Today in Redmond, Microsoft unveiled the Xbox One, its vision for the future of home entertainment. The Xbox One will expand Microsoft's Xbox agenda well beyond gaming, blurring the boundaries of gaming and interactive TV further than ever.

Let's take a look.

The Xbox One isn't much of a departure when it comes to design — but the tech under the hood is on steroids and then some.

With integrated Blu-Ray, Kinect and a whole new batch of hyper-responsive voice and gesture controls, Microsoft is angling for casual gamers and the hardcore set alike.

Microsoft's "futureproof" Xbox One features a reimagined (but not wholly reinvented) controller with developer-programmable buttons and "vibrating impulse triggers" that provide tactile feedback.

The Xbox One soaking up the spotlight... literally.

Microsoft hosted its Xbox One event in a tent at the center of at its Redmond, Washington Xbox campus.

Don Mattrick takes the stage for the biggest reveal moment of the day: the name of Microsoft's new console.

If the Today Show is any indication, the Xbox ain't just for l33t gamers these days — it's a console designed for the whole family.

Microsoft's new Xbox Live design takes after the successful formula of its predecessor rather than reinventing the wheel.

The Xbox One's multitasking chops on display, featuring a live Skype video chat demo.

With a demo of Call of Duty: Ghosts for the Xbox One, FPS fans are in understandable throes of ecstasy today. The new shooter will take the hit franchise in a new direction, setting the player up as the underdog in a ragtag team of post-apocalyptic warriors, who are presumably ghost-like in some capacity.

Since we can only assume that a handful of gamers out there won't be so into the Today Show thing, Forza Motorsport 5 will launch with the Xbox One.

The Xbox One may have made its photo op, but one big question remains: price. With so many advanced features on board, it's hard to imagine that the console will be able to match the $299 bill of its predecessor's base model. If Microsoft really wants to stave off the competition when the console becomes available—"later this year," executives said—the Xbox One's price tag needs to be as impressive as its spec sheet.

Photos by Taylor Hatmaker for ReadWrite

It's not every day one of the big three gaming powerhouses announces a new console. In fact, we've been waiting a solid eight years. In an event on its Redmond, Washington home turf today, Microsoft announced the Xbox One, its next generation Xbox gaming console — and more.

In fact, the Xbox One is pretty much an audacious land grab by Microsoft, an attempt to stake out your living room as its undisputed turf. Here's how.

The new console packs 8GB of RAM, a base 500GB hard drive, USB 3.0, wi-fi direct, and built-in Blu-Ray. The One runs on a custom eight-core AMD chip and will come bundled with Kinect, the motion-based controller system that Microsoft introduced with the Xbox 360.

 

Contrary to rumors, the Xbox One will not require an Internet connection at all times. Though it may crimp your ability to play used games and apparently won't play Xbox 360 games at all. 

 

On stage in Redmond, Head of Xbox Don Mattrick touted the Xbox team's ability to stay agile with trends — not always the company's strong suit — by feeding the voracious appetite of avid gamers. "Nearly 8 years after our launch, the Xbox 360 remains a vibrant platform," Mattrick said. "We made an early bet on Xbox live. Gamers were hungry to adopt emerging technologies... we doubled down on Xbox Live. Today it's time for technology to step behind the curtain."

But it is in the living room that the Xbox One stakes its major claim to fame. A new generation of Xbox Live will be the revamped, beating heart of the console, weaving together interactive TV, real-time major broadcast events like sports and awards shows and connected gaming, naturally.

The new Xbox Live interface enables quick-switching between Xbox Live's homescreen, movies and live TV — and in the demo, quick meant quick. ""You can switch to your game like it's a TV channel flip" according to Xbox Live head Marc Whitten. The quick-switching is thanks to "snap mode," a multitasking feature that allows apps to remain running in the background so that they can pop back up instantly.

By hosting its own event on its own terms, Microsoft is jumping the gun on E3 — the biggest North American gaming conference, and traditional grounds for big, flashy hardware announcements. Of course, Microsoft is also beating Sony to the punch, considering that the rival's PlayStation 4 reveal is just around the corner too. 

All photos by Taylor Hatmaker for ReadWrite

After a longer-than-expected wait, some shipping glitches, and a good deal of anticipation, my open-source, crowd-funded, cloud-gaming, Android-powered Ouya game console arrived in Friday's mail. I unpacked the box, plugged it in, and fired it up. After 24 hours, I've come to some conclusions about the device – though I can't say they're all positive.

(See also Can Startup Ouya's Crowd-Sourced Gaming Console Challenge Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo?)

Ouya: Out Of The Box

The Console: The first thing I noticed about the console itself was its size. The thing is small – about the size of a Rubik's Cube. With no optical drive or expansion slots, there's no reason for the device to be any bigger, but it was still a little jarring. It's also pretty idiot-proof. Plug in the included power adapter and HDMI cable, press the only button on the device, and you're ready to get started. 

The Controller: The controller was reputed to be the system's crown jewel, and overall, it's a success. The pop-off panels for accessing the dual battery compartments seem a little insecure at first, and I would have preferred a more traditional hinged compartment on the back, but the Ouya design seems rigid enough once everything is snapped together, and it's probably cheaper to fix, down the line.

Other than that, the pad, sticks and buttons worked as planned, the controller fit my average-sized hand nicely, and I was able to forget about controls and focus on the games immediately. And that's really the point. I found it worlds more comfortable than any Sony controller, and somewhat more natural than the Xbox 360's. If this controller shipped with a next-gen system, I wouldn't be upset.

Ouya Setup

The hardware was great, and pairing the controllers was straightforward. When I logged into my account, though, the Ouya's Kickstarter roots started to show. Setup went smoothly enough, but even a little documentation might have been nice. The box included only an FCC-mandated warning: no manual or diagrams. The log in process was simple, but to retrieve the username I'd registered months ago, I had to swap to my laptop and Google "Ouya username retrieval." An inline "Retrieve Username" next to the "Lost Password" link in the setup screen wouldn't have been terribly hard to add.

With any luck, that retail units will ship with more documentation and a smoothed-out interface. As an early backer, a reviewer and someone who'd like to see this type of project succeed, I didn't really care, but the Best Buy set is accustomed to a higher level of hand-holding.  

The Ouya UI

Once you're logged in, the Ouya interface is pretty clean, but there aren't too many more positives worth noting. It's tough to make four menu items a jumble, but Ouya somehow succeeded. The designers may have been trying a bit too hard to make things cool.

The menu items:

PLAY: Play the games you’ve downloaded. Simple enough.

DISCOVER:  This is the Ouya app store. DISCOVER is a horribly awkward list of downloadable games, with confusingly named sub-menus (What’s the difference between CHECK IT, STAFFPICKS, and FAVS, anyway?). The GENRES section is more useful, but it reveals an unfortunate lack of content designed for the device. As of the weekend, there were only six games in the DUAL STICK category and only three applications in APPS.

MAKE: Information for software developers that really doesn’t belong in a main menu.

MANAGE: System configuration.

I get what Ouya was going for, but everything abut the interface screams BETA, and it wouldn't have been that hard to do it right. Drop me straight into PLAY, provide a prominent link to the store, and link to games that are related to the one I'm currently playing. Hide the rest somewhere boring. Done.

Some of the gaps should get filled when more titles become available, but that list is likely to to see a lot of static. The bar is pretty low for Android games, so not every entry will be up to par for console games.

That's where some content curation could help. Branded channels (e.g., something by IndieCade or one of the gaming mags) could really help users find games worth playing. So could a healthy peer rating system and some filtering based on past ratings. The good news is that all of this can be fixed in software. The bad news is that the retail release date is coming up fast.

(See also Android Gaming Console Ouya Set To Ship At End Of June.)

Ouya Games

Final Fantasy III: What about Final Fantasy III? If you've played the Android version on other devices, you know what you're getting. If you played the original version 20 years ago, it's a refreshing trip down memory lane. FFIII offers Game Boy mechanics with 3D graphics: think Pokemon Stadium on the N64 compared to Pokemon Yellow and Red. Younger gamers without an appreciation of history will probably get bored very fast. It's great to see a major studio throw some weight behind the Ouya, but this game is not a kingmaker. 

The Ouya Verdict

I think the gaming industry needs a kick in the pants, and I'm glad to have helped support the Ouya's attempt to provide it. I have hopes that in time, the Ouya can provide exposure to indie game developers, add playability to Android games that could really use a solid controller and function as a valid over-the-top box for Netflix and other TV apps.

