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GTA Online and other digital content could generate $206M in next year for Take-Two

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GTA Online

Take-Two Interactive, the parent company of publisher Rockstar Games, could generate $206 million in revenue in the next year from Grand Theft Auto V’s digital content. That’s a big boost in revenue for the year’s hottest video game, which sold a record $1 billion’s worth of games in its first three days.

This estimate includes about $41 million in microtransactions from GTA Online, the online world based on GTA V, according to market researcher SuperData Research. GTA Online is now available as a free download on the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live (you need GTA V, of course, to play it). Roughly 20 million players have already bought Grand Theft Auto V. By comparison, Take-Two’s Borderlands 2 generated only $10 million in revenue over a  year. Take-Two’s revenues will be an important barometer for the future of game revenues, SuperData said.

GTA V is an open world game where players can play as criminals in Los Santos, a satirical version of modern Los Angeles. The game was five years in the making at a reported cost of $260 million. It made those expenses back in revenue in just eight hours of sales. It’s extremely popular — especially among hardcore male gamers — because it is a high-quality title, holds nothing sacred, and takes satirical jabs at modern life.

In addition to that, GTA V is expected to reap $165 million downloadable content (DLC) revenue in the next year. Over five years, the game is expected to generate $93 million in microtransactions, such as when users pay real money to get better guns or cars in the game, and $344 million in DLC.

The DLC is expected to add more storylines and experiences through downloadable content. The microtransaction revenue isn’t that high because Rockstar isn’t forcing players to purchase virtual goods. Rather, players can earn items over time without buying anything — they only buy money if they wish to speed up that process.

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Take-Two made $22M on its investment in gameplay livestreaming king Twitch

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Twitch at E3 2013.

Take-Two Interactive Software chairman Strauss Zelnick can thank Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos for this: The publisher reported that it received $22 million as it cashed out its investment in Twitch, the gameplay livestreaming company.

Amazon acquired Twitch for $970 million in September. That means that Take-Two held about 2.3 percent of the ownership of Twitch. No doubt Take-Two is happy with its return, although the company did not say what the initial investment was.

 

2K’s Battleborn is multiplayer combat in a drugged-out sci-fi world

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Battleborn's Miko and Thorn

Forgive me if I’m seeing the world through a psychedelic miasma. I’ve played a few rounds of combat in the multiplayer game Battleborn, coming soon from developer Gearbox Software and Take-Two Interactive’s 2K publishing label.

2K announced that the sci-fi shooter will have 25 unique playable heroes, a story mode that is playable alone or with up to four other friends, and several types of competitive multiplayer modes. It will have a persistent progression system, which means that Gearbox is investing heavily in this brand new intellectual property. And Gearbox’s last franchise, Borderlands, has sold more than 25 million copies.

I’m not going to argue too much with Gearbox about its creativity. I admire the company’s chutzpah, but I have to say, it’s hard for me to get excited about what I’ve seen of Battleborn right now. The main appeal could be as an esport, with five players challenging five players in the tradition of multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) titles like League of Legends. But in contrast to LoL, this game is a first-person shooter, dubbed a “hero shooter” because it has so many characters. In terms of competition, it is more like a rival to the recently released Nexon game Dirty Bomb.

“We have some very ambitious goals,” said Randy Varnell, the creative director on Battleborn at Gearbox. “We want to mix the types of characters you have in the game with characters with guns, swords, bows, and magic. There’s a lot of variety in the characters and the aesthetics.”

Battleborn is fun, and it has some of that signature humor that Gearbox created with Borderlands, but I’m not sure it’s going to stand out from the pack games that are hitting the market. It’s hard to put my finger on it. The universe of Battleborn is pretty and colorful but in a not so serious way, like Borderlands or Team Fortress 2. The missions are directed, like with Destiny, but the characters are hard to parse and the story isn’t really full of comedy as the whole universe stands on the verge of collapse if you fail.

Battleborn is set in the future where nearly every star in the universe has gone dark at the hands of a mysterious enemy, the Veralsi. Solus, the last star, is the only beacon of hope for the universe’s surviving population. There’s also a betrayer among the ranks of Battleborn, or the heroes. Rather than uniting humanity, the fading of the stars has led to a great war among different factions who are desperate for the remaining resources. The fighting is a combination of melee weapons and long-range shooting.

The mysterious enemy is threatening to extinguish the last star, and the heroes are the only ones who can stop it. The graphics help the game stand out, but not necessarily in a good way. The cartoon style is not bad, sort of like a superhero comic book’s art. But the palette does get a little crazy in the middle of a mission, with an explosion of colors that make you feel like you are in the middle of a druggie fantasy.

“It’s about whether you can live together, or die alone,” Varnell said.

Features and modes

Miko healing in Battleborn

Above: Miko healing in Battleborn

Image Credit: 2K

Battleborn has a story mode that is a narrative experience. You can play it in single-player, fighting with artificial intelligence allies on your side. Or you can play it cooperatively with a total of five players, either splitscreen or online. The story is modular, enabling players to choose which missions to do. You can also complete a mission again to collect better loot.

With 25 heroes, you’ll have a lot to choose from. Each has its own personality, attitude, and weaponry.

Using a “growth system” known as the Helix System, a character can level up from one to 10 in a single story mission or competitive match. Players can earn new capabilities on the fly and unlock new skins as well. I found this to be one of the most enjoyable features of the game.

“Every time you play, you get a choice on how you’ll level up,” Varnell said.

The competitive multiplayer system can handle up to 5-on-5 players with three distinct modes. That includes Incursion, where teams of heroes defend their base from waves of A.I.-controlled minions while working together alongside their own minions to destroy their opponents’ base. Another mode is Devastation, where teams of heroes face off in a fast-paced deathmatch and must capture and hold objectives on the map to win. The last mode is Meltdown, where heroes protect their minions as they march to their death at the center of the map. Points are scored for minions who throw themselves into the incinerator, and the team with the most points wins.

The game has a persistent progression system. All earned experience points contribute to leveling up a character as well as a command rank. That latter part means players can rank up their own player profile, earning badges and titles. Collected loot can be used to benefit any hero that the player chooses to command.

Solus has a numerous factions, including the Peacekeepers, the sworn protectors of Solus; the Eldrid, the preservers of the natural order of the universe; the Rogues, mercenaries only concerned with their own survival; the Last Light Consortium, the war profiteers, exploiting others for their own gain; and the Jennerit Empire, who rule others by force, valuing power above all else.

25 playable characters

Co-op in Battleborn

Above: Co-op in Battleborn

Image Credit: 2K

The playable heroes belong to the different factions, with huge numbers of choices akin to a Super Smash Bros. title. They all come with their own weapons and powers.

The characters include Montana, a tank-like character who has an awesome minigun. I used this character a couple of times as I was playing cooperative multiplayer. He is very powerful, but he becomes vulnerable when his minigun overheats. He can also run over other enemies with a shoulder dash.

Oscar Mike is a clone character who is built for combat. He uses a cool assault rifle, has battle armor that also serves as a stealth suit, and has “excellent personal hygiene.”

I also played as Teshka Elessamorn, nicknamed ”Thorn” for her short temper. She was the last aelfrin child of her homeworld before it was darkened by the Varelsi. Thorn ranges the jungles of Ekkunar and beyond with her bow ”Kreshek” and her advanced Eldrid magic. One of her skills is “blight.”

Miko is the last surviving bud of a once planet-sized fungal colony. She is widely known as a compassionate and very skilled healer. Now more of a combat botanist, Miko devotes her time to restoring all that can be restored and throwing “kunai” at things that cannot.

Verod Rath is mistaken for a vampire a lot. He is a master bladesmith and swordsman of the Jennerit Empire, once a member of the Keepers of the Blade — the elite guard of Empress Lenore. Rath has three energy blades with lethal efficiency.

The unhinged and unpredictable Orendi channels powerful magic-like energies, striving to test herself against the universe’s greatest foes. She has earned the title “Chaos Witch.”

Marquis d’Caliber is a high-society sociopath who wreaks havoc on the unwashed masses with his sniper cane Bindlebane and his explosively temperamental mechanical owl, Hoodini.

Phoebe is an inventor, adventurer, and heiress to one of the largest family fortunes within the Last Light Consortium. She is known as “Mageblade” among her friends, and she is fascinated with Edrid magic relics. We saw Phoebe in action, and her high-pitched voice was very annoying.

Caldarius won his name and fame in the Jennerit Fighting Pits. Armed in the jet-enhanced J-HTX Assault Frame armor of the Jennerit Shock troops, Caldarius is brutally efficient at hit-and-run close quarters fighting.

Boldur the Unbearable is a stubborn, ax-wielding native of Ekkunar who has survived the last two millennia of interruptions to his quiet forest life through sheer stubbornness and the aid of the civilian militia he leads called the Woodsworn. He’s a dwarf, and he was the least popular of the group.

Hands-on combat

Orendi and Phoebe in Battleborn

Above: Orendi and Phoebe in Battleborn

Image Credit: 2K

I played a few rounds of combat with several characters, including the tank and the witch-like character Thorn. But there wasn’t as much variety between the two as I expected. In both cases, I was firing at enemies as much as possible, using my special weapons occasionally, and then running for cover when I was vulnerable.

We started out at level four, which meant we could each choose four augmentations to change the way our character played. When you progress through a level, you pick up little yellow crystals, or shards. These are important as currency in the game. You can use them to upgrade your sentry gun, which sprays bullets in a given direction. Battleborn has mini challenges, like requiring the whole team to pick up a bunch of shards in one minute.

That wasn’t much variety. We played the same cooperative multiplayer story mission — “To the Edge of the Void” — a few times, where five human-controlled players had to fight our way into a compound, unlock new areas, unleash a giant walking tank-like machine, and then protect the base from an all-out assault. I found that it certainly paid off to stick close to your friends. Our job was to land on Bliss, a frozen moon. We had to fight off the enemy and then set off a big bomb. We had to deal with taking out guardians and generators and then attack big monsters (Thrall Ascendant), which can spawn additional enemies into the fight during the battle.

I’m not yet seeing the benefits of having so many characters. I hope, in reality, the gameplay variety will be fairly obvious among the characters. Otherwise, the opposite problem will ensue — confusion. Besides firepower, there is also a lot of variety in how fast the characters move. Phoebe can’t jump very high, but Thorn, who can augment herself with a double jump, has no problem vaulting to upper levels.

As a team, we didn’t have much problem winning the round against the A.I. in several rounds of the same mission. Overall, it wasn’t that challenging. And after I played the mission once, I didn’t really want to play it again. But in this demo, I had to.

