Stay on top of all our E3 2013 coverage here.

Four of the upcoming Wii U games announced during the Nintendo Direct webcast this morning will be available to demo at certain Best Buy stores.

Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime confirmed that you can try out Mario Kart 8, Super Mario 3D World, Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze, and The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker at participating locations Wednesday and Saturday. The company revealed three of games (we already knew about Wind Waker) during the Electronic Entertainment Expo, which began today.

You can find a list of Best Buy stores taking part in the event here.

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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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Stay on top of all our E3 2013 coverage here.

Nintendo is delaying the releases of Wii Party U and Wii Fit U, as announced in the Nintendo Direct webcast today during the Electronic Entertainment Expo.

The publisher wants Wii Party U to be the definitive party game on Wii U. It will include both standard board games and party games that use both GamePad and Wiimote control schemes. Nintendo also confirmed 80 new minigames for the title, including “tabletop” games that play directly on the GamePad. These different forms of gameplay will ensure that everyone can join in regardless of skill.

Instead of launching this summer, Wii Party U is coming in October. Nintendo requires more time to focus on development.

Nintendo also wants to take more time to add new features to Wii Fit U, which is coming this December as opposed to this spring/summer.

“After the Wii U launched, [we] couldn’t release games as smoothly as we have planned,” said Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata. “To those of you that have been eagerly awaiting these titles, I appreciate your patience.”

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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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Stay on top of all our E3 2013 coverage here.

Nintendo has revealed new details about the HD remaster of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker for Wii U today during its Electronic Entertainment Expo edition of its Nintendo Direct webcast.

The original Wind Waker debuted on the GameCube in March 2003. After 10 years, Nintendo is bringing it back in 1080p. It’s also refined certain gameplay elements and introduced new ones.

The Wind Waker will be available on the Wii U this October. It’s also coming to the Nintendo eShop as a download title.

Nintendo has added shaders to improve visual expression and has fine-tuned texture graphics. It’s hoping this will transform Wind Waker and its cel-shaded visuals so that it looks “reborn” on the Wii U.

Nintendo can’t share full information about its changes, but Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata said sailing on the open sea would be faster now due to adjustments to the game.

Using the Miiverse, players can also write messages and take screenshots that will “wash up” on the shores of other players’ games like messages in a bottle. This replaces the original Tingle Tuner feature, which allowed for assisted play by connecting the Game Boy Advance to the GameCube. Iwata said players can acquire the Tingle Bottle item, which allows them to connect to the Miiverse.

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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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Stay on top of all our E3 2013 coverage here.

Sony paraded out its lineup of independent game developers at its pre-Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) press briefing in Los Angeles today. Their games will make their console debut on the PlayStation 4, and they’ll be viewable in the recently introduced Indie Section of the PlayStation Store.

The company wants “to continue to lead the console space as the most open and inclusive platforms for developers,” said Adam Boyes, Sony Computer Entertainment America’s vice president of publisher and developer relations. Indie developers will be able to self-publish their own content on PlayStation systems, including the PS4.

Sony confirmed 10 developers whose indie games are coming to the new console, which launches “later this year.” The first is puzzle game The Witness from designer Jonathan Blow, who made Braid.

Supergiant Games, the creator of the hit game Bastion, is also working on its next release. Turn-based strategy title Transistor is hitting PS4 early next year. Director Amir Rao and writer Greg Kasavin took the stage to show off the world of Cloudbank.

In addition, Klei Entertainment, responsible for Shank and Mark of the Ninja, is bringing its open-world survival game Don’t Starve from PC to PS4.

Another indie, Tribute Games, is delivering the Metal Slug-esque Mercenary Kings to PS4. It features the same style of pixel graphics that we saw in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: The Game, another one of Tribute’s titles.

Young Horses is adapting Octodad: Dadliest Catch, a weird, slapstick game where players (try to) control an octopus passing as human. And from Switchblade Monkeys comes Secret Ponchos, a spaghetti western with shooter elements.

Developer Ragtag Studios, comprised of three industry veterans, is making a stealth-action puzzler where you command a zombie army. It’s called Ray’s the Dead. Another veteran-based developer, Red Barrels, is releasing the single-player horror game Outlast, which it also designed for PC.

Plus, Oddworld Inhabitants is working on a full remake of the first Oddworld title and dubbing it Oddworld: New N’ Tasty!.

Finally, 17-Bit Studios (maker of Skulls of the Shogun) is creating the side-scrolling open-world shooter Galaxy.

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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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Stay on top of all our E3 2013 coverage here.

Microsoft showed off a colorful, community-based game called Project Spark that’s the Xbox One’s exclusive version of LittleBigPlanet at its pre-Electronic Entertainment Expo briefing this morning in Los Angeles.

Dave McCarthy of Microsoft Studios and designer Claude Jerome demonstrated how players can build worlds and alter gameplay on the fly. Using the Xbox One and Windows 8, players can share content with anyone on virtually any screen.

Project Spark features Kinect voice functionality, which enables players to speak commands — shaping and constructing mountains, rivers, moats, bridges, textures, and more. They can even set the specific time of day. Players use what looks like a magic paintbrush to alter the landscape in real time as they imagine colorful, lush worlds at “the touch of a button.”

This new world-builder also enables players to add in objects and assign them behaviors. Microsoft showed how a simple rock could become animate by manipulating its “brain.” It hopped around and followed the player, who transformed it into a Rock Fighter and ultimately a Rock Mech.

McCarthy and Jerome stormed the grassy battlefield, assisting each other in combat. The onscreen characters launched fireballs and even manipulated the ground so that one could ride around on a cliff of earth as if it were an ocean wave. They could decide which types of enemies would attack their base, such as flying goblins and trolls.

Microsoft encourages gamers to think of Project Spark as both a blank canvas for creation and storytelling and as a way to build on and “remix” existing user-made content. You can play and share together.

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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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Stay on top of all our E3 2013 coverage here.

Updated at 11 a.m. with official info.

The Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) is going on now, and Spike TV host and video game journalist Geoff Keighley just confirmed that the Xbox One will launch in November.

I guess Xbox One launches in November! Guy from Rare just said it on the pre-show during Kinect Sports Rivals demo. #GTE3

— Geoff Keighley (@geoffkeighley) June 10, 2013

Microsoft has confirmed this information. The Xbox One will cost $499 and launch in 21 markets worldwide.

We’ll soon learn what Sony’s soft launch date looks like for the PlayStation 4.

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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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Piracy is the hated scourge of the game industry, but many people — like Russian hacker Barabus — believe it’s bad and do it anyway. Sometimes they even invent crazy justifications to mask that it’s theft. Unofficially releasing a PC port of the beat-em-up The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile, for instance, isn’t “stealing.” It’s a way to give back to developer Ska Studios and its fans.

Vampire Smile, which released in 2011, is the sequel to the 2009′s The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai. Both appeared exclusively on Xbox Live Arcade. Barabus believes it was OK to pirate and modify the game without Ska Studios’ permission because the developer wouldn’t lose any profits, anyway, according to Indie Statik. After all, the developer had no plans for a PC version, and a new platform release would only help more people find the game.

The hacker even blamed Ska Studios for not thinking of it first.

“The view was expressed that, with respect to the authors, it is not very nice to publish the game on the PC,” Barabus wrote on the gamedev.ru (via Google Translate). “I have to argue that the part of the authors are not very nice to publish the game exclusively for the Xbox 360, making it impossible for PC gamers to play such a great game.”

He added, “Piracy — yes, that is bad. On the other hand, we did not steal the game for the Xbox 360; we released it for the PC port. Given that the developers ignored the PC platform, about any loss of profit for them is not out of the question. After all, if they wanted to earn money, then the game would be issued on all available platforms. If the game came out on PC officially, then this thread would not exist.”

Designer James Silva said he had mixed reactions about the port, but ultimately he was OK with it — even “flattered,” he said.

@robotvevrything I’m not even mad, I’m impressed!

— James Silva (@Jamezila) June 4, 2013

“But I’m bewildered by the cracker’s attempt to justify the morality of it,” he told Indie Statik. “He assumes a lot about why Vampire Smile’s not on PC yet, and he could have cleared up a lot of those assumptions by just emailing me. I get that piracy is a service problem, but that’s a consequence, not a justification.”

@alejandrodaj @robotvevrything Yeah, I’m fine with letting it happen, but I’m annoyed at the entitlement/revenge angle.

— James Silva (@Jamezila) June 4, 2013

GamesBeat has reached out to Silva for comment.

Silva is currently working on a new beat-em-up called Charlie Murder with Microsoft Game Studios as publisher.

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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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Memories define who we are. They shape our futures and influence our decisions. They can also be the source of tremendous pain. If we could wipe away the bad and keep only the good, who would we be?

That’s the kind of question the action-adventure game Remember Me (out tomorrow for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC) seeks to answer through the setting of Neo-Paris in the year 2084. The corporation Memorize has created a remarkable brain implant called Sensen, which enables people to share and store their memories in a network. In the first few minutes, players go from listening to people praise the technology to witnessing the devastation it has caused.

When the female protagonist Nilin wakes up in a cell, we watch as her captor strips away her memories in an agonizing process. He misses a few. That makes her dangerous. Nilin is a talented memory hunter who can steal or “remix” people’s memories through their Sensen, and as a member of the rebel group the Errorists, she’s a threat to Memorize. With her mind still intact, a mysterious contact named Edge guides her out of prison and onto the streets where she can lead a revolution.

What you’ll like

An immersive sci-fi world
Remember Me’s opening moments are a powerful way to start out the game. As a disoriented Nilin staggers around the confinement facility, the camera follows her every unsteady movement, creating a sense of dizziness. Everything is a little too bright, and she encounters horror after horror: white rooms that house delirious inmates, a machine that rips the memories out of people’s heads, and even a menacing “coercive” robot that hunts down escapees. She leaves in a coffin — one of many mass-produced containers for the dead and still alive.

