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   There have been lots of dev / biz news over the last week, some of them pretty big stories, so I'll try to summarize most of the ones we haven't already covered. Kicking off this round-up is Perpetual Entertainment - who, according to a report on Gamasutra, has laid off 35 of its employees and delayed its ancient MMORPG Gods and Heroes: Rome Rising. The layoffs are said to be "a cost-saving measure to accomodate this increase in development time", however some of the 35 devs that left were actually working on Perpetual's other upcoming MMO, Star Trek Online.

   Perpetual also issued a public statement on the Gods and Heroes forums, saying that they are "within a month of being content complete on Gods & Heroes", meaning that several devs didn't have much else to do (so they had to go). The MMO's release was pushed back to summer 2007.

   Next we turn our attention to Red 5, the online development studio founded by key members from Blizzard's World of Warcraft team in 2005 (story). A few days ago they announced that they have secured a $18.5 million investment from Benchmark Capital and Sierra Ventures, which should come in handy for their MMO efforts. Red 5 Studios is currently working on a MMO game financed and distributed globally by Webzen, and powered by the impressive Offset Engine.

   In other investment news, Realtime Worlds secured $31 million in funding recently, from venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates. Realtime Worlds was founded by CEO and Creative Director David Jones, who created the Grand Theft Auto and Lemmings games franchises, and the studio plans to release its first title, Crackdown, on Xbox 360 next year. Realtime is also currently working on All Points Bulletin, a MMO game to be published on PC and Xbox 360 by Webzen.

   Another major deal was also revealed today on GI.biz, as German / Dutch investment group Catalis made a $8.5 million offer for Kuju Entertainment's parent company, Kuju Plc. Kuju's board of directors has unanimously recommended the offer to shareholders. The shareholders are pondering.

   And while they're pondering, we move on to Ritual Entertainment. Yes, Ritual as in "OMG where are all our devs going?!". Fortunately, nobody else is leaving (for now), but they appointed Ken Harward as the new studio director. Ken previously worked on Counter-Strike: Condition Zero and SiN Episodes: Emergence, and is currently over-excited with joy.

   All right, what's next... We also mentioned Empire Interactive in the title, so here goes: yesterday they announced that they are releasing three of their games through Steam. The first three Empire titles made available for digital distribution are FlatOut 2, Vegas Tycoon, and Ghost Master.

   And finally, a few days ago Sentinel Studios officially came to be. This is a new independent development studio in North Carolina, headed by industry veterans Paul Potera (formerly of Ubisoft) and Marc Racine (former co-owner of Vicious Cycle Software). Sentinel currently employs only 5 people, so they obviously can't be up to much. Nor did they reveal any solid game development plans, so we'll them staff up for now.

   Oh and speaking of Ubisoft (this is the last one, I swear), they sent us a note yesterday to let us know that they launched UBI|art| at www.ubi-art.com. What' that? Well, go see, I'm sure you'll figure it out!