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Electronic Arts is going after the casual consumer on multiple fronts. It offers Pogo.com online and EA Mobile for cell phone users (which will also expand to Apple’s iPod beginning July 7). Now EA Casual and Entertainment is unveiling the first offerings from the Hasbro licensing deal it negotiated last fall, and EA Sports is revamping its entire Wii lineup of games under the All-Play branding.

The publisher showcased many of its upcoming games at a New York event for the press. The games are part of an ongoing effort by the company to reach various casual audiences, including tweens, families and women — groups that don’t care for the first-person shooters and other action games that EA has traditionally made.

Last year, EA kicked its casual gaming efforts into high gear by creating separate label and organizational group led by former Activision executive Kathy Vrabeck to target the casual sector.

The company’s new focus is showing some positive results.

One of game worth noting is a sequel to “Boogie,” a Wii game that failed to win over the press the first time around, but sold enough units for EA’s new Montreal studio to go back to the drawing board. “Boogie: Superstar” is a game clearly aimed at tween girls, which Charles-William Bibaud, associate producer of the title, said was the one demographic that flocked to the original game. The new game, which ships in October, lets one person sing any one of 40 licensed tween hit songs while the second player is required to dance to choreographed routines. Up to four users can play the game taking turns. “Superstar” comes loaded with customization options that 10 to 14 year-old girls crave, including accessorizing their avatars. Ubisoft, Nintendo, Her Interactive, Disney, and a variety of other game publishers are regularly coming out with titles like this that target girls as the primary audience.

For girls 6 to 10 years old, EA has “Littlest Pet Shop” (pictured above) for Wii, PC and Nintendo DS. The Wii and PC game lets players travel through four worlds and collect 32 pets, which can be accessorized with over 100 items. Like “Nintendogs,” the Nintendo DS game will come in three different versions (Winter, Jungle and Garden), each with exclusive pets to interact with.

It’s been six years since “Monopoly” last appeared on a console. Now EA’s making sure most gamers have access to it by releasing Wii, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions this October. Hasbro is doing its part as well, launching Monopoly World Edition this September with its own marketing campaign. EA’s game will include this newest version of the game as well as classic Monopoly and the fast-paced “Richest mode,” which lets a family of four speed through the game in 30 minutes. The Wii version demoed to journalists looked great and blends nicely with Nintendo’s remote-like controller.

For those who want an array of virtual board game options, EA’s “Hasbro Family Game Night” for Wii offers Boggle, Connect 4, Battleship, Yahtzee, Sorry, and the new Sorry Sliders (a mixture of Sorry and curling) on one disc. Mr. Potatohead serves as the host of this multiplayer game, which offers traditional and new variations of each of these classic family games. This is another great synergy between family-friendly Hasbro brands and EA’s take on Wii innovation.

One of the coolest games on display for boys was “Nerf N-Strike” for Wii (pictured left), which is the first game to ship with a gun peripheral that works in-game with the remote, as well as around the house as a foam mini-dart Switchshot. It’s not just little kids who’ll, get a kick out of this dual-purpose toy gun. The game and gun will sell for $50 and extra guns can be purchased separately, since up to four players can take part in the robot target shooting action. One of the hottest toys this Christmas will be the Vulcan Nerf machine-gun, which will be displayed on the game’s box and playable in-game. EA is also giving kids an advanced look at some of the 2009 lineup of Nerf guns, which will be playable in the game.

EA continues its successful games based on Warner Bros. Harry Potter franchise. “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” ships this November in conjunction with the latest movie. Although the game will ship across all platforms, as is custom for EA, the Wii version was featured at the event. In addition to the single-player adventure, this is the first game in the franchise that offers competitive dueling between wizards in locales like The Great Hall and the Transfiguration Courtyard. This dueling mode looks especially fun on the Wii, where players can conjure spells using the remote as a wand.

The full lineup for EA Sports All-Play games for Wii were playable at the event. Each of these games has a completely different look and feel from the other console versions, as well as a different approach to last year’s Family Play games. They’re aimed at the family, allowing parents to play with their kids. Rather than focusing on realistic visuals and accurate simulations, these games (“FIFA 09,” “NBA Live 09,” “Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 09,” “Madden NFL 09” and “NCAA Football 09”) are about pick-up-and-play experiences that simplify the action for those who aren’t adept gamers. Some of the games, like “FIFA 09,” even offer Mii versions of famous soccer stars, which should appeal to younger fans. “NCAA Football 09” features football action with the mascots on the gridiron.

“Spore” was also on display at the event as a PC game and as a mobile game, which shows that EA is positioning this game as something that the mass market can play (a la “The Sims”).

