SEO Werkt!

Social game startup Seismic Games is launching CelebrityMe, a new Facebook title that lets players live out the fantasy of being a celebrity.

The new game is an attempt to find a niche — in the genre of character-driven games related to celebrity culture — that big companies such as Zynga haven’t occupied on the social network. While everyone else is building social worlds, Seismic wants to create fun characters.

“We’re not trying to do what everyone else is doing,” said Eric Gewirtz, chief creative officer and co-founder of Seismic, in an interview with VentureBeat. “Console game companies have become risk averse. We think there is room for innovation in social games.”

Los Angeles-based Seismic Games came out of stealth in January when it announced it had raised $2 million from DFJ Frontier, venture capitalist Tom Matlack, and other entertainment industry investors. The company was started by Gewirtz, Greg Borrud (chief executive) and Chris Miller. The 20-person team includes a lot of veterans of the hardcore game industry; they have worked at places such as Pandemic Studios, Activision and Vivendi Universal. Their approach is to try to create addictive games that emphasize fun, rather than analytics.

Their first effort is not unlike The Movies, the tongue-in-cheek movie career simulation game created by Peter Molyneux and Lionhead Studios for the PC in 2005. But there aren’t a ton of other games like it where you can pretend to be a celebrity.

In the CelebrityMe game, you start out as a new arrival in Venice Beach, Calif., and try to land gigs as an actor. You make friends, go to parties and buy clothes that gets you noticed. You learn the ropes and work your way up to being a star. You hang out with the rich and famous, avoid scandals, and try to land roles that will put you into center stage.

In that way, Gewirtz thinks of the title as a character-building game with a narrative. You can customize your celebrity with thousands of combinations of hair styles, facial features, clothing and accessories — all of which can provoke a reaction from your audience and critics. The game helps you create simple animated music videos or movie clips that you can share with your friends. The more people like those animations, the more you rise as a star.

“Facebook is all about expressing who you are to the world. CelebrityMe takes it one step further by tapping into players’ real world interests and dreams and delivers on the fantasy of living the celebrity lifestyle,” said Borrud. “CelebrityMe gives players the tools to express not only who they are, but who they want to be, and lets them live out and share these fun aspirations with all their Facebook friends.”

Activities include going to nightclubs and getting noticed by the paparazzi. If you get drunk and get into a fight, that will hurt your reputation. You get a “redo” if you bungle the task and want to try again. Over time, you build an entourage. You need help from casting agents, producers, directors, stylists and fellow stars. Eventually, you’ll be getting gigs for Oscar-quality movies, if you play your cards right.

There’s a limit to how much user-generated content is allowed. Initially, you have limited choices about what kind of film you want to shoot. You have to play certain mini games well to get your movie rated higher. If you want better ratings, you can bribe the critics with faux money.

The movie shorts have a few still scenes and may be good for some laughs. Players may enjoy sharing them with friends at first, but they will probably also get the urge to gain more control over the actual content over time. Gewirtz said the team will grant more freedom to experienced players over time, but exactly what that means isn’t yet clear.

“We think these are mainstream fantasies that appeal to both genders and they could get a wide international audience,” Gewirtz said. “On Facebook, the fantasies today are more like build a castle, a farm, a mafia or a city.”

The key to whether the game succeeds or not is whether gamers truly enjoy the short movies they create and the sense of humor that comes with them. They may (or may not) like the fact that you can’t do that many of the bad things that come with being a movie star: hookers, drugs, thugs and generally bad behavior. There are no limos or jets yet either. But the company will introduce a reputation system over time that will allow you to pursue alternative paths.

“It’s a light-hearted approach to celebrity,” Gewirtz said. “We stay on the family friendly side, though you can decide to be a ruthless bad-boy rocker.”

You can buy lots of clothes and, if these generate a better reaction from the audience, you’ll get higher ratings in movies. Rival games include the Electronic Arts’ The Sims Social and CrowdStar’s It Girl, but neither really highlights being a celebrity.

GamesBeat 2012 is VentureBeat’s fourth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. This year we’re calling on speakers from the hottest mobile, social, PC, and console companies to debate new ways to stay on pace with changing consumer tastes and platforms. Join 500+ execs, investors, analysts, entrepreneurs, and press as we explore the gaming industry’s latest trends and newest monetization opportunities. The event takes place July 10-11 in San Francisco, and you can get your early-bird tickets here.

Filed under: dev, games, social, VentureBeat

Phil Harrison, most recently a venture capitalist and former game design chief at Sony, has is joining Microsoft Game Studios Europe as its chief.

