(Update March 5: A few graphs have seen minor adjustments—2013 release Call of Duty: Ghosts was removed from the “most played” graph, and free-to-play title Dead Island: Epidemic was removed from the pay-to-own graph. The “Top 400” list has also been corrected to fix occasional row mismatches between games and developers/publishers. We regret the errors)

When we first unveiled the Steam Gauge project last April, we were tracking just over 2,700 games released on Steam to that point. Since then, the library of games on Steam has ballooned to include more than 4,400 games by our count. That’s incredible acceleration for a service that until recently was satisfied to grow slowly. For context, the last 18 months have seen as many new games added to Steam as the service’s first 10 years combined.

All of that is to say, we’re long overdue to see what Steam users have been buying and playing from that new crop of games. And that means diving back into our random sampling of public Steam data to estimate sales for all the Steam games released in 2014. We’ll be slicing that data a number of ways in this piece and even providing a good deal of raw data for you to slice it up yourselves at the end if you wish.

SAN FRANCISCO—At the Game Developers Conference today, Oculus CTO John Carmack announced that the Gear VR would be ready to move on from its confusing “innovator edition” branding and distribution for Gear VR to a full consumer model alongside the next Samsung product cycle, expected “around the end of the year.”

“We have a plan, we have a date,” Carmack said. “Oculus is going to go as hard as we can, to sell as many units as possible, to unleash the full marketing power of Samsung with the next edition of Gear VR.”

While the upcoming consumer unit sounds like it will be targeted to work exclusively with Samsung’s next mobile handset, Carmack said the release would accompany a sort of “back-unlock sales and promotion” of the previous Gear VR units. That sounds like Samsung will also start pushing consumer-facing Gear VR units for the Galaxy Note 4 and Galaxy S6, but these plans were still unclear in Carmack’s talk.

SAN FRANCISCO—Reloading a gun in home video games is crap.

Shooting is crap, too, in a way. Moving your mouse or tilting your joystick and hitting a button doesn’t really simulate the feeling of aiming and firing a gun that well, but at least there’s some directionality and physicality to it (especially if you’re squeezing a shoulder trigger on a handheld controller). Reloading, on the other hand, is total crap as an analog for the real-world action it simulates. All you do is tap a button, then watch a canned animation of your avatar making a complex series of motions to refill an ammo clip precisely with an unseen trove of bullets that are just sitting in an unseen backpack or something.

I didn’t really realize how unsatisfying and artificial this process really was until I played with the latest prototype of Sony’s Morpheus virtual reality headset at GDC today. There, in a demo called London Heist, I ducked and dodged behind a solid wooden desk as assailants fired on me from all directions, popping out to aim carefully placed shots by moving and tilting the PlayStation Move controller in my hands.

SAN FRANCISCO—At a Game Developers Conference presentation tonight, Nvidia revealed Shield, a living room gaming and 4K video streaming-focused extension of its existing portable- and tablet-based Shield game console line. The “streaming device on steroids,” as an Nvidia rep referred to it, will be available in “early May” for $199 with an included controller.

The Android TV-based, Tegra X1-powered Shield will run a selection of controller-optimized Android titles natively—Nvidia says a curated selection of 50 such games will be available at launch, but others will also be playable from the Google Play store or even through sideloading. This includes all the games that already run on Nvidia’s Shield portable and Shield tablet consoles; games purchased on one of those devices will be playable on the others through the same account. Nvidia also left open the option of games that takes particular advantage of the extra processing in the X1 chip, which doesn’t have the kind of power restrictions that often limit chips on mobile devices. Nvidia compared the power of the chip favorably to the Apple TV and the Xbox 360.

To show off that power, Nvidia let Ars try a demo of Doom 3: BFG Edition running at full 1080p resolution at 60 frames per second on the Shield, with some decently advanced lighting effects bouncing down the game’s narrow hallways. Nvidia also demonstrated Crysis 3 running on the console and said it’s working with Crytek to port the full CryEngine to Android for use on the device. During the announcement event, Gearbox co-founder Randy Pitchford came on stage to announce that Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel will be coming to the console as well, alongside ports for the Xbox One and PS4.

Kyle Orland

SAN FRANCISCO—At a Game Developers Conference event today, Sony revealed more plans for the company’s previously announced Project Morpheus VR headset, which will be coming in the first half of 2016.

While no prices or bundling details were announced, the device’s improved specs were outlined by Sony Worldwide Studios president Shu Yoshida. Someone in the audience let out an audible “wow” when Yoshida started by revealing Morpheus’ 120 Hz refresh rate and key display update. The screen is now an OLED display at 1920 x RGB x 1080, which Yoshida said means low persistence and removing motion blur from the old LCD. The device’s screen is 5.7 inches, which is large enough for a 100 degree field of view. And the new design includes nine LED trackers to provide 360 degree tracking, according to Sony.

“With these specs achieved, we’re one step closer to making VR a reality for games,” Yoshida said. He went on to say that with the device “near final tech,” there’s finally a set of standards for developers to target.

It’s been more than a year since Sony first announced its leap into the VR headset market with the GDC 2014 unveiling of Project Morpheus. Since then, there’s been a new Oculus development kit (and a new behind-closed-doors prototype), a commercial release for the Oculus-powered Gear VR, and the recent announcement of the Valve/HTC-powered “Re Vive” headset. So today, Sony is holding an “intimate event” to update the press and the public on where the Morpheus effort stands in the quickly changing VR world.

Sony is holding the event details close to its chest, but we wouldn’t be shocked if the PlayStation maker is ready to give official name, pricing, and/or release date details at the event. A few big name first-party game announcements or third-party game announcements would also go a long way toward convincing skeptics that their PlayStation 4 needs a pair of LCD goggles attached. Given how quickly LCD display and head-tracking technology is advancing, we’d also expect that the headset might now have more impressive specs than what we saw a year ago.

We’re expecting roughly an hour of announcements starting at 3pm Pacific time, followed by some hands-on time with whatever Sony has on hand. Whatever it is, you’ll hear it here first.