The STEAM Carnival is your typical geeked-out carny attraction, with fire, lasers, robots, and LED lights. Just another night at Burning Man or the Maker Faire, right?

But this carnival has a mission: To get kids excited about science, technology, engineering, and mathematics — the STEM disciplines that many educators feel are especially critical — as well as art.

Better yet, it may be coming to a school near you.

STEAM Carnival is the brainchild of two Los Angeles-based engineers and entertainers, Brent Bushnell and Eric Gradman, who do business as Two Bit Circus. The pair were involved with Syyn Labs, a collective that produced an enormous, complicated, amazingly fun Rube Goldberg contraption for an OK Go video a couple of years ago. Together, they’ve been spending several years putting on shows with their inventions, which combine LEDs and Arduino chips into interactive entertainment and education experiences. Now they’re about halfway towards a $100,000 fundraising goal on Kickstarter, and with 20 days to go, I’m pretty confident they’ll hit that target.

By dropping an A for “art” into STEM, you get STEAM, which is not only a cooler word, but also a more inclusive, all-embracing concept. The STEAM notion comes from John Maeda, the president of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Once they heard about it, Bushnell and Gradman latched right on.

“As someone with a strong engineering background, I was starting to burn out on engineering, until I discovered I could also make art with it,” said Gradman, during a recent phone interview. ”Discovering that I could use science, tech, engineering, and math to make art transformed my life.”

What’s more, art is suffering from many of the same problems as STEM education is: Lack of funding and the absence of strong champions in many school districts. As a result, it’s hard to get kids excited about it.

The STEAM Carnival hopes to tackle that with a clever, interactive approach to the old-fashioned carnival. A few months before the carnival arrives in town, they’ll send project kits to participating schools. Kits might include parts for children to make musical robots, or perhaps battlebots. Students will spend the next few months building things based on the kits.

Meanwhile, Gradman and Bushnell will be putting the finishing touches on an array of modernized carnival attractions, from ring-the-bottle games with fire effects to a Tesla-coil-enhanced strength test, where instead of a puck ringing a bell after you slam down a sledgehammer, you get to see a blue spark rising up. They’ll load the carnival onto a boxcar and put it on the rails.

Once it arrives in town, the STEAM Carnival will include games and attractions you can play, but it will also include shows that incorporate the kids’ projects.

“You put a bunch of musical robots on stage, and that’s a concert. You put a bunch of combat robots on stage, and it’s a sporting event,” Bushnell told me. (Side note: Bushnell’s father is Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari and Chuck E. Cheese’s, who knows a things or two about musical robots. The elder Bushnell is also backing the project.)

With the $100,000 funding, the duo will be able to put on a preview show, ship out kits to selected schools in L.A. and San Francisco this coming Fall, then put on the full carnival in the Spring of 2014, first in L.A., then in San Francisco.

See their Kickstarter video below.

Top photo: A child playing with an interactive display by Two Bit Circus. Source: Two Bit Circus.

Beleaguered open-world zombie shooter The War Z is in more trouble as publisher OP Productions admits hackers exposed players’ personal information.

In response to the attack, OP Productions shut down The War Z’s servers and its message boards. In an open letter, the publisher confirmed that the hackers gained access to user email addresses and passwords. Payment information, such as credit-card numbers, remain secure with a third-party company.

From OP Productions’ letter:

We are sorry to report that we have discovered that hackers gained access to our forum and game databases and the player data in those databases. We have launched a thorough investigation covering our entire system to determine the scope of the intrusion. This investigation is ongoing and is our top priority. As part of the remediation and security enhancement process we will be taking the game and forums down temporarily.

In total, the hackers accessed the email, passwords, and IP addresses players used to access the game or the forums. The publisher used security encryption on the passwords, but it warns that the hackers could crack simple words.

OP Productions hired external experts and investigators to discover the flaws in its security. It claims to have already patched a “number of ways” that hackers obtained access.

“The security of your data is important to us and we want our players to be assured that we take this situation very seriously,” reads OP Productions’ letter. “We have taken steps to improve security to minimize the chance of this happening in the future and will continue to invest in improving security going forward.”

OP launched The War Z for PC in December. Valve yanked it from its digital-download store a day after its debut due to loud complaints from customers. Many pointed out that several of the promised features weren’t in the product that they had just purchased for $15. Others were disappointed with the quality of the survival game.

In late February, the publisher relaunched the zombie title. It has avoided other major issues until today.

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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 next generation of household consoles has already started, and boy, are we in for a treat. Not only do we have the big three companies (Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft) fighting for our limited living room space — we have something more interesting as well: Android and Steam.

Xbox 360 (left), Ouya (center), PS3 (right)

In November, Nintendo launched the Wii U with its touch-screen controller, the GamePad, and high-definition graphics. Sony recently announced the successor to the PlayStation 3, and soon we’ll start seeing the next Xbox. Microsoft and Sony are battling it out in the hardware war, each trying to best the other by being stronger, better, and faster. Nintendo stopped playing that game years ago and decided to try a different approach by offering unique gameplay features with motion controls.

Both Microsoft and Sony tackle the premium side of the market, leaving Nintendo with the lower end to conquer. The last time I checked, both the PS3 and Xbox 360 were in the $299 range, with the Wii hitting a ridiculous $99 and the Wii U around $249. This is fantastic news for us gamers. No matter what your allowance is, you’ll find something that works for you. This brings me to my question: where do Android and Steam fit in?

Valve wants to take over your television.

Valve, the creator of Steam, is working hard to bring its popular digital distribution service from millions of computer screens to your living room TV. To do this, Valve introduced a new feature for Steam called Big Picture Mode (BPM). Essentially, this enables gamers to run Steam with a controller in front of a TV rather than a keyboard and mouse. It does this by changing up the user interface. I use BPM fairly often when playing games that are gamepad-enabled, and I quite enjoy it.

Valve has also announced it will be coming out with its own hardware to slap its new software experience on. This technology has been cleverly named the Steam Box. Details are scarce at the moment. What we do know is that Valve wants to make PC gaming easier and more comfortable by presenting a console-like experience. Gabe Newell, the founder of Valve, has said he expects Steam Box prototypes in the next few months.

Valve has kept mum about pricing, which is unfortunate. This is what everyone wants to know. This is the deal breaker. PC gaming can be ridiculously expensive. If Valve is able to bring powerful hardware, a small form-factor, and reasonable pricing together in one happy package, that could mean a massive shift for PC gaming. People wouldn’t dismiss it just because of the price barrier. The need for a monitor, speakers, keyboards, mice, and so forth would be gone. Instead, you plug the device into your TV, and it does the rest.

Ouya controller and the system.

Android is a different beast altogether. It’s the only system that is based as a mobile platform, and now it seems to be steering its way to your television. At least, that’s what the Ouya console is promising: a $99 Android console that hooks up to your TV. It’s a no-frills system. The developers encourage you to mess with it — they want you to get your hands dirty and mod the system. This fact alone will probably lure in much of the modding community. The Ouya may have a strange name and an affordable price, but does it have the games to back it up? A console can’t survive without a strong library. Perhaps with the convenience of a controller at hand, more games like Dead Trigger and Shadowgun will populate the Android marketplace.

Ouya isn’t the only console getting Android games on the big screen. Nvidia recently announced and showed off what it calls Project Shield. It looks very similar to a Xbox 360 controller with a 5-inch HD screen attached to it. Project Shield is backed by some serious horsepower, and it’ll be able to play any game from the Android marketplace as well as stream your Steam library over a Wi-Fi connection. A price and release date have yet to be announced. Nvidia will have to take a close look at its competitors, the Nintendo 3DS and Sony’s PlayStation Vita. The 3DS seems to be priced just right at the $149 mark whereas the Vita is struggling with sales — probably because of its higher $249 price. I’m afraid that Nvidia might have the specs and form factor down but will miss the beat with a too-high price tag to justify buying the slick piece of hardware.

Project Shield in all its glory.

Android is in a unique place right now, and it has the freedom to cover all angles of the market. From the Ouya to Nvidia’s Project Shield, it has the low-end and high-end markets covered. But if Valve can get the right combo of price/performance, we’ll very likely see PC gaming become much more common in the living room. Sony and Microsoft are going to battle for the most horsepower while Nintendo quietly and safely experiments with crazy motion and touch controls. One thing is for sure: we’ve never seen anything quite like this before. These companies and platforms are all fighting a war for our living rooms.

Welcome to the next generation.

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

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In 2011, Mojang sold access to Minecraft while it was still in development. Two years later, Steam is the first major platform to support that business model.

Since Minecraft, other indie developers have implemented this method, and now Valve is welcoming those games to Steam through a channel it’s calling Early Access.

“A lot of games are already operating as ongoing services that grow and evolve with the involvement of customers and the community,” Kinetic Void developer Sean Pollman said in a statment. ”Steam Early Access will let us continue the development of our game while gathering crucial feedback, input, and support from the steam community.”

The following games are available now through the Early Games portal:

• 1… 2… 3… KICK IT! (Drop That Beat Like an Ugly Baby)
• Arma 3
• Drunken Robot Pornography
• Gear Up
• Gnomoria
• Kenshi
• Kerbal Space Program
• Kinetic Void
• Patterns
• Prison Architect
• StarForge
• Under the Ocean

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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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It’s time to add another issue to the list of what’s ailing publisher Electronic Arts. The company’s chief executive officer announced yesterday that he is stepping down, and it is still reeling from a public-relations snafu with the recently launched city-builder SimCity. Now, a security research firm revealed that members of EA’s digital-download service are vulnerable to attack from hackers.

