For Electronic Arts, that clarity helped them see that their last-gen problems were driven by a cacophony of game engines, a mess of tools that hindered more than it helped the creation of new ideas. "The last transition, we didn't do a great job as a company managing our tech base," Frank Gibeau told Polygon. "What we ended up with was a proliferation of engines, such that at the peak of the last cycle, this cycle, we had something like 20 different development environments for our game teams to be working in. "Sometimes you just don't need 20 different hammers and 20 different set of tools because it becomes very difficult to manage, it becomes very costly, and in fact it actually limits innovation because you have so much time that your spending on engine development as opposed to...

In Plants vs. Zombies Adventures, players will still protect their home from an army of cartoonish zombies with defensive plants, but now they'll also take to the road, traveling in a beat-up RV to zombie hot spots where they'll have to defend their home on wheels from zombies that can attack from any direction. And those defensive plants now have to be grown ahead of time. The game brings with it ten new zombie types, 11 new plants, and most importantly, a personalized neighborhood that players will work to customize, expand, and, yes, defend from roving bands on zombies. Where the original Plants Vs. Zombies had the player defending from zombies that always marched across horizontal lanes of grass, this new Zombies game has the zombies attacking along cobblestone pathways that...

That blow up between the people who made Mass Effect 3 and the people who played it may have been the most notable debate over video game creative control, but it isn't the only one: Diablo 3, DmC: Devil May Cry, Sonic the Hedgehog video games, there's a growing tug-of-war over creative ownership of video games fueled by the interactive nature of this form of story-telling and art. More than any other artistic medium, video games are a two-way conversation between creator and consumer, game maker and game player. That blurred line is further obscured by the rise of player-created content. We recently spoke to a number of developers including the duo behind Mass Effect, Minecraft's maker and other independent developers and award winners to get their wildly differing views on the...

Swedish developer Mojang has been inundated with calls for help from parents who find they're unable to maintain and fix the increasingly complex versions of the PC game their children are playing. This summer, the developer hopes to release a new child-and-parent-friendly subscription service for the game that could cut down on those problems. For a monthly fee, Minecraft Realms will allow anyone to create a permanent world in the game on a server, controlling who can play in the private world and that the game won't run into compatibility issues spurred by fan-created mods. "We've been working on it for quite some time," Carl Manneh, CEO and co-founder of Mojang, told Polygon. "We were discussing pretty early on adding it to Minecraft." Minecraft already supports the ability for...

When Sony laid out the promise of the PlayStation Portable in 2004, it called it the Walkman of the 21st Century, a PlayStation 2 in your pocket. When the company unveiled the PlayStation 3, it talked about gaming across multiple screens, the ability for gamers to buy and sell in-game items and showed off a boomerang-shaped controller. When those systems hit, they delivered a feast of new playable content and edged forward the boundaries of gaming innovation, but both were shadows of the promises that Sony original made. Where Sony often promises the heavens, it's typically delivered the earth. Last week's PlayStation 4 unveiling seemed to be an event designed around this premise. While there were some hard promises made — we saw six games in development, some of the locked specs...