FTC May Save Take-Two From Getting Acquired by EA

According to Justin Blankenship, An ex-FTC Lawyer, EA and Take-Two merger could be stopped by FTC due to anti-trust laws. Blankenship sent a formal post to Newsweek, here’s a snippet:

Until 2004, I worked in a division of the FTC that spent a lot of time looking at technology-related mergers, and had at least taken a good look at mergers like this one. I also have every reason to suspect that my former colleagues would give this deal a hard look, especially in light of Mr. Pachter’s comments, of which I’m sure they’re aware.

If a government agency has problems with a merger, it’s likely because it believes the economic data supports a narrowly defined market (e.g., licensed professional hockey videogames or hockey videogames). The parties to the merger will argue to define the market more broadly (e.g., videogames as a whole, or sports videogames as a whole). Under a broad market definition of all videogames, the merger poses no problems, because the loss of one product in a market of thousands of competitors is a ripple in the sea. However, under a narrow market definition, no other third party can make a licensed professional hockey game (with real player names, team names, stats, etc.) other than EA/Take-Two, granting it an effective monopoly.

Read-up the full post here.

The Ship - Update Released

The Ship, mod-turned-full-version first person shooter has gotten an update on Steam. The update will automatically be applied when you restart your steam client.

RELEASE NOTES:

Fixed bug where you could noclip when jumping at the same time as interacting with something

Improved weapon combat under higher lag situations

Sounds and decals now get loaded correctly from custom maps that have these files zipped into the BSP

Fixed potential crash with very long chat messages

Fixed bug where fatigue was not going up while sprinting if you sprinted when you woke up

Fixed bug with players not being able to get other player names

Fixed bug where Quarry location was still being shown on map even though player has no Quarry

Bots no longer consider prison areas when looking for interactions outside of prison

Bots no longer think they are trespassing when in a toilet room meant for them (i.e. male toilet for male Bots)

Don’t arrest a player if they have been killed just after the arrest process has begun

Single Player - Needs are now reset when you fail a mission

Crysis Weekly Update #6

We welcome you to the “Crysis Weekly Update #6”, which is an official status report from Crytek to the world-wide community in order to get you up-to-date on the progress of various Crysis related topics. This time the update includes quite significant information about the recently detected security hole in Crysis. Additionally we have news on the upcoming patch 1.2 and the Mod SDK v1.2 for you. We also would like to inform you a bit about the future of Crysis, especially related to Multiplayer.
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