In February, Sony Computer Entertainment revealed its PlayStation 4 video game console — only it didn’t reveal the actual hardware. Now, the publisher is teasing the system’s design in a new video where it promises to finally lift the curtain at the Electronic Entertainment Expo trade show in early June.

Sony’s PlayStation YouTube channel just launched the following video which shows a fuzzy black monolith intercut with less fuzzy images that show the PlayStation logo, some exhaust vents, and the number “4.”

Sony will present its E3 event on June 10 at 6 p.m. Pacific time. At that point, we will likely see the PlayStation 4 in the flesh along with some new games and features.

As for the hardware, it’s impossible to make any final judgments about the aesthetic design from this video, but the teaser images sure do look like a gaming console.

GamesBeat is attending the June 10 press event, and we’ll have more information and images at that time.

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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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So it’s come to this, has it, Nintendo? You’re now content to skulk in the corners of the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) with your innovative devices and sequels to 20-year-old Super Nintendo games? This once mighty company won’t even attempt to assert itself on a stage against the new titans of the age, Sony and Microsoft?

I’m not so out of touch as to think E3 in 2013 is as important as it was to the video game industry back when it started in 1995. So in one respect, I can understand why it seems like a good idea to skip the expense and hassle of a major press conference. I’d applaud the decision if I didn’t think it was yet another symptom of the isolationist culture that’s embedded itself somewhere deep within your business, Nintendo — leading you to behave like an old hermit stubbornly whittling away at the same wooden toys that used to bring the kids out to visit a long time ago.

The Nintendo Directs are welcome and informative, but you might be overestimating how widely they are spreading your message. Sure, dropping a prerecorded video message from some far-flung corner of the earth has gotten people plenty of attention before, but I doubt you want to apply that communications model to your free-market enterprise. There’s something to be said for putting on a show at a venue where media, distributors, and industry officials will be converging for several days. You don’t want to leave it up to everyone to watch a 24-minute YouTube video presentation set against a stark white background.

With the Wii U, you’ve met the bare minimum requirements to say you launched a new console: You shipped boxes of them to stores, released a glossed-up version of New Super Mario Bros. Wii, and put out a variation on the theme of “Look at Us, We’re Innovative” with Nintendo Land. There was no effective marketing done to actually sell the Wii U to the people who bought the original Wii. Your promises of third-party game support have thus far fallen short, your own lineup of software keeps suffering delays, and the latest series of advertisements for the console show families struggling to put two cogent thoughts together about why they even bought the damn console in the first place.

You’re not in the clear yet, and it seems like a bad time to rely on others to come to you, especially when Sony and Microsoft won’t be waiting patiently for people to pass by their E3 booths to show them their versions of the next big thing in gaming. It’s not that the IGNs, GameSpots, and Kotakus of the Internet won’t notice you at E3. They will, and the gaming-informed will be able to recite by heart your holiday release schedule by the end of the show.

The problem is with U.S.A. Today, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal — the big types of mainstream news sources whose video game coverage largely consists of statements from congressmen and senators panning the medium for its portrayals of violence. They are going to be hard-pressed to find time for your discreet show when they are writing about how Microsoft will be taking over the suburban living room with the new Xbox this fall, with Sony’s PlayStation 4 tagging close behind.

Maybe in a year — when you’ve established a strong lineup of games for the Wii U, when the anticipation around next-generation consoles has died down, and when it’s just another time for more games — I might suggest forgoing the stage. In 2013, my only advice to you, Nintendo, is to “break a leg.”

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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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Good news, everybody! I’m going to get to play a bunch of new Wii U games at this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo! What? Aren’t you happy for me?

Nintendo president Satoru Iwata announced today during a Nintendo Direct video stream that the publisher will show off new installments of some of its biggest franchises at the June gaming conference. These games will be for the company’s newest system, the Wii U, which launched last November.

The Nintendo EAD Tokyo Software Development team, who previously gave us the Super Mario Galaxy series on the Nintendo Wii and Super Mario 3D Land for the Nintendo 3DS, is working on a new 3D Mario game that will be playable at E3.

We’ll also see the Wii U versions of racer Mario Kart and fighter Super Smash Bros. at the show. We know that Project Sora, the development team behind Super Smash Bros. Brawl for the Wii and Kid Icarus: Uprising for the Nintendo 3DS, is working with Namco Bandai on the new Smash Bros. Iwata said that Nintendo will show the first screenshots of the game at the conference. Mario Kart will be playable.

Nintendo has a history of showing off new software at the Electronic Entertainment Expo. Last year the venue gave gamers their first glimpses of Nintendo Land, Pikmin 3, and other Wii U exclusives ahead of the system’s launch. This year’s show will take place June 11-13 in Los Angeles.

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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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Welcome to the new year in games. I made my predictions about the game industry last week, but this week I’m thinking about what will happen in 2013 on a month-by-month basis. The pattern of the game industry is somewhat predictable, based on the major events that happen every year. But social, mobile, and online game companies have changed the business and the patterns of the year as well.

If you’re used to the old annual cycle, what follows below is more like what you can expect from the disrupted game business. As you can see, 2013 promises to be a very different kind of year. No longer is the cycle driven simply by the announcement of new games and their launch in the fall. Call it the drumbeat of disruption. But the cadence of news will be steady all year long.

January

Next week, we’ll make our way to the Consumer Electronics Show. Sony will have a press conference, but don’t expect it to announce the PlayStation 4. We’ll see all sorts of game peripherals from companies like Mad Catz Interactive (launching its GameSmart devices), but CES is losing its luster as a big event for the game business.

Still, there is a huge amount happening behind the scenes. If the console companies really want to release new consoles this year, the major chips have to be shipping from the chip manufacturer already, according to Charlie Demerjian at the chip blog SemiAccurate. The debugging process and the subsequent creation of launch titles happens so far in advance that the chip makers have much earlier deadlines than anyone else making components for the consoles.

The new game release schedule for the month is light, with smaller titles such as DmC: Devil May Cry coming out. In mid January, market researcher NPD Group will release sales figures for the full calendar year of retail video game sales, and we’ll find out just how weak a year it was for the core business in the U.S. That will coincide with earnings season for the major U.S. publicly traded game companies.

February

We’ll be delighted to see the release of some major titles such as Sony’s Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time, Konami’s Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, Electronic Arts’ Dead Space 3, and EA-Crytek’s Crysis 3. We’ll be traveling to events such as Casual Connect in Hamburg, Germany, and the Dice Summit in Las Vegas to capture the pulse of the industry. At Dice, we’ll see major talks from David Cage, head of Quantic Dream, whose major game Beyond: Two Souls should be one of the big titles of the year. The Dice Summit is a great place for game industry leaders to stir up a lot of news and focus the world’s attention on the big issues.

This year, many of the speakers will hail from tablet and mobile game makers. One of the speakers is Gabe Newell, head of Valve and a man who supposedly has his own Linux-based game console in the works.

Yet the game business is spilling over into different industries. Titles such as Skylanders, which offer both toy and game products, have seen their debut at the Toy Fair show in New York. As toys go digital, they’re becoming much more game like.

March

The Game Developers Conference will keep us busy for a whole week in San Francisco. And we’ll finally see a gigantic month for core games with the scheduled releases of Tomb Raider, God of War: Ascension, SimCity, StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm, Gears of War Judgement, and BioShock Infinite. Apple will probably try to upstage the game companies at the GDC by holding a launch of its own, either a new iPad or a new iPhone. Ouya also promises that its Android-based $99 game console will launch during March. The company is hoping to disrupt the traditional consoles with free-to-play games that were born on mobile devices.

April

Disrupt the disruptors! PlayJam hopes to disrupt the likes of Ouya with its own GameStick, a game console that sells for $79 and fits on a universal serial bus stick. For some reason, there aren’t many big games coming out, except for the Dead Island Riptide sequel. If you’re thinking about delaying a major game release, April is a good time for it to launch on a revised schedule. The Gamification Summit may offer a nice distraction for those who believe that making work more game-like can make people more productive. The Neuro Gaming Conference and Expo might also be cool for folks who want to see the mind and body meet through game play. Meanwhile, the Global iGaming Summit & Expo will highlight the intersection of social casino games and online gambling — a big growth area for games.

May

The industry will be full of next-generation rumors as it approaches E3. But the blockbuster titles expected this month include Sony’s The Last of Us and Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto V. Gamers will be in a state of heaven. Rockstar and its parent Take-Two Interactive have consistently launched big games during May in recent years. For all other developers, beware the Ides of May.

June

At the E3 show in Los Angeles, we’ll probably see Sony and Microsoft unveil their new game consoles. Sony’s PlayStation 4 will hopefully make use of cloud gaming technology acquired with the $380 million purchase of Gaikai. Microsoft’s Major Nelson, aka Larry Hyrb, has a timer showing that the event is only 158 days and some fraction of a day away. Some folks took that to mean that Microsoft will introduce a new game console at that moment, but Major Nelson does that every year. E3 will still be huge, but the changes wrought by new business models and distribution systems will be evident.

July

This is a quiet month, but Zynga sometimes holds its Unleashed event to describe the big new games coming on social and mobile platforms. Our own MobileBeat event will highlight the growth of mobile platforms and the app economy. And in Shanghai, the ChinaJoy conference takes place to highlight all things gaming in one of the fastest-growing markets for free-to-play games.

August

The Gamescom event in Cologne, Germany, has become Europe’s biggest game fest. And the Pax Prime event in Seattle is another show where the fans will come out by the tens of thousands.

September

The first games of the fall will start hitting the market, and the game developers who managed to get their games out on time will see the benefit of a longer selling cycle up through the holidays. This month is also home to the Tokyo Game Show. With the rise of mobile social game companies Gree and DeNA, don’t be surprised if the Japanese companies start making a lot more money from mobile games compared to what they make on the traditional consoles. Apple usually unveils its new fall platform launches in this month.

October

Super hero games will debut at the New York Comic-Con. But social and mobile games are likely to account for a bigger slice of these titles in contrast to superhero console games in the past. And this year, our GamesBeat 2013 conference will take place during October. We’ll line up dozens of speakers for this event. And we don’t know what they are, but there will be lots of games launching this month.

November

This is still the big month for blockbuster game launches. You can expect to see Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 (or something like it) debut this month. Ubisoft typically releases a new Assassin’s Creed game, Microsoft cranks out a Halo, and other big titles typically hit just before Black Friday. But this month will also likely see the debut of the Sony PlayStation 4 or the Microsoft Xbox 720 (as it has been nicknamed). In Korea, you can expect another Gstar conference to take place.

December

The Spike TV VGA game awards have distorted the calendar so that many new games that were once announced at CES are now revealed in December instead, after all the big games have already launched for the holiday season.

The industry will feel the impact of smartphones and tablets as game activity peaks in the last week of the year. But chances are that some of the biggest game playing will happen on mobile devices, as consumers cash in their gift cards and download mobile titles on their new devices. That was how Angry Birds saw more than 8 million downloads on Christmas Day in 2012. The days after Christmas may actually turn out to be the biggest days for game sales for the whole year one of these days.

[Image credits: Mike_fleming on Flickr Creative Commons, Major Nelson]

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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 Electronic Entertainment Expo, gaming’s largest North American trade show, isn’t leaving Los Angeles.

The Los Angeles Convention Center, E3′s home for more than a decade, is transforming to accommodate a new professional football stadium. The convention center’s owning entity, AEG, plans to demolish the West Hall and erect the new venue (known as Farmer’s Field) in its place. The Entertainment Software Association, the trade group that runs E3, was reportedly unhappy about how the reduced space and planned construction would impact an already crowded show. AEG seems to have allayed those concerns as the ESA announced it will continue to hold E3 in L.A. through 2015.

“My office was committed to doing whatever it took to keep the largest annual conference that the city hosts here for another three years,” said Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. ”I personally joined in the negotiations, and we worked with all parties to ensure the needs of E3 would be met. The city is grateful the Entertainment Software Association continues to view L.A., the entertainment capital of the world, as the ideal location for the world’s premiere video game convention.”

In a joint press release, the two organizations said they are working together to schedule the construction so that it has a minimal interference with the expo.

“Working with ESA to provide the confidence in scheduling they have requested has truly been a collaborative effort,” said Timothy J. Leiweke, president and chief executive officer of AEG. ”We are also grateful to ESA for their thoughtful input into the design plans which will result in the most efficient and modern facilities that will not only benefit E3 but all of the new conventions that will come to Los Angeles. On behalf of our city and AEG, thank you ESA, we won’t let you down.”

The noted new facilities include a 20,000 square-foot hall that will bridge the convention center to Farmer’s Field. Once this expansion is complete, AEG will drop the Los Angeles Convention Center moniker for the venue and will replace it with LACOEX (a mash-up of Los Angeles convention center and expo hall).

E3 2012 brought more than 45,000 industry professionals from over 100 countries to the city of L.A. The show generated $40 million in revenue for the local economy.

E3 2013 will run from June 11 to June 13.

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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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Video game sales at retail stores have been sinking this year. But 67 percent of all gamers have reported buying at least one game in either a physical or digital form in the past three months, according to market researcher NPD Group.

That means gamers are actively playing, despite the weak sales in one segment of gaming. About 75 percent of online gamers say they have acquired either free or paid games in the last three months. Among all gamers, 40 percent said they obtained a game in both the physical and digital formats.

All gamers reported acquiring an average of eight games, with those acquiring only digital games reporting an average of six. Those who acquired only physical games reported an average of three. Those that acquired both physical and digital games reported an average of 15 free or paid games.

“Gamers are growing more comfortable in acquiring content online, as we saw the preference for digital increase 10 percentage points from last year,” said Liam Callahan, industry analyst, The NPD Group. “The proliferation of free games on mobile devices has reduced the barrier of entry for online gaming to zero, fueling an increase in acquisition.”

Most online gamers say the non-gaming entertainment features on their console or portable device do not distract them from gaming. But a slight increase (3 percentage points) of people said they play fewer games as a result of having those other entertainment features. One in five online gamers said that other household members are using their systems for other entertainment activities, also up 3 percentage points from 2011.

“Every year at E3, we hear about new non-gaming features being added to major console and portable device manufacturers’ online services,” said Callahan. “It is reasonable to expect changes in the share of time and spend as consumers become aware and increasingly comfortable with the number of features, including gaming, available through their multifunctional devices.”

NPD collected data via an online survey from March 2 to March 23, 2012. 8,488 people ages 2 and up completed the survey (mothers were asked to talk about their children playing games).

GamesBeat 2012 is VentureBeat’s fourth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. This year we’re calling on speakers from the hottest mobile, social, PC, and console companies to debate new ways to stay on pace with changing consumer tastes and platforms. Join 500+ execs, investors, analysts, entrepreneurs, and press as we explore the gaming industry’s latest trends and newest monetization opportunities. The event takes place July 10-11 in San Francisco, and you can get your tickets here.

[Photo Credit: popculturegeek.com on Flickr]

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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 Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) video game trade show in Los Angeles was full of glitzy press conferences (like Ubisoft’s, pictured above). So many big companies were acting like it was business as usual. They showed games that were the third or fourth in the series on the same generation of game consoles. One very well-known game developer came up to me and said, “I wonder if any of this is going to matter. There is so much change happening in the industry that is going to make this all irrelevant.”

That sentiment seemed like a familiar takeaway from the show. I caught up with Mitch Lasky (pictured right), general partner at Benchmark Capital, at a recent dinner of his portfolio of game companies. The people around the table were the nimble startups that are more likely to trigger interesting changes and survive the zombie apocalypse for games — companies such as Gaikai, Meteor Entertainment, NaturalMotion Games, Thatgamecompany, and Gaia Online.

“We have seen disruptions come on a regular basis, like when we have a console transition,” Lasky said. “But I have never seen four major disruptions come all at the same time. We have disruptions in platforms, business models, content, and distribution. It’s the most exciting time I’ve ever seen.”

I couldn’t agree more, but I’m impatient for it to happen faster. Apple and Samsung’s disruption of TV-based gaming  seems to be happening in slow motion. Still, it seems inevitable that free-to-play games (where you play for free and then pay real money for virtual goods in a game) will hit the $60 console game like a comet hitting the earth and wiping out the dinosaurs.

