Business, Financial & Legal - Page 115

When was the last time you purchased a game for your PC from an actual retailer? If you're like me, every game you purchase is digital - either through Steam, Origin or even a service like GOG.com. Well, according to DFC Intelligence, 92% of PC game sales for last year were digital, leaving just 8% to physical copies.

Payday 2 publisher Starbreeze saw 80% of its first-month sales of 1.58 million copies being digital. But then titles like DotA 2 and DayZ were completely digital, adding to that huge 92%. Rewinding back to 2010, digital PC sales made up 48% of all PC sales, so we've seen a huge increase of 44% over the last three years.

But then powerhouse publisher EA has only seen 20% of its total sales being digital, but EA have titles on virtually every platform available to gamers, with games in both physical, and digital form.

An Apple shareholder is suing the estate of deceased founder and CEO Steve Jobs, claiming that his actions compromised the company's value and put stock holders at risk.

In particular, R Andre Klein's complaint lies with Steve Jobs' hiring agreements with other Silicon Valley companies, which essentially amounted to a no-poaching agreement. Critics say that in effect, this secret deal could have stagnated wages and prevented workers from getting what they were due. Klein, who is filing on behalf of all Apple shareholders, says that this behavior violates the US Securities and Exchange act.

"Jobs's conduct is a reminder that even widely respected businessmen can knowingly commit unlawful acts in the zealous pursuit of profits," it was stated in court papers. "In this case, Jobs and the other individual defendants knowingly caused Apple to enter into agreements that violated California law and US antitrust laws." The present CEO of Apple, Tim Cook, is also a defendant. Klein is seeking a payment from Apple for damages to shareholders, Sky reports.

Way back in 2000 a man named Neil Stammer was accused of sex crimes involving a child as well as kidnapping and other charges in New Mexico. The man was released on bond and then he skipped town and remained at large for 14 years. He was recently captured after facial recognition tech was used on his photograph.

The case was shelved years ago after no new evidence surfaced and the criminal couldn't be located. Things changed earlier this year when the Diplomatic Security Service began using facial recognition tech to crack down on bogus US passports. Authorities ran the facial recognition tech on Stammer's old photo and came up with a match.

The old photo matched a photo of a man named Kevin Hodges, who was actually Stammer living under a new name in Nepal. Stammer was teaching English to children there and was described as "comfortable" in Nepal.

Twitch has landed itself in some hot water in the last 48 hours, with some changes after its acquisition by YouTube. 24 hours ago, the company announced it was undergoing some serious changes that would see the use of unauthorized music in Twitch streams silenced for 30-minute periods.

Emmett Shear, Twitch's CEO, took to Reddit to answer some questions from users. The new rules about the use of unauthorized music don't apply to live broadcasts, and it will not affect games that feature original compositions. Reddit users were firing off some good points, that will see Rock Band playthrough videos muted because of the music that is copyrighted within the game.

The company was quick on pushing through changes though, where Twitch took to a blog explaining the new changes, that come after the news of the changes from yesterday. The maximum time limits applied to highlights have now been removed, and the company has said it is rolling out an "appeal" button for videos that have been flagged as violations. What do you think of these changes? Do you think Twitch has been sucked up into the big bad world of mega corporations that is Google?

We hear plenty about recalls of faulty cars for defects that can cause injury to owners, but we rarely hear about TVs being recalled. TV maker Vizio has done just that with a recall that has been expanded to cover 245,000 E-Series TVs that were sold between late 2013 and mid-2014.

The TVs covered in the recall are 39-inch and 42-inch units and the recall is due to faulty stands that cause an increased risk of tip over. This can be particularly problematic for homes with small children who are more likely to be injured if the TV tips over.

The TVs in the recall include model numbers E390-B0, E390i-B0, and E420i-B0 sold between December 2013 and June 2014. Vizio says that the defect that can lead to tip over isn't visible on the outside of the TV. No injuries have been reported, but 51 TVs in the recalled line have tipped over.

The social network for people who have to wear ties on a day to day basis, LinkedIn, has been forced by the US Department of Labor to pay out 6 million USD after being found guilty of breaking wage laws.

