On behalf of the ECA, GamePolitics, and my good friends Andrew Eisen and E. Zachary Knight, I wish you a happy and safe Independence Day. We'll be busy today grilling meat, drinking tasty beverages, watching parades, spending time with family, watching fireworks, playing games or watching cat videos today, but we'll be back on Monday with bells on.

We hope you'll do something fun today and - if you are old enough to have a job - that your employer gave you the day off.

To all of our friends outside the United States, enjoy your Friday!

On behalf of GamePolitics, I wish you a happy Valentine's Day filled with love, good food, and even better company if at all possible. For those of you who are single, Andrew Eisen offers an instructional video on how to ask the fairer sex out for a night on the town, a quiet evening at home, or whatever social function you can imagine. You can check out the video to your left. If you are single and like it that way, then I encourage you to do something fun today, like watch the new season of House of Cards on Netflix!

On behalf of the Entertainment Consumers Association (ECA) and GamePolitics, we wish you a happy and safe New Year's Day. If you are old enough to party, then please don't party too hearty, don't drink and drive, and please try not to throw up on any plants or small animals if you did party a little more than you should have. We wish that all of your hopes and dreams for 2013 came true, but if they didn't don't let that get you down: tomorrow is the start of a new day in a brand new year.

According to Valve's statistics page for Steam, the online service has set a new concurrent user record. On Dec. 29 Steam had 7.6 million of its 65 million members logged in at the same time, setting a new record for peak concurrent usage. This number is up slightly up from 7 million concurrent users recorded over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend and the all-time high of 6 million concurrent users in 2012.

If you heard that Valve's hit Zombie shooter Left 4 Dead 2 was free for a limited time but didn't get it yet - don't fret, there's still time. According to Valve's Left 4 Dead blog you have until 9 am PDT, or 1 pm EDT. From the blog:

All of us at GamePolitics and the Entertainment Consumers Association wish you a happy, safe, and joyous holiday! May all your dreams come true, DRM-free, without limits, and with no hidden clauses buried five pages deep in a document written by a soulless corporate robot!

We'll see you again on Thursday!

Glad tidings to all.

(Image © 2013, Shutterstock.com.)

Ron Nakada, a Senior Software Engineer at Blizzard Entertainment was diagnosed with Stage IV colon cancer six months ago. Doctors told him at the time that the cancer had metastasized to his liver, lungs and lymph nodes. While Ron is fighting for his life with all the determination and strength he can muster, his medical bills and expenses are ramping up and he needs our help.

If you own Mojang's turn-based card game Scrolls, then you can share it with a friend. To celebrate the holidays, Mojang is letting Scrolls owners give away a free copy of the game to one friend.

So how would one go about doing that? It's very simple: login to your Mojang account and then click on the "Send to a friend" button. A code will then be sent to the email you specify, and the recipient will have until January 31, 2014 to redeem the code.

Pay-what-you-want indie-focused game store IndieGameStand is hosting a 12-day event to celebrate the holiday season and benefit the children's charity Child's Play. From Dec. 18 - 28 the site will host a 12 Days of Christmas unwrapping event.

Here's how it works: each day IndieGameStand will reveal and spotlight a new indie game that is freely available on the internet. By donating, customers will unlock these games in their IndieGameStand account and all proceeds will be donated to Child's Play.

A new report from the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) claims that video games, video game systems, and accessories are the most wanted items for the 2013 holiday season. according to the report, approximately 79 million Americans intend to purchase video games during the holiday season, according to new market research and analysis.

GOG.com has launched its "2013 DRM-Free Winter Sale, giving consumers deep discounts on many of the games in its DRM-free catalog, offering special pricing in three different random categories and giving away all of its Fallout games for FREE for the next 48 hours.

While many will head over to the site to get Fallout, Fallout 2, and Fallout Tactics for free, there are plenty of decent deals on old and new games in the GOG.com worth checking out.

AbleGamers Charity has launched the 2013 AbleGamers Holiday Gift Guide for Gamers with Disabilities. This year's guide offers recommendations on which games were the most accessible and which assistive devices are the best solutions for helping disabled gamers. In addition to all that, the guide offers recommendations on several items you may want to avoid altogether.

On behalf of GamePolitics and the Entertainment Consumers Association (ECA), I wish all of our readers in the United States a safe and happy Thanksgiving Day holiday. We also want to wish those who observe Hanukkah (which began yesterday) a joyous and safe holiday season as well. For the rest of the world, we hope you enjoy the rest of the week and in Europe we hope you finally get your hands on those brand new console systems.

Valve Software has kick off its annual Autumn Sale today with daily deals running every 24 hours, along with flash sales every 8 hours until Dec. 3. Highlights include Terraria for $2.49, Skyrim for $7.49, Prison Architect for $14.99, Outlast for $6.49, Sleeping Dogs for $4.99, Left 4 Dead 2 for $4.99, Rogue Legacy for $5.09, The Walking Dead for $6.24, and Anti-Chamber for $4.99.

My personal favorites right now? DLC Quest and Breath of Death VII for $0.98.

As always the Steam sale offers listing for top sellers, games under $10, and games under $5.

Sony is giving away 10 free games (two each week for five weeks) to all PS Mobile gamers. Detailed on the PlayStation Blog, the games will work on your PlayStation Certified smartphone, tablet, or PS Vita. Between November 27th and December 18th of 2013, and then from January 8th through January 22nd of 2014, you can download two PS Mobile games. The first two games, available later today, will be Passing Time and Rymdkapsel.

