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From the warped mind of the guy who brought you LEGO Breaking Bad here is a game that will not be shown today at E3: Bluthfighter—The Arrested Development Fighting Game. As a not-regular watcher of the show, I get very few of the references here but I will say tag-teaming Tobias Fünke with Carl Weathers was a rather inspired choice. Arrested Development fans can fill in the rest of the blanks for me. (Tobias' finisher, and the trophy you earn for it, is also well done.) The video is by Brian K. Anderson. Enjoy. To contact the author of this post, write to owen@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @owengood.

Chinese microblogs are abuzz today after pictures appeared on Sina Weibo, of a Chinese man claiming to have found an alien. That's right, one Chinese man claims to have found an alien! First pointed to us by our good friends at the Shanghaiist, the extraterrestrial was discovered by a Mr. Li in Binzhou Shangdong province. Li said he came across the body of the alien in late March after following a bunch of "UFO's" along the Yellow River. Li say's he was following five floating lights in the sky and then came across the electrocuted body of the alien. Supposedly the Alien was electrocuted by a rabbit trap that Li had previously set up... After coming across the body, Li took the body and transported it to his home where he then interred it into his freezer Unfortunately for true believers, the police quickly tried to quell the interest by posting a quick blurb asserting that the alien was nothing more than rubber. "The alien purported electrocuted and discovered by a man in Binzhou is a high quality imitation," the Jinan Police posted on their Sina microblog. "The body is made up of high quality rubber." Unfazed by the possibility the alien being fake, Chinese netizens are busy trying to connect the Shandong alien to a purported UFO siting in Hubei province. Sadly police are also trying to put this rumor down. [Shandong man claims he electrocuted an alien and stored it in his freezer] [Shanghaiist] Top image: James Griffiths/Shanghaiist Kotaku East is your slice of Asian Internet culture, bringing you the latest talking points from Japan, Korea, China and beyond. Tune in every morning from 4am to 8am. Eric is Beijing based writer and all around FAT man. You can contact him @FatAsianTechie@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter @FatAsianTechie.

E3 (pardon Ned's medieval spelling here), the world's biggest video game trade show, is about to begin. Today. OK, well not technically today; the show itself doesn't open until Tuesday. But the two biggest draws for the week, the major press conferences by platform holders Microsoft (9am PDT) and Sony (6pm PD), are being held later today, as are EA's (1pm PDT) and Ubisoft's (3pm PDT) events. Kotaku will of course be there to cover all four conferences live. We'll have people on the ground at each show, we'll be hosting livestream broadcasts wherever possible, and if you're stuck on a phone or the streams go down we'll even be liveblogging like it's 2006. You can see the full schedule of events for this year's E3 here. And because most of you aren't on California time, here's a time converter so you can work out just when 9am PDT is in your part of the world.

Last Thursday, the annual China New Generation Cyber Game Industries Expo was held in Beijing. The expo was meant to show off the latest in China's ever expanding online gaming industry. The only problem was...the event didn't happen. Last Thursday, I had met a contact for lunch in Beijing. After lunch we had planned to attend the annual CNGCG Expo to check out some of web-games. A 20-minute cab ride to the Beijing Exhibition Center later we arrived on a scene where an expo had just occurred. Perturbed and confused as to why the expo was being taken down we approached the security. We were informed that the expo had ended.Confused and bewildered that an expo advertised for Thursday June 6 from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. had ended at 12:45, we pressed the security some more. Turns out the expo that was being taken down was the China International Internet of Things Expo and not CNGCG. Yes, it was an expo called China International Internet of Things. The CNGCG Expo is by all means not a fake expo. It has been held successfully in previous years, but this year, this year there was no expo. The expo was advertised in trade publications, websites and various other game industry related media leading up to the day of the expo. While my friend and I were outside trying to sort things out at least 20 plus people also walked by asking security about the CNGCG Expo, they too were turned away. Sure, the expo could have been canceled, but there wasn't any notice. In fact the event organisers at the Beijing Expo Center said that there was never an event registered under CNGCG all year round. Any calls and emails to the event organisers and related parties were either unanswered or the phone was discontinued. Beijing based writer Clarence Bing says that phantom expos are common in China. Bing says the reason behind phantom expos range from government interference, cancelation or just internet phishing schemes. "Every event requires the permission of a regulatory body before they can hold it," said Bing. "There are so many events in China, some of them can't get the permissions needed so they don't hold them at all." "On the other hand, it could all just be one big scam." Bing explains that sometimes scammers hold phantom expos to gather emails. What they do with the emails is anyone's guess but one thing is for certain, phantom expos are terrible. Kotaku East is your slice of Asian Internet culture, bringing you the latest talking points from Japan, Korea, China and beyond. Tune in every morning from 4am to 8am. Eric is Beijing based writer and all around FAT man. You can contact him @FatAsianTechie@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter @FatAsianTechie.

