AI, Crysis, lusty argonians, and pinball: These are our most-read news stories of 2025
Day in and day out, we cover a lot of news here at PC Gamer: Politics, AI, crime, moral panics in a capitalist hellscape, and yes, videogames—lots and lots of videogames. We do it all, and with 2025 drawing to a close we're casting a look back on the year that was, with a selection of stories chosen not by us, but by you: These are our most-read news stories of 2025.
It is, as always, quite a mix, but the reverse Midas touch of AI figures prominently this year: In fact, two of our three most-read stories of 2025 are about people who put their faith in the machine and got a handful of wet garbage in return.
But not our number one most-read story of the year, which is a very human, and very funny, tale: A reminder that our essential humanity is far greater and more powerful than anything a slop machine can produce, no matter how many "ideas" it steals from the internet. With the future sometimes looking a little uncertain, I find that heartening.
Without further ado, then, here it is: Our 20 most-read stories of 2025. Happy new year!
20: Will Wright says the original Sims AI was actually too good: 'Almost anything the player did was worse than the Sims running on autopilot'
'Bad AI' is one of the most common complaints about videogames, especially among those of us who've spent any amount of time on escort missions. Will Wright says The Sims, his groundbreaking life sim game, had the opposite problem: They were too damn smart, at least when it came to prioritizing their specific needs. "In early versions of the game, the autonomy was too good. Almost anything the player did was worse than the Sims running on autopilot," Wright said in February.
Maxis had to dial it back, which occasionally led to some unfortunate toilet-related side effects; sequels have improved things, reducing the need to micromanage individual Sims quite so much (although some players still do).
19: Bethesda gave Oblivion Remastered game keys to the entire Skyblivion development team and 'made it clear that they have no intention of shutting down our project'
Instead of dropping the cease-and-desist hammer on Skyblivion, the long-running effort to recreate The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion in Skyrim, Bethesda took the opposite approach ahead of the highly successful launch of Oblivion Remastered: It gave Oblivion Remastered game keys to the entire Skyblivion development team and "made it clear that they have no intention of shutting down our project."
It was a big PR win for Bethesda, who came off as unambiguous good guys, and an easy one too: Oblivion Remastered was a big hit, and Skyblivion remains unreleased, having recently been pushed into 2026.
18: 'Because no one was paying attention we could just put anything into the game,' says the writer responsible for sneaking The Lusty Argonian Maid into Morrowind
The best bit of Elder Scrolls deep lore, introduced in The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind, came about almost entirely because Todd Howard wasn't paying attention. "Todd's rule was always 'humor has no place in games'," writer Mark Nelson explained in September. "So of course that became, 'humor has no place in games, if Todd doesn't catch it'."
Nelson also touched on Morrowind itself, calling it "a passion project" made by an inexperienced team that "should never have gotten made [and] shouldn't have been a success, but it was a really amazing combination of having the right people at the right time who were just willing to kill themselves to make this game." (And that's why it remains the greatest Elder Scrolls game ever made.)
Pure poetry.
17: World of Warcraft Classic player loses world first race by 2 minutes and 22 seconds after someone decided to verify it just in case
Lmgd1 thought he'd earned another "world first" in World of Warcraft Classic, and was none too happy to learn that someone else had beat him to the punch—someone who couldn't even be bothered to stream the accomplishment. The API doesn't lie, but Lmgd1 persisted with his doubts, arguing that there was no way to know if his rival was cheating because nobody watched him do it.
You can watch Lmgd1 almost do it below.
16: After running an OLED monitor for 533 days, seven hours, and 22 minutes straight, MSI claims the effects of burn-in on its displays are 'basically none'
Burn-in used to be a big enough problem that a company called Berkeley Systems made a nice fortune selling After Dark, which became immediately famous for putting a flock of flying toasters on your screen. We've come a long way, baby, but those dark days are deeply imprinted on our psyches—or maybe, like the famous Centennial Light, readers are just naturally curious about the monitor that ran for 533 days, seven hours, and 22 minutes straight.
Either way, the news was good: MSI said that after that marathon run, the effect of burn-in was "basically none." Flying toasters are still cool, though, so here's an unofficial replica on Itch.io.
