splitenz writes “A TV executive told a major Australian broadband conference that television audiences are slipping away into social media, gaming and other online subscription spaces. YouTube and online gaming is taking the traditional TV audience online and TV is struggling to fight back.”
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Stoobalou writes “Soon-to-be-celebrity hacker and thorn in Sony’s side George ‘Geohot’ Hotz has denied any involvement in the ongoing breach at the PlayStation Network. The 21-year-old hacker — who is best known for creating the first software-based hack for the iPhone, and getting hypervisor access and exposing the root key to the PlayStation 3 — has made it clear that he had nothing to do with filleting Sony’s online gaming servers, saying ‘I’m not crazy.’”
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gabbo529 writes “Nintendo’s latest financial results reveal that initial sales for their portable 3D gaming system have been underwhelming at best. What’s the reason? Nintendo chief executive Satoru Iwata says consumers have yet to fully understand the console’s 3D capabilities, even when trying it out. Others think it might have something to do with the console’s high price ($250) and the lack of big-name titles available (Mario and Zelda are not yet out).”
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dotarray writes “The Australian classification debate has just gotten a little more interesting, with South Australian Attorney-General John Rau announcing that he wants to go one step further than merely introducing an R18+ rating for video games. His proposed plan would change the system to include G, PG, M and R18+ classifications (while still allowing for games to be Refused Classification or effectively banned), making a ‘clear difference’ between what adults can play and what is available to children.”
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Samfer writes with this excerpt from Operation Reality Gaming:
“[...] sometime this summer, likely around August, we will see the appearance online of both a Crysis 2 editor and a CryEngine 3 SDK (software development kit). This not only means that people will be able to make full blown new levels for Crysis 2 but that the CryEngine 3 will also be made publicly available for the development of non-commercial projects to the community at large. To quote, ‘This will be a complete version of our engine, including C++ code access, our content exporters (including our LiveCreate real-time pipeline), shader code, game sample code from Crysis 2, script samples, new improved Flowgraph and a whole host of great asset examples, which will allow teams to build complete games from scratch for PC.’”
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ZorbaTHut writes “I’ve been playing a lot of Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup lately. It’s a great example of a roguelike (and open source, too). But I can’t stop thinking that perhaps ‘roguelike’ is the wrong term for the genre. ‘Roguelikes aren’t about dungeons. They’re not about text-based graphics, or random artifacts, or permadeath. … Roguelikes are about using an unpredictable toolkit with complex interactions in order to overcome unpredictable challenges.’”
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Over the weekend, we discussed news that the PlayStation Network had been down for days, with Sony saying little other than that it was caused by an “external intrusion” and that they were “rebuilding their network.” Many of you have written to point out that the outage continues, with Sony saying they “don’t have an update or timeframe to share at this point.” One theory about the cause behind the network’s downtime was recently espoused on Reddit by ‘chesh,’ a moderator at PlayStation-modding enthusiast site PSX-Scene.com. According to him, recently released custom firmware called Rebug allowed people to essentially turn their PS3s into dev consoles, though some features were missing. A different group supposedly used this firmware to get on PSN through the developer networks, and also found that fake credit card numbers were not being validated for game purchases, leading to what chesh called “extreme piracy.” He acknowledges that this theory is speculation. Sony’s handling of this outage is starting to draw attention from the government. Update: 04/26 20:47 GMT by S : Sony just posted more details, saying that a massive data breach occurred: An “unauthorized person” has PSN users’ “name, address (city, state, zip), country, email address, birthdate, PlayStation Network/Qriocity password and login, and handle/PSN online ID.” Billing address, password questions, and credit card info may also have been taken.
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trawg writes “Sony has officially announced a new line of ‘Sony tablets.’ There are two models, both offering 3G/4G and Wi-Fi running Android 3.0 — one is a typical tablet with a 9.4-inch screen and the other is an ‘unprecedented dual screen’ type. Digital content is a big focus: music, books and first generation PlayStation titles will all be available (subject to the usual region restrictions for content).”
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An anonymous reader writes “Two researchers who have a history of publishing studies that claim violent video games lead to violence have now published a new study claiming that they’ve come up with an ‘objective’ way to measure why violent video games lead to violence. They’ve taken the names of people who signed an amicus brief on the upcoming Supreme Court case on an anti-violent video game law in California, and decided that if you added up the number of publications by each side the ones who supported ‘video games lead to violence’ had more publications, and thus that was ‘proof’ that they had more credibility. Yes, quantity is more important than quality. The fact that the researchers who published this ‘study’ also wrote the amicus brief that supported the same claim seems to call their objectivity into question as well.”
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Zothecula writes “While motion controllers are becoming a staple for console gamers with the release of the Wii, PlayStation Move and Microsoft Kinect, PC gamers have been left wanting. Razer is looking to change that with its Hydra motion controller which has been developed specifically for PC gamers. Unlike console-based motion control systems, the Hydra uses magnetic tracking technology by way of a base station that emits a magnetic field that Razer says allows the exact location and orientation of the handheld controllers to be detected with millimeter accuracy.”
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