Tilting Point has hired Tom Bass as its new Vice President of Marketing. Prior to joining the company Bass worked for video game publisher 2K Games, where he held the positions of Director of Marketing and Senior Director of Social Media and Consumer Relations. He worked there for the last eight years. According to Tilting Point, Bass will lead a team focused on mobile game marketing for the company’s portfolio of games.

The first two games to be funded by Ouya's "Free the Games" program are an officially licensed NFL title and the adventure game Elementary, My Dear Holmes. Both reached their funding goals via Kickstarter campaigns and Ouya took notice.

The latest efforts to fund Shadow of the Eternals - a spiritual successor to Eternal Darkness from Precursor Games - has come up short on Kickstarter, but the developers behind the game vow to keep trying, saying that they have "not given up." The Kickstarter campaign recently ended, raising $323,950 of its $750,000 goal from 5,932 backers.

Can't say we didn't see this coming.

Writer Sophie Prell has launched a Kickstarter to fund a bi-monthly web show that focuses on video games, the people that make them, and the fans (who will get a chance to interact with the games industry in various ways). The show will be called "Sincerely Sophie" and will run two shows a month for ten months if she can meet her funding goal of $16,000.

Here's more from the Kickstarter page:

The Kickstarter campaign for the next Video Games Live album, "Video Games Live: Level 3," is inching towards the halfway point with 22 more days to meet its funding goal. As of this writing the project has raised $112,064 of its $250,000 goal from 2,076 backers.

The Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation's handling of a $75 million loan deal to 38 Studios continues to have an effect on politics in the state, and today more reforms are being discussed so that the failure of that deal can never happen again.

An IndieGoGo fundraising campaign hopes to raise $9,250 to fund competition of a game about abortion rights in Texas called Choice: Texas. Choice: Texas is described by its creators as an interactive fiction game about abortion access in the Lone Star state, and will be made available for free online when it is completed. The game is the creation of Allyson Whipple (writer, editor, and poet) and Carly Kocurek (writer and cultural historian) with the help of illustrator Grace Jennings.

GOG.com has launched a new portal intended to entice indie developers to join its DRM-free PC games digital storefront. The new portal, found here, encourages indie developers to apply with GOG to have their games available for sale on the site. The site offers details on royalty splits and how developers who need a small investment can get some help from GOG.

(This article is a reprint of a story that originally appeared on Oklahoma Game Developers, and is reproduced here with the author's permission.)

Yesterday afternoon lawmakers in the Rhode Island House began examining hundreds of documents in an attempt to piece together a timeline on the $75 million loan guarantee awarded to Curt Schilling's 38 Studios. The committee began by looking at emails from the former Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation Executive Director Keith Stokes.

Stokes said in emails that the General Assembly would not have created the loan guarantee program without knowing Curt Schilling was interested in moving his video game company to Rhode Island in 2010.

E. Zachary Knight pointed out a new Kickstarter funding campaign for a game called A Wasted Life.  Developed by fellow Oklahoma developer Robert Dishong, A Wasted Life is a zombie survival game promising procedural weapons, randomly generated environments to explore, and a "dynamic" story system.

Last Limb let us know that a Kickstarter campaign for its physics puzzle game Organic Panic is underway and has raised $7,000 of its $40,000 goal. The game, which has been in development for five years, is the brainchild of Brooklyn-based studio Last Limb.

Ouya, the makers of the Android-based home gaming console of the same name that was released last month, hopes to influence game development on the platform with big wads of cash. OUYA today announced the $1 million Free The Games Fund, which promises to match the funding amount received by developers who fund their games via Kickstarter.

Former IGDA executive director Jason Della Rocca he been appointed to the advisory board for the ICT practice of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development Canada. The advisory board provides the ICT Practice with advice on various aspects of the ICT industry including its various sub-sectors like video games. Members advise on related issues and make recommendations on the funded programs and services delivered by Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development Canada.

Developer inXile Entertainment and publisher Deep Silver signed a distribution deal for inXile’s crowd-funded computer role-playing game Wasteland 2. inXile is developing Wasteland 2 and Torment: Tides of Numenera, both funded via highly successful Kickstarter campaigns. inXile Entertainment says that this deal allows the studio to focus on the creative aspects of developing the game, while Deep Silver will handle the retail release of the game and the physical good fulfillment for the Kickstarter backers.