As the SOCOM series slowly went off the rails, careening further and further away from what made the early games so good, fans were left with nowhere else to go. As anyone who liked early Rainbow Six or SWAT games will tell you, when it comes to tactical shooters, they just don't make 'em like they used to. Or, to be more accurate, they don't make 'em at all. Which is why David Spears, creative director of the original SOCOM games, has put a studio together to develop H-Hour: World's Elite, and is running a Kickstarter campaign to fund it. While the lack of a publisher means he had nobody to think of a better name, it also means he's free to develop a new game that's "the spiritual successor" to the old PS2 SOCOM games. Here's the brief: Like many fans of the early SOCOMs, you may be among the legions asking for an HD version of SOCOM II. This isn’t that. We’re not here to simply deliver the past in a prettier package. We’re building the spiritual successor to the early SOCOM games from the ground up. H-Hour: World’s Elite is immediate, realistic, multiplayer-oriented and team-based. It is an experience directly inspired by the SOCOM series because those games were the starting point. H-Hour is several miles down the road that we traveled with SOCOM, the kind of shooter that SOCOM would have become if I had continued to helm the series beyond the second release. So, yes, another Kickstarter so old games nobody makes anymore can be made for the people who still want to play them. The devs are asking for $200,000. H-Hour [Kickstarter]

Gerhard Mozsi is an Australian concept artist who got his start working for THQ's local studio, before moving onto companies like Acony Games and Koch Media (who recently made headlines for buying Saints Row). The last few years, however, Mozsi has been playing to a slightly bigger audience, shifting gears to work on movies like Terminator Salvation, the Harry Potter series and, most recently, Gatsby and the new Wolverine movie. You can see more of Gerhard's work at his personal site and CGHub page. To see the larger pics in all their glory (or, if they’re big enough, so you can save them as wallpaper), click on the “expand” button in the bottom-right corner. Fine Art is a celebration of the work of video game artists, showcasing the best of both their professional and personal portfolios. If you're in the business and have some concept, environment, promotional or character art you'd like to share, drop us a line!

If there is another certainty in life beyond the accepted death and taxes, it is that by the time I get around to doing one of these cosplay roundups on a Sunday night, somebody somewhere has dressed up as Zelda/Connor Kenway/Chun-Li. All three old favourites are featured this week, albeit with fresh new cosplayers in fresh new outfits. They're joined by some super Mario Bros. cosplay, a terrifying Joker and that Devil May Cry x Mass Effect fan fiction you've all been asking for. To see the larger pics in all their glory (or, if they’re big enough, so you can save them as wallpaper), click on the “expand” button in the bottom-right corner. Fancy Pants is Kotaku's weekly round-up of the best in video game cosplay (costume play), where fans dress up as their favourite characters. As seen on electric lady. As seen on sandman-AC. As seen on StarDustShadow. As seen on Leon Chiro. As seen on Carancerth. As seen on theCHAMBA. As seen on laahmichelle.

