Tag: unbranding the sheep

Over the past eight years, I have made the move from someone who occasionally writes about video games on my personal blog, to someone who’s run a large-scale fan site, to someone who wrote for a decent site, to someone who helped build up another site, to someone who is now paid to write about…

UK site gamesindustry.biz recently released a story about how gaming industry analyst Michael Patcher broke the seal on EA’s next step in Project Ten Dollar, by stating that the company is going to charge for premium DLC before release. Picture the demo for Battlefield: Bad Company 2 and imagine it costs money, and you essentially…

As a pro-consumer columnist, reporting on Activision makes me a lot of different feelings, usually at the same time. There is shock that a company can be so brazen about the fact that the ONLY thing they care about is profit, and anything else be damned. There is revulsion that a carpetbagger like Robert Kotick…

I use Apple products often. I own an iPhone, mainly because the alternative – the Blackberry – doesn’t really appeal to me. The fact that I already had AT&T as my wireless provider greased the skids. Therefore, I run iTunes on my PC, mainly because it’s mandatory for me to sync my iPhone, but also…

Last Friday, I reviewed the new PSP game SOCOM: U.S. Navy Seals Fireteam Bravo 3. I gave it a fairly positive write-up, and had no problems getting into the online component of the game, even if there was a sparse number of people due to my review going up before the game’s release. With that…

We consistently harp on how the American video game industry is affected by various forces within it. Most of the time, we only care about how specific releases are affected, if American jobs are affected, or if American release dates are affected. It’s not often we really look into the Japanese game industry unless it’s…

Ubisoft is the latest company to cause a stink among gamers with their announcement that starting with The Settlers 7: Paths to a Kingdom beta, they are instituting a new DRM policy that requires a perpetual connection to internet for any of their games. Ironically, as the music industry decides to gradually back away from…

If you asked two different types of people about Electronic Arts’ CEO John Riccitiello, you would get two different answers. One group – gamers, or at least those that look past the yearly Madden release – would speak highly of him. Since taking over in 2007, he mended the damaged relationship between the company and…

With their latest 360 update, Microsoft has added the ability to download actual 360 titles to players’ hard drives. This is a significant step for Microsoft, who before this was only offering original XBox games and their XBLA and “Indie” game lineup to be downloaded. Unfortunately, like every step a company the size of Microsoft…