We’re all slightly losing our minds getting ready for next week’s Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles, but we still put together a healthy amount of stories for this week. Specifically, we got our first look at the next Mortal Kombat, Batman: Arkham Knight got delayed, and we found out that Valve quietly updated the Steam FAQ with some interest info about its Early Access problem.
You’ll find all of that and much more below. Happy reading!
Pieces of flair and opinion
- The DeanBeat: What to hope for at E3, and what to worry about
- Great tabletop games for video gamers: Small World
- What Oculus Rift and virtual reality mean for sex, death, violence, and identity
- Steam Early Access: Your rights when game development stops
- Here’s what the chief game man expects to see at gaming’s E3 mega-show
- Read+Watch+Listen: Bonus material for Wolfenstein: The New Order fans
- 12 games that teach kids to code — and are even fun, too
- Mario Kart TV’s best videos: Unbelievable wins, amazing skill shots, total BS, and more craziness
- How League of Legends helped me realize my work ethic
- Growing up: Why I gravitate to games with child protagonists
News
- Nintendo is cutting jobs in Europe
- League of Legends’ most important map is getting a facelift
- GOG Galaxy connects players across Steam and other PC platforms
- The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt gets official release date
- The Xbox One controller is now also a PC controller
- Gamers are social, educated, and hanging out on Twitch
- Don’t expect that Early Access game to get finished, says Steam’s quietly updated FAQ
- The microconsole lives as OnLive and Mad Catz team up on Mojo
- Microsoft: Xbox One developers now have ‘more GPU bandwidth’ to work with
- Game of Xbones: Microsoft’s new console finally gets HBO Go and 33 other new apps
- New Oculus Rift game from Words With Friends creators brings Mario-like gameplay into virtual reality
- Xbox One’s Gold paywall for streaming video like Netflix falls today
- Overclockers push Intel’s Devils Canyon processor to 5.5 GHz
- Obama cares: The President’s praise of The Witcher shows growing importance of games to international trade
- Forget selfies: Use a Kinect camera to make a 3D figurine of … you
- A marketer’s dream: League of Legends, Dota 2 help e-sports rack up 2.4 billion viewer hours in 2013
- Walking dead in the Wild West — Hunt: Horrors of the Gilded Age is Crytek’s new co-op zombie-hunting game
- Trion Worlds gets into the game-promotion business with its Glyph hub
- Watch Dogs has a monster first week — surpasses 4M copies in sales
- Today’s Wii U update helps you get into games faster
- A new Xbox One, PS4, or graphics card: Study shows hardcore gamers plan to upgrade this year
- Batman: Arkham Knight is the latest big game to slip into 2015
- Global game business is booming, but physical store sales may ‘evaporate’ by 2015
- Google’s YouTube and search data show that attending E3 virtually is more popular than ever
- Xfire launches open beta for its e-Sports platform with player-created League of Legends tournaments
- Twitch E3 schedule reveals 21 unannounced games from publishers like Nintendo, Microsoft, and more
- Mario Kart 8′s sales powerslide beyond 1.2 million copies in 3 days
- Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us team is now overseeing Uncharted 4
- League of Legends pros get lengthy suspensions for ‘verbal abuse’ and ‘racial slurs’
- Protect your spine: Mortal Kombat X in the works for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One
Mobile and social
- Half-price mobile users: SessionM launches self-serve mobile user acquisition market
- As pixelated art takes off, Pixowl aims to grow its Sandbox to 100M players (exclusive)
- Germany’s Flaregames raises $12.2M for free-to-play mobile games
- Super Evil Megacorp scores $15M and ex-EA exec Kristian Segerstrale as chief operating officer
- Rovio is building the future of Angry Birds on character development
- Temple Run crosses a billion downloads. But will it become a global gaming brand?
- Kabam will bring its mobile games to Microsoft’s Windows devices
- Zynga departures finish new CEO’s complete makeover of the management team
- Graphics guru Tim Sweeney explains why Apple’s Metal will make mobile games far better
- Why game developers should be happy about Apple’s WWDC announcements
- Trends in app moneymaking: Buy the code of a popular app and re-skin it – or create a real-cash gambling game
- Apple to deliver ‘Metal’ platform for high-end games on iOS
- Apple debuts iOS Family Sharing: Buy apps once, share them with the whole family
- ‘Make it Rain’ app: The secret to its $50K per day success
Previews and interviews
- How Disney and Harmonix tamed Kinect to make the motion game Disney Fantasia: Music Evolved (interview)
- Triple Town developer’s next game is more than puzzling. It’s therapy (preview)
- Even with a Temple Run empire, Imangi Studios wants to stay indie at heart (interview)
- In Batman: Arkham Knight, the Batmobile really is a tank and the game world is five times bigger (hands-on preview)
- Same trick, new treats: Costume Quest 2 adds punchier battles and jokes
- Axiom Verge combines Metroid, Game Genie, and glitches into a frantic sidescroller
- Don’t call it a reboot: Sonic Boom is just a ‘different branch’ of the Sonic universe
- How Crytek has imagined Homefront: The Revolution as a modern guerrilla war on U.S. soil (interview)
- Crytek and Deep Silver unveil America’s second War of Independence with Homefront: The Revolution (preview)