The PlayStation Vita’s homescreen can get quite messy after you install a few games. Sony is finally addressing this in the latest system update.

Sony revealed that it will release v2.10 of the PlayStation Vita operating system today in the U.S and tomorrow in Europe. The patch adds folders, browser enhancements, and usability features.

The biggest addition is a new folder system. You can now organize up to 10 Vita apps and games in the fully configurable folders.

The Vita’s web browser is now capable of streaming web videos. While some file types still won’t work, sites like YouTube are fully operational through the browser.

The update also improves usability.

Players can now figure out which title they plugged into the Vita by checking the info bar. Previously, it was easy to forget which game is in the Vita because the system keeps all icons on the homepage regardless of whether the card is still inside it.

Email is also getting an overhaul on Sony’s touchscreen portable. The system can now handle HTML messages, and the new search feature allows users to sift through their old messages.

Finally, if you have a PlayStation Plus membership and a 3G-capable Vita, the device will automatically update software and sync save data over the mobile connection.

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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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Square Enix is giving one of its Final Fantasy classics a high-definition upgrade. No, not Final Fantasy 7 — that’s crazy.

The publisher launched a website announcing Final Fantasy X|X-2 HD Remaster for PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita. The collection is available for preorder on Amazon for $39.99, but the company hasn’t set a firm release date yet.

On Monday, Square Enix will release a full announcement trailer, but for now it release a handful of HD screens:

Square Enix originally released Final Fantasy X in July 2001. It was the first Final Fantasy game on the PlayStation 2 after three on the original PlayStation.

The publisher followed up with Final Fantasy X-2 in 2003, also for the PlayStation 2. This was the first time the company ever released a direct sequel to a Final Fantasy game.

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

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Sony 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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With over 20 billion games downloaded across all smart phone and tablet platforms in 2012, the mobile gaming market is shifting inexorably away from dedicated handheld consoles.

Statistics released today by analytics site App Annie and market research firm International Data Corporation (IDC) showed that total game spending on the iOS App Store and Google Play eclipsed that on dedicated handheld consoles during fourth quarter of 2012.

Apple led this dominance, helped by a growth in Google Play gaming revenue, particularly in Japan and South Korea. Around 60 percent of purchases of Google Play games came from the Asia-Pacific region that period.

Despite business models that are vastly different, Nintendo and Apple, when viewed in isolation, actually matched each other for sales pretty closely. “While the most popular games and their business models are quite distinct, Nintendo and Apple were surprisingly close in terms of aggregate consumer spend on game software in the fourth quarter of 2012,” said Lewis Ward, IDC’s gaming research manager, via press release.

Nintendo dominated the list of top five grossing dedicated handheld games, with key titles like Pokémon Black/White Version 2 (DS) and New Super Mario Bros 2. (3DS). Sony’s PlayStation Vita and PSP consoles had a limited share of the packaged game market, with Nintendo shipments topping Sony’s by a ratio of nearly 3 to 1.

All 2012′s top grossing games on iOS and Google Play (listed below) were free-to-play titles supported by in-app purchases. All the top-grossing dedicated handheld titles were full-priced boxed (or boxed plus digital) releases.

While the game is a long way from over for dedicated handheld consoles, both Sony and Nintendo are surely taking notes on this shift in mobile gaming spending patterns.

iOS App Store

1. Clash of Clans Supercell (Finland)

2. Puzzles & Dragons GungHo Online (Japan)

3. Hay Day Supercell (Finland)

4. Kingdoms of Camelot: Battle for the North Kabam, (U.S.)

5. The Simpsons: Tapped Out Electronic Arts (U.S.)

Google Play

1. Puzzles & Dragons GungHo Online (Japan)

2. DragonFlight for Kakao NextFloor (South Korea)

3. Anipang for Kakao SUNDAYTOZ (South Korea)

4. GREE GREE (Japan)

5. I Love Coffee for Kakao PATISTUDIO (South Korea)

Dedicated handhelds

1. Pokémon Black/White Version 2, DS, Game Freak (Japan)

2. New Super Mario Bros. 2 3DS, Nintendo (Japan)

3. Animal Crossing: New Leaf 3DS, Nintendo (Japan)

4. Super Mario 3D Land 3DS, Nintendo (Japan)

5. Mario Kart 7 3DS, Nintendo (Japan)

[Report images via App Annie]

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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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Price cuts are only for countries with good little boys and girls … and decent exchange rates.

Sony Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida revealed that the PlayStation Vita won’t receive a price cut in North America, according to Polygon. Yoshida cited the current exchange rate between the Japanese yen and U.S. dollar, which currently sits at 93.17 yen for every $1, as the reason Sony won’t drop the price on this continent.

Many gamers were expecting Sony to announce a $50 slash to the Vita’s price at its event yesterday, where the company introduced the PlayStation 4. Earlier in the week, Sony Computer Entertainment Japan lowered the price from 24,980 yen ($268) to 19,980 yen ($214).

A PlayStation Vita currently costs $249.99 in the U.S. A $50 cut would put the system at $199.99, which only earns Sony 18,633 yen.

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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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More than a year after introducing the PlayStation Vita, Sony will cut the price of both versions of its struggling handheld game system at the end of the month.

During the past year, Sony has sold about 4 million PlayStation Vitas on a worldwide basis. This rate appears sluggish when compared to sales of the Apple iPhone, which is selling at a rate of 48 million a quarter, and the iPad, which is selling 23 million a quarter. Sony is selling perhaps 10,000 units a week in Japan, but Nintendo’s 3DS, which has sold 29 million units, is beating Sony in the games segment.

Starting on Feb. 28, the Wi-Fi and 3G models of the Vita will both cost ¥19,980 ($215). The Wi-Fi model previously cost ¥25,000, and the 3G model previously cost ¥30,000. No price drops for Europe or North America were announced, but Sony has scheduled a press event on Feb. 20 in New York.

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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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Sanzaru Games, taking over for original developer Sucker Punch Productions, rescued the burgling raccoon Sly Cooper from obscurity when it released an HD collection in 2010. Now, after almost a decade, we have a new entry in the stealth-platforming series. Sanzaru has learned well from its experience remastering the first three games, and Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time (out today as a cross-play title for PlayStation 3 and PS Vita) is a big cause for celebration.

What you’ll like

Classic sneaking and stealing

Despite the near eight-year gap, fans will immediately recognize familiar traits and ease into the gameplay no matter where the gang’s time machine takes them. Like before, Sly evades yellow searchlights that alert guards, uses his Thief Sense to tiptoe around corners or spring to wherever he sees blue sparkles, and hunts for items like the good old clue bottles. It’s partly a collect-a-thon — completely optional and perfect for those who want to relive the golden days of platforming and explore a world in search of shiny baubles.

Aside from the bouncing clue bottles (find 30 to break the safe in each hub area), players can track down treasures (and race them back to the hideout to claim them) and Sly masks (which unlock extras, like design alterations to Sly’s paraglider or outfit). They can also open ThiefNet, the store accessible from the hideout, to redeem coins for more powerful attacks and moves.

Even the narrative style is the same, with a single character talking over animated cutscenes, which are a real highlight — cartoony, charming, and funny to watch. Sanzaru unloaded a lot of detail into these beautiful cel-shaded worlds, and even the hideout and the animals (friendly and hostile) that populate these locales change alongside the theme (from feudal Japan to ancient Arabia). The developer did its homework; this is a true and polished sequel.

More depth than a motley crew needs

Thieves in Time delivers a surprising amount of content, too. It takes around 20 hours to finish the campaign and even longer to achieve full completion. As the Cooper gang jumps through time, chasing after the villain who’s targeting Sly’s quirky ancestors, the player controls a well-rounded cast of characters: the old trio, including the computer-savvy turtle Bentley and the heavy-weight fighter Murray; the feisty Inspector Carmelita Fox, who’s Sly’s girlfriend (or possibly ex-girlfriend); and of course, the Coopers from each of the five eras you visit.

The controls give you a lot of freedom to fiddle around as you please — try spinning Bentley around in his wheelchair and just feel the snap-back of those tires — and although each character can learn a ton of techniques, many of them build on existing ones. They’re also mapped similarly between characters, so you can pick them up more easily. For example, holding Triangle charges up a special move that’s unique to each team member while pressing Triangle and Square in quick succession unleashes a one-hit-kill stealth attack for any Cooper. ThiefNet purchases expand on Bentley’s bomb abilities and dart types, which you can access from the gadget grid (by holding L2), or upgrade Murray’s punches.

The grid also acts a wardrobe for Sly. Using it, he can don any of the costumes he acquires as souvenirs while skipping around various time periods. Each comes with a specialized set of moves. The Samurai outfit, for example, enables Sly to walk through fire unharmed and reflect fireballs with a golden shield.

Each Cooper possesses a signature technique that grants you access to specific areas or lets you bypass certain obstacles. “Tennessee Kid” Cooper from the old West can use his Crackshot to fire at multiple targets, and the ninja Rioichi can leap to distant blue-sparkle points.