But Battleborn definitely has some pluses. The sounds are cacophonous and pulse-pounding, adding a lot of drama to the fighting. And it was easy and fun to level up and gain new capabilities in the middle of the match. If that kind of leveling up can tip the balance of power in a battle, that could make the matches much more interesting. Again, the problem was that I played the same way regardless of the situation or which character I was playing.

At the very end of the mission, we were rewarded with a comical explosion that was almost like watching fireworks go off. That was what made me think it was a druggie fantasy.

Conclusion

Rath and Boldur melee in Battleborn

Above: Rath and Boldur melee in Battleborn

Image Credit: 2K

Battleborn could get better with more revelations in the future. But I’m not sold yet. It has a cartoon art style that will turn off the fans of realistic shooters. And it’s not obviously funny the way that Borderlands was. It does pay off to work together cooperatively to fight the enemies. It felt like the game was a mash-up of a shooter, with a MOBA overlaid on top of it, in an effort to get players excited about playing it as an esport.

But Battleborn seems to be lacking something that would make it stand out from all of the other online shooters and combat games on the market: innovation. I know I haven’t seen much of the game at all, but Gearbox still has a lot to prove to me.

Surviving the watery dangers of Civilization: Beyond Earth — Rising Tide (hands-on)

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A frozen biome in the Rising Tide expansion of Civilization: Beyond Earth.

The first time I sent out a gunboat to explore the waters of my world in Rising Tide, a giant squid lashed its tentacles onto it and destroyed the vessel.

That’s just one of the dangers from the deep that players face in this expansion for Civilization: Beyond Earth, which debuts on Windows PCs this fall for $30. Published by Take-Two Interactive’s 2K Games label and developed by Firaxis Games, Rising Tide focuses on civilizations with floating cities on watery worlds. The expansion is the first major expansion pack for Beyond Earth, the latest version of Civilization set in a future when humanity colonizes the stars. Rising Tide is an important downloadable content (DLC) addition that is aimed at keeping gamers loyal to Civilization: Beyond Earth well after its initial 2014 launch.

I played the first 150 turns of the latest preview build at the 2K office in Novato, California. Besides the Waterworld-like landscape with floating cities, this expansion offers a new diplomacy system, four additional factions, a new artifact system, two new biomes, and the capability to mix affinities from two different civilizations. All of these changes mean that die-hard Civ fans should have plenty of reasons to pick up this DLC. But I don’t think any of these features will convince new players to pick up the game.

Oceans away

You can create floating cities in Rising Tide, the expansion for Civilization: Beyond Earth.

Above: You can create floating cities in Rising Tide, the expansion for Civilization: Beyond Earth.

Image Credit: 2K Games

One of the first things you’ll notice upon touching down on a new planet for colonization is the new graphics. It has plenty of water, and now it is transparent, with shallow parts near shore and deeper parts further out. Resources are visible beneath the surface, as are a variety of sea creatures.

The familiar grid of hexagons still covers the entire map, and you can still build on land and send satellites into the orbital layer above the planet. But now the oceans come into play with creatures such as huge Kraken and sentient and monstrous coral reefs.

“Graphically, we created new shaders, textures and other tech for the water. It’s now transparent and has visual clarity for depth,” said lead game producer Andrew Frederiksen in an interview with GamesBeat. “Some resources appear on different types of water. The tiles have different layers. You have to research technology to go into the deeper ocean. It’s been a lot of work. We wanted to push the envelope more and take these civilizations into new places.”

You still build cities in the traditional way: picking a good site, putting a colonist on the location, and then developing the tiles around it to enable it to gather resources from farms, mines, and solar collectors. Now you can create floating structures to collect the resources on the water around your cities. You can also physically move your floating cities to new locations, too.

How it plays

That becomes important as you deal with alien threats such as the giant coral, which can rope off your city and prevent all movement coming in or out of it. I created a couple of cities on two different maps. Fortunately, the coral didn’t gang up on me even after I started blasting back at my alien attackers.

Besides new sea creatures, this expansion also has new sea vessels. You can build Explorers that go on land or water as well as patrol boats, gun boats, trade ships, and submarines. As you progress and research new technologies, you can build more sophisticated seagoing craft. The submarines have an advantage of being invisible to an enemy’s surface units.

One of the things you have to learn through trial-and-error is just how tough your gunboats and submarines are against the sea creatures. Initial hostilities began and I chose to eradicate alien life on the planet.

In the early parts of my game, I had to make sure that my colony grew and the aliens didn’t eradicate me. Meanwhile, I had to explore the surrounding area and keep enough of a military presence to ward off attacks from the aliens in the water. I set up a floating city, and I kept my gunboats close so that I could bombard alien attackers with my Home City artillery, before committing naval ships to the attack.

I learned that the hardware. I sent some gunboats out into the ocean to survey the area. One of them was attacked by a Kraken and sunk within a couple of rounds of combat. By ganging up on a Kraken, my fleet was able to do enough damage to bring down the giant sea monster.

New faces, new foes?

Duncan Hughes, leader of the North Sea Alliance in Rising Tide expansion for Civilization: Beyond Earth.

Above: Duncan Hughes, leader of the North Sea Alliance in Rising Tide expansion for Civilization: Beyond Earth.

Image Credit: 2K Games

You also have to deal with four new factions. A previously announced faction includes Al Falah, from the Middle East. Another being announced today is Duncan Hughes, a late arrival from Earth. He’s a leader of the North Sea Alliance, a collection of Northern European countries. A Scottish sailor, he comes from roots in organized labor. His faction controls the seas. Their cities can move faster and they have a higher defense.

“When they are in the water, they are a force to be reckoned with,” said Frederiksen.

Frederiksen said the new diplomacy system expands your choices dramatically beyond declaring war, making peace, or trading goods.

Now you’ll see what the leaders fear, and the things that cause them to be afraid of your faction, or the things they like. If the other leader cares a lot about a strong economy, you will please that leader if you do things that strengthen your own economy or both economies, such as establishing trade routes. The hope is that the diplomacy of the artificial intelligence leaders will be as interesting as playing against another human.

“The diplomacy changes are big,” Frederiksen said. “You have a wider variety of choices. But you also have transparency into other leaders on fear and respect. That affects the options you have and who you can be friends with. You can try to guide the diplomatic landscape.”

Now you’ll have a better idea of where things stand with an ally and where they are heading. You still won’t know if a faction will attack you in three turns. But you’ll be able

You can also develop hybrid affinities. In the prior game, you could choose an affinity, such as Supremacy, focused on robots; Purity, focused on human development; and Harmony, focused on embracing alien life. You can now mix those affinities as needed and still stay on a particular path toward victory.

“You get some new gameplay out of those hybrid affinities,” Frederiksen said.

Al Falah faction of Rising Tide expansion of Civilization: Beyond Earth.

Above: Al Falah faction of Rising Tide expansion of Civilization: Beyond Earth.

Image Credit: 2K Games

Take-Two plans new ‘triple-A’ mystery titles for release in future

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Karl Slatoff, president of Take-Two Interactive.

Correction: I misheard the statement, fixing to future titles in coming years.

Take-Two Interactive Software will release unnamed “triple-A” titles in its future fiscal years, according to a company executive. Karl Slatoff, the president of New York-based Take-Two, announced during the company’s quarterly earnings call today that the company would launch unnamed new games during its future fiscal years. That should get tongues wagging about what those games might be.

The company just reported non-GAAP earnings per share of 31 cents (versus a loss of 14 cents a year ago) on revenues of $366.4 million (up 142 percent from a year ago). Analysts had expected non-GAAP earnings per share of 36 cents on revenues of $351 million.

While analysts expected more, Take-Two’s ability to stay profitable long after the initial launch of a Grand Theft Auto title. In years past, Take-Two would lose money in non-GTA years. The biggest contributors to revenue in the first fiscal quarter were Grand Theft Auto V and Grand Theft Auto Online, NBA 2K15, Borderlands: the Handsome Collection, and WWE 2K15.

If there’s any title up for renewal, it could be another installment in the Red Dead Redemption, the critically acclaimed third-person shooter set in the Wild West. At least, that’s what I am hoping for.

Take-Two already announced upcoming titles such as Mafia III, XCOM 2, and Battleborn.

Take-Two cans Borderlands Online — 150 people lose jobs as 2K China studio closes

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Gearbox just blew its brain matter all over Quebec.

Take-Two Interactive has shut down a 150-person game studio in China and stopped development on Borderlands Online, which would have been a free-to-play online game in the Asian market. The move is another sign that taking Western games and developing them for the Chinese market is a tough and expensive task.

China has become the major gaming market in the world, with about $15 billion in sales across online and mobile games, according to market research reports.

The 2K China studio was based in Shanghai, with offices in Shanghai. Take-Two is the publisher of games such as Grand Theft Auto V, and it is the 15th-largest publicly traded game company in the world. Take-Two did not shut down Visual Concepts China, the Chinese studio in Shanghai that created and operates NBA 2K Online, and it is still planning to launch Civilization Online in Korea. 2K also still has a game-testing office in Chengdu, China, which is also not affected.

In a statement, a spokesman for Take-Two confirmed, “We are excited about the opportunities to expand our business in Asia, and we remain committed to delivering triple-A offerings for that region. At this time, we can confirm that we are closing 2K China. We determined that the additional time required to finish current projects at the studio, particularly Borderlands Online, would not yield a favorable return on investment.”

The spokesman added, “We are working with affected staff to identify other opportunities within the company where possible. The costs associated with the closure will not materially impact the company’s financial results. This decision does not affect our team behind NBA 2K Online, which has been and continues to be highly successful for our company. In addition, we look forward to the commercial launch of Civilization Online in Korea during this fiscal year.”

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Sid Meier’s Civilization VI debuts this fall with a new take on cities

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Civilization VI allows you to spread your cities out across the map.

Take-Two Interactive‘s 2K label and Firaxis Games are pulling out a nice surprise for gamers today. They’re announcing that Sid Meier’s Civilization VI is going to ship on the PC on October 21.

The new turn-based strategy game is the next entry in the award-winning Civilization franchise that Sid Meier created 25 years ago. It debuts on the same day as Electronic Arts’ shooter game Battlefield 1, but Civilization has such a following that it may very well hold its own against the Battlefield 1 marketing machine. The Civilization franchise has sold more than 33 million copies, including 8 million for Civilization V, which debuted on the PC in 2010.

Dennis Shirk, an 11-year veteran at Firaxis and lead producer for Civilization VI, said in an interview with GamesBeat that the same team from Civ V is working on the new game. Those who enjoyed Civilization V will notice that many of the changes from that game will carry over like a “warm blanket” to Civilization VI, he said. One of those big changes was to spread the military units out from a giant stack in a single hexagon to a bunch of units spread out across the map.

