Displaying items by tag: Online Gaming

As we have told you very recently it is looking more and more like game companies are looking to head to online services to bolster their profits. We have heard rumors that Crytek is looking to move to the online only “free to play” model and now we hear something that might push another company into that market as well. This time the move is from a slightly different perspective and in a different market.

We are hearing that more companies are moving to the “free-to-play” gaming model as a response to piracy and also failing retails sales and subscriptions. Of course if you are a gamer then you will know that free-to-play does not mean free. Sure you can get in the games (usually online only) and play around, but to get anywhere you have to buy add-on packs and equipment packs. This is a nice way for companies to regain their lost revenue from retail packaging and also from the continual battle with new and more elaborate DRM mechanisms.

The game League of Legends has had some of their European and Nordic Database servers hacked; I know shocking right? According to the announcement by Riot the attackers exploited a specific security issue (again really?) that is now addressed and is no longer an issue. The attackers were able to get user login information, including passwords (encrypted), email addresses, “summoner name”, date of birth, and a small number of encrypted security questions and their answers.

Activision Blizzard is striking back at all of the recent press claiming that they (Blizzard) have a serious security issue. As we have told you before their actions of blaming the users and claiming that the thousands of compromised accounts are all due to spyware and keyloggers (without any proof of this by the way) is part of their corporate profile. However they are now making what amounts to threats against people posting about this on their forums.

So far we stayed away from the whole Diablo III fiasco (with the exception of a poll on the site about it). For the most part there is simply too many stories about it, it is almost as bad as all of the “tech” news that is about Zuckerberg’s wedding. Sure Diablo was a great game and from many accounts Diablo III is an even better follow on. The problem is that although Blizzard’s decision to allow for the game to be distributed online was a great idea and allowed people to gain access to it on launch day in a way that we have not seen in a long time, there are and always will be issues with running online games.

We have another possible new game announcement. This one again comes to us from a reader phone emailed this one in. A new site called MWTactics.com has popped up on the internet. This one also has another counter which at the time of this writing was set to about 6 days and some change.