Though Bioware's highly anticipated massively multiplayer RPG "Star Wars: The Old Republic" doesn't officially launch until tomorrow, up to 1.5 million pre-orderers are estimated to have played the game, having been granted early access to the code over the past week.

Cowen & Company analyst Doug Creutz notes that "The Old Republic" was already running on 140 distinct servers over the weekend — 77 in the U.S. and 63 in Europe — up from 106 servers running on Wednesday.

Those servers were consistently packed with players, too, with many complaining about long queues before being able to log on to the game over the weekend. Bioware said in a statement it is "taking this matter seriously and constantly reviewing [queues] to make sure that they are manageable and reasonable" as the title continues to roll out to more players.

Creutz estimated that "The Old Republic" servers have actually been filled a little more densely than those for Activision Blizzard's long-standing MMO leader "World of Warcraft," which hosts roughly 4 to 4.5 million players on 491 servers in North America and Europe. From those numbers, a little back-of-the-envelope math generated Creutz's estimate of 1 to 1.5 million early "Old Republic" players so far.

That pre-release success will be welcome news at publisher Electronic Arts, which has previously said the massive development costs for the game could be paid off by just 500,000 monthly subscribers. Of course, EA is projecting a much larger player base than that — EA Games president Frank Gibeau said earlier this year he sees the MMO as a "tens-of-million-person opportunity."

An eight-figure subscriber number would make "The Old Republic" the first MMO to compete seriously with the popularity of "World of Warcraft." That game still boasted 10.3 million worldwide subscribers last month, though it's off from a peak of 12 million players recorded last year.

So, does "The Old Republic" have what it takes to be the MMO industry's long-sought "WoW-killer"? Well, early impressions from the press have been glowing, and obsessive players have already reportedly reached the game's highest levels, suggesting that EA may have struck on a winning combination of addictive gameplay paired with a recognizable license.

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Kyle Orland has written hundreds of thousands of words about gaming since he started a Mario fan site at the age of 14. You can follow him on Twitter or at his personal website, KyleOrland.com.

Google Finance

A graph of trading so far shows Zynga's stock struggling to maintain initial enthusiasm among investors.

Just two-and-a-half years after it burst onto the scene with "FarmVille," and nearly six months after it first filed for its IPO, social gaming giant Zynga finally began trading publicly on the NASDAQ exchange today.

The stock was initially offered at $10 a share, a price that valued the company as a whole at roughly $8.9 billion. That's larger than the market cap for game publishing giants like Electronic Arts, and comes despite the fact that EA brings in roughly $4 billion in revenue every year, while Zynga has so far brought in only $1.5 billion in revenue in its short lifetime.

Investors seem to be balking a bit at Zynga's asking price, though. While the stock briefly rose to a high of $11.50 in morning trading, the share price had dipped to just over $9.25 as of 2 p.m. Eastern time.

That's a huge turnaround from estimates earlier in the year that would have valued the company at $15 billion to $20 billion. At the high end of that range, Zynga would have been among the 200 largest publicly traded companies in the country, roughly on par with food conglomerate Kellogg.

Zynga is undeniably the biggest success story of the social gaming revolution, with a player base of over 200 million, more than four times as large as its nearest competitor in the social gaming space (which just happens to be EA).

Only a small fraction of those players actually pay for the virtual items that can help them succeed in Zynga's otherwise free-to-play games, but those micropayments have been enough to help Zynga absorb smaller companies, including "Words with Friends" maker NewToy, on its way to filling 13 offices worldwide with more than 3,000 employees.

Still, some have worries about Zynga's ability to maintain its meteoric growth. As Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick recently pointed out, Zynga's business model depends on a constant stream of successful new games and new players to replace those departing from aging hits. Some also wonder if Zynga's brand of simple, almost compulsive, gameplay can stand up to somewhat deeper competition from titles including EA's highly successful "The Sims Social."

Regardless, the company has made it to market while the iron is still relatively hot, and will use the more than $1 billion it raised from today's IPO to try and cement its dominant position. Perhaps there's a lesson there for "Angry Birds" maker Rovio, which is reportedly eyeing its own stock IPO for 2013.

Related stories:

• Zynga launches 'FarmVille' toys, 'CastleVille' game
• Zynga reveals 9 new games, new game network
• 'FarmVille: The Movie' might happen ... no really

Kyle Orland has written hundreds of thousands of words about gaming since he started a Mario fan site at the age of 14. You can follow him on Twitter or at his personal website, KyleOrland.com.

In the never-ending battle between software pirates and PC game makers, Polish "The Witcher 2" publisher CD Projekt Red has come down firmly against the kind of invasive digital rights management (DRM) protections favored by many game makers.

But that doesn't mean the publisher is willing to simply allow illegal copies of its games to flourish online. The company recently confirmed it has been contacting thousands of alleged German pirates demanding penalties of over $1185 for their ill-gotten games.

