Welcome to another GamesBeat weekly roundup! This time, everyone’s freaking out about the Oculus Rift’s $600 price, Candy Crush gets some jelly, and Activision Blizzard made another big move in expanding its esports efforts.
Enjoy, and have a great weekend!
Pieces of flair and opinion
- Oculus’ pricing ‘misstep’ was a clever marketing ploy
- The best StepMania players in the world will melt your eyeballs
- This gamer raged so hard that it sparked a police alert
- Accenture sums up its predictions for the 7 key technologies of CES
- How to create a bootable Windows 10 USB flash drive
- Fallout 4’s latest bad guy is … Thomas the Tank Engine
- Pop a wheelie with your couch using this motion simulator gadget
- The best of GamesBeat’s 2015 coverage
News
- Alienware gamer PC bundled with Oculus will cost $1,600
- Tech company Catalis forms entertainment division after acquiring studio Curve Digital
- Final Fantasy XIV Yugiri voice actor Sian Blake found dead
- GameStop raises $2.8 million over holidays for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital
- Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare 2 gets a public beta on January 14
- Twitch has to beat Punch Club before the fighting sim releases on Steam
- Palmer Luckey apologizes for Oculus Rift pricing: ‘I handled the messaging poorly’
- Analyst: Oculus Rift ‘should sell 1M units this year’ at $599 price point
- Psychonauts 2 met its $3.3 million crowdfunding goal today, 11 years after the first game
- Xbox Live, Outlook, Bing down as Microsoft services experience outage (update)
- Oculus founder: ‘We are not making money on’ $599 Rift; it is ‘obscenely cheap’
- Square Enix closes cloud gaming-based Shinra Technologies division
- First Oculus Rift shipment sells out despite $599 price point — new preorders now shipping late
- You can now preorder the Oculus Rift for $599, starts shipping on March 28
- PlayStation 4 worldwide sales surpass 35M with 5.7M sold during the ‘holidays’
- New HTC Vive video shows handsome people looking silly in VR
- HP buddies up with HTC to build virtual reality gaming PCs
- Rise of the Tomb Raider’s PC version releasing on January 28
- Oculus gives final Oculus Rift headset to original Kickstarter backers
- Origin PC unveils new Chronos and Omni gaming desktops
- Virtual reality treadmill maker Virtuix tests the waters for a ‘mini-IPO’
- Stern Pinball shows off re-release of Steve Ritchie’s Spider-Man
- Activision Blizzard buys MLG for estimated $46M to build ‘ESPN of esports’
- Oculus Rift preorders open on January 6
- Logitech upgrades its Proteus Spectrum G502 gaming mouse … with colored lights
- Rise of the Tomb Raider has sold through 1M copies, according to Microsoft
- Rumor: Next Assassin’s Creed skips 2016 and gets Egyptian setting
- Oculus cofounder on not announcing Rift’s price: ‘This is standard practice’
- Xbox One’s promising Scalebound gets bumped into 2017
- Inafune’s ReCore is also coming to PC
- Osterhout Design Group unveils high-end enterprise augmented reality glasses
- Microsoft: Over 200 million devices now run Windows 10
- AMD rechristens its graphics chips under the Polaris brand ahead of a big 2016 product launch
Mobile and social
- Marvel Heroes publisher Gazillion loses chief exec David Brevik
- Adding gaming to the classroom boosts concentration, study finds
- Kabam sells off ‘classic’ mobile games to China’s Gaea to focus on bigger titles
- Candy Crush Jelly Saga is King’s latest jam
- Smite developer releases first mobile game
- Star Trek: Timelines is a mobile game fans should actually care about
- Speck wants you to recycle your Cardboard for their new mobile VR viewer
- Hot mobile topics for 2016: esports, personalization, and Internet of Things
- SuperData: Virtual reality will make $5.1B in 2016 mostly from mobile, not Oculus Rift or Vive
- Machine Zone and Ember settle lawsuit over Game of War copycat
- Microsoft taps Bango to expand carrier billing across Windows 10 devices
- Supercell soft-launches Clash Royale, a card-battling take on Clash of Clans
Previews and interviews
- Google’s Project Tango will enable cool augmented reality games (hands-on demo)
- Mad Catz designed the R.A.T. 1 gaming mouse to break apart (CES video)
Reviews and impressions