January – the month in five minutes

Firstly, here’s the top ten stories for the month:

1

The successor to the PSP has been revealed. It’s the most powerful and feature-packed handheld of all time, and developers will be able to port certain PlayStation games to Android devices.

2

Nintendo’s 3DS will launch in the US March 27th, and in the UK March 25th. Expect to pay $249/£229. Battery life is “between 3 and 5 hours”.

3

Bizarre Creations is closing after failing to find a buyer since put up for sale in November. An Activision exec claimed that other studios were waiting for Bizarre to close so they could snap up talent, as opposed to paying up to save the studio.

4

Disney has closed Propaganda Games. Around 200 staff are said to have been made redundant across Disney Interactive as it shifts focus to digital.

5

Jason West and Vince Zampella have been hit by extraordinary allegations of foul play when at Infinity Ward, including claims the pair delayed Modern Warfare DLC to aid rival firm EA. All unproven, our lawyers remind us to say.

6

Various Kaos staff have complained about relentless crunch work and studio unrest. Some, in fact, fear the studio will close as THQ looks to fill its 400-capacity studio in Montreal.

7

Capcom’s been accused of plagiarising a Twisted Pixel XBLA game. The studio won’t sue, partly due to a love for Mega Man. Inafune-san is probably delighted by that.

8

Kongregate’s Arcade app launched on Android, before being banned by Google hours later, and later returned to the portal with a few amendments.

9

Tiga has relaunched its Tax Relief plan. It warns that the UK could lose 24 per cent of its workforce by 2015.

10

Frontier has made about a dozen staff redundant. The studio denies reports that its project, The Outsider, is Cancelled.

ALL 219 JANUARY NEWS REPORTS CAN BE FOUND HERE

News we didn’t report:

1) Some annoying boy has hacked a PS3.
2) A Russian media outlet has reported on a gaming controversy in such a lazy and contemptuous manner it still isn’t being repeated here.
3) David Jaffe swore.

January’s Winners

Miles Jacobson
Though there’s the occasional whiff of David Brent rising from his Twitter feed, Jacobson is nevertheless a lovely guy, a bit of a working-class hero, and named here for being the games industry’s next and well-deserved recipient of an OBE.

The PSP2
Oh come on, it’s so much better than you thought it would be.

Tim Ingham
In what could be a scale of ignorance only Andy Coulson would care to admit to, broadcaster Sky Sports apparently failed to notice – presumably over twenty years – that its two longstanding pundits were practicing ‘gross-misconduct’-levels of off-camera misogyny. Thank god those leaked videos were found! Not only has CVG editor Tim Ingham ripped the whole sorry story apart, he’s also shown how game industry standards are so pitiful that even Andy Gray would burn his bra at them.

January’s Losers

The ‘NGP’
Neo-Geo Pocket fans in uproar.

Jason West [Allegedly]
For someone to have the utter gall to text ***********REDACTED********** just so Treyarch ************ REDACTED ************ want them to fail or something? Are you that sick?

The Coalition Government of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
In one month: DCMS blocks Develop’s line to the only minister that even knows what a video game is; it emerges that the Department for Transport gave a New York studio £2.8 million to develop a game for young Britons; the Treasury makes a pitiful response to Tiga’s new report on game tax breaks; unemployment continues to rise; GDP makes shock drop into negative levels while the man in charge of the economy blames the weather.

Tweet of the month:

“At Kaos studios in NY sitting with a team that’s finaling on 7 day weeks for a couple of months. Talk about that ‘thousand yard stare’”

-THQ president of Core Games Danny Bilsonjust a few days before his company was hit with allegations of enforced overtime.

In numbers:

£32,000
That’s how much the average game developer earns, as revealed in Develop’s latest salary survey.

10,000,000,000
Ten billion apps!? Apple insists that’s how many have been downloaded from the App Store since the platform’s birth.

600%
Quebec’s game development workforce has grown six-fold since 2003, according to Invest Quebec data. It is said the region now has about 50 dev studios providing work for 5,000 people.

You should have been there:

Learning Without Frontiers/ Jan 9th-11th
Despite its unclear invented-at-committee name, Learning Without Frontiers was an illuminating, relaxed and well-run conference with some of the biggest names in gaming in attendance.

The likes of Nintendo UK boss David Yarnton, SCE UK chief Ray Maguire and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales took stage at the London event.