Business, Financial & Legal - Page 85

Nintendo has revealed a complete list of the most downloaded games from the eShop in both Japan and the rest of the world, showing off the advantages of allowing third-parties to use your platform.

Taking the place for most downloaded game in Japan is Minecraft, this shows just how big the game became again once it was released onto the Nintendo Switch. In other regions Stardew Valley has taken first place in the most downloads topping Minecraft, Sonic Mania and Rocket League. The full list of the games can be found below.

Japan:

According to the analyst group NPD group, Nintendo sold 1.5 million Nintendo Switch consoles in just the last month of 2017, topping every other console sales in the US once again.

At the beginning of last month Nintendo said that the Switch was the fastest-selling console in US history, selling around 4.8 million units since its release back in March on 2017.

Not only has the Switch sales been off the charts, but the Nintendo 3DS has also been reported to be selling extremely well coming in with 750,000 units being sold just last month. Nintendo has said that the 3DS has sold a "27 percent increase over the same period a year ago."

Nintendo has just announced they're bringing out cardboard cut-outs to the world of gaming with Nintendo Labo, following Nintendo Direct Mini event which was just a couple of weeks ago.

Nintendo never disappoint with their motivation to be the leading company of innovative ideas in the gaming industry. Keeping up the pace of fresh ideas, Nintendo has now announced Nintendo Labo, a customizable accessory kit made out of cardboard for Nintendo Switch users.

Nintendo Labo will open the door to another widespread of games that will be available on the Switch, users will be able to make, play and discover the 5 different Nintendo Labo projects that are available. Users are encouraged to step out of their creativity boxes and take Labo to a whole different level by creating their own projects with the Labo cardboard.

Single-player games have had their cost of development increased by tenfold, according to Remedy Entertainments' Head of Communications, Thomas Puha. In a recent interview published by GamesIndustry.biz, Puha explained that the "reality is the traditional AAA single player experience is just really expensive to make."

Puha explains that even when going back 10 years that the console market still "roughly the same size" while the costs of developing new and more creatively challenging games continues to rise. Puha discusses that gamers now days expect much more from developers products, an example of this is how long the game is or the production value of the specific title.

"The reality is the traditional AAA single player experience is just really expensive to make. The expectation level from gamers is really high in terms of how long the game is, what sort of features it has, how good the production values are. All those things are very expensive to do. And if you go back 10 years, you could still say the console market is roughly the same size. In the end, the audience you're selling to is relatively the same size but the cost of making the game is ten-fold these days. So that's an obvious problem" said Puha.

SteamSpy has been a gamers and reporters best-friend for finding out whether a game has an active community or if the game is underperforming in terms of statistics. The third-party site scrapes information from Steam, the numbers cannot be counted as exactly correct but it is an approximation nonetheless.

According to SteamSpy, Steam has had 7,672 games released on their platform over the course of 2017, meaning that on average there has been 19 games a day uploaded to the Steam Store. That number might be hard to eat if you are in agreement with there being too many games on the Steam store and not enough curation, but sadly that is the reality of it.

From the below chart, we can see that there were 4,207 games released on Steam in 2016 which equates for 38% of all games released on Steam. In 2015 only 2,964 games were released, knowing these statistics gives a great perspective on just how many games were released in 2016 and more worryingly how many were released in 2017.

Nintendo is rumored to host their new Nintendo Direct event sometime very soon, and with the huge success of their Switch console and the mix of Nintendo Russia telling gamers to 'Follow the news' and that something new is expected 'soon'.

Nintendo Russia hinted to 'watching the news' on the Russian carbon copy of Facebook VK, the company answered a question that was a fan asking about the rumored January Direct event, Nintendo Russia replied with "good afternoon! Follow the news - soon expected!"

This is a small amount to go on to be completely fair, but still doesn't mean that the possibility of Nintendo coming forward with an announcement in the coming days is impossible. The best guess we have got is to just watch the news in the coming days, maybe an announcement will happen after CES or maybe the company will just hold off a few more weeks.

Last year Sony Interactive Entertainments CEO and president Andrew House's stepped down from leading the company and John Kodera replaced him and the role. Kodera has now taken to Twitter to announce that Sony fans will not have to worry about Sony becoming a 'games as a service' type of company.

Sony's John Kodera has taken to Twitter to say that Sony fans will not have to worry about their company steering towards 'games as a service' as that appears to be the last thing on the developers minds. Kodera has said that "PlayStation's vision is totally different" from 'games as a service' meaning that Sony is going to be sticking by a linear type storyline that includes a start and finish, instead a infinite amount of DLCs and updates.

