For the French game publisher Ubisoft, new platform launches represent an opportunity to test new ideas in the market and release new intellectual properties. With the Wii U, Ubisoft lined up eight games to come out at or near the launch of Nintendo’s new game machine. Nintendo sold 3 million Wii Us in its first season, but its expectations are falling short for the quarter ending March 31. So did Ubisoft make a mistake in backing the Wii U so heavily?

Xavier Poix runs Ubisoft France, overseeing the publisher’s three main studios, with more than 700 developers. He is in charge of the Just Dance, Raving Rabbids, Rayman, and Ghost Recon franchises. He gave a talk yesterday on leveraging new technology for games at the DICE Summit, an elite game industry event in Las Vegas. We caught up with him for an interview. Here’s an edited transcript of our talk.

GamesBeat: What is the gist of your talk?

Xavier Poix: It’s focused on leveraging new technology in order to change the way we play. It’s about how we can mix the creativity that we have with what we want to do in terms of new design and the innovation that’s brought by new technology. In France, we have two main studios — Montpelier and Annecy. Especially at Montpelier in Paris, we’ve focused on designing games for new consoles.

I’m sure you can imagine that when you’re designing for launch technology — when you need to be there at the launch of the console — at this point you have no benchmarks. There are no games out there using that technology. You can talk about it, but you can’t playtest it. It’s a time where it’s about your intuition and only your intuition. It’s about knowing that technology presents a lot of opportunities but also constraints. The tech is built by you and empowered by you. It’s quite complex.

The purpose of the talk is to explain that it’s at those moments, when you have so many new constraints and opportunities, that you can face new changes in gameplay. I have a lot of examples, from Ghost Recon, which we brought to the Xbox 360 at launch, to Rabbids and Red Steel on the Wii. There’s Just Dance, which came after that. And now on the Wii U, with ZombiU and Rayman Legends.

GamesBeat: How many titles have you shipped on the Wii U? You had eight in the works, right?

Poix: We did four in France. There was also Assassin’s Creed, which was done in Quebec, and a sports game we did in Barcelona.

GamesBeat: You guys report earnings on Thursday.

Poix: Yes. [Chuckles]

GamesBeat: So you can’t really say how well they did, but do you have some kind of postmortem on the process of getting those games out at launch?

Poix: Yeah. Our focus in this case is that we needed to make sure that we found the new innovation that the console is bringing. I think we’ve done a good job as far as what we’ve been able to provide in terms of asymmetrical gameplay. Our goal was to find new ways of playing with that, and we’ve done it.

Of course, it’s the launch window, so you need to wait for the final results. Nintendo is talking about that a lot. The figures aren’t as high as what they were expecting. But for us it’s been good. What we’ve discovered building games on this technology at launch — on the multiscreen approach, on having another kind of controller in the living room. It will bring something very new in terms of gaming. It wasn’t as easy and obvious for them, compared to the Wii, to communicate those ideas. It will take some time. But we’re very proud of what we’ve done. Since we have so many games that we’ll be releasing, the people who will buy the console will eventually play good games on it. We think that especially with ZombiU, for instance, and Rayman Legends, they’ll have something to play for a long time.

GamesBeat: What else is still coming on the Wii U?

Poix: I can’t disclose any other projects. Today our focus is on Rayman Legends. I don’t know if you had the chance to play it, but it brings something that hasn’t been seen on the Wii U so far, with the multiple gameplay types. It’s very interesting. The demo showed some, but we have so many more to show in the next month.

GamesBeat: Was there any feedback from gamers that was interesting to you, as far as playing your games on the Wii U?

Poix: One good example came from ZombiU. ZombiU was very challenging for us because it’s very innovative, in terms of both what Nintendo’s console brings and what we wanted to convey with the experience and gameplay. We decided to go for a very hardcore approach. Death is permanent. You need to start the game over again when you lose. We got a really good response from fans about that.

What was also widely talked about was a social feature that we added to the game. When your character dies, you can see them as an enemy afterwards. You can also see guys from another console that are dead coming over into your world. That’s the kind of stuff we really appreciate. Another nice feature that was quite new is the fact that you can write messages to other players at certain points. “There are zombies coming!” When you’re in your own experience and your own world, you see where other survivors have written stuff on the walls. It’s really interesting. The response from fans was ideal.

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The French company said that revenues were 279.2 million euros ($357.8 million), up from 248.5 million ($318.5 million) a year ago. The loss was 32.3 million euros ($41.4 million), compared with a loss of 37.1 million euros ($47.5 million) a year ago.

Ubisoft chief executive Yves Guillemot attributed the increase in sales to the shipment of Ghost Recon: Future Soldier, which came out in May, as well as initial sales of Just Dance 4. Online revenues were up 59 percent to 28 million euros. Ubisoft also said that it had also spent heavily on large marketing campaigns that are currently happening around the launch of Assassin’s Creed III and Far Cry 3.

Guillemot predicted a record second half of the year based on Assassin’s Creed III, Far Cry 3, and upcoming Wii U games. The target for the year is now expected to be sales of 1.2 billion euros to 1.26 billion, compared with a previous range of 1.16 billion euros to 1.2 billion euros.

In a conference call, Guillemot said that the big new original game, Watch Dogs, will becoming out next year. He also said that Assassin’s Creed III has sold more than 3.5 million copies in its first week, up 100 percent over last year’s Assassin’s Creed: Revelations game.

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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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Ubisoft recently launched Ghost Recon Online into its open beta test, a brave step into the world of high-quality free-to-play games. Now the company is readying a new expansion, dubbed Artic Pack. It shows that the French video game publisher isn’t just doing a fire-and-forget strategy with the online shooter gmae.

As a squad-based combat game, Ghost Recon Online is part of a larger franchise blitz by the French company. Ubisoft launched its Ghost Recon: Future Soldier high-end game for the consoles and PC in May, and it also launched a low-end 2D game on Facebook, Ghost Recon Commander, which has also seen its formal launch. These are part of Ubisoft’s “companion game” strategy, where Ubisoft delivers its top franchises to gamers wherever and whenever they like it.

We caught up with Theo Sanders, the creative director of Ghost Recon Online for Ubisoft Singapore. Here’s a transcript of our interview.

GamesBeat: Can you update us on how Ghost Recon Online’s progressed or changed?

Theo Sanders: Sure. Here’s a little background on what we’re showing today. We’ve already had the game in open beta for one month now. We’re reacting to some of the first community feedback we’ve had. On September 12, we’re launching the first expansion pack for the game. We’re calling it the Arctic Pack.

GamesBeat: How do you get that? Is that something you buy?

Sanders: No, it’s a free expansion. The map will automatically download, and then all the items we’re shipping with the map are available either with the free in-game earned currency, or with the premium one. Same as the existing items. It’s really our first opportunity to react to what we’ve learned from our open beta. It’s a nuclear decommissioning plant set in the northern Arctic wastes of Russia. So it’s a snowy map. Obviously, we’re releasing a whole set of new guns and new armor that fit that theme. Right now we’re in a wide open beta in 40 countries, North America and Europe.

GamesBeat: When you buy something in the game, what’s the transaction amount? Do you start at a certain dollar value or something like that?

Sanders: There’s 307 separate items in the game — 306 of those 307 you can buy them with the earned currency.

GamesBeat: Do you buy them one at a time, or in packs or anything like that?

Sanders: Let me show you here. For example, with my gun…the RP is the earned currency, and this here is the premium one. So you can save yourself time. That’s true for every item in the game. This here is a low-level gun. It represents about…50 cents, roughly, of real currency.

GamesBeat: What have you noticed about the players in the beta? How have people behaved?

Sanders: Overall, it’s been pretty smooth. We were in closed beta for over a yeah, so we already had a lot of expectations about what the initial reactions would be. One difference we’ve noticed is that closed betas tend to attract a more hardcore kind of player. They need a little less introduction to the game mechanics. They generally figure things out very quickly. With an open beta, you’re welcoming a much broader audience, and we’ve realized the need to make some of the core game systems a little bit easier to get into for new players. That’s one of our big focuses right now, with all the balance tuning. In this expansion, besides the map and the new weapons, we’re introducing something like 400 different balance changes, tweaks, and bug fixes based on the feedback we’ve had so far from the open beta.

GamesBeat: How long did it take you to put this pack together?

Sanders: We’ve been working on it for about two months now. Some of the things, like the map itself, have obviously been in production for a little longer. But we’ve also been able to incorporate a lot of the early open beta feedback we had in the first two weeks.

GamesBeat: Do you have a good idea yet of your pace for expansions? Are you going to do eight of these a year or something? Any sense of timing?

Sanders: Right now we’re shooting for a monthly update of some sort. It won’t always be a map. It might be some other new content, like weapons, or general balance-type features. But if you start going over a month, players start getting disengaged. It’s a constant process of not just feeding new stuff, but also iterating on the things you already have.

GamesBeat: Is there a way that this is a companion title with any others?

