Twitch had been teasing big news this week, and a few days ago they revealed exactly the nature of the news – they’re holding their own event which is called TwitchCon this September.

Revealed on Twitch Weekly, TwitchCon will happen at the end of the month on the 25th and the 26th. The location is the Moscone West Convention Centre in San Francisco and while there’s been no further information released or revealed at the moment a website has been set up at TwitchCon.com and a Twitter account at @TwitchConSF. The latter can be used to keep up to date with updates while exbititors can sign up for the event on the former.

In a statement about the event Twitch CEO Emmett Shear said, “Twitch broadcasters have the most passionate fans, so we want to create an amazing experience where they can come together in person. TwitchCon will be an opportunity for the entire community—broadcasters, game developers, viewers, and us—to play and learn together.”

Twitch is a streaming website especially for gamers which was founded in 2011; and recently after rumours of Google interest last year it was acquired by Amazon instead for $1 billion.

Diablo 3’s about to get a patch (2.2.0) that’s going to hit the Public Test Realm soon. It’ll add many things like new Legendary armour sets, a new type of Adventure Mode bounty, new Goblins to chase and much, much more besides. However, there are some things such as a new in-game currency, timed experience boosts and cosmetic items that won’t be available in all parts of the world.

Blizzard posted an update on the patch that cited “Some new features may start to show up in data mined information for patch 2.2.0 that will not apply to all regions,” citing five that won’t apply to the Americas specifically.

• A new currency called “Platinum”
• Timed experience boosts
• New cosmetic items including wings, non-combat pets, and character portraits
• References to stash space and character slot expansions
• A new UI element that references the above information

Taking a look at these, it looks as if Blizzard might be thinking about adding microtransactions to the game for regions outside of America. Blizzard themselves seemed to confirm this by saying in the same post “We recognize that many players have expressed an interest in microtransactions being added to Diablo III. While we may explore this model in some regions, we have no immediate plans to implement such purchases anytime soon for the Americas region.”

When queried, Blizzard said that “There are a lot of different factors that go into decisions like this, including various regional or local market considerations. We know that some of these features would be ones that players in several regions might enjoy, but we don’t currently have plans to support these in North America, and we don’t have any other region-specific details to share at this time.”

Interesting decision. Do you think America might see the microtransactions implemented in the future too?

After seven pre-releases of it, Minecraft 1.8.2 was finally released officially yesterday bringing with it all the changes from the pre-releases as well as a few other minor ones. However, if you opened up your Vanilla client you might notice something odd… it’s already been replaced by 1.8.3 in what must be one of the quickest version updates seen in Minecraft since the days of it’s pre-Alpha.

The reason for the quick and sudden update was a good one though. Mojang say that unfortunately a serious bug managed to ship out with the 1.8.2 server client and it causes crashes of the game upon world load. So really the update had to happen quickly to fix the problem, meaning that 1.8.3 is not so much a new version but a bug patch in disguise.

Speaking of bug patches, 1.8.2 brought a fair share of them too. The main one dealt with the fixing of explosive physics after a July snapshot made them go a little wonky, and another one notable only because it was a little funny was the bug fixes to the textures rendered on Mooshroom udders and mushrooms. There were also general performance tweaks and improvements, but the main point of 1.8.2 was the addition of a feature that had been asked for by players for a long time. Name changes to accounts finally became available on Feb 4th through the page of your Mojang account.

1.9 is still a mystery mostly at this point, although Mojang have revealed that they’re working on it now and that it will include changes to the Ender Dragon to make it behave more like the console version of the beast.

The infographic for the first week of Turtle Rock’s 4 v 1 shooter game Evolve has been released to the public and the numbers contained within seem to suggest that the game’s a success. After all, the first number on there is matches played over those first 7 days and it totals nearly 6 million. That’s a lot of running through jungle and shooting giant monstrous beasts (108 years worth of play – that’s another number that’s on it).

Over all some of the stats contained are not too big of a surprise. There’s one graph that details how often the monster player won when in certain stages of evolution, and as you’d expect Stage 3 had the greatest level of success with 76.7% win ratio, with the first stage only meeting success 11.2% of the time and Stage 2 winning just under half of the time with a win ratio of 47.8%. Also the most popular monster of the main 3 included in the game (Goliath, Wraith and Kraken), the first monster revealed came out on top with a play percentage of 37% compared to Wraith’s 33% and Kraken’s 30%. This is probably down to the fact that Goliath is the only one available and unlocked from the start of the game, as well as generally being easier to play as being more balanced in some ways than either the squishy but sneaky Wraith or the long-distance attack Kraken.

However some statics surprised me a little bit. For example Lazarus was the most popular Medic character played, despite the fact that I’d have thought Val’s healing gun would be more appealing to players. Maybe that’s just my own personal preference speaking though. Another surprising stat was that of the shortest match. Just 60 seconds long, someone must have got the jump on the other side quickly in that round…

Impressive though is the stat about minutes watched by people on Twitch which came to 133,707,700 minutes or 254 years of viewing, and I can see why. Watching videos of the game has been almost as thrilling for me as playing it, and sometimes just as funny. Also impressive is that the matches won ratio still remains fairly equal on both sides, with the Hunters winning 48.1% of the time and the Monster side 51.9%; which seems to suggest that the alpha and beta meant that Turtle Rock were able to get the balance almost perfect.

Despite some muttering about the DLC for this game, it does seem that Evolve’s launch week has been quite a success. Here’s hoping that the game continues to retain its audience for a while yet.

After two months of a lack of e-mail replied, the modeller for dinosaur survival game The Stomping Lands’ has signed up for a new project, effectively abandoning the game.

About a month ago artist Vlad Konstantinov posted onto The Stomping Lands’ forums, saying that his e-mail had gone unanswered for a while and “If this silence continues I will stop my participation in TSL.” It seems that the silence did continue and so Konstantinov has made the decision to go elsewhere. On Feb 6th he signed on to do Beasts of Prey, another dinosaur game and has taken all his modelwork from Stomping Lands with him.

“I’ve sent him 5 messages and haven’t got any single reply,” Konstantinov wrote in the forum post back in January. “I don’t know, probably he has some serious reasons to ignore me (and whole community) but to my mind there are no excuses for such behavior. Not to mention the fact that Jig owes me the money for the latest model, he’s put me in a very difficult situation because now I will have to pay our texture artist for his work from my own pocket.”

The project went quiet back in June of last year, when the leader developer Alex “Jig” Fundora cut off all contact with the community and it seems most if not all of his team for the game. A Steam Early Access build was released of the game back in May 30th 2014, but has only seen one update since and the game was even briefly taken down on Steam in September for a brief while. It’s back now though, selling at £18.99.

Without artists though, the game might be dead in the water even if Fundora comes back to finish it.