Professional

It's no secret that Valve's self-perpetuating user-made content trading on Team Fortress 2 and DotA 2 has been a massive success. Tens of millions of dollars have been made by the players, with Valve taking a cut of every transaction that goes on. It's not all about the money of course, as …

We Happy Few is a strange mashup of 1984, Brave New World and Equilibrium in terms of setting, and a bit like Bioshock meets Don't Starve in its gameplay, but there's one overarching theme from what we've seen of the game so far and that's that it's creepy. Thanks to …

Synology's latest single bay NAS is based on the twin-bay DS215j and uses the same processor, memory and configuration of ports and connectors. For some reason Synology has seen fit to change the colour from white to black, perhaps to disguise the heritage of the DS115 tiddler, but that strikes …

In an unexpected move, Apple on Monday reduced the price of its Apple TV set-top-box to £59/$69. It is expected that lower price will help Apple to sell more of its STBs and eventually boost sales of video content via iTunes. For well over a year Apple is rumoured to …

Considering backers of Star Citizen have spent $75 million between them on the game's funding, most of which has gone on ships that weren't out yet, presumably most are keen to keep their space faring vehicles in tip top shape. Still, if Star Citizen has done one thing throughout its …

Early this week Advanced Micro Devices advised game developers to use Khronos Group’s Vulkan and Microsoft Corp.’s DirectX 12 application programming interfaces instead of its own Mantle API. Later on, the chip developer made further clarification: Vulkan has absorbed the key features of Mantle, but it is not proprietary. While this …

When Valve announced the Source 2 engine and began showing off its VR headset at the Game Developers Conference, many were hoping that we would finally see a new game as well. Well it turns out that Valve did demo something new at GDC, it was a Source 2 version …

If you played and were somewhat disappointed by the latest SimCity, DarkSpore or Spore, then chances are you won't be too bothered by the news that EA Games is shutting down Maxis Emeryville, the developer that brought us all of those over the past few years. However even though the …

Advanced Micro Devices now commands only about 2 or 3 per cent of the server market because of various reasons and the company is not going to regain its positions with the current Opteron offerings. Nonetheless, the chip designer seems to pin a lot of hopes on its “Zen” micro-architecture …

Harmonix might be most well known for kickstarting the rhythm game trend in the latter half of the ‘oos, but it's been working on many other games since Rockband died off. Whether it's the Dance Central series though or an interactive version of Fantasia, Harmonix is always working with music, …

Games Workshop has a bit of a history of hiring on odd choices or relative unknowns to make its games, but it's gone a different route with the upcoming Skaven slaughter simulator, Warhammer End Times: Vermintide by having FatShark do it. Although that developer is hardly as well known as …

Unity has officially launched the latest version of its cross-platform game engine, Unity 5. The engine itself has had an early version around for a little while but the final version will launch today on the company's own website. Unity 5 launched in beta form back in October last year, …

The Sonic franchise is a pretty difficult one to manage. Although it has a series of classic games back in the '90s and an even better remembered duo from the Dreamcast era, Sonic games have otherwise been pretty hit and miss. The latest Sonic Boom was very indicative of that …

Although Gigabyte has more of a name for its internal components than anything else, that doesn't mean it doesn't have a business focus too and with the likes of HP and several of its contemporaries focusing on offering software and data analytics these days, clearly there's a little more room …

AMD’s Mantle application programming interface was the first low-overhead/high-throughput graphics API to reach the market. The emergence of Mantle has made Microsoft and many other companies in the industry to redesign their APIs, including DirectX and OpenGL. While Mantle will continue to be AMD’s graphics innovation platform, the company now advices …

The Steam Workshop will soon contain even bigger mods for Skyrim as Bethesda is updating things to remove the 100MB file size limit, allowing for mods of any size. The feature is currently being beta tested before going live, those that want to can get in on the beta. The creation …

Synology has announced that it's shuffling around the upstairs management, with the news that a new managing director for the UK, Ireland and Nordic region has been appointed: Mr Yi-Lin Huang. He replaces previous MD Mike Chen, who has held the position for the past three years. Yi-Lin has been …

It looks like something more than background support will come from Valve's VR efforts, as an announcement this weekend from HTC pegs it as teaming up with the smartphone maker to deliver a brand new virtual reality headset, known as the HTC Vive. Even more exciting however, is that beyond …

Thecus has come up with something new in the world of NAS with three models that are supplied with Windows Storage Server 2012 R2 Essentials. These NAS are described by Thecus as the ‘World's first Windows Essential NAS'. The three NAS models W2000, W4000 and W5000 are respectively two, four …

Although modern gaming is full of beautiful high-fidelity graphics, deep and emotional stories and inter-connected multiplayer experiences, there is something that it lacks almost right across the board: funk. That wasn't always the case of course, as a pair of aliens from Funkatron once taught us how to be cool, …

A couple of weeks after Apple started to offer its iWork productivity web applications for free to everyone, Microsoft Corp. decided to propose an even better deal and provide its Office 365 suite free worldwide, but even to students and teachers. Starting today, millions of students and teachers around the …

A little more than a year after Hewlett-Packard started to offer its business-critical systems (BCS) with Intel Xeon E7 microprocessors inside, the company reports that it sees some recovery in sales of such machines. While BCS revenues continue to decline, shipments of x86 servers for mission-critical workloads are beginning their …

Making a MOBA is a difficult task. Not only only is the landscape pretty crowded already, with the likes of DotA 2, League of Legends, Heroes of Newerth, Infinite Crisis, SMITE and the upcoming Heroes of the Storm, but it's a pretty defined genre. If you are going to make …

Valve has announced its plans for the Games Developers Conference. At the event next month the company will be showing off its own virtual reality hardware, the final Steam controller and new Steam machines, which are due to launch this year. The Steam client currently has a virtual reality mode …

Ah Rhythm games. If the second half of the '00s gave us anything in gaming, it was you. For a few short years, gamers everywhere were click clacking away on noisy plastic guitars, improving their finger dexterity to the benefit of no one but their gamer score and their respective partners. …

Relic Games' Homeworld is one of the most well remembered strategy titles of the past couple of decades, right up there with classics of the genre. However getting older titles like that to work on modern operating systems is never easy, which is why a lot of people are particularly …

Origin PC, a leading maker of high-performance personal computers for gamers, has announced its new line of its high-end systems. The new Omega home theater PC systems are designed for the living rooms and are projected to wed extreme performance with compact sizes and AV equipment design. Origin Omega personal …

Although microprocessors based on AMD’s next-generation high-performance micro-architecture code-named “Zen” are more than a year away, some details regarding the forthcoming chips and “Zen” in general are beginning to surface. The most recent rumours about the new architecture add some technical details and point to release schedule of the new …

Sony apparently has a four-hour long Project Morpheus event planned for the Games Developers Conference next month. The PlayStation VR headset will be shown off in detail on the 3rd of March, Sony will also be going over its future plans for virtual reality. It is likely that the headset …

Epic Games has always fostered new development in the gaming industry. As well as offering its latest and greatest game engine to everyone and anyone that wants to give it a try, for just $19 a month, it's been giving away huge prizes and funding to developers for years with …