Once again, it’s time to get some all-in-one analysis with our second-hand panel of experts!

Surprise! Microsoft’s launching a new hardware console … who knew? And inside a giant circus tent full of magic and dreams, we got our first look at the best fee-charging-for-used-games, not-backwards-compatible, Internet-mandatory, groovy-retro-design game console ever made: the Xbox One!

It won’t be long before this hardware masterpiece matches up against Sony’s PlayStation 4, but why wait to make crucial judgments? A 60-minute event with no Q&A session is plenty of time! What say you, panel of experts? The Xbox One: bringer of world peace or red ring of death?

Launch the gallery below to learn the language of love!

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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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A few retailers may have pulled the trigger early on revealing the next Call of Duty game.

Cover art for a game called Call of Duty: Ghosts from Activision and Modern Warfare 3 developer Infinity Ward appeared on the website for U.K. retailer Tesco today. An unconfirmed Target ad, pictured below, also lists the item for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

GamesBeat reached out to sources at Activision and Infinity Ward, but neither company returned our request for a comment. We will update this story if that changes.

We reached out to Tesco, who has since pulled the game from its website. A customer service representative told us that the reason it was pulled was because someone posted it prematurely.

“It was put up accidentally,” the Tesco customer service rep told me over the phone. “I think they made a mistake, and that’s why they took it back off.”

Similarly, a Target customer service representative told GamesBeat that the game is in one of the retailer’s advertisements. She also said that I couldn’t pre-order it yet since it wasn’t in the Target online system.

Since Activision isn’t talking, we’re don’t know what “Ghosts” in the subtitle refers to, but In the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare series, a character named Simon Riley goes by the handle “Ghost.” He is a member of Task Force 141, which plays a central role in the recent Modern Warfare games. Ghost also wears a distinctive skull mask and sunglasses that sets him apart from other characters.

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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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Kate Edwards has had a long career in video games, and now, she has become a leader of the industry. In December, Edwards became executive director of the International Game Developers Association. Her job is to run an organization with 10,000 members who are navigating all of the big changes in the game industry.

At Microsoft, she was the first “geopolitical strategist” who had to identify geopolitical and cultural land mines for the company as it moved into different regions of the world. She implemented a geopolitical quality review process for Microsoft’s games from 1995 to 2005. She worked on titles like Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Star Wars: The Old Republic, and other releases. She was the founder and chair of the game-localization special interest group within the IGDA and a leader in the IGDA Seattle chapter. She runs her own consultancy, Englobe.

This week, she attended the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco and had to handle the tough issue of women in games, particularly as a dispute erupted among IGDA members about an IGDA-sponsored party where scantily clad female dancers appeared. We sat down with Edwards on Monday, March 25, before any of that happened. Here is our edited transcript of our interview.

GamesBeat: How big is the IGDA now?

Kate Edwards: We hope to approach the neighborhood of 10,000 members by the end of this year. That’s the overarching goal. We have about 90 chapters worldwide. We have 20 or 25 special interest groups.

GamesBeat: How would you describe the IGDA to people who don’t know what it is?

Edwards: The way I like to describe it is, the IGDA is a professional development community. We’re a professional association focused on development. We’re focused on advocacy for issues that affect game developers. We have an international presence. We serve as a place of networking and community for individual game developers.

GamesBeat: Has the membership been growing?

Edwards: It leveled off for a while. Part of that is due to the structure of how we do membership, with studio affiliations versus individual memberships. We’ve gone through some adjustments there. That added to a bit of a plateau. Plus, with the industry being the way it is these days, that affects membership to a degree. We see studios that close, like 38 Studios for example. The members retain their membership, but the studio affiliation goes away.

GamesBeat: It’s hard to tell whether there’s more growth or more contraction.

Edwards: I like to the word “evolving.” That’s the way I see it. This is still a relatively young industry. It’s finding its way. We’re so receptive to the technology that arises in how we deliver and how we develop. It’s only natural that we’ll see a bit of evolution. Some things are going to die off and some things are going to rise. It’s not something that we necessarily want to see, when we see people laid off. It’s not a good thing. But unfortunately or not, it’s a natural part of a changing industry.

GamesBeat: Has anybody done a lot of tallying up there, working out whether they see growth or change like that?

Edwards: We have not done that kind of thing, no. We do the quality of life survey, which is an empirical survey along those lines. The latest one came out recently. But we don’t focus on the numbers as far as layoffs. That’s something that the ESA would know better than we would.

GamesBeat: It’s good that people do surveys, but yeah, I do wish there was more information to give people, a way to give them sound advice. “Okay, here’s where the wind is blowing. Go in that direction.”

Edwards: Within the IGDA, the chapters do communicate with one another, which is one of the strengths of the organization. Developers who are in the IGDA can do that. They can reach out to other chapters. “My studio is downsizing in Boston. I might move to San Francisco or Los Angeles. What’s going on out there?” You get a lot of qualitative information. You get some quantitative information on a per-studio basis. Someone in L.A. might chime in and say, “My company has 35 positions open.” I know it happens at that individual chapter level, but there’s not any oversight quantifying all of that.

GamesBeat: Has that quality of life gotten any better?

Edwards: It’s changing. In general I think the trend is better. Studios are getting more aware. A lot of times [quality of life] is equated with the notion of crunch. We like to look at something broader. It’s not just the crunch mode issue, although that tends to be a major issue. More studios are aware of it. That doesn’t mean all studios don’t do it, but they’re more aware of it. I was at Microsoft for 13 years, and even within my time there, the company became far more aware of work-life balance issues and all the other things that go along with them, for all kinds of good reasons.

GamesBeat: I wondered if some of these problems would carry over from the console business into the mobile and social studios.

Edwards: I think that’s inevitable. They’re going to carry over to some degree. When you’re self-employed or a small shop, you tend to have more control, but that affects your time schedule. It affects all kinds of other things. A lot of the indies that I know, or smaller studios, that’s one of the reasons they might have left a larger developer. They felt they would have more control over their work-life balance, and they do for the most part. At the same time, I’ve seen some of those small studios go through the same issues as any large studio. It comes down to promising a date and not delivering. That’s a reality in any business, not just the games industry.

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LAS VEGAS — Sledgehammer Games general manager Glen Schofield looks everywhere for inspiration for video games he has made (such as Dead Space or Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3). Schofield, whose studio is owned by Activision, says that you have to keep an open mind and do a wide volume of research to come up with the ideas that will help developers tell a fantastic story in games.

Getting inspiration isn’t an easy thing to do in any medium, but it’s especially important in video games, where production teams of 100 people work for years on projects that can cost tens of millions of dollars. If the game creator isn’t properly inspired, its consumers will be bored or think that the game isn’t realistic or aware of what has come before it.

“For me, inspiration is a process,” he said in a talk at the DICE Summit, an elite game industry conference in Las Vegas. “Go deep. Keep your mind open. You will be really surprised what you let in when you do.”

Schofield said keeping an open mind is critical at the beginning of any project. So is doing research, going deep into a topic that might seem like a tangent but is critical to putting ideas in your head.

Schofield travels a lot, and he is always taking photos with his smartphone. With thousands of photos, he opens a file in which he dumps everything that he wants to use to create a game and explain it to a big team. Schofield took about 500 photos and handed the booklet out to the staff. His team created a game wiki for documents.

While at EA, Schofield’s team made the space horror game Dead Space. For that, he looked at all sorts of blogs and torture sites. And he talked to horror film director Wes Craven for four or five hours. He happened to hear the sound of a Bay Area Rapid Transit train one day and decided to put that into the game. The sound of the train became the sound of a whirring mechanism inside a part of the space station.

Schofield also suggested that people read widely and see lots of movies. For a helicopter sequence in Modern Warfare 3, he watched the chopper scenes frpm Apocalypse Now and Black Hawk Down over and over.

He also sends teams around to experience combat situations, as much as possible. When he pulled open the door of a Humvee troop carrier, he was astounded that the door was so heavy — maybe 150 pounds. In the opening scene of Modern Warfare 3, a soldier struggles to push open the door of an overturned Humvee, only to see a bunch of debris falling down from the sky around him.

His teams went to a U.S. Marine Corps air base to ride in helicopters and hear the sounds of jets as they flew overhead.

“It let us frame the scene,” Schofield said. “You get all those details in your game that are correct.”

Another team (pictured right) went to check out the feeling of weightlessness. They used that experience to create a weightless combat scene (pictured above) in an airliner that was about to crash in Modern Warfare 3.

He noted that the opening scene of Star Wars, where a giant Imperial Star Destroyer chases a tiny Rebel corvette, inspired a ship’s movement in one of his games. Gamers may never have noticed the similarity.

He said, “I’m not saying you rip stuff off. You mine for stuff and look for things others have done really well.”

Schofield heard his 3-year-old daughter singing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” one day. So he got one of his team members to sing the song, and they used it in a scene of the planet and space station (where horror would soon ensue). It was a creepy experience. In the film Prometheus, the film trailer starts out with the sound of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” That was a case of a movie borrowing from a film that took an inspiration from real life, Schofield said.

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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 again, we turn to our expert group of video game characters to bring peace to the land!

Guns! Guns! Guns! If you aren’t clinging to them and your religion, you’re beating them into plowshares. But the recent spate of mass shootings has everyone looking for a simple, understandable root cause. Spoiler: It’s video games. Duh! Regardless, Vice President “Joltin’” Joe Biden told Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello that the game industry has “not been singled out” for blame … because they’re nailing everybody to the wall! Just days later, President Obama asked Congress for $10 million to fund research into the long-term effects of violent television, movies, and games on young, impressionable minds.

Well, we’re here to help. And because Mr. TV gave us short attention spans, we’re going to skip the research and go straight to the answers. What say you, panel of experts? What can we do about violence in video games?

Launch the gallery and be enlightened!

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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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Games journalism is not a popularity contest. It’s about writing the best, most informative content you can. But it’s always fun to see which stories proved the most appealing to our readers. That’s why we created this list of GamesBeat’s 10 most popular stories from 2012.

1. Ocean Marketing: How to self-destruct your company with just a few measly emails. We detailed one of the greatest PR blunders in gaming history. It just doesn’t pay to pick a fight with Penny Arcade. Also, this story was technically published at the very end of 2011, but since it received most of its hits in 2012, we’ll count it. This is the only article that also appeared on 2011′s list.

2. Educational outreach program Pixel Academy looking for a place to call home. Offering workshops on topics like video game design, 3D printing, film making, and app development to children ages 8 to 18, this worthy program turned to crowdfunding to help keep itself afloat. A good cause and a great story.

3. Google Zerg rush attacks your search results with this fun Starcraft-inspired easter egg. The search engine giant paid tribute to the famous real-time strategy game by swarming the computer screen with the famous Google O. It was a pretty simple gag, but the immense popularity of StarCraft helped make this one of our biggest stories ever.