A fatal flaw in EA’s Origin service may enable hackers to remotely execute software on a target’s Mac or PC, according to Malta-based security researchers ReVuln (via Time’s Techland blog). ReVuln published a paper earlier this month that explains the vulnerability in detail.

“Our team is constantly investigating hypotheticals like this one as we continually update our security infrastructure,” Origin spokesperson John Reseburg told GamesBeat.

The hack only takes seconds. It works by exploiting an “Origin://link” uniform resource identifier (URI), which publishers utilize to enable browsers to open and control actions on the Origin platform. Origin’s links follow a particular pattern. Hackers can mess around with that pattern to make the URI execute different commands. One of those commands could be bringing up a box that asks a user to download an application. They might trust that application because they’re on their trusted Origin site and click yes. The malware will then install, and the hacker will effectively “own” the system.

“Using games as an attack vector is pretty difficult to spot,” ReVuln security researcher Donato Ferrante told GamesBeat. “One of the reasons is that most people underestimate games as a possible way for attackers to compromise their systems.”

ReVuln released a proof of concept of the hack, which you can see in the video embedded into ReVuln’s Tweet:

EA Origin Insecurity paper: revuln.com/files/ReVuln_E… and video: vimeo.com/61361586 #BlackHatEU #0day—
ReVuln (@revuln) March 15, 2013

In October, ReVuln discovered a similar insecurity in Valve’s Steam digital service — EA’s primary competitor in the PC space. Ferrante claims Valve still hasn’t addressed the issue.

The security firm suggests that users set their browsers to pop up with a prompt when attempting to open a game in Origin or in Steam. More security-conscious users can install a tool like URIprotocolview to disable the “Origin://” URI.

VentureBeat security reporter Meghan Kelly contributed to this report

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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 need evidence that video games have made it, look no further than Adult Swim Games.

The digital side of Adult Swim, Cartoon Network’s late-night block of mature programming, has churned out cool game after cool game since 2007. Last week, the publisher released its first title on Valve’s Steam distribution service, and now it’s looking to expand even further.

What makes Adult Swim Games a beacon of the medium’s maturity is that its parent company doesn’t treat its titles as marketing material for the shows. The games stand as parallel representatives of the network’s brand. These Flash releases are just as important to what Adult Swim is as any of the shows are.

“We started with the philosophy that we want to make games that are like our shows but not based on them,” Adult Swim Digital vice president Jeff Olsen told GamesBeat. “A lot of networks were doing show-based games, and we thought for our audience — which is a pretty savvy audience — that was a mistake.”

For an example, look at Adult Swim’s daytime counterpart, Cartoon Network. Nearly every game on Cartoonnetworkgames.com is based on one of the shows. That’s not bad — kids love that kind of stuff — but it doesn’t work with the cynical college-age-and-older crowd that Adult Swim targets.

“They perceive those advert-games as something less interesting than something that is like our shows,” said Olsen. “Something funny and original — something that has Adult Swim’s perspective and level of quality and creativity but isn’t just a marketing tool.”

And that’s working.

Adult Swim has a stable of hugely popular Flash games, Facebook titles, and mobile apps.

Gamers played Amateur Surgeon, where you use common items to perform complex medical procedures, over 55 million times. Endless runner Robot Unicorn Attack has more than 45 million plays, and that’s just for the Flash game.

Adult Swim released Robot Unicorn Attack on Facebook, iOS, and Android as well, where it certainly racked up a few million more plays.

“It was 2008 or 2009 when we published our first game on the App Store, and that did really well,” said Olsen. “We’ve continued to publish aggressively on iPhone and on Android. We’ve had around 10 top 10 titles on mobile, which has been great.”

And now Adult Swim has its first Steam game in Super House of Dead Ninjas.

“With Super House of Dead Ninjas, it was just sorta opportunistic,” said Olsen. “One of our game producers was working on the Flash version, and he thought it could be really popular on Steam if they added some new features. So we spent a very small amount of money to port it over there to just see what would happen.”

What happened is that it immediately went to the top of the games-under-$5 chart (Super House of Dead Ninjas now goes for $6.99).

“It made sense to us that the Adult Swim audience and the Steam audience would overlap,” said Olsen. “So we definitely have plans to expand our efforts.”

Those efforts include more mobile games and definitely more Steam releases.

“Based upon the success of Super House of Dead Ninjas, we’re definitely in contact with the folks at Steam,” he said. “We’re trying to enlist their support for a wider slate of games on that platform.”

Adult Swim is even interested in working with Sony, Microsoft, or Nintendo on releasing some of its titles on the traditional home consoles.

“We’ve looked at it before, and the numbers just didn’t quite work,” said Olsen. “But that’s not to say that it couldn’t. It’s a matter of finding the right title. If it’s something that we develop that we think would be particularly fun on a console with a controller — and we can get the support of the people that run those platforms — that would be great.”

Olsen said he’s interested to wait and see how the next-generation of consoles handle digital content and that they’ll get involved if it’s profitable.

But just because Adult Swim is expanding and finding success (and lots of money) on Steam and iOS, that doesn’t mean it’s abandoning its Flash roots. The company’s games on Steam and mobile can charge the customer a few bucks to generate a lot of revenue, but Olsen says the ad-based model of Flash games is still incredibly vibrant.

“We have a video preroll in front of every game play, and our most popular games have done tens of millions of plays — if you add in social, there’s an additional hundreds of millions of plays,” said Olsen.

That adds up fast — and those numbers help Olsen and his team attract more talent.

“It’s really about trying to find the best people — primarily in the indie-game space — to give funding and support and feedback to make something that we can all be proud of and that we think our audience can appreciate.”

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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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Ubisoft’s next big online shooter will live or die based on support from the hardcore gaming community.

ShootMania Storm boils down the first-person shooter genre to its essence of running and gunning. Designed for multiplayer tournament play, Shootmania actively encourages players to create their own levels.

Putting together a level is as simple as creating something with Lego blocks. The editor for the maps is simple to use, in a “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) style.

Still in an open beta test, ShootMania Storm launched on Steam last week, and it officially releases on April 10. ShootMania is a competitive e-sport in the IGN Pro League. It isn’t gory, so it could have more broad appeal than many other, bloodier games.

“You can jump in, play the game, create your own maps, and it’s so easy” said Joshua Milligan, the senior director of online strategy at Ubisoft, in an interview with GamesBeat.

Players have already created 20,000 maps from the closed beta test, and now Milligan said he looks forward to a ton more.

The PC game is being built by Paris-based Nadeo, which developed the ManiaPlanet series of games such as the highly successful TrackMania and the still unreleased QuestMania.

I played a few rounds of ShootMania Storm at Ubisoft’s Digital Day last week in San Francisco and found the learning curve to be pretty easy. In the maps we played, you raced toward a flag. Once someone takes the flag, Shootmania triggered a storm that slowly moved in from all sides, killing anyone who was unlucky to get caught in it. That forced all players to charge into the center and fight each other with rocket launchers. You have to hit your enemies twice with a rocket launcher to bring them down. You can pretty much learn how to play in a few seconds and start taking out enemies in a matter of minutes.

The graphics look nice, and Shootmania’s design is all about speed kills. Once you die, you respawn at your start point, and you can jump right back into the action.

Ubisoft already has cash tournaments going, such as a $100,000 prize event running now. The Twitch streaming video platform is integrated into Shootmania, so you can easily watch tournaments.

Check out our interview with Milligan below.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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After angering gamers in December for making false claims on its Steam page, The War Z returns to Valve’s digital-distribution service.

The open-world zombie-survival game costs $15, although Steam users can spend more to buy it along with extra in-game credits. Developer Hammerpoint Interactive created the online game, which pits players against one another and hordes of computer-controlled undead monsters.

If that sounds familiar that’s because The War Z is nearly identical to the DayZ mod for Arma II, which has a rabid fan following. Some of the resentment against The War Z is traceable back to fans of DayZ who believe Hammerpoint ripped off the mod.

Hammerpoint originally released The War Z on December 18. Valve pulled the game the next day, and its vice president of marketing made the following statement:

From time to time a mistake can be made, and one was made by prematurely issuing a copy of The War Z for sale via Steam. We apologize for this and have temporary removed the sale offering of the title until we have time to work with the developer and have confidence in a new build. Those who purchase the game and wish to continue playing it via Steam may do so. Those who purchased the title via Steam and are unhappy with what they received may seek a refund by creating a ticket at our support site here: https://support.steampowered.com/newticket.php

Again, we apologize any inconvenience.

When The War Z first hit Steam, Hammerpoint claimed the title featured a skill-tree system, private servers, friends list, and maps between 100 square km and 400 square km. In reality, those features didn’t exist or the developer exaggerated them.

Hammerpoint is updating the title for gamers who already purchased it in December. It’s Steam page says nothing about skill trees or  private servers.

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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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Steam is now officially available on three different operating systems.

Valve updated the Steam client today to provide full compatibility with the Linux open-source OS. To celebrate the release, all 54 Linux-compatible games are on sale. That includes Half-Life for $2.49, World of Goo for $2.49, and Bastion for $3.74. This sale applies to Windows and Mac (when available) as well.

