Slashdot Mirror

Actually they are being sued over it: https://kotaku.com/current-and...

And suspended an exec for "repeatedly touching subordinates balls or butt or farted in their faces." https://kotaku.com/top-riot-ex...

Actually they are being sued over it: https://kotaku.com/current-and...

And suspended an exec for "repeatedly touching subordinates balls or butt or farted in their faces." https://kotaku.com/top-riot-ex...

It appears to me that the advocates for the Tumblr porn ban are a coalition of religious conservatives and radical feminists. But whenever I've seen this theory mentioned, the feminists vocally deny it, and claim that, "Mainstream feminism is generally sex-positive".

I suspect that these denials are disingenuous. In fact, there is plenty of evidence of mainstream feminists advocating similar bans. For example, there was the Page 3 topless photo ban:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/jan/19/has-the-sun-axed-page-3-topless-pictures

There was the Booth Babe ban:

https://kotaku.com/5916237/e3-makes-me-really-appreciate-the-pax-ban-on-booth-babes

And, of course, there is a very vocal anti-porn branch of femimism:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Porn_Culture

I suspect that when somebody says that "Mainstream feminism is generally sex-positive," they're only supportive of a very specific, tightly-controlled, pro-feminist sort of sex.

All praise to the Johns. Romero the design rock god that wanted to "make you his b*tch" and Carmack the programming god who could solve any problem in weekend.

Carmack has never stopped trying to bring a virtual experience to the masses, even today at Oculus.

Me and my friends had countless LAN parties when ID brought us LAN play. Staying up all night to heavy metal, mortal Kombat, and DOOM!

Publishing the tools to allow mod making really set ID apart.
The shareware idea of giving part of the game for free coupled with the gore and rock made Doom legendary overnight.
It's a shame the Johns had to split ways and crash. A game needs both design and innovation.
Quake was truly 3D awe-inspiring, but DOOM was ground breaking with such tight optimizations for fast 3D and nutty level designs.
When you beat the first mission and it simply ends in being curb stomped by a horde of demons.

It's on every platform, in every game store, hell I home brewed an ipod with a buddy to play Doom with a scroll wheel.

Download now and play it tonight on your Xbox or Ubuntu. I know I will.

With Sony, ANY company can sell games.

Are you referring to discs or to downloads? I was under the impression that 1. only PlayStation Store could sell downloads, and 2. Sony stopped manufacturing cartridges for its handheld, leaving downloads as the only way to get new games onto PlayStation Vita.

The summary reads like an attempt to cram as many instances of "piracy" and "hacker" into the text as possible. There are other reasons people crack their Switches or other consoles, including running homebrew or just simply to explore how these devices work behind the scenes. Not everyone who is interested in hacking their Switch is interested in pirating Switch games.

One example is the lack of save game backup support like the Wii and Wii U had. We had over a year of Switch with no mechanism for backups available. Nintendo Online allows backups but certain titles opt out and there is no solution from Nintendo for backups of those. However, hacked Switches have been able to dump saved games to SD cards for months now. The hacker community does what Nintendon't.

You mean Grand Theft Auto?
https://kotaku.com/idiot-steal...

Plenty of people blaming games for all sorts of thigns.

Call of Duty 4 is getting a battle royale mode.

for trading. That's how gambling sites work. Just make it so you can only trade in game and you have to hold onto an item for a while. Valve Just did the latter and that alone has almost made "skin gambling" dead. Take the APIs away and problem solved.

But they fucked up because the "free shareware episode" here already contains the data for the extra "commercial episodes" and only a small switch gets flipped to enable continuing.

What's more interesting, which Slashdot didn't touch on naturally, was that last week when this story broke the explanation was that Sega fucked up by publishing the full non-demo version of the game for a couple hours.

See: https://kotaku.com/sega-accide...
Reports:
https://twitter.com/Sawyer_DAA...
https://www.resetera.com/threa...

The way it was initially reported, there was no "small switch to flip" to enable the full game.
It was just all there.

Players reported on reddit that where the demo was supposed to stop according to teaser videos from Sega, their game didn't stop and kept right on progressing.

So the initial reports are that Sega fucked up and published the full version instead of a demo.
Now the stories have changed with Sega claiming players had to do something to unlock it beyond just beating a level.

