GamesBeat weekly roundup: PlayStation 4 sales pass 30 million, and the SNES turns 25

Welcome to a post-Thanksgiving GamesBeat weekly roundup! It’s time to snap out of your turkey coma with a week’s worth of gaming news and features, including some tips for virtual reality first-timers and some fun mods for Fallout 4.

Enjoy, and have a great weekend!

Pieces of flair and opinion

• DeanBeat: A big brain dump on video games in Montreal

• My mom’s holiday gift guide for gamers

• GamesBeat giveaway: Fallout 4 Xbox One bundle

• Nintendo Power’s Epic Center: a golden age of console role-playing games

• Gamers have so much to give thanks for — so don’t focus on the crap

• 5 cool Fallout 4 mods

• How EA’s Star Wars video game developers are approaching the creative process

• How Ubisoft’s Quebec City studio became the master of Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate

• Star Wars: Battlefront tips for intergalactic conquest and beating online strangers

• Heroes of the Storm designer guides us on how to win with Greymane and Lunara

• Fallout 4 guide: How to install mods

• 6 tips for your first time in virtual reality

• Nintendo’s biggest successes — and fumbles — from the era of the Super NES

• F-Zero and Super Mario World still hold console-launch lessons for Nintendo 25 years later

• Super Nintendo turns 25: Why it’s the best game console ever

Above: Bad company.

Image Credit: GamesBeat

News

• PlayStation Network is down and Sony is working to fix it

• Sony’s bringing PlayStation 4 Remote Play to PC and Mac

• Chinese blockbuster Cross Fire is crappy and fun — and here’s why it makes $1B a year

• Chinese publisher The9 signs $500M deal to secure the rights to Cross Fire 2

• Hearthstone is getting a $1M championship event in 2016

• EA promises free Star Wars: Battlefront maps beyond the Battle of Jakku DLC

• Sony has sold more than 30M PlayStation 4s to date

• Cooking startup financed by Valve boss Gabe Newell will make you ravenous before Thanksgiving

• EA says Battlefront is the biggest launch of a Star Wars game ever

• This mod makes Star Wars: Battlefront look impressive … most impressive

• Xbox Live’s December Games With Gold includes Thief, Van Helsing, and more

• Dota 2’s revenues slide even as worldwide digital sales reach $5.5B in October, according to analyst

• Fig levels up crowdfunding by accepting actual investments from gamers

• Judge dismisses ‘King of Kong’ star Billy Mitchell’s lawsuit against Cartoon Network

• AMD launches Radeon Software Crimson as your PC’s graphics OS

• Windows 10’s fall update is deactivating certain apps without asking

• EA’s Plants vs. Zombies Garden Warfare hits 8M players

• All 3,290 Japanese PlayStation games up for sale — bidding starts at $24,000

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Mobile and social

• Vonvon CEO defends privacy practices of its ‘Most Used Words on Facebook’ app against critics

• Marmalade platform now offers Leadbolt app monetization services to developers

• iOS downloads soar 23% higher in October for popular apps even as advertising costs rise

• Wooga and Fox team up to make Futurama mobile game

• Mobile is the gateway for virtual reality becoming a $15.9B industry by 2019

• JetBet launches social sports app with Maxim men’s lifestyle brand

• Arnold Schwarzenegger stars in Machine Zone’s new Mobile Strike ad

• How China is maneuvering into the global gaming markets

Above: You feel incredibly tiny next to Gunjack’s huge bosses.

Image Credit: CCP Games

Reviews, impressions, and previews

• Legacy of the Void is the weakest of StarCraft II’s single-player campaigns

• Gunjack is a harrowing shooter that shows the value of Samsung’s Gear VR

• World of Warcraft exec: We do things now we would’ve shot down 10 years ago

• Star Wars: Battlefront gives you nerdy chills even with a lack of content

• Heroes of the Storm’s two-player Cho’Gall is a chaotic riot — if you can find a partner