Welcome to, The RoundUp! This is our monthly news post summarising the past month in PC gaming, PC tech and new Thermaltake products. On today’s RoundUp for June 2021: E3 news, Windows 10 is on the chopping blog, and the RTX 3080 TI released. All that and more in this RoundUp for June 2021.
GAMES NEWS
Games Released
It was a really quiet month for games, especially on the PC. So, here is a few you might be interested in… emphasis on might.
It was the month for sport games on the PC apparently. Both Tour de France 2021 and Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 – The Official Video Game released on the 3rd of June and 22nd of June respectively.
Announcements
Here were some of the big announcements from June…
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is getting a Sequel. Koji Igarashi’s popular game announced this past May that they had a second version in development.
A new Battlefield game is on the way. Battlefield 2042 is set in the near future and will double the player count to 128. The game will release on October 22, 2021.
The new Rainbow Six spinoff game has been re-titled. Rainbow Six: Quarantine seemed like a great name back in 2019… but considering the last few years, Ubisoft opted for a new title. The now titled Rainbow Six: Extraction revolves around facing an alien threat, and is due for release on September 16, 2021.
Far Cry 6 finally has a release date. The game will release on October 7 and sees you play as part of a guerilla team taking down a wealthy dictator in true Far Cry fashion.
Both Crysis 2 and Crysis 3 remasters on the horizon for this year. After the first game’s (eventual) successful remaster, the other two games are due to release sometime later this year.
Delays
The only major delay announced this past month was from mystery solving simulator The Good Life. The game was due to release in this winter, but now probably won’t release until more into spring 2021.
E3
E3 2021 was held June 12 over in Los Angeles. Here’s a quick wrap up of some of my favourite announcements from it!
• Age of Empires IV (releasing October 28)
• A Plague Tale: Requiem (releasing in 2022)
• Chernobylite (currently in early access, but will release coming July 28)
• Contraband (unknown Release)
• The Dark Pictures: House of Ashes (releasing on October 2)
• Elden Ring (FINALLY announced a release date for January 21, 2022)
• Forza Horizon 5 (releasing on November 9, 2021)
• The Outer Worlds 2 (no release date but I’M SO KEEN!)
• Redfall (releasing Summer 2022)
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R 2: Heart of Chernobyl (releasing April 28, 2022)
• Starfield (releasing November 11, 2022… TIME IS MOVING SO SLOW I WANT IT NOW!!!!!)
Everything Else
Yuji Naka has parted ways with Square Enix. Yuji Naka is the co-creator of the popular Sonic the Hedgehog, as well as having worked on a number of other Sega Games in the past. He is looking to potentially retire now.
Overwatch has entered the cross-play world. The popular hero shooter stated in the past they had no plans to do so, however with a new game director in charge, the cross-play plans have headed into motion.
Cyberpunk: 2077 has returned to the Play Station store. After being promptly removed from the store a week after launch, the game has made its way back after a number of patches. Sony has warned however, that there are still issues with the game on the PS4.
Pete Hines has apologised for Starfield being an Xbox exclusive. At the reveal during E3, many keen eyed viewers noticed that the PlayStation logo was absent from the trailer, revealing that the game will only be on Xbox and PC. This is really no surprise after Bethesda’s purchase by Microsoft, however many fans were upset by this. Hines stated that it’s actually a good thing as narrowing their focus means a better polished game.
TECH NEWS
NVIDIA released another graphics card to add to the collection of cards you can’t get. The NVIDIA RTX 3080 Ti released on June 3rd at 6am PT and retailed for $1,920 AUD.
The anticipated Valve Index will soon finally be available in Australia. Prior to this, those who wanted the VR headset had to import them from overseas. Now, EB Games will stock the headset from August 18.
Back in June, there was a black out on the internet for a bit. A bunch of sites went down, including Amazon. This was all due to… one person. There was seemingly a bug in the Fastly system (one of the worlds largest CDN’s) that was just chilling until someone updated their settings, taking down a huge chunk of the internet with it. It was quickly resolved after less than an hour, but it was certainly a strange hour!
