Firaxis has confirmed the next DLC that forms part of the New Frontier Pass for Civilization VI will be releasing on January 28. Here's some highlights of what's to come.

While the full details are yet to be released, Firaxis did a developer update video to tease some of it. There's going to be a new civilization with Vietnam joining the world, two new leaders for existing civilizations (China and Mongolia), a new "Monopolies and Corporations" game mode with expanded economic options which sounds really quite interesting.

The new mode enables you to create an industry around duplicate resources. Industries will provide buffs to cities and as you get more resources you can level up your industry into a corporation, to further increase the buffs and then you can create products. You then have a Stock Exchange added to the Great Works system, to allow you to add in products to share buffs between cities and you can even create a monopoly on something which brings in vast amounts of tourism. Here's the full video if you wish to hear it all:

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Once they do release the full patch info and DLC details, we will let you know.

What's to come next for Civilization VI? They officially have planned one more free update, and then the final DLC in March as part of the New Frontier Pass. After that, we have no idea.

You can buy Civilization VI with Linux support from Humble Store and Steam .

ARM virtualization company Corellium has managed to get Ubuntu Linux running on the next-generation Apple M1.

The news comes from Corellium CEO, Chris Wade, who mentioned on Twitter how "Linux is now completely usable on the Mac mini M1. Booting from USB a full Ubuntu desktop (rpi). Network works via a USB c dongle. Update includes support for USB, I2C, DART. We will push changes to our GitHub and a tutorial later today.".

Impressive speedy work, and a separate project to the recently revealed Asahi Linux which is also aiming to do the same thing. Two heads are better than one, as they say. The Corellium team mentioned on Twitter they full back the Asahi project too, so it's wonderful to see true cooperation.

Right now this effort doesn't appear to have full GPU acceleration so it's doing software rendering, making it less suitable for a daily driver but work is ongoing towards that. Eventually everything will be in place, and it's taking far less time than I personally expected to see it running on such brand new hardware from Apple.

Thing thing is, as we noted in our article about the Asahi project, even Linux creator Linus Torvalds previously said in 2020 "I'd absolutely love to have one, if it just ran Linux" when talking about the new Apple M1 laptops.

You can see the code from Corellium up on GitHub .

Unrailed! from Daedalic Entertainment and Indoor Astronaut released back in September 2020 and now you have a chance to play for free to end your week. Don't pass up on it either from now until January 25 you can download and play the full game on Steam, and there's a 50% discount if you decide you like it enough to keep it.

What do you actually do in Unrailed! and is it fun? You and up to three others need to keep a train going for as long as possible, by constantly building a track. It's pure chaos once it gets going and an absolute riot to play with friends. Plenty of communication breakdowns, shouting and laughing all bundled in together. The train will get faster as you go too, plus you can upgrade it with new carriages and all sorts.

Watch video on YouTube.com

Feature Highlight:

• An intense and chaotic railroad construction experience
• Online and local couch co-op multiplayer (also mixing both possible)
• Procedurally generated worlds with 4 different difficulty levels
• Dynamic weather system & day and night cycle
• Game modes: Endless, Quick, Sandbox (up to 4 players) and Versus (2 vs 2 players)
• Distinct biomes (5+)
• A bunch of upgradable wagons (10+) to modify your train in Endless mode
• Unlockable characters
• A replay system
• Online highscores with replays
• Simple controls & split keyboard and split controller mode

Find it and play free until January 25 on Steam .

The European Commission just announced that they've now issued formal fines against Valve, Bandai Namco, Capcom, Focus Home, Koch Media and ZeniMax for breaching their antitrust rules. An investigation that has been going on for some time now since early 2017, and certainly not the first fine Valve has dealt with for breaking some rules here.

What's the deal? The EU say that Valve and the others restricted cross-border sales on the basis of their location inside the European Economic Area (‘EEA'). To put it simply: Valve allowed certain developers and publishers to block keys being redeemed in one country, that were purchased in another (where it might have been cheaper). Out of all those named, Valve is the only company that did not cooperate with their investigation and so they got slapped a lot harder.

