GamesBeat

Ubisoft hits reduced expectations, announces new Tom Clancy game

Ubisoft, the big French game company, reported third fiscal quarter results that met reduced expectations for its sales of video games in the busy holiday quarter.

Sales for the quarter were 495 million euros, down 2.7 percent from 508 million euros a year earlier. For the first nine months of the fiscal year, sales were down 22.5 percent. Ubisoft said it is refocusing its high-end game strategy by concentrating on more regular releases for its... Continue Reading

Nvidia’s Optimus adjusts your laptop graphics to fit the app

Nvidia is launching its Optimus technology today in an effort to match your laptop’s graphics horsepower to a given application.

The technology will assess a running application and decide whether to engage Nvidia’s own graphics chip or an Intel-provided graphics component that is part of a laptop’s chip set. Optimus can thus deliver the most appropriate graphics power while preserving battery life.

The new technology recognizes an old fact. A lot of laptops come with... Continue Reading

Electronic Arts makes a huge bet with Dante’s Inferno

Fresh off the success of Mass Effect 2, Electronic Arts is launching one of its big bets on a brand new video game as it debuts Dante’s Inferno.

The game goes on sale today. EA spent an estimated $3 million or so on a Super Bowl commercial touting the game. EA chief executive John Ricciteillo said the ad helped drive more than 3 million downloads of content related to the game as well as strong... Continue Reading

BioShock 2 Q&A: the trick to creating a critically acclaimed sequel

The first BioShock game surprised gamers when it debuted on the Xbox 360 in August, 2007. It was a horror-shooting game with mature themes and an imaginative story set in an underwater paradise gone bad. Today, Take-Two Interactive’s 2K Games division is launching the sequel, BioShock 2. The first game sold more than 3 million copies and got an average review rating of 94 out of 100 on the review aggregator Metacritic. Jordan Thomas, creative... Continue Reading

More GamesBeat@GDC speakers: Helgason, Pham and Mahoney

VentureBeat’s upcoming GamesBeat@GDC executive game conference is set for March 10 in San Francisco at the Game Developers Conference in the Moscone Convention Center. Here are some of the latest speakers we’ve added to the program:

David Helgason, CEO of Unity Technologies. He will be on a panel on Disruptive Innovation. Helgason’s company makes a 3-D game engine that enables just about anybody to create 3-D games that run inside a web browser, with no... Continue Reading

Offerpal Media lets you pay for games by putting you to work

Offerpal Media is launching a new way to pay for games and other social apps today. Basically, Offerpal is going to put you to work.

The new alternative to making a payment for a game with a credit card is called Offerpal Tasks. With it, you can get what you want — a virtual good that would ordinarily cost money — by performing a task that someone on the Internet needs to get done.

Offerpal... Continue Reading

Zeus Research and STi let you use phone cards to buy virtual goods

STi Prepaid has created a huge empire with prepaid phone cards, selling over 200 million cards a year in 200,000 stores.

In a smart move, Zeus Research is teaming up with STi to create a way to use those cards to pay for virtual goods inside online games.

San Francisco-based Zeus research is announcing today that STi will provide a massive increase in distribution for Zues’ online entertainment partners. Virtual goods are turning into a... Continue Reading

Electronic Arts tips its hand on big (and mysterious) titles in coming year

Electronic Arts is launching a number of big titles in the coming fiscal year that should get gamers excited, according to the company’s conference call with analysts today.

EA typically announces titles during its quarterly calls to get gamers frothing and to give analysts guidance about its expected financial performance. Those titles could always be delayed, but EA has been shipping more games on time than it used to.

During today’s conference call, EA chief... Continue Reading

Electronic Arts beats reduced earnings forecasts

Electronic Arts reported third fiscal quarter results today that were in line with the reduced expectations analysts had.

For the third fiscal quarter ended Dec. 31, EA reported revenue of $1.24 billion, down from $1.64 billion a year ago. Net loss was $82 million, compared to a net loss of $641 million a year ago. Loss per share was 25 cents compared to a loss of $2 per share a year ago. On a non-GAAP... Continue Reading

Unity Technologies strikes multi-year deal with LEGO for 3-D browser games

Unity Technologies is announcing today it has struck a three-year deal with LEGO in which the toy company will use Unity’s 3-D animation engine in its upcoming online games.

