Tens of millions of people have taken their PS3, PSP, or Playstation Vita online. That was one of the talking points from a Sony presentation at the Game Developers Conference this week. The event, which is of course geared toward people who make games, was a chance for Sony to appeal to independent developers. Manager of Sony Computer Entertainment America developer relations Ted Regulski said that Sony is “the only major console publisher to allow self-publishing.” He added, “There are others but they have publishing rules that aren’t much fun. and there are no weird limits you have to hit in order for us to pay you.” as quoted by Develop The great

Microsoft has bought video discovery service Videosurf to “evolve search and discovery of entertainment content” on Xbox 360. The press release sent out by Microsoft this morning in the US confirms the company will be integrated into Xbox 360 “ecosystem” in some form, noting that it’ll “evolve search and discovery of entertainment content” via Xbox Live. “This holiday we will launch voice search across our entertainment partners on Xbox Live. Over time, as we integrate VideoSurf’s technology into our system, we are excited about the potential to have content tagged in real time to increase the speed and relevance of the search results,” said Xbox Live director, Alex Gar

Back the day when we were thankful to play whatever Japanese RPGs we were given, we looked wistfully at all the huge titles that never came to the US, including Final Fantasy V. English-speaking players couldn’t officially familiarize themselves with the game until it was released on the PlayStation, but by then it looked fairly dated compared to games like Final Fantasy VIII and Parasite Eve. Few bothered to play it, which is a real shame, and it’s a mistake you can now rectify should you download the game off PSN starting today. Above: The main reason why this one ruled Though it’s graphics aren’t as good as FFVI, and the story is one of the weaker ones in Final Fantasy

Microsoft is preparing to release Avatar Kinect next week. Avatar Kinect will be released as part of the company’s Xbox Kinect Fun Labs product. Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie revealed on Monday that the company plans to issue Avatar Kinect next week: Company insiders familiar with Microsoft’s plans revealed to WinRumors that the software maker is planning to release Avatar Kinect on July 27. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer originally introduced Avatar Kinect using his own Xbox LIVE avatar at CES earlier this year. Avatar Kinect is a unique way for Kinect users to interact with each other. Kinect supports facial tracking and even facial expressions that will

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion announced Tuesday it has purchased Scoreloop, a Germany-based company which makes a toolkit for developers to add social features to mobile games. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. “We look forward to working with the team at Scoreloop to provide tools that will further enable our developer community to take gaming to a new level of social integration on the BlackBerry platform,” RIM said in a statement. Scoreloop chief executive Marc Gumpinger said the Waterloo, Ontario-based RIM has the “ambition to build the best platform for mobile games. So we’ve joined forces to help make this a reality.” Sc