The EU Commission made this handy chart for the issue:

Executive Vice-President Margrethe Vestager, in charge of competition policy, said: "More than 50% of all Europeans play video games. The videogame industry in Europe is thriving and it is now worth over € 17 billion. Today's sanctions against the "geo-blocking" practices of Valve and five PC video game publishers serve as a reminder that under EU competition law, companies are prohibited from contractually restricting cross-border sales. Such practices deprive European consumers of the benefits of the EU Digital Single Market and of the opportunity to shop around for the most suitable offer in the EU".

The fines:

For a company as big as Valve (and the likes of ZeniMax), they won't be losing any sleep over fines that for them will most likely be a drop in the ocean. Valve especially, as the Steam store pretty much prints money for them.

You can see the full announcement here .

TheFrenchDev have announced Aveliana, what they're calling an infiltration-action-adventure game that mixes together 2D and 2.5D to create a unique looking style.

"Embrace Aveliana’s quest to bring back someone she has lost! The game takes place alternatively in an isometric or a 2D point of view and is fast-paced. Guide her through arduous paths watched by monsters, follow the trace of a mysterious fox, and find the powerful artifacts she is looking for at the core of wonderful temples. Will you stealth your way to victory? Seek a forgotten path on the edge of a cliff? Or stand and fight against your enemies? The choice is yours!"

Inspired in parts by the art and gameplay behind Gris, Children of Morta, Zelda and more. The result is of their work mixing the styles together is quite striking as you can see in the below Kickstarter pitch:

Watch video on YouTube.com

Feature Highlight:

• Unique and diverse stealth gameplay
• Precise and fast gameplay for experts (speedrunners!), and adjustable for occasional gamers
• A recognizable artistic design
• Hand-drawn environments with a lot of variety
• A meaningful story with a lot of story twists

We spoke with the developer behind the project, who clearly stated to us in a message how Linux will be fully supported. In fact, even their early rough work-in-progress demo on Game Jolt has a Linux build available. It's being built with the Unity game engine, which for the most part has good cross-platform support for games like this.

I have to admit, I really like the transition it does between side-view 2D platforming and the 2.5D exploration view:

They're currently seeking 12,000 on a Kickstarter campaign which has until February 11 to hit the goal. Not a lot to make a game but they say that it will help towards paying for extras like music, and to later attend events to show it off which can be costly to setup. You can also follow it on Steam .

Game Maker and later GameMaker Studio is a very popular game engine with indie developers and YoYo Games just recently sold it off and it appears they did so at a loss.

Originally created by Mark Overmars, who later teamed up with YoYo Games who have carried it on since 2007. Later in 2015 the YoYo Games studio was acquired by Playtech for around $16.4 million dollars. News doing the rounds now though, is that Playtech have actually sold YoYo Games to an unnamed buyer:

Playtech has previously stated that it is a strategic focus of the Company to simplify its business and dispose of non-core assets. It is pleased to announce that it has now completed the sale of YoYo Games, part of the discontinued Casual and Social Gaming business, for a consideration of approximately USD 10 million. With the completion of the sale of YoYo Games, Playtech has now disposed of all its Casual and Social Gaming assets.

So they not only sold it for less than they originally purchased it for but the buyer has yet to be formally announced, even with that financial statement being released a week ago. Not just that though, for an entire game engine and company that's a tiny amount of money - which should ring some alarm bells.

Clever people from the official YoYo Games forum already found who might now own them, thanks to the UK Company House records system we can see that multiple people involved in the Opera browser company now sit as directors of YoYo Games. These records appeared the day after the Playtech statement.

For game developers, the game engine you rely on suddenly changing hands with no prior notice and no announcement a week later must be a little frightening. Games often take multiple years to create, so for developers well into the thick of using GameMaker Studio hopefully the result will be a good one. Perhaps though, the time is ripe to check out Godot Engine since it's free and open source.

We reached out to YoYo Games for a statement yesterday, will update if they reply.

Stuck on an island where the volcano is erupting constantly, Volcanoids is an interesting setting for a survival game that gives you a big moving drill for a base.

After sticking in co-op to the Early Access game a while back, the team at Volcanoid (yes the team is named like the game), have now boosted the combat in the game to make it actually a lot more interesting. To say this is a huge update would be quite the understatement. They added in aiming down sights, weapon recoil, bullet drop and spread, hit indicators, actual projectiles (no hit scans), lots of new animations, new guns and…you get the idea.

