Lyon, France-based indie developer Little Worlds Studio said that it is "playing its last card" and "places its fate in the hands of the public" with the launch of an initiative to save the company through what it is calling a "Kickfailer." Unlike a "Kickstarter," this initiative seeks support through its already established free-to-play mobile game Mana Crusher.

A Delaware Court has ruled that Vivendi cannot invoke a French law to avoid discovery in a lawsuit filed by shareholders over its stock deal with Activision. Activision announced on July 26, 2013, that Vivendi had agreed to sell back 85 percent of its majority stake for $8.17 billion. Vivendi owned 61 percent of Activision stock but allegedly owed more than $17 billion to its creditors, and desperately needed cash.

Quantic Dream founder David Cage will receive the French la Légion d'honneur aka the "Legion of Honour" award in a ceremony on March 13, according to Le Figaro. Cage is the first game developer to receive this honor, joining a host of celebrities and athletes including poet and novelist Jean Cocteau, actor Sean Connery, and Arsenal Football Club Manager Arsène Wenger.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said during her weekly podcast that she is proposing to other European nations - most notably France - to build their own communications network to help improve data protection. Chancellor Merkel described a network that would not have to automatically pass through the United States.

According to a brief report in Tax News the French government is pushing to reform the country's video games tax credit (known as the CIJV). French Culture Minister Aurélie Filippetti, Budget Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, and Innovation Minister Fleur Pellerin, have all embraced the French National Assembly's adoption of plans to reform the country's video games tax credit (CIJV).

A publicity stunt by several Micromania employees in Montargis (a town south of Paris, France) to celebrate the launch of Grand Theft Auto V led to a frenzy of law enforcement agents who thought something real was going on. The employees dressed up as criminals complete with face masks and toy guns.

The French government has decided that one of the tools used in its supposed "three-strikes" copyright enforcement law (commonly called Hadopi) is not necessary. Prior to the change one of the tools that the government had at its disposal was the ability to disconnect individuals who continually engaged in illicit file-sharing of copyrighted materials after several warnings and actions. Now a panel has decided that disconnecting citizens from the Internet as a punishment isn't that good of an idea.

After three years in place and "millions" of threatening letters being sent to alleged illegal file sharers in France, the French three-strikes anti-piracy law Hadopi has finally led to the disconnection of one person from the Internet. The individual, who was not named, faces two weeks without access to certain internet functions like web access and access to P2P software and a 600 euro fine.

The individual was caught sharing a few files online and never responded to earlier warnings.

Is France about to join the "net neutrality club?" According to this Ars Technica report that is a distinct possibility, but some things need to be worked out first… The French government has put forward a new plan that could enshrine net neutrality into national law, and should it pass it would become the second country in Europe.

TorrentFreak (based on a Numerama report) is reporting that France's anti-piracy agency Hadopi expects to send out more than 1.1 million strike warnings this year - up dramatically from 668,000 in 2012 - and the agency is increasing its activities even after it saw a 25 percent cut in its 2013 budget.

The AFP reports (picked up by Polygon) that the French military has issued a statement saying that an unnamed French soldier acted inappropriately when he wore a scarf around his face with a grinning skull similar to the character Lieutenant Simon "Ghost" Riley from Call of Duty.

A new print ad from Sony Computer Entertainment France is getting some attention for pushing the boundaries of sexism to promote the company's PS Vita hand-held. The ad (pictured left and courtesy of MCV) shows a female body with four breasts and compares those four breasts to the PS Vita's front and rear touch screens.

The tagline for the ad is "Touch both sides, twice the sensations."

Some are chalking the ad up to what is acceptable in French advertising and cultural standards.

Until now France's Hadopi system only took claims from the recording and movie industry, but apparently a new partner is about to join in on the action. According to French publication PCInpact (by way of TorrentFreak), next year France's Hadopi agency will get strong backing from the video game industry in the country.

While the agency running Hadopi (the three-strikes copyright infringement enforcement system that disconnects repeat offenders from the Internet) is defending itself in the face of threats to drastically cut its funding by the French government, some new data shows that Hadopi produces plenty of notices but very few disconnections or court cases. While we have no idea how much it costs to send out millions of notices, the system seems to be effective in making people stop sharing illegal files - even if it might be only temporary.

You may remember that the newly elected French president said recently that it might not fund the country's Hadopi agency. Hadopi, in case you'd forgotten is a copyright protection enforcement regime that uses a "three-strikes" policy that disconnects repeat offenders from the internet. President Francois Hollande hinted during his campaign that he might reform the agency to make it less repressive and more cooperative. Later in August he said that he would be scaling back funding for it. Now Hadopi is fighting back against the notion of having its resources clipped.

France's new culture minister has indicated that she will drastically cut the budget from the internet copyright infringement agency Hadopi. She will also encourage the agency to lay off on kicking people off the Internet, much to the delight of internet advocates. Culture Minister Aurélie Filippetti has appointed former Canal+ pay-TV CEO Pierre Lescure to conduct a review of France's Act II, a set of rules for protecting culture in the digital age - which includes the use of the Hadopi agency for enforcement.

Two French gamers decided that it would be a grand idea to reprogram a Sega Genesis so that every time a player made a mistake or took damage in a game they would get some punishment from shock collars. You can't make this kind of stuff up, folks. Also it goes without saying that you shouldn't try this at home.

