• Grand Theft Auto VI will be $80
  • Ars Technica – Grand Theft Auto VI will cost more than other AAA games
  • Game Developer – Grand Theft Auto 6’s $80 price settles the $100 question
  • WCCFTech – Rockstar Reportedly Has No Plans for GTA VI Physical Disc

Did anybody think it wouldn’t be $80?  And the ultimate edition will be $100.

There has been a whole meta narrative about GTA VI needing to be at that price point to “save the industry” or whatever.  Remember that analyst who got roasted because he said it needed to be $80.  Well, now we know that will be the price point.

Grand Theft Auto VI

So what?  Mario Kart World was launched with an $80 list price a year ago.  Will this game being $80 save the industry?  Raph Koster will tell you that making a AAA gets 10x more expensive every decade, meanwhile the industry itself is in decline. (Obligatory Matt Ball State of Video Gaming presentation for 2026 link.)

Probably not.  It will sell.  Probably very well.  But that will be due to the reputation Rockstar and the franchise has earned over the last 30 years.  That won’t sprinkle any magic fairy dust that will make it okay for everybody to charge $80.  And the world will keep turning.

There are other aspects to noodle on around this topic, like the fact that you’ll be able to buy the box at GameStop, but there won’t be a disk in the box, just a code to redeem, that pre-orders are leaning towards PlayStation over XBox by a factor of 6 to 1 (the PC release will be at some later date), that the online world aspect that has kept GTA V alive and making money for a decade won’t be there at launch, and how Rockstar is going to those GTA V players onto the new game, each of which could turn into a few thousand words of text.  Just not from me.

I actually own GTA V and, according to Steam, played it for 95 minutes.  But it was never something that really grabbed me.  I’ll go with the take from The Onion.

• XBox Hardware Prices are Rising
  • Game Developer – Microsoft raises price of Xbox consoles once again
  • Massively OP – Xbox prepares to jack up its console prices by a hefty amount

XBox Games can’t even buy a good headline it seems.  Already poised for a dramatic restructuring to meet Satya Nadella’s 30% profit margin mandate and still reeling from the disaster of the XBox Game Pass price hike fiasco, somebody decided they might as well put a hardware price increase on the shit sandwich buffet that is the division right now.

Sad Xbox Games AI slop logo generated by Co-Pilot

I guess this is understandable at least.  As noted over and over, the grasping desires of billionaires to never have to pay anybody ever again has caused them to throw all their resources at data centers in order to inflict LLM hell on society means that prices for RAM have gone way up.  Sure, it still seems cheap to 1988 me who spend $400 on two 1MB SIMMs, but we’ve had nearly four decades of Moore’s Law in play which usually makes things cheaper.

Now LLMs are making everything more expensive while trying to put us out of work.  Also, Satya Nedella is pouring money into the whole data center thing, so is at least incrementally responsible for the problem that led to the price increase.

Maybe MSFT felt empowered to raise the price after the Steam Box came in at a $1,049 price point?  The gaming press seems to be living on that Steam Box price point this week, which is still more that the most expensive remaining XBox option.  So MSFT has that going for them.

Is Destiny 2 the industry’s destiny?

Massively OP – Destiny 2 layoffs have affected around 300 workers so far

As previously noted, Destiny 2 is winding down into maintenance mode as Bungie moves on to other things.  So it was just a matter of time before the other shoe dropped… that shoe being layoffs that drops straight on the head of those affected.

Destiny 2

There is a temptation to make the comparison between film and video games in that both are ventures that need a lot of work done over a specific period of time, after which the need for many or even most staff goes away.   It just feels like maybe big old Hollywood has figured it out while the little video game industry is still struggling.

Except, of course, depending on how you measure, the video game industry brings in a lot more revenue than film studios… also, Hollywood has most definitely not figured it out for current circumstances.

But both industries seem beset with corporate avarice and timidity that leads to and endless series of sequels and attempts to cash in on somebody else’s success.

• Wildgate Winds Down
  • Massively OP – Wildgate hasn’t found a large enough audience
  • Steam – Wildgate Patch 1.5.4 Announcement

I’ll take “MMOs I Have Never Heard Of” for $200 Alek… and only in the loosest definition of “MMO” I suppose.

Wildgate

Wildgate, which launcher last year under the umbrella of Mike Morhaime’s Dreamhaven studio, is pulling back into an effective maintenance mode, the news of which made me wonder why I hadn’t looked into this space based title.  And then I went to the Steam store page (where it is currently $7.50, marked down from $30 for the Steam Summer Sale and saw it described as a PvPvE extraction shooter… and that was why.

