the next three complete Witcher games in a short six-year window.

In a recent earnings call, CDPR VP of Business Development Michał Nowakowski suggested that a rapid release schedule would be enabled in no small part by the team’s transition away from its proprietary REDEngine to the popular Unreal Engine in 2022. At the time, CDPR said the transition to Unreal Engine would “elevate development predictability and efficiency, while simultaneously granting us access to cutting-edge game development tools.” Those considerations seemed especially important in the wake of widespread technical issues with the console versions of Cyberpunk 2077, which CDPR later blamed on REDEngine’s “in-game streaming system.”

“We’re happy with how [Unreal Engine] is evolving through the Epic team’s efforts, and how we are learning how to make it work within a huge open-world game, as [The Witcher 4] is meant to be,” Nowakowski said in the recent earnings call. “In a way, yes, I do believe that further games should be delivered in a shorter period of time—as we had stated before, our plan still is to launch the whole trilogy within a six-year period, so yes, that would mean we would plan to have a shorter development time between TW4 and TW5, between TW5 and TW6 and so on.”

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If you know the name Ron Gilbert, it’s probably for his decades of work on classic point-and-click adventure games like Maniac Mansion, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the Monkey Island series, and Thimbleweed Park. Given that pedigree, October’s release of the Gilbert-designed Death by Scrolling—a rogue-lite action-survival pseudo-shoot-em-up—might have come as a bit of a surprise.

In an interview from his New Zealand home, though, Gilbert noted that his catalog also includes some reflex-based games—Humungous Entertainment’s Backyard Sports titles and 2010’s Deathspank, for instance. And Gilbert said his return to action-oriented game design today stemmed from his love for modern classics like Binding of Isaac, Nuclear Throne, and Dead Cells.

“I mean, I’m certainly mostly known for adventure games, and I have done other stuff, [but] it probably is a little bit of a departure for me,” he told Ars. “While I do enjoy playing narrative games as well, it’s not the only thing I enjoy, and just the idea of making one of these kind of started out as a whim.”

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After Valve announced its upcoming Steam Machine living room box earlier this month, some analysts suggested to Ars that Valve could and should aggressively subsidize that hardware with “loss leader” pricing that leads to more revenue from improved Steam software sales. In a new interview with YouTube channel Skill Up, though, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais ruled out that kind of console-style pricing model, saying that the Steam Machine will be “more in line with what you might expect from the current PC market.”

Griffais said the AMD Zen 4 CPU and RDNA3 GPU in the Steam Machine were designed to outperform the bottom 70 percent of machines that opt-in to Valve’s regular hardware survey. And Steam Machine owners should expect to pay roughly what they would for desktop hardware with similar specs, he added.

“If you build a PC from parts and get to basically the same level of performance, that’s the general price window that we aim to be at,” Griffais said.

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If you’ve ever tried to hook an old Nintendo 64 up to a modern HDTV, you know the results can be less than ideal. Assuming your original hardware still works and your flatscreen even has the requisite R/F and/or composite inputs to allow for the connection, the N64’s output will probably look like a blurry mess on a flatscreen that wasn’t designed with those old video signals as a priority.

The Analogue 3D solves this very specific problem very well, with a powerful FPGA core that accurately replicates a Nintendo 64 and well-made display filters that do a good job of approximating that cathode-ray tube glow you remember from decades ago. But the lack of easy expandability limits the appeal of this $250 device to all but the most die-hard fans of original N64 hardware.

A beauty to behold

As a piece of physical design, the Analogue 3D is a work of art. The gentle curves of its sleek black shell evoke the original N64 design without copying it, coming in at a slightly smaller footprint and height. Plus, there’s no ugly power brick.

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© Kyle Orland

A group of dedicated coders has managed to partially revive online gameplay for the PC version of Concord, the team-based shooter that Sony famously shut down just two weeks after its launch last summer. Now, though, the team behind that fan server effort is closing off new access after Sony started issuing DMCA takedown requests of sample gameplay videos.

The Game Post was among the first to publicize the “Concord Delta” project, which reverse-engineered the game’s now-defunct server API to get a functional multiplayer match running over the weekend. “The project is still [a work in progress], it’s playable, but buggy,” developer Red posted in the game’s Discord channel, as reported by The Game Post. “Once our servers are fully set up, we’ll begin doing some private playtesting.”