“We loved how the last product turned out, and we’re moving forward with the same team,” Shirk said. “And everything that Civ fans like about Civ V is going to be in there too. We’ve put some new systems on top.”

Cities spread out across the map

Civilization VI will force you to decide what a particular city will specialize in.

Above: Civilization VI will force you to decide what a particular city will specialize in.

Image Credit: 2K/Firaxis Games

The big difference that fans will notice this time is that the player is being encouraged to “play the land.” This means that the tiles for cities will be spread out across multiple hexagons, in contrast to past games where cities were all concentrated in a single place. You’ll have different districts of your city spread out across different tiles. You might drop a harbor into a tile on the water. If you do, you can’t build something else in that tile, like a Wonder. This reflects the influence of Ed Beach, lead designer on Civilization VI.

It doesn’t necessarily mean that the maps will be huge, with armies and cities spread out. You may wind up with a few cities or lots of cities. The happiness level will be focused on a city level, rather than on a global basis across your civilization.

“One city can only go out three tiles in all directions,” Shirk said. “One city with maximum land can’t build every Wonder. If you build every district in one city, you will not have enough farmland to support your population. You have to make these decisions city by city. We are unstacking the cities and taking that to the nth degree.”

That means you have to spread the different districts across multiple cities. That means you have to be able to defend multiple cities. The idea is to take full advantage of the terrain. Each hex that is near another can modify how your tile grows. You may get a bonus based on what is adjacent to the tile. Before, you could put down a building in a city and be done with it. Your districts can be containers for additional buildings. You can create a holy site that will eventually house religious buildings such as churches or temples. If you have a mountain pass, you may want to put a military encampment there to create an easily defended zone.

You can’t build every single type of district in each city because it causes the city to spread out and bump into its area and population limits, Shirk said. If you are invaded, you may be able to hang on to part of your city while sacrificing another part.

Terrain can also affect your research. If you do research in technology and culture, you’ll unlock new potential, such as boosts that speed your civilization’s progress through history. If you build a city on the coast, sailing technology will come a lot easier. If you build a quarry, you may get masonry much more easily.

A new approach for A.I.

Civilization VI

Above: Civilization VI

Image Credit: 2K/Firaxis Games

The artificial intelligence of the computer-controlled players will be different as well. This time, the non-player A.I. will always have some kind of agenda that drives their behavior. You can’t really change someone’s agenda, such as Manifest Destiny. But you can change their attitude toward you very quickly if you invade them.

This means that diplomacy will be dynamic, changing as the ages evolve and as the leaders show their character, said Andrew Garrett, an A.I. expert, in an interview with GamesBeat.

“We have a system that has a historical agenda linked to a leader, but they also have random leaders, chosen game by game, that are hidden from the player,” Garrett said.

You can find out what the agenda of a particular leader is by spying or just understanding their behavior. If a leader is obsessed with Wonders, he or she will strive to out-build the other societies when it comes to creating wonders. If you challenge that leader in the Wonder race, you’ll likely come into conflict. You may even be able to set leaders against each other through careful observation. Civilization VI will have a new espionage system, but Firaxis isn’t describing it yet.

“That’s part of the overall puzzle of the game, making each game unique,” Shirk said.

The art style matches the map changes

Civilization VI has a "color language" for distinguishing buildings and terrain.

Above: Civilization VI has a “color language” for distinguishing buildings and terrain.

Image Credit: 2K/Firaxis Games

The visual style is distinct from past games. Things are spread out more on the map. Every building in the game is modeled. You’ll see birds flying around the buildings. You’ll be able to zoom in and see the fruits of your labor now. The world is more vivid and alive. The leaders will be more expressive and realistic, all with the aim of making you believe the world is real.

“Things have to be a lot more readable, and you need a color language,” Shirk said. “You have campus districts with blue roofs that correspond to the color of science. It’s more expressive, colorful, and alive.” In Civilization IV, you could count individual trees. In Civilization V, the art style was much more realistic. This new game’s art style is geared toward enabling you to zoom all the way on your units and districts.

You can still become ruler of the world, starting out from a humble tribe in the Stone Age and growing your city to the Information Age. You can wage war, conduct diplomacy, advance your culture, and go head-to-head with history’s greatest leaders. You will still have multiple ways to win the game.

The game will have enhanced multiplayer modes, where you can cooperate or compete against your friends in scenarios that can be completed in a single session.

Rockstar Games has shipped more than 65 million copies of Grand Theft Auto V

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GTA V is still making money for Take-Two.

Rockstar Games has shipped more than 65 million units of Grand Theft Auto V worldwide, according to an announcement by Take-Two Interactive today.

Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick said during the company’s analyst call that GTA V had set yet another record, with the 65 million units up from 60 million in early February. A year ago, the game had sold 52 million units. If you multiply the total by $60 per copy at the retail price, you get about $3.9 billion in revenues. That’s pretty amazing.

Zelnick noted that the game just keeps on performing, even though it was originally released in September 2013 on PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360. The game debut on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in November 2014, and then it hit the Windows PC in April 2015.

One of the things that keeps it going its Grand Theft Auto Online, which has been a cash cow and keeps fresh content coming for the fans.

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Civilization V is set to invade North America’s high schools

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Civilization V has sold more than 8 million copies.

Take-Two Interactive Software, 2K and Firaxis Games are partnering with nonprofit GlassLab to take a version of Sid Meier’s Civilization V into high schools in North America.

CivilizationEDU will debut in schools in the fall of 2017. The history-inspired, turn-based strategy game has sold more than 8 million copies and is highly educational even in its unmodified state. The award-winning series is now 25 years old, but its basic gameplay hasn’t strayed from enabling players to build and run their own empires from the Stone Age to the modern age.

The companies announced the game at the 13th Annual Games for Change Festival in New York. Developed by Firaxis Games, Sid Meier’s Civilization V was one of the most critically acclaimed PC games of 2010, and earned numerous awards and accolades.

CivilizationEDU will provide students with the opportunity to think critically and create historical events, consider and evaluate the geographical ramifications of their economic and technological decisions, and to engage in systems thinking and experiment with the causal/correlative relationships between military, technology, political and socioeconomic development, the companies said.

GlassLab, a nonprofit that also made SimCityEDU, will add a learning analytics engine to CivilizationEDU to capture students’ progress and assess their problem-solving skills – harnessing the popularity and innovation of interactive entertainment and turning it into a powerful tool for the classroom and alternative to standardized tests. Teachers who use CivilizationEDU will have access to an online dashboard that will provide reports on students’ progress, demonstrating how in-game accomplishments relate to problem solving; developer diaries; gameplay tutorial videos, and instructional resources, including an in-depth gameplay guide and lesson plans aligned to academic and 21st century standards.

“We are incredibly proud to lend one of our industry’s most beloved series to educators to use as a resource to inspire and engage students further,” said Strauss Zelnick, Chairman and CEO of Take-Two, in a statement. “Civilization has challenged millions of people around the world to revisit and experience history, pursue boldly exploration, and create their own societies based on their passions and freedom of choice. I can’t think of a better interactive experience to help challenge and shape the minds of tomorrow’s leaders.”

Civilization VI will be launching on the PC this fall.

“For the past 25 years, we’ve found that one of the fun secrets of Civilization is learning while you play,” added Sid Meier, founder and director of creative development at Firaxis Games, in a statement. “We’ve always focused on entertainment first, but we believe that our players – young and old – enjoy learning, even if they don’t always enjoy education. Civilization players find fun in discovering new civilizations, running into famous historical leaders, and charting their own version of human history. Along the way, players learn valuable lessons from their success and failures and are able to try again, employing different choices and strategies. We’re absolutely thrilled to be partnering with GlassLab and I am excited to see CivilizationEDU in classrooms next year.”

Mafia III has a gripping narrative that’s full of tough choices

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Lincoln Clay in a shootout in Mafia III

Mafia III could be a very short revenge story. Lincoln Clay, the Vietnam veteran whose mobster friends are killed in the first act, could quickly make his way over to the mafia boss and take him out. But the game coming from publisher 2K Games (a Take-Two Interactive division) on October 7 is a very deep open world with some very different story threads that can lead to alternative story outcomes.

The reason that this game is so deep and varied is that Clay’s idea of revenge is so much bigger than just killing crime boss Sal Marcano. It says a lot about Clay, the “gifted anti-hero” of Mafia III, that he wants to take apart Marcano’s criminal organization, piece by piece, district by district. Clay wants to take over all the rackets, taking out the low level foot soldiers, climbing up the ladder, and then replacing them with his own people.


Check out our Reviews Vault for past game reviews. Editor’s note: This story has spoilers for the beginning of the game.


“The characters discuss this in the game a couple of times,” said Bill Harms, lead writer of the game at developer Hangar 13, in an interview with GamesBeat. “That goes to who Lincoln is as a character. He says early on that is not enough. His goal is to systematically destroy, not just Sal Marcano’s life, but his life’s work, which is the Italian mafia in New Bordeaux.”

Bill Harms, lead writer on Mafia III

Above: Bill Harms, lead writer on Mafia III

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

And that is why Mafia III is massive. I was able to get a good look at the whole first act of the game at an event at Hangar 13, a new studio headed by Haden Blackman, in Novato, Calif. In order to move through it fast and absorb the story, I played it on the Easy level. But for a more deliberate game and bigger challenge, I recommend you play it on a tougher level. While the shooting and gameplay wasn’t bad, I found that the story really drew me in to Mafia III.

The open world of New Bordeaux

Mafia III

Above: Mafia III

Image Credit: 2K Games

The studio has created a massive open world with the city of New Bordeaux, which is modeled after New Orleans. The game is set in 1968, a tumultuous year for history that included the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, as well as the major events in the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War.

Those events are mentioned in the game, not to make some statement about the 1960s but because they add to the authenticity. Clay was shaped by his experiences as veteran, and his ideas of loyalty and revenge are unique to his time.

“We wanted to take a gift anti-hero and place him in a specific time and place in American history,” Harms said.

The narrative is told in a series of flashbacks, so you move forward and backward in time. The overall narrative is that the game is part of a modern-day documentary where key figures are interviewed about what Lincoln Clay did when he took on the mob. At some points, the characters are older, and then you see them as younger characters in the flashbacks.

Lincoln Clay is the "gifted anti-hero" of Mafia III

Above: Lincoln Clay is the “gifted anti-hero” of Mafia III

Image Credit: 2K Games

We learn that Lincoln Clay was the son of a white man and a black woman. He categorized as “black” and was given up for adoption when he was a couple of years old. When the orphanage shut down, Sammy Robinson, who runs the black mob, and his family took Clay in as their own. Clay went on to fight in Vietnam and became a Special Forces soldier in Laos, where he earned multiple medals in combat.

