Stay on top of all our E3 2013 coverage here.

During its special Electronic Entertainment Expo edition of the Nintendo Direct webcast today, CEO Satoru Iwata took a moment to run through a few of the third-party games that will be coming to Wii U and 3DS.

In a quick montage trailer, Nintendo showed off Wii U versions of Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag, Batman: Arkham Origins, Deus Ex: Human Revolution – Director’s Cut, Just Dance 2014, Rayman Legends, Scribblenauts Unmasked, Splinter Cell: Blacklist, Sonic: Lost World, Watch Dogs, and Disney Infinity. Sprinkled throughout were the 3DS versions of Batman: Arkham Origins Blackgate, Scribblenauts Unmaked, Shin Megami Tensei IV, Skylanders Swap Force, and Sonic: Lost World.

Nintendo consoles have been infamously light on third-party support over the last few years, so hopefully this marks a welcome change of pace.

Most of the games have October release dates, and we’ll have more information as it becomes available. Check out the montage 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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Disney is announcing today that it will have a version of The Lone Ranger to play on its Infinity hybrid toy-game platform when it launches in August. The new “playset” for Infinity means that the company will engage in further heavy bombardment this summer of its rival Activision Blizzard, the maker of the rival Skylanders toy-game products.

Source: Disney

The Lone Ranger playset

The Infinity platform combines toys and video games in a single “transmedia” entertainment platform, much like the Skylanders figures that have become a billion-dollar business in the past couple of years. Disney hopes to compete by launching a similar game concept. You put a the game disc in your home console (like an Xbox 360 or a Wii U), but you can modify the character and the environment by putting a different toy on top of a reader platform that plugs into the system. Where Disney hopes to differentiate itself is by periodically adding new “playsets,” or a new six- to 10-hour game, based on big Disney brands.

The entertainment giant is launching a remake of The Lone Ranger; the film debuts July 3. That Jerry Bruckheimer action flick will create a ton of awareness, and The Lone Ranger playset will ride that slipstream when it debuts with Infinity. Altogether, Disney plans to have five playsets available at the launch of Infinity: The Lone Ranger, Cars 2, Monsters University, The Incredibles, and Pirates of the Caribbean.

The hope is that Infinity will be an enduring platform that the company can build upon over time, adding new games and toys on top of it. John Blackburn, the vice president and general manager of Infinity developer Avalanche Studios, said in an interview with GamesBeat that the platform will help Disney deal with the problem of having a huge number of franchises. Some older franchises may not justify a huge new console game, but they could be the basis for a new playset or a smaller treatment within the Infinity world.

“Infinity is a platform for a lot of different properties,” said Bill Roper, the vice president and general manager of production at Disney Interactive, the game arm of Disney. “Each playset has a new world, new characters, and new game play mechanics.”

The toy-game competition is perhaps one of the biggest wagers any company could make in entertainment. That’s why only the biggest companies — Nintendo, Disney, and Activision — are moving into the market so far. (Activision has its own plans to out-market Disney with another full Skylanders game this fall).

The Lone Ranger playset is based in the world of Colby, Texas, during the building of the transcontinental railroad. You can play as the Lone Ranger and shoot guns out of the hands of bad guys and take them out with a bullet ricochet. You can ride on trains or different horses. The in-game gun has a red tip at the end of it, to show that it is harmless (a concession to violence-shunning parents). You can customize your own train.

You can play with the playset as a story-driven game. Or you can also play Disney Infinity in ToyBox mode, where you can mix and match characters from all Disney products in an open world. With ToyBox, you an mix and match characters from Toy Story with The Lone Ranger and so on. That’s like having a meta game to go with the story game.

Source: The Lone Ranger playset

The Lone Ranger playset (ToyBox mode)

Disney’s big bet

Disney began work on Infinity shortly after it shipped Toy Story 3: The Video Game in mid-2010. The company’s Avalanche Software division in Salt Lake City was enamored with Toy Story 3′s Toy Box mode, which was an open world where you could engage in any kind of play with a bunch of different characters. Kids could build their own town from scratch, and it was clearly the innovative part of the title.

Then Disney adapted to the shift toward social and mobile games acquired social game maker Playdom for $763.2 million in July 2010, and it also grabbed mobile gamemaker Tapulous in mid-2010. Playdom’s CEO John Pleasants became the head of Disney’s game business, as the move toward digital games took on a new urgency.

A big part of the team was working on a game for Cars 2. But a smaller skunk works team at Avalanche focused on a game called Buzz Lightyear: Star Command. In conversations with that team, Pleasants directed to do something much more ambitious that would be a platform for all Disney games in the future.

“Instead of a one-off game based on Tron or Tangled, what if we could make a game using the same engine and tools and vary the amount of content we could do for a particular Disney property,” said John Vignocchi, the executive producer of Disney Infinity. “The idea of creating a platform really resonated with us.”

While this was happening, Activision Blizzard launched Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure in October 2011. It combined a multiplatform game with a line of toys that you place on a “portal” connected to a console. By placing the character on the portal, the toy character transfers into the game for the player to control. The series was an instant hit, and it has sold more than $1 billion worth to date, with toy sales beating out sales of Star Wars toys. That’s a real threat to Disney, and, while Disney executives won’t acknowledge it, Disney Infinity was clearly adapted to mimic the toy-game hybrid strategy of Skylanders.

But Disney’s own portal, or “Infinity Base,” isn’t an exact copy. The base lights up with different color LED lights based on which character is on it. Like with Skylanders, you place a Disney toy character on the portal to activate that character inside the game. But you can also add “power discs” in the form of plastic hexagonal pieces of plastic for the character to stand on. Those separately purchased power-ups give the character new abilities, and you can put up to two of them under a character. You can improve a character’s health by 20 percent or give the character an economic boost.

The starter pack for a character comes with one of those power discs included. Kids can trade those discs with each other. That enhances replayability for the toy-hybrid platform, giving players a reason to acquire a new toy for $12.99 each. The base package will sell for $75, including the game and the base platform. The potential for additional collectible toy sales is enormous — and it’s on a scale that only Disney can do.

Among the other toys coming are Mr. Incredible from The Incredibles, Sully from Monsters Inc. and Monsters University, and Jack Sparrow from The Pirates of the Caribbean.

The Incredibles, Pirates of the Caribbean and Monsters University will be bundled in the Starter Pack, which sells for $75.  Cars 2 and The Lone Ranger will be available at launch but sold separately.

Here’s an image gallery of screen shots for the Lone Ranger playset and the ToyBox.

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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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Disney is about to war with Activision Blizzard in the toy-hybrid business. Out of nowhere, Activision’s Skylanders has become a $1 billion video game and toy franchise in the past couple of years. But Disney, which is no slouch in either toys or games, is about to punch back hard with the launch of Disney Infinity in August.

The title has been in development at Disney’s Avalanche Software studio in Utah for three years. And when it launches, it will effectively be five games on one platform as you can put a physical toy on it and change the entire “playset” on your console. Each playset is the equivalent of a seven-hour game built around a Disney franchise such as The Incredibles or Cars. One of the masterminds of this “transmedia” strategy — or one that spans multiple entertainment media — is John Blackburn, the co-founder of Avalanche Software and a 20-year veteran of the video game business. When Infinity debuts, it will have all sorts of things you can buy, from toys that cost $12.99 to the main package with the Infinity platform (with three playsets) for $75.

We caught up with him recently as the company unveiled The Lone Ranger in the latest in a series of playsets coming for Disney Infinity. Here’s an edited version of our interview.

Source: Disney

The Lone Ranger playset

GamesBeat: You’ve been working on this for three years?

John Blackburn: Yeah, we have. It’s been a long time coming. It started out as a follow-up to the Toy Story 3 Toy Box mode. We were going to be doing a Buzz Lightyear version in space. Then, as we started getting into it, we realized that maybe there was an opportunity to do everything for Disney in this. When I say “everything,” I mean it. It’s the strategy behind a lot of the kids and family products, particularly the movies. We said, “Look, if we took that same conceit from Toy Story, that everything works together as a toy, we could do that with Disney and all the different properties.” We can make this one big platform, as opposed to just one game.

