Welcome to another GamesBeat weekly roundup! This time, we’ve reviewed some of the biggest holiday releases of the year, including Assassin’s Creed: Unity and Dragon Age: Inquisition. Also, a company in the business of horse racing spends hundreds of millions to buy a mobile game developer.
Happy reading, and have a great weekend!
Pieces of flair and opinion
- The DeanBeat: What are the ingredients for the billion-dollar deals in gaming?
- The Warcraft Hero retruns for Warlords of Draenor launch (comic)
- GamesBeat Unfiltered going down tonight to prepare for community relaunch (Delayed for Monday)
- Avoiding launch day disasters: How AAA games deliver the goods
- Grandmother who uses World of Warcraft to cope with cancer became the heart of a new documentary
- World of Warcraft’s most-killed character finally gets his due
- 8 custom Xbox One backgrounds
News
- League of Legends crushes other PC online games in October, finds Raptr
- PlanetSide 2 is shooting for 1080p and 60fps on PS4 — console beta coming in 2014
- 10 3DS games — including Smash Bros. — have surpassed 1M copies sold
- October 2014 NPD: The Evil Within sets survival-horror record; PS4, Xbox One still on fire
- Microsoft explains when Halo: The Master Chief Collection uses a dedicated server or a peer connection
- Twitch use confirms Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare is the most-streamed console game at its launch
- Nexon outperforms expectations thanks to South Korean gamers
- 1 in 5 Destiny copies are digital — and this lifts the game industry, according to analyst
- Alone in the Dark reinvents itself by becoming a co-op roguelike in Illumination
- SkreensTV lets you watch or play 4 things at once on your big TV
- Peter Molyneux on underestimating mobile monetization: ‘The biggest mistake I’ve made in the last 20 years’
- Sony hopes PlayStation Vue will make watching broadcast and cable TV suck less
- Oculus Rift VR headset starred in tonight’s ‘South Park’ and leads to Butters getting stabbed
- Strap a phablet to your face: Oculus VR releases mobile dev kit
- Microsoft claims Xbox One has outsold PS4 ‘for the past 2 weeks’
- Assassin’s Creed mastermind Patrice Désilets launches new studio after bad breakup with Ubisoft
- Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare’s first Xbox One and PS4 patch is live
- Forget the new Sonics: Sega is ecstatic about a 6-year-old rerelease
- Super Smash Bros. Wii U available for predownload as it breaks Mario Kart 8′s preorder mark
- Playing Call of Duty has long-term learning benefits for the brain
- Chinese game giant Tencent’s profits rise 46 percent in Q3 but fall short of analysts’ expectations
- Nvidia releases graphics re-creation software that proves the moon landing was real
- Microsoft debuts Halo: The Master Chief Collection at big fan event
- Made in America: Game industry grows 4 times faster than U.S. economy
- Fullscreen acquires Rooster Teeth, video studio behind ‘Red vs. Blue’
- Geoff Keighley unveils The Game Awards 2014 to replace the VGAs
- Halo fix incoming and 343 Industries apologizes for The Master Chief Collection’s launch
- OnLive expands cloud gaming to Benelux countries
- Assassin’s Creed: Unity’s framerate is worse on PlayStation 4 than Xbox One
- Just Cause 3 announced for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC for 2015
- Halo: The Master Chief Collection matchmaking is broken, and Microsoft’s fix may not work for you (update)
- World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor launch impales taxi with massive axe in Times Square
- Sonic, Mega Man, and more: Nintendo’s Amiibos will soon include third-party characters (gallery)
- Transformers Universe team facing layoffs at RuneScape developer Jagex
- GameStop expects to issue customers $250M in trade-in credit this holiday season
- Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare does use dedicated servers — but it also doesn’t
- Nintendo’s Amiibo gets something Skylanders and Disney Infinity lacks: Subscription service
- ‘Video Games Live’ producer Tommy Tallarico’s new project is ‘Electronic Opus’ — classical meets electronic dance music
- Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare is selling faster than Ghosts so far — at least in the U.K.
- PlayStation 4′s The Walking Dead saves failing to transfer between seasons
Mobile and social
- Retargeting is ‘where the puck is going’ in mobile advertising
- Swimsuit model Kate Upton stars in Game of War ad that debuts during ‘Thursday Night Football’
- GetSocial launches social platform for games and raises $1M
- Tencent and Line invest $110M in South Korean game developer
- Messaging app Tango signs game developers from around the world
- Scopely nabs $35M to build its mobile gaming ‘touchscreen entertainment network’
- Nvidia upgrades Shield tablet, gets Valve classics, and launches cloud-based tablet games
- Horse racing and games? Churchill Downs acquires social-casino studio Big Fish Games for $885M
- Japanese mobile gaming’s march West continues as Gumi brings another hit to the U.S.
- I just followed Taylor Swift around her house, and so can you
- Candy Crush Soda Saga quenches thirst of King fans with worldwide mobile launch
- Rovio targets China, opening 9 Angry Birds theme parks by 2018
- 2K Games launches XCOM: Enemy Within on mobile devices
- Players take home more than $2M from Skillz mobile-game competitions
- After 23M downloads, Japan’s Line Rangers partners with Rovio for Angry Birds promo
- Zynga launches Wizard of Oz Slots for mobile
- Canada’s Execution Labs raises $5.3M to accelerate mobile game startups
- Imagination reveals powerful graphics chips for smartphones and wearables
- Proxy42 unveils crowdfunding campaign for augmented reality shooter game with unique hardware
Previews and interviews
- How Fingerprint is taking its kids’ ‘mobile edutainment’ platform worldwide (interview)
- Battlefield: Hardline single-player campaign feels like a Miami Vice TV show (hands-on preview)
- How EA built the tension of being a cop into Battlefield: Hardline (interview)
- Overwatch: What 10 rounds of Blizzard’s chaotic shooter taught me
- ‘Halo: Nightfall’ returns its cast to the original Halo in its second episode (preview)
- Microsoft’s Halo 5 Guardians multiplayer beta will make e-sports fans ecstatic (preview)
- Halo 5: Guardians’ creators discuss the ‘instruments of death’ in multiplayer (interview)
- Insomniac’s Ted Price on Sunset Overdrive, working with Microsoft, and more
Reviews