AllThingsD » gaming

Story Telling

Eric Johnson — Fri, 25 May 2012 06:59:02 +0000

We’re at the end of the lifespan of the current generation of consoles, so the focus has been on the depth of story. When the new generation of hardware comes out, people will revel in the graphics and story will be swept aside again.

– Shadowrun creator Jordan Weisman

Timing of Microsoft's "Xbox 720” Hinted at in Lawsuit

Tricia Duryee — Thu, 24 May 2012 19:08:15 +0000

Microsoft is not saying when it will be unveiling a new Xbox console, except to say that it won’t be at the E3 game conference next month.

Now there’s some additional information on timing, thanks to a lawsuit between Activision and some former employees.

According to confidential agreements unsealed in the court case, Microsoft’s next game console, which is referred to as the “Xbox 720,” could be released in time for the 2013 holiday season.

The Los Angeles Times originally posted the documents on Monday, but it was Brier Dudley of the Seattle Times who came up with the theory on the timing.

The lawsuit is a complicated tale, involving Activision’s insanely successful first-person shooter Call of Duty. Former Activision developers are claiming they are owed hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties and bonus payments. Activision is claiming breach of contract.

The documents, revealed last week, detail a high-profile deal between Bungie and Activision in 2010.

The 27-page agreement calls for Bungie to develop four “sci-fantasy, action shooter games,” code-named “Destiny,” released every other year, beginning in the fall of 2013, according to the Los Angeles Times. Additionally, Bungie agreed to put out four downloadable expansion packs code-named “Comet.”

Bungie is the developer behind the successful Halo franchise, but is not the developer behind Halo 4, which Microsoft is developing and releasing in November.

Here’s what Dudley is suggesting based on the contract language:

Microsoft hasn’t said when the next version of the Xbox will go on sale, but the Bungie contract suggests that it could happen in the 2013 holiday season, with “Destiny” as a key launch title. That would be similar to the way Halo was a cornerstone of the first Xbox launch in November 2001.

An Xbox spokesman declined to comment on this theory, and referred questions to Activision and Bungie.

The document also says the game is expected to be released for the PlayStation 3 successor in the fall of 2014.

The big caveat to all of this guesswork is that the document is now two years old, so timing could easily change. Additionally, the name “Xbox 720″ could just be a code name or placeholder. Of course, console makers keep the timing of their upcoming hardware close to their vests, so that consumers don’t hold off on making purchases.

In March, Microsoft’s Corporate Communications boss Frank Shaw told AllThingsD that consumers probably shouldn’t expect new hardware at the E3 game conference, or “anytime soon.”

“For us, 2012 is all about Xbox 360,” he added.

Tencent to Restructure Business

Paul Mozur — Sat, 19 May 2012 15:07:07 +0000

Tencent Holdings said Friday it will restructure its business operations into six groups and named a new chief operating officer as the Chinese Internet company moves to improve efficiency and grow beyond its core gaming business.

The move is aimed at helping its smaller operations, such as its mobile, search and e-commerce businesses, gain more independence, analysts said. Over the past year Tencent’s profit growth has slowed as it has sought to spend on a wide array of initiatives to solidify its holdings in areas such as mobile chat and online shopping.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Maybe You Should Start Paying Attention to Indie Games Developers

Eric Johnson — Thu, 17 May 2012 21:47:10 +0000

Big video games like Mass Effect 3 and Halo 4 aren’t going away anytime soon. But a growing cadre of independent games developers is taking the road less traveled — keeping teams tiny and visions narrow.

In fact, they say they don’t want to grow. And despite that unorthodox philosophy, they’re reaching big audiences, making some impressive money and shaking up the games industry as a whole.

These independent developers, or “indie devs,” fill a huge spectrum of opinions about what video games can and should be. But, as with their counterparts in music and movies, it’s not always easy to nail down which games are indie and which aren’t.

Up-and-coming publishers like Zynga and Rovio started out small and indie, of course. In the loosest sense, the term applies to pretty much anyone who’s not one of the big legacy game companies, such as Nintendo, Sega or Electronic Arts.

However, after they put out a hit or two, a few independents peel off from the pack by continually hiring and growing. Contrast Zynga, which has nearly 3,000 employees at 21 offices around the world, with unconventional companies such as San Francisco-based Bolt Creative, where the two co-founders pointedly avoided hiring anyone but themselves.

“We made a decision to stay small,” said Dave Castlenuovo, Bolt’s only programmer. “To me, I get the most enjoyment working out of my home, getting to see my wife.”

Castlenuovo and his design partner Allan Dye eschewed the new-normal start-up song-and-dance: Securing VC funding, finding office space and building a company on the idea of scaling bigger and bigger.

Instead, they found huge success, despite staying small, with their flagship game Pocket God. The game lets sadistic smartphone owners punish an island of perennially doomed cartoon pygmies.

Pocket God was a one-off project started in late 2008, which went from idea to a first version on the iPhone App Store in about a week, Castlenuovo said.

But it has outperformed most one-week larks. The 99-cent app and its downloadable extras have earned about $7.5 million so far.

And the game’s pygmy characters have racked up an additional $600,000 through a spinoff comic book series, which is not bad for a two-man team.

So, how does a little operation such as Bolt Creative thrive while a company like Nintendo, with access to some of the world’s top talent and most beloved video game characters, is reporting to investors its first annual loss since 1981?

Part of it, of course, is the conventional wisdom that smaller start-ups are just nimbler on their feet. But to get at the real answer, you have to look primarily at three big companies: Valve, Apple and Facebook.

