Update: Adam Orth has left Microsoft.

Microsoft apparently has a new public-relations strategy: insult fans until they agree.

That’s how Microsoft Studios creative director Adam Orth came across on Twitter yesterday when he commented on the rumor that the next Xbox will require a constant Internet connection to play games. The company has never even confirmed the existence of a new console, but that didn’t stop Orth from weighing in.

“Sorry, I don’t get the drama around having an ‘always on’ console,” Orth wrote on Twitter. “Every device now is ‘always on.’ That’s the world we live in.”

That’s a controversial opinion among gamers, especially after games like SimCity and Diablo III suffered major issues due to their always-on requirements. Sony has already confirmed that the PlayStation 4 will not require an Internet connection to access disc-based games.

Orth went on to argue the subject with BioWare developer Manveer Heir:

Naturally, this offended some people who live in towns like Janesville and Blacksburg. Orth later apologized.

“[That was] just the normal daily back and forth I have with Manveer,” Orth wrote on Twitter later. “Apologies for offending non-cities. I was trolling him personally.”

As odd as Orth’s abrasive demeanor on Twitter is, his attempts to justify a console with constant digital-rights management is even stranger. In his conversation with Heir, Orth claimed that “electricity goes out, too,” meaning an unreliable Internet connection shouldn’t stop someone from purchasing the next Xbox. He expanded on that thought in a series of analogies:

Of course, as many gamers pointed out on Twitter and message boards, those analogies fall apart under a little scrutiny.

Vacuum-cleaner and mobile-phone vendors would both opt to make products that do not require electricity or a reliable cell network if they could. The technology is not yet available for them to avoid those prerequisites. Tesla didn’t have time to invent the self-powering vacuum.

On the other hand, gaming consoles have worked without an Internet connection from the very beginning. In fact, people played games on systems like the Nintendo Entertainment System before the public Internet even existed.

This is not some technical hurdle that Microsoft can’t overcome, as Orth suggests.

We’ve reached out to Microsoft, but the company has not returned our request for a comment.

Via NeoGAF

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Switching careers and making games isn’t easy. But Shinji Kim pulled it off in nine months.

The 26-year-old New Yorker quit her job as a management consultant at Deloitte Consulting and decided to make a game. In nine months, she created social puzzle game Shufflepix and launched it on the iOS app store. She demonstrated it at the Casual Connect Europe indie showcase in Hamburg, Germany, last week and gave a talk about do-it-yourself development.

Kim, a graduate of the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, was a fan of jigsaw puzzles growing up. After she quit her job, she contemplated making her own.

“I felt it would be cool to build a puzzle game that is personal to you,” she said.

It took about six months to create Shufflepix and a few more to polish it and figure out how to launch it. Kim said she went through hundreds of iterations on the design and user interface. The game is free to download.

Shufflepix takes pictures from your Facebook profile and turns them into scrambled images. You swap the tiles around to put the image back together. When the border on the image disappears, then the piece is in the right spot. It’s a simple game, but it isn’t easy to master, particularly as a clock ticks away while you play.

You can share your puzzles with friends and see who can solve them the quickest. The game pulls you back by giving you three new picture-puzzles to solve each day. Kim, who worked as an international growth intern at Facebook, hopes that the social nature of Shufflepix will help it spread. The game is built on HTML5, the new lingua franca of the web.

A variety of puzzle games are already in the market. Amy Jo Kim, a seasoned designer, created one called Shufflebrain on Facebook, where a user sees an image and then has to try to figure out where small snippets of that image fit while a clock runs down. But that title didn’t get traction. Shinji Kim (no relation) hopes that Shufflepix, which is very different, will get a big audience.

“I haven’t seen other puzzle games that take your pictures and make puzzles out of them on mobile,” Shinji Kim said.

The free-to-play game will have in-app purchases in the future, and Kim is thinking about publishing it on Android.

