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Yet another game development studio has come out of the 2009 shut down of Sweden based developer GRIN. Gamasutra reports that this week a new team called Whiteout, also based in Sweden, has formally announced its presence.

Made up of former GRIN members, the new Whiteout team is working on several ideas for digital download-based game. However it also has a larger project that it is making based on Crytek's CryEngine 3 technology. According to the story a playable prototype of the unnamed game has been made by Whiteout. Other than that no other info on the game has been announced. Following the shutdown of GRIN, former members has launched other game development teams like Outbreak Studios and Might&Delight.

Clearly, the 73% plunge in profits last year has Capcom feeling a little timid. As a result, the company will stop commissioning games created by Western developers. Capcom President Haruhiro Tsujimoto is quoted by a newspaper as saying, "As a group, the new titles where development was led from abroad didn't do so well."

Capcom's current strategy will focus more on Japanese created games, but may still outsource sequels of existing franchises to Western developers. Last year's major games included Bionic Commando, developed by the now closed GRIN Studios, which sold 700,000 copies instead of the projected 1.5 million. Despite numerous delays to help separate it from the competition, Airtight's high flying shooter Dark Void sold 520,000 copies, falling far short of the 2 million copies Capcom was hoping for.

[via Shacknews]

While the major revival of Bionic Commando wasn't a big financial success, the downloadable remake of the original game as Bionic Commando Rearmed was both a critical and sales success. Now the team responsible for that game has formed their own development studio in Sweden, Might&Delight (or Might and Delight; they seem to go by both monikers).

The team was formerly part of GRIN which shut down operations just after the release of Bionic Commando. While the team isn't talking about their first project under their new organization they seem to hint it will be some kind of downloadable release with a retro bend. Hmmm . . .sounds familiar.

Game developers have lot of third party game graphics engines to choose from, from Epic's Unreal Engine to Valve's Source Engine to id's id Tech 5 and others. Now a newly revealed company called BitSquid has announced that their BitSquid Tech graphics engine will soon be made available to PC game developers for licening.

The Sweden-based company is made up of members of Fatshark, the developers of the upcoming Western-themed multiplayer shooter Lead and Gold, along with members of the now defunct developer GRIN. The company has plans to release a public demo of their engine in the next couple of weeks. The demo, titled StoneGiant, supports DirectX 11 graphics and will allow gamers to benchmark their gaming PCs. You can check out a video of the demo after the jump:

Download HD StoneGiant DirectX 11 Benchmark Video (183 MB)

Last year, Sweden-based game developer GRIN closed their doors despite releasing three major games in the space of a few months in 2009. Rumors at the time had GRIN developing some kind of title from Square Enix. Now a person has uploaded a video to YouTube that supposedly shows footage from a tech demo of that title.

The video is supposed to show off "Fortress" which the YouTube posted claims was to be a sequel to Final Fantasy XII. The game, which was developed for the PC and other platform, isn't dead yet, according to the poster. Square Enix is reportedly working on the game at one of their internal studios but it has yet to be officially announced.

As August comes to a close and we enter what is traditionally the busiest time of the year for PC gaming, we are looking back on the past 31 days to pick out what we believe were the top 10 news stories of the month for PC gaming. It was a time of new game announcements (thanks in part to Gamescom) but a lot of the news came from Blizzard's own event BlizzCon.

News stories we picked for the top 10 included the sad news of layoffs and even complete shutdowns of game developers, the release of a new version of a PC gaming client and word that a two year old console game might be released for the PC in an "AO" rated version. We also threw in a couple of extra news stories that, while big, didn't quite make the top 10 list.

Click on the image above to continue reading The Top 10 PC Game News Stories For August 2009

"When one door closes, a window sometimes opens." That old saying could be used to describe the formation of Outbreak Studios, a newly launched game development team made up mostly of old members of GRIN, the Stockholm-based team that officially shut their doors today.

About 25 folks comprise the Outbreak team including Peter Bjorklund, the lead programmer for Terminator Salvation. He previously worked at Digital Illusions where he helped to create the engine that was used for, among other games, Battlefield 2. There's no word on what projects they will be coming up with but the company's web site did say they want to develop titles for Games For Windows Live, among other platforms. That makes it clear that Outbreak won't be just a console dev house.

Even with the release of three major games in the space of a few months this year, the Stockholm-based game developer GRIN could not stave off extinction. Today the company's official web site has now admitted it will close its doors after shutting down two of its satellite development teams earlier this year.

In its farewell message, GRIN blamed unarmed publishers it worked with for its demise saying, " . . . many publishers have been delaying their payments, causing an unbearable cashflow situation." It doesn't look like one of those publishers is Capcom; the company's two founders Bo and Ulf Andersson thanked the publisher of their Bionic Commando game "for being honest, a rare gift" in their farewell message. GRIN also had two other games come out this year; Wanted: Weapons of Fate (from Universal's interactive division) and Terminator Salvation (from Evolved Games).

GRIN released a couple of smaller PC games in the early part of this decade; the futuristic racer Ballistics and the post apocalyptic racer Bandits. Later Ubisoft hired GRIN to create the two PC ports for the Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter series before they were signed to multiple console-PC products. In their farewell message, GRIN's founder makes mention of "our unreleased masterpiece that we weren't allowed to finish" indicating they were indeed working on a new game project before their shut down.

It's been a couple of months since rumors started to fly about major issues with game developer GRIN. Despite releasing three games in the space of just a few months earlier this year (Wanted: Weapons of Fate, Bionic Commando and Terminator Salvation) the company reportedly shut down two of its satellite dev studios late in May.

Now Gamasutra is reporting through unnamed sources that GRIN's central office in Stockholm, Sweden could be going under as well. The reports claims that employees of the office were told not to show up for work today and it's possible that the company is preparing to go into bankruptcy or shut down completely. This news comes on the heels of this morning's announcement of Lead and Gold: Gangs of the Wild West. Developed by Stockholm-based Fatshark, the company has GRIN as a stakeholder and used GRIN's engine as the basis for the game.

The folks at Techland are about to get some competition for their Call of Juarez Wild West themed shooters. Today a new development studio called Fatshark announced plans to release Lead and Gold: Gangs of the Wild West. The third person multiplayer-oriented shooter is aiming to give players "a chance to relive the thrills of a gunfight in classic western settings."

Fatshark was founded in 2008 and will use GRIN's Diesel Engine (used for the recent title Bionic Commando) for the game. A release date was not announced but the game is expected to be released via digital download for the PC and other platforms.