Super Flower has launched the VGA 12+4PIN OCP Dongle, a small inline box that sits between the PSU cable and a graphics card's 12V-2x6 connector and keeps an eye on the current running through each 12 V line. It was first shown at Computex 2026, and can now be seen on Super Flower's website, priced at NT$1,190 (roughly $38) in Taiwan. However, you can't buy it on its own just yet. For now, it's only offered as part of a limited promotional bundle with Leadex VIII power supplies, and there's no word on standalone sales or a wider release.

As for the protection part, each alert needs to hold for 10 seconds before it fires. Between 9.5 A and 12 A on any line, or if two lines drift more than 6 A apart, the LED turns orange and the buzzer starts beeping. Past 12 A, it flashes red with a continuous tone for 180 seconds, stays solid red for another 15, and then triggers "VGA Black Screen Protection." That mode stays active even if the current settles. Super Flower doesn't say how the black screen works or whether power is cut, and simply advises shutting down and checking the cables. That part can be a bit unreliable, but it's safe to assume that most users will suspect something is wrong if the screen blacks out for a significant bit of time.

U.S. Representative Ritchie Torres (D-NY) has announced plans to introduce the "Power To The Players Act," a federal bill that would direct the FTC to write rules making a game purchase actual ownership rather than a revocable license. Games that rely on online servers would also need to offer an offline mode before those servers are switched off, and players would keep the right to transfer the games they buy. The bill hasn't been formally introduced yet, so there's no bill text, and Torres hasn't confirmed any cosponsors. Torres pointed to NBA 2K25 as the example. The game sold for $69.99, or $99.99 for the All-Star Edition, and it leaves digital storefronts on October 30, with online servers shutting down at the end of the year, roughly two years after launch. Here's how Torres put it:

When you pay for a game, you should own it. Consumers must have the right to own, the right to play, and the right to transfer the games they buy. A game that can be taken away the moment a company pulls the plug is not a purchase. It is a rental disguised as a sale. Families in the Bronx and across the country save up to buy these games, and they deserve better than a license that can vanish at any time. The Power To The Players Act ensures consumers own what they buy and can keep playing long after a company moves on.

Paralympics Productions, the modding group that got GTA 5 running natively on the original Nintendo Switch, is shutting down on October 3. Project lead M0jso announced on X that Take-Two Interactive sent him a cease-and-desist letter, after which he was left with no choice but to shut down his projects. The Android port he was working on after the Switch build is canceled as well, and he says nobody will take over the project or continue it under a new name. M0jso also says the source code won't be released, since that could bring more legal trouble. Apparently, he thinks Take-Two has solid grounds and that he probably wouldn't win in court.

Both ports reportedly relied on GTA 5 source code that leaked in 2023. However, he hasn't publicly detailed the legal claims, so it's not clear exactly what the letter targets. The timing seems to line up with Rockstar's move to tighten its mod guidelines this month. The new rules tell fans not to modify Rockstar games to run on consoles or other platforms where the company hasn't officially released them. Moreover, M0jso also took a jab at Rockstar over those rules about a week before the shutdown. Of course, we can't say for sure that's what triggered the letter, but it probably didn't help. For now, Android users are back to Winlator-style compatibility tools or streaming, and I doubt anyone will try a native port again any time soon.

Build a Rocket Boy, the studio behind MindsEye, has seemingly started shutting down after a recent round of layoffs and a tumultuous year following the launch of the aforementioned third-person shooter. The layoffs and subsequent shutdown have been confirmed by Build a Rocket Boy employees in recent posts on LinkedIn. So far, a number of employees have posted about the layoffs within the span of a day: Liam Shannon, a level designer at BARB; Elizabet Tyaneva, a senior QA analyst; Michaela Emslie, release manager; and Cameron Deaves, a production QA analyst, and Sandy Greig, a lead QA analyst; among others.

An additional post from Dan Hawkins reportedly stated that he "will be seeing BARB through till the very end, helping wrap things up here in the HR department," seemingly confirming that the studio will be shutting down. Additionally, the IWGB Game Workers Union issued a statement to Rock Paper Shotgun, effectively confirming the layoffs and stating that the union remains "committed to getting justice for BARB management's treatment of workers and organising to root these practices out of the video games industry." It's currently unclear when the studio will officially close its doors or announce its closure, since an official statement has yet to be published.

Ahead of the game's launch, 2XKO seemed to have a fairly bright future, with gaming giant Riot Games clearly dedicating a decent amount of resources to getting the new tag-team fighting game off the ground. However, shortly after launch, it became clear that the game's audience was not sustainable, and Riot ended up laying off about half of the developers working on the game. Now, just over six months after that round of layoffs, Riot has confirmed that it will be pulling development support from the new game.

In the announcement, Riot says that the game's trajectory "is painting a clear, consistent picture" that the game's retention isn't sustainable. It explained that, while the game started off with decent player counts, those numbers dwindled after players got a taste of the game. The result, thus, is that Riot will stop developing 2XKO in December 2026. However, it's not all bad news, because, while there will be no new content after that date, Riot still plans to add new content to the game before then, and it is not planning on shutting down game servers just yet.

