Category Archives: Trade

Bidding for the remainder THQ franchises which weren’t sold in January have closed.

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Ubisoft took home five prizes from last night’s MCV awards, while fellow behemoth publishers EA and Activision won two apiece and GAME walked away with the gong for best specialist retailer. More winners through the break.

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20% of Australia games sales were made online during December 2012.

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Developers make the games you love, but they don’t usually make the things that convince you to try the games you end up loving. That’s why, every year, an award ceremony honours the best of the industry’s marketing. In the last 12 months, Assassin’s Creed 3 was clearly the winner.

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This month’s NPD Report drops today, with Microsoft the first to spill details. The platform holder shifted 261,000 Xbox 360 consoles over the course of the month.

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Microsoft has announced quarterly revenue of $20.49 billion for the quarter ended March 31, 2013. The Entertainment and Devices Division, which encompass Xbox 360 figures, posted revenue of $2.53 billion, an increase of 56% from the prior year period. Xbox LIVE now has over 46 million members worldwide, an 18% increase from the prior year period.

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Multiple reports suggests the development group formerly known as Team Bondi has been let go after the LA Noire studio was unable to find a publisher for new project Whore of the Orient.

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Sterne Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia expects NPD figures for March 2013 to be down by 10-15% when the numbers are reported tomorrow.

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Although EA still isn’t keen to comment, it has made layoffs at at least one and probably two studios, with talk of a wider restructuring across its mobile and social divisions.

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In a lengthy post on the financial cost of independent game development, Dustforce developer Hitbox Team said the $100,000 it won for an early prototype of the game was enough to fund three staff members for one and a half years’ work. That meant the team needed to earn at least $67,000 per year to fund its next game, plus a “bit of a buffer”, so aimed to make about $400,000 with Dustforce. After one whole year on sale, the game has brought in $489,404 – after taxes and other costs, Hitbox received about $4.10 for every $10 of sales revenue. The hows and whys of how this happened make pretty interesting reading as few games companies reveal their financial data at all, let alone in such detail.

Thanks, PCGamer.

Southend Interactive has announced it is now a separate entity from its parent company, Tactel Holding AB. The firm announced the split today, which also marked the release of its digital title, Sacred Citadel. The firm is now 100% independent, and while the years with Tactel were “great for Southend,” now is “the right time for Southend to manage its own destiny and to invest in its own products,” said CEO Fredrik Brönjemark. Thanks, GI International.

Developers and publishers need to be included in the used-game revenue cycle, Bethesda vice president Pete Hines has said.

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Industry veteran Gordon Walton has called out the regular practise of forming and disbanding development teams with cyclical employment contracts.

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Former Eat Sleep Play boss David Jaffe has said developers need to stop whining about the evils of publisher interference and instead get good enough to avoid it all together.

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Paragon Studios did indeed try to purchase itself from NCSoft, and was shocked when the deal fell through at the lats minute.

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The UK’s Office of Fair Trading is looking into whether some free-to-play games may cross the line into unlawful activity, and has contacted developers and publishers to issue warnings.

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An always-on future, in which your gaming devices require a constant Internet connection to function, may be inevitable, Gears of War creator Cliff Bleszinski has said.

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Remember when Stardock sold digital distribution platform Impulse to GameStop? Instead of just rolling around in the stacks of fat cash it received from this transaction, the developer has launched a fund to help out new start-ups.

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Giant Squid, a new studio set up by former thatgamecompany art director Matt Nava, has an interesting relationship with Hollywood.

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Publisher Ubisoft has fully acquired Anno series developed related Designs. Polygon reports Ubisoft owned about 30% of the company following its 2007 acquisition of Sunflowers Interactive, and coughed up cash for the rest recently. Related Designs, which employs 65 staff, played a role in the development of Anno 1701, Anno 1404 and the latest of the city-builders, Anno 2070, and will continue working with co-developer Blue Byte on Might and Magic Heroes Online and future titles.