On PCs, Valve’s Steam Store eliminated the need for developers to get their games distributed in brick-and-mortar stores in order to find a mass paying audience of gamers. Mobile app marketplaces, starting with Apple’s on iOS, similarly leveled the playing ground for smartphone game developers.

And games have also infiltrated social networking sites, especially Facebook, although the spoils are decidedly lopsided: Zynga alone was responsible for 15 percent of the company’s revenue in the first quarter of 2012.

To raise the money to make new games, new avenues are also springing up fast. In March, San Francisco-based Double Fine Productions solicited donations on Kickstarter for a new point-and-click adventure game in the style of the classic games made by its founder, Tim Schafer. They met their $400,000 goal in about eight hours and ultimately raised $3.3 million from Kickstarter users.

These sorts of developers don’t always have it easy: They have to do more with less, taking on more responsibilities than they might have to in much larger teams. And they can’t bank on legacy pieces of intellectual property for success.

Not that this is an equally bad fate for everyone. For his part, Castlenuovo compares himself to Robert Rodriguez, an independent filmmaker who famously produces, writes, directs, shoots and edits most of his movies solo.

“I enjoy wearing many hats,” Castlenuovo said.

Plus, indie devs can now focus more on making the games they’re most passionate about and less on how they’re going to sell them, at least initially.

Derek van Vliet, co-founder of a Toronto-based indie shop called Get Set Games, seems to be in a good place. His company’s casual iPhone/Android game Mega Jump, initially developed by just three people (now upped to four), has racked up 24 million downloads since May of 2010.

But van Vliet grumbled that bigger companies like Electronic Arts can temporarily take over app store charts by throwing around the weight of some of their biggest properties, including Madden, Tetris and Scrabble.

“That’s getting a lot from very little work for them,” he said.

For better or for worse, the business of games is not a meritocracy. But it might be a mistake to assume it’s all one big, cohesive business in the first place. After all, the devs say, isn’t at least some of what we’re doing art?

Art vs. entertainment?

If you want to quickly start a fight on the Internet, you should follow Roger Ebert’s lead and assert in broad strokes that video games are not and will never be art. Even among the game developer community, the dividing line between art and entertainment is fuzzy at best and may be impossible to place outright.

After all, some games are just casual fun. But others are deeply personal for their creators and, if you believe their many fans, are more meaningful and higher-quality as a result.

George Fan, co-creator of Plants vs. Zombies, said he knows his game is a piece of entertainment, which he developed independently and later distributed through PopCap before EA bought the company in 2011. But he questioned whether art and indie projects even have a chance amid the business pressures at EA.

“It’s pretty much as far as you could get from indie in any company,” Fan said.

Castlenuovo echoed the sentiment, noting big companies are best able to serve their investors when they focus on making top-10 hits.

“I’m going to stick with the creativity,” he said.

Even if you accept that some developers are making artful games, getting others to appreciate them in that way is an uphill battle. In the delightful new documentary “Indie Game: The Movie,” developer Jonathan Blow explains how his indie mega-hit Braid explores the concept of trying to reverse past mistakes by giving players the ability to rewind time.

However, the directors then cut to an online video reaction to the game from Soulja Boy. The young rapper enthusiastically tells his fans that Braid “ain’t got no point … you just walking around, jumpin’ on shit.”

Still, when developers can work by themselves or on very small teams, rather than as part of a publicly traded company, they’re freer to pursue “passion projects” that mean more to them. On the surface, that’s good, but it can also be a sort of psychological poison.

For Leo Alterman, a hobbyist indie dev and senior at Stanford University, making games is about recreating a sense of wonder he felt as a child playing Nintendo 64. And he’s not just talk: A game he built from scratch starting in high school, Tasty Static, has racked up 100,000 free downloads online in the past two years.

But Alterman said he could never make games his profession — the personal stakes are just too high.

“If you’re doing that as a job, and you fuck it up, then yeah, you’re kind of in trouble,” he said.

Indie devs straddle the stressful line between living to work and working to live. Despite his quest for childlike wonder, Alterman describes himself as morbid, and he’s in good company: In “Indie Game: The Movie,” one developer compares his work to being in a concentration camp as a major deadline approaches. Another earnestly threatens to kill himself if he can’t finish his game as planned.

“So, that’s my incentive,” he deadpans.

It seems unlikely that gamers would look at the latest update to Madden or Words With Friends and use it to judge those games’ creators. But Edmund McMillen, co-creator of the popular (and maddeningly difficult) indie platformer game Super Meat Boy, said the game and its public image are so tied to his story and personality that it’s impossible not to feel judged.

“We put everything into it,” McMillen said of himself and his “Team Meat” partner Tommy Refenes. “We are the game.”

The mainstream response

Just as with indie music and movies, there’s a more emotional response to the idea of a game produced by one or two people than one produced by a faceless company. And finding indie game developers who are willing to question the values of big games companies — like EA and Zynga — is like finding sand on a beach.

“That doesn’t seem like art to me,” the hobbyist dev Alterman said of Zynga, which did not respond to requests for comment. “They’re playing a different game.”

“Zynga’s a business,” Team Meat’s McMillen said. “I would go so far as to say they don’t even make games. They make money.”

“That sounds like hell to me,” Refenes says in “Indie Game: the Movie,” after he’s asked about working at EA or Epic Games.

Plus, players are responding to independent developers in a big way. According to the mobile app analytics and advertising firm Flurry, 56 percent of all mobile games played in Q1 2011 were made by indie devs; one year later, in Q1 2012, that share had jumped to 68 percent.

