We are in the thick of midnight-launch season. Are you getting Skyrim under tonight’s full moon? Take pictures and write about your experience on Bitmob; I’m excited to see how everyone’s adventure goes.

News Blips:

Steam has been compromised, and it’s possible that the perpetrators have obtained encrypted credit-card numbers and personal information. Valve has sent out an alert that hackers have accessed a database containing sensitive info. “This database contained information including user names, hashed and salted passwords, game purchases, email addresses, billing addresses, and encrypted credit card information,” Valve wrote. The publisher claims that it has no evidence “that encrypted credit-card numbers or personally identifying information were taken by the intruders.” It’s definitely a good idea to check your credit-card statement on a regular basis for the next few weeks, and a password change is probably in order as well.

Zynga, in its infinite wisdom, offers certain employees a choice: return your stock or you’re fired. People get paid for their work. I don’t know when that started, but I don’t like it. It sounds like another one of our Communist President’s anti-corporate attacks on capitalism. So now companies have a choice: They can either pay a competitive salary or they can offer stock as a supplement. Zynga, the social-game developer responsible for those annoying notifications about how your friend will surely starve this winter unless you send them some beet seeds or some shit, decided to go with the latter. Now that the Facebook-game maker is planning its initial public offering, it’s regretting that choice.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that high-ranking executives, including CEO Mark Pincus, targeted employees they believed weren’t deserving of the high-dollar payout the stock would inevitably earn following the coming IPO. They asked those workers to return their stock unless they wanted to get the pink slip from which no Facebook notification can rescue you. The execs wanted to avoid a situation where someone like the company chef walks away with $20 million (which is something that happened at Google). Here’s the thing, though -- no chef can strut up to the corner office, kick the door in, and say to his boss, “Look, give me more stock or I’m jamming my arm into your face until I retrieve the 800 cupcakes that you’ve eaten over the last four months.” The Empires and Allies developer justified the move by saying it was best for the company. Well, in the words of that one cop from the end of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation: Mark Pincus, if you were my husband, I’d beat you with a rubber hose. [CNet]

Please put your wallets away; EverQuest 2 is going free-to-play. The seven-year-old MMO -- which is older than most six-year olds -- still has a dedicated following, but so do my Growing Pains fan-fiction stories. After all that time, the fantasy game is finally going to be playable without a monthly fee. If you want, you can still give the developer money in exchange for a variety of in-game benefits. The “Silver” and “Gold” members will gain access to more races and character slots for example. Get all of the incomprehensible details here.

Activision has announced that it is extending current Elite subscriptions for an additional 30 days. Call of Duty is more popular than Charles Hartman, who is that one kid in my high school with a couple of four-wheelers, a freezer that was always packed with bagel bites, and a hot mom. Seriously, everyone loved that guy. With that kind of popularity, no one should be surprised that Modern Warfare 3 is dolphin-diving off shelves. It could surprise some, however, to learn that the first-person shooter’s information service, Call of Duty Elite, is just as in-demand. In fact, the website was bombarded with so many users in its first few days that its servers have been almost constantly offline. Most people are reporting that the website and app are completely unusable. Activision is attempting to catch up with demand. In the meantime, the kind and generous executives at the world’s largest video-game publisher have agreed to grace all subscribers with an extra 30 days free of charge.

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