I found I already had a tag for it on the blog, but that was due to it being picked by Shintar in last years Fantasy Critic League.  It ended up with a review score of 76.4.  Not bad, but not high enough to make people take notice.

So it goes.  Extraction shooters are thick on the ground and PvP drives away a lot of players.  And this means more people out of a job as they cease development and only need a team capable of maintaining the game for the time being.

• Stars Reach Client Access Revoked
  • Inventory Full – REVOKED!

Bhagpuss has a post, linked right above, that goes into the details, but the high level is that after the Kickstarter Playable World gave us a second Stars Reach client.  I don’t know why.

Stars Reach

With the coming of their premature, need the money early access for their planetary colony sim, they decided that having two clients was confusing.

I had two clients, and since they both seemed to work identically, it didn’t seem all that confusing.  Both logged in with my Steam credentials, so there was effectively no difference I could detect.  But what do I know?  I just kept using the one I had been at it kept working.

But then Playable Worlds went through the effort to revoke access to one of the clients, giving everybody this charming message that you had to acknowledge.

Revoked!

I had never seen this before, and I have been in a few Steam based betas.  Somehow everybody else managed to avoid this and transition to another state without yoinking a registered client on which most of your play time has been recorded.  I had 30 hours on that client and an hour on the other one.

This seems like it might cause more confusion than it resolved, especially if you only had the one client.  But not everything Playable Worlds is up to makes sense to me from the outside.

• Tim Sweeney – Come with me if you want to live!
  • Game Developer – Tim Sweeney says only hope for new games is to ‘connect to economies of other games’
  • WCCFTech – Valve Is “Irresponsible” To Force AI Disclosures on Steam, Epic CEO Says, While Unreal Engine 6 Doubles Down on AI
  • Massively OP – Epic Games’ Tim Sweeney is trying to reinvent the metaverse (again)

I could write about this for days, but I don’t really want to expend that much effort on another shitty billionaire who believes the only way to save the industry is to make him richer.

And that is always the common thread in everything he says or does.

This time around his claim is that the “only hope” for new games is to connect to older, successful games, by which he means Fortnite.  This will, of course, let him collect rent on those new titles.

In order to make this as easy as possible, connecting with Fortnite and locking your game into its ecosystem so you must pay Tim forever, is a big part of the new Unreal Engine 6.  He hopes that the popularity of the engine will give him a lock on the ecosystem.

He is also reviving the dead on arrival idea of sharing assets across games.  You get a hat in Fortnite you can wear it in other games in the ecosystem.  He can’t be that dumb in reality, so this has to be a pitch to investors who don’t know any better.

Also, because he hates paying other people, even the people who work for him and make him obscenely wealthy, UE6 is going all in on AI slop, something certain to appeal to industry CEOs everywhere.

Finally, he is mad… again, still, moreso, or whatever… at Valve because Steam requires you disclose AI use on its storefront.  He hates that, and nothing says you feel confident you are doing a completely legit and acceptable thing than getting mad when people mention it.

But EA is on board for it all… and there is an endorsement that really tells you you’re on the wrong side of history.

Steam Summer Sale 2026

There was a time when I was in a rush to post about it soon after it started.  There was a time when knowing about the sale right away because there used to be daily, or even hourly special sales.  That, however, that fell by the wayside long ago.

Even the more general level of enthusiasm for the sale has kind of worn off over the years.  I should see if I can track how into these sales I was over the years via these posts.  There used to be a whole thing about going in and finding the mis-priced item, the title marked down too far.  But Valve has even gotten better at that.  I wasn’t there to check the site as the sale went live… I had stuff to do yesterday, so no time for a live post… but I bet the place didn’t even fall over like it used to.

All of that said, it is still an even worthy of note as Steam and its sales have changed the industry and, to a certain extent, forced it to play by Valve’s rules.  The sale dictates when a host of third parties who list on Steam offer their products at a discount on their own site as well as Steam.  Other companies run Summer sales in parallel.  Blizzard and GoG.com started theirs a bit earlier.  Epic did a sale in late May, not that I noticed.  I had to look that up because the only time the Epic Game Store gets a mention is when they are giving away something for free or when Tim Sweeney says something noxious.

The big deals are all on the deep discount page, which has some titles worth eyeing.

A sample of the deep discounts

You can see Wreckfest is there on the list for $2.99, the same price I mentioned I saw at GoG.com.

