The new record, set on August 25, represents a sharp climb in concurrent users since the beginning of 2024, when the new year ushered in a new concurrent user record of nearly 33.7 million. The number of people actually in a game concurrently has seen a comparable pop, according to SteamDB, from 10.8 million when that January record was set to more than 12.5 million at the time of this newest record.

Steam is a very reliable "number go up" operation as a regular thing but even so, this particular peak coming in the later days of summer—not exactly a time of peak gaming interest, I don't think—is interesting. The peak concurrent user count sailed past 36 million back in March and came oh-so-close to break 37 million in June, before sidling back down to mid-34 million peaks through most of July.

It's always fun to speculate about the reasons behind Steam's concurrent user peaks: Sometimes it's the holiday season, sometimes it's shitty weather, and sometimes it's a really big game. Most of the credit for surpassing the big Three-Seven, I think, has to go to Black Myth: Wukong, which launched on Steam on August 19 and quickly powered its way to the top of the charts, becoming the second-most played Steam game of all time. Its peak concurrent player count of more than 2.4 million crushed previous records held by games including Palworld, CS:GO, and Lord Ark, and now stands second only to PUBG Battlegrounds.

Those numbers are a clear reflection of the importance of China to Steam's future growth, and I have no doubt we'll be seeing more of it, driven by new Chinese blockbusters, in the future. Is a new record of 40 million concurrent users possible by the end of 2024? At this point, I would not bet against it.

On an average day about a dozen new games are released on Steam. And while we think that's a good thing, it can be understandably hard to keep up with. Potentially exciting gems are sure to be lost in the deluge of new things to play unless you sort through every single game that is released on Steam. So that’s exactly what we’ve done. If nothing catches your fancy this week, we've gathered the best PC games you can play right now and a running list of the 2024 games that are launching this year. 

Liminal Void

Steam ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ August 23
Developer:‌ Jeistar

If the ye olde Shin Megami Tensei first-person dungeon crawlers weren't weird enough for you, Liminal Void might pass the test. Set in the Liminal Layer—in other words, a "bridge between reality and the Void"—you'll need to keep climbing (or descending) layers of the liminal dungeon until you can face off against the Void Gods. A lot of preparation is needed to full that feat off: each layer is scattered with sigils which you'll definitely need to go out of your way to collect, lest you want to survive the many and varied liminal entities waiting to kill you. It's a roguelike with a bizarre art style, four playable characters, and 16 different endings. 

Galaxy Burger

Steam‌ ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ August 23
Developer:‌ Galactic Workshop

Galaxy Burger is a relaxing game about making burgers for a bunch of space weirdos, including a mecha-cat. Yes, you can probably stick to conventional burger ingredients, but some of your customers will want to be surprised, no doubt testing the limits of what is meant by "burger". When you're not working the counter at your outer space burger joint, you'll be roaming the galaxy looking for appetizing new ingredients. There's even coop for up to eight players, so you'll have someone to chat with while flipping patties. 

Mika and The Witch's Fountain

Steam‌ ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ August 21
Developers:‌ Chibig, Nukefist

Mika and the Witch's Mountain adds broom-top flying to the 3D platformer template. Taking inspiration from Kiki's Delivery Service, protagonist Mika needs to deliver packages to the inhabitants of her idyllic island home, but that's not always easy thanks to the very many illogical obstacles strewn all over the place, not to mention the sheer drops into crystalline blue water. This may offer simple pleasures—it's very much of the "cozy" persuasion—but the flying feels great, and more content will be added during the game's Early Access period.

Never Forgotten

Steam‌ ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ August 22
Developer:‌ Cody Hodge

Here's a gorgeous pixel art survival horror game with 1-bit graphics that somehow puts me in mind of those utterly indecipherable metal logos. Keeping to the grim theme, Never Forgotten is set in "an abandoned world enveloped in flesh", and while you're encouraged to flee from the disturbing creatures who inhabit this hellscape, occasionally you'll need to fight them in battles that kinda take the form of time-based mini-games. If nothing else, Never Forgotten has a lot of creepy flair.

This Is Not Your House

Steam‌ ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ August 24
Developer:‌ Cody Tierson (Trash Eyes)

This is a horror visual novel that feels like something you might find in a box of mysterious Commodore 64 floppy disks buried at the back of a charity store. Protagonist Roger arrives home to find that someone has started living in his house. Do you resort to violence straight off the bat, or try to negotiate? Will either extreme make a difference? I'm not sure myself, but there are ten unique endings, so your choices will definitely have consequences.