Sanders: We’re in the process of working on integration with Ghost Recon: Commander. It’s nice, because this obviously occupies the time of day after work, after school. You’re sitting at a big screen like this. It occupies all your attention. You don’t really have the option to spend five minutes on the bus or 10 minutes when you’re supposed to be working interacting with this game.

GamesBeat: You might earn rewards here for Ghost Recon: Commander, or vice versa?

Sanders: Yeah, that’s exactly the type of thing we’re working on.

GamesBeat: What about with Future Soldier? Is there any relationship there as well?

Sanders: We offer the Future Soldier players on PC some special rewards for playing Ghost Recon Online, yeah.

GamesBeat: Have you noticed a lot of crossover?

Sanders: I think so. I think to an extent there are just people who are interested in exploring everything the brand has to offer. There is a gap between this and people who prefer playing with a game pad on a console, though. Or there are people who prefer the user experience of one or the other. They offer the whole kitchen-sink extravagant Hollywood experience. This is more about a long-term process, with players slowly evolving in the game. It’s a different way to experience it.

GamesBeat: Is there any worry that this game might get too good over time?

Sanders: [Laughs] I hope so!

GamesBeat: Future Soldier might not seem as interesting….

Sanders: Well, I think in many ways the two complement each other. They offer different takes on the franchise. Over 10 years, gamers have expressed very clearly that they like the general gameplay of Ghost Recon. A bit slower, a bit more tactical. A lot of depth to the customization and the weapon progression. That’s something both Future Soldier and Ghost Recon Online have in common. How they differ is in the type of experience you can have playing them. Ghost Recon Online is much more about you and your friends engaging with the developer and the community. You slowly see the game evolve in ways that you participate in. Future Soldier is a very pure form of entertainment. It’s sitting down and getting entertained for 10 hours, 20 hours, by a bunch of game developers.

GamesBeat: And you’re more likely to play Future Soldier with your real-world friends, as opposed to playing with strangers in something like this?

Sanders: One of the things that’s great about an online title in general is that it’s so accessible for your friends to come in. If you have a good experience, there’s no need for your friend to go to the store. There’s no barrier to entry at all. You can literally be one text message and maybe half an hour away from them being in the game with you. In some sense I think online games are actually more social than console games.

GamesBeat: You haven’t really marketed it too much. It’s been kind of quiet. Will there be some promotion that will start now?

Sanders: We’ve been doing a little bit of marketing. We had an open beta launch announcement at the beginning of the month. But overall, we’re hoping to really organically grow the game. We’re in this for the long haul. I think the approach to take there is not the big bang marketing blitz on day one. You slowly build and iterate with the community, so when new players come in as you go along, they find an even better game than what we have today.

GamesBeat: Is it final, at some point? Do you see that someday? Outside of beta, I mean.

Sanders: There will be a final at some stage. It’s a little bit hard to articulate what “final” means in this space. Obviously this is already a monetized game in the open beta phase. But I think for me, it means a game that has a very broad appeal. We started with the core feature set and a core set of content. Different players have different needs. If you’re shipping a retail game, you need to have everything to compete. Co-op, multiplayer, PvP…we’re looking at some of those bigger, broader-based features to really celebrate a big final release.

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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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Ubisoft is unveiling a bunch of titles tied to its digital game publishing strategy today. The French game publisher is announcing something for every platform and business model. The games include enhancements to Ghost Recon Online, new Xbox Live downloadable titles, free-to-play browser games, mobile titles, and more Facebook fare. The games are based on both its “companion game” strategy of stretching a single game property across multiple platforms as well as its focus on publishing games on the appropriate digital platforms.

Chris Early, the vice president of digital publishing at Ubisoft, recently presided over the company’s third Ubisoft digital day event. We caught up with him there for a one-on-one interview. Here is a transcript of our interview with Early.

GamesBeat: Do you see this as your second generation of digital games?

Chris Early: Well, it’s our third digital day here. Somebody earlier asked me what I was most proud of here, and I think what I’m actually most proud of is that for the last two years, we did what we said we were going to do the year before. Now, this year for example, Ghost Recon: Commander is out [on Facebook]. The whole companion gaming strategy is coming together. In Commander, when you play a mission, at the end of the mission you can choose a reward for Ghost Recon: Commander, which helps you play. You normally have to pay for those things. Or you can choose a reward for Ghost Recon: Future Soldier and use it there. Sixty-five percent of the people are choosing Future Soldier rewards.

GamesBeat: So they can cash them in and….

Early: Yeah, they can use them in Future Soldier. That’s a lot higher than we expected, the tie rate. And if you then look at the Uplay players, because everything connects through Uplay, 83 percent of the people who are Uplay players in the Facebook game pick Future Soldier as well. That’s far more than we expected. We did a great job of brand extension in that case. Letting people play more.

GamesBeat: This is not the kind of game where your goal is to get those 10 million users, right?

Early: Well, it would be great if we had 10 million. [Laughs] But no. I’m not gonna kick that in the mouth, but….

GamesBeat: There are different goals, though.

Early: Right. They monetize higher than any of our other Facebook games. That’s what we expect from a mid-core game like that. Soon the ties to Ghost Recon Online will be out also, and then that, I think, will be an interesting back and forth. We’ll see. You’ll be able to earn things in Commander and then use them that night in Ghost Recon Online. And that night, you’ll get things you can use the next day at lunchtime in Commander. In both of those cases, these are things that you’d be buying, normally. We extend the interface. I think we’re at the beginning of our, if you want to call it… The second-generation games. A lot of the lessons that we’ve learned over the last year and a half, those games, they’re now appearing in the new games. We learned some things. We saw some things. It took a cycle to design them in. Now they’re starting to appear. That’s rewarding.

GamesBeat: Is this a larger number of games than you guys have shown before?

Early: Yeah, this is the largest number of games, and across the largest number of platforms, too. We talk about three main tenets. We support multiple platforms. We even announced that we’ll have digital content for download at the launch of Wii U, on day one. We support demanding gaming and the brand engagement. Not only through games like Ghost Recon Commander, but also through games like Rayman. You’ve got another platform where you can play Rayman and experience the brand.

GamesBeat: Oh, so your companion games?

Early: Or full-on games. And then the third thing we wanted to talk about was the way players can get to the content. How are we creating that business model and going with a variety of business models? You look out on the floor there: We’ve got premium games; we’ve got free-to-play games; we’ve got paymium games. However you want to call it, all the different “iums.” We have it out there. That third leg of the strategy is “Be present.” Learn about, and expand into each of the business models. That opens up our brands to more players being able to play.

GamesBeat: Ghost Recon Online: How has that been received so far?

Early: It’s been received well. It’s out. We’re just beginning a marketing push now. We launched it quietly, over at Gamescom. That was where we had the announcement. We have a lot of people playing it. They seem to be having fun. I don’t know if you played it or not, but it’s got a surprising amount of content before you have to even think about paying for anything. Which was, I think, one of the gutsy moves that the design team made. They decided that every single thing that you could buy, weapons-wise and gameplay-wise…. If you could buy it for real money, you could also buy it for in-game currency. Every single thing. You can earn the entire game free. My son and I, when we look at it…. I play, I get to the right level where I can buy the new sniper rifle, and I pull out the cash to do it. I don’t have the time. But he has plenty of time. He’s just going to play for another few hours and earn the gun. So from my standpoint, that’s ideal. I don’t want to spend 10 more hours to get that gun. I already got to the right level where I can buy it. Let me just buy it.

GamesBeat: What kind of platform is Call of Juarez on?

Early: That’s XBLA and PSN.

GamesBeat: Some of these are pretty hefty games….

Early: What you’re seeing is…you saw that with I Am Alive. It’s an XBLA, PSN, small-format game with production quality that you’d equate with a retail title. Same thing with Call of Juarez. Same thing with Spartacus. When we showed Spartacus at Comic-Con, we didn’t talk about the business model then. People thought it was a console game, a $60 dollar console game. What we were able to say today is… You probably saw the Microsoft talk about their free-to-play pilot program. There’s three games in it, and we’re the only third-party publisher. We’re going to be, at the launch of Spartacus, the only publisher that has a free-to-play game on both consoles. On PlayStation and on Xbox. Again, pushing that business model into new territory. Figuring out how the console crowd is going to behave when you give them a console-quality game and a free-to-play business model.

GamesBeat: Your mobile titles are still in the offing here? You’re still awaiting those?

Early: Well, we have a number of them out there. Rayman is a mobile title. Nutty Fluffies, which is the next one from RedLynx, is a kind of roller coaster game. That’s a mobile title. Trials Evolution has done well. There’s a new Trials coming. I would say that we’re not there with all of our major brands yet. There’s a partnership we have with Gree on Assassin’s Creed: Utopia, to develop a game in the Assassin’s Creed world. We’re getting there. We’re getting there a lot quicker than I would have expected, for having just come out of the exclusive relationship with GameLoft.

GamesBeat: When I was talking to Kabam, they had an interesting observation about how iOS games were actually monetizing better for them. They’re making more money on those games than the Facebook games. I wonder if you guys expect that to happen at some point as well.

Early: That would be awesome.