But those opinions and trends don’t seem to deter Rich Hilleman, EA’s chief creative officer and one of the company’s first 20 employees from the early 80s. He’s careful to praise talented indie devs who have gone on to join EA, but also stresses the administrative headaches that come with staying small.

“I want to not have to worry about clearing credit cards and legal issues and translating this stuff into Maltese,” he said. “I think you recognize that it was fun to be independent, except that that stuff wasn’t all that fun.”

When Hilleman joined EA, the company didn’t do any development in-house; it was solely a publisher that connected independent game designers with bigger audiences. Within the gaming world, the company helped make rock stars out of developers like Bill Budge, whose game, Pinball Construction Set, was packaged like a music album, with Budge’s name in giant script on the front.

Not really something you’d see today. I’ve sunk countless hours into EA’s Need for Speed racing game on my iPhone, but I couldn’t tell you the name of a single person who helped make it.

When I told him this, Hilleman countered that customers, not publishers, are the ones who decide who the stars are, although it’s hard not to wonder why that star status doesn’t correlate with hugely popular games like EA’s Star Wars: The Old Republic, which gained 1 million subscribers within three days of its launch last year.

Hilleman readily volunteers that one of the closest modern rock-star successors to Bill Budge is an indie dev: Notch, the creator of Minecraft. In the past three years, Notch’s sandbox game has built an extremely passionate community of over 16 million players, despite having primarily three programmers listed in its credits.

Despite all this, Hilleman draws a firm line in the sand in opposition to independent developers who say they’re freer to pursue “passion projects” than developers at EA.

“Building video games is just hard,” Hilleman said. “There is no such thing as building something you do not like. It just does not happen.”

Of course that doesn’t mean life is necessarily easier for devs who, at big companies, don’t have to translate anything into Maltese. James Swirsky, co-director of “Indie Game: The Movie,” said he saw plenty of hardship in his two years as a games tester at EA.

Devs there, he said, “were just as stressed out and pushed to the brink as the guys you see in the film.”

The key difference

Independent game developers share a lot of DNA with their big-business brethren, and the differences aren’t big enough to merit a culture war or to force audiences to choose between one or the other.

Furthermore, the mainstream world is not clueless: EA has learned its lessons from the years in the mid-aughts when console games seemed stuck in a rut, and has tried to reach out to and learn from the independent community — although Hilleman is quick to point out the irony of the situation, since in the 80s “Electronic Arts” was still small enough to be synonymous with the indie scene.

Meanwhile, Zynga has established a successful pattern of growing by acquisition, looking for the independent shops that are happy to sell out (not that that’s a bad thing, as OMGPOP and others can tell you).

But there’s still a key difference between the independents and the rest, and everyone watching the gaming space should note: With the rise of indie games as an economic force to be reckoned with, the charges are set for an explosion of creativity in the gaming world in the coming years. Indie devs have been around for decades, but now it’s easier than ever for them to make a comfortable living while making the games they personally pick and love.

The “hardcore” gamer community often derides social games on Facebook and mobile devices as too simplistic. But that will change. Games will get better and more ambitious as barriers to entry continue to fall and more outlier voices come into the mix.

With indies coming into the spotlight, games may finally be able to come into their own. Call it a real-world power-up.

Exclusive: Yahoo Director in Charge of Botched CEO Vetting to Step Down From Board

Kara Swisher — Tue, 08 May 2012 15:50:13 +0000

CSLie has claimed its first victim, although the mystery is still unsolved.

Patti Hart — the Yahoo director in charge of the search that resulted in the hiring of Scott Thompson as its CEO, making her directly responsible for a clearly botched vetting of his academic record — will not stand for re-election to the board at the next annual meeting, according to sources close to the situation.

Hart — who is CEO of International Game Technology, which makes electronic gaming equipment and systems products — is resigning. Apparently, said sources, her own board asked her to remove herself from the Yahoo mess to better focus on the company she actually runs.

But she is perhaps just a few steps ahead of being pushed, given her key role in the hiring of Thompson, who was president of eBay’s PayPal payments unit when he cold-emailed Yahoo director and Intuit CEO Brad Smith seeking the job.

A Yahoo spokesman declined to comment.

[UPDATE: Yahoo confirmed the inevitable departure later in the day and said the Yahoo board would have nine members going forward. Hart also released a statement, confirming the move.]
Hart, who came to the Yahoo board in 2010, has been head of its corporate governance and nominating committee.

The departure makes her the first casualty — but definitely not the last — of the controversy over how a fake college degree managed to get in Yahoo’s regulatory filings via Thompson’s inaccurate bio.

The issues around how Thompson was hired — including how background checks on him failed to discover that he never got a CS degree from the Boston area’s Stonehill College, as his longtime bio on eBay had claimed — are part of a new investigation by the board.

That will be officially announced later today, along with the hiring of an outside law firm to conduct the probe, which will be headed by independent director Fred Amoroso.

[UPDATE: Yahoo officially said it was forming a special committee to look at Thompson's bio snafu and the circumstances around his hiring. Along with Amoroso, the other members are John Hayes and Thomas McInerney, independent directors who joined the board in April.

"The special committee and the entire Board appreciate the urgency of the situation and the special committee will therefore conduct the review in an independent, thorough and expeditious manner," a statement from Yahoo said.

Interestingly, the statement did not include a show of support for Thompson, which often happens in such circumstances.]

