Strauss Zelnick, CEO of publisher Take-Two, has questioned Zynga's business model, saying the social gaming titan's proposed IPO has yet to go through because of its "sketchy metrics."
US radiologists claim to have shown for the first time that playing violent videogames has an effect on parts of the brain that control emotion.
The study, carried out by the department of radiology and imaging sciences at Indiana University School Of Medicine, split a group of 22 men aged 18 to 29, none of whom were regular gamers, into two. The first group played a shooter for 10 hours in a week, then refrained from playing at all in the second week. The other group played no violent games at all.
Founded 2000
Employees 65
Key staff Tim Schafer (founder, president and CEO), Brad Muir (project lead, Iron Brigade), Lee Petty (project lead, Stacking), Greg Knight (art director, Sesame Street: Once Upon A Monster), Tasha Harris (project lead, Costume Quest)
URL www.doublefine.com
Selected softography Psychonauts, Brütal Legend, Costume Quest, Stacking, Iron Brigade, Sesame Street: Once Upon a Monster.
Issue 231, back issues of which you can buy here, includes a Post Script article that why Double Fine’s storytelling is the first casualty of war.
PC RPG The Witcher 2 has been illegally downloaded 4.5 million times, according to Polish developer CD Projekt.
Speaking in an interview with PC Gamer, CEO and co-founder Marcin Iwinski explained that he had calculated the figure by monitoring stats on torrent sites.
More than eight million copies of Battlefield 3 have been sold since its launch last month, publisher Electronic Arts has announced.
The news was revealed by EA CFO Eric Brown at the Baird Technology Conference in San Francisco yesterday, as reported by Game Informer. Brown also revealed that shipments of the game have now passed 12 million.
A new PlayStation 3 system software update, version 4.0, will be released this week, preparing the console for the launch of PlayStation Vita as well as making changes to PlayStation Plus features and privacy settings.
Over 960,000 Xbox 360 consoles were sold in the US alone last week, driving “the biggest sales week in the history of Xbox”, according to internal Microsoft data.
The total included more than 800,000 sales within a 24 hour period covering the annual retail spree that is Black Friday.
Microsoft also sold 750,000 Kinect sensors in the US last week, including those bundled with consoles.
The company said it expects Xbox 360 to be the best-selling console in the US for the eleventh straight month in November.
The Unity platform has amassed more than 750,000 registered developers, Unity Technologies has announced, with two-thirds of that figure signing up in the last 12 months.
Two hundred thousand users return on a monthly basis, Unity says, and the Unity Web Player has also grown apace, its volume of installs doubling in the past year to more than 80 million.
Ron Gilbert has revealed two pieces of concept art from the game he is working on with Double Fine, the studio run by his Secret Of Monkey Island co-creator Tim Schafer.
"I'm so excited," he wrote on his blog. "This is an idea that has been in my head for a long long time. It predates Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island.
"It's a game that needed to be made."
When videogames were young, our lives were simple: we had three of them, generally speaking, and we lost one whenever we ran into a ghost, or an alien, or a tank. Health didn’t come into it back then. We were alive and then we were dead. We thrived, and we fell.
Health came along when games became more ambitious, but did health make games healthier? Suddenly there were meters to measure, medicine to devour. Health allowed us to last longer, but it also made us addicts. Is it better just to live, and then, just as quickly, to die?
Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick has questioned whether BioWare's upcoming Star Wars MMOG The Old Republic will make any money for publisher EA.
Speaking at the Reuters Media Summit yesterday Kotick, whose company has dominated the MMOG sector with World Of Warcraft, said that even if The Old Republic did take off it would be George Lucas, rather than EA, that reaped dividends.
Central to the appeal of the PixelJunk series is its developer’s ability to do a lot with a little. SideScroller, after all, sees Q-Games conjuring scorched subterranean caverns, throbbing pink intestines and even toxic celestial clockwork from a handful of coloured vector shapes, and grinding an endless supply of tactical choices from just three basic weapon types – although, granted, they can all be upgraded. It’s thrifty stuff, and it’s mesmerising too.