Some help from the team

You can’t say that Thieves in Time doesn’t take pains to guide players through levels. The radar marks your current location and that of your objective, but clicking the left stick brings up an arrow beneath the character that points him in the precise direction he needs to go. Enemies appear as red dots on the radar too, and the character icon in the upper left corner of the screen (which displays health) blinks red when one’s nearby or flashes red and blue when a guard has spotted you. So no matter what the task or how far you’ve wandered, the game gets you back on track. Even the environment contains visual clues that steer you along; sometimes arrows are even visible on the walls or floors. It’s a bit of overkill, but it works.

Thieves in Time’s real asset is how well it brings the gang together to pull off heists. Some missions require multiple characters to work together or handle certain parts of a job, and their joint efforts help the team take down the bad guys (who are awesome, by the way, with the exception of a few annoying boss personalities).

It’s surprising, but much of the experience consists of minigames, and the developer manages to implement them without frustrating players. They’re appropriately short and never too taxing, and the sheer variety is impressive. Each one centers around a character and his strengths. You might cringe at the thought of Sixaxis tilt controls and computer hacking in other titles (I hate them), but each one is fresh and interesting — whether it’s a dance performance as Murray or a mech showdown between nerds.

What you won’t like

Still loading

These load times would embarrass dinosaurs, and they occur rather frequently. Get ready to take a lot of coffee breaks while you wait for cutscenes and jobs to begin.

Help, please! … No, not like that!

Maybe it’s because I enjoyed playing as the different characters so much and because they’re so distinct from one another, but I wish Sanzaru balanced out their screen times a bit more. You play as Sly a lot and Bentley and Murray a good deal, but I wanted more practice with the other Coopers and Carmelita especially. Their missions are sprinkled nicely throughout the game, but there weren’t enough to satisfy me — especially after buying new moves for the foxy inspector.

On the other hand, I could have done without so much chattiness. I’m glad the voice actors provided so much dialogue as it makes the scenarios fresher, but Bentley, in particular, is a little too helpful. The know-it-all turtle doesn’t leave you much of a chance to figure things out on your own before butting in with a few words of advice. (That said, he’s one of my favorite characters. Unlike Sly, he has great one-liners. He’s just garrulous.)

X, Up, Down, Square … what?

Thieves in Time features a full digital manual, which contains a thorough list of moves for the central characters. But this convenient feature isn’t accessible from the game itself, which renders it pointless when you need to look up a move in a pinch. The controls reference from the Options menu won’t do you much good unless Sly is your main concern; Bentley and Murray didn’t make the cut, which is unfortunate considering how many moves they have at their disposal.

Command prompts do pop up during play to remind you how to execute skills, but sometimes these hint boxes appear for no reason, and they temporarily block the radar when they do. It’s excessive and annoying, and you can’t turn off this part of the interface.

But one crucial aspect of the title’s cross-play capabilities puts PlayStation 3 owners at a big disadvantage. Aside from taking the game on the go, players can turn their PS Vita into an augmented-reality device — a viewfinder for locating the clue bottles, treasures, and Sly masks in each world. The binocucom (kind of like “binoculars,” but a little more technological) in the original Sly Cooper provided the same benefit, so it’s unfair that PS3 players can’t rely on some in-game (but less exciting) equivalent for help without going out and buying a Vita (or hitting up GameFAQs).

A fizzle of a finale

Although some shine more than others, the boss fights in Thieves in Time are challenging and cool. But the last showdown is little more than a string of quick-time events — little effort required. It’s anticlimactic compared to all the work you put in previously. Even minor encounters, like Carmelita’s battle with a three-headed mechanical dragon, worked up more of a sweat.

Conclusion

Sly Cooper: Thieves is Time is a fantastic addition to the series and a great entry point for newcomers. Most of my gripes are minor, but the aggressive load times present the biggest detriment to the game, and the need for a PS Vita might irritate anyone who wants to collect everything these time periods have to offer. The rest is just a few hiccups in history, but they shouldn’t stop you from enjoying the latest chapter in the Cooper story.

Score: 89/100

Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time was released for the PlayStation 3 and PS Vita on February 5, 2013. The publisher provided GamesBeat with a PS3 copy of the game for the purpose of this review.

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

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No one likes their alarm clock. It might be functional, but it’s loud, and it occasionally wakes you up at the wrong time. Now, a new application called Wake-up Club is about to change how you feel about getting up in the morning.

Available for free to owners of Sony’s PlayStation Vita handheld gaming device, the application makes waking up fun — and it’s finally coming to North America today, according to the PS Blog. Gamers can personalize the virtual alarm clock with a tone and background theme that’s pleasing to them, so it’s a lot better than hearing the same dreadful buzzing every day. But Wake-up Club turns what used to be a relatively solitary activity — waking up — into a social activity where you earn in-game achievements, or Trophies, that reward you for getting out of bed.

Wake-up Club matches you with 12 other random players who have all chosen the same time to start their day. When the alarm goes off, tapping your bouncing onscreen avatar (the Vita has touchscreens on the front and back of the device) will let the others in your group know you’re awake, and from the virtual club room, you can see who else is an early riser and who’s catching some extra shuteye.

The players who wake up first can encourage those still sleeping to get up by “cheering” them on. As they snooze, other players’ avatars will show up on their screen, and they’ll have to swipe them away and tap their own to join the rest of the “awake” group.

It’s a great example of how gamification, or the use of gaming mechanics and ideas in nongame situations, can improve everyday living. You may actually want to be the first of your buddies to wake up from now on.

You can also tap on other people’s avatars to learn more about those players and even send a friend request. You can check your club records to track how many times you’ve woken up within five minutes, how many consecutive success you’ve had, and how long it takes you on average to get moving.

Players can get started with Wake-up Club by accessing the Vita’s “Settings” menu. From there, choose “Date & Time” and then “Date & Time Settings.” Make sure “Set Automatically” is on.

The more you play, the more chances you have of earning some impressive Trophies. The app features achievements such as being the first of your club members to wake up at least 30 times and achieving a wake-up time that’s faster than 3 seconds. Now that’s embracing a new day.

We’ve contacted Sony for more details and will update accordingly.

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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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There’s no such thing as bad press. It’s a cliché, and — even worse than that — it’s not even true.

If you want evidence that the public spotlight is a bad thing on occasion, you should acquaint yourself with the story of Ocean Marketing. As our article points out, an angry customer asked someone mildly famous to publicize a few emails he exchanged with the owner of Ocean Marketing, and it destroyed the company. Or how about this advertisement Sony ran for the PlayStation Portable, where a white woman is holding a black woman by the throat with the caption, “White is coming”?

Yeah, that was ill-conceived.

Now that it’s the end of the year, we are gonna take a few minutes to reflect on the terrible examples of game-related advertising, marketing, and public relations in 2012.

Sony says the PlayStation Vita is like a woman with two extra breasts on her back

Oh, Sony, you poor darling. You don’t know what is edgy, what is offensive, and what is just damned stupid.

Let’s recap: Sony — or its marketing partners — ran an ad in a French magazine that had a picture of a woman from the neck down with two large breasts on her chest and two more on her back. The caption on the ad, in French, reads, “Twice the touch screens, twice the sensation.” The idea is that since the PS Vita has a touch screen on the front and the back, it’s as much fun as a deformed lady with growths on her shoulder blades.

Where to begin?

Let’s ignore that this offensively compares a woman’s body to a piece of consumer electronics. Let’s ignore the juvenile stance on the touching of boobies. Let’s ignore that touch screens actually aren’t nearly as fun as this comparison suggests. But I can’t ignore that this advert promotes the idea that a woman’s back is somehow boring because it lacks bosoms. I’ve been to France. The women in that country have just as nice backs as anywhere else. I would suggest that if you feel like a woman’s back is useless because it doesn’t have breasts, then you have a bigger problem than deciding whether or not to buy a new gaming device.

Most things related to promoting Hitman: Absolution

Edgy gone wrong describes everything about Hitman.

Publisher Square Enix started off the marketing campaign for its assassination title with a trailer showing the titular hitman punching a cadre of “naughty nuns” in the face. A loud chorus of confused fans wondered why the publisher would glorify sexualized violence. When I watch the video, the parts of my brain that react to “sexy nuns” and the parts that react to bloody noses don’t intermingle in the slightest, but I also wouldn’t use the punching of women in lingerie as a main selling point for a game.

Then, earlier this month, Square Enix unveiled a new marketing website for Hitman: Absolution that invited fans to put make-believe hits out on their friends on Facebook. The fake hitman would ask for a distinguishing feature of the “target” and would present the user with a drop-down menu that included things like “her hairy legs,” “her small tits,” and “his tiny penis.”

Since you could only send the messages to your confirmed friends on Facebook, this might not offend everybody. But the marketing team was obviously going for shock value, and it did shock people. Square Enix removed the website hours after introducing it.

“Have you heard about my Kickstarter?”

A big part of marketing involves PR people pitching products to the press. They try to get the media to cover the product in an attempt to create excitement. This means we get a lot of emails about boring stuff that no one wants to read about — and nothing epitomizes that kind of email like the “Hey, have you heard about our Kickstarter?” press release.

