VentureBeat » League of Legends

Dota 2 replaces World of Warcraft as Raptr’s third most-played game

Jeffrey Grubb — Wed, 08 May 2013 16:04:15 +0000

Gamers pour millions of hours into top titles, but we never really had a good way to measure who is playing what across multiple platforms. That is until Raptr, a social network for gaming fans, began tracking play a few years ago.

Raptr just released its list of the 20 most-played games among its users in April. This method isn’t perfect since Raptr doesn’t log every gamer or even every system (it doesn’t log the 3DS or Vita), but it’s good for giving a glimpse at what people are playing.

We’ve embedded the list below:

Call of Duty: Black Ops II and League of Legends continue their stints at the top of the list, but Valve’s multiplayer online battle-arena game Dota 2 is making gains. In April, it jumped from fifth to third. That places it above Blizzard’s World of Warcraft for the first time ever.

Between League of Legends and Dota 2, MOBAs hold 10 percent of the total playtime among all Raptr members.

The only new title on the list is the multiplayer shooter Defiance for the PC, which placed ninth. Recent addition SimCity dropped off the list entirely.

Filed under: Games

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Zynga reveals League of Legends-like Solstice Arena for mobile

Jeffrey Grubb — Fri, 03 May 2013 16:58:53 +0000

Gaming trends come in waves. Recently, we’ve had modern military shooters, $1 iPhone games, and then free-to-play mobile games with in-app purchases. The popular trend right now is free-to-play multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) titles. As with any gaming craze, Zynga is making moves to capitalize on it.

Today, the social-game publisher revealed details about Solstice Arena for tablets and smartphones. The MOBA follows in the footsteps of Riot’s League of Legends and Valve’s Dota 2 PC games, but Zynga wants to take that playstyle to the wide-open mobile market.

“Our main goal with Solstice Arena is to take gameplay we love from a genre we love and transform it in such a way that allowed anyone — hardcore fans and casual players — to experience the thrill of multiplayer online battle arena gaming right from their mobile devices,” a Team Solstice spokesperson wrote on the game’s website. “We hope [some will] see a high-fidelity, well-balanced MOBA. To [others], we want Solstice Arena to simply be an awesome fighting game with great graphics.”

Solstice Arena will enter closed beta soon. Players can sign up on the game’s official website for a chance to get access to that testing.

Like Dota 2 and League of Legends, Solstice takes place in a fantasy world where heroes collaborate to take on teams of other heroes. Zynga is positioning Solstice Arena to generate revenue with in-game purchases that enable players to customize their characters, but Team Solstice is stressing that the title won’t have any pay-to-win bonuses.

“Solstice Arena is free-to-play and fair to play,” reads the Team Solstice blog. “Above all, we want to preserve the core progression of MOBA competition.”

Zynga isn’t the first company to bring a MOBA to mobile devices. Gameloft released Heroes of Order & Chaos on Android and iOS in 2012.

Team Solstice was previously known as developer A Bit Lucky. Zynga acquired that studio in September specifically based on what it saw in this title.

While Riot and Valve battle each other for dominance of the lucrative MOBA market on PC, Zynga is taking a blue-sea approach by releasing that style of game in a market with far less competition.

Filed under: Games

China’s PC online game market to hit $11.9B in 2013

Dean Takahashi — Thu, 02 May 2013 07:14:27 +0000

China’s PC online game market is expected to hit $11.9 billion in revenues in 2013, up 28 percent from a year earlier according to a forecast by Niko Partners.

San Jose, Calif.-based Niko specializes in measuring the Chinese market for online games. The company predicts that mobile games will disrupt the PC-based casual and social game markets in China, reflecting a worldwide change for the game business. On top of that, hardcore downloadable online games (such as League of Legends, pictured above) will also disrupt massively multiplayer online role-playing games such as World of Warcraft.

Niko’s forecast is included in the latest version of its China’s PC Online Games Market Report.

“China’s PC online games market has grown from $10 million in 2001 to more than $9 billion as of the end of 2012,” said Lisa Cosmas Hanson, managing partner of Niko Partners, in a statement. “Some industry observers say that because MMORPGs have given way to other genres, the market is done. This is definitely not true.”

The report says that 18-year-old to 24-year-old males are flocking to shooter games and bringing life back to the waning Internet café environment that has been in decline with the rise of home PC ownership. Niko said that Tencent dominates the MMO non-RPG category and the overall PC online game industry.

Niko also said revenue growth will slow over the next five years, but each year the market will add more than $2 billion in revenue.

Filed under: Games, Mobile

GamesBeat weekly roundup: Next Xbox rumors, BioShock Infinite talk, and more …

Jasmine Maleficent Rea — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 17:33:08 +0000

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

This week, Electronic Arts is named the worst company in America yet again, Microsoft executive Adam Orth is no longer employed after disastrous new Xbox tweets, and a Saints Row movie might be in the works.

You’ll also find previews for Civilization V’s Brave New World expansion, Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, and Leisure Suit Larry: Reloaded.

News

EA Troubles

Mobile

Multimedia

Tech

Previews

Interviews

Pieces of flair

Filed under: Games

Raptr starts releasing its most-played games of the month: Black Ops II is tops for March

Dean Takahashi — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 16:00:44 +0000

Raptr has begun releasing monthly figures for the most-played Xbox 360 and PC games, and in its first-ever report, Call of Duty: Black Ops II is at the top. Black Ops II came out in November, but the first-person modern combat shooter is still commanding about 7.61 percent of overall gamer time.

Raptr is a gamer social network with 17 million users who share information about their game playing on the Xbox 360 and PC. Since Sony doesn’t allow PlayStation Network members to share game play data, there are no PlayStation 3 games in the rankings. The chart below ranks titles by the percentage of the total time spent on the top 1,000 games played by Raptr users.

While Black Ops II has the lead, it is closely followed by League of Legends on the PC, with 5.9 percent; World of Warcraft for the PC with 3.4 percent, and Gears of War: Judgment for the Xbox 360 at 2.54 percent. Dota 2 (Valve’s battle arena sequel to the Defense of the Ancients mod for Warcraft III) is still in beta but it has climbed up the charts recently, with play time up 63 percent from February. Game time for Dota 2 is half the time of its rival battle arena game League of Legends, but in the last week of March, the gap in playtime was just 25 percent under League of Legends.

Battlefield 3 saw a surge from the release of End Game downloadable content (DLC) in the first half of March. Halo 4 on the Xbox 360, meanwhile, continues a slow decline, with game time down 28 percent compared to February. The largest percentage of those Halo 4 players returned to play Mass Effect 3, thanks to the release on March 5 of the Citadel DLC for that game. A smaller group went to play Gears of War: Judgment.

BioShock Infinite launched on March 26, and the Xbox 360 version was the second-most-played game for that week, with the PC version coming in seventh. Meanwhile, Candy Crush Saga is still the top browser game on Raptr, and Marvel: Avengers Alliance is a distant second, with 25 percent of Candy Crush’s play time.

SimCity had severe launch issues, and it came in 20th for the whole month. During the last week of the month, SimCity was the 34th most-played game.

Filed under: Games, Social

League of Legends is crushing World of Warcraft in China’s Internet cafes (exclusive)

Dean Takahashi — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 15:00:05 +0000

Riot Games’ League of Legends has clearly overtaken World of Warcraft as the most popular game in China’s Internet cafes, according to a new report by market research Niko Partners.

That’s a significant change. Activision Blizzard’s World of Warcraft has dominated the online games market for a long time in China. League of Legends, a fast-and-frenzied multiplayer online battle arena game (MOBA), debuted in 2009 and has been gaining on World of Warcraft for a while.

This also show how free-to-play games have supplanted subscription models and other traditional sales methods, especially in Asia.

In March, League of Legends was launched 75,930 times in the cafes monitored by Niko Partners, and gamers played it for 83,307 hours. By comparison, World of Warcraft was launched only 6,463 times and played for 6,027 hours.

Based on data from China’s Internet cafes, Tencent’s Cross Fire shooter game is also popular, with 77,878 launches and 17,889 hours played in March, Niko said. Lisa Cosmas Hanson, the president of Niko Partners, said that first-person shooters and MOBA games are tailor-made for Internet cafes, where players are younger and tend to play for hours at a time.

“Tencent [which owns the majority of Riot Games] is the dominant online game operator, with about 40 percent market share in PC online games,” Cosmas Hanson said. “You can see in that I-cafe data that the fact that Tencent has so many hot non-RPG games is a plus, though MMORPGs are still very popular in China. Many of the highly anticipated PC online games in 2013 are MMORPGs.”

The data is collected from more than 30,000 PCs from more than 400 Internet cafes throughout China. The PCs are monitored 24 hours a day and seven days a week, and they are spread through a variety of cities in China. Niko collects data such as the top MMORPGs, the top casual games, the top web games, and a variety of other information on the Chinese game market.

Filed under: Games

Blizzard purchases IGN e-sports league to help manage StarCraft II competitions

Jeffrey Grubb — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 19:12:09 +0000

Competitive gaming is growing rapidly, and publishers are starting to make moves to leverage that potential.

Yesterday, StarCraft II publisher Blizzard purchased the assets and technology of IGN’s Pro League competitive gaming organization. Blizzard also hired around two dozen former IPL staff to form the foundation of its e-sports team. This is part of a recent push by Blizzard to bring the StarCraft II competitive landscape more under its control.

“This new team will help us to further develop the rich media experiences that extend the fun and engagement of our games online,” Blizzard executive vice president of publishing Itzik Ben-Bassat said in a statement. “This is a team of passionate gamers with a proven track record, and we’re looking forward to now leveraging their expertise and technology to support a variety of online efforts.”

IGN’s new owner Ziff Davis was eager to shed the IPL despite its massive traffic-producing events, according to a GameSpot interview with IGN co-founder Peer Schneider. Ziff apparently did

With this purchase, the IPL brand is now dead. Blizzard is likely to integrate the acquired technology into its recently revamped World Championship Series.

In early March, Blizzard president Mike Morhaime spoke about his frustration with the current loose e-sports structure surrounding its real-time strategy game.

“We found that maybe there’s a little too much going on,” Morhaime told a crowd at MIT. “We’ve run into scheduling conflicts where players that you would expect to be at some of the major events couldn’t because they had other obligations. That’s something we’d really like to address this year.”

With its World Championship Series, Blizzard is following a path well tread by one of the most successful e-sports developers, Riot Games.

Riot has a firm grip on the competitive gaming scene for its popular League of Legends title. As a result, the League Championship Series is one of the biggest draws in e-sports.

Blizzard still has one of the most popular and important e-sports games, but it just hasn’t leveraged that popularity into a marketing and competitive juggernaut the way Riot has with LOL.

All of its recent moves suggests that Blizzard is serious about better managing the property.

Filed under: Games

Victor Kislyi storms into mobile with World of Tanks: Blitz (interview)

Dean Takahashi — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 15:00:37 +0000

Victor Kislyi’s plan is to dominate the world of gaming with free-to-play titles. The chief executive of Wargaming.net says his company has more than 55 million registered players for its World of Tanks online tank combat game, and it is setting new records for the numbers of concurrent users in its game. That’s enough to get the Cyprus-based company a lot of attention in the West, as the executives at traditional game companies are trying to figure out how to compete with Wargaming.

