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The New Zealand government spent at least $150,000 to create a video game that shows people how to run their own business. It reportedly took 14 months and eight designers to create. NZ Herald reports: The Tycoon Game series, which consists of Restaurant Tycoon and Tech Tycoon, challenges players to use what the World Economic Forum has deemed as 10 essential skills vital for the future of employment. The educational game will teach players business skills including emotional intelligence and cognitive flexibility, as well as critical thinking and creativity -- skills the Forum has this year bumped up the prescribed list. Players can level-up and earn badges for certain achievements, determined by how they manage scenarios in the game, including paying supplier invoices and wages. Do you think a video game is an effective way to teach business? If so, do you have any other games you'd recommend? A couple that come to mind include Capitalism Plus and Hot Dog Stand: Top Dog.

New submitter Donaithnen writes: Like many geeks, I'm against the idea of DRM in general and have championed GOG.com's DRM-free approach to selling games online. Yet like many geeks, I've also often succumbed to the temptation of Steam because of the convenience of tracking, installing, and playing my PC game purchases through the launcher (not to mention the compulsion of collecting achievements, and watching the total playtime for my favorite games (to my occasional dismay). Now, GOG has announced the open beta for GOG Galaxy, an entirely optional launcher to allow those who want (and only those who want) to have all the same features when playing GOG games.

New submitter Donaithnen writes: Like many geeks, I'm against the idea of DRM in general and have championed GOG.com's DRM-free approach to selling games online. Yet like many geeks, I've also often succumbed to the temptation of Steam because of the convenience of tracking, installing, and playing my PC game purchases through the launcher (not to mention the compulsion of collecting achievements, and watching the total playtime for my favorite games (to my occasional dismay). Now, GOG has announced the open beta for GOG Galaxy, an entirely optional launcher to allow those who want (and only those who want) to have all the same features when playing GOG games.

New submitter Bugamn writes Archive.org has added a new library of DOS games. The games are playable on the browser through EM-DOSBOX, a port of the DOS emulator. The games are provided without instructions, so some experimentation (or search for old manuals) might be necessary. The library does not mention any copyright concerns, although some of the games can be found for sale on sites such as Steam and GoG.

Via Engadget comes news that GOG, the DRM-free game store platform, has launched a DRM-free movie store. The initial set of movies are gamer oriented, and you won't find major studio releases (yet, and not for a lack of trying on the part of GOG). From GOG: Our goal is to offer you cinema classics as well as some all-time favorite TV series with no DRM whatsoever, for you to download and keep on your hard drive or stream online whenever you feel like it. We talked to most of the big players in the movie industry and we often got a similar answer: "We love your ideas, but we do not want to be the first ones. We will gladly follow, but until somebody else does it first, we do not want to take the risk". DRM-Free distribution is not a concept their lawyers would accept without hesitation.

We kind of felt that would be the case and that it's gonna take patience and time to do it, to do it, to do it right. That's quite a journey ahead of us, but every gamer knows very well that great adventures start with one small step. So why not start with something that feels very familiar? We offer you a number of gaming and Internet culture documentaries - all of them DRM-Free, very reasonably priced, and presenting some fascinating insight into topics close to a gamer's heart. Videos are mostly 1080p (~8GB for a 90 minute film) and can be acquired for about $6. They're using h.264/mp4 and not VP9/Matroska, but you can't have everything ;). If you don't want to download that much data, it looks like all of the videos are also available in 720p and 576p.

For years, Good Old Games has made a business out of selling classic PC game titles completely free of DRM. Today they announced that their platform now supports Linux. They said, We've put much time and effort into this project and now we've found ourselves with over 50 titles, classic and new, prepared for distribution, site infrastructure ready, support team trained and standing by ... We're still aiming to have at least 100 Linux games in the coming months, but we've decided not to delay the launch just for the sake of having a nice-looking number to show off to the press. ... Note that we've got many classic titles coming officially to Linux for the very first time, thanks to the custom builds prepared by our dedicated team of penguin tamers. ... For both native Linux versions, as well as special builds prepared by our team, GOG.com will provide distro-independent tar.gz archives and support convenient DEB installers for the two most popular Linux distributions: Ubuntu and Mint, in their current and future LTS editions.

jones_supa writes "More great news for Linux gamers: following the footsteps of Steam, GOG.com is preparing delivery of Linux games. They expect to start doing so this autumn. The officially supported distributions will be Ubuntu and Mint. Right now, they are performing testing on various configurations, training up their teams on Linux-speak, and generally preparing for the rollout of at least 100 titles — DRM-free, as usual. This will update some of the catalog's existing games with a Linux port and bring new ones to the collection. Further information on specific games is yet not known, but GOG invites fans and customers to their community wishlist for discussion."

