Seems that Battlefield 4 didn’t sell as well as EA had hoped it would. What then is the cause of this? According to the publisher it’s the next-gen transition that is the cause of the below-estimated sales, not the problems and bugs the game has had.

Of all the things related to Battlefield 4, the problems the game has had since release are some of the most talked about. November saw DICE having to compensate players who hadn’t been able to play the game even several weeks after release because of server issues and crashes that stopped them joining games in progress and December saw most of the month dedicated to dealing with on-going problems. There was even talk of lawsuits being brought against EA for the game’s unpredictable levels of playability. Yet this apparently had nothing to do with why the game didn’t sell as well as predicted.

“Shortly after Battlefield 4 went live, we began hearing from some players in the community who were experiencing issues with the game. The Battlefield team acted swiftly to address the issues through game updates, and they continue to make refinements as part of our live service to ensure a great game experience for all Battlefield 4 players.” CEO Andrew Wilson said.

They point to other big-name EA titles such as FIFA 14 and Need for Speed Rivals which also undersold to support their reasoning in pinning the blame solely upon the next-gen console release as the cause.

PC sales were also up, with a 157% increase on last year’s total, which EA attributes to Battlefield 4’s release onto PC; and with around 1.6 Premium Memberships sold despite the problems, it does seem that EA have still had some success from the game.

Japanese technology firm Fujitsu has amazingly managed a profit in the last quarter of 2013 according to its recent fiscal report, helped along by the weaker yen and strong sales in the enterprise sector. The latter point, driven by the company’s decision to increase PC sales primarily to businesses, even saw it defy trends and sell more PCs than ever in a weakening market for traditional computer models.

Company president Masami Yamamoto talked of solid performance in system integration services and in enterprise PCs in their third quarter, as the company claimed a net profit for the three months to December of ¥12bn ($114m), a happy improvement on the previous quarter’s net loss of $786m. Revenue rose 14.5 per cent for the firm to $11.4bn from the same quarter of the previous year.

The Yen becoming weaker against the dollar was not a small factor either. Fujitsu claimed foreign sales earned 25% more revenue for the company this quarter, but if changing foreign exchange rates between currencies were to be ignored, the real rise would have been just 2%.

The firm said it was still hoping to hit its targets this year, when it expects a net income of ¥45bn ($438m) on sales of ¥4.7tn.

“We expect to maintain this momentum for the rest of the fiscal year, and will continue to pursue ongoing structural reforms in the LSI device business and businesses outside Japan, as well as workforce-related measures,” Yamamoto said.

It’s a well-known fact that before Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft’s self-developed browser had quite an established reputation for being both insecure, with many bugs and vulnerabilities; and for being very flippant on HTML standards and breaking websites that, under official HTML guidelines, should work perfectly on all browsers (and usually did, on everything EXCEPT IE). However, since IE8 Microsoft has upped its game; and every Internet Explorer version since has been improving both in terms of standards-compliance and security.

Unfortunately, in the attempt to secure the browser, one of the fixes in recent Windows Internet Explorer versions removed the ability to use ActiveX tools within Internet Explorer. For some businesses, this is unacceptable, because developers in the last decade often developed web-based tools such as account management and business productivity tools that these businesses make strong use of, that took advantage of ActiveX – so these tools not only don’t work in other browsers, but now won’t work with modern IE systems either. With many of these businesses having strong reliance on these tools and unable to replace them with a modern version that doesn’t need the legacy baggage, many businesses are forced to stick with old Internet Explorer versions – and usually, the highest they can go is Internet Explorer 7. This means despite all the recent work by Microsoft to improve Internet Explorer, some businesses are still using a version that’s insecure and doesn’t respect internet standards; and web developers still have to adapt their websites accordingly if they plan to let these businesses see their work.

Many of those web developers state that in some cases, just giving those businesses whole new computers would be cheaper than supporting IE7 – software now five releases out of date. Now one business is putting their money on the table to test the theory. NursingJobs.us has determined it is cheaper to buy each customer using IE7 a brand new computer running a “modern” browser rather than making its slick new site IE7 compatible. The company is a recruitment site for nurses and medical employers, based in Microsoft’s home state of Washington; and following a new website launch, the company has told it users they’ll get a better experience using their new site, which has been revamped for mobile and tablets, on modern computers, devices and browsers.

“Some of our clients are still stuck with IE7 so we decided to make a bold offer, one that initially seemed crazy to us but now makes a lot of sense,” says a blog post the site.

“We are offering to buy a new computer with a modern browser for any of our customers who are stuck with IE7. We determined that it would cost us more to support a browser from 2006 in 2014 and beyond than it would to help our clients upgrade their legacy hardware.”

NursingJobs.us reckons IE7 makes up 1.22 per cent of its traffic.

Hotline Miami was one of those games that moved very very fast, yet seemed to take ages to finish. That was probably because every action, ever movement had to be perfect and a lack of quick reflexes meant it was game over all at once. Somewhat frustrating but also quite addictive. Also, you could total someone by opening a door into their face, and that’s just incredibly satisfying.

Now tweets from the @HotlineMiami suggest that the sequel Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number will soon have a release date. They’ve at least said that the game will release in Q3 2014.

Although there’s also been some vague hints at what will be new, there’s also been one detail that’s been outright stated. Wrong Number will be like the first Hotline Miami and will be releasing to the PC first before other platforms.

Good news for all the PC fans that made the first game such a success in the first place.

When a game is in Alpha players often find and exploit the mechanics of the gameplay that maybe the developers haven’t yet had the time to fix or fully implement properly yet. One part of the popular game DayZ (in which you must survive the attacks of zombies and often the other players) that has been exploited since its early origins as an add-on to the ARMA 2 game is the ability to leave and quickly rejoin a game if you didn’t like the server or spawn location you landed in. With the next patch to the standalone game though, such things will quickly lead to players being ‘timed-out’ for a short while to stop this from happening so often.

The line of the patch notes that refers to this reads thus: “Login: Player queuing system introduced. Penalty waiting time added for switching server or disconnecting a server quickly.” which seems to allow breathing room for the random disconnects that happen to every player, especially during the Alpha and Beta stages.

Other highlights of this patch, which is still in the Experimental stage for the moment, include that defibs now work on players with less than 500 units of blood, morphine can now fix broken legs and both machetes and crafting knives can open cans, which should be a relief for those players who find it hard to scavenge any can openers in the wilds of the game.

The last patch implemented to DayZ put an end to the infamous ‘backpack-ception’ part of the game which allowed players to carry as many filled backpacks with them as there were spaces in a backpack.

Patch notes are here.