Now the company is launching World of Tanks: Blitz, a mobile version of its popular online multiplayer tank game. Kislyi showed the title off at the recent Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. In an interview at the GDC, he acknowledged that the company still had to perfect the controls of the touchscreen game for tablets and smartphones.

But Kislyi is used to taking his time. His company is 15 years old, but it only began its shift to free-to-play games in 2008. With the October 2010 launch of World of Tanks, the company started blasting its way into the ranks of the most profitable online game companies. The company built its audience in Eastern Europe and went worldwide in 2011. Now it is moving into mobile and developing World of Warplanes and World of Warships. And it has expanded to more than 1,500 people, or roughly half the size of Zynga.

Wargaming also bought Day 1 Studios to get into console games and Chris Taylor’s Gas Powered Games to launch a new intellectual property.

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview with Kislyi.

GamesBeat: It’s a little hard to control your mobile game. I’m going to have to master that.

Victor Kislyi: Well, we all have to face the fact that there’s a generation of people that have never used computers for everything. They’ve used a digital device to do their homework, do their jobs, watch movies, send e-mails, use Facebook. They got used to this. They play shooting games with it. I’ll never trade away a mouse, myself, unless I’m in a taxi or waiting at the airport or something. Some people will only play it that way. You just have to try.

GamesBeat: It sounds like you’ve spent a lot of time trying to get the controls right. Is that very difficult?

Kislyi: This is our first playable. We’re going to improve them a bit more. There’s going to be the whole cycle of focus-testing and changes. Believe it or not, I can’t play this with a console controller. I just don’t know how to do it, but some people are great at shooting games with them. It’s just a matter of how accustomed you become.

GamesBeat: Was there a time when you thought mobile was not a good market to go into? Did that change very quickly, or change because of how the industry has changed?

Kislyi: A lot will depend on the initiative. Look at Clash of Clans or Angry Birds. There was no Clash of Clans before. Boom, out of nowhere, the installed base is huge. It’s not going to be coming down any time soon. There will be more devices like this, more powerful, brighter screens, better computing power, everything.

GamesBeat: So they’re moving the technology of mobile into your territory of AAA online games.

Kislyi: Yeah. That’s good for us. What we do is about gameplay experiences. The monetization is part of that blend of experience. What kind of metal and plastic device is involved doesn’t really matter, philosophically. Yes, we’re PC-only right now, but maybe five years from now there will be only one gaming device, something the size of your voice recorder here, and it plays all your movies and your games via Bluetooth to a huge plasma screen. What will be left to us? The experience. The visuals. The way the story unfolds. Why you fight and how you’re fighting.

Mobile games are becoming more complex and more sophisticated. Take Kabam for an example. They’re mid-core now.

GamesBeat: How would you classify this? Is this a mid-core title, a hardcore title? Would you spend five minutes in this kind of game, as opposed to hours in the PC games?

Kislyi: This is the first game of this kind, a massively multiplayer, graphically intensive, historically accurate World of Tanks-style game. It has long-tail progression. It’s not about making a couple of clicks per day and waiting for a cooldown. There’s no cooldown here. We’re taking a risk with this. It’s experimental. There’s no proven formula for making World of Tanks on the iPad. Somebody has to do that, and that’s us. There will be lots of tests and further experimentation and prototyping — hopefully not too much — and we’ll see. At this point, we can’t predict the result. It’s just about making it and testing it.

Filed under: Business, Games, Mobile

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Total War series gets a League of Legends-style spin-off

Jeffrey Grubb — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 20:15:56 +0000

Free-to-play games are huge. Multiplayer-online-battle-arena titles are everywhere. Sega and developer Creative Assembly want in on the action.

The Creative Assembly, which develops the Total War real-time strategy games, is now working on Total War: Arena. This new MOBA-style game pits players against one another as history’s greatest commanders in online combat.

The developer describes it as a mix of the standard RTS gameplay from previous Total War games and the MOBA genre exemplified by League of Legends and Dota 2. Naturally, it’ll cost nothing for players to get started.

Sega and Creative Assembly aren’t talking about release yet. The developer is still working on Total War: Rome II for PC, which is due out this year.

It will be fascinating to watch one developer introduce two games in the same franchise and see which one does better: The free-to-play game or the full retail release.

Filed under: Games

Infinite Crisis proves that superhuman brawls never get old (preview)

Giancarlo Valdes — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 12:00:59 +0000

SAN FRANCISCO — Comic book fans love to argue about which superheroes would win in a fight. Would Batman really beat Superman? Could the Flash take on the Green Lantern? But what if these heroes fought against themselves: Would Batman Prime (with the regular cowl and tights) win against the vampire-like Nightmare Batman? Or would Gaslight Batman’s steampunk gadgets school them both?

These are the sorts of questions Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment may answer with Infinite Crisis, a free-to-play multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) for the PC featuring the well-known heroes and villains from DC Comics. It follows the basic MOBA formula: Two teams fight for control over specific points on a map, players level up by capturing those points or killing the opposing team, and then they upgrade their skills and buy items to maximize the potential of their characters.

Handling development duties is Turbine, a studio best known for its massively multiplayer online games like The Lord of the Rings Online. With Infinite Crisis (set for release later this fall), Turbine is going up against established MOBA giants such as Riot Games’ League of Legends and Valve’s Dota 2. Even though Warner Bros. just announced it Monday, Infinite Crisis was ready to see, with an early version available to the press at the annual Game Developers Conference.

It may not set the MOBA world on fire, but my time with Infinite Crisis was enough to see that — just like the DC-centric fighter Injustice: Gods Among Us — superhero-on-superhero battles never get old, no matter what the genre.

“All of our work has been about players getting online, playing together in groups, and having a good time together,” said executive producer Jeffrey Steefel. “ And MOBAs felt like the natural next step for us.”

Taking inspiration from the comics

While the plot is loosely based on the Infinite Crisis comic book series that DC released a few years ago, Turbine wants to tell its own story and focus, in Steefel’s words, “on the characters and the [different] worlds they come from.” The premise involves a mysterious cataclysm that pulls in all sorts of parallel universes (hence the different versions of the superheroes and supervillains) to the Earth we know and love. As a protector, you must assemble a team to fight against other teams in order to restore order across all the worlds.

Source: Turbine

Zatanna (left) takes on Captain Marvel.

Infinite Crisis will start off with six different variants of each character, with Turbine planning to release more (including versions of heroes that aren’t in the comics) as time goes on. These aren’t just character skins, however. Each will have their own sets of powers, skills, and backstories: That means Gaslight Batman handles very differently from Nightmare Batman.

For those who closely follow DC Comics lore, Turbine also made sure to incorporate some character-specific touches to their attacks and abilities. I only got to play two characters during my short time with Infinite Crisis, but the best example I saw was when I was controlling Captain Marvel. His ultimate attack (ultimates unlock for all characters once they hit level 6) actually reverts him to his human alter ego Billy Batson, a young teenaged boy, who then runs up to the nearest enemy and yells his trademark battle cry of “Shazam!” This summons a large thunderbolt that hurts anyone within a small radius as Billy transforms back into Captain Marvel.

Other ultimate attacks also lean on creating the sort of spectacle you’d expect when superheroes fight each other. The Green Lantern (the Hal Jordan version) creates a large plane using the powers of his ring and smashes it on top of his enemies, while the Flash uses his incredible speed to repeatedly punch you.

Source: Turbine

The Flash’s ultimate attack: The fastest puncher in the DC Universe.

Familiar MOBA gameplay with a twist

I’m not the most seasoned MOBA player — I play a little League of Legends every once in awhile — but I was able to easily slip into Infinite Crisis without too many adjustments. Capture points are still here in the form of large electronic pads, as are your team’s “minions” or nonplayable allies — here they’re robots — that mainly serve to deter the enemy from venturing too far into your territory by themselves.

The matches I played took place on a circular map known as Gotham Heights. In order to win, you have to reduce the opposing team’s health bar to zero, which starts decreasing once your team captures three or more pads. On the one hand, you can join your teammates to hunt down and kill isolated players, but this leaves you with fewer eyes watching your captured points. If you spread out, you’re more likely to defend or capture new places, but you’re also more vulnerable, especially if the other team decides to gang up on you.

One major way Infinite Crisis tries to distinguish itself from other MOBAs is by pitting players against the map as well as the other team. This happens during sequences Turbine calls “catastrophic events,” where a large meteor heads toward the map whenever a team’s health bar dips below a set number. Small beacons determine where the meteor will land, and if you don’t deactivate the one near your team’s spawn, the meteor will crash and damage everyone, as well as alter some geographical features of the map itself. If both sides shut off the beacons in time, the meteor will just hit a “neutral” spot where no one gets hurt.

Source: Turbine

Nightmare Batman

Some abilities called “stolen powers” also let you interact with the levels. When I was playing as Doomsday, I had the Super Strength power already equipped, so I could lift heavy objects like cars and toss them at other players for extra damage.

Infinite Crisis isn’t finished yet (that’s why you don’t see any screenshots of the user interface, as much of that is still being finalized) but as far as MOBAs go, it seems like a solid addition. Given the worldwide recognition of DC Comics’ stable of heroes and villains, it should have no trouble finding a dedicated community to support it.

Filed under: Games

Riot releases League of Legends beta client for Mac

Jeffrey Grubb — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 21:13:35 +0000

Mac gamers can now download the native client for League of Legends.

Developer Riot Games unleashed the Mac version today on its official website. The client is in open beta, but it currently has all of the features of its PC brethren. The Mac version will get all of the future updates, features, and content simultaneously with the PC.

League of Legends is a popular mobile online battle arena game. It’s especially big among competitive gamers. League of Legends is one of the major draws at most e-sports gaming events.

Riot released the following video to celebrate the release of the Mac client:

Filed under: Games

Zynga, Kixeye, and legal combat in the free-to-play game industry

Community Writer — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 04:02:10 +0000

Free-to-play games are all the rage these days. Many people while away their days playing Angry Birds or Words with Friends before going home to watch Monday Night Football. Nerds — and, increasingly, “normal people” — do the exact same thing, except instead of watching football, they play games like Super Monday Night Combat. This summer, the remarkable viability of the free-to-play business model gained extra attention when Forbes reported that the most-played PC game in the world is now the free-to-play League of Legends. For those of you struggling to understand the profitability part, just take a look at League of Legends character Teemo (pictured top). I mean, seriously, who can resist purchasing all the adorable “skins” for him?! (Clearly, not me.)

Nevertheless, the business world of free-to-play gaming is not without its dark, seedy underbelly, where even the cute and cuddly characters are forced to work in digital sweatshops and sell virtual drugs on simulated street corners just to make ends meet. Well, OK, maybe it’s not that extreme. But as a recent (and bitter) dispute between gamemakers Zynga and Kixeye demonstrates, the business can be just as ugly (and fascinating) as some of the game battles themselves.

You know the games, but who are the players?

Zynga and Kixeye are both companies based in San Francisco that publish online social games for Facebook.

