Showing that at least a handful of news outlets are chasing the truth on Microsoft's new system that allows game publishers to shakedown consumers on used games, CVG, GameSpot and MCV have collectively contacted ten high profile third-party publishers to ask if they plan on using the new system including Bethesda, Activision, Capcom, Take-Two, Namco Bandai, Electronic Arts, Sega, Square Enix, and Konami.

An extensive investigation by Eurogamer has revealed that EA's Battlefield 1943 has been offline for nearly a month and EA did very little to rectify the situation. The story began when a tipster told Eurogamer that BF1943 was not playable on PlayStation Network or Xbox Live. In order to find out, Eurogamer writer Robert Purchese bought the game and tried to connect.

BioWare is apologizing publicly for accidently banning 100 - 150 players in its MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic. The company took to its forums to say it was sorry for banning over a hundred players for violating the game's terms of service. Yesterday those players received email notifications from the company saying they had violated the game's ToS and would be banned for a week.

Like a few other game developers who have crowdsourced a project or made a lot of money through PayPal transactions, Skullgirls developer Lab Zero Games found themselves unable to pay employees during the weekend because the online money transfer service froze the developer's account.

South Korean gamers are getting upset that servers for Riot Games' League of Legends in the country have spent more time under maintenance or facing downtime in the last month than being operational.

It looks like Electronic Arts has delivered a lethal blow to Bank of America in the grand finale of the Consumerist's 2013 Worst Company in America tournament. EA slaughtered Ticketmaster earlier in the week to get to the finals. It garnered 78.89 percent of the vote, compared to Ticketmaster's 21.11 percent in that battle.

EA COO Peter Moore may have wanted to defend his company in the wake of possibly winning The Consumerist Worst Company of 2013 award, but his defense of the company's practices and his contention that conservative groups are doing most of the voting does not sit well with the site.

Electronic Arts continues to roll over the competition in the Consumerist's tournament to decide the "Worst Company In America 2013." The semi-final round of winning this dubious distinction for bad service pits Electronic Arts against Ticketmaster, while Comcast will attempt to defeat Bank of America. The winners of this competition will go onto the finals.

A mother in Toronto (Ontario, Canada) blames lax security at Microsoft after her 11-year-old son's Xbox Live account was hacked for $300 in fraudulent charges for in-game content. Jennifer Stubbs of Toronto said an unknown hacker charged the FIFA 13 Ultimate in-game buys to her credit card.

"I wasn't aware that these purchases were happening," she told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. "Someone had gone into our device remotely."

SimCity's "always-online requirement" may have irritated consumers at launch, but by most accounts anyone that reads this or any other gaming web site was well aware that the game would require a constant Internet connection in order to play (EA made that fact clear quite awhile ago).

On this week's show we talk about Congressman Frank Wolf's hearing this week to slam "violent video games," changes being made to the ESRB, the ESA's plan for a PSA campaign, the latest SimCity news, and the results of the latest GamePolitics poll. Download Episode 45 now: SuperPAC Episode 45 (1 hour, 12 minutes) 66.6 MB.

Well, the good news is that EA's official Twitter for its digital distribution service Origin has confirmed that you will not be banned if you ask for a refund on your purchase of SimCity in light of the fact that you probably can't play it.

The bad news is that you more than likely ain't getting that refund.

It's been a pretty rough day for both customers who bought SimCity and the developers trying everything under the sun to get it working at full capacity. While EA has been trying to solve the problem and get gamers playing the game, some fans have been very vocal about how the game's DRM has broken it beyond repair.

Last night SimCity Senior Producer Kip Katsarelis posted a statement on the EA forums addressing the ongoing issues with the game and players' complaints that servers are continually inaccessible.

Engadget is reporting that the new PlayStation 4 console from Sony will not allow you to transfer all of those PlayStation Network games you might have purchased on the PS3. Sony admitted last night that current-generation PSN titles won't be playable on the system because architecture of the Power-PC-based PS3 and x86-64 based AMD processor powering the PlayStation 4 are so different.

Forbes is reporting that Electronic Arts has changed the language of the "End User License Agreement" (EULA) users have to agree to in order to play SimCity. Players, who are already peeved that the game requires an "always-on" connection in order play even single-player, took issue with some wording in EULA for the SimCity Beta.

Hammerpoint Interactive's controversial zombie survival game The War Z has been removed from Steam. Earlier this morning we reported on the very vocal and public outcry of consumers who say that The War Z was falsely advertised by its developers and that it was missing features promised in the game's original product page - which was later revised. You can get the rundown on all those issues in this news story.

