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With a guy like Bobby Kotick at the helm of Activision it seemed inevitable that a greater level of greed would soon be injected into console gaming. As you may know Activision bought out Blizzard so it could acquire World of Warcraft, which operates very lucratively on a monthly subscription basis.

The question is, are you willing to pay this? Not sure? Let me answer for you… yes! yes you are. As we’ve all shown we’ll pay a higher retail price for the original game and will then pay well over a tenner each time they bring some new maps out. Some of us will complain, others of us will curse but all of us will pay. Sooner or later we’ll all pay (Kotick rubs his hands together like Mr Burns… Exxxxxxccccellent (more…)

The leagues will be starting this Sunday – 11am for the PS3 and 12 lunchtime for the Xbox 360. The leagues will run for 16 weeks and the winners will receive a cash prize of £100 each with the people getting the most kills on either platform getting £50 each. There will also be a cash prize of £10 each week for the winner on each platform.

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Few people have said they’ve seen these things already being demoed in GAME. They have a suggested retail of £199.99, are said to be whisper quiet, have a 250GB harddrive and built in WiFi and they’re also said to be ready for Kinect. Does that mean previous models aren’t? (more…)

Admittedly it’s been a while since Mario graced any of my screens or consoles and perhaps that’s because I don’t own a Wii and my girlfriend’s DS is rarely used (more…)

Another publisher has joined the greed race and stuck their middle finger up at retailers and gamers as UFC Undisputed 2010 becomes another in a run of titles to have paid for content upon launch. Basically if you buy this game preowned then you won’t be able to play it online unless you pay a fee (which obviously won’t bother you if you’re not online).

Part of me gets this, I really do, as publishers don’t see a penny each time us greedy retailers resell one of their games and for a long time I’ve been mulling over the idea of paying publishers a fee or percentage each time we sell a preowned game. However (more…)

It’s been on the cards for a while and I’ve been looking at lots of locations and eventually we’ve found the perfect spot. We are currently fitting out a new store in Hebburn. It’s on Station Road – the street opposite the precinct – and right smack in the middle. You’ll see it if you’re passing as it’s the only shop without a sign up. We should have it ready and open pretty soon. Before you ask, yes we’re still keeping the South Shields store open and this marks the beginning of our modest expansion plans.

No it’s not because you’ve been naughty, though you probably have. It’s because demos are expensive to produce and are a luxury you’ve gotten all too used to. Or so says Cevat Yerli (maker of Crysis on the PC).

This comes on the back off a recently made and ill received announcement by EA to charge for demos. Though apparently, such demos would be much bigger and could be seen as games in themselves, rather than just tasters.

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Now that they’ve ironed out the kinks on the guinea pig that is the Xbox 360, Activision have announced release dates for the real machines PC gamers will be once again reinvigorated May 4th and PS3 gamers will feel new life on May 5th. So go beg your parents for money or convince your girlfriend that buying new maps and giving her even less attention is somehow a good thing.

Once again, in case you’d forgotten, there will be three brand new multiplayer maps (Bailout, Storm and Salvage) along with two tweaked maps plucked from the battlegrounds of the original Modern Warfare (Crash and Overgrown).

Something I’ve always wondered about is that if PC game sales are as bad as the publishers keep saying then why bother making them. It’s clearly not a case of just pressing a button to port from PS3 or XB360 so a lot of time, money and effort is required.

Well it turns out that PC game sales are not fairly reflected by industry figures. Sega UK managing director John Clark recently said that digital sales from companies such as Steam needed to be taken into account for a full picture – “[officially] The PC market is third in terms of its year-on-year performance with a decline of 26 per cent, but this doesn’t really reflect the full picture,”. (more…)

The guys over at Games Are Evil have spent some time compiling a family tree of game studios. Apparantley there are a couple of little errors but on the whole this is a tremendous effort.

I’ve never really sat and wondered where a studio came from before so I’m a little surprised that somebody took so much time to do this but it’s nice to know stuff about companies (that I’ve dealt with for years) that I didn’t know before, like: Activision was formed from Atari, SNK sold their company then went on to form another, Square Enix came about from a merger between Square (weren’t they called Square Soft) and Enix and Infinity Ward used to be called 2015. Not life changing stuff but certainly interesting.