Seeing the success of Double Fine's Kickstarter campaign to fund an adventure game through crowd sourced funding, other developers are starting to take an interest in the concept. Rock, Paper, Shotgun points out that Chris Avellone, the lead developer of popular RPG classic Planescape Torment and current creative director of Obsidian Entertainment has expressed some interest in Kickstarter.

It's crowd-source funding fever! UK game industry trade group UKIE announced this week that it will be publishing a new crowd funding report that urges the government to pass new legislation that will allow game companies to take advantage of this financing model to fund their businesses or projects. The announcement was no doubt inspired by the success of Double Fine's Kickstarter campaign - which has raised over $1.3 million dollars so far.

Sales of video games were down in January by 34 percent, according to the latest data from retail research firm NPD Group. Overall video game sales in January were down more than 33 percent to $750.6 million from $1.14 billion during January 2011.

Double Fine's Kickstarter campaign for the "Double Fine Adventure" game project has surpassed $1 million. Originally they were asking for $500,000 in funding but within eight hours of launching the appeal they had raked in well over $800,000 for a point-and-click adventure game and a documentary to be filmed by 2 Player Productions. Earlier in the day Tim Schafer said that any money over the initial amount would be used to bring the game to other formats.

Developers whose platform of choice for game deployment is Facebook say that the social network's mandatory payment system ends up being a "twenty percent net tax" and seriously hurts their margin of profit.

"We thought conversions would go up and be around 15 or 20 percent,” said Kevin Chou, Chief Executive for Kabam, “But it turned out to be around 5 to 10 percent, meaning that we’re taking a 20 percent net tax.”

Walmart has finally decided that it will share its video game software and hardware sales data with research firm NPD Group. The firm had been hampered by not having sales data from Walmart and instead had to estimate weekly and monthly figures related to the retailer. NPD today confirmed that it has reached an agreement with Walmart to receive and analyze its point-of-sale information from it retail stores and Walmart.com.

The agreement also covers many other industries that NPD tracks, including Entertainment, Apparel, Home, Hardlines, and Toys.

Overall video game software and hardware sales remained flat in November, thanks to reduced hardware sales. But the decline in consoles sales were offset by strong software sales and a huge jump in boxed PC games, according to November retail sales data from NPD Group. November saw a year-over-year decline in sales by 0.5 percent, with hardware sales down by nine percent, falling from $1.08 billion last year to $982.4 million this year. Peripheral sales were also on the decline in November by 34 percent.

As with most holiday seasons, games and electronics are becoming hot in December.

The Chicago Tribune and mobile shopping app firm ShopSavvy are tracking the scans of the 10 million active subscribers of ShopSavvy, which allows people to scan barcodes, compare prices and make purchases from their smart phones.

The folks over at Good Old Games (GOG.com) are getting into the holiday spirit, offering discounts of up to 50 percent on almost all their games beginning on Monday.

In a note to readers, the site also detailed how people can get a free copy of The Witcher and Empire Earth: Gold Edition.

It seems like the Reuters Media Summit is where CEO's of game companies go to say bad things about other game companies. Yesterday it was Activision saying that EA would not make as much as LucasArts would off the new Star Wars MMOG, and today it's Take-Two taking a shot at Zynga.

Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick says that he doubts the Zynga business model, and has accused the social gaming company responsible for Mafia Wars and Farmville of having serious "disclosure issues."

The New Zealand video game development industry grew by 46 percent, offering 359 equivalent full-time jobs in the 12 months to September 2011, according to the New Zealand Game Developers Association (NZGDA). The NZGDA surveyed 21 NZ game studios in September. Of those surveyed, the vast majority of these New Zealand studios were owned by people or companies that are from the region too, according to NZGDA chairman Stephen Knightly.

Live Gamer has managed to raise $8.5 million in funding, according to a TechCrunch report. The new injection of cash comes from Charles River Ventures and Kodiak venture Partners, and takes its total investment to date to $30 million. Live Gamer is an e-commerce company that gives its 48 million users access to its micro-transactions and virtual goods sales services for various online and social games.

Sales of physical product increased ever so slightly at US retail during October, despite the release of some serious titles such as Battlefield 3 and Batman: Arkham City. According to NPD, total video game sales were up just 1 percent to $1.05 billion from $1.03 billion in the same period a year ago, with hardware up 6 percent to $295.6 million and accessories up 3 percent to $621.3 million. Total software sales were up 1 percent to $649.5 million.

The Company Town Blog on The LA Times web site poses an interesting question: will the launch of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim today cause problems for any movie that just happens to be hitting theaters today? If you asked anyone who purchased either of these games and has settled in to start playing them, the answer would be a resounding "yes."