The War Z developer Hammerpoint Interactive sort of apologized to gamers who might have "misread" the game's Steam product page, and took a shot at "extreme DayZ fanboys." Yesterday Hammerpoint released their zombie survival game on Steam much to the delight of many users who were looking forward to playing it. The game ended up being pretty popular - in fact it had the most sales of any game on its launch day. But then fans struck back at the developer claiming that the game they had purchased lacked a lot of the features that were promised on the product page.

Earlier in the week we reported that Glu had shut down the multiplayer servers for several games that were powered by its GameSpy Technologies multiplayer technology including Rebellion's Sniper Elite. After a few days of silence GameSpy Technologies has issued a rather lengthy response to the situation on its Facebook page.

The post starts by contradicting reports that say users were never informed of multiplayer sever shutdowns for various game titles:

UK developer Rebellion finds itself in a tough situation this morning. Multiplayer servers for its Sniper Elite game have been shut down at the request of Glu, but Rebellion claims it was not informed about the servers being closed. The company has apologized to owners of the game and is telling the community that the decision was made without its consent.

Online retailer Amazon has apologized to UK customers who purchased a premium Wii U bundle but didn't get a copy of the game Nintendo Land. The retailer blamed supplier error for the omission of the game and said that the error only affected a small number of customers.

"It's been brought to our attention that a small number of orders for this item may have been delivered without the advertised game, Nintendo Land, due to supplier error," an email to customers confirmed.

Ubisoft is apologizing to Far Cry 3 players for issues with the company's Uplay online gaming service. Some players have reported that they were unable to play the game because of Uplay server issues. Apparently setting the Uplay client to offline mode allows players to play part of the game, according to Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

Gree apologized today for how it handled the closure of OpenFeint - announced earlier this week. The company also said that it was sorry for putting developers that used the technology in a tough situation. Speaking to PocketGamer, SVP of marketing and developer relations Eros Resmini said that it had originally planned to give developers a full year to migrate to a new platform, but did not elaborate why it decided to pull the plug now. The planned shutdown was announced earlier in the year.

After a few days of not being able to use the "@" character in passwords, Netflix has said this morning that the problem is now fixed. The problem relates to the new Netflix app that was launched this weekend alongside the Wii U's retail release in North America. Netflix subscribers that used the "@" character in passwords were forced to change them because the character was not allowed in the Wii U app. Now Netflix says that everything is fixed.

In Episode 29 of the Super Podcast Action Committee hosts Andrew Eisen and E. Zachary Knight discuss the shaky launch of the Wii U console over the weekend, Sony perma-bans for PS3 'hackers,' and the good and bad side of Electronic Arts. It's a show to remember unless you stopped that Wii U firmware update - then it's a painful reminder that getting your brand new console 'bricked' kind of sucks! Download it now: SuperPAC Episode 29 (1 hour, 19 minutes) 73 MB.

Apparently the Miiverse, Wii U's embedded social networking service, has been suffering an outage since last night, according to this C&VG report. The report also details some of the other launch day issues Nintendo's console has been having - some of which we have already covered in earlier stories.

The massive 1 - 1.5 GB firmware update (see note at the end of this story) that Nintendo decided to deploy on the consoles launch day - Sunday - is proving to be a disaster for Nintendo and for customers who might decided the hour or more wait for it to be applied is just too long. According to several games journalists and this GII story, shutting down the system while the update is being downloaded or stopping (resetting or powering the system down) it bricks the Wii U.

iPhone iOS 6 users are complaining that since they have started using Apple's new operating system for its hand-held devices, they have seen a dramatic increase in the amount of data they consume. UK publication The Guardian is reporting that a number of iOS 6 users have been complaining about a "significant hike" in their data usage, which translates into higher monthly mobile data usage bills.

Some players are claiming the newest Borderlands 2's character, Gaige is erasing their "Badass stats." The download, which also requires a patch to play seems to be affecting players on Xbox 360 and PC. The problem seems to be a repeat of an earlier issue some fans had with the game wiping out their progress.

Stardock Systems has filed a lawsuit against a former employee claiming that her actions damaged the launch of its strategy game Elemental: War of Magic. The company filed the lawsuit last month in Michigan Eastern District Court. Their complaint contends that when former marketing manager Alexandra Miseta resigned, she "deleted, destroyed, and/or stole promotional materials, analytics data, and trade show information" that was vital to the game's launch.