Death Stranding 2 launched on Steam on March 19, bringing Kojima’s surreal vision of a fractured Australia to a new audience nine months after its console debut. This marked the fastest PS5-to-Steam port for any single-player PlayStation Studios game, overtaking fellow second-party game Stellar Blade (14 months from PS5 to PC).

The Death Stranding 2 port has boosted the game’s lifecycle, with the Steam version selling 425K copies in its first week. Adding this to the 1.6M copies sold on PS5, the game’s total volume now sits at over 2M.

This means the Steam version of Death Stranding 2 already accounts for 21% of copies. In terms of revenue, Death Stranding 2 has generated over $110M on PS5 and $32.6M on Steam. With Epic included, it’s safe to say Death Stranding 2 has now passed $150M.

Steam can clearly be a timely second act for Sony’s more hardcore, auteur-led projects. Sony is reportedly pulling back from PC single-player releases, adding some tension to Sony’s choice of safeguarding its value proposition (sick single-player exclusives).

Krafton is shutting down PUBG Blindspot, a free-to-play PC spinoff of its hit PUBG Battlegrounds, after only two months in Early Access. The news comes despite the PUBG franchise powering the firm's best-ever annual revenue, but is in line with its previously stated policy of using Early Access releases to validate games before committing development resources.

PUBG Blindspot was a top-town tactical shooter which launched into Early Access in January with a promise of monthly updates and close community engagement. The game peaked at 3,251 players shortly after launch, according to SteamDB, but had dwindled to a few hundred in recent weeks despite broadly positive player reception.

The firm continues to work on PUBG Black Budget, an extraction shooter that was announced in 2022 and completed a closed alpha in December 2025, and 2021 mobile release PUBG New State.

It has previously stated that it plans to expand the PUBG IP "through cultural collaborations and long-term service improvements" alongside new game releases while extending the core PUBG Battlegrounds into a "content platform" with "sandbox-oriented UGC that leverages PUBG’s core gunplay, mechanics, and physics engine, consolidating an ecosystem where players can create and share their own content."

Krafton recently lost a legal battle with the leaders of its studio Unknown Worlds over the release of Subnautica 2. The final judgement stated that the firm fired the studio leadership in an effort to avoid paying bonuses, after its CEO turned to ChatGPT to find a reason to dismiss them. The publisher said it disagreed with the ruling, which restored ousted CEO Ted Gill to his former position.

The price changes are as follows:

• United States
  
• PS5 – $649.99 (was $549.99)
  
• PS5 Digital Edition – $599.99 (was $499.99)
  
• PS5 Pro – $899.999 (was $749.99)
  
• PS Portal – $249.99 (was $199.99)
  
• United Kingdom
  
• PS5 – £569.99 (was £479.99)
  
• PS5 Digital Edition – £519.99 (was £429.99)
  
• PS5 Pro – £789.99 (was £699.99)
  
• PS Portal – £219.99 (was £199.99)
  
• Europe
  
• PS5 – €649.99 (was €549.99)
  
• PS5 Digital Edition – €599.99 (was €499.99)
  
• PS5 Pro – €899.99 (was €799.99)
  
• PS Portal – €249.99 (was €219.99)

This could mean the PS6 may launch in 2028 or 2029, causing "major upset to a carefully orchestrated strategy to sustain user engagement between hardware generations."

The component crisis has also led Valve to delay the launch of its next-gen Steam Machine, Steam Frame VR headset, and new Steam controller. Steam Deck OLED stock has been affected as well.

The nominations for the sixth annual Gayming Awards have been announced, with Hades 2 and Date Everything each receiving three nominations across 14 categories.

Supergiant Games' Hades 2 is among the six titles nominated for Game of the Year, alongside Ball x Pit, Blue Prince, Ghost of Yōtei, Hollow Knight: Silksong, and South of Midnight.

Hades 2 and Silksong were also nominated for the Gayming Magazine Fan Favourite Award, along with Date Everything, Dead by Daylight: Steady Pulse, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, and Lost Records: Bloom & Rage.

Date Everything was featured in the LGBTQ+ Indie Game category, as well as Monster Prom 4: Monster Con, Quantum Witch, Takes of Seikyu, The Beekeepers Picnic, and Spirit Swap.

Winners of the LGBTQ+ Streaming Rising Star Class of 2026, LGBTQ+ Content Creator Superstar Award, and the Gayming Icon Award will be revealed in May 2026.

This year's ceremony includes a new suite of accolades called the Gayming Awards Creator Honours, which "set out to celebrate and uplift LGBTQ+ gaming content creators of all levels."

The Gayming Awards 2026 takes place on June 8 on World of Wonder's streaming service, WOW Presents Plus.

The ceremony will be hosted by last year's LGBTQ+ Voice Actor of the Year winner Erika Ishii and drag artist Dawn.

NVIDIA today unveiled NVIDIA DLSS 5, the company’s most significant breakthrough in computer graphics since the debut of real-time ray tracing in 2018.

DLSS 5 introduces a real-time neural rendering model that infuses pixels with photoreal lighting and materials. Bridging the divide between rendering and reality, DLSS 5 empowers game developers to deliver a new level of photoreal computer graphics previously only achieved in Hollywood visual effects.

“Twenty-five years after NVIDIA invented the programmable shader, we are reinventing computer graphics once again,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “DLSS 5 is the GPT moment for graphics — blending hand-crafted rendering with generative AI to deliver a dramatic leap in visual realism while preserving the control artists need for creative expression.”

Since the dawn of GeForce, NVIDIA has strived to deliver the graphics horsepower required for game developers to create incredible, realistic worlds — where lighting, reflections and shadows obey the laws of nature.

From programmable shaders with GeForce 3 in 2001, to CUDA with GeForce 8800 GTX in 2006, to real-time ray tracing with GeForce RTX 2080 Ti in 2018, to path tracing and neural shaders with GeForce RTX 5090 in 2025, NVIDIA has delivered major architectural innovations and a massive 375,000x increase in compute to meet this challenge.

However, the rendering horsepower available to a 16-millisecond game frame remains a tiny fraction of that available to a photoreal Hollywood VFX frame, which can take minutes to hours to render. Real-time rendering cannot bridge the gap to photorealism through brute force alone.

NVIDIA DLSS was released in 2018 as an AI technology to boost performance, first by upscaling resolution, and then by generating entirely new frames. It has been integrated in over 750 games, becoming a gold standard for the industry. Launched at CES this year, DLSS 4.5 uses AI to draw 23 out of every 24 pixels seen on the screen. Today, DLSS is evolving beyond performance to transform visual fidelity in games.

Video AI models have rapidly learned to generate photoreal pixels, but they run offline, are difficult to precisely control and often lack predictability, with every new prompt generating bespoke content. For games, pixels must be deterministic, delivered in real time and tightly grounded in the game developer’s 3D world and artistic intent.

DLSS 5 takes a game’s color and motion vectors for each frame as input, and uses an AI model to infuse the scene with photoreal lighting and materials that are anchored to source 3D content and consistent from frame to frame. DLSS 5 runs in real time at up to 4K resolution for smooth, interactive gameplay.