Let me be honest: I’m new to massively multiplayer online games. Completely new. But I’m no stranger to hack-n-slash action-role-playing games like Diablo and Torchlight, and that’s partly what developer Cryptic Studios and publisher Perfect World Entertainment have created here with Neverwinter, an MMO set in the Dungeon & Dragons Forgotten Realms campaign setting. Fresh out of an open beta that began in April, it officially launches today on PC.

Cryptic Studios made games like City of Heroes, Champions Online, and Star Trek Online. Those are all MMOs, so the company has experience with the genre. But underneath its vast communities, reams of user-generated content, and persistent world, Neverwinter is a single-player experience as well — one where 60 hours is almost enough time to reach the current level cap. And it’s free to play.

What you’ll like

Adventure your way
Welcome to the city of Neverwinter, where your journey begins. You quickly learn that the powerful lich Valindra Shadowmantle is leading the attack on Neverwinter and the nearby lands, and her reign of terror has caused a wave of upheavals. As some factions mean to overthrow Lord Neverember, the city’s ruler, others are claiming lands that were destroyed or abandoned due to the terrible Spellplague, a malady that turns normal people into enraged monsters — and is still a menace a century after it hit.

While Protector’s Enclave has survived and all but rid its people of the affliction, other regions have been less fortunate, and all sorts of monsters and creatures from beyond the grave are rising up to form armies. You can stop them — either on your own or with other players.

Adventuring solo is easy, and you can almost ignore all the MMO elements going on in the background. If you wish, you can quiet the active chat box so it only displays your logs and completely ignore the other players roaming around the vicinity. Only Protector’s Enclave, the main hub, is truly crowded: It’s where you return to buy and sell items at the auction house, shop at vendors, acquire mounts and companions (pets, clerics, and various fighters to assist you in battle), and more.

I often melted away into this “private” world when I left the hub, but other times, I chose to make friends. I joined a guild. I competed in player-versus-player (PvP) domination, where you compete on a team against a group of another five players, capturing bases on the map and executing successful kills for points until you win (or lose). I participated in skirmishes, where a bunch of us fought against waves of enemies, and invited several other players to join my dungeon delve or jumped into theirs. Neverwinter’s automated queue system matches you with similarly leveled players so you don’t have to search the chat box for potential party members (unless you want to). Whatever I was doing, it was easy to go alone or band together, and I found that most people were incredibly friendly and receptive to either idea.

Identity matters
I pumped roughly 60 hours into Neverwinter and almost reached level 50, and in that time, I learned how versatile the classes are.

Each class has a special movement ability. For example, the Trickster Rogue can roll while the Great Weapon Fighter can sprint. This not only makes getting around fun but also sets you apart from other players onscreen. Class also determines your skill set. When you’re in a dungeon or on the field, you can discover and interact with certain sparkling hotspots by using kits, and each class is naturally adept at using one type. This helps make empty environments a little more interactive — I felt like I was snagging items left just for me.

Rogues, for example, can also disappear temporarily with stealth and disable traps in dungeons, and daily powers — not so much daily as special and more energy-costly to use — regenerate differently depending on class. All of this combines so that you not only experience Neverwinter a different way but also serve as a valuable asset to any team. Everyone can contribute in a cool way. I didn’t have enough time as I would have liked to play around with all the clases, but they all have their perks. It’s fun to experiment with them.

Smart progression
One of the things that impressed me most about Neverwinter — especially early on — were the skills, or powers. Each time you level up, you earn a point to invest in them. You can either upgrade what you have or learn a new one: an at-will, encounter, passive, or daily type. You use these in different ways. For example, at-wills you can spam as regular attacks, and encounters recharge after a cooldown.

The nice part is that Neverwinter restricts you to a tier or two of powers at a time, meaning you have enough time to really go hands-on with what’s available to you. You can learn what you like before too many options are all vying for your attention. This curbs what I think of as the skill-tree problem, where you randomly pick and try out new powers only to ditch them entirely when some other cool one catches you eye.

And since it has no mana, so you can slam enemies with one power after another as long as you time your cooldowns correctly.

More than enough to do
To speak to the MMO side of Neverwinter, adventurers always have plenty to do. You can waste a whole day just completing enough daily quests to earn Astral Diamonds (ADs), one of the main forms of in-game currency. You can set mercenaries and other laborers to work in the Professions menu and farm resources, and you can collect and fuse like runestones and enchantments to create better socketables for your equipment. You can also perform an hourly invocation to your deity, entering a lottery of sorts where you’re guaranteed to win something. And you can do Foundry Quests, which are completely user-made experiences (more on those in a moment).

Plus, you can join a guild or share quests for even more chances to earn experience, gold, and other assets. Events cycle through the day, boosting the worth of opportunities like dungeon delves, skirmishes, and PvP. But when you’re not killing time, Neverwinter keeps you busy with an assortment of story-based quests. These are variations on a number of basic forms — eliminate a target, kill a horde of enemies, retrieve an item, gather materials, investigate an area, and so on — but they always feel different because they reflect what’s going on in the narrative or because you have a whole new themed region to explore, from frosty mountains to skyships.

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Just last week at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) trade show, Microsoft positioned Xbox One as the console of the future. Now, after a sustained negative reaction from fans, the company is taking a step backward in the name of appeasement.

That means some of the benefits of Xbox One’s now-dead always-online infrastructure are out.

Microsoft’s Xbox chief Don Mattrick released a statement today that details a full reversal on the company’s previous policies. Used games now have no restrictions. Xbox One does not need to check in with Microsoft’s servers every 24 hours. Rental games are back, and Microsoft is dropping all region-locking restrictions.

But that also means that potentially cool features like sharing digital titles with family members is out. Gamers will also have to put a disc in for every game. Previously, Xbox One would allow instant switching between titles without having to mess with discs.

Xbox chief product officer Marc Whitten was quick to point out some of the digital features that are sticking around in an interview with GamesBeat.

“We’re still very committed to the digital infrastructure and to the power of the cloud,” said Whitten. “Games like Titanfall and Forza can do [amazing things] when they’re taking advantage of Xbox One as a service. You’re also going to see us push how digital can change the experience. At launch, you’ll be able to get any of your content online or through a physical disc, which will work like it always has.”

Whitten also described a situation where you could bring a disc over to a friend’s house and play it on their Xbox One, that person can then purchase the game immediately and start playing with no downloads.

“That’s an example of how we’re leveraging the digital capabilities,” he said. “I think you’ll see us adding a lot of new features. A lot of new functionality.”

Whitten wouldn’t clarify if that new functionality could one day include instant-game switching or family sharing.

So why drop those features? Well, Microsoft didn’t get the response from fans that it expected.

“We’ve been working on Xbox One for a long time,” said Whitten. “Over the last several weeks, starting with the Xbox unveil and through E3, we had our first chance to show the complete story and to see what people love and what they didn’t like — what they were excited about and what they wanted changed. That was the journey. We put it out there and heard what people had to say, and I think we heard clearly that people wanted us to change around online and the physical disc.”

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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 One can now play used games just like an Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 do (and the PlayStation 4 will upon its release). Microsoft made a stunning course correction after weeks of gamer outcry against the company’s policy that would have severely limited used games with strict digital-rights management.

It turns out that the outcry is what made the difference, according to Xbox chief product officer Marc Whitten.

“Frankly, over the last three weeks we had an opportunity to share our vision and get feedback,” Whitten told GamesBeat. “I think we heard that people love our great games, they love the vision for the platform, they love so much about it, but they were very clear that they also wanted choice. The ability to use their console offline if they want to go on vacation or are in a low-connectivity area. They also want the choice to use physical disc the way they were used to. We listened.”

Microsoft listened, and now the Xbox One is a much more appealing machine to a lot of gamers.

The thing is, this is probably because of you.

“As a team, we’ve been reading the comments and reading the forums,” said Whitten. “We’ve been getting e-mail and collecting all that feedback. That’s been our conversation over the past week, and that’s what led us to make these changes.”

I asked Whitten if he resented having to change the Xbox One after putting so much work into it. No one has really had any hands-on time with the features that Microsoft changed, so maybe the company believed in them and hate that it has to take them out.

That’s not the case.

“This is literally what I love about this industry,” he said. “I’ve been on Xbox for a decade. I’ve been responsible for most of our updates on Xbox Live. All I do is put out new functionality, then listen to the community. I try to do more of what they like and less of what they don’t like.

“I’m absolutely not resentful. Frankly, I thank gamers for their feedback. That’s the beauty of this industry. It’s so much better than putting out a product and then not hearing anything because people don’t care. That’s the beauty. People care about Xbox, and they want to have an amazing experience. I love it.”

So, Microsoft is listening. The lesson is that if you don’t like the price (it’s still $499), the indie policies (small devs can’t self-publish), or the bundled Kinect (included with every console), then you better speak up now.

