With Microsoft’s announcement of the Xbox One this week, the slate of consoles for the next generation has become a known quantity. Each major game console maker has revealed its strategy, and game industry veterans can now weigh in on who has the best plan. But the competition in games isn’t limited to just the consoles anymore. Mobile devices, the PC, and a host of Android-based devices are hitting the market at the same time.

We asked what some smart folks in the game industry thought about who was going to win the game platform war, now that the chips are on the table. The question was simple: who will win? Among the choices we gave them were: Nintendo Wii U, Sony PlayStation 4, Microsoft Xbox One, Ouya, Android, iOS, the PC, and Other. Here’s some of our responses. Please comment on your own favorite and explain why. And please take the poll at the end.

The real answer, of course, is that consumers are going to win. But first, they’ll have to sort out a variety of factors that include price, launch timing, game costs, other services, backward compatibility, cross-platform play, used game rights, always-connected to the Internet, and the best games.

Chris Petrovic, former head of GameStop Digital Ventures

Of course, the right answer should be that the consumer looks best in that there have never been more compelling platforms on which to game then what we now have – just look at the list!

I really don’t see this as a binary answer. Each of these platforms can and will capture a meaningful share of consumers share of time and wallet. There seems to be general consensus in the game industry that it will continue to follow the ebbs and flows of its media brethren — movies, TV, etc. — in that the incumbent platforms will still provide the richest, most immersive premium experiences for the enthusiast while the newer platforms will appeal to the masses because they win on price and convenience.

As it relates to the competitors within each sector, Nintendo has lost the living room and should focus on opening up its IP to third party platforms. As between Microsoft and Sony, the one that has the best exclusive content will win. Free-to-play models will not work because the platforms are not conducive to indie developers and also because discovery will be a problem along the lines of what we see in mobile.

And as between Apple and Google, Google will win because of its market share and also because it has a better chance of solving content discovery.

Dennis Fong, chief executive of video game social network Raptr

The days of a gaming-only device are numbered, given the rise of smartphones and tablets as viable gaming platforms. So with that in mind, i think Microsoft is better positioned than Sony for the future. Microsoft has added some really cool features to make it a lot more useful and interesting in the living room.

That said, content is king. Since both MS and Sony have great exclusive games, neither will be going away any time soon. Microsoft did lock up some strong exclusives on the nongaming side though, such as the NFL, which should pay dividends in the future.

Ubisoft

It’s impossible to say whether Sony or Microsoft has the “edge,” as both consoles boast their own distinguishing features and will appeal to consumers for different reasons – for example, Microsoft has integrated the next Kinect technology into the console, which provides players a new interactive experience. Meanwhile, Sony proposes a seamless experience for all PS4 games in the Vita. These two different approaches will appeal to different types of gamers. And as developers, we’re excited about the potential both machines hold.

Tim Chang, managing director at Mayfield Fund and investor in game companies such as Ouya

On the record: I’m super-bullish on the new Xbox – they have so much buzz, momentum, and cool new features going for them that I think they’ll continue to pull ahead of Sony PS4. [There will be] some cool new titles for Sony PS4 for sure, but the battle going forward is going to be about connected functionality and cloud-driven services in addition to what hot new exclusive titles you can launch with and how much eye candy they pack.

iOS will keep innovating interconnectivity between phone, tablet, and TVs, so we’ll see tablet-plus connected TV gaming converging. Android will try to keep up, but the Bluetooth SW stack for native Android as well as the fragmented implementations by Samsung and other OEMs are actually a major hindrance for getting next-gen controllers to pair and communicate over BT. …

And of course I’m bullish on Ouya helping to drive a renaissance for indie developers – like the way XBLA, Steam, etc., should have been.

The promise of cloud gaming is still pretty cool, especially if it allows for great PC online titles like Eve, World of Warcraft, World of Tanks, Minecraft, etc., to be played on tablets and TVs

David Cole, analyst at DFC Intelligence

Overall, there has to be some concern that Microsoft is biting off more than they can chew. With no backward compatibility, the Xbox One is starting from scratch. Microsoft had a huge success with the Kinect, and that could be their downfall. The Kinect helped draw in a significant number of mainstream consumers. However, the Xbox brand resonated primarily with a core gaming group. Microsoft shouldn’t assume they that group will automatically stay around as they try and target the elusive mass market. Sony learned that lesson the hard way in the transition from the PlayStation 2 to the PlayStation 3. In the U.S., Microsoft has a major advantage but they could easily screw that up very quickly. We only need to look at Nintendo’s disastrous recent product launches for a lesson. This will be a marketing game and right now Sony seems to be winning.

Tim Merel, managing director at Digi-Capital

We believe the games market is splitting into “value” and “volume” markets. That prediction has not only come to pass but continues to accelerate dramatically. From platform, business model and geographic perspectives, we see more fundamental divergence than we did at that time. This has major implications across the entire games ecosystem (hardware, platforms, publishers, developers, enabling tech). We think that the coming 18 months will see even greater transformation than has gone before.

We continue to see the volume markets of high engagement, connected (mobile/tablet, iOS, Android, Over The Top [“OTT”]) and cross-platform (iOS, Android, OTT)/online [PC/web]) delivering long-term mass market growth. Despite (and partly because of) recent announcements, we see the value markets of console- and subscription-based MMO remaining large long term niches. [They are] till great places to operate, valuable, capable of producing great games companies and great games, but generally not on the same scale or with the same growth rates and profitability as the volume markets. Some of these value markets are trying to transform themselves into volume markets, and they may succeed in doing so despite the challenges. Naturally this is not absolute and there could be many exceptions.

Dan Fiden, partner at Signia Ventures

Nintendo is in a tough spot. They could have a terrific mobile business — now might be the time to consider building or licensing for iOS and Android.

This generation of game-focused hardware consoles will be smaller than the last, and fewer publishers will be willing to make $20 million bets on the blockbuster games that sell the hardware. Microsoft’s announcement indicates they’re not focused on insuring they retain the game hobbyist market. Their ability to retain them will say a lot about the power of players’ investment in affinity for the Xbox Live community.

iOS and Android are the most important platforms in this generation: Penetration of the hardware is outstanding, they’re generally developer friendly partners, and the tablet’s potential as a gaming device is still largely untapped. Couple that with the possibilities around AirPlay, increasing mobile development budgets and corresponding increase in quality and depth, and migration of very talented core development teams to iOS and Android. There’s an argument to be made that the winners of this generation have already been decided.

Ouya is a great story, but it will need to focus on building a brand and community for gamers — like Kongregate, or Humble Bundle combined with Xbox. The key is to become the Android game “channel” and to move away from participating in the brutal Android hardware refresh cycle. Hiring Kellee Santiago was a great move in this regard.

Jason Kay, principal at K2 Ventures

It seems safe to say at this point that Nintendo is likely to follow Sega’s lead in moving out of the hardware business and focusing on all of the amazing brands and games in their stable (Zelda, Donkey Kong, etc). It seems hard to fathom that the Wii U can ever recover, and it feels like the only portable business is the smartphone business.

Microsoft and Sony are are in a very tight race. I expect it will largely be a replay of 7th generation with both consoles selling well, and consumer choice most likely based on affinity and account transfer” rather than any one emerging a big winner. Microsoft clearly has a huge edge in the Xbox live architecture, subscriber numbers, and functionality, but but Sony looks strong and has some unique selling features like the cloud steaming system that could become game changers.”

I think that the PC will get stronger vs. the other two AAA consoles, but it probably has a ceiling because of price and the disintegrating PC marketplace vs tablet. There is an argument that tablet/laptop hybrids are going to take over. Perhaps that is true and then the line between these 3 and “mobile” below will blur quickly.

Android and iOS will continue to strengthen, with iOS in the premium segment and Android in a broader, value segment. The Android store should reach similar quality and ease of use to iTunes, if it hasn’t already, so that old advantages of a tighter payment loop of iTunes will disappear.

At some point, The ios and Android will reach dollar sales parity with the former three. Scary, but it seems inevitable. So by that measure, mobile probably “wins.” As you know, I think that happens as the games get PS3 level on tablet and the console pubs start porting down to tablet. There is a pricepoint question, though.

On Ouya: I’ve known Roy (Bahat, Ouya chairman) and Julie Uhrman (Ouya CEO) for a long time and am rooting hard for them. I think that its fair to say that I am excited for the launch and keeping my fingers crossed for great things. I think overall people want to call winners and losers way to early in the game.

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Please take the poll below.

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

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Before this moment in time, desolate planets, The Jungle Book, and Breaking Bad‘s Gustavo Fring weren’t often lumped together. That’s no longer the case thanks to developer Bungie.

The studio released a new CG trailer for its upcoming shooter Destiny. This video starts with actor Giancarlo Esposito, who played Fring on AMC’s Breaking Bad, reading The Jungle Book to a child. Esposito emphasizes a particular passage that illustrates the strength in numbers wolves get from their pack. This is all intercut with cinematic action sequences of armored fighters battling on harsh planets.

The video ends with a tease the Bungie will debut the game in action on June 1o at Sony’s press event during the Electronic Entertainment Expo trade show. Destiny is due out on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 in 2014.

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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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Nothing can stop the next-gen hype train now that Microsoft and Sony have both unveiled their new home consoles. Sony showed off its PlayStation 4 in February, and Microsoft did the same yesterday with its Xbox One. We now know the basics about each device, and that gives us a chance to look at each system to decide which one is best prepared to win over gamers’ hearts this holiday and beyond.

First, let’s get some basics out of the way. We don’t know the price. We barely know about the games. Each company, and their partners, will certainly show more at the Electronic Entertainment Expo trade show in early June. Until then, we’re simply working from the visions that Microsoft and Sony attempted to establish with their announcements.

Analyst Jesse Divinch, the vice president of insights at industry-analysis firm EEDAR, thinks it’s too early to tell.

“It’s always difficult to determine winners and losers off of highly choreographed presentations, but from other experiences, it is too close of a call to say one presentation was better than the other,” said Divinch. “From EEDAR’s view point, both were successful in demonstrating their platform’s core experience, and we believe that both Microsoft and Sony will realize market success at launch and through 2017. It’s too early to predict who will have a larger market share, but we are confident in saying that both will be profitable and viable platforms for third-party developers.”

Let’s look at the facts and then you can decide.

Hardware separated at birth

Microsoft has already lifted the curtain on the design for its new box. The PlayStation 4′s aesthetics are still under wraps. That doesn’t really matter, because gamers know that true beauty comes from within.

When it comes to internals, these two consoles are nearly identical. That’s because both are using the same AMD Jaguar accelerated processing unit that combines the computational and the graphical processing on to a single, streamlined chip.

The Xbox One collection.

Both systems have eight cores running at around 1.6GHz, with 4MB of L2 cache. Things don’t diverge significantly until we look at the system memory. Again, both systems have 8GB of RAM, but the PS4 uses the speedier GDDR5 memory that can stream data at 5,500MHz, while Xbox One’s DDR3 RAM tops out at 2,133MHz.

That translates into a huge difference in the amount of memory each system can move at any one time. That gives the PlayStation 4 a clear edge in raw computing power – but it’s not as simple as that. Microsoft specifically designed Xbox One to offload computation into the fabled cloud.

“There are a growing number of transistors in the cloud that you can move the [computational] loads onto,” Microsoft software expert Boyd Multerer said in during an Xbox One panel. “I think it’s an inflection point. So — over time — your box gets more powerful. We move loads into the cloud to free up resources on the box.”

The idea is that Microsoft will continually get better at handling certain kinds of computations (artificial intelligence, for example) on its servers. This will open up One’s local hardware so it can process more detailed visuals and other kinds of data.

That’s the plan, anyhow. It is up to game developers to follow through with that.

Meanwhile, Sony’s Gaikai cloud service might be able to do the same thing, but it looks like it is attempting to unload entire game demos into the cloud rather than piecemeal portions each title.

