Overwhelm is a chunkily pixelated hardcore shooter-platformer with a couple of interesting twists.
Bleszinski, who recently unleashed a new pack of multiplayer maps for "Gears 2″ over Xbox Live, talked to Forbes.com about the impact downloadable content has on games, making hardcore shooters appeal to casual audiences and his love for "Super Mario Brothers".
These are hardcore games, shooters, classic PC audience stuff.
While Dear Esther was winning awards and garnering plaudits from critics and, interestingly, the hardcore first-person shooter modding community, it was also meeting resistance and fuelling controversy about what games were or could be.
The gender ratio of players of so-called hardcore games, like first-person shooter games such as Halo, is generally disproportionately men, says Prof Williams, who also runs a game analytics firm, NinjaMetrics.
She says: "There are 2 billion gamers in the world now and 600 million of them play hardcore games, such as MOBAs, Shooters and MMOs.
These clusters are: (1) Full gamers, covering individuals that play all kinds of games with a high frequency; (2) Hardcore gamers, playing mostly first-person shooters and sport games; (3) Casual gamers, playing moderately musical, social and thinking games; and (4) Non-gamers, who do not usually play games of any kind.
The recipe is clear: take the class-based combat of multiplayer online battle arena (Moba) games, mash it together with the universally popular and accessible first person shooter, and make the finished product available not just to the PC hardcore, but also to the wider market of console gamers, who are typically excluded from the world of esports altogether.
Now as hardcore games like the League of Legends battle arenas and Call of Duty shooters hit the mainstream, and spectating has exploded, Facebook wants to muscle back in.
Kinect has been around since 2010, but among the hardcore it's often seen as a gimmick - a tool for playing dancing games rather than first-person shooters.