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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 state of mobile gaming is a theme at VentureBeat’s upcoming MobileBeat conference. 

Social gaming business Zynga has purchased Spooky Cool Labs in a major push for more real-money casino gaming that could help it generate more revenue.

Zynga has been struggling for a long while and recently laid off 520 employees so it could focus more on mobile and real-money games. It also closed its New York, Dallas, and Los Angeles offices at the same time.

But even while it trims staff, Zynga clearly sees the value of bringing in experienced real-money gaming veterans who could help it make more cash. So here comes Spooky Cool, whose founder is Joe Kaminkow. He’s an influential slot machine designer and a former VP at IGT, the “world’s largest casino game manufacturer.”

“We have a legacy in social casino franchises with Zynga Poker, and we believe that free-to-play social casino games for the web and on mobile have the potential to reach and connect a much broader audience,” Zynga chief revenue officer Barry Cottle said in a blog post today. “Spooky Cool Labs is the right team to help us bring the feeling of being on a casino floor and the thrill of hitting a big jackpot right to players wherever they play.”

While Spooky Cool Labs has casino talent, it’s most recent hit is a Wizard of Oz social game on Facebook, which had more than a million registered players back in March. Zynga no doubt will enjoy having the that title in its roster, too.

Spooky Cool Labs and its employees will remain based in Chicago. Kaminkow will also continue to lead game design at Aristocrat Leisure, a major Australian slots manufacturer.

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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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Microsoft is throwing its massive machinery into reverse to drop many of the restrictive digital-rights management policies it planned for Xbox One video game console.

“Since unveiling our plans for Xbox One, my team and I have heard directly from many of you, read your comments, and listened to your feedback,” Microsoft Xbox chief Don Mattrick wrote in a blog post. “You told us how much you loved the flexibility you have today with games delivered on disc. The ability to lend, share, and resell these games at your discretion is of incredible importance to you. Also important to you is the freedom to play offline, for any length of time, anywhere in the world.”

Giant Bomb reporter Patrick Klepek first reported that Microsoft would reveal changes to how Xbox One handles game ownership, online requirements, and more later today. The entertainment company since updated the Xbox One frequently asked questions page to reflect those alterations.

The big changes are as follows:

• Microsoft’s new stance will drop the always-online requirement for the console.
• Xbox One will no longer have to check in at least once every 24 hours for games to work.
• Game discs will work just as they do on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 consoles — meaning no restrictions, new or used.
• An Internet connection is now only necessary for the initial console setup.
• Microsoft is even drop region-locking — you can play a game from Japan on an Xbox One from America, for example.
• Rental games are allowed.

“These changes will impact some of the scenarios we previously announced for Xbox One,” wrote Mattrick. “The sharing of games will work as it does today, you will simply share the disc. Downloaded titles cannot be shared or resold. Also, similar to today, playing disc based games will require that the disc be in the tray.”

This is a massive swing in the other direction for Microsoft, who just came off a tough Electronic Entertainment Expo trade show that had Sony playing on each one of the Xbox One’s perceived weaknesses.

The biggest cheer of the week went to Sony when it announced that the PlayStation 4 will treat used games exactly as the PlayStation 3 does — meaning that they’ll work just as well as a new disc would. That was all due to Microsoft’s bungled messaging that still has consumers confused as to how game ownership works on Xbox One.

That confusion may finally evaporate now that Microsoft is returning to the simplified policies it used during the Xbox 360 and Xbox consoles. We’ll have more on this as we continue to dig.

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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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Sony is aware that it broke some PlayStation 3s yesterday with its latest firmware update for the hardware. It took down the patch and is really sorry about all of this.

“We are aware of reports that the recent PlayStation 3 system-software update — version 4.45 — has caused the cross-media bar to not display on a small number of PS3 systems,” a PlayStation spokesperson told GamesBeat in a statement. “We have temporarily taken 4.45 offline and are investigating the cause of the problem. We will announce when the system update is available for download as soon as possible. We apologize for the inconvenience.”

The cross-media bar (XMB) is the interface for the PlayStation 3. Without it, the console is nothing more than a big paperweight. We’ve asked Sony what steps affected users should take, and we will update with its response. PlayStation customer support is probably a smart place to start.

Everyone else should have no issues continuing to use their PlayStation 3s. In fact, it’s nice to start thing up and not have to update it for once.

We’ll have more info on update 4.45 as it is available.

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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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Big publishers weren’t the only companies excited about the newest sequels at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles. A few indie developers were also eager to improve on their breakout hits, some of which just came out only last year.

We’ve already covered the new indie games that impressed us at E3, so here’s a short list of the sequels (and updates) that we’re looking forward to.

Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number

Dennaton Games had a surprise hit on its hands when Hotline Miami debuted last October on PCs. You play as a vigilante who received mysterious phone calls from someone who ordered you to murder gangs and criminals. Players reveled in the pixelated mess of booze, guns, ’80s-inspired tunes, and blood — a lot of blood. The developer wants to deliver more of everything in Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number. According to Dennis Wedin, one half of Dennaton Games, the main theme for the sequel is expectations.

“Since it’s a sequel — and people will have a lot of expectations from the first game — it’s not about how ‘I’m gonna make this game that is too much like Hotline Miami, or too little like Hotline Miami,’” he said. “We wanted to incorporate that [theme of expectations] into the story.”

The tense kill-or-be-killed gameplay carries over to Hotline Miami 2. Where it differs is in the number of characters: You’ll play as multiple factions, each with different reasons for killing. The demo showed one of those factions, which Wedin calls “the fans,” people who are so obsessed with the events of the first game that they’ve started killing bad guys on their own (complete with animal masks, just like what the main character wears in Hotline Miami). It was with one of these fans that I got to play around with the new chain whip, a short-range melee weapon that gives you a little distance to work with.

Hotline Miami 2 has an extra twist. In the opening scene and tutorial level, you play as the pig butcher, who was last seen in Hotline Miami’s first teaser trailer. It turns out that the trailer was for a movie … which is actually a slasher film in Hotline Miami 2 based on the events of the first game. You’ll switch back and forth from the movie set and the factions as you progress.

Hotline Miami 2 releases later this year on PC, Mac, and Linux.

Payday 2

Payday 2 doesn’t mess around with its core formula: You still attempt to pull off bank robberies with, ideally, three other people (you can also play by yourself). Instead, developer Overkill Software chose to add more depth to the gameplay by putting in features you’d normally see in a role-playing game. Your job choices now depend on your level, and you choose them via an interactive map. You can customize masks and weapons. And at the end of every mission, you receive a bonus item or piece of equipment based on factors like how the job’s difficulty.

During my E3 demo, I was dumb enough to walk into a bank while carrying my gun, which triggered the alarm (as well as shattering any hope of a stealth approach). The officers in the building died from our gunshots within seconds, but reinforcements quickly arrived outside. While a teammate set up a machine that drilled into the vault, the rest of us had to defend the bank until we could grab the money and run. It was hectic: Cops came through the roof or the open windows, the machine broke down and someone had to keep fixing it, and I was running around trying not to get shot. We barely finished the mission.

Payday 2 comes out in August for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC.

DayZ

The new DayZ (nicknamed “DayZ Standalone”) isn’t so much a sequel as it is a proper relaunch for the multiplayer-only zombie-survival mod that came out last year. You will no longer need a copy of military simulator Arma II to play it — this DayZ, as the nickname implies, stands on its own. With that comes vastly improved graphics and a lot of tweaks, like a more concise and friendly user interface, smarter zombies, and an item-crafting system.

The original DayZ rose to popularity not because of its zombies but because of the other people you’d face: Do you shoot first and ask questions later? Or do you try to talk to them and maybe work together to search for supplies? Compounding this moral dilemma is the mod’s permanent death system — when you die, you lose all of your items, forcing you to start all over again. These situations led to crazy stories (and videos documenting those stories) that helped spread word of the mod through forums and blogs.

The latest build of the new DayZ at E3 — the developers were working on it up until the first morning of the show — wasn’t connected to its online servers, but I had no reason to doubt its chances of creating new player-driven narratives. What struck me the most, however, was the gameplay elements not related to the shooting or scavenging. You can now change your outfit with any clothes you find in abandoned homes, and some of these will have hidden benefits that could boost your stats. And some of the books you find are more than just decoration: You can read the entirety of such public domain novels like War of the Worlds and Robinson Crusoe.

Bohemia Interactive haven’t pinpointed a release date just yet, but players can purchase the game on PC when it releases the alpha build to the public. Like Minecraft before it, the price will rise as the game improves and closes in on its launch window.

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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 Wii U isn’t having a great first year. Nintendo’s latest home console is struggling to find an audience, and its battles will only get tougher as Sony and Microsoft unleash their next-gen systems this fall.