The two gamers try everything from Sonic to Golden Axe 3, with amusing results. You'll notice in one of the shots that alcohol might be involved in the production of this little experiment...

Last week's presidential election saw Socialist Francois Hollande rise to the highest political post in France. While this election may have serious repercussions all over the world, one side effect of it might be the end of the supposed "three-strikes" copyright infringement law better known by French citizens as "HADOPI." When we say end, we mean that HADOPI might not be enforced against internet users even though it might still take aim at large websites that traffic in copyrighted materials.

We like when politicians get cute and use video games to promote themselves, so it's a requirement that we write about French presidential candidate François Bayrou using the "Konami code" on his website. If you visit the site at bayrou.fr and enter the familiar cheat code (up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A), the site will greet you with 8-bit visuals of the candidate, some retro game-like music, and some French text about something. Since I don't know any French we'll leave it to our readers to figure it out.

Nintendo has begun providing the Louvre art museum in Paris, France with Nintendo 3DS systems that offer an exclusive audio guide. The Audioguide Louvre Nintendo 3DS will become available at the Louvre for visitors beginning today. The audio guide will provide audio and visual tools to the 8.9 million annual visitors which will help them learn more about all the exhibits on display.

France's video game trade association Syndicat National du Jeu Vidéo announced at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this morning a new brand to promote French video game creativity. The brand, "Le Game," is backed by the trade group and the French government, and has the backing of Game Connection USA. So what is Le Game all about, you wonder?

Agence France-Presse (AFP) is reporting that, beginning in March of 2012, the Louvre in Paris, France will use 5,000 3DS hand-helds to guide its 8.5 million annual visitors through the 35,000 art objects on display. The hand-helds are being supplied by Nintendo as part of a new partnership between the company and the iconic museum.

The 3DS systems the museum will use let visitors locate themselves on the museum's grounds, select from themed tours tailored to both adults and children, and listen to commentary about exhibits in seven different languages.

Two armed robbers managed to steal 6,000 copies of Modern Warfare 3 in France, according to multiple news reports. According to published reports (as translated by Eurogamer), at 8:00 AM on Sunday morning a car crashed into a van 10km southeast of Paris. The van was carrying unspecified video game cargo worth €400,000.

Nintendo may not be excited about its declining stock prices, eroding investor confidence or the fact that a majority of their investors want them to make games for the iPad, but they sure are delighted by a recent French piracy ruling. It’s all about having your priorities straight. Recently six companies were found guilty of importing and selling those nefarious R4 cartridges that allow users to play copied games on DS systems.

Two new research reports from Newzoo - the 2011 French National Gamers Survey (L’Etude Nationale des Jeux Video) and the international Games Market Revenue Report - reveal that 24 million French citizens spend a total of 27 million hours per day playing games. Interestingly, less than half (42 percent) of those gamers ever spend money on games. According to Newzoo, total consumer spending is expected to reach €3.2bn in 2011, down 10 percent from 2010. Almost three quarters (73 percent) buy PC, Mac or console games, including second-hand trade, digital downloads and import.

UK video game industry trade group TIGA has joined forces with members of the European Games Developer Federation (EGDF) to voice its concern that the new EU funding programs planned for media and culture and for research and innovation for 2013 - 2020 do not place "sufficient emphasis" on the video game development sector. The groups voiced their concerns at Gamescom this week in Cologne, Germany.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has opened the first e-G8 forum in Paris, with leaders in technology such as Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Wikipedia's founder Jimmy Wales, News Corp chief executive Rupert Murdoch, BBC director general Mark Thompson, and Google's Eric Schmidt set to give talks about Internet technology.

But even as the French president is excited to be thoe host of the technology gathering, many critics have said that the gathering is more about control than internet innovation. Attempting to address some of those concerns, Sarkozy said that the Internet enables and fosters the ability to engage in revolution without all the blood and death:

"The global revolution that you incarnate is a peaceful one. It did not emerge on battlefields but on university campuses," he said.

Next week France will serve as the host of a conference on online freedom of expression - a French-Dutch effort to draft a code of conduct against Internet censorship. Sounds good, right? However, a leaked memo from French President Sarkozy is undercutting the effort before it even starts. The leaked memo from the President of France urges the Minister of Foreign Affairs to push the country's anti-piracy legislation instead.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy is a strong proponent of anti-piracy efforts. Earlier this year he had a major victory when he managed to get Hadopi - the three-strikes anti-piracy bill - signed into law. Opponents of the law have seized on the memo as evidence that the President wants to convince the rest of Europe that Hadopi is the right way to deal with piracy.

The memo was exposed by the advocacy group La Quadrature du Net.

While France’s three-strike "Hadopi" law targeting illegal downloaders of copyrighted material came across as harsh to some critics, the country has come up with a novel approach to cut down on music piracy—the government will partially fund the purchase of music.

France’s plan is to sell pre-paid cards to be used to purchase music, with the catch, according to the BBC, that cards valued at 50 euros will cost only 25 euros when bought. The government will pick up the other half of the tab.

A proposed bill currently sitting in front of France’s Parliament seeks government assistance in promoting the risks that the overuse of videogames might have on that country's youth.

GP Reader Soldat_Louis pointed us towards the possible legislation (translated) and also broke down for us exactly how the bill made it from the country’s “Children’s Parliament” all the way to the real one: