Game industry business news

One of the most highly regarded HTC Vive and Oculus Rift games is making the move to PS4’s virtual reality headset. Arizona Sunshine offers a full campaign, as well as both single and multiplayer modes, set among the wastelands of a zombie apocalypse. While parts can be tense, however, it’s …

The number of games qualifying for the BFI’s video games tax relief (VGTR) has risen again this quarter by 65 per cent year-on-year. A total of 58 games received final certification in Q1, up from 35 in Q1 2016, with a European Economic Area (EEA)/UK spend of 41m and a …

While you can’t “create an esport”, many developers are now trying their hardest to create a game with a competitive scene, an attractive proposition for a game studio or publisher as esports success for a game can promise an opportunity for near-limitless cash and a strong community. But, while developers …

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe held its No.1 spot on the Japanese charts last week, shifting another 86,313 units during its second week on sale. Nintendo’s revamped racer sold an astonishing 280,229 during its first week, taking its cumulative total to 366,542. That might be a fall of 69 per cent …

Mark it in your diaries. Nintendo will be kicking off its E3 activities this year on Tuesday June 13th at 5pm in the UK. Starting with its now traditional E3 2017 video presentation – now dubbed Nintendo Spotlight as opposed to its traditional ‘Direct’ format – the platform holder will …

After a poor performance from Gambit Esports in the LCL Spring Split, Gambit has announced that it’ll be getting rid of all of its League of Legend players except jungler Danil ‘DiamondProx’ Reshetnikov. Viacheslav ‘Archie2b’ Egorov’s contract was not renewed, while Michal ‘zoiren’ Zika, Valentin ‘NikSar’ Zimakov and Ivan ‘FiRees’ …

Rime will no longer cost more digitally on Switch than it does on other platforms. Developer Tequila Works in March blamed the disparity on development and publishing platform costs. And indeed, the physical Switch release will still retail for more than other platforms – a fact that presumably can be …

Nielsen’s US Games 360 Report 2017 has found that non-gamers still remain largely unaware of some video games hardware. Among the general population, only 22 per cent of people have even heard of the Nintendo Switch and only 11 per cent the Xbox Scorpio. In contrast, 69 per cent of …

Develop’s editor Jem Alexander discusses the out-of-home VR market and how escape rooms are delving into digital. Escape rooms are exploding all over London. The rooms themselves aren’t literally exploding, of course, but I’ve noticed frankly ridiculous growth in the market in cities all over the world. It seems that …

There will be no more games in the Mass Effect series for the foreseeable future, it seems. Kotaku reports that the sci-fi RPG series has been put on hiatus and that its developer, BioWare Montreal, has been turned into a support studio. Indeed, the site adds that many of the …