This Week in Video Game Criticism: Our Marketing, Ourselves This week, our partnership with game criticism site Critical Distance brings us picks from Alan Williamson on topics including more on 'procedural death labyrinths' and the marketing legacy of games.

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  Blog: Creating team appreciation events that your team will appreciate Sometimes your studio has to come together as a team and celebrate -- but there are right and wrong ways to do it. This guide to what matters will help your team's next event hit the right notes.

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  Now Presskit() toolset is even more useful, with version 2.0 update Presskit(), the brilliant marketing toolset from Vlambeer's Rami Ismail, has received a notable version 2.0 update, which brings new visual and technical options.

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  What goes into building a game that lets players create? Createrria's 20,000 users have created 35,000 games. What kind of thinking goes into making a game that lets players make their own? Developer Wojciech Borczyk explains.

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  Consensual Torture Simulator: Is game violence meaningful enough? Leigh Alexander catches up with Merritt Kopas, prolific designer and creator of Consensual Torture Simulator -- an effort to create more meaningful player agency in 'violent game' situations.

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2 Report: Independent studio Terminal Reality has shut down Social media comments by a former longtime employee suggest that the Texas-based studio has closed down, though details are scant.

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8 $25,188: The median for crowdfunded games in the last six months Want to know what you can expect to earn if you crowdfund a game and hit your target? Someone has done the math -- and shared a bunch of stats.

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15 Cliff Bleszinski wants to build an old-school PC arena shooter The former Epic Games developer talks about working on a first-person arena shooter for PC on Kevin Pereira's podcast.

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4 CCP lays off 15 in Atlanta, but World of Darkness MMO continues dev CCP games today laid off approximately 15 developers working on its long-in-development World of Darkness MMORPG at its Atlanta, Georgia offices, Gamasutra confirms.

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  Video: 'Designing for the Blue Ocean' at the GDC Casual Games Summit In this Casual Games Summit session, postmortems on Women's Murder Club, Build-a-lot, and CampFu precede its first design challenge featuring Jason Kapalka, Nick Fortugno, and Todd Kerpelman.

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1 Blog: The 'most indie-friendly platform' debate is corrosive Arguing over what platform is best for indies just creates a lot of noise, argues James Coote. In this post, he quickly and simply lists the reasons the debate is bad for developers.

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4 Ubisoft's browser-based Rayman Legends is a next-gen promo tool The latest Rayman game is coming to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in 2014, and Ubisoft ported the free demo to browsers in an effort to help fans spread the word.

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4 Blog: From paper to Android, a game six years in the making Alex Rose turned a game he played with friends on paper into a mobile game years after getting the initial inspiration to do so. He charts his journey from idea to execution in this blog post.

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  Crytek working with DeNA to develop F2P mobile game The Collectables, a 3D squad shooter coming in 2014, will be the first mobile free-to-play game powered by CryEngine.

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  Mobile game installs could get a boost, thanks to video sharing Everyplay, a social sharing platform for mobile games, is looking to prove that allowing players to share gameplay videos of your game helps gain sales and install traction.

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1 Blog: Teaching players empathy, and changing the world through games Brandon Bozzi showcases games that teach players about real-life situations, designed to provoke empathy. Can games like this change the world?

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  How to pitch your game to investors: A quick guide Seth Sivak lays out a basic, solid plan for understanding how investors relate to your studio -- and what you should prepare in terms of knowledge and information before pitching.

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5 Xbox One launch sales neck-and-neck with PlayStation 4's Microsoft said today that its Xbox One console has now sold more than 2 million hardware units worldwide, just over two weeks after it launched.

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15 Copyright crackdown, as thousands of game videos are yanked from YouTube UPDATE Although we've seen plenty of crackdowns on Let's Play and game videos on YouTube in the past, it would appear that the largest crackdown to date in underway, with reports of thousands of videos being flagged over the last few days.

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30 Blog: The glorious lie of the indie bubble Indie developers are headed for a glut, a crash -- it's the 1980s all over again. Or is it? Independent developer Ben Serviss shares his opinion on what will really happen.

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16 Blog: Do investors understand VR? Why Shark Tank shot down one game pitch Shark Tank -- a reality show where businesses pitch investors -- recently auditioned a VR peripheral. But the pitch was shot down, and one blogger takes a look at why.

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  Yodo1 secures another $11M for its Japanese, Korean expansion Off the back of a new global mobile publishing strategy, Chinese mobile game publisher Yodo1 has raised $11 million in funding, and opened a new production studio.

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11 The Top 10 Game Developers of 2013 For 2013, we're kicking off our year-end video game roundups with perhaps our most important annual list: The Top 10 Game Developers.

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2 DICE troubleshoots in public with Battlefield 4 bug tracker A locked post on the game's forum lists every issue the team is working to solve along with the status of the fix, presumably in an effort to assuage community concerns about the game's buggy release.

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3 Double Fine launching indie-backed Hack 'n' Slash in 2014 The studio's next game is a quirky action puzzler borne from the Amnesia Fortnight and funded -- along with Spacebase DF-9 -- by a coterie of notable indies.

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