Microsoft Corp plans to cut the price of its best-selling Xbox 360 Pro model by $50, to $299 in the next few weeks, the Hollywood Reporter reported citing anonymous sources.

The price cut for the Xbox 360 model with the 20 gigabyte hard drive will come before the video game industry’s biggest trade show, E3, taking place in Los Angeles on July 15-17, the report said.

Rumors of the Xbox price cut swirled on popular gaming blogs Joystiq and Kotaku last week. The two sites received snapshots of Kmart and Radio Shack flyers advertising the $299 price.

A Microsoft spokeswoman declined to comment on the report.

Microsoft’s June security updates were bad news for online criminals who make their living stealing password information from online gamers.

The company’s Malicious Software Removal Tool– a program that detects and removes viruses and other bad programs from Windows machines– removed game password-stealing software from more than 2 million PCs in the first week after it was updated to detect these programs on June 10.

One password stealer, called Taterf, was detected on 700,000 computers in the first day after the update. That’s twice as many infections as were spotted during the entire month after Microsoft began detecting the notorious Storm Worm malware last September.

“These are ridiculous numbers of infections my friends, absolutely mind-boggling,” wrote Matt McCormack, a spokesman with Microsoft’s Malware Response Center, in a Friday blog posting.

Between June 10 and June 17, Microsoft removed Taterf from about 1.3 million machines, he said.

Google is heading to the PlayStation Portable and will have a place on the handheld’s Cross Media Bar (XMB) menu, Sony said Tuesday.

It will appear when users upgrade their PSPs to the version 4 firmware, which will be available “soon,” according to Eric Lempel, director of the PlayStation Network, who was posting on Sony’s PlayStation Blog.

“This new upgrade replicates the Google Internet search experience, delivering the same search results that you’d get at www.google.com. And with a search history recall of 20 items, Web searches couldn’t be easier,” he wrote.

Google will appear in the network section of the XMB. Also new in the version 4 firmware will be the ability to change viewing speed when playing back videos from Memory Stick cards.

Disney is bridging the gap between gaming and virtual worlds.

Disney Interactive Studios on Thursday formally launched DGamer, a free avatar-based community for U.S. buyers of games the company developed for the handheld Nintendo DS.

Beginning with Friday’s release of “The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian” in tandem with the theatrical release of the fantasy sequel, all Disney Interactive DS games will come with DGamer-added content like customizable avatars. DGamer members also will be able to use the WiFi connectivity of the DS to communicate with other members with either a DS or a PC.

Although it features avatars and text chat, DGamer can’t really be described as a true virtual world such as Disney Online’s Club Penguin or Fairies.com — at least not yet.

But as Paul Yanover, executive vp and managing director of Disney Online, noted, “DGamer is our opportunity to work with Disney Interactive to make sure we have this connected environment and to make sure we reach our guests wherever they are, including a player on a Disney Interactive DS title talking to a player in ‘Pirates of the Caribbean Online.’”

Microsoft Corp said on Wednesday its Xbox 360 game machine beat Nintendo Co Ltd’s Wii and Sony Corp’s PlayStation 3 to reach 10 million units in U.S. sales.

“History has shown us that the first company to reach 10 million in console sales wins the generation battle,” Don Mattrick, a Microsoft senior vice president who heads the company’s Xbox business, said in a statement.

The Xbox 360 was the first of this latest generation of game machines to launch in the United States when it was released in November 2005. The PS3 and Wii were launched in the United States a year later.

The Wii is closing in on the Xbox 360, with 8.8 million units sold as of the end of March, while Sony has totaled 4.1 million PS3 units sold, according to market research firm NPD.

Thanks to a new software driver Nvidia is cooking up, any PC game can be played in 3D, with no extra work on the part of game developers.

Beginning this summer, any PC with an Nvidia graphics processor will have the ability to run a game in normal mode, or in 3D, with the aid of 3D glasses.

The software driver will enable the ability to have two views–left eye and right eye–which, at the push of a button, appear blurry and pixelated to the naked eye. When viewed through 3D lenses though, the game pops into three-dimensional mode.

The important part is that game developers won’t have to do anything differently. They just continue to make their games the way they want, and Nvidia will take care of the rest. It’s just an option for gamers though–it doesn’t mean all games have to be three-dimensional.

Microsoft is cracking down on players on its Xbox Live gaming service who use hacks to artificially inflate their scores.

“Today, we took action,” said Larry Hryb, Microsoft’s Xbox Live programming director, in a blog post Wednesday.

Hryb, who blogs under the pseudonym Major Nelson, said Microsoft would reset cheaters’ “gamerscore” accounts to zero and eliminate all past achievements. Their gamer profiles would also publicly show they’ve been caught cheating, according to Hryb.

Sony on Thursday reported that hackers may have penetrated security on the PlayStation network and gained access to some users’ personal information.

Sony said the security breach occurred at the PlayStation Store, a content download service of the network. “Although unlikely, it is possible that the passwords of a small percentage of PlayStation Network users may have been changed through unauthorized access,” the company said.

The next update of Sony Corp.’s PlayStation 3 console, slated late this month, will include features that let users download games, video and ring tones.

Sony said Thursday the system update will add Blu-ray Disc Profile 2.0, or BD-Live capability, to the PS3. It will also let users copy photos and music playlists on to their handheld PlayStation Portable, use the PSP as a remote control for playing music on the PS3 and stream linked video files from the Web.

This will make the PS3 the first Blu-ray player with access to Internet content and downloads. Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., which owns the Panasonic brand, also plans to ship a BD-Live player this spring.

With the updates, Sony wants to build the gaming console’s status as an entertainment hub.

The downloadable content will range from bonus movie scenes and trailers to “interactive movie-based games.”

Microsoft Corp cut the prices of its Xbox 360 video game console in Europe by up to 28 percent on Monday to try to spur sales in a key battleground in the fast-growing industry.

The 80-euro decrease results in cuts of 18 percent to 28 percent across the three Xbox 360 models, bringing the cheapest Arcade version to 200 euros ($307) and the high-end Elite to 370 euros ($568).

Prices reductions in Britain range from 20 pounds to 50 pounds.

Microsoft Corp announced late on Wednesday it will cut the prices of its Xbox 360 video-game consoles as it continues to battle Nintendo’s Wii and Sony’s PlayStation 3 for dominance of the gaming market.

Microsoft said it would cut the price of the Xbox 360 console to C$349 from C$399, while the premium Elite model with a larger hard drive would drop to C$449 from C$499. The more basic Arcade model is dropping to $279 from C$299.

Microsoft Corp. said Wednesday it will make Xbox 360 video games developed by players available for download through the console’s online service.

The new service will double the size of the Xbox 360 game library, to 1,000 games within a year of its launch, scheduled for this holiday season, the company said.

To distribute a game on the Xbox Live service, game creators must use Microsoft’s XNA Game Studio software, which requires a $99 per-year subscription, or be an XNA Creators Club member. Each game will be vetted for quality and appropriateness by the online community itself.

Creators Club members will be able to test a beta version starting this spring.