An example of another company sticking by the single-player genre, that is also relative to Sony, is Naughty Dog. Last year at the PlayStation Experience, Naughty Dog's director Neil Druckmann announced that the company "will forever continue to make single-player, linear, narrative-based games" reinforcing the already great choice of upcoming single-player titles on the PlayStation platform.

Starting on January 10, the Overwatch League has its debut, and now the only streaming service that fans of the game will find the tournament on is Twitch, as Twitch has made purchased the rights of the game for a massive $90 million.

According to Sports Business Daily , Twitch has struck a deal with Activision Blizzard for exclusivity broadcasting rights for Overwatch League. The deal is reportedly the biggest exclusivity deal in eSports history and will provide fans of the game a selection of different languages to view it in so no one misses out. The stream will be broadcasted in Korean, English and French and everywhere except China.

The deal is believed to spread over a two-year time period which gives access to viewers the first two seasons of Overwatch League. Viewers will also be able to participate in a "viewership reward system" which grants in-game rewards that are Overwatch League inspired loot.

Paying for Google services has previously been a struggle as Google didn't have a unified payment platform, forcing users into fiddling with multiple applications such as Google Wallet and Android Pay. But this will all change with Google announcing that a new consolidated payment option is on the way, dubbed Google Pay.

Originally the first Google NFC-activated payment option was called Google Wallet, then it was decided that the name was to be changed to Android Pay and now the titan company wants to bring all of its payment options under a single umbrella titled Google Pay. In attempts to keep the competition interesting between Apple and Google, Google Pay can be used for all of Google's services such as the Play Store and all NFC-enabled payment transactions for Google products.

The re-branding stage is already underway as Google Pay has been spotted in several locations such as AirBnB, Dice, Fandango, HungryHouse and Instacart. Google says that the "Bringing everything into one brand is just the first step for Google Pay" so we can expect that as the year continues on we will be hearing more updates for the new service as more convenience is supplied to Google's users.

Steam has reached a new milestone for overall player count with just over 18 million gamers being recorded to be using the platform, surpassing the last milestone of 17 million in just over a month.

The last milestone that Steam hit was back in November 2016 when the service reached over 17 million users at once, in just over a month that milestone has been broken and a new one has been set. The specific number found on the Steam stats website is a huge peak of 18,528,722 concurrent users, the game taking the largest chunk of those players was none other than Battlegrounds, coming in with just over 3 million chicken dinner hungry gamers.

According to the graphs, the game taking second place on the leader-board is Dota 2, pulling in 780,061 players. Following up second place is Counter-Strike: Global Offensive with 637,510 players, then a massive drop in player count occurs as Grand Theft Auto V comes in with fourth place with a peak of 168,575 players.

Yesterday, Apple released a press release detailing its success over the festive season, more specifically the App Store pulled in $300 million on New Years Day alone.

During the festive week starting on Christmas Eve, Apple broke its last standing record of customer purchases made within the App Store, with$890 million spent in a seven day period. Phil Schiller, Apple marketing chief reacted to the sales record saying that he was "thrilled" to see customers venturing out and finding new apps and games to enjoy.

Topping the charts for the most downloaded app was the augmented reality game Pokemon GO, with Apple saying AR titles are among some of the most popular apps on the App Store at the moment, with titles including CSR Racing 2, Stack AR, Kings of Pool, Amazon, Wayfair, Night Sky, Pitu, and Snapchat adding to the mass downloads over the holiday season.

An ex-NSA contractor, Harold Martin has agreed to plead guilty to what could be the biggest theft of classified data in US history. Martin could face up to 10 years in prison for the single count of illegal retention of national security information.

Martin has been accused of stealing a massive 50TB of classified data from the NSA over the course of the 20 years that he was working there as a contractor. The government has not said what was done with the stolen data, but it is believed that the data stolen included elite hacking tools that Martin stole while working for Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corp, the very same firm that employed the whistle blower Edward Snowden.

According to Reuters, the stealing of classified information has caused Martin to be charged with a total of 19 other offenses, as it is alleged by the indictment that Martin also stole documents and information from US Cyber Command, the CIA and the National Reconnaissance Office.

Spotify is ringing in the New Year with a gigantic $1.6 billion lawsuit over alleged copyright infringement, with Wixen Music Publishing representing artists like Tom Petty, Missy Elliot, Stevie Nicks, and Neil Young.

The lawsuit was filed on December 29 and alleges that Spotify has infringed on copyright by using thousands of their songs without a proper license, with WMP seeking at least $1.6 billion in damages and injunctive relief. The lawsuit states that Spotify failed to "obtain the equivalent rights for the compositions".

The lawsuit continues, saying: "As a result, Spotify has built a billion dollar business on the backs of songwriters and publishers whose music Spotify is using, in many cases without obtaining and paying for the necessary licenses".

