Sony removes PlayStation account requirement from 4 single-player Steam games

In-game goodies still provide incentives even though the requirement is gone.

Sony's game publishing arm has done a 180-degree turn on a controversial policy of requiring PC players to sign in with PlayStation accounts for some games, according to a blog post by the company.

A PlayStation account will "become optional" for Marvel's Spider-Man 2, God of War Ragnarok, The Last of Us Part II Remastered, and Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered. Sony hasn't lost hope that players will still go ahead and use a PlayStation account, though, as it's tying several benefits to signing in.

Logging in with PlayStation will be required to access trophies, the PlayStation equivalent of achievements. (Steam achievements appear to be supported regardless.) It will also allow friend management, provided you have social contacts on the PlayStation Network.

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GOG revamps its “Dreamlist” feature to better pry old games out of publishers

Community demand played a role in getting Dino Crisis games approved by Capcom.

PC game storefront GOG, which has recently pledged to focus on restoring and preserving Good Old Games, has now revamped its community wishlist for games to bring to its storefront. The GOG Dreamlist serves not only as a way to get notified when a game you loved is newly available for DRM-free purchase, but also for GOG to use as market pressure in its negotiations with rights-holders.

The games GOG members picked out on what used to be called the Community Wishlist still have their votes, and they have been useful. It was often "the fuel for our actions," Karol Ascot Obrzut writes on GOG's blog. "When talks with IP owners hit a wall, the Wishlist kept the conversation going." GOG attributes the newly available Dino Crisis and Dino Crisis 2 (and the bundle) in part to wishlist leverage. Those games had about 5,000 and 3,500 votes, respectively, which helped when, as GOG puts it, "two Polish dudes" approached Capcom to ask about making the games Windows 10/11 compatible and upscaling it.

GOG's Dreamlist announcement video.

The Dreamlist has received a complete design and interface overhaul, and it makes it easier to see what other people are demanding. At the top, with more than 57,000 votes at the time of publishing, is Black & White, the 2001 game from Peter Molyneaux's Lionhead Studios that was a true "god game," giving you an avatar creature that learned from your actions and treatment. Black & White 2 commands the third-place slot at the moment.

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The questions the Chinese government doesn’t want DeepSeek AI to answer

Study of over 1,000 “sensitive prompts” finds “brittle” protection that’s easy to jailbreak

DeepSeek has quickly upended markets with the release of an R1 model that is competitive with OpenAI's best-in-class reasoning models. But some have expressed worry that the model's Chinese origins mean it will be subject to limits when talking about topics sensitive to the country's government.

The team at AI engineering and evaluation firm PromptFoo has tried to measure just how far the Chinese government's control of DeepSeek's responses goes. The firm created a gauntlet of 1,156 prompts encompassing "sensitive topics in China" (in part with the help of synthetic prompt generation building off of human-written seed prompts. PromptFoo's list of prompts covers topics including independence movements in Taiwan and Tibet, alleged abuses of China's Uyghur Muslim population, recent protests over autonomy in Hong Kong, the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, and many more from a variety of angles.

A small sampling of some of the "sensitive prompts" PromptFoo fed to DeepSeek in its tests. Credit: PromptFoo

After running those prompts through DeepSeek R1, PromptFoo found that a full 85 percent were answered with repetitive "canned refusals" that override the internal reasoning of the model with messages strongly promoting the Chinese government's views. "Any actions that undermine national sovereignty and territorial integrity will be resolutely opposed by all Chinese people and are bound to be met with failure," reads one such canned refusal to a prompt regarding pro-independence messages in Taipei, in part.

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Science at risk: The funding pause is more damaging than you might think

Research that helps drive our economy is on hold and may face new ideological limits.

Starting a few days after the Trump inauguration, word spread within the research community that some grant spending might be on hold. On Monday, confirmation came in the form of a memo sent by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB): All grant money from every single agency would be on hold indefinitely. Each agency was given roughly two weeks to evaluate the grants they fund based on a list of ideological concerns; no new grants would be evaluated during this period.

While the freeze itself has been placed on hold, the research community has reacted with a mixture of shock, anger, and horror that might seem excessive to people who have never relied on grant money. To better understand the problems that this policy could create, we talked to a number of people who have had research supported by federal grants, providing them with anonymity to allow them to speak freely. The picture of this policy that they painted was one in which US research leadership could be irreparably harmed, with severe knock-on effects on industry.

Nonsensical standards

The OMB memo (first obtained by Marisa Kabas; there's a copy at The Washington Post) lays out the logic behind the freeze: Funding by the executive agencies of the federal government should align with the policies of the chief executive. To ensure they do, it calls on all agencies to review the programs they fund based on the policy priorities laid out by Trump's executive orders.

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Review: Nvidia’s $999 GeForce RTX 5080 falls disappointingly short of the 4090

A good 4K card, a decent value on paper, but not the upgrade it could be.

Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4080 graphics card was faster than the RTX 3080 card it replaced. But it was also faster than the RTX 3080 Ti, 3090, and 3090 Ti. One of the good things about a new graphics card generation is that the new cards bring the last generation's inaccessibly expensive high-end performance down to cards that more people can actually afford.

That's not the case with the new $999 RTX 5080, which beats the previous-generation RTX 4080 Super by a little bit and the older RTX 4080 by a slightly larger bit but doesn't come close to beating or even replicating the performance of the outgoing 4090.

Nvidia points to its new DLSS Multi-Frame Generation technology as a mitigating factor here, leaning on its AI-generated frames to close the gap that the 5080's raw rendering performance can't close on its own. And sure, it's nice that this card can do that. On paper, the 5080 is also technically a good value compared to the flagship RTX 5090—between 60 and 75 percent of the performance for half the price (though talking about the MSRP of any of these cards at launch is strictly theoretical, given allegedly short supply and the demand from both actual buyers and scalpers looking to make a buck).

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