Facebook is evolving into a website that offers just about anything a web surfer would want to do. Watching TV shows, reading personalized news, and listening to music can all be done from within Facebook, Facebook also has a commanding presence in the gaming industry. It was a major player in the rise of “casual gaming”, and big publishers such as EA have invested a lot in its social gaming projects. Even though it’s in a position of dominance, Facebook will not take the extra step and start developing its own games.

A lot of Spider-Man fans were impressed with Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions and so was Activision.

The publisher has announced that Beenox, which worked on Shattered Dimensions, will develop the webslinger’s upcoming titles. To reinvigorate a franchise that Activision CEO Bobby Kotick once admitted his company had screwed up, Beenox called on four different Spideys. The game’s story whisked you through four separate, dare I say “Shattered,” dimensions for wall crawlers with unique play styles.

Gamasutra and sister site GameCareerGuide have just run a fascinating feature on breaking into voice acting for games, as part of their “Ask the experts” column. In it, voice actor David Sobolov (Unreal Tournament III, Call of Duty 4) shares a few tips and some insider knowledge about breaking in to a very competitive field. more »

After months of denials, Microsoft finally admitted that it will allow game developers to require a hard drive for some consoles games. The info was essentially let loose at GameFest Microsoft Game Technology Conference earlier last week (August 13-1, 2007) in Seattle, WA, by a Microsoft rep who said:

“Feel free to require 30GB for your game. That’s just going to make your potential audience a lot smaller.”

Microsoft has basically lifted the hard drive space restriction for MMO developers, potentially meaning that the Xbox 360 versions of games can be nearly identical to PC versions. Xbox Live games will still be capped at 150 MB though no mention was made…

Back in the day, video games were primarily homebrew creations, programmed by a single person who just wanted to share a bit of fun. Now it can literally take years to create a video game from scratch an involve a staff that reads like feature film credits. In a throwback to those early days of more »