Game industry business news

PlayStation owners are being compensated for the downtime suffered by PSN over Christmas. The PSN was brought down by a group (called Lizard Squad) who apparently wanted to show Sony and Microsoft how easy it is to bring down their networks. But they only really succeeded in angering gamers and …

Sony Online Entertainment has announced the Planetside 2 beta is now expected out by the middle of this month on PlayStation 4, confirming the early release will miss its previously scheduled 2014 target window. GameSpot reports on the delay and newly-specified release target of mid-January 2015 for Planetside 2’s PS4 …

Xbox Live manager and XNA framework developer Boyd Multerer has announced his exit from Microsoft. Gamasutra reports on Multerer’s departure, which comes following 20 years of work with the company. He initially started as a contractor with Microsoft and was later brought on as a full-time software developer. The industry …

Steam users came out in droves during the holiday break, with Valve’s digital distribution service scoring a new record in total concurrent users over the past weekend. Blue’s News reports Steam’s game and player stats page showed users peaking out at 8,357,541 on Sunday, December 28th at one point. DOTA …

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has emerged the victor in Steam’s best sellers chart for the last full week of 2014, beating out Far Cry 4 for the top spot during the digital distributor’s ongoing end of the year sale. Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, Skyrim and South Park: The Stick of Truth …

The Entertainment Retailer’s Association has once again revealed the 20 best selling video games, movies and albums of 2014 in the UK. And not a single parent will be surprised to discover that Disney’s Frozen tops the list. That movie sold a staggering 4.012m copies last year, which is 1.34m …

Sales of video game software in the UK increased by 7.5 per cent to 2.5bn last year, says the Entertainment Retailer’s Association. As predicted, sales of physical (boxed) video games dropped year-on-year but only ever so slightly. Sales decreased 6.6 per cent to 948.5m. It’s a little disappointing, but not …

Notable names discuss the leading trends of an eventful year for games developers

Lynne Kilpatrick of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport will receive an OBE as revealed in the latest New Year’s Honours List. Kilpatrick receives the honour for her services to the video games sector. She works behind-the-scenes promoting the games industry to Government. She was also instrumental in putting …

The brave new online, socially-connected world of video games is not quite proving as revolutionary as we had hoped. So this Christmas a group that call themselves Lizard Squad claim to have brought down PlayStation Network and Xbox Live (via the old DDoS attack), which effectively rendered both PS4 and …