Most people know Zynga for their popular Facebook games like Words with Friends or Zynga Poker. Others know them for FarmVille, where players can engage in make-believe farming with their friends. (Others know them for their reputation for aggressive firings and generally employee-unfriendly conduct … more on that soon.) And before you laugh about who in their right mind would want to engage in virtual agriculture, you should know that Zynga currently has more than 280 million monthly active users and that FarmVille 2 currently boasts more than 8.5 million users per day. That’s one heck of a lot of digital manure.

Kixeye, by comparison, is a much smaller company, with just under a million daily average users. According to Kixeye’s chief executive, Will Harbin:

“Our games have little in common with the ones that Zynga is known for. We make synchronous, combat strategy games. They make asynchronous cow-clicking games. We have two of the top seven highest grossing games on Facebook. Why on earth would we want to emulate a business that has seen a 75 percent decline in share price since their debut? According to their S1, their games average $.06 ARPDAU [editor's note: Average Revenue Per Daily Active User]. Our games generate up to 20 times that. You do the math.”

In terms of their markets, Zynga targets “casual gamers” whereas Kixeye targets “mid-core gamers,” i.e., gamer mini-geeks who are not quite geeky enough to be considered “hardcore.”

Or at least that used to be the case. Zynga now appears to be making inroads into the mid-core market space, as evidenced by a recent acquisition. At the same time, Kixeye recently poached one of Zynga’s employees, Alan Patmore, who ran one of Zynga’s more lucrative games, Cityville. (As a huge SimCity fan, I really can’t make any jokes about the joys of being a virtual mayor. When my virtual citizens are happy, I am happy too.)

The (inevitable) lawsuit

About a month after Patmore left Zynga for Kixeye, Zynga sued him, claiming that Patmore misappropriated company trade secrets and breached his company confidentiality agreement by transferring over 700 documents from his work computer and backing them up online. Zynga then obtained a protective order preventing Patmore from accessing or using the files in any way, and subsequently amended its complaint to include Kixeye as a defendant in the lawsuit. Kixeye then turned around and counterattacked Zynga with a scathing cross-complaint.

In the cross-complaint, Kixeye alleges that while Zynga is struggling mightily in the marketplace and that “important talent [is] leaving the company in a mass exodus,” Kixeye, by comparison, is doing quite well for itself. Kixeye further alleges that Mr. Patmore “responded to the lawsuit by cooperating fully with Zynga” and that “despite [his] cooperation and the fact that none of the forensic computer analysis done by Zynga show that he disclosed any documents containing trade secrets to Kixeye,” Zynga nevertheless added Kixeye as a defendant in the lawsuit.

According to Kixeye, “Zynga’s lawsuit has two aims … (1) to send a message to is employees about the consequences of leaving Zynga to work at Kixeye … and (2) to use the litigation as a Trojan Horse to gain access to Kixeye’s own confidential, valuable information and trade secrets and bog Kixeye down in the wasted time and expense of litigation while Zynga tries to enter the midcore market.” (Yup, there’s that reputation for employee-unfriendly conduct.)

If that wasn’t enough, Kixeye goes on, in excruciating detail, to explain its theory that Zynga is engaging in unfair competition, including a recitation of how Zynga employees allegedly described how Zynga’s leadership openly admitted to copying its competitors internally. According to the cross-complaint, “One former Zynga senior employee recalled a meeting with Zynga CEO Mark Pincus, in which Pincus stated: ‘I don’t fucking want innovation … . You’re not smarter than your competitor. Just copy what they do, and do it until you get their numbers.” The cross-complaint goes on to discuss other interviews “where ‘several former Zynga workers indicated that the practice of stealing other companies’ game ideas — and then using Zynga’s market clout to crowd out the games’ originators — was business as usual.”

To paraphrase a famous gaming meme, Kixeye essentially alleges that Zynga’s business strategy is to go around to its competitors saying: “All your trade secrets are belong to us.”

Can Zynga do that?

Because the bar for obtaining discovery with respect to trade secrets is high, a company pursuing a strategy of “find the other guy’s trade secrets by suing over your own” has a tough legal path to tread. In California, a party alleging the misappropriation of a trade secret has to “identify the trade secret with reasonable particularity” before it can obtain discovery from the other side. Even after identification of the trade secrets, a number of obstacles can get in the way based on the circumstances of the case.

But in most of these cases between big fish and little fish, the real issue is the cost of litigation for the little fish. For smaller companies, it can be hard to compete with competitors (or soon-to-be competitors) that have Scrooge McDuck-sized coffers, which are presumably used to host daily money swims. Even in this case, where Kixeye is going on the offensive and looks ready to fight tooth-and-nail, finances (or the lack thereof) will probably dictate exactly how long the bout will last.

This case is a good example of why it is particularly important to be careful when poaching valuable employees from competitors. As one might suspect, if there is even a hint of smoke, we lawyers are very, very good at making it look like there might be a fire. Even if Zynga’s claim is ultimately bogus, as Kixeye contends, Kixeye may find itself feeling a bit like Leonard Hofstadter chasing fellow physicist Sheldon Cooper around in the ball-pit — trying to be the mature party — while Sheldon keeps frustratingly dodging Leonard, all the while shouting: “BaZynga!”

Filed under: Games

Twitch removes ads in its game livestreaming with new $8.99/month Turbo service

Jeffrey Grubb — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 14:00:31 +0000

The problem with watching livestreaming gameplay of something like League of Legends on Twitch is all of the commercials. Sure, it’s nice that people get paid for broadcasting their dope skills, but the ads are disruptive.

Enter Twitch Turbo, the website’s new subscription service that removes those advertising breaks from the experience and adds a few goodies on the side. For $8.99 a month, fans of game streaming get the following:

Zero ads
Priority customer support
Special colors and emoticons for Twitch’s chat platform
Exclusive Turbo badge that displays on your profile

Twitch is one of the largest livestreaming sites for video games. The site brings in more than 23 million gamers each month to watch everything from The Legend of Zelda quick runs to professionals duking it out in Dota 2 tournaments.

Obviously, the big draw of Twitch Turbo is the ad removal. Unlike televised sports, the action in a League of Legends match doesn’t stop while the site rolls an advertisement, so fans are missing 30 seconds of entertainment on a regular interval.

At $8.99 a month, that’s $1 more than Netflix charges users to stream a vast library of films and television shows. Some Twitch users may hesitate just based on that price, but Twitch is counting on its dedicated viewers to upgrade.

“Comparing Twitch to Hulu or Netflix misses the mark,” Twitch vice president of marketing Matthew DiPietro told GamesBeat. ”We’re a different animal entirely, with different — live — content and a completely different set of features like chat and functionality you can’t get anywhere else, like in-game Call of Duty broadcasting, for example.”

Twitch announced a partnership with Activision last week that allows gamers to stream gameplay directly out to the website.

DiPietro pointed out that unlike Netflix, Twitch’s content is always free to access. Users don’t have to pay anything extra to watch anything on the livestreaming service.

“It’s about offering a premium experience based on the features that the Twitch community finds most valuable,” said DiPietro. “We have a large, incredibly passionate community on Twitch that we think will value the perks they get with Turbo.”

At the same time, DiPietro admits that the company is testing the waters with the Turbo initiative.

“Of course, this is a first-of-its-kind product for Twitch, so we’ll definitely be listening to community feedback — on pricing and features,” he said.

Filed under: Games

League of Legends Season 3: Taking the ‘e’ out of e-sports

Rus McLaughlin — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 17:00:39 +0000

The first rule of e-sports is to react fast. When viewership for League of Legends’ Season 2 World Championships went completely off the scale, developer Riot Games immediately doubled down for its upcoming Season 3 (scheduled to begin Jan. 30, pending a software patch), building an all-new, ESPN-like set and bringing in an 85-inch telestrator manned by color commentator David “Phreak” Turley — or “Weatherman 3″ as he’s now called around the Riot offices. Turley’s new toy just had one problem.

“We got that thing three days before the show started,” says Dustin Beck, Riot’s vice president of e-sports, “and it showed up cracked. We had to get a new one. It came day-of.”

Call it just a slight hiccup on e-sports’ road to legitimacy. Few games have moved that needle nearly as far as League of Legends did in the last two years. In terms of ratings, its Season 2 World Championships pulled in 8.3 million unique viewers, easily blowing away Emmy darlings like Mad Men and Breaking Bad and putting it on par with network hits like How I Met Your Mother and Modern Family. Top players take home six-figure purses. And for an encore, Beck and his team at Riot Games want to erase any distinctions between “e-sports” and “sports.”

“The biggest lesson we learned coming out of Season 2,” says Beck, “was how the fans are so involved that we had to deliver a really rich experience. It’s not OK anymore to start a broadcast late or to not deliver it in HD. These guys want e-sports to be just like any other sport out there.”

“We’re taking our cues from more traditional sports,” adds Whalen Rozelle, Riot’s senior e-sports manager.

The new set and an intact telestrator help with that image, but Beck and Rozelle intend to bring all the drama of sports to the electronic frontier. To do so, they’re backing 16 teams in their League Championship series — eight in North America and eight in Europe — with professional players and consistent, weekly schedules.

“We saw a lack of structure in the ecosystem,” says Beck. “There wasn’t any leagues like you see in the NFL, NBA, or FIFA, so we’re creating one. It’s a year-round, structured league where we pay the teams salaries. The players have compensation, and now this is a viable profession for these guys. They know they have matches every week. They don’t have to worry about going to tournaments intermittently and fighting for prize money and sponsorships.”

That’s partly because the usual sponsoring suspects like Razer, Logitech, and Monster Energy Drinks have already turned up. But now American Express wants in. Beck adds that a few traditional Major League Baseball sponsors are also lining up.

Filed under: Games

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League of Legends summons a Mac client

Mike Minotti — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 03:29:43 +0000

Mac users can finally run one of the most popular free-to-play games available, the multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) League of Legends.

Steve Mieczkowski, associate producer at developer Riot Games, announced that the Mac client is available now in a public beta environment. Mieczkowski provided a link for the download on the same forum post where he made the announcement.

“To make this happen, we’ve been hard at work,” Mieczkowski wrote in his post. “Riot engineers rewrote a lot of the underlying game engine so that both PC and Mac platforms share the same code base and assets. This means Mac players will receive all future features, bug fixes, and new content at the same time as PC users.”

More than 10 million people play League of Legends every day. This Mac client can’t hurt that number.

Filed under: Games

How major MMOs are celebrating Christmas in-game (gallery)

Sebastian Haley — Mon, 24 Dec 2012 19:00:43 +0000

Like Halloween, Christmas is a great time to hop in your favorite massively multiplayer online (MMO) game. Not just because your friends will actually have time to grind rare loot and experience with you but also because developers tend to go a little crazy (and generous) around the holidays. Unique items, characters, monsters, events, and locations — the more the merrier!

GamesBeat has rounded up what some of the biggest MMOs are doing for this year’s Christmas celebrations, but feel free to add in your own in the comments below.