4. Breaking Borderlands 2: Easy money, XP, Eridium, boss fights, and tokens. We tell our readers how to bend the world of Pandora to their wills in this popular guide. People must have found this story useful considering how many of them kept checking it out.

5. Can’t find Franchise/Dynasty mode in Madden NFL 13? Let us explain. I guess a lot of people were having this problem if this was one of our most read stories of the year.

6. Bethesda reveals Skyrim dragon mounts, house-building, Kinect shouts, and more! Developer Bethesda originally showed these ideas during a gaming conference as potential additions to its incredibly popular role-playing game — most of which became a reality in Skyrim’s downloadable content.

7. FYI: PlayStation Network down today at noon PT for planned maintenance. A lot of people were wondering why they couldn’t get online with their PlayStation 3s and PlayStation Vitas.

8. Minecraft (Xbox 360 Edition): Tips, tricks, and achievement guide. Another one of our great game guides. It helps when the title you’re writing about is as complex as Minecraft.

9. The world’s most wanted alleged pirate was also the No. 1 multiplayer player for Modern Warfare 3. You have to admire a guy who can top both an FBI most wanted list and a Call of Duty leaderboard.

10. Survive the real zombie apocalypse in an abandoned UK shopping mall. Zombies are huge in all forms of media right now, including gaming. But what can compete with the chance to fight off “real” zombies with Airsoft guns?

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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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For some time, analysts have been predicting that the Call of Duty video game franchise would run out of steam and fall back down to earth. It has been the fastest-selling franchise for several years now, and sales of Call of Duty: Black Ops II topped $1 billion in the first 15 days of the current season. But based on Activision Blizzard’s statements about the number of hours of multiplayer games that players have banked, it looked like the engagement level had dropped for the title, according to analyst Atul Bagga at Lazard Capital Markets.

But that’s not true, according to data mined from Raptr, the gamer social network with more than 15 million players. Dennis Fong, the chief executive of Raptr, told us exclusively that total playtime to date for Black Ops II is comparable with the last two Call of Duty games released. The data are significant because Call of Duty is the biggest $60 video game franchise on earth, and predictions about how well it is doing have affected Activision Blizzard’s multibillion-dollar stock valuation.

“So contrary to various reports that this year’s game is in significant decline, it looks like it’s holding up very well,” said Fong.

During the first three days after the launch of Black Ops II this year, the total multiplayer playtime was 8 percent lower than last year’s Modern Warfare 3, according to Raptr. But it was 42 percent better than the original Call of Duty: Black Ops from 2010. And this year, Activision Blizzard has been more active about promoting higher engagement with the multiplayer community than it has been in the past. You could say it is doing that out of weakness, but the results are pushing the engagement above previous levels.

In the second week after the launch of Black Ops II, playtime spiked higher than in any past games. So after the first two weeks post-launch, playtime was 17 percent higher for Black Ops II versus Modern Warfare 3. Activision gave fans a “Double XP” weekend, where they earned more points for playing. On top of that, Black Ops II benefited during that time because it included the Thanksgiving Black Friday that elevated overall playtime.

Those two factors were absent with Modern Warfare 3, which launched two weeks before Thanksgiving. By the time Thanksgiving rolled around in 2011, Modern Warfare 3 playtime had already begun to decline. Black Ops II sales benefited from a higher number of Black Friday deals, and Activision had never done a Double XP weekend so early before. It has used the Double XP events to get players reengaged with the multiplayer game or help generate awareness for a new map pack.

“Perhaps Activision realizes that community engagement activities planned early actually increases Call of Duty buzz and drives new user acquisition,” said Fong. “This spike in activity will level out as we move further past the launch phase, but early signs is that Black Ops II’s playtime activity is settling within a typical range of activity for Call of Duty but better than what Modern Warfare 3 was doing.”

Raptr says that more promotions and community engagement activities are likely to keep playtime above past Call of Duty games, so it’s a bit early to determine long-term effect right now. The new game has a number of ways to keep the community involved, including livestreaming, sharing brag videos on YouTube, and the Call of Duty Elite gamer social network with large numbers of tournaments.

Black Ops II is also doing well based on another perspective that Raptr analyzes. A calculation dubbed “total playtime as a percentage of launch” shows that Black Ops II is holding up significantly better than Modern Warfare 3. In that respect, Modern Warfare 3 did not hold up as well compared with previous games in terms of total playtime as a percentage of launch.

Last year’s MW3 eventually settled at 20 percent, compared with launch over the following few months. Previous games were closer to 40 percent compared with launch. One of the big differences this year is that Activision made Call of Duty: Elite, which was a subscription service last year, into a free giveaway for fans.

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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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Irrational Games (formerly 2K Boston) released the official cover art for the highly anticipated (and often delayed) BioShock Infinite earlier this month, and fans were mostly disappointed with the final look.

While previous games in the series proudly display the creepy and iconic Big Daddy and Little Sister characters, Infinite shows the star, Booker DeWitt, in a generic “hero” pose. For a game set in a steampunk flying city full of mechanical menaces and sorcery, you’d expect a more inspired box art.

DeWitt’s boring pose and general design are so banal that you could stick him in any action game and he wouldn’t seem out of place — something you could not do with a Big Daddy. Check out the gallery below and see for yourself.

What other games would Booker DeWitt fit in?

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

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Millions of players around the world are playing multiplayer combat in this season’s biggest video game blockbuster, Call of Duty: Black Ops II. But just how many of those players are doing things by rote, playing in the same old style year after year and never getting any better?

I have been one of those players, too lazy to change. And we’re not good for Activision Blizzard, which generates more than billion dollars a year from more than 40 million Call of Duty fans every year. (This year, the game sold more than $1 billion worth in its first 15 days). If you get progressively worse at multiplayer, you’ll drop off sooner and move to another game. Worse yet, you might be so embarrassed at how you play that you never even try multiplayer. Bit by bit, such fan erosion could one day knock Call of Duty off its perch as the fastest-selling game of all time.

That hasn’t happened yet. Its players are still very active. As of earlier this week, fans had played Black Ops II for 178,535,425 hours, and more than 399,835,504,682 shots had been fired in multiplayer. Players had thrown 2,359,330,195 grenades and killed more than 20,132,02,068 enemies. Of those, 1,677,862,824 had been killed with head shots. Call of Duty Elite developer Beachhead Studios tracks and shares the data on every bullet fired. It has figured out that the data itself has created a metagame that makes fans even more competitive.

I’ve played Call of Duty games for years. But this time, I engaged in a serious experiment as I rushed through the single-player game and began multiplayer. I got some expert advice from Treyarch game design director David Vonderhaar. His sensible advice reminded me that I should equip myself better to become consistently faster in order to get the drop on (the much younger) players with faster reflexes. He also suggested equipping myself alternatively for stealth, support, survival, or run-and-gun roles. That was like a basic therapy session on how I could play better, without embarrassing myself.

I’ve continued to play, keeping close tabs on my progress using Call of Duty Elite, the social network that now comes free with the game. And now I received a second review of my tactics from Michael Gesner, the executive producer at Activision Beachhead Studios (maker of Call of Duty Elite), and Jason Ades, a producer at Activision Publishing. I’m sharing their collective wisdom with all of those players who need the help, like me, but don’t get a chance to quiz the game developers. These experts are the front-line in the battle that Activision is fighting to get players to re-engage with Call of Duty.

My track record doesn’t lie (I wish it could)

For those who don’t know the game, Call of Duty: Black Ops II is not a realistic combat simulation. It is set in the year 2025, and some of the weapons, while rooted in fact, are not real. You can run faster in the game than in real life, and you can take more bullet damage. The game is very violent, but it is respectful of  the sacrifice of real soldiers. Activision donates some of the proceeds to veterans causes. The single-player story conveys a mature tale about the horrors of modern war, and it tries to give you a sense of what war is like.

But multiplayer is different. I think of the multiplayer version of the game as a sport. Activision encourages this comparison, encouraging players to create their own competitive clans and participate in league play. And it pays to have coaches in this sport.

The experts reviewed my lousy stats, which are available in an amazing amount of detail on Elite. With Elite, you can log in and go to your career page, which has a host of details aimed at helping you brag about the good stuff and improve your play. The stats come from every session you play. You can drill down on a “heat map,” which shows an overhead view of the level and has a timeline. If you haven’t done this yet, you should go to Call of Duty Elite and check it out. You can see where most of the deaths occurred on the map during the session, and who shot whom. The playback shows you exactly who shot you, the weapon they used, and the positions of the shooter and victim.

If I had recorded some matches, they could have seen the video playback of the match from my point of view. With all of this help, I feel that I’m getting enough feedback to help me get better at the game. And that makes me want to play it longer.

In Black Ops II, after 17.5 hours of play, I have a kill-to-death ratio of 0.74. For every three kills, I die four times. On last year’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, my kill-to-death ratio was 0.43. That was after 59 hours of play, and it was from playing a mode of multiplayer dubbed Domination, where your team tries to take and hold three flags on the map. I wrote about my Modern Warfare 3 experience here.

As you try to grab those flags, you’re more likely to get killed and less likely to get kills. And on the original Call of Duty: Black Ops, I had a 0.76 kill-to-death ratio after 69 hours of play. I always thought Black Ops multiplayer was easier than Modern Warfare 3, thanks in part to small changes like the radio-controlled car in Black Ops that enabled even the lamest players to get some easy kills.

I’ve become a Lieutenant Colonel III, on level 39 of 55 total, and I score about 136 points per minute in the game. My total score is 141,765. By comparison, the top player in the game has more than 4 million points. I’ve got about 23 hours to go before I hit the top level, or Prestige. I’m actually playing more than I have in the past. I’m also thinking about it more and am starting to use the Call of Duty Elite app for the iPhone, which lets me change my custom classes, or favorite weapon kits.

The stats tell you that the Modern Warfare style of multiplayer is much more difficult and less forgiving for average players like me. But I also feel there are some significant differences with Black Ops II that help equalize the playing field.

The no-brainer tricks I had already figured out

The first 10 levels now have a tutorial that you can play with bots, or computer-controlled characters. You can also watch five multiplayer videos on Elite TV for helpful hints. If you still need help, you can head over to Twitch to watch live Black Ops II games in action. It is mesmerizing to watch players who are really good.

The new Pick 10 system, where you can customize your loadout using 10 points — rather than be restricted to certain choices — is great for people who need to fix their problems with multiplayer fast.

Finding your right game is also essential. I switched from Domination to Team Deathmatch to improve my survival and get a better kill-to-death ratio. But I can probably earn more points taking one for the team and grabbing a flag instead of going for a kill. Domination is also a team game, and I mostly play on my own.

I also learned the maps better. When you know a map, you can start executing on a strategy to outwit your enemies. Some of the maps are very hard to figure out. For those ones, it pays to know that everyone dies in the middle. If you want to stay alive, keep to the edges.

