VentureBeat

It isn’t clear why Google would want to be the steward of the “Half-Life” video game franchise or be the company that sells to the world the “Left4Dead” zombie-killing game. But rumors are floating that the search giant is buying Valve LLC, the Bellevue, Wash.,-based game developer.

[Update: A source close to the matter tells us this isn't going to happen.]

The reason is that Valve owns Steam, the premier digital distribution network for computer games. Valve has become one of the biggest purveyors of games through Steam, which has more than 15 million PC users playing its games. Steam is a way to distribute and facilitate the play of high-quality online games such as Valve’s Counter-Strike team-combat game. But it’s also an end-run around retail stores and a way to put an end on piracy through online security controls.

Valve is best known for its games such as “Half-Life 2,” “Counter-Strike,” and “The Orange Box” (featuring “Portal”) — all of which have sold millions of units. It is headed by Gabe Newell, a former Microsoft executive who founded the company. The attraction for Google is that it could become a leader of digital distribution and expand Valve’s technology so that it can be an e-commerce vendor of all sorts of digital goods.

A spokesman for Google declined to comment. But Valve spokesman Doug Lombardi said in an email, “I wonder when Google’s going to call and tell us.”

BitRaider is launching a new way to download games today at the the Austin Game Developer Conference.

The Jacksonville, Fla.-based company has a smart streaming technology that allows players to start playing a game when only 10 percent of the download is complete. The player can continue to play without being concerned about whether the game play will be messed up by the download in progress.

That point is important to gamers who want both instant gratification when they purchase an online game as well as a high-quality experience, said Royal O’Brien, chief executive of BitRaider. The BitRaider technology figures out what digital assets the game needs and streams those ahead of time. It takes advantage of computers with multiple cores, or computing brains, on a single chip. It also works with any type of PC game.

BitRaider uses a small loader program that locates the assets, installs the package, and works without being disrupted by antivirus or digital rights management software. The company will compete with internal solutions used by game developers as well as third-party technologies such as Valve’s Steam.

The company says it hopes to improve the quality of digital distribution, resulting in fewer players abandoning downloads. It also says the BitRaider software uses less than a megabyte of hard drive data and a few megabytes of main memory in a computer. It unloads itself from memory when not in use.

BitRaider was originally founded a couple of years ago. O’Brien previously founded DiStream, which later spun off Game xStream. The original investors of that company wanted to go in a different direction. O’Brien negotiated an agreement so that he was free and clear to start a new company, BitRaider, but he said BitRaider does not use any technology from his prior company. The company has five employees and is self-funded.

As promised, I’ve followed up on my most anticipated games of E3 with an actual list of the top ten games of the show. I spent four days checking out games and interviewing executives at the Los Angeles media and game business summit. Clearly, I didn’t see everything. I didn’t even get to some of the games on the previous list. These games reflect my own tastes. I didn’t hold myself to any rules, like limiting the list to games that are coming out this year or ones that were actually playable. It’s just a list of what I can’t wait to play myself.

Gears of War 2 (Xbox 360) Microsoft/Epic Games, Nov. 2008. If video games got Oscars, this one would win for best art direction. While the first game was dark and gloomy in its depiction of a world of destroyed beauty, this sequel has brilliant colors and sharper lines. The original Gears title sold 4.7 million units worldwide, even though I thought it had a steep learning curve. But the more I played it, the more fun it was. Flamethrowers, big bosses, and swarms of enemies make this one more exciting and challenging. There is nothing as visceral as using a chainsaw bayonet to slice your enemy in half. And of all of the games that I played or viewed at E3, I stuck with this one the longest.

Wii Music (Nintendo Wii) Nintendo, fall 2008. Shigeru Miyamoto sure took his time with this game, which he first showed off to an audience in 2006. I was able to sit down with this game, which allows you hold the Wii controller and its companion Nunchuk to play the “air guitar.” I strummed a violin by going through the motions. I pounded on steel drums. This game has almost no learning curve, making it accessible to young kids and adults who have no rhythm and no idea how to play an instrument. In that way, it could promote freestyle play and be far more appealing for younger gamers than either the “Rock Band” or “Guitar Hero” series of music games.

Left 4 Dead (PC, Xbox 360) Electronic Arts/Valve, November, 2008. This game is set in a world where a pandemic turns everyone into a zombie. As a survivor, you are trapped in a city and must escape with a group of survivors. I played just a single round of co-op online play of this game with three other players. It was awesome. You have to work closely with the other players to take out the zombies. If you don’t synchronize your efforts, you’re bound to run out of ammo at the same time. The zombies are fast and so you can’t all pump lead into the same lead attacker or you’ll fall victim to the next ones. It makes for frenetic game play and a lot of repeatable fun as you await “Resident Evil 5,” the big Capcom zombie-killing game which was postponed until the spring of 2009. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

It’s getting a wee bit repetitive writing about casual game companies (see here, here, here, here and here for our coverage). Doesn’t anybody have some other kind of business plan? Sure, it’s a great opportunity to go after the market of people who are just discovering simple “casual” games that don’t take a lot of time to play. But it feels like there are too many start-ups in casual games, just as there were too many mobile games companies.

Thankfully, Greg Costikyan, who has 30 years of experience designing games, has hardcore games alongside the casual ones in the portfolio of his independent developer games site, Manifesto Games. The games — either casual or hardcore — are the result of “indie” game designers. That is, they were created by independent developers who are more like hobbyists or under-capitalized professionals trying to break into the inner circle of the game industry. Costikyan wants to create the Miramax of digitally distributed games and is raising a round of funding, VentureBeat has learned.

To be honest, I love the idea but I’m not sure this company can pull it off. It’s been trying to get off the ground for a few years, with visitors to the site a couple thousand a day. If there were justice in this world, this company ought to be able to raise money. Hey, if investors want to throw money at casual games, Costikyan deserves a few million to launch version 2.0 of his company. I’m not sure that will happen. As much as I admire Costykian’s intentions, I have to classify his effort as a long shot.

Three-year-old Manifesto Games is the anti-Electronic Arts if there ever was one. Its name came from a rant that Costikyan gave periodically at the Game Developers Conference. CEO Costikyan says the company’s manifesto is to “create for games what indie music and film provide: an audience and market for creativity and individual vision, defying the big publishers’ mediocrity and hype.” Read the rest of this entry »