Al Rose is the VP of retail and Internet properties at Telus International

Product development and player support have not always gone hand in hand. In fact, exceptional customer service from a gaming company might be surprising. Considering that the online gaming economy relies heavily on attracting and retaining players, and then moving them to recurring monthly or micropayments, the lack of good customer support is even more surprising. A growing player base requires happy players. Recurring payments requires recurring customers. Customer service should be a given.

On the flip side, the digital entertainment industry is experiencing massive growth. In times of hyper-growth, companies can only manage a certain pace of expansion. During the startup phase, game development is the main focus – it’s all about the release of the game, the company’s core business and raison d’etre. Player support is often a secondary concern, edged out in favor of the frantic pace of design and launch of new games.

Adding to this, some studios still view players as commodities, not customers, which may in part explain why players have low expectations when it comes to receiving support. This is set to change as many studios realize that providing exceptional customer interactions, alongside popular games, can directly impact the bottom line.

As customer service becomes another battlefield for winning over players, how can developers enhance their own game plan for customer support?

• Understand your player: Studios need to develop emotional connections with players, particularly millennials, and match gamers with like-minded customer service representatives. You should staff your customer service team with gamers who are continually leveling-up in the game and able to understand the needs of the players they support.

• Platform-specific service: Customer care needs to suit various types of players. PC game players are often proud of their technical abilities and are more inclined to work with websites or download patches to fix their own problems. In contrast, console game players are convenience-driven and typically prefer having easy access to customer support.

Free-to-play players are used to finding support in community forums or on the developer’s website. This provides a real opportunity for game studios: enhancing the experience of non-paid players will increase their likelihood to recommend the game, potentially moving them to paid player status in the future.

• Capitalize on player feedback: Sophisticated game studios spend considerable resources analyzing player feedback on their games. Analyzing player feedback via customer support channels and funnelling it back to development teams ensures that games reflect the latest player demands. The result is increased player value, playtime, satisfaction, retention and ultimately their likelihood to recommend the game to friends.

• Real-time, multichannel support: Many in the gaming community rely on peer-to-peer player support, but there is a real advantage to offering good customer service directly. Providing 24/7 multi-channel support via voice, email, online and social networks enables your players to interact with you whenever and however they want.

• Social media: Social media is becoming a key outlet for players to battle other players. A social media presence also allows players to engage with developers in real time, in their preferred communication channel. For smaller game studios, it’s an effective way to reach a targeted and relevant audience to and increase their player base.

• Team up: Studios who don’t have the customer service expertise in-house should consider partnering with a contact center provider that does. The company then can focus on their core business, while their partner takes care of the player support infrastructure and delivery. These same providers can also scale up or down their personnel to suit the development and growth of the game.

Maximize player lifetime value

Game studios have a massive opportunity right now. Game players, particularly in the free-to-play sector, may not expect the best customer experience. As the industry becomes increasingly fragmented and competitive, smart game studios can extend their game lifecycle and improve the value of their brand by providing better customer service. A good player support strategy can be a game-changer – where fostering a culture of care will improve the player experience, resulting in player retention and ultimately, player recommendations.

Al Rose is the VP retail and Internet properties at Telus International – a provider of customer care support solutions to global clients including social media and MMO gaming companies.  He serves as an advisory board member to several independent software providers providing social media, MMO gaming, and digital entertainment products. You can reach Rose at al.rose@telus.com.

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Ever since man first learned to walk upright and use the computer to make funny pictures, there have been competitions where people try to make the most humorous scenes. Then man discovered sharpened sticks and started to kill each other with them. But now, those two classic hobbies have found a way to come together in an upcoming game called Photoshop Wars.

Coming this November, Photoshop Wars is a website that will allow users to take part in image-editing competitions. One player will pick a title for the battle (the promotional video, posted below, suggests “The llamas are taking over!”) and then send a challenge to one of their Facebook friends (or any other Photoshop Wars user). Both combatants will then use an image-editing program of their choice to create a picture that best captures whatever the pre-decided title was, at which point they will submit their entries to the Photoshop Wars community. Whichever image receives the most votes will determine the winner. The victor gets experience points that go toward earning new ranks and special profile badges, effectively turning the average Photoshop competition into something more akin to the multiplayer mode in a Call of Duty game.

The two Iceland-based developers, who call themselves The Bluth Company, are hoping to raise $15,000 with crowdfunding site Indiegogo to pay for a better hosting service, new equipment, and the opportunity to work on Photoshop Wars full-time.

While the game hasn’t launched yet, future Photoshop Warriors can go to the official site and sign up to receive updates and more information on the upcoming beta.

In the spirit of the game and Photoshop competitions in general, I have created my own entry for “The llamas are taking over.” I’m pretty sure it would win.