GamesBeat: That seems like the interesting concept, going from making game after game to making one platform on which a bunch of games can sit. How soon did you get to understand the value of that strategy?

Blackburn: There was an evolution there, but it started with the way that licensed games have been going for the last while. The sales were continuing to decline particularly because consumers were essentially voting, “Hey, we don’t like what’s going on with these.” There was a downward spiral in the industry. You’d get a company that would make a game for whatever movie that came out. They’d spend a lot of money on the license and then not put a lot of money into the development. It made the consumer perception of those games continue to spiral downward, and eventually that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Within Disney — particularly my studio, where we’re kind of in charge of the kids and family space – we were fortunate enough to be working on big titles with Pixar and that kind of stuff. Those were profitable. The idea behind it was, it was easy to go and spend $30 million on a quality Toy Story game because you knew that if you did a good job on the game, you’d make that money back. But there are so many different films coming out year after year where that wouldn’t necessarily be the case. We couldn’t get behind all of them equally.

This was really a creative answer to a business problem. How do we support more of the things that we do? A ton of our fan base out there wants a game for every film. A certain number of people really want to play in that expanded world. But we needed to be able to do that in a way that was going to make sense and make money for us, and where we could also make everything uniformly high quality. Talking with John Lasseter [the head of Disney's animated movie business] and some of the other creative guys, the leaders in the company, it was like, “Look, we have to get to a point where it’s all about quality. That’s what we can get behind. That’s what you can sell.”

There were two or three angles coming at this. When you say it’s interesting how we got there, I’d say it was about a three-month period, when John Pleasants [the head of Playdom and now the game chief at Disney] came in and said, “We need to start thinking in terms of platforms.” We’d already been talking about it a bit, but talking with John cemented it down.

Source: Disney

The Lone Ranger playset

GamesBeat: The toy hybrid part, how soon did that come along?

Blackburn: Because everything was toys already, in the design, we went and pitched Disney consumer products — we’re getting into the inner workings of Disney here — on a toy line that we wanted to bring out with this. I don’t remember exactly when. It was the year after Toy Story launched. Their answer was, “Until this becomes a thing in the game industry, just having a toy line isn’t going to work.”

That initial pitch, we really weren’t thinking of the idea that there would be an RFID tag in there, and that’s actually how you’d get extra content. That came later once we started thinking from more of a business angle and getting into how we could monetize this.

GamesBeat: When Activision came out with Skylanders, then, you guys had an example of a similar platform that proved a point.

Blackburn: Yeah. Skylanders absolutely proved the viability of it for us. The ideas were essentially already there — we wouldn’t be here with a game that’s this large if they hadn’t have been — but yeah, it definitely proved a point.

GamesBeat: But yours is many games in one? That’s a big difference there compared to how they come out one game at a time. That seems to suggest the size of the bet you guys have made here. You’re coming out with a lot of stuff at once.

Blackburn: Absolutely. It’s very important for us to get it right. We felt like we needed to come with our strongest properties to launch the platform so that everybody understood it. We wanted to make sure that there was a ton of value in the starter pack.

The way I look at it, you’ve got four different games in the starter pack. You’ve got a Pirates game that’s different from the Monsters game, they’re both different from the Incredibles game, and they’re all different from the Toy Box game. The Toy Box game brings them all together, but the creative-editing capabilities in there are way more reminiscent of some of the best creation games on the market as opposed to the structured gameplay games that are out there. From our perspective, it was important to make sure that the initial bet was something that everybody got into because this was something we wanted to live on for years.

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Skylanders: Swap Force will debut this fall as the third in the series of game-toy hybrid products that have sold more than $1 billion worth since 2011.  The new game has interchangeable body halves of Skylanders: Swap Force toys, allowing kids to mix and match their collections to create new kinds of game characters. Activision hopes that will lead to more repeat business at a time when it will face significant competition from Disney’s upcoming Infinity toy-game hybrid products launching in August.

In this market, Activision is the smaller company, but it has the advantage of having sold more than 115 million Skylanders toys.

The challenge for Activision’s marketer’s — Josh Taub (left) senior vice president of product management, and John Coyne (right), senior vice president of consumer marketing — will be to grow the franchise at a time when Disney attacks the same market using famous entertainment brands such as Toy Story, The Incredibles, Monsters Inc. (and the upcoming Monsters University), and Cars. Activision Blizzard chief executive Bobby Kotick said in a recent earnings call that the company will face significant competition in the second half of the year, making financial performance less predictable. Activision is going to spend more money marketing its titles later this year, and that means there’s going to be a lot more pressure on Taub and Coyne to execute.

Here’s the edited transcript of our interview with Taub and Coyne.

GamesBeat: You’ve built up something pretty big in a couple of years here.

Coyne: Yep. We’re very proud of the growth that we’ve seen for Skylanders in about 18 months. We’re now over a billion dollars. For myself, I’ve been involved with the franchise now for more than four years. It’s been a great project, seeing everything come to fruition.

GamesBeat: You have competition coming from Disney Infinity. What does that mean for you?

Taub: It means that we have to continue to focus on where we started and where we’re going. We’ve innovated a category, bringing toys to life. We’re focused on what we’re doing. We’ve sold more than 115 million toys to date. We have kids playing on nine-million-plus starter packs. We’re focused on providing them with an innovative experience in the franchise, and we’re focused on doing what we do best, which is bringing a great video game experience and a great toy experience together.

GamesBeat: Obviously you have a really good margin for add-on sales after the base pack, especially with your great relationship with retail. The setups in Toys R Us are amazing. But there are 60 new toys coming out this season. That’s a significant amount of product. Is there a point where you worry that you’re going to get pushback from consumers when it comes to the number of toys being released?

Taub: I think what’s happened is that the consumers are actually telling us that they have an appetite for things that feel special to them, and the ways of interacting that are unique to the game. What they’re doing through buying the toys is having different engagements with the franchise as a whole. We’re not seeing at it as “there’s a saturation point.” We’re seeing it as there’s place where kids want to continue to come back through the year, and rather than buying the next game, they’re buying what is in a sense add-on content to experience the same game in a different way. Each time they put a new character on and have a different weapon or a different play pattern, it gives them a unique experience that they’re not getting anywhere else. We’re not seeing saturation as an issue. In fact, our attach rates are up from the first game to the second. We anticipate that will continue.

GamesBeat: Can you give us any specifics on what those attach rates are?

Taub: At this time, we can’t.

GamesBeat: Has the demographic shifted any since launch? It does seem like, just anecdotally, as it’s become a bigger deal, more people have come in from a broader audience saying, “This isn’t just a game for my eight-year-old.”

Coyne: I think there is a core still, but I do think it’s something that gamers are enjoying — the toys coming to life, the characters. Families enjoy it. Girls as well as boys enjoy the game. It really is quite a broad demographic that we’re seeing enjoy the game. I hope that, with the new game, we’ll see that trend continue.

GamesBeat: What about the spread between the people who buy a few and the people who have to collect ‘em all?

Coyne: I’ve worked on a lot of toy franchises, collectible franchises. You’re always going to have people that choose very carefully the characters they buy, and then you’re going to have some kids and gamers who want to get everything that they can. The game is equally enjoyable either way. We always make sure that you can play through the game with the starter pack toys.

Taub: The last piece on the expanding demographic is that they’re seeing that we’re not setting out to make a game that is just a kids’ game. It’s a triple-A game in every way, from graphical fidelity to development time to the studios that are involved. It’s a meaningful gaming experience. While kids may be the place where it started, you’re starting to see an appreciation for the quality of gameplay and the replayability and the enjoyment factor.

Coyne: That’s also true when you see families play together. It’s the type of game where dads and moms enjoy playing with their sons and daughters. It’s an easy game to enjoy.

