Game industry business news

Old Republic is "fastest growing MMO in history"

Over a million. That’s the closest we’ve got to hearing any firm sales numbers for EA and BioWare’s new MMO title Star Wars: The Old Republic. The figure was issued by EA on Boxing Day following the game’s release on December 20th. The game entered the UK Charts in 10th …

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US Special Ops vet slams ‘hideous’ Modern Warfare 3 ad

A former US Army Special Operations Command paratrooper and Afghanistan veteran has spoken out in criticism of Activision’s leading Modern Warfare 3 Christmas ad. [The ad] is so base and strident that it’s hard to believe that it’s not deliberately offensive,” D B Grady wrote on The Atlantic. The game …

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UK CHARTS: FIFA takes last No.1 of 2011

FIFA 12 has topped the UK games retail charts for the second week in a row ahead of Modern Warfare 3. The football game claimed the last No.1 of 2011 for the week ending December 31st, despite a week-on-week drop in sales of 27 per cent. It’s the second year …

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Atari launches legal assault on iOS devs

Black Powder Media, the producer of iOS title Vector Tanks 3, has claimed that Atari has issued a number of copyright infringement claims against games that resemble anything from Atari’s back catalogue. Vector Tanks 3 is in itself a derivative of Atari’s 1980 arcade title Battlezone. Thanks to their special …

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Time called on Shenmue mobile game

Not only are hopes of Shenmue 3 still dead in the balance, but now the newest Shenmue title to hit the market has been scrapped. Launched in December 2010 in Japan, Ysnet’s Shenmue World was a social game for mobile phones. However, Andriasang reports that Ysnet announced its surprise closure …

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Crysis 2 ‘crowned’ the most pirated game of 2011

The PC version of EA and Cryek’s Crysis 2 was the most pirated game of 2011, according to TorrentFreak. Between its release in March 2011 and the end of the year, the shooter was downloaded approximately 3,920,000 times. This ranked it ahead of other PC titles such as Modern Warfare …

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EA, Nintendo and Sony withdraw SOPA support

Three of gaming’s biggest companies have withdrawn support for America’s Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). EA, Nintendo and Sony had all previously backed the movement but their names have since disappeared from the official list of corporate supporters. The move comes as hacker group Anonymous released a video threatening to …

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PS Vita plays second fiddle to PSP in second week as 3DS shines

A drop in sales of 78 per cent week-on-week for the PlayStation Vita in its second week of sale in Japan has seen sales fall below that of its predecessor the PlayStation Portable. Andriasang reports that Vita sales fell from 325k to 72k – that’s fewer than all of the …

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