The Steam Controller officially launched just a couple of weeks ago on 4th May, but – outside of scalpers – you’d be hard pressed to find it in stock. Since the controller can only be purchased directly through Steam, it has created a bit of a bottleneck for Valve, and the company has now been forced to alter its reservation estimates in response to high demand.
Just three days after the Steam Controller went on sale, Valve implemented a reservations system that would place interested customers in a queue. For the last few weeks, they’ve been notified each time the controller comes back in stock, and it’s their turn in line. But Valve has now admitted demand for the peripheral has exceeded its expectations.
Watch on YouTube
In a new blog post, Valve explained that while its reservation queue helped put customers at ease, it has now realised it simply won’t be able to make Steam Controllers quickly enough to satisfy demand.
“We have no plans to stop making Steam Controllers,” it wrote. “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.”
To that end, the Steam Controller page will now give players a time frame as to when they can expect to receive their order email, which is itself based on when the reservation was made. As it stands, you’ll see one of three estimated windows: ‘By September 2026’, ‘By December 2026’, or ‘In 2027’. If you’ve already made your reservation, the page will now show one of these three order windows.
The bad news is that, if you haven’t reserved yours yet, you’re not likely to get a controller this year. According to Valve, the current estimate for orders placed today and going forward will likely land you in the 2027 window. These estimates will be updated the closer we get to each window, which is some consolation.
Image credit: Eurogamer
It’s easy to see why the Steam Controller, which costs £85/$99, has been popular. It emulates the experience of using a Steam Deck, essentially turning any PC into one. It also eliminates the need for a mouse to navigate certain portions of the UI, while offering a comfortable controller for sofa gaming – solving two problems at once.
In our Steam Controller impressions, Matt Wales wrote that despite its many ergonomic and feature triumphs, it still remains a niche product. “You’ll probably already know if there’s room in your gaming set-up for Valve’s latest effort, and if that’s you, it’s a rock-solid upgrade,” he wrote. “But for everyone else, at £85, it’s unlikely to be the best choice compared to traditional controllers.”
Bond sets out to earn his licence to kill in IO Interactive’s hugely enjoyable retelling of the agent’s early years. Mixing the stealth and open environments of Hitman with the narrative drive of the Uncharted games, there are fistfights, cool cars and hi-tech gadgets aplenty. Read the full review.
Forza Horizon 6
Photograph: Microsoft
The grand festival of car racing returns, this time bringing its automotive chaos to Japan, where bamboo forests, winding mountain roads and dense city streets play host to a wealth of driving challenges. With astonishing visuals and more than 500 beautiful vehicles, this is escapist gaming on a whole new level. Read the full review.
Forbidden Solitaire
Photograph: Grey Alien Games/Night Signal Entertainment
Trapped in a hellish dungeon surrounded by monsters, your only way out is to play increasingly challenging rounds of solitaire while your sister figures out who the heck made this cursed game in the first place. A brilliant puzzler housed within a clever meta conceit. Read the full review.
Mythmatch
Photograph: Team Artichoke
Cast out by the insufferable dudebros of Mount Olympus, aspiring goddess Artemis must prove her worth by helping the mortal inhabitants of a small village. Mixing the dynamics of a match-three puzzler with a warm narrative about kinship and perseverance, this is a multilayered treat. Read the full review.
Titanium Court
Photograph: AP Thomson
A fascinating combination of match-three puzzler, tower defence game and fourth-wall-breaking stage-play, Titanium Court has you crowned queen of a faerie citadel that you must defend from its mysterious enemies, matching tiles to arrange the battlefield to your advantage and exploring the court at night. Confused? You almost certainly will be. But in this spectacularly innovative game, that’s almost the point.
Pragmata
Photograph: Capcom
When contact is lost with a lunar research station, space cop Hugh Williams is sent to investigate – only to discover a seemingly abandoned base ruled over by a despotic AI. With the help of a charming android child, he attempts to shut it down, hacking robots and blasting drones as he goes. An engrossing sci-fi romp with a cute parental relationship at its core. Read the full review.
Resident Evil: Requiem
Photograph: Capcom
Rookie FBI operative Grace Ashcroft sets out to investigate a series of mysterious deaths tied to the destruction of Raccoon City many years before. Soon, she’s being stalked, spooked and kidnapped, while series hero Leon Kennedy closes in. Combining tense stealth and barnstorming action sequences, Requiem gets to have its zombie and kill it too. Read the full review.
