For Call of Duty, we're bringing the intensity of the recent Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare title to yet a new military theater to engage our significantly larger userbase which nearly doubled last year," said Activision Publishing president and CEO Mike Griffith.

Griffith said that the next Call of Duty will launch on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC, Wii, DS and PS2 during this fiscal year.

He also confirmed that more DLC is headed towards current players of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. "We'll drive category sales of downloadable maps and enhance Call of Duty 4 retail SKUs," he said.

Great news Charlie Oscar Delta!

The Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare Variety Map Pack for PS3 will be available on the PlayStation Network on Thursday, April 24th for both North America and Europe!

Additionally, there will be a PS3 Variety Map Pack Double XP Weekend Extravaganza! Enjoy Double XP all weekend for both continents from 12:01 AM GMT on Friday, April 25th to 11:59 PM PDT on Sunday, April 27th. We are also making Friday, April 25th a "Play with the Devs" day. The Infinity Ward team will be playing online on Friday, April 25th from 11AM to 2PM PDT and from 5 PM to 8 PM PDT.

Thanks to Charlie Oscar Delta for this news!

Sandy Duncan, formerly vice president of Xbox Europe, claims consoles as we know them will die out within a decade.
I think dedicated games devices will die [out] in the next 5 to 10 years. The business model is very risky and the costs associated with creating new hardware are incredibly high,” Duncan told That Videogame Blog.
"There is a definite convergence of other devices, such as set top boxes,” continued the man who now heads casual gaming business YoYo Games. “There's hardly any technology difference between some hard disc video recorders and an Xbox 360, for example.
"In fact in 5 to 10 years I don't think you'll have any box at all under your TV, most of this stuff will be virtualized as web services by your content provider."
Duncan’s views echo those of analyst Billy Pidgeon, who told Next-Gen earlier this week that traditional videogame consoles may play no part in the next platform cycle.
“I think it will be very hard for consoles to compete with PCs in five years, or for dedicated handhelds to compete with smartphones,” he said.
“…The platforms of the next cycle may not be a console at all, but software distributed by network to convergent devices like PCs, set top boxes and smart phones.”

From the i34 website the following statement is made:
It’s been 14 years in the making; from my first 20 player LAN in the Hotel Ibis Southampton back in 1994, the launch of the i-series in 1999 and our first LAN at Newbury Racecourse in 2001. We’re now poised to take the next step for LAN gaming in the UK! Newbury has been a great venue over the years and whilst we intend to continue to run events there we simply have no more room for expansion for either the BYOC or the Exhibition. It’s time to move our largest events to a new home and take things to the next level.

i34 will see over 2,000 BYOC spaces in one huge hall at Stoneleigh park, breaking our own record set at i33 at 1,610. There is oodles of on-site camping space including dedicated shower facilities and for those of you not wanting to camp there are over 400 beds in the on-site hostel. Catering is looking awesome with multiple indoor eateries staffed by Stoneleigh’s in-house team. Next door to the BYOC hall is a huge 3,500 square metre exhibition hall, where we’ll see all manner of the latest games, hardware and of course the main stages where gaming champions will be crowned.

We’re all really excited about the future of the i-Series and hope to see as many of you as possible there. The 5 months between now and then will really fly by… so go grab your place, pick your seat, and join in gaming history

Nvidia has officially unveiled the latest card in its new GeForce 9000 series - the 9800 GX2.

As the name suggests, it's a dual-GPU card in the same mould as AMD's HD 3870 X2, though unlike the AMD card it uses two physical printed circuit boards (PCBs), rather than two chips mounted on a single board.

Although the GX2 is the latest of Nvidia's "next generation" cards, it's based on the 65nm G92 core already seen in the 8800 GT. Internal speeds will be largely the same too, with a 600MHz core and a 1.5GHz shader clock. The memory clock has, however, been boosted to 2GHz, a step up from the 1.4GHz and 1.8GHz speeds available from the 8800 GT.

These clock rates are slightly lower than the core and shader
speeds of the already-released 9600 GT, which come in at 650MHz and 1.625GHz respectively.

Where the GX2 comes into its own is parallel processing power: its 256 stream processors, divided between two GPUs, represent the highest shader count of any Nvidia card to date. This should let the GX2 deliver performance far in excess of the 112-shader 8800 GT or the 64-shader 9600 GT.

It's also rumoured the GX2 will support quad-SLI, though we suspect that, as with the HD 3870 X2, this will really mean you're still limited to two physical cards.

And while standard models are expected to come with a total of 1GB of graphics RAM (512MB per PCB), it's been suggested that Nvidia's partners might increase this to a full gigabyte on each PCB, providing an unprecedentedly huge frame buffer.

The downside is the price, expected to be decidedly on the high side: it was suggested at CeBIT that the European retail price would be €549, or around £420. If true, this would make the GX2 £150 more expensive than AMD's dual-GPU card, and not far off three times the price of an 8800 GT.

