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Enlarge / The three rulebooks fo "fantastic medieval wargames" that started it all, released at some point in late Janua...
26/01/2024

Enlarge / The three rulebooks fo "fantastic medieval wargames" that started it all, released at some point in late January 1974, as seen in Dungeons & Dragons Art & Arcana: A Visual History. (credit: Wizards of the Coast/Ten Speed Press)

"We have just fromed [sic] Tactical Studies Rules, and we wish to let the wargaming community know that a new line of miniature rules is available."

With this letter, written by Gary Gygax to wargaming zine publisher Jim Lurvey, one of the founders of what would become TSR announced that a January 1974 release for Dungeons & Dragons was forthcoming. This, plus other evidence compiled by Jon Peterson (as pointed out by the Grognardia blog), points to the last Sunday of January 1974 as the best date for the "anniversary" of D&D. The first sale was in "late January 1974," Gygax later wrote, and on the last Sunday of January 1974, Gygax invited potential customers to drop by his house in the afternoon to try it out.

You could argue whether a final draft, printing, announcement, sale, or first session counts as the true "birth" of D&D, but we have to go with something, and Peterson's reasoning seems fairly sound. Gygax's memory, and a documented session at his own house, are a good point to pin down for when we celebrate this thing that has shaped a seemingly infinite number of other things.

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Dungeons & Dragons turns 50 this year, and there’s a lot planned for it

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Enlarge / The three rulebooks fo "fantastic medieval wargames" that started it all, released at some point in late January 1974, as seen...

Enlarge / The 7" screen of the Switch OLED (top) seen next to the 6.2" screen of the original Switch. (credit: Sam Machk...
26/01/2024

Enlarge / The 7" screen of the Switch OLED (top) seen next to the 6.2" screen of the original Switch. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

Nintendo's follow-up to the aging Switch—which is widely rumored to be aiming for release later this year—will sport an 8-inch LCD screen. That's according to Omdia analyst Hiroshi Hayase, who is cited in a Bloomberg News report focused on the upcoming handheld's potential effects on the market for "amusement displays" over the next few years.

An 8-inch screen (measured diagonally) would put the Switch 2 near the extreme upper end of portable gaming screens historically. Among mass-market devices, only the recently launched PlayStation Portal (8-inch screen) and Lenovo Legion Go (8.8-inch screen) have broken past the 7-inch barrier for dedicated gaming handhelds.

That said, the 6.2-inch screen on the original Nintendo Switch also set portable gaming records when it launched in 2017, easily surpassing the once-luxurious 5-inch screen of 2011's PlayStation Vita. The 2021 launch of the Switch OLED increased the diagonal screen measurement to 7 inches, a screen size that has since become somewhat standard on subsequent portable gaming devices like the Steam Deck and ROG Ally.

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Analyst: Switch 2 will have a massive 8-inch LCD screen

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Enlarge / The 7" screen of the Switch OLED (top) seen next to the 6.2" screen of the original Switch. (credit: Sam Machkovech) Ninten...

Enlarge / Who doesn't want less recoil? Unless, that is, you're someone competing against the person getting this benefi...
25/01/2024

Enlarge / Who doesn't want less recoil? Unless, that is, you're someone competing against the person getting this benefit with a $100 "emulation" device. (credit: Cronus)

The Cronus Zen describes itself as a hardware tool for "universal controller compatibility," letting you plug in a third-party controller, an Xbox controller into a PlayStation, or even your keyboard and mouse into a console. But you can also use its scripting engine to "amplify your game" and set up "GamePacks" to do things like reduce recoil animations in games like Call of Duty. And that is where Cronus seems to have gotten into trouble.

As first noted by the Call of Duty news channel CharlieIntel, the latest update to the PlayStation 5's system (24.01-08.60.00) software blocks the Cronus from connecting. The update is "NOT mandatory," Cronus claims in a notice on its website, so Zen players can hold off and keep playing. Still, there is "currently no timetable on a fix … it could be 24 (hours), 24 days, 24 months, we won't know until we've dug into it." There is, for now, a "Remote Play Workaround" for those already too far updated.