Saros
Photograph: Sony Interactive Entertainment
Colonists have gone missing on a distant planet and as part of the team sent in to find them, you must battle cybernetic creatures, explore weird fractured environments and die over and over again. Saros is an action game with style and vision, placing truly uncompromising demands on brave (foolhardy) space farers. Read the full review.
Cairn
Photograph: The Game Bakers
Aava is not a normal person; she is one of those fascinating maniacs obsessed with scaling places that no human ought to reach. On her trip up this forbidding mountain, you control her individual limbs, searching for hand and footholds in the rock. The higher you get, the more urgent the question becomes: why is she doing this, and what kind of person do you need to be to follow this kind of obsession? Read the full review
Pokémon Pokopia
Photograph: Nintendo
The latest spin-off from the Pokémon series is a delightful life simulation in which you must restore a ruined planet by building, planting and exploring – all with the help of various Pokémon pals with distinct personalities. Combining elements of Minecraft, Stardew Valley and Viva Piñata, this is a cosy yet complex adventure that brings new dimensions to Pikachu and co. Read the full review.
Three new actors have been added to the cast of Amazon’s acclaimed Fallout TV adaptation, as preparations continue for the show’s third season.
Manny Jacinto, Emily Mortimer and Thomasin McKenzie have all joined the series, Deadline reports, and while details on their characters remain a mystery for now, each will have a recurring role come season three’s debut.
Fallout 4: Anniversary Edition – Official Nintendo Switch 2 Launch Trailer. Watch on YouTube
Jacinto’s previous TV credits include as Jason Mendoza on the NBC sitcom The Good Place (very funny, would recommend) and the Stranger in Star Wars series The Acolyte.
Mortimer, meanwhile, has an expansive list of credits to her name, with her film roles including Notting Hill, Paddington in Peru, Shutter Island, and The 51st State. She has also starred in numerous television shows, including playing Phoebe in 30 Rock alongside Tina Fey.
Rounding out this trio of new cast members is McKenzie, who starred as Astrid in The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies before gaining wider recognition for her role as Elsa Korr in Jojo Rabbit. All three actors join returning cast members Ella Purnell and Walton Goggins, as well as fellow series newcomer Aaron Paul. Production for Fallout’s third season starts in LA this month.
Okie dokie, please welcome Emily Mortimer, Manny Jacinto and Thomasin McKenzie to Season Three!!! pic.twitter.com/YyKefdhRfn
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Fallout was renewed for a third season last May, months before season two made its debut. Then, in December, Bethesda’s Todd Howard confirmed writing for season three was already underway.
As for season two, it dolloped plenty of Easter eggs upon fans, including some familiar faces from games including the very first Fallout.
The 90s were a gold rush for adventure games. LucasArts kicked off the decade with its legendarily irreverent Monkey Island games. Then, Cyan Worlds materialised to deliver a series of atmospheric and boundary-pushing odysseys with Myst and Riven. Nestled between these primary genre texts is The 7th Guest, a lesser-known but still notorious adventure that earned plaudits for its unique FMV visual style, blending live-action filmed footage with pre-rendered 3D backgrounds. It was remade originally for VR, and now has been reconfigured into something playable on PC and consoles, its digital cobwebs cleared and tricky puzzles tinkered with for a fresh (or nostalgic) audience.
We are dropped into the ectoplasmic shoes of an amnesiac apparition, arriving at the gloomy haunted home of a toy-maker. Armed with a time-bending lantern and a Ouija board-shaped map, your job is to solve a historical whodunnit by literally illuminating events from the past. It’s a melodramatic, surprisingly campy adventure that effectively evokes the overzealous CD-Rom horror of its original era.
The dilapidated design of the manor can take some of the credit here, with its dusty ornate chandeliers and garish framed portraits lining the halls. But it’s the haunting spectres that make the most impact as you work through the story. To capture the original games’ full-motion storytelling, this rendition uses volumetric video capture on 3D models, creating an uncanny visual effect. This anachronistic look bolsters the game’s unnerving atmosphere, and I quickly became obsessed with stalking the figures and watching the polygons pop and bounce as if in response to the flamboyant performances of the game’s cast.
