Last year Sony rebranded its online content offerings to Entertainment Network as part of an effort to bring everything under one roof, and now all those games and videos have their own web store. Sony started testing the store in Europe last month, but it has now expanded to the US, Canada,...
Buy from your office chair, watch on your couch
Following the rather successful iOS launch of Temple Run 2 — over 20 million downloads in the first four days — the shrine-escaping sequel is now available for Android. As with the iOS version, it's a free download, and you can pick it up now...
Origin from Electronic Arts will be joining Apple's Mac App Store and Valve's Steam as the latest distribution platform for video games on OS X. The company today announced the immediate launch of an alpha version of Origin, which gives testers a free copy of Bookworms from PopCap Games. That's all you'll be getting right now though, as Origin's built-in game store isn't yet functional at this...
Authorities in the United Kingdom have fined Sony £250,000 ($396,000) for a widespread 2011 PlayStation Network data breach — a breach that the government says "could have been prevented." Describing the incident as a "serious breach of the Data Protection Act," the country's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) criticized Sony's European branch for not doing more to strengthen the security of its gaming network.
The April 2011 hack shut down Sony's PSN for several weeks, after exposing the personal data of about 100 million accounts. Company officials publicly apologized for the breach in May of that year, offering free games to all PSN users, but the ICO on Thursday said Sony's infrastructure should have been strong enough to defend against the hack in the first place.
"This is a business that should have known better." David Smith, ICO deputy commissioner
Games company THQ has just announced that it will be effectively dissolved, its assets sold off to former competitors. In a letter sent from CEO Brian Farrell and President Jason Rubin to THQ employees and published at Polygon, the company said that it considered both an original bid from Clearlake Capital Group, which would have purchased its assets wholesale, and competing ones for individual...
"We were hoping that the entire company would remain intact." Brian Farrell, CEO
Today Nintendo president Satoru Iwata revealed that the company is working on bringing some of its biggest franchises to the Wii U — unfortunately we have few details on what any of these games will be like. A new 3D entry in the Super Mario series was announced alongside a new Mario Kart, but Nintendo only confirmed their existence; actual details will have to wait until E3 in June, where...
We knew Nintendo was working on bringing downloadable classic games to the Wii U, and today president Satoru Iwata revealed that the feature will be available right after a system update this spring. Both NES and Super NES games will be available when the Wii U Virtual Console launches, and Nintendo also announced that Gameboy Advance games will eventually be coming to the service as well. The games will be playable on the Wii U's GamePad controller and there will also be some form of integration with MiiVerse, the console's social network. For users who have already purchased Virtual Console games on the original Wii, Nintendo will be...
Those who played StarCraft and StarCraft: Brood War likely remember the impressive cinematic segments that punctuated the game's campaigns, and Blizzard's latest trailer delivers the same excitement for galactic drama with the warring Terran, Protoss, and Zerg. The new opening cinematic, for the second installment of StarCraft II, shows off a huge Zerg mothership of Independence Day proportions, and an ensuing onslaught against besieged...
"Armies will shatter. Worlds will burn." Sarah Kerrigan, Queen of Blades
What makes a poem, and what makes a man? Artist, writer, and game-maker Sonny Rae Tempest explores both in Gap, a brief "navigable poem" about the boundaries of masculinity. Your player, the letter "A" or a "supposed Alpha male," must walk through a maze of letters — his presence is necessary...
Amazon will extend its in-app purchasing system, already available for the Kindle Fire or other Android devices, to games for the Mac, PC, and web. The move will allow game developers on those platforms to use Amazon's service, potentially...
Temple Run 2 has amassed over 20 million downloads in its first four days on the iOS App Store, with six million of those coming on day one alone. And though it's initially a free download, the highly-anticipated game has also rocketed to become one of the highest grossing...
The leadership of Atari Inc., what’s left of the gaming legend behind Pong and the Atari 2600, is filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in an effort to free the company from French parent Atari SA, formerly Infogrames, reports the Los Angeles Times. An unnamed "knowledgeable person" says...
On January 14th Gas Powered Games launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund a new action role playing game called Wildman — and just a few days later the studio was hit with "substantial" layoffs. Now the studio is using that misfortune as a selling point for its crowd funding campaign. In a video update, a visibly emotional Chris Taylor, Gas Powered's founder, explained the reasoning behind the layoffs and their...
Last summer designer Andrew Kim's vision for "The Next Microsoft" got a lot of traction online — including on The Verge — for its aggressively minimal rebranding of the company across platforms. The next month Microsoft unveiled its actual new...
Today, Electronic Arts announced that it is currently developing SimCityEDU, an online educational game based on the latest reboot of the company's popular SimCity franchise. Created in a partnership with GlassLabs, SimCityEDU is intended to be a learning tool for science, technology,...
Ahead of the highly-anticipated SimCity launch on March 5th, EA and Maxis have announced that users can beta test the game from Friday, January...
The premise of Temple Run is easy to understand — you steal an artifact from an ancient temple, and then you run like hell. This simple concept combined with exhilarating gameplay and intuitive...
CES is not a games show, as Sony CEO Kaz Hirai pointed out to us in our interview with him last week. That's his reason for the dearth of PlayStation news at CES this year — the PS3 and Vita were hardly even mentioned at Sony's press conference. And of course, Microsoft didn't come at all, so we weren't treated to any Xbox hype at the annual...
Square Enix published mobile games on Apple platforms before that was even really a thing — witness Song Summoner and Crystal Defenders, two of the few notable third-party releases for click wheel iPods — so it's been disappointing to see the Japanese RPG giant's approach to the App Store....
Temple Run 2 just hit the iOS App Store, but it doesn't look like Android users will have to wait as long as they did for its predecessor. In an interview with Polygon to be published later today, Imangi co-founder Keith Shepherd says the game is almost done and expects it to come to the Play Store next week, though he does qualify the statement a bit by saying that "with these things, you never know." Android users have reason to be thankful, however; Microsoft promised that the original T...
President Barack Obama is asking the Centers for Disease Control to investigate the possibility of a link between violent media and shootings as part of a blanket proposal to prevent future gun violence. In a memorandum, the White House urged the...
Temple Run fans take note — the incredibly popular mobile game is finally getting a sequel. Already available in the New Zealand App Store, Temple Run 2 is expected to start hitting other countries soon, with Touch Arcade reporting that it will...
Decades ago, the completion of a video game didn't result in a 10-minute roll of developer credits — instead, players were usually presented with a simple congratulatory message and the name of the company that released the game. Determined to have their legacy implanted somewhere in the products they worked so hard to complete, some developers took to embedding messages or credits of their own into the very ROM code they were hired to...
Since its launch, Apple's App Store has faced questions about its curation process, which roots out not only malware or copies of apps but keeps out things that could damage the store's reputation. The conversation over games has been particularly fraught: Apple has let through (though later pulled) shoddy and blatantly racist games, but it's rejected carefully produced "serious" titles that deal with controversial subjects like the Syrian...