Harrison, who currently serves as a partner at London Venture Partners, will step into the job vacated by former Lionhead Studios lead Peter Molyneux, who is joining the indie startup 22-Cans, according to GamesIndustry International.

Microsoft is expected to announce the appointment today. Harrison has served as a partner at London Venture Partners for the past two years. Before that, he was head of technology and a board member at Atari. And he is best known as the head of Sony Computer Entertainment’s worldwide game studios.

[Update: Microsoft confirmed that Harrison will be a corporate vice president in the Interactive Entertainment Business division with emphasis on growing the division's European business.

He will run the European game business and set up strategic partnerships in the region and bring "culturally relevant entertainment experiences" to Microsoft platforms. He will bring his market perspective on mobile and social games as well as new business models. And he will oversee the U.K.-based developers Lionhead, Soho Productions and Rare. He will continue as special advisor at London Venture Partners.

“Phil has played an instrumental role in shaping modern console history through his keen insights into both hardware and software strategy,” said Don Mattrick, president, Interactive Entertainment Business. “His addition to our leadership team will impact our global business in innumerable ways, as he aligns our studio development and growing portfolio of entertainment experiences in Europe to drive our continued growth worldwide.”]

[Photo credit: Sony]

Filed under: games

Our GamesBeat team is exhausted after five days of covering the biggest show for game developers in San Francisco. Here’s a day-by-day roundup of the major stories that we wrote from the Game Developers Conference this week. We’ve also thrown in stories from Microsoft’s pre-GDC press event. As you can see, it was a busy week for game news.

Here’s the headlines and links to stories in reverse chronological order:

Friday

Microsoft warns that OnLive Desktop’s Office streaming app violates license

Flurry launches AppSpot mobile app ad platform

How Thatgamecompany designed its new game, Journey

The DeanBeat: Tips from Ubisoft on making a happy game industry acquisition

Thursday

See what Tim Schafer is doing with all your (his) money. Kickstarter crowdfunding was a big topic at the GDC.

Konami and others will make games for Zynga.com

Core game sales drop like a rock in February

Electronic Arts reveals new Mass Effect 3 and Star Wars online numbers

Angry Birds Space gets geeky with awesome real-life demo from NASA (video)

Gaikai signs up Warner Bros.’ Lord of the Rings Online game for instant demos

Peter Molyneux departs Lionhead Studios and Microsoft to found 22 Cans

Wednesday

Facebook’s tips for getting your mobile game noticed

Browser-based games get real 3D graphics with latest Unreal Engine and Flash technology

Heyzap launches mobile API to add high-level analytics

Game developers salivate over the new iPad’s specs

EA lines up three Battlefield 3 expansions for 2012

Tuesday

EA to launch Medal of Honor Warfighter on Oct. 23

Google promises a unified social and mobile game platform

EA revives Sim City for 2013 launch — with curvy roads

Nintendo 3DS tops 4.5 million units in US within first year

Halo 4 quotes: The hype, the excitement, and the…huh?

Casino wars: Big Fish Games acquires mobile casino game maker Self Aware Games

Alex St. John’s Magi.com launches social gaming hub (exclusive)

Monday

Zynga reaches beyond Facebook with Zynga.com

Numecent spins out Approxy cloud-gaming startup

Numecent emerges from stealth with “revolutionary cloudpaging technology” for digital delivery

How to design a game for your teenage daughter

Funzio spreads out with games for Google+, Chrome Web Store, and Android

Facebook paid $1.4B to game developers in 2011

6L teams up with 16 mobile game developers and plans big marketing spend per title

Apple’s iOS runs HTML5 games three times faster than Android

Forza Motorsport fans can look forward to Forza Horizon and Porsche expansion

Star Wars Kinect lets you rampage like a monster using gestures (preview)

iSwifter makes iPad game streaming available to all PC game companies (exclusive)

Trials Evolution creative director discusses going bigger, multiplayer, and female riders (interview)

Steel Battalion Heavy Armor combines Kinect and controller commands (hands-on preview)

11 new things we’ve learned about Halo 4 (with video)

How Fable: The Journey will use the Kinect in revolutionary ways (interview with Peter Molyneux)

[Photo credit: Dean Takahashi's picture of Sony's Move/virtual reality demo]

Filed under: games

Peter Molyneux, one of the most recognizable names in the video game industry, has announced that he will be leaving Lionhead Studios, the company he founded 15 years ago.

Taking his place will be the studio co-founder Mark Webley. Molyneux also held the position of creative head at Microsoft Studios Europe, another title he will be relinquishing. There is no announced replacement for this position yet.

