By Dean Takahashi

No new consoles debuted at this year's Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3). But we saw plenty of new technology that reminds us that the hardware that hosts games could, until recently, be described as a supercomputer. For sure, we always get excited about games, but it's a sure bet that your favorite title has some really cool tech behind it. And some new technologies may even enable a whole new generation of games.

E3 did have some no-shows. Valve's Steam OS and the Steam Machines from its partners were missing in action because of delays that pushed the products into 2015.

Here's GamesBeat's perspective on the best new technology demos that we saw at E3 2014. For the sake of comparison, here's our list from last year.

1. Square Enix Project Flare. Any description of Project Flare has to start with If it works . That's because the cloud-gaming 2.0? technology, first described in November, is still in the tech demo stage. But Square Enix chairman Yoichi Wada has a team of 20 working on enabling a gaming revolution, putting a web-connected supercomputer at the hands of gamers. It could make possible virtual game worlds that have 17 times the playable area of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, the 2012 award-winning fantasy title. By using a more efficient blend of web-connected data centers and software designed for the cloud, Square Enix believes it can replace consoles with virtual supercomputers. You can log into huge game worlds, play both single-player and multiplayer experiences in the same space, and see huge numbers of game characters all governed by individual artificial intelligence.

A single game map could cover an area of 32 kilometers by 32 kilometers, with dozens of players hosted on a single graphics processing unit (GPU) in the cloud. And the cloud could support vast numbers of players because it can have vast numbers of GPUs in a server farm. Square Enix says the worlds can be massive and would require no loading times. Everything in the world will be calculated, rendered, and deformable. But a single player will receive a stream of video that shows only what the player's camera view can see. Networking, patching, hacking, and pirating will be gone. You ll be able to fly like Superman through a world filled with huge numbers of objects such as trees, mountains, and rivers. It sounds too good to be true. But if it works . Dean Takahashi.

2. Oculus VR showed some real games in development from its partners. The company has shown off a lot of progress since it first debuted at E3 two years ago. Now the company has a lot more credibility, as it is about to be acquired by Facebook for $2 billion. Last year, the company showed off its 1080p Oculus Rift virtual reality headset development kit. In January, it took the wraps off version two of that development kit. That version went a long way toward eliminating motion sickness, as it had positional tracking and it deleted the blurry frames that made us nauseous. This time, Oculus VR showed off demos such as Playful Corp. s Lucky's Tale, a platform game in three dimensions; Alien: Isolation, a virtual reality version of Sega's upcoming console game based on the Alien franchise; and a demo dubbed Superhot by the Superhot Team where you could freeze the action in a 3D game in order to dodge bullets.

Brendan Iribe, chief executive of Oculus VR, acknowledged in an interview that Oculus needs to deliver on its roadmap and get a real product out the door. He also said the company is working on new input systems that work well with the visuals as well as sound. Overall, Oculus wants to ship a full platform for virtual reality, rather than just a headset. It's a long way before that happens, but based on the progress that we ve seen, we re excited that it will . The next version of Oculus Rift should get rid of the screen door graphics, where a grid appears across all of the imagery, Iribe said. And with the full backing of Facebook to take care of the bills, we can expect that it will happen on a large scale for the mainstream consumer market. It's another if it works situation, but we re reasonably confident based on the track record that Oculus is serious. Dean Takahashi

3. Sony's Project Morpheus. Sony's virtual reality headset is running a little behind of Oculus Rift, in terms of the quality of its demos. But Sony executives say they ve been working on the tech for the new medium of virtual reality for four years. With their current development kit, they can show off virtual reality demos with a 1080p high-definition display and a 90-degree field of view.

Sony unveiled Project Morpheus at the Game Developers Conference in March with a couple of demos that included a shark attack scene, where you stand inside a steel cage and get lowered into an ocean and surrounded by water. Then a Great White shark swims around and shows its teeth at you.

Sony showed a couple of more demos at E3. I got to try out a Luge demonstration, where I lay comfortably on a bean bag. I put the Morpheus headset over my glasses and strapped it tight. Then I looked at my legs and feet, which seemed like they were extending into the screen. The luge started moving down the hill on a curvy mountain highway. I passed cars and had to dodge them by maneuvering the luge back and forth with my head. If I moved to the right, the luge moved with me. It was a little mis-calibrated, but it worked reasonably well. I smashed into an occasional car coming in the other direction. With demos like these, Sony has the right idea. As they are experiences that you can t get on a traditional console. Dean Takahashi

4. Alienware Alpha. The gaming division of Dell, Alienware, was all set to take E3 by storm with a Steam Machine dubbed the Alienware Alpha. But when Valve delayed the launch of the Steam OS and the Steam Controller until 2015, Alienware pivoted to adopt the Windows operating system with an Xbox 360 wireless controller. The result is a sleek and menacing looking gamer PC for the living room. The box is small and light, with a slightly higher price tag than it would have if it were a Steam Machine (since Microsoft charges more for the OS). It will cost $549 when it debuts this fall.

Players will still be able to use the Big Picture mode of Valve's Steam software to run PC games on a television. Big Picture works with 240 such titles already. The only drawback now is that you won t be able to play those games with a Steam Controller. There are also 450 titles with partial gamepad support. The machine will have a Intel Core i3 Haswell -based processor, 4GB of DDR3 memory, and a custom-built Nvidia Maxwell GPU with 2GB of dedicated video memory.

Alienware will outfit the box with its own graphical user interface (GUI) that turns a PC menu into something that can be navigated from 10 feet away. And Alienware still says it will launch a Steam version of the box by next year. Dean Takahashi

5. Just Dance Now. Ubisoft's new version of its Just Dance franchise is the first one designed for mobile users. One of its coolest features is that you can pack as many as 20,000 dancers into a single dance match. Through a combination of mobile tech and cloud gaming, Just Dance Now can get a bunch of people playing at the same time, in real-time, all scoring together in a giant competition. The game is run on web-connected servers in a data center and the video is streamed to a screen such as your television or laptop. You use your smartphone, with sensors such as accelerometers and gyros for detecting motion, to capture your moves. Those are the same motion sensors that are used in Nintendo's Wii video game console that debuted in 2006. Since that time, Just Dance has sold more than 50 million units.

Ubisoft's Massive division worked on the technology, dubbed Blue Star, so that it consumes very little actual mobile bandwidth. It works across multiple devices and is latency free, according to Jason Altman, executive producer at Ubisoft. Two years in the making, Just Dance Now will be available later this year on both Android and iOS smartphones, as well as other platforms. Ubisoft is also working on Just Dance 2015 for the consoles, but Just Dance Now is a way for the company to attack the growing market of mobile users who probably wouldn t pay $60 for a game. Altman said Ubisoft hasn t decided upon an exact business model yet, but you can bet it will be inexpensive. With the virtually unlimited number of users per session, Altman said you can expect event-based competitions, such as getting everybody at a concert to dance in the same Just Dance Now game. That would be something to see. Dean Takahashi.

6. Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. If you watch the video for this game, you ll see that about 2 minutes and 20 seconds into it, it switches over from a pre-canned computer-animated movie to live gameplay. You ll see flickering flames, dust motes, smoke, cracked building floors, and lots of things moving on the screen at the same time. When the player emerges from the building to see the full destruction of the city around him, it's an impressive site, and it all remains inside the game engine. The movement between cinematics and gameplay is seamless. While players have become accustomed to this level of visual quality in console games, the Call of Duty demo shows you what it really looks like on a next-generation video game console.

Microsoft showed off the game running at a full 60 frames per second on the Xbox One, but the game will also come out this fall on the Sony PlayStation 4 and the PC. Perhaps the most impressive scene in the demo is when the drone swarm arrives. This sea of drones all fly together like a bunch of flying sardines swimming in a school. It takes a lot of horsepower to show off something like this, and the next-gen consoles are clearly capable of some pretty impressive stuff. Sledgehammer Games, the developer of the title, has been working on it for almost three years. Now we can see how Call of Duty, the familiar first-person shooter that comes every year in the modern combat genre, is ready to raise the bar again. On top of that, the demo scene is really quite dramatic and emotional. And the sound is really good too. Kudos to Activision for recognizing that cool visual technologies are really at their best when they come with a gripping story and sound effects too. Dean Takahashi

7. SteelSeries Sentry Eye Tracker. Game peripheral maker SteelSeries teamed up with eye-tracking technology firm Tobii to create the Sentry Eye Tracker, which lets a player control a computer game with their eye movements. If you glance at a target, a game's crosshairs will move to that target and you ll be able to destroy that target much more quickly, at least theoretically, than a player with a game controller. The system takes your reaction time of thinking of something in your brain and sending signals down to your fingers to move a reticle toward a target. It could result in an unfair advantage for people who are in competitive game matches.