They will have a lot to investigate. Such as this mystery: Thompson’s correct bio appeared in filings eBay made with the Securities and Exchange Commission, while Yahoo’s similar documents were inaccurate about his educational credentials.

Also under scrutiny: How the falsehood was added to Thompson’s public resume, and who put it there; why Thompson never noticed the error, there since at least 2004; why he declined to correct it when asked directly about it; and who at Yahoo might have known about the problem before the hiring.

It’s a basic case of who, what, where, when and how. And, most of all, why anyone would make such a dumb mistake.

Hart would seem to have all the answers to that, along with a forensic firm that worked on the vetting. Key Yahoo staffers were also involved, said sources, although its headhunting firm on the CEO search, Heidrick & Struggles, was not used in relation to Thompson.

Presumably, there is a paper trail of some sort, which was the subject of a legal demand by activist shareholder Daniel Loeb of Third Point yesterday. He uncovered the bio error last week, in the middle of pressing a proxy fight to garner board seats.

Loeb’s allegations also nailed Hart in much-less-egregious padding of her own college record, making it appear as if she had economics and marketing degrees. She has one in business administration, with “specialties” (Yahoo’s ridonkulous word, not mine) in economics and marketing.

While Hart’s leaving might assuage some, providing a convenient scapegoat to the bizarre situation, this is by no means over for Yahoo or Thompson.

Another increasingly potent issue is the ever-declining morale at the Silicon Valley Internet giant over the company’s odd response — it initially called the bio problem an “inadvertent error,” without further explanation — and also Thompson’s lack of transparency on the issue.

He released an email to employees last night, apologizing for the “distraction” of the resume issue, but not for the error itself.

That, and other of Thompson’s actions — he has been described to me, by many close to the situation, as defiant over the issue, and as blaming Loeb for conducting a personal vendetta — did not sit well with many, both inside and outside Yahoo.

A Yahoo spokeswoman told me earlier this week that there is much support for Thompson internally and externally, but declined to provide specifics.

But message boards I read were mostly negative about him, as are a plethora of direct emails to me on the situation. One clever commenter on this site bemoaned that Thompson might get off “Scott-free.”

Ouch! Nonetheless, the atmosphere at Yahoo is indeed unsettled.

“Sentiment from employees is unanimous that he must go,” said a Yahoo employee, who has no personal agenda that I can grok, in a common refrain. “He clearly knew and lied for years; and his handling since exposed has been unacceptable.”

Unacceptable or not, though, Hart is the only one going for now. But stay tuned.

Until then, here’s an appearance I made today on WSJ.com to talk about Hart’s departure:

[ See post to watch video ]

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Get Yer Subscription Xbox for $99 (And $15 a Month)

Lauren Goode — Mon, 07 May 2012 18:03:03 +0000

Microsoft will sell the Xbox 360 game and media console, with the Kinect sensor, for $99 as part of a two-year, $15 per month “Gold” contract. The news was first reported last week by The Verge. Interested takers, however, will have to live near one of the 21 Microsoft stores across the U.S. to opt in to the deal.

Silver Lake Grabs Large Minority Stake of WME to Push Digital Initiatives

Kara Swisher — Wed, 02 May 2012 17:59:41 +0000

Large private equity firm Silver Lake is buying a large stake in powerful Hollywood talent agency William Morris Endeavor Entertainment, which is being described as a way to turbocharge its digital efforts.

While the pair would not disclose any financial details of the deal, which they are calling a “strategic partnership,” sources said Silver Lake is acquiring 31 percent of WME.

“Over the years, we have been brick-building, as we have been doing more and more digitally,” said Patrick Whitesell, co-CEO of WME with Ari Emanuel, in an interview today. “But the opportunities are so vast, there is a need for more capital to do more.”

Whitesell and Emanuel said they had been considering a range of investors, especially among media entities, but that they wanted to work with Silver Lake since it had more digital experience as an active investor in technology.

Skype, for example, was the driver of the sale of Internet telephony giant Skype to Microsoft for $8.5 billion, while WME reps stars such as Matt Damon and Hugh Jackman, among others.

“In addition to capital, we really wanted a partner that to help us build it out that had more technology expertise,” said Emanuel. “We are good with brands and creative and talent, but there are many more Silicon Valley opportunities.”

In fact, WME has long tried to up its digital portfolio to respond to the needs of its clients and the changing nature of entertainment distribution as consumer Internet use has exploded. That’s included a digital advertising effort, as well as one in online gaming.

Silver Lake, which has most recently looked at investing in Yahoo, it was a chance to get closer to a trove of premium entertainment content.

“You have two forces at play, ubiquitous distribution and four billion people connected,” said Silver Lake’s Egon Durban. “As that distribution has been commoditized, the only way to differentiate is through A-plus content.”

Along with the core investment, WME and Silver Lake said they will also be considering other possible deals together as they move forward.

“There is nothing we like more than handing our best partners more money,” said Durban, who will join WME executive committee and also help create a technology advisory counsel at the firm.

Calling Marc Andreessen! Actually, in an interesting factoid, it was the well-known tech investor and entrepreneur who introduced Durban to Emanuel.

But this movie has been shown before and is not the first Hollywood-tech hookup to happen. A variety of efforts have waxed and waned over the years — most of which have largely been underwhelming.

Last year, for example, Accel Partners invested $40 million in Legendary Pictures and, back in 2008, Accel, the then William Morris Agency and AT&T formed an investment consortium to focus on Southern California start-ups.

Most closely related was the 2010 deal, in which TPG Capital took a 35 percent stake in Creative Artists Agency.