“There’s a myth that free-to-play is cheaper than a $60 game,” Lasky said. “It’s just elastic. For some users, it winds up being a lot more expensive. I would have paid $150 a year to get a better version of FIFA.”

One of the mistakes the big companies are making is that they’re implementing micro-transactions, but they’re still charging $60 for the initial game. In other words, they’re trying to milk gamers for all they are worth. Imagine if you had that kind of experience at Disneyland?

“Free to play isn’t a business model,” Lasky said. “Free-to-play is a marketing strategy. It’s a way to get people over the hump of trying out your game. It gets rid of the friction that happens when you charge an upfront fee.”

One of Benchmark’s portfolio companies, Riot Games, learned that well and has had 42 million people download its League of Legends game.

The conversation at the dinner turned to zombies, survivalism, and gladiatorial games like The Hunger Games. There are so many zombie games now, and the shooter games that we see are becoming more and more brutal. We live relatively safe lives now, observed Jenova Chen, co-founder of Thatgamecompany, which raised $5.5 million from Benchmark.

“What if that all disappeared?” Chen asked.

Chen’s games — flOw, Flower and Journey — don’t have any violence in them. But someone asked, “Does this mean we’re going to have weapons in Journey 2?” That made everyone laugh, since Journey is such a unique experience and is the last game where you’d expect to see a weapon. Chen joked, “We did have rocket launchers in our prototype.”

Chen noted that his team started with its design around music and then built the game around it. He said he believes games as a medium are above cinema. Cinema combines a number of arts. But games are interactive. Chen says that if you’re going for evoking feelings in a game, it’s good to start with sound. Mark Long, chief executive of Meteor Entertainment, said that if you blindfold someone, you can absolutely use sound to make them think they’ve been transported to another world.

That’s one of the challenges of the mobile environment for games, Lasky said. With console games, the user is in the living room and can make all the noise they want. But with mobile games, they may be standing in line. Much of the time, they will be playing a game with the audio turned off unless they’re wearing head phones.

“It has to be flexible enough to be fun with no sound,” Lasky said.

Such chatter is fitting at a Benchmark dinner because Lasky believes that publishing is being transformed. The role of traditional publishers is becoming less obvious, Lasky said. Giving money to people who have ideas makes more sense. You don’t invest in a platform company that is trying to change gaming. You are better off investing in people who are creating the games that are transformative, Lasky said.

“The contest is also the market,” he said. “If your content is good enough, then that creates a pull for your games, rather than a push.”

Lasky said he believes its “impossible” for the big three console makers to respond to all of the changes, such as social gaming. They can try to adapt to the times. But they move too slowly. Kids have already changed their habits. They want instant gratification.

“My kids download 10 games,” he said. “They play them all for two minutes. They throw away the eight they don’t like. Then they play those last two obsessively for a month. That’s alien to those of us who buy a $60 game and play it for 40 or 50 hours. The discovery mechanism is completely social, and I don’t think you get that genie back in the bottle.”

Instant gratification is what Gaikai, another Benchmark company, is about. The cloud-gaming company can enable gamers to play high-end games on just about any screen, without the need for downloads. Gaikai struck a deal with Samsung to provide it with cloud gaming services.

Big game companies also don’t make much use of analytics. Torsten Reil, chief executive of NaturalMotion, said his company tested its iPhone game icon with huge numbers of consumers. Hi team tried 50 different icons before they found one that performed the best. That kind of testing, feedback, and alteration is critical to improving a game and getting new users.

“I remember back in the 90s when the consumer goods people came in with their focus groups,” Lasky said. “Game designers didn’t like it. Now the analytics movement gives you instant feedback.”

“That data sets you free and ends all the arguments about the best design,” said David Perry, CEO of Gaikai.

The tough thing about the analytics is that you can’t see the player and how that player feels. You almost wish you had a webcam to see someone’s face as he or she played a game.

“That part is very important for games,” Chen 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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GamesBeat: So how is everything going for you?

John Smedley: Very good. We have PlanetSide 2, which is our main tentpole feature this year. The reaction has been insane. There’s this point at which your baby is being shown to the world. This was it. To have people feeling as good as they are is what makes me feel the best. People are saying this is as good as Modern Warfare 3 or Battlefield 3 in terms of the feel of the shooter, which is what we’ve been going for. PC Gamer said that we looked better than Battlefield 3. It’s very gratifying to hear these things, because we worked so hard on it. We love it. We made the game for us.

GamesBeat: How many years have you worked on it now?

Smedley: Two years in development now. But we’re using our Forge Light engine, which we use for all of our next-gen stuff now. It’s decreasing the amount of time it takes us to make new games now a lot. That engine was four years in the making. So now we’re into much shorter dev cycles because of this. It’s come in handy.

GamesBeat: Did you wonder if adding the “2″ after the name would hurt the market for this game, since sequels aren’t always as successful as the original?

Smedley: We thought about it. As we were making the transition of our games to free-to-play, we found there’s a large number of people at SOE that have a love affair with PlanetSide 2. I’m one of them. I’m a shooter player at heart. I prefer shooters to role-playing games (RPGs) on a personal level. We were gonna make a free-to-play version of the old one. As we started making that game, we said we can do way better than this with our new engine. So we just started doing it. It kinda came from nowhere, and now I think it’s going to be the biggest thing that we’ve launched since EverQuest. It’s feeling that good. If you’re a shooter player I urge you to give it a try. Judge it for yourself.

GamesBeat: And it’s free-to-play?

Smedley: Yeah. Completely free-to-play.

GamesBeat: It seems like this sort of game, then, is starting to get into serious, serious competition with the 60-dollar products and subscription products.

Smedley: Yeah. I think three or four years ago, free-to-play had this kind of connotation that maybe the quality level wasn’t there. You are definitely seeing free-to-play games at the premier level now. I certainly feel like we’re in the leading pack on that. We’ve got the quality, the visual fidelity, the feel of the shooter, it’s as good as any of the top-tier titles. And those games can’t have 2,000 players playing at the same time. I don’t mean like in instances, I mean 2,000 players in the exact same continent at the exact same time. We have no control over where they go. They could all converge on one base and wreak havoc if they want to. That’s fun.

GamesBeat: How close are you to launch?

Smedley: We are weeks away from starting the beta. In terms of launch, that’s going to be determined by how the beta goes. We’ve got a ramp-up planned for the beta, we’re going to start small and ramp up very fast. And then we’ll just see how it goes. We’ve taken our time doing this right, and we want to make sure we do the beta right.

GamesBeat: How are you doing smartphone and tablet integration?

Smedley: Now, you’ve heard of companion apps. Our is cooler, and here’s why. You can see all the statistics you have in the game, weapons, what kind of weapons we have, all the stuff you expect from a companion app, it’s kind of like a complete encyclopedia. But it also has community features for the game, so you can go and you can check out the videos, tweets, Facebook stuff, all that good stuff. You can do complete voice chat with people in the game. I was standing out in front of our booth yesterday, basically using it as an intercom. If your guys are in-game and they’re in a big fight and you’re at work, you can just say, hey, how’s the fight going? And what’s even cooler, there’s a map. We’re going to enable this thing…this is going to be like the hunt for Osama. It’s a map app, and what we’re going to be doing is allow players to fly a drone on their phone. And then if they have a high enough level in the game, they’ll be able to launch a drone strike. So gameplay out of your phone or your iPad, and it works on both iPhone or Android.

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The lights were low; the volume was high. The screaming solo runs coming from the stage matched the notes on the screen. Three would-be rock stars stood facing the cheering throng — one bass player, one lead singer, and one rock guitar player.

This wasn’t a concert, but a live video game demonstration booth at Los Angeles’ Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) for BandFuse: Rock Legends, a new video game that promises to put players center stage and teach them how to play a real instrument.

Across the huge convention hall lay the gigantic city-state booth of Ubisoft, the publishers of Rocksmith, the original “play a real instrument” game that offers the same deal.

Both titles allow players to connect their real-life axe to an Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 console to interact with the music. Both have their own system of teaching budding or novice musicians the basics to the advanced techniques of playing rock guitar. Which one is better? Though both developers GamesBeat spoke to pushed their specific product, it may all come down to an individual player’s learning style or ultimate goal. I’ll compare the two based on my limited time with each game below, with a quick nod to the game I feel is best in each category.

Hardware & Connectivity
Advantage: BandFuse

Both games come with hardware for connecting a guitar, bass, or (in the case of BandFuse) a microphone. Both connectors seem solid, though the Rocksmith doohickey seemed a little less solid to my eyes. BandFuse can connect up to three instruments at once, which seems like a great thing for budding bands who want to practice together in a smaller space. UPDATE: Paul Cross (@crossieRS) let us know that Rocksmith can connect two mics and two guitars at the same time, with bass coming soon.

Presentation Is Key
Advantage: Rocksmith

BandFuse uses tablature, a simplified notation system that musicians use instead of traditional sheet music. It denotes finger placement rather than the pitch of notes, making it more user friendly than traditional musical notation. It’s a popular way to transcribe guitar music, with files that are easily found across the internet.

Rocksmith, on the other hand, uses a visual metaphor that looks much more like a traditional rhythm game, like Guitar Hero or Rockband, with big primary colored rectangles that move down toward the player on a stylized guitar neck. I was able to play this game more easily, due to the visual way the notes are presented on screen. Trying to jump in and sight read tablature can be tricky, but the RockBand style notation made a lot of sense to my brain, allowing me to play the lines without having to look at my fingers.

Automagical Training Difficulty
Advantage: Rocksmith

Rocksmith’s teaching system changes difficulty on the fly with a dynamic difficulty system. While playing, I noticed the notes I was expected to play got more numerous and the arrangement more complex as I hit the right notes. When I missed notes, things got a lost simpler. There are some sophisticated algorithms in there to help players stay at just the right learning level. BandFuse has a more traditional difficulty system; players press a button on the controller to change the difficulty setting on the fly. Winner: Rocksmith.

The Effects of Delay
Advantage: BandFuse

Latency is a measure of how long the delay is between the time a string is plucked on the guitar and when the sound is heard through a listening device, like an amp, headphones, or – in this case – a gaming console.

I could hear and feel a short latency when playing Rocksmith. Lead audio designer Nick Bonardi said that they have optimized the game to a short 40 millisecond delay, which he said was well within an acceptable limit. He also pointed out that most home theater setups could introduce delay within themselves, further complicating the issue. In my time with BandFuse, there was no noticeable delay – whether that is a function of the hardware or the software, I’m not sure and BandFuse rep Jon Heiner wasn’t saying.

Final Answer? No Clear Winner

While both BandFuse and Rocksmith use real instruments connected to gaming consoles to both engage and educate both novice and more advanced guitar and bass players, they each play to their own specific strengths.

Which game you choose will be a function of how you learn, and how much latency bothers you. If you’re a new musician who wants to transition from the fake plastic instruments of RockBand or Guitar Hero, Rocksmith may be the way to go, with its visual presentation and dynamic training system. If being able to transfer your skills to a non-game setting is important, and you have a hard time dealing with latency, BandFuse might work better for you.

BandFuse: Rock Legends, from Realta Entertainment Group, is finishing development now, with a planned release for January 2013 on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Rocksmith, published by Ubisoft, is available at retail outlets now for Xbox, PlayStation and PC.

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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 games stories we ran over the last seven days that you may have missed.

This week, Apple brought the iOS GameCenter to Mac, Silicon Knights confirmed a small number of layoffs,  and the Diablo III real-money auction house went live. You can also find a roundup of GamesBeat’s complete coverage for this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), the game industry’s largest trade show.

You’ll also find a review of Virtua Fighter 5 Final Showdown.

GamesBeat:

The DeanBeat: Apple and Samsung give console makers a reprieve

APB Reloaded: Turning a game that killed a studio into a 3-million-user success (interview)

Steam Workshop support added to Civilization V

Minecraft Xbox 360 Edition update fixes zombie pigmen, adds auto-save

Tony Hawk developer Neversoft answers the Call of Duty

The9′s Chinese mobile game network reaches 10M users and 12M downloads (exclusive)

Digital game sales are up but still can’t touch Call of Duty (infographic)

Fruit Ninja follows Angry Birds’ flight plan with licensed products

Microsoft’s NUads on Xbox Live ‘motions’ boring TV commercials forward

Virtua Fighter 5 Final Showdown is a triple-A fighting game with an iffy price tag (review)

Habbo’s woes continue with threat of regulation and loss of retailer support

Diablo III real-money action house finally goes live

Player’s decade-old Civilization II game is a world of “hellish nightmare”

A visual tour of the 2012 Apple Design Awards winners

Investor drops support for teen social game after allegations of sexual chats

Draw Something goes global with 12 new languages and celebrity endorsements

Silicon Knights head confirms “a small number” of layoffs

VentureBeat:

Embracing Silicon Valley, EA gears up for its digital empire (interview)

Despite huge Diablo III launch, May video game sales fall 28 percent

GamesBeat’s gigantic E3 2012 roundup

New studio uCool to launch ambitious Tynon social fantasy role-playing game (exclusive)

Kickstarter project aims to reimagine classic Atari game M.U.L.E. (exclusive)

Indie studio Thatgamecompany raises $5.5M to create magical games for wider audiences

PopCap survey shows 44 percent of people play mobile games

GamesBeat 2012 panel will examine the rise of social casino games

Trion Worlds will soon have multiple gargantuan online game worlds (interview)

Activision Publishing teams up with Flurry to release third-party mobile games

Bored, impressed, and giddy: Our final thoughts on E3 2012 (with photos)

Zynga stock price takes a dive, triggering circuit breakers

Apple brings its iPhone Game Center to the Mac

68-year-old grandmother to attempt world record 30-hour gaming marathon for charity

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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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Always nipping at the edges of the game industry, Apple and Samsung have the means to exterminate the video game console makers. But for some reason, they have held back on pulling the trigger. Apple was rumored to be working on a television that could bring apps to the living room. Faced with free or 99 cent apps, would consumers still plunk down $60 for console games? Maybe not. But Apple didn’t announce its TV this week.

Samsung, meanwhile, announced its plans to become a cloud gaming service provider with the help of Gaikai and Nvidia. But Samsung said almost nothing to reinforce that diabolical plan. Gaikai’s chief executive, David Perry, had to carry that flag. It would have sounded more intimidating coming from Samsung. Instead, the company changed its chief executive.

It’s a little maddening, seeing the potential for disruption so clearly, but having to wait for it to happen in slow motion. So we were left watching the conventional ground war between the console makers:

Nintendo unveiled the first games for its Wii U video game console coming this fall. The company made some fatal mistakes with the Wii U. It put an under-powered processor and graphics chip in the machine, making it barely on par with the existing Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 consoles. And that system is already going to have a tough time displaying games on a TV. Now it also has to display images on a tablet. This task is so difficult for the under-powered system that Nintendo can’t easily add a second tablet controller — the most basic of game controller necessities — to the Wii U. The Wii U will be affordable, but not revolutionary. It’s a timid plan.

Microsoft and Sony held back on hardware announcements, presumably because they’re doing well enough to postpone the next-generation hardware that they have planned. It was business as usual in the console business.

Sony showed its love for gamers with the launch of alluring new titles such as The Last of Us, The Unfinished Swan, and Beyond: Two Souls. But Sony isn’t in the best of health, as it is losing money and laying off people. Sony didn’t offer much-needed price cuts on the PlayStation 3 and the PlayStation Vita, probably because it couldn’t afford to. That isn’t exactly the best argument for winning the console war.

Microsoft is coasting in a leadership role because it is still getting a payoff from its bold move in 2010, when it launched the Kinect motion-sensing system. It announced a sensible SmartGlass app that takes advantage of second screens, or mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones. It also offered a $99 console with a monthly subscription fee, much like a discounted cell phone plan.

But it didn’t embrace cloud computing in a big way or deal with the threat from low-cost Apple apps. It showed off some games from existing franchises like Halo, but it had almost nothing to say about brand new games that are in the works. And it didn’t embrace free-to-play gaming on the console.