The system has already caught the eye of professional gamers. Sony is also working on eye-tracking technology in its Magic Lab research and development laboratory, and it recently showed off a demo that showed how you could quickly target enemies in the Infamous: Second Son game. Both technologies rely upon infrared cameras that track your eye and measure when it moves. SteelSeries is the first to test the waters on this front, but we re looking forward to whether this can enhance the controller or mouse input systems that have been with us forever. Dean Takahashi

8. No Man's Sky. Hello Games showed off a new demo of its infinitely replayable, procedurally generated galaxy exploration game. This sci-fi game is about exploration and survival in a universe that has no end. Every atom, leaf, fish, plant, shark, and everything else you see in the video is generated by the developers algorithms.

Procedural technology has been used before, but certainly not on this scale. It's pretty mind-boggling, and reminds me of Electronic Arts Spore game. But it is safe to say there isn t much competition for No Man's Sky. You could spend all of your time in this game scanning and uploading creatures, plants, and other things that you discover. There is a real game in here, but we haven t heard all that much about it yet. It doesn t have a lot of narrative, but there's a lore and a purpose to the game.

The demo got a lot of air time at Sony's E3 press conference, and it raised a lot of eyebrows. It is particularly impressive because the game is being made by an indie team with just four people. Their previous game was Joe Danger, and it's safe to say this is something completely different. The release date hasn t been determined, but you can expect it on Sony's platform. Dean Takahashi

9. Control VR. This virtual-reality tech fills in a crucial blank in the VR gaming experience: full upper-body motion tracking. It accomplishes this by placing 19 half-inch rotational sensors (similar to the ones in our smartphones) across our fingers, hands, forearms, and chest. The result? Games and other applications using Control VR can now track precise movements that aren t possible with just a VR headset, like making hand gestures or high-fiving another player. I tried on the prototype with an Oculus Rift in a small but busy E3 booth. Though crude and simple, the demo two players were astronauts exploring the moon was effective: I opened and closed my hands many times without the system losing track of them, I waved at the other player before pushing him aside, and I poked at little buttons on my in-game wristband to shoot ping-pong balls. I can t wait to see what game developers do with this. Giancarlo Valdes

10. Tom Clancy's The Division. Ubisoft's The Division arrives next year on next-generation consoles and the PC as yet another post-apocalyptic world. But this one looks really beautiful, if that is the right word for a landscape with fires, smoke, debris, and dead bodies.

The game won t run on older generation consoles because it takes advantage of the Snowdrop game engine, which Ubisoft's Massive game studio has developed over the years to bring to life a full virtual world.

You can pull out to view a whole map of New York City and then drill down on particular sections where you want to concentrate your squad. In a demo of the the game, Ubisoft's developers showed that you can approach a tactical battle in multiple ways. You can, for instance, go directly after another squad. But you ll find that there's another enemy squad nearby that can help it out and pin you down. You can take out that first squad at the outset, and then turn to the second one. But the response will never be exactly the same. So the Snowdrop engine enables fluid tactical situations that will change, depending on the choices the player makes. All the while, everything looks, uh, beautiful. Dean Takahashi.

GamesBeat 2014 VentureBeat's sixth annual event on disruption in the video game market is coming up on Sept 15-16 in San Francisco. Purchase one of the first 50 tickets and save $400! Oculus VR was founded by Palmer Luckey, self-described virtual reality enthusiast and hardware geek. The company launched a Kickstarter campaign to help fund development of their first product, the Oculus Rift, a ground-breaking vir... read more

Brendan Iribe is co-founder, president and CEO of Scaleform Corporation where he oversees product development, marketing and sales, and business development, and has established the company as the leading user interface technology prov... read more

Read More

By Derrik J. Lang, The Associated Press - The Canadian Press

LOS ANGELES, Calif. - Game makers at this year's Electronic Entertainment Expo went for the jugular.

That's not just a metaphor about the competitive spirit of the video game industry at its annual trade show this past week. There were also actual depictions of throats being ripped out — as well as spleens, spines, hearts and testicles — in some of the goriest scenes ever shown off at E3.

Developers of such titles as "Bloodborne," "Let It Die," "Mortal Kombat X," "Dead Island 2" and "Dying Light" weren't shy about harnessing the high-powered graphical capabilities of the latest generation of consoles to portray more realistic decapitations, dismemberments and other grisliness.

Why the apparent boost in high-definition gross-outs?

"I think in the early years of a console launch, you have the so-called early adopters and hardcore fan base," said Shawn Layden, CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment America, which launched the PlayStation 4 last November. "I think they look for the latest gaming experience that takes them to another level from where they've been before, and a lot of our publishing partners are pursuing the new, most impactful experience for gamers."

The parade of carnage kicked off Monday at Microsoft's presentation when the creators of "Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare" demonstrated a level in which a character's arm is ripped off while attempting to sabotage an enemy aircraft in South Korea. Michael Condrey, co-founder of "Advanced Warfare" developer Sledgehammer Games, later maintained the amputation wasn't only intended to shock.

"We know that war is terrifying," said Condrey. "The military advisers that we work with talk about the horrors of war. 'Call of Duty' isn't just about gratuitous violence. The scene that you saw in Seoul at the Microsoft press conference, that's an impactful story moment. The loss of the arm is really part of the narrative. We showed that for a particular storytelling reason."

Other slaughter on display at E3 included a first-person perspective of a decapitation in a demo of the French Revolution-set "Assassin's Creed: Unity" and several bone-crushing new moves in "Mortal Kombat X," like extreme close-ups of characters snapping their opponents' spines and manhandling their genitals.

"It seems, as time goes on, video games continue to become more violent, realistic and graphic," said Brad J. Bushman, a communication and psychology professor at Ohio State University. "This is a disturbing trend. Unfortunately, I see no signs that it will stop. The research evidence clearly indicates that violent video games increase aggression in players, and can make them numb to the pain and suffering of others."

But it wasn't merely blood and guts on display at E3 this year. The virtual horse that players will mount in the open-world action sequel "Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain" has been programmed to spontaneously defecate. And in a creepy abandoned mental institution from the Victorian-era thriller "The Order: 1886," there's not just blood smeared across the walls.

Game makers defend that gore aids the narrative, yet many believe a little goes a long way.

"For us, it's more impactful if it's done tastefully," said "The Order" game director Dana Jan. "If you just throw blood all over the place, it's meaningless. ... We have to look at what we think is disturbing or scary and figure out how to do that masterfully without going too over the top."

E3 wasn't completely consumed with bloodshed. This year's show featured a plethora of non-bloody, artsy games that attracted an unprecedented amount of attention. Still, the biggest games at E3 are usually the most hardcore

While violence has long been part of gaming history, and these gory titles are destined to be restricted to adult buyers by the industry's rating board, such footage received visceral reactions from even the most seasoned gamers this year.

"E3 2014, taken as a whole, doesn't feel as obsessed with violence as past shows," wrote Chris Plante, co-founder at the gaming site Polygon. That was before he cut the show's most graphic violence into a one-minute video. "The supercut is dense with blood, organs and unrecognizable viscera," Plante wrote. "It's strange how these things can wash over you but make an impact when taken together. These conferences can be a bit desensitizing."

AP Entertainment Writer Ryan Pearson contributed to this report.
Follow AP Entertainment Writer Derrik J. Lang on Twitter at https://www.twitter.com/derrikjlang.

Read More

LOS ANGELES (AP) Since the first battles over "Pong" machines in local arcades four decades ago, video gamers have loved good competition. And this year's Electronic Entertainment Expo the industry's largest annual gathering presented more thrilling showdowns than ever. Microsoft vs. Sony. Mobile vs. console games. "Titanfall" vs. "Destiny." So who won E3?

MICROSOFT VS. SONY: Both companies served up flashy presentations of the forthcoming next-generation consoles, the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4. Microsoft's show came off bland and corporate, and did little to answer consumer disenchantment with the Xbox One's requirement for regular Internet connections and Microsoft's vague statements on the playability of used games. Sony came out swinging, promising it would not try to restrict used game sales and the PS4 would not require a persistent online connection.

Sony also scored by announcing a $399 price tag for the PS4, $100 less than the Xbox One. While the contest is far from decided (indeed, much of the whole used-games issue rests in the hands of third-party publishers like Electronic Arts and Ubisoft), Sony assuredly won over some hearts. Winner: Sony.