But oh, sweet memories. Home from school, dinner's cooking, and I'm browsing the forums. Someone's explaining why I'm wrong to think a Frost-spec Death Knight can play DPS effectively, linking out to some previous WoW patch notes, a link I'm invested enough to click on. I anticipate a wall of text. But lo, before me, a boyish figure clicks his heels and swings his hips to hypnotic '80s synth, singing words that teach me the simple beauty of love and commitment. What a wholesome and innocent game that's been played on me.

Those were the days. Days it now seems that AI chatbots might bizarrely bring about once again, as we see Lindy AI's founder Flo Crivello showing the AI bot seemingly responding to a user request email with a bona fide Rickroll, stating, "Lindy is literally f***ing rickrolling our customers."

The bot, which boasts being "the world’s easiest way to build AI automations to save you time and grow your business", is seen in the post responding to a user request for an instructional video by linking out to what it said was a "comprehensive video tutorial". Lurking beneath the link's hypertext, however, in a tale as old as time, was a link to Rick Astley's 1987 pop hit Never Gonna Give You Up.

Rickrolling was good, harmless fun back in the day. The worst thing I can say about it is that it turned a genuinely good song into a punchline, but I'm sure Rick Astley's bothered by that that almost zilch.

Yes, it was fun, but before long it joined the likes of minion memes, trollfaces, and cats with a ravenous appetite for cheeseburgers. If you Rickrolled someone, you were behind the times (sonny). These days, it might be funny again in a kind of ironic way: because it's just so not funny. Maybe.

But does AI know that? Is Lindy doing ironic, here? Somehow, I think not. Unknowingly absurd, for sure, but not ironic. For that there'd need to be genuine self-awareness, and I think AI's a priori lack of self-awareness is what makes this Rickroll give me a minor case of the heebie jeebies. A human being who Rickrolls me gets a genuine kick out of it, but what does AI get out of it?

Though, it could also be an easy way of getting publicity for your chatbots from internet memologists and news writers by forcing this interaction for socials. But that's nowhere near as much fun.

Heebies and jeebies and fakery aside, I'll take Rickrolling over the Big Red Button and resulting mushroom cloud that some AI doom-and-gloomers predict. Plus, there's something kinda cute about an AI chatbot resurrecting an almost-20-year old internet prank, isn't there. Oh God, I just called AI cute, didn't I? Nobody tell the posthumanists.

As reported by Windows Latest, citing @phantomofearth on X, then personally verified by me spending hours waiting for Windows updates, the original feature is actually intended to be an accessibility tool. It is "designed for the hard-of-hearing community" though the function doesn't elaborate on how it might be utilised. 

To even access it, you need to sign up for the latest dev build of Windows 11: 10.0.26120.1542. Once you have this, you then have to go to a hidden setting in the advanced camera settings and toggle the "Multi-app Camera", which is off by default. And you can only get that far by using a special tool and turning on the features with the correct feature ID (thanks XDA for the help there).

This is all to say it's hours of work for a very minimal change, which might only be worth it for the aforementioned accessibility use.

However, there is one key reason streamers may get something out of this. If you are streaming games to an audience with a face cam and want to be able to talk on a Discord call at the same time, you previously needed two webcams or different rigs just to do this. With this new feature, your friends will be able to see your face in Discord, and the audience will see it too on stream. This is an incredibly niche feature but also one the right type of streamer could get some use out of. When turned on, you can't access in-app functions and need to change the brightness from Windows settings so it does limit use somewhat.

As far as accessibility is concerned, you could make the argument for transcription or lip-reading software, being able to pick out words and give you a written note of what is said at the same time. This is purely conjecture on my part though, and a cursory Google search doesn't alleviate my curiosity.

If this does roll out in a future Windows update, we should get a better idea of its accessibility purpose. For now, I've spent a painful few hours verifying it exists, though we don't know when we will see it in a more public Windows update.

The method in question was remarkably simple—just apply a /product server argument to the setup execute file to trick Windows 11 into thinking the PC was a server and thus bypass the TPM 2.0 requirement. But as X user Bob Pony found out (via Tom's Hardware), Microsoft has now blocked that method in an Insider build of Windows.

