Xbox One is top-selling home console in US for December

Alongside NPD US sales data released today, Microsoft issued a statement saying the Xbox one was the top-selling US console for December, selling 908,000 units.

The Xbox 360 came in third place with 643,000 consoles sold, thus leading "last-gen hardware" according to the Microsoft statement. The NPD clarifies that the Nintendo 3DS "topped overall hardware sales for December 2013 and for 2013 as a whole; however, with its $499.99 price point, the Xbox One led annual hardware sales on a dollars basis."

Altogether, Microsoft claimed "50 percent of the combined software, hardware, and accessories spend in the U.S," with $1.39 billion raised between the Xbox One and Xbox 360. Total US consumer spend in December, according to the NPD, was "just under $2.4 billion." The NPD clarifies that, "Xbox One led console sales in December, while PS4’s two-month total makes it the best selling console during the two-month launch window." In total worldwide sales, the PlayStation is also currently outselling the Xbox one with 4.2 PlayStation 4s sold compared to 3 million Xbox Ones. As editor Martin Gaston explores in his editorial,those sales numbers don't tell the whole story.

Nintendo, in addition to the successful performance of the 3DS, also had a positive month for the Wii U. The NPD says, that December was the "highest month for unit sales" so far. Altogether, with positive growth across the industry, December was a bullish month for gaming as a whole.

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6 Brilliant Tips To Make You Blog like A Pro Blogger

Do you also want to blog like a well-known blogger? When we start blogging, most of us are amateur blogger. When I started blogging, I have no idea what I was building, I was blogging because it was fun and it was something I was enjoying. I’m sure that you are also one of those budding bloggers, who is trying your luck in the field of blogging to earn money or to make a name or just out of your passion. For what ever reason you are blogging, what important is how well you are doing. If you are spending 2 hours a day on your blog and results are not up to the mark, it’s time for you to re-think your strategy. If you are not motivated, you should read this blogger motivation guide, that will surely make you feel refresh and will help you to get your blogging mojo back.

What important in blogging is, keep learning something new; implement it and share it with others who are new to it. This article is motivation and practical tips for you to leave your amateur seat and blog like a pro-blogger. So without wasting anytime let’s see what you can do to make you blog like a professional blogger.

Why you should blog like a professional blogger?

One of the thing that you should always keep in mind while doing anything is to make most out of it. If you are just one of millions of mediocre blogger, it’s time for you to take action and move one or multiple steps ahead. Here I’m sharing tips that I learned in the tenure of 5 years of blogging and if you follow them, in next 30 days you will become a better blogger than what you are today

Nothing is worse then taking an advice from a non-confident person, when you are blogging; sharing anything without being confident, you are surely losing more credibility than making. Always remember, “You can build the credibility by not losing it“. Think of the factor that make you trust a person, and when it comes to blogging it’s much easier because it’s not because of your physical presence, it’s your words that matters the most. Now, question is how you can become a confident blogger and how you can create an impression of the same.

1. Your posts and writing style:  Your writing is what makes all the difference. There is one tip that I always follow, and I imagine that you are sitting on an empty chair in-front of me, and I’m talking to you. If your blogging is more in a conversation way, you are more likely to leave a foot-print. Do notice the time I use “you” in this article, because this article is for you and you only. It’s just one person and that is “you” who is reading this article. Another thing to improve in your writing is using “I” instead of “we”, as people who are not so confident they use “We” to avoid taking responsibility for their work. If it’s one man show blog, why do you need to use “We” ? Open these articles in new tab: 10 tips to improve your writing skills and 11 effective tips to boost article writing skills.
2. Your blog design: I’m sure you must have been to a restaurant and been a situation, when waiter impression is created by what he is wearing. I’m more likely to tip a waiter who is in uniform than the one who is not. When you are working online, it’s your design which is the suit and you are the waiter. If your blog design sucks and doesn’t leave a good impression, you are not likely to get a tip i.e: convert one-time visitor into subscriber. So get rid of all jumble-bumble from your blog, and have a neat and professional looking design which reflects you and your blog personality.  Do remember, your blog design is the first point of content and first impression last forever.
3. Come out of the closet: How many popular blogger you know of? Check out this awesome inforgraphic of Professional bloggers and ask how many of them you know of  ? If you know even 2 or 3 of them, ask why and how do you know them? It’s because they didn’t hide in closet like you. All these successful bloggers put a face along with their name, and you can see that on their blog.Is int it easier to connect to a person rather than a brand?It’s high time for you to make some pro-active changes on your blog, and show who is the person behind that awesome blog, and mr. that’s  you. Add an author box, add few details about you in your blog about page, add your profile in the blog sidebar. Make sure that you add a good-looking picture of yours and add a seductive bio. If not seductive, write a description about yourself in a way that people can relate and connect.
4. Be honest and don’t doubt yourself: “Honesty is the best policy‘ and this is what we have been learned in our kindle garden, but with time we have experienced and we know that it’s hard to live by that rule. How many times in a day you lie about little things? When I calculated this about me, I realised that I lie for small-small things, which are not even intentional. We don’t lie because we want other’s to be happy and we don’t want them tone hurt. This is one of the biggest crime we commit to ourself. When we lie to please people, somewhere we are not listening to our inner-self, and soon we turn into people pleaser. Take this as a challenge, and for next 7 days try to be complete honest. Be honest with your offline and online life, and tell me how this changed your life. I started this as an experiment and within 7 days I started feeling the difference. Now, it’s been a month and apart from 2-3 instance when I lied, my life is not only changed but improved a lot. Not lying taught me how to say “No” and my confidence level is going up ever since. Once you do this, it will have positive impact in your writing and on your online presence. Do read, how being complete honest for 7 days changed my life.

