Press Releases

After months of PlayStation leading the chart, King is now in first place. GamesBeat has partnered with iSpot.tv, the real-time TV ad measurement company with attention and conversion analytics from more than eight million smart TVs, to bring you a monthly report on the TV ad impressions generated by the gaming industry’s biggest campaigns. These are the ads, and by extension the games, that game makers are putting major muscle behind. Below are the top five most-seen gaming industry TV advertisers from May 16 through June 15. Gaming industry commercials generated nearly 2 billion TV ad impressions during the period measured, with 22 companies spending an estimated total of $27.5 million to run 62 different spots over 13,300 times. King takes over as the gaming company with the most-seen ads, generating over 513.6 million impressions from its six ads that aired 3,100 times. All of its commercials were for Candy Crush, with “It’s Party Time! Get That Sweet … [Read more...] about Candy crushes: King dethrones PlayStation at top of most-seen TV game ads chart

The following is an excerpt from Replay: The History of Video Games by Tristan Donovan. It should have been a coup. On May 28, 1991, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago, Sony proudly revealed that it was working with Nintendo to create a version of the Super NES with an in-built CD drive. The two Japanese companies had been working together in secret on the project, tentatively titled the Nintendo PlayStation, since 1989 and with the hype about CD-ROM reaching fever pitch, Sony’s announcement should have been a highlight of the trade show. But behind the scenes, all was not well. Since agreeing to the alliance, Nintendo had become increasingly nervous about Sony’s intentions, fearing that it wanted to use the project to muscle in on the games business. Nintendo’s paranoia was justified. Ken Kutaragi, the Sony engineer who initiated the whole project, saw the partnership as the first step to achieving his dream of getting Sony to start making game consoles. … [Read more...] about The story behind Nintendo’s betrayal of Sony — and how it created its fiercest rival

The cryptocurrency craze seems to have stagnated in recent months, following a peak at the end of last year that saw Bitcoin reach an all-time high of $19,783.06, and Ethereum and Ripple make percentage gains of around 9,200 percent and 35,000 percent, respectively, in 2017. Yet interest in digital currency remains notably high in several Eastern European countries, our research shows. The question is: why? My team at Investing.com examined global interest in cryptocurrency five months into 2018. Taking the percentage of our website’s visitors in each country around the world who used our cryptocurrency section, we found that the five countries most interested in cryptocurrency from January through May of this year were: Venezuela (67 percent) Kosovo (61 percent) Lithuania (58 percent) Belarus (52 percent) Georgia (51 percent) Venezuela’s spot on the list comes as no surprise, as the South American nation has long been documented as one of the world’s … [Read more...] about What’s behind Eastern Europe’s crypto boom?

Raph Koster has a lot to say about making online games, as he’s been working on them for more than two decades. His new book, Postmortems, debuts on Monday at more than 700 pages. And that’s just volume one. Many of the essays in the book have come from his quarter century of writings and talks, though about a third of the material is completely new. The lessons focus on game design, online community theories, and candid self-evaluation from working at companies such as Origin Systems, Sony Online Entertainment, and Metaplace. In a quarter-century of writings and talks, he has offered up game design lessons, online community theories, and candid self-evaluation. The book from Altered Tuning Press has a foreward from Ultima game designer Richard Garriott. Some of the historical posts were written for players, chat logs, speeches, design sketches, and more. Koster hopes they will illuminate the history of virtual worlds and inspire more people to create new ones. Above: Raph … [Read more...] about Raph Koster’s Postmortems helps online game devs avoid past mistakes

It’s been awhile since OnLive came out of stealth in 2009 and promised to disrupt the game consoles with a revolutionary cloud-gaming service, where games could be computed in data centers rather than on a user’s machine. That rosy future quite happen, and OnLive’s assets were acquired by Sony in 2015 and the service shut down. But the promise of disruption is still out there. We talked about the future of cloud gaming at a breakfast sponsored by Akamai during the recent Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3). Just as movie and music services have moved to the cloud, companies such as Sony (via PlayStation Now), Blade via its Shadow, and others have begun offering games that are served and played via cloud services. The games are processed in distant data centers and images are passed down as video to players, who interact with the content without downloading the games first. Gamers haven’t yet flocked to these services, but cloud delivery is getting more efficient, … [Read more...] about Cloud gaming has potential, but its execution isn’t a breeze

