You may not care the China controls over 95% of the world's supply of rare earth metals, but you might want to. Read… 5/20/11 6:00am 5/20/11 6:00am

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. Read… 3/24/10 6:00pm 3/24/10 6:00pm

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. Read… 3/23/10 1:00pm 3/23/10 1:00pm

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... Read… 11/02/09 4:00am 11/02/09 4:00am

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. Read… 11/02/09 3:00am 11/02/09 3:00am

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. Read… 10/19/09 2:30am 10/19/09 2:30am

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. Read… 9/23/09 5:40pm 9/23/09 5:40pm

I've read a number of thought-provoking pieces over at Only a Game, and this week Chris Bateman has a meditation up on Nintendo, the 'mass market,' moving away from games, and what this could spell for the industry at large. Is it really all it's cracked up to be? Unlike most of my favorite essays from Bateman, this… Read… 7/19/08 5:30pm 7/19/08 5:30pm

Over at the Escapist, they're taking a look at the future of gaming — Hal Halpin, president of the Entertainment Consumers Association, looks at a number of 'maybe, maybe not' predictions with his own take. Ranging from the mundane ('Game prices will go down!') to the political ('Things will get better once gamers… Read… 7/12/08 4:30pm 7/12/08 4:30pm

Those concerned with 'virtual worlds' - as opposed to 'games' - spend a lot of time contemplating the role of virtual worlds in a wider market; over at Terra Nova, Bruce Damer looks at the potential future of virtual worlds, which could be a lot bigger than most people imagine. Some potential answers to keep the… Read… 7/05/08 12:00pm 7/05/08 12:00pm

Gamasutra has an interesting look up at the MMO free to play/micro-transaction vs. traditional subscription model up - talking with SOE's John Smedley, Three Rings' Daniel James and EA Mythic's Mark Jacobs. Unsurprisingly, there are differences in opinion on the utility of the micro-transaction model, with some… Read… 6/07/08 4:30pm 6/07/08 4:30pm

For those that lament the plethora of crappy MMOs and poorly-planned 'virtual worlds' of various stripes — fear not, a new report indicates that 90% are doomed to failure within a year and a half. Gartner, the research and advisory firm that produced the report, notes that the high rate of failure could be due to a… Read… 5/17/08 6:30pm 5/17/08 6:30pm