world-of-warcraft posts

Most of the time we really don't care about new trademarks filed by game companies. Quite frankly, filing trademarks is easy; it's making the games that's the hard part. However we will make a small exception for this mention of a new trademark from Blizzard Entertainment who seems to milk its previous IPs (Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo) for all they are worth (which is quite a bit actually).

According to game trademark-hunting web site superannuation, Blizzard has put in a trademark for "Catalysm" that will cover "computer games, paper-based products, and online games". Our sister site WoW.com hints that the name could be used for an upcoming World of Warcraft expansion pack or it could be used for . . . something else. Anyway, as we said, it's not the title that's really important . . is it?

Dave Perry has been hyping his streaming game service Gaikai for the past few months. We were supposed to see it in action at E3 last month but at the last minute Perry pulled out of showing the service to the press due to "patent filing" delays. Today, however, Perry decided to go public with a 10 minute + video showing off how the Gaikai service supposedly works.

You can see the video above with narration by Perry as he plays games like Spore, World of Warcraft and EVE Online with only a few seconds of load time via a Firefox browser. He even had a full version of Photoshop running near the end of the video, showing that the service can be used for more than just games. Perry claims that the video demo was being run via a streaming server 800 miles from his location and that the bandwidth for the demo was "mostly sub 1 megabit across all games" meaning that the requirements for playing these games will be fairly low. Perry took a couple of shots against rival streaming PC service OnLive (without mentioning them by name) saying, "We don't claim to have 5,000 pages of patents, we didn't take 7 years, and we do not claim to have invented 1 millisecond encryption and custom chips. As you can see, we don't need them, and so our costs will be much less. ;)"

There's still no word on when this service will launch but Perry states he will be talking more about the business model for Gaikai at game development conferences later this summer.

It looks like once you are a Horde or an Alliance member, you are not one of them "all the way", at least not after Blizzard makes some changes to their hit MMO World of Warcraft. Our sister site WoW.com has posted up word that Blizzard is planning to offer a service in the future that will allow players to have their characters switch factions.

Blizzard is giving players an early heads-up on this new feature because "you may be seeing bits and pieces of the service in the test builds we use for the public test realms moving forward." However Blizzard admits that this feature may be a ways off from being implemented because "we plan to take the time needed to ensure that it lives up to expectations before officially rolling it out." We are betting that this feature will also cost some extra cash but so far there's been no official word on that from Blizzard.

Blizzard's annual BlizzCon event sold out quickly but if you are not one of those heading to Anaheim, CA on August 21-22 you can still get some of the feeling of the event from the confort of your office chair or couch. This week pre-orders are being taken for the live Internet streaming video for BlizzCon 2009.

The video will come from the DirecTV coverage of BlizzCon which will have 16 hours of coverage of the event for its subscribers. While DirecTV owners will get that video in HD, those of us that don't have the satillete TV service will still be able to see the event via the$39.95 Internet streaming coverage. World of Warcraft players will even get the BlizzCon in-game Murloc Marine pet when they purchase the BlizzCon streaming services.

Australia is already known as a country that won't allow certain games to be sold because of their lack of a adult rating for game titles. Many games, including the above Fallout 3, have to be edited in order to comply with Australia's MA15+ rating. Now a new media report states that the country's government is moving to go beyond just monitoring retail games.

According to a story on TheAge.com.au, the government is thinking about censoring web sites that sell games beyond the MA15+ ratings along with Flash games and downloadable titles. This could affect MMO games such as World of Warcraft and others which are currently exempt from the ratings system. Naturally this move has angered many in the country. Electronic Frontiers Australia spokesperson Colin Jacobs stated, "Far from being the ultimate weapon against child abuse, it now will officially censor content deemed too controversial for a 15-year-old. In a free country like ours, do we really need the government to step in and save us from racy web games?"

We expected The Sims 3 to be on top of its first week on the NPD Group's weekly top 10 best selling PC games list and we were not dissapointed. Both the regular people sim game from EA and the collector's edition were number one and two, respectively, on the list for sales the week ending June 6.

