Square Enix Japan is likely to cut 200-300 jobs, according to a media report on Monday.
Kotaku is rumouring that the layoffs could be part of a corporate reorganisation after the publisher’s acquisition of Eidos earlier this year.
The introduction of tax breaks for videogame creators could tempt leading Scottish game developers like Realtime Worlds to relocate to Ireland.
Last week at an economic forum in Dublin, former Allied Domecq chairman and ex-Granada chief executive Sir Gerry Robinson urged the Irish government to target Scottish game developers with five-year tax holidays.
Sky Player, Sky’s online TV service, will be introduced to Xbox Live in October, Microsoft has confirmed.
Announced in May, the service will allow Xbox 360 owners to access a range of channels and programmes to view live or on-demand.
Apple has announced that more than two billion iPhone and iPod applications have been downloaded from the App Store in a little over a year.
The company said that there are now more than 85,000 apps available to over 50 million iPhone and iPod touch owners worldwide, and over 125,000 developers in its iPhone developer program.
Various online retailers in the US have suggested that the release of Sega and Obsidian's espionage RPG Alpha Protocol has been pushed back from this October to the summer of 2010.
Officially the game is due to be released stateside on October 6 for PS3, Xbox 360 and PC, but various retail outlets are now pointing to its likely delay, with GameStop indicating a June 2010 launch.
Microsoft Game Studios’ Kudo Tsunoda has said it’s unlikely it will be possible to “patch” current Xbox 360 titles to make them compatible with upcoming motion sensing technology Natal.
Japanese videogame tradeshow total attendance down five per cent on last year.
Figures from show organiser CESA indicate that total attendance on TGS’ two business days and two public days last week was 185,030, down from 194,288 last year and 193,040 in 2007.
The business days, however, proved slightly busier than last year, with 52,040 attending in total compared to 51,483. Attendance at 2007’s business days was rather higher at 62,173.
Sony US estimates 16,000 items will be available for download on PSN in north America with PSPgo’s release on October 1.
Though most content will be video, with 2,300 films and 13,300 TV programmes loaded on to the service, recently released games including Gran Turismo and Soulcalibur: Broken Destiny will also be available from the first day, according to IGN.
The 225 games in total comprise full versions of UMD releases, PSN exclusives and PSP Minis.
Joe Danger’s grinning, but you know he’s seen better days. There’s a little bit of a paunch. Faded posters showing him advertising breakfast cereal peel from his caravan walls. To top it all, the doctors said he’d never walk again. But this is his comeback – and it’s going to be sensational.
It’s often hard to draw a line between being captivated by an RPG and just plain being made a captive of one. They are games which reel out all manner of demands for progress, some petulant, some repetitive and some ludicrously illogical. Yet even by the standards of this tradition, Dark Chronicle’s opening acts dropped an unusually hefty ransom note into the lap of the player, for while most RPGs ask you to save the world, Dark Chronicle asks you to rebuild it, brick by brick, century by century, random dungeon by random dungeon.
Deal, to come to fruition later this year, marks end of O2’s two-year exclusivity and will double platform’s audience.
The news comes just three weeks after Orange proposed a merger with T-Mobile, which would make it the largest mobile network in the UK with 28 million subscribers compared to 02’s second position 22 million.
The deal, therefore, will mean that iPhone will be available to around 50 million customers in the UK, further expanding the platform's potential reach for App Store developers.
Bungie’s latest debuts in highest position while The Beatles: Rock Band drops out of top ten in week ending September 26.
It may not have thundered with a launch programme as loud as that granted to its older brother, but it hasn’t stopped Halo 3: ODST’s week one sales being the 12th highest sell-through ever for a single format title in the UK, according to GfK Chart-Track. Day one sales accounted for 65 per cent of the week’s total.
Over 25 game developers will receive funds designed to develop online gaming in the region, Korea Creative Content Agency says.
The investment is part of a £38 million (US$60 million) overall package disclosed by CEO Steve Ballmer in May. It will be spent over four years in a programme that includes Microsoft training software engineers, providing marketing and technical support and establishing new business enterprises.
Format: Nintendo 64
Release: 1998
Publisher: Gremlin
Developer: DMA Design
At the age of one, a child is on its feet and quite ready to walk around destroying things. In contrast, it took DMA Design nearly four years to prepare its own free-roaming rampage. Body Harvest is the sum total of all your fears. Not the game, but the nightmare of its development.
Ahead of his keynote speech at Games Convention Asia, Games Workshop co-founder and Eidos life president Ian Livingstone spoke with us about the future of UK game development.
Currently it’s more expensive to develop games in England than anywhere else in the world, he said. Without even considering outsourcing to Eastern Europe or China, it’s cheaper to make games in Japan and America.
Publisher Take-Two has announced that the sequel to 2007’s critically acclaimed BioShock is to release worldwide on February 9, 2010.
BioShock 2 is currently in development for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC at 2K Marin in collaboration with 2K Australia, Digital Extremes and 2K China. It was originally scheduled to launch on October 30, 2009 in Europe and on November 3 in the US, but was delayed in July in order to “provide additional development time”.
We've another Collector's Edition to give away, this time for PS3!
For those that have so far held back from buying Batman: Arkham Asylum, you could be in luck. We're giving away a copy of the PS3 version of the Collector's Edition to the first Edge reader to demonstrate a little knowledge of Batman lore.
During a presentation at the Games Convention Asia in Singapore, Lisa Cosmas Hanson revealed some insights into the minds of Chinese gamers.
Niko Partners, the research firm Hanson runs, tracks the attitudes of Chinese gamers, and has noticed some recent changes: the Chinese are as hungry as ever for games, but they now want to dictate the content they use.
During the opening keynote of Games Convention Asia in Singapore, the president of Sony Computer Entertainment Asia delivered a lecture on the subject of copyright protection and the human victims of piracy.
Using a translator, Tetsuhiko Yasuda - a veteran of the games business since launching Sony’s original PlayStation in 1994 - said: “It’s essential for the whole country to understand the protection of software is essential for the steady development of the game industry.
Format: iPhone, iPod Touch
Developer: Austen Chongpison
Direct App Store link
UK consumer show GameOn! London has been cancelled.
The event, which had attracted support from the likes of Nintendo and Capcom, was originally meant to take place in June before being pushed back to November and relocated from the Olympia National Hall to Earls Court.
Nintendo’s DSi knocked Sony’s PS3 from the top spot of the hardware sales chart in Japan during the week ended September 13.
Having sold over 150,000 units during its launch week, PS3 sales fell by 95,000 units to just over 55,000, while DSi sales were up by 6,500 units to 66,500.
Sony Computer Entertainment Europe has refuted claims that PS3 consoles have an inherent defect after the BBC show Watchdog carried out an investigation into what gamers have dubbed "The Yellow Light of Death".
Watchdog says it has been contacted by over 150 PS3 owners whose consoles no longer work, all of them displaying the same fault indicator - a yellow flashing light. If outside of the one year PS3 warranty period, Sony charges £128 to rectify the problem.
Celebrated music game creator Masaya Matsuura opened the DICE Asia summit in Singapore on Thursday with the line that “games are becoming a global language of culture”.
Matsuura said that music was a previous global language. “I feel proud to be part of an industry that’s truly without borders.” The games industry, he says, has brought him lasting relationships with people from many territories.
One month after release on Xbox Live Arcade, Trials HD’s leaderboards are 320,000 entries strong, a figure that represents by far the greatest commercial success yet seen by this small, Finnish independent studio.