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September 20, 2011

Unreal Development Kit now supports Mac

Mac support is the principal addition in Epic Games' latest update to its Unreal Development Kit (UDK) beta, with the company promising developers "easy cross-platform distribution."
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/37337/Latest_UDK_Beta_Update_Adds_Mac_OS_Support.php
Gamasutra

Mac support is the principal addition in Epic Games' latest update to its Unreal Development Kit (UDK) beta, with the company promising developers "easy cross-platform distribution."

In a statement seen by Gamasutra, Epic said: "UDK games can now run on Mac OS. Every UDK game's potential userbase has now increased dramatically yet again.

"The development process is virtually identical for games to be run on the Mac platform, but the packaging and deployment process does require some additional steps."


EA confirms Visceral closure

EA has confirmed reports that it is to close Visceral Studios, the Australian developer which worked on Dead Space, The Godfather 2 and Dante's Inferno.
http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/ea-s-visceral-melbourne-studio-closes/084952
MCV

EA has confirmed reports that it is to close Visceral Studios, the Australian developer which worked on Dead Space, The Godfather 2 and Dante's Inferno.

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Players spend "32 per cent longer" on InnoGames’ titles than Bigpoint's

InnoGames' highlights ComScore data which shows significantly higher German player retention rates than that of market leader Bigpoints in June 2011, across fewer releases.

According to InnoGames, the online publisher's German players spend on average 32 per cent longer playing its games than market leader Bigpoint's. InnoGames' release highlights ComScore data which showed that while Bigpoint had approximately 2.4 million players spending 7.4 million hours across the publisher's 71 games during June 2011, InnoGames 1.1 players spent 4.1 million hours across just five games in the same period.

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Gearbox wants your Duke Nukem feedback

Help decide Duke's future by completing a quick survey.
http://survey.gearboxsoftware.com/index.php
Gearbox

Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford is on record as saying that June's Forever wouldn't be the last we'd see of Duke Nukem, and the studio is now seeking feedback on the game, presumably as part of its planning for Duke's next outing. You don't even need to have played the game to give your feedback - it appears Gearbox is as interested in why you didn't - and the survey only takes a few minutes. We'd fill it out ourselves, of course, but we assume Gearbox already knows our thoughts.


Study: 72 per cent of App Store revenue comes from in-app purchasing

Further evidence of freemium's growth as revenue climbs from 28 per cent in 2010.
http://www.pocketgamer.biz/r/PG.Biz/Distimo+news/news.asp?c=33527
Pocket Gamer

Mobile market research firm Distimo looked at the 300 most popular apps on Apple's App Store and found that downloads of free apps had grown 34 per cent since last year. Downloads of paid apps, however, have grown by just 7 per cent.

Despite just 4 per cent of apps on the download service using the system, 72 per cent of all App Store revenue comes through in-app purchasing, up from just 28 per cent in 2010. Of that figure, 24 per cent was through paid apps, and double that through free apps.


Battlefield 3 honoured at TGS Future Game Awards

EA's shooter the sole foreign recipient of CESA award.
http://andriasang.com/comy8x/
Andriasang

This year, eleven of the hundreds of games on the Tokyo Game Show floor were honoured with a Future Game Award by organisers the Computer Entertainment Supplier's Association. The sole foreign recipient of an award, according to Andriasang, was EA's upcoming shooter Battlefield 3.

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Original Assassin's Creed bundled with PS3 Revelations

First shipment of Revelations to include 2007 original.
http://www.joystiq.com/2011/09/19/day-one-copies-of-assassins-creed-revelations-on-ps3-to-includ/
Joystiq

According to Joystiq, Ubisoft's initial shipment of Assassin's Creed: Revelations for PlayStation 3 will also include the 2007 original. Ubisoft has just confirmed that the offer applies to the European, as well as the North American, release of the game.


Harmonix explains Rock Band Japan no-show

"Japanese families tend to not make a lot of noise in their homes."
http://www.joystiq.com/2011/09/18/harmonix-ceo-alex-rigopulos-explains-what-happened-to-rock-band/
Joystiq

In 2008, Harmonix announced that it was working with Tetsuya Mizuguchi's Q Entertainment to bring the Rock Band franchise to Japanese shores. More than three years later that is yet to transpire, and at last week's Tokyo Game Show CEO Alex Rigopulos explained why.

