There's very little activity on the majority of this week's UK PC sales chart, with The Sims 3: Generations, Football Manager 2011, The Sims 3: Medieval and The Sims 3: Late Night all non-movers at the top of the rankings.

Ineligible for the full price PC chart, The Sims 3: Town Life Stuff enters at No.1 on the budget price PC chart and at No.12 on the UK all formats chart.

The Witcher 2: Assassin of Kings and Portal 2 re-enter the full price PC top ten, moving up five places to No.6 and nine spots to No.8 respectively. Sandwiched between them is StarCraft 2, while World of Warcraft: Cataclysm and Shogun 2: Total War round off the top ten.

GfK/Chart-Track PC Top 10 (week ending July 30):
01. The Sims 3: Generations (EA)
02. Football Manager 2011 (Sega)
03. The Sims 3 (EA)
04. The Sims: Medieval (EA)
05. The Sims 3: Late Night (EA)
06. The Witcher 2 (Namco Bandai)
07. StarCraft 2 (Activision Blizzard)
08. Portal 2 (Valve)
09. World of Warcraft: Cataclysm (Blizzard)
10. Shogun 2: Total War (Sega)

http://www.computerandvideogames.com...ntinues-reign/ ...

Online payment service PayPal has released data that shows more than 12 million of its users pay for Facebook games every month.

In a report on VentureBeat, Paypal also revealed that its users favoured World of WarCraft, Final Fantasy, Bejeweled, and FarmVille.

"In massively multiplayer online games, the number of paying gamers keeps going up," said Carey Kolaja, Paypal's senior director of emerging opportunities.

"The perception about digital goods is that they lead to micro transactions, which are small. But the average purchase for a paying user is in the mid-20s (in dollars). It is on a positive trajectory."

Most MMO players, 54 per cent, spend between $10 to $50 on virtual currency. 27 per cent spend more than that, while just 19 per cent stick to smaller purchases of under $10.

In social games just 9 per cent spend more than $50, while 22 per cent of "casual web site games" players send over the $50 mark.

Paypal also reveals that more than 40 per cent of adults are playing games online, and claims that 70 per cent of gamers use PayPal.

Paypal launched in 1998 and now has over 100 million users and $1 billion in quarterly revenue.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...facebook-games ...

Blizzard has revealed that the long-awaited Diablo 3 will require players to be constantly connected to the internet, even after an initial authentication process has been completed.

According to Blizzard's executive vice president of game design Rob Pardo, this requirement is due to the implementation of numerous new Battle.net and Auction House features.

Those features include the following:
A persistent friends list.
Cross-game chat via the RealID system.
Persistent characters that are stored server-side (no more having to play online once every 90 days, nor item duplication cheats).
Persistent party system.
Player-versus-player and public game matchmaking.
Dynamic drop-in/out for co-op
Larger item stash that gets shared among all of your characters (at the moment, up to 10)
The auction house (allows players to sell loot for real money)
The Achievement system and detailed stat-tracking, both of which feed into the final point:
The Banner system, a visual way to display your skills that take into account earned achievements, the number of PVP victories etc. Banners can be clicked to teleport to other players.
Blizzard's confirmed that Diablo 3 will be playable at GamesCom in Cologne, which takes place mid-August.

http://www.computerandvideogames.com...et-connection/ ...

MMO Diablo III will offer players the chance to use real world currency to trade game items.

The service will be on an item by item basis via an eBay style auction house system and entirely optional. Gold based auction houses will be available for players who don't wish to spend their money in-game.

Blizzard explained its motivations in an official statement, citing player behaviour and security.

"The item-based nature of Diablo game play has always lent itself to an active trade-based ecosystem, and a significant part of this trade has been conducted through unsecure third-party organisations."

"This has led to numerous customer-service and game-experience issues that we've needed to account for. Our primary goal with the Diablo III auction house system is for it to serve as the foundation for a player-driven economy that's safe, fun, and accessible for everyone."

Players can purchase gold, weapons, armour and runestones via their registered Battle.net accounts. Blizzard will not sell "game play affecting" items, and stated it has no plans to post items directly to the auction house, leaving trading to the players.

When selling, players can use the money they earn to purchase other other Diablo III items through the auction house, purchase Battle.net products, such as World Of Warcraft subscriptions, or claim the cash through third party services.

For each item sold for real currency players will be charged an unspecified "nominal fixed transaction fee" by Blizzard, which will vary by region and whether or not the item sold. Players will also be charged a fee for withdrawing sales proceeds from their Battle.net account.

Blizzard has said it will not be introducing the system to its other MMORPG, World Of Warcraft, due to differences in the game play. It also clarified that it has no plans to provide support for the auction house system to mobile devices.

Diablo III still has no official release date, but is currently recruiting players for a beta test. Diablo II was released in 2000, but still has a large online audience.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...lo-iii-article ...

Programmers don’t need to get good at a game to achieve a high score, they code a bot for that instead. Take [hypnotizd] for instance. He was learning to write in the C# language and decided to make a bot that plays Bejeweled Blitz on Facebook. He figures he took between 48 and 72 hours of coding over a couple of weeks, but remember, he was learning the language at the same time. We think you’d be hard pressed to achieve a 1.5 million range score by yourself, even with that amount of practice time.

