To get you up to speed from kotaku.com :


Facts:
Jason West and Vince Zampella no longer work at Infinity Ward (According to there Linkedin page)

Activision statement

Rumours

via eurogamer:

via kotaku.com

...

You may not be checking LittleBigPlanet for new levels as obsessively as you once were, but that doesn't mean that junior designers aren't still out there trying to perfect Super Mario Bros. 1-1 or trying to recreate the myth of Sisyphus. The game's community has just reached another big milestone: Two million available levels. It took them nine months to get the first million in late July of 2009, meaning that development isn't slowing down. In fact, it would appear to be speeding up.

It's inspired us to dust off our LittleBigPlanet disc and ... oh, wait.

http://www.joystiq.com/2010/03/01/li...reated-levels/ ...

You, me, we play console games in our living rooms. NBA players, however, are on the road most of the year. So they have to play on these amazing portable rigs instead.

http://kotaku.com/5482513/the-nbas-p...ox-360-systems ...

People rarely talk about iPhone app piracy, but when they do, it sounds devastating: 90% piracy rates, $450 million in lost sales, etc. Here's the truth: App Store piracy isn't a big deal—and it never will be.

With these shockingly high reports comes the general air that developers are being marauded and pillaged by Viking hordes and that Apple isn't doing enough to stop it. This resonates! Developers don't control much about the App Store, so if the entire app protection system has been cracked—which it has—you'd expect the looting to be wholesale; the impact on developers to be immediate and devastating; and the problem to be grave indeed.

And yet the piracy issue seems to be dying. The story behind the lack of a story, it turns out, is that iPhone piracy is nowhere near as serious as many people say it is, and that before long, it may not be a problem at all.

How It Works
It's tough to talk about iPhone app piracy without tacitly endorsing it. The mere mention of DRM cracking methods and application sources is—or rather, was—enough to send people looking, and presumably, stealing. But look at the piracy subscene today reveals that, like the jailbreak scene it's a part of, it's just not the same as it used to be.

Kicking off your career in app theft isn't too hard, and it'll only take a few minutes of Googling to get the full instructions. Still, I'll keep this as abstract as possible. Here's how you do it:

• Jailbreak your iPhone or iPod
• Open Cydia, the jailbreak equivalent of the App Store, and add a particular download source that isn't part of the default lineup
• Download two apps: One that lets you crack apps you've purchased for the benefit of others; and another that lets you install cracked applications yourself
• Download cracked apps to your heart's content, from various sources around the internet

At the peak, there were sites that aggregated huge numbers of download links together into an easily browsable website, which meant that once your phone was cracked, you could tap through these websites like you'd browse the App Store—links to the latest apps were plentiful, and you could snag that game you just read about on Gizmodo within a day or so, tops.

The most popular of these sites, called Appulo.us, disappeared just last month, leaving pirates without a centralized resource for apps. Soon, torrent sites and carbon copied link-dumps picked up the slack, at least for people dedicated and savvy enough to find them. So, yeah, piracy is alive, to be sure. But how serious is it?

The Problem
I wanted to find out how bad piracy was, so I went straight to the developers. I started with the types of apps I thought would be least vulnerable, just to set a baseline: Productivity apps. The verdict? Yes! Piracy happens!

"Roughly 10% of our paid app users are coming from piracy." That's Guy Goldstein, CEO of PageOnce, the company behind Personal Assistant, a top-selling organizational app. This is pretty stunning, if you think about it. Personal Assistant is available in a fairly full-featured free version, and as useful as it is, it's not the most glamourous of apps—it's a utility, not a flashy game. The paid version tracks a little high for a productivity app, at $7, but not matter how you slice it, Personal Assistant isn't the most obvious target for piracy. Nor, apparently, is it a serious victim: "Although i think piracy is generally bad and negatively effects companies, for us it's not big issue—our business model is based on purchasing, but also advertising. The more users we have, the better." Right, so piracy is happening here, but it doesn't really matter. Let's move onto the people who you'd really expect to be getting ripped off.

I contacted TomTom, whose navigation apps start above $50. They were cagey. Cagey and brief:

TomTom takes piracy very seriously. Per corporate policy, we do not disclose information about our ongoing efforts to disrupt software theft.
So I moved on to their direct competitor, Navigon, whose MobileNavigator North America app runs $90:

Navigon is well aware of hacked iPhone Apps. As with any other software, it is only a question of time when applications are being hacked and distributed illegally. There's no security mechanism available to prevent this 100%. Since hacking of additional application functions, which are available through Apple's In App Purchase mechanism, is more difficult, this helps to better secure Apps from software piracy. Our legal department is watching this very thoroughly and Navigon will fight piracy with all legal means.
Less cagey, and more ragey. But this is an official position—a conversation with a Navigon rep left me with the impression that while they don't condone piracy, obviously, it wasn't exactly the Issue of the Day. Ripe targets that they are, nav companies don't seem to be losing sleep over this. Which leaves the game developers.