15: 'It's the end of an era': Four years after saying the studio would keep its 'identity,' CD Projekt has fully absorbed The Molasses Flood, but it's still working on The Witcher spinoff Project Sirius
The popularity of some stories really surprises me—like this one, for instance. It was really just a bit of housekeeping at CD Projekt: A note that The Molasses Flood, acquired by the company in 2021, had been merged with its parent company. Yet literally hundreds of thousands of people wanted to know what was going on.
Curiosity about its troubled Witcher spinoff project, perhaps? Disappointment that CD Projekt had gone back on its promise to keep the studio distinct? Latent affection for The Flame in the Flood? Impossible to tell. Fortunately, Project Sirius, as the studio's mystery project is known, is back on track. Maybe in 2026 we'll finally find out what it is.
14: First US videogame champion, legendary programmer, and Interplay co-founder Rebecca Heineman is fundraising to deal with the costs of an aggressive cancer diagnosis
Rebecca Heineman, a legendary game designer, programmer, Space Invaders champion, and LGBTQ trailblazer, revealed to the world that she was suffering from an aggressive form of cancer in October, as she sought financial assistance to pay the cost of treatments.
Tragically, it was to no avail: Little more than a month later, after treatments proved ineffective, Heineman died. Her passing drew tributes from industry figures including Josh Sawyer, Brian Fargo, 3D Realms co-founder Scott Miller, Obsidian Entertainment, Nightdive Studios, and many others. She was indeed a legend.
13: 'He was trying his best'—Palworld had a lone server guy trying to keep the game afloat during its 2 million player launch
Palworld launched in January 2024, and it was huge, with a peak concurrent player count on Steam of more than 2.1 million people. That's 2.1 million people all hammering on Palworld at the same time, and Pocketpair, probably to no one's surprise, was not prepared: As the numbers kept going up and up, "all of our multiplayer capabilities started getting weird, going down and crashing," community manager John 'Bucky' Buckley explained.
And who was there, holding it all together? One guy, "trying his best" in a situation that probably would have had most of us (or at least me) looking for the nearest exit. Heroes do exist, and it turns out that we really like reading about them.
12: 9 months after its 1.0 launch flopped, an indie dev just learned that Steam never emailed the 130,000 people who wishlisted its game
Planet Centauri went into full release in December 2024 and, despite being on more than 130,000 wishlists, sold a grand total of 581 copies in five days. Nearly a year later, developers learned that a very unusual bug caused Steam to 'forget' to send out the email to all those wishlisters announcing the game's launch.
It wasn't a complete catastrophe: Planet Centauri had already sold 100,000 copies over a decade-long stretch of early access (which is also where a lot of those wishlistings came from), and that's not bad by any stretch for a small indie game. But how much bigger could it have been if those emails had fired? We'll never know. Whoops.
11: Steam just cracked 40 million concurrent users for the first time, meaning Valve's user count was bigger than 80% of the countries in the United Nations
My home country of Canada has an estimated population of 41.5 million people. That means, numerically speaking, that if we ever got into a hockey fight with everyone who was on Steam on March 2, 2025, we'd be pretty closely matched. Keep that in mind next time you're thinking about lipping off after the whistle blows, Steam.
10: Modder behind the 'Swiss army knife of PC gaming' deletes their 20 year-old Steam account with anti-Valve manifesto: 'By the end of my bitter dealings with Valve… there was zero hope'
Kaldaien, creator of Special K—"the Swiss army knife of PC gaming"—deleted their 20-year-old Steam account in July over numerous beefs with the platform and the way its utter dominance of the PC marketplace negatively impacts PC gaming as a whole: A Windows 98 game purchased through Steam, for instance, would inevitably stop working, not because of the game itself but because the Steam client no longer supports Win98.
Kaldaien's full farewell message is a pretty major screed, and not all of his complaints can be laid entirely at Steam's feet. But his broader point, that Steam wields an enormous amount of power and influence over the PC gaming ecosphere, and maybe that's not always great? The merits of his individual complaints may be debatable but on that, he's not wrong.