As a geek and freedom fighter, I think my money was well-spent. If I were a parent on a shopping mission or hardcore gamer looking for a fix, though, the Ouya just doesn't deliver. If you're looking for anything resembling a AAA-title gaming experience, your $99 would be better spent on a used Xbox 360 or a new video card for your gaming computer.

I think Ouya has the potential to fix the bugs and round out its stable of apps and games to make a really viable complement to traditional consoles, but the company needs to move fast, before gamers decide to move on.

News broke earlier this week of a new hack to Nintendo's Wii U that would allow gamers to play unauthorized (read: pirated) games. Nintendo immediately disputed it. But whether it's true or not, the Wii U will most certainly be hacked before long — and that fact tells us a lot about the increasingly tense arms race being waged between console manufacturers and hackers.

Users have been hacking their consoles — in the sense of writing new games and implementing new functions of their operating systems — since the dawn of gaming. But back when the hardware of your 1970s era console only slightly resembled the inside of your computer, it was more of a hobby and less of a widespread movement. 

In fact, you can blame game developers, not ordinary users, for modern anti-hacking measures. The Atari 2600, released in 1977, had no software restrictions at all, and neither did competing consoles. This left developers free to create a flood of terrible and low quality games that overwhelmed consumers and led to the great video game crash of 1983 — the industry’s first major recession. 

Nintendo Clamps Down

That changed with the rise of Nintendo, which sought to reverse Atari’s openness in favor of tight control over console technology and a business model that relied on revenue from licenses sold to game developers. Nintendo sought to ensure high-quality games by retaining the sole right to approve them — and by locking out rivals and hackers who might create their own.

Overnight, the challenge for hackers flipped from exploiting the potential of Atari’s open platform to finding ways to circumvent Nintendo’s lockout chip. It’s a cycle that’s continued to this day. Today, the Internet makes it easier than ever for hackers to collaborate and distribute exploits that allow even average players to bypass the lockdowns on their consoles.

If the Wii U has indeed been hacked, then it will join the ranks of the Playstation 3, Playstation 2, XBox 360, Xbox, Wii, Nintendo DS, and PSP. All of these consoles can be jailbroken like iPhones, ready to run whichever programs their owners choose. That could mean running an operating system like Linux on your XBox, loading homebrew, or original, games on your Wii, or playing pirating copies of commercial games on your PS3. 

Hackers Rev Up The Arms Race...

Obviously I don’t endorse piracy, and even at its most innocuous, console hacking lies in a legal gray area. (The Electronic Frontier Foundation is trying to change that.)

But it’s hard to imagine that hackers will — or can — be stopped. Locking down consoles seems to do little, if anything, to slow down people intent on hacking anyway. The more restrictions console manufacturers apply, the more it appears to spur hackers into trying to remove them. 

Or just enrage them. For instance, Sony's PlayStation Network —its online game service — was hacked shortly after Sony removed support for Linux on the PS3. Sony’s retroactive cutoff of the one place hackers could play around in the console could easily have incited the attacks in response. Of course, the PSN hack was very different from console “jailbreaks,” not least because it may also have resulted in credit-card fraud following the theft of user data.

...And So Do Game Companies

Yet console manufacturers won't give up, either. Their lockdowns are mostly ineffective against hackers, but they do plenty to make it not worth the average player’s time. If there was no lockdown at all, anyone could burn illegal copies of games on CDs to share.

The big console makers also have an incentive to hold onto all the money they can get. Aside from pirates, consoles face a slew of big challenges, not least among them a robust second-hand game market they would dearly love to kill off and a profusion of 99-cent game apps that are frequently just as fun to play as the $60 monsters produced by big game developers.

Of course, this entire mode of thinking could go out the window when the Ouya is out this summer. The world’s first “pre-hacked” console is a throwback to the fully open Atari. The very fact that it earned $8 million while still a concept shows a high demand for a open-source system, but time will tell if it inherits the Atari’s woes or finds a way to make it work.

Photo courtesy of Nintendo

Playing Snap, Snap, Go, a new iPhone-only app, is kind of like eating at a fast food restaurant. It's wonderful - at first. But the fun fades much too quickly. And then you're consumed with a sense of regret and shame because even though you just had sort of a pleasurable experience, you know it can't possibly be good for you.

If Snap, Snap, Go - which describes itself as "a picture game for awful people" - turns out to be as popular as fast food, it may mark the end of civilization's progress. Because that would mean smartphones - the most advanced personal computing and communications devices ever created - are really all about making us giggle. Which certainly isn't "awful," but still a vast comedown from the awesome, life-changing uses promised for our amazing mobile computers.

Snap Battle

Tellingly, Snap, Snap, Go's positioning isn't quite right. It's really for "awful people," it's for the awful person in all of us. 

Here's how it works: After downloading the app, you sign in using your Facebook account. For beginners, the game presents a series of meme-like questions, such as: "Eat Just One," and asks you to vote for which of the of two pictures it shows you best corresponds to the question. Your choices might be a bowl of jelly beans versus chili cheese fries, for example. 

There are also plenty of "awful" battles. Such as: "I lie to get __," "Donald Trump could wear it as a toupee," or "Ron Jeremy owns 10 of these." These are distressingly hard to resist. 

The real "fun" begins when you challenge your Facebook friends - or random opponents. (None of my friends use the app, which I'm sure means something, so I challenged random people.) Again, the app presents you with a series of meme-like questions. For example, "Why is my phone sticky?" (Yes, I know.) You then snap and post a picture that you think best answers the question - as do your opponents. If you don't have an, er, provocative picture of your own, the game lets you cheat and grab a photo from Flickr. Then others get to vote on whose photo they like best. (That's where the pictures come from in the beginner's example above.)

If your opponents don't respond quickly, the game lets you "nudge" them. Beyond that, there's not much else you can do. Another problem is that the game doesn't immediately provide you with results - who won, who lost, how many people voted for one picture over another. I often got bored waiting and moved on to a new snap battle. The game does make it easy, however, to encourage your friends and followers on Facebook and Twitter to join in on the action.

Like fatty, salty, fast food or that silly new pop song you can't stop listening to, the app does its best to keep you hooked. Who could resist responding when asked to come up with a picture for what "always gets you laid?" 

The free app is rated 12+, despite "mild mature" themes. The app does make it easy to report inappropriate pictures, which is a good thing. While playing for less than a day, I encountered one picture that I thought was borderline inappropriate.

"Wisdom" Of The Crowd?

The game's developer states that "witty or funny responses often win, the more awful, the better you do, but it all depends on the wisdom of the crowd."

Wisdom of the crowd is a bit of a stretch. This game is about stealing a few moments of amusement - the app equivalent of Lolcats.  

Somewhere on the Internet sits a very well-constructed research paper discussing the psycho-social reasons why we humans love silly pictures and random, mindless contests with strangers, and further outlines the implications of such behavior. That's great, and a huge validation of the enduring value of the Interent.  On the other hand, I have already spent far more time playing Snap, Snap, Go than I ever will reading that paper. 

Microsoft's follow-up to the Xbox 360, currently code named 'Durango,' will likely be unveiled on May 21 at a "small venue" with a focus on initial details and a 2013 company roadmap, sources tell The Verge.  Because this May event is only one month from this year's Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in June, its likely Microsoft won't actually show the physical console and will instead focus on hardware specs, social and online gaming features and a timeline for release. Perhaps most important, there's no word on whether Microsoft will require always-on Internet connectivity to use the the new platform.

Putting aside the decision to keep the event small, this move appears to parrot the steps taken by Sony in February when it unveiled the PlayStation 4 at an extravagant showing in New York City. Company executives spent a lot of time talking PlayStation philosophy but never displayed a physical console. With E3 right around the corner, Microsoft has no reason to jump the gun either. 

In another move seemingly cribbed from Sony, Microsoft is reportedly outfitting the new Xbox with an AMD x86 chip, giving it a PC architecture that will not play old games. Other notable specs rumored for the new console include a 1.6GHz 8-core CPU, 8GB of memory, and a 500GB hard drive. 

Always-Online Rumors Take Center Stage

More pressing than any hardware spec, confirmed launch title or release date is the rumor that Microsoft will bake in so called "always-online functionality" to its new Xbox. Always-online functionality would require players to maintain an active Internet connection at all times just to use the new console.

The benefits of this are unclear - at least for players - while the negatives have been argued time and again and even displayed in real-time with debacles like Electronic Arts' SimCity launch disaster, which has contributed to the game publisher reaching the finals of The Consumerist's Worst Company In America Poll for the second year in a row. 

