Top story · Analysis
How a living-room meetup grew into the Game Developers Conference
GDC began as a few dozen developers meeting in Chris Crawford’s living room in April 1988, then outgrew the house before the year was over.
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Xarmo News
Games, guides and sharp opinions from the browser arcade outward — Xarmo, Steam, Fortnite, browser games and whatever else is worth playing or understanding.
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Games
How Apex Legends went from a secret launch to 50 million players in a month
Guides
Turn Steam Notes into a campaign log for long strategy games
Platforms
Steam July hardware survey: 16GB VRAM and eight-core CPUs move in front
Analysis
The Witcher games in order: where should you start before The Witcher 4?
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Reporting
Timely reporting, updates, announcements and developments that do not belong more naturally in a specialist section.
Gaming Culture
Gamescom 2026 preview: the games and showcases worth watching
August is about to stop being quiet. Gamescom arrives with playable blockbusters, giant platform line-ups and enough trailers to ruin several release calendars.
Resident Evil
Resident Evil Requiem leads a busy 30th-anniversary year
Resident Evil's August 2026 picture combined a very active 30th-anniversary year with a new mainline release already in players' hands and another remake project on the horizon.
PC Gaming
August 2026 PC games: the quieter month is still full of interesting releases
A quieter release month is good news if your backlog is already threatening to become a second job. It also gives stranger games more oxygen.
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Analysis
Explanations, market snapshots, comparisons and deeper interpretation of how or why something matters.
Fighting Games
Fighting game frame data explained: startup, recovery and advantage
Frame data is less about memorising tables than answering one useful question: after this move hits, misses or gets blocked, who gets to act first?
Steam
What PC players are actually playing in August 2026
The PC market is not one trend. It is old competitive games, free-to-play ecosystems, returning hits, new releases and weird breakout ideas all fighting on the same screen.
Fortnite
Payday showing up inside Fortnite is a bigger deal than another crossover skin
A crossover skin borrows a character. A playable Payday experience inside Fortnite borrows the entire front door.
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Guides
Practical how-to material, settings, troubleshooting, advice, shortcuts and other reader-actionable stories.
Indie Games
How to find indie games you will actually enjoy without chasing every viral hit
Treat “indie” as a starting label, not a genre: use specific mechanics, moods and session needs to narrow recommendations before hype makes the decision for you.
Cloud Gaming
Cloud gaming feels rough? Check the network path before changing devices
Before replacing hardware or resetting anything, isolate cloud-gaming problems by checking the supported client, local network path and each service's own bandwidth or latency guidance.
Speedrunning
How to start speedrunning without caring about a world record
Pick a short category, learn one route at a time and treat your first completed run as the real milestone.
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Xarmo
Stories specifically about Xarmo, Xarmo games, site releases, features, experiments and project updates.
Xarmo
How Xarmo's browser arcade became a place to play and read
Xarmo started from instant-play browser games and has been growing a publication around the same idea: useful things should be one click away.
Xarmo
Rope Rush is a timing game disguised as one button
One button is enough when the timing window keeps asking a different question.
Xarmo
Three safe checks when a Xarmo browser game feels wrong
Xarmo is built around browser games on a shared public site, so the useful way to reduce friction is to treat the browser, controls and individual game state as separate layers.
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Platforms
Steam, Epic Games Store, PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo, subscriptions, hardware ecosystems and platform-level changes.
Epic Games Store
Epic Games Store reaches iPhones in Brazil, widening Epic's mobile push
Epic Games Store has launched on eligible iPhones in Brazil with Fortnite and Rocket League Sideswipe, adding another iOS market for Epic without amounting to a worldwide rollout.
PlayStation
PlayStation Plus August 2026 games are live — here's what changed
As of August 9, 2026, PlayStation's player-facing story was concrete: August Plus games were already live while Sony's June showcase had set out a substantial PS5 pipeline for later in 2026 and beyond.
Nintendo
The bigger gaming ideas hiding inside Nintendo
Nintendo Switch 2 is a useful example of Nintendo's broader design pattern: new hardware features are built around changing how people play together rather than only chasing raw specifications.
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Browser Games
Browser gaming, web games, HTML5-era play, distribution in the browser and the culture around instant-play games.
Browser Games
Browser games: what to check before clearing site data
Browser games are normal games delivered through web technology, which makes fast access and broad device reach possible but also makes browser state, input and performance part of the experience.
Browser Games
Fix browser-game friction without wiping your settings
Browser games are normal games delivered through web technology, which makes fast access and broad device reach possible but also makes browser state, input and performance part of the experience.
Web Gaming / HTML5 Games
Why itch.io still matters for browser games
A storefront that can launch an HTML game in the page is not just distribution. It changes how quickly a stranger can become a player.
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Games
Game- and franchise-specific coverage that is not a Guide, Analysis story, platform story, Xarmo story, Browser Games story, or Reporting item.
Apex Legends
Five ways Apex Legends reflects how games are changing
Apex Legends becomes less chaotic when players use the Firing Range to separate mechanical settings from the much harder problem of reading a live battle royale.
PUBG
A weird PUBG detail worth knowing
PUBG's July 2026 changes were practical rather than mysterious: Update 42.2 refreshed onboarding while the live game and store continued their normal update cadence.
Halo
The bigger gaming ideas hiding inside Halo
Halo Infinite is easier to enter when campaign, free multiplayer, Academy and Forge are treated as separate ways to use the same sandbox.
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Culture
Gaming history, retro gaming, communities, esports, mysteries, nostalgia and wider gaming culture.
Arcade Games
The surprising bit of Arcade Games history hiding in plain sight
Arcade design grew around short, readable sessions and public competition, and that structure still shows up in modern score attacks and quick-restart games.
Hidden Features
The long road that shaped Hidden Features
Hidden features work because they reward curiosity, but the best examples usually have a design reason or human story behind the surprise.
Mods / Modding
The overlooked chapter in Mods / Modding's story
Modding is easiest to manage when the player treats every mod as a dependency and version decision rather than as a pile of files to copy into a game folder.