San Francisco-based Unity makes a game engine, which is a set of tools that makes it easy to create a game. While many online games are based on Adobe’s Flash technology, those games tend to be two-dimensional and cartoon-like. Unity enables game developers using it to... Continue Reading

Sony Online Entertainment’s Free Realms hits 8M users

Free-to-play online games were pioneered in Asia and are making lots of money for game publishers there who sell virtual goods to users inside the free games.

That model seems to be taking off in the U.S. now, based on the latest announcement from Sony Online Entertainment. The San Diego, Calif.-based company’s Free Realms massively multiplayer online game has amassed 8 million registered users since its launch in April 2009. Prior to the launch of... Continue Reading

Latest GamesBeat@GDC speakers: Facebook, GameStop Digital Ventures, Sony

We’re starting to get pretty excited about this. Our upcoming GamesBeat@GDC executive game conference is set for March 10 in San Francisco at the Game Developers Conference in the Moscone Convention Center. Today’s featured speakers are as follows:

Gareth Davis, platform manager, Facebook. Davis has a big responsibility at Facebook. There are more than 400 million users on the social network, and the No. 1 activity they do is play games. And while those games... Continue Reading

Ideaworks Labs lets you publish mobile apps to multiple platforms

Creating a cross-platform smartphone app isn’t easy. It takes lots of work to port a single game or other app to the hundreds of different cell phones and carriers in the world.

Various attempts to make this easy have their pitfalls. But London-based Ideaworks Labs says it has solved the problem with its Airplay software development kit. It launched its fourth version of the software in October, and today it is adding a version for... Continue Reading

Tapulous launches new iPhone game, Riddim Ribbon

Tapulous has managed to maintain a strong business on the iPhone with its Tap Tap Revenge music games, despite the entry of RockBand from the big guys, MTV Networks and Electronic Arts. Now Tapulous wants to hit another home run with a new music app for the iPhone.

Riddim Ribbon is a “music racing” game, and it’s branded with the hot band The Black Eyed Peas, whose hit songs provide the soundtracks for the game.... Continue Reading

New Zealand’s MiniMonos raises $550,000 for kids virtual world

Virtual worlds aren’t exactly fashionable these days. They went through a hype cycle when everyone predicted that we’d all be living virtual lives in online worlds like Second Life. Now our expectations of them are more down to earth — but new virtual worlds continue to pop up.

MiniMonos is the latest. The Christchurch, New Zealand-based company has raised $800,000 in New Zealand dollars ($550,000 U.S.) for a virtual world for children.

MiniMonos is a... Continue Reading

Game developers move to iPhone, ignore Wii

Game developers are shifting their attention to the iPhone and starting to ignore the Nintendo Wii, according to Game Developer Research.

Developers creating games for mobile phones increased to 25 percent, up from 12 percent a year ago. Of those mobile developers, 75 percent are targeting iPhone and iPod Touch games. The total number of iPhone developers is more than twice the number making games for the Nintendo DS and Sony PlayStation Portable.

That could... Continue Reading

Check out the latest new speakers and new site for GamesBeat@GDC

We’re excited to unveil our latest speakers for GamesBeat@GDC, our executive game conference that takes place at the Game Developers Conference on Wednesday, March 10, at the Moscone convention center in San Francisco. We’ve created a Facebook group for the conference where you can chat with fellow attendees and see who’s attending. We welcome your suggestions on that page. And we’ve created our own GamesBeat 2010 dedicated web site. Look for more details to be... Continue Reading

Kongregate proves it can make developers money on browser-based games

Kongregate, which operates a web site for indie games, is announcing today it has had good success with its app platform for browser-based games. What’s more, it’s sharing some metrics so it can show potential developers how it can make them money.

The San Francisco-based company launched its Konduit Application Platform in December. The idea was to take sophisticated indie games, such as massively multiplayer online games, and give them monetization and social sharing benefits,... Continue Reading

Microsoft to discontinue Xbox Live for original Xbox

The Xbox Live online game service has had long run, but Microsoft announced today that it will discontinue the service, which is for the original Xbox console launched back in 2001.

The service will be shut down by April 15, according to an open letter posted by Xbox Live general manager Marc Whitten. That’s likely going to enrage the fans of multiplayer Halo 2, which has persisted as a fan favorite since the game launched... Continue Reading