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

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Capcom at Gamescom in Cologne, Germany, officially announced a companion website to the company’s upcoming zombie survival shooter Resident Evil 6. The website, which is only a placeholder site now, will act as a hub of information and gameplay sessions for Resident Evil 6 owners when the game releases this October.

ResidentEvil.net will host a number of features that are generally available for other games, such as Halo: Reach and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, including online game statistics and news from the developer. Along with traditional leaderboards and a friends list, ResidentEvil.net will feature social media notifications for your friends’ in-game achievements, social events for all players, and a secondary out-of-game currency that will unlock in-game items like costumes and digital figurines. And for the single-player campaign, the website will store any in-game documents found so that players can read them from a browser instead of directly in the game.

Events will showcase specific missions (as Epic did a few months ago with Infinity Blade II), where individual players can contribute to a collective mission and earn more points. The top earner will earn a championship badge, which then adds the player to a special leaderboard. Each event will enforce a time limit on the community, and all players contributing to the score will earn points to spend in the store.

Capcom is also developing a ResidentEvil.net app for smartphones and tablets, which will include all of the same features as the website. While the website and app will both be free, users must own Resident Evil 6 and connect their game console to the Internet. For social media functions through Twitter and Facebook, players can select when and how notifications appear: on all devices, phones/tablets, social feeds, and/or in the game.

Resident Evil 6, along with ResidentEvil.net, will release on October 2 on the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and PC.

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

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Ray Bitar, Full Tilt Poker’s CEO, was arrested yesterday on new charges that the poker czar has been involved in a Ponzi scheme.

Bitar had been avoiding arrest by living in Ireland; he was taken into police custody Monday as his plane landed at John F. Kennedy International Airport. The CEO planned the return to the U.S. to face the charges and turned himself over to law enforcement willingly, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Online poker itself has been a beleaguered market over the past year and a half as the federal government debates the legality (or illegality) of online gambling. Currently, Full Tilt’s site is being held hostage by the FBI and U.S. Justice Department, with players’ funds frozen until further notice.

“For the last 15 months, I have worked hard on possible solutions to get the players repaid,” said Bitar in a statement released today.

“Returning today is part of that process. I believe we are near the end of a very long road, and I will continue to do whatever is required to get the players repaid, and I hope that it will happen soon.”

Bitar and many of his colleagues in the world of online poker are being charged with such crimes as illegal gambling, bank fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering. Additionally, Bitar and other Full Tilt executives have been accused of running a Ponzi scheme, as the company allegedly used funds taken from players to pay back other players cashing in their virtual chips.

Eventually, Full Tilt was unable to pay back cashing-out players, leading to a civil complaint that sparked the larger investigation.

“I know that a lot of people are very angry at me. I understand why,” read a statement from Bitar. “Full Tilt should never have gotten into a position where it could not repay player funds.”

Currently, Full Tilt is in acquisition talks with PokerStars, a similar site under similar legal duress. The sale could consolidate the two companies’ legal issues and more efficiently negotiate a deal with the Justice Department.

Online poker had previously been a multibilion dollar business in the U.S. alone; that revenue has since almost entirely disappeared, leaving companies such as these practically bankrupt and former “professional” online poker players in search of real work once again.

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

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The former Disney Interactive veteran is in charge of online strategy for Nintendo’s 3DS and Wii U consoles. That’s important because Nintendo is behind rivals Sony (with its PlayStation Network) and Microsoft (Xbox Live) in pursuing online gaming services. The appointment shows that every game company has to pay attention to online gaming.

With its new Wii U arriving later this year, Nintendo has promised more robust online features. And it is trying to get 3DS handheld owners to purchase retail games through its eShop store.

Orrell-Jones reports to Nintendo of America president and chief operating officer Reggie Fils-Aime.

“Duncan Orrell-Jones brings knowledge and hands-on experience to Nintendo that will help us develop and implement long-term digital initiatives for our systems,” Fils-Aime said. “By creating this new position, we’re demonstrating our commitment to the expansion of our online business, and Duncan is the perfect person for the job.”

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

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Sweeney, a shy but brilliant programmer who helped create the backbone graphics engine for Epic’s blockbusters, predicted in his talk that games will look better and better, and upcoming advances will be so good, that console makers will be able to introduce next-generation machines that will blow us away with their visual quality. That point is up for discussion. Nintendo proved with the Wii that gamers may care more about innovations with the user interface—such as the motion-sensing Wii remote—than they do with graphical quality.

“How good is good enough, and how close are we to that now?” Sweeney asked.

Our eyes are equivalent to the quality of a 30-megapixel camera. You don’t perceive improvements in frame rate beyond 72 frames per second. Many games already run at a rate of 60 frames per second. The best resolution for humans, then, is 8000 x 4000 pixels, or several times better than today’s best displays. That is about 20 billion to 40 billion triangles per second in terms of graphics rendering.