Since what feels like the dawn of time, it's been customary for the entire side of the Figueroa hotel - just down the street from the LA Convention Centre - to be draped in the livery of a big upcoming video game. Skyrim, Max Payne 3 and Final Fantasy XIII are just some of the games to feature during the week of E3, but this year's honour goes to....World War Z. And not even a game adaptation of it. The movie itself. So long, video games. You had a good run.

I see the digital shadow you cast in this new trailer. You can't hide from me.

The Kotaku crew has just recently landed in LA, ready for a barrage of news to hit us in our collective faces. But before the press and exhibitors and everyone else comes piling onto the convention center show floor on Tuesday, we wanted to give you a quick tour of what E3 looks like this year. In the video above, Tina Amini walks through the length of the convention center to give you a brief look at the quiet, empty calm before E3 begins.

You probably shouldn't go in there, Bilbo. I mean, I know you do, but still. You probably shouldn't.

With their new console already out, and with the company deciding against holding a big E3 press conference, there's seemingly little for Nintendo fans to get really excited about at this year's show. But hey, who knows. If there's one company able to conjure a megaton moment out of nothing at E3, it's Nintendo. And if not? Pretend that outside the show this is happening. James Scott [Twitter]

My E3 hotel room key is brought to me by Thief. Very reassuring. I'm sure all my valuables are safe.

Either Hip-Hop Gamer's an official greeter at Los Angeles International Airport, or he was waiting patiently for Kotaku to touch down there today, as he was the first guy the gang saw after getting off the flight. Here, editor-in-chief Stephen Totilo models HHG's state-of-the-art, platform-agnostic pants holder-upper.

I started in San Francisco and ended up in Los Angeles. Fortunately, the questions came with me.

Previewed hilariously in this video a month ago, the Dubstep Gun from Saints Row IV finally got a good clean exploitable image this week, making it a no-brainer for the Kotaku 'Shop Contest. Remember, if it's not wub, then it's the womp that will bring us together. Real simple mandate—use the following in any image to make an even funnier image. I've included the largest-size official image Deep Silver has released so far. Source Image: The Dubstep Gun IRL While most of you are smart enough to figure out how to upload images, here are some simple steps to take for those less familiar with the practice. 1. Create your 'Shop and save it to your desktop. 2. Go to the bottom of this post and click "Discuss." 3. This brings up a comment window. Click the icon that looks like a picture. 4. This brings up another window called "Insert Image." Click "Choose file" if you're uploading your 'shop from your desktop 5. Alternatively, you can upload the 'Shop to a free image hosting service. I suggest imgur. Then paste the image's URL into the field that says "Image URL." Note: this must be the URL of the image itself, not the page where it is displayed. That means the URL ends in .jpg, .gif, .png, whatever. 6. Add editorial commentary and hit submit and your image will load. If it doesn't, upload the image to imgur and paste the image URL as a comment. I promise I will look at it. 7. Large-size images may not upload properly, though we have seen some big-ass animated .gifs upwards of 5 MB. If you're still having trouble uploading the image, try to keep its longest dimension (horizontal or vertical) under 1000 pixels, or the whole thing under 2 MB. Alright! Have at it. Thanks very much for your participation. To contact the author of this post, write to owen@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @owengood.

Welcome to Kotaku's Sunday Comics, your weekly roundup of the best webcomics, chosen by our readership. The images enlarge if you click on the magnifying glass icon in the lower right corner. Virtual Shackles by Jeremy Vinar and Mike Fahmie. Published June 5. Read more of Virtual Shackles Penny Arcade by Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik. Published June 5. Read more of Penny Arcade Awkward Zombie by Katie Tiedrich. Published June 3. Read more of Awkward Zombie Manly Guys Doing Manly Things by Kelly Turnbull. Published June 7. Read more of Manly Guys Doing Manly Things Brawl In The Family by Matthew Taranto. Published June 4. Read more of Brawl In The Family Nerf NOW!! by Josué Pereira. Published June 7. Read more of Nerf NOW!! Brentalfloss the Comic by Brent Black, Andrew Dobson and Dan Roth. Published June 3. Read more of Brentalfloss the Comic Corpse Run by Alex Di Stasi. Published June 6. Read more of Corpse Run Nerd Rage by Andy Kluthe. Published June 7. Read more of Nerd Rage To contact the author of this post, write to owen@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @owengood.

