As the sicko cartoon goes: "YES… HA HA HA… YES!" That's how I feel while peering at Steam's 100 most-played games list and spotting the Next Fest demo for shopkeeping sim Probably Stolen.

A singleplayer game about sitting behind a desk and managing inventory doing that well among the other 8,000+ demos that have arrived for Next Fest? So well it's actually charting with 34,230 concurrent players?

YES!

I played the demo back in September and loved it because it made me feel like I was running a corner store in Dredd or Cyberpunk 2077. You sit behind the counter of a grimy little shop on a space station and sell everything from food and beverages to weapons and cybernetic implants to a collection of interesting, unusual, and occasionally suspicious customers.

There's a bit of Fallout to it, as well: at night you can go and scavenge scrap and junk from trashpiles in hopes of adding something valuable to your inventory. You can do some crafting, too, smelting metals into ingots once you've got the gear for it, and this is the grim future so you can also start a rat farm and sell off the meat.

You can shop at other specialty vendors to acquire hard-to-find items to use or sell yourself, and there's even a bit of Papers, Please with the moral dilemmas you'll face: there's an underground movement fighting against the cyber-dystopia you can help or hinder, depending on if you want to turn a revolutionary in for a tidy bounty or keep your mouth shut if you spot someone on the cops' most-wanted list.

And don't worry, you don't need to be a huge sim geek to enjoy running the shop in Probably Stolen. The sim does go enjoyably deep, though: you can use a magnifying glass (Strange Horticulture style) to examine items for signs of counterfeiting, and even sell those counterfeit goods yourself to rich dummies who wouldn't know a legitimate cyber implant from a fake.

In other words, I'm pumped to see Probably Stolen getting so many players during Steam Next Fest, and you should become one of those players if you aren't already. There's not much longer to wait for the full game, either: Probably Stolen launches next week on October 28.

In anticipation of the full launch of World of Warcraft: Forever next month, Blizzard is throwing the gates wide open on the throwback MMO to stress test the servers.

Anyone with a World of Warcraft account will be able to play the 'WoW: Forever - Stress Test" client in the Battle.net launcher later today. You don't need an active subscription, nor do you need to have purchased any of the WoW: Forever special editions. All you need is some patience for what could be a bumpy few hours as people pile in.

The regular beta servers will be offline until the stress test is over, which means anyone who can't go that long without a hit of WoW: Forever will likely show up. I wouldn't be surprised if some Blizzard folks drop in with some surprises of their own, like spawning world bosses or something in the last hour or so (this happened during a recent PvP tournament).

Everyone will start fresh on the stress test server, so you won't have time to do much but the first couple of leveling zones. You will get a taste of what to expect on launch day: Crowds of players wandering around like ants, and quest enemies dying before you can even click on them. Get ready to fight for your XP.

Here are all the times for the WoW: Forever stress test:

• West Coast US: 2 pm - 6 pm PDT
• East Coast US: 5 pm - 9 pm EDT
• UK: 6 pm - 2 am BST
• Europe: 7 pm - 3 am CEST
• Australia: 8 am - 12 pm AEDT
• New Zealand: 10 am - 2 pm NZDT

Once everything wraps up, Blizzard is going to flip the switch back on for the regular beta servers until Friday.

I'm crossing my fingers that this stress test actually helps with stability on launch day. There will almost certainly be long queue times, but having to start and stop as servers go haywire will ruin any chance of actually enjoying the game that day. We already witnessed this with the launch of the beta, and that was only the people who paid for the game. On November 4, when WoW: Forever properly goes live, anyone out there with a subscription will be lining up.

Following the shocking closure of legendary RPG studio BioWare, Electronic Arts has posted a lengthy missive laying out its plans for "EA's next chapter," which sounds very much like cuts almost across the board.

I'll spare you the corporate gobbledygook about challenging assumptions, confronting assumptions, and imagining new possibilities, and cut straight to the chase: The plan is to do fewer things with fewer people focusing on its biggest franchises. What that works out to practically:

• Shooters: More Battlefield, more Apex Legends, and "bringing together our Respawn and DICE studios to collaborate on a future project."
• Action-adventure: Marvel's Iron Man and the third Star Wars Jedi game are still happening, but "beyond that, we will concentrate our efforts on fewer simultaneous, large-scale projects."
• EA Sports: Full commitment to EA Sports FC, plus a new American football game creatively codenamed "Project Gridiron," and Fight Night is coming back.
• Lifestyle: The Sims will continue but "Project Lotus," originally presumed to be a sort of precursor to The Sims 5, has been paused. The Skate dev team, meanwhile, is being cut to "build a healthier and more sustainable business."

Of course, there's also a gross little nod to BioWare and the end of Mass Effect: "As we focus on these larger opportunities, we've had a small team at BioWare working on early-development for Mass Effect. We've made the decision not to move forward with this development, which means we’re closing the studio and our Edmonton workspace. BioWare is a legendary studio that helped define the role-playing genre, and we do not take this decision lightly."

The message doesn't specifically reference the layoff of around 400 employees at Electronic Arts reported by Bloomberg, but it does say some of the changes announced today "are difficult, especially for the people and teams across the company who are directly affected," which is the sort of mealy-mouthed guffola put out by C-suites when they don't want to say with clarity that they just hacked out a significant chunk of their workforce.

One other thing I find interesting about this announcement: It's attributed to Cam and David, who I assume are Cam Weber and David Tinson, recently installed near the top of EA as president and chief studios officer, and president and chief operating officer. The name of Andrew Wilson, Electronic Arts CEO, is rather notably absent. Make of that what you will—but for the record, EA confirmed that Wilson is still the chief executive.

The post is short on detail, but the broad gist of the whole thing—cuts and concentration—aren't entirely surprising given the company's recent acquisition by Saudi Arabia, which saddled it with $20 billion in debt and owners not known for their liberal mindset. Plans for massive cuts were reported in early August, and a possible merger with Saudi-owned Savvy Games Group has also been rumored. But former BioWare lead writer Patrick Weekes made the call more than a year ago, when the EA acquisition first happened, predicting that "guns and football" games would be fine, but "gay stuff" would be out.