Activision brings in $1.08 billion in Q2: more than expected, but less than last year
Activision Blizzard beat its outlook for its fiscal Q2 (ending June 30), bringing in $1.08 billion in revenue – the outlook as of May predicted $950 million. This still falls short of the same period last year. It's no mystery as to where Activision's money came from. "For the first six ...
Diablo 3's long-term planning failures
This is a weekly column from freelancer Rowan Kaiser, which focuses on "Western" role-playing games: their stories, their histories, their mechanics, their insanity, and their inanity. The more I read about, think about, and play Diablo 3 at high levels, the more baffled I am by some of developer ...
Blizzard CEO on Diablo 3 problems, incoming improvements
Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime has taken to the Diablo forums to issue a statement on Diablo 3. In the statement, Morhaime addresses the game's launch, noting that it had both positive and negative elements. Blizzard, he admits, was not prepared for Diablo 3's staggering launch numbers – to which ...
Diablo 3 auction house now has gems and other commodities for real money
Blizzard has pushed patch 1.0.3b live in Diablo 3, and in addition to a few random bugfixes with General chat and the tutorial sequences, the patch brings another wrinkle to real-money spending with the game. You can now buy various in-game commodities (including gems, dyes, and crafting and ...
Blizzard: Diablo 3's 'item hunt' endgame isn't sustainable
Diablo 3's current endgame, a supposedly endless item-hunt and enemy-slaughtering system, isn't as infinite as Blizzard first hoped it would be, and players are quickly running out of things to do, community manager Bashiok writes in the Battle.net forums. Blizzard is aware of this problem and is ...
Diablo 3 bans not based on Linux software, says Blizzard
A handful of players using Wine, a program that allows Linux users to run Windows, recently reported being suddenly and unreasonably banned from Diablo 3. These players have sent in support tickets and one in particular notes his account remains banned, posting the following response from Blizzard: ...
StarCraft 2: Heart of the Swarm, WoW: Mists of Pandaria playable at Gamescom
Blizzard will attend Gamescom in Cologne, Germany, and bring its latest wares to the show. From August 15 to 19, Blizzard will showcase new content for Starcraft 2 and World of Warcraft. Attendees will be able to sample the new Terran, Zerg and Protoss units coming to multiplayer in StarCraft 2: ...
Recent Diablo 3 hotfixes address exploits, high-level item drop rates
Blizzard Entertainment has been keeping busy, tweaking a number of aspects of its best-selling loot-hunting game, Diablo 3. One of the hotfixes released today addresses an exploit used to circumvent the recent decreases in attack speed. Before the hotfix, players could "temporarily increase their ...
Blizzard lifts Diablo 3's Act 1 restriction for new digital buyers
Patch 1.0.3a for Diablo 3 fixes an issue that restricted unverified digital purchasers to playing only up to level 13 and only in Act 1. Blizzard previously listed the restriction as a feature of patch 1.0.3, and later said it was an "unintended consequence" that players were unable to progress ...
Get Diablo 3 for $50 from Newegg
The folks at Newegg have made Blizzard's latest trip to hell slightly cheaper, offering Diablo 3 for $50. That's ten extra bucks you could spend in the auction house, or on a bag of tacos to sustain you on those late night inferno runs (or create some inferno runs, amirite?). It's all up to you. ...