With its wide array of games aimed at the burgeoning casual games market, this first look at the Hasbro lineup shows that EA is not just going to regurgitate brands and hope the name sells units. That’s refreshing, since the last few Hasbro license-holders, including Hasbro Interactive and Atari, did exactly that. EA is taking casual games seriously, as was evident from “Boom Blox” (there’s an homage to that game in “Nerf N-Strike”). That’s good news for families looking to migrate gaming from dining room board games to the living room television.

Overall, EA’s Casual group has a lot of irons in the fire. It remains to be seen if this division can become as big a powerhouse as EA’s big sports, Sims, and hardcore console game divisions.

The iPhone’s remaking of the cell phone business is creating opportunities for new start-ups, particularly in the game field. That’s why one of the game industry’s leading executives left his job to create Ngmoco, an iPhone game start-up.

Neil Young was one of the rock star game development executives at Electronic Arts, responsible for games that sold millions of video games, from “The Lord of the Rings” titles to “The Sims 2.” He was the executive in charge of EA’s most important upcoming title, “Spore.” He gave it up a couple of weeks ago to start his own game company in San Francisco.

Today, the 38-year-old is announcing that Ngmoco will make and publish games for the iPhone. Young said the company will try to raise the bar on quality of mobile games.

“We are finally at the place where we can reinvent the experiences and the economics of the mobile games business. The industry has been stagnant for a few years. I feel the iPhone is a real opportunity to change that industry.”

I asked Young if he would tap Bing Gordon, the former chief creative officer at EA who recently left to become a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, for venture funding. Kleiner Perkins has set up a $100 million iFund to finance applications for the iPhone. But Young declined to comment on the possibility.

In particular, Young thinks the 3G version of the iPhone will be a much better platform for showcasing high-quality games. Apple’s new Apps Store, a web site where users can go to cruise for new applications, will likely make it easier to discern the bad games from the good ones, Young said.

Young said he’s impressed that the data usage and web usage on iPhones is so high. The iPhone has all of the enabling technology to create new kinds of games that are tuned to the mobile experience. That includes global positioning system navigation, a camera, an accelerometer (which detects which way the iPhone is tilted), an instant-messenger system, email, and other functions that games can exploit.

Ngmoco will focus on creating a new type of game publisher, making its own games or hiring developers to make games under the Ngmoco brand. Young said he has backers and cofounders but he isn’t revealing them now. He remains an advisor to EA.

Young said that he made the decision to leave in April and EA executives tried to talk him out of it. They even asked him if he wanted to run such a group inside EA. But he decided to make a clean break. At the time he left, Young was running an EA division dubbed Blueprint Group. That group included EA’s Maxis division, the Spore franchise (which includes an iPhone game), the relationship with film director Steven Spielberg (whose inspiration led to Boomblox) and a couple of unannounced titles.

Maxis will now be headed by Lucy Bradshaw, and Blueprint will be run by longtime EA executive Louis Castle. Young said he’s been happy with the leadership of John Riccitiello, who became CEO of EA last year, and he believes Riccitiello’s reorganization of the company into stand-alone studio groups will lead to better games.

“It’s bittersweet,” Young said. “I’m so excited about what we are doing. On the other hand, I’m stepping away from 11 years of history and a whole bunch of friendships. Sometimes you have to step out.”

The games that Young worked on or managed while at EA beyond those mentioned above include “Ultima Online,” “Medal of Honor,” “Command & Conquer,” “Boomblox,” and “Majestic.” The latter was a novel X-Files style “alternate reality” game that ahead of its time. Majestic staged a mystery and enlisted gamers to communicate with each other and left clues via mobile phones, instant messages, and web video.

Before joining EA in 1997, Young was a vice president of product development at game publisher Virgin Interactive. Upon joining EA, he became the manager of EA’s now-defunct Origin Systems division in Austin, Texas.

EA’s own mobile group will now be competition for Young. He said that the current mobile game business consists of about 200 million downloads a year with an average revenue per user of $8. That’s a $1.5 billion annual industry. By comparison, games on the Nintendo DS and PlayStation Portable generated at least $45 per user and billions of dollars a year in revenue. He thinks the iPhone could help mobile games bridge that gap. While iPhone is the big opportunity, Young is also intrigued by Google’s Android platform.

“This is the moment,” he said. “This next 24 months an industry will get revitalized and re-energized. You have to look at this opportunity on the iPhone and ask yourself, ‘What would a company like Nintendo do?’”

The iPhone games that have already shipped, such as “Tilt,” a free game where you tilt the iPhone back and forth to catch items being dropped, represent “first order thinking” and are fun initial distractions. Such games are just the starting point, Young said.

[Check out MobileBeat, our mobile conference on July 24. Be sure to vote for your favorite mobile application or service company.]

The Novint Falcon is an entirely new type of interface for PC games. It’s a small robot that lets players feel 3-D touch sensations in games that exploit its features. I thought it was cool the first time I saw it, and it drew a lot of attention at the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show. But I also knew the company would have an uphill climb convincing game developers to exploit the newfangled device.

