Marvelous AQL has launched a new Senran Kagura teaser site which has revealed that the company will be hosting a live stream on Nico Nico on January 8th at 13:30 Japan time. This live stream is being held so the company can announce some new developments for the series in the year 2014, meaning we may hear a 3DS or Vita announcement.
Marvelous AQL president Shuichi Kyoda and the series producer, a man to be admired, Kenichiro Takaki, will be hosting the event with a number of guests joining them throughout the stream. The teaser website can be viewed here and if you happen to scroll the page or click the image in a few certain spots, you’ll notice a little easter egg.
Phosphor Games has been hard at work on their game Nether. It is currently available through Steam’s Early Access program and the development team has pushed out a new update that brings several fan requested features. The new update features a new subway system to explore, a wing glider vehicle, a new Nether, a new surge objective, and a slew of new in-game items. Players can continue providing feedback to the developer team and vote on whether the next vehicle added to the game should be a helicopter or at their official forum.
Nether is a MMOFPS set in a city full of dangerous creatures called Nethers. Players must make the difficult decision to band together to survive or compete with each other to scavenge the best equipment. The game is currently in alpha and can be purchased for $15.99 until January 2nd, 2014.
While we received the best news of all from Square Enix a few months ago that Drakengard 3 would be released in the West sometime in 2014, we have yet to hear anything from the company about the title since then despite a number of revelations and details coming out of Japan.
But it seems that since Drakengard 3 has now launched in Japan Square Enix has decided to release some screenshots for the game, though admittedly they aren’t in English and a handful of them are old. Well it is good to see they still care. Anyways, a new trailer for the game was released a couple of days ago and can be seen here.
In celebration of the holidays, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment has announced some festive sales. So deck the halls and check your wallet because, for a limited time starting today, the following games will be priced at £0.69 ($0.99) on the App Store:
LEGO The Lord of the Rings is also available on the App Store for the low price of £1.99. Additionally for Android users, Batman Arkham City Lockdown, Man of Steel and Scribblenauts Remix are available on GooglePlay and in the Amazon Appstore for Android for £0.69.
So check out some of these jolly deals and give yourself a present…or thirteen. Go on, you’ve earned it. Happy Holidays!
Today Tecmo Koei has announced that they are planning on bringing Dynasty Warriors 8: Xtreme Legends to North America and Europe in Spring 2014 for the PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, and PS Vita. The PlayStation 3 release will only feature Dynasty Warriors 8: Xtreme Legends while the PlayStation 4 and Vita release is called Dynasty Warriors 8: Xtreme Legends Complete Edition as it features both Dynasty Warriors 8 and the Xtreme Legends version of the game.
The reason for this is because the PS4 and PS Vita never saw the original Dynasty Warriors 8 while the PS3 has. The company also went on to say that both versions of the game will feature English and Japanese voice options. As for the screenshots found above, they are from the PlayStation 4 version of the game.
The Pokemon Company International have only just announced that the Pokemon XYAnime series will be airing on Cartoon Network starting on the 18th of January 2014. The first two episodes of the series were shown once on Cartoon Network in October, just after the Japanese première, but now they plan to play the whole series every week at 8:30am. This is fantastic news, even though the Japanese series’ episode count is in the double digits it is still great to have it being aired in English so close to its Japanese counterparts release.
The people over at The Pokemon Company have gotten extremely good at localising and dubbing the series’ quickly and Pokemon fans outside of Japan should be thanking the heck out of them. A Pokemon XY series trailer was also released by The Pokemon Company, it’s in full English and even features a cover of a song that you may know from long ago, head down to our featured video section below to watch it now!
Sentai Filmworks made a surprising, but pretty great, announcement today when they revealed that they have acquired the license to release the first season of The Familiar of Zero in North America. This first season of an anime, that had four seasons in all, was originally released many years ago by Geneon but has been out of print for many years.
The Familiar of Zero Season 1 will be streamed first and will be released on Blu-ray and DVD with both English and Japanese voice tracks. For those who don’t know, The Familiar of Zero follows the story of Saito, a teenage boy from Earth who is suddenly summoned by a witch named Louise as her servant. Despite this mistake the two are bound together by the laws of magic and must learn to get along with each other.
Fans of the Legacy of Kain series will be surprised to know that a new game is currently in development set in an as yet unexplored time period of that world. Nosgoth is a free-to-play multiplayer PC game focused on the fight between Humans and Vampires during the Soul Reaver era coming from publisher Square-Enix and developer Psyonix.
What can players expect from Nosgoth? As both sides aren’t designed to perfectly offset each other, Nosgoth has players face off as one side and then switch in the second round to play the other. So, players will need to work as a team in order to achieve victory as relying on the skills of just one side will not win the match.