Filed under: Games

Heroes of Newerth 3.0 adds bots, hopes to teach new players (interview)

Mike Minotti — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 19:32:59 +0000

HoN, LoL, push mid, gank top. If that all sounds like gibberish to you, then you’ve never played a multiplayer online battle arena. Even though these MOBAs trace their origins to a custom map for Warcraft III that let two teams of five heroes attempt to destroy each other’s bases, games like League of Legends and Dota 2 have helped make this one of the fastest growing genres in gaming.

One of the more popular MOBAs is Heroes of Newerth, a PC game launched in 2010 by developer and publisher S2 Games. While a success in its own right, HoN never took off the way its biggest competitors did, but S2 is hardly ready to concede defeat.

GamesBeat talked to S2 Games founder Marc DeForest, who detailed the upcoming changes coming to Heroes of Newerth in early 2013 (known as HoN 3.0), including the addition of computer-controller bots. We also talk about the growth of the MOBA genre, the notoriously newbie-unfriendly community, and the challenges of differentiating HoN from its competitors.

GamesBeat: MOBAs have seen a lot of growth.

Marc DeForest: We’ve been pretty successful ourselves. I know that just in this year alone we’ve seen about 50% increase in our player base. We’ve had solid growth in North America, but we’re actually seeing most of our growth come from southeast Asia. I think our partners there said we’re the number one online game played in Thailand, which is a pretty exciting stat to have. Our partner in southeast Asia, we just signed a deal with them to launch HoN in Taiwan and China as well. The size of our company has doubled this year in terms of personnel. We’re close to 100 people. I just signed a lease on a new office this year which over doubles our current square footage to make room for additional growth. We’re not stopping with what we’re doing with HoN. We’re going to continue to operate it as a service. We’re going to continue to invest in it. We’re going to continue to invest in the company. We’ve got some other tricks up our sleeve, and we’ve got some other things we’ve been working on, which is pretty exciting. We’re almost three years old now and still extremely popular and still growing. I think that’s a testament to not just how good of a game HoN is as it is to the stickiness of this genre.

One of the things we have not spent enough time focusing on is the capability of learning how to play the game better before you play it online. Early next year we’re going to launch HoN 3.0. It’s an extremely solid update. We’ve spent a lot of time working on it. We’ve invested a seven-figure budget just into this update alone. One of the things we’re going to focus on is putting bots in the game. We’ve spent a lot of time making sure our bots feel like real players and not be so challenging that it is exactly the same as playing real players. Also, we’re focusing on easing players into playing their first bot game and teaching them the mechanics of the game in an easier fashion.

We have a thing in the office where if anyone calls it a tutorial then they have to get their hand slapped with a ruler, because it is not a tutorial. It’s not boring, but it is a good new-player walkthrough that will help transition someone, whether they’ve not played a game like this at all or they’ve been a long time LoL player and they’d like to try and play HoN.

But we knew we couldn’t just cater to all of those new players. 30 of the original (character) models, this being a three-year-old game, are getting refreshed artwork to a higher quality. Of course, we just call them HD versions of the models, but they look significantly better. And the map is getting a complete overhaul. The buildings, the towers, the wells, and the textures throughout the entire map are going to be changed, and it looks fantastic. I think people are going to be impressed. We’ve redone the in-game chat to make it better and streamlined it. We’ve redone the buddy list and notifications. So, you know, we’ve taken the time to take feedback from the community, to look at the things that we think we can do better, put those together, sit down, come up with a plan, execute on making the UI (user interface) better, making some of the art better, adding some new features, putting in bots.

We’ve had a lot of people who are like, “I’d love to just be able and sit down with me and four bots against five bots, me and two buddies with two bots against five bots, or I can get in a match and queue up with four other people I may not know and play against bots. It’s a totally different experience. And they’re pretty impressive. That’s the key. You don’t want to look at a bot and say, “I can tell you’re being controlled by a computer. You’re doing real asinine things.” They’re actually intelligent.

GamesBeat: The best thing with this is that one person can essentially play the game by himself and learn a new character or just learn the game in general. Especially when you’re new and trying to learn what a MOBA is.

DeForest: Yeah, and it’s an incredibly stressful time, and if you encounter the wrong type of players that exist you’re going to get punished, you’re not going to enjoy yourself, and you’re going to blame it on the game. You know, it is our responsibility as developers to make the transition for somebody who doesn’t really know much about the game to becoming somebody who can be great at the game. Self-admittedly, we looked at that and we didn’t do a good job of it. We’re always looking to improve on all the things that we do, including the games that we make. Nothing we do will ever be perfect, and we have to make it better.

Speaking of that concept, we also revamped our “report a player” system to make it more accessible and easy for players. I’m sure you see, being a player in the States yourself, that people can be mean-spirited and can be extremely hard on other people. That devalues the content. The community is actually a big part of the content of the game, and if you have a community that is detrimental to people who maybe aren’t that good, who maybe just want to log in, have fun, and not get berated for making one wrong move, it’s our responsibility to offer tools to our community to help police themselves and to make sure that people like that are no longer part of that community.

Filed under: Games

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Guardians of Middle-earth dispels the difficulty of online battle arenas (review)

Mike Minotti — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 01:51:08 +0000

Far over the Misty Mountains cold
Two teams of five fight for control
It’s a MOBA, just like Dota
But less complex, with no shop or gold

“What’s a MOBA?” You might just ask
It’s an action-RPG with a simple task
You have three lanes and skills to train
Heroes and villains make up the cast

You pick one fighter as your avatar
And with your minions, you travel far
You must erase the other base
And with the other team you’ll spar

Alright, enough of that. Guardians of Middle-earth is a multiplayer online battle arena game (MOBA), a genre made famous by the Defense of the Ancients mod for Warcraft III. You can kind of think of it as a real-time strategy game, like Warcraft III, but you just control one unit in team-based matches (generally 5-vs.-5).

The objective is to destroy the other team’s base. Sound simple? No. No, it’s not. This is one of the most complex and least forgiving genres you’ll find. You could spend a hundred years learning its rules and still discover nuances. If I spent this entire intro explaining how the game worked, you would be bored, and I would be fired.

Guardians attempts to not only bring MOBA to the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 (it’s out now), but it simplifies the experience at the same time. That’s sort of like trying to turn a soufflé into something you can order at McDonald’s. But against odds greater than trying to simply walk into Mordor, it succeeds.

Mostly.

What You’ll Like

MOBA made easy
The multiplayer online battle arena has never been the most welcoming of genres. Games like Defense of the Ancients and League of Legends are famous for their tough, often mean communities. It’s because these games are hard to play, with complicated rules that require hours to understand and skills that take a lot of training to use effectively.

Guardians of Middle-earth, while still very much a MOBA at its core, works to make its take on team-based lane-pushing simpler. The overall map is about half of the size of what is normal for the genre. Not only does this mean you have to take out fewer towers to advance, but the jungle, the area of the map filled with nonplayer controlled monsters, is much smaller. This means that” jungling,” where a player focuses on fighting these creatures for experience, status buffs, and gold, is far less effective and thus far less of a concern.

Speaking of gold, the biggest simplifier in the game is the lack of any currency or a shop during matches. The acquiring and spending of money to buy equipment is usually one of the trickiest aspects of a MOBA. Its exclusion may annoy genre purists, but this goes a long way toward putting everyone on a level playing field without having to look online for a guide that’ll tell them what kind of armor they should buy when they hit level 6.

These changes also make matches a lot shorter than what you would find in other MOBAs. While a game of Defense of the Ancients can easily take an hour to play, a round of Guardians rarely takes more than 20 minutes.

Designed for consoles
These changes all make sense, since developer Monolith designed Guardians for consoles, a rarity for a genre that has historically appealed to a hardcore PC crowd. Surprisingly, Guardians works great with a controller thanks largely to handy circles and cones that always tell you where your skills will hit, which helps make up for aiming that’s less precise than what you would get with a keyboard and mouse.

In some ways, using a controller works better, especially when it comes to controlling your character. Using an analog stick just feels easier and less prone to accidents than clicking around a map.

Love that Lord of the Rings flavor
Still, despite these drastic differences from its contemporaries, most will look at Guardians as a MOBA game with a The Lord of the Rings skin. So if you’re primarily interested in Guardians of Middle-earth because you’re a Tolkien fan looking to satiate an appetite for wizards and orcs, you’ll be happy to know that Guardians uses its license well.

Its cast of fighters includes multiple heroes and villains from The Hobbit and The Lord of Rings books, including favorites like Gandalf, Gollum, Sauron, and Legolas. Some of the cast is more obscure, like Lugbol the orc (who?) and Arathorn, who takes a spot on the roster that Monolith should have given to his far more famous son, Aragorn. Still, hardcore Middle-earth enthusiasts will appreciate the inclusion of these lesser-known characters, even if fans who are only familiar with the movies will scratch their heads as they try to figure out who Hildifons the Hobbit is.

Most importantly, each character feels distinct. You can have a lot of fun simply experimenting with this large and varied cast until you discover a few favorites. While some are unavailable until you buy them with in-game currency that you earn outside of matches, it doesn’t take long before you can unlock a good chunk of the roster.

What You Won’t Like

Lagolas (Get it? I combined lag and Legolas into one word. Funny, right?)
Sadly, lag has been an issue with my time with Guardians, though the problem seems to improve each day. It was virtually unplayable on Dec. 5, the game’s release day on the 360. I couldn’t last two minutes without getting booted from a match due to connectivity issues. If I wasn’t kicked out, then I had to suffer matches where characters plodded along like jittery phantoms.

Like I said, this issue has improved over time, but I still find instances where a server problem will cause me to miss an important attack or a teammate gets kicked out of the match, forcing me to play an unfair game of five versus four. Timing and precision is crucial in a MOBA, so any lag is a major problem.

Shrines
One addition that Guardians does make to the traditional MOBA formula is the inclusion of shrines, basically control points across the middle of the map that give your team buffs to things like defense and attack speed. Unfortunately, since they’re all in the center, the first team with a slight advantage is likely to gain control of all four, making a comeback from the other side almost impossible. Playing defense against a team that’s inside your base is already hard enough without these additional buffs.

Comebacks are a rare thing in MOBAs, but at least others give you the option to surrender when victory seems impossible. Guardians forces you to stick it out, even when it’s clear you’re going to lose ten minutes before your base is actually destroyed.

Long waits for games
Searching for a match can take upward of five minutes, during which time you won’t have much to do. This is usually a problem with the genre, but at least with the PC MOBAs you can always do something else on your computer while you’re waiting for the game to find you a match.

Conclusion

Guardians of Middle-earth sacrifices a lot of complexity to work as a console game. Hardcore MOBA fans will disapprove of the changes, but genre newbies looking for some team-based, Tolkien-inspired fun will happily take these heroes and villains to war. It’s nice to worry more about killing enemies and destroying towers than last hitting minions for an extra bit of gold so you can buy some expensive armor.

Of course, the shorter, easier victories you’ll experience in Guardians will never satisfy you as much as a win that took over an hour to achieve in Dota, but it’s also nice when a few losses in a row don’t make you feel like you just wasted an entire day of your life.

Score: 70/100

Guardians of Middle-earth was released on Dec. 4 for the PlayStation 3 and Dec. 5 for the Xbox 360. The publisher provided GamesBeat with a download code of the 360 version for the purposes of this review.

