Here’s a roundup of today’s news found elsewhere on the internet:

Tax boost helps Capcom profits leap (gamesindustry.biz) - Capcom's profits for the nine months to December 31 have jumped 866 per cent from ¥179 million to ¥1.73 billion (£11.9m / $19.06m), due to a corporate tax refund.

Sales for the nine months to December 31 were ¥49.98 billion (£345.3m / $549.8m), up 5.9 per cent from the same period in 2008.

According to the company, sales of Monster Hunter Tri for the Wii and Monster Hunter Freedom Unite PSP the Best were significant sellers, while sales of Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth and Mega Man Exe: Operating Shooting Star were satisfactory.

Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles and Okami for Wii saw "slow sales" said Capcom. Resident Evil 5 continues to perform well. PSP title Sengoku Basara Battle Heroes was also credited for attracting a dedicated female audience.

Capcom's home videogame and licensing segments were the only divisions to perform well during the period, with the arcade operations, arcade game sales and mobile business all suffering a decrease in sales.

Steam user base grows 25% in 2009 (gamesindustry.biz) - The number of active Steam accounts has now surpassed 25 million, according to the latest figures from Valve, following a 25 per cent year-on-year growth for the platform in 2009.

Of those accounts, over 10 million have profiles in the Steam community, said Valve, and the service's average monthly player minutes have hit 13 billion.

And peak numbers of concurrent users hit a new high in December of last year, eclipsing the 2.5 million mark.

There are over 1000 games now on offer through Steam's store, from over 100 developers and publishers. Unit sales in 2009 increased by more than 205 per cent, marking the fifth consecutive year the platform has achieved over 100 per cent year-on-year growth in unit sales.

"Steam turned five years old in March 2009," said Gabe Newell, president of Valve. "With the introduction of each new platform feature released over the years - such as the Steam Community, Steam Cloud, and Steamworks - we've seen corresponding growth in account numbers, concurrent player numbers and developer support for the platform.

"As such, we plan to continue to expand and grow the platform to better serve the developers supporting the open platform and millions of gamers logging in each day."

2009 saw an increase of titles supported by Steamworks, including Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Dawn of War II and Empire: Total War.

EA "confident" for strong 2010 (gamesindustry.biz) - Following a year in which Electronic Arts regained the publishing top spot in Europe last year, the company's regional boss - Dr Jens Uwe Intat - has told GamesIndustry.biz that he's confident of a successful 2010.

"The year's starting with four strong titles from us - Army of Two: 40th Day and Mass Effect 2 were in January," he said. "Next it's Dante's Inferno, and then in March we've got Battlefield: Bad Company 2.

"That's four strong titles in the first quarter of the calendar year, so you bet we're confident that it's going to be a strong year overall. Certainly for ourselves."

He added that he's also looking forward to another milestone release for the company - the BioWare-developed MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic, a game which he believes could be well-positioned to compete effectively with the genre's behemoth, Activision Blizzard's World of Warcraft.

"First of all, I totally agree that World of Warcraft has been a very impressive product success in the last several years," he said. "It has a very strong and loyal community.

"Secondly I agree that quite a few companies, including ourselves with Warhammer Online, have tried to dethrone the game with different approaches - all trying to have some innovation on gameplay in order to lure players away from World of Warcraft.

"The reason why I'm much more confident in Star Wars being able to do that then Warhammer, for example, is that while Warhammer has been a very interesting product from a games point of view, I think the Star Wars franchise has such a huge fanbase across the planet that people being able to play that as an MMO... it will be a totally different reason for buying than just buying another massively multiplayer online game.

"We do feel that the title has a very strong proposal, and we're very confident that it will be super-successful."

He also noted that while the game's biggest challenge would be retaining its subscriber base over time, he thought that BioWare's experience in building "longer-term franchises" would stand it in good stead.

Aliens Vs. Predator's Horde Mode (Kotaku) - Check out this trailer for Aliens Vs. Predator's Survivor Mode, in which up to four players co-operatively take on the Alien hordes.

I suppose it's time to set aside the comparisons to Gears of War 2 and simply accept Horde Mode as a standard game type in online multiplayer shooters. It's just the natural progression of things.

Remember back in 1990 when the term for first-person shooter was "Doom clone?" We've moved on from that, now we can move on from this.