Mechwarrior Online is honoring a five-year-old player who died of brain cancer in May by selling a special mech, with the proceeds going completely to charity. Earlier this year, five-year-old Sarah Marie Alida Parries of Vancouver (who was a big fan of MechWarrior and played the game with her dad Jon) died from complications with inoperable brain cancer.

Two League of Legends competitive teams have teamed up with eBay to create a charity tournament called the eBay Charity Invitational. The idea for the tournament came from members of League of Legends teams Evil Geniuses and Team Curse. Members of both teams will compete in one-on-one matches, with each player fighting for a charity of their choice. The tournament will take place on July 24 at 8 p.m. ET and will be live streamed on Twitch by One Nation of Gamers.

All good things must come to an end, but some come to that end sooner than later. Sony Computer Entertainment announced today plans to take three of its PlayStation 3 games offline early next year. The three titles are MAG, SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs Confrontation, and SOCOM 4: U.S. Navy SEALs. The three titles will have their multiplayer support cut on Jan. 28, 2014, according to a tweet from the official PlayStation Twitter feed.

ArenaNet is getting ready to deploy an update that will create a political campaign in its popular online RPG Guild Wars 2. On July 23 it will release the "Cutthroat Politics" update which will let players choose between two candidates who want to fill a vacancy in the Captain's Council of Lion's Arch.

A Chinese man thought it would be a good idea to forge government documents as a means to regain control of his online account for a MOBA game, according to Wenzhou Online. The Hangzhou, Zhejiang province resident, identified in the report only as "Zou," contacted the makers of the MOBA game Dream Three Kingdoms Online (Hangzhou Dianhun) asking it to reset the login and password after he was locked out of his account.

Speaking to GameSpot recently, Riot Games e-sports manager Nick Allen revealed that high-level League of Legends players can now be awarded a visa similar to those obtained by traditional pro athletes. He told GameSpot that the company had convinced US immigration services to recognize League of Legends as a professional sport and simplify the visa process. They apparently listened.

In Episode 60 of the Super Podcast Action Committee, hosts Andrew Eisen and E. Zachary Knight talk about the latest SHIELD Act, the many letters of Treehouse Avatar Technologies, Nintendo's EVO misstep, Square Enix's bad idea to deal with jailbroken iOS devices, and fake geek girls. Download Episode 60 now: SuperPAC Episode 60 (1 hour, 13 minutes) 59.1 MB.

When we first started writing about law firm Lerner, David, Littenberg, Krumholz & Mentlik sending letters on behalf of Treehouse Avatar Technologies to independent game development studios concerning an 858 patent (U.S Patent 8,180,858), we reached out to the signatory on those letters - Stephen F. Roth - to give him an opportunity to tells his client's side of the story.

On July 1, a law firm representing Treehouse Avatar Technologies sent a legal packet to Bothel, Washington-based indie developer Bad Pug Games warning the two-man studio that it was violating an obscure 858 patent (U.S Patent 8,180,858) "Methods for Presenting Data Over a Network Based Network User Choices and Collecting Real-time Data Related to Said Choices."

Portalarium announced today that Starr Long has joined the team developing Shroud of the Avatar. Long and Ultima series creator Richard Garriott have collaborated in the past on such projects as Ultima Online and Tabula Rasa. Prior to joining Portalarium, Long worked as executive producer at The Walt Disney Company where he oversaw the Disney Interactive studio responsible for Pirates of the Caribbean Online, Pixie Hollow and Toontown.

The father of Justin Carter, the 19-year-old League of Legends player that now faces up to eight years in prison for threatening Facebook comments, says that the whole thing was meant as a joke. Today on CNN the father of the Texas teen - Jack Carter - said that his son was scared, depressed, and concerned that he may never get out of jail.

"He’s very depressed, he’s very scared...and he’s very concerned he’s not going to get out. He’s pretty much lost all hope," Jack Carter told CNN in an interview this morning.

Online gambling company Ultimate Gaming has inked an agreement today with Donald Trump's Taj Mahal Associates LLC to operate a range of real money online casino games and poker, using its proprietary technology platform and the Ultimate Brands. Ultimate Gaming launched real money online poker in Nevada at UltimatePoker.com in April of 2013. Ultimate Gaming is also the exclusive online gaming partner of the Ultimate Fighting Championship.

According to the conservative political web site The Daily Caller, a Texas teen who made a joke while playing League of Legends (the story isn't too clear on whether he made the comments during an in-game chat or in the official LoL forums), was arrested back in March on charges of making a terrorist threat.