The free-to-play Team Fortress 2 is also available for Linux, and Valve is giving a free Tux item (the Linux penguin mascot) to anyone who plays it on the alternative OS before the end of the month.

To make things easy, Valve is suggesting people try installing Ubuntu, a specific variety of the Linux OS run by a group called Canonical. Here’s what the Linux page on Valve has to say about it:

Ubuntu is our favorite version of Linux. Interested in giving it a whirl? You can install and run Ubuntu from a live CD or USB stick, or install it to run alongside Windows.

Grab an Ubuntu installerfrom Canonical and see what it’s all about.

“The introduction of Steam to Ubuntu demonstrates growing demand for open systems from gamers and game developers,” Canonical director of consumer applications David Pitkin said in a statement. “We expect a growing number of game developers to include Ubuntu among their target platforms. We’re looking forward to seeing triple-A games developed with Ubuntu in mind as part of a multiplatform day and date release on Steam.”

If you already own any of the Linux-compatible games on Steam, you can simply install Steam on your Ubuntu systems and start playing them.

“We’re huge fans of Linux. It’s like the indie OS — a perfect home for our indie game,” Croteam (Serious Sam) chief technology officer Alen Ladavac said in a statement. “And who better to lead the charge into Linux gaming than Valve? With Steam distribution on Windows, Mac OS, and now Linux, plus the buy-once, play-anywhere promise of Steam Play, our games are available to everyone, regardless what type of computer they’re running. That’s huge.”

Valve chief executive officer Gabe Newell seems very keen to get away from Microsoft’s Windows platform. Newell called Windows 8 a “catastrophe for everybody in the PC space” at a conference in July. Out of that distaste for Windows, Valve began pushing to get Steam on Linux.

The software company also plans to release its own so-called “Steam Box” hardware, which Newell said will use Linux.

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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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Valve cofounder Gabe Newell said in a speech that he believes that the PC is poised to expand into the rest of the living room. He thinks that the constant flux of the game industry favors the PC, which is able to absorb technological change better than the traditional video game consoles.

Newell is a popular leader in games today, as Valve is the maker of Half-Life, Portal and Portal 2, Left 4 Dead, Counter-Strike, and others — all highly regarded and notable games. Valve also runs the Steam digital game distribution and community service on the PC, and it is considering entering the living room console market with the so-called Steam Box, an open Linux-based machine.

Yesterday, he appeared at the 12th annual DICE Summit, an elite game industry event in Las Vegas, with film director J.J. Abrams. At the end of their chat, they said they were working together on games. Today, Newell took the stage solo to explain the way Valve’s thinking has evolved. He said he wants the open, indie gaming world to thrive.

“If you look back the PC has been the center of innovation,” he said. “It has come out of open competition,” Newell said.

The PC has its weaknesses, like how its input system isn’t the best compared to game consoles. But the marginal cost of adding capabilities to a PC so it can function in the living room is less than putting a brand-new box in the living room. But Newell didn’t comment on Microsoft’s role in guiding the PC, as his company has clashed with Microsoft on how much of a gatekeeper the giant tech company should be for new PC software.

Newell wants the PC to have its own app store with an endless amount of user-generated content as well as professional content, all available for users to try out. Consumers already have a lot of content available for the PC and huge investments in PC-based social activities, too. That’s an investment that they should have to throw away.

He said that the PC is able to absorb new technologies, like in-home streaming and extra monitors. The price-performance of PCs also makes them ideal as hardware.

“There has been a massive capital investment in the PC in the last few years,” he said.

But he warned that Apple is a threat to the PC. If it makes a television or extends the iOS into the living room, it has enough momentum on its side with consumers to push the PC aside.

“It’s scarier what Apple will do,” he said.

Newell thinks that free-to-play games will be a boon for the PC. With it, users play for free and then pay real money for virtual goods. When a game goes free-to-play, Newell said that the audience increases 10-fold and revenues increase three-fold.

But Newell doesn’t like every new technology that can enhance the PC. Cloud gaming, for instance, puts the “latency compensation” in the wrong spot of the network. It should be out on the edge, not in the middle of an network.

“You have a network cost,” he said. “Cloud gaming falls over from its own success.”

Translation: The network becomes more expensive if cloud gaming succeeds and adds a flood of traffic to it. That will cause network pricing to go through the roof.

Newell also foresees a sea change in what games are. He thinks they will become goods and services that are all part of a connected ecosystem. He said he likes the idea of games as a service, where Valve fixes problems and responds to customers when they give feedback on a game. He also believes that users can make much better contributions for enhancing games than Valve itself can. Those people should be able to make money from their contributions to modifying games.

“We have people making $500,000 selling goods in a game,” Newell said. “Games are part of digital economies. In the past, people spend huge amounts of time in games. They move on to the next game, and all that is thrown away. It’s like moving out of your house and burning it down” rather than taking things with you.

As much as Newell supports the PC, he doesn’t necessarily trust Microsoft. He’s been critical of Windows 8 and its closed platform. Valve is reportedly working on a Steam Box PC-like console for the living room. One reason would be to provide an alternative to a Microsoft PC. Newell said he supports Linux as an alternative, to get around gatekeepers.

“Make sure we have the freedom to innovate and pursue opportunities,” he said. “Linux is a get-out-of-jail free card for our industry if we need it.”

Valve is working on input hardware, which is a hole in the market now.

“We don’t want to ship hardware,” he said. “Our goal is to move things forward on the PC.” The question is how to segment things properly.

Valve is working on console-like PCs with partners, emphasizing the price performance and opennesss of the PC. What it must work out is how to share revenue among all of the partners, Newell said.

Newell said stores should really have user-generated content. “It’s all about enabling engagement,” he said. “Same is true for a store.” Others can create versions of stores that sit on the front-end.

“If we are wrong, at least it will be spectacularly entertaining as a failure,” Newell said.

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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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Steam, the online gaming platform and community from Valve, seems to have fixed a security issue today that allowed anyone to easily get information about games played, achievements, and stats from a private profile.

Kyle Orland of Ars Technica reports that he found the hole while poking around his own Steam profile. He found that you could manipulate the HTML address to unearth a number of different “private” pages associated with his profile, as well as find games he’d played in the page’s source code. According to Orland, he was able to “independently confirm” that this did not just affect his profile but others as well.

People in general should be concerned about these kinds of privacy snafus — not just gamers. Like most things on the Internet, what you believe to be personal or shared just with friends often appears in unexpected places. Thankfully, the information exposed in Steam’s case didn’t include highly sensitive data such as credit card numbers or home addresses. But it’s likely just as annoying as having a Facebook photo leaked.

Orland first tried to find a private user’s (which happened to be his own profile) list of games played by typing in “/games/?tab=all” after the profile’s URL. That didn’t work and instead brought him back to the private profile page. So he inspected the source code associated with the page, and there, in plain text, was the list he’d been looking for.

After identifying the games, he played with the HTML a little more, choosing to search for achievements in the game Portal 2. He added “stats/Portal2/?tab=achievements” to the end of the URL and was immediately taken to the Portal 2 achievements page associated with that profile.

Using the same method, he found the player’s stats for specific games, as well as badges. Orland noted that an observant snooper could find the times that person was playing a game, if their profile was connected to Facebook, and when the profile was created.

As is courteous and traditional, Orland reported the hole to Steam before going public with his information. The holes have seemingly been fixed, but Valve has not responded to the bug report.

Steam image via Shutterstock

Just because Xbox 360 ownsers get The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim downloadable content first doesn’t mean developer Bethesda doesn’t care about its PC players.

As proof of this, the publisher updated the high-definition texture pack for its open-world role-playing game on Valve’s Steam service today, according to Bethesda’s blog. The update improves the overall look of the main game. It also adds the improved texturing to the Dawnguard, Hearthfire, and Dragonborn expansions.

The HD add-on is particularly taxing, so the developer suggests players thinking about installing the pack should use a PC that exceeds Skyrim’s recommended settings. If you already installed the HD textures, Steam should automatically update, but beware: The file is 4.7 GBs.

Just as a reminder of what the game can look like with the HD texture pack, here’s a video that compares the standard game with the high-res DLC:

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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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It was Top Indie Game of PAX 2012 from VentureBeat. It took six years to build by a solo indie developer. And a game with half of the attention to detail and imagination Antichamber has would be a smash hit — this bare-bones first-person puzzler is one of the most thought-provoking, engaging, and challenging video games ever developed.

The entire journey focuses on player discovery through exploration and sandbox experimentation. Players learn new skills on each new level and earn an upgradeable tool for gathering and placing blocks, adding complexity to puzzles. And like a good book that leaves readers in a daze, Antichamber is about deep puzzles that are almost always solved by subtle solutions. Creator Alexander Bruce has built a masterpiece of a game that intentionally dismisses foundations of development like plot, characters, and linear gameplay. Antichamber is a modern-day labyrinth, and Bruce has taken a step beyond Daedalus’ creation. Not even a literal trail of breadcrumbs can save you in this digital wonderland/prison.

I highly recommended that you don’t look up any hints or walkthroughs unless absolutely necessary as you explore Antichamber.

What you’ll like

A real challenge

Antichamber begins in the “start menu” with an ever-updating map of the world that fills in as players visit more areas; basic controls and settings adjustment; and a wall of all collected hints. Oh, and a glass wall that dangles a door to Antichamber’s end on the other side. All the while a timer ticks down from an hour and a half, providing you a time to beat.

