The Warp Pipe

Pineapple Smash Crew’s features should be bullet points for success: a great aesthetic, rockin’ music and a clever gameplay hook. But it doesn’t have much in the way of, well, an actual game. What starts of a as a novel premise quickly devolves into a sometimes mind-numbing grind, souring the initial promise of this quirky little indie game…

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Since the launch of the Diablo III beta in late 2011, many have complained about the low level of difficulty. It’s true, the content included in the beta is very easy to plow through. But as Blizzard reminds fans in its “You Will Die” video, the beta consists of only a small portion of the very beginning of the game on the easiest difficulty setting. On Nightmare, Hell and Inferno difficulty, Blizzard promises Diablo III is going to be a much more challenging experience…

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Update: Gabe Newell has sent the following status update to Steam gamers regarding the investigation:

We continue our investigation of last year’s intrusion with the help of outside security experts. In my last note about this, I described how intruders had accessed our Steam database but we fou…

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Earlier this week we saw Tim Shafer, designer and founder of Double Fine Productions, talk with Mojang founder Markus “Notch” Persson on Twitter about Psychonauts 2. Persson and Shafer tweeted openly about the prospect, with Notch stating that he would like to “make Psychonauts 2 happen.”

Since t…

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GameStop is building its digital distribution business, having seen a 158 percent growth year-over-year in the third quarter, with strong returns thanks to customers who don’t use credit cards.

“70 percent of our sales for DLC is non credit card. So that’s a customer either paying with cash, GameStop gift card or trade credit,” Steve Nix, manager of PC digital distribution for GameStop told us at DICE 2012. “Think about all those Call of Duty Elite subscriptions and all those customers who aren’t using a credit card to purchase them.”

“We’re actually growing [the downloadable content] market, because about half our DLC customers never purchased DLC previously. So, for game developers that want to sell more DLC, we’re introducing gamers to DLC for the first time in our stores.”

Nix recognized that it may seem odd the retail chain’s brick and mortar stores are so successful selling digital content. It’s clearly servicing customers who don’t have credit cards or don’t want to use credit cards, but still wish to extend their favorite games. He “absolutely” feels this same situation is what’s pushing their in-store PC full game sales, despite PC gamers having so many online purchasing options.

Since Gamestop purchased Stardock’s Impulse digital distribution store, we wanted to know if it would continue to pursue Goo, which would have essentially created a “used PC games market.”

Nixing the idea, he said “We don’t see a lot of interest in that model from our publishing partners.” He recognizes customers would be interested, but is not really seeing publisher support for such a model.

GameStop sees majority of digital sales from cash; won’t pursue used PC game sales originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 10 Feb 2012 17:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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