Ars attempted to reach Cronus for comment and reached out to Sony as well and will update this post with any new information.

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PlayStation has blocked hardware cheating device Cronus Zen, others may follow

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Enlarge / Who doesn't want less recoil? Unless, that is, you're someone competing against the person getting this benefit with a $100 "e...

Enlarge / Nexus Mods says it wants nothing to do with this kind of Palworld content. (credit: ToastedShoes / X)Palworld'...
25/01/2024

Enlarge / Nexus Mods says it wants nothing to do with this kind of Palworld content. (credit: ToastedShoes / X)

Palworld's viral success has already drawn a lot of obvious "Pokémon with guns" comparisons. But when it comes to mods that might add actual Pokémon to the game, at least one major online clearinghouse is preemptively and proactively avoiding anything that could draw Nintendo's legal ire.

Nexus Mods, a mod distribution site with tens of millions of registered users, said in a posted statement that it won't take the legal risk of distributing any Pokémon-themed Palworld mods. “We do think that adding Pokemon content to Palworld is a very cool idea and we understand why people would want such a thing," the statement reads. "However, we’re not comfortable hosting this content."

Nexus Mods goes on to cite Nintendo's "consistent record of mercilessly submitting legal challenges, DMCAs, and takedowns against fan-made content" as the main reason behind their hesitation. "Given Palworld’s similarity to the Pokémon franchise as a base game, hosting content that adds copyrighted characters or assets into the game is almost certainly going to put us at risk of legal action. Palworld content that is uploaded to Nexus Mods and is considered to have Pokémon-derived characters or assets will be taken down. Our normal moderation policies will apply."

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Major mod site says to keep your Pokémon content far away from Palworld

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Enlarge / Nexus Mods says it wants nothing to do with this kind of Palworld content. (credit: ToastedShoes / X ) Palworld 's viral s...

Enlarge / Everyone is focused on the Pals that look a lot like Pokémon; meanwhile, this guy is just a Totoro painted yel...
25/01/2024

Enlarge / Everyone is focused on the Pals that look a lot like Pokémon; meanwhile, this guy is just a Totoro painted yellow. (credit: Pocketpair)

This past weekend, a monster-catching survival game called Palworld took Steam by storm; the game has sold over 8 million copies and has been sitting at the top of Steam's "Top Selling" and "Most Played" charts all week. As of this writing, Steam's dashboard claims that just under 2 million players are currently exploring Palworld, twice as many as Counter-Strike 2 (the second game on the list).

You can tell just from looking at screenshots from developer Pocketpair that many of Palworld's monster designs are clearly inspired by designs from the Pokémon series, but the game's surprise success has led to greater scrutiny. Some observers have claimed that Pocketpair has taken actual 3D models from the games and modified them to seem original. (That has also prompted counter-claims that those 3D models were fudged to make them seem more similar, though it seems the alterations just scaled the models up and down to make them easier to compare.)

Today, the Pokémon Company released a brief statement about "another company's game released in January 2024," which could be a reference to a non-Palworld game but can only realistically be a reference to Palworld. The company will "investigate and take appropriate measures" in response to any asset theft or other infringement that it discovers.

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Pokémon Company will “investigate” Palworld in light of plagiarism accusations

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Enlarge / Everyone is focused on the Pals that look a lot like Pokémon; meanwhile, this guy is just a Totoro painted yellow. (credit: Po...

Our specific RTX 4070 Ti Super is a PNY model, the RTX 4070 Ti Super 16GB Verto. [credit: Andrew Cunningham ]Of all of N...
25/01/2024

Our specific RTX 4070 Ti Super is a PNY model, the RTX 4070 Ti Super 16GB Verto. [credit: Andrew Cunningham ]

Of all of Nvidia's current-generation GPU launches, there hasn't been one that's been quite as weird as the case of the "GeForce RTX 4080 12GB."

