Games are currently classified by the Pan-European Games Information (PEGI) system as well as the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), depending on the content of the game. The new regulations will see the responsibility placed solely at the feet of the Video Standards Council (VSC). The VSC will carry on using the PEGI system though, so don’t expect to find odd new stickers on your games.

The VSC will also have the power to effectively ban games from sale in Britain by refusing to give them an age rating — games that do not get rated are not allowed to go on sale. Any retailer who attempts to sell imported games without a rating can face up to two years in prison — you’d better warn ‘Big Jimmy’ down the market.

The government hopes that the new regulations will make it easier for parents to understand the ratings system and be confident that their seven-year-old isn’t playing a game that involves them hacking someone’s face off with a crowbar — although I’m not sure exactly why the government feels the parent can’t make that decision themselves without a legally enforceable policy.

If you’re over 12 then it’s not likely you’re going to be affected much by the new changes. The only risk is that the VSC will attempt to ban games it deems ‘dangerous’, in line with the various ridiculous claims that games like Grand Theft Auto are causing our children to become violent prostitute-killing drug dealers.

There’s no firm date on exactly when the new regulations are due to come into effect, and it’s too soon to say what impact they’ll have on video game sales here in the UK.

What do you think to the new rules? Is too much of a fuss made over age restrictions on games and films, or do you think that violent games are the downfall of us all? Let me know in the comments below or over on our Facebook page.

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Escape the horrors of The Sprawl with a platinum trophy courtesy of this advice from the PlayStation Community.

Dead Space 2 on PlayStation 3 is the terrifying tale of unfortunate engineer Isaac Clarke’s escape from a huge, doomed space station. His bad luck strikes again when he wakes from a coma to find nearby corridors and living quarters streaked with blood, and the entire facility crawling with his nemeses from the original Dead Space – the Necromorphs.

Thanks to bouts of dementia, conspiring politicians and the blood-curdling aliens themselves, Clarke’s traumatic escape attempt makes for one of the toughest platinum trophy hunts around. Yet when you, the PlayStation Community, were called upon to provide expert knowledge, you offered plenty of helpful hints.

Next month, head over to community.eu.playstation.com and tell us about your platinum pursuit in Uncharted: Golden Abyss on PlayStation Vita. In the meantime, charge your plasma cutter for the fight of your life.

“Dead Space 2′s platinum trophy is one to be proud of. That trophy separated the men-Isaacs from the boy-Isaacs and brought a touch of what draws people to the insanely difficult Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls. Namely, that failure has consequences beyond just replaying the last minute or so. It was perfect for a survival horror game because without consequence there is no fear of death to lend weight to the survival aspect.” (InfiniteStates, UK)

“A tip I have for gamers who want to get the platinum trophy is to start on Hard mode, unlock Zealot mode – which is very tricky – and then go through Hard Core mode, the toughest setting there is. The easier challenge levels are better for playing through once you’ve upgraded everything and just want fun. Dead Space 2 is one of the only examples of my re-starting a game the very second I beat it. It’s incredibly fun and one of my all-time favourites.” (CaptainCortez, UK)

“The single hardest trophy in the game comes from completing Hard Core mode because you can only save your progress three times, which makes choosing when to do so crucial. I saved at Chapters 4, 9 and 13, each before truly tough sections of the game, when I died often. It’s mainly the middle stint of the campaign that’s the hardest. From Chapter 13 onwards you can almost sprint past enemies.” (Ceron, UK)

“I thought the Javelin gun was really cool, there is nothing better than hitting an enemy then seeing him fly through the room and sticking to the wall for the Going for Distance trophy. Eventually an electrical bolt discharges, which makes the enemy and any nearby friends ignite. Intense, but also fun – especially after some of the nerve-racking parts of the game.” (kevin_1606, Netherlands)

“If you get too spooked out as you play through Dead Space 2, a very good tip is to play without sound.” (FoxMustDie, Portugal)

“It is actually quite difficult to get the platinum trophy as you have to play through the whole game in Hard Core mode with only three save points. Videos on the internet helped me as I had real problems with this trophy. Personally, I liked the difficulty of the game, it was a genuinely rewarding challenge.” (JusTaEpicFAIL, Germany)

“The Javelin gun is the most useful weapon in the game, and you can upgrade it from Chapter 2 for better results. Concentrate your upgrade nodes on its alternative firing mode, which lets you electrocute groups of enemies and wall guardians with ease.” (Black72Rat, Russia)

Need a little friendly advice about trophy hunting? Then put your questions to the experts on the official PlayStation Forums at community.eu.playstation.com. Don’t forget to come back next month to find out how to strike platinum in Uncharted: Golden Abyss on PS Vita.

