So it would appear that some third-party developers are getting what Stardock meant - the fate of PC gaming is on the hands of the developers. BioWare, a reputable PC developer of the past, has also expanded to the console market like many others, but they aren't about to abandon the gaming platform. Speaking to MTV, CEOs Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk said that the role-play experts might keep developing PC exclusives in the long run. And there's a little hope for Apple iPhone games from them as well. More on that when you click "read more".

With their strong library of annual franchises, Electronic Arts has gone out on a limb to say that games have longer lifespans today. To prove their point, EA talked about MMOs, DLCs, and their ten-year plan for the upcoming game, Spore (PC, Nintendo Wii, DS,  Mac, Mobile). More details after the jump.

Our article, "The Foundations of Fortress iTunes", covered what the entertainment industry sees as the challengers to Apple's dominance in the digital media download market: SpiralFrog, Zune, PSP and Connect, MP3 cell phones, MySpace and MTV Urge. We forgot to include one possible candidate: Sirius. As in the satellite radio. And just like the other upstars we covered in Part 1, a Wired.com reporter speculated that Sirius is looking like an assault on Fortress iTunes, too.

Remember Sirius' Stiletto 100 portable satellite radio and MP3 player that we featured last month? The company also announced an online subscription - "satellite-free" - service called Sirius Internet Radio (SIR). As mentioned in Part 1, iPod and iTunes were the perfect partners to capture an entire market for Apple. Yeah, well SIR isn't iTunes. The latter is an online media store. SIR's an internet radio service that streams CD-quality music and selected talk channels.

Enter Yahoo! Music, one of the partners of Stiletto's manufacturer, Zing. Stiletto 100 will reportedly work in conjunction with SIR and Yahoo! Music so that listeners can choose to purchase-download the song they're listening to. As announced by Bob Law, senior VP of Sirius, "The market for digital audio on-the-go is exploding. We are working with Zing to expand the availability of Sirius content on new platforms and bring the best in satellite radio programming to an increasingly mobile audience."

In other words, they're making Sirius and the Stiletto into an iTunes-iPod teamup of sorts.


And there's more after the jump: guess where the CEO of the Stiletto's manufacturer worked before.

Microsoft has released information at this year's Consumer Electronics Show on Urge, its new music download service, which aims to compete directly against iTunes. The service, which will not be based on a per-song or per-album cost, will allow users unlimited downloads, with access to music videos and other content.

Urge is the result of a partnership between the big M and MTV, and is the first serious contender to Apple's coveted crown. The news is not as surprising as how obvious Microsoft is making its move, making the new service incompatible with existing iPods -- a truly daring move.

The new program will be built into all versions of the upcoming Windows Vista, Microsoft's new operating system, the successor to Windows XP. It will be interesting to see how Apple reacts to the news.

[Via, The Independent]