The European Parliament is set to open a conference which seeks to promote the cultural impact and lucrative benefits of the videogame industry.
The event, currently being organised by Dutch MEP Jules Maaten, will offer keynote speeches from a number of industry executives. Its purpose will be to express the importance of the games industry, and encourage the growth of the sector.
Ubisoft has cancelled its annual European trade event, Ubidays.
The popular two-day conference is being shelved as Ubisoft trims its trade event commitments. The France-based publisher will now focus its marketing on GamesCom, TGS and the re-inflated E3 show.
As the home console market leader sits below the pack in Japan, Nintendo has admitted that the Wii has fallen into an “unhealthy” condition.
Sale estimates of the DSi continue to climb, with Nintendo president Satoru Iwata stating that the handheld has – in the space of two days – sold 600,000 units across Europe and the US.
Speaking at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan, Iwata claimed that the DSi had sold evenly across both regions; 300,000 units in the US, 300,000 in Europe, all during the handheld’s launch weekend.
Will Wright, the man behind SimCity, The Sims, Spore and other acclaimed games, has left the legendary company that he co-founded 20 years ago, Maxis.
Maxis owner EA said on Wednesday that it would be maintaining a close relationship with Wright as he embarks on his new venture, Stupid Fun Club.
An EA press statement describes Stupid Fun Club as "an entertainment think tank developing new intellectual properties" that will have its fingers in games, movies, TV, Internet and toys.
Global economic turmoil wasn't enough to keep the Chinese online game market down in 2008.
In its "Games Market in China" study, San Francisco-based Pearl Research said the online games market in China grew over 63 percent in 2008 to $2.8 billion. The firm projected that the market will grow to $5.5 billion in 2012.
Videogame companies and other industry watchers now have a new tracking tool.
OTX, a research firm that also tracks the international movie industry, introduced this week GamePlan Insights, a subscription-based analytics tool that combines data from game rental firm GameFly and AERS' eBay data (AERS is the exclusive tracker of eBay data). This data is used in tandem with OTX's weekly gamer tracker.
Metaboli has bucked current economic trends by reporting encouraging gains in turnover.
The France-based digital distribution firm reports that turnover for the first calendar quarter of 2009 grew by a striking 120 percent when compared to the same period last year.
The company attributes its growth to strong promotional activity, yet the privately-held company has not disclosed its profit figures for the same period.
Females aged between 25 and 54 make up the largest group of PC gamers.
That was one of the many conclusions found in a new report from media analysis group Nielsen.
In December last year, females in the 25-54 age bracket accounted for around 29 percent of all PC players, while males in the same age category accounted for just over twenty percent.
Nintendo president Satoru Iwata has elaborated on the group’s proposed on-demand video service for the Wii.
Little is known of Nintendo’s upcoming feature, yet Iwata elaborated that the “advertising-based” service has the potential to work on the DS as well as the Wii.
“If the Wii and the DS are connected, it should be possible to download video through the Wii and take it with you on the DS,” Iwata told the Wall Street Journal [sub].
Investors in the movie and game rental chain Blockbuster have been warned that “substantial doubt” has been thrown onto the firm’s ability to continue as a going concern.
The warning came though an independent assessment conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers, with the group’s conclusions released in a Blockbuster financial filing. Blockbuster had previously told investors that such a warning was likely to occur.
The whole appeal behind Rock Band is the ability to play on unique instrument peripherals with a group of friends, basically pretending to be a rockstar in a fun, social environment.
Rock Band Unplugged for PSP essentially strips away those two main components of the Rock Band experience by taking away the "instruments" and making the game single-player.
But maybe it's too early to write off this game.
Update: Nielsen has corrected some of its findings.
Nielsen's State of the Video Gamer study, released Tuesday, indicates that Wii owners use their console less than Xbox 360 and PS3 owners.
The research firm said Wii owners used their consoles 6.8 percent of the total amount of time that they could have used the system during Nielsen's measurement period in December 2008.
The Nintendo Wii is an odd duck.
It's innovative but low-tech; it's accessible for gamers, but difficult to nail from a game design perspective; it has a large install base, but one that has proven tough for third-parties to crack.
Electronic Entertainment Design and Research analyst Jesse Divnich asks again: If your videogame-illiterate (and ficticious) Aunt Sheila walked into a store and bought you a Wii game, what are the chances that it would be a quality title?
Nintendo has poured cold water on speculation that it could soon lower the retail price of the Wii.
Credit Suisse analyst Koya Tabata suggested on Monday that manufacturing costs for the Nintendo Wii have reduced by 45 percent since the console's launch, and implied that this gives Nintendo room to consider a console price cut.
The costs for Nintendo to produce a Wii console have nearly halved since the system launched.
That was the suggestion made by Credit Suisse analyst Koya Tabata in a recent note to clients. Tabata declared that manufacturing costs for the Nintendo Wii have been reduced by 45 percent when compared to its initial launch batch, produced back in 2006.
Tabata went onto suggest that the lowered manufacturing costs could lead the way for a price cut in Wii consoles.
Nintendo’s long-awaited DSi has become the fourth-fastest selling console in UK history.
The new handheld – which launched across the UK on Midnight last Friday – has already shown to have substantial pulling power, outselling all other systems combined over the weekend.
Douglass Perry is a games journalism vet, who has worked in key positions at Next Generation, IGN, Daily Radar, GameTap and other publications. He currently is a freelance writer who regularly publishes on his blog, GameInsano.com.
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Making sense of Nintendo before the success of the Wii.
A few weeks back I was up at Fraserburgh South Park PS because of visit from the BBC Newsround team who were interested in doing an article about the Dr Kawashima work that we did. I met a propbationer teacher called Jo Barcas Buchan and got to see what she had been doing with Nintendogs in her P.2 class.
It was great to see that Jo has written about her experience with this games based learning approach on the GTCS probationerscotland.org.uk site.
Great to see you sharing your experience Jo and hopefully other probationers may learn from what you have done.
Ollie Bray, depute headteacher of Musselbrough Grammar School, East Lothian, took first place in the Innovation in Community section for his presentation of ‘Thinking out of the XBOX’ at the Innovative Teachers Forum 2009 in Vienna. He is currently on secondment to Learning and Teaching Scotland as a National Adviser for Emerging Technologies in Learning.
Inspired by a project initiated by Learning and Teaching Scotland’s Consolarium initiative he organised an extension of this innovative idea and organised a transition project for the associate Primary schools of Musselburgh GS using Guitar Hero. This approach proved to be a great success and the Guitar Hero transition project will now be rolled out across East Lothian schools within weeks. Schools all over Scotland are already using this resource. Schools in England and even as far afield as Hong Kong and Australia, are interested in the project. Mr Bray devised a three-step process of ‘learning, social interaction and reflection and moving on’ as children change.
The Scotsman article: Teacher who inspires pupils with rock ‘n’ roll wins top award
Merlin John’s blog: Ollie Bray takes gaming to international stage
Ollie Bray’s blog: Microsoft 2009 European Innovative Teachers Forum
