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A fresh report into Unity's hugely-controversial decision to start charging developers when their games are downloaded has thrown fresh light on the situation.

MobileGamer sources say Unity has already offered some studios a 100% fee waiver - if they switch over to Unity's own LevelPlay ad platform.

The report quotes industry consultants that say this move is an "attempt to destroy" Unity's main competitior in this field: AppLovin.

A look at Wargroove 2, the turn-based tactics game that is out this year.

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The main campaign itself has been a treat so far. It's been mice against wood folk, but while I like the Faahri's new commanders and their Grooves - one can fling enemy units around, another can chain electricity and the third gets a boost to movement, strength and defence - I'm mostly struck by the degree of freedom in the missions. A lot of levels start off with a choice of which units to begin with - do I want extra cavalry or extra pikemen, say - and most missions also include two or even three victory conditions to flit between. None of this stuff is wildly inventive, but it allows me to head out onto the battlefield and keep my options open.

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It's here I first saw the new tiered Groove system too. Each hero unit can use its special attack when it reaches 100 percent on a gauge which is built up by your army doing good stuff - killing enemy units and taking villages, for example. But if you hold on and take it to 200 percent, you can unleash massive Groove attacks. I love this, because it's just the kind of feature I tend to forget about in the midst of battle, remembering only at the last minute and giving me that feeling of having just gotten away with stuff.

Starfield's New Game+ is full of bizarre sci-fi surprises, if you've got the patience to repeatedly beat the game.

There are plenty of weird sights in Starfield, from a zero-G casino to alien critters with exposed brains to Nicolas Cage's face in your flashlight beam. (To be fair, that last one was created by a modder.)

But some of the weirdest and most surprising stuff in Starfield is hidden pretty darn deep into the game. In fact, it's so deep you won't even find it until you've completed the main quest, and not just once but several times using Starfield New Game+.

NOTE: MAJOR SPOILERS* from here on out! Because to explain this I'm gonna have to talk quite a bit about Starfield's main quest and how New Game+ works.

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Renowned leaker billbil-kun found information suggesting that a PC release of Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition is very, very close.

Just a few days ago, the Singaporean game rating board revealed the imminent launch of Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition for PlayStation 5. This news held little surprise, however, given that it was a safe bet to assume Sony would bundle last year's Horizon Forbidden West with the Burning Shores DLC released a few months ago, just like they did for Horizon Zero Dawn and its The Frozen Wilds DLC.

Much more interesting is today's news broken by renowned leaker billbil-kun, who found out that Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition may also be released on PC at the same time, or very close anyway. According to the information gathered by billbil-kun, the game could launch on Steam and the Epic Games Store in the span of a month.

Hey all!

What type of PC content are you guys interested in seeing in here? Are you subscribed to other gaming communities?

I've been trying to help out the creator and post a mix of content, but am never really sure what people use it for. Here's a bit of what I've been trying:

• General PC games news
• hardware news & reviews
• Smaller/Lesser known game releases and reviews
• Industry news
• Trailers
• Bigger game updates

I skim through a ton of material every day and post a few highlights from the sources I think are most informative (so not always the original source).

A steampunk-themed side-scrolling shooter with a shotgun that’s also an umbrella, Gunbrella crams plenty of frenetic, brolly-based combat into its brief playtime

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Gunbrella is a classic 2D platform shooter in the style of a steampunk western. It’s like Deadwood crossed with Singin’ In The Rain, if Gene Kelly ever used his umbrella to blow holes through anyone who didn’t sufficiently praise his tap dancing. Some light exploration bits have you travelling by train from frontier towns to mining villages, much of them decorated with giant spinning cogs – so you know it’s steampunk – and populated by a small cast of quest-giving locals, pill-dispensing shopkeepers and monologuing villains.

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This realtime 4X makes great use of Dune’s furniture in crafting a compulsive, busy, and well-made strategy game, and its new campaign is a great addition. But the soul of Dune remains elusive, leaving its desert planet feeling barren in the wrong ways.