LinkedIn was found to have broken federal wage laws in California, Illinois, Nebraska and New York, and subsequently had to pay over 3 million in back wages, plus over 2.5 million in damages to 359 people, including former employees and those still at the firm. Although the company was caught out by the Department of Labor, it did praise LinkedIn for how it responded - agreeing to pay every cent and taking steps to ensure it didn't happen again.

"Talent is LinkedIn's number one priority, so of course, we were eager to work closely with the Dept. of Labor to quickly and equitably rectify this situation," a spokesperson for LinkedIn said to CNET. "This was a function of not having the right tools in place for a small subset of our sales force to track hours properly; prior to the DoL approaching us, we had already begun to remedy this."

Douglas Ladore has submitted a complaint with the California Northern District federal court, where he is claiming that Sony promised 1080p single and multiplayer graphics in its advertisements and interviews for Killzone: Shadow Fall before the game was released in November 2013.

On Killzone: Shadow Fall's packaging, it clearly shows a "1080p HD video output" logo on the back. Killzone's multiplayer renders the game at 960x1080, which is half of the 1920x1080 that "1080p" or "Full HD" is. In order to output the full 1920x1080 resolution, this source image has something called "temporal upscale" applied to it, something that fills the gaps with a horizontal interlace containing pixels from the previous frame. The result is graphical performance that the lawsuit, and reviewers across the world claim call "blurry to the point of distraction".

Guerrilla Games, the developer behind Killzone, along with Sony, took to a blog post to address the concerns of this "temporal projection" method. The companies said that it provides "subjectively similar results" to rendering at the full 1080p resolution. Ladore's lawsuit wasn't happy with this, where he argues: "While this reconstruction technique might be novel, it is decidedly not the 'native 1080p' Sony promised". But was anyone hurt from the result of this resolution downgrade in Killzone? Not directly.

During its investor relations conference call yesterday, Activision Publishing boss Eric Hirshberg was asked about game pre-orders, and how they are going with the slew of games Activision has coming out this year. This includes some of the biggest titles coming, including Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare and Destiny.

Hirshberg said that pre-order numbers were down, but not just with his company, but across the entire industry. Hirshberg attributed this drop to increased digital consumption, especially on the Xbox One and PS4. Another reason is that games are made available widely when they are released, so there's not much of an incentive to pre-order. These two factors, along with the fact that a decline overall for the last generation of consoles means that pre-orders are down.

Activision is now looking at other ways it can determine how popular its upcoming games will be, as it used to judge this by pre-order numbers. new methods could include "purchase intent" and "awareness" of a title, with Hirshberg saying: "It's important to note that pre-orders are just one data point that we look at when determining the momentum of a franchise". When it comes to Destiny, Hirshberg says Destiny's awareness is "at an all-time high and climbing when compared to any other new game intellectual property this distance from launch. Purchase intent is also at an all-time high and rising compared to any other intellectual property. The hugely successful open beta, which saw 4.6m players, probably had something to do with that. So all of those add to our sense of momentum for the launch".

The Union Street Guest House in Hudson, New York has had couples booking weddings at their venue, but if they, or any of their guests or family leave a bad review on sites like Yelp, they will fine them $500 for every bad review found online.

The hotel's online policy explains: "Please know that despite the fact that wedding couples love Hudson and our inn, your friends and families may not. If you have booked the inn for a wedding or other type of event . . . and given us a deposit of any kind . . . there will be a $500 fine that will be deducted from your deposit for every negative review . . . placed on any internet site by anyone in your party".

But it's not all doom and gloom, because if you remove your review, the hotel will refund you the $500. For negative reviews on the hotel, employees will come in trolling, saying things like the post was "mean spirited nonsense" and "she made all of this up". The hotel fired back at one of the negative reviews over the rude treatment over a bucket of ice, where the hotel said: "I know you guys wanted to hang out and get drunk for 2 days and that is fine. I was really really sorry that you showed up in the summer when it was 105 degrees . . . I was so so so sorry that our ice maker and fridge were not working and not accessible".