Still, the Albuquerque, N.M.-based Novint Technologies has done a good job getting the gadget off the ground. Today, it announced that marquee game developer Valve will add support for the Falcon to a number of games.

Gabe Newell, Valve’s president and co-founder, said in a statement that new interfaces are changing gaming and the Falcon adds a new level of interaction, adding force feedback while maintaining controls as accurate as a mouse. Under the deal, a new update will be sent through Valve’s Steam online gaming service to add compatibility for the Falcon for games such as “Half-Life 2: Episode Two,” pictured below.

This means that in first-person shooter games, users may feel a weapon recoil, enemy attacks, vehicle movement, and interactions with the environment. Novint is also taking reservations for a bundle of Valve’s “The Orange Box” series of games and a new Black Falcon with a pistol grip for $189.

The Valve deal on its own is impressive. But Novint has also managed to get the current $189 Falcon into chains and e-commerce sites including Tiger Direct, Fry’s Electronics, J & R Music, CompUSA.com, CircuitCity.com, and Amazon.com.

Earlier this month, Novint also secured a $5.2 million convertible debt financing at a 7 percent interest rate. No payments of principal or interest are due for three years. No interest is charged the first year.

The company also announced earlier this year that Electronic Arts will support the Novint Falcon in its game franchises, including “Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08,” “Need for Speed,” “NBA Live,” “Madden NFL 08,” and “Battlefield 2.”

Novint originally designed simulation systems for Lockheed Martin, Chrysler, and Chevron. In 2003, the company developed medical software with the University of New Mexico for training doctors in administering delicate injections. Using the Novint technology, a medical student could feel what it’s like to inject a needle through flesh. A year ago, Novint released the Falcon game controller with the globe-shaped handle that a player grabs and pushes. It hasn’t been an easy sell. The company lost $1.8 million in its most recent quarter ending March 31. Sales were only $72,000. The company’s stock is traded over the counter under the symbol NVNT.

U.S. video game companies haven’t done well in China. Stymied by piracy and sometimes unable to understand the tastes of Chinese gamers, they’re floundering in one of the fastest-growing game markets.

But Seattle-based PopCap Games, which has pioneered the development of casual games such as “Bejeweled,” hopes to buck the trend. The company is sending its long-time business development director James Gwertzman to Shanghai to head the company’s Asia/Pacific office. Gwertzman has studied the Chinese market and spent about half his time in Asian in the past year. He also served in Asia for two years in a previous role for Microsoft.

Gwertzman will manage a team of developers, artists, business development staffers and others charged with taking hits such as Bejeweled and “Zuma” to Asian audiences. The office will also include a team of Chinese developers tasked with creating original games for the Asian market.

“If we can get it right, it’s a tremendous opportunity,” Gwertzman said.

The good thing is that PopCap’s games are well known in China. The bad news is that most retail versions are pirated. “It’s clear that whining about piracy is not going to be the way for us to build a business in Asia,” said Gwertzman. Instead, he said, the company will explore different business models such as subscription online games, virtual goods sales, and other models that work in the region. He said the “try and buy” models may work, where gamers play a version of a game for free and then pay to unlock more of the game.

Historically, PopCap has focused on single-player games. But the nature of the market in China may force the company to come up with multiplayer versions. The company may also try its hand at creating mobile games for the Chinese market.

Gwertzman said it’s important for the company to remain humble, despite its successes in the U.S. PopCap has added staff in Korea, Singapore and formed a partnership with game publisher Square Enix in Japan. The company has 15 people in Shanghai and more than 200 overall.

Companies such as Electronic Arts have invested heavily in China but don’t have much to show for it. EA currently has an investment in The9, a company that distributes World of Warcraft for Blizzard in the Chinese market. PopCap CEO Dave Roberts (whom we interviewed in April) will be one of the speakers at the annual China Joy video game conference in July.

Maybe Electronic Arts is trying to wear down the management of Take-Two Interactive. EA said today it was once again extending its $2 billion tender offer for all of the shares of Take-Two.

The previous offer of $25.74 a share expired on Monday and remains unchanged. The offer has now been extended until July 18. Owen Mahoney, senior vice president of EA corporate development, said in a statement, “We congratulate Rockstar on the successful launch of GTA IV but believe our offer reflects a full and fair price based on the long-term value of Take-Two’s entire operation.” Grand Theft Auto IV has sold more than 11 million copies since its launch in April. The EA-Take-Two drama has been going on since February.

Take-Two issued a statement saying that EA was boring it to death and that was a reflection of the kind of games that EA makes. (Just kidding!). Strauss Zelnick, Take-Two chairman, recently said that Take-Two’s sports game portfolio is much better than EA’s. Take-Two’s actual statement said that the offer significantly undervalues Take-Two, which remains focused on exploring its strategic alternatives.

