Chris Roberts is under a lot of pressure to get Star Citizen right. The new massively multiplayer online sci-fi title from the creator of the legendary Wing Commander sci-fi spaceship combat games raised $7.7 million via crowdfunding on the promise of bringing back the glory days of science fiction combat simulations in a persistent online universe.

Roberts scored the money via Kickstarter and his own web site, Roberts Space Industries, for his new company Cloud Imperium Games, where he is chief creative officer. In an interview with GamesBeat at the DICE Summit game conference, Roberts said he is now working in the public eye. And everything has to pass muster with the thousands of fans who funded his project. On top of this, Roberts believes he’ll raise another round of funding from professional investors, just to ensure that he has all the resources he needs to live up to the eye-popping 3D visuals in his demo.

Last week, he posted about how he plans to handle “death” in the Star Citizen universe. If your spaceship is destroyed and you fail to bail out, you’ll lose your character and pass on the belongings to your heir, especially if you have taken the trouble to get an insurance policy.

Roberts’ game is perhaps the most ambitious crowdfunded online game that has ever been attempted. But he is accustomed to swinging for the fences. He started in games at Origin Systems, the Austin, Texas game studio that Electronic Arts later bought. He became a star in 1990 with the release of Wing Commander, a space combat game that produced nine sequels and spinoffs. For a time, it was a huge business for Electronic Arts, but the copycat sequels bored gamers and drove the franchise into the ground.

Roberts left Origin in 1996 and started his own company, Digital Anvil. Roberts said that no one has really picked up the mantle in sci-fi combat sims since his last company created the ill-fated Freelancer, published by Microsoft in 1999. That game took 4.5 years to make (and six to get to market), and by the end of it, Roberts had left the firm to make movies, and Microsoft acquired his company. Freelancer was not a huge commercial success, but it was memorable. The player went from planet to planet, running missions and building a cool spacecraft. In Roberts’ original vision, each one of those worlds was a living, breathing thing, full of people and adventures. It was a precursor to modern massively multiplayer online games.

Star Citizen will carry on that legacy on the PC when it launches in a couple of years. In the meantime, Roberts will release bits of it so that fans can battle test them. You’ll be able to inspect your ships and then fight in dogfights in the not-so-distant future. Once those modules are complete, they’ll be plugged into the larger game, which includes the online universe and a single-player campaign.

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

GamesBeat: You have an update, I guess? More things are happening?

Chris Roberts: I did this fairly big update the day before yesterday about how death is going to get handled in a persistent world. Single-player is pretty easy. You die, and you go back to an earlier save point. But obviously, in a multiplayer online world where there ’s lots of other people playing, you can’t go back in time. The universe carries on.

GamesBeat: How do you handle death?

Roberts: The hardcore version is permadeath. Your character dies and you start a new character. That’s hyper-realistic, but maybe not so much fun. Then the other side of the coin is that you never die. You respawn and you’re basically immortal. You just lose time getting back to the spot you were at. I did an update on something I’ve been thinking about for a while that I thought would give a sense of mortality and history and risk, but not be too punishing. It’s a slightly different approach from the way most multiplayer games work.

The big challenge for something like that in the environment where I’m building a game is that I’m doing it publicly. It’s not behind the curtain anymore. You have to figure out how to share concepts with people. You’re never going to please all the people all the time. You’re never going to keep them all happy. There’s always people who are polarized on either side. That’s one of the challenges of a crowdfunded game where you’re open about your development process. Any time you’ll try something slightly out of the norm, it takes some people out of their comfort zone. They’re going to be upset about it.

It generally went over well. I think it could work, and it would fix some of the problems I have with big multiplayer setups, where I have trouble getting immersed in the world. That’s my goal with Star Citizen, to have this living universe. People have history. If you’ve been in a lot of dogfights and escape by the skin of your teeth and I see you in the bar, you’ll have scars on you. Maybe you have a cybernetic arm. You look like you’ve been through the wringer a few times. I haven’t really seen that. That’s kind of like the character version of ship damage, so to speak. That was the recent big thing.

GamesBeat: The usual punishment for death in games is that you have to respawn far away, right? 

Roberts: Yeah. You have to go back to the spawn point.

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At 57, Warren Spector is a famous and unemployed game developer. At last week’s DICE Summit, Spector gave a talk about his art form and acknowledged the “elephant in the room.” Disney had just shut down his video game company, Junction Point Studios, the maker of the Epic Mickey series.

He isn’t talking about exactly why that happened, but it’s no secret that the studio’s second release, Epic Mickey: The Power of Two, didn’t sell well. Spector made a lot of comments about how he felt like the oldest game designer, though he noted the presence of many “gray beards” in the room listening to his talk. Spector was understandably downbeat during his presentation, and he intimated that he felt like he was the oldest person still making games. But he found some silver lining in his tired but wise message.

“I worked with an amazing team on amazing projects,” he said. “I got to visit Disneyland as a contributor to the company.”

Quoting inventor Alexander Graham Bell, Spector said, “When one door closes, another opens. Another aphorism is more relevant. ‘Chaos is a friend of mine.’ Bob Dylan said it in 1965, and it is still true today. I have seen so much chaos in the last 35 years, you wouldn’t believe it.”

Being unemployed has given Spector a chance to reflect on the past. Lots of console-game developers are closing now. But Spector remembers how people thought gaming had no future when arcades died out. When the PC supplanted the Apple II, fans thought that was the end of games as well. Massively multiplayer online titles were going to put an end to single-player releases. Spector has heard it all, yet the interactive-entertainment industry continues to grow and spread out in all directions.

After Junction Point shut down, a programmer asked Spector if he wanted to retire. But Spector knew he wouldn’t.

“I still have stuff I want to make,” he said. “It was an eye-opening question. I am close to an end of a career. I’m not ready to retire yet.”

Spector believes, like Quantic Dream’s David Cage, that developers should grow up and figure out how to reach wider audiences with more diverse content. But he disagreed with every solution that Cage recommended in his own DICE talk, such as creating games with meaning.

Showing a slide of a violent scene, Spector said, “Some games should not be made.” He acknowledged that a time existed when he was young where a title only needed “transgressive adrenaline rush and spectacle.” Now he wants content that is relevant to him today, with intellectual offerings like Cage’s Heavy Rain and Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead.

Spector said, “I have no interest in guys who wear armor and swing big swords. I really don’t need to go there anymore. I want content that is relevant to my life. That is set in the real world.”

“If we are going to reach a broader audience, we have to think beyond teen boys and girls, about things that are relevant to normal humans,” he said.

Right now, games appeal to people who have a lot of time and the ability to master skills best done by 16-year-olds.

In his 50s, Spector feels confident in his abilities and doesn’t give a damn what others think. Emotionally, he’s in a good place. But he recognizes that time is scarce.

“You don’t have time to make mistakes anymore. You value passion over analytics,” he said.

He said that it’s OK to rely on others and slow down. It’s OK for him to think about helping others accomplish their goals and give back.

“Know thyself but be careful,” he said. Spector explained that you don’t want to work on a certain kind of game for 30 years because that is your habit. You have to think about what else you can do.

“You should push aside those geekish things quicker than I did because you don’t have as much time as you think,” he said.

And he has come to appreciate the importance of the word “legacy.”

He said, “Leave something behind. Most people who are working for 30 years. You are creating something new and different the world has never seen. Think of your legacy.”

What will he do when he is in his 60s?

“I cannot wait to find out,” he said.

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

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Jesse Schell, a game designer and professor of entertainment technology at Carnegie Mellon University, is one of the leading academic thinkers and communicators in video games. He raised his profile in 2010 when he gave a talk, “Beyond Facebook,” at the industry conference the DICE Summit that got more than a million views on sites such as YouTube and TED.

“That was shocking to me because I’m a college professor, and I’m not used to having people listen to what I say,” Schell, who is also the chief executive officer of Schell Games, said at his second appearance last week at the DICE Summit 2013.

In his 2010 talk, he urged Zynga to go to real-money gambling. That turned out to be prescient. He also predicted the iPad would fail because it was like a Swiss Army knife that didn’t do any one thing great. That prediction was a dud. He also foresaw that gamification, where non-game companies used game-like mechanics to spur customer engagement, could be applied to such a large swath of activities in the real world. That spurred the creation of a gamification industry, which was a strange side effect since Schell wasn’t saying this was a good idea at all. He also predicted an onrush of “authenticity,” something that fans expect and want from all of the entertainment, products, and services they embrace. His message in 2010 was that “games have crept out and are going everywhere.”

At this year’s DICE, Schell returned with a talk on “the secret mechanisms,” which was loaded with a million ideas and a million expert opinions. He made some keen observations about the hype curve and what’s hot in games. He noted that Zynga was hyped, it crashed, and everyone dumped on it, and it may now be poised for a more realistic comeback.

Schell thought that the gamification hype was off base because those companies are applying a one-size-fits-all solution, and they are failing to consider the nuances in what motivates people. He believes game designers carefully study the psychology of seeking out pleasure and how it is different from avoiding pain. Done poorly, gamification can be as dumb as “chocofication,” or making vegetables sweet so kids will eat them.

A good way for developers to entice gamers is to invite them to engage in plans, like figuring out how to reach goals in titles. But Schell worries about the mad rush into free-to-play games — not because it’s a good way to reach a wider audience. Rather, he worries about properly motivating players and distinguishing between work and play. When players want a game so much that they’re willing to pay $60 upfront, there’s nothing wrong with that. But if you create a free-to-play game and then create frustrating hurdles so that the player is forced to pay money in a microtransaction, then it becomes a pain. If you trick players into playing a game that forces them to pay, they may resent you and quit.

“There are different channels in the brain for seeking positive consequences and avoiding negative consequences,” he said. “These games promise you utopia, and then you find yourself in chains. That’s the part that’s frustrating.” It would “suck” to make a game like Skyrim into a free-to-play title where you have to buy things to make progress. He pointed out that Disneyland started out with tickets, or microtransactions, and then shifted to a single ticket price. Disneyland’s revenues have gone up because people like to pay one price up front and then do whatever they want. Payment systems have to be fair.

“People are willing to sacrifice to get into utopia,” Schell said. “Every single one of us is searching for utopia … . In utopia, you don’t screw people out of nickels and dimes.”

To get to that utopia in games, Schell advocates creating social games that don’t use gimmicks to get you addicted. Rather, he wants social gaming that makes you feel more connected to friends and family. He believes games with magical interfaces will be appealing. And he wants companies to make people into better people, or the people they want to be.

“We are shifting into an enjoyment-based economy,” he said. “And who knows more about making enjoyment than game developers. Fake marketing bullshit isn’t going to work anymore. You have to bring people to the promised land. Then you will be in an excellent place.”

Schell hasn’t figured everything out. He tried his hand last fall at an idea that allowed players to suggest the course of a game that designers were creating, episode by episode. Schell Games created Puzzle Clubhouse to crowdsource games, but it didn’t work out. Schell Games is moving on to an interesting new idea that allows players to propose their own ideas for a game that professional developers can then create.

After his talk, we caught up with him for an interview. Here’s an edited transcript.

GamesBeat: Tell us about pleasure and pain pathways and why it matters in games. 

Schell: For me, it was a huge insight that, when you’re looking at the neuroscience of the brain, we have different systems for seeking out pleasure and different systems for avoiding pain. When we think about it as designers, we just think about it as, “Oh, we’re incentivizing the player.” We think about just one thing. But you can feel it as a player when it shifts over.

This is one of the problems with free-to-play. It lures you in initially with pleasure-seeking or reward-seeking behavior, and then it gradually shifts over to pain avoidance. Don’t let your friends down. You’ve got this, and you might lose it if you don’t do something. You plant the strawberries, and if you don’t harvest them, you’re going to lose the money and everyone’s going to see your wilted crops.

GamesBeat: This is what winds up not being fun — or frustrating players.

Schell: It’s part of the tool for slow seduction of players into something that isn’t fun anymore. Something that starts out fun becomes gradually less fun. You still want to do it as much. If you’re looking at the player incentive, it stays level, until one day it suddenly drops off. I love the way [my colleague] says it. People don’t just stop playing Facebook games. They divorce them. That’s why.

GamesBeat: Is it similar to gambling in that way? Gambling lures you in, but it doesn’t wind up being that much fun.