If you know an area is well-trafficked, like a corner in a corridor, you can put a Bouncing Betty mine on it. If you’re going to snipe, find good cover. Match your weaponry to the map, as appropriate. Submachine guns are better for indoors, and sniping is good for maps with long, outdoor spaces. When you are moving, go from cover to cover. Sprint to get to your hiding spot, but don’t get caught walking in the open.

The weaponry of Black Ops II, which is set in the year 2025, is far more deadly than in past games. But that can be a good thing for new and average players. If you level up your assault rifle, such as my MTAR, enough, you qualify for more and more accessories. I quickly latched on to the Target Finder, a scope that identifies enemies in bright pink rectangles as soon as you look through the scope. That helps my older eyes discern enemies against any backdrop in a split-second. I simply move my crosshairs of my gun into that rectangle and a white “X” appears. I fire indiscriminately at that X until the enemy drops.

Now that I have leveled up my weapon (getting access to the better accessories in doing so), I don’t really want to go back and start over again with other weapons. But that could pay off for me if I do that with better guns. Overall, I’ve only completed 88 of more than 1,700 challenges, such as getting 25 kills with a particular weapon.

You could say that’s cheating to use such a powerful scope. But I contend that anybody can take advantage of this scope, and it really helps the people who need some extra help pinpointing exactly where the enemy is. It helps the “noobs” and the average players more than it does the excellent players. And Black Ops II has counters to it. You can spend a point in your 10-point armory kit to negate the effects of the Target Finder.

Gesner says the interesting thing is the “rock, paper, scissors” effect of the strategies and counter-strategies. If you know how to counter somebody’s else’s strategy, then you’re a step ahead. But good players adapt and find new counters to a winning strategy. In fact, you can actually watch a good player and copy his or her custom class kit in Call of Duty Elite. And there are many different ways to succeed at Call of Duty, which makes the game so fun to so many different types of players.

Good advice on staying alive that I didn’t know

The good thing is their advice had an immediate effect on my game play.

They fixed one obvious problem in my kit, or the things I took into battle. They told me to get rid of the grenade launcher attachment (known as the noob tube) since I clearly wasn’t using it that much. That saved me one of my 10 points and I could apply it to something else.

I was using grenades and concussion bombs, to no effect. Whenever I tossed these, they only hurt the enemies by pure accident. I replaced them with electric shock charges, which you can plant in the ground and stop an enemy cold with an electric blast. The blast doesn’t kill the enemy, but it holds them still for a precious second. If I am camping by a window, I can turn around as soon as I hear the electric blast and shoot the frozen enemy.

Supplementing the shock charges is the Bouncing Betty land mine, which pops up in the air and explodes when an enemy comes near. If you plant this near the shock charge, you can kill the stunned enemy. These two changes to my loadout enabled me to stay in a building, look out the window, and shoot passersby without worrying that someone would take me from behind. It made me much deadlier as a “camper.”

But it didn’t make me invincible. The maps are designed for balance. Gesner said that the best camping spots are also the ones with the most intersections. You can’t possibly watch your back if there are three entrances into a room where you are camping. Gesner says that every camping spot has its weaknesses (on purpose). Perhaps the best method for camping/sniping effectively is to keep moving — maneuver to one camping spot, take out an opponent, then seek cover and move to your next one.

The big counter to camping is a new accessory, the millimeter scanner. At short range, this scope can see through buildings and barriers, showing you the outline of someone who is stationary. If you have a weapon equipped with a “full metal jacket” bullet, you can shoot through walls and take the camper out. The millimeter scanner also works when you toss out a smoke grenade, as it allows you to see the silhouette of someone obscured in the smoke.

Some more tips

Study the maps. And look at your heat maps. If you get too bored as a camper, or if the enemy comes after you, try the next best thing. Move around on a circuit. You can run from camping spot to camping spot, or from one part of the map to another where you know you can get the drop on people who are moving in the usual heavily trafficked spots.

Get the right accessories. If the recoil of your assault rifle is a problem, get a foregrip or stock to reduce the recoil. If you’re a sniper, consider carrying an assault shield to create your own cover. Every accessory should complement your style of play.

Scorestreaks (such as an air or missile strike you can loose on an enemy when you reap enough kills in a row) are a lot of fun to unleash on the enemy. But they are costly if you use the “Hardline” perk to reduce the number of kills it takes to get a Scorestreak. If you never get enough kills to get a Scorestreak, the Hardline perk may be a waste.

Corners matter a lot. Never go around a corner in a sprint, said Ades. It takes time to stop, draw your weapon, aim, and shoot. If possible, you should be aiming down your gun site if you can when you round the corner. Glance at your minimap to see if you can spot an enemy. And toss out a shock charge or Bouncing Betty mine to check to see if there’s an enemy there that you can’t see.

Pay attention to the range of your gun. Light Machine Guns have longer range than an assault rifle, but they slow you down. Sniper rifles have long range, but they’re slow, have a low rate of fire, and they don’t work in close quarters. Submachine guns are good for short corridors and maps with lots of corners. But they have a short range. Each of the guns also has a different amount of recoil, but you can reduce that with accessories like the stock or foregrip. And you can further reduce it by lying prone on the ground and shooting.

Conclusion

As I noted, the battlefield of 2025 is deadly. But the changes made to Call of Duty: Black Ops II’s multiplayer serve to level the playing field. Once you learn how to play a certain way, you can try out another method, such as stealth. That should increase the time you spend with the game, and that is good for Activision and your overall competence as a multiplayer participant.

One of the best moves that Activision made was to make Call of Duty Elite free. It provides the necessary feedback and transparency that a player can use to objectively evaluate different fighting styles. It pays off if you take the time to analyze your game (or find a seasoned veterans to analyze it for you) and make the changes you need to stay alive longer.

Gesner said, “There are other camps that will disagree with our advice, and that’s what makes Call of Duty great.”

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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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Jingoistic modern-day first-person shooters love quotes from icons of American history, or at least their loading screens seem to enjoy them. So I couldn’t help but use a JFK classic to summarize Medal of Honor: Warfighter as an experience: “Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.”

Electronic Arts’ recently released multiplatform first-person shooter assumes we can’t get enough of the blockbuster bang-and-boom escapades that have made competing franchises like Activision’s Call of Duty so popular.

Yet with Warfighter, EA remains at the rear of the corporate first-person-shooter platoon because it chose to march in place instead of moving forward.

That doesn’t necessarily mean Warfighter can’t hang with its big-budget brothers in arms, so let’s enter the fray and take a closer look.

What you’ll like

The modern-warfare shooter model is tired but still fun

Warfighter clearly takes inspiration from other releases in its genre. Unlike some of the me-too efforts that have followed a similar path, the gameplay here can be pretty fun at times. Shooting mechanics are familiar and precise. Helpful onscreen icons let you know when you’ve nailed that reflex-rewarding headshot. And single-player skirmishes give you access to a convenient peeking move that facilitates leaning around corners, adding a slight cover-based-shooter vibe to the combat. Sadly, the feature is unavailable for multiplayer encounters.

Wait … is this Need for Speed?

The remarkably short single-player campaign doesn’t just leave you gripping human-neutralizing weapons. It makes you grip a steering wheel every now and then, too. These vehicle sequences are surprisingly lengthy, and they task you with driving through people-packed Pakistani streets and freshly paved Dubai motorways. You’ll even get to maneuver an indestructible Zodiac boat through a fiery-and-flooded Filipino town.

While these moments don’t have the same feel as a tightly tuned EA racing title, they break up the body-count-boosting fighting sequences pretty effectively.

United Nations of multiplayer

Obviously, Warfighter puts a lot of emphasis on multiplayer. Playing on the Xbox 360, I had to insert a whole new disc just to battle other flesh-and-blood beings. Regardless, you’ll encounter many of the standard FPS multiplayer tropes. So expect to unlock different combat classes and weapon loadouts by racking up kills in the different online modes.

What makes Warfighter stand out, however, is its global approach to the aforementioned classes. Keeping with its from-the-frontlines tone, you’re immediately asked to browse through different real-world, tier-one special-forces archetypes representing 10 countries. You can deploy as a United States Army SFOD-D assaulter, a Canadian JTF2 sniper, or even a German KSK heavy gunner, among others. While somewhat superficial, the international angle adds an interesting layer to the typical choose-your-guy-and-go approach.

Multiplayer also introduces the “fire team” concept where you’re paired with someone for a group-deathmatch session. You’ll receive bonuses as you help your fellow friendly, and you’ll even have the option to respawn at your buddy’s location (if he can stay alive long enough).

What you won’t like

Mediocrity ‘inspired by real events’

Every contemporary-combat based FPS has a gratuitous near-death, arms-flailing-in-front-of-you, holy-expletive moment or two … or 12. Warfighter joins the club, but the instances in its single-player campaign take inspiration from actual events, adding a never-before-seen level of “realism.” So this time, when a massive explosion causes a chain reaction that leads to a giant crane collapsing on top of you, it’s more “lifelike.”

Horribly rendered CG cutscenes try to weave a patronizing and sometimes confusing tale of country-first heroes sacrificing their personal lives in the name of righteousness. One of the protagonists deals with personal crises involving his need-to-know-basis mission and uncanny valley-dwelling wife and daughter. Again, mimicking the “real thing.”

The genuine men and women fighting these wars are facing life-and-death threats, both on and off the battlefield. No one can replicate or claim to replicate what they’ve gone through, are going through, and will go through. Most FPS releases hide behind a digital veil of ignorance. They’re just video games, right? Nothing but mindless fun. EA deliberately chose to stick the authenticity label on Warfighter, and that decision brings the consequences, and scrutiny, that come with it.

In short, Warfighter feels like a Michael Bay movie masquerading as a Kathryn Bigelow film.

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For the last few years, Activision has delighted gamers with the elaborate and absurd bonuses that it includes in the various Call of Duty collectors’ editions. Modern Warfare 2 came with night-vision goggles, Black Ops came with a remote-controlled spy car, and now shooter fans will be wondering “where the hell am I going to put that thing?” again when they see what’s in the Black Ops II Care Package: a toy attack drone (dubbed the MQ-27 Dragonfire) with a gun on it.

Yes, really.

OK, it’s probably not a real gun, and it’s technically just a remote-controlled helicopter. But it is supposed to look like an attack drone, so you can probably use it to freak out your neighbors pretty easily. Joining the Dragonfire in the Care Package are the Nuketown 2025 and Nuketown Zombies in-game maps, both of which are based on a classic stage from the original Black Ops (and one of which contains zombies), as well as a SteelBook case, two collectible coins, exclusive weapon skins and player card backgrounds (so people in multiplayer will be envious of your fancy special edition), and a copy of the soundtrack.

PlayStation 3 owners will also get two dynamic themes, while the Xbox 360 version includes a pair of avatar items: a zombie costume and something called a CLAW that looks like a small robot hippo … but probably isn’t one. PC gamers will have to settle for the Digital Deluxe Edition, which drops the helicopter, SteelBook, and coins in favor of a free copy of Call of Duty: World at War.