Melodrama … The 7th Guest Remake. Photograph: Vertigo Games
Set dressing aside, the real meat of The 7th Guest Remake is its puzzles, which scale from approachable to migraine-inducing. You’ll find yourself rerouting a model train to attach cabooses, playing a theremin to explode runic vases and restructuring the squares of a musty quilt to re-create the cycle of life. Because the answer to each puzzle is crystallised in the past, you’ll need to use your mystic light to explore and scour each area for clues. This could have easily become tiresome over the game’s six-hour runtime, but the well-executed visual trickery and careful theming of each bedroom and rumpus room keep it from feeling like work.
The only problem with this spirited remake is that controlling it can be a nightmare. While you can move around the manor freely, shining your light on whatever you please, when you want to interact with something, you’re back to a finicky point-and-click system. You have to wait for a skeleton hand icon to appear on an item before you can engage with it, and the tracking of your inputs isn’t reliable at all, leaving you stuck nudging your mouse around a millimetre at a time to try to pick something up or press an intriguing button. This may be a result of the transition from VR, but given that The 7th Guest was a point-and-click game in the first place, the controls feel egregious.
It’s easy to see why The 7th Guest was so beloved in the first place. Vertigo Games has given this classic a well-deserved facelift, ratcheting up the impact of its theatrical story and unique historical atmosphere. Frustrating mechanical woes aside, it still feels like essential reading for puzzle-lovers who wish to experience one of the classics that shaped the adventure game genre.
The 7th Guest Remake is out now; £17.99/$19.99/€19.99
The usage of generative AI and LLMs is among the most controversial – and polarising – topics in game development today. Players and critics are becoming more alert to the use of such tools in games, scouring the Steam store pages of each newly-announced game to see if the tech was used during development.
Take-Two, the parent company of Grand Theft Auto 6 developer Rockstar, used to have a division dedicated to researching and exploring the ways AI, in its different forms, could help game development. That was true until April, when the company reportedly laid off that entire AI team.
The move was surprising, considering how many companies are either quietly, or outwardly embracing the implementation of generative AI in the development pipeline. But most of the people laid off weren’t actually working with generative AI.
Image credit: Rockstar
The team, which started off at mobile developer Zynga before Take-Two acquired it in 2022, later had its responsibilities expanded to cover the whole of Take-Two. In an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Dr Luke Dicken, the team’s former head, revealed that the skunkworks operation was founded in 2019, well before the 2022 public launch of ChatGPT and the subsequent rise in interest in generative AI.
“Generative AI is not something that I have ever been particularly passionate about,” said Dicken. “It was something I think there’s a moral obligation to see managed as best as can be, but also on the understanding that for any big corporation in 2025/2026, no generative AI is the wrong answer that will get a lot of people’s backs up.”
Dicken rightly pointed out that it’s a polarising topic, but that “some of the excesses of genAI are so egregious that you need to make sure you’re able to push back.”
Image credit: Rockstar
What he’s interested in seeing instead is a more holistic look at AI, not just generative AI. “Five years ago, you’d say you have an algorithm that will be really beneficial for accelerating level generation content in a mobile title,” he recalled.
“Back then, people looked at us like we had two heads. Now, the hype of AI has created an environment where I could tell you that AI is going to be the thing that moves your game to quantum computing, and people will nod and say: ‘Yeah, we want AI in the game’,” he added.
The upside is that “it has made people more receptive to conversations about what traditional techniques could have done for them years ago. They are more inclined to believe things like that can exist.”
Unfortunately, because of how overblown the hype around generative AI currently is, most people may abandon the entire field of AI research if the bubble pops.
“My worry is that generative AI is poisoning the well,” he added. “I don’t think there is enough sophistication and nuance to retain the traditional stuff. For LLMs, we have already stumbled into the trough of disillusionment.”
Every generation gets its own Simpsons game. Them’s the rule-diddly-ules. For some, it was the arcade cabinets that swallowed pocket money throughout the 1990s. For others, it was The Simpsons: Cartoon Studio. For millennials like myself, it was The Simpsons: Hit & Run. Joe Zanetti, vice-president of operations at Monopoly Go! developer Scopely, traces his Simpsons gaming nostalgia back to Konami’s 1991 brawler, The Simpsons Arcade Game. “That’s the one that made such an impression on me,” he says.
It certainly did, because Springfield has just crash-landed in Monopoly Go! itself through a collaboration involving Simpsons writers, animators and voice talent alongside a new animated short starring Dan Castellaneta, Nancy Cartwright, Harry Shearer and Will Ferrell. While most licensed TV games have faded into obscurity, The Simpsons keeps finding new digital lives.