As a creative tool, Freakyforms is a triumph. An expansion of Nintendo’s Mii channel palette, it offers a healthy variety of ways to assemble, shape and rearrange the creatures, or Formees, you’re encouraged to design. The more you birth, the greater the catalogue of parts you can choose from – and as your menagerie expands, so too does the simplistic cartoon world they inhabit. Gradually, new visitors arrive – either provided in-game or via StreetPass - to offer an even wider selection of assets.
Nintendo's 3DS has outstripped the first-year sales figure of its 3DS predecessor.
We all love a good dragon, but it’s the rare videogame that doesn’t completely ruin them, reining in those devastating powers so that a decent critical hit can finish them off in one go, or riddling that hide with glowing weak spots, perfect for attacks from cowardly archers. Burn And Turn doesn’t do any of that: it’s out to venerate fantasy’s biggest superstars rather than hobble them. Sure, its dragons may only be a dozen pixels high, but they’re formidable beasts all the same: jealous, violence-prone, and practically impossible to kill.
Blizzard Entertainment is looking for a sales director to cover Europe, Russia, the Middle East and Africa. You'll have to manage a team and will be directly responsible for creating and maintaining retailer relationships in Russia and new emerging markets. Best of all, the position is based in Versailles, France. Find all Blizzard's vacancies here.
Nintendo of Japan has announced that the 3DS firmware update, which adds a host of new features and was due before the end of the month, will now be released on December 8.
Super Mario 3D Land has sold half a million units in the United States since its launch on November 11, making it the fastest-selling handheld Mario game of all time.
Nintendo Of America president Reggie Fils-Aime told USA Today that sales of the 3DS itself rose 325 per cent in the week Mario's 3DS debut was released. Wii swan-song The Legend Of Zelda: Skyward Sword has sold 535,000 units since its release on November 20, with half a million Wiis sold on annual US retail spree Black Friday.
Robomodo, developer of Tony Hawk: Ride, is seeking funding for development of its new project on crowdsourcing website Kickstarter.
The developer's mobile wing, Robomite, is seeking $35,000 in funding for Bodoink, a Kinect game using Xbox Avatars for release on Xbox Live Arcade. Writing on Kickstarter, the team explains that its primary goal is to finish development of the game before finding a publisher, a necessary evil for the game to stand out on XBLA, enabling it to retain full control of the IP.
Thirteen million user accounts have been compromised after online game MapleStory was hacked, publisher Nexon has confirmed.
Nexon discovered last Thursday that data including user IDs, passwords, names and residential registration numbers had been taken, according to the Korea Herald, though only South Korean user accounts were compromised.
"We operate separate servers in each country," a spokesperson said. "Only Korean's users' information was affected."
Stephen Lavelle, working under the name Increpare, is well known for his prolific production of willfully lo-fi webgames, touting hurried, aliased art and some mixture of opaque philosophising and acidic satire. They are excellent, so long as your measure of excellence involves a substantial, perhaps overwhelming, dose of maniacal bafflement. With English Country Tune, though, it seems he's committed to a more commercial and coherent effort.
Zynga had bids knocked back this summer for PopCap as well as Angry Birds developer Rovio, according to reports.
The New York Times claims that Zynga bid $950 million for PopCap in July. The Plants Vs Zombies developer accepted a bid of an initial $750 million from Electronic Arts, with the promise of a further $550 million if earnings targets are met.
Size Five Games' educational title Privates was among the winners at the BAFTA Children's Awards in London last night.
Privates, a sex-education shoot-'em-up developed for Channel 4, won the Learning Secondary award. Lego Pirates Of The Caribbean won the Videogame award, beating Kirby's Epic Yarn, LittleBigPlanet 2 and Pokemon Black & White.
Our January issue, which is on sale December 20, will include an in-depth interview with Mojang founder and Minecraft creator Markus "Notch" Persson on the game's journey up to this point, and what comes next.