Harvey Smith's new book Big Jack is Dead is now available on Amazon.com, and it draws quite a bit of inspiration from his own life.

CCP Games today revealed the line-up of speakers that will be a part of the "Make EVE Real" track at its (sold-out) annual fan celebration EVE Fanfest from April 25-27. Dr. Richard Obousy (President and Co-Founder of Icarus Interstellar) and Chris Lewicki (President of Planetary Resources) will join Michael Laine (President of LiftPort Group) in sharing their thoughts on how current science fiction may soon become a reality.

Bethesda VP Pete Hines thinks that the debate about the acceptability of day-one DLC  comes from a misunderstanding from consumers on how the development process works. Speaking to OXM, Hines said that with most big budget games development of new content would stop a long time before the title’s actual release.

"I think there is [a misunderstanding], at least among a certain segment of the gaming audience," he said.

inXile Entertainment's isometric role-playing game managed to raise $4.1 million at the close of its Kickstarter campaign this weekend, making it the most well-funded video game in Kickstarter's history. The Kickstarter, which ended last night, generated a total of $4,188,927 from 74,405 backers. That is 455 percent more than the $900,000 that the developer asked for at the start.

Dead Shark Triplepunch has been named the winning team at Make Something Unreal Live 2013, Epic Games announced. The team has won a variety of hardware prizes in addition to the main award of a commercial Unreal Engine 4 license. The team from Belkinge Institute of Technology in Sweden won with their game Epigenesis, which was developed with Epic’s Unreal Development Kit (UDK), the free version of the Unreal Engine 3.

This weekend the Kickstarter for Richard Garriott's latest game, Shroud of the Avatar: Lost Virtues, raking in $1.9 million from backers. Adding that number with the money it raised from PayPal pledges on the Shroud of the Avatar Website, Portalarium sailed past the $2 million dollar mark. Over twenty thousand people backed the game on Kickstarter.

The Entertainment Software Association of Canada (ESAC) is urging members of the Canadian games industry to take part in a survey to gauge the size, composition and economic impact on the country's economy. The survey has been available for awhile, but today's public service announcement extends it for an extra week. Results of the survey will be published within a few months of its competition on April 15.

With 40 more hours until Shroud of the Avatar: Forgotten Virtues Kickstarter ends, Richard Garriott and Portalarium are making things interesting by adding some new Reward tiers for those who have not yet contributed and for those who may find some enticement in upgrading to get some spiffy new baubles in-game.

Sega has confirmed with Kotaku that it plans to close its Brisbane-based development studio later this year. Sega said that it would close Sega Studios Australia later this year, but gave no particular reason for shutting down the operation.

The publisher says it will shut down Sega Studios Australia later this year; no rationale provided.

According to data from the 2012 Game Developer Salary Survey (which was published in the March issue of Game Developer Magazine) the number of women working in the games industry is growing, but salary gap between the sexes is still apparent.

According to the data women only had higher salaries in one of seven categories: programming and engineering, but programming and engineering also has the smallest number of women working in those professions at four percent. Women were also hard to find in the audio sector of the industry at around four percent.

Digital Eel has turned to Kickstarter to fund the follow-up title to its wonderful rogue-like space adventure games Strange Adventures and Weird Worlds. The new game is called Sea of Stars and features the same kind of lunch-break-length space adventures complete with randomly generated worlds, space exploration, turn-based space combat and the kind of quirky humor that the previous titles are known for.

Having hit its latest stretch goal of $3.5 million for Torment: Tides of Numenera, developer inXile has officially brought Obsidian Entertainment's Chris Avellone on board to help with the game. Why is this such a milestone for fans of this role-playing game? Because while at Interplay's Black Isle Studios, Chris Avellone worked on the original AD&D title, Planescape: Torment.

The Kickstarter page for the project offers the following message to fans as the Kickstarter has just a few days left until it is all done:

DS game funding on Kickstarter is a rarity, but Island Officials is giving it a shot after seeing the success of Jason Rohrer's Diamond Trust of London. The indie studio is seeking a pretty specific funding goal of $85,412 to fund the development of a DS game about a robot and his seven friends who enjoy having adventures and solving pattern block puzzles.

Disney is closing LucasArts, the game development studio that has been a part of the LucasFilms family for decades. Disney said that its shift from an internal development model to a licensing model means that it needs to minimize its risks for its "broader portfolio" of games.

Organizers of this year's Game Developer Conference that took place last week in San Francisco say that the event saw a record breaking 23,000 attendees. This number includes game developers, businessmen, marketers, staff, and of course journalists covering the event.

While GDC may be over, the accusations continue to fly over the International Game Developers Association's GDC party which was brought to light last week in this report. Now the co-presenter of the party, YetiZen, is throwing a few elbows at the IGDA and the press.

