Amid reports that BioWare Austin is laying off staff today, Gamasutra says that Star Wars: The Old Republic‘s executive producer Rich Vogel is no longer with the company.  Vogel was instrumental in the development of SWTOR, overseeing all aspects of the MMO before and after its launch in December. The online game, though, has lost [...]

Game industry legend Tony Goodman, the co-creator of Age of Empires, is launching a new mobile game startup today called PeopleFun. The team has six veterans who will focus on creating games for iOS (Apple’s iPad, iPod Touch, and iPhone devices) and Android mobile devices. That’s a far cry from Goodman’s other games such as [...]

I founded GDC Online as the Austin Game Conference in 2003.  And while I handed the reins over to UBM Game Group in 2006 I’m extremely pleased and delighted that the show continues to this day and is celebrating it’s 10th anniversary this year.  This year the show takes place Oct. 9-11, 2012 once again [...]

Austin-based Portalarium, the social game startup headed by Richard Garriott (famous for designing the popular Ultima role-playing games in the ’80s and ’90s), has raised $7 million in funding to complete development of its first title, Ultimate Collector. Via VentureBeat

Can a video game be more than just a game? Can it also get you thinking about larger trends affecting the world? That’s what the team at White Whale Games is banking on. The startup studio, which consists of four people working in a Central Austin duplex, is hard at work on a new iPhone/iPad [...]

Personalized Media Communications, LLC (PMC) has filed a patent suit in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas against Zynga, Inc. (Zynga) NASDAQ: ZNGA, the largest social game developer, for infringement of four of PMC’s patents. The complaint alleges that Zynga’s social-networking games, such as Words with Friends, CityVille and FarmVille, [...]

Austin-based Spacetime Studios‘ mobile MMOs Pocket Legends and Star Legends: The Blackstar Chronicles have been played more than 100 million times. Spacetime players spend about twice the number of hours playing Legends titles than the average gamer spends across all mobile games each month. Users with iPhones play games for 14.7 hours per month while [...]

Deus Ex game director and producer, and Disney Epic Mickey creator Warren Spector will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 12th Annual Game Developers Choice Awards (GDCAs) for his contributions to the art and science of games. The Game Developers Choice Awards, held at GDC yearly, are the leading peer-based video game industry awards [...]

Just six weeks after launching Star Wars: The Old Republic, BioWare, a Label of Electronic Arts (NASDAQ:EA) says the game has has sold over 2 million copies, with a thriving base of over 1.7 million active subscribers, as gamers around the world have immersed themselves in the story-driven, online Star Wars universe from BioWare and [...]