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I agree with you, everybody should stop paying taxes and supporting the blood thirsty tyrannical governments

Yes, no go with evil governments of america. Move business to China. Move moneys to China. Chinese governments peaceful and lovings.

Good american business like Apple come to China. Big pineapple too. Everybody come to China.

this one
These

You are, of course, severely late to the party; a lot of interesting discussion on this point happened way back in August. Here's the Slashdot conversation from then. I believe the consensus is that since this is Blizzard and not EA, no boycott like the one that marred Spore's release will transpire, and the loss of flexibility will simply be accepted.

Another controversy from about the same time (which didn't receive Slashdot attention) is that all gameplay-altering modifications are banned in D3, a somewhat harsher stance than the one Blizzard took with WoW interface mods. There has been some concern that DarkD3, a mod that diminishes the game's 'painted' look to make it clearer and crisper graphics may be cause for a ban, but so far the word is "probably not".

I went through the medical training in America's Army 3 when it launched and was horribly buggy.

It was really well-designed and informative. Hell, it might have even helped save a life.

But, the story wasn't about a guy who played the game and shot up a mall full of teenagers, so you never hear about shit like this in the mainstream media.

Denton: "The idea of capturing the intelligence of the readership — that's a joke."

Ok, I admit, I find some interesting stuff on occasion on Lifehacker, but that aside, with the insidiously moronic nature of the typical Kotaku article, churned out 3 or 4 times per hour, who else does he expect to comment on such contrived stories as this:

http://kotaku.com/5567040/star-treks-levar-burton-is-not-pleased-with-e3

Or just posting random unnamed sources with PS4 specs that sound absurd. No one would get into a protracted, irrational debate about that, based on idle speculation ...
http://kotaku.com/5896996

And here's a real think piece from Gawker.com today:

gawker.com/zooey-deschanel

Can't believe more rocket scientists and doctors aren't jumping in to elevate the conversation...

Denton: "The idea of capturing the intelligence of the readership — that's a joke."

Ok, I admit, I find some interesting stuff on occasion on Lifehacker, but that aside, with the insidiously moronic nature of the typical Kotaku article, churned out 3 or 4 times per hour, who else does he expect to comment on such contrived stories as this:

http://kotaku.com/5567040/star-treks-levar-burton-is-not-pleased-with-e3

Or just posting random unnamed sources with PS4 specs that sound absurd. No one would get into a protracted, irrational debate about that, based on idle speculation ...
http://kotaku.com/5896996

And here's a real think piece from Gawker.com today:

gawker.com/zooey-deschanel

Can't believe more rocket scientists and doctors aren't jumping in to elevate the conversation...

What, you mean like http://kotaku.com/5842950/blockade-runner-is-a-minecraft+inspired-spaceship-sim ?

More on Kotaku.com

Crashed and burned? They have sold 95 million Wii's http://kotaku.com/5879478/the-wii-will-sell-a-hundred-million-eventually

Nintendo did dominate the Xbox and PS3 to the point where both Sony and Microsoft felt the need to incorporate motion controls. Nintendo also made money on every system and if the Xbox 720 rumours are true, Microsoft appears poised to follow in Nintendo's footsteps with the next console cycle. The Wii did fizzle out toward the end of it's life but it's still a great console that shook up the industry far more than the PS3 or Xbox could ever hope to.

If anything I'd argue the Wii U is the lacklustre console. The Wii is a pretty hard act to follow but this is Nintendo after all and they could easily pull off a SNES here. Only time will tell but as far as the Wii is concerned, I'd hardly call it the flop you imply it is.

The ESA pulled its support last week. http://kotaku.com/5877996/esa-drops-sopa-support

Sony put Linux on the PS3 solely to avoid EU taxes that apply to consoles, by pretending that it's a general computing device.

Mass Suicide Threats at Foxconn Xbox 360 Plant

http://cryptogon.com/?p=26902

January 11th, 2012

"Foxconn has a plan to deal with these pesky meatsacks, and I donâ(TM)t mean suicide prevention nets.

Foxconn Wants to Build âoeIntelligent Robotics Kingdomâ to Replace Human Workers with Robots

Foxconn: 1 Million Robots in 3 Years

Via: Kotaku:

On Jan. 2, over 300 employees at a Foxconn plant in Wuhan, China threatened to throw themselves off a building in a mass suicide. Foxconn makes Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony products. These workers manufacture Xbox 360s.

According to Chinese anti-government website China Jasmine Revolution (via Watch China Times), the workers were protesting denied compensation they were promised.

