A Windows support page was recently updated with the language "The Control Panel is in the process of being deprecated in favor of the Settings app, which offers a more modern and streamlined experience." After widespread discussion and reporting on the move, including PC World's editorial, "Windows will have to pry Control Panel from my cold dead hands" (much respect), Microsoft amended the language to read "many of the settings in Control Panel are in the process of being migrated to the Settings app, which offers a more modern and streamlined experience."

Sounds a bit gentler, but that still pretty much means the same thing, right? "Control Panel, you're off the team, Settings is getting called up from the Minor Leagues." The age of Control Panel is over, now is the hour of wolves. And I'm sure the phrase "modern and streamlined experience" feels bitterly condescending to the Control Panel likers out there. I know that in my experience, Windows' overall "modern and streamlined experience" feels like I'm being jerked around, slapped in the face, pushed down in the mud, and made to say "thank you" for it.

But I honestly can't remember the last time I used the Control Panel. I usually do get to my relevant destination via the Settings (ugh) "app," and failing that I'll make things work with the OS' search function, even though it's always trying to open up Bing in an Edge browser window for some godforsaken reason⁠—has anyone ever "Binged" a result in Windows' OS search intentionally, even once?

If we're being honest, the Control Panel has been in the process of being deprecated for Settings' streamlined and modern whatever for some time now, and I don't hate it⁠—I could never find shit in the Control Panel! There was never a rhyme or reason to its layout⁠—alphabetical, thematic, what have you⁠—you just had to squint and go down the columns until you found what you were looking for, or otherwise submit to a dumbed down categorical view that still felt randomized somehow. I owe the Control Panel nothing. It can die for all I care.

I just never want to let a grievance I don't actually buy into get in the way of all the real things I can't stand about Windows, like it's crappy HDR support, how every other Windows update tries to subscribe me to OneDrive and Office 365, how "update and shut down" actually restarts your PC, how if you have a second monitor plugged in, but turned off, Windows still presents an invisible, phantom desktop you can lose your cursor in, how Windows always resets my second monitor's wallpaper on restart, how the search tool doesn't work and sends you to Bing, or how the OS has this awful second ecosystem of "apps" for some reason, as if "programs" were just too nerdy and unsexy. And Instead of fixing all of this they're trotting out new AI surveillance tools then saying "sorry, sorry" when everybody gets mad

Yeah, I have some grievances. Festivus came early this year. I should really become a Linux Guy, like all men of a certain age.

It's here that Disney's lawyers step in, with one of the most truly amoral legal moves you'll ever see. Piccolo's suit includes reference to language used on the Disney website about the restaurant in question. Disney argued to the court that Piccolo could not sue the company over language on the website because, in 2019, he had signed up for a free trial of Disney+, as part of which he had agreed to the terms and conditions.

These terms and conditions, said Disney, included a clause saying users agree to settle any disputes with the company over any of its services via arbitration (a non-public process overseen by a neutral third party). From Disney's court filing: "The arbitration provision covers 'all disputes' including 'disputes involving The Walt Disney Company or its affiliates'".

To add insult to grievous injury, Disney's lawyers further argued that Piccolo had agreed to these terms again: when he bought the tickets through My Disney Experience for the couple's ill-fated trip to Disney World. Just as the finishing touch, Disney argued he had also agreed to these terms on behalf of his wife, whom he listed as a guest.

To be clear, this argument has not been ruled on by the court, and there's every chance that a sane judge would have turned around and told Disney exactly where it could stick the Disney+ terms and conditions. Piccolo's lawyers said the claim "borders on the surreal."

Last week Disney's argument became public and was widely covered across media, with the reaction almost unanimously being one of revulsion. Following the backlash, Disney has now announced it will be withdrawing its demand for arbitration.

"We believe this situation warrants a sensitive approach to expedite a resolution for the family who have experienced such a painful loss," said Disney's Josh D'Amaro in a statement to the BBC. "As such, we've decided to waive our right to arbitration and have the matter proceed in court."

You probably don't need a high-priced lawyer to tell you this, but Jamie Cartwright told the Beeb he reckons the "adverse publicity" may well have sparked the change in heart. "In attempting to push the claim into a confidential setting on what were very tenuous grounds, it succeeded only in creating the very publicity and attention it likely wanted to avoid," adds Cartwright.

To zoom out for a moment, while Disney's behaviour here has been the absolute pits, it's an argument that courts have been ruling on for years in various guises. When you get down to it, how many people actually read the terms and conditions of anything before agreeing to them? Is there a human being alive who reads all 34 pages of an Activision EULA before playing the new Call of Duty?

