VentureBeat » Destiny

GamesBeat weekly roundup:Xbox One unveiled, Yahoo acquires a game company

Jasmine Maleficent Rea — Fri, 24 May 2013 16:57:04 +0000

If you follow VentureBeat but don’t regularly check our GamesBeat site, here’s a list of the best video game stories we ran over the last seven days that you may have missed.

This week, Microsoft unveiled the Xbox One, the company’s next-gen console and one-stop living room entertainment device, Ex-EA chief John Riccitiello urges console makers to consider consumer wants before shipping products, and Yahoo continues its acquisition madness by picking up the game company PlayScale.

You’ll also find a review of Resident Evil: Revelations as well as previews for Batman: Arkham Origins, Dying Light, and Civilization V’s Brave New World.

Xbox One

News

Mobile news

Acquisitions incorporated

Marissa Mayer and Yahoo are on fire, acquiring gaming company PlayerScale

Tech news

Trailer hoedown

Destiny looks like Star Wars, Halo, and World of Warcraft in its newest trailer

Previews

Reviews

Resident Evil: Revelations is classic, slightly buggy, fun (review)

Interviews

Pieces of flair

Filed under: Games

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Destiny looks like Star Wars, Halo, and World of Warcraft in its newest trailer

Jeffrey Grubb — Thu, 23 May 2013 18:24:04 +0000

Before this moment in time, desolate planets, The Jungle Book, and Breaking Bad‘s Gustavo Fring weren’t often lumped together. That’s no longer the case thanks to developer Bungie.

The studio released a new CG trailer for its upcoming shooter Destiny. This video starts with actor Giancarlo Esposito, who played Fring on AMC’s Breaking Bad, reading The Jungle Book to a child. Esposito emphasizes a particular passage that illustrates the strength in numbers wolves get from their pack. This is all intercut with cinematic action sequences of armored fighters battling on harsh planets.

The video ends with a tease the Bungie will debut the game in action on June 1o at Sony’s press event during the Electronic Entertainment Expo trade show. Destiny is due out on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 in 2014.

Filed under: Games

Activision’s Eric Hirshberg bets that 40M Call of Duty fans will follow him to Xbox One (interview)

Dean Takahashi — Thu, 23 May 2013 17:00:31 +0000

Eric Hirshberg, the head of Activision Publishing, is sitting pretty with a Call of Duty franchise that generates $1 billion every year and has a loyal audience of 40 million. Yet he plans to take a big risk with a big bet. The company skipped the expected plan of making Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 and decided to create a brand new version of the game dubbed Call of Duty: Ghosts. That game will debut on a number of platforms, including Microsoft’s just-announced Xbox One. The title, which will be out on Nov. 5, will feature exclusive downloadable content from Microsoft.

That’s a big commitment by Activision, and that’s why Hirshberg took the stage in the final minutes of Microsoft’s announcement of the Xbox One on Tuesday. He showed off a new game that will push graphics to the limit and feature other innovations, such as voice commands.

We caught up with him after the announcement. Here’s an edited transcript of our interview with Hirshberg.

GamesBeat: How are you taking advantage of these things in the Xbox One with Call of Duty: Ghosts?

Eric Hirshberg: We showed a lot of things I think are differentiating and exciting to us about what both our new engine and the next-generation hardware enable us to do. I hope you agree that the visuals are a step change in terms of realism and immersion and subtlety. It’s important for a game like ours, where every pixel matters and we’ve always run at 60 frames per second. Making that environment as immersive and detailed as possible will make the game better.

Also, one of the biggest things is the ability to connect emotionally with the characters. The more human and natural they feel, the more we can build real connections with the characters through the narrative. That’s why we’re focusing so much on story. That’s why we’re working with someone like Steven Gaghan. That’s why we’re focusing on a single squad for the entire campaign. Traditionally, Call of Duty has jumped around, and your identity changes from level to level. Sometimes that even happens multiple times per level. This commitment to going through the adventure and the journey with one band of brothers is going to be a nice shift for the franchise.

GamesBeat: That does look like an interesting convergence, where you need to hire the best writers to match up with what you can do visually.

Hirshberg: Exactly. They’re very related. And that’s not new. We worked with David Goyer on Black Ops. Having top talent involved with the story is not new. I will say, though, that we’ve gotten even more integrated between the creation of the story and characters and the creation of the game events than ever before.

GamesBeat: I came from the panel where they did the Kinect demo. They can apparently measure your heartbeat now by watching your face move. The controller gives you this heartbeat-like feedback as well. You can imagine that in a Call of Duty game, where that feedback makes the game more intense. Everything that you talked about on stage was on the visual side, but are you also excited about those features as well, like what a better Kinect can deliver?

Hirshberg: I made a passing comment that you’re going to see voice integration, voice commands via Kinect, which is something that we haven’t done in the past with Call of Duty. We think the improvements to Kinect really excite us because of the level of responsiveness and detail. I thought that the demo they did with the voice commands on television, the instant changing between games and music, was really compelling. You’ll see more of this coming from us as we get closer to the launch.

Obviously, we didn’t reveal that element today. We just mentioned it. But we’ve always made sure that we don’t just use new technology for novelty’s sake. We always make sure that it makes the gameplay better. In this case, we think it will.

GamesBeat: When you buy into some of these things, what do you think about, given that you have choices? You have Nintendo, Sony, or Microsoft here. If you’re buying into Microsoft’s platform, why do you choose that?

Hirshberg: I think that’s probably a better question for Microsoft. Obviously, we want all these platforms to be successful. We’re proud to be here to help reveal the new Xbox, and we want to provide some great content for the players.

They all have to be great game machines first. I think that’s the tip of the sword. Everyone’s trying to own the living room and own the entire entertainment experience, but it’s a game machine first and foremost. We’ve been pleased with Xbox’s approach.

GamesBeat: There is more entertainment stuff that’s going to happen, though, on this box in the future. Is that a good thing for everybody?

Hirshberg: I think it is. The only way it isn’t is if somehow that makes it a less potent gaming machine, but in this case, what we’re seeing in the next generation of hardware is giving us tremendous new tools to play with.

