This is the first of a new series of columns about setting up a new independent game studio by Hello Games, creator of forthcoming race-platformer Joe Danger. In these articles, to be published every fortnight, the team will relate the trials and triumphs of developing a game with just four staff and an enduring love for Micro Machines and Super Monkey Ball.
Square Enix CEO Yoichi has said that the publisher aims to double its recurring profit to 50 billion yen ($561 million) in three to five years.
The executive said this could be achieved by expanding the company’s range of games and by growing its overseas operations in countries like China.
Available on Xbox Live today with first episode free; Peter Molyneux explains it’s a strategy to boost sales and will have implications for Fable III.
With the first section, the full childhood sequence, offered free of charge, Fable II: Game Episodes provide the same Achievements and challenges as the disc-based game, retain compatibility with existing DLC and player saves will seamlessly be carried between each instalment.
Age Of Conan developer Funcom will reportedly cut 20 per cent of its workforce and delay the release of its new PC and Xbox 360 MMO, The Secret World, by several months.
Vodaphone will become the third mobile phone operator to start selling Apple’s iPhone in the UK.
However, the UK’s second largest operator won't begin selling the 3G and 3GS versions of the iPhone until “early 2010”, meaning that it will miss out on the busy Christmas selling period, reports the Financial Times.
UK videogame trade association Tiga has released the results of its second business opinion survey, with CEO Richard Wilson suggesting that there’s “a cautious optimism among the majority of games developers with regard to the overall business outlook for the next six months”.
Almost 80 per cent of respondents expect their business to get a little or a lot better over the next six months and nearly two thirds of companies expect modest employment growth during the same period.
Nintendo will be an official sponsor of next month’s Handheld Learning Conference in London, where more than 1,000 delegates will debate and demonstrate ways in which learning can be positively improved through the use of technology.
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.
