In a bold, bold move that is already backfiring on them, games publishes 2K put out a statement clarifying their stance on the Belgian Gaming Commission (BGC) ruling against the specific loot box implementations on multiple games. In particular, the gaming commission made it clear that loot boxes were against the gambling laws of the country and several game publishers quickly complied, including Valve with CS:GO. 2K's NBA 2Kxx series (where xx is the year of the current decade) was one of the affected titles, with the "MyTeam" packs using a loot box-based mechanism for microtransactions.

The statement put out says that 2K is working to comply with the ruling and have made changes to the MyTeam mode, but they also disagree with it and are going to be, and I quote, "continuing conversations with the BGC in order to explain our view" to get around the ruling. Furthermore, they are actually asking players to contact their local government representatives, assuming they share this view, to try and get BGC to allow the old loot box system to be placed back in. To no one's surprise, 2K is collecting a ton of flak for this and we can only hope that fans of the NBA 2K franchise vote with their wallet and let the publisher know exactly what they feel about all this.

A performance preview of sorts for Monster Hunter World has surfaced via a post on Resetera, where user FluffyQuack posted his initial performance results with an advance copy of the PC version of the game. Initial impressions don't scale very well; performance isn't monstrous, but it isn't exactly pretty either. The game does look good, granted; however, there are some texture and fur processing quality issues that could be much better implemented.

Performance figures for a system equipped with 16 GB of RAM, an i7-4790k and a GTX 1080 are delivering a minimum of 44 FPS on the highest preset, 60 FPS on High settings, 65 FPS on Medium, and 108 FPS on Low. Of course, a day-one patch could optimize settings further, but there are some visually impressive games that both look and perform better. Still, the game looks good, and should be an interesting experience for the long summer.

BioShock is like mom's home-cooked meals. You might remember how great they were, but you've certainly forgotten how good they tasted. It's hard to blame anyone given that the last BioShock game was released almost five years ago. And to make matters even worse, the last installment (BioShock Infinite) wasn't even a sequel or a prequel to the previous BioShock 2 game. But fear not, Big Daddy is making his comeback. Kotaku's lengthy article on Hangar 13 revealed that a secret BioShock title, codenamed 'Parkside', is under development. According to Kotaku's report:

A year and a half later, however, Hangar 13 is a far different place. This past year was a turbulent time for the studio, as it floundered while trying to figure out what its next game would be. Many of the people who helped make Mafia III are now gone, including the game's art director, technical art director, senior producers, design director, many design leads, and a number of other key staff. Some left voluntarily; others were let go or asked to move. Some went to other game companies; others moved to the top-secret studio next door to work on an unannounced new BioShock game.

2K and Firaxis Games today announced that Sid Meier's Civilization VI: Rise and Fall, the expansion pack for the 2016 award-winning strategy title, is now available for Windows PC.

Civilization VI: Rise and Fall builds upon the critically-acclaimed gameplay experience of Civilization VI giving players new choices, strategies, and challenges as they guide a civilization through the ages. The expansion introduces new Golden Ages and Dark Ages, a new city Loyalty system, and Governors who can be stationed in players' cities. Civilization VI: Rise and Fall also adds nine new leaders and eight new civilizations, including returning fan favorites Shaka leading the Zulu and Genghis Khan leading Mongolia, alongside newcomers in a Civilization game for the first time such as Queen Seondeok leading Korea and Robert the Bruce leading Scotland.

AMD today officially announced FreeSync, an open-standard technology that makes video and games look more fluid on PC monitors, with fluctuating frame-rates. A logical next-step to V-Sync, and analogous in function to NVIDIA's proprietary G-SYNC technology, FreeSync is a dynamic display refresh-rate technology that lets monitors sync their refresh-rate to the frame-rate the GPU is able to put out, resulting in a fluid display output.