Some things on my wishlist are marked down, though that list has shrunk to a mere 16 titles as I have purged the things that lingered there for years that were never cheap enough for me to invest in.  Or that the reality of the titles did appeal to me once they launched.

Civilization VII is half price, just $35 for the duration of the sale.  But every time I go check the Steam charts more people are playing Civilization VI or Civilization V than the new entry in the series.

Steam DB rankings for Civilizations

Who am I kidding?  I am more likely to play Civ II than Civ VII.  I want a Civ II remastered that fixes the pathing problems.  But there are a lot of hurdles to making that happen, not the least of which is who even owns the rights to the game at this point.

Anyway, there is a whole post to be written about how Civ VII went wrong, but I won’t be writing it because the plan they announced before launch scared me off.  So that got removed from my wishlist a while back.

Half of my wishlist is in early access at this point as well, titles that look interesting but to which I am not ready to commit.  I have enough on my plate already.

And don’t mention Steam hardware.  The window has closed on Steam Box pre-orders, Steam Controllers have a 2027 delivery estimate, and the Steam Deck is there, but a bit pricey… like all hardware these days.

Hell, they don’t even have a good game on the site for the event this year.  You can earn some cards leafing through your discover queue, which I kind of like to do.  But nothing jumped out at me.

I earned my sale cards though

Still, I know I will dig around the site some more this weekend.  There is the possibility of something catching my eye.  I have had more than one sale opening post where I declared I wasn’t interested in anything only to end up buying something.  We shall see.

Related:

• Steam – Main Store Page
• Steam – Special Deals Page
• Massively OP – The best MMO and multiplayer deals from Steam’s 2026 summer sale

Stardew Valley Splash Screen

Everything is new to me past a very early point in the game and when an event comes up I will stop and wait until she can log on both to ensure she has seen it as well as making sure I understand what is important.

So while I play on our save during weekday evenings, I will stop and wait for the weekend for us to get in sync.  And so it was when I was notified that the annual luau was coming up.

When we got on together… we call to talk while we play… she explained that the focus of the luau was the soup, which was not something I would normally associate with a luau, and I have been to more than a few over the years.

The soup depends on adding in quality ingredients, so as the day of the luau started she went looking around for the right item while I grabbed a gold star radish I had harvested the day before.  It took a bit, but she finally found what she was looking for, so we headed towards the beach and… the luau was over.

The luau runs from 9am to 2pm, which is also a bit out of character for a luau, my experience being that they tend to be evening events.  But those people in Stardew Valley have their own customs I guess.

Not that the residents of Pelican Town can’t stay up late.  I went to the Moonlight Jellies event when it rolled around, and that ran from 10pm until midnight.

Staying up late for the jellies

So we both exited the game to restart the day. Saves only occurring when you go to bed at night, so if you quit mid-day you start back on the same morning.

This time we move a bit more quickly and were there early… and had to wait a bit.  But we were soon at the luau.

The luau in progress

The plan seems to be to add your special ingredient to the soup, then to go talk to everybody, but specifically speak to Mayor Lewis twice, once for the general social interaction and then again to get the soup tasting under way.

The governor, the guy in the purple up at the top of the screen shot, shows up for this special day and to judge the soup.  He was not enthusiastic.

Who’s the soup nazi now?

If he had been enthusiastic about the soup I would have gained rep with everybody in town.  Of course, if he didn’t like it, the whole thing would have been neg rep.  Everything hangs on your one ingredient I guess.  But an average soup… well, things go on as before.

Also, despite being scheduled into the early afternoon, the day is over once the governor renders his verdict.  We were sent back home and it was time for bed.

The morning brought a new surprise, a green rain.

While our daughter was knowledgeable about the luau, this was something new to her.  The town was in a bit of a panic and most everybody gathered at the Stardrop Saloon, exchanging conspiracy theories, while we went out to see what this green rain meant.

It was probably not encouraging to find Demetrius out in the green rain in a full hazmat suit.

But how long will that lifetime be?

As it turned out, the green rain just makes trees and bushes and grass grow very fast.  Also, there was a lot of moss to collect, an ingredient for later things.  Meanwhile Mayor Lewis got word from the governor that there was nothing to worry about.

The phones were still working at least

I will note that the governor was well out of town while saying this.

Anyway, we were out harvesting when we got the message that a train was passing through town.  This was back on familiar territory for our daughter, but something new for me.  So we ran up to where the train passes through to collect things that fell off.  For us it was coal.

