The Gathering movies now available!
http://www.sk-gaming.com/video/239224-The_Gathering_2010_GRANDE_FINALE_Part_1
Check it out!
From The Gathering 2010!
ClanBase Hall of Shame - March 2010
It has been a while but we have been able to compile a list again of all the rule breakers last month. Call of Duty (20 cheaters) detailsNickCountryPeriodCheataerox
http://www.sk-gaming.com/video/239224-The_Gathering_2010_GRANDE_FINALE_Part_1
The top 5 ways to game through the recession
After a few bank meltdowns, bailouts and seething anger from the Average Joe, we’re all ready to admit it: The economy is in rough shape. Jobs are hard to come by and many people are having trouble covering basic necessities. This leaves many gamers, myself included, struggling to scrape together enough cash to pick up new games.
With that in mind, GGL decided to list the Top 5 ways to game your way through the recession.
Follow these guidelines to soothe your aching wallet, support developers and patronize local businesses as the economy goes down the toilet!
5. Search for deep discounts online
It’s pretty rare to find box copies of games on sale in retail stores; however, the Interwebs are ripe with sites that offer discounted games. When short on cash, look to CheapAssGamer.com. The folks over at CAG compile all the current deals and promotions into an easy to navigate list.
If PC gaming is your thing, Steam is a no-brainer. There’s always some sort of discount or promotion happening and this past winter, Valve ran a 10%-75% off promotion sitewide. It’s hard to beat $5 for Bioshock, and Steam Weekend Deals are always around.
This sort of advice normally should go without saying, but it’s uninformed consumers that keep overpriced big box stores in business. If you can educate a fellow gamer to buy online, you’ll be “teaching him to fish.” And if you encourage people to buy from Steam, you’ll support a platform that gives independent developers a place to shine–and a cut of the proceeds.
GameFly acquires Shacknews
Game rental service GameFly has acquired venerable gaming site Shacknews for an undisclosed sum. This ends Shacknews’ 14 year run of independent operation.
Founder Steve Gibson will leave the site, according to Forbes’ Chris Morris. Gibson identified a desire to spend more time with family, rather than financial difficulties, as the primary motivator for the sale.
Speaking on the acquisition, GameFly co-founder Sean Spector said: “I think in the gaming category, there’s a large need for quality content. Shacknews fills that need, delivering great news and features and a vibrant community. We can leverage a lot of things we have internally, like our infrastructure and resources, and help expand it.”
In human-speak, GameFly is getting a built-in userbase to market its services to, in addition to a solid editorial team.
Some long-time members of the Shacknews community are up in arms about the sale, but may have missed the backdrop of the acquisition: Digital distribution.
Shacknews also owns FileShack, a strong competitor to IGN/Gamespy’s FilePlanet and Ziff’s FileFront in the file-serving space. And while GameFly deals with console games exclusively right now, a digital distribution service for PC games doesn’t seem out of the question.
FileShack’s infrastructure is already set up to deliver tremendous amounts of data, with the load distributed across multiple North American, European and even Asian servers. This seems like the logical progression for GameFly.
Gibson and Co. get a sack-full of money, while GameFly gets a huge boost in traffic to its network, a new userbase to market to and a file delivery network. In an ideal world, everyone wins.
Read: Shacknews comment by Steve on the sale
Read: GameFly Acquires Shacknews
Read: GameFly ‘Shacks’ Up
Is Counter-Strike dead? In defense of the king
Is Counter-Strike dead? It’s an interesting question, with many potential responses depending on your gaming identity. One of the largest English-language Counter-Strike coverage sites canned its major staff and scaled back coverage of (at one point) the world’s most popular first person shooter.
Does it mean the end for Counter-Strike?
It really just depends on who you ask. To give an example of how one man’s gaming treasure is another’s trash: Ask a 12-year-old gamer in central Texas whose currently library of games includes The Sims 2 and Call of Duty 4 if Starcraft is dead, and he’ll probably say yes because he’s never heard of it. Ask a 25-year-old real time strategy enthusiast from South Korea the same question and he’ll probably pull heat on you for dishonoring his national sport.