In the end, these two machines are a pair of powerful PC-based gaming rigs that should produce high-quality graphics.

Gaming or multimedia features

If PlayStation 4 is a slightly more powerful Xbox One — or Xbox One is a slightly slower PlayStation 4 — then what separates these devices?

The answer to that question is features: software, social capabilities, and more. These two companies presented varying takes on what a gaming console is. In fact, Microsoft made a big stride toward leaving behind the notion that Xbox is a gaming brand.

According to Microsoft, Xbox One is an all-in-one multimedia powerhouse. It will control your TV and your sports. It will connect you with your family with 1080p Skype calls. The software company is using its core competency, Windows, to flesh out Xbox One’s features. It wants to do everything you consider entertainment — and while that might include games, it also includes a whole slate of other things as well.

To power all of this, Xbox One uses a “touch of windows,” as VentureBeat gadget guy Devindra Hardawar puts it, to quickly switch between live TV, applications, and games. The result is a speedy operating system that didn’t hesitate to immediately gratify the onstage presenter’s every need during Microsoft’s event.

Sony, on the other hand, focused the PlayStation 4 on games. Likewise, nearly all of its features attempt to improve the playing experience. Right at the top of that list is a new Share button on the DualShock 4 controller.

This is the company’s one-step solution to broadcasting livestreams of gameplay to websites like Ustream. It also enables players to send brag clips to friends and to social media sites like Twitter.

All of that doesn’t mean Sony won’t have a vast multimedia strategy for PlayStation 4, but it’s clear it thinks the key to success — at least at first — is through the heart of its core gaming audience.

The many unknowns

Then we have the controversies. If one thing set apart the PlayStation 4 announcement from the Xbox One announcement, it was that Sony was able to avoid upsetting fans while Microsoft inadvertently threw some rocks at a monster closet full of angry gamers.

Right now, we don’t know how Microsoft’s new console will handle used games. We don’t know the details of its online requirement. The company says the Xbox One requires the Internet, but it won’t detail what that means. It says it is designing the system to allow trade-in games, but it won’t tell us what that means, either.

On all of these hot-button issues, Microsoft first gave a confusing swarm of contradictory answers before falling back on one company line: “All policy decisions are still being finalized.”

Sony is better off, but not by much. Following its February event, the company stated that PS4 doesn’t require a constant Internet connection. The used games issue is far more muddled.

Sony worldwide studio head Shuhei Yoshida told Eurogamer that “used games can play on PS4.” When pressed on the issue, however, Sony told Game Informer: “We are just now announcing the basic vision and strategy for PS4, and we’ll have more information to share regarding used games later this year.”

That is a very ominous response. How hard is it to share a vision where all used games work all of the time? For Microsoft and Sony, apparently it is very difficult.

These unknowns are only a problem for now. It’s possible both companies will fully explain everything and we will happily greet the answers — or we’ll have something very specific to complain about.

So, who’s winning?

This is a pretty silly question. It depends on who you ask and what you want from a big box that sits alongside your television. Gamers are clearly excited with Sony’s laser-focused vision on core gaming experiences. Microsoft seems equally confident that it can conquer the world with nothing but Call of Duty: Ghosts (a multiplatform game) and some video functionality.

That might appeal to an audience outside of core gamer circles. But ask Nintendo how that strategy works out in the end.

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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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Here’s something you might not know: One mouse click burns 0.00142 calories. In action-role-playing PC games like Diablo III, you’ll click that mouse literally thousands of times. And according to developer Blizzard Entertainment’s statistics (assuming one monster death equals one click), all that clicking has led players to burn 4.7 billion calories.

Who needs exercise when you have Diablo III?

Blizzard celebrates the first year of its action-RPG with an infographic [see below] full of all sorts of crazy numbers, like players killing 3.3 trillion monsters or finding over 648 trillion pieces of gold. Diablo III requires a constant Internet connection, which led to a catastrophic launch last year filled with errors, negative user reviews, and memes. In spite of its rocky start, 14.5 million unique players have fought against Diablo’s horde of demons.

For its second year, Blizzard is exposing Diablo III to a new set of players — PlayStation owners. During Sony’s PlayStation 4 event in February, Blizzard revealed that Diablo III will head to both the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 3 with console-specific changes and features. I can’t wait until Blizzard tells us how many calories we’ll shave off from pushing those analog sticks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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If you cheered Electronic Arts’ decision to end its three-year-old Online Pass program, I’ve got some advice: Don’t fly the victory flag quite yet.

I’m on record calling the Online Pass a fairly smart way to cut in on the used-game market. Inserting a one-use-only code that unlocked a chunk of a game — the multiplayer mode, say — didn’t punish EA’s customers, but a second-hand buyer had to cough up an additional fee to get those features. Consumer friendly? Absolutely not. But as a business tactic, the Online Pass addressed a real financial problem, and other publishers quickly adopted it as a growing industry standard.

“We listened to what the consumer was saying, and it just didn’t look like it was popular,” EA communications vice president Jeff Brown told me at a pre-E3 event this week. “When mainstream consumers make it clear they don’t like something, we listen to them.”

Brown added that with the new console generation coming, “it was time to either do it again or stop doing it. We’re not going to do it again.”

They might not have to.

Leaked details on both Sony’s PlayStation 4 and the successor to Microsoft’s Xbox 360, codenamed Durango, suggest both systems may not support used games. We continue to hear that each requires an always-on Internet connection — an excellent way to verify a first-use disc and reject a second-hand game. Sony also filed a patent on radio-frequency-tag technology designed to handle that verification without an online component.

If true, Sony and Microsoft can handle the used-game issue at the console level, whether it’s a partial or total lock. Then Electronic Arts can and should exercise a little realpolitik, step aside, and let the console manufacturers take the heat.

Indeed, an Online Pass might conflict with whatever system Durango and the PS4 put in place. Possibly, it violates the new consoles’ technical certification requirements — the set-in-stone rules for publication approval on a hardware platform. Certainly, it would become an unnecessary hurdle for customers to jump before playing their brand-new game, and adoption of the Online Pass in the secondary market was fairly low, netting $10-15 million a year, tops. So why not get rid of the thing?

When I put the question to Brown, he had to beg off slightly. “I can’t talk about what my partners are putting into their consoles,” he said, citing terms of confidentially that won’t lift for a while yet. But he added, “You’re making a good point.”

I’ve reached out to other companies, like Warner Bros. Interactive, who’ve used Online Pass-like content locks in the past. So far, no one is confirming or denying their plans to keep using them in the future. But don’t be shocked if they start slowly phasing out.

And don’t celebrate the demise of the Online Pass. It might have felt onerous to charge second-hand users extra for on-disc content, but that content and those charges were always fairly minor. What’s coming next might not be nearly so limited in scope.

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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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Gran Turismo 6 is real, and it is coming to Sony’s PlayStation 3 console this fall.

Developer Polyphony was absent from Sony’s PlayStation 4 reveal. Now, it isn’t talking about the PlayStation 4 for Gran Turismo 6. Instead, the studio is preparing over 1,200 cars and 77 tracks for the outgoing PS3, according to GTPlanet News.

Sony and Polyphony are holding an event at the Silverstone raceway in the U.K. today, where it is revealing details about the next iteration of the beloved driving title. In addition to the 1,200 cars, series creator Kazunori Yamauchi plans to add more customization options. This might come at a price, however, since Polyphony is focusing on downloadable content for GT6.

We’ve reached out to Sony to ask about the possibility of a PlayStation 4 version, and we will update with its response.

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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 spent a lot on development, research, and production for the PlayStation 3. The Japanese consumer-electronics company learned a lot since the launch of that system and says the PS4 won’t cause the same kind of financial strain on its bottom line.

“Unlike PlayStation 3, we are not planning a major loss to be incurred with the launch of PlayStation 4,” Sony chief financial officer Masaru Kato said in a call to investors. “At the time we developed PS3, we made a lot of in-house investments to develop the [Cell chip]. Development of the chip saw the silicon processing and all the facilities invested by us ourselves.”

Sony designed the Cell chip and saddled itself with those production costs. With the PlayStation 4, Sony contracted AMD to provide a more off-the-shelf solution that will streamline production and development. Studios should also have an easier time with the AMD-based tech, since it so closely mirrors the infrastructure of a PC system.

“This time, yes we have a team working on chip development, but we already have existing technology to incorporate and also product investment and all the facilities will now be invested by our partners, other foundries, so we don’t have to make all the investment in-house,” said Kato.

At the time of the PS3′s launch, Sony passed the cost of the system on to consumers with a massive $499 and $599 price for the two debut versions of the hardware. That sticker shock caused many gamers to shy away from the PS3 early in its life.

The company still isn’t talking price for PlayStation 4, but it might want to pass its savings on to costumers this time around just to help it get off to a better start.

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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 is a profitable company for the first time in half a decade.

The Japanese conglomerate reported total revenues of $72.3 billion for its fiscal year that ended March 31. That is up 4.7 percent from the previous year. The company also generated $435.7 million in profit, which is up significantly from a loss of $4.6 billion last year.

This turnaround is due to favorable foreign exchange rates, which have hurt Japanese companies over the last few years. It’s also due to Sony getting costs for its LCD television and Sony Mobile businesses under control.

The PlayStation, however, did Sony no favors in fiscal 2013.

Sony’s PlayStation home video game console business was down 12.2 percent year-over-year, with revenues at $7.2 billion, down 12.2 percent compared to the the last annual period. It’s operating income (its profits after taking out expenses) was down a massive 94.1 percent to $17.2 million.

Sales of the PlayStation 3 were down from 18 million in FY2012 to just 16.5 million in 2013. Handheld sales were up slightly from 6.8 million to 7.0 million, although the company didn’t delineate between PlayStation Portable and PlayStation Vita numbers.

Software wasn’t any better for Sony. Across its home consoles, the company sold 153.9 million pieces of software for the year. That is down compared to 164.5 million in FY 2012. Vita and PSP software also took a hit, dropping from 32.2 million to 28.8 million.

Sony doesn’t expect much from PS3 or Vita in its next fiscal year. The company believes it will sell 10 million home consoles and 5 million handhelds.

Clearly, they are waiting for the PlayStation 4 launch to reinvigorate the PlayStation brand.

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

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We’re coming close to the one year anniversary of my first article that made the front page of Bitmob. It was about my bromance with Garrus Vakarian in the Mass Effect trilogy. At the time, I was excited to share my favorite moments from Mass Effect 3. The article was the deciding factor in my wanting to begin a career in games journalism, but it’s also my most cherished article because it came from the heart of an innocent gamer. I hadn’t then been exposed to the greater gaming community.

A lot has happened since last April. I’m sure I don’t need to recap all the events for you; this isn’t that kind of retrospective. I’m more concerned about the video game community itself.

A year ago, I was pretty naive about our community. I thought it was filled with a bunch of passionate gamers who liked discussing their favorite hobby over the Internet. Bitmob itself was a great place — maybe too great. It truly was a shelter from the legions of trolls that infest the Internet. Eventually, the more I invested in Twitter, the uglier the conversations became, the more websites I visited, and the more bickering that went on.

Why would anyone want to be a part of this industry? I’ve asked myself this question a lot recently. Everywhere I turn, I see arguments about violence, sexism, and bigotry. I wish I could go back to last April, when I decided to write about video games. I would tell my former self to just enjoy the hobby and not try for a career in it.

I always feel awkward when someone asks me what I want to do for a living. Whenever I reply, “I want to write about video games,” I feel an awkward chill run down my spine. Recently, I realized that chill isn’t because most people view video games as childish but because I’m ashamed to associate with our community. Video games are no longer a children’s toy, but gamers sure as hell still act like children.

Last year, Electronic Arts was voted the most evil company in America, and it looks like it will be receiving that title once again. Really? How about the companies that skyrocket prices on pharmaceuticals or create a monopoly off blood diamonds? There is a laundry list of companies out there that treat humans and the environment like garbage, yet a software publisher is voted the most evil company in America because a bunch of gamers didn’t like the ending of Mass Effect 3. No wonder I’m ashamed to associate with this crowd. It’s pathetic; it’s disgusting.

