Warframe’s next update – Jade Shadows: Constellations – has finally arrived, bringing with it two new Protoframes: Ryoku and Vena. A relatively recent addition to the sci-fi shooter’s playable repertoire, Protoframes – essentially human versions of the game’s familiar Warframes – were a bold swing that won hearts and minds a few years back, and they’ve remained popular ever since.

When Protoframes were introduced in 2024’s Warframe: 1999 expansion, they were accompanied by an in-game romance system to much acclaim. Once players got a taste, they’ve desired more ever since – but Jade Shadows: Constellations’ new Protoframes are different.

Here’s a gameplay trailer for Jade Shadows: Constellatons.Watch on YouTube

“What’s interesting about Ryoku and Vena is I’m sure people will feel a certain way about them not being romanceable, but they can’t all be romanceable,” community director and live ops lead Megan Everett told Eurogamer.

This time around, Warframe’s new Protoframes play a mentor role for the stars of the update: Warframe brothers Orion and Sirius. Rather than attempting to woo Ryoku and Vena, players can side with one over the other, flying off for a space battle that concludes with a tense boss fight against your chosen foe. This is quite the drastic deviation from the norm with Protoframes, something Everett believes is necessary, even if she understands the demand for love.

“You have to branch out with Protoframes to make sure they still have that freshness, and dabble with what players like. But, I already see feedback about people wanting romance – I think everyone will always want romanceable Protoframes.

“I know if my favourite Warframe got a Protoframe, and I wasn’t able to do anything like that, I’d be so upset. But if you play the Constellations quest, you’ll understand why these characters are so linked to Sirius and Orion, and why they’re not an option to be romanced.”

It is worth noting that while a desire for romance is ever-present with Protoframes, it hasn’t always been included with the introduction of new ones. During last year’s Techrot Encore update, for instance, the game introduced four characters, each with their own narratives that meant romance didn’t always make sense. Two of them were divorced, for example.

For Everett, while the presence of romanceable Protoframes has been good for the game, it cannot be so present that it begins to lose its lustre. “Our players love the romance systems – it shows our players can swing different types of ways,” she explains. “They aren’t all around the metagame; not just about the grind. They are open to different gameplay avenues. That’s beneficial to us – the lore ones, romanceable ones, and now these mentors. We don’t want to have this Protoframe burnout – if we did it for every one we released people would get annoyed.”

There’s also the challenge of throwing in an ever-growing collection of romanceable characters to an audience who may already feel happy with a pre-established in-game relationship:

“You can’t make players care about a character so much, and then throw them another character they can date,” Everett says. “When we released the Triad, we had to emphasise you could still date the Warframe 1999 characters, to make sure people wouldn’t feel icky and gross. People got really attached to Protoframes, we’re beyond appreciative. We just want to avoid frustration wherever possible.”

This concern stretches beyond just the topic of romance, however. Too much of a good thing can have its downsides, and “Protoframe burnout” is an ever-present concern on the minds of Warframe’s developers. In Everett’s words, they have to “remain special”.

“We do four new Warframes a year, plus Prime Warframes. Adding Protoframes into the mix in a consistent way would lead to burnout. So we have to pick-and-choose, and have a strategy for where they go. They have to make sense thematically, and fit into the narrative. It’s not to say that Protoframes in the future won’t be datable, or some won’t have a divorce arc or whatever, but things must stay fresh.”

Becoming a professional fighter takes years of repetition, drilling techniques and training footwork until everything is instinctual. Your body needs an automatic answer for every limb, from every angle. In MMA, which encompasses every martial art, it’s even harder.

EA Sports’ UFC 6 realistically captures the grind of this brutal discipline. Throw on Career Mode and you spend most of your time working on combos and techniques. It’s all about making the complex controls feel second nature, increasing the effectiveness of every strike thrown by your fighter. With simulated six-week-long training camps between bouts, you can sometimes spar 12 times before a fight that could be over in a matter of seconds.