It was the third and slowest of the graphics cards Nvidia announced at the onset of the RTX 40-series, and at first blush it just sounded like a version of the second-fastest RTX 4080 but with less RAM. But spec sheets and Nvidia's own performance estimates showed that there was a deceptively huge performance gap between the two 4080 cards, enough that calling them both "4080" could have lead to confusion and upset among buyers.

Taking the hint, Nvidia reversed course, "unlaunching" the 4080 12GB because it was "not named right." This decision came late enough in the launch process that a whole bunch of existing packaging had to be trashed and that new BIOSes with new GPU named needed to be flashed to the cards before they could be sold.

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4070 Ti Super review: Faster GPU for the same $799, but not Nvidia’s best value

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Our specific RTX 4070 Ti Super is a PNY model, the RTX 4070 Ti Super 16GB Verto. [credit: Andrew Cunningham ] Of all of Nvidia's c...

Enlarge / A sample of the RTX Remix user interface being used to develop the enhanced Portal with RTX. (credit: Nvidia)I...
24/01/2024

Enlarge / A sample of the RTX Remix user interface being used to develop the enhanced Portal with RTX. (credit: Nvidia)

In the waning days of 2022, when Nvidia was preparing to release the impressive, ray tracing-enabled Portal with RTX, we were already looking toward a future when "the Nvidia RTX Remix modding platform used to remaster Portal will also be released to the general public at some point, making it easier to create updated versions of old DirectX 8 and DirectX 9 games with AI-upscaled textures and modern lighting effects," as we wrote at the time. That "at some point" future has fully arrived this week with Nvidia's open beta launch of its RTX Remix modding tools.

This isn't the wider modding community's first taste of RTX Remix's upscaling and lighting tools. Nvidia released an alpha version of the RTX runtime last April, offering "capture and replacement" modules that could upgrade older game assets and add modern graphical features like DLSS3 at playback. ModDB lists dozens of older games with an RTX.conf file that offers some level of RTX-powered graphical enhancement.

But this week's official open beta launch gives "experienced modders" new tools to easily create and insert these kinds of updated graphical effects and models in classic titles. That includes "generative AI texture tools" that Nvidia says use "our own proprietary model trained on our in-house dataset" to automatically upscale low-res textures to up to four times the original resolution. It also means the ability to add "physically accurate dynamic lights" that work with ray-tracing-capable hardware and a variety of open source models and material maps for modders to play with.

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Prepare for more upscaled classic PC game mods with new RTX Remaster beta toolkit

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Enlarge / A sample of the RTX Remix user interface being used to develop the enhanced Portal with RTX. (credit: Nvidia ) In the wani...

XFX's take on AMD's Radeon RX 7600 XT. [credit: Andrew Cunningham ]We don't need a long intro for this one: AMD's new Ra...
24/01/2024

XFX's take on AMD's Radeon RX 7600 XT. [credit: Andrew Cunningham ]

We don't need a long intro for this one: AMD's new Radeon RX 7600 XT is almost exactly the same as last year's RX 7600, but with a mild bump to the GPU's clock speed and 16GB of memory instead of 8GB. It also costs $329 instead of $269, the current MSRP (and current street price) for the regular RX 7600.

It's a card with a pretty narrow target audience: people who are worried about buying a GPU with 8GB of memory, but who aren't worried enough about future-proofing or RAM requirements to buy a more powerful GPU. It's priced reasonably well, at least—$60 is a lot to pay for extra memory, but $329 was the MSRP for the Radeon RX 6600 back in 2021. If you want more memory in a current-generation card, you otherwise generally need to jump up into the $450 range (for the 12GB RX 7700 XT or the 16GB RTX 4060 Ti) or beyond.