Amusingly enough, I would have sided with the “Counter-Strike is dead” crowd until last week, when I opened Steam for the first time in what seemed like months. Ten straight hours of CS later and I’m wondering if CS ever really died, or if the louder editorial voices of the gaming world just lost interest.
To get the news straight from the horse’s mouth, we’ll pull up our trusty Steam Statistics and compare CS with the two other most popular Steam games at this time, Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead.
At the time of writing (a Monday evening) 19,006 players are still online playing CS:S, and 14,760 playing 1.6. Combined peak players playing CS hits over 193k on a Monday. L4D peak: 25k; TF2 tops out at almost 17k. TF2 and L4D combined don’t hit half of the users playing just CS 1.6.
Mortal Kombat sequel underway
Despite Midway’s impending doom, Ed Boon claims that another edition of Mortal Kombat is on the way–following news of Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe shipping close to 1.8 million units.
While Sonya Blaze and her assorted female friends are no doubt sick of being pimped out on a yearly basis (check the tan lines on her waist), no company’s going to turn down free money in a time like this And it looks like gamers will continue to buy anything recognizable in the forseeable future.
“We’re already hard at work on our next version of Mortal Kombat, and look forward to being able to reveal more details in the future,” Boon said in a press release about MK vs. DCU’s shipping numbers.
Expect to see more sequels and less original IP as we continue down the path of economic decline. As the economy goes, so does gaming innovation.
Sony expects $2.9 billion loss, more layoffs loom
Sony has announced it expects to post a $2.9 billion loss at the end of the fiscal year. This is a reversal of its October 2008 prediction of a $2 billion profit by the end of the fiscal year.
How does a projected swing of nearly $5 billion happen in four months? Let me count the ways.
1) Low sales. 2008 was one of the worst years for sales of…pretty much everything, owing to a bad economy. This was expected, but no one really knew how bad it would be until after Christmas. Most of Sony’s products command high prices to begin with, which wasn’t helped by…
2) The yen’s value has gone up relative to other currencies, raising the export prices of high-end consumer electronics like Bravia TVs and PlayStation 3s. This undoubtedly caused low sales in certain markets. (The yen has now reached a 13 1/2 year high vs. the dollar).
Imagine a loop of failure, increasing in scope until the fail encompasses a $5 billion swing. I’m hardly an economist, but that’s just how I see it. Feel free to chime in if you think I’m wrong.
In any event, Sony will increase its layoffs past the original number of 16,000. Sony Computer Entertainment Europe does not expect to lose any of its (undoubtedly huge) staff, while Sony Computer Entertainment America remains mum on the matter.
Read:Sony Expects to Lose $2.9 Billion, Axes More Jobs
Funcom merging Age of Conan servers
It looks like it’s time for crappy MMO developers to pay the piper. First we heard about the shutdown of Tabula Rasa in February, and now Age of Conan developer Funcom is merging servers to account for low populations across the board.
When it’s all said and done, the total number of AoC servers will sit at 18, a far cry from the original 49.
It just goes to show that most of the companies trying to get a piece of the MMO cash cow are failing miserably after the release of Wrath of the Lich King. I’m going to throw out Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning as the next victim of Blizzard’s juggernaut. Flame away.
Read: Age of Conan Losing 63% of Severs
UGO acquires 1UP Network, EGM closing
With the bankruptcy of Ziff Davis rippling out into the gaming space, news broke today that Hearst-owned UGO will acquire venerable game blog 1UP, while the long-running Electronic Gaming Monthly is ceasing publication.
1UP director Sam Kennedy summed up the situation, appropriately enough, in a post on NeoGAF. He said:
“UGO did what they could to, what I consider, ’save’ 1UP…There’s no way to rationalize this for most people, and I don’t want to sugarcoat anything. Fact: 1UP was a business that was losing money. Fact: This economy sucks and the ad market is diminished.”
