gaming – Page 3

RAM and SSD prices are still climbing—here’s our best advice for PC builders

AMD, gaming, intel, NVIDIA, Tech / Mike M. / December 18, 2025

I would avoid building a PC right now, but if you can’t, here’s our best advice.

The 16GB version of AMD’s Radeon RX 9060 XT. It’s one of the products to come out of a bad year for PC building. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The first few months of 2025 were full of graphics card reviews where we generally came away impressed with performance and completely at a loss on availability and pricing. The testing in these reviews is useful regardless, but when it came to extra buying advice, the best we could do was to compare Nvidia’s imaginary pricing to AMD’s imaginary pricing and wait for availability to improve.

Now, as the year winds down, we’re facing price spikes for memory and storage that are unlike anything I’ve seen in two decades of pricing out PC parts. Pricing for most RAM kits has increased dramatically since this summer, driven by overwhelming demand for these parts in AI data centers. Depending on what you’re building, it’s now very possible that the memory could be the single most expensive component you buy; things are even worse now than they were the last time we compared prices a few weeks ago.

Component	Aug. 2025 price	Nov. 2025 price	Dec. 2025 price
Patriot Viper Venom 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR-6000	$49	$110	$189
Western Digital WD Blue SN5000 500GB	$45	$69	$102*
Silicon Power 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4-3200	$34	$89	$104
Western Digital WD Blue SN5000 1TB	$64	$111	$135*
Team T-Force Vulcan 32GB DDR5-6000	$82	$310	$341
Western Digital WD Blue SN5000 2TB	$115	$154	$190*
Western Digital WD Black SN7100 2TB	$130	$175	$210
Team Delta RGB 64GB (2 x 32GB) DDR5-6400	$190	$700	$800

Some SSDs are getting to the point where they’re twice as expensive as they were this summer (for this comparison, I’ve swapped the newer WD Blue SN5100 pricing in for the SN5000, since the drive is both newer and slightly cheaper as of this writing). Some RAM kits, meanwhile, are around four times as expensive as they were in August. Yeesh.

And as bad as things are, the outlook for the immediate future isn’t great. Memory manufacturer Micron—which is pulling its Crucial-branded RAM and storage products from the market entirely in part because of these shortages—predicted in a recent earnings call that supply constraints would “persist beyond calendar 2026.” Kingston executives believe prices will continue to rise through next year. PR representatives at GPU manufacturer Sapphire believe prices will “stabilize,” albeit at a higher level than people might like.

I didn’t know it when I was writing the last update to our system guide in mid-August, but it turns out that I was writing it during 2025’s PC Building Equinox, the all-too-narrow stretch of time where 1080p and 1440p GPUs had fallen to more-or-less MSRP but RAM and storage prices hadn’t yet spiked.

All in all, it has been yet another annus horribilis for gaming-PC builders, and at this point it seems like the 2020s will just end up being a bad decade for PC building. Not only have we had to deal with everything from pandemic-fueled shortages to tariffs to the current AI-related crunch, but we’ve also been given pretty underwhelming upgrades for both GPUs and CPUs.

It should be a golden age for the gaming PC

It’s really too bad that building or buying a gaming PC is such an annoying and expensive proposition, because in a lot of ways there has never been a better time to be a PC gamer.

It used to be that PC ports of popular console games would come years later or never at all, but these days PC players get games at around the same time as console players, too. Sony, of all companies, has become much better about releasing its games to PC players. And Microsoft seems to be signaling more and more convergence between the Xbox and the PC, to the extent that it is communicating any kind of coherent Xbox strategy at all. The console wars are cooling down, and the PC has been one of the main beneficiaries.

That wider game availability is also coming at a time when PC software is getting more flexible and interesting. Traditional Windows-based gaming builds still dominate, of course, and Windows remains the path of least resistance for PC buyers and builders. But Valve’s work on SteamOS and the Proton compatibility software has brought a wide swath of PC games to Linux, and SteamOS itself is enabling a simpler and more console-like PC gaming experience for handheld PCs as well as TV-connected desktop computers. And that work is now boomeranging back around to Windows, which is gradually rolling out its own pared-down gamepad-centric frontend.

If you’ve already got a decent gaming PC, you’re feeling pretty good about all of this—as long as the games you want to play don’t have Mario or Pikachu in them, your PC is all you really need. It’s also not a completely awful time to be upgrading a build you already have, as long as you already have at least 16GB of RAM—if you’re thinking about a GPU upgrade, doing it now before the RAM price spikes can start impacting graphics card pricing is probably a smart move.

If you don’t already have a decent gaming PC and you can buy a whole PlayStation 5 for the cost of some 32GB DDR5 RAM kits, well, it’s hard to look past the downsides no matter how good the upsides are. But it doesn’t mean we can’t try.