These companies were milking the existing market for profits. But they weren’t investing in getting new users in new markets. These are fine strategies for serving existing gamers. But they aren’t bold new grabs. Companies that aren’t innovating are sitting ducks for disruption by others. Nexon had very little to announce, so it just threw a gigantic party instead.

A few companies did make bold moves. Ubisoft announced an innovative game called Watch Dogs, but didn’t say when it was arriving. The French game publisher is working on eight titles for the Wii U, but its success with those titles will probably be muted because of Nintendo’s timidity.

Of all of the traditional video game companies, Electronic Arts was the most vocal about shifting into digital games. It announced a social version of SimCity, but compared to Zynga’s existing CityVille game, EA’s game might look like a copycat. EA also said it would create seamless experiences as players move from one platform to another. That would be great for consumers, but I would bet that a lot of platform owners will try to throw obstacles in EA’s way rather than encourage cross-platform capability.

Activision’s Treyarch fixed what wasn’t broken by completely changing the setting and weaponry for Call of Duty: Black Ops II, which I nicknamed the Attack of the Drones. Japan’s Gree stormed E3, taking out a huge booth that used to be THQ’s and turning it into a staging ground for its invasion of the U.S. mobile market. Zynga attended the show, hoping to snare developers away from the consoles. But it wasn’t about to create social games that run on the consoles.

I’d like to see more bold moves. This year, each company stayed in its comfort zone rather than crossing over into enemy territory to grab a new audience. Nor did anyone really try to get past the zero-sum game and seek out new users.

The gaming market isn’t for the timid. If you aren’t busy living, you’re dying. If Samsung and Apple wait too long to inflict their disruption, the new generation of game consoles will arrive. And then the console makers will have the high ground again.

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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 sensory smorgasbord of the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) heaved itself upon the video game industry for three straight days, and GamesBeat’s intrepid crew enthusiastically hit showfloors, conference halls, and meeting rooms to offer our readers piles of previews, interviews, and news.

What follows below is our collected coverage during the show. You’ll find everything here sorted into categories for easy navigability.

Awards

Who needs stickers? We analyzed, judged, and sorted our top picks for the show’s offerings directly for you. Take a look — the results might surprise you.

GamesBeat’s E3 2012 Game of the Show…plus staff picks – by Dan “Shoe” Hsu

The GamesBeat E3 non-award awards: The least prestigious awards in the industry – by GamesBeat staff

The coolest technologies we saw at E3 2012 – by Dean Takahashi

The best family games of E3 – by GamesBeat staff

The top 8 trends of E3, from bows to brutality – by Mike Minotti

The top 15 swag shirts of E3 2012 – by Rus McLaughlin

Previews

You’ve found the beating heart of E3′s overwhelming magic. Whether from observatory impressions or direct, hands-on experiences, GamesBeat discussed and dissected a sizable stable of upcoming games and hardware.

Hands-on

Hitman Absolution lets you perform hits in giant crowds – by Dean Takahashi

Metro Last Light fights shooter fatigue with deeper single player – by Dean Takahashi

Crysis 3 brings the jungle, gun hacking, and silent stealth kills to Manhattan – by Dean Takahashi

EA reveals Dead Space 3, coming with drop-in cooperative play – by Dean Takahashi

Sleeping Dogs turns Hong Kong crime movies into a video game – by Dean Takahashi

From the creator of Portal, Quantum Conundrum caters to physics-based puzzle gamers – by Dean Takahashi

Capcom remakes hack-slash-shoot-grapple formula with upcoming DmC: Devil May Cry – by Dean Takahashi

Capcom shows three playable characters for Resident Evil 6 – by Dean Takahashi

Finding similarities between Arma III and Carrier Command: Gaea Mission – by Omri Petitte

Neverwinter’s user-generated content could elevate it above the competition – by Stefanie Fogel

DmC: Devil May Cry is full of swagger…and F-bombs – by Eduardo Moutinho

Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed leaves Mario Kart in its dust…and wake…and vapor trail – by Mike Minotti

Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch is an anime you can actually play – by Eduardo Moutinho

Sony Online Entertainment’s PlanetSide 2 – by Rob LeFebvre

Slice, dice, and julienne enemies in Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance – by Eduardo Moutinho

Medal of Honor: Warfighter deploys fire teams to the front lines – by Eduardo Moutinho

Hell Yeah! is like Metroid with a chainsaw jetpack-riding demon bunny – by Mike Minotti

Dead or Alive 5 wants to deliver a power blow to the competition – by Eduardo Moutinho

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive’s simplicity is just what consoles need – by Omri Petitte

Hands-off

Just what kind of game is Star Wars 1313? – by Dean Takahashi

Warner Bros. confirms LEGO: Lord of the Rings video game – by Dean Takahashi

EA’s cute The Act romance game exploits iPad’s touchscreen for unique gameplay – by Dean Takahashi

Turn the snow crimson with redcoat blood in Assassin’s Creed III – by Dean Takahashi

Far Cry 3 demo leads you deeper into drug-induced insanity – by Dean Takahashi

Quantic Dream’s Beyond: Two Souls is one of the best games of E3 – by Dean Takahashi

The 5 different games you’ll be playing in Dishonored – by Sebastian Haley

Final Fantasy XIV brings new gameplay and western sensibilities to venerable franchise – by Rob LeFebvre

Windows 8 works hard to meet the needs of all gamers – by Rob LeFebvre

A trio of Mario games strengthen Nintendo’s 3DS lineup – by Mike Minotti

OnLive’s MultiView spectating entices multiplayer and co-op gamers – by Omri Petitte

Player choice matters in The Walking Dead: Episode 2 – by Stefanie Fogel

The Last of Us is even smarter than you think – by Rus McLaughlin

Star Wars 1313 is a game of firsts for the sci-fi franchise – by Eduardo Moutinho

The adventure-game renaissance continues with The Cave – by Eduardo Moutinho

Heroes and villains join forces in Epic Mickey: Power of Illusion – by Mike Minotti

007 Legends proves personality makes or breaks a game – by Omri Petitte

Breaking down what’s exactly new in God of War: Ascension – by Dan “Shoe” Hsu

Turning technology against your friends in Watch Dogs – by Omri Petitte

Interviews

Chasing after the wayward developer or evasive executive amid a sea of journalists and industry luminaries didn’t slake our interview appetite, and we nabbed a slew of thoughtful talks with members across various gaming companies. Take a look.

Why Ubisoft is pouring a lot of resources into Wii U games – by Dean Takahashi

Harvest Moon creator wants to spread happiness with his new game – by Jacob Lopez

How Shenmue’s lead programmer rescued a bad game – by Jacob Lopez

The Last Story developer talks Operation Rainfall, reason for cover system, and Wii U – by Jacob Lopez

With 1.3B tanks obliterated and 30M players, Wargaming.net plans to conquer the online gaming world – by Dean Takahashi

Even Scribblenauts’ creator is surprised by the things people make in his new game – by Jacob Lopez

The Witcher developer CD Projekt RED wants to set new standards with Cyberpunk – by Stefanie Fogel

Japan’s Gree moves mobile gaming into the spotlight at E3 – by Dean Takahashi

THQ’s Brian Farrell talks about looking for a bottom and staging a comeback – by Dean Takahashi

Crytek says CryEngine 3 already does awesome graphics as good as Unreal Engine 4 – by Dean Takahashi

Our opinions

During the craze-filled days of E3, our minds typically busied themselves with ensuring our legs avoided snapping off our torsos and running away with yelping noises. But sometimes, a cohesive thought miraculously coalesced within our overloaded brainpans. Our hands shakily reached for the keyboard, keys started tapping, and well…these are the results.

The DeanBeat: What to expect at E3 – by Dean Takahashi

4 ways developers will use SmartGlass to enhance Xbox 360 experiences – by Dan “Shoe” Hsu

Nintendo’s Wii U: Safe on first, weak on third-party – by Rus McLaughlin

Why Nintendo will have a tough time adding a second GamePad tablet controller to the Wii U – by Dean Takahashi

Tomb Raider is not torture porn – by Rus McLaughlin

Would it be a mistake for E3 to move out of LA? – by Dean Takahashi

Bored, impressed, and giddy: Our final thoughts on E3 2012 – by Dan “Shoe” Hsu

Move over, consoles – mobile is the future – by Rob LeFebvre

Microsoft’s E3 2012: Analysis of 16,000+ comments shows Halo 4, South Park impressed, rest did not – by Andrew Hiscock

Sony’s E3 2012: Analysis shows “shotgun blast” won big, Wonderbook lost – by Andrew Hiscock

Nintendo’s E3 2012: Reactions show hardcore gamers lost faith in Wii U – by Andrew Hiscock

Memes

All it takes is one memorable quote, one Freudian slip, or some facepalm-worthy banter to prompt the Internet community’s creative and unrestrained hand at animated gifs, a worshipful use of Impact font, and hastily jangled Photoshop edits. Here’s what we’ve found.

The best memes of E3 – by Jeff Grubb

Remember these crazy memes from past E3s? – by Jeff Grubb

The wildest memes from the Microsoft E3 press conference – by Jeff Grubb

Silly memes inspired by Sony’s E3 press event – by Jeff Grubb

Aisha Tyler: Ubisoft’s meme machine – by Rus McLaughlin

The oddest Nintendo E3 gifs and Photoshops from the Internet – by Jeff Grubb

Galleries

We snapped plenty of pictures while attending parties, pressers, and meandering the showfloor. Direct your eyeballs upon these galleries, and enjoy the view!

The big gallery of E3′s huge banners – by Mike Minotti

E3 2012 will get your hands up – by Evan Killham

Our editor-in-chief’s E3 adventure – by Evan Killham

The many costumes of E3 2012 – by Jacob Lopez

Retro games have a place at E3, too – by Jasmine Rea

Videos

Dubstep. A beleaguered Lara Croft. Ham-handed hosts. No, this isn’t the latest entry in Alex Trebek’s dream diary — it’s some of our E3 video and trailer content below. Enjoy!

Tomb Raider trailer shows how Lara Croft feels sorry for shooting you – by Dean Takahashi

Konami pre-E3 2012 event: More Castlevania and Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance – by Jasmine Rea

Ubisoft shows strong commitment to the Wii U – by Mike Minotti

6 awkward moments from the E3 press briefings – by Evan Killham

Why we wub wub wub E3 2012: The dubstep of E3 – by Jacob Lopez

Press conferences

Surprises and snooze-fests alike emanated from E3′s five major press briefings held by Microsoft, Electronic Arts (EA), Ubisoft, Sony, and Nintendo. Check out all the announcements and debuts here.

Microsoft (video)

Halo 4 trailer video shows Forerunners, new tech – by Rob LeFebvre

New Splinter Cell: Blacklist borrows from Uncharted – by Jeff Grubb

Gears of War: Judgment sets Sera on fire (again) – by Rus McLaughlin

Microsoft previews Xbox Music at E3 press conference – by Rob LeFebvre

Forza Horizon brings street racing to the franchise – by Jasmine Rea

Microsoft introduces Xbox SmartGlass to integrate smartphones and tablets with Xbox 360 – by Dean Takahashi

Nike+ Kinect Training brings in-depth fitness measuring to Xbox 360 – by Jeff Grubb

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer coming to Xbox 360 this fall – by Jacob Lopez

Usher hits the stage to announce Dance Central 3 – by Rob LeFebvre

Xbox Live is getting Nickelodeon, Machinima, and tons of live sports – by Tom Cheredar

Kinect voice commands hit EA Sports flagship titles – by Eduardo Moutinho

South Park creators introduce their game and playfully mock Microsoft – by Jeff Grubb

New Xbox 360 games coming from Signal Studios, Twisted Pixel, and…Gore Verbinski? – by Stefanie Fogel

Microsoft E3 2012 press conference recap…in limerick form – by Andrew Hiscock

Electronic Arts (video)

SimCity Social: If this free-to-play game is too good, will you pay $60 for the full PC version? – by Dean Takahashi

EA reveals Battlefield 3 Premium and fields “15 million players worldwide” – by Omri Petitte

Star Wars: The Old Republic gets new planet, new species, and free trial – by Jacob Lopez

EA nabs UFC from THQ – by Jeff Grubb

Medal of Honor: Warfighter’s beautiful carnage – by Rus McLaughlin

EA shows off Need for Speed: Most Wanted at E3 – by Rob LeFebvre

Ubisoft (video)

Rayman Legends rhythmically runs to the Wii U – by Eduardo Moutinho

You are the network in Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs – by Rus McLaughlin

Here’s where that Watch Dogs cube-head QR code goes – by Jeff Grubb

Sony (video)

Experimental developer Quantic Dream reveals the haunted life of Jody Holmes in Beyond – by Jasmine Rea

Nathan Drake and the Big Daddy Bouncer join PlayStation All-Stars: Battle Royale – by Mike Minotti

J.K. Rowling is writing PlayStation’s Wonderbook – by Rus McLaughlin

Sony announces Assassin’s Creed III Vita and PS3 bundles with exclusive content – by Jeff Grubb

Sony brings down the house with The Last of Us demo – by Dean Takahashi

Sony E3 2012 press conference recap…in limerick form – by Andrew Hiscock

Nintendo (video)

Social networking comes to Wii U, Miiverse will interface with PCs and phones – by Jasmine Rea

First look at action-strategy game Pikmin 3 – by Jeff Grubb

Nintendo confirms 23 games at E3, video streaming, and more for Wii U – by Mike Minotti

Wii Fit U will make you sweatier, livelier, and happier – by Rob LeFebvre

Brag to the Miiverse and take on new modes in New Super Mario Bros. U – by Eduardo Moutinho

Zombify your face with ZombiU for the Wii U – by Mike Minotti

Nintendo bets big on “asymmetric” tablet-based gameplay – one player against several – by Dean Takahashi

Batman: Arkham City Armored Edition utilizes Wii U’s GamePad screen – by Omri Petitte

Nintendo details 3DS Mario titles, Luigi’s Mansion, and third-party games – by Jeff Grubb

Nintendo Land brings asymmetrical multiplayer to Wii U – by Jasmine Rea

Nintendo’s E3 2012 press conference recap…in limerick form – by Andrew Hiscock

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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!

---

Crytek prides itself on on creating the highest-quality 3D graphics in its games, from the original Far Cry to today’s upcoming title, Crysis 3. The Frankfurt, Germany-based game developer also makes the CryEngine, which serves as the foundation for a number of high-end 3D games. At this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), the company showed off its Crysis 3 game and the downloadable free-to-play title Warface, which is expected to be published by Trion Worlds. With each game, the company is pushing the cutting edge of graphics in video games. Crytek is also working on its own social entertainment platform, dubbed GFACE.

We sat down for an interview with Anvi Yerli (right), managing director; Cevat Yerli (middle), managing director; and Nick Button-Brown (left), general manager for games. Cevat Yerli said that CryEngine already can handle the kind of graphics demonstrated by Epic Games with the new Unreal Engine 4, and Yerli hinted at great things coming for the engine and for cloud graphics. Here’s a transcript of our interview.

GamesBeat: Tell me more about Warface. Why is free-to-play interesting?

Button-Brown: Well, so we started looking at free-to-play in 2006. We were looking at what was happening in free-to-play in Korea. We thought it was a really interesting way of bringing a game to people, allowing people to play it for free and to purchase virtual goods. What a revolutionary idea. We started working on Warface not that long afterwards. Warface has been in the works for more than three and a half years. In that time, it’s become a model that works in other countries as well. We’re really proud of what we’re doing with Warface. We think we’ll bring a really high quality game to free-to-play.

Anyi Yerli: When we had visitors for the first time from Korea, in the year 2001, 2002, like XL Games and NCSoft, with Lineage and such, they came to our office and brought an interesting range of technology. Then they talked about how big the community is, and how big their user base is — the community was over 10 million — we were completely shocked by that. Where does this number come from? It was unbelievable. So that was the first time we made contact, when we got in touch with free-to-play. But then we continued our own development on Far Cry and Crysis. And then in 2006 we went out to Asia, and basically try to understand what’s going on. It was primarily in Korea, actually, trying to understand what works there, and understand why it works, how those games work, what kind of models they were applying. This was back in 2006. And then we started, basically, the roots of Warface at around the end of 2007. And we started thinking about the strength of the model, what makes this model unique, why is this so big?

