E3 2011 News

[Saephon]

If anyone has ten minutes or so of free time, I recommend reading this article. It's David's Wong reactions to E3 and why the game industry's in a really interesting, but worrisome place at the moment. It did a good job of expressing exactly why Kinect rubs me the wrong way: no buttons at all is possibly the most limiting form of input you could have. On-rails Star Wars game? Oh, fun.


http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-6-most-ominous-trends-in-video-games/

 

[Aazealh]

I don't think his assessment of the "motion gaming/touchscreen" situation is fair or even correct, notably when it comes to the Wii U controller. See what I already said about it in this thread.

The DRM problem isn't new, but like I mentioned in the Skyrim thread, people can only blame themselves for it. It's not like developers enjoy this bullshit any more than we do. But if you let people do what they want, then they don't pay for the products. That's the plain truth of it. And it goes for games just like it goes for manga, on a side note. There's a lot of hypocrisy in that regard and to be honest it pisses me off. Nowadays when you tell people you actually buy your games, they make fun of you.

Concerning the astronomical number of sequels, well, yeah, sure. Now look at Modern Warfare's sales numbers and try to tell me why Activision shouldn't keep churning them out. And why should Nintendo stop using Mario in their games when he's more of an icon than Mickey Mouse? But it's true, more creativity would be welcome. That goes for movies, comic books and TV series as well.

Lastly, about the smartphone games/"serious games" discrepancy, I kind of agree but it's nothing new. I've been saying for more than 10 years that games are like books or movies: there are different genres for different people. But that doesn't change the fact that the advent of smartphone games has had an impact on the industry as a whole. And is it all that bad? Sure there's a lot of shit, but it also promotes games that are developed by only a few people as opposed to dozens or even hundreds, which in theory makes it easier to be more creative.

 

[Begemot]

As far as DRMs go, I really hope somebody comes up with a better solution. I mean, yeah, I get that companies need to try and prevent pirates from well, pirating their games, but it's the people buying the games getting stuck with DRMs, not the pirates.

One thing I liked was that when Civilization IV Complete was released, they removed the DRM completely, since it was a collection of games that had been out a year or so. Plus it was only like 20$. I wish they would do that with more games with lots of expansions.