Then the Zulus had to foul it all up.

With one vote at the World Congress, a council of the world’s Civs, the Zulus had brought enough support from city states on their continent to pass an embargo on Morocco, shutting down my trade caravans with every other Civ and sending me into an apoplectic fit as my balance sheet at once dipped deep into the red.

This is the Brave New World of Civilization V. The new expansion comes out for PC on July 9. The “Brave New World” aspect focuses on how, once you either reach the Modern Era or have a few factories, you have a new option under the your social policies to set ideologies, which then results in new choices among “tenets” to underpin your new ideology.

But culture is where it’s at with Brave New World.

The artsy-fartsy expansion

One of the first experiences you’ll have with Brave New World is with Great Artists, Musicians, and Writers. These new Great Persons create Great Works that fill slots in your cities, which come from buildings and Wonders, and these pieces of art, literature, and music bring in culture and tourism (this is just a mechanic — you won’t see people from other Civs traveling to your cities). You can also send these new Great People to other Civs on tours, which ups tourism and culture. You’ll see composers such as Johann Strauss (I settled him in Marrakesh and got the Great Work “Die Fladermaus”).

This came about, explains Brave New World lead designer Ed Beach, because when it came to pursuing relationships with other Civs, he noticed something was lacking.

“Tourism fulfills the second shortcoming we saw with the existing Culture Victory: namely that you could win one without really engaging with the other players in the game,” Beach said. “Now in Brave New World, you must make sure this amazing culture you created is spread across the globe and permeates the other nations of the world. Tourism is the mechanic that enables that spread.”

I decided early on to focus on generating these new Great People, and I was surprised at how easy it was to do so (and just how much culture I was generating). Later in the game, I was pulling in 400 culture (or more) a turn. It makes pursuing a cultural victory easier, and if you’re a player who prefers plowshares to swords, it gives you more options.

“The culture victory in the Civilization series has been popular among fans; it’s a play style that many people seem to naturally embrace. And yet we’ve never before allowed players to really put their own ‘signature’ on their culture as they progress toward a victory of that type,” Beach said. “Introducing Great Works and putting them into ‘themed’ museums and Wonders allows you to create something culturally unique, in sort of a parallel to deciding which military units you were going to assemble into your armies when you went off on a conquest.”

World Congress is now in session

The United Nations doesn’t come into play until late in a game of Civilization. The World Congress, however, appears much earlier — and it can have a great influence on how your Civilization grows and the diplomatic relations you have with other world leaders, as I discovered with my diplomatic pissing match with the Zulus.

Ah, the Zulus. Our feud started modestly during the first session of the World Congress — a gathering of the world’s leaders. I proposed a resolution banning happiness from pearls, rendering the resource rather useless. Every nation but one passed it; the Zulus threw every delegate they had against that proposal. This started us down a path toward a cold war, where our relations quickly soured from Friendly to Guarded to Hostile.

But my Civ was on another continent, making open warfare a challenge. So the Zulus decided to use a new weapon against me: the World Congress. Shaka and his gang started proposing resolutions against my interests, culminating in an embargo against me. With delegates the Zulus gained from their allied City States (one per ally) and World Wonders — and my allies committing delegates to other resolutions — Shaka was able to get a trade embargo passed against my Civ. This embargo is worldwide; no Civ would accept a trade caravan from me. I countered with my own embargo proposal, and in ensuing sessions, I mustered votes against anything that would help the Zulus and sponsored resolutions that would hurt Shaka.

And I started building an invasion force as well, resulting in the world’s first arms race.

The World Congress adds new interactions to Civ V, but it doesn’t replace the United Nations — it evolves into it.

“[The World Congress] now springs into action well before the Atomic Era that you would historically associate with the United Nations,” Beach said. “But when you do reach those later stages of the game, the World Congress continues its evolution and does become the U.N. It is after this transformation that a World Leader can be elected, and that Civ wins the Diplomatic Victory.”

Trade winds

Brave New World also brings in trade caravans, special units that set up trade routes with Civs and city states. These don’t supplant trade routes; caravans also a second way to bring in cash. And as other Civs grow, the amount of gold that comes in builds up. In the modern era, I was getting significant amounts. I was able to establish new trade caravans with city states when the gosh-darned Zulus passed the trade embargo, which shut down my trade caravans with them (oddly enough, I could still trade luxury and strategic resources through the Diplomacy screen), and establish a new revenue stream.

Are cultural wins too easy now?

As I played with these news systems — and watched as piles and piles of culture accumulated — I worried that it would be too simple to pursue a cultural victory. But as my Congress feud with the Zulus shows, Brave New World comes with ways to keep you from simply winning through the arts.

Beach addressed these concerns. “We’ve been playtesting culture victory games for quite a while now to make sure we get the balance right,” he said. “During that time, we’ve had significant changes to how difficult it is to win the culture game. The biggest shift came when we finished tuning up the A.I. to really play the culture game effectively. It’s definitely a challenge now; I have no fears that it is too easy.

“In fact, in some games, when faced with a really dominant cultural A.I. such as France or Brazil [note: In my game, the Zulus crushed Brazil early], you might have to steer in another direction. It’s the equivalent of trying to win a Conquest victory when you are in the same game with Attila and Genghis.”

My final concern — and after my limited time with this preview build of Brave New World (about 10 hours), I can’t fully assess this — that the interactions between this systems, while rich, could be too complex and muddle Civ V’s existing game. But Beach is confident the resulting puzzle is one fans will enjoy.

“I don’t think any single system is very complex in Civ V. It is in the interactions between those systems where the complexity emerges, like religious pressure and science flowing along trade routes, or your tourism pushing the populace of other Civs to consider adopting your ideology,” Beach says. “It definitely takes some time playing with this expansion to get comfortable with all these interactions. But once you do, the web of interdependencies makes for a fascinating puzzle that holds one’s interest through the late game better than any earlier iteration.”

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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“Yes, we’re discontinuing Online Pass,” EA senior director of corporate communications John Reseburg confirmed to GamesBeat in an e-mail. “None of our new EA titles will include that feature.”

The modern military first-person shooter Battlefield 3 and a number of other EA games such as Madden NFL use Online Pass. You need it in order to play many of a game’s online features, including multiplayer. A code activates the Pass, which has a one-time use. You need a new code (which the publisher offers, of course, for a fee) if you’re playing the game on another console or if you bought the software used and the original owner redeemed the original. But players never embraced this feature.

“Initially launched as an effort to package a full menu of online content and services, many players didn’t respond to the format,” Reseburg said. “We’ve listened to the feedback and decided to do away with it moving forward.”

Online Pass is seen by publishers as a bulwark against the second-hand market, which retailer GameStop dominates. Publishers were worried that consumers were buying games used instead of new — especially big games with popular multiplayer modes. So the online pass became a way that publishers forced consumers to either buy a game new — or pay extra for online.

But from this point forward, you won’t need an Online Pass for any of EA’s games online.

“We’re still committed to creating content and services that enhance the game experience well beyond the day you first start playing,” Reseburg said.

EA wasn’t the only publisher using an online pass system. Activision and Ubisoft are among a handful that make use of it.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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This transmedia project — not only is Neverwinter part of the Forgotten Realms campaign setting, it’s also a book series from author R.A. Salvatore — is also coming out during an interesting time in D&D history. Neverwinter (originally scheduled to debut in 2012) is coming out while the 4th Edition of the tabletop game is winding down and the upcoming edition, dubbed “D&D Next” for now, is in playtesting.

Both Cryptic and D&D publisher Wizards of the Coast aren’t worried about this transition. Both don’t see the upcoming MMO as tied to the aging 4th Edition rules and world — even if the novels and Neverwinter core rulebooks are — nor do they fear that a future 5th Edition will make it redundant.

“[We're] not worried at all. We’re superexcited to see the next version of Dungeons & Dragons!” said Neverwinter lead designer Zeke Sparkes. “We aren’t actually based or bound by any one particular set of the rules. We are trying to make a game that is evocative of D&D as a whole, not just one version of it.

“Plus most of us are big D&D fans and can’t wait to play the new system, so that doesn’t hurt, either.”

Wizards of the Coast says it’s not the rules that matter for Neverwinter, even if some players aren’t happy about the effects the transition from one edition’s ruleset to another has on the pen-and-paper and video game versions of the franchise.

“Neverwinter is an outstanding expression of Dungeons & Dragons and which mechanics they base their game play off isn’t important,” says Dungeons & Dragons brand director Nathan Stewart. “What is important is that a fan of D&D will play the game and have a great experience true to the brand.”

When it comes to the story of Neverwinter, which expands on the events of Salvatore’s series and D&D‘s Neverwinter campaign rulebook, Sparkes maintains nailing those details is far more important than dealing with core D&D rules.

“What happens with the story, history, and setting of Forgotten Realms has a bigger impact on us,” Sparkes said. “Fortunately, our relationship with WotC is really
good, and we get to help them tell their stories moving forward as a full-fledged part of the setting.”

Both sides see “D&D Next” as a good thing for Neverwinter — while the rules may be different, the increased attention that the playtest is bringing to D&D actually helps the MMO.

“People get excited when a new edition of Dungeons & Dragons comes out,” Sparkes said. “ As a part of that world now, anything that helps Wizards of the Coast make D&D stronger is really good for us. We work with them very frequently, so we’re already planning for what they have in store for the Forgotten Realms and are super excited to be a part of it.”

Image credit: Jason Wilson/GamesBeat

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The first time I started hearing people talking with hands-free devices on their cellphones, I thought the population of local crazies in San Francisco had increased. When I started seeing Bluetooth headsets in people’s ears, I fretted about the coming of the Borg.

Enter Google Glass.

Stylish it’s not. But creepy? Sunday at my local Ikea (a scary place in its own right!), I saw someone using Google Glass in public for the first time. The slim, thirtysomething man was sitting in a children’s chair, and I assume he was looking at something that Google Glass was showing him. But I couldn’t tell. From my vantage point, he looked like he was staring off into space, looking at some undefined “middle distance” while the rest of us merely existed in the real world.

Oh, and he was ignoring his kid, too, who was begging for him to play with her.

At least he didn’t take the damned thing into the shower. (Seriously, Robert Scoble, did we really need to see your naked shoulders?)

I have no idea if Google Glass is going to be useful, or if it’s going to be a transformational piece of technology that changes how we interact with information and the world. But right now, seeing someone using it is like watching a creepshow.

And I just want out.

Tom Cheredar/VentureBeat. Original image: AMC/The Walking Dead

Robert Wonish is a director at the alliantgroup.

Considering the expensive and rapidly rising costs of the software industry, the game development cycle has become increasingly difficult to sustain. Many companies are feeling trapped by rising overhead and have been forced to outsource development to compensate. Luckily, tax incentives are available to software companies that can ensure crucial product developments remain in-house and even be the deciding factor that keeps a company’s doors open.

More often than not, software companies will discover that they qualify for the benefits of tax incentives, such as the R&D tax credit; however, many are simply unaware of its existence or assume that it doesn’t apply to them. If your company has invested time, money, and resources toward the advancement and improvement of designs and processes, then you most likely meet the requirements of the R&D tax credit.

More gaming activities may qualify than you think. In addition to designing and testing new games, software coding, hardware development, and iterative testing can make a company eligible for incentives. A gaming developer of innovative video arcade games had annual sales of $38 million and qualified for $650,000 in state and federal R&D tax credits. During the development process, the company created code for their new products to load into customized arcade devices.

If you are a game developer and the above activities sound in any way similar to what your company does on a day-to-day basis, the R&D tax credit is an available and powerful government endorsed incentive to which you are most likely entitled. If you would like to find out how you also can obtain thousands to millions of dollars in tax credits, read on.

R&D qualifications

The R&D credit is a reward for taxpayers that perform qualified research activities domestically. If you think that you have to have developed groundbreaking software platforms for Fortune 500 software companies to be conducting qualified activities as defined by the Internal Revenue Code, think again.

Game developers simply need to develop new or improved software features or functionality and go through a development process (agile, waterfall, prototyping, spiral, RAD, and so on).

If you don’t ask, you won’t receive

Firms of any size may qualify for this incentive. A smaller developer of gaming software with annual sales of $2 million developed touchscreen, video-based casino games. To develop new products, the company created innovative solutions to simulating games of chance. By utilizing custom algorithms, the company simulated real-world statistics and scenarios. Additionally, they created efficient and streamlined methods of delivering premium sound and graphics from compressed resource files. This company received over $250,000 in state and federal credits.

Sadly, it remains the case that one of the biggest roadblocks for businesses taking the R&D tax credit is self-censorship. It was recently reported in the Wall Street Journal that 19 out of 20 small and medium businesses that are eligible for tax incentives, such as the R&D tax credit, fail to take advantage. This is overwhelmingly due to self-censorship. Small and medium business owners frequently think that only Nobel Prize winners and rocket scientists should bother applying.

Happily, in the rare example of Congress getting tax policy right, the R&D tax credit is intended to support a broad range of industries and is focused on encouraging not only the new thing but also improvements and modifications to existing products and processes based on known scientific principles.

