Enlarge / Kaboom! (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Game engine-maker Unity has announced plans to lay off 265 workers—or just under 4% of its roughly 7,000-person workforce—as it winds down a partnership with special-effects house Weta Digital and refocuses on its core gaming business.

Unity spent a cool $1.625 billion in cash and stock to purchase the tech division of the Peter Jackson-led Weta Digital just over two years ago , taking in 275 company engineers in the process. The vast majority of those engineers are now being let go as Unity has "terminated its obligations to provide certain services to Weta FX and also amended certain intellectual property rights between the parties," according to a recent SEC filing and Reuters reporting .

The Weta Digital acquisition came as game engines like Unity and Unreal were increasingly being embraced by Hollywood studios as the basis for their digital-effects work. The deal was also part of an expensive wave of corporate acquisitions Unity undertook after its late 2020 IPO . That buying spree included cloud gaming-service Parsec , mobile ad giant Ironsource , and 3D collaboration company SyncSketch , to name just a few.

Enlarge / Conscience do cost, as a certain fictional denizen of Baltimore's East Side once said. (credit: Larian Studios)

One of the best things about playing Baldur's Gate 3 ( BG3 ) is the way that it simulates the feeling of having an actual Dungeon Master overseeing your session. The second-person narration, the dice rolls, and even the willingness to say "Yes" to your quirkiest ideas all add to the impression that there's some conscious intelligence on the other side.

But consciousness can sometimes be a curse, and a recent patch to BG3 introduce burdensome complexity into the game's thinking. Essentially, the game was suffering from lag and slowdowns as players progressed because the game's decision engine couldn't stop assessing previous instances where a party member had gotten away with theft, murder, or other nefarious deeds.

The performance issues have affected some players ever since Patch 4, released on Nov. 2 with more than 1,000 changes . One of those changes was a seemingly small-scope, situational bit: "Scrying Eyes in Moonrise Towers will now only react to theft and vandalism if they see the crime being committed." The floating orbs in that area were, apparently, ignoring players' best attempts at sneaking, invisibility, or other cover-ups.

Enlarge / Just some of the prizes you can win in this year's charity drive sweepstakes. (credit: Kyle Orland)

It's once again that special time of year when we give you a chance to do well by doing good. That's right—it's time for the 2023 edition of our annual Charity Drive!

Every year since 2007 , we've encouraged readers to give to Penny Arcade's Child's Play charity , which provides toys and games to kids being treated in hospitals around the world. In recent years, we've added the Electronic Frontier Foundation to our charity push, aiding in their efforts to defend Internet freedom. This year, as always, we're providing some extra incentive for those donations by offering donors a chance to win pieces of our big pile of vendor-provided swag. We can't keep it, and we don't want it clogging up our offices, so it's now yours to win.

This year's swag pile is full of high-value geek goodies. We have 40 prizes valued at over $2,500 total , including gaming hardware and accessories, collectibles, books, apparel, and more. In 2022, Ars readers raised over $31,500 for charity , contributing to a total haul of more than $465,000 since 2007. We want to raise even more this year, and we can do it if readers dig deep.

Enlarge / It's not a Razer device unless it's posed next to a bunch of custom RGB lighting, right? In great news, the Razer Kishi V2 includes zero glaring lights, which we prefer here at Ars Technica. (credit: Razer)

With smartphones getting more powerful processors and integrated graphics, gaming on mobile is a firmly established thing at this point. However, while the touchscreen on most smartphones is great for doing phone things, it's not always the best gaming interface (and having your hands obscure the screen can make playing some games particularly difficult). If you find yourself spending serious time gaming on your device, a dedicated gaming controller can make a huge difference, leaving you with something similar in form factor to a Nintendo Switch.

Sure, you could also pack a dedicated handheld gaming device like the Lenovo Legion Go , Valve Steam Deck , or Nintendo Switch —but that's just another piece of gear you'll need to remember to charge and pack into your gear bag each day. Gaming on a mobile phone brings convenience and eliminates the need for a separate, standalone device, and with mobile silicon getting faster every year—especially on the iOS side, where this year's iPhone 15 gets you ray tracing—you're getting rich graphics in a pocket-friendly form factor.

Backbone One mobile gaming controller, Playstation edition (USB-C 2nd gen)

The Backbone One gaming controller. (credit: Simon Nguyen)

The Backbone One mobile gaming controller is a solid accessory. The buttons are crisp and satisfying to press, and they provide console controller-like responses. While playing a game (in my case, Chrono Trigger for iOS), the D-pad allows for easy maneuvering and doesn't munge inputs together like some cheap controllers do. A removable piece also allows the Backbone One to fit a phone with or without a case, which is a nice addition. (We tried out the USB-C version of the controller for this guide, although it also supports Lightning devices.)

Enlarge / DOS_deck is an impressive technical feat, sure. But it's also a very keen curation of some DOS shareware classics (pun somewhat intended). (credit: DOS_deck/Martin Kool)

Revisiting a classic game from the AUTOEXEC.BAT/CONFIG.SYS era of MS-DOS can be a fun distraction. But the more friction and configuration between you and a playable game, the more likely you are to fall off before you ever hit the menu screen. You spend enough time fine-tuning your modern systems; doing so within an arcane framework, for a single game, is not everybody's idea of fun.

