by Erica Ogg
December 22, 2008 4:02 PM PST

Starting Monday, Electronics Arts will sell its popular video game Spore free of any digital rights management restrictions. It's part of a slew of titles which EA will offer on Valve's Steam distribution platform, according to a report by Ars Technica. Besides Spore, the collection will include Warhammer Online, Need for Speed Undercover, Mass Effect, and FIFA Manager 09.

Crysis, Crysis: Warhead, and SiN Episodes: Emergence are already available on the service, and there are more on the way. Prices for the DRM-free versions are said to be on par with what the games would sell for in a box in a retail store. It's a move likely to win EA some points with gamers after the disastrous public response to its DRM policy for Spore. Originally the company locked the game using DRM software called SecuROM to no more than three machines, which it later upped to five.

By Ben Kuchera
October 23, 2008 - 12:26PM CT

We know theft is against the law, and we know that when you download a song or a game without paying for it, there's a good chance that it's copyright infringement. But what about when you steal a virtual item? Dutch courts had an interesting case to deal with when two youths were sued for stealing in-game items from another youngster, forcing him to give up items in the game Runescape.

The youths were sentenced to community service for their crimes. In other words, theft of the virtual item has led to real-world consequences, a first for the Netherlands. There are other criminal aspects of this case, as it has been reported that the victim gave up the items after being physically assaulted in his room and threatened with a knife if he didn't comply. The case in question, however, dealt only with the stolen items, in this case an amulet and a mask. The 15-year-old and the 14-year-old were sentenced to 200 and 160 hours of community service, respectively.

Most significantly, the court treated the Runescape goods as though they were material items: "these virtual goods are goods (under Dutch law), so this is theft." This sets a strong precedent (at least in The Netherlands): these goods have real-world value, and they "belong" to you inasmuch as it's a crime to take them from you by force. This seems to be a very open-and-shut case, as it involves physical assault in addition to the theft, but cases rooted in virtual worlds may increasingly find themselves before meatspace judges.

Take EVE Online, for instance. The game has been home to many cases of virtual fraud, and in some cases the "crime" takes place over months, involving industrial espionage or plain-old social engineering to grab cash, plans, or simply destroy in-game property. EVE is a completely open, not to mention brutally competitive, world.

By Dean Pullen
18 July 2008, 5:41 PM

BIZZARELY, UBISOFT seems to have been caught distributing a 'no-CD' crack produced by a pirate group for one of its own games. A user named Twingo on the site Fileforums.com pointed users in the direction of a crack made available by Ubisoft for the PC game Rainbow Six Vegas 2.

This was meant to help users around problems experienced by the copy protection problems caused by the Direct2drive download service. The file has since been removed, but not before many users confirmed that the download was in fact a no-CD crack distributed by pirate group 'Reloaded'. The 'UK Community Manager' of Ubisoft attempted to address the issue by stating: "We're looking into this further as this was not the UK Support team that posted this, however if it is an executable that does not need the disc I doubt it has come from an external source."

Yet various users posted proof it was from an external source, using a standard hex viewer. Threads on the Ubisoft forums are now being closed on the matter, and the same community manager posted the following statement: "The file was removed from the site over a week ago now and the matter is being thoroughly investigated by senior tech support managers here at Ubisoft.

Needless to say we do not support or condone copy protection circumvention methods like this and this particular incident is in direct conflict with Ubisoft's policies." Some users have now resorted to calling the company 'Noobiesoft'.

By Ben Kuchera
July 09, 2008 - 12:20PM CT

PC gaming may not be dying, abut it is in a state of flux. We're seeing developers and publishers blaming piracy for all the ills of PC gaming, but attempts to rein in pirates with the help of DRM only annoys and mobilizes the legitimate customers of your games. The solution? According to David Perry of Shiny Games, PC games are going to be free.

He points to the Asian market as an experiment in this model. "They had so much piracy that they decided to stop charging for the games. Instead, there'll be a charge for things you might want to use in the game," he said in Belfast, according to the BBC. Companies are to make their money through microtransactions. "Your character might have a plain white T-shirt. If you wanted a nicer one you could have it for a dollar. Or perhaps you could buy a magic sword for a knight for a dollar."

For examples of how this model works, look no further than Korea's Nexon Corporation. Located in Seoul, it specializes in developing these free-to-play games, with a high level of success. Take Crazyracing Kartrider: the game itself is free, but you can pay for licensed karts or new paint jobs. Maple Story is a top-down MMO title that is likewise free-to-play, with certain items being available for purchase using real-world money.

It has to be noted that these games exist to allow profit for Nexon only, for-cash trading between players is prohibited; only virtual currency is traded when a player sells an item. The first attempt at this market by a western developer is EA's Battlefield: Heroes, a free-to-play version of the company's popular Battlefield titles that is geared for a casual audience.

