It’s being reported that Fallout 3, the blockbuster post-nuclear action adventure title from Bethesda which only yesterday went gold has already been leaked and pirated, a full 20 days before it’s slated release. Ouch. P2P services internet-wide are blazing with torrents of ripped copies for the Xbox 360 floating freely around. Neoseeker is speculating that this must be an early review copy, leaked by a scrupulous games reviewer, which we tend to agree with, unless someone from the duplication facility overseas really worked their piracy network into overdrive.

Bad news for those of you with the free, Silver-level Xbox Live account who actually wanted to give money to Microsoft and Netflix for their upcoming streaming movie service launching soon on the platform. You won’t have access to it. Why not? Simply put, on top of the Netflix subscription, you’ll also have to subscribe to an Xbox Live Gold subscription, pretty much limiting the service to those who care enough to pay to be verbally abused by 13 year olds while playing multi-player games.

When MTV’s Multiplayer asked Microsoft why at E3, there was no clear answer. Now there is, courtesy of Xbox Marketing Director Albert Penello. In Short: Making back bandwidth and licensing costs, and oh, helping add more value to Xbox Live’s subscription service.

“I think it’s about adding value to the gold membership,” said Xbox director of marketing Albert Penello. “I mean, obviously, the partnership there — it’s a lot of bandwidth. Obviously, there’s the cost of the licensing on the Netflix side, so…you’re not really paying for the movie. On silver, you have to pay for the TV show or movie that you download. Here, you don’t, so the relationship in gold kind of takes care of that funny business.”

As part of it’s voter registration campaign along with Rock the Vote, Microsoft is allowing Xbox Live players to virtually vote for their presidential candidate of choice. With the Xbox’s overwhelmingly younger demo behind it, it’s no surprise we’re seeing Obama eeking out McCain 43% to 31% with a large group of undecided at 13% and “other” at 13%. Possibly telling however, is the amount of voter registration forms which have been downloaded via the service since the campaign began. At 55,000 that’s quite a nice number to see, considering how under-represented the youth-generation is around the country.

Source: Accountalutionary

Atari and Eden have released a Lexus car pack for the Xbox 360 version of Test Drive Unlimited, featuring the incredibly hot Lexus GS 450h hybrid sports sedan. The pack is free via Xbox Live and also features the Lexus LS 460 luxury sedan model. For those Xbox 360 owners who haven’t yet tried Test Drive Unlimited, I encourage you to give it a try. It’s certainly not the greatest racer of all time, but the persistent atmosphere and recreation of Oahu are more than worth it.

Read more: Test Drive Unlimited

It seems Microsoft just isn’t feeling the Wii60 love anymore now that Sony has won a few minor PR battles in the UK. In a recent report by Daily Tech, Microsoft’s Xbox platform and Live product manager, John Rodman, implied that Wii customers are kids saying:

We don’t feel like the Wii customer and the Xbox customer are the same thing. We think that as soon as the Wii customer turns 14 they want something else.

Ouch!

Read more: MS: Silly gamers, Wii is for kids

Poor Sony. They just can’t catch a break. With their overpriced monster of a console failing to ignite the sales charts and now launching in Europe (for around $800 USD after conversion!) to a deafening lull, they have Microsoft trying to trip them up at every turn. From the official PS3 launch party held in Paris, the festivities were rudely interrupted when a barge carrying huge banners stating “XBOX 360 <3 YOU” floated on by, making PS3 fanboys around the world consider taking up high-seas piracy.

Watch video of the drive-by after the jump..

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New Line Cinema has won the rights to Epic / Microsoft’s super mega-hit Gears of War in a screenplay auction which consisted of a 21 page treatment by Stuart Beattie (Collateral, Derailed). Gears is of course MS’s biggest system seller since Halo, so let’s hope they go 1 for 2 in having one of their hits translated onto the big screen. I think there’s plenty of material to work with and it would be great to know actually what the heck is going on in the Gears universe with the game leaving so many unanswered questions.

Read more: New Line has rights to Gears of War film

Halo 3 gods Bungie have launched a new version of their community site, Bungie.net, improving usability and navigation in one fell swoop of the mighty sword of fandom. RSS feed, new ticker, easy access to everything in the Bungie universe and all the Halo 3 news you can shake a stick at.

See more: Bungie.net

Gaming and financial analyst Roger Eherenberg’s epic post tracking EA’s stock price and strategy is a great great read which he’s just revisited and revised. I’m actually still ingesting it all after the third read, but I can’t help but agree on just about every point raised. Focusing on EA’s mistake with focusing too much on the PS3, the article also takes Sony to task for their continued mis-steps in getting the PS3 into the homes of gamers and Nintendo’s brilliantly handled Wii which Eherenberg predicts is replacing the PS2 as the console of choice for mainstream gamers.

Read more: EA Revisited: Playing Catch Up on the Wii, Waking up to the Failure that is PS3

Crytek recently released a new DirectX 10 trailer for their upcoming FPS, Crysis, showing the world how things is done. What these folks are doing with their technology is beyond belief, but then again, with massive backers pumping lots and lots of money into them I’m not surprised what can be done.

Peep the future of high-budget AAA game development for Windows Vista after the jump..

Read more of “Crysis DX10 trailer, minds are blown“