Cevat Yerli: When we saw that, we thought, this is the future. Not what we’re doing, what they’re doing. The quality isn’t there, but the way they were doing it, that was the future. For us, at that time, the concept of GFACE was born as well. GFACE is our social entertainment platform. It’s a new kind of platform for entertainment, for gamers who want to play with their friends together. They want to play live games in real-time. They want to be free-to-play. So the concept of this was born, and we designed this over the last few years. In time there was Warface. To make Warface a launch title for the platform. It was a big learning curve for us, but when we launch it, both Warface and GFACE, we want to be sure that it shows how we think triple-A games will be experienced in the future. In a new kind of platform.

GamesBeat: How are you distinguishing between, say, the quality of this, which looks good, versus something like Crysis? A $60 game versus a free-to-play game?

C. Yerli: The central difference comes from the fact that Warface is actually a multiplayer game first. If you look at any multiplayer game, on console or PC, the multiplayer part is usually slightly lower-quality than the single-player parts. That is because in single-player you only have yourself, and you can put more action around you. In multiplayer, you have so much more going on with real humans, every game in multiplayer must be sort of lower-quality. So in Warface, because everything is online, the co-op player versus environment experience as well as the player versus player experience.

It is triple-A quality, but it’s still lower than your typical single-player game. But it’s on par with your multiplayer games. At least that’s our aim and vision. But at the same time, the most important part is that we need to run on as many PCs as possible. So it can hit six years of specifications. The last six years, if you bought a PC, you can run the game safely. Unlike Crysis 3, or Crysis 1 back then, which was pushing the limits, pushing the limits, moving forward. With Warface, we don’t push the limits on specs, but we do push the limit of what we can do within the specs. The GFACE platform is designed to be a destination for everybody who wants to play games. And Warface does not compromise that by requiring a frictional engine barrier, but rather it says, because the specs are so low. The friction is reduced by the price, the specs, and by the accessibility of the game.

GamesBeat: And why work with Trion on this one?

C. Yerli: Trion has, first of all, they have…

Button-Brown: We’re not talking about the partnership yet… [lots of embarrassed laughter] We’re expecting to talk about the partnership in a bit more detail next week. We have approached it, it’s not a traditional publisher-developer relationship. We wanted to bring it to western users in a slightly different way.

A. Yerli: So let’s say it this way. What I can say is, it’s an eye-to-eye level partnership. And it revolves around each company’s strengths. Which are very synergistic. And also, each of us around Warface, launching Warface and GFACE, our social network platform…

Button-Brown: We want to bring Warface to the market and give people the best experience. But we’ll talk about it next week.

A. Yerli: And we want to make sure it runs through GFACE.

GamesBeat: It sounds like they have some useful infrastructure, basically…

C. Yerli: They have the expertise, and…

Button-Brown: They have a lot of really talented people. And that’s what it comes down to, is talented people.

C. Yerli: It’s a very different level of cooperation, and hopefully it’s something that will be a benchmark going forward for others.

A. Yerli: I think the relationship that Crytek and Trion will portray will be a model going forward. And from a quality perspective, it will elevate the potential of how online games should be perceived. Something that both of us wouldn’t be able to do without each other in such a short amount of time. There’s not much left… [laughter]

C. Yerli: We just dance around the whole thing right now.

GamesBeat: How does Warface evolve over time? Is it as much a service as it is…

C. Yerli: Absolutely. Warface is an ongoing live service. We’re just starting it. We’ll be starting in Russia. It’s commercial. China is getting a closed beta now. So we’ll do Korea soon. We have a business plan for the next five years, on PC and mobile and tablet, for Warface. This is a business strategy, it’s not just a game strategy.

GamesBeat: When it comes to 3D graphics now, I sort of… I don’t know what distinguishes the different engines and the different platforms here, but…

Button-Brown: So our engine is the best… [chuckles]

GamesBeat: My eyes kind of tell me what I like. So Crysis 3 looks good. But Unreal Engine 4 looks good too. If you were to put some of these engines side by side, to me, I’m not sure I could tell what’s better. What can you explain about what makes yours better?

C. Yerli: The only thing I can say is that CryEngine 3 already exists at the quality of Unreal Engine 4. It already exists for three years now. You can go back three years ago to the GDC videos. What we put out there is pretty much what Unreal Engine 4 put out now. And what many others are doing now too. We haven’t really put out our latest stuff yet.

Pretty soon you’re going to see the next iteration of CryEngine, and I’m not putting a number behind it, just the next iteration of CryEngine. Very soon. But we already said, CryEngine 3 is next-gen ready since three years ago. We stand by that. If I look at what people call next-gen technology now, it’s what we were seeing three years ago. We already had massive particle systems, we already had GPU rendering, all these things. Deferred shading. We had tessellation already since we shipped Crysis 2. We already had DX11. We didn’t just talk it up as tech demos, we have games that are shipped and are doing it.

GamesBeat: As you go down this road, do you think that consumers are going to be able to tell these differences?

C. Yerli: There are tangible differences, but not in still images. It’s in the fluidity of the overall experience. It’s like you watch an Android phone and an iPhone. The iPhone, despite the fact that most Android phones can do the same things, just feels different. It feels more fluid, more organic on an iPhone. And similarly, with an Android, there are different limitations on an Android. One feels choppy, another feels better. Really, it’s not just about ticking off boxes next to features. It’s a holistic experience that has to be fluid and flawless and real. Not show. It must be real. That’s us and what CryEngine always stands for. It was always a very substantial, robust, polished experience that gamers will see. And I also think that we are dedicated to online games. When you look at our number of licensees in that space, we have more licensees than any other engine in the online space. In the console space it’s a different story. In the console space we’re definitely not leading. But I think the next time around, it’s going to be a very different picture.

GamesBeat: Is there a way to describe what you expect next-generation graphics to look like?

C. Yerli: Maybe one thing to add to this, actually. I think the biggest difference here between the engines is still the productivity. We have invented, back in 2001, what we called “what you see is what you play,” which is real-time editing of the game in the sandbox using the production tools. We did this in 2001, we put out a video at GDC 2001, and since then it’s been the heart of our technology. That’s something that even until today, our competitors, our main competitor, has still not 100 percent achieved. We’re talking about 10 years later, still not achieved. Some other competitors, when they started from scratch five years ago, they of course started from scratch with better ideas. Not a better idea than us, but a better idea than Epic. So in productivity and efficiency, it’s something where we claim we’re the fastest toolkit around. Because we’re 100 percent real-time. We’re the only engine that is 100 percent real-time. Look at our competitors and you will feel that every time they change a light or a shadow, it computes for hours. In our case, the lighting is real-time.

GamesBeat: For developers:

C. Yerli: For productivity, right. You can see the change in real time. It’s a huge iterative gain. And that’s true for everything, whether it’s our AI paths, navigation systems, our lighting and shadow systems, everything is real-time in CryEngine. Nothing is pre-baked.

GamesBeat: And that makes the difference as to whether you need 500 artists or a much smaller number to make a game?

C. Yerli: It can make productivity better. It can make your ideas come to concept better, you can test faster, you don’t have to wait for your modifications until tomorrow morning to see it. You can just see it. You don’t need a render farm or a lighting farm or a pre-baking farm. The artists just see the results right away. That’s a big difference, being real-time. And when you talk about next-gen graphics, what will define next-gen graphics. It’s definitely going to be about tessellation. It’s going to be about better lighting. We claim we have the best lighting. I think we’ll push it further, another notch. You will see animation quality make huge gains. And more realistic surfaces. As in materials like metals or wood, copper… Aged materials. This kind of realism will be playing a big focus in the next generation. And higher resolution texturing, like in the film industry, where you have effectively no limits on texture sizes. In the games, you used to have 256 by 256 textures, those limits will go up to…pretty much as much memory as you have in your PC. The new texturing will become a big topic as well.

GamesBeat: So like Pixar quality, I guess…?

C. Yerli: I think we are going to be very close soon to rendering computer-generated (CG) film quality. I’m not necessarily pointing to Pixar. But we will, very soon, be able to render out film CG quality rendering in real-time. In the next two years.

GamesBeat: That’s a big deal.

C. Yerli: I said already a couple of years ago, we’ll be able to do Shrek-quality graphics in 2012, and we can today. In 2008 I gave a speech on the future of computer graphics, I said in 2012 we’ll have Shrek quality, and today we are Shrek quality. I think in two years more… But then again, film will be further head as well. And then we’ll catch up again. It’s going to be like that for a while.

GamesBeat: It seems like there’s a lot of different vectors for trying to make things look good.

C. Yerli: Yeah, yeah. At the end of the day, it’s not about being realistic. It’s about being believable and emotionally rich. If you believe in the world you’re in, and you believe in the characters you perceive, and believe that what you do has a consequence in a realistic way. So you can buy in to the world of the game. That’s the ultimate vision. The quality, the higher it gets, the easier it is for you to immerse in it. The barrier gets lower.

For the mainstream market. I would say that the better the quality gets on our games, the more mainstream gamers are going to come into this world and accept the richness of our content. Because when they go to a film, they see it. And when they see a game they ask, why doesn’t the game look like a film? They don’t understand… Most people don’t understand. And most people don’t care about it. To reach the same kind of critical mass as film, where we take hundreds of millions of potential viewers, like DVD and whatnot. To get that kind of volume of consumers, I think it’s where the quality has to increase. And yeah, some people do it with a lot of things happening on the screen. Some people do it with focusing on one thing, making it the best thing ever. Some people focus on environments, making those the best believable worlds, fantastic worlds, so you can immerse yourself.

GamesBeat: What about the advances in cloud gaming and Nvidia’s newest cloud graphics effort? Are those getting interesting for you?

C. Yerli: Yeah, we have been talking to Nvidia for a long time about that. They were talking about cloud gaming three years ago, the first touch points as far as what we want to do and how we could collaborate and things like that. But that being said, we cannot talk about that relationship at this moment. What and how and if we’re doing something with Nvidia. But it certainly was already mutually inspirational for the both of us, many years ago. Cloud gaming is not a new topic for us internally. It’s been a project of ours, and there is…a CryEngine cloud per se…

Button-Brown: [begins Coughing Suggestively]

C. Yerli: I did it already. It’s already out.

Button-Brown: I can start talking about it! Excellent.

C. Yerli: I just announced CryEngine cloud!

GamesBeat: Does that have a parallel sort of high-quality single-player, lower-quality multiplayer, and then cloud quality, I guess…? Is it harder to do high-quality graphics on…

C. Yerli: No, cloud quality will be up there. The CryEngine cloud philosophy is, how do you offer the best visuals at the lowest friction barrier, with the most efficient cost? So low friction, low cost, highest quality to the user. It’s really about the user benefit. And with this CryEngine cloud platform, the way we see it, it’s going to be tied into GFACE, our social hub. And it’s going to be very different from Gaikai or OnLive. Very different.

GamesBeat: As I remember, Trion has online gaming infrastructure, but they don’t call it cloud, because they’re not streaming, right? They’re doing the computing at the client. So to you, what does cloud mean? Does it mean computing in the data center, or computing partly in the client?

C. Yerli: Time will tell. [laughter]

Button-Brown: Yeah, that much we’re not announcing yet. We have something cool in the pipeline.

GamesBeat: So then it seems like there’s a variety of cloud architectures.

Button-Brown: Well, “cloud” means something very different depending on the context. People use “cloud” to mean a huge variety of things.

C. Yerli: Some people say “cloud” is just downloading a game and that’s it. Apple’s App Store is a cloud for some people. But it’s way beyond storage, for sure. And from a user experience perspective, it’s got the highest quality and easiest possible… From the company perspective, it’s to provide the user the highest quality at the cheapest per-user cost. This is our friction. The cost factor doesn’t work out on OnLive or Gaikai.

GamesBeat: So what seems attractive about it? Self-publishing is a lot easier…

C. Yerli: Yes. You touch your consumer and you deliver to your consumer directly. And most of the friction goes away. But friction starts, not just from the content experience, but also the platform itself. So GFACE has been designed to be as easy and simple as possible to get your friends together to play a game. And then change it into another game and another game and watch a movie and listen to something together and then finish the day. So this isn’t trying to be a Facebook, by the way. This is trying to be a platform, akin to Xbox or PlayStation. It’s just not a hardware platform. We are seeing this cloud platform, its interface is called GFACE. And Warface has CryEngine cloud, that in total gives you a very simple experience and a high-quality content experience.

GamesBeat: So are you liking the PC or the consoles right now.

C. Yerli: Right now we like both.

Button-Brown: We like tablets, too. We like mobile.

C. Yerli: We like iOS, we like Android… We are a content developer. We do technology as well, that’s CryEngine and CryEngine cloud. But we also have a platform, that’s GFACE, and GFACE will sit on iOS devices, Android devices, on the PC, and hopefully also the consoles as a software layer, a software platform.

GamesBeat 2012 is VentureBeat’s fourth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. This year we’re calling on speakers from the hottest mobile, social, PC, and console companies to debate new ways to stay on pace with changing consumer tastes and platforms. Join 500+ execs, investors, analysts, entrepreneurs, and press as we explore the gaming industry’s latest trends and newest monetization opportunities. The event takes place July 10-11 in San Francisco, and you can get your tickets here.

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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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NeoGAF, one of the Internet’s most popular video game message boards, received over 16,000 posts during the three major Electronic Entertainment Expo press conferences. Now that E3 is over, we can take a look back at how these hardcore gamers reacted and draw interesting conclusions on what they thought of the industry’s biggest trade show of the year.

We’ve already seen how NeoGAF reacted to Microsoft and Sony’s press conferences, but what did the gaming community think of Nintendo’s? The below chart scores the members’ reactions, as posted in real-time:

Click for a full-size version. For a more detailed explanation of how we analyzed this data, please see the explanation at the end of this article.

What NeoGAF liked about the Nintendo press conference

Only three games registered as positive. The forum members received Pikmin 3 very warmly, and they gave it the highest reaction score of the press conference, while New Super Mario Bros. U and Scribblenauts Unlimited received largely positive comments for a very brief amount of time.

Otherwise, NeoGAF absolutely loved Shigeru Miyamoto, Nintendo’s legendary game designer, and Reggie Fils-Aime, president and COO of Nintendo of America.

The only other item that received a positive score was the announcement that the Wii U will support two GamePad tablet controllers at the same time.

What they didn’t like

NeoGAF reacted poorly to just about everything else. Posters lambasted established franchises such as Paper Mario and New Super Mario Bros. They dismissed revitalized and new intellectual properties such as Luigi’s Mansion and ZombiU, respectively. They outright destroyed any talk of motion-controlled games such as Wii Fit Plus and casual titles like Sing and Just Dance 4.

In fact, after Reggie Fils-Aime acknowledged the popular meme “my body is ready” in the 34th minute (which everyone thought was good fun), Nintendo did not generate a positive score for the rest of its morning press conference.

The worst individual minute occurred during the trailer for Sing, reaching a score of -117, which is extraordinary. To put this in perspective, I performed this same study in 2009, and the infamous Wii Vitality Sensor introduction scored only a -80. Sing’s lowest point was the worst E3 2012 press conference moment, beating out even Sony’s Wonderbook (though that scored lower overall due to it being a much longer demo).

Perhaps more interestingly, while the scores for the other conferences went up and down and back up throughout, Nintendo started very strong and then steadily went down from there. One could argue that this was just a result of what they showed and when they showed it. The 6,000+ posts of the NeoGAF thread on Nintendo made it clear that, as the press conference progressed, gamers were becoming increasingly disillusioned by the Wii U. By the end, the majority had lost faith.

This may have major ramifications for Nintendo. The Japanese company lost a big opportunity to court hardcore gamers during this press conference with a console many hoped would engage that very audience. With predicted new console launches next year, Microsoft and Sony could learn valuable lessons from Nintendo’s conference if they want to get core gamers excited.