The extension of the offer allows the Federal Trade Commission to proceed with its review of the deal, EA said. As of Monday, about 6.1 million shares of Take-Two had been tendered. That’s about 8 percent of the total. It seems this is still an offer that shareholders can refuse. EA needs to go back and play its Godfather game again.

A top Microsoft Xbox marketing executive is leaving the company, prompting musical-chair changes in the management team.

The company said that Jeff Bell, corporate vice president of interactive entertainment marketing, is leaving the company for another opportunity. Interactive entertainment includes the Xbox and PC games businesses.

Just when the management team stabilized, Bell’s departure shows that Microsoft continues to have a revolving door in its game business. The change is the first big one since Peter Moore left Microsoft’s top games post last year to join Electronic Arts. He was replaced by former EA game studio chief Don Mattrick. Among Bell’s accomplishments were creating the marketing campaigns behind big hit Xbox 360 video games such as “Gears of War” and “Halo 3.”

Matt Barlow, Charlotte Stuyvenberg and Jim Merrick, all day-to-day product marketing and marketing communications people in the game business, will carry forward global marketing initiatives for the business group while Microsoft finds a permanent replacement.
Shane Kim, most recently the head of Microsoft Game Studios, will become corporate vice president for strategy and business development for interactive entertainment. That’s a new position. And Kim’s top deputy, Phil Spencer, will now become head of Microsoft Game studios. That means Spencer will be in charge of all game development for Microsoft’s internally produced Xbox 360 and PC games. That’s a critical job, as Spencer will greenlight the games that distinguish Microsoft’s video game console from its rivals.

The executives are key parts of the management team that reports to Don Mattrick, head of the interactive entertainment business at Microsoft. Mattrick reports to Robbie Bach, president of the company’s Entertainment & Devices group. Bell became the head of Xbox and PC game marketing in 2006.

Electronic Arts game designer Will Wright may come up with the billion-dollar game ideas that get him on the cover of Wired magazine. But Lucy Bradshaw is the one that turns those ideas into bestsellers. The vice president in charge of production at Electronic Arts’ Maxis studio in Emeryville, Calif., Bradshaw runs the team for Wright’s latest brainstorm, “Spore.” It is one of the most anticipated games of all time, and Bradshaw heads the 80-person team cranking the video game out for its Sept. 7 launch. The game is a year late, but Bradshaw says the team has now had the time to polish the game play and execute on all of the grand ideas for sharing content via YouTube, email and other means. No stranger to the big time, Bradshaw spearheaded the production of “The Sims 2,” produced “SimCity 4,” and played a big role in the development of “The Sims,” which along with its offspring has sold more than 100 million units. Bradshaw joined EA in 1997 after stints at Activision and LucasArts. Now she and Wright are teamed up again on EA’s biggest game.

VB: I remember talking to you about the launch of The Sims in 2000. How does the pending launch of Spore compare to that?

LB: It’s funny. When we were launching The Sims, it wasn’t on the radar. People within EA were still scratching their heads. It was a game about human beings. It didn’t have leveling up or create an adrenaline rush. It took a lot of people by surprise. There were some very strong proponents within EA. [Then-EA executives] Bing Gordon, Don Mattrick and John Riccitiello [now CEO] strongly supported it. We didn’t have much press around it. With Spore, we have been talking to the press about it for a long time. Will has the success of The Sims and SimCity behind him. It’s an exciting and huge project with so much more attention. We’ve been working extremely hard to make sure we fulfill his vision on it.

VB: How far along was Spore when you joined it?

LB: I finished up The Sims 2. Will was finishing The Sims Online. Then I came onto Spore when it was ten people. Will was building prototypes, shaping the scope of the project. Most of the work had been done on what the creators would do and whether we could do the procedural animations, [which are animations that are not scripted and are really driven by interaction of the characters with the environment.] To be honest, [programmer] Chris Hecker was just beginning to think about how to do the procedural animations. We didn’t know if we could get the underlying technology done. Read the rest of this entry »

Electronic Arts will soon launch “Spore Creature Creator,” a download that lets fans create their own virtual identities for use in Spore, once the much-anticipated game launches in September.

In the download, you can fashion creatures from scratch then and share with your friends. The company showed it off to journalists on Tuesday night at EA’s Maxis game studio in Emeryville, Calif. I got a chance to create my own creature, shown in the video below, within a few short minutes. As with many of the other “Sim” games in the same kind of genre, the joy is in the building, not destroying.

Although we’ll see what the rest of Spore turns out to be — the game lets you start as a single cell organism and grow to rule galaxy-wide empires.

EA recognized the commercial value in the creativity tool itself. It’s a kind of a mini-game, with a free downloadable version and a premium version that costs $9.99. Both are available to the public on June 17.

