Livraisoncolis

If you’ve been champing at the bit for the return of GOG Connect, the service that allowed you to import selected games from your Steam library over to your GOG collection, then I’ve got some bad news. GOG has finally and quietly retired the service, with the URL now redirecting users to the store’s front page.

Eagle-eyed Reddit users began to notice the redirect around a week ago, even though the page was still accessible as recently as January 1, but the lack of an official announcement meant it was hard to be sure if the service was gone for good. However, a GOG spokesperson tells PCG that they “can confirm that GOG Connect is no longer supported and is removed from [GOG’s] page”.

It’s sad news, but not at all surprising. I don’t even remember the last time the service had games available (its offerings were always time-limited, giving players a brief window to import the available games if they owned them on Steam), and the last time it was mentioned as a going concern on our own site was during a Chinese New Year sale several years ago. That sentiment was echoed by GOG, which told us that “for a long time nothing really happened there, so we’ve decided to shut i…

In 2010 it was announced that Interceptor Entertainment was working on a remake of Duke Nukem 3D, the classic game of shooting, booting, and polluting children’s minds. What had begun as a fan project to bring it into the then-modern Unreal Engine 3 was given Gearbox’s blessing and renamed from Duke Nukem: Next Gen to Duke Nukem 3D: Reloaded.

A year later, the Duke remake was put “on hold”. The project’s lead, Frederik Schreiber, wrote in a blog post that Gearbox’s product manager and legal counsel had told him the remake was “getting too much attention from the press and the fans” and that “We were required to pull all media related to Reloaded, from our website and Facebook. We were also told, not to talk about it anymore.”

At the time, Duke Nukem Forever had been released to what could generously be called a mixed reception. Gearbox was focusing on DLC in an attempt to rehabilitate the unloved game. When Schreiber asked whether Duke Nukem 3D: Reloaded would still have Gearbox’s blessing to be published at a later date, he claimed he was told, “we can’t tell you if we will allow the game to be released.”

Schreiber and his team cut their losses and moved on. D…

An NFT-based cockfighting game that’s been in development for a year has been unceremoniously canned (thanks, Kotaku). Or in the words of its developers Irreverent Labs, entered “indefinite hibernation”. The game would have starred ‘mechabots’: Robotic chickens that were being sold as NFTs to verify each chicken’s uniqueness. It was intended as a so-called “play-to-earn” game where players would level the chickens and theoretically sell them on at a higher price. I’m not making this up. 

This hype video shows the production values weren’t too bad, though as soon as the fighting starts it’s pretty clear this wouldn’t have been a good game. But then the game’s cancellation is probably the least bizarre thing about this whole story. The studio behind the game has one of the most irritating websites I’ve ever used and has pivoted away from NFTs onto a new area of focus: AI. That may seem like swapping one grift for another, but it’s even more astonishing in the light of the fact it raised $40 million in private funding to make MechaFightClub, disclosed in an SEC filing.

At least some of the cash still remains. The one silver lining for fans of M…