He returns to New Bordeaux on February 27, 1968, and goes back to Robinson in a parish known as Delray Hollow. I was immediately transported back in time as the Rolling Stones’ Sympathy for the Devil song came on the car radio. I also wanted to stay in the car longer when I heard Barry McGuire’s Eve of Destruction.

In that car ride, Clay’s friend Ellis asks him what Vietnam was like. Clay relates a story where a woman being evacuated went aboard a boat with a baby and a pig. The U.S. soldiers told her she could only take one with her. So she threw the baby overboard. Clay said that was an example of what happens when you take everything away from someone and their only goal is to survive. It is a story of inhumanity that foreshadows what is to come.

A racist time

The world of Mafia III, set in New Orleans in 1968.

Above: The world of Mafia III, set in New Orleans in 1968.

Image Credit: 2K Games

The scene shifts to a heist. (Giorgi apologizes ahead of time for having to go along with that racist banter). The racist moments are disturbing, but it’s part of the time and place.

“We really did everything we could to not climb up on a soap box and preach. There is racism in the game, but the game is not about racism,” Harms said. “The game is about Lincoln Clay, who destroyed the Italian mob in our version of New Orleans. You get a feel for a time and place. We reinforce where the game is set…. We have a term for it. We call it ‘cinematic realism.’ It’s not about those things. Those things are part of the game. It’s authenticity.”

The heist gets going, but hen the game fast forwards to an earlier time. We get some very interesting commentary from Father James Ballard, the parish priest who tries to guide Clay and serves as a kind of narrator.

Lincoln Clay in stealth mode in Mafia III

Above: Lincoln Clay in stealth mode in Mafia III

Image Credit: 2K Games

During the heist, we see the seeds of the story sown. Collaboration. Betrayal. And then revenge. During this storytelling, we see what kind of person Clay has become. Even though he’s violent, he lives by a code.

Mafia III

Above: Mafia III

Image Credit: 2K

Through the action of the heist and the flash backs and flash forwards, the story is set up. Father Ballard rescues Clay, and Clay makes his pledge to take down Marcano’s empire. At this moment, I found the writing to be particularly good. And Clay goes after Marcano from the bottom up.

“In the mafia, it’s all about how the money flows up,” Harms said.

The sit downs

Mafia III sit-down meeting. Lincoln has to choose who gets promoted.

Above: Mafia III sit-down meeting. Lincoln has to choose who gets promoted.

Image Credit: 2K Games

Andy Wilson, executive producer of the game, said in an interview that every player’s story is going to be unique because of the choices that they make during these big “sit down” meetings. After reaching a milestone, Lincoln has to decide which of his three underbosses will take over a territory. If he favors one lieutenant — Vito, Burke, or Cassandra — then the other two are likely to rebel or betray Lincoln. You may wind up finishing the game with only one lieutenant left, or you may finish the game with all three of them alive.

“You can choose to balance it out or trigger one to betray you,” Wilson said.

Toward the end of the game, you’ll have some very wide open world and you can choose from among multiple missions to pursue. I haven’t seen those later missions, but I’m looking forward to playing the full game. The acting is superb, and the writing is good as well. The title debuts on Windows, OS X, the PlayStation 4, and the Xbox One on October 7.

Car chases are a big part of Mafia III.

Above: Car chases are a big part of Mafia III.

Image Credit: 2K Games
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Grand Theft Auto Online’s Biker gangs roar into town October 4

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Vroom vroom.

You can finally start that digital motorcycle gang you always dreamed of.

Developer Rockstar Games noted on its site today that the Bikers downloadable content for Grand Theft Auto Online will become available as part of an automatic update on October 4 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. GTA Online is the multiplayer part of Grand Theft Auto V, the open-world game that’s one of the top sellers in the industry’s history. GTA Online online has generated over $500 million in revenue. Updates like these keep players engaged, which makes them more likely to spend money on in-game purchases.

The update adds Motorcycle Clubs to GTA Online, which enable groups of up to eight players to ride with each other. Bikers will also include new vehicles, weapons, and clothing.

Rockstar originally announced the Bikers update earlier this month.

Civilization VI hands-on: Empire building is addictive and beautiful, but combat is messy

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Civilization VI has a "color language" for distinguishing buildings and terrain.

It’s that time again. Sid Meier’s Civilization VI is endlessly addictive and fun, and it pains me to play it only for a relatively short time before moving on to other games.

It launches on October 21 on the PC, and like my colleague Jason Wilson, I’ve been playing it for a press preview. But I must move on to other games before I sleep. I’ve played approximately 30 hours across a couple of campaigns so far. And it’s given me a taste of how this Civilization is different from the others. I found that the building and exploration is fun, but the combat is still frustrating. Veteran Civ players will appreciate just how fast the game runs.

It’s an important release for developer Firaxis Games and publisher 2K Games, a label of Take-Two Interactive. Over the past 25 years, Sid Meier’s empire-building franchise has sold more than 35 million units, including 8 million for the previous Civilization V. It’s a turn-based strategy game where you build an empire to stand the test of time. If you become ruler of the world, you win. But you can also win peacefully through cultural, religious, and other non-violent triumphs. You can wage war, conduct diplomacy with leaders who have their own hidden agendas, and change the way that history unfolds.

America's Teddy Roosevelt is all about his Big Stick.

Above: America’s Teddy Roosevelt is all about his Big Stick.

Image Credit: Jason Wilson/GamesBeat

Civilization VI is full of historical characters, inventions, and wonderful creations. But nothing about it is historically accurate, as you may find Hannibal born as a military leader in the United States. You have to learn to take advantage of the historical artifacts in your own alternate history to build the greatest civilization ever known.

The biggest change from Civilization V is the way that cities have been “unstacked.” Rather than taking up a single hexagon, the cities and their various districts can now spill across the map. You can add districts for commercial, religious, scientific, and wonder sites that are considered within the city borders, even though they take up surrounding hexagons. It’s almost as if suburbs surround each city.

“I felt very clearly that I wanted to make the map much more important in Civilization VI,” said Ed Beach, lead designer of Civilization VI at Firaxis Games, in an interview with GamesBeat. “If you look at a Civilization V map, there’s so much of the map allocated to farms and trading posts and mines and improvements outside the city.”

With this change, you can take advantage of the local terrain. You can build a harbor on a seaside tile. If you build a university next to a mountain, you can get bonuses for researching astronomy. You eventually run out of space due to urban sprawl. All of the cities on my continent merged into one huge metropolis. I also didn’t have enough space to add multiple districts to a lot of my cities. That was a little annoying.

War with the Scythians

Tomyris is the queen of Scythia in Civilization VI.

Above: Tomyris is the queen of Scythia in Civilization VI.

Image Credit: 2K

In my first campaign, I played Norway’s Harald Hardrada, the Viking king. I built a strong empire with a lot of cities. I had the highest score based on the strength of my armies, cities, and progress. Then I suffered an invasion by my neighbor to the east, Queen Tomyris’ Scythian Empire. It was a surprise attack, since I had not provoked her that much, except by building cities on her border. That, it turns out, was one of her pet peeves. She was quite bellicose.

I, on the other hand, never really intended to win through war. I’ve learned in Civilization games that war is an economic disaster. While you’re fighting, the other civilizations are advancing. I’m not completely against combat, as I enjoy squashing a barbarian camp like anyone else. I was in a race to grow, and I even created a few Wonders in my biggest city. But Tomyris clearly wanted to fight. I didn’t really want to provoke her, but with my back to the oceans, I only had one direction to expand.

I was caught off guard with a lighter military. But I did have the entire border guarded, including cavalry, field cannon, archers, and a couple of musketeers and infantry. I started shifting my new construction to the military. The Scythians pulled the dirty but smart trick of convincing the nearby city-states to invade me as well. This wasn’t good, since I was surrounded by three different enemy city-states. I held them at bay.

But the Scythians clearly weren’t as weak as I thought, even though I had the larger empire. They started churning out anti-tank gunners, or modern combat units who clearly outgunned my industrial age cannon and cavalry. Somehow, they kept producing new units quickly, and I couldn’t kill them. Perhaps she was spending her treasury buying units. I had to spend a lot of my dollars upgrading units to the modern age.

Civilization VI will force you to decide what a particular city will specialize in.

Above: Civilization VI will force you to decide what a particular city will specialize in.

Image Credit: 2K/Firaxis Games

Nor could I break into the cities that were virtually surrounded by my ranged units. That was frustrating, as I couldn’t take over a city defended by a single unit, because the walls were too thick. With every turn, the Scythians would simply cycle out another unit, or heal the embattled unit. And my siege would continue endlessly. I destroyed some of her improvements to the cities, sacking farms and mines and universities. But it did no good. I was eventually outnumbered by the Scythian anti-tank gunners. She also had a lot of horse units, as her empire can build two for the price of one.

So I cheated. I wound the clock back to before the war started and started preparing early for the inevitable conflict. I built forts on the frontier and turned the three city-states into my friends by sending them envoys. I then took control of those city-states when the war broke out. And I made sure I had more modern artillery and infantry to confront the modern troops of the Scythians.

But it wasn’t enough. I let the clock move forward and played out the alternate history again. This time, I was able to get three city-states to attack the Scythians after they launched their surprise attack. America and the Kongo joined in on the Scythian side, so it was effectively a world war. But those two were on a remote continent. The Scythians lost a lot of troops at the outset.

But the city-states had ancient troops, and they weren’t that effective against modern soldiers. They also didn’t stick around for the duration. After 10 or so turns, they gave up and stopped fighting. All of a sudden, I found that I had weak flanks, and the Scythians pushed back. They took out my artillery and infantry with an army of anti-tank infantry, and pushed me back into my own territory. I should have created some powerful units by combining multiple units into “corps” units. But that was hindsight.

Things were looking grim, but then the Asus laptop I was using permanently crashed … and that was the end of that campaign.

A second campaign with the Greeks

Pericles leads the Greeks in Civilization VI.

Above: Pericles leads the Greeks in Civilization VI.

Image Credit: 2K Games

I started another campaign as Pericles, the leader of the Greeks. In this campaign, I had the good fortune of having a ring of mountains surrounding my territory. I built cities at the mountain passes, and made my republic into a natural fortress. I had oceans on two sides and built some port cities. And I pushed out aggressively, sending settlers out with warriors or archers to constantly push the borders of my country outward.

I eventually ran into the Kongo leader, Mvemba a Nzinga, who didn’t appreciate my constant northern expansion into territory that he wanted as his own. So he declared war on me. The Germans, led by Frederick Barbarossa, and America, led by Teddy Roosevelt, joined in the war against me. America and Germany were too far to do any harm, but I was able to hijack some of their units.

