Seems like the developers at 11 Bit Studios are onto a winner. Their latest release is a survival sim game called This War of Mine which takes place within a war-torn landscape of a ruined city and calls for you to scavenge, defend your bases, and generally take care of your little pocket of survivors until the ‘end of the war’ and the end of the game.

The game was released on November 14th and has been floating around the Steam Top Sellers list since then, having made back its development costs in just two days. That’s the mark of a popular game.

There was a patch released to the public today, and with it the news of the recouped costs as well as a few other bits of information like the percentage of players who made it to see the end of the war (less than 11% in case you were curious.) If this has made you curious about the game it’s currently 10% off on Steam right now.

Patch notes are as follows:

Features and tweaks:

• A new radio station, featuring the music by Cool Kids of Death.
• Unlocked two additional dweller setups on higher playthroughs.
• Graphical improvements on various locations.
• Minor changes in French, German and English localizations.
• Minor animation improvements.

Fixes and balancing:

• Fixed “Input Not Supported” bug on Windows.
• Changed fullscreen mode handling on Windows.
• Improved game stability based on crashdumps sent by players.
• “Aggro bug” fix. NPCs should no longer attack or flee without reason.
• Fixed broken trade. NPCs should no longer trade their entire stock for one item (Marketplace, Garage).
• Price changes now have an impact also on selling items to NPCs.
• Fixed an exploit that allowed players to prevent items from getting stolen during night attacks.
• Fixed a bug with getting stuck with only one initial dweller group.
• Fixed a bug with incorrect shelter description when Reinforced Door was built.
• Fixed a bug with visible gendertag in shelter description.
• All achievements can now be unlocked.

Assassin’s Creed Unity did not have a good launch. Sure server-wise it was alright and worked most of the time (although there were some sudden disconnection issues), but it was the host of other bugs that gained so much attention that the BBC even sat up and took notice. Climbing invisible walls that weren’t there, falling off things you should be able to climb, NPCs rendering without body parts, heads vanishing except for hair eyes and teeth, objectives not completing… needless to say Ubisoft got it in the neck for releasing such a seemingly broken game (pun not intended).

Since launch they have been working to patch the bugs however and they’re about ready to release a nice big one to fix around 300 of the more common bugs and issues. Most of them relate to breaks in mission scripting, bugs that left many players unable to finish missions they played and thus unable to progress through the story.

Other fixes include some framerate fixes (although they plan to better address more of these in a later patch), quite a few of the bugs that made the player fall through the world or off climbable buildings have been fixed, it’s less easy to get yourself stuck somewhere (especially in the infamous hay bales) and its now possible to peek while in cover again.

The patch will make its way to PC sometime before the weekend.

Steam Gifts is a system set up in Steam to allow you to trade games with other users of the service, therefore both getting a game that you want and everyone’s happy.

Unfortunately there’s been a nasty little bug in the system that scammers have been exploiting to get games for nothing. Simply if the payment is declined for the game you traded for, you lose that game not the scammer while the scammer makes off with the game you traded to them and paid for. Basically it’s not good and so Valve have changed the rules a little bit. Now any game in your inventory set aside for trading can only be traded 30 days after purchase, which gives plenty of time for checks to be sure the payment method won’t be declined. This also means that legitimate trades that get hit with this payment declined issue will no longer happen either, which is good for all.

Valve said: “We’ve made this change to make trading gifts a better experience for those receiving the gifts. We’re hoping this lowers the number of people who trade for a game only to have the game revoked later due to issues with the purchaser’s payment method.”

The rule only applies to trading though, so if you want to buy and gift a game to a friend of family member for the holidays this new rule won’t be there to trip you up and stop you sending them your gift.

Seems there’s already new ideas in the pipeline over at Ubisoft Montreal. Through their ‘internal entrepreneurial initiative’ process, which encourages staff to pitch new ideas to the company in the gap between the AAA titles, Far Cry 4’s creative director Alex Hutchinson has had a project greenlit for working on.

While it still has to go through the approval process of Ubisoft’s Editorial Team before it can be called a confirmed production for Ubisoft, we do know that other members of the team that worked on Far Cry 4 will be involved as well as some of the development team from Assassin’s Creed 3. According to Hutchinson, the job then will be to make something competitive while still keeping costs to a sensible level.

This process has produced games before, Patrick Plourde’s fable-like RPG Child of Light being one of them. So it’s not unheard of for a pitched idea to become a fully fleshed out game. Hutchinson hopes to have something ready to show off at the end of 2015.

“Hopefully you’re back in a year and I can show you. It won’t be finished in a year, but the aim is [to show it].”

Bohemia have set themselves a goal for DayZ. Though the game is still a ways off from being complete, they realise that there’s still a few things getting in the way of what made the game so popular back when it was nothing but an Arma 2 mod and continues to make it unique today – the fact that no two encounters with another player on a server will be the same.

In the remaining weeks of 2014, they will be working on fixing as many of the issues keeping those meetings from happening as possible. This includes server issues, connection problems and all sorts of other bugs that stop people connecting or staying connected.

Lead producer Brian Hicks says that as well as these issues, security and server performance fixes rank “just as high” on the to-do list for the next month.

“Be it friendly or hostile, direct or at a distance – the interactions between players within Chernarus is what makes the world come alive without a structured narrative or reason to be… As we move towards our Christmas break, making those experiences be as fluid and enjoyable as possible on a development build is a personal goal for the team.”

He is also excited for the year ahead and thanks the community around the game for giving Bohemia the chance to develop the game in ways that wouldn’t be possible through a traditional design method.