In a press release and a decidedly breezy blog post, Bizarre Creations have just revealed that the’ve been purchased by Activision, who it seems have been wanting to acquire some racing genre talent. Bizarre are quick to downplay anticipated fan concerns:
* Bizarre Creations continues to exist as is. We won’t [...]

NCSoft have received a grant from the South East England Development Agency (SEEDA), and are aiming to double their headcount in the next 3 years. The size of the grant is unclear, with this Gameindustry article offering conflicting figures of £950,000 and £195,000:
The company has received GBP 195,000 (EUR 278,589) grant from the South East [...]

Derby-based Emote Games have just won £4 million of funding from VC investors Electra Quoted Management. News about it is here on GameDaily.biz.
Like Areae, they’re a very forward-looking company looking at digital distribution and the web.

The Competition Commission have given out more details on their concerns over the merger between Game and Gamestation that we blogged earlier this year. This is their website, and here are direct links to the PDFs of the news release and issues statement.

Raph Koster and co. at Area have been keeping quiet about what they’re doing, though the logo and Raph’s general talk of “game meets web” has been pretty revealing. Today, they announced Metaplace, which allows many virtual worlds to be connected up. From CNet:
“We are re-inventing virtual worlds that stop working like AOL,” Koster said, [...]

Studios can get up to €100,000 each from EU media program supporting games development. The European Commission has created a fund worth a total of €1.5m (close to £1m) specifically to support games developers.
The funds are direct aid and not repayable loans – it’s the first time the EU’s games developers have received such [...]

Starting on Monday, Gordon Brown joined the political discussion of video-games. Here’s a run down of what’s been happening since.
In response to David Cameron’s recent comments on “fighting back” against violence in media, Brown first talked about looking at the effects of violent media, but the comments were first misinterpreted as meaning a ban by [...]

Warner Interactive are recruiting/headhunting sales, marketing and PR people for their new London office, and Ron Scott, VP of worldwide sales and distribution, has been interviewed by MCV. A couple of tidbits:
This move into games isn’t going to preclude us from licensing products – we have a broader portfolio of IP than we have development [...]

Here’s a collection of the fallout over David Cameron’s recent comments on violent games.
In July, ELSPA were full of praise for his stance on IP and copyright. They’ve made some very reserved comments on Cameron’s latest about games though:
“Summer is well known for mixed and confusing political messages. Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media [...]