“The limit really is within sight,” Sweeney said.

Graphics technology tries to calculate approximate renditions of reality. In Doom, the id Software first-person shooter from 1993, the developers were able to create a first-order approximation of reality. Now we’re getting enough computing power to get a third order of approximation of reality, as seen in Epic’s Samaritan demo (shown below). Doom’s rendering required 10 megaflops; Unreal in 1998 required 1 gigaflop; and now the Samaritan demo requires 2.5 teraflops, an order of magnitude higher.

Doing a human face with movie-level accuracy is still very hard to do, Sweeney said. He believes that chip makers could double computing power every two years (as predicted with Moore’s Law), and that could continue for quite some time (perhaps even a couple of centuries) with the vertical stacking of chip circuitry and other advances in leading-edge physics.

That’s a bold claim, but predictions about how fast technology will advance in the long term always tend to fall short of reality.

“Within our lifetimes, we will be able to push out enough computational power to simulate reality,” Sweeney said.

Sweeney said he is equally inspired by non-graphical pushes in game technology. He is inspired by advances in 4G ubiquitous wireless networks, sensors, navigation systems, Kinect motion-sensing, and Apple’s Siri voice recognition.

“Kinect carried the technology for sensors to its amazing completion,” Sweeney said. “We are going to see some of the possibilities of what will happen over the next decade or two.”

He is also fascinated by cloud computing, which supplies the intelligent answers to Apple’s Siri via the Internet. He said that OnLive and Gaikai hold a lot of promise in creating cloud-based services where you can play high-end games without needing high-end hardware.

“Only question is whether a game runs in your living room or in a server,” he said. “It’s not going to change everything, but it will make things more convenient for gamers.”

In a wild prediction, Sweeney said that physical resources will become scarce, but virtual resources are unlimited, and we may see more of our economy shift from real-world to virtual goods. The worldwide real estate industry is worth $25 trillion, but a virtual economy could be a lot bigger than that.

Sweeney said he thought that Samsung’s transparent displays (shown at the recent Consumer Electronics Show) and augmented reality smart eyeglasses could be cool as well.

While the world is creating new game platforms now, such as smartphones and tablets, Sweeney thinks that will change, and we will see the industry converge on a smaller number of platforms. He is fascinated that tablet computers are stealing a march on the PC.

“We’ve just barely scratched the surface of the consumer applications of new technologies,” said Sweeney. “It’s going to lead to an entirely new world. I see a bright future for the future of computing and its implications for games. Our industry’s brightest days are yet to come.”

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

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Crytek, the developer behind Crysis and Far Cry, is backing a new social gaming network called GFACE. Created by a “small team with big ideas”, GFACE promises to deliver high quality free to play multiplayer games directly to your browser, while also offering Facebook-like social network features.

Crytek chief executive officer Cevat Yerli is a director of GFACE, and says, “GFACE enables its users to discover and experience entertainment together in real time. We want everybody to play everywhere for free.” With Facebook already offering its users a multitude of gaming opportunites, GFACE looks to be setting itself apart by focusing on providing quality multiplayer games first, and then building its social network around them.

According to the GFACE website, it will be providing a range of gaming experiences, from casual 2D games right up to console quality ‘core’ 3D games. Crytek’s first person shooter Warface is featured heavily on the site, and looks set to be one of the banner titles for the service. Warface is powered by CryENGINE3, the same game engine used for Crysis, Crysis 2, and the upcoming Homefront 2. It promises to deliver visuals that are “without equal” in the free-to-play arena.

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of the GFACE service is that all the games will be delivered via cloud-based streaming technology, much like OnLive or Gaikai. This means that hardware limitations won’t stop users from accessing any of the GFACE games. It also looks set to allow smartphone and tablet users to join in with large scale multiplayer games. A promotional image for the service shows three players with different devices teaming up on a multiplayer first person shooter, with each player taking on a different role.

The GFACE website states, “Because GFACE runs in your browser and is designed for live cross platform fun; it is independent of hardware and operating systems, so you can play with everyone, anytime, anywhere.”

GFACE’s social networking features will allow users to create groups, share links and media, and watch live videos together. The service will also include video chat facilities. While none of these features are unique, having them all in one place, alongside a streaming free-to-play gaming service, makes GFACE a very interesting proposition.

GFACE has just entered its closed beta testing phase. You can register your interest in joining the beta at the official website.

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

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Virgin Gaming, the online tournament gaming division of Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, is announcing today that it has snagged more than a million registered users for its prize-based online gaming tournaments.

