Razer, the world leader in high-performance gaming hardware, software and systems, today announced the Razer Atrox Arcade Stick for Xbox 360, the final product following an extensive beta testing program. Tested by some of the world's best pro-gamers and Fighting Game Community members all over the world, the Razer Atrox Arcade Stick is constructed with modders and tournament gamers in mind. Featuring premium quality Sanwa components, the 10 highly responsive buttons and a precision eight-way joystick allow gamers to strike instantly and surely, game after game, while maintaining peak performance and reliability.

An extremely moddable controller, the inside of the arcade stick platform opens up at the touch of a button, making the Razer Atrox a breeze to customize for all tastes and play styles. Users can swap in their own personal designs for a unique look, while also getting access to the internal compartments and honeycomb structure for easy screw mounting.

AMD's product manager for desktop graphics products Devon Nekechuk, in an interview with Japanese publication 4Gamer.net, revealed that his firm won't be launching any new Radeon GPUs in 2013, and that the company would instead play out the year on its current Radeon HD 7000 series' performance, with price adjustments and possible performance increments through driver updates. In a slide released to 4Gamers.net, AMD pointed that its Radeon HD 7900 series (high-end), HD 7800 series (performance), and HD 7700 series (mainstream), will carry on the company's mantle "throughout 2013."

This announcement is indication that GPU makers have decided to slow things down from the streak of rapid new GPU launches that lasted from some time around 2007, running up to 2012, which can be heavily taxing in terms of R&D costs for either companies. We know for sure that NVIDIA is clearing its backlog of consumer GPU development by releasing the GeForce GTX "Titan" graphics card in a couple of weeks' time, and we know from older reports that NVIDIA could launch a "refreshed" GeForce Kepler lineup, that largely retains the GeForce Kepler silicon while topping up with subtle changes (clock speeds, software features that don't involve redesigning the silicon, etc.,) but AMD coming out in the open with this announcement could change everything. NVIDIA has the opportunity to save a few coins by sticking to its current lineup (plus the upcoming GTX "Titan,") and responding to competition from AMD by price-adjustments and timely driver optimizations of its own.Source: 4Gamer.net

Razer, one of the world's pioneering supporters of e-Sports, and Evil Geniuses, the Western world's premier professional gaming team, have formed a partnership to reinforce Razer's support of e-Sports globally.

Team Evil Geniuses is one of the longest-running organizations in North American e-Sports, and they house arguably the most prestigious roster of professional gamers in the region. EG makes for a fantastic addition to the elite ranks of Team Razer: From their Dota 2 division, which features fan favorites like DeMoN, Maelk and Fear, to their broad roster of StarCraft 2 talent, including superstars like Jaedong, Stephano and IdrA, to Justin Wong, Ricky Ortiz and their deep Fighting Game line-up, to Snoopeh and their newly-acquired League of Legends team.

Mad Catz Interactive, Inc. announced today GameSmart, a technology initiative that moves smart devices one step closer to delivering a core gaming experience similar to a gaming console or gaming computer. GameSmart control products will function through the Bluetooth Smart stack, will be game and hardware independent, and will have a smart device app to provide additional functionality. By utilizing Bluetooth Smart, GameSmart devices will feature simplified setup, longer battery life and universal compatibility. In addition, GameSmart offers game developers and game publishers standardization, ease of implementation and scalability when enabling controller and console-like accessory functionality in mobile games.

Thermaltake, being the industry pioneer brand with expertise in PC chassis, power supply and thermal solution, is launching the new reinvent CPU cooler – the “BigTyp Revo”, the COMPUTEX 2012 d&i award winner, an award recognises Thermaltake being the pacemaker of CPU cooler, which also made the debut during CeBIT 2012 this March, to users and gamers who favor the down draft rather than the tower cooler.

Thermaltake BigTyp Revo is the next substantial down draft CPU air cooler after the introduction of the Orb Series and the Typhoon Series that marked a brand-new new CPU cooler era for Thermaltake.

