In a conference call, Eric Hirshberg, CEO of the Activision Publishing division, made a surprisingly direct statement on the success of Skylanders, the new toy/video game hybrid for consoles and iOS devices. With 30m toys sold and $100m in revenue across toys and games in the quarter, said Hirshberg, Skylanders made more money than the entire business of Rovio’s Angry Birds franchise. Rovio announced today that Angry Birds has been downloaded more than 1 billion times, across both free and paid versions.

An interesting twist is permitted on this particular TV show, because the contestants get a chance to discuss strategy. Normally the play here seems simple: you try to persuade the other person that splitting is a good idea, and that you can be trusted. This time, one of the contestants plays a different and very clever approach, signalling a clear warning to his opponent. The fact that he works in charitable sector funding only makes it better.

Initially heralded as the future of browser gaming and the next step beyond the monopolised world of Flash, HTML5 has since faced criticism for being tough to code with and possessing a string of broken features.</p><p>
The coding platform, the fifth iteration of the HTML standard, was supposed to be a one stop shop for developers looking to create and distribute their game to a multitude of platforms and browsers, but things haven’t been plain sailing.

Draw Something was first launched on OMGPOP's website five years ago. It remained there, as a relatively obscure game, without much usage. Six weeks ago, it was ported to iOS. Today, the company is worth $180m.

Microsoft will release the next version of its Xbox console in 2013 at the earliest, as the company squeezes at least one more year of sales out of its current model, said two people with knowledge of the matter.

The company may show the successor to its Xbox 360 in June 2013 at the E3 conference and put it on sale that same year, said the people, who declined to be named because the plans are confidential. David Dennis, a company spokesman, said earlier today that Microsoft won’t discuss new Xbox hardware at this year’s E3, quelling speculation that the device would be unveiled at the 2012 show.

No, this isn't payback, or about a grudge. This is just word from someone who's seen what this industry is capable of doing. Good, and Bad. No, I was not under contract, I was full time, offered stock (common shares, not that options bullcrap). I sympathized with contractors on how they were treated, most of the time. No, I was not some IT mangler. I worked for one of their "game studios", basically the front lines where content made it to the masses.

Here's what Ubisofts DRM is doing these days, they don't just verify the number of PCs you work on, nope .. they monitor hardware changes. So once we inserted that GeForce GTX 590 the hardware id # hash changed rendering our activation invalid.

What a bunch of rubbish ....This means that if we'd like to make a VGA performance review on Anno 2070 we'd need to purchase the game seven times. Ubisoft claims that you can send an email towards their support so that the activations are reset, we did so .. yet are still awaiting reaction.

When contacting Ubisoft marketing here in the Netherlands, their reply goes like this: 'Sorry to disappoint you - the game is indeed restricted to 3 hardware changes and there simply is no way to bypass that. We also do not have 7 copies of the game for you'.

I'm sorry, but I am not about to purchase the title seven times to make a review that by default benefits Ubisoft sales.