It’s been over a year since Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw was plucked from YouTube obscurity to host Escapist Magazine’s Zero Punctuation video series, and the acid-tongued Brit with the surreal, machine gun patter remains the undisputed star of game reviews, with regular appearances
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Wagner James Au
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Users of IMVU, the popular web-based virtual chat room network profiled on GigaOM last June, can purchase songs from a catalog of 1 million tracks, either as a stream to be played within IMVU or as DRM-free MP3s they can play anywhere. Read More »
A week after Linden Lab said it was raising the cost of buying and maintaining much of the virtual land in Second Life, leading to open revolt among many users, the company has significantly revised its pricing policies. Read More »
Say you’re looking for the perfect place to watch the election results pour in tonight, but your living room seems too lonely, your favorite blog seems too impersonal, and (depending on how the vote goes) your neighborhood bar may break out into a fight. How about a… Read More »
The denizens of Linden Lab’s virtual world Second Life are a passionate lot, so when the San Francisco company recently announced a steep purchase and maintenance fee increase on popular regions of their virtual land, sign-waving avatars were soon gathered outside Linden’s SL office,… Read More »
Plura Processing, a start-up funded by Houston’s Creeris Ventures has come up with a new model for game makers to earn some much needed cash: sell distributed network computing power. Read More »
The editorial/community game site Crispy Gamer, which has been in development over the past few months with $8.25 million in funding from Constellation Ventures and already boasts a million unique monthly visitors, is coming out of beta today. Read More »
More Must Reads
Metaplace, the user-created, web-based virtual world from visionary game developer Raph Koster, is announcing $6.7 million in Series B funding from new investors Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. Read More »
The market for video games is changing profoundly, and a comparison of two prominent titles’ recent sales figures shows just how much: Wii Fit, a game largely marketed to women, is outpacing the latest installment of one of the industry’s biggest franchises, Grand Theft Auto. Read More »
While slightly down from previous quarters, investment in virtual worlds continued at a good clip in the third quarter. Total investment for the year to date adds up to nearly a half billion dollars. Read More »
Yes, the “Obama for President” billboard in the Xbox 360 racing game Burnout Paradise is in fact an official advertisement placed by the senator’s campaign team. Read More »
This is either a brilliant Photoshop job, some canny viral political campaigning, or both: An Xbox 360 gamer playing Burnout Paradise spotted an Obama campaign billboard with a “Paid for by Obama for President” caption as he whizzed by in his turbocharged sports… Read More »
Social Line Connect is a simple iPhone game with a cross-platform backbone. The free app, which looks similar to Connect Four, was added to the App Store over the weekend. The real point of the no-frills game is playing it with friends — even… Read More »
Nintendo has announced that a Wii Speak Channel will launch this November. Think of it as “Skype for the living room.” Read More »
Mythic Entertainment, the studio that developed Electronic Arts’ new MMORPG Warhammer Online, has adopted an extreme anti-gold selling policy. But much as gamers claim to hate gold sellers, almost one in four patronize them — Mythic, therefore, is risking alienating a quarter of its user base. Read More »
So last year, most people decided that marketing real products in virtual worlds like Second Life doesn’t work. Since then, however, I’ve come across some avatar-driven advertising campaigns with very impressive numbers. In Gaia Online, for example, users grabbed over a million… Read More »
Launching today, MTV’s Backchannel is a very cool-looking social game synergizing a very silly product— specifically, the network’s “reality” show The Hills. As the title suggests, Backchannel’s a chat interface that runs live online while a Hills episode airs on TV; players quickly post… Read More »
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