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.
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