Some GameStop customers have had to provide their fingerprints when they traded in their used games in some of the Philadelphia-based stores in the US. GameStop is using fingerprints to help authorities track criminals who trade-in used games.

One employee at GameStop talked with Kotaku, where they said that the new anti-crime measure has been in place for around a month now. One of the reasons behind the new system is that GameStop stores in the city received a mandate from GameStop's corporate HQ after Philadelphia police asked if they could offer stronger security measures.

This employee said that customers of GameStop in these fingerprint scanning equipped stores can no longer trade in games if they don't provide their fingerprints. The fingerprints that are collected are uploaded onto the online database Leads Online, according to the Philadelphia Police Department, reports CBS Philadelphia. According to customers of these GameStop stores that CBS Philadelphia interviewed, they aren't happy with these '1984' style measures, which makes them all feel like they're being treated like criminals.

Apple has announced that it plans to shed about 200 workers from Beats Electronics after it takes over. Apple gobbled up Beats in a deal worth about $3 billion this year. A person familiar with the restructuring plans says that Beats workers in human resources, finance, and other roles with overlap between Beats and Apple will be let go.

The source claiming to know Apple's plans didn't want to be identified since the plans aren't public at this time. Beats was the largest purchase in Apple history and gains Apple a line of high-end headphones and a streaming music service.

No official comment has been made by Apple or Beats at this time on the layoffs. The Beats headphones often sell for hundreds of dollars per set making them high-end and a good fit with Apple's high-end product mix.

We only just reported that most of Crytek's leadership at its Texas, US-based studios had left, but now we have just found out that Deep Silver have acquired the rights to Homefront: The Revolution from the struggling studio. Deep Silver will continue development of the game at its new Nottingham-based studio.

A new studio called Deep Silver Dambuster Studios will now get to work on Homefront: The Revolution, which is still expected to launch in 2015 for the Xbox One, PS4 and PC. Hasit Zala, who was the Director on the game with Crytek, left Crytek a few weeks ago, but has reemerged as the lead for the game at the new studio.

Crytek only purchased the rights to Homefront from THQ during its bankruptcy in early 2013, but are now going through their own financial issues. Crytek's press release on the matter explains: "Firstly, Crytek has been in extensive discussions with leading producer and distributor of digital entertainment products, Koch Media, regarding the acquisition of rights for the "Homefront" IP. On completion of the proposed acquisition, the Homefront team from Crytek's Nottingham studio would transfer their talents to Koch Media in compliance with English law and continue their hard work on upcoming shooter, "Homefront: The Revolution". Both parties hope to finalise and implement a deal soon".

Netflix has been fighting to improve video streaming quality for a number of its users. The way it is fixing many of these streaming issues is by paying the ISPs for peering deals that improve video quality. The latest company to put its hands in Netflix's pockets is AT&T.

AT&T and Netflix have announced a new peering deal that will help reduce buffering when users on the AT&T network are watching Netflix. The peering deal kicked off on Tuesday of this week according to two people who claim to be familiar with the deal.

No word on the financial terms of the agreement has been offered. "We reached an interconnect agreement with Netflix in May and since then have been working together to provision additional interconnect capacity to improve the viewing experience for our mutual subscribers,'' an AT&T spokeswoman said in the statement."We're now beginning to turn up the connections, a process that should be complete in the coming days."

Crytek has been going some tough times lately, not paying its employees on time, key talent leaving, and more, but the German studio behind CryEngine and Crysis has finally made a formal statement to GamesIndustry.

The company said that it "has been in a transitional phase" as it changes from being a developer to an online publisher, something that requires considerable sums of money. Crytek said that it has secured the money required, and is better prepared for the long term, but added that "we won't be communicating further details about our developments and progress".

The full statement we have below:

It was only a few days ago that the now privately-owned Dell opened up another payment option: bitcoin. Now the company has announced that its subsidiary arm, Alienware, also accepts the digital currency as payment for its custom-made goods.

Alienware took to Twitter to announce the news, with @Alienware saying: "Alienware now accepts Bitcoin! For a limited time, get up to $150 off when using this payment method! https://www.alienware.com/". As you can see, Alienware is actually offering $150 off any purchase on its goods when using bitcoin, which is a nice way of attracting some new customers.