GamesBeat: Because the iOS crowd has a longer history of paying for things. They’ve got their credit cards on file. They’re hardcore gamers. You have a larger percentage of gamers among them. And then Facebook has a shorter history of monetizing, and it has a wider array of folks, many of whom have never played games seriously. Lower numbers on the iOS could actually mean more money for you in the pot.

Early: That’s right. It happens you make a payment mechanism frictionless. It’s the same thing I saw back at Microsoft with Xbox Live Arcade. When it’s easy to press a button and convert from trial to pay, many more people convert. That’s the way it’s set up with Apple already. It’s a lot easier to convert. Both the initial purchase and the ongoing in-app purchases.

GamesBeat: But it doesn’t mean you’re going to join a stampede off of Facebook, though?

Early: No, I don’t. We don’t really go off a lot of platforms, right? Like, we’re still making DS games. The question is, how do we make our efforts, how do we make those games profitable, no matter what platform we’re making them on? That’s the business management question, from the overall perspective. Will our games continue to be on Facebook? Yeah. Will they evolve so that we’re making the money out of the niche that we can on Facebook? Yeah, absolutely. Ghost Recon, like I said, is monetizing better than any of our other games. That’s great.

GamesBeat: Are some of your titles in the future going to be more mobile-first?

Early: I think we’ll see mobile…I don’t know about first, but either simultaneous or not delayed by a significant period. Right now, we’re talking about a few months in between, which is kind of painful.

GamesBeat: Any final thoughts?

Early: Let’s see, anything else to talk about… We announced the partnership with [the IGN Pro League]. They’re going to be using ShootMania in their tournaments. It’s the first time they’ll be using a first-person shooter. We’ve got the new pack in Ghost Recon Online, the Arctic maps. If you look closely, you’ll also see some Razer logos in there.

GamesBeat: An in-game ads?

Early: Well, maybe think of it as a sponsorship. It’s not a massive kind of in-game thing. Although I think there is a TV screen somewhere that’s playing a commercial. That’s more like… I think it’s some programmer’s idea. Spartacus is there. That’s another new free-to-play game. It’s 80 percent fighting and then 20 percent a city-builder. It’s a good mix. It’s getting a great response. We can’t wait for that one to come out.

GamesBeat: Any other lessons that you’ve picked up by the third digital day here?

Early: For the first time, we had products that we wanted to show but we couldn’t. From a space standpoint, we had to make some decisions. That’s good. It means we have more digital content than our floor space allows.

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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 French video game publisher Ubisoft hasn’t engendered a lot of goodwill with PC gamers over the years because of its aggressive digital rights management (DRM) policies. But the company made some big changes a year ago, and it wants gamers to understand that it is playing nicer these days.

“We realized we haven’t always been clear and consistent about communicating what our DRM policy was in the past, and that has led to a bunch of misunderstandings,” said Chris Early, vice president of digital publishing, in an interview with GamesBeat.

Ubisoft’s past policies have created a firestorm of abuse from angry users, both pirates and legitimate customers.

But some observers haven’t noticed yet that Ubisoft has made changes at all, and consumers have a long memory. But Early said the company instituted a big change in June, 2011, with respect to how it implements DRM in PC games. Since then, Ubisoft’s packaged good PC products require a one-time online activation, and then they can be played offline. If you buy the games from Ubisoft online, the games are authenticated at that time. If you play multiplayer sessions or if you play free-to-play games, you have to log in online. Authentication takes place during each session.

“The key date is June 2011,” Early said. “Everything since then is based on our current practice. Every game coming forward is based on that policy, and old games that came before that date are being switched over to that policy. It was originally much more of the stick approach. Now it is much more of the carrot.”

The new policy does a better job of staying out of the way of legitimate and loyal players who just want to enjoy the game.

In 2006, Ubisoft tried to implement the StarForce copy protection technology, but it ran into compatibility issues, and customer complaints led to its disuse. Then,  in January 2010, Ubisoft unveiled an online services platform which required users to log into an online service and remain connected while playing Ubisoft PC games. That meant they couldn’t play the games offline and they couldn’t resell their titles on the used game market. Technical problems accompanied the policy. If you were disconnected while playing, your saved game progress was lost in titles like Assassin’s Creed 2 for the PC. Ubisoft stood out in the industry for being aggressive. Angry users responded with denial-of-service attacks and other protests against the company.

“That, combined with challenges we had with uPlay hardware at the time, made for a pretty poor user experience for a couple of games,” Early said. “Listening to consumers, we then removed the DRM requirements for the games, and by June 2011 had this policy in place going forward.”

Accordingly, the negative feedback is lower these days, except when Ubisoft has some hiccups with the technology. (A Google researcher reported a flaw in Ubisoft’s DRM recently, but the company fixed it and said it had no incidents related to that flaw).

He added, “There were enough online components to those games that we mistakenly believe the earlier policy would not be an imposition for players. That was not the case. Players wanted to be able to play in an online and offline mode. They didn’t want to be online all the time to play.”

The earlier policy also limited the number of times a player could install the game Anno 2070 to just three. But if you installed a new graphics card, it would use up one of the installations and require you to reinstall that game. Ubisoft had to correct that again.

“Listening to our customers, we don’t have that as a limit anymore,” Early said.

The point of DRM in the first place is to establish with the consumer that they are getting value when they buy a Ubisoft game, and they should pay for that value, Early said. It helps stop piracy, which can be very high in the PC market. By emphasizing the “carrot” rather than the “stick,” Ubisoft is making use of alternatives that could help reduce piracy and generate more revenue at the same time. For instance, free-to-play games like Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Online open that franchise up to more territories where it isn’t feasible to sell a $60 Ghost Recon Future Soldier game.

“You can participate in a wider variety of services and content or choose a different business model,” Early said. “That allows access to games at a variety of different price points. We can reach a wider variety of people around the world. You can get to our games in more places without pirating them.”

Part of the reason why Ubisoft is the target of piracy is that its games are good.

“If we made terrible games, we wouldn’t have to worry about it at all,” Early said. “The more popular the game is, the more people want to play it wherever they are. As an industry, we need to talk about piracy. At the time when we took a very aggressive stance, we realized it impacted our customers more than it impacted our pirates.”

Ubisoft has also created its uPlay PC game client. That brings together PC game functions together, including a game library. It has social features like chat and leaderboards. It has rewards across platforms and an offline action mode. It has integrated saves, a shopping function, free-to-play games, and a general overall Ubisoft destination. Ubisoft has some rental systems that it supports, but in general it believes users should pay for their games. With online passes, players can reactivate a portion of the multiplayer play with a small fee from the secondary user. That view makes sense because multiplayer play requires Ubisoft to invest money in ongoing support for multiplayer operations, Early said.

“We don’t have excessive complaints about that,” Early said. “In that case, we were not the trailblazer. [EA was]“

There isn’t a consistent view on used games across the industry. But as free-to-play games expand, the used game market isn’t necessarily as relevant anymore, Early said. He didn’t have a comment on what the new game consoles being launched in the future will have as far as DRM policies go. If the platform owners change their policies, you can bet the topic will come up 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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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, the Xbox 360 is the number-one-selling console for the 18th month in a row, the U.S. Senate considers legalizing online poker,  and a Taiwanese gamer dies after playing Diablo III for 40 hours straight.

You’ll also find a review for Dyad as well as several video interviews with Tapjoy, Ouya designer Yves Béhar, and Zynga co-founder Mark Pincus.

GamesBeat:

The DeanBeat: What GamesBeat 2012 tells us about the road ahead in gaming

Nextpeer gives developers new ways to monetize their games via multiplayer tournaments

The War Z takes zombie-survival into the massively multiplayer arena

Tapjoy keeps looking for creative ways to monetize mobile app users (video interview)

Insomniac Games’ Pokémon-inspired Facebook title, Outernauts, is now in open beta

Startup hopes to fund a Shadowrun MMO through Kickstarter

Ouya designer Yves Béhar talks disruption and design (video interview)

Ubisoft posts strong quarterly results thanks to sales of Ghost Recon: Future Soldier

China’s Tencent marches to the West in search of kick-ass games (interviews)

If RuneScape were a country, it’d have the fifth largest population in the world (infographic)

Earnings preview: Game makers to see mixed second quarter

DICE: ‘We’re in one of the best positions’ for Battlefield 4 timing

New Call of Duty: Black Ops II video says games are better than movies while touting Hollywood connection

Estonia accelerator flooded with 122 game startup applications

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater HD is a decent update to the original but brings along some baggage (review)

Alt-rock legend Beck contributes exclusive tracks to Sound Shapes

U.S. Senate considering legalizing online poker — and cracking down on other Internet gambling

Valve targets Ubuntu Linux operating system for Steam port

I’ve got a bad feeling about this — Star Wars: The Old Republic’s producer leaves BioWare

Pachter on the case for Call of Duty: Black Ops II on the Wii U

Casual game site operator Oberon rebrands itself as Iplay

TransGaming to launch World Poker Tour game for smart TVs

Microsoft veteran starts PeopleFun mobile game startup (exclusive)