I know I’m coming off as pessimistic, but this is coming from anger. I’m angry that women are treated terribly from all angles in this community. I’m tired of seeing the trolls get more attention than those who are actually trying to add value to conversations. However, every once and awhile something great happens — something that revitalizes my love for video games. Two recent dates come to mind: February 20 and March 26, or the reveal of the PlayStation 4 and the release of BioShock Infinite, respectively.

On the day of the PS4 reveal, Twitter was vibrant and optimistic. Everyone was sharing their favorite PlayStation memories, and there were great discussions about predictions and what Sony needed to reveal. From the early hours of the morning to late at night, after the two-hour presentation, it was a great day to be a gamer — not because a new console was announced but because everyone put down their weapons for a day and shook hands in excitement.

On March 26, an amazing video game came out: BioShock Infinite. The Internet was abuzz once again. Everyone was enjoying common experiences in Columbia. A week later, great conversations are still being had — another example of trolls and white knights alike dropping their issues and sharing something together.

These significant events show how great our community can be. Sadly, it seems it can only sustain such greatness for a single day.

A lot has happened since last April. I’ve made great friends and played some fantastic games, but that feels overshadowed by a colossal community filled with pettiness. As long as the web is the main method of discourse for this industry, it will never get better.

I wish I had some answers, but I don’t. Remember, my first article was written only a year ago. I have no influence in this industry, but maybe one day I will, and I’ll have some answers then. Until that day comes, I think we should all ask ourselves one simple question: why would anyone want to be a part of this industry?

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

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A lot of racing-simulation games put equal emphasis on drizzling the car porn along with the actual driving experience. Now the genre’s new core pillar is social interaction. DriveClub, from Motorstorm developer Evolution Studios, earned a staring role at Sony’s PlayStation 4 announcement event for an attention to fine detail that bordered on outright lust … and a focus on collaborative, asyncronous gameplay that drops you into an actual racing team of friends facing off against other player teams. “We’re making the game we’ve always wanted to make,” said game director Matt Southern.

Only it seems Eutechnyx already made it, and it’s called Auto Club Revolution.

“They overlap 100 percent,” says Darren Jobling, the owner and chief operating officer at Eutechnyx. “We have real-time multiplayer and asynchronous multiplayer modes, and both are vitally important to the whole experience.”

“Our clans are the auto clubs,” he adds. “These are groups where gamers can get together, socialize, and combine their efforts to progress through the game and compete with other clubs.”

Browser-based and free-to-play, Auto Club Revolution opened its beta in July 2011 and went gold in 2012 with over 60 licensed cars in its stable. BMW, Bentley, Lotus, McLaren, Bugatti, and Jaguar all tear up the Daytona International Speedway, Indianapolis, and Silverstone, so yes, it’s a real racing game. And it’s a fairly successful one, too, by Jobling’s account. Eutechnyx announced a $31 per-player revenue average last November. $20 is the more common figure player average for successful free-to-play games.

Despite nine years of development, details on DriveClub are still thin. It’s easy to discard the “100 percent overlap” speculation, but its licensed cars will likely match or exceed Auto Club’s list, and the photo-real graphics will almost certainly leave all others in the dust. We also know DriveClub boasts a true first-person perspective, not unlike Need for Speed: Shift 2′s inside-the-helmet camera, something Auto Club doesn’t do. Auto Club doesn’t even have cockpit views for most of its cars — “We’re not seeing these demands from our players,” says Jobling, who notes that Auto Club iterates on a weekly basis based on player feedback. And directly or indirectly, DriveClub plans to tap into the social game model Auto Club proved is a winner.

“Our players very much buy into the social experience,” says Jobling. “About 50 percent of player time is currently spent racing. The other 50 percent is spent in social activities.”

That’s the big differentiator for both games. You meet up online with your racing buddies, geek out like proper gearheads, share your custom car tunings, and go on the road together as a team racing against other live opponents in relays or multiday rallies. They bring the sport aspect into the equation and let you share your enthusiasm with your amigos.

So here’s the real question. In an even matchup between a successful, rapid-iteration, free-to-play social racer and a more traditional, pay-for-play, social-centric race game with more features and far superior graphics, who wins?

It might simply come down to gameplay or platform preference — DriveClub looks like an exclusive launch title for the PlayStation 4 — but it’s tough to beat Auto Club’s price. And if the 50/50 split Jobling offers between socializing and actual racing proves out, a PC’s keybord/mouse configuration trumps the PS4 controller. As yet, we haven’t heard anything about Sony’s new voice chat options or whether their new console comes with headsets included. Microsoft’s Xbox packages do.

Could a hardcore racing game take the lead based in part on a direct message system and chat windows? Possibly not, but with focus shifting from social interaction, those count as big advantages.

For a social game especially, so does community. Auto Club already has one, and it’s thriving. DriveClub has a Facebook page that’s updated every two to four weeks and a slightly less neglected Twitter account. It’s got a lot of catching up to do. The genre is shifting focus. Physics and control will always dominate racing games, but it’s less about the cars themselves. Everybody’s got beautiful cars, and pornography has a very short half-life.

Now it’s about who’s driving those cars. Whoever brings those players together in the best way for a complete high-octane fantasy will take the checkered flag.

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

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With its Xbox 360 successor, Microsoft may just one-up Google for once.

The new Xbox will reportedly be able to control your television and cable/satellite box, similar to what Google (unsuccessfully) attempted with Google TV, reports the Verge.

The console would reportedly connect to your cable box via an HDMI pass-through (just like Google TV), which means you’d be able to view both the next Xbox and your standard TV programming in the same video input. It would display an overlay on top of your existing TV content, enabling the next Xbox to offer features around what you’re watching without the need to process the video.

VentureBeat attempted to confirm this report. A Microsoft spokesperson said that the company doesn’t comment on rumors.

You could say we should have seen this coming. After selling its MediaRoom IPTV platform last week, Microsoft noted that it will focus on the Xbox as its core TV strategy. The Xbox 360 has proven to be an incredibly popular video consumption device, thanks to apps from Netflix, Hulu, and others, but it makes sense for Microsoft to aim much higher with its next console entry.

This isn’t the first time such rumors have cropped up, either. Video game industry insider — he calls himself a “fixer” — Kevin Dent says he’s been forecasting this since the summer.

Not surprisingly, the Verge is hearing that the console — which gamers have nicknamed the Xbox 720 — would also require an Internet connection to use the entertainment services. If these rumors hold true, you would have the next Xbox running practically the entire time you’re in front of your TV.

Gamers have been suspicious about rumors of “always-on” consoles  (so-named because they require a constant Internet connection) as we gear up for this next generation in gaming — especially since recent always-on games like SimCity and Diablo III had major issues at launch. For game publishers, being always-connected also adds another level of piracy protection. But gamers don’t appreciate the inflexibility of not being able to play their games offline.

The rumor follows some controversial comments from Microsoft Game Studios’ Adam Orth, who didn’t see much of a problem with always-on consoles (and didn’t have much sympathy for those living in the boonies). Microsoft ended up apologizing over his remarks, but it didn’t outright deny that the next Xbox would be always-on.

I’m a big fan of what Google tried to do with Google TV, but slow hardware and a lack of decent content kept it from being a success. It sounds like Microsoft wouldn’t make the same mistake, as the Verge notes that the company already has partnerships with content providers. (And unlike Google, it’s not trying to promote cord-cutting.)

Microsoft’s Kinect sensor is also said to be a big part of the next Xbox’x entertainment experience. The updated version of the motion controller would reportedly be able to detect multiple people within a room, and it could even pause what you’re watching when you turn your head.

If this particular rumor is true, Microsoft would also have a leg-up on Sony (once again) when it comes to entertainment. Microsoft wisely maneuvered to make Netflix exclusive to the Xbox 360 for more than a year before it was available to the PlayStation 3 or Wii. We haven’t seen much of Sony’s PS4 entertainment plans yet, other than the fact that it will support 4K video.

Microsoft will reportedly unveil its next Xbox on May 21, which should lead directly into this year’s E3 convention in June.

Sony showed off an impressive array of indie games last night at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, saying it would invest considerable sums in titles produced by independent game developers for its various PlayStation platforms, including the upcoming PS4.

By unveiling these games at its GDC 2013 party, Sony showed its support for indies at a conference where half of the expected 23,000 attendees are from indie studios. In addition to launching an expanded version of its PlayStation Pub Fund, Sony is creating a flexible self-publishing process, lowering the barrier to entry on its platforms such as PS3, PS Vita, PS4, and PlayStation Network.

Adam Boyes (pictured), the vice president of publisher and developer relations at Sony Computer Entertainment America, told GamesBeat that Sony will use its PlayStation Pub Fund to finance anywhere from three to eight titles a year.

Under the Pub Fund, Sony funds exclusive (or timed exclusive) titles by giving them an advance on royalties. It cuts them a check when their titles reach “gold master,” or when they are ready to be published. The developers can then get started on the next game, Boyes said.

To back up its claim of supporting indie developers, Sony announced that Blacklight: Retribution from Zombie Studios will be the first PlayStation Pub Fund game for the PS4. That free-to-play game has more than a million players for its PC version.

“Every deal is different, but we do prefer a period of exclusivity,” Boyes said. “Without a program like Pub Fund, it’s like they are going out of the nest and flapping their wings.”

Last week, Sony teamed up with Unity Technologies to publish titles based on the Unity game engine on the PS4.

Sony isn’t saying exactly how large its fund is, but Pub Fund advances are often $250,000 to $500,000. It doesn’t own the developers after the deals, and the contracts focus on one game at a time. A committee reviews the deals, and Boyes signs off on them.

One of the clever games shown last night was Iron Galaxy Studios’ Divekick (pictured at top), a two-button fighting game where the object is to execute just one kind of combat move. Divekick and another title called Metrico (for the PlayStation Vita from Digital Dreams) will also get Pub Fund support.

“We want fresh ideas,” Boyes said. “I’m very excited and humbled to have this amazing swath of developers bring all of this amazing content to the PlayStation platforms.”

In a separate announcement, Sony showed off a trailer for a new PlayStation 4 title, Primal Carnage: Genesis. The game from Lukewarm Media features a dinosaur tied up with chains. The beast wakes up and proceeds to chew the head off of its robotic captor. Primal Carnage: Genesis, Blacklight: Retribution, and Jonathan Blow’s exploration-puzzle game The Witness will all be self-published titles on the PS4.

Boyes said that the award-winning title Limbo is coming to the PS Vita. Another award winner, Spelunky, will arrive on the PS3 and PS Vita with exclusive new features.

Other upcoming PlayStation Network Pub Fund titles include Sportsfriends, Guacamelee!, and Dragon Fantasy Book Two — as well as additional highlight titles Ibb & Obb, Hotline Miami, Luftrausers, Velocity Ultra, Thomas Was Alone, and Zombie Tycoon 2: Brainhov’s Revenge.

Boyes also said that the title Hermit Crab in Space won a contest to get a free pass to the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) 2013 trade show in June in Los Angeles. And for the PS4, Sony announced that it has introduced a faster global product proposal process for submitting games for approval.

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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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Next week is the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, and there are so many things I want to do there that I’m feeling overwhelmed. I’ve got interviews booked, talks to attend, press events to cover, and exclusive parties to go to. It’s such a first-world problem to have. One of the reasons I have this issue is that GDC has grown so much from its roots as a geek gathering where developers came together to discuss their craft. It has morphed into place where you have to be if you’re in the game business. That business has expanded so that it includes not only the hardcore PC and console industries but also free-to-play, mobile, social, and online businesses from around the globe.

