BLAST Open Porto playoffs opened at Super Bock Arena. Two quarterfinals, both done. $1.1 million pool.

Falcons 2-0 G2. Inferno 13-6 on G2's pick, 11-1 at half. Dust2 13-9. NiKo 37-24 (1.54), kyousuke 36-26. Falcons are the IEM Cologne Major winners. G2 take $75,000 and go home.

FURIA 1-2 Vitality. FURIA took Nuke 13-6 (10-2 half). Vitality took Cache 13-11, then Dust2 13-4. jL is still standing in for mezii. Vitality opened this event 0-2 to Inner Circle. They are through.

Saturday: Spirit vs Falcons 14:00 UTC, then MOUZ vs Vitality 17:30 UTC. Sunday Bo5 final 14:00 UTC. Winner $150,000 plus $100,000 club share.

Streams: BLASTPremier

Source: HLTV

Alinea Analytics has Steam at $15 billion gross for January through August 2026. Up about 15% on the same stretch last year, and already more than all of 2023. They think the year finishes well above $20 billion for the first time.

New 2026 games are not carrying it. The top six new releases are under $1 billion combined, about 6.6% of the total:

• Forza Horizon 6: $210.5 million
• Crimson Desert: $203.3 million
• Resident Evil Requiem: $200.9 million
• Slay the Spire 2: $148 million
• Subnautica 2: $139.2 million
• Meccha Chameleon: $89.8 million

The top 100 new 2026 games are about $2.4 billion, 15.9%. 63% of those titles are new IP. 52.5% of that revenue is still established franchises.

Steam has logged about 19,000 new releases this year already, on pace with all of 2025 and past 2024. Alinea flags the generative-AI dump as the next problem for anyone trying to get seen.

These are estimates, not Valve's books.

Source: Alinea Analytics

Archon Studio put up a cooperative playthrough of Quake: The Board Game. Rangers fight through a facility, recover Runic Keys, and seal an unstable Slipgate before it implodes.



Players plan at the same time with Action Cards. Slam lets you dump cards for extra movement, attacks, or heals. The deck is also ammo, stamina, and your connection to the server: spend too many without restocking and you cannot finish the round. Killing monsters and grabbing loot puts cards back.

Enemies run off a Control Card deck. Maps have High Ground, Low Ground, jumping, and jump pads. The co-op campaign is what they showed. Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch are still planned.

The Gamefound page is a campaign preview, not live pledging. About 13,000 followers. 1-4 players, about 60 minutes, 14+. Named expansions: Flesh and Runes (original Quake) and Stroggification (Quake 2 / 4). Archon has said rocket jumps are in.

Source: Archon Studio

The official StarCraft website is glitching on purpose. Images twitch. Text flashes. The page still sells StarCraft Remastered. The source does not.

Fans opened the JavaScript console and found a failed Terran Dominion login (user 2560037-DA, flagged, told to contact the service desk), a refused request for "special order 176," and a 2575 memo from a redacted first sergeant. Theta Squadron is inbound to the Roxara lunar mining complex. A freighter lands first. The crates are "pivotal to our research." Handle them carefully. Every scrap so far is Terran-only. No Zerg. No Protoss.

2575 is about 70 years after StarCraft 2: Legacy of the Void.

Same week, Korea's Chosun said Nexon is close to a deal with Blizzard for a StarCraft successor. First pass sounded like an IP sale. Later wording is a development license. Genre is still a mess: some of the Korean reporting says StarCraft 3, older reporting said a Nexon shooter, and Blizzard was separately incubating an open-world shooter under former Far Cry lead Dan Hay. Two StarCraft shooters at once is a stretch. An RTS from Nexon is the other rumor. Nobody has confirmed either.

BlizzCon is 12-13 September. Opening ceremony 17:30 UTC on the 12th. Day-one main stage has an unexplained hour gap. The floor map has no StarCraft booth, so if something is announced it is probably not playable there.

Blizzard has not commented. Nexon has not commented.

Source: Polygon

NVIDIA has a date for DLSS 5. It goes live 3 September at 21:00 PT in NBA 2K27, on RTX 50-series cards, laptops, and GeForce NOW. Nothing older. NVIDIA says it needs Blackwell's fifth-generation Tensor cores.

Older DLSS fills in pixels and extra frames. This one paints lighting and materials the engine never drew: skin, hair, contact shadows, light through ears. Faces in the March GTC demos came out looking like a different person. Resident Evil Requiem's Grace Ashcroft got memed as yassified. People called it AI slop. A few Capcom and Ubisoft staff said they found out their games were in NVIDIA's reel when everyone else did. Jensen Huang told Tom's Hardware the critics were "completely wrong."