Tom Hanks gets into the game-making business

Sony Pictures joins in on the movie-game disruption trend

Free-to-play Command & Conquer: Tiberium Alliances surpasses 1 million players

Intermittent Uplay outage renders several Ubisoft games unplayable

You can’t un-see these 11 video game box art clichés

Leisure Suit Larry publisher trades up to a new developer (exclusive)

PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale’s roster grows by two: Adding Cole MacGrath, Jak and Daxter

Microsoft releasing a $400 Halo 4-themed Xbox 360

Marvel teams up with High Moon Studios for an upcoming game based on Deadpool

Battlefield 4 seemingly revealed by Origin

Puzzler: Match the celebrity voices to the video game characters

Dyad is a psychedelic treat for the senses with gameplay to match (review)

VentureBeat:

6 video game icons acting hilariously out of character

Microsoft: Xbox 360 top-selling console for 18th consecutive month

AMD reports weak second quarter earnings on PC market softness

Another ex-Ensemble mobile game startup, BonusXP, comes out of stealth (exclusive)

BitMonster Games startup unveils a beautiful 3D iPhone game

Zynga’s Mark Pincus discusses how mobile could disrupt the game industry (video interview)

King.com: From tournament gaming to No. 2 on Facebook (video interview)

Taiwanese gamer dies after 40-hour Diablo III session

Applifier launches video ad network to monetize Facebook games

Ouya’s video game console Kickstarter tops $5M raised so far (exclusive interview)

American McGee’s Spicy Horse launches real-time, cross-platform title Crazy Fairies (exclusive)

Zynga designers help Pulitzer Prize winners create social charity game

Mandala adds French touch to social casino games

Teen gamer developers swarm Roblox’s hackathon conference

Penny Arcade says fans can ripoff and remix past comics if it meets Kickstarter goal

Russian hacker finds a way to get in-app purchases for free (updated)

Angry Birds follow-up Amazing Alex tops app charts after just one day

Samsung brings motion-controlled Angry Birds to Smart TVs, announces massive 75″ set

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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 video game industry has always had strong ties to the world of movies, something highlighted by the growing trend of using live-action trailers to help market games.

While such trailers are not new to the industry, the budgets attached to them are growing ever greater, to the point where some wouldn’t look out of place on a Hollywood showreel.

Michael Boniface, the European managing director of APB Reloaded developer Reloaded Productions, spoke to GamesBeat about the trend toward live-action. “The problem with gameplay footage is that it can be more difficult to convey concepts that live-action can do more easily,” said Boniface, “plus there’s still more interest and pickup from live-action. Like it or not.”

Veteran actor James Cosmo (Highlander, Game of Thrones) stars in the trailer for the game Darksiders II, and he sees the two industries growing ever closer. “The video gaming business is now bigger than the film industry. Big movies and big games are merging and becoming something really fascinating,” Mason said. He feels that, thanks to the anarchic nature of YouTube and the Internet, young filmmakers are able to get their work seen more easily and have the chance to blur the worlds of movies and games in a creative way.

Whatever your take on them, these big-budget efforts look set to stay, so it’s just as well that some publishers are doing them right, as you can see from these 10 cinematic gems.

Metro: Last Light

The trailer for upcoming shooter Metro: Last Light (PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360) focuses on the emotional and human impact of the world as we know it coming to an end. Filmed in freezing temperatures in Ukraine, with Mark Patton (Prometheus) as the director of photography, it looks every bit as epic as seasoned commercials director Jim Weedon intended.

The brief given to creative agency Ichi was to fire the collective imagination of first-person shooter fans and reintroduce Metro as a must-play title. The exact words from the THQ marketing team were, “Give us something BIG!”

With 4 million YouTube views during its first four days of release, this film ably demonstrates the impact that live-action trailers can have on the market.

Sleeping Dogs

Square Enix stepped in to buy the half-finished True Crime: Hong Kong when Activision decided to scrap it. Reborn as open-world crime game Sleeping Dogs (PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360), the marketing team enlisted Goldtooth Creative to help create some buzz with this explosive trailer.

Director Paul Furmiger talks in glowing terms about the creative possibilities offered by such live-action game trailers: “When we started creating trailers for gaming companies we were surprised by how much creative license they gave us. It was a bit like the Wild West. Even for this project, the game’s marketing team should really be commended on taking a chance and allowing us to create a live-action trailer for a video game.”

Darksiders II

James Cosmo stars as the manic priest in THQ’s trailer for the action-adventure game Darksiders II (PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Wii U), along with acting as a narrator in the game. He described the production process as “almost as if we were shooting an great big epic movie, but we only shot for two days. The production quality was on a par with anything you’d see on a big feature movie.”

“Trailers are really exciting things,” Cosmo said, “because you only have a certain amount of time to put over an awful lot of information and an awful lot of feeling, so it’s got to have terrific impact.”

Hawken

Gameplay footage of Hawken, an upcoming free-to-play mech shooter from Adhesive Games,  has already impressed with its atmospheric visuals and explosive energy. This live-action trailer — the first in a series of shorts directed by Gears of War art director Jerry O’Flaherty — takes things up another notch, adding a human element to the drama.

O’Flaherty is looking to put names and faces to the mech pilots in Hawken: “Through these characters I wanted to begin to speak to the fiction behind the game, to introduce people to a mythology that is just as interesting and intriguing as [my] first view of Hawken.”

APB Reloaded

When you relaunch a game that was previously a complete disaster, you’d better do it with a bang. GamersFirst certainly accomplished that with this live-action trailer for the free-to-play massively multiplayer online game APB Reloaded. Using YouTube stars Tobuscus, Katers17, SeaNanners, and SMPfilms as featured extras in the production is also an inventive way of helping spread word about the game.

Boniface told GamesBeat: “The live action with SFX was designed to show the game’s incredible customization in a way which was accessible to a more mainstream viewer, without relying on a bewildering array of different character models.”

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Ghost Recon: Future Soldier is really two games in one package. It would be nice if we could recognize that and give it two scores. With just one number down at the end, half the game winds up seeming better than it really is, and the other half of the game winds up sounding worse.

Sadly, in this unforgiving age of Metacritic and the rest of the score-aggregation mafia, one number it’s going to have to be. Just keep in mind, if all you’re about to do is read this introduction and then scroll all the way down to see the score, that the multiplayer game deserves a better grade and the single-player missions don’t.

Future Soldier’s solo campaign isn’t bad, but it needs some smoother scripting, a stronger plot, and a narrower focus on either action or stealth. You get the impression that it’s not quite sure how to find the right balance between the two. The multiplayer mode, on the other hand, gets that balance exactly right and a lot of other things besides. Part stealth, part gadgeteering, part pure gunfight, in a crowded field of military shooters, it still stands out.

WHAT YOU’LL LIKE

Diving from cover to cover
The original Ghost Recon was a very slow, very deliberate first-person shooter. It wasn’t quite a strategy simulation, but it was close. Over the years, the series has gradually picked up the pace. Future Soldier isn’t quite a run-and-gun action game, but it’s getting there.

In some ways, evolution has taken the game in the right direction. Moving around the environment, for instance, uses a very cool context-sensitive system for picking new cover points. Shift the camera around and the character smoothly locks on to whatever bit of cover lands in the center of their view. Hold down the movement button, and he automatically hops over any obstacles and charges to that new spot. That one button is all you need.

None of this takes away from the challenge of surveying the environment, learning enemy patterns, and using camouflage to keep out of sight. It just means that none of the challenge comes from fighting with a complex control scheme.

Watching a plan come together
In Future Soldier, the player directly controls only one member of the four-man Ghost squad. When they don’t have a specific target to focus on, the other three generally do their own thing as the artificial intelligence dictates. Guiding the entire team, then, is a matter of scouting the battlefield, picking out targets, and showing the A.I. where to work.

In an active gunfight, picking targets adds up to saying, “When you get a chance, shoot that guy.” During the sneaky parts of the game something more interesting happens — tagging a target assigns a Ghost to lock on him and wait. Once you tag as as many targets as you care to kill, hold down the fire button and the Ghosts all shoot at once.

Ubisoft calls this a “sync shot,” and aside from looking cool when four bad guys all fall at once, it’s a great way of incorporating teamwork into the stealthy side of the game. The player character still takes the lead in scouting out the battlefield, figuring out who to shoot and when to shoot them, but the team members still do enough heavy lifting to make them feel like more than just color commentary.

Miracles of modern technology
Like any good military shooter, Future Soldier has a giant selection of guns to choose from, and the Gunsmith customization mode offers umpteen million different potential combinations of barrels, suppressors, sensors, laser sights, and so on. The most interesting bits of equipment in the game, though, are not the ones that shoot people.

Instead, they’re the gadgets that hoover up intelligence and information about the battlefield. Enemies are often hard to see with the naked eye — camouflage actually works in Ghost Recon — and so there’s a whole separate aspect of gameplay that goes on before any shooting starts. Tossing out sensors, flying a little camera drone, and peering around with X-ray scopes to reveal where targets are hiding…all of this adds up to a neat kind of meta-shootout. Playing with what amounts to an R/C helicopter may not sound like as much fun as giant bloody shootouts, but you’d be surprised how effective it can be at building tension toward that moment of taking out your targets.