Full disclosure: The Casual Connect Europe organizers paid my way to Hamburg, where I moderated a panel. Our coverage remains objective.

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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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Minecraft has changed everything. It’s clear that a big chunk of people who play games also want to build things, and that’s what Tom Hall is trying to provide them with his new Kickstarter project.

A veteran of id Software and one of the creators of games such as Commander Keen, Wolfenstein, and Doom, Hall is looking to raise at least $400,000 on the crowdfunding website for Worlds of Wander. The game creator is compatible with Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android.

“Worlds of Wander is a platform game-creation tool,” Hall told GamesBeat. “You make games in it. It comes with the first game made in the tool, my own Secret Spaceship Club. I am showing folks you can obviously make a game in it — because I just did.  And it’s much easier to fiddle with something like this if you start with something done already.”

Hall is calling Secret Spaceship Club a spiritual successor to Commander Keen, id’s successful side-scrolling platform games from the MS-DOS days.

“The story [of Secret Spaceship Club] is in my quirky universe, with funny characters, charming story, environments, monsters, and a bit of a smart-aleck attitude I got from watching Chuck Jones cartoons as a kid,” said Hall. “And the characters will have alter-egos once they join the Secret Spaceship Club.”

The developer used his Worlds of Wander tool to build this game, and that’s really what the Kickstarter is all about — an outlet for creativity for people who want to build platformers.

The utility uses a simple and advanced editor to help ease amateur designers into building a game.

“The Simple Mode in the editor lets you use things as they are provided,” said Hall. ” The Advanced Editor lets you change scripts on things, how they work, and add simple cutscenes, have more complex NPCs, and so on. But most of the editing will happen in Simple Mode.”

And it does look simple. Everything is drag and drop, but Worlds of Wander doesn’t kill would-be designers with hours of mindless design. The editor uses smart tools that complete structures and landscapes automatically based on a few drags of the mouse.

“Once you’ve made a lot of levels, going forward into Advanced Mode can be done by most anyone,” said Hall.  ”If you don’t want to radically change the behavior of something, it will just be accessing more features. Only if you want to reprogram an actor or platform of something, will you get into the scripting language level.”

While Worlds of Wander will only ship with one complete game, Secret Spaceship Club, Hall expects users to fill the platform with their own games. We know that gamers crave to create, but it’s just a question of providing them the right tools.

No better way to find out if Worlds of Wander is the right tool than to present it as a Kickstarter.

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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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Nintendo TVii is finally coming to your living room and the Wii U tomorrow, the company announced, but it won’t arrive with all the features originally promised.

Nintendo announced TVii earlier this year as a service that would integrate all television content and Wii U apps, such as Hulu Plus, Amazon, and Netflix. Wii U owners could then use TVii as a hub for selecting viewing content whether it’s coming through live television or a streaming service. At least, that was the plan. The application didn’t make its expected launch alongside the Wii U.

When it arrives tomorrow, TVii will allow users to find content such as sporting events or movies and tap an icon on their GamePad to view the content. It works with their cable provider or satellite service and also offers social features like content sharing on Twitter, Facebook, and Nintendo’s Miiverse.

However, as website Polygon pointed out, some of the features that Nintendo announced with the service won’t be available tomorrow. TVii won’t be able to access DVR content, and it won’t have TiVo programming support. Those should be available next year. Netflix won’t be available directly through TVii, either. For now, users will have to launch the Wii U’s built-in Netflix app to view its content.

Nintendo’s Wii U is one of a host of devices angling to be your new all-in-one media center. Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s PlayStation 3 deliver many similar services, as do many other devices like Roku.

Well, at least Nintendo kept that December promise.

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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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Industry vets Martin Goldberg and Curt Vendel have penned a comprehensive history of the retro gaming juggernaut, Atari, in time for the 40th anniversary of the interactive, table-tennis classic, Pong. The book is called “Atari Inc. — Business is Fun.”

