Grand Theft Auto hit retail on Tuesday, and is expected to eclipse the launch of Halo 3 last year. GamesIndustry.biz reports that play.com was receiving 80 orders per minute on launch day (though it doesn’t specify how long for), and Jason Kingsley of Rebellion has spoken up for Britsoft:
“This is world’s biggest launch in the [...]

Games:EDU North was yesterday, and I’ve posted a few talk summaries on the main website.

Summary
Keynote: Matt Southern
Academic Workshops
Mike Reddy

There are also photos on Flickr.
The overall dialogue of the day continued the process of settling conflicts between theoretical and vocational content in courses. We’ll be continuing this in Brighton on July the 29th.

A bit of good news for the UK industry today: Codemasters have stepped in to buy Sega’s racing studio, based in Birmingham. Codemasters were already big by standards anywhere outside of Montreal, but they’re on the way to being a behemoth now:
“taking over the Sega Racing Studio could take our development headcount over the 350 [...]

This is quite a surprise: Beijing 2008 ARG The Lost Ring is sponsored by McDonalds. The NYT has a registration wall, so I suggest bugmenot, but here’s a highlight that conveys the gist:
“I think finding out that it was McDonald’s was kind of a big shock for everyone,” said Geoff May, a player in Ontario [...]

Much rumour around this, but SCi recently received a buyout offer. The scuttlebutt has cited Time Warner, Ubisoft and NBC as the potential buyers, but SCi have remained tight lipped, and news broke yesterday that they’d rejected the offer.
UK independent publisher ZOO Digital did just get bought up, by US based GreenScreen, a company just [...]

I linked the first part of an interview with new TIGA CEO David Wilson before, and the second part is now up at Develop. The whole thing is worth reading, but in this segment, he basically talks about some work Pixel-Lab has been doing for quite a while:
In terms of the skills and education issue, [...]

Industry lobbying of the UK government seems to be going up in frequency, with TIGA teaming up with their Austrlian equivalent, ELSPA speaking out again and Iain Livingstone voicing concerns.
Meanwhile, the European Commission have said the exact opposite of the Byron review about ratings: that PEGI needs to be strengthened and more deeply integrated with [...]

It’s been announced that this years game BAFTAs have been canceled. It makes sense, given that the October timeslot excluded a good many Christmas releases, and unreleased games were shortlisted last year.
Hopefully, they can make the awards more relevant. Outside of mainstream press, I’ve heard little but cynicism about them, one person going so far [...]

Here’s the crux of publishing games for PC right now:
“Whether it really is all about piracy, or it just becomes the domination of consoles, or [...] the ubiquity of gaming: there’s a way to get gaming so many ways now that thinking about the PC as a disc-based platform may in fact be old.”
I imagine [...]

An interesting move in Scotland: Game design skills are to be taught as part of the national curriculum there.
A drop in enrolment for university computing courses has resulted in a lack of qualified computer experts when the government wants Scotland to be at the forefront of a knowledge economy. Academics believe the fall is a [...]