Filed under: Games

‘Toxic’ League of Legends player responds to his 1-year ban

Jeffrey Grubb — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 15:52:53 +0000

Yesterday, League of Legends developer Riot Games announced that it was giving one of the competitive game’s top players a 1-year suspension for “violations of the Summoner’s Code.”

Christian “IWillDominate” Rivera, a member of Team Dignitas, isn’t allowed to compete in the online strategy title for a year, and Riot is permanently banning all of his alternative accounts. This is due to what Riot called “persistent toxic behavior.”

Rivera took to the League of Legends community on Reddit and posted this statement regarding the ban:

“Today I was informed by Riot that I will be suspended for 1 year of the Season 3 Championship Series. Although the ruling is extremely tough, I agree with Riot that player sportsmanship is a serious matter, and I want to apologize to anyone that I’ve offended in-game and my fans. I fully understand that pro players are viewed as role models and should act accordingly. I’d like to thank my teammates and the whole Dignitas organization for the amazing year that I have spent with them and wish the team the best of luck going into season 3. Personally, I will not let this end my dreams of being a professional League of Legends player. During my suspension I intend to keep my mechanics in top form and remain a competitive jungler. After my suspension I hope to rejoin the championship series and once again compete at the highest level. League of Legends is my life, and I will do everything in my power to play as long as possible.”

An apologetic and accepting tone, and one that only took getting punished nine separate times by the game’s governing body to elicit.

That’s right, prior to this extensive ban, the League of Legends tribunal, which gives the player community the opportunity to decide what is and isn’t appropriate, weighed in on Rivera’s behavior on eight other occasions. In the ruling from Riot Games, the developer stated that the pro gamer “violated the letter and spirit of the Summoner’s Code in a systematic fashion,” which is evidenced by his consistently terrible behavior.

From Riot’s analysis:

“His persistent tendency to engage in verbal abuse and insults, his lack of cordial demeanor, and his treatment of less-skilled players is unacceptable for any player, especially a high-profile professional player who has a regular opportunity to lead the community by example.”

This is the highest profile ban in what is video game’s biggest competitive title. It is likely to set a different tone among the remaining players.

Riot has the capability to track a player’s behavior based on a peer-to-peer ranking system. Rivera’s “harassment score” was worse than any other North American pro player.

I wonder how the guy who was No. 2 on that list feels today?

As a member of Team Dignitas, Rivera had several major sponsors, including Intel, Antec, and Alienware.

Filed under: Games

Massively multiplayer online games continue to thrive in this free-to-play era

Jeffrey Grubb — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 16:56:46 +0000

Sure, tons of people canceled their monthly subscriptions to big-budget massively multiplayer online games, but they aren’t saving that money. Instead, gamers are shifting to free-to-play games like League of Legends and World of Tanks.

That shift will stimulate a continued growth in worldwide MMO revenues, according to financial analyst firm SuperData Research. The think-tank expects the industry, specifically on the strength of free-to-play, to reach $9.5 billion by 2015.

“I recognize that there is some debate over including League of Legends [in our data] since you can only build characters within a short timeframe and play with a more limited number of players,” SuperData business development manager Sam Barberie told GamesBeat. “But for research and competition purposes people tend to group it with MMOs, especially because you are still building and leveling up a character. Our data come directly from publishers and developers, so it’s sort of a two-way street of both them and us considering a game to be MMO.”

SuperData pointed toward 2012, where F2P games out-earned pay-to-play titles in all 12 months. This new model is here and it’s where the money is at.

League of Legends, a multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) from developer Riot Games, is the best example of how lucrative free-to-play is for some companies. Riot sells players different skins for their characters — along with other in-game goods — to help personalize the player experience. This paired with the game’s popularity as a competitive eSport, which is always bringing in new players, generates major profits for the developer.

World of Warcraft still makes more money than just about any free-to-play game, but it also has pushed out all competing subscription-based titles. So while the traditional $15-a-month games have a clearer path to big revenue gains, it is also a market that’s nearly impossible to crack.

Filed under: Games

Major League Gaming: Serving 11.7 million viewers in 2012

Jeffrey Grubb — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 17:33:55 +0000

Our little Major League Gaming is growing up so fast.

The biggest competitive gaming organization in the U.S. announced today that its unique viewer count for the 2012 Pro Circuit rose to 11.7 million. That’s up from just 3.5 million in 2011. If percentages are more your thing, that represents a growth of 334 percent year-over-year.

That 11.7 million unique viewers numbers is a total from MLG’s four Championship weekend events. The league holds these events once every season in cities around the country.

“MLG’s 334 percent growth in live online audience this year surpasses growth demonstrated by traditional sports. This is a testament to the mainstream demand for competitive gaming and power of live streaming,” said Sundance DiGiovanni, the chief executive officer of Major League Gaming. “The last two years have been the largest in MLG’s 10-year history with over 636 percent growth in live viewers. I only expect that growth to continue in 2013.”

MLG’s major tournaments usually focus on the industry’s biggest competitive games. Starcraft II and League of Legends headlined many of the 2012 events.

It’s clear from this announcement that the MLG is positioning itself as a home for sponsors and advertisers. It’s audience is 85 percent male, primarily in that sweet spot demographic of 18 to 34. Currently, MLG partners with evergreen advertisers like Dr. Pepper and Bic.

Filed under: Games

See how games both big and small are celebrating Halloween!

Sebastian Haley — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 23:24:14 +0000

Some people like Christmas, and others favor Valentine’s or Thanksgiving. And if you’re a verbally abusive alcoholic like my cat, Sprinkles, you’re definitely keen on St. Patrick’s Day. But when it comes to video games, Halloween is where the good stuff’s at.

GamesBeat has rounded up a choice selection of games that are celebrating tomorrow’s festivities with some in-game events and special content. You can also check out Steam’s Halloween sale for some discounted horror titles, including all five episodes of The Walking Dead game.

Filed under: Games

GamesBeat weekly roundup: Kixeye opens up about racism allegations, OnLive assets sold for $4.8 million

Jasmine Maleficent Rea — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 20:17:30 +0000

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

This week, EA is reportedly working with Fox on a Battlefield: Bad Company TV series, Valve wants gamers to help playstest unreleased products, Kixeye opens up about last week’s racism allegations, and OnLive’s assets sold for a mere $4.8 million.

You’ll also find reviews for Dishonored, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, Forza Horizon, and Nights: Into Dreams HD.

News:

Mobile News:

Reviews:

Previews:

Interviews:

Pitch us in one Tweet:

The top 10 games of ‘Pitch us in one Tweet’ (#1: Sixty Second Shooter)

Pieces of Flair:

Filed under: Business, Games

How big is League of Legends? 12M daily users play for 1B hours each month, and 75 die every second (infographic)

Jeffrey Grubb — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 04:55:34 +0000

We know that League of Legends is popular.

You don’t get to hold competitions with multimillion-dollar jackpots if you don’t have a large audience. As it turns out, Riot Games’ mobile online battle arena (MOBA) has a staggering audience.

According to an infographic released by the developer, gamers spend more time in LOL than any other game. The competitive strategy title has more active daily users than Instagram and more Facebook Likes than Korean rapper Psy’s viral Gangnam Style.

The game is huge … although, the infographic explaining how huge it is probably still a bit bigger:

Filed under: Games

Allegations of cheating surface in $2M League of Legends playoffs

Dean Takahashi — Sun, 07 Oct 2012 23:35:08 +0000

Allegations of cheating has disrupted the $2 million League of Legends world playoffs.

The allegations surfaced on a community thread where observers noticed that the stage setup made it easy for teams to cheat. Players on opposing teams were reportedly able to just turn their heads and sneak a peek at the opposing team’s minimap, which gave away its positions. It seems like a silly mistake to make, given that $2 million is on the line. Observers of the livestream said they saw players looking at the screen to observe their rivals’ moves on the minimap.

Massively reported that the match organizer replied, “We keep a constant watch on all the players on stage at all times. We have cameras as well as live people walking onto stage to keep tabs in everything. All players are told that they need to remain sitting, facing forward, and with headphones on at all times, including during pauses. I can personally confirm that no WE player looked at the minimap at any point during the match.”

Filed under: Business, Games

The DeanBeat: Raptr’s gamer data shows that building real communities pays off in profits (it’s the community, stupid)

Dean Takahashi — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 15:00:31 +0000

It’s the community, stupid.

Game publishers may wonder what it takes to get loyal users. Well, the trick is obvious, according to gamer social network Raptr: You have to create a great game. Then you build a community around that game that generates goodwill among gamers. And that translates into better user engagement, revenues, and profits.

Most companies are using their analytics and data about gamers’ preferences to milk them for all they’re worth. They want to target gamers with services and goods that the players will pay for. But that’s a shortsighted approach, and the games-as-a-service business model isn’t as complete as the community-as-a-service approach, says Dennis Fong, the chief executive of Raptr.

“Games-as-a-service has a lot of rhetoric, but it’s mostly about monetizing the user,” he said. “In our view, it’s a missed opportunity. It’s really a chance to build a long-term relationship with the user.”

And Fong has some data to back up his beliefs in a new Raptr Report, which is mined by Raptr’s community of nearly 15 million gamers. The data show that it really does pay to establish trusted relationships with players through community services (which appear to cost money), such as livestreaming, eSports events, loyalty programs, or free modification tools.

Most companies don’t see the light here. They realize that giving to the community generates goodwill, but they worry about the cost and the impact on monetization.

“If you take a player-first approach, it’s good for business,” said Fong. “Companies need to do more, and we have the data to show why.”

Case study: Portal 2′s map creator

A good example of putting the community first is Valve’s recent behavior. In April 2011, Valve launched its big hit, Portal 2. The game was popular, but it had low replayability. In May 2012, Valve released its free map-creation tool that let players create their own maps and share them. Players created an astounding 35,000 levels, which were downloaded 1.3 million times during the first week after the launch of the mod tools.

Portal 2 saw an 806 percent increase in daily active users (the number of users who play a game in a day) the day after the tools were out. A month later, there were still 40 percent more people playing the game daily compared to before. Valve saw a 2,218 percent increase in new users. After release of the tools, they accounted for 18 percent of all daily active players. A month later, Portal 2 still had 28 percent more new users than before. Portal 2 also saw a 1,113 percent increase in bringing back lapsed players the day after the release; about 46 percent of all daily active users were returning lapsed players. A month later, there were still 15 percent more returning players than before.

The average daily playtime per user grew 36 percent from 1.4 hours to 1.9 hours per day. A week after release, people were still playing 29 percent longer per day than before. A month later, playtime was 17 percent higher. Valve’s goal was simply to extend the life of the game for existing players, said Fong. But the actual impact was clearly far greater.

Case study: DayZ user-generated mod breathes life into Arma II

A second example is from the military shooter game Arma II, which Bohemia Interactive released in May 2009. The game wasn’t particularly successful, with flat sales after its launch. Then one of the designers at Bohemia decided to create a zombie-themed mod of Arma II as a proof of concept for a game he wanted to create. Within a month after the release of the DayZ mod, sales for Arma II spiked 400 percent to 300,000 units. Within four months, more than 1 million gamers had played DayZ.