On Jan. 2, the workers asked for a raise. Foxconn told them they could either keep their jobs with no pay increase or quit and get compensation. Most decided to quit with compensation. However, the agreement was supposedly terminated, and the workers never received their payments.

Website Record China reported that the uproar the incident actually caused Xbox 360 production to be temporarily suspended.

The mayor of Wuhan intervened to talk the group down, and on Jan. 3 at 9pm, the group of 300 decided not to jump, ending what could have been a deadly game of chicken."

- http://kotaku.com/5874706/report-mass-suicide-threats-at-xbox-360-plant
- http://cryptogon.com/?p=23829
- http://cryptogon.com/?p=25875
- http://cryptogon.com/?p=17613

Microsoft, where's your TV commercial for THIS?

What you said is not true - Do your homework. Origin was launched on June 3rd of 2011. Crysis was pulled on June 14th
      * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_(digital_distribution_platform)
      * http://kotaku.com/5811996/crysis-2-pulled-from-steam-now-only-on-eas-origin

I've been puzzling over the corruption caused by business influence on government for awhile.

Setting it up as a problem in game theory, the tenet "candidate who spends the most money wins the election" makes the outcome a foregone conclusion: elected government officials will be in the pocket of corporations, in all cases.

This may be a way out.

We've bemoaned our inability to influence the political system, but here we see a striking example of the population rising up and affecting specific government actions.

Public outcry stopped the AT&T/T-Mobile merger, or at least it helped. Similarly, public outcry attempted to hurt Bank of America and GoDaddy over their political beliefs.

If we can make this work it will give us the fine control over government that we have been missing. We've been able to affect small companies - HBGary, Stratfor, Ocean Marketing, Sony. (OK, Sony isn't that small, but it was a slice of Sony much smaller than BOA.)

Future companies may need to think twice before supporting oppressive or corrupt legislation - if only because of the chance that the people will rise up and hurt their bottom line.

We haven't had an effect on the really big companies yet (BOA), but I'm hoping that this grows to be a worldwide trend. We need to install a healthy dose of respect for public opinion. To put it succinctly, the companies have to fear the possibility of public retribution, both legal and extra-legal.

This will give us the power to affect legislation, to control the corruption. This will put government back in the hands of the people.

If we can make this work...

"Anyone that has basic skills of google will never hire him again."

Of course, he's already demonstrated willingness to act under a different name -- even when it's another real person:

http://kotaku.com/5871400/cut-paul-oceanmarketting-christoforo-a-breakhe-probably-just-has-roid-rage

Just FYI, this guy does steriods. I'd imagine this accounts for 80% of his actions (the other 20% attributed to him being a dumb fuck).

Kotaku pegged it to roid rage. Maybe, maybe not. Maybe he's just incompetent.

Either way - nightmare for the PR firm, nightmare for the controller company, nobody wins.

Upon further reading, this guy appears to be a total 'roid head. Figured it had to be one of the two.

That's what I'm thinking - drugs or some sort of psychological issue that recently popped up (I'm assuming that a consistent pattern of similar behavior over any reasonably long period of time will result in that person being removed from the marketing profession).

Kotaku has pretty good evidence that someone with the same email address as this guy openly talked about using steroids on a web forum, so that may be the explanation.

Apparently N-Control decided to stick with this guy even when they were told not to:
http://kotaku.com/5871400/cut-paul-oceanmarketting-christoforo-a-breakhe-probably-just-has-roid-rage/

To explain the pre-amble, in the article, Paul pretends he's Brandon in an email earlier on:

Hi Joel,

I have been following this story since this morning when someone notified me about what was going on. I did not write that response to you.

Yes, in the past I received email at brandon@avengercontroller.com but even then we were an outsourced marketing agency for N-Control. I no longer receive email at that address because we fired N-Control as a client about 8 months ago due to constant shipping delays (which we had to deal with) and their association with Paul Cristoforo who is a street thug masquerading as a self proclaimed "Marketing Professional". This guy is a complete fool and somehow strong armed his way into working with the company so we walked away. I am not surprised in the slightest bit by what's going on right now. In fact, we told the owners of the company on many occasions that this would eventually happen.

I wasn't going to chime in but since he is replying as me, I can't resist. I personally can't stand him.

Brandon

Yeah, I gotta quit wading around in the Twitter during meetings. Not can I now not find the original hoax-claim, I'm seeing the Kotaku article indicating that it's just so, so, so much better than a hoax -- yeah, really at a loss as to how this could get better. But I am willing to wait and see, yeah.

No, it's just the steroid rage; apparently the guy also plagiarized his entire website and faked his industry credentials.