What if you want to buy something anyway?

As (relatively) old as they are, midrange Core i5 chips from Intel’s 12th-, 13th-, and 14th-generation Core CPU lineups are still solid choices for budget-to-midrange PC builds. And they work with DDR4, which isn’t *quite* as pricey as DDR5 right now. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Say those upsides are still appealing to you, and you want to build something today. How should you approach this terrible, volatile RAM market?

I won’t do a full update to August’s system guide right now, both because it feels futile to try and recommend individual RAM kits or SSD with prices and stock levels being as volatile as they are, and because aside from RAM and storage I actually wouldn’t change any of these recommendations all that much (with the caveat that Intel’s Core i5-13400F seems to be getting harder to find; consider an i5-12400F or i5-12600KF instead). So, starting from those builds, here’s the advice I would try to give to PC-curious friends:

DDR4 is faring better than DDR5. Prices for all kinds of RAM have gone up recently, but DDR4 pricing hasn’t gotten quite as bad as DDR5 pricing. That’s of no help to you if you’re trying to build something around a newer Ryzen chip and a socket AM5 motherboard, since those parts require DDR5. But if you’re trying to build a more budget-focused system around one of Intel’s 12th-, 13th-, or 14th-generation CPUs, a decent name brand 32GB DDR4-3200 kit comes in around half the price of a similar 32GB DDR5-6000 kit. Pricing isn’t great, but it’s still possible to build something respectable for under $1,000.

Newegg bundles might help. I’m normally not wild about these kinds of component bundles; even if they appear to be a good deal, they’re often a way for Newegg or other retailers to get rid of things they don’t want by pairing them with things people do want. You also have to deal with less flexibility—you can’t always pick exactly the parts you’d want under ideal circumstances. But if you’re already buying a CPU and a motherboard, it might be worth digging through the available deals just to see if you can get a good price on something workable.

Don’t overbuy (or consider under-buying). Under normal circumstances, anyone advising you on a PC build should be recommending matched pairs of RAM sticks with reasonable speeds and ample capacities (DDR4-3200 remains a good sweet spot, as does DDR5-6000 or DDR5-6400). Matched sticks are capable of dual-channel operation, boosting memory bandwidth and squeezing a bit more performance out of your system. And getting 32GB of RAM means comfortably running any game currently in existence, with a good amount of room to grow.

But desperate times call for desperate measures. Slower DDR5 speeds like DDR5-5200 can come in a fair bit cheaper than DDR5-6000 or DDR5-6400, in exchange for a tiny speed hit that’s going to be hard to notice outside of benchmarks. You might even consider buying a single 16GB stick of DDR5, and buying it a partner at some point later when prices have calmed down a bit. You’ll leave a tiny bit of performance on the table, and a small handful of games want more than 16GB of system RAM. But you’ll have something that boots, and the GPU is still going to determine how well most games run.

Don’t forget that non-binary DDR5 exists. DDR5 sticks come in some in-betweener capacities that weren’t possible with DDR4, which means that companies sell it in 24GB and 48GB sticks, not just 16/32/64. And these kits can be a very slightly better deal than the binary memory kits right now; this 48GB Crucial DDR5-6000 kit is going for $470 right now, or $9.79 per gigabyte, compared to about $340 for a similar 32GB kit ($10.63 per GB) or $640 for a 64GB kit ($10 per GB). It’s not much, but if you truly do need a lot of RAM, it’s worth looking into.

Consider pre-built systems. A quick glance at Dell’s Alienware lineup and Lenovo’s Legion lineup makes it clear that these towers still aren’t particularly price-competitive with similarly specced self-built PCs. This was true before there was a RAM shortage, and it’s true now. But for certain kinds of PCs, particularly budget PCs, it can still make more sense to buy than to build.

For example, when I wrote about the self-built “Steam Machine” I’ve been using for a few months now, I mentioned some Ryzen-based mini desktops on Amazon. I later tested this one from Aoostar as part of a wider-ranging SteamOS-vs-Windows performance comparison. Whether you’re comfortable with these no-name mini PCs is something you’ll have to decide for yourself, but that’s a fully functional PC with 32GB of DDR5, a 1TB SSD, a workable integrated GPU, and a Windows license for $500. You’d spend nearly $500 just to buy the RAM kit and the SSD with today’s component prices; for basic 1080p gaming you could do a lot worse.

Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue.