Nintendo chief executive officer Satoru Iwata claims that the problem is all with him and his company, according to an interview with CNBC.

“We are to blame,” said Iwata. “We relaxed our [marketing] efforts, so the consumers today still cannot understand what’s so good and unique about the Wii U.”

That’s probably true, but it also might understate the problem. In June 2012, CNN reported that the Wii U is an add-on accessory for the original Wii console. It’s likely that perception is still widely held by more casual customers.

“Because we’re always trying to be unique, it takes some energies on our side to [make] people understand the real attractions about whatever we are doing,” said Iwata “We have [also] been unsuccessful in coming up with one single [game] with which people can understand [why Wii U is different].”

On the Wii, that game was Wii Sports. The minigame collection helped teach players the different control styles using universally familiar sports like tennis and golf. Iwata recognizes that Nintendo Land doesn’t do the same thing for Wii U’s tablet controller.

“As long as people have hands-on [experience], they can appreciate the value of the Wii U,” said Iwata. “But because there’s not software that’s simple and obvious for people as Wii Sports for the Wii, potential consumers do not feel like trying the Wii U. Our challenge today is with the software lineup we are introducing now, we have to encourage [people] to experience the Wii U in the first place.”

In the six months following Wii U’s November release, the publisher didn’t just fail to release a game comparable to Wii Sports — it had nearly no support for the device at all. Nintendo and its publishing partners pushed games like Pikmin 3, The Wonderful 101, and Rayman Legends out of the “launch window,” which extend until March.

Over the last three months, Wii U’s best-reviewed game, according to Metacritic, is Mutant Mudds Deluxe on its eShop download store. The only other notable releases for the system were multiplatform titles like DC fighting game Injustice: Gods Among Us, HD remake Resident Evil: Revelations, and first-person shooter Sniper Elite V2.

Tomorrow, Nintendo will release New Super Luigi U, which is downloadable content for New Super Mario Bros. U. Beginning with that, Nintendo claims it will release at least one major game a month for the rest of the year. That includes Pikmin 3, The Wonderful 101, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD, Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze, and Super Mario 3D World.

It’s a decent lineup, but it’s unlikely that any of those games will end up the Wii U’s Wii Sports — and that game almost certainly won’t come from Wii U’s waning third-party support.

Still, Iwata isn’t going to give up.

“I do not think we should become too pessimistic about the current situation with the Wii U,” said the executive. “I think we should pour that time and energy into our [development] efforts, so eventually we can encourage third-party [publishers] to want to support Nintendo.”

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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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Developer 2K Marin is currently in the process of adapting the XCOM series into a third-person action game. That has the franchise’s fans worrying that tactics will take a backseat to run-and-gun shooter gameplay.

That’s not the case, as The Bureau: XCOM Declassified creative director Morgan Gray explained to GamesBeat in April.

“It’s pretty much classic X-Com,” said Gray. “But we wanted to move it away from the classic isometric god-view mechanics of the previous games. We wondered what it would be like to be the guys in the battlefield.”

Now, 2K Marin is showing off the game’s more thoughtful, tactical side in a new trailer starring The Bureau’s Battle Focus mechanic:

Battle Focus enables players to slow down the action, assess the situation, and enact commands and strategies in a gun fight. It looks similar to the turn-based interface that developer Firaxis used in 2012′s XCOM: Enemy Unknown, only The Bureau reverts to real-time gameplay once the player exits Battle Focus.

The Bureau: XCOM Declassified is due out for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC on Aug. 20.

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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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Sony’s upcoming PlayStation 4 video game console won over gamers at the 2013 Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) last week when the company announced a price and its stance on used games. But there’s still a lot we don’t know about the system.

Thankfully, a new video from Sony shows a bit more about how the console will work in everyday use. The PS4′s new interface is front and center, and it looks rather slick. Once you log in, you see a feed a social updates that is reminiscent of Facebook or Google+. The feed contains status updates, messages, notifications about new games, videos, and more.

The clip also shows how users can share game videos with each other. You just record a small snippet of gameplay and send to your friends. This can be especially helpful in figuring out how to beat a boss or overcome some obstacle.

One other cool thing in the new video is how games can be installed. The sci-fi military shooter Killzone: Shadow Fall lets you choose to download the multiplayer mode of the game or the single-player mode first. And you can download new titles while continuing to play other games on your system.

Check out the video above for more.

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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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Digital distribution has its pros and cons. On Steam, gamers may access to their digital library on any computer, and they don’t need to keep a shelf full of discs. At the same time, Steam customers can’t trade their games or lend them to friends … except that last part might change.

The latest beta for Valve’s Steam client includes dialog prompts for when a friend is using one of your games, according to a post on the gaming forum NeoGAF. That could mean that the company is considering enabling game sharing between friends through its digital store.

We’ve reached out to Valve to ask if and when this feature will go live.

The relevant code is only in the Steam beta, and you can find the following prompts by opening the steamui_english file:

SteamUI_JoinDialog_SharedLicense_Title “Shared game library”
SteamUI_JoinDialog_SharedLicenseLocked_OwnerText “Just so you know, your games are currently in use by %borrower%. Playing now will send %borrower% a notice that it’s time to quit.”
SteamUI_JoinDialog_SharedLicenseLocked_BorrowerText “This shared game is currently unavailable. Please try again later or buy this game for your own library.”

That makes it pretty clear that Valve is at least testing this capability. A feature like this is similar to what Microsoft is building into the new Xbox One console. That device treats physical games like digital releases, which limits how the discs are resold, but it also enables game sharing among family members.

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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 10:45 a.m. Pacific with additional comment from Sony

Details are still minimal right now, but it seems that the 4.45 update for PS3 is locking up systems. According to reports, owners can no longer boot their systems after the update after the update, which Sony released today.

The update is supposed to let gamers choose whether they want in-game notifications when they earn trophies.

According to website Engadget, the issue only seems to affect PlayStation 3 owners with 500GB or larger hard drives, but that’s difficult to confirm right now.

We contacted Sony representative, who say they’re looking into the issue. GamesBeat will update when we hear more. For now, it’s probably best to play it safe and avoid the system update.

Sony has since pulled the firmware update. A representative for the company told GamesBeat, “We are aware of reports that the recent PlayStation 3 system software update (version 4.45) has caused the XMB to not display on a small number of PS3 systems. We have temporarily taken 4.45 offline and are investigating the cause of the problem. We will announce when the system update is available for download as soon as possible.  We apologize for the inconvenience.”

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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

Seemingly out of nowhere tonight, graphics chip-maker Nvidia has announced one of the biggest changes to its business in some time: It will begin licensing its new Kepler GPU core — as well as future designs — to third-party companies.

The move will give Nvidia a completely new source of revenue, but more importantly, it will help bring its technology to even more mobile devices. The company has been struggling to get into the mobile market with its Tegra processors, but so far we’ve yet to see a killer Tegra device hit the market. By licensing its technology, Nvidia won’t have to rely solely on Tegra as its mobile workhorse, and it also opens the door for some interesting new spins on its technology from third-parties.

Additionally, Nvidia announced that it will license out its visual-computing portfolio, which includes more than 5,500 patents and its CUDA parallel-computing platform.

“Not so long ago, we only made and sold GPU chips, albeit the world’s fastest ones,” wrote David Shannon, the executive vice president and general counsel at Nvidia, in a blog post tonight. “Five years ago, we introduced Tegra, a system on a chip … . But it’s not practical to build silicon or systems to address every part of the expanding market. Adopting a new business approach will allow us to address the universe of devices.”

Nvidia is best known for its powerful graphics cards, which have been accelerating 3D performance for PC gamers (and emptying their wallets) since the mid-90s. But with Tegra and more recent announcements, like its GRID game-streaming system and the Android-based portable gaming system Project Shield, Nvidia has desperately been trying to make itself relevant in an entirely new wave of computing devices.

Shannon pointed out that Nvidia already licensed one of its earlier GPU cores to Sony for the PlayStation 3, which gave the company a taste of the possibilities of licensing. AMD, which purchased Nvidia’s main competitor ATI back in 2006, also has its chips powering the next-generation Xbox One and PlayStation 4.

While the licensing announcement was surprising, it makes a lot of sense for Nvidia. Its new Kepler GPU technology can scale from smartphones all the way to powerful supercomputers, making it perfectly suited for other companies to manipulate for their own uses.

Licensing also makes Nvidia’s technology viable for companies that would never adopt its Tegra chips, hardware guru Anand Lal Shimpi points out. Now Nvidia will be able to push its technology for future chips from Apple and Samsung, both of which would likely leap at the chance to outdo the other in graphics performance.

I opened my eyes slowly.

I found myself floating in an expanse of water. There was an island in the hazy distance, and I began to move toward it. I reached the edge of the sea and climbed ashore. There was a calming sound surrounding me, like music, but it seemed more alive. As I moved through the island, it moved with me.