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

This week, Activision reveals strong first quarter earnings while Blizzard loses 1.3 million World of Warcraft subscribers, EA lays off 1,000 but expects to develop Disney’s Star Wars games, indie charity drive Hunble Bundle now accepts the virtual currency Bitcoin, and the Amazon Appstore beats Google to distributing paid apps in China.

We’ve also got a lot of previews for you, including Splinter Cell: Blacklist, Deadpool, and Watch Dogs, and reviews of Star Trek and Mario and Donkey Kong: Minis on the Move.

News

• The DeanBeat: Why Nintendo should have bought Ouya and other might-have-beens
• Brenda Romero’s Train board game will make you ponder the Holocaust
• Warner Bros. gets a new digital games chief
• Battlefield 3 servers under DDoS attack; DICE ‘working around the clock’
• Sony insists the PlayStation 4 won’t kill its bottom line as the PS3 did
• Death by dubstep: Saints Row IV demo reveals gameplay and weapons
• Assassin’s Creed mastermind Patrice Désilets claims Ubisoft fired him
• After 1,000 layoffs, EA could find itself short-handed for Star Wars games (analysis)
• Xseed Games unites with Marvelous U.S.A. for bigger mobile and online presence
• Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon director already considering the sequel

Mobile news

• Mobile game Airport Scanner helping TSA officers screen luggage more accurately
• BlueStacks steps into gaming with Gamepop — a Netflix for mobile games
• Beware the Angry Bulls: Zynga launches Running With Friends
• Amazon Appstore invades China, beats Google itself to paid apps
• PlayScape partners with Amazon for custom content on the Appstore

Tech

• With $3.2M in funding, Dekko unveils a clever tech to insert animations into the real world
• Sony to begin making PlayStation 3 in Brazil
• Sims creator Will Wright: Next consoles can become ‘connective tissue’ between games & entertainment
• Ouya spills its guts for repair firm iFixit

Strange happenings

• Download version of Donkey Kong Country Returns 3D requires at least a 4GB SD card
• Humble Bundle now accepts the Bitcoin digital currency
• World of Warcraft loses 1.3 million subscribers
• Diablo III patch glitch results in gold duping that breaks auction house (UPDATED)
• Dota 2 replaces World of Warcraft as Raptr’s third most-played game
• SimCity moves 1.6 million copies despite troubled launch
• Star Wars: Battlefront III footage leaks online

Fighting words

• Developer Warren Spector slams Wolfenstein: The New Order

Fund it

• Crowdfunding for Eternal Darkness successor off to sluggish start
• Cryptozoic launches Kickstarter for Hex: Shards of Fate online trading card game

Earnings

• Not all game companies are hurting: Nexon posts strong Q1 results
• PlayStation a nonfactor in Sony’s first profit in 5 years
• Activision Blizzard says Call of Duty: Ghosts will be a huge launch, but stock falls on weak Warcraft numbers
• Activision blows away first quarter earnings targets, raises estimates for year
• EA misses slightly on revised earnings but hits its revenue targets

Safeguarding the future

• Activision ups marketing over fears of Battlefield 4, Disney Infinity, and Dota 2
• Sony teases something new for Gran Turismo; reveal coming May 15
• EA scores a licensing agreement to lock up FIFA brand until 2022
• EA has 11 big titles, 15 mobile games coming in the next year (but no Star Wars)

Previews

• Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs highlights the down side of smart cities (preview)
• Watch Dogs creates an open-world morality (preview)
• Katanas, daggers, and guns are no match for Deadpool’s mouth (preview)
• Splinter Cell: Blacklist’s co-op mission feels more like a solo op (Preview)
• Splinter Cell: Blacklist sneaks in new and classic Spies vs. Mercs modes (Preview)

Reviews

• Mario and Donkey Kong: Minis on the Move is a puzzler with delightful variety (review)
• The crew of the Enterprise finds an unremarkable shooter in Star Trek (review)

Interviews

• Watch Dog creators bring the reality of “smart cities” to games (interview)

Pieces of flair

• How 3D scanning helped create the face of Bioshock Infinite’s Elizabeth
• Valve’s experimental psychologist discusses sweat detection and eye-tracking for games
• Return of the Tweetbook Q&A: BioShock vs. BioShock Infinite

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

This week, Microsoft announced that it will unveil the new Xbox console on May 21, Nordic Games Licensing acquires both Darksiders and Red Faction from the THQ bankruptcy auction, and Candy Crush developer King overtakes Zynga as the largest social gaming company.

You’ll also find reviews of Monaco, Dead Island: Riptide, Injustice: Gods Among Us, and Defiance, as well as previews for Call of Juarez: Gunslinger and Kingdom Rush: Frontiers.

News

• The DeanBeat: King overtakes Zynga as the largest social gaming company
• Don’t call it the shooter: 2K Marin re-unveils its XCOM game
• EA confirms additional layoffs as it continues its post-Riccitiello transition
• Bethesda summons Legendary Edition of Skyrim to retailers on June 7
• Zynga to shut four more weak games, including The Ville
• Xbox alumni set up fund for student game developers at USC
• Harmonix lays off small number of staffers
• Dragon’s Crown finally dated as it draws fresh criticism for sexy imagery

Mobile News

• Square Enix teams up with Mobage for a new Final Fantasy Tactics
• American McGee reveals Hell Invaders F2P card battler for mobile devices
• Zynga launches Draw Something 2; terrible artists weep
• Smartphone game explores 2011 London riots with arcadey gameplay
• Chartboost expands mobile game developer cross-promotion business into Europe

Earnings and Acquisitions

• Zynga hits earnings targets and stays profitable in Q1
• Nintendo reports a small profit for fiscal year, but Wii U sales slow to a crawl
• Nordic Games Licensing acquires Red Faction, Darksiders, and other THQ assets for $4.9M
• Gearbox Software wins auction for Homeworld
• In March: BioShock Infinite does 878K on consoles; 14 titles cleared 100K

Tech

• Hey, cord cutters, the CW is now providing full TV episodes via Xbox Live
• Unity ceases Adobe Flash support
• No need to get off the couch. Gamers can order Pizza Hut using Xbox Live
• See Skyrim running on the Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset

Woops

• Origin store ‘Action Sale’ includes games that … activates on Steam?
• U.K. retailer Tesco pulls listing for Call of Duty: Ghosts after ‘it was put up accidentally’
• An indie developer’s strategy to sell games: insult fans and raise prices
• Former Activision U.K. PR executive pleads guilty to embezzling Call of Duty money (Updated)
• The 700 Club’s Pat Robertson: People should ‘flee from evil’ video games

Nintendo’s new plan

• Nintendo sets the Wii U to ludicrous speed with latest patch
• A digital olive branch: Ubisoft releases Rayman Legends Challenges on Wii U eShop
• Nintendo not holding a press conference at this year’s E3; smaller events planned
• Nintendo announces launch lineup for Virtual Console on Wii U

Nextbox

• Microsoft officially revealing next-generation Xbox on May 21

All This Funding

• PlayFirst raises $2M in funding as it debuts a new franchise character
• The playable races Kickstarter backers created for Stardrive
• Jagged Alliance: Flashback Kickstarter is live
• Skullgirls studio can’t pay development team because PayPal froze its account (updated)

Reviews

• Monaco’s co-op gameplay will steal your heart (review)
• Injustice: Gods Among Us is superpowered insanity (review)
• Dead Island: Riptide is a zombie game still searching for brains (review)
• Defiance is Borderlands: The MMO without the humor (review)

Previews

• The new towers and heroes in Kingdom Rush: Frontiers (preview)
• Call of Juarez: Gunslinger doesn’t do the Wild West justice (preview)

Interviews

• Aiming for better profits, Zynga cuts even deeper into once-beloved games (interview)
• Lost Planet 3 is repositioning the franchise for mainstream success (interview)
• Bringing characters to life with Pixar’s animator magic (interview)
• Creating a creature with 5.5M pieces of animated hair in Pixar’s Monsters University (interview)

Pieces of Flair

• Consoles that won’t die: The Atari Jaguar
• One of the fake languages from HBO’s ‘Game of Thrones’ hides a reference to Castlevania
• If today’s developers made NES games (gallery)
• How Pixar made Monsters University, its latest technological marvel
• Pong, anyone? Philly skyscraper becomes the world’s largest video game
• Video games are the new Thin Mints: Girl Scouts add new badge for game design

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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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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Monsters University, the new animated film from Disney’s Pixar division that debuts on June 21, will serve as light summer entertainment for most audiences. But the light-hearted, character-driven film is also a technological marvel, like most computer-generated movies that are years in the making.