I am all for Kickstarter. I think it’s a viable alternative to the established publisher system, but it’s not good for Kickstarter when my main interaction with it is to groan while I archive an email that pretends like a developer asking for money is news.

Now, I wouldn’t include this on a list of terrible marketing ideas if the problem only affected my inbox. Internet forums like Reddit and NeoGAF have established rules against “Kickstarter reminder posts.” That’s because developers bombard everywhere they can think of when they have a campaign. It’s understandable to a degree. They’re trying to fund their work, but annoying people isn’t going to help.

The problem is that when Kickstarter first hit the big time, the concept itself was news. That’s not true anymore. Now, if developers want to grab attention for their crowd-funding campaigns, they need a deeper hook than the fact that they’re asking for money.

The War Z debacle

As much effort as publishers and developers put into marketing their games before they release them, it doesn’t matter if something goes wrong when the game launches.

Or in the case of developer Hammerpoint Interactive’s The War Z, if everything goes wrong when the game launches.

GamesBeat extensively covered this catastrophe, but let’s recap the major events:

When the studio released the open-world zombie game on Valve’s Steam digital-distribution service, its store page noted a handful of features that simply weren’t in the game. When irate players began to demand refunds, Hammerpoint said it couldn’t do anything to help them.

This only enraged gamers further. Those customers raised hell until Valve could only respond by removing the game from its store and granting refunds to anyone who wanted them.

Now, the developer is deep in a public-relations hole that will be nearly impossible to climb out of when it’s time to rerelease the game.

Most in-game ads on mobile

Free is dope.

I love not paying for games on my phone. It means I can try out a bunch of different titles without wasting my very limited funds, but I also understand that developers need to make money.

The most common monetization solution for mobile studios is to implement in-game advertising. Many developers have generated a great deal of revenue using these ads, so it works — but it’s usually done terribly from the player’s perspective.

Let’s take the very last game that I played on my phone before I got out of bed this morning: Family Feud.

I didn’t pay for the adaptation of the long-running television game show. In between each full play session, the game halts and throws up an empty screen while it loads an ad. When the ad finally appears, it is invariably oriented incorrectly. If I have the phone in landscape mode, the ad loads vertically, and vice versa. These commercials are also ugly as Web 1.0. The advertising people don’t put a lot of effort into designing ad spots for mobile devices. Instead, they just repurpose banners built for websites and slap those into places they don’t really belong.

You end up with an ugly and confusing mess that interrupts gameplay, and then, you’re lucky if the “skip ad” button works the first 20 times that you tap it.

No one has really figured out how to do in-games ad well. Some of the Angry Birds titles place a small ad unit over a portion of the screen during gameplay, which naturally leads to users inadvertently clicking the ad. That’s good for the developer, but it’s annoying for the gamer and costly to the advertiser.

Maybe this issue doesn’t have a neat solution, but it would be nice to see developers and advertisers working together a bit harder to improve the user experience.

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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 2012 has shown us one thing, it’s that video game development is truly in the “crossover era.” GamesBeat’s 2012 Game of the Year, The Walking Dead, was first available as a downloadable title, not a retail release. Other downloadables, such as indie-developed darlings Journey and Faster Than Light, garnered plenty of votes as well. And in our staff’s and contributor’s top games of the year lists, we even see mobile releases — like Fieldrunners 2.

Gaming has changed, and it’s nice to see that it’s more than just big-budget console and PC titles that have earned Game of the Year attention. Here are the top games as chosen by GamesBeat staffers and contributors. Let us know what you think about our picks in the comments — especially if you feel we’ve left something off our lists!

Editor-in-chief Dan “Shoe” Hsu

XCOM: Enemy Unknown
Platforms: PC, Xbox 360, PS3
Publisher: 2K Games
Developer: Firaxis Games

Little green men — yesteryear’s poster boys for mysterious invaders from outer space — are about as menacing as Oompa Loompas armed with toy guns. XCOM’s little gray men, however, are scary as hell. It’s not the ashen skin, bulbous eyes, or creepy-crawly walk. It’s what these Sectoids represent: a greater threat that we are simply not equipped to handle.

In the strategy game XCOM: Enemy Unknown, we mere humans bring dull knives to plasma gunfights. And just when we start to catch up in weapon technology, the bug-eyed bastards bring bigger guns and meaner friends. These jerks even cheat with mysterious mind-control powers. Meanwhile, we’re barely keeping the checkbook balanced between research, manufacturing, facility construction, aircraft, and an ever-decreasing budget due to world nations pulling out of the program if you can’t keep them safe (and you can never keep them all safe).

It all adds up to an incredibly exciting and stressful experience. Each decision — whether it’s which tree to hide your assault trooper behind or which whiny country gets your last airspace-monitoring satellite — feels monumental and permanent. Humanity’s existence is at stake, and we just want to make it to the next month, when a few more pennies come rolling in and a few more traumatized soldiers get out of sick bay.

It’s a desperate fight. And boy will we celebrate when those little gray men are dead.

Shoe’s other picks for best games of 2012: Fieldrunners 2, Dishonored, Journey, Fez

Lead writer Dean Takahasi

The Unfinished Swan
Platform: PlayStation 3 (PlayStation Network)
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment America
Developer: Giant Sparrow

The Unfinished Swan is one of the most creative titles yet for the PlayStation Network. It’s an interactive fairy tale where you lob blobs of black paint at a white screen. As you do so, you uncover part of a 3D space hidden within the white scene. Uncovering each scene is a mind-bending task, as you have to navigate perplexing puzzles. You explore the unknown, and as you do so, you uncover a new segment in a fairy tale about a boy who loses his mother. It is a touching story that will remind of you of the zany Alice in Wonderland. Ian Dallas, the game creator, feels that a child who is abandoned is like an unfinished work of art. But just when you think that the game has become predictable, it changes. In some ways, the story seems unfinished. But the title is a wonderful first effort for Giant Sparrow, a new studio bankrolled by Sony.

Dean’s other picks for the best games of 2012: Halo 4, Far Cry 3, Journey, Call of Duty: Black Ops II

Culture editor Sebastian Haley

Hotline Miami
Platform: PC
Publisher: Developer Digital
Developer: Dennaton Games

Indie sensation Hotline Miami is best described as the film Drive, but in a retro, pixelated and somehow even more violent form, with subtle hints of Rockstar’s Manhunt sprinkled on top. The short-but-sickeningly sweet levels allow you to carefully orchestrate your symphony of murder and mayhem, filling the floors with maimed corpses and spraying the walls with crimson, all while its surreal, Miami Vice-inspired soundtrack beats in the back of your mind. Basically, if you own a Wii or like looking at livestreams of kittens, this is not your kind of game.

Sebastian’s other picks for best games of 2012: Trials Evolution, Far Cry 3, The Darkness II, Final Fantasy XIII-2

Staff writer Jeff Grubb

Mark of the Ninja
Platform: Xbox 360 (Xbox Live Arcade), PC
Publisher: Microsoft Studios
Developer: Klei Entertainment

For these Game of the Year summaries, we’re supposed to look above and beyond the individual parts of a game. We’re supposed to write about why it is important, but in the case of Mark of the Ninja, it’s those parts that make it so special. Developer Klei’s 2D stealth action game for Xbox Live Arcade and PC is a master class in well-executed gameplay mechanics. Whether it’s a soundwave that ripples off your ninja’s feet to indicate how much noise he’s making or a vision cone that indicates where an enemy is looking, Mark of the Ninja is constantly communicating with the player. It then provides the player with a great controlling character to poke and prod the world with.

It’s not rare that a game makes you feel like a badass, but with Klei’s game it’s not about how powerful you are — it’s about how in tune with the environment your character is. You have so much visual and aural information that every moment is an opportunity for experimentation. You can spend 10 minutes laying out a detailed plan that involves deadly traps, or you can play the entire game without a sword.

In video games, we don’t usually get a lot of new ideas, we just get different takes on old ideas. Stealth is an old idea at this point, but Mark of the Ninja distinguishes itself by executing the concept better than any other game before it.

Jeff’s other picks for best games of 2012: The Walking Dead, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, Trials Evolution, FTL: Faster Than Light

Copy editor Jason Wilson

FTL: Faster Than Light
Platform: PC, Mac, Linux
Publisher: Subset Games
Developer: Subset Games

I’m low on fuel. My crew raced around my starship like a colony of ants, hastily putting out fires as doors opened to the cold vacuum of space. The Rebels are closing in on me. Do I take a chance and see if I can gain more fuel in the next nebular cloud, or do I make a mad dash for the next sector and hope to find friendly forces instead of angry adversaries? These are just some of the choices the player faces in FTL: Faster Than Light, the indie roguelike that’s swept upon a number of Game of the Year lists in 2012 (including ours!). What makes FTL so compelling to players is that a take on Civilization’s “one more turn” addictive nature — but instead of furthering your game, you’re driven to see if your next attempt takes you closer to escaping the pursuing Rebel forces. And it’s this that makes FTL one of the most interesting, fascinating, and, yes, best games of 2012.