That said, I don’t think competition for different forms of entertainment in the living room is anything new. People can watch TV in their living rooms now. People can listen to music in their living rooms now. There’s a false divide that gets created in people’s minds sometimes, as though hardcore gamers don’t also consume other forms of entertainment and wouldn’t appreciate those things being made more seamless and more integrated into a more elegant experience. I think that’s all that you’re seeing here. To me, as a gamer, I’m excited by it.

GamesBeat: One thing that seems difficult for these guys to walk the line on is these consumer-rights issues that are popping up, about [digital rights management] and the constant connection and used games and so on. It seems like a sharper conversation to me than it’s been in the past.

Hirshberg: There’s certainly a lot of passions around it all. I think that it’s on the first parties to make sure that the benefits are compelling enough to attract people to that feature. But again, this is probably a better question to ask Microsoft. I know they’re considering that element carefully. I don’t want to just weigh in with my opinions. This is one of the things they’ve got to get just right with their launch. I think that a great experience is the way to the promised land.

Filed under: Business, Games

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Here are all the new games coming for Xbox One (updated)

Stephanie Carmichael — Tue, 21 May 2013 19:37:44 +0000

Updated on May 22 at 4:34 p.m. PST to include Ryse.

For more on the Xbox One reveal, check out our complete coverage.

Ubisoft, Square Enix, and other companies have confirmed a host of new games for Microsoft’s upcoming all-in-one games-and-entertainment console, the Xbox One. Microsoft said today that it would be releasing 15 exclusive titles, eight of which are new properties, in the first year of launch.

Ubisoft in particular is planning a good many titles. It’s promising “at least” six releases in the system’s first 12 months. Action-adventure games Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag and Watch Dogs are due out later this year, which is when Xbox One is set to debut. Both are multiplatform titles. The rest are a mix of new entries in existing series, new intellectual properties, and digital titles, according to a press release.

Square Enix and Eidos Montreal have confirmed the reboot of the stealth game Thief for Xbox One as well as PlayStation 4 and PC in 2014.

Alan Wake and Max Payne developer Remedy Entertainment is making a game called Quantum Break [above] exclusively for Xbox One. Activision announced the new multiplatform Call of Duty: Ghosts, which features storytelling from Stephen Gaghan, who wrote the screenplays for the award-winning films Traffic and Syriana. You can watch the new trailers and videos from the Xbox Reveal show below.

Another exclusive Xbox One title is Crytek’s Ryse, which features “controller-based gameplay enhanced by Kinect.”

Forza Motorsport 5 is also in the works from publisher Microsoft Game Studios. The racing series has long been exclusive to Xbox. In addition, EA Sports is releasing four titles: FIFA 14, Madden NFL 25, NBA Live 14, and EA Sports UFC, all of which use the new game engine Ignite. It “enhances the human intelligence of athletes” through their movements, which boast even more depth in animation. Take a look at the engine in action below.

EA’s games will release on Xbox One within the first 12 months of the console’s launch. Madden NFL 25 will also be available on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 on Aug. 27. FIFA 14 is coming to these platforms and more, including PC, at an undisclosed date. All four games are also making their way to the PS4.

Electronic Arts and DICE’s Battlefield 4 is scheduled for release on Oct. 29 on PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 and is arriving later on Xbox One and PlayStation 4. And Bungie’s upcoming new property, the action-role-playing first-person shooter Destiny, is also coming to the Xbox One in addition to PS4, Xbox 360, and PS3.

Some of these are hitting Xbox One first though Microsoft has not set official release dates for them or the console. We’ll update this post with more games as the news rolls in.

Filed under: Games

Activision blows away first quarter earnings targets, raises estimates for year

Dean Takahashi — Wed, 08 May 2013 20:15:42 +0000

Activision Blizzard reported better-than-expected earnings today for its first quarter ended March 31.

Activision Blizzard’s business is driven by major franchises, including Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Skylanders [above], and PC games such as StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm. These have helped make the company into the largest independent publisher of video games, and it has been making more money than rivals such as Electronic Arts.

But gaming’s No. 1 publisher warned that risks in the second half of 2013 are “more challenging than our earlier view.” But it also raised estimates for its financial performance. The company now expects revenues of $4.25 billion on a non-GAAP (generally accepted accounting practice) basis in 2013, compared to its earlier outlook of $4.175 billion. It also expects earnings per share of 82 cents, compared to 80 cents earlier.

The Santa Monica, Calif.-based company previously warned that 2013 would be a tough year, partly because it will have a major transition to new consoles for Microsoft and Sony. On a non-GAAP basis, earnings per share were 17 cents, compared with 6 cents a share a year earlier. Revenues were $804 million, compared with $587 million a year earlier. For the first quarter, analysts expected to see revenues of $704 million and earnings per share of 11 cents.

In after-hours trading, Activision Blizzard’s stock price fell 5 percent to $14.49 a share. Before that, the stock closed today at $15.26 a share, up 2.14 percent. GAAP revenues for the quarter were $1.32 billion, up from $1.17 billion a year ago and better than the expected $1.16 billion. GAAP earnings per share were 40 cents, up from 33 cents a year ago and the expected 29 cents a share

Activision Blizzard chief executive Bobby Kotick said in a statement, “Our first-quarter performance was driven by continued consumer interest in all of our key franchises.”

Kotick said that Blizzard Entertainment’s StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm was the No. 1 PC game for the quarter. He also said that Blizzard’s World of Warcraft remained the No. 1 subscription online game with more than 8.3 million subscribers. But that number actually represents a loss of 1.3 million paying subscribers. Most of that loss was in Asia.

And this decline is one of several reasons why Activision is speaking cautiously about the second half of 2013 despite raising earnings estimates.

“While we have had a solid start to the year, we now believe that the risks and uncertainties in the back half of 2013 are more challenging than our earlier view, especially in the holiday quarter. The shift in release dates of competing products, the disappointing launch of the Wii U, uncertainties regarding next-generation hardware, and subscriber declines in our World of Warcraft business all raise concerns, as do continued challenges in the global economy. For these reasons, we remain cautious,” Kotick said. “However, our focused and disciplined approach to our business has served us well in the past, and through continued investment and careful management of our costs, we expect to continue delivering shareholder value over the long term as we have for the last 20 years.”