Virgin has awarded more than $7 million in cash prizes. Four million game challenges have been issued and players are spending an average of 72 minutes per visit to VirginGaming.com as they play hardcore console games such as Electronic Arts Madden NFL 12 or Take-Two Interactive’s NBA 2K12.

“The numbers are increasing on a daily basis,” said Billy Levy, co-founder of Virgin Gaming and president of the group. “More than 700,000 of those players have signed on in the last four months.”

More and more publishers are adding new options for tournament play through the Virgin Gaming site. Besides EA’s EA Sports and Take-Two’s 2K Sports, other partners include Sony PlayStation, Ubisoft and GameStop.

“We knew we were on to something and that our service had significant potential, we just didn’t realize it would take off as quickly as it did,” said Rob Segal, chief executive of Virgin Gaming.  “Our team continues to evolve the experience on a daily basis, and user feedback has been a key component in our upgrades.”

Virgin Gaming’s tournament play is integrated directly inside the games. The service can match similarly ranked players in tournaments. It can report the results of matches, categorize players into rankings, process secure payments, and provide customer support. Players can compete for online cash, knowing that cheaters will be rooted out of the system, since Virgin offers a “fair play guarantee” with automated game results validation.

Virgin started the service in June 2010. But Levy said the team worked out the kinks for a period of time and the biggest games have really ramped up in more recent times.

Virgin Gaming is now running the Challenge Series tournament on the PlayStation 3, where players are competing in Madden NFL 12, NHL 12, and FIFA 12 for a chance to win over $1 million in cash and prizes in a single tournament. That’s the largest prize money ever for a console-based sports tournament. That tournament will end in April with live finals in New York.

When that happens, Virgin Gaming will begin to compete with Major League Gaming, which sponsors both online and live tournaments around the country. The tournaments can involve players of all skill levels, not just professional gamers. GameStop is also involved in a $100,000 Gridiron tournament with 30,000 players.

“That shows our system can really scale up to large tournaments,” Levy said.

What really helped the tournaments take off was the introduction of “asynchronous play.” In previous tournaments, players had to start playing at 7 pm at night and keep playing all night until they lost.” But now, you can play a game at a time of your own choosing, as long as you can find another player of your same rank at that time. That gives players more flexibility about when they have to play in the tournament.

Levy said that the tournaments are starting with online gaming but could be expanded to mobile and social games, where the company would compete with King.com, Worldwinner and GameDuell.

Levy started the company with his buddy Zachary Zeldin in 2007 during their days at a university in Florida. They followed some of the live tournaments but found those games were dominated by superstars. There wasn’t really a tournament gaming business for ordinary gamers. So they started one and teamed up with Segal, who ultimately introduced them to billionaire Richard Branson.

Branson was actually an early pioneer in video games. His company formed Virgin Games in 1981. The company made acquisitions and steadily expanded its operations, renaming itself  Virgin Interactive in 1994. It fostered some great talent such as David Perry, Louis Castle, and Brett Sperry. Sperry and Castle’s Westwood Studios made memorable games such as the real-time strategy games Dune II and Command & Conquer. But Virgin also made some major duds, such as the movie-based game Demolition Man. In 1998, Virgin sold the game company’s U.S. assets to Electronic Arts, while it unloaded the British game studios in a management buyout.

If Virgin Gaming keeps growing, then Branson will be happy he got back into gaming.

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

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The original layout for the PSN and the PlayStation store was heavy in text and had a lot of information on the screen. The new look is more streamlined, with bigger images and more accessible information, according to the report. It will be similar to the streamlined design of Microsoft’s online gaming network, Xbox Live.

Sony’s online network is a critical service that competes with Microsoft’s Xbox Live online gaming service among others. There are also 948 games now available in the PlayStation Network store, as well as 4,000 pieces of add-on content for games.

Sony’s PSN was offline for 24 days in the United States, and longer in other countries. The company took the PSN down after hackers were able to break in and steal sensitive information about more than 100 million customers. Sony laid indirect blame for the PSN’s downtime on hacktivist group Anonymous, which typically rallies a group of loosely connected hackers under moral or political banners.

PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable owners were unable to download new content for their games and play online with other players. The downtime came at a critical time for two major releases — Portal 2 and Mortal Kombat, both of which prominently featured online play and had received a good deal of critical acclaim.

Sony offered PSN users free games and a whole batch of other welcome-back goodies — like free subscriptions to the company’s premium PlayStation Plus version of the PSN — to entice players to continue using the PSN. The packages will probably appease a large number of console and handheld gaming device owners. But a lot of gamers — myself included — already own those Triple-A titles, and find they aren’t really worth as much as they used to be.

VentureBeat previously published a timeline for the PlayStation Network outage.

