Author Archive | Jared Newman

If you were a child in the 1990s with an ounce of geekiness in you, you read GamePro. Its review score smiley faces and staff writer avatars spelled out what games you’d be begging mom to buy, and its ProTips ensured high praise from friends while you huddled around the nearest Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis.

Effective December 5, the magazine and its website are shutting down. GamePro’s website says PCWorld.com will take over editorial (both publications are owned by IDG), while IndustryGamers reports that GamePro Media will focus on custom publishing, such as specialized gaming publications for trade shows and events. There will be layoffs, but it’s not clear how many people are affected.

(Disclosure: I write for PCWorld, but hardly ever about video games. I don’t know who will be producing GamePro content at the site.)

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Nvidia’s third quarter earnings are in, and apparently, quite good, with a revenue increase of 4.9 percent over last quarter. While you might expect the company’s Tegra smartphone and tablet processors to be the stars of the show, Nvidia’s actually attributing much of its revenue growth to desktop graphics cards for PC gaming.

That’s right, the gaming platform that conventional wisdom loves to declare dead is actually a big money-maker for Nvidia right now, with revenue growth of 23 percent over last quarter. And Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang is not surprised:

“This happens every major game console cycle toward the second half of its product life, because PC technology advances on a regular basis instead of once every seven to ten years,” Huang told investors.

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Apparently not all game publishers soaked in the lessons from Sony’s Playstation Network hack last April. Valve, which runs the popular Steam PC game service, said one of its databases was compromised over the weekend. The database contained user names, hashed and salted passwords, purchase information, e-mail addresses, billing addresses and encrypted credit card information.

“We do not have evidence that encrypted credit card numbers or personally identifying information were taken by the intruders, or that the protection on credit card numbers or passwords was cracked. We are still investigating,” Valve’s co-founder and managing director, Gabe Newell, said in a statement.

Still, Newell told Steam users to watch their credit card statements and activity closely.

The breach stems from an intrusion into Valve’s Steam forums. After investigating, Valve discovered that the hack went beyond the Steam forums, but there’s still no evidence of compromised information beyond a handful of forum accounts.

“We do not know of any compromised Steam accounts, so we are not planning to force a change of Steam account passwords (which are separate from forum passwords). However, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to change that as well, especially if it is the same as your Steam forum account password,” Newell said.

So, it’s a security blunder on Valve’s part, and now everyone who’s used Steam should probably change their passwords to be on the safe side. Frustrating? Sure, but at least Newell has the humility to do something that took Sony a long time to accomplish: he apologized. “I am truly sorry this happened,” Newell’s statement concludes, “and I apologize for the inconvenience.”