Firstly, this is a Daily Fail story - take with a large pinch of salt. As shown in the Leveson inquiry, they're happy to run "Organisation wants to ban something" story one day, then "Our campaign has forced organisation to back down" the next - despite no such banning effort happening. In addition, they do have a "anything invented after 1900 is suspicious" agenda.

Well, quite. There's a less hysterical account of the story here. The concern does appear to be the age-old debate on the effect of violent games on the perception of violence.

I think a shooting game in which one has to choose who to shoot (which seems to be the main thing they are complaining about -- indiscriminate killing of non-combatants and prisoners of war) would tend to be a better game than one in which you shoot everything that moves and most things that don't,and the overhead of having to deal with prisoners of war might make for an interesting game dynamic, but I don't see those as matters for legislation. Still, game makers could make in-game compliance with international human rights law more realistic by mentioning, if the player survives to the end (so it will never happen in unbounded games) that the protagonist might have to answer to the court for their actions a couple of years after game time.

This was on Kotaku yesterday: http://kotaku.com/5864910/digital-download-discount-for-vita-may-explain-sonys-memory-stick-plans

The info is unconfirmed, but it says they're charging 40% less for downloads than games at retail and that's why the memory cards are more expensive. In other words, please pay up front so they can hold your money for you, and very probably the developers don't get a cut.

Kotaku had a decent write up of why this is basically either a huge cultural misunderstanding or a naked attention-grab by PETA. Knowing the history of the organization, you decide...

Here's Fox "News", just last week, talking about how educational games such as Sim City are produced by a left wing conspiracy with the goal of frightening young children into protecting the environment: link.

Funny, because when I played Sim City I made it my #1 goal to cause a nuclear meltdown without using the disaster menu.

The professional liars then go on to cherry pick the example of "McDonald's: The Game", made by these guys as a representative example of the sort of games kids play.

Of course, a more popular game would be Modern Warfare. I haven't played one of those titles in MW2, but I distinctly recall a scene in which torture is used to get important intel from a bad guy, after abducting said bad guy from the streets of a sovereign nation (Brazil, I think). Which message would you rather expose your children to: "Torture is okay as long as the government says so!" or "Cities that bulldoze all their greenspace and get all their electricity from unregulated coal power plants end up with smog."?

Actually, if you watch Fox News, I'm guessing I won't like the answer....

Via Kotaku:

"You may have heard this weekend, activation keys for free Dirt 3 game vouchers shipping with a few AMD products were compromised. The keys were hosted on a third-party fulfillment agency website, AMD4u.com, and were not on AMD's website. Neither AMD nor Codemasters servers were involved.

We're working closely with everyone to address the situation. AMD will honor all valid game vouchers, but just a heads up, the current situation may result in a short delay before the vouchers can be redeemed."

The article on TV Tropes about fanwork bans links to interviews with Nintendo executives after Nintendo's overreaction to the "Suicide Girls" incident, such as a Kotaku article that quotes Nintendo president Satoru Iwata: "it would not be appropriate if we treated people who did something based on affection for Nintendo, as criminals." So avoid porn and commercial use, and you'll probably avoid "diminish[ing] the dignities" of the settings and characters of Nintendo products.

Kotaku has its own video up that is much better quality.

STOP OPENING MY GAMES. This is why I never buy from GameStop / EB, because you have the audacity to OPEN everything before I do. You know what shrink wrap is supposed to mean?, it means I'm guaranteed on getting an UNALTERED product.

ESPECIALLY with most stores not taking back opened copies.

Oh, when you hear about say,
selling used games as if they were new, or say, ripping off the customers, and then trying to distract them with a shiny gift card,
it makes me trust you even less then I did before.

1) Stop opening games. Sell them in their box. Even Bestbuy's game vault is better then getting an opened game.
2) Fork over $10 for the service they should have gotten in the first place, AND give them a gift card. I don't care how much the gift card is, that's not the issue, it's allowing you what you should have gotten to begin with, and then adding on an act of contrition.
3) Just stop your used game business. You are screwing over gamers and game companies. If you want, then buy the used games for 1/2 of what you sell them for, just don't act like trading 3 games in for a 5$ discount is a steal, especially when you sell each of the games for $5 under what you were for a new game.

Future Shop annoys me, Best Buy infuriates me, I hate the very concept of Walmart, and Gamestop / EB is STILL at the bottom of my list. I LOVED EB, it was the store for me, the store that seemed to understand the gamer geek, and you are lower then stores I hate even getting near.

It might be because of what I / we once had, but we can have it again, just treat me with respect, and carry stuff I actually need, (has anyone ever tried to get a PS3 cable to let their backcompatible PS3 read PS2 memory cards? 1, just 1 would have been good enough, and I might have kept caring).

