With the Game Developers Conference coming up soon, many have announced their plans for the event. First up is Macrovision, who sends word that its Trymedia Games Division will be participating in three sponsored panels to cover game business and technology topics. The sessions will take place on Wednesday March 22nd and will be open to all attendees. Details of the panels can be found after the jump.

Dutch developer Woedend! Games (W!G) will be present at the event to present their first game title and introduce the studio to potential publishers. No details of their project is known at the moment, but the company has made it known that they are focused on making “triple A” quality game titles for a mass market audience. W!G currently has a number of projects in the pipeline, with the first to be unveiled at GDC.

Today’s last GDC announcement comes from Lifemode Interactive, who announced that it’ll be launching its facial animation software Lifestudio:Head 2.7 and Xbox 360 support at the event. The company will be set up at booth 548, letting attendees get information and demo the multi-platform SDK for realistic facial animation.
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BioWare today announced the opening of a new studio in Austin, Texas. The company’s second studio, and the first to be located outside Canada, BioWare Austin has begun work on a yet-unannounced MMORPG, marking the debut of the company in the MMOG space.

The Austin studio has seen the hiring of a couple of new developers: joining the Austin team as lead designer is James Ohlen, who previous credits include work on Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, NeverWinter Nights and the Baldur’s Gate series; MMO veterans Richard Vogel and Gordon Walton, both of whom have worked at Sony Online Entertainment, among other companies.

There are currently job openings at both BioWare Austin and Edmonton; the developer is looking for new programmers, designers, artists, animators, world builders and writers. BioWare will be present at GDC at the San Jose Convention Centre in California, March 20 through 24, to recruit fresh blood.

A post on the official Galactic Civilizations II website talks about the exclusion of copy-protection systems in the game, stating that the developer is not inviting piracy. In fact, the post (logically) states that piracy can’t be avoided, but has to be reduced, and that the developer’s weapon to fight piracy is by offering legit players “convenient, frequent, free updates.”

The post goes on to talk about Starforce, the most hated copy-protection system in the planet. Apparently, a member of the company posted a link to a torrent site which was offering the full game for free download. It seems that the company was pissed that Stardock didn’t include their copy-protection software in Galactic Civilizations II, which, as it turns out, has been selling rather well. A related post discloses that the company has shipped more units of GalCiv II in the first 10 days than the total sales of the first GalCiv in its lifetime.

Good to see some developers still have their heads on their shoulders!

“Why do games suck so much” is a topic that has been going around since the dawn of time. Many developers have spoken out on the rising cost of development, disinterest in original games by publishers, and so on. But what exactly is it that makes the studios push out such crap? According to Salon writer James Wagner Au, it’s the press previews.

I found it at an E3 cocktail party in Beverly Hills, shortly after I’d begun introducing myself not as a journalist but as a writer with the virtual world Second Life-not a game per se, but close enough, evidently, for folks on the business end of the industry to lower their shields. The topic was the gaming press, and on that subject, the opinion of a top exec from a major publisher was decidedly bottom line.

“Press previews are very important to our sales,” he casually mentioned to me over martinis, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. “Retailers don’t know anything about games. So we show them previews of our titles from the game press, and they reserve shelf space for our games on the strength of those.”

And just like that, the gaping mouth of suckage was staring me in the face. Or rather, it had always been there, but I just hadn’t noticed until then.

In his post he states that Kotaku will begin a “Preview Ho of the Month” feature starting next month that will take a look at the most “egregious, blatant promotion for unreleased games from across the gaming press.” Looking forward to that!

There have been stirrings of a God of War sequel on the PS2 recently, what with 1Up reporting that the recent issue of the Official PlayStation Magazine carries word on the supposed sequel.

Now, pictures of the said article from the magazine have popped up online, revealing God of War 2: Divine Retribution, a follow-up on the PS2. The text can’t be read because the pictures are too small, but from the screenshots it looks as if things haven’t changed much.

It is expected that Sony will unveil the game soon, or we’ll have to wait till E3 2006 for more information.

As usual, the latest Steam update has been posted, and this time it talks about the delivery service’s “Friends system” which is nearing the end of its beta phase.

Friends allows you to see when your friends are playing games, and lets users chat with each other both inside and outside of many Steam games. There are also a number of additional features we’ll be adding to it over time. Early next week, we’ll be updating Steam with a convenient way to join the Friends beta.

The update also discloses word that Valve plans on updating older Counter-Strike: Source maps and adding HDR support to them.

If you’ve been keeping tabs on Press Start, an upcoming movie that parodies classic games, you’ll be delighted to know that Daniel and Carlos Pesina, the Pesina brothers, have joined the cast of the comedy feature film. The brothers, known mostly as Johnny Cage and Raiden from the Mortal Kombat series, will be spoofing the type of roles that have made them famous.

Daniel Pesina is best known for his motion-capture work as Johnny Cage, Scorpion, Sub-Zero and Reptile from the venerable fighting series. He has also worked in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies and The Book of Swords. His brother, Carlos Pesina, also works at Midway as a motion capture artist and animator, and is best known for his performance as Raiden.

“It’s a thrill to have Daniel and Carlos onboard,” beams director Ed Glaser. “Not only are they skilled and professional, not only are they living videogame icons, but they have a terrific sense of humor about what they do. I think videogame fans are going to love seeing them in these roles. Viewers who realize that they’re watching the Real Deal will find that extra level of humor that makes their scenes just a bit funnier.”

Press Start is the story of a suburban youth in a videogame world that is recruited by an “ill-tempered” ninja and a “tough-as-nails” space soldier to save the world from a “tyrannical, but comically insecure,” sorcerer. The movie is scheduled for release sometime this year, and more information can be found on its website.

Following up on the Ubisoft “schedule leak” story, GamePro has posted word that a “senior Ubisoft spokesperson” has “categorically” denied the content of the list. It is “inaccurate and incorrect,” according to him, and therefore, the site has taken the story down.

The ninth weekly development update for Prey has been posted, discussing the Xbox 360 version of the game. Here’s a bit from the lengthy post, which also offers a screenshot from the Microsoft console version on the right.

Prey really stretches the Doom3 engine, sometimes in ways it wasn’t designed for. It aims to create a convincingly organic-looking alien world full of curves and natural shapes from an engine designed around box-shaped rooms, and features many additional shaders and special effects that take the visuals far beyond the original Doom3 engine. This extra load meant the coding team had to work hard on optimising the code, removing bottlenecks and spreading the load across the three cores at the heart of the 360 to hit our target of a constant 30fps framerate. We have also had one coder, Mick, working for the best part of 6 months using the 360 performance analysis tools to identify the slower areas of code and rewrite, or in many cases replace routines with low-level machine code to squeeze the best from the machine.

Also included in the update is a group picture of the development team.

On the Legion Arena website you’ll find a v1.0101b update for the strategy game, updating its English, French, German, Italian and Spanish CD versions. This page offers details on what’s new in the update.

A hotfix for the recently released X3: Reunion demo has been released, fixing a problem with a “File Not Found error when you try to play the demo for a second time.” An updated version of the demo with the hotfix applied is also available.