Schell: For some people, it does. You could draw the similarity to if you’re gambling and you fall behind. Initially, you start out, and you’ve got your pot of money. You hope to leverage it into a big win. I think about gambling a lot because it’s interesting, and it’s hard to think about. If you go in with a pot of money and you say, “If I lose this all, it’s OK,” then you never get into it. If you go in and you say, “I’ve got this much money, but I don’t want to lose it all. I’m OK with putting up half,” but then you feel like you should dig in to that second half, then you get into that bad place of pain avoidance. “I gotta get my pot back, or I’m screwed. I shouldn’t have bet the company payroll on this.”

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LAS VEGAS — Jenova Chen got a letter from a 15-year-old girl named Sophia last month. She said that she had played Journey with her father before he died from an illness, and the game had changed her life.

“That letter made it all worth it,” said Jenova Chen, the cofounder of Thatgamecompany, which won game of the year last night for Journey at the DICE Summit. It’s a PlayStation Network downloadable title that’s unique among video games for its poetic ambiance and lack of violence and dialogue.

Chen talked about Sophia’s letter (attached at the end of story) at the close of a talk on emotions in games.

Many participants, like Shuhei Yoshida, the head of Sony’s worldwide game studios, said that Chen’s talk was the highlight of the event and that it was more like an authentic confessional. Chen got a roar of applause when he was finished.

He and his team also got a roar of applause when they won “game of the year” at the game industry’s equivalent of the Oscars, the peer-voted DICE Awards.

Journey, like Thatgamecompany’s Flower before it, was a rarity in a game industry full of violent content. The game depicts a being’s lonely journey to the top of a mountain and the spiritual change that takes place along the way. I played the game with my three daughters several times all the way through — something they’ve never done with a PlayStation 3 game (except Flower). Journey has no weapons or words, but it is full of emotion.

Journey’s unique in a business that has every kind of shooter game, but very little content such as romantic comedies, which are so plentiful in movies. The game was all the more remarkable in that it was made in about three years with a team of 13 people; major game projects typically employee a hundred or more.

In his talk and a subsequent interview, Chen revealed that not only is Journey a metaphor for life and death, it is also an apt description of the struggle that Los Angeles-based Thatgamecompany went through. During the process of shipping Journey, Thatgamecompany went bankrupt and had to idle its staff. If the team had shipped on time, they wouldn’t have had a polished game. It was a tough decision to delay it.

Chen said that the team was supposed to ship a year earlier than it did, and it had run out of money. The staff got by on half salaries for six months. When they shipped to Sony in January, the coffers were dry. The company ran out of money, gave everyone three-week vacations, and no one expected to come back.

Chief exec Kellee Santiago (in red) and designer Robin Hunicke (in black) both left the company. Chen stayed on in a minimal capacity. Eight of the company’s 13 employees eventually moved on to do something else.

But the story has a happy ending. Journey went on to become the best-selling PlayStation Network game of all time. Chen doesn’t know for sure, but presumably it will earn royalties. And Mitch Lasky, a general partner at Benchmark Capital, was so moved when he played Journey that he started talks to invest. Thatgamecompany raised $5.5 million, and it committed itself to making cross-platform games that deliver human emotion to a wider audience.

Last night, Chen won the ultimate vindication for delaying the launch of Journey. The company won eight awards out of 11 nominations, including the Best Game Director award for Chen and Game of the Year. We talked to Chen in an interview, and here is an edited transcript of the talk.

GamesBeat: Maybe you want to start with the ending of your talk, with this letter from Sophia and what it made you feel when it arrived.

Jenova Chen: Over the course of last year, we’ve been getting this kind of mail pretty consistently. I was quite moved by it early on. I think there were more than five or six people who’ve lost their family members. They contacted us to talk about how they were reminded of their passed-away family members in the game. By traveling with them, they were able to settle with their grief. Most of the mail was just along the lines of “It’s a wonderful game! I just wanted to tell you how great it is.” But very so often there’s a message that touches me, and I have to write back. I have to share it with everyone who worked on Journey. This happened to be one of the most recent ones. It’s January, so I still remember it.

GamesBeat: Did you have a conversation with her then?

Chen: She’s 15. I wrote back to her. I think my e-mail was probably too theoretical, talking about how it’s not the worst thing, how life will be better. I didn’t hear back from her. I shared the e-mail with Sony, though. A lot of people were moved by it. They wanted to send her a poster or the collector’s edition of the game. I think that’s what happened.

GamesBeat: As you said, that’s exactly the kind of target that you had in mind for the emotional reaction to the game.

Chen: The mission statement of Thatgamecompany, after all these years, is that we want to create timeless interactive entertainment that makes positive changes to the human psyche. If our games can help people, that’s the best reward we can get. Hearing that girl saying the game helped make her life better is all the hard work paying off.

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LAS VEGAS — Indie darling Journey destroyed its fellow nomines at the annual Design Innovate Communicate Entertain (D.I.C.E.) Summit winning Game of the Year to go along with seven other awards Thursday night at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino.

Source: Dean Takahashi

thatgamecompany accepting the 2013 DICE Awards GOTY.

Now in its 16th year and put on by the Academy of Interactive & Science, the awards ceremony wasn’t without a little controversy, as a series of montages glossed the announcements of a number of winners, preventing people from coming up to accept an award or give a speech. At one point, an apparently slightly intoxicated member of the Skylanders team rushed the stage to request his fellow montage winners be allowed to join him and thank their hard-working dev teams.

From the D.I.C.E. Award nominations press release: “Titles were played and evaluated by members of the Academy’s Peer Panels to determine final nominees. These panels, one for each award category, are comprised of the game industry’s most experienced and talented men and women who are experts in their chosen fields. All Academy members are eligible to vote for the winners in every category.”

Below you’ll find the full list of nominees, their corresponding publisher/developer, and the winner for each category (in bold). I found it a bit reductive of the Academy to merge the RPG and MMO genres into one category and that it didn’t consider many important releases, such as Xenoblade Chronicles.

Game of the Year

• Borderlands 2 (2k Games/Gearbox Software)
• Far Cry 3 (Ubisoft)
• Journey (Sony Computer Entertainment America, LLC/thatgamecompany)
• The Walking Dead (Telltale Games)
• XCOM: Enemy Unknown (2k Games/Firaxis Games)

Outstanding Achievement in Game Direction

• Journey (Sony Computer Entertainment America, LLC/thatgamecompany)
• Dishonored (Bethesda Softworks/Arkane Studios)
• Far Cry 3 (Ubisoft)
• The Unfinished Swan (Sony Computer Entertainment America, LLC/Giant Sparrow)
• The Walking Dead (Telltale Games)

Outstanding Innovation in Gaming

• Journey (Sony Computer Entertainment America, LLC/thatgamecompany)
• Nintendo Land (Nintendo of America Inc./Nintendo)
• Sound Shapes (Sony Computer Entertainment America, LLC/Queasy Games)
• The Unfinished Swan (Sony Computer Entertainment America, LLC/Giant Sparrow)
• The Walking Dead (Telltale Games)

Downloadable Game of the Year

• Fez (Microsoft Studios/Polytron Corporation)
• Journey (Sony Computer Entertainment America, LLC/thatgamecompany)
• Mark of the Ninja (Microsoft Studios/Klei Entertainment)
• The Unfinished Swan (Sony Computer Entertainment America, LLC/Giant Sparrow)
• The Walking Dead (Telltale Games)

Handheld Game of the Year

• Gravity Rush (Sony Computer Entertainment America, LLC/Japan Studio)
• Paper Mario Sticker Star (Nintendo of America Inc./Intelligent Systems)
• Resident Evil Revelations (Capcom USA/Capcom Co., Ltd.)
• Sound Shapes (Sony Computer Entertainment America, LLC/Queasy Games)
• Uncharted: Golden Abyss (Sony Computer Entertainment America, LLC/Sony Bend Studio)

Mobile Game of the Year

• Fairway Solitaire (Big Fish)
• Hero Academy (Robot Entertainment)
• Horn (Zynga Inc./Phosphor Games Studio)
• Rayman: Jungle Run (Ubisoft/Pastagames, Ubisoft Montpellier)

Web Based Game of the Year

• Bingo Bash (BitRhymes Inc.)
• Burrito Bison Revenge (Adult Swim/Juicy Beast Studio)
• CityVille 2 (Zynga)
• Sim City Social (Electronic Arts/Maxis, Playfish)
• Song Pop (FreshPlanet Inc.)

Action Game of the Year

• Borderlands 2 (2k Games/Gearbox Software)
• Far Cry 3 (Ubisoft)
• Halo 4 (Microsoft Studios/343 Industries)
• Hitman: Absolution (Square Enix, Inc./IO Interactive)
• Sleeping Dogs (Square Enix, Inc./United Front Games)

Adventure Game of the Year

• Assassin’s Creed III (Ubisoft)
• Darksiders II (THQ/Vigil Games)
• Dishonored (Bethesda Softworks/Arkane Studios)
• New Super Mario Bros. Wii U (Nintendo)
• The Walking Dead (Telltale Games)

Casual Game of the Year

• Fairway Solitaire (Big Fish)
• Journey (Sony Computer Entertainment America, LLC/thatgamecompany)
• Puzzle Craft (Electronic Arts/Ars Thanea)
• Rayman Jungle Run (Ubisoft/Pastagames, Ubisoft Montpellier)
• Sound Shapes (Sony Computer Entertainment America, LLC/Queasy Games)

Family Game of the Year

• Dance Central 3 (Microsoft Studios/Harmonix Music Systems)
• Just Dance 4 (Ubisoft/Ubisoft Paris, Ubisoft Reflections, Ubisoft Bucharest, Ubisoft Bune, Ubisoft Milan)
• Lego Batman 2: DC Super Heroes (Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment/ TT Games)
• Nintendo Land (Nintendo of America Inc./Nintendo)
• Skylanders Giants (Activision Publishing, Inc./Toys for Bob)

Fighting Game of the Year

• Persona 4 (Arena Atlus Co./Arc System Works)
• PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale (Sony Computer Entertainment America, LLC/SuperBot Entertainment, Inc.)
• Soulcalibur V (Namco/Project Soul)
• Street Fighter X Tekken (Capcom USA/Capcom Co., Ltd.)
• Tekken Tag Tournament 2 (Namco Bandai Games)

Racing Game of the Year

• Forza Horizon (Microsoft Studios/Turn 10 Studios Playground Games)
• LittleBigPlanet Karting (Sony Computer Entertainment America, LLC/United Front Games)
• MotorStorm RC (Sony Computer Entertainment Europe/Evolution Studios)
• Need for Speed Most Wanted (Electronic Arts/Criterion Games)
• Trials: Evolution (Microsoft Studios/RedLynx Ltd.)

Role-Playing/Massively Multiplayer Game of the Year

• Diablo III (Blizzard Entertainment)
• Dust: An Elysian Tale (Microsoft Studios/Humble Hearts)
• Guild Wars 2 (NC Soft/ArenaNet)
• Mass Effect 3 (Electronic Arts/BioWare)
• Torchlight 2 (Runic Games)

Sports Game of the Year

• FIFA Soccer 13 (Electronic Arts/EA Canada)
• MLB The Show 2012 (Sony Computer Entertainment America, LLC/San Diego Studios)
• NBA 2K13 (2K Sports/Visual Concepts)

Strategy/Simulation Game of the Year

• FTL (Subset Games)
• Minecraft 360 (Microsoft Studios Mojang/4J Studios)
• Orcs Must Die 2 (Robot Entertainment)
• Total War: SHOGUN 2- Fall of the Samurai (SEGA of America Inc./The Creative Assembly)
• XCOM: Enemy Unknown (2k Games/Firaxis Games)

Outstanding Achievement in Animation

• Assassin’s Creed III (Ubisoft)
• Far Cry 3 (Ubisoft)
• Hitman: Absolution (Square Enix, Inc./IO Interactive)
• Mark of the Ninja (Microsoft Studios/Klei Entertainment)
• Uncharted: Golden Abyss (Sony Computer Entertainment America, LLC/Sony Bend Studio)

Outstanding Achievement in Art Direction

• Borderlands 2 (2k Games/Gearbox Software)
• Dishonored (Bethesda Softworks/Arkane Studios)
• Far Cry 3 (Ubisoft)
• Halo 4 (Microsoft Studios/343 Industries)
• Journey (Sony Computer Entertainment America, LLC/thatgamecompany)

Outstanding Character Performance

• Borderlands 2: Tiny Tina (2k Games/Gearbox Software)
• Far Cry 3: Vaas Montenegro (Ubisoft)
• Halo 4: Cortana (Microsoft Studios/343 Industries)
• Mass Effect 3: Female Commander Shepard (Electronic Arts/BioWare)
• The Walking Dead: Lee Everett (Telltale Games)

Outstanding Achievement in Connectivity

• Call of Duty: Black Ops II (Activision/Treyarch)
• Halo 4 (Microsoft Studios/343 Industries)
• Nike+ Kinect Training (Microsoft Studios/Sumo Digital Lrd.)