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Inafune offered to finish Mega Man Legends 3

Capcom legend asked to stay on as a contractor, but was turned down.
http://www.gameblurb.net/news/capcom-refused-to-let-keiji-inafune-to-complete-mega-man-legends-3/
Game Blurb

Capcom cancelled what would have been Mega Man's 3DS debut in July, and former head of production Keiji Inafune apologised to fans soon after despite leaving Capcom last October. Speaking to 4Gamer - translated by Game Blurb - Inafune reveals that he reached out to the publisher in the hope of saving the game. He explains that, when he told Capcom he was leaving, he offered to stay on as a contractor to finish projects he had started.

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September 19, 2011

Netflix launches game rental service

The US movie rental service has renamed its mail-order offering Qwikster, and has quietly begun offering game rentals to at last give competition to GameFly, which has operated without significant opposition for the best part of a decade. "Members have been asking for videogames for many years," writes CEO and co-founder Reed Hastings in a blog post, "and now that DVD by mail has its own team, we are finally getting it done." GameFly can still boast of a competitive edge, however: its catalogue covers a far wider range of formats than Qwikster's PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii.
http://blog.netflix.com/2011/09/explanation-and-some-reflections.html
Netflix


TrackMania 2: Canyon review

Gorgeous, confusing and very much the same - the user-generated racer returns.

There’s a line that should be drawn between encouraging players to make a game better, and relying on them to make it playable. Or is there? Even that, it seems, is for the Trackmaniacs to decide. Visit the official forums for TrackMania 2 and what you’ll see is a game being documented more than discussed.

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DC Universe Online going free-to-play

Sony Online Entertainment has told IGN that is to restructure its PC and PlayStation 3 MMOG DC Universe Online to make the game free to play. The new, three-tier structure gives those that play for free just two character slots, though more can be unlocked through microtransactions. Those who have spent a minimum of $5 in the game in the past - either through microtransactions or subscription fees - will be Premium players, with access to more character slots and a higher cash limit. The third tier, Legendary, comes at a monthly cost of $14.99, and among other benefits will give players all future DLC packs for free. Executive producer Lorin Jameson said: "We are really seeing the benefits of free-to-play, and we're really liking it. Needless to say we're paying close attention to it and maybe looking to make some surprise moves a little later."
http://uk.ps3.ign.com/articles/119/1195161p1.html
IGN


Deus Ex's boss battles were outsourced

Eidos Montreal outsourced Deus Ex: Human Revolution's controversial boss battles to Grip Entertainment, whose president Paul Kruszewski admits in a behind-the-scenes video that he came into the project with no prior experience of the series. "Full confession: I'm a shooter guy," he says. "I was coming into this not knowing a lot about the Deus Ex world. The guys at Eidos gave us the design, gave us the engine…and we gave them back that experience." Many players will agree with Kruszewski's admission that bosses were a tough balancing act given the freedom afforded by the game's augmentation system - "Balancing that was brutally hard," he says - but may disagree with his claim that Grip succeeded. "I've been building technology for 20 years," he says, "and it's one of the cleanest, best pieces of technology I've ever built."

 


Exploring Borderlands' Pandora

How a dash of redneck charm brought Gearbox Software's world to life.

The guns – all 17 million of them – may be the most obvious draw, but it’s the setting of Pandora that ultimately saves Borderlands from a life spent aping Halo. The planet’s as craggy and hostile as any Forerunner ring-world, but it’s built to serve humour rather than dry, rattling grandeur, and its dramas are personal, for the most part, rather than apocalyptic.

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Out There: The rise of the local game

Plus HP Lovecraft envy and blocky resonance cascades.

“Historically, however, video games have shied away from game designs that required social organisation. The industry has long believed that organisation of people in that way doesn’t scale, and that while its fine for sessional games like a Wii Sports party, it just gets too complicated to keep a long term game going for most players to bother.”

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Portal with screenshots video

Arthur Lee's proof of concept demo is pretty remarkable. In it, you can take a screenshot and place it on a surface as a portal into the world as it was when you took the picture. Made in Unity, and described by Lee as a "rip off" of Portal and Retro Affect's Snapshot (see the lower video below to understand how), it sparks with potential, though taming the freedom that it'd lend players is probably the big challenge. Bets on Lee getting snapped up by Valve in the next few weeks?
http://www.superfundungeonrun.com/
Arthur Lee


Writers' Guild Awards nominees announced

Last year, Rockstar's Red Dead Redemption took home the Writers' Guild Award for Best Videogame Script, and this year's nominees have been announced. Ed Stern is nominated for his work on Brink, and is joined by Alex Garland and Tameem Antoniades for Ninja Theory's Enslaved: Odyssey To The West, and Kieron Gillen for Channel 4's online game The Curfew. The award ceremony is set for November 16 at The Tabernacle in London's Notting Hill.
http://www.writersguild.org.uk/news-a-features/general/203-guild-awards-2011-shortlists-announced
Writers' Guild


Foldit players solve AIDS puzzle

Gamers model retroviral protease, which has baffled scientists for a decade, in just three weeks.