Australian legislators voted in a new game rating system that expands choice for gamers, allowing them to play ESRB-Mature games, which often get restricted or banned in the Australian market. Called R18+, the new rating marks games restricted to consumption by people aged 18 and above. Before it, the highest game rating marker for the Australian market was M15+ ("mature", above the age of 15), which let through titles with depiction of violence, but blocked out quite a few that in the eyes of the powers that be, were "too violent" (eg: Mortal Kombat, with its gory critical hit animations). Like with every other government, in every part of the world, it took a lobby to move the Australian House and Senate (Parliament) and make R18+ a reality. Go ahead and score fatalities in style, mates.Source: GameInformer

Digital Storm, the predominant name in computer system integration and engineering, proudly introduces the Marauder line of high performance gaming PCs with a ground-breaking price. Designed with PC gamers in mind, the Marauder gaming line delivers an incredibly immersive gaming experience while being one of the most affordable gaming PCs ever offered by Digital Storm.

Gamers who have endured lag filled game-play with unimpressive low-resolution visuals finally can break free thanks to Digital Storm's Marauder gaming line, the first gaming PCs built around Corsair's Vengeance C70 chassis. No longer do gamers have to settle for sub-par performance because of a limited budget thanks to the Marauder's ground-breaking price.

Thermaltake Group with the most avant-garde innovation and creativity in delivering the corporate mission of the “perfect user experiences” is prepared to exhibit “Taipei Game Show 2012” from February 2nd to 6th. Together with Tt eSPORTS and Thermaltake, the 5-day event will host a series of exciting programmes to introduce an array of conceptual and technical innovations and offers an exciting glimpse of the brands’ future design language with amazing stage shows, and well-known players － our own professional e-Sports Team - Tt APOLLOS and it’s StarCraft2 player – SoftBall, the world-famous StarCraft2 players –Aleksey “White-Ra” Krupnyk from Ukraine, and MarineKing eSports Team from South Korea, together to present entirely new and creative innovations that comprehensively adapt to the cultures of “enjoyment of entertainment, e-Sports, technology, and lifestyle”.

Last week we brought you news of Ubisoft's hard three machine activation limit on Anno 2070 and how it scuppered a review by Guru3D when they swapped out graphics cards. Guru3D's post then went viral on the web and it appears that this has put sufficient pressure or 'heat' on Ubisoft to relax the restrictions just a tiny bit, since they weren't going to use any more Ubisoft games for benchmarks. So what have they done? Allowed an unlimited number of graphics card swaps. That's it, everything else stays the same, so if other components such as the CPU, motherboard etc are changed, then one will still run into this frustrating brick wall and have to get in touch with customer support to reset the activations.

Samsung Electronics has today unveiled a yellow colored version of the Series 7 Gamer notebook introduced last November. Said to be 'targeting young generation and lady customers', the gaming laptop comes with a Glass Flake coating that provides enhanced durability, and features a backlit keyboard, a 17.3-inch Full HD (1920 x 1080) display, a 2.1 speaker system, and a knob for switching between various power modes.

The Series 7 Gamer also packs an Intel quad-core mobile processor, up to 16 GB of RAM, an optical drive, and up to a 2 TB hard drive.

A month ago, we reported that CD Projekt RED, makers of The Witcher 2 had claimed that they could identify '100% of pirates' and had started an RIAA-style 'settlement letter' shakedown (extortion) tactic in Germany. Well, unsurprisingly, this hasn't gone down too well with their customers and the outcry has been loud and strong, especially on gog.com, where their forums have been full of posts from disgruntled customers. Well, it looks like the pressure has gotten too much for them and they have backpedalled furiously on this decision and issued an open letter, published on rockpapershotgun.com. In it, they state that they want people to continue to have faith in them and stressed how they're still totally against 'piracy' of their products and appealed for gamers to refrain from engaging in it:

In early December, an article was published about a law firm acting on behalf of CD Projekt RED, contacting individuals who had downloaded The Witcher 2 illegally and seeking financial compensation for copyright infringement. The news about our decision to combat piracy directly, instead of with DRM, spread quickly and with it came a number of concerns from the community. Repeatedly, gamers just like you have said that our methods might wrongly accuse people who have never violated our copyright and expressed serious concern about our actions.

