Gaming News
Jay Mohr: “Ted Price tried to buy my wife” (video interview)
Comedian/actor/grand wizard Jay Mohr was in Las Vegas this week to host the 15th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards for his seventh year. In addition to the DICE award ceremony, Mohr has also been a longtime host for the annual (usually) BlizzCon fan event.
GamesBeat caught up with MC Shark Cartilage himself to discuss this year’s BlizzCon cancellation, what game Jay would make if he were a developer, and a lot of totally non-game-related absurdity, all … Continue Reading
New details and Outland screens from “World of Warcraft within Minecraft” project (exclusive interview)
A 27-year-old U.S. graduate student known as “Ramses” is creating a stir in the community of Minecraft, the sandbox-building game by Swedish development studio Mojang. Within Minecraft’s blocky world, he has spent about 100 hours so far on a re-creation of Azeroth, the enormous setting of Blizzard’s massively multiplayer game, World of Warcraft (WoW).
Minecraft generates customizable 3D worlds that are made of cubes. Because every single part of the landscape can be altered, it … Continue Reading
Activision’s Eric Hirshberg: turning games into brands and other non-douche moves (exclusive interview)
Eric Hirshberg was an experiment when Activision Blizzard chief executive hired Hirshberg as CEO of the Activision Publishing division about 18 months ago. Hirshberg was an art school graduate who rose through the ranks of the creative side of advertising and eventually became CEO of billion-dollar ad agency Deutsch LA. Most video game CEOs rise through the ranks of finance or game development. But Hirshberg was a lot more comfortable with a paint brush in … Continue Reading
The DICE Summit in pictures (photo gallery)
Here’s our photo gallery from the DICE Summit 2012. This year’s conference drew more than 700 game industry luminaries to a wide variety of talks on the art and science of making video games.… Continue Reading
GamesBeat weekly roundup: DICE Summit news and more
Here’s some of the stories that ran only on GamesBeat this week. We’re running more stories exclusively on the GamesBeat section of VentureBeat now, particularly when the stories are mainly of interest to game readers. The broader interest stories are running on VentureBeat as well. And please visit the GamesBeat section to catch up on game news. We’re ramping up our game coverage, so you’ll find more and more news at GamesBeat.
Here’s some of … Continue Reading
Here’s what we REALLY thought about this week’s news (video)
Skyrim is awesome; Pinterest users need to calm the hell down; and Facebook users need to stay away from the gun cabinet.
In this week’s episode of VB Weekly, the VentureBeat writing staff takes a front seat, with a range of our editors and reporter spouting off about the stories they found most interesting.
This week, we’re talking about:
Steve Jobs’ FBI file
the crazy coming features for hit game Skyrim
Facebook’s all-new lightbox for
Valve’s Gabe Newell offers update on Steam security breach
Back in November, we learned that Valve’s online game-distribution service, Steam, had suffered a security breach. A letter to Steam users from co-founder and managing director Gabe Newell informed them that someone gained access to the Steam forums as well as the database containing user information. Valve began investigating the breach in hopes of learning whether any user information had been compromised. Today, the company offered an update.
It has hired outside security experts to … Continue Reading
Ninja Gaiden’s creator Itagaki pleads for game designers to create titles that change lives
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Tomonobu Itagaki was at the top of his game. The legendary Japanese game design leader of Team Ninja, known for his sunglasses and leather pants, was making top-selling games in the Dead or Alive and Ninja Gaiden fighting series.
Itagaki left Tecmo-Koei, the owner of Team Ninja, in mid-2008 and got into a bitter lawsuit with his former company over royalties. It was a wrenching separation, and Itagaki … Continue Reading
Call of Duty Elite: It’s not a douche move — Activision Publishing CEO Eric Hirshberg
Eric Hirshberg, chief executive of Activision Publishing, talked about the role that creative people should play in making decisions about running a video game business. Too often, he said, creative people leave it to the business experts. But creative people shouldn’t sell themselves short, as Hirshberg learned in the last 18 months running the division that includes Call of Duty franchise.
With the launch of the latest Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Activision Blizzard … Continue Reading
The DeanBeat: DICE Summit entices the game industry’s insiders to Vegas
The DICE Summit (Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain) is well under way this week, bringing some of the game industry’s best minds together in Las Vegas for a few days of networking, thinking, talking, back-slapping, and partying. Staged by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, it is a chance for the best of the business to shine, from an opening keynote by The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim game developer Todd Howard on why we create … Continue Reading
As social games boom, Spark Capital hires former Zynga exec as first venture partner
Zynga’s rise to a social gaming juggernaut traded on the public markets—which now boasts a market cap roughly equal to long-established companies like Electronic Arts—highlights the rapid transformation of the gaming industry.
