According to Electronic Arts over a million gamers worldwide celebrated the holidays in front of their PCs playing BioWare's MMO, Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Over the weekend, players spent over 5.5 million hours playing the game, according to EA.

SWTOR has hit a number of other milestones in the first week of release, according to EA:

Nexon has gone public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange and has managed to raise $1.17 billion from its IPO. Nexon's IPO is the biggest of the year for the exchange, putting the company's total market value of between $7.69 billion and $8.97 billion. In an interview with Bloomberg, Nexon CFO Owen Mahoney said that the social gaming and online gaming company plans on using the money to fund new acquisitions.

Zynga is telling investors as it pitches for its upcoming initial public offering, that it can and will double its user base - a user base that has been in decline for the last few months due to good-old-fashioned drop-off and Facebook's change in the way it measures user activity. "We could see that doubling," Pincus said at the luncheon at a Boston hotel with potential investors. He did not give a time frame for meeting this target.

Bethesda announced that it is hard at work fixing bugs and glitches associated with various versions of its epic RPG The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. After pages of forum posts and an avalanche of consumer complaints, Bethesda will attempt to fix the issues plaguing PlayStation 3 Skyrim players with a new patch next week - after the Thanksgiving holiday.

"PS3 and 360 updates have been submitted for certification. PC coming too. Current estimate is they will be live the week after Thanksgiving," said Bethesda's Pete Hines.

Analyst firm Cowen & Company has raised first-year sales estimates for EA's Battlefield 3 from 8 million to 11 million, after noting vigorous pre-order numbers. The firm said that the game is already benefiting from an extensive marketing campaign (some estimate that EA is spending around $50 million to promote the game prior to launch) ahead of its October release on Xbox 360, Ps3, and PC; and it is seeing pre-orders for Battlefield 3 "comparable" to Call of Duty Black Ops' numbers from last year.

The firm also commented on Star Wars: The Old Republic and the market’s reaction to a planned beta test. Yesterday Electronic Arts began taking pre-orders for the game and announced a beta for sometime in September ahead of its expected holiday release. For some reason this caused shares in EA to take a small hit.

According to new research data from Gartner Inc., an estimated $74 billion will be spent on gaming on 2011, delivering - by year's end - a 10 percent increase over 2010 numbers. The firm also estimates that two-thirds of that money will be spent on software. By 2015 that number will grow to $112 billion.

“As the popularity of smartphones and tablets continues to expand, gaming will remain a key component in the use of these devices," said principal research analyst Tuong Nguyen. "Mobile games are the most downloaded application category across most application stores. For this reason, mobile gaming will continue to thrive as more consumers expand their use of new and innovative portable connected devices."

Video-game industry-related funding and acquisition deals rose 36 percent to a total of 210 in 2010, driven by developments in the online and social network gaming segments. This is according to new IHS Screen Digest research. The research firm said that 123 funding rounds and 87 acquisitions closed in 2010, and that the volume of activity last year was up by more than a third from the 2009's total of 154 events.

Acquisitions doubled last year, with 20 - 24 events occurring every quarter, compared to 49 acquisitions for all of 2009. Total funding for 2010 reached $1.89 billion, up 130 percent from $819 million in 2009. The numbers cover funding and acquisitions activity in all areas of the games market (excluding mobile gaming, which was tracked separately).

Capcom says that it is "saddened" by the controversy surrounding its mobile division's game, "MaXplosion" for iOS platforms. The company has every reason to be, I guess. Many in the community have called it a blatant rip-off of Twisted Pixel's popular Xbox Live Arcade game 'Splosion Man. But what's worse is that Twisted Pixel has had a few things to say about Capcom's game in a very public way.

While the company has said that it won't sue Capcom for its game (Twisted Pixel CEO Mike Wilford says the company is too small to take Capcom on in court), many members of the company have had harsh things to say in the media and on Twitter. One Twisted Pixel developer went so far as to call it "complete theft." Wilford also said that his company pitched 'Splosion Man to Capcom, who passed on the game. That fact adds insult to the perceived injury.

While Blizzard was launching its biggest product of the year, behind the scenes it was having some serious problems with a data leak in China, according to a report on VentureBeat. According to that report, citing several news stories from MMOGameSite, Blizzard's release schedule and subscriber numbers were leaked from its China offices, and the general manager of the studio, Ye Weilun, was subsequently fired for it - allegedly.

The Associated Press reports that the Entertainment Software Association, which represents the interests of U.S. video game publishers, spent $1.2 million on government lobbying efforts during the period April-June, 2009.

Looking beneath the surface, GamePolitics has obtained an actual copy of the ESA's latest federal lobbying report. The document shows that Big Gaming has its fingers in a surprising number of legislative and governmental pies. The following are issues which the ESA reports that it lobbied on in Q2:

• Media regulation
• First Amendment protection
• Entertainment industry ratings
• Parental control technology
• Content/video game sale regulation
• Retailer enforcement of ratings
• Piracy
• Copyright Act (believed to be the DMCA)
• Anti-circumvention
• Patent modernization
• Intellectual property enforcement
• Customs reauthorization
• PRO-IP Act appropriations
• Dept. of Justice appropriations
• Dept. of State reauthorization
• Free Trade Agreements
• Special 301 Designated Countries
• Trade Policy Reform
• Domestic regulatory & administrative issues
• Trade enforcement
• Doha Round Proceedings (trade talks)
• Trade Promotion Authority
• Internet Governance
• Virtual worlds
• Online gaming
• Highly skilled workforce
• H1-B visas
• Green cards
• Immigration reform
• ISP management
• Copyright Enforcement
• Broadband deployment
• Broadband policy
• Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act implementation

Agencies lobbied by the ESA include some surprising entities. Here's the list:

• U.S. House of Representatives
• U.S. Senate
• Federal Communications Commission
• Federal Trade Commission
• National Telecommunications & Information Administration
• U.S. Copyright Office
• U.S. Customs & Border Protection
• U.S. Trade Representative
• Department of Commerce
• Department of Homeland Security
• Department of Justice
• Patent & Trademark Office
• FBI
• National Security Council

DOCUMENT DUMP: Grab your own copy of the ESA's lobbying report... (9-page PDF)