Anyone who has been a fan of gaming for a while now is more than familiar with Insomniac Games, long time supporters of the PlayStation formats and creators of famous franchises such as Spyro the Dragon and Ratchet and Clank. If certain rumours are to be believed though, this exclusive support may soon come to an end.

A “trusted source” who spoke to IGN anonymously during GDC claims that the company intends to go multi-platform.

Existing franchise are, as far as we know, locked into exclusivity on the PS3 for now, but this does not stop the company from creating a new franchise for the other existing consoles, the Xbox 360 and the Wii.

Insomniac is refusing to comment on this rumour for the time being, but we’ll let you know if something comes of it. I personally would be extremely surprised if this turned out to be true.

Well, this is interesting. According to Andriasang, Square Enix’s recruit page has a listing looking for staff for work on a “next generation” gaming engine.

“At Square Enix, in anticipation of the appearance of next generation platforms, we’ve started development on a new generation game engine for competing beyond the level of the strong developers throughout the world, and are presently seeking a lot of talent.”

Square used the image of Cloud from Final Fantasy VII in the listing, but we probably shouldn’t read into that too much – it’s most likely just a picture for the sake of promoting the company’s image. The FFVII remake rumours stopped running their course a long time ago.

[UPDATE] G4 reports that a source close to Activision has revealed that Activision CEO Bobby Kotick will adress the employees of Infinity Ward in a meeting today. There will also be a second meeting adressing the studio as a whole, but no details on either meetings are clear.

Trouble seems to be brewing within the halls of Infinity Ward. According to a report from G4, security guards of the “bouncer-types” showed up at the offices of Infinity Ward.

Studio heads Vince Zampella and Jason West reportedly met with Activision this morning and wasn’t seen by Infinity Ward employees since.

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Shigeru Miyamoto previously talked about Nintendo working on some new hardware, but wouldn’t reveal what they were working on. Could it be a new Nintendo DS?

According to French website Game Kult, development kits for the successor to the DS has already been sent out. And if CVG is to be believed, The Pokémon Company was the first third-party company to get the kit. Both websites cite unnamed sources as their sources, so mark this up as a rumour for now.

CVG’s source also mentions the new hardware has got a tilt function, not unlike that of the iPhone, but one that “does a lot more”. This adds up with Satoru Iwata’s mention of a new DS with motion controls.

Today’s a Miyamoto kind of day, isn’t it? Alongside the new Nintendo hardware announcement at the Japan Media Arts Festival, Shigeru Miyamoto clued listeners in on his inspiration behind Super Mario Galaxy–a hamster in a ball.

He revealed that he was taking care of a hamster during the development of the game and believed that putting Mario on a spherical world in a 3D environment would allow even inexperienced players to run freely and not get lost, while still providing a rich gaming environment to players.

Seems like such a banal thing to draw inspiration from, huh? I guess that’s why Nintendo doesn’t want Miyamoto divulging his hobbies–other people could start stealing his brilliance!

Shigeru Miyamoto has recently confirmed that Nintendo is working on some new hardware.

Speaking at the Annual Japan Media Arts Festival, Miyamoto revealed the company was working on something new, though no specifics mere mentioned. Miyamoto also mentioned he himself is working on a new motion-based game that will use the Wii Motion Plus.

There have been rumours speculating new Wii hardware for a while now, and the words “Wii HD” have been thrown around a lot. Satoru Iwata also suggested a motion sensing DS not too long ago.

Anybody want to guess what it could be?

I’m not a big fan of Twitter, but if it’s one thing that particular online service is good at, it’s creating a buzz around particular games or companies.

Aumeric Evennou, the Community Developer at Ubisoft has tweeted about a “thrilling new project” he’s working on with Community Developer Kimi Matsuzaki.

He continues to tease in a second tweet, stating: “I’d only say : “Big announcement coming up next week.” and I mean BIG!”

What could it be? Neither of us have any idea, unfortunately, but the title might possibly be revealed at Microsoft’s X10 event. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Even if they haven’t been there, most gamers follow E3 with the highest of scrutiny. And with good reason, as most of the good shit gets announced at E3.

While the convention itself is five months away the buzz machine seems to official start now as the event’s exhibitor list has gone live on the official E3 website.

Observant readers may have noticed that neither Take-Two, Blizzard or 2K Games are on the list. Blizzard are probably holding off until Blizcon, but the two others are strangely missing.

We probably won’t be able to attend the convention itself, but we’ll be covering all the press conferences so expect lots of updates when the time comes.

ELSPA presented some rather interesting software sales figures today. In 2009, the Xbox 360 overtook the (until recently) unstoppable Wii as the biggest software-shifting format in the UK. That’s a first.