By David Chartier
July 08, 2008 - 10:45PM CT

Google today introduced a 3D chat room plug-in called Lively that is easy to embed in websites and blogs. Ars Technica went hands-on to see if Google actually has introduced us to "another dimension of the web."

Unveiled on Google's blog with the disclaimer that it was a "20 percent" project, Lively is designed to be a portable 3D space where users can build rooms and interact with visitors via avatars. "Second Life in a web browser" is an applicable analogy, though Google appears to have made sure that rooms and user activities remain in the G to PG range.

Each room can be linked with a unique URL-I Hate Ewoks and Lively: Google Room are two good examples-or even embedded in a website through an iframe. "If you enter a Lively room embedded on your favorite blog or website," Google's Niniane Wang said in the announcement post, "you can immediately get a sense of the room creator's interests, just by looking at the furniture and environment they chose."

Apparently, a WordPress theme, Flickr photosteam widget, and a Twitter Flash badge aren't enough to show off one's personality anymore; we need to know people's architectural preferences as well. For now, Lively is only available for Windows XP/Vista PCs running Internet Explorer and Firefox; Mac and Linux clients are on their way.

By Ben Kuchera
July 06, 2008 - 11:45PM CT

When the driver jumps out, the truck keeps rolling... The love of money is the root of all evil, or so the saying goes. The proverb is definitely true in the case of rock-n-roll, where the love of money typically doesn't even bring about the good kind of evil (i.e., mid-80's Metallica), but rather the bad kind of evil (i.e. Metallica's Lars Ulrich whining about P2P and "this whole Internet thing").

Though it's not quite on par with the epic saga of Metallica's stratospheric rise and ultimate descent into rehab and anti-fan litigation, the ongoing story of the Guitar Hero franchise is also a story of money and rock-n-roll, of good and evil. The release of the latest two installments in the franchise—Guitar Hero: On Tour for the Nintendo DS and Guitar Hero: Aerosmith for the major consoles—gives us a new chapter in that story, and it offers us a chance to step back and take stock of the direction the story is headed.

Is it toward the right kind of evil, or toward the wrong kind? After Activision announced plans to merge with Vivendi to create Activision Blizzard, the company held a conference call in which new titles for almost every major Activision brand were announced. Guitar Hero, Call of Duty, Tony Hawk... the list went on. Activision was on a roll, and the Guitar Hero and Call of Duty franchises weren't just hits, they were monsters.

Between the two of them they were some of the best-selling games of the year, they unseated Halo on the Xbox Live standings, and they it cool to play with plastic guitars. Then Activision CEO Bobby Kotick said something chilling to all of those who had dialed in hear about his company's plans for the two blockbuster franchises.

By Frank Caron
July 01, 2008 - 10:30PM CT

Some will tell you that PC gaming is dying. Others will tell you it's never been stronger. Whomever you listen to, though, one thing is clear: the PC gaming industry is in a state of flux, as its key players search for workable business models to keep up with the times.

At the forefront of these initiatives is Microsoft, which has for better or for worse attempted some branding and platform-development schemes that, at least to some industry players, hasn't done a whole lot other than further stagger the PC gaming market. Microsoft's Games for Windows initiative and its Windows Live gaming platform are the company's two apparent answers to the PC gaming problem.

Together, these two plans were put into motion to help build a more structured and highly-visible unified "platform": a face to PC gaming that was more cohesive, more organized, more centralized for the gaming experience. The idea was to make PC gaming more accessible and to provide a place for gamers to unite, to click—the Xbox Live strategy applied to the fragmented PC market.

If it weren't for all that darn piracy, they say. But really, the heart of the problem is the company's approach. Plans haven't exactly worked out as Microsoft would have liked. Windows Live remains relatively unpopular, and the Games for Windows branding has done little than add a seemingly irrelevant quarter-inch to the top of some retail boxes.

By Ben Kuchera
June 27, 2008 - 09:44AM CT

There are a few different reasons you might not be playing on the same Xbox 360 system that you originally bought. You might have upgraded to an Elite system for the bigger hard drive and black HDMI. More likely, your original system died and you were forced to have it replaced.

Gamers who received new systems were in for an unpleasant surprise when they redownloaded their Arcade games or hooked up their old hard drive: the games they paid for would only work when connected to the Internet. No network connection, and they all reverted to demo versions. Microsoft has just released a tool that allows you to move those licenses over to a new console, but the question remains: what took so long?

The online tool is dead simple to use, and there is a video to walk you through it if you need help. Simply sign into the page with the Windows Live ID that's attached to your Xbox Live Account, click on "start the license transfer now" button, look at the number of licenses you have if you'd like, and then click next. Sign into Xbox Live on the console you'd like to move your licenses to, and click confirm on your PC.

