This Week in Gaming - December 7-12th

Each week I plan to cover the past week's latest news surrounding the world of gaming, including major tournament results, headline gaming news & headlines and notable games releases and updates.

Gaming News

First up, I'd like to high-jack my own weekly gaming news write-up to inform you that Crossfire has got their hands on a number of Tribes: Ascend Beta Keys. With so many Triple A shooters not fulfilling the needs of the Enemy Territory player, Tribes may offer a worthy compliment to many Crossfire users. You can check the relevant newspost here.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 has smashed even more industry records as the title reached the $1bn (£640m) sales mark in just 16 days since launch, one day quicker than blockbuster films Avatar and Harry Potter. Activision Blizzard, the software manufacturer behind the series, released this information to the public on Monday and it is the latest in a long line of records broken by the series - as I mentioned before in my column about Modern Warfare 3. To put the latest instalment of the Call of Duty series in perspective, the predecessor to MW3 - Call of Duty: Black Ops - did not reach $1bn until almost 2 months after launch. Last month, Activision announced that their profits tripled in the 3rd quarter, backing up their bold claim that the gaming industry is becoming just as important as film or television.

For those of you who regularly pirate the Football Manager series, you will undoubtedly have been frustrated by the anti-piracy measures taken by developers Sports Interactive, as they moved their product to Steam for online activation. For some die-hard supporters of the series, the new measures were a turn-off and the cause of much controversy. But the results speak for themselves as a spokesperson for Sports Interactive pointed out in a recent interview with Eurogamer:

Quote

We got cracked after 10 days, which is actually 15 days less than normal – normally we’re cracked the weekend before release. Of course it could be because we’ve got the best game that we’ve ever released this year and loads of people have rushed out and bought it, but there were definitely people on the forums that were talking about a pirated version of the game who were, after four or five days, posting that, ‘I can’t wait any more, I’m going out and buying the game.

In stark contrast to Ubisoft's views that the PC platform is obsolete thanks to pirates, Sports Interactive took a pragmatic approach through launching with Steam, causing little to no bother for genuine purchasing supporters, while providing tough anti-piracy measures for regular downloaders.

This week saw the release of another Diablo 3 intro cinematic. First shown at the Spike Video Game Awards, the cinematic depicts the struggles of series stalwart Deckard Cain and his adopted daughter Leah. Once again, Blizzard shows the world that they can make some visually stunning CGI trailers and there will be yet more calls for them to move their creations to the cinema screens for a feature length movie. The trailer can be found here.

eSports

This year's instalment of the World Cyber Games was hosted in Busan, South Korea over the weekend just gone. The three premier tournaments were covered here live on Crossfire by Noorgrin and can be found here. With the upcoming launch of Crossfire 4 and a greater interest from the userbase for other eSports titles, we hope to provide brief competition coverage from all major events such as we've done recently with the Major League Gaming: Pro Circuit and DreamHack Series. To summarise the Grand Finals:

StarCraft II[/u]
MVP vs XiGua 2-0

CounterStrike 1.6[/u]
SK Gaming vs ESC Gaming 1-2

League of Legends[/u]
CDE vs Gameburg Team 2-0

The finals of the Dota 2 Star Championship finished yesterday and the Russian's The Retry became the first team to beat Na'Vi in a LAN tournament of Dota 2. First place netted a cool $10,000 and despite the game still being in the Beta phase it continues to produce quality LAN competition time after time.

Notable Releases

With most of the big titles being released a few weeks ago in order to build sales for Christmas, there are few new notable releases at this time (though if there is one major one I've missed, feel free to comment!) With this in mind I thought that this is a great place to showcase the Steam Sale which for the past 2 weeks has offered so many amazing games for absolutely ridiculously low prices. Orcs Must Die, a single-player Tower Defence/Hack & Slash hybrid sold for as little as £2.99. Terraria went on sale for a similar price, as did Dungeon Defenders.

For all the latest gaming news check out crossfire.nu - a gaming community.