Since then NVIDIA has added sliders, three models, and masks so developers can leave faces alone. The launch game is NBA 2K27.

With DLSS 5, players will see how light naturally passes through player ears, the natural lighting of skin, and how light catches hair.

NVIDIA's charts have an RTX 5090 at 370fps in 4K Ultra with ray tracing, which includes the rest of the DLSS stack and a lot of generated frames. The neural pass itself is supposedly a 50-60% hit. In March this ran on two 5090s; now it runs on one.


How much better would this make Quake. We may never know.

Source: NVIDIA

This is the last installment of the MADIR series. This one was just a nice little Sunday project that I had fun putting together.

I want to say thank you to all my subscribers for supporting me over the years on my YouTube channel. Without your support and engagement, I probably wouldn't have had the motivation to keep making content for this long.

Music
5l33p - Mad Mercer (Slowed)
glwzbll - Untitled #13 (Super Slowed)
Hugeloud - Destiny

Programs used
Wolf Whisperer
DaVinci Resolve

Thanks to
The Movie Making Discord
All of my subscribers over the years

Special thanks to
Ryan_H — You were the person I looked up to when I first started the MADIR series. Without you, I don't think I would've ever gotten into making these in the first place. Love you, bud.

Fnatic are out of Worlds 2026. GIANTX beat them 2-1 on 30 August in the last LEC Summer regular-season series, so they miss Summer Playoffs and the last three European Worlds spots.

The LEC account called it the first time Fnatic have ever missed Summer Playoffs. The postseason streak went back to 2013. Worlds appearances had been uninterrupted since 2017; they last sat one out in 2016. They won the first Worlds in 2011 and made the 2018 final.

Summer opened 0-3, then three wins (SK, Shifters, G2), then three losses ending with GIANTX. Eighth in Versus, seventh in Spring. Roster churn all year: Oscarinin, Humanoid and Mikyx out; Vladi, Empyros and Lospa in; Soboro replaced Empyros for Summer. Razork is in year five.

Fnatic on X: "A heartbreaking end to our 2026 season." Their VALORANT side already missed every international this year.

Source: Shane the Gamer

cYpheR talked to baSe, LeXeR and Shambler on the 250 FPS Russian stream after 4-1'ing AGENT in the Season 5 grand final. Plus Forward translated it.

On yesterday's 2-3 winners-final loss, then today's 4-0 on the maps they played:

Yesterday I tilted very badly. I wanted to throw or break something.

I think yesterday I lost to myself. I was rushing.

One hundred. I am not going to pretend otherwise - one hundred out of one hundred.

He changed the Lost World red-armor read after AGENT kept stealing it on timing. Chat told him to ban Bloodrun; he did. First pick after Vertical Vengeance came out was Aerowalk. AGENT's "jokers" he named: Lost World and Bloodrun.

On pressure:

You smell blood - and it carries you forward.

AGENT does the same thing. If you get caught in his claws, he pushes you into an endless series of traps.

He said the final was "surprisingly comfortable" because AGENT was not at his peak. On hours vs twenty years (pro at sixteen):

Let them play as many hours and as many tournaments as I have, and then we can compare.

Next goal: win an Estoty or EGB Cup in Quake Champions. "At the moment, I can barely do anything in the game." Who he wants in 250 FPS Season 6:

Bring rapha here. I want revenge.

Name the date and time. Send me location.

Source: Plus Forward

rapha and maxter went unbeaten through EGB Cup 2v2 #3 and 3-1'd Keltz and serious in the grand final. $100 QC TDM: $70 / $30. Map record 7-2.

They opened 2-1 vs that same pair in WB R1, then 2-0'd ANTOWKA and st0n3 in the winners final. Keltz and serious came back through losers, 2-1 over ANTOWKA and st0n3 in the LB final, then lost the rematch.

k1llsen and rapha took Cup #2 two weeks ago. This pairing is the regular rapha/maxter tandem (KeenCon, Estoty 2v2). Keltz and serious play Quad-barrelled League WB R1 on Saturday.

Source: Plus Forward

Adam "SyncError" Pyle posted in the official Quake Discord that he is back on Quake Champions as of Monday, 31 August, for four weeks to finish the 1.31 update.

Back to work on Monday, for four weeks to wrap up the 1.31 update.

Not a new contract and not a rehire. He said he had remained an id Software employee and is now officially staying longer, though the extra four weeks only "delays the inevitable."

Not a contract, I'm just not being laid off (yet).

He also cut the wish list. No balance work in this window, and not enough time to implement, test, and ship public lobbies. The job is existing 1.31 work already underway.

He was in the July id Software cuts. After that the community petitioned for him to stay on QC; it passed 1,000 signatures in under three weeks.

