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U-Sing publisher Mindscape has shut its last internal development studio and confirmed plans to withdraw from the videogames business after three decades, Develop reports. The closure of Paris-based developer Punchers Impact, which was formed in December 2009 with staff drawn from the likes of EA and the ashes of Free Radical, is to result in the loss of around 40 jobs. Punchers Impact built various casual games for home consoles, but the failure of PC racer Crasher to make an impact at retail hit Mindscape hard. “We had relied much on that game,” a company spokesperson said. “It was not a success and was important to us that it was. We are no longer going to work in the game software business.”

French publisher Gameloft has reported sales of €76.8 million for the first half of calendar 2011, up 15 per cent year-over-year. The firm said the growth was driven by sales in emerging markets and by the success of its smartphone and tablet games, sales of which grew 55 per cent over the previous year. Gameloft plans to launch approximately 20 smartphone and tablet games during the second half of 2011, which it forecast should drive “solid sequential growth in the third and fourth quarters”. In the long-term, the company says it “appears to be in an ideal position to benefit from the rapid emergence of the digital distribution of video games on mobile phones, tablets, social networks, TVs and consoles”. Last September, Gameloft announced that it had achieved over 20 million game sales through the App Store, having released 100 titles since the digital distribution platform’s launch two years earlier. The company was formed in 1999 by the Guillemot family brothers, who are also the founders and owners of Ubisoft.

Ex-Ubisoft developers Audrey Leprince and Emeric Thoa have established a new mobile game studio, The Game Bakers. Based in Paris and Montpellier, France, The Game Bakers is “dedicated to crafting AAA quality games for mobile platforms”. Having previously worked on titles including Tom Clancy’s EndWar and Splinter Cell Double Agent, the pair will now “focus on smaller scale, more agile creative projects that will take advantage of the opportunities afforded by touch devices and the exploding mobile market”. The Game Bakers is currently developing Squids, an adventure game set for release on mobile platforms, PC and Mac this autumn.