Here is the official press release on the Silver Lake-WME deal:

WME Press Release_5 02 12_FINAL

Samsung Hits "Play" on Series 7 Gamer Laptop

Bonnie Cha — Tue, 01 May 2012 21:45:47 +0000

Samsung is dialing it up a notch or four with its new gaming laptop, the Series 7 Gamer.

First introduced in January at CES 2012 and available today, the Series 7 Gamer features a unique dial that allows you to switch into four different modes and optimizes the laptop’s performance, depending on whether you’re using the computer for gaming or less intense tasks, such as creating documents.

For example, in Gaming mode, the main gaming keys are highlighted in red, and the lights around the speakers pulsate to the sounds of the game. Meanwhile, General mode turns the Series 7 into more of an everyday laptop, on which you can surf the Web, work on documents or view photos.

There is also a Quiet mode that disables the fan and all sounds, as well as a Power Save mode designed to save battery life by turning off all non-critical components.

Gaming is at the core of this device, however, and the Samsung Series 7 Gamer has some of the latest technology to power the Windows 7 laptop. This includes Intel’s new Ivy Bridge i7 processor (2.3 GHz Intel Core i7-3610QM CPU), Nvidia’s latest Geforce GTX 675M graphics, 16 gigabytes of memory and a 1.5 terabyte 7200RPM hard drive.

Games should look spectacular on the Series 7’s 17.3-inch full-HD (1,920 x 1,080 pixels) display, which Samsung promises will offer 50 percent more brightness than traditional PCs. Samsung also packs in a Blu-ray player, Dolby Home Theater v4 speakers and a built-in two-megapixel camera.

A heavyweight in features, the Series 7 gamer is also just plain old heavy. At 13.34 pounds, this is definitely not a device for toting around town every day, especially with its rated battery life of 3.7 hours, but it could be an attractive option for gaming enthusiasts looking for a powerful, portable solution.

The Samsung Series 7 Gamer costs $1,900 and is available now through a number of retailers, including Amazon, Newegg and TigerDirect.

Angry Birds Space Hits 50 Million Downloads in Just Over a Month

Ina Fried — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 15:24:11 +0000

Rovio said on Monday that its Angry Birds Space game has been downloaded more than 50 million times since its release on March 22. That, Rovio says, makes the title the fastest-growing mobile game to date.

How Does Valve Decide What to Work On?

Eric Johnson — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 18:34:31 +0000

The same way we make other decisions: by waiting for someone to decide that it’s the right thing to do, and then letting them recruit other people to work on it with them. We believe in each other to make these decisions, and this faith has proven to be well-founded over and over again.

– From page 13 of the Valve Handbook for New Employees

The Real Reason Tim Cook Was at Valve Headquarters (Comic)

Nitrozac and Snaggy — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 23:47:33 +0000

Here is the latest comic from our Joy of Tech friends at Geek Culture, Nitrozac and Snaggy. Joy of Tech appears three times a week in the Voices section of this site.

Drinking From the Firehose

Eric Johnson — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 06:59:11 +0000

The great thing about Zynga that people don’t get, is our values are up on the wall, and the top one, which I take really, really seriously, is “Be the CEO.”

– Veteran game designer Bob Bates talking about social gaming and corporate culture at Zynga

Amazon's Video Library Can Now Be Streamed on the PlayStation 3

Tricia Duryee — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 18:24:21 +0000

Amazon has partnered with Sony to launch Amazon Instant Video on the PlayStation 3, marking the company’s first partnership with a game console. Other services, like Netflix, work on the Xbox and Nintendo Wii. Amazon customers who pay $79 a year for its Prime delivery service will now be able to stream more than 17,000 TV shows and movies using the PS3. Previously, the videos could be viewed using some set-top boxes, over the Internet and on Amazon’s Kindle tablet.

Smithsonian Brings Classic Arcade Games to Life (Video)

Ina Fried — Sat, 24 Mar 2012 16:00:21 +0000

In one corner of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, a preteen boy was throwing balls at aliens, bringing Space Invaders to life. In another, families were posing with flowers, clouds and stars, and doing their best impressions of Mario from Super Mario Brothers, as a professional photographer snapped away.

It was all part of last weekend’s kickoff for an exhibit celebrating the art of the videogame. The three-day GameFest also featured speakers, music performances and movie screenings.

The GameFest part was just for the opening weekend, but “The Art of Video Games” exhibit itself runs through Sept. 30 in Washington, D.C.

Each generation of gaming gets its moment in the spotlight — from the early Atari, Coleco and Intellivision consoles, through Nintendo, Sega Genesis and Dreamcast, to today’s Xbox 360, Wii and PlayStation 3.

The exhibit is interactive, allowing visitors to not only view the evolution of the graphics in videogames, but also to try their hand at some classics. Lines formed as kids and adults alike queued up to play Super Mario and Pac-Man on a giant screen.

For more on the exhibit and the accompanying GameFest, check out our photo gallery:

Windows Phone Users Will Get Angry Birds Space, Eventually

Ina Fried — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 16:06:30 +0000

Windows Phone users who want to play Angry Birds Space will have to use their laptops or borrow a friend’s phone for now. However, the CEO of Rovio says the just-released game will eventually make its way to Microsoft’s phones.

“We are working towards getting Angry Birds Space to WP7,” he told Reuters, without giving a time frame.

