Game industry business news

Girls Aloud, Jamie and Louise Redknapp, Fern Britton and husband Phil Vickery and Ronan Keating’s family will all star in Nintendo’s new marketing campaign. The push kicks off from October 27th. Nintendo describes the latest line-up as Natural choices in light of their appeal to a wide range of audiences …

Games journalists must hear this all the time. And I doubt it gets any easier defending their noble profession to those toiling at the tax office or selling insurance for a living. Clearly, games journalists get an awful lot of perks – press trips, free games and other tat, PRs …

Sony has confirmed that its highly anticipated LittleBigPlanet has been pushed back to an unspecified date, following the discovery of Qur’an expressions in the soundtrack. The game was due to be released on October 24th in Europe and October 21st in North America, and is tipped to be the PlayStation …

The first time appeared to be a freak one-off; the second a remarkable achievement and the third was simply astonishing – and now Microsoft’s Xbox 360 has outsold Sony’s PS3 for the fourth week in a row in Japan. CVG reports that Xbox 360 sold 7,763 units for the week …

Western studios 'well built to handle large-scale development', says iNiS co-founder Yano

SCEE has told MCV that it will be issuing a statement shortly that is expected to confirm that LittleBigPlanet has been delayed in Europe. Media Molecule’s creative platformer was supposed to be hitting retail on October 24th, but MCV understands it will now not be released until November 14th. Speculation …

Konami’s biggest marketing spend ever will help Pro Evolution Soccer 2009 become the fastest-selling title in the franchise’s history, the publisher has told MCV. The title touches down at retail today (Friday October 17th), and to coincide with its retail release Konami has embarked on a promotional campaign worth 2 …

Ubisoft became the first ever publisher to outsell Nintendo on DS in the UK last week – challenging the belief that third parties can’t succeed on the Japanese company’s consoles. Nintendo has been the dominant software publisher on the console in terms of units since the DS launched on March …

Warner Bros has increased its stake in Eidos parent SCi Entertainment to 16.13 per cent. However, Warner’s representative non-executive director at SCi, Kevin Tsujihara, has quit his post. Warner has increased its stake in SCi by five million shares to 42 million shares.

Developer relations chief Colaço says non-retail content offers new options