"As you know, we aren't huge fans of any sort of DRM here at CD Projekt Red," the company told industry site Eurogamer. "DRM itself is a pain for legal gamers — the same group of honest people who decided that our game was worth its price, and went and bought it. We don't want to make their lives more difficult by introducing annoying copy protection systems."

"However, that shouldn't be confused with us giving a green light to piracy," the company continued. "We will never approve of it, since it doesn't only affect us but has a negative impact on the whole game industry.

Piracy has become a major problem for PC game publishers, and "The Witcher 2" hasn't been immune from the trend. CD Projekt Red CEO and Co-founder Marcin Iwinski recently estimated the game saw at least 4.5 million illegal downloads via BitTorrent, compared to roughly a million legitimate sales.

Despite those figures, Iwinski said at the time he still doesn't think technical DRM solutions to stop piracy are worthwhile. Such solutions always end up either too light, and therefore easy for pirates to circumvent, or else so invasive they get in the way of enjoyment by legitimate customers, Iwinski said.

It's a valid concern — publishers including EA and Ubisoft have faced vocal customer backlash for piracy-prevention schemes that require a persistent internet connection during play or that install harmful, hard-to-remove rootkits on players' systems.

But where technical measures fail, CD Projekt Red seems more than willing to try out legal measures instead, even though its fully aware such efforts may hurt the company's image. "We've seen some of the concern online about our efforts to thwart piracy, and we can assure you that we only take legal actions against users who we are 100 per cent sure have downloaded our game illegally," the company told Eurogamer.

It's an interesting piracy-fighting balancing act, and one that game-makers of all stripes are going to have to address if they want to take part in the PC game market.

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• Pirates: Leave our PC game alone!
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• Pimp my PC

Kyle Orland has written hundreds of thousands of words about gaming since he started a Mario fan site at the age of 14. You can follow him on Twitter or at his personal website, KyleOrland.com.

EA' Battlefield 3 was one of 2011's top-rising Google searches globally, but failed to best Activision's "Black Ops" in U.S. video game searches

Google's annual "Zeitgeist" list of the most popular search terms for 2011 shows first-person shooters dominating video-game-focused searches while "Angry Birds" shows its wider cultural impact in some unexpected categories.

Electronic Arts' massive marketing push for war-themed shooter "Battlefield 3" seems to have paid off, making the game the fifth fastest-rising search term worldwide this year. Google's data shows search interest in the game peaked around its October release, unsurprisingly, and found that "Battlefield 3" searchers in Norway actually outpaced those in the U.S., on a relative basis.

The quick rise of "Battlefield 3" searches wasn't enough to push it to the top of the year's top video game searches in the U.S., however. Holiday 2010 best-seller "Black Ops" topped the category, with related term "Call of Duty" coming close behind in second. Microsoft's first-person shooter series "Halo" came in third, well ahead of "Battlefield 3" which languished in seventh place.

Long-running franchises "Super Mario" and "Mortal Kombat" appeared in fourth and fifth in the Video Games category, thanks to major new releases during the year, while newly released RPG release "Skyrim" showed up in sixth thanks to heavy searching in November. Upcoming titles "Diablo 3" and "Mass Effect 3" were the ninth and tenth most popular searches, respectively, showing strong interest in these upcoming sequels.

While Rovio's mega-popular "Angry Birds" wasn't a top Video Game search, it did show up as the number one fastest rising costume search in the U.S., peaking around Halloween time. "Angry Birds Plush" and "Angry Birds" also appeared as the seventh and eighth fastest rising U.S. toy searches for the year, helping to show the property's popularity outside the gaming realm.

Interestingly, the ninth fastest-growing toy search for the year was "LEGO Black Ops," which doesn't exist as either a toy line or a video game but does exist as a rather popular series of YouTube videos.

Finally, with Sony launching its portable Vita system in Japan this weekend, the company might be heartened to know the system was the ninth fastest-rising global consumer electronics search for the year, though only under its original "Sony NGP" (for "Next Generation Portable") codename.

Related stories:

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• Angry Birds turns 2, players get the presents
• VOTE: 'Modern Warfare 3' vs. 'Battlefield 3'
• 'Call of Duty' won't back down

Kyle Orland has written hundreds of thousands of words about gaming since he started a Mario fan site at the age of 14. You can follow him on Twitter or at his personal website, KyleOrland.com.

Nielsen

While playing games remains the most popular use for game consoles, streaming video represents an increasing chunk of console time.

Game consoles are still primarily for playing games, but a new survey from Nielsen shows they're increasingly being used for a secondary purpose: showing movies and TV shows from Netflix and other streaming services on the living room TV.

