Discover How to Follow Online Game Updates With an RSS Reader

Following several online games can feel like a part-time job. Each one has its own news page, social accounts, launcher announcements, community wiki and patch notes. Checking them all every day is tiring, and relying on social feeds means updates get buried among memes and arguments. An RSS reader solves this neatly. Most game news sources still publish feeds, and putting them in one calm list makes it easy to stay current.

I have followed game news through RSS for years. Here is how to set it up step by step.

Find the official feeds

Start with official sources for each game you play. Many studio blogs and news pages publish RSS feeds, sometimes linked at the bottom of the page, sometimes discoverable by pasting the news page address into your reader. Steam also offers RSS feeds for game news and announcements, which is useful for any game on that platform.

If an official site has no feed, check whether the studio posts the same news to a platform that does, such as a blog or a video channel. YouTube channels still provide RSS feeds for new videos.

Add community sources

Community wikis, fan news sites and forums often summarise updates more clearly than official channels. Many forums publish feeds for specific boards, such as an announcements or patch discussion section. Subreddits publish RSS too, usually by adding .rss to the subreddit address.

Be selective. One or two well-run community sources per game is usually enough. More context on how these communities filter information is in how online game communities curate the best guides.

Organise by game and priority

Create a folder for each game, or a single "Games" folder with feeds tagged by title. Put official news at the top priority level and community sources lower. Some readers let you set notifications only for specific feeds, which is perfect for official patch notes of a game you play competitively.

If you follow esports, keep results and match news in a separate folder so they do not crowd out patch notes. Finding good esports feeds is covered in the best feeds for following online game esports results.

Use filters to cut noise

Game news feeds can be busy. Store promotions, merchandise announcements and minor event reminders may not interest you. Use your reader's filters to hide items containing words like "bundle" or "sale", or to highlight items containing "patch notes" or "update". Spoiler filters are especially useful around story releases, a topic explained in how online game players filter spoilers out of their feeds.

Check once or twice a day

The calm benefit of RSS only works if you resist checking constantly. A morning and evening check is enough for nearly all game news. Patch notes rarely need reading the minute they are published, and reading a day later, after the community has digested them, often gives a clearer picture.

Is social media faster for game news?

Many players rely on social media because news appears there first. For breaking announcements, that is often true. But I think the speed advantage is smaller and costlier than it seems.

Official posts usually appear in RSS within minutes, since many feeds update as soon as a page is published. Social feeds show news mixed with reactions, speculation and unrelated posts, and algorithms may show an announcement hours late or not at all. For most players, a reader that is a few minutes slower but shows every update in order is more reliable than a feed that is sometimes faster and sometimes silent.

A starter setup

1. Install an RSS reader with mobile and desktop apps.
2. Add the official news feed for each game you play.
3. Add Steam news feeds for games on that platform.
4. Add one trusted community source per game.
5. Create folders by game and set filters for noise and spoilers.
6. Check twice a day.

Mobile notifications deserve care. Most readers can send a push notification when a specific feed updates. Use this sparingly, only for feeds where timing truly matters, such as maintenance announcements for a game you play daily or patch notes before a competitive event. Notifications for every news post quickly recreate the noisy experience you were trying to escape.

Archiving is another underrated benefit. Over months, your reader builds a searchable history of every update for the games you follow. When someone asks when a change happened or what a previous patch did, you can search your reader instead of digging through forums. Readers that keep full article text make this especially useful.

All your games, one list

An RSS reader turns scattered game news into a single, finite list. You see every update, nothing is buried, and you can read when it suits you. For the general case for RSS, see why RSS is still the calmest way to follow the web. More in our Games section.