Accessing the “Concord Delta” servers reportedly requires a legitimate PC copy of the game, which is relatively hard to come by these days. Concord only sold an estimated 25,000 copies across PC and PS5 before being shut down last year. And that number doesn’t account for the players who accepted a full refund for their $40 purchase after the official servers shut down.

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For well over a decade now, the Cities franchise has done its best to pick up the urban simulation ball that EA’s SimCity famously dropped. Going forward, though, that ball will be handed off from longtime developer Colossal Order to Finnish studio Iceflake (a subsidiary of Cities publisher Paradox Interactive).

The surprise announcement Monday morning on Paradox’s official forums says that Cities‘ developer and publisher “mutually decided to pursue independent paths” without going into many details as to why. “The decision was made thoughtfully and in the interest of both teams—ensuring the strongest possible future for the Cities: Skylines franchise,” the announcement says.

“Both companies are excited for what the future holds while remaining deeply appreciative of our shared history and grateful to the Cities’ community,” the statement continues. Colossal Order “will work on new projects and explore new creative opportunities,” Paradox wrote in an accompanying FAQ.

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Back in 2012, Dishonored earned the first Game of the Year honor of my tenure at Ars Technica. Looking back on the game some 13 years later, Arkane’s well-constructed world of steam punk magical realism earns its place as a modern classic.

The game does a great job of drawing you into that world immediately, with a memorable opening sequence that sees you framed for the on-screen murder of the empress you’ve been sworn to protect. The scene does a great job establishing the emotional stakes of the coming missions while also throwing you into the deep end of the political infighting that has consumed a besieged, plague-beset kingdom.

A Victorian steam punk world you can lose yourself in. Credit: Arkane Studios

Those stakes, and a battle against a real feeling of injustice, drive the plot through some admittedly predictable beats as Dishonored continues through a set of sneak-and-assassinate missions. But it’s hard to care about that predictability when even minor side characters on both sides of the conflict quickly develop from stereotypes to engaging, fleshed-out characters.

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If you ask random gamers what price they think Valve will charge for its newly announced Steam Machine hardware, you’ll get a wide range of guesses. But if you ask the analysts who follow the game industry for a living the same question… well, you’ll actually get the same wide range of (somewhat better-informed) guesses.

At the high end of those guesses are analysts like F-Squared‘s Michael Futter, who expects a starting price of $799 to $899 for the entry-level 512GB Steam Machine and a whopping $1,000 to $1,100 for the 2TB version. With internal specs that Futter says “will rival a PS5 and maybe even hit PS5 Pro performance,” we can expect a “hefty price tag” from Valve’s new console-like effort. At the same time, since Valve is “positioning this as a dedicated, powerful gaming PC… I suspect that the price will be below a similarly capable traditional desktop,” Futter said.

DFC Intelligence analyst David Cole similarly expects the Steam Machine to start at a price “around $800” and go up to “around $1,000” for the 2TB model. Cole said he expects Valve will seek “very low margins” or even break-even pricing on the hardware itself, which he said would probably lead to pricing “below a gaming PC but slightly above a high-end console.”

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Yesterday’s announcement of new living room and VR hardware from Valve obviously has many gamers clamoring for any news of a more powerful version of the nearly 4-year-old Steam Deck. In a new interview with IGN, though, Valve Software Engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais says that portable gaming silicon still hasn’t advanced enough to justify brand-new benchmark hardware.

“The thing we’re making sure of is that it’s a worthwhile enough performance upgrade [for a Steam Deck 2] to make sense as a standalone product,” Griffais told IGN. “We’re not interested in getting to a point where it’s 20 or 30 or even 50 percent more performance at the same battery life. We want something a little bit more demarcated than that.”

“So we’ve been working back from silicon advancements and architectural improvements, and I think we have a pretty good idea of what the next version of Steam Deck is going to be, but right now there’s no offerings in that landscape, in the SoC [System on a Chip] landscape, that we think would truly be a next-gen performance Steam Deck,” Griffais continued.

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