I hope this column will help you set your expectations for the event at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco. The GDC has become a strategic battleground, where platform owners vie for the attention of developers, who can make or break game systems. With 23,000 attendees and tons of press attending, companies are using GDC as a place to make a splash. They are making big commercial game announcements. Electronic Arts, for instance, has an invite-only event on Tuesday night where everybody expects it to unveil Battlefield 4, a title that EA hopes will break Activision Blizzard’s grip on the multibillion-dollar first-person shooter market. My schedule is so loaded with such stuff that, if a surprise news story breaks, it will wreck my beautifully orchestrated timetable, which is set up from morning to midnight, Monday through Friday.

The battle between the two juggernauts — EA and Activision Blizzard — is so multifaceted that you feel like you have to pay attention. Last week, EA chief executive John Riccitiello resigned because his attempts to sell more games of existing franchises to jaded consumers failed. If one of these companies gets a bright idea, like Activision Blizzard did with the hybrid toy-games for Skylanders, it can become a new multibillion-dollar business. GDC is wonderful because it is full of creative people who can come up with those ideas.

The problem for the paranoid journalist or attendee is that you just don’t know where to start when it comes to covering the bases at an industry event where there is just too much cool stuff going on. I thought I’d share my secret thought process on how to cover an event like GDC just because it might tell you what’s happening in the game business and what some of these important events say about the state of video games.

I am so tied up with these events that I have stopped taking meetings. And some wise PR folks have figured this out, so they’re briefing me on news I can write about this week, before the show. That’s why I have five stories to write at night before I go to bed. A few years ago, the debut of OnLive’s service details at our very own GamesBeat@GDC was the star of the show, with hundreds of news stories linking to it.

It used to be that I would look at the keynotes and figure out what the biggest companies in the industry were doing in order to set my schedule. Apple would occasionally disrupt GDC by holding a (seemingly) non-game event such as an iPhone or iPad press conference in the middle of the show. Normally, companies try to position themselves so that they are part of the flow of GDC events. But Apple worked against the tide, like only Apple can. But this year, Apple isn’t doing anything (big), and there are no keynote speeches. (I still remember that speech where Bill Gates introduced the first Xbox in 2000.) Fortunately for the game hardware makers, Apple has no nasty surprise waiting for them this year.

Now I want to know about the small companies that are there to disrupt the big guys. It is interesting for me to know about the doings of companies like Unity Technologies (and its new alliance with Sony), Oculus VR, and Ouya. I also want to see cool stuff, like the latest demos from Epic Games, Crytek, and the promises of visual heaven from folks like Bungie. And I want to know about issues, like women in games, crowdfunding, crunch time at companies where people work too hard, and — the perennial crowd favorite — sex in games. I’m also intrigued by the Experimental Game Workshop, where developers go to show off avant-garde gameplay.

Among the hundreds of talks, I’ve noticed some technical gems like “Techniques for Aim Assist in Console Shooters.” I’ve never felt like I had enough time at GDC, but I always felt like I had some time to walk the show floor and soak in the environment. I’m going to feel pretty obligated to hit some of the major talks. Sony, for instance, is going to give a sponsored talk on designing games for the PlayStation 4. Such talks may prove to be for the geeks, but once in a while they generate some news that everybody will want to know about. How can I not go to a talk about the PS4?

Well, odds are good that the room will be so crowded I won’t be able to get into that session. And, in fact, I’m going to refuse to tell anybody where it is if they ask me. I also feel obligated to accept when a company offers a secret hands-on meeting in a hotel suite for the debut of a major game. I feel like I have to attend meetings with celebrity game designers that come from faraway places. That leaves me with exactly zero time to roam and discover.

But that’s the thing about the game business. It’s those random meetings, sleeper sessions, and chance encounters where you can get a great idea that makes it all worth it. If you have a chance to break loose from the schedule and wander, do so. You probably won’t regret it. Just try not to go where you will get trampled.

Some folks are giving off-the-record dinners with a small circle of folks. Those invitations are rare, but when you get them, you feel like you have to attend. You can catch up with old friends at these events and get their take on the important news of the day. It’s hard to gauge whether these meetings are more valuable than waiting in line to get the last seat in a crowded session. Then some folks swear that you have to attend a party, particularly ones at swanky nightclubs with loud music and celebrity rock bands as special guests. I don’t always put these ones at the top of the list.

Sometimes I attend sessions to mark the passage of time. Last year, Google promised it would unify the Google+ social network, Chrome web browsers, and the Android app store (now Google Play) into a single platform. At Google’s session this year, I would hope they follow through on it. And sometimes, the absence of a session is meaningful. At a graphics conference this week, Nvidia canceled a talk on Project Shield, its handheld Android gaming system. Next week, I believe Nvidia may also keep a low profile. This thing is supposed to launch in a very short time, and I’m wondering why it isn’t ready.

This year, I don’t see anything that is going to steal the show. If you’re really scratching your head, here are some interesting “must see” sessions.

The Game Developers Choice Awards. You’ll learn something just from who gets cheers and who gets booed. It’s hosted by funny man Tim Schafer, the head of Double Fine Productions.

The emerging landscape of African game development. There is a lot of hope tied into this session.

#1ReasonToBe. A session about women in the game business and lingering sexism. It includes female notables such as Brenda Romero, Robin Hunicke, and Leigh Alexander.

Scapegoats no more: Improving the public image of games. Some leading thinkers like Ian Bogost, Michael Capps, and Daniel Greenberg will examine violence in games.

Classic game post-mortem: Myst. For old folks like me, co-creator Robyn Miller will describe how he made Myst, one of the first breakthrough games on CD-ROMs on the PC.

Experimental Gameplay Workshop. Stars like Keita Takahashi will show off cool gameplay prototypes.

Brave New World: New Bungie IP. From the makers of Halo, the next big game is Destiny.

Photorealism through the eyes of a fox. Hideo Kojima, a gaming legend, talks about photorealism.

Designing Journey. Jenova Chen, the creator of one of the most compelling non-violent games of 2012, describes the making of Journey.

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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 is making a big move to get cross-platform and indie games on the PlayStation 4 and the rest of its game machines. Today, the Japanese company announced a strategic partnership with Unity Technologies, the maker of a popular cross-platform engine for making 3D games. This is a case of the traditional console game business getting together with the modern social, mobile and online game business (where Unity thrives).

Sony will include Unity’s engine and development tools on the PS4, PS3, the PS Vita handheld, and PlayStation Mobile devices. The companies made the announcement in advance of next week’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, where different companies will jockey to get the attention of developers who will make or break a platform by their support or lack of it.

Since Sony came in third place in the last console war (in terms of systems sold) and is struggling financially, the Japanese publisher desperately needs the PS4 to be a hit and to have developers make awesome games for it. The company’s representatives will make a pitch at next week’s GDC to recruit developers, and now its platform will be more appealing to Unity’s developers. Unity is already being used by 1.5 million developers around the world. They have used it to make games for PC, iOS, Android, and other platforms.

For Unity, the deal is a big step toward ubiquity. Nintendo adopted Unity for the Wii U game console. While that has helped Nintendo get a wider variety of games on its struggling platform, it has not been a decisive advantage. The PlayStation platform development tools for Unity are expected to roll out this fall. Developers with a license agreement from Sony for the PlayStation software development kit will be able to use Unity to make Sony games without pouring a ton of resources into development tools.

And in the other direction, Unity developers will now be able to bring their games to dedicated systems such as the PS Vita without rewriting their code from scratch.

“We are very happy to be working with Unity Technologies to deliver Unity for our PlayStation platforms,” said Teiji Yutaka, Sony Computer Entertainment’s senior vice president, technology platform, in a statement. “PlayStation gamers can look forward to playing a broad array of new creative games from Unity’s global community of developers, which includes some of the best independent talent in the industry.”

Unity developers can use the new platform to create games for PlayStation Mobile more efficiently without having to use the additional PS Mobile SDK, as both use the .NET framework for easy transition between the tools. Unity developers will be able to port their games created for iPhone, iPad, and Android to run on PS Mobile. Unity for PlayStation games will be available on the PlayStation Store.

“We are excited to be able to help Unity’s massive ecosystem reach out to SCE’s incredible platforms,” said David Helgason (pictured at top, right), the CEO Unity Technologies, in a statement. “The kaleidoscopic innovation, high quality, and production velocity that our rich developer community brings will help drive the success of the future game development.”

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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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Recent events in the video game business once again give the DeanBeat a wealth of material to analyze. And we see this lesson hit home again this week: The community matters. If you make games the community likes, if you deliver authenticity and transparency, you’ll win. If you fail to execute, the community will roast you alive. We visited this subject in October when the gamer social network Raptr shared its own analysis of the benefits of treating the community right in games such as League of Legends, Portal 2, and the ARMA II DayZ mod.

But it’s time to hammer the point home again.

A tale of two launches

With the launch of StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm, Blizzard Entertainment teamed up with Twitch and delivered a live launch that treated the die-hard fans right with an in-person event and then let the large audience salivate over a live broadcast. Livestreaming of matches played by professional gamers showed fans just how exciting a Heart of the Swarm match could be. Fans had to log in and authenticate themselves on Battle.net. But if they owned StarCraft II already, they could immediately start playing Heart of the Swarm at the stroke of midnight.

With SimCity, EA witnessed the consequences of letting down the community and then angering it. EA launched a single-player game that required an always-on Internet connection. The megapublisher argued that it had to do it that way in order to give players the experience of creating a city amid a region full of cities belonging to friends. But EA failed to execute, as it didn’t have enough serves on hand to handle demand. Players who paid $60 — or more for special editions — couldn’t log in (sometimes at all) for days. EA endured ridicule and skepticism from people who believed the company had only wanted the always-on connection to defeat pirates. Fans believed that EA didn’t have their interests at heart. EA’s Lucy Bradshaw, the general manager of the Maxis Label (the developer of SimCity), admitted that underestimating demand was “dumb.” Bradshaw’s posts were perhaps the saving grace in preserving EA’s reputation.

Interpretation of good community and bad community

The lessons of these two launches are clear when it comes to the community. To interpret these events, I turned again to our game community expert, Dennis Fong [right], a former pro gamer and chief executive of Raptr.

“On the flip side, when you are not authentic, and you stumble, the community will be extremely vocal,” Fong said.

The problem for EA was that it didn’t seem to learn from server problems it had with the launches of Battlefield 3 and Star Wars: The Old Republic. SimCity was a very different kind of game, built by a different studio. But EA should have learned, as Blizzard appeared to do after the fiasco of the launch of last year’s always-connected game Diablo III.

“When you don’t provide a bunch of community tools that distract the users, and you have an always-on game where the servers get overloaded, that’s when the community goes crazy,” Fong said. “They clearly haven’t learned. EA is a big company and it is not easy to steer the company where the community wants it to be.”

(We do expect to hear more from EA about its own postmortem on SimCity, and we’ll update this piece as we do. EA has begun to do a good job of being more transparent with its SimCity blog, and it is offering a free game to SimCity purchases as penance). [Update: In a blog post today, Bradshaw said that the always-connected feature did not come as a mandate from corporate].

Fong is heartened to see the direct results Raptr’s own campaigns, where its targeting of rewards to like-minded fans helped the online game Rift achieve a 470 percent improvement in daily active users and 58 percent longer play sessions. It costs money to do that, and the traditional view of community support is as a cost center. But those additional players will help spread the word about the game, bring in more people, and effectively do the job of advertising without incurring the costs of advertising. In that way, the community gives a return on investment.

Livestreaming is authentic

We were pleased to see Sony, which Fong criticized as lacking in community support over the years, add a “share button” and livestreaming as built-in features of the upcoming PlayStation 4. PC gamers have long had access to such tools, but Fong said the inclusion in the consoles and the growing popularity of Twitch — which had 28 million unique viewers in February — is making livestreaming easier than ever. Twitch is also being built into online games made by Sony Online Entertainment, Activision, and EA.

It is becoming brain-dead simple to do livestreaming.