Become an Authority blogger:

It doesn’t matter how good your opinion is, until you are not establishing yourself as an authority or your blog as an authoritative blog, no body is going to believe you. Now the question is how can you become an authoritative blogger? Funny thing here is, you already know the answer and it’s very easy. If you have already made changes suggested in above point (Confidence), you are more likely to become an authoritative blogger.

Now, it’s time to leverage the power of social-media and establish yourself as an authoritative person in your niche. Let’s start with fixing your social-media presence, and start by updating your social-media profile details. Ensure that your social-media profile is like your resume and reflects your personality. Use same profile image everywhere (Twitter, Fb, G+, Gravatar, etc…) to stand out and make it easier for people to recall you.

Always share your opinion about the burning topics in your niche or hot topics around the globe. Yes, your opinion might not be as good as an industry expert, but it will still be better than many of the people who are following you. If you star doubting yourself at any moment, check out this amazing video on “If you think your idea is stupid, you are an idiot“!

Put others before you:

One of the most common attribute of a successful person is, they give credits to people for their work. Where as a shallow person will either never talk about others work & never share it with others. If you are still one of those who are not so vocal and doesn’t give credits to people for their work, you are standing on the other side of the fence. Like I said above come out of the closet, and share your liking with others. Don’t thrive for likes or comment, rather share or give credit to anyone you think they deserve.

Don’t just create relation, get into inner circle:

You must have heard a lot about “Networking is the key to success” and it’s important to build a strong network of people around you. Guess what, this is one of the most-important thing to do in every aspect of your life ( Online or offline). What make a difference is becoming a part of someone inner-circle. Many of you might be reading a lot about successful people and have them on your social-media profile, but you are not a part of their inner-circle. You are just one of those thousand people they are be-friended on Facebook or met in one of those blogging events. Your goal is to become a part of their inner-circle and become a companion where they want you to be around. This will happen when you lose that “Im a blogger” attitude and work on building a meaningful connection.

Smart work rather than hard work :

No matter in what niche you are doing business, it’s smart work which will take you to the places. Yes, working hard is important but working smart is more important than working hard. If you spending every day 2 hours for writing blog posts and not working on promoting it, you will be the same person even after an year or two. Yes, your blog would grow and you will get more traffic and make more money, but you are still slower than rest of the crowd.

There are people who just started online and making million of dollars because of their smart-work & ideas. Let me not confuse you between idea and smart work, as both are closely related. Without a good idea, no work will give you a better result. When it comes to working smart, all I could suggest is pick the right set of blogging tools, understand the value of time and work on time-management to become more productive. Maintain a perfect balance between your social and personal life, because if you want to succeed, you have to be a happy person and that will happen when you are satisfied with your life in 360* (In all the aspect of life).

Value your time and have a team

If you are a regular reader of BloggerGamer, I’m sure you have heard me  saying “Time is money“, and I will keep repeating it till the time you mail me and tell me “Yes BG, I believe that time is money!”. You might be having 30-40 great ideas, but alone it will take a lot of time to execute them. When you have a team of people working, you are more likely to get all the ideas turning into reality. Here is a practical example:  I had this idea of creating an infographic for Indian bloggers, and couldn’t do it because collecting data was a time-consuming process. Sharat joined my team 3 months back, and he is the guy who gets all the credit for making this infographic live.  And not to miss designer Abha Jain who designed it. Because of a helping hand I’m keeping all of my other blogs active and finding more time for myself. The thing is, you have to upgrade your role from a blogger to infopreneur and then a solopreneur. This will only happen when you have a team, and you start delegating work to others.

