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Steam tops 8 million concurrent users as sale draws to a close
Steam is quite popular during its Summer Sale thanks to its massively discounted games. How popular? As it turns out, the PC game distribution service reached a new peak of concurrent users, 8,020,792 to be exact, according to stats provided by Valve. Steam broke the 8 million mark as the storefront updated on Sunday for the final day of the Summer Sale. Valve revealed in January at its Dev Days event that Steam reached 75 million active users in total, up from the 65 million it had in October. The Summer Sale ends at which ends at 1:00 p.m. ET (10:00 a.m. PT) today, and includes games like The Wolf Among Us ($8.49), Tomb Raider ($4.99), Civilization 5 ($7.49), Dishonored ($4.99) and the Complete Edition of Metro: Last Light ($6.49). [Image: Steam]
Riot CEO Brandon Beck on forging success with League of Legends
Riot Games has announced player numbers for its extremely popular League of Legends title, and they're pretty phenomenal. With over 15 million registered players, the Defense of the Ancients-style online multiplayer RTS can now brush shoulders with games like Blizzard's World of Warcraft (12 million players), Call of Duty (13 million players on Xbox Live), and The Sims (16 million copies sold), as one of the biggest PC games in history. Granted, as a free-to-play title that relies on microtransactions for revenue, League of Legends has more access to a wider audience than games driven by retail sales or subscriptions. But there's no question at all that this is a huge and exceptionally popular game. Joystiq got to talk with CEO and co-founder of Riot Brandon Beck about today's announcement, and he says that even the company was surprised by how big LoL (as it's called in shorthand) has gotten. "The growth of the League of Legends community far exceeded our expectations," he tells us. "We are proud of the numbers we are hitting on our platform and are confident our fantastic team can continue to grow and evolve our PvP.net technology to handle even greater numbers."
Concurrent updates Start Over timeshifting service
By now, if its available in your area you're probably familiar with Start Over, basically a network DVR letting people see the beginning of a TV show they might have missed. Of course, all of that's only useful if it actually works and captures everything, so Concurrent has announced its latest advance for the backend is the Real Time Pitcher 2000, using reliable multicast to ensure no loss of video capture due to network or component failures and give it the big five nines of reliability. We certainly wouldn't want anything less tha a 99.999% chance of catching the first five minutes of The Closer, would you?
Chinese WoW hits 1 million concurrent players
var digg_url = 'http://wow.joystiq.com/2008/04/11/chinese-wow-hits-1-million-concurrent-players/'; The9, which is the company that runs Blizzard's World of Warcraft in China, has announced today that the game has hit a full million concurrent players (which means that they've had one million people playing the game all at the same time) following the release of the Burning Crusade expansion there last year. Here in North America, concurrent users hasn't really ever been as high (although that is of course unofficial data, and we don't have information after the first month of this year). But MMOs are a different beast in China and other Asian countries -- not only do players pay-to-play (instead of a monthly fee, many players often pay hourly or daily, which means concurrent users equals paying users), and there are actually three games that have hit a million concurrent users over there (while here, WoW is far and above the largest MMO online).Still, it's quite an achievement. It's interesting that it's coming so late in the product's life -- it seems that, just as over here, the expansion had a significant impact on player interest. Definitely a big milestone for Blizzard's game in China.
Cox Arizona getting VOD via SSD-based servers
It's one thing to get video-on-demand, but it's another thing if that content is being served up via Concurrent's MediaHawk 4500. Apparently, Cox Communications' Arizona division will be using the aforementioned media server -- which automatically detects failures and re-routes streams to alternate paths -- to dish out VOD content to its customers. Additionally, the unit relies on solid state discs, presumably making everything a bit snappier for the end user. We're not told whether HD material will be included in this VOD rollout, but nevertheless, deployment is scheduled to begin in Q1 of next year.[Via Multichannel News]