Using all those toys online
Class-based multiplayer does a lot for a shooter. Giving different styles of gameplay to different players encourages teamwork, it creates more replay value, and it adds more tactical depth. Another advantage, though, one that critics sometimes overlook, is that it opens up a game to more kinds of gamers.

Consider a game like Counter-Strike. Counter-Strike appeals largely to one kind of player. If you aren’t a shooter veteran with superhuman aim and footwork, well, enjoy getting shot in the head.

Future Soldier’s approach welcomes the Counter-Strike types. They can play the Scout class — the stealthy, sneaky, sniping commando class — and use their shooter skills to the fullest. Other classes cater to different strengths, though — especially the Engineer. Engineers carry intel-gathering equipment like sensors and drones for spotting targets and backing up other players’ attacks. They can make a huge difference doing something besides laying in those perfect headshots.

Watching players pick up on how the game works in the days since the beta has been interesting. Early on, almost everyone still tried to play it like a traditional shooter. Scouts were everywhere on most servers. Now, though, a couple of weeks after the retail version shipped, Engineers are representing in greater numbers. Folks have figured out how to use the gear like the drones to get the drop on the other team. (Unfortunately for everyone who got on the Engineer bandwagon early, players are also learning how to shoot down drones and backstab their unsuspecting pilots.)

Even though Future Soldier only has three official classes, gaining experience and unlocking new equipment reveal some loosely defined sub-classes within each one. For example, the Engineer can unlock a field computer that hacks objectives and enemy data feeds faster than normal. Some of those Counter-Strike experts are using that to play an in-your-face variation on the class, carrying stun weapons to take down enemies in close combat and hack them for intelligence. Finding those bits of depth in the game looks like it’s going to be a lot of fun over the coming weeks and months.

WHAT YOU WON’T LIKE

Trying to figure out the script
Generally, Future Soldier’s campaign works better when it’s trying to be a methodical Splinter Cell than when it’s trying to be an all-out-action Gears of War. The stretches of gameplay that emphasize stealth unfold with a consistent logic. Using cover and camouflage and gadgetry, scouting out enemy positions, taking targets down with the sync shot…all of that makes sense.

When a firefight kicks off, the game doesn’t quite descend into total chaos, but a lot of that logic disappears. Which is a completely realistic treatment of the subject — a battlefield isn’t a football field — but after you’ve died about half a dozen times at a stretch for no obvious reason, the fun starts to bleed right out of the game.

A lot of the more action-focused scenes in Future Soldier are scripted to funnel the player through certain areas and towards certain targets. That’s a tricky way to design a game like this. It’s no good when players can figure out that they’re riding on rails, and it’s just as problematic when they fall off those rails. Future Soldier hits both of those snags sometimes. It’s easy to get stuck and keep dying in a particular spot because you can’t tell where the script wants you to go — all that smoke and exploding stuff tends to obscure whatever might be pointing the way — and it’s frustrating when you finally do realize that your shooting or sneaking skill isn’t the problem; you’re just missing a scripting flag.

Another coup in Russia
When it comes to dialogue, Future Soldier is pretty well-written. The four Ghosts have a funny wisecracking camaraderie and enough distinct personality that we can tell them apart. Every so often an interesting character moment plays out in between missions — Ghost Lead has a simple but completely effective scene where he phones up his son on his way to another war. Some of the intermissions deliver a great action-movie impact, too. Watching a 9-11-style terrorist attack unfold in London is impressively terrifying, as tons of broken glass rain down from exploding skyscrapers.

As far as plotting is concerned, though, the campaign badly needs a creativity injection. Long-time fans of the series may recall that the original Ghost Recon was about a coup in Russia.  Future Soldier revolves around…yep, another coup in Russia. This isn’t just an overused cliche in gaming, it’s an overused cliche in movies, books, TV, everything. (It’s almost as overused as faceless terrorists with nuclear weapons, another cliche that Future Soldier briefly leans on.) Someone needs to declare a fiction-wide moratorium on coups in Russia as the centerpiece of technothriller yarns. The possibilities in the concept have been just about all squeezed out.

CONCLUSION

It’s unfortunate, then, that we can’t give the multiplayer mode its own score, because developer Red Storm did a bang-up job on that one. Future Soldier’s campaign is still a good time, and it hits a good window as far as length — 12 missions, each lasting an hour or so — but better scripting and storytelling would have carried it to much greater heights.

So if you’re planning to do most of your Ghost Recon online, do some mental math and adjust the number upwards. And don’t underestimate the R/C helicopter — no matter what kills you, you’re still just as dead.

Score: 80/100

Ghost Recon Future Soldier is available now for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC. A PS3 copy of the game was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review.

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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 beta test version of Ubisoft’s Ghost Recon: Future Soldier dropped late last week. Offering a taste of what’s coming up in the full edition’s multiplayer mode about a month from now, it has two basic maps and three different character classes (the Scout, the Rifleman, and the Engineer) who each provide gamers of different skill levels with complimentary play styles.

Are you good at games like these? Try the Scout. The Scout is for people who live and breathe shooters, know every corner of every level, and deal out headshots as easy as handshakes. Scouts carry sniper rifles or suppressed SMGs and come equipped with optical Predator camouflage, so they fade into the background while holding still. A good Scout knows every hiding place and sniping lane — the better to take out targets that’ll never know what hit them.

Are you not bad at games like these? Try the Rifleman. Riflemen pack assault rifles and light machineguns, which grant them the benefit of long range and huge ammo capacities. They also wear heavy armor, giving them a couple more chances to duck behind something before they die. Riflemen are good at teaming up with each other, finding cover, flanking the bad guys, and putting out some concentrated firepower.

Finally, are you not very good at these games? Do other players always sneak up on you? Is your aim not that great? Are you lost trying to figure out which side of the wall to hide behind? The Engineer may be for you.

Master’s in Engineering

Explaining “why” gets to the core of what makes Future Soldier a different kind of shooter. This is not Counter-Strike; although, I see some Counter-Strike in it. First-person shooter die-hards will be good at it and have their fun with it — the game naturally has a place for players who have superhuman awareness and perfect aim. It’s just that Future Soldiers also has a place for players who don’t.

Intelligence is a powerful weapon in Future Soldier, and intelligence is what the Engineer is about. Just as in the earlier Ghost Recon games, camouflage works here. It’s often hard to pick out opposing players, especially from a distance. If you can see an enemy, the odds are at least 50-50 that you are about to die.

Unless, that is, you have intelligence on them. The notion is that the Ghost team (and their Russian opposite, the Bodark unit) is geared up with a tactical data network and augmented-reality goggles. In other words, they have what amounts to a video-game heads-up display, and they share information about objectives and enemy positions with each other. If one member of the squad picks out the location of a bad guy, the rest of the team will see him as a big, bright, red-outlined target.

That’s what the Engineer does. The Engineer has “sensor grenades,” which detect the location of nearby enemies for a time, and a stationary camera that does the same in a limited space. He can also unlock a little UAV drone, a remote-control flying machine that zips around painting every target it can see. Engineers make lousy lone wolves, but they’re perfect if you’d like to back away and play the sidekick.

Rebounds and Assists

The UAVs provide a real sense of fun to setting them up as the Riflemen and Scouts knock them down. Hiding in some corner and buzzing a toy helicopter around the map may not sound all that great on paper; it is true. You need to see the game from that bird’s-eye view and watch your teammates flanking targets thanks to the intel you’re feeding them. Then the appeal starts to sink in.

It helps that the sidekick role is immensely profitable in the online progression system. Future Soldier’s multiplayer mode dishes out experience points for the usual accomplishments: kill a bad guy, take an objective, or revive a teammate. It also scores assists, though. Did your intel contribute to a teammate’s kill? Congratulations! Have some experience.

More experience means more cool stuff that unfolds along two pathways. First, a set tree of weapons and items unlock at certain levels. At level four, for instance, the Engineer can choose between the UAV or a field computer that manipulates objectives more quickly while the Rifleman can pick from two underbarrel attachments: a stun gun or a smoke launcher. This goes on up to level 40. By then, Scouts have backscatter scopes to see through walls and Engineers have UAVs that can actually shoot back.

Meanwhile, each level grants one point to spend in the Gunsmith customization mode. This is where a regular shotgun or rifle turns into a mutant beast with sights and lasers and sensors hanging off every which where. Some upgrades are unequivocally useful, like red dot sights or heartbeat sensors that provide intel at short range. Others can just reflect personal preference. Want to sacrifice accuracy for a faster rate of fire? Go ahead and tweak your rifle’s gas system.