This time, I simply defended. The Kongo troops were no match for my ranged units. Soon enough, Mvemba gave up and asked for peace. Everyone else settled as well, and I emerged with the largest of empires.

My take on the new gameplay

The Civics tree is a great addition to Civilizaiton VI.

Above: The Civics tree is a great addition to Civilization VI.

Image Credit: 2K

As always, the user interface is great, as it never really gets in your way. Perhaps the best thing about the game is that it runs fast. You can play in standard mode or fast mode (33 percent faster). I found that it was stable and didn’t crash on my Windows 10 laptop. I used to go take a break in past games when I hit the “next turn” button. But with this one, you can still do things the A.I. takes its turns. I could inspect cities, look at units, and move around the map, all while the calculations were happening. That was wonderful.

I loved the growth and exploration. It was fun watching my cities transition from the ancient world to medieval and the industrial world. It was fun to make progress on the map, doing things such as building two farms next to each other in order to gain an advantage in the development of feudalism. That’s where Firaxis clearly put a lot of thought into the relationship between territory and technology. I also enjoyed the details of the trading in the game. It made sense that the trade routes are the way that you eventually get roads in your empire.

I barely got into the modern age before I had to capitulate. But the art is truly incredible. You see animations of birds roaming the world. There’s a fog of war, and it rolls back as a unit moves. It’s cool to see the colors appear while the old cartography map style retreats.

The music and sound are also superb. John Murphy’s score is truly majestic, and it makes for wonderful listening. It’s really pleasant to play the game with the ambient music and sounds. It never gets really tiring, and that’s important in a game as long as Civilization VI.

I liked the leaders and got to know their personalities. I learned the hard way who not to push toward war. I got access to spies at one point, and that helped me start figuring out the hidden agendas of the different leaders. Sadly, it came very late in the game.

I learned some strategies to speed growth early, like choosing a site near resources, purchasing tiles, and building granaries.

Some flaws in combat and sprawl

Sid Meier's Civilization VI

Above: Sid Meier’s Civilization VI

Image Credit: Firaxis Games

But there’s things I didn’t like about the game. As I mentioned, combat is very frustrating, as it’s really hard to do something like take over an enemy city.

And the unstacking of the cities, along with unstacking of the combat units (which happened in Civilization V), you wind up with a huge urban sprawl, where the cities simply merge into each other and combat units are littered throughout the map. The city-states wound up having more units than their actual territory, and so they had to send a bunch of units out to sea. When I was at war with them, I used my navy to sink their transports. I think they really ought to go back to a reasonable amount of unit stacking, such as maybe three combat units and three city features per hexagon.

At the same time, I loved seeing features such as my Wonders, like the Forbidden City, clearly visible on the map. So I’m not entirely against the unstacked cities idea. But because of this sprawl, I recommend you play every game on a huge map size.

Conclusion

Civilization VI allows you to spread your cities out across the map.

Above: Civilization VI allows you to spread your cities out across the map.

Image Credit: 2K/Firaxis Games

Overall, Civilization VI is a great game that is worthy of the Sid Meier name. If I had more time, I’d play it endlessly for a few years. I am glad that Firaxis is still trying to innovate with the series, but I would prefer a map that wasn’t so crowded with too many units and too many city tiles. I guess that means we’ll have something to look forward to in Civilization VII.

Here’s my gameplay videos that show an early part of a campaign when I played as Pericles.

Watch the Red Dead Redemption 2 trailer right here

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Red Dead returns?

Put on your spurs and 10-gallon hat, because it’s time for a little more Red Dead.

Rockstar Games is planning to launch Red Dead Redemption 2 in 2017, and it has rolled out the first new trailer for the game. The developer is promising to get the game out in the fall, and it will likely hit PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. But what about PC and the new Nintendo Switch? Well, let’s see if the trailer has any answers.

You can watch it right here:

Take-Two Interactive’s Mafia III shipped 4.5 million copies in first week

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Lincoln Clay and Thomas Burke in Mafia III

Take-Two Interactive shipped more than 4.5 million copies of Mafia III to retailers in its first week, and the company said in its earnings release today that it is the fastest-selling game in the history of the 2K label.

Mafia III shipped after the September 30 close of Take-Two’s second fiscal quarter, debuting on October 7. 2K didn’t provide early copies of the game to the press, and some reviews came in pretty poor. I rated it at 75 out of 100, largely because of bugs and other problems in the execution of the gameplay. But the story about Lincoln Clay, an African-American man who took on the Italian mob in 1968 in a fictional city that resembles New Orleans, was spectacular.

Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, estimated before the earnings were released that sell-in to retailers for Mafia III was likely around 3.5 million copies. He noted that negative reviews with lower scores surfaced the week after the launch. Those negative reviews will likely have an impact on preorders by retailers, Pachter wrote.

I’m glad to see that Mafia III sold well at the outset, as the story really gives players something to think about. Were it not for the problems with gameplay and bugs, I would have rated the story at 95 out of 100. It’s a pretty good outcome as the first game from Hangar 13, a new studio in Novato, California, which 2K formed to make the game.

Mafia III is being supported with downloadable add-on content, including a Season Pass, as well as a free-to-play mobile battle RPG game, Mafia III Rivals, for iOS and Android devices.

Take-Two buys Spain’s Social Point mobile game studio for at least $250 million

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Dragon City is one of Social Point's big hits.

Take-Two Interactive has acquired Spain’s Social Point, a free-to-play mobile game developer of titles such as Dragon City, for at least $250 million.

The deal is a major step for Take-Two, the publisher of Grand Theft Auto and other big console and PC titles, to move into free-to-play mobile games. Overall, mobile games are a $40.6 billion market, according to a report released today by SuperData Research and Unity Technologies.

The transaction includes $175 million in cash and $75 million in stock, plus an earn-out bonus of up to $25.9 million. The deal draws a nice focus on Spain’s mobile game industry. Spain has 480 game companies and 4,460 people working at them.

Founded in 2008 and headquartered in Barcelona, Spain, Social Point is a successful free-to-play mobile game developer that focuses on delivering high-quality, engaging entertainment experiences. The company’s most successful games are Dragon City and Monster Legends.

Social Point is led by an experienced senior management team, including Horacio Martos and Andrés Bou, the co-CEOs, and Marc Canaleta, the chief technology officer and cofounder. It has over 270 employees.

The company currently has multiple profitable titles in the market. Its two most successful games, Dragon City and Monster Legends, have been downloaded more than 180 million times to date on iOS and Android. They have consistently been in the top-100 grossing mobile games in the U.S. since 2014.

Social Point’s games are currently ,available in North America, Latin America and Europe, and about half of its revenue comes from the U.S. In 2016, over 90 percent was generated from mobile platforms.

“With the acquisition of Social Point, Take-Two has further diversified its business, expanded its portfolio of owned intellectual property, and significantly enhanced its position in the fast-growing free-to-play mobile gaming space,” said Strauss Zelnick, the chairman and CEO of Take-Two in New York, in a statement. “The experienced team at Social Point shares our commitment to delighting consumers with high-quality entertainment, and we believe that Social Point’s deeply engaging mobile offerings will be a perfect complement to our business.”

He added, “Social Point is one of the few mobile game developers that has a proven track record of growing revenues and delivering multiple hits, and we expect this growth to continue given the company’s exciting development pipeline.”

Take-Two has been making mobile games for a while, but much of its focus in the past has been on selling premium-priced games on mobile. But that’s a fraction of the market compared to free-to-play, where you can play a game for free and purchase virtual items with real money. Social Point focuses on “mid-core” titles, or those with gamer-focused content that you can play in short time periods.

“Take-Two is one of the interactive entertainment industry’s premier publishers, whose labels are renowned throughout the world for their ability to create some of the most successful and beloved entertainment experiences on consoles and PC,” sad Martos and Bou, in a statement. “We are thrilled to have Social Point become part of an organization that shares our commitment to quality and innovation, and we look forward to being part of Take-Two’s continued success for many years to come.”

Take-Two said that the deal could meaningfully enhance recurring revenues. The deal is expected to be immediately accretive to net revenue and net cash and start producing net income in the coming fiscal year ending March 31, 2018.

Social Point has been consistently profitable since 2013 and has grown net revenue at a 29 percent compound annual growth rate from 2013 through 2016. For the trailing 12 months ended December 31, 2016, Social Point generated net revenue of $90.8 million and earnings before income tax, depreciation, and amortization of $19.9 million.


Take-Two teases mystery game in 2018 from one of ‘2K’s biggest franchises’

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Take-Two Interactive teased a new game during its earnings call today, saying that it would launch an unnamed game under the 2K label in the fiscal year that ends March 31, 2019.

The game publisher said that results for that fiscal year would get a boost from Rockstar Games’ Red Dead Redemption 2 and “a highly anticipated new title from one of 2K’s biggest franchises.”

That set off a lot of speculation on the Internet, with fans hoping for follow-up titles in the XCOM and Borderlands franchises. But the publisher didn’t give any indication of what the new title would be. Karl Slatoff, president of Take-Two Interactive, said in the earnings call that Take-Two would not show any brand new games on the show floor at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in June.

The last game in the XCOM series was XCOM 2, which debuted on the PC in February 2016 and on the consoles in September 2016. Borderlands saw its last release in 2014 with Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel. Gearbox Software’s Randy Pitchford also showed technology for a new game in March at the Game Developers Conference, and the art clearly looked like a Borderlands game.

Other 2K properties include Mafia, Civilization, BioShock, NBA 2K, WWE 2K, and The Darkness.

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Grand Theft Auto Online gives Take-Two breathing room as it awaits Red Dead Redemption 2

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Take-Two Interactive’s stock price took a short dip in May after its Rockstar Games label delayed its much-awaited Western video game Red Dead Redemption 2 until the spring of 2018. But it bounced back as the company reassured investors that it could still have a pretty good year.

That’s because revenues are still pouring in from Grand Theft Auto Online, which was launched in 2013. And Grand Theft Auto V also launched that year and continues to sell as well, with more than 80 million units sold to date. On top of that, the company will make money from expansion packs launched for Mafia III and XCOM 2 this year.

Take-Two has come a long way from the days when it was entirely dependent on the release of a new GTA title to make its numbers in a particular year. And the company is asking both investors and fans to be patient for what could be a very big 2018.

Overall, Take-Two is a more valuable company today ($7.6 billion market capitalization) because it is the owner of some of the most valuable intellectual properties in the world. It has also diversified with the $250 million acquisition of mobile game maker Social Point, and it has launched a new esports effort with NBA 2K.

I spoke with Strauss Zelnick, chairman and CEO of Take-Two Interactive, and David Ismailer, the newly appointed president of the company’s 2K label, which publishes games such as Borderlands, XCOM, Civilization, and NBA 2K.

