Hasta La Gadget!

I’ve been a gamer for a long time, and I’ve never been a fan of micro-transactions in games. These are the little paid add-ons that allow you to buy upgrades and other items that you might not have access to at all or at least not until you achieve higher levels otherwise. I’ve always felt like micro-transactions were a bit like legalized cheating. I also don’t like how some games make in-game purchases almost a requirement to advance. I long for the days when you just bought a game and you got the whole game.

EA revealed this week that it would be putting micro-transactions into all of its video games going forward. EA says that consumers like in-game purchases and micro-transactions. However, a lot of gamers feel the same way I do, and don’t like micro-transactions. EA’s video game Dead Space 3 was criticized over its implementation of micro-transactions because the game seemed to some to be focused on pushing users to make these purchases.

The info came from EA Chief Financial Officer Blake Jorgensen, who stated “The next and much bigger piece [of the business] is micro-transactions within games...  We’re building into all of our games the ability to pay for things along the way, either to get to a higher level to buy a new character, to buy a truck, a gun, whatever it might be.”

EA has offered in-game purchases and micro-transactions in the past, specifically on its driving game franchise Need for Speed. EA has allowed users to purchase car packs, providing them with vehicles earlier than they would normally be allowed to have them if they progress through the game naturally.

While this might be seen as a convenience to gamers who want to skip ahead, it’s also just a way for game developers to increase revenues by selling add-ons incrementally beyond the base price of a game.

[via EuroGamer]

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m worried. I love these Knicks, but lately they’ve looked as if they are lacking in something deep and important.
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Google Play Books has been on a slow world tour that hasn’t given Asia much love. Google is addressing that regional deficit in grand fashion today by launching its digital bookshop in India. The collection includes the expected blend of local and international titles, although the Books expansion is almost more important as a milestone for Google’s overall content strategy in the country — it’s the first instance of anything besides Android apps reaching India’s Google Play Store. In an appropriate (if not necessarily intentional) pairing with the launch, Google has also pushed out a worldwide update to the Books app for Android that lets readers filter books by type and identifies place names on the existing page. The news will still be happiest for those eager to read in Rajkot, but there’s a little for seemingly everyone at the source link.

Filed under: Cellphones, Internet, Mobile, Google

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Via: Google Play (Twitter)

Source: Google Play

Pandora has been the choice for many people who want to listen to radio stations across a number of genres such as artists, decades, and even seasonal. Pandora offers a premium subscription service called Pandora One that allows users to listen without any ads, at a higher audio quality and other perks. The problem is a good majority of Pandora’s users listen to the service’s free service, and as a result, the company is announcing some changes the majority of Pandora users probably won’t be happy to hear.

Pandora is announcing they will begin limiting the amount of time a free Pandora user can listen to their tunes to 40 hours a month on mobile devices. The reason for this change in service is due to the rise of royalty costs, although Pandora’s founder Tim Westergren says only about 4 percent of its over 65 million regular customers will be affected by these limits as the average user listens to about 20 hours of turns a month. (more…)

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I remember when HTC first came up with their Sense user interface skin on top of the Android operating system, it worked pretty good, although after a while, Sense started to feel old, and it more or less bogged down the handset’s performance due to the processing power that was demanded. Well, the folks over at HTC do seem as though they will be introducing their latest version of Sense, which stands at Sense 5.0, for the HTC One X, One X+, One S and HTC Butterfly in the “coming months”, at least according to an answer to a question by a fan on their Facebook page.

Sense 5.0 will hit the international models of the HTC One X, One X+, One S and HTC Butterfly, although you ought to take into consideration that some of the new features which were enabled by the new HTC One hardware will be unavailable in the software updates. Of course, it remains to be seen just what these features that are unavailable will be, but chances are pretty good that the 360-degree panoramas as well as proprietary Zoe collages might be a wee bit too much to handle for the older generation of Snapdragons processors.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Corning Willow Glass At Least 3 Years Away From Appearing In Consumer Products, Fujitsu Prototypes Tablet That Watches You Type A Nonexistent Keyboard,