That could be a big “if.” Video game consoles are much more versatile entertainment devices, engaging a much wider audience. Perhaps, as many members of NeoGAF fear, E3 is not for the hardcore gamer anymore.

Next year’s E3 press conferences should prove very interesting. With the possibility of new game systems, will Microsoft and Sony seek to please hardcore gamers? Or will they continue their momentum in search of more casual audiences?

The most valuable lesson they can learn here: Don’t try to appeal to gamers — as Nintendo repeatedly claimed to do throughout its 70 minutes on stage — and not deliver. As we’ve discovered, hardcore gamers are very hard to impress.

For more on how NeoGAF reacted to the E3 press conferences, check out the Microsoft and Sony studies.

How the scoring works

NeoGAF hosts a single message board thread for each press conference, where dozens of members comment throughout each show. I graded each comment as positive or negative, giving them scores of 1 or -1 respectively. Then I totaled the sum of these reactions for each discrete minute and plotted in the above chart. A high score means that the NeoGAF community liked what they saw; a score close to zero represents mixed reactions; and a low score means that they were not enjoying the show at that moment.

Some notes on how I scored each response:

• I made no distinction between really positive or somewhat positive comments — likewise for negative comments. Each was given either a score of 1 or -1.
• While I made every effort to understand the various memes and inside jokes that make up a large part of the responses, if I could not understand a response, I would not score it.
• In the event that a comment employed obvious sarcasm, I scored it to reflect the original intent of the commentator. If the sarcasm was not clear, I relied on the literal meaning of the comment. Fortunately, the very expressive NeoGAF community rarely employed subtle sarcasm.
• When comments included positive and negative observations, I accounted for the more immediate reaction to preserve a more real-time response. An example: “I liked the game that was shown at the beginning of the show, but this game now is bad” would have a negative score.
• Many comments weren’t scored as they offered no opinion. These included clarifications, questions, discussions between members unrelated to the press conference, and inquiries into whether one game or another would be shown at a later time.

GamesBeat 2012 is VentureBeat’s fourth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. This year we’re calling on speakers from the hottest mobile, social, PC, and console companies to debate new ways to stay on pace with changing consumer tastes and platforms. Join 500+ execs, investors, analysts, entrepreneurs, and press as we explore the gaming industry’s latest trends and newest monetization opportunities. The event takes place July 10-11 in San Francisco, and you can get your early-bird tickets here.

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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!

---

Over the course of four hours across three Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) press conferences, hardcore gamers submitted over 16,000 real-time impressions — a valuable set of data for anyone curious as to how fans felt about the most important announcements during the gaming industry’s biggest event of the year. Now that E3 is over, we can take the time to really dig into what they liked and didn’t like, learning some interesting lessons in the process.

For this study, we counted the positive and negative comments in the hugely popular NeoGAF gaming forums, charting the reactions minute-by-minute in the graph below. The basic rule of thumb: the more positive responses, the higher the reaction score and vice versa. In short, Sony received the most positive responses, well ahead of Microsoft and Nintendo…but the publisher didn’t exactly impress everyone.

Click for a full-size version. For a more detailed explanation of how we analyzed this data, please see the explanation at the end of this article.

What NeoGAF liked about the Sony press conference

NeoGAF reacted strongly to the following games: Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation, Assassin’s Creed III, and The Last of Us (for more on these or any products mentioned here, click the tags below). While they responded positively at first to Beyond: Two Souls, PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale, Far Cry 3, and God of War: Ascension, opinion soured soon after their first mentions.

The community also reacted positively to Jack Tretton, president and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment of America, and Kaz Hirai, president and CEO of Sony Corporation. Both have become heroes to the video game community. David Cage, founder of Quantic Dream (Heavy Rain, Beyond: Two Souls), also received good feedback, if not as strong as the two Sony personalities.

The most positive reaction of the show came at the end of the The Last of Us demonstration. The presentation concluded with the game’s protagonist killing his enemy with a brutal shotgun blast to the face, at which point the community exploded with shock and amazement. In fact, this single moment would prove to be the most popular across all three press conferences. One could say that The Last of Us “won” E3 — an expression gamers are very fond of using.

What they didn’t like

As noted, NeoGAF responded poorly to long demonstrations, and goodwill for games quickly evaporated as they continued. The group gave mixed responses when Sony discussed PlayStation Plus and PlayStation 1 games coming to the handheld Vita.

The most negative reaction of Sony’s press conference occurred during the Book of Spells demonstration. The community complained throughout this Wonderbook presentation, and comments hit a low point during the eighth minute of the Book of Spells segment. They cited a variety of factors for their displeasure: that the game is for kids, it was motion controlled, it was augmented reality, it was boring, and the demo was too long. In fact, the segment was so unpopular that members posted 943 negative comments during the 11 minutes Sony featured Book of Spells, compared to 103 positive comments. It didn’t help that the live demo had technical hiccups, and the game didn’t work for a brief moment.

For more on how NeoGAF reacted to the E3 press conferences, check out the Microsoft and Nintendo studies.

How the scoring works

NeoGAF hosts a single message board thread for each press conference, where dozens of members comment throughout each show. I graded each comment as positive or negative, giving them scores of 1 or -1 respectively. Then I totaled the sum of these reactions for each discrete minute and plotted in the above chart. A high score means that the NeoGAF community liked what they saw; a score close to zero represents mixed reactions; and a low score means that they were not enjoying the show at that moment.

Some notes on how I scored each response:

• I made no distinction between really positive or somewhat positive comments — likewise for negative comments. Each was given either a score of 1 or -1.
• While I made every effort to understand the various memes and inside jokes that make up a large part of the responses, if I could not understand a response, I would not score it.
• In the event that a comment employed obvious sarcasm, I scored it to reflect the original intent of the commentator. If the sarcasm was not clear, I relied on the literal meaning of the comment. Fortunately, the very expressive NeoGAF community rarely employed subtle sarcasm.
• When comments included positive and negative observations, I accounted for the more immediate reaction to preserve a more real-time response. An example: “I liked the game that was shown at the beginning of the show, but this game now is bad” would have a negative score.
• Many comments weren’t scored as they offered no opinion. These included clarifications, questions, discussions between members unrelated to the press conference, and inquiries into whether one game or another would be shown at a later time.

GamesBeat 2012 is VentureBeat’s fourth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. This year we’re calling on speakers from the hottest mobile, social, PC, and console companies to debate new ways to stay on pace with changing consumer tastes and platforms. Join 500+ execs, investors, analysts, entrepreneurs, and press as we explore the gaming industry’s latest trends and newest monetization opportunities. The event takes place July 10-11 in San Francisco, and you can get your early-bird tickets here.

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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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Gamers are passionate people, and none more so than the members of one of the Internet’s most popular video game message boards, NeoGAF. The forums are often vilified, sometimes celebrated, but one cannot argue their dedication to the medium. Each year during the game industry’s largest trade show, the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), NeoGAF members congregate to comment in real-time on the press conferences hosted by first-party publishers Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo.

And they posted…a lot. During the four hours taken by the three conferences, NeoGAF members submitted 16,214 posts — the equivalent of two full novels. You’ll find no better source of information detailing how hardcore gamers felt. Now that E3 is over, one can take the time to mine this valuable data. After analyzing every single response to the three stage shows, we have a powerful set of conclusions.

What did they think of the Big Three’s announcements this year? Here, you can see the number of positive and negative responses to the Microsoft press conference as the news poured out:

Source: Andrew Hiscock

Click for a full-size version. For a more detailed explanation of how we analyzed this data, please see the explanation at the end of this article.

What NeoGAF liked about the Microsoft press conference

The press conference started strong with Halo 4. After this, the response was largely negative, with positive reactions occurring when Tomb Raider and Resident Evil appeared. (For more stories on any of these games or products, click on the tags below.)

NeoGAF also liked South Park: The Stick of Truth. The high point of the conference followed its trailer when South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone appeared on stage. This was largely due to Parker’s joke about modern consumer electronics, reflecting the frustrations of the NeoGAF community, which we’ll explore below.

What NeoGAF didn’t like

They disliked just about everything else. It is no surprise that a community of hardcore gamers didn’t enjoy anything that wasn’t a game, including Nike+, Xbox Music, and Internet Explorer. Interestingly enough, while responses remained largely negative, an upswing occurred when Microsoft introduced SmartGlass. Another drop to low scores followed.

Many games also received negative reactions, particularly titles for casual audiences or those that would use the Kinect sensor. These included FIFA 13, Madden 13, Wreckateer, and Dance Central 3.

Two games for the hardcore audience also received largely negative reactions: Splinter Cell: Blacklist and Call of Duty: Black Ops II. In the case of the former, members cited a departure from stealth gameplay and the Middle Eastern environment as reasons for displeasure. In the case of the latter, many cited that it wasn’t enough of a departure from previous games in the Call of Duty franchise and that its developer had already announced and presented the game to journalists at an earlier event.

NeoGAF also strongly disliked long demos. This pattern presented itself in the reactions that became steadily more negative the longer a game stayed on stage. You can easily see this in the cases of Splinter Cell: Black List, Tomb Raider, and Resident Evil 6.

What wasn’t recorded

Unfortunately, due to NeoGAF’s popularity during press conferences, its servers went down for an extended period. During this time, data was unavailable for Fable: The Journey, Gears of War: Judgment, Forza Horizon, and for a significant part of non-game services.

Two other down periods occurred; although, they were much shorter, which resulted in some posts. These happened during the South Park: The Stick of Truth trailer and Usher’s live performance.

For more on how NeoGAF reacted to the E3 press conferences, check out the Sony and Nintendo studies.

How the scoring works

NeoGAF hosts a single message board thread for each press conference, where dozens of members comment throughout each show. I graded each comment as positive or negative, giving them scores of 1 or -1 respectively. Then I totaled the sum of these reactions for each discrete minute and plotted in the above chart. A high score means that the NeoGAF community liked what they saw; a score close to zero represents mixed reactions; and a low score means that they were not enjoying the show at that moment.

Some notes on how I scored each response:

• I made no distinction between really positive or somewhat positive comments — likewise for negative comments. Each was given either a score of 1 or -1.
• While I made every effort to understand the various memes and inside jokes that make up a large part of the responses, if I could not understand a response, I would not score it.
• In the event that a comment employed obvious sarcasm, I scored it to reflect the original intent of the commentator. If the sarcasm was not clear, I relied on the literal meaning of the comment. Fortunately, the very expressive NeoGAF community rarely employed subtle sarcasm.
• When comments included positive and negative observations, I accounted for the more immediate reaction to preserve a more real-time response. An example: “I liked the game that was shown at the beginning of the show, but this game now is bad” would have a negative score.
• Many comments weren’t scored as they offered no opinion. These included clarifications, questions, discussions between members unrelated to the press conference, and inquiries into whether one game or another would be shown at a later time.

GamesBeat 2012 is VentureBeat’s fourth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. This year we’re calling on speakers from the hottest mobile, social, PC, and console companies to debate new ways to stay on pace with changing consumer tastes and platforms. Join 500+ execs, investors, analysts, entrepreneurs, and press as we explore the gaming industry’s latest trends and newest monetization opportunities. The event takes place July 10-11 in San Francisco, and you can get your early-bird tickets here.

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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 big three gaming console developers — Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo — all want to get gamers playing on smaller screens as well as the traditional humongous ones. There’s even an info-graphic showing the potential market of console gamers who already use a tablet or smartphone. It makes a ton of sense to include mobile technologies to keep people in front of big screen televisions and, hopefully, console video games.

Source: Post author

A Microsoft representative demos SmartGlass tech for a group of attendees

Everywhere we looked at the Expo this year, we saw iPads, Tegra tablets, iPhones, and Android phones of all stripes. We saw PlayStation Vitas connected to PlayStation 3s, tablet computers connected to Xbox 360s, and the new GamePad from Nintendo connected to their new console, the Wii U.

This is in addition to the literally massive number of smaller screens around both expo hall areas, with Japanese social gaming giant Gree competing across the aisle with WeMade Games, a new Korean mobile gaming initiative that seems just as large, just as aggressive, and in some ways, a little higher in gaming quality.

“I’ve never thought about E3 as my industry before,” said Gavin Bowman, a mobile developer known for smaller, more casual titles at his company, RetroDreamer. “But this year, I finally feel like I’m doing the same thing as everyone else, that this IS my industry.” Bowman just released a new casual game onto iOS this past month called Duckers.

This year, Microsoft wowed the audience at its press conference with SmartGlass, not a new material for making smartphones but a way to move your gameplay from console to smartphone or tablet and back.

Yusuf Medhi, chief marketing officer for Microsoft’s Xbox gaming business, expressed his company’s willingness to use potentially competitive mobile platforms for the SmartGlass initiative by saying, “I think the decision to take an approach that says, embrace the world of smart devices, the billions of smart devices that exist today, and build a platform and a technology and a user experience across those, is absolutely the right call for the consumer, for the industry, and for us. Because what’ll happen is, I think we’re going to get traction here that will expand the Xbox business in a dramatic way.”

Source: GamesBeat E3 Photog

An E3 attendee checks out the latest second screen initiative from Nintendo: the Wii U GamePad

Nintendo showed off its new Wii U gaming console, still focusing on the innovative GamePad controller that has a touch-enabled screen embedded in it between the control sticks and buttons from a more traditional controller. Let’s not forget the 3DS, either, a successful dedicated handheld gaming device.

Sony PlayStation Vita is itself a slick piece of hardware for console-level gaming on the go, both as a remote play controller for several PlayStation 3 titles and as the most powerful dedicated gaming device on its own.

What is also fairly stunning is the number of mobile games being brought to market by giants of the PC and console gaming market. Majesco, maker of PC and console games, is here showing off several mobile games that it hopes will do as well or better than its core business. EA has focused a lot of its money and energy on a range of mobile titles, going so far as to acquire the premier mobile gaming publisher, Chillingo, a couple of years ago.

What really brought the mobile gaming explosion home, however, happened in the South exposition hall, where two giants of mobile gaming, Gree and WeMade, had enormous booth areas directly across from each other. Instead of catapults or cannons waging war across the aisle, they are using sound and huge screen monitors to show off their high-end, console-quality mobile games that are looking more and more like their big console brethren. Gree and WeMade are both banking, quite literally, on the incredible volume of players who want their gaming on the go.

“I think the most important point is the fact that the writing is on the wall: The mobile market is going to be bigger than the console market,” said Gree’s CEO Yoshikazu Tanaka, in a conversation with PocketGamer.biz that echoes that of other executives at Gree. “If you think about it, there are 200 to 300 million consoles out there, and by comparison, a billion smartphones. So, already, the market size is pretty much 10 times the size of what we have on consoles.”

When asked for comment, members of the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) were unwilling to quantify or make an official statement about any increase in the number of mobile market vendors or offerings at E3 this year.

GamesBeat 2012 is VentureBeat’s fourth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. This year we’re calling on speakers from the hottest mobile, social, PC, and console companies to debate new ways to stay on pace with changing consumer tastes and platforms. Join 500+ execs, investors, analysts, entrepreneurs, and press as we explore the gaming industry’s latest trends and newest monetization opportunities. The event takes place July 10-11 in San Francisco, and you can get your early-bird tickets here.

---

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!

---

Right after the GamesBeat staff got back from the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) last week, we started wondering if we were all at the same event. Despite a combined 38 years of experience attending the annual game-industry trade show, lead writer Dean Takahashi, culture editor Sebastian Haley, and I (GamesBeat’s editor-in-chief) came away from the 2012 edition with drastically differing opinions on what we saw.

Here’s what we thought of this year’s E3:

Sebastian Haley, culture editor:

I might be alone on this, but E3 was a disheartening experience for me this year. Sure, I’ll buy and love Borderlands 2, Dishonored, and a ton of other games that were shown off, but everything was just so iterative — from the countless sea of sequels and spin-offs, to even the press conferences that seemed to focus less and less on what gamers like myself actually want.