It’s about 12 years since Monsters Inc. debuted in 2001.  Animated movies can take a long time to make, but they’ve been a gold mine for movie makers and come with huge budgets that enable them to be forerunners in technological progress. Last year’s Brave, which generated more than $535 million at the box office worldwide, took more than six years to make on a $185 million budget. But Kori Rae, producer of Monsters University, said in an interview that her team of 270 people pulled together early in creating its story, which is a prequel to the first film. And that’s why the movie took a “short” four years to make.

Behind the tech magic: Monsters University

• How Pixar made the ultrarealistic The Blue Umbrella
• Bringing digital monsters to life
• Animating Sully: a puzzle of 5.5 million hairs

Technology is nothing more than a “big fat pencil” for animating a film and telling a story, the Pixar gang says. But the marriage of technology and art at the digital animation studio in Emeryville, Calif., goes to the very heart of the company and its efforts to entertain us. We took a tour of Pixar’s headquarters and sat down with the filmmakers, who over the course of a day and a half unmasked the technological process behind the making of the movie.

For sure, Pixar is always at its best when it focuses on story and characters. When you’re spending well over $100 million and putting hundreds of people to work for years, you have to have a solid foundation. Technology isn’t the driver of the films. It only makes it possible for the creators to do their work, said Dan Scanlon director of the movie, in a group interview.

In this film, the characters Mike (green) and Sully (big blue monster) return. Sully was the main character of the first film and Mike was his chatty sidekick. But in the prequel, the story is all about Mike and his lifelong dream of being a “scarer,” a monster who scares kids in their dreams, and his entry into college. He meets Sully, who at age 18 is really no more than an obnoxious frat boy, and they come of age in their attempts to make it at Scare School. Pixar showed the press the first 40 minutes of the film, and it seems like any other animated film. You pay attention to the story and characters, and only later do you consciously, if at all, think about the technology behind them. Our story will delve more into that technology to show how modern filmmaking has evolved.

Big fat pencils

Pixar’s fabulous glass-encased headquarter has been redecorated with a Monsters University theme. There is an MU arch at the entrance to the campus, and there are solicitation tables for clubs, like you see on college campuses. Banners of Monsters University characters are everywhere. They are intended to put Pixar’s employees in the spirit of the movie that they are furiously finishing.

Inside the building is a data center full of humming servers — double the size that the company used in the past — that would be considered one of the top 25 supercomputers in the world. The 2,000 computers have more than 24,000 cores. The data center is like the beating heart behind the movie’s technology.

Even with all of that computing might, it still takes 29 hours to render a single frame of Monsters University, according to supervising technical director Sanjay Bakshi.

Rendering means that the computers build the 3D world in its full colors as the scene is meant to be viewed in a theater. The machines create the frame and it is then captured as one of thousands of frames in the movie. When you watch the movie, you see anywhere from 24 frames to 60 frames per second.

All told, it has taken more than 100 million CPU hours to render the film in its final form. If you used one CPU to do the job, it would have taken about 10,000 years to finish. With all of those CPUs that Pixar did have, it took a couple of years to render.

The reason it took so much more computing power is that the eyes of the audience have grown. Something that looked spectacular 12 years ago, like the fur on the monster Sully, doesn’t look so great today. Sully now has 5.5 million individual hairs in his fur, compared to a fifth of that in the original film. In Monsters Inc., it was impressive to create one simulated garment with realistic, cloth-like behavior: the shirt on the character Boo. The new film has 127 simulated garments, and the hair and cloth simulator had to be re-coded from scratch, said Christine Waggoner, the simulation supervisor on the film.

“We had to simulate blankets, sheets, mattresses and pillows,” Waggoner said. “In a jacket simulation, a jacket is removed from the shoulder and it has to appear natural as it moves. We even simulated the zippers on the backpacks. That’s Pixar’s level of attention to detail.”

When you look at Monsters University, you’ll notice effects like the flag swaying in the wind. But you’ll also notice the blades of grass in the plaza, the swaying of the trees, the large numbers of student monsters roaming all over the school, and the lighting and shadows everywhere.

“With every Pixar movie, there is a technological breakthrough,” said director Dan Scanlon. “I was told early on that backpacks are hard to do.

Global illumination

One of the reasons that Pixar had to double the size of its “render farm” is that the technology team made a big change. It created a realistic system of lighting known as “global illumination.” That means that the sources of light, such as the sun, are accurately simulated, casting realistic light and shadows throughout a 3D animated scene. The sun serves as a perfect kind of global illuminator in a scene, as does a light bulb in a ceiling.

With global illumination, the light bounces around as needed. And it doesn’t just bounce once. It bounces around a scene over and over again, creating a new light source each time. Each scene is embued with more realistic details because the shadows and bright spots are all in the right place. The lighting and shadows are simulated and they naturally become part of the scene.

For instance, the simulators created six new lights with unique characteristics that created effects that the artists usually wanted in a scene. The “scare lights” combine blue, red, and green. Those lights can be used to create scary scenes.

The artists don’t have to worry about actually drawing those shadows in an accurate way on top of the scene that they’re creating. That requires a lot more computing power, but it removes complexity.

On the other hand, global illumination enables the team to push the technology envelope even more. It accurately captures the way that light bounces off of objects. In each scene, there are now 300 to 500 sources of light, all of them intersecting with each other. To manage all of that, lighting experts like Jean-Claude Kalache had to look at a special “lighting browser” that captured all of the lights shining in a scene at any given moment.

“You have to look at these lights from all angles to understand them,” Kalache said. “But the artist no longer has to engineer them. It was an unnecessary complexity. Global illumination creates a much richer world. It works with the trees, the grass, everything.”

While global illumination delivered a lot of benefits, it had to be approved at the highest levels at Pixar, because it drove the technology budget much higher. Rae said, “It was a studio wide decision that had to be made, and it reached beyond what we needed for Monsters University.”

Paging Pitch Doctor

Fortunately for Pixar, there are a lot of short cuts that technology makes possible. Kelsey Mann, Pixar’s head of story, showed a tour of journalists at the studio’s headquarters that he could create a “pitch” for a scene in a matter of minutes using a combination of Pitch Doctor and Adobe Photoshop. With a stylus for inputting his hand-drawn sketches, Mann drew a scene and then brought it to life.

The software interprets his drawings and then creates a frame-by-frame cartoon that shows people what he means. As a team goes to work on the pitch, Mann can erase the animation and produce a new version in a matter of seconds. He changes the expressions on the faces of the characters or revises the way that they’re facing so that it draws the viewers eyes to a central point.

“There’s an art form to the pitch, like there is to telling a good joke,” Mann said.

Once a scene pitch is approved, there is a lot less chance for confusion. The animators have something that they can flesh out. And the director can see if it fits within the overall vision for the film.

At the same time, the actors, such as Billy Crystal, who plays “Mike,” the one-eyed green circle character who is the star of the film, work through the script with writers. They improvise and record voice sessions over and over until they feel like they have it right.

On a high level, the writers had the challenge of making sure that the prequel — where everyone knows how things turn out because of the existence of the first movie — isn’t predictable, said Rae. Having tools that make it easier for everyone to come together on a story and quickly work out the kinks can be invaluable to the large team.

“We want people to root for our character, even though we know how it ends,” Rae said.

