Each year, Game Developer looks at the powerful lineup of new products and new releases of important tools, from game engines to books, and selects the top five products in each category. Front Line Awards finalists represent the most innovative, user-friendly, and useful products from behind the scenes of the world’s best video games. For this year, Autodesk 3ds Max won Game Developer Award for Best Art Tool [...]

In 2008, over 30 types of China’s online games were exported to overseas markets, which covered over 20 countries and regions such as North America, Europe, Japan and Southeast Asia. The total value of online gaming exports reached 71.78 million USD, an increase of 30.5 percent year-on-year. Revenue from overseas markets has become a new profit growth point for China’s online gaming enterprises, according to the Chinese Ministry of Culture [...]

Autodesk technology played a part in the creation of many top holiday games that hit shelves in 2008, including Fallout 3, Far Cry 2, Rock Band 2, and more [...]

Going offline: 18,000 words thesis to hand in tomorrow, so I better focus! # Autodesk Brings Historic Designs to Life in New Discovery Channel Series “Doing DaVinci” – http://tinyurl.com/cl8pnz # 2,000 words to go: “eye of the tiger, it’s the cream of the fight” # Just posted: “Autodesk’s Support to the User Experience Design Community [...]

In this funny (and actually poignant) 3-minute talk, social strategist Renny Gleeson breaks down our always-on social world — where the experience we’re having right now is less interesting than what we’ll tweet about it later [...]

The Pudong New Area government in Shanghai expects to attract more than 200 animation and cartoon enterprises into Zhangjiang High-tech Park within five to 10 years, the district government said recently. The new facility will also provide a creative hub for animation and comics artists and investors to tap the vast potential of the Chinese domestic market. ‘The combination of animation and online game development can help to form integrated industries that can optimize resources,’ said Yuan Liqiang, general manager of the Shanghai Zhangjiang Creative Industry Development Co Ltd…

According to the China Internet Network Information Center, the population of Internet users in China by last June is over 123 million — 63% of those people have broadband access. More that 20 million chinese play online games, and the e-commerce revenue have grown 50% in relation to last year numbers. Estimates of the revenue of the online gaming industry points to a total of 1.3 billion dollars by 2009, an annual growth of 35%, according to IDC. Such growth ended pushing the numbers of other sectors up: online games brought 17.3 billion Yuan (2.14 billion dollars) to Telecommunication industry, 7.1 billion Yuan (887.5 million dollars) to the Information Technology industry, and 30 million Yuan (3.7 million dollars) to the Publishing industry [...]