I’ll envy anyone who can finish this in 90 minutes. At 15-plus hours of playtime for me, Antichamber regularly tested my wits and patience, and it induced a rage as I pried and prodded every in-game object — animate or otherwise — in search of the one clue I’m missing. I’m not ashamed to say that I haven’t completed it just yet. Antichamber demands a consistent imagination and an open mind. Levels are designed to force out-of-the-box thinking and simultaneously provide essential practice of certain skills for future puzzles.

Playing Antichamber and solving puzzles is a reminder of the old days of gaming, when success was its own reward. In today’s world of achievements, trophies, hints, and tutorials, Antichamber feels fresh; the pure unbridled difficulty of the puzzles (which are too often oh-so-simple … once you solve them) gives you a real sense of accomplishment when solved. The last game that made me feel proud for actually achieving something was in Jonathan Blow’s 2008 indie hit Braid. Some of the puzzles in Antichamber will crush your ego. That makes completing them all the more satisfying.

Simplicity defined

Bruce took Leonardo da Vinci’s “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” quote to heart. Players start with nothing: no tools and no tutorial, just a flashing icon on the map indicating where to click. Instructions are at most one word long and often carry double or triple meanings. The first message reads “jump” over a chasm, and if you do leap, you plummet to the bottom — where you find a cheeky message. That fall is the first step to learning how to play.

This method of teaching players — through practice instead of the spoken or written word — is elegant, and the information is easier to retain. Written text comes in the form of digital screens on walls that offer subtle hints to puzzles, like a note about persistence just before what looks like an infinitely spiraling walkway. Just like the puzzles, all of the text is subtle and requires a little work and imagination to understand.

Antichamber is one of the leanest games in recent history. Every little bit is intensely focused on teaching players through gameplay and affording the space to experiment. The level structure, colors, and graphics are minimalist by design and offer only enough to progress. Thie is about solving puzzles, and nothing stands in the way of that.

Complete interconnectedness with nonlinear gameplay

One of the most beautiful aspects of Antichamber is how all puzzles and levels are, in some way, connected. Players can spend hours solving one puzzle after another, or they can completely circumvent whole sections of the world by taking another path. Because of this interconnectedness and the non-linear level design, there is no right or wrong way to play. And like a “choose your own adventure” book playing the game straight through is not necessarily the best way.

No matter how you play, it’s the same game every time, even if each new session feels completely different.

Antichamber is an intricate web, one where players have access to all sorts of puzzles at any time but may lack the skill or insight to complete them all. Many levels contain multiple puzzles and different exit points for each one but require advanced tactics to solve. These puzzles seem impossible early on, and while a few are, most are not. This intrinsic level design means that the game is beatable in less than an hour and a half, and that completing every puzzle isn’t necessary.

What you won’t like

The incredible difficulty

If Antichamber’s greatest strength is brilliant and mesmerizing puzzles, its greatest weakness is when players have trouble solving them. Antichamber is not what you want to play to unwind after a hard day’s work unless you really enjoy a good challenge. It’s hard, and it’s merciless. With no tutorials or direct hints, Antichamber demands your full attention.

Only the cleverest of you will finish this in a single sitting. Some puzzles have left me stumped for hours — and at least one for days. As positive as that may sound, not all players are patient enough to accommodate Antichamber.

Automatically reset levels

Because the world of Antichamber is really one massive level, you could go make a single run through and see your work on any previously completed chamber. Unlocked doors stay open, blocks stay affixed to surfaces, and lasers remain blocked. This is a great way to speed through completed areas without mindlessly spending time resolving puzzles. That is, unless players press the escape button (ESC) to return to the main menu. This resets everything in the world and erases any trace of your actions. Every “escape” creates a clean slate.

This design makes sense, but it is awfully painful, especially for time-consuming puzzles. It can feel like punishment for viewing the map or seeing your progress. If you’ve lost your place or need to get to a specific location, too bad. Players either must memorize the map and puzzle locations, many of which are nearly identical to one another, or resign themselves to play through the same puzzles again. This also means exiting the game or turning off your computer is a forced reset. Starting fresh does train players to be more efficient through practice, but for anyone stuck and rapidly losing their patience, constant resets are unpalatable.

Conclusion

Antichamber is the film Cube sans horror, the threat of death, and poor acting. It’s insanely hard and painfully simple, just like any expertly crafted puzzle. Bruce has created one of the finest and most challenging puzzle games I have ever experienced. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a game to finish.

Score: 92/100

Antichamber is now available for PC. The publisher provided GamesBeat with a Steam download code 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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It’s my shelf.

When I got my first job out of college and realized that I could afford to buy any game I wanted to play, I filled up all the empty space on my shelf with titles and even a PlayStation Vita. However, that newfound fortune came with a catch: spending time at work instead of with a controller. This resulted in a backlog of fantastic games that goes as far back as August. I’ve been making steady progress, but the video game industry discovered it could sell me games every month of the year and not just during the holidays. Because of this, my backlog has continued to grow at a near-unmanageable rate despite my efforts to stop it. Even from here, I can tell that March’s buffet of gaming goodness is going to be a bloodbath at retail and for my shelves.

Most casual players are probably pickier with their selection and don’t buy nearly everything that costs less than $10 during a Steam sale. Those players usually don’t run into this issue. I’m not those players. To make matters worse, I’m one of those people that has to finish every game I start. This means I’ve wasted countless hours playing bad games just because I didn’t have the foresight to avoid pressing the Start button, which takes time away from the good games in my backlog.

I want to play Sleeping Dogs. I want to play Persona 4: Golden. Before my brain will let me, though, I need to finish Resident Evil 6 — a game with a ridiculous logo that I think is kinda bad. I’ve started watching Netflix on my laptop while playing just so I can mindlessly shoot my way through. It’s actively boring, but I can’t fight the system. My backlog is my burden to bear.

I have a problem, but I’m looking for a solution. I’m going to try going back to my old ways of waiting for reviews and making tough decisions about what games I want to play. Just because I can buy any game that I want to does not mean that I should. With time more precious than it’s ever been before, maybe I can’t really afford every game I want to play after all.

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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 Steam 2012 holiday sale lives for another two days.

Valve just announced it is extending the big sale that deeply discounts many of the service’s best games for a special “encore weekend.”

“Gamers will have a final opportunity to get their favorite games on Steam,” said Valve spokesperson Doug Lombardi in a statement. “A select number of the most sought-after titles from the Steam holiday sale will reprise their biggest discounts for two additional days.”

The extended portion of the sale begins on Saturday at 10 a.m. Pacific. Valve will finally pull the plug on Monday at 10 a.m. Pacific.

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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 video game business never has a year without controversy. 2012 was no different in that respect. But the different ways that game companies could get into trouble and draw mass market attention were surprising. The age-old controversies about sex, violence, and other cultural insensitivities surfaced again this year. But game publishers also had to deal with the consequences of being hacked, violating the government’s concerns about military security, and upsetting fans by failing to live up to games-as-a-service obligations in free-to-play games.

Sometimes, the controversies brew up from the bottom as unintended consequences. At other times, it seems like the controversies are intentionally manufactured for marketing reasons, so that the game can rise above the noise and catch the public’s attention. But that’s a double-edged sword, as such marketing can turn off as many consumers as you attract. Whether the controversies are accidental or intentional, it’s clear that when you create entertainment for the public, there are so many ways to get into trouble. Please vote in our poll for the top game controversy, and leave a comment if you like.

Video games take the heat for Newtown shooting

The horrific shootings at Newtown left 20 children and seven adults dead. Though it happened late in the year, this incident revived concerns over excessive violence in video games. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that video games were protected under the First Amendment. But calls for regulation and studying of a possible link between games and violence went out again in the wake of the shooting. The anti-game-violence crowd got help from an unexpected corner, as the National Rifle Association blamed the shooting on violent video games (and called for armed guards at schools). Greg Fischbach, former chief executive of Mortal Kombat publisher Acclaim Entertainment, predicted that the consequences of the shooting will play out over years for the game industry.

Ex-Navy SEALS disciplined for consulting on Medal of Honor Warfighter

Electronic Arts touted the fact that former elite soldiers gave it advice in the design of its realistic combat shooter Medal of Honor Warfighter. But the company failed to go through the proper channels in getting permission from the government for the consulting. As a result, the Department of Defense punished seven active-duty Navy SEALs who consulted on the game. The SEALs had two months of pay docked and received letters of reprimand. More were under investigation.

Among those who consulted was Matt Bissonnette, who was part of Seal Team 6 team that killed Osama Bin Laden. EA said that it wasn’t aware of any rules that required EA to vet the game with the DoD. It wasn’t clear if any military secrets were improperly divulged in the game. Bissonnette also got into hot water for co-writing the nonfiction account of the raid that killed Bin Laden in the book, No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama Bin Laden.

Copycatting called out

Zynga has long been accused of copying other game designs. Electronic Arts finally sued the company this year for allegedly copying The Sims Social with the launch of Zynga’s The Ville people simulation game. EA claimed that Zynga’s team copied many details of The Sims Social. Zynga denied outright copying, and it noted that EA’s SimCity Social was similarly a copy of Zynga’s own city-building game, CityVille, and that CityVille itself has only passing resemblance to EA’s SimCity games on the PC.