Players of the online game Foldit have helped discover the structure of an enzyme that had the scientific community stumped for a decade, representing a significant step forward in attempts to cure retroviral diseases like AIDS.

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Fortresscraft passes 500,000 downloads

Projector Games' Xbox Live Indie Game, heavily inspired by Mojang's Minecraft, had grossed a million dollars from 350,000 copies sold by the beginning of last month. The intervening weeks have taken that total past the 500,000 mark, with the developer taking to Twitter to say: "After only 163 days of being available, I'm incredibly proud for Fortresscraft [to] finally sell that magic half-million; thank you everyone."
https://twitter.com/#!/Fortress_Craft/status/115562618449698816
Twitter


Cut The Rope hits DSiWare

It's little surprise that Cut The Rope will be released on DSiWare this week given its success - it was downloaded six million times in its first four months - but given Nintendo's stance on small independent, or "garage" developers, it's heartening to see a true mobile success story available as a download for Nintendo handhelds. However, those that take this as a sign that Nintendo has changed its policy on smartphone software should note that it's priced at €5, compared to just 69p on the iOS App Store. It'll also be available on the eShop, the 3DS download store on which an updated 3D version of NES shooter Twinbee will also be released this week.
http://www.nintendo.co.uk/NOE/en_GB/
Nintendo


Opinion: Identity in games

Videogaming’s greatest questions: Who am I? What do I shoot? Why am I an American?

The topic of ‘personal identity’ in philosophy is a knotty one, as Julian Baggini’s recent book, The Ego Trick, shows. What guarantees that you are the same person from one day to the next, or from one decade to the next? Some thinkers favour a story about psychological consistency, which others attempt to challenge with fantastical parables. Suppose that, through some magic sci-fi process, you suddenly underwent ‘fission’, so that there were now two identical human beings who shared all your thoughts and memories. Which one would be ‘you’? Both?

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Sony confirms Vita will be region free

At E3 in June, Sony Worldwide Studios Europe vice-president Michael Denny said that the company's upcoming PSP successor would be region free "to the best of my knowledge." Now Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida has taken to Twitter to confirm that the handheld will not be region-locked - just as well given that we're still without western release dates for the handheld, which will be on Japanese shelves on December 17.
https://twitter.com/#!/yosp/status/114813147948384258
Twitter


Dead Island retains UK top spot

Two weeks at the top for Deep Silver's zombie-infested action-adventure.

Deep Silver's Dead Island is the UK all-formats number one for the second week in a row.

The open-world zombie holds its lead over last week's number two, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine, which stays in second place despite sales falling by 52 per cent.

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Yoshida: Vita update process to be streamlined

Speaking to Game Informer at last week's Tokyo Game Show, Sony Worldwide Studios' Shuhei Yoshida said the company realised the time taken to update PS3 firmware was excessive. "It's very annoying when you only have one hour in your busy life to play a game, and when you have to spend 30 minutes out of that one hour to update the hardware," he said. "So it's not necessarily the frequency of how we update, it's the intrusiveness of the current process we have on PS3 and PSP. I cannot talk about specific plans, but we are very aware of the issues, and we'd like to address those issues on PS Vita."
http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2011/09/18/sony-s-shu-yoshida-talks-vita-psp-lessons-and-nintendo.aspx?PostPageIndex=2
Game Informer


Report: EA to close Melbourne studio

Kotaku reports that EA is to close Visceral Studios, the Australian developer which has worked on Dead Space, The Godfather 2 and Dante's Inferno, following the cancellation of its current project. EA Games vice president Patrick Soderlund has apparently decided that the team's triple-A Xbox 360 and PS3 game was not going to be profitable, and pulled the plug on both the game and the studio itself.
http://www.kotaku.com.au/2011/09/eas-visceral-studios-in-melbourne-rumoured-to-close-on-monday/
Kotaku


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