Japanese giant Square Enix has revealed that its poor financial forecasts for the remainder of the fiscal year are largely due to falling expectations in operating income from its Offline Games and Amusements divisions.
Operating income via offline games had been projected to hit ¥7.5 billion by the end of the four financial quarters.
Time Warner, a key Eidos stakeholder, has backed the recent acquisition bid from Japanese giant Square Enix.
Last week it was discovered that Square Enix had recently closed in on the struggling UK publisher and launched a generous takeover offer at 32p/share. That acquisition now has the backing of Time Warner and its 20 percent slice of the company.
By the time you read this column, 2008 will be receding into memory.
Nevertheless, I wanted to cap off a remarkable year in gaming with a closer look at the co-op zombie apocalypse shooter Left 4 Dead. Valve’s attention to detail and high levels of polish are well known, but after weeks of entertainment, I was still trying to tease apart on a fundamental level ‘How’d they do that?’ How did Valve take two tastes that taste great – survival horror and co-op – and make them taste great together? Here’s what I came up with.
Members of the defunct outfit Ensemble have reunited to form a new development studio, known as Robot Entertainment.
All copies of Street Fighter IV have sold out in Japan on the game's first day of launch.
Halo Wars
Microsoft Game Studios
Ensemble Studios
Xbox 360
US Release Date: Mar 3
UK Release Date: Feb 27
Screenshot Gallery
Here I am at the premiere art and music venue in the hippest district of one of the most creatively vibrant cities on the globe, and I’m playing videogames. I’m not alone, as the club is crowded and raucous with badge-wearing students, local artists, curiosity seekers, movers, shakers and, of course, videogame developers of every flavour.
This is GAMMA. We’ve packed into a dim concrete space hung with glaring projector screens, on which the world’s newest games are being played.
My profesional career has seen me devote my time, thoughts, ideas and energy into making the classroom experience for schoolchildren as worthwhile, dynamic and memorable an experience as possible. I like to think that I have a growth mind-set and that I will continue to evolve as a professional so that I can always look at new ideas and approaches with a critical eye but where I am always prepared to take informed risks. As Ken Robinson states, "If you're not prepared to be wrong then you'll never come up with anything original!"
Now up until now the work that I have done with teachers across schools in Scotland in the field of games based learning has received a pretty good press. In fact, that fact is mentioned by me whenever I deliver presentations. It seems though that I'll have to make a slight amendment to my presentations now after an article in today's Scotsman.
In Cash-strapped schools urged to spend on games consoles a rather disappointing attack is made on an offer recently made by LTS to local authorities to be able to buy Nintendo DSs for their schools at a discounted price, much less than what is quoted in the article. This, as I understand was a one-off offer to meet demand from schools that have had their interest in this educational resource raised mainly by the work of the Consoalrium but also because of some evidence based research that was carried out by LTS and the University of Dundee. This first research article is about to be featured in the British Journal of Education in the next month and if you are interested the reference is:
Miller, D.J. & Robertson, D.P. (in press) Using a games console in the
primary classroom: Effects of ‘Brain Training’ programme on
computation and self-esteem. British Journal of Educational Technology
Dr David Miller and I are curently working on the paper that details the finding of our extended research study that was partnered by HMIe in the summer term of last year. This work has led to requests to share our innovative work with audiences throughout the school community in Scotland, England (BECTa, Futurelab & Stephen Heppell's Be Very Afraid), and further afield-Singapore, Germany, Denmark, Australia, USA. I have also just finished, today, writing the UK case study for a forthcoming paper for European Schoolnet with a request to share our work in Strasbourg in May.
