For the first time in months the 3DS is the best-selling hardware format in Japan, with sales receiving a considerable boost from the release of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time 3D.

3DS sales for the week were up by more than a third to 40,649, well ahead of the PSP on 31,747 - despite an increase for Sony's portable this week as well.

There has been some controversy over the performance of Ocarina of Time 3D though, with website Andriasang reporting that it may have been supply constrained, with retailers reporting a low first shipment.

As a result sales of the game were almost identical to the other major release of the week: Level-5's Danbōru Senki on PSP - part of a cross-media franchise that includes toys and an anime.

Although independent chart compiler Media Create puts Ocarina of Time 3D in second place with 164,110 unit sales to 166,187, the chart from rival Enterbrain reverses the two positions.

In either case Nintendo will hope that this week sees a turning point for the 3DS's fortunes in Japan, with three titles in the top 10 and new releases generally now charting higher and for longer than during the post-launch period.

The other major new release this week is visual novel sequel Steins;Gate Hiyoku Renri no Darling on Xbox 360, from specialist publisher 5pb. A total of three new titles in the romance-themed franchise were released this week, with the sequel itself selling 31,666 units at number four.

A double pack containing the original game sold 11,041 units at number five and a budget-priced re-release of the first game sold 3,914 units at number 16.

Last Week This Week Title Format
New Entry 1 Danboru Senki PSP
New Entry 2 The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D 3DS
1 3 Yakuza Of The End PS3
New Entry 4 Steins;Gate: Hiyoku Renri no Darling 360
New Entry 5 Steins;Gate Double Pack 360
2 6 Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D 3DS
4 7 Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker 2 Professional DS
3 8 Battle & Get! Pokemon Typing DS DS
7 9 Wii Party Wii
5 10 One Piece Unlimited Cruise SP 3DS
Platform This Week Last Week
3DS 40,649 24,649
PSP 31,741 26,681
PlayStation 3 16,081 17,104
Wii 6,678 6,357
Nintendo DSi XL 5,464 5,283
Nintendo DSi 5,322 5,232
Xbox 360 2,875 2,370
PlayStation 2 1,346 1,291
Nintendo DS Lite 109 146
PSPgo 55 69

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...l-psp-in-japan ...

Ryan Cleary, the 19 year old hacker from Essex, will be in court today on Computer Misuse Act charges, but is apparently unconnected to recent attacks on industry sites.

The official statement from the Metropolitan Police lists the charges as relating to Distributed Denial of Service attacks on the Serious Organised Crime Agency, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry and the British Phonographic Industry.

Hacker group Lulzsec claimed responsibility for the SOCA attack, leading to suggestions that Cleary was part of the collective, but the group used its Twitter to publicly distance itself from the teenager.

"Ignorant press have failed to realize that actual authorities - i.e. Scotland Yard - didn't imply in the slightest that Ryan was LulzSec," it said. "They charge him with the SOCA attack, maybe he hit SOCA after we did? It was suspiciously down again after we let it up."

Lulzsec has admitted to hacking into the sites or user records of Sony, Nintendo, Bethesda as well as online games Minecraft, League of Legends and Eve Online.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...lated-offences ...

Dennis Durkin, COO and CFO of Microsoft's interactive entertainment business, has extended something of an olive branch to Sony over the issue of hacking, maintaining that he sees no advantage in crowing over his rival's security problems.

Although couched in terms of a larger statement on the security of Xbox LIVE as part of an interview with IndustryGamers, Durkin's comments seem to reflect a consolidated industry position on the threat posed by malicious hacking outfits.

"It's bad for the industry that this has happened to Sony," Durkin told our sister site. "It's very, very bad. It's very damaging. So we don't wish that upon anybody and you've seen we've been actually pretty quiet on the subject because we don't want to appear to even be looking to be taking advantage of somebody else's situation like that. That's just not in our DNA.

"Over time, all of the bets Microsoft is making are about cloud bets. We want customers to feel confident about the quality of service they're getting, the reliability they're getting, the security of the data that they have and the security of the private information that they have.

