Fresh details about Xbox 360’s upcoming motion sensing camera, Project Natal, are likely to be revealed at two Gamefest conference sessions in February 2009.
A Natal design track will focus on developing ideas “to help you take your game from office to living room - creating new ways to work, building showcase experiences, divining user intent, and designing gestures for UI versus game interactions”.
Apologies for the late appearance of last week's Games Index, due to Edge Online's site outage on Friday. Please note that the chart games are taken from last Monday's UK top ten selling games.
Every week, the Edge Games Index, produced in association with Brandwatch, rates games according to the volume of positive and negative buzz they're inspiring on the web.
US media watchdog the National Institute on Media and the Family (NIMF) is to close on December 31 due to a lack of funding.
NIMF was founded in 1996 “to educate and inform the public, and to encourage practices and policies that promote positive change in the production and use of mass media”.
Nintendo launched the DSi LL this weekend in Japan, generating queues for the product at a number of stores.
Around 100 consumers were waiting in line at Yodobashi Camera in Akihabara when the store opened on Saturday, while the queue was over 60 strong at Bic Camera in Tokyo's Ikebukuro, according to Famitsu (via Kotaku).
PS3 exclusive Uncharted 2: Among Thieves has surpassed one million sales “in just a couple weeks on the market,” according to publisher Sony.
"Uncharted 2 has become the highest rated current exclusive action adventure game on any platform with a Metacritic score of 96," Sony Computer Entertainment's senior VP of strategic business development, Phil Rosenberg, said at the BMO Capital Markets Digital Entertainment Conference.
Social networking sites Facebook and Twitter are to be made publicly available on Xbox 360 on November 17, Microsoft has confirmed.
The features will be free to Xbox Live Gold subscribers but won't be accessibe to those under the age of 18.
Konami’s World Soccer Winning Eleven 2010 debuted atop the Japanese software chart during the week ended November 8.
The PS3 version of the football title moved 218 000 copies in its first week – the Xbox 360 edition charted at 22 – to comfortably outsell Pokemon Heart Gold/Soul Silver and Wii Fit Plus, which shifted 73,000 and 70,000 units respectively.
PS3 was the bestselling individual hardware platform in Japan during the week ended November 8.
A 13,000 jump in weekly sales saw Sony’s home console overtake DSi, which took second place ahead of PSP-3000.
Sony’s handheld platform managed to outsell Nintendo’s when taking into account sales of all models, despite the fact that PSPgo sales more than halved during the portable’s second week on the market.
Weekly hardware sales (previous week):
PS3 - 48,925 (36,061)
DSi - 37,421 (37,517)
“Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has become the biggest launch in history across all forms of entertainment,” according to publisher Activision.
Having released on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC on November 10, the Infinity Ward developed shooter sold approximately 4.7 million copies in North America and the United Kingdom in its first 24 hours of availability, generating $310 million, the company estimated.
Xbox 360 sales have reached ten million across Europe, the Middle East and Africa in four years, Microsoft has announced.
The platform holder also said that Xbox 360 is the only console to achieve year-on-year growth across the region this year, based on figures from sales monitor GfK Chart-Track. Additionally, Microsoft research has found that 35 per cent of Xbox customers are women and 64 per cent are over the age of 25.
Square Enix's RPG will launch on March 9 next year on both PS3 and 360.
Announced at the end of a video hosted on the game's official site, the date for the game's European and north American release was accompanied by the news that X-Factor winner Leona Lewis will be singing the game's theme tune.
With FFXIII due for release in Japan on PS3 only on December 17, the gap between regional releases is the shortest in the series' history.
Nintendo and BBC will launch dedicated channel for on-demand TV and radio content with improved features on November 18.
The new version of the service, which has been available to Wii through its Internet Channel since April 2008, will feature improvements including a full-screen interface. It's a similar move to the one that saw iPlayer appear as a separate menu item with PS3's 3.0 firmware update in September.
Uncharted 2, Wii Fit Plus and Borderlands also perform well, but software sales decreased 18 per cent compared to October 2008.
At 575,000 units across all platforms, NBA 2K10 sold the most copies in October, while around half of Wii Fit Plus sales were bundled with the Balance Board, suggesting there are many newcomers to the series.
Wii and 360 face largest declines in unit sales compared to October 2008 in the US, with overall unit sales down 20 per cent.
803,000 Wiis were sold in October 2008, but only 507,000 sold in the same month last year, while 360 sales dropped from 371,000 to 249,700. DS sales held the most steady, year-on-year, at 458,000 sales compared to last October's 491,000.
Revenue for the month down 19 per cent on October 2008, but still the third highest on record, according to NPD Group.
Videogame software, hardware and accessories netted US$1.07 billion in the month, compared to US$1.32 billion in October last year. But the analyst projects that the US market is on track to generate full-year revenues of US$20-21 billion, which is only slightly below last year's revenues of US$21.3 billion.
Since embarking on building Astronaut: Mars, Moon and Beyond for NASA, Daniel Laughlin has had many people ask him if videogames were just about blasting anything that moved. After all, how can something so banal and violent possibly teach us about the inner workings of the universe?
The social networking game maker behind Mobsters and Sonority Life raises large sum in venture capital funding round.
Every Thursday, the Edge Games Index, produced in association with Brandwatch, rates games according to the volume of positive and negative buzz they're inspiring on the web.
'Father of the PlayStation' Ken Kutaragi has set up a new company, Cyber Ai Entertainment.
Kutaragi, who also acts as president of game developer Cellius, started the new company in Tokyo to develop next-gen online services.
Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer on PS3 has returned after an outage caused by server overloads following the game’s record-breaking first day on sale.
The problems, which saw the Playstation Network rejecting all Modern Warfare 2 traffic after a problem with a thirdparty server led to a flurry of error messages, were quickly fixed on the server side, but a patch for the game is expected on Friday to repair the party system.
Activision’s Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 sold an estimated 1.23 million units in the UK on the day of its release, grossing around £47 million.
According to figures released by ELSPA and GfK Chart-Track, that smashes the previous day one UK sales record held by Grand Theft Auto IV, which sold 613,000 units and grossed £27.2 million on its day of release in April 2008.
18 months ago, Philips came to our offices to show us a new product, amBX. Comprising desk speakers, a sub-woofer, units which put out coloured light and a fan, it was designed to enhance PC games with effects that were intended to enhance the experience of playing, blowing air into your face as you sprinted in Crysis, flashing red and yellow as we died in an explosion.
Microsoft has banned "a small percentage" of Xbox Live users found to be in possession of modified Xbox 360 consoles.
While the platform holder didn’t release specific figures, the Guardian reports that the number of users affected ranges from 600,000 to one million. Xbox Live had over 20 million active members across 26 countries as of May 2009.
EA CEO John Riccitiello has expressed his frustration at the weaker than expected performance of Nintendo’s Wii.
Speaking during a second quarter earnings call, the executive said that stalled Wii sales during the first half of the business year coincided with EA holding the lion’s share of third party sales for the platform.
