1up has a piece looking at the impact that commercial support of WoW Arena teams might have on the game. There are already two teams backed with corporate money, both pulled from prominent PvP guilds in the Bloodlust battlegroup. "It's a challenge to pick teams to sponsor in WoW's PvP: 'The same team that may be ranked #2 or #3 in one Battlegroup may be ranked #1 in another," said Stephen Schoder of Check Six. "this makes the proposition of scouting out the right team more difficult than most other competitive eSports. The arena system in World of Warcraft is much more complicated than the simplistic FPS and RTS games in terms of being able to immediately pick up on what is going on.'"

IronWilliamCash writes with a link to a BBC article letting us know some unsurprising news: Massively Multiplayer games are a Billion dollar industry here in the west. They're worth even more in countries like China, South Korea, and Taiwan, but the recognition of the MMOG genre's appeal in Western nations is quite laudable. "Games such as World of Warcraft and worlds like Habbo Hotel are fast becoming "significant platforms" in the converged media world, the report said ... Revenues from subscriptions to MMOGs will hit $1.5bn by 2011. But the growth in MMOGs remains limited compared to developing markets such as video on demand, which is expected to be worth $11.4bn from revenues in four years' time." The article goes on to cover the diversification of the genre and the rise of casual titles in the Massive space.

An anonymous reader writes "An increase in malware originating from China has not gone unnoticed by security researchers, according to the site ITWeek. The aggravating software has been increasing over the last three months, to the point where some unlucky persons may be getting some every day. Individuals interviewed for the article are seeing an increasing sophistication and independent use of rootkits, new to the Chinese malware scene. 'China has traditionally been a hotbed of password stealers who go after log-in names and passwords for online games such as World of Warcraft. The criminals are after virtual currencies and goods which can be sold on auction websites.' These new types of software are actually encrypted, and can prove hard to dismantle."

Last week at GDC I had the privilege of sitting down to speak with a representative from CCP, the folks who maintain EVE Online. The week before, we'd asked for questions to pass on. I had the chance to put them directly to Magnus Bergsson, CMO at CCP. He very directly tackles the recent scandal involving a CCP developer, the reason why EVE's hardcore gameplay is so appealing, the balance between casual and hardcore players, and some information on the future of the game. Read on for his answers to your questions in a transcript of the interview, as well as audio live from the GDC Expo floor.

Taking a page from the National Film Preservation Board, the History of Science and Technology Collections at Stanford University and a group of five prestigious games industry figures have inducted ten games into a sort of 'canon'. The New York Times reports that some of these titles represent the start of weighty gaming genres, while all are laudable for their place in gaming history. "[Henry] Lowood and the four members of his committee -- the game designers Warren Spector and Steve Meretzky; Matteo Bittanti, an academic researcher; and Christopher Grant, a game journalist -- announced their list of the 10 most important video games of all time: Spacewar! (1962), Star Raiders (1979), Zork (1980), Tetris (1985), SimCity (1989), Super Mario Bros. 3 (1990), Civilization I/II (1991), Doom (1993), Warcraft series (beginning 1994) and Sensible World of Soccer (1994)." Most likely, future years will see additional titles inducted into this game canon.

GamesIndustry.biz is reporting on comments from an interview they conducted with Doug Lombardi, marketing manager at Valve Studios. Lombardi criticized Microsoft's recent commitment to PC gaming in the form of the 'Games for Windows' initiative, which we've previously discussed here on the site. In Lombardi's view, this new push for games on the PC platform is nothing more than an extended advertising scheme to sell the Vista OS. "'Sony and Microsoft both have armies of PR people whose job it is to cram that information down the throats of press and analysts every day ... All those people do is say the PC's dying, the console's winning, and nobody on the PC side is championing that platform. And sales data tracks retail, and there's no doubt about it, PC sales at retail are declining ... World of Warcraft is making a whole lot of money outside of the retail channel, we're making a decent bit of cash off Steam, all the casual guys are not tracked - the PopCap games, Bejewelled, all that stuff doesn't show up.'"

With government concerns about online gaming growing steadily in China, Beijing has put in place a ban on the opening of new internet cafes for the rest of the year. GigaGamez reports on the country's move, which is largely seen as a response to some high-profile deaths from unhealthily dedicated gamers. From the article: "Honestly [this] shouldn't be that big of a deal if you consider that the Chinese government has already estimated that 113,000 Internet cafes already exist. Add this to the already bizarre limitation of World of Warcraft play time and you have some very unhappy gamers." Update: 03/08 14:52 GMT by Z : GamePolitics has the word that virtual currencies are also to be restricted, in an effort to ensure that the yuan is kept secure.

