Steve Swink left a game design job that was wearing him down to work on indie game development and teach game design.
In an excellent answer to a letter at Game Career Guide, he talks about making the transition from mainstream developer to educator. Part 1 is here:
If you’re going to grind your life away in [...]

The Times Online reports that the Nintendo Wii is being blamed for a decline in primetime viewing figures:
The Nintendo Wii – the games console that is outselling Sony’s Play-Station 3 by three to one – has begun to “steal” prime-time television audiences in Japan.
The Nintendo machine, which was specifically designed to repackage video gaming as [...]

Tax credits are one thing, but a regional games academy is a hugely positive step in aligning government, academic and commercial institutions around game development. Taking this further into a national centre of excellence would be a massive boost to UK game dev.
Yorkshire’s Bradford, Hull and Sheffield Hallam universities have teamed up to create what [...]

Ian Livingstone has an opinion piece up on MCV, lending weight to the call for UK game development tax breaks:
In continuing to focus on skills and the development of a first rate workforce the government is showing great foresight in tackling one of the key challenges faced by the industry.
This new focus will certainly help [...]

From MCV:
Margaret Hodge, Minister for Creative Industries, has pledged to continue the Government’s support of video games, telling MCV:
“I look forward to continuing to work closely with the video and computer games sector to support innovation and growth. The Government has an important role to play in championing all the creative industries, both at home [...]

There’s only one day left to get submissions in for the 2007 BAFTA videogame awards. Full details on their site.

It’s only two months since an 80% fall was reported, but in advance of their AGM, GAME have just announced a 74% rise in sales.
A growing base of current-gen systems has eased things somewhat, nonetheless GAME expect margins to shrink:
As we said in April, the higher volumes of new generation platforms will increase hardware participation [...]

We’re doing a Never Mind the Polygons in Brighton on the last day of Deveop. It will be at Koba on the 26th of July, with Dan Marchant, Nick Burton, Rusalka Clarke and Ange Fenge.
The pixel-horse’s mouth is here so to speak, and you can find Develop coverage here as well as a gamesindustry.biz piece [...]

The pro side of the to and fro over the effects of games just got a shot in the arm from Brunel University. The Scotsman reports:
Researchers from Brunel University spent three years studying 13-16-year-olds who play a leading web-based game.
And far from becoming pale prisoners of their own bedrooms, regular players were found to enhance [...]

Following on from the rebranding of Kuju Brighton as Zoe Mode, Kuju Sheffield has now been rebranded as Chemistry. The studio is set to be an Unreal Engine 3 specialist.
We blogged about Zoe Mode when it happened, indeed it’s such an unusual move that it often gets mentioned in in pieces about *other* rebranding exercises.
The [...]