Nosgoth is just about to get into Closed Beta, so those wanting to check the game out before its release can head over to its website to register. If you can’t make a decision yet, be sure to watch the gameplay trailer from the Closed Alpha embedded below to see what Nosgoth has to offer.
Ben Cousins is the Head of DeNA’s European Game Studios. Ben’s most recent project is the arcade-style shooter mobile game Lawless that is now available on the App Store. He has previously worked for DICE and EA’s free-to-play division.
Clearly free to play games have a new and permanent role in gaming, with both Microsoft and Sony allowing such titles on the new Xbox One and PlayStation 4 platform. However, what goes into the decision of “Should we make this game free to play,”
It’s the same process that goes into the decision “should we make this game full priced?” or “should we make this game subscription based?” It’s a set of business-related decisions connected to the strategy of the company that is creating the game.
“what should we charge gamers for,”
Simple. You add things to the game that you think gamers will want to buy!
“how do we make this balanced for all players?”
This isn’t generally a consideration. Free-to-play games work best when the people spending money can buy small advantages over those who don’t. Gamers complain about this, but in my experience it doesn’t have a negative effect on the size of the user base. See my talk from GDC 2011 for details on my experiences.
With the huge growth in crowd-funded games thanks to platforms like Kickstarter and IndieGoGo, what role can publishers play in supporting these developers?
Crowd funding only competes with one aspect of what publishers offer developers – funding. If a developer has received some funding via Kickstarter or similar, they could partner with a publisher for game design support, QA and manufacturing facilities, relationships with retail partners or distributors/platform holders, technical support, marketing and publicity among many others.
It’s really hard to declare a winner for last generation’s console wars. Xbox 360 started out really strong with console exclusives then PlayStation 3 really pulled ahead in the last year or so. If you have to choose a winner, who would it be? Any bets on who will claim the prize for the upcoming generation?
It’s hard to answer this question without determining the criteria for defining a winner. In my mind you define a winner by how many units of consoles are sold. In that respect Nintendo ‘won’ last generation with 100 million units over Sony and Microsoft’s 80 million. Nintendo’s console business was undoubtedly also the most profitable with the PS3 and 360 unlikely to have made any profit for Sony and MS from as an encapsulated business.
Using those same criteria we’d have to assume that either Sony or MS will ‘win’ this console generation, with it very hard to determine which at this stage. On the profitability angle, both of those platform holders are better set up this time around to actually have a profitable business as they are using relatively cheap off-the-shelf tech that is less likely to melt.
With the growth in the mobile games market, do traditional handhelds like the Nintendo 3DS and PS Vita still have futures in gaming?
Yes, they still have futures for sure. However, I don’t feel it’s very likely that any handheld dedicated gaming device will ever have a dominant market share ever again.
What were some of the 2013 mobile games industry trends that stood out to you as an industry insider? And what are some of your predictions for 2014?
On iOS, two games – Clash of Clans and Candy Crush Saga – remained in the number one or two position for the entire year. That is a huge difference from a few years ago. If these games continue to dominate, we’ll have billion dollar mobile games in the western world (previously these revenue figures were only hit in Asia). So we’ve had huge growth in players, revenue and also the continued dominance of free-to-play.
I believe that 2014 will continue along the same path. The obvious areas for disruption of the mobile industry are new upcoming platforms that also utilize iOS or Android – smart watches, smart glasses and smart TVs. These should add some interest to what is rapidly becoming a very mature industry.
I think it’s safe to assume that very few people work in the video game industry and don’t play/enjoy video games themselves. What are you playing now? Any titles that you really enjoyed this year? What are you looking forward to playing in the new year?
I’m currently playing a bit of Eldritch and Teleglitch. This year I spent most gaming time on Candy Crush Saga, but my favorite game was The Last of Us. Next year I’m looking forward to playing the new Halo game on the Xbox One.
Thanks to Ben Cousins who took the time to sit down for the interview! Be sure to check out Lawless on iTunes!
If you’ve been hoping to see more from Press Play then you will be happy to hear that they have a rather sudden release for everyone in the form of Max: The Curse of Brotherhood. Today the company has announced that they will be releasing Max: The Curse of Brotherhood on the Xbox One on December 20th, which just so happens to be tomorrow.
In Max: The Curse of Brotherhood players will play as Max as he ventures into a dangerous and fantastical world in order to save his kid brother Felix. With only the help of his Magic Marker, Max must take on the evil force as he ventures through various environments, including deserts, bogs, temples and more, to get his brother back. To go along with this release announcement the company also released a handful of screenshots for the game which can be found below.
