Blizzard have revealed the card back design you can receive by reaching Rank 20 or above in the Hearthstone ranked ladder for January 2015.

If you want it make sure you reach Rank 20 in the Ranked Ladder this month, and that does require you to log on at least once this month, even if your rank last month has given you enough stars to boost you to 20 instantly. Can’t claim the bonus stars if you don’t log on. Make sure you get a few higher on the ladder too this month so that you’ve got a boost next month too.

Happy gaming my fellow tavern-dwellers!

Both Sony’s Playstation and Microsoft’s Xbox had a little bit of a rough holiday period. After all, when many users turned on their new PS4s and Xbox Ones they found themselves unable to connect to the online networks for either console thanks to a DDoS attempt taking them both down. However, seems Valve’s Steam had a much better time of it.

At around 11:30 in the morning on January 1st, Steam reached a new record for users online at the same time. According to the Steam Game and Player Statistics page there were 8,466,441 people using Steam simultaneously at that time which is around 400,000 more than the previous record which saw just over 8 million log on around late July 2014.

Dota 2 was obviously the most popular game of the day, drawing around 875,000 players to that record total with Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (360,000 players), Rounding out the top five were Team Fortress 2 (89,000 players), Football Manager 2015 (75,000 players), and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (66,000 players) being the next four most played games of the time.

Given that it was only a year before Steam broke 7 million concurrent users, and two years that it made it past 6 million; no one can say that Steam has been anything but successful for Valve as a venture.

If only we knew when to expect news on the Steam Boxes…

If you’ve attempted to log into some of Blizzard’s most popular games today it’s possible that you’ve run into a problem that as of time of writing there has not yet been a given reason for. For some reason the login queues are taking a while longer than they usually do.

The reports of overlong queues for Hearthstone turned up on the sub-Reddit earlier when users complained that their waiting times were often around 15 minutes, sometimes more than that. As is typical several have already put forth the theory that a DDoS attack could be behind the problem, and while Blizzard haven’t yet provided the users with a reason it wouldn’t be the first time in recent memory something of a similar nature happened – after all Draenor’s launch woes were compounded by another attack.

For now all we can do is wait and see if it’s another attack or something more tech-related.

The results are in for how much money digital distribution of the video game on PC made for the industry in the last year, and it’s pretty good news. At least if you enjoy knowing that the industry is healthy.

Digital distribution has seen the UK games industry’s sales up by 7.5% in 2014 when compared to figures from 2013. Digital sales on their own have risen by a significant 18.8% over the 2013 figures, with the total figure for it standing at a fairly impressive figure of around £1.5 billion for the year. Boxed copies were down by around 6.6% compared to 2013’s figures which seems to suggest that digital continues to be the chosen method by which people choose to receive their new games.

Overall the UK games industry made around £2.452 billion in 2014, which as I said above is good news for those of us who enjoy seeing the industry of our preferred entertainment healthy and thriving. Especially when compared to the other two main entertainment forms, which both saw a slight drop with music sales down 1.6% and movie sales down 1.4%.

Who says video gaming doesn’t appeal to the general public?

Those of you paying attention to the MMO The Elder Scrolls Online might have noticed something’s gone missing recently from its page of subscriptions. It’s now no longer possible to subscribe to the game for longer than 90 days, with the six month option having been removed shortly before 2014 ended.

The French forums did put up an explanation for the disappearance of the six month subscription when a moderator told users that it’d been removed simply because the 30-day and 90-day subscriptions were proving more popular among the community.

However, past trends with previous MMO games suggest that something else might be going on behind the scenes at Zenimax Online. See, removing longer subscription times has been done with other MMOS. And those MMOs usually had the longer time periods removed as the first steps towards making those MMOs free-to-play mode MMOs.

There’s not a lot of evidence to support the theory that this is what’s happening to TESO, but given that the game hasn’t done as well as expected it would seem a sensible move to alter its model. After all, the game is a decent one. I will admit that. The only thing putting me off right now is that it isn’t good enough in my mind to justify the cost of the monthly subscription.

Until we do know if anything is going on with the game’s model, players have a new update to look forward to this month which will bring Champion and Justice Systems to the game. About time as well.