Was this a dream? Everything looked like a dream. It felt real, but in retrospect, it wasn’t quite right. I walked among the cherry trees, and as I climbed, the music swelled, lifting my spirits.

Surprisingly, I wasn’t alone. There was a small flock of chickens clucking away musically — the pleasing sound of mallets masking what should have been a more irksome clutter. I tried to get close, but they ran away frantically — the mallets falling on bars faster and faster like an intensifying rain. Leaving the birds in peace, I traveled a bit farther, noticing a change in the sky. It was darkening, and the music was becoming subdued, tranquil, and almost sorrowful.

I was near another shore, and something about the sea was calling to me. It seemed like the place where I began was the place to be as the world was calming. I swam out into nowhere and turned back to look at the island I had left. The music was still. The night was stiller.

I closed my eyes.

Game developers and their patrons are obsessed with value. With a stock price of $60 per game, it’s understandable — players want their money’s worth, and the creators know how to deliver. So much content is being crammed into games that they are ripping at the seams — bloated from dozens of hours of sidequests, achievements, and collectables. Beat the game on Normal. Beat the game on Hard. Beat the game on You’re Mentally Insane To Try This, You Idiot. Each of these warrants an achievement, and of course you can’t really feel fulfilled unless you get them all. There’s an emptiness inside you, and a small voice that says that you haven’t really beaten the game.

Then there are games with infinite possibilities like Skyrim, where you can easily log 100 or 200 hours with just one character. That’s not even experiencing a fraction of the game, with a number of classes to choose from at the outset and a daunting number of possibilities when leveling up the character. For a long time, I was just as obsessed as the Every Gamer with the amount of content crammed in a game. My excitement couldn’t be contained when I learned that Action Role-playing Game 3 or Adventure 7 was going to be the biggest game yet in the series, with a map so large that it would take an hour just to reach the edge.

That’s not to say that I still don’t love huge games that are packed with extra missions or unnecessary, time-sucking achievements, but recently, something else has stolen my heart: short games. With the growth of digital publishing on platforms such as the App Store, Steam, or the PlayStation 3, there has been a surge of indie studios, many of which consist only of one or two people. The ability for short-staffed developers to self publish digitally has allowed for more accessible, smaller scale games, and despite their scope, they carry the same weight and validity as triple-A titles. It has been proven by releases like Journey that satisfying, artful experiences can be packed into smaller games, but some developers have taken the minimal approach to gaming even further.

My time with Ed Key and David Kanaga’s Proteus confirmed that the value and length of a game are not proportionate.

Proteus consists of the most bare-bones video-game concept I can recall. You would be forgiven for wondering whether this is actually a “game” or just an “interactive audio-visual experience.” But perhaps not by the developer, who describes it as both — you can read Key’s defense of Proteus as a game here.

Upon starting the game, you’re presented with a colorful, randomly generated island that you simply explore, observing the landscape and creatures and structures, the changes in tone and music, and the transitions between day and night. You can walk, run, and change direction. That’s it. When I awoke in the ocean, I knew it was going to be a brief, meditative exploration. What I didn’t realize was that this would be a game that I would play for 11 minutes and leave feeling completely satisfied.

I didn’t accomplish anything while playing Proteus. I didn’t get to the next level or beat that boss or get a new high score. These are the cornerstones of traditional game design, but they’re tired and in need of respite. I could play Proteus over and over to get more value out of it, seeking out new experiences and soaking in the world — but I don’t need to just for the sake of getting my money’s worth.

After 11 minutes of play, I felt truly satisfied with my experience. I was greeted with an assortment of emotions including joy, excitement, serenity, and a certain bittersweetness that made my short time with the game just as fulfilling as a 50-hour adventure culminating in an epic coda.

I know that in 11 minutes I didn’t experience all that the game has to offer. I only saw a portion of the landscapes and heard just a smattering of music, but I don’t feel the need to squeeze everything there is to squeeze out of the game. With a short game like Proteus, it might be possible to do so. With a series like The Elder Scrolls, it seems more unlikely. There can be beauty in a brief, one-time experience that doesn’t need to last forever, and in my 11 minutes, I created a work of art that I will always value; though, I can’t promise that I’ll never play it again.

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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’d be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn’t know who Mario is. Due to his iconic red hat, blue overalls, and a fluffy mustache, Nintendo’s mascot is instantly recognizable. But after appearing in many new games, sequels, and remakes over the past 30 years, I’m beginning to grow weary of the Italian plumber.

Last week, the GamesBeat staff shared their thoughts on the state of the Wii U, and the consensus wasn’t very positive. At this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles, Nintendo proved once again that it’s relying on heavy hitters like Mario Kart and Super Smash Bros. to keep 3DS and Wii U players happy. And not surprisingly, Mario plays a prominent part in many of those games.

I kept this fatigue in mind when I spoke with Koichi Hayashida and Yoshiaki Koizumi at E3. Hayashida is the director of the upcoming co-op platformer Super Mario 3D World, and Koizumi is a producer in Nintendo’s Entertainment Analysis and Development (EAD) division in Tokyo. Both men have worked at Nintendo since the ’90s, with résumés filed with games like Super Mario 64, Super Mario Sunshine, and Super Mario Galaxy (as well as its sequel). They work closely with Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto, making them the ideal candidates to talk about Mario’s role in video games today.

A hardware-driven philosophy

As a hobby, Hayashida keeps a book full of quotes from Miyamoto, where he writes down interesting things that the legendary designer says about game development. One of those quotes explains the central philosophy behind each new Mario game.

“There is one thing from my quote book that Miyamoto is fond of saying: Mario games are easy to make in the sense that they’re always based on the way that hardware has evolved,” said Hayashida. “So you have to look at what the new capability of hardware is. You think about a specific, fun, new experience based on the capabilities of that hardware. That’s really what influences the outcome of the software. And so, we see Mario games changing all the time. And it’s very much based on what each new iteration of hardware can do.”

Though Nintendo finds a way to reinvent Mario with each new console it makes, the changes are never too dramatic — arguably, the last big leap was the advent of the 3D platformer in Super Mario 64. But since then, the changes usually come in the form of new worlds to explore, new powers to wield, or the addition of cooperative multiplayer. And with similarly sounding titles like New Super Mario Bros., Super Paper Mario, Mario and Luigi, and Super Mario 3D Land, it’s hard to keep track of them all.

Source: Giancarlo Valdes/GamesBeat

Yoshiaki Koizumi (left) and Koichi Hayashida.

With enough Mario games out in the wild to last a lifetime, I asked Hayashida and Koizumi if Nintendo is ever afraid that gamers will eventually lose interest in its chubby hero. As expected, I didn’t get a direct yes or no on the matter, but Hayashida did bring up some insight to how the company views Mario: He’s a status symbol for “quality.”

“I guess I should really turn that idea around,” said Hayashida. “Rather than getting worried about people getting tired of Mario, I like to think of Mario as being a reliable character, in the sense that people can be relieved knowing that they’re buying a game that represents a really high level of quality and a certain amount of [thought] that goes into the design.

“And certainly, that’s the case with Super Mario 3D World. We are presenting a lot of interesting new elements that really change the gameplay experience. Certainly the Mario character is familiar to everyone, but the cat suit is entirely new. And the ability to have multiplayer in a 3D Mario game for the first time I think feels very fresh and different. So it’s the same Mario character of course, but with each new hardware iteration — as I’ve said — we’re trying to bring different, new, fun experiences. So I usually don’t worry about it from that perspective.”

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Now that everyone’s home and feeling has returned to their feet — just as the con flu starts kicking in — we’ve had a chance to assess the real takeaways from 2013′s Electronic Entertainment Expo.

That’s right — I mean the loot.

Most companies hand out a little something to people who go behind closed doors. Shirts, bags, funny wigs … it gets a little strange out on the show floor sometimes. We can’t claim that we saw and grabbed everything we could, here’s what found its way into our hearts. And our luggage.

Launch the gallery below for swag!

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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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Real-money-betting company Skillz raised $5.5 million in its latest round of funding.

Skillz provides mobile gamers a platform to put real money on the outcome of competitive games. It is currently operating in more than a dozen Android games, where players can compete in tournaments for the chance to take home a real-money prize. This is similar to recent efforts from some companies to get into real-money casino games, but Skillz operates solely in skill-based titles.

Real-money tournaments for games of skill are legal in most U.S. states.

“Since we launched, the response from both players and game developers has been tremendous,” Skillz chief executive Andrew Paradise told GamesBeat. ”We surpassed 1M downloads in less than a month, so we’ll be expanding our marketing and customer support teams to keep up with our growing user base. We’ve also had overwhelming interest from studios who want to implement Skillz in their titles, so we’ll be expanding our developer relations team as we add games from around the world.”

