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Is EA Shuttering It’s Free To Play Model?

April 27, 2015 by  
Filed under Around The Net

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EA is shuttering four high-profile free-to-play games, all of them allied to popular IP like Battlefield and FIFA.

Battlefield Heroes, Battlefield Play4Free, Need for Speed World and FIFA World will all continue for another 90 days, at which point they will be taken offline for good. Further development on the games has stopped already.

“In more than five years since most of these titles launched, how we play games has changed dramatically,” said Patrick Soderlund, EVP of EA Games, in a statement. “These were pioneering experiences, and we’re humbled that, over the years, so many of you joined us to enjoy the games and the community.”

In terms of EA’s growing interest in free-to-play models, the real pioneer among that group is Battlefield Heroes, which was pitched at “frustrated, restricted” gamers back in 2008. Need for Speed World and Battlefield Play4Free followed, launching over the second half of 2010.

By the start of 2012, EA was reporting a combined total of 25 million players across the six games in its “Play4Free” initiative, with Battlefield Heroes and Need for Speed World contributing 10 million players each.

However, FIFA World is by no means a forerunner. It only reaching open beta late in 2013, and so it is being shuttered after substantially less than two years of public availability. This wouldn’t imply a slow decline in interest, but a lack of interest in the first place.

That’s in stark contrast to FIFA Online, the free-to-play version of the game made specifically for markets in Asia. In 2012, EA’s Andrew Wilson claimed that FIFA Online was making $100 million a year in revenue. A year later, FIFA Online 3, the most recent iteration, was the leading online sports game in both traffic and revenue in Korea.

One thing is certain, take these four titles away from EA’s free-to-play games on Origin, and you’re left with only Command & Conquer: Tiberium Alliances and Star Wars: The Old Republic – in his statement, Soderlund stressed the latter’s “enthusiastic and growing” community, and reiterated EA’s commitment to providing new content.

The remainder of the company’s free-to-play catalog is composed of games like Outernauts, The Simpsons: Tapped Out and Bejeweled Blitz. Casual, social, call them what you will, but they are intended for a very different audience to Need for Speed World and Battlefield Play4Free, and that audience has just lost two-thirds of the games EA had made to satisfy its needs.

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Unity Starts Pushing Open Source

September 4, 2014 by  
Filed under Computing

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Unity Technologies has stepped up its commitment to democratising game development by making key components of its ubiquitous engine open source.

At present, that applies to the Unity Test Tools and the engine’s new graphical user interface system, which was demonstrated in the opening keynote of Unite 2014. The features will be available under the MIT/X11 license, giving users the freedom to “control, customise and extend” their functionality.

The source code for the components will be hosted on BitBucket, and Unity has prepared a guide for any interested open source contributors. The source for the Unity Test Tools is already available, with the GUI to follow.

“Beyond that, we don’t have a concrete plan, but we have a lot of things in the pipeline,” the company said in a statement. “These components will all be isolated from Unity in such a way that you can modify them and use your own modified version with the official public Unity release.

“Although Unity Technologies has been active in the open-source community for quite some time, this is the first time we’ll be opening the source to components of Unity itself.

“We’re excited to see what you do with it.”

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Some Hackers Going To Jail

October 15, 2013 by  
Filed under Computing

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Thirteen people have been indicted, accused of being members of the Anonymous hacktivist group and allegedly involved in Operation Payback.

Operation Payback was the retaliation against payment firms that Anonymous put in motion following their blocking of Wikileaks donations.

The 13 are accused of taking part in a series of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, and the US Department of Justice filed a federal grand jury indictment in US District Court in Alexandria, Virginia. The indictment charges them with conspiracy to intentionally cause damage to protected computers.

Anonymous is a loosely linked digital rights collective. In its early days it pulled together volunteers from all walks of life.

Operation Payback struck a number of organisations including Mastercard, Visa, Paypal and the Motion Picture Association of America. The attacks lasted between September 2010 and January 2011. As well as retaliating against payment providers, part of Operation Payback was aimed at parties thought to be involved in a campaign against The Pirate Bay.

Agence France Presse (AFP) has seen the indictment and named those indicted in it. They are Dennis Owen Collins, Jeremy Leroy Heller, Chen Zhiwei, Joshua Phy, Ryan Russel Gubele, Robert Audubon Whitfield, Anthony Tadros, Geoffrey Kenneth Commander, Austen Stamm, Timothy Robert McLain, Wade Carl Williams and Thomas Bell.

According to AFP the 13 alleged Anonymous members “planned and executed a coordinated series of cyber-attacks against victim websites by flooding those websites with a huge volume of irrelevant internet traffic with the intent to make the resources on the websites unavailable to customers and users of those websites.”

In short, they are accused of having conducted a digital sit-in protest.

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nVidia Wins With Tegra 4

April 30, 2013 by  
Filed under Computing

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Nvidia’s first Tegra 4 design win is here, apparently, and it doesn’t appear very impressive at all. Tegra 4 is late to the party, so it is a bit short on design wins, to put it mildly.

Now a new ZTE smartphone has been spotted by Chinese bloggers and it seems to be based on Nvidia’s first A15 chip. The ZTE 988 is a phablet, with a 5.7-inch 720p screen. It has 2GB of RAM, a 13-megapixel camera and a 6.9mm thin body. It weighs just 110g, which is pretty surprising. The spec is rather underwhelming, especially in the display department.

However, a grain of salt is advised. It is still unclear whether the phone features a Tegra 4 or a Qualcomm chipset. Also, it is rather baffling to see a 720p screen on a Tegra 4 phablet, it just seems like overkill.

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Autodesk Heads To The Cloud

September 19, 2012 by  
Filed under Computing

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Autodesk announced today that its 3D simulation tool called Simulation 360 will be available through the cloud to reduce development time in product manufacturing by up to three times compared to the desktop version.

In order to provide services quicker and make it easier for its customers to collaborate internally, Simulation 360 means that cloud based simulation tools take away all hardware requirements and thus lower costs for businesses.

Speaking at an exclusive launch event, Autodesk’s technical sales manager Jonah Normand introduced the new software as “a change in business model”. He explained that it can advantage businesses by outsourcing product design rendering to the cloud and sending the results back instandly as they are being calculated, thus giving more flexibility in development time.

Referring to the Microsoft Xbox 360 recall that cost the firm $1bn after it found Xbox systems were overheating shortly after launch, Normand said simulation is an important step in the development process because it helps reduce risk for customers and avoid potential product hiccups.

However, Normand said companies have specific barriers preventing them from employing simulation tools in their product development, such as hardware requirements, costs and ease of use, but Simulation 360 aims to make simulation more accessible to everyone.

“Our strategy at Autodesk is to remove these barriers and give access to simulation,” he said. “Our vision is to move simulation to the front end of design.”

Therefore, Autodesk has developed the cloud based service so that companies can more easily make the transition to having simulation in their product development.

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