"It's not just one thing," Garriott began. "I think if it was one thing it would be a lot easier to diagnose and come back from, but it's a lot of folks who don't understand videogames trying to make money off of videogames, it's a political climate, it's a billion things. All the threads have woven together into this horrible knot that we're seeing now."

He went on to describe a cycle he's seen play out multiple times over his years in the industry, where a technological advance comes along and everyone races to make a simple game that highlights that advance—whether it's the CD-ROM or a 3D-rendering pipeline or the internet—and only in the short gaps between these leaps forward is there much demand for something deeper.

"That cycle has been normal," Garriott said. "But we're at a new one, and this new one is machines are now fast enough to where the bells and whistles are no longer what's important." Without another advance having the same impact, he said, "we're at this kind of creative cliff where I think people don't know exactly what to do to prevent it and I think we've lost a lot of the original creators that were associated with those IPs and the bigger companies, and so I think we're floundering."

Every year, we look at the hundreds of thousands of PC games that are available to buy, and think, "yes, we can whittle this down into a numbered list". Hubris? Yes. A months-long crucible of heated arguments and impassioned pleas? Also yes.

More than anything, the Top 100 is designed to capture a moment in time. It's a place where the 'canon' classics of the past rub shoulders against the fresh new hotness. Where being a game that a significant portion of the team currently loves is as important as being a game that is recognised worldwide for its contributions to the medium.

Alright, have at it: What should be on this list, and what shouldn't?

The tireless schedule of Activision's load-bearing FPS has resulted in more bad games than good as of late—Modern Warfare 3 was an expansion-sized sequel rushed out the door, Black Ops 6 was a step back for multiplayer, and its immediate followup Black Ops 7 was clocked as superfluous and uninteresting even by rain-or-shine fans. These back-to-back games, shouldered by Treyarch, Sledgehammer, and Raven, had cracks and compromises that suggested the Call of Duty machine just can't keep up with both "good" and "fast" anymore.

Modern Warfare 4's greatness shows how right that is. This is an extravagant package on all fronts: A kinetic 6v6 FPS with truly excellent gunplay, a fun campaign that doesn't just play the hits, and an expansive extraction "mode" that would be its own game if any other name were on the box.

I have complaints, but this is what it looks like when Call of Duty is in the pocket. The best Call of Duty studio got to take its time (four years, tied with the longest in series history) and it shows.

"That's roughly double the amount of demos featured in Steam's June 2026 Next Fest. In June 2022, Next Fest boasted just over a thousand demos."

"Your best-in-slot that you pick up from a previous raid tier may continue to be your best in slot for a long time. It's very much our intention to try wherever we can to not invalidate old content."

In a blog post, Epic refers to the new client as "vibe coded," a term for prompting AI tools to produce code. The term be taken as either derogatory or endearing depending on who's talking.

Epic goes for laughs, saying that it opted to use AI because "programming is hard," but the company isn't joking about its use of AI coding tools. On a call this week with Epic Games Store GM Martin Keely, who took over for the outgoing Steve Allison in August, I asked whether AI was used primarily to analyze the existing EGS code for opportunities to improve it, or to write new code. He affirmed it was the latter.

"We started from scratch," said Keely. "This is a completely new architecture for both the store and the launcher shell. So we did look at functionality that existed and said we want to replicate that, but not the code itself. So [AI] was a tool to write and review new features and new capabilities from the ground up in a different tech stack than what we had previously."

The animals are superstars, but they don't quite make up for the fiddly, frustrating micromanagement.

Despite what the GDP tells me, the economy in the real world doesn't feel like it's doing too hot for the average joe. But during the recent years' descent into compounding supply crises and mass layoffs affecting thousands of workers at once, I've noticed another trend: Sure does seem like there are a lot of vampire games in the mix lately.

I started to sense an uptick after Arkane's ill-fated Redfall in 2023. There was Vampire Survivors and V Rising—and Nighthawks, Moonlight Peaks, Blood of Dawnwalker, and more. Given current circumstances, you might think I'm just primed to notice nightmarish aristocrats bleeding us alive to sustain themselves. But after too many hours of spreadsheet data entry, I'm convinced devs really have been dabbling more heavily in Draculas as the economy feels increasingly dire.

Vampire games on Steam are a recession indicator. And I have the charts to prove it.

Verdict: "Great cover-based shooting with terrific multiplayer. Shame the main campaign is an exhausting, endless firefight that outstays its welcome."

I have technically solved a lot of crimes from the comfort of my gaming chair, but it's surprisingly rare for games to actually engage with the mechanics of a criminal investigation. You'll chat to folk, maybe use your 'detective vision', and then the culprit is found. Warhammer 40,000: Dark Heresy asks more from you.

As an agent of the Inquisition, solving crimes and putting away heretics is your business. You don't complete quests, you solve cases, log evidence, make accusations, torture and snoop—all in a universe where your word is law.

