Game industry business news

UK retailers continue to suffer as a recent survey reports that overall sales have declined over two consecutive months for the first time in three years. The latest edition of the British Retail Consortium-KPMG retail survey reveals sales in November were down by 0.4 per cent when compared to a …

Sony has announced it plans to cut 8,000 jobs from its electronics business, as well as shut ten per cent of its manufacturing plants. The company aims to generate cost savings of 100 billion yen ($1.1 billion) by March 2010, and follows the news that the Japanese economy has shrunk …

Activision Blizzard’s Call of Duty: World at War has achieved its fourth consecutive week at the top of ELSPA/GfK-ChartTrack All Formats Top 40 Chart, fending off advances from a range of new entries. No new entry lands higher than No.22, which goes to the PC version of Rockstar’s Grand Theft …

Factor 5 is currently suffering severe financial issues”, which have led to a project being cancelled and employees advised to start seeking new employment, it has been claimed. An artist working for the development studio, Sam Baker, has described on his blog how his project was recently cancelled. He also …

Publisher EA is to give its NASCAR racing a brand a drastic makeover with the release next February of new Wii racer NASCAR Kart Racing. The firm recently admitted that it has struggled to establish its sports brands on Nintendo’s machine – and the targeted thinking behind this family-friendly reinvention …

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The extent to which the games industry is or is not ‘recession-proof’ will be revealed over time, but two leading industry analysts have warned that casual-centric games firms, and more specifically Nintendo, could be more severely affected than most. To read more, click here to visit CasualGaming.biz.

Gaming giant Sega has become the latest established player from the games market to make a move into the casual gaming sector with the launch of its new Flash games portal PlaySega. For the complete story, head over to MCV’s sister site CasualGaming.biz.

GameStop has denied an MCV report that claimed the company was in the process of tabling a bid for Woolworths’ stores. The news comes after a highly-placed source informed MCV that the company was interested in buying around half of Woolworths’ oustanding 800 outlets from administrator Deloitte. If GameStop was …

The clock is ticking on Sony’s recurrent pledge to release an open beta for its PS3 social network Home by the end of the year – and a report in yesterday’s issue of The Sunday Times suggests that December 17th may be the day. The piece reads: To try Home, …