If for some crazy reason you don’t need or want a toy attack drone, Activision also has the Hardened Edition. It contains all of the same bonuses as the Care Package, but without the Dragonfire, making it less crazy and less likely to warm a shelf in your local Best Buy in a few months.

The Call of Duty: Black Ops II collectors’ editions are available for preorder now. The Care Package is $180 (attack drones are expensive), with the Hardened and Digital Deluxe Editions set at $80.

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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’ve been playing a lot of Call of Duty lately,” said Phelps in an interview with The Post Game when asked what game he’s been playing. ”I find myself playing like 30 hours a week.”

He was then asked if people knew who he was online. “Yeah, people don’t know it’s mine,” he answered. “I just get crushed. I always find myself getting heated, trash talking. And you know it’s a 10-year-old kid on the other line that just demolished me. It’s so frustrating. But it is fun, and I’m very competitive in everything I do.”

Liz Woolley, founder of Online Gamers Anonymous, uses Phelps’ love for competitive shooting to warn others about the dangers of gaming addiction in an article printed on Yahoo Sports.

“Any time you get up to more than a couple of hours per day regularly, it can start to interfere with your normal life, your job, your family, your friends and your social life,” said Woolley, according to Yahoo Sports. “But it can be even more dangerous for people like [Phelps] who are highly driven and competitive, which of course elite athletes and swimmers have to be. The games can be used as an escape from the pressures of training or competition, but it has to be moderated carefully or it can have terrible repercussions.”

Now, is 30 hours of gaming per week that much? Well, that’s just a little more than four hours each day. Sure, it seems like a lot, but if that’s how Michael Phelps wants to spend his time off from training (which I’m sure is very long and difficult), then why not? It’s better than smoking a bong, at least.

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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 might have seen this collection of movie poster clichés earlier this year (courtesy of French blogger Christophe Courtois). It shouldn’t surprise you that video game box art has its own recurring visual motifs, and I’ve collected 11 of them here.

For simplicity’s sake, I’ve mostly limited this to titles from the current generation of hardware (Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Wii). Otherwise, we’d be here all day.

Face-to-face

TV screenwriter Eddy Canfor-Dumas says, “Conflict is drama.” And he would know because he wrote Supervolcano.

Even non-narrative games like Pac-Man center around two forces in opposition, and the designers of game covers can express this in any number of ways. You can’t beat the classics, however, and sometimes it’s enough to just have two characters demonstrating their antipathy by getting into one another’s face.

Notable offender: Developer/Publisher Rockstar’s Bully: Scholarship Edition mixes up the formula with a difference in height between the two people staring each other down.

Guns pointed up

Modern video games are just straight-up full of guns, so it makes sense that many covers focus on their characters’ relationship to their hardware. It’s hard to show people holding guns without making them look too threatening, however, so the workaround is apparently to show them casually pointing their weapon into the air.

Notable offender: See that woman on the box for House of the Dead: Overkill’s Extended Cut? She’s pointing two guns up.

In the shadows

In this age of gritty reboots and cynicism, some video games have gotten pretty dark, and their covers reflect this in the most literal way possible. Apparently, the quickest way to convey to a prospective player that your game is for-reals serious is to design a cover in which your hero glowers in a poorly lit room.

Notable offender: Limbo’s and Alan Wake’s shadow-intensive covers make sense, considering the darkness inherent in their design. But why does a boxing game like Electronic Arts’ Fight Night: Champion need to go all monochromatic?

Screaming

Good visual art expresses emotion, and I can’t think of a quicker way to do so than to just have a picture of a person screaming.

Screaming probably appears on so many game covers because it can mean so many things, like anger, pain, fear, or aggression. But mostly, it gets us a bunch of pictures of people with their mouths open.

Notable offender: Dead Space: Extraction’s screaming heroine was so memorable that gaming blog Joystiq devoted an entire day to sneaking her into every image they posted on its site.

Explosion in the background

A game’s box is often the first impression a title makes on us, and it only has a few seconds to let us know that its contents are fun and exciting. Some can accomplish this with brand recognition and scantily clad warrior princesses, but it never hurts to goose up the excitement a little.

And in many cases, the shortest route to excitement is blowing some shit up.

Notable offender: Developer Infinity Ward’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 flips the script by featuring the only non-orange explosion in this image.

Face in your face

Some games discard the old reliable guns and explosions in favor of something a little more character-focused…and nothing focuses more on a character than an extreme closeup of their face.

Notable offenders: Super Meat Boy, SpongeBob Squarepants, Billy the Puppet from Saw, and God of War III’s Kratos are so in-your-face that their covers don’t have room for anything else.

From the waist up

If all those faces in your face made you uncomfortable, this batch of game art will be a little easier on your territorial bubble. It may not help that so many of the people on these games appear to be threatening you, though.

Notable offenders: This may be the preferred format for superhero games. Wolverine, Spider-Man, Batman, Thor, and Green Lantern all appear from the waist up.

“Look at my back”

Some characters are just rude. Here we are, just trying to pick out a game, and they can’t even be bothered to face us. You can’t take it personally all the time; occasionally, the subjects have their hands full with some kind of giant monster or an explosion. But others couldn’t care less and look back over their shoulders as if asking if we like the view.

Notable offender: Developer Capcom’s Devil May Cry 4 manages to sneak in a back shot of series hero Dante, who appears behind Nero, the game’s new character. Nero, for his part, appears from the waist up (see above).

3 people in a row

Three, as we know, is a magic number, which is probably why so many game boxes feature three characters standing in a row. Some of them mix it up by just putting three giant heads or torsos in the sky, but they’re not fooling anyone.

Notable offender: Publisher Sony’s PlayStation Move Heroes gets a special mention because it has not one, but two sets of three characters arranged in a row.

Hero in the middle

Main characters are at the center of the action, so why not get superliteral and put them in the center of the cover? Also, make sure it’s just them, so nobody is confused over who the game is about.

Notable offenders: War games like the Call of Duty and Battlefield franchises all favor this look.

The White Void

A lot of cover artists are into minimalism. That’s what I tell myself, anyway; the other possibility is that the designers of these covers just forgot to add a background.

Notable offenders: It’s easier to name platforms and companies for this one than specific games. Wii titles, Electronic Arts’ sports franchises, and Red Faction: Armageddon publisher THQ love the White Void.

In conclusion

If you’ve been looking closely throughout this article, you might have seen a few games pop up in more than one category. One title in particular contains four of the elements I’ve discussed here, and for that, I am declaring it the Ultimate Cliche Box Art.

Cover tropes: This is your king.

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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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Sir Paul McCartney, the former Mr. Heather Mills, announced on Twitter that he is working on music with Bungie, developer of the sci-fi first-person-shooter Halo. It’s a match made in the mind of a baby boomer who is desperately trying to reconnect with his angst-ridden son.

“I’m really excited to be working on writing music with Bungie, the studio that made Halo,” McCartney said. The 70-year-old knight included a picture (seen above) of him working closely with long-time Bungie composer Marty O’Donnell.

In January, McCartney told German website Zeit Online that he was already working on video game music.

“It’s a fascinating market,” McCartney said. “A new computer game sells so much better than a new CD these days. Young people will hear my music for the first time in a game.”

McCartney’s first active involvement with video games was promoting The Beatles: Rock Band from Harmonix, MTV Games, and Electronic Arts in 2010.

Bungie and McCartney have yet to announce what they are working on specifically, but it’s not Halo. After Halo: Reach, the studio has left the series behind and in the hands of Microsoft.

In May, a judge unsealed the contract between Bungie and its new publisher Activision due to ongoing litigation between that company and some members of Infinity Ward (the developer of the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare games). The contract revealed a series of games code-named Destiny that debut in the fall of 2013.

Since the rock legend is working with Bungie, we’re hoping McCartney rerecords “Band on the Run” as “Man on the Run” for a new Marathon 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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The Call of Duty franchise doesn’t skimp on patriotism. Of course, “patriotism” in this sense entails gamers enacting their civil responsibility of blowing each other’s heads off in the first-person shooter multiplayer arenas of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and Call of Duty: Black Ops.

Now, and just in time for the Fourth of July’s equally strong emphasis on blinding explosions and loud noises, publisher Activision kicks off a week-long half-off deal for all downloadable content released for both games on the PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360. That certainly beats eating hot dogs smelling like lighter fluid all day.

Here’s a more specific list on the content packs going up for half the cheese:

• Modern Warfare 3 Content Collection #1
• Modern Warfare 3 Content Collection #2
• Black Ops First Strike
• Black Ops Escalation
• Black Ops Annihilation
• Black Ops Rezurrection

If getting your mitts on a bunch of new multiplayer maps (and zombies!) named after calamitous events at a discount isn’t enough, check this: A cut of your money funnels into the Call of Duty Endowment, an Activision-run charity for finding jobs for veterans.

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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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Here at VentureBeat, we use the word “disruptive” a lot. Like, a lot. How is Company X disrupting the social or gaming market? Why is Corporation Y notable? What is Startup Z doing differently than everyone else? Sometimes it’s hard to identify exactly what sets certain products and businesses apart from each other, but that’s certainly not the case with Redbox.

Owned by parent company Coinstar, the DVD and game rental kiosk chain has been so disruptive in the entertainment industry that it helped Netflix hammer the final nail in Blockbuster’s coffin. Redbox has doubled its annual revenue year after year, cutting so deeply into Hollywood’s piggybank that several movie studios attempted legal action, eventually settling to impose a 28-day delay before new releases hit Redbox machines.

But that’s all old news. Last year, Redbox turned its sights on video game rentals in a big way and has shared some recent stats from that endeavor with GamesBeat, all of which we’ve put into this nifty (and exclusive) infographic for you:

Not surprisingly, Redbox says that families are hitting the rental machines the most, usually grabbing something lighter for the kids — such as Just Dance 3 — while the adults go for more mature titles like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

While I proudly take home a stack of movies from Redbox every weekend, I’ll admit to also grabbing the occasional game and tearing through it for achievements. However, it will be interesting to see if game rentals can provide the same growth for Redbox that DVDs have over time. After all, at $2 a night, a try-before-you-buy approach seems more efficient when the average renter plays less than seven hours a week. I spend more time than that just building bread forts in Skyrim.

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

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“We have molded our team into a crack squad of eager developers ready to push the first-person action genre in support of Activision’s Call of Duty franchise,” Neversoft says on its website (via Blue’s News).

Founded in 1994 and bought by publisher Activision in 1999, Neversoft is now the fourth subsidiary to work on the Call of Duty franchise along with Infinity Ward, Sledgehammer Games, and Treyarch. It’s not known at this time if Neversoft will support the other studios by creating content for the Modern Warfare and Black Ops series, or if it will create an entirely new COD game.

While four developers working on one franchise might seem like overkill, keep in mind Call of Duty is a massively popular money-maker for Activision. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 earned one billion dollars in sales in the first 16 days, eclipsing a record set in 2009 by the film Avatar, which reached the same milestone in 17 days. And it looks as if the upcoming sequel Call of Duty: Black Ops II could be even bigger; first-day pre-orders of the game on Amazon beat Modern Warfare 3′s pre-orders by 30 percent.