While I don't really know what happened nor played the demo when it was out, I'm FAR more likely to believe the players reporting the demo wasn't a demo.
Because currently Sega is trying to pass off the blame (which is expected), that they claim they didn't fuck up (also expected), and the many videos on youtube are not all faked showing players beating the level and just advancing to the next "locked" level automatically with no tricks glitches or otherwise fucking around with the thing.

I don't think it's greedy to want a full game when you paid full price for the game. I paid for Killer Instinct's "Ultra Pack" or whatever, $60 for all of seasons 1-3, including chars and maps. When I bought it, it said "ALL THE CHARACTERS" and such. Then a few months later they release more characters and maps for a not-insignificant $5 each. Even Mario Kart 8 had two DLC packs. Granted it felt pretty complete before them - but who can really resist an extra 16 courses and 4 characters? Of course, now all that and more is all included in the Switch port.

The most egregious of the DLC and lootbox madness is Train Simulator 2016. To get everything for the game requires an over $3000 investment. At what point does it become less of a game and more of a senseless money grab?

There was another quite big leak in 2003 of the Value Half-Life 2 Source Engine Code, the whole engine, that was quite a big thing.

http://www.eurogamer.net/artic...

https://kotaku.com/that-time-a...

Does anyone remember when OnLive and the Ouya console were the "streaming game service" flavor du jour?

Pepperidge Farms remembers.

... while it was a great method for user input and getting players to move around rather than remain sitting, advertisers were starting to use to the device to collect marketing data about users:

"Xbox One can essentially work like TV that watches you, bringing marketers a huge new trove of data,"

https://kotaku.com/xbox-ones-t...

More details on the cheating tools used would be helpful. The first seems to be aim-botting (which is using AI scripts to automatic aim weapons). The other is stream-sniping which involves intercepting someone's else servers communication to see their screen and make annoying comments on their strategy.

https://kotaku.com/epic-is-sui...

except for h.265

When has anything ever changed to accommodate your wishes by shutting up, sitting in a corner, and ignoring the possibilities? I've already mentioned changing code to get plugins to do what I want, so I'm willing to do it myself. Right now the ball is in the court of some other people - did the horrible "Must have the Kinect hooked up to use your XBOX One" requirement go away because nobody said anything or did it get done because everyone bitched?

Why am I feeding this fucking troll?

a.k.a. EA Kiss of Death

Almost every 3rd party studio EA has bought they have shut down after they exploited it and driven it into the ground.

* https://kotaku.com/an-updated-...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The one notable exception is DSI which became EA Canada. There are probably others.

Nintendo is all about keeping hardware profitable, and they do this not only by using low-to-mid range component specs, but perhaps also by not over-investing in production capabilities.

Nintendo consoles are built by children working for Foxconn, not by Nintendo. Presumably they just can't whip the children fast enough

Back on PS2 Sony worked with Square to allow
cross platform play with PC for FFXI, 360 had the game too but MS refused to link up and stayed off by themselves.

Because of that FFXIV did not come to Xbox platforms

PS3 Sony partnered with Valve to bring cross platform multiplayer, chat, achievements, etc allowing Steam to work across PS3 and PC. Again MS refused.

Gearbox wanted Borderlands 2 to work across all platforms, and here is what MS had to say via Kotaku:

"Here's a Microsoft spokesperson saying "no," while promoting how awesome the Xbox 360's online service is: "Xbox Live delivers the best entertainment experience unmatched by anyone else, with 35 million actively engaged members. We have a high level of expectation for our game developers to ensure that all Live experiences remain top notch. Because we can't guarantee this level of quality, or control the player experience on other consoles or gaming networks, we currently do not open our network to games that allow this cross-over capability.""

Now this generation, Sony helped launch Rocket Cars as a free download on PSN and it had cross platform play with PC. Same with Street Fighter V

So is it really any wonder now that MS is playing runner up that Sony got fed up of this fair weather crap and gave MS the very same excuse that MS gave back in the day?

So why again is Sony getting shit for this?

Back on PS2 Sony worked with Square to allow
cross platform play with PC for FFXI, 360 had the game too but MS refused to link up and stayed off by themselves.

Because of that FFXIV did not come to Xbox platforms

PS3 Sony partnered with Valve to bring cross platform multiplayer, chat, achievements, etc allowing Steam to work across PS3 and PC. Again MS refused.