Google is offering a new prize for anyone who can build a better power Inverter. The price is a cool $1 million and it is being offered as part of the little box challenge. To win designers need to build a better small-scale power inverter than is available today.

What Google and the other firms backing the prize are looking for is a kW-scale power inverter with a density of at least 50W per cubic inch. Some believe that a power inverter of this type will allow the unlocking of billions of dollars of commercial value from the electric grid.

Starting next year, the British government will decriminalize online video game, music and movie piracy, as well as totally removing harsher punishment plans after it has considered them unworkable. In 2015, file sharers will be sent four warning letters telling them of their activity being illegal, but after the fourth letter, no more correspondence will take place.

The British government has called this new scheme the Voluntary Copyright Alert Programme (VCAP), and has arrived after many years of discussions between ISPs, British politicians, and the movie and music industries. This has involved the UK's biggest providers - BT, TalkTalk, Virgin and Sky - with each of them signing up for VCAP, leading the way for the smaller providers to soon join them.

The newly installed scheme will replace anti-piracy measures that are already in place across the country, which included cutting users' Internet connections, as well as creating an ever-growing database of known file sharers. Chief Executive of the BPI, Geoff Taylor talked about VCAP, where he said that: "persuading the persuadable, such as parents who do not know what is going on with their net connection". He added: "VCAP is not about denying access to the internet. It's about changing attitudes and raising awareness so people can make the right choice".

That infamous hawker of hype and high-price handsets, Apple Corporation, has just posted its quarterly profits - of 7.75 billion dollars, up a very respectable 12 percent compared to the same time last year.

It claimed the runaway success of its latest iPhone models is to thank for the strong growth, as well as a swelling of its business in China, where revenue was boosted 28 percent to reach 5.9 billion dollars. The company brought in over 10.3 billion in operational cash flow, it said. "Our record June quarter revenue was fueled by strong sales of iPhone and Mac and the continued growth of revenue from the Apple ecosystem, driving our highest EPS growth rate in seven quarters," Tim Cook, Apple's CEO, said in a statement. "We are incredibly excited about the upcoming releases of iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite, as well as other new products and services that we can't wait to introduce."

For now it looks like the hype train is showing no signs of stopping, as the entire blogosphere speculates on what's next for the iconic iPhone. What's a little less on everyone's lips, though, is the iPad - sales of which happened to plummet for a second quarter in a row, down by a pretty substantial nine percent to 13.3 million.

The lure of bitcoins has potential suitors interested in learning about the cryptocurrency, but after losing 45 percent of value in 2013, the slide will continue in 2014, Bloomberg Global Poll respondents noted. The value peaked at $1,100, but dropped, with some financial analysts wondering if the bitcoin bubble popped already.

Over half of survey respondents (55 percent) said bitcoins and other virtual cryptocurrencies have unsustainable currency trades, with 14 percent also saying bitcoin is closing in on a bubble - while 6 percent are optimistic and say no financial bubble is currently forming. The last 25 percent said they are unsure of what's going to happen with the currency.

An assortment of businesses and retailers accept bitcoin for payment, but some financial specialists and government officials aren't drinking the Kool-Aid just yet. It's difficult because bitcoin values have varied in 2014, from a low of $341 up to $900, while currently valued at $623 per bitcoin - and headlines find bitcoin more during controversies than victories.

PC manufacturer Dell is the latest major company to join the bitcoin cryptocurrency bandwagon, with CEO Michael Dell confirming the announcement. Dell has partnered with Coinbase to help process payments, and the cryptocurrency receives a 1 percent processing fee following $1 million in sales.

"We've fostered a close partnership with the Dell team and that's been instrumental in getting the Coinbase integration up and running in such a short timeframe," said Fred Ehrsam, Coinbase co-founder, in a statement. "We look forward to continuing to support the team as they explore other ways to offer even more functionality when it comes to bitcoin payments."

The updated Dell 'Terms and Conditions' portion of the website indicates if a customer wants a refund from a bitcoin payment, they will receive a check in U.S. dollars.