This has been such a spectacular year for games, and that affected me in an unintuitive way. As I was putting together this list, I wasn’t sure if I would have 10 games to fill it out with. Now, to be clear, I’ve liked way more than 10 games this year, but I just wasn’t...
Tag: #VR #AR
360 VR advertising is the industry’s first sticky monetization model
GUEST: Monetizing VR content continues to be a tricky challenge for creators and publishers alike. There’s just hardly any rules of thumb to follow as the industry busies itself with building up a track record of trial and error, and while the addressable market of geared-up users continues to grow. Paid content works in some...
Cuphead is the most beautiful game of 2017
We’re at a point where you don’t have to play to the strengths of the consoles or PC graphics cards to get great visual results. Developers have enough power to do whatever they want. For the “Most Beautiful” category in our GamesBeat Rewind year-end event, we want to consider any visual style to determine the best-looking...
Minority Media bets on VR arcade games to survive
Virtual reality developers have to be creative to survive the VR desert, where sales haven’t kept up with expectations. So Vander Caballero, founder of Minority Media and creator of the VR game Time Machine VR, has adopted a new strategy to get through the tough times. Montreal-based Minority Media, which also created the groundbreaking PSN title Papo Y...
The Non-Award for Best Tech That’s Too Much Work to Set Up goes to VR
While everyone else is giving awards to Zelda and PlayerUnknown’s Battegrounds, our GamesBeat Rewind year-end event has the guts to hand out silly accolades to the real winners of the year as part of our Non-Awards. For example, virtual reality can’t win game of the year, but here’s something it truly deserves. The non-award for Best Tech...
GamesBeat Rewind 2017: The most overlooked games of the year
Sometimes, it seems like a Sisyphean task to try to keep up with all the games that come out every year. And that’s not even counting the seasonal Steam Sales, which are the bane of my wallet and of my backlog of titles to try. For our GamesBeat Rewind year-end event, we’ve come up with a...
Oculus patent seeks convertible HMD that can be powered by a PC or phone
A patent published today but filed in 2016 shows an Oculus concept for a convertible head-mounted display that can be powered by either a PC or phone. The patent application 20170364144 from Oculus is listed as invented by Yury Anatolievic Petrov. It covers a head-mounted display said to receive “video input from a stationary computer in...
This 3rd grade class went nuts for AR and VR
Steve Lukas and his son Christian were able to explain VR and AR to a third grade class without needing other kids to put on a headset. Earlier this year I decided against bringing VR to a recent career day at my child’s school because I would’ve insisted upon permission slips being signed by guardians...
Move over, voice: Holograms are the next user interface
GUEST: During Apple’s fourth-quarter earnings call with analysts, CEO Tim Cook said, “AR is going to change everything.” He wasn’t exaggerating. Augmented reality (AR) is shaping an entirely new paradigm for mass technology use. We’ve quickly evolved from typing on our PC keyboards, to the point-and-click of the mouse, to the smartphone’s tap or swipe,...
Holospark’s Séance: The Unquiet delivers ghostly VR entertainment
Virtual reality is taking off a little slow, but the team at Holospark is practicing its VR storytelling skills so that it can deliver cinematic moments the way that the best movies and games do. The Bellevue, Washington-based VR studio has a half-dozen people on a Séance: The Unquiet, a ghost story set in VR....