Blizzard ushered in the month of October by showing Starcraft II cheaters the door,suspending or banning roughly 5,000 players of the real-time strategy game for using hacks to gain an advantage in the game. Days later, the company went after some of the people responsible for the cheat programs.
Blizzard last week filed suit in the Los Angeles US District Court against three programmers, accusing them of creating and selling hacks for Starcraft II in violation of the end-user license agreement, Battle.net terms of use, and copyright law.
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As the holiday season approaches, things have yet to pick up for the video game industry as sales fell for the sixth month in a row in September.
Research group NPD reports that, in the month of September, sales of video game software, hardware and accessories fell 8 percent to $1.2 billion. Game hardware was hit the hardest, with sales falling 19 percent to $383 million. This month represents the first time that NPD has not publicly released sales for individual consoles (these numbers are still available for those willing to pay) but Microsoft was more than happy to reveal that the Xbox is still selling extremely well.
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Broussard lost up to $30 million of his own finances in developing Duke Nukem Forever.
Thursday CVG said that Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford wouldn't let the London press film portions of a new Duke Nukem Forever trailer because "it dances on the line of decency." 2K Games made a similar move during Duke's big reveal at PAX 2010, kicking video cameras out of the mini-theater once it began showing another trailer.
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When playing a war game, players like to be the hero. We want to shoot the gun that kills the guy that wins us the war, battle, whatever. The upcoming Medal of Honor title from EA stirred up controversy by including the Taliban as playable characters in the multiplayer portion of the game, and some gamers seemed unsure of how to react.While EA first responded to complaints by claiming it was just a game, and that someone needed to be the bad guy, the company has since buckled under the weight of the bad press; the Taliban has been removed from the multiplayer aspect of the game. Well, at least the name.
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Early trial for DICE multiplayer shooter runs October 4-7, will let players test two maps and multiplayer modes, check out playable Taliban controversy for themselves.

Ordinarily, when a Medal of Honor is awarded, it's not going to be taken away. Next month will see an exception of sorts, as Electronic Arts will be giving PC gamers an open beta for its first-person shooter Medal of Honor but will be pulling the plug on the testing period after four days.
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