Many players — including me — got a bit of a jump scare Thursday evening while playing games on Steam in the form of a pop-up that said Valve updated the Steam Subscriber Agreement. Like most people, I clicked the checkbox, accepted the changes, and tried to go back to my game.
Looking back, though, this update is kind of a big deal, as Valve has removed its forced arbitration clause. This means that it’s now easier than ever to sue the company, and the changes have been implemented immediately.
Forced arbitration, put simply, means that if you file a complaint against a company, you’ll instead be put into arbitration — where a third party that will decide what to do with your lawsuit — instead of going to court with a judge or jury. These kinds of clauses are actually quite common in the service agreements for larger companies, and can be a problem for consumers who want to hold companies accountable for wrongdoing by halting any legal progress in its tracks. So this is a big win for Valve users.
“The updates affect your legal rights,” the Valve message read. “They include changes to how disputes and claims between you and Valve are resolved … and require all claims and disputes to proceed in court and not in arbitration.”
The agreement notes that most problems should still go through Steam support, but if the complaints have to go further, they’ll “go forward in court instead of arbitration.” It’s worth mentioning that, like in most cases, Valve can still take legal action against intellectual property or copyright violations.
While the PC gaming platform company didn’t give a reason for the change, 404 Media refers to a class-action lawsuitn that accuses Valve of monopolistic behavior in this retail space that lets it “charge exorbitant fees and maintain market dominance not because it built a superior games store.” The plaintiffs, based on the old subscriber agreement, went to forced arbitration first.
Other recent Valve updates include making it easier than ever to share games in your catalog with members of your Steam family, user review improvements, and a beta native game recording feature.
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”
It’s turning into a pretty good time to be a Monster Hunter fan who plays on a phone. Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Outlanders will launch on Android and iOS on October 29, giving the series a new mobile-first game just as Monster Hunter Rise is also preparing to make the jump to smartphones through Netflix.
Outlanders is being developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group under license and supervision from Capcom. Unlike Rise, which appears to be the full console and PC game adapted for mobile, Outlanders is a free-to-play survival hunting game made specifically for phones.