"TITANFALL" VS. "DESTINY": Two of the biggest debuts at E3 were first-person shooters from veterans of the genre. Respawn's "Titanfall," shepherded by the masterminds behind the landmark "Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare," updates the formula with the addition of giant robots. "Destiny," from "Halo" creator Bungie, is more ambitious, promising vast open worlds that reward exploration more than the typical shooter. Winner: "Destiny."

CONSOLE VS. MOBILE: Console game publishers have been fretting over the continued viability of the $60, disc-based game in the face of competition from 99-cent smartphone apps. But mobile games, tucked away in the corners of the Los Angeles Convention Center, barely made a peep amid the bombast of their big-budget brethren at E3. And some big companies are looking at mobile games as less of a threat and more of a gateway drug for large-screen play. Winner: Consoles.

INDIE VS. CORPORATE: Independent game development is blossoming, and the Indiecade area of the convention center displayed more creativity than most of the expensive corporate booths. (The most fun I had this week was playing "Tiny Brains," a multiplayer puzzler from Spearhead Games, a small studio founded by EA and Ubisoft veterans.) But Sony, in particular, is aggressively wooing indies to create PS4 and Vita games, and the buzziest titles at its booth were idiosyncratic gems like "Hohokum," ''Octodad: Dadliest Catch" and "Secret Ponchos." Winner: Can't we all just get along?

'ELDER SCROLLS' VS. 'DRAGON AGE': The two most popular American role-playing franchises hurled a few fireballs at each other. BioWare is looking to rebound from the divisive "Dragon Age II" with the more classically expansive "Dragon Age: Inquisition." But Bethesda Softworks' "The Elder Scrolls Online" is further along and looks more impressive each time I see it. Meanwhile, sword-and-sorcery tales are thriving, with promising epics like "The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt," ''Dark Souls II" and "Blackguards" in the pipeline. And yes, "Final Fantasy XV" is coming. Winner: "The Elder Scrolls Online."

NINTENDO VS. ITSELF: Nintendo has a stable of talented game designers with impressive resumes, but they've been relegated to uninspired projects for the Wii U. The team behind the stellar "Super Mario Galaxy" games is producing the multiplayer "Super Mario 3D World," which plays an awful lot like last year's "New Super Mario Bros. U." Retro Studios, architect of last decade's spectacular "Metroid" reboot, is bogged down with another "Donkey Kong Country" game. While Nintendo's character roster is second to none, the company desperately needs an influx of fresh ideas. Winner: Nobody.

"PLANTS VS. ZOMBIES": Popcap Games' flora were in full bloom at E3, with the long-awaited "Plants vs. Zombies 2" for mobile devices as well as "Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare," a goofy 3D shooter for the Xbox. Still, zombies continue to run rampant, starring in "Dead Rising 3," ''The Evil Within," ''Dying Light," ''Ray's The Dead" and the next episode of the "Walking Dead" saga, alongside about half a dozen other games. Winner: Zombies.

"CALL OF DUTY" DOG VS. CAT MARIO: In "Super Mario 3D World," a cat costume enables Mario to scramble up walls and pounce on enemies. Activision's "Call of Duty: Ghosts," however, features a German shepherd named Riley who can sneak through bushes, jump through windows and rip the throats out of terrorists. Plus, he's become an Internet sensation, and his Twitter account has over 26,000 followers. Winner: Dog.

OPTIMISM VS. DESPAIR: No doubt, these are anxious times in the video-game business. The Wii U has yet to gain traction, and no one has any idea about how enthusiastically consumers will embrace the Xbox One and PS4. And big questions remain about piracy, privacy and the sustainability of big-budget game development. Still, the E3 show floor was packed all week, and most of the industry veterans I spoke with agreed it was the most exciting show in years. Winner: Optimism.

___

EDITOR'S NOTE Lou Kesten is a video game reviewer for The Associated Press. Follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/lkesten .

Read More

REDMOND, Wash. (AP) Will gamers want One?

After four years of development, Microsoft unveiled the Xbox One entertainment console and touted it as an all-in-one solution for playing games, watching TV and doing everything in between. Microsoft wants the Xbox One to be central to your living room, so it packed the new Xbox with such features as the ability to change TV channels through voice commands.

Although the device won't go on sale until later this year, at a price that hasn't been disclosed yet, Microsoft invited attendees of Tuesday's announcement event to take a closer look at the system.

Based on limited time with the device, the Xbox One feels like an improvement over its predecessor. But it fails to include features some fans have demanded, including the ability to play games bought for the existing Xbox 360 system.

Of course, many particulars about the Xbox One could change between now and when it's released. The specific date hasn't been revealed. More details are expected in three weeks at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, the gaming industry's annual convention in Los Angeles.

For now, the system looks to be a thoughtful piece of technology, but there's still a lot that isn't known.

DESIGN: With contrasting matte and gloss finishes, the Xbox One is the slickest video game console so far, although we don't yet know what Sony's upcoming PlayStation 4 will look like. (Nintendo's Wii U is already out, although sales have fallen short of the company's forecasts.) The Xbox's outer shell, which Microsoft calls "liquid black," features vented flourishes and all the inputs and outputs one might need, including multiple USB ports and HDMI pass-through.

KINECT: The new version of the Xbox's camera-based Kinect system comes with better motion and voice detection, including the ability to recognize faces, tell if you're smiling or talking and gauge your heart rate. It appears as sexy as the Xbox console and has been overhauled under the hood. It's three times more sensitive and has a larger, 60-degree field of view. In a demo, the doodad's high-definition camera easily displayed crystal-clear 1080p video and could detect up to seven people, though it lagged as more folks stood in front of it. The basic motion detection appears vastly improved, but the voice detection feature wasn't made available to try out, adding to the list of unknowns.

PERFORMANCE: The system seems to work harmoniously together. For example, by combining the Kinect's face detection ability with the machine's wireless controllers, it recognized almost magically when users swapped controllers.

CONTROLLER: The new controller's layout is mostly unchanged, but the bulky battery bump is gone from the back. The smoother Xbox One controller boasts a new directional pad and vibrating trigger buttons. The triggers pulsated in tandem with such imagery as a character's heart beating and a car revving up during a demo with a prototype controller.

REQUIREMENTS: Luckily, the Xbox One won't require a constant connection to the Internet, but there's a possibility that some of the key features wouldn't work as well or at all. The Kinect system is required and will come with the machine, rather than sold separately as has been the case with the Xbox 360. The Xbox One also will feature privacy settings so it doesn't feel like the Kinect's camera is always watching you.

LIMITATIONS: Xbox 360 games won't work on the Xbox One because the underlying technology is different, according to Microsoft. Microsoft was vague about how the Xbox One will handle previously played games bought from other gamers, though it confirmed used games will work somehow. There had been talk that Microsoft might restrict used games on the new machine.

GAMES: What games? Despite the fact that such titles as "Call of Duty: Ghosts," ''FIFA 14" and "Forza Motorsport 5" were teased during Tuesday's flashy presentation, actual games weren't available to try out afterward. Microsoft said it plans to focus on Xbox One titles at the E3 conference, which starts June 11.

The Xbox One shows promise with a sleek shell and a new Kinect detector that seems to perform fine at least if you don't try to confuse it with too many people at once. But the lack of games is notable, as are lingering questions about what it can do without an Internet connection. There are too many questions about the Xbox One, even after experiencing not just hearing what Microsoft has planned. At this point, it's too early to say whether Microsoft or Sony is leading in the latest round of the console wars. They'll have to duke it out at E3.

___

Online:

http://www.xbox.com

___

Follow AP Entertainment Writer Derrik J. Lang on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/derrikjlang

Read More

NEW YORK (AP) Microsoft is the last of the three big video game console makers to unveil its latest gaming system. The unveiling comes nearly eight years after the Xbox 360 went on sale. It follows last fall's debut of Nintendo's Wii U and a preview in February of the upcoming PlayStation 4 from Sony.

Each machine has a set of features designed to draw gamers away from rival consoles. There's one thing all three have in common, though: They are about more than gaming and include entertainment services such as television, movies and music.

Here's a closer look at the three systems. More details are expected at the E3 video game conference in Los Angeles next month.

Wii U (Nintendo)

The Japanese gaming company launched the Wii U, the follow-up to its popular Wii, in November, making it the only new console out for last year's holiday season. The console features a tablet-like controller with a touch screen, called the GamePad, which can be used to control games on the TV set or to play games separately, as you would on a regular tablet computer. It also allows someone with a GamePad to have a different experience with a game than someone playing it at the same time with a regular Wii controller.

The GamePad also serves as a fancy remote controller to navigate a TV-watching feature called TVii. The service groups your favorite shows and sports teams together, whether it's on live TV or an Internet video service such as Hulu Plus. And it offers water-cooler moments you can chat about on social media.

