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Tech companies file briefs supporting challenges to DACA withdrawal
Major tech companies are still voicing their support for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), a program that protects undocumented immigrants that came to the US when they were children. President Trump decided to end DACA protections in September and while tech companies spoke out in support of DACA prior to and following that decision, many have now filed a document backing those that are challenging the president's move in court.
Video games industry in great health, unlike the rest of the US economy
Interested in dosing up your video game knowledge with a shot of macroeconomic data? Of course you are. The US Entertainment Software Association has delivered its 2010 health report for entertaining software and things are looking rosy. While the US economy was enjoying a steady 2.8 percent annual growth between 2005 and 2008, video game revenues were expanding by 16.7 percent a year. Factoring in the economically arid 2009 chops total US economic growth in half down to 1.4 percent, but gaming again shows its resiliency by taking a smaller dip down to 10.6 percent. That'll be welcome news to the more than 120,000 people whose employment depends on this burgeoning industry, as will the fact that the average annual compensation in the sector is just under $90,000. Good work, if you can get it.
Palm's webOS PDK beta adds Pixi native development, PDK'd apps will hit the Catalog mid year
We just sat down with Palm here at GDC and fished out a few more details on the PDK beta front. Firstly, and most interestingly, Palm has confirmed that the PDK now works on all of its handsets (instead of just the Pre and Pre Plus), which means Pixi buyers can stop hating themselves pretty soon. Apparently the level of performance degradation should be comparable iPhone 3G vs. 3GS, which doesn't sound too horrible. This is functionality that wasn't available even to Palm's early PDK partners like EA and Gameloft, so we should be seeing versions of existing games make the jump to the Pixi when the time for PDK beta-developed apps to hit the Palm App Catalog. When will that time come, you ask? The "middle of the year," or "a few months," whichever sounds more promising to you. Palm's not saying whether this new era for the App Catalog (anyone being able to release PDK apps, and those apps working on the Pre and the Pixi) will accompany a full-on webOS update, but it seems logical to us. On a more technical front, we're told the PDK supports the Linux standard SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer) to ease in porting and development (Unreal for Linux runs using SDL, for instance), and that developers could even build apps like an audio processor that rely on PDK components but don't show up in the UI at all, or OpenGL-empowered things that aren't necessarily games or in 3D. Also, existing developers have only been able to do "full screen" games that rely on PDK components alone, but the PDK beta lets you mix and match webOS UI with PDK elements. Currently there aren't many PDK games that use the extra Palm hardware like the QWERTY keyboard and the gesture area, but we're told that's all exposed to the developer, along with any other element of webOS that Mojo SDK users have access to. One notable plugin hangup is the fact that Flash only works in the browser, and can't be embedded into a regular webOS app, PDK or no -- though we have to assume this is something that's in the works.
Author of World of Warcraft and Philosophy interviewed
World of Warcraft and Philosophy got released a little while back -- it's a book by Luke Cuddy and John Nordlinger that examines WoW-related topics like roleplaying and the Corrupted Blood plague, and ties them into philsophical ideas and thinking. TechFlash has now posted an interview with Nordlinger, and it's a good read as well. Nordlinger says that one reason they chose to talk about World of Warcraft in this way is that it's so incredibly big -- when you have 12 million (give or take a few at this point) people playing a game with a GDP larger than some smaller nations, you're going to touch on all sorts of interesting ethical, moral, and other philosophical ideas. He says the book has been pretty popular, and a few universities are currently considering teaching courses based on the material, not only because it's interesting, but thinking about the game in this way helps improve abstract thinking in general. And perhaps most interesting, he says that reading the book could help players better make ethical and moral decisions in the game. Just ninja-ing the mount from an Onyxia raid might not mean much to you, but when you look at the bigger picture, and what those actions mean for ethics in general, Nordlinger says the book might help players "make more aware decisions, if not different decisions." Of course, in practice, trying to explain higher philosophy to ninjas might not have the desired effect, but it does seem true that exploring the higher meanings of this game and the intents of the people playing it might put a little more meaning into the pixels as well.
CCP releases EVE QEN, says 250k subs by Q2, and plans Gross User Product report
CCP has released their Quarterly Economic Newsletter for the 4th quarter of last year in EVE Online, and the word is "growth." They saw big increases in trade volume and value all over the place on the market. Which isn't surprising, considering how much their population surged late last year, thanks in large part to the well-received Trinity expansion. And the growth isn't done -- CCP expects to see 250,000 subscribers by the end of Q2 2008.There are lots of great numbers in here -- apparently only 9% of players are out in low sec space (much lower than I'd thought). Jita is still a madhouse (no duh -- you'll already know that if you've ever tried to go in there on a weekend). Finally, they've introduced a new tracking variable, called Gross User Product, that is the value of all services and goods produced in a period of time, minus the amount of goods and services consumed. In other words, a GDP, but for a virtual world. They don't have a figure yet (because it has to be tracked over a period of time), but the next QEN should have some even more interesting information on how we might track virtual economies in MMO games.