Peter Molyneux was the driving force behind Lionhead Studios’ games. Both Black & White and the Fable series were incredibly ambitious, original titles that sprung from the seemingly evergreen mind of Molyneux. Of course, emotional narratives and character-driven plots weren’t always his focus. Molyneux co-founded Bullfrog Productions in 1987, a company that would release Populous, the first ‘god game,’ for the PC in 1989. The incredible success of Populous, along with a continuous stream of blockbuster hits afterward, led to the eventual acquisition of Bullfrog by EA in 1995.

Molyneux eventually parted ways with Bullfrog to found Lionhead. His team’s first game there, Black & White, further expanded the ‘god game’ genre that Molyneux helped create. Lionhead, like Bullfrog, was eventually absorbed by a much larger company. This time it was Microsoft after the success of Fable on the Xbox. The Fable series has since become a staple RPG series of the Xbox 360.

Now Molyneux has taken leave of the company he helped create yet again, and founded his third game company, 22 Cans.

Although his games have often been met with mixed results, possibly because of the impossible odds Molyneux often stacks against himself, there is no question that he is a true visionary in this industry. In fact, our very own Dan Hsu interviewed the founder of 22 Cans at GDC just days ago about Fable: The Journey. Check out the interview and see for yourself just how much this designer cares about the worlds he has helped craft.

Although the direction 22 Cans will go is still a mystery, we here at GamesBeat cannot wait to see wait Peter Molyneux has in store for us next.

We received the following statement regarding Peter Molyneux’s departure:

Lionhead Studios Founder and pioneer game developer Peter Molyneux has made the decision to leave Microsoft. While his decision was a difficult one, he felt the time was right to pursue a new independent venture. As co-founder of Lionhead and an integral part of Microsoft Studios, Peter was the creative visionary behind the blockbuster “Fable” franchise, and one of our most passionate and influential developers for the Xbox 360 platform. He has made an indelible mark on the games industry and we wish him all the best of luck in his future endeavors. Lionhead Co-Founder Mark Webley will assume the role of studio manager, while Peter will remain a Creative Consultant on “Fable: The Journey. The development of “Fable: The Journey” remains on track to be one of the year’s most anticipated Kinect for Xbox 360 titles.”

GamesBeat 2012 is VentureBeat’s fourth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. This year we’re calling on speakers from the hottest mobile, social, PC, and console companies to debate new ways to stay on pace with changing consumer tastes and platforms. Join 500+ execs, investors, analysts, entrepreneurs, and press as we explore the gaming industry’s latest trends and newest monetization opportunities. The event takes place July 10-11 in San Francisco, and you can get your early-bird tickets here.

Filed under: games

In September, social game developer Idle Games launched on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco, declaring that they were on a mission to become “the Pixar of casual games.” In other words, they want to make games that not only look good, but have an interesting narrative. The startup’s first title, Idle Worship, is a throw-back to Peter Molyneux and EA’s Black & White, except, instead of finding it on a PC, Idle Worship will make its home on that social network everyone’s talking about.

Like Black & White, gamers get to play the role of a god, lording over villagers on an island in whatever way you choose — you can be a vengeful god, or a forgiving one. Both in its first title, and in the games it plans in the future, Idle Games is looking to provide a better alternative to the stale social games already out there produced by the bigs like Zynga.

Idle Games was founded by Co-founder of Playdom Rick Thompson and COG1 Founder Jeffrey Hyman, who bring their collective gaming experience to a space sorely in need of some re-focusing on quality design and actual entertainment value. As social games mature, there is increasingly plenty of room for social game developers to target not only the casual games fans, but the MMO audience as well.

Since launching at Disrupt, Idle Games has been testing and tweaking Idle Worship to get it into fighting shape, and we’ve learned today that the Disrupt alum will officially be launching its flagship game into the wild on March 14th, after giving a sneak-preview of the game next week at GDC. Idle Games CEO Jeff Hyman told us that early engagement for its beta has been better than expected, with players logging an average of 20 minutes per session, with nearly four sessions per day.

What sets Idle Worship apart from other social games is that it offers synchronous gameplay, in which players can interact in realtime, collaborating with millions of other players. The team has also done away with the “friends bar,” so that players can connect with people they actually want to play with, instead of spamming friends with requests.

In anticipation of the launch of Idle Worship, the startup is also announcing today that it has hired Michael McCormick as Director of Game Design. Idle Games was able to steal McCormick away from Zynga, where he was Lead Game Designer for CityVille, which currently ranks second among social games, with nearly 47 million monthly active users (according to AppData).