"As a company, you can look back 8, 9 years ago, when Bill Gates wrote his Trustworthy Computing Memo that basically said, 'We need to change the way we architect our products and it has to be designed into the way we architect our products and services.' So it's in our DNA, across the company. This is not just an IEB thing.

We don't want to appear to even be looking to be taking advantage of somebody else's situation like that. That's just not in our DNA.
Dennis Durkin, Microsoft.
"So this has really been a multi-year effort for us as a company and it'll continue to be one because this future, which we think is very much about services and very much cloud based - whether it be entertainment consumption or productivity - in order to do that, you have to have a secure environment. So we're going to continue to do that and we don't want to see any of our competitors hurt along the way. We think that's bad for consumers."

It's likely that benevolence was not the only reasoning behind Microsoft's placidity on the issue, as the two platform rivals have a long history of public sniping. By putting its head above the virtual parapets to deride Sony's security, for example, Microsoft would likely have become a target itself. In his closing comments to IndustryGamers, Durkin was keen to stress the importance which Microsoft places on the security of its customer data.

"[Xbox Live] is obviously very important to our consumers," Durkin argues. "It's part of the value proposition of why consumers buy our gaming consoles... So they want that to be on just like you want your phone to be on. And so we have that obligation and we've been diligently, not only in terms of our processes, which we leverage heavily from the company, but just in terms of our people resource and all that so we do everything we can to protect our consumers' data.

"Like in society, you can't always protect everything. There are people who are going to want to disrupt things and you can't always perfectly protect against every scenario, but we're going to make sure we do everything to we can to be sure we're as secure as we possibly can be. And thankfully - I'm grateful to be part of a company like Microsoft, who has such deep investments across its whole ecosystem that we leverage. Because it's an industry challenge and it's something that we all have to get better at."

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...urity-breaches ...

Amazon is letting US gamers know that their pre-ordered PlayStation Vitas will be with them in January 2012.

The news comes from an email to customers, via Destructoid, which states the release date is December 31, and they can expect their machines in the first week of January.

A Sony spokesman told GamesIndustry.biz today that there is currently no official release date for the Vita.

The date could be speculation on the part of Amazon, based on SCEA president Kaz Hirai's announcement at the E3 press conference that the machine would be available this holiday season.

European president Andrew House spoke directly about the release date for Vita in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz at E3.

"There's a very good and sensible reason why we haven't clarified exact timing in regions and geographies - we were significantly impacted by the events of March 11 in Japan," said House.

"We've undertaken, across Sony but also SCEE, a significant assessment of impact on our supply chain and what we think the long or medium term impact is going to be. Once we've completed that assessment and have a full understanding of what our supply chain looks like then we'll be in a position to be more specific about launch in specific regions."

On Tuesday online retailer shopto.net suggested prices for Vita launch games of £40, and a release as early as November 4.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...ita-in-january ...

Gaikai targets 10 million MAUs through affiliate scheme

Game streaming service Gaikai is looking to add 10 million monthly active users by this autumn through it's affiliates programme.

That's on top of the users it intends to attract for its retail partnerships - this week it confirmed a deal with Walmart in the US - and European equivalents are expected to be announced soon.

"Our first target is to get ten million monthly uniques that we can push these game experiences out to as a way to help the publishers and the online retailers address more audience," Nanea Reeves, chief strategy officer at Gaikai told GamesIndustry.biz in an interview published today.

If our business is to help all of the partners scale their business we have to be ready across multiple fronts
Nanea Revves, Gaikai
The media affiliate partners scheme includes GamesIndustry.biz sister site Eurogamer.net and The Escapist - although a deal with IGN is thought to have stalled since Christmas.

With the service up and running on media and retail websites, Gaikai is also looking at ways to help its publisher partners reach across multiple formats, as the service is able to stream to any device with a decent internet connection.

It's likely Gaikai will expand beyond just offering demos for games and evolve to full game streaming, with Reeves stating that: "The challenge is you get a customer that might be playing a game in their browser but they can't play the game on their Mac. In that case we've been approached – how do we support that customer, and can we transition them to an always on full game stream?"

And while games may not have been designed to work on TV, tablets or mobile devices, Gaikai is currently prototyping solutions that will help make games much more playable on alternative hardware.