Previous accounts associate Atari with its laid-back culture – the lax dress codes, hot tub meetings, and copious amounts of drugs and alcohol. And you’re probably familiar with the company’s seminal contributions to the early histories of video gaming … Pong, Asteroids, Breakout, Tempest, Centipede, etc.

You’re probably also aware of Atari’s principle responsibility for the great video game crash of 1983 via an adorable alien named E.T. 3.5 million unsold units, a $1.3 billion loss in market valuation, and a New Mexico landfill later, and one of the great video game cautionary tales was born.

But the book goes beyond all the facts and figures to focus on the people who made this early ‘70s zeitgeist such a success. Basically – what was it like to work for a company “whose sole intent was to create FUN for a living”?

According to Vendel, “This book will dispel … and maybe also ‘confirm’ numerous rumors by giving readers that front row, first person experience.”

This 800-page tome – over seven years in the writing – contains 300 pages (yes, 300 pages) of previously unseen photos and is available from Amazon right now.

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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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Don’t ever go back and try to play Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare on the Xbox 360. It’s a nightmare hellscape controlled by modders and hackers who have every perk and can find you through walls three sets of walls.

Developer Treyarch is taking a tough stance against such cheating in Call of Duty: Black Ops II, a futuristic first-person shooter that came out today for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC. Treyarch will permanently ban any Black Ops II player who modifies the game from playing online, according to the game’s Security and Enforcement Policy.

Additionally, Treyarch will erase the transgressing player’s stats and will block their username from appearing on the leaderboards.

This will have a bit more of an effect on Xbox 360 than the PlayStation 3, since Xbox Live users will have to keep buying subscriptions to the Microsoft’s Gold service if they want to make a new account and keep playing, while PlayStation Network users can make an unlimited number of accounts.

Treyarch will also report console modders to Microsoft and Sony and will report PC users to the Steam enforcement team.

Just say not to cheating, kids. Friends don’t let friends frag modded.

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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 thing about augmented reality is that it’s inaccurate. What good is an app that can overlay the nearest Dunkin’ Donuts on my phone screen if it actually just leads me into the city sewer system? New technology company Precision Augmented Reality Works has an AR system that removes those issues.

“We come at augmented reality form a completely different direction,” said PAR Works chief executive John Serafini. “We use point-cloud models to build models of any arbitrary object, building, or product that you want to augment. The software builds a very precise model of that object in the cloud server and overlays specific information on top of that model and returns it to your device. We can do that within a second or so and we within a few millimeters of accuracy.”

http://player.vimeo.com/video/53110636

Compare that to the traditional method of augmented reality which relies on a device’s sensors. Most apps use a phone’s GPS, compass, and altimeter to determine its location and where it is looking and then overlays the information on top of the picture. Only the accuracy is only within tens and maybe even hundreds of meters.

Something like Google Goggles, while not strictly augmented reality software, uses an alternative method where users take a picture that is then matched against a finite database of objects. If the software recognizes the image, then it will return information about it.

PAR Works has already deployed their tech onto construction sites where foreman can take a picture of the work in progress, send it to the cloud, and get back a comparison between reality and the original blueprint schematics in less than a second.

The Consumer Electronic Association named PAR Works an International CES Innovations 2013 Design and Engineering Awards Honoree for its work in the augmented reality field.

Now, PAR Works is sitting back waiting to see what developers can do with its technology. The Virginia Tech scientists that created it, led by co-founder and chief scientist Dr. Jules White, completed the platform and are offering it to interested programmers and designers at PARworks.com.

“We just announced a developer competition for $25,000,” said Serafini. “Our platform is complete and available for developers to build upon. For the next couple of months we’re gonna take a hard look and watch what people are building on top of our base technology. We want to see the traction we’re able to build. That’ll help dictate to us where the business is.”

PAR Works was born out of the Allied Minds investment company which works to apply longer-term principles to the tech sector.

