In the company’s quarterly report, Activision Blizzard announced strong numbers in both digital and retail alongside new product releases that should have gamers excited for 2012.

To appease the avid Blizzard fans, the company let drop in the report that Diablo III is targeting a Q2 launch this year. They report that the current beta and auction house testing is going well, so Diablo III should make its Q2 release window.

As for Blizzard’s other franchises, the new World of Warcraft expansion, Mists of Pandaria, is going to be detailed in more depth at a press event on March 19.

In StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm news, they are adding in new multiplayer units. Blizzard is also going to be taking a “more active” role in the eSports community surrounding the game.

Finally, Blizzard has multiple unannounced titles set for 2012 with one of them being Blizzard DOTA – a free-to-play online game. There is also the unannounced MMO that we’ve known about for a while.

As for Call of Duty, as expected there will be a new release this year. The company announced that the series is now the “largest interactive entertainment franchise ever” in the U.S. and Europe.

With each new Call of Duty release, the number of online players has grown exponentially. In the graph below, it shows the number of online players growing by the millions with each new game. Modern Warfare 3 saw a jump of 20 million online players over Black Ops to reach 40 million active monthly users across all Call of Duty games since the original Modern Warfare.

Call of Duty ELITE, the multiplayer service for the game, has reached 7 million users worldwide with 1.5 million of them being paid users. They also announced more DLC than ever before to continue support for Modern Warfare 3. They also announced development of Call of Duty China, a free-to-play microtransaction based game for Asian markets.

If you were wondering what Bungie was up to after they left the Halo franchise, they are hard at work on their new game for Activision that is set to be revealed at some point this year.

Lastly, we can’t forget how amazing Spyro Skylanders has done for the company. The video game where players scan in actual toys to unlock new characters was Activision’s largest new IP launch ever. They sold over 20 million toys and it became the number one children’s title in 2011.

The company took the opportunity to announce Skylanders Giants, new toys that are much larger than the original toys from last year. They will be all new characters with unique in-game powers. Thankfully, the toys will still use the same scanning device called the “Portal of Power” from last year. The toys will be sold in starter packs that come with the “Portal of Power,” expansion packs and stand-alone characters.

Activision Blizzard is looking to have a great year and gamers, no matter the age or type, should find something to enjoy from the publisher in 2012.

Citing a jam-packed schedule on their blog, Blizzard has opted out of holding their annual convention of all things Blizzard this year. They will use the time to focus on all the products they have coming out this year like Diablo III, Stacraft II: Heart of the Swarm and the WoW expansion Mists of Pandaria.

To perhaps fill the gaping wound in your heart, Blizzard will instead host the 2012 Battle.net World Championship. The tournament will host StarCraft II and World of Warcraft Arena championships somewhere in Asia. My bet is on South Korea.

If the void in your heart is just too big to be filled by some tournament, Blizzard confirmed that BlizzCon will be back in 2013. Better save that Kerrigan costume until next year then.

As always, the Twitterverse has exploded with the news:

Now, I’m going to file this one under all but confirmed because it’s not actually confirmed yet, but a fan on twitter asked if Diablo III was coming to consoles. Community manager “Bashiok” confirmed the console port and said that Josh Mosqueira was the project lead on it.

Now it’s rather uncommon for a community manager to confirm a game’s existence before the company makes the official announcement, but it seems legit for now.

Ars Technica did some digging in Mosqueira’s LinkedIn profile and found that he has been a lead game designer at Blizzard since last May. Beforehand, he had worked on Far Cry 3 for Ubisoft and a few games for Relic such as Company of Heroes.

If this is indeed true. It makes perfect sense. While Blizzard’s other games such as Starcraft II and World of Warcraft don’t make sense on consoles, Diablo III is a perfect fit. Torchlight’s release on Xbox Live Arcade last year proved that a loot heavy dungeon crawler could work wonders on a console.

The only doubt is Diablo III’s auction house that allows players to sell and buy equipment for real world money. Microsoft and Sony both have tight control over their platforms to make sure they get a little piece of the pie through any transactions made through their service. An open service like Blizzard’s auction house would have to be axed or monitored heavily if it were to be released on consoles.

Now if only we can get Blizzard to make a new Lost Vikings for consoles, the entire world would be at peace.

As an extra bonus, here’s the incriminating twitter conversation that started it all:

“With the launch of Diablo 3’s public beta, gamers around the world will jump into Blizzard’s dungeon crawling masterpiece that, with its auction house system, promises to allow players to buy and sell virtual items from the game using real money,” a spokesperson for PayPal tells WebProNews. “PayPal will be the payments solution for the auction house service in several regions of the world and PayPal will also be added as a payment option on Blizzard’s Battle.net platform.”

