— better known as E3 — got a big, if unofficial, kick-off on Monday as
two of the video game industry’s largest players touted their latest
wares.
off Kinect, formerly known as Project Natal, its add-on for the Xbox
360 that lets users play games, navigate menus and start and stop
movies without the use of a remote control or game controller. The
company also unveiled a new, svelte, “whisper quiet” version of the
Xbox 360.
Meanwhile,
showcased a collection of upcoming games, mostly those that will excite
the core, male gamer demographic. They include a new “Medal of Honor”
game that is set in
E3, which officially starts Tuesday, is the game industry’s biggest showcase in
Game companies typically use the event to generate excitement about
their upcoming products, both by showing off ones slated for release by
the holidays and by giving glimpses of others whose release dates are
further off.
This year’s event comes at a rocky time for the
industry. After initially seeming immune to the economic downturn, it
has fallen on tough times. Retail sales of its products have fallen in
10 of the last 13 months leaving big game makers such as THQ, Ubisoft
and EA struggling with declining results.
At a breakfast talk on Monday morning,
the industry’s trade group, tried to put a positive spin on the state
of the business. While retail sales of games have been declining, those
figures don’t include the industry’s newer sources of revenue,
including the sales of games distributed digitally or to mobile
devices, he noted. They also don’t include the sales of virtual goods
in games on social networks such as Facebook.
If you add up all those sources of revenue, the total is about
“We have a technology that whatever screen a
consumer has, they want to use our product on it,” said Gallagher.
“That’s the wind in our sails.”
The game industry may be moving into new areas, but
E3 is still largely focused on the traditional game business of selling
hardware and packaged games through brick-and-mortar retail stores. And
the event is dominated by the types of games that core gamers love:
loud, violent, and often bloody.
disappoint the crowd that attended its press event Monday, when it
showed off trailers for three role-playing games. They are the
war-themed “Call of Duty: Black Ops;” “Gears of War 3,” which is set in
a dystopian future where players fight off evil aliens; and “Metal Gear
Solid: Rising,” which features a powerful sword that can slash through
seemingly anything and at just about any angle.
But the company spent much of its event talking
about Kinect, which it previewed at E3 last year. Kinect is an
accessory that includes a microphone and a camera system that can
visualize players and their movements in three dimensions. It allows
players to interact with games using gestures and movements, much as
they can with
Consumers also can use Kinect to interact with the
Xbox 360. They can use voice commands to start and stop movies or play
songs. And they can use the camera in the Kinect for video chat
sessions with other friends who either have Kinect or are running
Windows Messenger on their PC.
Kinect will hit store shelves on
But
didn’t answer the biggest questions about the device: How much it will
cost or how will it will market it? Many games designed for Kinect are
family-friendly ones that typically haven’t sold well among the Xbox
360’s hard-core gamer audience.
At its media event, EA briefly talked about
family-friendly fare, such as “The Sims 3” and a new version of its “EA
Active” fitness game. But it spent the bulk of its time showing off the
adrenaline-inducing games that core gamers love. Among the
crowd-pleasers: “Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit,” a new version of the
outlaw racing game that lets users play either as racers or the cops
pursuing them; “Dead Space 2,” a gory role-playing game in which users
battle alien monsters; and the new “Medal of Honor” game.
The company, as it did last year, also highlighted its upcoming “Star Wars: The
title and had actors dressed up as Jedi and Siths in the lobby of the
theater at which it held its event. But like last year, EA didn’t say
when the game will be coming out and showed very little of the actual
game.
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