Outstanding Achievement in Gameplay Engineering

• Dishonored (Bethesda Softworks/Arkane Studios)
• Gravity Rush (Sony Computer Entertainment America, LLC/Japan Studio)
• Journey (Sony Computer Entertainment America, LLC/thatgamecompany)
• The Walking Dead (Telltale Games)
• XCOM: Enemy Unknown (2k Games/Firaxis Games)

Outstanding Achievement in Online Gameplay

• Borderlands 2 (2k Games/Gearbox Software)
• Call of Duty: Black Ops II (Activision/Treyarch)
• Diablo III (Blizzard Entertainment)
• Halo 4 (Microsoft Studios/343 Industries)
• Journey (Sony Computer Entertainment America, LLC/thatgamecompany)

Outstanding Achievement in Original Music Composition

• Diablo III (Blizzard Entertainment)
• Far Cry 3 (Ubisoft)
• Journey (Sony Computer Entertainment America, LLC/thatgamecompany)
• Mass Effect 3 (Electronic Arts/BioWare)
• World Of Warcraft Mists Of Pandaria (Blizzard Entertainment)

Outstanding Achievement in Sound Design

• Assassin’s Creed III (Ubisoft/Ubisoft)
• Diablo III (Blizzard Entertainment/Blizzard Entertainment)
• Journey (Sony Computer Entertainment America, LLC/thatgamecompany)
• Medal of Honor: Warfighter (Electronic Arts/Danger Close Games)
• Syndicate (Electronic Arts/Starbreeze Studios)

Outstanding Achievement in Story

• Dishonored Bethesda Softworks Arkane Studios
• Journey (Sony Computer Entertainment America, LLC/thatgamecompany)
• Sleeping Dogs (Square Enix, Inc./United Front Games)
• Spec Ops: The Line (2k Games/YAGER Development GmbH)
• The Walking Dead (Telltale Games/Telltale Games)

Outstanding Achievement in Visual Engineering

• Call of Duty: Black Ops II (Activision/Treyarch)
• Halo 4 (Microsoft Studios/343 Industries)
• Hitman: Absolution (Square Enix, Inc./IO Interactive)
• Need for Speed Most Wanted (Electronic Arts/Criterion Games)
• Total War: SHOGUN 2- Fall of the Samurai (SEGA of America Inc./The Creative Assembly)

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

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Back in October, Bettner and his brother, David, made headlines when they resigned from Zynga. The social gaming giant had paid $53.3 million for their company, Newtoy in McKinney, Texas, in 2010. And Words With Friends is still played billions of minutes each month on mobile and social game platforms. The Bettners were part of an exodus of key employees and executives at Zynga, which has reported weak financial results.

Julie Uhrman, the chief executive of Ouya, said in her talk at the DICE Summit that she was excited that Bettner’s firm will make two games for her company’s console, which brings Android games to the television. She also said that Tim Schafer’s Double Fine Productions will also publish its game, The Cave, and another upcoming game, Reds, on Ouya.

Bettner said David, who moved to Austin, won’t be joining his new company, Verse, which is based in McKinney. The company has seven employees. David is on the board.

“I thought I would take time off, but that didn’t work out,” he said. “There is so much exciting stuff going on.”

He said that he feels like the launch of the Ouya console is a lot like the excitement in the early days of the iPhone. He left Microsoft as a game developer in those days to start Newtoy, and everybody thought he was crazy.

“It felt to me that the opportunity was right,” he said. “I felt like I have been an explorer to an uncharted island. Now I am looking back at the mainland that I left, and I think the pendulum will swing back now. This television gaming will follow the similar disruption that happened in the handheld space.”

Bettner believes that Ouya’s solution will satisfy many people who want to get an experience like an app store on their television. When Bettner spoke to Uhrman at Ouya, he got more excited about the possibilities of getting free-to-play apps on his TV.

“Why can’t I get that experience on my TV,” Bettner said. “A bunch of people like me are waiting for this to happen in their living room. This talk of consoles dying is ridiculous. I want to take what I learned and bring it back to the industry I left. The app store democratized gaming on mobile devices. The same opportunity should exist on the console.”

As for quitting Zynga, Better said that he found that “I am not good at working for anybody else. My vision is very different.”

Bettner has funded the company himself but may seek a seed round. He is also fascinated by Hollywood funding models, where directors, actors, and other talent get together for a funded movie and then move on to something else.

“You can’t do that in the game industry now,” he said.

David Edery, the head of the mobile game firm Spry Fox, said his firm concentrates on making hobbies, rather than games. That is, he makes things that people will come back to every day and play over and over again. That’s what Bettner accomplished with Words With Friends, and that is what he aims to do again. He isn’t talking about what titles he will do yet. But he wants to tailor it to fit the Ouya device.

Bettner said he was impressed when Ouya completed its Kickstarter, raising $8.3 million, and then met its schedule for shipping its development kits last December.

Will Bettner repeat the success of Words With Friends? “We built that with three people,” he said. “We didn’t know it would be a cultural sensation. It was good enough and focused so much on execution. That is still driving us today. We are trying to build that hobby again, becoming part of someone’s life so they can’t wait to play it again with their friends.”

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

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Cage, the chief exec of movie-like game developer Quantic Dream (the makers of alternative titles such as Indigo Prophecy and Heavy Rain), is making an ambitious game dubbed Beyond: Two Souls, which received accolades last year at the E3 game trade show. He gave a talk at the DICE Summit about the “Peter Pan syndrome,” or how the game industry’s refusal to grow up as other industries have.

“The ‘Peter Pan syndrome’ describes a person who is socially immature and anxious at the idea of becoming an adult,” he said. “They refuse to grow up.”

As evidence for this, Cage pointed to the list of the 30 best-selling games of all time. Nintendo had 21 of these, such as Super Mario Bros., mostly directed at kids. The Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto series accounted for a number of the game on the list. And the lone casual title was Kinect Adventures.

This means that the winning genres are kids, casual, and violent action games.

If you compare the 1992 game Wolfenstein 3D to Call of Duty: Black Ops II in 2012, you see the tremendous evolution of realistic graphics. But the games, he said, are pretty much the same.

“You kill people before they kill you,” Cage said. “We use the same paradigms. You master this system to beat the computer or your friends. Same worlds. Same games. No surprise, we have the same audience.”

Cage said the game industry should change because the landscape is changing quickly, with big changes in digital distribution that brings more competition. On top of that, the competition for entertainment time in a world of many platforms is getting even more fierce.

Cage’s prescription for the game industry follows.

1. He said we have to make games for a wider audience.

2. Change our paradigms. “We cannot keep doing same games all the time,” he said. “Violence and platforms are not the only way. We have to decide that as an industry.” He added, “If the main character can’t hold a gun, designers don’t know what to do. How do I play?

3. Remember the importance of meaning. He asked, “What do we have to say?” He said games should address real-world themes like politics or homosexuality, should let authors in. All real-world themes should come into use.

“It will leave an imprint and keep you thinking about it after you have finished,” he said.

4. Become accessible. “Let’s focus on minds, not on thumbs,” he said. “Who cares how fast you can move your fingers?” He said the journey is important, not the challenge.

5. Bring other talent on board. Like filmmakers.

6. Establish new relationships with Hollywood. Games shouldn’t just be licensed products. “This is not the right way to build a relationship,” he said. “Games can be a respected medium now. Time has come for a constructive, balanced new partnership.”

7. Changing our relationship with censorship. “Sometimes I use violence, sometimes I use sex,” he said. “Now I have someone looking over my shoulder saying what you can’t do. If it is OK in a film, why is it not OK in a game?” The answer is games are “interactive” or geared toward kids. “As long as violence and sex are put in context, they should be fine,” he said. At the same time, he is shocked by games that try to one-up each other with increasing levels of violence. “We should stop doing this, because this is a matter of being responsible to ourselves and society,” he said. “If we don’t want to be accused of being responsible every time something terrible happens, we should be responsible.”

8. The role of the press should evolve from reviewers to critics. “Press are very clever people who analyze the industry,” he said. “On the other side of the spectrum, people give just scores. You have a camera bug and so you get a 5-out-of-10 [review score]. This is not press. Where is the analysis or thinking? Being a critic is a very serious job.”

9. The importance of gamers. When you buy games, he said, “You place a vote on where the future of games should go.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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And then they revealed that they are working with each on movie and game projects.

Abrams’ star has risen in Hollywood as he directed films such as Super 8 and Star Trek. Last week, Disney named him the director of the upcoming Star Wars: Episode 7 movie.

Newell is a celebrity in his own right, as Valve is the maker of Half-Life, Portal and Portal 2, Left 4 Dead, Counter-Strike, and others — all highly regarded and notable games. Valve also runs the Steam digital game distribution and community service on the PC, and it is considering entering the living room console market with the so-called Steam Box, an open Linux-based machine.

The two celebrities shared their views on stage at the 12th annual DICE Summit, an elite game industry event in Las Vegas. Abrams thanked Newell for the games that he and his family have enjoyed over the years. The audience laughed throughout the conversation, and the faux antagonism was clearly staged to make the divisions between movies and games seem sharper.

Abrams started talking about how films are linear and they craft the experience that the filmmaker wants the audience to have. Then Newell interrupted him and said, “Not to pick on you, but movies take away the notion of agency.”

He showed a clip from Cloverfield, featuring massive destruction happening in front of the camera, and Newell then said, “Put the camera down and fucking run.”

Abrams said, “The problem I have in games is that players are sometimes running in the same direction.” Abrams showed two clips where a player could completely ignore a computer-controlled character who was talking to the player’s character. The player could interrupt the conversation and throw a grenade at the person.

“When you and I are playing Left 4 Dead, you can come over and save me,” Newell said. “It is our story.”

But Abrams retorted that there should be consistency and meaning to the story being told.

Abrams showed a couple of scenes from Jaws, saying that film makers can plant seeds early on in a story that are pulled into a major plot element later on in the film. But Newell showed a clip from the Portal 2 video game where plot points are delivered in a very cinematic, movie-like way.

“It leads you toward the resolution of the game, and one of the great things about this is that it is under the player’s control,” Newell. “The self-paced mechanism is key” to a better psychological experience and multiple playthroughs. Movie makers could learn from this pacing, Newell said, where the player gets the satisfaction of being in control.

Abrams showed a clip from Star Trek where he embedded an image of R2-D2 from Star Wars in a pile of debris outside of the Enterprise.

“So I should go back to watch all of your films to study debris and find out what movie you are directing next?” Newell said.

Abrams showed another clip from Die Hard and noted it was 23 minutes into the film before the real action started. That sequence sets up all of the pyrotechnics that happen later.

“Movies let you experience moments that are not the point but are everything,” he said.

Newell showed a scene from Half-Life 2 where you get a new weapon. But the scene shows more of the background behind the character Alex, her sense of playfulness, and her relationship with her father. In that sense, Newell works in the same kind of storytelling into the fabric of a game.

“The more you play, the more you learn, the more you feel,” Abrams said, agreeing with Newell.

“I love your games,” Abrams said. “It would be fun to work with you on.”

“We are recapitulating a series of conversations about what happens when game and movie people work together,” Newell said.

And the kicker: The two men are working together on a game, and Valve will see how it can contribute to an Abrams movie.

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

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The game industry’s marquee conference, the DICE (Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain) Summit, is going to open with the geek equivalent of Star Trek’s Kirk and Spock. Film maker J.J. Abrams, who is directing the next Star Wars movie, will appear on stage with Valve co-founder Gabe Newell to talk about storytelling across digital entertainment platforms.

The opening keynote discussion at the conference will feature a conversation between the giants of two different entertainment industries in a talk entitled, “Storytelling Across Platforms: Who Benefits Most, the Audience or the Player?” We’ll be there, covering it live.

Abrams’ presence at the game event will inevitably invite discussion about the marriage of Hollywood and gaming, two industries that have had a mixed history together. But “transmedia” entertainment properties, or those that cross into different media, have become a bigger deal, leading to either huge entertainment blockbusters or flops.

Abrams is clearly the more famous entertainment celebrity, but Newell — whose company has made blockbusters such as Half-Life, Portal, and Left 4 Dead — has an equally committed fan community in the gaming space. At DICE, Newell will enter into the game industry’s Hall of Fame.

The keynote will take place on Feb. 6, the opening day of the 2013 DICE Summit at the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas. The Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences (AIAS) produces the summit, and it will feature an awards program that is akin to the Oscars of games.

