Steam top ten sellers chart: October 6-12

October 14th, 2013, 23:24 Posted By: wraggster

Civilization V is out in front of yet another Steam weekly software sales chart filled with aging hits on special.
Civ V's Gold Edition finished first, while its Brave New World expansion grabbed the sixth spot.
Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed franchise also filled multiple chart positions, with a discounted Assassin’s Creed III climbing to the runner-up spot and Assassin’s Creed IV Black Flag pre-orders making the list as well.
Telltale’s The Wolf Among Us made its debut in fifth, and indie Terraria – hanging around in the eighth spot – continues to sell well following its recent title update.

1. Civilization V: Gold Edition
2. Assassin’s Creed III
3. Bioshock Infinite
4. The Wolf Among Us
5. DmC Devil May Cry
6. Civilization V: Brave New World
7. XCOM: Enemy Within
8. Terraria
9. Total War: Rome II
10. Assassin’s Creed IV Black Flag

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PC players offered cut-price Deus Ex: Human Revolution Director's Cut upgrade

October 14th, 2013, 22:42 Posted By: wraggster

Those who already own Deus Ex: Human Revolution on PC via Steam are being offered the chance to upgrade to the new Director’s Cut Edition at a discount.
Those who already own a copy of the original game on Steam can buy the Director’s Cut for just £6.99/€7.99/$9.99. Gamers who already own the Missing Link DLC get an even steeper discount at £3.49/€3.99/$4.99.
Alternatively, those who don’t yet own the game can buy the entire Director’s Cut version for £12.99.
The Director’s Cut release offers a host of tweaks and changes including altered boss battles, visual improvements, a Game+ feature and of course all of the original game’s DLC.
DEHRDC (we’re not writing it again) will be released on PC, Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii U on October 25^th.

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/pc-pl...pgrade/0122571

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M.O.J.O. microconsole to stream PC games

October 14th, 2013, 22:30 Posted By: wraggster

Mad Catz confirms feature, but consumers will have to wait until after launch

The M.O.J.O. microconsole will be able to stream games to a user's television, Mad Catz has confirmed.

The function had previously been advertised for the “hardcore” android console but was later removed, leaving some doubt as to whether or not it would make the cut.

Now the company has told Gamasutra that the M.O.J.O. will feature PC game streaming, similar to the Nvidia Shield portable device, though the function won't be available at launch.

“For PC streaming to work, M.O.J.O. will require a simple update which we hope will be available shortly after launch," said a Mad Catz representative.

"The plan is indeed for M.O.J.O. to enable streaming from compatible PCs', allowing gamers to play their PC titles on the living room TV."

The Mad Catz and Nvidia Shield are similarly priced, and since both offer streaming it will be interesting to see if the living room can beat a portable device, or whether mobility will prevail.

These two aren't the only systems to be advertising the ability to stream games from a PC over a local network; Valve has billed this as a major feature for its upcoming living room invasion through Steam OS and Steam Machines.

The M.O.J.O. has something else in common with Valve's living room initiative, as its messaging places a premium on openness to developers.

The M.O.J.O. is due out on December 10th with a $250 price tag.

http://www.develop-online.net/news/m...-games/0184433

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Microsoft admits Surface RT name confused people

October 14th, 2013, 22:10 Posted By: wraggster

Microsoft’s Surface product manager has admitted that the RT branding for the firm’s first-gen tablets confused customers.
Speaking to ARN, Jack Cowett revealed that for the second-gen models, ‘RT’ was dropped in favour of ‘2’ to make it easier.
"We think that there was some confusion in the market last year on the difference between Surface RT and Surface Pro," said Cowett.
The Surface 2 comes with a full HD screen and updated internals. It also has a new two-stage kickstand designed to make it easier to use on your lap. Cowett said this addition is a result of users complaining that the original Surface was difficult to use as a laptop.
Other new features include a thinner and lighter design, battery life of up to 10 hours, and a new silver colour variant.
Last week, Microsoft tweeted that the pre-order stock of the Surface 2 and the Surface Pro 2 wasclose to selling out.
Set to go on general sale on October 22nd, the Surface 2 will start at £359 and the Pro 2 will start at £719.

http://www.pcr-online.biz/news/read/...-people/032166

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Slow PCs waste almost a week's worth of personal time every year

