With the Big Three’s press conferences out of the way, E3 has settled into immersion mode, the vast majority of the press and publishers getting into a groove of demoing games, showing off videos, and hosting meeting after meeting after meeting. Publishers Take-Two, Konami, Ubisoft, and Capcom have all held press conferences and the extent of big news was the Capcom’s making a movie out of their sci-fi shooter Lost Planet and Ubisoft is making a game called I Am Alive, in which the player tries to survive natural disasters. Exciting stuff, eh?
Not to beat a dead horse — 61 Frames Per Second prides itself on beating only a select number of dead horses — but what, exactly, is the point of this year’s E3? It certainly seems to be running more smoothly than 2007’s air-hangar-showroom debacle, but it’s become clear that everyone in the business of making games is not using the event as a venue for announcing new titles. The obvious implication is that, with the expansion of the gaming audience and the broadening of mass market releases throughout the year, publishers no longer need a centralized event to show North America what’s on the horizon.
There is, however, a more subtle implication.
The lack of marquee title announcements at E3 2008 shows that the business of game creation has finally adapted to the information age. Now that the main source of gaming news and coverage is online venues and any-and-all information (right down to press conference rehearsals) is transmitted to the public instantaneously, the preview cycle for videogames is shortening. Games could be shown in early, unplayable states in the past because of the delay of that information reaching consumers and enthusiasts. It takes a month to put together a print magazine, publish it, and get it into readers hands, a whole other month for creators to work on their games before anyone sees or hears about them. Now, things are being kept under wraps until they’re in a state where they’re in a form close to finished.
The internet broke you, E3. Now go away.
Related links:
E3 Day 1: Microsoft, Sony, Final Fantasy, and For Whom the Bell Tolls
E3 Day 2: Spin, Malaise, Sony's New Clothes, and Nintendo's True Disruption