jones_supa writes "More great news for Linux gamers: following the footsteps of Steam, GOG.com is preparing delivery of Linux games. They expect to start doing so this autumn. The officially supported distributions will be Ubuntu and Mint. Right now, they are performing testing on various configurations, training up their teams on Linux-speak, and generally preparing for the rollout of at least 100 titles — DRM-free, as usual. This will update some of the catalog's existing games with a Linux port and bring new ones to the collection. Further information on specific games is yet not known, but GOG invites fans and customers to their community wishlist for discussion."

SquarePixel writes "The nostalgic games seller Good Old Games has added Mac OS X support to its platform and a catalog of games to go with it. 'During its much-ballyhooed news-a-thon, GOG drew back the curtain on a new version of its service tailored to Macs, which brings with it 50 games (eight of which you receive free just for signing up) and some rather tempting deals. Speaking of, there's this insane 32-game pay-what-you-want Interplay special leading the charge in celebration of GOG's fourth anniversary.'" Unfortunately, Linux support doesn't seem to be in the cards just yet. On a list of requested site features, Linux support has gotten quite a few votes, but a GOG employee said, "Linux is a great platform, and we love how much passion you guys are showing for it here on our wishlist. ... If we're able to bring GOG.com games to Linux--and we're constantly evaluating ways that we can do this--we want to make sure that we're doing it the GOG.com way: simple, easy, and it 'just works.' I'm not telling you guys to give up hope--we know how much you want this--but what I am saying is that this is harder to support than it might seem initially, and we're not ready to move to support Linux officially just yet."

SquarePixel writes "The nostalgic games seller Good Old Games has added Mac OS X support to its platform and a catalog of games to go with it. 'During its much-ballyhooed news-a-thon, GOG drew back the curtain on a new version of its service tailored to Macs, which brings with it 50 games (eight of which you receive free just for signing up) and some rather tempting deals. Speaking of, there's this insane 32-game pay-what-you-want Interplay special leading the charge in celebration of GOG's fourth anniversary.'" Unfortunately, Linux support doesn't seem to be in the cards just yet. On a list of requested site features, Linux support has gotten quite a few votes, but a GOG employee said, "Linux is a great platform, and we love how much passion you guys are showing for it here on our wishlist. ... If we're able to bring GOG.com games to Linux--and we're constantly evaluating ways that we can do this--we want to make sure that we're doing it the GOG.com way: simple, easy, and it 'just works.' I'm not telling you guys to give up hope--we know how much you want this--but what I am saying is that this is harder to support than it might seem initially, and we're not ready to move to support Linux officially just yet."

gspr writes "On Sunday, Slashdot and many others reported that DRM-free games site GOG.com was shutting down. Now the site is back, revealing that it was all a hoax. According to the site: 'Now it's time we put an end to all the speculations once and for all. It's true that we decided that we couldn't keep GOG.com the way it was so we won't. As you probably know by now, GOG.com is entering its new era with an end of the two-years beta stage and we're launching a brand new GOG.com with new, huge releases.' So it was all an advertising stunt."

An anonymous reader writes "Just a day after adding a new game and a handful of promotions, GOG.com, a seller of classic games in a DRM-free format, has closed shop, leaving only a sparse placeholder page and a mention on Twitter that 'sometimes it's really hard being DRM-free... hard to keep things the way they are and keep management and publishers happy.' The site mentions that games purchased in the past will become accessible for downloading within the week, but there is no word on how long this will continue to be possible." The announcement on the site's front page says, in part, "This doesn't mean the idea behind GOG.com is gone forever. We're closing down the service and putting this era behind us as new challenges await."

arcticstoat writes "With all the controversy surrounding DRM in games at the moment, one games store has decided to buck the trend, proudly proclaiming that all its games are DRM-free. First announced back in July, Good Old Games is now in the public beta stage, which means that anyone can now access the site's archive of classic PC games, and you can do what you want with your game when you've bought it, too. 'You won't find any intrusive copy protection in our games; we hate draconian DRM schemes just as much as you do,' says the site. 'Once you download a game, you can install it on any PC and re-download it whenever you want, as many times as you need, and you can play it without an internet connection.'" In related news, Stardock, the company responsible for the Gamer's Bill of Rights, is apparently working on a new copy-protection solution that will be friendlier to consumers than current schemes.