It’s a big score for the young startup, as McCormick has more than 20 years of experience in game design, having previously worked at EA, Backbone Entertainment, Playfirst, and HumaNature Studios (where he was Design Director on MMOs based on DreamWorks movies).

McCormick will take the lead ahead of Idle Worship’s launch in two weeks, overseeing further development of the game, which has created its own proprietary social mechanics to connect gamers with both friends and strangers, enabling them to battle swaths of opposing (or friendly) gods in realtime.

As the team puts it, they are trying to encourage others to wage a “holy war agains social games that suck and/or aren’t actually social,” basing that on their proprietary distributed simulation platform that endeavors to combine an “unshared” game world with synchronous and asynchronous mechanics. (Idle Games already has five patents pending.)

For more, check out Idle Games at home here, and stay tuned for more on Idle Worship.

In a blog post Wednesday, Mojang noted that they’ll be creating a new game in 60 hours starting Friday, Feb. 17, with the proceeds going to charity. Even more interesting, the development will be streamed live through the Humble Indie Bundle website for all to see. They’re asking for donations, which will benefit a charitable cause as well as net all donators a copy of the game Mojang ends up producing.

They’re looking to get fans to choose the game genre and theme. Genre options up for vote include Dating Simulator and Peter Molyneux, while the list of themes includes Candyland and Steampunk. This looks like a ton of fun already.

Mojang is the highly celebrated maker of indie smash Minecraft, and the Humble Indie Bundle has been packaging independent video games for Mac, PC, and Linux each year, with user-defined and donated proceeds being split across charities, developers, and themselves.

To follow more of the action, besides tuning in to the coding jam on Friday, follow @mojangteam, @humble, and @notch on Twitter for live updates. You can also use the #Mojam Twitter hashtag to submit questions for the team while they code.

Filed under: dev, games, VentureBeat

Every week we highlight some of our favorite recent stories, as well as revisiting the most popular VentureBeat stories of the week. This week we’ll start with the popular list.

Most popular

Women who play online games have more sex (Infographic)
Freelance contributor Jacob Lopez published this infographic, which is loaded with statistics about women who play online games. They actually have a life, it turns out.

Review: The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword proves Nintendo hasn’t learned anything
Contributor Sebastian Haley’s goes in-depth with the latest Zelda game.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin gives $500,000 to help Wikipedia
It’s not just about the PageRank. Brin made a much-needed donation to help Wikipedia this week, Jolie O’Dell reports.

Apple Black Friday deals include big discounts on iPad, Macbooks and more
If you’re looking for Apple products this weekend, Devindra Hardawar has a list of the best deals for you.

 Asus Transformer Prime is the first Android Ice Cream Sandwich tablet
Asus is planning a new tablet, Jolie O’Dell reports, and it will be the first to be running the latest version of the Android operating system.

Editor’s picks

Peter Molyneux parody account ‘Molydeux’ suspended by Twitter
Someone created a hilarious parody of videogame designer Peter Molyneux, but he (and Twitter) were not amused. Dan Crawley reports.

Want to know what Ron Conway got up to in 2011? Here’s his full list of investments
Bay Area super-angel Ron Conway has made over 70 investments so far in 2011. Jolie O’Dell pored through the list and created a set of graphs showing where he’s putting his money.

Liquid Robotics Wave Gliders start difficult ocean journey for science
Ocean-crossing robots set out on a journey across the Pacific, collecting data. Chikodi Chima brought back the story and photos.

How HiveMind’s Will Wright plans to crowdsource your happiness (interview)
Dean Takahashi’s interview with the master video game maker goes into detail on the next game he’s planning.

RiseArt introduces the fine arts world and social media with its new e-commerce website (exclusive)
Artists aren’t always the best business people, and it can be hard to get into a real-world gallery. So RiseArt hopes to provide an online alternative. Meghan Kelly has the exclusive story.

Filed under: VentureBeat

The Twitter account parodying Peter Molyneux, the legendary English game designer and Microsoft Europe creative director, has recently been suspended.

The account — which gained over 19,000 followers and cited by many as the funniest  account on Twitter — clearly stated that it was not the real deal. It also doesn’t have Twitter’s “verified” seal of authentication. But that hasn’t stopped some people from taking it all too seriously.

Molyneux, perhaps best known for creating the Fable series of games, has a reputation for occasional flights of fancy (a.k.a. hyping up a game that sucks) as well as thinking outside the box.

The parody Twitter account @petermolydeux was created by an anonymous game developer who previously worked at Molyneux’s studio Lionhead. The account routinely drew on the notoriously eccentric side of Molyneux’s character, producing random thoughts and musings such as:

“Have you ever played a racing game and wanted to play as the road rather than the cars? I know I have…”

“You know in cut scenes when it says ‘3 months later…’? What if the game ACTUALLY locked your save file for 3 months?”

