The $399.99 Kinect-less Xbox One will soon be joined by two other bundles that include games. The first is a limited run Madden NFL 15 bundle that includes a code for EA's annual NFL game and the standard Kinect-free Xbox One with all the trimmings. That bundle will launch on August 26 and will be priced at $399.99.

GII reports that UK games publisher Mastertronic announced that it is being "forced" to apply for a Company Voluntary Agreement (CVA) to avoid catastrophe over outstanding loans. In addition, the company announced that it will be closing its Cambridge, England headquarters, exiting the physical retail business it has been involved in for decades, and laying off 40 percent of its workforce.

A new report from Games Industry International notes that the console market segment in Japan declined by 16 percent overall in 2013. According to data from the Japanese Computer Entertainment Supplier's Association's annual report - obtained by Japanese analyst Dr. Serkan Toto - console hardware and software sales declined from $4.8 billion in 2012 to $4 billion in 2013.

UK Prime Minister David Cameron's chief adviser on intellectual property and Member of Parliament Mike Weatherley is pushing for penalties related to theft in virtual worlds and online. According to several reports, Weatherley, an avid World of Warcraft player, has asked members of Parliament to consider new laws that would make it so that “people who steal online items in video games with a real-world monetary value receive the same sentences as criminals who steal real-world items of the same monetary value."

Gamasutra has released some highlighted data from its 2014 Indie Salary Report, an annual survey of non-salaried game developers in North America. The data shows that 2013 was not a great year for solo indie developers, with individuals in that category earning an average income of $11,812 in 2013, down a whopping 49 percent from 2012’s $23,130 average.

According to Gamasutra's Game Developer Salary Survey 2014, men working in the video games industry here in the United States made an average of $85,074 in 2013, while women in the same jobs made an average of $72,882. According to Gamasutra, women made 86 cents on every dollar that men made in the U.S. game industry.

While this is certainly an issue that needs to be addressed, the pay gap between men and women is less than the national average: in the U.S. overall, women make 77 cents on every dollar that men make, according figures from a 2012 Census Bureau survey.

BioWare's Star Wars MMO remains strong, and World of Warcraft is still leading the MMO space with subscriptions by a wide margin, according to new data from research group SuperData.

According to that data, EA's Star Wars MMO, Star Wars: The Old Republic, made $165 million in revenue worldwide last year. That figure comes from revenue generated by subscriptions, expansion packs and microtransactions.

This should come as a shock to absolutely no one: Ubisoft's action/hacking game, Watch Dogs was the best selling game in North America for the month of June, according to data released by NPD Group this week. The open-world action game managed to beat out Mario Kart 8 and Minecraft on PS3 and Xbox 360. UFC came in third, with FIFA 14 placing a respectable fifth on the charts.

Microsoft announced that Xbox One sales in the US in June were twice as much as they were in May thanks to the retail release of the Kinect-less bundle.

"Since the new Xbox One offering launched on June 9, we've seen sales of Xbox One more than double in the US, compared to sales in May," said the firm in an announcement late Wednesday afternoon.

The figures are based on "internal data based on retail calendar and sold through numbers" from Microsoft.

A new report from Jon Peddie Research suggest that the PC gaming hardware market is now worth over $21.5 billion – over double the value of the console gaming market. Jon Peddie Research (JPR) said in its recently released PC Gaming Hardware Market report that PCs, associated upgrades, and peripherals used for gaming remain strong, despite an overall decline in the PC market. Ted Pollak, senior gaming analyst at JPR, said that while casual users were moving to mobile devices, PC gamers were actually investing more in high-end machines.

Ubisoft announced its first quarter of the 2014-2015 fiscal year, revealing that the company's growing digital games business is booming and that Watch Dogs was a major sales success. The company brought in $489.4 million in sales during the fiscal quarter ending June 30, 2014.

If you put all the sales for your most recent consoles together it looks pretty impressive. That's what Sony did revealed via a new promotional video that it has sold 100 million PS3, PS4, and PS Vita systems to-date, collectively. Of course the lion's share of that number belongs to the PS3, which has sold 80 million units since its release many moons ago to November 2013.

In the past Sony said that - since its release in November of last year more than 7 million PS4 systems have been sold as of April 6.

According to a study highlighted in The Guardian, 85 percent of the top 50 grossing apps on Apple and Android stores across the world are games. The data comes from Midia Research, and shows that 84.9 percent of the 700 apps covered by the study were games, with the next nearest category being social networking and only accounting for around 4.1 percent.

"The app economy is, for now at least, a games economy," the report concludes.

The Game Developers Conference (GDC) Europe today released results from its second annual European State of the Industry Survey, which reveals trends around regional development hubs, tax incentives and more. The survey is conducted annually prior to the launch of GDC Europe in August.

GDC Europe 2014 is organized by UBM Tech Game Network and runs from August 11-13 at the Congress-Centrum Ost in Cologne, Germany. It takes place in tandem with Europe's biggest video game trade and public show gamescom.

Oddworld Inhabitants co-founder Lorne Lanning explained why he left the video games industry in 2005 to focus on creating animated films and shorts, and what lured him back into the business of making games this year. The biggest reason that Lanning waited so long? According to this interview, he was basically waiting for the rights to his games to revert back to his company.

Some good news for Majesco; the company, who had been threatened with being delisted from the NASDAQ stock exchange for its stock trading below $1, has managed to avoid any punitive action. The company's stock is now trading above the $1 requirement and is in compliance with NASDAQ rules. The company announced the good news this week.

Back in March of last year NASDAQ gave Majesco 180 calendar days to raise its stock price above $1 or face delisting. Majesco received an additional 180 day extension to Feb. 14, 2014 in August of last year.

According to this [A]ListDaily report, video game and movie rental kiosk company Redbox has an incredibly high conversation rate when it comes to video game sales. The company credits this to a demographic they call "recreational gamers." Research conducted on behalf of the company through surveys finds that recreational gamers are the average age of 34-years-old, spend about six hours a week playing games, over 58 percent of this demographic have kids, and make roughly $61,000 a year.

Bioshock series creator Ken Levine says there is so much violence in video games because that type of content is technically simple to create and it's perceived that it is the kind of content that consumers really want. Speaking to NPR, Levine offered the following when asked about the topic of violence in video games:

In an interview with Polygon, Atari explains how a combination of old and new IP, licensing, digital publishing, and a smaller operation will put the company back on the right track after surviving bankruptcy.

Valve's international prize pool for the Dota 2 International competition has surpassed $10 million today, according to the company. As Gamasutra points out in its reporting, this prize pool is larger than many familiar professional sporting competitions like the U.S.

Mojang has announced that its flagship title Minecraft on consoles has surpassed sales on PC and Mac. According to a tweet from Mojang Data Analyst Patrick Geuder, the console versions of the game (PS3 and Xbox 360) have finally passed Windows and Mac versions.

Mojang did not offer specific breakdowns on sales for the myriad of platforms the game is available on. Geuder also noted that Minecraft across all platforms has surpassed the 54 million units sold mark.

Financial research firm DFC Intelligence has raised its 5-year video game forecast for the second time this year. DFC predicts that software revenue will climb from $64 billion in 2014 to $100 billion by 2018. This includes revenue from PC games, console games and mobile games, but does not include hardware spending on game devices.

The National Reconnaissance Office is looking closely at technology used for video games to help it improve how it gathers and analyzes intelligence data, according to a research proposal released Monday and reported on by USA Today. The NRO specifically wants to take advantage of the video game industry's "innovative algorithms" and "enhanced visualization techniques," according to the proposal.

Phil Spencer, head of Xbox at Microsoft says that separating the Kinect from Xbox One at retail will not drive game developers away from utilizing the device. Speaking to GII, Spencer said that Microsoft expects that the stand-alone Kinect will sell well and the success of the device and the software that uses it is heavily reliant on having a strong Xbox One install base.

Total global revenues from mobile games will reach $28.9 billion by 2016, according to a new report from research firm Juniper Research. This represents a 38 percent increase from the $20.9 billion Juniper predicts by the end of 2014.

Bastion senior programmer Chris Jurney announced via Twitter that he is leaving Supergiant Games at the end of the month to work for virtual reality headset maker Oculus. Jurney worked on the hit RPG Bastion and on the company's most recent release - Transistor.

Details on what Jurney will be doing at Oculus were not disclosed at the time of this writing.

The PlayStation 4 was the best-selling console for the month of May, while Ubisoft's open-world action hacking game Watch Dogs was the best-selling software title for the month, according to data from NPD Group.

Sony's current-generation console has been on top for five consecutive months, with Xbox One last leading sales in December 2013 (during its launch window). Combined physical hardware and software spending was up 52 percent to around $586 million from $387 million in the same period a year ago.

Street Fighter IV and series producer Yoshinori Ono announced today that he is resigning from his director position at Capcom Vancouver. Ono announced via Twitter that he was leaving his position and thanked the staff working on the Dead Rising series and Capcom Vancouver in general:

"I resigned from the director position about [sic] CAPCOM Vancouver. Thanks good staff of CAPCOM Vancouver, and Dead Rising staff!"

Capcom shareholders have rejected a plan that would have stopped someone from presenting an unsolicited acquisition bid. At the company's annual meeting today, shareholders opted not to renew a "takeover defense plan" that had been in place since 2008, and had been renewed every two years since.

A new report from Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) suggests that Portable connected devices are becoming primary gaming devices in U.S. homes, while wholesale revenue for home video game consoles will increase 85 percent in 2014. The study, "The Future of Gaming," gauges consumer behaviors regarding ownership, device use, gamer segments, video game attachment rates, purchase intent and more.