Last quarter, Activision Blizzard said its outlook for 2013 was for non-GAAP revenues of $4.175 billion and net income of 80 cents a share. It also previously said it had expected $690 million in revenue and earnings per share of 10 cents for the first quarter. For the second quarter, it now expects non-GAAP revenues of $590 million and earnings per share of 5 cents.

Before the earnings were announced, analyst Michael Pachter of Wedbush Securities expected the company to beat earnings targets because of continued strong sales of Call of Duty: Black Ops II, which sold more than $1 billion in its first 16 days back in retail in November. Overall retail software sales for console games were up 19 percent in the first quarter, according to NPD. Pachter also said that the newest version of Skylanders, Skylanders: Giants, was selling better than he and others excepted it would.

In the future, Activision will publish a new first-person shooter game from Bungie, the maker of the smash hit Halo series. Pachter believes that Destiny would arrive in the fourth quarter of 2013. Analyst Arvind Bhatia of Sterne Agee said that he is bullish on Activision Blizzard and its long history of exceeding expectations.

Filed under: Business, Games, Mobile, Social

Earnings season: What to expect from EA, Activision, and Take-Two

Jeffrey Grubb — Tue, 07 May 2013 19:32:29 +0000

Earnings season is that special time when video game publishers reveal if they are actually making money. Starting today and continuing through next week, Activision, Electronic Arts, and Take-Two will all report their results for the last fiscal quarter.

We checked in with a few analysts to see what they are expecting from these three major publishers. Will first-person shooter BioShock Infinite push Take-Two Interactive over its expectations? Is the Call of Duty military first-person franchise still powering Activision’s growth? Will the Star Wars video game license have an immediate impact on EA’s outlook?

Let’s take a look.

Electronic Arts

Let’s start with Electronic Arts, which reports its earnings today after Wall Street’s closing bell.

The Madden publisher is still looking for a permanent chief executive officer since John Riccitiello stepped down from that position in late March. That hasn’t stopped EA from making big moves under the direction of executive chairman Larry Probst.

Under Probst, EA cut 1,000 jobs. It severely downsized its EA Mobile operations in Montreal. It also cut staff at Army of Two: The Devil’s Cartel developer Visceral Montreal. The publisher secured the rights to the Star Wars franchise. Oh, and it also won the title of Worst Company in America from the Consumerist blog for the second year in a row.

EA also had a spate of game announcements that include two new Plants vs. Zombies titles, The Sims 4, and rumors that Respawn (former Call of Duty team) will show its shooter at Microsoft’s Xbox event later this month.

That’s a lot to fit into a single financial report.

“EA has already preannounced results ‘at or below the lower end’ of [expectations],” Sterne Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia wrote in a note to investors. “For EA, the key will be fiscal-year 2014 guidance, which is likely to be conservative given the company doesn’t have a permanent chief executive officer and new chief financial officer Blake Jorgensen appears to have a mindset of under-promise and over deliver.”

With the huge news that EA has secured the Star Wars license, however, investors may want to see a forward-looking guidance that factors in that gigantic property. That’s unlikely to happen.

“Star Wars won’t impact earnings next year,” Wedbush analyst Michael Pacther told GamesBeat. “It’s going to take a while to make a game.”

As for The Sims 4 and PopCap’s new games, those will factor into the guidance, but EA will have had them in the works for a long while.

EA seems like a company trying to reboot in order to offer a fresh start to whoever takes over as CEO. For that reason, expect an underwhelming guidance that will give the new chief executive the chance to overdeliver, just as Bhatia suggests.

Activision and Take-Two

Conflict and hardship makes for a good story, which is why EA is the big story. The other two publishers, Activision and Take-Two, are in much sturdier positions.

Activision still has Call of Duty generating huge numbers, although we’re curious to see if Black Ops II kept up with previous entries in the series.

Take-Two had critical and commercial success BioShock Infinite to push it through its last quarter.

“We believe Activision and Take-Two will likely exceed March quarter expectations,” Bhatia wrote.

Take-Two is flipping over to its fiscal 2014, so we will get a look at some annual guidance. In the past, the publisher expected Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto V to bring in around $600 million before delaying it to September. Expect the publisher to roll out some major expectations for the next year.

Activision just announced a new Infinity Ward Call of Duty game that will anchor its holiday lineup. The publisher will also get help from a new Skylanders game that has its own line of physical, interactive toys, which retailers struggle to keep on the shelves.

Activision is also publishing the next game from Halo developer Bungie. The first-person shooter, titled Destiny, isn’t due out during calendar year 2013, which coincides with Activision’s fiscal year, so don’t expect that game to factor into any guidance.

Finally, any guidance through the spring quarter will likely tail downward for all three publishers. The release slate from April through July is devoid of many major releases. That’s due to the typical swing of the release schedule, but many developers are probably busy producing products for the upcoming next-gen consoles.

Filed under: Games

Inside Bungie: A walk through a top-secret headquarters where Halo gave way to Destiny (photo gallery)

Dean Takahashi — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 15:00:39 +0000

Little by little, Bungie is opening up. The company has had to keep a lot of secrets, especially since it split from Microsoft in 2009 and began working on a top-secret project. We now know that the secret, code-named Tiger, is a new game series called Destiny.

A visit to Bungie’s headquarters is an enviable journey. It’s like going to Oz and seeing the man behind the curtain. Gamers and budding developers would love to get a foot in the door — and perhaps make off with a souvenir. But having been there, I can tell you it’s pretty secure place. Fans have to keep out, but the whole place seems like it is built in the service of fans, like a physical homage to Halo and the company’s next big project.

After a couple of leaks spilled the beans, Bungie acknowledged Destiny and said it would make a series of games over the next ten years, all to be published by Activision. For the first time since the Halo series started more than a decade ago, the new game series will be multi-platform, publishing on platforms such as the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4, not to mention the next Xbox and perhaps the PC.