But Disney's approach was taking that even further. It was trying to say that, because Piccolo had previously signed up for a completely unrelated Disney product, the terms and conditions associated with that product then applied to his interactions with Disney across all of its services. A company trying to wriggle out of a wrongful death lawsuit with this rationale is just breath-taking, and almost makes you wish it had gone in front of a judge.

Piccolo is suing Disney for a sum in excess of $50,000, as well as damages for suffering, loss of income, and medical and legal costs. Disney argues that, as the restaurant is operated independently, it bears no responsibility. The case will now be heard in court at an unknown date.

The show had once been preserved by its original makers on reel-to-reel tapes, but over the years these were apparently scattered and lost. The Internet Archive project to preserve the show began when computer historian Kay Savetz acquired several of these tapes at a property sale, and subsequently launched a crowdfunding campaign to digitally archive and make the show available again.  

"While full of time-capsule descriptions of 1980s technology news, the most exciting aspect of the show has been the variety and uniqueness of the interviews," writes Savetz. "The list of people that the show interviewed is a who’s-who of tech luminaries of the 1980s: computer people, musicians, publishers, philosophers, journalists. Interviews in the recovered recordings include Timothy Leary, Douglas Adams, Bill Gates, Atari’s Jack Tramiel, Apple’s Bill Atkinson, and dozens of others."

I adore old technology shows, particularly the thrill of listening to smart people try and puzzle-through where the field is going, alongside the nostalgic thrill of an age when people were asking just what computers were, as well as what they can do.

I listened to the episode of The Famous Computer Cafe where they interview a young Bill Gates. He turns up around ten minutes into the show, just after a review of the Muppet Learning Keyboard, which doesn't have very good key responsiveness and may leave a three-year-old bored. Gates was already semi-famous and fabulously successful at this stage, but computers simply weren't as mainstream news as they are now, and their purpose and potential still had to be explained in simple terms.

Gates is first asked to explain an operating system, which he does by talking about how a computer is made of many components, and needs something to communicate between them: "that basic housekeeping function, what we sometimes call input / output management, is performed by an operating system."

Gates goes on to talk about MS-DOS, before listing various bits of Microsoft software including "one of our most popular programs" Flight Simulator: "It lets you be in a plane flying around [...] we have maps of various cities so you can actually see the Sears tower, or whatever landmarks are in the city you happen to be from." 

The interviewer asks about the Apple Macintosh, which Gates enthuses about as a pioneer for graphical applications: "We think that graphics will be on all machines [...] so we were enthusiastic to develop graphical applications." Gates goes on to wheel out some of his favourite phrases ("A machine on every desktop, a machine in every home") while talking about the future of computing, including his ideas for computers "to aid you" through what at the time Microsoft called "softer software." 

Asked if this means AI, Gates says AI is a "loaded" term. "People think of robots, and they're gonna take over the world [but what I mean] by softer software is the machine recognising what you're trying to do."

This interview took place in November 1984 and, four decades on, it's perhaps not surprising just how right Gates is on almost every topic he addresses, and the absolute conviction with which he talks about where the humble PC is going. Later in the show Gates goes on to talk about MSX, before it moves onto talking to Kazuhiko Nishi, who at the time was spearheading Microsoft's push into Asia, about the Japanese PC market. Near the end of the show there's a brief segment about how new government legislation may affect, get this, working from home on your computer.

The Famous Computer Cafe is a wonderful place to hang out for a while, and the list of interviewees means I've already got several episodes bookmarked for the next few weeks. The 53 shows archived and released do not represent the entirety of the show: these episodes are from the period November 17 1984 through July 12 1985. Other shows on those reel-to-reel tapes are hopefully still out there somewhere, and include interviews with the likes of Ray Bradbury, Robert Moog, Donny Osmond (!), and Gene Roddenberry. So maybe if you have a garage in Los Angeles, give it a clearout.

The story of The Famous Computer Cafe and how this project happened is the subject of a new episode of the Radio Survivor podcast, which interviews co-creator Ellen Fields alongside Kay Savetz.

As usual, there have been teasers for games that are definitely turning up to the showcase: Black Ops 6, Monster Hunter Wilds, Dune Awakening, Civilization 7, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and a lot of others. Keighey tends to pack an event pretty tight with trailers so there will likely be some surprises we haven't anticipated. Oh, but he did do us all a favor and confirmed ahead of time that no, Silksong isn't there.

When is Gamescom Opening Night Live?