Act now

This incentive is one of the largest available to game developers, but is also one that is often overlooked. “The federal R&D credit has been in place for several decades, and it has become more generous over the years. Businesses that looked at the credit in the past and determined that they didn’t qualify may now realize significant benefits due to the credit’s broader applicability,” Mark Everson, alliantgroup Vice Chairman and former IRS Commissioner, said. “I can certainly attest to the complexity of the tax code, and the requirements for the R&D tax credit are no exception. That having been said, at almost $10 billion a year, the R&D credit is one of the most generous tax benefits established by Congress.”

With a challenging economy and costs continuing to rise, it is essential that every company avoid self-censoring and take advantage of the R&D tax credit.

While this incentive can be of extreme benefit to game developers, it is also complex, and fully identifying the proper substantiation for capturing the credit requires a deep understanding of the tax code. For this reason alliantgroup, a specialty tax firm, has developed a Software Specialization Group that includes industry experts with educational backgrounds and hands-on analytical and developmental experience.

The available federal and state R&D tax credits can offer substantial financial support to gaming developers. At over $10 billion credits awarded a year, if you did not think you qualified in the past, it pays (literally) to take a second look!

Image source: Warner Bros.

Robert Wonish, J.D., is a director in alliantgroup’s Tax Controversy Services department. Robert holds a bachelor’s in business administration in information systems and international business and a J.D. The alliantgroup is a national specialty tax service provider, working with businesses to ensure companies receive the full benefit of available federal and state tax incentives.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Ron Piovesan is the global lead for content acquisition for Mozilla

One meme that will happily be put to rest is if HTML5 can handle gaming.

The answer is a resounding “Yes”! Whether on desktop or mobile, HTML5 is now at a stage where it can support the most challenging game experiences.

Gamers are a notoriously demanding bunch. And that’s understandable. You don’t want any hiccups or stutter in gameplay when you’ve got compounds to storm, races to win, balloons to pop, and ropes to cut.

The latest proof that stuff’s getting real now is that developer Epic’s Unreal Engine 3 game engine has been ported to the web. This means it will be almost impossible to tell the difference between a native code game and a web game running on the browser. The same 3D graphics and immersive experience hard core gamers are used to can now be handily served up via a browser.

Browsers are getting better, too. The new OdinMonkey JavaScript engine shipping on upcoming versions of Firefox and has a performance boost of about 1,000 percent (yes, that is three zeros) over anything else out there. Now you’ve got JavaScript running lighting fast and providing a mind-blowing gaming experience right in the browser.

Want to see what a boost in performance can provide? Check out the future of web-based 3D gaming on the totally awesome (but goofily named … it wasn’t my idea) BannanaBread demo, an incredible 3D first-person shooter running on nothing but web technologies. And if you’re not into playing games by yourself, you can now have immersive multi-player action served up over the web via WebRTC.

But never mind the technology — let’s talk game experience. As EA’s Rich Hilleman points out in the video below, games are about magic and pushing the limits of imagination. One potential the web offers is the possibility of a single, contiguous gaming experience that carries with you wherever you go.

In a multidevice, multiplatform world, the consumer won’t accept playing their game in only one environment. As they move about their day, they’ll want to access their game, at the right state, on the device they have handy. The ubiquity of the web provides for that.

Also, by extending games to different devices and different form factors, the web helps open up gaming to the casual user, who is a great new customer for the gaming industry.

How else can the web help the gaming industry?

• Massive reach: It isn’t called the World Wide Web for nothing!
• Marketing and discoverability: Developers aren’t restricted to marketing a game in the confines of an app store. The expanse of the web and all of its inherent linkability and shareability are available so developers can reach new customers.
• Payments: People have been doing payments on the web for years. With the web, developers have the flexibility to charge what they want, and use the payment processer they want.
• Easy updates: The game is on your server. Developers can update when they want without having to bother with store approval processes.
• Easy analytics: Again, the game is on your server so you don’t have to wait for analytic reports from an app store, you get all the analytic information you need, in real time.
• Customer relationship: Distributing a game on the web means the developer has a direct relationship with the customer. Game developers don’t need to go through an app store or any other third party to manage payments or updates. You have a direct line to the customer. No one is in the middle.

But ultimately, as Chris Ye of Uken Games says in the below video, gaming is about spreading happiness. If a developer is getting the performance they need from the web (and we think they will), then HTML5 lets them spread happiness across multiple platforms without the unhappiness of needing to maintain and upgrade multiple code bases for multiple devices.

The web still has some work to do to live up to its full potential as the ultimate global game platform, but it is getting there. And realizing the benefits the web provides, the industry participation in building out a game ecosystem is closely tracking the improvements in web game performance. That’s a trend we’ll see across the game market.

Image source: Epic Games

Ron Piovesan leads business development for the Firefox Marketplace and is responsible for signing distribution deals with major content and games providers. His team has closed over 200 distribution deals and helped lead Mozilla’s first strategic equity investment. He also leads the content acquisition strategy for the new FirefoxOS phone in Brazil, in partnership with Telefonica. Prior to Mozilla, he was a marketing director with DataDirect Networks. Piovesan spent over seven years at Cisco. Piovesan lectures on marketing and social media strategies at Stanford University. He has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Carleton University in Canada; a master’s degree in media and communications from Goldsmiths College, U.K.; and an MBA from the joint program at the Columbia and UC Berkeley Haas GSB.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Sidney Fussell is a freelance writer, occasional stand-up comedian, and full-time gamer.

In preparation for the January press conference in which President Barack Obama would issue his executive orders concerning gun regulation, Vice President Joe Biden met with representatives of several games companies, many of whom make the military shooter-themed games repeatedly indicted in “debates” on causes of gun violence. Initial reaction was extremely apprehensive, the industry norm following the 1999 Columbine tragedy, which launched an entire generation of scholarship dedicated to linking video game use and violent behavior and created the recurring trope of gamers as potentially dangerous sociopaths.

The industry has long been haunted by the lazy, causal link between video games and mass murder. The defenders of the industry are acutely aware that as long as video games dominate conversations of national violence, there is no reflection on the culpability of state and corporate sponsored real violence. Instead, virtual violence became a diversionary tactic to avoid such a discussion — the perfect parent-scaring, ratings-grabbing scapegoat. But this has produced a grievous lack of introspection within the industry. Industry defenders wholesale reject any connections between games and gun violence, cutting off internal industry criticism, while, simultaneously, the developers they defend flood the market with the very image the industry is trying to condemn: the white male shooter. White men with guns are everywhere in video games, across all platforms and genres. This industry standard of dismissing its own complicity in gun-violence combines with a similar media standard of privileging white male violence – creating a dangerous, racist double standard the video game industry must confront.

Researcher and game designer Daniel Greenberg, in an Atlantic piece, says the gaming industry must include internal criticism as part of its defense against media mischaracterization: “Why don’t more people in the games industry … defend our work? So many stories that ran on TV and in the press were one-sided because they lacked … industry response. But rather than calling for a full-throated defense, many in the industry surprisingly called for further disengagement.” Given the media’s misinformed commentary driven coverage following Columbine, industry reticence is perhaps understandable but Greenberg warns disengagement will only further damage gaming’s public image: “the public is bound to view…isolationism as a tacit admission of video game culpability in real-world violence.” The industry itself needs to lead the charges for more research, not as an act of contrition, but because countering scapegoat narratives circulating in the media requires factual evidence.

Certainly internal industry criticism and defense is key in renegotiating the industry’s public image, but Greenberg, newsmedia and the nation at large continue to obscure the white male shooter. Author David Sirota discusses this in a Salon piece, asking “Is it time to profile white men?” Sirota reasons that “because most of the mass shootings in America come at the hands of white men, there would likely be political opposition to [profiling white men] because as opposed to people of color … white men … are the one group that our political system avoids demographically profiling or analytically aggregating in any real way.” Sirota’s piece continues by saying conversations on gun violence should be afforded the proper complexity by including mental health and media violence as factors, but these topics arise only to obscure the privileged status of white male violence: “The demographic at the center of it all is white guys…the one group that gets to avoid being [profiled], which means we are defaulting to a … conversation [that] treats perpetrators as deranged individuals, rather than typical and thus stereotype-justifying representations of an entire demographic.” White male violence, and only white male violence, must be explained via external reasons, never internal.

Clinical psychologist Christopher Ferguson said as much in a Forbes interview in 2011. Ferguson told Forbes: “There’s a certain type of racism in place with these killings. When shootings happen in an inner city in minority-populated schools, video games are never brought up. But when these things happen in white majority schools and in the suburbs, people start to freak out and video games are inevitably blamed.” Video games serve as prime scapegoats because so many white men play them and they fit a narrative that centers discussions of white male violence on external causes.

It’s a narrative this industry both encourages and benefits from. White male violence is omnipresent in the industry across genres and platforms, and assertions such as Greenberg’s fail to address industry complicity in this double standard. The next time you stand in any retail outlet selling video games, count how many box covers are variations of a white man holding a gun.  Count how many games, regardless of story or design, center on a white man rewarded for violence. The first person shooter genre is especially notable here for consistently topping year end worldwide sales charts, moving millions of copies and saturating consumers with images of the white male shooter.

This image is key because even moreso than television or movies, everything in a videogame is intentional. Games are created from the ground up by (overwhelmingly white and male) publishers, engineers, illustrators, marketers, programmers and designers. The omnipresence of the white man with a gun is not incidental, it is purposeful. The industry purposely adopted this cultural meme, benefiting from the norms rationalizing white male violence, using it to increase their games’ sales and social acceptability.

None of this is to say the gaming industry is either causing or condoning gun violence. Instead, it is to say that it benefits from a racist cultural norm that itself obscures the potential causes of gun violence. Greenberg is right to call for transparency, research, and internal criticism from the industry, but an unraced, ungendered, nonstructural examination will be ineffective in uncovering either real or virtual linkages to violence. Certainly, the current media climate isn’t conducive to industry introspection, but video games are in the unique position of reversing the timbre of the “national conversation” on gun violence by being the first entertainment entity to both acknowledge and question a pervasive double standard with clear connections to real-life gun violence.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Elyse Petersen is the founder of Tealet

Tea Drinkers Anonymous is a guild on the popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game Guild Wars 2. And no, they are not trying to fight a tea addiction: On the contrary, they brought it online. Its members sip tea as they explore the world of Tyria together. The connection between tea and games could stop there, but it turns out tea connoisseurship relates to gaming personas, as modeled by Richard Bartle. More, these might apply to many other kinds of products and experiences.

A model for gamer’s personas

While Bartle’s research comes from early MUDs (multiuser dungeons, ancestors of current online games and RPGs), it laid a foundation for the personas of gamers that has been used to describe many other online communities. Other models compete, but Bartle’s is widely used.

He found that the four things that people enjoyed most from MUD games were: achievement, exploration, socializing, and competition Most players exhibit dominance of one or two traits. And consciously or not, game developers manage the balance of these elements in order to sustain a healthy ecosystem of players.

Achievers want to complete the game and gain levels and recognition.

Explorers enjoy their knowledge of the game world and finding out hidden corners of the game’s world.

Socializers spend a great deal of their time interacting with the other players in the game. Their influence and network of friends in the game keeps them motivated to play.

Competitors are more aggressive and find fulfillment in “winning” and domination.

From MUDs to tea leaves

“Herbivorous” tea lovers are – like gamers – on a journey, and they exhibit many similar behaviors.

In the tea world, here are the equivalents of Bartle’s personas:

Achievers are the enthusiasts that will spend their life becoming a tea master. These connoisseurs will stop at nothing to learn more about the artistic mysteries of the Camellia sinensis plant. They might share their enthusiasm in detailed blogs about the teas they taste and stories they learn. They might not have a mastery level attached (unless they practice Japan’s cha-do), but the community respects these achievers as experts.

Socializers are the backbone of the new tea lover community. These tea community builders love tea not just for its wonderful taste and healing powers but also for the bond that forms when people share a tea experience. Since the beginning of tea’s history, it has played a significant role in bringing together communities – from India to East Asia and to England and more. With technology, you can share a cup of tea across the world — regardless of the time difference involved.

The tea journey for explorers is motivated by the desire to try every tea they can. Believe it or not, those adventurers may find themselves traveling around the globe to well-hidden tea-growing regions just for the taste of something that you can’t find anywhere else. More than likely, these explorers have so much experience tasting teas that they can taste the difference between two Dragon well teas harvested from the same plant just days apart. They are not unlike wine lovers or birders.

Competitors, also referred to as killers, are not out to drown others in tea or poison their cup. These passionate tea lovers enjoy heated discussions with others about their favorite beverage. They are always sure to correct someone’s tea ignorance or disagree with someone about the degree of muscatel of a Darjeeling. A quick browse on subreddit /r/Tea will show a list of engaged discussions on proper tea pouring and tasting etiquette. These discussions are had in good fun and help create bonds between the community members.

Communities increasingly dominate industries

As the Internet is connecting isolated enthusiasts in all sorts of fields, similar personas are emerging and gaining power from their knowledge, network, attitude or opinions. Offline experiences that used to be isolated are being shared and influencing in turn which companies succeed by harnessing those powers to serve customers better.

Thinking about your own interests you can surely identify how much of an achiever, explorer, socializer, or killer you are.

While at Tealet our passion took us on the way of tea, the lessons from online games and virtual communities as Bartle describes are taking over. Is life a game, or were games life in the first place? We might ask the members of Tea Drinker’s Anonymous around a virtual campfire and … a cup of tea!