If you delve into the hardware requirements for Windows 11, you'll see that you really don't need much, just a basic dual-core CPU, 4 GB of RAM, and a GPU that has WDDM drivers. Oh, and the PC needs to have TPM 2.0 (Trusted Platform Module), but what exactly is that?

Basically, it's a tiny security chip on the motherboard and it's typically used to create cryptographic keys, which in turn are used to encrypt the contents of the PC's storage drives. If you've bought or built a new PC within the last eight or so years, then it'll almost certainly have a TPM chip, but the older the hardware, the less likely it'll be present or the right version.

That meant when Windows 11 appeared with its TPM 2.0 requirement, an enormous swathe of perfectly viable PCs were left without the chance to upgrade to the latest version of Windows. That hasn't been a problem because millions of people have just stayed on Windows 10 or found ways to bypass the requirement.

Microsoft has been steadily chipping away at those bypass methods, although it is a little surprising that it's taken so long for it to nix the incredibly simple 'product server' method. In previous blocks, Microsoft added a check for a modern CPU instruction during the Windows 11 installation process, so even if one could sneak past the TPM 2.0 check, if it was a really old CPU, then you were stuck.

As this new block is only in a Windows Insider program version of the operating system, if you're currently using Windows 11 on 'non-compliant' hardware then you'll still be fine. But it's probably only a matter of time before Microsoft rolls it out in a normal Windows update, at which point you could well find your system no longer functional—assuming you've used the product server method to bypass the check.

One thing that I'm not sure about at the moment is whether Rufus, the best Windows installation tool around, uses this method for its option to bypass Secure Boot and TPM 2.0.

Even if it does, I should imagine there will be some clever folks out there who know of a sure method to avoid the whole TPM issue, but I also reckon that over time, Microsoft will find a way to kill them off one by one. But given how slow it's been at doing all of this so far, I don't think one needs to be concerned just yet.

Windows 11 Build 27686 adds the new settings to the power menu, with drop-down boxes for both plugged-in and on-battery settings—allowing you to choose from options like Best Performance, Balanced or Best Power Efficiency (via Bleeping Computer) for each.

This allows you to ramp up performance for when you're plugged into the wall and set it to a power-efficient mode for when you're on the battery—eeking out a little more battery life for travel and gaining a boost when you're pushing your machine in demanding tasks. Of course, Windows 11 does have advanced power settings that help in this regard, but you'd need to fiddle around in the old control panel to find them.

It won't be a huge amount of performance or battery life gained here, granted, but every little helps, especially when it comes to squeezing out some more minutes from your laptop. Changing the new settings should take a little bit of the pressure off in stressful scenarios like, I don't know, writing a time-sensitive article in an airport lounge while all the plugs are taken up. Ask me how I know.

You'll have to be part of the Windows Insider Program on the Canary channel to enable the feature currently, and it's a pretty easy thing to do. Canary builds can be unstable, though, so you might be better off waiting until it hopefully turns up in more Windows 11 builds.

It's not the only new feature worth talking about in the latest build, either. The arbitrary 32 GB size limit for FAT32 partitions has now been bumped up to 2 TB, and there's a new HDR streaming feature to tinker with, too. It doesn't fix the mess that is HDR gaming on a Windows machine, but we can all keep praying for that eventual update, can't we? 

In the meantime, some long overdue power setting segmentation for mobile devices is certainly a useful feature. While Windows has always performed a degree of power adjustment when switching between the battery and the outlet, allowing you to set the options yourself is a nice win for giving more control to the user. More power to your elbow, as we Brits say, or in this case, more (or less) power to your laptop, too. 

On an average day about a dozen new games are released on Steam. And while we think that's a good thing, it can be understandably hard to keep up with. Potentially exciting gems are sure to be lost in the deluge of new things to play unless you sort through every single game that is released on Steam. So that’s exactly what we’ve done. If nothing catches your fancy this week, we've gathered the best PC games you can play right now and a running list of the 2024 games that are launching this year. 

Oddada

Steam‌ ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ August 15
Developer:‌ Sven Ahlgrimm, Mathilde Hoffmann

Oddada is about using a range of strange toys to compose music. Each toy needs to be approached or "played" differently, and each has its own distinct sonic flavour. For example, one instrument takes the form of a simplified isometric town builder, with each object placed on the grid modifying the overall melody or rhythm. Don't mistake it for some arcane take on a DAW: it's definitely a game, albeit one that wants to capture the exploratory fun of music creation. During each playthrough the order of instruments switches, encouraging a wide range of results, and once you've created a bunch of tracks you can create digital mixtapes which can be exported into audio files. First Oddada-composed IDM album when?