RAM and SSD prices are still climbing—here’s our best advice for PC builders Read More »

Reporter suggests Half-Life 3 will be a Steam Machine launch title

gaming, half-life, Half-Life 3, hl3, rumor, steam machine, valve / Kris Guyer / December 16, 2025

If you can take your mind way back to the beginning of 2025, you might remember a fresh wave of rumors suggesting that Half-Life 3 was finally reaching the final stages of production, and could be announced and/or released at any moment. Now, though, 2025 seems set to come to a close without any official news of a game fans have been waiting literal decades for.

That doesn’t necessarily mean a Half-Life 3 announcement and/or release isn’t imminent, though. On the contrary, veteran journalist Mike Straw insisted on a recent Insider Gaming podcast that “everybody I’ve talked to are still adamant [Half-Life 3] is a game that will be a launch title with the Steam Machine.”

Straw—who has a long history of reporting gaming rumors from anonymous sources—said this Half-Life 3 information is “not [from] these run-of-the-mill sources that haven’t gotten me information before. … These aren’t like random, one-off people.” And those sources are “still adamant that the game is coming in the spring,” Straw added, noting that he was “specifically told [that] spring 2026 [is the window] for the Steam Machine, for the Frame, for the Controller, [and] for Half-Life 3.”

For real, this time?

Tying the long-awaited Half-Life 3 to a major hardware push that has already been announced for an “early 2026” window certainly sounds plausible, given previous leaks about the game’s advanced state of development. But there are still some reasons to doubt Straw’s “adamant” sources here.

For one, Straw admitted that the previous information he had received on potential Half-Life 3 launch and/or announcement dates was not reliable enough to report in detail. “I had been told a date. I was not going to report that date because they weren’t 100 percent confident in that date,” he said. “That date has since passed.”

Reporter suggests Half-Life 3 will be a Steam Machine launch title Read More »

Microsoft takes down mod that re-created Halo 3 in Counter-Strike 2

counter-strike 2, CS2, DMCA, engine, gaming, Halo, microsoft, source 2, takedown, valve / Paul Patrick / December 15, 2025

Last month saw the release of Project Misriah, an ambitious modding project that tried to re-create the feel of Halo 3 inside Valve’s Counter-Strike 2. That project has now been taken down from the Steam Workshop, though, after drawing a Digital Millennium Copyright Act complaint from Microsoft.

Modder Froddoyo introduced Project Misriah on November 16 as “a workshop collection of Halo ported maps and assets that aims to bring a Halo 3 multiplayer-like experience to Counter-Strike 2.” Far from just being inspired by Halo 3, the mod directly copied multiple sound effects, character models, maps, and even movement mechanics from Bungie and Microsoft’s popular series.

In the weeks since, Project Misriah has drawn a lot of praise from both Halo fans and those impressed by what modders could pull off with the Source 2 engine. But last Wednesday, modder Froddoyo shared a DMCA request from Microsoft citing the “unauthorized use of Halo game content in a [Steam] workshop not associated with Halo games.”

A trailer announcing Project Misriah, posted last month.

In a social media post sharing that DMCA text, Froddoyo ruefully said that players should “make sure to give your thanks to Microsoft” for the project’s fate. But in a comment on Project Misriah’s YouTube trailer, Froddoyo noted that, following the takedown, the project “will not be worked on or uploaded in the future. But hey, it was fun while it lasted. Thank you to all of the players and supporters of [the] project. We will use the knowledge and skills obtained from this to cook up something else!”

Microsoft takes down mod that re-created Halo 3 in Counter-Strike 2 Read More »

Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic announced as a KOTOR spiritual successor

Bioware, casey hudson, gaming, KOTOR, old republic, star wars / Mike M. / December 13, 2025

Over two decades after the release of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II, a new project described as a “spiritual successor” to that seminal RPG series was announced at The Game Awards Thursday night. Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic will be a collaboration between Lucasfilm Games and Arcanaut Studios, a new development house being launched by original KOTOR director Casey Hudson.

Hudson, who will serve as director on the new game, said in an interview with StarWars.com that he has remained in contact with Lucasfilm since the KOTOR days, in the hopes of being able to collaborate in the Star Wars universe again. “It took the right conditions to get everything to line up,” he told the site.

Calling KOTOR “one of the defining experiences of my career,” Hudson said he wants to “explore a contemporary vision” of the Star Wars universe and “deliver on the combination of player agency and immersion in Star Wars” that defined the original games. As director on the upcoming game, Hudson said he sees his role as “to gather and shape a cohesive vision that the entire team contributes to. Ensuring that everyone shares that vision and understands their part in creating it is critical to the success of a project.”

Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic announced as a KOTOR spiritual successor Read More »

Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles for you

gaming, jonathan blow, Order of the Sinking Star, puzzle, The Witness / Rejus Almole / December 13, 2025

For many independent developers, of course, spending nine years on a single game idea is an unthinkable luxury. Financial constraints mean many game ideas have to be shipped “as soon as you get to the point where it’s fun and shippable,” Blow said, leading to games that “kind of converge to a certain level of complexity and then stop there.”