Amazon has an absolutely huge business that has tentacles in virtually everything these days, with the company announcing that Prime members shipped over 5 billion items in 2017.

Amazon announced the news amongst other statistics that showed their own Fire TV Stick and Echo Dot were the best-selling products purchased by Prime members in the US. Instant Pot was the most gifted item with Amazon's Wedding Registry, while the Instant Pot Cookbook was the book that Prime members gifted throughout 2017.

Throughout 2017, Amazon worked on Prime's non-shipping features like reserving early film screenings for Prime members, added new content to their video service, and more. Speaking about their video service, Amazon took home three Golden Globe nominations, too.

Facebook has over 2 billion users and is slowly growing as the titan company extends its reach to other countries that are not yet connected to the network. Having so many people connected to the same network provides a difficult task of regulating the information that is circling on the site, and now Facebook has now openly apologized for its poor efforts of failing to maintain their high standards of regulation.

According to ProPublica, a non-profit site, Facebook was sent 49 items which each contained hate speech and few containing acceptable expressions. From the crowd sourced pool of 900 items, Facebook has openly admitted that 22 of the cases that were sent and regulated by the companies reviewers were incorrectly monitored.

"We're sorry for the mistakes we have made, we must do better." said Facebook VP Justin Osofsky in a statement.

Amazon have been at constant battle with titan companies such as Google but now the tech giant Amazon wants to expand its online ad business by joining up with mobile ad houses.

Primordially an internet retailer, Amazon has ideas to link up promotions of their products with advertisements on TV. An example of this is if Amazon were releasing a new product a viewer would watch the ad on television first, then only to check their phone and have another related ad present there as well.

Amazon not only want to implement this new strategy of advertising but also want to expand other ways of advertising as well. Video ads are also in the pipeline for an increase in production, as well as creating what is known as "branded" videos with celebrities as hosts.

We all know about the Nigerian prince email scams that have been around for what feels like the beginning of time, and now a 67-year-old man has been arrested in connection with the scam, except he's shockingly not Nigerian royalty.

Michael Neu, a 67-year-old man in Slidell, Louisiana was arrested after an 18-month investigation in connection with Nigerian prince email scams. Neu is suspected of being a middle-man for a group in Nigeria that used the scam to make money from unsuspecting people (I still don't know how anyone could be stupid enough, but there's obviously a lot of them).

The Federal Trade Commission has a page dedicated to the Nigerian prince scam, describing the scam as a common phishing scam that cons people out of their money. FTC explains: "These messages are the butt of late night jokes, but people still respond to them. The people behind these messages claim to be officials, businesspeople, or the surviving spouses of former government honchos in Nigeria or another country whose money is tied up temporarily".

Microsoft has posted a tweet that was an ad for PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds on the Xbox One X which has caused much controversy surrounding the image, as it appears to be stolen, or at least heavily influenced from a Redditor's concept art.

The company is currently being accused by many people for 'stealing' Redditor Macsterrs concept art as his own image is almost identical to that of the one posted by Microsoft. As seen in the above image we can see that there is very strong resemblance between the two pictures, as both consist of an Xbox One X with a Battlegrounds character placed in the middle huddling in some grass.

The only differences or changes that Microsoft have done to the image is that they have changed the camera view of the image as well as added an Xbox One X controller and a small loot crate located to the right of the character. These small additions to the already highly popular image circling Reddit had has caused people to say that even if Microsoft did steal the image that they should of at least given credit to the artist that designed the idea.

Wu Xiangyang, a local Chinese man has been seized by authorities for running a unauthorized VPN service which bypassed China's 'Great Firewall.'

The Great Firewall is a system that has been employed by the Chinese government to block sites and services that the Chinese government has not authorized, examples of this are YouTube, Facebook, Google and many others.

Due to internet users only being able to access government authorized sites privacy activists have come fourth explaining that this is a violation of online human rights. They say this because under the Chinese government laws they have the ability to save and store logs from each authorized service.

There is one woman on the planet that can easily say she had the biggest electricity bill ever, or alternatively she's an evil mastermind that is about to take over the world by building killer robots, or something.

Mary Horomanski from Erie, Pennsylvania, recently logged onto her online utility account where she saw a balance of $284,000,000,000 - yes, $284 billion. Horomanski was interviewed by local news outlet GoErie, where she said: "My eyes just about popped out of my head. We had put up Christmas lights and I wondered if we had put them up wrong".

But don't worry, the utility company only wanted $28,156 up front, and would give the family 12 months to pay the $284 billion bill. Mary's son contacted the utility company, where they were quick to fix the bill which eventually came down to a respectable $284.46.