You’re probably aware that something called ‘Christmas’ is next month. Christmas is a wonderful thing where you have to spend all your money on other people, because you’re a nice, generous soul. Unfortunately, that means you probably won’t have much money to spend on feeding your gaming hobby. Sure, the Steam Christmas sales are probably coming up, but wouldn’t you like to get some quality games for nothing, for a change?
As we all could have guessed, Modern Warfare 3 is leading the all formats chart this week, but it isn’t having its’ own way on Steam. The current figures from Steam stats show 94,076 people currently playing Bethesda’s epic with 39,289 people playing Modern Warfare 3 when adding up multiplayer and singleplayer versions. Hit the jump for some more stats.
The latest UK games charts are now in at Chart-Track with Modern Warfare 3 predictably leading the way at Number 1 while Skyrim sits in a happy second place. But perhaps more important for the business is that this was the biggest week ever for game sales in the UK according to Chart Track. It was a week when game sales took more money than the opening weekend takings for the last four Harry Potter films. That is big and shows that despite the economic difficulties, the games industry can still bring in the money.
Indie games portal Show Me The Games is currently running a huge two week sale with a whole heap of great indie games available for half price. The brain behind Show Me The Games, Positech’s Cliff Harris describes the event with such words as these:
“Today marks the first day of the first two-week ‘Show Me The Sales’ promotion!
Hosted by the online indie game database at www.showmethegames.com, ‘Show Me The Sales’ is a collection of indie game developers who are each offering substantial discounts on their games over the next two weeks. Unlike any other games bundle or sale, SMTS is a collection of sales hosted directly by the developers, acting just as a directory of discounts, so you still buy the game direct from the individual developer, and the developer gets to keep all of the money.
Just to emphasise that, ShowMeTheGames takes NOTHING from any of the sales, or the developers.”
If you want to get titles such as VVVVVV!, AI War: Fleet Command and Gratuitous Space Battles! at great prices, just head here.
We have a little update on the Steam security breach. I have come accross the above image, from Steam UnPowered which indicates that Valve’s Gabe Newell has confirmed that any credit card details stored by Valve using AES256 which seems to be a very secure system. We can’t guarantee the validity of the above email exchange, but we are following up with Valve for more details.
After taking down the Steam forums earlier in the week due to a hacking attempt, Gabe Newell of Valve today released a statement revealing that the extent of the damage may have been worse than originally thought.
With Deus Ex Human Revolution out of the door and the team behind it presumably enjoying a little rest in between lighter DLC work, all eyes should rightly be on Eidos Montreal’s second team and their big project: Thief 4. Doing the rounds in the last couple of days have been 12 storyboard illustrations apparently from the game, posted on the portfolio of Vancouver-based artist Marlon Deane.
For all of their convoluted relationships, quests and all the arbitrary specifics of their canonical stories, the only thing that puzzles me about Namco’s fighting game mythologies is how some people actually manage to care about them. But they do, and Soul Calibur‘s habit of dropping in guest characters has long been a source of acute pain for those who can wrap their heads around the game’s tale of two swords better than I can.
Well that looks quite nice, short and sweet and certainly is GTA through and through. Are you full or joy or anger? I’m a tad disappointed it isn’t a new city, or even Vice City, but I’m sure it will be an impressive addition to the series. Head here if the embed isn’t working.
SEGA have sent through the official launch trailer for Sonic Generations, bucking the recent trend in ‘launch’ trailers by being released somewhat close to the actual release date (Uncharted 3 we’re looking at you. Well, actually, we’ve been looking at you for two weeks and waiting for you to get to it, but whatever).