http://cache.kotaku.com/assets/base/img/thumbs140x140/kotaku.com.png http://kotaku.com/tag/microsoft http://kotaku.com/tag/microsoft A new set of downloadable content for Gears of War 3, Forces of Nature, will be out on March 27. It includes three new character skins, three new maps, two old maps, seven weapon skins and Gears of War 2's Guardian Mode. Forces of Nature will cost 800 MSP. [GameTrailers] More »
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343 Industries, you so sneaky. We've already noticed that the Microsoft division tasked with the future of all things Halo debuted the new look of the sci-fi shooter series' hero at Toy Fair 2012. And the Chief's new duds are quite different. Leaner, meaner and perhaps more aerodynamic. More »
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Kotaku has heard from multiple sources close to the project that the code-name for Microsoft's next console is Durango. More »
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Microsoft Korea joins World Gym Fitness Center in the Ilsan district to promote the Kinect throughout February. Members of the gym will be able to participate in the "Dance Time with Kinect" program, held twice every Tuesday. The promotion will use Dance Central 2, and during the last week of February, there will be a dance competition for prizes. More »
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Offering the company's first detailed and dare I say it human response to a recent flood of hijacked Xbox Live accounts, Microsoft's Alex Garden, General Manager of Xbox LIVE, has issued the following statement: More »
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Stephen Toulouse—known as StepTo to those listening to Major Nelson's podcast, or unfortunate enough to feel the cold kiss of the Xbox Live banhammer—has given his two weeks notice to Microsoft. The director of Xbox Live Policy and Enforcement will leave Feb. 16, after 18 years with the company. More »
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According to Xbox France's Marketing Director Cedrick Delmas, there'll be no new Microsoft console released in 2012 to compete with Nintendo's Wii. More »
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Whether motivated by trolling or delusional wish fulfillment, some guy tossed up a page pretending to be a registration site for a Halo 4 multiplayer beta last week. 343 Industries, the game's developer, quickly branded that as a fake, and the site was taken offline. That's not good enough for Microsoft. More »
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For Westerners, the conditions are shocking. Workers slave away for hours on end, pulling overtime, until their legs swell or they suffer from crippling disabilities. More »
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So, we've heard from a source that the next Xbox may feature some kind of anti-used games technology. When you first read that, your first instinct was probably to think it's either bullshit or the worst idea a video game company has ever had. More »
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Microsoft will upgrade its disc technology for its next Xbox from DVDs to Blu-Ray discs, catching up to rival Sony, games industry sources tell Kotaku. More »
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Time for the latest instalment of "shit people are saying/guessing about the next Xbox console"! This week we have two reports, one from IGN and the other from Fudzilla. More »
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At Starbucks, you see people with their iPads, their MacBooks, and, yes, their gaming portables. What you don't usually see are people with their home consoles. More »
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Good news, haters of arbitrary online currencies! The end for Microsoft's confusing "Points" system may be near, if a report on Inside Mobile Apps is to be believed. More »
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Anonymous continues to lash out following the seizure of Megaupload and the jailing of its founder, having momentarily deleted both CBS.com and UniversalMusic.com. Xbox Live has been threatened, but is that credible? More »
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After a few months of people pointing the issue out, Microsoft has finally acknowledged that the 2011 dashboard update has created a problem with the console's video playback. More »
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Taking the notion of institutionalised rewards maybe a little bit too far, Microsoft has begun awarding achievements to developers. More »
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So there's been some kind of security problem with Xbox Live accounts for a while now. Microsoft denies there's been any compromise of its own data, yet still, for months now users have complained of having their accounts hijacked by people making unauthorised transaction. More »
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Ever since the first wave of "FIFA Hacks" surfaced last year, a lot of people have been complaining that their Xbox Live accounts had been "hacked". Microsoft has continually denied any such breach of security, but you know, there have been too many cases for too long now for this to be nothing. More »
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There was a lot of buzz last year that Microsoft would be introducing a new TV subscription service for the Xbox 360, one that would bring all kinds of live TV shows to the platform and let them work with motion and voice control. More »
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Earlier this week, Kotaku told you about how a large number of employees at a Foxconn factory in China had threatened mass suicide having been "denied compensation they were promised". More »