“It was a true Simpsons little episode,” says Loni Steele Sosthand, a co-executive producer who is in her sixth season writing for The Simpsons. She’s speaking to us from the Fox lot in Los Angeles, where she is currently working on the show’s 2027 Treehouse of Horror episodes – just to give an idea of how long these projects are in the works.
The Simpsons has always felt unusually suited to games. Unlike many sitcoms, Springfield isn’t just a setting but an entire densely populated world with hundreds of characters, dozens of recognisable locations and decades of running jokes waiting to be explored, from the Stonecutters to Mr Sparkle.
That flexibility has allowed the franchise to move effortlessly between genres, from arcade beat-’em-ups to open-world adventures. Monopoly Go! is simply the latest stop on the gaming monorail.
Sosthand thinks the reason is simple. “At heart it’s a family show,” she says.
The latest stop on the gaming monorail … Monopoly Go!, featuring the world of The Simpsons. Photograph: Disney/Scopely
It’s also a show that has always thrived on mischief, which gives the creators permission to be naughty themselves. “It’s not: ‘This is our box,’” says Zanetti. “It’s more: ‘How can we break the box?’”
The most unusual thing about the new Monopoly Go! collaboration – a two-month Springfield takeover featuring original storylines, animated shorts, themed mini-games and dozens of Simpsons characters – is the level of creative involvement behind the scenes. Rather than licensing characters and applying a yellow coat of paint, Scopely worked directly with Simpsons writers, artists and animators for months. It was less about borrowing Simpsons characters and more about borrowing Simpsons writers.
“We weren’t just providing a homage,” says Zanetti.
The team obsessed over details. Characters such as Rich Texan and Homer’s pet pig Plopper made their way into the game alongside familiar faces. One of Sosthand’s favourite inclusions is Cowboy Carl, a nod to her Writers Guild award-winning episode Carl Carlson Rides Again, which explored the character’s Black cowboy heritage.
“We were trying to come up with a joke for every mechanic,” Zanetti says. “That one really felt very writers’ roomy.”
Veteran animator Eric Keyes, who has worked on the show since the beginning, acted as an unofficial quality controller. “He can just glance at something and see if there’s not the right number of eyelashes,” says Sosthand.
Decades ago, a Simpsons video game typically meant a TV show adapted into interactive form. Today, the relationship runs both ways. “I’ve been impressed with the richness of this world we’re creating,” says Sosthand. “I have a newfound respect for games.”
Live-service games such as Monopoly Go! are places where audiences spend years rather than hours. For a franchise as established as The Simpsons, they can offer something television increasingly struggles to provide: an endlessly expandable world.
Over nearly four decades, the series has survived every major shift in entertainment: broadcast television, DVDs, streaming, social media. Most franchises eventually become trapped by nostalgia; The Simpsons seems to dump it straight back into the Springfield nuclear power plant and convert it into fresh fuel.
Perhaps that’s why the showdown between Mr Burns and Mr Monopoly in the game feels oddly natural. As Zanetti puts it, both occupy “a really important place in the zeitgeist”.
More than three decades after Homer first walked into Moe’s Tavern, Springfield remains woven into the fabric of popular culture. And if the journey from arcade cabinets to Monopoly Go! proves anything, it’s that The Simpsons’ greatest trick was never predicting the future. It was finding new ways to belong in it.
The Simpsons season of Monopoly Go! is running until 29 July as a free download on iOS and Android.
Let’s be real: There’s no shortage of Zelda-style games to play right now. That’s true even if you’ve exhausted all there is to see in Tears of the Kingdom or Echoes of Wisdom. Indie developers keep finding new ways to refresh the formula, whether it’s fusing it with a Soulslike, making it cozier, or simply shrinking it down into something more manageable. Now we have Square Enix and The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales, a curiously named RPG that mixes the classic Zelda structure with something that resembles Final Fantasy. And it’s a combination I can’t seem to get enough of.
The Adventures of Elliot is the latest in Square Enix’s “HD-2D” line of games, a loosely collected series defined largely by their visuals, which reimagine pixel art for modern audiences. The other defining trait is every game has an incredibly weird name, so Elliot fits right in. Many are more traditional JRPGs, like the Octopath Traveler series, some Dragon Quest remakes, and an actual Final Fantasy game. But Square Enix has also grown the HD-2D style to encompass more genres, like Triangle Strategy’s, well, strategy, and now an action-adventure game.