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Celebrated today in a pitch-perfect Google Doodle, the 30th anniversary of the ZX Spectrum will have many veteran gamers swooning into a reverie of eighties nostalgia.

Released on this day in 1982, the machine typified the British approach to industrial design – utilitarian but also idiosyncratic and characterful. It should have been buried by its more powerful contemporary, the Commodore 64, but somehow this strange little slab of plastic and rubber earned itself a considerable slice of the nascent home computing market, especially in Britain.

Partly its success was about price. Since the launch of the ZX80 computer two years earlier, restless British inventor Clive Sinclair had been interested in computing for the masses.

Using cheap components and a minimalistic approach to design, he was able to manufacture machines at a lower cost than rivals such as Acorn, Apple and Tandy. The computer’s rubber keys, for example, were created from a single sheet, with a metal overlay to separate them – much less expensive than producing a conventional keyboard.

So while the BBC Micro started at £235 for the Model A option and the C64 hit the shelves at around £350, the Spectrum launched at just £125 for the 16k version or £175 for the mighty 48k.

At a time of deep recession, with unemployment at 3 million in the UK, this was a vital factor – especially as a lot of the interest in home computers was coming, not from businessmen who wanted to do spreadsheets at home, but from kids, excited by the possibility of writing and playing cool arcade games in their own living rooms.

“The key thing was price for us,” says Ste Pickford, who together with his brother John, started out writing computer games in the earlier eighties.

“We spent a full year with this massive jar in the house labelled ‘Spectrum savings fund’. We put every spare bit of pocket money we had into it. £175 was way more than what mum and dad would have been able to afford on a Christmas present, but we wanted it all year.

“We must have saved up £80, and our parents were just about able to put the rest in. So the price was everything. It was the only way a family like ours could have owned a computer.”

There was also a fundamental difference in philosophy – while his competitors were still producing hardware with serious computing interests in mind, Sinclair was targeting the mass market; he saw the wider consumer appeal of computers, not just as serious workhorses for home accounting, but as gadgets that could be as ubiquitous and easy to use as the TV or pocket calculator.

“Computers were quite scary at the time,” remembers Philip Oliver, co-founder of Blitz Games Studios and one half of the Oliver twins, who created the legendary Dizzy series of games on the Spectrum.

“Some people were actually worried they were going to take over the world, thanks to movies like WarGames, other people worried that computers were going to steal their jobs. What the Spectrum did was gave a friendly, fairly simple image to computing. There was nothing frightening about the Spectrum!”

Ironically, there were strengths too in the technical limitations of the hardware. The Commodore 64 was more powerful and capable – its multi-chip architecture had been designed to move coloured sprites around the screen as quickly as possible – but it also did some of the work for the coders.

“When we started at the development studio Binary Designs we noticed that, actually, a lot of the C64 programmers weren’t that good,” says Pickford, now running digital publisher Zee-3, responsible for the Bafta award-nominated puzzler Magnetic Billiards.

“We realised that machines like the C64 had a lot of clever hardware; they did a lot of the hard things – like scrolling and sprites – for you. You could get most of the way to having a game running without knowing that much.

“The Spectrum had nothing. Architecturally, it was a really simple machine for a programmer – it was just a load of Ram and a processor; and the screen itself was just dealt with as part of the ram. You had to do everything the hard way, but it meant that if you managed to get a sprite moving around on the screen, you’d done a lot of really clever stuff.

“Years later, when that generation of coders grew up, Britain was really punching above its weight in the PlayStation era, when you had the start of games like Grand Theft Auto. The Spectrum bred a generation of really smart programmers.”

This blank slate design also meant that developers weren’t steered toward creating conversions of established arcade titles – they were free to improvise. Hence, the surreal Python-esque platform puzzlers Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy, created by eccentric lone coder Matthew Smith; hence, the beautiful and challenging arcade adventure, Head over Heels, by Jon Ritman who introduced the concept of controlling two different characters.

There were also bizarre experiments like Mel Croucher’s Deus Ex Machina, an adventure about life emerging from a computer, which came with an audio tape featuring Ian Dury and Doctor Who star Jon Pertwee.

The ZX Spectrum held its own in the format wars until the late eighties, and developers were pushing the tech to the very end.