“What Twitch has done is made it more universal,” Fong said. “Having 600,000 people broadcasting their own content in a month is a big milestone. The fact that people know how to do that is new. I’m staggered at how quickly it has grown.”

What makes Twitch community-friendly is that it is authentic, Fong said. (For a view on authenticity, see our interview with gaming academic Jesse Schell). A livestream doesn’t lie. Gamers may get tired of reviews, trailers, interviews, and staged videos that are filtered views of games. But a livestream delivers what the unfiltered gameplay looks like, albeit when it is played by some of the best gamers in the world. When you watch a livestream, you get an authentic and transparent view of how the game really plays. If you recall the sexy, beautifully illustrated covers of comic books, you probably remember the disappointment you found when you opened them up to see the lower-quality paper and hurried art on the pages in the middle. A livestream is more like showing the gamer what is behind the cover — so you know exactly what you’re paying for.

This may help explain the growing popularity of e-sports. If you see a game being played the right way, you’ll have an easier experience as you play it yourself. Games are being designed for the e-sports community, making them more fun to watch as spectators. And the community’s feedback makes the games better, enabling the developers to improve the games on the fly. Livestreaming and e-sports are becoming part of the core strategy of games such as Call of Duty: Black Ops II, which draws players back over and over.

The other thing that makes a livestream more authentic is the “shoutcasting,” or play-by-play commentary by expert broadcasters. Those shoutcasters can convey the excitement of the game to the players, but those shoutcasters have to be authentic enough to know their stuff and describe the fast-action game play to the audience.

“They know the nuances in the game that the audience cares about,” Fong said. “They can convey it with fidelity and respect.”

The future of community

I’ve focused on this week’s events. We can applaud Blizzard and scold EA, but at least they are engaged closely with users. But there are other issues that matter to the community, as the game industry matures, moves on to new consoles, and moves deeper into the digital revolution.

Valve, which is reportedly working on a Linux-based Steam Box living room console, is carrying the flag for the community on openness. Open versus closed is a familiar debate, as we’ve seen with Android versus iOS in mobile devices. The community favors openness. But the advocates of closed cite a better user experience and security. You can close off your platform, but if you don’t deliver on that better user experience and you get hacked (ahem, PlayStation Network), then the community will once again show you no mercy — and maybe move on to a better platform.

As the console makers complete their designs and business practices, they would do well to remember this. Their machines should be designed to be community-friendly. You could build a console with no disc drive or discs, convincing gamers that they don’t need to own a physical copy of their digital games. But if the player’s downloads disappear from the account and the cloud access doesn’t work, people will be pissed. As social and mobile games become more focused on multiplayer experiences, the makers of those games should focus on community satisfaction and engagement. And this does not necessarily mean that game companies need to fleece consumers with microtransactions at every turn.

“Community should be part of the core strategy of a company,” Fong said. “In a year or two, we’ll be talking about that for mobile games.”

It would be great if someone could come up with a ranking of community-friendly game companies that also make the best games. I’d like to know which of those high-ranking, community-smart companies are making the best return on investment. That’s the company that I would bet on as a big winner in the future of games.

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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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Former Sony chief executive officer Howard Stringer announced he will step down from his position as chairman and retire in June, according to Games Industry International.

This ends a 16-year period that Stringer spent with Sony.

The British businessman started his career as a journalist at CBS. He moved up the ranks and spent the last seven of his 30 years with the network as its president. He left CBS in 1995 to start TELE-TV, a set-top-box company that developed an interactive television service.

He left TELE-TV in 1997 to begin working with Sony as president of its U.S. operations.

In June 2005, Sony named Stringer its CEO and chairman. Sony launched the PlayStation 3 during the following year against strong competition from Nintendo’s novel Wii and Microsoft’s Xbox 360, which had a year head start.

Despite the PlayStation 2′s success, PlayStation 3 struggled to justify its $499 and $599 price tags to early consumers. Not only that, but developers struggled with PS3′s complicated architecture and most cross-platform games looked and played better on Microsoft’s console until about 2009.

In April 2011, hackers breached Sony’s PlayStation Network and stole millions of user’s data and credit-card information. Sony waited a week before telling users. Stringer didn’t get a handle on the public-relation disaster until he released an open letter in May 2011.

Since these struggles, the PS3 has found worldwide success comparable to the Xbox 360, but only after several price cuts that dug into profits. The early PS3 models cost an estimated $800 to $840 to manufacture, so even at the $499 and $599, the system cost Sony money to sell. The eventual “slim” redesigns helped alleviate that issue.

In 2009, Sony replaced company president Ryoji Chubachi with Stringer. The executive used this time to initiate a company-wide restructuring with the purpose of bringing Sony’s varying divisions closer together.

One of the results of a closer-knit Sony was an intense focus on 3D technology throughout 2010 and 2011. Sony attempted to leverage the PlayStation brand by combining the promise of 3D games on its 3D televisions.

Today, Sony’s effort to promote 3D is seen as a failure. By 2012, the company had ceased actively talking about 3D in its games or televisions.

In April 2012, Sony Computer Entertainment chairman Kazuo Hirai, who had overseen the PlayStation brand, replaced Stringer as CEO and president. Stringer also stepped down as chairman of Sony and took up the position as Sony’s chairman of the board.

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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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As mobile developers continue to discover new ways to exploit the casual market, core gamers continue to buy a lot of games — just not as many as before.

The NPD Group released a preliminary look at its latest report, which focuses on core gamers. Nearly 38 million people in the U.S. qualify as core gamers, which the study defines as someone who plays a non-social/casual game for more than five hours a week on a PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PC, or Mac.

According to the study, 10 percent more core gamers claim their spending decreased versus a year ago compared to gamers stating their spending increased. That fits with recent NPD monthly sales reports, which have shown a steady decline year-over-year for months.

Sony recently announced the PlayStation 4, and many gamers slow or stop spending to save up for the new device.

Still, core gamers are buying games. A huge chunk (88 percent) of the core crowd stated that they purchased a new physical game this year. Meanwhile, 78 percent purchased a used physical game and 70 percent bought a full digital release.

“Digital purchasing among core gamers has plenty of room to grow,” The NPD Group industry analyst Liam Callahan said in a statement. “While many core gamers indicate they are purchasing full games and digital add-on content frequently, there are those that stated they have never purchased digital content.”

That number should spike up in the next generation as customers grow more accustomed to digital sales in the next-generation of consoles.

NPD conducted this study online from Jan. 4 to Jan. 23. It surveyed 6,322 individuals age 9 and older.

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

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We toss around a lot of fancy words when talking about the future of the game industry. But now one of the biggest publishers around, Electronic Arts, is proving that when it comes to digital, it’s more than just buzz.

SuperData Research predicts that EA, the publisher of franchises like Dead Space and Mass Effect, will earn most of its revenue from digital games by the end of 2013. That means focusing more on streaming and downloadable content. Revenue from physical products has dropped below $500 million.

This trend isn’t just happening with EA. A January report indicated that the overall digital market improved 39 percent from the same time one year prior.

This quarter is the second-to-last period that physical content drives sales for EA, according to the online-games market research firm. A lot of revenue will come in from Battlefield 4, which is expected to release later this year and increase retail sales to an estimated $539 million. Then mobile revenue across consoles, PC, and mobile devices will overtake the physical side by Q3 2013, reaching roughly $2.1 billion.

Companies like EA, Sony, and Valve are now focusing on making digital more accessible through hardware — like with Nvidia’s Project Shield, the PlayStation 4, and Steam’s Big Picture. It’s all about enabling digital content to overtake the traditional console-based environment of the living room by introducing new technology, new platforms, and more ways to play.

“We do think there’s going to be more digital business and digital download business,” EA’s chief financial officer Blake Jorgensen told SuperData in a financial earnings call last week. “But a lot of it will depend on when we release titles, when Sony and Microsoft choose to release titles. And in no way do we want to see the retail channel disappear. We think that’s an important part of the overall industry, and we want to keep that a vibrant channel for us long term as well.”

It’s about balance, and with more digital business will come a wider availability and ease of digital gameplay components due to better storage capacity, Jorgensen added.

Joost van Dreunen, the chief executive officer of SuperData, told GamesBeat that Electronic Arts is coming into the “digital revolution” well prepared. So what does this mean for gaming?

“I think it’s positive when large incumbents adapt to a new environment,” he said. “Sure, there are critics, but the leaders in the game industry have moved a lot faster to accept new distribution and revenue models than, say, the music or film industry. Perhaps most importantly, this benefits gamers, who now have access to quality games on a platform of their choosing.”

EA hasn’t responded to our request for comment.

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

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With the Wii U out on the market and Sony’s recent reveal of the PlayStation 4, there is no doubt that the next generation of consoles is already here. Along with that is all the talk about technology and specs that will (hopefully) open up new avenues of interactivity and gameplay. Early adopters pick up a console with the promise of fantastic games down the line, but most consumers have to be convinced to purchase a new system. With many gamers satisfied with their current consoles, the major players are going to have to convince them to break away from their outdated boxes.

Since all three systems (the Wii, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3) have a robust library of games, the only way these companies are going to attract new customers is with fresh offerings — not just the latest Call of Duty or the best-looking game in existence, but ones that present completely new experiences that people cannot get anywhere else.

It is uncertain what each of the new systems’ must-have games will be, but the titles below are what made me buy each of the current-generation consoles. Today, I look back on the three games that sold me on the Wii, Xbox 360, and PS3, in the order that I bought them.

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess

I will admit that I was one of those people who cried when I saw the reveal of Twilight Princess (LoZ:TP) at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) 2004, weeping in happiness in front of a 20-inch television screen as Link strode across the Hyrulean landscape in what appeared to be the darkest Zelda game to date. It was slated to came out on both the Wii and GameCube, and while I owned the latter, I was blown away by the thought of playing a Zelda title with motion controls — swinging my arm like a sword to cut down enemies and shooting arrows just by pointing at the screen. Even the fishing minigame looked to fun with the Wiimote as a rod. There were also rumors that the Wii version would be the superior version not only control-wise but also graphically. (It’s true. The Twilight Realm in the Wii version looks significantly better.) I grew up a fan of Nintendo, so I knew I would get the Wii one day. Twilight Princess convinced me that I had to have it day one.

It’s the reason why I was outside Costco at 5:00 in the morning, waiting with my friends and other fans, playing Mario Kart DS, and chatting about what games we were all going to play first. My friends and I ended up playing Wii Sports and Excite Truck together the first couple days — so caught up in the excitement of beating each other up in boxing or crashing into each other’s cars. I was also scared to play LoZ:TP. What if, after the excruciating wait and all the hype, it was bad? I did not think I could bear having my spirits crushed.

When I popped in the disc on the third day, my worries were unfounded. Playing LoZ:TP with the Wiimote, swinging it around, and becoming engrossed with the characters and the dark tone of the story is still one of my favorite memories as a gamer. It showed me just what the Wii was capable of — an experience I couldn’t get on any other console. It is debatable whether or not the Wii was successful in that regard, but it still is a console I had immense fun with.  LoZ:TP ranks as one of my favorite Zelda games of all time as well as one of the best launch titles I have ever played.

Dead Rising

I was not sold on the Xbox 360 at first. In middle school, I was a part of a small club of podcasters for a while. We had a segment dedicated to video game discussion, and one day, the topic was about the recently released Xbox 360 and whether it was worth buying or not. I clearly remember saying, “Yeah, it’s good if you want to pay a lot of money to play the same games you can on the Xbox with shinier graphics.” At the time, it was a good observation. Most of the games that launched with it were just prettier versions of the same games you could get on current consoles, and the rest were not very good. Even when The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion came out, I could play it on my PC, so what use was a 360 to me?

My mind was changed a year after the 360’s launch with the release of Dead Rising. I have been a zombie fan since the day my father sat me down with him to watch Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, so when I played Dead Rising at my friend’s house, I was floored. It was exactly how I imagined a video game based off that movie would be like. You could fight hordes of zombies with anything you could find (everything was a weapon), explore an enormous mall, save survivors (or kill them), be a hero (or not), snap photos (sacrificing survivors was perfect for those achievements), and unravel a conspiracy.

