As Intellisponse recently discovered: it's not a very intelligent maneuver to, as a marketing research firm with clients like Microsoft and Activision, leave the company's data backend in a state that can be easily accessed by the public. When such a thing occurs, and this is just an example, the gaming press may get their hands on a great deal of unannounced information. So far gamers have discovered that the Xbox 360 has a Wii-like avatar system forthcoming, a third Forza game is in the works (yay yay yay), and that some company called Trioxide wants to do something where people could play console games on their PCs. That doesn't sound like a lawsuit waiting to happen at all. Anyway, thanks for the information Intellisponse and I hope you can still get clients in the future.

In the wake of Tomonobu Itagaki's resignation from his directorial position at Team Ninja it has now been revealed that every Tecmo employee is suing Tecmo. Tecmo instituted an illegal "flexible hours" scheme that allowed the company to avoid paying their employees overtime; the company was ignoring over one hundred overtime hours worked by its employees every month and falsified documented to cover the whole thing up. The filing was handled by two Tecmo employees (one of which was the head of Tecmo's Labor Division, Hiroaki Ozawa) and asks for 8.3 million yen ($77,000 USD) per employee as compensation. Basically, Tecmo has been a bad, bad company.

It's not often you hear a corporate executive say that the company had been "torturing a very talented group of people" Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello said just that referring to the developers of the Need for Speed franchise. The recent batch of duds in a series which peaked a few iterations ago has been attributed to a vicious work flow caused by the yearly Need for Speed iterations. To remedy this, Riccitiello says that the Need for Speed team has been split up into two separate -- and expanded -- teams which will each have a two year cycle for every iteration of franchise. The forthcoming Need for Speed: Undercover won't have the benefit of this new bi-yearly cycle per team but the games which follow Undercover will. Good move on EA's part.

Working at a smaller game development company must have me very unfamiliar with the way the huge companies and publishers handle things because if THQ CEO Brian Farrell's comments about their new greenlight process wasn't featured at GamesIndustry.biz then it would have taken several readings of the article to determine that Farrell wasn't actually talking about movies. "[The process] is very visible. It is very open. It is very clear what the process is [...] There's feedback, if something doesn't get greenlit, as to why it didn't get greenlit." So if a project high concept isn't up to snuff the people who created it are informed as to why it's not a viable product possibility? Revolutionary.

In his speech at the GameHorizon conference, film producer Todd Eckert warned against the game industry's tendency towards emulating the film industry. "Games should become the world's dominant medium...the film industry sees itself as a funnel channelling pop culture down the throats of the masses. For some reason the game industry still seems completely enamoured with the film industry. And if we're not careful we'll become like they are - little more than a marketing tool." I think that's pushing things a bit extreme but Eckert's point is a valid one. The gaming industry is one of the very few industries which produces a creative product that gives its users a choice in the way things play out. As much as I love Metal Gear Solid 4 and continue to play it after beating it I have no wish to see more games take its cinematic-heavy approach to storytelling; this is a medium where interactivity is king, there is absoluteyl no reason to have such elaborate cutscenes that don't involve the player.

Mainstream news is now reporting that games degrees aren't all that and a bag of bits (BBC article here). The GI article quotes the source for the BBC piece as saying, months ago, "95 per cent of videogaming degrees are simply not fit for purpose." And the EA headhunterHead of Global Talent is also requoted from earlier this year as saying "If you look at the gaming degrees, a lot of them have been put together quite hastily and don't prepare graduates for a career in the industry. That means they come to a company like ours and they need extra training - they're not quite ready." I've heard sentiments like this expressed elsewhere in the industry before, but it's odd to see a major news source reporting on it.