For example, the initial inability to properly colour sprites without bleeding out into surrounding space (thanks to the way the Spectrum handled colours as 8×8 pixel cells), was defeated in games like Trap Door and Dizzy through the use of thick character outlines and large sprites.

But the machine didn’t prosper outside of the UK, and with the arrival of 16bit behemoths like the Commodore Amiga, as well as specialist consoles like the Nintendo NES and Sega Master System, Sinclair found itself unable to compete.

But for those thrilling years between 1982 and 1988, against other machines designed to push objects around screens, the Spectrum symbolised and amplified a peculiarly British approach to technology; it was about lone mavericks, doing their own thing, figuring stuff out, inventing their own conventions.

Certainly, the Commodore 64 produced plenty of genius coders, artists and game musicians, but the Spectrum arguably fostered something else – something that the Raspberry Pi initiative is now attempting to re-capture – an approach to computer hardware that is more about exploiting the machine, testing the architecture, probing at the metal and silicon innards, rather than trusting to high-level languages and application-programmer interfaces.

Writing for the ZX Spectrum was more about invention than design. It was a blank slate on to which a large section of the British game development industry drew itself.

Computing

Programming

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It is, of course, an impossible task to root through the many hundreds of ZX Spectrum titles to deliver a definitive Top Five. But we’ve had a bash anyway. I’ve concentrated on titles that appeared originally on Spectrum, so no arcade conversions (goodbye R-Type) and no translations from Apple II, BBC or Vic-20 titles (so long Elite). For some reason, I also neglected Daley Thompson’s Decathlon. And Chuckie Egg. And Chaos.

For a more comprehensive round-up, you should head immediately to the Your Sinclair Official Top 100 Spectrum Games of All Time, which was persuasively and entertainingly written by Stuart Campbell. He put the motorbike-riding-through-forest thriller Deathchase at number one.

Jet Set Willy (1984)

This early flip-screen platforming adventure featured surreal locations and bizarre enemies, burning itself onto the minds of impressionable gamers who had, until this point, possibly only controlled spaceships and racing cars. Creator Matthew Smith became a bedroom coding enigma when he disappeared in the mid-eighties, spending several years in a Dutch commune before returning to the UK.

Lords of Midnight (1984)

This prototype role-playing game allowed players to explore a vast kingdom as they gathered armies to fight the evil witchking, Doomdark. Designer Mike Singleton managed to provide the look and feel of a 3D world by creating thousands of still images, which could be viewed from multiple perspectives.

Knight Lore (1984)

Created by prolific UK developer Ultimate: Play The Game, this was the first title to use the studio’s filmation engine, resulting in lush isometric visuals. It was created by Tim and Chris Stamper, who would go on to found Rare – still one of the biggest development studios in the world, and most recently responsible for Kinect Sports.

Tau Ceti (1985)

Pete Cooke’s revolutionary 3D space adventure pitted the player against a malfunctioning mainframe computer and its robot killers on the abandoned colony world of Tau Ceti III. Respected for its deep varied gameplay as well as visual innovations such as a functioning day/night cycle.

Skool Daze (1985)

One of the first games to actually attempt a replication of real-life experience, Skool Daze had players rampaging around a school building, scrawling on blackboards and trying to locate the combination for the headmaster’s safe. Later spawning a superior sequel, Back to Skool, it was like an interactive Grange Hill – with the added bonus of letting you change all the teacher and pupil names. Rude word hilarity ensued.

Games

Computing

Software

Programming

Keith Stuart

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To play against me and the rest of the CNET UK gang, just look for the username ‘cnetuk’ and challenge us to a game. Be warned: we did a couple of modules of finger-painting in primary school, so as the picture above shows, we’re pretty quick on the draw.

The game, developed by OMGPop, sees you take turns with friends to guess a word from their phone-based doodling. Once you’ve guessed the word, choose your own easy, medium or difficult word and doodle your picture. Then send it to your friend for them to guess the word.

It’s a simple pleasure — falling squarely into the it’s-so-simple-why-didn’t-I-think-of-that-dammit-I-could-be-a-millionaire-by-now category — but it’s the little details that make it so addictive.

For example, in between turns your drawing process is played back so you can watch your opponent trying to guess what it is, allowing you to see at which point they grasped the full breadth of your artistic vision — or you can watch them floundering in confusion at your bizarre and puzzling pictograms.