This year Gamescom Opening Night Live premieres at 8 pm CET on Tuesday, August 20, 2024. You can check what time that is in your time zone, or check what 8 pm CET equates to around the world below:

• 11 am PDT (Los Angeles)
• 2 pm EDT (New York)
• 7 pm BST (London)
• 8 pm CET (Cologne)
• 4 am, August 21 AEST (Sydney)
• 6 am, August 21 NZST (Auckland)

Opening Night Live is expected to last about two hours, but given that it is a live show it could very well run long. Here's a longer list of games that Keighley has confirmed will be turning up to the showcase:

• Call of Duty: Black Ops 6
• Monster Hunter Wilds
• Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
• Little Nightmares III
• DRAGON BALL: Sparking! ZERO
• Batman: Arkham Shadow
• Dune Awakening
• Marvel Rivals
• Squid Game: Unleashed
• A new from Tarsier Studios
• Sid Meier's CIVILIZATION VII
• Kingdom Come Deliverance II
• Lost Records: Bloom & Rage
• Mecha Break
• Infinity Nikki
• ARC Raiders
• Persona 3 Reload Episode Aigis
• Delta Force

We'll be on the ground at Gamescom, so expect to see more about plenty of the games above on PC Gamer this week.

Lynch and his 18 year-old daughter Hannah are among three Britons that remain missing, while his wife, Angela Bacares, has been rescued. Two Americans and a Canadian are also missing.

A statement from the Italian coastguard reads: "This morning at about 5:00 am, following a violent storm, a 56-metre yacht called Bayesian flying the British flag sank near Porticello." 

Local reports said the boat sank after being hit by a waterspout, a mix of wind and water that can form in storms and is often referred to as a mini-tornado. The BBC reports that fishers saw the waterspout off the coast at around 3:55 am local time, and shortly afterwards saw a distress flare that may have come from the Bayesian. Approaching, they found only "scattered remains of the sailboat floating in the water."

Eight of those rescued, including the baby, are now in local hospitals in a stable condition. The captain of a nearby boat told reporters he had taken on 15 survivors from a life raft, and that the Bayesian was "heeling" (listing to one side) before it went under.

The one year-old was saved by her mother, who held her daughter's head above the water while screaming for rescue. "It was all dark," said the woman, named by the BBC as British citizen Charlotte Golunski. "In the water, I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I was screaming for help, but all I could hear around me were the screams of others."

The Bayesian is owned by Revtom, a firm registered in the Isle of Man of which Angela Bacares is the sole owner. The luxury yacht can carry 12 guests and a crew of ten. 

Lynch is best-known for founding Autonomy Corporation in the 1990s, a software company that was bought for $11.1 billion by Hewlett-Packard in 2011. In recent years he had been in the news after HP launched legal action against Lynch and others over the sale, alleging they had exaggerated the firm's numbers and misled regulators to dupe HP into the sale. Lynch was extradited to the US, and won the case earlier this year. Dubbed "Britain's Bill Gates" by some, Lynch is also a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Royal Society.

After being acquitted in the HP case and returning to the UK, Lynch said "I am looking forward to returning to the UK and getting back to what I love most: my family and innovating in my field."

The Italian Coastguard remains searching, with both divers and helicopter teams involved. They have located the wreck approximately 50 metres below the surface. The operation will continue through the night, with further specialist teams travelling to the scene.

"We think [the bodies] must be there [in the wreckage]," Francesco Venuto of Sicily's civil protection agency told the BBC. "We've been searching all day with helicopters and boats, we've found nothing. That wouldn't make sense, in these conditions we should have found something by now."

"We are in contact with the local authorities following an incident in Sicily," said a spokesperson for the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, "and stand ready to provide consular support to British nationals affected."

And that means it's time for another Future Games Show from our sister site GamesRadar. Coming at you on August 21 at 1 pm PT / 4 pm ET / 10 pm CEST via Twitch, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, GamesRadar, BiliBili and more, this one's gonna be a doozy.

Hosted by Alex McKenna (Red Dead Redemption 2's Sadie Adler, who remains that game's true deuteragonist in my heart), and Ned Luke (GTA 5's Michael de Santa), it's set to show off over 50 games from a bunch of devs and publishers. 

We'll be getting two deep dives into Civilization 7 from the folks at Firaxis, a fresh look at planetary defence cannon sim PVKK, and a bit more insight into Greedfall 2. All that plus a bunch more, including new game announcements I'm not allowed to spoil here.

There's even a bit of non-videogame fun to be had, which I didn't even realise you could do at Gamescom. On top of all the gaming stuff, Prime Video will also be along to give us an exclusive look at The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power season 2. I'm hoping for a cameo from Mozû the Blight.