We spoke with [hypnotizd] yesterday afternoon to get a bit of background on how he made this happen. His code (he’s not releasing it so you’ll have to write your own) scrapes the screen image as input. You can see at the beginning of the video after the break that he sizes his app to properly align each jewel in its grid. The program then identifies each game piece by finding the center of the cell and taking a 25 square-pixel average color. Many of the jewels are easily recognized in this first pass, but some are harder and require several different tests to identify. That’s the difficult part, choosing the best move is just a matter of coming up with your own rules on how the bot should play the game.

http://hackaday.com/2011/07/30/bejew...look-just-sad/ ...

The PC has been the master of the FPS, adventure and strategy genres for over a decade with some genre defining games along the way, so it’s little wonder that this author values the gaming platform so highly. There’s also very little in the way of PC gaming magazines digitally archived around the globe, so we at Out-of-Print Archive try to address that problem with the first issue of PC Player. This is also an official Maverick Magazines release with the permission of the company’s publisher to release all the issues at OoPA.

PC Player is virtually unknown among retrogamers and was certainly an underdog in the PC magazines scene at the time, but don’t any of those facts get in the way of this fantastic publication. Publisher Hugh Gollner stated in his interview at OoPA that PC Player was “probably the best games magazine [he] was involved with. For serious gamers it was just perfect — big fat, thorough reviews of serious strategy, simulation and adventure games.” And I can’t agree with that statement more. Yes admittadly, the design is, as Hugh also pointed out, a bit of a rip-off from Edge, but with such great content, with up to six pages per review, it doesn’t matter a jot.



One of the more unique features of PC Player were the additional comments within the reviews. Nothing unique about that you may say, but these “Expert Opinions” were from idependent experts in their own field (i.e. for the RPG reviews, PC Player drafted in Dave Renton, the editor of Role Player Independent). Then there were Making Of…, game profiles and developer profiles integrated into some of the bigger reviews, something which definitely wasn’t the norm back in 1993.

That’s not even mentioning the superb design and layout, the use of five-star ratings, the in-depth articles, reviews, previews and players’ guides. PC Player was a magazine that certainly showed lots of potential and initiative when the PC gaming scene was just starting to explode. It was a shame then that the magazine seemed to fade out of existence when Maverick Magazines itself faded out. Or was that the case? There are some suspicious adverts for PC Gamer, Future Publishing’s then fledging PC gaming mag, adorning the latter issues of PC Player. Now that was something you didn’t see often.



The PC Player archive would never have existed without the generousity of Paul Mallinson. The deputy editor on PC Player very kindly donated his spare copies, including the very important first issue that is available now. Also thanks to John Davison (editor), Paul Mallinson (again), Jason Simmons (art editor), Alex Simmons, Keith Sloan (writers), all the contributors and, of course, Hugh Gollner (Publisher), who granted us permission to realease the back catalogue of PC Player at Out-of-Print Archive.

PC Player issue 1 can be found at Out-of-Print Archive, where you will find the full contents and editorial details of the issue, online material chosen from the magazine (reviews of Return to Zork and Privateer and previews of Alone in the Dark 2 and Beneath A Steel Sky) and the all important download links in both full PC resolution and portable device resolution

http://retroactionmagazine.com/retro...gital-archive/ ...

When Google Chromebooks started arriving without the Netflix streaming we'd been promised we were predictably bummed, but that may be rectified soon. While Chromebook owners attuned to beta channel updates first noticed an entry for a Netflix plugin last month, it still couldn't actually play movies and didn't appear on older, single-core Atom powered Cr-48 laptops. Fast forward to the present, where one of our friendly comment moderators, masterofrandom has spotted this updated v1.0.2 plugin lurking in the depths of his murdered out 12-incher. There's still no playback to be had, but we're figuring Netflix didn't update the version number past 1.0 because it's finally figured out the perfect queue management system. Chromebook owners or prospective owners (and by extension, Linux users) still awaiting Watch Instantly streaming -- your alert level is at Vermilion.

http://www.engadget.com/2011/07/31/n...icial-release/ ...

Machines running the decade-old Windows XP make up a huge reservoir of infected PCs that can spread malware to other systems, a Czech antivirus company said. Windows XP computers are infected with rootkits out of proportion to the operating system's market share, according to data released Thursday by Avast Software, which surveyed more than 600,000 Windows PCs. While XP now accounts for about 58% of all Windows systems in use, 74% of the rootkit infections found by Avast were on XP machines. Avast attributed the infection disparity between XP and Windows 7 to a pair of factors: The widespread use of pirated copies of the former and the latter's better security. Vlcek assumed that many of the people running XP SP2, which Microsoft stopped supporting with security patches a year ago, have declined to update to the still-supported SP3 because they are running counterfeits."

http://it.slashdot.org/story/11/07/3...kit-Infections ...

Ubisoft riled the masses with news that Driver: San Francisco will have always-on DRM, requiring that players be constantly connected to the internet for the game to function. Ubisoft has used constant DRM in previous titles, such as Assassin's Creed 2 and Splinter Cell: Conviction, arguing it combats piracy. Players argue DRM is an unfair, frustrating hassle, and Ubisoft is now counter-arguing this point, with the announcement that always-on DRM has been "a success."

Ubisoft said it has seen "a clear reduction in piracy of our titles which required a persistent online connection, and from that point of view the requirement is a success," speaking with PC Gamer. Ubisoft has also successfully angered many fans, who say its DRM policies only hurt those who pay for the game, and citing previous DRM titles that have been cracked, pirated and hacked anyway.

Ubisoft has previously removed DRM from its titles, but this year the restriction is making a comeback -- and we'll get to decide if it's on the level of Justin Timberlake or Vanilla Ice.

http://www.joystiq.com/2011/07/30/ub...-are-confused/ ...