Many mobile and social developers use the free-to-play business model that generates revenue on the backend through advertising and in-game publishing. A real-money wagering platform like Skillz can offer a new revenue stream while simultaneously exciting gamers that want to add a bit of risk to their gaming experience.

Casino games that use virtual currency saturate the social-gaming market. It’s likely that Zynga and other publishers will quickly flip a switch to make those games work with actual cash when it’s legal to do so. Skillz is attempting to build up a rapport with gamers using skill-based games so that it too can expand to include casino-like titles.

“While companies like Zynga are experimenting with games of chance and how to enable them, gamers are already engaging with Skillz right now,” said Paradise. “We have a survey that shows 41 percent of consumers want to play in real-money competitions in their favorite iPhone or Android games. It’s a staggering number. If everyone already has a balance established with a known company, like Skillz, when games of chance enter the U.S., it creates an interesting dynamic for us to capture some of that.”

Paradise cofounded San Francisco-based Skillz in 2012 along with Casey Chafkin. Skillz was previously known as Lookout Gaming. Under that name it raised $1.3 million in a seed-funding round. Skillz’ investors include Atlas Venture, Nextview Ventures, and former IGN chief executive Mark Jung.

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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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At least one developer believes our future is a digital-candies-based economy. Candy Crush Saga developer King is hiring banks to help it pursue an initial public offering (IPO) in the United States, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Candy Crush Saga is one of the most-played and highest-grossing social games on mobile platforms and Facebook. That success is leading King’s executives and its investors to consider taking the publisher public.

“King’s success and growth presents numerous opportunities for the business to develop further, and one option would be to take the company public,” a King spokesperson told WSJ. “However, while it’s an option for the future, we would not comment on when we could consider making such a decision.”

Social-game developer IPOs don’t have a stellar track record. In 2011, Zynga went public with a lot of attention from Wall Street. Zynga debuted its offering at $10 a share in December 2011. After shooting up to $11, the stock quickly shed its value.

Since then, Zynga’s shares have lost nearly 70 percent of their value. It is currently trading at $2.89. That drop is largely attributed to Zynga failing to re-create the success of its games, like FarmVille and CityVille.

King could face a similar issue. Candy Crush Saga is a gigantic success, but the company’s other releases haven’t duplicated that performance. Even with King generating a ton of revenue, Wall Street might not have a lot of confidence in another studio coming out of the volatile social-gaming sector.

[Editor's note: We'll also be talking about what it takes to establish long-term success in mobile at our MobileBeat 2013 event next month in SF, where we're hosting major players to debate what makes a winning mobile experience, from Google, to Facebook, Millennial, Chartboost, Flurry, Tapjoy, HasOffers and many more.]

Apax Partners, a private-equity firm, and Index Ventures, a venture-capital firm, invested nearly $50 million in King in 2005. Both would stand to benefit greatly from an IPO.

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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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One of gaming’s superstar creative minds is dropping vigors for Carrousel.

BioShock and BioShock Infinite creative lead Ken Levine is writing the script for Warner Bros. Pictures’ Logan’s Run remake, according to Deadline. Levine will update the story of the 1976 sci-fi film that has the titular Logan running after aging out in a dystopian future that does not allow anyone over 30 to live.

While Levine is best known of his work in video games, he actually has a history in film. He started his career as a screenwriter and playwright. He wrote two scripts while living in Los Angeles before moving on to Irrational Games. He spoke about his time in Hollywood during a 2008 keynote at the Penny Arcade Expo.

This return to film doesn’t mean Levine is abandoning Irrational or video games. The BioShock creator will continue on as creative director at his development studio.

This is WB’s latest effort to get Logan’s Run off the ground. The studio has previously attached names like Superman Returns and X-Men director Bryan Singer and Driver director Nicolas Winding Refn to the project. Both of those attempts fell through.

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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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Publisher Electronic Arts is continuing to prepare for the next generation by cutting out costs where it can. That includes dropping nearly 20 jobs over the last few days, an EA source confirms.

As Microsoft and Sony spool up for the next generation of console, Electronic Arts is bracing for the tough transition by enacting layoffs. This latest round of cuts is part of the effort the company began after its chief executive John Riccitiello left in March.

“In recent weeks, EA has aligned all elements of its organizational structure behind priorities in new technologies and mobile,” an EA spokesperson wrote in a statement in April. “This has led to some difficult decisions to reduce the workforce in some locations. We are extremely grateful for the contributions made by each of our employees — those that are leaving EA will be missed by their colleagues and friends.”

At the Electronic Entertainment Expo trade show last week, EA revealed a next-gen-heavy strategy that includes games like first-person shooter Titanfall, third-person shooter Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare, and sports games like FIFA 14. Titanfall even earned GamesBeat’s E3 Game of the Show award.

The publisher will combine its next-gen efforts with a deeper focus on mobile games. On mobile, EA is finding success with titles like The Simpsons: Tapped Out and Real Racing 3.

EA plans for this focused strategy, along with the cost cutting, to help it endure any potentially lean earnings due to the console transition.

“These are hard but essential changes as we focus on delivering great games and showing players around the world why to spend their time with us,” said the April EA statement.

EA’s board hasn’t appointed a new CEO. Former EA CEO and current executive chairman Larry Probst is handling those duties in the interim.

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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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Check out all of our E3 2013 coverage here.

Last year, the gaming community declared that 2012′s Electronic Entertainment Expo trade show (E3) ushered in “the year of the bow.” We just finished up this year’s event, and while it was far less full of twings and/or twangs (unless Alice in Chains frontman Jerry Cantrell’s guitar performance at the Ubisoft presentation counts, which it might), one thing kept coming back through all of the press briefings, floor demos, and previews.

Seriously, did you notice all of the open-world games?

Sure, we saw the ones we expected, like Assassin’s Creed IV, Watch Dogs, Infamous: Second Son, and Saints Row IV. But we knew about these free-roaming titles going into the show, so we had no surprises there. As the week went on, however, we saw both new franchises and new installments of established series going the open-world route. Games like these:

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

(PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, Xbox One)

The lead-up to the reveal of Konami’s latest in its stealth-action franchise has been almost as complicated as the series’ plot.  We’ve had an investigation-launching fake-out trailer at the Spike Video Game Awards in December, some confusion as to exactly how many games we were talking about, and a switch in voice actors. By the time we actually got to see the game in action at the start of the Microsoft press briefing on Monday, it was actually a little anticlimactic.

Well, it looks pretty good, actually. I can’t pretend it doesn’t. And what was the first thing that the gameplay video proclaimed once it got its expository dialogue out of the way?

Konami is right to throw that exclamation point in there; this is a big deal. The Metal Gear series is far from being the most linear around, but it has followed a pretty strict “go here, do this” structure in which players follow a prescribed sequences of events with lengthy cutscenes between them. It’ll be interesting to see how much freedom this translates to once the game actually comes out.

Whatever it means, however, I’m pretty sure the plus-sized cinematics are staying. Let’s just take one series-changer at a time here.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

(PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One)

Developer CD Projekt RED’s Witcher series of role-playing games has always been fairly open, but the designers apparently thought they could do more. “You can get to every place you see on the screen,” one of the developers said during a live demonstration of the upcoming game at E3. “This is a massive improvement in comparison to Witcher 2, which had some artificial barriers.”

CD Projekt wasted no opportunity to talk up the size of The Witcher 3′s world, claiming that it is 35 times larger than the previous game in the series and 20 percent larger than the open world in the developer Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, which is the current standard for the “go ahead and get lost in the woods/hills/mountains for a few hours” gaming experience.

CD Projekt aims to improve on that experience, however — or, at least, bring some more to it. “Skyrim, which I think we all love, is a rather short game in terms of the main storyline,” gameplay producer Marek Ziemak said. “If you just want to focus on that element and you’re not that interested in exploring the world, it’s not that big. But that’s the core of The Witcher 3: the main story. It’s 40, 50 hours, plus the open world.”

Dying Light

(PC, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, Xbox One)

If you’ve read Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel I Am Legend, you might remember this scene: Hero Robert Neville, convinced that he has enough time to make it to the safety of his fortified home before the legion of vampires that used to be the human race rose up from their lairs to murder him, realizes with horror that his watch has stopped.

That’s the feeling that developer Techland seems to be going for in Dying Light, a game that substitutes zombies for Matheson’s vampires and throws in some free-running. The game switches between two stages: exploration and preparation during the day and stealth and hasty retreats from high-powered superzombies at night.

Dying Light is about scavenging through the world to locate resources, supplies, and materials to build weapons before the sun goes down. Unlike CD Projekt, Techland is keeping quiet about the size and scope of its world, but we’re sure to hear more soon.

Driving games

E3 saw several new driving games, including the latest releases from Microsoft’s Forza series and Sony’s Gran Turismo, but the two that belong here are Need for Speed: Rivals and The Crew.

