Something absolutely monstrous has emerged from the Scamville scandal instigated by Techcrunch last month.
Not only were offers being used to scam users into subscriptions, but they were also being utilised to dupe people into supporting political campaigns they don’t necessarily agree with, building a base of fake dissent to campaign against healthcare reform in the [...]

What if game publishers, like some music publishers often have done, spun out smaller labels tp publish indie games? Brian Baglow from Denki asks more or less just that on their company blog, and it’s a very interesting thought. Surely, as indie games become more popular and players become more accustomed to smaller, cheaper games [...]

Ars Technica ran a rather provocatively titled piece last month, entitled “Innovating problems: why DJ Hero flopped“. Harsh, but it did suffer from lackluster sales, mostly likely because launching something quite niche, during a recession when seasonal games sales aren’t looking great so far, with a three figure price tag isn’t, ahem, the most obvious [...]

Every Christmas, kids ask or beg their parents for games rated way above their age, and every year game developers and publishers inevitably have to defend themselves against accusations of targeting minors with violent or sexual content, by pointing out that their games are prominently age rated and that parents should pay attention.
In one of [...]

MP Tom Watson is in the games news today for more games industry coordination. Shadow Minister Ed Vaizey has also been criticising government support of the industry for a while too.
Say what you like about the tax breaks debate, and governments that are inevitably on the way out too, but this kind of vocal support [...]

Lately I’ve been working on Get In The Game for Northwest Vision and Media, and as a part of that I’ve been listening to pitches for games. Several companies have pitched ARGs, and it occurred to me during the last pitching session that absolutely everyone I heard speak about or pitch ARGs seems to approach [...]

A bit of good news in the face of so many studio closures and redundancies this year: Ex-Codies Nick Wheelright and Trevor Williams are opening a new studio in the Midlands, called Playground Games. My bet is that Birmingham will snaffle them, as it seems to be doing with a lot of creative businesses at [...]

Last.fm have apparently, through integration with XBox Live, gained 1 million new subscribers in the past few weeks.
We’ve tried out Twitter and Facebook on our 360s, and to be honest it seems deeply pointless to go through that interface when we have laptops and phones with web access. Microsoft have spoken plenty now on their [...]

There’s a very interesting post-mortem of Time Fcuk by co-creator Edmund McMillen over on Gamasutra. The comments on the piece are also worth reading; Gamasutra is managing to build quite a community of known game designers in the comment sections on some features.
Time Fcuk is one of the games I sought for the Indie Games [...]

Advantage West Midlands have launched a new regional networking body, Game Central. It’s kicking off with a series of events, and the first one, Meet ‘Em Up, is happening in Leamington Spa on the 3rd of December.
Regional networking bodies for games are difficult to get right. Some regions just don’t have enough public support or [...]