Featured Product

Monster AC601 Open-Ear ENC Wireless Earbuds Was $99.99 → $20.00 on Amazon

Eighty percent off is the biggest cut in this week's entire newsletter, and it's on something genuinely useful. Open-ear buds clip on rather than sealing your ear canal, so you stay aware of the room — useful if you need to hear a doorbell, a roommate, or traffic while you've got audio going. The ENC mic filters background noise on calls.

For streamers specifically, the clip-on design means no ear fatigue over long sessions and no plugged-up feeling after six hours. At twenty bucks these aren't competing with studio monitors on fidelity, and they're not meant to — this is a situational-awareness and comfort pickup, and at that price it's an easy experiment. 👉 👉 Grab the Deal on Amazon

Intel Core Ultra 7 270K 24-Core Desktop Processor (+2 Games) 🖥️ Was $311.50 → $255.15 on Amazon

A real PC component pick this week. The Core Ultra 7 270K brings 24 cores to a mainstream desktop build — the kind of core count that actually matters if you're encoding a stream while gaming, since you can hand OBS its own threads instead of fighting the game for them. It ships with two games bundled in, which softens the price further.

Context worth having: we covered NVIDIA raising GPU prices for the third time this year back in Issue 12, driven by Samsung's DRAM increases. Component prices have been moving in one direction all year, so an 18% cut on a current-gen CPU is more meaningful than the percentage suggests. 👉 👉 Grab the Deal on Amazon

SUPVAN E11 Bluetooth Label Maker (+4 Tapes) Was $39.99 → $29.99 on Amazon

Unglamorous, genuinely useful. If you've ever traced a cable back through a rat's nest behind your desk to figure out which brick belongs to which device, this fixes that permanently. It pairs over Bluetooth so you type labels on your phone rather than thumbing through a tiny keypad, and it ships with four tape rolls to start.

Cable management, storage bins, drive labels, con travel gear — it earns its keep fast for anyone running a multi-device setup. At 25% off it's a small spend against a problem that otherwise never gets solved. 👉 👉 Grab the Deal on Amazon

Grepro 10,000mAh Magnetic Portable Power Bank (22.5W USB-C) Was $29.99 → $23.99 on Amazon

The magnetic attachment is the differentiator here — it snaps directly to the back of a compatible phone instead of dangling off a cable, so you can keep using the phone normally while it charges. Built-in USB-C cable means there's no scenario where you packed the bank and forgot the cord.

10,000mAh is roughly two full phone charges, and 22.5W is fast enough that a short top-off actually helps. At 20% off it's a modest discount, but the built-in-cable-plus-magnetic combination is harder to find at this price than you'd think. 👉 👉 Grab the Deal on Amazon

CROSS GEAR 40L Expandable Travel Carry-On Backpack Was $79.99 → $59.98 on Amazon

The expandable design is the actual selling point. It runs 30L for a normal day and zips out to 40L when you're hauling a full kit — so one bag covers the commute and the con trip instead of owning two. It fits laptops from 15.6" up to 17.3" plus a 10.2" tablet, and the laptop compartment uses 15mm of padding rather than the token foam most bags call protection.

Seven exterior pockets and multiple interior compartments mean the capture card, cables, chargers, and portable monitor each get a home instead of forming one tangled pile at the bottom. If you're heading to gamescom, a con, or any event where you're carrying a rig, that organization is the difference between setup taking ten minutes and forty. At 25% off, it's a fair price for a bag doing carry-on duty. 👉 👉 Grab the Deal on Amazon

What's Streaming

🎮💰 GTA VI Giveaway: New Date — Win Cash Live on 11/14

Heads up — new date. We're moving the GTA VI cash giveaway to Saturday, November 14th, around 9PM CST. The game drops November 19th, and we're giving it the extra runway to make sure there are no more delays — and to see whether a PC rollout gets announced before we draw. Same deal otherwise: instead of preordering GTA VI, BLKSUIT is handing the cash straight to one of you. Spin the wheel, cash lands in your pocket.

The upside for you: entries stay open a whole lot longer, so there's plenty of runway to stack them up.

How to stack entries:
Sub (new or current) — +2  |  Subbed 3+ months — +2 bonus  |  New follower — +1  |  Cheer 500+ bits during the stream — +1  |  Sign up for the newsletter — +1  |  Every gift sub you hand out — +1

👉 Catch the drawing live on Twitch!