Open-world vehicle games are not without precedent. Developer Criterion’s Burnout Paradise was one of the first major releases to cut players loose in a virtual city to complete challenges in any order they pleased. Surely enough, Criterion’s first foray into the Need for Speed franchise, Most Wanted, was also an open-world racer. Rivals, developed “in association with” Criterion, looks like it will combine single- and multiplayer modes in interesting ways, with players driving around on their own one moment and then jumping into a high-speed chase against an online opponent the next. It comes out this November for current-gen systems with next-gen versions to follow.

The Crew, which publisher Ubisoft revealed at its press briefing, is shaping up to be an even more ambitious title for PC and next-gen systems that involves joining up with your friends to create a Fast-and-the-Furious-style … well, crew. Developer Ivory Tower’s creative director Julian Gerighty described the in-game world as “as big as has ever been created.” But nobody tell CD Projekt RED he said that.

Once you’ve gotten your crew together, your ragtag group of misfits can take on other teams in a variety of driving challenges like races and takedowns. You can roll to each other’s aid in locations including New York, Miami, Las Vegas, and the Black Hills. It also includes a single-player mode, but Ubisoft’s focus at the event was on four people taking on a fifth in a free-form pursuit across a large city map.

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Stay on top of all our E3 coverage here.

Like a binary Bo Jackson, EA Sports’ new Ignite game engine hopes to excel in multiple athletic pursuits. The next-gen tech provides a versatile foundation for superstar franchises like FIFA soccer and Madden football. Electronic Arts claims that Ignite will enable more realistic — and better-looking — virtual competition.  I visited the EA Sports Ignite Lab during the 2013 Electronic Entertainment Expo to learn more about the engine.

At the lab, I played versions of the upcoming FIFA 14 and Madden 25 while getting the latest on the redebut of the NBA Live basketball game and rookie-on-the-rise EA UFC release. All of these share the Ignite base. As a result, they benefit from some of the system’s most interesting new features.

A.I. for the next generation

Madden 25′s demo highlighted one of its big selling points, the War In the Trenches mode. The battle between the offensive and defensive lines is more complex than ever, with the CPU calculating multiple scenarios, leading to life-like collisions among blockers and pursuers.

In FIFA 14, multiple players now jostle for headers when an attacker crosses a ball toward the area near the goal. Defenders adjust to situations more pragmatically, too — all thanks to the improved computer control.

While the UFC game didn’t have a hands-on demo, its video presentation discussed the MMAi feature, which should give players a true challenge while highlighting the intricacies of mixed martial arts, including strategic submission battles.

Digital players that behave more like real athletes

While sampling the simple NBA Live 14 shootaround demo, gameplay developer Scott O’Gallagher touched on how Ignite redefines animations and motion. “Being able to change animations on the fly — that’s something we just could not really do before,” he said. “Obviously, you can see here that everything is fluid.” This development, which EA dubbed “true player motion,” became evident as I guided Cleveland Cavaliers all-star Kyrie Irving around the court.

With quick flicks of the right stick, I directed the onscreen point guard to link dribbles seamlessly. “We are releasing the ball to physics on every dribble, which then results in a realistic responsiveness. … Proper foot planting and change of direction, momentum, everything is here with the bounce step,” O’Gallagher continued.

This attention to physics and movement carried over to FIFA and Madden, where the virtual players in those games moved with more realism. On-field FIFA footballers sprinted with added subtlety. Strikers avoided tackles by hopping over the feet of oncoming defenders. Players in the Madden demo galloped more like their real-life counterparts, running and cutting with increased precision.

A new engine means more detail

Ignite brings upgraded visuals as well, amplifying EA Sports’ overall presentation. Uniforms ripple and deform. Madden players’ jerseys and pants accumulate grass stains and dirt with each play. Stadiums come to life with colorful fan demonstrations, and blades of grass shoot up into the air as a soccer ball rolls on the pitch during a FIFA match.

EA Sports UFC will feature fighters who bruise and cut with borderline-discomforting accuracy, and even their skin will discolor as they exert themselves.

Overall, I saw many small changes that didn’t immediately come across like revolutionary leaps. When I played a game of FIFA, it didn’t feel much different than before. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing since EA’s soccer sim is pretty damn good to begin with.

The important thing here is that Ignite is really here to unite … all of Electronic Arts’ sports franchises under one versatile system. While players will see the incremental tweaks and improvements they expect from the publisher’s yearly franchise refreshes, the new engine brings increased development efficiencies and a more consistent final product.

So from a bottom-line standpoint, it looks like Ignite is on its way to victory.

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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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Check out all of our E3 2013 coverage here.

I wasn’t at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) trade show last week, but in talking to my friends and colleagues who were there, their No. 1 complaint was that their feet hurt. Last year, it got so bad that GamesBeat freelancer Rus McLaughlin gave an award to some carpet.

It’s probably no wonder, then, that tantalizing alternatives to walking were all over the place at E3. Microsoft brought out the McLaren P1 [above] during the Forza Motorsport 5 presentation at its press briefing, but it wasn’t the only foot-friendly mode of transport on display at the show.

Not that you could actually drive — or even sit in — most of them.

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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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Check out all of our E3 coverage here.

I wasn’t lucky enough to attend the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles last week, so while everyone else was off networking, playing games, and not at all enjoying drinks with names like “the Ninja Turtle,” I was hanging out at home watching the event, thankful that I was in a place with a comparatively low concentration of body odor.

Between my coworkers and the photographer we had covering things, GamesBeat ended up with a lot of pictures from in and around the L.A. Convention Center. And when I looked through the photos, some of them took a while to understand. Some still don’t make any sense, actually, but I think if I knew what was actually going on, they wouldn’t be as fun anymore.

Below is a gallery of the most confusing pictures I found while clicking through our Photobucket over the weekend.

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

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As major publishers like Microsoft and Sony reload for the next-generation console war, social-game developers like Zynga, King, and GungHo continue battling it out on mobile and Facebook.

On the social front, Zynga continues to lose ground as Candy Crush Saga developer King gains more players every day. The puzzle title, which debuted in November, quickly established a major presence on mobile devices, but it just took the top spot on Facebook in terms of daily average users and gross revenue.

“Although our top social developers survey for May again placed Zynga in the No. 1 spot, King appears poised to surpass the former social-gaming leader during the period as it is gaining DAU as Zynga sheds them,” Cowen Partners analyst Doug Creutz said in a note to investors. “We also note that our estimate for Zynga.com’s ‘playing now’ users dropped another 10.8 percent during the period to an average of just 800,000.”

That’s in comparison to King’s phenomenally successful Candy Crush Saga, which took the top spot across all of the top-grossing charts for both social and mobile, according to Cowen’s research.

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The House of Mouse has come full circle.

Now that Disney has created a cartoon series for Swampy, the alligator from the popular Where’s My Water? puzzle games, the company is calling in its No. 1 star for the next title in its Where’s My … ? series. Like its spiritual predecessors, Where’s My Mickey? is a physics-based puzzler: In each level, you have to guide the water through obstacles so Mickey can fill up his bucket. It comes out this Thursday for phones (iOS, Android, Windows) for $0.99 and tablets (iOS, Android) for $1.99 as well as Windows tablets and PCs for $4.99.

This isn’t the first time Disney has done a spin-off of Where’s My Water?. Last year, it released Where’s My Perry?, which replaced Swampy with Perry the Platypus, a character from the Disney Channel original TV series Phineas and Ferb.

“After Perry was a success, we were talking about [how] we were stumbling on a little bit of a method here to kind of continue to support this cool game idea we came up with,” said Tim FitzRandolph, the vice president of creative design at Disney Mobile Glendale, to GamesBeat. “We started to talk about the next characters. We thought, ‘Let’s swing for the fence. Let’s go for Mickey.’ That’d be the best thing we could possibly do.”

The reason Mickey needs the water varies from one episode to the next; each episode has 20 different puzzle levels. You’ll watch small snippets of the story as you solve each puzzle; however, the developer came up with some inventive ways to thwart Mickey until the very last level of the episode. Where’s My Mickey? also introduces a new gameplay feature: weather. Clouds can store water until you need it in another section of the puzzle while wind will move the clouds in the direction that it’s blowing.

“We had a whole list of ideas for the puzzles that didn’t fit into the existing games,” said FitzRandolph. “And once we found out we were gonna be able to make a Mickey game, we went back and kind of looked there. They weren’t clouds originally; they were sponges — same basic function to catch the water and release it later. Once we realized it was Mickey and we were gonna go above ground, that’s when we realized that clouds were the better way of using this idea we had in mind all along.”