A week after DayZ’s release, Arma II daily active users were up 36 percent. But the game gained momentum over time. A month after release, daily active users were up 847 percent. The Dayz mod brought in a 1,343 percent increase in new players in a month. These players accounted for 15 percent of all daily active users in the first month. Returning users were up 20 percent in the first week and 101 percent in the first month. Players also spent 36 percent more time in the game, from 2.2 hours per day to 3 hours per day. The week after launch, players played 23 percent more than before.

“It was like they created a whole new game,” said Fong.

Case study: Riot Games gets players engaged even when they aren’t playing

League of Legends took off in October 2009 as Riot Games published the free-to-play fantasy multiplayer online battle arena game. The title grew steadily to tens of millions of players. On average, League of Legends grows its user base by 7.6 percent each month.

But by turning the game into an eSport, or a spectator sport that was broadcast online, Riot Games was able to bring a consistent boost to the audience. The MLG eSports finals and the Dreamhack competitive event boosted player activity from 3 percent to 10 percent in daily active users. Overall, playtime was up 3 percent to 8 percent following the events. New player rates jumped 10 percent, and returning players were up 12 percent. The League of Legends Season One finals drew 241,000 peak concurrent online viewers, who watched more than 3.6 million hours of video.

“No one really knows if a holding a tournament is good for a game,” said Fong. “We dug into it and found it was true.”

The stats go on and on

Of course, you would expect Raptr, a social network for gamers, to say that social work pays off. Fong said that when Blacklight: Retributions developers engaged the Raptr community in a long question-and-answer session, the number of daily active players increased by 10 percent and playtime increased 19 percent. Players asked 1,600 questions and viewed 60,000 pages during the session.

Fong says it’s critical to know who the loyal players are, where they come from, and what their habits and behaviors are in the game. OGPlanet launched a loyalty program with Raptr Rewards (where brands give rewards to players who play a game a lot). The program helped increase daily playtime per Raptr user by 97 percent. The game saw a 400 percent increase in new players and a 180 percent increase in returning players on the first day of the program.

The conclusion should be clear: Don’t just milk your users. Give them what they want, and they will pay you back many times over.

“Lots of companies treat community as an afterthought or a charity,” said Fong. “It’s a huge missed opportunity.”

Filed under: Business, Games

Gaming art for your Twitter header (Part 3: PC)

Samir Torres — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 18:00:35 +0000

Your Twitter profile just got a whole lot prettier with the addition of header images. Our vast selection of video game-themed pictures covers a wide range of genres and platforms.

We’re releasing seven days’ worth of artwork, each with a different theme:

Monday: The modern era
Tuesday: Popular franchises
Wednesday: PC
Thursday: It came from Japan
Friday: Mobile
Saturday: Retro arcade
Sunday: Consoles

Today’s batch of headers features 10 entries from new and classic PC games. Right-click (or Ctrl-click for Macs) the picture you want and hit “save image as” to save to your computer. To add the header to your Twitter profile, please follow these steps:

Sign in to your account.
Go to “settings” and click on the “design” tab.
Scroll down to the “customize your own” section.
Click on “change header” and select the image you want to upload. No need to scale.
Click “save.”

Diablo III

League of Legends

StarCraft

Guild Wars 2

The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings

Crysis 3

Dungeon Siege

Fallout 3

Half-Life 2

Doom

For gaming-themed Timeline covers for your Facebook profile, click here.

Filed under: Games

Why Guardians of Middle-earth (wisely) chooses not to compete with PC games like League of Legends (interview)

Sebastian Haley — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 01:09:07 +0000

Guardians of Middle-earth is an upcoming downloadable title for Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network set (very loosely) in The Lord of the Rings universe. Developer Monolith Productions and publisher Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment are set to throw their hats in the multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) ring against genre champions DOTA (Dota All-Stars, DOTA 2, and Blizzard DOTA) and Riot Games’ blockbuster League of Legends.

GamesBeat recently attended an extended play session at Monolith’s headquarters in Kirkland, Wash. We observed a handful of players (each using distinct characters) across several matches, as well as a few select live gameplay segments presented by the Monolith team. We also dominated the rival team as an unannounced unlockable Evil character, but I think that was mostly because we were playing against game journalists and, as everyone knows, game journalists don’t actually play games.

The gameplay is typical MOBA fare with a Tolkien skin wrapped over it. Two teams compete for points while moving between three lanes, attempting to destroy each other’s towers and guardians (playable characters) to gain experience points and dominance over the map. Here’s a video if none of that made sense:

Guardians of Middle-earth has just over 20 characters, split across five playstyles: warrior, striker, mage, tactician, and defender. Gollum, Gandolf, Sauron, Legolas, and most of the usual suspects make an appearance, but it also has a decent selection of characters excluded from Peter Jackson’s film adaptations to fill the roster.

After we played it, we sat down with Ruth Tomandl, a senior producer at Monolith, to discuss bringing a dowloadable MOBA to home consoles and competing (or not) with the big boys in the genre.

GamesBeat: Can you give some of your history in the game industry?

Ruth Tomandl: Yeah. I was at Gas Powered Games for seven years. I was a level designer on all of the Dungeon Siege games, and I worked on Supreme Commander a little bit. Content engineering. Then I was a lead level designer, and I liked the scheduling aspect, so I wanted to get into production. I came to Snowblind as an associate producer on Lord of the Rings: War in the North and eventually became a senior producer on Guardians of Middle-earth.

GamesBeat: How did you go from Snowblind to Monolith?

Tomandl: Snowblind and Surreal and Monolith were all acquired and put into this one building, so we’ve had some transfers back and forth, depending on project needs.

The Dark Lord Sauron.

GamesBeat: Let’s start with previous Lord of the Rings games. They’ve been of varying quality. Some of the movie ones may have performed well financially, but they were just the generic common denominator. Movie’s coming out, and Electronic Arts just pumped out a game to go with it. There was a real-time strategy game that I actually kind of liked. …

Tomandl: Our creative director worked on that game, on Battle for Middle-Earth.

GamesBeat: Then there’s War in the North and several others. So what is some of the good, but also particularly some of the bad, feedback that fans have had about previous Lord of the Rings games that you’ve addressed with this one?

Tomandl: It seems like with Middle-earth games, the things that have excited the fans the most and the things that they’ve been looking forward to the most are the capability to play with the world and characters and not necessarily be stuck in a single narrative. I think that because the books are so strong and the films have been so strong, I think people expect to see that in games as well. But like you said, the games that follow those same narratives haven’t been as strong. I think it’s because there’s so much more to the world and so much more to the characters than just those stories.

I think players are always asking for open-world Middle-earth games. The RTS was a really good use of the Middle-earth license, because it lets you do more with it. It lets you explore that world and those characters and those races more. I think that’s something that’s a strength of Guardians of Middle-earth. We’re taking those characters, but we’re not locking them into a narrative. We’re letting you explore the characters themselves as heroes in battles and see what happens with them. They each have their own backstory and personalities, which are very strong, and the world is very strong. But we’re not locked into a single story that’s been rehashed 50 times.

GamesBeat: Even though the MOBA genre is growing, you are facing some extremely hardcore steep competition. Does Guardians plan to infiltrate some of that fanbase? Are you maybe targeting the console-specific audience instead?

Tomandl: I think it’s an advantage for us, certainly, to be only coming out on the consoles. It’s let us focus on making a really good console game, but it also eliminates any question of competing. Because yeah, those games are very established. They’ve had a lot of time to iterate. They’ve had a lot of time to polish and come out with new champions and stuff. I think if we went head-to-head with that, we wouldn’t have a very good chance. Guardians of Middle-earth is a new game, and it doesn’t have all the history and polish and established fanbase. I think being on the consoles gives us a chance to surprise players and give them something that’s familiar to them, but also new.

I think that we’ve seen that with MOBA players..we brought a lot of professional MOBA players down here to test the game and give us feedback on it. They said that they felt like it was a separate genre. Part of it is that they’re so steeped in their particular game and all the minutiae of it. Anything that deviates slightly from it, they see it as completely different. But also, they said that there were enough differences, the controls were different enough, that they didn’t really consider it to be in the same genre as the PC MOBAs. I think it’s a good place for Guardians to be in. It’s something that people recognize, but at the same time we’ve been surprising people. It’s always a good thing to pleasantly surprise people with your game.

GamesBeat: What are some of the drastic features or changes that differentiate it from other MOBAs?

Tomandl: A lot of it is the pacing. The matches are shorter. You get into matches more quickly. When you get into a match, you start the larger battles more quickly. We shortcut some of that initial laning and jockeying for position and getting a creep score phase. I think pretty much all of the PC MOBAs have that. We start you off with three abilities unlocked already. The map is a little smaller, so you move between lanes a lot more. There’s more incentive to move between lanes. I think it just gets into more of a fast-paced battle more quickly. Which is something I think console gamers are more interested in. PC gamers, I think, have more patience to invest a lot of time and then reap the rewards of it, whereas console gamers want to get in, play a match, get out, and get more expertise that way, by playing more matches. I think that’s the biggest difference people will notice. We’ve also added some things like upgrading your towers. Upgrading your soldiers. The shrine captures. That kind of thing. The player customization. The character customization is different. But I think the biggest change people will notice is the pacing.

GamesBeat: I did notice the pacing while playing and during the presentation, but maybe not necessarily in a good way. Obviously you have your faster characters and your slower characters. The movement speed is one thing. But I noticed that the actual attack animations felt a little sluggish. The battles didn’t seem very exciting or urgent because of this.

Obviously the spells are pretty spectacular, but the actual clashing of swords and things like that felt a little underwhelming. Is that something that was intentional, or if that’s something still in the works? Or if I’m the only person who’s ever said that?

Tomandl: I don’t think I’ve heard that feedback specifically, except that it’s possible it’s because you were using the basic controls. That is one drawback to that control set. Was it that when you use an ability, you have to press the button and then let go of it, which does introduce a delay?

GamesBeat: Let me ask you this, because I first noticed it while you were giving the presentation. During that demo, I noticed that if there’s a soldier or whatever, it just seems like he’s swinging really slow. It was notable.

Tomandl: Interesting. I don’t think I’ve heard that before. I don’t have anything to refute it. And I’ve also been looking at this game for a year, so I probably wouldn’t notice it. But that’s interesting. …

GamesBeat: Has the game maybe been balanced to not be too overwhelming to the player? Obviously a lightning-fast game would be intimidating to anyone. But have the animations or the pacing maybe been designed to be more accomodating to an average gamer?

Tomandl: Not that I know of. I wouldn’t want to speak to the design specifically, because I certainly don’t know of any design focus on that. I do know that there are some…let’s see. I know I’ve seen a lot of bugs on animation delays being set incorrectly, and I think that there are. … When you use an ability, there is a delay before you can do something else sometimes, which might be what you’re seeing. I don’t know. That might be interesting. You might want to talk to Scott Compton about it. He’s the lead designer and he knows a lot more about that than I do. I’m more familiar with the backend systems. But yeah, I haven’t heard that before, but it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.

Arathorn, the heir of Isildur.

