gaming – Page 2

Nintendo raises planned Switch 2 accessory prices amid tariff “uncertainty”

gaming / Paul Patrick / April 20, 2025

The Switch 2 hardware will still retail for its initially announced $449.99, alongside a $499.99 bundle including a digital download of Mario Kart World. Nintendo revealed Thursday that the Mario Kart bundle will only be produced “through Fall 2025,” though, and will only be available “while supplies last.” Mario Kart World will retail for $79.99 on its own, while Donkey Kong Bananza will launch in July for a $69.99 MSRP.

Most industry analysts expected Nintendo to hold the price for the Switch 2 hardware steady, even as Trump’s wide-ranging tariffs threatened to raise the cost the company incurred for systems built in China and Vietnam. “I believe it is now too late for Nintendo to drive up the price further, if that ever was an option in the first place,” Kantan Games’ Serkan Toto told GamesIndustry.biz. “As far as tariffs go, Nintendo was looking at a black box all the way until April 2, just like everybody else. As a hardware manufacturer, Nintendo most likely ran simulations to get to a price that would make them tariff-proof as much as possible.”

But that pricing calculus might not hold forever. “If the tariffs persist, I think a price increase in 2026 might be on the table,” Ampere Analysis’ Piers Harding-Rolls told GameSpot. “Nintendo will be treading very carefully considering the importance of the US market.”

Since the Switch 2 launch details were announced earlier this month, Nintendo’s official promotional livestreams have been inundated with messages begging the company to “DROP THE PRICE.”

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Sunderfolk review: RPG magic that transports your friends together

chris sagaty, dreamhaven, gaming, Review, role-playing game, sunderfolk, Tabletop, tabletop gaming, tactical rpg / Rejus Almole / April 20, 2025

Using your phone as a controller keeps you engaged with this accommodating RPG.

The creators of Sunderfolk wanted to make a video game that would help players “Rediscover game night.” By my reckoning, they have succeeded, because I am now regularly arguing with good friends over stupid moves. Why didn’t I pick up that gold? Don’t you see how ending up there messed up an area attack? Ah, well.

That kind of friendly friction, inside dedicated social time, only gets harder to come by as you get older, settle into routines, and sometimes move apart. I’ve hosted four Sunderfolk sessions with three friends, all in different states, and it has felt like reclaiming something I lost. Sunderfolk is a fun game with a lot of good ideas, and the best one is convincing humans to join up in pondering hex tiles, turn order, and what to name the ogres who shoot arrows (“Pointy Bros”).

Maybe you already have all the gaming appointments you need with friends, online or in person. Sunderfolk, I might suggest, is a worthy addition to your queue as a low-effort way to give everyone a break from being the organizer. It does a decent job of tutorializing and onboarding less experienced players, then adds depth as it goes on. Given that only one person out of four has to own the game on some system, and the only other hardware needed is a phone, it’s a pretty light lift for what I’m finding to be a great payoff. Some parts could be improved, but the core loop and its camaraderie engine feel sturdy.

I haven’t reached the mine cart missions yet but am glad to know they exist. Credit: Dreamhaven

Pick a class, take a seat

My party getting a well-deserved level up. From left: Boom Boom the berserker, Roguefer, Bob the mage, and Fire Bob. Credit: Kevin Purdy

Sunderfolk is a turn-based tactical RPG, putting you and your friends on a grid filled with objects, enemies, and surprises. You pick from familiar role-playing character classes—my party picked rogue, berserker, wizard, and a kind of pyromancer—and choose one ability card each turn. The cards put a Gloomhaven-like emphasis on sequence and map positioning. One of my rogue’s potential moves is a quick attack, then gaining strength by picking up nearby gold. Another involves moving, hitting, moving, hitting, then one more single-hex move at the end, to stay out of danger and get a protective “Shrouded” effect.

You and your squad are all watching the same screen, be it a living room TV, a laptop, or a window streamed over Zoom or Discord. You choose your cards, plot your movement, and interact with everything using your phone or tablet’s touchscreen. Once you’ve won a quest by beating the baddies and/or hitting other markers, you head back to town and do a whole bunch of housekeeping tasks. Sunderfolk has mechanics for both players not being present (scaling the quests and keeping the missing leveled up) and for someone having to drop mid-battle (someone else can play their seat and their own). It’s accommodating to players of different RPG experience levels and different schedules.

Sunderfolk launch date trailer.

You have my sword—and my phone

Let’s address the phone controls, the roughly 6-inch-diagonal elephant in the room. My three friends all had to spend a few minutes getting used to using their phone screen as a multi-modal controller: touchpad for hex movement and cursor pointing, card picker and info box reader, and then the town landscape screen. After that, nobody had any real issues with the controls themselves. The tactile feedback guides your finger, and there was no appreciable lag in our sessions.