On behalf of everyone at the Entertainment Consumers Association and GamePolitics I'd like to wish all of our wonderful readers a very Happy Easter and Passover. The ECA offices are closed in observance of the holiday beginning on Good Friday so expect this space to be relatively quiet unless something ultra exciting happens tomorrow.

We'll be back here with bells on on Monday. As always thank you for reading our publication and for the stimulating and spirited conversations in the comments and the shout box. You are the reason we get out of bed every morning!

On behalf of the ECA, our writers and contributors and myself, we wish you a happy, safe and healthy New Year. While 2012 had its fair share of ups and downs, Internet freedom and free speech had a very good year. Draconian laws and treaties that would have limited free speech and taken away our rights to privacy were soundly defeated by a vocal majority in countries all over the world.

Mojang's popular world building game franchise Minecraft had a wonderful Christmas / holiday season, according to tweets from company co-founder and Minecraft creator Markus 'Notch' Persson. According to Notch, the company sold 453,000 copies of the game across all platforms during the Christmas season.

"Across all platforms, Minecraft sold 453k copies on dec 24! Wowzers! <3," he tweeted.

He corrected himself in a follow-up tweet shortly thereafter:

On Christmas day iOS and Android device activations were greater than any other day in history, according to a new report from mobile analytics company Flurry. As highlighted by VentureBeat Flurry claims that over 17 million new smartphones and tablets were activated on Christmas day. Compared to the rest of December, new iOS and Android activations rose a whopping 332 percent on Christmas Day.

On behalf of myself (James Fudge), Andrew Eisen, E. Zachary Knight, GamePolitics, and the ECA family, we wish you a happy, safe and wondrous holiday. No matter what you believe in (or don't believe in), whether you are surrounded by friends and family, or are on your own, we hope that you have a full 24 hours filled with joy, hope for the future, and peace.

Indie Royale has launched its Xmas Bundle 2.0, offering a pay-what-you-want bundle just in time for the holidays.

If you think that the biggest selling game of the year is Call of Duty or some other huge franchise then you are likely not taking into account digital sales across all platforms. As this MCV report points out, the biggest games of the year are likely Angry Birds or Minecraft related. According to research firm Kantar Worldpanel, the two week period that ends on January 1, 2013 will account for almost seven percent of all games downloaded across mobile, tablet, console and PC platforms this year.

Due to a technical issue yesterday we were unable to offer our best wishes for the holiday to our American readers concerning Thanksgiving. Still we could not start the day without saying that we hope those of you that are lucky enough to have today off have a wonderful sabbatical from the trials and tribulations of work, school or whatever arduous activities keep you continually challenged. We hope you spent some quality time with family and friends, and that you had no awkward moments (like your mom showing your girlfriend or boyfriend naked baby pictures...).

The AbleGamers Foundation has released its annual holiday gift guide for those shoppers with loved ones and family members that are gamers who have a disability. This year's guide, located here, offers nearly a dozen items ranging from technology and peripherals to accessible video games with low prices for those on a tight budget.

Happy Halloween Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve!

Because we love Halloween - and totally not because GP told us to - the SuperPAC crew is having a special, all Halloween-themed podcast next week.  EZK and I will be wearing costumes (which you won’t see because Super PAC is an audio podcast), munching candy and blabbering about our favorite spooky games and other fun stuff.

On behalf of the ECA and GamePolitics, I wish our readers a happy and joyous new year! May 2012 turn out to be everything you imagine it to be, and may the forces that continually seek to take away our rights to play what we want and to express ourselves in the name of the almighty dollar be utterly humiliated and defeated.

Happy Independence Day, everyone. We are taking a day off to enjoy the weather, good food, excellent company, and our freedom. We'll be back to our regular schedule tomorrow. This July 4 is made all the more important in light of the recent decision in Brown v. EMA. While a great victory was won on behalf of free speech. The door is still open and the wolf is lying in wait.

Our liberties and our freedoms mean everything. We should never forget the sacrifices made on behalf of those freedoms and we should always be vigilant, never be complacent, and always ready to stand up for what is right and just.

Happy Independence Day.

The staff at GamePolitics would like to wish all of our loyal readers a safe and Happy New Year.

I hope that 2011 will be the year when..

..the highest court in the land rules that video games are protected under the first amendment and that only parents have the right to control what their children play.

..that the FCC protects consumers from usage-based schemes and content services (Netflix, Xbox Live, PlayStation Network, Steam, etc.) from broadband service providers.

..that DRM becomes less popular with developers and publishers.

..that the governments of the world realize that there must be some sort of balance when it comes to protecting intellectual property rights.

..that rights holders or their lawyers decide that there is no money in suing thousands of file-sharers.

The staff at GamePolitics would like to wish all of you a happy and safe holiday season. We are thankful for your continued support, criticism, occasional smart aleck comments this year, and look forward to more of the same in 2011. We hope your holiday is full of joy, family, fun, and gaming. May all of your holiday dreams come true! Happy Holidays!

Best Wishes,

James and the GamePolitics crew 

According to Game, Set, Watch, this weekend Giant Robot Los Angeles will host its fourth Game Night get-together and it will offer some special Christmas fun. Giant Robot's Game Nights are free bi-monthly parties that celebrate indie titles and invite people to play games in a casual, friendly environment.

With the help of Attract Mode and Meat Bun, this Saturday's event will feature the following:

- An X-mas edition of Vlambeer's hit indie game Super Crate Box made exclusively for Game Night

- Arthur Lee's Merry Gear Solid games

- A custom "holiday pack" edition of 8-BITar Hero, which mixes the Rock Band experience with old-school Nintendo games