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The maker of Braid didn’t bring any explosions, but he did bring an interesting new title for PlayStation 4.

Braid developer Jonathan Blow took the stage today at Sony’s PlayStation Meeting for its new hardware. Blow spoke about The Witness, his first game since the breakout hit Braid. It’s an open-world puzzle game where every puzzle contains some sort of deeper meaning — and it’s set to debut on the PlayStation 4.

“In most games with open worlds, the developers try to make them as big as possible so you’ll be impressed by the scale. In The Witness, we compress everything so you’ll always be finding new things,” Blow said in his stage presentation. “Every puzzle has an idea in it. On the design side, we worked very hard to convey — in a nonverbal way — the essence of each puzzle.”

Blow said PlayStation 4 is the only console that The Witness will hit at launch. It is also scheduled for iOS and PC.

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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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Once upon a time, a hero was born. He defeated evil, saved a princess, and then did the same thing over and over again, only more poorly.

Writer Tevis Thompson no longer thinks The Legend of Zelda is good, but he hasn’t stopped believing in it. Neither has Braid artist David Hellman or the 1,500-plus backers who pledged money to their Kickstarter campaign Second Quest, named so after the post-game challenge in the original Zelda that has since become a regular staple of the series. The Kickstarter ended tonight, surpassing its funding goal of $50,000 for a grand total of nearly $70,000.

“Modern Zeldas are broken at their core,” wrote Tevis in his essay “Saving Zelda,” which appeared in February and inspired the Kickstarter. “By modern, I mean the console Zeldas [from] Ocarina forward (though Link to the Past is not innocent), and by core, I mean their central structure and mechanics.”

But the series still has potential, and that’s what the Second Quest graphic novella is about: giving people, including disengaged Zelda fans, “compelling worlds and a sense of real discovery,” according to the Kickstarter. It’s not about venting frustrations about The Legend of Zelda but turning them into a better vision and an original story that addresses issues in the larger game community as well.

“It’s just a roller coaster ride,” Hellman told GamesBeat in a phone interview. “It’s so exciting to launch the Kickstarter, and we had an incredible show of support immediately from friends and family and the community beyond.

“I think halfway through, we had kind of gone through that initial burst of energy, and the fundraising slowed down — as it always does with Kickstarters, it seems, in the middle,” he said. “And I think we both — being somewhat exhausted from fundraising — began thinking about what we can do for the actual art-making, which this is all for. So there was a need to shift gears there, and we both had been looking ahead while continuing to run the Kickstarter — looking ahead to the art-making, going back to that.”

One of the things that came out of that creative reflection was the six-page Side Quest minicomic, which is releasing in December for all backers. It contains callbacks to Zelda, like a flute-playing boy and landmarks concealing secret entrances, that reflect an affection for and understanding of the games without being parody or identical to them.

“I feel like we’re ending on a great note,” said Hellman. “People are really supportive. We’re doing this live playthrough. Tevis is playing through Zelda live, and I’m drawing illustrations of the adventure as he goes, so it’s a lot of fun.”

Second Quest is unique — for Hellman and Thompson, it’s a personal project. “It’s not about being critical as much as trying to point toward something really precious that I haven’t found recently in the Zelda series,” said Hellman.

For that reason, they don’t see themselves doing this again with another troubled series. “Without our investment in Zelda, this wouldn’t happen,” said Thompson. “We not only personally have a history with Zelda ourselves but also the fact that Zelda once did the kinds of things that we come to games for. I’m critical, actually, of a lot of modern games, but I wouldn’t necessarily take the time to create something along these lines because the love’s not there. But also because [those games] never tried to do those kinds of things — that sense of adventure or a huge world to explore. Very few games have actually done that that well.”

Second Quest deals with more than just Zelda, though. Thompson and Hellman have inserted their own experiences and thoughts about gaming into the comic: disintegration of franchises, female characters, the scripted qualities of games … even time spent in China. Thompson also believes that cross-fertilizing games across different forms of media and shaping those experiences into other forms, including art, is worthwhile.

“I think David and I both could see a future of making art out of video game experiences but not necessarily this kind of project,” he said.

Thompson and Hellman largely contribute their success to a combination of preparation and support from the community as well as fortuitous events. Kickstarter chose their campaign as its Project of the Day in their second week, which brought in more interest.