This follows a similar pattern for the birds, which came to Windows Phone 7 last June, well after arriving on Android and the iPhone. Rovio launched the space-themed game on Thursday simultaneously for Android, iOS, Windows PCs and Macs. Chief Marketing Officer Peter Vesterbacka was quoted by Bloomberg this week as saying that the game might not come at all for Windows Phone, but Hed’s comments indicate that it will come at some point.

Microsoft recently announced it had just passed 70,000 applications in its Windows Phone Marketplace; however, it is still not on par with Android and iOS when it comes to getting its share of the latest hits.

YouTube Heavyweight Machinima Gets a Grown-Up With Gamer Cred

Peter Kafka — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 11:30:54 +0000

Machinima is a YouTube powerhouse that specializes in videos about videogames and the dudes that play them. Good fit for Nanea Reeves, the company’s new chief operating officer.

Reeves comes to Machinima after years in the games business, most notably at Electronic Arts and Jamdat, the mobile games company EA bought in 2005. Most recently she was at Gaikai, a cloud company that helps stream games to Web sites and devices.

Machinima is a different but related kind of company: It serves lots and lots and lots of videos to an audience that loves games.

The site is one of the most important players in the YouTube landscape, and passed the billion-monthly-view mark at the end of last year. There’s still an open question about how much that traffic is actually worth, though.

That’s in part because advertisers still don’t know what to do with YouTube eyeballs. And in part because much of Machinima is both a content creator and a distributor/ad network, which counts lots of third-party videos in its view totals.

One of Reeves’ first priorities will be to reduce Machinima’s dependency on YouTube, where all of its views come from, by creating a “multichannel platform” that will allow it to distribute its stuff to other sites and directly to devices. But investors seem okay with Machinima the way it is, too. The company is in the midst of a big-dollar funding round.

No New Xbox "Anytime Soon," Says Microsoft

John Paczkowski — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 16:45:55 +0000

Microsoft’s Xbox 360 is selling so well there’s no need for the company to release its successor this year.

The company confirmed today that it won’t be unveiling a new Xbox console at the E3 video game conference in June, and said consumers probably shouldn’t expect new hardware for quite a while.

“While we appreciate all the interest in our long-range plans for the future, we can confirm that there will be no talk of new Xbox hardware at E3 or anytime soon,” Microsoft’s Corporate Communications boss Frank Shaw told AllThingsD. “For us, 2012 is all about Xbox 360.”

And for good reason. Shaw notes that the past year has been the best ever for Xbox 360 — a year in which it outsold not just all other gaming consoles, but DVD players and digital media receivers as well.

With demand for the Xbox 360 that robust, Microsoft can take its time bringing a successor to market, milking another year of strong sales out of the 360, which is still riding an upswell of momentum thanks to its Kinect motion-sensor peripheral and a strong lineup of games.

Here Come the First D10 Speakers: New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Entrepreneur Sean Parker, Zynga’s Mark Pincus and More on the Red Hot Seat

Kara Swisher — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 18:40:29 +0000

Even though our D: All Things Digital conference always sells out well in advance every year without our announcing even one single speaker (like this one, too), it’s the action on stage that truly matters.

And in 2012 — which also happens to be the 10th anniversary of the confab of tech and media titans — it’s already shaping up to be another fantastic event in terms of programming, with a lineup of onstage appearances that is sure to make some news.

There are many more very big names to come, but Walt Mossberg and I are pleased to introduce the first group of interviewees, which will give you a glimpse into the firepower we expect at D10 in late May. It is again being held in Rancho Palos Verdes, just south of Los Angeles.

The initial speakers we have confirmed so far include: New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg; serial entrepreneur Sean Parker, who will appear with Spotify co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek; Zynga founder and CEO Mark Pincus; Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz; LinkedIn Chairman and VC Reid Hoffman, who will appear with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner; and Skype CEO Tony Bates.

It’s hard to imagine someone we have wanted to have onstage more than Michael Bloomberg, a man of many talents and interests. He’s known worldwide as the 108th Mayor of the City of New York. First elected in November 2001 (and again in 2005 and 2009), he is also one of the most compelling politicians in the U.S. today.

But Bloomberg is also a pioneer in terms of the business of digital news and information technology, having built a huge and groundbreaking media company and information service. Bloomberg (the company) has 310,000 subscribers to its financial news and information service, and more than 15,000 employees worldwide.

There will be a lot to talk about with him, from the upcoming presidential election to the state of our government to the future of innovation, news and technology.

Also sure to be voluble is Sean Parker, the legendary Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has been on the cutting edge of innumerable important digital trends of the recent decade. In 1999, Parker co-founded Napster, the controversial and industry-changing music service, at the age of 19.

He followed up with early contact information service Plaxo, and then shifted over to his critical involvement as founding president of Facebook in its early days as a start-up, an experience which was dramatized in the movie “The Social Network.” Parker continued to found and also invest in companies, from Causes to Spotify to his most recent, Airtime, a social video company that he is doing with his Napster co-founder Shawn Fanning.

Parker will be appearing onstage with Daniel Ek, another serial entrepreneur and technologist, who started his first company in 1997 at the age of 14. The Swedish native later co-founded online music phenom Spotify in 2006, with Martin Lorentzon.

The former CTO of Stardoll and founder of Advertigo leads a company that is changing the way music is delivered and consumed by fans, against a backdrop of intense change in the industry, succeeding even as a plethora of other services have stumbled.

Also a groundbreaker is Zynga CEO and founder Mark Pincus, yet another serial entrepreneur, whose latest effort in the online gaming arena has finally resulted in his biggest success. It recently went public, and now has a nearly $10 billion market cap.

