Kabam Raises $85 Million EA Adds New Features to NHL12 Analyst Blog Ubisoft Announces Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Online FreeToPlay Game Sony Estimates $171 Loss From PSN Hack An Open Letter To CEO Howard Stringer 24/7 Free Bingo at Site City Seduction Secrets In Video Design SOCOM 4 and Mortal Kombat latest video games include online fee for used buyers but GameStop insists the trend isn't hurting its business With rewards Zynga hopes get you launch PlayStation app iPhone Android Starz Launches TV Series Facebook Tech Startups Watch in 2011 Apps rush Angry Hipsters Chaos Rings Ω Tokyo Girls Collection more Call of Duty dev confident it can stop hackergate Financial Times NYT's Paywall Will 'Absolutely' Work 'Intrusion' knocks out Entertainment Kid Friendly

Social gaming start-up Kabam has raised $85 million in a new round of funding led by investors Google Ventures and Pinnacle Ventures, in the latest in a series of bigtime funding rounds for fast-growing tech companies. Electronic Arts Inc. announced new features for their award winning franchise EA SPORTS NHL 12. Diving into the free-to-play game market, Ubisoft is announcing today it is developing Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Online. As such, the French game publisher hopes to kick off an era of AAA-quality free online games. The game is an attempt to capitalize on the collision of two worlds: the hardcore console games and the free-to-play online games that are taking off in places such as Asia. Ubisoft is walking a tightrope, making some of its cool content available at a lower entry price than its typical $60 games, but still giving gamers a reason to pay full price as well. In this case, users can play the online game for free and pay real money for virtual goods such as better weapons or decorations. All console game makers are engaged in creating these kinds of free-to-play hardcore online games, from Electronic Arts with its Battlefield Heroes game to Activision Blizzard's upcoming Call of Duty Online. The Ubisoft game lets players become Ghosts, or modern super soldiers with advanced technology and intelligence, in a multiplayer-only combat game. It is played from a third-person point of view and focuses on the tactics of team combat, allowing online matches ... Sony will lose approximately 14 billion yen ($171 million) following the PlayStation Network outage, it said Monday. This loss includes expenses for security improvements, "Welcome Back" packages and an estimate of the impact on future profits of the security breach and resultant outage. Sony says it has still not confirmed any reports of credit card fraud [...] Howard - While we all can appreciate the difficulties you've been through in the last month, what with your online cash cow being tipped by thousands of overbright fratboys, the simple fact is your responses have been, well, completely terrible. First off, nothing heals fresh wounds like dismissive handwaving. When you have millions of customers and hundreds of developers locked out of their online connection for over a month, the use of the word "hiccup" isn't exactly going to smooth things over. A term like that is usually deployed to indicate minor speedbumps, like 12 hours of downtime for "unscheduled maintenance" or informing the end users that their Diner's Club cards are no longer being honored. Following it up with defensive comments about your response time (faster that others!) and claiming the attack was unprecedented (no one has ever been hacked like this before!) isn't really endearing you to the Home crowd. (Yes, that pun was intentional. And terrible.) This sort of irritated tone lacks the contriteness that those of us who have supported Sony for far too long would like to see. I suppose we're supposed to feel grateful for your swift turnaround time, but if you're ... (EMAILWIRE.COM, May 21, 2011 ) Free bingo site City Bingo now allows customers to play free bingo around the clock. Many of the online bingo providers offer games of free bingo but this latest scheme from the metropolitan bingo site means that games can be played with no deposit throughout out the... Hugh Pickens writes "Drawing on cognitive science, an increasing number of game theorists and designers say that our growing love of video games has important things to tell us about our intrinsic desires and motivations. Central to it all is a simple theory - that games are fun because they teach us interesting things and they do it in a way that our brains prefer - through systems and puzzles. 'With games, learning is the drug,' writes Raph Koster, the designer of seminal multiplayer fantasy games such as Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies. 'In game theory, this is often spoken of as the "magic circle": you enter into a realm where the rules of the real world don't apply - and typically being judged on success and failure is part of the real world. People need to feel free to try things and to learn without being judged or penalised.' Another important element is autonomy as games tap into our need to have control. This is very obvious in 'god games' such as The Sims, where we shape the lives of virtual humans, but it's becoming a vital element of action adventures and ... When I met with the top executives from GameStop a few weeks ago, the focus of the conversation was the Grapevine-based video game retailers strong moves into digital distribution. But I also asked about the impact from game makers putting one-time-use codes into their games. These codes generally grant buyers access to standard components such as online multiplayer. However, these codes are only good for a single use. If the original owner sells the game (to, say, GameStop), and another gamer buys that used title, that original code no longer works, and all the cool goodies are inaccessible. However, the publisher will offer that gamer the option of buying a new code for $10 or so. The reason publishers are doing this is because they feel that used games are unfairly sapping their profits, that gamers either shouldn't have the right to buy used games or that the publishers should get some cut of that used sale. GameStop argues that letting gamers sell their old titles in for credit actually boosts the sale of new games (sell two or three of your old games and buy one new one), but the publishers never seem to have embraced ... share: digg facebook twitter The lure this time is "RewardVille," a show of appreciation aimed at getting players even more absorbed in their online farms, cities, crime rings and poker games. All games are free to play, but players can pay real money — a few