Here’s an edited transcript of our conversation.

Above: David Ismailer (left), president of 2K, and Strauss Zelnick, CEO of Take-Two Interactive.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

GamesBeat: What’s interesting to you right now?

David Ismailer: We’ve been talking a lot about the NBA and our efforts in esports today.

Strauss Zelnick: We announced a joint venture with the NBA to launch the first professional gaming league based on a real sport. We’ll have a season in 2018. 17 teams will be participating, drafting professional players and populating five-person teams.

GamesBeat: Was this a gradual approach to esports that you’ve had? You seemed to pick your time carefully.

Zelnick: We did two tournaments to see how it would play. It played really well. Then we thought, “Wow, if there was an opportunity to do this with the NBA, that would be great.” But I would say we’ve taken our time. It’s been two years.

GamesBeat: And then the NBA teams have been investing in esports teams, meanwhile.

Zelnick: Some of them, yeah. Some of them have bought into Overwatch, for example, or League of Legends.

GamesBeat: It seems like that’s starting to get more real, these edges of the business.

Zelnick: What’s real in terms of real live revenue so far is League of Legends, and to a lesser extent Overwatch. What’s real for sure is viewing, though. 250 million people watch esports. 125 million watch avidly. When we had the finals of our second tournament, the viewing was huge. Anecdotally, there are a lot of people who are excited about watching esports. It’s more than a dream. There’s a real market. But it’s still nascent.

GamesBeat: How do you look at some of these frontiers and how they’re progressing? Esports is one. VR is another.

Zelnick: VR is not a market, currently. Mobile is a huge market, a $45 billion market. We acquired Socialpoint recently and two hit games in the marketplace, Dragon City and Monster Legends. They’re working on additional releases, so we feel good about our exposure. We also have exposure to mobile titles at 2K, with WWE Super Card and the NBA2K app. Mobile is an important part of our business. What we call recurrent consumer spending at our company – all forms of digitally delivered content except for full console game downloads – that’s rapidly growing. It was nearly a third of our net bookings last year.

Above: GTA V is still making money for Take-Two.

Image Credit: Take-Two Interactive

GamesBeat: You’ve grown a lot over the last decade. I remember years ago you were the Grand Theft Auto company.

Zelnick: That’s exactly right. Look, Grand Theft Auto is still terribly important to this company. As we’ve grown and become successful in other areas, Grand Theft Auto has grown too. Grand Theft Auto V has sold 80 million units. Grand Theft Auto Online had another record year. Grand Theft Auto is an important part of our company, but we’re fortunate that we have other hit franchises as well. Certainly not as big or as powerful, though.

Above: Grand Theft Auto Online.

Image Credit: Rockstar Games

GamesBeat: Grand Theft Auto Online seems like it’s become a pleasant surprise to everyone, including you.

Zelnick: We weren’t surprised that the quality was great, because we knew what Rockstar was doing, what they’re known for. Naturally we’re surprised we had another record year, because we said we expected the results to moderate.

GamesBeat: And Red Dead is waiting in the wings. You still seem to have the focus on quality that prompts decisions like delaying that release.

Zelnick: On quality, I would say everyone’s focus sharpens all the time.

GamesBeat: How do you look at the whole industry and select your strategy? I have this theory that, in some ways, some of the big companies have evolving strategies. It’s taking a long time, but — if I look at Bethesda and Fallout Shelter, the opportunity they had, they had their core guys make a mobile game that was very well-designed. That represented an opportunity, but they didn’t fully exploit it. They nailed the mechanics of that game, but they ran out of content. If they had the content, it might have become a Clash Royale, a billion-dollar game that funds everything else they want to do. They’d never have to worry about delaying a triple-A game, thanks to that mobile revenue. It seems like that’s an opportunity that somebody could push for.

Zelnick: It’s very, very hard to have console developers create a mobile title, though. We tried it. We made Civilization for mobile – or for Facebook, actually – and it was fantastic, but it didn’t speak to what people do on Facebook. We made stand-alone mobile titles before we bought Socialpoint and they didn’t succeed. We have had success with WWE and NBA. We’re getting better at this. But Cat Daddy is the studio in our shop that does this. They’re not a console developer. They’re a mobile developer.

GamesBeat: Triple-A talent is all concentrated in a certain area, do you think?

Zelnick: I just think it’s a different business.

Above: Grand Theft Auto Online has a new Kill Quota adversary mode.

Image Credit: Rockstar Games

GamesBeat: I look at companies in Hollywood. They seem to see things stalling there a little, but they’re still in love with making movies. The audience is slowing down for movies and TV, so they’re moving into games. I wonder if console game companies might ever have similar thinking.

Zelnick: We don’t really think that way. We’re not looking for financing. We’re looking to delight consumers. If we can’t do something well we don’t want to do it. We just don’t look at the world through that lens. We’re an entertainment company. We want to be the most creative, innovative, and efficient company in the business. We want to delight consumers in everything we do. We want to create the highest quality.

We got involved with Socialpoint because they make their own intellectual property, because they pride themselves on quality, and because there’s a market opportunity. We’re not doing science projects. There has to be a market opportunity. But we’re not looking for a cash cow to finance something else. It would be nice to have a cash cow, but it would come out of doing great work.

We have a strategy. Our strategy, again, is being the highest quality company, the most innovative company, the most efficient company in our space, and delighting consumers. That’s our strategy, and arguably the expression of our tactics as well.

GamesBeat: You guys have some of the most valuable properties in the industry, but you don’t have the highest valuation as a company.

Zelnick: We don’t have the highest sales or operating income. If you think about where the company was 10 years ago, we’ve made a lot of progress. None of our two bigger competitors were in that position 10 years ago. We’re playing catch-up. I’m proud of the position we’re in. We have a market cap of $7.5 billion or so today, compared to $700 million 10 years ago.

We have a lot of wood to chop, a lot of opportunity. We won’t just be judged on the quality of our games and how much we delight consumers. We’ll also be judged on our bottom line, appropriately.

Above: XCOM 2: War of the Chosen

Image Credit: Firaxis Games/2k

GamesBeat: Do you approach 2K in a different way?

Zelnick: I hope not. It would be a problem if you were.

Ismailer: No.

Zelnick: Oddly, we have the same strategy.

GamesBeat: What do you want to accomplish with 2K?

Ismailer: Speaking to 2K’s strategy, we have six focus areas, six growth areas. We have the NBA and WWE businesses. We have the strategy business the Firaxis anchors. We have the triple-A titles that alternate between years – different years, different studios, different titles. We’re focusing on mobile in Asia. We’re trying to grow each of those over time to become a bigger company, as Strauss was saying. Get to higher revenue, higher market cap.

GamesBeat: It seems like a year of expansion for you, but it’s not a problem. You can keep running on what you have even while expanding.

Zelnick: It’s a very thin frontline year, with only our sports and entertainment titles coming. Yes, it’s a disappointment that, because of the way our development has unfolded in search of the highest quality possible, a number of events aligned so we don’t have the kind of release schedule this year we’d like to. We’d like to have the kind of year 2K had last year, or that the company had in 2015, where we bring a lot of titles to market and have a lot of success, plus we have catalog and recurrent consumer spending.

That’s the kind of year we expect to have in fiscal ’19. We have Red Dead coming from Rockstar. We have a big title coming from 2K. We have our sports and entertainment releases. We have recurrent consumer spending. We have catalog. We have Socialpoint. We have NBA2K Online in China and the like. Then you have a company doing $2.5 billion in net sales at least and $700 million in cash flow for operations. Then we’re knocking on the door of what our bigger competitors are doing. But right now we’re not.

At the end of the day, though, where did this come from? It came from the high class position of—we have diversified the business. We have 11 franchises that have sold at least five million units in one release. We have more than 50 that have sold over two million units in an individual release. We have the biggest title on the market in Grand Theft Auto. We do come at this from a position of strength. I think you’re right, and I’d reinforce your statement: even with a thin frontline release schedule, it’s still a pretty good year.

Above: NBA 2K17

Image Credit: 2K

GamesBeat: What about China? How do you look at that opportunity?

Zelnick: It’s super exciting. We’re exposed to Asia. We have a headquarters in Singapore. We have the number one PC sports title in China, with 35 million registered users, in association with Tencent. We’re excited to support Tencent’s new downloading platform. It’ll be interesting to see what the Chinese government does about approvals. We think there’s a great opportunity.

GamesBeat: As far as how you reveal things these days, with influencers playing a role in a big way, how has that changed?

Ismailer: We’re committed to working with them. They’re clearly what people follow today. With every title we have a specific strategy as to which influencers we’re going to. It’s the evolving form of marketing right now.

Above: Lincoln Clay and Thomas Burke in Mafia III

Image Credit: 2K

GamesBeat: I wonder if they’re the vanguard of a world where people play one game all year round. GTA Online and nothing but.

Zelnick: I hope not. I don’t think that’s what’s going to happen. People get engaged with a title and then eventually they move on to the next thing. Maybe they stay engaged with a couple of titles at a time. But I don’t think you’ll ever see a situation where a gamer plays only one title, permanently. That seems unlikely.

The numbers don’t bear it out, either. Massively successful titles like World of Warcraft—the number of subscribers they have is a small percentage of the number of gamers out there. And they have churn, people coming in and leaving. I don’t mean that critically. It’s a great piece of business. I’m just saying, that’s how it is.

GamesBeat: With Mafia III, how do you feel about how that turned out?

Ismailer: We’re pleased with the results on the title. It’s a little early for us to do any postmortems.

Zelnick: It sold more than five million units. It was the biggest first week we’ve had for a 2K title.

Above: Mafia III.

Image Credit: IGN

GamesBeat: I loved the story, and I’d love to see games go more in that direction. It feels like some titles here this week are doing that.

Zelnick: We’re trying. It’s that ephemeral sweet spot of character development, graphics, music, look and feel, and gameplay. You need all of it. We had great gameplay in Evolve, but we were sort of missing the story. We’ve had other situations where we had a great story, but the gameplay wasn’t adequate. When we get all of it right, like with GTA – great story elements, great character, graphics, look and feel, great gameplay – you see what happens.

GamesBeat: Do you think someone like Socialpoint has to worry about that?

Zelnick: They absolutely have to worry about quality. In super casual, maybe you don’t have all of those elements to it, but Socialpoint is aspiring to be a mid-core company. Character development matters. Story matters. But gameplay really matters. In that way I think you’re right. It’s also a shorter experience. A mobile game is a seven- to nine-minute experience. A console game can be a four-hour experience at just one time.

VentureBeat's PC Gaming channel is presented by the Intel® Game Dev program.