I don’t remember how I convinced my parents to buy me a 360 — it must have had something to do with how good my grades were — but under the Christmas tree in 2007 was a box with a copy of Dead Rising in it. It still remains one of my favorite games to this day. Dead Rising 2: Off the Record for the PC is a go-to-game for me when I am feeling down, but if Microsoft were to rerelease the original for the PC, I would snatch it up again in a heartbeat.

Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots

I never owned a PlayStation 2, but I had played through the entire Metal Gear Solid series with a friend. Despite not owning the three main games, I adored the franchise. There were so many rumors that MGS4 would eventually come out on the Xbox 360 because of the slow sales of the PS3, but my heart sank when Konami squashed the possibility of that ever happening. If I wanted to play MGS4, I was going to have to buy a PS3 or else I would never get to experience the end of Solid Snake’s story.

Thankfully, I was working a job when Sony announced that it was discontinuing the 80GB model of the console. It was the one I wanted because it had backward compatibility for the PS2, something that the future models were not going to have. I did not have nearly enough to pay the $600 price tag of the MGS4 bundle at Fry’s, so I convinced my mom to pay for half because it was a Blu-ray player we could all enjoy.

We rarely used it for Blu-rays because they were so expensive, though. What it was used for was games. I was finally able to experience all the PS2 games I missed out on, like Kingdom Hearts, Shadow of the Colossus, and the Devil May Cry series. For a while, I had more PS2 games than PS3 games, but it all started with MGS4.

Arguments aside about the length of the cutscenes, the game is a technical marvel and, in my opinion, flawless. The gameplay was perfectly balanced between sneaking and gun fights, and you could play any way you wanted. The story tied up everything wonderfully. The presentation was beyond stellar, from the set pieces to the cutscenes and the boss battles. Very few games have satisfied my needs like MGS4 has, which is why I am afraid to play it again in fear of ruining all the amazing moments I had with it. But I know I have to again one day.

Was it worth it, and what’s next?

For one or two games, buying a whole system is never worth it. You always have to look at the complete package and think about what you are investing in. However, there will always be that one game that makes you need the console, and that will open up the door to a plethora of experiences you could not get anywhere else.

I have not regretted owning all three consoles. The Wii has provided me with excellent titles and unique games that took advantage of the hardware, like MadWorld and No More Heroes. The Xbox 360 introduced me to the world of online gaming with the Halo series. Although I no longer pay for Xbox Live, I have to thank Halo for showing me how much fun it is to play with friends and strangers online. I don’t use the PlayStation 3 for online play but rather its amazing single-player titles like Heavy Rain, Uncharted, and HD collections of games I missed in the last generation — not to mention the backward compatibility that I am grateful for every day.

I bought a Wii U on launch day and have already gotten a taste of what the future holds with ZombiU, which was what sold me on the console largely because of the GamePad. I have also had a load of fun with Ninja Gaiden: Razor’s Edge, which proves that traditional titles work wonderfully on the system. I am not fully sold on the PlayStation 4, nor do I think I will fall in love with the next Xbox at first sight. It will take a good game to do that — one that shows me that yes, the next generation of gaming is here. I look forward to it.

What have been some games that have made you want to buy a console and why? Leave comments, criticisms, and concerns down below. Thank you for reading.

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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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Plenty of companies plan to launch an Android-based game console in the coming year, but you might already own one. It could be in your pocket right now. Possibly you’re even reading this article on your next big gaming system.

At least, that’s all true if Charles Huang, the chief executive officer of Green Throttle Games, has played his cards right. “I really do think, even more so than phones, that the tablet is going to be the entertainment platform of choice going forward,” says Huang, who also co-created the Guitar Hero franchise that raked in over $2 billion for publisher Activision. “The console’s monopoly on gaming is going to end.”

Haung co-founded Green Throttle in 2012 to get ahead of that curve. His answer is Arena, a multitiered gaming system centered on an Android app due to release Tuesday for the Amazon Kindle Fire.

“The biggest segment of revenue in the game industry comes from gaming on TVs,” says Huang, “but the most common devices that play games are actually phones and tablets.” Green Throttle specifically designed Arena to bridge that gap. The Arena app leverages existing mobile hardware and creates a central hub for finding, buying, and playing games. Connect your device to a television using a Micro HDMI cable, and those games automatically scale to the HD picture. I watched a simple twin-stick shooter go from a 7-inch tablet screen to a 55-inch LCD with absolutely no loss in image quality.

Of course, to tap into the “core” gaming market, you need something more responsive than a tablet’s touchscreen controls. So the Atlas controller — which bears a striking resemblance to an Xbox 360 controller by way of Tron — marks the other half of Arena’s strategy. But while it might look a little too familiar, the $40 Atlas does something other wireless devices don’t.

Tablets and smartphones “presume a single-user experience,” says Huang, “but TV is a shared experience.” So while you can usually only pair one Bluetooth device to your phone or tablet at a time, a special protocol written into Arena lets players connect and use up to four controllers.

We’ve gotten a few early looks at the Green Throttle Arena over the last year, but now that it’s finally ready to go live, we have an exclusive video to show how it all comes together:

“It’s a way to promote different game developers and different games that work with our controllers,” says Matt Crowley, an alumnus of Nokia, Palm, and Philips Electronics now serving as Green Throttle’s chief operating officer. “We decided to do our commercial release on the Kindle Fire — it’s marketed as a $199 e-book, but it’s actually a pretty good gaming system.”

But Arena won’t stay exclusive to the Amazon Kindle Store — or the Kindle Fire — for long. Expect to see it on Google Play by the end of the month and full compatibility on Android smart phones rolling out not long after, starting with Samsung’s Galaxy S3 and Galaxy Tab.

Priority goes to the devices that make the games look good. The hardware itself handles the negotiation for scaling up to an HDTV. Crowley is quick to points out that many mobile devices can output two different displays with two independent resolutions, and the technology itself is shifting to fit new philosophies.

“The hardware guys thought 30 frames per second was OK for Netflix even though the phone itself can do 60 frames per second,” says Crowley. “That’s not ideal for gameplay. But this year, a lot of the phones will have 1080p at 60 frames per second moving forward.”

“The LG Nexus 4 does that,” says Huang. “In all likelihood, so will the Galaxy S4.”

“Hardware is changing to accommodate gameplay,” adds Crowley.

If Huang and Crowley prove right, the powerhouse game consoles set to release this fall could find themselves at a severe disadvantage. Green Throttle’s hardcore gaming system will run on hundreds of popular devices that iterate on a yearly basis, and with a (perceived) entry cost of $40, it will easily run consumers 1/10th or less the likely purchase price of a PlayStation 4.

Will that make Arena the future of video games? If it picks up traction, it’s tough not to see Green Throttle Arena — or something very like it — carving out a huge piece of a changing market.

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

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We all know that Nintendo’s Wii U is in trouble. It sold more than 3 million units during the holidays and was in short supply. But with a dearth of new titles after that launch, sales have slowed down. Nintendo shaved its sales target for the period ending March 31 to 4 million, down from its previous estimate of 5.5 million hardware units.

And now the Game Developers Conference has published a survey showing that U.S. developers are making few titles for the Wii U. The GDC’s survey of 2,500 attendees showed that only 4.6 percent of developers are creating a Wii U game, and 6.4 percent plan to make their next game on the console.

This is a critical problem because the developers are the canaries in the coal mine. When they start dropping, there’s a bigger problem.

The Wii U is a brand-new console, but its developer support is significantly below the level for the Xbox 360. About 13.2 percent of companies are making games for Microsoft’s current machine, and 14 percent plan to make their next title for the Xbox 360. About 13 percent are making current games for the Sony PlayStation 3, and 12.4 percent will do so again. Sony’s announcement of the PlayStation 4 could put a big dent in developer support just as Sony’s early announcement of the PlayStation 2 helped kill off support for the Sega Dreamcast.

By comparison, developers are moving en masse to mobile. About 55 percent are making games for smartphones and tablets, and 58 percent plan to do so for their next title. And 48 percent are making games on the Mac and PCs. The only weaker platforms than the Wii U are the Nintendo 3DS and the Sony PlayStation Vita. Despite the grim picture, Nintendo chief executive Satoru Iwata said that no price cut is coming for the Wii U, whose basic version is selling for $300 in the U.S.

It’s not a happy state of affairs for Nintendo, which launched the Wii console in 2006 and sold more than 100 million units worldwide. It has sold more consoles than Microsoft and Sony in this generation, but for the last couple of years, the Wii has been weak. That’s why Nintendo introduced the Wii U, which has a tablet controller, last fall. But the naysayers were out early, saying the Wii U’s processing power was feeble and that its support for only one tablet controller was a major problem.

Cevat Yerli, the chief executive of game studio Crytek, said that his company made a Wii U version of Crysis 3, its flagship game that just debuted. But Crytek didn’t have a license to publish games on Nintendo, and his publisher, Electronic Arts, hit its own impasse over deciding to publish on the Wii U. And with that, Yerli said in an interview with GamesBeat, “Crysis 3 on Wii U had to die.”

Now a lot of people are tossing rocks at Nintendo. EA has offered very little support for the system, and EA chief executive John Riccitiello said that the “true next generation” consoles will begin with the launch of machines from Sony and Microsoft. Cliff Bleszinski, the former design director at Epic Games, said that Nintendo may need to get out of hardware.

Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, said that Nintendo “misfired on the Wii U.” Sales were weak in January, and Microsoft’s old Xbox 360 outsold the new Nintendo machine that month. Another marquee developer, who asked not to be identified, said, “The Wii U is already a non-event. I couldn’t be more disappointed with the launch titles.” Mario Wynands of gamemaker Sidhe said that he had multiple conversations with developers who are dialing back their support of the Wii U because of the weak sales.

“While I believe they need to build a very strong digital marketplace for both developers and consumers longterm, their current business model demands they continue to respond to the needs of retailers and hardcore consumer,” Wynands said. “Fundamentally, they just need to start selling a lot more hardware in order to create a viable marketplace and survive long enough in order to be able to transition their business.”

David Cole, a longtime analyst at DFC Intelligence, said, “The Wii U is in big trouble. Nintendo didn’t get out in front with [games on the Wii U], and that means third parties are cautious. We are lowering our Wii U forecasts quite a bit, and it can become an ugly cycle. It is really on Nintendo’s shoulders to turn it around. They can’t rely on third parties.”

Ben Sawyer, a leader of the games for health movement, said that Nintendo’s ecosystem isn’t open enough compared to smartphones and tablets.

Nintendo isn’t giving up yet. In a statement to GamesBeat, the company said, “[We are] proud of the relationships we have built with all our third-party partners, from the large publishers and their well-known franchises to our independent developer partners making incredible downloadable games for the Nintendo eShop.”

Indeed, while the Wii whiffed at coming up with a rival to Microsoft’s Xbox Live, some developers say they like the eShop, where gamers can download new titles.

Nintendo also said it “has robust third-party support on both Wii U and Nintendo 3DS. The biggest publishers in the world — Ubisoft, Activision, EA, 2K, SEGA, Disney, Warner Bros. and Namco Bandai, to name a few — have brought their best franchises to Wii U with games like Call of Duty: Black Ops II, ZombiU, Scribblenauts Unlimited, Batman: Arkham City Armored Edition, Assassin’s Creed III, Disney Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two, Just Dance 4, and Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed. On Nintendo 3DS, Nintendo has a great lineup of third-party games, including the upcoming Castlevania: Lords of Shadow — Mirror of Fate from Konami and Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate from Capcom.”

Nintendo has also done a good job of recruiting smaller developers. Nicalis, WayForward, Gaijin Games, Tomorrow Corporation, and Renegade Kid are all in the midst of working on downloadable titles for the Wii U.