“Getting the Creature Creator out there before the launch of the game is an important part of getting consumers to understand what Spore is all about and getting their own creations to come to life,” says Lucy Bradshaw, executive producer of Spore.

The tool is aimed at whetting the consumer appetite for Spore, a unique video game that goes on sale on Sept. 7 on a variety of platforms, including the PC, the Mac, the iPhone, and the Nintendo DS. In the game, players can create single-cell animals, creatures, and shape the galaxy. It is the latest creation of game development genius Will Wright, whose “The Sims” has sold more than 100 million copies worldwide. Wright conceived of the game, but a large team led by Bradshaw is following through on his vision. Although it is a single-player game where players can create everything in an open world, Spore has a lot of unique features that take advantage of social media.

EA has been working on the game for more than five years and it is launching the game as a cross-media franchise right off the bat, selling everything from 3-D toy models of creatures to an iPhone Spore game. As such, it is probably the biggest bet in the video game industry.

The early release of the Creature Creator will actually make EA’s job of developing the game much easier. That’s because users can upload their own creatures into a Sporepedia, which can be shared with every other player who buys the game. The players download those creatures into their own games. The game developers concentrate on creating tools and game mechanics, but they don’t have to use tons of their own artists to populate the world with their own creatures.

Those users’ creatures become the species that your own creature must compete against in a survival of the fittest evolutionary war. First you compete to beat out single-cell animals, then you build out a tribe or civilization, battle for control of a planet, and finally you try to control the galaxy. There is no limit to the types of creatures in the galaxy because players themselves can create an infinite number of creatures. At last, user-generated content has come to video games.

From within the Spore Creature Creator tool, you can create your creature using custom tools and templates for various body parts. You can give the creature its skin texture and paint it. To lengthen the creature’s body, you use the mouse to grab the backbone and stretch it. You can drag in body parts such as eyes, ears, noses, claws, feet, or, as I used, tail spikes.

You can put the creature into a test mode, where you can make it dance, make babies that carry the creature’s unique genetic signature, and get them to express emotions like happiness or sadness. Then you can email a snapshot of a creature to a friend from within the tool’s own email client. And you can also create a video, which you can immediately upload to your YouTube account. EA has established a partnership with YouTube for a Spore Channel. It has also created Spore.com, a community site where users can share their creatures, rate the best ones, and communicate with others about their Spore creations. Users will also be able to create their own Spore comic books based upon their own characters.

I had fun with my short time with the Spore Creature Creator. The tool itself was intuitive. I didn’t have to ask anyone how to use it. But I did mess up my creature. I didn’t realize the creature’s body parts face only one direction when you’re creating it. I started with a creature that was facing the wrong way. So when it came time to attach legs to it, they went on backwards. The creature’s face was on one side and the feet were facing the opposite direction. I asked if I could rotate the legs and the Maxis folks told me I couldn’t. So I may have found the one bug in the software.

Bradshaw said the 80-person development team is busy debugging the game now. That’s a smaller team compared to the 140-person team for “The Sims 2,” and that speaks to the fact that a lot of consumers are going to contribute to the game with their own user-generated content.

Here’s a link to my own Spore creation, the creature with legs facing the wrong way, on YouTube.

Electronic Arts is still banned from Liberty City.

Take-Two Interactive bought itself some time with some solid earnings yesterday that beat earnings expectations. That gave a boost to its stock price and it suggests that Electronic Arts is going to have to raise its bid in order to acquire its game publishing rival.

Take-Two reported yesterday its revenue for the second fiscal quarter was $539.8 million and net income was $98.2 million, thanks to the April 29 launch of Grand Theft Auto IV. A year ago, revenues were only $205.4 million and the company had a loss of $51.2 million. Today, the stock fell slightly, down 29 cents to $27.36 a share. But it remains above EA’s offer of $25.74 a share.

The company threw a damper on things when it said yesterday that it did not expect its sports game business to be profitable in the current fiscal year. Take-Two said it is formal discussions with others but those aren’t necessarily negotiations that would trigger a filing. EA says its offer is based on long-term value, not one quarter’s results, and is therefore “full and fair.”

Now EA has to think about raising its bid or withdrawing it. Investors are telling the company that the stock is worth at least a little more. EA’s previous bid only snared 8 percent of the shares outstanding. Its next tender-offer deadline in June 16.

EA had said the GTA IV success had been baked into its offer price. But analysts have consistently been surprised by the strength of GTA IV sales. Yesterday, Take-Two expanded its fiscal year revenue guidance to $1.4 billion to $1.5 billion, up from $1.25 billion to $1.4 billion. But they’ve been cautious about saying EA has to pay more for Take-Two. Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Morgan Securities, said that Take-Two will likely sell no more than 12 million GTA IV copies during the fiscal year and he has a hold Take-Two stock.

