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The newest console war is really taking off now. Microsoft has shipped 5 million Xbox Ones to stores, but Sony has sold 7 million PlayStation 4s. Still, the best-selling game of March was an Xbox One exclusive, Titanfall.
Elsewhere in the gaming world, Blizzard’s popular free-to-play card game, Hearthstone, came out for the iPad, and Zynga released a mobile version of FarmVille 2.
You’ll find all of that and more in our weekly collection of GamesBeat stories.
Pieces of flair
- The DeanBeat: Why gamers should be grateful for Titanfall
- 5 Blizzard all-stars missing from Heroes of the Storm
- God Mode: An underrated Steam summer sale treasure
- Great tabletop games for video gamers: Fightball, Brawl
- This Final Fantasy VII house would be worth 38M gil (or about $2M in real life)
News
- Microsoft has shipped 5M Xbox One game consoles to stores, but that’s far short of Sony’s 7M PS4s sold
- RockYou buys three Playdom games from Disney to keep them running for players
- March 2014 NPD: PlayStation 4 outsells Xbox One again despite Titanfall
- AMD beats earnings targets as game console-chip shipments remain strong — but earnings are down big
- Major League Gaming’s online viewership is up 1,376%
- Is the candy crushed? Titanfall, Hearthstone, and other hardcore fare drove digital gaming in March
- Sony may offer a PS4 upgrade plan to PS3 owners of The Last of Us
- PlayStation 4 sales surpass 7M consoles worldwide
- Sony is selling off all its shares in Final Fantasy publisher Square Enix
- Twitch puts its money where the crowd is by pledging funds for audience-controlled game
- Former Halo developer Bungie allegedly ‘terminated’ longtime composer Marty O’Donnell last week
- Trials Fusion won’t get online multiplayer until ‘months after launch’
- Eve Online developer’s financials take a major dive into the red
- Infinity Ward is “putting a little Snoop-ism” in Call of Duty: Ghosts with Snoop Dogg’s voice
- Titanfall’s mechs will get nosejobs in future update
- Today’s Xbox One update helps Kinect tell the difference between a gesture command and a swig of beer
- Updated: X-COM creator’s Kickstarter for Chaos Reborn hits its funding goal
- Southern comfort: Georgia ‘deals’ out $25M in tax breaks to game developers
- Hitchhiking with the crowd: Star Citizen space sim reaches $42M in funding
- BlazBlue: Chrono Phantasma is coming to the Vita
- Nintendo surprises cheap gamers everywhere by lowering the price of five first-party 3DS games
- Square Enix India closes before releasing a single game
- Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth escapes global warming
- World of Darkness MMO an unfortunate casualty of latest round of CCP layoffs
Above: Hearthstone running on an iPad Mini.
Image Credit: Blizzard
Mobile and social
- Hearthstone is the most-downloaded iPad app in 16 regions — including the U.S.
- FarmVille on mobile thrills Wall Street
- Mobile game startup Zoom debuts with the familiar face of Sony, Sega vet Bernie Stolar as its chairman
- Mobile takes a bigger share of social casino games in the first quarter
- Candy Crush Saga is now in the fastest-growing mobile market of them all: China
- Marvel Puzzle Quest’s road to the mythical $1 ARPDAU, Part 4: Card-pack design and currency sales
- FarmVille 2: Country Escape comes to Android and E-I-E-iOS devices
- Google: The Play market is helping developers around the world
- Never stop playing Hearthstone: Blizzard’s card battler available for iPad everywhere
- Marvel Puzzle Quest’s road to the mythical $1 ARPDAU, Part 3: Event-design improvements
- 247 game companies generate more than $1M in mobile revenue in the U.S. alone
- Why accurate ad measurement is critical to the growing mobile ecosystem
- 300M downloads and $600M in revenue say Google is the ‘loser’s choice’ in mobile games monetization
- mNectar makes mobile ads that let you play a game before downloading it (exclusive)
Previews and interviews
- From backwater to blockbuster: The lessons that games can teach mobile companies (interview)
- How one indie publisher accidentally found its own Mega Man, Castlevania, and Zelda (interview)
Reviews
- Warlock 2: The Exiled turns World War II-style island hopping into a plane-spanning fantasy quest (review)
- Moebius: Empire Rising can’t point-and-click its way out of mediocrity (review)
- Trials Fusion is a beautiful poem of physics and motion (review)
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