Character design

The character designers at Pixar were lucky because they inherited two popular characters, Sully and Mike. But because the movie is a prequel, they had to make the characters look younger. With an animated character like Mike, who is just a circle with a big eye and a mouth, that’s not an easy thing to do, said production designer Ricky Nierva.

The college-age characters are slimmer and their faces are slightly different.

“How do you make an eyeball look 18 years old?” said Jason Deamer, the character art director. “It’s a lot more subtle.”

Rae said, “We wanted to figure out who these characters really are. Who they are before they get to Monsters Inc. Who is Sullivan? Who is Mike? We wanted to dig in and find out more about them and go back to a time in life that everyone can relate to.”

Besides designing Mike and Sully, the team created more than 400 monsters to fill out the roster of students at Monsters University. There were six basic body types, including a fungus, and a slug. Still, each character had to be unique to live up to Pixar’s reputation of creating wonderful, believable characters. Besides, some of those characters would prove useful in ancillary merchandise, such as toys or game characters. Disney is putting together a Monsters University version of its toy-game product, Disney Infinity, debuting in August.

“The technological problem with this film is that there are so many students, because you have to sell the audience on the idea that this is a college,” Scanlon said. “But we chose the college years because we wanted to see these characters develop a relationship while they were becoming adults. College is so much about self-discovery.”

The animator’s technology

Once a scene is scripted and voice acted, it receives a series of approvals. At that point, it is supposed to be frozen. Then people like Scott Clark, the supervising animator, take over. One of hundreds of worker bees at the digital animation studio made famous by films like Toy Story and Up, Clark joined Pixar as an intern when Toy Story was coming out in 1995.

The Pixar way of creating an animated movie is a far cry from the hand-drawn art that Walt Disney’s artists used to create their first animated feature film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, in 1937. Computers can automate the creation of 3D scenes and moving characters in a film. But even with a lot of computer automation, it still takes a long time to animate something because you have to create the animation frame by frame, crafting something from nothing on a computer. It still takes weeks to do a few seconds’ worth of animation.

Animators are the “actors and stunt people of this virtual world,” Clark said. That’s because animators have to make the same kinds of decisions actors and stunt people make. If the actors get 20 takes to perform in real-time, the animators take a lot longer to plan a scene, and they ultimately wind up with just one take.

That’s because it is expensive and time-consuming to render (or fully animate with the highest quality imagery) a scene. In fact, it took Pixar’s server farm about 29 hours to render each frame of Monsters University, the prequel to Monsters Inc., one of the studio’s most beloved films.

Clark uses Pixar’s own proprietary software, Presto (named after a 2008 short film), to create the skeleton of a scene. Clark can create something and then play it back at around 8 frames per second (a film runs at 24 frames per second or faster) just to see if it works. When the scene looks just right, Clark finishes and submits it for approval. If someone above doesn’t like it, they may revise the script or shorten the scene, wiping out weeks of labor.

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

This week, Clash of Clans developer Supercell is now valued at $770 million and raised $130 million in February, Bethesda wraps up major Skyrim updates, and Disney fully embraces transmedia integration in Disney Infinity.

You’ll also find reviews for ShootMania, Cut the Rope: Time Travel, and a Threeview for BioShock Infinite, as well as our early impressions for Defiance.

News

• The DeanBeat: Defiance is inescapable transmedia that you’ll want to escape
• The Evil Within is the new survival-horror title from Resident Evil creator Mikami
• Nintendo finally releases the Circle Pad Pro for the 3DS XL in North America
• Angry Birds maker Rovio hires new exec to lead game development
• OnLive improves game-streaming performance with new optimization options
• Microsoft determined to make Xbox 360 more popular in Japan
• TimeGate loses appeal: Court orders Section 8 developer to pay $7.3M in damages
• Valued at $770M, Clash of Clans game studio Supercell raises $130M
• How Digital Chocolate teamed with Betable to launch a real-money gambling game in the U.K.
• Ex-Call of Duty team at Respawn Entertainment files for new trademark
• 2K Games is removing evidence of the XCOM shooter from the Internet
• Bethesda says farewell to more major Skyrim updates
• EA pulls the plug on 3 Facebook games

Mobile news

• Chinese ‘app store’ lets you install pirated iPhone apps — without jailbreaking
• PopCap releases Bookworm Heroes for iOS
• Hold on, mobile gaming monetization ain’t as easy as it looks
• Former Unity execs reveal cyberpunk tactics game for tablets
• With $11.3M to back it, Music Mastermind’s Zya app will turn consumers into music creators
• Papaya’s AppFlood helps developers monetize games in lucrative Chinese market
• Pocket Gems evolves from a successful developer into a mobile game publisher

Tech news

• Benchmark reveals Ouya’s aging Tegra 3 can’t keep up with newest Android phones

NPDs and future plans

• March 2013 NPD: Industry slumps another 10 percent as BioShock Infinite tops the charts
• Xbox division up big for Microsoft in Q3; Xbox Live has 46M members
• Japan’s Capcom slashes forecast and cancels games
• U.S. digital game revenues were stable in March, Superdata says

Exciting announcements

• Bethesda revealing Shinji Mikami’s horror game tomorrow: Here are the clues
• Breaking down what’s old and new in the 3DS’s upcoming lineup
• 3DS Nintendo Direct trailer roundup: Earthbound, new Link to the Past, and more
• Here’s a quick look at Yoshi’s Island for the 3DS
• Nintendo is making a new Zelda set in the A Link to the Past universe for 3DS
• The Legend of Zelda: Oracle games heading to 3DS eShop
• EarthBound coming to the Wii U Virtual Console this year
• Winged Pikmin take to the sky in the Wii U release this August
• Mario Party coming to Nintendo 3DS this winter
• Nintendo explains how it made Donkey Kong Country Returns 3D easier
• Mario & Luigi: Dream Team due out August 11

Interviews

• ‘Terminator’ actor Michael Biehn talks voicing Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon’s hero
• Signia Venture Partners’ Rick Thompson delivers the über-investor’s take on mobile gaming investments (interview)

Reviews

• Cut the Rope: Time Travel is a charmingly addictive puzzler with a few new tricks (review)
• Defiance is not your normal massively multiplayer online game (first impressions)
• Threeview: BioShock Infinite reviewed by a critic, an analyst, and an academic
• ShootMania Storm excels at shooter simplicity and customization (review)

Previews

• Disney Infinity takes shape as a huge investment in transmedia (hands-on preview)

Pieces of flair

• The uncanny similarities between the original BioShock and Infinite (gallery)
• Read+Watch+Listen: Bonus material for BioShock Infinite fans
• 10 better-than-Hollywood video game cosplayers
• Camp Minecraft: How educators use the block-building game to inspire kids to code
• Racing with friends: PS4′s DriveClub vs. PC’s Auto Club Revolution

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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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When Disney announced its Infinity platform for combining toys and video games in a single entertainment platform, it was easy to dismiss it as a Skylanders copycat.

Activision has seen more than $1 billion in revenues from its Skylanders toy-game hybrid products. Disney’s offering is similar, but it is pouring a lot of its game- and toy-design chops into making sure that Infinity will be unique and valuable, considering that fans could pour a lot of money into this new platform over time.

Disney had originally targeted a June launch, but it delayed until August to make sure the game is polished. Disney is position Infinity as a platform to transform it into a huge game company, for once and for all.

We got a look at Infinity recently, and it’s clear that Disney’s engaging in a full-scale cross-platform toy and game war. Infinity is going to have depth and scale, and it will benefit from tapping into some of the biggest entertainment brands on Earth, said John Vignocchi [above], the executive producer of Disney Infinity, in an interview with GamesBeat.

“We have this treasure chest of intellectual property, and we can decide how much of that to leverage in Disney Infinity,” Vignocchi said.

Disney is making several entertainment properties available on Disney Infinity from its inception. So it’s clear that Disney isn’t just testing the waters with Infinity.