“We believe that Take-Two remains a takeover story rather than a fundamental one,” Pachter said.

Ben Schachter of UBS wrote that he expects GTA to sell more than 14 million copies this year and that could be low, given that 11 million copies have alrady shipped. He thinks that EA will either hold or raise its offer to no more than $30 a share. He also says that Take-Two is more than a one-trick pony, given the appeal of franchises such as BioShock, Mafia and Carnival.

Here’s the latest action:

Sony opens to in-game ads — The company is about to announce support for ads in the PlayStation 3 video game console, and in-game advertising company IGA Worldwide will be the first to announce a deal, according to Forbes and other publications. As video games become both more lucrative and more expensive to make, this seems like an obvious revenue source, albeit one that may not be welcomed by all gamers. No word on which games will be the first to include ads, but I think there’s something weirdly appealing about the idea that billboard space in the Grand Theft Auto games could become the equivalent of a real billboard.

EA confirms acquisition of social gaming service Rupture — Game giant Electronic Arts has confirmed its acquisition of ThreeSF, the company behind Rupture. The service is the brainchild of Napster co-founder Shawn Fanning, and there have been rumors that EA had acquired ThreeSF for $30 million. EA did not release any details on the acquisition.

Music service Pandora now available as a desktop app — The startup, which delivers a personalized music stream to users, has built a desktop application using Adobe’s AIR platform. Pandora could already be streamed to mobile devices or home entertainment systems, but as far as computers go, this move is a big step because it moves Pandora out of the web browser. It’s not exactly a subtle application that runs in the background, but instead looks almost identical to the Pandora homepage. The company says this is necessary “for now” to display ads.

YouTube adds video annotation feature — Video creators can now add informative or snarky commentary in speech bubbles or other formats to the movies they upload. I would have included a sample video, but it looks like the annotation feature doesn’t support embedded videos yet. The feature is still in testing mode, and YouTube says full functionality will eventually include embedded videos and support for multiple languages. There don’t appear to be any plans to let viewers — rather than creators — add their own annotations.

SoCal Edison agrees to buy power from eSolar, a solar thermal company — The companies say the deal should result in the construction of 245 megawatts worth of concentrating solar towers in Southern California’s Antelope Valley by 2011.

The truth is revealed about Twitter’s constant downtime — The startup has been doing a lot of talking about the reasons behind its scaling problems, but Valleywag has an alternate explanation.

It was Hammer Time tonight at the Intel Capital dinner.

With some 600 start-up chief executives in the audience, entertainer MC Hammer offered ministerial advice (embrace technology, don’t forget community) for tech entrepreneurs from a “content guy’s” perspective. With references to “tweets” and rubbing shoulders with the tech elite at the D6 conference, the middle-aged rap artist showed he knew his technology.

He started by showcasing musicians from his own music label (including his talented daughter) and moved on to a demo of his latest start-up, DanceJam.com, where he is chief strategy officer. He closed with a rendition of his ’90s hit, “Too Legit to Quit;” joining him onstage were a couple of dozen audience members as backup dancers — including Intel CEO Paul Otellini. (We have the pictures to prove it).

Hammer (Stanley Kirk Burrell) started on the road to fame as a bat boy for the Oakland A’s baseball team. Slugger Reggie Jackson gave him the nickname “Hammer” because he thought the youngster resembled “Hammerin’ Hank Aaron.” Hammer said he was an entrepreneur from the start, selling tickets that the A’s players were allotted but didn’t use. Charley Finley, the legendary coach of the A’s, kept Hammer aboard as a child “executive vice president.” By the time Hammer was 14, Finley was asking Hammer to fire people.  He had the crowd laughing at that.

But he got serious for a moment, noting how Finley as a CEO managed to pull together the fractured community of Oakland — during a time of urban chaos and protests of the Vietnam War — with five championship wins.

“I would be less than I really am, if I stood before four or five hundred CEOs, and didn’t emphasize the point that each and every one of you, in our current, turbulent times, each one of you can change the environment,” he said. “We as CEOs are not irreplaceable. Why don’t we take our time to create not only great businesses, but make an impact on the lives of the people in our companies and bring some light into dark moments?”

He noted how Napster disrupted his own industry and mentioned how he met a despairing Shawn Fanning as Napster was going down the tubes. While riding around in Hammer’s Hummer, Hammer told the bright Napster founder that he probably had four or five companies in him. Fanning just sold another company, ThreeSF, to Electronic Arts for $30 million. (EA confirmed that today, but didn’t disclose the price).

“Don’t let them discourage you,” Hammer told him. “Hang in there. Even when I saw disruption coming, I embraced the man and the technology. Today, the music industry still doesn’t embrace technology. Just to use a song, you still need a seven-month licensing process.”