It's hard to imagine Microsoft thinks it can get away with enforcing such a monumental shift on Xbox players. By restricting console use to the quality and reliability of the players' Internet connections, Microsoft would make players  beholden to company servers and whatever digital content management restrictions publishers decide to impose. 

Such a move would be a disaster waiting to happen, though it illustrates the contentious future of an industry stuck in a constant in a tug-of-war between big gaming companies and committed, tech-savvy gamers. If Microsoft is smart, it will keep quiet in May on the always-online rumors, but even that won't soothe the angry mob. 

Image of current Xbox suite courtesy of Microsoft. 

One hundred fifty four days after acquiring Lucasfilm — and the rights to everything Star Wars — for a cool $4 billion, Disney has shut down LucasArts, the Lucas division long responsible for making video games. The tech press had two immediate reactions to the news, both of them wrong.

Some greeted the news with sadness and longing. Per TechCrunch:

While the move was not unforeseen (the company’s last few games haven’t been very successful, and rumors of projects being shuttered have trickled in since the acquisition), that doesn’t make today’s news any less disheartening. A part of my childhood — a part of an entire generation of gamer’s collective childhood, really — goes down with LucasArts.

From CNET:

"So, first, Disney cancels the 'Clone Wars,' the best thing to happen to 'Star Wars' since the original trilogy, and now this," wrote a commenter on a Kotaku story on the shut-down. "I am now extremely skeptical of Disney's handling of this company, and I fear [for] the franchise's future."

For others, the move was new evidence of the gaming shift from consoles to smartphones, as Wired supposed:

It’s hard to be surprised at this turn of events when Disney spelled it all out at the time of the acquisition. It’s moving away from internally-developed console games, having shut down Warren Spector’s studio Junction Point following the release of Epic Mickey 2, and towards social and mobile. 

But the real reason for Disney's shuttering of LucasArts was foretold many years ago in that cinematic classic Spaceballs: "Merchandising. Merchandising. Merchandising."

Merchandising, as the wise Yogurt tells us, is "where the real money from the movie is made."

Consider the official Lucasfilm statement regarding the closing:

After evaluating our position in the games market, we’ve decided to shift LucasArts from an internal development to a licensing model, minimizing the company’s risk while achieving a broader portfolio of quality Star Wars games.

It's hard to view that statement, and the prominent use of the phrase "licensing model," as meaning anything but this: Disney's Star Wars team is looking forward to revenues, but backwards for, well... for "content."

It's All About Content. Star Wars Content

This is not cynical, just (big) business. Business — and Disney is the master of the "content" business — is what this acquisition was about, after all. Disney bought content, pure and simple — great big barrels of Star Wars content with which to fill its merchandising channels and theme park attractions and all that vast empty space on the Disney Channel.

Just think of it — all those great concepts like the Death Star, lightsabers and pod racing, and characters such as Luke and Leia, R2D2 and that robot that had the bad cough, all pureed and processed and poured out into any number of new money-making ventures. That's what Disney was buying when it paid for the highly immersive Star Wars universe.

In the Disney calculation, LucasArts was little more than a distraction, if that. The Disney machine already includes a gaming division, an animation studio, and plenty of skilled people already on staff.

Likewise, Disney almost certainly never even considered the proposed Star Wars 1313 video game shooter, and probably never thought much — if at all — about many of the division's great legacy games. Even if they produced memorable scenes or characters, these games touch very few people. Disney covets blockbusters — which, of course, are then ground up and forced through all of Disney's many channels.

The Future According To Disney

So expect not just a new Star Wars trilogy but a cavalcade of Disney World-Star Wars thrill rides. Assume there will be a Star Wars "Experience" at Disneyland. Your daughter will be singing catchy Star Wars-esque tunes she's already heard a million times on the Disney Channel. At night, you'll read your young son one of the many age-appropriate Star Wars books.

New toys, action figures, games — based solely on the original Star Wars blockbusters and the hoped-for blockbusters of the future — will probably sell in the billions. The characters in Toy Story 4 will lovingly mock their new friend, the bumbling Jar Jar Binks. Your grandchildren will grow up believing Jango Fett is a spaceman-like Billy the Kid, delivering outlaw justice throughout the furthest corners of the galaxy.

LucasArts was never going to be a part of this grand Disney vision. All you can hope for now is that whatever Disney creates based on their total ownership of the Star Wars universe does not suck.

Image taken from Spaceballs press photo

When it comes to video games, the death knell is rung loudly and frequently. In an industry so intrinsically tied to technological innovation, we won't stop hearing any time soon about what former trend or gaming mainstay has its head on the chopping block. The most recent forecast from worried gaming circles: original, story-driven, triple-A games are too bloated and risky to survive in a cheaper, stripped-down and more mobile world. Unfortunately, there's a lot of evidence backing this claim up. 

Case in point: BioShock Infinite, which hit shelves on March 26 to universal acclaim. An artistic endeavor that cost anywhere between $100 to $200 million (developer Irrational Games won't confirm) to make and market on top of almost five years of development to fine tune it to near perfection, it's the second original installment in the BioShock series.

But it's not a sequel. A game unto itself, it continues the trend of creator and writer Ken Levine's visions of thought-provoking period pieces. This one happens to mash a 1912 setting with pop-culture aesthetics, sensitive American history (like racism and eugenics) and moral philosophy into what is being called easily one of the greatest games ever made. In other words, while the first BioShock was a coming-of-age moment for video games as an art form back in 2007, Infinite can be viewed as the epitome of the modern, blockbuster "art game," a term usually reserved for offbeat indie titles but one that aptly fits the murky, morality-infused waters that only BioShock treads.

Despite all the accolades, BioShock Infinite might be the last of its kind. A number of factors are contributing to this outcome, but principally the struggle is between the money that can be made versus the amount of time, effort and studio dollars invested. Early sales reports from the United Kingdom say that despite the fever pitch engulfing the gaming community, BioShock Infinite still didn't outsell the new Tomb Raider at launch. 

The gaming landscape is allowing independent developers to gain recognition easier and faster than ever before, mobile and Facebook games are generating more and more revenue, and a $99 console has Kickstarted its way into the hands of consumers. So there might not be a place for an artistically grand game with a $100 million plus budget, a $60 consumer price tag and a narrower target audience. Well, at least one that doesn't have a number tagged on the end of its name. 

In The Next Console Generation, Sequels Will Sell

Of course, a handful of big-budget, triple-A games are slated for the end of the current generation of consoles this year. And 2014 and 2015 hold the promise of a slew of new games for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox 'Durango,' as its called at the moment. 

But a lot of these titles - and a healthy chunk of what Sony debuted at its PS4 event in February - were sequels within established franchises that are only confirmed and shown off because publishers know they will sell. 

After all, your annual Call of Duty or Assassin's Creed take an international team of developers only a year to churn out and still make hundreds of millions of dollars in sales (Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 made $500 million in its first day, making it the largest entertainment launch ever).

These games still cost tens of millions of dollars to make, but are offering increasingly less innovation with each iteration so the developers can put them on shelves every fall and keep turning those profits. However, to call BioShock a franchise - and Infinite a sequel - is to ignore its studio Irrational Games' mission, which is delivering unique, orginal, epic stories that constantly push the medium. Given the rave reviews, the game pulls that off well. 

So it's not quite the case that BioShock Infinite will be the last "art game" as it is likely that it could be the last big-budget one. As the money begins to move away from console games in general, what's left for triple-A titles will naturally funnel to profitable franchises and not to unique, original gambles like BioShock.

BioShock was such a gamble in fact that Levine, just to get the series off the ground last decade, had to pitch the original for three years before getting a publisher, Take-Two Interactive, to put some money behind it. That kind of attitude will become less and less common as the financial jaws begin to close in on console game publishing. 

Follow The Money: Facebook And Mobile

Hardcore gamers scoff at the shallowness of Angry Birds, the manipulative tactics of Facebook games, and the move towards a mobile-dominated industry offering smaller satisfactions. But the sad truth is that that's where the money is. 

Console sales are tanking. NPD Group reported last month that console sales fell 36% in February from the same time last year (though you could attribute some of that to consumers holding out for Sony and Microsoft's next generation), and Nintendo's Wii U has been hurting of late. As for game sales, those fell 25%. 

(See also: Game Consoles Are Already Dead, And Developers Know It)

Compare that to how Facebook game developers have been doing and you can start to see the shift. Makers of Facebook games like Candy Crush generated a total of $2.8 billion in 2012 alone. These are free games developed with the sole purpose of making you spend more time on Facebook and driving you, through addiction, to pony up more money than any traditional console game could ever milk out of you.