We recently interviewed Pete Parsons, chief operating officer, about what it’s like to work at Bungie. Eric Osborne, community manager and writer at Bungie, led me on a tour through the company’s 80,000-square-feet headquarters in Bellevue, Wash., a suburb of Seattle. The place has no signs visible from the street, and you would never guess that it is housed inside a shopping mall in an office park. It used to be a theater complex and a bowling alley. This is the place where a team was willing to bet on the future and walk away from a multibillion-dollar game property.

A Halo museum, invaded by the Sexy Sax Man

The past is in the downstairs, where the former bowling alley was. Security is tight.

In fact, the day before I got there, two security officers had to escort a woman who was breaking the rules by trying to talk with every employee who exited the building. She wanted speakers for her class, and she also wanted to find out how her son could get work at Bungie. A few days earlier, a guy named Sexy Sax Man burst in to play music, and he got thrown out too.

Osborne says that the downstairs area is where they show fans who come into the building during shows such as Penny Arcade’s PAX event. During such times, dozens of fans mill about the entrance, hoping for a peek inside.

Just past the lobby, the downstairs hallway leads to a series of rooms: an arcade game room and interview rooms. In those interview rooms, a potential new hire could spend a whole day, being interviewed by one Bungie staffer after another. Bungie contends it has never lowered its standards for hiring. The hallway itself is littered with Halo paraphernalia on the walls and behind glass cases. Props from marketing campaigns of years past sit around.

A 3o-foot glass case houses a bunch of Halo toys and life-size replicas of weapons. Another glass case holds the trophies — all of the awards, like Halo’s first million games shipped. A big metallic award with a lightning bolt sits above a big couch. Nearby is a theater where Bungie entertained the gaggle of press that recently came to see Destiny. We were in there all alone, lucky to have our own private tour. The theater seems way too big for our small group. It has seating for 80.

Further down the crooked hallway is the Laboratorium, where a bunch of cubicles are equipped with game machines, monitors, and webcams. The team shoots video of players as they play snippets of the upcoming game. They gauge the reactions and emotions of the players. The team can even do eye-tracking, or monitoring which part of the screen the player is looking at. If those players get lost in a maze, the team goes back to designing something better.

Still further down the crooked hallway is the Spandex Palace. This is the motion-capture studio, a big empty space with floor mats and rigs that mount 22 motion-capture cameras. The team can capture all movement in the room, including that of performance actors as they speak their lines. The cameras record the movements in 3D and store them in digital form.

Game artists can take the entire performance — the body movements, the lip movements, the voice acting — and bring it directly into the game. They can then enhance it with their digital artistry, so it looks nothing like actors in spandex and more like alien creatures and space marines. The fact that Bungie has its own mo-cap studio shows it is working on the high end; many other studios hire motion-capture experts to do the work for them.

One painting on the wall, by Seattle artist Ken Taya, stands out. Created for Bungie’s 20th anniversary, it has a bunch of events from the company’s history woven into a single, overcrowded painting. At the bottom is a chair, and by the chair is a tail. It is a tiger’s tail, and it was a hint about what was coming up.

There’s a snack room with all sorts of free goodies. Bungie employees get a lot of free food. And executives like Parsons go out to lunch with most new employees, so they can get a download on what works and what doesn’t.

“We have a free-lunch program so we can make sure new employees meet older employees,” Parsons said. “We even have something called Bungie University where there’s more than 60 hours worth of video. Starting from when we kicked off Destiny to the team at large in August 2009, you can watch all the way until now.”

There’s also something called Tiger University, which brings new employees up to speed on the new project.

Filed under: Games

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GamesBeat weekly roundup: Zynga shuts studio, top exec leaves EA, and Ouya ships March 28

Jasmine Maleficent Rea — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 18:12:31 +0000

If you follow VentureBeat but don’t regularly check our GamesBeat site, here’s a list of the best video game stories we ran over the last seven days that you may have missed.

This week, Zynga shuts down its Baltimore studio while consolidating three others, THQ will sell off Homeworld, Darksiders, and Red Faction in its last auction, and the Android-based Ouya console will ship March 28.

You’ll also find reviews of Star Wars Pinball and Tomb Raider, as well as previews for Lego City: Undercover, Warface, Time and Eternity, and Throw Trucks with Your Mind.

News

Mobile News

Reviews

Previews

Interviews

Pieces of Flair

Filed under: Business, Games

Bungie leader Pete Parsons discusses how studio is shaping gaming’s Destiny (interview)

Dean Takahashi — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 16:00:29 +0000

I met Pete Parsons before Halo came out, as he was going around the country evangelizing the first-person shooter on the Xbox game console that Microsoft was about to launch way back in the fall of 2001. I recall his enthusiasm as marketing director at Microsoft, always promoting the idea of doing a pioneering shooting experience on consoles that, frankly, were inferior to the PC. Now, Parsons is still doing the same thing, only he is promoting Destiny, the next shooter from developer Bungie.

As chief operating officer at Bungie, Parsons must help lead the 350-person team do the enormous amount of behind-the-scenes work in bringing the persistent world of the always-connected Destiny to life. Activision Blizzard is planning on publishing a series of Destiny titles over the next decade, and Parsons will play a big role in making that happen.

Parsons left his job at Microsoft to become the COO at Bungie after Halo launched. In 2007, he left Microsoft to start Meteor Solutions, a viral-marketing startup, and worked double duty for a time. As Bungie prepared to leave the Microsoft fold and move on to a new franchise, Parsons came back. He returned to the studio in 2010. Parsons is now fully focused on getting Destiny out the door and managing the culture and talent inside Bungie’s 80,000-square-foot headquarters in Bellevue, Wash.

After a few years of secrecy, Bungie finally revealed concept art from its new game universe while announcing that Destiny would debut on the PlayStation 4 (and likely other platforms). We visited Parsons at Bungie HQ last week, and here’s an edited transcript of our conversation.

GamesBeat: You must feel good right now.

Pete Parsons: [Laughs] Well, I think it feels good to be Bungie right now. We’re always about doing great things and ambitious things. That’s because we have such a great team, because we can do that. It’s a great time to be at Bungie. It’s an energy that many people haven’t felt since some of the earliest days of Halo. That’s exciting. We still have a lot of the old guard around, but we’ve been able to bring on a massive amount of new talent.