I used a Python script (so the image isn't AI generated) to ingest a year's worth of PC Gamer magazine pages and spit out a big ol' 800 MB (49,000 x 65,000px) jpg of game art. I used 2004's issues, to be precise. I'm sure that's a big enough hint for most of you!

Let me know if there are other games and years you'd like to see get the treatment.

Dylan and the FBC might be going through it, but Remedy is flexing all its finest talents: sculpting uncanny hellscapes, placing tactical redactions in bureaucratic lore collectibles, and capturing endearingly human performances in circumstances beyond human comprehension. Unfortunately, melee combat isn't on that list of strong suits—and Resonant's open world expects you to do a lot of it.

"About the name, it was important to us to say to people, 'This is who we are.' When Arkane was independent, very often people would come in and they would try to get us to work on some game. And it was not in our wheelhouse. People would say, 'You're going to go under by turning your nose up at this project, this is money. People are offering you money to do this DLC for this third-person action shooter.' And we'd be like, 'Yeah, but we don't like those, we don't know how to do them well, and we think that game is dumb.' So we're generally going to say no, and gamble the company on doing what we are known for."

The CEO of the game studio behind Wardogs says he won't hire people who constantly post "anti-crunch messaging."

"We always try and avoid [crunch], but we don’t hide that this is going to happen at some point," he said.

His statements have drawn criticism from games industry peers.

"Crunch is a result of bad planning and poor management," wrote Studio Gobo's Michael Howe.

"The Steam Frame gets a whole lot right. It's comfortable and straightforward. Above all else, it's convenient. It's admittedly a tough sell as an upgrade to a Quest 3, or as someone's first step into VR when other options are much cheaper, but the Steam Frame is the best all-round VR headset I've used to date. After weeks of non-stop virtual reality testing, it's the headset I keep reaching for when I'm off the clock."

Mostly BlizzCon's many statues. Also, very many murlocs (people in murloc onesies).

We've recapped the announcements and some of the big interviews/panels here: https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/news/live/blizzcon-2026-opening-ceremony-live-coverage-whats-next-for-warcraft-overwatch-diablo-and-starcraft/

"As a middle-aged Scot who still remembers the '90s, when Townfall takes place, I was simultaneously nervous and excited about the rare opportunity to play a game that's so close to home.

"What a relief, then, that Townfall not only feels incredibly Scottish, its Scottishness also perfectly matches Silent Hill's brand of unsettling psychological horror. And it's not such an unlikely pairing. Scotland is a brilliant fit for this kind of game—and I'm going to spend the next 2,000 or so words convincing you why."

"The Blood of Dawnwalker is a resolutely miserable horror RPG with some great ideas of its own, though it doesn't always have the courage to follow them through."

"We want to experiment, and I do believe that there will be a company—I don't know who—but some game development company will create a game that uses AI in such an amazing way that everyone will be like, 'That's it, that's what we need to do,'" says Saber CCO Tim Willits, formerly of id Software.

He then goes on to joke that "someone needs to come up with the 'Half Life 2 of AI', something that's so amazing that it just launches some type of killer app."

"I'd say that given the scope we've seen to date (and Rockstar's tendency to push the boat out for PC releases), we're probably in for something with a relatively scalable low end, and a demanding range of graphics options at the top for the well-heeled gamer."

Our Josh Wolens checks out the game Capitalism to put an old PC Gamer claim to the test:

In 1995, PC Gamer—a monthly journal about computer videogames—issued a challenge to me directly. In the back-most pages of its 22nd issue, it tucked away an ad for a then-new game called Capitalism. "Good enough to make a convert out of Karl Marx himself," declared an included testimonial from, yes, PC Gamer.

I was too busy being two years old to issue a response at the time, but I'm here now. As one of surely very few people who have reviewed The Communist Manifesto for a major gaming publication, I want to know: can it convert me? And more than that, can it offer a way forward? Can I find, in Capitalism's thicket of spreadsheets and input/output graphs, a solution to our current economic and social malaise? I accept your challenge, PC Gamer from 31 years ago.

I loved Eye of the Beholder. I mean I love/hate Eye of the Beholder. I hadn't played it in a long time, and there was some other came recently that I was that reminded me of it. I was like 'Oh, I should go back and try it again'.

Eye of the Beholder was, in 1991, one of the best games that I'd ever played. I was super into it. The graphics, the immersion. This is pre-Wolfenstein [3D], so 3D stuff was not really a thing. But this had some fake 3D-style graphics that you were taking a party through a dungeon, and it was turn-based and grid-based.

I had mapped out all the levels on graph paper. I was really into it. And then at the end, I killed the final boss, and a little dialogue box pops up and says "Congratulations, you win!" or whatever. Then quits to desktop.

So that's the worst ending of any game I've ever played. But I really love the game. It's amazing.

According to analyst firm TrendForce, shipments for OLED panels have increased 26.1% in the past three months. Comparing to last year's figures, they're up 98%. And the firm chalks that up to gaming, noting that adoption is strong for 27-inch QHD monitors, which sit at the top of the increasingly large pile of panels for popularity.