Where’s My Mickey? is intricately tied into the upcoming series of animated Mickey Mouse shorts coming later this month to Disney Channel and Disney.com (a teaser episode came out a few months ago). Disney gave us a preview of two of these shorts. They all sport a crisp, clean look, and they embody the spirit of Walt Disney’s original short-films by emphasizing visual gags over dialogue. Both the game and the new cartoon maintain the same art style, and Where’s My Mickey? even references some of these episodes with in-game collectible items and jokes.

“We realized [the new look] would work really well for our medium as well. Very simple graphic styles are great for us,” said FitzRandolph. “And we need a character to be really easy to see on a small portion of the screen. And so the art styles really worked out well that way.”

The original Where’s My Water? has had 200 million downloads since its launch 18 months ago. Disney still updates it regularly with new content.

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King, a casual social games developer, recently decided to abandon in-game advertising, and considering my position with the NativeX Games Task Force (where we collaborate with mobile game developers to increase the engagement, retention, and monetization), this sparked a few questions and discussions in circles of people around me. Why is King doing this? What’s its motive? Were players leaving? Did King need a better ad experience? These are all good questions, but before addressing them specifically around King, let’s look at the two major groups of developers who don’t want or like ads. There might be more groups than this, but in my experience most developers fall into these two buckets.

Purist developers

I’ve encountered several developers who don’t want to break the 4th wall in their game designs. They’ve created stories and worlds where they feel players should immerse themselves, and advertisements would make players aware that it is just a game. I have a hard time believing this in mobile gaming, but I won’t argue that point against developers who feel this way.

There are also developers who believe that the game they are creating will be good enough that players will “want” to spend money in-game through in-app purchases (IAP). With those developers, I wish and hope that they’re right! I would hope that a game could achieve 100 percent conversion rate, 75 percent, or even 30 percent. Unfortunately, you’ll never have 100 percent conversion, and most developers won’t see more than 10 percent conversion in a free-to-play title just because one word is associated with their game: free. Some consumers have preconceived notions or assumptions with the word free, and game designers will never be able to change how those people feel about the word free.

Lastly in the purist category, there are some developers who think that advertisement revenues cannibalize their IAP revenues.  This can be true but only if they slap ads into a game without thinking how to “intelligently” integrate advertisements. I can take any game and completely destroy it with advertisements. I think we all can, but you can also increase your revenues significantly with the addition of advertisements, too. That is … if you care for more revenue.

Elective developers

The other kind of developer who doesn’t use ads are those who have enough cash flow or resources and don’t feel the need to include advertising revenue or any other benefits associated with it. They can “elect” to include ads or not. Most of the time, this way of thinking spawns from great success, so it’s really difficult to criticize the decision to remove ads because they’re obviously doing something right being as successful as they are. If you haven’t guessed it yet, King falls under this category.

Many developers think of advertisements as a “necessary evil” in order to make a living out of doing something they love. On the flip-side, advertisers believe they are offering a service or product that the consumer values. Which is right? Well, that depends on the game, platform, and the consumer.

Let’s look at Hay Day, for example. My wife has been playing it for over a year and is level 60-something at the time of this writing. She has never made an IAP. She will never make an IAP. I asked her why, and her response was, “Because it’s free.” But she will watch videos for in-game currency. She actually likes to watch ads for currency. This is a case where a consumer finds value in an advertisement and the developer is benefiting from it as well. Of course, on the other end of the spectrum, 20-some-year-old hardcore players who only buy Call of Duty will hate advertisements. (OK, that’s sort of an extreme example, but I think you get the idea.)

You think I’m saying that King is making a mistake?

Not necessarily, but I believe there’s a role for advertisements in most games. I’ve seen the effects first hand from players who won’t spend; however, the data at my fingertips from the NativeX network and from the shift I’ve witnessed in the past few years shows the importance of advertising.

But this is sort of a win-win scenario for King. It’s successful, so advertising isn’t as important. It’s getting some press coverage for the announcement, and in the eyes of players, it looks like King is “doing good.”

Do I think this stance can last? That all depends on King’s  future success. If it stays on top or keeps releasing hits, then yes. But if revenues start declining or it’s not meeting expectations, then King might reintroduce ads. There’s also always the possibility of reintroducing ads back in games that are “sunsetting,” so we could always see them pop back into games that aren’t in the spotlight anymore.

You can find more thoughts from me at my blog, the NativeX blog, or on Twitter.

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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 sale of new physical games at retail retreated another 25 percent in May, according to industry-tracking firm The NPD Group.

Total game sales at physical stores like GameStop and Best Buy totaled only $386.3 million. That’s down from $517 million from the year before. It’s important to emphasize that these numbers do not include digital sales of games on services such as the PlayStation Network or Steam, used games, or even mobile games.

“When taking into account our preliminary estimate for other physical format sales in May such as used and rentals at $91 million, and our estimate for digital format sales including full game and add-on content downloads including micro-transactions, subscriptions, mobile apps, and the consumer spend on social network games at $339 million, the total consumer spend in May is $787 million,” NPD analyst Liam Callahan said in a statement.

We have more in-depth hardware numbers, and we’ll get to the software chart in just a second.

Before we do that, just a quick note about the NPD numbers. These charts and figures aren’t inherently important. Millions in sales are happening outside of what The NPD Group can monitor. The true value of the NPD is that Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, and some other publishers continue to use it as a way to make business decisions. If you want to know why one game series is left behind while a publisher decides to create another military first-person shooter, the NPD chart is one reason why.

OK, now on to the software chart:

Software

1. Injustice: Gods Among Us (360, PS3, Wii U)
2. Call of Duty: Black Ops II (360, PS3, PC, Wii U)
3. Donkey Kong Country Returns (3DS, Wii)
4. Dead Island: Riptide (360, PS3, PC)
5. Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon (3DS)
6. Metro: Last light (360, PS3, PC)
7. NBA 2k13(360, ps3, Wii, Wii U, PSP, PC)
8. BioShock Infinite (360, PS3, PC)
9. Battlefield 3 (360, PS3, PC)
10. Lego Batman 2: DC Super Heroes (360, Wii, DS, PS3, 3DS, Wii U, Vita, PC)

That’s two months in a row for Injustice in the top spot, which indicates more of a weakness in May’s new releases than it does the strength of Warner Bros. DC fighting game. Outside of Metro: Last Light, the only other May release on this list is Nintendo’s Donkey Kong Country Returns 3D. That game and Luigi’s Mansion helped propel the 3DS to one of its best months in a while.

In total, software sales were down 31 percent from $255.4 million in 2012 to $175.1 million last month.

“Nintendo 3DS software-unit sales were up 60 percent versus May 2012,” said Callahan. “And when looking at the game ranking based on SKUs, there were three 3DS SKUs in the top 10.”

Still, the 3DS and Metro: Last Light couldn’t fill revenue vacuum left by Blizzard’s Diablo III release. That title, which sold in the millions, caused 2013 to drop 44 percent by comparison.

Hardware

The Xbox 360 outsold the Wii, Wii U, and PlayStaiton 3 for the 29th month in a row. Microsoft revealed that the Xbox 360 sold 114,000 units in May. Nintendo’s 3DS handheld was the top-selling console overall, although the publisher didn’t reveal the specific sales numbers.

In terms of total console and portable sales, revenue dropped to just $96 million, which is down 31 percent from $139 million in the similar period a year ago.

Nintendo, which has skipped sending out NPD press releases for the last few months, sent out one to trumpet the success of its portable device.

But the company didn’t have anything to say about the Wii U’s performance. Instead, it pointed out that it is scheduling one game a month for the console through the end of the year. It has Pikmin 3 in August, The Wonderful 101 in September, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD in October, Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze in November, and Super Mario 3D Land in December.

Nintendo will have to hit big with those games as both Sony and Microsoft plan to launch their next-gen consoles before year’s end.

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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 coverage here.

As part of our larger interview with Final Fantasy XIV game director Naoki Yoshida, we asked the opinionated developer how Square Enix justifies a monthly subscription for its upcoming MMO relaunch. After all, most similar games have thoroughly embraced a free-to-play model, and those brazen enough not to, such as Star Wars: The Old Republic, quickly course-corrected after subscriptions and active players take a massive dive within the first couple of months.

Yoshida’s explanation, given through a translator, is a lengthy but interesting one, describing the mindset within a major corporation such as Square Enix as well as discussing his thoughts on titles like World of Warcraft and The Old Republic:

There are many different types of MMOs. There are two big types or groups that we see. You have one group with games like your Rift or your Star Wars, which are very large-scale MMOs with established IP. Then you have your smaller MMOs, which are maybe new IPs that don’t need as big a user base to be successful. So we can start off with the big group, the large-scale MMO group, with your Rift, your Star Wars, your Guild Wars, your Age of Conan and The Lord of the Rings. These games all started out on a subscription model, or were planning for a subscription model when they were in development. Then, partway through, they switched to free-to-play.