Gearbox wanted Borderlands 2 to work across all platforms, and here is what MS had to say via Kotaku:

"Here's a Microsoft spokesperson saying "no," while promoting how awesome the Xbox 360's online service is: "Xbox Live delivers the best entertainment experience unmatched by anyone else, with 35 million actively engaged members. We have a high level of expectation for our game developers to ensure that all Live experiences remain top notch. Because we can't guarantee this level of quality, or control the player experience on other consoles or gaming networks, we currently do not open our network to games that allow this cross-over capability.""

Now this generation, Sony helped launch Rocket Cars as a free download on PSN and it had cross platform play with PC. Same with Street Fighter V

So is it really any wonder now that MS is playing runner up that Sony got fed up of this fair weather crap and gave MS the very same excuse that MS gave back in the day?

So why again is Sony getting shit for this?

How is it not a challenge? Sure its not

physically

challenging, but keeping yourself motivated to do the same thing over and over for two years straight with little or no reward sure as hell is mentally taxing.

And no, if he spent 2 years grinding the starting zone in an MMO he wouldn't have much of squat in terms of gear drops because starting zone gear isn't worth anything. At least not in any MMO I've ever seen (also, someone has indeed done that. And others have done similar things.)

Go onto any RPG forum on gamefaqs and you'll pretty much always find guides for doing some type of challenge play or other. Usually in the form of handicapping yourself but still completing the game (kind of the opposite of what TFA is talking about) but still.. people like to challenge themselves, in whatever way they can. Even if their version of challenge doesn't live up to your standards.

Unless, of course, WWIII is a videogame war. Then we'd be all set.

You wish. Koreans and Chinese teams win international professional video game tournaments. The team the Koreans beat was European. The American team didn't even make it into the semifinals. The team the Chinese beat was nominally American, but only had two out of five American citizens. Two of the others were Korean and the fifth was filipino. Immigration at work...

Also, according to the magazine supervised by the US Department of Defense, the quietness of the Soviet submarines improved after 1979, which is before the export of machine tools. Richard Armitage , who was then Assistant Secretary of Defense at the time, in a letter addressed to the House of Representatives military chairman of the House of Representatives, the Soviet nuclear submarine was equipped with a silent screw already three years before the incident, He said that he was opposed to sanctions against Toshiba. Furthermore, the quietness of submarines is not limited to the molding technology of screws but also to nuclear reactors and motor technology.

Also it's coincided with the incidents in 80's, 90's, Japan rose as the most potential competitor to the U.S (which was predicted to be surpassed U.S in 90's), which called "Japan Bashing":

During the 1980s, Japan Bashing reached a boiling point. Riding the late 1970s energy crisis, competition from Japanese car companies offering cheaper, fuel efficient cars became heated. Japan, however, was not interested in buying large American automobiles with steering wheels on the wrong side. The country was labeled as "protectionist", and protesters burned Japanese cars and flags, and the term "Japan Bashing" was coined.

Maybe he can get with Jack Thompson and start a law firm in Florida...

I seem to remember someone talking about the code being absolutely abysmal

From a quick google search: http://kotaku.com/5942128/star...

It is ironic that a program called circle of life is what is accelerating the natural death of the brick and mortar game store. Since used games are nearly 100% profit, and new games are closer to 20% profit, stores were given quotas in terms of the percentage of total sales dollars that needed to be from used merchandise. These quotas all but forced employees to lie about stock, and to discourage sales of lower margin items.

When you put your employees in a position where a 0 dollar customer transaction is less likely to put their job in jeopardy than a 500 dollar transaction, you dun fucked up your business model.

First, read this: http://kotaku.com/5975610/the-...
That is an analysis of the coding style used in the Doom 3 source code

Next, read this: ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstu...
It is linked within the first article, but it is important enough to directly reference. It is id Software's official programming guidelines. Seriously, just having clean, clear, consistent guidelines for source code makes a world of difference in quality.

The very first thing to teach young'ns is this:
"Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute."

Relevant link missing - http://kotaku.com/zapp-brannig...

I found this thread where somebody was selling an original NES Development Kit.

Any information on what that development environment was like? This is the closest I can find

There are a lot of Steam gamers already with Oculus or Vive rigs.

No, there aren't. In fact, almost nothing you've claimed is born out by the statistics.

1) There have only been about 140,000 Vive unit sales so far according to HTC. That was as of last month.