“We only invest in raw technologies coming out of universities and federal research institutions,” said Serafini. “Whoever makes the investment in the initial technology goes on board as the CEO and general manager of the company.”

That’s how Serafini got the gig at PAR Works. He believed in the tech enough to invest in it and so he now has to work to take responsibility for it. Another benefit is Allied Minds will continue to fund the company as long as it continues pursuing its business model. That means that the technology people don’t have to go looking for capital investments.

Typically, venture capitalists deal in strict timelines. For technology, investors are looking to put in some money, push along the company, and harvest that investment within two to six years.

“Some of the technologies we see coming out as raw intellectual properties from universities and national labs are so disruptive and transformative they require five to seven to ten years of development time to maximize value. Because they are answering hard problems from five to ten years out.”

Allied Minds has the ability to reach back to principal investors, the most notable of which is Investco, to write big checks when they’re required. This combined with their investor-to-CEO management model gives them the slack to see these investments through to fruition.

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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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A few weeks back, we reported on a trend of many Hollywood studios forgoing traditional movie-licensed games in favor of mobile apps based on established iPhone and Android properties. Titles like Temple Run: Brave and Angry Birds Rio do an excellent job of promoting the movies they’re attached to as well as the games they’re based on.

Now, Sony Pictures is getting in on the action with the help of Hotel Dash developer PlayFirst. The two companies announced a deal in which the mobile-app dev would produce a game based on the upcoming film Hotel Transylvania.

Hotel Transylvania plus Hotel Dash equals Hotel Transylvania Dash. It’s a match made in Hollywood.

“This deal with Sony, along with others that we have delivered on, continues to demonstrate the unique appeal of PlayFirst mobile games when combined with top content and major media brands,” said PlayFirst president and chief executive Marco DeMiroz.

Hotel Transylvania is a 3D-animated comedy from Samurai Jack creator Genndy Tartakovsky that stars Adam Sandler as Dracula, the owner of the titular inn. PlayFirst will take that narrative and apply it to the basic framework it established in its series of Dash games (Diner Dash, Garden Dash, and Soap Opera Dash), which have attracted a fan base of over 600 million players.

“For the Hotel Transylvania mobile game, we wanted a licensee who could uniquely deliver the high-quality game experience and fun on par with our movie,” said Mark Caplan, a Sony Pictures Entertainment vice president. “PlayFirst delivers a proven, immersive game mechanic and a worldwide recognized brand with both the ability to develop a great game and market it globally to an existing and growing fan base.”

It’s particularly telling that Caplan mentioned the gameplay mechanics as an important aspect in the decision to go with PlayFirst. That is not the usual type of language we heard from executives during the years of mediocre movie-licensed games on consoles.

PlayFirst will release Hotel Transylvania Dash for the Apple App Store on September 20. The Hotel Transylvania film will hit theaters a little more than week later on September 28.

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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 engineers that maintain online services like Steam and Origin must have itchy trigger fingers. A few days after a rogue promotion on Origin seemed to confirm the existence of Battlefield 4, the Steam app on mobile platforms suddenly began listing nongame-related software categories.

For a few hours on July 16, performing a genre search on the Steam app produced sections like “accounting,” “photo editing,” and “software training.” While this is far from a confirmation, it suggests that Valve may soon broaden its digital-retail offerings.

“I understand why Steam would do this, since they have built the infrastructure to deliver software, and I understand why vendors would list products there, since Steam has a big audience,” Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter told GamesBeat.

“Steam does have a pretty avid base of  about 40-million registered users,” IDC research manager Lewis Ward said in speaking to GamesBeat. “Steam’s customers tend to be relatively affluent younger males that are obviously amenable to spending money on digital downloads.”

Although this may seem like the next step in Valve’s march toward becoming the Walmart of the Internet, both Ward and Pachter were quick to throw cold water on Steam’s prospects in the nongame-software market.

“I very much doubt it’s going to be the next Amazon or app store,” Ward said. “I think of it more as an incremental opportunity, at least in the next several years.”