Boston’s Spark Capital, eager to tap the next wave of startups in that space, has added Nabeel Hyatt, a general manager who helped founded Zynga Boston, as their first venture partner.
Hyatt has a long history as a tech entrepreneur. He trained as … Continue Reading
AIAS game of the year: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim takes home the top honor
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim took home the award for game of the year today from the prestigious Academy of Interactive Sciences. The Interactive Awards took place at the DICE Summit in Las Vegas, where 700 game developers and industry professionals are gathered. The awards are like the Oscars of the game industry.
Tim Sweeney won the Hall of Fame award. Sweeney is the chief executive and graphics wizard at Epic Games, which he started … Continue Reading
Double Fine Adventure shatters Kickstarter record with $1M raised in first 24 hours (updated)
Updated at 4:30pm PST for record $1 million amount.
Earlier this week, crowd-funding site Kickstarter set a new record when the Elevation iPhone Dock became the first project to close in on the $1 million dollar mark. But that milestone has officially been bested. In its first 24 hours, gaming studio Double Fine Adventure’s Kickstarter project has raised more than $1 million and it shows no signs of slowing down.
Double Fine’s Tim Schafer tweeted … Continue Reading
Activision Blizzard earnings: Diablo III to debut in Q2, 2012
During Activision Blizzard’s earnings call to analysts today, the publisher revealed that the long-awaited action-role-playing game Diablo 3 will be coming out the second quarter of this year.
(That puts the release date sometime within April to June, for those of you who are counting down the minutes.)… Continue Reading
Core video games crash in January by 34 percent as free games take their toll
Video game sales crashed 34 percent in January, with total industry sales falling 34 percent to $750.6 million from $1.14 billion a year ago, according to market researcher NPD Group.
The lousy performance of video game sales in physical retail stores masks what’s really happening as the industry transforms to digital sales, which aren’t captured in the retail numbers. Gamers are shifting their purchases to online, social, and mobile forms of gaming—dubbed digital gaming—while the … Continue Reading
Epic’s Tim Sweeney predicts the next 20 years in gaming technology
As chief executive of Gears of War developer Epic Games, Tim Sweeney has been on the forefront of video game graphics for a couple of decades. So the DICE Summit, which is giving him a high honor today, turned to him to explain how graphics technology for games will evolve over the next 20 years.
Sweeney, a shy but brilliant programmer who helped create the backbone graphics engine for Epic’s blockbusters, predicted in his talk … Continue Reading
Activision Blizzard earnings: Call of Duty Elite snares 7M subscribers
Activision Blizzard reported today that its new Call of Duty Elite social network service for hardcore gamers has signed up 7 million subscribers since going live in November.
That includes both free and paid memberships, and it represents a sizable chunk of the overall numbers of consumers who bought the game. About 1.5 million of those users have chosen to pay $4.99 a month for the privilege of getting the latest content for titles such … Continue Reading
Activision Blizzard earnings: World of Warcraft resists the assault from EA’s Star Wars
Activision Blizzard has beaten earnings expectations for its third fiscal quarter, which ended Dec. 31, and its major cash cow is still holding up. World of Warcraft didn’t suffer after Electronic Arts launched its massively multiplayer online game Star Wars: The Old Republic. World of Warcraft ended the year with 10.2 million paying subscribers, down only slightly from 10.3 million in the previous quarter.
Bobby Kotick, chief executive of Activision Blizzard, said in an analyst … Continue Reading
How Google plans to avoid Facebook’s “games ghetto” with Google+
“We’ve seen communities ruined by games,” said Google+ engineering director David Glazer to a room full of app developers.
“How do we find that balance between people who are interested in games… without having the problem of more spam?”
Glazer said these words onstage today at the Inside Social Apps conference in San Francisco, and it was quite clear which community he was talking about: Facebook, which itself sees gaming as a sort of double-edged … Continue Reading
Angry Birds Facebook landing with new power-ups and exclusive levels on Valentine’s Day
Not content with dominating the mobile gaming market, Angry Birds is winging its way to Facebook on Valentine’s Day. Developer Rovio has today revealed some of the features that this Facebook app will be boasting, including brand-new power-ups and exclusive levels.
Angry Birds has been downloaded over 700 million times since its launch in December 2009. The phenomenal success of the game has seen it released across a wide variety of platforms, including iOS, Android, … Continue Reading