GamesBeat: Did somebody in particular sell you on the idea of Destiny? I think you came in after it started, right?

Parsons: No, we’ve all been working from the very beginning. Well, it depends on how you look at it. Destiny has been an idea bouncing around since even before the technology to make it existed.

Destiny is very much a product of everybody at Bungie, but its inception comes from Jason [Jones, co-founder of Bungie]. This is very much a vision that Jason has. Then, he gathers a small group of really talented people who have been here a long time, and they begin hammering on it. It’s had multiple incarnations until it finally landed into what it is today. That’s fun to watch. Not just on technology, but art and story.

GamesBeat: It sounds like you did have options, though. Was there a point where you bought into Destiny and said, “I want to do this too?” For 10 years or whatever it will be.

Parsons: As naïve as this may sound, if Jason believes in something and he’s ready to go for it, I’m in. No joke, I still walk in the door every day and think, “Who gets to do this? This is awesome, to be a part of this thing.” Even when I’m having a shitty day, I feel that way. There are so many other things I could do that, for me, wouldn’t be as satisfying or as interesting. They might be enriching. They might satisfy some level of my curiosity. They might be exciting. But there’s something about these people and this place.

GamesBeat: Did you feel any tug when Halo went off in another direction, with Microsoft’s 343 Industries, and then Bungie went its separate way with Destiny?

Parsons: Personally, I did not. I love the Halo universe. I think it’s great. It inspires me. It inspires my children. They’ve never played, but they know the universe. One, though, I’ve spent a lot of time with Halo. Two, the mythic science fiction of Destiny immediately attracted me. It was that first image … It’s a simple image, but it took weeks of back-and-forth to put together. There were a few images already, maybe three or four, but they didn’t speak to what it was. The moment that image was done, it was like, “That’s it.” That’s the game. That’s the idea. That’s a place that I want to be.

GamesBeat: Is that published now? Which image is that?

Parsons: I don’t know if it’s ever been published. It was just this very striking image that had that feeling of — this is not purely a science fiction universe. It’s not just about two big military-industrial complexes smashing into each other. It’s a place with myths and lore. There’s a guy with sci-fi armor on, and yet he’s got a rifle that looks like it’s from an ancient desert somewhere. It was super cool. That certainly spoke to me. I didn’t look back.

At the time, we were working on both Halo: ODST and Halo:Reach. I still love the Halo universe. It’s an interesting place. But I think what we’ve been able to do is create an incredibly deep fiction and a place that you’re going to want to be in.

GamesBeat: You had a leak. You had some interesting reactions. What was it like, looking at the reaction from the inside?

Parsons: You’re never really excited when you first learn that a leak happens. Then you get to see the reaction. We had this really quick thing. We said, “There’s a leak happening. We can either say nothing, or we can say, ‘Yeah.’” Instead of looking at images that we didn’t want you to see, let’s give you one that we want you to see. So, we released the picture of the Fallen. When our community, who we love, reacts so positively to an image — “Oh my God. That’s so great. That’s a place I want to be in. I can’t wait to learn more about that” — we go from, “Oh, man” to “Sweet!” Within less than half an hour, we were like, “This is the course of action. Let’s go.”

Filed under: Games

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GamesBeat weekly roundup: Sony reveals PlayStation 4, House GOP blasts game research, and Crysis 3 review

Jasmine Maleficent Rea — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 18:22:09 +0000

If you follow VentureBeat but don’t regularly check our GamesBeat site, here’s a list of the best video game stories we ran over the last seven days that you may have missed.

This week, Sony unveils it’s latest home console the PlayStation 4, Ziff Davis Media shuts down 1Up, UGO, and GameSpy, and Electronic Arts and Activision both lay off workers.

You’ll also find reviews for Crysis 3, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, and Serious Sam Double D XXL.

PlayStation 4

News

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The DeanBeat: Sorting through the significance of Sony’s PlayStation 4 revelation

Dean Takahashi — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 16:00:12 +0000

Read all of our PlayStation 4 coverage here.

As the curtain closed on Sony’s revelation of the PlayStation 4, I was pretty excited. After all, Sony hasn’t revealed this much about the future of games since 2005 and 2006. But some of that reality distortion field is wearing off, and I’ve decided to take a step back and rate the overall goods that Sony delivered against expectations.

I was annoyed that Sony didn’t say more. The Japanese company revealed a fall launch, but not a launch date. It didn’t show the box, talk about the price, or say if it had functioning hardware. Given the history of console-first revelations, that’s typical. After all, it doesn’t want to give too many answers to its rivals Microsoft and Nintendo, which will maneuver based on what they learn about Sony’s strategy. And it doesn’t want to overpromise and underdeliver.

Still, I come away unsure about whether Sony “gets it” and really understands how to make itself relevant in game world that is full of business and technology disruptions. Sony answered this in part, but not in full.

But some questions are being answered as I write. Sony didn’t say, for instance, if the PS4 would play used games — considered a sacred right of fair use by many gamers. But Sony’s game studio chief Shuhei Yoshida told Eurogamer that players would indeed be able to. By the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), Sony should address all of our lingering doubts.

I was intrigued to notice that Sony is continuing a tradition of learning from Westerners. It didn’t learn all that much from former chief executive officer Howard Stringer, the first Brit to run Sony. But Andrew House, the head of the company, came out on stage instead of current CEO Kaz Hirai.

The lead system architect was Mark Cerny, who has tremendous respect among game developers (and is fluent in Japanese). I hear from a good source that Cerny was able to get good feedback from the West and translate that to the Japanese system engineers, and most of the user interface for the new machine was created in the West as well.

Dave Perry, the CEO of Gaikai (the cloud-gaming startup which Sony bought for $380 million), talked about Sony’s broader network strategy.

This fresh crew of leaders shows that Sony is listening to the markets that matter, as the U.S. and Europe are critical to the success of any console. In the past, Sony’s thinking seemed to be too insular and too focused on Japanese styles of doing business. Fair or not, I associate that with being unable to learn from startups — not open enough — and failing to listen closely to the desires of game developers.