I haven't bought new from GameStop in years because of their general practice of lending new copies of games to employees and then later selling those games as new. Last time I tried to buy a new game from them, it looked like this guy's game, so I just walked away without buying. Now I only buy new from my local Target store, or online from Amazon.

I still go to GameStop to buy and sell used games, though.

By reasonable standards, yes, but Gamestop used to sell used games as new. This is basically a monopoly that abuses their customers. And their customers are largely under 18 year olds with more disposable income than experience or common sense, so they keep shopping there.

...and just buy a chinese ripoff... http://kotaku.com/5549865/china-rips-off-the-ipad-with-the-iped ... just goes to show how much patents are truly worth

What happens when you reach your 250GB/month cap from all that streaming? http://kotaku.com/5820450/the-day-comcasts-data-cap-policy-killed-my-internet-for-1-year

The password reset issue is not intentional. Normally Sony would email you a URL with a security token in it, this is required to reset your password. As it happens that security token can be gotten from another form if you have a user's username, email address, and date of birth. Kotaku has a list of steps used for this exploit: http://kotaku.com/5803070/sony-playstation-network-password-reset-page-exploited-customer-accounts-potentially-compromised

However, thus far the track record is in Valve's favor.

Except when they do things like release L4D with an indication of post-release content, then release a sequel that is really at best an expansion with a such a timeline that indicates they moved everyone off of L4D1 content as soon as it shipped? Or being vocally against paid DLC only now they have it? I don't know what Valve did to convince so many people to have such a huge blind spot when it comes to any of their anti-consumer behavior. It isn't that they are worse than anybody else for it, and they are definitely better than many, but they've already proven repeatedly that they their customers do not necessarily come first.

wow, someone read bruce schneier's interview on kotaku about the PSN outage!

Leaked? How come all these 'leaked' video game articles always look like perfectly assembled press releases?

Here are the original Kotaku articles:

http://kotaku.com/5801226/the-modern-warfare-3-files-exclusive-first-details-on-the-biggest-game-of-2011
http://kotaku.com/5801353/modern-warfare-3-multiplayer-features-battles-in-brooklyn-clash-in-mogadishu/gallery/
http://kotaku.com/5801345/where-youll-go-how-youll-kill-and-who-will-die-in-modern-warfare-3

I wonder if they were delivered pre-written?

Full Disclosure: I loved MW and MW2. I would still be playing MW2 if i had just gotten a 360

Leaked? How come all these 'leaked' video game articles always look like perfectly assembled press releases?

Here are the original Kotaku articles:

http://kotaku.com/5801226/the-modern-warfare-3-files-exclusive-first-details-on-the-biggest-game-of-2011
http://kotaku.com/5801353/modern-warfare-3-multiplayer-features-battles-in-brooklyn-clash-in-mogadishu/gallery/
http://kotaku.com/5801345/where-youll-go-how-youll-kill-and-who-will-die-in-modern-warfare-3

I wonder if they were delivered pre-written?

Full Disclosure: I loved MW and MW2. I would still be playing MW2 if i had just gotten a 360

Leaked? How come all these 'leaked' video game articles always look like perfectly assembled press releases?

Here are the original Kotaku articles:

http://kotaku.com/5801226/the-modern-warfare-3-files-exclusive-first-details-on-the-biggest-game-of-2011
http://kotaku.com/5801353/modern-warfare-3-multiplayer-features-battles-in-brooklyn-clash-in-mogadishu/gallery/
http://kotaku.com/5801345/where-youll-go-how-youll-kill-and-who-will-die-in-modern-warfare-3

I wonder if they were delivered pre-written?

Full Disclosure: I loved MW and MW2. I would still be playing MW2 if i had just gotten a 360

to deal with all the sacred cows the company had accumulated over the years.

So Sony is the corporate equivalent of a Mooby's? Wait... actually, that kinda makes sense.

But no, the reason he was hired was to be a distraction, really. Sony's real business model has always been to try to take over the standard so that everyone has to license from them.

Consider the following list:
Beta vs VHS -> Sony collected royalties for over two decades on Beta in the form of Betacam recording and the professional TV industry (where image quality did in fact matter more).

DAT vs standard audiotape vs CD Audio -> DAT was actually very popular in Europe and Asia for a good while. Licensing restrictions and "piracy worries" kept it mostly out of the US thanks to the MafiAA.

Minidisc vs CD Audio -> See DAT. Minidisc eventually came back for another, even more stupid round as the "UMD" they were pushing in the PSP.