At the other end of the equation, EGM will cease to exist because it can’t re-use articles from 1UP writers. The print audience has diminished rapidly in the last few years, so it’s not a huge surprise, but this is the end of a 20 year publishing run (EGM was founded in 1989).
Ultimately, the cynic in me feels gamers are (finally) starting to realize that many of the reviews and articles in mainstream game mags are bought and paid for with advertising contracts, and are taking their readership elsewhere.
As much as some people like to believe that writing reviews amounts to true “hold their feet to the fire” journalism, I’m of the opinion that gaming mags are enthusiast press outlets. There’s a pretty massive conflict of interest when a mag claims claims to uphold gamers’ best interests, and then we hear about pay to play contracts in the industry. EGM may well have been an innocent bystander, but gaming journalism is really a misnomer when all involved parties stand to benefit from the sales of games.
Time will decide if 1UP returns its former glory, but when your most well-recognized product is a podcast, an untimely demise could always be around the corner.
Read: 1UP director Sam Kennedy: UGO not ‘the bad guy’
Read: UGO Entertainment Acquires 1UP
Worlds.com files suit against NCsoft over MMO patent bullshit
On Christmas Eve, Worlds.com, a company I’ve never heard of likely because it’s never done anything worthwhile, left a steaming pile on NCsoft’s doorstep. It filed a lawsuit claiming that NCsoft infringed on an obscure patent, #7,181,690 - System and method for enabling users to interact in a virtual space, in bread-and-butter MMOs like Guild Wars and City of Heroes/Villains.
This isn’t as much a case of NCsoft infringing on proprietary technology as it is a case of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office sucking more than a $2.33 hooker by awarding such a vague patent to begin with.
After all, the kindly-worded press release in which I received this information noted that this patent, and another owned by Worlds.com (#6,219,045 - Scalable virtual world chat client-server system), could apply to all 3D worlds everywhere. Somewhere on the internet, an owl is hooting mockingly.
The explanation behind all this? Naturally, Worlds.com is hoping for an easy settlement. It has a patent but no obvious technology aside from a screenshot showing a floating IBM cube in a pixelated Second Life environment, while NCsoft has MMOs that are reasonably well-known in the west and are/were explosively popular in Asia. I can thusly sum up the challenger’s business model in four easy steps:
Employee outrage exposes more problems at EA LA
Following the cancellation of shooter/RTS hybrid C&C: Tiberium, there was much outrage in the land (also known as the internets).
Now a number of EA LA employees have spoken out against the management practices of their company on GamaSutra, and the 8 day long bitch session has been…quite enlightening.
Chief among the employees’ complaints is the fact that EA seems to have a glut of managers and producers, but not nearly enough developers and artists to see a project through. See this quote from an anonymous poster:
The real story of Tiberium’s fate was a project being led by these incompetent leaders, as is par for the course at EALA, but was recognized as an opportunity for a new team of management to make a powerplay for their own development team. At first they made the right moves to win over the crowd, eliminating Orzulak, “pretty boy EP,” and their “no action is the best action” technical director, along with demoting the similar philosophy senior development director in one fell swoop. The team rejoiced, and invested their full faith into the newcomers…
Activision bringing even more microtransactions to Call of Duty: World At War
Microtransaction Voltron assemble! There’s a crisis in Santa Monica!
Actually, not really. However, Activision has just announced that it will make DLC a bigger part of Call of Duty: World At War, which is being developed by Treyarch.
CoD5 will have three times as much DLC as CoD4, as well as premium content to give gamers a leg up on the competition. The premium program, dubbed “Day One Advantage,” which sounds more like a yeast infection remedy than a glorious content mechanism, will allow paying users to gain two new weapons (a rifle and light machine gun) quicker than their miserly counterparts.
I could argue the dubious nature of such a program, and how initatives like it lead to the wimpification of gamers everywhere, but I’ll leave you with this: Since the game isn’t being developed by Infinity Ward, and it’s going back to WWII, I’d skip it.
Read: Activision To “Monetize” Call of Duty Online