DOS_deck seems to get this, providing the most frictionless path to playing classic DOS shareware and abandonware, like Doom , Jazz Jackrabbit , Command & Conquer , and Syndicate , with reconfigured controller support and a simplified interface benevolently looted from the Steam Deck. You can play it in a browser, right now, the one you're using to read this post.

In fact, I stopped between that last sentence and this one to play a couple levels of Doom in a Chrome browser. And now I've taken another punctuation break to play the first level of Syndicate , which moves much faster than I remember. The control schemes are clever, the interface is easy to get used to and move around, and there's a host of little extras to appreciate, including constant game progress (game state) saving, and linking and setting certain games as favorites.

Major film franchises expanding into streaming television is officially a trend: Star Wars, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the DC Universe, and now Legendary Entertainment's MonsterVerse , which brought together Godzilla, King Kong, and various other monsters ( kaiju ) created by Toho Co., Ltd into the same fold. There have been four feature films thus far, with a fifth slated for a 2024 release, plus the animated series Skull Island , which debuted on Netflix earlier this year.  And now we've got the first teaser for Apple TV+'s Monarch: Legacy of Monsters , which picks up where the 2014 film Godzilla left off.

Set 15 years after a nuclear disaster in Japan, the 2014 Godzilla reimagined the classic monster's origins and featured the titular beast battling giant winged parasitic creatures called MUTOs (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism) that feed off nuclear energy and waste (and also warheads). San Francisco suffered quite a bit of major property damage as a result. That film also introduced us to Project Monarch, a secret organization established in the 1950s to study Godzilla and other kaiju —after attempts to kill Godzilla with nuclear weapons failed.

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters will further explore the history and aftermath of those events. Per the official premise:

In 2021, when speedrunner Niftski became the first person to complete Super Mario Bros. in under 4 minutes, 55 seconds, we used the four-minute mile as a metaphor for the difficulty and importance of the achievement. But now that Niftski has pushed that time even lower—setting a new world record of 4:54.631 for a live, human-controlled full game run —we're left grasping for metaphors that accurately capture the performance.

Niftski's new record perfectly matches a "perfect" TAS of the game (i.e., a "tool-assisted speedrun" that uses frame-by-frame input recordings using an emulator) through seven of the run's eight levels. His best time is now running ahead of the "theory limit" of 4:54.798 that runner Bismuth set back in 2018 as the ideal human performance standard.

In the battle of man versus machine, Niftski is now just 0.35 seconds away from standing up, John Henry-style, against the standard of machine-made automation. Hey, I guess I did come up with a good metaphor after all.

Enlarge / Artist's conception of the judge getting ready to legally blast the defendant into Destiny 2 's version of non-existence. (credit: Bungie)

Just over a year ago, Bungie went to court to try to stop a serial Destiny 2 cheater who had evaded multiple account bans and started publicly threatening Bungie employees. Now, that player has been ordered to pay $500,000 in copyright-based damages and cannot buy, play, or stream Bungie games in the future.

In a consent judgment that has apparently been agreed to by both ides of the lawsuit (as dug up by TorrentFreak ), district court judge Richard Jones agrees with Bungie's claim that defendant Luca Leone's use of cheat software constitutes "copyright infringement" of Destiny 2 . Specifically, the cheat software's "graphical overlay" and use of "inject[ed] code" creates an "unauthorized derivative work" that violates federal copyright law. The judgment imposes damages of $150,000 for violations on each of two infringed works (seemingly encompassing Destiny 2 and its expansions)

Leone also created new accounts to get around multiple ban attempts by Bungie and tried to "opt out" of the game's license agreement as a minor in an attempt to do a legal end run around Bungie's multiple account bans. This made each of Leone's subsequent Destiny 2 logins unlicensed violation of Bungie's copyright, according to the judge's order, which tacks on $2,000 in damages for each of "at least 100" such logins.

Enlarge / The AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT, 7800 XT, and 7600. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Two big things have happened since we last updated our PC build guide in the spring . First, we got a batch of late-spring and summer midrange GPU launches, including AMD's Radeon RX 7600 , 7700 XT, and 7800 XT , plus Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4060 and 4060 Ti . Second, Bethesda's Starfield finally dropped , prompting a whole bunch of people to ask "can my PC run Starfield ?"

Starfield isn't an exceptionally demanding PC game, at least not by the standards set by buggy PC ports like The Last of Us . But it will give any PC more than 3 or 4 years old a serious workout, and it should serve as a decent yardstick for building a PC that can run this console generation's games fairly well.

This guide will focus on just minor tweaks to our spring PC builds, since other component pricing hasn't changed much and there haven't been major CPU introductions since then (Intel's don't-call-them-14th-generation Core processors may be out within a few months, but on the desktop they'll be a mild refresh of 13th-gen, which was already a mild refresh of 12th-gen).