Ubisoft has bought the rights to Atari’s Driver franchise for around $24 million.
The deal will be completed during Ubisoft’s second fiscal quarter, which ends September 30, 2006, and includes the acquisition of developer Reflections Interactive and its staff, along with most of the studio’s assets.
Yves Guillemot, The big cheese at Ubisoft, said:
"We are thrilled [...]

The US retailer Target has pulled the plug on UMD movies in all of their stores due to poor sales.
Recently, Reuters reported that Wal-mart also considered pulling all UMDs from their store shelves. From ProGamer:
An unnamed movie executive says that UMD situation is "awful," and that "[UMD movie] sales are near zilch." The studio exec [...]

Passthepress reports that reliable sources have indicated that the Flagship Studios network has been hacked and the source code for the upcoming Hellgate: London has been stolen.
It appears the hacker, a chinese individual, is now trying to sell the source code from his personal website.
Bill Roper, Head of Flagship Studios, Would not confirm or [...]

Sony’s John Hight, Director of External Production at SCEA Santa Monica, Discusses with Gamasutra how their digital distribution platform will be beneficial for both publishers and developers alike.
"Certainly being able to sell globally on-line makes it easier to reach international and remote markets. On the business side, it also lowers our cost of sales [...]

Crytek, The team behind the upcoming Crysis game for PC are looking to hire themselves some PS3 console programmers.
So far, Crytek have only announced Crysis for the PC (expected early 2007), but this job posting suggests that they’re looking to appeal to third party developers by bringing CryEngine2 to the PS3.

Online Entertainment retailer Shopto.net are offering pre-orders for the Nintendo Wii for £149.99 (about $275) and have the launch date chalked up for October 15th.
The £150.00 price point was expected in the UK, Though Nintendo boss Yoshihiro Mori has already stated that the Wii would cost no more than $250 when launched in the US.
Shopto [...]

Analysts from DFC Intelligence have published their prediction that Sony could end up at the bottom of the pile, behind Microsoft and Nintendo, in the next-gen wars.
They claim the high price and lack of quality titles as the main reason the system won’t appeal to as broad an audience. From the report:
“It is our [...]

In a recent interview with Gamedaily, SEGA of America’s Scott Steinberg confirmed Sonic The Hedgehog and Full Auto 2: Battlelines will be launch titles on the Playstation 3. He also mentioned Virtua Fighter 5 will be on the PS3 by March 2007.
It’s quite an interesting interview as Scott discusses much of SEGA’s strategy in [...]

PS3 Land are reporting that Track7Games have cancelled development on the PS3 version of their upcoming multi-platform title Theseis.
Track7Games blames the problem on "the exceptionally high cost of developing for PS3".
Theseis is still planned to appear on the Xbox 360 and the PC sometime later this year.
Vicky Valanos, Managing Director of Track7Games went [...]

Microsoft’s Peter Moore talks to Business Week about Xbox 360, Xbox Live!, E3, and the competiton in the next-gen console wars. From the Article:
Blu-ray? "You can over burden the features [of a console] and therefore offer features that the consumer is not particularly interested in. Case in point, look at the PSX in [...]