The vividness of the environment persists. Neo-Paris is a gorgeous city, its infrastructure part historical and part new — the street level littered with androids, neon lights, and holo-televisions. From the skyscraper vistas to the grimy underground, Remember Me is an atmospheric wonder. It feels well thought-out down to the lingo, which the characters constantly bandy about. The game tops that off with weird, futuristic-sounding music that’s different from anything you’ve likely heard before.

The story drives much of the game and introduces you to eccentrically named characters such as Johnny Greenteeth, Headache Tommy, and Bad Request, among others. Nilin sets out to save the suffering city from Memorize. Only she can reach the people responsible and either enact revenge or “remix,” aka rewrite, their memories — altering their roles in events to better suit the Errorists’ agenda. Without her own complete memories, however, she’s unsure whether what she’s doing is right.

The uncertainty makes the experience that much more compelling and enjoyable.

A deep combat system
While Remember Me is big on story, developer Dontnod Entertainment carefully balanced it with strong combat mechanics. Basically, players assemble combos in the Combo Lab menu. You have only four increasingly long, predetermined combinations of the X and Y buttons to toy with the entire game — you unlock these slowly, one at a time — but the real depth emerges with the Pressens. Think of these as the individual Xs and Ys that you can assign to each entry in a combination.

Pressens come in different forms: Power, Regen, Cooldown, and the rarer Chain. While Power Pressens deal a lot of damage, Regen regains health for Nilin every time she uses one in a combo. Cooldowns reset your S-Pressens (special moves) faster, and Chains magnify the effects of the Pressen that came before it in a combo. Players can mix and match to engineer any devastating combo they please — maybe one string that inflicts maximum damage or another that helps recover more health. Some arrangements can even grant bonus Procedural Mastering Points (PMP), which unlock forgotten Pressens. Think of them as level-ups that offer you even more ways to kick butt.

The inputs are always the same — a series of Xs and Ys — but the results vary. Longer combos are more deadly, too, as later Pressens take on more power.

Remember Me constantly adds new layers to the combat, and it takes the entire 10-hour game to see them all. Nilin can use S-Pressens to more effectively terminate the enemies around her. For example, Sensen Fury is very similar to free-flow in Batman: Arkham City, in which players can rapidly trash a number of baddies without losing stride. And Sensen R.I.P. (Rust in Pieces) turns all robots into allies that eventually self-destruct.

On top of this, Nilin can shoot foes with the Spammer weapon she acquires. It has a number of applications, such as breaking shields or weak environmental structures with its Junk Bolt enhancement. She can also use it to interact with the environment by opening doors, moving objects from afar, and so forth.

Frequent new challenges
Remember Me flavors its gameplay with various activities. Some minor missions involve tapping into people’s memories and activating their “Remembranes” (ghosts of themselves in the environment) to watch scenes from their past. This helps you bypass security and learn vital information.

You can also locate and collect different items. SAT Patches and Focus Boosts increase health and Focus (which fuels your S-Pressens), respectively. Those are useful. And Scaramechs — little white “bugs” that crawl on walls and emit a ticking noise — are fun to search for and kill for PMP bonuses.

Sometimes bosses and minibosses, especially, act as the perfect break from regular combat, challenging you to think fast and use your S-Pressens and other abilities in creative ways. It’s fun to hear a lumbering death robot roar and then tell you “it’s just a flesh wound” when its arm falls off. This is a Zorn, and I love him.

These fights do end with a few quick-time events, but fortunately, the title allots you plenty of time to press buttons in sequence, and you quickly get a feel for when these moments will happen. They shouldn’t catch you off-guard.

For some encounters, though, a little surprise could do some good.

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Text adventures were some of the earliest forms of video games, but we’ve come a long way since Hunt the Wumpus and Adventure. Some of today’s surviving pockets of the genre are visual novels and gamebooks — two very niche types of games that most people associate with tons of reading. They cringe at the idea and then go peruse libraries in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

Despite their name, these games aren’t all about text. Interactive fiction is perhaps a better classification. That misconception can hurt sales, so manipulating the genre to emphasize its versatility and flexibility could be the key to a more successful future.

The grim state of visual novels

Xseed Games knows a little about the merits and challenges of publishing visual novels in the United States.

“Similar to a good book, [visual novels] can totally engross you within that world as your mind has to get creative to fill in the blanks on everything that’s happening,” Xseed and Marvelous U.S.A. executive vice president Ken Berry told GamesBeat. “This works especially well in the horror genre, something that the Japanese do very well because it’s what you can’t see that’s the most horrifying.”

The first Corpse Party for PSP.

The first localized Corpse Party horror game, which released in 2011, “greatly outperformed” its sequel, Book of Shadows. Berry speculates that because the series switched from a perspective where players control an onscreen avatar to one that resembles a more traditional visual novel — with less direct interaction and player input — gamers were less interested.

Low sales forecasts have sometimes prevented Xseed from localizing more of these games, such as with Anata wo Yurusanai, which translates to “I will not forgive you.”

“It had an interesting story, branching storylines depending on player input, and the legendary [Final Fantasy composer] Nobuo Uematsu himself was in charge of the game’s music,” said Berry. The publisher passed it over because the overwhelming amount of translation work well exceeded what Xseed predicted it would make off the game.

How can companies alleviate these Western-specific problems?

Corpse Party: Book of Shadows.

“I’m really not sure, to be honest,” said Berry. “Manga in Japan is more popular than their counterpart comic books in the U.S., but both cultures have a history of associating pictures and art to help tell a written story. As Japan embraced digital technology to take it a step further, I don’t think many companies tried to do the same in the West, so perhaps it’s just a matter of being more exposed to that kind of storytelling format.”

Many developers have supplemented simple pictures with action and puzzles, which can help break up long stretches of reading — such as in Aksys Games’ popular title 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors or Capcom’s Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney series. However, it probably doesn’t help that visual novels often contain anime tropes (like the overused high school setting and blushing, androgynous characters) that can alienate many Western gamers and — in addition to the amount of reading — keep them from discovering what’s enjoyable about these titles.

Hope for the future

A little-known studio in Melbourne, Australia called Tin Man Games may have what it takes to breach the divide between reading and games.

Most recently, it released the digital “gamebook adventure” Judge Dredd: Countdown Sector 106 on Android (it hit iOS last year) and partnered with San Diego, Calif.-based Black Chicken Studios for the successful Kickstarter Holdfast. Its mobile game Trial of the Clone — by Zach Weiner, the author of the webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal — featured the voice narration of geek-culture idol Wil Wheaton (aka Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation). That in particular is a great example of how to popularize the genre, especially in a time when e-books are changing our expectations of how we interact with text.

Like visual novels, gamebook adventures involve much more than reading, and Tin Man’s digital versions of traditional — and entirely new — gamebooks remove much of the pen-and-paper calculations of choose-your-own-adventures, streamlining them for modern audiences.

Neil Rennison didn’t always think small. Before he started Tin Man Games and created its gamebook engine, he founded Fraction Studios, which has worked on hit racing franchises like Need for Speed. “I’d always had a bit of a love affair for gamebooks in the ’80s,” he told GamesBeat, explaining that he shifted focus because he needed a change. “They were the first kind of portable gaming. There were no Nintendo DSes to take on your holiday trips, so instead I took piles of these gamebooks with dice and pencils.”

Some of his favorites growing up were the Fighting Fantasy series. His first was Ian Livingstone’s Deathtrap Dungeon. “We’re actually publishing that book,” said Rennison. “We got the rights to it. So we’ll be publishing that this year, which is very odd. It’s kind of a pinch-yourself moment, really.”

Tin Man has adapted other Fighting Fantasy gamebooks like Blood of the Zombies and House of Hell — adding bookmarks, achievements, and other features. These might sound like embellishments on a tired genre, but Rennison reminds us of the impact these games — and in turn, other text adventures — have had on the medium as a whole.

“The weird thing is that when you play a modern computer game these days, it’s essentially the same decisions that you’re having to make, just not in a written form,” he said. “They’re in more of an action form, where you’ve got to [decide] which button combination you’ve got to make or which 3D room you got into next.

“Even though it’s an old kind of genre, it’s still so relevant to today’s game design principles. I’d even go as far as to say they set some of the wheels in motion to modern game design.”

Now gamebooks are borrowing elements from the very games they inspired. The Kickstarter project Holdfast, which has surpassed its target funding goal of $20,000, tells a story of “dwarven vengeance.” Its system verges on more role-playing-game complexity, taking the genre in a new direction.

It’s a challenge and just one way that these games can rope in a wider audience.

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When we were kids, jigsaw puzzles were those funny pictures of cats and national landmarks we put together at Grandma’s house, jamming the pieces in until they fit. Many of us have moved on to new hobbies, but now a team of developers at Montreal-based company Trinôme is reminding us why they’re still cool — by moving them off the table and on to mobile devices.

The project is a twist for the French company, which usually works with television and web shows. That’s actually what Puzzle Axe started as before Trinôme scrapped it into a game. This isn’t a totally new excursion for the group, however. Producer François Veillette has some background in making web-based games such as point-and-click adventures — a good basis for the “jigsaw meets adventure” Puzzle Axe — but this is the first professional venture into games for community manager Alphonse Hà.

“We think it’s going to reach an audience that likes to do puzzles, but it’s also going to reach an audience of people who don’t typically like puzzles,” said Hà.

Veillette and Hà showed GamesBeat some early footage of Puzzle Axe, which is still in development. Below are a few of the ways the team is redefining what we think of as jigsaw puzzles by turning them into interactive, fully animated adventures.

Puzzles that tell a story

Illustrator Samuel Boucher provided the concept art for 10 minutes of animated cutscenes interspersed across 25 puzzles. These short sequences lend context to the scenarios. Players witness how the princes Andylion and Noxious choose to use the two royal axes while their father is away on vacation. With the magical heirlooms, the brothers can either destroy or rebuild the world around them by breaking it into jigsaw pieces.