Unlike the Wii, the Wii U features high-definition graphics. In doing so, Nintendo's system catches up to the years-old Xbox 360 from Microsoft and the PlayStation 3 from Sony.

Sales of the Wii U have been disappointing, with 3.5 million sold as of March 31, the end of Nintendo's fiscal year. Nintendo Co. had originally expected to sell 5.5 million units and later lowered the forecast to 4 million, but it still fell short.

Price: Starts at $300 but some retailers have offered it at lower prices.

PlayStation 4 (Sony)

Sony shared some details about the PlayStation 4 in February, but it didn't show what the console would look like. The company said the PS4 would essentially be a "supercharged PC," much like the Xbox. That's a big departure from the old and idiosyncratic PlayStation design and should make it easier for developers to create games.

But the adoption of PC chips also means that the new console won't be able to play games created for any of the three previous PlayStations. Players will have to stream older games over the Internet.

Other new features revolve around social networking and remote access. With one button, you can broadcast video of your game play so friends elsewhere can watch. You can also run a game on the PS4 to stream over the Internet to Sony's mobile gaming device, the PlayStation Vita, which debuted last year.

The PlayStation online network will have access to Sony's video and music services, as well as Netflix, Hulu and Amazon as long as you have subscriptions to those services. You'll also be able to access Facebook.

The PS4 will have a Blu-ray disc drive for movies, just like the PS3. The console will go on sale this holiday season, though Sony Corp. has not disclosed an exact date.

Price: Not yet announced.

Xbox One (Microsoft)

Microsoft's new console seeks to deliver the Holy Grail of home entertainment an all-in-one device that lets you watch television, play movies, listen to music and browse the Internet as well as play video games.

The Xbox One lets you use voice commands to switch between watching TV and playing "Call of Duty," or ask "What's on HBO?" to view a TV channel guide. Simply connect your cable or satellite set-top box to the game machine with an HDMI cable.

A new version of Microsoft's camera-based Kinect controller offers better motion and voice detection than the one currently available. Unlike the Xbox 360, the Xbox One will require Kinect, which will come with the package.

Microsoft also reached a multiyear deal with the National Football League to develop new interactive viewing experiences, such as the ability to watch games, chat with other fans, view statistics, access highlights in real time and gather fantasy information about players and teams all on a single screen.

Although Nintendo's Wii was the most popular of the three at first, the Xbox 360 has outsold its rivals in recent years largely because of its robust online service, Xbox Live, which allows people to play games with others online for as much as $60 a year with annual plans. Activision Blizzard Inc.'s "Call of Duty," has been a driving force behind Xbox Live, and Microsoft said players will be able to download new content for upcoming titles in the series on the Xbox One before any other system.

The new console will also add the ability to play Blu-ray discs, matching what Sony has in its older PlayStation 3. What it won't play are games for the Xbox 360.

Microsoft said the system will launch this year, but it did not give a date during Tuesday's unveiling.

Price: Not yet announced.

Read More

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- It's almost time for a new Xbox.

Eight years have passed since Microsoft unveiled the Xbox 360, double the amount of time between the original Xbox debut in 2001 and its high-definition successor's launch in 2005. With the next-generation Xbox expected to be revealed Tuesday, anticipation for the entertainment console's latest evolution is higher than Master Chief's spaceship.

"People get excited about new consoles because consoles represent the future," said Stephen Totilo, editor of gaming site Kotaku.com. "When you buy a new console, you're essentially investing in five years of your future in the hopes that this box won't just be cool the day you buy it, but in five years from now, it will be even cooler."

The platform has been the exclusive home to such popular gaming franchises as sci-fi shoot-'em-up "Gears of War," racing simulator "Forza" and first-person shooter "Halo," starring super-soldier Master Chief. In recent years, Microsoft expanded the console's scope beyond just games, adding streaming media apps and the family-friendly Kinect system.

The next generation of gaming already got off to a rocky start last November when Nintendo launched the Wii U, the successor to the popular Wii system featuring an innovative tablet-like controller yet graphics on par with the Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3. Nintendo said it sold just 3.45 million units by the end of March, well below expectations.

Microsoft will likely take aim at Sony during Tuesday's next-generation Xbox unveiling at its headquarters in Redmond, Wash. Sony was first to showcase plans for its upcoming PlayStation 4 but not the actual box at an event in New York last February. The reaction to that console, which featured richer graphics and more social features, was mixed.

Totilo said to wow gamers with the next Xbox, Microsoft must show off great games for it that players will crave, as well as technology that feels futuristic. He said there's concern from Xbox fans that Microsoft has lost interest in hardcore gamers with their recent efforts to attract casual gamers with the Kinect, its camera-based system that detects motion.

There will be at least one hardcore game showcased at the Microsoft's event: "Call of Duty: Ghosts," the next chapter in the popular military shooter franchise from "Modern Warfare" developer Infinity Ward. Activison-Blizzard Inc. previously announced that "Ghosts" would be on display Tuesday and will be available for both current and next-generation consoles.

"They wanted 'Call of Duty' on their stage to show off what next gen is capable of," said Eric Hirshberg, CEO of Activision Publishing. "We're excited about the approach that both Microsoft and Sony are taking to the next generation. Our business, of course, depends on them launching this new hardware, so we want to do everything we can to help."

For the past five years, questions and rumors about a new Xbox have circulated more than the chainsaw on the end of a "Gears of War" rifle. What will the new Xbox be called? How much will it cost? Will it play used video games? Blu-ray discs? Will it be backwards compatible? Must the Kinect always be on? Will it require a connection to the Internet?

It's that rumor about an always-on Xbox which has ignited the most negative comments on social networks, according to research firm Fizziology. Overall, Fizziology said gamers seem to be more jazzed about a potential new Xbox, with 32 percent of the chatter positive compared to 10 percent of the sentiment negative in online conversation.

"I think because people have been waiting a long time, expectations are higher," said Laurent Detoc, North America president of Ubisoft Entertainment. "As a result, they may not be seeing what they anticipated. In the end, from the research we've done, there's a strong appetite for new machines. I have no doubt they're going to sell extremely well."

___

Online:

http://www.xbox.com/

___

Follow AP Entertainment Writer Derrik J. Lang on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/derrikjlang.

Read More

By Malathi Nayak and Bill Rigby

SAN FRANCISCO/SEATTLE (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp is set to make a splash this week with the eagerly awaited unveiling of its new Xbox game console, eight years after the last version, as it seeks a larger share of the $65 billion a year global computer gaming industry.

But the small device faces some big competition from the PlayStation 4 by Sony Corp and the Wii U by Nintendo Co Ltd in a shifting market.

Gamers are gravitating to online play - suggesting the hey-day of console games are over - while Microsoft wants its sleek new toy to finally cross the bridge to the mainstream and become the family's entertainment center.

"Core gamers are very hungry for a new machine but the difference between 2005 and now is that the stakes are so much higher," said Ryan McCaffrey, executive editor at entertainment website IGN.com, harking back to Microsoft's last Xbox release. "The entire Xbox experiment from Microsoft was for it to be the center piece of your living room."

To that end, industry-watchers are expecting a raft of improvements from the new Xbox, when Microsoft unveils it at its Redmond, Washington, headquarters on Tuesday, from closer integration with the TV and link-ups with mobile devices to access to new and even exclusive content.

Console gaming still takes the lion's share of a growing gaming market - about 42 percent of the $65 billion world market, according to Microsoft. But playing games on smartphones and tablets, or as an offshoot to online social networks, is gaining ground fast.

Console sales have been in decline for the last four years, chiefly because of aging devices, but the first of the new generation of machines has not reignited the sector.

Nintendo's Wii U, launched in November, had sold only 3.45 million units through the end of March, well below the company's initial forecast of 5.5 million. Hopes for Sony's PS4, teased in March, are low key.

"The next wave crest isn't as high as the previous one," said Lewis Ward, research manager at International Data Corp, who calculates that about 250 million Xbox 360, Sony PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii units were sold between 2005 and 2012.

"I do think that consoles as a product category have peaked and the next gen devices won't match those totals," he said.

LOW MARGINS

The Xbox itself is not a key financial factor for the world's largest software maker. Its Entertainment & Devices unit is set to break $10 billion in sales for the first time this year, but that's half the sales of its Windows unit, and a lot less profitable, averaging less than 15 percent margin compared to 60 percent or higher for Windows or Office.

The company has more than 46 million members who subscribe to its online gaming and digital entertainment service Xbox Live, but that's still a fraction of the people who pay for its software.

However, the Xbox is still a key weapon in Microsoft's strategic battle with Google Inc, Apple Inc, Amazon.com Inc and others for a central place in consumers' lives.

