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E3 Draws Close, Companies Reveal Games Ahead Of Time
Thanks to Planet GameCube for reprinting data revealing the amount and diversity of games to be shown at next week's E3 Expo in Los Angeles. It's noted: "Approximately 1,000 of the nearly 5,000 computer and video game products to be displayed at the 2004 Electronic Entertainment Expo... have never been seen before... survey results indicate that about 40% of products displayed will be for video game consoles, while about one-third will be for personal computers." Many companies are revealing titles before E3, though, with some highlights including most of Sega's line-up (including "SPIKEOUT: Battle Street... and Virtua Quest"), a list of 23 new EA titles, including new Timesplitters 3 details and a first look at Catwoman, THQ's new info on Destroy All Humans!, Rockstar's announcement of Midnight Club 3:DUB Edition, Activision's showing of X-Men Legends, and UbiSoft's announcement of Prince Of Persia 2.
May not be all that unreasonable. Note the use of the word "products" perhaps not all the 5K are actual games but game controllers...etc. Also consider that this probably includes all the games for the PC,Mac,PS2,GC,GBA and Xbox.
A good game for me has to be easy to learn and difficult to master. You can just pick up the classics and start having fun right away instead of reading a freaking 40 page manual first!
Not that all newer games are bad (Halo, Far Cry rocked) but the classics will always hold a special place in my heart!
-CyRo
http://www.nwcge.org
-rant- Alllll the news you get will pretty much be focused on 'the big names'. You won't have any Mike Medium's Game Review Webpage reports of E3. You won't have adventureous gamers who spend the whole weekend looking at the indie games and shunning games like MGS3, Doom 3, HL2, and Halo 2. The end result is a lotta money being wasted on flashy events news sites won't report on. A public which has to read/search 4 different sources to find all the screenshots released on a certain game. And a hardcore community is left sitting on the sidelines groaning over the fact that they still can't go. -endrant-
5,000 video games. Five thousand. Assuming that this is an entire year's supply of games, this means that 14 games a *day* will be coming out over the next year. Does anyone else think that this might be a stupid number? (and odds are that less than 50% of the coming year's games are going to be showing at E3).
I might buy six games a year. 6/5000 = 0.12 percent. I like games, but how the hell is *anyone* supposed to keep up with this market?
Even if it really was 5,000 games, which, as an Anonymous Coward pointed out, is not correct, it still wouldn't be a ridiculous number. E3 generally covers more than one year of games (Full Spectrum Warrior and Fable, at least, are from E3 2003) and this year will cover at least eight major platforms: PS2, GameCube, XBox, GBA, PSP, PC, and cell phones.
Obviously, no single gamer is meant to play all of those games, or even a small percentage of those games, in a year or two. Instead, they're aimed at a very broad range of gamers. Kids that only play E-rated GameCube and GBA games, teens who only play crime and FPS games, RPG gamers who are going to support various small niche companies (Atlus, Nihon Falcom, etc.), businessmen who play games on their cellphone when they're bored, PC gamers eagerly awaiting Doom 3 and Half-Life 2, etc.
When we think of gaming, we generally don't take into account things like cell phone games, crappy licensed GBA games, obscure niche titles like The King of Fighters or Ys VI, or just genres that we're not very interested in. But E3 takes all of that into account.
You can download it now and register a beta account. I run the game every couple of days to get any streaming content thats new. I suggest others do the same, so that way you're not fighting for bandwidth just to get to the login screen come May 12th.
It will be interesting to see if the servers can survive the thousands of players this early on. Supposedly, there have already been well over 10,000 copies of the client downloaded off Fileplanet. Add in copies distributed to friends, and copies from PC Gamer, theres going to be a LOT of people trying this out.