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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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Jump into the floppy sneakers of Marty McFly, Jr. from Back to the Future Part II. Remember the scene where he flips on the TV after noisily arriving home, instructing it to display channel after channel of visual bombardment in one screen? He then sits back in the well-worn armchair, his lax calm-as-they-come expression heralding the type of future shock adults spoke about in feverish whispers during the 1980s. Still, Marty’s monster dose of info provides him exponential entertainment value within a widely established platform.

Yeah, that pretty much summarizes OnLive’s freshly announced MultiView feature.

At a blearingly early presser event at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) Wednesday, the video game streaming service discussed its plan of attack in utilizing increasing consumer interest in cloud-based and cross-platform gaming applications. The company’s practiced hand at fending off walls of skeptics for its understandably incredulous product – some even called frame-by-frame gameplay streaming “impossible” – guided MultiView’s debut following a declaration by chief executive officer Steve Perlman of OnLive’s successes so far.

“Skeptics said OnLive would never work, never scale, and perform unreliably over consumer broadband connections,” he said. “OnLive now has millions of subscribers worldwide. Not only is it available on PCs and Macs, but also on TVs, tablets, and smartphones via wired, wireless, and even cellular networks, and I’m pleased to report we’ve had 100 percent uptime 24/7 since launch.”

As we’ve talked about before, MultiView furnishes players with a row of three in-game spectating windows. Any game and any user broadcasting across OnLive’s network slots into MultiView with a few clicks or button presses.

The real win for OnLive here is MultiView’s latent advantages for competitive and cooperative gaming. Keeping tabs and a constant awareness on your teammates through secondary streams ensures squad leaders, dungeon masters, and guild officers second-by-second location data. As an example, Perlman loaded a multiplayer session of Borderlands within MultiView while streaming his three fellow Vault Hunters simultaneously next to his game screen.

Consider MultiView’s uses within a pro-gaming environment. Games such as Halo: Reach, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, and Battlefield 3 demand constant communication between team members during competitive matches, an activity typically involving screeching interjections over headphones and across tables. A coach trading a ruined voice for increased efficiency via tracking his or her players under one interface easily edges into win-win territory.

Of course, this all hinges on the infrastructural magic occurring without a hitch – an especially critical accomplishment for OnLive if it seeks a stronger multiplayer gaming presence. Reaching for the clouds won’t happen without taking care of the weighted baggage of latency, and plenty of voices spoke on the matter already. “The round-trip latency from pushing a button on a controller and it going up to the server and back down before you see something change on the screen should be less than 80 milliseconds,” Perlman claimed in a 2009 BBC report. “We usually see something between 35 and 40 milliseconds.”

MultiView headlined OnLive’s showfloor booth, and after nabbing some hands-on time, I met no latency issues or quality hitches while watching – though a supervised, guided demo with OnLive techs on hand isn’t completely indicative of a living room experience. In any case, OnLive’s latest additions brought a recurring theme of cloud power, and the end-of-day takeaway spelled a bright future for OnLive and similar companies of its ilk.

“We’ve made gaming a non-platform-dependent activity,” Perlman said. “You play what you want, when you want it, and we take care of the rest.”

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

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But this week, the legal case took some new turns. For a while, it looked like Activision would prevail, but now the outcome isn’t so clear. It started in 2010 when the founders of Infinity Ward, the Activision-owned game studio that turned Call of Duty into a billion-dollar franchise, were fired for breach of contract and insubordination. Co-founders Vince Zampella and Jason West said Activision owed them royalties, and Activision accused them of planning to defect to a new studio funded by its arch enemy, Electronic Arts. The founders fired off a lawsuit saying Activision conspired to get rid of them.

The legal action spiraled in a bigger battle for control of the first-person shooter market, which has turned into a multibillion-dollar business. Activision sued EA for interrupting its business by stealing away Zampella and West, who set up Respawn Entertainment and hired dozens of former Infinity Ward employees. Activsion recently claimed more than $1 billion in damages.

Activision said that it had to pull another studio, Sledgehammer Games, off of its own Call of Duty game to help the decimated Infinity Ward studio finish Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. That game generated more than a billion dollars in revenue forActivision, but the company said it could have made more profits and also completed another game in the Call of Duty family. EA could have been stuck holding the bag for a very large legal bill.

But EA and Activision settled the lawsuit this week. In a joint statement, the companies said: “Activision and EA have agreed to put this matter behind them.” They declined to disclose the details of the settlement, but Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter said that no money changed hands. EA said it would not have to file an 8K financial disclosure related to the settlement, and EA never set aside a fund to insure against legal losses related to the case.

On top of that, Activision voluntarily agreed to pay $42 million in royalties that it owed to Infinity Ward employees — not including West and Zampella. But the trial will go forward in West and Zampella v. Activision case.

Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Elihu Berle denied Activision’s motion to postpone the case for an additional thirty days. The trial will begin as scheduled on May 29.

Even more stunning were court disclosures about Project Icebreaker. Activision executives’ email records showed that they had allegedly conspired to find dirt on West and Zampella because the Activision management was fed up with their arrogance and wanted a pretext to fire them. This project preceded the time when the founders began communicating with EA and Hollywood agent Seamus Blackley, who helped get the Infinity Ward co-founders and EA together.

In other words, Activision was trying to get rid of the duo that it said were critical to the success of its Call of Duty business. In the legal filings, former chief legal officer George Rose at Activision asked Thomas Fenady, former director of information technology at Activision, to “dig up dirt on Jason and Vince” because “we just want to get rid of them.” Rose allegedly told Fenady that Activision Blizzard chief executive Bobby Kotick had given the orders. Rose also told Fenady not to get caught and said that “Bobby will take care of you” if things didn’t turn out well. Rose denied this in his deposition. Fenady reportedly tried to get access to West and Zampella’s hard drives and email records.

Activision said that it accepted the court judgment and looks forward to the trial. But this week has had a few big setbacks for its proxy war with EA, which is its biggest rival in the video game business.

Microsoft’s Xbox Live Director of Programming Larry “Major Nelson” Hryb posted his regular activity roundup for the Xbox 360’s online network, and the Minecraft mania flows strong on the lists.

Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition nabbed the top position for bestsellers as well as sliding in behind long-standing champions Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and Call of Duty: Black Ops for unique-user counts. Other titans felt the squeeze: Battlefield 3, Halo: Reach, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and Gears of War 3 trailed by significant margins.

Here’s the punchline: All of this happened in Minecraft’s first week of release.

Creativity spawns popularity, or so the legions of Minecraft’s stalwart community believes. Originally released for the PC on November 18, 2011, the open-world tinkering title arms players with pick, axe, sword, and other tools while throwing open the floodgates of crowdsourced content, resulting in masterful works such as a recreated Westeros from Game of Thrones and Portal’s test chambers.

Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition launched on May 9, promptly fashioned a golden sword, and smashed digital-sales records on its first day in the wilds. Its 1,600 Microsoft Points ($20) cost, unusually large for an XBLA title, and its lack of a modding infrastructure didn’t prevent the acclaim rolling in.

Check out Major Nelson’s activity lists below. If you’re playing Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition, what have you created so far? Let us know in the comments!

Xbox 360 Top Live Titles (based on unique users)

1. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3
2. Call of Duty: Black Ops
3. Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition
4. FIFA 12
5. Battlefield 3
6. Halo: Reach
7. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
8. NBA 2K12
9. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
10. Gears of War 3
11. Grand Theft Auto IV
12. Trials Evolution
13. Forza Motorsport 4
14. Mass Effect 3
15. NHL 12
16. Madden NFL 12
17. Halo 3
18. Red Dead Redemption
19. Saints Row: The Third
20. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

Top Arcade Titles (Full Versions purchased)

1. Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition
2. Trials Evolution
3. The Walking Dead
4. Fable Heroes
5. Fez
6. Pinball FX2
7. Awesomenauts
8. I Am Alive
9. Castle Crashers
10. Family Game Night
11. Fruit Ninja Kinect
12. Bloodforge
13. Toy Soldiers: Cold War
14. Gotham City Impostors
15. Toy Soldiers
16. Trials HD
17. Dungeon Defenders
18. Full House Poker
19. Peggle
20. Magic: The Gathering — Duels of the Planeswalkers 2012

Top Indie Games (Full Versions purchased)

1. CastleMiner Z
2. CastleMiner
3. Total Miner: Forge
4. The $1 Zombie Game
5. FortressCraft: Chapter 1
6. The Impossible Game
7. Avatar Paintball
8. Avatar Deathmatch
9. Fortress Wars
10. FLIRT
11. End of Days: Infected vs. Mercs
12. Avatar Legends
13. Flight Adventure 2
14. Toy Stunt Bike 2
15. Solar 2
16. Firing Range 2
17. Miner4Ever
18. Avatar Air Wars
19. Don’t Die Dateless, Dummy!
20. Attack of the Zombie Horde

Games for Windows Top Live Titles (based on unique users)

1. Grand Theft Auto IV
2. Age of Empires Online
3. Batman: Arkham City
4. Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition
5. Microsoft Flight
6. Batman: Arkham Asylum
7. DiRT 3
8. Gotham City Impostors
9. F1 2011
10. Resident Evil 5
11. Fallout 3
12. Street Fighter X Tekken
13. Toy Soldiers
14. Fable III
15. BioShock 2
16. Colin McRae: Dirt 2
17. Bulletstorm
18. F1 2010
19. Street Fighter IV
20. Section 8: Prejudice

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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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Activision Blizzard beat expectations for the first-fiscal-quarter earnings today. The results, coming two days after Electronic Arts posted better-than-expected earnings, could be interpreted as good news for the larger game industry.

Activision Blizzard is the largest independent publisher of traditional video games, and its results are a bellwether for the PC and console game business. Of course, how the stock fares today will depend on how investors interpret the company’s signals about its future earnings. On that front, the company guided estimates slightly upward for 2012. It expects non-GAAP revenues for the current year to be $4.5 billion and earnings per share to be 95 cents, compared to previous estimates of 94 cents to 97 cents a share.

Activision Blizzard will, of course, want to show that its juggernaut money-maker, World of Warcraft, has kept its status as king of the hill in the massively multiplayer online (MMO) space, while also proving that the hit Call of Duty franchise has financial legs with Modern Warfare 3, Black Ops II, and the new Elite multiplayer service.

Analysts expected to see non-GAAP revenues for the quarter of $555 million and an earnings per share of 4 cents. The company actually did slightly better: On a non-GAAP basis, Activision Blizzard reported first fiscal quarter revenue of $587 million and net income of 6 cents a share.

In a conference call, Activision Blizzard chief executive Bobby Kotick said that “building a billion dollar business” with new game franchises requires a huge up-front investment. Looking beyond 2012, he said he sees big “mega franchises” coming, with a new massively multiplayer online game from Blizzard and another project from Bungie.

