Several times in my life I’ve fantasized about packing up my guitar and some recording equipment and moving to a remote cabin for a month or so to write and record music. Far removed from the stress, distraction, and responsibility of normal life, I’d be free to put all my energy … | Continue reading
Heroes of the Storm fans have plenty to watch Saturday and Sunday. This weekend — February 27 and 28 in Los Angles — the best Heroes of the Storm teams in North America will compete for a chance to enter the game’s Spring Global Championship, which takes place in South Korea from … | Continue reading
High Voltage Software is creating a collectible card game, Dragon Front, as an exclusive for the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset. The game plays like Blizzard’s Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, except with the innovative twist that you play it inside VR. That’s a good thing b … | Continue reading
FEATURE: Mike Gallagher came out swinging in defense of the game industry in a recent talk. He has to be feisty, as he’s the industry’s chief lobbyist as the CEO of the Entertainment Software Association. Gallagher is gaming’s biggest cheerleader, and he showed that at the recent … | Continue reading
Welcome to another GamesBeat weekly roundup! This time, Fire Emblem: Fates is a hit, we learn more about the Iron Maiden mobile game, and Nintendo cuts its 2016 earnings guidance. Enjoy, and have a great weekend! Pieces of flair and opinion The DeanBeat: Nine memorable moments fr … | Continue reading
FEATURE: We are now two decades removed from the start of the Pokémon fad, and I’m starting to think it is more than just a phase. Back in the late 1990s, it was difficult to understand why Pokémon caught on with so many people around the world. But with the benefit of 20 years o … | Continue reading
Last week, I heard a lot of smart people talking about the game industry at the DICE Summit, the elite game industry event in Las Vegas. After I got home, people kept asking me what the most interesting thing I heard was. I had to punt and say I couldn’t think of any single barn- … | Continue reading
2016 is the year of Pokémon. Nintendo revealed Pokémon Sun and Moon today, the next entries in its popular series that has so far sold over 200 million games. We don’t know much about Sun and Moon yet, other than that it will come out worldwide this holiday. This announcement com … | Continue reading
The game and tech industry has heard a lot of chatter about diversity, recruiting women and minorities into development, and encouraging girls to become engineers. This kind of talk usually takes place on a high level, with chief executives like Brian Krzanich at Intel weighing i … | Continue reading
It’s time to crack open your Pokéball and catch some fresh news about pocket monsters first thing in the morning. Nintendo is about to start its Pokémon Direct livestreaming show at 8 a.m., and you can watch it right here. We don’t know what the company has in store for us, but w … | Continue reading
Nintendo needs to release a new system or get that mobile money rolling in soon because its current business is coming up short. The publisher revealed this morning in a financial filing on its site that it is expecting to generate 12.3 percent less in revenues for its fiscal 201 … | Continue reading
Humans have played cards since the 9th century Imperial China, and we might keep doing it even when we upload our brains into virtual reality. Oculus VR, the Facebook subsidiary working on the Rift virtual reality head-mounted display, is teasing a new card battler. In a message … | Continue reading
Earlier this month Craneballs released their latest iOS game Splash Cars [Free], a wonderful little game about painting color onto a black and white world by driving around and blasting paint out of the back of your vehicle. It was fun just to drive around and paint the world, bu … | Continue reading
In November of last year, Pixeljam released a wonderful little game called Last Horizon [$2.99]. In it you played an astronaut who needed to flee your dying world in a hurry, so you set out on a solo journey through space attempting to harvest resources and not get killed on your … | Continue reading
Niantic, the former Google division that is working on a Pokémon Go location-based mobile game, has raised $5 million in an expanded seed funding round. The new investors include Alsop Louie, former Havas boss David Jones (and his new venture You and Mr Jones), Fuji Television, L … | Continue reading
Pac-Man is one of the first gaming franchises that fans turned into a phenomenon. But these days, the yellow pizza-shaped hero is spending more time chasing other hit games than his own power pellets. Bandai Namco released Pac-Man: Puzzle Tour for iOS and Android today. It is the … | Continue reading
