Microsoft announced earlier this month that the installed base of Xboxes worldwide has reached 13.7 million, and the Xbox Live service now has 750,000 subscribers.

Frankie has written at Bungie.net that this past December, Xbox Halo has sold four million copies worldwide, and the more recently-released PC version (not including Mac sales or... ah... downloads) has sold a half a million. Halo has been on the top of the Xbox charts for most of the two years since it was released, and was #2 seller this past holiday season.

Peter Tamte of MacSoft agreed to be interviewed by Tuncer Deniz of Inside Mac Games to talk about the issues some users have been having with the 1.03 patch, many of which center on the anti-piracy features; namely, the requirement that the CD be inserted in the drive in order to play, as with the PC version. The earlier version of Halo for the Mac did not have this requirement.

[image:6655 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0]The 'net has been all abuzz of late about the so-called "release" of Half-Life 2 in parts of the former Soviet Union; it has been spotted for sale in Ukraine and Siberia. Most of these reports have drawn attention because Half-Life 2 is hotly anticipated, and because this game is not yet near an official release, and the source of these copies for sale is a leaked beta.

However, the average gamer may or may not be aware that piracy of computer software, music and movies isn't limited to Internet-based peer-to-peer schemes and shady chat rooms in CIS countries; it's right out there on apparently legitimate store shelves for everyone to see.

Case in point: Halo for the PC. Shortly after the release of PC Halo in the US (and long before we got our copies here at Rampancy, which arrived in a package with Mac Halo and First Strike) there were CDs on store shelves in former Soviet countries that purported to be Halo for the PC-- version 1.5, no less. (Perhaps that's where the rumors came from.) This applies not just to games, but operating systems, application suites like Microsoft Office, even enterprise level software like Oracle 8i.

The jewel case art itself is an interesting study; while the cover art appears to be based on screenshots from the shipping game, the back of the box features screens as old as E3 2000 and older.

Of course, trends are in place to reverse this state of affairs. Microsoft has opened representative offices in some (not all) former Soviet countries, and has been lobbying their governments to enact (and enforce) protection for intellectual property rights, as well as urging local computer resellers to cease practices like selling cracked copies of Microsoft operating systems and applications with new computers, or selling OEM copies over the counter that are clearly marked "for sale only with a new PC".

However, the real "gotcha" for anyone who plonked down hard currency (or its nearest equivalent) for "Halo 1.5" in any of the CIS countries-- and the going price is about two U.S. dollars-- is the system requirements. The only words in English on the back of the CD case are for the system requirements, and they read:

Pentium-2 233 Mhz, 64 MB RAM, 4 MB 3D Card

If anyone actually tried to play Halo on that system, that's almost punishment enough for warezing the game... almost.

In summary, piracy is something that affects not only Half-Life 2, or even just Halo-- but just about every piece of software you can imagine. And before anybody asks, no, I am not going to tell you exactly where you can get this. Buy Halo.

CNN Money has a post-resignation interview with Ed Fries that looks a bit more deeply than most about why Fries is leaving Microsoft just as details for the Xbox 2 and (hopefully) the release of Halo 2 are right around the corner:

...at least, not anymore. In a move that has surprised many, but was apparently a done deal awhile, long time Microsoftie Ed Fries has resigned as head of Microsoft's Game Division.

There are already quite a variety of items up around the web; some full stories, others just mentions like this one. Here's a list of the ones we've logged so far:

MacCentral has two notes on the Mac gaming scene, which will certainly be getting slightly more attention from the gaming press as Halo finally "returns home" to the platform it was originally announced for more than four years ago.First, Duane Johnson, formerly of Westlake Interactive (the company that ported Mac Halo, as well as countless other games) is becoming the fourth programmer to join the newly-formed

David "Alpha Male" Mertz, lead designer for PC Halo at Gearbox Software, resigned on Dec 1 after completing the Halo Editing Kit tutorial. No news on how this impacts the release of the Editing Kit. Thanks Louis Wu.

Similar to the earlier vague announcement that ATI will be producing chips for "future Xbox technologies", Microsoft has named IBM as party to an agreement wherein they are allowed to use IBM technology in "new Xbox products and services".

This has led to the widespread conclusion that the Xbox 2 will use a PowerPC architecture. It's not completely farfetched, as the PPC architecture is widely used in embedded devices where power and heat consumption are major issues; perhaps the plan is for the Xbox 2 to be sleeker and slimmer than its predecessor.

oddworld18 pointed out an article on ars technica concerning the Xbox; comments and flames galore regarding Bungie, Microsoft, Gearbox and Halo are in the thread. Go have a look.

Xbox2 News, a site dedicated to the as-yet-unannounced successor to Microsoft's first foray into console gaming, the Xbox, recently interviewed ATI's Public Relations Manager for Consumer Products regarding the announcement earlier this summer that ATI wouild produce "future Xbox technologies" for Microsoft, fueling speculation that Nvidia, which made the GPU for the first iteration of the Xbox, was be

As if to confirm our original suspicions, we got another copy of the "you've won an Xbox" mail from another domain, this time prizebounty.com. IANAL, but this one spells S-C-A-M to me.

GameSpot is reporting that Microsoft's Xbox division in Japan is now being run by Yoshihiro Maruyama, former senior vice president and COO of Squaresoft.

Subnova is reporting that Nintendo has dropped the GameCube price to $100.

Looks like MS may or may not be catching up with Sony, but the battle with Nintendo may be becoming desperate for the older manufacturer.