Activision on Thursday announced that the 2015 Call of Duty Championship will be held in Los Angeles from March 27-29. The prize pool will be US$1 million with the semi-finals and finals streamed live via Xbox Live. "We developed Advanced Warfare with the competitive community in mind, and we can't wait for the top talent from around the world to compete in the Call of Duty Championships," Sledgehammer's Glen Schofield said. Call of Duty: Advance Warfare is still freezing for PlayStation 3 users after two months of patches. The latest Forza Horizon 2 DLC Storm Island caused a storm with fans due to crashes.
The Internet Archive — a non-profit digital library — now hosts 2,386 DOS games you can play for free. Due to the way it works some games may not run as intended, but it is an excellent and simple way to play old games on new machines. Supergiant Games creative director Greg Kasavin revealed their latest game Transistor sold 600,000 units — their first game Bastion sold 3 million. "Word-of-mouth is what kept Bastion going for way, way longer than we could have imagined, and it's what's kept Transistor going strong, too," Kasavin said. An eBay auction for Stadium Events — a rare NES game — has topped US$40,000. The seller claims verification of the cartridge by the Video Game Authority, a group who authenticates retro games.
Microsoft is playing with the Xbox Avatars again, possibly spreading them throughout the Microsoft ecosystem. Microsoft is playing with the Xbox DRM again, a response to an issue triggered by FarCry 4. Xbox One owners, who pre-purchase Evolve from the Xbox Games Store, will get some characters, allowing users to cut some of the level grind. Microsoft announced new streaming and recording rules granting users a "personal, non-exclusive, non-sublicenseable, non-transferable, revocable, limited license." Sony announced pricing for PlayStation Now, their online streaming gaming service. They have a library of more than 100 PlayStation 3 games, with PS1 and PS2 games coming later.
Codemasters is looking to lay off fifty staff members to ease its wage budget. Steam enforced a CAPTCHA for trading, to stop gamers from being exploited and having their goodies transferred from their account. Star Citizen developer Cloud Imperium Games has reached US$69 million in funding for the game, and now has 180 staff members worldwide. Minecraft surpassed Valve's popular online game Dota 2 in cracking one million concurrent players.
Mad Catz announced a new mobile controller called the L.Y.N.X. that offers "uncompromised control and portability." for use "across multiple devices." Rockstar made it snow over the Holiday Period, creating a serene and slippery Los Santos. Razer announced Cortex, their game streaming technology which will work with any hardware and software, unlike the solutions used by Nvidia and Steam. Razer announced their open-source headset called OSVR. The open-source dev kit can work with other devices, so games, which support Oculus, should automatically work on OSVR. Nyko announced a dock for the PlayStation 4 that will allow over two Terabytes of storage. Nvidia announced the Tegra X1 at CES 2015, a chip, they claim, that is twice as powerful as the Tegra K1 introduced in 2014. Nvidia touts performance levels and energy efficiency that will bring console and PC-grade graphics to tablets and phones.
