Valve’s Take on Piracy

by Stephen Spring on January 19th, 2009 at 11:22 am EDT - 410 views

Valve, creators of such games as Half Life, Counter Strike, and more recently Left 4 Dead, have come forward today at a Game Business Law summit at Southern Methodist University. At the summit Valve stated that the piracy problems were largely the fault of the marketers and not the consumers.

We take all of our games day-and-date to Russia. The reason people pirated things in Russia is because Russians are reading magazines and watching television. They say ‘Man, I want to play that game so bad,’ but the publishers respond ‘you can play that game in six months…maybe.’ 

Holtman then stated that whenever their Valve products were readily available in Russia, piracy of said game dropped dramatically. Holtman took aim at the marketers again saying that the majority of pirates were simply “Underserved” customers. (That’s UNDER-SERVED)

This comes as a suprise to many as Valve, the creator of Steam, currently is one of two dominating powers in the video game sales industry and for a company whos livelyhood is creating and selling games to take a defensive stand point strikes us as a little odd.

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Motorola Job Cuts

by Stephen Spring on January 15th, 2009 at 10:39 am EDT - 556 views

Motorola announced Wednesday that it would be axing another 4,000 approximate jobs in 2009. This comes only a year after the mobile phone company realeased 3,000 of their workers in the 2008 year.

The 7,000 total job cuts are said to save the company around 1.5 Billion dollars in annual savings. The majority of the job cuts are mostly realated to the moblile phone business, however corporate Motorola see’s to lose around 1000 jobs. The cuts are a major initiative in the  cost-cutting measures being taken by Motorola. But, to give some props to Motorola they are cutting their Executive’s pay in these trying economic times. Which is better than we can say about some of the bailout banks like AIG financial.

This is no suprise with many other companies doing similar job cuts. However, you wouldn’t think companies like Motorola would have to cut jobs after a pretty action-packed year. 

Image courtesy of portfolio

Top Ten Free iPhone Applications

by Stephen Spring on December 24th, 2008 at 9:44 pm EDT - 3,394 views

In the past year or so I’ve made two major purchases. One of these purchases was my new gaming rig which is used everyday when I’m at home. The other purchase was my iPhone which I use everyother place I go whether it be in a long car ride…..or in the back of Trigonometry when our teacher is talking about ‘God knows what’. The point being that I have scoured near every popular free app there is and that is how I make my mark with these, my top 10 free iPhone apps.

10. Remote- This application created by Apple was created to allow an iPhone owner to sync their iPhone with their iTunes library. I find myself using this when I lie in bed not wanting to get up and turn on some tunes from my computer that’ll liven me up and begin the day. Although it is number 10, it is still a good app.

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