Nielsen's survey of 3,000 Americans ages 13 and up found use of streaming video and video-on-demand services up on all three major consoles from 2010 to 2011. On the Nintendo Wii, in particular, streaming video now accounts for an estimated 33 percent of usage time, up from 20 percent in 2010. Streaming video made up 14 and 15 percent of usage time on the Microsoft Xbox 360 and Sony PlayStation 3, respectively, both up significantly from last year.

Does this mean people aren't using their consoles to play games anymore? Not exactly. Online and offline gameplay still combine to make up a majority of usage time on all three consoles, though proportional gaming time did decrease slightly for Nintendo Wii users this year.

For the most part, Nielsen's data shows the increase in streaming video time comes at the expense of other non-gaming uses for the consoles, such as listening to music, browsing the Internet, or using social networking apps. Users are also spending a little less time watching traditional Blu-ray and DVD movies on the Xbox 360 and PS3 (the Wii doesn't allow users to play disc-based movies, which perhaps explains its larger-than-normal streaming rates).

The increase in streaming is great news for Netflix, which sees half its users watching via a game console, according to a Nielsen report from this summer. The heavy streaming rates among console owners also help explain why, at peak times, Netflix is responsible for close to a third of all U.S. internet traffic.

More than that, though, this new data shows how game consoles are used more than ever as all-purpose, entertainment-focused computers for the living room. Over the last few weeks Microsoft has added new video content from sources including Comcast, Verizon FiOS and YouTube, and both the PS3 and Xbox 360 can already connect to your Facebook account.

Don't be surprised if the next generation of home consoles offers even more internet-connected apps to complement the core gaming functions that still make up the bulk of their usage.

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Kyle Orland has written hundreds of thousands of words about gaming since he started a Mario fan site at the age of 14. You can follow him on Twitter or at his personal website, KyleOrland.com.

Residents and visitors in New York City's NoHo neighborhood encountered a surprise today when they saw Tony Rosenthal's iconic, cubic Alamo sculpture dressed up as the Weighted Companion Cube, easily the most popular lifeless-yet-adorable inanimate object in Valve's Portal game series.

The fabric drapery adorning the sculpture was the work of the CalTech Prank Club, according to a note, photgraphed by a local Tumblr user, which quotes heavily from the game's malevolent GLaDOS artificial intelligence.

It's part of a tradition of CalTech pranks that dates back to at least 1961, when pranksters made fans in the Rose Bowl stands hold up cards spelling out the school's name, even though CalTech wasn't even playing. It's not the first time the Alamo sculpture has been dressed up, either — a group of pranksters once turned the 15-foot-to-a-side sculpture into a giant Rubik's Cube.

Though it utters no lines and doesn't even move on its own, the Weighted Companion Cube has become one of the standout "characters" in the two Portal games, inspiring countless fan craft creations and even an officially licensed plush toy.

Personally, we think the new threads make the imposing sculpture much more friendly and easy to love, and less like the kind of thing you'd want to heartlessly throw into a fire.

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• 'Portal' theater is space bendingly awesome

Kyle Orland has written hundreds of thousands of words about gaming since he started a Mario fan site at the age of 14. You can follow him on Twitter or at his personal website, KyleOrland.com.

A promotional image from the makers of "Rock Vibe" shows how a vibrating glove helps blind players participate in rhythm games.

The rhythm game revolution has largely ignored a significant segment of the population — blind people. If you have vision problems, you are unable to follow the titles' on-screen prompts. The creators of "Rock Vibe" are trying to fix that by developing a "Rock Band"-style game that can be played by blind and sighted people alike.

In addition to an on-screen stream of notes, "Rock Vibe" tells players which guitar buttons or drum panels to hit by sending timed vibrations to specially designed, wearable equipment. The game is built on top of a free PC rhythm game called "Frets on Fire," and is not affiliated with the official, Harmonix-developed "Rock Band" available on consoles.

First created by three University of California, Santa Cruz researchers in 2008, "Rock Vibe" has since been featured in a number of computer accessibility conferences and journals. But now the developers are looking to raise money through Kickstarter to help develop a more professional, commercial version of the game.

That effort has already drawn over $12,000 in donations, though the developers are looking for at least $20,000 more by Jan. 20 to help fund research and development, testing and promotional travel, as well as to provide free games to schools and centers for the blind. Those who contribute can receive copies of the finished game and even personalized features, depending on how much they donate.

"Rock Vibe" isn't the first game designed for sightless play — there's a long tradition of audio games meant to be played without any visual input, and coders have made blind-accessible conversions of traditional games ranging from pinball to first-person shooters.

But the earlier titles have largely failed to keep up with the latest advances in gaming, the "Rock Vibe" creators say, and are often too simple to keep the interest of sighted players who may want to play, too.

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• 'Dance Central 2' delivers more dancers, music, laughs
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Kyle Orland has written hundreds of thousands of words about gaming since he started a Mario fan site at the age of 14. You can follow him on Twitter or at his personal website, KyleOrland.com.