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Steams

A knight with a gun shoots other knights.

One Of Steam’s Most-Wishlisted Games Indefinitely Delayed Days Before Launch

by admin October 5, 2025

Kingmakers was due out in Early Access in just a few days but it’s apparently not ready yet. The medieval sandbox shooter has been indefinitely delayed as the team at Redemption Road works on getting everything working as intended. “We just need a bit more time on content polish before we feel good about charging money for it,” the studio wrote in an announcement on Friday.

Odds are you’ve seen a bit of Kingmakers here or there over the years, even if you didn’t know it. The multiplayer game features sprawling maps and giant armies and is supposed to facilitate real-time destruction as you engage in everything from medieval combat to blowing up a bunch of armor-clad knights with tanks. The game’s impressive physics simulation helped it go viral on social media, land a big trailer at Summer Game Fest this year, and become the sixth most-wishlisted game on Steam. So it’s surprising to see it pulled from launch at the last minute.

pic.twitter.com/HhiDBLQrOS

— Ian Fisch – Lead Coder on Kingmakers (wishlist!) (@Ian_Fisch) October 3, 2025

“After much contemplation, we realize that the scheduled Kingmakers launch on October 8 will no longer be possible,” the team announced today. “We want to apologize to all of the fans who are eagerly anticipating this game. We are sorry for letting you down.”

The rest of the message goes on to try to explain why the game is being indefinitely delayed. TL;DR: Kingmakers is ambitions and delivering on that is hard!

GTA6, but you’re dropped in the 1400s.
No cops. Just the angry knights you ran over 🚗 pic.twitter.com/tLmQjUgmM3

— Kingmakers ⚔️ (@Kingmakers_Game) June 3, 2025

“We currently have tens of thousands of soldiers, each with AI and pathfinding that rivals what you’d expect from an AAA third-person shooter,” Redemption Road states. “When you walk away from a battle, it continues to play out. Nothing is faked. We have giant 6-story castles where every room can be entered and every wall, floor, and ceiling destroyed. When you build a lumbermill, it’s a real place that can be entered, or, in an enemy invasion, turned into a combat arena.”

The studio doesn’t really go into much more detail than that but promises that a deep-dive overview will be livestreamed soon to update players on where things are at. That makes it sound like the delay won’t just be a couple of weeks or months. Will it still be out before the end of 2026? We’ll see. “We’re making sure everyone who buys the game is enthralled and feels like their money was well spent,” the developers wrote.

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October 5, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

Steam’s latest beta lets you easily check if you have Secure Boot enabled before firing up Battlefield 6 or Call of Duty

by admin September 24, 2025

Steam’s latest client beta has given you another way to quickly check whether you’ve got secure boot enabled before you hop into some FPSsing about. Enabling the setting’s become mandatory for the likes of Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 and Battlefield 6, as the possibly futile war on cheating continues to rage like, er, well, you know.

It’s a controversial way of going about trying to limit the amout of fraudulent 360 no-scopes, as it involves publishers mandating an aspect of how players’ hardware’s used, if a pretty easy one to check with a trip to your BIOS if you know what you’re doing. Not everyone’s used to delving into those settings though, which is why it’s nice Valve have made this useful addition to their game playing place.

As outlined in this brief post spotted by Pretty Cold Grandma, a Steam client beta update deployed early this morning has brought in this tweak.

To use it to check if you’ve got secure boot enabled, you’ll first need to opt into the latest client beta if you haven’t already. On desktop, that’s done by heading to the Steam logo in the top left when you open up Steam, then selecting ‘Settings’ from the drop-down menu. From there, you go to ‘Interface’, ‘Steam Client Beta Participation’, and select ‘Steam Beta Update’ from the drop-down menu to the right of the latter. A restart of Steam’ll be required, then once it loads back up, you can head to ‘Help’ in the top left, select ‘System Information’ from the drop-down.

You’ll get a list of info about your PC, and in the bit about your operating system, you’ll find a line which specifies whether or not secure boot is enabled. Just below that’s a line listing your Trusted Platform Module (TPM) version, this being a processor that allows your PC to carry out cryptographic operations with some added security measures. It’s generally a requirement to get secure boot up and running.

Image credit: Valve / Rock Paper Shotgun

We’ll see if these measures ever manage to do more than continue to move the goalposts those keen to cheat will likely just find another way to auto-aim their bullets through. At least if the amount of time/energy it takes to check if secure boot’s enabled can be minimised, with the added bonus of making it easier for the less tech-savvy, that’s something positive.

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September 24, 2025 0 comments

An elderly sad woman in a wheelchair looks at a tablet and talks to her family via video call - stock photo

Gaming Gear

Steam’s new store look is out and is earning a mixed response: ‘Thanks Valve I am a grandma using Steam on a giant old touchscreen Samsung tablet’

by admin September 24, 2025

I’m beginning to think I have far-too-strong feelings about changes to Steam minutiae. Why? Because when I heard that Valve had finally unleashed its updated storefront from beta, I fired up the site so quickly you’d have thought it was giving out candy. No one should care this much about website UI updates. I do. This is my cross to bear.