Perry’s technology has brought some much-needed flexibility to Sony’s console business. Cloud gaming is potentially disruptive as it allows a publisher to run a game in an Internet-connected cloud and stream it from the data center to any client. Sony can use it for backward compatibility, allowing you to play older PlayStation, PS2, and PS3 games on the PS4.

It remains to be seen how much full game streaming will be enabled by the Gaikai technology. You can certainly use the game streaming to play demos, and it’s good that Sony fully embraced game downloading by enabling you to do it in the background, while you’re doing other things like playing games, said analyst Atul Bagga.

And the streaming technology from Gaikai also allows you to play PS4 games on a handheld PlayStation Vita and perhaps other devices as well. I really like this aspect of the technology, which House said puts the gamer at the center of the ecosystem, rather than the living room console. It embraces the reality of mobile devices being used in concert with a console.

The cloud gaming technology can get rid of the need to put backward-compatibility hardware in the console, lowering its costs. Ultimately, no one cares about backward compatibility except at the very beginning of a console sales cycle. So enabling it with as little cost as possible is an absolutely necessary ingredient of a modern game console that Microsoft has to match.

The cloud solution also allows Sony to break with the mistakes of its past. The Cell processor from IBM, Toshiba, and Sony was never popular with developers, who hated its complexity. Intel’s own chips were too expensive, but the accelerated processing units (APUs) from Advanced Micro Devices fit the bill. The eight x86 64-bit cores are both powerful and inexpensive. They can be put on the same chip as a graphics processing unit, reducing the cost and complexity of the console. And they bring the economic efficiency of the PC and its volume cost reductions to Sony while offloading considerable engineering tasks.

PC gamemakers will embrace this solution as they already know how to program PC games using the same technology. This is a big step toward simplification of the game development process, and that could help lower costs, rather than constantly increase them. The move toward the PC will get more developers on Sony’s side. After coming in third place with the PlayStation 3, Sony needs to convince developers that they will profit by sticking with Sony. And it needs to reveal games that are better on the console than they will be on the PC.

Sony showed off a bunch of cool-looking games from a number of third-party developers. But many of them are not that exciting when you consider whether they will be exclusives. Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs, Bungie’s Destiny, Quantic Dream’s Beyond: Two Souls, Capcom’s Deep Down, and Square Enix’s Final Fantasy game will likely also appear on the next Microsoft console. Those games certainly show off the kind of outstanding entertainment that will define the next generation. Quantic Dream’s rendering of a human face looked extremely realistic.

But Sony didn’t show off the “only on PlayStation 4″ titles. Bungie’s game, for instance, will also debut on the PlayStation 3 at the same time as it appears on the PS4.

But I can’t fault Sony too much here. It did show off some cool Sony-owned content. Sony’s Killzone: Shadow Fall looked stellar, but it is one more installment in an aging franchise. The Killzone demo certainly looked like it was running live, in real-time, on prototype hardware. That’s a good sign, and it is welcome, considering that it’s easy to play tricks by faking game play by using animated movies in place of real-time live gaming. I may have been fooled, but it certainly looked nice. I hear that the prototype hardware is plentiful and developers are using the machines to create their games.

The Drive Club from Evolution Studios is a unique take on social racing. Knack could have a place in the comic-combat genre. And Media Molecule seems to have a weird gesture-based sculpture game in the works. I was impressed that some of these developers said they had been working for years on PS 4 titles, or at least were working on their concepts for a long time.

But many fans were flabbergasted that there was still no mention of Sony’s The Last Guardian, a title that has been missing in action for years. Square Enix made a major fumble, too, when it showed an old trailer and still didn’t describe the game that the video revealed. The company obnoxiously told the crowd to wait until E3.

I wondered why Electronic Arts wasn’t there in a big way as the company is still a major player in the industry. But EA probably didn’t have a brand new intellectual property that was ready to unveil yet. Still, the absence of the big player will set some conspiracy theories in motion. I have no doubt that Sony has enough backers, but it should show more of them.

I was also disturbed that Sony said little about its own response to two major disruptions in the games business. Sony didn’t say what operating system the PS4 runs, but I hear it isn’t Android. It’s another custom-made Sony operating system, designed to run games fast.

Is it a mistake? Sony might have embraced the open nature of operating systems like Android and the innovation that comes from mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. An open OS is upgradeable and flexible to change with the times.

Embracing Android would also invite large numbers of indie game developers to make games for the PS 4. Sony did not do a very good job of communicating this goal of getting more indies in its press conference and in a follow-up interview with Gamasutra. It is being too vague. But from what I hear, the console isn’t going to be as magically easy for indies to self-publish games on — at least not as easy as it is on Android. Until we know where Sony stands on this, we won’t know what it really means by being “more open.”

Sony did embrace sharing on platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. It embraced video spectating via services such as Twitch. And it also will host a variety of non-game video services, from Netflix to Vudu. That will help it fulfill the PS4′s role as an entertainment device, beyond a game console. But I saw no evidence that Sony will catch up with Microsoft’s superior Xbox Live service.

Sony also didn’t speak much about free-to-play games. Indeed, other players like Nvidia, PlayJam (GameStick), Ouya, and others are trying to bring those disruptive forces to the TV. If Sony doesn’t do it, then these other players have a chance, and so does Microsoft.

I do think that Sony showed off enough to do a great deal of PR damage to Nintendo, whose Wii U game console isn’t selling as well as it hoped. If Sony comes out with the right games, the right price, and the right launch date, the PlayStation 4 could be a huge threat to Nintendo’s console.

To sum it up, Sony’s revelation raised more questions than it answered. That’s par for the course in the games business, as most major revelations don’t take place until E3 in June. But I wish there were more “wow moments” than questions or disappointments. In that respect, Sony left some major openings for Microsoft to exploit.