In response to similar allegations of copying in a bingo game, Mark Pincus, chief executive of Zynga, claimed that his company has re-imagined past games by making them more social. The result is those games become more popular than ever thanks to sharing with friends on Facebook. EA said that it had to stand up for the industry to stop the rampant copying. Complicating the matter was the fact that The Ville’s designer, Mark Skaggs of Zynga, used to work at EA, as did many other Zynga executives. The issue of copying came up again as Spry Fox sued 6waves for copying not the look of its game, but the game play. That lawsuit was settled. But the EA-Zynga dispute is still pending.

The courts have been clear on the subject. Making a new game in an existing genre isn’t a violation of copyright law. But taking someone’s computer code and claiming it as your own is illegal.

Talent raiding wars

Related to the copycat allegations, big companies also went to war over talent raids. After Zynga hired an EA executive, Zynga alleged that EA’s chief executive John Riccitiello proposed an anti-competitive no-hiring pact or he would threaten litigation. Zynga claimed that was the real reason for EA’s copycat lawsuit. Meanwhile, Kixeye CEO Will Harbin made a hilarious video lampooning Zynga and EA as part of a campaign to recruit talent. But then Zynga sued Kixeye for stealing a game designer. Zynga alleged that Alan Patmore took 763 confidential documents with him when he started his new job at Kixeye. But Harbin blasted Zynga for lashing out while it was “burning to the ground and bleeding top talent.”

Apple cracks down on bot marketers

Early in the year, Apple quietly prohibited mobile game companies from using bots and other marketing tactics that artificially boosted games in Apple’s rankings of its top-performing apps. Animoca alleged that Apple unfairly cracked down on its Pretty Pet Salon game and that communication from Apple was sparse. Our own investigation found that the secrecy around the crackdown left a lot of developers wondering what was OK to do and what wasn’t when it came to marketing games. Game developers feared that if everyone used unfair marketing tactics, then legitimate high-quality apps might never get noticed. But one thing was clear. If you used too many incentives, Apple would start paying attention. Late in the year, Tapjoy again learned a tough lesson about being too aggressive with incentives, this time with web-based offers that apps linked to from within Apple apps. Neither Apple nor Tapjoy elucidated on the matter, leaving developers in the dark.

Hackers disrupt online games

Anonymous taught Sony a big lesson last year as it hacked into both the PlayStation Network and disabled the network for 77 million registered users who could no longer access their online games. It also attacked Sony Online Entertainment. This year, hackers were back with more attacks. Gamigo got hacked and lost control over 8 million email addresses and passwords for its users. And 11,000 Guild Wars 2 players also had their passwords stolen. Zynga’s YoVille social game saw disruption for 1,000 fans after some players began using a vulnerability to steal belongings from other accounts. Game companies that get hit by hackers will find out that consumers will blame the company for lax security as much as they will blame the hackers.

Fan revolts hit Mystery Manor

Game Insight had a tough time dealing with fan outcry after it decided to take away some perks offered to players of the game. Game Insight made the iOS version of Mystery Manor: Hidden Adventure, which was enjoyed by as many as 20 million registered users. The hidden object game was a free-to-pay title where users could play for free and pay real money for virtual goods. But Apple banned a practice that the game had previously allowed: letting friends obtain and trade gifts with other players inside the game. Game Insight had to scramble to comply with the rules and fans objected. A second fan revolt erupted with a second service disruption. Fair warning. Fan revolts are going to be common if game developers decide to change long-standing online games or discontinue them altogether.

Sex chat brings down Habbo virtual world

A British TV station dealt Habbo a severe blow when it blew the lid off a sex chat culture within parts of the virtual world, which has more than 250 million registered users. During the scandal, retailers stopped carrying prepaid cards for Habbo and an investor pulled its support from the company. Habbo had measures in place to stop sexual predators, but it shut down the service to deal with the new allegations. The company reviewed its chat records and found 3.7 percent of members were engaged in inappropriate chat. By the time that Habbo went back online with new measures in place, it had lost about 35 percent of its membership. Chief executive Paul LaFontaine pledged to redouble efforts to protect kids and win more of those users back.

Ex-OMGPOP ignites debate about refusing to work for Zynga

OMGPOP’s Pictionary-style mobile game Draw Something gained a huge number of users early this year, prompting Zynga to buy the New York game company for $180 million. But Shay Pierce, one of OMGPOP’s employees, wrote a blog post about how he didn’t want to work for Zynga, which he viewed as completely antithetical to his professional and creative values. Then OMGPOP CEO Dan Porter tweeted that the one employee who didn’t accept a job with Zynga (Pierce) was the “weakest” one. But Pierce didn’t miss out on much. Draw Something lost millions of users and Zynga had to take a write-off of $95 million because of the diminished value of the mobile game. Zynga’s stock price also cratered as it announced two quarters of weak earnings in a row.

EA and Activision Blizzard spar over Infinity Ward

In 2011, Activision Blizzard and Electronic Arts squared off over the departures of the founders of Infinity Ward, an Activision-owned studio that built the Call of Duty franchise into a billion-dollar machine. Two co-founders were fired from Infinity Ward as they prepared to exit and set up Respawn Entertainment, a new game studio funded by EA. The lawsuit was headed for a trial this year. Just before the trial, EA and Activision settled the case. But not before there were some interesting disclosures about Project Icebreaker. Activision executive email records showed that executives were hunting for dirt on the co-founders as a pretext to fire them. Activision denied the characterization of the emails.

Mass Effect 3′s ending fiasco

Fans were in an uproar after they played through the entire Mass Effect trilogy, only to be disappointed by the uninspired ending of Mass Effect 3. The fan reaction was so intense that Electronic Arts’ BioWare division decided to come out with an enhanced ending to satisfy gamers. And not long after that, BioWare founders Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk decided to retire from their top positions at EA.

Here’s our poll.

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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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So you bought the first five Tomb Raider games that recently hit Steam, and your collection is complete. Hang on, treasure hunters. You’re still missing a few.

The early Tomb Raider action-adventure games are available on a variety of modern platforms: PlayStation Network and PC via GOG.com and most recently Steam. But previous Tomb Raider developer Core Design also released a number of add-ons and standalone expansions for PC that are nowhere to be seen. Unless you own the original discs, you can’t play them even if you find a download online.

This extra content is substantial, too. The first of the Tomb Raider Gold games for PC and Mac arrived two years after the release of the original Tomb Raider. This version contained four bonus levels on a second disc: “Shadow of the Cat,” where female lead Lara Croft searches for a tomb devoted to the Egyptian cat goddess Bastet, and “Unfinished Business,” where she ventures back to Atlantis to destroy, well, mutant creatures guarding an alien hatchery.

Tomb Raider II Gold featured five bonus levels (“The Golden Mask”), The Lost Artifact was a brief sequel to Tomb Raider III, British newspaper The Times released an exclusive level for The Last Revelation in collaboration with publisher Eidos, and Chronicles sold with a level editor.

We asked Stellalune (who goes by her pen name online, not her real name), the owner of the popular and long-running Stella’s Tomb Raider fan site, whether it’s possible to play these lost levels another way. She doesn’t think so.

“In a perfect world, all the expansions would be available on all systems,” she said. “But sadly, I don’t make those decisions.”

Are the extras even worth it? “I really enjoyed all the Tomb Raider bonus levels, and I think they’re just as well designed and fun to play as the main games,” she said. “[They're] also just as weak on plot, but I don’t really care about that much. I just like exploring, solving puzzles, et cetera. That said, I don’t think any of them are essential to the Tomb Raider experience.”

She added, “I’m still a little cranky that they never released the Xbox 360 Underworld bonus levels for other systems since those add-ons actually do add to the plot of the main game.

“Meanwhile, there are also tons of amazing user-created games done with the Tomb Raider Level Editor. I haven’t had a chance to play even a tiny fraction of what’s available, but sites like trle.net, skribblerz.com, [and others] are great places to start if you’re interested in tons of free Tomb Raider.”

GOG.com’s Trevor Longino confirmed that the site does offer the extra level in Revelations, at least.

“We signed the rights to the Tomb Raider 1-3 Pack, which is what we released,” he said. “We did not sign the Gold editions of Tomb Raider One and Two, but we’re looking into the possibility of adding them to our catalog in the future.”

We also reached out to Steam but have yet to receive a response.

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

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Click here for all of GamesBeat’s Nintendo Wii U launch coverage.

Indie developers seem to like the new Nintendo Wii U … a lot.

The video game console launched on Nov. 18 with a number of indie games (although Cloudberry Kingdom is behind schedule), and the flexible, stress-free setup of the eShop could help bring more developers on board. Frozenbyte, the maker of launch title Trine 2: Director’s Cut, is one independent studio that’s happy with the revamped digital platform, the Nintendo Network. Marketing manager Mikael Haveri recently told IGN that Nintendo is allowing developers to set their own prices and release dates.

“It is very close to what Apple and Steam are doing at the moment and very indie friendly,” he said.

Part of that includes making patches free to implement, encouraging them. “Simply put, [Nintendo has] told us that there are no basic payments for each patch — which were pretty high on most platforms — and that we can update our game almost as much as we want,” said Haveri. “For indie developers, this is huge.”

