Will Wright is Right: E3 is Dead

Imagine that, a well known game developer finally says what everyone has been thinking, “it’s the walking dead.” Will Wright, famous for TheSims, SimCity and upcoming Spore believes E3 is in a state now where we’ll never see the old E3 and we’ll never accept the slimmed down anorexic thing we’re getting now.

End result is simple: it’s time to move on and create a new event and begin our arms race anew. Or, bring a version of the Game Convention over here from Europe and allow a new convention group to see what they can do with it, booth babes and all.

It’s hard to argue with the sheer amount of money that was spent to “compete” at a PR level with each major publisher and console maker. However, allowing E3 to die and starting a brand new design means people will be able to think ahead of “what’s to come” before re-igniting the exact same brand under a new name. We need something as exciting and invogorating without the massive hommoraging of cash.

(Thanks, GameStooge)

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David Braben, founder of Frontier Developments, says retail outlets that buy and sell pre-owned games are “essentially defrauding the industry.” Although multiplayer gaming might not be a huge threat, the single player experience in games may die out because gamers play the game quickly and resell it back to places like GameStop for others to buy.

Developers don’t get a dime when a game goes traded, many gamers will “share” the single player experience with a single copy of the game by reselling it over and over. The end result, retail outlets make a good penny for marking up old games while developers see nothing. This is really how game retail outlets survive because the margins on video games is so damn low.

The story has been heard before, developers want a piece of the action so they’re taking steps to entice people to keep the game with renewed downloadable content on old games; you can’t experience the new content without keeping the game around longer. In the world of low margin games, high cost development and short-lived story lines the solutions to this problem aren’t exactly obvious.

Braben’s idea of a solution is to offer two versions of the game, a not for resale/rental version at a high price, say $160, and a low priced version that cannot be shared (heavily DRM’ed?) for $50. In essence, gamers would no longer be able to trade in games because the idea of spending double for a game so you can resell it makes no sense to most gamers (including myself.)

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This week’s news items include:

  • EA deals with Rock Band iOS debacle
  • Microsoft “banned” in Germany
  • Analyst predicts 3.5M sales of Diablo III in first year of release
  • Report: Next Xbox already in production

All that, plus Reader Feedback and the Question of the Week, “What Kickstarter project have you backed or are most interested in buying?”

Episode 749: No Plan BEpisode 749: No Plan B

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The news this week: Elon Musk’s estranged daughter weighs in on his pro gamer claims: ‘He was a Bronze Torbjörn main. He was fucking dogshit’, Palworld decides it wasn’t April fooling after all, is actually making a visual novel dating sim where you can, uh, ‘dismember and eat’ some of its cast, Death Stranding has crossed 20 million players since launch, If the Switch 2 stumbles, Nintendo has no Plan B, Final Fantasy 9 Anniversary celebration begins, Star Wars XCOM game on the way?, and Shuhei Yoshida believes Nier: Automata was a turning point in modern Japanese games.