Stardock has revealed that its sleeper PC hit Sins of a Solar Empire has sold over half a million copies. The company's CEO Brad Wardell tells Gamasutra that 400,000 units were sold at retail, while 100,000 in sales came from digital downloads. Not bad for a full-bodied PC strategy game that cost less than a million dollars to make.

Wardell is certainly becoming an interesting character in the narrative of this industry, with relatively small publisher Stardock really stepping up. He explains part of Sins' success is that it was designed to run on a "four-year-old video card" and still look good. He says there might be a "piddly super-mega effect" that gets missed, but the result is more sales for the game, a strategy which sounds similar to Blizzard's take on being a PC developer. Sins' first mini-expansion, Entrenchment, will be available for purchase later this year.

Sun xVM VirtualBox 2.0 has arrived!

If you want to set up a virtualization environment on your PC or Mac, but don't want to spend money on Parallels or VMWare Fusion, VirtualBox is a free and full-featured package that may fit your needs very well (I use it to run Windows on my Ubuntu desktop)

What's new in version 2.0?

* 64-bit OS guest support (only on 64-bit hosts, as one might expect)
* New native Leopard user interface on Mac OS X hosts
* New-version notifier
* Guest property information interface
* Host Interface Networking on Mac OS X hosts
* Framework for collecting performance and resource usage data (metrics)
* Added SATA asynchronous IO when accessing raw partitions

Check it out here.

GNU, in case you don't know, is a computer operating system composed entirely of free software (and part of the popular GNU/Linux platform). According to wikipedia:

"The plan for the GNU operating system was publicly announced on September 27, 1983, on the net.unix-wizards and net.usoft newsgroups by Richard Stallman. Software development began on January 5, 1984, when Stallman quit his job at Massachusetts Institute of Technology so that they could not claim ownership or interfere with distributing GNU as free software. "

FSF has started its month long celebration of the anniversary by publishing Happy Birthday to GNU film, presented by none other than Stephen Fry (he explains 'free' software very well).

Happy Birthday GNU

Expect a battle royale to be joined between Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and the innovative Nintendo Wii this Christmas as the Seattle software giant cuts prices of the Xbox to sub-Wii levels.

After cutting prices of the Xbox 360 in Japan earlier in the week, Microsoft yesterday cut the price of the games console in the US to a level that will give parents hard choices in the busy sales season ahead.

Yesterday, Microsoft cut the price of the Xbox 360 Arcade version to US 199 (137 euro), the Xbox 360 console for US 299.99 (206 euro) and Xbox 360 Elite for US 399.99 (275 euro).

Expect a price cut in Europe next as Microsoft prepares to undercut the Wii and unbalance the power of PlayStation 3 in the region.

“We are thrilled to be the first next-generation console on the market to reach 199 dollars, a price that invites everyone to enjoy Xbox 360,” said Don Mattrick, senior vice-president of the Interactive Entertainment Business at Microsoft.

“Xbox 360 delivers amazing performance at an extraordinar [read more]

Describing its accidentally leaked foray into the browser world currently dominated by Microsoft’s Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox as a “fresh approach”, Google is hedging its bets on a more visually arresting and technologically diverse cyberspace.

In what can be called a ‘comic’ approach to launching a web browser, Google’s Sundar Pichai, vice-president of product management, and Linus Upson, engineering director, said that Google Chrome, which will be available today in more than 100 countries, will add value for users and help drive innovation on the internet.

The impact of this browser may hark back to the days of the browser wars in the Nineties when Netscape battled furiously against the onslaught of Microsoft’s Explorer.

This time, it took a comic book to kick-start the next phase of the browser wars.

“At Google, we have a saying: ‘Launch early and iterate’. While this approach is usually limited to our engineers, it apparently applies to our mailroom as well! As you may have read i [read more]

Warner Bros. has confirmed long-running rumors that it will reboot the Superman movie franchise.

Jeff Robinov, Warner Bros. Pictures Group President, tells The Wall Street Journal that the Man of Steel will be reintroduced on the big screen without regard to 2006’s Superman Returns.

“Superman didn’t quite work as a film in the way that we wanted it to,” Robinov says. “It didn’t position the character the way he needed to be positioned. ... Had Superman worked in 2006, we would have had a movie for Christmas of this year or 2009.”

There’s no mention whether Superman Returns director Bryan Singer will be part of the reboot. Earlier this week, Variety’s Anne Thompson reported “that it is a priority at the studio to find the right direction and if Bryan Singer is willing to do that, fine, but if he gets in the way, he may not stay on the project.”

Taking a page from Marvel, Warner Bros. has reversed its earlier position of using the now-stalled Justice League of America as a launching pad for [read more]

When Activision and Blizzard merged not too long ago, certain games were in danger of being canned. One of these games was Terminal Reality’s upcoming Ghostbusters game, which Sierra - who is owned by Activision - was set to publish prior to the merger. With its fate now uncertain, games retailer Gamestop has started informing customers that they’re canceling all Ghostbusters pre-orders.

Customers who preordered the game have the option of either getting a cash refund or transferring that preorder to another game.

The Ghostbusters game isn’t exactly canceled per say, but given that it’s in “development limbo,” there’s no solid release date and therefore pre-orders cannot be accepted.

The Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory FREE stand alone multiplayer game has been released to the world! It's fun, addicting and full of Wolf love! You no longer need the retail Return to Castle Wolfenstein to play ET. What you need is what you download, from here

Enemy Territory takes the Wolfenstein online action to the next level with teamplay you'll die for (again and again!) and more class based, campaign crushing juice than you have the right to dream about! The final release version of ET includes six multiplayer maps and a full campaign mode. Wolfenstein Enemy Territory is a stand alone Quake III engine game, so you know it rocks

You can also read a preview of the new, soon to be released third Wolfenstein title here.

Ready or not, here it comes. And it is Firefox 3.0.1. Mozilla has been issuing automatic updates for Firefox for ages. If you're running Firefox 3, you were probably prompted to install version 3.0.1 a few weeks ago. But if you've been running an older version of Firefox, you might still be at version 2.0.0.16. Now Mozilla plans to push out an update to all Firefox 2 users that will prompt them to update to version 3.0.1.

The update could come as soon as next week. Firefox 3 offers a number of advantages over Firefox 2. First, and probably most importantly, it's the most up to date version of the browser when it comes to security features. But it also has improved JavaScript support, faster page load speeds, and improved performance with web applications like Gmail, Google Docs, and Zoho Office. Firefox 3 also has a completely redesigned location bar that makes it much easier to find pages you've recently or frequently visited.

Firefox 2 users don't have to update. If [read more]

Havok, the company behind the physics engine in most top 10 selling computer games, is offering a €40,000 prize for amateur games developers who can find the next big thing in game developing.

Entitled the Havok Physics Innovation Contest, amateur game developers worldwide are being asked to create an innovative playable PC game demo using the Intel sponsored no-charge PC version of Havok’s Emmy award-winning software Havok Physics.

The ultimate aim of the competition is to drive innovation and creativity for the use of physics in game developing worldwide.

One of the prizes on offer is open only to third-level students in Ireland, offering budding Irish game developers a fantastic opportunity to showcase their talent to the global game developing community.

A panel of five judges, including representatives from Havok and Intel, will review all entries and choose the winners based on a variety of criteria including: use of physics in a way that has not been seen before; realistic user inte [read more]