As for mobile games, they generated $2.1 billion last year and will keep growing alongside digitally sold titles and downloadable content. These are the new money makers, typically using a free model that sucks players dry like for instance Real Racing 3, described as "F1 meets Farmville" because of its microtransaction system that forces you to pay every 30 minutes to keep playing. 

The final frontier to collapse into the gaming chasm is the indie community, which has undergone a bit of a transformation ever since the big hardware companies gained the ability to sell independently developed titles over their online marketplaces at prices as cheap as $5 and $10.

The robust new market for quirky, well-designed games from small teams raises an interesting question: if indie games can provide a thought-provoking, philosophical and emotional interactive experience, what are we to lose in chopping off the triple-A limb if not simply scale and scope?

The Indie Game Revolution 

At this year's Game Developer's Conference that took place in San Francisco last week, downloadable game Journey became the first independent title to win the Game of the Year award. That would be on top of the game's other multiple game of the year awards and its Best Soundtrack Grammy nomination, a first for the medium. 

Journey has been hailed as one of the greatest, most emotional storytelling experiences in modern gaming, and yet it clocks in at about three hours of playtime and only costs $15 to download to your PS3. The concept is simple: play as an unnamed, cloaked figure that must travel to the peak of mountain. Yet it has a unique mechanism, as most indie games do, that allows you to join up with an anonymous player from anywhere in the world who can serendipitously enter your game at any time.

This kind of thought-provoking take on gaming concepts is part of the canon of "art games," a genre getting more and more recognition from mainstream markets. These titles are also fulfilling a need for deep, meaningful games in a world where the next BioShock Infinite is looking less and less likely. They're just doing it on a smaller scale and for less money. 

“Like it or not, we’re not the Clash anymore. We’re Green Day," said Andy Schatz, an indie game designer, in an interview with The New York Times' Chris Sullentrop. A clever analogy and one that accurately describes the indie game market as it's evolved from fighting the traditional system to being embraced by it. 

This trend bodes well for the future of what was once a peripheral community that could barely get its creations on the market, but is also yet another reason why the industry may not sustain projects as bold and expensive as BioShock in the future.

The Ground Is Shifting

To deny there are artistic, big-budget games on the horizon would be to ignore the work of a handful of forward-thinking studios. Naughty Dog is producing The Last of Us, a post-apocalyptic game that puts you in the role of protecting a young girl amid vicious survival combat, and French studio Quantic Dream is making Beyond Two Souls, the first ever title to use full motion capture to transform an actress (Ellen Page, in this case) into a video game character while keeping real-world likeness completely intact. 

These games are doing what BioShock Infinite did: building off a previous success (Naughty Dog with its Uncharted series and Quantic Dream with Heavy Rain) and trying something new and envelope pushing. But in many ways they are also maneuvering the line between a bold step forward for the medium and something that still resembles a marketable blockbuster-style psychological thriller.

BioShock's appeal comes primarily from the way it feels like a complete realization of artistic vision, one painstakingly crafted over many years fraught with uncertainty, revision and a number of high-profile employee departures. It's a mix of ideas screaming to be translated into film, but likely will never get there because of how impossible it would be. 

"For all I know, I'll never get to work on another big $60 title - or the equivalent of that. Maybe there will be no economy for that. Who knows?" Levine says to nonfiction author and game critic Tom Bissell in a Grantland interview. "…I'm pretty confident that talented people will be able to work on quality products. I just don't know exactly how." Admitting it's the 'how' that's up in the air is the first step. Figuring out what to do next is the important part. 

For those who have their hands on BioShock Infinite, and to the many who may likely pick it up in the near future, savor the game's moments and all that went into creating its floating city environment and the one-of-a-kind feel it evokes. It could be the last sign of a dying breed. 

Image courtesy of Irrational Games; second image courtesy of Google Play; third image courtesy of thatgamecompany.

Back in the day, Nolan Bushnell invented Pong, founded Atari and created Chuck E. Cheese. But now he says that new tools and cultural norms are enabling creativity in ways never before possible - and offers hints on how to make your company more creative.

We spoke on the occasion of the release of Bushnell's new book: Finding the Next Steve Jobs, written with Gene Stone (more on the book's unusual publishing model later).

As many people know, Jobs worked for Bushnell at Atari in the mid 1970s before moving on to Apple. Bushnell uses Jobs as a symbol of creativity at tech companies: "Steve Jobs showed that an innovative company can create the highest market cap company in the world." Despite Jobs' passing in 2011, Bushnell says today's best companies are far ahead of where we used to be.

"In the early days of Atari," Bushnell recalls, "engineers came to work in a coat and tie and were working 9-5." Venture capitalists willing to give cash to help innovative startups were just a tiny niche, he says, "All the real financial clout was controlled by big banks in New York, but now we have vibrant angel investors, Kickstarter and crowdfunding."

And that's only part of the change. Even as we eliminate the gatekeepers, Bushnell contends, the costs of creativity itself are coming down as technological tools get cheaper and more powerful. Individuals and small groups can now shoot a movie or create a software company on their own. "In many cases, that's the most important thing," Bushnell says.

Unleashing Creativity

But there's still a lot more to be done. "The problem isn't creativity," Bushnell explains, "but creating the environment for creatives to work in… too much [good stuff] ends up on the cutting room floor."

"I believe we have literally thousands of Steve Jobses," but we don't empower them to create. "Look at the way we treat creative people! We just have to detoxify our companies and we'll have innovation flowing out of the ground like oil."

Hire Obnoxious People

One key considieration is to value true creative talent over mere niceness. This flies in the face of the "no assholes" rules now gaining popularity The problem, Bushnell says, is that "a lot of really brilliant people are obnoxious. They're used to always being the smartest person in the room and they may treat other people with disdain."

And Bushnell says that separating brilliant and obnoxious from just plain obnoxious is actually easier than you think.

The Importance Of Hobbies

Their contribution is one clue, of course, but Bushnell also suggests looking at what creative types do on their own time. "Enthusiasm is kind of the mitigator" for the obnoxious people, he says.

What you want is someone who truly has the companies interest at heart and just happens to be dismissive of people less capable of achieving those goals.

Bushnell points out that many people used to complain withering criticism from Steve Jobs. But Bushnell adds that it turns out that most of the time, Jobs was right. His victims just didn't like the way he critiziced them.

Today's Most Creative Company?

"Google. There are so many things going on at the Google campus right now that exemplify the right track. A lot of true craziness coming out of that company, but it's crazy like a fox. Autodrive cars? That's going to happen in a short amount of time… and think about what it took! That represents a large corporate commitment."

Book Publishing As Startup

Clearly, Bushnell tried to be creative with his book, as well. Rather than signing with a big publisher or going the self-publishing route espoused by folks like Guy Kawasaki, Bushnell chose to be the first example of a new startup publishing model that distributes the risk and the rewards.

Instead of doing all the work yourself, or having a traditional publisher pull together all the skills needed to put together a book, Net Minds works by trading equity in the project for the required work. Editors, designers, etc. get points, not just cash, and participate in any upside. According to co-founder Tim Sanders, Net Minds has 17 more books in the pipeline - not all of them attached to well-known names like Bushnell. According to Sanders, the team-publishing model lets freelance publishing professionals optimize their available time to earn passive income from successful projects.

Sanders claims to have 400 freelancers signed up, both new players and established veterans like Bushnell's co-author Gene Stone. While Sanders says the company is working on software to appraise a book's commercial potential, it's hard to see how it could pull in top-notch talent for anything but the sexiest, easiest-to-sell projects.

Disclosure: Many years ago, Nolan Bushnell wrote a column for me at Electronic Entertainment magazine.

Nvidia has just about pulled off the trick of rendering computer-generated human faces -- in real time -- that won't make viewers squirm. At least so long as they don't grimace. Or try to talk.

The graphics chip maker Nvidia said on Tuesday that it had teamed up with the University of Southern California to develop two sets of simulation technologies designed to improve rendering and simulations in video games, one for oceans (Wave Works) and one for faces (Face Works). 

The faces technology is the big deal here. At certain moments during a demonstration at its GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia's virtual "Ira" transcended the so-called "uncanny valley" and made me think that the virtual head on stage was an actual, living person.

It's been a long time coming.