Double Fine's latest crowdfunding efforts on Kickstarter for the fantasy strategy game Massive Chalice ended with a total of $1.2 million raised. The company created the Kickstarter page in May with the hope of raising $725,000. That goal was surpassed in early June, and as of this week Massive Chalice raised almost double what Double Fine was seeking. With funding secured, Project lead Brad Muir is putting together a separate team within Double Fine to create the game.

Oculus VR has secured $16 million in its first round of funding as the company moves towards bringing its virtual reality hardware technology to the masses. According to reports from Panodaily and AllThingsD the series A funding round was led by Spark Capital and Matrix Partners.

Precursor Games has decided to cancel its Kickstarter crowd funding campaign for its spiritual successor to Silicon Knights' Eternal Darkness - Shadow of the Eternals. With less than three weeks to go before the campaign ended Precursor was only able to raise a little over $300,000 of the $1.5 million it was asking for.

Precursor CEO Paul Caporicci explained the move recently in an update to the project's Kickstarter page.

Even as the makers of the Ouya console (seem to) struggle to fill the orders of those individuals who backed them in their successful Kickstarter crowd-funding campaign (to the tune of $8.3 million), the company behind the Android-based console announces that they have secured $15 million in venture capital financing and that it will move its retail release from early to late June. The $15 million in funding is from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), the Mayfield Fund, Nvidia, Shasta Ventures and Occam Partners.

Phosphor Games has decided to put its ongoing bid to fund its super hero themed open world game Project Awakened on hold for the time being. The developer started the private funding initiative after it came close to funding the game via Kickstarter. Though that campaign failed, the developer noticed that thousands of gamers backed the project and decided to try again via its web site for the game.

The former staff members of Zynga Boston have managed to raise $2.25 million for a new game development start-up called Proletariat. The new studio managed to raise all of its funds through an equity funding run, according to an SEC filing by the new company.

Harmonix has secured funding for three of its upcoming products from Colorado-based capital venture firm The Foundry Group, according to Polygon. The firm generally invests in companies that are in the business of "human computer interaction," and its last high profile investment land at Zynga.

Project Awakened, a game that lets you play a highly customized super being of your own making is nearing the half-way mark of its funding goal on Kickstarter but only four more days remain for developer Phosphor Games Studio to raise the rest of the funds. As of this writing, Phosphor Games has raised $210,596 of its $500,000 goal from 5,324 backers.

Chris Roberts' Star Citizen has surpassed the $8 million dollar funding mark from several sources including over $2.1 million on Kickstarter alone. That milestone is leaps and bounds above the original pitch for $500,000. The PC based space sim from the man behind Wing Commander, Privateer and Freelancer continues to break new ground for a crowd funded game, raising more than a half million dollars in February alone.

Popular crowd funding platform Kickstarter has launched an app for iOS devices today that allows users to have more streamlined access to their favorite projects. The app promises the community the ability to "discover new projects, watch project videos, and get updates from projects and your friends." For project creators looking to get some funding from the community the app allows you to "stay connected with your backers, track your project’s progress, and post updates from wherever you are."

According to a Eurogamer report detailing how Triumph Studios came to be developing Age of Wonders 3, it was revealed that Mojang co-founder and Minecraft creator Markus "Notch" Persson was very instrumental in making it all happen.

The whole thing started when Triumph kept seeing a blurb mentioning Age of Wonders in the Minecraft title screen. After sending Persson a demo of the game they all managed to work something out:

With only four days left to earn the other half of its $1.1 million funding goal, Gas Powered Games boss Chris Taylor decided to end the WildMan Kickstarter Campaign.

Mobile game developer and publisher GREE announced details on a new $10 million fund to invest in and foster long-term relationships with "talented developers in the free-to-play mobile games industry." The fund is appropriately called the GREE Partners Fund, and will be administered by GREE International’s VP of Publishing and Partners, Jim Ying. The fund will allow GREE to invest an aggregate of $10 million through equity investments of $1 million or more.

With just two more hours to go in its Kickstarter campaign, Goldfire Studios has managed to go slightly over its funding goal of $20,000 for its gambling-based MMORPG, CasinoRPG. As of this writing the Kickstarter raised $20,161 from 197 backers. The next step for the persistent virtual world gambling game is a private beta test, though some of that testing will likely be tied to various reward tiers.