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

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

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Sony first focused on bringing its PSN online in the United States, and then Hong Kong and South Korea. The company first brought the service back online in California and New York before turning the service back on in the rest of the United States. It then began bringing the PSN back online in other countries. The company began phased restoration of its PSN service in Japan at the end of May.

The network was offline for 24 days in the United States, and longer in other countries. The company took the PSN down after hackers were able to break in and steal sensitive information about more than 100 million customers. Sony laid indirect blame for the PSN’s downtime on hacktivist group Anonymous, which typically rallies a group of loosely connected hackers under moral or political banners.

PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable owners were unable to download new content for their games and play online with other players. The downtime came at a critical time for two major releases — Portal 2 and Mortal Kombat, both of which prominently featured online play and had received a good deal of critical acclaim.

Sony offered PSN users free games and a whole batch of other welcome-back goodies — like free subscriptions to the company’s premium PlayStation Plus version of the PSN — to entice players to continue using the PSN. The packages will probably appease a large number of console and handheld gaming device owners. But a lot of gamers — myself included — already own those Triple-A titles, and find they aren’t really worth as much as they used to be.

Sony’s online network is a critical service that competes with Microsoft’s Xbox Live online gaming service among others. There are also 948 games now available in the PlayStation Network store, as well as 4,000 pieces of add-on content for games. VentureBeat previously published a timeline for the PlayStation Network outage. You can view the full video of Sony Chief Executive Kazuo Hirai (pictured above) detailing the return of the PSN at the PlayStation blog.

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

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

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But what Activision Blizzard did not announce was when — or if — the map pack would come to players on Sony’s online gaming network, the PlayStation Network (PSN). That could be because the PSN experienced an outage after hackers were able to break into the network and steal sensitive information about more than 77 million PSN users. Sony was forced to take the PSN offline while Xbox Live remained online and flourished during Sony’s downtime.

Call of Duty Black Ops is one of the best-selling video games of all time, with sales of more than $1 billion since the launch in November. Activision Blizzard previously launched its First Strike map pack in February. Itlaunched its most recent map pack, Escalation, in May.

The map packs, which are add-ons for the game that feature new levels for multiplayer matches, are a lucrative business for Activision Blizzard. Both previous map packs are the highest-selling add-ons on Xbox Live, according to Microsoft.

The third map pack, called Annihilation, will give Call of Duty: Black Ops players four new maps: Hangar 18 (one of the most famous buildings in Area 51) Drive-In, Silo and Hazard. The new maps will take gamers to exotic locations like Shangri-La, where they will have to fend off hordes of zombies and avoid traps in the legendary location that’s supposed to be an earthly paradise.

Activision Blizzard has said customers have played the Black Ops game online for more than 2 billion hours since its launch in November. You can expect more Call of Duty fans to log into the Xbox Live service starting today, since they won’t be able to play on the PSN or on Sony Online Entertainment’s PC online games, which were shut down today pending an intrusion investigation.

Activision Blizzard said some time ago that it had sold more than 20 million Call of Duty map packs, generating more than $300 million in sales. So it’s clear that map packs are a big business, and video game publishers may want to avoid publishing rival games on May 3, since gamers will be a little busy. You can catch a full video of the trailer for the map pack below. Activision Blizzard’s first map pack, First Strike, sold more than 1.4 million copies on Xbox Live on its first day of sales.

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

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Trion Worlds on Wednesday showed off a preview of Defiance, a persistent open-world shooting game that takes place in the same universe as an upcoming science fiction television show, also called Defiance, that will air on the SyFy channel. The company announced the game at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles, Calif.

The tie-in means that any event that’s significant in the world, such as a cataclysmic event or a change in the balance of power, will take place in both the game and the series. But the worlds are loosely tied: The game takes place in San Francisco and the series takes place in St. Louis. As a result, the game and series directors can efficiently coordinate events between the two parts of the experience without having to worry about the logistical nightmare of having them tied together all the time. The game and series will be closely tied together, but separate enough to be avoid major consistency headaches.

That also means that the show’s directors can decide to send a character from the series over to San Francisco, and that character will appear in Defiance’s in-game world. Players can interact with that character before he or she heads back to St. Louis to rejoin the cast of the show.

Characters on the show will also talk about some of the most powerful and well-known players in the Defiance world too, said Robert Hill, senior producer at Trion Worlds.

“A character might be like, ‘I just had the most amazing experience in San Francisco,’ and you can be like ‘I was there!’,” Hill said.

Defiance is a third-person over-the-shoulder shooting game like Gears of War. It’s set in the not-too-distant future when Earth has been attacked and partially terraformed by aliens. The open world is part of the San Francisco Bay Area, so it will feature landmarks and other indicators that show the world is still Earth — though it’s lush with alien vegetation and life forms.