coins or dollars at a time — to buy special items or reach a higher level of play more quickly. Since CEO Mark Pincus launched the San Francisco startup in 2007, Zynga has attracted about 250 million game players — most of whom connect on Facebook's even larger Web hangout. Marc Andreessen, who helped trigger an Internet boom in the mid-1990s after co-founding Web browser pioneer Netscape Communications, already bought a stake for his venture capital firm. Zynga makes most of its money through the sale of virtual items in its games, with the rest from advertising and partnerships with companies such as Netflix or Vistaprint on special offers. Ian Bogost, a game designer and Georgia Tech professor who studies video games, likened its games to fast food — mass-produced fare with little nutritional value. Facebook last year changed the way it notifies users about games so that people ... Sony has announced that it will soon release an official PlayStation application for the iPhone and for Android smartphones. Sony's PlayStation app will let you view your PlayStation Network trophies, check your friend's games and online status updates, find new games and news for the PlayStation 3, PSP, and PlayStation 2, and read up on announcements from the European PlayStation blog. Its social networking features will allow you to share news and favorite games with Facebook, Twitter, or via e-mail. Sony says the first version will be available in the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and The Netherlands. It says the next version will support most European countries and languages and that it's planning lots of new features. The app will be free and will run on the iPhone and iPod touch running iOS 4 and newer, and Android smartphones running Android 1.6 or newer. There's no word on a U.S. version yet. Read the full story here. Catering to fans' growing belief that a TV show should live on in other forms of media, cable network Starz is launching the series _Spartacus: Gods of the Arena_, a Facebook game and an iPad app. The… Light bulb moments happen frequently in the tech world. You might be driving home from a day job and think: what if I created a social network for dog owners? Or how could I capitalize on the iPhone's popularity and build my own app? Unlike some other industries, costs for starting a tech company can inflate quickly -- for Web hosting, servers, and hiring a staff. Yet, these brand new tech start-ups took a brilliant idea and turned it into a fledgling company that is ready to take on the world. Here's how each business owner started their company, how the technology works, and their projections for success. **ThredUP** ThredUP started in October 2009 as the brainchild of James Reinhart (his official bio says he is the "Chief Knitwit"). Initially, the site allowed you to send in a shirt you didn't want anymore and receive a shirt in the mail at a low cost -- almost like a NetFlix for clothes. Reinhart says, around the time he and his wife were expecting their first child, he kept hearing from customers who wanted a service for swapping out kid's clothing. The site re- focused and revamped, then ... What's new for iPhone, iPad, Android and Nokia on 19 May 2011 A burst of 11 apps for your consideration ## Angry Hipsters The title may have some of you rolling your eyes – yes, this IS Angry Birds redone with a cast seemingly plucked from a Shoreditch bar. However, the interesting aspect is its use of music service Hype Machine to stream in music for the soundtrack on the fly, complete with buy buttons for songs that players like. The downside may be the data usage, though. ## Chaos Rings Ω The un-SEO friendly Chaos Rings Ω is a game from Square Enix that acts as a prequel to its well-received iOS RPG Chaos Rings. The publisher has also taken the unusual step of pre-announcing the updates to the game – six will come over the next six months with new content and level caps. ## TGCxELLEgirl Digital Magazine The Tokyo Girls Collection (TGC) fashion show apparently attracts 20,000 visitors, eager to check out the latest Japanese fashion trends. Now it has an app in partnership with Elle Girl, offering a mixture of photos, videos and music from this year's event. ## Relict Racer 3R Studio's Relict Racer ... Anyone with a PS3 version of the latest Call of Duty games has come face-to- face with a harsh truth: people cheat. But unfortunately, unlike the Xbox 360 and PC versions of the same games, the developer's safeguards to keep the online servers free from these cheaters isn't exactly working. read more "The reality is that the habit of reading a broadsheet is not something that is for everybody." Sony Online Entertainment, the publisher behind games such as DC Universe Online and Free Realms, revealed they have temporarily taken down their ... save a buck, online, free, websites, kid friendly, teach, educate, fun, children, learn, grandkids, educational games, puzzles, teachers. Mobile giant Nokia has begun offering its upcoming C7 smartphone for a pre- order price of £359.99, precluding the first glut of contract deals which are likely follow this announcement. The C7 is the natural sibling of the brand new N8, as it has the fresh Symbian 3 operating system onboard and is also blessed with [...] We love mobile phones Nokia C7 £359.99 sim free Storage giant Seagate is announcing today the first mobile wireless storage device for iOS devices (iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches). The GoFlex mobile wireless storage device is a battery-powered external hard drive that can wirelessly extend the storage capacity of any Wi-Fi-enabled device. The device can store 500 gigabytes of data and extend a device's storage via 802.11 b/g/n wireless networking. It has enough storage capacity to back up the entire library of video, music, pictures and documents that most people have on their mobile devices. The devices can connect directly to the GoFlex Satellite drive via a free GoFlex Media app now available on iTunes and the Apple app store. GoFlex Satellite is available at online retailers such as Seagate.com, Amazon and BestBuy.com for $199. It is expected to arrive in Best Buy stores in July. Global availability is expected in the summer. The Seagate device comes with a rechargeable battery, and it has a stand-by battery life of 25 hours and an operational battery life of five hours. Most mobile devices don't have much storage for things like video, games or other media. Patrick Connolly, vice president and general manager of Seagate's retail group, said that as ...
Key Words: free games online

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