“This about great entertainment, storytelling, and creativity,” said Martin Rae, president of the AIAS, in an interview with GamesBeat. “It’s about how two very different people have a conversation about what is important in entertaining their audiences. I know DICE attendees will be fascinated with what these two incredible people will have to say.”

Lucasfilm, which Disney acquired for $4 billion, recently confirmed Abrams as the director of the next Star Wars film, the seventh episode in the series.

“J.J. is involved in activities that resonate with game people,” Rae said. “And Gabe looked out ahead of everybody and anticipated what gamers needed. They’re brilliant and creative but come from different places.”

Abrams is the founder and president of Bad Robot Productions. Formed in 2001, Bad Robot has made films and television series such as Cloverfield, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, ABC’s Lost, Fox’s Fringe, and CBS’s Person of Interest. In 1998, Abrams co-created his first television series, Felicity; he then created and executive produced Alias in 2001, and co-created and executive produced Lost in 2004. In 2006, Abrams directed his first feature film, Mission: Impossible 3, followed by 2009’s Star Trek and 2011’s Super 8, which he also wrote. His most recent feature, Star Trek Into Darkness, will open in May.

Through Bad Robot Interactive, Abrams also created two award-winning apps, Super 8 and Action Movie FX. Rae said, “J.J. is about pushing entertainment to people using different media. The question for the future is how do you want the audience to be engaged? The entertainment of the future will be more interactive.”

Newell will also speak on the morning of Feb. 7 in a talk entitled “A View on Next Steps.” That talk will focus on the game industry. Newell made headlines recently when he unveiled plans to create an open-source, Linux-based video game console for use with televisions. The machine uses Valve’s Steam service, which dominates the field of digital-game distribution.

Rae said the Abrams-Newell conversation will stream live online.

[Image credits: JJ Abrams by Joi Ito, Flickr Creative Commons; Gabe Newell, Dean Takahashi]

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

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The game industry’s brain trust has revamped the structure of its exclusive DICE Summit conference and renamed its industry awards.

The 12th annual DICE (Design, Innovate, Communicate and Entertain) Summit will be held at the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas and will feature an awards program — renamed the DICE Awards — in the larger venue of the Hard Rock’s The Joint remodeled concert hall, said Martin Rae, president of the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences. The changes are aimed at garnering more attention for both speakers and the awards program, which draws around 900 or so people who are leaders, visionaries, and decision makers. It’s a high-end event for an industry that generates $25 billion a year in the U.S.

Rae (pictured above at last year’s event) said the new format will shake things up at the conference, which has been successful at drawing some of the industry’s elite executives and game developers for the past 11 years. This year’s first announced speakers include Jenova Chen, creative director and co-founder of thatgamecompany (maker of Journey); Randy Pitchford, president of Gearbox Software (maker of Borderlands 2); and Jesse Schell, chief esecutive of Schell Games (maker of Puzzle Clubhouse) and distinguished professor of the Practice of Entertainment Technology at Carnegie Mellon University. Their jobs are to enlighten, inspire, and challenge the attendees.

The venue change brings the DICE Summit closer to the Las Vegas Strip. In the past, the event was held at the Red Rock Resort outside of Las Vegas. Rae said that The Joint, which now holds 1,400 people in a tiered hall, is a big part of the reason for moving it back to the Hard Rock, where early DICE Summits were held.

“It’s still going to be an intimate experience where people can get business and socializing done,” Rae said. “But our board is always looking to how we can grow the awards show in stature and the conference too.”

As always, the conference themes will focus on tracks related to design, innovation, communication, and entertainment. But each talk will be shorter, around 18 minutes to 20 minutes, much like the vaunted TED conferences. “We want to leave people wanting more,” he said. “We will have really creative people.”

Some of the talks will be livestreamed.

“Interactive entertainment is ingrained in our culture,” Rae said. “We’re a $60 billion global industry of individuals and companies who are pushing the boundaries of technology, creativity, and artistic expression every day. The Academy established the annual DICE Summit and awards program to not only celebrate our industry achievements but to provide a dedicated forum to share ideas and foster innovation. Our industry is maturing, and we’re excited to reflect that with changes, such as the new format and new look for the Awards, so that we remain at the forefront of shaping and moving our industry into the next stage of its evolution.”

The 16th annual DICE Awards (previously known as the Interactive Achievement Awards) are peer-driven, where Academy members vote on the best games of the year. They’re like the Oscars for games, but they haven’t had great exposure in the past.

“Over the past several years, our members and many supporters independently began referring to our awards program simply as the DICE Awards — a nickname celebrating the shared history and principles embodied in the D.I.C.E. Summit moniker,” said Rae. “We began to think that this nickname, coined by our community, would serve as the best and boldest way to represent the awards. It truly encapsulates what we are all about: the celebration of the amazing designers, innovators, communicators, and entertainers within the video game and interactive entertainment industry.”

The summit will begin on Feb. 5 with the traditional golf, go-kart race, and poker tournament. But the group will add whiskey, beer, and wine tasting, as well as a 5K run event. The conference will take place on Feb. 6 and Feb. 7 (Wed. through Thu.), with just a send-off breakfast on Friday, Feb. 8. The awards will be held on the evening of Feb. 7. Rae said that the event will effectively close after the highlight awards in contrast to years past. Registration is now open.

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

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Remedy Entertainment had a big week this week with the debut of Alan Wake’s American Nightmare, a new adventure in the Alan Wake series available on Xbox Live Arcade. The downloadable game started out as an arcade action game and it evolved into a full-fledged story-based episode where the hero Alan Wake, a bestselling horror novelist, has to grapple with a nightmare that is born from Wake’s own pulp fiction.

While the first Alan Wake didn’t live up to its original hype and was panned by critics, Remedy stayed with the property and found a way to publish the new game without a huge amount of risk. Matias Myllyrinne is chief executive of Remedy Entertainment in Helsinki, Finland. He and other developers at Remedy believed that they had an opportunity to take Alan Wake in a new direction, improve the game play to appease critics, and test the idea of releasing a big game via digital distribution. We sat down with Myllyrinne at the recent DICE Summit in Las Vegas. Here’s our edited transcript of the interview.

GamesBeat: Tell us about what Remedy is up to in Helsinki. Is the team working on multiple projects?

Matias Myllyrinne: So right now there’s a lot of interesting stuff that we’re doing in the digital space. We’re shipping Alan Wake (the original game) on PC (via digital distribution) on Steam. And then American Nightmare. So from a company that usually ships something every five years, this is big because we’re now having two launches in two weeks. That’s exciting.

We’re continuing to support Death Rally and update that, on iOS, with our external partners at Mountain Sheep. We have our large projects. We have a large project in the works as well. (It has not been revealed) We are launching Death Rally on Android as well. We’ve been changing the dynamics there to support free-to-play better, and to ship that on Android. It’ll be fun. We learned a ton about the iOS market with Death Rally, how the gamers play. A lot of the backend statistics are interesting. How many minutes do they play for, what kind of things do they do? That kind of stuff. I think it’ll be interesting to have data. So yeah, tons of stuff. We’re working with some external partners in Finland, but our main focus has been that whatever goes out with the Remedy brand is important. People need to know that it stands for something.

GB: And how was the experience of getting Alan Wake’s American Nightmare out?

MM: We’ve talked about the backstory, how it came to be. We got a lot of fan feedback from Alan Wake one. People loved the story, they loved the fiction, they loved the pacing. But one of the things we started getting comments on was that the action was repetitive. We started whiteboxing these different kinds of environments, adding wilder and wilder weapons, and wilder enemies. Not being constrained by the fiction at all, but just letting the game designers knock themselves out.

GB: By the way, on that front, fans criticized your game for repetition. But when you look at games like Halo, there is a huge amount of it. It’s funny how sometimes it matters.

MM: I know. I mean, personally, I think I’d rather see us try to focus on what’s the essence of the game, and then try to do those one or two things really well. And hopefully one of them is something that nobody else is doing. And then it adds something to gaming culture, as opposed to trying to add a lot of version two features into a game.

Not to pick on anybody in particular, but if you look at multiplayer as a kind of requirement for some games out there, they don’t really match up to Call of Duty or Battlefield, and it’s a me-too multiplayer. Nobody’s really playing those. I think if they focused on what was unique in their game, it would be much nicer for the gamer. I think we are on the side of focus, as opposed to bringing too much to the table.

American Nightmare was a fun project. It started in a very different way from other Remedy games. Usually we start with a story first and foremost, but this time around, we made these arcade maps. We were just battling against each other. We’d go down for a cup of coffee and then show who was on the leaderboard. Oz has dropped me from slot number two to slot number three. And then you’re saying, “Okay, I need to play some more.” So we just felt that it was a good game right there.

Sam Lake, our creative director, is very much driven by storytelling. There’s a larger fiction that’s been mapped out for Alan Wake. We then picked and chose elements of that fiction that would fit into an Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA) environment. It’s like [British chef] Gordon Ramsay comes over to your place and gives you a burger. It’s still Gordon fucking Ramsay cooking you a hamburger. You give him fifteen bucks for a great burger. But if you go to his restaurant, you pay him sixty bucks for a three-course meal. Then you expect something different. And I think that’s essentially what, internally, was our guideline. It still needs to hold to the Remedy quality. But on the other hand, you need to respect the medium as well. You don’t try to cram a three-course meal into something that’s not built for that. We’ll see what happens. Really, it’s exciting times.

GB: You have to put some story in because of who you guys are, but you also have to make the experience short enough so that it fits with Xbox Live?

MM: Yeah. And it needs to be pick-up-and-play. It needs to be fun immediately. If you think of Wake as a franchise, there are two sides to it. One is the story and the characters, one is the action. This time around we emphasize the action much more than we did in the first one. And also the tone is different. We were more tongue-in-cheek with this one, not taking ourselves too seriously. In many ways I think it shows. It feels like a game from gamers to gamers. Having the pulp elements there lets us get away with a lot of…cliches or classics. [chuckles] Even the setting, classic Americana, Route 66, the motel, the drive-in movie theater, the observatory, all these… You can’t quite put your finger on it, but you know you’ve seen a film with something like this, or read a book like it. I think we take from that popular culture and make it into something of our own. And hopefully we give something back. I think that’s very much been our thing.

GB: Something like this has never really been done on Xbox Live Arcade. It seems like it could have been a stand-alone console game. Something bigger than DLC. How did you find a home for it?

MM: When we were doing Max Payne, we wanted to add the elements of slow motion. We had seen it in films, but never in games. We wanted to give that to the players. Push that envelope in action. With Wake, we thought that storytelling was something that could be taken further, especially in terms of pacing and building it like a series — a whole season of TV episodes. For us, it’s not enough that we do something good. I think it also has to be something new, or something that delights the player. There’s a surprise. I think with American Nightmare we’re hoping to challenge some of the conventions of XBLA. There are great XBLA games out there, and I don’t think there’s anything to take away from them. I love my Limbo, Super Meat Boy, those are terrific games. But I think there was an opportunity to push the envelope a little bit, and we wanted to do that. Luckily we’re in a position where we built a lot of it and then gave a call to Seattle (Microsoft). “By the way, would you like to see a Wake game on XBLA? Oz can be there in a week with a build. Why don’t you take a look at it?” [laughs] We knew that they’d be delighted. I think they were surprised and happy about that. It’s something that we very much wanted to do. I think the same goes for finally being able to take Wake to the PC as well. I think you need to have a sense of purpose in what you do. Making games is not always easy. It’s downright hard. But I think you need to have a reason to do it.

GB: It seems like how you release a game matters, too. You guys released on the same day as Red Dead Redemption. That was a tough choice when the original Alan Wake debuted.

MM: Rockstar Games (makers of the smash hit Red Dead Redemption) is really wonderful at what they do. I think they have an insane attention to detail, and I think those guys are brilliant. If you looked at Red Dead Redemption, you couldn’t go to any major city, certainly in North America or western Europe, where they didn’t own the real estate (for billboard advertising) with it. Their point-of-sale is the standard in the industry. When you talk to developers, it’s like… “What do you need to do to get the Red Dead Redemption treatment?” They’re certainly wonderful at doing stuff like that. At least for me as a gamer, one’s a western and one’s a thriller. To me they’re orange juice and beer. They serve a different audience.

GB: And the original Alan Wake sold more than a million units, right? So even if people at the time thought it wasn’t a good launch, in the end it did sell over time.

MM: I think it was a respectable amount for a single-platform release. And we were second in that launch window. We placed second against good games like Prince of Persia and Blur.