“Every puzzle mechanic has a link in what happens in the story and what emotions we want to convey to the audience,” said Veillette.

The levels follow the narrative. “In the story, you need to figure out who’s going to be the legitimate heir to the throne,” said Hà. “That’s why you go down the staircase to go into the crypt to meet with the Oracle” — one of several characters that players meet in the game who also triggers the whole adventure.

“Puzzle is kind of the natural way of interacting with your fingers,” he said. “And on top of this, with the digital aspect of it, you can do so much more that’s interactive [than just] putting pieces together.”

Cool physics

As players explore the kingdom, they interact with its architecture in various ways. “Almost every puzzle has a new mechanic in it,” said Veillette.

One puzzle tasks the player with exploring a portion of the castle by lighting and building a staircase shrouded in darkness. Players must place torches at certain points to be able to see the rest of the room, which isn’t confined to one frame. It keeps going down — a jigsaw puzzle that expands and comes to life through animation.

This was Veillette’s favorite for its “purity,” he said. “I like it because it explains really well that there’s a new twist in the jigsaw puzzles.”

Another puzzle in the crypt involves constructing a glass ceiling under the pressures of gravity. “There’s a right order to put the pieces,” he said. “You cannot start building from the top because it’s going to fall down. So you’ve got to go from the base and then build, build, build.”

Monsters battles

Puzzle Axe contains a few puzzles that feature monsters — like a rotten chicken-leg beast that the Oracle summons to test the brothers’ mettle.

“With your finger, you just tap on the monster, and the monster falls out into jigsaw puzzle pieces,” said Hà. “And then after that, you can rebuild [him] with other pieces.”

Eventually, he becomes a friendly creature. The same concept applies to a storm scene at sea, where players change angry clouds into happy ones.

Through the dual animation, the monster becomes what Hà called a “two-faced version” of itself.

“There are different ways to play with this one,” said Veillette. “You can choose to destroy everything in the screen and build it, but it’s much easier to destroy just small parts. So you see half of the rotten chicken leg and half of it which is well done. So it’s really funny to see the combination of those two images together, and the animation makes them fit together.

“At the end, it’s a happy chicken leg, and you eat him,” he said, laughing.

Rock ‘n’ roll

Another puzzle involves arranging identically shaped pieces by listening to the music notes they produce, which come from four different instruments.

“When you hear the melody … it’s because you click on the axe to hear it. So it’s like a magical axe,” said Veillette.

Players have to rely on sound rather than sight to solve the puzzle. Hà considers it the most challenging one.

“Every piece is the same shape, and you really have to go with the ear, and there’s a lot of different sounds,” he said. “And usually [with] jigsaw puzzles, your reaction is to go for whatever is visual. You get visual cues, and that’s how you put things together. But this is completely different.”

The world is your jigsaw

Players also construct images from objects that don’t resemble typical jigsaw pieces. One scenario takes place underwater, where players put together scraps of a boat, which bobs to the surface. But before they can, they have to figure out how to prevent a fish from darting out of its cave and wrecking it.

“It’s like a puzzle within a jigsaw puzzle,” said Hà.

Veillette also demonstrated how players navigate a maze of their own creation by forming a path across the screen. The “labyrinth,” as he called it, grows with every new selection. Players may encounter dead ends or have to cross intersections by choosing the right pieces.

The power of touch

At one point, Andylion emerges from the castle to find a mouse named Bob trapped in a cage. To free him, players fill a bowl with monsters by building up the picture.

What’s cool, though, is that as you move pieces around the screen, the eyes of the creatures inside the cage follow your finger.

“This has nothing to do with gameplay,” said Veillette, adding, “You see that detail, and this is some funny detail that adds up to the overall vibe.”

Another mysterious element is a butterfly that flutters around the screen. It has a special role in the puzzle. There are a lot of these little moments, said Veillette. “Sometimes it’s just small stuff like that.”

“With the iPad, with the touch devices, mobiles — whether it’s iPhone or any other Android device — it doesn’t really take advantage of the full power of the touch yet,” said Hà, in reference to other puzzle games on mobile. “Angry Birds is nice, but that’s something you could easily do with a mouse and a cursor.” There aren’t enough games out there that maximize this potential.

“To make a game is like a conversation we have with people,” said Veillette. “You’ve got to give them something different and take them by surprise.”

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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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Updated on May 22 at 4:34 p.m. PST to include Ryse.

For more on the Xbox One reveal, check out our complete coverage.

Ubisoft, Square Enix, and other companies have confirmed a host of new games for Microsoft’s upcoming all-in-one games-and-entertainment console, the Xbox One. Microsoft said today that it would be releasing 15 exclusive titles, eight of which are new properties, in the first year of launch.

Ubisoft in particular is planning a good many titles. It’s promising “at least” six releases in the system’s first 12 months. Action-adventure games Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag and Watch Dogs are due out later this year, which is when Xbox One is set to debut. Both are multiplatform titles. The rest are a mix of new entries in existing series, new intellectual properties, and digital titles, according to a press release.

Square Enix and Eidos Montreal have confirmed the reboot of the stealth game Thief for Xbox One as well as PlayStation 4 and PC in 2014.

Alan Wake and Max Payne developer Remedy Entertainment is making a game called Quantum Break [above] exclusively for Xbox One. Activision announced the new multiplatform Call of Duty: Ghosts, which features storytelling from Stephen Gaghan, who wrote the screenplays for the award-winning films Traffic and Syriana. You can watch the new trailers and videos from the Xbox Reveal show below.

Another exclusive Xbox One title is Crytek’s Ryse, which features “controller-based gameplay enhanced by Kinect.”

Forza Motorsport 5 is also in the works from publisher Microsoft Game Studios. The racing series has long been exclusive to Xbox. In addition, EA Sports is releasing four titles: FIFA 14, Madden NFL 25, NBA Live 14, and EA Sports UFC, all of which use the new game engine Ignite. It “enhances the human intelligence of athletes” through their movements, which boast even more depth in animation. Take a look at the engine in action below.

EA’s games will release on Xbox One within the first 12 months of the console’s launch. Madden NFL 25 will also be available on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 on Aug. 27. FIFA 14 is coming to these platforms and more, including PC, at an undisclosed date. All four games are also making their way to the PS4.

Electronic Arts and DICE’s Battlefield 4 is scheduled for release on Oct. 29 on PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 and is arriving later on Xbox One and PlayStation 4. And Bungie’s upcoming new property, the action-role-playing first-person shooter Destiny, is also coming to the Xbox One in addition to PS4, Xbox 360, and PS3.

Some of these are hitting Xbox One first though Microsoft has not set official release dates for them or the console. We’ll update this post with more games as the news rolls in.

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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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Blizzard Entertainment forced a major shutdown of its gold and real-money auction houses in Diablo III on Wednesday after a mishap with coding caused a gold-duplication bug that players exploited for their own benefit. Now the houses and all gold trading are back in action, and Blizzard has taken what it considers to be an honest and positive approach to cleaning up the mess it started.

John Hight, the production director for Diablo III, took to the game’s forums today to inform players that it’s resolved the problem. He admitted that the bug came from a code oversight in Patch 1.0.8, which went live earlier this week.

“The bug was the result of a coding error that was exposed when we increased the gold stack size from 1 million to 10 million,” wrote Hight. “This resulted in an overflow on cancelled auctions that yielded a greater amount of gold in return. Only a relatively small number of players had the billions of gold necessary to exploit the bug, and only 415 of those players chose to use this exploit for personal gain.”

Blizzard was able to deploy the patch glitch-free in other regions because players reported the exploit hours after the patch hit the Americas.

“While this was happening, we locked accounts that appeared to be exploiting the bug as well as collaborators that held gold or items for the exploiters,” wrote Hight. “Once we confirmed that an account was involved in this exploit, we either banned or rolled back the account depending on their activity.”

Hight also explained why Blizzard decided against a complete rollback of the servers, which many players pushed for. “The vast majority of players did not participate in the exploit, and we didn’t like the idea of punishing them for the bad behavior of a few people,” he wrote. “… Many players made significant accomplishments in the game that required time and dedication, and we felt it was worth the work involved to try to preserve these efforts and go after the exploiters instead.”

Blizzard is now working to remove the duplicated gold from the in-game economy “through targeted audits and account actions.” The task is 85 percent complete, and the company is taking measures to prevent similar exploits from happening in the future.

It will also be donating all proceeds from the faulty auctions — including transaction fees and money it’s intercepted from culpable players’ sales — to Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals, which has raised more than $4.7 billion for 170 children’s hospitals across the United States and Canada in the past 30 years.

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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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Updated at 5:10 p.m. with new details about the exploit, an update on the auction houses, and a response from Blizzard.

Blizzard rolled out the latest patch for action-role-playing game Diablo III yesterday, but the update has created a serious glitch that has caused players to unfairly reap massive amounts of gold through the auction house. To curb the issue, the developer has shut down both the gold and real-money houses for maintenance.

Patch 1.0.8, which implemented a number of different game changes and bug fixes, spawned a gold duplication bug that Blizzard caught on to hours after its release. The company took both auction houses — controversial additions to Diablo III when it launched last year in May — offline to help “troubleshoot [the problem] in a more stable environment while preventing further exploiting,” wrote community manager “Lylirra” in the game’s official forums. Blizzard was unable to provide an estimation on when they would return, but it has since instituted a fix, and testing is now complete.

Another community manager responded to the following image of a 371 trillion gold dupe, where “a user saw fit to greatly exaggerate a screenshot by creating a photo-edited image. It’s important to call this out because some players may believe this image to be real, when it truly isn’t.”

The company told GamesBeat in a statement this evening, “The auction house services will be restored as soon as the situation is resolved. As always, maintaining a stable, safe, and fun gaming experience for legitimate players is a top priority for us, and we’ll continue to monitor activity on Battle.net and take action as needed.”