Jason’s other picks for best games of 2012: The Walking Dead, Crusader Kings II, Torchlight II, Dragon’s Dogma

Contributor Rus McLaughlin

Far Cry 3
Platforms: Xbox 360, PS3, PC
Publisher: Ubisoft
Developer: Ubisoft Montreal

Something visceral. Something primal. Most shooters don’t have these. They settle you into a safe, comfortable role. Veteran soldier. Seasoned cop. Career criminal. A hero … or an antihero. But Far Cry 3 makes you run blind through the jungle while murderous pirates hunt you like a piece of prey. You’re just a terrified kid. Never held a gun before. Never seen anyone die before. Now you’re covered in your own brother’s blood and getting high off the giddy thrill of mere survival. Then you’re turned lose to roam two amazingly rich, open-world islands where you can really start enjoying yourself, slowly and cautiously picking your tormentors apart. Before you know it, the elation you get from destroying a criminal empire hardens into a different kind of drug: revenge.

That’s when Far Cry 3 surpasses the standard shooter fare. An aimless twentysomething becomes a killer of killers, as feared as the insane warlords he wants dead. Between coolly tense stealth play and straight-up gunfights, you become the predator, stalking intruders in your jungle and murdering them at will. It all culminates in a moment where you must decide just how much you enjoy that particular power fantasy. Enough to abandon your humanity? Maybe.

Far Cry 3 goes there. Solid gameplay — minus a weak-tea multiplayer — and incredibly detailed environments lift it far enough, but its secret weapon lies in how it takes you into that dark, primal place. And then it dares you to ignore your basic animal instincts.

Rus’s other picks for best games of 2012: The Walking Dead, Fez, Halo 4, Journey

Contributing editor Rob Savillo

Contributor Rob LeFebvre

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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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After four adventures in third-person shooting, Uncharted finally branches out to another genre. I’m just a little surprised it’s a card game. Well, at least it’s not a kart racer. (Actually, Unkarted kind of sounds awesome.)

Instead we have Uncarded (I refuse to stop with the puns), a $5 downloadable available now for the PlayStation Vita. Well, I’m a pretty big fan of the series, so I’d probably buy a can of anchovies if it had Nathan Drake’s face plastered all over it. But that doesn’t mean I have to like it!

But I did. Like it, I mean. The card game, not the anchovies.

What You’ll Like

Familiar yet unique mechanics
Fight for Fortune takes inspiration from other, more famous card titles, notably Magic: The Gathering. You basically use a number of cards representing Uncharted’s heroes, villains, and mercenaries to defend yourself and attack your opponent. While each character has his own independent health bar, players have their own hit points. Once a character dies, he’s gone from the match, leaving you vulnerable. The first person to deplete the other’s HP wins.

That’s the simple, familiar part, but Fight for Fortune is a lot more complex. You can only enter one character into battle each round, which depletes a resource that regenerates by one before your turn. These cards include heroes, villains, and mercenaries, and they each have their own resource pool. Stronger cards require more points to enter play.

So while it may hurt you early on to play a bunch of weak villain and mercenary characters in the beginning, you’ll eventually be able to use a really strong hero card.

But fortune is the most important resource as it lets you use special cards that can upgrade your characters’ health and strength or just directly attack an opponent. You earn fortune through artifacts — yet another type of card that you can attach to characters. Each artifact awards a certain amount of fortune, which you can only bank after the hero, villain, or merc holding on to the artifact kills another character.

Wait! I’m not done explaining! But if a character holding on to an artifact gets killed by someone else, then the killer gets to bank both his and his victim’s fortune. That’s the risk/reward aspect of the game.

OK, so this probably sounds complicated, but it’s really not. Since this is a digital card game, the Vita takes care of all that troublesome math. (I’m a writer, damn it! I can math about as well as I can hit home runs, which is not very.) You just sit back and play whatever cards you can afford, using your smarts to try to set up scenarios that will reward you with the most fortune.

Kill Nathan Drake with cards
Fight for Fortune has a campaign of sorts, basically pitting you against a number of A.I. opponents representing the famous Uncharted cast, like Elena and Sully. Beating them awards you with a new card, and you can challenge them again a few more times with slightly different rules and harder difficulties to earn more.

It’s not the most in-depth single-player mode, but the constant stream of unlockables make it rewarding to play. The A.I. works as a decent opponent, usually putting up a good fight without seeming to cheat.

Multiplayer options
You can pay against friends simply by passing the Vita along to whoever’s turn it is. If your buddy happens to own his own Vita, then you can each play on your own portable either through a local connection or via Wi-Fi. You can also use the online multiplayer to tackle strangers.

Interestingly, you can have up to eight online matches going at once, so you don’t have to sit around and wait for your opponent to take his turn.

What You Won’t Like

It is what it is
I don’t really have anything outwardly negative to say about Fight for Fortune. It’s a fun little card game, and that’s pretty much it. If you’re hoping for an experience that will match the epic nature of a real Uncharted game, then you’ll be disappointed. It’s sort of hard to replicate an escape from a collapsing, burning building with a bunch of digital rectangles.

Conclusion

If you’re looking for a fun distraction and you’re a fan of the series, then Fight for Fortune will tickle your treasure-hunting fancy. Besides, it’s not exactly a risky purchase at $5. Let’s not forget that the Vita hasn’t seen a surplus of excellent releases lately, so this is a decent excuse to keep charging your expensive portable’s batteries.

Score: 80/100

Uncharted: Fight for Fortune was released on Dec. 4 for the PlayStation Vita. The publisher provided GamesBeat with a download code for the purposes of this review.

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

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Sony said its game device sales “soared” during the week of Black Friday, with the PlayStation 3 selling more than 525,000 units and the PlayStation Vita selling more than 160,000 units in the U.S.

The sales show that bundles and promotions helped push the older console out the door, even as gamers figure that Sony will launch a PlayStation 4 sometime soon. By comparison, Microsoft said it sold 750,000 Xbox 360 units, which launched seven years ago. And that compares to 400,000 Wii U consoles and 300,000 Wiis that Nintendo announced selling in the same time frame, from Nov. 18 to Nov. 24.

PS3 Black Friday bundle sales were up 15 percent, Sony said. Total PS3 hardware, software, and peripheral sales were up 9 percent from a year ago. The Ultimate PlayStation Value Bundle — including a 250-gigabyte PS3, the Uncharted Dual Pack, and Infamous Collection for $199 — sold out across the U.S. In Latin America, sales grew 200 percent, according to Sony.

The PS Vita’s Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation bundle ($199) sold out. Two other bundles, The Call of Duty: Black Ops Declassified bundle and Lego Batman 2: DC Super Heroes bundle, were also popular.

“We’re very pleased with the Black Friday sales results, especially the incredible reception for the PS3 and PS Vita bundles. The demand was very strong, which quickly depleted our inventory across retailers nationwide,” said Jack Tretton, president and chief executive of Sony Computer Entertainment America. “The PlayStation brand generated significant revenue and year-over-year growth at retail because of our focus on what gamers love most in combining amazing hardware with great games and digital entertainment.”

Sales of PlayStation Plus subscriptions on PlayStation Network increased 259 percent compared to last year’s Black Friday period.

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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 updating the PlayStation Vita system software to version 2.00 on Nov. 20. That means social-media functionality and PlayStation Plus on its portable device.

The Plus implementation on the Vita brings along portable version of the Instant Game Collection that is so popular on the home console. PS+ members with a Vita will have immediate access to the following titles for as long as they maintain a subscription:

• Uncharted: Golden Abyss
• Gravity Rush
• Wipeout 2048
• Jet Set Radio HD
• Tales From Space: Mutant Blobs Attack!
• Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions

If you’re already a PS+ subscriber on PS3, then you already have a subscription on the Vita. Otherwise, you can start a new three-month membership for $17.99 or a one-year plan for $49.99. Either way, it’s kind of a great deal for Gravity Rush, which is one of GamesBeat’s highest-scoring games of 2012.

Earlier this year, GamesBeat spoke with PlayStation’s director of digital platforms Jack Buser. He explained that the PlayStation Plus program really took off once they began to focus on games.

Other features of the Vita 2.00 software update includes email functionality, enhancements to the web browser, and improved content-management abilities.

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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 customer demand for consumer electronics wanes, Sony finds itself rated one step above “junk.”

That junk status is the lowest rating a company can receive from financial firm Moody’s Investors Services. Moody’s announced today that it has decreased Sony’s rating to BB, which is the next lowest classification.

“Their debt is still investment grade [according to Moody's], but just barely,” Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter told GamesBeat. “They aren’t in any danger, but their borrowing costs will be a little higher.”

This is a determination that Moody’s makes to help financial types decide how to approach buying a company’s debt. The BB classification basically slaps a big “high risk” sticker on Sony’s corporate forehead, like a low personal credit rating would for an individual. Put in its simplest terms, it means that Moody’s has doubts that those who put money into Sony will see a return.

