And it’s not as if it slouched out the door back then, either: According to Steam Charts, its peak concurrent player count in May 2015 was an impressive 92,268. That number has continued to climb since the weekend, and today the nearly five-year-old game set another new mark, surpassing 100,000 concurrent players for the first time ever. (The fact that it’s an outstanding RPG is probably a factor too.) (Trivia bit: The “romance cards” in the initial Witcher release in North America were censored

Just days before CES kicks off, Alienware announced a revamped version of its 25-inch AW2518HF gaming monitor. That’s to say it retains the same 240Hz refresh rate as its predecessor, making it suitable for competitive gaming. However, I’m not aware of any 24-inch or 25-inch monitors sporting IPS panels with a 240Hz refresh rate. IPS panels typically offer better image quality than TN screens, by way of displaying a wider color gamut. Viewing angles are better as well, with IPS panels commonly m

Gunslinger, an overhaul mod for Stalker: Call of Pripyat, has been in the works for almost 10 years, but it’s never had any sort of playable version released. Gunslinger is finally in open beta. There’s also a sweet-looking modded PDA you can see in the video at the top of the page. I recall seeing a video clip of Gunslinger way back in 2014 of an encounter with a controller, one of Stalker’s most-dreaded mutants. Hopefully there will be new sources to download the files from soon, so keep an ey

This 2TB SSD deal gives you more room for your games, and is fast too boot. If you’re tired of doing that, then check out this deal for a fast 2TB SSD. Sabrent’s Rocket Q 2TB SSD is an M.2 form factor drive with an NVMe interface. Sabrent Rocket Q 2TB SSD | M.2 | NVMe | $199.99 (save $20)This is one of the lowest priced 2TB SSDs on Newegg right now. Case in point, Crucial’s 2TB MX500 (SATA) SSD went on sale for $209 during the Black Friday/Cyber Monday period, and quickly sold out.

It was Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice that ended up getting the most votes for Game of the Year. Of the nominees, I think the best game ultimately won, though 2019 had no dearth of games deserving of the title. VR Game of the Year, meanwhile, went to Beat Saber, no doubt because you can now play Toss a Coin to Your Witcher on it. We also revealed PC Gamer’s Game of the Year a couple of days ago, judging the phenomenal Disco Elysium to be the best (and one of the weirdest) games of 2019. Now that the

That appears to be the case here, with Walmart discounting Netgear’s Nighthawk AC2100 (R7200-100NAS) to $89. Sure, newer Wi-Fi 6 models offer some nice enhancements over Wi-Fi 5, and there are reasons why gamers should care about Wi-Fi 6. However, to utilize a Wi-Fi 6 router to its full potential, your devices and wireless adapters need to support Wi-Fi 6 as well, and most existing ones do not. In my testing, Netgear’s Nighthawk models have been among the best gaming routers, with fast speeds an

If you’re looking to get a new gaming laptop for the new year, this deal might be of interest to you. One of Acer’s high-end Predator laptops is down to $1,400 on the Microsoft Store, a discount of $260 from the original MSRP. This laptop has a 15.6-inch 1080p 144Hz screen, an Intel Core i7-9750H processor, 16GB of 2666 MHz RAM, a large 512GB SSD, and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 graphics card. The main downside is that the RTX 2060 graphics card in this laptop is the Max-Q variant, so gaming perf

It has been over two years since the first Ryzen processors were released, and AMD apparently still has a few unopened CPUs left to sell. If you’re on a tight budget for a gaming PC build, you can now get a Ryzen 5 1500X processor for just $69.00 from Amazon. The 1500X is a 4-core/8-thread processor, with a boost clock of 3.7 GHz. It uses the AM4 socket type, same as all Ryzen CPUs, but it won’t work with the latest X570 chipset. No matter what motherboard you go with, you’ll be able to upgrade

Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic is a fascinating, unique take on the city-building and management game that puts you in control of a tiny Soviet-era republic and its entire economy. If you want something built, you get the resources and manage your workforce to build it yourself, or you pay foreigners to come build it for you. Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic is made by a little studio called 3Division, based in Kosice, Slovakia. You can get Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic on Steam

Our alternative awards don’t work like our regular GOTYs—there’s no voting or spreadsheets or discussion among the staff. It’s a free-for-all, with uncontested picks marked for special recognition in 2019—not always in a good way—and these awards don’t even have be awarded to video games. You’ve clearly already scrolled down to skim the Untitled 2019 Alternative PC Game Awards. For its exploration of this personal subject, Gris won the Games for Impact Award at The Game Awards. Best magic act: R