Blizzard said on its forums that it would review suspected accounts and respond appropriately, pointing to its policies on related issues, which clearly state that bugs that “provide an unfair advantage to certain players or negatively affect the game itself” are subject to penalty. That includes a verbal warning, temporary suspension, or complete account closure. Reports indicate that Blizzard has banned guilty players and refunded real-money spending, according to Gamasutra.

It has also reduced the stack size for gold in the real-money auction house from 10 million back to 1 million — an upgrade in Patch 1.0.8 — until it can squash the bug preventing stacks from displaying correctly. This particular patch note was apparently the source of the problem. Reddit user TyroPyro speculates that Blizzard’s “[real-money auction house] gold-selling code wasn’t written to handle numbers over 2,147,483,648 properly, and the result was duplicate gold being added to people’s stashes. … I think it was coded at the last minute and not really tested.”

Blizzard has also decided not to roll back the servers, which is a move that may not sit well with some players.

“We feel that this is the best course of action given the nature of the dupe, how relatively few players used it, and the fact that its effects were fairly limited within the region,” Lylirra said in the forums. “We’ve been able to successfully identify players who duplicated gold by using this specific bug, and are focusing on these accounts to make corrections.”

Lylirra added, “While this is a time-consuming and very detailed process, we believe it’s the most appropriate choice given the circumstances. We know that some of you may disagree, but we feel that performing a full roll back would impact the community in an even greater way, as it would require significant downtime as well as revert the progress legitimate players have made since patch 1.0.8 was released this morning.”

The auction house system emerged as a way to monetize the game and prevent the creation of external economies. Jay Wilson, who stepped down from his position as lead game designer on Diablo III in January, has criticized the feature, saying they “really hurt the game” and that “we would turn it off if we could.”

In a new forum update, Blizzard has announced the auction houses will stay offline until tomorrow morning around 10:00 a.m. PDT. Gold trades are still disabled until further notice.

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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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Xseed Games is joining a new family that expands its reach into more markets.

Announced today, Tokyo-based parent company Marvelous AQL has settled in North America as Marvelous U.S.A. It will not publish games but instead unify and oversee U.S. operations as umbrella company of both Xseed Games and Marvelous Online, a new extension of Xseed’s team that’s focused on publishing mobile and online-social games.

Xseed quietly launched its first iOS and Android title, the action-role-playing game Ark of the Ages (pictured), back in early March. The Torrance, Calif.-based publisher of Japanese-developed titles like Pandora’s Tower for Wii and Ragnarok Odyssey for PlayStation Vita will continue to release console, handheld, and PC games under its old name. Gamers won’t see a difference, but the structure behind the scenes has changed.

Current Xseed president and chief executive officer Shinichi Suzuki will head the Marvelous U.S.A. team with the same roles. He previously held those positions as Atlus, whose four-year-old Online Division has now merged with Marvelous Online, located in Irvine, Calif. Marvelous purchased it earlier this year from Index Digital Media. The staff consists of about 40 members between the two offices, with 10 at Xseed and the rest running the mobile team.

“I would like to expand our future offerings in order create a well-rounded game entertainment company across all platforms and types of play,” Suzuki told GamesBeat. ”I think the Marvelous Online mobile and online social titles will be a big part of Marvelous U.S.A. in the near future. Ark of the Ages was our first mobile release and kind of a test case for us, and we learned a lot from it on how to improve the game experience, better marketing and operations, [and so forth] to help ensure quality products in the future.”

Executive vice president Ken Berry, who has worked at Xseed Games since it formed in 2004 (before Marvelous AQL acquired it in June 2007), will continue to manage all publishing aspects for the company’s titles. He and Tatsuya Nishioka of Marvelous AQL, who is assuming the role of senior director of Marvelous Online, will report to Suzuki.

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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 article contains spoilers for BioShock Infinite.

The recently released BioShock Infinite reveals many possible realities through the tears that Elizabeth opens. We also learn that Columbia is only one of many worlds. Others lie beyond countless lighthouse doors.

It’s kind of beautiful, but these worlds and the people who inhabit them are parallels to each other. Some are good; some are bad. A million versions of Booker DeWitt exist in a million dimensions.

When you compare the cloud city Columbia to the underwater society of Rapture, you start to see all sorts of similarities. GamesBeat spotted a bunch and collected them in the gallery below. Did we miss any? Irrational Games developed both titles, so many different connections are possible.

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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 Xbox 360 has been leading video game hardware sales here in the U.S., but in Japan, the console hasn’t been so fortunate. Microsoft is now determined to get more gamers interested in the machine before the next one launches.

The company is challenging Japanese gamers to set aside their other devices and play more Xbox 360 — for a million hours. In return, Microsoft is promising complimentary Microsoft Points to all Xbox Live members (both free and Gold subscribers), according to a report on Siliconera. The 1 Million Hours campaign will run between April 20 and June 19, or for roughly two months.

The event is largely skewed in Gold members’ favor. Once gamers clock 300,000 hours, Microsoft will reward paying subscribers with 100 MSP and free members with 10 MSP. If they reach 500,000 hours, they’ll receive twice as much — 200 MSP and 20 MSP, respectively.

At 1 million hours, Microsoft will dish out 400 MSP to Gold members and 30 to free Xbox Live users. Note that the value of MSP is different for the two countries; it’s not a simple yen-to-dollar conversion. Gamers in Japan have to pay more to obtain the same amount.

Microsoft is also only counting hours logged in 20 specific games (listed below). Players must also be online and enrolled in Xbox Live Rewards to participate.

Sales in Japan have dropped so low that many stores have stopped carrying the console and its games altogether. Some developers, like Keiji Inafune, the creator of the upcoming action-role-playing game Soul Sacrifice for PS Vita, attribute its lack of popularity to the competition: Sony’s PlayStation, which is a domestic brand, unlike the Xbox. American brands have traditionally struggled in other markets as well, like the automotive industry, as Japan tends to support domestic goods over foreign ones.

This is a big marketing push from Microsoft. Analyst Jesse Divnich of video game research firm EEDAR told GamesBeat, “Microsoft’s Japan promotion is quite unique, but without being able to drop price on its software or hardware, Microsoft has few options to correct their Japan performance. Microsoft could have simply increased its marketing and retail presence. Large media companies tend to throw money at their problems, so I admire Microsoft for at least speaking directly to gamers in Japan.

“The promotion is likely to increase Xbox 360 engagement in Japan, which should trickle down into sales, but given PlayStation 3’s five-times lead over the Xbox 360 in Japan, I doubt that this promotion will shift the tides anytime soon. But from Microsoft’s point of view, it is certainly worth the effort.”

Dvinch says the promotion is achievable. Each Xbox 360 owner in Japan would have to play 40 minutes to hit the overall goal.

We’ve reached out to Microsoft for more information and will update accordingly.

The 20 games under this program are:

Battlefield 3
Forza Motorsport 4
Forza Horizon
Halo 4
Dance Central 2
Skyrim
Gears of War: Judgment
Crysis 3
Far Cry 3
Call of Duty: Black Ops 2
Bioshock Infinite
Borderlands 2
Tomb Raider
Resident Evil: Revelations
Resident Evil 6
Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor’s Edge
Caladrius
Dodonpachi: Saidaioujou
Child of Eden
Monster Hunter Frontier G or Monster Hunter Frontier

Image source: MSN

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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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Teenagers sleep. A lot. I would know — not too long ago, I was one of them. Saturdays mornings (and afternoons) were meant for catching up on REM.

The Glasgow, Scotland-based developer Chunk and Channel 4 Education released a free mobile title called Zeds today on the U.K. App Store. The release is due in mid-May in the U.S. It gives teenagers — or people of any age — a way to turn their own sleep patterns into an interactive, unique game level.

It works like this: Players set an alarm and place their iPhone or iPod Touch at the corner of their bed when they sleep, and Zed records their sleep data while they’re snoring away.

“In normal sleep, people will go through sleep cycles, from light to deep and back, every 90 minutes,” Chunk owner and founder Donnie Kerrigan told GamesBeat. “The app detects movement and noise, which is out of [sync] with the cycle, and graphs it accordingly.”

In the morning, players can stop tracking and check the app to learn what the graph means. Then they can play through what’s essentially a reproduction of their night of rest.

How well — or poorly — you sleep shapes the level. If you wake up or your sleep fluctuates from shallow to deep, those changes manifest in the game. Spikes in activity can lead to more dangers, for example, while calm periods might produce more Zs, collectible power-ups that grant temporary invulnerability or other bonuses.

“The game itself plays like a runner,” said Kerrigan. “You have a team of Zeds who you need to get home safely by destroying the bad guys and leaping chasms with swipe gestures.”

Players must perform the correct action to eliminate enemies on the path before they attack. Kerrigan said, “As you complete levels, you level up your Zeds and add more to your team — giving you the chance of bigger scores.”

Chunk and Channel 4 hope that teens will use the game to become more aware of the impact sleep has on their lives.

“Anything that increases the awareness of the importance of good sleep practices, especially for this age group, is very important, and I’m very supportive of it,” said professor Russell Foster, who teaches circadian neuroscience at Oxford University, in a press statement. “People underestimate teenagers, but if you explain to them why they need more sleep, many will respond — but if you force them, they won’t do it. So anything that helps inform that view of the world is very important.”

Channel 4 thought that teens would relate to this kind of education better if it were presented in a way that’s familiar to them. That way, they could “come to their own conclusions about their sleeping habits and how it affects them,” said Kerrigan. And kids today carry smartphones everywhere. (So do we adults.)

The issues that disrupt their sleep are age-centric, too. Exams and studying can cause stress or lead to all-nighters, and technology like computers or social demands can alter sleep schedules as well.

“If you don’t sleep properly, your ability to think creatively, to solve problems, your sense of humor — everything that makes us special human organisms — is lost,” said Foster. “Sleep needs to be at the center of our world.”

“We wanted to encourage teenagers to both switch off from their gadgets and help them understand the benefits of doing so,” said Faraz Osman, the editor of education at Channel 4. He added, “We wanted something that could alter that perception in an intelligent way.”