It’s an authentic fighter experience. In real life, these athletes spend relatively little time actually trying to take each other’s heads off with a shin, and most of their time training. In a game, however, it’s a bit of a slog. Once you’ve proven that you can ace these drills you can skip them, but you get fewer benefits. And it’s still laborious, as is tending to your inevitable injuries.

Happily, the fighting itself is excellent. UFC games have had a bit of a rock-’em’-sock-’em quality to them, but this latest instalment does a great job at creating more natural animations, flowing beautifully between the different levels submissions, wrestling, and stand-up — of an MMA fight. It looks almost worryingly realistic, too. From the pores on their skin to the wrinkles on the soles of their feet, these character models are the most detailed I’ve seen in a sports fighter, as impressive as Fight Night was when we saw HD video games for the first time. You can even tell who’s a standup fighter and who’s a wrestler by who has the most disfigured ears.

Every fight takes its toll on their bodies, too, with bruises and cuts appearing in direct response to your strikes. Blood droplets fly through the air and stain the canvas. When you land a knockout punch, the slow motion replay cranks up the volume so you hear the crunch of bone on bone and see cheeks wobble like a basset hound barking at a hairdryer.

A welcome new addition is The Legacy, a story mode that mythologises the rise of an up and coming fictional wrestler who’s trying to escape the shadow of his famous father, while brewing up a rivalry with another prospect at the same gym. It’s fully acted-out melodrama, your very own Rocky story, shining a light on how violence occasionally spills outside the Octagon and stains careers; inbetween fights, you attend press conferences and respond to provocations on social media.

The story does a great job of pulling you along for the first few hours as you go from rivals to friends and back to rivals again. It gets you invested in the action and raises the stakes, but the narrative climaxes near the beginning of your UFC career and then fizzles out. It feels like a bit of a missed opportunity to keep you engaged when you reach the top and have to defend your belts. Nonetheless, between the fluid fighting and the story-mode razzmatazz, this is the best version yet of EA’s fight-sim series.

UFC 6 is out now; £69.99

Epic Games has been touting the potential of an interoperable metaverse for years, though that vision hasn’t yet become a reality. But with Unreal Engine 6, the next major version of its game development engine, Epic plans to take a big step toward that theoretical future: It will let developers make games that can use a player’s Fortnite skins and will let developers build skins of their own that work with Fortnite.

“We’re tackling this problem first because we want to prove things out with a system that’s complex enough to be a meaningful existence proof of the idea, and one that inherently comes with a ton of player value by respecting their purchases across an interconnected ecosystem of games,” Marcus Wassmer, Epic’s EVP of development, says in a blog post tied to Epic’s State of Unreal keynote.

Should this system work and get broadly adopted by developers, it could actually be pretty cool. I have spent more money on Fortnite skins than I care to admit, and I imagine it would be fun to romp around in games that aren’t Fortnite with outfits like John Wick or my favorite Stormtrooper Samurai.

But for that to actually happen, developers will have to do the work to implement support for the systems in their games, which isn’t a guarantee. They’ll likely need some kind of incentives to make the effort with it instead of just opening a door that feeds back into Epic’s Fortnite ecosystem. And with Epic targeting an early access release for Unreal Engine 6 for the end of 2027 — and the full release coming “12-18 months later” — it will be a while before all the tools are in place for interested developers to even begin implementing ways to allow Fortnite skins in their games.

This is also all being announced as Fortnite is facing some challenges, with Epic laying off more than 1,000 workers in March due to a dropoff in Fortnite engagement. Fortnite is still popular — it has 75 million monthly active users, Epic’s Hannah Lowry said on stage. But it’s not as big as it once was, and Epic is trying to turn things around with more gaming crossovers and a planned shift to show the Roblox-like “Discover” screen featuring different experiences when you boot up Fortnite instead of dropping you into the lobby. And Epic’s planned “persistent universe” it’s building with Disney still hasn’t come to fruition after being announced more than two years ago.

Epic is also getting pushback against its approach to generative AI. This week, it detailed how it uses generative AI to assist with making art for Fortnite, and as part of the State of Unreal news, Epic said that it would add an experimental MCP plugin to Unreal Engine to let developers connect LLMs to their projects to help with generating assets and other parts of development. On stage, Epic announced a planned Fortnite crossover featuring the indie hit Vampire Survivors, but Poncle, the developer of the game, said that because of “today’s news about gen AI usage by Epic to create all sort [sic] of game assets, including Fortnite characters,” it would be “reviewing” the collaboration.

