The new year has barely begun but it seems we already have 2024's biggest game – and it's not a multi-million dollar sci-fi extravaganza set in a vast universe created by a gigantic publisher. It's a survival adventure released by a small company in Japan, which had only previously released one game. It's called Palworld, and it's being accurately described as "Pokémon with guns". And if that sounds horrible to you, it seems you are very much alone. Within three days of its release on 18 January, it had sold 5m copies.

Hit play on the player above to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript below. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text. Welcome back to talking tech huge news in the world of video games. And for that matter technology, Microsoft announced it plans to acquire video game publisher Activision Blizzard in an all cash deal valued at an eye-popping 68.7 billion.

While billionaires buy up property in New Zealand and pay technologists huge sums of money for advice on how to keep their staff in check after "the event" – that is, whatever it is that wipes out enough of the planet to justify living in bunkers – the rest of us are left to deal with the looming threat of catastrophe by playing video games. Bethesda Game Studios' Fallout series offers a very American take on the post-apocalypse: humans, ghouls and mutants protect their respective corners of the wasteland with big guns and power armour, in a retro future with sci-fi technology and a 1950s aesthetic. The games present a ravaged, irradiated all-American picket-fence fantasy with classic cars, suburban homes and US landmarks devastated by nuclear bombs. Fallouts 3 and 4 are explorative role-playing games that cast the player as a survivor emerging from a vault after more than 100 years into a world they don't recognise – though, after a few hours, they have significantly more weapons and resources than the average pitiable remnant of humanity. The games offer the player 100 or more hours exploring the wasteland and meeting its dogged inhabitants.

E3 is nearly upon us, and that means that all the major publishers, developers and platform holders will be vying for eyeballs as they try to build hype for new releases in the fall and beyond. So far, it's looking like a big one: Nintendo is back as a company capable of generating excitement, and there are plenty of other big games rumored and confirmed from other publishers. Even Microsoft, which has been struggling as of late, might come to the table with some big announcements. So with that in mind, let's take a look at the 6 biggest games coming to the show in LA. A few notes: this is for games confirmed to be coming to E3 2018.

Apparently the lawsuit was filed months ago but only became public knowledge this weekend. I'm not sure what PUBG Corporation thinks they can achieve here. I'm not sure it's a very smart idea to sue the company whose engine you happen to be licensing for your own game. If this was the case, every tabletop RPG after Dungeons & Dragons would have been sued into oblivion. Every first-person shooter after Wolfenstein and DOOM would have been hit with a lawsuit. The game itself, which I enjoy and think is very fun, is just about as generic as any you'll ever see.

Let's think about an alternate version of Epic Games' gigantic Fortnite: Battle Royale esports announcement today. In this reality, Epic Games sends out a press release following the success of its Solo Showdown limited time mode: the company is making a big investment in competitive play and putting up $10 million in prizes in its first year. It would have been a big bet from one of the biggest games in the world, and reporters probably would have talked about it in such terms. In an instant, we would have said, Fortnite made an impressive entrance onto the stage of international esports. But Epic didn't announce a $10 million prize pool.

Fair warning: datamined files are sometimes reliable indicators of what's coming in a game, like when we get to see the Fortnite challenges a few days earlier or when the skins make it into the game week or so before they actually hit the shop. If there's a full-on skin in the game, for example, you can bet it's actually coming. Sometimes datamined files are less reliable, and we're talking about the latter right now. Recent sleuthing has uncovered a new folder attached to the limited time modes with "comp" in the title, and many are taking this to mean that Fortnite: Battle Royale is getting a competitive mode. Let's think about why Fortnite could use a competitive mode, to start with.