Today’s update allows you to undo your last step, saving you from having to employ the eraser or scrap your whole drawing. And when you’ve created a masterpiece, you can share it to Facebook and Twitter or save it for posterity.

You can now also chat to your opponents in between rounds, to award kudos for their artistic endeavours or mock them mercilessly for their ham-fisted doodlings.

Draw Something is available now for the iPhone, iPad, and Android phones and tablets.

Would you like to join the CNET team in a round of drawing things on Draw Something? Just sign up for a game against the username ‘cnetuk’ — happy sketching! We’ll share the best pictures — and the worst — on our Facebook page.

Download Draw Something for Android or iPhone

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Available to download now

Episode 25 of Access TV is available to download from the Store right now, and this week is headlined by EA Sports’ rebooted FIFA Street. Watch as the team talk you through the new trick system, explain the awesome world tour mode, and hardly trip over and look stupid at all.

The show also jets out to Poland to catch up with Bloober Team, the studio behind PlayStation Vita’s playful puzzler A-Men, and hits the slopes in Serbia to talk SSX with pro-boarder Scott Penman.

There’s also a regular round-up of what on the PSN Store, and a news round-up including a look at the announcement of Assassin’s Creed 3 and a chat with the guys behind the new XCOM game.

Access TV is available on the PlayStation Store every Wednesday, free to download for all UK PSN users.

To sign up for future Access events or to hang out and chat with other members of the Access community, then visit us on Facebook at facebook.com/PlaystationAccess, or follow us on Twitter at twitter.com/PSAccess. 

This site is updated several times every day with the very latest Free PS3 news and hardware reviews.

Sony has sold 1.2 million PS Vitas worldwide, a promising start for the gigantic handheld console. It’s just over two months since the Vita went on sale in Japan, and a week since us Brits were able to pop to our local games emporium and pick one up.

There’s no knowing how much we contributed to the total sales, as Sony didn’t break down the figures by region. But it did acknowledge the European and US launches helped the Vita “exceed expectations”. It’s still early days, but maybe smart phones haven’t killed the handheld console after all.

The Vita touched down in the UK last week, with Asda undercutting everyone else, charging just £197 for the Wi-Fi-only version. A 21-year-old from Uxbridge was the first Brit to pick one up. It went on sale in Japan just before Christmas, and shifted 321,400 units in the first two days — though that lagged somewhat behind the Nintendo 3DS, which managed 370,000 in its first 48 hours.

Is 1 million units (and counting) enough? Game studios are famously conservative, requiring what they see as guaranteed sales of millions of copies before they’ll commit to the huge expense of producing a game. With 60 million PS3s sold, that’s a massive user base to sell games to.

Let’s say the Vita sells 5 million this year — that’s great, but it’s still a pretty niche system. So we’re likely to see a lot of ports of games already created for the home consoles. And if you’ve bought a £40 game for your PS3, are you going to buy the same one for £30 on your Vita?

The Vita’s Japanese launch was marred with some faulty hardware, with some consoles having stains on the screens, and others refusing to boot. The UK launch was relatively glitch-free, though there is a slight software issue. And the Facebook app was pulled, but that was Facebook’s fault, according to Sony.

The Vita packs a 5-inch touchscreen, but there’s a touch panel on the back, which adds even more controls. That’s along with the screen, two thumb sticks, buttons and a d-pad. It is pretty large compared to phones though, and games are a lot more expensive. The battery isn’t brilliant either. You can also stream PlayStation 3 games to the Vita without switching on the TV, though they won’t be the full versions.

Did you buy a PS Vita? What do you make of it? Do you think it’ll sell enough to make it a vibrant games platform? Let me know in the comments below, or on our Facebook page.

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Download now from PlayStation Store

We’re never happy about the weather in Britain are we? Just as the sun perks up a bit, we’re neglecting the shades and flip-flops in favour of loads of snow thanks to EA’s trick-spinning reboot, SSX; which is Game of the Week on Access TV episode 23. As well as a mountain’s worth of gameplay footage, there’s also an interview with SSX guru Todd Batty, who delves into the all-new online modes.

Elsewhere the show is stuffed full of PS Vita-fuelled excitement, with exclusive coverage from the console’s midnight launch from both London and Birmingham. There are interviews with some truly dedicated fans, who in some instances queued for upwards of 72 hours to be first in line when the clock struck midnight on February 22nd.

And that’s without even mentioning the final leg of the Access Vita Rooms tour from London, which features performances from rap aces Wiley and Tinchy Strider as well as PS Vita impressions from you lovely lot.