"It's stuff we're already prototyping. We've got default iPad, iPhone controllers," Reeves revealed.

During E3 the firm said it expected to be serving games on web-enabled TVs next year - just behind rival OnLive which hopes to open up an addressable market of 75 million users by year end through a deal with Intel and others.

Although Gaikai won't require a custom chip built into TV units, it is also currently working on a control solution for big box gaming.

"With the TVs we will be shipping a controller with the TV as a separate accessory," said Reeves.

Earlier this month at E3 the company demoed games streaming to TV, using a basic remote to highlight the potential.

"We worked with the manufacturing company's engineers to get this working. It's just a proof of concept to see if it was really possible and so now we're starting to figure out how we continue to scale that," added Reeves.

"If our business is to help all of the partners scale their business we have to be ready across multiple fronts. And the nice thing about this solution is that it doesn't require any custom chip to be included in the device or separate unit. We're straight on the existing infrastructure."

Cutting out dedicated games hardware isn't the only solution that Gaikai is offering. Developers will be able to integrate an SDK to take advantage of additional features - one of which is to retrofit 3D to games that were never originally coded that way.

"The game wasn't made in 3D so we're facilitating that in the stream delivery."

"We just built out our network to support the more high end content, so we're just starting to ship those servers out," said Reeves, of 3D services that were first shown at CES this year.

And again not to be outdone by OnLive, Gaikai allows games to be embedded in social networking site Facebook.

"If you just think we can embed in any web page, that would include Facebook, so it's not a big deal. So OnLive is announcing that they're launching from Facebook so you know, we're actually embedded in there. We like those guys, they've done a great job, it's just a very different business model."

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...filiate-scheme ...

Unnoticed in the Tuesday release of Firefox 5 was Mozilla's decision to retire Firefox 4, shipped just three months ago. Mozilla spelled out vulnerabilities it had patched in that edition and in 2010's Firefox 3.6, but it made no mention of any bugs fixed in Firefox 4 on Tuesday, because Firefox 4 has reached what Mozilla calls EOL, for 'end of life,' for patches. Although the move may have caught users by surprise, the decision to stop supporting Firefox 4 has been discussed within Mozilla for weeks. In a mozilla.dev.planning mailing list thread, Christian Legnitto, the Firefox release manager, put it most succinctly on May 25: 'Firefox 5 will be the security update for Firefox 4.' Problem is, users are being prompted to upgrade now but are hesitant because the new rapid release of updates means many add-ons are not compatible. And without security updates in between, many could be left exposed with unpatched browsers.

http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/06...curity-Updates ...

In yet another setback for Oracle, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has rejected 17 of 21 claims associated with one of the patents in Java that Oracle asserted Google had violated with Android. Groklaw reports, 'In the reexamination of U.S. Patent 6192476 the USPTO has issued an office action in which it rejects 17 of the patent's 21 claims.'

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/06/...Android-Claims ...

JK Rowling finally takes her wizard franchise digital
Author J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books have famously not been available as e-books, but that will change from October this year.
This morning, Rowling took the wrappers off Pottermore, a new website designed to offer new material about the characters and places in the Potter universe. It will be free to use, and launches in beta on 31 July. She is working with Sony on the site, as well as digital agency TH_NK.
However, it's the e-books angle that interests ME. In October when the site emerges from beta, it will also launch a Pottermore Shop, which will sell the Harry Potter series as e-books and audiobooks "exclusively" according to the press release.

http://www.pcr-online.biz/news/36542...coming-October ...

Gabe Newell pleased with new console’s graphics performance
Nintendo’s next-generation console is powerful enough for Valve to consider as a platform to release content on, the studio’s co-founder has said.
Speaking at the Games for Change Festival in New York, Newell said, compared to the original Wii, it is “a lot easier to look at Wii U and have it fit within our [game development] framework”.
"Wii U seems to be a lot more powerful than the previous generation," Newell told Joystiq.
"It sort of fits better into the scalability in terms of graphics performance and CPU performance, so I think it'll be a lot easier for us to fit it into our scalability model."
Develop understands that Nintendo would need to dramatically improve its online services for Valve to seriously consider building games on the platform.

http://www.develop-online.net/news/3...-U-development ...