After 2 years of speculations and rumors, the much-talked about Halo MMO is now officially canceled.

The news hit the web following Microsoft's announcement that Ensemble Studios will be closed after the completion of Halo Wars, and the subsequent cancellation of another unannounced MMO project -which turned out to be Halo.

The unnamed MMO was revealed by CEO Geoff Iddison during a panel discussion at today’s GameHorizon Conference in Newcastle.

Dubbed ‘Nextscape’ by Iddison, the game was said to incorporate – as Runescape does – a variety of business and subscription models to drive consumer engagement, he said.

However, although the company has run its successful Runescape MMO since 2001 – offering biweekly content updates - with the new property due to join it early next year, Iddison said that Jagex’ real value isn’t its IP, but its infrastructure.

“We’ve got an infrastructure behind Runescape which is the real silver of the Jagex, the value of the company,” said Iddison. “It’s not the game, the game is going to come and go,” he said.

“The infrastructure is the thing that can scale. Runescape has 10 years of good growth – but the infrastructure is infinitely scalable,” he added of Jagex’ vast operation of servers and online support teams.

Although Jagex employs 400 people at its Cambridge, UK HQ, only 25 per cent are dedicated to development. Half the staff are focused on content and support whi

Realtime Worlds today unveiled its plans to host a "full public beta of APB," its upcoming crime-based MMO due out on PC and Xbox 360. Helmed by Grand Theft Auto creator David Jones, the studio's first release was the open world title Crackdown (360).

The news and two new bits of character art were tucked away within the announcement of Chris 'Ulric' Dye as the game's community relations manager.

According to business manager Mario Rizzo, Dye's hiring "signals the start of a new phase for APB where we can interact more fluidly with both gaming sites, and our potential future player base. This is an important milestone for the game now that we are transitioning into Alpha and moving towards the full public beta of APB."

Alpha and beta tests are relatively common for massively mutliplayer online efforts, though they often occur within the confines of an closed, invite-only environment. No timeframe or platform details were provided for the public beta, though the game is expected to launch in 2009.

Via Shacknews

Remnants of Skystone, a steampunk-themed MMOG, was announced recently.

REMNANTS OF SKYSTONE: Finally - a Steampunk-styled MMO has been announced. OK, so it’s browser-based and possibly not very “Massive” per se, but I’ll take what I can get!

Explore the REMNANTS OF SKYSTONE developer blog and you’ll uncover many fun-looking screens, an evolving backstory, and developer ,Flipline's plans for the game’s release and beyond. Super Steampunk Skystone, OK!

via Gamebunny

click to Developer Blog

Ubisoft acquired full rights to the Tom Clancy name a few days ago for a reported 90 million dollars and has now announced a Tom Clancy MMO.Development on this new project has not yet started, but speculation is already putting the budget for this game at around 50 million.

It truly seems that the MMO rush is on and everyone wants a piece of the action. No doubt a Tom Clancy MMO would be a FPS, although I don’t know how you can take a spy/swat type gameplay and turn it into a MMO. How does that work? 50 spies all trying to steal the same suitcase? No, most likely it would follow in the footsteps of The Agency, which Sony is working on. You would create your team and signup for missions that are instanced.

click here for more details about it .

MMOcrunch

SOE announced a deal with Live Gamer to expand in-game real-money trading in its current and future MMOs last week. But do real-world economics belong in a fantasy setting?

     Have you ever been paid or received real money for virtual goods?

ppls ,i need ur opinions about it.

As for  me,  i often buy some virtual money from ppls in-game

i dun break the  game balance and dun use any cheater in-game LOl

plz let me know,whether i was wrong ?

Video games and TV sets could be subject to a 1% sales tax in New Mexico if a coalition of environmental groups has its way.

              The tax idea, initiated by the Sierra Club, would raise an estimated $4 million a year, to fund programs aimed at giving school kids an outdoors education.

Michael Casaus, the New Mexico youth representative for the Sierra Club, referred to the tax proposal as part of the “Leave No Child Inside” movement, and said:

              We believe it is such a nominal tax that consumers won’t feel it too much, especially if they are educated about where that money goes.

Click here for more details about Tax on video games

 If gamers  live in New Mexico, they will sonn be paying an additional 1% tax when they feed their gameing habit --!

i do hope tax about videos games will not be spread out to all over world LOL,or we will cost a lot  when we play thousands of new mmorpgs

SecurityFocus contributor Federico Biancuzzi tracked down McGraw ,who has written a book about his experiences in finding vvarious security flaws in Mmorpgs ,to learn more about the state of security in modern video games, asking about cheating and anti-cheating systems, how the market for cheats, exploits, and digital objects is growing, what we could learn from the design of these huge systems, and how game developers react to submissions of security vulnerabilities.

The below  are  some fragments of their interview ,plz check it

McGraw : hackers who cheat in online games and are not detected can make tons of money selling virtual items in the middle market; the law says next to nothing about cheating in online games, so doing so is really not illegal

The book has a chapter on the law, a chapter on money, and lots of explicit discussion of very interesting software security problems. It's also a no-holds-barred, hands-on kind of book with lots of code and ideas you can sink your teeth into.

LOL, Guinness World Records are known to all

do you want to be a record breaker or do you want to be the first one in-game ?

http://gamers.guinnessworldrecords.com/book2008/preview.aspx 

Think you are the ultimate Guitar Hero? Join us on the 6th February for the Guinness World Record Guitar Hero Marathon Relay between the UK, US, Canada, Australia and France to celebrate the launch of the new Guinness World Record Gamers Edition!

You will have the chance to rock with Guitar Hero for one song before passing on to the next player for the most exciting record breaking event of the year! Those of you brave enough to dress as your favourite Guitar Hero are especially welcome!

To register to take part and to discover venue and time details please e-mail your respective country:

via Guinness World Records

After Bethesda-parent ZeniMax revealed it had secured $300 million to fund massively multiplayer online games," among other things, the internet was once again rife with speculation that an MMO set in the popular Elder Scrolls universe was on the way.
It was a familiar tune for some, given that ZeniMax had recently announced it was opening an MMO division and recruited former Mythic Entertainment executive producer Matt Frior to head it up.

The latest piece of evidence pointing to an online Elder Scrolls game comes from Voodoo Extreme. The site reports that ZeniMax recently acquired the domain name ElderScrollsOnline.com. It could be a simple matter of the company attempting to circumvent domain squatting, but it at least indicates that ZeniMax is thinking about such a game.

No system has been indicated for the MMO project, though a PC version is assumed as it is the main platform for MMOs. PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 editions are possible as well, as ZeniMax's last major game, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion from Bethesda, was well-received on both systems, with its next big title, Fallout 3, being developed for PC, PS3, and Xbox 360 as well.

Looking at the popular franchises h