Along with today’s cover art reveal, Rockstar has also quietly revealed its best visual overview so far of Grand Theft Auto 6’s crime-laiden metropolis, Vice City.

This new look at the series’ version of Miami comes via the official GTA 6 website, which has had a bit of refresh and now includes a dynamic view over the city as you scroll down the page. The city is bathed in the pinkish hue of a setting sun, and the video reveals more, we see helicopters moving across the sky, boats in the harbour, activity on the docks and a ferris wheel lighting up the far shore.

GTA 6 Official Cover Art Reveal Teaser Trailer. Watch on YouTube

There is also a tennis court in the lower right corner of the final shot, with two people meeting under its floodlights. Are they about to have a quick rally, or are more nefarious deeds afoot? (Given this is Vice City, anything is possible.)

This clip offers only a brief look at Vice City but it gives an idea of just how dense and detailed GTA 6’s world will be. This city seems alive, lit up by billboards and high rise buildings, with activity stuffed into every available corner. I just hope we get a tennis mini-game or something similar. Rockstar did once make a table tennis game after all.

Image credit: Rockstar

Following a couple of delays, GTA 6 is set to release on 19th November on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S. Pre-orders will be available from 25th June, Rockstar announced today, along with that aforementioned GTA 6 box art reveal.

Meanwhile, Rockstar Games is also embroiled in a legal dispute with the UK’s Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB), which in November accused the company of committing “one of the most blatant and ruthless acts of union busting in the history of the games industry” after it dismissed around 30 employees. Yesterday, an employment tribunal ruled against Rockstar Games’ request to remove blacklisting claims from this ongoing legal dispute. It’s going to trial on 10th September.

In March 2000, Bill Gates stood onstage at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco and, to a packed crowd, officially announced the company’s long-anticipated video game console. “We want Xbox to be the platform of choice for the best and most creative game developers in the world,” he told attenders – and that was indeed the intention of the small, dedicated team who put together the blueprints of that first machine.

The Xbox landscape seems very different 25 years later. Last week, mere days after a bullish summer showcase full of Gears of War revivals and promises of a renewed focus on Xbox’s gaming strengths, new CEO, Asha Sharma, and chief content officer, Matt Booty, wrote a memo to Xbox staff inviting them to brace for “hard truths”. “Excluding Activision Blizzard King, over the past five years, we have spent over $20bn on ongoing investments in our content, platform and hardware subsidy, but our annual revenue has declined nearly half a billion during that time. Going forward, this cannot continue,” it read.

With grim inevitability, Bloomberg and Kotaku reported that Xbox is planning to cut costs by shutting three studios: Ninja Theory, Double Fine and Compulsion Games. All three are said to be in the process of negotiating with Xbox in order to buy their independence and avoid closure.

None of this has yet been confirmed by Microsoft, but several members of staff at the affected studios have publicly posted that they are available for work. Sharma and Booty’s memo warned that Xbox would need to “reset” in order to meet the challenges of the modern industry. “We expanded our studio system when we needed a pipeline of content to meet multiple strategies across subscription, streaming and devices,” the memo said. “In the process, we have found ourselves overextended.”

Microsoft also cites the “hardware component crisis” as a motivator for change – a components crisis that Microsoft itself has driven, along with every other company that has powered the AI boom. A reminder here that Microsoft overall posted profits of $217.4bn in the most recent financial year.

Craig Duncan, the head of Xbox Games Studios, and the chief of staff, Louise O’Connor, have both resigned from their positions, perhaps after discovering how the company planned to correct its over-extension: by shutting the sorts of talented studios that Microsoft once relentlessly pursued and purchased. Ninja Theory and Double Fine are both multiple award winners, responsible for some of the most fascinating, boundary-pushing games of the past two decades, from the gruelling mythological psychodrama Hellblade to the wacky cartoon adventure Psychonauts. Compulsion, meanwhile, produced South of Midnight, a truly original southern gothic thriller and Peabody award winner. Now they are to be jettisoned in favour of more Halo and more Gears of War – two ageing franchises that have almost certainly left their best years behind.

Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II. Photograph: Xbox Game Studios

It is all the more frustrating when you consider how recently Xbox was grandstanding these studios as creative giants. During the Xbox Showcase in early June, the third Hellblade instalment, Senua, was given its world premiere followed by a glowing feature on the Xbox Wire site. Now Ninja Theory will need to gather whatever funds it can manage to survive and continue its project. In April, Sharma and Booty sent out a different message to staff – a sort of Jerry Maguire-style vision statement containing a list of 10 commandments for the business. One was “Makers over managers”, another was “Clarity is kindness”. How much clarity was extended to the team at Ninja Theory in this case?

It is, after all, not the first time Xbox has been here. In 2024, the company shut Arkane Austin and Tango Gameworks, the latter after delivering unexpected hit HiFi Rush. In 2025, Microsoft made 9,000 staff redundant and cancelled high-profile game projects including a Perfect Dark reboot and new title Everwild from Rare. This was all after billions were found to purchase Bethesda and Activision. (Going further back, Microsoft is also responsible for purchasing and then closing legendary British studio Lionhead.)

The newest whispers are that Xbox plans to spend cash to speed up development on new Halo, Fallout and Elder Scrolls titles. There are even reports that Xbox itself may be spun off into a separate company by Microsoft. It is an enormously disappointing situation for anyone who has spent two decades buying, playing and adoring Xbox games. It’s true that many of the market conditions the company is now facing could not have been predicted when Seamus Blackley, Kevin Bachus and the rest got together to put the original console together 25 years ago – the industry has been through massive technological changes and now faces ceaseless competition for consumer attention.

But a division founded on a love of games, a division that brought us Halo: Combat Evolved, Xbox Live, Forza, Fable, Sea of Thieves and hundreds of other wonderful titles and experiences, now appears to be in danger of being finally, fatally overcome by its corporate owner, intent on undoing decades’ worth of work to build a portfolio of diverse studios full of talented developers making interesting art. For developers as well as fans, the future has got to be brighter and broader than this.

What to play

The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales. Photograph: Square Enix

Hot on the heels of last month’s brilliant Mina the Hollower, comes a second piece of playable Zelda worship: The Adventures of Elliot. Says our reviewer Tom Regan:

“Created by the makers of Octopath Traveller, this Square Enix published Link-a-like swaps Mina’s swear-inducing sadism for a breezy, big budget take on top down Zelda. Rendered in glorious 2D-HD, it reimagines Link’s Gameboy-era time-travelling adventures as a sprawling, narrative-driven modern adventure, part Chrono Trigger, part Oracle of Seasons. Our obnoxiously upbeat hero journeys through the ages in order to solve puzzles, uncover lost magic and of course, save the princess. With Breath of the Wild-esque temples hidden across the map, fast travel, and constant hints about your next destination, Team Asano sacrifices retro mystique for satisfying forward-momentum.”

Available on: Nintendo Switch 2, Xbox, PS5, PC
Estimated playtime: 30-50 hours

What to read

Social media apps are to be restricted to young people under new laws in the UK. Photograph: Hollie Adams/Reuters

• There is much more to be written about this when we have more information, but the UK government announced an “Australia-plus” social media ban for under-16s this week. It seems the ban will not target online gaming spaces, but will make it mandatory to prevent under-16s from talking to strangers on voice chat and messages (functionality that already exists on all games consoles). The real effect here will be on the spaces where teen gamers gather: Discord, YouTube, and Twitch. What will Twitch even look like without teenagers?

• For more video games and politics, a new book from George Osborn (not that one, promise) shows how rightwing and authoritarian governments from the US to Russia to Saudi Arabia are way ahead on using games as third spaces to build political influence. It’s called Power Play, and it’s out this week.

