It’s funny what a difference there just across the pond. In America, we’re in a pitched battle to determine whether games will be stripped of first amendment protections and treated like pornography. Meanwhile, the British Library is making overtures to the National Videogame Archive to help preserve England’s 30 year history of digital interactive media. [...]

Amazon.com has posted their year-end sales rankings for everything in the video games category (via Gamasutra). Looking at just the top ten, Nintendo positively dominated the year and took home nine of the slots. The video games category includes software, hardware, and optional peripherals. Interestingly, of those nine slots, seven are straight hardware or are [...]

The rumor mill has been running overtime this week, with patents, trademarks, and offhand developer mutterings flying everywhere. You’d think that with BlizzCon only just passed and PAX coming in hard on its heels there’d be other things to talk about. However, I suspect that the gaming press has a deep-seated need to manufacture news. [...]

Jeez, it’s been a heck of a week for merged publisher/developer Activision Blizzard. First, the company announced it would be delaying Starcraft II into next year. They tried to ease investor fears by pointing out that the rest of the 2010 schedule is still on track, but it doesn’t seem to have helped. Between the [...]

One of the funnier properties of human thought is that paying for something will make you think it’s valuable, and the more you pay, the more you think it’s worth. The opposite is true as well, where the less you pay, the less valuable your purchase seems. It’s called cognitive dissonance. When you pay the [...]

Poor Duke Nukem: Forever; the only postmortem for its development team will be an elegy. When Forever developer 3D Realms collapsed a week ago, it seemed like the end of a 12 year saga of promises, delays, and jokes that were more easy than clever.

However, the show must go on, and Take Two interactive is keeping the Duke Nukem farce alive by suing the closest living relative to 3D Realms: Duke Nukem creator Apogee Software. Take Two has alleged that the closure of 3D Realms constitutes a breech of Take Two’s contractual publishing rights, and that Apogee is responsible for the failure. It’s like a 12 year setup for a spit take, only instead of saliva there are summons.

This news seems to put to rest any theories that 3D Realms was conspiring with Take Two for media attention to the ailing FPS franchise. Instead it appears that Take Two is trying to recover losses from the $12 million publishing rights they purchased in 2000 and renewed during the intervening years.

Come to think on it, I’d really like to see a postmortem from the development team. It seems like it’d be an instructive reflection on how not to make a game.

Once upon a time, Valve and Sierra had a happy relationship where Valve would develop games and Sierra would publish physical copies and sell licenses to cyber café players. However, after a royalty dispute, Valve began to move toward its now wildly popular Steam distribution platform, and the developer-publisher relationship strained until it cracked. Soon, [...]

Vendor ultra-giant Amazon.com yesterday entered world of digitally distributed gaming. The new Amazon Store solely features casual games, all of which are being initially offered for $10.

Although Amazon will be leaving thorny issues like DRM to the publishers selling games through the new service, every game will be distributed through a proprietary Amazon downloader. Of course, people are loath to install new software just to buy from Amazon, so the vendor will be sweetening the deal with three free downloads: Jewel Quest, The Scruffs, and Build-a-Lot. These titles are available alongside the remaining 597 casual games in their library.

When Gamasutra asked why the vendor was focusing exclusively on casual games, it was revealed that Amazon plans to use the service to pilot their gaming digital distribution program. If it sees success, we may expect the selection of available games to suit a broader gaming palette.

Given all the layoffs reported lately, it’s time for some good news. PopCap Games, makers of such universal hits as Bejeweled and Peggle has announced (via Gamasutra) an 85% retail sales jump in 2008. This spike came at a time when PC games took an overall 14% hit in retail revenues, and has catapulted the publisher into the top 20 retail publishers by dollar volume.

They attribute their success to the recent release of Bejeweled Twist, and while that’s certainly a substantial contributor, the economy also likely plays a role. In economic circumstances where gamers are working longer to keep their jobs and money is short for everyone, publishers like PopCap who sell cheap games that don’t take long to play but have substantial replayability should flourish.

What’s surprising about this news is that PopCap is best known for their web portal, where they do digital distribution of demos and Flash versions of their retail games. It’s certainly true that nothing sells a game like a good demo, but if digital distribution is really driving consumer interest, you’d expect the sales to be via digital distribution as well. Perhaps it really is true: you can’t predict where the consumer will buy.

It looks like Nintendo is getting a case of the ‘me toos’. Gamasutra reports that the casual console maker is following suit with Microsoft and Sony’s Netflix partnerships.

Of course, Nintendo still marches to its own drummer, and it appears that the new partnership will actially be with an advertising company, Dentsu, to provide original streaming content instead of the Netflix video rental model. Although this announcement only applies to japan for the time being, Nintendo hopes to extend the service to the west in 2009.

This announcement follows an earlier one that the Wii would soon see a theater channel. Whether this means that Nintendo plans to offer both movies and television remains to be seen. How long can it be before the Omni-Leisure 5000 graces our living rooms?