The announcement comes just after PayPal’s recent announcement with Microsoft that will see Xbox 360 users be able to pay with PayPal directly on their Xbox consoles.

The announcement on Blizzard’s Battle.net blog says:

We’re pleased to announce that in most regions, PayPal will be our payment-service partner for the Diablo III auction house, allowing players who trade with real-world currency the ability to cash out the spoils of their battle-torn adventures via a PayPal account.

We’ll share region-related specifics, as well as further details on everything mentioned above, in the near future.  Stay tuned!

“Gamers want to focus on gaming and prefer an in-game payments solution that’s convenient, easy and secure,” says PayPal’s senior director of emerging opportunities, Carey Kolaja. “Last month we told you that our research has shown that over 70% of gamers are PayPal users, and we believe that’s because we understand that central principle.”

The $25 Glider program performs the perfunctory character tasks like grinding and skinning in World of Warcraft. This frees up the player to enjoy other aspects of the game, like Battlegrounds.

Blizzard considers Glider a bot, against its terms of service, and wants Donnelly and Glider grounded for good. Donnelly claimed in an October 2006 filing against Blizzard that three people, one a Blizzard executive, the other a lawyer for the company, the third unidentified, showed up at his home and ordered him to stop violating Blizzard’s rights with the software, then called WoW Glider.

Thinking his company faced an immediate lawsuit from Blizzard, Donnelly’s company filed a request for declatory judgment that Glider does not infringe on Blizzard’s copyrights.

Blizzard counter-sued Donnelly over Glider. As the BBC noted, both sides seek summary judgment in the case, per motions each side filed on March 21.

Attempts at settling the case in October 2007 made some progress, but both sides were too far apart on the issues to come up with a settlement.

You might think a business with 10 million customers would have a way to work with them outside of email. Such logic does not apply to Blizzard, operators of the world’s biggest MMORPG, World of Warcraft.

About five days into our ten-day trial, where we have been trying out different characters to get a feel for the game, I was in the middle of taking a Forsaken mage through his paces when boom, disconnected. Upon reconnecting, I received this message: “This World of Warcraft account has been closed and is no longer available for use.”

The accompanying link noted I should check my email for a follow-up message, and noted an email address to contact. Here’s the astonishing message I received:

Access to this account has been permanently disabled for exploitation of World of Warcraft through associated accounts which have been closed for intended exploitation. While we try to be as lenient as possible in our assessments of the results of exploitation investigations, reoccurring trends in exploitative endeavors on your accounts have ultimately lead to their closure. The recurring subscription on the account has been disabled to prevent further charges.

Wow, I must be some kind of horrid person, right? Um, wrong. I downloaded a trial directly from the official site, then installed the full version from a new, purchased box set of software. I’ve only logged in through the regular software client.

There’s no spyware, rootkits, or any other threats my various little defensive software tools have found on my system. I don’t have any problem blaming Blizzard for taking a remarkably stupid action, compounded by arrogantly hiding behind an email address instead of making someone useful available by phone.

To summarize, I’m sure as hell not doing anything that could be considered exploitative.

Maybe if they hit 15 or 20 million subscribers they might consider the benefits of real customer service and shell out some bucks for a phone contact option. Disney figured that out for both of their online games, ToonTown and Pirates of the Caribbean.

How a company with 10 million customers can thrive and grow while arbitrarily and erroneously screwing over a player simply eludes me. I’d only considered World of Warcraft recently, as a way to reconnect with my idled interest in fantasy gaming, sparked by the passing of Gary Gygax.

Looks like I’ll be picking up Neverwinter Nights or something else. In closing, Blizzard, get a clue, tell whoever manages your customer service to take a class or two in communications (a first for you, perhaps?), and have a nice day.

I was going to write about Blizzard this morning; however, I then saw that the Pageflakes site was down.  A temporary page said, “We’ll be back at about 10am PDT (1pm EDT, 7pm CET).  Stay tuned!”  It looked planned, and I figured I could wait.  But it’s now about 2:20 PM on the East Coast, and the message is still in place.  Hmph.

In any event, Pageflakes users should at some point benefit from a number of new media partnerships.  “International partner media properties include major brands such as USA Today, Rolling Stone, CNN, Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, Entertainment Tonight, The Insider, Slate, AOL, Die Welt, Bild and others,” according to a press release.

