online gaming news stories on Newser

Farmville Maker Zynga's IPO Pegs Value at $7B

John Johnson — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 16:44:05 CST

Tomorrow should be a pretty good day to live in Farmville: Creator Zynga begins trading publicly on the Nasdaq exchange under the ticker ZNGA, and the company has set the price for the 100 million shares being sold at $10, reports MarketWatch . That would peg the market value of Zynga...

Hackers Grab Data of 1.3M Sega Players

Mary Papenfuss — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 01:20:00 CDT

Hackers have swiped personal data of nearly 1.3 million Sega video game players, the Japanese company has revealed. The information included names, birth dates, email addresses and encrypted passwords, reports AP . Service was "illegally accessed from outside and personal information of all" customers of the online Sega Pass, operated...

Here's Why You Kept Losing at Online Poker

John Johnson — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 12:29:38 CDT

Nate Silver offers a lengthy primer on the online poker industry and its prospects for survival after the recent crackdown by the feds , with this interesting reveal from the stats whiz: "Between 2004 and 2006, I played a substantial amount of online poker, using it as my primary source of...

New Facebook Game Highlights Human Rights

Rob Quinn — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 04:16:00 CDT

A new game out on Facebook focuses on human rights and social justice instead of virtual crops or online Mafias. America 2049 , set in a future US obsessed by disease control and short on civil liberties, puts the player in the role of an agent for the "Council on American...

How CityVille Sucked In a Hardcore Gamer

Matt Cantor — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 14:55:33 CDT

The online city-planning game CityVille is meant for “casual gamers,” and there are plenty of them: 92 million active monthly users, to be exact. But such simple gameplay and basic graphics would turn off any sophisticated player, right? Wrong—as JP Mangalindan, writing in Fortune , found out. A lifelong “hardcore...

Urban Sprawl: CityVille Tops FarmVille

Polly Davis Doig — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 10:58:02 CST

Zynga is officially taking over the planet, having converted millions of functioning human beings into game-playing zombies in the first month of its latest release alone, reports TechCrunch . CityVille, oddly reminiscent of the Sims, has logged a whopping 72.5 million monthly unique visitors since its launch Dec. 2—eclipsing...

Howdy, Crazy FarmVille Addicts: Here's a New Vice

Polly Davis Doig — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 14:25:53 CST

Maybe there are people out there who don't know someone who is batspit crazy about FarmVille, and those people should count their blessings. For the rest of us, Zynga is in the next few weeks rolling out its newest iteration of online game crack, ingeniously titled CityVille. You guessed it:...

Gamer Stabs Counter-Strike Foe—For Real

Rob Quinn — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 04:55:53 CDT

A Frenchman—possibly so divorced from reality that he failed to realize there's no respawn option in real life— hunted down a player who "fatally stabbed" his virtual character in online game Counter-Strike and plunged a real knife into the game rival's chest. The victim survived after the knife missed...

Want Hot Halo Opponent? Try Gamecrush

Will McCahill — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 21:00:00 CDT

Male online gamers surely fantasize that one of their opponents is a good-looking female, and one Web site is looking to capitalize, making it happen in exchange for dough. Gamecrush can set you up with a PlayDate whose profile you find sexy, er, interesting, and $10 gets you about 10...