We're expecting to finally hear more about the long-awaited Master P/Seth Green video game. No we aren't.

I stink. It's a great weekend for a heatwave. I can only hope that Los Angeles will somehow be cooler than it is here in my house, because super heat is very much not my thing, at least when running around to see video games is concerned.

Look, E3 2013 is right around the corner, people. And we're going to start coming at you with a variety of live shows.

The first one will be tomorrow, Sunday morning. Against all advice, I've decided to keep the dream alive by driving to E3. By myself. Hey, I was looking for a good reason to drive my car real fast, so maybe this works out. Along the way, I'll have my iPad on the passenger seat, where it will hopefully be pushing my lonely, open road voice out via Mixlr.

Depending on how quickly I wake up and get my shit together, that show should start no later than 10AM. It'll happen right here: http://mixlr.com/jeff-gerstmann/ - I'll be posting that link to Twitter when it starts, but since the cell towers along the interstate are made of tin cans and signs that read "food grows where the water flows," I can't guarantee that it'll be a solid six hours of me slowly going insane. Mixlr has a chat room, if you want to sign up for their service, so depending on how dedicated I am to almost wrecking my car, maybe I can take some questions.

Just envision me behind the wheel, slightly less Japanese writing, and me singing along to satellite radio until I crash.

The real show starts Monday night, around 10PM PDT, with the first live video show from our all-new (to us) studio located just minutes away from downtown Los Angeles. That'll be the press conference day, so we should have plenty to discuss, but we'll bring in some guests, too, to help liven things up.

For the rest of the show, we'll be back in the evening. So on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, expect to find us up on your internet screens around 8PM. We have a mixture of old and new broadcast favorites lined up as guests, and if you've been with us in years past, you know that you're in for a great, loose, and probably weird time.

We'll also have a handful of interviews hitting the site over the course of the show along with a bonus podcast where we talk about the E3 things I saw prior to the opening of the show an make a few last-minute predictions.

This year you'll watch the Xbox One. Next year? The Xbox One watches you.

If you're looking for a chat room to crash in, we've got your back for that, too. :Rorie will be back in the lab, keeping the chat room pumping as we feed in GameSpot's press conference live streams on Monday and their main stage broadcast for the three days of E3 Actual. I've caught a few glimpses of their stage show schedule, and it looks like they've got just about all of the major players there to give demos and talk about their games.

So turn out all the lights, close your blinds, break your phone, unplug your Kinect, wrap the tinfoil over your head, put a piece of bubble gum over your webcam, and order a billion pizzas (but tell them to leave the pizza on the doorstep and get the hell away from your dwelling). E3 is on!

America's heartland has produced many great things on wheels, none greater than the pride of Youngstown, Ohio—the X-Box—the most ludicrously mobile operating base since the S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier. There are 17 more ridiculous uses our 'Shop artists thought up for it, led by overall No. 1 silentstrife! For starters, here's what everyone was working with: And now, before we get to the finalists, a couple of quick notes. Somehow Ginger Snap managed to upload a 5.1 megabyte animated .gif. So, disregard my previous advisories on file size limitations. That must make docherty real mad, because he tried to play by the rules and ended up just putting his on YouTube. Either way, both are included. On with the finalists! Abrahim Ladha ACP arniejolt AttorneyAtMusic Brandon0151 burner07leroy casmith07 docherty frr171 Ginger Snap jamaicanmecrazy MichaelBastianelli RJT sciteach silentstrife Sr.Muffin uscg_pa To contact the author of this post, write to owen@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @owengood.

