China has closed down what is believed to be the country's biggest training website for hackers, state media has reported.
They say the site, Black Hawk Safety Net, gave lessons in hacking and sold downloads of malicious software.
The reports say three people suspected of running the site were arrested.
Hacking is a sensitive topic for China, especially since the internet giant Google recently threatened to pull out of the country.
Google said China-based hackers had attacked its operations but the Chinese government denied any involvement.
The hacker training operation openly recruited thousands of members online and provided them with cyber attack lessons and Trojan software, the China Daily and the Wuhan Evening News said.
Trojans, which can allow outside access to a computer when implanted, are used by hackers to illegally control computers.
Black Hawk Safety Net recruited more than 12,000 paying subscribers and collected more than seven million yuan ($1m: £650,000) in membership fees, while another 170,000 people had signed up for free membership, the paper said.
The Hubei government refused to comment on the reports.
It was unclear when the shutdown had taken place but the Black Hawk Safety Net site was unavailable on Monday.
Cyber attacks
In January Google threatened to pull out of China unless the government relented on censorship.
It said it had uncovered a computer attack that tried to plunder its software coding and the e-mail accounts of human rights activists protesting against Chinese policies.
Government officials have defended China's online censorship and said the country is the biggest victim of web attacks.
China has some 350 million internet users - more than any other country - and provides a lucrative search-engine market worth an estimated $1bn last year.
Google holds about a third of the country's search market, with Chinese rival Baidu having more than 60%.
The BBC's Damian Grammaticas in Beijing says that the reports made no link between the hacking site and Google's allegations.
But the case will help authorities show that China is taking action against those who hack into computers, says our correspondent.
Final Fantasy XIII, Dragon Quest IX and Arkham Asylum deliver the goods
Square Enix has reported an operating income of YEN 21.4bn for the nine months ending December 31st 2009, a jump of 67.7 per cent year-on-year.
Net sales for the period were up 30.0 per cent at YEN 135bn.
Its games operations in isolation saw net sales jump 97 per cent to YEN 73bn and operating income climb 99 per cent to YEN 18bn.
Releases in the period included Final Fantasy XIII, Dragon Quest IX, Batman: Arkham Asylum and Kingdom hearts 358/2.
Square Enix has also announced that it is to consolidate its online and offline gaming operations under a single corporate ‘Games’ segment and form a brand new Merchandising segment.
For the full year ending March 31st the publisher’s forecasts remain unchanged, with net sales of YEN 180bn and operating income of YEN 25bn predicted.
The UK Parliament's Joint Committee on Human Rights has recently reported on the controversial Digital Economy Bill, which seeks to restrict the connections of anyone accused of infringing copyright using the Internet. According to the BBC, the committee noted the lack of details in the Bill as it stands, asking for 'further information' from the government on several issues. They also raised concerns that some punishments under the bill could be 'applied in a disproportionate manner' and said that the powers the bill granted to the Secretary of State (i.e. Lord Mandelson) were 'overly broad.' These echo the concerns raised in recent months by the Open Rights Group, a consortium of web companies including Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and eBay, as well as the UK's Pirate Party. The Bill is currently being scrutinized by the House of Lords, and if it passes there, will likely be forced through the Commons quickly, despite the opposition from the public, industry and members of parliament. The committee's full report can be found on the parliament website.
New York State's Attorney General, Andrew Cuomo, has subpoenaed a number of online retailers, including GameStop, Barnes & Noble, Ticketmaster and Staples, over the way they pass information to marketing firms while processing transactions. MSNBC explains the scenario thus: "You're on the site of a well-know retailer and you make a purchase. As soon as you complete the transaction a pop-up window appears. It offers a discount on your next purchase. Click on the ad and you are automatically redirected to another company's site where you are signed up for a buying club, travel club or credit card protection service. The yearly cost is usually $100 to $145.
Here's where things really get smarmy. Even though you did not give that second company any account information, they will bill the credit or debit card number you used to make the original purchase. You didn't have to provide your account number because the 'trusted' retailer gave it to them for a cut of the action." While there is no law preventing this sort of behavior, Cuomo hopes the investigation will pressure these companies to change their ways, or at least inform customers when their information might be shared.
