Language Selection

English French German Italian Portuguese Spanish

Online gaming costs set to rise

Filed under
Gaming

Four new maps for the Xbox game Halo 2 are now available for download onto the console.

The new maps breathe life into Halo 2's multiplayer element and will undoubtedly spark a renewed rush to pick up the controller.

Downloadable content has become part and parcel of online gaming, especially for Xbox users who can store new content on the machine's hard drive.

New maps, levels, cars and weapons have become familiar adds-ons for gamers.
In Halo 2's case the new content comes with a catch, of sorts - while two of the maps are free, the other two cost £2.99 for the pair.

If gamers wait until the summer, all four of the maps will be free, but for hard core fans the temptation to pay out will be strong - especially when all it takes is a click of a button.
More than 6.7 million gamers have bought Halo 2 since its release in November last year and if only one in 10 of those buy the maps that is an additional £2m of revenue.

So are the paid-for maps worth the cost?

Rob Fahey, editor of Gamesindustry.biz website, said: "It depends largely on how much you play Halo 2 online.

"There are people playing every day and for them £2.99 will bring hours and hours of gaming, which is good value."

Downloadable content is likely to be a core component of all the next generation of consoles from Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony.

"Microsoft want to tap into a cultural trend of customisation," explained Mr Fahey. Electronic Arts too has spoken about "micro transactions", letting gamers buy "gear" for their video games for small fees.

But he warned games developers and publishers from trying to exploit gamers by selling content which had been intended to form part of the original game.

"I'm aware of a strategy of some publishers to finish a game and then take content out, only to charge for it later.

"That is immoral and will soon backfire on publishers."

Full Story.

More in Tux Machines

digiKam 7.7.0 is released

After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech

The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.