Kotick said preorders for Diablo III, which debuts May 15 after nine years of development, have been the biggest in history. In a statement, Kotick said, “Our better-than-expected first-quarter performance was driven by global consumer demand for Activision Publishing’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, and Skylanders Spyro’s Adventures, as well as Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft which remains the No. 1 subscription-based MMORPG in the world.”

A year ago, the company reported net income of $156 million, or 13 cents a share, on revenue of $755 million. Sales were driven by titles such as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (pictured above), which was the fastest-selling video game in history. Analysts focus more on non-GAAP revenue. In the second fiscal quarter, Activision expects revenue of $805 million and EPS of 10 cents a share.

During the first quarter, Activision Blizzard published Prototype 2. During the second quarter, the company is publishing Battleship on May 15 and The Amazing Spider-Man on June 26.

Since the launch of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 in November, gamers have logged more than 1.6 billion hours playing the game. Game sessions have topped 2 billion, up 19 percent from Call of Duty: Black Ops a year earlier. The company said its social network for shooter fans, Call of Duty Elite, has reached more than 2 million premium members, while the number of registered users, which includes free members, is more than 10 million.

Beyond solid Call of Duty sales, Activision Blizzard said it sold more than 30 million Skylanders hybrid toys to date since the launch last fall. Kotick said that was more than the number of Star Wars toys sold in the first quarter. Sales of Skylanders were above $100 million in the quarter, above the 2011 revenues for Rovio, publisher of Angry Birds.

Analyst Michael Pachter of Wedbush Securities has worried about an increasing reliance on Call of Duty and World of Warcraft, noting that the Activision arm continues to commit more and more financial resources to the military first-person-shooter (FPS) franchise, while Blizzard focuses more on the upcoming Diablo III, Starcraft II expansions, and its successful MMO. In addition, while the futuristic Black Ops II game should help the Call of Duty franchise maintain its market share, it could well succumb to FPS fatigue as the market continues to become saturated with similar titles.

Additional success could come from the multiple releases by Blizzard, if Call of Duty packaged goods do better than expected at retail, and if the upcoming Skylanders expansion, Giants, outperforms the original game. Eric Hirshberg, president of Activision Publishing, said on the call that more than 850,000 multiplayer clans have been formed.

Traditionally, Activision Blizzard has maintained a strategy of culling its titles ruthlessly to focus its resources on what works. While it maintains a leadership position in online console games, it hasn’t experimented as much as EA in the realm of social, mobile, and free-to-play online games. EA hasn’t had huge successes in those areas, but it is generating $1.2 billion a year in revenues and it has spent a lot of time learning lessons.

Those new markets represent the big expansion opportunities in the games business, while the core console market — where Activision Blizzard focuses most — has been shrinking. How Activision Blizzard and EA manage these industry-wide transitions will determine who comes out on top in the long run.

Activision Blizzard can, and has, argued that it has the most important digital gaming business in World of Warcraft. But the online game has shown weakness in recent quarters, dropping to 10.2 million paying subscribers in the fourth calendar quarter compared to past highs of around 12 million. World of Warcraft numbers were flat at 10.2 million in the first qurater.

Star Wars: The Old Republic may has gained 1.3 million subscribers in the past four months. But other online game worlds such as Trion’s Rift (which is soon bound for China) and En Masse Entertainment’s Tera are also likely to peck away at the big game.

Dennis Durkin, a former Microsoft executive, has joined Activision Blizzard as chief financial officer, replacing Thomas Tippl, who was serving both as chief operating officer and CFO. Tippl remains COO.

Call of Duty: Black Ops II, which is set in the near future with weapons such as drones and robots, is “hands-down our most ambitious Call of Duty game to date” and it pushes the edge on a number of fronts, Hirshberg said. The game debuts on Nov. 13. Early consumer response has been big, and the initial trailer for the game was viewed by 82 percent more people than those who viewed the trailer for Modern Warfare 3.

“We believe that Black Ops II could be the best Call of Duty we’ve ever made,” Hirshberg said. “It’s the biggest step for the franchise since leaving World War II and entering the modern era.”

GamesBeat 2012 is VentureBeat’s fourth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. This year we’re calling on speakers from the hottest mobile, social, PC, and console companies to debate new ways to stay on pace with changing consumer tastes and platforms. Join 500+ execs, investors, analysts, entrepreneurs, and press as we explore the gaming industry’s latest trends and newest monetization opportunities. The event takes place July 10-11 in San Francisco, and you can get your early-bird tickets 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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That’s saying a lot since Modern Warfare 3 was the fastest-selling game in history when it went on sale last November, eclipsing sales of the previous record setter, Call of Duty: Black Ops, from 2010. Modern Warfare 3 currently holds the record for the most pre-ordered game of all time and was among the top 20 pre-orders ever on Amazon.com. Modern Warfare sold more than $1 billion worth of games since it debuted.

Black Ops II will be released Nov. 13. Pre-orders are now being sold on Activision.com, Steam, Amazon, Best Buy, Gamestop, and Target for $59.99.

Activision Blizzard will report its first-fiscal-quarter earnings on Wednesday, May 9, after the market close. This will come two days after its arch-rival Electronic Arts reports its earnings, and the two together will paint a better picture of the grudge match between EA’s Star Wars: The Old Republic and Activision Blizzard’s flagship online game World of Warcraft.

Activision Blizzard will, of course, want to show that its juggernaut money-maker, World of Warcraft, has kept its status as king of the hill in the massively multiplayer online (MMO) space, while also proving that the hit Call of Duty franchise has financial legs with Modern Warfare 3, Black Ops II, and the new Elite multiplayer service.

Wedbush Securities’ analyst Michael Pachter expects Activision to report results at or above its current estimates for revenue, at an estimated $570 million with an earnings per share (EPS) of $0.08. This is higher than the consensus of other analysts, who expect to see revenues of $552 million and an EPS of $0.04. Pachter also expects to see an overall decline in Activision Blizzard’s publishing revenue of approximately 30 percent, better than that of the larger market decline of approximately 40 percent as reported by market-research firm NPD Group.

Pachter notes that this shortfall should be made up for with new Call of Duty Elite subscriptions (an estimated $22 million), the first Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 downloadable-content pack, and $30 million in accessories for Skylanders (a game with separately purchased collectible toys), which is not accounted for by the NPD Group.

Activision Blizzard share valuations dropped a bit on Thursday, closing at $12.66 per share, while remaining valued at approximately $14.31 billion. While this shows the publisher to be much larger than rival EA (valued at $5.26 billion), there are still factors that can affect even a big company.

Pachter points to an increasing reliance on Call of Duty and World of Warcraft, noting that the Activision arm continues to commit more and more financial resources to the military first-person-shooter (FPS) franchise, while Blizzard focuses more on the upcoming Diablo III, Starcraft II expansions, and its successful MMO. In addition, says Pachter, while the futuristic Black Ops II game should help the Call of Duty franchise maintain its market share, it could well succumb to FPS fatigue as the market continues to become saturated with similar titles.

Activision could, of course, exceed even these measured positive expectations. Pachter says additional success could come from the multiple releases by Blizzard, if Call of Duty packaged goods do better than expected at retail, and if the upcoming Skylanders expansion, Giants, outperforms the original game. Finally, Pachter predicts that Activision Blizzard’s stock price will go as high as $19.00 per share, which is about 16 times the company’s expected 2012 earnings per share.

Traditionally, Activision Blizzard has maintained a strategy of culling its titles ruthlessly to focus its resources on what works. While it maintains a leadership position in online console games, it hasn’t experimented as much as EA in the realm of social, mobile, and free-to-play online games. EA hasn’t had huge successes in those areas, but at least it has spent a lot of time learning lessons. Those new markets represent the big expansion opportunities in the games business, while the core console market — where Activision Blizzard focuses most — has been shrinking. How Activision Blizzard and EA manage these industry-wide transitions will determine who comes out on top in the long run.

Blizzard’s World of Warcraft has shown weakness in recent quarters, dropping to 10.2 million paying subscribers compared to past highs of around 12 million. The Old Republic may have taken some users away. But other online game worlds such as Trion’s Rift (which is soon bound for China) and En Masse Entertainment’s Tera are also likely to peck away at the big game.

GamesBeat 2012 is VentureBeat’s fourth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. This year we’re calling on speakers from the hottest mobile, social, PC, and console companies to debate new ways to stay on pace with changing consumer tastes and platforms. Join 500+ execs, investors, analysts, entrepreneurs, and press as we explore the gaming industry’s latest trends and newest monetization opportunities. The event takes place July 10-11 in San Francisco, and you can get your early-bird tickets 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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The official Call of Duty website is counting down to a “world reveal” (most likely Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, if all the recent leaks on the Internet are anything to go by) on May 1 during the NBA playoffs on TNT.

The site is also filled with “classified” pictures, some of which will unlock throughout the rest of April.

Activision has released a new Call of Duty every November since Call of Duty 2 in 2006, which was a launch title for the Xbox 360. Since then, developers Infinity Ward and Treyarch have taken turns handling the series, with the former responsible for the Modern Warfare titles and the latter 2010′s Black Ops. Since Modern Warfare 3 came out last, it’s likely that the next, Treyarch-developed entry in the series will be a sequel to the wildly popular Black Ops.

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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 see, even though I’ve invested days of my life in Modern Warfare 3 multiplayer, my rank is a lowly 5,573,021 — although that’s still pretty good considering that maybe 25 million or more have bought the game since its debut on Nov. 8. I figure I’ve got a better record than four out of five players. But the stats also mean that millions of players have invested more time than I did to make it to level 80 — the rank of Commander. Now I can start the whole cycle of leveling up again in Prestige mode.

The numbers above show that engagement of Call of Duty players are through the roof, and that tells you why it’s so hard to knock Call of Duty titles out of the position of best-selling video game of all time. Call of Duty Black Ops from last year and this year’s Modern Warfare 3 have generated more than $2 billion in sales in the last two years. Sales are one thing, but the time spent playing the product is another.

One of the attractions of Call of Duty multiplayer is that it’s a very instrumented experience. When I say I lost my way to the top, I know that because the game’s metrics tell me just how terrible I am, one bullet at a time. I can measure the impact of using different weapons or grenades. I can pinpoint the play pattern that best suits my skills.

The metrics tell me I was on the winning team 137 times and lost 195 times. My accuracy rate for shooting was 8.29 percent (yes, they count every bullet). I had 2,356 kills, 677 assists, and 5,580 deaths. My kill-death ratio, therefore, was 0.422. In terms of number of kills, I ranked 6,164,044 of all players. That rank is actually higher than my overall multiplayer rank because I like to play a version of the game called Domination, where you have to capture and defend three flags on a map. Since I can get points for grabbing flags, that improves my overall ranking on multiplayer.

