Daily Briefing: Monday 22nd February

Diablo 2: Resurrected won't ruin the original version like Warcraft III: Reforged did

Reforged was a laundry list of controversies when it released last January, but one of the biggest was that its multiplayer component merged with the original Warcraft 3 and wiped out two decades of features for fans who didn't even buy the new release.

• Blizzard have apparently learned from their mistakes, with Diablo boss Rod Fergusson confirming that while Diablo 2: Resurrected is built on top of the original game's code, it'll still exist separately. It was important to the team that "D2 original stayed D2 original", with Resurrected still offering a faithful remaster. So there you go.

Teardown suggests DualSense sticks "have a life of 417 hours"

According to tech channel iFixIt, the PS5's DualSense controller uses the same off-the-shelf joystick hardware as Nintendo and Microsoft's controllers. The Xbox One and Nintendo Switch controllers each experience drifting to a degree, so now all three companies are playing in the big class action lawsuit together.

• The manufacturer of the joystick parts notes that the expected operating life for the stick is 2,000,000 cycles for the actual stick part, and 500,000 when the stick is clicked. Using Call of Duty: Warzone as a testing ground, iFixIt determined that these thresholds could be hit in just 417 hours.

Apple are trying to drag Valve into the Epic Games lawsuit

Despite the fact that Fortnite isn't available on Steam (and Epic say it won't be until Valve change their business model), Apple subpoenaed Valve in November 2020 for quite a lot of information - including the names, prices, and configurations of every product on Steam, as well as details on how much money the platform makes and how it's used.

• Apple claim that this request is "very narrow" and doesn't risk competitive harm. but Valve aren't for playing ball. Their attorney's have stated that obtaining this information would be an "overwhelming" amount of work at "significant" cost for little value, as Valve don't even compete in the mobile market. This thing really does keep getting messier, doesn't it?

Valheim sells 3m copies in just over two weeks

The Viking survival game is just steamrolling through the milestones at the moment - shifting 2m copies in just under two weeks and then hitting 3m just a couple of days later. According to developer Iron Gate, this sales figure is the equivalent of "74,219 longhouses stuffed with Vikings."

• Valhim's concurrent player count on Steam has repeatedly broken its own record, too. When the 3m sales milestone was announced Iron Gate happily confirmed a new concurrent player peak of 390K. At time of writing, however, that peak has risen to 502K. That's a lot of Vikings.