For everything from family to computers…
For independent moviemakers, film festivals can be like speed-dating — show off your best qualities to as many distributors as possible and hope that someone wants to take you out to theaters. And at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, the creators of Indie Game: The Movie entertained nearly every suitor at the party. Then they decided to go stag, becoming the first full-length feature film to be released via videogame delivery service Steam.
from Wired Top Stories
Valve’s Source engine will make its big screen debut in a movie called Deep, Variety reported on Saturday. The small-budget animated movie will use Valve’s engine as a low-cost solution for real-time rendering and editing, an unusual approach that may grow in popularity for smaller studios. The partnership between the developer and the film production team may also result in the release of the movie on Steam.
The Source engine debuted in 2004, and has powered games including Counter Strike: Source, Half Life 2, and the Portal series. Valve has a working relationship with production studio Brown Bag Films, according to Kotaku, and agreed to license the engine for Deep. The animated film is set in the post-apocalyptic landscape of World War III, where the remainder of mankind huddles in abandoned ship hulls and struggles to survive.
Deep has a budget of €15 million ($18.7 million)—sizeable by European standards, but small by American ones. Companies like Pixar spend well into the hundreds of millions on their 3D animated films. By using Source, Deep may well be one of the first feature film instances of beginning-to-end machinima, a type of animation that involves using game engines to animate (usually short) movies. Red vs. Blue is the canonical example of machinima, and the style was used throughout the World of Warcraft-themed South Park episode, “Make Love Not Warcraft.”
from Ars Technica
That was quick. Just two weeks after Valve posted a new Steam beta that allows remote game downloads, it now has a truly polished release for everyone. Both Mac and Windows gamers can now queue up demos and full games, whether it’s from a browser at work or from the Steam mobile app. Appropriately, Valve will let you reinstall games as well as start downloading a purchase as soon as the credit card clears. Either way, it’ll guaranteed that your new copy of Bastion or that attempt to relive your Quake nostalgia will be ready when you get home.
from Engadget
It looks like the analysts were right in their suspicions that EA and Bioware’s The Old Republic MMO is already losing subscribers just a few months after its late 2011 launch. In an earnings report issued today, EA announced that the game currently has 1.3 million active subscribers, down nearly 25 percent from the 1.7 million active subscribers reported in March.
from Ars Technica
The thugs in charge of recruiting kids for use in bloody African wars are finding their efforts are being hampered in Somalia. Not through the direct actions of the government or the UN, but because kids now have enough things to do in their spare time to keep them off the streets. More »
from Kotaku