2) Vive represented 60% of SteamVR gaming according to the latest survey. If we generously assume (for your benefit) that all 140,000 Vive users were active in SteamVR this last month, that'd mean that the other 40% number about 95,000. Put together, we can say that...

3) There are less than than 235,000 active SteamVR gamers. And again, that's if we make some generous assumptions for your benefit. In reality, the actual number of active SteamVR gamers is likely MUCH lower. But either way...

4) Not even one-fifth of 1% of Steam gamers have used SteamVR in the last month. Steam had over 125,000,000 active users in early 2015. If we ignore (for your benefit) the fact that the number has likely grown since then, we can see that less than 0.19% of Steam gamers have used their VR rig in the last month.

5) Even if every single active SteamVR user was a closet Mac/Linux dual booter who would go back to Mac/Linux if SteamVR was available, it'd only shift the OS statistic by, at most, 0.19% away from Windows. Mac/Linux dual booters are clearly not throwing a wrench in the statistics like you claimed.

6) Contrary to your suggestion that Mac and Linux gamers are staying booted into Windows for SteamVR, their numbers are actually higher today than they were before VR. Mac and Linux have been growing at Windows' expense all along, with VR having no noticeable impact.

7) As for consoles, the Playstation VR is on track to outsell both the Vive and the Oculus by the end of the year, despite there being far fewer PS4 owners (~40M) than active Steam users (125M). So, no, VR is not "a much larger percentage of the PC gaming market than it is if you factor in consoles". But even if you had been right, so what? If VR was even less significant in another market, that doesn't make it significant in this market.

Finally, there's this (emphasis mine):

[...] they would be people capable and possibly willing to run SteamVR on the Mac if they were able to, with no new computer purchase.

And what Mac model would these people be using, exactly? One of the big complaints from Mac users when it comes to VR is that there isn't a Mac with the horsepower to run VR. The Mac Pro was last updated in December...of 2013. It's woefully insufficient. The iMac, MacBook Pro, and most other lines have seen updates, but they all use mobile-class dedicated graphics or integrated graphics, both of which are currently insufficient for VR. Given that the hardware doesn't exist, I think it's safe to say that today's Mac users aren't influencing the numbers by booting into Windows for SteamVR.

Mind you, I say this as someone who has continuously used a Mac as his primary machine since the late '80s, including for gaming. My current Mac is my primary gaming machine, just as the one before it and the one before it and so on. So I'm speaking from experience when I say that we're a vocal group, but that we don't account for much.

As for VR, it has a lot of hype, and it may eventually amount to something, but it's barely even a rounding error at this point, so your assertions that it's affecting those numbers in any sort of a meaningful way are demonstrably false.

Maybe they had this sort of thing in mind?

When an industry refers to their most profitable consumer to exploit as "whales" you know there is a problem with a lack of respect:

http://kotaku.com/who-are-the-...

Of course, Ghandi being such an asshole was originally a bug.

That said, in later games they included it more as an easter egg or homage or something. Had they been *trying* to be accurate, I suspect they might have actually fixed the bug instead.

None of the "new right" as you put it censors the left but Milo himself has been kicked off of Twitter (even though Leslie Jones incited her followers to attack someone in the same thread: https://twitter.com/Lesdoggg/s...), had his event shut down at DePaul where he was threatened by Black Lives Matter, and nearly had other events shut down at other colleges, including UCLA.

Oh, you bet it happens. But according to the loonier parts of the "new right", whenever someone on the left has an event shut down it's a "false flag" operation or some such bullshit. For some reason it's easier to believe a grand unprovable conspiracy theory than admit that each side has its fair share of crazy people.

Regressive practices like censorship and threats may appear to impose a solution but they really just bully other points of view into silence, which breeds contempt and leads to the rise of the more radical elements, like Trump and Milo.

Trump and Milo more than take up the slack with threatening and dog-whistle threat incitement (respectively) on their side of the debate. (Also, kudos for recognising that Trump and Milo have a hell of a lot in common.)

Having said that, I agree with the general thrust here. A pox on both their houses.

In the mobile space customers who use IAP (In-App-Purchases) are known as whales.

* Who Are the 'Whales' Driving Free-to-Play Gaming? You'd Be Surprised

* Forbes: Why It's Scary When 0.15% Mobile Gamers Bring In 50% Of The Revenue

This exploitation is nothing more then a legalized form of gambling. In other news gambling is for those that suck at math.

But go ahead and keep hijacking the term "free" and making headlines about how gambling makes money.