Sometimes we’d get momentarily flummoxed by the card-choosing flow, and there is perhaps some inherent mental tax in switching between screens. But the phone controls, besides making couch co-op possible, also allowed everyone in my group to play in their most comfortable spot: a TV streaming the Discord app, a tablet on the couch, a laptop at the kitchen counter.

Not for nothing, but with each player using their phone for controls—and the game announcing when players had “disconnected” if they switched to another app too long, only for them to come right back—Sunderfolk can apply some anti-scrolling pressure and keep everyone checked in. You could get around this with secondary devices or tiled windows, but it’s better to be present and ask your friends whose turn it is to fire off their Ultimate card.

(To clarify how remote play works: One owner of the game can screen-cast their game to Discord, Zoom, Meet, or whatever service, everyone playing can chat there or elsewhere, and players log in their phones/controllers with a QR code that is displayed from the screen-casted main title screen)

Cheerhaven

Most times, your party will be spread out all over the town, but in this provided screenshot, everybody has remembered to upgrade their Fate cards at the Temple. Credit: Dreamhaven

All this adventuring takes place in a world of anthropomorphized animals and overgrown woods and purple-blue ogres that strongly evoke World of Warcraft’s style (at least in Act 1). When you’re back in town, you tap around to chat with recurring NPCs, gain friendship levels that sometimes result in gifts, and upgrade parts of the town to your liking. The town hub provides more opportunities for strategy and bonding with players. You might send some of the gold you greedily picked up on the last quest to the friend so they can nab a great weapon. You might, as a group, buy a quirky town upgrade just for the chance to rename some things.

But the town is one place I felt some friction, familiar from more in-depth board games. Some players will be done with making their decisions and speeding through dialogue faster than others and may or may not be more engaged with the town chatterboxes. Just as with cardboard games, you can take this moment to get up, stretch your legs, and maybe refresh a drink. But you might have to nudge people along if they’re overwhelmed by gear choices.

The non-gory, often goofy nature of Sunderfolk’s setting makes it appropriate for a wider range of players. The voice acting, almost all of it by Anjali Bhimani (i.e., Symmetra), re-creates the feel of having a game master switch between “Frightened Blue Jay miner” and “Furious Ogre Queen” in one session. I’m not too engaged in the broad plot after one act—ogres, fueled by Darkstone, want to extinguish the village’s Brightstone—but it’s not a big deal. The game has given my group something else to latch onto: naming things.

Touching the Neatos to heal Boom Boom

Michael Keaton must reach an exit hex! Credit: Kevin Purdy

The chance to name things in Sunderfolk, and have those names stick for the whole campaign, is something a good GM would do to engage their players and break up tension. Sunderfolk is clever about this, offering both secret naming prompts to individual players on their phones or dishing out naming opportunities in town. In my party’s campaign, healing statues are named Neatos, the town bridge is Seagull Murder (a misremembered, obscure Peace Bridge reference), and the beetle we rescued is named, as it was during my preview, Michael Keaton. It’s fun to build your own stupid world out of goofy names, something too few games provide.

Individual phone controls give the game a chance to pull off a few other tricks, like only telling certain players about how a certain enemy looks like they’re carrying great loot. If Sunderfolk added even more of this, I would not mind at all.

I’m generally enjoying the combat, difficulty ramp (on the default setting), and upgrade paths of the characters. After three or four sessions, your character has much more move variety, and items and weapons are more useful and varied. The town of Arden, while overly chatty, has more to offer. It feels like a game that has had its pacing and onboarding fine-tuned.

But I have nits to pick:

There are cheap but great upgrades you can easily miss in town, like tavern meals and temple fate cards
Enemy variety feels slightly lacking in the first act
Some things, like mission selection, demand all-party agreement; perhaps the game could figuratively flip a coin when parties are divided
Everyone in my party has accidentally skipped an attack once or twice, despite an “Are you sure?” prompt
Movement traces and signaling could be clearer, as we have all also wasted hexes and shoved each other around

A very human computer game

You and your friends deal with a lot more stuff as *Sunderfolk* goes on: Boom Shrooms, loot, pits, explosives, and lots of little coin piles. Credit: Kevin Purdy

It’s been hard to be overly critical of a game that has all but forced me to log off and talk to friends for a couple hours each week. The downsides of Sunderfolk have mostly been the same as those of playing any tabletop game with humans: waiting, expertise imbalance, distraction, and someone’s dog needing attention.

Beyond that, I think Sunderfolk is a success at what it set out to do: Put the cardboard, cards, and dice on the screen and make it easier for everyone to show up. It won’t replace the traditional game night, but it might bring more people into it and remind people like me why it’s so good.

This post was updated at 10: 45 a.m. with a note about how remote play can work.