"This (the new Xbox) is of massive importance to Microsoft. It is a piece of a larger war for the consumer that it is battling. They want to be fully integrated with the consumer whether it's in the living room or mobile," said P.J. McNealy, CEO and founder of Digital World Research. "Arguably the battle against both Apple and Google for dominating a consumer's time share more so than taking on Sony and Nintendo directly."

That means Microsoft will be aiming for many markets at the same time, from the core and casual gamer to the TV watcher and music fan.

To do that, industry watchers expect Microsoft to integrate the new Xbox much more closely to the TV and cable or satellite box, perhaps allowing users to change channel or buy movies with a wave of the hand through its motion-control Kinect sensor. They also expect to hear more about SmartGlass, Microsoft's app that lets you link an Xbox to a tablet or smartphone.

Users can already get Netflix through the Xbox, and Microsoft recently started its own studio to produce exclusive content, meaning the new device is a gateway to much more than games.

"I think they're going to try to have their cake and eat it too - they will try to get casual people for entertainment while keeping the hardcore gamers interested," said McCaffrey at IGN.com. "They want their console on all the time, whether it's a mom watching Amazon video, the son playing a game and the dad watching (Major League Baseball) TV on another app - that's their goal."

(Additional reporting by Edwin Chan; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)

Read More

By Jonathan Stempel

(Reuters) - Nintendo Co, one of the world's largest makers of video game players, won a U.S. appeals court decision in a patent case that will allow it to keep importing its popular Wii system into the United States.

Monday's decision by the U.S. Federal Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. affirmed a January 2012 ruling by the U.S. International Trade Commission, which handles many technology patent disputes.

The decision against Motiva LLC, which sued Nintendo in 2008, could make it harder for U.S. companies to halt imports of products that allegedly infringe patents on grounds they want to establish a "domestic industry" for similar products.

In January, in a patent dispute between InterDigital inc and Nokia Oyj over wireless phones, the Federal Circuit said companies could seek such relief when they sought to license products incorporating their patents, even if such products were not being made.

Motiva, which is based in Dublin, Ohio, had claimed that Wii infringed two patents for a system to track a game user's position and body movement.

A three-judge Federal Circuit panel agreed with the ITC that the main impetus behind Motiva's litigation against Kyoto, Japan-based Nintendo was to win damages or a settlement, not to license or make products incorporating Motiva's patents.

This panel said Motiva's litigation did not amount to the "significant" or "substantial" investment toward commercializing patented technology that was required under a patent protection law, known as the Tariff Act, that sets limits on imports.

"Motiva's litigation was targeted at financial gains, not at encouraging adoption of Motiva's patented technology," Circuit Judge Sharon Prost wrote. "There is simply no reasonable likelihood that, after successful litigation against Nintendo, Motiva's patented technology would have been licensed by partners who would have incorporated it."

The ITC had also concluded that Nintendo did not infringe the Motiva patents.

Christopher Banys, a lawyer for Motiva, called Monday's decision "unfortunate" but said the case will continue.

"We are confident that Motiva will be vindicated when its case is tried in district court," he said.

Richard Medway, deputy general counsel of Nintendo of America, in a statement said the company is pleased with the Federal Circuit decision.

Wii's major competitors include Sony Corp's PlayStation and Microsoft Corp's Xbox.

The case is Motiva LLC v. International Trade Commission, U.S. Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, No. 12-1252.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; editing by Andrew Hay and Nick Zieminski)

Read More

By Malathi Nayak

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - In the midst of the bitter national debate on gun violence, gun manufacturers and videogame makers are delicately navigating one of the more peculiar relationships in American business.

Violent "first-person shooter" games such as "Call of Duty" are the bread and butter of leading video game publishers, and authenticity all but requires that they feature brand-name weapons.

Electronic Arts licensed weapons from companies like McMillan Group International as part of a marketing collaboration for "Medal of Honor: Warfighter." Activision Blizzard gives "special thanks" to Colt, Barrett and Remington in the credits for its "Call of Duty" titles.

Rifles by Bushmaster, which made the gun used in the Newtown, Connecticut school shooting last December, have appeared in the hugely popular "Call of Duty."

Yet, in the wake of the Newtown shooting, the biggest advocate for gun ownership, the National Rifle Association, took aim at videogames to explain gun violence. One week after 20 schoolchildren and six adults were killed in the shooting, NRA chief executive Wayne LaPierre called the videogame industry "a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells, and sows, violence against its own people."

Now at least one game maker, the second largest by revenue in the United States, is publicly distancing itself from the gun industry, even as it finds ways to keep the branded guns in the games. Electronic Arts says it is severing its licensing ties to gun manufacturers - and simultaneously asserting that it has the right, and the intention, to continue to feature branded guns without a license.

For the gunmakers, having their products in games is "free marketing, just like having Coca-Cola" in a movie, said Roxanne Christ, a partner at Latham & Watkins LLP in Los Angeles, who works with video game companies on licensing, but has not personally done a gun deal.

Yet it is also a virtual double-edged sword. "It gives publicity to the particular brand of gun being used in the video game," said Brad J. Bushman, a professor at Ohio State University who has studied video game violence. "On the other hand, it's linking that gun with violent and aggressive behavior."

Gun makers, including the Freedom Group that owns brands like Remington and Bushmaster, and the NRA, did not respond to repeated requests for comment from Reuters.

'ENHANCED AUTHENTICITY'

First-person shooter games let players blast their way through battlefields while looking down the barrel of a virtual gun, taking aim with the flick of a controller.

Some of those guns - like the Colt M1911 pistol in "Call of Duty" - turn sideways to face the screen during reloading, revealing the brand name. Games also offer lists of branded weapons to choose from.

Licensed images of weapons in "Medal of Honor: Warfighter" - a game that simulates military missions like fighting pirates in Somalia - offer what EA spokesman Jeff Brown calls "enhanced authenticity."

Back in the late 90's, video game makers initially approached gun companies for licenses to inoculate themselves from potential lawsuits, video game industry lawyers say. Over the years, legal clearances were granted for little or no money by gunmakers, these lawyers said.

Yet overt signs of cooperation between the video game and gun industries had begun to draw criticism even before the December school shooting in Connecticut.

In August, game fans and some video game news outlets vehemently objected to EA putting links to weapons companies like the McMillan Group and gun magazine maker Magpul, where gamers could check out real versions of weapons featured in the game, on its "Medal of Honor: Warfighter" game website.

"What kind of message is a video game publisher like EA sending when it encourages its players to buy weapons?" asked Laura Parker, the associate editor of gaming site GameSpot Australia in a post in August.

EA immediately removed the links and dropped the marketing tie-up, which it said was part of a charity project to raise money for military veterans. The company said it received no money from its gun company partners.

"We won't do that again," said Brown. "The action games we will release this year will not include licensed images of weapons."

EA said politics and NRA comments critical of game makers had nothing to do with its decision. "The response from our audience was pretty clear: they feel the comments from the NRA were a simple attempt to change the subject," Brown said.

EA also says video game makers can have branded guns in their games without getting licenses, meaning the industry could drop the gun companies and keep their guns.

Activision, the industry leader, declined to comment on whether it licenses gun designs from gun manufacturers or if it would stop doing so. Branded guns have consistently been featured in its blockbuster shooter games like the decade-old "Call of Duty."

"We're telling a story and we have a point of view," EA's President of Labels Frank Gibeau, who leads product development of EA's biggest franchises, said in an interview. "A book doesn't pay for saying the word 'Colt,' for example."

Put another way, EA is asserting a constitutional free speech right to use trademarks without permission in its ever-more-realistic games.

Legal experts say there isn't a single case so far where gun companies have sued video game companies for using branded guns without a license.

But EA's legal theory is now being tested in court. Aircraft maker Bell Helicopter, a unit of Textron Inc, has argued that Electronic Arts' depiction of its helicopters in "Battlefield" was beyond fair use and amounted to a trademark infringement. EA preemptively went to court, suing Bell Helicopter to settle the issue.

The U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, has set a jury trial for the case in June.

(Reporting By Malathi Nayak, Editing by Peter Henderson, Jonathan Weber, Mary Milliken and Tim Dobbyn)

Read More

By Gerry Shih

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - In the past twelve months, Zynga Inc has struggled with a contracting player base, a deflated stock price and waves of layoffs. Now it is coming to terms with downsized ambitions.

As Chief Executive Mark Pincus, 47, leads the online games developer he founded in 2007 through perhaps the most crucial year of his tenure, he is pushing to restore revenues by doubling down on "FarmVille," the franchise that took Facebook users by storm four years ago and launched Zynga to stardom.

