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News Byte

April Was a Loser for Videogame Industry

John Paczkowski in News on May 17 at 1:36 pm PT

April was a cruel month indeed for the videogame industry. Sales of gaming hardware, software and accessories in the U.S. for the month peaked at $495.2 million, according to sales data from research firm NPD, down 25 percent from the same period in 2012. Retail software sales declined 17 percent year over year to $254.3 million. Hardware sales plummeted 42 percent from the year prior to $109.5 million. The top console for the month? Microsoft’s Xbox 360, though it sold just 130,000 units in April, down 45 percent from a year earlier.

News Byte

Hulu Plus Hits Windows Phone 8

John Paczkowski in News on May 6 at 1:00 pm PT

Microsoft has added another marquee app to its Windows Phone 8 catalog: Hulu Plus. The video service app debuted Monday on the Windows Phone store, offering streamed access to its catalog of TV shows and Criterion Collection films for an $8 per month subscription. The app’s lone Windows Phone customization: a Live Tile that updates with Hulu’s “hottest shows.” Still, a great addition to the Windows Phone app catalog which has been criticized for its lack of top-tier apps.

News Byte

Hotmail Takes a Dirt Nap

John Paczkowski in News on May 2 at 2:54 pm PT

Hotmail, the Web-based email service Microsoft acquired in 1997 for $500 million — its largest acquisition at the time — is no more. Microsoft said Thursday that it has finished its Hotmail to Outlook.com transition, a massive undertaking that required migrating hundreds of millions of Hotmail accounts and some 150 petabytes of email data to Outlook.com, its much-improved “modern” email service. With that hard work finished, the number of active Outlook.com accounts has surpassed 400 million, and Hotmail — one of the very first services to offer free Web-based email — is gone, though user Hotmail addresses live on, if their owners so choose.