Category Archives: gaming

How much are we playing video games? Check out these stats from Halo 4

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Well here are some stats from the first week of Halo 4’s release:

Over four million people played Halo 4 on Xbox LIVE in the first five days, as well a lo t of people look for bonuses for online casino games at bonuses.co.uk.
31.4 million hours were spent playing Halo 4 in the first five days.
1,116,882 people completed the Campaign in the first five days.
4,590,416,285 kills were earned playing Halo 4 on Xbox LIVE in the first five days.

Source: http://blogs.halowaypoint.com/Headlines/post/2012/11/14/The-Halo-Bulletin-111412-.aspx

Unity 4.0 released!

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For those that have been waiting for the latest version of the game engine Unity well its out. Here is a press release (source) that has a breakdown of the features. For more details please visit Unity here.

“Unity 4.0 Launches

San Francisco – November 14, 2012 – Unity Technologies, provider of the Unity multi-platform engine and development tools, is proud to announce Unity 4.0 is now available for download. Unity 4, announced in June, will consist of a series of updates designed to improve the product through an extensive improvement of existing tech and the rollout of new features.

The first in a series of updates for Unity 4, this version includes significant additions such as DirectX 11 support and Mecanim animation tools. In addition users will have access to a Linux deployment preview and the Adobe® Flash® Player deployment add-on.

“Unity 4 will see the addition of an incredible number of new, highly advanced, features and continuous improvement across the tech to be released in smaller, faster increments than Unity has seen in the past,” said David Helgason, CEO, Unity Technologies. “It’s an exciting time for Unity and the 4.0 release marks the beginning of a great new era for our technology.”

Mecanim – Stunning Character Animation
Mecanim, Unity’s powerful and innovative animation technology, is setting new industry standards for tools in integrated development environments allowing the creation of complex state machines, blend trees, IK rigging, and auto retarget animations to characters of different sizes and shapes, all inside of the Unity editor. Developers will find a sizeableselection of retargetable animations available in the Unity Asset Store: http://unity3d.com/unity/asset-store/.

DirectX 11
With the ability to take advantage of full DirectX 11 support, including shader model 5, tessellation for smoother models and environments in game worlds, and compute shaders for advanced GPU computation, Unity 4.0 empowers developers. DirectX 11 support development was aided by development of the Butterfly Effect demo: http://unity3d.com/promo/butterfly/.

High-end Visual Capabilities for All Platforms
Unity 4.0 also features real-time shadows on mobile, skinned mesh instancing, the ability to use normal maps when bakinglightmaps, and a refined GPU profiler. It’s easy to make extremely high-end visuals that scale across the best of what’s available on modern PCs and the most advanced mobile graphics chips.

Adobe Flash Player Add-on
The Adobe Flash Player deployment add-on will empower developers to publish their new and existing titles to one of the world’s most ubiquitous gaming platforms on the web. With the wealth of incredible features in the 4.0 release, Unity is the most powerful development pipeline for creating high quality 2D and 3D content for Adobe Flash Player. The add-on is now available for sale in the Unity store: https://store.unity3d.com/.

Linux Publishing Preview
Unity 4.0 will also include a preview of a new deployment option to publish games to Desktop Linux, clearing a path for the Unity community to bring exciting new content to the PC market’s most voracious indie gamers. Desktop Linux standalone publishing will be available for allUnity 4 users at no additional cost.

Unity 4 introduces many additional features and improvements, including:
● Shuriken particle system supports external forces, bent normals, automatic culling, and environmental collisions
● 3D texture support
● Navigation: dynamic obstacles and avoidance priority
● Major optimizations in GUI performance and memory usage
● Dynamic fonts on all platforms with HTML-like markup
● Remote Unity Web Player debugging
● New Project Window workflows
● Iterative lightmap baking
● Refined component-based workflows
● Extensible inspectors for custom classes
● Improved Cubemap import pipeline
● Geometry data improvements for huge memory and performance savings
● Meshes can be constructed from non-triangle geometry – render points & lines efficiently

Unity 4 and the Adobe Flash Player add-on for Unity are now available for purchase at the Unity store (https://store.unity3d.com/).“

Halo 4 released 11.6.2012

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The sequel to Halo 3 will be released tomorrow and I thought I would post some interesting stuff about this game because it has changed gaming tremendously.

There are some awesome things about this game, including the fact that there is a movie that Microsoft created for it (which cost 10 million) called Forward Unto Dawn.

First some stats:

*Preorders of Halo 4 are 1,179,659 as of last week.
*Sales of Halo games in general just totaled 46 million.
*The Halo 4 soundtrack debuted at number 50 in the top billboard charts last week, a first for a video game
*Additionally, the Limited Edition of the game has been sold out for months. Have you ever heard of a video game selling out?

Now for those that do not know, MLG (Major League Gaming) which is the professional video game league will be using Halo 4 in competition just as it has the other Halo games. And for those that do not know, MLG pros can make millions of $$$ a year.

For more info on Halo 4, check out the website here

To watch the Halo Movie, Forward Unto Dawn, use the following videos. Microsoft has been kind enough to release the movie online for free in 5 clips. The 2 minute trailer is first if you want to preview what will take 90 minutes to watch:

Gaming statistics

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I have lost the source for these but here they are. I did find an infographic with the same stats though. These are from 2009/2010:

– 15 Billion $ industry (70 billion by 2015)
– 20 million xbox live players have spent 17 billion hours on it
– 58% Male/42% female
– More people spend time on games than email. The only electronic thing they spend more time on – social networking
– 5,901 Years…Spent Online In Halo: Reach’s First Week
– 3.3 Million…Day One Sales Of Cataclysm
– $650 Million…In First Week Of Black Ops Release
– 54% of gamers play online an average of 8 hours a week
– Average age: 25-44
– Average income: 35k-75k

Atari game sells for $10,000

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Absolutely insane. I am not sure why anyone would care to buy this. The game was made for atari by an independent person. The game was not even known to exist until someone bought it at a yardsale in 2007 and verified that it was real. I do get paying more money if someone found the original game disk from the company (like the test copy) for a popular game – and by more money I mean maybe $100 to a huge fan. But 10k on a game that no one will ever play and no one even knew existed?

Article here