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Australian game developer Krome Studios has launched a new website, simultaneously unveiling a new Ty the Tasmanian Tiger game currently in development.

While the studio is choosing to stay silent on more details about the game, including what platforms it will be released on, it has confirmed that it will be announcing more information about the project and the studio’s new direction next week.

Krome was once Australia’s largest independent game developer, with more than 400 members of staff across its various locations.

The studio ran into financial trouble in 2010, undergoing a series of staff cuts across all of its Australian studios, and eventually shutting down its Adelaide branch completely. At the time, the studio blamed economic factors.

The studio’s last few games, Blade Kitten and Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole, received mediocre reviews.

Stay tuned to GameSpot for more information on Krome next week.

Pro Evolution Soccer publisher Konami plans to establish a European studio for Tokyo-based PES Productions. The London studio will focus on PES projects for “high-end consoles and PCs,” Konami said in a press release.

The new London-based satellite office will “adopt and recreate local football culture that will ensure the long-running series is kept fresh and exciting,” according to Konami. The Japanese firm will be recruiting staff for the new studio at the Games Developer Conference Europe, the mid-August industry conference that precedes Gamescom in Cologne, Germany.

With the Tokyo team’s PES 2013 scheduled for release this autumn, a secondary team dedicated to “high-end consoles” might turn its attention to the next generation of games machines, given that the Wii U launches this winter, and Sony and Microsoft are expected to unveil their efforts next summer.

The football franchise will be looking to recover ground lost to rival series FIFA. Though last year’s PES 2012 performed solidly for Konami, it debuted in the UK sales chart at five, while FIFA 12 charted at number one and outdid PES’s first-week sales several times over.

Konami president Shinji Hirano talks up the new UK studio as an initiative to capture “the majesty of European football,” saying that “these are hugely exciting times for the PES series.”

A string of high-profile indie developers have sounded off on the struggles of developing games for consoles in a new feature at Ars Technica, using words like “adversarial,” “prohibitive,” and “a handicap” to describe the process.

“The edge that both Apple and Valve have going into the future is that they both genuinely care about the end-user experience and want to make it as good as possible,” Braid creator Jonathan Blow said. “Which coincidentally seems to be the place that these consoles are handicapped due to their corporate culture. Can anyone look at the current 360 or PS3 dashboards and legitimately say that those are products of an entity that deeply cares about user experience?”

Blow said the certification process for console games, in theory, is done to ensure the prosperity and health of the marketplace. But he pointed to Apple’s iTunes store as an example of a marketplace that succeeds without much of a certification process.

“But look at iOS. There is almost no certification process for iOS, so by the Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo theory, the apps should be crashing all the time, everyone should think of iOS as sucky, etc,” he said. “But in fact this is not what is happening. There is no public outcry for more testing and robustness of iOS software.”

Blow also forecasted the doom of consoles if they do not evolve and offer new experiences alongside competition from Apple and its iPad line. He said if next-generation consoles operate in the same way as they did in the current generation, they will become “functionally archaic in the marketplace.”

Also in the Ars Technica piece was a quote from Spelunky developer Derek Yu, who admitted he understood that console development was “prohibitive,” but was so enthused about bringing the game to Xbox Live Arcade that he was not deterred by the additional costs and time investment needed.

Lastly, World of Goo co-creator Ron Carmel opened up on business dealings with Microsoft, a process he described as a multifaceted challenge.

“Contract negotiations [with Microsoft Studios] are drawn out and adversarial,” he said. “I’ve heard many complaints about having to work with a producer, and their terms are the worst among all modern digital distribution channels.”

The original 2009 Borderlands was a hit. It won warm reviews, and was commercially viable at sales of over 2 million. Despite this critical and commercial success, no significant imitators have come to market, just two months before a full-blown sequel arrives in September. Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford told Gamasutra he can’t wrap his head around the fact the Borderlands formula has not been copied.

“I’m actually astonished that we’re about to launch a sequel and no one’s stole it from us,” he said. “The formula’s right there. No one’s stolen it yet. That’s weird. We’re in an industry where people do nothing but steal from each other. That’s kind of interesting, isn’t it? Not that I want anyone to steal it, or I’m challenging people to steal it.”

Pitchford said Gearbox’s approach was to avoid the competition entirely, and it was never the company’s intent to go head-to-head with the likes of Battlefield or Call of Duty. Using boxing as an analogy, Pitchford said differentiating from the industry leaders allowed Borderlands to have success.

“Why let our brains get beat in and put so much energy, when we’re not even sure we can beat the best boxer? We can create new sports, or we can win some other sport,” he said. “If you’re the only ones that do something that people find as valuable? You don’t have to worry about competition. Like, Borderlands has zero competition. It doesn’t have to worry about that at all.”

Lastly, Pitchford recalled the marketing push for the original Borderlands. He said it was challenging to wrestle with communicating what he felt made the game great, while also not spilling design details and opening the gates for copycats.

“When talking about Borderlands 1, it was really confusing, because on one hand we gotta scream from the highest mountain to get attention because it’s a new IP. On the other hand, it’s like, “S***, we don’t want to tell people our secret because then they’re all gonna copy it because it’s so good,” he said.

Development recently wrapped on Borderlands 2, with Gearbox now working on post-launch support for the game, including the Mechromancer class. The game is due out for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC on September 18. A recent game guide writer’s playthrough of the title took 58 hours, with Gearbox calling the game a “hobby.” For more on Borderlands 2, check out GameSpot’s latest preview.

While several game developers and publishers can hardly wait for the next generation of consoles to come, FIFA Soccer 13’s executive producer is just fine with the current crop. David Rutter spoke with CVG about the franchise’s future and whether he felt constrained by the unusually long lifespan of home systems.

“For the FIFA team, we haven’t got to a point where anything we’ve wanted to include in the game hasn’t been possible,” Rutter said. “In the past, when we’ve decided not to include something it has not been because of technological limitations.” He said the first thing many fans would want his EA Canada team to do with the greater power of the coming generation would be to make the crowds in FIFA’s stadiums look better, but that is not very high on his list of priorities.

Earlier in the interview, Rutter went over several of the changes to have come to the series throughout the current console generation, including a new defensive system and shouting at referees with Kinect. FIFA Soccer 12 received largely strong reviews from critics. He said he was excited about the Wii U’s potential, though no entries in the FIFA franchise have been confirmed for the console.