The indie treatment, then and now

Developers have complained in the past of the exorbitant fees that publishers like Microsoft charge. “I mean, it costs $40,000 to put up a patch,” Tim Schafer of Double Fine Productions told Hookshot Inc. early this year. “We can’t afford that! Open systems like Steam, that allow us to set our own prices, that’s where it’s at, and doing it completely alone like Minecraft. That’s where people are going.”

Phil Fish of Polytron said in July — in a web entry that’s no longer on the developer’s blog but is recorded in full on sites like Kotaku — that he wouldn’t patch the broken patch for Fez (pictured top left) “because Microsoft would charge us tens of thousands of dollars to recertify the game.”

We asked Microsoft about its policies, and its response applied to Xbox Live Indie Games — not Xbox Live Arcade titles like Fez.

“As part of the $99 USD annual Xbox Live Indie Games membership fee, developers have the opportunity to update their game whenever they choose,” said Pete Isensee, the principal program manager in the Xbox Advanced Technology Group at Microsoft. “There is no additional cost per update. All updates must go through peer review.”

When asked about the differences on XBLA, Isensee said, “We cannot disclose these details but can say that Xbox Live Arcade titles must pass a rigorous certification process to ensure high-quality applications and game updates. XBLA titles also have access to a broad set of Xbox Live services, such as Title Managed Storage, that allow them to update the game’s content at any time.” It’s not clear at what cost.

Microsoft also said that indie developers (on XBLIG) can set the price of their games based on size. “Games that are less than 150MB in size can be priced at 80, 240, or 400 points,” said Isensee. “Games larger than 150MB can be priced at 240 or 400 points. Developers also have the choice to either manually select their own custom release date or have their game automatically published to the Xbox Live Marketplace after it has passed peer review. Earlier this year, based on feedback from the development community, Microsoft updated its pricing policy, so developers now have the flexibility of changing the price of their game once every seven days.”

While Fish’s comments were explicitly directed at Microsoft, not every developer has issue with the company. Bruce Morrison, who worked at Freeverse and ported the 3D shooter Marathon: Durandal to XBLA before forming Man Up Time Studios this year, said he never encountered patch-cost issues with Microsoft, according to The Penny Arcade Report. “I got two free patches for my XLBA game,” he said via Twitter. “[Microsoft] can bend any rules they want. You just have to make a case for it.” But that was in 2007, and Fez came out in 2012. It’s possible the rules changed.

But what about Sony? Brandon Laurino, the executive producer for the free-to-play first-person shooter Dust 514, told Eurogamer in March that Sony actually removed barriers for them. As for patches, is the cost comparable to what Microsoft allegedly charges? “We’ve worked out a framework where it’s certainly not at that level,” said Laurino. “And essentially it’s not even a thought — it’s a completely trivial part of the equation.”

We asked the PlayStation producer about its stance on indie developers. “Indies have been able to set their own prices and release dates since SCEA [Sony Computer Entertainment America] opened up access to self-publishing back in 2008,” said Adam Boyes, the vice president of publisher and developer relations. “Allowing indie developers to publish their content how and when they want, using the business model of their choosing — including free to play — without the need of a traditional publisher, has resulted in the PlayStation platforms being the most accessible console in the marketplace. The Pub Fund program is further evidence of the importance we place on indie developers and self-publishing through guaranteed royalties and additional publishing and co-marketing support.

“As for fees,” said Boyes, “we do our best to remove any obstacles that would impact indies from self-publishing on the PlayStation platforms. SCEA hasn’t charged an indie dev a patch fee in over two years, which represents our passion for supporting the indie dev community.”

The Wii U is different — here’s what to expect

The experience with the Wii U seems to be friendlier than these platforms from the outset, which could put the console in good standing with indie developers and make it the more appealing option.

Martin Pichlmair of Broken Rules, the developer of indie game Chasing Aurora (pictured middle left) for the Wii U, told GamesBeat, “The eShop is a huge step forward for Nintendo. We’re setting our own price, we can do sales, and patches and updates to the games are simple to submit. There is still a strict QA [quality assurance] check by Nintendo, of course, which we regard as very valuable. That, all together with the ability to download digital copies of triple-A retail games, should make it attractive for a lot of players.”

Pichlmair also noted that since the marketplace is less crowded, it’s easy for small developers like Broken Rules to stand out — an advantage especially around the time of launch, when the selection of games for a console is thinnest.

“[Nintendo] never gave us the feeling that we were second-class citizens just because we’re one of the smallest studios they’ve worked with for this console launch,” said Pichlmair.

He added, “I can personally only compare them to Steam because we have no game on Xbox Live Arcade or PlayStation Network. Nintendo provides hardware, QA, and marketing whereas Steam provides a huge community and a great user experience — even for a developer. Both platforms have their pros and cons.

“It is unlikely that the eShop [will generate] the sprawling ecosystem for indie games that iOS and Steam created,” he said, “but I am certain that there will be many more indie games on this platform than on any Nintendo platform before — not at least because the hardware is comfortable to develop for.”

Collin van Ginkel, the co-founder of Two Tribes — which is releasing its puzzle-platformer Toki Tori 2 (pictured bottom right) on Wii U first on Dec. 20 — also favorably compared the eShop to Valve’s service. “It’s a lot like Steam’s setup, which has enabled us to keep reaching new players even years after we release our games,” he told GamesBeat. “It’s still [in its] early days, but we’re completely on board with Nintendo’s new approach so far.

“We were skeptical at first since our experiences on WiiWare and DSiWare had been a mixed bag, but the system Nintendo has put in place is about as good as it’s going to get for indie developers,” he said. “There honestly isn’t much we’d like to see them change.”

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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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Fighting with mechs never looked so beautiful, at least from a bird’s-eye view. Carbon Games is launching the open beta test of its free-to-play AirMech game today as a downloadable title on Valve’s Steam digital distribution platform.

Carbon Games built the real-time strategy title with no outside funding and a team of six people. It looks beautiful and has more than 420,000 beta testers. You can play AirMech cooperatively or competitively online on the PC. The sci-fi game is akin to a tower defense game, with pretty graphics. But it runs on low-end hardware, including mobile phones.

Bellevue, Wash.-based Carbon Games was founded in July 2011 by James Green and Ken Klopp, who were among the makers of the Sony PlayStation Network game Fat Princess. Carbon built AirMech with a few hundred thousand dollars of its founders’ own money, said Green, and it is running across 23 servers scattered around the globe.

“Our plan is to crush all competition by offering ‘fair’ free-to-play that the big companies just can’t compete with because they have tens of millions to recoup,” Green said. “Our profits are going to be reinvested back into the game because we love it and want to build a trans-media empire out of it — not because we’re in it for the money. It’s because we love this game and want to prove that you don’t need a ton of venture capital to do it.”

Green said that Carbon has an Android version up and running at 30 frames per second on Tegra 3 tablets and also has a Google Chrome Native Client version. The company has an Ouya development kit and plans to launch AirMech for that platform. Its soundtrack comes out Tuesday, a work from electro-industrial performers Front Line Assembly.

Rivals include games such as League of Legends, StarCraft II, and Dota2. Green and Klopp met while working in Shanghai for Ubisoft. They both founded Titan Studios and then merged it with Epic Games China. After Epic Games China wasn’t interested in their pitch, they set off on their own.

Green added, “We are proving that the old publisher model is broken. Six people in a room can make a game played by people all over the world. I was tired of AirMech being rejected time and time again, and I knew the only way to get it made was to make it ourselves, fund it ourselves.”

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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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Are you reminiscing about the 1980s? Well, Jordan Mechner has a game for you. The designer of the original, groundbreaking Prince of Persia has gone back to dust off his first big hit, Karateka, and he is now releasing the fighting game reimagined for today’s digital platforms.

Karateka is launching today as a downloadable title on Xbox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network, Steam, and iOS. Mechner has made some blockbuster games in his time, and he spent time in Hollywood writing the screenplay for the feature film Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, a Jerry Bruckheimer film that was the highest-grossing video game film adaptation ever at $335 million.

So it is interesting that Mechner has turned his attention to digital platforms, including the iPhone, as the medium of the future. The reason he is doing so is creative freedom.

“We had time to experiment with new approaches,” he said in an interview with GamesBeat. “No pressure. We did more than make the game again. We rebuilt it completely, with brand-new combat mechanics.”

The original game was a karate-fighting title with a love story that Mechner first created for the Apple II as student at Yale University more than 30 years ago. It was a best-seller in 1984, selling more than 500,000 units. It influenced a generation of gamers with its rotoscoped animation and cinematic cutscenes. And it sold so well that Mechner was able to move on to his signature game, Prince of Persia. More than 17 million Prince of Persia games have been sold to date.

With his new firm Liquid Entertainment, Mechner led a team of 12 people this time and says he loved to immerse himself in the daily work with the whole team.

“It was refreshing where it was small enough where I got to talk with every member of the team every day,” Mechner said. “We wanted it small because at its heart, we wanted Karateka to be a small game that you could play in one session.”

And they could proceed through a period of experimentation over the course of a year, without the pressure of a publisher breathing down their necks. Mechner funded the game with friends and family, including an investment from screenwriter John August. They made use of graphics, sound, music, and environmental effects that could make a mobile and digital game as immersive as a $60 retail game.

The new title is a rhythm-based story fighter. That means that you match the rhythm of your opponent’s attacks and eventually earn your counterattack.

“Anyone can grasp it, but it is difficult to master,” Mechner said.

