Today, the Moscow-based developer has nearly 60 employees spanning three continents. Cut the Rope is available on multiple platforms, and they told Polygon that it recently passed the 300 million download mark. By the end of the year, Zeptolab plans on releasing four new games, beginning with a new Cut the Rope-related game in April. Polygon spoke to the brothers Voinov at GDC 2013 about the studio's past, future and how they've coped with a magnitude of success they didn't foresee by staying focused. "Our plan is to release four games this year," Semyon said. "Some of them are related to Cut the Rope, and some of them are completely different. We wanted to keep this healthy balance, because Cut the Rope is our baby, and we want it to grow, obviously. But also we want to do new things...

We stopped by Valve's CES booth this morning and spoke with Greg Coomer, product designer at Valve and one of the earliest champions of Steam's recently launched Big Picture mode, which reformats the PC gaming platform with a living room-appropriate 10-foot UI. With its part of the software problem solved, Valve is now meeting with hardware developers and has brought "multiple" hardware prototypes to the show, including the Xi3 system unveiled yesterday. "We're surprised that there aren't more PC manufacturers who are addressing the combination of form factor, meaning size, and things like noise and industrial design that seems appropriate for the living room," Coomer told Polygon. "And I think that maybe there's a situation in the industry where that got tried a number of times in the...

The comparison was always inevitable. PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale brings together key characters from PlayStation franchises and pits them against each other in a battle arena. Nintendo's Super Smash Bros. series does the same thing but with Nintendo characters. Superbot, the developers behind All-Stars, is well aware of these comparisons. According to the game's director, Omar Kendall, this is exactly where the similarities end. Kendall, who has worked on fighting games like the UFC series, says the similarities between the two games are superficial and the differences lie in the core gameplay mechanics. "The biggest difference is Super Smash Bros. is a game about knocking people off a level, and we don't really have that," Kendall tells Polygon. "At the heart of PlayStation...

Alain Corre, executive director at Ubisoft, spent some time a few weeks back checking out the Tokyo Game Show, an event he personally attends each year. He's a lot more enthusiastic about the Japanese market than you'd think. "Just walking inside the show floor, I felt that the game market is changing very rapidly," Corre told Famitsu magazine in an interview published this week. "The fact that the population of people playing games is going up in this environment is something we can be really happy about. I also saw fans lining up to play Assassin's Creed III and I was really excited to see what they thought of the game. It's the biggest title in Ubisoft history, and I'm looking forward to it being a big success in Japan as well." The history of Western console games in Japan is not...