After years of being the punchline of the Internet, why is it so hard to make a good E3 press conference? Microsoft gave carte blanche to Nike and ESPN to talk as long as they wanted, but when it came time to show off the only three original intellectual properties (IPs) in the entire lineup, if you blinked you would have missed it. And even if you didn’t blink, you’d still have no idea what the games were even about. Then Usher and Joe Montana come out for awkward performances, and that’s supposed to make things better?

The industry more or less seems to be on autopilot, and I can only hope it’s saving up all its energy for a massive 2013. But again, maybe that’s just me.

Dishonored

Dean Takahashi, lead news writer:

The game industry didn’t have such a bad showing at E3. The traditional game publishers showed off new original games such as Beyond: Two Souls, The Last of Us, The Unfinished Swan, Dishonored, Warface, Hawken, World of Warplanes, and Watch Dogs. New technologies such as Unreal Engine 4, facial animation, SmartGlass, the Wii U, and Sony’s Wonderbook were cool. The staple franchises such as Assassin’s Creed III, Call of Duty: Black Ops II, Tomb Raider, SimCity, Medal of Honor: Warfighter, and Crysis 3 will keep gamers delighted and busy in the next year.

But like Sebastian, I also have high expectations of game makers in the core console market. And I’m not sure they have done enough to shield themselves from the disruption that is hitting their industry. This E3 was an in-between year. Next-generation consoles are in the works, but only Nintendo showed off its cards, and they weren’t very disruptive this time around.

From the outside, the game industry is under pressure. Apple is one of the driving forces of the real disruption, but it isn’t alone. Samsung announced at the show that it will create its own cloud gaming service in partnership with Gaikai and Nvidia. It will in effect become a fourth major platform for game makers, launching a cloud-based game service that could threaten the core console business. Apple and Samsung could bring cheap, high-quality games into the living room that could compete quite nicely against $60 games that come with the number “3″ or “4″ after their names.

This is a very real threat. At E3, I didn’t see a masterstroke to deal with it. There was innovation, but not enough of it to make a difference.

The Last of Us

Dan “Shoe” Hsu, editor-in-chief:

Last year’s E3 only gave me one stick-with-me moment: the BioShock Infinite demo. It left me near breathless, and even though I don’t smoke, I felt like I needed a cigarette after watching it.

Nothing this year quite matched that, but three games came awfully close, all from my personal top 3 games of E3: Watch Dogs, The Last of Us, and Dishonored. I saw The Last of Us on the last day of the show, and it just put the biggest smile on my face. Right when that amazing, frightening, tension-filled demo finished, it cemented this E3 as one of the best in recent years for me. So I’m quite surprised at Sebastian’s reaction — this show was amazing! When was the last time so many new IPs surprised and wowed us like this? We’re always complaining about the sequel parades (and rightfully so), but it’s up to us to look past the flashy hype of the Call of Duties of the world to champion original games like the ones I just mentioned.

Nintendo Land and ZombiU on the Wii U were both pleasant surprises as well (though the latter proved to me that first-pers0n-shooter controls will take a lot of hand-eye-coordination reconditioning due to the controller’s new layout — a reconditioning I’m not sure I want to commit to). Even the known quantities got me excited again: I honestly thought I was over Halo and Gears of War, but both Halo 4 and the overrun mode in Gears of War: Judgment were a lot of fun to play in multiplayer.

I went into my 16th E3 jaded and thinking I’ve seen and experienced it all. I left a surprised, giddy gamer.

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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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Your secret’s out, and it’s a weapon used against you.

Ever since Ubisoft’s open-world techno-thriller Watch Dogs floored attendees at this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), websites, Twitter feeds, cameras, and microphones gorged themselves on protagonist Aiden Pearce’s unscrupulous mastery over a grittier Chicago’s webwork of information hubs and electronic devices. It paints a bleakly exposed world where, as the politically charged debut trailer ominously intones, “you are no longer an individual.”

But like everyone else in this interconnected dystopia, Aiden’s actions occur under constant surveillance. Our first impressions touched upon possible cooperative play accompanying Aiden’s vigilantism, with players downloading missions from the network in an online environment. During Ubisoft’s more in-depth demo of the game, we quickly learned rivalries form just as quickly as convenient alliances, thanks to Watch Dogs’ elaborate cross-platform mobile app.

Although Ubisoft refrained on details about supported devices and a release schedule, its unveiling of the app brushed upon one of the most intricately intertwined cross-platform mechanics we’ve seen.

Aiden’s unrestrained access to Chicago’s info-troves extends into your fingertips, as players can hack, access, and track people and systems of interest in real-time within a constantly updating map of the city. Landmarks and critical mission areas can be scoped in preparation of any groundwork, enabling a liberating degree of contingency within an already emergent world. Hacked financial data such as credit card numbers and bank accounts plug into the app for fast cash when needed, and any new information gleaned on one platform transfers seamlessly to the other.

Not Orwellian enough for you? Dig this: App tracking includes second-by-second updates of your friends’ progress within Watch Dogs…and you can hack everything they see within their game.

Consider our minds blown. The possibilities of mischievous multiplayer meddling are almost endless, and coupling total control over all things digital with a flair for sabotage has already hatched more than a few nefarious schemes among our staffers. As a refresher, check out some of the tools at your disposal for hindering friends at the touch of a button.

Traffic lights: Aiden’s graceful creation of a 12-car wreck within a rain-slick intersection involved jumbling the signal patterns of nearby traffic lights during a carefully timed opportunity for catching acquitted criminal Joseph Demarco. It’s safe to say playing red-light-green-light with the evening commute will become a favored toy in everyone’s bag of tricks, but think of the adversarial elements as well – what could be a more perfect roadblock to your buddy’s speedy getaway from the inevitable police response than the impromptu sandtrap of a colossal fender-bender?

Security cameras: Sure, the app’s bird’s-eye view of your friends’ struggles elicits plenty of cackling laughter and steepled fingers, but when that personal touch is needed for the calling-card finale of your latest ambush, Watch Dogs’ legions of security cameras await your command. Not only do cameras give enhanced looks at the whereabouts of impending victims, their digital-grade visual quality ensures your friends’ expressions of horror are captured with crystal clarity. Remind me to shoot every camera I see like a paranoid wretch once I start playing.

Bridges: Hightailing it out of the neighborhood in style invariably involves the many bridges dotting the Chicago River. Of course, your friend’s dream of pulling off the perfect aerial stunt over a raising bridge kind of hits a wall after you’ve already fully raised it long before. No, really, we mean literally hit a wall.

Public transport: Chancing the metro? Too bad – in Watch Dogs’ connected world, even rails fall under the digital sway, and normally effective trains turn into cylindrical deathtraps. Mix things up by cutting the juice to your friend’s ride right in the middle of a pitch-black subway tunnel. And don’t worry; those screams of claustrophobia won’t scar the mind too much. That’s why therapy exists.

Watch Dogs has a planned 2013 release for the PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360.

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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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Brian Farrell, chief executive of embattled video game publisher THQ, has endured a lot of criticism in the past year as investors have pummeled the company’s stock price and watched as Farrell has had to make cutback after cutback in staffing.

THQ’s bad bet on investing in the uDraw tablet cost the company a lot of money and forced it to accelerate a shift out of kids mass market games into hardcore titles for older players. The company’s revenues fell short during the holidays, and it has scaled back investments in its upcoming Warhammer 40,000: Dark Millennium, changing the format from a massively multiplayer online game to a single-player title.

Another blow landed last week as publishing rival Electronic Arts announced it had won the right to make Ultimate Fighting Championship video games, taking the mixed martial arts franchise away from THQ, a move that will affect THQ’s San Diego, Calif. studio.

But THQ has also had better-than-expected revenues recently, and it hired Jason Rubin, co-founder of Naughty Dog, as president to help turn around the company. We caught up with Farrell at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), the industry’s largest trade show, last week. Here is an edited transcript of our interview.

GamesBeat: You have good games here at E3, but I know it’s been a tough year.

Brian Farrell: It’s been a tough year on a number of levels. We’ve had to completely reposition the company. As you know, for a long time, the kids business was part of our bread and butter. We recognized that the kids business was declining. In fairness, we didn’t move quickly enough out of that business, but now we’re out, totally focused on core, and I think you’re seeing the results here.

GamesBeat: Is there a way to figure out how to find where the bottom is for THQ and where your stable base will be?

Farrell: I think we have not only hit that bottom, but we’re starting to pull out a little bit. Don’t take my word for it, but if you look at our Q4 financial results, we look at that as a template for our future. We have high-quality games. A lot of the upside came from the digital downloads coming from Saints Row: The Third. So you ship a successful game, and the follow-on digital revenue is really strong. We had great cash flow as the result of those two things.

We’ve been talking about the focus word, but now look around. I don’t have to talk about it. Every one of the games we’re showing have some kind of awards or nominations hanging from them. The focus is working. Now, we’re not declaring victory yet. We have a boatload of work to do. But getting Jason Rubin was a huge win. He is a smart, creative, but disciplined guy who has a vision to do even better on the core side. We also share a vision for where the industry is going and where the core business is going on a digital level. I’m personally reenergized. I think a lot of the company is, too.

GamesBeat: It must be hard, still, to hear that the Internet at large is calling for your head. “Why is Brian still here?” or whatever. How do you work with that kind of criticism?

Farrell: [Chuckles] The good news or the bad news, depending on your point of view, is that I’ve been doing this a long time. I’ve been through these troughs before, and I’ve been through the peaks before. Both of those things, the peaks and the troughs, come from products, right?

When we hit good products, we bring a very successful company. And when we’ve not delivered good products, we’ve been in a failure state. In a failure state, I double down in terms of work ethic, dedication to the business. I feel personally responsible for where THQ is right now. I take full responsibility for that. But I’m also taking responsibility until relieved of command for making it work. I’ve done it before. I intend to do it again.

GamesBeat: I guess it still takes a while to change directions or to also make an impact. If you’re doing fewer, more high-impact games, then by necessity it’s going to take a while.

Farrell: I completely agree with that. If you think about what we’ve been saying over the last few months, it’s not a new strategy. It’s just getting there faster. Getting out of the kids business — we said we were heading in that direction, but given what happened with uDraw last year, we did it more immediately. So this is not a new concept, again, if you look at what we’ve done with the smaller slate of titles and the focus, I think you’re going to see a high level of quality on all of those.

Again, the products speak for themselves. Look around the booth and see what’s hanging from the walls. So we’re on that path, we’ve been on that path, and what Jason and I completely agree on. Obviously that’s not where he’s going to have his imprimatur. It’s just a little further out and also in the digital realm. The new business models are emerging. It’s a little too early to talk in specifics about it. But he has a point of view that I’m very supportive of that is right in line with what we’ve been talking about the last couple of years.

GamesBeat: How do you look at your slate as far as decisions that you guys have made? Clearly it’s more focused, they’re bigger games, each release looks better. What else would you observe about this?

Farrell: That’s the business model now, right? Let’s start with Darksiders. Launches in a couple of months. I think that’s another demonstration of our commitment to what we said we were going to do. We said quality core games in a good window. The team came to us a couple of months ago and said, you know, we knew the game was good, but to get it to where it needs to be, we need a couple more months. You know the financial situation of the company. Tough call. But I said, you know what? We said we’re going to do quality games, and we’re going to do quality games. Team, you have an additional two months. I think it’s going to be reflected in the quality.

And also, we checked around in terms of what’s a better window for launching the game? I personally picked up the phone with a couple of key retailers and said, you know, let’s make the right decision here. And we did the right thing for the product. Again, we said we were going to do it, we’re doing it.

One of the pleasant surprises for me this show was Metro. I’ve always been a fan. I don’t know if you remember all the way back to S.T.A.L.K.E.R. — then that same team left and formed a new team to do the original Metro for us. Once again, they needed a little more time with the game. We gave them the time. We’re going to put it away from all the other shooters coming out this holiday, away from Halo, away from Call of Duty.

I think we’re going to have a good window. It’s a unique product, right? Where can THQ stand out? Competing with 100-million-dollar budgets? Probably not. But a new world you’ve never been to before with a feeling and an ambiance that gamers can’t get elsewhere? That’s super cool about Metro. And gamers are recognizing it. So again, time, positioning in the market, competitive window release. We’re doing the right thing by our games.

GamesBeat: And then the UFC thing, was that predictable? Or was that a surprise?

Farrell: Well, it wasn’t a surprise to us. It was something that we were very interested in. We’ve been very clear. Our CFO Paul Pucino has said the break-even on a game is around two million units, plus or minus. We’ve also said that we’ve done about 1.4 million units of UFC 3. An 86-rated Metacritic game, you know what that means in the sports world — that’s really hard to do. Some people did connect those dots.

We were being asked a question: Why are you continuing on with this? Personally, I almost hate to admit this. I love the sport. I have a lot of respect for the Fertittas and Dana White. It’s been a great brand for us, but for us the ability to get cash and invest in things that are more core to our strategy, great for us. Will UFC be a better platform on EA Sports? I’m sure that’s the hope at EA and the UFC, and honestly, we wish them well. I hope to keep going to the events. It’s a win-win-win here.

GamesBeat: I guess it helps that you can get out from under some financial obligations there, that keep on ratcheting up on the marketing… That would have been a burden?

Farrell: Yeah, that and ongoing development on something that wasn’t working for us. Again, great brand, and again, we wish them very well, but again… I think all parties are absolutely delighted with the outcome.

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The 2012 Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) was the year of dubstep. We heard a lot of wobble bass wub wub wubbing the walls of the showroom floor and press conferences. Dubstep has been on the rise over the past few years, and most recently exploded into the mainstream thanks to artists like Skrillex. Below is a video highlighting some of the dubstep of E3 2012.

Have a listen.

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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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New story, new moves, new enemies, new levels…despite all that, God of War: Ascension still seemed “same-y” to me. The latest chapter — prequel, actually — in the mythological-themed action series didn’t pass the initial “this is a brand-new game” look test when Sony gave us a demo of the single-player campaign last week. No one would blame a casual observer for confusing Ascension with one of its predecessors. Skyscraping monsters, chain-blade-whipping combat, and limb-tearing brutality…yeah, we’ve seen that before.

But Luis Sanchez wouldn’t agree with that assessment. Sony Santa Monica’s senior game designer spent some time with GamesBeat and broke down in detail just exactly what’s new with this God of War, due out March 2013 for the PlayStation 3.

Warning: Hardcore details ahead!

The softer side of Kratos

Canon-wise, Ascension “takes place before all the other God of Wars but after Kratos has killed his family,” Sanchez told us. That means our series star hasn’t yet bricked-in his soul to become the cold-hearted bastard we’re used to seeing him as.

In one scene during our demo, local villagers were running away from a pack of monsters who were lobbing spears at them. Two of them impaled their targets, but Kratos casually pushed the third civilian away at the last second, saving his life.

Casually. It’s not that Kratos is bleeding-heart softie in Ascension, but such a seemingly trivial act actually said a lot about his character development. Remember, this is the guy who will eventually have no qualms about throwing an innocent woman into a death trap just to solve a puzzle in one of his later games.  ”Kratos saving someone is something we’ve never seen in any God of War,” said Sanchez. “We get to see a bit of his humanity, before he becomes just a rage machine.”

The Lifecycle ability

Kratos picked up some new Lego-game-like magic called the Lifecycle ability. “He can repair things that are broken or take things that are pristine and break them,” said Sanchez. “In addition to that, I can stop the process halfway and freeze the debris at that point in time. I can use this as a navigation tool…a path, but we can use this for puzzles as well.”

You won’t be able to use Lifecycle in the environment whenever you want — it only works in designated spots as determined by the level design. But it’s effective in combat as well. “You can blast these guys with Lifecycle, and they get slowed down,” said Sanchez. “It’s a good entryway into a combo.”

Button-less minigames

God of War didn’t invent the quick-time event, but it does rely heavily on the mechanic. Throughout the series, we see timing-based button prompts to advance highly choreographed (and quite exciting) combat scenes.