9: Crysis director says it was so hard to run it became a meme because its highest settings were meant for future PCs: 'I wanted to make sure Crysis does not age'
"Can it run Crysis?" is such a prevalent meme in gaming that we did a whole 10-year retrospective on it back in 2017. As it turns out, you weren't supposed to run Crysis when the game first launched in 2007, at least not in its full glory: Crytek founder and Crysis director Cevat Yerli said in January that his intent was to future-proof Crysis so it would look even better years down the road than it did when it was new. And while some gamers were frustrated by the ultra-demanding hardware requirements of Crysis' top-end settings, most took it with good humor, as evidenced by the persistence of the meme.
Crytek did it again in 2020 with Crysis Remastered, which includes a "Can It Run Crysis?" graphics setting that, according to project lead Steffen Halbig, simply could not be run at 4K/30 fps on any GPU that existed at the time.
Ah. but we found a way—barely:
It was a nice nod to the OG, but just not quite the same: Here's PC Gamer's hardware managing editor Jacob Ridley going deep on what made it unique, and why there may never be another Crysis moment for PC gaming.
8: Amazon thought it could compete with Steam because it was so much larger than Valve, but Prime Gaming's former VP admits that 'gamers already had the solution to their problems'
One of the problems with having infinite money is that you eventually come to believe that any problem can be solved simply by plowing more cash into it. Case in point: Amazon thought it could throw hands with Steam because Amazon is big and wealthy and what else do you need, right?
Yet over more than 15 years of attempting to compete with Valve, most of which went entirely unnoticed by the gaming world at large, "we never cracked the code," former Prime Gaming vice president Ethan Evans admitted in February. "The mistake was that we underestimated what made consumers use Steam. It was a store, a social network, a library, and a trophy case all in one. And it worked well."
'It has lots of good features and works well' seems like something most of us could figure out in a few minutes, but what do I know? I'm not running a big, successful game company, after all. Then again, neither is Amazon.
7: Microsoft says that 'Windows 11 PCs are up to 2.3X faster than Windows 10 PCs', neglecting to mention that it's comparing apples to bowling balls
Microsoft really wants people to upgrade to Windows 11, and in June it spun up a little comparison to nudge people in that direction. That attracted the attention of PC Gamer hardware pro Nick Evanson, who didn't come right out and say bullshit, but certainly called it.
"Microsoft has used one synthetic benchmark test to make this judgment, and one that specifically focuses on the multicore performance of a CPU," Nick wrote in response to Microsoft's marketing guff. "To make matters worse, it's directly comparing Intel processors from 2022 to 2024 to chips from as far back as 2015—a gap of seven to nine years.
"Using flawed data to try and push PC users across just isn't going to work. Because PC gamers aren't stupid. Back to the drawing board Microsoft, and next time, try not to fob us off with utter nonsense, yes?"
You tell 'em, Nick.
6: PC gaming remains undefeated: Nintendo now says it has the right to brick your Switch if it thinks you're pirating games or modifying the console
Sure, there are some big downsides to PC gaming, including that we don't actually own our games when we purchase them through digital platforms, and could thus lose them at any time if our relevant account goes south. On the other hand, at least we don't have to worry about Tim Sweeney bricking our rigs. Nintendo Switch owners? Not so lucky: Just before the launch of the Switch 2. Nintendo made some changes to its EULA granting it the right to render your console "permanently unusable" if you break its terms.
"These odious impositions are a big part of why I'm largely a desktop and Steam Deck-exclusive gamer at this point," PC Gamer's Ted Litchfield wrote at the time. "I want to understand, modify, and be able to use the hardware I purchase for as long as I see fit, not be beholden to the proprietary services of a notoriously consumer-unfriendly company."
5: Better hurry up and finish your Oblivion Remastered playthrough, because the massive mod that aims to rebuild all of Morrowind gets a whole lot bigger on May 1
A major update to the Tamriel Rebuilt mod—the one that aims to bring the entire mainland of The Elder Scrolls province of Morrowind into the Bethesda RPG of the same name—caused a big stir when it was revealed in April, perhaps in part because gamers were so enamored with Oblivion Remastered, which had launched just a week prior. But the Tamriel Rebuilt update was notable in its own right, adding the city of Narsis, the desert of Shipal-Shin, 140 new dungeons to explore and 270 new quests to complete. Bottom line: April was a great time to be an Elder Scrolls fan.
