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

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

A tale of two launches

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

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

Interpretation of good community and bad community

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

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

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

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

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

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

Livestreaming is authentic

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

It is becoming brain-dead simple to do livestreaming.

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

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

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

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

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

The future of community

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GamesBeat: You must feel good right now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Neither company has talked officially about their plans for new consoles, which the industry has nicknamed the Xbox 720 and the PlayStation 4. But a story in online game news site Ludos Mundi predicts that Microsoft’s Xbox 720 will win based on the searching that users are already doing for the new consoles.

In the past 11 months, searches for information on the new Xbox have far exceeded searches for the PS 4 or PlayStation 4, according to Google Trends. On a worldwide basis, people search for Xbox 720 about 60 percent of the time, compared to 40 percent for the PS 4. In the U.S., about 66 percent of the searches are for the Xbox 720, and 34 percent for Sony’s future machine.

Google Trends accurately predicted the winner of the next-generation DVD format, showing that results favored Blu-ray movies over HD-DVD movies. The graph at right shows that the Xbox 720 is becoming more popular over time.

To search for yourself, go to Google Trends and compare Xbox 720 and PS 4 using the “forecast” feature, with the settings on 2004 to the present.

If I were Sony, I would hire an army of users to search on the PS 4 or PlayStation 4.

As an aside, the number of searches for Nintendo’s new game console, the Wii U, has been declining since its launch in late November. What does that mean?

[Image credits: Tsheko, Ludos Mundi]

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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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Microsoft’s next-generation machine is rumored to be code-named Durango. That name was partially verified on Feb. 28, when a senior technical artist at Crytek tweeted that he was “enjoying the Durango developers summit in London. So far, great swag and interesting talks.” He then deleted the tweet and his account. In meetings, Microsoft reportedly showed details of the new console hardware.

Now Xbox World magazine is reporting that development kits for the new console were shipped to developers in March. Those kits include an IBM PowerPC central processing unit (CPU) with 16 cores, compared to just three cores on the Xbox 360′s CPU. The graphics chip is equivalent to an Advanced Micro Devices Radeon HD 7000-series graphics card, and the machine has a Blu-ray optical drive. The report mentioned that Kinect 2 (the sequel to Microsoft’s motion-sensing system) will chew up as many as four cores tracking multiple players.

If Microsoft is shipping the dev kits now, then it is likely on schedule for a launch in 2013. The developers need a year or more to make launch titles for the increasingly complex console hardware.

Nintendo got dinged by unnamed developers who said that the Wii U’s performance isn’t as good as either the Xbox 360 or the PlayStation 3. It’s a little hard to believe that a brand new Nintendo console debuting in the fall of 2012 won’t be faster than the consoles that debuted in 2005 and 2006, respectively. Nintendo will make the leap to high-definition TVs with the graphics on its new machine, and it has never put a priority on processing power in the first place.

“We do not focus on technology specs,” said a spokesperson for Nintendo of America. “We understand that people like to dissect graphics and processing power, but the experience of playing will always be more important than raw numbers.”

Nintendo isn’t confirming that the report is untrue, but it isn’t denying it either. Do such rumors matter? Based on the news, Macquarie Equities Research analyst Ben Schacter downgraded his stock rating on Nintendo.

Sony’s PlayStation 4, code-named Orbis, got outed by Kotaku last week. The Orbis reportedly has an AMD 64-bit CPU and an AMD Southern Islands GPU (graphics processing unit). The GPU will be capable of displaying games at a resolution of 4096 x 2160. And it will play games in stereoscopic 3D at 1080p high-definition resolution. It will not be compatible with PS 3 games and will not play used games.

VG247 said that the next PlayStation will be released prior to the Durango machine from Microsoft.

We’re checking with the companies to see if they want to comment further, but don’t hold your breath.

[Image credits: Sillegamer, Kotaku and Nintendo]

Sony’s next PlayStation is code-named Orbis and it will use chips from Advanced Micro Devices, according to video game publication Kotaku.

Sony isn’t expected to begin talking about it for months, and Kaz Hirai, the new chief executive of Sony starting April 1, said in January that the company will not talk about a PlayStation 4 at the next E3 trade show in June. If and when it launches, Orbis will be Sony’s attempt to regain supremacy in the video game business.

But Kotaku, citing a reliable source, said that the Japanese company will launch the machine in time for the holidays in 2013. Microsoft is expected to launch a new machine in 2013, while Nintendo plans to launch its Wii U this year. Sony declined to comment to Kotaku.