October 14th, 2013, 22:08 Posted By: wraggster

Around five and a half days of Brits’ time every year is spent waiting for slow computers, a study has found.
The worldwide survey of 8,000 people, conducted by SanDisk, found that the average PC user in the UK has lost 130 hours in the last 12 months due to delays caused by slow computers.
Meanwhile, over a quarter (27 per cent) of the American users questioned said that PC delays had been so bad that they had lost sleep, with around the same around saying that PC-related frustration had put them in a bad mood for that day. Over half (53 per cent) blamed computers at work or home, with only 22 per cent frustrated by their mobile phone.
File transfers also took up a large amount of people's time, with over two days of Americans' time spent waiting for the actions.
While almost a quarter (23 per cent) of Germans were likely to throw misbehaving devices at a wall or stamp on them in anger, American and Chinese users were the most calm to react, with only 14 per cent of users in those countries doing likewise.
In the free time that slow computers eat up, an overwhelming majority (92 per cent) of Spanish users would rather be with their partners, while Americans (56 per cent) would rather be with family and those in China (56 per cent) would prefer to spend the time with friends.

http://www.pcr-online.biz/news/read/...ry-year/032168

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Rumours are emerging that Grand Theft Auto V is to be released on the PC in early 201

October 14th, 2013, 22:07 Posted By: wraggster

Rumours are emerging that Grand Theft Auto V is to be released on the PC in early 2014.
Sources who spoke to Eurogamer said that the game, which is currently exclusive to PS3 and Xbox 360, will land on the PC in the first quarter of 2014.
The lack of a PC release hasn’t stopped the game’s success, breaking seven world records including being the best-selling videogame in 24 hours.
Chris R. Silva, Director of Marketing for Premium Notebooks at Intel, previously told PC Gamer that he didn’t expect the game to remain “console exclusive very long”, but suggested that “somebody paid a lot of money to make sure that title was exclusive.”
Nvidia’s senior director of investor relations Chris Evenden also spurred rumours of a PC release when, during a financial call, he said: "[PC] gamers are preparing their systems for a strong roster of games coming this fall, including blockbuster franchises such as Call of Duty: Ghosts, Grand Theft Auto 5 and Assassin's Creed 4."
Evenden’s comments were later said to be an “error” by Nvidia, but didn’t halt the flood of PC gamers scrambling for proof of the game on PC.
If Rockstar’s open-world crime blockbuster is released on PC next year, it would recall the release schedule of Grand Theft Auto IV, which was released on PS3 and Xbox 360 in April of 2008, before making the transition to PC in December.

http://www.pcr-online.biz/news/read/...release/032169

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Gofr, the feed reader for the cloud

October 14th, 2013, 03:12 Posted By: wraggster

So about that Google Reader replacement app I mentioned last time… It’s been over three months since I wrote the last post, and I learned quite a bit about scalability and relational database performance since then.
While grr did fine for a while initially, after a while it became painfully obvious why relational databases perform so poorly with quickly growing data. As the application’s storage footprint grew, application navigation started becoming more and more sluggish – switching subscriptions sometimes would take 3 to 6 seconds (in all fairness, the database is on a shared host), and after spending several weeks attempting to optimize data queries, I decided that the undertaking was probably futile.
So I decided to do something that a friend of mine recommended I do all along – write a feed reader for Google App Engine. Somewhat encouraged by the success of goread.io and using bits from grr’s concurrent updater and client-side code, a little less than two months later, the result is Gofr - a feed reader for the cloud, written in Go.
A live version of the app is available at http://www.gofr.io/, with the source code hosted at GitHub. Since service currently costs me very little, registration is free – at least for the time being.

http://0xff.akop.org/2013/10/06/gofr...for-the-cloud/

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Battlefield Director: Linux Only Needs One 'Killer' Game To Explode

October 13th, 2013, 22:56 Posted By: wraggster

dryriver writes with an except from Polygon's interview with DICE creative directory Lars Gustavsson, who says it would only take one "killer" game for Linux to break into mainstream gaming (something some would argue it already has):"We strongly want to get into Linux for a reason," Gustavsson said. "It took Halo for the first Xbox to kick off and go crazy — usually, it takes one killer app or game and then people are more than willing [to adopt it] — it is not hard to get your hands on Linux, for example, it only takes one game that motivates you to go there." "I think, even then, customers are getting more and more convenient, so you really need to convince them how can they marry it into their daily lives and make an integral part of their lives," he explained, sharing that the studio has used Linux servers because it was a "superior operating system to do so." Valve's recently announced Steam OS and Steam Machines are healthy for the console market, Gustavsson said when asked for his opinion on Valve's recent announcements."

http://linux.slashdot.org/story/13/1...ame-to-explode

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Vivante Mobile GPU Architecture Gains Traction

