Speaking at the Virtual Goods Summit in San Francisco on Friday, Zhan Ye, president of GameVision, commented that he has worked on traditional, single-player PC games as well as new free-to-play games in China. In fact, he's brought experienced developers from the West to China and seen the culture clash -- because the two types of games, while seemingly similar, have important differences, he says. Changing The Way You Think "As I was working with ...

The Asian virtual goods market is estimated at $5 billion in 2008, and could reach $7 billion in 2009, according to Benjamin Joffe, CEO of +8* (Plus Eight Star), a consultancy firm dealing with bringing Asian online market concepts to Western companies. Joffe explained his estimate during a presentation at San Francisco's Virtual Goods Summit 2009, highlighting the state of the market in Korea, China, and Japan. Says Joffe, "This is an estimate I came ...

At the Gamasutra-attended Virtual Goods Summit 2009 in San Francisco, reps from leaders in the microtransaction-based market, such as Nexon and IMVU, discussed the nature of a successful virtual goods market based on first-hand knowledge. Attending the panel, which was moderated by Lightspeed Venture Partners' Jeremy Liew, were Nexon America (Maple Story) vice president Min Kim, Dai Watanabe from DeNA, which runs Japanese mobile games portal Mobage Town, Cary Rosenzweig of U.S.-based virtual world IMVU, ...

[Every week, IndieGames.com: The Weblog co-editor Tim W. will be summing up some of the top free-to-download and commercial indie games from the last seven days on his sister 'state of indie' weblog.] This week on 'Best Of Indie Games', we take a look at some of the top independent PC Flash/downloadable titles released over this last week. The delights in this edition include a cave spelunking game with low resolution graphics, a Western-themed shooter ...

Bethesda Game Studios' Fallout 3 took top honors at Future's gamer-determined Golden Joystick Awards in London this week, as Activision Blizzard was named best publisher among its show-topping five total awards. Run by Future Publishing, the award show drew votes from 1.2 million gamers in its 27th year of existence. Games released between May 22, 2008 and May 22, 2009 were considered eligible for nomination, meaning most of the big winners hit during last year's ...

With Nokia putting more focus on its iPhone App Store competitor, the Ovi Store, the mobile phone giant has confirmed it is phasing out its beleaguered N-Gage gaming platform in 2010. The news came by way of a question-and-answer post on the official N-Gage weblog, in which a company spokesperson said Nokia will cease N-Gage software publishing. The company will maintain community features for games through 2010, and will keep the N-Gage store open through ...

Major Japanese mobile social network operator DeNa has made a "strategic, multi-million dollar investment" in iPhone social platform developer Aurora Feint, taking a 20 percent stake in the company. Simultaneously, Konami subsidiary developer Hudson Soft will become the first Japanese game maker to incorporate Aurora Feint's OpenFeint technology when it releases a new Bomberman title later this year. OpenFeint is a suite of online features that connect iPhone games from different developers with social features ...

As an independent developer working without a traditional publishing agreement, Unknown Worlds Entertainment has to find non-traditional sources of revenue to fund development, and founder Charlie Cleveland says direct pre-sales of its upcoming Natural Selection 2 are becoming a bigger part of the picture. "Natural Selection 2 pre-sales have completely changed our financial picture," Cleveland told Gamasutra in an interview this week. Unknown Worlds has generated about $220,000 from preorders, compared to nearly half a ...

The upcoming PlayStation 3 motion controller will not just be an extra gaming peripheral, but a "platform product" that will have a variety of applications, says Sony Worldwide Studios boss Shuhei Yoshida. "We are still in the very early days of motion control development," Yoshida told Gamasutra as part of a larger interview. The Sony veteran took the reins of SCE Worldwide Studios from former head Phil Harrison in May last year. "We have had ...

Wii Sports has sold over 50 million units worldwide and New Super Mario Bros. for Nintendo DS is approaching 20 million -- 19.94 million, to be exact -- according to new software sales data released by the publisher. Other Wii and DS titles that have sold in excess of ten million are Wii Play (24.43 million), Wii Fit (22.5 million), Mario Kart Wii (18.36 million), and Mario Kart DS (18.09 million). The figures include bundles ...