But thanks to the sales success of The Witness—which reportedly grossed over $5 million in just its first week—Blow said he and his team have had the freedom to spend years “generat[ing] this giant space that’s much more complex than where you go with a typical puzzle game… When we create that much possibility, we feel like we have to explore it. Otherwise we’re not doing our duty as designers and correctly pursuing this agenda of design research.”

The sales success of *The Witness* helped enable the extended development time for *Order of the Sinking Star.*

Blow also said the size of this project helped get him past his general distaste for playtesting, which he said he was “not that big on” for his previous games. “Even The Witness didn’t have that much play testing, because I always felt like that was a way to make games a little more generic or something, you know? Like playtesters have complaints and then you file down the complaints and then you get a generic game.”

After being immersed in Order of the Sinking Star development for so long, though, Blow said he realized it was important to get a fresh perspective from playtesters who had no experience with the idea. “We have to playtest it because it doesn’t fit in my brain all at once, you know?” he said.

Some might say a nine-plus-year development cycle might be a sign of perfectionist tinkering past the point of diminishing returns. But Blow said that while he “might have been a perfectionist” in his younger days, the difficult process of game development has beaten the tendency out of him. “But I have the remnants of perfectionism,” he said. “I have… wanting to do something really good.”

And eventually, even an idea you’ve been tinkering with for roughly a decade needs to see the light of day. “Even for us, this was very expensive,” Blow admitted. “Man, I’ll be happy to get it out and have a new game making some money, because we need to make that happen at this point.”

Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles for you Read More »

Reminder: Donate to win swag in our annual Charity Drive sweepstakes

gaming / Tim Belzer / December 12, 2025

How it works

Donating is easy. Simply donate to Child’s Play using a credit card or PayPal or donate to the EFF using PayPal, credit card, or cryptocurrency. You can also support Child’s Play directly by using this Ars Technica campaign page or picking an item from the Amazon wish list of a specific hospital on its donation page. Donate as much or as little as you feel comfortable with—every little bit helps.

Once that’s done, it’s time to register your entry in our sweepstakes. Just grab a digital copy of your receipt (a forwarded email, a screenshot, or simply a cut-and-paste of the text) and send it to [email protected] with your name, postal address, daytime telephone number, and email address by 11: 59 pm ET Friday, January 2, 2026. (One entry per person, and each person can only win up to one prize. US residents only. NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. See Official Rules for more information, including how to enter without making a donation. Also, refer to the Ars Technica privacy policy (https://www.condenast.com/privacy-policy).

We’ll then contact the winners and have them choose their prize by January 31, 2025 (choosing takes place in the order the winners are drawn). Good luck!

Reminder: Donate to win swag in our annual Charity Drive sweepstakes Read More »

Apple loses its appeal of a scathing contempt ruling in iOS payments case

Apple, epic, epic games store, gaming, iOS, IPhone, legal, payments, Policy / Kris Guyer / December 12, 2025

Back in April, District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers delivered a scathing judgment finding that Apple was in “willful violation” of her 2021 injunction intended to open up iOS App Store payments. That contempt of court finding has now been almost entirely upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, a development that Epic Games’ Tim Sweeney tells Ars he hopes will “do a lot of good for developers and start to really change the App Store situation worldwide, I think.”

The ruling, signed by a panel of three appellate court judges, affirmed that Apple’s initial attempts to charge a 27 percent fee to iOS developers using outside payment options “had a prohibitive effect, in violation of the injunction.” Similarly, Apple’s restrictions on how those outside links had to be designed were overly broad; the appeals court suggests that Apple can only ensure that internal and external payment options are presented in a similar fashion.

The appeals court also agreed that Apple acted in “bad faith” by refusing to comply with the injunction, rejecting viable, compliant alternatives in internal discussions. And the appeals court was also not convinced by Apple’s process-focused arguments, saying the district court properly evaluated materials Apple argued were protected by attorney-client privilege.

While the district court barred Apple from charging any fees for payments made outside of its App Store, the appeals court now suggests that Apple should still be able to charge a “reasonable fee” based on its “actual costs to ensure user security and privacy.” It will be up to Apple and the district court to determine what that kind of “reasonable fee” should look like going forward.

Speaking to reporters Thursday night, though, Epic founder and CEO Tim Sweeney said he believes those should be “super super minor fees,” on the order of “tens or hundreds of dollars” every time an iOS app update goes through Apple for review. That should be more than enough to compensate the employees reviewing the apps to make sure outside payment links are not scams and lead to a system of “normal fees for normal businesses that sell normal things to normal customers,” Sweeney said.