“I feel like at the end of the Kickstarter, now I know how to do a Kickstarter,” said Thompson. “Now I’m really ready to do one even though we just did it. We’re not making it up as we go along — we had a lot of plans. But some of them just went out the window once we saw what was working and what wasn’t.”

Figuring out how to communicate their passion with others and explain the campaign was a big obstacle, but it was also key to gaining an audience. Getting people on board also helped push the campaign in the right direction. They’re now working with Fangamer, which is handling physical production and fulfillment for Second Quest.

“It kind of ends up being a lot of people helping out, and it’s really something to have a success and to know that it’s because of so many great contributions from other people,” said Hellman.

The 50-page, full-color hardback of Second Quest releases to contributors in October and to the public in late 2013.

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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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I have never, ever played a Fable game. I always intended to throw on one of Peter Molyneux’s fantasy epics and take it for a spin, and hey, I still do. Someday. Really.

But the simple fact is this: If you game, you’ve got a pile of shame … that list of titles you haven’t played yet but fully intend to. Someday. Really.

Nobody likes to admit it, but few of us have the money and time to play everything we’re interested in. In fact, the number of missed opportunities just grows and grows as shiny distractions (work, family, newer games that look really cool) come into the picture. So as we come out of the summer doldrums and into a very busy gaming season, we asked some of most influential names in the industry to publicly humiliate themselves by telling us what’s still on their piles of shame.

And they didn’t all answer. But here’s who did.

Cliff Blezinski: former design director, Epic Games (Gears of War)

I’ve yet to go back to Batman: Arkham City because I can’t find the darned disc in my cluttered setup.

Jenova Chen: cofounder, Thatgamecompany (Journey, Flower)

I haven’t played Deus Ex: Human Revolution after the first boss. It’s the game of the year for our lead engineer, John Edwards, so that means a lot. But I haven’t got time to go back to it yet.

Dan “Shoe” Hsu: editor-in-chief, GamesBeat

Mass Effect 2. I don’t understand what all that hub-bub was about the ending to the Mass Effect storyline. We’re still not even halfway through the trilogy, right? Right?

Sigh … yes, this is my big shame game. I’m not even finished with Mass Effect 2 yet. I know it’s something I need to get through — Mass Effect is a major franchise in gaming, after all — but I just can’t seem to find the time. Actually, that’s not true. I somehow scraped together 188 hours for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

I honestly don’t know what it is about this series. I loved the first game, but it took me over a year and a half to beat it because I was constantly leaving it, then coming back, and then leaving it again. For all of 2012, ME2′s been sitting next to my TV, beaming subliminal messages to my brain: “Play me … play me. …” But it hasn’t worked. Now that Borderlands 2 is here, and all the other fall games are arriving soon, I’m afraid part two of this sci-fi trilogy will just have to wait a bit longer.

Morgan Webb: co-host, X-Play

Spec Ops: The Line. Everyone tells me it’s really good. Everyone tells me about the crazy tough choices you have to make. And I even bought it. It is still in the plastic and will likely remain so until about January. It’s not a very large pile. I try really hard to keep up with things. And seriously, Shoe needs to play Mass Effect.

Frank O’Connor: franchise development director, 343 Industries (Halo 4)

Working on Halo is a pretty  involved process. There’s the work, of course – story, universe building, endless meetings, travel … most developers know the score there. But you compound that work with home life, raising an angry 3-year-old, taking out the trash, fixing the sewer, making dinner – there just aren’t that many hours in the day. And so when I do play games in my downtime, they tend to be Halo. Take-home tests, matchmaking, just a ton of Halo stuff. So my pile of shame is almost limitless. And to prove that point, my main shameful miss is a couple of years old, and I still haven’t gotten around to it properly. It’s Red Dead Redemption.

Hardly unusual, but when I did finally put it in my drive, I immediately knew this was a place I wanted to inhabit. And I got as far as the first horse race, couldn’t beat Bonnie around her ranch, and that’s where I left it. Right back to Halo stuff. I also have a miserably small completion ratio of Forza, and in fact I have not unlocked the Halo Warthog that’s squirreled away in there. The least dusty, still-shrinkwrapped item on that pile is Borderlands 2.

I still haven’t seen the new Batman, either, and I only saw Cabin in the Woods because it was on my plane. I genuinely feel actual shame because part of my job is to understand why other games are cool and expose myself to new experiences. I feel like I should really just take a couple of months off to reengage and immerse myself in what’s new and what’s awesome.

