Game industry business news

US retailers see PS3 sales spike

Two of North America’s leading retailers have reported significant uplifts in sales of PS3 consoles. This is thanks, of course, to the recent Sony PS3 price cut that came into effect in key territories on Tuesday. "In terms of recent trends, clearly, we’ve had two major events recently with the …

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Sony’s House pays tribute to new SCEE boss

SCEE is in safe hands with Jim Ryan at the helm, says PlayStation’s incoming CEO Andrew House. In his final interview as SCEE boss, published exclusively in MCVnext week, House paid tribute to the man he has worked alongside for more than two years. He said:You could not have had …

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Vita specs comparable to PS3

Sony has at last revealed some of the internal specs of its PlayStation Vita handheld. And claims that the machine is comparable to a PS3 in your pocket are seemingly quite legitimate. Joystiq reports that Vita will house 512MB or RAM and 128MB of video RAM. That compares to 256MB …

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Skylanders takes Activison to ‘unexpected’ territory

Forget video games, Activision is well on its way to establishing a foothold in the toy sector. The firm is talking to retailers and media it has never spoken to before in a bid to ensure Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure is a hit. The game is almost a reboot for the …

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Onlive looks to exclusive deals

OnLive has acknowledged that exclusive content deals will help tempt more consumers to its cloud gaming service. Currently OnLive, which officially launches in the UK on September 22nd, streams PC games from its data servers – and all are either available as standalone PC or multiformat console games too. But …

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Is this retail’s digital console breakthrough?

We’re told time and time again that retail can play an important part in the digital gaming landscape, but one obstacle has always remained – the iron grip platform holders have over digital console platforms. But international games retailer GameStop could be about to shatter that stalemate thanks to new …

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MCV GameTime: Industry TV advertising monitor (wk ending August 19th)

We look at the latest TV advertising activity for games targeting men and how it affects web search traffic. This is provided by specialist communication firmGeneration Mediawhich focuses on the entertainment and leisure industries. This week we take a look at the year-on-year weekly marketing dynamics from March 20th to …

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Ubisoft again incurs wrath of PC gaming fraternity

PC DRM has again got Ubisoft into a sticky situation with PC gaming fans. The publisher had previously claimed that recent PC release From Dust would only require users to authenticate their copy of the game online the first time it was loaded. However, users have complained that the game …

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Mojang becomes indie games publisher

The ascent of Minecraft studio Mojang knows no bounds – a multi-million dollar franchise, a fanbase to envy, an event and growing merchandise business… And now it’s a third-party publisher too, helping bring another indie studio’s game to market. Mojang has signed up Cobalt from Oxeye Game Studios. It’s the …

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Vita will seize "market opportunity" for richer handheld gaming

There’s a line of thinking which argues PlayStation Vita will struggle on the market due to its inability to compete with smartphone gaming’s low price software model. Not true, according to Sony’s US hardware marketing boss John Koller. We view that as two separate demographics, and we’ve done a lot …

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