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Welcome to another GamesBeat weekly roundup! This time, we have tons of coverage out of this year’s DICE 2016 summit, including stories on about the now Konami-free Hideo Kojima. Also, we reviewed Fire Emblem: Fates, and Bethesda reveals it’s working on three new games.
Happy reading, and have a great weekend.
Pieces of flair and opinion
- The DeanBeat: The joy of covering video games for 25 years
- HTC Vive opens for preorder on February 29, ships early April
- Fire Emblem makes you feel like a monster for choosing Conquest over Birthright
- 5 Fire Emblem: Fates tips to prepare you for a three-game adventure
- Blizzard’s 25 years built bonds and friendships as well as iconic games
- Here’s a Street Fighter V PC vs. PlayStation 4 graphics comparison
- The game industry has an abundance of talent in 2016
- Tomb Raider writer Rhianna Pratchett paves a new way for female heroes
DICE 2016
- Game of the Year goes to post-apocalypse game Fallout 4
- Hideo Kojima gets Hall of Fame honors from the video game industry
- Nintendo’s Satoru Iwata gets posthumous lifetime achievement award from gaming peers
- Hideo Kojima: ‘I feel extremely free right now. I’m doing exactly what I want to do’
- Guillermo Del Toro: Games are ‘only limited by the bastards with money’
- Fallout 4 maker Bethesda is working on 3 new games
- Tomb Raider’s writer shows the rise of storytelling’s importance in gaming
- Civilization: 25 years, 33M copies sold, 1 billion hours played, and 66 versions
- How Ubisoft visits real places to make its open-world games like The Division
- Penn Jillete: ‘If you liked rock ‘n’ roll in 1971, you have to love video games today’
News
- Minecraft’s first big update of the year comes to PC and Pocket Edition
- Nimble Collective raises $8.5M for cloud-based animation community
- TwitchCon 2016 moves to Comic-Con’s home: San Diego
- Virtual reality hype helps Nvidia sell more graphics chips for high-end PCs
- PC market is slowing, but Nvidia beats results as it expands to new platforms
- System Shock revival lures Warren Spector away from academia and back to games
- Intel continues to back gender diversity in gaming industry by promoting new program
- Leap Motion introduces amazing Orion hand-tracking for virtual reality
- Switzerland’s MindMaze raises $100M in funding for VR for stroke victims
- After the gold rush, FunPlus is starting a $50M game investment fund
- Game developers bet mobile virtual reality has mass-market appeal
- Industrial Light and Magic is talking VR — and likely Star Wars — at Game Developers Conference
- Minecraft creator Markus ‘Notch’ Persson’s Game Developers Conference honor cements his legacy
- Fallout 4’s DLC has you building robots, capturing creatures for Pokémon-style pit fights
- U.S. game industry hits $23.5B in 2015 — with software revenue up 7% to $16.5B
- You can target enemies in Ubisoft’s The Division using Tobii’s eye-tracking technology
- Sinclair ZX Spectrum targets retro fans — and U.S. gamers — with a new handheld console
- RankR gives esports a single hub for news, rankings, and tournaments
Mobile and social
- Facebook named undisputed leader in mobile advertising for app developers
- Fiksu lets marketers target its audience of 3 billion mobile devices
- InnoGames’ mobile stable sees 100% growth in 2015 thanks to Forge of Empires
- Google Play Games drops Google+ integration
- The Apple TV now lets you watch previews of apps before you download
- Kendall and Kylie Jenner join Kim Kardashian in Glu’s mobile game celeb stable
- Sign up now for Nintendo’s first mobile game, Miitomo
- Rocky Horror Show fans will get their own ‘Touch Me’ mobile game
- Mobile devices will be more powerful than PlayStation 4, Xbox One in 2017, ARM forecasts (update)
- The International Mobile Game Awards announces its nominees for 2016
- Players who buy once are six times more likely to buy again in mobile games
- Sony’s GSN Games acquires rival U.K. social casino slots studio Plumbee
- Why Zynga founder Mark Pincus is confident about the former juggernaut’s turnaround
Previews, reviews, and interviews
- Fire Emblem: Fates’ branching paths help it escape Awakening’s shadow
- Golfstream turns golf into a hilarious augmented reality sport
- Street Fighter V shows how Capcom wants to make fighting games — and players — better
- Civilization’s father, Sid Meier, shares 25 years of insights on his beloved series