Several former employees of MicroProse have announced the formation of Thriller Publishing, a company with a focus on military and espionage-themed games.

Thriller Publishing's senior management is led by industry veterans J.W. Stealey, Fred Schmidt and Jim Bull, all of whom served together at MicroProse. The new company will set up shop in Austin, Texas.

"We have over 100 years of game publishing expertise among our senior management alone, always working with first-rate development talent. At Thriller, these studios and their products will be handled directly by us, top management," said Thriller CEO Fred Schmidt. "They get the full benefit of all that experience to maximize the likelihood for mutual success.”

MicroProse was a legendary PC development house founded by Sid Meier and perhaps best known for spawning the Civilization and X-COM series of games. It spanned 19 years of operation before it was acquired and later dismantled by publisher Infogrames.

The release states that Thriller has contracted several New York Times best-selling authors to create and develop new properties with the potential for sequels and sustainable series, but no specific authors were named.

Online retail giant Amazon.com is looking to incorporate video game downloads into its digital distribution service, as revealed by a job posting on Gamasutra.

The posting calls for a software development engineer for a position in video game and software downloads. "The Software and Video Games Digital Technology Team ... is responsible for digital distribution of software and video game products from the Amazon website," the listing reads. At present, no official announcement of digital game distribution has been made.

A significant portion of PC gaming sales have shifted towards digital distributors such as Valve's Steam platform over traditional retail channels, as reflected in recent sales trends and analyses. Amazon currently only provides digital download service for MP3s, movies, and PC software applications.

Valve's PC digital distribution platform Steam now has over 15 million user accounts, with the company reporting a 158% growth in holiday sales over those of the last season.

In today's announcement, Valve trumpeted Steam's free community features, the upcoming release of the cooperative zombie shooter Left 4 Dead, and the recent revelation of Steamworks--Valve's free offering of its internal server tools to all PC developers.

"PC gaming is thriving, and has evolved into an era of constant connectivity," said Valve president Gabe Newell. "That connectivity gives us the ability to have a much better relationship with customers, not just for delivering our games, but across all aspects of our business--including the design, development, and support of our games."

Cyan Worlds' Myst Online: Uru Live (PC) is scheduled to be removed from GameTap's on-demand gaming service in April, according to GameTap content VP Ricardo Sanchez.

On the GameTap forums Sanchez explained that the plug was pulled for "business reasons". Myst Online: Uru Live has been operational for just under a year, having gone online via GameTap's subscription service on February 15, 2007.

Sanchez also assured fans and subscribers that GameTap's relationship with Cyan Worlds remains amiable despite Uru Live's closure. "Cyan is still a very valued partner of GameTap," he wrote. "We are on excellent terms, and we look ... Read more

Employees of the worldwide Hilton Garden line of hotels will gain a bizarre edge over the competition thanks to new training software powered by none other than Epic Games' ever-increasingly popular Unreal Engine 3. An announcement today by Hilton Hotels claims that the software is "the first interactive training game to be used in the hospitality industry that utilizes game-based technology"--not likely to be contested.

Ultimate Team Play, as the hospitality training software is called, contains numerous elements common to many commercial video games, particularly RPGs--branching dialogue trees, NPCs with unique motives and moods, numerous types of interactions with the world and characters, and rankings based on virtual performance.

Like many RPGs, Ultimate Team Play also contains a capitalized acronym describing its score system, in this case SALT, for Satisfaction and Loyalty Tracking. It is also worth noting the video game-esque adjective "Ultimate" in the title.

Players apparently even play the game as one of various classes, be they in the housekeeping, food service, engineering and maintenance, or reception fields.

"Ultimate Team Play allows our hotel team members to play their hotel specific role and show them how their various actions directly affect the guest and the hotel," said Hilton Garden senior VP Adrian Kurre.

The software is being developed by Virtual Heroes, which has created training software for such companies as the U.S. Secret Service, U.S. Special Army Command, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and Discovery Channel Canada. Said Virtual Heroes founder and CEO Jerry Heneghan, "Ultimate Team Play leverages cutting-edge games-based technology in a realistic and immersive virtual Hilton Garden Inn environment."

Shacknews has sent a request to Hilton Garden for Ultimate Team Play screenshots.

Update: The NPD Group has chimed in, attributing the low percentage of PC software sales to the growing shift towards digital distribution, which the firm does not track.

Original Story: Of the $18.85 billion the video game industry generated at North American retailers throughout 2007, only $910.7 million of that, roughly 14%, was attributed to PC games.

Data from the sales-tracking firm NPD reveals that retailers sold 267.8 million games in 2007, 36.4 million of which were PC titles. Console games brought in $6.6 billion, selling 153.9 million units total, while portable software hauled a record $2 billion in revenue with 77.5 million units sold.

Figures were also released highlighting the top ten best-selling PC games of this year, accompanying last week's list of 2007's top ten console games. The numbers, which do not take digital downloads into account, have Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft and EA Maxis' Sims franchises occupying six of the top ten spots. A complete run-down of the top PC games of 2007 follows:... Read more

Rock, Paper, Shotgun is carrying an interview with Raph Koster, the Star Wars Galaxies creative director who founded the MMO company Areae in 2006.

Westwood, Massachusetts-based developer Turbine Studios, known most recently for PC MMO The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar, announced a replacement for CEO Jeff Anderson today. Jim Crowley, former COO of mobile media company m-Qube, will take over as president and CEO of the company.

