Kotaku spoke to Greg Hart, Vice President of Video Games and Software for Amazon.com about the new service, who explained that offering casual games for purchase and download via the popular online shopping marketplace is a boon to both customers and developers. Customers benefit by having a safe place to download their games with the same quality and convenience they've come to expect from Amazon.com, while casual developers who have never released a retail box have the online equivalent of a big box retailer where they can display their wares.

Customers are able to download and try any game sold through the service for 30 minutes, after which they can either purchase the full game or forget they ever played it. As a special promotion good for the first week only, customers can download full versions of Jewel Quest II, The Scruffs, an Built-A-Lot completely free of charge.

So why casual games, instead of just going for an all-encompassing online store model like Valve's Steam?

"Casual Games are a natural fit with our demographic," explains Hart. "We have 88 million active customers who can appreciate the convenience of the true amazon shopping experience combined with the casual games experience." The man makes a very good point. The person who spends a great deal of time browsing Amazon.com is open to new experiences on their computers, and quick, inexpensive casual games delivered by a trusted source should prove extremely popular to the shopping masses.

That's not to say that the Game Downloads section won't expend into other, more mainstream titles in the future. "We always want to offer the widest selection possible, just like we've done with our boxed games over the past two years."

So don't worry, Valve. With Amazon focused strictly on providing inexpensive casual titles to the shopping masses, they are no threat to your digital download empire at all. For now.

Amazon Game Downloads [Amazon.com]

iPhone owners accounted for 14 percent of mobile game downloaders in November, with 32.4 percent of all iPhone users reporting they downloaded a game in the month, compared with a market average of 3.8 percent.

That's nearly 10 times the average. No wonder so many companies are hopping onto the iPhone bandwagon.

Smartphones Provide Extra Mana for Mobile Games Industry as Audience for Downloaded Games Grows 17 Percent [comScore]

Her 'people' think that Still Alive might be about to change all that and are offering you lot the chance to see the music video for the track and to hear a remix of the song by Teddybears (who are presumably also household names in.. wherever they are from).

A full album of Still Alive remixes is on the way featuring mixes by Junkie XL, Paul Van Dyk, Benny Benassi, and Armand Van Helden. Check out the Teddybears' contribution here.

“We would like to welcome Niko Bellic, the most charismatic personality that the GTA license has ever known," said Metaboli's VP of Content Pierre Forest, "This agreement enables us to become the first digital distributor in Europe to offer Rockstar’s entire catalogue."

The games will be available through Metaboli's 'download to own' site Gamesplanet.com and I suppose there is an outside chance that the older titles could end up in the 'Ultimate collection' all-you-can-eat pack you can get via metaboli.co.uk.

Rockstar signs up to Metaboli [MCV]

"We started the in-house development team a couple of months ago and we're starting with downloadable content because the team is still small," explained the studio's US president John Yamamoto. "All formats – Xbox Live, WiiWare, PlayStation Network – are all viable formats for us"

The LA studio will also be investigating middleware solutions, after successfully using the Unreal Engine 3 for The Last Remnant. "I want to [...] evaluate lots of middleware," said Yamamoto, "because western middleware is much more advanced compared to Japanese middleware. So we will study and feed back information to Square Enix in Japan."

Square Enix LA studio to focus on digital titles [GamesIndustry.biz]

"ParticleMan simulates gravitational attraction between particles in a cloud. This system was used to study such gravitational dynamics as orbits, nebula formation, star formation and particle streams from sources like pulsars and black holes," says the official site.

ParticleMan has the following elements:

• Particles — point masses which interact with each other
• Gravity Wells — fixed point masses which attract or repel particles(depending on magnitude, which can be negative), but do not move or change mass without user input
• Particle Guns — sources that spit particles out at a given angle and velocity
• Gravity Wells and Particle Guns may only be placed on the green grid in the z=0 plane.
• The Iso Surface — an isosurface geometry object derived from the positions and masses (which act as field strengths) of the particles.

By toying with the physics controls you can create different kinds of gravitational simulations. Set fusion rate to high, you can simulate the birth of stars in a collapsing nebula. Low fusion rates can simulate the interaction between stars in a galaxy.

ParticleMan is an .exe, so Mac gamers (like myself) are SOL. But if you've always wanted to make stars, and not in the American Idol sense, here's a nice weekend time-waster.

Spore Protoypes [Spore.com, big thanks to reader Bryce]

Whether or not Haze looks like just another FPS or something better, the still undated demo will give us all a chance to decide for ourselves before the game comes out. It reminds us a lot of what Criterion gave us with Burnout Paradise—a small, robust chunk of the entire gameplay experience. Good stuff.

