Microsoft has announced that it has acquired Austin-based Splosion Man and The Gunstringer developer Twisted Pixel.
Founded in 2006, the studio has built close ties with Microsoft, releasing four games for Xbox Live Arcade since 2009, while recent game The Gunstringer was a boxed Xbox 360 exclusive that made use of Kinect.
At a press conference in Japan last weekend, Square Enix showed off tech demos of its next-generation Luminous Engine, which it first announced in August, and announced features of its Luminous Studio development framework.
Designed with native DirectX 11 support, the engine includes cloth and fluid simulation, realtime reflections and highly efficient tessellation techniques that lower the level of detail of 3D models with minimal memory usage cost.
Zynga may have dominated the Facebook game charts, but its now eyeing the playing field outside of the social network. At the Zynga Unleashed event in San Francisco this week, company founder Mark Pincus confirmed "Project Z" (or Zynga Direct), a direct-to-consumer gaming platform that could effectively side-step Facebook and deliver Zynga content straight to the fans.
The Project Z website will still make use of Facebook Connect for multiplayer, however, and players will be able to swap between the two sites without affecting their game progress.
Revenue from social gaming on platforms other than Facebook is set to grow from $3.2 billion to $5.6 billion by 2014, according to data from a new study.
The report, compiled by online game research company Superdata and commissioned by social distribution platform provider Viximo, claims that Facebook represents just a third of worldwide traffic for social games.
If you've filled your hard drive to the rafters (as we have), news of a beefier 320GB hard drive, will come as a pleasant surprise in time for your Christmas haul/wishlist. Priced at £79.99 ($129.99 in the US), the drive comes with a download code for Lego Star Wars 3: The Clone Wars, too.
Cloud gaming company Gaikai chose GDC Online as the stage to announce that Colorado-based Level 3 Communications will be providing its online infrastructure.
"We've built the fastest, lowest latency interactive network in the world, and plan to expand the capacity to reach even more gamers using Level 3's incredible array of IP services," said Gaikai CEO David Perry. "We have focused religiously on the quality of the experience and are confident of being able to reach an audience of over 100 million users within the next year."
Sony has reported another hacking attack attempt on 93,000 accounts. Of the accounts, PlayStation Network and Sony Entertainment Network make up 60,000, plus 33,000 Sony Online Entertainment users.
Sony claims the hackers used "a massive set of sign-in IDs and passwords" to carry out the attack, but that only a "small fraction" of the accounts accessed displayed any activity before the company locked them.
A new report from Forfás, Ireland's policy advisory board for enterprise and science, has laid out a plan to double the size of the Irish game industry’s workforce within three years.
The report [PDF], Games Sector In Ireland: An Action Plan for Growth, says the Irish game industry currently directly employs 2,000 people, up five-fold since 2004, but that the number could grow to 4,500 by the end of 2014 if the government offers appropriate support for the sector.
A new report from market research firm the NPD Group has found that 91 per cent of US children aged 2-17 play games.
That amounts to approximately 64 million kids when you take the 4,136 individuals surveyed and weight the results to represent the US population.
According to the report, Kids and Gaming 2011, since 2009 the population growth of US children aged 2-17 rose 1.54 per cent, while the gaming population of that age group increased 12.68 per cent.
Facebook has rolled out an update for its iOS app which allows developers to distribute HTML5-based games. Users are now able to purchase, bookmark and play the third-party apps from within the platform, as well as purchase Facebook Credits.
And so the biennial Forza Motorsport edition rolls out on to videogaming’s increasingly congested racetrack. Picking out the competition, despite the heavy traffic, is easy: somewhere near the front, Shift 2: Unleashed and Gran Turismo 5 trade paint as Forza 3 pits from the lead, straight into retirement. That front spot is the position Forza 4 assumes it will take. It’s a fair assumption, and one that should surprise no one.
And so the biennial Forza Motorsport edition rolls out on to videogaming’s increasingly congested racetrack. Picking out the competition, despite the heavy traffic, is easy: somewhere near the front, Shift 2: Unleashed and Gran Turismo 5 trade paint as Forza 3 pits from the lead, straight into retirement. That front spot is the position Forza 4 assumes it will take. It’s a fair assumption, and one that should surprise no one.