Can the GX2's performance justify this sort of cost? Watch this space for benchmark results and a full review.

Microsoft’s decision to drop the price of its entire range of Xbox 360 consoles in Europe has resulted in an immediate and significant sales increase in the UK.

Sales monitor ChartTrack told MCV that Xbox 360 sales have leapt 36 percent since March 14 when the price cut was introduced. While the price of each of the three Xbox 360 models was reduced, perhaps most interestingly the cost of the entry level Arcade unit was slashed to £159.99, making it cheaper than Nintendo’s mass-market friendly Wii.
“During week 11, Xbox 360 enjoyed a 36 percent jump on week 10, which is a nice refreshing uplift for the console” said ChartTrack director Dorian Bloch.
During the same period PS3 sales rose six percent, while sales of all other systems fell. Software sales across all platforms also dropped week-on-week.
“We need to wait two or three more weeks to see if the 360 sales surge will carry on,” Bloch added. “I would predict that it will increase again over the Easter period. It’s a bit of an odd year for the industry – Easter is early, and doesn’t coincide with the end of Q1 – when publishers traditionally release very big games – like it usually does.”

Microsoft has confirmed a European price cut for the Xbox 360, effective March 14.

Microsoft will be selling the 20GB-equipped model for £199.99, down from £249.99, while the 120GB top-line Elite will sell for £259.99, down from £299.99.
The base, hard drive-less Arcade model will sell for £159.99 in the UK, down from £199.99.
Microsoft hopes to increase its Xbox 360 market share as high demand continues for Nintendo Wii, and Sony's PlayStation gathers momentum.
“Xbox 360 is now mass market in Europe,” claimed Microsoft Interactive Entertainment Business Europe VP Chris Lewis. “We have reached and surpassed several key milestones that form part of our long term strategic plan to achieve critical mass in Europe; and our portfolio now offers the kind of mainstream entertainment experiences that secure wider appeal for Xbox 360. These factors allow us to execute on our strategy to widen the market for Xbox 360, as planned."
He added, "History shows that £159.99 is the price point where a console’s audience begins to expand, and with these new ERPs in place we’re ready to bring more consumers into the Xbox 360 world.”
Rumors of a price cut appeared well ahead of Microsoft's official confirmation on gaming websites as well as online financial publications. An Amazon UK price drop happened just ahead of Microsoft's official announcement. Microsoft’s latest European Xbox 360 price cut has put Sony under renewed pressure to slash the cost of its PlayStation 3 console, according to Strategy Analytics. The company’s principal analyst, David Mercer, said Microsoft’s move to cut the RRP of its entire family of Xbox 360 consoles in Europe could force Sony to follow suit with a PS3 price cut sooner than it had planned.
"Sony will be nervous that the PS3's recent sales surge may fizzle out now that the premium Xbox 360 undercuts the PS3 by £40, and the cheapest Xbox model is almost half the price of a PS3," said Mercer.
"Sony will be scrutinizing the daily sales reports, but will probably try to hold out until later in the year before making its next price move."
Mercer also noted that "Microsoft must continue to drive costs out of console manufacturing” in order to sustain its Entertainment and Devices division’s drive to achieve its first profitable year.

Virgin Media has announced that UK trials of 50MB broadband services in Ashford, Folkestone and Dover have been successful, and that the company will now begin to offer it to a wider customer base by the end of 2008
Additionally the company will upgrade existing customers on its 'L' package for free, more than doubling their basic broadband line speed.

"We're moving everybody from the 4MB service to the 10MB service from February onwards, and this will help us to achieve better results that competing ADSL options," a spokesperson told GamesIndustry.biz.

ADSL lines currently have a general limit of 8MB and that base speed can degrade based on a customer's distance from the local exchange, while the technology used by Virgin Media could potentially yield speeds of up to 150MB – although the company has no plans to trial those kinds of speeds at this point.

The increasing speeds of broadband connections has led to a boom in online gaming services, enabling the growth of huge subscriber bases for games such as World of Warcraft and other MMOs.

Virgin Media's new 50MB service is also aimed at enabling a more widespread use of IPTV, and the existing trial demonstrated the potential for offering high definition television programmes across an internet connection, rather than via cable or satellite.

Internet service providers have come under attack from some users claiming that speeds advertised are not always delivered, but Virgin Media denies claims that its users are affected by these problems.

"We do have a traffic management system set up, but it only runs for five hours per day, and only affects around 3 per cent of our users.

"We don't restrict speeds for anybody based on specific activities, such as peer-to-peer network usage, and there are no speed caps."

The spokesperson also pointed out that some web sites that purport to measure the speed of a user's internet connection often aren't able to reflect the true performance of the line, and can often lead to confusion on the part of consumers.