The Demise of E3

The Electronics Entertainment Expo or E3; an industry-only exposition held each year has long been considered the be all and end all of gaming.  If you had a new game or system or piece of hardware coming out, you displayed it at E3 in Los Angeles in May or you went unnoticed.  While other gaming expos certainly take place each year (the Tokyo Game Show, the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco, and - to a much lesser extent - the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas), E3 was the place to be and was always the biggest and most impressive show of its kind anywhere.

That all ended this year.

Citing a need for a more subdued experience and the reluctance of game companies to spend so much time and money concerned with E3 every year, the conference swallowed a bunch of sleeping pills this summer and will never again awaken.  There will still be a west coast summertime gaming event, but it is now known as the E3 Media and Business Summit and will be a much more low-key event than the giant that gave birth to it.  From the “new” E3’s official website:

“The centerpiece of the invitation-only, three-day event will be the opportunity for both ESA members and non-members to stage major press events, and to have intimate meetings in premier hotel suites and meeting rooms with media, retailers, developer partners, and other audiences. In addition, the nearby Barker Hangar will be converted into a software showcase where attendees will be able to casually test drive the featured video games planned for the coming holiday season and beyond.”

This may in fact be a good thing.  For one it allows game developers and publishers the chance to do what it is they do best: make games.  When a big part of every game’s development cycle involves making sure that there is a demo ready in time for E3, it can be easy to allow things to get lost in the shuffle.  Too many games wind up feeling or looking rushed at the conference, resulting in poor press reception and eventually poor sales.  This hurts gaming in general.  Sure there is an occasional runaway hit that has E3 to thank for getting the word out early (we’re looking at you, Guitar Hero), but the chances are good that a good game will find an audience regardless.  E3 had grown too big for its own britches.

And now Dr. Kevorkian is eyeing the Tokyo Game Show.  It may have one or two good years left in it with the booths and the dating sims and the cosplay and the wackiness, but its time will also come.  If it will not go gentle into that goodnight perhaps we should tie it to a tree and whack it with a shovel, Old Yeller style.

Forced Evolution

Of course while all this new system launching was going on, Microsoft was doing what it had been doing for the past year: selling next-generation games.  With a year-long head-start over the other systems, MS is enjoying not having to worry about launching new hardware this season and just needs to keep the shelves stocked with Xbox 360s and the games that play on ’em.

One such game, Capcom’s eagerly anticipated Dead Rising, released this year to thunderous applause.  Everyone seemed to love the new zombie-fest (ourselves included - we gave it an 89% in our review and named it our Game of the Month for August as well) until the first guy who tried to play it on a standard definition television (SDTV) came away squinting.

It seemed that Dead Rising suffered from a strange new disease that wasn’t passed on by the bite of a zombie, but by Capcom’s failure to recognize that a large portion of the population (read: most of us) still didn’t own HDTV sets.  The text that appears onscreen in Dead Rising is nearly illegible on an SDTV, rendering the game unplayable for many people (to be fair, it is just mission text that is also related to the player verbally and many who complained probably could still play just fine, but it was annoying).  When faced with the issue, Capcom did not release a downloadable patch or provide refunds to anyone.  Instead they told us to adjust our sets and basically live with the problem.

This is interesting because what Capcom was essentially saying (even if they didn’t intend to) is that the next generation has indeed started and we all need to evolve with the technology or be left behind.  We were being silently told that playing a next generation videogame on an SDTV is as silly as trying to play an 8-track in an MP3 player.

Recently a multiplayer demo version of Capcom’s Lost Planet proved to have the same “small text” issue that plagued Dead Rising.  As gamers breathed a collective sigh of “here we go again,” Capcom surprisingly announced that they would resolve the issue before the game ships.  So, maybe it is possible to halt evolution?  Perhaps it's just easier to do so before millions have been spent on producing and packaging a product.