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“At a place like this, you’re hearing the [conventional wisdom] right now,” said Blow, the indie-darling creator of puzzle-platformer Braid during a panel about the present and future of independently developed games at today’s GamesBeat in San Francisco. “If something seems like a good idea, if that’s the theme of the conference, then that’s not what you do. Because if you do that, you’re playing the odds that your game is the one word game that breaks out from 30 crappy word games.”

With this console generation grinding to a close and buzzwords like “mobile” and “social” gaming flying around thick and fast, Blow and SpyParty developer Chris Hecker in particular stood firm in the need to create high-quality content over following current trends.

It was a common thread in a discussion that saw Blow, Hecker, Nicalis’ Tyrone Rodgriguez, and Super Meat Boy’s Tommy Refenes alternately rail against the failure of platforms to properly promote smaller titles, praise those who they believe are getting it right, and expound on the current state of indie development.

Among the platforms the group believes is “getting it right” is Valve’s digital download service, Steam. It received praise for promoting smaller titles and making it easy for indie developers to turn a profit.

“It can be a little harder to get on Steam. But once you’re on there, it’s pretty easy to make $50,000 or $75,000 in a weekend sale, and you do that a couple times a year,” Blow said.

Hecker was effusive in his praise for what he sees as a “golden age” in which “triple-A indie games” are rewarded with strong sales on platforms like Steam, Xbox Live Arcade, and PlayStation Network. He used Magicka as an example — a little-known action-adventure game developed by eight Swedish students that managed to sell 200,000 copies in its first two weeks on Steam: “If you make a game that’s high quality, you’re totally set.”

Other platforms took the brunt of the criticism. While Hecker referred to Steam as a “healthy market for a certain kind of game” and included XBLA in his “golden age” statement, he was critical of Microsoft for “being more intent on having car ads than on featuring games that will make them money.”

Hecker was forceful throughout the panel in touting independent development as a new artform, wondering why Microsoft doesn’t do more to help the medium grow. “They have no interest in helping with that. They would rather chase what is popular now,” he said.

Blow had his own criticism for the certification processes of XBLA and PSN. “There’s a long list of rules that you have to follow. It doesn’t look that bad until you try to actually follow them,” he said, adding that they aren’t “testing your game for actual bugs, so you have to do that yourself.”

All four developers cut a wide swath through the industry as the panel went on. While Rodriguez praised Nintendo’s eShop for being a feature-driven system with much larger numbers, he was critical of WiiWare for requiring too many clicks to navigate and failing to highlight all but the latest games. Refenes criticized the PlayStation Vita, Sony’s most recent handheld, for not making it clear that it’s possible to download complete games and being afraid to “step into the new territory [of digital downloads] and take the plunge.”

Hecker and Blow were both harsh in their assessment of free-to-play games.

“Free-to-play is kind of a slum,” Blow said. When Hecker agreed that free-to-play “warps game design” by weaving incentives to buy items into the gameplay, Blow added, “It fundamentally shifts your relationship with the player, and it’s very easy for that to become ugly.”

Nevertheless, Blow said that he wants to do a free-to-play game at some point. However, it won’t have premium items like “hats.” He instead envisions a system in which players pay a dollar for a level to explore with a friend. According to Blow, “That’s a respectful way to treat players. Tweet this game to your friends is not a way to treat players.”

As the discussion ended , the panel examined ways in which to promote independent games to both the press and gamers at large. Blow was blunt: “You don’t want to try and expose [the press] if they aren’t going to care when they play it.”

Braid was a game that got a lot of press despite having a marketing budget of “zero dollars and zero cents” because “enough people that I sent the game to found it interesting…that did the work.”

The press and gamers are “starving for interesting content,” Hecker said. “If you give them something interesting to talk about, they will love it.”

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

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Facebook’s Timeline lets you place an image at the top of your profile. Sure, you could add a crummy, awkwardly cropped family photo — or you can use a kick-ass cover from your favorite video game.

We’re releasing seven days’ worth of artwork, each with a different theme, that you can use to decorate your Facebook profile:

• Sunday: The Modern Era
• Monday: Modern-Retro
  
• Tuesday: The Indies
  
• Wednesday: The 8/16-bit Era
  
• Thursday: Social and Mobile
• Friday: Arcade
• Saturday: Future Games

Today’s batch of covers features 10 popular titles from independent game developers. Click on the thumbnails to enlarge the pictures, then right-click (or ctrl-click for Macs) them and hit “save image as” to save to your computer.