I jumped in surprise within 30 seconds of entering The Void in Las Vegas. I was cowering in fear just a few minutes later. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something rush toward me. I heard it coming closer as I pointed my head down and closed my eyes. I waited for it to pass. And then I felt something dig into my shoulder. A powerful chill moved down my spine and throughout my body. I crossed my arms to rub the goosebumps and tried to laugh off the feeling something had grabbed me. I remembered earlier, when I was getting strapped into the headset, I was looking down at my vest and reading the word “Rapture” upside down. Of course — it was The Void’s haptic vest. When The Void upgraded to Rift-level visuals last year, I drove out to Utah to experience it. Their walk-around system and environmental effects impressed, though both the Ghostbusters and Star Wars experiences from The Void invite comparisons to forms of 2D entertainment. Is … [Read more...] about Nicodemus: Demon Of Evanishment hands-on — The Void’s upcoming VR horror show will terrify

The open-world exploration game Sable has an extraordinary art style, appearing as a kind of living science-fiction graphic novel. But the eponymous character’s journey is common in the world, a coming-of-age ritual that will urge her to cross massive sand dunes and explore palatial ruins. Developer Shedworks teamed up with publisher Raw Fury, and the game is due out sometime in 2019 for PC and consoles. During last week’s Electronic Entertainment Expo, I was excited to dig into a hands-on demo. I was attracted to Sable’s sparse elegance and flat colors. And also, I saw that I would get to cruise around on a hoverbike. Even though I was excited to take my new ride for a spin, Shedworks cofounders Gregorios Kythreotis and Daniel Fineberg noted that this is actually quite ordinary. Everyone in Sable’s world has a hoverbike. This is a thread that emerged several times in our conversation — even though this journey looks marvelous and alien, Sable isn’t … [Read more...] about Sable’s alien desert is a central figure in its story

After Nintendo revealed that it would be bringing Fortnite to its Switch console during its presentation at E3 2018, it picked up over 2 million downloads in about 24 hours. Epic Games, the creators of the battle royale hit, also announced that Fortnite had picked up 125 million players since its launch just under a year ago. Most notably among those players is Tyler Blevins, aka Ninja, who boasts almost 2.5 million Twitter followers, over 13 million YouTube subscribers, the world’s largest Twitch subscriber total, and a current monthly income of over $500,000 from streaming alone. While all hopeful professional gamers aspire to Blevins’ numbers — as well as casual hangouts with celebrities like Drake — the reality is that his sudden rise is an anomaly. While the number of Twitch content creators earning money through streaming spiked by 223 percent in 2017 to over 150,000, only the top 112 Twitch streamers (as of print) have enough subscribers to make over … [Read more...] about Want to make your name as a streamer? Work on your GIF game

Following numerous complaints and class action lawsuits, Apple belatedly announced today a “keyboard service program for MacBook and MacBook Pro,” enabling users with sticky keys to obtain free repairs or refunds for earlier paid repairs. If any of the following symptoms apply to your recent model Apple laptop, you can bring it either to Apple or an Apple Authorized Service Provider for service: Letters or characters repeat unexpectedly Letters or characters do not appear Key(s) feel “sticky” or do not respond in a consistent manner The process may involve the replacement of one or more keys, or the entire keyboard, Apple says. Only the following models — notably all the ones with so-called “Butterfly” keys — are eligible for service: MacBook (Retina, 12-­inch, Early 2015) MacBook (Retina, 12­-inch, Early 2016) MacBook (Retina, 12-­inch, 2017) MacBook Pro (13­-inch, 2016, Two Thunderbolt 3 Ports) MacBook … [Read more...] about Apple offers to fix ‘sticky’ MacBook keyboards and refund prior repairs

Sea of Thieves is one of the biggest Microsoft releases of 2018, and during our conversation at the Electronic Entertainment Expo trade show, executive producer Joe Neate was quick to point to a wall of stats that all highlight exactly how big of a deal the online pirating simulator is. It has had 4 million players, a quarter of a million people all playing at once, and an average play time of nearly 23 hours per player. But Sea of Thieves is rapidly moving from successful launch into a support phase where developer Rare must keep dedicated fans happy with new content while also continuing to bring in new players. I spoke with Neate about how Rare can support Sea of Thieves and a number of other subjects for a half hour last week. One of the aspects of development that he touched on most was responding to what players want, and then using data to see if the tweaks, updates, and content drops are addressing those concerns. And he explained that the studio is already seeing massive … [Read more...] about Sea of Thieves’ updates are transforming player behavior