Ideally, Dota Underlords, like its auto-battler kin, plays out as a game of slow-build strategy in which you amass an army of heroes based on synergies between them. Maybe that means a chanting brood of surprisingly survivable warlocks. Maybe that means a beefy team of brawny boys who are even beefier together than…

Last time we checked in on endearingly grouchy democratic socialist uncle and presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders’ Twitch channel, it was notably lacking in Bernie Sanders himself. It also felt more like a campaign commercial than any sort of broadcast Twitch viewers were used to seeing. Yesterday evening, Sanders and…

We’re once again in the midst of summer’s steamiest months, and you know what that means: Blizzard has made yet another Overwatch character hot. Also, Lucioball is back for the fourth year in a row. Between those two things, it’s unsurprising that it’s Hanzo “Hotzo” Shimada who’s the talk of the balmy beach town right…

Around this time last year, the professional Overwatch team Shanghai Dragons had just finished up a history-making 0-40 season. At the time, nobody would have expected that just one year later they’d be leaving the league’s top three teams in a heap of black-and-blue bodies on the ground. Maybe they should change…

Unless you’ve got the world’s most powerful ad blocker, you’re probably painfully aware that it’s Prime Day, a holiday that Amazon made up because it could. Deals parade naked in the streets and the company hosts glitzy concerts, all to encourage Amazon Prime subscribers to stick around. For the second year in a row,…

Adding fully-manned spaceships and space combat to a gargantuan online game like Warframe isn’t rocket science. It’s portal science. It’s also game development wizardry that makes my brain hurt.

Last month, Ubisoft released a tool that allows players to create their own quests in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. Players could choose to have other players’ custom quests appear in their games.. Almost immediately came a mess of quests dedicated to rapid-fire power-leveling. “To each their own,” you might say of this…

Just days after the end of a summer sale that laid bare many of Steam’s issues with helping people discover new games, Valve has announced a new section dedicated to “experiments around discoverability, video, machine learning, and more.” It’s called Steam Labs, and the first bits of mad video game science to emerge…

A couple weeks ago, I came across a Dota Underlords video that changed everything for me. In it, a player managed to buff one unit, the self-cloning Arc Warden, such that he was able to spawn nearly limitless copies of himself. The board was a sea of crackling wizards with fishbowls on their heads. I imagined an old…

This year’s Grand Prix-themed Steam summer sale was a bumpy ride, to say the least. Two weeks ago, Valve apologized and altered the sale’s meta game—in which players join teams and “race” against each other for prizes—after players found it unbalanced and confusing, and developers suffered a bloodbath of sudden…

Today, after a nearly month-long absence following his E3 bathroom stream suspension, Dr Disrespect returned to Twitch. His suspension lasted two weeks, during which he released a series of trailers for his return and tweeted an awkwardly worded apology “on behalf of the Dr Disrespect brand.” The result of all that…

G2A, a third-party gray market for game keys, doesn’t exactly have a sterling reputation, given the accusations of sub-par security, developer disenfranchisement, and fraud that have surrounded it for years. Today, someone from the company tried to take control of the narrative surrounding its shady public image—by…

Are you someone who still battles in video games by using your fingers to directly input commands, like some kind of barbarian? That’s old hat. Today, auto-battlers are all the rage. Simply buy some guys, arrange said guys, and they (the guys) will do the battling for you. With Dota Underlords, Valve rushed to…

A very wise man who wore a hood and whose skin was practically melting off his bones once said, “Good! Use your aggressive feelings, boy. Let the hate flow through you.” Probably, he was talking to a gamer about video games. Competitive games make people mad. There’s no getting around it, so you might as well embrace…

Fans of tough-as-nails animated shoot-’em-up Cuphead have been waiting since 2018 for Delicious Last Course, a DLC expansion with a whiff of finality about it. Unfortunately, they’re going to have to wait a little longer, because it’s been delayed to 2020. The developers offered a commitment to quality and a focus on…

Last week, Twitch announced a new feature that’s already proven divisive: subscriber-only streams. True to their name, they’re like regular streams, but only people who’ve subscribed (with real money) to a particular streamer are able to watch them. It’s an option that many streamers say they won’t be using, for fear…

Three weeks ago, Guy “Dr Disrespect” Beahm live-streamed himself walking into an E3 bathroom and, ultimately, walked out without a Twitch channel or an E3 badge. In the immediate aftermath of the incident, he didn’t seem to be taking his suspension very seriously, despite the fact that he may well have broken the law…

The other day, a talking robot ball was taunting me, saying I couldn’t raise my arms and pump my fists like him. This, he proclaimed, was my ultimate failing, and I would forever marinate in my shame. I raised my own physical hand and slowly unfurled my real-life middle finger. My in-game finger shot up in righteous…