The train in the rain stays mainly on the plain

This did remind me a bit of some things I had read about the Soviet Union in the 30s during the famine about children checking along the railroad tracks for lumps of coal or anything else they could find to help their families… and getting sent to the gulag if they got caught.

Fortunately, the governor’s regime is not so heavy handed.

But that was two new things for me and one for both of us.

Forza Horizon 6

There is also the issue of having something to say.  My previous post about the title was devoted to its open world nature that continues to reward you even if you decide to roam around, driving down every road while knocking over mascots, sign boards, and whatever gets in your way.

A 5,000 point sign board in a stadium

This time around, as the title of the post strongly suggests, I want to talk about actually racing.

There is a whole progression/story line that you need to follow to fulfill your completionist desires.  In fact, there are two parallel progression lines.

Inside you there are two progression paths

Discover Japan is its own thing, and I will post about it later.  But the Horizon Festival path is the usual race focused advancement that you have to follow if you want to unlock all of the crazy, flying through the air, racing against airplanes and mechs events.

Damn Daniel, at it again racing airplanes

That means doing at least some of the race events.  You have lots of options on the map.  That map is littered with races.

Things to do while driving in Japan

The thing is, all race events are not equal.  There are some at which I am… I was going to say “good,” but that overstates my ability… adequate, and others at which I struggle.  I am prone to arriving in last place in street race events on windy roads in wet weather at night… especially when the cars in the race are somewhat over powered.

Honestly, I am absolute crap when driving super cars or anything that has a high power to weight ratio on anything with tight corners.  I tend to be heavy on the throttle which, in a car that spins the tires and breaks loose if you lack a delicate touch, tends to end up with me facing the wrong way or off in the bushes or what not.

This is not helped by the fact that I turned off the rewind button, which will roll you back a few seconds of driving time, because I kept hitting it by accident.  So, in opting to commit to my mistakes, I have hamstrung myself a bit.

I also tend to treat racing as a full contact sport, my favorite routine being to come in too hot on a corner on the inside when there is somebody I can slam into in order to help myself through the bend and off to the next straight away.

Generally I am best served with modest to under powered cars; the James May philosophy of it being more fun to drive something common to its limit than to fiddle with the super cars.

Where I tend to do better is when things are at least a bit off road.  Putting me in a Subaru or a Mitsubishi AWD sedan and pointing me towards the dirt is more fun for me.

Went pavement for an off road rally start

Even better is something where big off road vehicles are involved.  That Jeep I mentioned a post or two back, that will go go go across the landscape and over hills and off of jumps like no other.  All I need to do is keep enough control to get through the checkpoints.

Off we go in some more durable off road vehicles

So you would think I would just stick to my strengths.  But that would require planning and focus and I can’t even do a three race series.  I hate those.  I do the first race and then meander off and run the next race I land on and get this warning that if I do this race, the one right here in front of me, then I will lose all progress towards whatever it was I just started but completely lost the thread for because the other races were on the other side of the map.

So what will happen is that I will get an off road race or two and the game will chide me for playing in the kiddie pool, encouraging me to step it up a bit.

Hey, you’ve been winning!

So I do it.  And then I’ll hit a set of road races or things on the track and I’ll come in 10th place out of 12… or maybe 12th place if I really got myself stuck… and then the game comes back and tells me I suck and maybe I should stay in the kiddie pool.

Hey, you’ve been losing!

Here’s the thing.  If you run enough races you’ll still unlock the next festival event and get to go jump through the air as you race against planes or mechs, and you’ll come out the other side with the next wristband.

It says “expert,” but not expert at what!

And even when I am not doing so well… it is still fun.  Maybe a bit frustrating when I’ve slid through a turn too fast and wedged myself against another bridge abutment and have to scramble to catch up to the pack, but it is all a good time.

Behold the Steam Machine

And by “arrived” I mean you can now queue up to be on the randomized-order list of people who will get to buy one whenever they are available.  But to get in on that first group you need to go there and sign up by 10:00am Pacific Time on June 25th, which is freaking Thursday, so go do it if this is Steam machine is your dream machine.

The whole things is… about as rumors suggested.  I mean, in looking at the order page over on Steam, there is nothing outlandish or really surprising.  It very much follows on from the success of the Steam Deck, going from the handheld form factor to a console form factor.

It runs SteamOS, a flavor of Linux, which Valve has been honing for a while now to run Windows games using Proton.

Valve makes a pitch that it is really a PC, and certainly the host of connector options on the device speak to that level of flexibility.