Like other MMO games, there’s a progression system that lets characters get experience points for completing objectives and killing enemies. They eventually level up and unlock new skills and abilities and get more health and armor when they earn enough experience points. Some of the skills in the game include creating holograms to distract enemies, lassoing enemies with an energy rope and pulling them nearby or cloaking in a stealth field and sneaking by enemies.

The combat looks very fast paced and it isn’t like some cover-based over-the-shoulder shooters that can sometimes leave players stranded behind walls while they wait for the right time to strike. Players can dash, shoot, jump and jump a second time while in the air in order to avoid attacks from enemies. It seems like the game revolves more around “twitch” gameplay, which relies on players’ skills and reflexes rather than progression in the game to make them more powerful.

The game looks great for an MMO — but that’s to be expected from Trion Worlds, which also runs Rift, another MMO. Rift also looks gorgeous and the worlds are very dynamic and feature a lot of moving objects and environmental effects. The Trion Worlds employees demoing the game blitzed through three or four quests throughout a ten minute demo, so it seems like the progression is very quick and players will be able to cover a lot of events in a short amount of time.

It looks like the game is not relying on “instances,” which other MMO games typically use on to segment the world and make it a little more bearable for the servers on the back-end. For instance, in World of Warcraft, the system transfers players over to separate servers when they are running through a dungeon with five or more people. This use of separate instances helps the back-end servers because they aren’t constantly bombarded with information from everyone all at once. It also means the players get access exclusively to bosses in an instance rather than having to camp out and wait for a boss to re-spawn.

In contrast, Defiance looks like it has players rushing around the world and jumping in and out of groups on the fly to complete quests. When players run by another group completing a quest, they can quickly drop into that group and help complete the quest and then continue on their way. They can also turn and take potshots at the other players if they’re feeling particularly malicious.

The same is true for the games’ large-scale events, called Arkfalls. Those feature large alien-like structures crashing into the group in the open world. All players in the area take place in the Arkfall and have to fend off aliens throughout the event. The Arkfall in the demonstration had players gunning down a giant terraforming pod to spawn a boss. The players then have to take down the boss to get access to the game’s most powerful rewards, and they are split evenly among all players that took place in the Arkfall. It looks like there is theoretically no limit to the number of players that can participate, compared to the limits in other games like World of Warcraft, which cap raids at 25 players.

All that being said, the combat demonstrated at E3 today seemed a little clunky. The movement of the target reticule wasn’t smooth and the hit detection on enemies looked a bit dodgy. When they shot at an alien’s head, the graphic would show up on the alien’s legs and torso even when it was the first shot fired at close range. A lot of that probably has to do with the early nature of the game. The shooting seems a little less refined when compared to other shooters like Gears of War and Uncharted. It also seemed like the skills they were using on-screen weren’t really helping much and the players were just blasting through the game with guns blazing and there wasn’t much strategy involved.

A few companies have taken a crack at creating an open-world MMO that features twitch-based gameplay and shooting. Sony was an early candidate with Planetside, a first-person shooter open world that launched in 2003, to moderately good reviews but was knocked off rails by a weak expansion pack that frustrated gamers. While the Trion team demoing the game was showing it on both an Xbox 360 and a PlayStation 3 simultaneously, the games will all have discrete worlds. That means that PC gamers will only play with other PC gamers, Xbox 360 gamers will play with Xbox 360 gamers, and so on and so forth.

“Those decisions are only up to the platform holder,” Hill said. “Right now we can do cross-platform play but we don’t expect to have that at launch.”

The game will launch relatively close to the television show, but Hill wouldn’t give any additional details about when it will launch. It will go into a closed beta before it finally launches.

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

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The two free games are available for PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable owners and span a number of Triple-A titles that are part of the company’s “greatest hits” series. Those games retailed for around $60 when they first came out but have since seen a price drop to anywhere between $10 and $20 — so that’s not an enormous cost to Sony. The company is also offering a free month’s access to its premium services like PlayStation Plus and Music Unlimited.

Sony first announced that it was bringing the PSN back online late Saturday, gradually turning the servers on across the country. That ended a 24-day period where PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable owners were unable to download new content for their games and play their games online with other players. The downtime came at a critical time when two major releases — Portal 2 and Mortal Kombat, both of which prominently featured online play, came out and received an enormous amount of critical acclaim.

Sony was mostly quiet throughout the downtime, except to lay indirect blame on hacktivist group Anonymous, which typically rallies a group of loosely connected hackers under moral or political banners to take down large companies. Anonymous has denied that it was involved in breaking into and bringing down the PSN. Sony had to offer a hefty welcome-back package to win back the trust of its customers and gamers around the world.