GB: Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter was saying that maybe the standard for developers to shoot for is now like three million units sold. Is that true?

MM: That’s true. The bar is very high. But I think you also need to look at how impactful was your game. Obviously sales matter. They matter in that you’re able to continue to do things that you want to do. But I don’t think that’s the only measure. I think it’s one of the most important ones, but quality is also a measure.

GB: I mean, you can think of it as a success, but you can also think of it as something to learn from, I guess? It seems like that’s the approach you took here.

MM: We certainly learned technically and creatively a lot. I think we’re more of a cohesive and strong unit than we ever were before. We’ve always been fairly small. Max Payne one, we did it with 22 guys. Max Payne 2 was about 25 guys. With Alan Wake, we peaked at 55 with freelancers and contractors. We’re growing, but I think we’ve always wanted to keep it small.

GB: Where are you guys now?

MM: I think we’re about at 60 employees. But I think we have seven open positions. For us that’s large. And we’ll continue to grow. I don’t want to build a game factory. If you have something that needs to ship every two years, or every year God forbid, an annual installment, then you’re going to need to go big first. And it’s very hard to innovate in that kind of atmosphere. But I think now with the digital channels, we can do smaller installments. We can do larger things. It’s a lot of fun. There are different kinds of experiences that you can get into. Kind of like a season special or a full-featured episode of a series.

GB: I’ve wondered if we’re in an interesting in-between period, too, where you’re just beginning to be the first ones to release major things on Xbox Live Arcade. At some point, digital is the whole future. Are you looking more towards that future?

MM: Yeah. I think that this is a good spot for those who are quick and aggressive, to make their mark. We certainly want to be there. You look at [hockey great] Wayne Gretzky. He says he is always skating toward where the puck is going to be. Not where the puck is now. I’d rather be that guy. If anything, it’s better to err on the side of going forward too much. It’s a good time for indie developers. You look at what’s happened, even in our neck of the woods in Finland. A lot of the developers are very successful because of the digital ecosystems, reaching a tipping point. Obviously Angry Birds, but also the guys at RedLynx who did Trials, and loads of others. I think those things are possible because of the ecosystems. No longer do you have to battle your way to Wal-Mart through a publisher. And they’re run as services. That’s what Death Rally is. Ten updates, adding multiplayer and stuff like that, I think it’s very much a service there. Less of a product.

GB: I guess you could think about consoles and something huge, like Alan Wake 2, or you could go down this other path of smaller titles on Xbox Live. You guys have these options.

MM: I think there are more options to reach people, and there are more options for how you package or price games. Are you selling per episode, are you selling a season pass? How do you build it? It’s certainly something that we’re looking at, and I know a lot of other people are trying to get their heads around it as well. There’s a lot to be said for giving people a disc for 60 bucks, but on the other hand, there’s a lot of people who will put their toe in the pool and try the water in digital distribution.

GB: Things like Runic Games’ selling Torchlight for $20.

MM: Yeah.

GB: With Arcade, can you still get enough feedback? As if you’re putting something out on iOS? Or is it still kind of filtered in some ways through the platform owner?

MM: There are certain basic things that we like to do. Obviously you can track how people are completing the game. We had really, really good completion on Wake. And I think a lot of that obviously came from the fact that we paced it like a TV series. It was easier to do bite-sized moments of gaming and then come back to it. Or you could binge. But at least you knew that this episode would end. So anyway, you can do a lot of things with achievements and see what they’re completing and what they’re not completing. It’s a whole art of its own, where you can track how people are doing that. And Microsoft’s really good with their testing. Not only on stuff like bug-tracking and stuff like that, they’re really good at seeing how people play your games, what their reactions are. Their usability labs are awe-inspiring. You can tell their roots and heritage there. That’s one of the things they nail down really well. If you want 200 people to play your game over the weekend and you want a report on Monday, they can do that. Which is impressive. That infrastructure.

GB: That kind of feedback, then, is it enough, or do you hunger for even more feedback than you could get…? Like the way Zynga gets feedback…

MM: I think that’s the wave of the future. How much and how quickly we get there, we’ll see. But I think anybody who’s seen a presentation from Zynga understands the power of what they have in their hands. That power can be used for good or it can be used for evil. [big laughs] I’d like to think that we err on the side of the benign.

GB: So there’s certain forces in the industry that you’re accepting, and also some that you’re fighting against, I guess?

MM: Yeah. I think as long as you’re… I don’t know. I like to think that if you entertain people and make something sticky and impactful, then eventually you’ll be financially and commercially successful as well. I think it’s important to start from the entertainment side, or the creative side, and then figure out what the right business model or the right pricing or the right channel is for that. Rather than starting with the channel and the business model first. But it works for a lot of people, so I’m not knocking it. A lot of good, smart people are doing it the other way around. That’s fine. But I think for us it just comes more intrinsically where you start from a creative place. We’re not altruistic, we’re out to be financially successful, and luckily we’ve been that. We’ve been there, and we hope to stay in that spot.

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

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At DICE Jaffe’s controversial topic focused on why developers should not try to tell stories in their games. That might come as a bit of shock from the director of the original God of War, an epic tale of revenge whose complex narrative helped give the intense action sequences a compelling context. It also flies directly in the face of what Jaffe’s fellow Eat Sleep Play members told GamesBeat in regards to why certain characters and features were cut from the upcoming Twisted Metal game, which launches tomorrow on PlayStation 3.

Is Jaffe an abrasive genius, or a contrarian troll? You can judge for yourself from the unedited transcript of his talk below.

David Jaffe: Hey, you guys. Um… So, y’know, I don’t need slides, I don’t have any PowerPoint, I’ve been real busy the last few days offending women. That takes up a lot of time, so I apologize. But really quickly, I wanted to say, before I jump into my talk… My mom is watching on GameSpot, and everybody says, “Well, Jaffe, you cuss a lot.” And she says to me, before I get off the phone with her, “Well, watch your language,” and I say, “You know, you taught me…” I grew up… She cusses like a sailor. So if you guys would do me a huge favor… She’s 80 years old, living in Alabama, could you guys, on three, please say “Hi, Bobby!” She would get the biggest fuckin’ kick out of this. So I’m gonna count to three, if you would indulge me, I would appreciate it, so here we go. One… It’s “Hi, Bobby,” I don’t know why she’s called Bobby, it’s not her real name, but here we go, one, two, three.

[crowd yells “Hi Bobby!”]

I’ll tell you, y’all just made an old lady orgasm. That’s fantastic, thank you for that. So now, my talk… Oh, I gotta get water, I was supposed to have water… My talk is, um… Can I get water, whenever they get a chance? My talk is actually a warning, about why we shouldn’t tell stories with our video games. I think it’s a bad idea, I think it’s a waste of resources and time and money, and more importantly I think it actually stunts, and has stunted over the last 10 years or so, the medium of video games. Sort of at our own peril.

And to be clear, I’m not talking about player-authored stories, and if you don’t know what that means, it’s kind of a buzzword these days amongst designers, but basically, a player-authored story is something… I mean, the best example these days is… Skyrim and Arkham City are wonderful, but you can also go down the chain of scope to a game like Angry Birds. A player-authored story is basically where the mechanics and the interactive is so compelling and so engaging that the player, by the very act of playing the game, creates a narrative in his mind. His play session is the story that he has created. And sometimes that gets shared on the internet, sometimes… I mean, if you play a game like Skyrim, I believe, you can literally, over the course of a weekend, create a novel-sized tome like Game of Thrones, literally of that quality sometimes. But even if you play, like, “Where’s My Water?”, it really is, whether you share it with friends or share it in your head or even if you’re not conscious of it, I think those kinds of stories are the heartbeat of our medium, and they are to be protected and supported and applauded. They’re wonderful.

And also… A lot of people hear me say this and they think I’m talking about a return to sort of old-school, Atari 2600 days. Abstract visuals and pure play mechanics. And I’m not talking about that either. I’m a huge believe in IP, I’m a huge believer in… I think our industry actually… I’m amazed every year when I look at the games we make, and I realize, I think, that our industry is probably the best and most vibrant IP creation medium that’s working today, in terms of the characters we create, the worlds we create for us to explore, for players to explore. And the context, and the stories, and the cutscenes. I’m not opposed to any of these things. I think when they serve as a nest, to protect and to house the actual gameplay. In fact, I think you really shouldn’t be making a game, no matter the scope, if you don’t have an IP. Because it’s important for branding, but more importantly, or maybe it’s really the same thing, it really is the first way that a consumer or a gamer connects emotionally with the product. So I am absolutely a big believer in IP.

I’m talking about two things. I’m talking about games that have been intentionally made, from the ground up, from the design document or the log line up, with the intent purpose of telling a story or expressing a philosophy or giving the player a designer’s narrative. That can sometimes be the entire game, or that can sometimes be a brilliant game, like Arkham City, which is one of my… I struggled when I was voting this year, between Arkham City and Skyrim… Where even a game like that, that is filled with opportunities for player authorship, sometimes goes a little bit, in my opinion, off the rails, and forces you into an area of storytelling, but not game-playing.

I’ll give you a really good example, at least, that worked for me, or didn’t work for me, that illustrates this point. If you played it, and I imagine everybody in this room has played that amazing game, the opening of the game is… If I remember correctly, you’re Bruce Wayne, you’re chained up, you’re a prisoner, you’re being sent to Arkham City, which is Gotham, but it’s been turned into a… You know the story. So he’s being led through, it’s beautifully executed, beautiful art. And you’re chained up, so you can’t do anything. All you can really do with the controller is look up, down, left and right. And the story is being told, and it’s… In my opinion, it was probably done in the service of the story, which is a great story. But I feel that in that case, we lost, or we… I didn’t make the fuckin’ game, but you know, we as game developers… They lost sight of the gamer mentality, of what they bring to a game and what they want from a game, and they let the desire to tell a story take over. Because ultimately, if you’re thinking at a pure mechanics level, it’s really not a lot of fun. You get home, you’ve spent 60 bucks, hopefully, not a buck at fuckin’ Redbox, you’ve spent 60 dollars on this thing, and you get home, and you sit down, and you go through all this stuff and you play it, and you’re like… All you can do is this, this, this, and this.

[Jaffe bobs his head up, down, left, and right.]

Now, a design argument can be made… Well, because right afterwards, Bruce Wayne breaks out of the chains and now he can fight. You could argue, “Well, yeah, we did that because when the chains broke, we wanted you to have a gameplay sense of all this ability rushing at you.” And I can appreciate the argument. But I think that the stronger probability is that that was just a good story setup, and they gave you a little bit of interactivity. And I think it came at the expense of the opening of that game, which then, crazily enough, is filled with brilliant, amazing opportunities for player authorship and wonderful in-game storytelling. So, now, look… There’s a lot of people who will tell you I’m crazy. Again, not just my mom is watching on GameSpot. I guarantee you, the comments are filling up. “Jaffe’s a fuckin’ idiot,” right? Because there’s a vocal community, and I don’t know how big they are, on the other side of this argument, that will tell you, “Cinematic storytelling and gameplay, that is the future.” And that’s why I called this “Chocolate and Tuna Fish.” Because a lot of people think it’s chocolate and peanut butter. They think, “Oh, take the movies and games and mush ‘em together, and suddenly we’ve got the next big thing.” But I do think it is chocolate and tuna fish. They don’t fit. I don’t think they fit.

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Comedian/actor/grand wizard Jay Mohr was in Las Vegas this week to host the 15th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards for his seventh year. In addition to the DICE award ceremony, Mohr has also been a longtime host for the annual (usually) BlizzCon fan event.

GamesBeat caught up with MC Shark Cartilage himself to discuss this year’s BlizzCon cancellation, what game Jay would make if he were a developer, and a lot of totally non-game-related absurdity, all to the beat of sensual electronica and rhythmic light patterns.

Disclaimer: I am not a professional camera operator. Obviously.

What are we talking about?

• Undead Male Fail
• Jamie Kennedy
• Oz
• John Norris
• Sarah McLachlin commercials
• Fastlane

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

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Eric Hirshberg was an experiment when Activision Blizzard‘s chief executive hired Hirshberg as CEO of the Activision Publishing division about 18 months ago. Hirshberg was an art-school graduate who rose through the ranks of the creative side of advertising and eventually became CEO of billion-dollar ad agency Deutsch LA. Most video game CEOs rise through the ranks of finance or game development. But Hirshberg was a lot more comfortable with a paint brush in his hands than a spreadsheet. But under Hirshberg, Activision Publishing has launched some of its most successful games in history, including Call of Duty: Black Ops and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. At the DICE Summit in Las Vegas, Hirshberg talked about the experiment of an advertising creative person rising to the top of one of the world’s biggest video game companies.