If you are someone who live in a remote place (Yah internet is everywhere), all you need to do is create a virtual team of your own. You should check out these two articles from Srikanth, where he shared everything you need to know about virtual assistance.

• How virtual assistant works : FAQ and everything you need to know
• 5 places where people find Virtual assistant jobs  (Use these places to hire one for yourself)

Take away here is, leave the conventional way of working and work like an internetpreneur. When you are working online, you are Mr. limitless and you can achieve everything.

I have shared all the important points which will help you to grow bigger and achieve more than what you getting right now. If you have read this article word by word, make sure you pick those points which you believe will improve your blogging career and make you blog like other pro-bloggers.

Do let me know which of these tips you will be working on, and how you planning to start? If you need help with any of these points, feel free to ask me via comment. If you find this article useful, do consider sharing it on Facebook and Google plus for others.

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Samurai Gunn Review

Do you know who fights with honor? Dead people. Life is fragile in Samurai Gunn, too fragile to worry whether your unsavory tactics might blemish your stellar reputation. An honorable person wouldn't lie among the fallen fighters, ready to surprise enemies with a flourish of sword slashes and gunshots, nor would someone who has dignity position himself near respawn points, eager to vanquish foes with little chance for retaliation. If feigning death keeps you alive one more minute, then be as still as possible, and let your defeated friends bicker about the right way to compete. You may have played dirty, but don't be ashamed; you alone are left to enjoy the spoils of victory.

Samurai Gunn is a two-dimensional brawler with a dark heart. Four local friends take part in frantic fights to prove their quickness with a sword, deftness with a gun, and their shrewdness in the heat of combat. One screen reins everyone into a diminutive arena, and as you leap up walls and dash through bamboo paths, you're never far from bursting into a bloody mess. Because just one strike ends your life, you learn to accept your failings. Your friend may have slain you with one perfectly timed shot as he plummeted toward the bottom of the screen, but next time, you may reflect that bullet right back at him, or rush toward him before he can pepper you from afar.

Tactics are thrust to the forefront once you master the basic controls. With three other players dancing around you, death comes quickly to the unprepared, so a little bit of thought goes a long way toward ringing up the kills. If trickery is your desire, just kneel down near dead bodies or deep in spike-laden pits, hoping to blend in to the environment to surprise a distracted foe. Or maybe long-range attacks are your specialty. Slide up and down walls, and use platforms to your advantage, as you keep your distance while bringing pain. Of course, such a strategy won't last long, given that you have only three shots per life, and if you should fall into a pond, your ancient gun sprays only water. Samurai Gunn swallows anyone who lacks versatility. Rely on any one plan for too long, and your friends will catch on, and your run at the top will end.

Victory is achieved in one of two ways, depending on which option you choose--by killing the most or being the last to use up your stock of lives. With the former goal, offense is emphasized. You must continually stalk your friends or else you're left with nary a point to your name. Samurai Gunn is fast and deadly in this mode. Blood splatters as each character dies, respawns, and then dies again, and any setback must be brushed aside as you rush once more into the fray. The kinetic excitement leads to moments of pure joy--such as when the person in last place goes on a killing spree to wrest away victory--and the ending of a match only makes you eager to jump into another round on a different map. Maybe you want to test your mettle on the icy mountains, where icicles can impale you from above, or crawl upon the sticky ceiling of the graveyard to laugh in the face of gravity.

Stock matches have an entirely different feel. Here, death matters, so rushing pell-mell into fights means you're going to end up sad and bruised. So you play with patience. Watch as two players square off, and then fire a shot into the back of your distracted friend. Or wait until that moment after one friend kills another, that second of celebration that invariably comes after a successful fight, and then show why you're the only real samurai of the bunch. Matches where living takes precedence over killing are so deliberate, so full of cunning, that your stress is on the same level as your excitement. The energy builds in your chest, ready to be released in a storm of slashes and blasts, but you must hold back. Taunt your friend, get him to rush at you or stupidly turn his back, and then release the wrath that has been building inside of you. When the match comes to a close, and the scores are tallied up, there may be just one point separating the victor from the losers. In such a situation, there's a showdown. One flat stage, one life, winner takes all. And you thought stock matches were stressful

Are you by your lonesome? There are single-player matches as well that mirror the rhythmic conquests of multiplayer duels. You compete on the same maps with the same attacks as before, and if you forget that you're going against AI foes, you could be tricked into thinking that you're facing off against friends. But it's not the same. That triumphant yell when you best a person next to you, whom you've joked with and plotted against, can't exist when you're sitting by yourself, matching wits with a computer. It's a shame that Samurai Gunn lacks its maniacal edge when played without friends, because there's no online option to take on faraway people. Thankfully, you can take on AI enemies if you don't have three friends nearby, and trying to kill the computer samurais but not each other adds a whole new layer of strategy. And if you must slay alone, you can practice your techniques, and the volatile back and forth is so enticing that you still get lost in the bloody rhythm, but the matches can't live up to the multiplayer escapades.