Kevin is a senior technology reporter at Ars Technica, covering open-source software, PC gaming, home automation, repairability, e-bikes, and tech history. He has previously worked at Lifehacker, Wirecutter, iFixit, and Carbon Switch.

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Assassin’s Creed Shadows is the dad rock of video games, and I love it

assassin's creed, Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Assassin's Creed Shadows, gaming, open world, RPG, Star Wars Outlaws, ubisoft / Kris Guyer / April 20, 2025

It also proves AAA publishers should be more willing to delay their games.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows refines Ubisoft’s formula, has great graphics, and is a ton of fun. Credit: Samuel Axon

Assassin’s Creed titles are cozy games for me. There’s no more relaxing place to go after a difficult day: historical outdoor museum tours plus dopamine dispensers plus slow-paced assassination simulators. The developers of Assassin’s Creed: Shadows seem to understand thisbetter than ever before.

I’m “only” 40 hours into Shadows (I reckon I’m about 30 percent through the game), but I already consider it one of the best entries in the franchise’s long history.

I’ve appreciated some past titles’ willingness to experiment and get jazzy with it, but Shadows takes a different tack. It has cherry-picked the best elements from the past decade or so of the franchise and refined them.

So, although the wheel hasn’t been reinvented here, it offers a smoother ride than fans have ever gotten from the series.

That’s a relief, and for once, I have some praise to offer Ubisoft. It has done an excellent job understanding its audience and proven that when in doubt, AAA publishers should feel more comfortable with the idea of delaying a game to focus on quality.

Choosing wisely

Shadows is the latest entry in the 18-year series, and it was developed primarily by a Ubisoft superteam, combining the talents of two flagship studios: Ubisoft Montreal (Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, Assassin’s Creed Origins, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla) and Ubisoft Quebec (Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, Immortals Fenyx Rising).

After a mediocre entry in 2023’s Assassin’s Creed Mirage—which began as Valhalla DLC and was developed by B-team Ubisoft Bordeaux—Shadows is an all-in, massive budget monstrosity led by the very Aist of teams.

The game comes after a trilogy of games that many fans call the ancient trilogy (Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla—with Mirage tightly connected), which was pretty divisive.

Peaking with Odyssey, the ancient trilogy departed from classic Assassin’s Creed gameplay in significant ways. For the most part, cornerstones like social stealth, modern-day framing, and primarily urban environments were abandoned in favor of what could be reasonably described as “The Witcher 3 lite”—vast, open-world RPG gameplay with detailed character customization and gear systems, branching dialogue options, and lots of time spent wandering the wilderness instead of cities.

An enemy fort sits in a wild landscape — As in *Odyssey*, you spend most of your time in *Shadows* exploring the wilds. Credit: Samuel Axon

I loved that shift, as I felt the old formula had grown stale over a decade of annual releases. Many other longtime fans did not agree. So in the weeks leading up to Shadows‘ launch, Ubisoft was in a tough spot: please the old-school fans or fans of the ancient trilogy. The publisher tried to please both at once with Valhalla but ended up not really making anyone happy, and it tried a retro throwback with Mirage, which was well-received by a dedicated cohort, but that didn’t make many waves outside that OG community.

During development, a Ubisoft lead publicly assured fans that Shadows would be a big departure from Odyssey, seemingly letting folks know which fanbase the game was meant to please. That’s why I was surprised when Shadows actually came out and was… a lot like Odyssey—more like Odyssey than any other game in the franchise, in fact.

Detailed gear stats and synergies are back, meaning this game is clearly an RPG… Samuel Axon

Similar to Odyssey, Shadows has deep character progression, gear, and RPG systems. It is also far more focused on the countryside than on urban gameplay and has no social stealth. It has branching dialogue (anemic though that feature may be) and plays like a modernization of The Witcher III: Wild Hunt.

Yet it seems this time around, most players are happy. What gives?

Well, Shadows exhibits a level of polish and handcrafted care that many Odyssey detractors felt was lacking. In other words, the game is so slick and fun to play, it’s hard to dislike it just because it’s not exactly what you would have done had you been in charge of picking the next direction for the franchise.

Part of that comes from learning lessons from the specific complaints that even Odyssey‘s biggest fans had about that game, but part of it can be attributed to the fact that Ubisoft did something uncharacteristic this time around: It delayed an Assassin’s Creed game for months to make sure the team could nail it.

It’s OK to delay

Last fall, Ubisoft published Star Wars Outlaws, which was basically Assassin’s Creed set in the Star Wars universe. You’d think that would be a recipe for success, but the game landed with a thud. The critical reception was lukewarm, and gaming communities bounced off it quickly. And while it sold well by most single-player games’ standards, it didn’t sell well enough to justify its huge budget or to please either Disney or Ubisoft’s bean counters.

I played Outlaws a little bit, but I, too, dropped it after a short time. The stealth sequences were frustrating, its design decisions didn’t seem very well-thought out, and it wasn’t that fun to play.

