Daily News Spin — February 15, 2001 (Thursday)

More trouble on the 'net

EUniverse is closing its affliate program. They own the Gamer's Alliance network, so we're assuming that will be ok for now. For more on this story, Swankygames has a brief news story, including a copy of the email and a link to the gaming affliates who are affected. Thanks Actiontrip!

In another story, related to the advertising fallout in all liklihood, NASDAQ sent theglobe.com a letter yesterday informing them that they were moving to delist them from their stock exchange. Theglobe.com owns Happy Puppy, Games Domain Review, Computer Games Online, and Computer Games Magazine. Theglobe.com is appealing the decision.

Delisting is really a fatality, in the parlance of Mortal Kombat. It makes it very difficult for a company to raise additional cash, and theglobe.com indicated in their most recent financial report that they would need additional funding to continue.

Mod your own MMORPG world

Caeron3000 by Magique Productions, yet another massively multiplayer game in development, issued a press release stating that they will support mod authors for their science fiction game in development. The game will come with six official planets supported, but ambitious mod authors who want to host their own planet can make one if they are accepted into the program. Here's a bit from the press release, as gleaned from Gamespydaily:

The main Caeron3000 universe consists of a solar system of 6 planets. This system is reserved for control and expansion by Magique Productions, Ltd. A map will be published in a few days that will illustrate all the stars in neighboring sectors of space that will have planets available for MOD. Mixed in with these will be some planets reserved for control by Magique Productions, Ltd. The others are open for expansion by the MOD community.

To reserve a planet or portion of a planet for expansion, you must request a MOD Application by e-mailing [email protected]. You will be required to specify the planet you wish to acquire for expansion and a description of the planned MOD. Along with your plans, you must include a rough map of the area and descriptions of points of interest. You must also have the resources to host the MOD. Hosting requires 2 servers on a fast internet connection (DSL or Cable minimum).

This is a bit of a gamble on the part of Magique Productions. Mods that are poorly designed and maintained may reflect poorly upon the entire commercial game. It will certainly be a good, albeit laborious way for would-be MMORPG designers to break into the market, however.

NVIDIA sends Xbox chips to fabrication plants

A critical milestone was passed for the Xbox, and we hope it wasn't painful. NVIDIA released the processors it's making for the Xbox, one for video and one for broadband networking and audio, to the fabrication plants.

According to NVIDIA and Microsoft, this means the Xbox is on track for a fall release. We wonder how the games are coming along? We're getting to within a six to eight month timeframe for their release, yet we haven't seen too much about them. Of course, we expect that all will be revealed at Gamestock next month when Microsoft puts on their annual dog and pony show.

3am

We talked to Blizzard's Bill Roper today, so we hope to have the interview up tomorrow, sometime. He did mention that just this past Monday the entire company was invited to play the Diablo expansion for the first time to solicit feedback and that it's on schedule, which is a minor miracle for a Blizzard game.

Click here to read the yesterday's news