Then go to download history in the account management tab on your 360, and re-download the licenses. Now even when offline, the full versions of the games will play. You can only use the tool once every 12 months, so you can't change your licenses over to a friend's system for a weekend and then move them back.

XP SP2 vs. Vista RTM vs. Vista SP1: Gaming benchmark
February 28th, 2008
By Adrian Kingsley-Hughes

Here are the benchmark results that many of you have been waiting for - a look at how well ten popular games work on XP SP2, Vista RTM and Vista SP1. It’s been nearly a year since I took a look at the state of gaming under the Vista OS.

The last time I compared XP SP2 to Vista, I was disappointed with Microsoft’s new OS as a gaming platform because I could get far more bang for my bucks out of XP than I could out of the new OS. Partly I put this down to immature drivers, but on the whole I was convinced that at the core of the problem was Vista.

So, is Vista worth bothering with as a gaming platform? The tests will be carried out on the AMD Spider platform that I have set up in the lab (Phenom 9700, Radeon 3850 graphics card, 2GB of RAM …). I’ve used this system as the platform for a number of benchmarks I’ve run over the past week (for a full spec, see this post).

Here’s the deal. I set up three images for the system - one based on XP SP2, one on Vista RTM and one on Vista SP1 (all 32-bit flavor). On each of these images all the updates provided by Microsoft were installed. The installation of drivers in addition to those supplied by Microsoft was kept to a minimum (XP SP2 required more drivers than Vista).

ZDNET Blogs
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FPS Deaths Provide Sweet Relief To Victims
By John Timmer
February 25, 2008 - 09:20PM CT

The literature regarding the affect of violent gaming on a person's psyche is complex and often contradictory. Ultimately, many of the contradictions may result from differences in what's being measured and how those measurements are interpreted. These challenges are nicely illustrated by a paper in the most recent issue of the journal Emotion.

The paper tracks the emotional responses of players of a first person shooter as they kill and get killed, but it leaves unanswered questions regarding what emotions those responses actually reflect. The design of the study was pretty straightforward. A group of Finnish college students, lured with free movie tickets, were asked to play two games: the first person shooter James Bond 007: NightFire, and the nonviolent Super Monkey Ball 2.

While playing, skin conductance levels were monitored to track emotional arousal, while specific emotions were measured by electrodes that followed the activities of facial muscles. The students were also given a test (the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire) that determined psychotic tendencies. According to the authors, those who get high scores on the test are, "impulsive, sadistic, hostile, aggressive, unemotional, and lacking in empathy."

They also tend to find media portrayals of violence amusing, rather than disturbing. When playing James Bond, both killing and being killed consistently triggered emotional responses. The big surprise came in the measurements of facial muscles: "instead of joy resulting from victory and success, wounding and killing the opponent elicited anxiety, anger, or both."

Ars Technica
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Lego Universe, a brick MMO, is in development
by Daniel Terdiman
February 20, 2008 6:21 PM PST

SAN FRANCISCO--On a regular basis, two of the things I most like to write about are Lego and virtual worlds. So when I first heard about Lego Universe, a Lego-themed virtual world, well, I was more than a little interested.

Lego Universe, which, sadly, is still about two years from public release, will be a full-scale MMO (massively multiplayer online game) aimed at Lego's core audience, kids ages 8 to 12. But in keeping with the company's awareness of the millions of adults who are utterly devoted to the iconic toys, there is expected to be something for the big kids, too, said Mark Hansen, Lego director of business development and a guiding force behind the game.

In fact, Lego Universe is being developed by a Denver company called NetDevil, and not long ago, Lego flew 50 "partners" to the Colorado capital for some in-depth discussions about what the game should entail. Exactly what came out of those meetings, of course, is secret, but it's safe to say they were about creating the types of environments the adults would like to see the game include and which would be suitable for children.

A big part of the game is expected to be building--as in letting players build houses, vehicles, and so forth, all out of the famous plastic bricks. Well, at least digital versions of them. During a meeting Wednesday at the Game Developers Conference here, Hansen explained to me that Lego Universe is very much a part of the, er, Lego universe.

CNET Blogs
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GDC '08: Game devs terrified of sex
By Emma Boyes, GameSpot UK
February 20, 2008 3:06 pm PT

Brenda Brathwaite implores game designers to put a bit more nookie in its titles, and for stores to stock naughty games. SAN FRANCISCO--Game developers are frightened of sex, claims the founder of the International Game Developers Association's Sex special interest group.