Apple loses its appeal of a scathing contempt ruling in iOS payments case Read More »

Instead of fixing WoW’s new floating house exploit, Blizzard makes it official

Blizzard, exploit, floating house, gaming, Glitch, Housing, World of Warcraft, wow / Rejus Almole / December 11, 2025

In a forum post formally announcing the official UI change, Community Manager Randy “Kaivax” Jordan noted that the team “quickly” got to work on enabling the floating house UI after seeing the community “almost immediately” embrace the glitch. But Kaivax also notes that the undersides of houses were never intended to be visible, and thus “aren’t modeled are textured.” Players who make floating houses “may decide to hide that part behind other things,” Kaivax suggests.

Players with houses that float too high may also have problems positioning the camera so they can click the door to enter the house. For this problem, Kaivax suggests that “you might want to consider building a ramp or a jumping puzzle or a mount landing spot, etc.”

WoW‘s floating houses join a long legacy of beloved game features that weren’t originally intended parts of a game’s design, from Street Fighter II‘s combo system to Doom‘s “rocket jump.” Now if we could only convince Blizzard to make Diablo III gold duplication into an official feature.

Instead of fixing WoW’s new floating house exploit, Blizzard makes it official Read More »

Please send help. I can’t stop playing these roguelikes.

ball x pit, Features, gaming, hades 2, roguelikes, roguelites / Kris Guyer / December 8, 2025

it’s “rogue,” not “rouge”

2025 was a very good year for my favorite genre.

Hades 2 has me in a chokehold. Credit: Supergiant Games

It’s time to admit, before God and the good readers of Ars Technica, that I have a problem. I love roguelikes. Reader, I can’t get enough of them. If there’s even a whisper of a hot new roguelike on Steam, I’m there. You may call them arcane, repetitive, or maddeningly difficult; I call them heaven.

The second best part of video games is taking a puny little character and, over 100 hours, transforming that adventurer into a god of destruction. The best thing about video games is doing the same thing in under an hour. Beat a combat encounter, get an upgrade. Enter a new area, choose a new item. Put together a build and watch it sing.

If you die—immediately ending your ascent and returning you to the beginning of the game—you’ll often make a pit stop at a home base to unlock new goodies to help you on your next run. (Some people distiguish between roguelikes and “roguelites,” with the latter including permanent, between-run upgrades. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll use “roguelike” as an umbrella term).

2025 has been a truly horrific year for most things. But for roguelikes? It’s been an embarrassment of riches. Because I’m an editor and there’s no one here to stop me, I’d like to tell you about them. To keep things manageable, I’ll stick to games that hit 1.0 in 2025.

Hades II

Screenshot of hades 2 — Credit: Supergiant Games

Where else could we start? In a year of wall-to-wall video game showstoppers, Hades II sticks out. The first Hades got our nod for best game of 2020, and Hades 2 certainly has my vote for 2025.

This time, you play as Melinoë, sister to Hades protagonist Zagreus and daughter of Hades himself, as she attempts to take back the house of Hades from Chronos, the titan of time. The cast of Olympian gods returns to bestow blessings (upgrades to your various attacks and defensive maneuvers) to help you on your way. If you played the first game, you’ll know what you’re getting into here; the sequel just vastly expands the content and mechanics.

As you fight through the game’s two different paths, you’ll slowly uncover the game’s story via little snippets of dialogue (there’s a truly mind-boggling amount of dialogue in this game), and oodles of unlockables and endgame challenge runs ensure you’ll be playing for a long time.

You won’t find many roguelikes with higher production values. The game is $30. Madness! If you like roguelikes, you’ve probably already picked this up. I’ll go further, though. If you enjoy video games at all, you should buy Hades II. It’s that good.

Ball x Pit

ball x pit screenshot

You ever boot up a new game and immediately think, “Well, this thing is going to be a problem for me”? Yeah.

We’ve been blessed with several pachinko-style roguelites over the past couple of years (Peglin, Ballionaire, and Nubby’s Number Factory are all worth your time); now comes a take on another ball-centric classic. I’m talking about last month’s Ball x Pit, a roguelite version of Breakout. Or at least that’s the simple way to describe it. In actuality, the game is that rarest of finds: something that feels unique.

Take one of your many and varied characters onto the battlefield, and you’ll lob a stream of balls toward the top of the screen, where slowly descending enemies periodically fire attacks back at you. When you level up, you’ll choose “special balls,” which have all manner of effects, like inflicting fire or poison on enemies or balls that explode into other balls. As the game progresses, you can “fuse” these balls together, combining the effects. Sometimes, you’ll be able to “evolve” two balls into an entirely new type of ball. Not enough for you? Slam two evolved balls together for even more wackiness.

