Held in the Middle East (Dubai, UAE) for the first time, Microsoft’s premier technical education and networking conference; TechEd Middle East, took place last week. Presented by a big line-up of Microsoft team members and experts, amongst whom was Eric Rudder, the Senior Vice President of Technical Strategy, who showed off a game (a simple Indiana Jones platformer) developed in Visual Studio as a singular project with 90 per cent shared code between the three platforms.
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So Ubisoft came out with a brand spanking new DRM policy for their new PC titles, including the recently released Assassins Creed II and Silent Hunter 5. The whole idea is to combat piracy by ensuring that players have a constant online connection to their DRM servers while playing a singleplayer game. Should connection to the servers be lost, the singleplayer will not be playable.
Sod’s law therefore comes into full effect as Ubisoft’s DRM servers were down for pretty much the entire weekend and have yet to go up. So meanwhile paying customers are stuck at the Main Menu, pirates have been enjoying said games this whole time. Good times Ubisoft, good times.
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Your first glimpse into a world of wonder, nostalgia and pain.
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A few days ago, Ubisoft announced Pure Football, an entirely new sports brand that is being developed by Ubisoft Vancouver. More over, the game is slated for a May 2010 release. On Feb 1st, we reported on a rumor that Ubisoft might be hard at work developing a football game that will compete directly with the likes of FIFA and PES franchises.
As per the announcement, Pure Football is a new and unique vision of football video games, emphasizing the intense, physical and spectacular aspects of the sport. The over-the-shoulder camera and visceral audio dynamically react to the context of the match, placing the gamer in the heart of the five-a-side football action, as opposed to the feeling of watching a TV broadcast. The game releases on the PC, PS3, and Xbox 360 in coming May 2010.
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Private companies tend to keep their financial data locked away from preying eyes, and so calculating their value is not easy. One of the many ways to do that is by tracking down the shares’ buying and selling transactions of such private companies, and that’s what SharesPost’s website does. Lately, SharesPost published its first value index, comprised of seven leading venture backed private companies. Of interest to us is Zynga, the company behind some of the most successful social networking games out right now, including Facebook’s Farmville, Mafia Wars, Word Twist, and Scramble. Zynga’s games can be found on Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Friendster, and Hi5. It’s estimated that 12 million daily active users play Zynga games across social networks and iPhone.
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Valve’s 2007 deal of the century, aka The Orange Box contained a sweet little gem nestled amongst the other 4 behemoth games; Portal. This short puzzle game was the darling of the gaming industry back then, winning many awards and hearts. No puzzle game had ever been created before with this much style, taste and subtle humour. Three years on and we’re finally getting a sequel in the form of a full fledged retail copy.
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There is a big difference in the cost of games, and unfortunately for us, it’s more expensive to buy games here. Every time I want to buy a new game, I have to hand over more cash that I would in the UK, where the standard cost for a game is 40 GBP, and that includes to 17.5% tax the Government forces us to pay. 40 GBP is a fair bit of money, but I don’t often pay it for a new game. Many game shops sell the games for less than the RRP through some discount. Also, games lose a lot of value over time; a 5 month old game could have as much as 20% discount! But in this region, it’s a different story, one that doesn’t agree with my wallet. Shops here sell the game for the RRP set in the UK, converted to Dirhams which includes that extra bit of tax. Surely it’s not very fair that we should be paying the UK 17.5% tax, and it should be removed before we part with the money?
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