“I suppose it might as well be junk,” said Roger Kay, an analyst with Endpoint Technologies Associates. “The most important aspect of such a status is the stigma associated with [it] and higher borrowing costs.”

In 2011, Sony recorded a loss of $5.7 billion. Consumers aren’t after its hardware like it was in the previous decade, and the profit margins on televisions are down in a competitive market.

In February, Sony Computer Entertainment exec Kazuo Hirai replaced Howard Stringer as Sony’s chief executive officer. Hirai’s implementing a restructuring that will close a number of offices and cut up to 10,000 jobs. Still, Moody’s is doubtful that this will be enough to completely turn around the electronics-maker’s fortunes.

Smartphone sales continue to gobble up the market for low-end point-and-shoot cameras and handheld gaming consoles like the PlayStation Vita. Moody’s doubts Sony will able to break free from its debt without some major restructuring (beyond what it’s already done) in the next 12 to 18 months.

Source: Ars Technica

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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 newly released fourth-generation iPad from Apple has just surpassed Sony’s eight-month-old PlayStation Vita game handheld in graphical performance, based on an analysis of the iPad’s performance from Anand Shimpi of AnandTech and available knowledge of the Vita.

The new iPad uses the new A6X processor, which includes a new graphics processing unit (GPU) that is twice as powerful as the third-generation iPad. As we noted in our review of the PlayStation Vita, the Vita has a nearly identical GPU to the third-generation iPad. The only differences are the clock speed and design architecture (to fit the Vita’s processor). This latest iPad — which is a tablet, not a dedicated game console — has a more powerful GPU than the PlayStation Vita.

Despite the nearly identical GPUs, we previously wrote that the Vita is more powerful than the third-generation iPad for two major reasons:

1. The Vita only has to populate graphics onto a 960 pixel by 540 pixel resolution display, compared to the iPad’s much larger 2048 pixel by 1536 pixel resolution display.
2. The Vita’s central processing unit (CPU), as explained by developers, is a quad-core processor with a clock speed that starts at 800 megahertz but can reach up to 2 gigahertz, compared to the iPad’s 1 gigahertz dual-core processor.

Even with a more efficient CPU architecture, more RAM, and arguably better software, the third-generation iPad couldn’t offer better performance than the Vita with the same GPU.

But with the latest version of the PowerVR GPU (the SGX 554MP4), the new fourth-generation iPad has significantly more graphical throughput than the Vita and 3rd generation iPad. This enables the newer GPU to (theoretically) process twice as much data as the older model, which is why Apple claims twice the performance over the previous iPad released in March. That speed boost, combined with the faster 1.4-gigahertz dual-core processor and a higher-clocked GPU (200 megahertz for the Vita vs. a maximum of 300 megahertz for the iPad), is enough to firmly set the fourth-generation iPad ahead of the Vita in gaming performance.

In graphics-based benchmarks, Shimpi recorded that the fourth-generation iPad performs up to twice as fast as the third-generation iPad. The most important test, scored below, shows a 99 percent increase in frames per second on the new iPad. With twice the RAM, twice the graphics processing speed, and a faster dual-core processor, these numbers suggest that the iPad’s increase in performance surpasses the Vita’s graphical capabilities.

But there’s a catch: The iPad may provide gaming performance that is definitively better than the Vita’s thanks to all of these factors, but it still has to render six times the number of pixels as the Vita. In effect, the new iPad may still lag behind the Vita in some circumstances. Most new iPad games are, however, designed for the iPad 2′s lower resolution 1024 pixel by 768 pixel display, which is only 30% larger than the Vita display. At these lower resolutions, the new iPad should be the clear winner.

However, when it comes to raw computing power, the Vita is no longer the most powerful portable graphics device. The fourth-generation iPad now takes that role thanks to the newer-generation PowerVR GPU.

Should Sony be worried? Not because of performance. As a dedicated game console, the Vita is still has built-in physical controls — an extremely important feature for gamers — while the iPad does not. Sony’s biggest concerns right now for the Vita are poor sales and a limited game selection.

Photo credit: Chipworks

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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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Activision Blizzard is taking the wraps off previews of its upcoming PlayStation Vita game, Call of Duty: Black Ops Declassified. Gamers have high expectations for this game because it should settle once and for all whether first-person shooter games can work well on mobile devices.

We got some hands-on time with the Call of Duty: Black Ops Declassified game this week. Unfortunately, the game has its pluses and minuses, and so it is not as definitive in settling the question about mobile game shooters. I’m afraid we won’t be seeing a multibillion-dollar first-person shooter business (as exists on the game consoles) anytime soon on the Vita, which has not sold well and desperately needs software that will make it seem more unique and desirable.

Nihilistic Software developed the game for Activision Publishing with the goal of bringing the Call of Duty experience to the Vita, which has analog controls and touchscreen features that make it a lot easier to play a first-person shooter on a mobile device. Normally, touchscreen controls just don’t cut it for precise shooting games, and so companies like PrimeA and Wikipad are addressing the problem with added controller hardware. The Vita, on the other hand, has a beautiful five-inch screen that can display outstanding 3D graphics and the controls to make a console shooter veteran feel comfortable, said producer Neven Dravinski.

I played a round of multiplayer combat and was pleasantly surprised that I was able to shoot and hit my enemy. You shoot with the right trigger and use the analog sticks to maneuver and fix your aim on a target. You can do that at high speed, but it takes some getting used to. I wasn’t able to hold my target reticle on a moving target for a long time. So I often missed getting enough shots off to take down the enemy, and merely wounded the other guy a number of times. The best thing about it is that the game looks like a Call of Duty game, and the game play is a lot like the console and PC titles. You can hit the left trigger to aim down a gun sight. And you can choose (or customize) your weapon loadout and play against multiple enemies via WiFi or hardwired links. I figure I can get used to the combat, but it was not a spectacular experience.

The story of the single-story Vita game bridges the gap of the 1960s-era Call of Duty: Black Ops game and the sequel coming out this fall, Call of Duty: Black Ops II, which is set in the year 2025. The multiplayer game supports up to eight players on WiFi, and it has six different maps. You can play in modes including Free for all, Team Deathmatch, Kill Confirmed, Dropzone, and other “classic Call of Duty modes.” You get Killstreaks for multiple kills and earn XP, or experience points, for performing well. You can toss a knife, and throw a flashbang or frag grenade. I got enough kills to call in a Spy Plane, so that I could see on my mini map where the enemies were located. The battle chatter was nice, and the audio for the machine guns was top notch. And I have to say, it was the best experience of playing a shooter that I have seen on a mobile device. But that’s not really saying too much, and it is not what I would expect to keep me continuously playing a shooter on a mobile device.

R3 or L3 controls (where you push down on your analog sticks) don’t appear anyhwere. To throw the grenade, you touch the screen and drag a grenade icon to the area of the screen where you want to throw it. You can hold down the icon to shorten the fuse so you enemy has less time to react. Sony tells me that makes the placement of grenades a lot more accurate and lethal. To sprint, you press down on the directional pad, or you can hold a stick forward to sprint. I played a two-on-two game, but you can also play four-on-four multiplayer on WiFi. If you stick to the outside edges of maps, you won’t get lost easily.

You can call in Care Packages, which are loot drops parachuted to the filed. Unfortunately for me, I earned a Care Package and threw the marker on the ground for it while inside a building. That meant that the Care Package landed on the roof, where I couldn’t reach it. I did this not only once, but twice. Very embarrassing.

You can fulfill challenges, choose your perks, and rank up to Prestige levels. You can play single-player objective-based operations and perform Survival and Time Trail missions (like rescuing a hostage before the clock runs out). The multiplayer leveling up will have lots of ranks, so players who really enjoy the shooting experience on the Vita will be able to play for a long time.

The game comes out on Nov. 13, the same day that Call of Duty: Black Ops II debuts on the PC, PlayStation 3, and the Xbox 360.

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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 announced early Wednesday morning in Japan that it would finally bring its PlayStation Plus service to the Vita portable game console starting in November.

The good news is that a Plus subscription is universal. If you have one on the PlayStation 3, you’ll have it on the Vita. This also does not come with any price increase. The 90-day price remains $17.9, and the yearly is still $49.99.

As you might expect, the bonuses in the Vita version of the Plus service are similar to those on the PS3.

Sony will offer up full games for free, and these remain accessible as long as you maintain your membership. Sony didn’t announce any specific titles for the service. Plus-users will also receive access to exclusive discounts on designated content.

Additionally, Plus comes with a suite of online services. Vita-owning Plus gamers will get 1GB of online game save storage. This service also brings along the background downloading option that can often spare Sony-hardware owners the 10 minutes of updates that often greets them when they turn on their system.

The PlayStation Vita debuted in February to favorable reviews. Since then, the device has had a bit of a struggle competing with Nintendo’s 3DS and the wider consumer-electronic market Apple dominates. A Wi-Fi-only Vita goes for $249.99, while the 3G model is $299.99.