Graphics Chips: Not Just For Graphics Any More

Years ago, Nvidia, Rendition, 3Dlabs and others helped transform the PC with the introduction of 3D graphics, from which evolved PC gaming, CAD animation, video production and a number of other creative enterprises. Nvidia's chief executive Jen-Hsun Huang has been an evangelist of sorts, helping to push Nvidia into the enterprise space with integrated machines that use its graphics processing units (GPUs), as well as into smartphones and tablets with new versions of its Tegra chips.

"Over the last 20 years, this medium has transformed the PC from a computer for information and productivity to one of creativity, expression and discovery," Huang said in his opening keynote. "The beauty and the power of interactivity this medium allows us to connect with ideas in a way that no other medium can. And the GPU is the engine of this medium."

The original 1992 Alone in the Dark, a PC gaming classic. Source: KentuckyFriedPopcorn.blogspot.com

The fundamental building block of the GPU is the polygon, also known as "triangles" - groundbreaking games like Alone in the Dark created 3D characters out of polygons that players could easily distinquish. Today, however, faster processors have allowed those 3D polygons to become so small that they can't seen by the naked eye. Those 3D surfaces can be colored, textured and even "bump-mapped" to break up the regularity of the image, improving realism.

At the same time, GPUs have become physics engines, modelling everything from how light passes through and reflects off of objects - ray tracing - to applying real "physics" to objects as they fall and bounce. Tracking particles as they move, such as smoke or water, is also part of the equation. That's the kind of computational power that supercomputers tap into - and in February, Nvidia launched its Titan card, using the same GPU technology as the world's fastest supercomputer, ORNL's Titan, uses.

Face Works, Ira And The "Uncanny Valley"

For a time, both Nvidia and its chief rival, ATI Technologies (now part of AMD) used, well, virtual dolls, to demonstrate the realism of their graphics technology and appeal to hormone-fueled gamers. AMD's Ruby is a thing of the past, but Nvidia's fairy-like Dawn appeared in Huang's keynote. The showcase for 2002's GeForce FX line, Dawn was created to embody "cinematic computing" and turned heads with impressive attention to detail, realistic hair and dynamic lighting effects. But Face Works and Ira are the future.

Nvidia's Face Works was developed in conjunction with USC's Institute for Creative Technologies, which helped develop LightStage, a high-speed illumination system designed for human-scale subjects consisting of 6,500 white LED sources. Essentially, Huang said, a person marches into a giant sphere, where the subject is photographed from 253 different directions. Each image is matted onto a black background, and compiled into a 3D object. Face Works allows each object to be modified, or "stretched," to simulate speech and movement.

A shot of a model using ICT's Light Stage technology.

It's not easy. "Simulating an ocean is hard; simulating a face is harder," Huang said.

Humans are trained to instinctively spot things that are a little off, and that reaction, dubbed "the uncanny valley," ironically kicks in the more realistic a simulation gets. Basically, some people get creeped out by CGI that looks a little too realistic, but not quite realistic enough to be fully convincing.

Ira demonstrates the problem. As these images show, Ira looks quite normal - fully human, actually, under certain lighting conditions. What Face Works does is model light as it enters the skin, reflects, and diffuses through the skin's surface. Slight disfigurements - a freckle, skin pores - add to the realism.

But the illusion often breaks when the 3D model moves, as you can see in the keynote video below (the ocean modeling begins at about 9 minutes in, Ira and Dawn appear about 16 minutes in). Essentially, Ira looks eerily realistic when motionless, but when he grimaces (and, above all, talks) we begin to pick up on how his facial expressions aren't quite lifelike.

Still, recent games like L.A. Noire became famous for their realistic depictions of human faces, and "reading" expressions became a gameplay mechanic. Years ago, getting those right at all was an amazing accomplishment. We're now at the point where companies like Nvidia get it right most of the time. "All of the time," it seems, will soon be within our grasp.

Wave Works: Splash!

Nvidia's ocean simulation, meanwhile, uses Wave Works to tap into Titan for what the company called the most realistic ocean simulation ever. Most water simulations paint the ocean as a flat surface, with random ripples distorting it. Objects that "float" on top, like a ship, might not actually move in response to the ocean's undulations.

Nvidia's "Wave Works" models a gale at sea.

Wave Works, however, uses 20,000 "virtual sensors" on a ship model to model water pressure, and to respond to the proximity of the water on the ship. And Water Works even models spray, tracking 100,000 "spray particles" as they move through the air. The Nvidia software can model an entire Beaufort scale of wind speed, dialing up everything from a sunny day to a near-hurricane, Huang said. And as the ship moves, it crashes through the waves, being tossed up and down. This simulation, at least, was completely convincing.

If you went to Amazon on Thursday and tried to buy the new SimCity, the first major release of the classic urban planning PC series in 10 years, you wouldn't have been able to. Amazon wouldn't sell it to you.

Why? Because the servers of the game's publisher, Electronic Arts, were in such a disastrous state that very few people could actually access the game. And those who could were seeing server issues disrupt their save files. So Amazon decided to pull it.

Server problems wouldn't normally hamper a video game's launch, unless that game is developed by EA. In an effort to combat piracy - or something, it's not quite clear - EA deployed an online-only Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology through its Origin service for SimCity, which came out on March 5. That means in order to play the game, you need to be online at all times and connected to EA's servers, even when playing the single-player mode. When player demand starting causing the servers to fall, it also brought down nearly every player's ability to play any aspect of the game. 

EA moved fast to address the problem but not fast enough. A string of press releases addressed the issue with mounting seriousness, culminating with EA's decision late Thursday to actually begin removing key features of the game to help keep the servers online. For example, the company eliminated the mode that lets players speed up time to accelerate their city's growth. A blog post by Kip Katsarelis, SimCity's senior producer, details the company's plans to address the problems, but did not offer concrete information on when the changes would happen.

And in an email sent out on Friday to EA's marketing affiliates, the game publisher announced that it has "deactivated all SimCity text links and creative and we ask you to please remove any copy promoting SimCity from your website for the time-being." Wow.

The Aftermath

Gaming site Polygon addressed the issue, docking SimCity 1.5 points from its original stellar score of 9.5 for the ongoing server problems. Then it updated it again, dropping the score to 4.0. Kotaku told fans, under a heading titled "Should You Buy This Game?" a big, bold "NOT YET." Even The New York Times decided to address the topic, apparently taking a philosophical approach by asking A Game That Can't Be Played: Is It Still A Game?

As of now you can at least buy the game from Amazon again, if you really want to. Both the physical and downloadable versions are back up for sale, with a special note warning, "Many customers are having issues connecting to the 'SimCity' servers. EA is actively working to resolve these issues, but at this time we do not know when the issue will be fixed."

These issues aren't going away: Take one look at the physical version of SimCity's limited edition on Amazon and you'll get a good idea of the breadth of the backlash. The product is on its way to becoming the worst rated item in the Amazon marketplace, with an astounding 2,796 1-star reviews compared to just 70 5-star reviews, at the time of publication. If EA can't fix this fast enough, SimCity may garner as much Amazon hatred as 2008's Spore, another EA title (ironically from Maxis and Will Wright, the same team that created SimCity) plagued by the company's self-imposed DRM measures. (Ironically, Maxis is earning the sympathy of some players who prefer to blame EA.) 

Even more telling is the review marked "Most Helpful," happens to be a facetious take on the game, including satirical gems like, "Thankfully, the game never actually loads. I was looking for a program where I could zone out, and stare at my computer screen in a meditative state for hours on end with no interruptions." 

The Biggest DRM Failure

The point isn't just that SimCity is a great game plagued by a bad launch. The real question is how big an impact these kinds of DRM debacles have on game sales - and on DRM technologies.

EA's online-only DRM is not alone in the gaming industry. Blizzard, makers of the Warcraft and StarCraft series, tried similar tactics with the release of Diablo 3 last year, angering thousands upon thousands of players locked out of the overburdened severs. But as Wired's Chris Kohler noted, Blizzard fixed the issue in a matter of days, and the game went on to sell millions and lead the PC market in 2012.

If companies solve these issues fast enough, the backlash bubbles for about a week before everything goes back to normal. And nothing substantive changes. Publishers like EA get to keep pushing the limits - revising the terms of digital ownership through brute force. 

We can only hope things will be different this time. SimCity proves once and for all that online-only DRM is an utter failure. It doesn't even do much to combat piracy - making legitimate customers feel more pain than the pirates.

There's a big difference between protecting content reasonably - perhaps with activation codes or secure disc-based DRM - and asserting authoritarian control over the people who actively want to pay for your product. The first priority should be treating paying customers with respect. 

