The above is an Easter Egg in The Witcher 2, depicting a certain protagonist from Assassin’s Creed in a not so comfortable situation after doing what he does best: jumping into carts filled with hay. You can find it in video format here.

Oh, Zynga, will thy never learn. The company which has been blatant in its ripping off other developers’ game mechanics has now been found to steal stock photos from iStockphoto. Specifically, the Zynga Poker game features a vector artwork of a football stadium, with the watermark still there. Our reader Anand did some digging and found the artwork on iStockphoto, from artist Todd Harrison.

This could be a simple glitch where Zynga forgot to remove the watermark before the stuff went live, but even then, publishing a photo without paying the creator is considered theft. Given Zynga’s reputation these days, we wouldn’t be surprised if they just didn’t care.

Thanks for the tip, Anand!

By now, you should know that it’s possible to create virtually anything in Minecraft, no scratch that, it’s possible to create everything in Minecraft. Including re-creating Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

The project is called “Hyrulecraft”, and its goal is to recreate the entire world of Zelda: Ocarina of Time inside of Minecraft, complete with NPCs, dungeons, etc. Fore more details on Hyrulecraft and how to play it, check out this run down by GenGame.

There are petitions these days trying to get developer From Software to port Dark Souls to the PC. The petitions have garnered hundreds of thousands of signatures, but it’s still unlikely we’ll ever see Dark Souls on PC. Why? Because PC is a platform with 90% piracy rate.

The majority of PC gamers will never pay for their games, no matter how many Steam sales Valve has, no matter how much the game are marked down, no matter how easy and convenient and DRM-free it is: it’ll never be better than free. Last year, a whopping 4 million PC gamers pirated Crysis 2. When time comes for Crysis 3, which platform do you think developer Crytek will focus on? PC or consoles? Even Portal 2, which is made by Valve, a company with a God-like status among gamers, was pirated more than 3 million times on the PC.

“If you didn’t pay for it, you stole it. Doesn’t matter if its a physical copy, or a digital copy — the developer won’t get paid for their work.”Developers like Valve can afford to put out great and expensive PC titles: they have an established fan base who are going to buy the game no matter what. But when it comes to small developers, and especially first time developers, it’s a very different story, as Bohemia Interactive showed last year with the release of ArmA 2: for every 3 people who bought the game, 100 pirated it. The head of Bohemia said the statistic was “really worrying for us as a mid-sized, independent, PC-oriented developer”.

Politically correct PC gamers insist that services like Steam and lower prices are the solution to game piracy, but Steam has been around for a few years now, as have other digital distribution systems. Has PC gaming piracy gone down? Not at all. Granted, publishers share some of the blame: restrictive DRM solutions have certainly driven away some legitimate gamers. But before you start praising “non-DRM” solutions, know that there are no true “non-DRM” services. Steam is a DRM service. If you don’t believe that, try and give one of you Steam games to a friend. Try and sell the game that you bought and rightfully own — oh, you can’t. That’s because you don’t own the games in your Steam library, technically you pay for a “subscription” to them.

With those kinds of numbers, why should From Software make Dark Souls for the PC platform? If 9 out of 10 gamers will pirate the game, that’s not a good business proposition. And when multiplatform titles do get a PC release, it’s usually in the form of a bad console port. That’s where the hypocrisy lies: elitist PC gamers complain about bad ports and developers not caring enough about the PC platform. But then they pirate the game anyway. At least 9 out 10 times. The tired old excuse that “online piracy isn’t theft, because it’s just a copy” is bullshit. If you didn’t pay for it, you stole it. Doesn’t matter if its a physical copy, or a digital copy — the developer won’t get paid for their work.

“If I was a developer, would I spend my resources developing for a platform with 10% piracy rate, or 90% piracy rate?”For the record, I don’t own a console. I’m a PC gamer. And all but one (Battlefield 3) of my 40+ games were bought on Steam. But unlike many other legitimate PC gamers, I don’t complain when a developer decides not to release a PC version. Or when they decide to spend most of their resources on the console versions. Nor I don’t complain about bad PC ports that are released years later. I understand their reasons. If I was a developer, would I spend my resources developing for a platform with 10% piracy rate, or 90% piracy rate?