The moment-to-moment gameplay is fantastic, with different characters and upgrades forcing you to play differently to succeed. The game doles out new mechanics and surprises along the way to keep things fresh, though this is a game you can “complete”; the between-run metaprogression eventually lets you become a bit of a god.

A base-building system—and a minigame in which you bounce your characters around the map to activate buildings—is a nice, thematic diversion between runs, but it’s mostly just a flashy upgrade screen. I usually just wanted to get back into the game as soon as possible.

Need more convincing? Check out the free demo.

Absolum

absolum screenshot

Absolum’s well-regarded demo was released in June, but this thing came out of nowhere for me. The elevator pitch: a beat ‘em up, but make it roguelite.

Not really a beat ‘em up fan? Me neither. Doesn’t matter. The last side-scrolling brawler I played for more than an hour was probably 1991’s The Simpsons arcade game or that same year’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time (though the original TMNT arcade game from 1989 was my first quarter-munching arcade love).

The game features gorgeous hand-drawn visuals and the year’s best soundtrack, including this absolute banger from Doom’s Mick Gordon (that’s from a particularly metal boss fight; most of the songs are more fantasy-forward).

Over your runs, you’ll traverse multiple paths, finding secrets and unlocking new features. The roguelike elements are a bit thin at first, but piecing together powerful builds becomes simple as you fill out your options. The combat is sublime—you can get away with button-mashing for a while, but you’ll want to learn at least some of its intricacies to make it to the end.

This thing’s the complete package, and it’s easily one of the best games of the year. Bring along a friend if you’re into co-op. The surprisingly beefy demo is still available—there’s really no excuse not to check it out.

Clover Pit

clover pit screenshot

I’ve never actually been to a casino, but judging by the electric dopamine surge I get when hitting a jackpot in the slot machine roguelike Clover Pit, I know I should maintain my chastity.

Clover Pit locks you in a disgusting, blood-soaked closet of a room, and the only way to earn your freedom is to deposit money into an ATM over a series of ever-increasing payments. In other words, it’s what’s come to be known in some circles as a Balatro-like, aka a numbers-go-up game (of course, Balatro was just the first such game to hit it big; the genre’s true progenitor came a year or so earlier in the form of another excellent slot machine roguelike, Luck be a Landlord).

Standing on a trap door that will drop you to your death if you fail to hit your deadlines, you’ll pull a lever on a slot machine over and over, hoping to hit it big. It’s not totally random, though, of course. Purchaseable trinkets allow you to manipulate your odds, trigger beneficial effects, and multiply your score. Getting a jackpot of all 7’s? It’s easier than you may think.

Don’t expect Balatro-like depth—most strategies here involve simply picking one symbol and buffing it to high heaven—but fun, game-breaking builds are easy to put together to make you feel like a winner. There’s something disconcertingly hypnotic and soothing about repeatedly pulling a slot machine lever—it’s best to do it here, where you won’t end up losing your home.

Shape of Dreams

shape of dreams screenshot

I’ve been playing the hell out of this game, but if you stopped me on the street, I could not tell you what it’s called. Forgettable name aside, I love it.

I’ve heard the game’s combat and controls described as MOBA-like. That seems reasonable, at least from what I remember from my ill-advised and short-lived attempt to get into Dota 2 a decade ago. Don’t let that scare you off, though; this is basically a top-down action RPG where you’ll be fighting through small rooms of enemies, Hades-style.

What makes it special is its skill system. You start each run with a couple of attacks and a passive ability, and you’ll pick up (and replace) skills as you go. Each skill—here called “memories” (don’t ask me; I skipped the lore)—can fit up to three “essences,” modifications that affect how the skill functions. You can rearrange these modifications at any time, enabling a “make your own skill” system that’s endlessly fascinating.

Unique unlockable characters and robust metaprogression skill trees will keep you busy for embarrassing amounts of time. You can even play with friends. Before long, you’ll be creating game-breaking, room-nuking builds, the hallmark of my favorite games of the genre.

Megabonk

Megabonk screenshot

As its name might suggest, Megabonk is not a serious game. Unlike some other games on this list, there’s no chance of this one becoming an all-time great. But there’s a reason this buzzy little title has been on many gamers’ lips since its release in September. The concept is simple: it’s Vampire Survivors meets Risk of Rain 2.

If you’ve played both games, mash them up in your mind and you’ll know exactly how this thing plays. And not just in the way that most “Survivor-likes” tread extremely similar ground to the original. Megabonk‘s treasure-chest-opening animation is ripped straight from Vampire Survivors, and the game’s structure and items (down to the artwork style) are basically just Risk of Rain 2.