As if free Saints Row: The Third and Deus Ex: Human Revolution weren't enough, PlayStation Plus members also get free Uncharted 3, Littlebigplanet: Karting, and XCOM: Enemy Unknown beginning Tuesday.

In an E3 that is full of sequels and the same-old, same-old Murdered: Soul Suspect, may stand out as something that's actually new. But one look at this game—the adventure of a ghostly detective who has one night to solve his own murder—probably wouldn't make you think of its even more unusual origins. "Square Enix actually came to us," the game's senior design producer, Eric Studer told me recently, after running through a demo of the game. He was referring to the famous publisher of Final Fantasy and, more recently, Tomb Raider. He works at Airtight Games, development studio for the jetpack action-adventure Dark Void and the Portal-like puzzle game Quantum Conundrum. "Their creative director, [Yosuke] Shiokawa-san, had an idea for a game. It came, kind of in a weird way, from the movie Die Hard. He imagined: What if John McClane had died? And he wound up as a ghost and was trapped in this space? What would he do? What would his goals be? Well, he's not just going to turn around and abandon his wife. He's not just going to let the bad guys win. He would find a way to, as a ghost, to stop the bad guys and save his wife." This was not at all what I thought Studer was going to say. This is a third-person action game. You're a dead detective wearing in a vest and a fedora. You can possess people and see through their eyes. You can walk through walls. I mean, look at the trailer. Die Hard inspired this? I would have thought Patrick Swayze's Ghost did. Nope. Die Hard. "So he had this kernel of an idea and he brought it to Airtight Games," Studer said. "We built a team to support this concept. We started kicking around prototypes. Two of the things that really stuck were: this notion of using investigation gameplay to help drive the narrative—the story we wanted to tell—and also this concept of interior walls and not being bound by the same rules that living people are. And with his original germ of an idea and these other gameplay concepts we were working on, that's sort of where Murdered came from over time." Alright. They used to call this game Fate (Studer even did by accident a couple of times during the demo). It's the adventure of a detective named Ronan O'Connor. He's been killed at the start of the game after poking his way through a house in the spooky American town of Salem. A mysterious figure throws him out of a three-story window onto the pavement below and then shoots him for good measure. The game unfolds over the course of the night and is designed to be a mystery with more focus on clues than combat. It might be the first big-publisher mystery game since Take Two and Rockstar's 2011 game L.A. Noire. Here's some gameplay, via GameSpot (skip two minutes in): The rules of the game are as follows: you can possess people to see through their eyes. You can walk through interior walls of buildings. The exterior ones, according to the fiction of the story, have been sealed by the townspeople with a spell that keeps supernatural ghosts and demons out, unless there's a breach like an open door or window they can pass through. Inside, walls are no obstacle, but manifestations of the spirit realm O'Connor now operates in—the dusk—can block him. To solve mysteries, players will have to learn about an area and its people by possessing them, sorting through word puzzles that represent a manifestation for the player of O'Connor's thoughts, and subtly trying to manipulate the goings on in the land of the living. There is some combat. Red demons who exist in the dusk plane will attack O'Connor, but he can fight them by sneaking up on them. They're only vulnerable when they're unaware of him. Studer: "You're sort of breaking rules that, passively or not, they've come to expect in video games." The big gameplay twist appears to be the walk-through-walls thing, something that's hard to appreciate without playing the game a bit. Studer said his team has seen this one change really throw players off, at first. "You're sort of breaking rules that, passively or not, they've come to expect in video games. There's a lot of legwork in teaching them and helping them to understand that, 'No, you're not bound by this anymore. You have a freedom you've never had before.' In some of our early playtests people walk into a space—we tell them they have this ability—but it's almost like they don't believe it initially. ... By the end of the playtest they get so used to this notion that internal walls don't block you anymore that they're passing through walls and barely even notice it anymore." If none of that sounds like Die Hard to you, well, me too. But who cares? The point of the game is to tell a story while giving players some skills (investigation) that they don't use much in major modern games and some skills (walking through walls) that will feel new. The story and the level design are going to have to be good to make this work, but 'tis the season for optimism. The game will be out on PS3, Xbox 360 and PC in early 2014. "I think what we're developing is a really, fascinating interesting world," Studer said to me in closing. "All the gameplay mechanics of it, the characters, the story, all serve to help build what is a really original creative space for them to interact with." This preview is based in part on a hands-off demo of about 15 minutes of the game. To contact the author of this post, write to stephentotilo@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @stephentotilo

