Game industry business news

It was the week Take That reformed. The week a new Harry Potter movie premiered.But the real winner in the entertainment war? It was a video game. Activision’s Call of Duty: Black Ops led a software market boom last week. Day one sales stood at 1.4m units, generating 58m in …

Analyst Cowen and Company is claiming that the most recent title in the Tony Hawk series, Tony Hawk’s Shred, sold just 3,000 copies in its first week on sale in the US. The game was a virtual no show”, the analyst is quoted as saying by GamesIndustry. It adds that …

The 2010 stock allocation for Kinect is just days away from running out, Microsoft has warned US consumers. Speaking at a Web 2/0 Summit in the US, Microsoft’s president of the Interactive Entertainment Business Don Mattrick said that anyone who wants a Kinect this Christmas has been advised by Microsoft …

Staff at renowned Liverpool studio Bizarre Creations have spoken of a twenty-four-hour emotional rollercoaster as it has emerged that several companies have shown interest in buying the Blur developer. Last night Activision put Bizarre Creations up for sale – in a move that put the job security of 200 developers …

The first images of what pertain to be the still secretive PSP2 have appeared online. You can see them both below. VG247 says the images are of the dev kit that until recently had been doing the rounds. However, it has since been superseded by a single brick design that …

Handful of firms declare interest in the Liverpool-based Blur studio, sources tell Develop

While Microsoft has claimed a notable victory in the US hardware market last month, Sony has highlighted the strength of PS3s software sales in its response to NPDs latest report. The platform holder says it enjoyed an incredibly strong October” and that the PS3 was the only format to enjoy …

Labour MP Keith Vaz has raised his second anti-games Early Day Motion of the year, this time linking video games to a spate of shootings in Sweden last month. Earlier this month Swedish police arrested a 38-year-old man, whose motivation was thought to be racial. That is, unless you’re Keith …

It’s a well-known fact that marketing budgets are signficantly higher in the months leading up to Christmas than at any other time of the year. Only a few weeks ago, MCV reported that UK games firms are spending a combined total of over 181 milion on promoting their wares this …

Mastertronic has promised to provide more stock for Divinity II: The Dragon Knight Saga after the first batch sold out. The launch allocation for Focus Home Interactive’s Xbox 360 RPG had run out ahead of its release last Friday. But the game’s distributor has assured retailers that there will be …