Thanks to Benjamin Joffe for suggesting this connection between tea and gaming and reviewing drafts of this article.

Elyse Petersen is the founder of Tealet, an online community and marketplace for tea lovers. She is an advocate for tea growers and technology and wants to connect growers and tea drinkers around the world. Tealet is part of the 500 Startups Accelerator Batch of Winter 2012.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Chris Carvalho is chief operating officer of San Francisco-based online game publisher Kabam.

I just spent a week at TED, the renowned conference focusing on technology, entertainment and design, where some of world’s most enlightened people question the unquestionable, empower “factivists,” and help make the seemingly impossible possible.

For more than 20 years TED has presented its members a whirlwind of ideas that have changed consumer behavior and even shaped global cultures. This year TED’s themes included Disrupt, Dream, and Create. I sat with and learned from such people as Elon Musk (SpaceX), Vint Cerf, Bono, and others who presented such thought-provoking topics as bringing wooly mammoths back to life, enabling consumer space travel, and communicating via reading people’s minds, all of which are apparent possibilities in the next 15 to 20 years. (If you think the Internet has privacy issues today, imagine when someone commercializes the capability to read another’s thoughts.)

I work for a video game company — arguably the poster child of industry disruption today – and I found so much of TED’s content to be dead-on relevant to our industry.

Traditional gaming, with its prepackaged discs and $60 upfront commitments to play a single game, is going the way of other packaged media like CDs, DVDs, and home-delivered newspapers. Not today. Not tomorrow. But the tide already has turned with a proven business model that has changed gamers’ playing behavior. It’s called “freemium.” Most consumers call it … awesome. Just like with LinkedIn or Dropbox, consumers try the service (games, in our case) and can continue for free as long as they want. If they want an enhanced experience, they pay for premium content. Free-to-play gaming equals disruption of the established $30 billion packaged games industry.

My company’s — and many others — goals don’t stop with enabling disruption. We are bringing all the genres of traditional gaming to a free-to-play mobile environment. Fans of strategy, role-playing games, racing, action, adventure, and more are experiencing an incredible entertainment revolution. I soaked up every bit of TED and imagined the possibilities for our industry. Some examples:

Think inside the box: Phil Hanson is an artist who had suffered nerve damage and had to completely rethink his art because his toolset (his hands) no longer had their former capacity. His doctor said he could not “fix” him and he should instead embrace his limitations. And he did, fueling incredible creativity – including designing art using Starbucks cups. By limiting his options, Hanson avoided the distraction of thinking through the endless tools he could use and his art became more singularly unique.

Application to games: Would game teams be better off if we limited such choices as tech stacks, business partners, or platforms and had them focus instead on making the most of known processes, partners and technology to create the most amazing and innovative games? Are we distracted by too much choice and too many options?

Five-senses design: Jinsop Lee introduced a design concept that measures value against a 10-point scale of sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste. The ultimate example is a product or an activity that scores highly across all five senses. For example, riding a motorcycle scores high on almost all but smell or taste. You can improve a product materially by applying this measure, even if you can only improve one of the five senses.

Application to games: Video games are visual and they have incredible sound. Could we make both better? Could we add “touch” to the game by enabling the smartphone or mobile device to vibrate when you hit a certain goal?

Overcoming the impossible: Jack Andraka was a 14-year-old boy whose uncle died of pancreatic cancer. Andraka’s uncle never stood a chance because there was no effective early detection test available to him. Detected late, pancreatic cancer takes 95 percent of its victims.   Using Google and Wikipedia, Andraka did his own research and contacted 200 professors in the field, seeking help in remembrance of his uncle. He was rejected 199 times. One professor finally said, “Let’s talk.” Together they built a lab and eventually created a very effective screen for pancreatic cancer (and eventually many other diseases) that costs almost nothing. It will save millions of lives.

Application to games: Every day we face roadblocks in what we do. Teams say some things are too hard. Or have to be delivered too fast. But we live in incredibly disruptive times. So I say to our industry, to the gamemakers: Keep dreaming, keep creating.

Think possible.

Image credit: Mammoth image via Shutterstock

Chris Carvalho is chief operating officer of Kabam, which he joined in 2009. Working with CEO Kevin Chou, he has helped grow Kabam to more than $180 million in revenue in 2012. Earlier, Carvalho spent a decade heading Lucasfilm’s business development efforts and driving the company’s digital media strategy and partnerships. Prior to Lucasfilm, Carvalho consulted with a range of companies, from startups to the Fortune 500 as a management consultant with Deloitte & Touche. He is a graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles’ Anderson School of Management and completed undergrad studies at University of California, Berkeley.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Lead system architect Mark Cerny announces the design principles for PlayStation 4 at Sony’s kickoff event last week in New York City.

Jussi Laakkonen is the founder and CEO of Applifier.

The console war of today is no longer a battle between just Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo. It’s expanded and is now a fight for hundreds of millions of players and tens of billions in global revenue across all screens: from smartphones and tablets to the PC and the living room. The iPad alone should blow past 200 million units sold in just three and a half years. Compare this with the PlayStation 2. It was Sony’s biggest hit, and it managed to sell 150 million units in 12 years.

Console manufactures are in a dire competition with smartphones and tablets, and Sony has clearly realized this. The PlayStation 4 announcement bedazzled the gamers and press worldwide, but not many noticed that the PS4 design principles “Simple, Immediate, Social, Integrated, and Personalized” have a common underlying theme.

Let’s make it like a tablet.

Simple: Consumer-oriented functionality, ease of use. Sony is looking to copy tablet-like user experiences. Can anything drive that point home better than using an image of a tablet at the PS4 launch event?

Immediate: PS4 brings a low-power standby state that you can resume games from and the capability to update games in the background. This is something we have had on smartphones and tablets for ages. Making games playable rapidly without waiting for the full download to complete is cool, but this is standard for mobile game, where you grab the first 50MBs of the game, get going, and it adds in content from the servers on the fly.

Social: Always-on hardware video encoding/decoding for live video streaming, a share button on the controller to share screenshots and video replays across Playstation Network, web and Facebook. Share your live video stream and spectate friends’ or celebrities’ gameplay. These are really cool features and will make playing on PlayStation 4 a lot more social. Yet you can get all of it already on mobile phones and tablets. Similar video hardware has shipped in hundreds of millions of iOS devices. My own startup, Everyplay, is powering easy video sharing for mobile players. Other mobile startups are innovating at break-neck speed to build rich social features. Once the pioneer, but now-shuttered Openfeint, provided GameFeeds similar to PS4’s planned features. Heyzap is building gamer profiles and multiplayer functions. Industry giants DeNA and Gree have both built gamer-oriented social networks. PlayStation 4 is doing the right thing bringing these features together as a platform standard, but a walled garden like the PlayStation 4 will always be playing catch-up to the innovations of an open ecosystem like iOS and Android.

Integrated: Connecting to third-party devices and services. Watching PlayStation 4 game replays on a smartphone or on Facebook. It’s great to see Sony opening up and connecting the PlayStation to third-party services and devices like smartphones. Unfortunately, every integration will have to go through Sony’s rigorous approval process, so don’t expect rapid support for Tumblr, Pinterest, or “name your favorite new social network” here. Although a very welcome feature, this is just table stakes in 2013.

Personalized Social feeds of gameplaying, real-world identity, connect with your Facebook friends, get recommendations based on what kind of games you like and dislike. Gamers can expect a built-in “Facebook for games” focused on rich media like video streams. PlayStation 4 will have players hanging out together and talking about their gaming experiences. Mobile offerings like Mobage from DeNA, Playphone’s social platform and Gree’s platform are all attempting to build similar, fully fledged gaming networks while focused services like Facebook’s App Center for game recommendations and Everyplay for game replays provide solutions for individual gamer needs. Recommendations and social proof of what friends play will do a lot to improve discoverability in the PlayStation Store. Sony’s taken what works on social and refined it to make it their own.

Good job, Sony, but the gaming revolution isn’t being televised

I’ve worked on console, social and mobile gaming. My first console was a PlayStation 2, and I’ve got a soft spot for Sony. They get games. PlayStation 4 seems to have the performance edge over the specs leaked about the so-called Xbox 720. It’s clear from the PS4 launch that Sony is serious about getting on with the times and is looking at how people play today on mobile and bringing that experience to the PS4.

Still, the gaming revolution is not being televised. The plastic boxes sitting below TVs led the gaming industry’s growth for nearly two decades, but now the big screen is fading just as the mobile screens are exploding. While Sony may, if lucky, get to 100 million PS4 units sold in the next 10 years, I expect the tablet user base to crack a billion in less than five years as tablets replace PCs. It has taken less than six years for smartphones to blow past that magical billion units, and all signs point to tablet shipments accelerating faster than smartphones.

Sony. I like what you do. Guess we both agree that the future of gaming is in mobile.

Jussi Laakkonen is the founder and CEO of Applifier and has spent the last few years in helping small and medium-sized game developers grow their games. As the leader of what the press dubbed “the rebel alliance,” Jussi rallied Facebook game developers together with the original cross-promotion network and grew it to reach over 150 million monthly active users. Jussi & Applifier are now focused on building authentic social discovery for mobile games with Everyplay, which lets players share their most memorable game replays with friends and fans. You’ll find him tweeting from @jussil about games and entrepreneurship.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Al Rose is the VP of retail and Internet properties at Telus International

Product development and player support have not always gone hand in hand. In fact, exceptional customer service from a gaming company might be surprising. Considering that the online gaming economy relies heavily on attracting and retaining players, and then moving them to recurring monthly or micropayments, the lack of good customer support is even more surprising. A growing player base requires happy players. Recurring payments requires recurring customers. Customer service should be a given.

On the flip side, the digital entertainment industry is experiencing massive growth. In times of hyper-growth, companies can only manage a certain pace of expansion. During the startup phase, game development is the main focus – it’s all about the release of the game, the company’s core business and raison d’etre. Player support is often a secondary concern, edged out in favor of the frantic pace of design and launch of new games.

Adding to this, some studios still view players as commodities, not customers, which may in part explain why players have low expectations when it comes to receiving support. This is set to change as many studios realize that providing exceptional customer interactions, alongside popular games, can directly impact the bottom line.

As customer service becomes another battlefield for winning over players, how can developers enhance their own game plan for customer support?

• Understand your player: Studios need to develop emotional connections with players, particularly millennials, and match gamers with like-minded customer service representatives. You should staff your customer service team with gamers who are continually leveling-up in the game and able to understand the needs of the players they support.

• Platform-specific service: Customer care needs to suit various types of players. PC game players are often proud of their technical abilities and are more inclined to work with websites or download patches to fix their own problems. In contrast, console game players are convenience-driven and typically prefer having easy access to customer support.

Free-to-play players are used to finding support in community forums or on the developer’s website. This provides a real opportunity for game studios: enhancing the experience of non-paid players will increase their likelihood to recommend the game, potentially moving them to paid player status in the future.

• Capitalize on player feedback: Sophisticated game studios spend considerable resources analyzing player feedback on their games. Analyzing player feedback via customer support channels and funnelling it back to development teams ensures that games reflect the latest player demands. The result is increased player value, playtime, satisfaction, retention and ultimately their likelihood to recommend the game to friends.

• Real-time, multichannel support: Many in the gaming community rely on peer-to-peer player support, but there is a real advantage to offering good customer service directly. Providing 24/7 multi-channel support via voice, email, online and social networks enables your players to interact with you whenever and however they want.

• Social media: Social media is becoming a key outlet for players to battle other players. A social media presence also allows players to engage with developers in real time, in their preferred communication channel. For smaller game studios, it’s an effective way to reach a targeted and relevant audience to and increase their player base.

• Team up: Studios who don’t have the customer service expertise in-house should consider partnering with a contact center provider that does. The company then can focus on their core business, while their partner takes care of the player support infrastructure and delivery. These same providers can also scale up or down their personnel to suit the development and growth of the game.

Maximize player lifetime value

Game studios have a massive opportunity right now. Game players, particularly in the free-to-play sector, may not expect the best customer experience. As the industry becomes increasingly fragmented and competitive, smart game studios can extend their game lifecycle and improve the value of their brand by providing better customer service. A good player support strategy can be a game-changer – where fostering a culture of care will improve the player experience, resulting in player retention and ultimately, player recommendations.

Al Rose is the VP retail and Internet properties at Telus International – a provider of customer care support solutions to global clients including social media and MMO gaming companies.  He serves as an advisory board member to several independent software providers providing social media, MMO gaming, and digital entertainment products. You can reach Rose at al.rose@telus.com.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Nomad Games, the fledgling studio behind Talisman Prologue and the upcoming multiplayer adaption of the long-lived fantasy board game from Games Workshop, has signed a deal with Thumbstar Games to bring Talisman to iOS and Android devices.

Talisman Prologue is now available for PCs. It’s a single-player adaptation of the board game — instead of fighting other players to see who finds the Talisman and reaches the Crown of Command first, Prologue offers a set of individual quests for each character from the basic Talisman game. Thumbstar will also publish the multiplayer version once Nomad releases it. Mouse clicks control rolling dice, drawing cards, and other actions, but on the mobile versions, a tap of your finger accomplishes all these tasks.

Neither company announced the release date in its release.

“Talisman is a great brand, and we are confident that Thumbstar is the right partner for us and Games Workshop,” Nomad Games’ Don Whiteford said in a statement.