Regular Schedule

Catch BLKSUIT live every Monday and Thursday. The GTA VI giveaway stream is now set for Saturday, November 14th. 🔔

This Week in Gaming

🚨 GTA 6 Gameplay and Full Map Leak Nine Days Before the Netflix Reveal

The biggest GTA leak since 2022 hit on August 18, and the timing could not be worse for Rockstar. A person or group calling itself Cyberleek posted two roughly minute-long gameplay clips featuring protagonist Jason Duval, plus images claiming to show the complete map of Leonida. Rockstar and Take-Two responded within hours with DMCA takedown notices across X, Reddit, and Streamable — which most outlets read as confirmation the footage is real. Bloomberg's Jason Schreier has said the clips are genuine.

What's actually in them: a six-star wanted level, a stamina bar during fistfights, fuel and engine gauges on vehicles, and what looks like a karma or honor system tracking Jason's actions à la Red Dead Redemption 2. One clip shows Jason shooting hoops at a waterside safehouse and gaining a "Focus" stat boost, pointing to real RPG progression mechanics. The other has him crashing an El Camino-style Vapid Ganado into a delivery van and getting into a fistfight that draws police.

Two important caveats. Insider NateTheHate says the footage is over a year old, with community analysis pointing to a 2023 build — so anything on screen could have changed. And the map image specifically is disputed: the community-run GTA 6 Mapping Project has called it fake, citing artwork too simple to be a genuine Rockstar asset. The leaker has also solicited crypto donations for promised future leaks, which multiple outlets flag as a likely scam. The official Extended Look still premieres August 27 on Netflix. 👉 👉 Check out the article!

🎬 The Leaker's Motive: A Protest Against Digital-Only Games

This isn't a straightforward hack-for-clout story, and that's what makes it worth a closer look. Cyberleek published a lengthy manifesto alongside the footage, framing the leak explicitly as punishment for publishers going digital-only and abandoning offline modes. The demands, which the leaker calls "commandments," include: no consumer shall pay for a game through digital storefronts without a physical option, and publishers must support offline play. The stated price for stopping: a public statement and apology from Rockstar with a "concrete commitment to be better."

The pressure point is real. GTA 6 was confirmed to launch with no disc — the physical version ships as a code in a box — and that decision landed right as Sony announced it's ending disc production for new PlayStation games in January 2028. We covered the "Don't Kill the Disc" petition in a previous issue; this is the same frustration, expressed by someone who apparently had access to Rockstar's files.

Not everyone in the preservation camp is on board. Stop Killing Games publicly condemned the leakers for "using illegal means" and promoting a meme coin to advance their goals. Whatever your read on the cause, the tactics have muddied it — and the leaker has said they aren't finished. 👉 👉 Check out the article!

✊ Fired Rockstar Workers: "Don't Boycott GTA 6"

The 34 developers Rockstar fired last October — 31 in the UK, three in Canada — released a video this week with a message that surprised a lot of people: don't boycott the game. "We spent years pouring our hard work, skill, and creativity making GTA, and we want people to experience the universe we helped build," said one worker. IWGB member Jack Hoxby put it plainly: "We poured years of our lives into helping build this game. We don't want you to boycott it. We want you to help us fight for justice."

The backstory: Rockstar dismissed the group in October 2025, which the Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain characterizes as union-busting. Rockstar maintains they were fired for distributing confidential information in a public forum. In June, a tribunal upheld the workers' right to bring "blacklisting" allegations — that Rockstar compiled a list of union members to treat them unfavorably, which would violate the Employment Relations Act.

The full trial runs September 10 through October 15 in Glasgow, ending just weeks before GTA 6's November 19 launch. Instead of a boycott, the workers are asking supporters to buy a "Rockstar 34 Solidarity" T-shirt through the IWGB, with proceeds funding their legal costs. Their reasoning is strategically sound: a boycott was never going to dent a game with over 4.38 million pre-orders and $400 million already banked. Legal funding actually moves the needle. 👉 👉 Check out the article!

📉 Netflix Shuts Down Oxenfree Studio Night School — Weeks After Praising Its Numbers

Netflix closed Night School Studio and Helsinki-based Moonloot Games on August 13, along with unspecified layoffs across its internal games team. Night School was Netflix's first-ever game studio acquisition back in 2021, and made the beloved Oxenfree, its sequel Oxenfree II: Lost Signals, Afterparty, and a Black Mirror tie-in. Moonloot, founded in 2022, never shipped a game at all.