Check out the new trailer to show it off:

Watch video on YouTube.com

Enemies got more interesting too and they no longer aimbot, they have to try and hit you now. Enemy COG robot units also now come in many more flavours and designs for each class and tier, plus they learned some new tricks like how to switch weapons depending on the situation, what clever cogs. There's even more like new sound effects, turrets to build and even a defibrillator to bring your buddies back to life.

For me it's probably one of the most exciting open-world survival games (next to Valheim) supported on Linux. The idea that you build up a base that doubles as a moving drill you walk around inside, it's just awesome and very steampunk with the inspiration and design work. Lots of levers to pull and big buttons to press.

You can buy Volcanoids on Steam . It's 25% off until January 25.

Irdeto, the company behind Denuvo and the newer Denuvo Anti-Cheat have announced that developers on Steam can now get direct anti-cheat integration through Steamworks. Denuvo is one of the most popular DRM solutions, with it often appearing in Windows releases of popular AAA games. Now with this Anti-Cheat easily available direct through Steam no doubt many developers will look to use it.

The question is: how will this affect Linux compatibility of games both native Linux builds and Windows games run through the Steam Play Proton compatibility layer? Back in May, we reported that the Denuvo team did mention they were aiming for support of Proton.

After shooting a message over to Irdeto here's what Reinhard Blaukovitsch, Managing Director of Denuvo by Irdeto, said in reply:

We can confirm that future deployments of Denuvo Anti-Cheat will not prohibit Linux users from accessing single-player and non-competitive multiplayer features of their games. For example, campaigns or custom multiplayer game matches. Linux users will not be required to install a kernel-mode driver, and the lack of anti-cheat software will not prevent their game from starting.

Even though there is no kernel-mode driver on Linux, the userspace game process performs significant cheat detection. Linux users accessing multiplayer will be reported to online services as running at lower integrity. Some game developers may choose to prevent Linux users from accessing ranked or competitive game modes. We'll do our best to convince developers and publishers to allow Linux users to participate in competitive modes. Still, we must be honest with them and disclose our reduced detection capability on Linux.

We'll communicate concrete plans for growing Linux detection capability and how the community can contribute as our userbase grows.

In a further clarification to us, we asked if this was only for Windows games in the Proton compatibility layer or if it will have the same kind of support for native Linux builds to which they replied "This is for Windows games in Proton".

When asked for their plans (if any) to support native Linux builds of games, here's what they said:

We have not yet been engaged by an organization expressing interest in native anti-cheat support for Linux. Once there is demand, we’d have no hesitation to take on that task. It’s worth noting that we’ve had anti-cheat technology on consoles for many years now.  Our experience with Linux-like environments on the Nintendo Switch and Sony PlayStation 4 & 5 indicates that effective native Linux anti-cheat would require a from-the-ground-up effort and not just a port. Denuvo Anti-Cheat is heavily dependent on hardware security features which makes it fairly kernel-agnostic, so it’s just a matter of ‘when’ not ‘if’. Our best bang-for-the-buck in the short term is Proton.

So there you have it. If demand comes, they will do it too and it's only a matter of time. Nice to see them being so open about it and happy to chat with us on it so clearly.

NERTS! Online is the free to play card game from the clever people at Zachtronics (Eliza, Opus Magnum, Infinifactory) that was created to help them play together that they released free to the public.

It's not an original game though, as Nerts has been around in some form since the late 1890s. It has also been called Pounce or Racing Demon. Zachtronics mentioned they "learned about it from our artist Kyle, who has played it for years, and started playing it after lunch in the Zachtronics office. Over time we added more to it, including house rules, longer tournaments, and even a theme song".

Watch video on YouTube.com

At release the multiplayer was limited to Steam friends and people you're in Steam Groups with. It worked but now they've nicely expanded it to have public lobbies. Now anyone can download it free (it's properly free too, no micro transactions), create a lobby and make it public for anyone else playing to join.

Seems like a really slick game overall too, great to see more like it and being free means there's no barrier to enjoying it with your friends and others alike.

Find NERTS! Online free on Steam .