Dell has officially gone from being a publicly traded company to a privately owned firm with the help of a $2 billion loan from Microsoft. Given that Microsoft makes the top operating system for the platform, I suppose they have a vested interest in one of the PC market's biggest players staying healthy. Dell completed the terms of the deal that will take the company private, buying out stockholders at $13.65 a share in a $24.4 billion deal.

As mentioned by E. Zachary Knight on Episode 39 of the Super Podcast Action Committee, today is the last day to contribute to the Kickstarter for Oklahoma City, Oklahoma-based Goldfire Studios' Vegas-themed MMORPG CasinoRPG.

No one can deny that PlayJam's Kickstarter campaign for its GameStick Android console has proven successful, though not as successful as that other Android-based console Ouya. The Kickstarter campaign closed with $647,658 - $547,658 more than it was seeking with its original goal of $100,000 (the Ouya closed with nearly $8.6 million raised).

Indie game developer Andy Schatz thinks that stretch goals for all these Kickstarter crowd funding campaigns are "bullshit." Speaking recently to Penny Arcade Report, Schatz said that Kickstarter stretch goals are total bullshit and can lead to unnecessary new game features, the developer of the upcoming indie game Monaco said that the use of "stretch goals" - the promise of more game features if a certain amount of money is generated

At its current trajectory, Gas Powered Games' Kickstarter crowd funding campaign for its game Wildman will not be funded if it can't raise around $44,000 a day for the next 17 days. As of this writing the Kickstarter is at $352,827 of its $1.1 million goal. That leaves an outstanding funding deficit of $747,173...

Gas Powered Games is on its way to staying alive, as its Kickstarter campaign for its latest game Wildman heads towards the $280,000 mark. Late Friday Chris Taylor posted a video on the Kickstarter page explaining that he had to lay off most of the company's staff and that the only way to save the company and hire those people back could be the Kickstarter campaign for its single and multiplayer action RPG. Since that appeal GPG has raised right around $69,000.

After multiple reports from various sources revealed that a majority of the staff at Gas Powered Games had been laid off, Chris Taylor took to the Internet to comment. Apparently Taylor and a few employees are the only ones left at the studio behind such titles as the Dungeon Siege series, Demigod, and Supreme Commander. Recently Taylor and company launched a Kickstarter for a new game called Wildman but concerns over its early performance cause Gas Powered Games, who is short on cash, to lay off its staff.

Chris Taylor's and Gas Powered Games' Kickstarter for their MOBA-style action RPG strategy hybrid Wildman is well on its way to raising the $1.1 million it is seeking on the crowd sourcing site from the community. Yesterday after the announcement I posited on Facebook that they would need to raise at least $50,000 a day to be well over their goal in the time remaining (around $1.6 million).

Gas Powered Games founder Chris Taylor today launched the official Kickstarter campaign for his next big game called Wildman. Taylor and GPG are seeking $1.1 million in funding for the development of what he calls an action game that combines some of the best elements of his previous titles including Dungeon Siege, Supreme Commander and Demigod. Taylor is best known for creating the ultra popular real-time strategy game Total Annihilation while at Cavedog Entertainment.

According to Kotaku, game designer American McGee and his company Spicy Horse Entertainment need more money to finish the development of their free-to-play action-role-playing game set in ancient Japan that combines role-playing and Japanese culture with a grim retelling of the Little Red Riding Hood fairytale.

While there has been some speculation that the Android-based mini-console GameStick will have a hard time competing with the likes of Ouya, that hasn't hampered the enthusiasm of the community. The Kickstarter for the tiny little stick-based Android device designed to simply plug into the HDMI port of most modern high definition television sets has easily destroyed its funding goal of $100,000 in a little over a day and a half.

It looks like the Android-based Ouya will have some competition. A Kickstarter funding campaign for PlayJam's "GameStick" has launched asking the community to help it raise $100,000 to bring its mini gaming console devices into full production. The GameStick is being billed as a home console that plugs directly into the HDMI slot of most major modern high definition televisions.

The Kickstarter for Barkley 2, the follow-up to the 2008 hit indie RPG Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden, closed its crowd funding campaign just over the amount it needed to get fully funded, reports Polygon.

Black Isle Studios, a label of publisher Interplay, is trying something a little different: it is asking the community to crowd-source a "proof of concept" prototype of its post apocalyptic strategy role-playing game, Project V13. Funding tiers include $10, $20 and a Top 20 contributor tier for anyone who pledges more.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has received $500,000 in funding from Minecraft creator and Mojang co-founder Markus "Notch" Persson and serial entrepreneur (and Dallas Mavericks owner) Mark Cuban. Both donated $250,00 each to help the advocacy group fight for patent reform in Washington, according to GII. Cuban is also a star on the popular ABC television show "Shark Tank."