Limbo

PixelJunk Monsters

Super Meat Boy

Fez

Braid

Cave Story

Minecraft

Bastion

World of Goo

Journey

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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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According to an update from Polytron Corporation, Fez has sold almost 20,000 units in its first day on the Xbox Live Arcade marketplace. The perspective-warping platformer launched on Friday the 13th but didn’t suffer any unluckiness outside of some game-breaking bugs. Currently, the pixel-art puzzler sits at an even 90 on Metacritic, and our own review is generally positive.

For comparison, here’s a quick overview of how some other popular Xbox Live Arcade games have sold in the past:

• In its first week of sales, Braid sold 55,000 units. The puzzle-platformer went on to surpass 450,000 in total unit sales.
• Record-breaking Shadow Complex sold 200,000 copies in its first week. Its total lifetime sales reached 600,000.
• In its first month of sales, Trials HD sold through 300,000 units. Since the motorbike platformer’s release in 2009, it has sold 1.8 million copies.
• After its first two weeks on the marketplace, Limbo sold 244,000. It peaked at just over 892,000 total units.
• The number-one selling game of all time on XBLA is Castle Crashers, with over 2.6 million paid downloads.

Amongst that company, Fez is most comparable to Braid and Limbo. All three are indie darlings that hit the Xbox 360′s downloadable-content platform in the leaner seasons of spring and summer. Each of these titles are also critically acclaimed with Metacritic scores of at least 90. But as Limbo benefited from a greater installed base of Xbox 360 owners than Braid enjoyed, so Fez will benefit even more.

In 2008, the year Braid hit XBLA, Microsoft had sold approximately 26 million Xbox 360s worldwide. By the time of Limbo’s 2010 release, that number approached 50 million. With double the amount of 360s in people’s homes, Limbo (892,000 units) sold almost twice what Braid (450,000 units) did.

Two years later and the Xbox 360 install base has reached 65 million, which can only help Fez maintain a strong tail.

Nearly 20,000 in 24 hours is a healthy start. If Fez can overcome any negative word-of-mouth based on its technical hiccups, then it should continue to sell well. According to the game’s leaderboards, Fez now has over 26,000 total players. At $10 per download, that’s already a $260,000. Not bad for a game that looks like an NES title from the 1980s and forces players to use their heads.

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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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Video game endings tend to feel a lot like an afterthought. Whereas a bad movie only ever consumes two hours of your life, games can have you playing upwards of 100+ hours before reaching the finale, and quite often that payoff is woefully underwhelming. Two big-names examples in just the past few weeks include Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City, where the conclusion was given about as much attention as bug-testing in a Bethesda game, and Asura’s Wrath, which has a “true” ending that acts as nothing more than a gateway for “closure DLC.”

And of course, Mass Effect 3’s troubled ending has had myriad repercussions for the entire industry. With that in mind, the GamesBeat review team pooled together some of our all-time favorite climaxes in the hopes of showing modern developers how to end a game the right way.

Super Metroid

Before Aerith’s death in Final Fantasy VII, there was Baby in Super Metroid. Before self-destruct sequences became a staple of the Resident Evil series, Metroid did it first. This game’s ending has it all: suspense, nostalgia, loss, redemption, and an edge-of-your-seat escape as an entire world explodes around you. You can even subtly alter the ending by entering a secret area and helping the friendly Zebes creatures escape. Then, depending on how well you performed throughout the game, you may receive the prize you’ve been waiting nearly a decade for: a 16-bit version of Samus Aran sans her armor. It was all worth it!

The BioWare version: Instead of rushing to your defense, the Metroid larva is shown aboard the Normandy outrunning a solar-system-sized explosion, leaving you to fend for yourself during the final battle.

Silent Hill 2

Silent Hill 2 remains to be one of gaming’s most thought-provoking and unsettling experiences. If David Lynch created a survival horror game, this would be it. Even after several sequels, Konami themselves have failed to capture the essence of what made Silent Hill 2 so affecting (and they have they tried so very, very hard). There are six different endings, with the first four being no more or less perplexing than the game itself. Somehow these are outdone by the other two endings, which involve aliens or discovering a dog has been the mastermind behind all of your internal struggles. Perhaps his owner is the Architect from The Matrix Reloaded?

