My go-to for hardware is
RetroRGB. Bob's weekly news Vlog and podcast are pretty inclusive, and it regularly gains new news posters. I support Bob and Tito regularly on Patreon because my main interest now is video fidelity and console modding.
Tho it isn't really news, I try to once a month visit itch.io to see what's making chart status and search the same site on google to see what's up with the indie not-on-steam games. There's a complete other side of pc gaming there.
Aside from those, and my ~40 Patreon subscriptions, I just spent too much time on Youtube and I'm subscribed to a lot of niche gaming channels. Between myself and my nephew who's obsessed with pre-alpha games and indie game modding (he asks me to fix crashes like his phone and pc aren't completely destroyed ) , I find out about stuff fairly real-time as it happens in the gaming and emulation world. I reserve posts here about retro games and rom-hacks because I feel like my interests might not coincide with the regular folks here. I semi-regularly post a rom hacking update for those who might like to know about highlights and noteworthy things, but I think a regular visit to cdromance to get them while they're hot is warranted.
Sadly, Social media is where everything is landing now. Some sites I never really followed like Kotaku, Resetera, Nintendolife, AndroidAuthority, etc are stiil reporting everything relevant, but it really depends where your interests lie.
As it used to happen on Facebook, now it happens on Discord.
I don't use Discord unless necessary because I dislike being in so close communication with that many people despite is being an impersonal chat program. I'm sure I turned off the right settings, but there's constant news bulletins. Probably I'm just suing it wrong.
I absolutely need to use it to communicate with people who develop, make, and sell things I subscribe to or buy. I dislike having my chat program subscribed to so many news channels, so I mostly leave it off. The things I care about happen real-time there, but it's too much noise.
Where my Google searches used to end up in forums like this or NeoGAF, SegaXtreme, NesDev, Shoryuken, PocketHeaven, GBATemp, RomHacking forums, now they mostly land in Reddit. Reddit is where the particulars of each niche get posted and sorted. The wildly bad or good things float to the top. If you visit or subscribe to the right Reddit topics, you'll have the news real-time as it unfolds, but again, if you subscribe, it's all just so much noise.
I miss when Zophar's Domain was the go-to site for romhacks, translations, ripped game music, hacks, and everything else. There was another site called The Well, it hosted rom translations.
Did any of you watch RetroRGB's
interview with Zophar himself a few months back? I thoroughly enjoyed it. A lot of nostalgia and talk of Bloodlust Software even.