SOL Republic’s college-themed Tracks headphones offer yet another way to showcase your fandom

SOL Republic's latest line of headphones let you represent your school with your ear-gear.

It’s autumn once again, and with the first semester half-over and the college football season in full-swing, school spirit is abound. Headphone-maker SOL Republic is looking to capitalize on this trend with collegiately-customized versions of its Tracks headphones geared for students and alumni alike.

Tracks phones feature an in-line mic, three-button remote and the company’s V10 Sound Engine drivers. The college line comes equipped with a fan-band if you will, as the “track” connecting the stock earpieces is emblazoned with your school’s logo and/or colors. A selection of schools are now available to ship,  offerings include: Alabama, Arkansas, Auburn, Boise State, California Berkeley, Clemson, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, LSU, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma State, Oregon, Oregon State, Penn State, Purdue, South Carolina, Stanford, Tennessee, Texas, and Washington.

Standard Tracks HD cans retail for $130, and the school-specific versions cost the same. We’re evaluating the original Tracks HD’s now and we’ll let you know where they stand. Beyond that, you’ll just need to decide how hard you want to rep your school of choice.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Disturbance in the Force: Star Wars MMO creative director leaves BioWare

BioWare loses another marquee member of its creative staff, as Star Wars: The Old Republic's Daniel Erickson resigns.

Star Wars: The Old Republic hasn’t had the rockiest first year an MMO has ever had. Age of Conan, Dungeons & Dragons Online, and many others never racked up the more than 1.5 million players BioWare and Electronic Arts’ years in the making game did when it opened for business last December. Few MMOs have lost players as quickly as quickly as Star Wars has though, with 400,000 players abandoning the game between February and May alone, forcing BioWare to redesign it as a free-to-play game. It is now, perhaps unsurprisingly, losing its creative staff almost as fast as its players. Creative director Daniel Erickson announced on Thursday that he is leaving BioWare.

“As part of leaving BioWare I’m officially starting a Twitter account for job hunt and design thoughts,” said Erickson.

He went on, clearly frustrated with the current cut throat state of the video game industry as the retail market dwindles, and other game formats take center stage in the quest to replace lost revenue. “When 90 percent of the industry is saying the exact same thing (social, mobile, FTP!) a huge number of people are going to lose that race. Job hunt thoughts: If you think a monetization approach is saying the exact same thing as a game idea, I don’t know why we’re talking.”

As recently as July, Erickson was discussing how he and the rest of BioWare’s Austin team were working diligently to improve The Old Republic to try and reignite interest in the project. “What we always say is, before the game came out it was out game,” he told Digital Trends, “As soon as it launched, it became the community’s game. [What] we’re saying now is we’re going to find any way we can to get the game in front of people. Because when people play The Old Republic, they like The Old Republic. If we can get people to get in there, play it, hang out… we’re really confident we’re going to get a bunch of new players from that.”

Shortly after that though, EA announced that the game would go free-to-play to level 50, and then went on to layoff a significant number of staff members at the Austin office, including executive producer Rich Vogel.

BioWare is bleeding these days. In addition to the exodus of The Old Republic’s staff, the company’s founders left the studio at the end of July.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

BioWare’s Command & Conquer: Generals 2 becomes part of EA’s free-to-play empire

First Star Wars: The Old Republic, now BioWare's Command & Conquer: Generals 2. Electronic Arts sees the future, and it's in free-to-play.

How do you modernize Command & Conquer properly? Free-to-play.

Command & Conquer: Tiberium Alliances, the debut free-to-play, browser version of the series, opened for business in May. On Tuesday though, EA announced that Tiberium Alliances is just the first salvo in what it hopes will become a free-to-play empire. Next up: The BioWare-developed Command & Conquer: Generals 2 will be free-to-play as well.

First announced in December 2011 at the Spike Video Game Awards, Generals 2 was confirmed to be in development at BioWare Victory (formerly Victory Games) and would release exclusively on PC in 2013. On Wednesday though, Electronic Arts announced that Generals 2 would be one of the games marking EA’s broad transition into free-to-play gaming.

“It’s not just Generals 2 that we’re talking about. We’re trying to create an entire universe of Command & Conquer, and make that as an online destination,” Jon van Caneghem, EA vice president, told Gamasutra, “And the first game that we’re highlighting under the new paradigm is Generals 2. Initially the Generals product was really online-focused, so much that shifting the business model, and removing the barrier of entry of purchasing a box just made so much more sense. Letting someone play a triple-a game for free was something that I think was pretty cool.”

Command & Conquer: Generals 2 is expected out in 2013.

EA has slowly but surely been expanding its free-to-play library. What started a few years ago as an experiment with Battlefield Heroes has expanded to include Need for Speed World, FIFA Online, and soon Star Wars: The Old Republic. Even as EA grows into a free-to-play publisher, its still finding other ways to price gouge players with for-pay add-on content. Look no farther than the DLC for Mass Effect 3; that is the true nature of EA’s free-to-play future, a world in which its games need to purchased piecemeal.

The plan a few years back was to transform the Command & Conquer into something profitable in the modern age. Blizzard had a lockdown on the real-time strategy market with StarCraft II on the horizon. So EA did what any big publisher does these days: It turned Command & Conquer into a first-person shooter with solo and multiplayer components. Tiberium was in production for a couple of years when EA, in a rare stroke of rational thinking, realized that its plan was stupid and it killed it off. EA saw moderate success with Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 later that year, and again in 2010 with Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight, but it still wasn’t the money making engine it could be. Free-to-play may succeed in the effort, but whether or not that’s good for players depends on just how much of the game is actually free to play.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com