Tech Culture

The Activision-EA war of words is heating up.

Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick had said in a recent interview with Edge Magazine that Electronic Arts is in trouble and that "great people really don't want to work there."

EA has now responded with some potshots of its own.

"Kotick's relationship with studio talent is well-documented in litigation," Jeff Brown, EA's communications vice president, told Gamasutra on Monday in an interview.

Brown was ostensibly referring to Kotick's recent legal forays with Jason West and Vince Zampella, former heads of Activision subsidiary Infinity Ward.

Earlier this year, Activision announced that it had terminated West and Zampella. After that, the executives, who were integral to the success of the Call of Duty franchise, established a new development studio, Respawn Entertainment, and inked a deal with EA that would make the mega-publisher the studio's exclusive game distributor.

Litigation that surrounded those events was a bit ugly.… Read more

If you needed any further proof that the story of Facebook's origins has captivated the world, get this: A Vancouver-based comic book company called Bluewater Productions announced on Monday that later this year, it'll be releasing a title called "Mark Zuckerberg: Creator of Facebook."

The team behind it says it is attempting to strike a balance between portraying Zuckerberg as a benevolent philanthropist and critical player in the hot education reform movement, and a ruthless young business genius in the league of the film "The Social Network," which premiered Friday in New York to rave reviews.… Read more

Activision CEO Bobby Kotick believes Electronic Arts, his company's biggest competitor, won't attract people who will help the Madden maker keep up with his firm.

Speaking to Edge Magazine in a recent interview, Kotick said that EA "has been struggling for a really long time." And one of the main problems the company faces, he believes, is attracting talent to help it build high-quality games.

"The most difficult challenge [EA] faces today is great people don't really want to work there," Kotick told Edge Magazine. "It's like, if you have no … Read more

QUEENS, N.Y.--Under the shadow of the Cold War-era Titan II and Atlas rockets set up outside the New York Hall of Science, this weekend's World Maker Faire extravaganza was, more than anything, a tribute to the more colorful fringes of hands-on innovation, science, and engineering. And the "makers" who populated its tents and booths wanted nothing more than to get the thousands of children in attendance interested in physics, engineering, biology, and even metalwork.

The kids were enthralled. This was not the kind of science you saw in a textbook: there were exploding chemistry experiments, … Read more

QUEENS, N.Y.--It was an almost inevitable question when you walked into the World Maker Faire at the New York Hall of Science this weekend: What do all these hardcore-indie home brew and crafting aficionados think of the fact that Ford Motor, Red Bull, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, and Time Warner Cable (and this site's own parent brand, CNET, which had sponsored the Maker Faire preparty on Friday night) had attached their brands to the festival?

After all, the culture of "making" has gone mainstream. Gerard Nebesky, the chef in charge of Maker Faire's traditional paella dish, … Read more

QUEENS, N.Y.--They did it, mostly: The artists and engineers who dreamed up, built, and now operate a large-scale version of the classic board game Mousetrap took center stage at this weekend's World Maker Faire at the New York Hall of Science, with the aim of flattening a New York taxi with a two-ton safe through a series of deployments of their massive Rube Goldberg machine. Standing guard were the Lifesize Mousetrap operators--a half dozen clowns, a few women in tasteful burlesque costumes with mouse ears and tails, and a man in a gorilla suit.

If this all … Read more

Rumors are swirling that Nintendo could soon announce a new Wii Remote that combines the functionality of the current controller with the Wii MotionPlus add-on.

Speculation about a new Wii Remote started when game retailer GameStop displayed box art for a soon-to-be-released game, FlingSmash. The title, which combines aspects of tennis and pinball to help gamers "save the day" on Suthon Island, is being developed and published by Nintendo of America. It's expected to hit store shelves in November.

According to a description of the game, the title uses the "Wii Remote controller with the Wii … Read more

Classic PC gaming fans were thrown for a loop last week when the GOG.com Web site was replaced with a terse message about changing market conditions and the promise of a forthcoming further announcement. The digital distribution service also known as Good Old Games was known for offering officially licensed versions of older PC games, all packaged as DRM-free executable files, suitable for modern operating systems. But with the site down, members could no longer re-download games they had purchased (an important selling point for customers), and the future of this DRM-free experiment seemed shaky at best.

It turns … Read more

Sony informed consumers this week that some counterfeit PlayStation 3 controllers could ignite or explode when used.

According to the company, counterfeit PlayStation 3 controllers, which Sony says are "identical in appearance to genuine PlayStation 3 wireless controllers," have started cropping up in the wild. The company said that the "quality, reliability, and safety of counterfeit products is uncertain."

But it gets worse. Those who have bought counterfeit PlayStation 3 controllers could put themselves in physical danger. According to Sony, the counterfeit products could "ignite or explode, resulting in injury or damage to the user, … Read more