EA Targets Hollywood, Becomes Buddies with UTV

If you’re tired of EA’s never ending franchises, wait till you hear that they’ll soon be coming to life as movies. That’s right, EA has partnered with UTV (United Talent Agency) to milk the games even further by releasing movies based on them. Yay!

UTA is an ideal partner for us to bring the richness and story telling nuance of our popular games into other forms of media that give consumers more ways to experience these creative concepts,” said Patrick O’Brien, Vice President of EA Entertainment. “Some of our teams have already made steps to expand our games into other forms of media like online, social networks and print publication. This partnership will help us take these efforts to the next level and match each of our titles with the right artists, producers and financiers.

Ignition Entertainment Licenses Unreal Engine 3.0

Ignition Entertainment is the latest studio to acquire an Unreal Engine 3.0 license to use in their upcoming multi-platform “groundbreaking” FPS.

Press Release: 

Ignition Entertainment, Ltd. (www.ignitionent.com), a UTV enterprise, today announced that the company entered into an agreement with Epic Games to license Unreal Engine 3 for its upcoming, groundbreaking FPS, currently under development at its Florida studio.

“Epic’s Unreal Engine 3 is an extremely versatile engine,” said Jeremy Stieglitz, Game Director and Lead Designer, Ignition Florida. “So when deciding on technology for Ignition Florida’s first next-generation video game, there was no questioning that Unreal Engine 3 is the way to go.” Read more

GFI Signs Upcoming Adventure Games from Daedalic Entertainment

Game Factory Interactive, one of the leading publishers in the Russian game market, and German developer/publisher Daedalic Entertainment announced today that they have entered into an agreement that will see GFI publishing three upcoming adventure game titles from Daedalic in Russia, former USSR countries and the Baltic Region.

Titles signed by GFI for publishing in these territories include A New Beginning, The Whispered World and Edna & Harvey: The Breakout. All three titles will be released for Windows PC.

THQ Buys Elephant Entertainment

As reported earlier, THQ has bought the minnepolis based publisher Elephant Entertainment. The transaction amount was not disclosed.

“The addition of Elephant Entertainment and our exclusive retail publishing deal with Oberon significantly expands the depth and breadth of our casual and online game offering,” said Clemmer. “These deals will allow us to expand our presence in this rapidly growing segment and deliver unique value to our retail partners through Oberon’s turn-key solution to deliver online games.”

Thanks, GameDAILY

Assassin’s Creed QnA

IGN sat down with Charles Beauchemin, technical lead at Ubisoft to chat about the upcoming PC version of Assassin’s Creed. Snippet from the QnA:

IGN: How much of the changes were based on community feedback after the console version’s release?

Charles Beauchemin: When the console version was released, we looked at the feedback from the community and we decided to use the additional time of development to add some variety by including new investigation types. Here is an example: before receiving the green light to assassinate Garnier de Naplouse, you had to complete 2 investigations out of 6. However, you could complete all the investigations available as well. Since we had 5 potential investigation types, you would at least encounter one type twice. Now, with the 4 new investigation types, we have a total of 9 investigation types, so you can complete all 6 investigations before going for Garnier de Naplouse without doing the same investigation twice.

Full QnA and 33 screenshots after the jump.
Read more

Assassin’s Creed Leaks to BitTorrent, gets Nuked

As we reported earlier, Ubisoft’s upcoming PC port of (produced & pimped by Jade Raymond) Assassin’s Creed was leaked to Internet a FULL month earlier from it’s original release date. However, it seems that both releases have been nuked and the “early adopters” are unable to progress beyond level 1. Apparently, the game is missing some critical level files that cannot be fixed by a cracked exe.

serves them right, we say.