realnetworks posts

It has not been the best of times over at internet media company RealNetworks. The company, best known for its RealPlayer media software, has been cutting a number of jobs lately. This week Gamasutra reports that the company, citing unnamed sources, has decided to shutter its first party PC casual games division as a result of a new round of layoffs announced on Tuesday.

The story says that RealNetworks will continue to run its game portal web site with third party games and will also continue to develop games for Facebook. Officially RealNetworks said on Tuesday that 85 people would be laid off in this latest round. That includes about a quarter of the company's executives.

Update: A RealNetworks rep sent over a note to Big Download stating that Gamasutra's original report (which they have since revised) had inaccurate statements. According to the RealNetworks rep it is still developing casual games at their Eindhoven, The Netherlands offices under the GameHouse brand.

During an interview at E3, Valve's Doug Lombardi revealed that the company hopes to add a movie making function to Left 4 Dead at some point after the launch of the core game. He loosely described features that would allow players to record, edit, play back, and possibly share their virtual near-death experiences. Sadly, that functionality probably will not be available for a while; we didn't see it in our own hands-on experience with the game.

Lombardi also mentioned that Valve went to Microsoft, Yahoo!, and RealNetworks when it was first conceptualizing Steam, but was told by all that such a service would only exist "10, 15 years in the future." Of course, now Microsoft operates the separate and struggling Games for Windows Live service, which shares some features with Steam.

And yes, we know the above screenshot features the old, now-replaced Left 4 Dead characters. But how about a little nostalgia?

Well that was certainly a case of excellent timing. The same day as the NPD Group announced that the Realarcade.com casual game web site was the second biggest subscription based gaming web site, its parent company RealNetworks announced it was planning to spin off their game business into its own separate company. RealNetworks may even launch an IPO of the new game company to sell up to 20 percent of its shares.

According to the press release, RealNetwork's gaming division generated $108.5 million in revenues in 2007, an increase of 26 percent. In the last quarter (January-March 2008) it had $31.8 million in revenue, up 33 percent from the same period a year ago. While plans for the spin-off company are still early RealNetworks plans to file the appropriate papers with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission by the end of 2008.