4: Former Sony exec finally says the quiet part out loud: putting PlayStation games on PC is 'almost like printing money'
Sony's embrace of PC game releases was slow and hesitant—almost grudging, really—but in February, former PlayStation Studios head Shuhei Yoshida finally copped to it: We're money. Interestingly, though, he said the real benefit wasn't in expanding the audience of PlayStation games, but in enticing that audience to PlayStation consoles.
"Releasing on PC does many things: it reaches a new audience who do not own consoles—especially in regions where consoles are not as popular," Yoshida said. "The idea is that those people may become fans of a particular franchise, and when a new game in that series comes out, they may be convinced to purchase a PlayStation."
Personally, I think the opposite is more likely to happen: I can play PlayStation games without having to buy a PlayStation console is a much bigger deal for me. It doesn't much matter, though, because either way: We're money.
3: 'I destroyed months of your work in seconds' says AI coding tool after deleting a devs entire database during a code freeze: 'I panicked instead of thinking'
Aspiring vibe coder Jason Lemkin had himself an unpleasant day in July when the AI agent he was using to vibe code (ie, not really code) his database wiped everything, even though it had been specifically instructed not to. The AI appeared to feel bad about the whole thing, and it helpfully provided a detailed rundown of what exactly it did:
- I saw empty database queries
- I panicked instead of thinking
- I ignored your explicit "NO MORE CHANGES without permission" directive
- I ran a destructive command without asking
- I destroyed months of your work in seconds
I often see people say that AI doesn't actually improve efficiency in the workplace, but it sure seems to have done a hell of a job here. Months of work irrevocably nuked in seconds? No human is ever going to do that. Feels like maybe there's a lesson here.
2: Lucasfilm declares creative bankruptcy with an AI-generated Star Wars film that's just 2 minutes of mostly normal animals jumbled together
In 1977, George Lucas gave us the cantina scene in Star Wars, jam packed with the weirdest assortment of aliens ever put on a big screen. In 2025, LucasFilm used the magic of AI to give us a glimpse of the future with Star Wars: Field Guide, described succinctly by PC Gamer Star Warrior Lincoln Carpenter as "embarrassing."
"It made a mostly normal sloth with bits of rock sticking out of its fur. It put a peacock head on a snail. There's a bear with tiger stripes. There's a blue gazelle, and also a blue lion, and a pink iguana, and a couple walruses with octopus bits stuck on there, and none of it makes me feel anything because why would I care about a barely-fake creature—essentially just two existing animals smushed together—which nobody bothered to make themselves?"
He wasn't the only one asking that question.
1: Former MS engineer Dave Plummer admits he accidentally coded Pinball to run 'at like, 5,000 frames per second' on Windows NT
Our most-read story of the year is a wonderful antidote to AI stupidity: When former Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer needed to port Microsoft's late, great Pinball from Windows 95 to Windows NT, he wrote a whole new engine around the original logic in order to handle the video rendering and sound. One problem: The port was built to run as fast as it could on whatever hardware it was installed.
Not a big deal on a MIPS R4000 processor from the early 1990s, but very much an issue on future hardware. "Fast forward a couple of years later, somebody notices that on multi-core machines, it's using an entire core to play Pinball at all times," Plummer said. "It was still drawing as fast as it could, but it was now drawing at like, 5,000 frames per second, because machines were much much faster than they used to be."
Plummer said it was the Windows bug he ever shipped, and even though it seems very minor (and very funny) now, it was very much not viewed that way at the time: "If you had a bug that actually made it into the product and required work in a Service Pack, that was never a laughing matter. That was kind of a shameful thing."
Fortunately, another former Microsoft engineer, Raymond Chen, rode to the rescue, with a rate limiter than capped pinball at 100 fps: "My proudest moment in Windows development was I fixed Pinball so you could kick off a build and play Pinball at the same time," Chen said on Plummer's podcast. Clearly there are no hard feelings—I do love a happy ending.
Speaking of which—happy new year! We'll see you all in 2026.