The British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) award-winning team at The Brothers McLeod in Warwickshire, England, is handling animation for the game.

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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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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Virtual reality is a wonder, but cracking the latest in technology removes a little of the mystery.

That’s a good thing.

The tech site IFixit posted a teardown of the developer edition of the Oculus Rift headset, which is basically an early prototype of what consumers will receive. We played with the device earlier this year at the Consumer Electronics Show, calling it “virtual reality that won’t make you barf.”

The headset uses a resolution of 1280-by-800 pixels, or 640-by-800 for each eye. Head-tracking works with a combination of a gyroscope, an accelerometer, and a magnetometer as part of a 1,000Hz absolute 9DOF orientation sensor. You can look around your environment without moving your entire body in the virtual world. IFixit tested the headset with one of the few compatible video games available, the multiplayer shooter Team Fortress 2.

The dev kit also included a convenient, generously sized case for storing various cables and adapters.

IFixit found that the 3D “magic” of the headset was really just the science of stereopsis. The Rift assigns a separate image to each eye, and your brain does the rest by merging them into a single image. The Rift comes three differently sized eye cups to suit each wearer’s interpupillary distance (IPD).

Taking the Rift apart was just as simple. Disassembly only took about 10 minutes with some basic tools, and it was easy enough for the website to award a 9-out-of-10 repairability score.

As it turns out, the headset uses an Innolux HJ070IA-02D 7-inch LCD panel, which comes from Chimei Innolux in Taiwan, the same manufacturer rumored to be Apple’s replacement source for the iPad Mini screen.

Three main chips control the device: a STMicroelectronics 32F103C8 ARM Cortex-M3 microcontroller with 72 MHz CPU, an Invensense MPU-6000 six-axis motion-tracking controller, and an A983 2206, or a suspected three-axis magnetometer that helps account for gyroscope drift.

A basic control box, which contains a motherboard with three additional chips, connects the Rift to PCs. It features buttons for configuring settings and several I/O ports and supports HDMI to DVI output conversion.

There’s no telling how this product will compare to the finished one, but right now, it’s in good shape.

Photo credit: iFixit

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Updated with equity-based growth information.

Crowdfunding is getting so much bigger than Kickstarter. Last year alone, it generated 1 million successful campaigns and $2.7 billion across the globe.

Research firm Massolution gathered that data from 308 active crowdfunding platforms (CFPs) worldwide via the website for its 2013 Crowdfunding Industry Report. The information shows that crowdfunding nearly doubled last year, with an 81 percent increase over 2011. North America and Europe, taking second, dominate the market, with a more than 95 percent stake.

Massolution, which specializes in the crowdsourcing and crowdfunding industries, is predicting these figures will reach $5.1 billion this year, with North America contributing 72 percent.

Last year saw significant milestones for crowdfunding. In January, the Elevation Dock became the first to pass $1 million. Then in April, the Pebble smartwatch beat this achievement in only 28 hours, going on to raise $10 million total.

“While lending-, donation-, and reward-based crowdfunding have thus far been leading this global financial revolution, equity-based crowdfunding is about to take center stage in the U.S.,” said Massolution chief executive Carl Esposti in a press release. It’s expected to reach $166 million in 2013, up from $116 million this year.

“The JOBS Act, which will allow non-accredited investors to make investments in exchange for equity, is expected to go into effect by the end of 2013,” said Esposti.

President Obama signed the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act into law a little over one year ago. It gives regular people the chance to become investors.

This is an “untapped funding source” that will help entrepreneurs who need funding, Massolution analyst and research director Kevin Berg Kartaszewicz-Grell told VentureBeat.

“Crowdfunding offers a great opportunity for everyone to leverage their social networks and transform social capital into financial support,” he said. “Clearly, companies that already make use of distributed networks — such as software developers, media companies, Internet companies, etc. — are in positions of relative strength because the communication networks have already been established, and reaching out via crowdfunding campaigns is thus a natural extension of their networking activities.“

Massolution found that crowdfunding volumes grew 105 percent to $1.6 billion in North America and 65 percent to $945 million in Europe. All other markets expanded close to 125 percent. Most of this growth came from donations (680,000 campaigns) and lending (about 250,000), the latter stemming mainly from crowdfunded microloans and community-driven loans to local small- and medium-sized entities (SMEs), along with the adoption of reward-based campaigns, like those on Kickstarter.

Social causes drive 30 percent of all activity, which Massolution expects to change as more startups and SMEs begin leveraging the platform. The graphic below shows the 10 most active categories by percentage.

Video games were also huge beneficiaries of crowdfunding last year, raising $83 million on Kickstarter alone. Kartaszewicz-Grell said that most game developers would fall under “Software and Smart Apps,” “which is an emerging category I personally expect to see growing rapidly. Software development — especially video games — is a perfect match for crowdfunding because this space has a relatively high portion of its transactions done online and because developers are more used to communicating their state of development via social media.”

Massolution composed its report from survey responses received in the first six weeks of 2013. It was unable to reveal which participating crowdfunding platforms were the most active.

Photo credit: Massolution

Ghostlight is an expert on localizing Japanese games, but we don’t hear of the company much in North America. That may be about to change as the European publisher has been working for months to bring Japanese role-playing games from consoles to PCs worldwide.

It announced its first today, a strategy RPG called Agarest: Generations of War (pictured), which is now visible on Steam Greenlight and is the first entry in developer Idea Factory’s Agarest series.

Generations of War has come to North America before on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 but not PC, and the popularity of Steam could be beneficial. Worldwide release on Valve’s digital distribution platform means the publisher can reach audiences in more territories and generate greater attention for these often underloved games.

That idea became Ghostlight’s mission in 2004 when it emerged with a focus on bringing Japanese PlayStation 2 titles to the PAL territories, like Europe and Australia. Its first published game was Shin Megami Tensei: Lucifer’s Call, or Nocturne if you live in the United States or Japan. It then followed with the Digital Devil Saga series — “all of which met with great success,” said Ross Brierley, the community manager for Ghostlight, who spoke to GamesBeat about the announcement.

If the company’s vision sounds familiar, that’s because it’s not too far off from that of Atlus, a more recognizable name in North America. Atlus develops and publishes Japanese games like the Shin Megami Tensei line in North America and Japan.

Ghostlight has expanded since its early days, releasing games on PSP and PlayStation 3 and just recently on 3DS with Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor Overclocked. Naturally, the next step forward was to penetrate the PC market. Success on Steam could mean a different strategy for Ghostlight in the future.

“Should this first release take off, we will be looking to bring more JRPGs to PC,” said Brierley. “And with the nature of the PC as a platform, we would be looking to give them a worldwide release [wherever] possible.”

Where the genre fits in

The landscape is not identical around the globe, however. Not everyone is even clear on what a JRPG is.

“Personally, I tend to view them as being any RPG that comes from Japan,” said Brierley. “However, there are several things that occur far more regularly in JRPGs than in Western RPGs. JRPGs often concentrate on telling a single story with perhaps several different endings rather than the branching storylines you are more likely to see in Western RPGs.

“Moment-to-moment gameplay can often be different, too, with many JRPGs favoring a more strategic turn-based system as opposed to the real-time combat that many Western RPGs prefer. There are, of course, exceptions on both sides, with Japanese action RPGs such as the Ys series favouring real-time combat.”

Brierley says that while JRPGs are considerably more successful in Japan, for obvious reasons, they seem to sell better in North America than in Europe.

“This might partially be due to the underlying popularity of the genre, but one of the major reasons is the difficulty of localizing games for Europe,” he said. “The number of languages in Europe means that we are faced with the difficult choice of either limiting our audience by releasing our games in English only or increasing our localization costs drastically to release our games in multiple languages. Unfortunately, given the costs involved, the latter is not practical in most cases.”

He doesn’t think the genre has diminished in the West, either; although, it may appear that way to many fans here who cross their fingers and hope for RPGs like Pandora’s Tower or Bravely Default: Flying Fairy to make it stateside.

“Rather, the surrounding games market has grown larger — what with the casual market picking up like it has,” said Brierley. “In fact, the overall market has grown for JRPGs, but casual sector growth — as with many other genres — distorts the statistics.”

Keeping the love alive

“I think there’s also a bit of a problem with the perception of JRPGs at the moment in that some gamers who are new to the genre will assume that JRPGs are old-fashioned,” said Brierley. “I firmly disagree with that point myself. I’ve found that many of my personal bugbears, such as fixed save points instead of the ability to save anytime, seem to be on the way out. Also, perhaps it’s due to my increasing involvement in gaming, but I’ve seen a huge variety in battle mechanics and the like in this generation, and it seems like there are some awesome-looking games in the pipeline from Japan as well.”

Brierley also noted that limited releases have been an obstacle in the West.

“While there have been some excellent PS3 JRPGs, the supply has been somewhat limited on the home consoles,” he said. “This is not really the case with the handhelds, but unfortunately, many portable JRPGs have not made it over here. And for the ones that do, the coverage is not as great as it was in previous generations.”

Bringing these games to PCs overseas could change all that. “There’s a lot of interest in the idea of bringing JRPGs to PC/Steam,” said Brierley. “Every time we even mention the subject in a blog post, we get a large increase in traffic, and the overwhelming majority of comments we get are excited about the idea.

“As you’d expect, we get a lot of people asking us to bring particular titles over, but we also get lots of comments about what features a port should have to take advantage of the PC as a platform, which download services we should release the game, etc. We also get lots of questions regarding the possibility of a physical PC release. While we can’t please everyone, we are listening to everyone’s feedback and trying to do what we can.”

Localizing these games takes a lot of work even for a company like Ghostlight, whose years of experience means a longer list of contacts in Japan. The publisher has to form an agreement with a game’s rights holder and talk to Japanese publishers and developers about the idea. Sometimes it works the other way around, and companies approach Ghostlight first.