“I’d love the idea of trying to make a Mario game in which Mario is unable to jump.”

“I’d like to make a game where the tutorial comes up after the credits”

“You live in a little house made of guns. You need many guns to fight invaders but also need to keep a roof on top of your many children”

“You know, my dream for gaming is where in one game you’ll shoot someone and then during a game of say Fifa you’ll see their son crying”

More recently, the person responsible for the fake @petermolydeux Twitter account (we’ll just call him “fake Peter”) began creating videos spoofs of ridiculous prototype games, like a survival horror bowling title. Those may have been a step too far, having since been pulled from YouTube.

But we might not have heard the last of fake Peter. As Kotaku reports,  fake Peter said he made contact with Lionhead studio, and “their general thoughts regarding the account seem to be positive, but it’s looking like they want me to change the use of the logo in the videos I’ve created, and to make it even more clear in my bio that the account is fake.”

Fake Peter also added, “they do actually have people getting in contact asking about the fake prototype videos I’ve created, which I can understand must be frustrating.” (Yes, frustrating and even more hilarious.)

Regardless of whether you’re familiar with fake Peter’s work, you should really watch the video message he left for fans on YouTube yesterday (embedded below). As @petermolydeux says himself, “it highlights just how insane the thought of any of this being real actually is.”

Filed under: games, offBeat, VentureBeat

If you were into PC gaming in the early 2000s, you know what Black & White is. Peter Molyneux’s 2001 classic published by EA gave every gamer the role they wanted: God. A new startup is aiming to bring that style of game into the social space. And more broadly, they aim to be the “Pixar of casual games”.

Idle Games is launching today at TechCrunch Disrupt. Their first title is Idle Worship, a Black & White-esque game for Facebook. You play the role of a god, controlling villagers on an island to do certain tasks for you. While that may sound ominous, you can choose to be either good or bad in your actions. And overall, the game is light-hearted and fun. We’ve been playing with a beta version of the game for a few weeks; it’s solid.

This first title by Idle Games, a startup founded by Rick Thompson (a co-founder of Playdom) and Jeffrey Hyman, aims to disrupt the casual gaming market by being an “anti-Zynga” of sorts. They believe social gaming is more about entertainment, interaction, and quality — not just button-mashing or mindless clicking. In many ways, they’re also going after the MMO market too. While the games will start on Facebook, you can imagine that they could quickly spread to other platforms as well.

Like other casual games and MMOs, the emphasis for the business will be on virtual goods. But again, the Idle Games team is determined to create goods of the utmost quality so that users feel compelled to buy them and happy when they do. In this regard, Idle Games’ mission sounds a bit similar to that of Tiny Speck, makers of the soon-to-be-released game MMO Glitch.

The Idle Games team also has a number of pending patents surrounding their particular style of social gameplay, they note. One key is their use of synchronous gameplay (as opposed to other games which typically are asynchronous). You can play alongside other “Gods” in the game, visit their islands, etc. Inside Social Games did a new preview of the game back in April.

“The game must be your wingman and break the ice for you,” Hyman said on stage today, explaining why Idle Worship creates better gaming connections than other endeavors out there.

All told, Idle Worship took the team of about 50 around two years to build. Again, the focus is on quality. They’ve raised roughly $9 million in funding so far.

Expert Judges Q&A Session:

Josh Felser, Freestyle Capital; April Underwood, Twitter; Jim Lanzone, CBS Interactive; Michael Marquez, CODE Advisors

JL: Why this game? There are a ton out there.

A: We think it’s like the entertainment industry. It is a hits-driven business, we’re putting the emphasis on quality. It’s a bit like capturing lightning in a bottle, but we’re leveraging the social graph in unique ways. We think this is the first true social game on Facbeook.

MM: Is this launched?

A: In a few countries so far.

MM: What about use engagement?

A: The initial metrics are blowing away the norms. Over 50 percent are returning after week one.

JF: Can you compare this to Zynga?

A: Absolutely. I don’t know if you read last Friday’s WSJ, but it says on the front page, Zynga is an analytics company masking as a game company. We’re an entertainment and games company. Zynga is a black and white television. Everyone wants it until the color television comes out. That’s us. We care about the entertainment experience.

AU: Your game looks engaging I want to play it. Tell me about the patents.

A: We’ve invest two solid years of engineering to do the tech here. We have five patents filed for this stuff. Rendering engine, etc.