Games Toaster

Directory: Producers

Games Toaster’s Irish Computer Games Directory 

PHASE ONE: Developers, Publishers, and Middleware Providers
After vastly expanding our news archive’s category tags, the following is the first phase of Games Toaster’s Irish Computer Games Directory.

Part one coverers producers (developers, publishers, and middleware providers etc). This first phase, like what is to come, will be dynamic; but also contains historic entrees.

The directory comes after many years of looking at the idea of a database or similar. It is planned to expand from producers to every area of computer games in Ireland.

NOTE: While every reasonable effort has been made to make sure all information is accuracy, we can not guarantee such. Please send error reports to errors@gamestoaster.com. Other information is welcome at directory@gamestoaster.com. As always, we can not take responsible for other websites. Research sources: Company Registration Office, Dublin; Google;  companies’ websites; GameDevelopers.ie.

NOTE: Old content being picked up as new

Google News and other sites have picked up some of our old news as new.

UPDATE: This looks like it is happening again for different reasons – on request, Google News changed the RSS news feed they use to obtain our news. The new feed is located at http://www.gamestoaster.com/games_toaster/rss.xml

In order to make our news archive more accessible, Games Toaster is currently expanding the list of categories tags on our news archive; for every new category created a new page is automatically created for the category, apparently because of this Google News and other sites have found our archived news items and listed them as current news – we apologies for any inconvenience caused.

The beast that is Google News picked up at least one new category “e3_2005” at /games_toaster/e3_2005/, this looks to be causing the most redirects.

The most notable other site which has linked to our archive is the Inquirer, who kindly picked up our news article on ‘Streaming music over Live may breach laws’. This article was however published last May; we list the date of publication at the end of articles. We would like to extend our apologies for any inconvenience caused to the Inquirer, and their readers.

Before proceeding with more tags we will publish highly visible banners on this sites side panels which should be seen on any page of this site.

This clarification has been added to all recently created tags, and should appear at the top of the relevant pages.

Irish games companies in the news

The Sunday Business Post reports the flock of some Irish games companies to California this week, for the Game Developers Conference 2006. A second article covers the Galway-based Nephin Games raising $1 million in funding.

‘Game on for Irish tech firms’ centres on Demonware, as well as Havok, Torc Interactive, Upstart Games, and Selatra, the article also lists off BitRabbit, Gmedia, Eirplay Games, Meedja, and PopCap.

To make itself seen among the big players, Demonware is hiring a San Francisco cable car on wheels to transport people around San Jose. The company hired a fleet of Hummer limousines for last year’s GDC, but it has been prudent with its cash.

It has raised just over €1million from private investors, Enterprise Ireland and the Dublin Seed Capital Fund since it was founded in 2003. It is now ‘‘looking at various options’’ to fund its growth after a ‘‘fantastic year’’ last year, according to Collins.

BitRabbit's Yukiko now in Ireland, the UK

At the beginning of the year, Games Toaster reported that ‘Yukiko’, the first game by Dublin based mobile developer BitRabbit, was finished and released, just not in Ireland.

For about a month now, Yukiko has been available for Series 60 mobile phones vie jamster.ie, or jamster.co.uk. For the slightly hidden option of 'single purchase', jamster.ie gave us a price of 4 euro, while the UK site quoted £4.50 (UKP), both not including operator charges.

In addition, the two Jamster sites, which also sell the 'Crazy Frog' ring tone, offered the option of saving "up to 80% with the Jamster! club", however when the Office of the Director of Consumer Affairs joint the club recently their experience, like many consumers, wasn’t the best.

The Yukiko is also available in the Carphone Warehouse preinstalled on a 128Mb Multimedia Card (MMC) for £19.95, with two other games (by other developers), Marble Revolution, and Sky Force.

Corrections

Our article ‘Mobile games news roundup’ on February 22 2005 contained screenshots of BitRabbit’s ‘Yukiko’ that we resized, while resizing the screenshots we inadvertently adversely affected the quality of the images.

We apologies for this, as we understand that it could possible do harm to the reputation of the company as it may have reflected badly on their work. We accept that this was an error on our part. The  images in question are now corrected, and we will take steps to avoid any recurrences.