Though some industry observers had declared farm simulation games a fad and predicted FarmVille 2's early demise, the sequel to Zynga's best-known title has defied expectations at its San Francisco headquarters, Pincus said in an interview. FarmVille 2 has clung to its perch near the top of Facebook charts and the number of people who play the game each day still hovers near all-time highs of 8 million, even six months after launch.

Given a glaring weakness in mobile games, however, one of Zynga's current priorities is porting FarmVille 2 to mobile devices so players can move from PCs to smartphones and back without losing their data. That presented technical challenges that the company is ironing out, Pincus said.

"The ideal is to make that one seamless experience between Web and mobile so you can take your farming experience from work to home," Pincus said. "We're having to retool and reinvent around our process and technology."

Pincus badly needs a reliable hit franchise. In the past nine months, Zynga has shuttered 20 titles and closed offices in Baltimore, Boston and Tokyo. It has trimmed 5 percent of its workforce, though its headcount of nearly 3,000 still dwarfs that of fierce rivals like Supercell, a Finnish company with 100 people that claims an equivalent amount of revenue, or the 600-strong Rovio, the publisher behind the "Angry Birds" games.

Gone is the swagger that defined the early years, when Zynga's army of developers flooded the market with dozens of new titles from cooking games to bingo variations, its dealmakers splashed money to snap up smaller rivals, and its managers opened studios in cities around the world.

Wall Street is viewing Pincus' shift with cautious approval, having been singed by Zynga's abysmal stock performance an 80 percent decline over the past year that began around the time it invested $180 million in then-promising game studio OMGPOP.

"Certainly their shareholder base wants to see more discipline," said Sean McGowan, an analyst at Needham and Co. "When you have limited resources, it makes sense to start with a proven winner, then expand that franchise. But it needs to be a blend of sticking with the proven brands and realizing when people might say: 'FarmVille 4? No, I'm done with that.'"

Investors place much stock on Zynga's future prospects in Internet gambling, because of its massive poker-playing community and existing game software. But with meaningful income from real-money casino efforts likely to be months, if not years, away, it may have to risk "sequelitis" for now.

TABLES TURNED

Almost 18 months after going public, Zynga is staving off fierce competition from newer or nimbler rivals that mimic its games.

Supercell, founded in 2010, has scored with "Hay Day," an iPad game that contains elements resembling FarmVille. With just one other game under its belt, Supercell says it is on track to make more than $800 million in revenue this year, roughly equal to the $860 million that Wall Street expects from Zynga in 2013.

Veteran video games publisher Electronic Arts Inc, one of Zynga's earliest rivals, in recent weeks said it would lay off an undisclosed number of employees and focus on core franchises like Battlefield and sports titles.

Activision Blizzard Inc, another publishing heavyweight, has fared better thanks to the strength of series like "Call of Duty," which has brought in more than $8 billion in cumulative sales since the first title launched in 2003. Yet even Activision is struggling to sustain revenue growth.

Zynga's bottom-line could be shored up through a more streamlined pipeline, Pincus argued. Since FarmVille first launched, it has gradually honed its development process to reduce the resources and development costs required for each significant update by more than 80 percent, he said.

"As long as our players are interested in farming, we'll offer a Farmville," Pincus said. "It could be the Seinfeld of our era in gaming, a multi-season show that has a quality and a consistency that you can rely on."

Zynga declined to address its game pipeline. Bing Gordon, an investor at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and a Zynga board member, said he has repeatedly nudged the company to develop FarmVille 3.

"Coca Cola has learned not to change their formula," said Gordon, a game industry veteran who formerly served as chief creative officer at Electronic Arts. "If you've got something people want, keep doing it."

BOLD BEATS

Even as Zynga seeks greater efficiency, it acknowledges it has been pressed to invest more to stay competitive.

At the heart of the company's strategy has been its "bold beat" schedule, a roadmap first laid out by Pincus in 2009 to release significant upgrades and new features to games every quarter to keep players hooked.

Once criticized in the industry for low-quality graphics and rudimentary gameplay, the company's latest launches and "bold beats" have placed a greater emphasis on elements like visuals that were once considered superfluous, game designers said.

"Player expectations are higher than they used to be," said Zynga Senior Vice President Todd Arnold, who oversees FarmVille and FarmVille 2. "You're not able to launch a minimalist product as we used to be able to."

For its leading franchises, the company is also investing more in quantitative and analytical tools. Every week, it shuttles players into a room deep inside its offices, where they are shown minute new design features. Their reactions are recorded by video cameras as well as a team of game designers sitting behind a two-way mirror in an adjacent room.

The company also holds periodic panel discussions with its most loyal fans to solicit suggestions for new features.

Linda Zoccoli, a retired daycare business owner in Moraga, California, suggested at a session in March that water was too scarce a commodity in FarmVille 2. Weeks later, she noticed the game began to feature periodic rainfall.

She has spent three hours almost daily for the past eight months tending her plot but hasn't found it repetitive.

"As long as they come out with new quests, new items, it keeps it interesting," she said.

(This story was fixed to correct spelling in paragraph 22 to oversees instead of overseas, corrects spelling in paragraph 25 to Zoccoli instead of Zoccolli)

(Reporting by Gerry Shih; Editing by Edwin Chan, Jonathan Weber and Chris Reese)

Read More

TOKYO (Reuters) - Nintendo Co Ltd said on Wednesday that it expects to sell 9 million of its new Wii U game consoles in the year to next March 31, after a disappointing start since their launch in November.

In the latest business year that ended on March 31, the creator of Super Mario sold 3.45 million of its successor to the hit Wii machine. It initially forecast sales of 5.5 million but later lowered that to 4 million.

Nintendo, which began by making playing cards in the late 19th century, is counting on the Wii U, its first console in 16 years to come with a dedicated Super Mario game title, to revive its fortunes as sales of the six year-old Wii slacken.

The Japanese gaming company forecast sales of its handheld 3DS console to rise nearly 30 percent to 18 million.

(Reporting by Tim Kelly; Editing by Edmund Klamann)

Read More

LOS ANGELES (AP) Activision is trading "Modern Warfare" for "Ghosts."

The video game publisher announced Wednesday that the next installment in its successful "Call of Duty" franchise will be titled "Call of Duty: Ghosts" and feature a new story and characters.

Activision Blizzard Inc. said "Ghosts" will be released Nov. 5 for PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and next-generation consoles.

The game is being developed by Infinity Ward, the Encino, Calif., studio that created the original "Call of Duty" and reignited the military first-person shooter franchise with 2007's "Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare" and its two sequels.

"'Ghosts' delivers an all-new story, all-new characters, an all-new 'Call of Duty' world, all powered by a next generation 'Call of Duty' engine, which is a leap forward for the franchise," Activision Publishing CEO Eric Hirshberg said in a statement. "Infinity Ward is going all-in to create the next generation of 'Call of Duty' worthy of the world's greatest fans."

For more than five years, the action-packed "Call of Duty" franchise has garnered unprecedented success.

The previous "Call of Duty" game, Treyarch's futuristic "Call of Duty: Black Ops II," crossed the $1 billion mark in worldwide retail sales 15 days after its release last year. Infinity Ward's "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3" hit the $1 billion mark in 16 days after its 2011 debut.

Activision said more details about "Ghosts" will be revealed May 21 at a Seattle presentation where Microsoft is expected to unveil the next Xbox.

___

Follow AP Entertainment Writer Derrik J. Lang on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/derrikjlang .

___

Online:

http://www.callofduty.com/ghosts

Read More

By Tim Kelly and Mari Saito

TOKYO (Reuters) - Super Mario creator Nintendo Co Ltd forecast a return to the black after two years of losses and camera maker Canon Inc raised its profit forecast by nearly 10 percent as a weaker yen, spurred by aggressive deflation-fighting policies, bolstered the outlook of Japan's tech companies.

The two companies, however, show no sign of reciprocating the government's helping hand with fresh job-creating investment. Canon, still worried about a struggling global economy, pared its capital expenditure.

As the first blue-chip Japanese tech companies to report quarterly results, Nintendo and Canon are often seen as a barometer for the sector's earnings. The tech sector directly employs around 2 million workers in Japan.

"We welcome Abenomics," Canon Chief Financial Officer Toshizo Tanaka said at a news briefing, acknowledging the impact of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's economic stimulus policies.

"The Japanese economy moves on this kind of mood so we value this and hope to find success," he added.

At Canon, a weakening yen is helping to compensate for a squeeze on compact camera sales as consumers switch to photo snapping on their smartphones. And the softer Japanese currency may buy Nintendo more time to plug its Wii game console successor, the Wii U, which has disappointed with dull sales as it also competes with smartphones and tablets.