RX 7700 XT

RX 7600

RX 7600 XT

RX 6600

RX 6600 XT

RX 6650 XT

RX 6750 XT

Compute units (Stream processors)

54 (3,456)

32 (2,048)

32 (2,048)

28 (1,792)

32 (2,048)

32 (2,048)

40 (2,560)

Boost Clock

2,544 MHz

2,600 MHz

2,760 MHz

2,490 MHz

2,589 MHz

2,635 MHz

2,600 MHz

Memory Bus Width

192-bit

128-bit

128-bit

128-bit

128-bit

128-bit

192-bit

Memory Clock

2,250 MHz

2,250 MHz

2,250 MHz

1,750 MHz

2,000 MHz

2,190 MHz

2,250 MHz

Memory size

12GB GDDR6

8GB GDDR6

16GB GDDR6

8GB GDDR6

8GB GDDR6

8GB GDDR6

12GB GDDR6

Total board power (TBP)

245 W

165 W

190 W

132 W

160 W

180 W

250 W

The fact of the matter is that this is the same silicon we've already seen. The clock speed bumps do provide a small across-the-board performance uplift, and the impact of the extra RAM does become apparent in a few of our tests. But the card doesn't fundamentally alter the AMD-vs-Nvidia-vs-Intel dynamic in the $300-ish graphics card market, though it addresses a couple of the regular RX 7600's most glaring weaknesses.

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Review: Radeon 7600 XT offers peace of mind via lots of RAM, remains a midrange GPU

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XFX's take on AMD's Radeon RX 7600 XT. [credit: Andrew Cunningham ] We don't need a long intro for this one: AMD's new Radeon RX 7...

Enlarge (credit: Pocketpair)I'm whacking at a rock as the sun sets. The game is telling me that I am cold and hungry. Bu...
23/01/2024

Enlarge (credit: Pocketpair)

I'm whacking at a rock as the sun sets. The game is telling me that I am cold and hungry. But I need to collect enough resources to make a Pal Sphere to catch some Pals so I can assign them to work at my base and gather even more resources.

I am in the very opening minutes of Palworld, a game made by an obscure Japanese indie studio named Pocketpair. Some combination of algorithmic providence and word of mouth helped the game score some impressive achievements in its first Early Access weekend: over 5 million copies sold and nearly 1.3 million concurrent Steam users playing the game, beating out the high-watermarks for big-name games like Cyberpunk 2077, Elden Ring, and Baldur's Gate 3.

The game's success means it has already been through multiple cycles of minor Internet controversy, mainly related to circumstantial evidence that its monster designs may have been created by generative AI or from the actual 3D models used in the Pokémon games.

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“Pokémon with guns”: Palworld’s runaway Steam success should be a lesson for Game Freak

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Enlarge (credit: Pocketpair) I'm whacking at a rock as the sun sets. The game is telling me that I am cold and hungry. But I need to c...

Enlarge / Andrew Cunningham's modded and restored Game Boy Advance could, with enough time, sing out all the data loaded...
22/01/2024

Enlarge / Andrew Cunningham's modded and restored Game Boy Advance could, with enough time, sing out all the data loaded into a cartridge. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Sometimes, a great song can come from great pain. The Game Boy Advance (GBA), its software having crashed nearly two hours ago, will, for example, play a tune based on the game inside it. And if you listen closely enough—using specialty hardware and code—you can tell exactly what game it was singing about. And then theoretically play that same game.

This was discovered recently by TheZZAZZGlitch, whose job is to "sadistically glitch and hack the crap out of Pokémon games. It's "hardly a ready-to-use solution," the modder notes, as it requires a lot of tuning specific to different source formats. So while there are certainly easier ways to get GBA data from a cartridge, none make you feel quite so much like some kind of cargo-cult datamancer.

TheZZAZZGlitch's demonstration of re-creating Game Boy Advance ROM data using the sounds from a crashing system.

After crashing a GBA and recording it over four hours, the modder saw some telltale waveforms in a sound file at about the 1-hour, 50-minute mark. Later in the sound-out, you can hear the actual instrument sounds and audio samples the game contains, played in sequence. Otherwise, it's 8-bit data at 13,100 Hz, and at times, it sounds absolutely deranged.