The Scotsman article mentions research by Professor Alain Lieury but fails to go into detail about research done in Scotland. Now I recently put my thoughts about Profesor Lieury's work down in print on the Games based Learning discussion forum but here's what I had to say about that:
I, on behalf of LTS, carried out the first small scale research initiative in Scotland. This is really what made people sit up and take notice of this application of a commercially available game. If you haven't seen the case study then have a look:
http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/ictineducation/gamesbasedlearning/sharingpractice/braintraining/introduction.asp
As a result of this study and the many questions that we felt were raised by it, LTS funded an extended study http://ltsblogs.org.uk/consolarium/2008/09/25/dr-kawashima-extended-trial-summary-results/last year that saw the same methodology compared with only a control group this time. This was done in 32 schools across Scotland. The results we found were very similar to our initial study. The first study has been peer reviewed and accepted for academic publication and the second one hopefully will too.
I read the headlines about the Rennes study and was at first a little bit apprehensive about what their findings meant for the work that I have led. As a result I have taken my time to reflect on things...
There are questions that I'd like answered before I make a definitive comment about the Rennes research but as there is little available to read (but you'll get it in a forthcoming book 
) so I don't feel that I can do that. What I can do though is ask some questions:
I do think that they have missed the point here. Come to Scotland, see the children work with Dr Kawashima, listen to them talking about how they are better at maths, challenge them to the x20 test and watch their faces give you total respect when you do it in 10 seconds 
Also come and talk to our teachers who continually talk of improved performance in mental maths, self-esteem gains, social dynamic enhancements, improved time-keeping, metacognitive activity and much much more. Also, teachers don't worry about the tech here, they can focus on supporting the learning. There is so much good that has come out of this initial idea that I devised whilst playing this game nearly two years that I find it hard to take in a piece of work that appears to be so detached from the real world of classroom practice that I like to think that I inhabit.
Finally, with a little help from Dr Kawashima I believe we have made it a valued aspiration for our schoolchildren to be red hot at mental maths. Can you really tell me that pencil and paper does that? I look forward to reading a fuller account of what was carried out in Rennes but I have faith and confidence in what LTS, the University of Dundee and Scottish teachers and children did. It worked an absolute treat.
I was also not convinced that Ken Cunningham's, the general secretary of School Leaders Scotland and Frank Gerstenberg's, the former head of George Watson's College, apparent scepticism was really about the value of the games and what we argue it can bring to the classroom. It was more about school budgets in particular. No it took Nick Seaton, the chairman of the Campaign for Real Education to really get the traditional mobs 16 hole Dr Marten boots on when he said: "It's absolutely crazy and a poor use of taxpayers' money for schools to be spending on things like Nintendos when there isn't sufficient money to pay good teachers and buy school books." Now I know that we are in a difficult climate at the moment and that money must be spent wisely but I do believe that schools who have chosen to spend some valued cash on this offer are doing right here...at least this ICT spend has some evidence to base the spend on! This appears to me to be a clear case of when the going gets tought the tough get traditional. Come on, who in their right mind thinks that pencil and paper, alone, is going to do it for the very many school kids who are not and will not connect with a school experience that does not move with the times, evolve and position itself in the cultural framework from in which it's client group comes from?
Have I got it so horribly wrong. Have I imagined the raise in attainment that our data has shown? Am I strong-arming the very, very, very many teachers across Scotland that I am working with to come on board with this? Am I not seeing happy, challenged and interested faces on school children in the classes that I work in with some of the most thoughtful and objectively critical teachers that I have met? I can assure that the answer to all these questions is no.
Maybe it is the turn of games based learning to have its bad press day but I will debate the merits of gbl with anyone. It works, it's right and this backward and traditional view is one that, in my opinion, will fail our schoolchildren...or do we never want them to come up with anything original?
Like a drunken phone call to an ex, blind enthusiasm does not always equal success. To celebrate Valentines, we present examples of game-love gone slightly nuts...
Ten stories for the weekend, including some games you might enjoy...
Warner Bros Interactive Entertainment has appointed a new general manager to its Seattle studios.