Then again, you have games like Rift and Star Wars. Even though people have been saying that yes, there is this change in the market, everything’s moving to free-to-play, they still – up until recently – were developing a system that would be subscription-based. Even though everyone is saying the industry is going free-to-play, they still were developing these huge games with subscriptions in mind. Again, we’re not saying that one is better than the other, that free-to-play is better than subscription or subscription is better than free-to-play. But for a large game on that scale, what’s most important – more important than making a lot of money – is making a stable income, a stable amount of money over a long period of time. And so to develop a large-scale MMO like this, you need to spend a lot of time with a lot of resources and a lot of staff to make this game.

To do that, you need a lot of money, and to get a lot of money to do that, you usually need investors to invest in your game. Because you’ve spent a lot of money on getting this game ready and borrowed a lot of money from these investors, when you release the game, the investors expect to see returns. If your game gets a lot of users and a lot of subscriptions right away, your investors will be happy and you can pay them. But what happens if you don’t hit that number right away? You have a bunch of staff members waiting to get paid. You have a bunch of investors waiting to get paid. You have a bunch of contents that needs to get made because you have to have updates, but you can’t do it because you don’t have enough money, because you didn’t hit that number you were aiming for. And so what do you have to do? One option to get instant money is free-to-play, or selling these items. To get that money so you can pay off your staff, pay off your investors, and start making new content, switching to free-to-play, selling items, and using that money is one way to do it.

So why didn’t Rift or EA with Star Wars do this from the beginning? Why didn’t they start with free-to-play? There’s a reason behind that. With free-to-play, because you’re selling these items, you’ll have months where you sell a bunch of stuff and you make a lot of money in that one month. But it’s all about what happens during that month. Next month, the person who maybe bought $100 worth of items in the last month could purchase nothing at all. You don’t know what you’re going to be getting, and because you don’t know what you’re going to be getting, you can’t plan ahead. You don’t know how much money is coming in. If you can’t plan ahead, then you can’t keep staff, because you don’t know if you’ll have enough money to pay the staff next month.

With a subscription base, if you get maybe 400,000 members, you know that you’re going to have the money from that monthly subscription for the next month. You also know that you’re going to have 400,000 this month, and it’s not going to go down to 200,000 users next month. That type of jump really doesn’t happen with a subscription model. So you know that you’re going to have a steady income. Because you have a steady income, you can plan ahead further. You can make sure you have staff members to create that new content. By creating new content, you’re making the players happy. If they know this game is going to keep creating new content, they’ll continue to pay their monthly subscription fees. So rather than going for the huge $100-million-a-month hit that you might get with the free-to-play model, having that steady income allows us to provide a better product to the players.

Now, you have Blizzard and you have Square Enix. We’re the only two companies in the industry, basically, that are making MMOs with our own money. That gives us an advantage, because where other companies have to get money from investors and have to pay that back, we don’t have a lot of time to build slowly and be able to pay that back. Investors want their returns right away. With Square Enix and Blizzard, because we’re putting our own money into it, we don’t have those investors to worry about, and that means we can release something and maybe take a little bit of a hit at the beginning, but as long as we’re increasing the amount of people we have, then we’ll get that money and make the players happy. We’ll get into that cycle I talked about before, where we’re creating good content and have that steady income to keep the cycle going.

With version 1.0, even though we call it a failure, we still had a user base. During the time that we were developing this game, 2.0, we were able to increase the amount of subscribers threefold as well. Again, it takes time. It takes showing the users that we’re really into this and giving them that new content. But we’re able to see a rise there. That’s what we’re looking for in this. Again, we’re not saying—The market didn’t change. It’s that there are two different types of models. Choosing the model that’s right for your product and being successful with that is what’s important. We believe that the bigger the game, the larger the scale of the MMO, it’s going to be better for the game if it’s on a subscription model.

That’s why you see a lot of companies that chose the subscription model, that wanted to do what we were doing, but were forced to free-to-play. They didn’t go to free-to-play by choice, because if that was the case, they would have gone free-to-play at the beginning. They’d develop it for free-to-play, not full subscription, instead of being forced to go free-to-play. We hear a lot of people saying, “Star Wars is free-to-play now, it’s great!” But then you ask them if they’re playing free-to-play Star Wars and they say, “No, not really playing it.” Everyone talks about how great it is that it went free-to-play, but then you ask around and really, there aren’t that many people who are playing it since it’s gone free-to-play. If you spend all that money on a game ,release it, and it’s filled with bugs and you don’t have enough time to do your updates, people will leave. Players need that new content. Not being able to provide it is fatal. If they were able to produce as much content as players wanted, then people would have stayed there. We don’t really believe it’s a problem with the business model. It’s how that’s handled.

You can read the rest of GamesBeat’s interview with Yoshida 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 our E3 coverage here

To avoid any trouble with his employer, Kensuke Tanabe wants to make it clear that the following game ideas are his and his alone — and not an official statement from Nintendo. But that doesn’t make them any less fun to think about.

Tanabe is a producer on the upcoming Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze, a 2D platforming sequel to Donkey Kong Country Returns. When Nintendo revealed at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) last week that Retro Studios was working on Tropical Freeze for the Wii U, the announcement came as a shock to some hardcore fans. They had hoped that the developer was working on another installment in the Metroid series (it previously worked on Metroid Prime [above]), an iconic Nintendo franchise that features the heroine Samus Aran blasting away aliens with her arm cannon.

Retro president Michael Kelbaugh has already said multiple times why it chose to make Donkey Kong over any other game. So instead of asking him that same question, we tasked Kelbaugh, Tanabe, and Nintendo project leader Risa Tabata to figure out, hypothetically, how a Metroid game would play on a Wii U with the GamePad controller.

But that’s not all. Tanabe later comes up with another idea that’s so crazy it just has to work.

Source: Giancarlo Valdes/GamesBeat

From left to right: Risa Tabata, Kensuke Tanabe, and Michael Kelbaugh

A hypothetical Metroid Prime

Kelbaugh and Tabata immediately thought of ways of using the GamePad to display information to the player – like incorporating the suit’s HUD elements on the controller’s touchscreen — and for minigames, such as turning Samus’s ball-morphing ability into a pinball-like game.

“Samus obviously has a lot of features [in her space suit],” said Tabata. “There’s a lot you can do with that thing — once she pulls her arm up and pulls out that [metal flap] and does some of this stuff [Tabata pretends to punch buttons on her forearm]. I can see mapping some of that to the GamePad. I think that would be really cool.”

Tanabe, meanwhile, focused on what the shooting gameplay might feel like. At first, the translator had trouble figuring out what Tanabe meant, going back and forth to confirm what he heard. Here’s what he had to say.

“I [told Tanabe], ‘What, you want to hook a GamePad on a Zapper [gun peripheral]?’” recounted the translator. “He said: ‘No, that’d be too heavy. Maybe something more streamlined. But like a Zapper-style thing with a GamePad feature on it or some device like that. I’d love to do some shooting stuff with something like that! Maybe some day.’”

‘Retro does Tingle’

Tanabe wasn’t done brainstorming. Toward the end of our interview, he spoke up about another type of game that he’d like to put on the Wii U. But he focused on a peculiar character — Tingle. He has a reputation for being one of the most annoying characters in the Nintendo roster — Tingle’s a middle-aged man dressed in tights who likes to yell “Tingle, Tingle, Kooloo-Limpah!” — but that’s exactly why Tanabe finds the idea of a new, standalone Tingle game so compelling.

Source: Wikipedia

The much-reviled Tingle from The Legend of Zelda games.

“There’s no definitive plan or anything,” he warned me at first. “It’s just me off the top of my head.” But as Tanabe spoke in Japanese, the room suddenly exploded into laughter. It took a second for the translator to calm down and tell me what he said.

“I know how hated the character of Tingle is in the U.S,” Tanabe started. “I know that people cannot stand Tingle. But to me that challenge is: Could I take this character that is so reviled in the West and just [do] a complete turnaround and make him a beloved, fun character? The idea of that really just gets me going. I know we have made a Tingle game in the past, but maybe at some point down the road. …”

My reaction gradually changed from horror, to bewilderment — is he serious!? — and finally to curiosity as Tanabe explained himself.

“It’s like love,” Tanabe said. “It’s like romance: You meet someone and you’re like, ‘Oh god, I can’t stand that person.’ And then three weeks later, you’re madly in love — it’s that turn, that quick whip, that motivates [me] a little bit.”

“If we we ever get a really successful Tingle game, maybe we will have like a big Tingle statue out there [points to Nintendo's E3 booth outside the room's walls],” said Tabata.

“Retro does Tingle!” Kelbaugh added, playing along with the joke. Another round of laughter swept through our little room.

I don’t know about you, but I believe in Tanabe’s vision. Forget Metroid — at E3 2014, I better see this damn Tingle 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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