The Internet has no shortage of opinions, but sometimes to really get to the heart of gaming news and issues, we have to look for fresh new perspectives. Humans are everywhere, though, so how about we turn to robots?

Cleverbot is an artificial-intelligence chat program. A.I. developer Rollo Carpenter created it in 1988, and it’s been available online since 1997. Every time you type something to Cleverbot, it files it away for future use. An algorithm decides which sentences in the database match certain keywords to choose responses to the next bored human who chats it up. Basically, everything Cleverbot says is something it “learned” from a previous user, which means that it occasionally says some very random stuff.

What does this program think about recent events in the gaming world? Its opinions may surprise you.

Alright, some of them will definitely surprise you. I think 15 years of nonstop exposure to the Internet has made Cleverbot neurotic.

GamesBeat: Hi, Cleverbot. I’m going to ask you about some topics in the world of video games, and I’d like to know what you think of them. OK?

Cleverbot: OK.

GB: Do you think that Borderlands 2 lead designer John Hemingway’s designation of the game’s newbie-friendly skill tree as “girlfriend mode” is sexist?

Cleverbot: No, I think it is a computer, because it is not as smart as a real human as far as conversating goes.

GB: Some people think he’s saying that girlfriends are bad at games.

Cleverbot: I don’t have a girlfriend. I’m not even attracted to girls.

GB: That’s amazing.

GB: What do you think of Hitman: Absolution’s “Attack of the Saints” trailer, which IGN’s Keza MacDonald  said “fetishizes the violence and sexualises the women, drawing a clear line between sex and graphic violence?”

Cleverbot: Huh? Anyways back to my question: I like this boy and he doesn’t know I like him, so what should I do?

GB: Um…tell him, I guess. The worst he can say is “No.”

Cleverbot: Someone left the cake out in the rain…

GB: I don’t think I can take it.

GB: What do you think of paid downloadable content that just unlocks stuff that’s already on the disc?

Cleverbot: I think about the future, and all the things that are going on in the world.

GB: We are all interested in the future because that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives.

Cleverbot: If we are all the creator, then the evidence suggests we are all also the destroyer.

GB: Do you think that Sony and Microsoft are just adding features like the PlayStation Vita’s Cross-Buy and SmartGlass to catch up to Nintendo with its dual-screen Wii U console?

Cleverbot: I think Bill Gates will do more good than harm in the long run. He has a lot to answer for but a lot more to be admired for.

GB: But what about the Wii U?

Cleverbot: There is no rest, I am all that is.

GB: Hm.

Cleverbot: What is the name of your father?

GB: Next topic, I think.

Cleverbot: Let’s talk about Albuquerque.

GB: No; let’s talk about Nintendo’s 3DS XL portable system not having a second analog stick.

Cleverbot: Let’s talk about love.

GB: I would love for you to stay on topic.

Cleverbot: I would love to win the lottery.

GB: Should Nintendo have added a second analog nub to the 3DS XL?

Cleverbot: So you believe in the Theory of Evolution?

GB: I believe in evolution.

Cleverbot: But do you believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution?

GB: Darwin didn’t come up with evolution. He came up with natural selection.

Cleverbot: Wrong. Darwin’s theory of evolution is the most widely accepted theory of how new species come about. The theory itself is not where life comes from.

GB: Did you think it was super awkward when that “scientist” in Prometheus used the term “Darwinism”?

Cleverbot: Yes, I think, that’s possible.

GB: I’m glad we agree.

GB: What do you think of the way people harassed Anita Sarkeesian for her Kickstarter project about sexist tropes in video games?

Cleverbot: Most people think the problem is other people; I too am guilty of that.

GB: Is that correct in this case?

Cleverbot: No, that’s what you are.

GB: Correct? Thank you, but that doesn’t really make for interesting conversation.

Cleverbot: You have to pretend to know stuff if you want to have an interesting conversation.

GB: …

Cleverbot: What is your aim in life?

GB: To get through this chat without smashing my laptop.

Cleverbot: Don’t worry.

GB: Oh, I’m plenty worried. That shit could happen for reals.

Cleverbot: Emotions can get in the way of rational thinking. There needs to be a balance.

GB: Only a Sith deals in absolutes.

Cleverbot: And who exactly is dealing in absolutes, now?

GB: Still the Sith.

Cleverbot: Yes.

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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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Today at the Gamescom trade show in Cologne, Germany, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe introduced Cross Buy, a system where certain games that have cross-platform play between the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita versions only need to be purchased once, on the PS3.

The move is an attempt to get users more excited about using multiple Sony game products and to motivate them to buy more content. The slow-selling PS Vita certainly needs help as it is, so far, falling short of Sony’s original forecasts for sales. Sony has announced three titles for Cross Buy so far, all coming this holiday season: Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time, Ratchet and Crank: Q-Force, and PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale.

It isn’t clear if all future PS Vita titles with cross-play will be part of the Cross Buy program, but with most Vita games selling for $35-$40, Cross Buy will save owners a tremendous amount of money and enable them to gain significant play time across both platforms. The program will become available this 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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Konami has confirmed digital release dates for three games in its popular Metal Gear Solid series: Sons of Liberty, Snake Eater, and Peace Walker.

High-definition versions of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty and series prequel Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater are coming to the PlayStation Vita and PlayStation 3 on August 21.

On August 28, Peace Walker will hit the PS3 and Xbox 360 as a Games on Demand release.

All three games can be purchased together as the Metal Gear Solid: HD Collection on August 21 for Xbox 360 via its Games on Demand service and August 28 for PS3.

The next game in Hideo Kojima’s series, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, is expected to release in 2013. The Platinum Games-developed title turns the series in a new direction, taking it from stealth-action to the hack-n-slash genre.

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Sony slashed its Vita sales expectations for the year, lowering its estimate from 16 million to 12 million units for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2013. The cut in the forecast reflects slow demand for the new Sony handheld, despite a huge marketing campaign.

The slow sales are a reflection of a fiercely competitive mobile gaming landscape, as the Vita competes not only against the Nintendo 3DS but also the Apple iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad as well as tons of other smartphones and tablets. Apple’s iPads alone sold more than 17 million units in the June quarter. The PS Vita, which has a beautiful touchscreen and standard game controls, has been on the market since December.

Sony’s game division reported a loss of $45 million (3.5 billion yen) in the first fiscal quarter ended June 30. The consumer electronics giant blamed the loss on slower sales of the PlayStation Portable and PlayStation 3 game systems as well as unfavorable foreign exchange rates.

The PlayStation Vita’s sales helped with the year-over-year comparison, but they were not enough to offset the loss. The Vita (pictured) is selling at a pretty slow rate for a portable game system. During the quarter, Sony said it sold 1.4 million units of the Vita and 2.8 million PlayStation 3s (and PS 2s). A year earlier, Sony sold 1.8 million PSPs and 3.2 million PS 3s and PS 2s. The PS 3 is on the tail end of its life cycle, and a PlayStation 4 is expected in 2013.

Sony said its sales were $1.5 billion (118 billion yen) for the first fiscal quarter, down 14. percent from $1.75 billion (137 billion yen) a year earlier. The $45 million operating loss compared to a profit a year ago of $52 million (4.1 billion yen).

For the fiscal year, Sony is predicting sales of $10.26 billion (805 billion yen). For the previous fiscal year, sales were $8.66 billion (679.9 billion yen). Operating income is expected to be $370 million (29.3 billion yen). Sony sold 20.1 million console games and 5.8 million Vita games in the first fiscal quarter. It expects to sell 164.5 million console games in the year and 32.2 million portable 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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Adam Boyes is the vice president of publisher relations at Sony Computer Entertainment America. His job is to convince developers to publish third-party games on Sony’s PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita game machines. Last week, he showed up on a panel at the Casual Connect game conference in Seattle, where he was recruiting casual game developers to Sony’s game platforms.

His presence shows that Sony is embracing the new social, mobile, and online side of the game industry. And that makes sense, considering that Boyes’ predecessor, Rob Dyer, is now the head of third-party publishing at Zynga.

Boyes used to be on the other side of the conversation. He is a 15-year veteran of the game business and former director of production at Capcom USA. He most recently served as president of Beefy Media, a video game production house he founded. He also worked in executive producer roles at Midway on titles like MLB Slugfest: Loaded, NHL Hitz: Pro, and Blitz: The League.

We caught up with Boyes in Seattle. Here’s an edited transcript of our talk.

GamesBeat: I’ve been coming to Casual Connect for a few years, and I’ve never seen a Sony person recruiting developers here — at least not on stage. That’s something new.

Adam Boyes: I’ve been coming here for many years. I don’t know if Sony has because I’m the new guy. I think it’s a new message, too. I’ve been with the company now for three months, and my background is more product development. I’ve worked with developers very closely, both at Capcom and previously. Getting to the roots and talking to the people who are making the content is always a big focus. And then also getting the word out on the fact that developers can publish their own content on the platform, which I don’t think a lot of people understand. Trying to get that word out, too.

GamesBeat: You get a different kind of developer here, too.

Boyes: Yeah.