Another day, another failed Kickstarter campaign. This time it is "Dizzy Returns," the brainchild of former Blitz Games developers Philip and Andrew Oliver, who finally and quite publicly threw in the towel today. The brothers admitted that their Dizzy Returns Kickstarter would likely fall short of its £350,000 goal - a goal that many in the community questioned and the brothers tried to defend shortly after they pitched the game idea on Kickstarter.

Yesterday The Escapist shined a spotlight on the Kickstarter project Code Hero, which managed to garner a lot of support from backers. The game, which promised to teach users how to create a game was asking for $100,000.

Yesterday we reported that Activision and developer Vicarious Visions had been working on Guitar Hero 7, but a report today from Kotaku citing an anonymous source close to the situations says that the game was a hot mess and overly ambitious.

BVM Capital announced that it has made a seed round investment in health and fitness gaming company Fitness Interactive Experience (FIX). FIX is dedicated to making fitness and health fun, accessible and socially connected using massively multiplayer online games.

Pixel Academy, a New York City-based company founded by former Lead Game Designer at Nickelodeon (Mike Fischtha) has been conducting workshops for children ages 8-12 all over the city at locations such as homes and public libraries. These workshops teach children video game design, 3D printing, Arduino fashion design, and other fun technology based courses.

Veteran game designer Don Daglow wanted to make a smartphone-based baseball game called Tony La Russa's Baseball With Fans so he launched a Kickstarter appeal to raise $249,000. Unfortunately after only a week of activity, the project only managed to bring in about $2,440 of that goal from 23 backers.

Popular crowd funding site Kickstarter has no plans or interest in becoming a publicly traded company, according to CEO Perry Chen. The company, which recently expanded into the United Kingdom and has managed to drive nearly $350 million into 76,000 projects since April 2009, is backed financially by a number of investors including Union Square Ventures, Betaworks and a number of angel investors.

You can't get blood from a stone, but the state of Rhode Island is going to try anyway. The state announced today that it has filed a lawsuit against Curt Schilling and various executives at the now bankrupt 38 Studios in an attempt to recoup the $75 million loan guarantee given to the studio to set up shop in Providence and create an MMO.

A prominent executive officer at Vancouver-based game developer Slant Six Games says that the Vancouver video game industry in danger of dramatically declining because of the lack of support from the government of British Columbia. CFO Lance Davis blames a lack of investment from the regional government since 2008. He also claims that this lack of support has led to 14,000 job cuts at various game studios in Vancouver. In June of this year Slant Six cut a quarter of its workforce temporarily.

Kickstarter has officially opened up its doors to those in the United Kingdom who want to get in on the business of crowd funding projects. The UK version of the services "kicks off" with 200 projects. Kickstarter hopes that it will be as successful in the UK as it has been in the United States where more than 75,000 projects have launched and $343 million has successfully been raised to date.

World of Tanks, World of Airplanes, and World of Warships creators Wargaming announced this morning that they are "fully underwriting" aircraft enthusiast David Cundall's efforts to recover British Spitfires reportedly buried in Burma at the end of World War II. The company's investment in Mr. Cundall's will allow him and the Burmese authorities to pursue the long-standing mystery of the Pacific theater.

Wing Commander creator Chris Roberts must be a happy camper this week as his Kickstarter campaign for Star Citizen cruises past its target goal of $500,000 with 26 days left before it even hits its deadline. Currently the new space simulation game from Roberts has raised $544,293 from 11,974 backers.

In Episode 25 of the Super Podcast Action Committee hosts Andrew Eisen and E. Zachary Knight talk about what happens when a fully funded Kickstarter project (in this case the game Haunts: The Manse Macabre) fails to become reality, the wisdom of knowing when to shut down a failing Kickstarter campaign (the focus of that topic being Loot Drop's attempts to fund the 'Old School RPG'), the latest on the "six strikes" copyright enforcement scheme adopted by U.S. ISPs, Andrew's latest video, and the horrors of using voice chat on Nintendo's Wii U.

The federal government of Australia is planning to introduce brand new incentives to help grow and support the country’s game industry, according to an MCV Pacific report.

Loot Drop - the studio created by John Romero, Brenda Braithwaite and Tom Hall - has given up on trying to fund its promising old-school role-playing game project through Kickstarter. After raising only a small part of its $1 million funding goal, the trio has decided that it would be in the best interest of all involved to discontinue the funding drive.