The Xbox 360 pulled in £459 million worth of software revenue in 2009, although the Wii sold a higher number of titles in general, shifting over 18 million games last year.

PlayStation 3 finally made itself competitive in 2009, with over 11.9 million games sold to consumers, up 1.5 million from the 10.4 million games sold in 2008.

In total, over 74.6 million games were bought by people in the UK last year, which roughly accounts for one video game per person in the country. If that’s not mainstream, I don’t know what is.

Gotta love them analysts. Speaking with Gamasutra recently, Cowen Group analyst Doug Creutz believes that this holiday season will be a hard one for Nintendo, and that Sony will be the one to come out on top this holiday season.

According to Creutz, Wii gamers (wait, those actually exist?!) are holding off on game purchases this year. His conclusion? “The Wii bubble could be deflating.”

“While we believe the Wii is likely to be a drag on overall software sales through the holiday, the impact should be limited to those publishers which have invested significantly in Wii development, with the biggest negative impact likely to be felt by Electronic Arts, which (unwisely in our view) heavily invested in Wii development for [calendar 2009].”

Who do you think will come out on top this holiday season, fine gamers?

Sony’s PlayStation and Vaio division has just reported a 24.2 percent drop in sales compared to Q2 2008, down from 465.2 billion yen to 352.6 billion yen. Losses for this period widened from 40.6 billion yen to 58.8 billion yen.

First half sales have gone done to 599.5 from 859.6 in the previous corresponding period. Losses extended from 36 billion yen to 98.6 billion yen.

Sony is blaming “a deterioration in Vaio PC and the game business profitability,” and, “Deterioration due to a decrease in PS2 hardware and software unit sales, and the impact of foreign exchange rates,” for the figures.

This brings Sony’s total losses in the PlayStation division at $4.7bn since the release of the PlayStation 3. Ouch.

In what can’t be a bad move by Nintendo, the quality control branch of the company is being split off, into its own separate company.

The new company will be called “Mario Club” and aims to improve the quality of Nintendo’s first party games. Mario Club will be dedicated to extensive playtesting and bug hunting.

Contract employees will become full-time Mario Club employees and the work condutions for play testers will improve. This should make games published by Nintendo of Japan even better.

Now, if they could only do this with some of their third party games, we would see less of all this damned shovelware.

One of my favourite game developers, Funcom, has decided to open a new studio in Montreal Canada, assisted by Investisseement Quebec.

Funcom is known for creating the hit adventure game series The Longest Journey, as well as operating and developing MMOs Age of Conan and Anarchy Online. The company is currently developing a new MMO, The Secret World, set in the modern-day with a large emphasis on storytelling and skill progression

Dev boss Ragnar Tørnquist tweeted last night that “a large and important part of the TSW team will be located in Montreal. I’ll need to brush up on my French.”

The new Montreal studio will be headed up by Ole Schreiner, previously Funcom’s VP of operations:

“We are excited about the opportunity that Montreal represents to our company, not only because of the great incentives offered by Quebec, but also the authorities’ strong commitment to training qualified video games personnel and building a video games cluster in Montreal and Quebec,” said Schreiner in a statement.

Montreal currently houses game developers such as Ubisoft, Electronic Arts, indie developer Artificial Mind and Movement, as well as numerous others.

Surprising move, this. As you may already know, several retailers confirmed to the press today that the Xbox 360 Arcade SKU will be receiving a price increase (yes, you read that write) in the UK, up from £129.99 to £159.99.

It was also confirmed that Xbox 360 accessories will receive a price increase by at least one or two pounds. It’s important to note that this only applies to the UK as well.

This move is not entirely surprising. The pound sterling is currently a horrendously weak currency. Some may recall that Nintendo did the very same thing no more than six months ago, so this is hardly unprecedented.

Today conventional displays render game worlds on a flat 2D plane (the monitor/tv).

When Nintendo first released the Wii, critics often commented it had a gimmick interface that would not last long. Now, both Sony and Microsoft are exploring ideas for innovative interfaces.

Arguably, the same can be said for monitors today.

There are limitations associated with current displays. The sense of immersion in First Person Shooters are very limited as the monitor is not the same shape as the human eye. There are also 3D cues present in the real world, that do not translate well into these games today either. Gamers are familiar with these issues, and still play these games despite displays drawbacks.

We rarely see effort to break out of this cycle of standardised display hardware. Alienware showed their curved monitor running Crysis a while back and Ubisoft have shown a demo of their upcoming game RTS game “Ruse” running on Touch tables.

Is there a need to change the way we display game worlds?

Will there ever be Holodeck/Matrix/Minority Report display interfaces for games?