Games Up While Economy Breaking Down
Stop. Banhammer time.
While the world economy is busy scaring the business pants off people abroad, the games industry is sipping a latte, not knowing what all the damn fuss is about.
According to a recent study released by the NPD Group, video game sales are down in Japan due to a lack of popular titles, however, games continue to rake in the cash elsewhere. Both US and British audiences are dropping even more money on the games industry, with sales growing by 8 and 15 percent, respectively.
With consumers exhibiting an obvious hunger for games, we’re unlikely to see any nasty development pads bite the dust over the current financial crisis all too soon. Obviously great news, and the coming festivities are presumably a strong driving factor, although sales are actually up over the same period last year.
In other news, both Microsoft and Blizzard have brought down the swift hammer of justice on their respective audiences, sending many Xbox 360 modders and a veritable plethora of Battle.net cheaters to the great black hole of inaccessibility.
“In our our continued effort to keep gameplay safe and secure for our community of more than 14 million members, Microsoft has taken action against a small percentage of Xbox 360 consoles that have been illegally modified in order to play pirated games,” writes Xbox Live’s Larry ‘Major Nelson’ Hryb on his interlog. How Microsoft noted the difference between those modified to play pirated games and those used to keep the retail discs scratch-free on the console known to scratch discs is unknown.
Although ban numbers weren’t released by Microsoft, Blizzard says it whacked over 350,000 Diablo II and StarCraft accounts because their owners were using third-party hacks, presumably as opposed to the official first-party hacks. “Cheating ruins the game experience for legitimate players, and we will not tolerate it,” says a Blizzard developer according to GamesIndustry.
If you’ve been kicked as a result of either incident or think lattes are gross, we’d love to hear your side of the story – email us at ‘info’ on the ‘newenthusiast.com’ domain. And in case you’re wondering, there’s no ‘on the’ character, just lame anti-spam measures.
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