--
redditard, noun, some one who down votes simply because they disagree instead of content.

So, is that why their economy has been stagnant for the past few decades? They've had *two* "lost decades" now? Oh, don't forget being overworked until you commit suicide, a phenomenon common enough to get its own term. How about making a whopping $26K a year as a key animator for anime? It's not exactly a fantastic place for women's equality in the workplace. And they're worried about their increasingly elderly population and how to care for them as fewer young people are choosing to have kids, resulting in a negative birth rate.

On the plus side, Japan has relatively few lawyers, their people tend to save a lot, are relatively healthy in general, and don't have nearly the violent crime problem we have in the US.

Japan has a lot going for it, but every society has its positives and negatives. It's typically not very practical to pick one single element and transplant it to a different society.

Maybe this will finally convert those heathen millennials.

Both the Neo Geo AES and 3DO Interactive Multiplayer broke $1,000 after adjustment for inflation to 2013 dollars. Intellivision came close at $935. The 3DO sort of flopped, but the Neo Geo retains a following.

Unboxing of Game Developer Barbie annotated with overly-smarmy commentary.

Coding, like all forms of creative writing, is best done on tools and methods tailored to them. The terminal, or electronic typewriter, is an image of the best physical device we have created to do that so far, the mechanical typewriter. Second only to pencil/pen and paper it enables those with the messiest of hand writing to become published authors.

Thanks to Sturgeon's Law the only thing that greatly increasing the number of coders does is increase the number of mediocre ones. Good ones are still going to be expensive and rare.

Fortunately there is not that much of a market for the computer version of Romance novels. Only so many companies can ripoff programs and games and still profit.

Software valuable enough to sell is often valuable enough to have Free/Open Source clones. And both require skills of laborers who charge quite a lot for this effort - either in salary or in commitment of "Intellectual Property" back. The artists and writers got screwed buy business a long time ago. Everyone can see this and aren't fooled. Trying to reduce the cost of the labor pool by increasing the number of mediocre programmers will only work to a certain point and not for successful projects.

To make it obvious, let's re-write the CEO's messsage a little:

"Instead of attempting to lure literate teachers away from Libraries, we need to revolutionize the way book-writing is done. Rather than fit the person to the tool, let's fit the tool to the person. Pop literature can help us get there, offering a gloriously diverse array of tools to match our gloriously diverse species. It's only a matter of time before the process of writing books itself is transformed, from one that requires a mastery of syntax -- the precise stringing of sentences needed to tell a story -- to the mastery of logic. Logic is the essence of plot creation, and the second step after mastering syntax.'

It's only the businesses that are failing to plan ahead or which are experiencing business problems that have the entire staff there at night consistently. It's more of a sign of flaw in leadership and business operations.

Either that or it's an intentional and cynical attempt to con gullible staff into working longer than expected under the guise of a "crunch", most significantly in the gaming industry.

'Course, it's probably not coincidental that the gaming industry is the one with the highest proportion of relatively young, newly-graduated, gullible (smart but with little life or industry experience) and easily manipulated programmers.

By the time they figure out that the "crunch" is a pathological and embedded aspect of that industry, there's a fresh supply of naive graduates willing to take their place for mediocre wages just to follow their dream of working in the games industry.

The costs of the consoles have been increasing since the days of the NES. I remember when I first got the Nintendo when it was about $100 brand new. I remember getting the N64 when it was about $140. Now we have consoles costing $300+. Even adjusting for inflation the prices have gone up.

You Fail at math. The earliest release model of the NES included ROB and launched at $249. The control deck+ Mario release which came later was $199. The NES only became $100 late in it's life, AFTER the SNES was out. The N64 also launched at $199.

The NES would cost around $450 if rleased now.

http://www.ign.com/articles/20...

http://kotaku.com/36-years-of-...

ET mostly gets the title these days because its release was such a famous fiasco.

Until fairly recently, what was generally agreed to be the worst Atari game ever, and quite possibly the worst in history, was a game called Custer's Revenge. Not only was the gameplay pretty cruddy, but the idea behind it was just repellent. The object was to kill as many "Indians" as possible and rape their women. Not even kidding. It was made by a porn producer.

Even by the standards of cultural sensitivity in the late 1970's, this was going too far. Atari tried to sue to keep the game off their console, and it was exhibit A for a long while of why console platform makers have to keep control of their platform (a theory which governs game console licensing to this day).