It has cinematic cutscenes and a series of escalating karate battles. It has three playable characters who seek to free the princess Mariko from her evil captor, the warlord Akuma. The first character is her True Love, the second is a Monk, and the third is a Brute. The full game lasts about 40 minutes. If you die, then the next character takes your place. Mariko is happy to be rescued, but she wants to be rescued most of all by her True Love. So you have to get good enough to make it through the first time without dying.

That makes Karateka highly replayable, Mechner said. And it also means the rotating characters means that the player stays immersed in the game in the transition from one life to the next.

“The game never pulls you out of the story the way a respawn does,” Mechner said.

Composer Christopher Tin, who won a Grammy award for his “Baba Yetu” song for Civilization IV, created the musical score. Made with authentic Japanese instruments, the music changes in real time based on how much action is happening and who is winning. Mechner said, “You can tell what is happening just by listening to the music.”

Jeff Matsuda, animator on the celebrated Batman: The Animated Series, created the art.

“On the first game, the team size was me, unless you count my dad, who made the music,” Mechner said.

Mechner said he hopes the game will appeal to the original fans as well as younger players too. The game available today on Xbox Live Arcade (published by D3 Publisher) for 800 Microsoft points. It will be out on PSN, Steam, and iOS in November for $9.99.

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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 biggest puzzle-platformers of recent years — like Limbo and Super Meat Boy — are punishing in their difficulty. Take even a single hit and it’s game over. They’re also endlessly creative, constantly testing players with new angles on previous challenges and surprises in gameplay. Now, Might and Delight’s debut title Pid, or Planet in Distress (out today for Xbox Live Arcade and Steam), seeks to reproduce that winning formula as it leaves the fate of a world with a young boy.

What you’ll like

Otherworldly colors and sounds
All Kurt wants to do is go home. When the bus drops him off at a remote planet by accident, he learns the return trip will take a little longer — traffic to and from the planet has completely stopped, save for its newest little visitor. The boy proceeds to explore his surroundings only to become embroiled in a conflict that concerns the welfare of the planet and its robot inhabitants, who are helpless to the changes and evil-doings going on around them.

Life on the planet might be tragic, but the sights and sounds are wonderful. The game begins (and ends) with a wordless series of illustrations set to sound, which gives the story its context and mood. From there, Kurt journeys to locations like an old castle, an opera house, and an eerie cave and underground maze. The colors are gorgeous, especially in areas outdoors; the hazy palette blends together beautifully even as each part of the environment stands out from the rest. This effect gives Pid a sense of childlike wonder, like we’re viewing these scenes through a veil of starlight. It helps to emphasize how brave one small boy can be to take on a mission this big. Kurt has amazing spirit, and his determination to find a way home brings hope and aid to a desperate people.

His adventure unfolds to the beat of an excellent soundtrack, which seems to reinvent itself each time Kurt discovers a new region of the planet. The drums, bass, guitar, and saxophone come together in an easygoing and energetic way — it’s not intrusive, but it’s as hard to ignore as the ever-changing, gorgeous environments.

Challenge for one player or two
Pid is tough even on Normal, the only available difficulty setting at the start (the other is Hard, which you unlock upon completion). Luckily, the game lets you power through its stressful scenarios with a friend, a preferable way to play any puzzle-platformer of this caliber.

And this one has plenty of challenges and content. I clocked in just shy of 15 hours, but only after dying 648 times, according to the end-of-game stats. Puzzles require the use of your growing inventory of weapons and items — the beam, which bounces off walls and can float you in any direction; bombs and timed bombs; the slingshot, for when you need to trigger a beam on a distant surface; and more — but the tasks always differ. Pid even introduces new enemies and traps toward the end (like the flying black domino-shaped foes pictured above, which cling to your light beams), a rarity for some puzzle-platformers.

What you won’t like

Unforgiving gameplay
While Pid can be fun at times, be prepared for it to wear heavily on your patience and tolerance for frustration. As hard as the puzzles are, the bosses are even tougher. You’ll face six of them, and each is more aggravating than the last. You can spend most of your time during these fights just surviving and only whittle away at the boss’s health before dying. The mechanics are imprecise — one showdown, for example, involves climbing your opponent’s shoulder while avoiding missiles, but Kurt can get stuck on his anatomy. More than one confrontation turns into a chase scene, and another requires you to make a perfect landing or else spend minutes doing little more than avoiding enemies and their fire. The chances of dying are great, and they’re too slim for success.

It wouldn’t be as much of a problem if the game stocked you up on health at the start of a fight, but too often you have little to no armor by the time you reach the boss. You can buy life vests at vending machines, trading in the star constellations you collect (which play a greater role in the story), but it’s easy to lose them as you take damage. Considering the duration of these battles, a little extra health could go a long way.

Occasional drops in quality
As hard as Pid works to keep play fresh and interesting, it’s not immune to repeating the same tricks. A good handful of scenes could have been cut, and it’s here that players will notice the repetition — too many laser-based or missile-based obstacle courses set back to back, for instance, with no scenic view.

Pid also resorts to a few fetch quests, but it’s better off without them. They only feel misplaced in a game that’s largely about pressing forward, not running around in circles, lost. If players have to repeat rooms they already died on just to gather X number of batteries, that’s when they abandon the game.

In addition, while Pid has a strong checkpoint system — crucial for puzzle-platformers where the player death count is in the hundreds — half the time it never works the way you need it to. It might, for instance, reload the game at a previous scene or start the player off at a point they’ve long passed.

Conclusion

Pid is just as atmospheric as Fez and as grueling as Braid, but it’s the little details of its execution that keep it from flawlessness. An Easy mode would be a huge boon if only the developer had added one; the boss fights are unnecessarily tedious and slow; and the health and item system is too unreliable (why spend stars when you’re just going to lose your new power-ups before the real trouble hits?).

But it is a quality puzzle-platformer, and one with excellent narrative, graphics, and music. Most of the mistakes you make belong to you, not Pid — no matter how much you swear at it.

Score: 75/100

Pid was released for Xbox Live Arcade and Steam on Oct. 31. The publisher provided GamesBeat with an XBLA code 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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Greenlight, the relatively new service that allows Steam users to vote on which games they think deserve to make the popular digital PC game store, will soon be sending another group of titles off to graduation.

Valve, the publisher behind Steam and Greenlight, won’t reveal which upcoming products will make the cut (because that would make this an announcement and not an announcement of an announcement), but it is expecting to have at least 10 games earn a spot on Steam through Greenlight on Nov. 30. On top of that, Valve’s anticipating that this group will see the service’s first software titles (as in, not games) to make it through. This would be a big boost for Steam’s growing software library, adding to the handful of photo editors and 3D modelers that popped up on the store at the beginning of this month.

Greenlight users have already approved 29 games, including fan-made Half-Life remake Black Mesa, but only two (McPixel and Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams) have officially been released. Since the service doesn’t let you sort entries by amount of approval votes, it’s difficult to predict what games and software Valve expects will be joining them. As of right now, the software category only contains 28 items, and most of them are more photo editors and 3D modeling programs (like Substance Designer 3, which brings us Dr. Zoidberg up there), so a few of those are probably going to make it.

You can keep voting for Greenlight games at the official page.

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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 team within Valve is working to bring the Steam digital-distribution client to the Linux operating system, and now we know which games will work on the open source OS during the beta test.

Linux users get fully functional versions Serious Sam 3: BFE, Portal, and Team Fortress 2 in the upcoming beta, according to a Facebook post from developer Croteam. The studio, which developed Serious Sam, is apparently the only other company providing a game for this anticipated trial; Portal and Team Fortress 2 are both Valve products.

Steam for Linux represents a significant effort by Valve to diversify its platform support. The company’s digital-download store is available on Mac OS X as well as Windows PCs.

Valve’s chief executive officer Gabe Newell voiced criticisms of Microsoft’s newly arrived Windows 8 calling it a “kind of a catastrophe.” Linux could act as a lifeboat if Valve needs to abandon Windows, as unlikely as that is.

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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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Valve chief executive officer Gabe Newell wants real gamers to come out to his secret laboratory to give feedback on his company’s newest creations.

An official post on the video game publisher’s Steam user forums asks folks to fill out a survey if they’re interested in heading up to the company’s Bellevue, Wash. headquarters to take a look at what it’s working on. The survey on the digital download/community service asks for name, zip code, and email address, as well as many questions about specific gaming habits.

Valve will invite select users who fill out the survey to visit its workshops.

The Half-Life developer is primarily looking for people local to the Seattle/Bellevue area, but it welcomes other U.S. citizens to submit their info, as it has plans for remote tests around the country in the future. International fans should hold off for now, as this current round of testing won’t expand outside of the states.

So, what are they testing? Probably Half-Life 3 and the Steam holodeck … or probably not. Valve isn’t saying, and the testers will surely be bound to nondisclosure agreements the second they step into the door.

In recent months, Valve confirmed it’s working on computer hardware in a job posting for an industrial designer. It’s also hard at work bringing it’s Steam digital-download service to the Linux operating system.

Valve is one of the biggest gaming companies on the planet. As a developer it’s created popular franchises like Half-Life, Portal, and Left 4 Dead. As a distribution platform, Valve’s Steam service is the leading online retailer for digitally purchased PC 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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Valve has officially expanded into nongaming software. The company’s Steam digital-download service now offers products that aid in 3D modeling and photo editing instead of just zombie-killing and hat-wearing.

