The Steam Summer Sale 2020 is in full effect. If you didn't know it's the annual time of year where your wallet screams for mercy because "oh, it's only $4" times 37. There are plenty of big name co-op games on sale, you've got your Borderlands 3, Halo: The Master Chief Collection, and Monster Hunter: World among dozens of others. But we're going to dig a bit deeper than page 1 and show you some of our favorite games we've found on deep discount.

Piece of Cake Studio's stealth action title, Hacktag, is officially out today on Steam. The game has been in some version of alpha/beta/Early Access since last year, but today it officially leaves all that behind and enters the world as a full version release!

Hacking - everyone's doing it, but nobody knows why. Locke and Jason dive into Hacktag to get a better understanding of this mysterious world and see if they can finally sneak past that rhino guard (spoilers: they can't).

Piece of Cake Studios has announced that Hacktag, their asymmetrical, 2-player co-op stealth puzzle game, will be hitting Steam Early Access on May 18th. To kick things off, a closed beta is scheduled for May 11th to give curious players a chance to experience the game for themselves. Registration for the beta is currently open (you can sign up on their website).

At PAX East last weekend, I went hands-on with asymmetrical stealth co-op game Hacktag. Created by Piece of Cake Studios (a studio completely dedicated to making co-op games and composed of industry vets), Hacktag impressed. My time with the game left me wanting to play and improve more.

While more than a few of us spent the past weekend (and this past week) clicking through "just one more turn" in Civilization VI, we have not been doing it together.

If you received a new console yesterday (or even if you didn't) you likely tried to connect online to download some games, stream some video, or play with friends. You were also likely greeted with a message saying that online services were down or you were unable to connect. While past Holiday outages were caused by the sheer number of people connecting to services like Xbox Live and PlayStation Network, this year that was not the case. A hacking group named Lizard Squad brought down both networks.

After PSN, Hearthstone, League of Legends and Path of Exile, hackers have turned their attention to Microsoft's Xbox Live service. Continuing a distributed denial of service attack (DDOS) against the service, Microsoft's servers are having a hard time mitigating the problem. The end result is difficulty logging in, joining parties, and connecting to other players games.

There are unconfirmed reports today that PSN has been hacked, though it's unclear as to the severity of it. Hopefully it's nothing like the situation that happened just a few years ago. PSN has been unreachable for most of the morning and the official AskPlayStation Twitter account confirmed the outage - while also responding to thousands of tweets from users.

Welcome to 2014 and the latest edition of Beyond Co-Op, our week's end news piece that accumulates a few of the more interesting non co-op stories from the past several days. With the end of 2013, there were a lot of "best of" lists and "what to expect for gaming in 2014" going around. Once you get past those, however, there were a couple pieces of note, like a piece of malware stealing WoW players' account information and a new Ace Attorney game in the works.

A couple of days ago, War Z succumbed to a serious hacker attack that put private user information at risk. Both the game’s database, as well as the forums that sparked the huge controversy over the game’s legitimacy last year, were hacked to the point where developer, OP Productions, was forced to shut down their servers and take it offline until further notice.

Consoles might have had the split-screen co-op advantage on Portal 2 that their PC counterparts didn’t for a good while, but those days are now gone. Along with some minor fixes, Valve has recently added the split-screen co-op mode to the PC version of Portal 2, making Steam the undisputed best way to experience the entire game on one platform.