Free-to-play MMO company Nexon is planning an initial public offering on the Tokyo Stock Exchange next month, according to a TechCrunch report. The IPO is reportedly worth $1.3 billion USD, or ¥100 billion. The TechCrunch report is based on a report in the Japanese business paper The Nikkei. If the valuation turns out to be accurate, it could make Nexon the most valuable IPO in Japan this year. The IPO will be handled by Nomura Securities, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, with Nexon expected to be approved for the listing by the end of the week.

New research released by Newzoo digs a little deeper into the lucrative Chinese and Korean online gaming markets. The research focused on the 190 million Chinese (76 percent) and 26 million Korean (60 percent) consumers ages 15 to 50 - who make up the majority of those who play games in those countries. Newzoo found that both countries were passionate about MMO games, with 100 million MMO gamers in China and 8 million in Korea. While both countries enjoy games, players in each country have different preferences when it comes to social and mobile gaming.

A new market study conducted by research firm Newzoo indicates that trading games is the most popular game of all. More than half of the 82 million gamers in the U.S. don't spend money on games, and of the 44 percent who make game purchases around 85 percent regularly purchase pre-owned titles. Around 23 percent of the game-buying public spends 23 percent of their gaming budget on pre-owned games says Newzoo.

Richard Garriott, the man behind Ultima Online and the Ultima series, says that Blizzard Entertainment (and other big publishers like EA) face new challenges from the "Zyngas of the world."

According to a Wall Street Journal report, Zynga's latest IPO filing reveals that company CEO Mark Pincus will have "super voting shares" so that he can maintain control of the company. Basically Pincus's shares will carry 70 votes per share, as opposed to regular shares which will give stockholders one vote per share. While Zynga's five venture capital investors will hold a larger combined economic stake than Pincus, he will hold a larger percentage of the company's votes.

Nintendo has released its financial results for the first half of the fiscal year ending September 30, reporting a massive loss. The company posted a loss of 70.29 billion yen ($927 million USD) for the first six months of the fiscal year. As a result, the company has dramatically revised its projected revenue for the full year. The company now says that it will generate 790 billion yen ($10.4 billion USD) in net sales, a change from the 900 billion yen ($11.9 billion) it expected in an earlier forecast.

Cowen and Company analyst Doug Creutz says that the continued user decline in various Zynga games on Facebook is "extremely troubling."

Consumer spending on electronics gifts will reach an all-time high this holiday shopping season, according to new research released today from the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA). The research firm's 18th annual CE Holiday Purchase Patterns Study shows that overall spending this holiday will increase as well. The study was released today at CEA's Industry Forum in San Diego, a four-day conference for leaders in the consumer electronics (CE) industry.

Is virtual property found within games and often freely traded real legal property? One legal expert says absolutely not. Minneapolis lawyer Justin Kwong says those virtual baubles you spent real-world cash on are simply lines of code owned temporarily through a license. Or so he posits in the most recent issue of the William Mitchell Law Review (as highlighted in this article).

Steam is doing all that it can to tap into the lucrative Russian game market - including making it easier for customers to put rubles in their Steam wallets.

New research looking into the gaming habits of New Zealanders found that nine out of ten households in the country own a game playing device of some sort and nearly four in five parents with children ages 18 and under play games. In households that use video games, 38 percent said they used a mobile phone and 9 percent said they used a tablet device to play games. Around 51 percent of gaming households said that they owned a traditional game console.

According to a new market survey from analyst firm EEDAR, video game console owners are purchasing more downloadable content than ever before. EER's market survey finds that more than 51 percent of Xbox 360 and PS3 owners have purchased downloadable content (DLC), expansion packs, full games or indie games via the internet in the past 12 months. That number is up from 40 percent in 2010 and 34 percent in 2009.

UK game industry trade group UKIE announced today that it will take the lead in the formation of what it calls "a cross-industry coalition" to implement the recommendations of the Livingstone-Hope "Next Gen" report. The Next Gen report highlighted a lack of computer science skills in the United Kingdom, and was one of the key discussion points for Ed Vaizey, the Minister for Culture Communications and Creative Industries, on the recent BBC current affairs program Newsnight.

Overall sales of games went up 4 percent in September, according to market research firm NPD - but not without more than a few caveats. The video game industry raked in $630.2 million in software sales at retail stores last month, up from $612.1 million a year earlier. But the bad news is that console sales tumbled 9 percent to $349 million from $382.9 million in 2010. The decline in hardware sales offset the gains in software, creating a 6 percent overall drop in total sales to $1.16 billion from $1.23 billion in September 2010.

A new research report by industry analyst Colin Sebastian for RW Baird predicts that the global game industry will generate right around $60 billion in total revenue for 2011, and is growing at a rate of 10 percent annually. By 2014 the industry will hit $80 billion, he predicts. The areas where most of this growth will occur are in mobile and online games, while other areas will remain flat or decline.

While it might seem that Facebook is the number one destination in the world for social games, a new report indicates that the social network's dominance may simply be isolated to the North American market.