Hacking scandals, interstellar protests and a raft of high-profile closures - 2011 was certainly a turbulent year. But there was plenty of good news too, from new hardware in the form of Vita and Wii U, to Minecraft's incredible rise and the advent of cloud gaming. Here we collect our round-ups of 2011, and look back across one of the game industry's most vibrant twelve months.
Greg Borrud, co-founder of Mercenaries and Full Spectrum Warrior developer Pandemic Studios, has unveiled his new venture, social game developer Seismic Games.
Speaking to TechCrunch, Borrud, who is co-founder along with fellow Pandemic staffer Eric Gerwitz and ex-Vivendi VP Chris Miller, said Seismic would not be working to the accepted social gaming model on Facebook.
Given its evident appreciation of vintage game design, WayForward's moniker often seems a little ironic. Yet this talented developer has a knack for making retrograde standards seem almost radical. Mighty Switch Force has a story – fembot Patricia Wagon must bring a cabal of bikini-clad criminals to justice – but it's tucked away in the e-manual, while tutorials are conspicuously absent.
So saturated is the App Store with word games that new arrivals struggle to stand out. W.E.L.D.E.R. relies on its pedigree - developed by Highline Games, a startup formed by ex-Rockstar New York staff - and its difficulty. Players are tasked with completing a set number of words per level by exchanging adjacent letters with a limited number of swaps, with a further five swaps awarded for every 250 points scored. Make a word and the letters disappear from the 8x8 board, the tiles above fall into their place and new ones appear at the top of the screen.
Microsoft Studios has announced a multi-year, multi-game strategic partnership with Arkadium, a New York-based developer of social and casual games.
In a press release, Arkadium described the deal as "an evolution of the relationship the two companies have been developing over the previous two years." Arkadium, set up in 2001 by husband and wife team Jessica Rovello and Kenny Rosenblatt, reaches more than ten million users each month on Facebook and the wider web, and claims to have the world's largest Flash game library.
EA's FIFA 12 holds onto top spot in the UK all-formats software chart for the week ending January 1, despite sales slowing by 27 per cent week on week.
It was a slow week at retail, with sales of the entire top five falling week on week. Battlefield 3 rises one place to third, replacing Just Dance 3; Mario Kart 7 climbs three places to number nine, and Forza Motorsport 4 rises one place to tenth. Those games aside, the top ten is unchanged from last week.
Organisers of the Serious Play Conference have issued a call for speakers ahead for the second annual event in August.
The conference - to be held at the same venue as last year, the DigiPen Institute Of Technology in Redmond, Washington - will over the course of three days feature sessions held by publishers, developers, market analysts and other industry professionals using game technology in the fields of education, health care, government and the military.
Over the Christmas holiday, the enterprising Flickr user Post-apocalyptic Research Institute published a set of pictures showing off its physical creation of a village from Minecraft using 3D printing technology and superglue.
The original world in Minecraft
Hideo Kojima has confirmed, and shown off, a special 3DS system being released alongside the upcoming Metal Gear Solid: Snake Eater 3D.
The system, to be bundled with the game in Japan, features what Kojima touted on Twitter as "the industry's first snake pattern-embossed design," according to Andriasang.
We'll be publishing our awards for this year throughout the week. See all of them by visiting the Edge Awards topic page, or following the topic using My Edge.
Steam has set a new record after more than five million people were logged in to Valve's PC platform at the same time.
Our friends at PC Gamer spotted that Steam passed the milestone yesterday, reaching an all-time high of 5,012,460 concurrent users on January 2.
Japanese retailers are cutting prices of the 3G model PlayStation Vita in a bid to stimulate demand, according to reports.
A Playfront report contains an image showing that one retailer has reduced the price of the WiFi/3G model from its RRP of ¥29,980 (£250) to ¥24,999 (£209) - a drop of almost 17 per cent which leaves it costing just ¥19 more than the WiFi-only model.
Atari has said it will "vigorously protect" its IP after one developer said he received legal threats from the company concerning his games on the App Store.
A touchscreen-controlled fusion of Frogger, Flight Control and Braid, Time Ducks is the kind of boardroom pitch that would likely open investors' chequebooks long before they were able to visualise what had just been sold to them. While the Braid allusion - the developer's own – might be a stretch, Frogger and Flight Control's mechanics are more useful in understanding Tough Guy Studios' warmly funny game.
We'll be publishing our awards for this year throughout the week. See all of them by visiting the Edge Awards topic page, or following the topic using My Edge.
Nintendo's 3DS has sold more than four million units in both Japan and the United States.
The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) has admitted it is "mindful of concerns" over its support of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) but said it has no intention of dropping its backing of the controversial US bill.
Games in the Angry Birds series were downloaded 6.5 million times on Christmas Day alone, according to Finnish developer Rovio.
A private arbitrator has ordered that Viacom pay $383 million to former shareholders of Harmonix, developer of the Rock Band series and a former Viacom subsidiary.
The dispute concerns bonus payments due to Harmonix shareholders following Viacom's acquisition of the studio in 2006. The terms of the deal required that Viacom pay bonuses of 3.5 times gross profit in excess of $32 million in 2007, and in excess of $45 million the following year.
A model Wipeout track complete with levitating ships, ostensibly created by the Japan Institute Of Science And Technology and released on YouTube just before Christmas, demonstrates the obvious and pure destiny of the superconductor technology known as quantum levitation.
Well, it would if it were real, at least. There's something fishy about the way the track looks - and some of the liquid nitrogen smoke trails seem to be visible through solid objects. So our money's on it being a CGI fake made as a viral for Wipeout 2048.
When it comes to open conflict, you're at your most vulnerable when you're on the offensive. It's the single insight that unites pursuits as varied as chess and Battlefield 3, and it's true of sumo, too, the ritualised form of warfare from which The Octagon Theory draws most of its inspiration.
Edmund McMillen's PC action-RPG The Binding Of Isaac could be headed to 3DS, the developer has revealed.
The long-running dispute between Bethesda Softworks and Interplay over the proposed MMOG Fallout Online has apparently come to an end after the parties reached a settlement.
Duck And Cover reports that a settlement was reached on the day of the trial itself; after lunch, the courtroom was locked to everyone but attorneys and clients because those inside were working towards a deal.
We'll be publishing our awards for this year throughout the week. See all of them by visiting the Edge Awards topic page, or following the topic using My Edge.
Indie action-RPG Bastion has passed half a million sales, developer Supergiant Games has announced.
"Recent holiday sales on Steam and Xbox Live Arcade put us over the top," Bastion writer Greg Kasavin posted on the studio's blog. "We're happy to have this many people playing and to be in a position to make more games on our own terms.