Welcome to another GamesBeat weekly roundup! We were extra busy this week putting on and covering our yearly GamesBeat conference in San Francisco. You can find stories about many of the panels below, but we also have a lot of other gaming-related content to share with you.
Enjoy, and have a great weekend!
GamesBeat 2015
- The DeanBeat: GamesBeat 2015 put the spotlight on two kings of mobile
- An interview with Gabe Leydon, Machine Zone’s man on the Iron Throne
- Glu’s Niccolo De Masi spreads his bets across the A-list celebrities
- Virtual reality is gaming’s ‘Mother of Dragons’
- Wargaming’s secret: World of Tanks is the ‘ultimate hobby for our audience’
- Magic Leap’s Graeme Devine on how to design for mixed reality and the impossible
- Epic’s graphics guru Tim Sweeney on AR/VR, game engine wars, and simulating humans
- How to cater to your players’ demands and know your audience
- Gambling on your future is a necessary step for game studios
- Magic Leap’s Graeme Devine: ‘Mixed reality’ is one of gaming’s unexplored frontiers
- Kongregate CEO Emily Greer: There’s nothing small about microtransactions
- How Nexon accidentally invented microtransactions
- User engagement is the new user acquisition
- Why authenticity is one of the most important parts of game marketing
- Brianna Wu: Women in tech discussion is ‘about making better games’
- How Disney became successful in mobile by being itself
- Epic CEO Tim Sweeney expects small games at the dawn of the virtual reality revolution
- Reliance chief: ‘India is where China was’ 5 years ago
- India’s gaming market is ripe — ‘but they’re not monetizing’
- Epic chief says games like Ark: Survival Evolved, not mobile, are how small studios can make big money
- Esports grow closer to real sports, grow more in mobile, and — well — just grow
- Glu Mobile CEO explains why celebrities are better than film brands for mobile games
- Gambling and fantasy are the ‘biggest esports investment opportunities’
News
- Nintendo is rebalancing Splatoon next week — rollers getting nerfed
- Scuf Gaming partners with Microsoft to make the Xbox Elite controller even better
- Tobii reveals new eye-tracking chip and platform
- Microsoft stops automatic Windows 10 upgrades, says default checked update was ‘a mistake’
- Russia’s largest esports community receives a potential $100M investment
- Microsoft, Dell, HP, Intel, and Lenovo launch massive ‘PC Does What?’ advertising campaign
- Here are the countries that make up most of the $91.5B global gaming business (Spoiler: China rules)
- A ride-making company wants to bring World’s Fairs to virtual reality
- Cyberpunk 2077 will be ‘a mess of effects’ and far bigger than The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
- Ingress maker Niantic spins off from Google and raises up to $30M from Pokémon and Nintendo
- HoloLens hits the road to convince developers that augmented reality is the future
- Darkest Dungeon leaves Early Access and releases January 19
- Blizzard’s Overwatch enters closed beta on October 27
- MOBAs are more popular on Facebook than Major League Baseball and the NFL
- Game preorders are up 24%, with revenue up 33%, in 2015 — even if you hate them
- Metal Gear Solid V’s opening day was twice as good as Avengers: Age of Ultron’s
- Star Wars: Battlefront has no dedicated voice chat on console or PC
- Asus’s upcoming Republic of Gamers line is a gaming hardware buffet
- MaxPlay launches ‘disruptive’ game engine that uses modern cloud technology
- The landscape of VR is complicated — with 234 companies valued at $13B
- Ubisoft adds another team in Canada as it acquires developer Longtail Halifax
- Master of Orion is a crucial part of Wargaming’s DNA
- Hearthstone’s Grim Patron meets a grim fate on the eve of BlizzCon
- One of Hearthstone’s most powerful combo cards — Warsong Commander — gets nerfed
- Star Wars: Battlefront had 9M gamers battling for the Empire and Rebel Alliance
- Friday the 13th imagined as an asymmetrical multiplayer game? Yes, please, and thank you!
- Man plays Minecraft for 35 hours in world record attempt
- Rocket League gets Back to the Future car pack
Mobile and social
- Cloud Chasers is a moving mobile exploration of the migrant’s journey
- Hands-on with YouTube Gaming’s mobile capture: Broadcasting from mobile is easier than with Twitch
- Nevada Gaming board: Daily fantasy sports is gambling
- Bee7 cross-promotion tool now available for Cocos2D-X mobile game engine
- Fallout Shelter gets a long-awaited update
- YouTube Gaming one-ups Twitch with a crucial mobile-capture feature, adds subscriptions
- Clue comes to mobile … in Bingo form
- Lebanon’s Game Cooks studio launches PolyBlast mobile arcade game
- DeNA West boss: We should announce our Nintendo mobile game ‘soon’ [update]
- Convergence of ‘Candy Crush Moms’ and traditional players will double game industry profits
- Glu Mobile CEO explains why celebrities are better than film brands for mobile games
- Gambling and fantasy are the ‘biggest esports investment opportunities’
- Game Insight reveals tower defense-based spinoff for its strategy hit, Cloud Raiders
Reviews and impressions
- Meet Hex FRVR, the new puzzle game that’ll take over your life
- Pro Evolution Soccer 2016 is a watershed release that should put FIFA and EA on notice
- Yoshi’s Wooly World is adorable but can’t match Yoshi’s Island’s brilliance
- Goosebumps shows that the beloved children’s series’ scares work in virtual reality
- The trapped-in-a-game story becomes your reward in genre-hopping shooter Bedlam
- Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection makes the PS3’s best action games even better
- The Witcher 3: Hearts of Stone continues to prove a world is only as good as its stories
- The Crew: Wild Run enlarges an already expansive massively online racing world