Aside from the GTA VI hype, Rockstar has been in the news quite frequently of late, relating to a new union forming at its UK offices. That union, which started taking shape in early 2026 following what it called unfair firings, has now officially started coming to fruition, as recognition of the IWGB Rockstar Game Workers Union will officially be put to an employee vote from November 12 to 26, according to a new announcement by the union on Bluesky.

According to the union's social media page, the vote seeks to officially ratify the recognition deal agreed to by management and workers across union meetings that have taken place over the last few months, and it would "give workers a say over issues including pay and bonuses, overtime, redundancies, flexible working arrangements, and generative AI policies." The union vote will coincide with the launch of Grand Theft Auto VI, which appears to have been a deliberate publicity move by the union, and it will take place via an anonymous online vote.

A few months ago, Microsoft promised its Windows enthusiast community that the company would implement a major overhaul to improve performance and stability in the Windows 11 operating system. We conducted a poll and received nearly 33,000 responses from the community to answer one question: Are you experiencing the promised improvements in Windows 11? However, the findings are quite polarized, as the majority of the enthusiast community doesn't actually notice any difference before and after the promise was made. Among all respondents, 43.4% voted that there are no noticeable improvements. This represents thousands of Windows 11 users worldwide who are not seeing any enhancement in their day-to-day operations with Microsoft's latest operating system.

What is perhaps more alarming is that many enthusiasts report a worse experience following Microsoft's promises. About 38.1% of the voters indicated they are experiencing actual degradation in day-to-day operations, as Microsoft continues to push updates that negatively impact everyday use and introduce more bugs. Notably, a recent example is the Windows 11 August update, which reset custom cursors to an oversized default one. In some cases, the color and size settings don't stick, no matter how many times they are changed. This update has also caused gameplay issues, such as forced crashes, random freezing, errors, and unexpected device restarts due to RGB peripherals.

Back in February, ComputerBase conducted a large blind test comparing in-game screenshots generated using the latest upscaling technologies: AMD's FSR 4.0 and NVIDIA's Deep Learning Super Sampling 4.5. The testing has since been updated, and community votes have been processed, revealing that AMD's updated upscaling technology, FSR 4.1, shows significant improvement over FSR 4.0. However, it still trails behind NVIDIA's DLSS 4.5 in visual quality. In the latest ComputerBase testing, the following games were upscaled using FSR 4.0, FSR 4.1, and DLSS 4.5: Year 117 - Pax Romana, ARC Raiders, Assassin's Creed Shadows, Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, Kingdom Come 2: Deliverance, Resident Evil Requiem, and The Last of Us Part I. In all of these games, the ComputerBase review concluded that DLSS 4.5 was the top performer, a view confirmed by the community in a separate blind test vote.

Similar to the previous test, the ComputerBase team conducted the comparison using videos labeled with three options, without revealing which rendering method was used, to ensure a fully blind test. This resulted in a community verdict with two notable outcomes. First, NVIDIA's DLSS 4.5 remains the leader in image quality, with 6 out of 7 games showing the best results using DLSS 4.5. The only game where AMD's FSR upscaling came out on top was Resident Evil Requiem, where DLSS 4.5 placed second behind FSR 4.1. Overall, DLSS 4.5 is seen as providing sharper visual details and more consistent frame generation compared to AMD's FSR upscaling.

Every year, Valve holds The Steam Game Awards, a community-driven initiative to recognize the best games that were launched in that year. Valve has just released the results for the 2024 Steam Game Awards, which are determined by community vote—as opposed to events like The Game Awards, which feature a jury selection—and split into individual categories. This year, though, the overall winner for Game of the Year was Black Myth Wukong, which beat out other finalists: Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, Balatro, and Helldivers 2 for top spot. Game of the Year wasn't Wukong's only victory, either, with the game also taking home the "Outstanding Story-Rich Game Award," which seems logical given its overall victory, and the cleverly named "Best Game You Suck At Award," which is meant to highlight the best difficult game of the year. In this category, Black Myth Wukong was up against Dragon Ball Z Sparkling Zero, The Finals, Ghost of Tsushima, and Tekken 8, which is again a very diverse mix of games and genres, so it's somewhat interesting to see a narrative-driven game like Wukong come out ahead here.

The rest of the Steam Game Awards 2024 was less of a one-man show, with Metro Awakening VR taking Best VR Game of the Year, Elden Ring nabbing the Labor of Love Award, and God of War Ragnarök taking the Best Game on Steam Deck Award. Helldivers 2 won Better with Friends, while Silent Hill 2 took home the Outstanding Visual Style Award, Liar's Bar won Most Innovative Gameplay, Red Dead Redemption won Best Soundtrack Award, and Farming Simulator 25 was crowned with the Sit Back and Relax award, beating out the likes or Webfishing, House Flipper 2, and Tiny Glade. One of the more surprising "minor" awards winners here is God of War Ragnarök taking home Best Game on Steam Deck, since you often hear in discourse around the Steam Deck that it's not suitable for AAA gaming, and God of War is only two years old at the time of writing, meaning it is still very demanding, with an NVIDIA GTX 1060 6 GB quoted as the minimum recommended GPU to play the game.

Last month, we covered ASML's plans to leave the Netherlands after a crisis with the Dutch government that prevented skilled immigrants from entering and working inside ASML's facilities. However, it appears that ASML has managed to strike a potential deal with the Netherlands Prime Minister Mark Rutte and his office about the company's plans to stay in the country. In an effort dubbed "Operation Beethoven," the Dutch government aimed to keep the tech giant in the country, with a deal now seemingly in place. AMSL's roadblocks and reasons for potentially leaving the Netherlands were difficulty in obtaining building permits, constraints on the electrical grid, transportation bottlenecks, and a need for supporting infrastructure like hospitals, schools, and housing. The most prominent of them was importing foreign labor in the form of highly skilled engineers and scientists needed to develop next-generation lithography machines.

According to the NLTimes, ASML now plans to potentially expand in the Brainport Industries Campus (BIC) in Eindhoven, with a creation of 20,000 new jobs in a 2.5 billion Euro investment from the Dutch government. "BIC is an interesting option for us, which we are now exploring together with the municipality of Eindhoven," noted ASML CFO Roger Dassen. Given that ASML needs to double its operations in the following decade to meet soaring demand, the company has many uncertainties. Questions of finding skilled immigrants and building infrastructure to support their needs remain the company's priority. In the Summer, the plan to support ASML's expansion will be voted in the Eindhoven City Council, which will decide the fate of ASML's stay in the Netherlands. An interesting comment from January from AMSL CEO Peter Wennik is, "Ultimately, we can only grow this company if there are enough qualified people. We prefer to do that here, but if we cannot get those people here, we will get those people in Eastern Europe or in Asia or in the United States. Then we will have to go there." The final decision still awaits.

A huge thank you to all of our Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition players for your record-setting support and to everyone who has played Return of Rome so far! This is the biggest DLC launch in Age of Empires II history! We've been listening to your feedback and would like to share our plan to address the concerns regarding your in-game experience and your desire to see Age of Empires campaigns in Return of Rome.

We are actively monitoring the issues you're reporting and will address them as soon as possible. This includes disruptions to your hotkey settings, issues preventing UI mods from loading in correctly, and games failing to load. The hotkey disruption was a one-time adjustment. You can visit our support page if you need help getting them reconfigured. Our teams are paying close attention to the reports you make and are thankful for your continued trust.