So no, it’s in no way original. And I was disappointed to learn that there are only two real “stages” to play; a Risk of Rain-style teleporter just takes you to a harder version of the stage you’ve picked. There are also balance issues; the damage scaling on anything but the first 10-minute stage is absurd. But there is some ridiculous fun to be had with it.

If you’re not into the whole auto-shooter/bullet heaven thing, there’s nothing here for you. But if you’re interested in seeing how chaotic a third-person Vampire Survivors can get, step right up.

It’s also the one 2025 game where you can play as a sunglasses-wearing, skateboarding skeleton who throws bouncing bones at enemies. In these tough times, that’s not nothing.

Deep Rock Galactic Survivor

deep rock galactic survivor screenshot

We’ve talked about this Survivors-like take on the beloved co-op shooter Deep Rock Galactic a couple of times over its Early Access period, but we were remiss in not discussing it upon its 1.0 release last month. The game was already an Ars favorite, but its progression systems still needed a bit of work. It’s now ready for public consumption, and it’s one of the best auto-shooters on the market. It’s so good that you might want to take a look at it even if you want nothing to do with the oversaturated subgenre.

Its Vampire Survivor-like bones are obvious—you walk around a map while your weapons fire automatically at hordes of enemies closing in on you. Collect the XP gems defeated enemies drop to level up and choose an upgrade. The difference here is that you’re also able to mine through walls of rocks, letting you escape tricky situations and funnel bad guys to traps you’ve laid.

The progression system is heavy on the grind, but there’s plenty of fun to be had no matter how hardcore you want to be about it.

Rock and stone!

Monster Train 2

monster train 2 screenshot

Five years after the original, it’s time for the sequel to the second-best roguelike deckbuilder of all time (the sequel to the first-best roguelike deckbuilder has—thankfully, if I’m being honest—been delayed until the beginning of next year). As in the first game, and as the game’s title might suggest, you’ll be fighting monsters on a train, trying to stop them before they ascend three floors to reach your “pyre”—your health pool for the run.

In Monster Train 2, as in any deckbuilder, you start with a fairly crappy deck of cards and upgrade and expand it throughout your run to try to make it to the end. But in addition to the usual spells and attacks, Monster Train 2 gives you units to assign to the different levels of your battlefield, infusing an interesting spatial element to the cartoonishly violent proceedings.

The sequel is more of the first game, but with smart updates that make everything flow smoother. It’s one of my favorite games of the year, and I highly recommend it to any fan of tactical card games.

Deadzone Rogue

deadzone rogue screenshot

Deadzone Rogue instantly joins the pantheon of roguelite first-person looter shooters, which includes perennial favorites Gunfire Reborn and Roboquest (I haven’t played them yet, but the brand-new Abyssus and Void/Breaker are also generating a bunch of buzz).

Where Roboquest excels at fun, Doom-like movement and colorful environments, Deadzone Rogue is all about the shooting. The game has the best gunplay of any FPS roguelike I’ve played, and the random weapons, armor, and upgrades you get give each run a sense of personality.

The game’s music, voice acting, and lore are best ignored, but the sound design is nice and punchy. This won’t be a game you’ll play for 100 hours, but sometimes it’s just fun to shoot a gun in a video game, and Deadzone Rogue gets that simple formula right.

9 Kings

9 kings screenshot

Look, I’m going to cheat here, and I’m not ashamed of it. It’s true—9 Kings is not fully released. But I can’t not talk about. I initially wrote the game off when it was released into Early Access in July, thinking it looked too simple. It is simple, but that’s to its credit.

The premise is easy to explain: Build a little kingdom on a 3-by-3 grid of squares. Play a card to construct or upgrade a building or unit in your kingdom. Afterward, a neighboring kingdom will attack, and your units will automatically fight to defend your home. After the battle, you draft a card from the defeated kingdom to add to your hand.

As you can see from the above screenshot, you can expand your kingdom beyond the initial nine squares, and unlockable perks change up the way you play each king. A handful of enemies are randomly chosen from the pool of nine, meaning that the cards you can draft each run will be different.

Making busted builds and fighting your way up the difficulty levels is extremely compelling; there was a week where the “one more run” curse descended on me, and I did little else than play this game.

Aaron is Ars Technica’s Copy Chief. He has worked as an editor for over 17 years. In addition to editing features at Ars, he occasionally reviews board and video games. He lives in Chicago.