To top it all off there’s the usual flick through the week’s biggest news and PlayStation Store content, including a first look at Spec Ops: The Line and a run through PS Vita’s free-to-play augmented reality titles. Happy viewing!

Access TV is available on the PlayStation Store every Wednesday, free to download for all UK PSN users.

To sign up for future Access events or to hang out and chat with other members of the Access community, then visit us on Facebook at facebook.com/PlaystationAccess, or follow us on Twitter at twitter.com/PSAccess. 

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It is, of course, the feel-good story of the year so far. Veteran developer Tim Schafer didn’t think he’d get any publisher support to create an old skool point-and-click adventure, even though fans had been requesting one for years. So he set up a Kickstarter fund and asked for $400,000 within 32 days. What actually happened was this – he hit the target within a couple of hours, and the total is now over a million dollars.

To celebrate this immense story of talent, philanthropy and the power of crowd-sourcing, today’s friday question is a simple one: which developer would YOU fund to create a new game, and what title would you want to see?

I’ve put three of my own below:Matthew Smith – MegaTreeBack in the eighties, Matthew Smith programmed two of the most important games of the era: Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy. However, his third project, the mysterious MegaTree, was cancelled by his publisher and later, Smith went AWOL, moving to a commune in Holland to fix bicycles. He’s back in the UK now, but I believe the source code to MegaTree was auctioned off in aid of charity eight years ago. Still, $1m in funding might spur the idiosyncratic bedroom coding genius back into action.

Yu Suzuki – Shenmue 3Oh, okay, I know we’d need a lot more than $1m dollars, but what the heck – this would be the crowd-sourcing motherlode. Sega spent an absolute fortune on the first two Shenmue titles and as astonishing as this seamless action adventure series was, it never got close to recouping the investment. There is, at least, a large community of fans who want to see a third and final title in the proposed trilogy, so that’s a start. And perhaps Suzuki could scale down his ambition a little. Maybe form a ragtag indie studio and make it with the Unity3D engine?

Ninja Theory – Enslaved 2This beautiful post-apocalyptic shooter tanked when it was released in 2010, despite co-direction from Andy Serkis, a script from Alex Garland and a haunting score by Nitin Sawhney. Some suggested that the enemies lacked variety and that the action was muted. I just thought it was a beautifully imagined world, with appealing characters and smart dialogue. I guess there’s always a chance Ninja Theory will do another, but a Kickstarter fund of a million dollars or so won’t do any harm.

Over to you…

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Are we reaching the tipping point at which the downloading of games begins to dominate the industry? And will it be more about old games than new ones? Some interesting events this week suggest we’re close

During a conference call to investors and analysts on Wednesday, Electronic Arts revealed some rather impressive – and telling – figures. Apparently, the company’s revenue from digital games exceeded $1bn in 2011.

Its controversial download service Origin generated $100m through the year, its social and casual games performed well, and its online multiplayer release – Star Wars: the Old Republic – managed to attracted 1.7 million paid subscribers barely a month after its launch.

Of course, the publisher’s boxed big-hitters – Fifa 12 and Battlefield 3 – did good business too, selling 10m units each, but the thrust of the company’s attempts to claw back into profit are coming from the digital sector.

Meanwhile, fellow publishing veteran THQ is reported to be in dire straights, cutting staff and facing a Nasdaq delisting.

Although the company was one of the first publishers to recognise the rise of mobile gaming with its THQ Wireless arm, it has not succeeded in transferring major brands such as Saints Row and Darksiders to mobile and social platforms. In fact, it sold its Wireless division in February 2011, while a lacklustre Facebook version of Saints Row did little to take on the likes of Mafia Wars at its own game.

THQ’s problems no doubt run deeper than failing to exploit the rise of digital downloading, but it seems as though the future of traditional publishers is going to rest on how well they’re able to explore the online, mobile and downloadable possibilities of their brands.

Physical media, though beloved of hardcore gamers, is generally suffering. The high street chain Game is facing its own major difficulties – financing problems have led to rumours that its stores would be unable to stock the week’s new releases; though the company has since confirmed that the likes of Metal Gear Solid HD and Final Fantasy XIII-2 will be on sale this weekend, and that it has secured new deals with lenders.

Meawhile, digital newcomers are flourishing. Freemium publisher BigPoint announced on Tuesday that it now has 250 million users of its free-to-play online games; on the same day, web gaming company Spil Games, revealed that it now boasted 170 million unique users, with many of its customers spending up to £38 a month on virtual goods. A recent report by Juniper Research claimed that in-game purchasers would be spending $4.8 billion by 2016.