Hammerpoint Interactive's zombie survival MMO, The War Z, has been renamed Infestation: Survivor Stories today, the developer announced this morning. The name change won't have any effect on the game itself. Hammerpoint claims that the name change is meant to "help fans differentiate the popular game from similarly titles brands." In January of this year, DayZ creator Dean Hall expressed anger at the similarity of the two game names, feeling that it caused confusion about which of the games was the original concept.

Dota 2 network StarLadder TV has issued a ban for a player that allegedly bet on his team losing. The ban was issued after a "suspiciously horrible performance" made that player a winner of the bet but not the match.

When asked by CVG if Microsoft plans to change course on its "connect once a day" requirement and policy on used games for Xbox One, Microsoft executive Phil Spencer said that his company's stance on those issues is fixed and "definitive" - at least in the short term.

If you pay close attention to Sony's video about sharing video games on the PS4 then you'll likely note that playing the multiplayer portion of games on the PlayStation 4 will require a PlayStation Plus account. This was also mentioned briefly in a slide during the E3 press conference on Monday evening.

The fine print in the video notes:

"PS4 multiplayer online access requires PSN account & PS Plus subscription."

The Poker Players Alliance (PPA) thinks that the Internet Gambling Regulation Enforcement Act of 2013 is the bee's knees.

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.

Blizzard is turning a bad situation into a good one by donating the money made from a money duping bug in the real money auction to a children's charity. Diablo III production director John Hight announced via the game's official forums this weekend the charitable contribution to the Children's Miracle Network Hospitals. He said that those who made money of the exploit would have their ill-gotten gains donated as well as its transaction fee that it charges in the real-money auction for the game. The company did not disclose just how much money was made off of the glitch:

Blizzard announced that it will keep the Diablo III auction houses offline for awhile longer as it deals with the aftermath of a gold duping bug that was introduced in a patch released earlier this week. While the nasty little bug that saw a handful of users take advantage and create trillions of in-game gold has been squashed, Blizzard tells the community that it needs a little more time to audit players who may have used the exploit and made transactions in the auction houses.

World of Tanks developer Wargaming.net has filed a lawsuit against Changyou.com and Beijing Gamease Age Digital Technology Co. in the United States Federal District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. The lawsuit alleges that the defendant(s) "stole" Wargaming.net's intillectual property to create an online tank game called "Project Tanks" that is "disturbingly similar" to World of Tanks. Wargaming.net is using the law firm Banner & Witcoff, Ltd.

The new Diablo III update has caused the game's in-game economy to go a little bit crazy after some enterprising (unscrupulous?) players found and exploited a gold duping bug. The problems with the game's economy forced Blizzard to shut down the game's auction house temporarily. According to some reports, the problems with the patch have enabled some players to generate "trillions" in gold. One post in the Battle.net forums claims that a user managed to amass a whopping 371 trillion gold using the exploit.

According to data collected from a consumer survey conducted by research firm NPD Group, 72 percent of those who play games say that they do so online. The data comes from NPD Group's Online Gaming 2013 report, which surveyed 8,800 self-described gamers earlier in the year about their preferences and gaming habits.

Ultimate Poker is the first online game to use real-world money in the United States. Of course players who want to take it for a spin will have to be physically located in the state where this game is legal to play: Nevada. Sometime today UltimatePoker.com is expected to launch the country’s first official fully legal online poker site where players can wager real-world money for the very first time.

Valve Software announced that the very first game to make use of its freshly launched support for subscriptions is the MMO Darkfall Unholy Wars, with "additional subscription-based games to follow."

EVE Online maker CCP Games today announced the final schedule of events for its sold-out annual fan celebration, EVE Fanfest (April 25-27). Playing up this year's "Second Decade" theme (which commemorates the 10th anniversary of EVE Online) CCP has managed to bring some pretty interesting speakers to the event this year including Dwarf Fortress co-creator Tarn Adams, and Paola Antonell from MOMA.

Dark Souls has now sold more than 2.3 million copies worldwide, according to developer From Software (by way of NeoGAF and Gpara). From Software president Eiichi Nakajima announced the sales figures on stage this week at an event for Japanese press, attended by Gpara. He also announced that the sequel to the popular hardcore action RPG, Dark Souls 2 would be coming to the Xbox 360.

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.

Valve's popular MOBA game DOTA 2 has officially surpassed Riot Games' League of Legends as the most played in the West in the first quarter of this year, according to data collected by research firm DFC Intelligence. The report, which covers PC gaming in North America and Europe, is based on the DFC Intelligence PC Game Meter service. It combines data from multiple sources, including real-time stats from Xfire's 23 million users.