Episode 354: E3 Swag Bag Part 2

The E3 Swag Bag contest is still going on, while Paul, Jordan and Jonah discuss the latest in videogame industry news.

This week’s news includes:

  • Nintendo loses Wii patent lawsuit to Philips
  • PlayStation Now beta gets six new games, but those high prices remain
  • Crytek claims it’s doing fine, despite rumors
  • Oddworld: New ‘n’ Tasty heading to Xbox One with ID@Xbox
  • Google announces virtual reality app Cardboard

All this and Listener Feedback. The contest question is still up: “What was your biggest takeaway from E3?”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Related Post

Episode 506: E3 Swag and Sony SagEpisode 506: E3 Swag and Sony Sag

This episode follows the three hour long E3 episode, but there was so much E3 to talk about, a lot of the show spilled over into this show, including the crew talking about the swag Jonah sent to them, and Sony’s “winning” of E3 in terms of media attention. There was going to be a Gaming History, but the episode ran long and they weren’t going to have a two hour podcast after a three hour one.

The news of the week includes:

  • Microsoft and Nintendo troll Sony over crossplay
  • Bethesda lawsuit says Westworld game stole Fallout Shelter code
  • Microsoft and Razer are working on Xbox keyboard and mouse support
  • Nintendo Switch could get its own new Monster Hunter games
  • Life is Strange 2 Episode One release date revealed

There was some Listener Feedback to last week’s episode, too.

Sony’s E3 Conference: Fairly ImpressiveSony’s E3 Conference: Fairly Impressive

We’re all used to Sony falling on their face at E3 in the last few years, but, this year, things were different. They’re information was delivered well, they had a great presentation medium using Little Big Planet‘s game engine as a presentation platform over the standard PowerPoint slides and everything went smoothly.

The format for displaying their facts, figures and sales numbers was well played. Nobody wants to sit in front of a chart and listen to an executive blab on about what they did and where they’re going. But, when you add some Little Big Planet flair, such as having the graphs built within their game engine and Sack Boy hopping around on the statistics things smooth over well.

I was confused on why they chose to display the Little Big Planet graphic engine followed by Resistance 2 and then taper into talk about the PlayStation 2 with game previews. It seems more appropriate to bring in the PlayStation 2 product line first, then blow the crowd away with the current generation graphics. Instead, we were awed by the epic Resistance 2 graphics and then presented with old generation stale game engines… silly.

They went on to show off the wide array of PSP games arriving and a little trailer for Resistance Retribution for the PSP. The game system is definitely more mature than their DS competitor but seems to have a bit less sales momentum.

Overall, Sony did one right by talking about their three tiered solution to gaming instead of focusing too much on a single system. PlayStation 3 numbers are good but not mind boggling (like Wii) and their PSP product is doing much better than it used to and the PlayStation 2 numbers are high but falling compared to last year (as would be expected).

By focusing on the full suite of products they’ve put their eggs into many baskets rather than rely on their bleeding edge flagship product which still needs time to grow.

Well done Sony.