What apps are more pirateable than games? They're shiny, they're extremely popular, and they're often expensive. Surely the EAs and Gamelofts of the world are the hardest hit, right?

On record, they basically clammed up. Off the record, though, they were a bit more free. A rep from one of the largest studios—you've probably played one of their games if ...

After Sony's warning, the PlayStation Network seems to be back online and fully operational, according to reader Larry Gallant:

I wanted to let you guys know that the phat PS3s are now able to login to the Playstation network and the clocks are working. I was able to login at 6:28 PM eastern time in the Boston, MA USA area.
No official word from Sony yet, however, so proceed with caution.

Have you been able to connect to the network? Tell us in the comments.

http://gizmodo.com/5483212/update-pl...ur-fat-ps3-now ...

Killer Orca is one of many to tell us about a new study on the effects of violent video games on kids. The latest meta-study that analyzed research from 130 different reports claims to have "conclusively proven" that violent video games make more aggressive, less caring kids.
"The team used meta-analytic procedures — the statistical methods used to analyze and combine results from previous, related literature -- to test the effects of violent video game play on the behaviors, thoughts, and feelings of the individuals, ranging from elementary school-aged children to college undergraduates. [...] Anderson says the new study may be his last meta-analysis on violent video games because of its definitive findings."

http://games.slashdot.org/story/10/0...-Be-Conclusive ...

Activision, after acquiring Vivendi, became the new copyright holder of the classic King's Quest series of adventure game. They have now issued a cease and desist order to a team which has worked for eight years on a fan-made project initially dubbed a sequel to the last official installment, King's Quest 8. This stands against the fact that Vivendi granted a non-commercial license to the team, subject to Vivendi's approval of the game after submission. After the acquisition, key team members had indicated on the game's forums (now stripped of their original content by order of Activision) that Activision had given the indication that it intended to keep its current fan-game licenses, but was not interested in issuing new ones

http://games.slashdot.org/story/10/0...-By-Activision ...

Sony and Quantic Dream's ambitious PlayStation 3 exclusive Heavy Rain has taken the number one spot in the UK charts in its debut week.

The title is the publisher's first number one hit since Killzone 2, released in early 2009.

The game pushed out last week's number one, Aliens Versus Predator, to number two with sales down 38 per cent, according to data from GfK Chart-Track.

The second highest new entry in the charts was Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing at number eight, with the publisher also claiming a respectable twelfth place with PC game Napoleon: Total War. Sony's role-playing game White Knight Chronicles entered the charts at 35.

The full top ten follows:

01 Heavy Rain
02 Aliens Versus Predator
03 Just Dance
04 Wii Fit Plus
05 Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
06 Wii Sports Resort
07 New Super Mario Bros. Wii
08 Sonic & Sega All0Stars Racing
09 BioShock 2
10 FIFA 10

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...nce-killzone-2 ...

Monumental Games, the UK developer behind PC MMO Football Superstars and upcoming Capcom racer MotoGP 09/10, has said that it will be 2-3 years before the big players enter the MMO console space as they wait for issues relating to subscriptions and royalty shares to be resolved.

In the meantime, the company told GamesIndustry.biz, it has its own plans to make steps into the space early, possibly starting with a licensed title set to be announced in the coming months.

"I think the big players will start moving into console MMOs now that the format holders are moving in themselves and releasing the ability to do console MMOs: like billing, who gets the share, do they have to use PlayStation Store, what's the royalty share, hard-drive downloads and so on," said Rik Alexander, the company's CEO and co-founder.

"Now those hurdles have been gone through then everybody's going to be moving into it. I think it'll be 2-3 years before the main players, or rather the normal players get into it. But we want to just be part of the solution, so we'll be 2-3 years into knowing about console MMOs before anybody else thinks about it."

"Online's the exciting place," he added, as he outlined his studio's plans to launch a 3D Facebook MMO in June, as well as its ongoing work on owned IP Hunter's World.

"We're currently talking to a big North American publisher about a deal on a console MMO, which we'll hopefully announce in the next three months or something. We've already ported our tech onto it - it's an ongoing process, we're still developing tools and so on."

Console MMOs have been slow to emerge on the current generation platforms, with Final Fantasy XI the only one properly nailing the experience. Sony Online's plans to bring Free Realms to PlayStation 3 appear to have stalled and Realtime Worlds' APB is now only in development for PC, although a future Xbox 360 version hasn't been completely ruled out.

The ideal model for a console MMO will need to be defined, added Alexander. Retail packages with subscriptions could be an option, as could a hybrid micro-transaction model - "We're not going to define, we just want to be part of the solution," he said.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...f-in-2-3-years ...