GamesBeat: Longevity is something that the mainstays of the MOBA genre have just conquered. They have their different ways of doing it. Every week in League of Legends, I believe, there’s a new hero. I noticed that in the booklet, with the characters, one of the dwarves was “featured this week.” Can you explain what being featured means and also what your plans may be to give the game a long lifespan?

Tomandl: Yeah. When the game ships this fall, it will have more than 20 guardians included. All of those are included in the game. Five of them will be available to the player right off, and other ones will have to be purchased with in-game currency that you earn from playing matches and completing challenges. You get some in-game currency, you can purchase a guardian. …

GamesBeat: Will it also have unlocks like Forza and other games do, where if you don’t want to take the time to earn it, you can just spend Microsoft points?

Tomandl: We’re not planning to do any microtransactions. We don’t want to have that model in the game. It’s all in-game currency. So there’s no way to shortcut it with real currency. What we do have for people who want to try a guardian that they haven’t purchased. … We do have between one and five guardians unlocked by default for a short time. That’s what the “featured this week” thing is. What we can do via our backend systems is say, “OK, this week everyone can play as Galadriel.” And then at the end of the week she’s gone, but you can also purchase her with in-game currency after that.

GamesBeat: You only have five?

Tomandl: Up to five.

GamesBeat: Wouldn’t it be relatively easy to unlock all five and not have any left? At that point you would kind of render the “featured” system unnecessary?

Tomandl: You start with five unlocked. And then there’s still 15-some that aren’t unlocked. Of those 15, we can say, “OK, these five are unlocked this week, these five are unlocked next week. …”

GamesBeat: Is there a target for how long it would take a player to unlock that initial lineup entirely?

Tomandl: Let’s see. The max profile level is 20, but then you can prestige and start over at one. I think by the time you hit profile level 15 or so, you should have enough currency to unlock all the guardians if you don’t spend it on anything else. But there’s also potions, which are consumables that you use in-game currency for. There’s relics and gems. I think that’s it? But all of those things together will absorb your currency over time as well.

GamesBeat: The presentation showed a chart where you can eventually summon a Balrog. How does that system work?

Tomandl: Profile level one; you don’t have any custom loadout stuff at all. You can use the default loadouts for the guardians, which gets you into the system in an easy way. Then as you level up your profile…I think at profile level two you unlock your first potion slots. Then you can earn a potion and take it into the match with you. The commands…I don’t remember when they unlock. But at certain levels…you’ll unlock the first tier of commands, which are things like healing and speed bursts. The second tier of commands unlocks at a later level. By the time your profile is at level 20, you’ve unlocked all four tiers of commands, and the fourth-tier commands are the really powerful ones like the Balrog summoning. And those are all things you can load out on your character for the match.

Runsig, a new character exclusive to this game.

GamesBeat: I meant to ask, when you said you weren’t playing…you didn’t want to have microtransactions. Is there a reason why you wouldn’t? Because it’s a common feature of other MOBAs. Why is it not right for this one?

Tomandl: We did run into some difficulties doing it on the console. It’s not something that’s really well-known, how to do it well. And it’s also something that players just really don’t like. We’re already blazing enough of a new trail that we want to keep as much player goodwill as possible. We’re already doing something that players are very skeptical of. We’ve gotten a lot of comments and a lot of feedback to the effect of, “I don’t think this is going to work on console at all.” Once people play it, I think that they’re a lot more, “OK, this does work.” But that initial “This genre isn’t for consoles!” kind of mindset: If we added microtransactions to it, that would make it much worse. It was just something that we didn’t want to pursue for this first game.

GamesBeat: It’s just something that blows my mind, because every day at GamesBeat, we write or read stories about how EA’s doing something with Mass Effect or Capcom’s doing something with Street Fighter X Tekken or Activision’s got like 80 day-one DLC pieces for Transformers. It just seriously blows my mind that you guys said, “No, we don’t really want to do microtransactions. We just wanted to leave that out.”

Tomandl: Well, we like money. [Laughs] I don’t know. It just felt nicer to have it as a package that the player purchases. And we are planning to do DLC, certainly. We just don’t want it to be like, you have to pay more real money than you’ve already paid for the game to play the game. We’re already trying something so interesting and different that we want to reward people instead of punishing them for trying it out.

GamesBeat: So the last question, which may be a very short answer: Can you speak to the long-term plans for the game?

Tomandl: I think all I can tell you is that we have spoken to the postlaunch tuning. We’ve got a pretty robust system. We can tune any number in the game. And we are planning to do DLC. But I’m not allowed to tell you anything more about that. [Laugh] That makes PR really happy.

Filed under: Games

China’s Perfect World quietly becomes a North American powerhouse in online games (interview)

Dean Takahashi — Thu, 16 Aug 2012 17:00:00 +0000

Asia’s online gamemakers are churning out the profits, but they aren’t well known on the global stage. Perfect World, based in Beijing, is one of those lesser-known companies. But it has made a fortune in free-to-play massively multiplayer online games.

Over the years, Perfect World has become an expert at monetizing free-to-play games, where users play for free and pay real money for virtual goods. The business model has become fashionable and is helping the company move to the forefront of games. In the past 12 months, Perfect World has had trailing revenues of $429 million. Outside of China, it is closing in on $100 million in annual revenue. In North America, nine of its 10 games are MMOs, and one is a first-person shooter. And the company has 350 employees in the U.S. now, and more than 4,500 worldwide.

Perfect World Entertainment, started in 2008, is the U.S. subsidiary of the Chinese company. Chief executive Alan Chen heads the division, based in Redwood City, Calif. It is on the growth path, having acquired Cryptic Studios in Los Gatos, Calif. Cryptic has made MMOs such as Star Trek Online and City of Heroes. Perfect World Entertainment is readying the launch of its RaiderZ online game (which Korea’s Maiet Entertainment developed) and is preparing to launch the Western-style MMO Dungeons & Dragons Neverwinter, which Cryptic Studios is building.

We recently visited Chen at the company’s headquarters. Here is an edited transcript of our interview.

GamesBeat: How many years has Perfect World been set up here in the U.S. now?

Alan Chen: We set up the office in June of 2008. So it’s about four years now.

GamesBeat: Perfect World International was the first game that you brought over into the U.S. market?

Chen: Yeah, Perfect World International. It’s a little confusing. The name of the game is also the name of the company. We try to use “PWI” as the official name of the game now.

GamesBeat: What’s the experience been like, as far as expanding in the U.S.?

Chen: We were pretty committed to the market because we believe that there’s great potential. We have a strategy with different phases. For phase one, we just wanted to leverage whatever product we had available in China. We wanted to polish it, localize it, and bring it to a good level of quality. Then we published it here to grow our business from scratch. I still remember having our meetings in a hotel lobby. We didn’t even have an office in the very beginning. Gradually, we published our first game. By the end of 2008, we made our business profitable. That’s quite amazing, in only half a year.

Right after that, we grew the business 100 percent every year, until recently. We’re still enjoying 30 to 40 percent growth. Of course, it’s more difficult when the numbers get bigger and bigger. Doubling the big numbers is more challenging than doubling the smaller numbers. Now we’re in the second phase of the business. We have a different strategy. In the second phase, since we’ve already grown significantly in the past two to four years. Ever since last year, we’ve started to license third-party games. We are not just bringing over projects from the parent company. We’re licensing and codeveloping new projects — western-style games. We want to make sure we provide high quality and the right style of games to gamers here in America and Europe. We licensed a few games from Korea. We also acquired a company, Cryptic Studios. Their Neverwinter MMO has some high anticipation in the market. That’s our second-phase strategy. We wanted to provide more tailor-made products to western gamers.

GamesBeat: The challenge always seems to be to have success crossing over from one market to the other. I wonder how you look at all the opportunities before you now in that way. You can cross over from different types of games to new types of games. You can cross over from China into the U.S., or cross from Asian content into worldwide content. You could also try different platforms, as well, from the downloadable PC games to browser-based to social and mobile content. How do you look at all these different opportunities right now?

Chen: We started with PC massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), and I still believe there are tremendous opportunities in the MMORPG market. We’re continuing to invest in MMORPGs. However, I look at different platforms — like iOS, Android, or browser platforms — as new initiatives for us, particularly for the American and European markets. The browser market is not as hot as it is in Asia, I believe, because of the culture and the history of video games in the different markets. A very big chunk of business was taken by console games here, and console games are very well represented in the gaming market. Console games gave you a very high quality of experience here, and that made it very difficult for people to accept less quality from the browser space. If a 3D, good-quality game can be developed in the browser or web game space, I believe that’s going to be the future of the market. We’re paying a lot of attention to this. We’re actively looking around at opportunities, be it for investment or codevelopment or acquisition. We think that’s the way to go when the time is right.

GamesBeat: Technologies like Google’s Native Client or Flash 11.4 are making these browser-based 3D graphics technologies possible. We’re close to having some really good 3D browser games.

Chen: Exactly, right. We’re looking at a new generation of 3D browser games. People here aren’t so interested in 2D, although it’s super hot in China. Whenever I went back, people were always talking about browser games. I don’t see that happening in the U.S. The market perception is totally different.

GamesBeat: Does it make sense to do more U.S.-specific content and fewer imported Asian games for the U.S.? Is there a difference in tastes…?

Chen: There are two points I’d want to make. Number one is when we talk about online games, we consider an online game a service. It’s not a product, where you eventually finish the development of the product — the game. Most important is the continued support of that service. When a game launches, it’s just the beginning. It’s not the end of the development process. It’s the beginning of the business. So we need a developer to be able to continuously drive the business higher and higher. Our first choice would be working with our own teams. With our own team, it’s easier to be involved in the future development.

If we use a developer-publisher deal, like we see on the console side, it’s going to be challenging after the developer finishes up its work. The future support becomes questionable. Of course, like I said, we want to provide more tailor-made games to local players — no matter whether we import them from Asia or we develop them here. But we’d like to move away from the projects that are only suitable for China or Asia. We want to make Western games, regardless of who might be the developer. Because Western games in the Chinese and Asian game markets…. It’s not just the cultural or visual differences. Gameplay-wise, they’re also very different.

GamesBeat: Have you seen some teams in China actually make good games for a worldwide audience yet? I think PopCap, for example, has a team in Shanghai that’s just launched a U.S. game. I think Spicy Horse Games, which American McGee runs, is also making U.S. games out of China. I wonder about that possibility.

Chen: Yeah. That’s the strategy of leveraging the cost factor in the Chinese market. It’s still a question of how you introduce your Western game concepts and how you manage the project to leverage those lower costs there. It’s doable. But it’s different from importing a Chinese game from China. If it’s designed for the Chinese market, it can still be popular in other countries. Like PWI, the game we launched — our first project. It was the most successful international game that was originally developed for the Chinese market in China. That game was licensed to more than 40 countries around the world. I consider it the most successful global game from China. It was developed for China, but it also worked in other countries.

GamesBeat: What about the ability of studios in the West…like, say Cryptic…to develop games that are also popular in China?

