Gaming Rage

kkleiner writes “How much would you pay for a piece of imaginary real estate? Anshe Chung has made millions renting it. Today, Anshe Chung Studios has 80+ employees managing thousands of rental properties, helping design new 3D virtual chat rooms, and making tons of money on virtual to real currency exchanges. Anshe was the first person whose virtual property exceeded a real world value of 1 million dollars, and Anshe Chung Studios is perhaps the single largest third party developer of virtual property ever.”

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written by Soulskill \\ tags: Games, Video Games

kkleiner writes “How much would you pay for a piece of imaginary real estate? Anshe Chung has made millions renting it. Today, Anshe Chung Studios has 80+ employees managing thousands of rental properties, helping design new 3D virtual chat rooms, and making tons of money on virtual to real currency exchanges. Anshe was the first person whose virtual property exceeded a real world value of 1 million dollars, and Anshe Chung Studios is perhaps the single largest third party developer of virtual property ever.”

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written by Soulskill \\ tags: Games, Video Games

ArrowBay writes “Dice Age, a independent game project that raised nearly $35K through Kickstarter, is apparently facing some scrutiny from a certain movie studio that has produced movies with a similar name. From the latest project update: ‘As if the Ice Age was exclusively the name of a movie, or if Dice Age was a movie itself, the 20th century fox has just asked for an extent of time (till 10-26-2011) to oppose to the registering of our beloved Dice Age game name. My point of view, as a scientist, is the Ice age is a geological era before it is a movie.”"

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written by Soulskill \\ tags: Games, Video Games

sdasher writes “Finally, there’s a chance to combine your love of version control and parties: Gitionary. The brainchild of two MIT alums, it’s a party game where you try to illustrate git commands. A set of gitionary cards (PDF) has been posted as well. Personally, I’m still holding out for the Debugging Python RPG.”

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written by Soulskill \\ tags: Games, Video Games

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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written by Soulskill \\ tags: Games, Video Games

An anonymous reader sends this quote from Wired:
“A novel anti-piracy measure baked into the Nintendo DS version of Michael Jackson: The Experience makes copied versions of the game unplayable and taunts gamers with the blaring sound of vuvuzelas. Many games have installed switches that detect pirated copies and act accordingly, like ending the user’s game after 20 minutes. Ubisoft has come under fire multiple times for what players have seen as highly restrictive anti-piracy measures that annoy legitimate users as much or more so than pirates. But some more-mischievous developers have used tricks similar to the vuvuzela fanfare to mess with pirates. Batman: Arkham Asylum lets unauthorized users play through the game as if it were a normal copy, with a single exception: Batman’s cape-glide ability doesn’t work, rendering the game impossible to finish — although you might bash your head against it trying to make what are now impossible jumps. If you pirate Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2, brace yourself for an explosion, as your entire base will detonate within 30 seconds of loading the game.”

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written by Soulskill \\ tags: Games, Video Games

simrook writes, “Many people filed privacy complaints with the ESRB over Blizzard’s recent (and afterward recanted) move to require the display of users’ real life names on Blizzard’s official forums. 961 of those complainants had their email addresses exposed in the ESRB’s response.” The response itself didn’t go into the organization’s thoughts on Blizzard’s plan, but they explained to the Opposable Thumbs blog that anonymity isn’t a huge concern to them, as long as users are given the opportunity to opt out.
“The role of the ESRB Privacy Online program is to make sure that member websites—those that display our seal on their pages — are compliant with an increasingly complex series of privacy protection laws and are offering a secure space for users to interact and do business online. … But online privacy protection doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing as anonymity. It’s about making sure that websites collecting personal information from users are doing so not only in accordance with federal regulations but also with best practices for protecting individuals’ personal information online.”

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written by Soulskill \\ tags: Games, Video Games

An anonymous reader writes “A California steel contractor spent 2,200 total hours over the last three years racking up a high score in Bejeweled 2. He exceeded the 2^31-1 maximum score programmed for the score display, proving that there is, in fact, an end to the game. I suppose congratulations or condolences are in order.”

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written by Soulskill \\ tags: Games, Video Games

theodp writes “In a blog post, venture capitalist Fred Wilson gives his thoughts on ripe areas for tech investment in 2010 — mobile, gaming, new forms of commerce/currency, Cloud platforms/APIs, education and energy/environment. Asked to comment on scams and social gaming (he is an investor in Zynga), Wilson defended Zynga’s Farmville: ‘Zynga makes almost all of its revenue on virtual goods. I said in my etsy/san telmo post the other day that more tractors are sold every day in Farmville than are sold in the US every year. That’s where the money is in social gaming. The “scammy ads” thing is total red herring that everyone got excited about but is almost entirely irrelevant.’”

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written by Soulskill \\ tags: Games, Video Games