FreeSync is an evolution of V-Sync, a feature that syncs the frame-rate of the GPU to the display's refresh-rate, to prevent "frame tearing," when the frame-rate is higher than refresh-rate; but it is known to cause input-lag and stutter when the GPU is not able to keep up with refresh-rate. FreeSync works on both ends of the cable, keeping refresh-rate and frame-rates in sync, to fight both page-tearing and input-lag.

AMD today announced that qualifying purchases from participating retailers of an AMD Radeon R9 295X2, R9 290X or R9 290 graphics card will be eligible for a complimentary copy of 2K's Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth.

"I personally have enjoyed more than 500 hours of game time with the Sid Meier's Civilization franchise, and I'm thrilled by what AMD and Firaxis Games have done with the Mantle graphics API to make Beyond Earth a smooth, high-performance marvel," said Roy Taylor, corporate vice president, ISV/IHV Partner Group, AMD. "AMD believes that gamers should freely experience that remarkable development work, and our new Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth promotion offers exactly that as a 'thank you' to new AMD Radeon customers."

2K Games and Gearbox Software announced today the much anticipated Borderlands 2 is now available in North America and will be available internationally on September 21, 2012 for the Xbox 360 video game and entertainment system from Microsoft, PlayStation 3 computer entertainment system and Windows PC. The four-player cooperative shooter-looter already has critics raving, with review scores of 9 out of 10 from IGN, 9.75 out of 10 from Game Informer and a perfect 10 out of 10 from PlayStation: The Official Magazine.

"Borderlands 2 is a game made by gamers for gamers," said Christoph Hartmann, president of 2K. "The unique visual art style, all-new characters, loads of loot, 87 bazillion guns, and role-playing-shooting combine for a truly addictive experience, especially when played with three other friends. The initial response from the press has been fantastic and the game is poised to be one of the highest-rated titles in the history of 2K."

The games market went to Hell in May. Diablo III topping retail software sales for the month, according to the latest sales figures from NPD, and helped fuel a resurgence in the PC games space. Other top performers included Max Payne 3, which launched the same day as Diablo III, as well as Sniper Elite V2 and Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Future Soldier.
While action titles continued their dominance of the top 10, 2K Sports' NBA 2K12 held the fifth spot for the second straight week. Blizzard continued to show its impact in the PC market with Diablo III at number 1, the first time since July 2010 that a PC-only title has accomplished that feat. The game that did it in 2010? StarCraft 2, another Blizzard mainstay.

Total video game sales continued to shrink, down 28 percent from last year. However, the PC market jumped 230 percent from the same time last year to $80 million, fueled by Diablo III sales. The overall spend in May, including digital sales and microtransactions was estimated to be $1.17 billion.

More and more publishers seem to be seeing Steamworks as the best viable DRM on the market and 2K Games is no exception. All PC editions of Borderlands 2 will use Valve's Steamworks suite as their DRM. Steamworks supports snazzy features beyond simple copy protection, Gearbox's shooter-RPG will also use it for multiplayer matchmaking, Steam Cloud storage, achievements, auto-updating, downloadable content, "and more." How Steamworks... works is that if you buy a boxed edition of Borderlands 2, you'll need to register the game with a Steam account, and launch it through Steam. The box will still contain a disc to install the game from, but you'll have the option to download it directly through Steam whenever you please. Digital distributors other than Steam will simply sell you a product key to activate on Steam. Steamworks was to be expected, really, as 2K Games has used it for PC editions of games it's published since Mafia II in 2010. It briefly dabbled in Games for Windows Live before then but, thankfully, that was a short-lived experiment.

Borderlands 2 is coming to PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 on September 18. As ever, a selection of shiny things are on offer as pre-order bonuses.

2K Games and Gearbox Software announced today that Borderlands 2, the sequel to the multi-million unit selling breakout hit, Borderlands, will be available on the Xbox 360 video game and entertainment system from Microsoft, PlayStation 3 computer entertainment system and Windows-based PC in North America on September 18, 2012 and internationally on September 21, 2012. Currently in development by Gearbox Software, Borderlands 2 is the sequel to the critically acclaimed four-player cooperative shooter-looter that combined intense first-person mayhem with role-playing gameplay. In addition, fans who pre-order the title from participating retailers will receive access to the Borderlands 2 Premiere Club, including rewarding in-game items and bonuses.