Amid mass layoffs at Xbox and studio closures elsewhere, more bad news emerges from the ailing gaming industry, as Midgar, the Nacon-owned studio behind Edge of Eternity, a turn-based JRPG adventure game, has officially announced that it would be shutting down. Earlier this year, Nacon also shut down Spiders, the studio behind GreedFall, for similar reasons. Similarly, Nacon also went on to publish a GreedFall DLC after the studio shut down.

The closure comes as a result of a court-ordered liquidation, which follows the studio's failure to find a buyer. The announcement comes by way of a LinkedIn post by the studio's co-founder and current Nacon CTO, Jérémy Zeler-Maury, who says that "we worked until the very end to find a solution that could preserve both the company and the team," but after exhausting other alternatives, this is the only way forward.

Book of Travels is a highly stylized "serene" MMO that launched to Steam Early Access in October 2021. Despite an interesting concept, standout art style, and the developer's best efforts, Book of Travels has mostly failed to meet the lofty expectations the studio set for the game, with the studio, Might and Delight, having laid off more than half its staff shortly after a challenging launch. Since then, player counts have dwindled, ultimately resulting in an announcement on 15 April that the servers for Book of Travels will be shut down on July 31, 2026.

Book of Travels will not be shutting down, however. Instead, Might and Delight has issued an update to implement an offline mode and make the game more friendly to single-player gameplay. The studio has also opened the game up to the modding community and added a modding channel to the official Discord in order to work with the modding community on mod support. Book of Travels will also transition from being an Early Access title to being a complete game, and Might and Delight has reduced the price from $29.99 to $4.99. The studio notes that "We are truly sad that this project didn't become all that we wanted it to be. We hope that with this last push, the game can be as good as it possibly could be given the circumstances, and that it can continue to be played for a long time."

If you've been following the Stop Killing Games movement, you'll know that Ubisoft shutting down The Crew, a fairly modern video game by most standards, having launched in 2014, has ruffled some feathers. Now, as reported by Reuters, Ubisoft has been taken to court by French consumer action group, UFC-Que Choisir, who argues that the contractual practices that Ubisoft engages in when it sells games may be abusive and deny consumers their rights.

Ubisoft, as is the case with many gaming companies, argues that players buy limited licenses to play the games they pay for—not an actual product—and that the license can be revoked at any time. With lawsuits like the one brought against Ubisoft, UFC-Que Choisir intends to put an end to these "harmful practices," remove the relevant clauses from sales contracts, and make Ubisoft recognize the collective harm done to the collective interests of consumers.

PUBG: Blindspot launched at the beginning of February as a new 5v5 top-down shooter from the same studio and publisher as the original PUBG, but now, less than two months after the launch of the game, the developer, ARC Team, has announced that the new free-to-play tactical shooter will be shutting down on March 30, 2026. ARC Team says that, although the developers had tried to explore ways to improve the game based on player feedback, the studio is "no longer able to sustainably provide the level of experience we set out to deliver through Early Access."

PUBG: Blindspot has a fairly acceptable 72% positive rating on Steam, but player counts are rather low, with an all-time peak of just 3,251 concurrent players and a 24-hour peak of just 236 at the time of writing. PUBG: Blindspot is already delisted from Steam, and players will no longer be able to access the game. This is only one of a number of recent game closures, with other notable additions including Highguard and a number of other games that were in development, like those that recently got caught up in the Ubisoft reshuffle. Further, Riot recently laid off a number of staff from its 2XKO fighting game due to sustainability reasons, all of which seem to suggest that game studios are fighting for revenue more than ever and are unable to make it work long-term if their games aren't immediately successful.

There has been much said about OpenAI's Sora video app—both positive, about how the tech would make video creators and social media influencers obsolete, and negative, about how it would kill creativity and fill the internet with soulless slop—but it seems like neither side of that argument will ever get to find out if they were correct. In a recent post on X, OpenAI announced that it would be shutting down both the Sora app and API, suggesting a pivot away from video generation at OpenAI. A final date for the app and API closure has not yet been announced, but OpenAI says it will reveal more information soon.

Following the announcement, The Hollywood Reporter reported that a Disney spokesperson had confirmed that the media giant would be withdrawing a previously announced $1 billion investment into OpenAI's video generation model and product. Disney's statement reads: "As the nascent AI field advances rapidly, we respect OpenAI's decision to exit the video generation business and to shift its priorities elsewhere. We appreciate the constructive collaboration between our teams and what we learned from it, and we will continue to engage with AI platforms to find new ways to meet fans where they are while responsibly embracing new technologies that respect IP and the rights of creators." The closure of Sora comes after backlash and legal action against OpenAI from a number of publishers, including Square Enix, Bandai Namco, and Nintendo over AI-generated videos created with some of their characters and other IPs.

Highguard players recently noticed that the game's official website was offline, leading to widespread speculation that the ailing game was silently shutting down shortly after the studio laid off "most" of its development team. However, according to a response from one of the developers on Discord, the site being down isn't an indication of the future of the game, with the implication being that resources are being redirected towards the game content itself, while the site will be reworked and "simplified" before it is put back online.

