sammyF70 writes "The Wolfire/Humble Indie Bundle real time statistics have been updated to show the average amount donated per platform. It looks like Linux users donate twice as much, on average, as Windows users. You can see some graphs on the Wolfire blog."

sk8pmp writes "With the cost of solid state memory going down, will we see the return of the game cartridge? Or will digital distribution reign supreme and transition our entertainment into the cloud? This editorial explores the beginnings of the cartridge vs. disc battle of the '90s and theorizes a second one in the future. 'Imagine if you could marry the vast spaces of discs with the blazing fast speeds of solid state memory. Can you say "no more load times"? You pop the game into the top of the console, so the game is sticking out the top like in ye olden times, and you could see the sweet artwork on the front of the cartridge. The nostalgia is killing me!'"

sopssa writes "2K Games today announced that Civilization V will be using Steamworks for online matchmaking, automated updates, downloadable content and DRM for the game. Steam's Civ V store page is also available now, revealing some new information about the game. There will be an 'In-Game Community Hub' for online matchmaking, communication, and for sharing scenarios between players. While including Steamworks might put some people off, it might also indicate better online gameplay than in the previous Civilization games, where it was almost impossible to have a good game without playing with just friends."

A few months ago, 2K Sports announced a unique contest to promote a new game they were working on, Major League Baseball 2K10. They said whichever gamer was the first to pitch a perfect game and provide proof would win $1 million, with the contest running for two months. Reader yukk tips news that the two months have now passed, and 2K Sports has announced a winner. It turns out the prize was won on the very first day, by a player who had put less than an hour and a half of effort into it.

BanjoTed writes "Michael Pachter's ongoing spat with Nintendo regarding the Wii 2 is well documented. Pachter is sure it's coming, Nintendo says it's not. Now the analyst has gone one further by claiming that the declining sales of the Wii documented in the platform holder's recent financial statements will only get worse unless it speeds up attempts to get its successor to market. He said, 'The reason for this is clear: the software being created is just not interesting enough or compelling enough to drive Wii owners to buy more than two [games] per year, and most of those purchases are first party software. We can blame the third party publishers for making shovelware, or for misjudging the Wii market, but the simple fact is that the publishers have to develop completely separate games for the Wii because its CPU is not powerful.'"

acemtp writes "Breakthrough for Free Software gaming. Ryzom announces full release of source code and artwork, and a partnership with the Free Software Foundation to host a repository of the game's artistic assets."

An anonymous reader tips a post up at the Wolfire blog that attempts to pin down a reasonable figure for the amount of sales a game company loses due to piracy. We've commonly heard claims of piracy rates as high as 80-90%, but that clearly doesn't translate directly into lost sales. The article explains a better metric: going on a per-pirate basis rather than a per-download basis. Quoting: "iPhone game developers have also found that around 80% of their users are running pirated copies of their game (using jailbroken phones). This immediately struck me as odd — I suspected that most iPhone users had never even heard of 'jailbreaking.' I did a bit more research and found that my intuition was correct — only 5% of iPhones in the US are jailbroken. World-wide, the jailbreak statistics are highest in poor countries — but, unsurprisingly, iPhones are also much less common there. The highest estimate I've seen is that 10% of worldwide iPhones are jailbroken. Given that there are so few jailbroken phones, how can we explain that 80% of game copies are pirated? The answer is simple — the average pirate downloads a lot more games than the average customer buys. This means that even though games see that 80% of their copies are pirated, only 10% of their potential customers are pirates, which means they are losing at most 10% of their sales."

Gametap writes "If cloud gaming works for enough genres, it can't help but find popularity. Even just a game like WoW might be enough to make it happen, and Gaikai's Dave Perry posted a picture of doing just that on an iPad. So is it the future or not? Could somebody make a tablet with nothing more than a screen, battery, network port, and video decoder, and have it be a good gaming platform? Will it change the mobile, PC, console, and TV world as we know it? Lots of questions, lots of skepticism, lots of players and money being invested — but one thing is for sure: it will be very interesting to see how this evolves."

A recent GamePro article sums up a lesson that developers and publishers have been slowly learning over the last few years: gamers don't want as much from games as they say they do. Quoting: "Conventional gaming wisdom thus far has been 'bigger, better, MORE!' It's something affirmed by the vocal minority on forums, and by the vast majority of critics that praise games for ambition and scale. The problem is, in reality its almost completely wrong. ... How do we know this? Because an increasing number of games incorporate telemetry systems that track our every action. They measure the time we play, they watch where we get stuck, and they broadcast our behavior back to the people that make the games so they can tune the experience accordingly. Every studio I've spoken to that does this, to a fault, says that many of the games they've released are far too big and far too hard for most players' behavior. As a general rule, less than five percent of a game's audience plays a title through to completion. I've had several studios tell me that their general observation is that 'more than 90 percent' of a game's audience will play it for 'just four or five hours.'"