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Modder re-creates Game Boy Advance games using the audio from crash sounds

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Enlarge / Andrew Cunningham's modded and restored Game Boy Advance could, with enough time, sing out all the data loaded into a cartrid...

Enlarge / CGI Harrison Ford just can't believe he's getting roped into another globe-trotting adventure. (credit: Bethes...
19/01/2024

Enlarge / CGI Harrison Ford just can't believe he's getting roped into another globe-trotting adventure. (credit: Bethesda/Machine Games)

Almost two years ago to this day, Bethesda told everyone its Machine Games subsidiary was working on a new Indiana Jones game, one with "an original story." Now we can see what Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is going to look like, with a gameplay trailer showing up during Microsoft's Developer Direct event, and when it's arriving: "2024." You can now wishlist it on Steam and the Xbox store; it's exclusive to those platforms.

Gameplay reveal trailer for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.

While the game has Harrison Ford's likeness, it's not Ford voicing your character. Troy Baker, the original voice of Joel in The Last of Us, picks up the role of the archaeologist.

From the trailer, Great Circle looks a lot like the modern Wolfenstein games that Machine Games made—and that's a good thing. The New Order and The New Colossus excelled at making you feel more like a human action hero than a shooting tank. They've got a knack for first-person platforming, stunts, and cinematic moments that are nowhere near as painful as in many shooters. They excel at balancing immersing you as a player and letting your character have a personality.

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Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a new first-person Nazi-whipping journey

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Enlarge / CGI Harrison Ford just can't believe he's getting roped into another globe-trotting adventure. (credit: Bethesda/Machine Games...

Enlarge / The future of game development? (credit: Getty Images)A new survey of thousands of game development profession...
18/01/2024

Enlarge / The future of game development? (credit: Getty Images)

A new survey of thousands of game development professionals finds a near-majority saying generative AI tools are already in use at their workplace. But a significant minority of developers say their company has no interest in generative AI tools or has outright banned their use.

The Game Developers Conference's 2024 State of the Industry report, released Thursday, aggregates the thoughts of over 3,000 industry professionals as of last October. While the annual survey (conducted in conjunction with research partner Omdia) has been running for 12 years, this is the first time respondents were asked directly about their use of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, DALL-E, GitHub Copilot, and Adobe Generative Fill.

Forty-nine percent of the survey's developer respondents said that generative AI tools are currently being used in their workplace. That near-majority includes 31 percent (of all respondents) that say they use those tools themselves and 18 percent that say their colleagues do.

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Game developer survey: 50% work at a studio already using generative AI tools

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Enlarge / The future of game development? (credit: Getty Images ) A new survey of thousands of game development professionals finds a...

After 16 (nearly unbroken) years of regular DLC releases, Rock Band's avatars haven't aged a day.Here at Ars Technica, w...
17/01/2024

After 16 (nearly unbroken) years of regular DLC releases, Rock Band's avatars haven't aged a day.

Here at Ars Technica, we remember covering Rock Band's weekly DLC song releases way back in 2007, when such regular content drops were still a new concept for a rhythm game. Now, Harmonix has announced the last of the series' roughly 2,800 downloadable releases will finally come on January 25, marking the end of a nearly 16-year era in music gaming history.

Previously purchased DLC songs will still be playable in Rock Band 4, Harmonix's Daniel Sussman writes in an announcement post. Rock Band 4 live services, including online play, will also continue as normal, after online game modes for earlier Rock Band games were finally shut down in late 2022.

"Taking a longer look back, I see the Rock Band DLC catalog as a huge achievement in persistence and commitment," Sussman writes. "Over the years we’ve cleared, authored and released nearly 3,000 songs as DLC and well over 3,000 if you include all the game soundtracks. That’s wild."

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Harmonix is ending Rock Band DLC releases after 16 years, ~2,800 songs

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After 16 (nearly unbroken) years of regular DLC releases, Rock Band 's avatars haven't aged a day. Here at Ars Technica, we remember co...