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Last month, when I got my hands on the PS Vita, the first thing I did was open the box. The second? Flipped over the device to see where it was made. More »
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Did you know that in the US, police can use Xbox 360 consoles—and Xbox Live—to trace and catch criminals? And that there are often law enforcement officers posing on the service undercover in an effort to catch child porn offenders? More »
]]> http://kotaku.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5875049&view=rss&microfeed=true An earlier piece on the mass suicide threat at the Foxconn electronics manufacturing factory reported how 300 people there nearly jumped off a building in a labor dispute. Microsoft's responded to the situation and you can see the full comment by going back to the original story. More »
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On Jan. 2, over 300 employees at a Foxconn plant in Wuhan, China threatened to throw themselves off a building in a mass suicide. Foxconn makes Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony products. These workers manufacture Xbox 360s. More »
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Microsoft has announced that Kinect is coming to Windows on February 1. More »
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Microsoft announced just ahead of its CES keynote that the Xbox 360 has sold 66 million units worldwide. Kinect has sold 18 million. And there are just under 40 million Xbox Live users. More »
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Every night across the globe, kids log into Xbox Live and game online. They should be studying or sleeping, but they're gaming. Except in South Korea. More »
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Shortly after the new "Metro" dashboard for the Xbox 360 was released to the public, Eurogamer's Digital Foundry noticed that in-dash video was of a poorer quality than the same video played elsewhere. Investigating further—as Microsoft remained totally silent on the matter—it's discovered why: They say the software development kit given to third parties is limited to lower-quality video. More »
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Microsoft said it has intervened to restore the Xbox Live account of a customer hit by an overseas phishing scam, and refunded all unauthorized charges the scammers were able to make as her complaint got lost in customer support and was never properly locked down. More »
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Xbox 3, Xbox 720, NextBox… whatever you call it, lots of rumors are being floated about Microsoft's next home console. Some say it'll output Avatar-level visuals while others say it'll lean heavily on cloud architecture. But the latest hint as to Microsoft's gaming future point to their ever-increasing ambition to fuse TV, film and gaming content. More »
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This announcement oughta go over like a turd in a punchbowl. Seems that on Jan. 1, Xbox Live is taking guns away from all avatars. That is according to Epic Games' community manager, who in a reminder to Gears of War fans said that if they don't have the Lancer or Hammerburst avatar props, they better run go get strapped because all guns are verboten after the new year. More »
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Ever since the release of Microsoft's new dashboard the other week, some unlucky users have been unable to get their consoles back online, something the company is promising to "resolve ... as soon as possible". More »
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The Xbox 360's video player does not display video properly, a problem that testers reported during the new dashboard's beta period, and one confirmed by Eurogamer this weekend. More »
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The gist of many big company's new "No Sue" clauses are that you can't sue them, but beyond that, aarrggghh, there's so much legal wish-wash it makes your head spin. More »
]]> http://kotaku.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5868690&view=rss&microfeed=true A new Christmas DLC pack for Fruit Ninja Kinect is now available for free on Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade. The pack includes a Santa's Workshop, Snow Globes to smash and a Candy Cane Blade. More »
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The Red Ring of Death claimed many original Xbox 360s. Some of them were fixed. Some of them were recycled. And this one ended up a saltwater aquarium with live corals, fish, crabs, snails, and shrimp. More »
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Once the poster lovable wild animals for Microsoft's motion-sensing Kinect peripheral, the Kinectimals now appear to be feline ambassadors of goodwill to the iPad and iPhone. How very odd. More »
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If you count the directions keyed on the D-pad (or the left stick) it takes 17 button presses to reach the Indie Games section of the Xbox Live Marketplace under the new Xbox dashboard, which released this week. It takes only eight buttons to get to the Xbox Live Arcade and Games on Demand catalogs. More »
]]> http://kotaku.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5866930&view=rss&microfeed=true On the heels of the new dashboard rollout this week, Xbox Live's Gold level services are free to all this weekend. In addition to multiplayer gaming, features like Video Kinect are also available to Silver (free) subscribers. The weekend includes free previews and discounts on downloadable films (like The Hangover) as well. Enjoy. More »
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