One other interesting addition; apparently not every owner of Fallout 3 downloaded the first two mini-expansions. The retail release of Operation Anchorage and The Pitt showed up at number 10 on the list.

1. The Sims 3 - Electronic Arts
2. The Sims 3 Collector's Edition - Electronic Arts
3. The Sims 2 Double Deluxe - Electronic Arts
4. World Of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King - Blizzard
5. World Of Warcraft Battle Chest - Blizzard
6. Spore - Electronic Arts
7. Real Deal Slots Adventure - Phantom EFX
8. World Of Warcraft - Blizzard
9. Empire: Total War - Creative Assembly/Sega
10. Fallout 3 Operation Anchorage & The Pitt - Bethesda Softworks

While we are firmly in June, the NPD Group has gone ahead and set out their top 20 best selling PC games in the US for the month of May. As you can see there's a lot of familar games in the top 20. In fact not one of the games listed was released in May. That will likely change for June with The Sims 3 and possibly other titles.

Blizzard took seven out of the top 20 slots for the May list and three of the top five, including the number one slot for the MMO expansion World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King.

1. World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King - Blizzard
2. The Sims 2 Double Deluxe - Electronic Arts
3. World of Warcraft Battle Chest - Blizzard
4. World of Warcraft - Blizzard
5. Empire: Total War - Creative Assembly/Sega
6. Spore - Electronic Arts
7. Left 4 Dead - Valve
8. The Sims 2 Apartment Life - Electronic Arts
9. Fallout Trilogy - Interplay
10. StarCraft: Battle Chest - Blizzard
11. World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade - Blizzard
12. Demigod - Gas Powered Games/Stardock
13. Real Deal Slots Adventure - Phantom EFX
14. The SimCity Box - Electronic Arts
15. Fallout 3 - Bethesda Softworks
16. Diablo Battle Chest - Blizzard
17. Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Game of the Year Edition - Bethesda Softworks
18. Warcraft III Battle Chest - Blizzard
19. Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War II - Relic/THQ
20. Company of Heroes: Tales of Valor - Relic/THQ

The million of World of Warcraft gamers in China are now dealing with some withdrawl symptons. Early on Sunday the company in charge of the the game's Chinese servers, The9, shut down those machines. The reason? Earlier this year, Blizzard announced it was breaking off its relationship with The9 and handed the big China World of Warcraft keys to a rival company, Netease.

The problem is that, according to the Wall Street Journal, Netease isn't ready to launch its servers for the game and won't be until sometime later in June, which means that a number of Chinese players might not come back to World of Warcraft when it resumes operations. According to a poll of those gamers, 53 percent stated they would come back, 26 percent said they would wait and see what happens with the transition while 21 percent said they were done with the game.

The NPD Group's latest list of the top 10 best selling PC games in retail stores is, well, boring with little change from the previous week's list. The list below is for the week that ended on May 30. However we expect the next week to see The Sims 3 on top of the list in its debut week:

1. The Sims 2 Double Deluxe - Electronic Arts
2. World Of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King - Blizzard
3. Spore - Electronic Arts
4. World Of Warcraft Battle Chest - Blizzard
5. World Of Warcraft - Blizzard
6. Empire: Total War - Creative Assembly/Sega
7. Reel Deal Slots Adventure - Phantom EFX
8. Civilization IV: The Complete Edition - Firaxis/2K Games
9. The Sims 2 Apartment Life - Electronic Arts
10. Left 4 Dead - Valve

On the last day of E3 2009, the Guinness World Records organization announced that a number of PC game developers and publishers were honored with brand new records for game sales. Above you can see Blizzard execs Mike Morhaime and Paul Sams accepting two awards; one for World of Warcraft becoming the most popular MMO with 11.6 million subscribers and the other for the original Starcraft becoming the world's most successul PC strategy game with 9.6 million copies sold.

Also honored during E3 was Bethesda Softworks for the fastest-selling multi-platform RPG. That would be for Fallout 3 which sold a total of 4.7 million copies in its first week on sale. Finally the US music group The Dares were honored as the first such group to hold a concert in both the real world and in the virtual world at the same time for a performace at E3 while also "performing" inside Sony Online's free-to-play MMO Free Realms.