While Ouya, (the $99 Android-based games console that promises an open-source-style high-concept developer ecosystem) may be just a concept at this stage, it's hard not to take notice of it when so many major players are attached to it already.

Sony Online Entertainment has opened registration for its annual fan event, SOE Live. In its 12th year, SOE Live is a fan gathering for the entire SOE community to celebrate their favorite games and connect with other players and the games' developers. Taking place at Bally's in Las Vegas October 18-21, SOE Live will celebrate the communities of such games as DC Universe Online, EverQuest, EverQuest II, Free Realms, Magic: The Gathering - Tactics, PlanetSide 2, PoxNora, Star Wars: Clone Wars Adventures, and Vanguard: Saga of Heroes.

BioWare announced today via its official Blog that it will release the "Extended Cut" DLC next week. The DLC was in response to a firestorm online about how the things players do within the game didn't have a significant impact on the ending of the game. The DLC will be released on June 26 in the U.S and Europe for Xbox 360 and PC. While U.S. customers will be able to get the PS3 DLC on June 26, European players will have to wait until July 4.

Online registration for the Online Community Summit ends tomorrow (June 22). Taking place next week, the annual event dedicated to managing communities in the age of social media starts June 28 in San Francisco, CA at the Moscone Center. Admission to the event is $99 if you register online at communitysummit.org.

Forbes has an interesting article on the popularity of shooting ranges in Las Vegas and what one owner of a popular establishment thinks has driven the industry to grow over the last few years.

How long does it take to complete the single player campaign in Diablo III on Normal difficulty? I have no idea, but it took Level 32 Barbarian Yoshichan 12 hours and 29 minutes to beat Blizzard's freshly released game. This NeoGAF post (thanks Eurogamer) shows off a final shot of the Barbarian character's stats.

A new petition is online to protest the release of DLC for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. More specifically protest organizers are urging the CoD community not to download and buy any DLC for the game until Infinity Ward and Activsion fix a number of problems with the core game. So far the petition has 240 signatures, the Twitter feed dedicated to it has 1183 followers and a YouTube video explaining what the protest is all about has been viewed 2400 times.

A new profile of George "Geohot" Hotz, the guy who jailbroke the iPhone and then the PlayStation 3, went live today in The New Yorker Magazine. 

A new "community action" on the BioWare forums suggest that Mass Effect 3 players upset about the game's ending and wanting the best out of the upcoming "Ending DLC" should "Turn it On / Turn it off For BioWare" (thanks to Blue's News). The way the campaign will work is described as follows:

A handful of TERA European subscribers are quite angry about blood in TERA and they have launched an online petition to complain about the lack thereof in the European version of the massively multiplayer online fantasy RPG world from Frogster.

The petitioners are upset that Frogster decided to cut down the amount of blood that appears in the European version of the game, though - as The Escapist points out - they don't seem to be upset at the other features omitted from the European release like adjustments to the game's classes, the leveling system and more.

UPDATE: Eurogamer has confirmed an even more alarming fact for fans of this release: 24 out of the 53 teams featured in the Euro 2012 expansion are "generic" unlicensed squads.

A spokesperson for the company said it would have been ideal to license all those teams but "the realities of negotiating terms with 53 separate national football associations meant that was impossible to achieve." Here is what they told Eurogamer:

The White House Council on Women and Girls will host a Girls in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) event tomorrow (April 24) moderated by EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson. The panelists will share their experiences and encourage young women to follow in their footsteps or blaze a trail of their own. The event will also include the first public screening of "Girls in STEM," a video featuring girls who participated in the 2012 White House Science Fair.

Employees from 30 corporations, including Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Google, IBM, Intel, Twitter, and Zynga, are getting ready for Season Two of the After Hours Gaming League (AHGL). Microsoft is the reigning champion, having bested everyone else in the last season, but this year they found themselves utterly defeated. After four months of hard-fought battles, the StarCraft II Championship sees healthcare software company and newcomer Epic Systems battle IBM in the finals. In the League of Legends Championship, Amazon.com is set to compete against Electronic Arts.

What inspired From Software and Namco Bandai Games to bring the popular PS3 action RPG Dark Souls to the PC - an online petition - is being used to dissuade them from including a certain feature. Around 12,184 gamers have signed an online petition ("Namco-Bandai and From Software: Release Dark Souls PC Edition without Games for Windows Live") asking both companies to reconsider putting Games For Windows LIVE support into Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition for Windows.

The Hollywood Reporter has an interesting interview with the Motion Picture Association of America president Chris Dodd, who you may know better as the man who has served as both a Democratic Congressman and as a Senator from the great state of Connecticut. After having spent 36 years trapped inside the bubble that is Washington D.C., Dodd's first test were getting two bills fast-tracked through congress: SOPA and PIPA.