Anyway, Steam’s storefront update is out of beta and the frontpage is a whole lot slicker now. Also, wider. Valve has merged the two constituent parts of its old UI—that big list of categories down the left-hand side and the blue bar up top—into a single easy-to-navigate bar.

As part of that merge, the Categories section now displays, well, actual categories. Before, when it was consigned to the sidebar, the Steam categories you could select consisted of things like “Top sellers,” and “New releases.”

Now, hovering over the new Categories display section shows much more useful game genres, letting you easily browse by things like racing, stealth, and what-have-you. Also, the categories that appear are personalised for you, which is either very convenient or yet another intrusion by the dead hand of surveillance capitalism. Whichever you prefer.

I like the look of it, though I suspect the most stalwart PC gamers among you might recoil a little at how clearly mobile-friendly the new layout is. Indeed, some of the community response on Reddit has been a little mixed. “Thanks Valve I am a grandma using Steam on a giant old touchscreen Samsung tablet,” writes dogdillon, who may in fact be a grandma on a giant tablet but is more likely a sarky Steam user. “Yet another site update that gets worse on pc in favor of mobile. Bigger icons, less information, more clicks to navigate menus…” concurs hooliganmike.

It’s a brave new world. (Image credit: Valve)

Still, at least some people do like it. “Good lord, it’s actually so, so much better,” writes Xedronic, “and the categories tab is ACTUALLY COMPREHENSIBLE to look at!”

Me? I like it. Or at least, I disliked how it looked before enough that this feels like an improvement. Hey, take the wins where you can: at least Valve hasn’t installed a helpful AI chatbot prompt up there.

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September 24, 2025 0 comments

Subnautica 2 trailer still - woman waving

Gaming Gear

With Silksong in our hands, Steam’s new reigning wishlist kings are both kind of basket cases: The partially-released Deadlock and lawsuit lightning rod Subnautica 2

by admin September 8, 2025

Just as prior wishlist chart-toppers The Day Before (lol), Manor Lords, and (briefly) Stray gave way to Hollow Knight: Silksong’s long reign, so too has Team Cherry’s platformer passed the torch to a new contender. Subnautica 2 is now the most wishlisted game on Steam, followed by Valve’s MOBA-shooter Deadlock. Slots three through five are taken up by Battlefield 6, Borderlands 4, and Light No Fire.

Steam’s publicly available data isn’t the end-all, be-all of the hobby⁠—not the least because it doesn’t account for other storefronts or console players⁠—but it is useful for divining trends and getting a snapshot of the current gaming scene.

It’s kind of weird that the two most desired PC games of the moment are such basket cases, right? They boast pre-release anti-hype cycles to give the long Silksong silence a run for its money, yet we apparently can’t get enough of them.

Let’s start with Deadlock: Given the fact that it’s an honest-to-god new Valve game, it’s shocking it hasn’t just clinched number one by default. But it’s a kookster: The second most wishlisted game on Steam is already being played for free by tens of thousands of people⁠—about 45k at the time of writing, according to SteamDB.

The game is not out, but we’re already at a point where lapsed players can have discussions about whether or not to come back to it. Before Deadlock’s playtest broke containment, it became the gaming story of the moment despite Valve pretending it didn’t even exist.

At the beginning of Summer 2024 (this thing’s been around for over a year!), screenshots, gameplay footage, and even datamined information was leaking out of the then-secret playtest like a sieve. Valve finally “announced” the game⁠—really just acknowledged it⁠—last August, and the vast proliferation of invites to the invite-only game has effectively soft-launched it.

That might be the most confounding fact of all: Valve invented the early access model, but won’t brand its own, effectively early access game as such. If I’m being honest, I kind of love the chaos of it all, even as I wish the studio would finally tackle a singleplayer game again.

Subnautica subpoena

The number one wishlisted Subnautica 2 has a more familiar, but also troubling story: A falling out and legal clash between senior creative and managerial staff behind the game, one that doesn’t seem likely to resolve in time for Subnautica 2’s projected 2026 early access release.

Studio Unknown Worlds was acquired by publisher Krafton in 2021, and a sequel to the developer’s beloved underwater survival sim, Subnautica, was slated to launch in early access this year. In July, Krafton replaced the senior leadership of the studio: CEO Ted Gill, designer Charlie Cleveland, and co-founder Max McGuire.

The ousted developers say they were terminated unfairly in order to duck paying them a $250 million bonus, and that the game could have still launched in early access this year. Krafton claims the trio dropped the ball, that Subnautica 2 was far behind its agreed-upon early access launch milestones, and that going through with the planned release would have been disastrous.

More than anything, I’m just struck by the anti-charisma of these games and some of their immediate predecessors at the top of the list. A messy lawsuit for Subnautica and a messy not-launch for Deadlock. Silksong gave fans nothing but stony silence for years, and The Day Before seems to have gotten there on accident, much to the detriment of developer Amazing Seasun.