“We’re thrilled to work with major partners that recognize the rapidly changing nature of the Internet, in which personalization is at the heart of a new generation of web media experiences,” said Dan Cohen, the CEO of Pageflakes, in the same release.  “By embracing the Pageflakes platform, our partners are now offering Pagecasts in which anyone on the web can combine their favorite print and broadcast content with new forms of media such as user-generated content and social networking.”

If you’re trying to visualize the final product, don’t bother – Mashable’s Kristen Nicole has pictures of nine different Pagecasts.  And of course, whenever the Pageflakes site begins working again, you’ll be able to view the real deal there.

Now, however, “Startpage Pageflakes is preparing [the] latest version of its offering, entitled Blizzard,” reports Mashable’s Kristen Nicole.  “The launch was originally planned for today, but has been pushed back until July to incorporate more feature requests from users.”

Neither Mashable (which provides a disclaimer saying Pageflakes is a sponsor) nor the Pageflakes site itself provides a more specific date.  The Next Net and TechCrunch, which are also covering these developments, didn’t have that information, either.

As for the update itself, some features of Blizzard sound interesting, but remain up in the air.  “Included in this newest version may be more Pagecasts from media companies such as CBS, The Washington Post and People,” according to Nicole – and those would be some powerful partners, indeed – but “these too are liable to change.”

In other words, we may still have all buzz and no bee.

Hopefully that’ll change in the near future, however.  And don’t disregard these rumors as a Pageflakes publicity stunt – an editor’s note at Mashable states, “Pageflakes isn’t particularly happy about this story coming out now, especially since the features won’t be live until July.  However, since some blogs have jumped the gun a little, we thought we’d try to clear up some points . . .”

The practice has been met with much scrutiny by the developers of these types of games, sometimes leading to the banning of accounts linked to the sale of virtual property.

The parent companies claim that, while the player is in virtual possession of said items, ownership of the property ultimately remains with the game developer.

IGE is a service that directly sells currency, items and other services to MMO gamers. The bulk of virtual property transactions, however, take place on the world’s most utilized auction site, eBay.

Blizzard Entertainment, makers of the insanely popular World of Warcraft MMO, have been putting pressure on eBay for some time to halt the sale of its virtual property. It appears that within the last month, those appeals have finally been answered.

According to a Slashdot article, eBay has begun taking down any auction pertaining to virtual currency or items associated with MMOs. A representative from eBay comments in the piece:

Of course, not everyone is in agreement that Blizzard (and other MMO developers) have a legal leg to stand on concerning the sale of virtual property. This commenter writes:

With eBay taking itself out of the picture, you can expect more sites like IGE to pop up across the Internet. Most of these companies, IGE included, have their operations based overseas (China in particular) so it will be difficult for U.S. based MMO developers to go after them in the legal arena.

This is a semantic issue, to be sure, and not one for the weak of heart. I expect a vicious tirade of litigation to ensue as the MMO industry is rapidly closing in on becoming a billion dollar business.

(Disclosure: I play World of Warcraft. A lot.)

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Joe is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest ebusiness news.

Project member Chris Blizzard reported on his blog yesterday that the first shipment of the $100 laptops were received.

“Today we received the first large shipment of laptops from the factory,” said the Fedora Core developer. Blizzard also added, “I’m told it’s about a thousand pounds. The boxes are all labeled with the countries the keyboards are built for: The U.S., Nigeria, Thailand, Argentina, Brazil and Libya.”

Designed by a Taiwanese laptop manufacturer, the laptops for children are designed to withstand the harsh conditions of third world terrain.

These “tough machines with a handle” feature a webcam, speaker and microphone, WiFi connection, a screen designed for easy visibility, 128 MB of memory, 512 MB of storage and are run on free Linux OS.

The first ten hand-built models were produced at a cost of $150 and shipped to children in several third world countries who tested them.

Governments from around the world including Brazil, Argentina, Nigeria, Libya, and Thailand signed up for the program that would enable them to distribute 1,000 laptops per participant to educational districts in each of their countries.

Recently, however, a political coup in Thailand resulted in the country reporting to the Bangkok Post that they do not want the laptops, “even at $100 per box.” This action is believed to be based on rejecting the former government’s policies, and not open sourcing.

Nicholas Negroponte, co-founder of the project, says they hope to have produce and distribute at least 900 more of the $100 laptops by 2007.

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Autmn Davis is a staff writer for WebProNews covering ebusiness and technology.