Daredevil: End of Days #8 Daredevil's a superhero who's constantly in thrall to his emotions It often seems like Matt Murdock's passion is in control of him and not the other way around. In this issue of potst-mortem miniseries, we see the Devil's emotions in a calmer, more poignant light. I recently started co-worker Tina Amini on Mark Waid's current run of Daredevil. She had a bunch of questions about Matt Murdock and his backstory, which I answered. When I asked her what she thought of the Man Without Fear, she replied "He's kind of a jerk, isn't he?" I'll admit to being take aback, especially since Waid's been delivering the most even-keeled, in-control version of the character in decades. But when you look at Daredevil's long history after Frank Miller re-invented the character, you can see how he's been a catalyst of chaos in the lives of the people he loves, moreso than with other superheroes. That's what makes the moments Daredevil shares with the person he's talking to in the panel above so meaningful. He's able to step back and offer the kind of positive reinforcement that he rarely got. Matt Murdock's father died when he was a boy and even when Jack Murdock was alive, the gruff boxer never seemed to be one for tender emotional sharing. Then, when the scrappy blind ninja sensei Stick became Matt's mentor, there wasn't a whole lot of 'ya done good, kid!' in that relationship either. Despite all of that, Daredevil was able to lift someone up in his last days. This series started with Matt Murdock's death but the best part of this last issue comes from showing that he might've found some fleeting inner peace before he met his end. Astro City #1 There've always been capes and masks aplenty in Kurt Busiek and Brent Andersen's much-acclaimed series. And those heroes have generally been cleverly angled pastiches or homages to the icons of superhero myth: a Superman analogue who comes not from another planet but a possible future or a would-be Batman who's a vampire. These do-gooders have been so interesting that it's easy to forget that Astro City's true epicenter has been in the hearts of the common men and women that live in the titular city. So, while it seems like you're supposed to be drawn in by new characters like the fourth-wall-shattering Broken Man and manga-influenced American Chibi, it's really ordinary guy Ben Pullam who's the pivotal figure here. Wherever this first story arc goes—and it's almost certainly gong to be a trippy, cosmic adventure—Ben will be the axis around which the drama turns. It's the sort of thing that's made Astro City an all-time classic: showing that the courage and heroism of people who don't wear spandex can be equal to or greater than that of the metahumans flying above them. What about you? What sequences or covers from this week's comics made your eyeballs happy? Share ‘em in the comments below. To contact the author of this post, write to evan@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @EvNarc

Our first stab at Captain's Mode results in... well, you'll see.

For some people, making add-ons for popular games is a hobby. For Ben "Bronto ϟ Thunder" Retter, it's his livelihood. What are the ins and outs of creating your own commercial content for a game made by people you don't even know?

