Posted by: Drew Sikora at October 22, 2009 1:28:23 PM
Another day, another Daily! Let's get you all caught up on what's going on in the industry as it happens. Well, ok not really but I've always wanted to say that. I think it's one of the cooler news anchor phrases. I can at least give you what's been cooking since last week and yesterday's Daily.
Studio News - Idol Minds, Slipgate Ironworks, Blade Games, EA/Playfish. In addition to the layoffs that hit Slipgate Ironworks and Transmission Games earlier this week, reports have come out revealing that Idol Minds, developer of PAIN for the PSN, appears to have been sacked with at least 17 and as many as 26 employees being let go. No confirmation of these layoffs have been received yet - the original source was a former employee with the company. And speaking of Slipgate, its parent publisher Gazillion just reported that John Romero is still large and in charge after the "change in format" to the company. In a time where layoffs run rampant, hirings also tend to make headlines, like Blade Games'recent acquisition of two vets from Microsoft and EA. Nothing really huge there except, hey - the industry is still hiring big! Finally, there's another source that claims EA has indeed purchased Playfish for a very decent chunk of small country(side), but still no official announcement from either company. Why the hush hush?
EA's Dead Space: Extraction "test" off to slow start. Despite that the game was only out 5 days in September, analysts and EA are still calling the NPD numbers below satisfactory with only about 9,000 copies sold, although everyone does acknowledge that very little marketing push was put behind the game, which EA calls a "test" to see if they can attract gamers with multiple platforms to extend their mature play experience across two or more consoles that aren't just Xbox and PS3. While Dead Space: Extraction does have the success of the original Dead Space pushing for it even if EA doesn't lift so much as a marketing finger, the outlook is pretty grim - the other two mature Wii titles MadWorld and The Conduit have both sold less than 100,000 copies. We'll be hearing more on this experiment as the sales data continues to roll in, especially with the holiday season revving up as I type this.
Pitchford's accusations against Valve remain ignored. Kotaku did a quick summation of the fact that no one really seems to have reacted much to Gearbox's Randy Pitchford making some pretty hefty accusations against Valve taking advantage of small developers and having an ongoing conflict of interest regarding Steam. I'm sticking the headstone in this story, which I filled up last week with dirt from Tripwire Interactive's defense in favor of Valve. Valve itself has refused any comment at all. If this comes back to life they will most likely cap it in the head, Zombie-defense style. Don't forget the double-tap - that's Rule #2.
Dev Asserts Ownership Of blah blah blah Controversy. It's kinda cool how I was drawn to this headline simply based upon the fact that it included the word "controversy". Who doesn't like a little controversy? I have no idea what it's about, I didn't actually read it, but I guess it did get me partway there. Just saying.
Daily Remainders - more cool stories that didn't make the cut along with game dev articles/features.
Tickets are now on sale for PAX East, which is a damn shame because I can't go. And neither can a good majority of the 11,000-ish people that will be attending GDC that same week. Gabe and Tycho have mentioned that they don't see the conflict as anything major, but here's hoping they don't do it again next year (and that GDC doesn't screw everything up with a weird schedule that lasts into Saturday)
So yeah... discussion is cool. I'm hearing lots about Borderlands. A friend of mine was audio director for that game, but I'm still on the fence as to whether it's my cup of hot chocolate.
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