The Crimson Diamond

Steam‌ ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ August 16
Developer:‌ Julia Minamata

Whenever I see the familiar color schemes of the EGA era my heart skips a beat and I want to go back. Plenty of modern adventure games mimic resplendent VGA chunkiness but few aim for EGA and get it right like The Crimson Diamond does. It's a point 'n' click detective adventure starring "reluctant detective" Nancy Maple, who has arrived in the barren Ontario township of Crimson to investigate a giant diamond. Expect a mix of exploration and puzzle-solving, which is good enough to have earned an endorsement from Sierra co-founder Roberta Williams.

Arco

Steam‌ ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ August 16
Developers:‌ Franek, Max Cahill, Bibiki, Fayer

This tactical RPG swaps out the usual fantasy trappings for hard-boiled supernatural western. Players take on a rotating cast whose varied perspectives shed light on a conflict between colonizers and incumbents, but into this gritty mix is monsters and a more varied approach to environment design than "western" might imply. It's the combat that looks really fun, though: You'll choose your moves in advance and watch them play out, but Arco foregoes the usual grid-placed gameplay for a more flexible line-based approach. It looks like a lot of fun, and deeper than meets the eye. 

Intravenous II

Steam‌ ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ August 16
Developer:‌ Explosive Squat Games

Like its 2021 predecessor, Intravenous 2 may look like Hotline Miami but its approach is pretty much the opposite. It's a slow-paced tactical shooter with a big emphasis on stealth. That's not to say you can't just bowl through doors and gun down miscreants loudly as possible, but it would probably be missing the point. This sequel has a branching narrative following the adventures of Sean and Steve who, despite their amusingly boring names, are embroiled in a hectic kidnapping affair which can only be solved with tactical thinking and guns. There are tonnes of weapons and gadgets at your disposal, and a lot of options to personalize.

Feed the Deep

Steam‌ ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ August 17
Developer:‌ Luke Muscat

At first glance Feed the Deep looks a bit like Wario Dave the Diver: you'll navigate subaquatic mazes looking for stuff, but instead of cheerfully vibrant greens and blues these waters are murky and foreboding. To keep humankind's now-necessary airborne cities afloat, the protagonist must feed a mysterious creature inhabiting the ocean floor. Along the way you'll chance upon upgrades and items that in roguelike fashion will change the course of your procedurally generated run. It's inspired by Spelunky and Dome Keeper, and made by the creator of Jetpack Joyride, so you know it's going to have the exquisitely more-ish movement that can turn a good idea into a great game.

According to Microsoft, this exact issue is affecting certain installs of Outlook, Word and OneNote, and its Outlook and Office teams are currently investigating (via Neowin). In a support post, MS defines the problem as:

"After updating to [Office] Version 2407 Build 17830.20138 or higher you find that Outlook, Word, or OneNote may unexpectedly close when typing or doing other authoring tasks such as spell check."

Yep, the simple act of typing or performing a spell check can cause the applications to close, undoubtedly inspiring a choice selection of curse words from affected users. Microsoft says that you can confirm the issue by looking for Event 1000 or Event 1001 in the Windows Event Viewer Application Log and that the issue may be caused by older language packs:

"The faulting module name will vary depending on what language packs you have installed. For example, mscss7it.dll for Italian, or mscss7ge.dll, for German, and others could include: EN, ES, FR, GE, IT, NP, PB."

Currently, MS advises a workaround involving an online repair of the affected Office application, searching for and uninstalling old Office language installations, and reinstalling the Language Accessory Pack for Microsoft 365. 

Affected users are also pointed towards a thread on the Microsoft forums in which multiple users report their Outlook installations crashing from simply typing, saving drafts, and typing in different languages—both in the Windows version and the Android application. 

Many of the users in the thread report that they were typing in (or spellchecking) German when the problem occurred, although by the look of the support post MS seems to think multiple languages could cause the affected apps to close.

Chalk one up for Notepad, I guess, although it's not like you can send an email with the app I internally refer to as "Ol' Reliable". Still, it does have a surprisingly good spellcheck and multiple useful features these days, and I've yet to have it crash on me while I'm taking notes. Sometimes the classics are the best, ey?