New York State's Attorney General, Andrew Cuomo, has subpoenaed a number of online retailers, including GameStop, Barnes & Noble, Ticketmaster and Staples, over the way they pass information to marketing firms while processing transactions. MSNBC explains the scenario thus: "You're on the site of a well-know retailer and you make a purchase. As soon as you complete the transaction a pop-up window appears. It offers a discount on your next purchase. Click on the ad and you are automatically redirected to another company's site where you are signed up for a buying club, travel club or credit card protection service. The yearly cost is usually $100 to $145. Here's where things really get smarmy. Even though you did not give that second company any account information, they will bill the credit or debit card number you used to make the original purchase. You didn't have to provide your account number because the 'trusted' retailer gave it to them for a cut of the action." While there is no law preventing this sort of behavior, Cuomo hopes the investigation will pressure these companies to change their ways, or at least inform customers when their information might be shared.
A study by gift e-tailer intotheblue.co.uk has found that IT workers are the best at choosing both thoughtful and unique gifts for their loved ones on Valentines Day.
The site polled 1,769 men and found that 73 per cent of IT workers and technicians said that they had something special planned for the day, with just over half saying that they had been looking at gifts for over a month.
Of the overall survey, just 39 per cent had planned on buying a special gift, while just under half said they hadn’t even thought about it.
The least romantic employment group was personal trainers, of whom only seven per cent planned on something special, followed by stock brokers with 13 per cent and DJ’s at 16 per cent.
“I think this research has shown that certain professions can have a level of influence on what kind of gifts that they are likely to get,” said intotheblue.co.uk’s e-commerce and marketing manager, Rob Holmes.
“I think that this is reflective on the jobs that allow people to be more creative like IT workers, musicians and interior designers.”
Buy a game. Play it. Decide whether to keep it or sell it back. That's the current cycle of a gamer's gaming life. In the near future, that third choice may evaporate. You may soon never sell a game again.
Two events this week, one of them involving one of the most famous franchises in gaming history, the other involving one of the biggest gaming publishers, demonstrate the two approaches being taken by game makers in what one might call the War On Used Game Sales. Sega announced that its next major Sonic The Hedgehog game would be downloadable. EA inadvertently leaked that its early February single-player Dante's Inferno game would be supported with a multiplayer expansion available in April.
The Sega move made it likely that the next big Sonic game that gamers buy will be one gamers can never sell.
The EA move made it less likely that February purchases of Dante's Inferno would want to sell that game back any time before April.
The moves represent the two tactics of this war, though it's not right to call it a war. After all, what kind of war has the potential — emphasis on "potential" — to make its victims happy? Or well, to strip them of something many gamers believe is their right.
The Won't Sell Approach
It's no secret that video game companies would prefer that their customers don't sell the games they buy back to stores. The gamer who spends $60 on a game and sells it back for $30 enables the game shop they sold it to to sell that same game again for $55. None of that second sale profit goes to game publishers.
Gaming retailers such as the giant GameStop like that used-game sales cycle. After all, a year ago GameStop was reported as taking in $2 billion per year — nearly half of its revenue — from the sale of used games. GameStop has argued to me and others that publishers should like it to, as gamers are more likely to buy new games with the help of that $30 they made selling that $60 game back. Publishers, through their actions, clearly don't buy it.
So, you're a publisher unhappy with this. How do you keep a gamer from selling a game back? One way is to keep your customers busy with the games they buy. Make the games longer. Offer them adventures that will last more than a weekend. Make the games more fun, experiences they'll never want to part with. Or try this: Keep adding to the game, week after week, month after month.
The additive approach appears to be the one favored by EA at the moment. Last fall, the company announced that people who bought role-playing game Dragon Age could expect to enjoy access to two years' worth of downloadable content, some of it that would cost money, of course. Those who liked Dragon Age and finished in by the end of November would therefore have reason to hang onto the game through not just December but all of 2010 and much of 2011. One imagines that EA believes gamers wouldn't want to sell a game like that back.
Dragon Age wasn't a one-off. In January, EA announced that Mass Effect 2, through a service called the Cerberus Network, which also promises free and paid future content expansions for the game, though not for any defined amount of time into the future. Again, EA's hope would appear to be that gamers wouldn't want to part with the game.
