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 try to help horror fans come to turns with Silent Hills’ cancellation, Valve can’t sell its community on paid mods, and the mobile game Mr Jump is jumping (heh) to success.
Happy reading, and have a great weekend!
Pieces of flair and opinion
- The DeanBeat: Bold ideas in gaming
- Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft Blackrock Mountain guide — how to beat The Hidden Laboratory
- Fans are still salty two days after Silent Hills’ cancelation
- Bloodborne is the best Silent Hills we are going to get
- 6 horror games to help you mourn Silent Hills
- After 6 Call of Duty games, Treyarch is hitting its stride with Black Ops III
- Grand Theft Auto V mods weekly: FOV and superpowers in slow motion
- Bloodborne Easter egg reveals what Hunters read in their spare time
- How Shovel Knight’s developer revived the bane of GameStop clerks everywhere: Battletoads
News
- Dota 2 launches new Compendium to build another gigantic prize pool
- New Destiny T-shirt supports earthquake relief efforts in Nepal
- DayZ creator Dean Hall on the gaming trend he wants to see: ‘cruelty and loss’
- Valve has a game that lets you pretend to be a unicorn in virtual reality
- Xbox 360 system update adds new features, more storage capacity
- Microsoft shows a realistic crying human face using DirectX 12 graphics
- Microsoft announces Minecraft modding add-in for Visual Studio
- Valve launches OpenVR dev kit for virtual reality hardware makers
- CCP boss: VR is ‘not going to be big’ next year
- Unreal Engine 4 gets SteamVR support in its latest update
- You can now embed and play MS-DOS games directly in a tweet
- Vainglory dev hires former Wargaming exec to tap into MOBA-crazy Asia markets
- Heroes of the Dorm didn’t exactly make ratings history, but ESPN’s still happy
- GameMaker: Studio plans to show off Windows 10 Universal Apps at Build 2015
- Controversial mass murder game Hatred gets a June release date
- Former Kickstarter success story Ouya is up for sale
- Mask that adds Smell-O-Vision to virtual reality goes to Kickstarter
- Square Enix survey: 80% bought Final Fantasy Type-0 to play Final Fantasy XV’s demo
- Mega Man-influenced Mighty No. 9 partners with Deep Silver, gets Sept. 15 release date
- WWE finally releases a game on PC today
- Valve on paid mods: ‘We didn’t understand exactly what we were doing’
- Oculus announces a virtual reality art competition — and two new hires
- PlayStation 4 has Nintendo to thank for its first game from Central America
- Kerbal Space Program officially releases after 4 years of testing
- Konami voluntarily delists from New York Stock Exchange
- Konami confirms Silent Hills cancellation (update)
- Ominous news for Silent Hills: Konami is taking down P.T.
- Valve boss Gabe Newell: Paid mods have only made $10K, and ‘that’s not stupidly greedy’
Mobile and social
- Terra Battle reaches 2 million downloads worldwide, console version in development
- It costs more than $3 to acquire a mobile user now, Fiksu finds
- Game of Thrones: Ascent marches to Kindle Fire
- Britney Spears joins the celebrity rush to mobile gaming
- The Kardashian effect: Tencent pays $126M for 15% of Glu Mobile
- Lebanon’s Wixel Studios expands from Middle East drama to games that fight kids’ cancer
- App Annie: Mr Jump leaps to second most-downloaded iOS game in March
- China could be the hotbed for mobile e-sports
- Inside Wooga’s mobile gaming hit factory in Berlin (photo gallery)
- Facebook launches desktop video app ads to drive game installs
- Germany’s Handy Games chief dives into wearable game design
- Ad partnership helps bridge the worlds of kids mobile and TV advertising
- Kabam teams up with Longtu Games to launch Marvel mobile game in China
- Disney Infinity app debuts on Android devices
- The Galaga-Tekken crossover is real and heading to iOS in Japan
- China’s TestBird dives into mobile analytics and user acquisition with TrackingBird
Previews and interviews
- Actors from The Order: 1886 discuss starring in an interactive Hollywood blockbuster
- Call of Duty: Black Ops III’s designers on underwater guns and MOBA-like play (interview, part 3)
- ‘Apple doesn’t care’: Why one longtime indie role-playing game maker has left iOS
- Treyarch designers explain the big multiplayer changes in Call of Duty: Black Ops III (interview, part 2)
- How Treyarch evolved its own brand of Call of Duty multiplayer
- Call of Duty: Black Ops III’s single-player campaign takes you deep into a cybernetic quandary
- Call of Duty: Black Ops III multiplayer’s biggest additions are all about e-sports
- Call of Duty: Black Ops III introduces multiplayer changes that make it faster and more fun
- Activision’s Treyarch takes the veil off Call of Duty: Black Ops III
- Xenoblade Chronicles X is wondrous — but this lush, massive world is not for the timid
Reviews and impressions