Gamertell

Sierra Entertainment has announced that it is willing to ramp up the development of new products based on four titles from different genres - real-time strategy, open world, first person shooters and children’s games.

The games, most of which have already been released, include F.E.A.R. as a new first-person shooter by Sierra followed by Prototype as an open-world action title from Radical Entertainment, a polished TimeShift from Sabre Interactive and a future development of The Spiderwick Chronicles as a movie based children’s game to be released on February 2008…

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Videogames are certainly a lucrative business and MTV has decided to continue investing. In the past, MTV has made various videogame-related business acquisitions like Harmonix (developer of Guitar Hero and Rock Band), Atom Entertainment and Gametrailers.com to name a few. It has now investing an astronomical $500 million for continued videogame operations

History and analysts are staked against media companies enjoying success with videogames but MTV has enjoyed considerable success with online properties like Xfire.com, Gametrailers.com, Neopets.com and Addictiongames.com and is betting big on its upcoming title, Rock Band. It is also focused on ...

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EA Casual, a newly launched arm of Electronic Arts, will be soon developing games based on popular Hasbro franchises. Hasbro and EA Casual have finalized a licensing deal. The games developer will churn out games for all conceivable platforms including consoles, web and mobile devices. This augurs well for EA Casual, as the label was born only in June 2007.

The quid-pro-quo end of the bargain means that even Hasbro would be allowed to make toys and traditional games based on popular EA games franchises.  EA plans to release the first Hasbro-based games in 2008 though no word was given on when Hasbro will begin releasing EA-inspired toys.

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Casual game maker, PopCap Games, announced that it recently hired Andrew Stein to be its Director of Mobile Business Development. Stein was most recently the Senior Marketing Manager - Games for Cingular’s Wireless Media Mall (how does that even fit on a business card?), and also worked for SEGA of America and Enix America, Inc.

Some of Stein’s responsibilities in the newly created position will include creating a North American mobile strategy, developing partnerships with mobile carriers (so games can be played on “cellular phones, BlackBerrys, iPods, PDAs and other mobile devices") and developing promotional programs.

Dennis Ryan, EVP of Worldwide Business Development at PopCap, was quoted in a press release as saying, “Mobile devices, especially cellular phones, could well be the largest market for casual games like ours.”

PopCap has produced games including the now infamous Bejeweled, Bookworm and Astropop, typically selling several of the top ten portable (non console) and downloadable casual games.

With so many younger Americans putting a phone in their hands - and we’re still well behind most other countries in terms of a phones-per-citizen ratio - mobile gaming may be taking a distant second to text messaging in terms of non-talking uses for cell phones. I’m going to guess there will be an increase in mobile game marketing geared toward teens since they seem to be the earliest adopters of new tech.

How much time do you spend “playing” - games, texting, taking pictures, etc. - on your phone?

Read [SeattlePI] Site [PopCap]