When you think about objects that you can invest in for hopefully high returns, you tend to think of things like gold, jewelry, art, antiques, and so on. A new study from the economists at the Higher School of Economics in Russia recently released a study that presents a new and unique lucrative alternative: Lego sets. Throughout the course of their study, the economists discovered that the market prices of the retired Lego sets sold on the secondary market grow by at least 11% annually,...

Christmas is approaching fast, and I hope you are looking forward to a fun and festive holiday season! Animated wallpapers for DeskScapes  is a fantastic way to add some holiday decoration to your desktop. Whether it's Christmas trees, Holiday lights, or a beautiful winter scene, we have a variety of wallpapers for you to check out. Here are some of our favorite holiday animated wallpapers! Here Comes Santa   Christmas Winter Window   Ch...

For many years,  I have put the Galactic Civilizations games through their paces to see how well a given game does at feeling like a story.  I do this to help nitpick things we need to change.  With the beta for GalCiv IV just around the corner, I thought I’d see how well the game stacks up so far. I also will be inserting comments that normally we would have at internal meetings, but for you aspiring game developers I wanted to show some of the feedback the team gets fro...

As a general rule, most everyone thinks of Pong as the first actual video game (it isn’t technically , but it was the first one commercially available).We’ve come a long, long way since then - both visually and technically.  I have grown up on video games, starting back in the 1980’s with Nintendo’s Super Mario Brothers. At the time, I don’t recall being particularly enamored with the graphics of even the technological marvel that it was for its time...

Stardock Releases Fences 4 with Peek, Support for Windows  10 and 11     Get it Now Stardock released Fences 4, an app that allows users to automatically organize shortcuts and icons on their PC desktops into custom-sized spaces called fences. Building upon previous versions of Fences that are used by millions of users of Microsoft Windows ® , Fences 4 introduces new features that will streamline workflows while ...

A cube-shaped object has been spotted by scientists working on China's Chang'e 4 mission on the far side of the Moon. Pictured below, you can see the object standing out against the blackness of space, practically begging in the Yutu 2 rover to come over and examine it.  While the object is probably something like a displaced boulder, scientists want to complete their due diligence and fully intend to send the Yutu 2 over to investigate. Our Space, a Chinese language science outreac...

It's crazy to think that we're already at the end of 2021! At least we have the Christmas and Winter holidays to celebrate while we wait for the new year to approach. As always, a new month means we have a new desktop screenshot thread in the forums so our awesome community members can show off their desktops. Let us know what skins and themes you are using, especially if you have a holiday themed desktop! Post your desktops to the monthly thread here:  https://forums.wincustomize.co...

We know the Christmas and Winter holiday season is one of most popular times of year for themes and skinning. WinCustomize has a huge amount of holiday skins available and finding them all can get a bit tricky. So, we wanted to ask what's your favorite holiday skins and themes to use? Whether you created them yourself or just a fan of the theme, post the link in the comments so we can get some of them featured for others to see!  

I love open exploration. This fact is actually relatively newfound information for me. I have always enjoyed RPGs and the “exploration” they offer - by that, I always meant whatever new world tidbit or experience I had as I progressed through a linear storyline.  But as open world exploration started to permeate several different game genres, I found myself finally at a place where open-world sandbox and RPG intersected: Skyrim. As far as my immediate recollectio...

We hope everyone had a fun and festive Thanksgiving, and now that November is winding down it's time to focus on our Christmas desktops! Christmas is always a fun time for skinning as we have such a wide variety of themes to choose from here on WinCustomize. Some of my favorites for the season is animated wallpapers for DeskScapes . It's always relaxing to have a nice scene of animated Christmas trees on the desktop, and we have plenty of holiday scenes to choose from. Here are a few of our...

** RELEASED 12/15/2021 ** As hardware gets better, we are able to update some of the things in the game, including AI and map density.  While we were at it, we made a number of long requested balance updates as well. What players will probably notice the most, however is how much better the AI is at putting together  fair trade offers.  This may only merit a single line in the change log but represented the bulk of the engineering time for this update. All versions: ...

The weather in Michigan has started to turn colder, though for the time being we've dodged any real abundance of snow (I know, I know - I just cursed us). As we enter into the holiday season, I find it impossible not to reflect a bit on how fortunate I am to have become friends and share so many experiences with my inredible colleagues at Stardock. The last two-ish years have been a bit strange, to say the very least. The pandemic forced us all into remote work and kept us from seeing each ot...

In the previous entry , we discussed whether we needed a battle viewer.  That’s because combat in GalCiv IV works somewhat differently than previous entries. Specifically: Combat on the map can involve multiple (ranged) tiles which complicates things a bit. Combat can take multiple turns which complicates things After getting a lot of helpful feedback we think we’ve come up with a way to have our cake and eat it too: AAR (After Action Reports).  Whenever combat take...

Today, in cool things I found out about but definitely can't justify the cost of: Disney's Star Wars experience will offer lightsaber training. When Disney first announced their fully immersive  Star Wars  experience, I expected it would be expensive...but the cost was revealed to be around $6,000 for a family of four for just two nights, so it exceeded my expectations but quite a bit there. Still, it's fun to dream about, because as more details emerge it just keeps sounding cooler an...

The Thanksgiving holiday is this week for many of us in the community. We wanted to take a moment and send out a big thank you to our community and to send a big Happy Thanksgiving to everyone who is celebrating this week with family and friends. We appreciate everyone in our various Stardock communities, and we hope you have a great holiday! Do you have any plans for this week or the weekend? Are you cooking anything good? Let us know in the comments!