Gavin Scott writes "Blizzard has introduced a new web site called the Armory which lets you get information on any World of Warcraft character, extracted from their live databases, in near real-time. This exposes a great deal of information that was not previously obtainable including profession choices, skill levels for all skills, and the character's complete talent specification and all faction reputation data, along with all gear currently equipped. The complete roster of any guild or arena team is also available. Some players are upset about this, such as arena PvP teams who now have all their gear and talent choices exposed to the world, or players with non-standard or less-popular talent choices who fear they will have difficulty getting into pickup groups now that people can instantly find out everything about them. Are these complaints fair? Blizzard claims to own all the data and the characters, but at what point does this data represent personal choices and information about their players which would be covered by their own privacy policy? In a virtual society, should people be able to present a view of themselves that differs from (virtual) reality, or should all details be exposed?"

In our interview with the Warhammer Online team a while back, there were questions as to why we weren't going to be seeing a Warhammer 40K MMOG. Several people seemed quite keen on the idea. Well, for those people: your time is now. THQ has announced they'll be developing Warhammer 40K into a MMOG and mobile games. Gamasutra reports on comments from Kelly Flock, executive vice president of worldwide publishing for the company, about their plan to work with Austin startup Vigil games on the project. Says Flock, "We realized this is one of those few properties that has a high level of interest from the hardcore gaming community, which could be a great launching point to turning it into a great mainstream mass-market MMO ... We're not out to replace World of Warcraft, we think we have a unique offering in the same category that will get its own share of attention if we deliver properly on the gameplay mechanics we'll build our own audience." Flock demures from offering a timeframe for release of the game, saying they're not even going to try to pinpoint a development schedule yet.

It would be hard to argue that World of Warcraft hasn't been a huge success. Not only has it been a financial success in the MMO market, but it has introduced many new people to Massive gaming that might not have otherwise given it a shot. With their first expansion, The Burning Crusade, Blizzard has made huge advances in many areas of the game. Long-standing complaints have been addressed, and the structure of the popular title has been reinforced. The casual players have gotten a large injection of content that is both accessible and enjoyable to someone who doesn't have huge amounts of time to play. At the same time, hardcore players who thirst for new challenges on a daily basis have quite a bit of work ahead of them. This is not to say that The Burning Crusade (BC) doesn't have its pitfalls, but overall I get the feeling that this is closer to what Blizzard's World of Warcraft dream was meant to be. Read on for my opinions of this new round of addiction.

Marcus Eikenberry writes "Blizzard and Vivendi today filed against MDY Industries, the makers of the 'WoW Glider' software. Glider allows World of Warcraft players to 'play' while away from the keyboard; the software moves the player's avatar along a set path, following a complex set of instructions dictated in advance. Blizzard is seeking injunctive relief and money damages against MDY. What that means is they want him to stop the production of WoW Glider and they want him to pay them damages. Blizzard believes that Glider infringes on their intellectual property. They believe Glider allows players to cheat, giving them an unfair advantage and that they believe Glider encourages Blizzard customers to breach their contracts for playing the game. Last they claim that Glider is designed to circumvent copyright protections."

Red Herring tackles the rush into virtual space, talking about the MMOG goldrush and the business consequences World of Warcraft has had on the games industry as a whole. Though sometimes it doesn't seem to fully understand the difference between a single player game and a Massive one, the article still touches on a number of important points. Lots of folks are looking to cash in on WoW's success, and they're importing or licensing every Massive game they can find to get on the bandwagon. "The problem is that no one knows what the next WoW killer will look like. Creating a hit video game, which combines strong characters, a compelling story, and top-notch production values, is part art and part inexact science. Making a hit game can be much more difficult than producing an Oscar-winning movie. After all, the hit video game must be compelling enough to keep players coming back for more." Even if a lot of their conclusions are odd, and they call Puzzle Pirates silly, it's worth a look. What do you think it's going to take to crack Blizzard's deathlock on the Massive genre?

The Non-Disclosure Agreement for the Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO) beta test has been lifted, and with the game set for release soon it may be useful to you to peruse some hands-on previews of the title. Hexus.net offers A Day in the Life of a Hobbit, and Tobold's MMORPG blog has similar hobbit-related impressions. Tobold also has a comparison between LORTRO and World of Warcraft for those who might be thinking about making the jump. More hands-on info is available from Warcry, Kill Ten Rats, and Gamers With Jobs. Van Hemlock offers up a high level overview of the title, mentioning recent releases and pointing out the realities of Massive gaming: "How the Great Fantasy Epic Saga will stand the ravages thousands of petty powerlevelling smacktalkers all loitering about Rivendell bank, level one hobbit girls - dancing as naked as the game will allow, shouting ridiculous three-letter-acronyms and generally not getting into the spirit of the thing, remains to be seen. I expect Our People can crush even The Lord of the Rings beneath our metagaming heel without feeling too guilty."