Evil is ready to reside in 2016. Capcom announced today that Resident Evil 6, RE 5, and RE 4 are coming to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One throughout the year as digital downloads. They’ll each cost $20. The series has sold over 66 million copies, making it one of Capcom’s most import … | Continue reading
Few bands could probably inspire a mobile role-playing game, but Iron Maiden has always been special. Since forming in 1975, the heavy metal group has created 16 studio albums, including The Book of Souls just last year. It was the 10th best-selling metal album in 2015. In total, … | Continue reading
In a way, cooperative board games like Matt Leacock's Forbidden Island and Forbidden Desert [$6.99 (HD)] are peculiar animals because for most players, playing a competitive game means competing against other players rather than alongside them. And yet, there are fantastic moment … | Continue reading
Before he worked on Civilization with legendary game designer Sid Meier, Bruce Shelley was a board game designer at companies such as Avalon Hill. He designed games on paper back in the 1980s and 1990s, and it was easier to keep revising until the game was right. That’s a lot lik … | Continue reading
You’re going to need a big ol’ pile of cash if you want to get into high-end virtual reality on the PC, but that is creating an opportunity for Samsung and Google to sweep up entry-level consumers. Mobile VR is on track to reach $861 million in revenues this year, according to da … | Continue reading
andai Namco Entertainment America has teamed up with Jordan Weisman’s Harebrained Schemes to bring Necropolis, a permadeath dungeon-action game, to home gaming consoles. Longtime game creator Weisman, the chief creative officer of Seattle-based Harebrained Schemes, told GamesBeat … | Continue reading
EXCLUSIVE: MNectar came up with unique way to get players to view ads on mobile by creating playable segments of games that could be streamed directly to users. No downloads were necessary just to try out a game. Now mNectar is announcing Spectra, a cross-platform app-streaming n … | Continue reading
One of the reasons I was excited to attend Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this year was to try out HTC’s Vive VR headset in person. After spending an hour with it, I’m happy to report that the Vive lives up to the hype and then some. Equipment The $799 Vive kit includes a hea … | Continue reading
BARCELONA, Spain — In the search for new ways to grow, the mobile industry is placing a large stack of chips on virtual reality even if the wisdom of these bets are far from clear. Virtually reality has dominated nearly every corner of the gargantuan Mobile World Congress 2016 th … | Continue reading
Well, the long, strange trip of the latest Assassin's Creed mobile game finally comes to an end as Assassin's Creed Identity [$4.99] has just launched worldwide. The saga began when Identity soft-launched in select countries way back in September of 2014. The game was built aroun … | Continue reading
EXCLUSIVE: PlayRaven announced today that it has released its Robocide free-to-play mobile game today as part of an effort to expand the genres of the PC to mobile devices. The Helsinki-based startup has created a “micro real-time strategy” (RTS) game. In doing so, it is trying t … | Continue reading
Sony and Naughty Dog dealt with a major goof with their otherwise brilliant Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End story trailer released today. Ubisoft’s Azaïzia Aymar noticed that the video contained an image lifted from Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag video game, and he said so on … | Continue reading
AMSTERDAM — If you spend millions of dollars on something, you would hope that you know exactly what that something is. But that was not the case for one of the biggest publishers in Eastern Europe. Wargaming, the publisher responsible for the online multiplayer shooters World of … | Continue reading
It took a few decades, but Fire Emblem is no longer one of Nintendo’s third-stringers. Fire Emblem: Fates, the latest entry in Nintendo’s tactical fantasy role-playing game (read our review) has surpassed 300,000 copies sold in the United States in its first week, according to th … | Continue reading
It would be an understatement to say that we really like Rayark's Implosion - Never Lose Hope [$9.99]; we gave it 5 stars in our review and haven't stopped looking for more content to play through. A couple of months ago, we wrote that the game was getting a new character somewhe … | Continue reading
Two decades ago, Nintendo unleashed the first Pokémon games in Japan. This Friday, Nintendo will celebrate that milestone with fans. A Pokémon-themed Nintendo Direct livestreaming video event is coming Friday at 7 a.m. Pacific time (10 a.m. Eastern). This is not only a chance for … | Continue reading
Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End’s newest story trailer is all about a dramatic choice that adventure Nathan Drake faces in the what could be the final installment in the Uncharted series. This game is probably the best thing that Sony has coming for the PlayStation 4, which has sold m … | Continue reading
What if mobile applications weren’t standalone, isolated experiences, but could actually connect users to each other – or even to the app’s developers – with a push of a button? That’s the vision behind a startup called RevTwo, exiting from stealth today. Its mobile app SDK for i … | Continue reading
Another Wednesday, another Hearthstone [Free] Tavern Brawl, and this one is a new one. Clash of Minions has you building your own deck, and then you lead your minions to battle against the opponent. Every minion you play from your hand gets Charge and Taunt, which is an interesti … | Continue reading
Ashes of the Singularity is an upcoming real-time strategy game for the PC where tons of things can move around on the screen simultaneously. As such, it requires a lot of 3D graphics horsepower to run fluidly. That’s why graphics chip maker Advanced Micro Devices is teaming up w … | Continue reading
All of Warren Spector’s games over the past few decades have been about “emergent gameplay,” which give players choices so that they can solve problems in their own way. Spector has been religious about this view, which contrasts to the tastes of game writers such as Amy Hennig, … | Continue reading
Glu Mobile has seen ups and downs with its celebrity mobile games, and now it’s on the ups again thanks to its release of Kendall & Kylie, based on the lives of reality stars Kendall and Kylie Jenner. Founded in 2001, Glu toiled away for years in mobile until it scores a huge suc … | Continue reading
Just about a month ago developer Lucky Kat launched Sky Chasers [Free], a game with the heart and soul of a 16-bit platformer but the mechanics of a cave flyer. To be honest, as much as I loved the pixel art and overall charm of Sky Chasers, I can't say I loved it right off | Continue reading
EXCLUSIVE: Mark Skaggs is a seasoned game designer whose hits such as FarmVille and Empires & Allies reached more than 365 million people. But after seven years at social mobile game giant Zynga, he resigned last fall to his next big thing. And today, he’s revealing that his futu … | Continue reading
AMSTERDAM — Consumers haven’t even had the chance to buy some of the most promising virtual reality devices yet, but the industry is already looking toward a future where all VR is mobile. But if we’re going to get to that point, the industry will need to solve a few key problems … | Continue reading
Tastee Beverage Studios plans to release a sci-fi combat racing game for the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset. The title is one of many launch titles coming for the Rift, which Facebook’s Oculus VR is launching on March 28. The launch is one of the biggest events for VR, which … | Continue reading
AMSTERDAM — The price of oil continues to drop, but Saudi Arabia still has cash to burn on mobile games. Only around 30 million people live in Saudi Arabia, but that population generates approximately $350 million per year in revenues for mobile games, according to research firm … | Continue reading
If only customer support were more … human. RevTwo is coming out of stealth mode today with a new way to offer support for people while they are using an app. It works for when you are stuck in a game and need a hint, or when your app isn’t working right. RevTwo has created […] | Continue reading
Earlier this month we caught a glimpse of an awesome-looking upcoming platformer from Emergency Studios called Chel-Z [Free]. With colorful 8-bit style pixel art, similarly 8-bit chiptunes, one big 36 room map that you could explore and slowly gain access to Metroidvania style, a … | Continue reading
If you want new ideas, you may need to come up with fresh ways of soliciting them. And that’s why the University of California at Davis made a game. Envision UC Davis is a massively multiplayer online game that launches at 11 a.m. Pacific time tomorrow. It runs for 36 hours, and … | Continue reading
I’m guessing you like free games. Here’s some details about the free game’s you could get in March. Microsoft today revealed what Xbox Live Gold members will receive in March. From March 1 to March 15, Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishment for Xbox One and Supreme Commander 2 fo … | Continue reading
Cartoon Network has been my go-to animated block for years. I remember when it first debuted (complete with plenty of teaser commercials) and hosted master-crafted shows like Dexter's Lab and Powerpuff Girls (which is coming back by the way!) and smiling throughout. Over time Adu … | Continue reading