This is the approach close observers should have seen coming. In June, EA CEO John Riccitiello told Kotaku what kind of game company EA would be transforming into:
"In Fiscal 10 [EA's financial year, ending March 2010], we're still a packaged goods company that connects to a lot of online services and features. But it's still a packaged good at its core. I think while we'll have big packaged goods sales in Fiscal 11 and 12 - they'll be larger in this year and continue to grow - we're going to feel more like an online services company, with a disc as an enabler of service." [Emphasis added]
Imagine that: A disc game that keeps on giving. It sounds exactly like the approach for Dragon Age, for Mass Effect 2 and now even for Dante's Inferno.
That third game, Dante's, might be a surprise candidate for EA's disc-plus-more approach. But it's a fitting one, given the fate of another game made by the same internal EA studio behind Dante's, Visceral Games. Visceral's first game, Dead Space, was released in 2008 to critical acclaim and sales that clearly could have been better. How much better? Former Visceral Games executive producer Glen Schofield revealed the missed sales on an EA podcast quoted last year on Kotaku:
We looked at how many we sold. We also looked at - we didn't have online which is one of the big features that you need to have to kind of keep it in the house a little bit longer these days. But then we also did studies on sort of how many unique users there were on the PSN network and Xbox Live. And realized, you know what, there's over three million people that have played Dead Space. Maybe we've only sold 1.5 million or whatever the number is. But there's something there because that means that, ok, there were a lot of used sales. So there's a lot of people when I go out and talk to [them]… it seems that everybody has played it or heard about it or whatever. [Emphasis added]
What Schofield was saying then was that copies of his team's game were leaving "the house," getting sold back to shops and being re-sold by those shops. The same copies of Dead Space were passed around until, by his calculations, as many as twice as many people played the game than paid EA to do so. It's no wonder that EA would want Dante's Inferno purchasers hang onto their games at least for a few months.
There are other ways to keep a gamer from wanting to sell a game back, which could more positively be defined as ways to ensure a gamer wants to keep their games. Multiplayer modes are important for that, ensuring that players of, say, Activision's Modern Warfare 2 would want to hang onto a game that can feel different enough session after session. That's a classic hook for keeping a gamer attached. Fewer games lack such hooks. Sometimes the lure is a multiplayer mode added to a single-player formula, as is the case with next week's BioShock 2. Sometimes that lure is the promise of future downloadable content, as with next month's single-player Heavy Rain.
None of the above methods, all designed to make gamers want to keep their games, appear to be a problem for gamers. They don't block the sale of a game back to the shop. They just make it less likely that you would want to. That's the Won't Sell approach.
The Can't Sell Approach
But then there's other tactic that is also increasingly popular with game publishers, one celebrated not just by Sega but by EA and many more. That's the shift toward selling customers more of their games digitally.
The digital sale of games has been championed by future-looking gamers and game-makers alike. It promises a graduation of gaming technology to the shelf-saving convenience of MP3 music libraries and eBook readers. It matches the transition of cherished TV and movie programming, which consumers went from possessing on clunky VHS tape form to sleeker DVD disc form to, increasingly, purely digital form. Yet to have all of one's games digital would be to have all of one's games in unsellable form.
Will gamers who want to keep the newly-announced Sonic 4 forever, never selling it to a gaming shop or in a garage sale? Better hope so, because none of the gaming platforms that will run the game, Xbox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network, and WiiWare allow a customer to sell back their games. The same is true for any games downloaded through the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Wii. These are the games you can't sell and there will be more of them. Just yesterday, publisher THQ announced that it was turning two of its studios into creators of purely digital games. Capcom and Konami have found success with the release of new downloadable games, revivals and sequels of classics such as Mega Man and Castlevania, none of which consumers can sell back.
Two Tactics, Similar Results
The gamer-won't-sell and gamer-can't-sell approaches to publishing games both have their benefits. The first approach expands games, makes them last longer even as it raises suspicions about what is being withheld from a game only to be released later. The second approach saves gamers gas or subway fare, allows access to games more swiftly and keeps shelves at home clear for houseplants and framed pictures of loved ones.
