Yanis Varoufakis, the economist Valve recently hired to study Team Fortress 2's virtual economy, has published his first paper. If you are not an economist and suffer from insomnia, you might consider giving this a close read.

Done with that Zynga story? Thought that was all the economics you were getting today? Nope. While he's not recommending investor action, writer Paul Manwaring did some number crunching and conservatively valued Team Fortress 2's unique items economy at, oh, about $50 million.

Nintendo isn't the only company seeing a jump in value after announcing that they plan to release a 3D version of their popular DS portable console.

The billion dollar business of selling virtual goods in free-to-play games is more than just a financial windfall for companies like Playfish. A controlled economy with millions of active participants gives economists an entirely new way to model consumer behavior.

While a bird in the hand is worth more than 2.5 million copies shipped worldwide, Tekken 6 is nothing to sneer at. Wait, that came out wrong...

Unofficial day-one sales are in for Bayonetta and boy does Japan love its PlayStation 3s. Ninety-three thousand copies sold for Sony's home console compared to the 45,000 sold on Xbox 360.

Kai Huang, Peter Moore and Neil Young forecast a grim future for physical media at the University of California at Berkeley's PLAY Conference this past weekend.

Rumors can be powerful forces in the economy, as evidenced by an 8.1 percent rise in Electronic Arts stock today following unsubstantiated rumors that Microsoft was interested in buying the publisher out.

The Montreal International Game Summit recently wrapped up, and keynote speaker David Braben of Frontier Development really took the industry to task on everything from the business model (broken!) to retailers (killing longevity of games!) to the 'online myth' of the next gen consoles. He makes some interesting…

Despite declining stock value, Giant Interactive — the company behind the intriguing MMO Zhengtu Online, which is a mix of MMO, gambling, real money transactions, and gold farming — is still tearing up the Chinese market. Steve of PlayNoEvil has some interesting analysis up of some recent numbers, which have…

Dave Perry, founder of Shiny Entertainment, sat down with Valve's Gabe Newell to talk about how to shoehorn your way into the industry — and what's the industry going to look like in a few years, anyways? Are game degrees a waste of time? Is specialization going to be the name of the game, as in film ? And how can…

Gamasutra has an interesting — if dry — analysis of a variety of sales figures from Nintendo's investor presentation. While targeted towards a particular audience, the variety of graphs and pie charts illustrate what's going on in the global marketplace: handheld and console sales, as well as first- and third-party…

Gene Hoffman, CEO of Vindicia (a billing and fraud protection company), has some words of wisdom regarding the headache that is billing and payment for MMOs — be they the more 'traditional' subscription model or the free to play model. Obviously, there are benefits and downsides that come with each model, and…

Leigh Alexander has a nice piece up on what she calls the "dysfunctional family circle of game industry, game media, and game consumer," focusing on the whys and wherefores of the 'hype cycle,' hot (sometimes misleading) headlines, and a culture of jaded consumption. There's been a lot of talk of the problems of game…

A gold farming/money laundering ring in South Korea has been accused of moving somewhere in the neighborhood of $38 million USD from Korea to China (with the help of real money transactions). According to PlayNoEvil, they made false purchases to a Hong Kong paper company to move the money, which is what eventually…

Are video games the movies of our current economic slump? In an article wittily titled, "In Tough Economic Times, Video Games Console", NPR writer Laura Sydell explores the similarities between the growing popularity of video games in mainstream culture with the movie boom that occurred during The Great Depression in…

Well, we already know what disgruntled ex-employees think of GameStop; how do the head honchos think they're doing? Christian Nutt sat down with Bob McKenzie (senior vice president of merchandising) and Tony Bartel (executive vice president of merchandise and marketing) at the yearly GameStop Expo event for managers…