Companies fail all the time, but this… this was different. For Brenda Laurel, it was personal. Logistically, Purple Moon amounted to six years and $US40 million dollars spent on research where thousands of kids were interviewed and eight games were produced. Prior to 1996, when the company was created by Brenda Laurel, a pioneer extraordinaire within human-computer interaction fields, these kids had no voice.
Doodle Jump is now an icon of iPhone gaming, but it almost died at launch after selling just 21 copies on its first day of release. How did developer Lima Sky get from there to Doodle Jump being a more famous app than anything not called Angry Birds? The answer is a strange mix of snack food, bubble wrap, blogger nagging, brotherly co-operation and sheer luck.
Nintendo has yet to release the official hardware specifications for the Wii U, and it’s something Gearbox’s Brian Burleson, senior producer on Aliens: Colonial Marines, won’t discuss directly. But, he said to Eurogamer, the Wii U will get the best-looking version of the game because it has “more modern tech”.
Microsoft has responded to our earlier report of Xbox Live accounts being “jacked” via the “social engineering” of support staff.
Last week’s rough launch of Diablo III neatly illustrated the biggest problem with the game’s ‘always-on’ internet requirement. It was a reminder that consumers have lost a portion of their ownership of the game, that we no longer have complete control even over whether or not our game will start.