The i/o layout of the Steam Machine

They even invite you to install your own apps and operating system, because why limit your target audience or throw a fit like certain console makers about what you do with the hardware you have purchased?

Really though, this is a PC games console, and Valve says, “Your Games on the Big Screen!” right up front.  As somebody who recently wrote about the joy of playing Stardew Valley on our TV (rather than on the tiny Switch Lite screen), I can certainly get behind that.  Somewhat.

There are two configurations available, one with 512GB of storage for $1,049.

Base Model Steam Machine

And for $300 more you can get a 2TB model.

Somewhat more Steam Machine

They also throw in a couple of other faceplates for the device at that price point.  I am going to guess that soon Etsy will be teeming with cute faceplate options, but for now you get black, walnut, and red fabric.

Each configuration is also available with a Steam Controller, which knocks $20 off the price of buying them separately.  I haven’t been convinced of the need for one, but Valve sold out of Steam Controllers the moment they landed.  I assume they held some back for these bundles. Meanwhile the word is that the Steam Machine itself will start shipping on June 29th.  However they haven’t said how many units that first batch would entail.  It is probably a small number, something in the low to mid three digits.  So who knows who is getting what and when?

There is that, plus whole thing feels a bit pricey, running a bit more than $6 per cubic inch for that 6″x6″x6″ cube.  The price seems to be at the core of most reactions to the announcement.  People expected it to be less, and I suppose I did too.  I mean, last November EuroGamer was wishcasting the idea that it ought to be “$400 with a controller” to send a real message.

Yeah, it ain’t that.  And the actual price sends its own message.

I will admit that my PC parts price tolerances are from a time before we had a madman setting tariffs at random and disrupting trade by losing wars, all while a host of billionaires are out buying up RAM futures and GPUs to feed the seemingly endless need for data centers to build out their dystopian vision of the future where they own everything and we have to say “please” and “thank you” for merely being allowed to exist on their planet.

Everything costs more now, so one would expect this would as well.  I haven’t tried to build out one on my own based on parts, but I bet I wouldn’t do a lot better.

And there is some value in the compact size alone.  The Steam Machine would fit nicely on the shelves on our TV stand.  And nothing says that you’re going after the living room market dominated by consoles than the form factor.

But, as a console, it also doesn’t bring me anything new.  The Steam Machine merely locks me into a subset of the PC games I already play.  While you might note that the two titles I have mentioned playing on my new Switch 2 are ALSO titles I could play on my PC (Stardew Valley and No Man’s Sky), there is at least access to an ecosystem of Nintendo titles, including some Pokemon titles I might actually invest in.

And the Switch 2 plays on the TV like a console or as a hand held.  I already use it in both modes.  Oh, and it was $449, less than half the Steam Machine price.  I feel confident I would make the same purchasing decision today.

(Nintendo is no doubt subsidizing the hardware price, and Valve says we shouldn’t want that.  But I wouldn’t expect subsidies from Valve either.  Nintendo lives or dies on the number of hardware units they ship to support their software ecosystem.  Valve lived high on the hog with Steam software sales alone long before it went after hardware.  And hardware subsidies don’t buy mega yachts for Gabe.  So I am a bit mixed on the subsidy thing.  Valve could certainly afford it… if they were serious about breaking into the market.)

All of which means that the Steam Machine, at least this first iteration in this particular point of time, is not for me.  It doesn’t deliver enough for the price being asked.

Not that I don’t feel a bit of desire.  I appreciate the design and if I wanted to do co-op PC gaming on the TV, this would seem an ideal candidate.  But the base model would need to be… $650 to keep a Playstation 5 from being in contention.  I wouldn’t consider an XBox for sure, given where all of that is going.

If you are eager to get one, I won’t be cluttering up the queue trying to get on the list, so there is at least that.  I’m just here to see how this plays out.

I bet Valve will sell/ship all they can make for the rest of the year.  After that… we’ll see.

Related:

• Steam – The Steam Machine Page
• Ars Technica – Valve’s Steam Machine ships June 29 for $1,049
• WCCFTech – Valve’s Steam Machine Pre-Orders Open at $1049
• WCCFTech – Steam Machine Either Hides a Fat Margin or Got Rinsed by Suppliers
• Massively OP – Valve’s wild Steam Machine price tag has gaming consumers balking
• In An Age – Steam Machine is $1000+
• Aftermath – The Steam Machine Is An Iconoclastic Computer Born In Unforgiving Times