The part that stings: Night School released Unhinged, a 30-minute phone-controlled horror game, just six weeks before the shutdown. On Netflix's Q2 earnings call on July 16, co-CEO Greg Peters told investors that "FIFA and Unhinged became our 2 most successful cloud game debuts, really solid numbers that put it in the top tier of game performance for us." Four weeks later, the studio behind one of those debuts was gone. Game director Sam Warner posted on social media: "Despite directing Unhinged and shipping it 6 weeks ago to millions of excited, satisfied players, it looks like I'm back on the market."

Netflix says it's refocusing on kids' games, party games, story-driven fare, and mainstream titles like its FIFA release. This is the fifth studio Netflix has closed or divested since entering gaming in 2021, leaving Next Games as its only remaining owned studio. The irony isn't subtle: Netflix is winding down its own game development in the same month it's hosting the biggest game reveal of the year. 👉 👉 Check out the article!

🎩 Warren Spector Retires After 44 Years: "It's Just Not as Much Fun for Me Anymore"

One of the genuine architects of modern game design is stepping away. Warren Spector — the man behind Deus Ex, and a producer on System Shock, Ultima Underworld, Thief: The Dark Project, and Epic Mickey — announced his retirement on LinkedIn on August 18. "Let me cut right to the chase. I'm retiring from game development. At least I think so. I've been here before and changed my mind but this time I'm pretty sure I mean it."

The numbers behind the career: 17 full games, roughly nine expansion packs, teams ranging from a dozen people to 800, across a month shy of 44 years. He's widely credited as a founding father of the immersive sim — games built around giving players multiple legitimate ways to solve any problem, an idea whose fingerprints are on everything from Dishonored to Baldur's Gate 3.

The reasons he gave are worth sitting with. At 70, he cited age and health, but also said the business "has changed and it's just not as much fun for me anymore." He still has three games he'd like to make — one very big, one very small, and one he doesn't know how to build — but implied that's no longer realistic in the current industry. His final release, the heist immersive sim Thick As Thieves, launched in May; OtherSide Entertainment laid off most of its staff and ended post-launch support weeks later. Spector says he's writing books, lecturing, consulting, and getting his piano chops back. 👉 👉 Check out the article!

🎪 Gamescom 2026 Sells Out for the First Time Ever — Opens Next Week

Gamescom sold out completely for the first time in its history ahead of next week's show in Cologne. The industry's largest consumer gaming event runs alongside a packed announcement slate, and this year adds a first: gamescom dev is getting its own dedicated edition of the trade fair magazine, signaling how much the developer-facing side of the event has grown.

For streamers, gamescom week is reliably one of the densest content windows of the year outside of Summer Game Fest — reveals, hands-on demos, and a steady stream of announcements to react to. Insiders are already predicting a sequel announcement for an unexpected Xbox franchise, and the show floor has become a major source of viral IRL content.

Worth noting on the flip side: the inaugural Esports Nations Cup in Riyadh was pushed all the way to November 2027 due to what organizers called the "wider regional situation" — a reminder that the events calendar isn't expanding everywhere at once. 👉 👉 Check out the article!

This Week in Streaming

🤖 Twitch Turned On Amazon AI Training By Default — And Admitted Why

On August 12, Twitch quietly added a setting called "Training for Generative AI" that lets Amazon use your channel content to train its generative AI models. It was switched on for every account by default. Streaming reporter Zach Bussey spotted it buried in the menus and posted a screenshot; it spread fast, and the backlash was immediate. Within hours, a comment on Twitch's own support forum demanding the setting be opt-in had racked up nearly 14,000 upvotes.

Then Twitch executives went on a Patch Notes livestream to answer questions in front of roughly 3,000 users, and Chief Product Officer Mike Minton gave an answer the platform is going to have a hard time living down. Asked why it wasn't opt-in: "There's an honest answer, and I think most of you can probably appreciate this: if it was opt-in, nobody would opt in. That's honestly the answer." Head of Community Mary Kish was equally candid, telling viewers "We don't expect you to be happy or excited about this," and adding that high opt-out numbers would at least help her make the case internally that the community isn't receptive to AI. Asked whether Amazon had already trained on Twitch content before the toggle existed, Minton said he didn't know.