“Either way, we then have to crunch the numbers ourselves to work out if the release will be viable before submitting an offer,” said Brierley. “Should a deal be agreed [upon], only then can we start work on the port.”

It’s worth the effort, though: “There is still something about the JRPG which speaks to a lot of people,” he said. While other forms of entertainment, like social and mobile gaming, are on the rise, Brierley says the future of the genre is secure — at least in Japan.

“Here in the West, there are a few more potential threats, including the possibility that the gap between the popularity of certain platforms here and in Japan will continue to widen, increasing focus on big-budget triple-A titles,” he said.

“Having said that, the success of several JRPGs, such as those from Carpe Fulgur on Steam, has shown that there is still a lot of interest in these types of games and that you need to bring the games to the people rather than expecting people to come to whichever platform the game is on.”

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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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Pokémon may be Game Freak’s flagship title, but the developer has made other games, too, like Drill Dozer and Yoshi. Its latest is HarmoKnight, a rhythm-action game releasing Thursday, March 28 on the 3DS eShop. Before you dive in, here are a few pointers as well as everything you need to know about unlocking and surviving the secret eighth world.

Before you begin

HarmoKnight is essentially a runner where you swing a musical staff to hit enemies or jump over gaps and obstacles to progress safely. It’s a nice cross between Pokémon and Rhythm Heaven. It’s a lot harder than it looks, though, and careful timing is key to attaining “good” or “great” status at the end of levels, which earns you the Royal Notes you need to continue forward. Some even require a perfect score. Listen to the beat and watch for any patterns.

After the credits roll, you should have obtained almost all the Royal Notes, but the “pinklefs” your buddy Tappy the Rabbit tells you about early on in Symphony City are more of a mystery. Five of them are necessary to unlock the barred path that leads to a tough eighth world called “Sky Roost,” which contains seven trials that incorporate the toughest enemies and trickiest elements from across the land of Melodia. Waiting at the end is the “Final Trial,” which could take you nearly as long to beat as it did to finish most of the game.

Collecting the pinklefs

“Pinklefs” are actually pink birds that resemble the musical symbol the treble clef. One is hidden in every major world, and these special stages are marked by feathers on the overworld map. Once you figure this out, the rest is easy.

The first pinklef is located in World 1 in “Springtime Stroll.” Advance through the level until Tappy says, “I sense a secret path …” and then spring off the next drum. (Hint: If you have trouble bouncing successfully, try waiting a little longer to push the B button.)

White and pink platforms indicate the location of the giant pinklef eggs in every one of these areas. Break the shell with your staff like you would a normal heart-containing egg and reach the end, and the first pinklef is yours. At this point, it’ll be called “a bird,” but the resemblance should tip you off.

Next up is World 2. Head to “Rockin’ Dragorn” and take the higher path as soon as Tappy instructs you to. Veering away from the trail of music notes is how you’ll find most of these birds; don’t worry about missing points.

Another pinklef resides in World 3. Enter “Revisiting the Shore” and take the lower path (after passing the dragon and the normal egg).

You’ll need to hold off until the very end for this next one. In World 5, go to “Looking for Birds.” After the second drum, keep to the middle path whenever possible until you find the signature white platforms.

Finally, “Crossing the Crater” in World 7 conceals the fifth pinklef. At the second set of pillars (before the dragon appears), climb and jump across them and hop up again to reach your goal.

Now venture back to Symphony City and unlock the eighth world.

‘Sky Roost’

None of the trials in “Sky Roost” contain any health boosts, so you’ll have to collect as many music notes as possible without taking more than five hits total. All of them involve frequent and often tricky leaps over pits and obstructions like flames, and unexpected shifts in the  perspective — from side-scrolling to a rear view or a close-up zoom — or the path that the hero Tempo runs along mean that you’ll need to listen carefully for telltale cues.

For example, before open flames sprout from the ground, they audibly ignite. And the ghost-like enemies cast a moving shadow prior to popping up and making a whooshing sound. Memorizing these signals will help you learn when and how to react. It’s the same with other perils. Master the pattern and you’ll make it through unharmed.

The “Baroque Trial” is one of the most rigorous and intense, as is the “Clock Tower Trial,” which slows down and speeds up the pace more dramatically than in any other level. A couple trials put the playable side characters Lyla and Tyko to work.

But the “Final Trial” is the most difficult of all, demanding near-perfection. Master Woodwin shares a story with you after you finish.

If you conquer those challenges and want more, try aiming for a “great” performance in every level, including the boss and miniboss stages.

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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 “whales” of the social-gaming world are a mystery to most of us. As the biggest spenders, they make up a tiny group (think about 2 percent of audiences) that drives most of the revenue for publishers of these games. But the word “whale” isn’t a flattering term, and neither are the numbers associated with it. These are people, not just customers.

It’s easy to think of whales anonymously because we’re not quite sure who they are or how they think — they’re often elusive due to the stigma that surrounds them. We know they play social games, but are they social? Are their habits casual or obsessive? What kind of people are they?

‘Whale’ has many meanings

Whales existed in online and mobile video games long before they started appearing in the West. Longtime game analyst Michael Pachter told GamesBeat that Asia has used free-to-play with microtransactions for 15 years, but it still feels like a relatively new phenomenon here as we wonder whether the business model holds a place in our future.

Today, the idea of a “whale” carries a different weight for each company. 5th Planet Games, a developer of social games for both casual and hardcore audiences, starts classifying its players as whales when they spend $100 or more a month. That’s a big jump from whales on Facebook, for instance, where social gamers could drop $25 per month to meet the same qualification.

5th Planet chief executive Robert Winkler revealed at the Game Developers Conference Online in 2012 that with its game Clash of the Dragons, 40 percent of revenue came from 2 percent of players who spent $1,000 or more. Ninety percent came from those who spent $100 or more, and the top whale had spent $6,700.

Other companies, like social casino developer Blitzoo, defines various categories of whales based on a combination of factors: total money spent, playtime, experience points earned in-game, and so on. Play sessions tend to be three or four times longer than what an average player’s would be.

But these are all still numbers, not faces or personalities. Winkler told us that a strong sense of community is important for encouraging whales to not only engage but also monetize, and that’s a clue to who they are as people.

“We’ve found that most players are more willing to spend money to help out their fellow gamers than to try to defeat them,” he said. “As an example, players who take part in our ‘guilds,’ or groups of players who come together to accomplish communal missions, are 8.5 times more likely to monetize than players who do not belong to a guild, and the ARPU [average revenue per user] of players in our guilds is 53 times higher than other players.”

For that reason, building community is a huge priority for 5th Planet. It’s a way to attract more whales and monetize more successfully.

“This could be by participating in your forums, by running contests and giveaways, by forming special guilds or councils, or simply by talking directly with your players and showing that you’re listening,” said Winkler. “When players feel like they’re part of community, they become more invested in the outcome of game. And when they’re more emotionally invested in the game, they’ll invest with their wallets as well.”

5th Planet declined to inform us whether their whales receive any special benefits, and as for whether these players subsidize the game for others, it only said, “As with any free-to-play game, there are a group of paying players, including whales, whose in-game [spending] allows game houses to bring new, fresh, and updated content to all players.” We were unable to acquire responses from the other companies we spoke with for this article.

Are whales different from ‘normal’ gamers?

Talking to whales isn’t easy; their habits and relationships with social-game publishers are touchy subjects. But as I found with one player, Greg Genega — who allowed us to identify him by name and also goes by the handle “Bludex” — all you have to do is disarm their defenses a little. Aside from the amount he spends every month ($100 on average and sometimes as much as $400), he shares many of the same interests and concerns of regular gamers.

Like many whales, Genega prefers to stick with one or two games — in his case, 5th Planet’s Clash of the Dragons (a free social massively multiplayer online role-playing card game) and Legacy of Heroes (a free collectible card game). He doesn’t stray much into other platforms.

“To me, a game is only as good as its following and associated community,” he said. “Without quick queue times for competitive events and a bustling forum, games tend to lose interest with me.”

He’s not exactly glued to his computer screen, though. Genega says he plays for roughly 20 minutes in the morning and one to three hours in the evening. Just because he spends a lot of money doesn’t mean this routine conflicts with everyday living.

“When I’m at work, I barely have any time to think about games,” he said. “However, most of my social time with friends involves lots of gaming. Board games, card games, going to a casino, playing Magic [the Gathering], etc. So gaming is very important to my social life.”

That’s social life outside of games, not necessarily in them. Genega supervises a network operations center for a large company and enjoys active pursuits like hiking and eating out at restaurants. That’s part of why he doesn’t prefer single-player experiences.

“I’m a social being at heart,” he said. “When there’s nobody to share my experience with — whether it be some friendly trash-talking or a virtual high-five of an accomplishment — the games just become less interesting.”

He doesn’t leave those friendships solely online, either. “I have friendships going on 10 years or more with people I game with online that I’ve almost all met in real life at some point or another,” he said. “I would definitely say gaming has been the main driver in my social life both online and offline.”

Like most dedicated gamers, Genega actively follows news announcements related to the titles he plays, but frequent content additions are what keeps him coming back. With each break he took from Clash of the Dragons, for instance, he returned to check out a new update. And when he played World of Warcraft, he would quit for as long as a year — until Blizzard released a new expansion.

The more we talked, the more Genega opened up about his passions and thoughts on current issues in the industry, but one question remained: How does it feel to be called a “whale”?

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We toss around a lot of fancy words when talking about the future of the game industry. But now one of the biggest publishers around, Electronic Arts, is proving that when it comes to digital, it’s more than just buzz.

SuperData Research predicts that EA, the publisher of franchises like Dead Space and Mass Effect, will earn most of its revenue from digital games by the end of 2013. That means focusing more on streaming and downloadable content. Revenue from physical products has dropped below $500 million.

This trend isn’t just happening with EA. A January report indicated that the overall digital market improved 39 percent from the same time one year prior.

