Feed aggregator

Though Final Fantasy XIII didn't release in the West until this week, Square Enix has already shipped five million copies of the highly anticipated RPG worldwide. The publisher shipped three million of the game's PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 copies to North America, Europe, and Australia. In Japan, where Square Enix released Final Fantasy XIII last December exclusively for PS3, the company shipped 1.8 million copies for the RPG's launch. Square Enix didn't indicate how ...

This week's edition of Critical Reception examines online reaction to Square Enix's RPG sequel Final Fantasy XIII, which reviews describe as "the most technically impressive title in Final Fantasy history." Final Fantasy XIII currently earns a score of 82 out of 100 at Metacritic.com. Joe Juba at Game Informer rates Final Fantasy XIII at 9.25 out of 10. "Final Fantasy XIII has ascended to a nearly religious significance in the eyes of many gamers," he ...

The PC Gaming Alliance (PCGA), a non-profit PC gaming advocacy group, revealed a new research study indicating that PC gaming software revenues worldwide reached $13.1 billion in 2009, a 3 percent increase over the previous year. That increase came in spite of decreased retail boxed sales for PC games, which suffered the "biggest downturn" out of all the sales categories PCGA tracked and now accounts for less than 20 percent of total software revenue for ...

EA Sports announced EA Sports Active 2.0 (working title), a follow-up to its popular Wii fitness game, releasing this fall on Wii, PS3, iPhone, and iPod Touch with a new wireless control system, a heart rate monitor, and online hub. While the first EA Sports Active game featured a pouch that players used to strap Wii Nunchuk to their leg and track their movements, the sequel's new wireless control system (pictured) is designed to give ...

Tiger Style co-founder Randy Smith (Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor) delivered the keynote of the Indie Games Summit, encouraging indie developers to embrace a philosophy of immediacy and depth to hasten their popular ascendancy. Opening with a self-deprecating "I do have a worry that this presentation will not live up to expectations or achieve what it could," Smith outlined that his background may not be "indie" enough for the crowd -- having worked for ...

One benefit of being an indie developer is that there is a community out there made up of people who want to see the scene flourish. But organizing that community can be a challenge. Jeff Lindsay, contributor to indie community events such as TIGJam and SuperHappyDevHouse, offered 10 ways to nurture your local indie game community, at GDC's Indie Game Summit on Tuesday: 1. Hold Events "Nothing beats in-person," said Lindsay. His SuperHappyDevHouse events grew ...

Wolfire, developer of Overgrowth, managed to create a lot of buzz for its game before it was even released - in fact, the game still isn't out, but John Graham, one of four people on the team, says that it doesn't matter. You can and should create buzz as an indie even if your game isn't finished. "When you're beginning a company you have to figure out how you want to approach that issue," he ...

As part of a technical talk at GDC's Social Games Summit, Amitt Mahajan, lead developer of Farmville, revealed a number of interesting statistics about the game, including current stats of 32 million players per day. Farmville, a Harvest Moon-like farming social game, is one of Facebook's biggest success stories, earning the small team huge accolades before being purchased by Zynga. The game took only 5 weeks from conception to launch, developing the back end, using ...

Panelists billed as the world's foremost experts on funding, buying and selling game companies have a view of gaming's future that's likely to be controversial to those working in traditional development. In a panel at GDC 2010, Northwest Ventures' Tim Chang, Trinity Ventures' Gus Tai, Pacific Crest analyst Evan Wilson and Making Fun and Minor Studios CEO John Welch discussed what companies and products will get funded today -- and according to them, it's not ...

iPhone developer ngmoco released the virtual pet game Touch Pets Dogs onto the App Store in November 2009 as a "freemium" download. But it wasn't always planned that way. When the studio was working on the game in early 2009, ngmoco producer Matthew Roberts said they felt the game should be sold for $19.99, in the same price range as games sold on Nintendo DS and Sony PSP. By mid-2009, ngmoco thought it'd be wiser ...

