Displaying items by tag: Xbox Live

Hey remember the group that launched the DDoS attack on Steam? Well they are back and have decided to make a little bit bigger of a statement than just throwing packets at a group of servers. This time they appear to have managed to grab a large number of user information from companies like Blizzard, Ubisoft and many others. They have taken this information and (unsurprisingly) dumped it to paste bin. If you do not know who we are talking about it is the DerpTrolling “hacker” group and they have been on a mission to shame just about every game publishing/distribution company on the planet.

In the current round of console wars it is pretty clear who is winning and who is not. Ever since it was first introduced Microsoft’s Xbox One has had challenges with consumer acceptance. Almost all of the reasons for this lay with Microsoft and the message they were putting out about the gaming console. The alienated the gaming community with massive restrictions and a multi-media push that Sony was able to counter from day one.

Development teams who want their games to be included in the Xbox Live offer of Arcade games on Xbox 360 had to make sure to offer players a demo version so that everyone could try out a game before buying. Microsoft was the one that insisted on this practice but not so long after the release of Xbox One they confirmed that this practice will become a past tense.

Sony's PlayStation Plus program has proven to be very popular throguhout the years, as players for a relatively low cost subscription each month got access to new games and significant discounts on selected titles available for purchase on PSN.

Well, well, well Microsoft is catching up to companies like Google when it comes to attempting to secure user accounts. Although many of the steps they stated they were going to take are still in the development stage we are at least hearing that they will be implementing two-factor authentication (TFA) for their Microsoft Account Services. This move is behind Google and a few others that use either an app or a key token to generate a random number which is used to verify your identity. The move comes as many are criticizing Microsoft for making such a big push to the cloud.

The Vice-president of Sega's department for digital distribution asserted during London Games Conference that Valve's Steam has a whopping 50 million registered users. In addition, approximately half a million users willingly embraced the so-called Big Picture mode, which is currently in the beta testing phase. Also we wrote about Linux beta for the Steam client getting 5000 more users so soon these numbers could explode even further.

Windows 8, Microsoft’s heavily cloud based operating system, is due to hit the market in four days along with their Surface RT Tablet. While Microsoft (including Bill Gates) is talking up the operating system and its virtues there are many in the industry that are concerned about what will happen once (really if) a larger number of people start using these cloud services. This is highlighted today by yet another outage at Amazon that brought down many services including Reddit.

Microsoft's console, the Xbox 360 has achieved a great milestone. They managed to sell 70 million consoles since the launch back in November 2005. This news comes from Microsoft’s fiscal first quarter (July 2012-September 2012) report and it shows Xbox post total revenue of $1.95 billion. This is just a small decrease of 1% from the last year. They managed to sell 1.7 million Xbox 360s worldwide during the last fiscal quarter, which is 29% lower than the last year, making it around 600,000 units less.

Halo 4 will be released worldwide on November 6, 2012 but a pirated version of the game has already leaked to the web and can be found on popular torrent sites. We are not surprised that Halo 4 has already been pirated as this is one of Microsoft’s most popular games especially if you consider the multiplayer side. Users are eager to try it and they will, in most cases download the pirated version, at least to try it. This really pissed Microsoft off; they decided to permanently ban all Xbox Live users that are caught playing a pirated version of the game while their console is connected to the Internet.

Just as we wrote about Minecraft creator Persson and his refusal to release a Minecraft version for Windows 8, they marked a 4 million sales milestone for their Xbox 360 version of the game. 4J Studios tweeted “Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition has passed 4 million sales! Incredible number, thanks to you all!”. With numbers constantly increasing it's not really a big deal for them to decide not to support newest Windows.