Sony CEO Howard Stringer today told 8,360 shareholders at Sony's annual shareholders meeting in Tokyo that the hacking attacks against PSN were a result of the company defending its IP. "We believe that we first became the subject of attack because we tried to protect our IP, our content, in this case videogames," he said.
The Entertainment Software Ratings Board and Entertainment Merchants Association have each issued statements voicing their approval of yesterday's US Supreme Court ruling against the California violent games law.
Yesterday's ruling threw out Leland Yee's bill, which looked to ban the sale of violent videogames in the state, and instead asserted confidence in the ESA self-regulated ratings system.
In a landmark case for the videogame industry, the United States Supreme Court has ruled against California's video game violence law in the Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, declaring it unconstitutional.
The decision of the nine Justices was announced today, the law ruled invalid with a vote of 7-2. The court's full decision can be read here.
Former Team Bondi employees who worked on LA Noire have revealed the game's difficult seven-year development in a series of interviews with IGN.
The site interviewed 11 former employees - all of whom wished to remain anonymous - and studio head Brendan McNamara. Common themes that come up include complaints of constant crunch periods, a lack of overtime pay, a confused hierarchy within the team and criticisms of McNamara's leadership.
Samaritan. Not the most obvious name for a tech demo inspired by Blade Runner. But then you see who it’s by. Epic Games, whose Unreal Engine 3 sold many of today’s leading developers a ticket into this hardware generation. Whose Unreal Tournament games, furthermore, with their modding tools and contests, sold gamers tickets to development in general. Whose Unreal Development Kit, which incorporates the tech behind its latest triple-A games, is now handing out tickets for free.
505 Games' perennial chart botherer Zumba Fitness has kept the number one spot it reclaimed from Duke Nukem Forever last week. The muscle-bound misogynist has dropped down to number eight, replaced by Warner Bros. Interactive's horror FPS F.E.A.R. 3, which debuts, fittingly, at number three.
According to market research company NPD, digital gamers are now spending nearly as much time as 'core' gamers playing and buy more games on average.
While core gamers remain out ahead when it comes to play time, spending on average 18 hours a week gaming, digital gamers spend just two hours less a week at 16.
Meanwhile, core gamers acquired 5.4 games on average over the previous three months while digital gamers were ahead with 5.9. When considering these figures, it should be remembered that digital games often cost less than retail titles.
Heading the Brighton-based conference's design track, David Braben will discuss the challenges Frontier's team has faced in creating an open-world Kinect game that takes place in a faithful recreation of Disney's themepark.
"You don’t get a better opportunity than this to work with a wide range of rich characters and stories that are genuinely loved by huge numbers of people the world over. It has been a great experience which I’m looking forward to discussing in Brighton in July," Braben says.
Microsoft is preparing a free-to-play service for Xbox Live, incorporating Microsoft point-funded microtransactions, according to Develop sources.
The sources claim that Microsoft is courting developers to discuss possible free-to-play game deals monetised through either in-game purchases or premium upgrade options.
Hacking group LulzSec has disbanded following one last attack on EA's free-to-play Battlefield Heroes beta. Announcing an end to its activities via Twitter and a statement posted on a file sharing site, the group said that its "planned 50 day cruise has expired."
Until late last year, Brighton studio Relentless Software had spent its entire seven year history bound by an exclusivity deal with Sony.
Until late last year, Brighton studio Relentless Software had spent its entire seven year history bound by an exclusivity deal with Sony.
Despite constantly being touted for some time as the future for mobile gaming, new research has shown that HTML5 remains some way behind Flash in terms of performance.
Software architect Sean Christmann used his benchmarking tool, GUIMark, to assess the current disparity in performance between HTML5 and Flash on nine different mobile devices.
If the short story, as John Updike argued, is a room upon whose walls a number of fake doors have been placed, then a videogame adaptation offers it the chance to be transformed into a series of rooms upon whose walls a number of locked doors have been placed. That’s certainly been the fate of H. P. Lovecraft’s famously ghoulish tale The Outsider.
Duke Nukem Forever is number one in the Nordic chart, which collates sales data from Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark, for a second successive week.
The Take-Two shooter, which became a byword for protracted development before Borderlands developer Gearbox Software was finally able to finish off the work started in 1997 by 3D Realms, retains top spot despite the release of The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time 3D, which makes its debut in third.