Source: Plus Forward

cYpheR came through losers and 4-1'd AGENT in the 250 FPS QL League Season 5 grand final. AGENT had a one-map lead from the winners bracket. Maps played: Silence 9-4, Aerowalk 11-5, Lost World 7-1, Furious Heights 4-1. $1,000 / $500 from a $5,500 season pool.

cYpheR opened 3-0 vs k1llsen, then lost the winners final 2-3 to AGENT (Lost World, Vertical Vengeance, Bloodrun, Furious Heights, Cure). In the LB final he dropped Vertical Vengeance 5-9 to ash, then took Lost World 7-2, Bloodrun 13-5, Furious Heights 7-5.

Third 250 FPS grand final between these two. cYpheR 4-0 in Season 2, AGENT 4-3 in Season 3, now 2-1 for cYpheR. Fourth straight season final for him: won 2 and 5, runner-up 3 and 4.

3rd ash. pavel 4th after beating k1llsen 2-1 in LB R1, then 0-2 ash. cherepoff 6th: 3-1 pavel in WB R1, 1-3 AGENT in the WB semi, 0-2 ash in LB R1.

Source: Plus Forward

About 12TB of Steam content from 2003-2013 is circulating as a torrent of old Steam2 depots: retail builds plus betas, prototypes, trailers, demos, and soundtracks. Valve has not commented.

Dataminers Gabe Follower and Scolcer say this was not a hack. Steam2's content endpoint was public until Valve switched to SteamPipe in 2013.

No hacking involved, just verified that everything in Steam2 Teraleak was obtained via a publicly accessible [API] endpoint. It's Valve's fault...

Gabe Follower, on X.

Reported Valve material so far: a playable Portal 2 build from 2009 (TF2 stand-in assets, cut GLaDOS and Cave Johnson lines), Left 4 Dead and CS:GO prototypes, assets from F-Stop (the canceled Portal prequel), and a weapon also seen in old Half-Life 2: Episode 3 footage. There is no confirmed Episode 3 game in the dump.

The archive is not Valve-only. Hidden Palace has listed obtainable third-party prototypes including Spec Ops: The Line, Civilization V, Mafia 2, and GTA 3. A depot name list is hundreds of titles wide; that is not the same as extracted playable builds. Tyler McVicker called the third-party slice more legally dangerous than Valve-only files.

Source: Ars Technica

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma told the BBC that the next console, Project Helix, has to chase "efficiency and affordability alongside performance." She would not say whether Helix ships a disc drive. Dev kits are not due until 2027. Helix is described as a console/PC hybrid.

As an industry, we're in the middle of 'Rampocalypse'.

RAM and storage prices are up because AI data centers are buying the same chips. Microsoft is one of the buyers. Xbox already hiked current hardware this month: UK Series S 512GB to £430 (from £250 at launch), Series X 1TB with disc to £670 (from £450). The translucent green 25th Anniversary Series X is $899.99.

We've reached a point where it will be hard to imagine that mass audiences can afford thousands of dollars to spend on a console generation.

That line is from June. In the BBC sit-down she added that Xbox will look at "how they play their console and how they purchase their console," and at "hardware efficiency in terms of how you use storage and memory." In June she also floated "radically different business models" later this year. No detail on what that is.

Same interview: disc-to-digital. Insert a supported Xbox One or Series X disc, claim a digital license. About 1,000 titles at first. Insider test starts 31 August. The license follows the disc if you sell it. Sharma tied it to backwards compatibility on future hardware.

Within Xbox, we haven't been healthy.

Source: BBC

Inner Circle dumped Vitality 2-0 in the BLAST Open Fall Group B opener in Copenhagen. HLTV had Inner Circle at #34, Vitality at #4. jL stood in for mezii (paternity leave). Prize pool is $1.1 million. Groups run through 31 August at BLAST Studios; playoffs are in Porto, 4-6 September.

Anubis 13-8, Inner Circle's pick. Vitality's T half was 5-7; ZywOo went 0-7 to start. Cache, Vitality's pick, went to OT. Vitality led 6-0 then 12-7 and still lost 13-16. cptkurtka023 was 43-30 (1.58), headtr1ck 42-24 (1.37). ZywOo finished 27-36 (0.78).

Today we were mentally much, much stronger.

onic, to HLTV.

Same event, Group A (26 August): M80 2-1 NaVi (NaVi took Anubis 13-4, then 6-13 Mirage, 6-13 Inferno), G2 2-0 Aurora, Spirit 2-0 DENDELE, FURIA 2-0 paiN.

Inner Circle play MOUZ next in the Group B upper semi. Vitality drop to 9z in the lower bracket. Three teams per group make Porto.

Streams: BLASTPremier

Source: HLTV