ATRAC audio vs MP3 audio -> The reason nobody in their right mind would ever buy a Sony portable music player as compared to, say, a Nomad or iPod.

Sony MemoryStick vs SD Memory Sticks -> Sony keeps pushing out their own proprietary lines of gear. PSP and a host of cameras keep this line alive and it sells, despite being way overpriced compared to the SD Micro format.

Think about it. Why did the PS2 have a DVD drive? Sony was part of the DVD consortium. Why did the PS3 have a Blu-Ray drive? Same reason. Before the PS3 launched, HD-DVD was actually winning the format war despite Sony USA refusing to put out any of their movie catalog in the format.

That's the Sony business model. Try to win a "format war" in a way that everyone has to pay you royalties to license your format. Everything else is ancillary at best.

Sony says while personal information was likely stolen they don't believe credit card numbers were and that they hope to have the Playstation Network service back up within a week.

I actually find it hard to believe that this is an intrusion. I think that they were working on the upgrade to the new "PSN": http://kotaku.com/#!5785451/yes-your-playstation-network-account-is-changing-hands-sort-of. They screwed something up, lost their database, and didn't have proper backups. They are probably trying to rebuild the database and in the meantime use a convenient scapegoat to blame the outage on so they don't look quite as bad. In fact, all of the recent problems have been since this announced change of account management for PSN.

If the facts stated in this review are accurate, Microsoft should be embarrassed by this level of "support."

http://kotaku.com/#!5792076/kinect-for-netflix-is-a-catastrophe-microsoft-has-no-idea-what-to-do-with-kinect

that describes quite the level of fanboyism - as powerful as sex. :P

http://kotaku.com/#!5384643/i-kept-playing--the-costs-of-my-gaming-addiction refers to a sadly extreme example of this.

P.S.
What do you think of "However, that which is sexually related can sometimes be used with class and artistic merit, sometimes not.", by the way?

The codes were generated I believe on a MS service that was tricked into generating codes based on existing codes.

From Kotaku:

With Microsoft able to track the generated codes, that means they can also track accounts that cashed in the generated codes for points.

And since they can track the damage, they are qualified to tell us that the $1.2 million figure being thrown about is far from the actual number. "We can't share specific numbers, but the figure is nowhere near the amount that has been reported."

[...]

"We take safety and security very seriously and require that Xbox LIVE members use the service in compliance with applicable laws and specifically prohibit people from engaging in illegal activity as a part of our Terms of Use and Code of Conduct," the statement continued. Our Policy and Enforcement team is evaluating whether or not certain individuals have violated the Terms of Use for Xbox LIVE and will take the appropriate enforcement on an individual basis."

http://kotaku.com/#!5780686

Microsoft has taken action already:
http://kotaku.com/#!5780686

"SONY was today at my home"? That's not how raids work. In the US, Sony had to go through some rather extensive legal action to be able to get a TRO on geohot, and now they've convinced the German police to raid some random hacker's house out of nowhere? He's also not even one of the more prominent people involved, and had very little to do both with the core hacks and with subsequent piracy tools - he mostly worked on his own on hypervisor reverse engineering and there's just about nothing they could charge him with. This would also be the first action taken by SCEE regarding this entire issue. And you'd expect someone other than graf_chokolo to notice, publish, or somehow independently report the raid. Not to mention that if you're raided, the first thing you do is talk to an attorney, not post a care package online (as "proof"?). None of this makes any sense.

He did mention that if he ever got a takedown notice from Sony or something along those lines, he'd release his hypervisor disassembler database. I think it's more likely that he got tired of waiting and just made up an excuse.

Kotaku confirmed it was legitimate.

Okay, to be fair, I just found out that Kotaku reports getting confirmation from SCEE. I don't exactly consider kotaku (or SCEE for that matter) to be completely infallible, but at least this beats blog comments.

Nonetheless, I still think this makes no sense, if it did actually take place. If it did, graf_chokolo's reaction is, to put it bluntly, stupid (at the very least, his database, which by its nature contains a full copy of the hypervisor, is copyright infringement if nothing else). Bad plan if you are in fact the target of legal action. He needs a lawyer ASAP.

What is more puzzling is what the existence of two camps creating such huge codebases for a fundamental application type says about the whole state of open source development at this time. It clearly isn't the idealistic world it tries to present itself as."

How exactly is this different from, say, a developer or team of videogame developers, leaving a company they were fed up with, to create their own with new and fresh ideas for innovative and competitive products? Happens all the time.

Ah, yes, almost forgot this tiny difference: with open source software, the LibreOffice guys didn't have to start from scratch...