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Now hang on a minute. It doesn't seem like five minutes since some gaggle of market pundits were proclaiming that the iPhone had turned the mobile games market inside out and pointing at developers rolling around in pits of cash like Scrooge McDuck.
Brash Entertainment are no more. It's OK, your grief will pass. While you're waiting, know that two developers working with the now-defunct publisher are suing the company. 7 Studios - who were working on a game called 9, based on a cartoon produced by Tim Burton - are suing because Brash owe them $US581,000. The other studio suing is Zootfly, who claim Brash owe them $US748,000 for the Prison Break game they were working on. Oh Brash. They didn't live with dignity, guess it'd be too much to be expecting they die with some.
Brash sued by two developers [Variety]
Get a look at this guy! Atari, long expected to run itself right into an early, second grave, are showing signs of life. Partly thanks to games people actually wanted to buy - like Alone in the Dark and Dragon Ball Z - and partly because of the influence of a certain cloned, well-dressed gentleman, the company have seen sales for the last six months jump by 145% to €36.3 million ($70.56 million). Course, parent company Infogrames still lost a bit of money, but hey, things are looking up!
In case you missed it, there was a big, business-end-of-town conference, called the BMO Capital Markets Conference, held today in New York. Everyone who was anyone the the business end of the games industry was there. And that includes Take-Two boss Strauss Zelnick, who gave a little talk on the state of his company. While it was filled mostly with stuff about sales projections and IP strengthening and blah blah blah, he did whip out a few presentation slides that were of interest.
People want stuff cheap. It's human nature. Why spend $100 on something when you can spend $50 on it and spend the other $50 on something else? You see where we're going with this. Anyway, lots of people want the Nintendo Wii and Nintendo DS cheap because, well, the Wii hasn't had a price cut since forever, and the DS hasn't had one in a while either. What the people want, though, and what Nintendo are willing to give are two completely different things. Reggie Fils-Aime:
According to Variety, Brash Entertainment are no more. The young company - who were only launched in 2007 - had recently laid off a bunch of employees and cancelled a few projects, but were promising the world that they'd not be going under. Shows how good business promises are these days! The Variety reports says that, ever since company co-founder Thomas Tull jumped ship, the investors propping the company up with cash money have bailed as well, leaving them with...no money. If this checks out, we won't really miss them as a company, since the only thing they ever did was release a few crappy games and talk a lot of talk, but it always sucks to hear of devs and staff losing their jobs en masse.
Times are tough. Economically speaking, at least. And when times are tough, people have less money to spend, and when people have less money to spend, big business gets worried. Gaming is a big business these days, so is gaming worried? Let's find out. Speaking at the BMO Capital Markets interactive entertainment conference today, the big cheese from EA, Nintendo, Take-Two and Ubisoft all sounded off on their thoughts for the holiday season. Those thoughts range from the optimistic to the not-so-optimistic.
Chicago-based developer Midway announced its third quarter earnings today, pulling in $US51.4 million in revenue. That's better than the $US36.7 million it did the year prior and thankfully in line with expectations. The bad news — oh, there's bad news, naturally — is that Midway took a loss of $US75.9 million, with losses planned to continue for the year. That's worse than the quarter before and the year prior, for those who like to keep track of such things.
Square Enix has released its first half results for the financial year ending March 31, 2009. Exciting! While net sales are down, net income is up — in large part due to the strong sales of the DS Dragon Quest V remake and a successful media mix campaign. The company's financial briefing has games sales data for Japan, North America and Europe. The biggest seller is the above mentioned Dragon Quest V, selling 1.150 million copies in Japan alone. The rest of Square Enix's worldwide sales figures for the period dated April 1, 2008 to September 30, 2008:
Even as CCP works away at its 