The BLAST SLAM VIII playoff bracket is complete. LGD Gaming and 1W Team took the last two spots through the Last Chance stage. Both won 2-1, and both had to come back from losing the first game. GamerLegion and OG are out. The six remaining teams now head to Malta, where the Dota 2 event resumes this week.
Neither series was clean. Both LGD and 1W looked shaky in the opening game before fighting back to win.
LGD Recovers From a Rough Start
At first, GamerLegion looked like the stronger team. They took game one 40-10, closing it out just before the hour mark. Yuma finished with 10 kills and 11 assists, and RCY had 10 kills and a huge 22 assists. A score like that usually wins a series.
Counter-Strike 2 is still one of the biggest games on Steam. But "still big" and "still growing" are not the same thing, and right now CS2 is only managing the first.
According to dust2.us, the game's average player count dropped again in September 2026, landing at roughly 805,000. That makes it the seventh month in a row that the average has gone down, and the lowest monthly figure since February 2024. On its own, one bad month wouldn't mean much. Seven in a row looks like a trend.
A streak nobody wanted
The streak is the notable part. Per the dust2.us report, no stretch of falling averages this long has happened before, across both CS2 and its predecessor, CS:GO. That covers a lot of history, so this is not a quiet blip in the margins. September isn't an outlier. It's the latest step in a slide that has been building since early in the year.
"Cozy" isn't a word you'd normally put next to open world PvP.
Yet that's the pitch behind EmberQuest, a new MMORPG from Faded Scroll Games, a studio run by a single developer. The game calls itself a "cozy lite MMO" on its Steam page and in an introductory post on Reddit. It also has physics-driven action combat, PvP zones, and world bosses. That's an odd mix on paper. Whether it works in practice is something players will be able to judge soon, because EmberQuest launches on Steam on Thursday, October 15th, as a free-to-play game.
Myth of Empires: Throne wants to take its players up into the sky.
The free-to-play multiplayer game, which runs on a seasonal structure, has used its latest dev blog to preview the centrepiece of Season 4. The headline feature is a new region called the Voidbound Realm, a map made up of floating islands. The developers open with a rhetorical question: "What if there were an entirely new realm above the clouds-a place where you could explore, build, and develop?"
It's a big pitch, and the answer is obviously yes. Floating islands aren't exactly unheard of in games, and the blog's sense of wonder can feel a little overcooked. Still, a fresh map is a fresh map, and for a game built around seasons, that matters.
Sea of Thieves has a habit of talking openly about the stuff that doesn't work. That's rarer than it should be in live service gaming, and the latest developer vlog leans into it hard. Some experiments flopped, some got delayed, and one long-running problem is finally getting smaller. Quite literally.
Here's the rundown of what Rare's pirate sandbox has in the pipeline, and what got shelved along the way.
A Quick Word on Rare's New Bosses
The video opened with something everyone was probably wondering about. Microsoft has moved Rare Ltd. under Activision's control, and the team acknowledged the change only briefly. They thanked fans for their well-wishes and moved on. That's it. No roadmap shake-up, no grand statement about the future. Whether that's reassuring or not probably depends on how you feel about Activision.
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