Eyebrow Interactive's indie puzzle-platformer Closure took home the Grand Prize at this year's Indie Games Challenge at the D.I.C.E. Summit in Las Vegas, with other winners including Symphony, The Bridge, and Nitronic Rush. Alongside the Grand Prize, the three-man team behind Closure will take also home a cash prize of $100,000. Indie Game Challenge organizers said the game stood out thanks to its stylish presentation and unique light and shadow mechanics, which allow players to ...

[Gamasutra highlights choice quotes from game industry figures such as Electronic Arts' Peter Moore, Big Huge Games' Colin Campbell, David Jaffe, and many others.] In our original and exclusive interviews, analysis, and feature pieces over the past week, a wide variety of developers, publishers, and indies shared their thoughts on the PS Vita, creating cinematic games, bringing real-world brands into games, and more. This Week's Noteworthy Game Industry Quotes "I keep all of my focus ...

[Gamasutra rounds up the week's biggest reports on South Korea's booming online games market from This Is Game, the leading English-language site about the country's game industry.] In our latest round-up of news from South Korea's online games space, we look at a proposed new bill that would prohibit minors from playing online games for more than four hours a day, or from playing game betas. MEST proposes "Cooling Off System" bill, game tax The ...

[In this weekly column, Gamasutra rounds up the most popular paid and free iPad gaming applications on the App Store as of today, with Ragdoll Blaster 3, Eufloria HD and Battlefield 3: Aftershock currently ranking among the platform's top downloads.] This week's top paid titles are: 1. Where's My Water? ($0.99) 2. Ragdoll Blaster 3 HD ($2.99) 3. Kingdom Rush ($0.99) 4. Angry Birds Seasons HD ($1.99) 5. Words With Friends HD ($0.99) 6. Angry ...

Newsbrief: Imangi Studios' endless running game for iOS Temple Run has been downloaded more than 36 million times since launching in August, and five months after it switched to a free-to-play model. The Washington D.C.-based independent studio reached that milestone less than a month after it crossed 20 million downloads, and a week after Apple removed the unauthorized copy cat game Temple Jump (and a number of other alleged clones) from the App Store. Imangi ...

Newsbrief: Today, Namco Bandai revealed that it has partnered with movie studio Paramount Pictures to co-publish the upcoming Star Trek game from The Darkness II developer Digital Extremes. The game, first announced at E3 2011, is a co-op action title that will tie into the latest J.J. Abrams Star Trek film, which will debut May of next year. Namco Bandai says the game will feature its own standalone story penned by the film's writers in ...

[Every week, IndieGames.com: The Weblog co-editor-in-chief Tim W. will be summing up some of the top free-to-download and commercial indie games from the last seven days on his sister 'state of indie' weblog.] This week on "Best Of Indie Games," we take a look at some of the top independent PC Flash/downloadable titles released over this last week. The goodies in this edition include a time-travelling 2D platformer, a new release from Recettear publisher Carpe ...

In the latest postings over the last seven days, Gamasutra's jobs board plays host to roles in every major discipline, including opportunities at Double Fine Productions, Amazon, Beachhead, and others. Each position posted by employers will appear on the main Gamasutra job board, and appear in the site's daily and weekly newsletters, reaching our readers directly. It will also be cross-posted for free across Gamasutra's network of submarket sites, which includes content sites focused on ...

Through its investigation of last November's Steam's security hack, Valve has discovered that intruders may have gained access to a backup copy of Steam transaction information ranging from 2004 to 2008. The data contained in this file included user names, email addresses, encrypted billing addresses and encrypted credit card information, though Steam account passwords were not part of this database. In an email sent to the press and Steam users, Valve head Gabe Newell reassured ...

Adam Adamowicz, a key concept artist behind some of Bethesda Softworks' most prominent titles, passed away this week. Adamowicz is remembered most as the man responsible for defining the visual style of Bethesda's Fallout 3. His art became one of the driving pillars behind the game's post-apocalyptic aesthetic, influencing everything from character models, environment designs, and beyond. He also worked on numerous other Bethesda releases, including the recently debuted Elder Scrolls title Skyrim. Shortly before ...