If you work in the videogame industry, your goal should be to entertain and delight as many people as possible, and everything you do should be measured against it. The logical consequence of this is that players are the constituency you should really care about: everything you do should be aimed at making them happy, as they can make your life really difficult if they decide that they’re not being catered to properly, and reward you handsomely if they are satisfied.
Japanese publisher Marvelous Entertainment has finalised its merger with Liveware and AQ Interactive.
AQ Interactive, the parent company of Blue Dragon and Yoshi's Island DS developer Artoon, Nier studio Cavia, and Feelplus, developer of No More Heroes: Heroes' Paradise and Moon Diver, has been dissolved following the merger, as has mobile and social developer Liveware.
Clothing retailer Urban Outfitters is, in partnership with Kiranbe Collectibles, selling a 1989 Donkey Kong Game & Watch. For £130.
Gunpei Yokoi's original gaming portable may be collectible, but with eBay prices ranging between £20 to £50 we just hope Urban Outfitters hasn't overstocked.
Kaio King Of Pirates, the 3DS action-RPG in development at Keiji Inafune's Intercept studio, was announced a few hours ago. In an unusual move, the game's debut trailer and official website have already been translated into English.
LA Noire developer Team Bondi is to close its doors, according to documents filed with the Australian Securities And Investments Commission.
Earlier today, forms were submitted confirming that a liquidator has been appointed, with the company to be wound up, following a meeting of creditors last week. The liquidator will now handle the sale of Team Bondi's remaining assets and payment of outstanding debts.
Mediabistro has added more speakers and exhibitors to its Social Gaming Summit London event, due to take place November 14 and 15 at Chelsea Football Club.
WeeWorld CEO Celia Francis will deliver a presentation on online, social and mobile convergence; kiip founder Brian Wong's session will cover the "moments-based" advertising model; and SigusLabs managing director Arseny Lebdev will chair a discussion looking at web platforms for games.
Adult Swim's record as a publisher includes Robot Unicorn Attack, a browser and later iOS Canabalt-alike featuring a rainbow unicorn running to Erasure's Always. We'd recommend it. It's hard to ignore the cable TV channel's chosen videogame projects and Monsters Ate My Condo, developed by PikPok of Flick Kick Football fame, is another reason why.
Reiner Knizia is a designer extraordinaire of board games, many of which have already found their way onto iOS, including the excellent Samurai. But in recent years Knizia's work has been finding its way onto iOS less as conversions, and more as platform-specific new games.
Amid all the fresh new developers that the App Store supports, it's easy to miss how it's given a little bit of freedom to some of the more venerable software houses. Boutique blaster outfit Llamasoft's recent output speaks for itself: Goat Up is its fourth game of 2011.
Amid all the fresh new developers that the App Store supports, it's easy to miss how it's given a little bit of freedom to some of the more venerable software houses. Boutique blaster outfit Llamasoft's recent output speaks for itself: Goat Up is its fourth game of 2011.
Capcom legend Keiji Inafune has announced Kaio, an action-RPG for 3DS from his new studio Intercept.
Andriasang reports that Kaio - which translates as Sea King - has multiplayer support and a pirate setting, though the main character is a penguin. Its western name is King Of Pirates.
The game is being developed by Intercept in collaboration with Marvelous AQL, the newly formed company comprising Marvelous Entertainment, AQ Interactive and Liveware, and will be released in Japan next year.
On stage at yesterday's Let's Talk iPhone event held at its Cupertino headquarters, Tim Cook, new CEO of Apple, said that the iPod Touch had become the world's most popular portable gaming device.
"Not only is it the most popular music player in the world, but we're excited to announce it's now also the most popular portable game player in the world," he said.
Epic Games has announced that Adobe Flash now supports Unreal Engine 3, with CTO Tim Sweeney showing Unreal Tournament III running in a Flash-based environment during his keynote address at Adobe Max 11 in Los Angeles yesterday.
The move means games of similar graphical quality to some of the current console generation's biggest blockbusters will be playable in web browsers, on internet-connected TVs and social networks, and goes a long way to ensure Flash's longevity despite HTML5 being touted as the future of videogames on the web.
Epic Games has announced that Adobe Flash now supports Unreal Engine 3, with CTO Tim Sweeney showing Unreal Tournament III running in a Flash-based environment during his keynote address at Adobe Max 11 in Los Angeles yesterday.
