For 16 days, the internet has collectively been playing Pokemon. Well, a lot of the internet.
The crowd-play event, streamed over Twitch, has been mesmerising viewers as thousands of participants slowly and frustratingly progressed through the game by inputting commands at the same time.
And several hours ago, they beat it. Monkeys can write Shakespeare after all.
It's an achievement that would have been impossible had the developer not tweaked the input code to make spamming more difficult, but it remains an impressive achievement of democracy vs anarchy nonetheless.
Now, a countdown for 26 hours with the message "A new adventure will begin" sits on the screen.
The game's programmer has announced plans to continue into the next gen of Pokemon, so go take a quick breather and mentally prepare yourself for Pokemon Gold or Silver to begin imminently.
Payday
Did the EU just receive an unexpectedly hefty iTunes bill? The European Commission has declared it is taking action on free-to-play gaming. It's concerned with games misleading people (particularly children) with their promise of being "free", when they include in-app purchases that can actually be quite costly.
The EC is currently in discussion with Apple, Google, the Office of Fair Trading and other parties.
"Misleading consumers is clearly the wrong business model and also goes against the spirit of EU rules on consumer protection," said a statement from the EC. The result of all of this could be that "free-to-play" games may no longer be able to give themselves that name.
Following the recent comments from one of Nintendo's investors, it's probably well timed. Seth Fischer, a Hong Kong hedge fund manager, wrote in a letter to Nintendo that if it wants to "stay relevant", it should consider the microtransaction model.
"Just think of paying 99 cents just to get Mario to jump a little higher."
How about no.
But hey, not all F2P games are evil. Some have a better idea about how to treat microtransactions, and we've rounded up a list of some of the best (and worst) F2P games to guide you through these murky waters.
Mobile wasteland
This week we also learned there's a new Tony Hawk game coming exclusively to mobile platforms. [CVG]
Hawk himself let the cat out of the bag in an interview with Bloomberg. Last week, he revealed a new game was in development but didn't divulge anything on platforms.
Sounds like this is probably that very game, but we're still holding out hope that a PS4/Xbox One Tony Hawk could happen.
Our Future friends are MIA this week, so instead of a link roundup we'll leave you with this...
