Games

Games Convention Asia Conference has opened its call for papers and is seeking speaking proposals from experts in the international game community.

The main topics for this year's conference are casual games, online games, financing, outsourcing and business models. The deadline for submissions is June 15.

The event is being organised by Leipziger Messe International, a subsidiary of Leipziger Messe, the team that puts on GC Developers Conference in Europe.

In a form SC TO-T/A filed today with the SEC, Electronic Arts indicated that it has received a commitment for up to USD 1 billion in senior unsecured term loan financing towards its attempted acquisition of Take-Two.

EA indicated that it expected the cost of the merger to be approximately USD 2.1 billion, and that as of March 31 it had cash and equivalents in the amount of USD 2.3 billion.

id Software, the developer of such video games as Doom and Quake as well as the company that licenses popular video engines to other game makers, on Wednesday said it had begun development of the Doom 4 title and was seeking for new workforce. The new title promises to bring “hell on earth”, but there are questions whether it would become popular and would use id’s latest id Tech 5 rendering engine.

The guys at The Pirate Bay do enjoy sticking their thumbs into the eyes of authority. Intellectual property? They say, “no hablamos law.” (A mangled Swedish translation probably would’ve been a better fit.)

And considering the inherent unruliness of the very successful video game franchise Grand Theft Auto, which will be celebrating the launch of the fourth installment in the series in just a few days, TPB of course find it their customary duty to play the jokester. According to Michael McWhertor of Kotaku, they have temporarily replaced their logo with the title “Liberty Bay.”

Gamers in China will be paying more than US$3bn a year to play online by 2010, according to new forecasts.

The online games market in the world's most populous nation was worth US$1.66bn last year, US-based Pearl Research reported.

"A key trend to track in 2008 is rising average revenue per user," said Pearl Research managing director Allison Luong.

"Certain online games are reaching US$7 to US$12 a month in average revenue per user, significantly higher than past averages of US$5 or less per month.

Publisher Electronic Arts and magazine PC Gamer have pulled back the iron curtain, revealing the existence of Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3. The game marks the first entry in the spin-off RTS series to hit since the Yuri's Revenge Red Alert 2 expansion pack in 2001.

With the title featured in PC Gamer, a PC version is a given, though it is not yet known if it will arrive on a console or consoles a la EA Los Angeles' Command and Conquer 3 Tiberium War (PC, X360).

First it was banks and now it is online gamers. As global internet usage continues to grow, cyber criminals are training their eyes on the net gaming community for their next big hit, according to specialists from computer security company McAfee.

Experts at the firm’s Avert Labs research centre have named the 10 security threats they expect to be the most serious in 2008. And they revealed that the number of password-stealing Trojans, or malicious software, that targeted online games in 2007 grew faster than the number of Trojans that targeted banks.

As a true testament of the potential of the PC gaming mass market, Blizzard today announced another amazing milestone in the continuing popularity of the company’s insanely popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game. World of Warcraft now has more than 10 million subscribers worldwide – more than 2 million subscribers in Europe, more than 2.5 million in North America, and approximately 5.5 million in Asia.

As Sam commented on, an ill-conceived publicity stunt by GameCock (for which they did apologize) at the Spike VGA's threw the show off and left Ken Levine without a chance to say anything as he accepted the award for Game of the Year given to BioShock. While he's off enjoying some well-deserved vacation time, he took a few minutes out to give us his acceptance speech and answer a few questions looking back at BioShock.

What's it like to work alongside the god of gaming?

Yoshiaki Koizumi could tell you. As the director of Nintendo's biggest Wii game yet, Super Mario Galaxy, Koizumi reports directly to Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Mario, the head of Nintendo's game development group, and the greatest game designer the world has ever known. It's a job, says Koizumi, that requires him to "translate" the maestro's often-inscrutable insights into real-world gameplay.