Hilbert Hagedoorn of well-known PC tech review site guru3d.com recently bought a copy of Ubisoft's Anno 2070 and wanted to use it in one of his graphics card reviews. However, he became badly unstuck. This game comes on the Steam platform and the store page states: "3rd-party DRM: Solidshield Tages SAS 3 machine activation limit". Unfortunately for Guru3D, they found out exactly what this means, which resulted in just one performance graph, an aborted review, an unplayable game – and bad publicity for Ubisoft once again. They have published an article about their experience, pledging not to use their titles again because of this DRM.

The draconian internet censorship bill, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) being lobbied for by wealthy big media corporations (mostly fronted by the RIAA/MPAA, News Corporation and the like) and currently being debated in Congress is still losing support wherever one turns. A week ago, we reported that GoDaddy initially supported it, but soon changed its mind as it immediately began to haemorrhage customers. Now, it turns out that many video games companies are also coming out against it and with no pressure against them required.

The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) is the game industry's trade association and stands firmly behind the much-despised bill, which means that the gaming industry as a whole is deemed to support SOPA. However, while some members openly support it, others just won't say so publically and some of its members actively do not support it, having made official statements to this effect. Here are just three of them:

Welcome to the TechPowerUp 2011 PC technology Christmas special. We hope that you will enjoy reading it while tucking into your turkey, Christmas presents and a little too much wine... In this article, we go through the technology of 2011 that has had the most significance, the most impact and was generally the most talked about. It's not necessarily the best tech of 2011 which is the most significant though, since lemons can be just as significant as the ground-breakers in how they fail to deliver - and the backlash that goes with it.

January: Intel Sandy Bridge i5 & i7

Released on January 9th, the new Intel Core i5 & i7 processors were based on Intel's second generation Core architecture built on a 32 nm production process (HEXUS review). They included an IGP (Integrated Graphics Processor) physically on the same piece of silicon along with HyperThreading. These new dual and quad core processors soundly beat all previous generations of Intel processors in terms of processing performance, heat, power use, features and left AMD in the dust. Therefore, Intel badly needed some competition from AMD and unless you have been living under a rock, you will know how that turned out in October with the launch of Bulldozer. Sandy Bridge was a sound win and is generally considered to be the only architecture worth considering at this point. The i5-2500K is currently at the sweet spot of price/performance. It comes at a stock speed of 3.3 GHz, but typically overclocks to an amazing 4.5 - 5 GHz with a decent air cooler and without too much difficulty in getting there. Models in the budget i3 range were released at various times later. See this Wikipedia article for details.

Activision Publishing, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Activision Blizzard, Inc. (Nasdaq: ATVI), announced today that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 crossed the $1 billion mark in sales since its launch on November 8, 2011, according to Charttrack and retail customer sell-through information. Highlighting the trend of interactive entertainment gaining a greater hold of audiences worldwide, the game achieved this milestone in just 16 days, eclipsing the record set in 2009 by the feature film "Avatar," which reached the $1 billion milestone in 17 days.

While 2011 box office revenue is on the decline — down 4 percent this year at $9.4 billion, compared with $9.8 billion in 2010 -- the number of people purchasing and participating in gaming is on the rise, with no sign of slowing.(1) With more than 30 million gamers, the Call of Duty community now exceeds the combined populations of the cities of New York, London, Tokyo, Paris and Madrid.