Hammer was looking a bit older than I remembered him while watching his smash “U Can’t Touch This” video in my youth. But his deep preacher’s voice was unmistakable. He left most of the dancing and singing to his own daughter and other rapping kids being groomed for the big time.

He noted how he considered every “artist as a start-up” at his Full Blast House music incubator, where he sees his job as applying filters to find talent. Those young artists are immediately matched with business development people who could start thinking about the brand at the beginning and move beyond CD sales.

“There are so many ways to monetize content,” he said.

One of those is to showcase the dancers and artists on his new site, DanceJam.com, founded a few months ago and funded by Softbank and Rustic Canyon Ventures. His site demo didn’t work. “Oh well, Hammer, welcome to the tech world,” he said, not skipping a beat.

But its point is to highlight young dancing talents, index their videos, allow viewers to rate them, and show dance competitions “dubbed battles.” Maybe it will catch on. Hammer reminded everyone that music is what made MySpace take off. He promised big partner announcements soon. At the same time, Hammer is starting an effort to get music and technology into the hands of troubled youth in Philadelphia to “keep them from killing each other.”

He closed with an encore performance, encouraged by Intel Capital President Arvind Sodhani, who did his own Hammer dance imitation. Hammer was inspiring and he brought the crowd to its feet. Don’t be surprised if a few of those 600 CEOs start busting some moves in the future.

Game startup Trion World Network is today revealing how it is designing massively multiplayer online games with high graphics fidelity that will run across video game platforms — such as consoles, PC, mobile, and set-top boxes — a feat that no other video game company has yet pulled off.

The bold scheme will let the startup launch multiple games at once on what it calls the “Trion Platform,” which consists of software that runs on a bunch of game devices and exists on a network run by Hewlett-Packard. The games are cross platform because they run on servers in contrast to most desktop-based or console-based games.

“For decades, games have run on the clients, but we’re transforming them so they are completely server based,” said Lars Buttler, chief executive of Trion in Redwood City, Calif. “We think that will disrupt the industry.”

I’ll talk about the significance of shifting from client to server games below, but it’s a bit like how Salesforce.com disrupted traditional business software companies with its software-as-a-service, or how delivering software over the web has disrupted delivery through traditional means.

Trion may have amibitious goals, but it’s done some heavy lifting in just a couple of years: signing up partners and investors, building game design teams and creating a fundamental technology infrastructure. While most start-ups take on an innovation in just one part of the value chain, Trion is trying to create most of that value chain itself.

“It’s like Apple designing everything it needs,” he said. “It’s very risky, but highly profitable if it works. We’re not just doing a little piece. We’re bringing it all together.”

The first major partner being announced today is the Sci Fi Channel, but Trion plans to have a whole portfolio of online game worlds. I’m duly skeptical until I see how good these games look and how fast they play. Server-based games aren’t new as a concept. Typically, they have lousy graphics quality and suffer from time lags because of bandwidth limits, said Billy Pidgeon, a game analyst at International Data Corp.

Coordinating fast-action games is so tough that they usually have to be limited to 16 to 64 online players in a single game. Trion wants to allow thousands of players in the same game arenas. Others who try to build massive game worlds with thousands of players always run into some trade-off that compromises the quality of the experience.

Buttler can see the company he wants to disrupt outside of his company’s window, since Trion’s home is within view of Electronic Arts‘ headquarters. The more focused target, however, is Blizzard’s “World of Warcraft,” which has 10 million subscribers worldwide and is the No. 1 online game. Read the rest of this entry »

“It’s time to go to war.” That’s how Mark Jacobs opened a recent meeting with analysts at Electronic Arts as he talked about his new online game, “Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning.” Jacobs started Mythic Entertainment 13 years ago to make online games. He has done 15 such games since founding the company. In 2001, the company launched “Dark Age of Camelot,” which introduced “realm versus realm” combat among thousands of players. Electronic Arts bought his Fairfax, Va., company in 2006. Now, as general manager of EA Mythic, his team of 200 developers is finishing WAR, which is based on Games Workshop’s Warhammer fantasy role-playing-game franchise. That game will be EA’s biggest challenge to Blizzard Entertainment’s “World of Warcraft,” which has more than 10 million subscribers worldwide. The online version of Warhammer, Jacobs says, is all about going to war, both in the virtual sense, and in the real sense of competing with World of Warcraft.

VB: How is development going on Warhammer Online?
MJ: It’s going great. We opened a new phase of the beta. We have players running around a city called Praag with sticks and swords.

VB: Can you describe the Warhammer history?
MJ: The Warhammer franchise was created by Games Workshop in England about 25 years ago. It is the longest and best-selling of all of the fantasy games. It started as toy soldiers, which we call miniatures. It was a tabletop game. You would take the miniatures and do battle with them. Over 25 years, it evolved into Warhammer 40,000 (a sci-fi universe which THQ is working on) and multiple editions of the core Warhammer fantasy universe. They have sold hundreds of millions of toy soldiers. They have 1 million active customers. It can be found even in Asia now. They had a massively multiplayer online (MMO) deal with Climax.