• Vintage UK computer brand Commodore has announced a new electronics product … a flip-phone. “Welcome to the Internot,” promises the Commodore Callback. This extremely Y2k-looking device blocks browsers and social media but still runs other useful apps, though honestly I don’t fancy going back to typing messages without a touchscreen.

What to click

Question Block

Titanium Court. Photograph: AP Thomson

This week’s Question Block is a question for you, readers:

“What are the best games of 2026 so far?”

We published our favourites last week: unfortunately (or fortunately, for one other game that would have gotten knocked off the list), these were compiled a couple of days before Keza discovered Ribbit. Titanium Court (pictured above) ranked highly for both of us, and Pokopia, Pragmata and Forbidden Solitaire also feature.

What did we miss? Have you already played something you’re sure will be a favourite by the time December comes around? Write in a paragraph about it and we’ll round up some reader recommendations in a couple of weeks.

If you’ve got a question for Question Block – or anything else to say about the newsletter – hit reply or email us on pushingbuttons@theguardian.com.

The $50 GB Operator is an accessory that lets you connect, play, and authenticate Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance cartridges on PCs and other devices. Now it’s getting some new functionality for the Game Boy Camera. After turning the Game Boy Camera into a charmingly awful desktop webcam two years ago, device-maker Epilogue has just released an iOS/Android mobile app so you can take photos while the Game Boy accessory is connected to your smartphone through the GB Operator.

The Game Boy Camera was a terrible camera even by 1998 standards when it was released. It captured 0.01434-megapixel images in just four shades of gray and images were trapped on your Game Boy unless you printed them or bought a third-party cable to extract them. But it was accessible and affordable at $90, which is also part of the appeal of Epilogue’s solution to using the camera with modern devices.

The GB Operator isn’t free, but paired with the new Flashback app and your phone it’s a cheaper alternative to devices like the $240 Analogue Pocket that also work with the Game Boy Camera. The app reads the data straight from the Game Boy Camera’s aging Mitsubishi M64282FP sensor so the images you capture with the accessory attached look exactly the same as they would have decades ago. But the app’s experience is better than what was offered on the original Game Boy with options to make adjustments to settings like shutter speed, gain, exposure, sharpness, dither, and grain, plus the ability to apply one of 32 different color palettes.

If you don’t own a Game Boy Camera or the GB Operator, Epilogue’s Flashback app also features a software mode that simulates the accessory’s capabilities. Photos captured by your smartphone’s camera are processed and output as low-res 128 x 112-pixel images with dithering and a minimal color palette. When using the real Game Boy Camera hardware or the app’s simulation mode, images you create are stored in your phone’s Camera Roll so they’re easily accessible and shareable.

Epic Games boss Tim Sweeney took to the State of Unreal stage yesterday to deliver a rallying cry of sorts to the games industry, which he described as being “in a time of both crisis and also opportunity”. And guess where the opportunity is? But we’ll come back to that.

Sweeney closed the show by referencing the “huge” number of games – blockbuster games – he says he sees releasing but that are “failing” to find audiences large enough to survive.

“We’re seeing often hundreds of millions of dollars of [development] costs followed by tens of millions of dollars of revenue, and the costs are continuing to grow,” Sweeney said at the start of his talk. “It feels to many like a tidal wave is sweeping over the triple-A game business.”

“On the upside, there’s a new generation of gamers coming in with new tastes in games, and they’re playing at a higher rate than any previous generation,” Sweeney said. “The biggest games, like Fortnite, are once again growing and thriving. But underneath this, there’s a serious challenge to triple-A developers, and that’s that a huge number of the new releases of major games are failing now.”

Watch on YouTube

He believes this is partly the result of generational changes in how people interact with games and the types of experiences they want. Games are increasingly socially driven, he said.

“In the old days, it was: you decide to play a game, you download it, you may play it by yourself or maybe play multiplayer with strangers. Nowadays, it’s much more about you getting together with your friends and then deciding what to do together online, to play a game or experience.” This favours “long-established” games, he said, which probably explains why PlayStation’s top five most-played games in the US in 2025 were exactly the same as they were in 2024: Fortnite, Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto 5, Minecraft, and Roblox, in varying orders.

