Interestingly, whether this is due to wanting to accommodate people who suffered from the horrific DRM when the game first released, every PC owner of SimCity will also receive a version on Mac OS for free.

SimCity blends various social functions and the traditional city-building mechanics along with copious amounts of micro-transactions. Of course, it also featured the now-infamous always-online DRM. Thanks to overloaded servers, players were unable to access the game’s single-player component. Which of course meant happy times for EA.

Thankfully, The Sims 4 is confirmed as not being always-online or having any invasive DRM. Will SimCity see a decent response on the Mac? We’ll find out in the coming days. Check out our official review of SimCity here.

President of Sony’s Worldwide Studios for SCE Shuhei Yoshida recently answered a fan’s question regarding the same on Twitter and confirmed that cross-platform party chat would indeed be possible between the systems.

@rossthebassist yes

— Shuhei Yoshida (@yosp) August 23, 2013

Too bad PlayStation 3 was never added to the mix, right?

As of now, the reasons for owning a PlayStation Vita (and subsequently for Sony to release a bundle for the Vita and PS4) are just piling up. Along with cross-platform party chat, you can also turn on your PlayStation 4 console using the Vita as a remote and even transfer your PS4 games to the Vita to play on the go, via Remote Play through Gaikai. What else will we see, as the PlayStation 4 nears its November release date? Stay tuned.

Speaking to GamesIndustry International, he stated that, “”Basically, we’ve built an engine team. On Witcher 2, it was just one team. A few engine programmers were on there as well, but now we’ve split the team up.

“Now we’ve got a big core engine team. There’s like 15 programmers working just on the engine to create a cross-platform solution for the game. These guys have lots of console experience.

“It’s all about staffing and team organization… we’re in new territory now. It’s not PlayStation 3, it’s not Xbox 360. It’s new platforms, so it’s still a learning experience for us.

“It’s going to be a real challenge to do a cross-platform simultaneous release. First time for us, too. It’s going to be hard. It’s going to come down to the expertise on our programming team to get that right.”

It will also mark the first time a Witcher title comes to a Sony platform (The Witcher 2 only released on PC and Xbox 360, while the first game only came to PC). Currently, the results look astounding but we’ll have to wait and see how the game pans out when it releases for the Xbox One, PS4 and PC in 2014.

As of now, the game has been available for PC and PS3, but with the latest beta phase, gamers on both platforms can now play together for the first. The cross platform support for FFXIV: A Realm Reborn will be going through the ringer here. However, that’s not all – new content, such as the introduction of the Ul’dah and Limsa Lominsa city states will also become available.

Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn is due for release on August 27th 2013 for PlayStation 3 and PC, with details for a PlayStation 4 release still to come.

Xbox Europe boss Chris Lewis says that while exclusives are very important, and Microsoft is constantly working towards making more exclusive titles and promises that we will see more exclusives soon, he also says that Microsoft is constantly making sure that multiplatform games are better on the Xbox 360.

“[Exclusives] are important,” he told Eurogamer. “DLC windows of exclusivity are critical for us for differentiation… Exclusive IP is critical. You’ll see more of that over time. You’ll also see us, though, committed to working with people like EA and Activision on their cross-platform consoles to make sure they play better, and they integrate better across PC, phone and the console in a way other people’s just simply can’t.

“We’re also pretty confident the cross-platform experience is better on Xbox,” he added. “We enjoy great success with Call of Duty. Live is the oxygen that runs through our business. The experience users have through Xbox Live is a fundamental differentiator for us versus other platforms. FIFA is another one. Certainly here in Europe football is a religion. Our ongoing commitment to experiencing better and playing better on Xbox is partly a function of what we do with Xbox Live.”

Recently Chris Lewis also said that Xbox 720’s release could overlap with the 360’s life cycle. Earlier, he also said that Microsoft is confident the Xbox 360 can be the No.1 console worldwide.

Sony has detailed some Vita features which enables you to use it as a controller for the PS3. Sounds exciting, doesn’t it? Phil Rogers, Europe R&D manager, explained more about this feature to Eurogamer.

“PS3 can send data down to Vita and Vita can display it. You could use the unique features [of Vita] – gyroscope, touch front and back – as a control device for a PS3 game.”

“You can run software on both devices and use the network to sync the game states. And that’s pretty good, because you then have the processing power of PS3 doing that work, Vita [doing] fancy graphics – however you want to do it. You’re not sacrificing the PS3’s CPU to be able to have a rich experience on Vita.”

This is indeed an exciting development, and you can read about it more here.

According to Rahul Sood, founder of Voodoo PC and CTO of gaming at HP, Microsoft apparently killed the idea after an experiment was conducted to pit PC gamers with a keyboard and mouse versus console players with a gamepad.

Naturally, the console players were annihilated.

They pitted console gamers with their “console” controller, against PC gamers with their keyboard and mouse. The console players got destroyed every time. So much so that it would be embarrassing to the XBOX team in general had Microsoft launched this initiative.

The effort that would have effectively bridged the gap between the Xbox and the PC has now apparently been scrapped though- because the console players got their asses whooped.