The new CEO of Crytek USA David Adams says that he wants to buy the Darksiders franchise from THQ. Writing on Twitter, Adams said the IP should stay with its makers. Adams co-founded Darksiders makers Vigil Games.

During the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco last week Google's YouTube announced a new API for game developers that allows them to allow users to directly stream video from their games without using an external streaming service such as Twitch.TV or Ustream. YouTube streaming is already in some games - like Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 - but the goal of the new API is to bring in-game streaming solutions tied to YouTube to far more developers.

Facebook was at the Game Developers Conference today in San Francisco throwing around a lot of facts and figures to show that it is still a popular and relevant gaming platform. The company said that over 250 million users are still playing Facebook games each month, accounting for around 20 percent of the social network's daily traffic. Facebook also claims that over 100 game makers generated over $1 million (each) or more last year. Collectively game developers earned over $2 billion in payouts.

We totally flaked yesterday and forgot to mention this interesting Kickstarter promising a game from the folks behind the popular Sega series, Ecco the Dolphin. The game is called The Big Blue and it is being built by Ed Annunziata and former members of the Ecco the Dolphin development team including programmer Laszlo Szenttornyai and composer Spencer Nilsen.

Starbreeze Studios and publisher Sony Online Entertainment do not want to be associated with a video promoting a contest seeking "women" to star in a proposed movie based on the popular Payday game. The CEO of Starbreeze went out of his way to explain to Games Industry International this morning that the video featuring an office visit to the Overkill Software is not representative of the company's views. Some have called out the video featuring Top Model Sweden contestants Angner Sophie and Nina Strauss sexist in tone for its use of sexual language and jokes.

Project Awakened recently suffered a major setback when the Kickstarter campaign asking for $500,000 in crowd-funding missed the mark by $161,502. Being so close to the goal and garnering the support of 6,287 backers,

Phosphor Games has decided that it will try again - but this time it will do it without the help of Kickstarter. Right now those backers who want to see this open-ended super powered action game world come alive can fund it again at www.projectawakened.com.

On this week's show we go live on Google + for a lengthy (video) discussion on the "RPG Camp" Kickstarter controversy, the results of the FTC's latest Secret Shopper Survey to test ratings enforcement at retail, Sega's decision to stop pulling Shining Force videos from YouTube and a whole lot more. Download Episode 46 now: SuperPAC Episode 46 (1 hour, 34 minutes) 240.0 MB.

While GREE made a lot of developers upset when it discontinued the OpenFeint platform in December of last year, the co-founder of the social mobile platform will soon have something to replace it. Late last year GREE shut down the OpenFeint platform, feeling that Apple's GameCenter was dominating the space. Much to the chagrin of developers using that platform, they were not given enough time to migrate their game data to another platform and lost a lot of the user data they were storing in the OpenFeint cloud.

Oculus VR announced today that those who purchase the Oculus Rift development kit will get a free Oculus-ready version of Epic Games' Unreal Development Kit (UDK) as well. The makers of the "virtual reality headset that allows users to step into the game" worked closely with Epic Games to make sure that the UDK works very well with the headset so that those developers that want to create games for it will have an easier time doing so.

Javier Mairena of The Game Kitchen dropped us a note to let us know that the first episode of its horror adventure game series The Last Door has been revamped to make it a little friendlier to those with hearing impairments and dyslexia. Javier says that his studio has added dyslexic-friendly fonts in the game as well as close captions for those with hearing impairments.

The first episode in the episodic horror adventure series launched on March 11 on www.thelastdoor.com. It is titled "The Letter."

The newest Kickstarter stretch goal for Torment: Tides of Numenera won't add any new bells and whistles into the game, but it will add an important person into the creative mix. inXile Entertainment's upcoming RPG will secure the services of Planescape Torment designer Chris Avellone if the Kickstarter surpass the $3.5 million mark. With 14 days to go, the Kickstarter would need to generate roughly $700,00 more to hit that mark. That seems like a lot until you consider that this game generated $900,000 in just seven hours after it first launched.

Richard Garriott posted a lengthy explanation of a PC Gamer interview that was published yesterday in which he said that "most game designers really just suck," and that he had not met anyone who he thought came close to being as good a game designer as he was.

Tax relief for the video games industry in the United Kingdom has been delayed because the European Commission was not able to approve the Cultural Test provisions of the plan, according to this GamesIndustry International report. The Cultural Test requires those applying for tax credits to promote the culture of the UK in various ways.

UK games industry trade groups UKIE and TIGA expressed their disappointment in the news, but were optimistic that the government would continue to be committed to tax breaks for games developers.

In a recent PC Gamer interview Ultima series creator Richard Garriott said that he has never met anyone who is as good a game designer as he is and that the only one that comes close is his old friend and colleague Chris Roberts. Garriott acknowledges that there are proficient game designers in the industry but none that have the skillset that would put them in the category of being "great."