If You Don't Like The Terms, Ignore The Product

Those hosed by EA don't have much recourse. EA is not offering refunds for digital copies, and fuming in online communities doesn't seem to have much effect on the giant company. 

Going forward, the only real solution may come from the most helpful 1-star review on Amazon, from a user named Malor who earned more than 7,700 recommendations. He noted that SimCity is not a typical game with a beginning, middle and end. It's a toy, and you used to be able to buy that toy and play with it. But now, Malor wrote, "You don't even get to buy your toy. Rather, you rent a toy from EA, who lets you play with it only in very limited, circumscribed ways, only on their servers."

Malor's final recommendation offers perhaps the best approach: "You would be wiser to take three twenties out of your wallet, and light them on fire." In other words, don't waste your time or money on products with draconian DRM, no matter how intriguing they might be otherwise. Only when DRM affects sales will EA and other publishers take this situation seriously. 

Image courtesy of Electronic Arts.

Ouya, the $99 Android game console that racked up more than $8.5 million in Kickstarter funding last August, will finally begin shipping to backers next month. The big date: March 28, according to CEO Julie Uhrman in a Kickstarter update this morning. A full launch in retail stores is still set for June.

(See also: From Kickstarter to Target: Indie Ouya Gets Major Retail Partners)

Uhrman acknowledged up front that units will ship in staggered fashion over a number of weeks, given that production is still ramping up and the company has a large number of orders to fill. She did tell the project's backers to expect a tracking number with an arrival estimate via email.

Ouya's Confirmed Games

Uhrman also announced a string of confirmed games for the console, expanding on a once-ambiguous set of titles that had many skeptical that Ouya could live up to its goal of revolutionizing the game industry. 

(See also: Can Ouya Challenge Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo?)

Newly announced games include an exclusive title from Kim Swift (of Portal and Left 4 Dead fame) and Airtight Games, a port of developer Minority Media's Papa & Yo, The Ball from Tripwire Interactive (maker of The Killing Floor), and a console version of the PC role-playing title ChronoBlade.

Uhmran also announced the winners of Ouya's 10-day game jam contest, co-sponsored with Kill Screen:

• CREATE Grand Prize: Strange Happenings on Murder Island (Free Lives)
• Most Surprising: Television (Laboratory Games LLC)
• Four Bright Buttons and Two Sticks: Bombball (E McNeill)
• Most Immersive: Whispering Willows (Night Light Interactive)
• Pop Your Eyes Out: Pipnis (Santa Ragione)
• Best Couch with Friends Games: 2D Cube Zombie Platformer (Molinware)
• Best Game Created Using Unity Engine: Stikbold (Team Stikbold)

Ouya, of course, still has a long way to go before it becomes a console gamers can rely on. Uhrman is quite aware of all that:

You will also get to watch Ouya evolve over the coming weeks and months. We’ll continue to add new features, refine our user experience, and bring on more games. As always, we appreciate your feedback (and apply it), so keep it coming.

Even as virtual farms lose their luster, Zynga is looking to rebound in greener pastures - ones lined with real cash.

Even as it suffers a spate of bad news related to its traditional social-gaming businesses, the company is now working on ways to throw its weight behind real-money gaming in the U.S. - in the hope of very real new revenue streams. 

Zynga's Silver Lining Playbook

On Monday, Zynga announced plans to close offices in New York, Texas and Baltimore. The Baltimore office will suffer about 30 layoffs, with the rest of the staff being farmed out to other Zynga HQs. The team in Baltimore was focused CityVille 2, a social game that the company axed earlier this month just five months after its launch.

That's a big come-down over the past year. In March 2012, Zynga shares were trading at a 52-week high of $15.91. They opened at $3.41 on Tuesday. Something has to change. The company may be synonymous with the advent of social gaming on Facebook - FarmVille, Mafia Wars, etc. - but its best hope now seems to shifting gears toward more lucrative real money games - assuming it can get legislators to go along.

In a way, getting its hands dirty in gambling is a return to its roots. Zynga's first game, Texas Hold'Em Poker (now known as Zynga Poker) launched way back in July 2007 - two full years before FarmVille started polluting our Facebook feeds. Now, Zynga hopes to benefit from the rivalry between revenue-starved states eager to legalize - and tax - online gambling.

Online Gambling Legislation Fast-Tracked

After signing a fast-tracked bill into law last week, Nevada is the first state in the nation to allow virtual gambling. New Jersey is right on Nevada's heels, and Governor Chris Christie could sign a similar bill as soon as this week. The legality of online gambling in the U.S. has a confusing history - one typical of U.S. law trying to grapple with emerging online phenomena.

The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, which "prohibits gambling businesses from knowingly accepting payments in connection with the participation of another person in a bet or wager that involves the use of the Internet," solidified online wagering's illicit status back in 2006. So states like Nevada and New Jersey will still have to reconcile their state laws with federal regulatory agencies - a process that could delay big profits for Zynga and other companies hoping to get into online gambling. 

Is Zynga playing dead? An Uphill Battle Remains

According to The Wall Street Journal, Zynga may have to play the waiting game for another 18 months - and even then there's no guarantee of a big pay-out: 

"The opportunities within Nevada are somewhat limited since its population is small, but bigger opportunities might emerge. State officials have discussed the possibility of forming compacts with other states considering legalizing poker to merge markets and create bigger groups of players, much as lotteries have done with large lottery draws such as Powerball. California is among the other states that have considered bills in their legislatures to legalize online poker." 

Zynga Poker allows anyone over the age of 13 to play, but the company hasn't released hard numbers on who exactly plays the game. With age and location narrowing the pool, there are some big questions about how many of Zynga's existing players are ready to convert to real cash gamers.

A Sea Of Mishaps

In the meantime, Zynga has been hemorrhaging talent. Chief Game Designer Brian Reynolds, who worked at the Baltimore office, jumped ship last month.  Last October, Paul and David Bettner, co-founders of Words With Friends, left the company's Austin studio. That's a big deal because while the company has been quick to axe underperforming products, ad-ridden Scrabble-clone Words With Friends remains one of Zynga's top properties. The company reported that in December 2012 alone, players spent 7.5 billion minutes shuffling around virtual tiles in the game, which launched four years ago. 

(See also ReadWrite DeathWatch: Zynga.)

Still, the failure of games like CityVille 2 point to a flaw in Zynga's casual-gaming formula. Zynga CEO Mark Pincus has admitted that the company's sluggishness and lack of innovation has failed to keep users engaged with its cadre of social games. But rather than improve its recipe to make better games - or better clones of other, better games - Zynga seems to have its sights on the real deal. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

Zynga Is Ready To Gamble

Open any free Zynga game in the App Store and you'll be assaulted with a shamelessly busy user interface. There are so many pop-over and click-through ads that getting rid of them is basically a hyperactive mini-game all its own. Zynga's mobile and social games won't win any design or innovation awards - rather, they have addiction woven into their fabric. Incessant notifications draw users back, pop-up prompts prod players to invite their entire social circles. Those techniques should translate well to actual gambling.

So in spite of all the bad news and likely delays in legalized online gambling, Zynga's shares have perked up lately. With 38 million players, Zynga already has the world's largest free-to-play online poker site - it only needs legislators to open the gates and let the cash start pouring in. 

Images courtesy of Shutterstock and Zynga.

After Wednesday night's PlayStation Meeting event, a flurry of questions still surround the future of next-gen gaming and where the PlayStation 4 will fit in.

(See also The PlayStation 4 Is Here, But We Don't Know What It Looks Like)

Since then, Sony has been nice enough to clear up a few of the most pressing issues, namely why it did not show the console even once throughout its two-hour presentation. The answer, from Sony CEO Jack Tretton, is that there is no "mass-production box" at the moment.

"The Console Is Just A Console"

Shuhei Yoshida, president of Sony's Worldwide Studios group, complemented that answer by explaining that event was aimed at expressing the company's next-gen vision, not showcasing hardware specs and final design. "The console is just a box… the controller was very important to show because it has the share button, but the console is just a console," he said in an interview with Polygon.