The packages will probably appease a large number of console and handheld gaming device owners. But a lot of gamers — myself included — already own those Triple-A titles and they are not really worth as much as they used to be worth. So Sony might be shooting itself in the foot by skimping on the games they are making available for free to returning PSN users, considering that the biggest titles (LittleBigPlanet and inFamous) either already have a sequel or have one on the way.

The PSN’s downtime has given other online network operators a golden opportunity to reach out to Sony’s gaming audience, and many PlayStation 3 owners have exchanged their consoles for other gaming devices that still have access to an online gaming network. The PSN has around 77 million users, and the company’s online gaming portal, Station.com, has around 24 million users. That means more than 100 million users were forcefully taken offline and kept in the dark for nearly a month as to when they would be able to play their games again.

Sony’s online network is a critical service that competes with Microsoft’s Xbox Live online gaming service — as well as other online gaming services. There are also 948 games now available in the PlayStation Network store, as well as 4,000 pieces of add-on content for games. VentureBeat previously published a timeline for the PlayStation Network outage and credit card information theft scandal. You can view the full video of Sony Chief Executive Kazuo Hirai (pictured above) detailing the return of the PSN at the PlayStation blog.

Here’s a full list of what PSN users are getting, all of which will be available for 30 days after the PlayStation Store (which is still down) is open again.

PlayStation 3 Titles

Dead Nation

inFAMOUS

LittleBigPlanet

Super Stardust HD

Wipeout HD + Fury

PlayStation Portable Titles

LittleBigPlanet (PSP)

ModNation Racers

Pursuit Force

Killzone Liberation

Other Goodies

A selection of rental movie titles will be available to PlayStation Network customers over one weekend, where Video Service is available. Those titles will be announced soon.

30 days free PlayStation Plus membership for non PlayStation Plus subscribers.

Existing PlayStation Plus subscribers will receive an additional 60 days of free subscription.

Existing Music Unlimited Premium Trial subscription members will receive an additional 30 days of free premium subscription.

Additional 30 days and time lost for existing members of Music Unlimited Premium/Basic subscription free of charge for existing Premium/Basic members.

PlayStation Home will be offering 100 free virtual items. Additional free content will be released soon, including the next addition to the Home Mansion personal space, and Ooblag’s Alien Casino, an exclusive game.

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

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Sony Online Entertainment also restored online gaming service for The Station, the PC online gaming network that was also infiltrated by hackers.

The announcement was made by Sony chief executive Kazuo Hirai (pictured), bringing an end to the torment of both Sony, PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable users everywhere that were kept in almost complete silence over when the network would finally be back online. The whole ordeal has been a huge black eye for Sony. The company took the network down right when two blockbuster titles came out — Portal 2 and Mortal Kombat. Both involved a lot of online content, including co-operative and competitive play. Hirai pledged that it has taken a number of measures to improve security.

The PSN’s downtime has given other online network operators a golden opportunity to reach out to Sony’s gaming audience, and many PlayStation 3 owners have exchanged their consoles for other gaming devices that still have access to an online gaming network. The PSN has around 77 million users and the company’s online gaming portal, Station.com, has around 24 million users. That means more than 100 million users were forcefully taken offline and kept in the dark for nearly a month as to when they would be able to play their games again.

They PlayStation Store — where PSN users can go to buy games and other pieces of downloadable content — is still offline, as are some components of the company’s music service, Qriocity. But just about everything else, including online gaming and access to third-party services like Netflix and Hulu, are back online. Right now the PSN is available in New York, California and a few other states in the northeast U.S. — you can find a map of available states here. The current map is pictured above, with the network online for any green state.

“The service is being restored in phases, and I’m pleased to say that the first phase has now been launched around the world,” Hirai said in an announcement on the company’s website. “I can’t thank you enough for your patience and support during this time — we know even the most loyal customers have been frustrated.”

Sony will offering a “welcome back” package for all Playstation Network users. Hirai didn’t give exact details about what would be in the package, but he said that information would appear on the company’s site in the next couple of days. The package will likely include a free month’s access to the company’s premium online service, PlayStation Plus, as well as some games or movies, according to a leaked letter that went out to PlayStation 3 publishers.

Hirai was quick to note that there’s still a chance hackers could find a new way to break into the network — a pretty humbling statement after its network was taken offline for nearly a month. Sony was uncharacteristically quiet throughout the downtime, except to lay indirect blame on hacktivist group Anonymous — which typically rallies a group of loosely connected hackers under moral or political banners to take down large companies. Anonymous has routinely denied that it was involved in breaking into and bringing down the PSN.

“I wish I could tell you that technology is available to completely protect any company against cyber attack, but unfortunately the threat of cyber crime and data theft will continue to plague networks, companies, government agencies and consumers around the world for some time to come,” Hirai said in his announcement.