Last April, we discussed news that video game rental service GameFly had complained to the USPS that a large quantity of their game discs were broken in transit, accusing the postal service of giving preferential treatment to more traditional DVD rental companies like Netflix. Now, just over a year later, an anonymous reader sends word that the USPS has responded with a detailed inquiry into GameFly's situation (PDF). The inquiry's 46 questions (many of which are multi-part) cover just about everything you could imagine concerning GameFly's distribution methods. Most of them are simple, yet painstaking, in a way only government agencies can manage. Here are a few of them: "What threshold does GameFly consider to be an acceptable loss/theft rate? Please provide the research that determined this rate. ... What is the transportation cost incurred by GameFly to transport its mail from each GameFly distribution center to the postal facility used by that distribution center? ... Please describe the total cost that GameFly would incur if it expanded its distribution network to sixty or one hundred twenty locations. In your answer, please itemize costs separately. ... Does the age of a gaming DVD or the number of times played have more effect on the average life cycle of a gaming DVD?"

dunng808 writes "If a couple of young, game-crazy guys wanted to get started designing a game with the intention of selling the concept, how should they proceed? In the music industry they would make a demo MP3. In the film industry they would write a script (and I would recommend lyx with the hollywood document class). Should they develop some sample game play with a well-known engine? Is the one in Blender good enough? This somewhat dated list suggests it is. Or should they focus on textual descriptions and static scenes made with Blender and the GIMP? Is there even a market, let alone a convention, for selling game concepts?"

supersloshy writes "Last year, 2D Boy, the developers of the popular independent game World of Goo, had a pay-what-you-want birthday sale with curious results. For the next seven days, Wolfire Games is attempting the same kind of sale, but with some new twists. Wolfire Games' Humble Indie Bundle contains five independent games (World of Goo, Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru HD, and Penumbra) with no DRM and they are all cross-platform. In addition to directly supporting the developers of these five games, part of the money also goes to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Child's Play Charity. No matter how much you spend, you also get to choose who your money goes to (charity only, developers only, evenly, or custom)."

Mr. Sketch writes with news that the free release of MechWarrior 4 has finally arrived. We've discussed the game in the past when it was announced, and later when its release was held up by Microsoft. Quoting the announcement: "One of the greatest features of MekPak3.1 and of MechWarrior 4: Mercenaries in general, is the ability to customize. MechWarrior always has been about the Mechlab, especially multiplayer. The Mechlab truly distinguishes MW4 from a long list of shooters that have come out in the past 10 years. The ability to create literally thousands of configurations allows the game to continue in popularity over its lengthy life span. Since the Free Release not only comes with the original mechs and weapons of Mercenaries, but also with the Clan and IS Mech Packs and all the Mektek mechs and weapons, here is what you are getting ... for free."

Blizzard announced today that StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, the first game in a series of three, will be released on July 27. The game will contain the Terran campaign (29 missions), the full multiplayer experience, and "several challenge-mode mini-games," with "focused goals designed to ease players into the basics of multiplayer strategies." It will launch alongside the revamped Battle.net, which we've previously discussed. Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime said, "We've been looking forward to revisiting the StarCraft universe for many years, and we're excited that the time for that is almost here. Thanks to our beta testers, we're making great progress on the final stages of development, and we'll be ready to welcome players all over the world to StarCraft II and the new Battle.net in just a few months."

An anonymous reader writes "Politicians in the Australian state of Victoria are currently locked in a debate about whether an injured man should be able to claim the cost of a Nintendo Wii for rehabilitation purposes under worker's compensation. The man's doctor apparently recommended he use the Wii Fit exercise device, but both insurance companies and the government itself have blocked the payment and have now ridiculed the idea as paying for video games. But with the Wii Fit increasingly being used for rehabilitation purposes internationally, does the man have a fair case?"

UgLyPuNk writes "In amongst all the lawsuits and signings, Activision and Treyarch have found the time to announce the latest in one of the world's best-selling video game franchises: Call of Duty: Black Ops is due to hit shelves November 9." The official site has a trailer, which has been dissected for details by the folks at GameTrailers.

An anonymous reader writes "A California steel contractor spent 2,200 total hours over the last three years racking up a high score in Bejeweled 2. He exceeded the 2^31-1 maximum score programmed for the score display, proving that there is, in fact, an end to the game. I suppose congratulations or condolences are in order."

Jack Action writes "The University of British Columbia runs a summer camp where kids get to play computer games for three hours a day. The camp organizers say it is 'a good social opportunity for some kids who didn't fit into other programs.' However, health professionals declare they are 'troubled' by the camp. A professor in UBC's department of medicine says kids should be outside and engaged in 'unstructured play,' while the CEO of an NGO that monitors kids' health chimes in that they already spend too much time in front of screens and not exercising. Do the health experts have a point, or are they just criticizing something they don't understand, or perhaps is not to their taste?"

eldavojohn writes "Sure, they're stepping all over proprietary rights and copyright, but something must be said about the amount of bliss-filled nostalgia inside Exploding Rabbit's Super Mario Crossover. If the plumbers never really did it for you, you can now kill those goombas as Link, Mega Man, Samus, Simon Belmont, or Contra's Bill. Goodbye jumping and spitting; hello slicing, whipping, and shooting. Is this one of the early firsts in the new genre of video game mashups?"

An anonymous reader writes "Infinity Ward may be suing Activision under allegations of low payment and no royalties, but it seems some developers are still happy to work with the publisher — it has just signed a 10-year deal with Bungie, the studio behind the popular Halo series of FPS games. Activision will publish all of Bungie's games in the next decade — although Bungie will own the IP. The terms of the deal are similar to those brokered by former Infinity Ward chiefs Jason West and Vince Zampella when they signed with EA after being fired in March."