2K Games announced today that Sid Meier's Civilization V: Gods & Kings, the expansion pack for the award-winning Civilization V, is being developed for Windows-based PC. Developed by Firaxis Games, Sid Meier's Civilization V: Gods & Kings introduces new gameplay content, enhancing the Civilization V experience and providing even more ways for players to achieve world domination. The Gods & Kings expansion pack spans the breadth of human civilization, taking players from founding the first Pantheon of the Gods and spreading religion across the world, to deploying spies in enemy cities to steal information and technology.

"Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword set a precedent in new content and game features in a Civilization expansion pack. 2K Games is continuing that tradition with Gods & Kings," said Sarah Anderson, senior vice president of marketing for 2K. "The Gods & Kings expansion is the quintessential Civilization V addition, making Civilization more addictive than ever before."

Quite possibly one of the most anticipated games of 2009, BioShock 2 has finally been given a set date from publishers 2K Games. Set for a simultaneous release on the Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and PC on October 30th 2009 internationally, while North America will have to wait another few days for their release on the 3rd November.

In an interview with Godfrey Cheng, Director of Technical Marketing in AMD's Graphics Products Group, Bit-Tech.net has quoted him saying that standards such as PhysX would die due to their proprietary and closed nature. Says Mr. Cheng:

"There is no plan for closed and proprietary standards like PhysX," said Cheng. "As we have emphasised with our support for OpenCL and DX11, closed and proprietary standards will die."

Bit-Tech.net interviewed the AMD person to get the company's take on EA and 2K's decision to adopt NVIDIA PhysX across all of their worldwide studios, earlier this week. Interestingly, when asked about how the major publishers such as EA adopting PhysX across all of their studios would impact the propagation of the API, Cheng responded with saying that monetary incentives provided to publishing houses alone won't help a great deal in propagating the API, and that the product (PhysX) must be competitive, and that AMD viewed Havoc and its physics simulation technologies as leaders. "Games developers share this view. We will also invest in technologies and partnerships beyond Havok that enhances gameplay." he added. PhysX is a proprietary physics simulation API created by Ageia technologies, which was acquired and developed by NVIDIA. You can read the full Bit-Tech.net interview with Godfrey Cheng here.

Bit-tech reports that a new 2K Games studio is being founded specifically for the development of BioShock 2. The new studio, 2K Marin, will consist of the remnants from the 2K Boston developer team of the first BioShock. Apparently, not many of the original staff wanted to work with Ken Levine ever again after the first BioShock. 2K Games understood the sentiment and allowed the staff to set up a new studio so they can work on BioShock 2 while leaving Ken in 2K Boston with Project X which has been confirmed as being a new X-Com game.

It appears that players are having problems after reinstalling BioShock a few times. BioShock is using Sony's anti-piracy SecuROM which contacts them with your hardware specifications. SecuROM's website states "Only legitimate customers who have purchased the product are able to unlock the program which is bound to the hardware after activation. This ensures that once activated, it cannot be transferred to another PC and therefore not being mass pirated." Players are reporting after installing the game more than two times will stop the installation process. So not only is it being bounded to your current hardware. It will also lock you out after too many installs.

2K Games announces it will publish Borderlands, an upcoming sci-fi first person shooter from award winning developer Gearbox. The game features a revolutionary content generation system allowing for near endless missions, environments, enemies, weapons, item drops and character customizations. Christoph Hartmann, President of 2K says "Borderlands represents an important evolutionary leap in game design and technology. By utilizing revolutionary new technology to create thousands of unique, randomly generated missions, weapons and situations, Borderlands will raise the bar for next gen action games." Borderlands is set to release Christmas 2008.