Since I wasn’t alone in that impression, Ubisoft looked at Shadows (which was due to launch mere weeks later) and panicked. Was the studio on the right track? It made a fateful decision: delay Shadows for months, well beyond the quarter, to make sure it wouldn’t disappoint as much as Outlaws did.

I’m not privy to the inside discussions about that decision, but given that the business was surely counting on Shadows to deliver for the all-important holiday quarter and that Ubisoft had never delayed an Assassin’s Creed title by more than a few weeks before, it probably wasn’t an easy one.

It’s hard to imagine it was the wrong one, though. Like I said, Shadows might be the most polished and consistently fun Assassin’s Creed game ever made.

A sprawling vista viewed from one of the game's viewpoints — No expense was spared with this game, and it delivers on polish, too. Credit: Samuel Axon

In an industry where quarterly profits are everything and building quality experiences for players or preserving the mental health and financial stability of employees are more in the “it’s nice when it happens” category, I feel it’s important to recognize when a company makes a better choice.

I don’t know what Ubisoft developers’ internal experiences were, but I sincerely hope the extra time allowed them to both be happier with their work and their work-life balance. (If you’re reading this and you work at Ubisoft and have insight, email me via my author page here. I want to know.)

In any case, there’s no question that players got a superior product because of the decision to delay the game. I can think of many times when players got angry at publishers for delaying games, but they shouldn’t be. When a game gets delayed, that’s not necessarily a bad sign. The more time the game spends in the oven, the better it’s going to be. Players should welcome that.

So, too, should business leaders at these publishers. Let Shadows be an example: Getting it right is worth it.

More dad rock, less prestige TV

Of course, despite this game’s positive reception among many fans, Assassin’s Creed in general is often reviled by some critics and gamers. Sure, there’s a reasonable and informed argument to be made that its big-budget excess, rampant commercialism, and formulaic checkbox-checking exemplify everything wrong with the AAA gaming industry right now.

And certainly, there have been entries in the franchise’s long history that lend ammunition to those criticisms. But since Shadows is good, this is an ideal time to discuss why the franchise (and this entry in particular) deserves more credit than it sometimes gets.

Let’s use a pop culture analogy.

In its current era, Assassin’s Creed is like the video game equivalent of the bands U2 or Tool. People call those “dad rock.” Taking a cue from those folks, I call Shadows and other titles like it (Horizon Forbidden West, Starfield) “dad games.”

While the kids are out there seeking fame through competitive prowess and streaming in Valorant and Fortnite or building chaotic metaverses in Roblox and—well, also Fortnite—games like Shadows are meant to appeal to a different sensibility. It’s one that had its heyday in the 2000s and early 2010s, before the landscape shifted.

We’re talking single-player games, cutting-edge graphics showcases, and giant maps full of satisfying checklists.

In a time when all the biggest games are multiplayer games-as-a-service, when many people are questioning whether graphics are advancing rapidly enough to make them a selling point on their own, and when checklist design is maligned by critics in favor of more holistic ideas, Shadows represents an era that may soon by a bygone one.

So, yes, given the increasingly archaic sensibility in which it’s rooted and the current age of people for whom that era was prime gaming time, the core audience for Shadows probably now includes a whole lot of dads and moms.

The graphics are simply awesome. Samuel Axon

There’s a time and a place for pushing the envelope or experimenting, but media that deftly treads comfortable ground doesn’t get enough appreciation.

Around the time Ubisoft went all-in on this formula with Odyssey and Valhalla, lots of people sneered, saying it was like watered-down The Witcher 3 or Red Dead Redemption 2. Those games from CD Projekt Red and Rockstar Games moved things forward, while Ubisoft’s games seemed content to stay in proven territory.

Those people tended to look at this from a business point of view: Woe is an industry that avoids bold and challenging choices for fear of losing an investment. But playing it safe can be a good experience for players, and not just because it allows developers to deliver a refined product.

Safety is the point. Yeah, I appreciate something that pushes the envelope in production values and storytelling. If The Witcher 3 and RDR2 were TV shows, we’d call them “prestige TV”—a type of show that’s all about expanding and building on what television can be, with a focus on critical acclaim and cultural capital.

I, too, enjoy prestige shows like HBO’s The White Lotus. But sometimes I have to actually work on getting myself in the mood to watch a show like that. When I’ve had a particularly draining day, I don’t want challenging entertainment. That’s when it’s time to turn on Parks and Recreation or Star Trek: The Next Generation—unchallenging or nostalgic programming that lets me zone out in my comfort zone for a while.