Both approaches might tick some gamers off and both approaches appear to promise pain for the game shops that trade in used games. They also may make life more difficult for those gamers who depend on discounted, used-game prices.
Which approach will become the standard for gaming? It's hard to say, as early 2010 shows both the can't-sell and won't-sell approaches gaining publisher popularity.
Of course there's a third way to handle this, a surefire technique to keep gamers from selling their games back: Make the games free.
The Caucus, a NY Times Blog, is reporting on the overwhelming majority vote (422 yeas) the House gave a new cybersecurity bill. The Cybersecurity Enhancement Act, H.R. 4061 has a number of interesting provisions. Representative Michael Arcuri, a Democrat of New York who sponsored the bill called cybersecurity the 'Manhattan Project of our generation' and estimated the US needs 500 to 1,000 more 'cyber warriors' every year in order to keep up with potential enemies. The new bill 'authorizes one single entity, the director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, to represent the government in negotiations over international standards and orders the White House office of technology to convene a cybersecurity university-industry task force to guide the direction of future research.
The Hut Group-owned online retailer Zavvi.com has once again been accused of deliberately selling games early with listings for BioShock 2 on its eBay portal stating that game is “now in stock and despatching”.
Zavvi.com was caught up in a similar storm last year when some customers who had pre-ordered Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 received their orders four days before the tightly controlled global release date.
BioShock 2 is due to be released worldwide next Tuesday, February 9th.
However, The Hut Group’s commercial director Richard Chapple has told MCV that the high level of interest in 2K’s game means that retailers have to begin processing orders early.
“The Hut Group, like all online entertainment retailers do have the product in stock at our warehouse now,” he stated. “Because this title is in such high demand we're processing the orders already, so some customers have already had our 'dispatched email'.
“This allows us to get the tens of thousands of orders sorted by postcode and ready in bulk to hand over to our postal partners today.
"The majority of the orders will arrive with our customers on Tuesday 9th February, which in our experience will be over 90 per cent , the other 10 per cent may arrive a day early or late, but we have no control over this 10 per cent as the product is in the mail system by that point."
Alain Corre, Ubisoft's MD for EMEA territories has said that he expects 2010 to be another transition year for the industry in which consumers will continue to be cautious about where they put their money.
But he added that he's confident people will continue to enjoy gaming, and points to the upward growth of the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 markets as proof that core gamers will continue to spend money on their hobby.
"We kind of expect 2010 to be another transition year, meaning that we see the market stabilising in this calendar year, with the possibility of growth after that," Corre told GamesIndustry.biz.
The reason for 2009's mixed performance was partly down to the economy, said Corre - "People had less money to invest, especially in the US."
"I'd say it was more, to a certain extent, in the casual segment of the market, especially on the handheld side, where people spent much less on cartridges," he added.
"But on the other side there was also the music game business, which went down quite a lot - and if you combine that with the DS decrease, it's been a big part of the decrease of the market last year.
"However, if you look at what is important for the future, both the PS3 and 360 markets went up, which means that the gamers are still around, they're still enjoying playing and they're still playing more - which is essential for the dynamism of our industry, because these consumers are very vocal, they define trends, so that they're still getting to play great games is a very positive sign."
Corre pointed to the sales performance of Assassin's Creed II - which by the end of December had already sold 40 per cent more units than the original game two years earlier - as proof that high quality, well-known franchises can sell even higher numbers of units, despite the economy.
"That's very positive - but it's a more challenging industry in the sense that, on the gamer's side, only the triple-A-quality games will sell, but these games can sell many more units than they were selling before," he said.
Going forward, Ubisoft has already stated its intention to focus on key franchises, and Corre said that he could also foresee a strategy of combining the talents of different studios to create those key games.
For Assassin's Creed II "our Montreal studio worked with our Singapore studio and the Annecy studio in France to make sure that the game would be a top quality game," said Corre. " And we've been able to make all the talented people - engineers and creatives - at the three studios work together."
"I think in the future we'll see that as very much more the case - a bit like in the movie industry, where talent combines from different parts of the world. For example, our studio Hybride in Canada helped James Cameron to make the film Avatar," he added.
"The same way I think we'll see more and more people from different companies with different talent combine to create the best games on earth."