This quarter is the second-to-last period that physical content drives sales for EA, according to the online-games market research firm. A lot of revenue will come in from Battlefield 4, which is expected to release later this year and increase retail sales to an estimated $539 million. Then mobile revenue across consoles, PC, and mobile devices will overtake the physical side by Q3 2013, reaching roughly $2.1 billion.

Companies like EA, Sony, and Valve are now focusing on making digital more accessible through hardware — like with Nvidia’s Project Shield, the PlayStation 4, and Steam’s Big Picture. It’s all about enabling digital content to overtake the traditional console-based environment of the living room by introducing new technology, new platforms, and more ways to play.

“We do think there’s going to be more digital business and digital download business,” EA’s chief financial officer Blake Jorgensen told SuperData in a financial earnings call last week. “But a lot of it will depend on when we release titles, when Sony and Microsoft choose to release titles. And in no way do we want to see the retail channel disappear. We think that’s an important part of the overall industry, and we want to keep that a vibrant channel for us long term as well.”

It’s about balance, and with more digital business will come a wider availability and ease of digital gameplay components due to better storage capacity, Jorgensen added.

Joost van Dreunen, the chief executive officer of SuperData, told GamesBeat that Electronic Arts is coming into the “digital revolution” well prepared. So what does this mean for gaming?

“I think it’s positive when large incumbents adapt to a new environment,” he said. “Sure, there are critics, but the leaders in the game industry have moved a lot faster to accept new distribution and revenue models than, say, the music or film industry. Perhaps most importantly, this benefits gamers, who now have access to quality games on a platform of their choosing.”

EA hasn’t responded to our request for comment.

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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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Hamburg, Germany-based Daedalic Entertainment is going international with its popular adventure games, but its move around the world also means good news for the genre and other developers. The publisher/developer of titles like Harvey’s New Eyes and The Whispered World wants to show the potential for adventure games to succeed in foreign digital markets and enable smaller studios to bring their titles to a global audience.

First, the company needs to stabilize sales in different countries. As it delivers the final chapter of its Deponia series with Goodbye Deponia, Daedalic is preparing for worldwide simultaneous releases of four other new games this year, including The Night of the Rabbit (due May 29), 1954 Alcatraz, a sequel to The Dark Eye: Chains of Satinav, and an unannounced turn-based strategy title.

“Now we are looking very deep into new platforms, which we’d like to do besides PC and Mac,” Carsten Fichtelmann (pictured left), the chief executive officer and founder of Daedalic, told GamesBeat in a phone call. Moving forward, the company will bring its full library to iOS, Android, and consoles like PlayStation and Xbox (either Sony’s and Microsoft’s current-gen and/or next-gen systems).

“We expect to make all of Daedalic’s in-house series available on iOS and Android within the next six to nine months,” said Sergei Klimov (pictured right), the company’s director of international business development. Daedalic already released its first iPad game, Edna & Harvey: The Breakout, six months ago to test the App Store waters.

Klimov said Deponia may be the first release on Sony’s platform, and as for Microsoft, Daedalic wants to debut with its under-wraps strategy game, which it’s revealing next month at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

Equalizing launch across territories

Daedalic has already found huge success in Germany, which previously contributed to 70 percent of its revenue and about 80 percent of sales. While that’s comfortable territory for the team, which is closely familiar with that market, Klimov said, “Production is quite big and expensive, and to recoup the budget, we need to be international. There’s no way that we’ll go back and say, ‘Let’s do smaller projects based on the size of the German market, and that’s it.’

“You have to cross the border, and you have to stop thinking, ‘We’re a German studio that’s going to be successful.’ We have to think, ‘We’re a studio — one of the many studios.’ And we have to be relevant to not a single culture but to every culture — to every language.”

Same-day release is a strategy that began with Deponia; however, the game had a gap between the German and English launches. Daedalic is working to ensure that localizations happen at the exact same time, and that includes markets beyond the common English, German, and French languages, such as Brazilian Portuguese.

The Night of the Rabbit will ship in German (with voices), English (with voices), Russian, Polish, Spanish, French, and Czech on day one.

“As the digital market is international, we’ll have to learn to work with that market,” said Klimov.

The audience potential is huge, too. Daedalic’s Facebook community is roughly three times as large as one the adventure-game leaders, Double Fine Productions. The success of campaigns on Kickstarter — like the Sierra Entertainment-style adventure Mage’s Initiation, nearly to its goal, and the successful Asylum (which completed today) — is also a good indicator of the interest in these games.

“This shows that the genre is very vital and that people like to play [these] games,” said Fichtelmann.

Adventure games come a long way from the old industry model of box-only business. “This … makes us quite confident that we will be more successful in the future,” said Fichtelmann. “So it makes sense for us to do more localizations.”

Losing the PC-only mindset

One of the big challenges to breaking into different markets is simply making the move across borders. Every product is collecting small sources of revenue from different countries, which makes the need to go international even stronger, said Klimov. Then the next step is to get away from the genre’s most native platforms.

“We have to stop thinking that we’re doing a PC game, and we have to start thinking that we’re doing a game,” said Klimov. “We’re creating a world. We’re creating characters. We’re creating the story.” Daedalic wants to tell that narrative on any device, but that’s “a big mental shift,” he said.

“People move to different devices. People move to different lifestyles,” said Klimov. But expanding to a variety of platforms also means investigating alternate distribution methods.

“We may come up with a slightly different strategy for mobile because we’re still selling all our games [at] higher price [points],” said Fichhtelmann, who added, “At the moment, we’re not selling episodic content.”

However, the episodic format may become more of a reality for Daedalic, which is also considering selling subscriptions and enabling cross-play between devices.

“We’re looking at the fact that the audience is no longer this one group of people who comes home, opens up the desktop computer, and plays,” said Klimov. “The audience has different cases that we have to find a strategy that delivers our properties — our stories — to these people in the way that they like to consume.”

Another issue concerning mobile platforms is figuring out how to approach microtransactions in these storytelling-focused games. This is just one area that the company will need to learn to respond to as it progresses.

Regardless of platform, Daedalic wants to focus on building a quality product and then investing in communication so that people know that it exists. That’s part of what makes its reach on sites like Facebook so important.

Attracting new players in more markets

Despite its history, Klimov doesn’t believe that the genre is niche.

“We would like to make the games as accessible and as easy [as possible without] requiring previous familiarity and knowledge of the genre [so] that our games actually create interest in the genre,” he said.

He added, “I think it’s important for us to remember that we’re making games for every level of experience and not necessarily for the hardcore fans who don’t mind certain issues,” such as intense puzzles.

Careful moderation on services like Steam Greenlight and community-based sites like Kickstarter can help drive adventure games toward better quality products as well.

“The involvement of the community is really good for showing to developers the potential of international sales,” said Klimov. Feedback is arguably more valuable there than with other genres, such as action games.

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Updated at 2:11 p.m. PST with response from Anodyne developer.

Updated again at 3:03 p.m. PST with a quote from Huntsman director.

Valve revealed today the fifth set of games and software titles to achieve “green light” status on Steam Greenlight’s community platform, including a radical surgical simulator and a survival-horror game that shies away from excess blood and violence.

Ten games made the cut this time, such as Surgeon Simulator 2013, where players control a clumsy doctor during surgery, and Evoland, which shows the evolution of the action-adventure genre through creative gameplay and style changes.

The indie first-person shooter Receiver — an experiment in “gun-handling mechanics, randomized levels, and unordered storytelling” — and the alternative horror game Huntsman: The Orphanage were also successful. The latter’s creator, Dene Waring, contributed a community article to GamesBeat on the topic of gun violence and the games industry in January.

“Within the creative industries, the hurdle has traditionally been getting past the front door of the big distributors with your unknown, unproven indie project,” wrote Waring, the director of Shadowshifters Entertainment, in an email to GamesBeat. “And that’s why I was excited to see the Greenlight concept put in place; here, at last, was a way to let your potential customers decide the viability of your idea.

“Now, having Steam distribution in place means we can apply for government funding to complete the game to a higher level again, with a full-time team, and that’s a level we couldn’t have achieved without the Greenlight process — so we’re grateful to all our supporters!”

Anodyne, which recently garnered attention through promotion on The Pirate Bay, also received approval.

“I think getting Greenlit is very much thanks to the quality of game — people seem to enjoy the world we’ve created, finding themselves immersed in it, and enjoy the gameplay,” Sean Hogan, one of the two developers who made Anodyne, told us. “This helped to make the Pirate Bay promo a possibility, which was the biggest driving force in helping out the Greenlight cause. Now I’m just working on adding some Steamworks SDK stuff in, then releasing on Steam, and later, Kongregate/iOS/Android! And then working on the next game!”

Joining the list are Refract Studios’ arcade racer Distance, Ironhide’s PC and iOS strategy title Kingdom Rush, Dreamatrix’s role-playing game Legends of Dawn, the zombie-edutainment title Organ Trail: Director’s Cut (by developer group The Men Who Wear Many Hats), and Gaijin Entertainment’s massively multiplayer online combat game War Thunder.

“We’re very grateful to the Steam community and all to our supporters for making this possible,” said Sébastien Vidal, the chief executive officer of Evoland studio Shiro Games. “Being on Steam is a big milestone for most indie developers as it provides a level of exposure that is hard to get without a significant marketing budget. Now we have to finish the game and squeeze in as much content and polish as we can before release!”

Some of the titles, like Organ Trail and Distance, have also succeeded in crowdfunding efforts on Kickstarter.

Valve also approved the digital-painting program Black Ink and Driver Fusion, a full driver manager for the PC.

Over 70 titles have emerged from Greenlight so far since the platform, which enlists the community’s help in selecting games for release on Steam, launched in August of last year.

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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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Yesterday, Sony revealed its next-generation console, the PlayStation 4, using its conference in New York to act preemptively before its major competitor, Microsoft, could make a move. But fans are left with some unanswered questions, such as whether the future has room for used games.

Apparently, it does — at least on the PS4. Sony Worldwide Studios boss Shuhei Yoshida told Eurogamer that it won’t prevent the use of second-hand games despite concerns that it would.