Face it, we PC gamers don’t deserve any more exclusive titles. We don’t deserve proper PC versions or ports. We don’t deserve a truly non-DRM system. By pirating 9 out of 10 games, we have’t earned the right to any of those things.

Sincerely,
A PC gamer.

The recently released first person puzzle game QUBE, which draws inspiration from the likes of Portal, has been somewhat successful, according to the developers. CUBE had a budget of $90,000, pennies compared to AAA titles, but it managed to recoup its costs after just 4 days of being available on Steam. The game retails for $15, and is somewhat of a short affair, with little story and somewhat repetitive gameplay (yes, we’ve played the game). The game has sold 12,000 copies as of a few days ago, but we imagine those numbers are quite higher now.

Either way, we’re glad to see indie titles succeed in an industry that’s increasingly getting hooked on sequels, remakes and adaptations. The developer is currently looking to port the game to iOS and consoles.

According to a new report coming from Chiphell, which has a decent track record when it comes to GPU leaks, Nvidia has decided to launch the next generation GPU, GTX 680, earlier than expected. The original launch was slated for March/April, but due to AMD’s slight lead, Nvidia decided to release the card in late-February.

The GTX 680 is said to offer the same performance as AMD’s 7970 card, and will ship with 2 GB of RAM and a clock speed of 780 MHz. The GTX 680 will reportedly be followed by the GTX 700-series later this year.

According to new findings, Ubisoft’s draconian DRM system is even worse than we thought. The company has received heavy criticism for the limitation it puts on PC players, like having a constant Internet connection in order to play offline games. Now, it appears that the DRM software also monitors your hardware changes, and if any major changes are made, the game won’t run. Those changes could include a simple graphics card upgrade.

PC enthusiast site Guru3D found out that if you swapped your graphics card, Anno 2070 would no longer run and would refuse to be installed on the system. We dunno about you, but this is definitely taking it too far.

Indie hit and cult phenomenon Minecraft has now topped 20 million registered users, Minecraft creator Notch revealed via his Twitter. Minecraft has been a huge success over the past few years, and has generated lots of revenue for its studio, Mojang Games. However, 20 million registered users doesn’t mean 20 million copies sold. Last time we checked, Minecraft had sold about 4 million copies, as of late last year.

The big Warhammer 40K MMO, Warhammer 40,000: Dark Millennium Online, has reportedly been cancelled due to financial issues over at publisher THQ. According to rumors which are flooding out of THQ, the company is in such a dire state that it might announce bankruptcy soon, or offer itself up for sale. More THQ games are reported to be on the chopping block, but it’s unclear which ones. Currently, the publisher is funding projects such as Darksiders 2 and Metro: Last Light.

According to reports coming from game analyst Kevin Dent, THQ is now desperately looking for a buyer, and has not only cancelled all projects it had lined up for 2014, but has returned IP rights it acquired from Disney. With no refund.

It’s still unlikely that THQ will go belly up, considering that the company has a lot of assets and a lot of IP that they can sell, like Red Faction, Saints Row et al. If not sell, the IP can be used to attract potential buyers. Currently the company employs around 1,000 people. All things considered, things aren’t looking good for THQ.

As for Warhammer 40,000: Dark Millennium Online, it looks like this expensive project is over. The game has been in development since 2009 at Vigil Games.

Halo 4 on the PC might be a possibility, according to a new rumor emerging from developer 343 Industries. The rumor comes from an “inside source” sent to DigitalBattle, suggesting that 343i has a “team looking into the possibility of porting Halo 4 to the PC” and that Microsoft is interested in this in order to “breathe life back into Games For Windows Live”. While 343 has yet to release a PC game, many developers from the defunct Pandemic studio left for 343, developers with a lot of PC experience (Pandemic shipped some 10 PC titles over the years) — so 343 definitely has the capacity and talent to work on the PC platform.

Halo hasn’t seen a Windows PC release since Halo 2 back in 2004. Since then, it’s been an Xbox 360 exclusive, even Halo Wars, an RTS, was only released on the Xbox 360.

Naturally, take this rumor with a grain of salt. Halo has been a system seller for the Xbox 360 over the years, and even if we see a Halo 4 PC release, don’t expect it to be simultaneous with the Xbox 360. Perhaps a year down the line, 2013, we might see Halo 4 on the PC. Might.