Crispy Gamer News

The game that NCsoft hopes will be be its next big hit in North America, Aion: Tower of Eternity, has seen more than 170,000 concurrent users in its closed beta in Korea. Obviously the game will do very good there but how it will do in the west is debatable at this point. Aion is scheduled to launch in Korea within the year and in 2009 in places like China, North America, Europe and Japan.

NCsoft calls the response in Korea “incredibly exciting” and notes that its audience in North America and Europe is rapidly growing. The company has aggressive plans for Aion in the west as it prepares to launch the game in multiple regions in 2009. We’ll see how that all pans out later this year, I guess, but it’s hard to gauge how well an Eastern themed MMO will do here given the failings of previous games that have attempted to crack the lucrative North American and European markets.

According to research data from Think Services employment in the video game industry is up 12 percent from just over a year ago. Polling of companies in the United States, the Game Developer Research project found that 44,400 people are currently employed in the game industry - up from 39,700 in 2007. Canadian companies also saw an increase in staffing and number of studios, with total employees up around 17 percent — to 9,500 from 8,100.

In total, the North American game industry increased in size 13 percent, from 47,800 to 53,900 staffers. The numbers also reveal that Canada is becoming an important hot spot for the industry thanks to companies like EA, Ubisoft and many others.

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It’s official: those of you that have been holding out on buying an Xbox 360 because of the price can now stop being so cheap. You can now buy the low-end model Xbox 360 Arcade for $199, the regular version for $299 and the top of the line Elite system for $399.

These low prices go into effect on September 5th, so don’t go bum rushing your local Gamestop just yet. Obviously this is part of Microsoft’s plans for the holiday shopping season and a way to take back some of the market share taken by Nintendo’s Wii and Sony’s PS3. After all, being number one or two is better than being the third man out.

These price cuts follow similar cuts in Japan on September 1.

Sony’’s PlayStation 3 game machine has sold a total of 1.2 million in North America during the key holiday season, according to sales figures released by the company today. Some of these sales are being attributed to the system’’s ability to play Blu-ray disc, something that the Xbox 360 can”t do. On a related note, Warner Bros. Entertainment announced over the weekend that it was jumping ship to the Blu-ray format, leaving only Paramount Pictures and Universal Pictures backing the HD format.

Sony Computer Entertainment also said Monday that sales of the PlayStation Portable reached 1.4 million in North America during the Nov. 23 to Dec. 31 holiday shopping season. The PS2 also continues to prove its viability with 1.2 million in sales during the Christmas shopping season.

Finally, Sony announced that owners of the latest version of the PSP will soon be able to make phone calls via Skype starting later this month. To do so, consumers will need a microphone, special software that will be made available for download, and a Skype account.