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This buffet of different resources is key to what makes Spice Wars interesting. You’ll go into each match or mission with a game plan. Which flavour of control do I fancy today? Generally, this means focusing your techs and bonuses on a couple of resources while trying not to cripple your economy in other areas. Done right, all those tiny flaps of a baby steamroller’s wings will cascade into some sort of steam-nado before long, allowing you to pancake your foes with the sheer power of multipliers. Now, certain houses favour specific plays, and some resources are easy to trade for, stripping the risk from negelecting them, but there’s otherwise a decent amount of freedom. Spice Wars’ AI isn’t an especially tricky opponent, but cascading jenga towers of choices do make for some satisfying plays, especially now tweaks have made a relatively barren mid-game feel much richer.

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With last week's Starfield launch slowly simmering down, Bethesda has started to cast its gaze forward, confirming a number of "community requested" features are on the way, including Nvidia DLSS support on PC, an FOV slider, and more.

As detailed in a post on social media, Bethesda is initially targeting a "few top issues" in a small hotfix out today, after which it'll be turning its attention to various community requested features, which will arrive in updates at a "regular interval".

Specifically, it's confirmed Nvidia DLSS Support on PC following its controversial partnership with AMD, as well as 32:9 ultrawide monitor support on the platform. Additionally, players can expect a range of quality of life improvements, including a field-of-view slider, an HDR calibration menu, plus brightness and contrast controls.
Digital Foundry reckoned the PC version of Starfield "still requires a lot of work".

"We're also working closely with Nvidia, AMD, and Intel on driver support," the studio adds, "and each update will include new stability and performance improvements."

Investigation into Nvidia GPU workloads reveals that Tensor cores are being hammered, just incredibly briefly.

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An intrepid Reddit poster, going under the handle Bluedot55, leveraged Nvidia's Nsight Systems GPU metric tools to drill down into the workloads running on various parts of an Nvidia RTX 4090 GPU.

Bluedot55 ran both DLSS and third party scalers on an Nvidia RTX 4090 and measured Tensor core utilisation. Looking at average Tensor core usage, the figures under DLSS were extremely low, less than 1%.

Initial investigations suggested even the peak utilisation registered in the 4-9% range, implying that while the Tensor cores were being used, they probably weren't actually essential. However, increasing the polling rate revealed that peak utilisation is in fact in excess of 90%, but only for brief periods measured in microseconds.

Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, the upcoming cRPG set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe developed by Owlcat Games, now has a release date, as revealed in the new trailer that you can watch above. That date is December 7, 2023. The trailer also reveals that the game is being released on more than just PC and Mac: it'll also hit the PS5 and Xbox Series X|S that same day.

The turn-based cRPG will be another big release in what has been a massive year for RPGs, capping off a year in which the genre has added Starfield, Baldur's Gate 3, Sea of Stars, Final Fantasy 16, and Diablo 4 (among others) to its ranks. The new trailer also introduces Marazhai, the last of your 10 available companions who Owlcat describes as "one of the Drukhari, a xenos race famous for elevating pain to a whole new level and draining life and power from it."

No Man's Sky has had a great month, coincidentally around the launch of the other big space adventure of the day.

No Man's Sky has been one of the best examples of a video redemption story, and developer Hello Games never stopped expanding the game with new content, and more features. Just recently, the procedural space adventure celebrated its seventh anniversary with the Echoes update, and it doesn't look like there's an end in sight to this support.

But do these updates bring back players? The answer is an emphatic yes! Hello Games founder, Sean Murray, recently revealed that No Man's Sky is having "its biggest month in the last few years." Interestingly, this is happening across all platforms where No Man's Sky is available - so PC, consoles, Mac, and even VR.

Lies of P manages to be a solid soulslike with its interesting setting and combat mechanics, despite not attempting to bring any innovation to the formula

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Despite having been released over eight years ago, FromSoftware's Bloodborne continues to be among the most popular action role-playing games ever made, thanks to its unique atmosphere and gameplay mechanics. So far, a few soulslike games tried to replicate this formula with little success, such as Spiders' Steelrising, but with Lies of P, NEOWIZ proved that it is indeed possible to create a solid action RPG in the same vein as FromSoftware's legendary title, although the lack of innovation does impact the experience a bit, even with the many tweaks made to the formula.