The upcoming console reportedly uses an AMD “x64″ CPU, Kotaku said. That would be x86, according to common chip language. An AMD Southern Islands graphics processing unit, or GPU, will also be in the machine. That’s consistent with rumors reported by SemiAccurate, a chip blog. AMD is prepping the Southern Islands graphics chips for high-end PCs this year. The resolution will reportedly be 4096 x 2160, far ahead of today’s high-definition TVs. It will be able to do stereoscopic 3D in full HD. Some developers are reportedly getting early developer kits already.

The PS 4 will likely not run PS 3 games, and used games will likely be unable to run on the Orbis. The games for the device will reportedly be authenticated via a PlayStation Network (Sony Entertainment Network) account.

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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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One of the most detailed rumors came on Jan. 18 from SemiAccurate, the geek blog run by Charlie Demerjian. He said that initial production of the Oban chip for the Xbox 720 has begun. Oban is the code name for the combination graphics and processor all-in-one chip that will power the next-generation game console from Microsoft, Charlie reported. Microsoft declined to comment.

IBM is reportedly the foundry, or contract manufacturer, for the Oban chip. But it’s not clear exactly who designed it, as Microsoft now has its own chip design capability these days and may have collaborated with IBM and ATI (Advanced Micro Devices) on it. Oban has an IBM-designed processor based on the PowerPC architecture, which is compatible with the Xbox 360. It also has an ATI GCN/HD7000/Southern Islands graphics chip from AMD.

There’s a small chance that Oban is x86 (Intel-compatible), but SemiAccurate said that was unlikely. I’m sure Microsoft would love to poke holes in this, but for now they can’t comment. AMD’s spun-out manufacturing business, now called Globalfoundries, is also making some of the first batch of prototypes and could serve as another foundry.

The initial batch of these 32-nanometer chips will go into development systems, which game developers use to make their launch titles for the new system. So even though production of chips has begun early, it’s quite possible a launch is set for 2013. Demerjian believes it will have embedded memory, just as the Xb0x 360 did, in a special package.

I know Charlie and he is pretty good about snagging rumors in private conversations with engineers who talk too much. But the “SemiAccurate” name is a good one and Charlie knows that he isn’t right all of the time. When I conveyed one of Charlie’s tips for official comment, a PR guy laughed. But Charlie isn’t always far off the mark, and he gets to plenty of stories before others in the press, including yours truly, do. Fudzilla, another geek blog, said it verified the rumor from SemiAccurate.

IGN, meanwhile, said its sources confirmed that mass production of the system’s GPU (it did not say it was part of a combo chip or multi-chip package) will begin by the end of 2012, but it will not be based on AMD’s 7,000 series. Rather, it will be based on the 6000 series, like the ATI Radeon HD 6670 (pictured in a PC add-on card at top). That chip has DirectX 11 support, multi-display output, 3D, and 1080 high-definition output. It is priced at about $79.99.

That chip’s graphics power is said to be six times that of the Xbox 360 and 20 percent greater than that of Nintendo’s upcoming Wii U console. That numbers seems particularly low. The Xbox 360 shipped in 2005 and graphics chip vendors generally follow the path of Moore’s Law, which holds that chip performance doubles every year or two. If it indeed doubles every year, a 2013 graphics chip should really be more like 256 times more powerful than the Xbox 360′s 2005 graphics chip. But that’s what IGN said. IGN’s rumor makes no sense to me, and Charlie said the same.

Kotaku, meanwhile, said that Microsoft’s next game console will be upgraded from DVDs to Blu-ray discs. The system will also reportedly block the playing of used games, a feature that is not present in today’s consoles. Game publishers have been furious with GameStop for selling a huge collection of used games, where the money generated does not go to the publisher. But the move might also anger consumers.

Kotaku also said that Microsoft will ship a new version of its Kinect motion-sensing system.The new Kinect will have an on-board processor for improving its performance and accuracy. The console will also have a smaller game controller.

Our analysis: We haven’t independently verified these rumors. But we can think about whether they are plausible. The name Xbox 720 itself is a made-up one, as shorthand for the successor to the Xbox 360. The rumor from SemiAccurate has the most detail, but it is also coming from a source with a mixed track record. Usually, the more detailed the rumor, the more accurate it is. Vague rumors, such as the Kotaku story, usually mean that the source is pretty low level. And when it comes to big decisions on game consoles, most of the information at this stage in the game is held by a small group of executives at the platform owner’s company.

We’ll pass along the rumors and our opinion of them as they arise, but be prepared to see plenty of wrong information before the real confirmation comes. One thing that is plausible is the timeline. If Microsoft plans to launch a console in early 2013, the game developers have to get the development kits right about now to get their launch titles under way.

As for the PlayStation 4, MCV reported that Sony would talk about it at the E3 2012 trade show in June. But Sony’s high-ranking executive Kaz Hirai quashed that rumor at the Consumer Electronics Show.

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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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