Category Archives: Internet

Former Playfish CEO Kristian Segerstrale believes the noise surrounding next-gen consoles is distracting publishers from “the fastest growing parts of the game industry.”

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Harmonix has said its Rock Band and Dance Central website servers have suffered an “apparent attack,” and registered users will need to change their passwords just to be safe.

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News Corp. is in the process of closing a deal with Ziff Davis over the sale of IGN, according to All Things Digital.

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Aaron Swartz, programmer and Internet activist who helped scrap the Stop Online Piracy Act bill from passing in Congress through his Demand Progress group, has died.

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Business cloud services provider j2 Global has completed a deal to purchase long-running tech publisher Ziff Davis. j2 paid $167 million for the company and expects the investment to have an instant impact on its financial report, contributing $60 million to its revenue in 2013.

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Atari Arcade has been announced and it allows you to play classic Atari titles through Internet Explorer, ad-free.

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Sony Pictures has registered 18 domains this week for “Console War movie” in various forms. The domains, dug up by Fubsible, range from TheConsoleWarmovie.com to consolewar.net and everywhere in between, and all were registered on August 23. Sony Pictures is the television and film production/distribution unit of Sony, and none of the registrations were filed by Sony Computer Entertainment. Fusible notes this could be a marketing campaign for PS4, but at this point, the purpose of the domains are anyone’s guess as there are no webpages attributed to any as of yet.

GameTrailers has relaunched its website. It looks well organized. Good job guys. Go check out the spiffy new duds.

Two lawsuits have been filed in South Korea, challenging the Shutdown Law as unconstitutional. The law prohibits those under sixteen from playing games for a nightly six hour block so they can do more constructive things. Parents and teenagers with a Korean organization representing culture filed a suit claiming the law doesn’t take into account the parental right to educate their children. The other lawsuit was filed by NCsoft, Neowiz, and Nexon, also claiming the Shutdown Law is unjust. More on Kotaku.

GameTrailers.com turns 10 this year, and in order to make the occasion special, it has decided to relaunch the site. Brad Winters, GM of GameTrailers has told GI International the site will be relaunched “from the ground up,” with a “brand-new, everything from the back-end to the new logo, a new look and feel.” The relaunch started a year ago, after noticing a “heavier year-over-year consumption,” of original content,” said Winters. Video views from GT’s original content average 40% of total monthly views, which is up from 28% in 2010 and viewers average 44 minutes per visit. The site will undergo stress-testing over the next few weeks. You an look over the upcoming changes via the site’s production blog.

A website carrying the leaked document allegedly pertaining to the specs and features of the next Xbox has been ordered to remove it by Microsoft.

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The closed beta testing period of Codemaster’s free-to-play PC management title, F1 Online will come to an end on Tuesday June 19 in preparation for the open beta. In addition, the non-disclosure agreement that closed beta participants have been bound by will also expire on June 19, freeing all and sundry to talk about their experiences with the title and share any screens and video captured from it.

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Following the launch last month of its site servicing the Middle East, IGN has signed a licensing deal with Blah! Asia – a division of Spiral Media – to publish IGN Asia Pacific. The site is available in three languages: English, Chinese Mandarin and Malay and will cater to ten markets including Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Hong Kong and China.

IGN Asia Pacific editor-in-chief, Maxime Villandré said, “We will be reaching out to players with a wider variety of game titles and indulge it with unique voices: stories and exclusives delivered in local languages by resident gamers, heroes and industry players, which establish rapport on content that energizes Asia.”

From Dust is now available through Chrome. To celebrate its launch, Ubisoft has put the title on sale for week, and it will run you $9.99. After that, you’ll have to pay full price for it, which is $14.99. Get it now through the Chrome Web Store.

IGN and T-Break Media have launched IGN Middle East which will service 15 countries in the Middle East and North Africa region, including United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Egypt and Morocco and its “potential audience of more than 340 million people.” The site will be headed up by Abbas Jaffar Ali, formerly of ME gaming site Megamers, which has been incorporated into IGN ME. The site is available in Arabic and English and mixes “locally created editorial content with that from IGN’s teams in the US, UK and Australia.”

FortressCraft designer Adam Sawkins has struck out at Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson after the game’s website was allegedly hit by a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack yesterday.

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Staff for Australian gaming site PALGN have resigned from the site, although will continue to work on the site until end of play this Friday. The confirmation, according to MCV Pacific, came in a mail from site vet site executive editor Jeremy Jastrzab, which noted the call ” stems from an inability for the editorial team and the PALGN ownership to come to agreement on how the site would function.” It follows after a forum thread that aired internal grievances between staff and owner Roland Kulen was recently made public on Pastebin over the direction of the site.

More details at the link.

Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid (NV) has postponed a vote on PIPA due to various issues and protests surrounding the bill, stating there’s “no reason that the legitimate issues raised by many about this bill cannot be resolved.” SOPA has also been postponed for the time being, and the ESA has dropped support of it altogether.

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Oddworld developer Just Add Water and the Oddworld website, Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Gamasutra and SavyGamer have all blacked out in protest to SOPA this morning.

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The anticipated vote on SOPA has been delayed until the US House of Senate can find some sort of “consensus,” its been announced over the weekend.

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