There might be some PTSD involved here. Once upon a time I owned a MacBook Air, and I loved that laptop. Brilliant piece of hardware: no Windows laptop has ever had a trackpad that good. It weighed nothing. The battery life was killer in its day. But man there were some things about Mac OS that I couldn't stand, including particularly Apple's preference for hiding away all my files, as if catching sight of ".jpg" would immediately stricken me with the bubonic plague. If I wanted to look at the pictures from my phone in the Photos app, easy peasy, but finding the actual files involved spelunking through some horrific sequence of folders.

One of my strongest opinions about computers is that I should not have to dig through, like, "User > Wes > .temp > astuvkcaqcf > 4748949585" just to find some damn files. 

Maybe Apple's gotten better about that in the years since—I have no idea. But to see Valve go down the same road now makes me want to pick up my PC and walk directly into the sea with it. I live about two miles away from the ocean which is a long time to carry a 30-ish pound desktop, but on the bright side, holding onto it will ensure I sink to the bottom of the sea where Steam's screenshot interface can no longer hurt me.

For many years the Screenshot window has included an all-powerful button, a simple vehicle for raw, efficient digital scrapbooking. You clicked it, and it opened up a Windows Explorer window straight to all the screenshots you'd ever taken for that individual game using Steam. Easy! Its other features have always been far less useful to me: I rarely want to upload a screenshot to the Steam Cloud because I do not post on the Steam forums. I do not need to use Steam's screenshot management window because if I'm taking a screenshot, I just want the dang .jpg, or a whole handful of them, to upload onto this website. 

Now in Steam's latest beta, clearly pulling in a simplified interface that prioritizes the Steam Deck, the ability to browse to one-click jump to that folder is gone, replaced by a Share button. You also used to be able to right-click an individual image and jump to the file location that way. That's gone, too. Valve wants you to stay inside Steam for all this stuff now, furthering a trend where all computing happens in an app and barely acknowledges the computer it's installed on.

Has anything been more of a scourge on computer interfaces this last decade than the Share button? It's the ultimate "clicking this doesn't actually do shit, but it does open up a list of other things you can do that used to have their own buttons" bit of obfuscating UI design. Via the Share button, Steam now lets me, one at a time, click "Save image" and choose where to save a screenshot on my computer.

But it's already on my computer, Valve. Where is it? Where did you put it? WHERE ARE MY FILES!!

The old interface remains in the non-beta branch of Steam for now, but I must implore Valve: bring back your second-best button. Don't make Steam another casualty of the obfuscation era of interface design. Sometimes The Old Ways are best. I would even accept a return to skeuomorphism if that was the only way to get back the simple click action I crave. Animate your screenshot window rolling open like a file cabinet full of manila folders if that's what it takes. Just give me back my button!

Footage of the robot in action was posted on X by Google DeepMind and as someone who has some experience of programming robot arms, albeit in a limited manufacturing engineering capacity, I was really impressed by what I saw, and the study's research paper is well worth reading.

It's more than just a camera keeping track of the ball and then motors wildly swinging a paddle about. To start things off, Google DeepMind built a database of all the initial states a table tennis ball could have, such as position, speed and spin. From here, the robot arm just practised various movements, getting used to switching between fore- and backhand grips, applying topspin, and so on.

Then it was pitched against real players, with the AI system designed so that would monitor how different people would behave and play, and use that information to refine the overall algorithm. Its success rate was tracked and the selected strategy self-adjusting in real-time accordingly.

Google DeepMind says that the robot played against 29 opponents, ranked into four different skill levels, and after completing all the matches, it came roughly in the middle of them—essentially the same as an "intermediate amateur."

Of course, it got its metal butt well and truly handed to itself by the better players and one clip shows a person starting slowly but then trouncing the AI with one quick shot. Google DeepMind says that this is to be expected, as aspects such as how paddle rubber affects spin are difficult to model properly in simulations.

But even so, it's still an impressive achievement, and I can think of multiple applications that future versions of the technology could be used for. Mass-manufacturing production lines that use robots for things like painting or welding are brilliant but often struggle to cope with minor mispositions or changes in lighting. An AI system trained to react properly to all of these will help prevent such issues from stalling the production line.

And I can foresee a time when seriously injured people could be routinely relying on AI-trained robot arms to handle things for them, while they recover and return to full strength and mobility.

For now, though, getting better at table tennis is where it's at—and I'm 100% on board with that goal. After all, it's infinitely better than getting better at robotic nuclear armageddon.