The toy-game competition is perhaps one of the biggest wagers any company could make in entertainment. That’s why only the biggest companies — Nintendo, Disney, and Activision — are moving into the market so far. But Infinity isn’t the only project happening. Disney will continue to invest in standalone games, such as separate mobile games from Disney Mobile. And if Disney Infinity is a hit, the entertainment company could have a profit engine for years to come.

Disney began work on Infinity shortly after it shipped Toy Story 3: The Video Game in mid-2010. The company’s Avalanche Software division in Salt Lake City was enamored with that Toy Story 3′s Toy Box mode, which was an open world where you could engage in any kind of play with a bunch of different characters. Kids could build their own town from scratch, and it was clearly the innovative part of the title.

Then Disney adapted to the shift toward social and mobile games acquired social game maker Playdom for $763.2 million in July 2010, and it also grabbed mobile game maker Tapulous in mid-2010. Playdom’s CEO John Pleasants became the head of Disney’s game business, as the move toward digital games took on a new urgency.

A big part of the team was working on a game for Cars 2. But a smaller skunk works team at Disney’s Avalanche focused on a game called Buzz Lightyear Star Command. In conversations with that team, Pleasants directed to do something much more ambitious that would be a platform for all Disney games in the future.

“Instead of a one-off game based on Tron or Tangled, what if we could make a game using the same engine and tools and vary the amount of content we could do for a particular Disney property,” said Vignocchi. “The idea of creating a platform really resonated with us.”

While this was happening, Activision Blizzard launched Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure in October 2011. That title combined a multiplatform game with a line of toys that you place on a “portal” connected to a game machine. By placing the character on the portal, the toy character transfers into the game for the player to control. The series was an instant hit, and it has sold more than $1 billion worth to date, with toy sales beating out sales of Star Wars toys. That’s a real threat to Disney, and, while Disney executives won’t acknowledge it, Disney Infinity was clearly adapted to mimic the toy-game hybrid strategy of Skylanders.

But Disney’s own portal, or “Infinity Base,” isn’t an exact copy. The base lights up with different color LED lights based on which character is on it.

Like with Skylanders, you place a Disney toy character on the portal to activate that character inside the game. But you can also add “power discs” in the form of plastic hexagonal discs for the character to stand on. Those separately purchased power-ups give the character new abilities, and you can put up to two of them under a character. You can improve a character’s health by 20 percent or give the character an economic boost.

The starter pack for a character comes with one of those power discs included. Kids can trade those discs with each other. That enhances replayability for the toy-hybrid platform, giving players a reason to acquire a new toy for $12.99 each. The base package will sell for $75, including the game and the base platform. The potential for additional collectible toy sales is enormous — and it’s on a scale that only Disney can do.

The software is broken into playsets, or “true to property experience,” Vignocchi said. These are original stories based on the entertainment property, such as the upcoming Monsters University coming out in June from Disney’s Pixar animation division.

“The days of going to see the movie and going home to play the same story in the game are gone,” Vignocchi said. “Players want a new adventure. That’s what we aim for with every play set.”

The game teams are working with filmmakers to create the original stories and craft characters for the games.

The other part is the Toy Box mode, which is like the toys on your living room floor. They’re all mixed together. You can mix and match Disney characters from different properties in the Toy Box mode. In that mode, you can add a “theme disc” to the back of the portal, changing the whole background of the world to match the theme. You can, for instance, switch from a Toy Story world to a Tangled world in an instant.

“It’s not a linear, level-based game” like the Skylanders games, Vignocchi said. “Players can decide where they want to go and how they want to play. There’s no wrong way to play the games.”

At the outset, the Toy Box world is populated with a mash-up of buildings and environments from different Disney properties. The creativity part of the platform is designed to be intuitive. With Toy Box, you can use a magic wand to highlight different objects. Once it is highlighted, you can move that object around, delete it, or edit it. You can rotate the item or use it to build things like castles in the sky. When you’re editing an item, you can change the texture of the item so it will look different in the world. You can modify the nature of the world very quickly simply by putting a power disc on the Infinity Base.

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Disney Infinity is skipping Pixar’s next movie in exchange for more shelf space at retail.

The company is delaying Disney Infinity from June to August based on feedback from retailers, according to the New York Times. Disney Infinity, a Skylanders-like digital playground that works with physical toys based on popular Disney properties (like the upcoming Monster University), will now hit U.S. stores on August 18.

While August is normally a back-to-school month for children and parents, retailers were willing to give the game and its toys more display space if Disney launched the product closer to the holiday shopping season.

“The date because an issue in terms of them asking ‘Is there a better opportunity here?’” Disney Interactive co-president John Pleasants told the Times. “We could deliver in June if we wanted to.”

Pleasants said the developers will use this extra time to ensure the game “sings and pops.”

Meanwhile, Nintendo is planning a similar title for its Pokémon franchise, which it just recently introduced in Japan, and Acitivion will unleash the third Skylanders game, Swap Force, sometime this fall.

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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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Few companies have branding muscle like Disney’s, and the multimedia conglomerate is flexing it today to help hype gamers for its upcoming Disney Infinity.

Disney is working on the Skylanders-inspired Infinity title, which combines digital video games with physical toys. Today, it revealed a new set of interactive action figures based on Pixar’s Cars franchise. It previously demoed play sets based on The Incredibles, Monsters University, and Pirates of the Caribbean.

Disney plans to release the game on June 18 for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii U, Wii, 3DS, and Windows.

Players of Disney Infinity can use the Cars characters like Lightning McQueen, Mater, Holley Shiftwell, and Francesco Bernoulli on its racing and stunt track levels.

Disney released the following trailer that shows the characters in action:

Disney Infinity: Cars gallery

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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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Midterms, late-night parties, and skipping classes are all part of the collegiate experience. But when you’re a pint-sized cyclops or a tall blue Sasquatch, things might be a little different.

During the annual American International Toy Fair that kicked off last weekend in New York City, Disney unveiled a few new images from its upcoming toy-powered sandbox game, Disney Infinity. It focuses on the world of Pixar’s Monsters University, the June film that serves as a prequel to Monsters, Inc, where goofball heroes Mike and Sulley are just wide-eyed freshmen.

Monsters University is only one of many “Play Sets” (physical figurines that unlock levels and characters from a specific movie) possible for Disney Infinity — at its reveal last month, developer Avalanche Software also showed one based on Pirates of the Caribbean. You can use pieces from these Play Sets in the Toy Box mode, a level editor where you can mix and match as many Disney properties as you want.

Just seeing Mr. Incredible flying a Recognizer brings a tear to my eye (and wallet).

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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 Walt Disney Company is shifting its gaming focus to mobile, social, and the upcoming Disney Infinity.

Disney’s game division, Disney Interactive, reportedly laid off 50 employees yesterday. This is in addition to the closure of Epic Mickey developer Junction Point Studios in Austin, Texas.

The Los Angeles Times report, spotted by Joystiq, cites a source that is “knowledgeable” but “not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.”

According to the Times, the cutbacks come as Disney Interactive aims for profitability this fiscal year. Last quarter, the company reported that interactive revenues for the year decreased 14 percent, and quarterly revenues were also down 14 percent. It also noted a reduction console game development as part of an ongoing shift to the mobile and social sector. Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two sold 529,000 units last year, reports the NPD.

The Times also obtained an internal email sent to employees from Disney Interactive copresident John Pleasants. In it, he mentioned the closure of Junction Point, noting that the “division operates in a rapidly evolving industry” and that it must “sometimes make difficult decisions to ensure we’re meeting market demands.” One of those decisions is increased focus on its upcoming project, Disney Infinity.

It’s likely that the ever-growing mobile and social space is taking priority for Disney’s gaming division, and Junction Point was one of the first casualties.

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

This week, Disney announced its version of a Skylanders-like game featuring characters from the company’s various intellectual properties, President Barack Obama urged Congress to research the effects of violent video games on children, and the Internet takes Dead Island: Riptide to task over a controversial preorder bonus.