Of those games, it’s Roblox that seems to particularly aggravate Sweeney, perhaps because it presents a direct sort of competitor to the user-generated games and experiences Fortnite also offers.

“One view of the future is that Roblox grows and eats gaming,” Sweeney said. “A lot of people are saying this online. What you have there is a centralised platform that has a single ‘gatekeeper’ that commoditises everything and takes more than 70 percent of revenue generated by 450 million users. So that’s a real challenge to game developers,” he added.

The other thing Sweeney sees is the economy of games shifting to people buying things inside them, rather than buying the games themselves. That and the war of attention games are waging with not only other games, but social media apps like TikTok.

Image credit: Epic Games/Disney

“The final trend that’s affecting gaming is that the market for players’ attention has become extraordinarily competitive, more so than I’ve ever seen before,” Sweeney said. “We were competing with lame television and other things. Nowadays, there’s all kinds of social media platforms as well as things like prediction markets that trend almost into vice – all competing for people’s times, all very effectively.”

Sweeney’s vision for a “brighter future” is, unsurprisingly, one that revolves around Epic’s products and especially the Unreal Engine, which is what it wants to unify the games industry with.

“We’re going to all need to change the way we build things,” Sweeney continued. “We’re going to need to build better games. We’re going to need to build them more efficiently. We’re going to need to design upfront and build for connected games, where all of our player bases are connected socially and our economies are connected, so that players, instead of seeing these as isolated products, [they] see them as part of a global ecosystem that all game developers participate in together.”

Indeed, Epic intends to be the first to demonstrate that idea in action. As part of the same show, the developer talked about the upcoming Unreal Engine 6 allowing Fortnite skins and other assets to be usable in other games, and vice versa. These so-called “smart assets”, which aren’t just limited to Fortnite, are designed to work across different games, provided they’re all running on Unreal Engine.

Epic Games is not itself immune from the ills of the games industry. The company laid off more than 1000 developers in March. In recent years, Epic expanded to support the explosive growth of Fortnite, but a drop in Fortnite player engagement is partly what caused that wave of layoffs. At the time, Sweeney also called out issues affecting the rest of the industry as well as Epic itself, like the declining console hardware sales.

You can’t help but wonder if developer Team Asano is in a private competition with itself to come up with the most ridiculous name for a video game. Following Project Triangle Strategy and Bravely Default: Flying Fairy we have this mouthful: The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales. It’s a playable love letter to the Zelda adventures of yesteryear rendered in the studio’s trademark glorious 2D-HD art style, melding evocative pixel sprites with modern visual effects.

From west Philabieldia, born and raised, our hero is adventurer Elliot. The antagonist making trouble in the neighbourhood is a king’s dastardly aide intent on summoning an ancient evil. The story is pure after-school-TV schlock, fully voice-acted but still unafraid to make you sit through reams and reams of text, and the action comprises treasure-hunting, temple-roaming and dispatching monsters. It’s part Chrono Trigger, part Oracle of Seasons as our almost obnoxiously upbeat hero journeys through the ages in order to solve puzzles, tip his fedora and of course, save a princess.

In each of the world’s four time periods, your surroundings change to suit the age you’re in, helping you uncover new abilities and the realm’s mysteries. While there is potential for a darker tale to be told, this is all stupendously saccharine stuff. It’s a world where everyone is pure of heart except for the mustachioed villain. Side quests have you saving cats and running errands for orphans.

Luckily, it’s a blast to play. What starts off as a straightforward exercise in Zelda worship later possesses a surprisingly deep and customisable combat system. Equippable gems allow you to modify your weapons and mix up your gameplay, boosting a sword’s critical hit ratio or adding flames to your arrows; combining these different fun effects can result in total grin-inducing carnage on screen later in the game. Even the weapons themselves are fairly inspired. Alongside your quintessential classics such as a shield, sword, bow and boomerang, there is a wildly swinging scythe and utterly devastating hammer.

