“Farewell, Microsoft. We all worked hard. Xbox is great! It’s time to create something new, “- wrote in his Twitter Malterer Boyd (Boyd Multerer). In 20 years with the company, he did a really great deal: led a team to develop Xbox One, helped create the Xbox 360, introduced by our vision of Xbox Live service, and recently served as Director of Development Xbox.

Over the past few years Xbox division has left a lot (for this post) of top managers: Don Mattrick (left in Zynga), Nancy Tellem, Jordan Levine, Mark Whitten and Ben Smith (now both work in Sonos).

Personnel changes may be associated with different events, but the vast majority of experts are inclined to the version with the new strategy of Xbox. After initially console was supposed to be a kind of multimedia center for the whole house, but this approach is not very liked the users, so Phil Spencer (who is now the chief on all matters relating to the attachment) suggested a return to the old and familiar model, where Xbox – First of all games. This approach has had an effect in November. Microsoft joy knew no bounds: Xbox for the first time surpassed the sales of PlayStation 4 in the US and the UK.

Twitter users tried to find out in which direction will move Boyd Malterer, but “folder Xbox» kept their plans secret: “It will be new projects, but I can not say exactly what.”

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Valve has announced a new milestone in the history of their own digital distribution service games Steam – the number of registered users broke the mark of 65 million, which is approximately 30% more than the year before.

By the way, the peak attendance of service at the moment is about 6 million This can be easily verified in the statistics Steam, where daily attendance for a better perception of the curve is shown as a wavy shape. Fluctuations are completely dependent on the time of day.

By far the most popular game on Steam Dota 2 remains. The maximum daily amount of players in Dota 2 is more than 0.5 million official release Dota 2 to the model free-to-play took place this year. After a long period of beta testing, the sequel to the popular mod for Warcraft III – Defense of the Ancients, in the shortest possible time is now available for users of Steam.

Recently, the service Steam was 10, which was for some kind of Valve’s push to expand into new markets. Recall a little earlier, Valve announced the OS Steam OS , reference design game system Steam Machine and game controller Steam Controller .

For comparison, it is worth mentioning that the number of users of the service Microsoft Xbox Live is 48 million, while the users of the Sony PlayStation Network, there are 110 million

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Microsoft has announced to hold the shares for subscription service Office 365. For example, users who apply for an annual subscription to Office 365 Home Premium or Office 365 University, will receive a free subscription to Xbox Live Gold for 12 months.

To take advantage of this offer, you must perform three steps:

1.  Buy and activate a one-year subscription to Office 365 Home Premium or Office 365 University in the period from 18 July 2013 to 28 September 2013;
2. Get the code, authorized in the Microsoft account , which was used to subscribe to Office 365 (up to 31 October 2013);
3. Redeem the code on the site Xbox.com or through the Xbox 360.

It should be noted that the use of this offer will not everyone, but only residents of 38 countries . This list is listed Russia, but, unfortunately, there is no USA.

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