Spending on physical games falls to lowest on record since 1995 — US console sales plunge 39% in July as memory costs push average price to $542

U.S. console hardware sales fell 39% by unit volume in July against a year earlier, while the average price paid for a new system rose 16% to $542.

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Catastrophic GTA VI leak is a full working build — notorious hacker CyberLeek taunts Rockstar Games by spraying the word ‘leek’ onto a wall in-game with bullets

Cyberleek has leaked another in-game footage of GTA VI, with some social media users claiming that it an actual build of the title. This is the second leak coming from the hacker, who claimed that they will release more until Rockstar issues ‘a public statement and apology with a concrete commitment to be better.’

Console modder builds working Switch 2 Joy-Cons inside original Wii Remote shells — motion-sensing controllers snap magnetically onto a Switch 2

YouTuber Kouzex has transplanted the internals of a pair of Joy-Con 2 controllers into two original Wii Remote shells, producing motion controllers that snap magnetically onto a Switch 2.

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Hacker leaks GTA VI gameplay and map to protest digital-only release — claims pre-orders are a legacy of physical game releases

Hacker Cyberleek leaked gameplay clips and the entire map of GTA VI in protest of Rockstar’s decision to launch pre-orders of a digital game. They claim that pre-orders were created because physical discs could run out at retailers, meaning gamers will pay more to ensure they have a copy on launch day. But because digital copies cannot sell out, there is no need for a pre-order system.

$10 Quake shareware CD locked copies of all id Software games behind a flawed encryption scheme — pay-over-the-phone system only held up for 39 days after 1996 release, leaving developer with 150,000 discs it couldn’t sell

id Software included locked versions of its entire game library on the $10 Quake shareware CD it released in 1996. But the system meant to allow gamers to pay for and unlock those titles over the phone proved vulnerable to crackers who discovered a way to unlock every game on the disc for free.

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Player builds working AI chatbot in vanilla Minecraft using 445K command blocks — clever approach shrank initial block count from over 1 million, requires no mods, plugins, or datapacks to work

Building neural networks in Minecraft using redstone is a relatively common pursuit, but a clever creator has worked around the limitations of command blocks’ available math operations to implement an LLM in just 445,782 blocks, down from over a million in the initial implementation.

GitHub programmer ports playable Doom to DSLR camera with 3-inch TFT LCD display — Canon EOS 550D with open-source Magic Lantern firmware uses camera’s button as controls, even plays sound

A developer posted their Doom port for the Canon EOS 550D on GitHub. The game uses the Magic Lantern firmware add-on to run on the camera, and uses various camera buttons to play the game directly from the SD card.

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GameStop customer earned over $10,000 in store credit from a stack of broken consoles — traded ‘hundreds’ of PlayStations, Xboxes, Game Boys, Switches, and more

One man’s trash is another’s treasure, and GameStop just paid out over $10,000 for hundreds of broken consoles.

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GoldenEye 007 for N64 has been ‘100% decompiled’ — success of half-decade project opens up possibilities for complex mods and ports

A reverse engineering and retro gaming enthusiast has finally succeeded in their goal of decompiling GoldenEye 007, the monumental James Bond adventure shooter from Rare.

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Functioning version of ‘the first arcade video game ever created’ heads to auction with $200,000 estimate — green sparkle 2-player edition of Computer Space hails from 1973

A games industry veteran is selling off what is ‘probably the rarest arcade game in existence’ via Boston’s RR Auctions.

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