Nathan Grayson

Valve Removes Nazi Steam Profiles After German Complaints

Far-right groups that often employed Nazi-inspired language have long been able to create ugly little dens on Steam without facing too much resistance. Last year, Valve quietly deleted many hate groups in the wake of sustained reporting from publications like Vice, but Steam’s owners weren’t comprehensive in their approach, leaving some questionable groups unscathed. Now…

The First Epic Exclusives Are Now Arriving On Steam

In the annals of holiday lore it said that, every year, after circling the globe on a carpet-sized copy of Death Stranding, Geoff Keighley touches down for the briefest of moments in December to host The Game Awards. Last year, this led to an announcement that was curious indeed: a store, from grumpy old mega-corporation…

Top streamers Benjamin “DrLupo” Lupo, Saqib “Lirik” Zahid, and Timothy “TimTheTatman” Betar have all signed “multi-year” exclusivity deals with Twitch. Twitch partners are technically exclusive to the platform already, so this is being billed as a “re-signing” in a time that’s seen popular streamers like Ninja, Shroud, and CouRage leave Twitch for platforms like Mixer…

Scammers Are Impersonating Popular Twitch Streamers

Anybody can make an account on Twitch. It’s a quick, simple process that takes only a few minutes. You (a super villain, in this hypothetical scenario) might be wondering what’s to stop somebody from naming an account after a popular streamer and, say, scamming a bunch of people. Not much, it turns out. Over the…

Donkey Kong 64 Originally Had A Realistic Shotgun, Horrifying Shigeru Miyamoto

Donkey Kong 64 stood out from the rest of the banana-obsessed Donkey Kong bunch. The DK Rap is, of course, its most memorable and meme-able element, but we cannot—and indeed, should not—understate the fact that Donkey Kong also had a freaking gun. The coconut gun could fire in spurts, and if it shot you, it…

In AI Dungeon 2, You Can Do Anything–Even Start A Rock Band Made Of Skeletons

Plenty of games offer players multiple solutions to problems. Fight or talk. Stick to the beaten path or explore. Stealth or charge in like a conspicuously bullet-resistant idiot. A game that lets you do anything, though? That’s harder to come by. Released yesterday, AI Dungeon 2 purports to be one such game, and for the…

Minecraft Is The Top YouTube Game Of 2019, Thanks To A Boost From PewDiePie

It’s not like Minecraft ever really went anywhere. But it definitely spent the past handful of years less firmly entrenched in the zeitgeist than in the first half of the decade. Not so in 2019. The blocky game about digging holes and punching the ever-loving shit out of trees is back on top of YouTube,…

Halo: Reach, As Told By Steam Reviews

Halo: Reach, Bungie’s final entry in its second (of three, so far) series about armored space knights, is finally on PC. People are clearly excited, so much so that they managed to propel it to the third most-played slot on Steam earlier this week. But do they actually like the port? Yes and no. For…

The State Of PC Gaming In 2019

Sometimes, as borders erode, new fissures form in their wake. In 2019, more games flowed between PC and other platforms than ever before, but a single major division cracked the PC gaming landscape in half. This year’s central throughline was undoubtedly the titanic clash between Valve and Epic, with Epic snatching up every high-profile exclusive…

Psychiatrist Brings Streamer To Tears During Confessional Stream

Everyone could benefit from therapy, especially streamers. While popular streamer Byron “Reckful” Bernstein’s on-stream conversation with Dr. Alok Kanojia was not an officially designated counseling session, it resembled one at times. Bernstein is a former top World of Warcraft player and current streamer who’s now working on his own online game, Everland. Over the years,…

Twitch Briefly Bans One Of The Biggest Moderation Bots

If allowed to chatter and meme unchecked, Twitch chat can grow into an unstoppable avalanche of ugly behavior. Many streamers rely on at least a handful of volunteer or paid moderators, as well as chat bots that allow streamers to auto-block specific terms, stop spam before it starts, and quarantine questionable comments. Yesterday, Twitch accidentally…

How To Talk To Your Parents About Dexit

Thanksgiving is nearly upon us, which means we have officially entered the swirling vortex of vacation days, feast-engorged couch naps, and family gatherings that is The Holiday Zone. For many of us, this means a potentially uncomfortable amount of time around relatives who might not share our views on a laundry list of important topics:…

Valve Is Not Making Any More Steam Controllers

We are gathered here today to bid farewell to the Steam Controller, the little gamepad that could in some cases, but couldn’t in others, because it made people’s hands hurt. Its haptic pads are tickling the fingers of angels now. Currently, Valve’s maiden foray into the world of long-distance game manipulation is on sale for…

Valve Removes 1,000 Games From Steam As Punishment For Abusing Tools

There are more than 30,000 games on Steam. When Valve removes the odd offender for breaking the rules by, say, being a low-effort meme masquerading as a low-effort game or by being low-effort porn masquerading as a low-effort game, it’s like siphoning a drop from a bucket. Yesterday, Valve removed over 1,000 games from Steam.…

Data Suggests Most Steam Users’ PCs Aren’t Ready To Play Half-Life: Alyx

Deep-pocketed companies like Valve and Oculus have been pushing virtual reality for years, but mainstream interest in the practice of strapping video games to one’s eyeballs has remained relatively low. Half-Life: Alyx seems primed to give a whole new audience a very valid reason to hover a hesitant finger over a headset’s Buy button and…

Battleborn Is Shutting Down In 2021

Despite a small crowd of diehards who went so far as to organize events in an attempt to save the game, Battleborn seems destined to go down in history as a high-profile flop. Two years ago, developer Gearbox halted updates to the already-shot hero shooter. Today, publisher 2K announced plans to sunset the game entirely.…

Old World Of Warcraft Glitch Created A Terrifying Instant Death Bear

World of Warcraft contains countless fantastical creatures with otherworldly powers. Legendary dragons, skyscraper-sized fire elementals, several different kinds of boar—the list goes on. One beast from the game’s distant past, however, put them all to shame. I speak of the Death Bear of the Arathi Highlands, though I fear that simply by uttering his name,…

Visual Novel Sets Out To Buck Trends By Being Less Sexual, Gets Blocked By Steam Anyway

From the start, the lead developer of Crime Opera: The Butterfly Effect, Sean Bester, wanted his game to be different from the other games in Steam’s sea of often sexually-tinged romance and horror visual novels. This meant it would have very little sex and nudity, with the focus instead on a “mature” mafia tale. That,…

Jeremy “DisguisedToast” Wang, who you might remember from his grueling shiny Pokémon ordeal earlier this week, is moving from Twitch to Facebook Gaming. This exclusivity deal comes in the wake of similar Twitch departures from high-profile streamers like Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, Michael “Shroud” Grzesiek, and Jack “CouRageJD” Dunlop. Facebook’s streaming platform is, according to streaming…

Half-Life: Alyx Takes Place Between Half-Life 1 And Half-Life 2 [Update]

Half-Life: Alyx, you might be dismayed to learn, is definitely not Half-Life 3. But it is a new “full-length” Half-Life game, Valve said today, and it’ll be out in March. In a press release, Valve said the game—first announced earlier this week to surprise, confusion, and memes from fans—has been “designed from the ground up…