With Christmas coming, all game developers and publishers are starting to offer all sorts of game goodies for free – we could have a special weekly round-up just for the freebies, but we won’t. Instead, just as we do with the news, we are only picking the best of the best and offering them, once again, to you. So here are some of the most important news of this week that’s just drawing to an end.

It was a week dominated by the highly anticipated release of the PlayStation Home Open Beta. Unfortunately (but not coming as a huge surprise, since such things happen) the launch was accompanied by errors and problems, which were fixed in the end by Sony.

Nintendo must’ve been very happy this week since the hardware sales figures for November arrived and showed us that the Wii sold twice as better than last year in the same period. We can’t say, however, that Sony is doing great right now: the company announced 8,000 jobs will be cut; on the other hand, it appears that things can be better for Microsoft, too: they’re going to slash 1,700 jobs as well…. and tough times are coming!

A possible solution for the companies to record much higher sales would be combining successful franchises and offering them as one title. It is very unlikely to happen, at least in a few particular cases – and we have a list of games that should be mixed together but won’t.

However, you should not be upset! If super cool game combinations are not coming, at least the freebies are flourishing these days: you can get a couple of Far Cry 2 maps for free, for example, or you could simply go check our top ten list of best free games of 2008 and pick a game. You’ll certainly enjoy it. Happy gaming!