A Last-Minute List of E3 Thoughts
By Jared Newman | Sunday, June 13, 2010 at 3:55 pm
Video gaming’s biggest trade show, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, doesn’t officially start until Tuesday, but already the industry is descending upon Los Angeles for the show better known as E3.
Tonight, the first event of news value is a press conference for Microsoft’s motion-sensing Xbox 360 camera, so far only codenamed Project Natal. I’ll be there, but before the sensory overload of video games galore begins, I saw fit to throw together a short list of what I’m looking for at the show:
Sequels galore. Check out Kotaku’s list of all-star E3 games and you’ll see lots of 2’s, 3’s and roman numerals. Not that the industry usually swings the other way, but the sheer number of heavy hitters on hand — Gears of War 3, Killzone 3, Sonic the Hedgehog 4, Rock Band 3, another Call of Duty, a Medal of Honor reboot, just to name several — suggests a particularly busy holiday season and early 2011 for well-known franchises. The upshot is that any completely original games will likely get glowing praise from a gaming press tired of the same-old.
Return of the handheld. E3 2009 was quiet on the handheld gaming front, with only a retooled PSP from Sony and no news from Nintendo or Microsoft. With Apple’s iPhone making big moves into gaming, the stage is set for retaliation. Nintendo’s expected to show off the Nintendo 3DS, which will have a 3D display, and there’s a rumor that Sony will reveal the PSP 2. I’m more interested to hear Microsoft’s plans for Windows Phone 7 as a gaming device.
E3 2010: The Year of Exercise. Physically, this show’s a lot easier to cover than the sprawling hallways of the Las Vegas Convention Center during CES, but that could change with Microsoft and Sony sporting new motion controllers. Don’t pity me, but expect me to look at the new creations with a skeptical eye. Cool technology? Sure, but I need to see some amazing games, and not just souped up versions of Wii Sports.
The dark horse of cloud gaming. OnLive and Gaikai are two startups that want to stream video games to your computer as an alternative to owning expensive game consoles or PC hardware. Neither were present at E3 2009, but I’m planning to try both this year. I’ve got my doubts about the business model of cloud gaming, but here’s hoping the technology impresses.
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June 14th, 2010 at 9:21 am
I really hate the whole idea of cloud-based gaming, and I really don’t think it’s gonna work: basically it demands a constant downstream of Full-HD or higher resolutions, while being fully responsive.
This won’t work for two reasons:
An inputlag of over 50ms is just unacceptable for serious gamers. And since the cloud-based service it’s purpose is offering high-end games with really intense graphics, I suppose this is the public they are after. So this would require a very reliable service with a LOT of servers spread over the country since you just can’t lower pings across long distances even with a ton of bandwith.
Second: this would require tons and tons and tons and tons and tons of computational power. The very problem this system is out to solve, cannot be solved through centralisation. Intense moments where a lot of gamers are online, would require an immense amount of servers, not only to render the games, but also to control and distribute the workload: the actual required power would only increase.
I just don’t get cloud-based services: they forget the very sole power that made the internet big: distribution. The internet became the powerful and useful thing it is today because it is a decentralised network where services do not rely on a single node to work.
Centralising things will NOT solve anything: it doesn’t work and never will.
Sure, Onelive will be able to demo an impressive game running on a low-end device, maybe even an iPad running crysis, but getting one or a few devices to run a few games does not meanthe system will work well on a larger scale. Just remember that for every iPad they show running Crysis at E3 (or whatever demo they show), they have one quadcore monster running behind the scenes, and are using a few Mbps for a constant videostream. Upscaling that and making a profit on it seems impossible to me, and so far I haven’t seen anyone even trying to address that issue.