I thought I might mention it anyways, since certain keywords in resumes really stand out to me.

Sometimes nothing turns to be nothing and sometimes it turns out to be something.

Wallace D. Robinson is Lead Lighting Artist for Rockstar Toronto.

He worked for Rockstar San Diego for more than 5 years, where most of his time was spent on Red Dead Redemption.

Max Payne 3 was announced in 2009, when he was still in SD working on RDR.

When he moved to Rockstar Toronto in August 2011, he started work on an "Undisclosed Project". Apparently, R* Toronto is working on another project and it's not Max Payne 3.

Also, pay attention to his job description:

* He copied-and-pasted his RDR job description to his Undisclosed Project.
* Developers use "Unannounced" and "Untitled" for game names that haven't been selected yet or announced. "Undisclosed" typically means existing franchise.
* He has RAGE experience with RDR and R* Toronto has also been working with the RAGE Engine for Max Payne 3.

I don't see why RDR would need a lighting artist (unless it was more than a PC port) though, so this could be Bully 2 using the RAGE engine, or another game they're working on besides Max Payne 3.

I've always found that Rockstar employees are even more careful than Blizzard when it comes to posting online information, but I'll dig around to see if I can find out anything else. It's probably too early into the project to find anything though.

Electronic Arts just killed off two of their Darkspore related trademarks.

This one and this one. The main game trademark was renewed though ("2011-11-16 - Extension 2 granted").

Looks like they simply abandoned the trademark and never bothered to file an extension. This means that there won't be any Darkspore "Caps; Jackets; Pajamas; Pants; Shirts; Sleepwear; Sweat pants; Sweat shirts; T-shirts" or "Action figures; Board games; Hand held units for playing video games other than those adapted for use with an external display screen or monitor; Modeled plastic toy figurines; Playing cards."

I don't know if I can live without my Darkspore PJs and Action Figures.

They're definitely not as confident in the game as they once were. Do you remember all of that major hype about the game? I guess they were really expecting it to be quite popular, but now they're realizing that it's not going to be as big as they had initially hoped.

Fun Fact: I didn't even KNOW Darkspore was out until I noticed the trademark changes. It came out last APRIL?? Guess I blinked.

There has also been some simultaneous forward momentum on ALPHA CENTAURI, THE SIMS SOCIAL and FLY WITH ME.

It appears to be more than just maintenance (e.g. renewing old trademarks that they might use one day), and it looks like they've been approved for publication. Meaning that they'll appear in their gazette for other organizations to challenge before "fully approved".

"Fly With Me" is a new game, probably a flight simulator. Sims Social has already begun. But I'm most interested in Alpha Centauri (one of my favorite games.) I'll check around to see if there have been any new announcements.. but it looks like EA is getting pretty serious now about releasing it. Hopefully, we'll hear something concrete within the next 1-2 months.

* UPDATE:

CAPCOM just created a new trademark for game called "E.X. TROOPERS" too.

I couldn't find any details online about it, so it's something that hasn't been announced yet.

And, by the way, the ex-troopers.com domain has expired and it's currently available for purchase. I wonder if that's even successful? Buying a domain, and then selling it a company who wants it?

Apparently, a WoW Law Enforcement guide was leaked by Anonymous/AntiSec.

It's already on a couple other blog sites already, where you can check out the various law enforcement guidelines.

For example, how "Player Mail is not maintained for more than 180 days."

The document doesn't really cover Player Chat very well though. It says they can do realtime monitoring of chat, and they describe Player Chat Logs, but they don't say anything about retention of older chat logs.. so, they only retain old Mailbox messages?

There was also another contradiction. In one paragraph, Blizzard wrote "Warcraft alone has more than 9 million active users worldwide spread across several hundred servers", but later they wrote "Because Blizzard has over eleven million active users, Blizzard does not have the ability to retain all types of information indefinitely." In December 2008, they announced 11.5 million subscribers and then in Feb 2010 Morhaime announced that there had been no growth since 2008.

Maybe they dipped quite a larger subscription number than everyone had estimated? (e.g. 11.5 to 9 million)

This was the really interesting part though:

Blizzard currently maintains more than 500 WoW servers with well over 100 dedicated to the North American region.. Each server can host more than 3500 players at the same time.

This is the first time I've ever seen a source directly from Blizzard confirming the maximum number of concurrent players per realm (i.e. "players at the same time"). It was always estimated that each WOW Realm could support about 5000-6000 concurrent player logins.

Although WarcraftRealms isn't a very good source for total player counts (because there's a lot of overlap of players), it is a very good source for daily player activity.

If you look at the Average Daily Activity Chart here, it shows total number of players logged in during each hourly interval. Remember though, that the same players might be logged in for 8 hours straight. And, if you look at the graph below the chart, they all max out at around 3500 concurrently per realm. :)

If you assume that an average player spends 3 hours per day playing WOW, that's about 6950 unique players per realm (on average) that play throughout the day. Blizzard has less than 900 realms worldwide, which makes it about 6.3 million players.

I wouldn't be surprised if this 2009 policy is the exact same one still used today. Documents like these are very rarely updated, and it doesn't look like they spent a lot of time preparing it. Still, it's pretty interesting..