As you can probably guess, Elliot stars an adventurer named Elliot in a world of magic and monsters. In Elliot’s time, most of the land is a dangerous place, with only a single city free from the beast tribes, as it’s under the magical protection of a young princess. That makes adventurers like Elliot an integral part of society: They’re the ones who go out into the world and complete tasks that are otherwise too risky for normal citizens. Soon enough he gets pulled into a larger adventure with the fate of the kingdom at stake, at first involving one of the king’s advisers with a thirst for power and eventually spanning multiple timelines across a thousand years.
There are many clear similarities to Zelda. You cut down grass and jewels appear; you collect pieces of heart to increase your health; you slowly unlock an arsenal that includes bombs and a boomerang; you heal yourself with magic elixirs collected in empty bottles. Eventually you even get a fairy companion who is extremely annoying. The structure also feels very Zelda. There are smaller dungeons where you unlock new powers and abilities, and then larger ones where you have to use those powers and abilities to solve puzzles, find a big red boss key, and then take on the bosses themselves.
I’m making The Adventures of Elliot sound like a Zelda clone with an HD-2D sheen, but it’s much more than that, thanks in large part to the roleplaying elements and worldbuilding. While you don’t earn experience and level up like in a typical RPG, there are a number of elements reminiscent of games like Final Fantasy. Most notable is a collectible substance called magicite, which lets you customize Elliot’s various weapons to better suit your playstyle. Similarly, there are a number of different magical spells your fairy can learn, which lets you do things like light enemies on fire or warp out of danger. And like in a traditional JRPG, you spend a lot of time talking to folks in towns and watching cutscenes, poring over dialogue as the story unfolds. Elliot is a very chatty game, and its main character will give you a good idea of what Link would be like if he ever spoke. (Nice but kind of boring.)
What really pulled me into this world, though, is how detailed and expansive it is. You’re essentially exploring the same map across four different time periods, and as you go back you learn more about how the world was, and thus how it came to be the way it is in Elliot’s time. There’s a highly advanced era where magic is prevalent and has led to new technologies, and one that lives in the ruins of that society, as humanity struggles to survive amid the growing monster threat. You might see a beautiful building in one era that’s nothing but a wreck in the next, or empty fields that eventually give way to a sprawling kingdom. The game lets you freely jump around between the time periods, as many quests involve going backward or forward in time to learn some vital piece of information or collect an important item.
Image: Square Enix
It’s all very Chrono Trigger, and it makes the world of Elliot feel like a real, lived-in place with centuries of history to discover. The layout of the world remains largely unchanged from one era to the next, but there are important differences: cities that are larger and more elaborate in one time period, or bridges that haven’t been built yet, forcing you to find a different path. The same goes for caves and dungeons, which are like remixed versions of themselves as you explore them across eras. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention just how important cats are in this game; they’re everywhere in the world, and finding and befriending them unlocks some very important items.
Elliot is also streamlined in a way that makes it approachable without being overly easy. The game is very generous with save points and fast travel. For instance, I’d often complete a dungeon right up until the final boss, and then fast travel to a town to refresh my resources before jumping into the main fight. Your fairy companion can revive you in a boss battle for a price that increases with each revival, so if you’re struggling with a particular enemy, you can always grind for cash to make things a little easier. The game still rewards skill: You can build up a combo for every enemy you defeat without taking damage, and the higher the combo, the better the item drops you get.
Like the rest of the HD-2D games, The Adventures of Elliot takes something that looks and feels very familiar, but adds just the right amount of modern touches and ingenuity to make it stand on its own. There may be a lot of Zelda-style games — and more coming — but few as polished, creative, and expansive as Elliot. Don’t let the goofy name scare you off.
The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales launches on the Nintendo Switch 2, PS5, Xbox, and Steam on June 18th.
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As with all previous Battlefield 6 seasons, Season 3 unfolds over three phases. The second phase of Season 3 kicked off last week, albeit with a large number of bugs and issues, and the next one will arrive 30th June.
This third and final stage, dubbed High-Value Target, will be released alongside a big patch, as expected. The new stuff part of this update includes the Wet Work event, which kicks off with its release.
Wet Work is introducing what the developer calls a “contract-focused experience”, which will be available in traditional Battlefield 6 multiplayer, as well as the Redsec free-to-play portion.