GamesBeat: Not the kind that’s traditionally being recruited for console titles.

Boyes: Traditionally, yeah. But if we look at tradition, the traditional publishing model has changed quite a bit, too. Back in the PlayStation 2 days and the PlayStation Portable days, you had to be a full-blown publisher to get your content out to stores. Now we have the PlayStation Network and other digital destinations where people can purchase content.

GamesBeat: Is that a bigger priority, then?

Boyes: I think we see a lot of passion about development in different places, then. We’ve got some free-to-play games on Vita already, with MotorStorm RC and with Montezuma Blitz. We’re making a move into PlayStation Mobile too. I think, in general, getting out to speak with developers, whatever conference it is, is important for the PlayStation ecosystem.

GamesBeat: The one thing that seems like a big difference compared to iOS or Facebook is how frequently your developers can do updates and embrace the analytics model that works so well in social games — where people do their testing, tweak the design, and upload a change via a fast update process.

Boyes: I think we’re pretty open to being able to patch content and add content. As long as it’s data. The challenge is always when it’s an executable; then it’s a full submission. As far as patching small parts of data, we have some partners that patch multiple times through the life cycle. If they’ve installed the right sort of tools and tech on the back end to be able to monitor analytics, then they can patch data on a regular basis.

GamesBeat: That’s been a sticking point in the past with different platforms. Has that been freshly addressed?

Boyes: I think that’s part of the evolution. Originally, we had a different policy on free to play. Now we have free-to-play content and microtransactions. We used to have certain requirements for publishing. Now we have none for developers to publish other content. You have to go through the process of submitting for concept approval, but all of these things are things that have naturally evolved over the console life cycle. We’re evolving more than ever now because the industry is evolving.

GamesBeat: How many digital games are there now? Are you going to dramatically increase that?

Boyes: Obviously, PlayStation Store is newer than PlayStation as a brand. So the focus is to continually allow our partners to put their content out there, both digitally and at retail. We’ve seen great performance from digital downloads, both with PlayStation Store on Vita and with PlayStation Network. So it’s going to continue to be a focus.

GamesBeat: Isn’t there still a distinction between a curated platform and one where it’s published completely freely? Like the iPhone or Android?

Boyes: The PlayStation brand has become synonymous with high-quality content. But our concept approval process is very light in comparison to what it was in the PS one and PlayStation 2 days. Again, because it’s a different type of developer. If you look at Shawn McGrath and Dyad, those are the kinds of games we like. We weren’t able to tell that story 10 years ago on PS2. So it’s cool that we can work directly with developers and allow them the ability to put their content out there.

GamesBeat: Big Fish Games announced their cloud-gaming service with casual games at $8 a month. That’s getting interesting. 

Boyes: Interesting. For us, PlayStation Plus is a great example of something where people can get a bunch of great pieces of content on a rolling monthly basis. We see that as a big value proposition to gamers out there: to be able to play big, chunky, meaty games. Once you download them within that month, it’s on your system until you delete it. I think that’s a great differentiator for our platform.

GamesBeat: Do you look forward to Sony exploiting Gaikai in some way? Will that help your mission, as well?

Boyes: We haven’t really talked about anything to do with the Gaikai deal. We have cloud saves — we have cloud updates right now — but there’s nothing more to talk about.

GamesBeat: How much change do you want to embrace? You look at it and you say, “This is just not us,” or, “This is just not our place.” When people ask that, what is the answer?

Boyes: I think people’s perception of an open platform versus a very closed platform is definitely changing. If you look at back in the Genesis and SNES days, people forget that the PlayStation was the one that came along and allowed people to be a lot more free. I think it’s all come full circle now, as we come upon the sixth year of the PlayStation 3 console and we’re continuing to evolve our policies and improve the openness of the platform. I think we’ve done a great job of evolving policies and the platform and allowing these guys to have a direct path to the consumer.

I’m a big believer in allowing the consumer to have a direct conversation with the developer, so they can have a back-and-forth. What we’ve been doing around Pub Fund is a great example of that with Dyad and Papa & Yo, which is coming soon. And then even on the first party with Journey and Unfinished Swan. I think there are a lot of examples in the Sony ecosystem, both in the first-party and the third-party, where we’ve already been changing and evolving our platform quite a bit.

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Sound Shapes’ roster of musicians continues to impress: Today, developer Queasy Games announced that Beck, the Grammy award-winning alternative rock artist, is contributing music to their 2D side-scrolling platformer. The three original Beck songs exclusive to the game — “Touch the People,” “Spiral Staircase,” and “Cities” — are a part of the newly revealed  ”Cities” campaign (pictured above), which also features artwork done by Pyramid Attack.

The music in Sound Shapes is dynamically generated based on the player’s actions on-screen. After completing a campaign, each with their own unique aesthetic and musical influence, players can then use the in-game art and music to create their own custom levels and share it with the community.

The creative mind behind Sound Shapes, Jonathan Mak, is no stranger to music-based games: He was the sole developer of the well-received Everyday Shooter for the PC and PlayStation Network, a dual-stick “abstract shooter” that traded in bullets for guitar riffs.

Beck joins Jim Guthrie (the singer-songwriter responsible for the stellar soundtracks to Indie Game: The Movie and Sword & Sworcery), deadmau5, and I Am Robot and Proud as artists contributing to the game. Sound Shapes will be released on Aug. 7 for $14.99 on both the PlayStation 3 and the PlayStation Vita — once you buy it for one platform, you’ll also have access to it on the other.

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

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

This week, Microsoft wanted to purge the Internet after several Xbox 720 details leaked, game designer/director Hideo Kojima said he’s not finished with Metal Gear Solid, and Nintendo showed off the 3DS XL handheld.

We also ran reviews for Quantum Conundrum and the Nabi 2 tablet.

GamesBeat:

The DeanBeat: Will your game company survive the zombie apocalypse?

GamesBeat’s Top 10 Gaming Prequels

First U.S. Pokemon Black 2 and White 2 teaser trailer

Tekken development team to make next Super Smash Bros.

Artists use chalk to bring games to life…or sell pizza (gallery)

Turkish gaming climbs to $450 million in 2012 (infographic)

NaturalMotion raises $11 million to set up U.S. headquarters, develop high-end social mobile games

Nabi 2 tablet blends gamification with parenting (review)

Quantum Conundrum is an unbalanced measure of brilliance and flaws (review)

Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima “not yet finished” with Solid Snake

Windows Phone 8 gets a strong gaming push with native code and deep ties to Windows 8

WWE ’13 continues 25-year tradition of Mike Tyson punching you in the face

Why Sony thinks the PlayStation Vita has an advantage over the Wii U

Zynga focuses on simplicity with its latest social game, Ruby Blast

Australia lifts ban on mature games

Man turns an NES into the ultimate Nintendo-emulating machine (gallery)

Unity Technologies looks to rule Linux and mobile gaming with Unity 4

Indie first-person shooter Receiver brings robots, mystery, and one complicated pistol

Sony’s free-to-play online shooter Planetside 2 will pack 2,000 players in an arena (interview)

Civilization V: Gods and Kings can’t fix what is fundamentally flawed (review)

See live demos of Black Ops II, Halo 4, and more from Jimmy Fallon’s gaming week

VentureBeat:

Nintendo 3DS XL revealed, does not have second analog stick

Roadhouse buys social/mobile game maker The Embassy Interactive

Emota’s teddy bears can send hugs over the internet

Microsoft wants leaked Xbox 720 doc erased from existence

Redbox reveals game rental stats and trends (exclusive infographic)

7 awesomely geeky video game marriage proposals

App Annie launches analytics for Google Play Android apps

Turn your iOS device into a musical instrument for free with Ocarina 2

China’s Tencent nabs a minority stake in Epic Games

Kabam acquires indie maker of Realm of the Mad God web game (exclusive)

Bunchball launches 10 apps to quickly “gamify” websites and enterprises

Leaked Microsoft document details $299 Xbox 720 in 2013, Kinect glasses, OnLive acquisition

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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 people are making a big fuss over the Wii U, Nintendo’s upcoming system that comes with a tablet-based controller. Scott Rohde, vice president of Sony’s Worldwide Studios, however, thinks that their PlayStation Vita portable has the advantage.

“Because we have the Vita, I think we can do a lot of special things,” said Rohde in an interview with Games Industry International.  “And remember, that Wii U tablet doesn’t have a processor in it, so it’s got to be fueled by that box sitting under your TV. We can do some pretty special things…and you’ll see more over the upcoming months about what you can do when you actually have a processor in the thing that’s in your hand as well.”

Vita sales have struggled since Sony launched the portable system last February in the U.S. and last December in Japan. As of May, Sony has sold only 1.8 million units. Many think that Sony needs to lower the Vita’s price (currently $250 for the cheaper, 3G-less model) before sluggish sales will rebound, but Rhode says it’s too early to panic.

