Study: 19% of eSports fans would pay $200 for eSports tickets Eventbrite surveys over 1,500 people who attended eSports events, and the full results hold some interesting learnings for developers -- especially those making games that shine during live events.

---

  Video: Molyneux reflects on indie dev and the rebirth of design At GDC 2014, 22cans founder and industry veteran Peter Molyneux talks through what he learned as a developer who "grew up indie" and worked in AAA before going indie again with 22cans.

---

  Road to the IGF: Shovel Knight An interview with Shovel Knight composer Jake "Virt" Kaufman about both the technical aspects of the IGF Excellence in Audio finalist soundtrack's creation, as well as its inspirations.

---

28 Don't Miss: The challenges of being a mom in game development Gamasutra's Leigh Alexander talks to game developers who also happen to be mothers, about the challenges of balancing work and life, and finding success in a male-dominated industry.

---

  Tim Schafer and Nathan Vella host next week's GDC and IGF awards Double Fine's Tim Schafer is set to host this year's 15th annual Game Developers Choice Awards at GDC 2015, while Capy's Nathan Vella returns to host the 17th annual Independent Games Festival awards.

---

  5 essential playability-focused activities every game should budget for "Here are five practical tasks that every studio -- large or small -- should be including in their game development cycle in order to improve their player experience right from the start of the project."

---

1 Obituary: Iconic actor Leonard Nimoy Actor, poet, musician and occasional video game voice-over artist Leonard Nimoy passed away at his home this morning due to complications from obstructive lung disease. He was 83.

---

6 Finish your game! "This advice is meant to be for people who have never finished a game. If you're struggling with any project, no matter how big it is, you should know your destination and how to get there."

---

  Robot grabs minority investment from Chinese giant Tencent Hero Academy maker Robot Entertainment is the latest Western studio to see investment from Tencent, the China-based megacorp with significant investments in (among other things) Epic and Riot Games.

---

  Catch Epic's Tim Sweeney and Xbox chief Phil Spencer at GDC Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney and Xbox frontman Phil Spencer are just two of the can't-miss speakers that will be delivering sponsored talks at GDC 2015 next week.

---

  Keep the guns rolling: Modeling for Overkill 3 and optimizing workflow "The gaming industry demands the best of you as gamers are merciless critics. But what if you are alone, targeting mobile devices and most of all, the clock is ticking? Let's optimize."

---

3 Mobile struggles and lessons: An Atoms iOS postmortem "I never expected to get rich, but bringing in a few hundred or a thousand pounds didn't seem unrealistic. Maybe, if I'd charged £1.99 up front, or had the right marketing...? Maybe I'm just a naive fool though."

---

  Don't miss these standout talks during the eight GDC 2015 Summits As everyone prepares for the big show next week, GDC 2015 officials take a moment to highlight some of the most interesting can't-miss Summit sessions at this year's conference.

---

  Viber launches Viber Games worldwide Viber launches Viber Games with three titles, Viber Candy Mania, Viber Pop and Wild Luck Casino.

---

2 Prototyping modes for a competitive typing game "I was imagining a competitive typing game where you would face off against a friend, typing as fast as you can with words / attacks flying in both directions. I thought it to would be very interesting."

---

3 Red vs. Blue: Which team should you choose? "The rules of the Olympics stipulate that one competitor is randomly assigned a blue outfit while the other gets red. The researchers found that those wearing red uniforms won a statistically significantly larger portion of their matches."

---

6 Water interaction model for boats in video games Avalanche Studios senior software engineer Jacques Kerner (Just Cause 3) walks us through coding "a simplified model that captures the important features of a boat" in this meaty programming article.

---

  Road to the IGF: Devine Lu Linvega and Rekka Bell's Oquonie In this interview, we speak to Linvega and Bell about the creation of IGF Excellence in Visual Art finalist Oquonie and its cute but disquieting world.

---

4 Blog: Make the kinds of games you can be proud of "Yesterday I started to create some pixel art mockups of how I think the game should look... And a funny thing happened. As I was doing it I realized I felt happy."

---

1 New net neutrality rules pass, but expect a fight from ISPs The FCC has decided in a split vote to enact new rules that regulate the internet -- but service providers aren't happy about the decision and are expected to sue.

---

  Get a job: Wargaming seeks an AI Engineer Wargaming.net is seeking an AI software engineer to work on the company's current and upcoming projects alongside the team in its Chicago, Illinois studio.

---

  New DeepMind AI learns to play Atari 2600 games at human levels A team of researchers at Google DeepMind claims to have developed an articial agent capable of learning to play (from scratch) 49 different Atari 2600 games at skill levels comparable to human beings.

---

6 Darkest Dungeon, and encouraging the player to have a deep bench "What makes this system so great isn't that it makes things harder, it is that it creates more choices with unclear answers: Questions that are interesting and meaningful to the people in the game world."

---

17 Thoughts on turning fifty (as a game developer) Laralyn McWilliams muses on aging in the game industry:"I debated whether to say in public that I’m fifty years old, and what effect that might have on my career."

---

27 Don't Miss: How Camouflaj saved République's Kickstarter In this classic postmortem, Camouflaj founder Ryan Payton explains what went right -- and wrong -- in the crowdfunding and development of the studio's debut stealth game République.

---

[Read More]