Codemasters has announced Bodycount, a new game under the creative direction of Stuart Black, best known for the Criterion Studios shooter Black -- and which draws inspiration from J.J. Abrams and Lady Gaga. Though Black has been at Codemasters for "two or three years now," he says, he "actually started on a different project, another original IP that's kind of been on the back burner... We started [production] work on Bodycount about nine months ago." ...

The New York-based Education Development Center (EDC) has received a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation supporting the development of handheld games designed to improve reading comprehension among struggling middle school students. The Gates Foundation grant supports the EDC's two-year research project "Portable Word Play: Discovering What Handheld Games Can do for Adolescent Reading Comprehension," conducted in collaboration with the game development studio 1st Playable Productions. Researchers at the EDC's Center for Children ...

Every week, sister iPhone site FingerGaming rounds up the top-grossing iPhone and iPod Touch applications, as current that day in the iTunes App Store, and this chart is now available on Gamasutra. This week's U.S. iPhone revenue charts see EA's Monopoly take the lead over Square Enix's Final Fantasy, while Ragdoll Blaster 2 ranks high in its debut week. This relatively recently-added chart allows end users to see who is making the most money on ...

Microsoft has announced version 4.0 of its XNA Game Studio development package, which includes support for its new Windows Phone 7 Series, as well as enhancing features for Xbox 360 and PC game development. The details have been posted on Microsoft developer blogs, including this lengthy post from XNA Development Platform lead program manager Michael Klucher and this quick breakdown on MSDN from Shawn Hargreaves. The platform will now support development for Microsoft's newly announced ...

Harmonix's ground-breaking band game franchise, Rock Band, is set to become a trilogy. Publisher MTV Games announced today that Rock Band 3 is coming for holiday 2010. As it has with previous installments, Electronic Arts will act as distributor, implying the company has renewed its distribution agreement with Viacom that expires this month. The decision also comes despite EA's recent announcement that it would be scaling down its distribution business to focus more on owned ...

"Our business is becoming more of a business." Attorney Jim Charne opened his all-day GDC program, "The Best of Times The Worst of Times: Building and Independent Dev Studio in 2010," with a thesis that set the tone for the morning session. The tide has been shifting the last couple of years, according to Charne, and independent studios this year must strike a balance between diversifying their portfolios and maintaining their integrity by sticking to ...

Gareth Davis' GDC Social Gaming Summit keynote was a mixture of old and new, but his larger takeaway was the potential future of cross-platform gaming, based around your friends. There were quite a lot of congratulatory statistics (rightfully so), including the facts that 70% of the Facebook audience is global (i.e. non-U.S.), 200 million people use Facebook daily, and 400 million monthly. Over a million developers have created over 500,000 apps over the last few ...

2D Boy's Ron Carmel calls relationships between indies and publishers "a system that never worked". At the 2010 Independent Gaming Summit at the Game Developers Conference, he explained why -- and detailed the Indie Fund, a new alternative for independent games funding. When software development began to be conisdered as an engineering field, design came before building -- the "waterfall approach", as Carmel says, involving big design documents that everyone scrutinizes before implementing. But in ...

U.S. gamers spent $3.8 billion on massively multiplayer online games in 2009, almost 15 times more than other substantial MMO markets in Europe, according to a new study. Consumer data from Today's Gamers MMO Focus Report by Gamesindustry.com and TNS indicates that the number of MMO players in the U.S. has reached 46 million, 46 percent (21 million) of which paid to play online games; the rest, around 25 million gamers, play MMOs without spending ...

Part of being an indie game studio means focusing on the benefits of being small, rather than dwelling on the drawbacks of not being big - to think like a guerrilla. That's the idea that Sean Murray, programmer for Joe Danger developer Hello Games conveyed during GDC's Indie Game Summit on Tuesday. "We saw ourselves as the A-Team. We're a motley crew, but we know the landscape," he said. That wasn't the only 1980s action ...