According to the announcement, Crowley had been working with Turbine on a long-term strategic plan for Shadows of Angmar for months before he officially came on board. The announcement gave no indication of former CEO Anderson's reason for leaving or his future plans.

Turbine also created the PC online titles Asheron's Call and Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach.

EVE Online developer CCP Games is expanding into North America, the company announced today. The new office is located in Stone Mountain, GA and will serve as the company's North American headquarters.

Much like the company's studio in Iceland, a former fish processing plant, the new branch will focus on massively multiplayer online games. In addition to maintaining and continually upgrading the persistent online universe of EVE Online, CCP is also developing an MMO based on White Wolf's World of Darkness property, which it began after the two companies merged in 2006.

Within the next year, CCP North America hopes to fill more than 100 design and development positions.

"CCP Games is excited to be at the epicenter of the US online gaming industry," said CCP North America president Mike Tinney. "Following the merger of CCP Games and White Wolf Publishing last year, we look forward to expanding our CCP North American team and player base over the course of this year."

Seoul-based Reloaded Studios will use German developer Crytek's CryENGINE 2 in an upcoming action-strategy MMO, the two companies announced today. The announcement makes Reloaded's project the fourth publicly announced MMO to license the CryENGINE 2, used by Crytek in its forthcoming PC shooter Crysis.

"When we saw the stunning concept visuals and exciting game design ideas they shared with us we immediately knew that what they have planned will be a true next-generation MMORPG, and become the kind of game which will set the visual and game play standards against which future MMO‘s will be judged," said Crytek director Faruk Yerli in the announcement, speaking on the collaboration with Reloaded Studios.

The project is the first title for Reloaded, as the studio formed in August, with its website going live today along with the announcement. The studio was founded with industry vets from Korean MMO-publisher Webzen along with the creators of MMORPG MU Online.

Last month, XML games announced its agreement with... Read more

Titan Quest developer Iron Lore is breaking into console territory soon, and with that shift came two recent appointments: Jeff Goodsill to president, and former EA Mythic employee Steve Marvin to design director. Read my interviews with the two, and glean tidbits on such informative industry topics as the size of Iron Lore's gaming room, what a grognard is, and how far they are in BioShock.

At the time, PC Action-RPG franchises restricted their audiences by topic or by difficulty. We believed the casual and mass-market buyers were under-served. Diablo limited its audience with its mature rating and high level of gore. Some parents would not buy a game with a flaming skull on the box cover for their kids.

LivePlanet--a media group co-founded by Hollywood stars Ben Affleck and Matt Damon and responsible for the television show Project Greenlight--today announced the formation of Virtual World Productions, a company with the sole purpose of reporting on in-game MMO events.

VWP has allocated 30 reporters alone to cover Linden Labs' virtual nightmare Second Life, with stories posted on its website Grid World News. A similar Warcraft-themed site has also been started, billing itself as "The World's Greatest News Source."

The two sites feature news, culture, and entertainment sections. Classified ads in the form of account sales fill the Azeroth World News' marketplace, virtually guaranteeing that it won't be seen on the official Blizzard portal anytime soon.

One recent story from the Second Life rag ends with a poignant couplet: "Healthy outlet or conjuring of the depraved, one thing is for certain: this is entertainment. Kill me now!" At least the reporting is accurate.

CMP Technology has canceled its PC-centric consumer event PC Game On, citing "time and planning constraints."

Announced earlier this year, the first-time event was slated to occur at the Austin Convention Center in Texas on September 8 and 9. It would have immediately followed CMP's Austin Game Developers Conference and Game Career Seminar, which runs from September 5 to 7 in the same location.

PC Game On was meant to feature new and upcoming PC games, tournaments and GDC-style conferences. Hardware manufacturer Dell and subsidiary Alienware had been tapped as sponsors. CMP has yet to determine if the event will return in the future, but says it is, "committed to learning more on how best to serve the PC game market."

Living the Dream: NetDevil's Ten Years of Independent Development is an article format interview with NetDevil President Scott Brown on GameDaily Biz, where Brown talks about "living the dream".

A four-year-old game is being voluntarily pulled from store shelves due to the discovery of a CCTV image of murdered toddler James Bulger shown in a cutscene.

Law & Order II: Double or Nothing (PC), the second game in a series of Legacy Interactive titles based on the hit TV show, has been withdrawn from sale by the company after Denise Fergus--the mother of James Bulger--called for stores to take action. A spokesman for Ms. Fergus told the BBC that she did not want her son's death to be used as a "form of entertainment."

The photo--which shows Bulger being lead away from a... Read more

A new service allows gamers to quickly trade currencies from a wide variety of popular MMO games. The marketplace--dubbed Gamer2Gamer--is the work of company Sparter, which bills the service as a way to protect both gamers and developers by supporting safe trade and recognizing intellectual property.

Although the site strictly supports direct sales of currency rather than auctions, Gamer2Gamer resembles a video game-themed Ebay. Reliability ratings accompany each seller's listing, notifying buyers of potentially dishonest dealers. Purchases can be made using credit cards or Paypal... Read more

New at FiringSquad this morning is this Q&A with Mike Wallis of Colony Studios. Originally hoping to create a Battlestar Galactica game, the company is now working on its own sci-fi themed MMO.