There’s an entire aesthetic of games marketing and discourse that, frankly, deserves to die. The games press, both consumer and industry facing, has struggled with some very tricky questions for years now, largely around the relationships between publisher and reviewer, and reviewers and fans.
It’s easy to spot something is wrong, even enumerate the sector’s faults [...]

A lot of games were just announced at E3. Here are HD trailers of some of the ones we’re most looking forward to:
The Last Guardian, by Team Ico
WipeOut HD Fury, developed by Sony over in Liverpool
Assassin’s Creed 2, set in Renaissance Venice. While the gameplay of the first may have been criticised, the artistry in [...]

Valve are setting an excellent example of how to update games at the moment, by making the updates into entertainment themselves rather than mere patches.
Last week they unveiled an update to the sniper class in Team Fortress 2, which seemed to completely negate spies, the counter to snipers. Knowing full well that such an update [...]

Aleks talks about Eidos getting lower than expected sales on Tomb Raider: Underworld, and as a result saying they’ll possibly make Lara Croft more “female friendly”. What on earth does that even mean? Do Eidos have a clue why North American sales were so low compared to expectations? Have they tied that to American women [...]

LittleBigPlanetoid brought this very interesting nugget to my attention on Monday: Companies have been asking Media Molecule to add their IP to a whitelist for LittleBigPlanet, meaning that rather than being treated as copyright infringement, works based on their things will be treated as fan art or free marketing, and allowed to stay in place.
Sony [...]

From the Introversion forums comes disturbing news that online game review sites may be cutting back on reviews. Money quote:
We’ve heard disturbing rumours from more than one source that major games websites are now cutting back on the number of games they review – and it’s games like Multiwinia that are getting dropped because there [...]

A quick update on EA’s marketing stunt from Monday:
Photos of the petrol station are on Flickr, and Games Radar has a couple of pictures of the resulting queue.
MP Lynne Featherstone has waded in and demanded an apology. One again from the BBC:
“Whilst a lucky few might have got free petrol, hundreds of residents have faced [...]

This is disruptive yet amusing. Electronic Arts took over a petrol station and gave away over £20,000 worth of fuel to UK drivers. Why? To promote a game of course. They have made national news and done something that people will talk about a lot. The resulting marketing will be worth way more than an [...]

Bruce Everiss posted this morning about the 360 apparently selling well in Japan:
So the effect of Tales of Vesperia will be to lift the 360 to a higher sustained level in the market. And at this higher level, because of word of mouth and peer pressure, there will be far more organic growth. It is [...]

via Nicholas Lovell comes a rumour that Google are nearing a release of the in-game ad service they’ve been testing for a while. It’s most likely true given the recent release of Lively. Also, as Nicholas points out:
the opportunity for independent and smaller studios who fall below the radar screen of Massive, IGA or Double [...]