Last week, we speculated about whether or not Grand Theft Auto 6 will release on PC on the same day as consoles. Most of us predicted that Rockstar will once again wait a year or so after the console release date before dropping the PC version, and I regret to report that we were probably right.

The first GTA 6 trailer, above, only tells us that Rockstar’s next open world crime spree is coming in 2025, with no platforms listed, but in a press release, Take-Two announced that GTA 6 will release on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. There’s no mention of the PC in the press release, which suggests that Rockstar will once again hold the PC version for a later date like it did with Red Dead Redemption 2.

Asked for comment on the status of a PC release, Rockstar told us that all of the information currently available is in the statement.

I was one of the few who thought Rockstar would get with the times and give up on this silly timed console exclusivity game. It feels awfully ol…

I really appreciate the principled refusal of research scientists to let casual truths remain casual. A group at Oxford has asked, more or less: Do people feel good when they play PowerWash Simulator? And the answer they got was: Yep, over 70% of PowerWash Simulator players feel good when they play PowerWash Simulator.

Congrats to the PowerWash Simulator developers: How many games have been deemed fun by a team of Oxford scientists?

There’s a bit more to it than that, of course. Videogame mood studies tend to focus on long-term effects, but that might be putting the cart before the horse, say the Oxford Internet Institute researchers behind the study, which was published in August. They think that understanding how games affect mood in the short term is necessary if we’re going to understand their potential long-term mental health effects.

The researchers also have a few problems with previous studies on the mood-altering properties of games: The experiments ofte…

The original Starter Set was an introduction to Dungeons & Dragons’ 5th edition rules released in 2014 that included a scenario called Lost Mine of Phandelver. This better-than-average adventure for beginners, available relatively cheap in a boxed set you could buy at a bunch of chain stores rather than just dingy nerd shops, served as a gateway to D&D for a lot of people. Even the Adventure Zone podcast started out playing it.

The digital version of Lost Mine of Phandelver has been available on DND Beyond for free since 2022, but it won’t be for much longer. Wizards of the Coast released a new Starter Set last year with an adventure called Dragons of Stormwreck Isle in it, and just published Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk, a longer campaign that incorporates a tweaked version of Lost Mine of Phandelver as its opening chapters. So, from October 10, they’ll be replacing the free version of Lost Mine with a different free adventure called Intro to Stormwreck…

Square Enix plans to overhaul its approach to making games, as it seeks to improve individual game quality and increase its overall profit margins.

As reported by Bloomberg Japan, the move was announced by Square Enix’s president Takashi Kiryu, at a financial results briefing for analysts held yesterday.

Speaking at the conference call, Kiryu reportedly said “We are reviewing from scratch what the organisational structure is, and what the best way is to materialise the contents of the pipeline.”

Details about this new system will apparently be revealed by “at least this spring”, while analysts attending the conference said it will go into effect in April. But broadly, Kiryu wants Square Enix to double-down on developing games in-house and curb the amount of work on games that is outsourced to third-party companies. The analysts further stated that the new system will include a checking mechanism to judge the quality of games.

As a publisher, Square Enix has b…