Keep on Moving

The fanciest gun in the game is no substitute for teamwork. That’s especially true in the main multiplayer mode so far, an objective-based game called Conflict. In Conflict, your goals randomly spawn around the map, giving each team something different to do: defend a control point, destroy an object, activate a device, or take out a specific player. The randomness gives it an interesting ebb and flow since teams are constantly fighting over different parts of the map, and the focus on objectives means that it’s about working together to do something more involved than just racking up kills.

It also means that Future Soldier has room for gamers who aren’t so quick on the draw. Targeting drones and sensor doohickeys may not sound quite so macho as X-ray sniper rifles, but the other guys end up just as dead. Gamers who’ve lucked into the beta should give them a try, and everyone else can look forward to Future Soldier’s debut later this spring.

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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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Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Future Soldier is Ubisoft’s big release this year in the third-person shooter market. The video game is one of the major releases of the year and should help revive interest in Tom Clancy’s long-running combat franchise, which is in major need of modernization.

It’s appropriate, then, that Ghost Recon Future Soldier isn’t just about contemporary warfare; it takes you into the future with cool technological advances, such as stealth cloaking, that are meant to give soldiers an unfair edge on the battlefield.

The game is an important one for Ubisoft because it revives an important franchise for the French video game maker as it strives to compete with much larger rivals Activision Blizzard and Electronic Arts. If Ghost Recon Future Soldier sells well, it will help the company grow its war chest and double down on its top franchises. And it will help the company advance the state of innovation in the lucrative multibillion-dollar shooter market.

I had a chance to test a couple of levels with two different modes of gameplay recently with the game’s lead designer. The conclusion: the team-oriented cooperative play is phenomenal, but the graphics may be disappointing to gamers used to the visual quality of Call of Duty or Battlefield games. I played the Valiant Hammer and the Firefly Rain missions in the campaign game, and fought in Guerilla Mode on the Mansion map. All told, there are 12 missions, each of them pretty long. The eight main locations include the dusty villages of Africa, the suburbs of Moscow, and the icy territory of the Arctic.

Great team play

The lack of phenomenal graphics isn’t a killer drawback. I’m assured that the bugs I saw will get fixed by the launch. And the experience isn’t all about the visuals; Ubisoft Paris lead designer Roman Campos Oriola positioned the game as an intelligent shooter, where you combine team tactics, modern technology, and thoughtful strategy in order to beat various terrorist enemies. You can’t just go running and firing down the street, since a bullet or two will put you in your grave quite easily.

The other thing that is attractive about this game is that a single smart team leader, in our case Oriola, can teach three other players how to fight. You can play the entire single-player campaign game with four-person cooperative play. When we started our missions, Oriola led the way. He sent a small recon drone up into the air to identify enemy soldiers. A marker appeared above each high-priority target, as selected by the squad leader. Then we each identified one target and clicked on it with the right bumper to claim it. Then everyone else could see which unsuspecting soldiers had been claimed. Upon counting down, Oriola told us to fire and four enemies fell just like that — a synchronized kill. It’s not a fair fight, but the odds are tilted against you.

As long as everyone stays in stealth mode and uses a quiet, silenced weapon, you can execute those silent takedowns repeatedly. That helps you get through tough missions where there are armies of enemies that will attack you upon discovery. If you go into a crouch, your invisibility cloak, known as “optical camouflage,” goes into effect. This turns you virtually invisible until you start firing. After that, you’re on your own. It’s amazing how much you can accomplish when you stay in a tight group and communicate.

Graphics

The graphics aren’t nearly as impressive as Battlefield 3 or Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. You can’t run as fast as you can in those games, but then again, you’re not supposed to be able to move fast because the game is so realistic. I noticed this a lot while moving through the water. You could step into and through the water without seeing any wake. I’ll reserve full judgement on this when I see the real shipping game. But it’s a little disappointing that, after so many years of development and long delays in production, this was the best Ubisoft could do.

Gunsmith mode

Another cool part of the experience is customizing your gun. In Gunsmith mode, you can pick all of the features, from grips to nozzles, that will help your soldier kill more efficiently. I created a gun with a grenade launcher and a stable grip. My scope didn’t work so well, but I expect they’ll fix that bug by the time the game ships. You can use the Gunsmith in both single player and multiplayer, resulting in a unique experience. As you proceed through the campaign, you win credits that can be used to level up your gun. You get a choice of dozens of attachments and components. When you enter the mode, the weapon goes into a freeze frame and you can see all of the parts in an exploded view, where it seems like the parts float in the air.

Guerilla Mode

In Guerilla Mode, our team of four players had to defend a spot on the Mansion map. Enemy soldiers surrounded us and attacked in waves. At first, the waves were easy. But they got progressively harder. One of the things that adds to the realism is the battlefield chatter that comes from your comrades.The chatter isn’t completely idle. At the outset, one comrade will yell what direction the enemy is coming from. If one of your team members is hit, they will yell out for help. You can then revive them, as long as you don’t expose yourself.

In between waves, you have to pick up ammo and grenades from chests on the map. Then a clock ticks down until the next assault wave starts. As many as 50 waves will hit you. If one enemy is giving a teammate trouble, you can fire at the enemy and suppress them, or pin them down so they can’t fire. You can carry a couple of primary weapons and toss out grenades. I enjoyed earning claymore mines and then plopping them down on pathways. I got used to playing defense in my corner of the battlefield. But occasionally, I’d have to fight with one of my teammates for the best spot to snipe. The location you have to defend rotates sometimes just so you don’t get to used to defense on a section of the map.

If you are shot, your comrades can revive you. If you bleed out and die, your team loses the mission. As you level up, you can get access to air strikes. I got one during the game, but dropped it on nothing because I found it particularly hard to control.

One of the problems in the game is that if you’re noisy and give away your position, you compromise your entire team. For that reason, you’ll only want to play with friends via online co-op. The teamwork required is very involved and it won’t be a fun experience if you play with a stranger who flakes out on you or otherwise screws up your team dynamics.

One really unfair advantage is that you can see the enemy through walls, thanks to either special goggles or your recon drone. You can fire through some of the walls but not all of them. If you press the A button, you move into cover. You can move from cover to cover and try to outflank enemies. But maneuvering isn’t that easy if you want to do it fast. Too often you run into obstacles and can’t see that you have done so. That’s a typical problem with the third-person perspective. It’s also quite hard to see where an enemy is when they’re close to you in hand-to-hand combat. Up close, I noticed a lot of graphics clipping. Again, I hope Ubisoft’s minions take care of this before launch.

The missions

Each of the missions comes with cut scenes and a story that properly motivates you to fight. You have to help a Russian general fend off his own comrades. To do so your team has to take out a bunch of artillery that is being used to pin down the general’s forces. It isn’t easy to get through a mission because all of your people have to survive. You can get a headstart on the mission with a synchronized kill, but very quickly the firefights that ensue become chaotic. I found that my best bet was to flank the enemy as much as possible.

Once in a while you come across mounted weapons, such as machine gun nests. It’s quite fun to man them and spread death across the battlefield. But you have to be supported when you do so, or else you’ll be an easy target. The whole lesson of the combat is that the team with the best coordination is the one that’s going to win under heavy fire. You can compete against friends on online leaderboards. In multiplayer mode, eight players can square off against eight. You can pick rifleman, engineer, or scout classes. You can level up your character as you complete more missions.

I enjoyed playing the Firefly Rain mission, where the dialogue among the troops kept me immersed in the real-world feel of the combat. After a while, my teammates became good at launching synchronized kills and sweeping through the enemy formations. But we always had the most trouble in places where the enemies could easily surround us on the battlefield.

The game will be released on May 22. That gives Ubisoft time to fix some of the graphics flaws. So hopefully you won’t see water that leaves no wake when you wade into it. We played the game on the Xbox 360. It will also be out on the PlayStation 3 and the PC.

Check out the new trailer below.

For the quarter, revenue was 652 million euros, or $878.9 million, up 8.8 percent from 600 million euros a year earlier. Ubisoft is the third-largest video game publisher in the U.S., and it has the clout to create and market giant titles such as Just Dance and Assassin’s Creed and get them in front of a lot of gamers.

The company shipped more than 13 million dance titles in the quarter and estimates that it has about 70 percent share of the worldwide market in this segment, which has effectively replaced the guitar game market in the music game genre. Just Dance 3 on the Wii and the Xbox 360 with Kinect led the growth.

Assassin’s Creed revelations shipped 7 million units. Ubisoft reports sell-in numbers, which means the units have shipped to retailers but have not yet been purchased by gamers.

Ubisoft said its online segment saw a 159 percent increase, driven by Settlers Online and Howrse. The company estimated it has 8.6 percent of the console game market in 2011, compared to 8.1 percent in 2010.

Yves Guillemot, chief executive of the Paris-based company, said in a statement that the company has focused on creating brands for both core and casual markets. That has helped it grow market share in consoles and online.

“In fiscal year 2012-2013, we will start to capitalize on the large-scale investments we have undertaken more than three years ago,” he said.

Ubisoft is aiming for a comeback in shooters, led by titles such as Ghost Recon Future Soldier. He said he is also focusing on opportunities related to next-generation consoles.

