We mentioned earlier today that this is the season for earnings to be revealed by publicly traded companies including game publishers. Today Ubisoft released their latest numbers for their first fiscal quarter which ended June 30. Revenues were €169 million for the time period, up from €134 million for the same period a year ago and exceeding Ubisoft's previous expectations. The sales figures were helped in part by the release of the PC game ports of Rainbow Six Vegas 2 and Assassin's Creed.Sales for the current quarter are expected to come in at €169 million, a 25 percent increase from the same period the year before as expectations are high for the release of the WWII shooter Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway. One piece of expected bad news was that the long-delayed Splinter Cell Conviction has now been pushed into Ubisoft's 2009-2010 fiscal year which begins on April 1, 2009....

It look a little longer than anticipated but Ubisoft has now released a new free map pack for its recent tactical shooter Rainbow Six Vegas 2. The map pack is now available to grab right here at Big Download and contains three new multiplayer maps. Two are "dark" versions of Murdertown and CQB Training and the third a revised version of Calypso Casino. All of the maps can be used in Versus and Terrorist Hunt modes. This is a separate download than the Fan Pack patch which was released earlier this week.Download the Rainbow Six Vegas 2 map pack at Big Download now....

As expected, the Fan Pack for Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas 2 has been released, adding a slew of new content to the game. Featured among the new content are three new maps on which to wage strategic combat, as well as new ranks and weapon balances.Download the Rainbow Six Vegas 2 fan pack from Big Download...

A new trailer for Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six 2: Vegas has been released, offering a preview of what fans can expect from the game's forthcoming fan content patch. As we reported earlier today the Fan Pack will add three new maps to the game along with some other new additions and features. It's due out in July and will be a free download for the PC and the game's other platforms.Download the HD Rainbow Six Vegas 2 Fan Pack trailer from Big Download....

Looks like Ubisoft likes giving stuff away for once. The publisher has announced plans to release a free "Fan Pack" for its recent tactical shooter Rainbow Six Vegas 2. The downloadable content will be released sometime in July and will contain a ton of additions to the Tom Clancy branded title.The Fan Pack will include three new maps (Murdertown-Dark; CQB Training-Dark and Calypso Casino) along with new Ranks and A.C.E.S, a grenade indicator, weapons balancing and more. The full info on the Fan Pack can be found at the game's official web site....

This week (and probably many other weeks to follow), Valve owns the world of PC gaming. In addition to a week filled with excellent Team Fortress 2 news and excellent gaming compilations, two new games and two excellent weekend sales have made their way to the Steam digital distribution platform. Yes, we think it's safe to classify Steam as its own platform.The first of two new additions is Crazy Machines 2, a creative design title "packed with all new features to help you create your wackiest 'Rube Goldberg-style' contraptions yet!" Crazy Machines 2 features over 150 elements which can be used to create or demolish 200 levels, tons of Rube Goldberg-style puzzles, and a $19.99 price tag.Next up to the virtual plate is Out of the Park Baseball 9, a baseball sim focused on managerial skills. According to the game's description on SteamPowered.com, the $39.99 baseball title "lets you do almost anything a real life general manager can do to guide a baseball team to glory. Set your line-ups. Replace that aging veteran with a rookie from your minor leagues. Put your injured starter on the disabled list and scout the waiver wire for someone to fill that roster spot. Put that disgruntled star heading for free agency on the trade block, and see what shakes out."This week's annual Steam weekend sale features Tom Clancy's Rainbow 6 Vegas 2 for $30, and Call of Juarez for $10, with each game seeing a $20 decrease from their typical price tags....

Team Rainbow is all patched up and ready to fight for your right to gamble, again. Yesterday Ubisoft released a beefy 90Mb patch for Rainbow Six Vegas 2 which addresses numerous bugs, while adding new features to the popular tactical-shooter.Most notably addressed in the 1.02 patch is putting a stop to the notorious Crashdump generation problem found in the original patch that horded up as much as 1GB of hard drive space during game crashes. Added to Vegas 2 with 1.02 are speech recognition features as well as KillCam and SwapTeam options for the SADS (Stand Along Dedicated Server). Other bug fixes included in the patch promise to end game crashes while using customizable weapons and minimizing XP losses during server crashes.The full list of additions and fixes can be found after the jump.Download the Rainbow Six Vegas 2 1.02 Patch from Big Download!...

So little has changed in recent months -- The Sims 2 and World of Warcraft still completely dominate PC game sales. Sure, now and then something usurps them for a short time, but they always come back. The top 10 PC games in the NPD sales report released this past week:1. The Sims 2 Kitchen & Bath Interior Design Stuff Expansion Pack2. The Sims 2 Double Deluxe3. The Sims 2 FreeTime Expansion Pack4. World Of Warcraft: Battle Chest5. World Of Warcraft6. Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare7. Sins Of A Solar Empire8. World Of Warcraft: Burning Crusade Expansion Pack9. Assassin's Creed: Director's Cut Edition10. Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Vegas 2That makes four years that The Sims 2 and World of Warcraft have been fairly consistently pwning the industry. The only other PC exclusive on the list is Ironclad/Stardock's runaway 4X RTS hit Sins of a Solar Empire. The others -- Call of Duty 4, Assassin's Creed, and Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 -- are multi-platform titles. WoW's position is no surprise, given the NPD's research with regards to online game revenues. The Sims 2's domination of the charts, however, speaks to a vast, silent market of gamers to whom hardcore games like Rainbow Six don't appeal....

The quarterly time period where publicly traded game publishers reveal their latest financial numbers has begun yet again. Ubisoft reported that revenues for their last quarter (which ended March 21) came in at 217 million euros ($340.5 million), a 10 percent increase from the same period a year before. The sales success of Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas 2 and Assassin's Creed for the Xbox 360 and PS3 were the main reasons for the rise. The PC versions of both games were released to stores this month and Assassin's Creed has already topped the PC sales charts in the US.For once, the publisher didn't announce any delays in upcoming game titles, something that the company had a habit of doing in the last few financial press releases. That hopefully means that previously delayed titles like Brothers In Arms: Hell's Highway, Splinter Cell Conviction and especially Far Cry 2 will be released sometime this year....

Apparently it doesn't always pay to play in Vegas. At least not if you're playing Rainbow Six Vegas 2 for the PC. When the game crashes (likely due to far too much Vegas styled fun and frivolity) the resulting memory dump can horde up as much as 1,000 megs (1 gig) of hard drive space. That's a whole lot of dumpage. That's Mafia-style dumpage. The official R6V2 forums are alive with the sound of wailing and gnashing of teeth over the problem. As of this blogging, the forum admins are aware of the problem and have passed along the info to the developers, but a fix has not been forthcoming yet. They of course ask for your kind and benevolent forgiveness. And really... why not? You don't want to go and piss off a bunch of highly trained para-military sorts now do you? Ya, didn't think so....

Well that didn't take very long did it? Ubisoft's just released PC version of their latest tactical shooter Rainbow Six Vegas 2 now has a "day one" patch that's available for download ("day one" patches seem to be more and more prevalent in the game industry nowadays). The 50 MB download can be grabbed at Ubisoft's web site.You can check out the list of changes in the patch ahead of time via this Ubisoft message board post. The big added feature in the 1.01 patch is voice chat support, something that will likely please a boatload of multiplayer gamers. There are a number of bugs that have also been addressed in the patch including some better support with ATI Crossfire PC rigs and some hang time bugs with "certain graphics hardware". Let's hope that this patch will deal with the majority of post-release issues in the game....