Square Enix has laid off "almost half " of IO Interactive's employees as part of what it calls "significant changes" at the studio, according to Develop. In a statement passed on to MCV from Develop, a spokesperson for Hitman series developer IO Interactive said that the Denmark-based studio was moving towards focusing solely on the Hitman series and has cancelled a number of projects and other initiatives that were being worked on as a result.

Speaking to MCV India, Eidos life president Ian Livingstone threw some gasoline on an old rumor: that the Xbox 720 might block used games. Livingstone also said the next-gen consoles weren't prepared to go fully digital quite yet as its only method for selling and delivering content.

Speaking at the Broadband World Forum in Amsterdam on Wednesday, Eidos Life President Ian Livingstone said that broadband bottlenecks around the world are slowing down the game industry's transition from the physical to the digital world, and urged telecommunications companies to build more broadband infrastructure.

"What we need is super-speed broadband,″ said Livingstone. "You're kind of holding us back in many respects."

If you're a video game tester and you act like a dumb ass (allegedly) you'll probably get fired. Just ask 20-something Blake Marsh, who decided to try a little political comedy with a dash of misogyny and hate on his Facebook page. It's too bad for Marsh that his bosses at Eidos Montreal weren't laughing when they found out.

Following a failed assassination attempt by suspect Richard Bain on the newly-elected Quebec premier-designate Pauline Marois that saw one person killed and another severely injured, Marsh decided to make light of the crime:

Are there any themes or topics that should never be explored in a video game?

Eidos life president Ian Livingstone recently responded to the controversy over what Tomb Raider executive producer Ron Rosenberg said in describing a scene in the new Tomb Raider game that involved protagonist Lara Croft narrowly avoiding an "attempted rape."

Livingstone said that the recent controversy about Tomb Raider's E3 trailer was "quite extreme" and "blown out of proportion."

Eidos life president Ian Livingstone has praised Google chairman Eric Schmidt for a recent speech about the state of education in the UK, calling it a "ringing endorsement" of the Livingstone-Hope video games skills review. In fact, says Livingstone, "It's as though he lifted his comments straight from Next Gen." - referring to the report he helped create.

UK culture minister Ed Vaizey was also apparently "delighted" that Schmidt's MacTaggart lecture echoed the key conclusions of the government-backed Next Gen report.

Square Enix has confirmed that it has no plans to region-lock the European version of Deus Ex: Human Revolution for Windows.

"We're aware of some discussion regarding the planned region-locking of boxed PC versions of Deus Ex: Human Revolution and, after careful review, we have decided not to implement this in the UK/Europe," wrote Square Enix mastering manager Jason Walker (via Rock Paper Shotgun).

Sony isn't the only company worrying about lost data, personal privacy and the level of security on its web sites. Today Square Enix revealed that the Eidos Montreal website has been compromised on Wednesday and that up to 25,000 email addresses and 350 resumes may have been compromised. From Square Enix:

“Square Enix can confirm a group of hackers gained access to parts of our Eidosmontreal.com website as well as two of our product sites. We immediately took the sites offline to assess how this had happened and what had been accessed, then took further measures to increase the security of these and all of our websites, before allowing the sites to go live again,” Square Enix said in a statement sent to VG247.

Square Enix said that no credit card data had been stolen because the site did not have that kind of data on its servers. More from the statement:

Avalanche boss Cristofer Sundberg says that DRM solutions like Ubisoft's "always on" protection do more harm than good. Speaking to CVG, Sundberg said that DRM like Ubisoft's does more to punish consumers than it does pirates; who considered cracking it the "ultimate Rubix Cube."

Pirates and crackers do so love to be challenged. But more than that, Sundberg noted that this kind of DRM is the sign of a "scared market" that doesn't fully grasp how much ill will it creates with consumers who simply want to buy and enjoy a game without hassles.

As part of its annual awards, the National Academy of Video Game Testers and Reviewers Corp. will honor the founder of GamePolitics with a special award.

Dennis McCauley, who also wrote for the Philadelphia Inquirer in addition to manning the helm here, will be receiving a special Honorary Award for his “contributions to the gaming community and gaming journalism.”

Additionally, 209 nominees were announced across 47 categories for awards designed to pay respect to the interactive entertainment industry’s best in the fields of art technology and production. Sony led the way with 47 total nominations, followed by Electronic Arts with 28, Activision with 20 and Eidos with 18.

Game of the Year nominees include Batman: Arkham Asylum, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, and Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. Batman: Arkham Asylum also led the way among games in total nominations, with 17, followed closely by Uncharted 2’s 16 nominations.

A voting body of 640 journalists and writers picked the nominees. Winners will be announced on February 27.

Congratulations Dennis!

Eidos president Ian Livingstone (left) is the latest game industry exec to complain about used game sales.

The BBC spoke to Livingstone about the issue. Here are the Eidos exec's comments:

The pre-owned market is a serious problem, because there is no benefit to developers or publishers...

A shop makes a bigger margin on a pre-owned title, and can sell them six or seven times, so there is no incentive for them to reorder and the content creator gets no slice of the action.