For the fourth fiscal quarter, Ubisoft expects sales of 150 million euros to 180 million euros. For the full year, the company expects sales of 1.05 billion to 1.08 billion euros and operating income of 45 million to 65 million euros.

In the fourth fiscal quarter, Ubisoft is releasing five games for the PlayStation Vita, including Asphalt: Injection, Dungeon Hunter Alliance, Lumines Electronic Symphony, Michael Jackson The Experience, and Rayman Origins. Ubisoft also has a dozen titles coming for online markets such as the iPhone, Facebook, Xbox Live Arcade, and the PlayStation Network. But the console release schedule is light for the quarter.

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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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Ubisoft is unveiling Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Future Soldier today at the E3 video game show in Los Angeles and we’ve already had a first look. The game, which debuts in 2012, is going to be one of the French game publisher’s major contenders for blockbuster status. If it succeeds, hundreds of millions of dollars will flow into Ubisoft’s coffers.

The game has been in the works for a few years. It uses a new graphics engine with better-looking imagery and it is another example of how Ubisoft is focusing on beefing up its game quality, said Yves Guillemot, chief executive of Ubisoft, speaking at a dinner on Sunday night. Guillemot also said the game will be like other future Ubisoft games in another respect; it will have as yet-unannounced social features that will get players to play with their friends and become more engaged with the product.

This modern combat game series has a reputation as a thinking person’s shooting game. The whole concept has been that a squad of properly equipped soldiers with intelligence and technology can beat a force of a much larger size. With Future Soldier — the fourth game in the series — the franchise is pushing further into the future than past games, which means gamers get access to cooler technology.

While other games reward players for speed and kills, Future Soldier will reward cunning soldiers who work together in teams. One key feature for that is the ability to suppress an enemy, something that comes from Ubisoft’s Brothers in Arms series of World War II games. With suppression, a soldier with an automatic weapon can fire at an enemy and prevent that enemy from moving. Then a squad mate can outflank and take out the enemy.

If you play close to a squad mate — a concept called proximity — you can help your squad mate out when the soldier is wounded. In multiplayer play, you can take out an enemy and then steal that enemy’s data. That lets you know where the enemy is for 60 seconds. It’s like a power play in hockey, where your side gets an advantage for a period of time.

Over time, you can upgrade your intelligence, weapons and combat skills. The team can share weapons with each other. And the squad can easily call up an overhead map that shows where all of the friendlies are.

In Future Soldier, a squad of soldiers can walk into a hostile town cold and figure out how to deal with hidden enemies in minutes. They can, for instance, launch a little aerial drone that flies ahead and checks out what lies ahead beyond a bunch of buildings.

In preparation for a firefight, the whole squad can figure out which enemies they will take out first as soon as the squad opens fire. And new kinds of enemy detection systems can temporarily reveal where enemies are hiding behind barriers.

Those are huge advantages, and it may make it seem like the Ghost soldiers have too much of an advantage. But they also have to deal with larger waves of enemies.

Ubisoft has been working on the game for a while now. It seems like it doesn’t move as fast as the Call of Duty or Battlefield 3 games. But that’s a consequence of the style of game. Ghost Recon is a third-person shooter game, though you can switch to first-person mode when you using a scope to aim your weapon.

I played a four-player cooperative mission where four soldiers entered a town and used drones to identify and take out enemy sentries. Then we all ducked below a concrete barrier and identified the soldiers that we were all going to target first in the coming firefight with the enemy’s main force. That way, we didn’t wind up targeting the same person. Once we locked on, the chaotic firefight ensued. When one Ghost is hit, another can heal the comrade on the spot. That allows the Ghosts to survive a major battle.

At the close of the battle, you rescue a hostage. But a pair of enemy helicopter attacks your force on the ground and you have to escape. The group calls in a spectacular missile assault on the enemy helicopters as they are about to overwhelm you. That shows that Ubisoft’s developers have learned a thing or two about dramatic combat scenes from rival games such as Call of Duty Black Ops. This game has a more visceral feel than past Ghost Recon games, and that’s a good thing because it will hold a gamer’s attention.

Ghost Recon Future Soldier will appear on the PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 next year. On top of that, Ubisoft is working on a Facebook game called Ghost Recon Commander, said Chris Early, head of digital games at Ubisoft. That game will be a companion to Future Soldier but will have its own storyline. Ubisoft is also working on Ghost Recon Online, a free-to-play version of the Ghost Recon game online.

We’ll be exploring the most disruptive game technologies and business models at our third annual GamesBeat 2011 conference, on July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. It will focus on the disruptive trends in the mobile games market. GamesBeat is co-located with our MobileBeat 2011 conference this year. To register, click on this link. Sponsors can message us at sponsors@venturebeat.com. To participate in our Who’s Got Game? contest for the best game startup, click on this link.

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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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We’ll be excited by the announcements that take us by surprise and we’ll revisit this list after the show is over. But for now, this is what we consider to be the games that we are most eager to see and play. There are many sequels on this list. At the same time, we appreciate the indies and the originals for the creativity they bring.

Here’s VentureBeat’s picks for the most anticipated games of E3 2011. Check out our list from last year for fun. And check out our preview on how E3 will show the video game industry in transition.

We’ll be exploring the most disruptive game technologies and business models at our third annual GamesBeat 2011 conference, on July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. It will focus on the disruptive trends in the mobile games market. GamesBeat is co-located with our MobileBeat 2011 conference this year. To register, click on this link. Sponsors can message us at sponsors@venturebeat.com. To enter the Who’s Got Game? contest for the best game startup, click here.

1. Journey
Developer: Thatgamecompany
Publisher: Sony
Platform: PlayStation Network
Timing: TBA
This game, pictured above, is one of the strangest you’ll ever see. But that’s not surprising coming from Thatgamecompany, which delivered the very strange Flower and Flow games. These developers — led by Jenova Chen, Kellee Santiago and Robin Hunicke — are known for creating beautiful environments and unusual game experiences. In Flower, for instance, you play the wind in the dream of a flower in a dilapidated city. With Flower, the flowers and grass looked beautiful. With Journey, the sand and the wind are beautifully done.

You play a character on a journey through an ancient civilization. Hunicke says that the game will have more human contact and emotional impact than the more abstract Flower. As the name implies, your character is on a journey across the desert to a distant mountain. You can walk, glide and fly through the landscape. The game play is very simple and intuitive. If you play with a stranger online, the game gets more interesting. But don’t expect to hear any words spoken at all in this game. I’ve put this at No. 1 because I’ve never seen a game like it before.

2. Tomb Raider
Developer: Crystal Dynamics
Publisher: Square Enix/Eidos
Platforms: Xbox 360, PS 3, PC.
Timing: 2012
Lara Croft is getting a reboot, and it’s going to be a good one based on all of the material that has been released to date. Crystal Dynamics promises to take gamers into a world of Lara Croft that they have never seen before. Tomb Raider is about due for a good re-imagining. The game first debuted in 1996 with the buxom version of Lara Croft. A total of eight Tomb Raider games have since been published. In those games, Croft has gone through a number of remakes, some of which have been panned by critics as uninspired. Angelina Jolie took the franchise into superstardom with the release of two movies, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life. For a time, it seemed that Lara Croft got top heavy and over-exposed. We’re hoping that this remake is going to take the game series in a brand new direction. The Tomb Raider site shows a much younger and desperate-looking Lara, with the tagline “a survivor is born.” We could use a more human, less mythical version of the adventurer.

3. Call of Duty  Modern Warfare 3
Developer: Infinity Ward and Sledgehammer Games
Publisher: Activision Blizzard
Platforms: Xbox 360, PS 3, PC
Timing: Nov. 8
We’ve seen Modern Warfare 3 in a darkened theater. It will be another intense combat game where you’ll be shooting enemies left and right with all sorts of interesting new weapons, from Reaper drones to helicopter gunships. And now you’re fighting right in the middle of some of the world’s largest cities: New York, London and Paris. We’re not sure what will be left to destroy in the next version of Modern Warfare. The game features helicopter duels and a running gun battle on a moving subway train. These over-the-top combat scenes and new environments for firefights are what it takes to give fans a new kind of experience in a franchise that has become the most popular in the world. The game will also feature a new subscription social network, Call of Duty Elite, that will enhance the social and multiplayer aspects of the game. That’s going to be hard for arch rival Electronic Arts to match.

4. Battlefield 3
Developer: EA DICE
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Platforms: Xbox 360, PS 3, PC
Timing: fall
EA’s bid to unseat Call of Duty in the multibillion-dollar first-person shooter game business is looking mighty good. The graphics for this game, as shown off in EA’s trailers, look ultra-realistic. They make you feel like you’re really a soldier in the middle of a deadly war. You really feel like you’re in a place like Iraq, walking warily through the streets with your brothers in arms. The combat scenes feel gritty and down to earth, not staged Hollywood style as you feel in the Call of Duty games. EA’s last game, Medal of Honor, also went down this road with a setting in Afghanistan, but that game couldn’t knock Call of Duty Black Ops off its perch. And so far, we don’t see any social network coming from EA to match what Activision Blizzard is planning with Call of Duty. Gamers will likely play both games, but there will be an amusing war of words between the two different fan groups about which game is better.

