Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios boss Shuhei Yoshida has said the industry must support digital indie game development in order to sustain innovation.
Yoshida told Develop “the whole industry will stall” if small, creative ‘garage developers’ aren’t encouraged to flourish.
“As an industry, we have to support those smaller teams, and let them try out their ideas,” he said. “Without doing so, the whole industry will stall, in terms of innovation.”
Mobile analytics and advertising network specialist Flurry has released research which shows that free-to-play revenue has overtaken premium revenue in the App Store.
Flurry's research shows that 65 per cent of revenues from the 100 most-downloaded games in June came from titles using the freemium pricing model, compared to just 39 per cent in January this year.
According to market research company NPD, US consumers spent an estimated $5.9 billion on videogames, hardware and accessories in the first quarter of 2011. The figure represents a 1.5 per cent increase year-on-year, with $2.03 billion accounting for video and PC game sales.
In total, an estimated $1.85 billion was spent on used games, rentals, subscriptions, digital downloads, social titles, DLC and mobile games.
According to market research company NPD, US consumers spent an estimated $5.9 billion on videogames, hardware and accessories in the first quarter of 2011. The figure represents a 1.5 per cent increase year-on-year, with $2.03 billion accounting for video and PC game sales.
In total, an estimated $1.85 billion was spent on used games, rentals, subscriptions, digital downloads, social titles, DLC and mobile games.
Capcom is the modern master of repackaging, and Street Fighter IV is its flagship project. Excluding the arcade versions, Volt is the sixth standalone SFIV game thus far. Cynics point out that these iterations often introduce features that should have been in the game in the first place, and to an extent they have a point, but it's a shallow one. No one who's bought multiple SFIV iterations cares as much about new characters and levels as new features the playerbase has demanded.
Politics is not a game – it's a dirty business, one that Titus makes almost straightforward as he faces a series of elections in which he tries to pocket cash from lobbyists, or hold a town hall meeting while dodging rotten tomatoes.
Retro can mean all sorts of things – especially when, as it is in gaming, it's trendy. Retro tends not to deal in specifics, the description often presaging a blocky aesthetic that skins a modern game rather than something that could have been made thirty years ago. But Forget-Me-Not isn't trendy retro: you could have found this on a C64 compilation, and it's infused from title screen to the music’s ascending bloops with old-school values.
Eve Online developer CCP has revealed that players of its upcoming PS3 massively multiplayer FPS Dust 514 will be required to pay a "cover charge". According to the developer, the charge will be refunded as in-game currency and is in place to help manage the rollout of the game.
If someone had told me a decade ago that I would prefer digital media – downloads or streams – to physical media, I’d have said they were crazy. After all, I didn’t have broadband in my Brooklyn apartment, just at the office. My Palm VII wireless handheld and my SkyTel two-way pager were the pinnacle of technology. And I still fancied myself a proud collector of CDs, DVDs, books, comics and games.
Zumba Fitness remains at the top of the UK all-formats software chart this week, while Dirt 3 makes a late bid for the top rising from seven to two.
Transformers: Dark Of The Moon also ascends the chart, buoyed by the release of the film, settling at number three. Lego Pirates Of The Caribbean and LA Noire round out the top five.
UK trade association TIGA has warned that the nation's game industry is facing a continued "brain drain" of skilled development staff. The warning was based on results from a recently conducted survey of 104 UK game business which revealed that 20 per cent of them had lost staff to foreign countries in the past 12 months.
Katamari Damacy and Noby Noby Boy creator Keita Takahashi will help out on the development of Tiny Speck's upcoming casual MMOG Glitch (check Glitch's tag page for a full preview of this fascinating game) according to a blog post on the developer's site.
Takahashi, who left Namco Bandai last year, has moved to Vancouver in order to join the team.
Zynga has acquired Toronto, Canada-based developer Five Mobile for an undisclosed sum.
“Zynga is crossing the border,” the social gaming firm said in a blog post announcing the deal, which includes “certain assets and intellectual property” created by Five Mobile.
The acquisition is Zynga’s 15th in just 13 months.
Five Mobile founders Ameet Shah, Jeff Zakrzewski, Oliver Tabay and Troy Hubman will all remain on board, with Shah heading up the studio.