The marketing campaigns for those games helped them rise above hardcore gaming enthusiasts to mass audiences. Under the tag line, “there’s a soldier in all of us,” Black Ops commercials billed the game as one that any weekend warrior could play. The Modern Warfare 3 TV commercials promoted the  game as playable by both veterans and newcomers, or “noobs.” These ads showed that creative marketing could elevate a game to the level of a cultural phenomenon. Modern Warfare 3 generated more than $1 billion in revenue in its first 16 days on sale, and Call of Duty had 40 million monthly active users in 2011.

Hirshberg said that, based on his background, he believes that great video games are not products. They’re brands. While people buy products, they “buy into brands,” he said. That is what Activision was counting on when it decided to launch Call of Duty Elite, a social network for hardcore Call of Duty fans. It was an attempt to keep gamers engaged in the product year round, rather than just for a few weeks a year. The tough sell was that Activision wanted to offer a premium version of Elite for the hardcore fans. The hint of the subscription fee caused a fan revolt by bloggers such as Neils Hansen (pictured on screen), of the Gunn Shop report.

After a summer of criticism, Activision threw a fan appreciation event, Call of Duty XP, where it announced the fee for the premium version of Elite would be $4.99 a month, which was a bargain considering subscribers would get free access to content such as map packs that would ordinarily cost more than $60 a year. After that, bloggers such as Hansen decided that Elite wasn’t a “douche move” after all. Call of Duty Elite got more than 7 million subscribers, including 1.5 million who paid, making it one of the fastest-growing premium subscription services ever.

We sat down and talked with Hirshberg after his DICE talk. Here’s an edited transcript of our exclusive interview.

Gamesbeat: I didn’t quite connect all the dots in the talk. What turned around bloggers like Hansen in particular? The bloggers turned around on Elite because…?

Eric Hirshberg: What I described was, the first impression we made was during the beta. We told people who there was going to be a paid subscription part of the service, but we didn’t tell them about everything you were going to get, because we didn’t want to talk about things that we couldn’t yet show. It was a no-good-options situation. What turned them around was when we got to Call of Duty XP. We got the chance to finally show Elite and all of its features working in the game, and tell everybody what they were going to get. So once he heard the whole list, it turned him around.

GB: He seemed to latch on to the value proposition.

EH: Yeah.

GB: It was as if $60 for four different content drops, or $4.99 a month, and I get the maps for less money than I would otherwise spend during the year. So the value proposition is what sold him. Everybody’s going to come around to the value of that deal at some point, right? But is there also something more that you guys accomplished there, where you convinced them to go from, say, buying one product a year, to staying with it for the whole year?

EH: Well, if you rewatch the video, he did latch on to the value proposition, but he also talked about all the other services that we’re baking into Elite. It was way beyond just what other services were offering. So yeah, I think that the value of the product and the vision of the product won people over. The story was really about how we had to make this Sophie’s Choice between doing the beta and making the best possible first impression. We couldn’t do both.

GB: I guess the experience of creating the brand and promoting the experience seems to help with this message. The task you wanted to do was convert from product-only purchases to year-round engagement, I guess?

EH: As I said, I think both Call of Duty Elite and Call of Duty XP, if looked at through a certain lens, are sort of experiments with how willing people are to enter into a real relationship with a game that they like. To think of it differently than something you buy once a year, to think of it more as something you do all year round. Or do, in the case of XP, as a sort of lifestyle piece of entertainment. So I think that both of them show a greater potential than people might assume that games have, to become those kinds of brands in people’s lives.

GB: Is this a case of the games industry hasn’t come to truly realize this yet? That games are brands, that they’re not just products?

EH: I don’t know that it’s the games industry hasn’t come to realize it so much as, it’s almost very emblematic of how all entertainment industries promote their products. But as I said in my comments, games are different, because they’re not disposable, they’re not one-time. They really are relationships. The way you interact with a game has much more in common with the way you interact with a sport that you love, or a hobby that you love, that’s ongoing and long-lasting, than with how you watch a movie. Which you do for two hours and then you move on. So I think all we’re trying to do is look at that behavior and change the way we talk to people about games.

GB: It makes sense, that (game industry) people should start thinking this way, especially if they’ve figured out what their powerful properties are. That seems to explain all of Activision’s behavior for the last few years, focusing on the brands that are really the hottest.

EH: Well, not just the hottest properties. I got a lot of questions in the run-up to Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure about why we were choosing to enter the kids category when others were exiting it. When the strength of the Wii sales were slowing down. There were a lot of reasons that, if you just looked at them on a spreadsheet, you would think that might not be a great idea. But the magic of the idea doesn’t fit on a spreadsheet. Where Activision has chosen to make the big investments and take the big risks are the places where we feel that we have something special to contribute and something that sets our game apart. In the case of Call of Duty, I think it’s the strength of the brand itself, and the strength of the developers behind it. In the case of Skylanders it was the idea of toys coming to life. In the case of Bungie, it’s the strength of that developer. In the case of Call of Duty Elite, it was the behavior of our gamers — the fact that they were sticking around all year and buying up every piece of downloadable content (DLC) we could release. We had the resources to make a really big investment, to try something new. So we definitely have a strategy not to just compete in every category, just because we don’t compete there, but to only compete where we feel like we have something special to bring to the party.

GB: And if people buy into a brand, that becomes just more valuable, and you can extract more value from it?

EH: It’s a matter of a shift in mindset. People don’t have any problem thinking about products in other sectors this way. I don’t think anyone would say that when you buy an Apple product, you’re just buying a piece of consumer electronics. You’re also buying a little bit of the Apple belief system, an emblem of your creativity, your design aesthetic. Same with Nike shoes or different soft drinks or beers. There are all kinds of brands that have meaning beyond the product in other categories. That hasn’t been historically true of games, but I think it can be, and some of the work we’ve done on Call of Duty and some of the approaches we took on Skylanders show that.

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Here’s some of the stories that appeared exclusively on GamesBeat:

Valve’s Gabe Newell offers update on Steam security breach

AIAS game of the year: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim takes home the top honor

Bethesda reveals Skyrim dragon mounts, house-building, Kinect shouts, and more!

Gameloft Live enters the social mobile fray on Android, coming to iOS soon

Tips and tricks: Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning

The Skylanders financial bet gets a lot bigger with Giants sequel

Review: The Simpsons Arcade takes us back to the bowling alley

David Jaffe to leave Eat Sleep Play when Twisted Metal is complete

Microsoft Flight takes off on Feb. 29
And don’t miss some of our bigger stories in gaming this week, including coverage of the DICE Summit:

Call of Duty Elite: It’s not a douche move — Activision Publishing CEO Eric Hirshberg

The DeanBeat: DICE Summit entices the game industry’s insiders to Vegas

Ninja Gaiden’s creator Itagaki pleads for game designers to create titles that change lives

Epic’s Tim Sweeney predicts the next 20 years in gaming technology

How Google plans to avoid Facebook’s “games ghetto” with Google+

The makers of Asteroids, Centipede, Missile Command: iPhone is like an ’80s arcade

Temple Run developer shares a behind the scenes look at making a runaway hit iOS game

Meteor Games to publish high-end online game Hawken in December (exclusive)

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

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In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Tomonobu Itagaki was at the top of his game. The legendary Japanese game design leader of Team Ninja, known for his sunglasses and leather pants, was making top-selling games in the Dead or Alive and Ninja Gaiden fighting series.

Itagaki left Tecmo-Koei, the owner of Team Ninja, in mid-2008 and got into a bitter lawsuit with his former company over royalties. It was a wrenching separation, and Itagaki finally related his version of events yesterday at the DICE Summit in Las Vegas. Speaking through a translator on stage, he talked about what happened during a dark episode in his career and how he bounced back to create a new game development company, Valhalla Game Studios.

Itagaki said he originally wanted to be a novelist when he was in high school. He wanted to know the techniques to move people. Books and movies, he believed, were tools to move the thoughts and hearts of people. But he also spent a lot of time in gambling halls. To win, he said, you needed to control your rivals heart and emotions.

He read books such as The Red and the Black by Stendahl, The Stranger by Albert Camus, The Old Man the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, and the novels of Raymond Carver. When he was young, he didn’t quite grasp these books. But over time, they became relevant to his career in games.

In that career, he said he learned to focus on the “Happy Three.” This included the happiness of the audience, the happiness of creators, and the happiness of game publishers. Only two or three times in his game-making life did he achieve all three of these goals. For public companies, he said, the fourth requirement for happiness is shareholders.

“It is much more difficult to achieve the Happy Four than the Happy Three,” he said.

He managed to do that when he was creating the PlayStation 2 version of Dead or Alive. He created the game in part to help Tecmo go public. But the game production got started way too late to be a launch title for the PS 2. The game ran off schedule and a sales general manager came to him to borrow a copy of the game, which was still in development. Itagaki gave it to him. Then Itagaki said the disk was sent off to manufacturing for publication, even in its unfinished state. The company made huge profits and the IPO was a success.

“But I thought I would quit making games,” Itagaki said.”An incomplete game was released.”

Some coworkers didn’t mind that. But Itagaki became depressed. He stayed at home for several months. He drank alcohol from morning to night, “but no matter how much I drank I could never get drunk.” His wife suggested he watch movies and bought him a lot of DVDs.

“It was more like just looking at the screen than watching movies,” he said.

One DVD film touched his heart, the Armageddon action movie that starred Bruce Willis, directed by Michael Bay. Itagaki watched the movie over and over again. It had a song sung by Steven Tyler for his daughter Liv Tyler. Itagaki had a three-year-old daughter of his own. Finally, she told him she didn’t want to watch this movie anymore, because the father dies. The film brought tears to Itagaki’s eyes. He kept on drinking and crying. It was, Itagaki said, such as stupid life he was living.

“What a stupid decision I had made,” Itagaki said. “I died as a game developer without even making something for my daughter.”

He decided he had to stop hiding, fight for his family and friends, and returned to work.

“There were many people waiting for me,” he said.

Itagaki pushed to make a version of Dead or Alive for the Xbox, not Sony’s platform, because it was the most powerful platform. He used Steven Tyler songs in the games, because he thought that Aerosmith and Armageddon saved his life, family, and career.

He eventually left the job and became an independent game developer. There was a lawsuit and other controversy, and Itagaki did not directly address the details of his departure.

He is now making a game called The Devil’s Third for THQ. He only has to worry about the Happy Three for that game and is a stockholder himself. He urged game developers to make games that can personally inspire people to change their lives.

“Do whatever you want to do with all your passion, to make everyone happy,” he said. “Not just for your own satisfaction. Make something that can change the life of your audience. I believe video games have such power.”

Mark Cerny, a fellow game developer, said he was touched by Itagaki’s talk. He noted that while Itagaki looks tough on the outside, his talk in Japanese was genuine, polite and heartfelt.

With the launch of the latest Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Activision Blizzard (the parent company) made some controversial moves. One of them was to create the Call of Duty Elite social networking service for game fans. The service offered things like networking with friends, videos, service enhancements. But the controversial idea was that Activision wanted to charge a subscription fee for the premium version of the service. When bloggers heard about that, they revolted, Hirshberg said, because they thought that Activision would charge for things that used to be free.

“It’s a douche move,” said Neils Hansen (pictured on big screen below), a blogger who runs the Gunn Shop report on YouTube. He said he couldn’t believe that the company would alienate its core gamer base by charging money. He organized a protest to boycott the Elite service, even before he fully knew what it was.

“We had a summer of criticism,” Hirshberg said, speaking at the DICE Summit game conference in Las Vegas.

But Hirshberg said he believed from his creative background as an artist and advertising executive that games are not products, they’re brands. While people buy products, Hirshberg said, they “buy into brands.” That means that brands are a cultural phenomenon built around products such as games that inspire people to buy those products over and over again. By treating Call of Duty as a brand, Hirshberg said, the company could get away from the traditions that held that a game was a product that sold for $60. After all, in 2011, Call of Duty was a top ten topic of conversation on Facebook; it was the only entertainment brand with a product you could buy on the list.

To convince game players that there was a core Call of Duty experience, Activision created a campaign with the tag line, “There’s a soldier in all of us,” showing people of all sorts engaging in faux combat, as the weekend warriors who play games like Call of Duty. The company also created a service that players could buy into on a year round basis, delivering them new map content, vidoeos, shows, contests, and community features that could make Call of Duty into an ongoing experience, not just a product.