Talisman Prologue and the upcoming multiplayer version use the art and rules from the 4th Edition of the board game, which came out in 2008 from Games Workshop. Fantasy Flight Games has since released subsequent expansions.

Image source: Jason Wilson/GamesBeat

* “Toad,” in this context, means using the feared Random spell to turn a player into a weak, slimy toad for three turns. Everyone must chant “Toad! Toad! Toad! Toad!” when rolling the die to see if they suffer this embarrassing fate.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Brian Fargo. Tim Schafer. Chris Roberts. Chris Taylor. These designers are responsible for a number of noteworthy video games. And all four also have another thing in common — they’ve gone to Kickstarter to fund their latest projects.

Path of Exile recently went into open beta — effectively “releasing” to the market. This online action-role-playing game (a genre that emphasizes combat, leveling up your characters and selecting skills, and acquiring treasure) from startup Grinding Gear Games began development six years ago, financed by the founders and later “wealthy friends,” said general manager Chris Wilson. As its development kicked into a higher gear, the founders paid themselves just enough to get by, leaving as many funds as possible for the rest of the development team — including Wilson and the others, this is 20 people, plus another couple of contractors — and infrastructure for this online game.

“We view ourselves as a startup,” Wilson said. “The founders have made no money yet. We are paying ourselves living costs, but others are making more than the founders. Our priority is making delivering a quality game and not monetizing it.”

The revenue model for Path of Exile deals with microtransactions, but Grinding Gear doesn’t sell items that give players advantages. It makes its money by “prettying up” your gear — in short, from its players’ desire to brag about how cool their armor, weapons, and other equipment looks.

Cozying up to the crowd

But Wilson and co. needed funded. Inspired by the success Fargo found with Wasteland 2 and Schafer enjoyed with Double Fine adventure, they turned to crowdfunding. At the time, Kickstarter wasn’t an option — in April, countries outside the U.S. couldn’t use it. Grinding Gear is a New Zealand studio. But Indiegogo didn’t appeal to them either. “We knew we wanted to do something similar,” Wilson said. “We wanted to do crowdfunding for a long as we needed, not just for a burst of funding for a month. And we didn’t want people to wait months for their packages, as with Kickstarter.”

Even when Kickstarter became a viable option, Rogers said the studio avoided it. He, Wilson, and the rest of the team had seen mistakes other game developers had made, and they didn’t want to risk that or the headaches involved.

“If we set our goal for $40,000 and don’t reach it, it looks bad,” producer/lead programmer Jonathan Rogers said. “And if we’re over it — if we get $2 million — people ask why we need that much money if we asked for $40,000. It’s amazing to see companies seek $300,000 to make a [massively multiplayer online game]. We can do that to polish part of our game.”

Hopeful because of email from fans saying they’d love to give money — this added up to $90,000 — Wilson and his compatriots set up their form of crowdfunding on their site. Working with another startup, the credit-card processing company Stripe, Grinding Gear set up a way for those interested in backing Path of Exile to give to it directly on its website.

“[Stripe] had to implement a new process. We crashed their servers on the first day,” Wilson said.

“That was annoying,” Rogers said with a laugh.

‘Selling the free audience’

Slowly, Grinding Gear sold Path of Exile. Wilson said fans pledged $320,000 in April alone. But as Grinding Gear processed the numbers, Wilson said he and his cohorts noticed something interesting — while 60 percent of donors were in the $10 range, the “diamond tier,” in which someone commits to $1,000 or more, was drawing plenty of interest. “We had 183 people pledge at this level,” Wilson said.

And the perk for these four-figure financiers? Custom items, like a sword that turns monsters into stone. Granted, this happens when the monster dies — this sword wouldn’t turn the monster into stone on first contact — but instead of the corpse falling to the ground, it would become a hunk of rock. It has no effect on the gameplay. It’s all cosmetic.

“The big thing is that people are please players with our game,” Wilson said. “Ninety percent get it for free. The $10 people have gotten their money’s worth. Now it’s about making it worthwhile for those who pledged $1,000 or more.”

“[The diamond tier] people are paying to show off. We’re selling the free audience to them to show off to,” Rogers said.

What sort of items have the higher-tier players been asking for? “We’re getting requests like, ‘I will pay you to put a wolf in a certain area,’” said Rogers. “Though we were hoping people would be asking for something cooler.” Another wanted a talking sword. So Grinding Gear recorded some dialogue for the sword and gave it a history. The blade holds the soul of a whimsical but thoroughly mad wizard.

These top-notch items come with lots of embellishment and details (Path of Exile supports resolutions of 2,560-by-1,440 and sets its art for that standard). Gloves have brilliant embrodiery. Armor shines and displays contours and filigree. Some of the designs come from the same person who created the concept art for Dobby the House Elf from Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

“We want players to have to interact with their items. At the end of the day, the game is about the items,” Wilson said.

Big spenders are key

Like many social games, Path of Exile has its “whales” — in this case, players who have spent $5,000. “They call themselves the same thing,” Wilson said. How did they learn about this? “A university did a study on our whales. What we got was an interesting report.”

Researchers at New Zealand’s University of Waikato went into Path of Exile’s forums and talked to the “diamond” supporters. They found that some are just wealthy and like games. Others, like Minecraft developer Markus “Notch” Persson, are game developers who like what they’re doing.

The most interesting, Wilson noted, is that many aren’t rich or even well-off — “they set aside $1,000 of what they make, $25,000-$30,000 annually. They see themselves invested in the game for 10 years.”

The long play

That plan mirrors what Grinding Gear wants for Path of Exile. “People were playing Diablo II for 12-and-a-half years?” Rogers said. “Our goal is to spend five years developing and supporting the game, with another five after that maintaining the game.” And Wilson noted that since this is its main product, it will be years before the developer considers the game to be “done.”

How does this cosmetic model influence player behavior? Could guilds of players arise sporting particular colors of items or something else cosmetic? “That would be nice,” Wilson said.

What has Grinding Gear learned about crowdfunding? Well, besides that you don’t need Kickstarter or Indigogo to do it well or that people will pay lots of money for fancy-looking armor, they quickly understood something about reward tiers — especially when those rewards include signed items.

“I made a point of including signed letters,” Wilson said. “I never realized I’d spend seven hours signing my own name.”

“By offering signed things, I didn’t know we were ‘signing’ ourselves up for a big job,” Rogers said.

Image source: Grinding Gear Games

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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If you’re Jon Shafer, you find another option: You start your own studio.

The lead designer for Civilization V and Elemental: Fallen Enchantress has founded Conifer Games, which you can find in the Detroit metro area. His first title is Jon Shafer’s At the Gates, a 4X (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate) turn-based 2D strategy game set at the fall of the Roman Empire. It’s due for a 2014 release.

“I am a creator. I’d rather be the person doing the design work, and I think this is the right way to do it — and the most fun for me,” Shafer said. “Obviously, Sid [Meier] has made that model work for a while now.”

Dumping the manager hat

Founding a game-design startup is all about making the game Shafer wants to create and doing it his way. He takes his inspiration from how hands-on Civilization designer Meier is at Firaxis (Shafer says he still does a great deal of programming and design) while divorcing the management duties that come with being a lead designer. It’s not necessarily about being indie — the freedom Shafer seeks is not just from big publishers but also big teams, which in his experience get in the way of making strategy games.

“[A strategy] game is a combo of systems that must work together well. It’s not an role-playing game where one person can do combat, another can do narrative, and another can do level design, and stitch it all together,” Shafer said. “With strategy, all go together seamlessly. You can’t separate the job. You have a vision and want to build it, and the number of nuances and details are immense. Your first and second drafts aren’t good enough. You must iterate.”

By starting a smaller studio, Shafer wants to close that design loop. He wants to be both the programmer and the designer. When he left Firaxis and went to Stardock, he tried to divorce game design from programming. But what he found is that he enjoys design work. “I had a conundrum — with larger teams, you can’t do it right,” he said. “You don’t have the time to do it right. You can’t ignore your team. You can’t lock yourself in a closet, and you don’t want to take the time from programming. The game can’t be as good.”

His conclusion? “What works for me is doing my own thing, starting something new, and for the development of At the Gates, I’m doing the design and A.I. programing, have another doing programming — a team of three, all living together — plus a few contractors. I can dig in how I want and spend time how I feel is best. It’s a ton of fun. It’s everything I wanted it to be. It’s what I wanted when I wanted to be off on my own.”

An evolution for strategy games?

While making the rounds after the announcement of Civilization V a few years ago, Shafer said that he was a student of history — in particular, 19th century German history. But he’s had an interest in many eras of world history. The theme for At the Gates comes from discussions for a Fall of Rome-type scenario he had with a developer friend from Firaxis, Scott Lewis. (“You can blame him for this,” Shafer joked.)

“In a 4X empire-building game, you start small and build up over time. The Romans didn’t do that in the later stages [of their empire], but the barbarian tribes they were fighting with did. That same friend got me hooked on the History of Rome podcast — one of the best out there — and it all coalesced with my game-design ideas.”

At the Gates is different because of its “evolving map.” Things change. One turn equals a month, and 12 turns equals a year. As Shafer points out, the change of seasons had an influence on the events of Rome’s fall. “When the Rhine or Danube freezes over, you can cross over, whereas in the summer, you can’t get an army over,” hesaid.

It’s also different because you’re not building an empire but seeking to save one — you’re destroying Rome’s crumbling corpse. This is an important distinction. “You don’t play as the Romans — you play as the barbarian tribes around them. The Huns, Goths, and Vandals,” Shafer said. “You have to move as resources expire.”

As At the Gates starts, the Roman Empire has already split into its Western and Eastern halves. Rome and Constantinople may be working together at this point or fighting. “At the beginning, they are tough. But they eventually get weaker and weaker,” Shafer said. “The progression is that you start with camps and build up over time.”

This is where the changing maps and eroding resources come into play. “The arc is different than in most empire builders and 4X games, where you get stronger and stronger and hit a point where you get so strong that no one can beat you,” Shafer said. This is where many players start new games as it’s just not fun to play out a scenario you can no longer lose.

“We wanted to get away from that,” he said. “One of the ways that we do is with depleting resources. You need food, wood to build improvements. In the early game, it’s fairly traditional. You go around, finding villages, resources, and uncovering the map. As the game gets in its later stages, the map runs out of stuff. The game climax is that your goal becomes to capture Rome or Constantinople, and you must do this before the map runs out of fuel.”

As your resources dwindle, you have two choices: Find more resources or take them from other barbarian tribes or the Romans. In many strategy games, you can sit and expand without fighting meaningful battles. That’s not going to happen in At the Gates.

“A big part of the game is trying to figure out where your next meal is coming from — during the first half, you can find resources pretty easily or capture iron mines or farms to keep economy going,” Shafer said. “But eventually, the easy pickings disappear. You must find new resources or take them from your neighbors. There is a military bent to the game — it’s a little bit more brutal.”

Shafter acknowledges this take isn’t going to appeal to all strategy gamers. “We wanted to do something fresh and interesting. The 4X genre is a great one, but there’s not a ton of innovation. Between seasons and a new arc to the game, it really spices up things.

“Unlike other strategy games, it becomes harder as you go.”

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But after about 10 hours, the combat may drive you mad — or bore you.

Ni No Kuni is all about a heartbroken young boy, Oliver, who ends up leaving his world to help another. On the way, as in many other RPGs (Japanese or Western), he meets an oddball band of characters who helps him take on a menace. One that is, in this case, threatening two worlds.

At times, Ni No Kuni feels almost like one of Studio Ghibli’s — which developed this with Japanese RPG house Level-5 — animated films. The storytelling is just a notch below movies like Howl’s Moving Castle. At other times, Ni No Kuni feels like another RPG that’s grounded in a grindy past.

What you’ll like

The poignancy

The affecting storytelling is at its best in the first 10 hours. Oliver deals with the loss of a loved one, and one of the reasons he’s traveled to this land of fantasy is to bring that person back to life. This is tricky territory for any artist, be it a video game studio, a film writer, or a poet. Yet I found that Studio Ghibli and Level-5 nailed this, and I speak from my own experience.

Children do not know how to deal with loss, and a flight into fantasy is one way in which they cope. I can’t remember how many times I could’ve used magic or some other fantastical method to have brought my mom back when she died when I was 7. After my father died recently, my niece wanted to bring him back with a magic potion. So it’s no surprise that Oliver, when confronted with an epic quest that could just happen to bring back someone he loves, grabs hold of the opportunity.

But Studio Ghibli’s and Level-5’s take on poignancy isn’t limited to Oliver’s coping with his loss. In Ni No Kuni’s world, a number of citizens are dealing with the loss of vital emotions and drives, such as enthusiasm. It’s up to you to heal these folks, but how? It’s simple, and to me, it’s also quite moving. You find people who are bubbling over with such emotions, and you sprinkle in some magic by taking some of this extra emotion and transferring it to another person. Typically, these little quests net your stamps — fill a card with enough of them, and you can trade it in for an ability boost (or save it and trade in two or more for bigger boosts).

What amazes me about these two elements is just how much they work together. As a child who suffered a great loss early in life, I wanted to do whatever I could to help others feel better about things in their life. I have no scientific or psychological evidence to back this up, but from talking to others who as children also suffered similar losses, I found that the need to “fix people” is something many of us share. And Ni No Kuni nails this. You are fixing people here. It makes me wonder if any of the writers also suffered similar losses when they were young.