October 13th, 2013, 22:55 Posted By: wraggster

Over the past few years, a handful of mobile graphics companies have emerged but the top dog, by far, has been Imagination Technologies, with Qualcomm, Nvidia and ARM all picking up significant businesses of their own as well. But now, there's a new kid on the block — a company with a tiny, highly customized GPU, a number of recent design wins, and a strong product portfolio. Vivante got started in 2004 and started licensing its GPU designs in 2007. The company's early wins have been in Eastern markets, but this past year, it's begun to show up in devices intended for the West, including the Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 and Google's Chromecast. Vivante has taken a different approach to core design from most of the other companies that play in this space. All modern GPUs are explicitly designed to be modular and scalable. Typically what that means is that a company like Nvidia or AMD defines a single compute unit that can be duplicated throughout the GPU design. Vivante's GPUs are modular as well, but with a much finer level of granularity. Each of the three shaded blocks (3-D Pipeline, Vector Graphics Pipeline, 2-D Pipeline) can be segmented or stacked into various configurations. A GPU core, in other words, could contain more ultra-threaded shaders, or additional vector graphics engines, up to 32 cores in total. One of the advantages of this tiny, modular architecture is that you can clock the cores like gangbusters. According to Vivante, the 28nm high performance silicon variant of the Vivante architecture can clock up to 1GHz at full speed, but fall back to 1/64th of this in power saving mode, or roughly 16MHz.

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/1...gains-traction

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JavaScript-Based OpenRISC Emulator Can Run Linux, GCC, Wayland

October 12th, 2013, 23:27 Posted By: wraggster

The jor1k is an interesting open-source toy emulator project to emulate a 32-bit OpenRISC OR1000 processor, 63MB of RAM, ocfb frame-buffer, and ATA-hard drive ... all in JavaScript. Though JavaScript based, there are asm.js optimizations and the performance seems to be quite decent in modern web browsers. The jor1k OpenRISC emulator can do a lot, even handle running the Linux kernel, GCC compiler, ScummVM Monkey Island, and the Wayland/Weston compositor, all from within the web browser.

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/10...ux-gcc-wayland

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An Open Source GPU

October 12th, 2013, 09:06 Posted By: wraggster


Unless you’re bit-banging a CRT interface or using a bunch of resistors to connect a VGA monitor to your project, odds are you’re using proprietary hardware as a graphics engine. The GPU on the Raspberry Pi is locked up under an NDA, and the dream of an open source graphics processor has yet to be realized. [Frank Bruno] at Silicon Spectrum thinks he has the solution to that: a completely open source GPU implemented on an FPGA.
Right now, [Frank] has a very lightweight 2D and 3D engine well-suited for everything from servers to embedded devices. If their Kickstarter meets its goal, they’ll release their project to the world, giving every developer and hardware hacker out there a complete, fully functional, open source GPU.
Given the difficulties [Bunnie] had finding a GPU that doesn’t require an NDA to develop for, we’re thinking this is an awesome project that gets away from the closed-source binary blobs found on the Raspberry Pi and other ARM dev boards.

http://hackaday.com/2013/10/11/an-open-source-gpu/

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Valve Shows How Steam Controller Works In Real Life

October 12th, 2013, 08:59 Posted By: wraggster

Valve Software have demonstrated how the controller works in the real world with popular games like Portal 2, Civilization V, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Valve has to give users a glimpse of the Steam Controller experience."

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/1...s-in-real-life

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Arma 3 campaign DLC 'Survive' is wheels up on October 31

October 11th, 2013, 22:06 Posted By: wraggster

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Saints Row 4 FPS mod puts Steelport all up in your face

October 11th, 2013, 22:06 Posted By: wraggster

If you want a fresh perspective on Saints Row 4's unique style of debauchery, a new PC mod will grant your extraordinarily creepy wish. The view mod brings Volition's over-the-top open-world experience into the FPS realm, allowing you to wield dildo-shaped bats with increased vigor and personal aplomb.

Instructions to download and install the mod are available atSaintsRowMod.com. Though the process is quite simple, the mod is still in alpha testing and suffers from a few bugs. Following the instructions, which are also detailed in the video above, will help alleviate some of the mod's initial quirks.

Now ... Cry Havoc! And let slip the hogs of war. Or whatever farm animal of war.

http://www.joystiq.com/2013/10/11/sa...-in-your-face/

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Study: Tablets, Smartphones hurting PC market

October 11th, 2013, 20:52 Posted By: wraggster

The worldwide PC market is in decline thanks to iOS and Android tablets, according to a new study from research firm Gartner.
The company’s research shows an 8.6 per cent drop in earnings from the same quarter last year, due in large part to consumers shifting from PCs and laptops to tablets and smartphones for their day-to-day needs.
80.3m PCs were shipped globally during Q3, 2013 – the worst quarter for the market since 2008.
Gartner points out the period typically tends to coincide with a sales increase, as parents and students purchase computers for the start of the school year.
That wasn’t the case this time around, with iOS and Android tablets seemingly taking over as the primary study device.
"Consumers' shift from PCs to tablets for daily content consumption continued to decrease the installed base of PCs both in mature as well as in emerging markets," Gartner's Mikako Kitagawa said.
"A greater availability of inexpensive Android tablets attracted first-time consumers in emerging markets, and as supplementary devices in mature markets."
Gartner added that EMEA territories are also in decline, dropping 13.7 per cent of sales during the quarter due to multiple factors including: Transitioning in new processors, the impending launch of Windows 8.1, and the introduction of Android tablets at various PC vendors.
"During the third quarter many vendors went through product transitions to Intel's new Haswell and Bay Trail processors, while preparing for the October launch of Windows 8.1," Gartner's Isabelle Durand stated.
"These product transitions and the clearing of old inventory that is taking place through the third and fourth quarters of 2013, have played a part in the slowdown of the PC market in EMEA. Many PC vendors also introduced Android tablets as a main part of their portfolios and this initiative drove PC sales downward."