The company had a chance to turn around attitudes by appealing to the hardcore fans and the culture of Call of Duty. Activision then announced Call of Duty XP, a live event in Los Angeles where it would announce Modern Warfare 3 and Elite as part of a gigantic fan appreciation event. The event involved everything from paintball on a real Call of Duty map to eating at a Burger Town restaurant, which is a fictional chain in the Call of Duty games. The event was a huge success, generating $21.5 million in media impressions, 175 million Facebook impressions, 10 mil Twitter conversations, 9.8 million YouTube views, and huge livestream traffic.

Finally, at the Call of Duty XP event, Hirshberg revealed the price. It was $4.99 a month and it included all of the map packs that would normally cost gamers about $60 a year. It was a price that generated annual subscription revenue for the company. And Hansen, the Gunn Shop blogger, came back and said that he would eat his words and subscribe. It wasn’t, after all, a douche move. Activision could only accomplish something like this by establishing Call of Duty as a brand, guaranteeing gamers a unique experience, and getting the gamers to buy into the value of what it offers, Hirshberg said.

Elite had a rocky launch and it is far from perfect, he said.

“This is not a victory lap and we had technology stumbles,” Hirshberg said.

But the company has 7 million sign-ups and 1.5 million paying subscribers so far. That’s a success, and one that forced Activision to look to what it could learn from creative concepts, not just business ideas. The new tagline for Elite, Hirshberg joked, is, “Call of Duty Elite. It’s not a douche move.”

The DICE Summit (Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain) is well under way this week, bringing some of the game industry’s best minds together in Las Vegas for a few days of networking, thinking, talking, back-slapping, and partying. Staged by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, it is a chance for the best of the business to shine, from an opening keynote by The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim game developer Todd Howard on why we create and play to the game industry’s equivalent of the Oscars, complete with a red carpet show.

More than 700 game developers and other professionals will attend the event this year, according to Martin Rae (pictured below), president of the AIAS. He said in an interview that he believes that the industry is doing very well, with new platforms flowering and indie designers sprouting up all over the place.

“Some people call me crazy, but the game business is in a golden age,” Rae said. “Anytime the game industry goes through a transformation, some parts of the business won’t grow like they used to. But if you truly measure everything, games are growing like crazy. There are so many more demographic groups playing games, including my mother. It runs through the whole population, and you have to believe 2012 will be a great year.”

I’ve been to every one of the DICE Summits over the years, and I always find them fascinating and valuable for networking. By no means are they extravagant or elegant by Hollywood standards. Even though there are a few velvet ropes at this event, if they let me past some of them, well, it can’t be that exclusive. We will see more social and mobile game developers there, but the core game developers have decided that the new guys won’t bring down the party standards.

“We’ve got [Zynga chief game designer] Brian Reynolds and [Nexon America cofounder] Min Kim from the social and online industry, and that’s a recognition of how they represent the new industry,” Rae said.

This year, Rae hopes the audience will find the sessions to be more conversational, with speakers on a dais that extends into the audience so that they’re surrounded on three sides by the viewers.

To me, DICE is like the watering hole of the industry. Executives from rival publishing houses and enemy platforms laugh and party it up with each other as if they were the best of friends.

There are so many movers and shakers at the conference that I always wonder what kind of deals take place there. At one past summit, Cliff “CliffyB” Bleszinski, lead designer at Epic Games, gave a pitch to Ed Fries, then the head of Microsoft Game Studios. And soon enough, the Gears of War franchise was announced, with Microsoft as the publisher. It makes me wonder what would have happened if Bleszinski had bumped into the Sony guys at the bar that night.

Another time, I saw a Microsoft chieftain chat in the corner with a prominent Sony game developer. Years later, that developer finally started making games for the Xbox 360. I can always tell there’s some wheeling and dealing going on because when I show up, people exchange furtive glances and stop talking. One of these days, I’ll catch them chatting about how Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo are going to build the XboxStationWii 10,000 together, so they can gang up on Apple.

I fondly remember one summit where a developer took me out of the main room and showed me a web page on a laptop. It displayed the first known patent filings for the Cell microprocessor, the brains of a box that Sony would eventually call the PlayStation 3. After I wrote a story about it, hell broke loose. I learned many years later that IBM, which was co-producing the Cell chips, was pissed at Sony because the Japanese company put the names of its engineers on the patent filing but not the names of the IBM engineers. After threats of a lawsuit, Sony added the names of the IBM engineers to the filing.

On stage, the speakers aren’t always sensational, but they’re inspirational and memorable. In 2010, Jesse Schell, a game design professor at Carnegie Mellon University, gave a talk entitled “Beyond Facebook” where he envisioned everyone would copy the game industry’s success and offer achievements and rewards for things like brushing your teeth or riding the bus instead of taking a car. Two years later, the trend that Schell observed has turned into the “gamification” industry, where corporations try to get users to get more engaged with products via game-like rewards.

Among this year’s highlights: On Thursday, Xbox co-creator Seamus Blackley talked about his new Innovative Leisure startup, followed by a discussion from the startup’s creative team: Rich Adam, Ed Logg, Ed Rotberg, and Owen Rubin — all former arcade game designers who worked at Atari during its golden years. They talked about how mobile games have become the new arcade, and 99 cents is the new quarter.

Today, Eric Hirshberg, CEO of Activision Publishing, will talk about his perspective coming into the game industry from the marketing and advertising side of the world. Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, was inducted into the Academy’s Hall of Fame and give a speech about the next 20 years of technology and games. Transmedia (making game properties that spread across different media from comics to TV) is a topic for multiple speakers.

The Summit’s 15th Interactive Achievement Awards was once again emceed by comedian Jay Mohr (pictured top). Brian Crecente, news editor of Vox Games, referred to the ceremony as “the Other Academy Awards,” oft overshadowed by the movie and music equivalents. These, as well as the Game Developers Choice Awards coming in March, still aren’t televised. The lack of visibility is due to the fact that, in the grand scheme of things, the video game business is still a young industry. As more and more entertainment becomes more interactive, Rae said, and as the game industry matures, then the recognition of developers will become more and more relevant to larger groups of people. The awards will be livestreamed on GameSpot.

Sebastian Haley, our GamesBeat reviews editor, is attending DICE for the first time along with me. Please check the GamesBeat section for our stories. A few of the sessions will be webcast on GameSpot, and post-show videos of the talks will be aired. And if you hear about any big deals happening in the hallways or the poker tables, let me know.

Here’s hoping that this DICE will be another memorable one.

[Photo credits: Dean Takahashi and AIAS]

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Tim Sweeney won the Hall of Fame award. Sweeney is the chief executive and graphics wizard at Epic Games, which he started more than 20 years ago. Epic has made giant blockbusters from Unreal to Gears of War, and Sweeney’s graphics technology has made them all visually outstanding. In a talk on the future of gaming technology, he predicted the game industry can still look forward to years of improvements in realistic graphics.

Ed Logg, a former game designer for Atari, won the lifetime achievement award. He created classic arcade games like Centipede, Asteroids, and Gauntlet. Now he is part of Innovative Leisure, a startup creating iPhone games using a team of original Atari game designers.

Todd Howard, head of Bethesda Game Studios, accepted the award and didn’t say much because he had already won several awards. He had earlier thanked his parents for believing the lies he told them as a kid when he asked for an Apple II computer to do his homework. Sadly, he also dedicated an earlier award to a Skyrim team member who died from cancer last night.

Altogether, Bethesda took home five awards for Skyrim.

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

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Sweeney, a shy but brilliant programmer who helped create the backbone graphics engine for Epic’s blockbusters, predicted in his talk that games will look better and better, and upcoming advances will be so good, that console makers will be able to introduce next-generation machines that will blow us away with their visual quality. That point is up for discussion. Nintendo proved with the Wii that gamers may care more about innovations with the user interface—such as the motion-sensing Wii remote—than they do with graphical quality.

“How good is good enough, and how close are we to that now?” Sweeney asked.

Our eyes are equivalent to the quality of a 30-megapixel camera. You don’t perceive improvements in frame rate beyond 72 frames per second. Many games already run at a rate of 60 frames per second. The best resolution for humans, then, is 8000 x 4000 pixels, or several times better than today’s best displays. That is about 20 billion to 40 billion triangles per second in terms of graphics rendering.

“The limit really is within sight,” Sweeney said.

Graphics technology tries to calculate approximate renditions of reality. In Doom, the id Software first-person shooter from 1993, the developers were able to create a first-order approximation of reality. Now we’re getting enough computing power to get a third order of approximation of reality, as seen in Epic’s Samaritan demo (shown below). Doom’s rendering required 10 megaflops; Unreal in 1998 required 1 gigaflop; and now the Samaritan demo requires 2.5 teraflops, an order of magnitude higher.

Doing a human face with movie-level accuracy is still very hard to do, Sweeney said. He believes that chip makers could double computing power every two years (as predicted with Moore’s Law), and that could continue for quite some time (perhaps even a couple of centuries) with the vertical stacking of chip circuitry and other advances in leading-edge physics.

That’s a bold claim, but predictions about how fast technology will advance in the long term always tend to fall short of reality.

“Within our lifetimes, we will be able to push out enough computational power to simulate reality,” Sweeney said.

Sweeney said he is equally inspired by non-graphical pushes in game technology. He is inspired by advances in 4G ubiquitous wireless networks, sensors, navigation systems, Kinect motion-sensing, and Apple’s Siri voice recognition.

“Kinect carried the technology for sensors to its amazing completion,” Sweeney said. “We are going to see some of the possibilities of what will happen over the next decade or two.”

He is also fascinated by cloud computing, which supplies the intelligent answers to Apple’s Siri via the Internet. He said that OnLive and Gaikai hold a lot of promise in creating cloud-based services where you can play high-end games without needing high-end hardware.

“Only question is whether a game runs in your living room or in a server,” he said. “It’s not going to change everything, but it will make things more convenient for gamers.”

In a wild prediction, Sweeney said that physical resources will become scarce, but virtual resources are unlimited, and we may see more of our economy shift from real-world to virtual goods. The worldwide real estate industry is worth $25 trillion, but a virtual economy could be a lot bigger than that.

Sweeney said he thought that Samsung’s transparent displays (shown at the recent Consumer Electronics Show) and augmented reality smart eyeglasses could be cool as well.

While the world is creating new game platforms now, such as smartphones and tablets, Sweeney thinks that will change, and we will see the industry converge on a smaller number of platforms. He is fascinated that tablet computers are stealing a march on the PC.

“We’ve just barely scratched the surface of the consumer applications of new technologies,” said Sweeney. “It’s going to lead to an entirely new world. I see a bright future for the future of computing and its implications for games. Our industry’s brightest days are yet to come.”

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

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According to the creators of legendary hits like Battlezone, Asteroids, and Centipede, the iPhone is a whole lot like the old arcades of the 1970s and 1980s.

Game-makers are learning lessons from the history of the arcades and using them for today’s designs. That thinking is driving Innovative Leisure, a startup that is pulling the veterans into a kind of reunion company headed by Seamus Blackley (pictured far right and at bottom) and Van Burnham. The makers of classic Atari games like Asteroids, Missile Command, Battlezone, and Major Havok drew parallels from the new games on the Apple App Store to the old games of the arcades in a panel at the DICE Summit in Las Vegas today.

The talk captured wisdom from (left to right) Ed Logg, creator of Asteroids and Centipede; Rich Adam, co-creator of Missile Command; Ed Rotberg, creator of Battlezone; and Owen Rubin, creator of Major Havok. They are all working for Blackley and are paired on new iPhone game projects with students from the game design program at the University of Southern California.

They say original game play is the cure for dealing with the host of hundreds of thousands of competing games in the App Store, just as originality was a way to stand out in the old arcades filled with competing machines.

The new games on the iPhone can take advantage of the computing power of the latest mobile device chips, but they are still starved for memory and resource constrained, just as the arcade machines were.

“We had 256 bytes for memory and 2K bytes for the whole program storage,” said Logg. Rotberg added, “That put limitations on your game. But it forces you to come up with tricks for how to do things without wasting resources. We started the design at the core of the hardware.”

That forces the game designers to be more efficient, and when you create a more efficient game, it has the benefit of being simpler, easier to use, and more broadly appealing to a larger amount of people. Today, the older designers don’t waste system resources as modern programmers sometimes do when they create games with automated programming tools that are available today.

These old guys get a lot of respect today because they created something giant. Asteroids was a staple of restaurants and arcades across the country, selling 70,000 refrigerator-size machines at $2,000 each. And the arcade business boomed from $50 million in in 1978 to $8 billion in 1982, all driven by kids putting quarters into machines when they should have been doing their homework. The demographics of that audience was incredibly wide — kids, boys and girls, and older folks too.