It's gonna be spectacular, so if you're looking forward to the Gamescom festivities, pencil in some time to hang out with our pals this Wednesday.

If you're like me, you might be wondering what the hell any of this means, and why someone would pay life changing amounts of money to crank up their Steam profile level. I've had my account for a long time, play a lot of games, but barely interact with Steam as a social media platform, leaving me at a paltry level 14. The real power gamer meta is to purchase trading card boosters and seasonal badges on Steam to juice that number.

Which, it must be said, does not have an immediate practical benefit, just bragging rights for the top power-levelers tracked by SteamDB. It reminds me a lot of NFTs⁠, investing cash into a digital signifier with no tangible value, but potential entry into a strange alternate economy. While it in large part appears to be an absurd form of conspicuous consumption, maintaining a high Steam level does also seem to be a form of networking, a way of proving you're a serious customer amongst the crazy-expensive Counter-Strike skin trading set: "I won't talk business unless you're over Level 100."

OhnePixel typically estimates the value of a profile's Steam level by calculating the cost of badge purchases required to get there. In this case, he eyeballed stasik's off what St4ck paid to reach level 5,000: $500,000-$700,000. Stasik has since raised the account's level even further than when ohnePixel checked in, making the total cost even higher⁠—and that's not even counting the value of other items and skins tied to the account.

Speaking of other items and skins, stasik's Counter-Strike 2 inventory has a bit of a landmine hidden in it. Amid numerous multi-thousand dollar skins, you can find a nearly $9,000 "Factory New" M4A1 Howl with stickers arranged on the side to spell out a racial slur. In addition to being extremely odious and distasteful, the gesture puts stasik's account at risk of a potentially permanent community ban, a particularly absurd move given the sheer amount of money injected into the account.

Stasik declined to speak directly to ohnePixel, but has a public Steam profile and linked Instagram with nearly 15,000 followers, both of which refer to a "Discord Kitten"—another user with the user name "Начальник пыли" (Russian for "Chief of Dust")—with a matching couple's profile that links back to stasik. Both stasik and his presumed paramour list the United Arab Emirates as their country of residence.

Further on, stasik's Steam account also makes reference to another user taking issue with him and other people who speak Russian. A since-deleted comment, preserved in ohnePixel's video, by Reddit user Formal_Palpitation14 on a thread about Stasik's account offers a potential, though unverified explanation.

Claiming to be Steam friends with stasik, they wrote: "He mentioned to me he had some beef ongoing with the guy called MoneyLead [The third highest-level Steam user] and how he told him it's not so easy to level up and hold 1st/2nd place… then he just wanted to show him how easy it actually is if money isn't a problem.

"Now Moneylead deleted/blocked everyone he had in his friends list who was friends with stasik."

Take that with a grain of salt, but it does fit with stasik's vague posting and sudden rise through the Steam level ranks. Regarding stasik's allusion to discrimination against Russian speakers, MoneyLead has a number of Ukranian flag emojis on his profile, and a bio that reads: "Glory to Ukraine. The world must stop this terror." Further down, there is the spoilered message, "Not accept VAC BANED [sic] REP BAN and below level 100 and russian." 

This is quite the story, but I'm not sure I can draw any important life lessons from it. I hope these conspicuously wealthy gamers, if they are indeed feuding, can learn to give peace a chance, and I also hope that they stop putting slurs on their Counter-Strike guns.

At the top of the list are Igor and Dmitry Bukhman, whose names, games, and studio I had never heard of before beholding this very list. The brothers founded and own Playrix, a 4,000 person-strong developer of free-to-play mobile games, with their most notable releases being Township, Fishdom, Homescapes, and Gardenscapes. I guess I'm happy for them and their eye-watering £12.5 billion fortune.

Past a metaverse guy and the founder of Candy Crush developer King, now the oft-forgotten third pillar of Activision Blizzard King, you'll run into some rich guys more PC gamers will recognize: Dan and Sam Houser, who lay claim to an estimated £350 million fortune. Co-founders of the niche indie developer, Rockstar Games, their fortune was built on revenue from Rockstar's breakout hits: The Warriors in 2005 and Bully in 2006. Those games' runaway success have allowed Rockstar to indulge in less lucrative passion projects like Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption.

The biggest surprise, at least for me, is #6 on the list: Garry's Mod's titular creator, Garry Newman. I guess it shouldn't be a shocker. Garry's Mod is a ubiquitous presence in PC gaming, and despite the name, it's a $10 standalone game. Newman's Facepunch Studios is also behind the highly successful Rust, and his deep pockets have me much less worried about Newman's imminent Skibidi Toilet-related legal battles.