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/study...market/0122446

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PC sales decline continues

October 11th, 2013, 20:45 Posted By: wraggster

PC sales worldwide have seen a further decline, falling almost 10 per cent compared to the same period in 2012, as consumers continue to choose tablets, a new report claims.
Research firm Gartner reports that the third quarter of 2013, which is historically a period of growth as students and teachers return schools and colleges, PC sales totalled 80.3m units – an 8.6 per cent decline compared to Q3 2012.
“Sales this quarter dropped to their lowest volume since 2008,” said Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner. “Consumers’ shift from PCs to tablets for daily content consumption continued to decrease the installed base of PCs both in mature as well as in emerging markets."
Tablets sales have been chomping away at PC sales since the arrival of Apple’s iPad. But Gartner also blamed overall decline on a shift in inventory.

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/pc-sa...tinues/0122472

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PengPod Crowdfunding a Tablet Made With OS-Switching In Mind

October 11th, 2013, 17:08 Posted By: wraggster

PengPod is running a crowdfunder to create a GNU Linux/Android tablet, the PengPod 1040. This is their second such product; the first was mentioned on Slashdot last year. PengPod has pledged to make all source and tools used to build the images available, so users can build their own OS top to bottom to guarantee that it's free of NSA tracking. The PengPod has previously found some success as a low-cost touch platform for industrial/commercial control systems and is partnered with ViewTouch, the original inventors of the graphical POS to offer PengPod1040s as restaurant register systems. The feature that the developers seem keenest to emphasize is that the PengPod is built to run conventional desktop Linux distros without special hacking required; Android is the default OS, but it's been tested with several others (including Ubuntu Touch) listed on their Indiegogo page.

http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/13/...tching-in-mind

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Windows 8.1 helps PC market beat expectations in Q3 2013

October 11th, 2013, 16:52 Posted By: wraggster

The PC market was buoyed by the intake of Windows 8.1 systems in September and other business purchases, helping to slow the sales decline in Q3 2013, say analysts.
IDC reports that worldwide PC shipments totaled 81.6 million units during the quarter, with the market contracting 7.6 per cet ahead rather than the projected decline of 9.5 per cent.
Lenovo (17.3 per cent market share), HP (17.1 per cent), Dell (11.7 per cent), Acer (6.7 per cent) and ASUS (5.2 per cent) had the most shipments during the quarter, with Lenovo in the number one spot and ASUS at number five.
In EMEA specifically, the PC market contracted in the third quarter in line with IDC forecasts. The analysts said that PC shipments "remained constrained in the home segment, which continued to suffer from weak consumer demand amid an ongoing budget shift to tablets".
IDC also said the quarter was affected by an "unfavourable" year-on-year comparison with the strong Q3 2012 period around the launch of Windows 8.
IDC added that laptops shipments in Q3 2013 suffered a strong decline, while desktops were less affected.
"As forecast, the commercial market was less negative than the consumer market due to pockets of investments remaining available despite constrained spending," added IDC in a statement.
"[In the worldwide market] the third quarter was pretty close to forecast, which unfortunately doesn’t reflect much improvement in the PC market, or potential for near-term growth," said Loren Loverde, Vice President Worldwide PC Trackers at IDC.
"Whether constrained by a weak economy or being selective in their tech investments, buyers continue to evaluate options and delay PC replacements. Despite being a little ahead of forecast, and the work that's being done on new designs and integration of features like touch, the third quarter results suggest that there's still a high probability that we will see another decline in worldwide shipments in 2014."

http://www.pcr-online.biz/news/read/...q3-2013/032157

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Steam hosts huge Capcom sale

October 11th, 2013, 00:40 Posted By: wraggster

Running from now until October 14, the sale sees a large selection of Capcom games slashed by up to 75 per cent, including titles in major series such as Lost Planet, Dead Rising, Resident Evil, Devil May Cry and Street Fighter.
The sale comes as part of Capcom's 30th anniversary celebrations, and new deals are promised each day until the sale ends.
The full list of discounted items is below, and the Steam Sale page is here.

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Acer details Haswell-based C720 Chromebook, begins pre-orders at $250

October 11th, 2013, 00:29 Posted By: wraggster

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