Current European developer trends in relation to gaming platforms were revealed when the results of The GDC Europe State of the Industry 2014 Survey were published today.

Console wise, despite Microsoft’s strong showing at E3 a higher percentage of developers either were currently developing for the Playstation 4 or planned to for their next game, 18 per cent and 33 per cent respectively; as opposed to just 13 per cent currently developing for the Xbox One and 23 per cent planning to make their next game for Microsoft’s console.

Beating out the consoles though were the number of developers currently developing for PC and mobile, with 58 per cent working on a PC title and a massive 65 per cent developing a mobile title. Future development aims beat out the consoles too with 60 per cent looking at PC and 64 per cent at mobile.

Trends also suggested that while currently the percentage of crowd funded projects in Europe were low, almost 41 per cent of developers were considering using crowd funding to finance their next projects.

The full details of the survey can be found here on the Game Developers Conference website.

Seems like the Minecraft community might have been marked out as an easy target. Another unofficial Minecraft convention has been called off five days from the date it was meant to start on, in fact it was due to happen this weekend – the forth in six months.

The convention in question was named Mine-o-rama and was due to take place in New York over the weekend of the 12^th and 13^th of July, but was called off at very short notice. The reason given for the cancellation was that the con-organisers had wished to stream live feeds of panels and events but had been met with refusal of permission from Mojang to actually do this due to the fact that said livestreams would have been pay-to-view – probably due to Mojang’s EULA saying that you cannot make money from their game, with a few exceptions. This, the organisers claim, means that they didn’t have enough money to run the event.

This of course has left a lot of attendees with tickets they currently cannot use and in some cases flights to New York and hotel bookings to attend an event that is no longer being held. However many of the booked guests have hastily begun to organise fan meet-ups for their fans to give them something to attend on the trip at least.

The Mine-o-rama Twitter account has acknowledged that the cancellation has left many fans disappointed and out of pocket but have said they tried desperately to re-plan the event but were left with a shortfall of about $175,000. They have said they are hoping to have the team meet next week to plan rescheduling the event but so far refunding people has not come up although the tweets are all terribly apologetic.

As with the last big Minecraft convention cancellation (article can be found here) BebopVox of Minecraft Mondays has put together a video on details he dug up that were publicly available:

The article about the event published in Forbes magazine was also referenced on the Twitter account, with the number of ‘7,500 tickets sold’ disputed as being 2,000 sold at the time and another 5,500 promised to students of which about 3,000 were actually sold. It also disputed the total of $1 million saying that in the end they only raised around $600,000 through ticket sales.

It’s another tricky situation, and I’ll be watching as the story develops more. My heart goes out to those left disappointed and I hope that the fan meet-ups that are actually organised go as smoothly as they can be.

It had to happen eventually. In Hollywood’s relentless pursuit for more cash, any movie that doesn’t get a videogame tie-in either before or within a month of the movie’s release is a rarity – as is, sadly, the chance of said game being any good.

With Sharknado 2 scheduled to premiere on July 30 in US Cinemas, production studio The Asylum and TV channel Syfy have announced Sharknado: The Video Game will be released soon for iOS devices. Just like the film, the game features protagonist Fin racing to destroy several shark-infested tornadoes in New York City. And just what medium has the game chosen to represent this in gameplay terms? An “infinite runner”, similar to Canabalt and the variety of imitators its spawned.

Yawn.

Played in a third-person perspective with the camera just behind Fin; and with objects coming towards you from up ahead rather than side-on, the game nevertheless sees you running through Manhattan – collecting coins, for no apparent reason – while heading towards one of the shark-filled tornadoes. Along the way you’ll also pick up buckets of fish, which you can feed to any sharks thrown your way to avoid certain death. If you can’t feed them, you can try to fight them off with your trusty broadsword (yup). Reach the Sharknado and you can equip a chainsaw, jump inside and try to destroy it from within – as if you can just jump into a rapid vortex of wind rather than be scooped up by it and thrown around every which way but loose.

The game’s release date and price has yet to be announced, but given the imminent launch of the film as mentioned earlier, it probably won’t be long until we hear both details. Meanwhile, forgive me if I decide to spend my time looking for more interesting games to play.

Fans of the Civilization franchise of games are currently awaiting details of the next announced game, Civilization: Beyond Earth which will take the standard Civilization formula and place it onto alien planets in humanity’s near future.

Today 2K have released gameplay footage from E3 of the game:

They’ve also given a date of release for the game: October 27th. There’s also been a pre-order bonus pack announced. The Exoplanets Map Pack, a DLC mini-drop which takes inspiration from real-life exoplanets and includes:

• “Kepler 186f: This lush forest planet is one of the oldest known Earth-like planets;
• “Rigil Khantoris Bb: Orbiting the closest star to our solar system, the historical records of this arid continental planet’s settlement are well-preserved;
• “Tau Ceti d: This planet of seas and archipelagos features a booming biodiversity and a wealth of resources;
• “Mu Arae f: Tidally locked in orbit around a weak star, the southern hemisphere of this planet is a blistering desert where the sun never sets, while the northern hemisphere is perpetually in frozen darkness;
• “82 Eridani e: An alien world of scarce water and wracked by tectonic forces;
• “Eta Vulpeculae b: A mysterious new discovery with unknown terrain.”

Upon release the game will be retailing at £27/$50.

If yesterday’s article (that can be found here) about the Hearthstone qualifier in Finland with access restricted to only the male sex made your blood boil then be angry no more. The International eSports Federation have changed their mind and the male-only tournament will now be open to both male and female players. Result!

The scandal began on Tuesday when a flier for the event was passed about online, specifically on a sub-Reddit with the entry restrictions highlighted. The Finnish organisers then replied to the criticisms by revealing that they were only in place due to the IeSF’s own rules that split tournaments between male and female players as an attempt to get eSports taken seriously as sport. Upon hearing the outcry from the gaming community and the gaming press Blizzard themselves got involved, making it clear that they wouldn’t stand for such restrictions of entry and would in fact prohibit any event that tried to as they wouldn’t want to be seen to promote the exclusion of women from the gaming community. Upon hearing the opinions the IeSF held an emergency meeting of their board to make a decision on what should be done.

“IeSF shall have two event categories: “Open for All” events and events that are reserved for women. The events which were initially set aside as the male division will now be open to all genders, and the events which were initially set as the female division will remain as they were.” read the statement that they released declaring the change of the rules.

They further justified that the female-only events were staying as they were to encourage more women into eSports with the hopes that they would eventually grow in confidence enough to move to the Open for All events and make eSports less a less male-dominated industry of the gaming community.

Just shows what we as a community can do when we seek to go against the sexist stereotype that gamers often get tarred with