Posts By Mat Growcott

The Microsoft/Activision deal has been given a preliminary approval by the UK’s CMA and that means it will be closing within a fortnight. The biggest deal in tech history is coming to a close. This has been by no means a foregone conclusion. The deal made a lot of legal sense, but some regulators seemed desperate to shut it down. We went from being fairly positive it would close, to some industry analysts giving it a less than 20 percent…

CSGO is still hugely popular, even 11 years after it was first released. In fact, it’s massively more popular today than it was back then. That’s a rare thing in today’s gaming industry, and there’s a couple of simple reasons why. The first is that it’s just a very good game. Free-to-play and with far more content than it launched with, there’s never been a better time to get into it. It is one of those occasional titles ...

,I’ve made no secret about my love for Final Fantasy VII. The remake was a long-awaited treasure, and this week’s trailer for its sequel, Rebirth, made me pre-order immediately. It will be a masterpiece. And while I’m mostly saying that as an excited fan, it’s undeniable that the trailer showed a game that I didn’t think was possible. The scope and scale of Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth is something far in excess of what I ...

Game engines aren’t supposed to cause major problems for their users. Usually when they do, it’s accidental. This week Unity bucked that trend. And while there is no shortage of column space around this very issue, it’s worth another look. It could very easily impact on the way we all play our games old and new. So as a quick recap: Unity decided to change their deal with developers. They would charge a set fee of $0.20 for every download…

Final Fantasy has struggled with itself for a good long time. How do you recreate the scale and majesty of a massive SNES or even PS1 game in the HD era? The answer, for a long time, was that you just don’t. You stick to narrow corridors, or scale back the story. Maybe you confine your characters to a car for long journeys, with passing landmarks doing just and only that. With Final Fantasy VII Remake and now Final Fantasy…

It seems for a while everybody had settled on the idea that Game Pass wasn’t some kind of weird space/time hack. It works, it’s profitable and it’s popular. Then Starfield came along and broke everybody’s minds all over again. Is six million players enough for Microsoft to be happy with Starfield’s release? Have enough people paid for the game through Steam to subsidise the obvious losses made from a subscription service? Should ...

When we got our first PC, it came as part of a bundle with a chair included. That was how important it was to get a PC chair – it came with your initial purchase. No wonder that bundle cost more than even today’s GPUs. On the other hand, it allowed me to play Black and White without any problems so it did its job. But it seems the days where desk chairs are seen as vital are gone. Thank…

Within 24 hours, critics across the world will be sharing their thoughts on Starfield. And it’s clear that they have something pretty special in their hands. Honestly, I’ve never seen this level of hype from critics before. Everybody seems to be sharing hints and teasers. Some are saying it’s their biggest review ever. I’ve seen at least one review split into two videos. Notice so far I haven’t said anything about good. None of ...

It used to be that talk about servers was vitally important to the gaming community experience. The Xbox 360 was better than the PlayStation Network, or so the internet discourse said. Dedicated servers were expected and rarely received. Today that discussion seems to be a thing of the past. Online games have improved and, by and large, the conversation has moved onto other, more “important” things, like acquisitions and monthly active users. That ...

With a tantalisingly small amount of time left until Starfield is in our grubby little mitts, it’s a good idea to take a look at an extremely helpful but often overlooked Xbox feature. You can pre-install the game to your console or PC via the Xbox app right now, with the pre-install for Steam coming this week too. But you’re also able to do this on console if you don’t own the game yet. The full install can be put…