Pachter compared Steam selling utilities and productivity software to Amazon trying to sell games. Amazon has had some success in that market but nothing on the level of what Valve has done.

“Developers that sell apps that appeal to younger males will probably go for [Steam] as long as the process is streamlined and the revenue-sharing terms are competitive with other digital stores,” Ward said. “But I don’t think [Steam selling nongame software] will keep other retailers up at night.”

But it’s possible that Valve is more worried about what keeps its executives up at night.

“I think [Valve] has to branch out,” analyst Roger Kay of Endpoint Technologies Associates told GamesBeat. “[Gaikai and OnLive are] threatening game download sites, and perhaps Steam is trying to diversify away from games in order to parry that attack.”

Gaikai and OnLive are a pair of Netflix-like services that stream video games instead of movies. Gaikai was recently purchased by Sony, and OnLive continues to expand its reach on PC and mobile devices.

It’s hard to imagine that anyone at Valve is really sweating about the competition. It’s more likely that the business people inside of Valve decided that it is silly to limit the excellent infrastructure they’ve built to just games. Of course, that’s assuming that this incident was more than an accidental leak of an experimental program.

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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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French publisher Ubisoft is getting a pretty stern talking-to from its customers. Angry users have taken to Ubi’s official forums to complain that they cannot access their legally purchased games. This is apparently due to outages in the Uplay online service, which verifies the legitimacy of the company’s PC games.

Forum posters are reporting that the Uplay service is giving a “Wrong username or password” error when trying to log into games like Assassin’s Creed: Revelations. This failure is only affecting PC games.

In February, a server transition rendered a handful of Ubisoft titles unplayable for a matter of hours. In that case, however, the publisher provided the public with ample warning.

We’ve contacted Ubisoft to determine the exact nature of this outage.

In the meantime, messages in the aforementioned forum thread suggest that perseverance is the key to overcoming Uplay’s current fickleness. Users are confirming that repeated attempts to log in eventually convince the servers that you have the correct username and password.

Detractors of always-on digital-rights management (an antipiracy solution that requires a constant Internet connection to confirm a game’s authenticity) will likely point to this as more evidence that publishers like Ubisoft are hurting their legitimate customers in the attempt to lock out software pirates. Although, many have made that argument prior to this incident, and this didn’t stop the initial implementation of these security measures.

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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 focused web comic Penny Arcade has hit the $250,000 goal for its Kickstarter campaign in just four days. With 31 days left (as of July 14) for people to contribute, the PA team has introduced a roadmap of stretch goals that include a new tabletop adventure game at $650,000 and a free PA comic reader for iOS and Android at $750,000.

The most interesting tier, however, is $900,000. Here’s how the official Kickstarter page puts it:

“PA Blanks/Creative Common License: We will release, with each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday strip, a blank version of the comic (art without word balloons) for your editing and remixing enjoyment. In addition, we will open the ENTIRE PA archive to a Creative Common License under CC BY-NC-SA.”

This particular license (BY-NC-SA) allows for derivative works based on the original Penny Arcade content (that’s the SA) as long as the new creators give proper attribution to the original authors (BY) and use the work for non-commercial endeavors (NC).

More simply put: Penny Arcade fans can ripoff and remix all of Penny Arcade’s work as long as they tell everyone it came from the PA site and don’t make money from it.

The result of enabling a Creative Commons license on popular work is often a more creatively engaged audience.

An example of this idea in effect is the Nine Inch Nails album The Slip. Front man Trent Reznor released the entire tracklist for free and encouraged his fans to remix and redistribute the music under a creative commons agreement.

Cards Against Humanity, a popular card game that began on Kickstarter, also implements a creative commons license. The development team sells the deck and an expansion but offers a free-to-print PDF version that allows consumers to manipulate the game for themselves.

