social networking

Ubisoft: All Our Games Will Do This UPlay Thing

2:40PM Owen Good | Ubisoft’s freebie-dispensing UPlay community will launch alongside Assassin’s Creed II, and ultimately will incorporate all games under the Ubisoft banner, the publisher’s CEO said on Thursday. More »

360 Facebook, Twitter And Last.FM Will Be Accessible To Teens

4:40AM Mike Fahey | Right now three major features of the new Xbox 360 dashboard update — Facebook, Last.FM and Twitter — are inaccessible to users under 18. Major Nelson says that will change weeks after the update launches. More »

Do Game Developers Need To Be On Facebook And Twitter?

10:00AM Stephen Totilo | Insomniac Games boss Ted Price recently confessed he’d been ignoring the world of Internet “community” that he’d been proselytizing as the future of gaming. Apology necessary? More »

Atari Randomly Makes A Facebook Photo App

7:20AM Mike Fahey | Atari jumps on the Facebook bandwagon, carrying a knapsack full of kitschy stickers so you can personalise your photos with Atari Photo Sauce. More »

Nexon America Throws A BlockParty

2:40AM Mike Fahey | Over the next several months, Nexon America is transforming into BlockParty.com, a social networking website where fans can keep track of their games and stalk their friends to their heart’s content. More »

Sackbook Is Facebook For Sack People

2:40AM Mike Fahey | If Facebook and LittleBigPlanet got drunk and had an illegitimate offspring it might be Sackbook, a fan-created community website dedicated to connecting sack people with sack places for sack fun. More »

Vigster – A Social Games Shelf

8:20AM Stuart Houghton | Typical — you wait years for a social network for gamers, then two roll up at once. Yesterday we had Dennis Fong’s Raptr but this fine evening/afternoon/morning (delete as appropriate) we shall be looking at Vigster. While Raptr was all about sharing your game scores and profiles from different networks (LIVE, PSN, Steam, etc.) Vigster has a more modest aim – a virtual games shelf, like a gamer’s version of book lover’s sites like Shelfari and WeRead. After free signup, you can assemble a list of games that you own or play and find like-minded fellow gamers for fun and frolics. You can add reviews, videos and screengrabs of games, and submit tips and recommendations to your new pals. A discussion forum is on the way too. Vigster.com More »

Raptr – Social Gaming Network Enters Public Beta

1:00PM Stuart Houghton | Sometimes Facebook, Myspace, Bebo, Orkut and OpenSocial just aren’t enough. Too much real world stuff, not enough gamerscore bragging. Enter Raptr – a new social network for gamers founded by Dennis ‘Thresh’ Fong (he had to do something with all that prize money) that offers a way of tracking your friends and sharing what you are in to on several popular games networks. Once you have signed in and chosen a nick, you can enter your IDs on Xbox Live, PSN, World of Warcraft, Steam and others, then start entering the games in your collection. Where it can, Raptr will pull data from your various networks and update your profile with a list of your current games, achievements and the like. There are plugins for displaying your data on Facebook et al too, of course. A free client for PC or Mac will display and update data from you and your friends in real time as well as suck data from any games you play on your box — less of an issue for most Mac geeks, presumably. Raptr [via 1UP] More »

BioWare Fans 4 Million Strong

9:40AM Leigh Alexander | BioWare’s fan forums have now reached four million user accounts, the company announced today. BioWare co-founders Dr. Ray Muzyka and Dr. Greg Zeschuk began cultivating a fan community around Baldur’s Gate on newsgroups and in chat rooms back in 1996, and its own forums launched in 2001 alongside Neverwinter Nights, which is when it began collecting registrations. On the heels of Mass Effect, and with Dragon Age up ahead (plus the mysterious “unnanounced MMO”), Bioware said its community usership is at an all-time high. More users, apparently, have united for social interaction around the work of a single studio than use social networking sites like Friendster and Xanga. EA recently acquired a social network of its own — makes you think, perhaps, about where they might be going with it. Full announcement follows the jump.