Before founding Zynga in 2007, Pincus had already started three other companies: Push start-up Freeloader in 1995; automated tech-support company Support.com after that; and early social networking site Tribe.net in 2003.

(I met Pincus when he was at Freeloader in Washington, D.C., while writing a profile of him for the Washington Post, so I have enjoyed tracking his progress since then.)

Pincus is also an avid angel investor, with early stakes in Napster, Brightmail, Twitter and Facebook.

Reid Hoffman was another early investor in Facebook, along with many of Web 2.0’s most successful ventures. Well-known in Silicon Valley as an entrepreneur and VC, and recently dubbed the “start-up whisperer” by the New York Times (although I am not sure exactly what that means), he’s also chairman of LinkedIn, the business-networking service that also recently went public (at a $10 billion valuation, too).

He’ll appear with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, who started out life in Hollywood, but soon made his way to Silicon Valley as a top exec at Yahoo. After running its media division, Weiner spent a short time at venture firms before going operational again at LinkedIn.

What it takes to build and maintain momentum as tech companies move into more mature stages, as well as how the social networking space evolves, are among the many topics on tap for the pair.

The evolution of a start-up phenom — in this case, Internet telephony service Skype — will be among the topics covered by Tony Bates, who is now a president at Microsoft, which bought it last year.

As such, he is responsible, says the software giant in its description of his job, “for overseeing the company’s direction, strategy and overall mission to become a global communications service that will eventually reach billions of users.”

That’s a tall order for Bates, who came to Skype from a top job at Cisco. Bates has deep roots (or maybe, routing?) in the guts of the Internet, having done backbone-engineering strategy for Internet MCI. The U.K. native also holds nine patents.

Lastly, given all the activity we expect will happen between government regulatory agencies and tech companies over the next few years, we felt it was key to bring in FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz. He has been at the FTC as a commissioner since 2004, but was given the top job by President Barack Obama in 2009.

Among his priorities, according to his bio, is “promoting competition and innovation in the technology sector through law enforcement and policy initiatives; and protecting consumers’ privacy — especially while they are using the Internet.”

Uh-oh!

Leibowitz knows from regulation, having served as the Democratic chief counsel and staff director for the U.S. Senate Antitrust Subcommittee from 1997 to 2000, where he focused on competition policy and telecommunications matters, as well as a similar stint at the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism and Technology before that.

There will be a lot more speakers to come, of course. But, so far, we think D10 is off and running fast.

Viral Video: Finally, "Kara" Becomes a Cyborg (Bucket List, Check!)

Kara Swisher — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 09:00:02 +0000

Here is a very cool — if slightly creepy — video that debuted at the Game Developers Conference this week in San Francisco.

Made by the Paris-based Quantic Dream, developers of the groundbreaking Heavy Rain game, the “Kara” concept video is a look at the future of gaming, using full-body motion capture and a new computer-graphics engine. It is running in real time on Sony’s PlayStation 3 platform.

Mostly, it is just heartbreaking, as a robot comes to life and is quickly scared by the idea of how precious that can be.

Enjoy:

When Office Is in the Cloud and on a Tablet, Is It Really Office?

Arik Hesseldahl — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 23:12:28 +0000

Now we know how Microsoft feels about the whole “desktop as a service” thing that has started to gain traction in some quarters: It doesn’t like it.

Redmond today officially pushed back against OnLive, a company known best for its streaming gaming service that has created a streaming desktop for use on tablets, including Apple’s iPad and those running Android.

OnLive started offering the service last month for $4.99 per user per month, including two gigabytes of cloud storage.

In a corporate blog post today, Joe Matz, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for worldwide licensing, said the company sees OnLive’s product as a violation of its licensing terms for Office. “We are actively engaged with OnLive with the hope of bringing them into a properly licensed scenario, and we are committed to seeing this issue is resolved,” Matz wrote. The licensing terms allow some desktop functionality on a tablet, but not the full version delivered as a hosted service, he wrote.

Microsoft partners who host under the Services Provider License Agreement (“SPLA”) may bring some desktop-like functionality as a service by using Windows Server and Remote Desktop Services. Under this solution, the partner is free to offer this service to any customer they choose, whether or not they have a direct licensing agreement with Microsoft. However, it is important to note that SPLA does not support delivery of Windows 7 as a hosted client or provide the ability to access Office as a service through Windows 7. Office may only be provided as a service if it is hosted on Windows Server and Remote Desktop Services.

The response from OnLive was brief: “We have never commented on any licensing agreements.”

Nintendo Sells 4.5 Million 3DS Units in U.S.

Ian Sherr — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 01:00:56 +0000

Nintendo Co. has sold 4.5 million units of its latest hand-held device, the 3DS, in the U.S., setting what the company said was a strong pace and potential momentum for its next big product, the Wii U console.

The 3DS’s sales — $1.2 billion including software — mark an important milestone for the company and its dual-screen portable 3D-game system, which had a bumpy start in the first half of its initial year of sales.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

When Gaming Is Good for You

Robert Lee Hotz — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 16:00:21 +0000

Videogames can change a person’s brain and, as researchers are finding, often that change is for the better.

A growing body of university research suggests that gaming improves creativity, decision-making and perception. The specific benefits are wide ranging, from improved hand-eye coordination in surgeons to vision changes that boost night driving ability.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Here's Zynga's Filing on $228M HQ Building Deal (For All You Real Estate Types)

Kara Swisher — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 01:40:12 +0000

Zynga bought its San Francisco HQ building for $228 million, the company said in a regulatory filing, which I have embedded below.