As a follow-up to last week's eBay delisting story, CNET has the word that Second Life content is exempt from this decision. Mr. Durzy, speaking with CNET, specifically cited Second Life content as exempt because of the uncertain role of the virtual world. As the company (and the rest of us) are uncertain whether to label Second Life as a game in the first place, player-created content is still sellable via eBay auction. A perfectly fine explanation, but GigaGamez takes things a step further, pointing out that eBay founder Pierre Omidyar became a major investor in Linden Labs in 2004. It's uncertain if this constitutes a conflict of interest, because confusion about what exactly Second Life is persists pretty much everywhere. Just the same, it's interesting to note. Their article on the subject also has a few words of commentary from Edward Castronova, the well-known commentator on all things RMT.

Next Generation has a quick post about NPD's PC games data for 2006. The market was just about even, only increasing by about 1% to $970 million. World of Warcraft and The Sims were the two top-sellers last year, with WoW pushing about a million units and Sims titles occupying five of the top ten slots for the year. From the post: "PC games included, 2006 industry sales were up 18 percent compared to 2005, and 15 percent higher than the $10.5 billion generated in 2002, the former record-holding year. The PC numbers don't include subscriptions and paid online content. The NPD also revealed the top ten US retail PC titles of 2006 by units. WoW beat out second place The Sims 2 by a sizable margin, with EA's hit selling over 598,000 units (list placement includes special editions of applicable titles)."

Via GigaGamez (which has a breakdown of the problem), a GameDaily article about the unfriendliness of Vista towards Indie games. The problem is this: Vista has a setting which allows parents to restrict user profiles from accessing ESRB games 'above' a certain rating. IE: Timmy can't play F.E.A.R., or any other 'M' rated game. The problem is that getting ESRB rated is expensive: '$2000-3000 for the privilege', according to GigaGamez. Shoestring budget Indie games just may not have the money for that kind of expenditure. From the GameDaily article: "'It's unfortunately a mercenary way of doing things,' [GFW Group Manager Chris Donahue] explains, 'but, even though we're Microsoft, we do have limited resources. And we do look at the sales charts to determine where our help will have the most impact. Certainly we want Blizzard's 'World Of Warcraft' [currently the most popular massive multiplayer online game] to work flawlessly on day one of Vista because 8 million tech support calls would be a very bad thing. The casual developers don't sell quite as many.'"

Game Developer Blizzard Entertainment's long-anticipated expansion to World of Warcraft has gone live. Initial impressions are ... not available, since all 8 million players are currently in the Outlands. I'll take that to mean the servers for the most part have not melted yet. At a Burning Crusade launch party, a Blizzard exec revealed we may see a new StarCraft game very soon. But today is all about WoW. If you're not playing, and want to live vicariously, check out WarCry's extensive preview of the expansion. You could read designer Jeff Kaplan's comments on new features at FiringSquad, or Shane Dibiri's talk of inspiration at Next Generation. One new expansion a year, eh? Some folks are already looking to the future, where we probably won't see WoW on consoles, but may see it with security dongles. 0.1% of the Earth's population can't all be wrong.

Joe Drago writes "I purchased a Mac Pro within the first week that they were available, and immediately upgraded to 3GB of RAM (knowing that OSX loves memory). When playing 3D games (World of Warcraft mainly), the game would Kernel Panic the machine if I had played it for a few hours, or if I swapped in and out of the game a few times, etc. I eventually found out (from an official Blizzard poster) that NVidia has a bug in their drivers that kernel panics a Mac Pro if any memory past the 2GB boundary is addressed in the driver. After waiting months for a resolution to this, I decided to post on Apple's support site. Here is an image of my post.. Within a few hours, they removed it from the site, placing it under 'Posts Removed by Administration.' What's going on here? Is Apple trying to hide this bug, or is there something more serious going on between Apple and NVidia?"

eldavojohn writes "Disney has announced plans to launch more movie-based Massively Multiplayer Online Games. With plans already on the table for a "Pirates of the Caribbean" title, additional properties are apparently now under consideration for a similar treatment. They are aiming at teens more than the older crowd, and don't seem to be interested in fighting for players from World of Warcraft or Second Life." From the article: 'We plan to build more virtual worlds like "Pirates" based on a broad range of our properties,' Iger told attendees of the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas ... 'You can imagine living in Buzz and Woody's toy universe,' he added, recalling Disney Pixar's computer animated hit feature film 'Toy Story'."

jeremy_white writes "I'm happy to announce that we've shipped version 6.0 of CrossOver, for both the Mac and Linux. We have a full changelog available; highlights are are Outlook 2003 and support for games, notably World of Warcraft and Steam based games. I can attest that World of Warcrac...er craft is the most well tested application we have ever supported. It's exciting to watch the Wine project progress — it's a great and growing community of developers (which is a good thing, as we're now all too busy grinding Honor in Alterac Valley to keep up our pace of contributions :-/)."