Sony also addressed some of the less important questions surrounding the PS4:

1. The Dualshock 3 controller will not be supported on the new console.
2. The PS4 will in fact support 4K video and photo streaming, but not for games.
3. 3D is not important. Yoshida explained the company's dismissive mindset when it comes to 3D, "…All of the companies have shifted focus from 3D TV to something else, so if they're not talking about it, why would we?"
4. Used games? To the many gamers who feared the PS4 would integrate a ban on used games, Yoshida offered concise, yet vague, reassurance. "Used games can play on the PS4," he said in an interview with Eurogamer, leaving open the possibility of a potential access code that customers might have to purchase to access a used title.
5. Social and offline play. In a cheeky swipe at those adverse to Sony's big push for social media integration, Yoshida said, "We understand there are some people who are anti-social! So if you don't want to connect to anyone else, you can do that."

For those who like to salivate over processing power and performance, Sony released a full spec sheet, confirming its AMD innards. The processor will be comprised of eight x86-64 AMD Jaguar CPU cores and a next-gen AMD Radeon-based graphics engine that will push 1.84 teraflops. 

Sony is still playing mum on an official release date and pricing, and Yoshida didn't shed much light on whether or not the physical console box will be ready for an E3 unveiling: "We're still trying to decide that," he said.

We're only two months into 2013, but it has already been a big year for graphics-processing giant Nvidia. At the Consumer Electronics Show in January, the company unveiled Project Shield, its first foray into console gaming hardware. And in February, it was revealed that Nvidia is helping the team behind the Ouya, the wildly successful Kickstarter campaign for an Android-based $99 gaming console, max out its Tegra 3 processor.

Now Nvidia, which started as a 3-person team 20 years ago, has announced that it's outgrown its headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif. In a post on the company's blog, co-founder Jen-Hsun Huang unveiled plans to build a new complex across the street from the current HQ, designed by architecture firm Gensler with a team headed by prominent architect Hao Ko.

Losing Ground To AMD

Its no secret in the industry that by purchasing rival graphics chip-maker ATI, chip-giant AMD has in recent years been steadily pushing Nvidia out of one of its prime markets - gaming GPUs. The Gamecube, Wii U and the Xbox 360 all went AMD in that respect (and the Xbox 360's successor will reportedly follow the same path).

With the pressure mounting, Nvidia gambled big and moved fast this year, attempting a home-console disruption with its partner Ouya. So far, the plan seems to be working. The Ouya, which runs solely on a souped-up Nvidia Tegra processor, has everyone talking, be it about the system's launch games or the fact that CEO Julie Uhrman wants to release a hardware update every year. And Project Shield, a strange hybrid device that fits a flip-out screen to a full-sized controller, has generated some well-earned buzz.

New Markets?

Beyond gaming, Nvidia is also expanding into vehicle add-ons - driver assistance technology, navigation and in-car entertainment hardware - and has its units in space through a partnership with NASA.

The new HQ is meant to signify the company's new aggressiveness - and free up some desks in the old office, which Huang wrote is getting a little tight now that the company has grown to 8,000 employees across more than 40 sites.

In a mock-up provided by Gensler, the new office looks like something out of one of the many science-fiction games Nvidia chips have powered over the years. Featuring two large triangular heaps of glass and what looks like a sprawling hedge-filled perimeter, the new design looks flashy enough to represent the company's confidence. An even cooler reason behind the three-sided geometry: the triangle represents the fundamental building block of computer graphics.

Addicted to Facebook? You're far from alone. Quite a few of Facebook's 1 billion+ users spend a large portion of their day logged in. Some passively check status updates and messages during breaks from work. Plenty of others are glued to social games like FarmVille and Words With Friends. 

Using the latest statistics from AppData, we pulled together a list of the seven most addictive Facebook apps. Sure, there are plenty of others grabbing attention (Bejeweled Blitz anyone?), but these seven rank especially high on the monthly and daily active users charts. We skipped third-party services like Spotify and Microsoft Live in favor of the truly addictive, fully integrated apps on which people seem to be wasting the most time. 

7. Words With Friends

Words With Friends has been everybody's favorite social Scrabble copycat for a few years now. Still, as new Facebook apps have risen and fallen, it remains one of the most widely used on the platform. Anybody who's ever played Words With Friends knows why. It's truly addictive for the same reason that Scrabble has long been a beloved board game, but this newer digital take on the classic bakes in your actual, real-life friends and lets you play multiple people at once to make it pretty much impossible to stop clicking. 

6. Diamond Dash

If you've ever played Bejeweled or Candy Crush Saga, you've essentially played Diamond Dash. It's incredibly simple: look for groups of like-colored diamonds and click on the cluster to make each one disappear. Rack up points. Neglect your professional duties. Repeat. 

Diamond Dash has the same basic pattern-seeking premise of many other games, but with as dead-simple of an approach as possible. That way you'll never get frustrated and the game's design, and visual hints ensure you'll keep clicking away until you get fired. 

5. Trip Advisor 

What better way to kill time on a slow work day than by daydreaming about fleeing your cubicle for some faraway escape? That's apparently what a lot of people do, among other things, on Trip Advisor's Facebook app. It doesn't have as many daily active users as the popular Facebook games, but more than 10 million people use it every month. 

On Facebook, you can plot your world travels on Trip Advisor's map, list where you'd like to go and see where your friends have been. It's pretty simple functionality. To be sure, much of the app's activity is probably coming from TripAdvisor.com, a robust travel search utility into which users can sign using their Facebook account. For a travel search site, there could hardly be a more successful social strategy than what Trip Advisor has pulled off. 

4. Texas HoldEm Poker

It should come as no surprise that virtual gambling is addictive, just like the real thing. With 38 million users, Zynga's online poker empire is the world's most popular. While you can't play for real money just yet, Zynga is planning to lobby lawmakers in Washington D.C. and California to change that. Later this year, Zynga is going to launch its first legit gambling product overseas. In the meantime, you can continue to waste your workday challenging your friends in one of Facebook's most popular social apps.  

3. CoasterVille 

Riding on the success of FarmVille, Zynga's CoasterVille has pretty much the same premise, but in an amusement park setting rather than on a farm. 

It's kind of like Sim City's less-popular cousin Sim Coaster, but doesn't require anywhere near as much thought.  Like so many of the most addictive Facebook games, CoasterVille pretty much tells you exactly what to do and is designed to keep your attention fixated on the game. Ride by ride, you can build your own theme park on the company dime while other people around the world suffer.

2. FarmVille 2

Surprise! FarmVille is really popular.

You knew that though, because even if you don't play Zynga's wildly popular social farming simulation game, you've seen your friends harvesting crops via status updates auto-barfed out by the app. At any given moment, the sequel to 2009's FarmVille can reliably be found in the top three most used Facebook apps. Every day, millions of people spend hours raising virtual farm animals and crops while our collective productivity withers away like a neglected bed of corn.

1. Candy Crush Saga

There could hardly be a simpler and harder-to-lose game than Candy Crush Saga. And that's what makes it the perfect Facebook app: You can sit there and mindlessly line up similar-looking pieces of candy, zapping each batch and scoring points as you go in Dr. Mario-like fashion. 

If you get stumped, zone out or wind up distracted by Facebook notifications, the game continually reels in your limited attention span with subtle visual animations that hint at what your next move should be. 

It's no surprise that the PlayStation 4, code-named Orbis, is going to debut at Sony's big event on February 20. But until gaming blog Destructoid got its hands on a leaked image of the controller and published it on Thursday there wasn't much concrete information on what any component of the device would look like.

On Friday, All Games Beta offered up its own leaked image, from an unknown source. Whether this new image - which gives viewers a slightly different angle from which to furiously theorize about the new console's possible features - is from same source as Destructoid's is unclear.

But the two are likely of the same version of the prototype, which Kotaku has confirmed is indeed a controller of Sony's new system, though it could change significantly before the final version comes out.

Of the few details that can gleaned from these images, the most important is the mysterious, potentially touch-screen-based black bar running above the analog joysticks. Whether this will involve second-screen technology - perhaps a move aimed at competing with Nintendo's Wii U - or something else entirely will likely be revealed at next week's event.

In All Games Beta's leaked image, we also get a better look at the position of the Start and Select buttons, which have been spread far apart and rest on the top edges of the black bar.

While the rumor mills will be spinning from now until next until next Wednesday, there's not much else we can say for sure concerning Sony's big announcement. Maybe we should take the time to relish in the used game market, which will supposedly implode if Sony and Microsoft decide to limit new games to one console.

 Update: Reddit user Auto_aim1 uploaded this PlayStation 4 mockup (below) offering an interesting take on the mysterious black bar.

Top image via Destructoid. Second image via All Games Beta.

Remember the humble Ouya game console? Maybe it was never that humble, but considering its indie roots, the Kickstarted experiment in Android-powered gaming just scored some surprisingly huge distribution partnerships for its release later this year. 

