Electronic Arts announced that Remedy Entertainment, Focus Home Interactive, Iceberg Interactive, Strategy First, Macro Games, Selectsoft, and Legendo Entertainment have signed on to sell their games via the Origin digital distribution platform. Remedy's first title to be available on the platform will be Alan Wake.

As part of its earnings announcements today, Electronic Arts revealed that its digital games service Origin generated around $100 million in the 2011 calendar year from an estimated 9.3 million consumers.

The company also said that its MMO (created by BioWare) Star Wars: The Old Republic currently enjoys about 1.7 million active subscribers since launching in December, with 2 million units sold.

The internet certainly isn’t wanting for videos that focus on the particulars of why legislation like SOPA and PIPA are unmitigated piles of horse dung.  Heck, this week’s Extra Credits episode is just such a video.

But if you’d like to see something a little different, check out the latest Game OverThinker episode in which Bob Chipman, better known as MovieBob over at The Escapist, forecasts what our post-SOPA futures might look like.

UKIE is planning on launching a digital chart next month, but many wonder how on earth the UK games industry trade group will be able to get an accurate measurement of digital sales because it is missing two major players in the space. The problem is that UKIE's digital charts won't include EA's Origin or - more importantly - Valve's Steam.

"I would love every company to be involved in the project. Are we going to get every company? Probably not," UKIE's Sam Collins told GamesIndustry.biz.

Story time!

Last month, musician Dan Bull rapped his thoughts about SOPA in a YouTube video called SOPA Cabana (you should watch it.  It’s really well done).  This video went viral and racked up over a million views.  As it happens, it was through this video that most people discovered Dan’s second album, Face, which he offered for free on Megaupload.

Yeah, I think you see where this is going.

Valve says that Steam has enjoyed 100 percent growth in 2011, marking the seventh consecutive year the digital retail and distribution platform has doubled its sales. In 2011 Steam’s catalogue of titles grew to 1,8000 titles and its user base grew to over 40 million. The company also claimed that 780 Petabytes of data was purchased by customers.

Over 14.5 million Steamworks-enabled games were registered in 2011, a 67 percent increase over 2010. Steamworks is included in over 400 individual titles.

Game streaming company Gaikai has managed to secure several high profile deals with online retailers that should give the company the exposure it needs to compete with the likes of OnLive. Those deals include BestBuy.com, YouTube, Capcom, and Ubisoft (UbiShop), according to VentureBeat.

The Humble Indie Bundle 4 has ended, and was the biggest bundle offering to date, selling 435,236 bundles for a total of $2,372,194.97. By the end of the pay-what-you-want DRM-free indie games bundle event, the organizers offered a total of 12 games including Nightsky HD, Cave Story+, Gratuitous Space Battles, Jamestown, Bit.Trip.Runner, Super Meat Boy, Shank, Crayon Physics Deluxe, VVVVVV, Cogs, Hammerfight, And Yet It Moves, and a bundle of soundtracks. 

Eurogamer has launched game streaming on its site today, as part of a new relationship with video game streaming service Gaikai. Eurogamer and Gaikai have partnered to provide free streaming game content, with such AAA titles as Crysis 2, Magicka, The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, and FIFA 12 available right now. More titles will be added to the list in "the near future."

GameFly is finally putting that acquisition of digital distribution platform Direct2Drive to good use. According to a Joystiq report, the video game rental company has launched the public beta for its PC game distribution client. The highlight for GameFly members is that they can play the entire PC library for no charge.

Publishers and developers that are under the impression that the used games market is hurting them can't wait for everything to go digital. One such developer is Obsidian Entertainment's Chief Creative Officer Chris Avellone. You may know the company best for such games as Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II, Dungeon Siege III, Fallout: New Vegas - and soon - the South Park RPG.

A TorrentFreak report asserts that CD Projekt has hired a law firm in Germany to go after those who downloaded DRM-free copies of The Witcher 2 - even as it extolled the virtues of its games being DRM-free. CD Projekt was not available for comment at the time of this writing due to the late hour in its home country of Poland - but we hope to bring you an official response to this story as soon as it becomes available.

If you wanted to avoid using Origin to update Battlefield 3, you can forget about that. Electronic Arts, responding to an inquiry about it from Aus Gamers said that stand-alone update files will not be released and the only way to update the game is through its Origin platform. This makes sense given that much of EA's falling out with Steam was over having more control of deploying updates and content directly to customers.

OnLive brings its cloud-based gaming services to smartphones and tablets with a new app for iOS and Android. The app allows those that subscribe to the service to stream playable PC games to smartphones and tablets. Some companies, such as Rockstar Games are even working with OnLive to tailor the experience; the company is creating a specific touch screen interface for L.A. Noire as part of a collection of 25 games with reconfigured controls ready for the launch.