Penny Arcade’s ultimate goal is to make its entire site ad free. That is the million-dollar tier. That amount of funding would fuel Penny Arcade for a year; then it would have to hold another drive to raise money or return to an ad-supported model.

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

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In the early morning hours of July 14, a pre-order promo on Origin (the Electronic Arts digital-distribution service) for the new first-person shooter from developer Danger Close apparently revealed the existence of Battlefield 4. A banner ad read: “Medal of Honor Warfighter – Pre-order today for exclusive Battlefield 4 beta access.” That bonus no longer appears anywhere on the Origin service.

Battlefield 4 has not yet been confirmed by developer DICE or publisher EA. During a speech at the University of California in November 2011, Electronic Arts president Frank Gibeau said, “There is going to be a Battlefield 4.” After that keynote, EA backpedaled, claiming that Gibeau was speaking “broadly,” and that the company had nothing to confirm.

Well, someone at Origin seems to think that Battlefield 4 is coming.

This type of pre-order promotion is in keeping with the marketing EA employed for Battlefield 3. The publisher granted early access to the Battlefield 3 beta to players who bought the Medal of Honor: Tier 1 edition.

According to the copy on this Origin offer, only customers that pre-order Medal of Honor Warfighter will get into the BF4 beta.

EA knows where it’s first-person bread is buttered.

[Update: EA announced the Battlefield 4 deal formally on July 17]

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

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At the crowded geek conclave known as Comic-Con in San Diego, Calif., Microsoft and 343 Industries introduced the full trailer for their upcoming promotional film based on the adventures of Master Chief. Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn is a five-episode live-action series starring a young ensemble cast. The first episode will launch on the Machinima Prime YouTube channel and on Halo Waypoint beginning October 5.

Forward Unto Dawn tells the story of a group of United Nations Space Command cadets who are training to become soldiers in the war against the Covenant (it’s set before the Chief took care of all that business). The boot-camp facility comes under attack, which gives the cadre of beautiful people a chance to act tough and shoot things.

Sorority Row filmmaker Stewart Hendler directed Forward Unto Dawn based on the script penned by Smallville alums Todd and Aaron Helbing. It stars a  plethora of young up-and-coming actors who have had roles in The Twilight Saga (Daniel Cudmore as the Master Chief), Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (Mike Dopud), and Dance Academy (Tom Green).

The Halo franchise isn’t new to elaborate prerelease marketing campaigns. Los Angeles-based Stan Winston Studio and New Deal Studios built the gigantic Halo 3 Believe diorama to promote that game’s release, which resulted in an amazing TV spot.

Microsoft will release Halo 4 for the Xbox 360 worldwide on November 6.

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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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My Wii was stolen. Don’t worry about me; this happened in 2007. The most frustrating moment occurred the day after the crime when I was on the phone with Nintendo and customer service informed me that it had no way to return my virtual items even if I were to buy a whole new Wii. I had over $50 worth of downloaded games and another $50 in unspent points all just sitting on the system. It was infuriating that not only did I have to suffer at the hands of a thief, but I also had to suffer the incompetence of a company that didn’t understand an online world.

That’s why I was happy to hear this news from GoNintendo.com:

“A unified account system will be implemented later this year with the launch of the Wii U. Eventually, this same account system will be made compatible with the Nintendo 3DS system,” said David Marshall, customer support agent with Nintendo of Canada. “If the system is stolen, we can transfer the account to a new system once we are provided with a valid police report.”

Both the unified network and the ability to recover an account from a stolen system is a positive step forward, but is a police report really necessary?

I wondered what a person with a stolen 3DS would have to do today to recover any downloaded games or unspent points. So I contacted Nintendo’s customer-service line (that 800-number on the back of your Wii and 3DS), and I asked.

A young man named Rob answered the phone after I got through the automated menu.

I posed this question to him as a hypothetical: “How would I get the downloaded games from my 3DS to a new 3DS if the old system was stolen?”