That’s what Assassin’s Creed has been for about a decade now—comfort gaming for a certain audience. Ubisoft knows that audience well, and the game is all the more effective because the studios that made it were given the time to fine-tune every part of it for that audience.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows isn’t groundbreaking, and that’s OK, because it’s a hundred hours of fun and relaxation. It’s definitely not prestige gaming. It’s dad gaming: comfortable, refined, a little corny, but satisfying. If that’s what you crave with your limited free time, it’s worth a try.

Samuel Axon is a senior editor at Ars Technica, where he is the editorial director for tech and gaming coverage. He covers AI, software development, gaming, entertainment, and mixed reality. He has been writing about gaming and technology for nearly two decades at Engadget, PC World, Mashable, Vice, Polygon, Wired, and others. He previously ran a marketing and PR agency in the gaming industry, led editorial for the TV network CBS, and worked on social media marketing strategy for Samsung Mobile at the creative agency SPCSHP. He also is an independent software and game developer for iOS, Windows, and other platforms, and he is a graduate of DePaul University, where he studied interactive media and software development.

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Nvidia nudges mainstream gaming PCs forward with RTX 5060 series, starting at $299

Blackwell, gaming, NVIDIA, rtx 4060, rtx 4060 ti, rtx 50-series, rtx 5060, rtx 5060 ti, Tech / Mike M. / April 16, 2025

As with its other 50-series announcements, Nvidia is leaning on its DLSS Multi-Frame Generation technology to make lofty performance claims—the GPUs can insert up to three AI-interpolated frames in between each pair of frames that the GPU actually renders. The 40 series could only generate a single frame, and 30-series and older GPUs don’t support DLSS Frame Generation at all. This makes apples-to-apples performance comparisons difficult.

Generally, the company says the 5060 Ti and 5060 offer double the performance of the 4060 Ti and 4060, but all of its benchmarks are made using the “max Frame Gen level supported by each GPU.” The small snippets of native performance information we do have—Hogwarts Legacy runs on a 5060 Ti at 61 FPS 1440p, compared to 34 FPS for the 3060 Ti—suggests that it’s slightly less than twice as fast as that two-generation-old card. This would still be reasonably impressive, given the underwhelming 4060 Ti refresh. But we’ll need to wait for third-party testing before we really have a good idea of how performance will stack up without Frame Generation enabled.

As we and others have observed since the launch of the 40-series a few years ago, Frame Generation gives the best results when your base frame rate is already reasonably high; the technology is best used to make a good frame rate better and is less useful if you’re trying to make a bad frame rate good. That’s even more relevant for the slower 50-series than for the other GPUs in the lineup, which makes Nvidia’s reticence to provide native performance comparisons especially frustrating.

Rumors from earlier this year that correctly reported the specs of the 5060 series also indicated that Nvidia was planning to launch a low-end RTX 5050 GPU at some point, its first new entry-level GPU since launching the RTX 3050 in January 2022. The 5050 could still be coming, but if it is, it wasn’t part of Nvidia’s announcements today.

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Razer built a game-streaming app on top of Moonlight, and it’s not too bad

game streaming, gaming, GPL, GPL 3, Moonlight, NVIDIA, Open source software, pc remote play, razer, razer pc remote play, sunshine / Paul Patrick / April 15, 2025

I intentionally touched as few settings as I could on each device (minus a curious poke or two at the “Optimize” option), and the experience was fairly streamlined. I didn’t have to set resolutions or guess at a data-streaming rate; Razer defaults to 30Mbps, which generally provides rock-solid 1080p and pretty smooth 1440p-ish resolutions. My main complaints were the missing tricks I had picked up in Moonlight, like holding the start/menu button to activate a temporary mouse cursor or hitting a button combination to exit out of games.

Razer’s app is not limited to Steam games like Steam Link or Xbox/Game Pass titles like Remote Play and can work with pretty much any game you have installed. It is, however, limited to Windows and the major mobile platforms, leaving out Macs, Apple TVs, Linux, Steam Deck and other handhelds, Raspberry Pi setups, and so on. Still, for what it does, it works pretty well, and its interface, while Razer-green and a bit showy, was easier to navigate than Moonlight. I did not, for example, have to look up the launching executables and runtime options for certain games to make them launch directly from my mobile device.

Streaming-wise, I noticed no particular differences from the Moonlight experience, which one might expect, given the shared codebase. The default choice of streaming at my iPad’s native screen resolution and refresh rate saved me the headaches of figuring out the right balance of black box cut-offs and resolution that I would typically go through with Steam Link or sometimes Moonlight.

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Five standout games revealed at today’s Triple-i Showcase

deep rock galactic, deep rock galactic rogue core, deep rock galactic survivor, endless legend, endless legend 2, gaming, heroes of might and magic, heroes of might and magic III, iii initiative, neverway, survivorlikes, the alters, triple-i initiative / Tim Belzer / April 11, 2025

“No ads, no hosts, no sponsors, just games.” The Triple-i Initiative‘s pitch for its now-annual showcase of games, crafted by studios working somewhere between “Solo dev or very small team” and “Investor-minded conglomerate with international offices,” promises a lot of peeks at games without a lot of chatter, and once again it delivered.

