The new Framework 12 laptop's secret weapon is its battery life court…

Framework has just announced a new version of its Framework 12 laptop that apparently gets a bunch more battery life. That's despite it keeping the same 50 Wh battery and thanks to Intel's Wildcat Lake processors.

The Framework 12 is the company's two-in-one (touch-and-type), low-power, entry-level offering, mainly used for study and light work. Previously it used low-power Raptor Lake-U (13th Gen) processors, but now ones that you pre-order will use fresh—but still low-power—Wildcat Lake, ie, Core Series 3, processors. amunra-opinie.pl

Framework currently lists a few options to choose from:

New Framework 12 options

	Max clock speed	Cores	Price BlogFingerhakeln: So trainierst du deine Griffkraft wie ein ProfiÖffnen →
Core 3 304	4.3 GHz	1 P + 4 LPE	$549 / £549
Core 5 320	4.6 GHz	2 P + 4 LPE	$779 / £779
Core 7 350	4.8 GHz	2P + 4 LPE	$999 / £999

Those prices are, of course, base prices before adding on the other storage and memory to your DIY kit.

These processors obviously won't get you close to running any kind of heavy productivity tasks with ease, but for general day-to-day use they should be fine. It's also unlikely to be great for gaming, given even the top processor here, the Intel Core 7 350, has just two Xe (GPU) cores. Even Intel's newly-rumoured low-power handheld processor is said to have four.

That being said, the switch to Wildcat Lake, Framework claims, greatly improves battery life. The company is claiming 57% extra hours while browsing the web and 70% extra hours streaming Netflix. Those are some bold claims, but given what we've seen of Panther Lake's battery life (different processors but using the same 18A node), it's not beyond believability.

There are a number of other improvements, including:

• Wi-Fi 7
• Backlit keyboard
• Thunderbolt 4
• Fingerprint reader
• Pre-installed Fedora Linux

Of course installing Linux isn't exactly difficult, but it's nice to see Fedora installed by default for those who just want to buy a laptop and get to it, right out of the box.

Fedora in particular is a great choice, in my not-so-humble opinion. It at least gave me a better time of things than many other distros did. But hey, I don't want to go sparking the perennial distro debates in the comments.

Other than those changes, you're getting the same convertible, two-in-one touch and type lappy as before.

New analysis of 99,206 Steam games illustrates just how extreme the economics can be on Valve's PC gaming emporium, with a full half of paid games earning well under an estimated $4,000 while the upper crust gross anywhere from $15 million to several billion.

This research comes from game discovery hub We Love It. Totally Human Media's Ichiro Lambe and Matt Martindale worked with VaporLens' Dr. Tim Ermilov to analyze 99,206 paid games, estimate their earnings, and plot genre data. Lambe notably worked at Valve from 2018 to 2020, and he "co-created Steam Labs at Valve to improve game discovery and recommendation," per his LinkedIn profile.

Their analysis comes with the usual Steam research caveat: Valve doesn't publish revenue figures, so they're instead reverse-engineered using user reviews as a base that's then multiplied to estimate sales.

This report also only looks at premium games, meaning free-to-play giants like Valve's Counter-Strike are left out, as are "non-game software, adult-only titles and unreleased entries." The list of 99,206 was selected from a base of 136,281.

The standard multiplier here is 35, so this research assumes one Steam review is worth 35 sales at a game's current listed price, though you can also use a more "conservative" 20 or "generous" 50 in the report's impressive graphs. This ratio is not constant across games in real life, and Steam games always sell more when discounted (unless you're exactly Factorio), so do not take this as gospel.

Despite extremely soft estimates, especially for massive games where one percentage point is worth more money than I'll ever see, the aggregated trends here are still useful and interesting. Many estimates also align with publicly available financial reports as well as other analyst research.

"Half of all paid games on Steam have earned less than an estimated $3,622 in their entire lifetime," the report reads. "A game at the 90th percentile has earned about $236,184, and the 99th percentile starts at $15,872,031."

A scatter plot of game revenue puts this into perspective: a storm of green at the bottom, and a sparse constellation of hits at the top. Around or above the $100 million revenue mark, Half-Life 2, Vampire Survivors, Terraria, Among Us, Stardew Valley, Valheim, Schedule 1, Palworld, and Baldur's Gate 3 shine like stars. At the very top rests our sun: GTA 5. (What's GTA 6, then? A black hole? A supernova?)

"On a linear scale the same chart is a flat line and about two hundred visible dots, which is the whole story of Steam's economy in one picture," the report adds.

A full 8,024 paid games analyzed don't have any reviews at all. Last year, Steam data sleuth Gamalytic estimated that over 5,000 games released in 2025 alone didn't even earn enough to cover the $100 Steam listing fee.

Arguably more striking is the rate of Steam's growth. "Steam's catalogue grew faster than its revenue," the report says, and this has seen those earning extremes widen. A massive 19,714 games were released on Steam in 2024, and 2025 passed even that at 23,107.

Go back just five years and Steam looks very different with 7,427 games released in 2018 – more than even 2019, and the highest on record at the time. 2026 has already doubled that at 15,814 games released, and the year still has several busy months ahead of it.

