Welcome to another GamesBeat weekly roundup! This time, the PlayStation 4 beat the Xbox One again, Amazon reveals a new game engine, and we learn a bit about Destiny’s future.
Happy reading, and have a great weekend!
Pieces of flair and opinion
- The DeanBeat: Farewell to #GamerGate
- The real world imitates the virtual with Fallout 4 ramen
- Mario Kart meets Star Wars, and it’s fantastic
- How Blizzard stayed laser-focused on quality games for 25 years
News
- January 2016 NPD: Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto top sales chart with few new releases
- PlayStation 4 outsold Xbox One at U.S. retailers in January
- Call of Duty saw double-digit growth in 2015, now has more players than ever before
- Destiny sequel launches in 2017 after ‘large new expansion’ drops this year
- Despite strong Call of Duty growth, Activision Blizzard fails to beat expectations in holiday quarter
- An Xbox One player is worth more to Ubisoft than a PlayStation 4 owner
- Twitch has more than half a million people watching live video at any one time
- Ubisoft earnings comes up short thanks to Assassin’s Creed
- No Assassin’s Creed in 2016 as Ubisoft admits the series is slowing down
- Quantum Break is Microsoft’s latest weapon in linking Xbox One and Windows 10
- Tera publisher’s new project is a real-time strategy game ‘for the rest of us’
- The eyes have it: Eyefluence may have the answer to navigating AR/VR
- Call of Duty and Dreamworks vets jump on the VR bandwagon
- Every Oculus Rift owner will get a Unity Pro trial to help them (and Palmer Luckey) make more money
- Sony: ’36 million PlayStation 4 owners’ are ready for PlayStation VR
- Unity demonstrates new way to develop games inside virtual reality
- Unity game-making tool gets native support for Google’s 5M Cardboard virtual reality devices
- Unity Technologies and Valve team up to make VR development easier
- Watch Unity’s virtual and augmented reality Vision Summit right here
- Pantomime lets VR headset and smartphone users share a virtual space
- Frozen Synapse 2 announced for this year
- Nintendo makes big promises about profits for its mysterious NX and smartphone business
- Why Nintendo thinks electric toothbrushes are a key to its future
- BioWare writer David Gaider joins Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition studio as creative director
- The Division open beta gets official release date — comes early to Xbox One
- GameTrailers shuts game video hub after 13 years
- Firewatch is a digital release — but it’s got one of the coolest physical bonuses of any game yet
- Watch Blizzard reflect on its 25th anniversary and thank its fans
- Pokémon’s $5M Super Bowl ad ranks among Sunday’s big winners
- Machine Zone spends $5M on Mobile Strike Super Bowl 50 commercial with Schwarzenegger
- Titanfall 2 will feature a single-player campaign and possible TV spin-off show
Mobile and social
- Betcade shows off the look of its Android app store for real-money gambling
- Chartboost acquires Roostr to connect mobile games with YouTube influencers
- Total War Battles: Kingdom takes epic war strategy franchise to free-to-play mobile
- Chukong spins SDKBOX services as a separate company [update]
- China’s Locojoy partners with Taptica to drive downloads of new game
- Watch an iOS game get ported to Windows 10 in under 5 minutes
- FanDuel shuts down Florida game studio and lays off 55
- Zynga pins hopes on ad revenue potential and high-end Dawn of Titans strategy game
- Zynga beats Q4 financial estimates and announces 10 games for 2016
- Transformers: Earth Wars requires Hasbro, Backflip, and Space Ape to come together like Devastator
- Mobile games hit $34.8B in 2015, taking 85% of all app revenues
- Sweden’s Stugan game accelerator gets its first mobile game launch
- Rez and Lumines developer’s iOS puzzle-RPG is coming West
- The best Final Fantasy hits mobile before Steam (hint: It’s IX)
- Star Wars: Commander is a big hit in China with 1M users in four days
- Amazon takes on Unity, Unreal, Stingray, and more with Lumberyard, a free cross-platform game engine
- Oculus VR guru John Carmack leads crucial position-tracking development for mobile VR
- Turkey’s Gram Games scores a second hit with 1M downloads of Merged!
- Supercell announces Clash Royale will launch globally in March
- Apple’s gaming censorship continues: The Binding of Isaac blocked from App Store
- Google reportedly plans to release a Cardboard successor like Samsung’s Gear VR this year
Previews, interviews, and reviews
- Hearthstone designers discuss Standard, Wild’s relevancy, and putting off new classes
- Hitman reboot takes ‘assassination tourism’ to new heights (hands-on)
- Studio chief wants players to show their assassination creativity in Hitman
- Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime on the last 25 years of games — and the next 25
- Firewatch knows that you don’t really want the truth to its mystery
- Unravel is cute and touching — and it’ll drive you mad, too