While the United States has groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation to fight against unfair copyright law and government encroachment on internet freedoms, Canada has the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC for short). CIPPIC will be making oral arguments in what it calls the "Copyright Pentology" - five copyright cases that the Supreme Court of Canada will hear from December 6-7.

The Witcher 2 developer CD Projekt RED estimates that 4.5 million copies of its action-RPG have been pirated. The game has sold 1 million copies through various channels. Speaking to PC Gamer, CEO and co-founder Marcin Iwinski said that the number is also a conservative number.

Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime said in a recent interview with AOL Games that Nintendo is giving 3DS developers the ability to charge for downloadable content, even though they aren't that excited by the idea of charging consumers.

"We're interested in it to the extent that it makes sense to the consumer," Fils-Aime said. That new feature is part of a 3DS software update coming next month and will allow developers who want to sell DLC to do so if they want to.

US video game retailer GameStop announced that it recorded sales of $1.95 billion for the third quarter ended October 29, up by about 2.5 percent from $1.9 billion in the same period a year ago. The company reported that profits were down ever so slightly from $54.7 million to $53.9 million, which it blamed on lower sales of new software.

GOG.com, the DRM-free digital distribution platform for classic PC games, announced its plans for 2012 and 2013 today. The company revealed that it will start offering new titles in 2012, that it will bring new improvements to its online portal, and that it is making a stronger effort to work with "ambitious developers and independent publishers" to bring their games to market.

Speaking at a press conference in a room full of investors and journalists, Managing Director Guillaume Rambourg said the following:

According to a report on UGO's Wii channel, Nintendo may use EA's Origin service with its upcoming Wii U console. According to an anonymous tip from within EA, the company is supposedly working with Nintendo on a deal related to the Origin digital distribution platform. The source claims that EA and Nintendo are in talks to use Origin as Nintendo’s primary hosting platform for game distribution online.

The source also claims that Valve has been talking with Nintendo, but the impression they give is that EA is being extra aggressive in sealing the deal.

In a recent talk at GDC China (as detailed on Gamasutra) Microsoft's Brian Prince said that cloud-based streaming services such as Onlive and Gaikai are leading the way into the future of the industry. Prince, who some call a "cloud evangelist" for Microsoft, claims that these services provide a roadmap for where gaming is headed.

Zachary Knight (better known as EZK around GamePolitics) has written an interesting article at TechDirt about Good Old Games CEO Guillaume Rambourg's comments to Edge Magazine about how keeping games DRM-free has helped his company make money and has kept its customers happy.

Dino Patti, CEO of Limbo developer Playdead, says that retail in its current state is "broken" and "inefficient."

Electronic Arts revealed today the first third-party publishers that will offer their games via its Origin digital distribution platform. The company will offer select games from THQ, Capcom, and Warner Bros. beginning in November. While EA has always maintained that its platform was never meant to compete with Steam, it sure seems like this move to carry third-party titles could be considered slightly competitive...

According to a new market survey from analyst firm EEDAR, video game console owners are purchasing more downloadable content than ever before. EER's market survey finds that more than 51 percent of Xbox 360 and PS3 owners have purchased downloadable content (DLC), expansion packs, full games or indie games via the internet in the past 12 months. That number is up from 40 percent in 2010 and 34 percent in 2009.

Speaking to the Sydney Morning Herald following an appearance at last weekend's EB Games Expo, EA's COO Peter Moore responded to a heckler who had disrupted his presentation of Origin by basically saying that it "sucked."

"Like any piece of software, and I worked at Microsoft for enough years to say this, you launch software and continue to polish it, upgrade it, get feedback and make it better," he said.

Valve Software claims that more than $2 million has been generated from Team Fortress 2 micro-transactions. The popular free-to-play team online shooter allows players to create, buy and sell virtual items to wear during matches. Apparently fans are fond of the system and are willing to spend real-world cash on luxury in-game items. Valve also said that it plans to update the system with a new interface to make it even easier for customers to create and sell virtual goods.

Warner Bros. has confirmed to Eurogamer that the Batman: Arkham City VIP pass (a code that comes in the retail box) unlocks the playable Catwoman content. While Warner Bros. says that "playing as Catwoman is not required to complete the game," to access her in the campaign missions you'll need to use the code. When Warner Bros. first started talking about Catwoman as a playable character, they noted that her part in the game's story was around 10 percent.

Sort of... For the first time in the history of the game industry digital sales have finally passed retail sales in the United States, according to new data released by NPD Group for the second quarter of 2011. Of course, the numbers they present are not all digital sales; NPD's category for “digital sales” is an amalgamation of digital sales, used game sales, and game rentals.

In these trying financial times it's nice to see a developer care about the little guy. Spiderweb Software is one of those development studios. The one-man operation run by the outspoken Jeff Vogel has cut prices across the board for its entire catalog of role-playing games for Mac, iPad, and Windows by 20 percent. In addition, for the month of October Spiderweb has slashed an additional 10 percent off of all of its games.