Back from E3!
I have finally returned from E3 in LA. Mom Nature didn't seem to want me to get out of Denver last night, but I made it back.
Thanks to all of you who I met with during the course of the week. As is always the case, there were a few of you whom I didn't get a chance to speak with - such is the way of conferences like these. Please shoot me an email so we can discuss business.
I finally did manage to look at some of the stuff on the show floor on Thursday (which usually ended up with a discussion about business). I have to say there are certainly interesting things happening in the game industry. However, I was somewhat dismayed by the wide array of genericy (is that a word?) still on display. Some have asked if we have too many titles on the shelf. I would contend that we have too many titles that all do the same thing.
Anyway, it is nice to see E3 back the way it needs to be - but without all the excess that was there in 2002-2003 when I last attended. There were only a few areas of the floor where I could not hold a decent conversation with people. I especially liked how many companies had headphones attached to their demo systems - some with a link so that the demo person could talk to them through the headphones as well. Very nicely done. It cuts down on all the ambient noise on the floor and lets you hear what's going on in the game. For some games that's actually important, ya know!
One thing that was somewhat depressing was knowing that people playing a game for 5 or 10 minutes really have no way of grasping any AI other than the surface issues. They can't "engage" with the game to feel things out. At that point, it's only a slightly more interactive version of the "back of the box" mentality... it's really difficult to hype AI in the promo posters and trailers. A 5 or 10-minute demo isn't going to change all that much.
Anyway, back to going through my massive stack of business cards. Keep checking back for more news on some of the interesting conversations that took place during the course of the week.
posted by Dave Mark | (Permalink)
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