GamesBeat reported back in July that Valve was looking to diversify the selection in its virtual store. That plan has come to fruition.

Here is the short list of all the software available now on Steam:

• ArtRage Studio Pro
• CameraBag2
• GameMaker: Studio
• 3D-Coat
• 3DMark Vantage
• 3DMark 11

Valve is celebrating this launch by offering a 10-percent discount on all the aforementioned products. That brings the most expensive item, 3D-Coat, down from $99.99 to $89.10.

The Bellvue, Wash.-based company is applying much of the great Steam functionality that made the service popular to this new aspect of its business. Many of the launch titles will feature automatic updating and Steam Cloud support. That means users can save their work to the cloud while at the office and automatically pick it up on their home machine.

For Half-Life 3 conspiracy theorists, the number “3″ appears in the title of three separate products on the Steam nongaming software page. That’s probably significant.

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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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Valve’s Steam for Linux team announced that it’s made some serious progress on the ambitious project.

According to a Valve Software blog post, a Linux version of gaming’s best known digital-download service will go into an internal beta starting next week. Quickly following that, the team plans to hold an external private beta that will include 1,000 users at some point in October.

That private beta will work with Steam and one Valve game. It’ll include support for the user-friendly Linux variation Ubuntu (versions 12.04 and up.)

Don’t expect any other Valve games or the recently introduced television-optimized Big Picture Mode, which is still in beta itself.

If you’re a Linux user who wants to sign up for a chance to get into this beta … well, you’re just gonna have to wait. Valve is saving those details for a future announcement.

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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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Video game publisher Valve’s giant digital-gaming portal Steam faces scrutiny in Germany over its end-user license agreement.

When agreed to, the EULA strips Steam customers of their right to join a class-action lawsuit against Valve. If a Steam user declines the EULA, they automatically lose access to their previously purchased library of games on the service.

Germany’s Federation of Consumer Organization believes this is a coercive practice and has demanded that the company end the implementation of its current EULA. The protection agency, which includes all the German states’ independent customer-advocacy groups, previously gave Valve until September 26 to respond to its order.

According to CinemaBlend, the FCO extended the deadline to Oct. 10.

GamesBeat contacted Valve and the German Federation of Consumer Organization, but neither responded at the time of this posting.

Valve already faces legal troubles in the wider European Union. The EU passed a ruling that demands that sellers of digital goods enable a way for end users to resell those items. Germany’s consumer-protection group also hopes to force Steam to comply with that decree.

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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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Puzzle games are self-descriptive: The best ones combine tiny pieces to create something bigger and more exciting.

That’s exactly what Gateways — a puzzle-platformer from Smudged Cat Games coming out tomorrow, Sept. 13, on PC and Xbox 360 –  does with finesse. It’s a little bit Portal, a little bit VVVVVV, a little bit P. B. Winterbottom, a little bit Metroid, and more…but altogether, it’s something much greater. That very idea can mean the difference between a stale game and an innovative one.

“Developers always look at games and think, ‘I like that, but I would have done X, Y, and Z slightly differently,’” Gateways’ creator, David Johnston, told GamesBeat in an interview. “There’s always a lot of talk about people stealing ideas, like declaring every voxel game to be a Minecraft clone. People also accuse Minecraft of stealing ideas from Infiniminer, as well, but really it’s just a new genre of game that has emerged recently. It’s like how every first-person shooter used to be declared a Doom clone, but we now accept that it’s a genre of game.”

At its core, Gateways seems a lot like Valve’s popular series Portal — only applied in 2D instead of a 3D world. As an inventor exploring his own ruined lab, you find the gateway gun, which allows you to reach otherwise inaccessible areas by traveling through two-sided portals. But that’s only the beginning. As you obtain upgrades, you can illuminate dark areas with a “torch” (it’s more like a flashlight), reflect laser beams with a mirror, shrink the professor or make him giant-sized, rotate the gravitational pull, and even create duplicates of yourself by manipulating time. These are all elements we’ve seen in other games.

But the game isn’t all puzzles and solutions. Players must figure out how to defeat the strange alien-like “monkoid” enemies that have infiltrated the inventor’s lab, too, and this requires platforming skills and a fresh perspective.

“The enemies aren’t really there to pose a major threat,” says Johnston. “Once they’re destroyed, they’re gone forever. They’re really just a way to break up the puzzle-solving elements a bit and give you something more action-based to do while you travel between different puzzles. The only exception is the recharging enemy type, which requires a bit more thought to eliminate. I think it’s nice to have a bit of variety. Even if you really love a particular type of game, it can get monotonous if you’re doing the same thing over and over again.”

Gateways keeps its gameplay interesting by challenging players to use techniques in new ways. Time travel is the most difficult by far, especially in combination with the other power-ups, and eventually players can activate all the various gateway guns at the same time. It would be a huge headache if it weren’t so well done and addictive.

The game’s hint system helps with that, too, and it’s something lots of other puzzle games could learn from. For the cost of five power orbs, you can learn whether or not you have progressed enough to solve a puzzle or if you must complete another task first. For 40 orbs, you can pay to see the solution; the game even performs it for you. But the different names of these help points can provide clues as to what players need to do, as well.

Johnston says it’s important to have a good system in place for when players get stuck. “People play games for fun,” he says. “It’s nice to be challenged and feel that sense of accomplishment when you complete a difficult puzzle, but if you get really stuck and can’t continue the game, then you can feel a bit cheated. You’ve paid for all this content but have suddenly been locked out. It’s always a difficult line to tread because if you provide a free help system, it encourages people just to automatically use it, so they never get that sense of accomplishment. At the same time, I don’t like the thought of people running out of orbs and being unable to continue. Hopefully, Gateways gets the balance right!”

But aside from the platforming, puzzles, and hints, another important aspect of the game is the layout, which Johnston says is inspired by Metroid. Here the lab is color-coded, and each section features a different type of music. You can also unlock shortcuts that transport them from the center area to different spots around the map, which is easily viewed at any time. Taking a quick look at it prevents players for getting lost and reveals the next possible objectives.

“I decided quite early on to have different areas of the map,” says Johnston. “It helps break things up a bit and feels like you’re really exploring; it also help a lot with navigation. If everywhere in the map looks exactly the same, then it can be difficult to remember what was at a particular point, but different areas give you a reference. Once I had the different areas, it made sense to have music tracks for each of them to help give them all a different feel. The basement area is very dark and gloomy, the upper section is more high tech with the most difficult puzzles, and the middle area is more platforming-focused.”

While none of the ideas presented in Gateways are revolutionary by themselves, together they become something original and fun. Arguably, Gateways is so enjoyable precisely because Johnston pays attention to what else is out there — he doesn’t create games in a vacuum.

“I do play quite a lot of games,” he says. “It’s really interesting to see what other people are doing, particularly in the indie scene. There are a lot cool ideas out there, and the chances are if you come up with an idea, then someone will have done something similar before. I thought the way you look through gateways was unique, but then I heard about ASCII Portal by Cymons Games. A lot of indie games have really interesting ideas but never quite get the audience they deserve, so it’s always interesting to look and see what’s going on.”

Johnston adds that playing games has made him a better developer. “It helps me to see what other ideas people have tried and what works as a game mechanic,” he says. “Sometimes something sounds like a good idea on paper, but when it’s actually implemented and you get a chance to try it out fully, it doesn’t quite gel somehow. If someone else has already tried an idea that is similar to yours, then it helps to see how it works and if it’s actually something that can be fun.

“One thing I find about puzzle games is that they tend to be pretty linear in general. It’s one of the reasons I decided to set Gateways in an open world and allow the player to explore and discover things off the beaten track. It comes back to that thing of reaching a puzzle in a game and being unable to progress. In those situations, it’s nice to know there are other options to keep you occupied while you [think] about that puzzle that’s proving a bit too tricky.”

Gateways releases tomorrow on Steam, the indie digital download service Desura, and Xbox Live Indie Games as part of the Indie Games Uprising promotion. It costs $5 for PC (initially on sale for $4) and 240 Microsoft Points for XBLIG. Gateways was a winner of this year’s Dream.Build.Play competition from Microsoft.

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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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For everyone who has ever dreamed of being able to play computer games without having to leave the room they watch American Idol in, Valve has created Big Picture, a new mode that optimizes Steam and all of its features for larger-screen TVs.

The beta launches later today (PC-only for now). With it, you can navigate the entire library of Steam games, demos, videos, and community features from your couch. While it still supports keyboard and mouse, Big Picture is specifically tailored to controller use, as evidenced by its new method of inputting text, the Daisywheel. Rather than shoehorn a QWERTY-style keyboard on a controller (like on the Xbox 360), it uses a flower-shaped collection of characters that you select with a control stick and button press. Valve is also catering to controllers with what its touts as “world’s first first-person web browser,” which lets you navigate the Internet with shooter-esque crosshairs, as opposed to a traditional mouse pointer.

Assuming you’ve already installed Steam on your computer, activating Big Picture is as simple as connecting it to your TV with an HDMI cable and then clicking on the Big Picture icon in your Steam client. Valve is still collecting data on which systems work the best, but for now their official site has some guidelines on how to find a suitable computer or set up the one you already have.

For more information, go to the Big Picture site or check out the trailer below.

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

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