For the business year to December 31, Canon, which relies on foreign markets for four-fifths of its sales, lifted its operating profit forecast to 450 billion yen ($4.53 billion).

Nintendo, which generates three-quarters of its revenue abroad, forecast an operating profit of 100 billion yen after two years of losses as its Wii boom ebbed.

Canon raised its forecast dollar rate for the year to 95 yen compared with the 85 yen forecast issued just three months earlier.

Nintendo estimated a rate of 90 yen to the dollar for the year to next March. Its president, Satoru Iwata, told a news briefing in Osaka that the figure was "conservative".

Nintendo sold 3.45 million Wii U consoles from its November launch until March 31, far below the 5.5 million it initially predicted. For this business year, it is aiming to sell 9 million.

LONG-HELD WISH

For Japanese business leaders worried about their ability to compete globally, particularly against South Korean rivals such as Samsung Electronics Co Ltd and LG Electronics Inc, the yen decline fulfils a long-held wish.

Fabricating goods worth almost $400 billion a year, Japanese makers of TVs, mobile phones, printers and personal computers account for a sizeable chunk of Japan's $5 trillion economy.

Canon's operating profit in the first quarter dipped 34 percent to $552 million, which the company blamed on a weakened global economy and the hit to its compact camera business from smartphones. Nintendo posted a full-year operating loss of 36.4 billion yen.

Corporate heads who have praised Abenomics include Sony Corp CEO Kazuo Hirai. His company and other Japanese TV makers, Panasonic Corp and Sharp Corp, have struggled to fend off competition from Samsung Electronics as a strong yen bit into profits.

Sony, with its bigger exposure to overseas markets, is the best-placed among TV makers to gain from a weaker yen, particularly versus the euro. A 1 yen drop against the European single currency adds about 6 billion yen to operating profit at the maker of Bravia sets.

At Panasonic, a 1 yen weakening against the euro boosts operating profit by 2 billion yen, while it reaps a 2.5 billion yen gain for declines against the dollar. At Sharp, which more heavily relies on its home market, a 1 yen move is worth around 500 million yen in operating profit against the euro and 700 million yen against the dollar.

More than a third of Japanese companies remain worried about domestic demand stagnating, a Reuters survey of 240 companies released on Friday shows. A quarter said they were likely to increase output in Japan because of the weaker yen.

On balance, however, Wednesday's results produced no signs that Abenomics was encouraging a boost in capital spending.

Canon, which stands to benefit more than most Japanese companies from a weak yen, on Wednesday trimmed its capital expenditure for the business year to 265 billion yen from 270 billion yen.

"Dramatic monetary easing has prompted a revision of the strong yen, but there are still uncertainties surrounding the U.S. budget problems and European debt issues," Tanaka cautioned.

Since mid-November, when an Abenomics-driven stock rally began, Canon's shares have gained 58 percent, in line with a 60 percent gain in the Nikkei 225 benchmark index. Its stock rose 1.3 percent in Tokyo to 3,840 yen on Wednesday.

Nintendo, which has gained 17 percent since November, rose 4.6 percent to 11,950 yen. Quarterly results for both companies were released after the close of trading.

($1 = 99.3600 Japanese yen)

(Editing by Daniel Magnowski and Edmund Klamann)

Read More

By Malathi Nayak

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp will unveil its much-anticipated next-generation Xbox on May 21 following months of speculation the company is gearing up to announce a new video game console this summer.

The company sent out media invitations on Wednesday, hinting it would be announcing the successor to its seven-year old Xbox 360. A new console from the software company will come on the heels of rival Sony's announcement in February that it will launch the PlayStation4 this holiday season.

Microsoft's May event will be held at its Xbox campus in Redmond, Washington, just a month before the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles, the gaming industry's largest annual convention, where next-generation consoles will be spotlighted.

"On May 21, we'll mark the beginning of a new generation of games, TV and entertainment," the company said on its official blog.

The Xbox 360 is the market-leading console that has an installed user base of 76 million. Gaming blogs have been afire with speculation about what features a next-generation console might offer, but Microsoft has been tight-lipped so far.

The current version of the Xbox sports voice- and gesture-command capabilities.

Shares in Microsoft were up 3.1 percent at $31.53 in the afternoon.

(Reporting By Malathi Nayak; Editing by Kenneth Barry)

Read More

By Gerry Shih

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Zynga Inc said on Wednesday the number of people playing its online games dropped dramatically in the first quarter, a development that overshadowed better-than-expected revenues and sent its stock tumbling in after-hours trade.

Shares fell 10 percent to $2.99 in extended trading.

The San Francisco-based publisher behind games like "FarmVille" and "Words With Friends" said its number of monthly players continued its decline to 253 million, the lowest figure since the number peaked at 331 million at the end of the third quarter of 2012.

On an adjusted basis, Zynga reported earnings of 1 cent per share, beating analyst expectations of a loss of 4 cents per share. But the company also projected that its second-quarter loss would be between 3 to 5 cents per share, exceeding the 1 cent per share loss analysts had expected.

"The second quarter guidance is light," said Sterne Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia. "We continue to think that any hope for real growth for this nebulous company really depends on what it can do in real-money gaming."

Zynga has struggled to keep users, who once flocked to its games on Facebook Inc's website. In recent months, Zynga and Facebook have revised their business partnership, as Zynga has sought to establish itself as a more independent gaming network at the risk of receiving less visitor traffic from Facebook.

Zynga has promised investors that it could tap into a potentially lucrative new revenue stream by launching real-money casino games around the world.

The company reported revenues of $263.6 million, down 18 percent from the year-ago quarter but above Wall Street's depressed expectations as the online game maker wrung more sales than expected out of its shrinking user base.

Zynga's quarterly bookings of $229.8 million also topped estimates but represented a 30 percent decline from a year ago.

(Reporting By Gerry Shih; Editing by Leslie Adler and David Gregorio)

Read More

NEW YORK (AP) Zynga Inc.'s surprise profit in the first three months of the year got overshadowed by a revenue decline, a drop in the number of users and a lower-than-expected second-quarter forecast.

The online game maker's stock fell more than 10 percent in extended trading Wednesday after the first-quarter results came out.

Zynga, which makes "FarmVille" and other games, said Wednesday that it earned $4.1 million, which was breakeven per share. A year earlier, it lost $85.4 million, or 12 cents per share. Adjusted earnings were 1 cent per share in the latest quarter, compared with expectations for a loss of 3 cents.

Revenue fell 18 percent to $263.6 million, from $321 million.

Analysts, on average, had expected revenue of $264.5 million, according to FactSet.

As demand for its Facebook games fades, Zynga has cut jobs, closed game studios and shut down games to reduce expenses and focus only on popular titles. The quarter's expenses fell 34 percent to $268.5 million, from $406.6 million.

The number of people who play Zynga games at least once a month fell 13 percent to 253 million, from 292 million a year earlier. The number of daily players dropped 21 percent to 52 million, from 65 million.

CEO Mark Pincus said in a statement that 2013 will "continue to be a transition year." Zynga, whose games are played mainly on Facebook's website, is working on shifting to mobile games and to its own site off of Facebook.

For the current quarter, Zynga is forecasting an adjusted loss of 3 cents to 4 cents per share on revenue of $225 million to $235 million. Analysts were expecting a loss of 1 cent per share on revenue of $258.1 million.

Shares of San Francisco-based Zynga fell 34 cents, or 10.1 percent, to $3.01 in after-hours trading. The stock had closed up 17 cents, or 5.3 percent, at $3.35 before the results came out.

Read More

LOS ANGELES (AP) The princess-rescuing adventurer Link is coming to the Nintendo 3DS.

The Japanese gaming giant announced plans Wednesday to bring a new "The Legend of Zelda" installment to its hand-held gaming system.

Nintendo of America Inc. president Reggie Fils-Aime said Tuesday that the new "Zelda" game would be set in the world of "The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past," which was originally released in 1992 for the Super Nintendo console.

The as-yet-untitled 3D follow-up will be released later this year and feature a new story and levels, as well as gameplay that allows sword-wielding Link to transform into a 2D drawing.

"It fully utilizes the Nintendo 3DS," said Fils-Aime. "It gives the game a sense of depth, and this puzzle-solving mechanic of being able to launch into a wall and navigate through walls to get into places that Link wouldn't normally be able to get into is exceptionally fresh."

It will mark the first all-new game starring Link for the glasses-free 3D hand-held device.

Other games announced coming to the 3DS include new "Yoshi's Island" and "Mario Party" titles.

Fils-Aime said more than 20 million 3DS games have been sold since the device debuted in 2011.