Alex Neuse and Mike Roush, co-founders of Gaijin Games, said they enjoy developing on the Wii U and it is a step up from the Wii. They just released Bit.Trip Presents Runner 2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien for the Wii U eShop.

“We see great business potential in the Wii U eShop. It’s a particularly indie-friendly distribution channel, and if you’re an independent developer and want to get your game on a console, the eShop looks like it might be the next big thing,” the Gaijin founders said in an email. “But above and beyond the eShop, the Miiverse has been an integral part of growing our community of fans. Being able to interact with fans in real time, on the console, while the game is running is an incredible feature that only Nintendo has. If Nintendo can manage to continue their efforts towards wooing indies, as they have been doing so far, they could probably corner the console indie market without much trouble.”

Of course, Nintendo has always been its own savior. First-party games on the Wii U are spread out and slow in coming. But if its own gamemakers create bigger hits, then console sales could pick up, the third-party developers could return, and the ecosystem will look better.

Even if this griping about the Wii U’s prospects continues, don’t expect Nintendo to waver. The company has been in tough spots before, and it has pulled off turnarounds. It can still point to Sega and say that getting out of hardware is not always a good solution. Nintendo is working on some big games. And it still has a hold on young audiences and families, which are different from the audiences for the other consoles, said Jon Peddie, an analyst at Jon Peddie Research.

Whatever happens with Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony shouldn’t gloat about the slow acceptance of the Wii U.

Alex St. John, the co-creator of Microsoft’s DirectX technology, who has been predicting the death of consoles for years, said, “I think Apple is the next-generation console and that all of the next-generation consoles will fade. If your next-generation ‘console’ isn’t a cell phone that can deliver a console experience to a TV, you’re already obsolete.”

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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 upcoming PlayStation 4 could serve as one of your first gateways to 4K video content — just as the PlayStation 3 helped bring Blu-rays to the living room, and the PlayStation 2 did the same with DVDs.

Sony Electronics president and chief operating officer Phil Molyneux (above) hinted that the 4K service would make its way to the PS4 in an interview with the Verge last night. While it’s not exactly a confirmation, we can’t imagine Sony would keep a flagship video service off of its much-hyped new console. Molyneux announced Sony’s intention to create the first 4K distribution service at CES back in January.

4K offers four times the resolution of 1080p HD video, which is currently the highest resolution supported by TVs and Blu-rays today. The technology was one of the stars of CES — likely because the industry seems ready to move on from promoting 3D in the home. Broadcom announced a 4K gateway chip at CES that could make it easy for devices to manage massive 4K data streams.

Sony has already confirmed that the PS4 supports 4K resolution videos and photos, so the announcement doesn’t come as a huge surprise.

What is surprising, though, is how Sony is approaching the service. According to Molyneux, 4K movies will be around 100 gigabytes in size, depending on their length. In comparison, 1080p HD videos streamed via Netflix and iTunes are typically around 4 GB to 8 GB. He told the Verge that huge file sizes and typical broadband speed are “challenges that we have to work through. … We’ve got some very good ideas that will make that a comfortable consumer experience.”

He could be referring to overnight downloads for the 4K movie service, which the PlayStation 3 already offers when downloading large games. But that’s still a significant difference from the instant access consumers are expecting with services like Netflix and iTunes. A 100 GB download could take eight to 12 hours to download, and it could also quickly eat up your ISP’s bandwidth cap. It’s even less convenient than hopping in the car and finding a Redbox kiosk.

Perhaps Sony will come up with some method to alleviate the huge downloads. Molyneux said that work on new compression was in “active progress.” But even then, you’ll likely be looking at files around 50 GB to 70 GB.

I can’t imagine consumers will suffer through such an arduous process to view 4K video, especially when its benefits are difficult to see on TVs smaller than 60- to 80-inches. So not only will you need to buy a new TV to watch 4K content, it’ll also have to be somewhat massive (unless you opt for a projector setup). That’s why Samsung is so focused on its 85-inch and 110-inch 4K TV sets.

4K content certainly looks great, from what I’ve seen. But given that most people can’t even see the difference between 720p HD and 1080p on typical TV sets, 4K seems destined to be ignored by consumers. The headache around Sony’s 4K service certainly won’t help.

Photo: Dean Takahashi/VentureBeat

Making a modern triple-A video game is a massive undertaking — just ask Ubisoft.

It took six Ubisoft teams to make Assassin’s Creed III. The company spreads out development for its big games because it’s not viable to produce something so massive at one studio. That’s because, according to Ubisoft Reflections managing director Pauline Jacquey, it takes hundreds of people to make a triple-A title.

“‘There are games that Ubisoft specializes in, like open-world action games, with a lot of production value, and you need a team of 400 to 600 people,” Jacquey told Games Industry International in an interview. “That’s a lot, and the next-gen is increasing this.”

Jacquey goes on to say that not all games require such massive teams. Some games only require 100 people, but a next-gen console like the PlayStation 4, with all of its extra capabilities, adds to the amount of work.

“For the new PS4 console, you need teams of up to 600 guys so you can’t do it at just one site,” said Jacquey to Games Industry International. “So there’s organization within Ubisoft to make sure that collaboration happens and works.”

Ubisoft has teams all over the globe. For the aforementioned Assassin’s Creed III, Ubisoft Montreal led development, Ubisoft Kiev/Ubisoft Romania ported the game to Windows, Ubisoft Annecy designed the multiplayer, Ubisoft Singapore led development on the naval combat, and Ubisoft Quebec handled the Wii U port.

It’s a lot of effort and overhead, which increases the financial risk.

“Ubisoft is very generous with resources, making sure product quality is top notch,” said Jacquey to GI. “But then the outcome, the production revenue, should be much higher as well so it balances. It’s just the risk is higher, so if we miss it once or twice the impact is big.”

Big hits drive revenue in the games industry, but this certainly seems like a precarious position for Ubisoft to put itself in. If one of these juggernaut games flops, the publisher could take a huge loss. At the same time, gamers crave these immersive experiences, so the money is apparently there for any company that can capitalize on this craving.

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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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Last time I posted about the upcoming console generation, I made a big deal about how social features might define it for consumers. I still stand by that, but I also think console gaming is hitting an important impasse regarding developer relations.

We’ve had guys like Cliff Bleszinski and the president of Sony Computer Entertainment talking a bit about it — how platform holders need to be more flexible with developers. I think this could turn out to be one of the biggest changes going into the next generation. Really, it’s been one of the most important aspects of console gaming throughout its entire history.

In an interview with Eurogamer, SCE head Shuhei Yoshida noted that Sony will allow indie studios to self-publish games on the PlayStation 4. SCE America head Jack Tretton also mentioned that they’ll allow companies to set PS4 games at various price points, ranging from 99 cents (and likely free to play) to $60. 

Trine 2 creator Frozenbyte noted awhile ago how it was able to self-publish the Wii U eShop version of the game as opposed to going through an outside publisher for Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network. I think that’s a pretty big deal. It’s also probably one of the biggest differences between the console digital-distribution services and other stores like Steam, iOS, and Google Play. Finding a full publisher is one of the biggest barriers for indies and probably the reason why a lot of PC and mobile indie games don’t come to consoles.

Price variation is a big issue, too. The console game market during the current generation was almost cleanly bifurcated between $60 retail games — too many of which struggled to sell — and $15 small indie games. If you look at, say, the PC during the same period, you see a lot of games in a nice place in between. You see $20 games like Amnesia and Strike Suit Zero that you don’t see on consoles at all. There are also cases of $1 iOS games like Angry Birds, which for some reason had to be priced much higher on consoles.

I think Blezinski put it pretty well at the 2013 East Coast Game Conference: “Right now, he suggested the console market is 80 percent $60 retail titles and 20 percent cheaper downloadable offerings, but it needs to embrace virtually all genres and all price points,” Gamesindustry.biz reported. “That means $20 horror games, $40 shooters, $60 triple-A blockbusters, free-to-play, and everything in between, all easy to find for the audience who would be most interested in them.”

A third important element of publisher-developer relations that’s now changing is platform-holder policies on patching. A lot of developers have complained about all the bureaucracy involved in patching console games. “When Gears of War 2 launched and we found out that our netcode wasn’t working right, it took us three months to get an update out,” Bleszinski said. “By that time, the majority of users had moved on to the next game or had traded it in.”

In contrast, Steam and Apple have put the onus entirely on the developer to QA each patch, and they let developers release those patches without charge. I think the difference shows in how often software gets patched on Steam or iOS as opposed to Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

The developers of Dungeon Defenders basically gave up on updating the console versions, but my Steam copy of the game seems to be receiving a patch all the time. The number of content updates Valve has released for Team Fortress 2 on PC is in the triple digits; it’s hardly even the same game it was in 2007, but the company gave up on the Xbox version after running into Microsoft’s policy on how many free updates a developer gets. That same policy has forced Valve to charge for Left 4 Dead downloadable content on Xbox 360 while offering it for free on PC. There’s also the infamous case of how Polygon declined to patch Fez on Xbox 360 because of the costs Microsoft imposed.

In contrast, developers have already confirmed that Nintendo lets Wii U developers patch for free and as often as they want. Sony and Microsoft definitely need to follow suit.

A Wired article puts all these factors together pretty well in what it and The Penny Arcade Report call “The Minecraft Test.” Basically, it asks if a phenomenon like Minecraft could have occurred on a particular game platform. Minecraft happened because Mojang was able to “release” the game in a proto state, switch up its pricing model as the company pleased, and update it whenever it wanted without having to go through approval processes. I don’t think a console will ever be as completely open as the PC (unless Ouya really takes off), but the current ones are probably still a little bit too closed.

And that’s really the whole point: If consoles really want to fight off mobile gaming, tablet gaming, and the resurgent PC, they need to be more flexible with developers. More flexibility will probably get a platform more software, and more software increases the value of the hardware.

That’s how it’s been since basically forever. Sony overtook Nintendo with the original PlayStation by offering third-party publishers a friendly alternative to Nintendo’s then-draconian certification policies.

On the other hand, platform holders should remember the reasons why they have content curators in the first place. Nintendo’s draconian policies resurrected console games after the 1983 crash, when too many crappy games flooded the market. IOS is the perfect modern example of too little management, with good games struggling to stand out in a sea of shovelware along with a price ceiling so low as to prohibit full games.

A relations system built around big third-party publishers has worked up until the current generation. With the resurgence of garage development, though — with which mobile and PC have gotten along well and quickly — consoles are going to have to find a new balance to accommodate them properly.

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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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Lead system architect Mark Cerny announces the design principles for PlayStation 4 at Sony’s kickoff event last week in New York City.

Jussi Laakkonen is the founder and CEO of Applifier.

The console war of today is no longer a battle between just Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo. It’s expanded and is now a fight for hundreds of millions of players and tens of billions in global revenue across all screens: from smartphones and tablets to the PC and the living room. The iPad alone should blow past 200 million units sold in just three and a half years. Compare this with the PlayStation 2. It was Sony’s biggest hit, and it managed to sell 150 million units in 12 years.

Console manufactures are in a dire competition with smartphones and tablets, and Sony has clearly realized this. The PlayStation 4 announcement bedazzled the gamers and press worldwide, but not many noticed that the PS4 design principles “Simple, Immediate, Social, Integrated, and Personalized” have a common underlying theme.

Let’s make it like a tablet.

Simple: Consumer-oriented functionality, ease of use. Sony is looking to copy tablet-like user experiences. Can anything drive that point home better than using an image of a tablet at the PS4 launch event?

Immediate: PS4 brings a low-power standby state that you can resume games from and the capability to update games in the background. This is something we have had on smartphones and tablets for ages. Making games playable rapidly without waiting for the full download to complete is cool, but this is standard for mobile game, where you grab the first 50MBs of the game, get going, and it adds in content from the servers on the fly.