MEDIA ALERT: HAZE(TM) - *4 Player Co-op / Campaign Demo Incoming Exclusively for the PLAYSTATION®Network*

April 15, 2008 - Ubisoft, one of the world's largest video game publishers, today announced the imminent release of a fully playable demo for Haze, the new first-person shooter set in a harsh future where war is never quite what it seems. Coming exclusively to the PLAYSTATION®Network in early May, this playable demo will give gamers a taste of not only the single-player campaign in Haze, but will also allow up to four-player, drop-in drop-out co-op play online. Developed by shooter experts Free Radical, creators of the critically acclaimed TimeSplitters® series, Haze is scheduled for release exclusively on the PLAYSTATION®3 computer entertainment system on May 20th 2008 in the US. Haze is rated "M" for Mature by the ESRB.

But Universe at War looked fantastic, despite its only moderate reception. And now it's available as a demo on the Xbox 360. So if you enjoy RTSs but don't have a PC or trust console-ported controls, it might be worth giving a download. And just think: if such demos were around back at Leipzig, I probably wouldn't have to run all my posts by Tristan before publishing. And Mini Bash might have approved my raise, too.

Demo: Universe at War: Earth Assault [Major Nelson]

...ten years from now the ratio of games sales will have gone from 90 per cent in-store to 90 per cent online.

I remember loading Facing Worlds from the original UT on my first bohemeth 19-inch monitor and feeling dizzy as I looked to the Earth below, making my stomach churn. A few years of innovation later, my 46-inch HDTV should force an alien baby through my shirt.

Free DLC Now Available for Unreal Tournament III [Gaming Today]

We're asked if we're going to do Bring Down the Sky for PC, and it's a consideration. We're looking in to exactly what we want to do; maybe we'll do something different, because the PC offers some different potentials.

The advent of Video Store is a competitive advantage from a PR standpoint, alongside the range of games on our platform. In the last two months, since the launch of Video Store in the UK, our audience figures have grown dramatically.

The problem isn't Microsoft's video store itself—the service is decently integrated on their platform. The problem is that their selection of titles is little more than a novelty for consumers. If you can't rent even a quarter of the movies you want to see on LIVE, you won't think of your Xbox as the place to see movies—bottom line.

Of course, if our little rant is incorrect and their video store rocks your world, feel free to correct us in the comments.

Xbox Live to focus on family, says Microsoft [MCV]

PS3 - Regional User Faces...[NeoGAF via DigitalBattle]

FileFront has the download and installation instructions, which, curiously, point out that removable storage of some sort is required for import. Whether it be compact flash, Memory Stick or simply a USB thumb drive, it seems one can't simply download to the PS3's built-in mass storage via the internet browser. What's up with that?

FileFront Exclusive: First Ever PS3 Unreal Tournament 3 Map [FileFront]

I don't think we're ready to look at that and say, "This is the way it should go right now." But we're at an interesting point in the industry where consumers know they can get things fast and they're getting used to it with other devices from other companies. So it's something we always wanted to do.

...we want to start opening up some of these channels and getting consumers used to that and experimenting with it...I would say it's a glimpse towards the future. Definitely just by releasing a UMD title in the store it definitely puts ideas in people's heads, but no I wouldn't categorize this as a shift in business model at this point.

Save a copy of your downloaded files on a Zip-drive, floppy disk etc. in case you computer breaks down.

...three action games, two music-based games, one racing title and a shooting game...

All titles are being developed internally, which has a lot of promise if we see the same level of creative talent on these projects as we have in PSN downloads. And apparently Sony has been pitching external development companies with the approach, "why give part of your money to a retailer?"

We just can't wait for when the PSP store can function without a PC or PS3...and it's not even open for business yet.

More details emerge on PSP PlayStation Store [gamesindustry]

...any customer who downloads the equivalent of 30,000 songs, 250,000 pictures or 13 million emails in a month.

Comcast Clarifies High Speed Extreme Use Policy [gamedaily]

Given that they also said the attachment rate is reaching an average of 6-7 XBLA titles per user, we're a bit confused by all the numbers at the moment. Either those 25 45 million downloads are arcade title exclusive, or that 6-7 title figure is inflated and based upon only the most current users. We have an email out to Microsoft and will let you know if the numbers start making more sense.

UPDATE: We've talked to Microsoft PR. The real number is actually 45 million Xbox Live downloads.

Gamefest 2007: 25M Downloads on XBL [1up]

GDI claims it will allow users to play games within minutes of initiating downloads, but the article did not specify how much each download would cost. Oftentimes, downloadable content is cheaper when artwork, packaging and shipping are not factored into a product's final cost.

This of course makes GAME, who has already eaten up Gamestation earlier this year, an even more powerful company—depending on if it can dodge those little monopoly rumors. Kim Phu

GAME adopts GDI's on-demand PC service [Games Industry Biz]