Founder and CEO Julie Uhrman tells The Wall Street Journal that the console will be available through Amazon, Gamestop, Target and Best Buy when it launches this June.

The Ouya was born out of Uhrman's notion that gaming was in major need of disruption. And disrupt she did, to the tune of $8.6 million worth of crowdfunding rocket fuel. Now, the little indie gaming console that could will sell through the biggest digital and brick-and-mortar retailers around, a funny turn of events for one of Kickstarter's shining stars. 

The Ouya console, available for pre-order now, will retail for $99. An extra controller will set you back a modest $49. All Ouya games will be free to try. Uhrman even invites advanced users and devs to unscrew the console's casing and tool around. It's wide open, after all. Kickstarter backers could see their consoles ship out as early as next month.

What do you do if your teenage daughter is addicted to videogames and Internet porn? For one South Korea family, the answer is to enroll your daughter in a horse riding therapy program. And by all accounts, it did the trick.

Horse Therapy

I guess that’s one way to sublimate your daughter’s budding sexual desires. Reports Reuters:

Four months ago, the parents of a teenage South Korean girl were at their wits' end over her addiction to surfing the Internet for pornography.

Kim's parents tried art, music therapy and persistent nagging to try and stem their daughter's addiction.

When none of these worked, her school suggested the Riding Healing Center, a therapy organisation that uses horse-riding to cure emotional and behavioral disorders, which it believes are an underlying cause of internet addiction.

And the equine therapy worked! Kim used to send seven hours or more on her computer, but now her mother says she “barely goes on the Internet,” and when she does, “she makes a promise to me first about how long she will play on the computer.”

Fun With A Living Thing

Yoosook Joung, a Doctor of child psychiatry at Samsung Medical Centre, explained to Sky News the horse riding worked not just because it is "a very fun" physical activity, but also incorporates "a living thing" which ends up forging an "emotional connection" that can "help overcome Internet addiction."  

It is unclear if giving dogs and cats to those suffering from Internet addiction, which Korean government data estimates affects 680,000 children (or 10% of the total population under 19), would work as well as horses.

Besides this horse therapy program, which plans on building 30 additional facilities by 2022 to meet "rising demand," South Koreans have used anti-depressants as treatment for Starcraft 2 videogame addicts, and specifically for minors, instated a "Shutdown Law" that prevents anyone under the age of 16 from playing on the Internet past midnight. This Shutdown Law, however, is easily circumvented by teens like Kim who admitted to playing on the Internet all night long whenever her parents were away by using their accounts instead of hers.

Internet Addiction Is A Worldwide Problem

South Korea isn't the only Asian nation restricting minors' use of the Internet; Thailand banned the use of cyber cafes for minors from 10pm to 2pm in 2006, and the Philippines did something similar way back in 1999. The popularity of cyber cafes has waned given the accessibility of personal computers and smartphones, but the appeal of the Internet has not.      

Internet addiction is a buzzword in the United States as well, but a simpler solution - compared to giving everyone horses, anti-depressants or banning Internet usage at certain times for minors - would be education about the effects of being on the Internet for, say, seven or more hours a day.

Basically, the idea is that there is more to life than the Internet (gasp).  Dancing therapy, for instance, is successfully combating Internet addiction in teen males in China. 

Image courtesy of Lana K/Shutterstock.

Everyone in the gaming industry currently has their eyes on two companies that have long been major players in hardware and software, but have never made an official foray into gaming platforms until now.

Graphic processor maker Nvidia and gaming developer Valve have begun outlining their visions for the future at this week's Consumer Electronics Show (CES), giving the world a peek under the hood of forthcoming devices they hope will someday become entertainment mainstays.

Nvidia is in the late stages with codename "Project Shield," a portable Android-based device fitted with a mishmash of the company's hardware. Resembling an Xbox controller connected to an HD touch-screen display, Shield is bound to shakeup the lackluster handheld market that is being slowly crushed by the rise of mobile gaming on smartphones.

On the other hand, Valve, the creators of the Steam distribution network and the Source engine that powers Half-Life and Counter Strike, is taking its time, and for good reason. The company is aiming to not only give consumers an all-powerful living room console, known on the Web as the "Steam Box," but also a seamless way to tie together every device in the home using screen-mirroring technology like Miracast.

No such Steam Box will hit shelves in 2013, says Valve's Ben Krasnow, but the company is at CES to meet with hardware developers. And the team has brought along a few prototypes that have spurred the rumor mill and led them to drop a few details.

Both companies have big ideas, and if there are any two players in the industry that can pull off revolutionary changes, it's Nvidia with its hardware track record and Valve with its Steam network. Either way, video games — and where and how we play them — will only get better as two of the biggest names in PC gaming move beyond the mouse and keyboard.

Nvidia Shield: A Handheld With Big Potential

When Nvidia began to see its role in traditional console gaming slowly squeezed out by rival chipmaker AMD, whose Radeon processors have steadily captured more of the market (including the Xbox 360 and the Wii U's Graphics Processing Unit, or GPU), the natural response was to develop a fully packaged product targeted at a specific gaming niche. Shield is that device.

Marketed as a handheld, but with big-screen potential, it will be able to wirelessly stream games to your television. That puts Nvidia in the somewhat precarious position of having to market the device somewhere between casual handheld gaming you can do on the go and the HD, graphics-heavy gaming you do on a big screen. So there is no telling yet how well it will perform, or if will come even close to competing with the next- or even current-gen consoles.

There is reason to wonder whether the Shield's insides are up to the task. Using the Android Jellybean operating system, it will run a custom 72-core (72-core!) Nvidia GeForce GPU and a quad-core A15 CPU, the newest additions to the company's Tegra processor line, while the touch-screen with be able to push 720p visuals. That sounds great for high-end Android games currently running on tablets, but who knows how far Nvidia will push the envelope. The possibility of Shield being used to play games equivalent to those on of current-generation game consoles remains up in the air.

There's no word yet on whether the screen is detachable, though it would certainly make for an interesting move if it became a second screen while you gamed on your television, effectively bringing Nvidia into Wii U territory.

As for Shield games, Nvidia lags a bit  in terms of the breadth and quality offered by its TegraZone, which right now mainly offers up solid old-school ports and Android favorites. But if the company can create the right kind of developer interest in the device's hardware capabilities, Project Shield has the potential for great handheld games - and maybe even some console-quality titles. Just don't get too excited: Nvidia did not announce a release date for Project Shield.

Valve Plans To Extend The PC Gaming Ecosystem

While Nvidia focuses on the handheld market, Valve is carefully crafting a full-blown overhaul of the PC gaming ecosystem. What's being thrown around the Internet as the "Steam Box" is known as "Big Foot" inside the company, said Valve founder Gabe Newell in a recent interview. And at CES this week, prototypes showed up of an intriguing new device - though not officially confirmed to be the same as what Newell discussed.

Codenamed Piston and developed with Xi3, the small, blue rectangular console was built to port Steam to bigger screens using Valve's Big Picture TV streaming service. It's also pitched as a "development-stage computer game system," so there's really no telling where it stands in Valve's Steam Box vision.

Piston could be the first in a long line of many prototypes Valve works up with a number of different hardware partners. But one thing is for sure: Newell and crew aren't banking on just one device to compete with the Xbox and PlayStation. Instead, Valve will keep tinkering until it knows it's ready to make a move beyond the PC.

Despite the mystery regarding the Steam Box, Xi3's Piston, "Big Foot" and so on, Newell did offer some concrete details in his CES sit-down.

After struggling with the consumer issues and philosophy behind open and closed systems, Newell says, the company decided on a Linux-based device that hands a huge amount of freedom to the consumer. Users will be able to install Windows - or any kind of software - if they want.

And there is in fact a "Little Foot" mobile component, Valve's take on what mobile and tablet gaming need to succeed in a seamless gaming ecosystem. As for controllers, Valve is staying away from motion and trying to incorporate what Newell believes is the future of innovative gaming philosophy: biometrics, including the possibility of wearable devices.

Valve could release a whole suite of devices that route the Steam ecosystem on multiple screens in the next two years. Newell was bold enough to suggest that the next-generation GPUs could support as many as eight simultaneous screens!

"So you could have one PC and eight televisions and eight controllers and everybody getting great performance out of it. We're used to having one monitor, or two monitors — now we're saying let's expand that a little bit," he said. The ambitious effort is already generating some skepticism, but it will take this kind of effort to push the boundaries and once again give the term "next-generation" some legitimate weight.