I DON’T CARE.
Seriously. What’s the point of saying who “won” or “lost” until we actually see some of these games on shelves? You can argue about who gave a good presentation and who gave a poor presentation, but these are the equivalent of the upfronts in the TV business. Things can look great in a press conference and then come apart once you’ve spent some time with them. (Yeah, I’m looking at you Studio 60.)
The heavily hyped next-gen console launches of the last two years have led to horse race coverage in the online gaming space where every announcement is framed in terms of market share and sales figures. These are, of course, important, but if Rock Band is a great game we all win – not just Microsoft.
This brief spell of bitterness was brought to you by caffeine.
There’s some bad weirdness going on in the industry and attending media right now. It’s as if everyone suspects the wheels are coming off and are trying to prove how valuable they are to the process of momentum.
Almost enough to send me out in full Hunter S. Thompson regalia for a little gonzo coverage of these events.
It’s funny; they’re billing this as the “new” E3, but it’s suspiciously similar to the “old” E3. At least they managed to do away with the superfluous booth babes.
Ah… it’s not like the old E3 though in one major way, the information is being filtered a lot more heavily through the publishers.
At E3 in past years, you’d have a lot of folks who were less tied to the mainstream gaming press posting their findings around the net. There is a whole lot less of that this time because those people simply aren’t there.
I think that’s changed the entire tone of E3 to something more centered on who’s winning and who’s losing because ultimately these publishers are most concerned with that message and not so much with the actual products themselves.
There’s just no excitement around the games because everyone’s watching through the same lens this time.