Industry

Kotaku AU's rumour report on 10 staff retrenchments at Australia's leading mobile developer has been met with a quick rebuttal from Firemint's community manager, Sam Mayo.

The rumour suggested that as much as 10 employees from Melbourne-based Firemint, mostly non-managerial roles such as artists as well as a producer, were let go on Thursday and Friday this week.

As THQ's share price continues its extraordinary plummet over the years, from $33.73 five years ago to now just 66 cents according to Kotaku AU, it has had to take some extreme cost cutting measures to stay afloat.

It's been a busy last few months for Surprise Attack, the new marketing agency for local independent games developers established by games developer veteran and former Marketing Director at THQ's Australian studios, Chris Wright.

During mid-2011, a bomb-shell was exposed on the working conditions over at Gameloft Auckland. Inspired by the reports that unearthed the harsh working conditions at Team Bondi, head programmer Glenn Watson opened the lid on the sweat-shop like work conditions at Gameloft's new studio in New Zealand.

Well, I hope you've all enjoyed our video coverage of this year's phenomenal GCAP conference. We captured 50 gigs of raw data, compressed it down and uploaded all 12+ hours of footage on to youtube. Thankfully, Google had upgraded our youtube account for hour long videos so we didn't need to chop each session into pieces and manage them into playlist's like we had to previously.

The Aussie App Sale kicks off this weekend! For the holiday season, many Aussie app developers will be dropping the cost of their apps down to a measly 99 cents for an entire month. If you ever wanted to check out some home grown apps, this is the place to be.

There's a whole variety of apps to grab from there, with productive applications that cover photography, property, TV guides, gamebooks to music tappers. And there are plenty of awesome games from local games developers too.

In a feature at the Financial Review, Mad Max and Happy Feet director, George Mlller, says that if the 40% tax rebate for games is given the green light in Australia, he can start the production of two big games here right away. He lists one of the titles as the long rumoured game adaptation of the new Mad Max film which was originally planned for development in Sweden until Miller saw what Team Bondi was capable of with L.A Noire.

Startupsmart.com.au reports that Federal Arts Minister, Simon Crean, will make the case for extending the 40% producer tax rebate enjoyed by the films sector to the games industry to the expenditure review committee before the next budget. The 40% producer tax rebate was successful in securing film productions such as Happy Feet Two and The Great Gatsby and it's hoped to spark similar revitalising activity for local games developers.

Some great news for the local games industry with a new studio opening up today in Canberra. Dreamgate Studios is founded and managed by industry veterans with a combined 40 years of experience, and they are focussing on self funded development and publishing, as well as projects and specialised jobs for industry and non-industry clients.

There are small time patent trolls like Tim Langdell who are a minor annoyance for developers in the games industry, and then there are patent trolls like Lodsys who are a considerable force to be concerned about.