The Center for Copyright Information, an organization that was created to oversee a new anti-piracy regime negotiated by content providers and internet service providers last summer, has begun to take shape and some of its key leaders are surprising. The organization announced on Monday that the names of its executive director and several members of its advisory board. At face value, the choices to serve as the architects of the "Copyright Alert" system could strike a balance between the interests of rights holders and the rights of users.

If the 2012 presidential election were held today and inside Nexon's MMO Maple Story, President Barack Obama would get a second term. The results come from a web-based poll that was conducted by Nexon among its U.S. Maple Story players between March 23 - 26. 

A group of former Irish GAME employees have been staging on-site protests at a number of now shuttered stores in Ireland and have released a statement explaining why they are so upset with the video games retailer that recently went into administration. The protests are a direct response to GAME and administrator PriceWaterhouseCoopers refusing to pay fired employees for the remainder of their contract, holiday pay owed and other compensation owed.

The group says that it will continue their protests until PwC amends its decision. The full statement can be found below:

There's no denying that sending your child online to play a game alone is like sending a puppy into a lion's cage at the zoo. If you want someone to experience the crassness of society, you can get a quick lesson playing Call of Duty, Battlefield, or even UNO as teenagers call you every name in the book (and some you didn't even know existed). Anyone that plays games online knows this, but it's always interesting to see how local news channels handle such topics. Usually they handle it badly, but one station does a good job of delivering a balanced report..

Microsoft has hired former Sony Computer Entertainment executive Phil Harrison to lead Microsoft Studios Europe. Specifically, Harrison joins the Interactive Entertainment Business (IEB) leadership team as corporate vice president with an emphasis on growing the division’s European business. Microsoft emphasized that he will not be filling the Creative Director vacancy left by Peter Molyneux, who revealed last week that he was leaving Lionhead and Microsoft. Molyneux's role as Lionhead Studio Manager is being filled by Lionhead COO Mark Webley.

Professional gaming league Major Gaming League has managed to raise $11.3 million of a $13 million target in funding, according to an SEC filing uncovered by GamesBeat. The filing lists relevant parties (according to GamesBeat): Sundance DiGiovanni, founder; Jarratt Brown; Michael Sepso; Edward Glassmeyer; John Kermath; and Harlan Stone.

Sony Online Entertainment is accepting applications and submissions today for its 2012 Gamers in Real Life (G.I.R.L.) Game Design Competition. In its fifth year, the G.I.R.L. program grants scholarships to four winners through the Game Design Competition.

PAX East will keep Boston as its home until 2023, thanks to a new deal with the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority. Organizers will also donate $325,000 ($25,00 annually) to Becker College's Massachusetts Digital Games Institute. PAX East has been hosted in Boston since its launch two years ago.

If you are a fan of propaganda and that classic art form of stretching the truth, then you might want to check out this New York Times editorial penned by RIAA CEO Cary Sherman. In it he claims that technology companies like Google and Wikipedia were the only driving force behind the letter writing campaigns to lawmakers and website blackouts that happened in protest of SOPA last month.

A protest against Valve for its lack of information on Valve's "lack of information" regarding Half-Life 2: Episode 3 seems to have missed its mark slightly. The protest - which had the support of 30,00 players who pledged that they would play Half-Life 2 on Steam over the weekend - saw only half of those players playing over the weekend. They increased the usual amount of players playing Half-Life 2 by about 10,000.

Stephen Toulouse (better known by his nickname "StepTo"), Xbox Live's director of policy and enforcement, has resigned from his position at Microsoft after 18 years with the company. He announced his departure from the company on his personal blog. His last day at Microsoft will be February 15. Although he says that his reasons for leaving are personal he also emphasizes that the exit from Microsoft is amicable.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has asked all parties involved in the MegaUpload criminal case to halt any plans to delete or otherwise dispose of data hosted on severs once leased by file-hosting services. With its assets frozen and its operators in jail, MegaUpload is unable to pay for storage of the data.

While a petition asking the White House to dump ACTA is well intentioned, as TechDirt points out, it misses the mark for a number of reasons. The real question Americans should be asking is did the President follow the Constitution when he unilaterally had his administration negotiate this international treaty and did he have the authority to do it without involving lawmakers?

Another petition launched at the White House's official site asks the Obama Administration to end its support for the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA. From the text of the petition created on January 21:

On January 18 at 8:00 am ET GamePolitics and other ECA-owned websites will go dark in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Acts. We are proud to stand with an estimated 7,000 web sites and organizations to show our opposition to the government’s efforts to curtail free speech and innovation in the name of protecting the interests of corporations and lobbyists. We feel that there are better ways to fight online piracy and the sale of counterfeit goods without comprising innovation, free speech, and the integrity of the Internet.