“My basic argument for digital generally is that, first, it allows the publisher to reach a massive audience at no marginal cost, by going free,” says games industry analyst Nicholas Lovell.

“Secondly, it allows you to let the people who love what you do to spend lots of money – for example, the Bigpoint users spending €1,000 on a drone.”.

Unsurprisingly then, smaller developers are increasingly adopting digital-only agendas. On Monday, the UK game developer trade body, Tiga, released a report showing the impact of digital downloads on British studios.

Apparently, 102 British games companies are currently developing browser and download-based casual online PC games. These studios released more than 600 titles in 2011 and employed nearly 700 development staff, contributing £70m to the UK’s GDP.

“We are fast approaching the tipping point,” says Tiga managing director Dr Richard Wilson. “UK retail sales figures for video games have been in decline for several years now, but all the indications are that digital consumption of games is increasing.

“Tiga research from 2011 shows that 50% of UK developers regard retail as the largest monetisation mechanic for their games. However, 47% say their games are also sold via online stores such as XBLA and the Apple App Store. 13% generate money from subscriptions, 26% via micro transactions and 29% use free-to-play mechanics.

“Additionally, almost half of UK developers are now self-publishing online or on mobile. The shift towards digital distribution is enabling developers to become self-publishers and reduce their dependency on publishers. It should also allow more innovation and choice for consumers.”

But more telling than new titles and fresh ideas are the possibilities for older brands in the digital space.

Earlier this week, the veteran MMORPG Everquest became a free-to-play title after 15 years as a subscription service. Long past its incredible peak as a massively multiplayer phenomenon, profit can still be made via a freemium model that will make the game more attractive to casual users.

Meanwhile, publishers such as Ubisoft, Konami and Capcom are busy filling the online stores of the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and Wii consoles with spruced up versions of classic titles, as well as fresh additions to nostalgic lines such as Rayman.

While the ability to sell DLC and create free-to-play titles is enticing, it might be that the real driver into a digital-first business is the ability to exploit that old internet chestnut, the long tail.

In packaged-goods retail, games have a very short shelf life and need to make all their money in the space of a couple of weeks. After that, titles get shoved into the back catalogue. Years ago, there was another opportunity to make money here via special cheaper editions of old games – the PlayStation Platinum range, for example.

However, that market has been all but destroyed for publishers by the rise of the pre-owned sector. Go into any branch of HMV or Game and you’ll usually only see a chart display of new titles, and then a huge area dedicated to second-hand titles.

That’s because retailers make 100% of the revenue from these second purchases – there’s little benefit for them in providing shelf space to first-hand copies of older titles.

In the digital space, though, publishers can keep flogging old titles indefinitely. When the title is out of the charts, it can be kept alive with DLC; after this, there are price reductions on digitally distributed versions of the original games. And then, on titles like Everquest and Lord of the Rings Online, there’s the option to convert to a freemium model.

For new titles, the digital arena is more complex. As Lovell points out: “Chris Anderson’s original definition of the long tail is that in a world of infinite space, everyone can get on the shelf. But the App Store shows that just being on the shelf is no guarantee of sales.

“The App Store has hundreds of thousands of apps, and the long tail players are not making much money.” Indeed, research released last autumn by developer Owen Goss showed that 50% of game apps on the App Store make less than $3,000 (£1,900).

And over in the social and casual gaming spaces, it’s not old brands that are being regurgitated, it’s old ideas. Zynga’s release of Dream Heights on iOS has prompted a furious response from bloggers who feel it is effectively a rip off of NimbleBit’s hugely successful iphone game Tiny Tower, merely adding a social layer.

The cloning of games has become a huge issue in the sector, but with little in the way of legal recourse, it is running amok.

And really, the digital gaming princples behind continually re-inventing old brands for new business models and continually “borrowing” other studios’ successful ideas are the same.

It’s all about mining proven concepts for all they’re worth in a marketplace that allows swift development, easy distribution and lightening fast iteration based on rapid customer feedback.

Those who imagine that the tipping point from physical media to digital distribution will herald a new era of fresh innovative gaming experiences could well be hugely mistaken.

We may be about to enter a new epoch in which the digital sector transmogrifies into one giant thirft store – your favourite game ideas served back to you in different forms on different platforms by different publishers, forever.

Games

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