But Brenda Brathwaite isn't talking about nerds living in a basement who are too scared to approach a member of the fairer sex; she's talking about the lack of it in the actual games themselves. She told the audience at her "Hentai, Hardcore, and Hotties" talk at the Game Developer's Conference that "Developers are terrified of putting sex in games in case they get an AO rating, which is the kiss of death."

Part of this fear is justified, she admits, as even games that get an M for Mature rating are not stocked by the biggest chain stores. "Western sex games like Leisure Suit Larry and 7 Sins didn't sell," she sighed. "And they didn't sell because they couldn't get into Best Buy, Wal-Mart, or Target. If you can't get into those three stores, you're done."

Gaming's first lady of sex also bemoaned the ratings system as blocking the potential for serious, educational sex games. "For example, you can make a game about safe sex for teenagers, and it would automatically get an AO rating," she ranted. "There's absolutely no provision in the ratings system that says anything like, 'unless it's an educational title.'"

Gamespot
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GDC '08: Gears of War 2 rolls out in November
By Tom Magrino, GameSpot
February 20, 2008 11:46 am PT

[UPDATE] Sequel to Epic Games' high-octane third-person shooter gunning down the Xbox 360 for the holidays; first trailer inside! The fact that Epic Games is at work on a sequel to 2006's massive Xbox 360 hit Gears of War is one of the industry's worst-kept secrets.

Aside from being a logical business move--Gears has sold 4.5 million copies globally across the Xbox 360 and PC to date--Epic has been less than opaque about its intentions, even as far back as last year's Game Developers Conference when lead designer Clifford Bleszinski (aka Cliffy B) said that his company "intends to do a sequel." The question, then, has been when would Microsoft and Epic finally get around to making the announcement. True to rampant speculation, that reveal came today during Microsoft's keynote speech at the 2008 Game Developers Conference

After Epic founder Tim Sweeney and president Mike Capps left the stage with no mention of the shooter midway through Microsoft's presentation, the lights dimmed to close out the keynote...and a trailer for Gears of War 2 played. Cliffy B then stormed the stage, chainsaw rifle in hand, revealing the game would officially light up Microsoft's console exclusively this November.

No PC version of the game was mentioned, though Epic released an enhanced PC port of the sci-fi third-person shooter a year after its console counterpart.

Gamespot

GDC 08: Wii Fit's Interface Challenges
By Ray Barnholt
February 20, 2008

Putting two scales together is harder than it looks. When you look at Wii Fit's Balance Board, do you think it looks like it and the Wii were made for each other? Designer Takao Sawano does, but it took a while to reach that point. As the man in charge of producing the Balance Board, Sawano and his team found that making a game centered around your health took as much trial-and-error as any project at Nintendo. In a presentation at GDC, Sawano outlined the making of Wii Fit as how the Board and the game itself came to work in harmony.

It all started before the Wii was even finished, when producer Shigeru Miyamoto drew up a diagram of different "packs" of games that Nintendo could develop. Aside from the "Party Pack" (Wii Play) and "Sports Pack" (Wii Sports), there was the "Health Pack," which described features like calorite control and body management. Since Miyamoto had enjoyed keeping records of his weight and health progress, he thought it would make a good game. Sawano had to make sure it actually would.

Sawano's team inspected the innards of everyday bathroom scales, which are manufactured for cost-effectiveness. Adapting that for a game controller, though, left Sawano unsure if they could replicate that efficiency. When Miyamoto liked the direction the project was going, Sawano's worries of cost-effectiveness turned into a drive to simply make a good scale.

1UP
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PC Gaming Alliance debuts
By Tor Thorsen
February 20, 2008, 8:54 AM PST

SAN FRANCISCO--With consoles increasingly intruding on such hallowed ground as the real-time strategy genre, many PC gamers have adopted something of a siege mentality. This defensive attitude is also apparently afflicting hardware manufacturers and software publishers, a number of which on Monday announced the formation of the PC Gaming Alliance.

The first body ever formed solely to promote the PC gaming industry, the PCGA is a nonprofit organization dedicated to "driving coordinated marketing and promotion of PC gaming...and creating forums for member companies to cooperate on solutions to challenges facing the PC gaming industry, such as hardware requirements and antipiracy."

Said member companies include PC hardware manufacturers Acer-Gateway, Dell-Alienware, Intel, and Advanced Micro Devices. AMD also owns ATI, a leading manufacturer of PC graphics cards, whose chief rival, Nvidia, is also on the PCGA board along with PC game peripheral company Razer USA. Rounding out the list are game developer Epic Games and the biggest third-party publisher on the planet, Activision.

Ironically, the maker of one of the consoles being blamed for cutting into the PC's market share is also on the PCGA's board. After spending billions on launching and promoting the Xbox 360, Microsoft has joined the board as part of its reinvigorated PC gaming initiative, Games for Windows.

CNET News
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