Steam's revenue, and Valve's earnings, have exploded in the same way. Last month, Alinea Analytics reported that Steam has made Valve more money in the first half of 2026 than in the entirety of 2020. PC gaming is notably the platform showing the most growth in many regions, here in this mature gaming market and cost-of-living crisis.

The extrapolated genre math is also fascinating. Sandbox games have exploded on Steam in recent years, this report finds, and are now the most reliably bankable genre on the whole platform, with both the highest median and top decile revenue. In 2026, sandbox also ranks highest in "crowding vs. payoff," beating out much larger genres in estimated revenue per game.

Other top genres, ranked by estimated revenue, include:

• Visual novel
• Simulation
• RPG
• Horror
• Psychological horror
• Point & Click
• Sports (notably, heavily affected by microtransaction revenue)
• FPS (similar to sports, and also skewed by absent F2P giants like Counter-Strike)

The worst-performing genres on Steam are 3D and 2D platformers, according to this report, and data showing "when each genre peaked" suggests they've only struggled more in recent years. The action and adventure genres are so broad and popular that they've been giants for years, but simulation and strategy games are seemingly gaining on them in terms of new games released.

Obviously, this genre math is also a little opaque. Would a hit like Hollow Knight: Silksong go in 2D platformers, or, with no Metroidvania tag, the broad "Exploration" or "Action" tags? "A game counts towards a genre only when the tag is one of its six most popular tags," the report explains.

This may be the most comprehensive, best-presented report I've seen for this side of Steam, and it really underscores an old adage of the internet age: for every breakout success story, there's surely hundreds or thousands failures.

After earning $1 million on Steam from a game that took 4 months to make, stunned devs end up in Valve's coveted "chocolate tier."

I love a good Arc Raiders map condition. Whether it be hunting for rubber ducks in Bird City, or trying to survive frozen temperatures in Cold Snap, each one offers up a much-needed revamp on what can sometimes be a stale selection of maps. The only problem is that some conditions can be pretty inaccessible.

Initially map conditions followed the same global release for everyone. This wasn't much of an issue when the game released t as there were only a handful of conditions to tack onto maps, but as more appeared it's become increasingly difficult to play some of them. Take Bird City for example—I love it, but when it first released it was almost impossible to play because it was only live when I was at work (boo) or sleeping (yay).

Embark tried to fix this by upping the frequency of said map conditions but this only worked so well, with there still being regions which would see less of certain conditions compared to others. Luckily, it seems like this is all behind us now as Embark has pushed out a solution in its latest update which means fairer map condition distributions for all.

"We have been working to make sure that the way we schedule map conditions is aligned with your playing habits," Embark says in the new update blog post. "To that end, we’re introducing Regional Map Condition Scheduling. Starting with 1.42.0, map conditions will have their schedule offset based on regions, instead of a single, global schedule.

"This means that the schedule will shift to fit specific regions' peak hours to better match your experience. This way, it’ll be less likely to miss out on a map condition regardless of where you are."

You can check out the new schedule for yourself using the map conditions tracker. And as you'll be able to see, there's masses of conditions ticking away every hour during peak times for you to pick from now, so you won't have to stay up way past your bedtime to collect matriarch reactors or limited edition rubber ducks.

Player choice is a time-honored part of sci-fi action-RPGs, going back to the likes of Deus Ex, through the genre-defining Mass Effect trilogy, and now The Expanse: Osiris Reborn is joining those ranks. In the latest post about the upcoming game, developer Owlcat Games chats how what you choose will change the complexion of the narrative.

The team points out that people saw one possible fork in the road in the Beta, but what "players have not seen is just how far that decision ripples."

Essentially, you have to pick whether to defend your space station, or give it up to roving mercenaries. The immediate effect is how much combat you'll see, but there'll be further ramifications down the road.

"Later, you may meet the families of station personnel and see for yourself how your one decision has affected them," Owlcat Games writes. "The consequences can even reach the people behind the unauthorized raid - especially if your actions allowed the situation on the station to spiral beyond their control."

This spills out into cast dynamics, too, and not just in terms of romance. Young crewmate Polly is used as an example, because you have to choose who she'll shadow, and that can have a pretty profound impact on her.

"Polly may become a cautious hacker, a capable engineer, or pursue a career in medicine," the post says. "The mentor you choose will shape not only her abilities, but also who she will become."

This will no doubt be space catnip to the ears of Mass Effect fans who're waiting for Mass Effect 5 - even if this is very much its own kind of game. The deeper and more complex the choices, the better, to be honest. Owlcat then takes a second to highlight the political aspects here.

"How you deal with Earth, Mars, and the Belt ultimately affects how their stories unfold, including the fates of important characters," the devs say. "Building a strong relationship with a faction can also open up unique rewards, including exclusive items and a faction-specific quest. Those relationships can even pay off during missions, with factions potentially providing direct support."

This Trekkie is apprehensive, but you're saying a lot of the right things, Owlcat, and I admire that much. The Expanse: Osiris Reborn is due out in the back half of 2027. Plenty of time to ponder how you might or might not ruin your save.

Star Citizen stream lifts veil on the $1 billion crowdfunded game's buggy state after 14 years in development, and neither devs nor fans seem impressed: "Such a s*** show"