VB: Did you stumble upon the MMO license?
MJ: Going back five years, one of my friends was working with Games Workshop. They were working with Climax. They wanted to meet with us to see how we make games. We always opened our doors to that kind of thing. Blizzard was one of those who came to visit us.

VB: You didn’t regret that Blizzard visit?
MJ: I’m really happy that Blizzard was so successful. I’ve been making online games for 20 years. I’ve been waiting for someone to come up with a mass market hit to expand the market. I don’t regret it at all. It was the best thing to happen to online games.

VB: And the license?
MJ: We showed the Games Workshop guys how we do things. The game went south. GW canceled the Climax license. They came to us and asked us if we would do it. I said no. I told them to take time, think about it, and get together when they were ready. We got a call months later. We eventually worked it out. We signed the deal at E3 in 2005. Read the rest of this entry »

Electronic Arts is expanding its grip on the mobile gaming market with its acquisition today of Hands-On Mobile Korea for an undisclosed price.

The deal gives EA a strong presence in the fast-growing South Korean mobile games market, adding to the strong share EA Mobile already has in the U.S. and Europe.

Hands-On Mobile Korea’s hot game is Heroes Lore. EA did not buy the rest of San Francisco-based Hands-On Mobile (formerly known as Mforma), the owner of Hands-On Mobile Korea.

Hands-On has raised more than $100 million in venture backing since its founding in 2001. Its investors include Bessemer Venture Partners, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, General Catalyst Partners, eFund and Institutional Venture Partners.

EA Mobile revenues were $155 million for the year ended March 31, 2008, about 4 percent of EA’s overall revenues. In the first calendar quarter of 2008, EA said its mobile revenues were 18 percent higher than its nearest competitor.

The deal will give EA Mobile a stronger international footprint and put pressure on rivals such as Digital Chocolate, Glu Mobile, and GameLoft.

Among the video games Electronic Arts showed off in a press preview last week at the Supper Club in San Francisco was DeadSpace. And it was very bloody.

This is the survival-horror game that debuts on Halloween and is EA’s bid to create a cross-platform franchise. EA will be releasing a comic book series, animated TV show and video game based on the same DeadSpace universe.

The blood and gore surprised me. We’re talking a spray of blood shooting out of the alien creatures as you shoot them aboard a gigantic space mining ship. You walk by a bloody and disembowled creature lying on an operating table while another creature is operating on it. It was like a scene out of BioShock, the best-rated game of last year from Take-Two Interactive. And you can die an inglorious death as a creature rips your head off and tears off your limbs. One of the most prominent people in the game industry (who shall remain nameless) was laughing his head off as we watched this scene together.

That’s tame for this mature-rated genre of games and even for movies like “Saw.” But for Electronic Arts, one of the biggest video game companies in the world that built its name on family-friendly fare, it’s quite a departure.

Blood has always been an issue with video games. The Ensemble Studios team had a big debate over the presence of blood in the first “Age of Empires” game published by Microsoft. The big companies have been pulled, kicking and screaming, by game developers who push the edge in order to satisfy the bloodlust of the gaming public. In order to get a teen rating on its “Medal of Honor” games, EA never had blood, or at least had very little of it. That ensured the widest possible audience.

But it’s a new era at EA. The studios under CEO John Riccitiello are operating as independent city states. They get to do what they want, as long as they deliver. Mike Quigley, vice president of marketing for EA’s EA Games Label, which is marketing DeadSpace, talked to me about the dilemma.

EA is in the business of selling lots of games and it doesn’t want to artificially restrict its market with design decisions. He said EA’s corporate side didn’t want to interfere with developers on this game, although he did let the development team know that the game is likely to be banned in Germany.

The pace of the game isn’t a crazy shooter, like the “Doom” series. Rather, it’s slower. It builds fear and anticipation in the gamer about what’s just around the corner, the way a good horror film does. I found it to be relentlessly tense, though some of the aliens did look a little too much like opossums to be entirely scary. Gamers have also spoken. They’re not as happy with the vanilla mainstream games anymore. They want edgy, as the hot sales of Grand Theft Auto IV suggest.

I asked one of the developers about the blood. He said, “This is the reason I stayed at Electronic Arts. This is the game I wanted to make.”

So now you can see the politics of blood. It might offend mainstream gamers, but it appeals to hardcore fans. Hardcore developers really want to make games that have it. But corporations have to walk a tightrope, facing either developer defections or the wrath of parents.

We’ll see how the market receives this one come Halloween. But the game is already a testament to the style of leadership under EA’s new chief executive. And it tells where the game industry, and our own society, are heading.