I'd argue it's pretty much the same today:

1) Releasing a game before it's truly "ready".
2) Not doing market research, instead releasing incremental updates as "new games" (Yes! you can jump slightly higher! 2 new weapons!)
3) Predicting millions of sales in a saturated market... when you are the one that saturated it.

Examples of #1, look no further than any game with day-one patches, and pre-advertised DLC. There's a fundamental problem with "game: $60, game plus season pass: $90", especially when that season pass is developed during the main games development.

for #2: Call of modern battlefield: Mech warrior 9000 edition, Assassin's Creed, even Far Cry/Crysis. Any other game series with an annual release cycle.

#3? See #2.

See also: Street Fighter V. Came out last week and checks off just about everything you listed.

Some indie game developer (who happened to be female) received a glowing review of her game from a game journalist. Said journalist was accused of being her boyfriend and demonstrating favoritism.

this is an important statement for two reason. First, it's notable that if the event were true, then the person who committed the ethics violation was Nathan Grayson, the writer for kotaku. Yet Zoe Quinn caught all the rage and hate. If #gg was all about ethics in journalism, why was Zoe demonized? This says to me that the movement is not in fact about ethics.

Second notable thing: your statement is false on its face. Nathan Grayson never reviewed Depression Quest. See this kotaku statement. If this is incorrect, please provide the link to the review. So the entire rage against Zoe and the entire genesis of #gamergate is based on a false premise. A good question, how could so many people get so upset about an issue that can be demonstrably proven false with a simple Internet search? This confirms to me that the whole thing is invalid and about hate for uppity women.

Your thoughts on this?

I didn't say it promotes any particular behaviour, I said it normalizes it.

So did Thompson - from this link over here:
It's entirely possible that shooter video games helped desensitize Lanza to violence. "

If this argument didn't work for Thompson, what makes you think it would work for you? It's the exact same argument - $FOO desensitizes people to $BAR - just replace $FOO and $BAR with whatever you've got in $IDEOLOGY argument.

http://kotaku.com/5943789/star...

These digital item trading systems which allow items to be redeemed for real money are, when linked to otherwise-useful gaming account systems, an absolute plague. They're the worst kind of incentive to spamming, scamming and outright criminality.

It's not just limited to Steam. If you look over at Xbox Live, you'll find there have been (and to some extent continue to be) serious issues there, despite there only being a single game series that allows these kinds of trades (FIFA Ultimate Team).

It's a funny thing; everybody knows about the Sony PSN hack. And yet very few people ended up actually being inconvenienced by that hack, save for the inconvenience of the PSN being down for a few months. What's not widely known is that there have been a number of less eye-catching but more severe compromises of Xbox Live security in recent years. The most serious exploit involved a flaw in Microsoft's phone-support protocols. It got very little publicity, because it doesn't fit with the media's perception of what a "hack" looks like, but it hit an awful lot of account and resulted in an awful lot of fraudulent credit card transactions.

And why were the scammers doing this? Mostly, it turned out, so that they could purchase and then monetise FIFA Ultimate Team trading items. Ordinarily, there was no means to get money "out of" the Xbox Live system. So you could compromise somebody's account and use it to buy games or DLC, but you couldn't sell these on and once the original owner got their account back, you were left with nothing to show for your efforts. FIFA changed all of that and created a pretty large industry in compromising XBL accounts. Worse, besides keeping a constant eye on their account, there was nothing at the time that users could do to protect themselves; there was no need to get people to divulge a password or click a dodgy link - the scammers were going straight to MS's flawed support services.

Back over on the PC, Valve have been very slow in waking up to the issue of compromised accounts. I suspect it's only the growing prospect of a number of countries' consumer protection authorities taking enforcement action against them that's prompted this recent action. The option they've gone for is slow and over-burdensome. I was disappointed to read in their statement announcing it that they had considered but rejected the idea of just scrapping these trades. Sadly, given they cream off a good chunk of each transaction, that was too much to hope for. But for as long as it is possible to launder money out of Steam, large-scale attempts to illegally access accounts will continue.

or 5/ is apple paying developers not to release products for Android? (hint: they were caught paying the developers of plants vs. zombies not to release a version for android)

Nope, they were caught giving them "premium placement on their app stores' home pages and features lists.". And Google was caught doing the same. http://kotaku.com/report-apple...