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Welcome to another collection of a week’s worth of GamesBeat. This time, Google spends $1 billion to get Twitch, we all blushed a bit as interactive porn heads to virtual reality, and we picked our favorite gaming monsters in honor of Godzilla’s current rampage through Hollywood.
Enjoy all the stories, and have a great weekend!
Pieces of flair
- The DeanBeat: How far will the advantage swing to Asia in games?
- Transistor: Master complex skills and possible combos with this Function guide
- A game veteran’s hard lesson on the humane way to shut a startup
- Why Twitch is worth $1B to Google
- HBO’s John Oliver pokes at Nintendo over gay marriage
- Godzilla ain’t got nothing on the favorite monsters of the GamesBeat staff
- No wishing: We expect Nintendo to add these characters to Super Smash Bros. for Wii U and 3DS at E3
News
- Asia will account for 82 percent of the $6B global game market growth this year
- Amplitude passes its Kickstarter goal with less than 24 hours to spare
- GameStop’s earnings are up thanks to demand for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One
- Crytek gets into the lucrative MOBA game with Arena of Fate
- Minecraft’s coming to Xbox One this August, and 360 crafters get a discount
- Samsung is making a VR headset to beat Oculus VR and Sony’s Project Morpheus
- Ukrainian studio overcomes violent political turmoil while remaking its postapocalyptic Metro games
- Driveclub’s developer bets you’ll still pay $60 for its racing game
- Achievements turned legit: Play games, get rewarded with stuff from Amazon, Target, and more
- You can now stream Steam from your PC to other, crappier computers in your home
- ZeniMax sues Oculus VR and founder Palmer Luckey
- Want to try out Oculus Rift? You’ll have to brave the brats at Chuck E. Cheese’s
- U.S. video game spending stagnated at $4.6B in the first quarter
- South Korea’s online PC game market is growing — but dislodging its biggest players is impossible
- The game academy’s new board signals the shift to digital gaming (exclusive)
- Just like PS4: Xbox One getting real names and external storage
- Brian Fargo will (finally) ship his Kickstarter darling Wasteland 2 in August
- Online support for Mario Kart DS and hundreds of Wii and DS games ends tomorrow
- GameStop dumps its PC games client — you can buy codes for Steam, Origin, or Uplay now
- Sony starts closed beta for its game-streaming PlayStation Now service tomorrow
- The post-Oculus boom: Survios raises $4M for free-moving virtual reality
- Google reportedly buying game livestreaming startup Twitch for $1B [update]
Mobile and social
- Codemasters follows other console publishers as F1 Race Stars drifts from consoles to iOS
- Tangible Play’s Osmo opens up new ways for kids to play with an iPad
- Epic Games launches Tappy Chicken to show off cross-platform Unreal Engine 4
- The Google Play Store saw a boost in-game revenues after creating better categories
- Playstudios expands virtual casino game rewards to real Mississippi casinos
- Social casino market shrinks, and game operators shift strategy
- With its stock still struggling, King announces its first mobile game since going public
- Upsight gains in quest to be the mobile marketing-analytics service that rules them all
- Can’t code? Who cares — you can publish your own Flappy Bird clone today with Appy Pie’s Game Builder
- With Super Monkey Ball Bounce, even Sega is ‘cloning’ popular mobile games now
- $6M Dota 2 championship: The largest prize pool ever in e-sports — and it’s still growing
- Storm8′s mobile games have reached more than 400 million casual gamers (exclusive)
- The latest Flappy Bird success story on mobile is Make It Rain — and it’s doing just that for its studio
- Kabam brings one of China’s biggest hits to the West, and you play it on … YouTube?!
Previews and interviews
- Sony’s Driveclub pushes next-generation race-car graphics past the speed limit
- A beautiful and brutal Shadow of Mordor lets you turn orc chiefs against each other (hands-on preview)
- Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor is a Tolkien game with shades of gray, not good or evil (interview)
- 2K Games reveals new hunters to track, burn, and kill the creature in Evolve (hands-on preview)
- Evolve adds ‘a hell of a lot more’ to Left 4 Dead’s style of storytelling
- Why the developers behind Left 4 Dead and Evolve love making co-op games
- Batman: Arkham Knight shows us what the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One are really capable of
- Beware the city-devouring worms in Civilization: Beyond Earth (hands-on preview)
Reviews