The Week in Review & Rumor Round-up: Valve Apologizes for Wrongful Bans, GTA 5 Rumored to be in Hollywood, Hard Financial Times for Many, and Tons of 3DS Scuttlebutt

This week kicked off with Valve apologizing to over 12,000 Steam users whose accounts were wrongfully banned. Gabe Newell stated “The problem was that Steam would fail a signature check between the disk version of a DLL and a latent memory version. This was caused by a combination of conditions occurring while Steam was updating the disk image of a game.” In short, Valve’s cheat-detecting software went crazy and shut down honest people’s accounts. While I’m sure this experience was annoying for these users, they will be getting a free copy of Left 4 Dead 2 for the inconvenience.

Grand Theft Auto 5 rumors were also flying this week, with two separate websites claiming the next entry in the series would be located in Hollywood (or its GTA equivalent). Both sites are citing anonymous sources, with VG247 saying that Hollywood is already a done deal and Eurogamer simply stating that Rockstar is researching the location. While this doesn’t make the location official, it does lend some credence to the possibility.

With several companies reporting on their first financial quarter this week, it became apparent the video game industry certainly isn’t recession proof. Nintendo reported a very rare loss of $288.4 million and Capcom barely turned a profit after a ninety percent drop, leaving them with only $25.3 million in earnings. However, while Sony also reported a loss in their PlayStation division, being down $43 million was a vast improvement over their previous year, which saw them reporting a loss of $422.1 million.

Considering much of Nintendo’s financial losses were being pinned on a lack of DS hardware sales, it came as no surprise that this week was full of 3DS talk. The company trademarked a plethora of terms, most of which involving CrossPass, thought to be a renaming of the system’s tag mode. Speculation from analysts suggested that 3DS games may cost more than those of the DS and the console itself may have a price tag of anywhere up to 300 dollars. Thankfully, the company themselves announced the system would be launching in Japan by October and that official pricing and release date information would be given on September 29th.