APRIL 2, 2009 • Sony announced that Little Big Planet MMO had attained 2 million players worldwide, and had generated more than 725,000 user-created levels. Impact: A big part of Little Big Planet’s appeal is encouraging player contributions to the game environ.....

APRIL 1, 2009 • No April fools. A new law put into force by the Quebec provincial government prohibits the sale of new English-only video games if a French-language version is available. Therefore, if a French version is distributed in France, the English version cannot be sold in Quebec. Given that Europe often gets i.....

MARCH 31, 2009 • After resisting a reduction in PlayStation 2 pricing for years, Sony Computer Entertainment announced it was lowering the retail price from $129 to $99 in North America, and from €129 to €99 in Europe. Impact: The PlayStation 2 remains the most played .....

MARCH 30, 2009 • At a recent Federal Trade Commission (FTC) conference, the Entertainment Consumers Association (ECA) made a number of recommendations regarding retail video game packaging. The first recommendation was for disclosure of what kind digital rights management (DRM) is included, and how invasive that DRM will be. The other.....

MARCH 29, 2009 • This month DFC Intelligence released two comprehensive surveys of high-end PC gamers. The surveys were conducted in February 2009 using the panel of over 1.2 million GameShadow users. One survey was conducted of Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) users and another survey was conducted of First-Person Shooter (FPS) users. The exciting thing about these surveys was it provided valuable insight into not just demographics, but also the actual hardware systems and other so.....

MARCH 29, 2009 • Start-up companies trying to compete in the console game market have routinely met with failure. Even well-established companies like Philips, Apple and Matsushita have not been able to crack the market. It took years of planning and investment for Sony and Microsoft to launch successful .....

MARCH 24, 2009 • The latest OnLive video game streaming technology made a media splash at this week’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco  In development for the last seven years by the same Steve Perlman who was behind WebTV, OnLive uses a MicroConsole set-top .....

MARCH 23, 2009 • Enterbrain’s Famitsu magazine published the results of a reader survey that illustrated how much more mobile Japanese gamers are. Only 15.1% did not own a Nintendo DS, and 15.5% lacked a PSP. When it came to consoles, the PS3 was most favored with 41.6% of respondents saying they did not o.....