These stats are telling in a few ways. If 5.5 million players have put more time into this game (or have just played better) than I have, those players alone have collectively put more than 245 million hours into it over the past six months. That means multiplayer has significantly extended the amount of time that players are putting into this game. And that means Activision Blizzard is capturing a significant slice of the available game time for millions upon millions of hardcore gamers.

I might have played four other single-player campaign games all the way through, had I not been tied up with Call of Duty multiplayer. The pattern among other gamers is similar, and that’s why you see some games scoring huge on the charts while many other medium-ranked games fall flat. Nobody has time to play mediocre games anymore, because the big hits suck in all of our time. Even now, six months after the game launched, I can log in at midnight on a weekday and find 150,000 other players online. This is why it makes sense for Activision Blizzard to put four or five studios to work on Call of Duty at any given time.

If you look at Zynga’s games on Facebook, where players log in for maybe 10 minutes at a time, the engagement level — the amount of time players spend with a game — doesn’t seem like it’s anywhere near the level in Call of Duty games. As I noted last year, the comparative numbers show that, while casual social games are heavily instrumented and extremely popular, they have a long way to go before they can match the enthusiasm that users have for hardcore online games.

At the same time, things are different from a year ago. League of Legends, the multiplayer online battle arena game from Riot Games, has tens of millions of users who are highly engaged in short online battles. That’s why Tencent bought a majority stake in Riot Games for nearly $400 million. This game and others like it are played year-round.

In recognition of that trend, Activision Blizzard has changed its own game to adapt. It has launched Call of Duty Elite, a hardcore social network for Call of Duty fans. With it, I can get a lot more engaged than I already am. So far, I’ve spent most of my time playing the game and little on the Elite network. But it has some intriguing options for improvement, so I won’t always have to play with a big “L” on my forehead. I can view videos of each map and the best way to fight on it, either as a sniper or a short-range fighter. It has heat maps that show all the deaths on the map in red, based on where players were shot. That tells me where the hot spots on the map are and how to position myself for maximum survival and ambush opportunities.

Elite has a free version and a paid version for $49.99 a year that gives you access to all of the monthly “content drops,” or new maps and other downloadable content (DLC) that is arriving much more frequently than the map packs of the past. In short, Elite is a way for enthusiastic players to sink a lot more time into the game and the Call of Duty culture than they have in the past. And if it can help me feel like I’m a winner, not a loser, then I’ll probably stick around and play the game even more.

Call of Duty, now in its eighth iteration, has held my attention because it’s a lot like a Las Vegas slot machine, where the key is to keep you playing. It’s a fast-action combat game in which split-second timing matters. Typical multiplayer matches last about 10 minutes, which is great for when you only have a short amount of time available. The mature-rated game is very violent and bloody, but it isn’t exactly realistic in the way it plays and looks. Players can move much faster than they can in real life. The combat is fierce, but not excessively bloody. I can take off and play another game, and then come back to Call of Duty during a lull in the new release schedule, like right now.

At the end of the multiplayer round, you can see how many Call of Duty points and experience points you’ve earned. The experience points allow you to level up. In the early levels, it takes only a few thousand points to move up. But later in the game, it could take 47,000 or more to reach the next level. The top experience level is 80, but once you hit that, you can start over and get up to level 90 again, earning what is called Prestige levels.

But getting back to me as a loser: My kill-to-death ratio with last year’s Black Ops was 0.69. That was partly due to the fact that it was a lot easier for unskilled players to kill veteran players with the remote-controlled RC-XD car bomb. That reward equalized a lot of the combat, but there is no such salve in Modern Warfare 3. My accuracy was better a year ago, at 16 percent. That’s due in part because I’ve been using a less-accurate weapon this year, a submachine gun, to try to get the drop on rivals faster. This year, I’ve enjoyed playing Domination on the short-range maps such as Piazza, Dome, and Hardhat.

Even so, I’ve been able to make more contributions to my team effort in Modern Warfare 3. That’s because Activision’s developers — Infinity Ward, Sledgehammer Studios, Raven Software, and others — changed the way weaker players participate in the combat effort. In the past, players could earn “killstreaks,” a reward that let you earn a significant weapon for a short time, such as an RC-XD car or an attack helicopter. To earn those rewards, you had to rack up a lot of kills in a row.

Raptr, the social network for gamers, has collected some interesting data on the usage of Black Ops versus Modern Warfare 3. In the opening months, Black Ops had 19 percent more play time per player at 49 hours versus 41 hours for Modern Warfare 3, according to Raptr. But as of this date, Modern Warfare 3 is performing better than Black Ops. Fewer people are player Black Ops, naturally, as that is an older game.

The average Black Ops player has played 58 percent more than Modern Warfare 3, at 130 hours versus 82 hours, for the entire history. That’s expected, since Black Ops has had an extra year to rack up more hours. In the opening month, average sessions lasted 2.11 hours for Modern Warfare 3 and 2.18 hours for Black Ops. Today, the average session length for Modern Warfare 3 is 1.72 hours, compared to 1.59 hours for Black Ops.

“Overall, every Call of Duty game appears to do a remarkable job of keeping gamers engaged for well over a year, something you don’t seem is many other annually updated gaming series,” said John Lee, vice president of marketing for Raptr. “Even when Black Ops and Modern Warfare 3 are two different storylines, gamers are still playing each Call of Duty game with the same sort of persistent dedication year in and out. The Call of Duty formula of annual updates, alternating between two different stories/dev teams, robust multiplayer support, and a steady infusion of DLC doesn’t appear to result in brand fatigue just yet. Both games are holding rock steady when it comes to playtime behavior. “

This year, the developers made the game play more accessible. You earn “pointstreaks” to get the new weapon rewards even if you’re playing in a support role. If you use the “support” strike package rather than “assault,” you can keep racking up points toward weapon rewards even if you die a lot in between kills. I was able to get the Stealth Bomber award 15 times in my support role, which means I was able to help my teammates and rain bombs on the map, even if I didn’t get a lot of kills in a row. This is a significant design change that makes the game more appealing to less-skilled players. And it’s the kind of thing that Activision Blizzard has to do to keep interest high in the world’s biggest video game. If you’re competing with this game, take note on how to do it right.

GamesBeat 2012 is VentureBeat’s fourth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. This year we’re calling on speakers from the hottest mobile, social, PC, and console companies to debate new ways to stay on pace with changing consumer tastes and platforms. Join 500+ execs, investors, analysts, entrepreneurs, and press as we explore the gaming industry’s latest trends and newest monetization opportunities. The event takes place July 10-11 in San Francisco, and you can get your early-bird tickets here.

---

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 core-gaming market has a problem: A single mistake is costlier than ever. Meanwhile, the mobile/online/social-game market provides an alternative model that cuts down on that risk. From a purely economic perspective, why do developers keep making console games?

Fleet Fighter, Dinglepop, Aim For The Nuts — most consumers have likely never heard of these online games. UDraw Studio, Thor: God of Thunder, and MAG, on the other hand, are titles that a wider audience is familiar with. Despite their varying public profiles, all of these games have one thing in common: They failed to find a substantial audience. The difference is that Zynga just paid $180 million-plus for the developer of the three obscure titles (OMGPOP) while the creators of the big-name console releases (THQ, Sega, and Zipper Interactive) suffered layoffs, cancellations, and a studio closure, respectively. If you watched the news in the last week, it would be easy to conclude that hardcore console game publishers are collapsing.

OMGPOP, THQ, Sega, and Zipper Interactive have produced flops, but they’ve all had successes as well. In fact, all of them except for the Draw Something developer (OMGPOP) have had multiple hits. Something about the mobile market is allowing content creators to make multiple attempts without the fear of financial collapse. Traditional games, by comparison, are a very risky proposition.

What happens when you forget to look backward and fail to look forward?

“The issue with the games business is that it’s high-risk/high-reward,” said David Cole, analyst at DFC Intelligence, in speaking with GamesBeat. “In terms of raw money to be made, it’s still the big budget products that make the most. An iOS hit cannot come anywhere near the size of the big budget hits for console or PC.”

In 2010, THQ released a surprise hit casual art game for the Wii called uDraw Studio. UDraw came bundled with a tablet peripheral that allowed users to create paintings and sketches on their television. By March 2011, THQ had sold over 1 million of the devices to customers.

Next, THQ decided to take a high-risk/high-reward gamble. The publisher made a version of the uDraw game and tablet for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. It didn’t work out.

Last month, during an investor call, THQ Chief Financial Officer Paul Pucino admitted that the company had 1.4 million unsold uDraw tablets sitting in inventory. The crudely drawn bubble burst, and Pucino explained that revenues were a breath-takening $100 million less than expected for the art title.

Now, excuse me while I go take my turn in Draw Something, a similar title to uDraw, but born on a different, fast-growing platform. THQ latched on to a sinking platform, the Wii, while Draw Something took off on iOS and Android.

It’s unfair for me to sit here with the benefit of hindsight and suggest that Pucino and THQ who hold rights to Pictionary and a successful drawing game could have beat Draw Something to the punch. That’s almost not the point. The issue is that the uDraw failure cost the company $100 million and has crippled the company. Even if the company had a failed uDraw or Pictionary app on iOS, the damage would have hardly been a fraction of that.

So why didn’t THQ take its uDraw brand and its Pictionary license to the mobile space?

“Success [on iOS] is all about companies that aggregate hundreds or thousand of games. So for an individual developer, the biggest bucks will still be in traditional development unless you happen to be really lucky,” said Cole.

Because who knows that Draw Something is going to create $1 million in revenue every four days before it actually does? Until the industry witnesses that kind of success, it doesn’t exist as far as the executives making decisions are concerned. The traditional publishers believe (or at least they did believe) that a $100 million gamble is worth it for the type of returns that the traditional consoles can produce.

Despite the fact that we’re in a world with Angry Birds and Draw Something, the real money for an individual game development company or game publisher is going to continue to be in making a a game that succeeds on the traditional platforms.

Of course that’s the problem: not every game succeeds. I’d never heard of Ballracer, which is one of OMGPOP’s handful of other titles. It is probably a fine ball-racing game, but for the sake of argument — and no evidence exists to suggest this is the case — let’s assume that Ballracer is the worst failure the development team has ever had. Even if the game didn’t make a dime back of its budget, its failure wouldn’t wound OMGPOP’s finances.

The business model for mobile games is a lot less risk for what is typically a lot less reward. It makes for a more stable job market, and that one-in-a-thousand chance to blow up and go mainstream is always just out of reach to keep everyone motivated. OMGPOP’s single hit game more than made up for 34 previous so-so titles that just kept the team afloat.

It’s halftime for hardcore games

Downsizing is never good. As illustrated above, it is usually the byproduct of myopic leadership. It can, however, be used as an opportunity to right a company’s trajectory. For example, mixed in with the news that many people were losing their jobs at THQ was an announcement that Warhammer 40,000: Dark Millennium is shifting from a massively multiplayer-online game to a single-player title with some online features.

