Videogames, as we know, are a massive industry: According to PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), a consulting firm, the global video-game market was worth around $56 billion last year. That is more than twice the size of the recorded-music industry, nearly a quarter more than the magazine business and abo
While we were thinking about how post-release developer layoffs may do more harm than good, Zynga was busy laying off most of their Austin-based studio. Ian Miles Cheong at Gameranx has the gorey details: We are told that the employees were given less than two hours to clear out their desks followin
It’s no secret that videogame production is lacking in diversity, both in who makes games, and whom they are made for. A panel at Game Narrative Summit suggests that tackling this issue (as it relates to women) is more complicated than simply making a main character that is a strong, androgynous, ro
The Internet contains too much information for any individual to read it all. One approach to this problem is to go on a “raw” information diet of reading actual bills in Congress and original scientific papers. It’s… an interesting idea rooted in the local slow food movement, and strikes me as kind
A Google study of tablet use comes to some predictable conclusions: When U.S. tablet owners are playing games on their devices, they’re most likely sitting or lying down on a couch, according to a new Google study examining how consumers use tablets. The research paper, which seeks to provide an und
Many major videogame companies go through a common development process: Developers staff up to make a huge game, then shed members once it ships because they no longer have anything for them to do. It happens again and again, whether the game is successful or not: Take-Two had a huge hit with Red D
Jim Rossignol has a great take today on why he wants to play Day Z, XCOM, and FTL so much more than Dishonored: the more ways there are to fail, the more invested he becomes in a game. Novelists and scriptwriters have understood this trick for years: piling problems on to the protagonist, in as many
We here at Kill Screen international HQ were fondly recalling our halcyon Doom days (the Doom 3 rerelease came out last week), when the subject of the ending to the first game came up. For me, this was the most terrifying and memorable moment in the entire series. Speaking of which, MR HONEY BUNNNN