Having enjoyed a party or two in the space at 650 Townsend Street over the years — even before it housed the online gaming company, I vaguely recall an epic Devo concert there during Web 1.0 — I can tell you it is a nice space and that Zynga has fixed it up real pretty.

Zynga CEO Mark Pincus — for those who might not know — is a bit of a real estate mogul himself, having housed Zynga and other start-ups in previous buildings he owned.

This one’s all Zynga’s, which sources said will give the fast-growing company — which just went public — an ability to lock in affordable growth space and also host community events.

I vote to bring back Devo ASAP, now that we can trash the place without worrying about the landlord.

ZNGA-20120305-8K-20120302

Microsoft Xbox Exec Named Activision Blizzard CFO

Lauren Goode — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 20:10:15 +0000

Microsoft veteran Dennis Durkin will join Activision Blizzard Inc. as chief financial officer, reporting to CEO Bobby Kotick and replacing interim CFO Thomas Tippl, who will continue to act as chief operating officer. Durkin had been at Microsoft since 1999, where he was vice president, COO and CFO of Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business (IEB), which includes Xbox.

Cloud-Paging Start-Up Numecent Emerges From Stealth, Spins Off Gaming Unit Approxy (Video)

Arik Hesseldahl — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 16:59:19 +0000

When you think about the way cloud computing works, there’s a progression to it, which, when taken to a logical extreme, looks a little like this: First your data migrates to the cloud and you interact with it via software that runs locally on your own machine. Then your applications go to the cloud and you run full-featured software via a browser. This is the classic software-as-a-service approach.

Now, there are lots of X-as-a-service plays in the IT world, and one of them is the desktop-as-a-service approach, where everything you need for a workaday PC can run on a virtualized server in the cloud, and all the user sees is a keyboard, mouse and screen. It’s efficient, easier and less costly to support than desktop PCs. But? You need to fully license every instance of software you use, in much the same way you would with an old-school desktop. And then there’s always the latency that comes from delivering something via the pipes, which are never quite fast enough, no matter what you do.

But what if you could deliver a full computing experience — operating systems, applications, gaming, the whole enchilada — virtually? Two weeks ago, I saw a demonstration of just such a service that kind of blew my mind. And today the company behind it, Numecent, is coming out of stealth mode and also announcing a spinoff.

First, let’s cover the basics: Numecent is a start-up run by Osman Kent, the onetime CEO and co-founder of 3Dlabs, the company that in the 1990s more or less started the graphics processor industry, which Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices are the leaders of today. The company has a bunch of undisclosed investors, but last month TechCrunch reported that it had raised $2 million in a series A that was part of a larger $10 million funding round. I’m told there are 107 individual shareholders in the company.

So what does Numecent’s Technology do? It calls its technology “cloud paging,” and in its corporate literature it takes pains to explain that it is nothing like “pixel streaming,” a technique in which applications, mostly games, run on a cloud server and deliver the experience of the game — literally the pixels of a gaming environment — to a PC over the Internet. This is essentially how OnLive, a gaming outfit, works.

The fundamental problem here is that while the cloud is good for streaming linear content like movies and music, where one bit follows logically after another, it’s less good at nonlinear stuff, like applications. One bit doesn’t necessarily follow in a logical order from another, because users jump around from one process or feature to another. So if you’re trying to run a software application via the cloud, you can run into trouble pretty easily if it’s a processor-heavy program.

Cloud paging, as best I understand it, uses the Internet to transmit x86 chip instructions — basically telling the Intel or AMD processor in a PC what to do remotely. What this allows is something Numecent describes as “friction-free” computing. What that means in practice is that you could run any application on your local system from the cloud, in an almost-instant, on-demand manner. And when you’re done using it you just shut it down and your local system is left more or less untouched. When you’re done using it, it’s as if the software had never been on your PC.

Numecent’s cloud-paging scheme breaks software up into small pieces, called “pages,” that can then be pushed out dynamically. The user’s machine creates what’s called a virtual memory management unit, which handles the job of requesting the pages that are delivered. Connections between the client machine and the server are also strongly encrypted.

The end result, the company says, is a reduction by as much as 60x in deployment and delivery time of applications. And there’s also nothing to maintain. When the user is done using the virtual application or machine, there’s nothing left on the client machine.

Let’s say you’re a part-time graphic designer who works for a company only two days a week. The company would normally have to pay for you to have Adobe Creative Suite installed on the machine you use. This can easily run a few thousand dollars. But if you could check it out for a few hours and run it on a cloud server, with the same features and the same native speed, as though it were installed on your local system, it would cost your employer a lot less.

Central to all this are 10 patents that Numecent has on its cloud-paging technology. I’m told that these are battle-tested patents, and that Microsoft and Citrix Systems are among its licensees.

The same experience can be applied to games. Most games worth having can be bought from download stores today, but they’re huge and take a lot of time to download and then install. What if you could just play whatever game you wanted, pay for the time you use it, and then stop paying when you’re done? That’s sort of the idea behind Approxy, a spinoff that Numecent is launching today, as well. Yavuz Ahiska, another 3Dlabs alum, is taking it out of Numecent, and plans to offer a white-labeled cloud gaming service that gaming companies can license. Approxy is described in a lot more detail in the video (below) that Numecent shared with me exclusively.

Numecent’s plan is to essentially spin out different companies that put its cloud-paging technology to work in different contexts.

Approxy from Arik Hesseldahl on Vimeo.