Peanut Butter the dog speedruns Gyromite at Awesome Games Done Quick 2024.The twice-a-year video game speedrunning and f...
17/01/2024

Peanut Butter the dog speedruns Gyromite at Awesome Games Done Quick 2024.

The twice-a-year video game speedrunning and fundraising live event Games Done Quick has been a source of amazement and joy for years, but we're still saying "that's never happened before" even now, more than a decade after the first event.

Case in point: Awesome Games Done Quick 2024, which is streaming live 24-hours a day throughout this week on Twitch, saw the very first speedrun performed by a dog.

A Shiba Inu named Peanut Butter (shortened to PB, also a speedrunner term for "personal best" finish time) completed a 30-minute speedrun of the 1985 Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) game Gyromite.

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That’s never happened before: Games Done Quick video stars speedrunning dog

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Peanut Butter the dog speedruns Gyromite at Awesome Games Done Quick 2024. The twice-a-year video game speedrunning and fundraising l...

Enlarge / Artist's conception of iOS developers after today's Supreme Court ruling, surveying a new landscape of payment...
16/01/2024

Enlarge / Artist's conception of iOS developers after today's Supreme Court ruling, surveying a new landscape of payment options and subscription signaling. (credit: Epic Games)

The Supreme Court declined to hear either of the petitions resulting from the multi-year, multi-court Epic v. Apple antitrust dispute. That leaves most of Epic's complaints about Apple's practices unanswered, but the gaming company achieved one victory on pricing notices.

It all started in August 2020, when Epic sought to work around Apple and Google's app stores and implemented virtual currency purchases directly inside Fortnite. The matter quickly escalated to the courts, with firms like Spotify and Microsoft backing Epic's claim that Apple's App Store being the only way to load apps onto an iPhone violated antitrust laws.

The matter reached trial in May 2021. The precise definitions of "games" and "marketplace" were fervently debated. Epic scored a seemingly huge victory in September 2021 when a Northern California judge demanded that Apple allow developers to offer their own payment buttons and communicate with app customers about alternate payment options. An appeals court upheld that Apple's App Store itself wasn't a "walled garden" that violated antitrust laws but kept the ruling that Apple had to open up its payments and messaging.

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Supreme Court denies Epic v. Apple petitions, opening up iOS payment options

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Enlarge / Artist's conception of iOS developers after today's Supreme Court ruling, surveying a new landscape of payment options and sub...

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Valve)From Black Mesa to the recently launched Portal: Revolution, Valve has had a repu...
16/01/2024

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Valve)

From Black Mesa to the recently launched Portal: Revolution, Valve has had a reputation for being pretty willing to let modders run wild with new creations based on its popular games. Recently, though, a series of legal threats and takedowns of Valve-related fan projects have some worried that the Half-Life maker is going the way of Nintendo in stringently enforcing its IP rights against projects and mods that it sees as infringing.

While there are differences between the situations leading to three recent fan project takedowns, there are also some similarities that hint at the specific types of fan projects that are drawing Valve’s legal attention these days.

What’s happened so far?

Valve’s recent efforts started last week, when the company sent a DMCA takedown request to Amper Software, a team of volunteers looking to remake the aging Team Fortress 2 in Valve's more modern Source 2 engine. The DMCA notice, as posted to Amper's GitHub, focuses on the team’s use of "TF2 assets [that] have been ported to Source 2 without permission" and the "unauthorized porting and redistributing of Valve's assets without a license, [which] violates Valve's IP."

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What to make of Valve’s recent fan project takedowns

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Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Valve) From Black Mesa to the recently launched Portal: Revolution , Valve has had a reputation for ...

Enlarge / The GeForce RTX 4070 Super Founders Edition. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)Judging by the comments on YouTube rev...
16/01/2024

Enlarge / The GeForce RTX 4070 Super Founders Edition. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Judging by the comments on YouTube reviews, you'd think Nvidia's RTX 4070, launched in April of 2023 for $599, was a terrible graphics card. The reaction wasn't as brutal as it was among commenters and reviewers for the 4060 Ti a month later (a "waste of sand," declared Gamers Nexus), but you'd usually find praise for its power efficiency but criticism of its price (high for a xx70 card) and its performance improvement relative to the previous generation (only about as fast as an RTX 3080, sometimes less).