What's covered and how to opt out: streams, VODs, clips, chat messages, and channel images and text. Go to your profile icon → Settings → Security and Privacy → scroll to "Training for Generative AI" and toggle it off. Three things worth knowing: it only applies going forward, so anything already ingested stays ingested. It only covers your channel — if you chat in someone else's stream, that channel owner's setting governs your messages, which is why streamers have started using an "aioptedout" tag so viewers know which chats are safe. And it doesn't exempt you from Twitch's non-generative AI systems like AutoMod, auto-captions, or recommendations. Several users also reported the toggle reverting to enabled after they'd already turned it off, so it's worth double-checking. 👉 👉 Check out the article!

💸 Twitch Is Handing Out Bonus Gift Subs for Dual Format Streams

Actionable one for anyone streaming on Twitch: for one week only, when viewers buy five gift subs on a channel that's broadcasting in Dual Format, Twitch adds a bonus gift sub on top at no cost to the viewer or the streamer. Twitch's own guidance was to get set up before August 20 to earn from day one — so if you haven't flipped it on yet, do it now.

Dual Format is the feature announced at TwitchCon Rotterdam that lets you broadcast horizontal and vertical simultaneously. Mobile viewers get a full-screen vertical view, desktop viewers get the classic horizontal one, off a single stream. It rolled out alongside 2K (1440p) support with higher bitrate ceilings — up to 9 Mbps for 1440p and 7.5 Mbps for 1080p.

Worth pairing with the other August changes that quietly landed: Creator Badge Drops got significantly harder, with gifted-sub badges now able to require up to 100 gifts and watch-time badges up to 24 hours — what used to be an afternoon of viewing is now a full day at the top tiers. Twitch Turbo also picked up a real subscription perk, and the DJ Program began enforcing a long-standing live-only rule as of August 1, meaning no more pre-recorded sets. 👉 👉 Check out the article!

🎮 Kai Cenat Confirms a 24/7 GTA 6 Marathon Until 100% Completion

With GTA 6 locked for November 19, Kai Cenat has reaffirmed the plan he first floated back in early 2025: he's going live at launch and not stopping until the game is 100% complete. Not just the main story — every collectible, every side activity, the whole checklist. "I'm not just talking about the story and all this other stuff. We're talking about one hundred percent complete."

The scale here is genuinely unclear, and that's part of what makes it interesting. Rockstar hasn't published a completionist estimate, but GTA 5 runs roughly 32 hours for the story and 85+ for full completion — and Leonida is expected to be substantially bigger and denser than Los Santos. Realistic projections put Cenat's run at a week and a half of near-constant play at the low end.

A true no-sleep marathon almost certainly won't happen, and his own history says so: his Red Dead Redemption 2 run was about 56 hours, and his Elden Ring marathon stretched to roughly 170 hours spread across days with food and rest. He's not the only one planning big — Adin Ross has said people can get paid jobs in his GTA 6 server. Worth flagging for anyone spoiler-averse: with streamers this size playing around the clock, major story moments will be all over TikTok and X within hours of launch. 👉 👉 Check out the article!

🤖 Kick's New "Active Chatter" Count Is Exposing Viewbotters

Kick quietly added a feature that's turned into an accountability tool: an active chatter count visible right in the chat panel. Open it and you see how many accounts are actually talking, sorted into moderators, VIPs, OGs, bots, and regular chatters. Compare that number against the channel's viewer count and unusual gaps become obvious fast.

Users started doing exactly that. One X user posted screenshots showing a channel with 12,704 viewers and 201 active chatters, another with 5,469 viewers and 51 chatters, and one with 6,000 viewers and zero chatters. The post called the feature the "ultimate destruction against viewbotters" and claimed several channels were "exposed overnight."

The important caveat: a low chatter count is not proof of botting. Plenty of legitimate viewers lurk without ever typing, and engagement rates vary enormously by creator and content type. But it's a meaningful transparency shift on a platform where this has been a live controversy — we covered Kick's CEO accusing two of his own top streamers of viewbotting a few issues back. Twitch introduced viewership caps for repeat offenders earlier this year; this is Kick's more public-facing approach. 👉 👉 Check out the article!