Samurai Gunn revels in its own simplicity. The selectable characters are identical save for their outward appearance, and there are only a handful of moves in your repertoire. There are no unlockable skills, no stages to earn, or any other distractions. And all of that is to this game's benefit. The battles are all that matter, letting you focus entirely on the exciting conquests. When you play with a trio of like-minded friends, everything comes together in such an enticing way that you scream and laugh and taunt and growl until you have to pull away to do other life duties. Samurai Gunn makes excellent use of its simple nature to keep you invested in the bloody life born warrior.

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China to block "hostile" video game

China has begun drafting new rules for the sale of video game consoles and games in the country, following the nation's announcement last week that its 14-year ban had been lifted.

Cai Wu, head of China's Ministry of Culture, said that the rules are being written as quickly as possible, though no specific timeline for their publication was provided.

"Things that are hostile to China, or not in conformity with the outlook of China's government, won't be allowed" under the rules of the free-trade zone, Cai said. "We want to open the window a crack to get some fresh air, but we still need a screen to block the flies and mosquitoes."

One game that is likely to be blocked is Battlefield 4, which China labeled a threat to national security late last month.

China originally banned game consoles in 2000 , following concerns about potential harm to the physical and mental development of children. Nintendo and Ubisoft shares surged following China's announcement that it would lift the ban, but any long-term prosperity remains to be seen.

Representatives for the Sony and Nintendo told Bloomberg that they are examining their opportunities for how best to take advantage of the new market. Meanwhile, Microsoft and Shanghai-based BestTV announced a multi-million dollar partnership in September to leverage the new rules.

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Android 4.4 KitKat starts to hit Galaxy Note 3

Owners of the international version of Samsung's Galaxy Note 3 should expect Android 4.4.2 KitKat to flavor their phablets before too long.

The latest version of Android for the Note 3 has already begun showing up in Poland, according to blog site Sammobile, where users must download and install it via Samsung's Kies software. An over-the-air variant is expected to appear as well.

No specific dates were revealed to indicate when additional regions might see the update. But other Note 3 owners around the globe will likely receive it sometime over the next couple of weeks.

However, US users are out of the running for this particular update. The firmware version for the new update is N9005XXUENA6, which points to the international edition of the Note 3.

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Titanfall dev responds to criticism about 6v6 player limit

Titanfall developer Respawn Entertainment has responded to criticism regarding the game's 6v6 player limit, saying that ultimately, it's impossible to make a game that everyone enjoys.

One NeoGAF user said the appeal of 64-player multiplayer games is that because there are so many players, you never fully know what could happen in any given match. This user argued that for players who enjoy this kind of thing, why not at least give them the option?

"What about high player counts makes that more fun, though? I honestly want to know, because this kind of stuff is super important and we obsess over it every day," McCoy said in response. "None of us are deluded enough to think we're making a game that fits every gamer. We're making a game we think is badass, and hope other people do it.

The same forum user said they enjoy games like M.A.G. and Planetside because you're able to interactive with dozens of players, whereas in Titanfall, you'll be limited to your five other teammates. That being the case, McCoy said Titanfall may not be the best game for this player, but made clear that Respawn is always listening to feedback and suggested that things could change in the future.

"If having more people is just core to what you expect for fun, then I guess that's it," McCoy said. "That said, this is a multiplayer game, and we do plan on supporting it, adding to it, and making it better. Player feedback is something we crave, and want to do things based on."

Titanfall is limited to 12-player matches--6v6--but games will feature up to 48 total combatants when you factor in AI-controlled characters. The game started its life with 12 human-controlled players on each side, but after playtesting, this was whittled down to its current form.

Finally, McCoy said it has been "really tough" to market Titanfall to players because unlike franchises like Call of Duty or Battlefield, it does not feature a single-player campaign that can be used to create cinematic trailers. Marketing material for Titanfall so far has consisted of extended gameplay trailers. The game has also been playable at various events, including PAX.

"There's no amount of polished marketing that can replace playing the actual game," McCoy said.

Titanfall launches for Xbox 360, Xbox One, and PC on March 11, 2014. The game is never coming to PlayStation or Nintendo platforms, though sequels could. Respawn is "definitely" thinking about offering a beta game for the game.

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