Posted by: Drew Sikora at August 20, 2009 1:44:09 PM
Make way, GDNet Daily comin' through!
Studio News. The rather quick demise and sale of Gamecock Media Groupis chronicled by former CEO Mike Wilson, who also brings to light that the new owner, SouthPeak Interactive, has been withholding payment for contractors. Playlogic, another publisher, based out of Amsterdam, is reporting losses and uncertainty about their future in this current hit-driven industry for games. They have the contracts lined up and the products ready to hit shelves but no idea whether any of them will generate the revenue to start pulling them out of their current $63.5 million deficit. Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli spoke again about the German anti-violence game bill at the end of his GDCE keynote, encouraging Germans to support the petition and once more declaring that the passing of this bill would literally force the company out of the country. Former members of Castaway Games have resurfaced behind the reigns of Big Tree Games, but their reappearance remains troubled as they are currently looking for a publisher for their action-strategy game Demonborn. UK-based Endrant Studios has been working with Wolfenstein developer Raven Software on the game's multiplayer component. Unfortunately with the release of the game several team members became redundant and were let go. While a normal thing to happen at the end of a development cycle, we none the less hope these developers land back on their feet soon.
Valve developing for PS3? "Uh, [hells] no." I mentioned a few weeks ago that Valve was looking for PS3 developers and everyone was considering that they were building a core PS3 team with which to start developing titles or at least handle in-house porting of their games to PS3. However it turns out that this is not so, as Valve's boss man Gabe Newell was recently interviewed by GameTrailers TV where he said "Uh, no. not in any real way" to the question of whether Valve was working on anything PS3-related. He then goes on to call the PS3 "a disaster on many levels." Owch. However he does apologize to owners of the Ps3 Orange Box who haven't received any support on the product saying "yeah, I'm sorry, you have a legitimate beef with us." In related news, former Free Radical designer Karl Hilton blames the PS3's arcane architecture on the demise of Haze, saying they spent too much time "trying get the game running properly and less time to design the game properly." Hilton, however, is willing to admit that there is hope for the platform and that Crytek, his current employer, will get the most out of it.
Sony goes from motion control to emotion control. The latest out of Sony R&D is an emotion detection system for the PS3, combining the PSEye and a microphone to detect emotions like, happiness (high-fives, laughter), anger (flailing, screaming), boredom (yawning, talking over cutscenes), etc. This will no doubt be coupled with their motion control system (however this has not been specified - could the two function at once?). Kudos to Joystiq for being the only news outlet covering the story to compare this to the Wii's vitality sensor.
Sorry LAN fans, Blizzard remains adamant about not including the networking protocol in StarCraft 2. Yes, you'll now have to call them "LAN" parties.
You now have no excuse not to own Uncharted if you also own a PS3 now that it is (finally!) a part of the Greatest Hits collection. Welcome to last year, Sony.
Daily Remainders - more cool stories that didn't make the cut along with game dev articles/features
Check out my latest Sitrep in my journal to view two videos of a chambers group orchestral performance of Chrono Trigger and Super Mario Bros medleys. I promise you won't be disappointed.
previous story
next story 
Read this post in Chinese