Last year’s showcase debuted titles like Norland, Slay the Spire 2, and The Rogue Prince of Persia, along with updates from Darkest Dungeon 2, Palworld, and Vampire Survivors. This year featured looks at titles from the Deep Rock universe, the cloning-yourself-to-survive curiosity The Alters, an Endless Legend 2 that continues tweaking the 4X formula, and more.

Below are five selected highlights for the Ars crowd, along with some notable other announcements. The full list is not yet up on the Triple-i site, but you can see what jumped out from the full showcase.

Deep Rock Galactic: Rogue Core

Deep Rock Galactic: Rogue Core gameplay reveal.

Ghost Ship Games and its publishing arm advanced two of its Deep Rock Galactic (DRG) spinoffs at the showcase, one of them with real gameplay. DRG: Rogue Core, the run-based, shoot-ier game set in the same dwarven universe as DRG, showed off a new trailer with actual play and announced a closed alpha test, accessible on the game’s Steam page. DRG: Survivor, a fine entry into the burgeoning “Survivor-like” genre (it still needs a name), now has a 1.0 date set for September 17. The trailer shows off some of the new content updates, biomes, systems, and quirky little “overclocks” and artifacts that make the number of run variations nearly incalculable.

Endless Legend 2

Endless Legend 2 early access announcement trailer.

The sequel to the game that expertly incorporated randomness into a 4X strategy framework is getting a sequel, and it hits early access this summer. The game will add more factions as the summer approaches, and the sequel promises more disasters and strategy options to come. You can sign up for early access through Amplitude Studios’ Insider Program.

Heroes of Might & Magic: Olden Era

Heroes of Might & Magic: Olden Era trailer.

It’s been a minute since a turn-based game set in the Might & Magic world of Enroth came around—about 10 years, actually, not counting spiritual successors. Olden Era takes players to the continent of Jadame, never before explored in the game universe. Woodland spirits fight medieval armies, zombies spawn from the battlefield, demons get into the mix—there’s a lot going on. You can sign up for a playtest at the game’s Steam page, and it’s due out in early access in Q2 2025.

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Mario Kart World’s $80 price isn’t that high, historically

gaming, inflation, mario kart world, price inflation / Kris Guyer / April 9, 2025

We assembled data for those game baskets across 21 non-consecutive years, going back to 1982, then normalized the nominal prices to consistent February 2025 dollars using the Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI calculator. You can view all our data and sources in this Google Sheet.

The bad old days

In purely nominal terms, the $30 to $40 retailers routinely charged for game cartridges in the 1980s seems like a relative bargain. Looking at the inflation-adjusted data, though, it’s easy to see how even an $80 game today would seem like a bargain to console gamers in the cartridge era.

Video game cartridges were just historically expensive, even compared to today’s top-end games. Credit: Kyle Orland / Ars Technica

New cartridge games in the 20th century routinely retailed for well over $100 in 2025 money, thanks to a combination of relatively high manufacturing costs and relatively low competition in the market. While you could often get older and/or used cartridges for much less than that in practice, must-have new games at the time often cost the equivalent of $140 or more in today’s money.

Pricing took a while to calm down once CD-based consoles were introduced in the late ’90s. By the beginning of the ’00s, though, nominal top-end game pricing had fallen to about $50, and only rose back to $60 by the end of the decade. Adjusting for inflation, however, those early 21st century games were still demanding prices approaching $90 in 2025 dollars, well above the new $80 nominal price ceiling Mario Kart World is trying to establish.

Those $50 discs you remember from the early 21st century were worth a lot more after you adjust for inflation. Credit: Kyle Orland / Ars Technica

In the 2010s, inflation started eating into the value of gaming’s de facto $60 price ceiling, which remained remarkably consistent throughout the decade. Adjusted for inflation, the nominal average pricing we found for our game “baskets” in 2013, 2017, and 2020 ended up almost precisely equivalent to $80 in constant 2025 dollars.

Is this just what things cost now?

While the jump to an $80 price might seem sudden, the post-COVID jump in inflation makes it almost inevitable. After decades of annual inflation rates in the 2 to 3 percent range, the Consumer Price Index jumped 4.7 percent in 2021 and a whopping 8 percent in 2022. In the years since, annual price increases still haven’t gotten below the 3 percent level that was once seen as “high.”

