BioWare's Mass Effect franchise was one of the studio's more successful ventures, selling an ungodly number of copies for both the original game and its sequel across a number of systems. Stunningly, Dragon Age managed to outsell not just that franchise, but according to BioWare's Rob Bartel the game has apparently beaten sales records of all their other titles as well. That makes it all the more confusing as to why they've apparently decided to heavily emulate Mass Effect while creating Dragon Age 2, out next year.

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Last week, Yahoo!'s Plugged In site ran an interview with Epic Games' president Mike Capps detailing why his company has decided to leave the PC platform and switch focus to console games. Inevitably, his claim of rampant piracy has been picked up on a number of news sites and thrown up as validation that PC gaming is somehow "dying."

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Steam announced yesterday that they had partnered up with Prima, long the purveyor of official "strategy guides" for games like Mass Effect 2 and Prince of Persia, to offer downloadable versions of their guides through Valve's platform. At first glance I liked this idea a lot, but after buying one of them it seemed like a waste of money.

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As you may have heard, yesterday Valve (mostly) met one of their rare scheduled dates and released the OS X version of their popular digital distribution client, Steam. While the move to OS X is certainly a welcome one, as it gives access to a subset of computer users often left out when it comes to games, Steam's arrival hasn't been completely graceful.

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Last week Wolfire Games announced the "Humble Indie Bundle," a collection of five popular indie games packaged together under one price. The enticing factor was that you could choose to pay whatever you wanted for the package. One might think the lack of DRM coupled with the ability to get a number of stellar games for as little as a penny would mitigate the need to pirate the collection. But on a blog post to their site, one of the co-founders of Wolfire Games posted numbers indicating that he believes around 25% of direct downloads of the bundle are pirated.

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No real surprise: the preliminary results of December's public solicitation over an R18+ classification for video games have started to come in; overwhelmingly, the public is in favour of introducing one. Last year the Minister for Home Affairs released the long-awaited discussion paper and gave Australian citizens and lobbyist groups the chance to voice their opinions on implementing a classification for games higher than the existing age-15 limit we have today. Even in February it was clear that the results would be firmly in the for-camp and although final numbers haven't been tabulated yet, so far only a small percentage of Australian citizens oppose the measure.

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Funcom has introduced an optional "offline character progression" tool in the latest update to Age of Conan. With this new toy, a player will accrue bonus levels every four days that can be applied to any of their characters over level 30. The bonus levels are granted regardless of whether or not a player even logs in once during that four-day period, but an active paid subscription is a requirement to get them in the first place. Once your character reaches max level, the bonus ones still sit in their progression pool and accrue normally, ready to be applied to a new character once it reaches 30.

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