E3 Thoughts

With the opening of the Video games Industry annual Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3 for short), brings major buzz that will ripple throughout the industry for remaining year and beyond.The E3 conference has been the go to place for the video game Industry and does not plan on changing anytime soon. Over the years we have seen the rise of the casual games market via Wii, Nintendo DS and recently apple products Ipod and Ipad . The casual market has been great for the industry and has brought in a great amount of revenue and casual gamers into the fold. But, as the casual games market has risen, traditional games are becoming less frequent do to there large budgets for example Red Dead Redemption budget was estimated to be over 100 Million.

The "hardcore" gamer is no longer the industries central focus,there are still games that cater to this audience be it , Modern Warfare 2,the Halo series and the God of War series and have shown great sales but,based on the indications of the E3 we can all see were the trends of the industry are currently heading.Both, Microsoft and Sony are currently planning on releasing there own motion controllers this fall the Kinect (formally Project Natal) and Sony's move. The major differences is Kinect is remote free while PlayStation Move uses a wand and analog stick similar to the Wii remote and nun-chunk.The Kinect seems to be focused on the casual Wii gaming market with Kinectimals and kinect Sports etc.While the PlayStation 3 is working a two pronged attack with the casual and hardcore with games such as the Eye Pet and hardcore games such FPS with Killzone 3 .

I can understand why Sony and Microsoft are going for motion control hardware do to the success of the Wii;The Wii was able to find the market that played very few games or never played video games before.The problem with the Wii is that most of the software is shovelware.Unless you are a Nintendo developed game sells have been sluggish for third party developers,EA, capcom etc.But, they are cheaper to make compared to there big budget counterparts which sometimes does not make a profit for the company.Just hoping that someone will develop interesting games rather then mini games collections;This technology has great potential case in point Child of Eden; which is innovate and allows people interact more then REZ ever could. Motion controllers are not going away anytime soon much to the chagrin to many people in the industry and hardcore gamers alike. Motion controllers can be beneficial to the industry as a whole.But, give people more options and new innovative ways to play these games rather then the slew of dance,fitness and mini game collections. I do enjoy that both Nintendo and Sony's Press conferences had a great mix of traditional games and a mix of family and party oriented games.Which will be beneficial for the video games industry to expand and the potential for the casual video game player to eventually play traditional games. Time will tell where the industry will be heading to but I look forward to hear more news coming out of this years E3.