Join the Leaders Making Gaming’s Next Big Deals. GamesBeat NEXT brings 500+ executives, CEOs, founders, and investors to San Francisco, November 2–3, to shape the future of gaming, entertainment, and AI. Connect with industry leaders, forge strategic partnerships, and close deals that move business forward. Be in the room. Get your ticket.
Welcome to another GamesBeat weekly roundup! This time, we’ve reviewed some of the biggest holiday releases of the year, including Assassin’s Creed: Unity and Dragon Age: Inquisition. Also, a company in the business of horse racing spends hundreds of millions to buy a mobile game developer.
Happy reading, and have a great weekend!
Pieces of flair and opinion
- The DeanBeat: What are the ingredients for the billion-dollar deals in gaming?
- The Warcraft Hero retruns for Warlords of Draenor launch (comic)
- GamesBeat Unfiltered going down tonight to prepare for community relaunch (Delayed for Monday)
- Avoiding launch day disasters: How AAA games deliver the goods
- Grandmother who uses World of Warcraft to cope with cancer became the heart of a new documentary
- World of Warcraft’s most-killed character finally gets his due
- 8 custom Xbox One backgrounds
News
- League of Legends crushes other PC online games in October, finds Raptr
- PlanetSide 2 is shooting for 1080p and 60fps on PS4 — console beta coming in 2014
- 10 3DS games — including Smash Bros. — have surpassed 1M copies sold
- October 2014 NPD: The Evil Within sets survival-horror record; PS4, Xbox One still on fire
- Microsoft explains when Halo: The Master Chief Collection uses a dedicated server or a peer connection
- Twitch use confirms Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare is the most-streamed console game at its launch
- Nexon outperforms expectations thanks to South Korean gamers
- 1 in 5 Destiny copies are digital — and this lifts the game industry, according to analyst
- Alone in the Dark reinvents itself by becoming a co-op roguelike in Illumination
- SkreensTV lets you watch or play 4 things at once on your big TV
- Peter Molyneux on underestimating mobile monetization: ‘The biggest mistake I’ve made in the last 20 years’
- Sony hopes PlayStation Vue will make watching broadcast and cable TV suck less
- Oculus Rift VR headset starred in tonight’s ‘South Park’ and leads to Butters getting stabbed
- Strap a phablet to your face: Oculus VR releases mobile dev kit
- Microsoft claims Xbox One has outsold PS4 ‘for the past 2 weeks’
- Assassin’s Creed mastermind Patrice Désilets launches new studio after bad breakup with Ubisoft
- Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare’s first Xbox One and PS4 patch is live
- Forget the new Sonics: Sega is ecstatic about a 6-year-old rerelease
- Super Smash Bros. Wii U available for predownload as it breaks Mario Kart 8′s preorder mark
- Playing Call of Duty has long-term learning benefits for the brain
- Chinese game giant Tencent’s profits rise 46 percent in Q3 but fall short of analysts’ expectations
- Nvidia releases graphics re-creation software that proves the moon landing was real
- Microsoft debuts Halo: The Master Chief Collection at big fan event
- Made in America: Game industry grows 4 times faster than U.S. economy
- Fullscreen acquires Rooster Teeth, video studio behind ‘Red vs. Blue’
- Geoff Keighley unveils The Game Awards 2014 to replace the VGAs
- Halo fix incoming and 343 Industries apologizes for The Master Chief Collection’s launch
- OnLive expands cloud gaming to Benelux countries
- Assassin’s Creed: Unity’s framerate is worse on PlayStation 4 than Xbox One
- Just Cause 3 announced for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC for 2015
- Halo: The Master Chief Collection matchmaking is broken, and Microsoft’s fix may not work for you (update)
- World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor launch impales taxi with massive axe in Times Square
- Sonic, Mega Man, and more: Nintendo’s Amiibos will soon include third-party characters (gallery)
- Transformers Universe team facing layoffs at RuneScape developer Jagex
- GameStop expects to issue customers $250M in trade-in credit this holiday season
- Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare does use dedicated servers — but it also doesn’t
- Nintendo’s Amiibo gets something Skylanders and Disney Infinity lacks: Subscription service
- ‘Video Games Live’ producer Tommy Tallarico’s new project is ‘Electronic Opus’ — classical meets electronic dance music
- Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare is selling faster than Ghosts so far — at least in the U.K.
- PlayStation 4′s The Walking Dead saves failing to transfer between seasons
Mobile and social
- Retargeting is ‘where the puck is going’ in mobile advertising
- Swimsuit model Kate Upton stars in Game of War ad that debuts during ‘Thursday Night Football’
- GetSocial launches social platform for games and raises $1M
- Tencent and Line invest $110M in South Korean game developer
- Messaging app Tango signs game developers from around the world
- Scopely nabs $35M to build its mobile gaming ‘touchscreen entertainment network’
- Nvidia upgrades Shield tablet, gets Valve classics, and launches cloud-based tablet games
- Horse racing and games? Churchill Downs acquires social-casino studio Big Fish Games for $885M
- Japanese mobile gaming’s march West continues as Gumi brings another hit to the U.S.
- I just followed Taylor Swift around her house, and so can you
- Candy Crush Soda Saga quenches thirst of King fans with worldwide mobile launch
- Rovio targets China, opening 9 Angry Birds theme parks by 2018
- 2K Games launches XCOM: Enemy Within on mobile devices
- Players take home more than $2M from Skillz mobile-game competitions
- After 23M downloads, Japan’s Line Rangers partners with Rovio for Angry Birds promo
- Zynga launches Wizard of Oz Slots for mobile
- Canada’s Execution Labs raises $5.3M to accelerate mobile game startups
- Imagination reveals powerful graphics chips for smartphones and wearables
- Proxy42 unveils crowdfunding campaign for augmented reality shooter game with unique hardware
Previews and interviews
- How Fingerprint is taking its kids’ ‘mobile edutainment’ platform worldwide (interview)
- Battlefield: Hardline single-player campaign feels like a Miami Vice TV show (hands-on preview)
- How EA built the tension of being a cop into Battlefield: Hardline (interview)
- Overwatch: What 10 rounds of Blizzard’s chaotic shooter taught me
- ‘Halo: Nightfall’ returns its cast to the original Halo in its second episode (preview)
- Microsoft’s Halo 5 Guardians multiplayer beta will make e-sports fans ecstatic (preview)
- Halo 5: Guardians’ creators discuss the ‘instruments of death’ in multiplayer (interview)
- Insomniac’s Ted Price on Sunset Overdrive, working with Microsoft, and more
Reviews