From five-hundred ninety-nine dollars and Riiiiiiidge Racer seven years ago to more flattering presentations today, Sony CEO Kazuo Hirai has been one of the gaming industry's most .gif-able and meme-able public figures. Hirai wants you to know he's cool with that. Of course, Hirai might be sanguine because Microsoft is gettin' toe up about as bad as he was after E3 2006, when he was running Sony Computer Entertainment America. In an interview with SGNL, Sony's YouTube video magazine on gaming and entertainment, Hirai was asked what he thought of being the subject of so many Internet memes. Hirai offered this: Well, you know, I think that especially with the PlayStation business, I used to get that a lot, as well, even when I was running the PlayStation business in the U.S., whether it's YouTube or just other websites. And, you know, obviously the gaming world has a tendency of really enjoying that. And I've come to also, you know, look at it from a perspective of 'That's really creative.' So I enjoy some of the stuff that folks have done. I like to think that the visibility that I get is not a visibility of me personally but in fact a representation of the visibility that Sony gets worldwide so I'm more positive about it. Hirai may have stepped on a couple of rakes at E3 2006, and it certainly felt like a disaster at the time. But if you can laugh at yourself and, more importantly, not repeat those mistakes, yesterday's keystone kop can still become today's action movie hero. Kaz Hirai enjoys being an internet meme [NeoGAF] To contact the author of this post, write to owen@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @owengood.

What's happened in the business of video games this past week ... QUOTE | "Xbox is the only thing that has investors excited about Microsoft, so it makes little sense to divest."—Analyst Asif Khan, talking about other analysts' comments that Microsoft should sell its Xbox business. QUOTE | "We could kill this industry if we don't get more inclusive."—Patrick Liu, creative director at Rovio's new Stockholm studio, talking about the attitude of some veteran developers that mobile games 'are not real games'. QUOTE | "Even as a developer now, when I say I'm working on NBA Live, people kind of snicker at that."—NBA Live Executive producer Sean O'Brien, talking about the pressures involved in bringing this game back. STAT | $349 and $399 – Prices that analyst Michael Pachter expects for the PS4 and the Xbox One, based on the estimated cost of goods; he also expects a subsidized Xbox One for $299 and price cuts on the PS3 and Xbox 360. QUOTE | "All the things that build a community have been actively blocked by console owners. That has to change."—Paradox CEO Fredrik Wester, talking about how being able to update titles freely has helped PC and mobile game publishers. QUOTE | "Below that [minimum level of quality ] you're not a fun game and you're not worth anybody's time, let alone their money."—David Reid, chief marketing officer for CCP, talking about Dust 514 and CCP's future. QUOTE | "The pressures of building and iterating games at a relentless pace did, in fact, create diamonds."—Brian Kahrs, former Zynga product manager, talking about the way ex-Zynga employees benefited from their experience. STAT | $3.5 billion – Amount of money spent on games in Q1 of 2013 in the USA, according to NPD; this amount includes $1.37 billion in physical software, $559 million on used games, and $1.49 billion on digital games (including mobile and DLC). QUOTE | "Great design of a free-to-play game can put the monetization and the gameplay side-by-side without really requiring each other."—David Brevik, president/COO of Gazillion Entertainment, talking about how the Marvel Heroes MMORPG will avoid crippling the game experiences. QUOTE | "It's disruptive technology, right? It's fun to see what these technologies can do."—Sega of America director of mobile business David Zemke, talking about putting Sonic games on the Ouya console. STAT | 29% – Percentage of gamers classified as "free & mobile" according to a survey of 8,831 people by NPD; this percentage jumped up from only 2% last year at the same time. QUOTE | "There's a lot of free-to-play games where it's more like free-to-pay games."—Matt Nava, former Journey art director and now of Giant Squid, talking about why he's making a free-to-play game. This Week in the Business courtesy of GamesIndustry International Image by Shutterstock

The frontier is a wild place. You gotta catch your own food, build your own fires, pilot your own mechs...

It's almost E3! Kotaku Selects is going to be busy next weekend, but we have plenty of our best stuff to show you from the past week. Check it out over here. I'll be in LA for next week's round-up, but Fahey will keep you all comforted. See you guys on the flip side. As for today's image, I decided that the Into The Pixel winners needed another highlight. To contact the author of this post, write to tina@kotaku.com or find her on Twitter at @tinaamini.

It's our last show before E3 so let's grab a drink play some of those nice, relaxing video games.