Contracts, according to the blog post, will be dropped by eliminated players. They can be picked up by anyone else, and will then trigger a mid-match objective for you to chase. Some of the examples given include killing enemies, looting chests in Redsec BR, capturing objectives or simply staying alive for a set period of time.
Image credit: EA / Battlefield Studios.
If your brain has been rotted by playing too many multiplayer shooters, this concept may sound familiar. That’s because it’s eerily similar to the Field Order mechanic from the often maligned Call of Duty: Ghosts. Much like Contracts, Field Orders – represented by a briefcase icon – would drop from dead players. When picked up, they’d trigger a brief, mid-match challenge, very much along the lines of what Battlefield Studios is alluding to here.
Fulfilling a Field Order would award you with a Care Package that only you could open. Care Packages, of course, include one random Killstreak. It’s unclear what rewards await players who fulfill the Contract challenges in Battlefield 6. More details about Wet Work, and its Contracts system, will be unveiled closer to launch.
Speaking of events, the game’s next update will debut the new event menu, which Battlefield Studios says will make it easier to track event challenges and their rewards by moving them into one place. This is a welcome change, especially as it will also show event-exclusive modes, too.
Image credit: Infinity Ward, Activision
Elsewhere in the same update, you can yet again expect changes to gunplay and vehicles. On the gunplay end, Battlefield Studios is working on tweaking recoil, weapon handling, bullet dispersion, and limb damage modifiers. Bullet velocity and drag are also being looked at.
Vehicles, on the other hand, are getting another balance pass. Thermal Smoke will no longer counter C4, and RPG damage against tanks and helicopters is being buffed. More interestingly, the automated AA at team spawn will no longer protect land vehicles, and will go on a 20-second cooldown after each retaliation attempt, rather than continue its targeting indefinitely.
The developer also revealed that the game will be getting a ‘Mark All Seen’ button to cut down on instances of the ‘New’ orange markers appearing on many screens. You can look forward to being able to clear all markers in Loadouts, Battle pass, Store, Profile, Challenges, and the main Play tab.
Aimee Davies, better known as Aimsey to their fans, is 24 but looks much younger. Sitting in a bland meeting room above the annual TwitchCon event in Rotterdam, they’re a barely contained whirl of energy in a beanie hat and T-shirt, all smiles and lightning-fast chatter. Aimsey (who uses they/them pronouns) is also a Twitch veteran, having started streaming eight years ago at the tender age of 16. A million subscribers tune in every week to see them chaotically play Minecraft and share snippets of their life. They have grown up, from teen to young adult, carrying a vast audience with them into maturity. What is it like to experience that?
“When you’re 16 you want to tell everyone everything about you,” they say as music blares from the event below. “When I came out as a lesbian, I told the world. Every part of my identity, my mental health struggles … I thought if I could help one person feel like they weren’t alone, I wanted to do that.”
For several years Aimsey was in a relationship with another content creator, Guqqie, and it played out in front of their fanbases with very little filtering – until it ended. It’s a situation common to streamers – they’re young and naive, they build an audience through sharing personal details with few boundaries, then the pressures of endless invasive attention take a toll. “Honestly, for a long time, the lines got blurred,” says Aimsey. “Streaming would seep into my real-life friendships, where I thought the only way people would be my friend was if I could give them something – because that’s obviously how it is on a stream.”
Recently however, Aimsey has learned how to step back and be a little more guarded. “I’ve been so open all my life, but I was falling into these cracks where I was like, God, who am I? I felt like I couldn’t figure that out. I think that in the last few months something switched in my brain. I’m living a little bit more of a reserved life. I’m still myself when I stream, but I’m trying my best to keep some things private – at least for now. I surround myself with people who definitely remind me that I’m not just content.”
Fellow Twitch star Sweet Anita is older at 35 years old, but she too is a veteran, having streamed since 2018. As a sufferer of Tourette syndrome, the platform has been a kind of emancipation. “Streaming has changed me a lot,” she says. “I used to be a timid person and quite apologetic – obviously I’d learned to be after a lifetime of dealing with Tourettes. I feel like streaming really gave me a space to be myself without constantly having to apologise to people. I have a lot more fun, I reach out to more people, I’m a lot more sociable now.”
Some visitors play in a racing simulator game. Photograph: Lina Selg/AFP/Getty Images
It concerns her that so many children are now listing content creator as their ambition. “When I was a kid, it was astronaut or fireman, but now they desperately want to be in my position,” she says. “But it’s a little bit of a trap because once you’re here, people don’t forget you. You could leave tomorrow and someone might continue stalking you for the next 10 years. Once you’re in, you’re in. The only difference is how much security you can afford.”