Some friction is introduced by refreshingly challenging late-game bosses, but everything else on this adventure is designed to speed players along to the credits. With Breath of the Wild-esque temples spread out across the map, fast travel and constant hints about your next destination, Team Asano sacrifices retro mystique for satisfying forward momentum. A controllable fairy companion helps you solve puzzles by, for example, bursting into flame to light candles, but she also constantly remarks on each new dungeon and cave, advising you on whether it’s worth exploring. Such constant good-natured assistance may make Hollow Knight players scoff, but Asano has made the decision to keep the good vibes rolling, also ensuring that younger players are never hopelessly lost.

The Adventures of Elliot is not especially ambitious. It is a comforting balm during turbulent times. If you can stomach its occasionally nauseating earnestness, this rich fantasy world is a cosy one to retreat to. And despite my instinctive reaction to the off-puttingly cheesy dialogue, this charming world eventually began to warm even my cold, cynical English heart, thanks to some inspired dungeons and rewarding, customisable combat.

The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales is out now; £49.99

Valve has some good news and bad news about Steam Controllers. The good news: If you make a reservation for a Steam Controller, the company will now show you one of three estimates of when you’ll be able to actually order your gamepad: by September 2026, by December 2026, or sometime in 2027. The bad news: Any reservations made today “indicate a 2027 date for shipping,” Valve says.

“We have no plans to stop making Steam Controller,” according to Valve. “But as we look at the current demand compared to how many we know we can make by the end of the year, we want to manage expectations as much as we can with regards to when folks can expect to receive their order.”

Valve’s very good new Steam Controller went on sale in early May, and the initial rush led some people to run into frustrating problems with trying to check out ahead of the controllers eventually going out of stock. A few days later, the company announced that it would be implementing a reservations queue for interested buyers so they could get on a waitlist. If you’re on the waitlist, when you get notified that a Steam Controller is ready for you to buy, you have 72 hours to actually make the order.

“When we launched Steam Controller last month, we quickly saw that initial demand exceeded our expectations,” Valve says. “Switching to a reservation queue has (hopefully) cut down on the headaches on the customer side, and for us it’s also been helpful as we plan ahead and try to get as many out as quickly as we are able.”

All three of Valve’s big hardware products were delayed from a planned early 2026 launch because of the component crisis, Valve still hasn’t announced when the Steam Machine PC or Steam Frame VR headset might go on sale. However, just yesterday, Valve officially launched its big SteamOS 3.8 update with support for the Steam Machine. It’s also been importing a lot of hardware into the US as of late.

AdHoc has released a patch for its occasionally quite rude superhero workplace comedy Dispatch on Switch, addressing some of those controversial censorship mandates put in place by Nintendo.

When the game made its Nintendo debut, many fans were disappointed to discover Dispatch was heavily censored on Switch and Switch 2, with characters’ nipples and penises covered by a black box, and noises of sexual pleasure dampened down. Soon after, AdHoc said it understood why its fans were “pissed” and that it was working with Nintendo “on a path forward”.

Dispatch – Official Launch Trailer. Watch on YouTube

Which brings me to today, and Dispatch’s HR Violations Pack, which is available to download in Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand. Once this pack has been downloaded, Switch players will be able to choose whether or not they see all of the game’s various “breasts, butts and birds (AKA, obscene gestures)” on offer.

While this is an improvement, there are some “hard requirements from Nintendo” which apparently remain, so those aforementioned moans of sexual pleasure are still muted and you won’t see any penises on screen. AdHoc has at least sought to make the censorship for these bits a touch more playful, though, and players can choose to cover up the offending dangly with either an “elegant mosaic, the classic black bars, or…utter chaos”. If you choose the path of chaos, then you will see the penis covered up with the likes of denim hot pants (“Strategically placed jorts, anyone?”) or an oozing jam donut.

Those who have Dispatch on Steam or PS5 will also be able to choose from the game’s new censorship options, though Uncensored will remain the default settings on these platforms. This will also be the same when the game arrives on Xbox this summer.

Image credit: AdHoc

Despite this recent blip in public favour, Dispatch has been a huge success for AdHoc, selling over 1m copies in just 10 days following its initial release last year. Thanks to this success, the studio is now considering a second season, possibly with even more sex scenes given the “ravenous” response to the first season.