___

Follow AP Entertainment Writer Derrik J. Lang on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/derrikjlang

___

Online:

http://www.nintendo.com/3ds

Read More

What if you could take up swords against the Lannister family on "Game of Thrones"? Or solve mysteries with the "NCIS" crew? Or pitch an ad campaign to Don Draper on "Mad Men"?

And then: What if you could watch the consequences of your actions on TV the next week?

That's the premise behind "Defiance" (for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC, $59.99), a collaboration between the online game studio Trion Worlds and cable TV's Syfy. By the time "Defiance" the TV show debuts Monday, "Defiance" the video game will have been out for a few weeks enough time for players to make their own mark on this new universe.

Both the game and the TV drama are set in 2046, some 30 years after the Votan collective of alien species arrived in the skies over Earth. After a brutal war, the humans and aliens have settled into an uneasy peace, but alien technology that crashed to Earth has drastically changed the landscape.

The "Defiance" game shows the effects of these "arkfalls" on California's Bay Area, now a wasteland packed with bloodthirsty mutants, hostile cyborgs and overgrown, fire-spewing insects. Your character male or female, human or Votan is an ark hunter who makes a living by scavenging from crash sites, and the search for a particular alien artifact brings you to the West Coast.

Soon after your arrival, the game's sprawling map opens up, letting you choose from dozens of missions. You can race dune buggies around the wilderness. You can infiltrate raider strongholds and steal their loot. You can rescue farmers from "hellbug" infestations. Most missions can be handled solo, but if you stumble across a major arkfall you're going to need help from other online players.

You'll also discover "episode missions" that relate to the next week's installment of the "Defiance" TV show. In the first such adventure, you meet military veteran Joshua Nolan and his partner, an alien named Irisa. They ask for your help retrieving a lost Votan doohickey, which turns out to be a significant plot device in the premiere of the Syfy drama.

The titular town of Defiance was built on the ruins of St. Louis, so I don't know how many of its characters will visit us ark hunters out West. But both sides of the "Defiance" team have collaborated on building an impressive world, and I'm eager to see where they go from week to week.

I was able to battle through the initial batch of episode missions in just a few hours, but there's plenty more to do. As with any online shooter, you can engage in raucous death matches with your fellow humans. Or you can enroll in the Shadow War, in which huge teams of up to 64 players each battle for control of sites all over the map.

Such massively multiplayer epics are popular among computer gamers, but we haven't seen many on consoles. I've been playing "Defiance" on the Xbox 360, and I love being able to use an Xbox controller instead of a PC's keyboard and mouse. On the other hand, I was frequently unable to log onto Trion's servers during the first few days after the game went on sale. That problem has eased up, but there are still too many glitches, from unresponsive controls to disappearing inventory items.

There's also a wearying sameness to the bulk of the missions, which typically consist of racing to a location, killing a bunch of monsters and retrieving some object. The action is intense and challenging, often reminiscent of 2K Games' fine "Borderlands." But it's missing that series' twisted sense of humor, and I'm hoping Trion delivers more variety in future episodes. It's a work in progress; for now, I give it two stars out of four.

___

Online:

http://www.defiance.com/en/

___

Follow Lou Kesten on Twitter at http://twitter.com/lkesten

Read More

By Estelle Shirbon

LONDON (Reuters) - A British computer hacker pleaded guilty on Tuesday to cyber attacks on targets including Sony, Nintendo, Rupert Murdoch's News International and the Arizona State Police.

Ryan Ackroyd's plea meant his planned jury trial did not go ahead and, as a result, the court did not hear any evidence on the motivation behind the attacks he made using the persona of a 16-year-old girl named Kayla as part of hacking group LulzSec.

Dressed in a tracksuit bottom and t-shirt, with a large tattoo on his arm and crew-cut hair, Ackroyd spoke only to identify himself and to enter his plea.

Ackroyd, 26, was arrested in 2011 with three other British young men in connection with an international cyber crime spree by LulzSec, a splinter group of hacking collective Anonymous.

The other three had already pleaded guilty to several charges including cyber attacks on the CIA and Britain's Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA).

Anonymous, and LulzSec in particular, made international headlines in late 2010 when they launched what they called the "first cyber war" in retaliation for attempts to shut down the WikiLeaks website.

Ackroyd faced four charges but pleaded guilty to just one. Prosecutors said they would not pursue the other charges.

Ackroyd and his three fellow hackers will be sentenced on May 14, judge Deborah Taylor said.

Mustafa Al-Bassam, 18, and Jake Davis, 20, had both pleaded guilty to two counts while Ryan Cleary, 21, had pleaded guilty to six counts including that he attacked Pentagon computers operated by the U.S. Air Force.

Cleary, Al-Bassam and Davis admitted to launching so-called distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks in which websites are flooded with traffic to make them crash.

Ackroyd denied taking part in DDoS attacks but admitted, as did the three others, to hacking into computer systems, obtaining confidential data and redirecting legitimate website visitors to sites hosted by the hackers.

The targets listed in the charge to which Ackroyd pleaded guilty also included Britain's National Health Service, the U.S. public broadcaster PBS and 20th Century Fox.

The defendants are free on bail pending their sentencing, under the condition that they do not access the Internet.

Cleary was indicted by a federal grand jury in Los Angeles last June but U.S. authorities have indicated they would not seek his extradition as he was being prosecuted in Britain on the same charges.

The name LulzSec is a combination of "lulz", another way of writing "lols" or "laugh out loud", and security.

(Editing by Louise Ireland)

Read More

By Eric Kelsey

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Science-fiction drama "Defiance" wants to go where no television series has gone before, weaving a show with an online video game to achieve the elusive goal of parlaying success on one entertainment platform to another.

The new series, which premieres on U.S. cable channel Syfy on April 15, tells the story of frontier town Defiance, formerly St. Louis, in the near future following a 30-year war between humans and seven alien races.

Syfy last week released a multi-player, plot-based video game, developed with Trion Worlds, that lets users build their own personas and explore the landscape of a reshaped Earth in the San Francisco area. The game is made for Sony's PlayStation 3, Microsoft's Xbox360 and PC.

Spinning a film or TV series into a video game, or vice versa, is nothing new. But producers say "Defiance" is the first to weave both game and show together at the same time. The video game alone took some five years to create.

Known in the entertainment industry as the "second screen," the concept lets viewers engage with a show on a second platform on which networks pin hopes for additional advertising sales and cementing a dedicated fan base.

"What's unusual about what we're doing ... is we're building the second-screen concept into the actual DNA of the show-game combo," "Defiance" executive producer Kevin Murphy told Reuters.

"We're working to make a terrific serialized drama that stands on its own, but we understand that what has people watching us is the fact that this cross-platform promotional is something very, very desirable."

"Defiance" will be a guinea pig for the viability of merging media like video games with TV shows.

"Nobody has done this before, that's the scary part," he said. "The wonderful part is that there's nobody to say, 'No, no, no, that's not the way it's done.

"It's something (Syfy President) Dave Howe always refers to as the holy grail of entertainment," he added.

Syfy spent about $100 million to develop the game and show, and the network expects about 20 percent of viewers and players to cross over between the two platforms.

"We're very cautiously optimistic," Howe said, adding that it will still take the standard four or five weeks to know if "Defiance" will be renewed for a second season.

'OLD-SCHOOL' SCI-FI

The "Defiance" cast is led by ex-Marine and vagabond Nolan, played by "Liz & Dick" star Grant Bowler, and his adopted alien daughter Irisa (Stephanie Leonidas).

The two finally become tied down helping Defiance Mayor Amanda Rosewater (Julie Benz) defend the town from invasion.

Murphy, whose past credits include writer and producer on TV drama "Desperate Housewives," said there are plans for several crossovers between the series and game, including adapting user-created personas from the game into subsequent seasons of the television show.

Murphy said he wanted to depart from the recent popular television series of dark, dystopian sci-fi, such as AMC's "Walking Dead" and Syfy's "Battlestar Galactica."

"I think this is sort of a tip of the hat more to the old-school science-fiction like 'Star Trek' and 'Star Wars,' which were very hopeful, optimistic worlds," Murphy said.

The show often reflects American challenges of an ethnically diverse and often divided society.

In the pilot, polyglot alliances are tricky as humans and some races of aliens must reluctantly brush aside differences to protect the town from automatons known as the Volge.

"On our show, the aliens are not invading us," Murphy said. "The aliens are part of the melting pot .... They each have their own sort of social mores that they left behind and have been challenged because they've come to a new world."

Syfy is a unit of Comcast Corp.

(Reporting by Eric Kelsey, editing by Jill Serjeant and Cynthia Osterman)

Read More