The animation

Years ago, Level-5 established its reputation with some of the best visuals in Japanese role-playing games. Its lush animations in Dragon Quest VIII remain one of the best we’ve seen on the PlayStation 2, and the same goes for the Professor Laytons for the Nintendo DS and 3DS. Marry this with the beautiful animation work from Studio Ghibli, and you’ve got one of the best-looking creations not just for the PlayStation 3 but any platform.

The animation is at its best during the cutscenes; the work here is just as top-notch as what you’d find in Ghibli movies. Normally, I’d get upset when a game takes its time to “clear its throat,” so to speak, and get on with its opening (it takes about 45 minutes before Ni No Kuni does so), but since I spent most of that time admiring the masterful visuals, I really didn’t mind.

But when the action moves away from the cinematics — be it as you explore a city or venture out in the wilderness — the world you find is still better looking than that of most role-playing games. What’s particularly keen about the artwork is how it complements the world. In one fight, a genie pulls out Victorian dresses and parasols from a big pot, and these have all of the embellishments one would expect from clothing that just might fit the set of Downton Abbey. Oliver’s “real world” looks like snapshots of 1950s America. The greenery is appropriately lush in forests; the grass seems to almost flow on the Savannah. When it comes to the visuals, Level-5 and Studio Ghibli have put together a game that almost asks, “Do we really need new consoles when we can do this?”

Drippy and the familiars

Drippy is one of the best companions ever written for a Japanese RPG. A doll your mother made that your tears bring to life, he’s also the Lord High Lord of the Fairies — and your best friend, your guide, your mentor, and your smart-alecky older brother. He adds to the richness of the fantasy world.

With a snhozz that would inspire envy in Jimmy Durante, Drippy propels you through the story, especially when you’re just learning about combat, magic, taking or giving heart, and traversing between the fantasy world and the mundane. It’s during this time that most players, I imagine, would bond with Drippy. His insights and humor almost always add to the story. At first, with his outrageous accent, I thought of him as a variation of Angus of Dragon Quest VIII. But Drippy grows on you much quicker, proving to be an invaluable resource — and more importantly, a friend — on your journey.

Another of Ni No Kuni’s charms is its familiars. These are mostly cute little critters that you raise like Pokémon and send into combat. While Ni No Kuni’s lore establishes that they’re born from a wizard’s heart, in truth, your best tactic for finding and training these creatures is to capture them in combat (which, sadly, you can’t do until you’re double-digit hours into it).

What’s great about the familiars is their variety and their names. I would hope the writing staff had a thorough “pun cleansing” after finishing their work as the wordplay for many of them goes beyond anything you’d find in Dragon Quest. Things like “Sore Boar” and “Green Buncher” (this looks like a walking bunch of bananas) — and my favorite, the “Purrloiner” (a pirate cat!) — enhance the charm and show that while the writers are dealing with some heavy issues, they also have a light heart (if a heavy hand when applying it).

You train your familiars by throwing them into combat, feeding them food that boosts their abilities, and using “drops” to help them transform into more powerful forms. This can be a timesink, and while some will find it fun, I did grow a little bored of spending time leveling these critters up.

What you won’t like

The disjointed story

One of the greatest challenges that designers of role-playing games face is the balance between combat, exploration, and story. Focus too much on one, and many players cry out for the others — and your game turns into either a slog of going from one place to another, fighting too many enemies to get where you’re going, or not offering enough “gameplay” to balance out your cutscenes.

Because you must level up your characters and familiars in order to withstand some of the bosses, I kept spending more and more time wandering the wilds, encountering monsters and engaging in combat, which extends the time between one story bit to another. Now, maybe I was too obsessive about leveling up my party and familiar (I do tend to be a bit compulsive when I play Japanese role-playing games or any other genre that grants some level of freedom of choice and exploration), but I felt like I had no other alternative, especially when I arrived at a couple of points where my party just wasn’t strong enough to deal with a boss fight or another specific encounter. It would’ve been great to have experienced Studio Ghibli’s cutscenes more often. They’re that beautiful and engaging. Sadly, you’ll find yourself spending more time chasing experience than you will pursuing the story.

The combat system

You spend a great deal of your time fighting, and the more you fight, the more obvious it is that the combat system needs help.

When you fight, you may choose to control Oliver (or another party member) or one of your familiars. You can switch among these choices during combat should the need arise to use powers available to a specific character or familiar. This is the best part of the combat system, giving you the flexibility to throw the right weapon at the problem instead of fighting with a disadvantage. If you’re battling a monster that’s weak against fire, it’s easy to scroll through your party members and familiars and find the one that’s best equipped to handle that encounter. This works just fine.

Other things make combat a chore. The fights take place in real time, but each action — be it from a party member or a familiar — is on a timer, and sometimes, you find yourself wishing that this limit didn’t exist. You’re defending against an attack, and more often than not, the defense routine would end just as my foe was taking a strike at me. So of course, I suffered a blow. Your familiars are also restricted in this way; you can use them for only so long before you need to switch to another.

Your allies are also stupid. Just plain ol’ stupid. They don’t always choose the best positioning or attacks, and they love to snare glims (small balls of energy that fall from your foes as they suffer damage) that heal you or restore your mana. Your allies are especially fond of nabbing the special gold glims that unleash the most powerful attacks of your familiars. During fights against bosses, I swore more than I have while editing copy from a busy day at E3 — and in a much smaller window of time — because of my allies’ insistence on being “ballhogs.”

You may think this is a nitpicky compliant, but when you spend as much time in combat as you do in Ni No Kuni, it escalates from annoying to ball-busting.

Conclusion

Ni No Kuni is a noteworthy achievement for Studio Ghibli and Level-5. Take a master of film animation and add one of the well-regarded studios for role-playing development, and in this case, we get a video game that’s stunning to behold — one that can take players to unexpected emotional places and make them eager to push through the story to see the next brilliant cinematic.

And we also get an experience that’s a bit too rooted in old Japanese role-playing traditions.

I hope Ni No Kuni’s reception — and sales — convince Studio Ghibli that its dive into video games was worthwhile. I’d love to play another from them — as long someone there remembers that video games, like movies, need good pacing.

Score: 72/100

Ni No Kuni: The Wrath of the White Witch is available now for the PlayStation 3. Publisher Namco Bandai provided GamesBeat with a copy of the game for this review.

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That image, though classic, would be inaccurate.

According to the Entertainment Software Association, today’s average gamer is 30 years old (it had been 37, but the ESA recently changed its metrics for this statistic, resulting in the lower age) and has been playing for 12 years. About two-thirds are adults, and nearly half are women. Gamers clearly are a more diverse group than most people recognize.

Not only that, the buying power of gamers is evident in the $24.7 billion they spent on games and equipment in 2011. This makes the demographic an attractive target for marketers seeking to boost engagement with game apps. It’s also why marketers are following these consumers into the mobile space, where they spend so much of their time.

Mobile marketing messages: Less is more

Today, mobile gamers receive billions of push notifications, mobile e-mail, and even some SMS messages from marketers looking to drive player engagement though signups, social shares, and in-app purchases. Many of these messages, however, aren’t having their intended effect despite mobile devices holding more potential for brand engagement than any previous innovation.

Research shows that message overload results in 69 percent of mobile phone users to unsubscribe from mobile marketing updates, while 60 percent say they unsubscribe because the messages aren’t relevant to them. How can marketers seeking to enhance their connection with gamers maximize the likelihood that their mobile marketing messages will be opened and acted upon?

Simple. With measurement.

Mobile message analytics may be in its early stages, but it’s already capable of helping developers and marketers capture gamers’ long-term attention, boosting engagement, and return on investment. Mobile analytics can provide the tools to target game-playing mobile consumers by linking individual message copy to user behavior and gathering granular, real-time data. That includes pushes sent versus opened, session times, repeat visits, and in-app actions and marketing goals such as social sharing or upgrades.

Another powerful way to measure the effectiveness of a mobile message is through A/B split testing, wherein different versions of a message is used to test tone, urgency, personalization, or calls to action, which opens up a world of constant testing, feedback and improvement. Real-time data tells marketers which message gets the strongest return on investment and should be used on future campaigns.

With intelligent, actionable analytics, marketers can separate what works from what doesn’t and use that knowledge to craft well-timed messaging that is relevant to individual mobile gamers. This is the case with the push notifications that come with many of today’s apps.

And speaking of apps. …

The push-notification potential

Today, when it comes to mobile gaming, apps rule, and push notifications are the preferred method of game app developers and marketers to reach mobile gamers. Apple alone has delivered about 1.5 trillion; over a billion pushes daily have been sent, received and acted on.

For marketers who want to drive engagement with gamers, push notifications are the best bet. Gamers agree: 72 percent favor immersive ads and push notifications over banner ads, which are more like annoying mini-billboards screaming random offers.

Developers and marketers must create messaging that provides value, which in the gaming world might be reminders of new levels, “perks” for a “skill tree,” the announcement of a new expansion pack or enough XPs required to reach a new level – any one of which is delivered at the right time. Real-time analysis of what works and doesn’t is critical. Through techniques such as A/B split testing followed by retargeting to reinforce the message, brands can secure a valuable foothold in gamers’ minds, hearts and wallets.

Mobile analytics has the power to pinpoint the right messages for each member of the widely diverse gaming community at the right times. It’s a win-win: gamers get an enhanced play experience while brands score the long-term engagement and ROI they want.

OtherLevels CEO Brendan O’Kane has more than 20 years of experience working in the online and mobile industries. It recently opened its first office in the U.S. and works with game studios such as Halfbrick (Jetpack Joyride) on their push and SMS campaigns. Prior to leading OtherLevels, O’Kane once worked for Oracle.

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If 2012 has shown us one thing, it’s that video game development is truly in the “crossover era.” GamesBeat’s 2012 Game of the Year, The Walking Dead, was first available as a downloadable title, not a retail release. Other downloadables, such as indie-developed darlings Journey and Faster Than Light, garnered plenty of votes as well. And in our staff’s and contributor’s top games of the year lists, we even see mobile releases — like Fieldrunners 2.

Gaming has changed, and it’s nice to see that it’s more than just big-budget console and PC titles that have earned Game of the Year attention. Here are the top games as chosen by GamesBeat staffers and contributors. Let us know what you think about our picks in the comments — especially if you feel we’ve left something off our lists!

Editor-in-chief Dan “Shoe” Hsu

XCOM: Enemy Unknown
Platforms: PC, Xbox 360, PS3
Publisher: 2K Games
Developer: Firaxis Games

Little green men — yesteryear’s poster boys for mysterious invaders from outer space — are about as menacing as Oompa Loompas armed with toy guns. XCOM’s little gray men, however, are scary as hell. It’s not the ashen skin, bulbous eyes, or creepy-crawly walk. It’s what these Sectoids represent: a greater threat that we are simply not equipped to handle.

In the strategy game XCOM: Enemy Unknown, we mere humans bring dull knives to plasma gunfights. And just when we start to catch up in weapon technology, the bug-eyed bastards bring bigger guns and meaner friends. These jerks even cheat with mysterious mind-control powers. Meanwhile, we’re barely keeping the checkbook balanced between research, manufacturing, facility construction, aircraft, and an ever-decreasing budget due to world nations pulling out of the program if you can’t keep them safe (and you can never keep them all safe).

It all adds up to an incredibly exciting and stressful experience. Each decision — whether it’s which tree to hide your assault trooper behind or which whiny country gets your last airspace-monitoring satellite — feels monumental and permanent. Humanity’s existence is at stake, and we just want to make it to the next month, when a few more pennies come rolling in and a few more traumatized soldiers get out of sick bay.

It’s a desperate fight. And boy will we celebrate when those little gray men are dead.

Shoe’s other picks for best games of 2012: Fieldrunners 2, Dishonored, Journey, Fez

Lead writer Dean Takahasi

The Unfinished Swan
Platform: PlayStation 3 (PlayStation Network)
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment America
Developer: Giant Sparrow

The Unfinished Swan is one of the most creative titles yet for the PlayStation Network. It’s an interactive fairy tale where you lob blobs of black paint at a white screen. As you do so, you uncover part of a 3D space hidden within the white scene. Uncovering each scene is a mind-bending task, as you have to navigate perplexing puzzles. You explore the unknown, and as you do so, you uncover a new segment in a fairy tale about a boy who loses his mother. It is a touching story that will remind of you of the zany Alice in Wonderland. Ian Dallas, the game creator, feels that a child who is abandoned is like an unfinished work of art. But just when you think that the game has become predictable, it changes. In some ways, the story seems unfinished. But the title is a wonderful first effort for Giant Sparrow, a new studio bankrolled by Sony.

Dean’s other picks for the best games of 2012: Halo 4, Far Cry 3, Journey, Call of Duty: Black Ops II

Culture editor Sebastian Haley

Hotline Miami
Platform: PC
Publisher: Developer Digital
Developer: Dennaton Games

Indie sensation Hotline Miami is best described as the film Drive, but in a retro, pixelated and somehow even more violent form, with subtle hints of Rockstar’s Manhunt sprinkled on top. The short-but-sickeningly sweet levels allow you to carefully orchestrate your symphony of murder and mayhem, filling the floors with maimed corpses and spraying the walls with crimson, all while its surreal, Miami Vice-inspired soundtrack beats in the back of your mind. Basically, if you own a Wii or like looking at livestreams of kittens, this is not your kind of game.