That’s a good thing. No one was clamoring for another MMO. Better for the developer to cut it’s losses now than to try to support a game that won’t stand a chance against World of Warcraft and Star Wars: The Old Republic. Clearly the studio was forced to make this alteration based on a financial situation that is out of its control (THQ is down to its last $50 million), but that has forced them to be creative with a smaller budget — it’s forcing the company into the smart move by default.

THQ knows how make a hit. If it can just stay on the Darksiders/Saints Row: The Third/UFC: Undsiputed 3 side of Metacritic, then it has a shot to rake in some cash. It has to avoid making mistakes that cancel out any good the hits produce.

It’s like that Clint Eastwood commercial that aired during the Super Bowl. The one where he’s giving a pep talk to American industry and encouraging Detroit automakers to get back on their feet after years of hemorrhaging money and jobs.

Only…it’s nothing like that. Ford, GM, and Chrysler were on a real decline. Detroit was facing a crisis because its entire consumer base found an alternative that served all of their needs. Social and mobile games are finding an audience, but no one is wholly replacing their cinematic Xbox 360 titles with CityVille.

It doesn’t help that publishers are uncertain about the future. The next round of consoles should have started by now. This extended cycle has caused a transitional lull that has every publisher in an awkward holding pattern as they await new hardware.

Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo are all taking an extra beat because they don’t really know what gaming is going to look like in two years. It’s a war of attrition, and the winner is very likely going to be the manufacturer who makes the fewest number of mistakes. As a result, it seems like the industry is suffering perhaps more than it actually is. The NPD group tracking numbers show that February sales are down significantly from the same time frame in 2011. That alone wouldn’t be much of an issue, but third-parties like Sega are probably assuming that this is a trend that’ll continue until the PlayStation 4 and Xbox 720 hit store shelves. With the news that Microsoft will definitely not reveal a new console at this summer’s E3, Sega and THQ are likely attempting to conserve their last bit of money until the next generation can drum up consumer excitement.

The rich keep getting richer

The real problem is gaming’s complete lack of a middle class. It drops from high-risk/high-reward to low-risk/low-reward with nothing in between. If a middle-risk game does exist, it’s like Sega’s Sonic the Hedgehog series. It’ll always sell to a large enough group of dedicated fans, but nostalgia isn’t a business model others can follow.

This is one issue that the big three are going to need to address in the next round of consoles. Pricing for retail titles is archaic. The $60 model represents a large risk for the customer, and if they get burned on a bad buy, they may just end up sticking to their free-to-play Angry Bird games. Freemium needs to come to consoles, and it likely will.

Brian Fargo, chief executive of InXile Entertainment, pointed to the lack of a middle tier in games that made it hard to raise money to build Wasteland 2. Like Double Fine Productions, Fargo had to turn to Kickstarter to raise the money for Wasteland 2. It’s a good thing he could raise that money, but it’s sad that no one would fund it otherwise.

We’re in a very strange stage for gaming. Everyone on the production side knows that the way the entire industry works is going to be turned on its head in the next generation. The winner could possibly define the way games are delivered to customers for the next 10 years and beyond. With so much on the line, however, the industry has hit a lull that is exacerbating poor decisions and mistakes.

Sega can’t find its voice. Zipper Interactive releases a SOCOM game just before PlayStation Network experiences a blackout for weeks. THQ blows it on uDraw. These are errors that a strong home-console market can withstand, but not the uncertain one we find ourselves in now.

Those three companies must be looking at OMGPOP and Zynga with envy right now. Draw Something is a phenomenon. What THQ and Sega should be looking at is the stability of the social game market. These are companies with a handful of properties that they can leverage to build up a steady stream of revenue. They’ll probably never match Zynga, but it’s not a race. A freemium Warhammer 40K strategy game that echoes Hero Academy (a hit iOS game) would probably be a good start, and maybe an iPad version of Seaman from Sega. The idea should be to limit the amount of damage a single bad choice can do, and it’s clear that including mobile, social, and online games is probably one of the best ways to protect against that. And who knows, maybe the next Draw Something will come from THQ.

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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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Bowling has been an active tweeter and spokesman for Infinity Ward in the past year, particularly since Infinity Ward began showing off Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 almost a year ago. Bowling offered no explanation in his tweet for why he’s leaving the company, saying only, “Today, I resign from my position as Creative Strategist of Call of Duty, as a lead of Infinity Ward, and as an employee of Activision.”

Bowling was the main spokesman who stepped forward on behalf of Infinity Ward after the studio lost its co-founders Jason West and Vince Zampella in a legal meltdown with parent company Activision Blizzard. Dozens of employees left to join West and Zampella at their new studio at Respawn Entertainment. But Infinity Ward replaced the employees and got additional help from other studios to finish making Modern Warfare 3, which is now the best-selling game of all time.

Bowling did interviews with the press at events such as Call of Duty XP in September and helped manage communication with fans during the launch of Modern Warfare 3. Bowling also had plenty of tips on how to fight in Call of Duty games.

In a statement, Activision said, “We sincerely thank Robert for his many years of service. He’s been a trusted and valued member of the Infinity Ward team. We wish him all the best on his decision to pursue future opportunities.”

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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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With 10 million downloads in three days, Angry Birds Space has vaulted the mobile-game business into the stratosphere of bona fide entertainment blockbusters.

It’s hard to calculate how much money the game has generated because prices range from 99 cents for Angry Birds Space on iOS to $6 on Windows PCs. At a minimum of $10 million, that puts Rovio in a different league among mobile-game publishers.

Still, the mobile game industry is young and its revenues are much smaller when viewed against the backdrop of other entertainment hits. If this were a movie’s opening weekend, the $10 million take wouldn’t be so impressive, as Hollywood’s “The Hunger Games” proved over the weekend with box office receipts of $155 million.

And in its first 24 hours in November, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 generated $400 million of sales on the PC and consoles.

But looking at the sheer number of users, Rovio’s 10 million customers is impressive. The Modern Warfare 3 user count was just 6.5 million people making purchases in the first 24 hours. At around $10 each, The Hunger Games’ opening audience was perhaps 15.5 million people.

Worth noting as well: Rovio is selling a lot of non-game merchandise through partners such as Walmart. It is also selling virtual goods inside the game, with in-app purchases of 99 cents or more. There is no limit to the number of virtual-goods purchases that players can make in the game.

All told, Rovio has reached far more users across the globe than the other blockbusters, with more than 700 million downloads of the whole Angry Birds series since December 2010.

“That’s a pretty significant achievement that has not happened on iOS or Android before,” said Matthaus Krzykowski from mobile search firm Xyologic and an occasional consultant for VentureBeat. “For comparison, it took a juggernaut like Pinterest more than one and a half months to get to such numbers.”

Rich Wong, a partner at Accel Partners, the venture capital firm that is a backer of Rovio, said that the spectacular Angry Birds Space launch is due to great execution and other factors, including the fact that there are far more smartphones and tablets in the market today than one or two years ago.

Rovio also leveraged third-party promoters such as T-Mobile, which created a 300-feet-long slingshot with a Red Bird on the Seattle Space Needle (pictured). It also worked with Walmart, Samsung, and National Geographic on cross promotions and collaborated with NASA for publicity that raised the game’s visibility.

Rovio was able to debut Angry Birds Space on iOS (the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad), Android, the PC, the Mac, and the Barnes & Noble Nook eBook reader all on day-one. It is also working on versions for other platforms such as Windows Phone 7.

Andrej Nabergoj, chief executive of App-o-day mobile discovery site Iddiction, said, “Angry Birds Space is really polished game. It’s a textbook example on how to build on existing intellectual property. If the original Angry Birds was a surprising success, nothing was left to coincidence here. Deeper game play, gorgeous graphics, innovative physics, reinterpretation of the original music. But most importantly, as extremely well-coordinated and innovative global marketing campaign involving the space station, installations, etc. Angry Birds Space repositions and re-establishes Rovio as one of the leading and most innovative mobile gaming companies.”

Tim Merel, managing director at Digi-Capital, a boutique gaming investment bank, said, “It points to the strength of the brand, and in particular the potential for Angry Birds to turn Rovio into one of the first true trans-media games companies to come out of mobile. The potential for Rovio as an entertainment platform  company is very strong, and 2012 is likely to be a pivotal year for realizing that vision. Delivery on all fronts (other game types, TV, film, toys etc.) is what the company has the potential to achieve commercially, so it will be fascinating to see how” the team chooses to do so.

Peter Farago, vice president of marketing at analytics firm Flurry, said the only thing that comes close in numbers is the Draw Something game, created by OMGPOP (which was promptly acquired by Zynga), which took five weeks to get to 20 million downloads.

Jeff Scott, editor of 148Apps Network, said, “It’s great that it still has such life left in it. Rovio has said that it is bringing three to four additional Angry Birds games out this year. If they continue to pull these huge numbers they may well be on their way to (their stated goal of) ‘being bigger than Disney.’”

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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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Outages have become a big deal in the multiplayer gaming world, as millions upon millions of fans are staying busy playing their favorite games year round.

Robert Bowling, creative strategist, at Activision’s Infinity Ward, tweeted last night, “I say we keep Double XP going for a bit longer than just the weekend to make up for lost time. What do you think?”

It’s a small perk, but at least it’s something. So far, we haven’t heard an explanation for the outage or how widespread it was. Modern Warfare 3 outages have been rare.

Meanwhile, Bowling also tweeted, “Do not accept game invites or join Private Matches from any player you don’t know & trust in #MW3. There are dirtbags up to dirtbag things.” That seems like a reference to hackers who take over your Xbox Live account and make unauthorized purchases.

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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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Activision Blizzard said today that its largest downloadable content (DLC) in history for a Call of Duty game is hitting Xbox Live today.

The company is releasing the new content both as two new Spec Ops missions and one new multiplayer map for Call of Duty Elite subscribers. But it is also releasing its full collection of DLC for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 for purchases as a separate collection for those who aren’t subscribers.

In the full “content collection 1″ package, Activision is including two Spec Ops missions and four multiplayer maps. That includes the previously released Liberation, Piazza, and Overwatch maps, as well as the new Black Box map.

I’ve played the new Spec Ops missions — Black Ice and Negotiator — and reported on them here. In Black Ice, you team up with another player on a snowmobile and make your way into a diamond mine, where you plant explosives and escape. In Negotiator, you have to free as many captives as you can with your partner and then hold off an enemy counterattack. The new Black Box map is a site where Air Force One has crashed into a Southern California hillside neighborhood.

Those who don’t subscribe to the premium version of Call of Duty Elite can buy the new collection for 1,200 Microsoft Points, or $14.99. Premium Call of Duty Elite players pay $49 a year and get access to all of the new content on a monthly basis. The DLC pack will be available on the PlayStation 3 and PC at a later date.

To celebrate the launch, Activision will pit football stars Ahmad Bradshaw of the New York Giants against Rob Gronkowski of the New England Patriots in a Grudge Match show.

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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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