4 Don't Miss: The making of Elite Elite co-creator David Braben shares the motivation behind and genesis of the genre-defining space flight sim, which stood against industry demands for another arcade-patterned game.

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  Get a job: Crystal Dynamics seeks a Senior Environment Artist The house responsible for the Tomb Raider reboot is looking to hire an experienced environment artist to work alongside the Rise of the Tomb Raider team in its Redwood City, CA office.

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  Video: How to build a healthy eSports community around your game As part of the GDC Next 2014 Community Summit, Jason Xu (CEO of eSports management platform Battlefy) presented developers with data and strategies for encouraging competitive play in their games.

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1 A muse on Metroid II: A maze of murderscapes "I first played Metroid II: Return of Samus in the dimly lit women’s wing of a homeless shelter in Providence, Rhode Island. Nestled in my palms like a religious text is the video game machine."

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2 Joystiq and Massively shut down amid AOL downsizing The rumors are true: Venerable games media outlet Joystiq is closing up shop alongside its sister site Massively and a host of other AOL-owned websites. Many people have lost their jobs.

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1 Analysis: Hardware revisions not stopping the decline of the 3DS business Gamasutra analyst Matt Matthews shows in his new post that the 3DS business has been in steady decline: "the continued erosion of their active hardware base is a serious issue," he writes.

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  Shake-up at Sega sees up to 300 jobs cut and an office shuttered Japanese company Sega Sammy announced today that it plans to restructure the company in a way that will see roughly 300 jobs (or more) cut and Sega of America's San Francisco office shuttered.

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  Analysis: Nintendo climbs the digital hill According to Gamasutra analyst Matt Matthews, "Nintendo is finally all-in on digital sales," and he here provides a historical analysis of the company's performance in the digital download realm.

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  Catch Croteam's Talos Principle postmortem at GDC GDC officials confirm Alen Ladavec and Davor Hunski, CTO and CCO (respectively) of Croteam, are delivering a postmortem of development on their IGF award-nominated game The Talos Principle at GDC 2015.

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  How we created the video for our successful Kickstarter "The video was the thing that we feel was most important to the success of our campaign and is also the place that we see otherwise great games trip and fall down on."

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  Building the booth: A PAX South indie exhibitor postmortem "With this post I want to do a postmortem and share some behind the scenes footage on what's it like trying to wing a 'professional indie setup' during a major games convention."

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2 Lessons learned from localizing our game in 10 languages "It was so painful and tedious and boring which obviously led to mistakes and led to more time spent in QA. We could have made it more interesting, quicker and less of manual work if we knew some tricks."

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3 Kickstarter in 2014: The breakdown A detailed analysis of the Kickstarter platform in 2014 -- and a particular look at how game projects did. Full numbers inside.

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  Get an inside look at The Long Dark and This War Of Mine at GDC GDC officials highlight great GDC 2015 talks from the developers of This War Of Mine and The Long Dark about the art of making great indie games.

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2 Cook, Serve, Delicious, the final chapter: Sales, crunch, and success David Galindo returns after a year with the sixth installment of dev-log for Cook, Serve, Delicious, including Humble Bundle and Steam sales numbers, and how his free updates were created (and performed).

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  Twitch heats up: In 2014, it had 100 million unique viewers per month Developers, take note: The premier video game streaming site has hit some impressive milestones, and it's more than likely that your audience is waiting for you there.

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2 Nintendo sells 5.7 million Amiibos and plenty of games, but it's no relief While Nintendo's stock price has slid following its latest financial results, reports are pouring in about how well its games and new Amiibo toys are doing.

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  Get a job: Hangar 13 seeks a Graphics and Rendering Engineer 2K Games' newest studio, the Novato-based Hangar 13, is hiring a seasoned graphics programmer to work on researching, developing and debugging graphics tech in its Novato, CA offices.

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  Stalled Ouya just landed $10 million investment, report claims The Wall Street Journal reports that anonymous sources claim Alibaba is considering integrating the Ouya platform (and its catalog of games) into its own line of set-top boxes.

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1 How Crossy Road made $1 million from video ads After topping a million downloads and $1M in ad revenue in its first month of release, Crossy Road co-creator Andrew Sum breaks down the award-winning mobile game's unobtrusive monetization design.

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  Road to the IGF: Justin Smith's Desert Golfing Continuing our Road to the IGF series of interviews with nominees, we speak to Desert Golfing creator Justin Smith about his Nuovo Award-nominated surprise hit, an infinite and improbable existential cruise.

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21 Don't Miss: Self-promotion for game developers Industry vet Raph Koster (Ultima Online) explains in this post how self-promotion is neither dishonest nor tacky -- and explains how you should step up and take credit for your work.

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  Sleep well, come prepared, collaborate: Lessons from the Global Game Jam "This year I honestly felt like I didn't learn much about the direct process of making a game, but I learned a lot more relating to everything else that plays a supporting part in game development."

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  Nintendo turns YouTubers into partners via new affiliate program The company launched a beta version of the Nintendo Creators Program this week, and it affords developers some interesting insight into how one of the biggest names in games views YouTubers.

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  Creating a user-generated chain story: A Global Game Jam postmortem Lessons learned when one developer worked through his fears to create Escalate! -- a collaborative storytelling game where the next person to pick up the game branches its story and adds their own touch.

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