Those are all largely valid criticisms. But the 4070 is actually Nvidia's most popular RTX 4000-series desktop GPU, at least according to the (admittedly flaky and opaque) Steam Hardware Survey data for December 2023. It's not in the top 10—this is dominated by older midrange GeForce cards that have been out a lot longer—but it's doing better than Nvidia's other 40-series desktop cards and better than every one of AMD's RX 7000-series cards put together.

The release of the RTX 4070 Super should help bring the enthusiast commentariat version of reality and the Steam Hardware Survey's version of reality into closer sync with one another. At the same $599 price—still more than the $499 of the 2070 Super or 3070, but not higher than the 4070—you get performance that Nvidia says is more in line with the RTX 3090. And the power efficiency remains quite impressive, though power use overall is up just a bit from the regular 4070.

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Review: Nvidia’s $600 GeForce RTX 4070 Super is one of its best values

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Enlarge / The GeForce RTX 4070 Super Founders Edition. (credit: Andrew Cunningham) Judging by the comments on YouTube reviews, you'd ...

Enlarge / Valve took a look inside Portal 64, saw itself inside near something involving Nintendo, and decided to shut d...
12/01/2024

Enlarge / Valve took a look inside Portal 64, saw itself inside near something involving Nintendo, and decided to shut down the experiment. (credit: Valve/James Lambert)

Any great effort to generate appreciation for Nintendo's classic platforms, done outside Nintendo's blessing, has a markedly high chance of incurring Nintendo's wrath. This seems to apply even when Nintendo has not actually moved to block something, but merely seems like it might.

That's why, one week after announcing that his years-long "demake" of Valve's classic Portal to the Nintendo 64 platform had its "First Slice" ready for players, James Lambert has taken down Portal 64. There's no DMCA takedown letter or even a cease-and-desist from Nintendo. There is, as Lambert told PC Gamer, "communication with Valve" that "because the project depends on Nintendo's proprietary libraries, [Valve] have asked me to take the project down."

Ars contacted Valve and Nintendo for comment and will update the post with any new information. Lambert could not be reached for comment.

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Valve request takes down Portal 64 due to concerns over Nintendo involvement

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Enlarge / Valve took a look inside Portal 64 , saw itself inside near something involving Nintendo, and decided to shut down the experim...

Can you tell which of these seemingly identical bits of Steam iconography were generated using AI (trick question, it's ...
10/01/2024

Can you tell which of these seemingly identical bits of Steam iconography were generated using AI (trick question, it's none of them). (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Last summer, Valve told Ars Technica that it was worried about potential legal issues surrounding games made with the assistance of AI models trained on copyrighted works and that it was "working through how to integrate [AI] into our already-existing review policies." Today, the company is rolling out the results of that months-long review, announcing a new set of developer policies that it says "will enable us to release the vast majority of games that use [AI tools]."

Developers that use AI-powered tools "in the development [or] ex*****on of your game" will now be allowed to put their games on Steam so long as they disclose that usage in the standard Content Survey when submitting to Steam. Such AI integration will be separated into categories of "pre-generated" content that is "created with the help of AI tools during development" (e.g., using DALL-E for in-game images) and "live-generated" content that is "created with the help of AI tools while the game is running" (e.g., using Nvidia's AI-powered NPC technology).

Those disclosures will be shared on the Steam store pages for these games, which should help players who want to avoid certain types of AI content. But disclosure will not be sufficient for games that use live-generated AI for "Adult Only Sexual Content," which Valve says it is "unable to release... right now."

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Valve now allows the “vast majority” of AI-powered games on Steam

Source: Pinoy Buzz Anchor

Can you tell which of these seemingly identical bits of Steam iconography were generated using AI (trick question, it's none of them). (cr...

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