Chen: I think, in general, the markets in China and the West are different in terms of demands on gameplay. For example, in the Western market, people are more focused on gameplay. People enjoy the experience of directly playing the game. In China, it’s different. It’s more social; it’s about showing off. “How can I get to the maximum level as fast as possible and then player-kill everyone else in one shot?” That’s what a lot of people enjoy. Different gameplay, different market demands. But if you want to make one game that’s universally popular, then that’s very challenging. Especially if it’s an MMO. It’s easier with eSports-type games. That kind of appeal is more universal. But if you want to do an MMO, that’s more challenging.

With Cryptic, we’re working on a very attractive title, Neverwinter. It’s very attractive to the Chinese market, as well. When we took it to ChinaJoy [game show], we drew a lot of attention from the media and from players. However, in order to make a game very successful, it’s going to be challenging if we don’t have some local adjustment to the content. We need to tailor it for local demand. Not only graphics-wise, but also as far as gameplay. In that regard, we will deploy local development teams in different countries and markets we consider significant. We’ll transfer technology to those places to make sure they can produce content tailored for their local markets.

GamesBeat: It seems like League of Legends and World of Warcraft are some of the only ones from the West that have made it in China.

Chen: Yeah. World of Warcraft is different because of their timing in the market. It’s like our game, PWI. If we published it today, it wouldn’t be as successful as it was when we published it four years ago. At that time, high-quality 3D MMOs were not so common in China. So it hit the market at the right time. We acquired players who would stick to the game. They made so many friends there in the game, and eventually they had so much virtual property in the game, that they didn’t want to abandon it. So that’s the trick, in one way: to enter the market in its early stages, when there’s less competition. That’s also one of the success factors for World of Warcraft in China. For League of Legends, it’s a different genre of game. It’s more geared towards eSports. That appeal is more international.

GamesBeat: It seems like the conclusion could be that companies that succeed in a crossover strategy — that succeed in more than one market or one type of game — are the ones that create the most value. If EA has any particular value right now, it’s that a quarter of their revenue is digital. And if Zynga is considered valuable by anybody still, then it’s because they have so much investment in mobile. Somebody who’s crossing over from their stable base in social games on Facebook, say, and moving into mobile…. If they succeed, then their stock price will go back up. Would you agree with that assessment: that any company that succeeds in a transition like that is going to be one of the more valuable companies?

Chen: Exactly. If you can make your games more appealing to an international market, then by all means you can create value. You might build a special genre like eSports, where you don’t need to localize it too much to make it appeal to all the markets. Or you might have to deploy local resources and make sure you have a local…. I’ve always believed localization will pay off with local demand. Even between the Chinese-speaking markets in China and Taiwan. They’re still different. Either you focus on one market, the original market, and you just make your money there, or you should do your best in every market, which means listening to the requirements of those different markets and making a change — creating different content locally. I believe that’s the way you can succeed, with an MMO or with online games in general.

GamesBeat: It’s interesting to look at which companies can afford to do this now, too. If you look at THQ, they’re a $500 million dollar company still, but they can’t afford to invest in mobile and social anymore. They’re going to invest just in console games.

Chen: Actually, the investment in social and mobile is not something that’s so challenging or difficult. It’s all about strategy. The cost isn’t much. If you look at most of the mobile developers, there’s a lot of them, actually, that are just one, two, three, or five people. For a big company like THQ, which has 100 or 200 employees, they could easily afford to start in this business. So the challenge isn’t the investment. The challenge is does it make sense? You’re jumping into a very crowded pool against a lot of those developers with just two or four people. You’re one of thousands of developers, and there are thousands of new games that queue up in the App Store waiting to be published every week. So that’s the challenge. It’s not coming up with the investment. The challenge is what’s the hook? Your odds of getting in the top 25 are very long.

That’s had us thinking very dynamically in recent days. Where will be the next move? What will be the next booming business in the gaming market? What’s making people think this way is mobile gaming makes the barrier to entry very low. Anyone can get into this kind of gaming now. Because of the popularity of the iPad or mobile phones, people can enjoy kinds of gameplay that weren’t possible on mobile devices. It’s diversified the way people use their time, especially small bits of time. Given that so many people can develop these kinds of games, it makes it difficult for a big company to decide to get into this space. You think of EA, THQ, or us…. How many development teams do you want to establish for mobile projects? Ten? Twenty? Even 50 might not be enough because you’re facing up against hundreds or thousands of other developers. For so many people, it’s so easy to make games now. University students or even high-school students can make a fun game and get a ton of market attention — a lot of market share. For the big guys, it’s challenging. It’s harder for us to move around. Where should we go? That’s why I believe that big companies have to carefully consider what platforms we choose and how we can provide better services. How do we provide something that one or two people can’t? We have to leverage the size of the company to provide a benefit.

GamesBeat: Has that led you to conclude that you should just focus on what you do best?

Chen: Yeah. We’re going to continue to invest in very high-end, high-quality online games. We don’t do everything. If you look at our portfolio recently…. Initially, it was a portfolio of Chinese games only. Then we added licensed Western games. Now we have Neverwinter, as you saw at E3 this year. We’re promoting Neverwinter as our main thing. But we’re thinking, next year, what will be our focus? It has to be something Western-style. We don’t want to go back to just Chinese games. We want to provide a high-quality game and services to local markets everywhere.

GamesBeat: How many people are you at now?

Chen: We have about 180 people here and about 50 people in Amsterdam. And then there are about 70 people providing us with dedicated support in China. Cryptic is about 120 or 140 people. That 180 people doesn’t include Cryptic. So in America alone, we have around 350 people.

GamesBeat: Do you think that’s enough for now? Or do you expect you’re going to have to increase that a lot?

Chen: We’re going to have to do it, like I mentioned. We are considering the next level of strategy. MMOs are one of our cash cows, and we’re going to continue to invest in those, to make sure people can still enjoy playing in virtual worlds. But in the meantime, we’re also looking at new projects, like iOS. That platform is very challenging, but it’s very interesting, and we have a lot of expertise. We’re looking at how to organize our teams and how to invest in this new area. We want to make it into a business, not just a tool to help our publishing. So we’re moving forward in new directions. Very likely, we’re going to expand our investment.

GamesBeat: At some point, once companies expand and they get a hit or two, then they turn it into a third-party platform. Zynga is doing that with Zynga.com, and some other companies are…. Trion is starting to do that, as well. Are you also heading in that direction at some point?

Chen: It’s different. The key factor is what’s your strength? We have to leverage our strength. We don’t just want to do generic stuff, whatever people are doing. I don’t believe in a following strategy. So our strength is free-to-play publishing and know-how and also free-to-play game design and development: virtual money, virtual currency management, and virtual account management.

GamesBeat: Do you believe that free-to-play still has a long way to grow out here?

Chen: Yeah, free-to-play is diversifying in different areas. Initially, when we started our business here, we were kind of the only one: the one company talking about MMO and free to play. But gradually, we’ve seen it expand. There’s Facebook games, browser games, and mobile games. They all offer free to play. So I think free to play is one of the strong growth engines for games in different areas: mobile, Facebook, and online.

GamesBeat: And maybe on the consoles, as well?

Chen: Yeah…. But consoles have a lot of changes there. The key thing for free to play is you need to update very frequently — almost every week. But the current processes with console games — the testing and approval processes — don’t support this. Microsoft, Sony, and all the platform owners need to establish new processes.

GamesBeat: There’s a lot of talk about that now.

Chen: A lot of people talk about it, but it’s very difficult to implement. That’s the reason. They don’t have the ecosystem.

GamesBeat: We’ll see if the next generation of consoles changes things.

Chen: Right, right. Personally, I believe that with the technology involvement…. Eventually, consoles, the PC, and the tablet are all going to consolidate. They’ll be merging together. For gamers and developers, they don’t want to see all these platforms. Gamers want to play the same game on different platforms, wherever they go — no matter when and no matter what device they have. They want easy access to all their games. Developers, meanwhile…their desire is to develop their games for one platform. I don’t know if that’s going to happen, but I think there’s a small number of choices. Nobody wants to develop for three or four platforms because of the difficulty involved. So in that regard, when the market becomes open, that’s when the technology becomes open.

GamesBeat: And then you don’t have to pay somebody 30 percent….

Chen: [Laughs] Exactly, exactly.

GamesBeat: You have some news coming later this year. You have more games coming?

Chen: Yeah, we have RaiderZ. It’s our next action-MMO. Gamers can enjoy something like a console action experience in an online space with social features and community — talking and competing with other players online. You can do all kinds of fighting moves, just like in a console action game. It’s very interesting. We have high expectations. The closed beta is going online today or tomorrow, and the commercial launch will be later in the year.

Our strategy is that we want to focus on our key games. We don’t want to have too many at once. By early next year, we’ll have our next big title, which is Neverwinter. After Neverwinter, there’s a couple of very highly anticipated Chinese games on their way, as well as some international projects from companies like C&C in Japan. The IP is from Japan, but we developed the MMO. That’s going to fill out our portfolio very well as far as a variety of styles.

Filed under: Dev, Games

Riot Games’s path to blockbuster expansion: League of Legends eSport tournaments

Dean Takahashi — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 16:00:16 +0000

Riot Games hopes to turn its hit title League of Legends into a household name by dramatically expanding a professional-gaming league that rewards players with big prizes and recognition.

The game’s developer, which is majority owned by Chinese Internet giant Tencent, is unveiling the League of Legends Championship Series, an eSports worldwide-tournament league where the best players of the downloadable fantasy multiplayer-online-battle game can duel each other across the globe. League of Legends is one of the most successful online PC releases with more than 11 million monthly active players. On average, 2 million to 4 million people already view pro tournaments for the game. The new pro league will feature salaried teams and free high-definition online broadcasts.

Teams will spawn from North America, Europe, and Asia. They will start playing multiple regular-season matches each week in early 2013.

“Talking to players around the world, they repeatedly asked if we could kick League of Legends eSports into higher gear,” said Brandon Beck, cofounder and CEO of Riot Games. “The new League of Legends Championship Series is our answer. Millions of fans tune in every time we support a major League of Legends tournament, so we’re broadening that support in an unprecedented way.”

The top eight teams from North America will battle the best teams from Europe and Asia. Millions of dollars in salaries and prizes will be on the line in the championship series. The European seasonal regional tournament will be staged at the Gamescom expo in Cologne, Germany, from August 16 to 19. The North American seasonal regional tournament will be held at the PAX Prime conference in Seattle, from August 30 to September 2.

The competitors will also battle in the Challenger Circuit, which consists of events hosted by eSports promotions Intel Extreme Masters (IEM), Major League Gaming (MLG), and the IGN Pro League (IPL).

“IEM, MLG, and IPL are invaluable partners, and we’ll continue to work closely with each of them in Season 3 as they foster the next generation of League of Legends competitors,” said Dustin Beck, vice president of eSports at Riot Games.

Riot Games was founded in 2006, and Tencent paid more than $400 million for a majority stake in the company last year. People in 145 countries play League of Legends every day, and it is the most popular PC game in Korea, Taiwan, the U.S., and Europe, according to the company. Online game matches are broadcasted live daily on TV in Korea, with 3.9 million viewers.

Riot Games envisions the series being streamed to tens of millions of fans over time along with offering a multi-million-dollar prize pool.

Filed under: Games