For its part Twitch recognises the vulnerability of streamers. It has set up guilds to help specific minority groups navigate the platform and communicate concerns to the executives. It has created an AI-driven AutoMod feature, which polices chat during streams to delete abusive messages. “We’ve invested heavily in moderation tools so streamers can define what safety looks like to them,” says head of community Mary Kish. “It is going to be very important to be familiar with how you can protect yourself. I’m worried about anyone who might think on a whim, I’m going to go live. You need to be prepared – you need to have mods, or at the very least, turn Auto Mod on, you need to set your community up. We have a little work to do to make sure that anyone making their first stream understands what they’re getting into.”
Tellingly, neither Aimsey and Sweet Anita have plans to stop streaming any time soon. “Honestly, my vision is I’m probably always going to be streaming,” says Aimsey. “It’s something that’s been so consistent in my life and I adore it. That could change. But I’ve got so much more stuff I want to do with Minecraft – I want to do events, I want to do more stories and role-play, and there are so many more ideas in my head that there’s no point in even thinking about stopping.”
Sweet Anita has plans to move on from video games, at least some of the time. “I used to do animal rescue before this and I haven’t done enough for animals – that’s what I’d like to do next. I hope I get to go to animal sanctuaries, I hope I get to show people endangered animals. I’d love to do some rehab again, release some wild birds, that was the core of my existence before all of this.”
A streamer known as pearlescentmoon is among the visitors. Photograph: Lina Selg/AFP/Getty Images
The maturation of both streamers and stream watchers is certainly something Twitch itself is thinking about. A huge majority of streams used to be about playing and watching video games, but recently categories such as Just Chatting and In Real Life (IRL) have become more popular. Streamers are getting out of their home studios and taking their viewers on days out, to restaurants, on walks, and beyond – top creator IShowSpeed has been streaming while scuba diving. Shayanelhawk literally sent his Twitch chat into space.
“Right now our biggest age group is actually 25-34 because people have aged up while using it and they keep using it,” says CEO Dan Clancy. “We’ve seen this in the growing diversity of content because as creators get older, they have new interests and their community stays with them. So I think we’ll see continued diversification. I’ve often conjectured that when the so-called Twitch generation gets to 60-70, we’ll see all these knitting and crochetting streams. As you get into retirement – the issue of looking for connection that you had as a teenager comes back, because the kids have left home, you’re looking for people, for community – and you have time. As we saw during Covid, Twitch is a platform that explodes when you have time.”
The one massive gamechanger lurking on the horizon is AI. There is already a successful AI avatar streamer, Neuro-sama, a cutesy anime girl with 1 million followers. Will Aimsey be part of the last generation of human teens who’ve had the chance to become, and grow up, as streamers? They think not. “No matter what happens there is always going to be an audience for human-made things. It doesn’t matter what we do, it doesn’t matter how big AI gets, there’s always going to be people who need that human connection to feel real.”
SanDisk has announced an expensive way to boost the PlayStation 5’s storage capacity. The company’s new Optimus GX PRO 850P NVMe SSD is an officially licensed PS5 accessory in capacities ranging from 1TB to 8TB. The largest option can store up to 200 PS5 games (based on average installation sizes) SanDisk claims, but thanks to the global memory shortage, it will cost you $2,959.99 when it’s eventually available through the company’s online store, discounted from $3,699.99.
Even after you take into account Sony’s recent console price hikes, you can buy three PS5 Pro consoles for the price of just one of these 8TB sticks. But the smaller capacities are similarly expensive. The 4TB version is $1,499.99 (discounted from $1,874.99), while the 2TB option is $759.99 (down from $949.99) — still $100 more expensive than the standard PS5.
The new SSD features an “optimized heatsink built specifically for the PS5 and PS5 Pro M.2 slot” and has been tested for both consoles so gamers can “store more and play more with confidence,” according to SanDisk. A Western Digital SSD (SanDisk’s parent brand) with similar specs to the new $3,000 option is currently available on Amazon for $1,470. And as VGC points out, according to the price comparison site PC Part Picker, that Western Digital SSD sold through retailers like Best Buy and Newegg for around $640 last year. When compared to this new SSD, that’s over a 360 percent price increase for the same capacity. So while AI is potentially making games worse, it’s also making them more expensive to play.
