The Awesome Games Done Quick 2015 speedrun marathon has come to an end for now, having been playing many games at top speed all in the name of raising money for charity. This time round it was Prevent Cancer and the total was brilliant: around $1,180,000.

The event director, Andrew Schroeder, has said though that there appears to have been a bug in the donation tracker the event used, which means the actual total could be closer to around $1.5 million. Wow.

Speaking at the end of the event Schroeder revealed the total as well as the news of the bug: “Several people have contacted us since Thursday, letting us know that their donations haven’t been showing up… we can confirm that there was indeed one that caused donations not to show up.”

They’ll be adding them manually over the course of this next week, holding off awarded prizes until then as well but hope to find that the total is $1.5 million, including the money made off the special Humble Bundle offered which brought in around $192,547 by itself.

Go to their Twitch channel if you missed anything you wanted to see, the broadcasts are still up right now.

Just over a month ago Valve had to step in to help users who were becoming the victim of trades gone wrong when dodgy payments used to buy a game sometimes left one side of the trade with nothing after the game was revoked by Steam. Now they’re stepping in again to tackle another trade related issue, this time to do with malware clearing out accounts.

A new Captcha system is being put into place for all trade offers that go through Steam now, in an attempt to stop malicious programs that are designed to access users’ accounts and make trades on their behalf, thereby clearing out the account in question.

“We’re updating trading to include a captcha as part of confirmation process.” said Valve in an announcement about the change. “This is to prevent malware on users’ machines making trades on their behalf. We know it’s a bit of a hassle, and we don’t like making trading harder for users, but we do expect it to significantly help customers who are tricked into downloading and running malware from losing their items.”

It’s a nice step towards a more secure process, but unfortunately it seems its implementation has reset the trade system – cancelling all current and pending trade offers which has angered some users. Valve is looking for input on the system over on the Steam forums though so feel free to hop over there to have your say.

The question of monetising video content on Youtube is one of those subjects that’s been debated back and forth for years now. There are some who say that it isn’t fair for people to make money off playing games that weren’t made by the content creator themselves, but there’s a lot of proof that such videos can be fantastic advertising for video games of all sorts.

Game companies are mostly in favour of it, although there are a lot of different approaches and guidelines for how people can monetise content based off their properties. Some like Nintendo have opted to claim the revenue themselves unless you’re part of their content program, while others (mainly indie studios) have expressly given creators permission to monetise videos based on their game. Others haven’t put across anything concrete.

Now Microsoft Studios have made public a set of guidelines for content creators, and they seem pretty sensible. They favour the content creators but take steps to help Microsoft protect their intellectual properties.

Firstly the policy forbids reverse engineering of games, meaning assets cannot be extracted and therefore you can only use the game to do what they programmed it to be feasible to do within it. Secondly you cannot one of their games to create a video that contains any number of offensive types of content including but not limited to: pornographic content, lewd or obscene content, discriminatory (on the basis of race, religion, gender, sexual orientation), anything that promotes violence, drug use etc. and many other objectionable forms of content.

They are also forbidding the use of their logos in your own logos (no using the Xbox X to replace the letter), and stress that anything created should not be attempting to appear official or can be mistaken for official content at all. There’s also a little bit of text that needs to be included somewhere with the video, either in the description or as part of the video itself, somewhere where “anyone who sees your Item will easily find [it].”

[Name of the Microsoft Game] © Microsoft Corporation. [The title of your Item] was created under Microsoft’s “Game Content Usage Rules” using assets from [Name of the Microsoft Game], and it is not endorsed by or affiliated with Microsoft.

The video itself cannot be part of a subscription or pay-for-play website or part of an app that carries a fee. It can’t even appear on the same page as such items, even if they’re unrelated to the things being sold.

These rules apply for most of the properties owned by Microsoft, although not for Mojang’s Minecraft which already has its own guidelines set out, and some like Forza have some slight differences thanks to licenses for other content included.

If you want to read over the new policy in full, click the link here.

The standalone game in the Saints Row franchise is almost upon us. Gat Out of Hell will see Johnny Gat and Kinzie taking on the legions of hell and thus some of the pre-order bonuses being offered through Deep Silver are suitably… unusually themed.

If you pre-order the game through the UK retailer GAME, you will receive the Saints Row “Wee-Ja” board to let you get in touch with the other side, and if you want to use it for reasons other than dabbling in the dark arts (but seriously, don’t do that) you could stand a chance of winning something.

Sending photos of yourself with your “Wee-Ja” board to weeja@deepsilver.com will enter you into a competition to win an evening ghost-hunting with spirit medium Derek Acorah. If you’re into that sort of thing, it should be great.

In other more traditionally-themed pre-order bonuses, you’ll get the DLC pack Plague of Frogs for free if you do pre-order and that will allow for the weaponisation of amphibians. Somewhat more standard fare for Saints Row really.

Australian retailer EB Games will remove The Elder Scrolls Online from its bricks and mortar shelves on January 13, a Kotaku AU source claims. If the report is true then it serves as fresh evidence that Bethesda intends to scrap the MMO’s monthly subscription fees in favour of a free-to-play model.

Both boxed copies of the game, as well as pre-paid subscription cards, will reportedly be discontinued.

The development follows news late last year that players can no longer purchase six-month subscriptions to the MMO, which was met with mixed reviews when it launched last year. While a moderator on an official French TESO forum claimed the six-month blocks were discontinued due to lack of demand (ie, customers prefer to buy shorter blocks), evidence is certainly mounting that a change is imminent.

We will keep you upto date on this story, as we’ve not reviewed the game since release, however if Free to Play does happen, we’ll have another look at the game which we were underwhelmed by during the betas