They haven’t gone away in Ascension, but the developers are mixing it up a bit. In one scene, a giant bipedal elephant monster grabs our antihero and puts on the squeeze in what looks to be another close-up quick-time sequence. Instead of waiting for the game to tell you what to do, however, you’d just take matters into your own thumbs. “You’ll see that there are no button prompts here,” said Sanchez. “I can do my two attacks — my light and my heavy — but I can also dodge out of the way. So the elephant is going to try to grab me [with his other hand], and then I can dodge left or right with no button prompts. This allows us to get really close-up with the action and keep it cinematic but give the player control of what’s happening. It’s very fluid.”

The elements

Various elements — at the very least fire, which is the only one Sony is ready to talk about right now — will factor into gameplay in Ascension. “If I’m infused with fire,” said Sanchez, “then my blades do an attack on the enemies where they become fire bombs and can explode and do area-of-effect damage to other enemies.”

Your foes can be naturally imbued with the elements as well: “Our Brute enemy, if you notice the inside of his helmet, is glowing with fire. He’s actually elemental-based, and we’ll have different variations of him using different elements. So one enemy might have different fight tactics compared to the same guy using a different element.”

How your own elemental magic will interact with the ones your opponents are wielding remains to be seen.  ”We’re trying to figure out the combat between the element that Kratos has versus the element that the enemy has,” said Sanchez. “But you’ll have different elemental attacks, and you’ll have to approach different enemies’ elements in different ways.”

More natural movement

“We created a new navigation system from the ground up for this game,” Sanchez explained.
“It’s more free-form and allows us to do interesting navigation paths, where before, [Kratos' climbing] was very rigid. It was 90-degree movement and feels outdated now. We thought we’d update that whole system.”

Environmental weapons

While Kratos has had access to secondary weapons before, they’ve always been a part of his set inventory. In Ascension, he can pick up killing tools from low-level enemies and use them. So far, we’ve seen a sword, spear, and club, but the player can “exhaust” them for super attacks as well. “I can discard the sword, and it gives a powerful attack which can stun large enemies,” said Sanchez. “With the spear, I can discard it [as well to] rain spears down. All environmental weapons have a special discard, so while you get rid of it, you get a special attack out of it.”

Other combat options

Kratos can now continue a weapon combo with his bare hands or kicks, showing a little versatility in his combat skills.

“The other cool thing we added was a tether,” said Sanchez. “I can stick one [chain] blade into an enemy and drag him around. Then with my other blade, I can attack other enemies. Then I can swing him around and use him as a weapon. So it works for different play styles. You can use it for crowd control, or you can use it as an offensive move. We’re trying to weaponize enemies.”

More Rage

“We overhauled the Rage system,” said Sanchez about Kratos in souped-up overdrive mode.”Any positive action that the player does — whether it’d be hits, blocking, or parries — will fill up your meter. And once it gets full, you automatically go into Rage mode. And once you’re in Rage mode, if you continue doing positive actions, you’ll maintain that Rage mode. This is different from previous games where you had to activate it. There are some players who save that special, and they ever use it. It’s a shame because that’s a very powerful attack to use, so that’s why we chose to go this route and reward you for kicking ass.”

Now, Sanchez admitted this could lead to situations where Rage kicks in just a player offs the final enemy in a scene, wasting the special effects. “That could happen, but every fight scenario [we've designed], you’ll be able to use Rage.”

Whew. We certainly wouldn’t want Kratos to get all worked up with no one to tear up into bloody bits.

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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 someone asked me for the name of the game I’ve clocked the most hours in to this day, I’d confidently respond with Counter-Strike (CS). Originally a user-crafted modification for Valve’s first-person shooter Half-Life in 1999, CS bowled over the PC gaming community with its team-based straightforwardness, gracefully balanced map design and arsenal, and competitive appeal.

Now, Valve wants that same magic on consoles. Releasing on August 21, 2012 for the PC, Mac, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive retains the aged mod’s core design while touching up its graphics, loading up more weapons and maps, and adding a new mode. Pretty standard stuff for ported re-boots, but CS:GO’s emphasis clearly lies upon making the old flow with the new.

The result? Something consoles needed for a very long time: simplicity. For an explanation, check out three design mechanics powering CS:GO below, and make sure to leave a comment on what you think of its differences versus other shooters.

No aim-assist. Like its predecessor, CS:GO’s armory of rifles, pistols, shotguns, and submachine guns disfavor sprayed automatic fire, a staple veteran CS gamers instantly recognize. Similarly themed console titles with robust multiplayer aspects such as the Battlefield and Call of Duty series offer gamers the familiar hand-hold aim-assist provides, but no dice with CS:GO – you’ll need accurate, precise fire to drop tangos downrange, an especially crucial skill with the lack of iron-sights and sprinting. A Valve representative at CS:GO’s cubby hole at E3 explained the lack of aim-assist aligns with the developer’s intentions of transferring the same classic CS gameplay PC gamers know and love to consoles. Time to brush up on those recoil patterns.

No killstreaks, perks, or clunky experience point systems. CS’ most popular mode, Demolition, shot to the top for many reasons. It built upon multiplayer shooter gaming’s team deathmatch structure with a bomb defusal aspect promoting coordination and communication beyond a kill-or-be-killed objective. That doesn’t mean the latter’s action sours in comparison. Far from it – most shootouts occur within the hallways and chokepoints leading up to each map’s bomb zones.

As in most shooters, victory lies within superior positioning and a steady trigger. Unlike most of today’s shooters, however, CS:GO doesn’t need airstrikes, attack helicopters, gold-plated guns, or “+2 sprint speed of the wolf” perks to shine. Showing off your personal flair involves loading up with your preferred weaponry, purchased via cash accrued by completing objectives and racking up kills.

No prone shenanigans. Know what a “dropshot” is? If not, take a look at the linked video. Essentially, a dropshot – also known as a “dolphin dive” in Battlefield circles – snaps a player into the prone position with minimal loss of accuracy, a frustratingly unrealistic I-win move during engagements. Thankfully, CS:GO’s terrorist and counter-terrorist teams stay on their feet, with the option to crouch down for added accuracy at the cost of mobility.

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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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UPDATE: Congratulations to Ryan H. (@kancer) for winning our giveaway.

GamesBeat is your source for some of the best coverage of the 2012 Electronic Entertainment Expo, and we’re also your hookup for some genuine E3 swag. We brought a few goodies back from the show and want to give them away to one lucky GamesBeat Twitter follower.

What kind of goodies? How about Halo 4 and Gears of War: Judgment t-shirts, some Dishonored/The Elder Scrolls Online portable speakers, a Takamaru’s Ninja Castle pin, a Dead or Alive 5 necklace, and some other cool surprises? And we’ll even include a free game from our collection.

Read these rules before you throw your name into the mix:

• Follow us on Twitter (@GamesBeat). You’ll be the first to see our latest content, and we’ll be able to direct message you if you’re our winner.
• Tweet this message to get the word out: Follow @GamesBeat and RT this for a chance to win a bag of #E32012 swag. Rules: http://wp.me/p1re2-1YFg #GamesBeatGiveaways
• If we get at least 20 re-Tweets, we’ll draw one winner at random later this week and direct message him or her for shipping details (continental U.S. only).
• Void where prohibited.

We’ll update this post once we have a winner.

Good luck, and don’t forget to check out our E3 hub for the latest news from the event.

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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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Believe it or not, Activision’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) offerings this year didn’t solely hinge upon first-person shooter (FPS) Call of Duty: Black Ops II’s bombastic bomb-fests. As much as the publishing giant enjoyed blasting developer Treyarch’s latest excess of grandiosity across quite possibly the largest collection of pixels ever, other titles clamored for attention. Count Eurocom’s 007 Legends among the latter’s hopeful throng.

Releasing this fall for the PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360, Legends gives a nod to the James Bond film franchise’s 50th anniversary of fast cars, custom martinis, dangerous damsels, and one of the most recognizable musical hooks in existence. Eurocom eschewed the trend of mono-plot settings earlier Bond games adopted — adaptions of GoldenEye, Quantum of Solace, and From Russia with Love spring to mind — for a six-sided tribute to five classic Bond films and the upcoming Daniel Craig blockbuster Skyfall.

Legends’ E3 demo included a snippet of gameplay from Bond’s memorable infiltration of space supremacist Hugo Drax’s sprawling lair in 1979′s Moonraker, complete with loitering henchmen wearing silly yellow jumpsuits. Wrapped in a mixture of FPS, stealth, and over-the-top destruction — sorry, Call of Duty, Bond did it first — Legends teems with potential.

One question remains: Where’s Bond?

Let’s clarify. The super-spy’s physical presence is certainly front-and-center for the entirety of the game. Your viewpoint sits squarely within Bond’s set of eyeballs. You’re hefting Bond’s go-to Walther PPK pistol. Drax’s complex mirrors its 33-year-old counterpart. After watching Eurocom’s walkthrough, though, I realized none of the above sufficiently imparted Bond’s iconic personality. And that’s a crucial checkmark for success these days.

Here’s why: More and more contemporary shooters lean heavily upon drivable characters. Gamers remember protagonists carrying dimensionality beyond walking lead dispensers. Names like Uncharted’s Nathan Drake, Max Payne’s titular ex-cop, and yes, even the refreshingly vulnerable Lara Croft stick in our brains via tidbits of personality. For a game portraying a character backed by 50 years of development, Legends needs more of Bond’s humor, wit, and suaveness.

Sure, bullets, explosions, and monologuing villains handily accomplishes a scale of spectacle, but like its namesake, a Bond game needs inventiveness, creativity, and wit. During a short gameplay sequence, 007 encounters recurring nemesis and mobile man-tower Jaws behind a control room door. It’s a worthy matchup, but Legends dispenses with any lead-up whatsoever. The player steps through a doorway, and out pops Jaws with nary a snark from Bond. Even more alarmingly, Bond combats Jaws in practically complete silence, punctuated occasionally by the loud clangs issued from the piece of steel railing used as a makeshift club.

That isn’t the Bond I know.

Thankfully, Legends has many opportunities for diving saves here. Moonraker represents but one film enshrined within Legends’ homage. Eurocom plans gradual reveals of later film missions leading into the game’s release, and that’s plenty of chances for Bond to re-appear back into the spotlight where he belongs.

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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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With publishers showing so many games in such close proximity, the Electronic Entertainment Expo is a great place to discover the directions that developers are taking the entire industry for the next year and beyond. Below are eight trends that GamesBeat’s writers noticed during the annual trade show.

1. The year of the bow.

I don’t know when bow and arrows became so cool. Maybe we should blame Hawkeye from The Avengers? Or maybe that girl from the Hunger Games? Whatever the reason, many of gaming’s protagonists have traded their rifles for wood. GamesBeat writer Jeff Grubb actually detailed this phenomenon quite a bit, listing Crysis 3, Tomb Raider, Far Cry 3, and Assassin’s Creed III as examples of string-tugging action.

Now, some of these characters use bows because of limited resources (Tomb Raider) or because of the technology of their day (Assassin’s Creed III), but why on earth is the guy from Crysis 3, who probably has access to the most advanced weapons technology on the planet, using such a primitive device?

2. Fourth installments of franchises, aka fourquels.

This industry has always loved its sequels, but when you reach the fourth installment of a series (in many cases within the same console generation), you begin to want for a bit more originality. Microsoft is the most guilty party here, showing off an upcoming library of software that includes Halo 4, Gears of War: Judgement, and Fable: The Journey.

Not that Sony is completely off the hook, thanks to God of War: Ascension, the fourth console release of the series. Sure, all of these titles are likely to be enjoyable on some level, but franchise fatigue is definitely setting in.

3. Shocking brutality.

Video games have been violent for a very, very long time. It seems like ages ago when we all gasped while Kano tore a guy’s heart out of his chest in the original Mortal Kombat. Still, the violence was usually treated with a sort of action movie level of seriousness…meaning it wasn’t taken very seriously at all.

Well, now all of the killing, cutting, ripping, bludgeoning, and bleeding seems much more real. The trend seems to start with the new Tomb Raider, which sees protagonist Lara Croft screaming in almost constant pain as she is impaled and beaten. Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us is also a clear example of more visceral violence, especially thanks to a notable scene from Sony’s press briefing where the player shot a guy in the face with a shotgun while he begged for his life. Despite a lifetime spent watching polygons and pixels explode into bits of organs and limbs, for the first time ever gaming violence is making me wince.

4. Everything looks like Uncharted.

I’m guessing that we’re beginning to see a lot of the games that were put into production after 2009′s Uncharted 2: Among Thieves proved to be a big hit. There were multiple titles on the show floor that featured climbing and mouthy characters that could easily be describe as, “It’s like Uncharted, but….”

I mean, there was Star Wars: 1313, which was like Uncharted but with a sci-fi setting, and Tomb Raider is like Uncharted without any of the lighthearted comedy. Even Splinter Cell: Blacklist seems to take the series in a more climbing-focused direction. I guess imitation is flattery, right?

5. Stealthy franchises are less stealthy.

Remember when Metal Gear was a stealth-based franchise? Sort of hard to believe that series could inspire a hack-and-slashing affair where you cut a guy into a dozen pieces with a sword, but that’s exactly what we have with Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. What about Assassin’s Creed III? The new protagonist, Connor, seems to prefer to charge directly at his foes rather than stunning his adversaries with surprise like his ancestors, Altair and Ezio, did.

Even Agent 47 has gotten bold enough to kill his targets in the middle of giant crowds in Hitman: Absolution. Of course, these could all just be vertical slices that are focusing on more action-oriented aspects of these titles, but you still couldn’t escape the feeling that stealth was out of style at E3.

6. Second screens.

Dual screen gaming was made popular with Nintendo’s DS hand held device back in 2004, but now we’re seeing that concept taken to the consoles. We already knew about Nintendo’s Wii U, the new system that heavily features the use of a tablet controller, but Microsoft showed off SmartGlass technology, with allows preexisting smart phones and tablets to act as a second screen for Xbox 360 experiences.

We saw a lot of examples of this technology being used for unique gameplay possibilities, notably in Wii U platformers New Super Mario Bros. U and Rayman Legends, where the second screen can be used to assist the main player. Microsoft, meanwhile, showed off the ability to instantly transfer a movie from the television to a smart phone mid-scene. It’ll be interesting to see how consumers take to this innovative (and potentially expensive) technology.

7. Revenge!

A lot of characters seem to be motivated by revenge this year. Just look at the tagline for Dishonored, the new steampunk, action-adventure title from publisher Bethesda: “Revenge solves everything.” You can also look at the trailer for the four player co-op mode in Far Cry 3, where four random people unite in their quest for (what else?) revenge.

Don’t forget about Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. There’ so much revenge that they have to make up new words for it!

8. Amazing facial animation.

Last year’s L.A. Noire impressed many with its exceptional  facial animation, and it seems like the trend for more realistic looking characters will continue. The PlayStation 3′s Beyond: Two Souls, the new title from Heavy Rain’s David Cage, leads the pack with some absolutely stunning faces that are able to emote and act as well as any real person.

Even franchises which aren’t normally renowned for this kind of technology have stepped up their game, notably seen in trailers for Far Cry 3 and Call of Duty: Black Ops 2. Man, I remember when the character’s mouths didn’t even move.

GamesBeat 2012 is VentureBeat’s fourth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. This year we’re calling on speakers from the hottest mobile, social, PC, and console companies to debate new ways to stay on pace with changing consumer tastes and platforms. Join 500+ execs, investors, analysts, entrepreneurs, and press as we explore the gaming industry’s latest trends and newest monetization opportunities. The event takes place July 10-11 in San Francisco, and you can get your early-bird tickets here.

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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 Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) showcases the latest in video game technology, but sometimes a little bit of retro slips in. This year, a few companies showed off their latest titles in arcade form, and the Video Game History Museum had a little exhibit on the show floor.

If you’ve ever wanted to see a Coleco Telstar Arcade machine, check out the gallery 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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Dead or Alive 4 first graced Xbox 360 disc trays in 2005, which blows my mind. Tecmo Koei is bringing back its sexy, storied franchise in 2012 — seven years later — with a few new features and character cameos in tow.

The DOA series of 3D fighting games has always been known for its frenetic action, counter-friendly gameplay, and interactive environments. Dead or Alive 5 is no different. The build that I played at this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) was as quick and deadly as its predecessors. I also had the chance to meet with Marko Bursac and Kohei Shibata from the game’s developer, Team Ninja, to discuss some of the title’s potent new additions.

