Welcome to another GamesBeat weekly roundup! This time, we got to go inside Valve, PewDiePie causes controversy, and we went hands-on with Halo Wars 2.
Enjoy, and have a great weekend!
Pieces of flair and opinion
- The DeanBeat: The esports scene keeps gaining momentum
- Hearthstone’s big changes soothe players worries while padding Blizzard’s wallet
- Nexon’s Owen Mahoney will tell how to craft a culture of inspiration at GamesBeat Summit
- Overwatch with a GoldenEye 64 skin looks crazy fun
- How Valve is taking a Nintendo-like approach to virtual reality
- Is E3 2017 opening to the public a good idea? GamesBeat Decides
- How to play Nintendo 3DS games on an Xbox One
- Where in the world are the game jobs?
- PewDiePie’s anti-Semitic jokes show the peril of backing unpredictable influencers
- Vivid Helix launches Semispheres 2D puzzle game on PS4 and Steam
- Inside the home of top-ranked Dota 2 esports team Evil Geniuses
News
- Ark: Survival Evolved hits 1 million copies sold on PS4; 7 million on all platforms
- NPD: Nintendo’s NES Classic was January’s third best-selling console
- January 2017 NPD: Resident Evil 7 offsets slumping hardware sales
- Check out Nintendo Switch’s interface in this leaked video
- Electronic Arts now offers annual membership to Origin Access for $30
- Crash Bandicoot remaster trilogy launches in June with a jorts problem
- Hearthstone’s Year of the Mammoth: Classic cards going to Wild, and no more Adventures
- 49ers, NBA’s Jeremy Lin part of $15 million Series A for Plays.tv and its game-recording service
- Former Marvel CEO Peter Cuneo named chairman of VR startup Uncorporeal
- Game trade group ESA takes a shot at Trump’s ‘reckless’ immigration policy
- Grand Theft Auto luminary Leslie ‘The Benz’ Benzies drives investment in Krotos audio tech
- YouPorn’s Team YP esports squad is back — and hitting Overwatch
- Unreal Engine gets native Nintendo Switch support
- Twitch viewers watched 292 billion minutes of livestreams in 2016
- Ex-Sony Online chief John Smedley starts Amazon game studio after Kickstarter failure
- Let It Die slashes its way past 2 million downloads on PlayStation 4
- Everest VR now represents the most epic mountain climb on Oculus Rift
- Apocalypse Now game Kickstarter canceled as fundraising shifts to website
- Hearthstone targets fast metagame by weakening Shaman and pirate decks
- The U.S. game industry has 2,457 companies supporting 220,000 jobs
- Newzoo: Esports will generate $696 million in revenues in 2017
- Humble Bundle hits goal to help ACLU, Doctors without Borders in less than 1 day
- Gabe Newell admits ‘childish’ Valve employees egg on Half-Life 3 rumors
- Magic Leap said to be ‘doing 1,000 things badly’ after raising $1.4 billion
- 8i raises $27 million round for augmented reality holograms
- Valve won’t manually curate Steam because it dominates PC gaming
- Counter-Strike: Global Offensive league Esports Championship Series announces third season
- Modop partners with talent agency to expand esports sponsorships
- The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild gets its own Game Developers Conference panel
- Razer updates 14-inch gamer laptop with new Intel CPU, faster memory
- Valve: Wireless high-end VR is a solved problem
- Valve boss Gabe Newell still thinks you should pay for game mods
Mobile and social
- Storm8 lays off about 130 from its social mobile gaming studio
- Futurefly’s EatMessage app turns your face into a game controller
- Former Wooga developers launch mobile game studio in Berlin
- Supercell’s Clash Royale reaps $1 billion in its first year
- HTC is working on a new kind of mobile VR headset
- Clash Royale, Clash of Clans push Supercell to $2.3 billion in 2016 revenue
- Plarium makes match-3 mobile game with Fox’s Rio animated characters
- Pokémon Go gets 80 Gen 2 monsters from Gold and Silver in massive update
- AppsFlyer says retaining users is still a challenge for app marketers
- How Hatch aims to transform the way you play mobile games
Previews, reviews, and interviews
- Hands-on with Halo Wars 2’s grueling Lights Out mission
- Hands-on with the Halo Wars 2 single-player campaign on Xbox One