There's a lot to dig into with the 30-person list: PewDiePie is still rich as hell, believe it or not, and I definitely felt my heart warm at the sight of Luca Galante, founder of poncle and creator of Vampire Survivors, at #26. It's a bit of a bummer and not exactly surprising that there are only three women on the list, but I don't know if "more women in the UK games industry 1%" should become our next rallying cry for gender equality in the hobby. One thing we can all agree on though: The people I really like and admire on the list like Galante and Newman are just cool guys with talent who also got lucky, and the rest of them should be paying more taxes.

While Krafton wanted to "inherit the entire development team" (as per a statement from Krafton PR, shared by Stephen Totilo in both his GameFile newsletter and on Twitter) the publisher hasn't managed to get the full breadth of talent it made the "acqui-hire" for. Here's the full statement:

"KRAFTON plans to transfer approximately 50 development staff from Tango Gameworks to KRAFTON's Japan subsidiary. These transferred staff will continue to work on new projects, including the expansion of the HI-FI RUSH IP, at KRAFTON."

That's almost exactly half of the studio's previous size (via Genki_JPN on Twitter). Given Krafton's explicit statement that it wanted to get the entire team transferred, it's a reasonable assumption that most of Tango Gameworks' former staff have found new employment—or, more pessimistically, ducked out of the industry entirely, which is not an impossible prospect considering just how grim things have been.

The deal, as Totilo writes, was "effective Aug 1"—leaving a roughly three-month gap between the initial closures, which took place in May, and the certain knowledge that Tango wouldn't be closing its doors for good.

Tango Gameworks' current website has several job listings available—animators and programmers, as well as sound, environment, and UI designers, plus VFX, character, and concept artists are all wanted at the studio. That's a wide roster of talent, though whether Krafton intends to replenish its numbers back to the pre-closure times remains to be seen.

As per Krafton's initial statement earlier this week, the studio appears focused on the Hi-Fi Rush IP in particular—which tracks. While Ghostwire: Tokyo didn't do abysmally, Hi-Fi Rush captured more of the public's imagination as an exciting and vibrant new IP and, in Aaron Greenberg of Microsoft's own words: "was a break out hit for us and our players in all key measurements and expectations". Which, as you might imagine, makes Tango's closure all the more perplexing.

Giving away half-a-billion game copies a year, even when paying a small fraction of each copy's list price, is not cheap. Thanks to documents that came out during Epic's legal fight with Apple, we learned that the company spent $11.6 million on free games in just the first nine months of the program. Epic has been giving away games for six years now.

However, responding to a question about Epic's free game strategy on a call with press earlier this week, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney said that it's been a "very economical" user acquisition program, with the bonus that the budget goes to game developers—a group it's in a game store's interest to see thrive—rather than toward Facebook or Google ads.

"Giving away free games seems counterintuitive as a strategy, but companies spend money to acquire users into games," said Sweeney. "For about a quarter of the price that it costs to acquire users through Facebook ads or Google Search Ads, we can pay a game developer a lot of money for the right to distribute their game to our users, and we can bring in new users to the Epic Games Store at a very economical rate.

"And you might think that this would hurt the sales prospects of games on the Epic Game Store, but developers who give away free games actually see an upsurge in the sale of their paid games on the store, just because their free game raises awareness. And it's so much that often developers, when they're about to launch a new game, come with us wanting to work closely on a timed release of a free game, just to drive user awareness of their next game. That's been an awesome thing. And it's been by far the most cost effective aspect of the Epic Games Store."

Epic's other big method for attracting new Epic Games Store users has been to strike exclusivity deals with publishers like Ubisoft. It's been an unpopular strategy, and hasn't gone as swimmingly.

"We spent a lot of money on exclusives," said Sweeney. "A few of them worked extremely well. A lot of them were not good investments, but the free games program has been just magical."

Back in 2021, we learned that Epic was likely to lose over $300 million on just the exclusivity deals made up to that point. Epic seems to have slowed down on pursuing exclusivity deals, although it hasn't dropped the strategy.

Epic Games Store exclusivity now also applies to games Epic is funding through the publishing division it started in 2020. The first of those Epic-published games to release was Remedy's Alan Wake 2, which hasn't made a profit yet.

The free games, though: that's a hit. If you want to see what Epic is giving away right now, and every game it's given away in the past, we're keeping track in our Epic Games Store free games list.