Dundee based Realtime Worlds have secured a third round of venture finance, totaling around £25M. There’s not much to say beyond “congratulations”, however…
Realtime were founded by David Jones, designer of both Lemmings and the Grand Theft Auto series. We have some absolutely stunning talent over here in the UK, but it won’t matter so much [...]

No details on how many people or how much money yet, but Paramount have followed Warner Bros and Disney into games, upping the size of their interactive team and first looking at lower risk projects like mobile and casual. Variety has the scoop. It reads as if they’re trying to spread the risk as far [...]

I’ve blogged before about Grand Theft Childhood and am still looking forward to my preorder landing, but for now Open Education have an interview with one of the authors:
One very encouraging finding was how sophisticated middle-school boys were in their understanding of violent games. They could enjoy playing bad guys without wanting to be them. [...]

A Develop feature from Tuesday 25th examines French Games Industry tax breaks in some detail. It makes a lot of very good points, taking examples from France’s past of where they’ve gone wrong before:
France’s games industry was in trouble before Montreal started calling. Its independent sector was shrinking rapidly just like every other major development [...]

The Byron Review has now been published, and so far there are no big surprises. It takes a much more balanced tone than Gordon Brown talking about games and knife crime.
Hardly a day goes by without a news report about children being brutalised and abused in the real world or its virtual counterpart. Some make [...]

I have a lot of time for Metanet, mostly because they did such stunning work with the flash version of N. Now they’re finding their feet with commercial indie development through the release of N+, they’ve had a few things to say about XBox live, some of it controversial:
Live Arcade had just came out, and [...]

This is quite an interesting tidbit on convergence and the games industry: Autodesk are buying AI middleware developers Kynogon, but it’s the latter who’ll be taking the lead on games technology. Quote:
He says this as he and fellow founder Pierre Pontevia will head up Autodesk’s new games technology group with ‘to bridge the gap between [...]

It was only last August that global studio group Foundation 9 bought Sheffield based Sumo Digital, and Sumo’s founder James North-Hearn has just become CEO of the so called “superdeveloper”:
North-Hearn briefly laid out his strategy for the company, saying: “When I worked with Infogrames and also with Gremlin, I was very studio-oriented. The first thing [...]

Game Republic are holding an event on game licensing on April the 15th. From the site:
Speakers confirmed so far include Aaron Ludlow from Mastertronic. Keep an eye on this page for further updates. The session will be chaired by Northern games industry legend, Charles Cecil, Managing Director of Revolution Software.
(CC Image of the N64 in [...]

Yet more big media pushing into games: Nickelodeon plans to make a further 600 original flash games this year, and get 1000 more from other publishers. They’ve also reiterated a commitment to virtual worlds, and announced game development tools aimed at users rather than game developers:
– Nickgamestudio.com is a completely new vertical launch for the [...]