At long last, Electronic Arts has provided some clarity into when EA Access will launch on Steam.
EA Access will be available to Steam this summer, the game publisher said in a statement over the weekend. There’s no word on exactly when it will be available or how much it will cost, but it’s the first time EA has referenced the planned Steam relationship in months.
Last fall, EA announced plans to make its game-subscription service available to Steam this spring but has remained silent since, prompting questions across the industry about the launch’s status.
The move to Steam represents an important shift for EA. The company previously only offered PC players access to its titles on its own Origin service, but as Steam’s popularity has continued to outpace all others by a wide margin and Origin’s has faltered, the company is turning to Steam to attract more PC players.
“We want to make it easy to play the games you love, wherever you want to play,” Mike Blank, EA senior vice president of strategic growth, said in a statement. “Delivering games to the Steam community is an important step in achieving this goal.”
One of the big questions surrounding EA’s decision, however, is how it’ll price EA Access on Steam. The service costs $5 per month or $30 per year on the Xbox One and PlayStation 4, giving players access to free games, trials, and other content.
EA made its announcement alongside the launch of more than 25 games on Steam and a promise of even more titles to come to the service in the coming weeks. The first batch of games includes Dragon Age: Inquisition and Dragon Age II, as well as Need for Speed Heat and Crysis 3. EA didn’t say which other games will be available on Steam in subsequent releases.
EA said it will share more about its plans for Steam and EA Access at its EA Play Live event at 4 p.m. PT on June 18. EA previously planned to hold the event on June 11 but chose to delay it to support the Black Lives Matter movement and protests against racial injustice in cities across the U.S.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.