News:

• The DeanBeat: Disney starts a cross-platform toy war with Activision
• Kingdom Conquest II primer: How to protect yourself and dominate your enemies
• Rumor: The next PlayStation is more powerful than the next Xbox
• WGT partners with NBC’s Golf Channel for online golf game
• Déjà vu: New bill would give ESRB video game ratings the force of law
• Diablo III’s director is moving on (but is staying at Blizzard)
• Animal Crossing: New Leaf and more missing from Nintendo’s Q1 release list
• Disney Infinity: Made possible because Disney owns all of this
• Chartboost shines a light on holiday app performance (infographic)
• Gamewise connects gamers with a social experience and a reference tool
• German Facebook page leaks possible Star Wars 1313 release info (UPDATED)
• This week in the Nintendo Download: Fire Emblem, Crash Mobs, and Kirby
• Poll: Tell us what you want in a next-gen console
• Fallout: Coming soon to a TV near you?
• Ubisoft and New Regency team up again for the Splinter Cell movie
• Coming in October: GamesBeat 2013 — ‘The Battle Royal in Gaming’
• Sony exec confirms a new PlayStation announcement could come this spring
• Xseed completes Operation Rainfall trilogy with Pandora’s Tower this spring (updated)
• Obama: ‘Congress should fund research into the effects violent video games have on young minds’
• World of Tanks introduces Chinese armor with newest update
• Watch the Disney Infinity figures wiggle in 3D
• Nintendo to merge console and handheld divisions
• PlayStation Vita’s Wake-up Club is your new social alarm clock
• Dead Island Riptide developer apologizes for special edition’s severed torso statue
• BioShock Infinite on PC scales down to run on integrated graphics cards
• Apple: ‘Want to criticize religion? Write a book’ — don’t make a game
• Game acquisitions set new record at $4B in 2012, but investments tumble 57 percent
• Imprisoned Arma III devs free on bail
• We should inspire game developers to create alternatives to violent entertainment
• Homosexuality in Star Wars: The Old Republic is separate but unequal

 Mobile News:

• Match wits with Mike Tyson and other celebrities in interactive game-show app Braindex
  
• King.com’s Candy Crush Saga beats Zynga with top social-mobile game
• NRA pulls bait-and-switch with iOS shooting app
• Ad giant Interpublic invests in mobile-rewards startup Kiip
• The spendy social gamers of Anchorage (and other facts about mobile gaming habits)
• Mobile-app advertising platform SponsorPay doubles revenue in 2012
• Kabam acquires Vancouver studio Exploding Barrel Games

Interviews:

• How Rick Thompson became the über investor for gaming (interview)
• Tomb Raider’s multiplayer takes a different direction (video interview)

Reviews:

• Temple Run 2 prefers sure footing to leaps of faith (review)
• Earth Defense Force 2017 Portable brings B-movie fun to the Vita (review)
• Offensive Combat pumps out laughs and bullets in equal measure (review)
• DmC: Devil May Cry brings the sexy back to demon killing (review)

Previews:

• Oculus Rift is virtual reality that won’t make you barf (hands-on preview)

Community Spotlight:

• The Dead Island: Riptide reaction was an equality fail
  
• The backlog blues: What happens when you can play it all
• Milkshake Resolved: A Dead Island Riptide poem
• Dishonored’s use of tired storytelling devices shows that game narratives are stale
• Cyberpunk’s old-school order: The history and future of the tabletop games
• The most popular video games are also the most violent
• Honoring your game characters’ deaths is about respecting yourself
• Memorable quotes from video game history
• The future of gaming: What gun violence means to the industry
• Second glance: Investigating the creation and failure of Damnation with lead designer Jacob Minkoff
• 4 things we may never see again in video games

Pieces of Flair: 

• Video games and libraries are a good mix, say librarians
• The funniest Achievements and Trophies ever, part four: I see what you did there
• The funniest Achievements and Trophies ever, part three: That’s so meta
• The funniest Achievements and Trophies ever, part two: Murder is fun(?)
• The funniest Achievements and Trophies ever, part one: Failures
• GamesBeat’s PlayStation 2 memories
• The Kickstarter Hall of Shame: Crazy gaming gadgets
• The ideal Mega Man vs. Street Fighter game would look like this (gallery)

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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!

---

Toy war. It sounds like a title for a game or a movie. But it applies to the business competition between Disney and Activision Blizzard that erupted this week. You might call it the first major “transmedia” war between two heavyweight entertainment companies that are both deeply involved in video games. The winner will be able to stake out a leadership role in the cross-platform worlds of toys, video games, mobile apps, and online universes.

In short, the victor will carve out a toy-game empire.

On Tuesday, Disney unveiled its Infinity interactive gaming platform, which pulls together characters from Disney and Pixar into the world of digitally connected toys and games. It is a direct challenge to Activision Blizzard’s Skylanders franchise, which generated $500 million in retail sales of toys and video games in 2012. Who is going to win? In this battle, brands, marketing, technology, and gameplay should set apart the victor and the loser.

Both companies are bringing toys to life in the virtual environments of games across consoles, mobile and online. The toys serve as storage devices, keeping a gamer’s custom data for use in the game. And players can unlock the game and characters from a number of platforms. Activision has a head start. It said that its toys are outselling both the Transformers and Star Wars lines of action figures. That’s a shot across the bow for Disney, which now owns the Star Wars brand. (Hasbro currently produces action figures under the Star Wars license.)

Based on Skylanders’ positive reception, Disney’s Infinity could very well be a huge driver of demand across different marketing channels. Kids (and adults) already love the Disney and Pixar characters, and this Infinity platform will give them multiple ways to engage with those characters. They can play with them in the home, at a friend’s house, or on the run with a mobile device. The market demand for one character will pull consumers into getting the same character on a different platform.

Technology is making it possible. The Disney and Pixar characters (starting with Captain Jack Sparrow of the Pirates of the Caribbean, Sully from Monsters. Inc., and Mr. Incredible from The Incredibles) stand on power discs that connect to the Infinity platform. That seems an awful lot like the Portal of Power that the Skylanders connect to.

Skylanders use a cheap radio-frequency identification chip — much like the ones in employee badges that unlock company doors — that interacts with a reader in the portal. Disney’s Infinity, which arrives this June, probably uses a similar technology for data transfer, and it can connect with a computer or console via a USB port. Players use this tech to drop in or drop out, shifting from one character to another quickly simply by moving a character onto the platform. These portals provide the basic connectivity and storage of saved games. But I expect new technologies to come into the platforms over time.

Disney has the advantage of having bigger brands, with scores of characters to churn out that any child would recognize. The Skylanders had the advantage of novelty, but they’re definitely less memorable. Either side could spend a lot of money to publicize its characters, but Disney definitely has the upper hand in marketing muscle. Activision will have to accelerate its plans to update Skylanders. Already, its Toys for Bob game studio in Novato, Calif., is working at a punishing pace, having launched two major games in 10 months. Now it will have to come up with something new again. Disney, meanwhile, has huge resources to bear as it tries to be a fast follower.

Can startups play in this game?  Certainly, Disney and Activision have upped the ante. If you have just a toy business, or a game business for kids, you’ve been disrupted. San Francisco-based Nukotoys labored for years before it debuted its hybrid of physical card games with mobile games on an iPad. Nukotoys may get swamped by Disney and Activision. But Nukotoys has brands of its own. It teamed up to deliver card games based on the Animal Planet and Monsterology.

The scary thing about this transmedia business is that the bets are huge. And the consequences of failure are tremendous. If you fail, you don’t just fail in one business. You can bring down a whole franchise across multiple platforms. That’s why this competition between Disney and Activision will be so interesting to watch.

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No other company besides Disney could make Disney Infinity. Aside from the obvious, the amount of resources it can pull together for this upcoming platform is staggering.