Sebastian’s other picks for best games of 2012: Trials Evolution, Far Cry 3, The Darkness II, Final Fantasy XIII-2

Staff writer Jeff Grubb

Mark of the Ninja
Platform: Xbox 360 (Xbox Live Arcade), PC
Publisher: Microsoft Studios
Developer: Klei Entertainment

For these Game of the Year summaries, we’re supposed to look above and beyond the individual parts of a game. We’re supposed to write about why it is important, but in the case of Mark of the Ninja, it’s those parts that make it so special. Developer Klei’s 2D stealth action game for Xbox Live Arcade and PC is a master class in well-executed gameplay mechanics. Whether it’s a soundwave that ripples off your ninja’s feet to indicate how much noise he’s making or a vision cone that indicates where an enemy is looking, Mark of the Ninja is constantly communicating with the player. It then provides the player with a great controlling character to poke and prod the world with.

It’s not rare that a game makes you feel like a badass, but with Klei’s game it’s not about how powerful you are — it’s about how in tune with the environment your character is. You have so much visual and aural information that every moment is an opportunity for experimentation. You can spend 10 minutes laying out a detailed plan that involves deadly traps, or you can play the entire game without a sword.

In video games, we don’t usually get a lot of new ideas, we just get different takes on old ideas. Stealth is an old idea at this point, but Mark of the Ninja distinguishes itself by executing the concept better than any other game before it.

Jeff’s other picks for best games of 2012: The Walking Dead, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, Trials Evolution, FTL: Faster Than Light

Copy editor Jason Wilson

FTL: Faster Than Light
Platform: PC, Mac, Linux
Publisher: Subset Games
Developer: Subset Games

I’m low on fuel. My crew raced around my starship like a colony of ants, hastily putting out fires as doors opened to the cold vacuum of space. The Rebels are closing in on me. Do I take a chance and see if I can gain more fuel in the next nebular cloud, or do I make a mad dash for the next sector and hope to find friendly forces instead of angry adversaries? These are just some of the choices the player faces in FTL: Faster Than Light, the indie roguelike that’s swept upon a number of Game of the Year lists in 2012 (including ours!). What makes FTL so compelling to players is that a take on Civilization’s “one more turn” addictive nature — but instead of furthering your game, you’re driven to see if your next attempt takes you closer to escaping the pursuing Rebel forces. And it’s this that makes FTL one of the most interesting, fascinating, and, yes, best games of 2012.

Jason’s other picks for best games of 2012: The Walking Dead, Crusader Kings II, Torchlight II, Dragon’s Dogma

Contributor Rus McLaughlin

Far Cry 3
Platforms: Xbox 360, PS3, PC
Publisher: Ubisoft
Developer: Ubisoft Montreal

Something visceral. Something primal. Most shooters don’t have these. They settle you into a safe, comfortable role. Veteran soldier. Seasoned cop. Career criminal. A hero … or an antihero. But Far Cry 3 makes you run blind through the jungle while murderous pirates hunt you like a piece of prey. You’re just a terrified kid. Never held a gun before. Never seen anyone die before. Now you’re covered in your own brother’s blood and getting high off the giddy thrill of mere survival. Then you’re turned lose to roam two amazingly rich, open-world islands where you can really start enjoying yourself, slowly and cautiously picking your tormentors apart. Before you know it, the elation you get from destroying a criminal empire hardens into a different kind of drug: revenge.

That’s when Far Cry 3 surpasses the standard shooter fare. An aimless twentysomething becomes a killer of killers, as feared as the insane warlords he wants dead. Between coolly tense stealth play and straight-up gunfights, you become the predator, stalking intruders in your jungle and murdering them at will. It all culminates in a moment where you must decide just how much you enjoy that particular power fantasy. Enough to abandon your humanity? Maybe.

Far Cry 3 goes there. Solid gameplay — minus a weak-tea multiplayer — and incredibly detailed environments lift it far enough, but its secret weapon lies in how it takes you into that dark, primal place. And then it dares you to ignore your basic animal instincts.

Rus’s other picks for best games of 2012: The Walking Dead, Fez, Halo 4, Journey

Contributing editor Rob Savillo

Contributor Rob LeFebvre

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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But can Black Ops II sustain Call of Duty’s amazing momentum? We turn to industry analyst Michael Pachter of Wedbush Securities and Soraya Murray of the University of California at Santa Cruz to provide additional perspective on the success of this latest Call of Duty game.

Call of Duty: Black Ops II — The critic’s review

• By Dean Takahashi, GamesBeat staff writer

My arms feel like they’re permanently vibrating from all of the machine-gunning I’ve been doing lately. I’ve played just about every aspect of Call of Duty: Black Ops II, and I have the sore wrists to prove it. As the holidays approach, Activision Blizzard is launching its ninth installment in the Call of Duty military combat series, and this one is as violent, action-packed, and as full of adrenaline as ever before.

So much for peace on Earth.

Each year, Activision generates more than a billion dollars in sales from Call of Duty games. In order to hold the title of the fastest-selling game in history, the developers at Activision’s Treyarch studio have to keep trigger-happy gamers feeling like the game has something new to offer. On this front, Treyarch has delivered. Call of Duty: Black Ops II is loaded with so much content that its $60 price seems like a bargain, and everyone else in the industry is going to have to meet a high bar if they want to hang on to the attention of gamers as well as this title does.

This game has so many elements that it is four games in one. It includes the single-player story campaign with 11 missions. On top of that, it has five single-player Strike Force missions, the Zombies cooperative play game, and multiplayer gaming with 16 maps and several new modes at the outset. The single-player campaign may keep you busy for eight hours or so (I played it on the Hardened difficulty (which is one notch above Normal), and it kept me busy for about 12 hours), but the whole package is meant to keep you occupied with Call of Duty so that it becomes a round-the-clock, year-round part of your life.

Read the full GamesBeat review

Final critic’s score: 89/100

Call of Duty: Black Ops II — The analyst’s review

• By Michael Pachter, managing director, Wedbush Securities
• Twitter: @michaelpachter

Call of Duty: Black Ops II is another gravity-defying offering from Activision. When the 2009 installment in the series, Modern Warfare 2, sold 16 million units, many (including me) doubted that any other versions of the game could achieve that level of sales. Instead, Black Ops sold a staggering 25 million units in 2010, setting the bar for future versions ridiculously high. Last year’s Modern Warfare 3 sold “only” 23 million units, and the skeptics returned, questioning whether Black Ops II could come close to that figure. It appears that this year’s version has a sufficiently high Metacritic rating (86), solid marketing support, and very good early numbers ($500 million in first-day sales) to once again exceed the 20 million unit sales level. Of course, naysayers may consider that a failure, but I think Black Ops II developer Treyarch should be commended for creating a series that will likely sell 45 million units in just two years.

When thinking about why the Call of Duty series has been so immensely successful, one need look no further than the large (and apparently growing) Call of Duty multiplayer community. According to Activision, as of June, the various Call of Duty multiplayer offerings had more than 25 million monthly active unique online players. I have heard anecdotal evidence that more than 50 percent of Call of Duty players never even bother with the single-player campaign, launching into multiplayer right out of the box. From the reviews I’ve seen, Black Ops II multiplayer is once again outstanding, and the community of online players will find itself once again compelled to purchase this year’s game.

While early returns may appear underwhelming, insofar as they are likely down slightly year-over-year, it is important to keep in mind that Black Ops II faces a lower level of competition, with last year’s solid Battlefield 3 effort replaced by this year’s Medal of Honor Warfighter disaster. It is highly likely that competition from Battlefield attracted wallet share, especially from gift givers, and we are confident that few gamers’ holiday wish list contains Medal of Honor. Thus, although Black Ops II may be off to a slightly slower start than last year’s Modern Warfare 3, I’m pretty confident that the game will catch up in sales by year-end.

Final analyst’s score: 95/100

Call of Duty: Black Ops II — The academic’s review

• By Soraya Murray, Ph.D, assistant professor, University of California at Santa Cruz
• Twitter: @sorayamurray

Call of Duty: Black Ops II possesses all of the storytelling elements of great theater or film: a tragic intertwining of a brother and sister’s fates, an almost Shakespearean relationship between father and son, brotherhood in arms inadvertently betrayed, and scenes of action, gore and all-around emotional gut-punching. The word “interactive” is a bit passé at this point, but it really does feel like interactive cinema, with gameplay driving the player toward the next tantalizing plot point. I remember sitting on a game panel with Jordan Mechner, creator of the Prince of Persia franchise, and he described one of the core qualities of the cinematic experience being as follows: No matter what happens on screen, you are powerless as a viewer to affect any outcomes. One watches helplessly, and that is an inflexible dimension of the form.  That means, depending upon the buy-in from the viewer, the maker of the film can potentially ratchet up emotions and angst to almost unbearable places.

I’ve seen a few games that can generate this kind of investment, even though the player can interact with onscreen action through gameplay.  Spec Ops: The Line, with it’s “War is hell,” Apocalypse Now-brooding meditation was one. Black Ops II excels in this regard. If there is some kind of benchmark for a game that is the most film-like, this would be it.  This is due in some part to the liberal application of references to blockbuster films (Mission Impossible 4, Battle: Los Angeles, Reign of Fire, Black Hawk Down, or any supersoldier film). Its first-person shooter perspective contributes to this investment, too. At times, it is frustrating what limitation this imposes. For example, the worlds of the past (1980s) and future (2025) are rich, textured, full of spectacular sound and image — and yet one is bound to always stay on track and complete the missions.  So, one fights through history and the future, seemingly to change the outcome, but the very form of the game itself precludes any real possibility of more than four outcomes, and hence any real exploration. Ultimately, one is trapped in the labyrinth of progress, from that which has been to that which will inevitably be, in a kind of tunnel vision of objectives. To be forced to experience it in that way doesn’t do justice to the game’s brilliant sense of place.

And speaking of past and future, this is a key theme of Black Ops II. Namely: What in our past makes us (both as individuals and the human race) who we are, what propels us toward our fates, and what assures the future. Let me tell you: If it were up to this game, it is not looking good, with it’s futuristic Cold War crisis, cyber-warfare, scenes of torture, drone attacks, and maniacal philosopher terrorists. Case in point: Raul Menendez, argued by many reviewers to be the most developed, pathos-inducing genius mad-dog villains in video game history, wants to bring the whole global economic system down.  He mutters anti-capitalist phrases like “Opulence is sinful, and we all pay for it.” Overlaid onto this is an interspersing of actual history with the fictional narratives of the game — including major historical figures, one of which (Oliver North) actually voices his own character for the game. What does this mean about the flexibility of these stories we tell ourselves about the past, the present, and what is possible for the future? Let’s hope our future outcomes aren’t quite so hopelessly delimited by our past.

Final academic’s score: 90/100

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King’s Bounty: Warriors of the North is the second full expansion for the 2008 strategy-role-playing game King’s Bounty: The Legend for the PC (and Mac, though this isn’t out for Apple’s platform yet). Four years is a long time to continue adding to one game. King’s Bounty has introduced new lands, new challenges, and new factions through all of its updates. Warriors of the North’s big addition is the Viking faction, something I wasn’t all that enthusiastic about going into my first playthrough. Does is this new army build upon the fun, addicting, tactical gameplay of the previous games? Or has developer Katauri Interactive spent too long working on essentially the same thing?

What you’ll like

The Rune system
The Viking faction brings a significant modification to King’s Bounty turn-based combat: Runes. Each Viking unit has a limited number of Runes it can use in combat — either to boost offense (such as improving your chance of a critical hit), defense, or luck (giving the unit a small chance of taking a second action during a single round). Units from other factions may use them, too. This gives your traditional King’s Bounty tactics a tweak (you must implement Runes each turn), but it’s your abilities and spells that really make these a special addition. An entire new Spell tree, Runic Magic, specializes in using Runes. These spells gather them, distribute to allies, chain Runes (setting up another spell that takes these chained Runes and deals out damage), or use them to power their magic.

What’s fantastic about the Runes and Runic Magic is that, in each round of each combat, you face a decision: How do I use these, and do I want to use them in conjunction with magic? This adds an additional layer to the tactical options you face in battle, and after a couple of expansions, it’s always nice to see a developer give the player new choices.

More loot
Gold has always been at a premium in King’s Bounty, especially when you’re a low-level character. Warriors of the North takes care of this, giving you enough gold that you can still buy new warriors to replace fallen units even on the higher difficulties. And like previous expansions, this one brings a slew of new items as well (and this time, you can actually afford to purchase a number of them early on). Some items have Viking themes (like the Soothsayer staff or an icy spear). Others fit King’s Bounty’s existing factions.

New companions: The Valkyries
Each King’s Bounty has brought about a new set of companions from you. In Warriors of the North, you hang out with the mighty otherworldly warriors of Norse legend, the Valkyries. As you explore Warriors of the North’s world, you find more Valkyries. You may only benefit from one at a time (each of the five gives you a specific benefit, such as increasing your Leadership, thus boosting the size of your armies). You can increase the warrior maidens’ abilities by giving “donating” items to them. Each accepts a specific class of item, like weapons, armors, or artifacts. You may also deconstruct items cluttering your inventory for magic crystals, which allow you to add more spells to your spellbook. Here’s another example of Katauri asking the players how they want to approach combat: This time, it’s about managing your resources and what you’re willing to sacrifice in order to gain an advantage.

