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Welcome to another collection of a week’s worth of GamesBeat’s coverage of the world of gaming. This time, we’re checking out the annual Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco, Sony introduces its virtual reality initiative for the PlayStation 4, and it looks like mobile hit Flappy Bird is making a comeback.
Oh, and a little game called Minecraft continues to sell well.
You can read about all of that and more below. Enjoy, and have a great weekend!
Game Developer’s Conference
- The DeanBeat: What meme had wings at the Game Developers Conference?
- BioWare developer Manveer Heir challenges colleagues to combat prejudice with video games
- The 2014 Game Developers Choice Awards convey a message of hope
- Nintendo on Animal Crossing: ‘We mistakenly stayed the course with the Wii version’
News
- Free-to-play games are doing better than ever on PlayStation platforms
- ‘Xbox One will see improved performance’ with DirectX 12, according to Microsoft
- Microsoft dev boss ‘fully expects’ to see more Xbox One games in 1080p
- Ryse developer offers its powerful CryEngine for $10 a month — half the price of Epic’s tech
- About 15 percent of PS4 owners bought the console’s camera peripheral
- Hackers compromise EA website, use it to steal Apple IDs (report)
- Sony continues its courtship of indies with deal to bring GameMaker Studio to the PlayStation 4
- Infamous: Second Son launches Friday, but its lead designer has already left its studio
- Epic Games breaks triple-A secrecy and gives access to Unreal Engine’s source code
- Sony will soon fulfill its promise to make gameplay sharing easier on PlayStation 4
- Minecraft developer made $326M in 2013
- Titanfall for Xbox 360 now coming in April, not March
- Project Morpheus: Sony announces its virtual-reality headset for PlayStation 4
- Crusader Kings publisher Paradox will distribute South Park developer’s crowdfunded role-playing game
- Electronic Arts might get ‘Worst Company in America’ three-peat
- Too little, too late? A year later, SimCity finally gets offline single-player mode
- Retro PC-game distributor GOG.com is adding support for Linux (and potentially SteamOS)
- Walmart moves in on GameStop’s turf: Will give store credit for used games
- Xbox One heading to Japan, Sweden, and 24 other countries in September
- Roadhouse Interactive offers digital publishing services to indie game developers
- Unity Technologies unveils next version of its game development engine to make thousands of 3D games more realistic
- Xbox One architect Marc Whitten leaves Microsoft
- Castlevania director Koji Igarashi exits Konami — the latest high-profile developer to step away from long-time gig
- U.K. sales-tracking firm: ‘Titanfall gives a colossal boost to Xbox One’
- Valve’s latest Steam Controller design looks a little less crazy
Mobile and social
- Flappy Bird will fly again someday, says creator, but Apple might clip its wings
- Quizup gets 1M new players after a week on Android — and sets sights on other markets
- Russian e-commerce giant Mail.Ru adds its own MyGames mobile division with four new games
- Chasing Facebook, Alibaba leads an astounding $280M round in mobile messaging network Tango
- Sulon Technologies enters the virtual reality race with a new kind of immersive experience
- Gamevil plans to take five Korean mobile games to the global stage
- Deep Silver expands from Saints Row IV to free-to-play mobile games
- China’s FunPlus raises a huge round of $74M to build a global gaming company
- Analytics firm Flurry reveals how to best make money from the 70% of Android devices that engage in gaming
- Mozilla and Unity partner to make the browser one of Unity’s many available platforms
- Google introduces cross-platform multiplayer gaming for iOS and Android
- Twitch’s mobile broadcasting coming to Gameloft’s Asphalt 8 racer on iOS
- Ninja Metrics finds ‘social whales’ with enterprise version of its Katana analytics (exclusive)
- Google Play unveils new engagement and discovery options for Android game developers
- Tapjoy unveils one-stop platform nGen for mobile app monetization
Previews and interviews
- Game development leader Kate Edwards spells out how the game industry needs to change (interview)
- Microsoft’s game exec Phil Harrison explains how Xbox One will catch the PlayStation 4 (interview)
- A shark attack convinced me that Sony’s Project Morpheus makes virtual reality work
- Empathy game Thralled explores slavery through love and motherhood, not violence
- You can assault an aircraft carrier in EA DICE’s Battlefield 4: Naval Strike DLC (hands-on preview)
- In a race with Sony, Oculus unveils improved Rift virtual reality dev kit (hands-on preview)
- Cloudbuilt captures the dreamlike feeling of flying and falling (preview)
- Kinect Sports Rivals puts you in the game with a flattering ‘Awesome You’ (preview)
- How a seasoned venture capitalist at IDG Ventures views game investments (interview)
Reviews
- Infamous: Second Son unlocks the spectacular new powers of your PlayStation 4 (review)
- Luftrausers’s unfriendly skies packs a ridiculous amount of thrill and drama into short chunks (review)
- Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes is a demo trying to sneak its way into your wallet (review)
- Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft is Magic: The Gathering for noobs — and it’s one of the best free-to-play games around (review)
Pieces of flair
- Examining the viability of crowdsourcing models like Betabrand for game development
- Project Morpheus and Oculus Rift are more like ‘The Matrix’ and the holodeck than you think
- How Oculus Rift and virtual reality could change racing games forever
- How soccer and theater helped Irrational create BioShock Infinite’s Elizabeth
- Meet the gamers who earned big in the now-closed Diablo III real-money auction house
- Sony had to pioneer six different technologies to develop its virtual-reality headset
- Developers and fans celebrate the legacy of Final Fantasy X and X-2 for a good cause
- Triple-A developers-turned-academics now ship students instead of games
- The games that convinced my wife to give up her gym membership