Disney Infinity is essentially an open-ended Grand Theft Auto sandbox with a Minecraft/LittleBigPlanet creative component that you can use to make their own content. You can unlock new characters, items, worlds, and more by placing stylish collectible figures and chips onto a special base. And everything is wrapped in the family-friendly ethos of the Disney films and theme parks.

Infinity launches this June for PC, all major home consoles, and mobile platforms. Leading up to the summer, the House of Mouse is making a big push to establish this new brand (read: money machine). It officially unveiled Infinity this week at the classy, Disney-owned El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood, Calif. John Lasseter, the chief creative officer at Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios, was on hand to talk about Infinity’s emphasis on play and creativity.

I had a chance to preview the game and learn about all its different elements. I came away with one main conclusion: Regardless of how you feel about conspicuous consumption or one company owning so many different things, you must admit that something as ambitious as Disney Infinity is only possible because one conglomerate owns all this:

Walt Disney studios: It’s no coincidence that Infinity and the upcoming Monsters University film are both coming out in June — and that the game features characters and stages based on the movie. Expect this to become the norm whenever a new high-profile Disney flick comes out. Instead of having to spend two or three years making a standalone movie-game tie-in, developer Avalanche Software can just make a new set of levels and characters to expand Infinity.

Executive producer John Vignocchi explained to me that Disney hooks Avalanche up with unprecedented access to filmmakers like Jerry Bruckheimer (Pirates of the Caribbean), Tim Burton (The Nightmare Before Christmas), and their teams.

Talk about going to the source for authenticity.

The type of audiences that Disney commands from its motion pictures is tremendous, and now each of those viewers is a new potential customer to try an inspired interactive experience with Infinity. How many people are fans first of Spyro the Dragon and other characters from the rival Skylanders series and then get into the games second? Compared to all those for the beloved Disney franchises, not many.

Since Avalanche is able to draw from all the Disney-owned properties, what else might we see in the game? One of the add-on vehicles available at the event was the Electric Mayhem bus from The Muppets. Does this mean we might see some Marvel Avengers or Star Wars content when Disney releases those blockbusters in the following years?

“The possibilities are infinite,” Vignocchi said.

Parks and resorts: Picture the iconic Sleeping Beauty castle from Disneyland with a Finding Nemo underwater twist. Now, swap out the coral decorations for some neon-laced Tron trim. Add a constantly growing interactive world around it and you start to get the idea. These are the kind of images Disney showed us to promote some of the creative potential for players using the Minecraft-inspired level-editor Toy Box.

The theme park connection is also visible in the Play Sets. These are what Disney calls the different in-game worlds (each with mission-oriented gameplay) that players can unlock with Play Set figures. The Pirates of the Caribbean level we saw had a couple of visual references to the classic ride. As Captain Jack Sparrow rowed a boat under archways and between vessels exchanging cannon fire, I instantly thought of the Disneyland attraction. No one had to tell me. The park experience is that ingrained in me, and that can be a powerful way to connect with customers

Consumer products: “We’re all game developers,” Vignocchi said. “So while we hoped and dreamed, since the inception of Infinity back in 2010, that we’d have this line of collectible figures that went with it, none of us know how to make toys.” That’s where Disney’s massive Consumer Products division comes in. This is the group that manages the mountains of official Disney licensed stuff in stores.

They help us “identify factories that we we’re going to work with for manufacturing, make sure that we’re delivering the correct file formats to the various factories, quality assurance, working with the FCC. …” said Vignocchi.

Disney’s Imagineering and other research teams also served as consultants to the special figurine technology that Avalanche conceived of. Those teams are also helping to develop what future versions of the base reader (what you use to connect the toys up to the game) can do.

Club Penguin: With user-generated content, fans inevitably will try to make levels featuring swastikas, marijuana leafs, penises, four-letter words — you name it. Hell, some rogue Disney animators even inserted a picture of a topless woman into The Rescuers. That’s apparently the kind of thing some people will always do given creative freedom.

To keep the game environment family-friendly, Disney is bringing in some pros to vet the levels that players submit. The customer support staff from the popular online children’s game Club Penguin (which reportedly has over 30 million registered user accounts) will sort through submissions and weed out the inappropriate ones before players can download any of it for Toy Box mode.

Club Penguin is aimed at kids ages 6-14 and has been around since 2005. I cannot imagine a group of people who have more experience cleaning up online f-bombs and hate speech than the folk who work there.

Avalanche Software: A quick glance at this developer’s portfolio shows that the people there definitely know how to make solid licensed games. They’ve been crafting them since Disney acquired the studio in 2005. More intriguing is the Octane development engine that they’ve been adding to for the past 11 years.

“Right now, I know that we have well over 60 different mechanics in the game,” said Vignocchi. “Whether that’s melee combat to sword fighting to projectiles, driving … it is on par with some of the biggest games out there, like Grand Theft Auto, and it is a ‘family game.’”

This foundation is essential for Avalanche to make each Play Set feel different. The Incredibles level involves a lot of superhero fighting and robot smashing, while Monsters University is more focused on stealth to scare students from rival Fear Tech. The Pirates of the Caribbean world featured galleon customization and naval gun battles. These certainly aren’t cookie-cutter platformers. Considering how many developers treat the stable cash-in of licensed properties, it’s refreshing to see Avalanche go the distance. “As game developers,” Vignocchi said, “our mantra is, we kind of take a page out of Pixar’s book, we create games for ourselves but that are accessible to kids.”

That focus will ultimately benefit fans since the freedom in Toy Box mode turns them into game makers. In a demo video, we saw how quality assurance staff could change the camera angle to 2D for a working Donkey Kong arcade game level. Another person re-created the Bowser’s Castle race track from Mario Kart 64 that players can actually drive on. When you add in the programming logic items that enable aspiring level designers to add and chain together triggers, doors, moving platforms, and more, the potential is pretty promising. Disney plans to foster user creativity by holding themed contests.

It’s that emphasis on play and imagination that appears to ground Disney Infinity. So much of this corporate synergy is a bit mind-boggling. The business model is classic Disney (movie tie-ins, collectible trinkets and toys, and so on), but it’s the gameplay that will determine whether Infinity is just a massive cash-in or the title that could finally establish Disney Interactive as a formidable, traditional game maker.

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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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One thing is for certain: Disney is going to cash in with the sales of these collectible, interactive figures for its upcoming Disney Infinity video game. They work similarly to the popular Skylanders series where each toy can unlock a different character to play as in the platformer. Disney plans to release Infinity on June 18 (as repeatedly told to me by a development team member demoing the game) for PC, Nintendo Wii, Wii U, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and various mobile platforms.

I suppose we can then expect a chaotic eBay black market to emerge for the 2013 holiday season (the figures regularly retail for $12.99 each).  In the mean time, check out these 3D wiggle pictures I snapped of a few treasured Disney characters using my Nintendo 3DS. If you suffer from seizures, however, you might want to hold off on looking … especially at that Incredibles one at the end.

The collection of interactive figurines Disney has unveiled so far for Disney Infinity

Sully and Mike Wazowski from Monsters, Inc. and the upcoming Monsters University

Captain Jack Sparrow and Hector Barbossa from The Pirates of the Caribbean

Violet, Mr. Incredible, Elastigirl and Dash from The Incredibles

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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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HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — Video game companies are paying attention to the success that Activision’s struck with its Skylanders series. That’s the clear message behind Disney Interactive’s news today, as the House of Mouse’s video game arm showed of its upcoming Disney Infinity sandbox project — and revealed that it uses collectible figures to unlock different worlds and characters.

These new figures work similarly to Activision’s toy-infused Skylanders series; players save their game data on the toys, which they can take on the road (like to a friend’s home). The developer who walked me through a demo of Infinity repeatedly said the release date was June 18, roughly alongside the highly anticipated Monsters University film.

Disney took inspiration from the popular, stylish vinyl figurines available at its theme parks. It is not, however, use the same the technology as Skylanders despite the similar functionality. It developed this technology in-house.

The figures will retail for $12.99 each.

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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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