Game industry business news

Japanese publisher Square Enix has revealed a new strategic partnership with online games giant Shanda that will see the Final Fantasy series get its first ever official release in China. The first game to get a release will be MMO outing Final Fantasy XIV, though the date of its arrival …

Retro seems to be very much the theme at the moment – following news that cult Saturn shooter Radiant Silvergun is getting an XBLA release, Sony has gone one better by announcing a brand new PSOne Import section on PSN. The new sub-store will offer PSOne games previously only released …

Mark Cale of System 3 reveals why publishers aren't to be feared

It was MIA at E3. There was no sign of it at Gamescom. And all hope of a Tokyo Game Show reveal was scuppered this week when Sony’s press event came and went without even the faintest whiff of new hardware. So where is PSP2? By the sounds of it, …

Realtime Worlds’ administrator will scale back efforts to rescue the collapsed studio, Develop can reveal, and MMO APB will be closed. The game is still available to buy at a number of retailers. But it looks like players will no longer be able to go online with it. Administrator Begbies …

Activision’s Call of Duty: Black Ops could stand to benefit the successful launch of Halo: Reach in the long run. That’s according to Lazard Capital’s Colin Sebastien. The analyst claims the early sales figures for Microsoft’s latest shooter suggest strength for the core market, which bodes well for similar titles …

Startup iSwifter has emerged from stealth mode with a service that lets iPad users play Flash games from some of the world’s biggest games portals. The service describes itself as a ‘cloud-based Flash streaming service’, and while it works on iPad initially, iSwifter plans to roll it out to iPhone …

Potential partners reluctant to buy the studio; redundancies made; APB bid to relaunch

Platform holder Microsoft has claimed that Xbox 360’s ongoing sales gains have heralded a mid-generation leadership change” that puts its console at the front of the pack. Analysts are telling us that we’ve broken all their models,” Microsoft Xbox product director Aaron Greenberg told Gamasutra. They say there’s never been …

Xbox 360 motion camera Kinect will sell over 3m units this holiday period following its launch this November, platform holder Microsoft has claimed. Our estimates that we will sell in excess of 3m units this holiday,” Microsoft Xbox product director Aaron Greenberg told Gamasutra. Our key indicators are feedback from …