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Carmack defends AI tools after Quake fan calls Microsoft AI demo “disgusting”

AI, AI criticism, AI development tools, Biz & IT, game development, game synthesis, gaming, id Software, john carmack, machine learning, microsoft, quake, quake ii, Tim Sweeney, X / Paul Patrick / April 9, 2025

The current generative Quake II demo represents a slight advancement from Microsoft’s previous generative AI gaming model (confusingly titled “WHAM” with only one “M”) we covered in February. That earlier model, while showing progress in generating interactive gameplay footage, operated at 300×180 resolution at 10 frames per second—far below practical modern gaming standards. The new WHAMM demonstration doubles the resolution to 640×360. However, both remain well below what gamers expect from a functional video game in almost every conceivable way. It truly is an AI tech demo.

A Microsoft diagram of the WHAMM system. — A Microsoft diagram of the WHAM system. Credit: Microsoft

For example, the technology faces substantial challenges beyond just performance metrics. Microsoft acknowledges several limitations, including poor enemy interactions, a short context length of just 0.9 seconds (meaning the system forgets objects outside its view), and unreliable numerical tracking for game elements like health values.

Which brings us to another point: A significant gap persists between the technology’s marketing portrayal and its practical applications. While industry veterans like Carmack and Sweeney view AI as another tool in the development arsenal, demonstrations like the Quake II instance may create inflated expectations about AI’s current capabilities for complete game generation.

The most realistic near-term application of generative AI technology remains as coding assistants and perhaps rapid prototyping tools for developers, rather than a drop-in replacement for traditional game development pipelines. The technology’s current limitations suggest that human developers will remain essential for creating compelling, polished game experiences for now. But given the general pace of progress, that might be small comfort for those who worry about losing jobs to AI in the near-term.

Ultimately, Sweeney says not to worry: “There’s always a fear that automation will lead companies to make the same old products while employing fewer people to do it,” Sweeney wrote in a follow-up post on X. “But competition will ultimately lead to companies producing the best work they’re capable of given the new tools, and that tends to mean more jobs.”

And Carmack closed with this: “Will there be more or less game developer jobs? That is an open question. It could go the way of farming, where labor-saving technology allow a tiny fraction of the previous workforce to satisfy everyone, or it could be like social media, where creative entrepreneurship has flourished at many different scales. Regardless, “don’t use power tools because they take people’s jobs” is not a winning strategy.”

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Nintendo explains why Switch 2 hardware and software cost so much

gaming / Mike M. / April 8, 2025

Things just cost more now

In justifying the $450 price of the Switch 2, Nintendo executives predictably pointed to the system’s upgraded hardware specs, as well as new features like GameChat and mouse mode. “As you add more technology into a system, especially in this day and age, that drives additional cost.” Nintendo Vice President of Player & Product Experience Bill Trinen told Polygon.

That said, Trinen also pointed toward rising prices in the wider economy to justify the $150 jump between Switch and Switch 2 pricing. “We’re unfortunately living in an era where I think inflation is affecting everything,” Trinen said.

The Switch never saw a nominal price drop, but inflation still ate away at its total cost a bit over the years.

Trinen isn’t wrong about that; the $299 early adopters paid for a Switch in 2017 is worth about $391 in today’s dollars, according to the BLS CPI calculator. But for customers whose own incomes may have stayed flat over that time, the 50 percent jump in nominal pricing from Switch to Switch 2 may be hard to swallow in a time of increasing economic uncertainty.

“Obviously the cost of everything goes up over time, and I personally would love if the cost of things didn’t go up over time,” Trinen told IGN. “And certainly there’s the cost of goods and things that factor into that, but we try to find the right appropriate price for a product based on that.”

Is $80 the new $70?

Talk of inflation extended to Trinen’s discussion of why Nintendo decided to sell first-party Switch 2 games for $70 to $80. “The price of video games has been very stable for a very long time,” Trinen told Polygon. “I actually have an ad on my phone that I found from 1993, when Donkey Kong Country released on the SNES at $59. That’s a very, very long time where pricing on games has been very stable…”

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Balatro yet again subject to mods’ poor understanding of “gambling”

age restricted, balatro, gambling, gaming, Google, online gambling, PEGI, youtube / Tim Belzer / April 8, 2025

Balatro is certainly habit-forming, but there’s nothing to be won or lost, other than time, by playing it. While the game has you using standard playing cards and poker hands as part of its base mechanics, it does not have in-app purchases, loot boxes, or any kind of online play or enticement to gambling, beyond the basics of risk and reward.

Yet many YouTube creators have had their Balatro videos set to the traffic-dropping “Age-restricted” status, allegedly due to “depictions or promotions of casino websites or apps,” with little recourse for appeal.

The Balatro University channel detailed YouTube’s recent concerns about “online gambling” in a video posted last weekend. Under policies that took effect March 19, YouTube no longer allows any reference to gambling sites or applications “not certified by Google.” Additionally, content with “online gambling content”—”excluding online sports betting and depictions of in-person gambling”—cannot be seen by anyone signed out of YouTube or registered as under 18 years old.

Balatro University’s primer on how more than 100 of his videos about Balatro suddenly became age-restricted.

