Seattle

Sony has closed Seattle-based firstparty studio Zipper Interactive. More >

Big Fish Games has announced an OnLive-alike game streaming service for the iPad after securing Apple's approval to use App Store subscriptions for videogames. Bloomberg reports that the Seattle-based casual gaming company will offer users instant access to its library of games from iPad for $4.99 a month, rising to $6.99 next year when more games are added. More >

Microsoft has unveiled Kinect Accelerator, an program to support the creation of Kinect applications for use in the business world. The programme, which runs from March to May, is part of Microsoft's effort to expand the use of Kinect beyond the living room. It intends to launch a commercial version of the Windows Kinect SDK early next year. More >

Warner Bros Interactive Entertainment has confirmed an unspecified number of layoffs at its Seattle offices. The news was broken by 3D Realms president George Broussard on Twitter, who claimed around 60 staff had been let go from Warner Bros' Seattle operation. More >

The number of people playing Team Fortress 2 has increased by a factor of five since it switched to the free-to-play model, according to Gabe Newell, co-founder of developer Valve. Newell revealed the news at a recent conference in Seattle, Geek Wire reports. Valve is also seeing a far higher percentage of players purchasing virtual items through microtransactions than is typical across the industry. More >

A trademark filing in July outed Harmonix's next project, an iOS app called Vidrhythm, with the developer at first refusing to reveal anything about it beyond a curt "it will be awesome" and later moving to correct reports that described it as a game instead of an app. At last weekend's PAX event in Seattle, Vidrhythm was formally unveiled as an earnestly lo-fi music video generator: it records a succession of short video clips of users making various sound effects and stitches them together. As IGN's report shows, there's clear potential for some clever creations in the right hands - and some frankly nightmarish efforts in the wrong ones.

Sean Ryan, director of game partnerships at Facebook, has dismissed suggestions that Zynga has gaming on the social network all to itself. "It's not a market where ten apps get all the users," he said at Seattle's Casual Connect event yesterday. "The market is growing like crazy and you can participate in it." While Zynga has the world-building social genre locked up, Ryan pointed to the relative lack of romance, hunting, fishing, and fighting games, as well as FPSs and RPGs on Facebook, and said: "It's easy to forget that this market is less than four years old. It's too late to clone a game that is a clone of another game, but there is plenty of opportunity."

Seattle-based Titan Studios, the Epic Games China subsidiary that developed PSN title Fat Princess, has closed, with around half of its former staff now working at start-up Carbon Games. The new studio's co-founder James Green told Joystiq: "We had actually been winding down Titan gracefully for a while. The longterm plan was always for Epic Games China to exist on [its] own. We were just in a support/advisory role which is why we never followed up Fat Princess." Carbon will develop smaller, accessible, core games, with an initial focus on PC which Green says will enable the studio to "iterate and get player feedback faster and actually control the patching process."

New algorithm, which turns pixel art into scalable vector assets, revealed in joint paper published by Microsoft Research and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.