“Typically, it’s not possible,” Rob told me. “In the case of a stolen system, the only way we could do it is if you registered your 3DS. Like if you signed up for Club Nintendo. We’d have to be able to confirm the serial number.” Because, apparently, tying your credit-card info to the system is not enough for some reason.
It’s an improvement for Nintendo to just require a valid police report. When my Wii was stolen, I had a police report, but that didn’t help me. At least someone else in that situation can rest knowing his virtual goods will always belong to him. Still, a police report seems like an overzealous demand and especially if you compare that to Sony’s and Microsoft’s respective solutions.

Sony allows each of its customers to activate a PlayStation Network ID on up to two systems (including both the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita) at any one time. If a user already has two devices attached to a PSN account, then the company provides a way to decommission one on its website.

Microsoft does something similar with the Xbox 360. When no other profile is signed in, the Xbox Live system provides a “download profile” option.

Both Sony and Microsoft simply required a username and password to make a person’s games and downloadable content available on a new system. No police report required.

Why wouldn’t Nintendo emulate these perfectly reasonable methods? It’s possible that the Nintendo Network still won’t utilize account profiles and that purchases won’t be tied to a single user-and-password combo. It’s also possible that the Japanese company is just being unnecessarily overcautious.

We’ve contacted Nintendo, and we will update if they have any comment on this story.

If you were wondering, the police never found my Wii. I bought another one and moved to a better part of town.

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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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Left 4 Dead and Portal publisher Valve officially unveiled the new service Monday, calling it an “incredible level of added exposure for new games” on the popular Steam platform. The service shows that Valve is paying attention to critical issues such as judging demand for games and helping developers get noticed.

Debuting August 30, Steam Greenlight gives indie devs the chance to convince the community that their titles should be published on Steam. They provide videos, screenshots, and a written description of their games, and in return, Steam users rate these projects and give feedback.

Speaking to GamesBeat via email, Dejobaan Games’ Ichiro Lambe says it’s potentially a great complement to Valve’s existing process. “The Steam review team’s biggest problem right now seems to be volume,” Lambe says. “They receive an overwhelming number of submissions during a week. Playing through each of them would be a full-time job for dozens. Ideally, Greenlight will help highlight the hidden gems that might otherwise fall through the cracks.”

Lambe says he was one of a handful of independent developers Valve flew to its home in Bellevue, Washington, to provide input on Greenlight. “They took us through the process, as planned, and let us try to knock it down. That’s roughly a dozen indie developers — people who love picking things apart just to see how they work – asking questions about everything from the overarching concept — ‘Does this help solve the problem for indies? — to the nitty-gritty, ‘What are all the ways people could game the system?’”

Abuse of Steam Greenlight’s upvoting system seems to be a common concern. Zeboyd Games lead designer Robert Boyd says, “I think it’s a great idea in theory. However, I hope that Steam has some safeguards in place against developers boosting their Steam Greenlight ratings via dubious means.”

A Valve spokesman tells GamesBeat, “We worry a lot about maintaining a good user experience for those creating value. A small handful of people will inevitably try to abuse a system like Steam Greenlight, and we’ll have some systems to deal with that. But we’re also going to be careful not to erect hurdles for legitimate users. Along with initial solutions we’ll have in place, the system will evolve over time as we get a better picture of how the community is using Steam Greenlight and what kind of potential abuses surface.”

Alex Jordan, the creator of the platformer puzzle game Cute Things Dying Violently, says Valve’s new community-focused feature is a wonderful idea despite its potential drawbacks. ”It seems to mimic aspects of Kickstarter, bringing great games to Valve’s attention while still putting the final decision on Valve’s shoulders. Ideally, that’d leave it to the community to just approve the best games and cut down on the Steam submissions team’s workload, allowing them to better review pre-vetted games and hopefully spend a bit more time with them.”

He adds, “The bottom line is that this is a great opportunity for indie developers to not only publicize their projects and get a shot at Steam, but also to participate in a new and vibrant community.”

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