Trials system for pre-ordering second-hand games, from one week after release, for £33.99.
UK retailer Game has combined two cornerstones of its business strategy by enabling customers to pre-order pre-owned games.
MCV reports that the UK’s largest specialist retailer is trialling the service, whereby consumers can order in advance a second-hand copy of the game one week after release, for £33.99, a £16 saving on SRP and a £6 saving on Game’s typical retail price for new games.
How catering for spectators as well as players was “like inventing Basketball 2.”
Social reinvention promises “more prominent role” to pigs; cross-media strategy outlined as Rovio looks to Disney.
Angry Birds, Finnish developer Rovio’s game which has been downloaded more than 75 million times since release in 2009, is to see a release on Facebook.
There are millions of potential players on the social networking site, and Rovio sees a social reinvention of the game as an exciting prospect, allowing is to experiment with its hugely successful formula.
Populous creator tells how beans, Commodore and someone in his local fired the creation of a classic.
Co-founder enthuses about “super-high engagement” which drove 1.1 million hours of work last month.
More than 400,000 developers are using the Unity development platform, according to Unity Technologies.
The Schell Games CEO compares gaming to Valhalla and says men are "faking it" when it comes to social games.
Giving a typically amusing speech at the Women In Games Awards during this year's Game Developers Conference, Schell Games CEO and creative director Jesse Schell, highlighted the differences in approach between all male, and mixed-sex teams, pointing out the benefits of female input in any project.
Double Fine picks up three awards in the third annual ceremony.
The third annual Women in Gaming Awards was held yesterday at GDC 2011, hosted by Microsoft and the IGDA Women In Games special interest group. The awards recognise the key women working in the industry today and featured the following categories: Art, Audio, Business, Design, Engineering, Production, Rising Stars. The full list of nominees and winners is below:
Art
Lydia Choy, Senior Tech Artist at Double Fine
“We want good play, we want compelling experiences. We are not the ones making ‘evil’ games.”
Brenda Brathwaite, co-founder of social game developer Loot Drop, pleaded with her audience at GDC yesterday to not tar all social game firms with the same brush.
Senior engineer John McCutchan on how Move’s homebrew development platform works.
Earlier this week, Sony announced Move.Me, a server application enabling hobbyist development of software using PS3’s Move motion controller. At GDC yesterday we caught up with John McCutchan, a senior engineer at SCEA, who explained how it works.
Developer: Farbs
Format: Flash
One game at a time, we’re gradually getting our heads around franchises that use a well-placed off-shoot to mess with the mechanics and change the main series’ temperament. Square-Enix and AlphaDream have spent much of the last decade proving that Super Mario works surprisingly well as an RPG hero, for example, while more recently Rebellion has helped Evil Genius bring a touch of style and humour to social games on Facebook – even if a little of the empty grind remains intact.
TT Games producer says 3DS has roughly equivalent power to Wii, "but with superior lighting".
The former Apple gaming evangelist points out the industry's relative youth, says smartphones offer very real competition.
Former Apple gaming evangelist Graeme Devine gave a talk on how to create a good iPad interface at GDC 2011 yesterday. We caught up with Devine, whose CV boasts lead designer roles on games such as 7th Guest, 11th Hour, Quake III Arena and Halo Wars, following his session.
Latest iteration of Sony's free development environment adds support for PSP and NGP.
The third iteration of Sony's free cross-platform development environment, PhyreEngine, has been revealed at GDC 2011, and adds support for PSP and NGP development. Previous iterations of PhyreEngine have powered games such as Critter Crunch, Shatter, Demon's Souls and thatgamecompany's Flower and flOw.
Though confusion over total units sold results in contradictory figures.
Speaking during the PlayStation Network Analysis panel at GDC 2011, SCEA digital distribution manager, Pierre Gravereau, claimed that Sony's revenue was up 70 per cent in 2010.
New franchise to be published by Activision in ten-year deal.
Speaking at a seminar on gameplay networking at GDC 2011, Bungie lead network engineer, David Aldridge, revealed that the studio’s next game will be a “massively multiplayer action game”.
Aldridge directly addressed rumours that the game would be “WOW in space”, emphatically denying that this would be the case. Moreover, the game won’t be set in the Halo universe and will instead form part of an all-new franchise.
The Quantic Dream head wants to bring emotion and greater realism to games' portrayal of war.
Quantic Dream founder and CEO, David Cage, has told CVG that the studio behind Heavy Rain is currently working on two “very different” projects, and intends to turn its sights on the war genre once they’re finished.
PC eco-sim Fate Of The World will see a UK retail release after being picked up by publisher Lace Mamba Global.
Developed by Oxford-based Red Redemption, the indie title hands players a complex simulation of the world's climate and lets them choose whether to rescue humans from global warming or seal their fate.
PopCap’s Jason Kaplan on unsexy sexy poker, and by which match-three puzzler Bejeweled was inspired.
At a few months short of ten years old, Bejeweled is by some way the youngest game to be the subject of one of GDC’s Classic Game Postmortems. Yet with the conference dominated by the recent rise of quick-fix, mainstream mobile and social games it seems an appropriate subject.
Double Fine founder Tim Schafer announced at GDC that the studio is developing new mech combat title Trenched for Xbox Live Arcade.
Set to be published by Microsoft, the thirdperson action game is a sci-fi war blaster that lets players “turn no man's land into real man's land,” according to the tagline.
EA has announced that the open beta for Battlefield Play4Free will launch on April 4.
According to PC Gamer, early access to the open beta will be granted to Battlefield: Bad Company 1 and 2 players who hold an EA account, and Battlefield Play4Free Facebook and Twitter followers, on March 31 and April 2 respectively.
Ruined, the latest title from browser-based MMOG specialist Bigpoint, has entered closed beta in the States, with a European release to follow in the summer.
Playable through any web browser and set in ruined venues inspired by some of San Francisco’s most famous landmarks, it’s billed as a fast-paced, tournament-style thirdperson shooter that pits players against one another in a competition to become the ultimate villain.
Creator of beloved Dreamcast series says: “Only 200 people will buy it... funding is an issue.”
Yu Suzuki told a GDC session earlier today that Sega will “probably” let him make Shenmue III – though he admits that budgetary constraints are a likely stumbling block.
In response to a question asking when Shenmue III would be released, the series’ creator Suzuki said: “Well, I want to make it. About 200 people will buy it, I think. But funding is an issue.
Infamous 2 will allow players to create their own missions and upload them for the community to play.
Writing on the PlayStation Blog, Sucker Punch development director Chris Zimmerman said the studio had been working on the secret feature for the past two years.
PS3 application allowing development of motion-controlled software to be shown off at GDC.
Later today at GDC Sony is to officially unveil Move.Me, a software development application allowing homebrew applications to be created for PlayStation 3's motion controller, Move.
Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata has said the company won’t make decisions about a Wii successor until software developers run out of inventive ideas for the original system.
Speaking to Yomiuri Online (translated by Andriasang), he pointed out: "It's just four years since [Wii's] release. It's selling over seven million units a year in North America, so we don't think it's at the limit.
“We'll make decisions about a successor system at the time when software developers cannot offer surprises [on Wii]."