The PlayStation Network is a critical service that competes with Microsoft’s Xbox Live online gaming service — as well as other online gaming services. There are also 948 games now available in the PlayStation Network store, as well as 4,000 pieces of add-on content for games. We previously published a timeline for the Playstation Network outage and credit card information theft scandal. You can view the full video of Hirai’s announcement at the PlayStation blog.

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

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Lenovo

Beijing-based Eedoo Technology (spelled eedoo by the company) hopes to cash in on the fact that foreign companies like Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft are barred from direct sales in China. Eedoo is funded by Lenovo, China’s biggest PC manufacturer, and it unveiled the iSec (previously known as the eBox) on Friday. The name refers to Sports Entertainment Center.

The iSec uses a 3D depth camera, much like Microsoft’s Kinect motion-sensing system does, so that a user can control the system with hand gestures or body motions. The games that the company has talked about so far focuses on exercise or martial arts. The system also supports other kinds of entertainment such as movies and web surfing or karaoke.

China’s government hasn’t approved the game consoles in the past because they have been focused purely on fun, rather than entertainment. Eedoo has an edge in getting approval because it is locally made and it is family friendly, with a focus on health and entertainment.

Jack Luo, chief executive of the company, said the company will focus on the Chinese market first. He did not disclose the price. China’s online game market based on the PC is going through a boom right now, with overall revenues expected to hit $5.8 billion in 2011, according to Niko Partners. Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft are still trying to get approval to sell their machines in the country. Zeebo, another low-cost console maker, launched in China with a focus on education titles.

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

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Sony brought the network down last month after hackers broke in and stole sensitive information about more than 100 million PSN and Station.com users. The network has been offline since then, with no additional details about when the site would come back up. This is the first indication about when the online network might finally be back online for the PSN’s 77 million registered users.

“We understand that many of you are eager to again enjoy the PlayStation Network and Qriocity entertainment services that you love, so we wanted you to be aware of this milestone and our progress,” Sony spokesperson Patrick Seybold wrote in a blog post. “We will provide additional updates as soon as we can.”

The whole ordeal has been a huge black eye for Sony. The company brought the network down right when two blockbuster titles came out — Portal 2 and Mortal Kombat. Both involved a lot of online content, including co-operative and competitive play. Sony held a press conference where the company’s top executives — including Kaz Hirai (pictured above) — apologized to users and gamers everywhere for more than an hour and a half, but it still might not have been enough for the gaming company that has to face off against other major gaming companies whose networks are still alive and kicking.

Purdue University security expert Dr. Gene Spafford told Congress that security experts knew Sony was running outdated versions of the Apache Web server software that did not have a firewall installed. Sony said hackers were able to breach the PSN and steal sensitive data while the company was fending off denial of service attacks from Anonymous, an online hacker group that typically takes up politically charged causes.

Sony laid indirect blame for the intrusion and PSN outage on Anonymous yesterday, saying Anonymous’s denial of service attack left Sony with its doors open for other hackers to come in and steal sensitive information. The hacker group said today it is not responsible for the theft of sensitive information and credit card data from Sony’s PSN.

The PlayStation Network is a critical service that competes with Microsoft’s Xbox Live online gaming service — as well as other online gaming services. There are also 948 games now available in the PlayStation Network store, as well as 4,000 pieces of add-on content for games. You can find a timeline for the Playstation Network outage and credit card information theft scandal here, courtesy of VentureBeat’s gaming guru Dean Takahashi.

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

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

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Handman replaces Mike McGarvey, who becomes OnLive’s chief strategy officer. The new hire reflects OnLive’s need to have both a technical executive in charge of operations and someone who has relations with the major entertainment studios, said OnLive chief executive Steve Perlman in an interview.

It also means that OnLive is moving on to a new stage of growth, moving beyond providing a cloud-based gaming service to also offering, at some point in the future, other kinds of entertainment on its cloud service.

Perlman confirmed in December that OnLive plans to stream movies to users, starting sometime in 2011. Handman will help expand into the broader entertainment business, Perlman said today.

Perlman said that OnLive, a nine-year-old company that started offering its online game service last year, has grown to more than 200 employees and it needs someone with technical know-how to take charge of operations, engineering, and other business units. That will free Perlman up to do other things and it means McGarvey can focus on executing a lot of partnership deals and financial agreements.

Handman has 25 years of experience managing tech companies. During his tenure as COO of Pandora, the music-streamning service grew to more than 75 million users. Perlman said Handman’s knowledge of streaming will be important to OnLive, which also relies on web-connected data centers to stream high-end games to players on a variety of devices.

OnLive investors include Warner Bros., Autodesk, Maverick Capital, AT&T, British Telecommunications, and The Belgacom Group.  Because its technology is potentially disruptive to traditional game retailers, investors recently valued the company at $1.1 billion.

[photo credit: Bob Adler]

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

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