GP: "No slice of the action," of course, is the operative phrase in Livingstone's mini-rant.

Frankly, I have no sympathy for the industry's used game whiners and even less when I remember that digital distribution is inching ever closer. When that happens, the publishers will be in the driver's seat.

Enjoy your used game savings while you can.

Via: gi.biz

SCi, the parent company of Tomb Raider publisher Eidos, is apparently a takeover target.

UK newspaper the Daily Mail reports that Electronic Arts and Ubisoft are both considering an acquisition of the troubled firm.

Given that SCi is on hard times, EA and Ubi are no doubt enticed by the prospect of picking up Eidos's popular Tomb Raider and Hitman franchises on the cheap. From the Daily Mail story:

[The merger talk] follows a nightmare year for the firm in which its losses have quadrupled and the share price has slumped 92 per cent... From a peak of £1billion at the height of the dotcom boom it is worth just £50million today... As recently as a year ago the games developer was worth more than £600million.

But a series of self-inflicted wounds coupled with the precipitous slide in the stock market have conspired to drag the shares down from a 12 month peak of 243p to just 18½p yesterday...

The source said the suitors have been waiting to see if SCi would deliver the latest Lara Croft game, which has been delayed, but finally came out this week in time for Christmas.

Via: Edge Online

When last we looked in on Eidos, it was over a little episode that came to be known as GerstmannGate.

The UK game publisher's ham-handed attempt to manipulate GameSpot's Kane & Lynch review scores unfairly cost long time journo Jeff Gerstmann his editor position and nearly brought the site down as outraged veteran staffers bailed one after another.

Recent reports indicate that Eidos is up to its old tricks, this time in regard to Tomb Raider: Underworld. Naturally, the Penny Arcade crew can't resist making Eidos the star of its latest cartoon.

Hit the link for the full version of The Truth is the New Lie...

Yesterday, GamePolitics noted comments by Eidos exec Ian Livingstone, who claimed that indifference to the video game industry by the U.K. government amounted to "madness" (see: Eidos Exec: Games Regarded Just Above Porn by U.K. Govt.).

The Guardian reports that at one least one member of Parliament has raised his voice in support of the British game biz. Don Foster (left), a Liberal Democrat from Bath, asserted that video game development is critical to the U.K. economy. Said Foster:

I hardly play any games – I'm not from that generation – but because of my job, I had to research the industry. The vast majority of my parliamentary colleagues are always wanting to ban the latest game, but they don't know the details of the industry. Few people in this country realise how important it is to the UK economy.

Via: Edge Online

The British government views its nation's video game industry as "one notch up from pornography," according to an Eidos exec.

The Guardian reports on comments made by Ian Livingstone (left), Eidos' creative director and head of acquisitions.

Livingstone also criticized the U.K. government's refusal to offer tax incentives to game developers:

We've recently slipped from third to fourth in world development behind Canada. We're now the most expensive country in the world in which to develop. Other countries – not just Canada, but two states in the US, Scandinavian countries, France, Singapore, Korea and others – offer salary subsidies...

 

It seems to me the UK government would rather see our great industry go into decline than help it maintain its prominent position in the world, and that is madness...

 

We're still seen as the red-headed stepchild of the creative industries, one notch up from pornography in the eyes of most of the establishment. They forget that half of the world and half of the UK's population play games. Games help define who we are as human beings – they are as important, culturally and socially, as music and films.

UK Conservative leader, occasional video game violence critic, and potential prime minister David Cameron has been invited by Eidos Interactive to visit a July 23rd media event unveiling Tomb Raider: Underworld, according to MCVUK.

The invitation was extended following an interview with UK newspaper The Guardian in which Cameron compared his political fortunes to playing Tomb Raider: 

There is an element to politics that is a bit like Tomb Raider. Until you have cleared level one, which I have incidentally never done, you cannot get on to level two. Level one is: are you a reasonable, decent, non-discriminating, sensible, practical person who understands the world as it is lived today, who wants to live in a modern world and who accepts what that means? If so, then you can move on to level two, where you can talk about some of the difficult issues about families and about responsibilities which can lead to trouble.

Jon Brooke, Eidos' UK marketing boss, seized the opportunity to invite Cameron:

We’re delighted to hear that David Cameron is talking to today’s voters using Tomb Raider as an analogy. As we build up towards launch, we’d be really pleased to offer him an exclusive look at the latest Lara Croft adventure, so he can see for himself how the series has evolved– and maybe come up with some high definition political parallels. Of course, both [current prime minister] Gordon Brown and [Liberal Democrat] Nick Clegg are equally welcome, provided they all sit together nicely.

GameSpot reports that the upcoming Shellshock 2: Blood Trails has been refused classification by Australia's Office of Film and Literature classification over concerns about violent content:

Shellshock 2 is an Eidos game slated for the PS3, Xbox 360, and PC platforms, and was due for release in 2009. The game places players in Vietnam War-era Cambodia, where a mysterious chemical dropped into the jungle has had some strange effects on people. An [Australian distributor] Atari spokesperson said there were currently no plans to appeal the banning decision.

The last game to be RC'd by the OFLC was D3's Dark Sector.