Mandatory installation of Steam for the game's use of Steamworks deemed a "Trojan horse" by Direct2Drive; Impulse and Gamersgate follow.
Direct2Drive has told Gamasutra, "We don’t believe games should force the user to install a Trojan Horse." The PC version of Modern Warfare 2 will use Valve's Steamworks to manage such processes as installation, DRM, patching and save games, but this also means that Steam itself needs to be on players' systems.
Format: Flash
Developer: Oil Productions and Playerthree
http://www.miniclip.com/games/sneeze/en/
Half year financial results show jump in sales on same period 2008, but down 55.7 per cent in net income.
The Japanese publisher, and new owner of Eidos, reported that over the six month period between April 1 and September 30 net income of its entire business decreased 55.7 per cent from 6,054m to 2,683 million yen, while revenue from sales climbed from 67,974m to 90,561m yen.
CEO Bobby Kotick put the results down to the success of Guitar Hero 5 and the franchise in general, Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2, the Call of Duty franchise and World Of WarCraft.
Australian retail game sales were up 8.3 per cent in the first nine months of 2009 when compared to the same period a year earlier.
Citing data obtained from GfK Retail and Technology Australia, the Interactive Games and Entertainment Association (iGEA) said that sales are on track to outstrip last year’s record domestic haul of $2 billion.
The iGEA said that sales of console hardware rose ten per cent during the first nine months of the year, while software sales jumped five per cent to $716 million.
Epic Games has released a free edition of Unreal Engine 3 for educational and non-commercial use.
The Unreal Development Kit gives users access to the 3D game engine technology, Unreal Editor, Unreal Content Browser, UnrealScript, Unreal Matinee, Unreal Cascade and other tools, which are detailed here.
Previously, non-commercial access to the Unreal Engine 3 toolset had been available only through the PC versions of games such as Unreal Tournament 3 and the Gears Of War series.
3G wireless console Zeebo, positioned by Zeebo Inc both as an affordable game system and education platform, has shipped to over 2,000 stores in Mexico.
Rock band No Doubt has filed a lawsuit against Activision over the use of its name and likeness in Band Hero.
The group alleges that it has been transformed “into a virtual karaoke circus act” because players can perform songs using No Doubt avatars that weren’t approved by the band.
A social space? A cartographically accurate proxy for the real world? Some VR terra incognito to be carved up by entrepreneurs and homesteaders? A white elephant?
EA CEO John Riccitiello has said that the strength of digital sales is currently offsetting a challenging retail environment, and that he expects the digital sector to dominate the market in years to come.
Square Enix’s Dragon Quest IX was the bestselling game across Japan, the US and the UK during the third quarter of the year, according to sales trackers the NPD Group, GfK Chart-Track and Enterbrain.
Despite only being released in Japan, Dragon Quest IX outsold its nearest rival by almost one million units between July and September.
The top five sellers for the period were as follows:
Dragon Quest IX (Square Enix) - 3,925,000
Wii Sports Resort (Nintendo) - 3,014,000
The latest Top Global Markets report from sales trackers the NPD Group, GfK Chart-Track and Enterbrain has been released, showing a strong rise in Japanese software sales during the third quarter, but a decline in US and UK sales during the period.
According to the report, combined software unit sales across the world’s three largest game markets experienced a decline of six per cent between July and September.
THQ has announced its financial results for the three months ended September 30, 2009, showing a drop in sales but also reduced losses.
For its second quarter the publisher reported net sales of $101.3 million, compared with $164.8 million in the prior-year period, but its losses were heavily reduced from $115.3 million to $5.6 million.
Ubisoft has reported its financial results for the six months ended September 30, with sales during the period down 52 per cent year-on-year to €166 million.
Due to the sharp decrease in sales, the company expects to report an operating loss of around €80 million for the first half, compared with an operating income of €33 million during the first six months of 2008-09.
EA Sports boss Peter Moore has expressed his delight with FIFA 10’s critical and commercial reception in Japan, at the same time noting that foreign titles “have an extremely difficult time breaking through” in the country and that EA still has work to do to understand the market.
In the time it’s taken many to simply suss out the hardware, Burbank’s Insomniac Games has made more triple-A titles for PS3 than any other developer. Say what you like about the solemn and scrappy Resistance series, but its ongoing work with Ratchet & Clank has been exemplary. The gambolling Future series – which comes to a close with this month’s Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack In Time – shows just what you can do when you know your market, nail down your philosophy and, above all, have just as much fun as you intend for your audience.
MTV and Harmonix parent company Viacom has said that the economics of its Rock Band franchise “are improving, though not as quickly as we’d like”.
Speaking in a financial results call, CFO Tom Dooley said that the franchise made a negative contribution to margins in the third quarter.
Age Of Conan developer Funcom has been awarded a NOK 1.5 million ($262,000) grant from the Norwegian Film Fund to aid its development of a new extreme sports game.
“Funcom is working on a new project called Board With The World,” Erling Ellingsen, the company’s director of communications told us. “This will be a free-to-play social MMO focusing on the world of extreme sports."
Activision has launched a ratings awareness programme designed to educate parents about the Entertainment Software Rating Board's classification system.
For the initiative, dubbed Ratings Are Not A Game, the publisher has partnered with Dr. Cheryl Olson, co-director for the Centre for Mental Health and Media at Massachusetts General Hospital.
The pair have produced seven videos to help parents make informed decisions about the games their children play.
French publisher Gameloft has reported €90.2 million in sales for the first nine months of 2009, up 18 per cent year-on-year.
Mobile games generated 95 per cent of sales and console games the remainder. Europe was the firm’s biggest market, accounting for 38 per cent of sales. North America and the rest of the world both generated 31 per cent of revenues.
Atlus has acquired a majority stake in Japanese online publisher Gonzo Rosso in a bid to expand its business into the wider Asian markets.
Gonzo Rosso focuses on massively multiplayer online games, distributing titles including SONOV's Shaiya: Light And Darkness and Izumi Project's Pandora Saga, reports Gamasutra. Its games are available in numerous Asian territories and there are plans to bring them to North America.
Nintendo will offer demos of WiiWare games beginning later this month in a bid to stimulate sales of downloadable titles.
The test programme was confirmed by Nintendo president Satoru Iwata during a financial results briefing, reports IGN. Initially it will cover only a few select titles and it’s currently unclear whether it will run outside of Japan.
Playing Demon’s Souls makes me a boring person.
I've been playing the game. A lot. And I love it. A lot. The other night I spent hours with it, and in those hours, all I did was farm the same sections again and again, futz around with my gear, gain a few soul levels, and kill one Vanguard demon - and I killed him by shooting about fifty arrows into his forehead while he just stood there scratching himself.
One of my favourite things about Out Of The Game, the biweekly podcast that I record with three other former journalists and one current journo, is when a seemingly ordinary discussion of a recently released game veers into topics that are more provocative. Take the September releases of The Beatles: Rock Band and Guitar Hero 5 along with the August release of the movie Inglorious Basterds, for instance.
Microsoft has launched its previously rumoured Xbox Live Rewards programme in the US.
Designed to encourage use of Xbox Live services, the pilot scheme rewards active users selected to participate with free Microsoft Points.