Blackley (pictured right) said that the crash of the arcades in 1982-1984 should be a warning to companies today that are churning out copycat, me-too games that bring no innovation to the table and add to the clutter of the App Store.

“There was a danger period in the history,” Blackley said. “There is a period of novelty, like discovering I can play a game on Facebook. People then develop taste. They want a quality product. Exploitation of franchises and copycats leads them to stop buying. Then you have a crash and put (the games you can’t see) in the landfill.”

In 1982 memo, Adam wrote to his bosses at Atari that licensing games to manufacturers who made bad imitations of them, or “license fever,” was hurting the whole industry.

Logg said that today’s casual iPhone games are refreshing because they are casual and easy to learn. In the old arcades, you had to learn how to play a game in 90 seconds or less, or it just didn’t catch on. Adam said the arcades were cutthroat when it came to competition. If you didn’t collect quarters with it, the machine was quickly replaced in an arcade.

“It had to be immediately accessible,” Adam said.

Rotberg observed that today’s development teams are smaller for iPhone games, much like the old days. One difference was that it was easier to test new games in arcades by just watching how people played them. But creating a prototype required a lot of hardware engineering. So the design had to be good at the beginning of that process.

To accomplish that, the old Atari team would collaborate and comment on each other’s games. They were all “engineering jocks” who wanted to share their latest tricks with each other, Adam said. Rotberg said that Rubin constantly bugged him about a volcano in the background of Battlezone. It wasn’t erupting, and Rubin hated that. So one day, Rubin wrote the code to make the volcano erupt and left it as a stack of papers on Rotberg’s chair.

“You get honest feedback,” Adam said.

Today, modern prototyping tools make it easy to create a prototype in software. So game creators should take advantage of that by creating lots of prototypes, playing them over and over, getting feedback, and then iterating on the design until it really works.

“The market was made by small groups with tight design cycles,” Blackley said. “Players will drop it trivially if they don’t like the game, and they will love it a lot and play it over and over if they do like it. We are in this situation again. That’s why these guys want to get back into it.”

Rubin said he is a little sad that people today are discovering old Atari games on the iPad because the controls of the touchscreen device don’t perfectly map to the old hardware controls. Blackley pointed out that the spinning wheel control on Tempest was essentially to the feel of how that game played.

“The touchscreen doesn’t have the same feel,” Adam said. “The feel of a game is just as important as it was 35 years ago. It’s the ego gratification of you being in total control of a complex machine. In our day to day lives, we don’t have much control. Things like traffic. If we can feel control and empowerment over a complex machine that is gratifying.”

Blackley said that modern analytics can tell you a lot about how to tweak a game, but they won’t necessarily tell you how to fix a fundamentally flawed game. Preventing flaws in the first place was one of the outcomes of the collaborative environment at Atari.

Rubin said that he feels that some of the new social games on social networks aren’t really social and that people are too distant these days as they play games.

The audience of 700 game developers and industry professionals responded well to the famous Atari game designers. Randy Pitchford, head of Gearbox Studios (maker of Borderlands) thanked them for their work and said he wouldn’t be there today, were it not for them. So he got up on stage and bowed to them.

“Don’t do this to them,” Blackley joked as Pitchford lay prostrate on the stage.

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

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Min Kim (pictured below), vice president of Live Games at Nexon, and Brian Reynolds (pictured right), chief game designer at Zynga, have joined the board. The appointments signal that the game industry has changed and the AIAS is changing with it. And they mean the makers of social and online games, once considered the second-class citizens of gaming, now have a seat at the board table.

It’s no surprise the seats went to these two companies — both Nexon and Zynga raised more than $1 billion in initial public offerings and are considered to be the pioneers of the new game business. The board, after all, has to consist of the movers and shakers of the game industry. Reynolds is a veteran of the traditional game industry who made the leap to Zynga, which has more than 235 million monthly active users playing free-to-play games on Facebook. He created Zynga’s FrontierVille, which hit a peak of 35 million users, and gave a talk at a past Dice Summit talked about metrics-based game design.

Kim is one of the executives at Nexon who helped create the free-to-play business model. Aiming to deal with piracy for games in Korea, Kim pushed more than a decade ago to create free-to-play games where users play for free and pay real money for virtual goods. Kim co-founded Nexon America, bringing the model to the U.S., and launched the global edition of Nexon’s flagship game MapleStory. He helped get retailers to adopt prepaid game cards in stores and helps the industry deal with the risks of cyber attacks. And as you can see from the picture above, Kim will do anything to promote a game.

These appointments are a big deal because the AIAS, which has 22,000 members and a board of 16 industry leaders, considers its task to be the advancement of artistic values of the game community.

“As one of the earliest advocates of free-to-play online games, Min has been instrumental in bringing this business model to gamers worldwide,” said AIAS president Martin Rae. “Their introduction of free-to-play, giving players free access to games in favor of generating revenue from microtransactions, has quite literally been a game changer. Nexon has been quite involved already with Academy activities and we’re really excited to have Min’s input at the board level.”

Reynolds is a 21-year industry veteran who played a key role in founding the game studios Firaxis, Big Huge Games, and Zynga East. His games, ranging from Civilization II to Alpha Centauri, have sold more than 6 million copies.

“Zynga has been leading the charge for delivering quality social gaming to an ever expanding demographic,” said Rae. “And they have been at the forefront of one of the major shifts in our industry. Brian’s work at Zynga has helped redefine how people enjoy and interact with the medium of gaming, and we are proud to have his experience and deep insight on the board as gaming further becomes a part of everyone’s everyday life.”

Since Zynga has been under attack lately for copying other games, Reynolds’ appointment is to one of the industry’s highest artistic bodies will help Zynga fend off charges that it isn’t innovative.

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

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Now the company is setting its sites on social games on Facebook and mobile games on tablets and smartphones as well. It wants to succeed through something that hasn’t really been tried in Facebook games yet: hooking users through engaging game play, rather than via casual “snack”-type games.

In the struggle between hardcore and casual, casual games have won so far on Facebook. Simpler games such as CityVille and FrontierVille have had much better luck reaching audiences. But Daniel Kim, chief executive of Nexon America in Los Angeles, believes social games will continue to evolve; he notes that in early Hollywood, most of the successful movies were Westerns. Only later did the industry evolve other types of films.

Like many other game companies, 16-year-old Nexon faces a tough transition. Maplestory and other Nexon games are hefty online titles that have to be downloaded. By contrast, Facebook games are often light and casual, built with Flash animation and played instantly via web browsers. Even though Nexon is one of the giants of online games, it’s new to social and mobile games.

Kim said in an interview at the Dice Summit video game conference in Las Vegas that Nexon’s focus is on connected games, building online community, and creating competition that drives engagement. Despite the slowdown in game industry growth, Nexon’s formula has kept its rate of growth high, Kim said. Altogether, Nexon is operating more than 30 games as online services across the world. Most of that is on the PC. But Nexon now wants to move on to a variety of platforms.

In an interview with Nexon’s Kim last year, we talked about the dinosaurs of the game industry (console game makers), the mammals (the free-to-play online game companies) the rats (the social game companies on Facebook), and the cockroaches (the mobile game makers). The question is, who among these different rivals is going to inherit the Earth?

Nexon manages to hang on to its players for a long time, with many of them playing for months. A higher percentage of Nexon’s users convert to paid users than is normal. To try to get Facebook players, who often play for just five minutes a day, to switch to longer engagement times is a challenge.

Nexon is working with two outside studios, Antic of Canada and One2Tribe in Poland. The goal is to get Nexon to move as fast as a startup. It aims to get double-digit payment rates, double-digit average revenue per user, double-digit tens of millions of users playing, and double-digit months of engagement. Nexon’s games are played by users for hours per session, compared to a matter of minutes for social games. And Nexon’s numbers of concurrent users, or the number playing at any given time, hit new peaks for Maplestory in December after the company launched a major update to the game.

“When it comes to engagement, I feel Nexon has a 10-year head start,” Kim said. “But we are trying to move into new platforms and to do that via engagement.”

It may be late compared to rivals such as Zynga, but Kim says the market is just getting started.

Check out my video interview with Nexon’s Kim below.

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

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But the video game industry has changed. Facebook, the iPhone and Android devices have made social and mobile gaming into big businesses. Once greeted with outright hostility, social game developers are now commanding more respect, and social and mobile game speakers will be prominently featured at two of the traditional video game industry’s premiere events, the Dice Summit in Las Vegas next week (Feb. 9 to Feb. 11) and the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco (Feb. 28 to March 4).

This kind of tension happens in any industry undergoing change, where the old guard don’t always welcome the upstarts who are both trashing tradition and breathing new life into the industry. The social and mobile game developers, from Zynga to Ngmoco, were easily dismissed when they were small. But now Zynga’s valuation (as determined on private exchanges) is bigger than Electronic Arts, which is one of the oldest and most venerable game companies. Smartphone and tablet game companies are also proving themselves by generating real revenues on platforms that are now selling by the hundreds of millions.

“The social and mobile developers are a new piece of the interactive industry,” said Martin Rae (pictured right), president of the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, which stages the Dice Summit, a sold-out and exclusive event for 700 of the key publishers, developers, and executives of the game industry. “They’re a piece of the business that is not going away.”

Adds Simon Carless (left), executive vice president of the UBM Techweb Game Group (which puts on the GDC), “There’s a lot less tension than there used to be. The social developers are using more game design concepts, and their games are more fun than they used to be. And the core game developers are learning how to create more social experiences.”

The summit includes speakers such as Zynga chief designer Brian Reynolds, Electronic Arts Mobile worldwide studio chief Travis Boatman, Google engineer Bill Budge, Facebook game company chief Richard Garriott, and Booyah CEO Keith Lee. Social and mobile game developers are also baked into the main speaking roster of the GDC; they’re not just relegated to the mini-event summits that precede the main GDC.

When Zynga’s Mark Skaggs, a former EA veteran, accepted an award at the GDC’s Game Developers Choice Awards a year ago, I heard a lot of boos from the audience. One speaker at the GDC held a “rant” against social games because they were so backward from the eye of a game developer.

But so much has changed in the past year. Zynga found huge audiences on Facebook among middle-aged women and others who had never played games before. Lots of seasoned game developers made the leap to the new companies, which became hot tickets because they promised riches in the form of valuable stock. Reynolds launched FrontierVille, a carefully designed game that was much more playable than its predecessor FarmVille. Virtually overnight, FrontierVille amassed an audience above 30 million, far more than the typical console game. And then Zynga launched CityVille late in the year and saw it soar above 100 million users in less than two months after its debut on Facebook. Carless said developers recognize that these social games are becoming better and more fun to play.

“If you look way back in history to the 8-bit game platforms, these social games are a lot like them,” Rae said. “You have to realize it’s early in the industry’s evolution. We’re finding that there are fascinating ways to be creative, no matter what the platforms are.”

This year, one of the finalists at the Dice Summit’s awards program is Angry Birds, the hot mobile game that has dominated the charts for the top iPhone games for the past year. Angry Birds wasn’t formally nominated, but a write-in campaign helped push it into the finalist list at the awards show, which happens on Feb. 11 at Dice. Rae said, “My mom plays Angry Birds, and she never played a game in her life.”

Another reason social and mobile are more accepted is that social and mobile game companies are creating most of the new jobs in the video game industry, while console game studios are still laying off people by the hundreds. In a couple of years, Zynga has grown well beyond 1,500 people, while just recently Disney laid off more than 200 console game makers as it steered its strategy into social and mobile games.

This year, Brenda Brathwaite is giving a rant on behalf of social game companies at the GDC. She is a game industry veteran who became the creative director at social game maker LOLapps, which recently published Ravenwood Fair, a game designed by Doom creator John Romero, who has opened his own social game studio.

One of the interesting bridges between the two industries — hardcore and social — is Bing Gordon (right), former chief creative officer of Electronic Arts and a current partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which has funded Zynga and Ngmoco (the latter bought for $403 million by Japan’s DeNA). Gordon is getting the lifetime achievement award at the Dice Summit. And he’s getting it not just for his 25-year career at EA, but also because he helped create and navigate the fledgling social and mobile game industries.

“With social games, you also had to have a thick skin,” Gordon told us in an interview. “A few years ago, a lot of gamers despised social games. It was never as bad as the 1980s in terms of the disregard for games as a legitimate business. But it was still contrarian. It’s always nice to overcome that.”

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

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