Laura Fryer – who up until recently was an executive producer at Microsoft Game Studios – will lead two key development studios in Seattle; FEAR 2’s Monolith Productions, as well as Snowblind Studios. Warner Bros state that the most recent title under Fryer’s supervision was Gears of War 2.
The demo version of Ensemble’s final game, Halo Wars, has been downloaded over two million times.
That figure was reached in the space of one week since the demo was released, marking it as one of the most popular Xbox 360 demos yet.
Microsoft will soon be opening a string of official retail outlets across the US.
The company has also announced that David Porter – the former head of worldwide product distribution at DreamWorks Animation SKG – will be taking charge of the new enterprise.
Total hardware sales for the week ending Feb 8 have taken a fifth successive drop, according to data provided by Media Create.
Around 146,876 hardware units were sold at the retailers in Japan, representing a weekly decline of 13% from the previous week’s sum of 169,019.
All next-gen consoles, save for one, felt the drop, yet the chart arrangement hasn’t changed throughout 2009.
Nintendo has released a statement emphasising the significance of its contribution to the expanding videogame market.
“While the video game industry grew by $150 million year-on-year,” read the statement, “Nintendo's total sales grew by $300 million in January, offsetting declines on other platforms.”
Sony has announced that total worldwide sell-in units of the PSP have now reached 50 million.
That essentially means that 50 million PSPs have been bought in and displayed by retailers. Sell-through figures were not announced by Sony at the same time, though last August the firm stated that the PSP had a worldwide install base of 41 million.
Coming off of yet another record-breaking year of double-digit growth, games at U.S. retail bounded out of the gate in January 2009, with the industry recording $1.33 billion during the month, a 13 percent year-on-year increase.
Videogame consumers weren't quite done spending at the close of the 2008 holiday season.
Research firm NPD Group said Thursday that total U.S. videogame industry revenues grew 13 percent in January to $1.33 billion, an accomplishment considering the worsening state of the economy.
Just ahead of complete January U.S. videogame sales data, Microsoft said Thursday it achieved record hardware sales for the month.
Citing NPD data, the company said it sold 309K Xbox 360s, up 33 percent year-on-year in the U.S.
Sales of third-party games on Xbox 360 reached $139 million in January. The oftware to hardware tie ratio was 8.1.
Microsoft added that January 2009 was the "single biggest month ever" for Xbox Live membership growth, following strong holiday sales that saw 1.44 million hardware units sold in December.
Bandai Namco Games, subsidiary of Bandai Namco Holding, plans to acquire 100 percent of fellow Japanese game company D3 Publisher, Edge has confirmed.
A rep for D3 said Bandai Namco intends to buy all of D3, including its subsidiaries D3 Publisher of America and D3 Publisher of Europe.
D3 Publisher has released games including titles in the Ben 10 kids' franchise, Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords and Dark Sector (pictured).
As part of its quarterly results, Japan's Namco Bandai revealed the top 10 games for the nine months ended in December, with Soul Calibur IV leading the pack by a large margin.
The weapons-based fighting game sold 2.26 million units worldwide across Xbox 360 and PS3 during the period. The game launched in summer 2008.
The next closest seller was Dragon Ball Z: Burst Limit, released in June 2008, with 730K sold.
The Rock Band franchise has sold millions, but according to MTV Games parent Viacom, the series fell short of expectations for the fourth quarter ended in December.
Viacom CFO Tom Dooley said in a Thursday earnings call that Rock Band 2 sold nearly 2 million units ("hardware, software and bundles") since its debut in September 2008 across all platforms.
But a challenging retail environment kept sales of the sequel below Viacom's projections, Dooley said.
Chicago-based Mortal Kombat house Midway Games said Thursday that it has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, as the company anticipates it will not be able to satisfy accelerated note repurchase obligations.
In November last year, a change in control of the company triggered a provision that gave two groups of noteholders the option to ask that their bonds be paid in full. Midway had negotiated with both parties to extend their right to demand payback until this month.