“The problem is,” Balatro University’s host notes, “Balatro doesn’t have any gambling.” Balatro University reported YouTube placing age restrictions on 119 of his 606 videos, some of them having been up for more than a year. After receiving often confusingly worded notices from YouTube, the channel host filed 30 appeals, 24 of which were rejected. Some of the last messaging from YouTube to Balatro University, from likely outdated and improperly cross-linked guidance, implied that his videos were restricted because they show “harmful or dangerous activities that risk serious physical harm.”

Screen from the game Balatro, showing a pair hand with two — *Balatro*, while based on poker hands, involving chips and evoking some aspects of video poker or casinos, only has you winning money that buys you cards and upgrades in the game. Credit: Playstack

Developer LocalThunk took to social network Bluesky with some exasperation. “Good thing we are protecting children from knowing what a 4 of a kind is and letting them watch CS case opening videos instead,” he wrote, referencing the popularity of videos showing Counter-Strike “cases” with weapon skins being opened.

Apparently Balatro videos are being rated 18+ on YouTube now for gambling

Good thing we are protecting children from knowing what a 4 of a kind is and letting them watch CS case opening videos instead

— localthunk (@localthunk.bsky.social) April 5, 2025 at 4: 39 PM

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Dustland Delivery plays like a funny, tough, post-apocalyptic Oregon Trail

dustland delivery, Fallout, faster than light, ftl, gaming, PC games, RPG, steam / Rejus Almole / April 6, 2025

Road trips with just two people always have their awkward silences. In Dustland Delivery, my character, a sharpshooter, has tried to break the ice with the blacksmith he hired a few towns back, with only intermittent success.

Remember that bodyguard, the one I unsuccessfully tried to flirt with at that bar? The blacksmith was uninterested. What about that wily junk dealer, or the creepy cemetery? Silence. She only wanted to discuss “Abandoned train” and “Abandoned factory,” even though, in this post-apocalypse, abandonment was not that rare. But I made a note to look out for any rusted remains; stress and mood are far trickier to fix than hunger and thirst.

Dustland Delivery release trailer.

Dustland Delivery, available through Steam for Windows (and Proton/Steam Deck), puts you in the role typically taken up by NPCs in other post-apocalyptic RPGs. You’re a trader, buying cheap goods in one place to sell at a profit elsewhere, and working the costs of fuel, maintenance, and raider attacks into your margins. You’re in charge of everything on your trip: how fast you drive, when to rest and set up camp, whether to approach that caravan of pickups or give them a wide berth.

Some of you, the types whose favorite part of The Oregon Trail was the trading posts, might already be sold. For the others, let me suggest that the game is stuffed full of little bits of weird humor and emergent storytelling, and a wild amount of replayability for what is currently a $5 game. There are three quest-driven scenarios, plus a tutorial, in the base game. A new DLC out this week, Sheol, adds underground cities, ruins expeditions, more terrains, and a final story quest for four more dollars.

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Switch 2 preorders delayed over Trump tariff uncertainty

gaming / Rejus Almole / April 6, 2025

Nintendo Switch 2 preorders, which were due to begin on April 9, are being delayed indefinitely amid the financial uncertainty surrounding Donald Trump’s recent announcement of massive tariffs on most US trading partners.

“Pre-orders for Nintendo Switch 2 in the U.S. will not start April 9, 2025 in order to assess the potential impact of tariffs and evolving market conditions,” Nintendo said in a statement cited by Polygon. “Nintendo will update timing at a later date. The launch date of June 5, 2025 is unchanged.”

Nintendo announced launch details for the Switch 2 on Wednesday morning, just hours before Trump’s afternoon “Liberation Day” press conference announcing the biggest increase in import duties in modern US history. Those taxes on practically all goods imported into the United States are set to officially go into effect on April 9, the same day Nintendo had planned to roll out Switch 2 preorders for qualified customers.

Welcome to day 2 of Nintendo Treehouse Live’s “drop the price” stream

[image or embed]

— AmericanTruckSongs10 (@ethangach.bsky.social) April 4, 2025 at 10: 14 AM

The delay in the preorder date comes as outspoken gamers online are making plenty of noise over the Switch 2’s higher-than-expected $450 price point and over Switch 2 software pricing falling in the $70 to $80 range. Nintendo’s promotional “Treehouse” streams showing Switch 2 gameplay have been inundated with a nonstop torrent of chatters demanding the company “DROP THE PRICE.”

Yet today’s announcement suggests that Nintendo might need to “assess” whether even a $450 price is feasible given the additional taxes the company will now have to pay to import systems manufactured in countries like China and Vietnam into the United States. Alternatively, Nintendo could eat the cost of any tariffs and sell its console hardware at a loss, as it has in the past, in an attempt to make that money back in software sales.

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