Leading US retailer GameStop began selling copies of Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 this weekend ahead of the highly anticipated shooter’s official release on November 10.
The company’s management said that it had authorised select stores to begin selling reserved copies of the game in order to counter a loss of sales to other retailers who had broken the title's street date.
Tekken publisher Namco Bandai has posted a net loss and reduced sales for the first half of its business year.
Sales for the six month period ended September 30 fell 9.5 per cent year-on-year to 172.73 billion yen ($1.9b/£1.14b), while the company swung from a profit of 1.28 billion yen ($14.2m/£8.4m) to a loss of 6.04 billion yen ($67.1m/£39.9m).
If you want to play Radiant Silvergun – and in a few hundred words you may – you’ll need two things: a Japanese Saturn and a spare £100. Everyone has tales to tell of the arms and legs they’ve paid for a longed-for game, whether it was stomaching £65 for Mario 64 or handing over £90 to an unscrupulous indie for a ‘rare’ copy of Super Street Fighter II.
Nintendo’s Wii Fit Plus climbed one place to take the top spot on the UK all formats chart as Wii hardware sales rocketed during the week ended November 7.
South Korea-based NCsoft has reported giant leaps in third quarter profit and revenue on the back of the western release of its latest MMORPG, Aion.
Third quarter revenues rose 112 per cent year-on-year to KRW 116.3 billion ($100m/£60m), while net income soared 836 per cent to KRW 46.9 billion ($40.5m/£24.1m).
As expected, Konami has reported sharp revenue and profit declines for the six months ended September 30, 2009.
Company wide revenues fell 22.5 per cent year-on-year to 114 billion yen ($1.27b/£757m), operating income declined 79.8 per cent to 4.6 billion yen ($51.1m/£30.6m), and net income fell 81.3 per cent to 2.2 billion yen ($24.4m/£14.6m).
PSP was the bestselling hardware platform in Japan during the week ended November 1.
Including first day sales of PSPgo, which launched in the country on the final day of Media Create’s weekly tracking period, PSP hardware sales topped 64,000 units.
Nintendo’s DSi remained the most popular individual system, ahead of PS3, while Wii slipped to fifth place thanks to PSPgo’s debut.
Weekly hardware sales (previous week):
DSi - 37,517 (42,199)
PS3 - 36,061 (29,977)
PSP - 34,911 (32,865)
Leading Nintendo figures have sent out mixed messages concerning the company's high definition strategy.
During the firm's recent financial results briefing, Genyo Takeda, general manager of Nintendo’s Integrated R&D Division, said that the industry’s shift to high definition “appears a natural flow", although he stopped short of confirming HD support for future products.
Sky Player on Xbox 360 is now available to all Xbox Live Gold subscribers in the UK and Ireland, Microsoft has confirmed.
Every week, the Edge Games Index, produced in association with Brandwatch, rates games according to the volume of positive and negative buzz they're inspiring on the web.
Format: Wii
Release: Out now
Publisher: Majesco
Developer: WayForward
Screenshot gallery
Activision president Mike Griffith claims removing support for dedicated servers will lead to improved "consumer experience".
Mandatory installation of Steam for the game's use of Steamworks deemed a "Trojan horse" by Direct2Drive; Impulse and Gamersgate follow.
Direct2Drive has told Gamasutra, "We don’t believe games should force the user to install a Trojan Horse." The PC version of Modern Warfare 2 will use Valve's Steamworks to manage such processes as installation, DRM, patching and save games, but this also means that Steam itself needs to be on players' systems.
Format: Flash
Developer: Oil Productions and Playerthree
http://www.miniclip.com/games/sneeze/en/
Half year financial results show jump in sales on same period 2008, but down 55.7 per cent in net income.
The Japanese publisher, and new owner of Eidos, reported that over the six month period between April 1 and September 30 net income of its entire business decreased 55.7 per cent from 6,054m to 2,683 million yen, while revenue from sales climbed from 67,974m to 90,561m yen.
CEO Bobby Kotick put the results down to the success of Guitar Hero 5 and the franchise in general, Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2, the Call of Duty franchise and World Of WarCraft.
Australian retail game sales were up 8.3 per cent in the first nine months of 2009 when compared to the same period a year earlier.
Citing data obtained from GfK Retail and Technology Australia, the Interactive Games and Entertainment Association (iGEA) said that sales are on track to outstrip last year’s record domestic haul of $2 billion.
The iGEA said that sales of console hardware rose ten per cent during the first nine months of the year, while software sales jumped five per cent to $716 million.
Epic Games has released a free edition of Unreal Engine 3 for educational and non-commercial use.
The Unreal Development Kit gives users access to the 3D game engine technology, Unreal Editor, Unreal Content Browser, UnrealScript, Unreal Matinee, Unreal Cascade and other tools, which are detailed here.
Previously, non-commercial access to the Unreal Engine 3 toolset had been available only through the PC versions of games such as Unreal Tournament 3 and the Gears Of War series.
3G wireless console Zeebo, positioned by Zeebo Inc both as an affordable game system and education platform, has shipped to over 2,000 stores in Mexico.
Over the last 3 days I have been visiting schools in Highland Region with whom we will be working over the coming months. The enthusiasm and hospitality from everyone I met was brilliant and nothing, I’m sure, to do with the hardware and software that goes with the project!( although one school did take great delight in calling me “wii man”)
My journey took me just over 600 miles and 3 days from Castletown, just outside Thurso to Alvie, just outside Aviemore, via Dornoch, Dingwall and Merkinch in Inverness. Every school was different in many ways (in fact one school had almost twice as many primary sevens as another had pupils) and served a wide range of catchments; but everyone showed a real commitment to embracing technology to enhance learning and teaching and were in no doubt to the impact it might have on their children. I am really looking forward to working with the schools over the coming months and will post regular updates on our progress.
Rock band No Doubt has filed a lawsuit against Activision over the use of its name and likeness in Band Hero.
The group alleges that it has been transformed “into a virtual karaoke circus act” because players can perform songs using No Doubt avatars that weren’t approved by the band.
A social space? A cartographically accurate proxy for the real world? Some VR terra incognito to be carved up by entrepreneurs and homesteaders? A white elephant?
EA CEO John Riccitiello has said that the strength of digital sales is currently offsetting a challenging retail environment, and that he expects the digital sector to dominate the market in years to come.
Square Enix’s Dragon Quest IX was the bestselling game across Japan, the US and the UK during the third quarter of the year, according to sales trackers the NPD Group, GfK Chart-Track and Enterbrain.
Despite only being released in Japan, Dragon Quest IX outsold its nearest rival by almost one million units between July and September.
The top five sellers for the period were as follows:
Dragon Quest IX (Square Enix) - 3,925,000
Wii Sports Resort (Nintendo) - 3,014,000
The latest Top Global Markets report from sales trackers the NPD Group, GfK Chart-Track and Enterbrain has been released, showing a strong rise in Japanese software sales during the third quarter, but a decline in US and UK sales during the period.
According to the report, combined software unit sales across the world’s three largest game markets experienced a decline of six per cent between July and September.