The latest installment of Awesome Games Done Quick is due to start soon. If you love speedrunning done for charity, you’re in luck.

The Games Done Quick events are held every year in the winter and summer by the Speed Demos Archive group, and are popular enough to attract the sort of attention needed for a nice big charity fundraising event. This next one will take place on Sunday at 5pm British time, which actually means it’ll start later today for those of us in the UK. Visit the Games Done Quick site for your timezone if you’re not in the UK though just so you don’t miss it, and also to get a peek at the schedule.

It’ll last a week and the 9th seems a good bet for PC gamers as Half-Life: Opposing Force, Episode 2, Portal/Portal 2 and Aperture Tag all make appearances that day.

You can view the event from the main site for GDQ or via their Twitch stream. The donations are going to the Prevent Cancer Foundation this time, so it’s for a very good cause.

Diablo 3’s first season started just over four months ago with the introduction of a new game mode that included a competitive element and a leaderboard to show who was doing well. Now Blizzard have announced that the end of the season is in sight and the second season is just around the corner.

Blizzard hope that they can bring Season 2 along for February 3rd, although they’ve stressed that the date is a target rather than a goal and that it could start any time before or after that although they’ll “do their best to adhere” to it. Currently seasonal characters will be carried over to the non-seasonal pool along with their items and paragon experience.

Around the same time should be a patch for the game which is already being tested on the Public Test Realm and also had a showing at the last Blizzcon. No one can say if patch 2.1.2 will actually be ready for when Season 2 goes live but it’s a fair bet that Blizzard are aiming to bring them both out at around the same time.

Blizzard have revealed the card back design you can receive by reaching Rank 20 or above in the Hearthstone ranked ladder for January 2015.

If you want it make sure you reach Rank 20 in the Ranked Ladder this month, and that does require you to log on at least once this month, even if your rank last month has given you enough stars to boost you to 20 instantly. Can’t claim the bonus stars if you don’t log on. Make sure you get a few higher on the ladder too this month so that you’ve got a boost next month too.

Happy gaming my fellow tavern-dwellers!

Both Sony’s Playstation and Microsoft’s Xbox had a little bit of a rough holiday period. After all, when many users turned on their new PS4s and Xbox Ones they found themselves unable to connect to the online networks for either console thanks to a DDoS attempt taking them both down. However, seems Valve’s Steam had a much better time of it.

At around 11:30 in the morning on January 1st, Steam reached a new record for users online at the same time. According to the Steam Game and Player Statistics page there were 8,466,441 people using Steam simultaneously at that time which is around 400,000 more than the previous record which saw just over 8 million log on around late July 2014.

Dota 2 was obviously the most popular game of the day, drawing around 875,000 players to that record total with Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (360,000 players), Rounding out the top five were Team Fortress 2 (89,000 players), Football Manager 2015 (75,000 players), and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (66,000 players) being the next four most played games of the time.

Given that it was only a year before Steam broke 7 million concurrent users, and two years that it made it past 6 million; no one can say that Steam has been anything but successful for Valve as a venture.

If only we knew when to expect news on the Steam Boxes…

If you’ve attempted to log into some of Blizzard’s most popular games today it’s possible that you’ve run into a problem that as of time of writing there has not yet been a given reason for. For some reason the login queues are taking a while longer than they usually do.

The reports of overlong queues for Hearthstone turned up on the sub-Reddit earlier when users complained that their waiting times were often around 15 minutes, sometimes more than that. As is typical several have already put forth the theory that a DDoS attack could be behind the problem, and while Blizzard haven’t yet provided the users with a reason it wouldn’t be the first time in recent memory something of a similar nature happened – after all Draenor’s launch woes were compounded by another attack.

For now all we can do is wait and see if it’s another attack or something more tech-related.