Codemasters has announced Bodycount, a new game under the creative direction of Stuart Black, best known for the Criterion Studios shooter Black -- and which draws inspiration from J.J. Abrams and Lady Gaga. Though Black has been at Codemasters for "two or three years now," he says, he "actually started on a different project, another original IP that's kind of been on the back burner... We started [production] work on Bodycount about nine months ago." ...

The New York-based Education Development Center (EDC) has received a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation supporting the development of handheld games designed to improve reading comprehension among struggling middle school students. The Gates Foundation grant supports the EDC's two-year research project "Portable Word Play: Discovering What Handheld Games Can do for Adolescent Reading Comprehension," conducted in collaboration with the game development studio 1st Playable Productions. Researchers at the EDC's Center for Children ...

Every week, sister iPhone site FingerGaming rounds up the top-grossing iPhone and iPod Touch applications, as current that day in the iTunes App Store, and this chart is now available on Gamasutra. This week's U.S. iPhone revenue charts see EA's Monopoly take the lead over Square Enix's Final Fantasy, while Ragdoll Blaster 2 ranks high in its debut week. This relatively recently-added chart allows end users to see who is making the most money on ...

Harmonix's ground-breaking band game franchise, Rock Band, is set to become a trilogy. Publisher MTV Games announced today that Rock Band 3 is coming for holiday 2010. As it has with previous installments, Electronic Arts will act as distributor, implying the company has renewed its distribution agreement with Viacom that expires this month. The decision also comes despite EA's recent announcement that it would be scaling down its distribution business to focus more on owned ...

"Our business is becoming more of a business." Attorney Jim Charne opened his all-day GDC program, "The Best of Times The Worst of Times: Building and Independent Dev Studio in 2010," with a thesis that set the tone for the morning session. The tide has been shifting the last couple of years, according to Charne, and independent studios this year must strike a balance between diversifying their portfolios and maintaining their integrity by sticking to ...

Gareth Davis' GDC Social Gaming Summit keynote was a mixture of old and new, but his larger takeaway was the potential future of cross-platform gaming, based around your friends. There were quite a lot of congratulatory statistics (rightfully so), including the facts that 70% of the Facebook audience is global (i.e. non-U.S.), 200 million people use Facebook daily, and 400 million monthly. Over a million developers have created over 500,000 apps over the last few ...

2D Boy's Ron Carmel calls relationships between indies and publishers "a system that never worked". At the 2010 Independent Gaming Summit at the Game Developers Conference, he explained why -- and detailed the Indie Fund, a new alternative for independent games funding. When software development began to be conisdered as an engineering field, design came before building -- the "waterfall approach", as Carmel says, involving big design documents that everyone scrutinizes before implementing. But in ...

U.S. gamers spent $3.8 billion on massively multiplayer online games in 2009, almost 15 times more than other substantial MMO markets in Europe, according to a new study. Consumer data from Today's Gamers MMO Focus Report by Gamesindustry.com and TNS indicates that the number of MMO players in the U.S. has reached 46 million, 46 percent (21 million) of which paid to play online games; the rest, around 25 million gamers, play MMOs without spending ...

Part of being an indie game studio means focusing on the benefits of being small, rather than dwelling on the drawbacks of not being big - to think like a guerrilla. That's the idea that Sean Murray, programmer for Joe Danger developer Hello Games conveyed during GDC's Indie Game Summit on Tuesday. "We saw ourselves as the A-Team. We're a motley crew, but we know the landscape," he said. That wasn't the only 1980s action ...

Activision's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has hit 25 million active multiplayer users, Infinity Ward's Robert Bowling revealed on his Twitter. The title has racked up over $1 billion in retail sales and sold close to 12 million units, breaking entertainment records. It saw an unprecedented launch, pulling in $550 million in its first five days. Bowling also said that new details on upcoming downloadable content for Modern Warfare 2 are set to emerge ...