“We have one extra move that we actually implemented in Dead or Alive 5. It’s called the power blow,” Bursac detailed while translating Shibata’s thoughts. “It’s more like a special super move that we have in the series for the first time.”

The power blow adds an important new weapon to a player’s arsenal. It drains significant amounts of enemy energy, and in some cases, it can even end a round in dramatic fashion. During our private session, Shibata demonstrated the move on a city-rooftop level. He charged up his character and executed the maneuver on his heavily damaged opponent, which led to an elaborate ending sequence where his combatant literally kicked the adversary into a flaming, flying car. The power blows introduce an added level of risk to fights and can be real game changers if used correctly.

DOA 5 also adds more depth to its highly technical critical system. Advanced players are now able to execute a critical-burst attack that can completely paralyze foes for a split second, leading to devastating combo opportunities.

As I mentioned earlier, the game continues the franchise’s hallmark of treacherous fighting environments. “The stages are very interactive … We’re trying to use the stages to reinforce the fighting-entertainment dynamic that we have in the game,” Bursac stated as Shibata played through a match. In addition to the rooftop scene, I also saw a lighthearted, circus-inspired area and a war-torn street environment. With the new gameplay mechanics, the backdrops are now even more crucial to a fighter’s ultimate success.

And speaking of fighters, the floor demo included mainstays like Ayane, Hayabusa, and Zack, so expect to see many of your favorites return. Interestingly enough, Akira and Sarah from the Virtua Fighter series will also be making appearances. While translating for Shibata, Bursac explained the inclusion of the characters, “The Virtua Fighter series has been the forefather of the 3D-fighting genre … Since we’re bringing back Dead or Alive … we wanted to celebrate that occasion and show our respect.” The Team Ninja members didn’t go into detail about how the VF veterans will figure into the storyline, however. “They might pop up,” Bursac coyly replied.

If you’re a fan of the DOA saga or 3D fighting games in general, be sure to check out Dead or Alive 5 when it combos its way onto Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 this September.

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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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Each year, during the various press conferences surrounding the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) game-industry trade show, people applaud. Some of it’s polite (some guy we don’t care about is getting on stage). Some of it’s fanfare (yay, a new Zelda!). Some of it’s fake rah-rah (come on, we know you’re employees trying to pump up the crowd).

But once in a while, it’s pure, legitimate wow.

An extended, genuinely enthusiastic ovation awaited the conclusion of publisher/developer Ubisoft’s demo of Watch Dogs, a new modern-day drama/action/adventure game with a touch of cyberpunk. It’s stylish. It’s violent. And it’s oh-so-pretty. Of course, it’s way too early to judge whether this upcoming (date: TBD) Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC release will be any good or not, but read our quick-look preview and peep the gameplay video below to see why we picked Watch Dogs for GamesBeat’s E3 2012 Game of the Show.

Ubisoft’s thriller wasn’t the only star of E3. Here are the final top-threes by the rest of the GamesBeat staff who were in attendance at E3 2012. (To check out more coverage of any of the games, just click on the tags below the article or follow our E3 tag.)

Dan “Shoe” Hsu, GamesBeat editor-in-chief

1. The Last of Us (PlayStation 3)
2. Watch Dogs (multiplatform)
3. Dishonored (multiplatform)

Dean Takahashi, GamesBeat lead news writer

1. Beyond: Two Souls (PlayStation 3)
2. The Last of Us (PlayStation 3)
3. Watch Dogs (multiplatform)

Sebastian Haley, GamesBeat culture editor

1. Metro: Last Light (multiplatform)
2. Watch Dogs (multiplatform)
3. The Cave (multiplatform)

Omri Petitte, GamesBeat writer

1. Watch Dogs (multiplatform)
2. Assassin’s Creed III (multiplatform)
3. PlanetSide 2 (PC)

Mike Minotti, GamesBeat writer

1. Assassin’s Creed III (multiplatform)
2. Disney Epic Mickey: The Power of Illusion (3DS)
3. Rayman Legends (Wii U)

Jacob Lopez, GamesBeat writer

1. Watch Dogs (multiplatform)
2. The Last of Us (PlayStation 3)
3. Scribblenauts Unlimited (Wii U)

Stefanie Fogel, GamesBeat writer

1. The Walking Dead — Episode 2: Starved for Help (multiplatform)
2. Borderlands 2 (multiplatform)
3. Quantum Conundrum (multiplatform)

Rob LeFebvre, GamesBeat writer

1. Watch Dogs (multiplatform)
2. Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch (PlayStation 3)
3. Gravity Rush (PlayStation Vita)

Rus McLaughlin, GamesBeat writer

1. Watch Dogs (multiplatform)
2. The Last of Us (PlayStation 3)
3. Tomb Raider (multiplatform)

Eduardo Moutinho, GamesBeat writer

1. Star Wars 1313 (multiplatform)
2. Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (multiplatform)
3. Injustice: Gods Among Us (multiplatform)

Please vote for your own favorite in our poll and explain your vote in the comments.

GamesBeat 2012 is VentureBeat’s fourth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. This year we’re calling on speakers from the hottest mobile, social, PC, and console companies to debate new ways to stay on pace with changing consumer tastes and platforms. Join 500+ execs, investors, analysts, entrepreneurs, and press as we explore the gaming industry’s latest trends and newest monetization opportunities. The event takes place July 10-11 in San Francisco, and you can get your early-bird tickets here.

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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 GamesBeat team has returned from the Electronic Entertainment Expo with minimal casualties. Unfortunately, we’re going to have to change our motto from “leave no man behind” to “leave no more than three men behind in West Hollywood at 3 a.m. and don’t ever talk about this.”

We saw some messed up stuff at the Los Angeles trade show, man. We were horrified to find dudes in 20-year-old Sonic t-shirts, a cubic ton of crossbows, and “We Are Young” by that one band playing on repeat in every booth. It was a lot to deal with. Instead of running to safety, like any well-adjusted human would, we handed out awards to celebrate all of the weird.

Enjoy GamesBeat’s E3 2012 non-award awards:

The Most Charming Booth Babe award: “Jane” from Ubisoft

Oh, Jane. You broke my heart. This hard-working lady laughed at my jokes. She ignored my body odor. Her eyes sparkled every morning when I was waiting for her in the ZombiU booth. Although, I’ve been told that I can’t read facial expressions, so that sparkling could have been her silently screaming for help. No way to know for sure.

I wasn’t the only one to fall under her spell. Jane apparently ensnared one fellow so desperately that he took to posting a Craigslist advertisement to find her. I’ll let this love-sick man explain our affections for Jane: “Maybe it’s your dark, flowing hair, your ready smile, your toned, tan little body, your playful laugh, your personable demeanor, or something that simply can’t be quantified…I don’t know!” Me neither, buddy. -Jeff Grubb

The Biggest Group of Sheep award: Everyone who gathered in a giant crowd to watch a Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 trailer

Activision adorned the front of its gigantic booth with a very, very wide screen. In the middle of this display was a counter, and when it reached zero, all traffic in that area of the show floor would stop and almost a hundred people would stand around to watch a trailer for Black Ops 2. A trailer! They’re at E3! They can play unreleased games, but instead they’re going to watch a trailer! Just go on YouTube when you get home or something! -Mike Minotti

Press conference most likely to get you fired: Ubisoft

If you’re not one of the super-special journalists invited to the major E3 press conferences, chances are you’re watching remotely. This year, each company seemed determined to out do one another with adult themes, and Ubisoft definitely wins. When the infamous Far Cry 3 trailer (you know, the one with the shirtless woman) popped up on-screen I was actually at my other job. Yeah, Ubisoft nearly got me fired. – Jasmine Rea

The Most Overused Motivation Award: Revenge

Game creators used the word “revenge” in the taglines and trailers for a lot of titles this year, including Dishonored (“Revenge solves everything”) and the four player co-op mode for Far Cry 3 (featuring four characters who are looking for…yup, revenge). And then we have Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. I’m not sure exactly what “revengeance” is, but I’m assuming it’s a lot like revenge (which is the cheapest and easiest form of character motivation a writer can possible employ). -Mike Minotti

Coolest Not-Cool Line: “My body was ready” by Reggie Fils-Aime (Nintendo briefing)

Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime took an opportunity during this year’s press event to take ownership of his meme-spawning line from E3 2007. During the Wii U maker’s press briefing, Fils-Aime reminded us all that he had uttered that sentence, seemingly in an attempt to reconcile himself with the .gif makers who have been laughing at him for five years. It was an endearing moment of self-deprecation…that the subsequent awkward Wii Fit U video immediately ruined. -Evan Killham

The Brown Nose trophy for the Biggest Flatterer: Epic Mickey: Power of Illusion’s Peter Ong

Peter Ong, director of Epic Mickey: Power of Illusions for the 3DS, was quick to praise my amazing platforming skills during my demo of his 2D side-scroller. Now, I am pretty awesome at video games, so I can’t blame him for being stunned at my incredible ability to bounce off of enemy heads. Still, I guess it is possible he was just buttering me up so I would be kind to his game. Naw, I’m probably just that awesome. -Mike Minotti

The Carpet That Most Felt Like It Was Making Love to Our Feet: Gree

Folks, E3 hurts. You spend three days standing when you’re not walking and walking when you’re not running. Mid-way through day two, your feet experience the kind of sensation that makes you consider amputation as a viable option. But when I happened to cross over the Gree booth on the show floor, it felt like walking on clouds made of whipped cream. I’ve walked barefoot on grassy hills that didn’t feel as wonderful as that amazingly plush, cushy, off-white masterpiece. Seriously. I’ve got hardwood floors in my house. I love having hardwood floors in my house. And I still want whoever put down that flooring to come into my home and carpet everything, including the walls and ceilings. -Rus McLaughlin

The Cutest Piece of E3 Swag: The Neverwinter Dragon Hat
T-shirts. Baseball caps. iPhone cases. PR reps love to hand out promotional swag during E3, but Neverwinter publisher Perfect World Entertainment cranked the “d’awwwww” up to 11 this year with its knit, tasseled dragon hat. I’ve received a lot of compliments on it at work, including, “What the hell is that thing on your head?” and “I need to see you in my office.”  -Stefanie Fogel

The Greatest Threat to the Uncanny Valley award: Beyond: Two Souls (PS3)

It’s hard to believe, but real-time facial animations are starting to make games like Mass Effect and L.A. Noire look outdated. The creepy uncanny valley is starting to go away, soon to be replaced by another creepy phenomenon: that game characters are starting to look an awful lot like real people. -Dan “Shoe” Hsu

Most (Literally) Show-Stopping Moment: Wonderbook presentation (PlayStation 3)

I’ve heard from people who were there that Wonderbook will provide hours of entertainment and learning for people far younger than I can remember being. Unfortunately, I didn’t get that impression after Sony’s eight-and-a-half-minute-long demonstration of the augmented-reality platform brought the entire show to a screeching halt. Eight and a half minutes is a long time, especially at a trade show at which Microsoft presented a product that makes watching a movie just one thing you’re doing. -Evan Killham

Stealth? We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Stealth award: Assassin’s Creed III

In the Assassin’s Creed III trailer, the newest assassin character Connor, is such an acrobatic combat master that he charges a whole British troop formation in pursuit of a target. Connor charges past the line of bayonets and muskets, hurtling past red coats until he finds the leader to dispatch. In a real playable scene, Connor blows up a gunpowder barrel and then takes out a few soldiers in a frontal assault on the way to a fine assassination as he leaps from a fort structure onto the back of his target. Who needs stealth when you can take out a whole army with one assassin? -Dean Takahashi

Best — or Grossest? — Quote: “Girl wood” by Aisha Tyler

During Ubisoft’s press conference, emcee/actress/comedian Aisha Tyler gave us this gem after seeing some exciting demos: “Let’s play a game entitled ‘How many times Aisha gets girl-wood during this presentation.’ We’re up to two.” There’s plenty more where that came from. -Dan “Shoe” Hsu

Year of the Bow Award for the Most Bows: Ubisoft.

In a year where every game seemed to bring a bow/crossbow to the party, Ubi really pulled out all the stops to take this one home. Assassin’s Creed 3. Far Cry 3. Splinter Cell: Blacklist. ZombiU. For all we know, Just Dance 4 has a move called “The Archer.” Well played, Ubisoft. Well played. -Rus McLaughlin

Longest Applause: The debut of Watch Dogs (multiplatform)

In the 16 years I’ve been attending E3, I’ve never seen a new, non-sequel game get this level of reception after it debuted at a press conference. Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs genuinely wowed the audience with its absolutely stunning modern world with a slight cyberpunk flair, brutal and stylish combat, and hack-everything gameplay. I can’t wait to see more. -Dan “Shoe” Hsu

The You Couldn’t Have Made One of These a Kirby Game or Something? award: Nintendo

Between New Super Mario Bros. U, New Super Mario Bros. 2, Paper Mario: Sticker Star, and Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon, Nintendo isn’t suffering from a dearth of Mario-universe titles. Now, we’re all huge Mario fans, but isn’t this a bit of overkill? Maybe the guys back in Kyoto could tap into the vast library of characters and mix it up a bit with Kirby or the Ice Climbers or something. -Jeff Grubb

The New “Space Marine”: Climbing and stringed weapons

In the recent past, a lot of games were hopping on the space-marine, zombies, or first-person-shooter bandwagons. This year, it’s all about new climbing and scaling moves (Splinter Cell: Blacklist, God of War: Ascension) and bows or crossbows (Tomb Raider, Blacklist). And that’s just a tiny sampling! -Dan “Shoe” Hsu

Best Emotional Rollercoaster: Watch Dogs reveal (multiplatform)

I’m beginning to think that the horrifyingly awkward Ubisoft briefing was all an elaborate plan to keep us confused and off-guard to maximize the impact of the Watch Dogs announcement at the end. There we were, all ready to leave (or turn off the livestream) and wash our hands of this whole ordeal, but Ubisoft had one more thing to show. “Fine,” we thought. “Let’s get this over with.”

And that is when Watch Dogs melted our goddamned faces off.

It didn’t happen immediately; that wouldn’t be enough of a mindjack. What we got first was a reaaaaaallly loooooooooong video about digital footprints and other lines that the Wachowski brothers cut out of The Matrix for being too pretentious. That’s when the awesome gameplay footage started, and we were like, “HOLYSHITTHISISAMAZING,” and we stayed that way until the hero drove off, and the camera pulled back to reveal a second character who had what appeared to be an online handle floating over his head. I don’t remember what happened after that because I was trying to figure out how that gameplay we’d just seen would work in online multiplayer, and what that would mean for everything, that I blacked out for about 10 minutes before waking up in a puddle of Mountain Dew. I hope. -Evan Killham

We’ll Just Go Ahead and Assume It’s the Richest Company: Gree

With a massive E3 booth (complete with a bar right in the middle), a ritzy after-show party with popular mash-up artist Girl Talk as the main attraction, and, of course, a huge hiring spree over the past few months in Silicon Valley, mobile publisher Gree seems to have plenty of moolah to toss around. We’re willing to bet that conversations in its check-writing department typically end with, “Go ahead and add a couple of zeros to the end of that figure.” -Dan “Shoe” Hsu

The Mr. Caffeine Memorial Cup for Special Achievements in Terrible Public Speaking: Toby (Ubisoft)

This cup is given in memory of Mr. Caffeine who spoke so ineloquently at the Ubisoft press briefing in 2011.

Ubisoft had a wonderful E3 press briefing this year, but that was in spite of a man named Toby Turner (or Tobuscus on Youtube). Comedian Aisha Tyler handled the hosting duties for the French publisher’s E3 event, while Toby stood backstage with a camera and made bad joke after bad joke. His banter with Tyler, which was apparently supposed to be playful, seemed to genuinely annoy the host. No one has seen Toby since, and witnesses claim Tyler sprinted away covered in blood. Don’t worry, Aisha, we’re on your side in this. -Jeff Grubb

Get more E3 coverage from our hub page.

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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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