"Not sure on the timeframe, but basically needs to be transferred and simplified. Low priority atm (reputational damage already done). Now we just need to focus on delivering updates and content to improve," explains the developer in a response to a question about the site being down, implying that the studio is still investing some resources into keeping the game alive, even if much of game's development team is no longer there. This isn't the first time we're hearing of planned new content, as a former developer at Wildlight revealed that the company had already been working on a lot of new, unreleased content that was to land post-launch.

Linux enthusiasts gather to hear the latest news: Intel is officially shutting down its Clear Linux distribution after ten years of development and optimizations. As many recall, Clear Linux is an Intel-optimized Linux distribution that serves as a high-performance, optimized OS designed to extract every last ounce of performance from Intel hardware, especially Intel Xeons. As software optimizations, such as AVX-512, became more common, Intel consistently pushed these optimizations and specific pre-compiled software with compiler flags and kernel optimizations that increased performance on Intel and even AMD CPUs by a few percents. Traditional Linux distributions weren't optimized in that regard as they were mostly compiled to run on every x86 or Arm CPU, without any special flags raised for performance. This has enabled compatibility, but lacks a few percentage points of performance that Clear Linux managed to extract. As of now, these efforts are essentially terminated, and the distribution will cease to receive security and quality of life improvements, effective immediately. Users are advised to switch to another distribution. The complete statement follows.

Ubisoft this week announced that XDefiant would be joining the recently axed Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. As of December 3, the free-to-play first-person shooter will no longer be available to download, and no new players will be allowed to create an account. On June 3, 2025, XDefiant's servers will officially be shut down, making the game unplayable for old and new players alike. Along with the announcement of the closure, the development team behind XDefiant will also see significant changes, with 277 developers being laid off as a result of the shut-down, according to Stephen Totilo on BlueSky.

The remaining development team will be kept on to manage the game throughout its sunsetting until June 2025. It's not really a surprise that XDefiant is shutting down, despite the game's executive producer vehemently denying the allegations of the same as recently as October this year. While the exact reason for the game's closure wasn't revealed, news broke about XDefiant's struggles soon after its March 2024 launch, and it appears that the staunch competition in the space and the difficulties of monetizing a free-to-play game, even one that tries to break the mold, was just too much for XDefiant and its developer team.

Humanoid Origin, a game studio started and lead by former Mass Effect creator, Casey Hudson, has just announced that it will be shutting down just 3 years after its creation. The main driving factor behind the closure of Humanoid Origin is a lack of funding, with the announcement coming from a LinkedIn post on Monday, November 25. In the announcement, Hudson places some of the blame on the "broader challenges in the industry" and says that the studio's main goal right now is to support its employees in the transition to new projects.

The fledgling game studio was unable to launch its first project, which was to be an ambitious, large-scale AAA sci-fi game for which it had aggressively been hiring creative talent since the company's 2021 start. This is just the latest studio casualty in what has been a brutal year for the gaming industry as a whole. Earlier this year, studios owned by much larger corporations with deeper pockets also saw similar closures, like the somewhat mysterious shuttering of the Humble Games publishing division, which was later clarified as "restructuring."

According to @momomo_us, Intel has discontinued its Cryo Cooling Technology as of July 1, 2023, marking the end of one of the tech industry's few sub-ambient cooling options. The technology, which could chill CPUs to 0 degrees Celsius to enhance performance, accompanied Intel's processors from the 10th-generation Comet Lake to the 13th-generation Raptor Lake. Despite its innovative approach to boosting CPU performance, the cooling solution was not widely embraced. The discontinuation comes just before the arrival of the 14th Generation Raptor Lake Refresh, which will not support the Cryo Cooling tech. Intel plans to maintain updates for the existing Cryo Cooling hardware until December 31, 2023.

This specialized cooling method did see some use in products like the Cooler Master MasterLiquid ML360 Sub-Zero and the EKWB EK-QuantumX Delta TEC waterblocks. Interestingly, the technology has managed to work even with non-Intel CPUs, which famous overclocker der8auer managed to get up and running on AMD's Ryzen 9 5950X. Some modifications were in place, but it was possible to do so. The likely reason for shutting down the cryo cooling project is the need for more financial sense to continue to pursue this technology and the effort to keep the cost of R&D down and make funds available for other projects at Intel's laboratories.

As we close in on 15 years since the release of Battlefield 1943, and Bad Company 1 & 2, we are announcing that their journey is coming to an end. Starting April 28 2023, Battlefield 1943, and Battlefield: Bad Company 1 & 2 will be removed from digital storefronts and you will no longer be able to purchase them.

This is in preparation for the retirement of the online services for these titles which will happen on December 8 2023. For Bad Company 1 and 2, you can still continue playing them and use their respective offline features, such as the single player campaign. You can also read our FAQ and Service Updates for further information on the retirement of online services.

Update 14:17 UTC: EA updated their press release this morning, to clarify that the inclusion of Mirror's Edge was an error. They stated via Twitter: "We currently have no plans to remove Mirror's Edge from digital storefronts."