The DeanBeat: 9 industry leaders sound off on the state of gaming in 2017

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Interviewing some of the wisest people in the game industry is a fun part of my job. Over the past few weeks, at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles and at the Gamelab event in Barcelona, Spain, I interviewed a bunch of executives, CEOs, and game creators about their views on gaming. This week’s column takes snippets of wisdom that I gleaned from those interviews.

I like to think of this as “strategic zoom,” or zooming in on important details or zooming out to see the big picture, just like you could do in Chris Taylor’s Supreme Commander game from a decade ago. After each E3, I try to absorb a few of the ideas and quotes that are really important.

We’ve all had a big data dump from talking to so many people at these big events. But I hope to zero in on some of the people who can synthesize what’s important. I’ve run longer Q&As with many of these people, but you probably didn’t have time to read these interviews during the show. Each name links to our full interviews. I hope some of these people will be speaking at our GamesBeat 2017 event on October 5-6 in San Francisco.

Also, here are quotes from the leaders we interviewed at E3 2015 and E3 2014.

Above: Insomniac Games chief Ted Price (left) talks with Mike Gallagher, CEO of the Entertainment Software Association, at the GamesBeat Summit. 2017.

Mike Gallagher, CEO of the Entertainment Software Association, the trade group that puts on E3, responded to a question I had about how competitive the U.S. is when it comes to creating jobs in the game industry.

“I continue to hear and see great reasons for optimism when it comes to the ability of this country to continue to have a leading position in game-making. But it has to be earned every day. Policymakers cannot coast or expect that it will continue. They have to be very engaged to make sure that the environment remains favorable.

It’s not an easy task. Around the world — look what’s happening now, just within the United States. All 50 states now have game companies in them. That shows the democratization of game-making. Game creation is now something that can be done anywhere by anybody. That doesn’t just apply within the borders of the United States. It applies around the world, when you have tools like Unreal and Unity that can be accessed freely over the internet and put to work.

The United States does not have the market cornered on creative genius. What we do have is huge momentum drivers. We have respect for the rule of law. We have a thriving economy. We have a terrific secondary education system. We have protection for intellectual property. Most important, we have freedom of expressions. The government does not tell a game-maker what they can or cannot make. That’s a force multiplier that gives us an advantage even over western Europe.

I’m bullish about the prospects for the U.S., but very clear with policymakers. They need to continue to compete, because other countries are subsidizing the placement of jobs and seeking to displace the U.S. when it comes to making great games. When you look at mobile, it’s the wild west. There is great success being enjoyed by companies founded and operating outside the United States. That’s a signal. We have to continue to earn it every day.”


Above: David Ismailer (left), president of 2K, and Strauss Zelnick, CEO of Take-Two Interactive.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

Strauss Zelnick, CEO of Take-Two Interactive, said it is hard to get Triple-A console developers to make mobile games.

“It’s very, very hard to have console developers create a mobile title, though. We tried it. We made Civilization for mobile – or for Facebook, actually – and it was fantastic, but it didn’t speak to what people do on Facebook. We made stand-alone mobile titles before we bought Socialpoint and they didn’t succeed. We have had success with WWE and NBA. We’re getting better at this. But Cat Daddy is the studio in our shop that does this. They’re not a console developer. They’re a mobile developer.”

Zelnick also lauded the move toward better stories in console games, like in Take-Two’s Mafia III.

“It’s that ephemeral sweet spot of character development, graphics, music, look and feel, and gameplay. You need all of it. We had great gameplay in Evolve, but we were sort of missing the story. We’ve had other situations where we had a great story, but the gameplay wasn’t adequate. When we get all of it right, like with GTA – great story elements, great character, graphics, look and feel, great gameplay – you see what happens.”

And he does not think that mobile games are poised to finance big console hits.

“We don’t really think that way. We’re not looking for financing. We’re looking to delight consumers. If we can’t do something well we don’t want to do it. We just don’t look at the world through that lens. We’re an entertainment company. We want to be the most creative, innovative, and efficient company in the business. We want to delight consumers in everything we do. We want to create the highest quality.

We got involved with Socialpoint because they make their own intellectual property, because they pride themselves on quality, and because there’s a market opportunity. We’re not doing science projects. There has to be a market opportunity. But we’re not looking for a cash cow to finance something else. It would be nice to have a cash cow, but it would come out of doing great work.

We have a strategy. Our strategy, again, is being the highest quality company, the most innovative company, the most efficient company in our space, and delighting consumers. That’s our strategy, and arguably the expression of our tactics as well.”


Above: Sam Lake is Remedy Entertainment’s storyteller.

Image Credit: Gamelab

I spoke with Sam Lake, creative director at Remedy Entertainment, at the Gamelab event in Barcelona, Spain. We talked about transmedia, or taking a single story and using it in different media such as TV and games.

“There are many signs of these different media coming together, and separating again, and then coming together again in different, surprising ways. That still interests me a lot. I want to explore those possibilities, keep exploring them. Both the traditional idea of transmedia — taking a game concept or character or story and seeing if you can do spin-offs or extensions outside games — but then also very much looking for new ways of bringing other media into the game experience. I think it’s essential as well as exciting. Like anything else, you can do it in an interesting way, or in a way that really doesn’t bring anything very new to it. Even that can work out nicely if you have talented people catching it and making their own interesting spin out of it. But either way we’ll keep exploring it in the future.”


Above: Richard Garriott speaks at Gamelab in Barcelona about his 40 years in games.

Image Credit: Gamelab

Richard Garriott, also known as Lord British, created the Ultima series of fantasy role-playing games, and he made the Ultima Online and Tabula Rasa massively multiplayer online role-playing games. Now he is back to being an indie again with Shroud of the Avatar at Portalarium. Here’s what he had to say about making new intellectual properties.

“Part of that is my belief that the introduction moment of a new platform is the moment where you can create new IP. Ultima, Wizardry, Might of Magic, all of these things were created, essentially, at the beginning of all platforms.

But once a platform matures, you have the reverse problem. Once you already have Ultima, Wizardry, Might and Magic, and Bard’s Tale, an RPG no one has heard of is hard to market. That’s when people start to buy licenses, like Lord of the Rings or Star Wars, to break through the chaff. But those people who do that don’t own the IP themselves. It’s only a way to get their game to sell well. As game creators, the real opportunity—you want to create IP, you want to own the IP, and the place and time to do it is when you have the blue ocean of a new platform, where existing powerful IP is not already present. These windows open and close periodically around us and you have to take advantage of those moments.”


Above: Cliff Bleszinski, CEO of Boss Key Productions and creator of LawBreakers.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

Cliff Bleszinski, CEO of Boss Key Productions, maker of first-person shooter Lawbreakers, spoke about how it good to “un-retire” and get back in the game.

“I’m just proud. I got a little emotional this week. For me to un-retire because I was getting bored, to have a seat the table here, and to know that with my scrappy team of 65 folks I can compete with the heavyweights — it’s a pretty amazing feeling. Being at the Marriott and catching up with everybody, everybody was coming up and shaking my hand and saying, ‘Congratulations.’ I’m like, ‘Okay, I guess we’re doing all right?’ They weren’t putting their hands on my shoulder and saying, ‘My condolences.’ It feels good to be back on my own terms. I’m gonna sleep well after this show.”


Above: Paul Bettner of Playful and Jeff Grubb of GamesBeat.

Image Credit: Michael O'Donnell/VentureBeat

Paul Bettner, CEO of Playful, maker of Lucky’s Tale for virtual reality and Super Lucky’s Tale for the Xbox One, talked about the strategy of creating a new intellectual property in virtual reality and then taking that property, based on the character Lucky, to 2D flatscreen games.

“I’ve been thinking about it a lot at this show because it sounds similar, but it’s a different idea. We are targeting two groups of gamers with what we’re working on with Super Lucky’s Tale. We’re targeting 30- to 40-year-old gamers who grew up playing platform games and who love this genre. They see it and think, ‘That’s like a game I remember from when I was a kid.’ Those are the folks that are going to talk about the game. They’re the reviewers that’ll give us a lot of press. But we’re also targeting the 8-year-olds who are playing their first game.

In the way that we’re using VR as our tip of the spear to get attention for the IP, we’re also using the enthusiasm and the nostalgia for these kinds of games to get that attention and ultimately using that in service of introducing the game to a new generation of gamers. I was having this conversation with our creative director last night. I think that’s actually what Nintendo does and has been doing for decades. It’s this endless cycle because then, those folks grow up and have kids. It’s a great strategy, I think, for the stuff we’re building.”


Above: Yves Guillemot celebrates a good E3 and and a good three decades

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

Yves Guillemot, CEO of Ubisoft, talked about the rise of interactivity.

“It’s difficult to say what eventually becomes the biggest part of the industry. We like very much that the consoles are so successful now. They’re coming back as a major entertainment medium. Interactivity is going to become the major force in entertainment as a whole.”


Above: Phil Harrison (left) of Alloy Platform Industries and Matt Handrahan of GamesIndustry.biz

Image Credit: Gamelab

Phil Harrison, former Sony and Microsoft game executive and current cofounder of investment firm Alloy Platform Industries, talked to me about the big platform companies — Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo, as well as Google, Apple, and Amazon — and whether their big game businesses are intentional or unintentional (neglected in some way).

“They all have tremendous positives and some small challenges. If Microsoft’s Xbox business was a stand-alone business, only focused on games, that would be an incredible business. When you look at it as a part of Microsoft spitting out $20 billion in free cash flow every year, it just shows up as a tiny little dot, which is always a deep frustration for the leadership in the Xbox business. They do an incredible job, but they don’t show up that often on the scorecard.

It’s a different pressure that Sony has. They have a much smaller balance sheet. They’re a much more focused company through necessity, through the challenges they’ve been through, which have been public over the last 10 years or so. It’s a good question. Which would you rather be: a focused company with a smaller balance sheet or an unfocused company with a very large balance sheet? Ultimately a strong balance sheet is a good thing to have, which is why a company like Amazon could end up being a disruptive force in games. They have AWS as this secret provider of incredible services to so many games companies, which they’re monetizing like crazy.

I think Amazon knows they have a games business. It’s interesting that the games bit of Amazon reports in to the AWS leadership. That’s not a surprise or an accident. That’s very purposeful.

The one unknown, unseen is what Apple is really doing in AR and VR. I don’t believe for an instant that what they showed at the worldwide developer conference is all they’re doing in AR. But they made a very strong statement of intent, and that’s exciting for the future.”

Harrison said that mobile is the key market for game entrepreneurs to target.

“Even with all of the challenges of audience acquisition and barriers to entry — the development barrier to entry is really low, but distribution, awareness, cutting through the noise is really hard. Even with all those challenges, I still think mobile is the place to go. To make a console game as an indie, unless you have a sugar daddy relationship with the platform holder effectively sponsoring you, it’s really hard to make money….