Windows 10 is on the CHOPPING BLOCK! Well, not for a while. But Microsoft have officially announced Windows 11, with the end date for Windows 10 Pro and Home support falling on October 14, 2025. Windows 11 has seen a limited preview release since this announcement, to somewhat positive reviews so far.
The first DDR5 RAM kits are rolling out finally. However, you don’t really have anywhere to put them just get. Team Group’s DDR5 memory sticks consist of 2 16GB kits but they have already sold out. Those who managed to snap these up will have to wait for Intel’s new Alder Lake release towards the end of the year before they can actually see how they perform.
CONTROVERSIAL NEWS
Capcom has found themselves in some hot water. A lawsuit recently filed alleges that the company stole art from a photographer for a variety of their games including Resident Evil. The photographer alleges that their photos are used in Capcoms work, including as a detailing over the Resident Evil 4 logo. This is made even worse due to the leak last year, which revealed that some of the texture files found were had the same name as the photographers’.
Popular Minecraft streamer Dream had a rough month in June. This came after it was revealed that he accidentally cheated during his recent record-setting run of the iconic game. It turned out that Dream had a mod still running during the run that increased his chance of certain drops, something he didn’t think would be the case. His popularity hasn’t really taken a hit though, with his content still reaching millions.
Facebook will start testing ads in Oculus games soon (to really nobody’s surprise). This very much explains Facebook’s requirement of Oculus users having an account, as they will actually pull data from your account to cater ads to you. The first ads will appear in a game called Blaston, with other apps to follow. Whether there will be any ways to turn ads off is currently unknown.
Five Nights at Freddy’s creator Scott Cawthon was recently outed as a Trump supporter, upsetting many fans. This came after financial contributions were revealed online, displaying his support of the Republican party.
THERMALTAKE NEWS
Products wise, this month has been a super quiet month for us here at Thermaltake. This is because of our Global Expo we held at the start of the month, where we showcased a TON of new items. You can check out our Australian portion of the Expo, right HERE.
We had a very busy month over on the YouTube channel for live streaming, so video wise it’s a little slow. First, we showed you all how to install our new TOUGHAIR 310 CPU cooler. Then we released a bunch of short videos teasing our Streamraiser Stream which we held on June 29th. If you missed that stream, you can rewatch the whole ten hours over on our channel too!
Here on the blog, you may have missed a few cool posts from us. Michael wrote about some of his favourite games from Australia Developers, as well as some games he used to play in school. We also gave some (albeit slightly unhelpful) advice for getting one of the new NVIDIA GPUs, and spoke about common mistakes every PC builder makes.
Don’t forget, our podcast Thermal Talk is still going strong! Check out our latest episode on your podcast platform of choice: Spotify, SoundCloud or Apple Podcasts.
A MESSAGE…
Hi there! This edition of The RoundUp marks officially 2 years since I began writing it. This began as a pitch for a video series, however it ended up finding it’s way into the blog and I’ve been writing it monthly ever since. It’s been really cool to try out this whole ‘news reporting’ thing and it’s been a great way to keep up with all the trends and goings on in the world of Tech and Gaming.
However, due to my expanding role here at Thermaltake, it has become increasingly taxing to compile and write this rather long post each month. So, sadly, this does mark the end of the RoundUp in its current format. I might brainstorm some ways to bring it back in a shorter, easier way for me to produce in line with my increased work load. But for now, thanks for reading!
I’m not really sure if anyone out there actually reads these, but if you do (even just once or twice) I hope I was able to share some interesting or exciting news with you that you hadn’t heard before. If I managed that even once, all the hours spent on this over the last two years has been worth it. I will of course still be producing normal blog content, just more in line with the other posts I’ve been doing of late which are much easier to produce for me now.
Take care out there, and for now, the RoundUp and I bid you adieu.
– Sarah
