Enlarge / Norland is a game that communicates its intent well through screenshots. (credit: Hooded Horse)

The Triple-i initiative is a gaming showcase that gets it, and is also in on the joke.

The thing Triple-i gets is that most gaming "showcases" are full of corporate fluff, go on way too long, and are often anchored around a couple huge titles. Triple-i's first event on Wednesday delivered 30-plus game trailers and teases within 45 minutes, and there was a consistent intrigue to all of them. There were some big names with some bigger studios loosely attached, and the definition of what is "triple-i" is quite vague, maybe intentionally. But there were a lot of games worth noting, especially on PC.

What kind of games? Triple-i's website notes the announcement "may contain traces of rogue-lites." At a breakpoint in the showcase, the omniscient text narrator notes there are "Only a few more rogue-lites (promise)." Triple-i was stuffed full of rogue-lites, roguelikes, survival, city-builders, deckbuilders, Hades -likes, 16-bit-esque platformers, Vampire Survivors and its progeny, turn-based tacticals, and then a car that sometimes has legs. There are strong trends in indie and indie-adjacent gaming, but also some real surprises.

Enlarge (credit: Valve)

PC gaming is often regarded as a solitary pursuit, but the advent of PC gaming handhelds like the Steam Deck has made sharing favorite titles far easier—at least unofficially. Valve's Steam platform, which previously didn't have too much in the way of sharing, has embraced this hand-off reality with Steam Families .

Steam Families, now in beta, replaces both the more limited Steam Family Sharing and Steam Family View. You invite up to five family members (for a six-person total family), share games with them (if developers allow it), and then family members can see their family library games in a subsection of their list. Anyone can play a shared game and keep their own save files and achievements.

Steam Families is, on the surface, more permissive than Family Sharing. You can play a game from a family member's library even if they're already online and playing something else. Multiple members of a Steam Family can play the same game at the same time, although the total number of people playing must match the total number of purchased copies among household members. All games are automatically shared with all other family members, though parents can use parental controls to limit games, playtime, and tune other features.

Enlarge / A plucky, likable creature under the looming threat of consumption by an interconnected menacing force of nature in one of Adult Swim Games' titles. (credit: Adult Swim Games)

Warner Bros. Discovery seems set to remove at least 16 games from its Adult Swim Games subsidiary from games markets and has told the affected developers that it will not transfer the games back to them nor offer other means of selling them in the future.

Ars reported Wednesday on the plight of Small Radios Big Televisions , a Steam and PlayStation game made by a solo developer who received a notice from Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) that it was "retiring" his game within 60 days.

In a comment on that Ars post , Matt Kain, developer of Adult Swim Games' Fist Puncher , noted that they had received the same "retired" notice from WBD. "When we requested that Warner Bros simply transfer the game over to our studio's Steam publisher account so that the game could stay active, they said no. The transfer process literally takes a minute to initiate (look up " Transferring Applications " in the Steamworks documentation), but their rep claimed they have simply made the universal decision not to transfer the games to the original creators," Kain wrote.

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  The game includes recreations of classic battles from the original trilogy... [credit: Lucasfilm ]

There was once a time of outstanding Star Wars computer games, before Disney made a deal with publisher EA that led to a plethora of lukewarmly received multiplayer games-as-a-service and mobile titles. (And Jedi Fallen Order , of course.) Now a cornerstone of that era is set to be revived in the form of the Star Wars Battlefront Classic Collection .

Announced this morning, the collection includes two beloved LucasArts-developed online multiplayer shooters from the 2000s: Star Wars Battlefront and Star Wars Battlefront 2 . Although it debuted during a Nintendo livestream, the collection won't just be coming out on Nintendo Switch—it's coming to PC, PlayStation, and Xbox, too.

The collection will include "restored online play for up to 64 players" of all the previous Galactic Conquest and Campaign mode content from both games on all platforms, including bonus maps and extras that were previously exclusive to specific consoles. Additionally, the Hero Assault mode will now be playable on all ground maps.