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Playful’s Paul Bettner is betting on both ‘flat screen games’ and VR

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 12 min

Paul Bettner had a good time at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), the big game trade show in Los Angeles last week. His McKinney, Texas-based Playful studio debuted two games at E3, Super Lucky’s Tale for the Xbox One and Star Child for Sony’s PlayStation VR.

Those games show that Bettner is striding the line between traditional platform games and virtual reality. Bettner believes that VR will be a big market, but it is taking off more slowly than he and everyone else had hoped. His team has created new intellectual properties that can be used for both VR games and traditional console and PC titles.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.