The BioWare version: The Dog ending is the only ending available. The door on the left reveals a shih tzu, the one down the middle reveals a pug, and the one on the right reveals a corgi.

Darksiders

The original Darksiders wasn’t exactly a perfect game. War, the most badass of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, spends most of his time overcoming contrived puzzles that would make Nathan Drake scoff. However, after the final boss battle, War openly challenges both Heaven and Hell. The archangel Uriel asks, “You would wage this war alone?” “No. Not alone,” War grumbles, just as three meteors plummet from the sky heralding the arrival of the three other Horsemen. It’s the moment players have been anticipating for the entire game, and its execution is handled perfectly.

The BioWare version: Darksiders itself remains untouched, but Obsidian Entertainment replaces BioWare to develop the now-inevitably inferior and “hella buggy” sequel.

The feature continues on the next page.

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Humble Bundle gives independent developers a way to publicize their games and compete with the major publishers in an industry that regularly churns out triple-A titles.

Much like the Apple App Store, independent game developers struggle for visibility on distribution systems like Steam and the Xbox Live Arcade. Humble Bundle brought visibility to games like World of Goo — which ended up porting its game to the iPad because it became so popular.

Like the last bundle, gamers can pay whatever they want for Frozenbyte’s five titles, distributing the profits amongst the developer, two charities and a tip for Humble Bundle. The default payment gives a majority of the funds to Frozenbyte, with Humble Bundle receiving around 5 percent of the payment as a tip.

It’s a very effective distribution model that could make a decent amount of money, too. Humble Bundle hasn’t disclosed how much money the company has made off of its sales, but it ended up selling more than $1.8 million worth of game bundles in less than two weeks. If most gamers used the default payment schedule, that means Humble Bundle picked up more than $90,000.

Humble Bundle went through startup incubator Y Combinator, which launched specifically to organize operations after 2009′s Humble Indie Bundle (put on by a group of indie game developers) ended up being a runaway success. The sales let gamers pick up to five games that are free of copyright protection software, and lets them pay whatever they want for them — anywhere from 1 cent to $6,000. After deciding what to pay, gamers can decide what percentage of the fund goes to charity, to the developers and whether to give Humble Bundle a tip for its troubles.

Gamers will get licenses to download the games in the Humble Bundle through Steam as well as through independent downloads — a new feature in the latest batch of games. Steam has become one of the most popular avenues for distributing indie games and boasts an enormous social network of gamers, so there’s more appeal to buying a game through Steam than through another distribution channel. Humble Bundle is also giving gamers the option to get a license for Trine that works on OnLive, an online service that streams video games through the Internet rather than running them on local machines. OnLive was, not surprisingly, the largest contributor to the last Humble Bundle, donating $5,000 for the second batch of games.

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

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The bundle was on sale for 11 days and was run by Y Combinator-backed Humble Bundle, which launched specifically to organize operations after last year’s Humble Indie Bundle (put on by a group of indie game developers) ended up being a runaway success. The company apparently plans to put on frequent similar sales going forward. The sales let gamers pick up to five games that are free of copyright protection software, and lets them pay whatever they want for them — anywhere from 1 cent to $6,000. After deciding what to pay, gamers can decide what percentage of the fund goes to charity, to the developers and whether to give Humble Bundle a tip for its troubles.

Despite being able to pay just a cent, gamers paid an average of $7.83 for the games. Some companies paid enough to get themselves into the top-five contributor space so that they could advertise in the space. Streaming game provider OnLive, for example, paid $5,000 for its Humble Indie Bundle and left its name as “Play.onlive.com Just Play.”

The standard distribution for each sale gave Humble Bundle around a 5 percent tip. So if most of the buyers went with the default distribution, Humble Bundle could earn a little more than $90,000 for just over a week’s worth of work hosting and promoting the games. Not a bad Christmas present in exchange for promoting independent games and helping out a few charities.

The sale was such a success this year that Humble Bundle included the five games from the last Humble Indie Bundle. Most of them are darlings of the independent game industry, like side-scrolling puzzle game Braid and survival horror game Penumbra. They are games that didn’t do poorly with critics by any means, but lacked the promotional firepower that major publishers wield. Braid, for example, scored a 93 out of 100 across 57 critics on review aggregation site Metacritic.

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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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