A game development team was hard at work when the police suddenly busted in and put them all on handcuffs. How’d that happen?

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EA and BioWare are supporting the Dragon Age franchise with ambitious downloadable content plans and even an expansion. On top of that, we may have just discovered the release date for the upcoming sequel. Retail copies of Dragon Age: Origins Awakening arrived at the 1UP offices today, and included in the box was a placard with an intriguing hint (above). The iconic bloody dragon accompanies the date, February 1, 2011.

As far as release dates go, this one is being dropped much sooner than most, as well as in an unconventional manner. But February 1 falls on a Tuesday next year, the traditional game release day, and an EA conference call already revealed the Dragon Age sequel would be hitting between January and March of 2011. While we’ll have to wait for word from EA and BioWare to call it official, this fits comfortably in that range, and so it seems likely as the date for the sequel. Mark your calendars, Dragon Age fans.

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Epic Games and Valve Software have announced a mutually beneficial partnership to bring Steamworks to Unreal Engine 3. Valve’s full suite of tools will now be offered to Unreal Engine licensees completely free of charge.

Steamworks allows developers to utilize any of the features of Valve’s digital distribution platform in their own products, including Steam Cloud save importing, Achievements, user stat tracking, and DRM authentication. It’s normally available for free, but its integration into the latest version of the Unreal Engine should encourage even more developers to utilize Steamworks.

“Valve has created a world-wide phenomenon with Steam and we’re excited to be able to have the Steamworks suite of services available to Unreal Engine 3 licensees so they can take full advantage of all that Steam has to offer,” explained Epic’s Mark Rein, adding, “With Valve offering these services free of charge, the idea of providing the Steamworks SDK to all Unreal Engine licensees was a no-brainer.”

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The Wii doesn’t often fall off its perch atop the console crowd, and when it does it’s worth noting. The Wii slipped below the Xbox 360 this month, though the reasons aren’t easy to identify. None of the consoles have seen price drops, so this seems more of a natural equalizing of the consoles than we’ve seen in months past. The last time the Wii slipped below another console was September of 2009, due to the PS3 price drop and launch of the Slim. The last time the 360 topped the Wii was September of 2007, during the Halo 3 launch. Now that the three are on par without any particular mitigating factors, we may see them swapping spots for a while.

Year-over-year sales were down, though the consoles saw moderate gains from January of this year. Still, all of the hardware manufacturers have reason to celebrate this month. The PlayStation 3 sales are up 30%, the 360 is on top of the console market, and Nintendo always has its trusty DS to sell like hotcakes.

February 2010 Hardware Sales

Nintendo DS — 613,200
Xbox 360 — 422,000
Wii — 397,900
PlayStation 3 — 360,100
PlayStation Portable — 133,400
PlayStation 2 — 101,900

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Following yesterday’s announcement of Rock Band 3, MTV Games and Harmonix have given the upcoming Green Day: Rock Band a June release date.

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Did you get for yourself a copy of Fable II? If yes, how much of the features did you actually understand? We’re asking you because apparently, Microsoft did a study on the game, and here they found

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What’s next for Bungie after Halo? They’ve said time and again that Halo: Reach may very well be their last project from the franchise, but that doesn’t mean it’s the end of the world for them. As

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