Though the last few days has seen a string of staff cuts and studio closures, there remains an encouraging opportunity for other businesses to grow into the vacuums left behind.
That’s what distributor THQ Asia Pacific is thinking of doing, as the recent fall of Australia's Red Ant has given the business a chance to expand further.
Eidos has closed its Rockpool Games studio in Manchester, with fourteen of its staff made redundant.
Rockpool Games was acquired by Eidos in February 2007 as part of the publisher’s efforts to succeed in the browser and mobile games sector. It is not known if the 14 redundancies make up the entire studio’s workforce; when sold to Eidos, the Manchester studio had 36 staff members.
It’s the sound that hits you. Your chest trembles with subtle power far beyond that of the crude thud of bass in a club, and shrill notes ply the very limits of your hearing.
At least 200 workers at Vancouver’s Black Box studio have been made redundant, as its publisher EA continues plans to reduce its global workforce by ten percent. Black Box had some 350 staff at its studio before EA began the staff cuts.
As a nerd dressed up as a nuclear-powered, pest-controlling saviour of humanity, Harold Ramis played a good impostor in Ghostbusters. He plays a bad one in Ghostbusters: The Video Game – the actor cast in a role that no longer suits him.
EA and Maxis are about to expand the Spore franchise.
Publisher EA said Thursday that it plans to release Spore Galactic Adventures, Spore Creature Keeper, Spore Hero and Spore Hero Arena in 2009.
Galactic Adventures is an expansion pack to the September PC release of Spore, adding more content to the space section of the game, such as mission-based adventures and the option to create new adventures.
Paris, France-based Ubisoft touted software diversity as it announced on Thursday fiscal Q3 results that slightly beat sales guidance.
The publisher posted revenues for the quarter ended December 31 of €508 million, up 13 percent year-on-year, beating guidance of €500 million.
Ubisoft attributed the performance to "diversity and quality" within the holiday games lineup.
GameStop's used games business alone will rake in $2 billion this fiscal year, or 23 percent of total revenue, one analyst estimates.
The number is compared to $1.6 billion, or 22.4 percent a year ago. The retailer's fiscal year ends January 31.
Ubisoft has confirmed that Assassin's Creed 2 and a new Ghost Recon title will be launching during the company's fiscal year 2009-2010, ending March 2010.
Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot said durings a Thursday earnings call that Assassin's Creed 2 could be one of 2009's biggest titles, indicating that the company intends to launch the game by the end of the calendar year.
The original Assassin's Creed, released in 2007, "greatly outstripped" Ubisoft's sales expectations, selling 2.5 million units worldwide in just one month.
Microsoft confirmed Thursday that it would be cutting 5,000 jobs over the next 18 months, with 1,400 to be eliminated immediately.
Cuts will be made across an array of departments including R&D, marketing, sales, finance, legal, HR and IT.
The cost-saving measures will reduce Microsoft's annual operating expense run rate by about $1.5 billion, and reduce fiscal year 2009 capital expenditures by $700 million, the company said.
Microsoft currently employs over 94K workers worldwide.
Earnings
Intel has not been able to escape economic recession, as the chipmaker announced this week that it will be closing a total of four plants, a move that will affect 5,000-6,000 employees.
The firm intends to close two assembly test facilities in Penang, Malaysia and one in Cavite, Philippines. The company will aso halt production at Fab 20 at Hillsboro, Ore., "an older 200mm wafer fabrication facility."
The fifth location to cease operations is the D2 facility in Santa Clara, Calif.
Agoura, Calif.-based THQ will miss its guidance for a breakeven second fiscal half on slow sales of key releases, said Cowen and Company analyst Doug Creutz in a Thursday research note.
Citing NPD data for U.S. software sales, Creutz said sales of the latest WWE wrestling game SmackDown vs. Raw 2009 were down 22 percent year-on-year during calendar Q4 2008, and the SpongeBob franchise was down 19 percent year-on-year.
Premier League football club Arsenal says its fans will soon be able to watch instant replays of key match moments via their PSP when attending the club’s home stadium.
The newly-built Emirates Stadium is to be engineered so that it will stream data to people inside the ground soon after key incidents occur, as well as provide stats of the match. The Sony-built technology could be mass-market-ready before the 2011/12 season begins.
Sony has announced that it will be making further expenditure cuts across its businesses in a bid to save the company $2.8 billion.
The announcement immediately followed the firm’s projections that it would lose $1.68 billion for the fiscal year.
Sony had initially prepared to save $1.1 billion through a number of restructuring measures; savings which many analysts thought would be too little.
Just about everyone working in the games biz had heard the heart-warming tale of Ethan Nicholas. He wrote an iPhone game (a tank simulation called iShoot), which duly sank into the soft eiderdown of iTunes obscurity. Then, he improved it. The game sank further. Then he released a free demo of the game. The full-priced version shot to number one, and is currently earning Ethan a tidy $20,000 a day.
Konami has assured that its Australian release schedule will not see any changes after its distributor, Red Ant, was placed into administration.
Sydney-based Red Ant is one of Australia’s biggest game distributors, and serves a number of large third-party publishers such as Besthesda, Konami, Midway and Capcom.
Sony expects to make an operating income loss of $1.68 billion for the fiscal year, marking the first annual loss for the company since 1995.
The fall is greater than previously expected, as many reports and analysts predicted Sony would forecast a loss of around $1.1 billion.
A former journalist for IGN, Ziff-Davis and Ultra Game Players has shot himself and his wife in an apparent murder-suicide.
Jason Montes, 33, of Sacramento was found dead by police at the home of his estranged wife in Concord, California on Sunday, January 11. His wife Serena Montes, 25, was fatally wounded at the location. According to police, Montes had called a friend to say he had shot his wife and planned to kill himself. The gun belonged to his father.
Skate was a reaction to sequels, a youthful breath of uncluttered thinking in the face of the incremental gimmickry that sent Tony Hawk tottering into stodgy middle age. That puts Skate 2 in an awkward position from the start.
Endless Ocean for the Nintendo Wii was one of those games that immediately caught my eye. A wonderful world in which the player can become immersed in a rich, vibrant and somewhat hypnotically therapeutic underwater world. I’ve written about how I thought it might be used to drive learning before but my initial ideas have been put into place and extended beyond recognition by some really creative teachers.
Last week I went with Margaret Cassidy from Stirling Council to Cowie PS to see a teacher that was using Endless Ocean with her class:
Mrs Bullivant and her class of P.6 children treated me to an afternoon of sheer joy. I walked in to a class that had been turned into an underwater world that was awash with a tide of enthusiastic and industrious learnning.
This was just a wonderful visit and an example of what learning in class can be. Yes we need creative teachers to lead this but isn’t that what we are meant to be. The work that was in evidence in this class was delightful to witness and further cemented my ideas of the possibilities of sandbox games such as Endless Ocean.