5. BioShock Infinite
Developer: Irrational Games
Publisher: 2K Games, Take-Two Interactive
Platforms: Xbox 360, PS 3, PC
Timing: 2012
BioShock was one of the great original hits of 2007, and BioShock Infinite bears very little resemblance to it. That’s a good thing, because the world of BioShock Infinite is so completely original that you’ll be fascinated simply exploring the floating city of Columbia. This game is a violent shooter with a lot of gritty combat, but it also has a character, Elizabeth, who has been locked in a tower in Columba since childhood. Your job as a hired gun is to rescue her and bring her back to her family. Your problem is that Elizabeth is jealously guarded by a giant mechanical bird creature who will hunt you down wherever you go. The player has a chance to build an emotional bond with Elizabeth, and that drives a lot of the story that will make this game more interesting to play.

6. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Developer: Bethesda Softworks.
Publisher: Bethesda Softworks
Platforms: Xbox 360, PS 3, PC
Timing: Nov. 11
Everybody needs a chance to slay a dragon once in a while. In Skyrim, you’ll get a chance to do that. This game is going to be a massive role-playing game in a series whose last installment was the Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, which debuted back in 2007. The trailers for this game show that the quality of graphics and the dramatic flare are top-notch. Bethesda’s developers have created an entire fantasy world that will immerse you in the story. The back story, lore, and attention to detail will make the world seem all the more real. Skyrim is going to raise the bar for fantasy RPGs to some pretty lofty heights.

7. Gears of War 3
Developer: Epic Games
Publisher: Microsoft
Platform: Xbox 360
Timing: September 20
This game wraps up a saga that first began eight years ago. Epic Games returns with an exclusive for the Xbox 360 that will carry more emotional impact because it is bringing the third-person sci-fi shooter to its close. There are bigger enemies, more interesting weapons (like mortars), and new tweaks to multiplayer combat such as four-player cooperative play. But I have high expectations for the single-player game, whose story was written by sci-fi author Karen Traviss, who has written three Gears novels. You still have to fight the Locust horde and hide behind cover as you do so. If the fighting gets too nasty, you have to cut your enemy in half with a chainsaw bayonet. But you’ll have firefights where you deal with the little horde bad guys and the big horde bad guys. That is, some of these monsters are as big as houses. There’s also some female characters, finally. And really, we just want to know if humanity is going to survive or not.

8. Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception
Developer: Naughty Dog
Publisher: Sony
Platform: PS 3
Timing: fall
Uncharted 2: Among Thieves was such a good game when it swept many awards in 2009. So we had to include Uncharted 3, even though we have seen only a few parts of the game so far. Back in March, Sony showed how you could play this game with stereoscopic 3D. That level, where Nathan Drake has to maneuver through a multistory burning building, looked incredible. You have to fight off enemies even as all of the building is crashing down around you. It showed how Naughty Dog continues to push the envelope with outstanding graphics on the PlayStation 3. This game has an interesting new female villain, Katherine Marlowe, who should help continue another fine tradition of the Uncharted games: a fascinating and enthralling story. As with the previous game, this one has an opening where Drake is looking back on a gigantic wreck. You will no doubt spend a lot of time in the game figuring out how that wreck happened. We’re looking forward to getting a much better look at the game at the show.

9. Mass Effect 3
Developer: BioWare
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Platforms: Xbox 360, PS 3, PC
Timing: first quarter 2012
I’ve played the past two games all the way through and they have been delightful experiences, even when I don’t play the games correctly. Mass Effect 2 was a huge improvement on the first game, where you discovered a threat to all life in the form of the Reapers. In the second game, the story got better. You had to round up a team to go on a suicide mission to stop the Reapers from returning to wipe out all organic life in the galaxy. Now you have to save not only the galaxy, but planet Earth itself. EA has pushed this title into 2012, but mainly because BioWare wanted to make improvements to the game play. That means making the game more like an action shooting game, as opposed to a role-playing game. I’m always happy to be doing more shooting than anything else in a game. One cool feature is that the decisions you made in Mass Effect 2 can be imported into Mass Effect 3, and that will affect what kind of game you will play.

10. Batman Arkham City
Developer: Rocksteady Games
Publisher: Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment
Platforms: Xbox 360, PS 3, PC
Timing: Oct. 18
Batman Arkham Asylum was one of the best games of 2009 and it brought back the much-maligned superhero video game genre. As the Dark Knight, you can now fly over the city and stalk bad guys from above. You have an advantage coming down from the sky undetected, but combat is brutal once you’re on the ground. As with the earlier game, it pays to stop and investigate a situation before you go barging in. Batman has some cool scanning devices that give him the intelligence he needs to move forward with stealth weapons.  The art work is great and it’s clear that Rocksteady Games has doubled down on the game quality in this much-anticipated sequel. If you want to explore gender-bending, you can play as Catwoman as well in the game.

Honorable mentions. Other highly anticipated titles include Assassin’s Creed Revelations, Ghost Recon Future Soldier, Rage, and Forza Motorsport 4. We could go on and on, but then it wouldn’t be much of a curated list.

What’s your opinion? Please take our poll and explain your vote in the comments. If your game isn’t there, add it in the comments.

Online Surveys – Zoomerang.com

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

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The game is an attempt to capitalize on the collision of two worlds: the hardcore console games and the free-to-play online games that are taking off in places such as Asia. Ubisoft is walking a tightrope, making some of its cool content available at a lower entry price than its typical $60 games, but still giving gamers a reason to pay full price as well. In this case, users can play the online game for free and pay real money for virtual goods such as better weapons or decorations.

All console game makers are engaged in creating these kinds of free-to-play hardcore online games, from Electronic Arts with its Battlefield Heroes game to Activision Blizzard’s upcoming Call of Duty Online.

The Ubisoft game lets players become Ghosts, or modern super soldiers with advanced technology and intelligence, in a multiplayer-only combat game. It is played from a third-person point of view and focuses on the tactics of team combat, allowing online matches such as four players squaring off against four players over the internet. Ubisoft says the 3D graphics and environment maps will be so sophisticated they will seem like scenes from a retail console game.

The title will debut in the second half of the year on the PC as a downloadable and dynamic title. While it looks good and features cool tactics such as a detection device that allows players to see the locations of enemy players for a number of seconds, the game doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of the complete upcoming console game, Ghost Recon Future Soldier.

Chris Early, head of digital games at Ubisoft, said that the company examined its brands and focused on Ghost Recon for a free-to-play game because it hasn’t been on the PC for some time and thought that it could use its updated game engine for the upcoming Ghost Recon Future Soldier to create a cool online multiplayer game. The game marks an important transition for Ubisoft, which generated $1.4 billion in sales in the most recent fiscal year.

“Ghost Recon lends itself to the free-to-play, virtual goods model because of all of the different guns you can use and the types of soldiers,” Early said. “It adds up to a good package where you can play and earn those pieces of the game or buy those pieces of the game.”

He describes the game as the most social, connected and customizable Ghost Recon experience yet. I played the early alpha version of the game in a four-versus-four match where players had to dominate three flags on a map. We ran through a bullet-ridden retail complex trying to get to the flags first and holding them for as long as possible. The game is a thinking person’s shooter, since it’s easy to die and the winner usually isn’t the side with the fastest reflexes.

The combat in this game is all about superior weapons, intelligence, and tactics. You can outflank an enemy. You can detect where they’re moving and set up a trap. And you can use special abilities such as a forward-facing shield or a bubble shield to protect yourself as you move forward. It isn’t quite as polished — nor is it as arcade-like — as Call of Duty Black Ops. But we’ll see how it develops over time.

Users can choose between three classes of Ghosts:  assault soldiers, snipers, or specialists. The graphics look really good, but the real test will be how fast the game plays on an ordinary broadband connection. The game’s lobby has social chat features and leaderboards. And you can see how you progress in achievements as you play the game over a long time.

A lot of rival games use technologies such as Adobe Flash or Unity Technologies’ game engine. But Ubisoft chose to use its own engine to create the highest-quality graphics, Early said. You have to download a client in order to play the game. The game isn’t a port of a previously created game.

Ubisoft is also investing heavily in other online games. It has launched CSI Crime City on Facebook, The Settlers Online in Germany and France, Might and Magic Heroes Kingdoms. Petz World is coming this summer and Imagine Town is in the works; both are for kids. There are a half dozen social network games and mobile games coming too, Early said.

The game is being built by Ubisoft’s Singapore studio. Players can sign up for the closed beta test now. The game will be launched worldwide.

We’ll be exploring the most disruptive game technologies and business models at our third annual GamesBeat 2011 conference, on July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. It will focus on the disruptive trends in the mobile games market. GamesBeat is co-located with our MobileBeat 2011 conference this year. To register, click on this link. Sponsors can message us at sponsors@venturebeat.com. To pitch a startup at the Who’s Got Game contest at GamesBeat 2011, click 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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