GamesBeat Weekly Roundup: Bad game PR, Watch Dogs over 8M, and clever Osmo iPad games

Happy Eleventh of July! Before you celebrate with leftover explosives, why don’t you catch up on a week’s worth of GamesBeat’s news and stories?

Below, you’ll read about Cliff Bleszinski’s explanation for coming out of early retirement, what happens when PR takes a wrong turn, and Ubisoft’s sales of 8 million copies of Watch Dogs.

Enjoy, and have a great weekend!

Pieces of flair

• The DeanBeat: When Games are too fricking hard — it’s a joy
• Guns, goats, and bomb scares: When video game PR goes bad
• Chasing League of Legends: Here’s every upcoming MOBA we could think of
• Mega Man, Castlevania, and Mario: Digging through Shovel Knight’s retro inspirations
• Robots can play Angry Birds, too — and help kids with disabilities

Above: Watch Dogs is a big hit.

News

• Sony is considering a Steam-like Early Access program to let you try games in development
• Games for LGBT audience are finally hitting the market
• Want another Tony Hawk or Guitar Hero game? Neversoft won’t be making them
• Sony games chief says PS4 doing ‘OK’ in home market of Japan
• Flaregames to publish the next Fieldrunners game from Subatomic (and let’s hope it’s not too hard)
• The Sims 4 bosses talk about ‘Playing with Life’ at GamesBeat 2014
• Decent Capital’s Jonathan Qiu talks gaming and investing in American companies
• Trion Worlds and XL Games bring a sandbox MMO to the West with a prestigious pedigree: It’s from Lineage’s creator
• Remember that old PS3 game Heavenly Sword? It’s got a Blu-ray movie now
• Raptr: League of Legends and Dota 2 take up 25 percent of PC gamers’ play time
• Microsoft CEO reaffirms commitment to Xbox — on page 4 of a 6-page memo
• Global growth for social casino games slows to 8.6% in Q2 as big companies dominate
• Watch Dogs’ 8M copies sold pushes Ubisoft to record Q1
• Nintendo continues courting hardcore Super Smash Bros. fans with a tournament at San Diego Comic-Con
• What the heck? Japan’s mobile-game company Gree invests in a … hotel booking startup
• Curse raises $16M in wake of launch of Skype-like gamer voice service
• Cliff Bleszinski met with Zynga and traditional publishers — here’s why he’s partnering with Nexon
• Microsoft Flight Simulator returns — and one is coming to Steam
• Microsoft: Reports that it’s abandoning retail Xbox Ones as dev kits are ‘inaccurate’
• The original Alien cast reunites for Isolation — but only if you preorder
• Beyond Twitch Plays Pokémon: New crowd-play Dick Starr Conquers Mars appears
• China helps Guild Wars 2′s sales almost double in just 2 months
• Five things that drove $12.5B in game company acquisitions in the past year
• Report: Samsung and Oculus will launch co-developed ‘Gear VR’ headset at IFA 2014
• WiMi5 unveils platform so developers can easily make and publish HTML5 web games
• Game of Code: Checkio gamifies and crowdsources the task of programming
• Oculus VR acquires game-networking engine RakNet — and makes it open-source
• Toyze makes custom 3D-printed figures from mobile games—like Cut The Rope’s Om Nom (exclusive)

Above: Kent Wakeford of Kabam and Malathi Nayak of Reuters.

Image Credit: Michael O'Donnell/VentureBeat

Mobile and social

• Big Fish Games adds Luxury Slots to its mobile social-casino game
• Android vs. iOS: Revenue gap ‘appears to be closing,’ claims Racing Rivals developer
• Mario, Master Chief, and … Kim Kardashian: Reality TV star’s game is a huge hit
• Hearthstone is sliding down iPad’s top-grossing charts — expansion as well as iPhone, Android versions will help
• Smartphones are making console-only gamers rarer despite PS4 and Xbox One
• mNectar raises $7M for mobile ads that let you play a game before downloading it
• Kabam COO says mobile game companies have to get serious about Asia
• EA Mobile is launching global user-acquisition campaigns on Twitter
• Brain+ startup aims to outwit rival Lumosity with scientific brain-training games

Previews and interviews

• BioWare finally harmonizes real-time and tactical combat in Dragon Age: Inquisition (preview)
• The Escapists is bringing the prison break genre back to life — on a shoestring budget

Reviews

• Osmo uses physical objects to turn iPad games from a solitary experience into a social one (review)