Social: Always-on hardware video encoding/decoding for live video streaming, a share button on the controller to share screenshots and video replays across Playstation Network, web and Facebook. Share your live video stream and spectate friends’ or celebrities’ gameplay. These are really cool features and will make playing on PlayStation 4 a lot more social. Yet you can get all of it already on mobile phones and tablets. Similar video hardware has shipped in hundreds of millions of iOS devices. My own startup, Everyplay, is powering easy video sharing for mobile players. Other mobile startups are innovating at break-neck speed to build rich social features. Once the pioneer, but now-shuttered Openfeint, provided GameFeeds similar to PS4’s planned features. Heyzap is building gamer profiles and multiplayer functions. Industry giants DeNA and Gree have both built gamer-oriented social networks. PlayStation 4 is doing the right thing bringing these features together as a platform standard, but a walled garden like the PlayStation 4 will always be playing catch-up to the innovations of an open ecosystem like iOS and Android.

Integrated: Connecting to third-party devices and services. Watching PlayStation 4 game replays on a smartphone or on Facebook. It’s great to see Sony opening up and connecting the PlayStation to third-party services and devices like smartphones. Unfortunately, every integration will have to go through Sony’s rigorous approval process, so don’t expect rapid support for Tumblr, Pinterest, or “name your favorite new social network” here. Although a very welcome feature, this is just table stakes in 2013.

Personalized Social feeds of gameplaying, real-world identity, connect with your Facebook friends, get recommendations based on what kind of games you like and dislike. Gamers can expect a built-in “Facebook for games” focused on rich media like video streams. PlayStation 4 will have players hanging out together and talking about their gaming experiences. Mobile offerings like Mobage from DeNA, Playphone’s social platform and Gree’s platform are all attempting to build similar, fully fledged gaming networks while focused services like Facebook’s App Center for game recommendations and Everyplay for game replays provide solutions for individual gamer needs. Recommendations and social proof of what friends play will do a lot to improve discoverability in the PlayStation Store. Sony’s taken what works on social and refined it to make it their own.

Good job, Sony, but the gaming revolution isn’t being televised

I’ve worked on console, social and mobile gaming. My first console was a PlayStation 2, and I’ve got a soft spot for Sony. They get games. PlayStation 4 seems to have the performance edge over the specs leaked about the so-called Xbox 720. It’s clear from the PS4 launch that Sony is serious about getting on with the times and is looking at how people play today on mobile and bringing that experience to the PS4.

Still, the gaming revolution is not being televised. The plastic boxes sitting below TVs led the gaming industry’s growth for nearly two decades, but now the big screen is fading just as the mobile screens are exploding. While Sony may, if lucky, get to 100 million PS4 units sold in the next 10 years, I expect the tablet user base to crack a billion in less than five years as tablets replace PCs. It has taken less than six years for smartphones to blow past that magical billion units, and all signs point to tablet shipments accelerating faster than smartphones.

Sony. I like what you do. Guess we both agree that the future of gaming is in mobile.

Jussi Laakkonen is the founder and CEO of Applifier and has spent the last few years in helping small and medium-sized game developers grow their games. As the leader of what the press dubbed “the rebel alliance,” Jussi rallied Facebook game developers together with the original cross-promotion network and grew it to reach over 150 million monthly active users. Jussi & Applifier are now focused on building authentic social discovery for mobile games with Everyplay, which lets players share their most memorable game replays with friends and fans. You’ll find him tweeting from @jussil about games and entrepreneurship.

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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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Electronic Arts is finally talking about the PlayStation 4 and the next-generation of home gaming systems. And the short version of chief technology officer Rajat Taneja’s conversation on a call with investors today? “OMG SO MANY RAM,” or at least that’s what it sounded like to my dimwitted brain.

“At EA we’ve never been more ready for the start of a new console cycle,” said Taneja. “The console itself is a giant leap for our industry. If you look at it on an aggregate basis, the new consoles are between eight and 10 times more powerful than the current generation. We no longer have to constrain our games or ration memory.”

Later in the call, EA chief financial officer Blake Jorgensen said that he’s seen Battlefield 4, and that it looks stunning. So we can expect a major visual overall from EA, but the Taneja is also excited about Sony’s new dedication to socializing traditional gaming with the “Share” button.

“The connected sharing capabilities of the new console fits directly with our strategy,” said Taneja. “It’s part of the trends of that we’ve been embracing of multiplayer gaming, connected gaming, and social gaming. This helps us accelerate those features in our games.”

For those that don’t know (and you can get fully caught up on the PlayStation 4 here), Sony’s new PS4 controller features a button called Share that players use to quickly broadcast livestreaming gameplay videos. Gamers can also use this feature to cut together a highlight reel based on recent in-game actions. The PS4 is always recording and saves up to the last 15 minutes of gameplay.

EA was already looking into similar features for its popular first-person shooter series Battlefield and soccer franchise FIFA, but Taneja says the publisher is happy to have such an elegant solution built into Sony’s new hardware.

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

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At its PlayStation 4 event last week 20 in New York City, Sony Computer Entertainment showed off a number of games from a handful of first- and third-party developers. Publishing giant Electronic Arts, however, was notably absent from the event.

During an investor call today, EA chief financial officer Blake Jorgensen said that EA skipping the Sony event doesn’t indicate that its games aren’t ready for PlayStation 4 this year.

“It was more about timing of our own slate as well as trying to maintain a good balance of power with all the parties out there,” said Jorgensen.

The only other possible party “out there” is Microsoft. EA may prefer to introduce its first next-gen games along with the so-called “Xbox 720.”

“Between now and E3, you’re going to see a lot of stuff from us,” said Jorgensen. “We’ll just choose [on our own] marketing cadence when to start to announce stuff.”

If EA plans to announce games for the new systems before E3, it’s a safe bet that it could make an appearance on stage at Microsoft’s rumored event in April.

“At the end of the day, we’re very excited about Sony’s new platform,” said Jorgensen. “We feel it’s a great opportunity. As [chief technology officer Rajat Taneja] said, the technical power of the system is going to allow us to do a substantial number of things that we’ve never been able to do before. I’ve seen the new Battlefield, and it’s just stunning.”

EA plans to debut Battlefield 4 this fall for PC and the major home consoles.

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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 is putting the pieces into place for the launch of its next-generation PlayStation 4 home video game console.

Sony Computer Entertainment America announced today that Carat Media will now manage the PlayStation company’s media strategy going forward. Carat Media will design how the company will market its products and will handle the buying of advertising spots on television, on the web, and elsewhere.

“All of the participating agencies presented outstanding approaches during the selection process,” SCEA senior vice president of PlayStation brand marketing Guy Longworth said in a statement. “Carat presented an innovative model that will drive significant marketing value to SCEA, and we look forward to partnering with them.”

Carat recently signed to work with automotive giant GM and retailer Macy’s. The firm will work with SCEA’s new advertising agency BBH New York, which will create the actual ads.

“We are thrilled to be able to redefine the value of PlayStation’s media, especially at this incredible moment in time for the brand,” Carat Global president Doug Ray said.

Previously, advertising firm Deutsch handled both the ad creation and media management for SCEA.

Sony plans to launch the PlayStation 4, which it introduced last week, during this year’s holiday season.

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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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I met Pete Parsons before Halo came out, as he was going around the country evangelizing the first-person shooter on the Xbox game console that Microsoft was about to launch way back in the fall of 2001. I recall his enthusiasm as marketing director at Microsoft, always promoting the idea of doing a pioneering shooting experience on consoles that, frankly, were inferior to the PC. Now, Parsons is still doing the same thing, only he is promoting Destiny, the next shooter from developer Bungie.

As chief operating officer at Bungie, Parsons must help lead the 350-person team do the enormous amount of behind-the-scenes work in bringing the persistent world of the always-connected Destiny to life. Activision Blizzard is planning on publishing a series of Destiny titles over the next decade, and Parsons will play a big role in making that happen.

Parsons left his job at Microsoft to become the COO at Bungie after Halo launched. In 2007, he left Microsoft to start Meteor Solutions, a viral-marketing startup, and worked double duty for a time. As Bungie prepared to leave the Microsoft fold and move on to a new franchise, Parsons came back. He returned to the studio in 2010. Parsons is now fully focused on getting Destiny out the door and managing the culture and talent inside Bungie’s 80,000-square-foot headquarters in Bellevue, Wash.

After a few years of secrecy, Bungie finally revealed concept art from its new game universe while announcing that Destiny would debut on the PlayStation 4 (and likely other platforms). We visited Parsons at Bungie HQ last week, and here’s an edited transcript of our conversation.

GamesBeat: You must feel good right now.

Pete Parsons: [Laughs] Well, I think it feels good to be Bungie right now. We’re always about doing great things and ambitious things. That’s because we have such a great team, because we can do that. It’s a great time to be at Bungie. It’s an energy that many people haven’t felt since some of the earliest days of Halo. That’s exciting. We still have a lot of the old guard around, but we’ve been able to bring on a massive amount of new talent.

GamesBeat: Did somebody in particular sell you on the idea of Destiny? I think you came in after it started, right?

Parsons: No, we’ve all been working from the very beginning. Well, it depends on how you look at it. Destiny has been an idea bouncing around since even before the technology to make it existed.

Destiny is very much a product of everybody at Bungie, but its inception comes from Jason [Jones, co-founder of Bungie]. This is very much a vision that Jason has. Then, he gathers a small group of really talented people who have been here a long time, and they begin hammering on it. It’s had multiple incarnations until it finally landed into what it is today. That’s fun to watch. Not just on technology, but art and story.

GamesBeat: It sounds like you did have options, though. Was there a point where you bought into Destiny and said, “I want to do this too?” For 10 years or whatever it will be.

Parsons: As naïve as this may sound, if Jason believes in something and he’s ready to go for it, I’m in. No joke, I still walk in the door every day and think, “Who gets to do this? This is awesome, to be a part of this thing.” Even when I’m having a shitty day, I feel that way. There are so many other things I could do that, for me, wouldn’t be as satisfying or as interesting. They might be enriching. They might satisfy some level of my curiosity. They might be exciting. But there’s something about these people and this place.

GamesBeat: Did you feel any tug when Halo went off in another direction, with Microsoft’s 343 Industries, and then Bungie went its separate way with Destiny?

Parsons: Personally, I did not. I love the Halo universe. I think it’s great. It inspires me. It inspires my children. They’ve never played, but they know the universe. One, though, I’ve spent a lot of time with Halo. Two, the mythic science fiction of Destiny immediately attracted me. It was that first image … It’s a simple image, but it took weeks of back-and-forth to put together. There were a few images already, maybe three or four, but they didn’t speak to what it was. The moment that image was done, it was like, “That’s it.” That’s the game. That’s the idea. That’s a place that I want to be.

GamesBeat: Is that published now? Which image is that?

Parsons: I don’t know if it’s ever been published. It was just this very striking image that had that feeling of — this is not purely a science fiction universe. It’s not just about two big military-industrial complexes smashing into each other. It’s a place with myths and lore. There’s a guy with sci-fi armor on, and yet he’s got a rifle that looks like it’s from an ancient desert somewhere. It was super cool. That certainly spoke to me. I didn’t look back.

At the time, we were working on both Halo: ODST and Halo:Reach. I still love the Halo universe. It’s an interesting place. But I think what we’ve been able to do is create an incredibly deep fiction and a place that you’re going to want to be in.

GamesBeat: You had a leak. You had some interesting reactions. What was it like, looking at the reaction from the inside?

Parsons: You’re never really excited when you first learn that a leak happens. Then you get to see the reaction. We had this really quick thing. We said, “There’s a leak happening. We can either say nothing, or we can say, ‘Yeah.’” Instead of looking at images that we didn’t want you to see, let’s give you one that we want you to see. So, we released the picture of the Fallen. When our community, who we love, reacts so positively to an image — “Oh my God. That’s so great. That’s a place I want to be in. I can’t wait to learn more about that” — we go from, “Oh, man” to “Sweet!” Within less than half an hour, we were like, “This is the course of action. Let’s go.”

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