Filed under: Business, Games

PlayStation 4 trailer roundup: New Infamous, new IP, and more

Jeffrey Grubb — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 06:15:43 +0000

Sony revealed many of the details about its next-gen PlayStation 4 console at an event in New York City today. We saw the new controller, some cloud functionality, and a bunch of other features. But what about the games, man? Well, I’ve got you covered there.

We went to Sony and the third-party publishers and asserted our dominance until they forked over their highest-def trailers for all the new PlayStation 4 games. Let’s check ‘em out:

Destiny

Watch Dogs

Killzone: Shadow Fall

Infamous: Second Son

Knack

The Witness

Drive Club

Deep Down

Filed under: Games

GamesBeat’s complete coverage of Sony’s PlayStation 4 announcement

GamesBeat Staff — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 03:33:21 +0000

It’s official: The PlayStation 4 is coming out this fall.

Sony announced its latest gaming hardware at an event in New York tonight, but if you weren’t around to see it, we have you covered. The GamesBeat staff has spent the past couple days writing up the big reveal, and we’re collecting all of our stories here. And we’re still working, so be sure to check back for the latest news about Sony’s big night.

Speculation, part one

Ever since that frustratingly vague video came out last month, the gaming world has wondered what Sony was planning to show at tonight’s event. We were all pretty sure from the start that it was the PlayStation 4, but beyond that, we only had rumors and wishful thinking to point us anywhere. But those things aren’t really news, so we passed the time getting nostalgic and trying to see what the past could teach us.

Here’s what we expect from Sony’s Wednesday event

Rumor: PlayStation 4 will launch in November and comes with a PlayStation Eye camera

PlayStation Meeting: Six disappointing scenarios that aren’t PlayStation 4

What we can learn from past PlayStation reveals

Thanks for the #PlayStationMemories: The industry tweets Sony’s legacy

The system

Finally, it was time to see which of those speculations, if any, were correct. Over a two-hour press briefing, Sony made its announcement, had some developers come out, and showed off some games — all without ever actually telling us what the console is going to look like.

Everything you need to know about the PlayStation 4 (so far)

A play-by-play of Sony’s big PlayStation 4 reveal

Sony finally reveals the PlayStation 4 for holiday 2013 — but not the console or price

PlayStation Cloud streaming tech the ‘fastest gaming network in the world’ — and promises PS4 games on Vita

Used games will work on the PlayStation 4, says Sony

Good news: Move controllers work on PlayStation 4. Bad news: DualShock 3 doesn’t

The games

Here’s a look at what you’ll be playing when the PS4 launches late in 2013.

PlayStation 4 video trailer roundup

Knack is the first game confirmed for the PlayStation 4 (and it looks like a Pixar movie)

Sony unveils Killzone: Shadow Fall for the PlayStation 4

Sony’s Evolution Studios reveals social racing Drive Club for PlayStation 4

Sucker Punch reveals Infamous: Second Son as a PlayStation 4 exclusive

Indie darling Jonathan Blow’s The Witness is headed to the PlayStation 4

Blizzard announces Diablo III for PlayStation 4 (and PS3)

Ubisoft announces Watch Dogs for the PlayStation 4

Sony closes PS4 event with a trailer for Bungie’s Destiny

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is officially a next-gen title for PlayStation 4

Speculation, part two

Now that we know that the PS4 is coming, where do we go from here? It’s time for another round of analysis and speculation, but now we have way more confirmed information to work from. Here’s what people are talking about now that the briefing is over.

Here’s what a chip expert says about the PlayStation 4′s potential

PlayStation 4: Reactions from around the Internet

Sony’s Shu Yoshida talks PlayStation 4: PS3/PSN compatibility, microtransactions, and more

PlayStation 4: Sony impresses analysts — others not convinced the next Xbox won’t overshadow it

Grading the PlayStation 4 rumors

The biggest PlayStation 4 disappointments

The DeanBeat: Sorting through the significance of Sony’s PlayStation 4 revelation

Killzone: Shadow Fall demo reveals that Jimmy Fallon isn’t good at first-person shooters

Filed under: Games

Sony closes PS4 event with a trailer for Bungie’s Destiny

Dean Takahashi — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 01:30:56 +0000

Read all of our PlayStation 4 coverage (including games) here.

Game developer Bungie will take its upcoming Destiny first-person shooter game to the PlayStation 4. That’s a big deal, if Destiny is anywhere near as big a hit as the Halo series, which has sold more than 50 million games and generated billions in revenue to date.

Jason Jones, the co-founder of the Bellevue, Wash.-based game studio that created the Halo series, said in a video, “We can’t wait to see what PlayStation fans do when they set foot in our world for the first time.”

Destiny is expected to be one of the highest-quality, and most expensive, titles in the works anywhere in the industry today. After Bungie finished making the first set of Halo games for Microsoft, it cut a deal with Activision Blizzard to make Destiny, a three-part series to be published over the course of 10 years.

“Destiny is going to be amazing on PlayStation 4,” he said. “It’s a great piece of gear.

Bungie is creating a first-person shooter game that will be part of a massively multiplayer online gaming universe. And Jones said that players will be able to create, grow, and customize characters in a “persistent online world.”

He said the studio has been working on Destiny for a few years and the goal is to “take a genre like the first-person shooter and turn it on its head again.”

He said it includes a “fantastic new universe to explore” and that playing Destiny “cooperatively with friends will blow your mind.”

In a statement, Bungie chief executive Harold Ryan said, “Destiny is being developed for PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4, with both versions available at Destiny’s launch. Destiny will also feature exclusive in-game content, only available on PlayStation.”

Here’s some previous coverage of Destiny, and check out the new trailer below.

Filed under: Games

Bungie’s Destiny sure makes a lot of promises

Community Writer — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 13:24:08 +0000

By now, I’m sure you have witnessed the Destiny reveal ViDoc (video documentary). I, for one, was disappointed with it — the reason being that we didn’t learn anything substantial. Sure, we got some details about platforms, that the game is an always-online experience, and different character classes. But did we get to witness any actual gameplay or substantial in-game footage? Not really. All we got was concept art and lofty promises.

