Atari has appointed Anthony Jacobson and Pierre Hintze as vice presidents of business development and product development respectively.
Based at Atari’s Los Angeles office, the new executives will play key roles in the publisher’s growth strategy, according to CEO Jim Wilson, to whom they’ll report.
Jacobson most recently served as senior VP of game studios at interactive TV channel PlaydayTV. In his new role he’ll focus on deals for product development resources, licensing Atari content and new business opportunities.
With less than a week to go until launch, Naughty Dog’s Uncharted 2: Among Thieves currently ranks as Metacritic’s highest-rated PS3 exclusive game to date. You’ll find our review in E208, out October 27, but until then, here’s an interview with multiplayer designer Justin Richmond and community manager Arne Meyer in which we discuss how the studio’s “open family” approach helped build upon the outstandingly solid foundations of 2007’s Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune.
EA Sports’ FIFA 10 has sold 1.7 million copies in Europe in its first week of availability.
In the process the EA Canada developed game recorded the publisher’s biggest ever European launch and became “the fastest selling sports game ever”.
“We were confident that FIFA 10 would be a hit, and this week fans across Europe have shown just how much they love this game,” said EA Sports president Peter Moore.
Sales of Nintendo’s Wii and Sony’s PSP more than tripled in Japan during the week ended October 4.
Wii sales hit 32,000 units, compared with 10,500 units the previous week, while Sony sold about 49,000 PSPs, up from 15,000 units a week earlier, according to Ascii Media Works, reports Reuters.
Digital distribution sales figures belong to publishers, according to Valve, allaying hopes for global digital distribution sales charts.
In an interview with MCV, Steam business development head Jason Holtman said that publishers have little reason to share the detailed data they get on sales figures from the PC digital distribution platform.
Three of the leading men behind Halo break away to create high quality downloadable games.
Lead by managing director Michel Bastien, who was a producer on Halo 2 and 3, the team also comprises Damián Isla, who led Halo’s AI design, as director of technology and Rob Stokes, who was a design lead on Halo 3 and a designer and writer on Halo 2, as creative director.
Books and films are a linear form – a one-way communication from author to audience. Games are interactive, and increasingly players are discovering that the stories that matter most to them are the ones that they express through the game rather than the one that the game’s predefined narrative attempts to tell them. From the Machiavellian wrangling of Eve Online’s player-sustained universe to that last, improbably perfect, sticky grenade that garners you a Killtacular, player expression is rapidly overshadowing the script and setting.
President of Nintendo of America emphasises software as main driver for motivating continued Wii sales success.
Asked in an interview with US business news TV channel CNBC whether he saw further price cuts in Wii’s future, he said, “Absolutely not. What we have is great software.”
Ask anyone who doesn’t read comic books what other people like about comic books, and you’ll often hear: “They’re a power fantasy.” Take a cliché: the class runt comes home from a day of getting beaten by the bullies, reads a superhero comic, and dreams about putting on tights and throwing buses at everyone he despises. Complex problems turn into concrete objects, and then you smash ‘em. And so the bigger the wham-bam, the better.
As announced at its worldwide developers conference, the news that Adobe has enabled the conversion of Flash games into native iPhone apps has split opinions among developers.
Nicolas Doucet, a producer and art director at Sony Computer Entertainment's London Studio, has suggested that PS3 titles The Getaway and Eight Days have not been completely axed but instead “just put to one side”.
Sony appears to be making concrete steps towards the introduction of a digital rental service for PSP games.
The platform holder has added "Starts," "Expires," and "Hours Left" options to the information pane within PSP titles, according to The Retail Gamer and GameSpot.
Almost half of the workforce at Activision’s 7 Studios has reportedly been laid off.
The Los Angeles-based developer, which has worked on projects including Fantastic 4: Rise Of The Silver Surfer, Shrek The Third and Napoleon Dynamite: The Game, has cut around 30 members of staff, sources have informed Kotaku.
Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime has said that the firm isn’t anticipating any Wii or DS shortages this holiday season.
37 per cent of Wii games released from January to June 2009 were not reviewed, according to Jesse Divnich, director of analyst services at Electronic Entertainment Design and Research.
As our preview in E205 noted, and our review reiterates, it’s hard to press Scribblenauts’ start button. The game opens in a sandbox in which you can spawn objects ad infinitum, with no rules or conditions to get in the way, and it’s an awfully long time before you’re willing to translate your experimentation into the game proper’s more confined walls. That’s hardly a fault: how could you criticise a central mechanic for being so fun that all the normal apparatus of playing seems unnecessary?
King of casual plans to use money to aid expansion into social media and reaching new audiences.
The capital marks the first PopCap, maker of Bejeweled, Peggle and Plants Vs Zombies, has secured in the 10 years the developer has been in business.
Format: PS3
Release: Out now (US, Japan), TBA (Europe)
Publisher: Atlus
Developer: From Software
The disorientation you feel during the first few hours of Demon’s Souls is unprecedented. It’s not that you’ll be in any doubt about the mission: with a sword in one hand, a shield in the other, and a horde of approaching undead, the challenge is one of gaming’s most familiar. Few, however, will be prepared for the relentless setbacks heaped upon their miserable bones in facing it.
This is the first of a new series of columns about setting up a new independent game studio by Hello Games, creator of forthcoming race-platformer Joe Danger. In these articles, to be published every fortnight, the team will relate the trials and triumphs of developing a game with just four staff and an enduring love for Micro Machines and Super Monkey Ball.
Square Enix CEO Yoichi has said that the publisher aims to double its recurring profit to 50 billion yen ($561 million) in three to five years.
The executive said this could be achieved by expanding the company’s range of games and by growing its overseas operations in countries like China.
Available on Xbox Live today with first episode free; Peter Molyneux explains it’s a strategy to boost sales and will have implications for Fable III.
With the first section, the full childhood sequence, offered free of charge, Fable II: Game Episodes provide the same Achievements and challenges as the disc-based game, retain compatibility with existing DLC and player saves will seamlessly be carried between each instalment.
Age Of Conan developer Funcom will reportedly cut 20 per cent of its workforce and delay the release of its new PC and Xbox 360 MMO, The Secret World, by several months.
Vodaphone will become the third mobile phone operator to start selling Apple’s iPhone in the UK.
However, the UK’s second largest operator won't begin selling the 3G and 3GS versions of the iPhone until “early 2010”, meaning that it will miss out on the busy Christmas selling period, reports the Financial Times.
UK videogame trade association Tiga has released the results of its second business opinion survey, with CEO Richard Wilson suggesting that there’s “a cautious optimism among the majority of games developers with regard to the overall business outlook for the next six months”.
Almost 80 per cent of respondents expect their business to get a little or a lot better over the next six months and nearly two thirds of companies expect modest employment growth during the same period.
Nintendo will be an official sponsor of next month’s Handheld Learning Conference in London, where more than 1,000 delegates will debate and demonstrate ways in which learning can be positively improved through the use of technology.