You’re betting on five watts versus 160 watts. Are you going console, PC, hardcore, or are you going mobile, free-to-play? It doesn’t seem like there have been breakout hits in free-to-play on console yet, maybe because the top of the funnel isn’t big enough to support all of the customer acquisition. But that will happen.

I’m excited about the future. I’m enormously bullish about the future of games, mainly because now we don’t have to explain what this is anymore. There’s an understanding of games among the wider population.”


Above: Eric Hirshberg is CEO of Activision Publishing.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

Eric Hirshberg, CEO of Activision Publishing, talked to me about why the time is right for another Call of Duty game set in World War II.

“Sledgehammer has that cinematic storytelling gene, that impact in their creative approach that is really well-suited to the anguish and the humanity of the WWII setting. To their credit, they talked to the team, got excited about it, and got on board. We’re all over the opportunity. It’s been off to the races from there.

Everyone talks about ‘boots on the ground.’ I think of it a little differently, in terms of a human scale. There’s a vulnerability to the way you feel when it’s just a man and a gun. That’s what taking Call of Duty back to its roots means to me, that sense of vulnerability. And I think it’s a great game.

Certainly the level of graphic fidelity, the level of emotional connection you have with a human character in a game, the level of immersive, photorealistic environments — all of that has gotten exponentially better since the last time we were in the WWII setting. As a result, I think the impact and the feeling is incredible. It’s a game that not only plays great, but it feels great.”

Disclosure: The organizers of Gamelab paid my way to Barcelona. Our coverage remains objective.

The PC Gaming channel is presented by Intel®'s Game Dev program.

GamesBeat Boss interview: China’s Leyou moves from chicken meat to triple-A game publishing

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A few years ago, gamers had a good laugh when they learned that a Chinese chicken meat company bought Digital Extremes, the maker of Triple-A games such as The Darkness 2 and Warframe. Then, when the company bought Splash Damage in 2016, people did a double take again.

Alex Xu, the CEO of Leyou, was the guy behind that. He was the chief business officer at Perfect World, a Chinese role-playing game maker that acquired Cryptic Studios and publishes titles, such as Neverwinter. To do more deals, he left Perfect World and acquired control of a shell company in Hong Kong. It so happened the shell company was a chicken meat supplier, and Xu planned to use it as way to buy more companies. He exited the chicken business, and he is fully focused on publishing triple-A games. Xu will be a speaker at our upcoming GamesBeat 2017 event in San Francisco on October 5 and 6.

Xu’s company, Leyou, sees a big opportunity in publishing free-to-play games on the consoles — like Warframe and Dirty Bomb. The consoles don’t have as many users as mobile devices or the PC, but they do have very committed audiences. And games like World of Tanks have shown that you can run a free-to-play game on the consoles because a larger percentage of players are willing to pay for something. Warframe has been going strong for years now, and it will help Leyou expand into the West. I caught up with Xu at the Devcom event in Cologne, Germany.

Digital Extremes has a Warframe booth at PAX West, the big fan show in Seattle this weekend. That shows that Leyou is willing to spend money to raise its profile among Western gamers. And if Xu gets his way, we’ll be seeing a lot more Leyou games in the West in the future.

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

Above: Alex Xu is the CEO of Leyou, owner of Splash Damage and Digital Extremes.

Image Credit: Leyou

GamesBeat: Tell us how you got started.

Alex Xu: Once upon a time, it was big news when a Hong Kong chicken meat processor acquired a triple-A game studio like Splash Damage. A lot of people were asking questions about that, why a chicken company was buying game studios. That was my start. I didn’t have any chance to explain that.

Back in 2013, when I was at Perfect World as chief business officer, we were trying to do cross-partnership deals. Perfect World was one of the early Chinese game companies that tried to do some Western operations in the U.S. We acquired Cryptic Studios, the makers of Star Trek Online and Neverwinter, and Runic Games, the maker of the Torchlight series. We did a lot of those deals. We had experience in working with Western studios. Perfect World was trying to talk with any Western studio doing online games, multiplayer games, trying to get them join Perfect World’s platform and bring in more online game players.

We found Digital Extremes, which was doing a free-to-play game that had just launched on Steam, Warframe. Warframe had a lot of potential, so we talked to them about doing something together. We thought we could link up Chinese experience in developing and operating online multiplayer games, especially free-to-play games. We had that experience from working with Cryptic, how to make a free-to-play game run in the right way in the Western world. We had a lot of synergy there.

Then, we come to the point where we were talking about merging together with Digital Extremes.

GamesBeat: But it wasn’t easy to do?

Xu: But in early 2014, Perfect World already had some plans to go private off the Nasdaq. We were trying to find another way, instead of using internal funding, to do the acquisition. I was forced to find some other ways to do the acquisition and still keep the possibility of Perfect World doing a buyback in the future. That wasn’t easy. Whenever a studio gets sold to someone else, in most cases, it’s hard to buy that back. You have to pay multiple times the valuation in the future.

A Hong Kong-listed company could serve that purpose. If you don’t do any promotion in the market and attract eyeballs from investors, you can make it very quiet. I was able to find a shell company. Previously, they were in the chicken industry, supporting KFC or something, but they were almost out of business. They were still listed, but that was all. We leveraged that company to acquire Digital Extremes step by step, by issuing bonds or new shares, whatever. It’s very complicated. That took almost a year. We signed the deal in 2014 and partially finished it by 2015. It was 100 percent finished in 2016.

During those two years, Perfect World was doing the privatization and relisting A shares on the Chinese domestic financial market. We were also talking to Splash Damage. We kept finding more good targets to acquire but still by using the Hong Kong-listed company. Back then, the company had a different name, but after the acquisition of Digital Extremes, we changed the name to Leyou. It’s an independent Hong Kong-listed company. We’ve been able to get rid of everything related to chicken. It’s just a game company now, holding Digital Extremes and Splash Damage.

Last year, when Perfect World was trying to acquire the whole listed company back, there were some difficulties. It didn’t happen. Now, there’s a new owner of the Leyou group. They did a general offer to take over the whole shell company from the previous shell owner. It’s now owned as an independent company, and they hired me as a CEO because I’m the guy who made the deals happen. I’d already left Perfect World to work for Qihoo 360. They hired me away from Qihoo 360 to join Leyou as CEO.

Above: Perfect World booth at ChinaJoy 2015.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

That’s the whole story over three years. We’re an independent company holding two triple-A game studios in the West. The strategy is very clear. From the beginning, it was about trying to help Western triple-A studios do online multiplayer games for the worldwide market — not only for the Chinese market but built from scratch for the worldwide market, especially targeting PC and console. We see the biggest opportunity on console.

In PC and mobile, 60 [to] 70 percent of the revenue, the majority of revenue, comes from item trading, free-to-play, continuous live operations, the game-as-a-service model, as opposed to the premium model, paying per download. But on console, still, almost 100 percent of the revenue comes from premium. A bigger and bigger percentage is coming from online, but it’s still premium. You pay before you play. But, we’ve seen more and more games on console, even premium games, building a longer life cycle by putting more efforts into live services after sales. Premium games on console are selling more content, more items, and greatly lengthening their lifespans. People are becoming more engaged with one game because they love it, and they want to keep playing together in multiplayer modes for a longer time. That’s changing the premium world as well.

Still, most developers in the West, especially triple-A developers, are scared of doing a game that starts from scratch as free-to-play. There are different reasons. They’re investing huge development costs in games, hundreds of people working for many years. They’re doing very high-quality games. It seems reasonable to charge up front. It’s an easy way to generate money. They still don’t know how to design a game, too, for a long life cycle, how to make players happy in that context. People hate the pay-to-win model, and that’s mostly come from Western developers or a few Asian developers who don’t know how to design a game in the right way for a Western audience.

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Grand Theft Auto V is still Take-Two’s biggest hit with 90 million copies sold

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One of the biggest games of the decade has hit another milestone. Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto V has sped past 90 million copies sold-in to retailers and sold-through digitally worldwide. The 2013 open-world crime game has had “unparalleled longevity,” according to publisher Take-Two Interactive, due to the appeal of GTA: Online. T…Read More

2K’s Hangar 13 opens new studio office in the United Kingdom

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The Hangar 13 logo
Hangar 13 built its rep as a triple-A game studio with 2K’s Mafia III, and now it is expanding to a fourth location with the opening of an office in Brighton, England. Game development veteran Nick Baynes will run this outpost. It says something that a studio working on one or two big console or PC games has to have offices around the globe t…Read More

Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick: ‘I’m charged with making hard decisions’

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Red Dead Redemption 2 will now debut on October 26.
Strauss Zelnick is very efficient with his answers. When I interviewed the CEO of Take-Two Interactive last week at the 2018 Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), the big game industry trade show in Los Angeles last week, he gave some short answers. But when it came to topics that interested him, he gave engaging replies. Zelnick says he’s not…Read More

Grand Theft Auto creator Dave Jones: You never know when you’ve got a hit idea

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Dave Jones, creator of the original Grand Theft Auto, and Robert Purchese of Eurogamer.
Since cofounding DMA Design in 1987, Dave Jones has created video games that have become massive franchises, including Lemmings, Grand Theft Auto, Crackdown, and APB: All Points Bulletin. Few people have had such hits as Jones, who most recently founded Cloudgine, a cloud-based game engine company, and sold it to Epic Games earlier this year. But i…Read More

2K reveals NBA 2K Playgrounds 2 is coming this fall

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NBA 2K Playgrounds got the green light.
Take-Two Interactive‘s 2K label announced today it will publish a new arcade-action video game, NBA 2K Playgrounds 2, from game studio Saber Interactive. The New York-based 2K said the sequel will debut this fall for PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. It will focus on 2-on-2 competition. The game will be complement the realisti…Read More

Take-Two’s summer earnings are the calm before the Red Dead Redemption 2 storm

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Red Dead Redemption 2 will now debut on October 26.
For Take-Two Interactive Software, it’s the calm before the storm. The New York company reported better-than-expected financial results for the first fiscal quarter ended June 30, but the company has the most-anticipated game of the year, Rockstar Games’ Red Dead Redemption 2, coming on October 26. That’s when the company could ki…Read More

The DeanBeat: How much did Red Dead Redemption 2 cost to make? (updated)

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Red Dead Redemption 2 debuts on October 26.
Is it possible that Rockstar Games spent $644 million to make its epic Wild West game, Red Dead Redemption 2? We've taken our guess.Read More

Red Dead’s doing great, but Grand Theft Auto still prints money

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Rockstar has shipped more than 100 million copies of Grand Theft Auto Online. It is in a realm with Tetris and Minecraft.Read More




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