⚠️ Asmongold's Ban Lifts — And He Says He Had a Health Scare

Asmongold's ZackRawrr channel was suspended August 6 for 14 days, putting his earliest possible return at August 20. He confirmed the length himself and said he planned to appeal for a reduction to one week, though he also floated streaming on Kick or just taking the time as a vacation.

The part that's new since we last covered this: he revealed he was dealing with a serious health scare when the ban landed. He experienced a symptom he described as "identical" to one his father had before being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer — his father was hospitalized in September 2025 and passed away later that month. "I got really upset. I was freaking out. I'm laying in bed. I'm petrified." He went to the emergency room, where doctors examined him and told him he was okay. He says the symptoms have since gone away entirely, though he plans further testing. His reaction to learning the ban was two weeks: "Thank God. Now, I'm going to have two weeks to deal with this problem."

On the ban itself, he hasn't backed down. Twitch never told him the specific reason, and he's said "I apologize for nothing," standing by comments about defending borders with lethal force. He did say he'd try to tone down his delivery to avoid recurring problems with the platform. 👉 👉 Check out the article!

Hot Deals This Week

Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake (PS5) Was $59.99 → $19.99 on Amazon

Square Enix's HD-2D remake takes the 1988 original that basically wrote the blueprint for the JRPG and rebuilds it in the same gorgeous pixel-and-diorama style that made Octopath Traveler stand out. The class system got real upgrades, the Monster Wrangler vocation is new, and the whole thing runs with modern quality-of-life fixes without sanding off what made it a classic.

At 67% off, this is the steepest cut in this week's list. If you've never played a Dragon Quest game and wondered where to start, this is genuinely one of the best entry points in the series — and twenty bucks is about as low a barrier as you'll find. 👉 Grab the Deal on Amazon

FINAL FANTASY I-VI Collection Anniversary Edition (PS4) Was $74.99 → $39.99 on Amazon

Six full games in one physical package — the pixel remasters of Final Fantasy I through VI, the run that built the entire franchise. These are the definitive versions: redrawn sprites, rearranged soundtracks overseen by Nobuo Uematsu, and modern conveniences like boosted XP toggles for anyone who doesn't want to grind the 1987 way.

It plays on PS5 via backward compatibility, so don't skip it because it's a PS4 disc. At 47% off, that works out to under seven dollars a game for six genre-defining RPGs. 👉 Grab the Deal on Amazon

FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth Day One Edition (Nintendo Switch 2) Was $49.99 → $34.99 on Amazon

The middle chapter of the FF7 remake trilogy finally on Switch 2, and it's the one that opens the whole world up — Cloud and the party leave Midgar behind for a genuinely massive overworld packed with side content, minigames, and a combat system that's the best the series has had. The Day One Edition includes an exclusive Magic: The Gathering FINAL FANTASY promo card, which is a real collectible given how hot that crossover set has been.

At 30% off, it's a strong pickup for anyone who played Remake and stalled out waiting for a portable option. Worth noting for the record: we featured Remake Intergrade a few issues back — this is the sequel, not a repeat. 👉 Grab the Deal on Amazon

Virtua Fighter 5 R.E.V.O. World Stage 30th Anniversary Edition (Switch 2) Was $49.99 → $29.99 on Amazon

Sega's legendary 3D fighter gets the anniversary treatment, and R.E.V.O. is the version built for competitive play — rollback netcode, rebalanced roster, and the tight, grounded fighting system that's kept Virtua Fighter respected in the FGC for three decades despite going quiet for years.

If your fighting game experience stops at Street Fighter and Tekken, this plays differently enough to be worth the detour. At 40% off on a 30th anniversary release, it's a fair price to find out. 👉 Grab the Deal on Amazon

Mafia: The Old Country (PS5 / Xbox Series X / PC) Was $39.99 → $29.99 on Amazon

The newest Mafia entry moves the series back to 1900s Sicily, trading the American crime saga for the origins of the thing itself. It's a narrative-driven, linear take rather than an open-world sandbox — a deliberate return to what made the first Mafia work, and a genuine change of pace if you're burned out on map-marker games.

At 25% off on console it's the most modest discount here, but this is also the most recent release in the list. PC players get a better deal — the PC download code drops from $49.99 to $29.99, a full 40% off, so you're paying the same price as console for the version that normally costs ten dollars more. If you're stacking games ahead of a slow fall, this one's aged the least. 👉 Grab the Deal on Amazon