If you're buying an Electronic Arts game, be prepared for the Online Pass that came with it to have already expired. This was the recent experience of a NeoGAF member who bought a brand new copy of Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit from Amazon, only to find that he got an error message saying that the code was either incorrect or no longer valid. Gaming website Joystick picked up on this and asked an EA advisor about this situation. It turns out that it's EA's corporate policy to have some of these codes expire, but that no one should be faced with this, as a rule. However, if they are, then they can get a new one for free, by either downloading it or getting it from EA directly. Checking the EULA shows that at the moment, there is only one game with this restriction. It's only Dragon Age 2 (packaged) which has a time-limited an Online Pass code and that it expires on March 31, 2012:

In news, that will be sweet music to the ears of honest gamers, InfinityWard has been busily banning cheaters who exploit loopholes and coding errors in the game to get one over others. The figure is currently around the 1600 mark and rising, as InfinityWard's community man Robert Bowling posted on Twitter: Any attempt to cheat, hack, or glitch in #MW3 will not be tolerated. 1600+ bans issued. Updates in works. Please cont. to report offenders. He then added: We are doing mass bans on PC as well while we work on updates. He has promised that a hot fix is in the works for multiple glitches that have been reported.

Now, while cheating is wrong, it can also be an incredibly fun, but guilty pleasure. So, is it really all the cheater's fault, when opportunities like this are laid at there feet? It's like giving someone a cake and telling them not to eat it. Perhaps the program code should have been more bug free in the first place, too?Source: CVG

While the Modern Warfare 3 launch has got off pretty smoothly overall with few technical glitches and made Activision a shed-load of money, it seems that some XBOX 360 players are not so lucky. g4tv.com reports that there is a "A 14-page thread on Xbox.com points to multiple XBOX 360 gamers getting similar disc read errors from the game." The general symptoms seem to be that the console will either not read the disc at all, or starts, but then falls over flat on its face with an ungainly crash a little while later. While many posters have suggested solutions, there doesn't appear to be a definitive fix. Therefore, the best course of action for this problem is to return the disc to the retailer and ask for a replacement.

Finally, If you're a console gamer, then this of course serves you right for not being a PC gamer and enjoying the benefit of superior hardware. It should also be noted that the PC version comes as a download on the Steam online network. This eliminates any DVD read issues as there's no DVD (the installation disc in the retail version can be ignored) and also greatly improves loading times both at the start and during level changes, since it loads from the hard disc.

NVIDIA today announced that system builders worldwide are now shipping the fastest PC gaming platforms ever built, thanks in part to NVIDIA SLI technology and the just-released Intel Core i7 Extreme Edition processors and X79 chipset-based motherboards.

The combination of NVIDIA SLI technology -- which allows for multiple GPUs to run on a single PC -- and new X79-based motherboards allow gamers to customize their PC experience with up to four NVIDIA GeForce GTX GPUs, including the GeForce GTX 580 and GTX 570, the world's fastest DX11 GPUs. Licensed by the world's leading motherboard manufacturers -- including Intel, ASUS, ASRock, EVGA, Foxconn, Gigabyte and MSI, SLI technology is crucial for playing this year's hottest graphics-intensive games, such as the recently released Battlefield 3 and upcoming Batman: Arkham City with detail, resolution and immersion settings cranked up.

Today, we brought you the depressing news that Activision are unlikely to bring the Call of Duty social network called Elite, to the PC platform, despite all their loyal PC gamers, who have bought every iteration of the game going and in particular helped them achieve their blockbuster sales of $400M last week. This delight came courtesy of this tweet:

@thejuggz We are working towards a universal Elite experience but we cannot guarantee if or when a version will be available for the PC.

Well, what do you know, but it looks like Elite is coming to the PC platform after all. Yes, you heard that right. In a tweet a while later, Activision claim to have "misspoken", like this:

We misspoke. Our goal has always been to provide a free PC offering for ELITE. Stay tuned for an update as timing is still being determined.

So PC gamers will at least get the free version. Fantastic. Still second class, but better than nothing. Probably best to keep a close eye on those tweets and a sceptical outlook on this one until it happens. You couldn't make this stuff up.