Speaking at GDC Online, Ben Cockerill, associate producer at CCP Games, detailed the highest grossing avatar asset purchased by players of MMORPG Eve Online: a monocle.
The reason? It gets you into trouble, apparently: "If you dock a ship and you're wearing a monocle, people come and fight you," Cockerill told the audience.
We knew there was a reason monocles went out of fashion.
Speaking at GDC Online, Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell reinforced a recurring claim in game industry circles; that there won't be another (traditional) console platform, stating: "I don't believe there will be another major console".
Speaking at this week's GDC Online in Austin, Texas, frequent Edge contributor Giordano Contestabile addressed the transformation of the mobile gaming industry.
"One day the iPhone arrived and we became the darlings of the game industry," he said in a talk titled Successful Publishing On Smartphones: iOS vs. Android.
Speaking at this week's GDC Online in Austin, Texas, frequent Edge contributor Giordano Contestabile addressed the transformation of the mobile gaming industry.
"One day the iPhone arrived and we became the darlings of the game industry," he said in a talk titled Successful Publishing On Smartphones: iOS vs. Android.
Dr Richard Wilson, CEO of UK trade association TIGA, has responded to comments made by Ed Vaizey on BBC 2 current affairs programme Newsnight. During last night's programme, Vaizey called on UK businesses to help kick-start a computer science revolution in schools, but Wilson warns that most UK developers don't have the time to help teach in schools.
Dr Richard Wilson, CEO of UK trade association TIGA, has responded to comments made by Ed Vaizey on BBC 2 current affairs programme Newsnight. During last night's programme, Vaizey called on UK businesses to help kick-start a computer science revolution in schools, but Wilson warns that most UK developers don't have the time to help teach in schools.
"Evil is not the death of games design… it is its logical end point." Film writer Jonathan McCalmont suggests that game designers are ruthlessly manipulative, playing with our brain chemistry in order to make compulsive games. So evil, in fact, that he compares them with Michael Bay.
With US ratings body ESRB slapping a mature label on EA's upcoming COD-contender Battlefield 3, the company issued one of the more blunt - and hilarious - statements of response in recent times: "I don't think you understand the gravity of the situation," an EA spokesperson told Eurogamer. "For God's sake, there is a nuke in Paris! Millions of lives are at stake!!"
With US ratings body ESRB slapping a mature label on EA's upcoming COD-contender Battlefield 3, the company issued one of the more blunt - and hilarious - statements of response in recent times: "I don't think you understand the gravity of the situation," an EA spokesperson told Eurogamer. "For God's sake, there is a nuke in Paris! Millions of lives are at stake!!"
A pamphlet circulated at a Sony sales briefing in Japan has detailed how PSP owners will be able to continue playing their UMD collection on Vita. News of the pamphlet came from a Japanese retailer who claimed to be in attendance at the event.
Following the report, Sony development chief Yoshio Matsumoto revealed that Sony is considering offering a service which would allow owners of the UMD version of a game to download it again at a discounted price.
Web games are now far from an amateur concern. Once the scene was fuelled by dabblers, collecting under the banner of Flash to tease out the capabilities of a new technology. Now a fulsome economy has grown, allowing indie talent to blossom into professional concerns, while maintaining a good deal of creative freedom. In this second instalment of our weeklong series on Flash, we examine just how this unique arrangement came to be, detail the deals being cut, and discover what sort of sums are exchanging hands.
Following in the footsteps of the Humble Indie Bundle, a group of mobile developers have created their own iOS charity bundle. The Corona Indie Bundle includes five games created using Ansca Mobile's SDK, Corona, and costs 69p.
17 per cent of the proceeds from every sale will be split between three charities: Bliss, Child's Play and Dispensario de Managua.
In a post on its forums, BioWare has detailed how Mass Effect 3's four-player co-op will work following the confirmation of its existence yesterday.
According to community co-ordinator Chris Priestly, the co-op missions will have a "direct impact on the outcome of the single player campaign, giving players an alternative method of achieving ultimate victory”.