For the first time in 12 years, voice actor Mike Shapiro has taken on the voice of the G-Man in yet another teaser ahead of the release of Half-Life: Alyx . Shapiro posted a short video on Twitter with a monologue as the character, complete with stilted tone, odd speech pattern, and all the other mannerisms that haunted the Half-Life series over the years. Here’s what he says:”Should old acquaintances be forgot, then, after so much… time. Some things can prove difficult to remember. And, do prep

Here’s a unique and wonderful indie project for you: Meditations. Most every day for the coming year the Meditations launcher will give you a small, cute game by various indie developers—from the relatively famous to the totally unknown. On the first day of each month, the Meditations launcher downloads that month’s games in a big bundle, then doles them out to you each day after. Each game is only available on the day it was made for, so if you miss a game or love it you have to wait until next

This is the setting for Cyberpunk Red, a tabletop RPG in the same world as Cyberpunk 2077, but a few decades earlier in the year 2045. HardwiredBoth Cyberpunk 2077 and Cyberpunk Red owe their existence to a tabletop RPG designed by Mike Pondsmith and published by R. Talsorian Games in 1988. As the actual year 2020 approaches, Cyberpunk Red moves the setting forward, streamlining rules and assumptions along the way. Right now, the jumpstart kit is enough to get your first game of Cyberpunk Red go

Bigger isn’t always better, though when it comes to gaming monitors, I’d argue that staring at a larger display is more enjoyable than looking at a smaller one, even if only at 1080p. It’s the same size an resolution as the Pixio PXC273, which we consider one of the best gaming monitors. This deal also brings pricing parity between the two, and MSI is a more recognizable brand. This monitor is built around a curved VA panel with a fast 144Hz refresh rate and 1ms response time (MPRT). MSI also cl

If you, like many nerds, have the song Toss A Coin To Your Witcher from Netflix’s Witcher TV series stuck in your head, here’s a way to get it stuck even deeper by associating it with muscle movements: It’s now in Beat Saber. And it’s a natural fit, too, because just like Geralt, in Beat Saber you also have two swords and are irritated by Jaskier’s singing. If you’re unfamiliar, Beat Saber is the best-selling VR rhythm game where you cut blocks by hitting them with glowing laser swords, but the

Pictured above is a ‘tooling’ used in manufacturing. A tooling is, essentially, a mold used to give form to metal or plastic parts, like a PC case. Think of it like a really precise, really heavy steel cake pan. Toolings are placed on large metal presses in the factory (you’ll see those in a few slides), and then the raw metal is placed within and pressed into shape. Unlike a cake mold, though, you can’t make a whole PC case with a single tooling.

As a teenager, I stormed out of a friend’s house over such a case of Street Fighter 2 bullshit. It’s another attempt at bringing the basic concept of party game Werewolf—you may know it by its Mafia variant—into a multiplayer videogame. In one game, while warming up inside the starting cabin with two other players, we heard an argument outside. Project Winter is one of the few games where I don’t mind spectating if I die early. I’m sure there’s fun to be had with the right group of strangers, bu

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt presently has more concurrent players on Steam than it had on launch day in 2015, breaking its own record of 92,000 by several thousand players. At the time of this report more than 94,000 people were playing the game according to SteamDB, Steamcharts, and Valve’s own statistics. These figures are for Steam only, and don’t count players from other distribution platforms like Witcher developer CD Projekt’s own GOG. Most highly-anticipated games never again reach their lau

Last year, when we discovered the Star Wars Empire at War Remake mod, Fraser Brown requested to be frozen in carbonite until it was done . Not only does this mod update the game to cutting-edge visual standards with new models and effects, it adds new units and deepens the game mechanics. Empire at War Remake has also been given the Mod of the Year award by the ModDB community, surprising literally no-one. Here’s a bunch of pretty pictures of the mod in action:Image 1 of 4 (Image credit: Petrogl

The Epic Store’s free holiday games just keep on coming, and today’s is philosophical sci-fi puzzler The Talos Principle. Plus, even if the puzzles aren’t unique in execution, the way it constructs them is masterful—and the challenge puzzles are some of the biggest brain-burners I’ve ever encountered in a 3D puzzle game. Our reviewer quite liked The Talos Principle on release, calling it “An adept and satisfying puzzle game with a narrative that requires a bit of player investment to yield its b