The Skald class
Players may take three roles in Warriors of the North: The Viking (fighter), the Soothsayer (mage), and the Skald, who assumes the middle path that the paladin had in previous King’s Bountys. But the Skald is more than just a mix of melee and magic. Before each battle, the Skald can “sing” one of a series of buffs that boost your units’ capabilities — or debuff your foes. This gives you yet another option when deciding how you’re going to take on your foes.

Surprise and delight
Warriors of the North provides a few surprises that I’d prefer to leave unmentioned for now. But several times, I found myself smiling when I reached a new area and realized where I was or what I was about to do.

What you won’t like

Vikings are boring
As a faction, the Vikings aren’t the most interesting lot. The Vikings (yes, one unit bears this name!) and Berserkers don’t feel all that different from the Berserkers and Barbarians of previous King’s Bounty games (sure, they look different but have similar abilities and cannon-fodder roles). The archer units are likewise uninspiring; the Soothsayer is the Viking mage, and he fills the role of both magic cannon and healer (though he does neither well). The Warrior Maiden combines the roles of archer, warrior, and healer, and while it does fight well, in my playthrough, these valuable units were in short supply. These are all missing the charm of King’s Bounty; the faction takes itself far too seriously (well, save for the quest about the arguing drinking buddies).

The only Viking unit that has any character to it is the Skald. Like the warrior bards of Norse lore, King Bounty’s Skalds focus on their musical abilities. One ability gives each of your units a random spell buff, and the other debuffs the enemy (including inflicting such powerful spells such as Pygmy, which shrinks your foe and reduces its damage by 40 percent). The Skald is the only must-have Viking unit, but since you only get a morale boost when your army consists of units of the same faction, I found myself using other Norsemen as well.

The other thing the Vikings have going against them is Warriors of the North’s first act, which has you using this faction almost exclusively (Neutrals exist, but they aren’t as plentiful as Vikings). This always can lead players to grow bored with it.

Is this King’s Bounty or Twilight?
The Undead are the big bad of Warriors of the North, but fight after fight against these shambling corpses grows tiresome. The Undead have always been one of the shadier factions in King’s Bounty, but making them the main villain faction in Warriors of the North doesn’t result in an epic conclusion. Because you don’t end up fighting much against other factions, you spend too many of your battles against the Undead, and consequently, you find yourself falling into similar patterns as you plot out your strategy because you’re facing the same foe again and again and again.

Where are the Lizardmen?
The second expansion added the Lizardmen faction, which has disappeared from Warriors of the North. I see two reasons for this: Either because it didn’t fit the story, or King’s Bounty coding can only support a specific number of factions, and it was either the Lizards or the Vikings. If it’s the latter, this shows me that it’s time for Katauri to move from this version of King’s Bounty for a King’s Bounty II. Certain Lizardmen units appear as Scruggs, beasts you can summon with Rune Magic. But considering that the Lizardmen are some of the more interesting units in King’s Bounty, it’s a shame that the faction isn’t in Warriors of the North.

Conclusion

Warriors of the North gives franchise fans something they love: more King’s Bounty. I’m a fan of more King’s Bounty, yet the magic is missing with this latest expansion. The Viking faction isn’t as fun to play as other groups. The tweaks to combat, though, give players more tactical options, something any player of a strategy-RPG can appreciate. And this makes it incredibly hard to hold something like a faction’s aesthetic against it. But the Vikings just aren’t interesting, and for the first time, a King’s Bounty expansion doesn’t measure up to the charm of the 2008 game.

But if Katauri is wise, the developer will kick the current King’s Bounty code out and begin development on King’s Bounty II. It’s time.

Score: 70/100

King’s Bounty: Warriors of the North released Oct. 26 for the PC. The publisher provided GamesBeat with a Steam digital download code for the purposes of this review.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The American Revolution held special significance this fall. As we prepared to vote, a number of U.S. citizens took a moment to reflect on how, more than 200 years ago, a people hungry for freedom cast off the Old World and in turn created one of the grandest civic and social experiments that the world has ever seen: the United States of America.

Ubisoft used the Revolution to bring the story of Desmond Miles to a close in Assassin’s Creed III. GamesBeat’s Rus McLaughlin has had his say about the game, but we decided this blockbuster need our “Threeview” review treatment, in which a critic, an analyst, and an academic examine a game to see where it stands on the business side of the industry and how game theory influenced its development. We’ve turned to noted analyst Jesse Divnich of EEDAR and Soraya Murray of the University of California at Santa Cruz for these additional perspectives.

Assassin’s Creed III: The critic’s review

• By Rus McLaughlin, GamesBeat staff writer
  

It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel like jumping through trees and stabbing random Englishmen. Hey, it’s not like you’d have a better idea.

Fortunately, Assassin’s Creed III (releasing today on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, Nov. 18 on Wii U, and Nov. 20 on PC) steps up as my morally flexible enabler. This time, the action moves up from Renaissance Italy to Revolutionary America as the Order of the Assassins and the Knights Templar bring their centuries-old conflict to the New World at the onset of the War for Independence. Their clashes in the 1700s revolve around the same “First Civilization” vault that 21st century assassin Desmond Miles hopes can somehow head off the impending apocalypse … scheduled for Dec. 21, 2012.

The key to activating those ancient technologies lies in the past. With the doomsday clock ticking down, Desmond once again enters the Animus to relive his ancestors’ adventures in professional murder and uncover the secrets they buried.

And so developer Ubisoft Montreal finally closes the book on the historical epic they started five years ago. The ride hasn’t always been smooth. As a franchise, Assassin’s Creed pulled off several incredible highs and sunk to a few disappointing lows (tower-defense minigames, anyone?). Perhaps then it’s fitting that Assassin’s Creed III, as the culminating chapter, does both.

Read the full GamesBeat review

Final critic’s score: 79/100

Assassin’s Creed III: The analyst’s review

• By Jesse Divnich, VP of insights and analysis, EEDAR
• Twitter: @JesseDivnich

Over the last three years, Assassin’s Creed’s success has mostly been stagnant, selling between 6 million to 8 million units every year, with no growth in its fan base. While most publishers wouldn’t complain about having such consistent and profitable success, Ubisoft challenged itself with a formidable task: Grow an existing franchise with multiple yearly iterations late in a console-generation cycle. To date, none of successful franchises have accomplished such, but that might change with Assassin’s Creed III.

The gameplay, multiplayer, and storyline are what you are expecting from an Assassin’s Creed game, and at face value, it would seem the series is in for yet another stagnant year. However, the key difference with Assassin’s Creed III is its pop-culture relevancy—the 2012 United States presidential election.

Assassin’s Creed III’s storyline is entirely structured around the bloodshed, politics, and heroism that created this country, and it is no coincidence that Assassin’s Creed III’s release date coincides with the election. It truly was a brilliant strategy, one that will no doubt capture the attention of millions of more gamers who would have otherwise written Assassin’s Creed III off as yet another iteration in the stagnant series.

While some concerns were raised that a United States setting may alienate European gamers (over 50 percent of Assassin’s Creed’s fan base is in Europe), many have forgotten the critical role that Europe played in the foundation of our country, and that was not lost on the developers as European’s involvement in the Revolutionary War is present and prevalent.

What is even most spectacular is that Ubisoft didn’t need to completely overhaul its game design nor wait for a new console cycle, which is often what has to be present in order for a brand to grow (think Call of Duty: Modern Warfare). It’s truly a brilliant move on Ubioft’s end; one that executives and producers across the industry should make note of.

Final analyst’s score: 90/100

Assassin’s Creed III: The academic’s review

• By Soraya Murray, Ph.D, assistant professor, University of California at Santa Cruz
• Twitter: @sorayamurray

The first descriptors that leap to mind when playing Assassin’s Creed III are adjectives like “stunning,” “cinematic,” “sweeping,” and maybe even “grand.” And those are fair characterizations — certainly no exaggeration — as Ubisoft has spared neither expense nor creative energy on its large-scale period piece, albeit one that is punctuated by spectacular moments of science fiction. Though it occupies a different genre (historical action-adventure), you’ll bona fide moments of the sublime in Assassin’s Creed III that recall the fantasy game Shadow of the Colossus for its similar qualities of massive scale, vast unexplored space, artistic richness, emotional expressiveness—and, of course, the ability to whistle for your trusty steed.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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That’s when I said to myself, “Who is going to save Nintendo?”

New IP the lifeblood of kids media

Be it games, films, cartoons, or characters, a kids’ media company needs to continuously create new IP to connect with each new generation. What no one ever brings up when discussing Nintendo is that they have not created a breakout IP or character in over 20 years. Their hit games are rehashes and different variations of Mario Bros, Metroid, and The Legend of Zelda. This appeals to people like me who grew up on these titles. We fanboys, turned fan-parents, endlessly debate about which Zelda is the best and argue how Nintendo messed up with Metroid: Other M. We anxiously await  each new release as everyone now does for Apple products.

However, our kids could care less. They have no connection or legacy to Mario and Luigi. This was reinforced on a recent trip through Times Square. Kids were lining up to take pics of someone in an Angry Birds costume while Mario and Luigi dejectedly looked on.

Games can no longer live on one system

Nintendo’s adamant stance on only allowing their characters on its own hardware is just making it dig its own grave. Who cares how good the Nintendo 3DS is if the new generation has no exposure to Nintendo’s IP. Kids 2 to 8 aren’t playing the Wii or DS; they are on iPods, iPhones, and iPads. If you want to attract users to your hardware, you need more software from third-party developers. Game developers have ditched Nintendo and gone for more open mobile platforms like iOS and Android. The only draw for Nintendo’s hardware is its own games based on its own characters. Again, this only appeals to Nintendo fans who are 35 and up, hardly the group to build a kids brand around.

Generational evolutions of WWE and Disney

This strategy of Nintendo targeting fan boys who grew up on its product is interesting because it actually relates to World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), who came to prominence at the same time as Nintendo in the mid 1980s. The 10-year-olds back then grew up on Hulk Hogan and the cartoonish side of wrestling (it was also called the World Wrestling Federation then). But in the 90s, these kids got into their 20s, and the WWF started faltering. Vince McMahon and co. took notice and made their product appeal to a young adult audience by introducing them to Stone Cold Steve Austin and The Rock. The Attitude Era essentially saved the WWE. Then that audience entered their 30s, had their own kids, and got too busy to watch WWE. Once again, WWE took notice, toned down their product and went PG to get the new generation of 10-year-olds.

Disney Animation is also a good example of what could happen to Nintendo. In the late 90s, Disney’s films became stagnant and failed to produce lasting breakout IP. Fortunately, Pixar came along and created new, refreshing characters everyone loved. Disney’s own IP became so dated that 5 year olds today are surprised when they see Mickey Mouse in a cartoon. They just see him as a logo. Go to any Disney store or theme park and it’s Pixar’s IP that the kids are latching on to. If Disney hadn’t bought Pixar, its entire Animation division could very well be closed. And without new IP, it can’t sell merchandise, books, and clothes that really keep the House of Mouse growing. Its stock prices tell a great story. Since Disney’s purchase of Pixar in 2006, its stock has gone from $30 to over $50. Since the peak of the Wii and DS in 2008, Nintendo’s stock price has gone from $71 to $15.

Can Nintendo find its own Pixar?

But Nintendo is stubborn and will not acknowledge their weaknesses. If it did, it would have gone and bought up some of the studios that were creating hits on the mobile platforms. Everyone knows how hard it is to find and nurture talent, so when it comes available, you should grab it.

Nintendo needs to sell more hardware in order to keep selling the old IP that made it rich. But you need new IP to grow and attract new kids to buy the hardware you sell. But without new IP, your hardware and old IP becomes irrelevant. It’s going to be interesting to see the consumer response to Nintendo’s new console, the Wii U. If it fails to connect, Nintendo may need to find its own Pixar or reinvent itself as the WWE did.

Pavel Bains is a former chief financial officer/chief operating officer with 10 years of experience delivering top games for Disney, EA, Activision, and Atari. He now is the CEO of Storypanda, a 500 Startups-backed iPad publishing platform for children’s books. 

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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This is, by far, my favorite feature we’ve done in my (admittedly short) time at GamesBeat and VentureBeat. Has the process taken a lot of time? Yes. Did we get a lot of response from developers eager to “Pitch us in one Tweet?” We sure did. And it’s totally worth the work of sifting through all those entries.

“Pitch us in one Tweet” is grounded in the foundations of our publication: finding new startups and telling the world about them. I’m proud that we’re doing this, and I’m eager to see the finished products that come from these pitches.

And after reading the entire series, I hope you are, too.

The game: Sir Gentleman Backyard Rumble

Availability: In development for iOS (iPhone and iPod Touch) with a release date no earlier than March 2013.

The pitch: @MattStenquist: “T-rexs with miniguns that shoot rainbows while panda bears with lightsabers attack you on flying narwhals.”

Why I picked this: You really must ask me this after reading the pitch? Who wouldn’t pick it? The only things that could make this better are monkeys with rocket launchers riding sharks with laser beams on their heads.