The move means games of similar graphical quality to some of the current console generation's biggest blockbusters will be playable in web browsers, on internet-connected TVs and social networks, and goes a long way to ensure Flash's longevity despite HTML5 being touted as the future of videogames on the web.
FIFA 12 has sold-through 3.2 million units across all platforms since its September 27 debut, making it the biggest release in the history of sports games and the number one global videogame launch of 2011, according to preliminary internal estimates from publisher Electronic Arts.
Sell-through is thought to be up 23 per cent over last year's FIFA 11 launch. The iPhone and iPad versions of the new game have shifted 879,000 units, with the former becoming the top-grossing app for Apple’s device on 30 worldwide storefronts.
Apple's iPhone 4S press conference today played host to the unveiling of Epic Games subsidiary Chair Entertainment’s Infinity Blade 2, the follow-up to December 2010’s iOS smash hit.
The sequel will be exclusive to iOS devices, launching on December 1, 2011 for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, Gamasutra reports. It will support iOS 5 features including iCloud, enabling users to transfer profiles between devices.
A new report from the NPD Group has found that US children aged between two and 14 have increased their spending on digital games content by 17 per cent over the past two years.
The Kids and Entertainment Content report noted that for every dollar children spend on entertainment content, $0.79 goes on physical content and $0.21 towards digital.
The majority of kids’ content collections across both physical and digital formats consist of music with a 72 per cent share, followed by movies, games, TV shows, books and apps.
Apple has announced iPhone 4S, an upgraded version of June’s 2010’s iPhone 4, which will be available from Friday, October 14 in Europe and North America in 16GB, 32GB and 64GB models.
Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, said the device will feature the same dual-core processor found in the iPad 2. The A5 chip will make the phone itself "up to twice as fast as before" and enable graphics to run up to seven times quicker than on the previous iPhone.
Apple will launch iOS 5 on October 12, the firm announced this evening during a press conference at its Cupertino, California headquarters.
Available for iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPad and iPad 2, plus the third and fourth generation iPod Touch models, the free operating system update will add a range of new features.
Microsoft has announced that it has cancelled production of its Zune portable media player.
The news confirms reports from earlier this year, which claimed the platform holder would discontinue Zune hardware in the face of “tepid demand”. The last Zune player released was 2009's Zune HD.
In a statement, Microsoft stressed that the move will not affect current Zune owners as the portable entertainment brand will live on across various Microsoft platforms.
The Unreal Development Kit has been installed more than a million times, Epic Games co-founder Mark Rein has revealed.
"This isn’t a download count nor does it count users who installed a new version of UDK over an old version, or reinstalls," Rein clarifies in a post on Unreal Insider.
"This means there are more than one million different computers onto which the UDK has been installed. With this massive installed base there are countless stories to tell about what these developers are doing with the technology."
Capcom's Resident Evil Revelations will be released in Europe on January 27, Nintendo has announced.
As was the case with Resident Evil's 3DS debut, The Mercenaries 3D, Revelations - which promises to fill in the story between the events of Resident Evil 4 and 5 - will be co-published by Nintendo and Capcom.
According to a new study by E-skills UK, the sector skills council for business and information technology, UK developers are more concerned by the general state of the economy than Games Tax Relief.
The report, passed to Develop, polled 80 British studios and asked them to rate a list of issues on a scale of zero (no concern) to three (priority concern). The respondents rated the general health of the economy at an average of 1.8, ahead of exchange rate fluctuations on 1.5.
Indie RPG developer Jeff Vogel explains why he's decided to lower all the prices for his games, across the board, and why he sells at twice the price on his website compared to Steam.
Following wide demand, Jude Buffum is now offering unlimited numbers of copies of his Magna Arbor Vitae Deku poster (pictured in part above), which visually traces the evolutionary biology of Hyrule.
Guerrilla Games, the studio behind the Killzone PlayStation series, is looking for a senior multiplayer designer - one who "eats, sleeps and breathes nothing but multiplayer" - to work on the studio's latest project. If it's Killzone 4 you'll be able to build on the grand scale of the series' multiplayer component, if not you'll get to bring your ideas to something new. Either way, you'll be in charge of everything from level design to game mechanics.