“That’s the general expectation by consumers,” said Yoshida. “They purchase physical form, they want to use it everywhere, right? So that’s my expectation.”

Yoshida and his Japanese PR adviser were a little unclear, though, when responding to whether Sony would stop someone from reselling one of its games. But Yoshida eventually said, “So, used games can play on PS4. How is that?”

That’s fine by us.

Part of the anxiety over whether used games would be playable on Sony’s next-gen console came from the discovery of an anti-used-games patent last month, but Eurogamer reports that a Sony source has denied that it has anything to do with the PlayStation 4. The alleged patent would brand discs with a tag that would bind them to only one console each. Gamers wouldn’t be able to resell their copy because the disc wouldn’t operate on another system.

A similar suspicion has been raised with Microsoft’s future Xbox console although analysts doubt that the company would choose such a dangerous strategy. Blocking them would likely upset gamers and prove harmful to big retailers like GameStop.

For now, at least, the used games market appears to be safe.

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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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Stone Blade Entertainment (formerly Gary Games), the maker of the deck-building game Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer, is so confident that it can raise $125,000 for its new Kickstarter that it’s limiting the crowdfunding campaign to a measly 10 days.

A lot of companies need an entire month to publicize a project and convince would-be backers that it’s worth their money, but not Stone Blade. The team has already found huge success with the mobile version of Ascension on iOS, tallying 2 million play sessions in December alone. On top of that, its previous Kickstarter for the SolForge digital trading-card game amassed nearly twice its target goal of $250,000.

Now it wants to bring Ascension Online to Android and PC “by the end of 2013.” The audience is clearly there, and today — one day into the campaign’s launch — Stone Blade is already approaching half of its funding goal, with more than $57,000 in donations pouring in.

“The Ascension iOS app has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times, and players have logged over three million games played online,” the Kickstarter page reads. “We think it’s time to take Ascension to the next level.”

Stone Blade introduced the physical card game in 2010 and has since released three expansions (Return of the Fallen, Storm of Souls, and Immortal Heroes) plus an iOS version, along with supplemental promo cards. (The fourth expansion, Rise of Vigil, is due out in April and even earlier for backers.) The team is focusing on enhancing the Android and PC version with new features, including online tournaments, a campaign mode, and a base game that’s free to anyone who wants to play it — with in-app purchases in the form of additional expansions and bonus features (cosmetic changes, special event tournaments, and so on).

“Our programming team currently has their hands full making SolForge,” the campaign page reads. “With this Kickstarter, however, we will be able to bring on additional programmers to develop Ascension Online in parallel. We feel that Ascension Online deserves a dedicated team, one that can commit all of their time to developing for new platforms, creating new features, and ensuring timely set releases.”

Backers have access to rewards such as exclusive physical and digital promo cards and decks, unique avatars, free expansion downloads, and more — like a bobblehead, playmat, and much fancier incentives at the mid-tier and higher levels.

The game designer is working with iOS partner Playdek to add features like cross-platform play to the current game version or “transition users to a newly released app with all the features we are promising in this Kickstarter.”

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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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You don’t have to have college-level experience to write good poetry — just a video game that makes you think.

B.J. Best, an assistant professor at Carroll University in Waukesha, Wis., knows a thing or two about poetry. He’s published two books full of it called Birds of Wisconsin and State Sonnets. Unlike a lot of academics, he’s also gamer, and he even claims to have beaten Super Mario Bros. on a pontoon boat — with an actual television and Nintendo Entertainment System. This is probably a feat you could only attribute to him.

But Our Princess Is in Another Castle is Best’s third self-authored poetry book, which debuts in March for $14.95. These are prose poems, whose paragraph-style makes them even more accessible to general audiences. While they’re entirely about video games, they’re not full of gaming lingo. That can be hard to parse for readers who aren’t entrenched in the appropriate genres.

“For me, the critical idea is that the poems are not directly about the video games; rather, the games and their details provide points of departure for talking about other, nondigital aspects of life,” Best told GamesBeat, explaining why you could hear one of his poems and never guess that it was about a video game like Golden Axe or Asteroids. “As I was writing the book, I tried to remain very cognizant that many readers might not have played the particular game that inspired a poem, so I needed to make sure the poem still appealed to them. Those who know the games will find familiar details from them in the poems, but they’re usually included in brief, sidelong ways.”

Best chose to follow the adage “write what you know,” looking to classic video games rather than new ones since they better represent his ’80s childhood. As it happens, they’re a lot easier to write about, too.

“They’re much smaller, easier to conceptualize, and, frankly, weirder in a way that encourages exploration,” he said. “I think it’d be much harder to write about a contemporary first-person shooter, for example, because they’re very lifelike and so much of the story is given to you — it’d be hard for me to pick only the details I need and then make the material my own.”

The creative exercise of translating pixels to poetry shows that you can use any experience — even video games, which are often viewed as trivial entertainment — to discuss serious subjects, said Best. Because so many different types of people play them, we wondered how other people — those without teaching degrees, for example — could learn to write the way he does.

“My best advice is to take ownership of whatever details of the subject have energy for you, and then try as hard as possible to ignore the rest,” he said. “Video games are a great medium for this because they often have such an odd and incongruous set of details. Why is Pac-Man chased by ghosts but eats fruit? Why is Mario in a kingdom ruled by mushrooms that was invaded by turtles?

“A writer doesn’t owe any allegiance to fully or even accurately rendering the initial experience — what’s more important is using key details to talk about something more than just the surface subject.”

Those aren’t the only pointers you’ll need if you want to write “good” video game poetry, though. The basic tenets still apply, and that means making sure your poem contains strong details and imagery, compelling word choices, and a fresh perspective. Best recommends taking an initial observation and then developing it into something with more resonant meaning.

“Some video game poems fail, I think, because they take place entirely within the game world,” he said. “And since the poem takes place within the game, it usually just re-creates the experience of playing it. Those who haven’t played the game will likely be uninterested or lost, and those have played the game are already familiar with the experience. That poem is probably not doing enough to make the material new and interesting.”

So if you can accomplish that by writing about video games, does that make them art? Best told us that this book is outside that discussion — used for its own artistic intents, not those of the games’ — but that he thinks the debate is settled by now since all games involve artistic creation through graphics, sound, and other aspects.

Not even game is art, though, the same way that film can be art — communicating messages — but “major motion pictures” are only made to entertain.

“Both sides of this debate often argue in problematic ways,” said Best. “The ‘games are not art’ advocates are usually predictable, uninformed, and unwilling to seriously engage the topic; the ‘games are art’ folks often have a neurotic need to be accepted by the first group. I think developers and gamers should be pretty comfortable by now they’re working with an art form, and that the rest of the culture will eventually catch up. And, of course, it’s already catching up, with [the Museum of Modern Art's] recent plan to house a video game collection as an example.”

Click on for excerpts and a name-that-game quiz.

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Chocolate, wine, and romantic dinners. These are just a few of the gifts people expect on Valentine’s Day, otherwise known as the most hated day of the year. But it’s not all love and cherubs — Nintendo wants to let you celebrate with a brand new 3DS XL, which you can keep for yourself or give to your special honey.

Nintendo of America tweeted today that the pink-and-white 3DS is available just in time for that special occasion on Thursday. (I’m betting at least one of you read that and panicked.) The limited edition handheld costs about $200 and features an extra large screen (over 4 inches for both the top and lower screens), longer battery life (6.5 hours), and a larger SD card (4GB).

This themed 3DS actually appeared as part of a limited run back in November, bundled with Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask and Style Savvy: Trendsetters, but it sold faster than most people could grab it. It’s on sale once again.

So even if you date dumps you, at least you’ll have a candy-colored 3DS to keep you company.

If you hate Valentine’s Day, though, just ignore this post and go back to grumbling every time you come across the words.

(Grumble, grumble.)

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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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Luigi’s turning 30 this year, which is well past the “oh, look at the cute baby plumber” stage. But Princess Peach forgot to bake him a cake, and you neglected to get him a gift … again.

Shame on you! We remembered his birthday. Well, actually, DePaul University in Chicago told us (but don’t tell Luigi that).

Even after 30 years, says assistant professor of game development and interactive media Jose Zagal, he’s still “player two” — the Robin to Mario’s Batman.

“Though Robin was young and inexperienced, he was portrayed as competent and even somewhat cool,” said Zagal, who works at the university’s College of Computing and Digital Media and authored The Videogame Ethics Reader. “Luigi, however, is often portrayed at best as a clone of Mario and, at worst, the more cowardly brother who still pulls through in the end.”

Luigi made his debut in 1983, two years after Mario appeared as a carpenter in the original Donkey Kong. While Mario has taken on many roles — doctor, teacher, and all-around unlicensed professional (he can’t be that talented) — Luigi’s just … Luigi.

“Due to technical constraints of the era, the color of overalls was the best means to tell the characters apart,” said Zagal. “Luigi started as a simple palette swap of the Mario character and has continued to live in Mario’s shadow.”

Life’s not all bad for the green-clothed Italian. He has starred in two of his own titles: the unpopular educational game Mario Is Missing! (although that’s still kind of about Mario) and Luigi’s Mansion for the Nintendo GameCube, which is getting a sequel this year for the 3DS called Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon.

That’s still crumbs compared to the fame Mario has achieved, which makes Luigi ever the underdog. Perhaps that’s why Zagal thinks we should appreciate him a bit more.

“Luigi’s cowardice makes him more relatable and interesting as a character,” said Zagal. “As a player that makes him a better partner; he’s a reluctant hero, and it’s thanks to the player that he can — temporarily — overcome that. Heroes need to be human, and Luigi has more of that than Mario.”

DePaul University might have marked their calendars early, but we at least tried to show our appreciation for Luigi in some small way. Below is a (non-comprehensive) gallery of his design changes through the years — kind of like a photo book. That’s our present to the poor, unloved brother. Maybe you could at least send him a card?

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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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