What is it? Sir Gentleman (this sounds classier than calling it “Backyard Rumble” or “SGBR”) is what happens when you mix capture the flag with the wackiness of Cartoon Network’s hit animated show Adventure Time. Power-ups drop from the sky to give your character a hand as you battle for the flag. Other players sometime drop coins. Gather this currency and use it to buy new characters: wackos such as “Bamboo Panda,” “Kangaroo Joe,” and “Unicorn Narwal.” Each of these crazies possesses special abilities. Sir Gentleman Rexasaurus sports miniguns on his back that fire killer rainbows instead of bullets. Bamboo Panda hits hooligans (aka “other players”) with a bamboo stick. The game comes in two modes: survival/high score and progression.

Oh, and cheeseburgers fall out of the sky.

Is it good? Sir Gentleman sounds wackier than your Aunt Francine after a fifth of whiskey (OK, maybe my Aunt Francine, not yours), but since it’s only in development, I can’t tell you if it’s good or bad. (The screenshot above is mostly still placeholder art.) Figures that I’d be the one to pick the game that isn’t ready yet. Talk to me after March 2013’s Games Developer Conference. Stenquist plans to have it ready by then to show it around.

Look for it: On Apple’s App Store once it comes out.

For more info: http://www.dig.ital.me or follow Stenquist on Twitter.

Check back tomorrow for the #8 finalist in our “Pitch us in one Tweet” contest. You can follow this tag link to catch all of the top 10.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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We’ve all heard it many times now: Women are gaming more than ever before, making up more than 50 percent of the gaming audience. And while developers have started catching on, developers still have a lot to learn about the intersection of women and gaming; namely, how do different demographics view gaming, and what are the ripple effects that stem from these perspectives?

Grannies and gaming

What a difference a couple of generations makes. When many of today’s grandmothers were kids, console games hadn’t hit stores yet, let alone the homes of virtually every middle class family. And the grandmothers of a couple of generations ago were entertaining themselves with card games and civic clubs and introducing their granddaughters to Barbie dolls, which first hit shelves in 1959.

Today, it’s an entirely new world with markedly different forms of entertainment, and this has affected grandmas in many ways. For starters, it’s a lot harder to steer grandkids’ attention away from the gadgets they’re playing with. This has pushed many senior women to learn how to use these devices themselves, so they don’t feel so disconnected from their little loved ones. And as more grandmothers have learned to play games, and the majority do so via consoles or desktop computers, they have discovered many benefits. Research indicates that gaming for seniors counters depression, improves balance, provides exercise, and improves mental health. Knowing this, some senior centers and nursing homes now house Nintendo Wii’s and have online gaming competitions rather than the traditional Bingo night.

For grandmothers, gaming has also helped to bridge the technology gap in their lives. Games with simple navigation, like solitaire, can be a senior’s first foray into the “online” world and show them to learn how to use a mouse, a touchpad or a touchscreen. Slightly more advanced senior women have delved into the world of casual games via Facebook and enjoy playing puzzle games like Words With Friends for the challenge and mental stimulation and its social elements. These experiences with technology spill over to other devices and help older women feel better about purchasing e-readers, tablets, and other devices.

Mommas and gaming

Even more than their older counterparts, moms are reaping the benefits from gaming. Like grandmothers, moms use gaming as an important tactic to bond with their kids, especially children between the ages of 8-12. They play online cooking or dress-up games with their daughters and play console or online adventure games with their boys as a way of spending quality time with them (and to monitor what they’re doing online). The on-the-go mom also uses gaming as a way to entertain their young child when they need a moment of distraction.

In addition to connecting with their kids, moms are playing games for then own entertainment as well. For this strapped-for-time audience, gaming has become a way to break away from the daily hassles of life. Moms largely enjoys games that require a only short burst of time and with a defined beginning and end. Online puzzle games such as crosswords and word scrambles or strategy games resonate best with this audience. Moms are not as social as their mothers or daughters when it comes to online games, though, because they largely view the entertainment as “me time.”

Even though there are many benefits to gaming, including stress relief and mental stimulation, many moms don’t like to discuss their gaming habits because they feel embarrassed by this “guilty pleasure.” As such, gaming companies need to stress marketing messages that convey how gaming is good for this audience, in the hopes that they will grow more comfortable with sharing more about their gaming habits.

Girls and gaming

The line “girls just wanna have fun” rings especially true when it comes to tween gaming, and developers have caught on to this notion. Unlike their male counterparts, girls opt for intensely social games that feature characters. For girls, gaming is about connecting with like-minded spirits, acting out future lives, and experimenting with different styles and looks, rather than head-to-head competition. If competitive elements are involved with the game, such as posting high scores, it should be done within the framework of these social games and negative points shouldn’t be awarded (scores that can only go up).

As a result of gaming, girls can experience new worlds that they can then apply to their own lives. For example, many girls are using fashion games to experiment with their own sense of style, and this helps them pick out their new back-to-school outfits when shopping with mom. Girls are also role playing as chefs, entrepreneurs and veterinarians, which help them better understand and identify their own talents and interests.

Smart money: Marketing to women

The net of all of this for the gaming industry is that as more women and girls venture into online gaming and spend more time doing so, developers and marketers need to understand that a certain psychology exists not just for women as a whole but that different age groups approach gaming in different ways. Many positive ripple effects stem from women and girls gaming, and the more the gaming industry can identify and promote these benefits, the more likely they are to grow these very coveted audiences.

Oscar Diele is the chief marketing officer of Spil Games, a global leader in online gaming. Spil Games owns the No. 1 tween girls gaming platform, GirlsgoGames. He has previously held senior management roles at other online media, ecommerce, and entertainment industry organizations, including TomTom and eBay. Diele is currently based in Amsterdam.

Image Credit: Floral City Public Library, Floral City, Fla.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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As the former publisher of Saturday Night Magazine, a traditional print magazine, and currently head of publishing, licensing & distribution at SGN (Social Gaming Network), I have experienced the shift in the publisher-to-content-developer relationship across the board. As such, I can tell you that what we’re seeing in the mobile/social games business today is something that we’ve seen before in other content mediums.

Historically, the publishing model for games, and most industries for that matter, was quite simple: One party makes the content, and another party markets and distributes the content. It’s the common theory taught in business school, the principle of specialization: that groups are better off specializing and “trading” based on one’s comparative advantage.

We have seen shifts in this publisher/content developer relationship in the music, film, book, and magazine industries as digital distribution models opened channels for content holders to reach their respective markets directly. The video game business is no different.

The major change? Distribution, distribution, distribution.

The case for content

The key difference in today’s environment is that the publisher no longer entirely controls digital distribution channels and, even worse, distribution is readily available to content holders. Just look at the music business: Napster and MP3s took distribution out of the hands of the record labels and made music readily available to consumers. Not long after, websites and services such as MySpace, iTunes, and Amazon enabled musicians to speak and market themselves directly to customers, essentially eliminating the traditional record labels and giving rise to popular indie artists.

The same took place in the magazine business, where the publisher historically controlled or owned the distribution channel. Content producers, aka writers, were at the mercy of the publishers who controlled the media and medium. But now, with that crazy thing called the World Wide Web, writers can distribute their content directly to consumers, instantly and for free. The speed at which information is processed makes the morning newspaper old news before the presses even fire up.

Now we’re seeing this affect the games industry. In the past, the major game publishers controlled the consoles or were large enough to fund the manufacturing and distribution of game cartridges, and thus the content maker/publisher relationship made for one happy family. But now Facebook, Apple, Google, and Amazon, among other daily entrants such as the Desura, the digital download service for independent games, have flipped this model upside-down. Any yahoo can develop and distribute their own game, reaching millions of potential customers practically instantly and for free (minus the app store royalties, but there is no real upfront cost). Just as the music and magazine industry experienced, distribution has been ripped from the game publishers’ hands, and content developers now have a direct line to customers. Essentially, the barrier to entry has been removed.

Thus, content is king, and death to the publisher, right? Not so fast.

The case for publishing

Just because it’s now “easier” for developers to release their own titles, both the mobile and social gaming space is incredibly crowded and competitive. Yahoos launch games every day, hundreds daily on Apple’s app store alone. Yet nearly two-thirds of apps on the app store are so-called “Zombie Apps” that generate no downloads, a good number of which are smaller developers who poured their heart and soul into developing the content. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some diamonds in the rough, but we’ll never find them because of the lack of monetary and/or marketing support.

You can roll the dice and do everything on your own: develop, distribute, market, and promote your own game. Or you can stick with the principle of specialization and focus on what you do best while relying on others to handle the rest. As a game developer, your time is better spent developing games than optimizing marketing plans, leveraging CPIs, and analyzing LTVs. Publishers continue to play a major role in the ecosystem, providing support, best practices, brand value, funding, access to the store operators (for promotional opportunities, tech support, and new feature sets), an existing user base, marketing dollars, and marketing expertise. As this business matures, the publisher’s role will only become more valuable. So how do we all get along?

The answer is that Publishing 2.0 is a greater collaboration between parties of specialization.

No longer does the relationship end when a developer hands their game to the publisher. If anything, this is when the relationship begins. It takes communication and a true partnership. With this new form of distribution, speed-to-market and live information has created new opportunities in the ecosystem. As publishers pivot to fill this void by providing real-time data and analysis, developers need to recognize this shift and thus adapt their development cycles. Publishers should work more closely with developers to provide support with user data, analytics, monetization strategies, game feedback, and coordinated promotional plans, while developers need to create flexible schedules in order to adjust to live consumer feedback and operate as a more service-oriented business.

Neither have a strong case?

The biggest issue here is economics. With distribution platforms taking 30 percent off the top and publishers taking anywhere between 30 percent to 50 percent, that leaves the developer with a remaining 20 percent to 40 percent — if they’re lucky. It doesn’t take a mathematician to understand the share of a $0.99 game for developers and publishers, before any marketing dollars are spent. Simply put, with developers working hard on developing a game and publishers making heavy investments (commonly north of $1 per user), it becomes very clear that even in a Publisher 2.0 world, it’s incredibly hard to turn a profit.

Therefore, goals and expectations need to be more accurately aligned prior to entering into a partnership, and both parties must be prepared for the outcome to change. Will the developer support the game on an ongoing basis? If so, for how long? What does that road map look like? Is the studio prepared to make adjustments based on user and publisher feedback? What does the publisher’s marketing plan look like, and how does it align with the type of game and its target audience? What baseline commitment is the publisher willing to guarantee on all levels of the marketing plan, including existing user engagement, acquisitions, advertising, PR, and so on? Can the publisher scale to take advantage of the market opportunity if the game is a hit? These are just a few of the questions every developer and publisher should consider in a Publisher 2.0 engagement. Ultimately, relationships and specialization still matter, and those that “tie the knot” the best will continue to succeed and rise above the fray.

Michael Ritter is the vice president of licensing and distribution at Social Gaming Network, the developer of popular social and mobile games such as Fluff Friends Rescue, Rescue Reef, Bingo Blingo, Jewels of the Amazon, and Skies of Glory. Follow him on Twitter at @Ritter83 or @SGNGames.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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It’s been a big two days for the Ouya console. Less than eight hours after its Kickstarter listing debuted yesterday, the open-gaming console smashed a record for the crowdfunding site by pulling in $1 million faster than any previous project. And today, it surpassed $3 million as GamesBeat interviewed its designer, Yves Béhar.

We posted our exclusive interview with Behar earlier today. Here’s GamesBeat’s Kat Bailey talking to the noted designer about “The People’s Box.”

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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When Microsoft first announced its Surface tablet, many wondered how it might work with games for the Xbox 360 (or any future Xbox console). Microsoft’s president for interactive entertainment business had a morsel of insight about this today.

Speaking during a panel at VentureBeat’s GameBeat 2012 conference, Microsoft exec Don Mattrick mentioned that the upcoming first-person shooter Halo 4 will work with Surface. VentureBeat reporter John Koetsier confirmed this with Mattrick after the panel.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Those of us who follow video games know that a mind-boggling number of people play Zygna titles daily. But the breakdown of player stats shows that the social-game developer not only has a supersized pool of players but likely gobbles up huge hunks of the world’s productivity each day.

Here’s the breakdown for several of Zygna’s most popular games.

Zygna Poker:

• Has 33.8 million active players (per month). To put this into context: Throw in 4 million more people and you have the population of California in 2010.
• Has 61 million likes on Facebook. That’s up from 51 million likes from Inside Facebook’s Fall 2011 list of the 25 most-liked Facebook pages. The only page with more likes? Facebook itself.
• Sees gamers play 55 million hands daily.
• “Pays out” 16 trillion in chips daily. If each chip represents a dollar, that pays off the U.S. national debt in…less than a day, with a little more than 200 billion chips to spare.

Zynga Slingo:

• Has seen players make 23 billion spins since its February debut.
• Has “paid out” more than 2.2 trillion in chips.

Zynga Bingo:

• Has seen users play 368 million bingo cards since its February debut.
• Has had 69 million “bingos” called.
• Has 10 million rounds of bingo played daily.

Bubble Safari:

• Boasts of more than 6 million daily players.
• Has seen players pop 115 billion bubbles since its May debut.
• Has had users share more than 24 million bubbles.
• Has had 260 million on-fire moments.

Source: Zynga