Developer Bungie’s first ViDoc for Destiny felt less like a reveal and more like a Kickstarter campaign. Maybe to some this isn’t a big deal. I’m sure these people are just excited to hear some news about what Bungie has been up to. I, on the other hand, can’t get past the fact that the team invited journalists from every publication to their HQ and told only them about the game. They revealed the game on a Sunday — a day that traditionally doesn’t generate news in this industry — and this way Bungie knew that Destiny would be the only game-related news for the day. It went out of its way to make this reveal big, but all it gave us were promises and more promises. One phrase from the video that stood out to me (and I also believe it sums up the entire reveal perfectly) was, “We are blazing tons of new trails.” What trails? So many promises and concepts, but nothing to back it up.

Please don’t get me wrong. I want Destiny to be everything Bungie promises. I am optimistic about what the final product will be. But when all we receive are lofty ideals with nothing to back it up, I become skeptical. Bungie should be wise and not wait too long to truly show the world its game. I hope it will be showing Destiny at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), and if we are lucky, also at PAX East.

Plain and simple, the ViDoc was a bad idea. It gives us all this information that we don’t know what to do with. This makes conversations on websites and social media like Twitter all about what was promised. Bungie should have just released a shiny 30-second story trailer. This way, all we would be talking about was how cool the trailer was, and the buzz around Destiny would still be high without blowing expectations of the game out of the atmosphere. This is much like someone running for political office. A candidate should never purposely raise expectations of himself because if he can’t meet those expectations, it looks really, really bad. And now, Bungie just took its already pretty high expectations and raised them to the moon.

Filed under: Games

Destiny revealed: The creators of Halo unveil their newest game

Jeffrey Grubb — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 18:15:42 +0000

Developer Bungie revealed its first new game since Halo: Reach today.

Destiny is a sci-fi shooter due out for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. It follows the story of the remaining humans on Earth after a near-apocalypse wipes out most of the planet’s population.

Bungie released the following video documentary to give gamers an early look at the game:

Filed under: Games

Beatles legend Paul McCartney is working on music for former Halo dev Bungie

Jeffrey Grubb — Sat, 07 Jul 2012 18:38:51 +0000

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.

Filed under: Games

Video game series contract will be tough for Bungie, easy for Activision

Dean Takahashi — Fri, 25 May 2012 19:00:40 +0000

The contract between Bungie, the celebrated maker of the Halo series, and Activision Blizzard was unsealed this week in litigation related to Activision’s feud with the co-founders of Infinity Ward, creator and former developer of the Call of Duty series.

As the Los Angeles Times reported, the 27-page document is the most detailed revelation of how to cut a modern deal between a super game studio and a giant game publisher. And based on a look at the contract, it seems like the deal is quite favorable to Activision and very challenging for Bungie, which signed with Activision after spending a decade working on Halo with Microsoft. The deal says that Bungie will make four massively multiplayer online (MMO), sci-fi, fantasy, action shooter games for Activision. The contract speaks volumes about publisher-developer relations.

The contract designates these as Destiny Games #1 through #4. The first game debuts in the fall of 2013, with a sequel following every two years. A major downloadable content (DLC) title (code-named Comet) also debuts in between major releases. Initially, Destiny will be an Xbox exclusive, but the PlayStation 3 version will come out in 2014. Bungie itself will hand off the PS 3 version to another developer. Bungie will own the intellectual property.

But in exchange for that, Kirkland, Wash.-based Bungie gave up a lot. Observers believe the games could easily cost $40 million to develop, with marketing budgets equal to that. If you add in 10 percent for overhead, the breakeven number for sales would be about 4.7 million units, according to one source who declined to be named. To get all of the bonuses, the average Bungie Destiny game might have to sell 13 million units or generate $804 million in revenue including the expansion pack’s sales.

Ben Schacter, an analyst at Macquarie Equities Research, said in a note that the bonus and royalty structures in the Bungie-Activision contract are “meaningful and quite positive for long-term investors” in Activision Blizzard. The game series as a whole must hit an operating margin of 25 percent before Bungie is eligible for meaningful royalties. That means that employees may have to stick around for years before they see a big bonus, and it could be tough for Bungie to hold on to its talent for a long time.

The contract was dated April 2010, so it is possible that it has been amended. In the document, the royalty payments are based on a series of operating income thresholds. The operating income hurdle is operated as a deficit account. That means that the deficit in one year will be subtracted from the following year’s operating income before calculating any royalty payments. Operating income is the money left over after you subtract game-related development, marketing, advertising, promotion, production and distribution expenses from net revenue. Activision can also terminate the contract if the first game does not sell 5 million units within the first six months.

The contract shows that Bungie is very confident that it can hit the 25 percent operating margin hurdle. For operating income up to $100 million, Bungie will receive a quarterly royalty of 20 percent. For operating income of $100 million to $400 million, the royalty rises to 24 percent. For $400 million and up, Bungie gets 35 percent. If the series hits $750 million in operating income, Bungie gets $25 million. It gets $25 million more if the operating income tops $1 billion. Activision can reduce the royalties if the games come out late. Bungie is contractually required to focus most of its resources and key people on Destiny, and the release of the games may come as either digital downloads or physical disks. The Destiny game is expected to debut on both the Xbox 360 and its successor.

If Bungie’s games hit a 90-plus rating on GameRankings.com, a review aggregator, then it gets another $2.5 million. That tells you that ratings for games aren’t viewed nearly as important as the operating income targets. In other words, making a ton of money from consumers is more important than pleasing the critics.

The contract also showed that Bungie is working on a successor to Marathon, the original Bungie game that became a cult hit after it was published in 1994 on the Mac. But Bungie can devote no more than 5 percent of its staff to work on the Marathon title. In 2018, Bungie is free to work on action shooters other than Destiny as it wishes. And while other developers may work on the DLC, Valve, Gearbox, and Epic are banned from doing any Destiny or Comet adaptations.

Other miscellaneous contract stipulations include: The game will fit into a “teen” rating, each Bungie employee can only receive two Activision games as gifts each year, and Bungie also has to disclose all Easter eggs, or secret rewards, hidden in the game.

We’ve asked Bungie and Activision for further comment on the contract and have not heard back from either party yet.

Filed under: Business, Games