Manor Lords and Stray, while having far less abnormal pre-launches, are still far from traditional blockbusters in character: A hardcore city builder and a moody, meditative indie platformer.

Classico triple-A juggernauts like Borderlands 4 and Battlefield 6 can still make it up there, but that kind of pedigree and budgetary heft isn’t the guarantee of success and popularity it used to be. It’s of a piece with so many of the biggest games in recent years being surprises⁠—Baldur’s Gate 3, Balatro, Helldivers 2, REPO, Palworld⁠—and so many old guard publishers like EA and Ubisoft falling on hard times.

Aside from just making a good game and hoping it catches on, nobody seems to have cracked the code for getting people excited about a new release these days. Most devs can’t just pull a Silksong and say absolutely nothing while a memetic legend spontaneously develops around their project.

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September 8, 2025 0 comments

Product Reviews

It’s kind of weird that Helldivers 2 isn’t in Steam’s big third-person shooter sale, but there are plenty of other great deals so I don’t really miss it

by admin August 26, 2025

Most of the time, I’m an FPS guy: third-person shooters tend to lack the immersive qualities of first-person bang-bang, and the weird over-the-shoulder perspective makes aiming a headache (which I am sure has nothing to do with the fact that I don’t play many TPS games). But every now and then one comes along that’s just too good to ignore, which very circuitously brings us to the point: The new Steam TPS Fest, a week-sale that’s all about disembodied gunplay.

“It’s a fest full of games in the third person,” the TPS Fest page says helpfully. “And those persons are shooters.” And indeed they are, but in terms of specific genre—at least as defined by Steam—there’s quite a range to choose from: 569 action games, 276 adventures, 101 RPGs, 81 “casual” games, 63 strategy, 54 sims, eight sports games, and—somehow–two racing games. (I suspect someone may be playing a little fast-and-loose with some of those designations.)

Anyway, the pick of the litter as far as I’m concerned has to be Control Ultimate Edition, which includes the base game, The Foundation and AWE expansions, and all other additional content for just $4/£3.29/€4—90% off the regular price. That’s a whole lot of videogame for four bucks, and Control really is primo stuff—and, I have to admit, its extremely effective blend of gunplay and powers almost certainly works better in third person than it would as an FPS.

My personal favorite, though, is Max Payne 3, and I mention it specifically because it’s grossly underrated and deserves the love—and if you haven’t played the first two and don’t especially want to, this final part of the trilogy works perfectly well as a standalone game. It’s an incredibly cinematic shooter, very different from Remedy’s take on the character (which is mainly why it tends to be not as well regarded) but easily up to their level. For $6/£5.39/€6, you won’t regret it.

And if you do want to play the first two Max Payne games (and you should), you can also get those on the cheap. Take note, however, that the Max Payne Complete Pack bundle, which includes all three games, actually costs more right now than buying the games separately. I have no idea why and it might be changed at some point, but for now double-check before you push the button.

(Image credit: Steam)

Helldivers 2, one of the most popular third-person games to come along in years, is actually not on sale right now, but that’s okay because Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint and Ghost Recon Wildlands are, and they’re both a lot of fun, especially if you can jump in with a friend or two.

Breakpoint had an infamously tough start but Ubisoft did a good job of whipping it into shape with post-launch updates, and for $6/£5/€6—90% off—it’s a solid pick. Wildlands is actually 50 cents more than Breakpoint for some reason, and I quite like it too, but honestly you don’t need both. Breakpoint would be my pick, but maybe check to see what your friends are already into if you’re not sure which way to go.

Sniper Elite 5: Maybe you get tired of X-ray nut shots. I do not. $10/£9/€10, 80% off.

100 Testicle Nut Shots in Sniper Elite 5 (4K) – YouTube

Watch On

Earth Defense Force 6—I used to work with a guy who was a big fan of the EDF games, and this one is a solid addition to the series. Half-price, $30/£25/€30.

Star Wars Outlaws may not be the most original Star Wars idea, but it’s still a very good game—I’d probably play it myself, except I really don’t like Star Wars. If you do, you can score this one for $31.49/£27/€3149, less than half the regular price. If you’re not sure, there’s a demo so you can get a feel for what it’s all about.

Senior editor Wes Fenlon is a big Risk of Rain fan, and that’s good enough for me: Risk of Rain 2 is 67% off, taking it down to $8.24/6.59/€8.24.

If you like a little survival horror mixed in with your firefights, The Callisto Protocol is down to $9/£7.49/€9, 85% off. It wasn’t a huge hit but it does what it does quite well.

And one more, although there’s a lot more to rifle through than just what I’ve mentioned here: Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is 95% off, taking it to just $3.49/£3/€3.49. And sure, it had problems, was probably a bad idea right from the jump, but if you can’t get three bucks of fun out of this thing, I think we have to consider the possibility that it might be a “you” problem.

So there you have it, even more ways to spend your money on Steam. You’re welcome. Steam’s Third Person Shooter Fest is live now and runs until September 1—after that, you get a week off and then it’s time for the Steam Political Sim Fest. No, I am not kidding.

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August 26, 2025 0 comments