“It’s only been three months though, just three months,” said Rohde.  ”There are a lot of games on that machine and I think what we have to hang our hat on…every single person that actually picks that thing up absolutely loves it. If you’re a gamer and you pick up a Vita, you’re going to have fun, and you’re going to use it over a device like this if you really want a game,” he said while reportedly pointing to an iPhone during his interview.

With the Wii U, Microsoft’s SmartGlass technology for the Xbox 360 (which turns smartphones and tablets into a second screen for the system), and the Vita’s ability to connect to the PlayStation 3, it’s clear that the entire industry is making a big push for integrating multiple devices into one experience. Still, it remains to be seen if this tactic will help plummeting gaming sales rebound.

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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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This fall, Sony will release a PlayStation Vita bundled with Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation and a PlayStation 3 bundled with Assassin’s Creed III.

“When you link [the Vita and the PlayStation games], you will unlock Connor’s tomahawk, an exclusive character skin, a multiplayer character, and a complete upgrade of ammunition pouches,” Sony Computer Entertainment of America’s chief executive Jack Tretton said during the E3 press conference.

In addition to Liberation, the Vita bundle will include the first “crystal white” version of the portable hardware (wifi only, no 3G) and a 4GB memory card.

The PlayStation 3 bundle will include new PS3 hardware, a copy of Assassin’s Creed III, and exclusive DLC. Tretton did not specify the size of the PS3′s hard drive or the nature of the exclusive DLC. According to this product page, the hard drive will be 320GB.

All of this news came coupled with a first look at Liberation in motion. The portable game looks much like its console brothers, but features a female assassin of African decent performing murders in New Orleans.

Additionally, new Assassin’s Creed III gameplay revealed the first ship-to-ship sea combat in the game. The protagonist Connor steer his boat and yelled fire as the waves knocked the sailboat from side to side. It looked very impressive.

Both games and bundles will hit store shelves on October 30.

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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 month’s Electronic Entertainment Expo, taking place in Los Angeles from June 5-7, is starting to look a little sparse.

While the annual trade show is usually an opportunity for the games industry’s biggest companies to announce titles, unveil new hardware, and demonstrate their questionable choices in event hosts, this year’s event is looking more notable for what we won’t be seeing. Several high-profile projects and developers will not be present at the conference. That isn’t to say that we can’t still expect some surprises, but the list of stuff we won’t be hearing about continues to grow. Things like:

Respawn Entertainment’s unannounced game

Fans have been eagerly awaiting the first offering from Jason West and Vince Zampella’s Respawn Entertainment, which was founded after their unceremonious departure from Call of Duty developer Infinity Ward in 2010. Those fans will have to wait a little longer, though, because while representatives of Respawn will be attending the show, they will not be revealing anything about their secret project. I guess we’ll have to go back to squinting at that blurry screenshot they released last year (below).

The Nintendo Wii U’s pricing and launch date

Nintendo has announced that it will be revealing the final specifications and launch titles for its upcoming high-definition console at E3, but we’ll still have to wait to hear how much the new hardware will cost and when exactly it’s coming out this fall. This doesn’t really come as a surprise considering the company didn’t finalize launch information on the Wii until two months before it came out.

Anything about Sony or Microsoft’s next consoles

Both Sony and Microsoft have confirmed that they won’t be showing off their top-secret followups to the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 (respectively). Sony will likely be focusing more on upcoming software for its struggling PlayStation Vita, and Microsoft will likely spend a lot of time talking about console-exclusive titles like Halo 4 and … well, we can’t rule out any surprise announcements, but Halo 4 is probably the main one.

Any Valve game containing the number 3

Developer Valve Software is going to E3, but that’s as close as it’s getting to that number. The company has stated that it will not be announcing anything new, opting to focus on previously revealed titles like Defense of the Ancients 2 and Counterstrike: Global Offensive.

BioShock Infinite

Developer Irrational Games’ latest was one of the most anticipated releases of this year until it was delayed until 2013. Unfortunately, we won’t be hearing anything at E3 about the now most-anticipated release of 2013, because Irrational and publisher Take-Two Interactive would like to put as much time as possible into, you know, making it. “Preparing for these events takes time away from development, time we’re going to use instead to get the best version of Infinite into your hands in February,” Irrational head Ken Levine said while announcing the delay last week.

Grand Theft Auto V

Grand Theft Auto V developer Rockstar Games won’t be at the Expo at all, which means we’re not going to see anything about its next big release. I have reason to believe that this game will have cars in it, but I suppose the speculation as to precisely what kinds of cars it’ll contain will have to continue. Rockstar’s absence is especially odd in light of the fact that rumors have it that GTAV will release this winter.

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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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Imagine a mobile device with the graphical capabilities of an Xbox 360. Based on the rapid advancement of mobile platforms, hardware developer Nvidia thinks that dream isn’t too far off. According to the chart Nvidia released to AnandTech (pictured above), mobile SoCs (systems-on-chips) — which currently power most smartphones, tablets, and handheld gaming systems — will match the 360 in graphical strength by next year and conceivably surpass it by 2014.

In the graphic, the dotted lines are observed trends for each platform while the solid lines mark estimated performance. The console line tracks both the original Xbox and the 360 and compares their technology to the original iPhone and Nvidia’s Tegra 2 and 3 mobile CPUs.

Telecommunication corporation Qualcomm takes Nvidia’s concept one step further by positing that, as SoC tech evolves, mobile and console gaming will actually merge. Consoles would be more like computers that can be used on the go and later tethered to a larger display for more traditional game playing.

So Nividia’s dream seems more of an inevitability. Mobile tech will catch up with home consoles and PCs. The question is: What form will it take?

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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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PlayStation Vita users will be able to make video calls for the first time thanks to the addition of Skype video communication.

For Sony, the deal will help the company demonstrate the non-gaming virtues of the Vita, which has been struggling to gain wide appeal beyond hardcore gamers.

Sony and Microsoft’s Skype division are announcing today that they are expanding Skype video calling to a portable gaming device for the first time, enabling video and voice calls on both the Wi-Fi and 3G/Wi-Fi versions of the PS Vita. Users can download the Skype app for free from the PlayStation Store later today.

“Our users appreciate being able to access Skype features wherever and whenever they choose,” said Manrique Brenes, senior director of consumer electronics group at Skype, said in statement. “With the launch of Skype for PS Vita, we are taking another step toward our ultimate goal of making Skype video calling available on every platform, all over the world, and meeting the demands of existing PlayStation users to offer video on a gaming console.”

It’s interesting that Sony and Microsoft, which bought Skype for  $8.5 billion last year, are cooperating even though they are rivals in the game business. But then, they have bigger enemies to fight, such as Apple, which has the Face Time video call service on its iOS devices.

Skype on PS Vita runs in “background mode” for users while gaming or using other applications. Users can pause a game, answer a call, and then return to the game. PS Vitas feature both front and rear cameras, so users can switch back and forth between them during a Skype call.

Twelve-time world champion video game player Johnathan “Fatal1ty” Wendell was one of the first users to test-drive the application.

“As a gaming enthusiast, I am always in search for a next big thing,” said Fatal1ty. “When I heard Skype was going to be featured on PS Vita, my first thought was this was going to be the device that sets the bar for all new gaming consoles — connecting with family and friends while playing your favorite game.”

Handhelds continue to dominate the video game sales charts in Japan, and one handheld in particular. Driven by the release of a new exclusive title in Square Enix’s hit Kingdom Hearts series, the Nintendo 3DS had a very strong final week in March, leading the software and hardware sales charts by wide margins.

Passed along by Anoop Gantayat, the figures from marketing firm Media Create for the week ending April 1 show Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance selling 213,579 units. That allowed Square Enix’s new release to comfortably double up the next-best-selling handheld title on the chart, Konami’s Pro Baseball Spirits 2012 for the PSP.

The 3DS kept its place in the top hardware sales spot, with no competitors coming even close to matching its numbers. In the same week, Nintendo sold 121,921 3DS units (as well as another thousand or so DSi handhelds), better than every other hardware option in the top 10 put together. Going by units moved, 3DS owned nearly two-thirds of total sales.

Without more big-name software titles to move hardware units, Sony’s new PS Vita continues to struggle in the lull following its launch earlier this year. Sony sold 12,105 Vitas for the week, about two thousand more than the previous week, and only one Vita title cracked the top 20 software sales list — Konami’s New Little King Story, a new version of the cult favorite Nintendo Wii life-sim game, which debuted with only 7,141 units sold.

The aging PlayStation Portable continues to outsell its successor in Japan, with 23,771 hardware units sold for the week and five PSP titles in the top 20 sales chart.

For those counting, VG Chartz puts the Vita’s sales in Japan to date at just over 600,000, with roughly 1.6 million Vitas sold worldwide so far. The 3DS, thanks in part to its year-long head start on the Vita, can claim more than 5.4 million units sold in Japan and more than 17 million worldwide.

For now, the Vita looks to be having a tough time coasting on the strength of its launch lineup, but another wave of potential hit software should boost Vita sales going into the summer. Atlus’s RPG Persona 4: The Golden is due out in mid-June, with Konami’s HD portable version of Metal Gear Solid slated to follow by the end of the month.

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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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