Please send help. I can’t stop playing these roguelikes. Read More »

SteamOS vs. Windows on dedicated GPUs: It’s complicated, but Windows has an edge

AMD, AMD Ryzen, gaming, intel, NVIDIA, Radeon, steamos, Tech, Windows, Windows 11, windows 11 25h2 / Kris Guyer / December 5, 2025

Other results vary from game to game and from GPU to GPU. Borderlands 3, for example, performs quite a bit better on Windows than on SteamOS across all of our tested GPUs, sometimes by as much as 20 or 30 percent (with smaller gaps here and there). As a game from 2019 with no ray-tracing effects, it still runs serviceably on SteamOS across the board, but it was the game we tested that favored Windows the most consistently.

In both Forza Horizon 5 and Cyberpunk 2077, with ray-tracing effects enabled, you also see a consistent advantage for Windows across the 16GB dedicated GPUs, usually somewhere in the 15 to 20 percent range.

To Valve’s credit, there were also many games we tested where Windows and SteamOS performance was functionally tied. Cyberpunk without ray-tracing, Returnal when not hitting the 7600’s 8GB RAM limit, and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla were sometimes actually tied between Windows and SteamOS, or they differed by low-single-digit percentages that you could chalk up to the margin of error.

Now look at the results from the integrated GPUs, the Radeon 780M and RX 8060S. These are pretty different GPUs from one another—the 8060S has more than three times the compute units of the 780M, and it’s working with a higher-speed pool of soldered-down LPDDR5X-8000 rather than two poky DDR5-5600 SODIMMs.

But Borderlands aside, SteamOS actually did quite a bit better on these GPUs relative to Windows. In both Forza and Cyberpunk with ray-tracing enabled, SteamOS slightly beats Windows on the 780M, and mostly closes the performance gap on the 8060S. For the games where Windows and SteamOS essentially tied on the dedicated GPUs, SteamOS has a small but consistent lead over Windows in average frame rates.

SteamOS vs. Windows on dedicated GPUs: It’s complicated, but Windows has an edge Read More »

Why won’t Steam Machine support HDMI 2.1? Digging in on the display standard drama.

AMD, drivers, gaming, steam, steam machine, steamos, valve, Windows / Kris Guyer / December 4, 2025

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.

Doing what they can

This situation has caused significant headaches for Valve, which tells Ars it has had to validate the Steam Machine’s HDMI 2.1 hardware via Windows during testing. And when it comes to HDMI performance via SteamOS, a Valve representative tells Ars that “we’ve been working on trying to unblock things there.”

That includes unblocking HDMI 2.0’s resolution and frame-rate limits, which max out at 60 Hz for a 4K output, according to the official standard. Valve tells Ars it has been able to increase that limit to the “4K @ 120Hz” listed on the Steam Machine spec sheet, though, thanks to a technique called chroma sub-sampling.

Why won’t Steam Machine support HDMI 2.1? Digging in on the display standard drama. Read More »

Testing shows why the Steam Machine’s 8GB of graphics RAM could be a problem

AMD, gaming, intel, NVIDIA, steam deck, steam machine, steamos, Tech / Kris Guyer / December 2, 2025

By Valve’s admission, its upcoming Steam Machine desktop isn’t swinging for the fences with its graphical performance. The specs promise decent 1080p-to-1440p performance in most games, with 4K occasionally reachable with assistance from FSR upscaling—about what you’d expect from a box with a modern midrange graphics card in it.

But there’s one spec that has caused some concern among Ars staffers and others with their eyes on the Steam Machine: The GPU comes with just 8GB of dedicated graphics RAM, an amount that is steadily becoming more of a bottleneck for midrange GPUs like AMD’s Radeon RX 7060 and 9060, or Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4060 or 5060.

In our reviews of these GPUs, we’ve already run into some games where the RAM ceiling limits performance in Windows, especially at 1440p. But we’ve been doing more extensive testing of various GPUs with SteamOS, and we can confirm that in current betas, 8GB GPUs struggle even more on SteamOS than they do running the same games at the same settings in Windows 11.

The good news is that Valve is working on solutions, and having a stable platform like the Steam Machine to aim for should help improve things for other hardware with similar configurations. The bad news is there’s plenty of work left to do.

The numbers

We’ve tested an array of dedicated and integrated Radeon GPUs under SteamOS and Windows, and we’ll share more extensive results in another article soon (along with broader SteamOS-vs-Windows observations). But for our purposes here, the two GPUs that highlight the issues most effectively are the 8GB Radeon RX 7600 and the 16GB Radeon RX 7600 XT.

These dedicated GPUs have the benefit of being nearly identical to what Valve plans to ship in the Steam Machine—32 compute units (CUs) instead of Valve’s 28, but the same RDNA3 architecture. They’re also, most importantly for our purposes, pretty similar to each other—the same physical GPU die, just with slightly higher clock speeds and more RAM for the 7600 XT than for the regular 7600.

Testing shows why the Steam Machine’s 8GB of graphics RAM could be a problem Read More »