VGTribune

Steam has today confirmed that it will bring it’s digital distribution platform to Mac this April.

The service will launch with a variety of games from Valve’s extensive library, including Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, Portal and the Half-Life series. The Newly-Announced Portal 2 will be the first title to be released by Valve for Windows and Mac when it is released this Christmas.

The launch of the Mac version of Steam will also introduce a feature called Steam Play, which will work in conjunction with Steam Cloud to allow consumers to play their purchased games on both PC and Mac.

“As we transition from entertainment as a product to entertainment as a service, customers and developers need open, high-quality Internet clients,” said Valve president Gabe Newell. “The Mac is a great platform for entertainment services.”

We know this has been in the pipe for a while now especially after the teaser ‘Apple’ like images released in early March.

[Via MCV]

Blizzard president and CEO Mike Morhaime revealed that the upcoming World of Warcraft expansion will play a major role in converting trial players into fully paying subscribers of the game.

Morhaime explained that around 30 percent of WoW’s trial players make it past  level 10, meaning that the majority of players never get to see what he describes as the “games best content and design” found later in the game. This is something that the Cataclysm expansion hopes to fix.

” With Cataclysm we will be overhauling the early gaming experience for players, bringing all of the content in World of Warcraft up to our current design standards and ensuring that even new players to the game will experience the best work of our development team,” explained Morhaime.

“This will also provide additional replayability for our veteran players as well. In the long run, we hope that this effort will capture more players and drive continued growth.”

Morhaime has also confirmed that development on the expansion is going smoothly and that the game is on track for release in the second half of 2010

As technology has advanced, developing games and applications has become increasingly complex. As a result of this, developing an application or a game requires an immense amount of time, money and development know-how. For some companies and individuals it just isn’t feasible to build a program from the ground up. Cue Sourcebits; a crack team of expert graphic designers, coders and project managers who’ll make the game or application you’ve envisioned. All you need is and idea and the developing ninjas will get to work creating it.

Not only do those who hire Sourcebits for the projects outsource work to another company, but they outsource their project to another country as well. Founded with 3 people within a garage in Bangalore, India, Sourcebits has grown through both kinds of outsourcing into a team of over 120 people and even offices in Atlanta, Georgia.

India is quickly becoming one of the world’s fastest growing Information Technology (IT) markets and its share of the global software market is set to increase threefold by 2015 according to a recent report by India’s National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM). The NASSCOM report indicates that “the next decade will be a period of disruptive growth for this segment,” and that the annual revenue aggregate of Indian software product businesses will grow from $1 Billion in 2008 to $9.5 Billion by 2015.

As you might imagine, this kind of development hasn’t sprung up over night and Sourcebits has an intriguing story to tell. How do you go from being a radiologist to becoming the CEO of a highly profitable App development company? Where is this kind of development going? What’s their take on outsourcing? What does this new business plan mean for the IT industry as a whole?

You can find the answers to those questions and more after the break!

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You may remember a while back EA talked about releasing a world tool for The Sims 3, well today that very tool has been released to Beta, available now at: http://www.thesims3.com/ players can update their game and for the first time ever you can access the Sims Shop directly in game, players will be able to browse the catalog and purchase items such as furniture and hair for their Sims.

The world tool is a “robust tool for avid Sims players that want to expand their gameplay experience and create an entire world” say EA, with the tool players can build anything from a mountain to a waterfall you could even build your home town all of which you can then add to your Sims 3 neighbourhood. A walk-through is also available.

Players can also share there creations via The Sims 3 Exchange.

You can find a few screenshots of what you could create after the jump!

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Rotface

Dateline Azeroth:

For almost a month now Goblin siege engineers and Gnomish engineers have been tirelessly working on bringing down the gate at Death-bringers rise. Any day now they will break through allowing the combined forces of the Horde ,the Alliance and the Ashen Verdict to move further into Icecrown Citadel. The next wing on the list is the Plagueworks, a laboratory for creation of potions, vials and containers of the Plague of Undeath and blight slimes. It is also the factory where several Abominations and horrific scourge creations are made. Professor Putricide along with his flesh abominations Festergut and Rotface await. Are you brave enough to wounder these halls and destroy the blight, or will you be turned into a slave of the Lich King?

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Thanks to good ol’ Geoff Keighley’s Twitter account and an Activision Blizzard earnings/investor conference call we now have a release window for Starcraft II. According to an Activision Blizzard official Starcraft II is being targeted for a lunch within the “first half of 2010.”

Thanks to this confirmation we can confidently predict that World of Warcraft Cataclysm won’t be launched until the second half of 2010 so as not to cannibalize Starcraft II’s sales.

13 Days ago World of Goo developer 2D Boy decided it would sell its game at whatever price gamers were willing to pay in celebration of its one year “birthday.” After 13 days and 83,250 copies later, the results of what gamers paid are in. Payments ranged from as low as $0.01 to $150 with the average payment was about $3.

Some interesting information that came out of 2D Boy’s experiment was that while Linux users are the most generous, Windows users are at the other end of the “stingy” spectrum. They’ve even collected data based on the generosity of gamers in different countries. You can find that chart after the jump, but for now let’s just say that I’d like to be tipped by a gamer from Switzerland and not Turkey.

[Source]

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We’ve all heard that in game micro-transactions with real money would be the  next big thing for games with online components, but up until now implementation of that strategy has been sparse with major titles. Blizzard has taken the first big step in this direction by opening a pet store in WoW that uses real currency rather than in game gold.

What pets are for sale and how much are they? The first pets available for purchase are the Pandaren Monk and Lil’ K.T., the Littlest Lich. Now, before you go running off to buy either, you might want to know that they

will cost players $10 each. The price may be high, but if you buy the Kung-Fu-Panda-looking Monk pet you can find comfort in the fact that you’ll be sticking it to cancer as $5 of each purchase will go to the Make-a-Wish Foundation until the end of the year.

We think $10 for a virtual pet is a high price to pay, but keep in mind WoW players are used to paying exorbitant fees ($15+ for character realm changes, account changes, etc.). Five dollars for a panda? We’ll bite. But $10? No thanks.

[Source]

I’ve been playing world of warcraft for about a year now and have gone from a hardcore player/near on addict to a now casual WoW player. I’ve seen the dark side of WoW and I think I’m the best suited on VGTribune to give an overview of what you can expect in World of Warcraft Cataclysm. You can find my recap of the recent World of Warcraft: Cataclysm news after the jump!

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Cars. Fast cars. Fast cars in a video game. That’s really all you need to know. Just sit back, relax and watch the cars go by as you find out what to expect with Need For Speed: Shift.